John Rampton's TV Interview on Blogging

John Rampton of Search Engine Journal and Jon Kaufman of Advice Interactive Group discuss blogging on D Living TV show.

INTERVIEW

Blogging is a powerful way to spotlight your hobby or business. And getting one started is actually easier than you think. And we’re going to turn this over to Jon Kaufman, from Interactive– I can’t even read this prompter today, y’all. Jamie had me flustered– Advice Interactive Group, who’s going to tell us about how you can start your own blog.

Thanks, Courtney. So when the experts are looking for the right place to go to find out how to blog, how to build website, they turn to Search Engine Journal, one of the largest and best authorities for digital marketing across the country. And John Rampton, managing editor of Search Engine Journal, came all the way from San Francisco to join us today. How are you, John?

I’m doing well.

So you’re going to tell us a little bit about blogging today and what somebody from home can do, whether they’ve got their own business right now or whether they’re starting a new business. Do you really need a blog?

Well, yeah. A blog’s a great way to express your opinions and take what you’re doing offline and share it online, to explain what your business is. So it’s a great way to segue what you’re doing offline to online so people can read about it.

So if someone has no idea where to start, they have no idea where to go, where do they go? What resources can they use?

So a great way to start a blog is using platform such as WordPress, Tumblr, or Blogger. They’re great ways to start. They’re free. They take literally 20 seconds to set up.

You can go there. It walks you step-by-step through. And you get started and start working with it.

And I know what some of the questions that are going to come into my office are going to be from this is, well, we don’t know how to write code. We see it’s really complicated. Can anyone from the complete novice go on and start this? Are they able to just type in words? Is it easy?

Yeah, kind of like I said, it takes you about 20 seconds to set up. You don’t need to know– basically, all you need to know is how to move a mouse and how-to type.

OK, so what do you write about? You’ve got no blog. You’ve got no content.

You start this blog. You go onto WordPress. You go onto Tumbler. Where do you start? What topics do you use? How do you get people to get interested in what it is you’re talking about?

So when you’re starting a blog, the biggest thing that I recommend to people is to follow your passion, write about your passion, and blog about your passion. Because if you’re not passionate about something, about your business, about whatever you’re talking about, you’re going to quit after a couple days.

Right.

So you really need to have a passion behind it. Get started on one of those platforms, and just start going and see how it goes.

And where does it go? So you’ve got this great blog now you’ve created. You’ve got this great passionate content. You hear about all the social media things that you can do to get your message out.

Yep.

So what is it that they do? How can we make it easy? What are your tips to get that out there and get people reading it?

So some of the tips to get your content, people reading it, people communicating and interacting with it is just use social media to do it. Share it on your Facebook. Shared on your Twitter. Share it on Pinterest. Share it on Instagram. Whatever you can do, shareit on those and interact with people about your blog.

And does it just have to be words, or can you add pictures? How do you make it a little bit spicier or a little bit juicier so that people really get into it?

So when I blog, typically I get a lot more interaction when I put photos on stuff. So write a little bit, then share photo. Say you have a cooking blog.

OK.

You’re going to write your recipe and then take a picture of the beginning ingredients then more.

Well, that’s a good way to get started. So if you want more information about how blogging can benefit your business, visit our website, adviceinteractivegroup.com/tv. And you can also send your questions to me and all of the people at our company at Advice Interactive Group. And tweet us at the address on your screen,#bizvisible or go to searchenginejournal/blogging.