The last two lessons that we’ve had are prone to help you out with your Content Strategy, especially at times when it becomes really hard to produce new content for your audience.
This lesson comes to continue the ideas that I’ve presented to you in the other lessons, and it will be something actionable that you can start doing as soon as you read each idea that will follow here. It’s going to be really hands-on and it’ll all be done with the help of a very special Assistant.
The Blogging Assistant
It’s an important part of the Squirrly SEO product, and it’s no wonder really that thousands of people use it on a daily basis. It doesn’t just provide free images to use in your blog posts, it helps you enhance your Content Strategy and it also helps you save a lot of time.
How will the Blogging Assistant help your overall Content Strategy?
The same as Google Alerts What do you mean? I mean exactly that. If you’ve gone through the last two lessons, you saw that google alerts helps you be up-to-date with the latest topics, articles, ideas and things that people share in your industry.
This way, you can cut your research time in half and produce amazing content very fast.
The Blogging Assistant helps you do the same thing, and best of all you can do everything straight from your WordPress Admin dashboard.
Also, you can cut some days out of your editorial calendar, by assigning something like “I’ll do a Blogging Assistant Article” or something that sounds cool and makes you realize (when reading) that you will create a fast article that’s inspired by the Blogging Assistant from Squirrly SEO.
Now, on that particular day, you can just open up your WordPress, click Add New Post and start building a great article, all by using the Blogging Assistant.
Using the Assistant- How Integrating Your Work Inside WordPress Keeps You More Focused and Helps You Work Faster
Before we start, make sure that you have the Squirrly SEO Plugin installed in your WordPress. If not, please go ahead and install it. Here, I start showing you what steps you can take to use the integrated workflow of the Blogging Assistant:
1) Set Your Topic
In WordPress, go to Add New Post.
On the right side of the screen, you will see a box that reads: “Optimize for Keyword”.
Remember that in all the courses you’ve taken from us, I always said that you need to start thinking about your Keywords as Topics. One Topic => One Article. Hope that’s clear.
In the Optimize for Keyword field, make sure that you type in your topic. Let’s continue with “cooking recipes for dinner”.
HIT ENTER
2) See what tweets go around in your industry. Think of inserting some, to be more Web 2.0 and have interactive content
Now let’s see what tweets we can find related to your topic “cooking recipes for dinner”. Click the tweet button. It will start by displaying the last word you inserted in the “Not relevant” box, which in this case is “recipes.”
You can see what people are currently talking about related to “recipes”.
This will help you get a glimpse into what’s new in your industry and also it may help you find amazing content that people share a lot. Remember, you can use that to your advantage. You can take some ideas from there and give them a new spin, to make it interesting for your audience, while also not having to spend too much time doing a lot of research.
Also, you can experiment with using the Not Relevant button to find tweets related to all kinds of topics like “pie” or “soup” or whatever.
3) Wiki It if it’s something weird. Or new.
You may just read about something weird that’s related to “cooking recipes for dinner”.
It can be something that only top chefs know about or something that’s totally random or crazy and you want to check it out and learn more about it. Or maybe it’s just something new. Normally, you’d have to leave your WordPress interface and move to some other distracting tabs.
No More. You have the Blogging Assistant now.
Look, I’m a content marketer, I’m an archer, a swordsman (sounds weird, but yes I really am). I’m certainly not a cook, so for me, even something like: “broule” is weird and new and I don’t know anything about it.
I don’t know what “Hasselback Potatoes” are.
But Wikipedia seems to know that one as well, so straight from my WordPress I can find out all about it and read more about it. All I need to do is type “Hasselback Potatoes” in the Not Relevant section.
Note: this is just a simple use-case with the cooking recipes and these weird potato thingies. You should start using it like right now and see how it fits for your normal workflow. Try it out a couple of times. You’ll see that it can integrate insanely great in your content-generating workflow.
You see that “Read It” button there. Click it 🙂 (magic happens)
Now, directly in your Post interface from WordPress, you can read the Wikipedia article that includes the info about this potato dish from Sweden.
Of course, if you intended to write about it in your blog, you can click the “Insert it!” button right there.
The best part is that it includes the paragraph in a beautiful way and it also inserts a link back to the original article from Wikipedia, so you don’t have to.
Pretty neat, right?
4)Hijacking News like a Ninja
News directories can be very useful because they could offer you quality news related to your topic. This way you can get informed about the latest industry standards very fast and start publishing articles right away.
Now you can do the same thing, straight from your WordPress. Click on the button that reads Blogs from the Blogging Assistant, and you’ll start seeing a feed of articles written about your topic.
See what are the most interesting news you can find about your topic and then click “Read it!”. Just like you did in the Wiki example above. Now, you can take a look at the previous lesson and follow the steps I gave you there for quickly crafting new articles for your audience, based on the latest news about your topics.
You’ll find that it’s great that you can read new blogs directly in your WordPress interface.
5) My Articles
If you click on the last button to your right from the Blogging Assistant, you will see that it finds articles from your WordPress site that have used the topic you now inserted in the “Optimize for Keyword” box.
This is especially helpful for building a lot of inner-links to help out your content strategy and get the best SEO for your site. Internal links are important because they help Google find, index and understand all of the pages on your site. When used strategically, they can send page authority to important pages in your site to help them rank higher on Google.
6) Search For Images. Dare for More.
Great. Now you’ve set your topic in the software and the Blogging Assistant now knows that you’re looking for all sorts of stuff that’s related to your “cooking recipes for dinner” topic.
Click on the button that looks like a photo-camera. You’ll find it just under the text field from the Optimize for Keyword box.
If you see something like “No results found!” don’t worry! It just tells you that it could not find images that are copyright free AND ALSO related to your “cooking recipes for dinner” topic.
Here’s what you do when that happens: Click on the “Not Relevant” button you see there.
A small text field appears. Write an alternative, perhaps more general keyword there. In my case, the word “recipes” works just fine.
Hit ENTER
Check the box next to the text that reads “Show Only Copyright Free images to” keep surfacing copyright-free images. As you can see, this allows you to find a lot of potential images for your new article, straight from your WordPress interface.
And so on.. Play a little with it. After you’ll begin using it a couple of times, you will start noticing patterns. You will get some amazing insights and ideas on how to integrate this into your content strategy.
This feature right here can save you a lot of money, because buying the rights to use images in your articles can get pretty pricey. And using images that are not copyright free can even lead to legal issues that you surely don’t want.
So make sure to make the most out of this amazing feature made available by the Blogging Assistant. Dare for More.
The End of the “Idea Generation that Supports Your Content Strategy” course
Thanks for following through with this new course from Squirrly. You’ve learned a lot throughout these lessons.
Here’s a quick recap that’ll make you feel proud about all that you’ve accomplished:
- You’ve learned to create an efficient infrastructure for idea generation that will help you harvest more ideas than ever before;
- You’ve learned how to organize and filter your ideas;
- You’ve learned how to write better headlines that your audience is going to love;
- You’ve learned how to use different tools to come up with content ideas that are fresh and interesting;
- You’ve learned what it takes to create content that is relevant, timely; Google-friendly and Human-friendly.
- And a lot more.
I really hope that you’ll put all this insight to good use and that it will help you generate a lot of new ideas for your content.
One more thing before you go; if you liked the content of this course, make sure to share the knowledge with your friends and peers 🙂
Cheers!
