The Best Way to Manage Your Blog in Twenty Over Ten

It’s so important that you are creating strong blog content for your website regularly, especially as digital marketing is becoming even more important.

7 Steps for Managing Your Blogs in the Twenty Over Ten Platform

Step 1: Brainstorm Ideas

Even though you’re ready to dive right in, you’ve got to start with research. Before you dive in, check your Google Search Console and see the top keywords that people are searching for. Your findings will help you to craft a strong post that drives traffic by including those top keywords. Additionally, check your Google Analytics and find out which blog posts are performing the strongest, and then you can craft similar content. Determine what has worked in the past and go from there.

When brainstorming ideas also keep in mind what your title will be as this will be one of the most important pieces of your blog. You want your blog post title to grab the attention of your readers, so you should also consider including keywords or key phrases that someone might use when looking for answers on Google.

quick ideas for creating Strong titles:

• Use numbers in your title, such as: “9 REASONS TO STOP DIY INVESTING AND HIRE A FINANCIAL ADVISOR”
• Create How-to Guides that will make readers want to find out more: “How to Make Your Money Last in Retirement”
• Use adjectives that appeal to what your readers want: “My Easy, Fool-Proof System For Creating a Family Budget Like A Boss”
• Use “what”, “why”, “how” or “when” in your title: “What to Do With Your Old 401(k) When You Switch Jobs”

Think about what words people are searching for in search engines and then include those words in your titles.

Step 2: Create a Calendar

Between running a business, family, and just balancing everything, things get busy, and if you don’t keep track, you can quickly become lost in the mix. At Twenty Over Ten we use Google Calendars to map out when all of our blog posts will go live, who will be writing them, and anything else to keep this process running smoothly.

When it comes to creating your calendar, there are some important things to keep in mind. 

THINK ABOUT YOUR NICHE when Brainstorming Topics

What is going to captivate your audience? What do they want to read? It’s important to keep these in mind when creating topics for your calendar.

Delegate the Topics

It’s important to delegate so that tasks don’t get missed or wires crossed. Figure out who will do what and assign the different topics for each team member with a due date so that everything continues to run as planned.

Make Sure You are Prioritizing Content

Constantly create strong content, but if there is a selling point, such as a new product or a webinar, then prioritize that. Make sure you create a balance of content that focuses on selling something and content that answers questions, inspires your clients, provides them with information, and anything else that helps them to find out more about your firm and industry.

Map Out Your Content

After you have put in the planning, map out the content. Though it will primarily be for blogs, including videos, webinars, newsletters, and whatever else you have going on so that you and your team can keep track and keep the content running smoothly.

It is a great way to ensure everyone has access to what is being posted when and what their responsibilities are. You can also download an editorial calendar in the blog post, “How Financial Advisors Can Craft The Perfect Blog Post: A Step-By-Step Guide.”

Step 3: Save Time By Using Content Assist

Creating content doesn’t have to be time-consuming, especially when you use Twenty Over Ten’s one-click integration Content Assist. With Content Assist, financial advisors can choose from an extensive library and can either use it as is or tweak it to fit their brand, tone of voice or to best fit their niche.

Advisors have the ability to customize and edit the content to add their voice, SEO keywords, and further promote their expertise, or use the content as-is. It’s available to all of our users for no additional fee, so there’s no reason not to take advantage of it.

Step 4: Add Imagery

Adding imagery is so important for many different reasons. While you want to get a lot of information out there, reading and digesting lots of text without any type of break can make this difficult. In fact, according to Social Media Today, content with relevant images gets 94% more views than content without relevant images. These numbers speak for themself, so make sure you are utilizing strong imagery in your blog posts.  This can include:

• Infographics
• Charts
• Tangible Examples from your website, a client, etc.

However they are used, they are great ways to break up a lot of text and to add meaning to a point that you are trying to express. This webinar replay, “Webinar Replay: Visuals Matter: The Importance of Visual Content in Digital Marketing,” offers some insight into adding visuals into your content.

In the above, Twenty Over Ten blog, “Top 3 Reasons Why Investors Read Blogs,” we have included a graph and examples from clients to break up the text and add additional substance to each post.

Adding Images Into a Twenty Over Ten Website

STEP 1: Log into your Twenty Over Ten account.

STEP 2: Click anywhere you would like to add your image. The editor toolbar will pop open on click.

STEP 3: Add your images to your site by clicking the Insert Image button in the editor toolbar. You can then add images by dragging and dropping the image file into the box, clicking the box to open up your computer’s file browser to locate the file, or by using a linking URL for the image.

STEP 4: Click the “Insert” button to add your image and then save your changes.

When adding images, it’s important that you also add “Alt Text,” as search engines can’t read what an image is without text explaining it. It is used to describe to search engines what the image is showing, allowing search engines to give users better results when performing an image search. It is easy to add alt-text to images in the Twenty Over Ten platform.

Adding Alt Text

STEP 1: Select the image you want to add alternative text to.

STEP 2: Access your “alternative text” button from your sidebar.

STEP 3: After you have added the content of your choice, click the update button.

STEP 4: After you have clicked the update button, click the save changes button.

Step 5: Categorize

By categorizing, you are basically creating a table of contents for your blog. They are typically broad in nature, however, they should also encompass more specific topics, as well. In the financial services industry, the most common blog categories we see are “retirement,” “investing,” “saving,” and “education.”

Why should you be categorizing your blogs? Well, you don’t have a lot of time to captivate a visitor, so if your site isn’t easy to navigate and content isn’t easy to find, then they will leave your site. It’s important to repurpose, link back, categorize and archive your content so that it can be easily found.

When creating categories, it makes it much easier for visitors to read and digest your material, but it also helps to increase your SEO by helping out the search engines. They will be able to more easily crawl your website and process keywords, causing your rankings to boost.

How Can You Add Categories in the Twenty Over Ten Platform?

STEP 1: To add more categories for your blog posts you need to first access the Page Settings window. Hover over the page that contains your blog. Two icons will appear, a capital ‘A’ and a gear. Click on the gear.

STEP 2: The Page Settings window will appear. Scroll down until you see Categories. To add a new category click on the text box, type in your new category, and click enter.

STEP 3: If you would like to remove a category, you can click on the ‘x’ button next to the category you wish to delete. A confirmation window will pop up. Click Confirm.

STEP 4: Once you are finished adding categories click Save.

Adding categories to a new or Existing Blog Post

Open the “Manage Posts” window.

To add a blog post click on the ‘Add New Post’ in the top right.

To edit existing blog posts click on the post you would like to edit.

Step 5: Adding Categories

Categories are a way of categorizing posts. Click from the categories you’ve entered to add them to an individual post or click the ‘x’ to remove any category for a post.

Step 6: Save Changes

Step 6: Add Excerpts, Meta Descriptions & Social Sharing

Excerpts:

Excerpts are a summary of your post content and are used to shorten your posts so that only the introduction or a summary of your post is displayed rather than the full post. It’s important that you make these strong as it’s like a little preview of what your blog post will be about. You don’t have a lot of time to draw in your readers, so make sure you write something enticing that will make them want to find out more.

Meta Descriptions

Much like the excerpts mentioned above, a meta description is a short snippet that provides a summary of the page. It forms an HTML tag that search engines will show in search results as a preview. Optimizing one for a strong keyword is key, as you want these to show up in search engines and allow your page to rank. A few things to keep in mind when creating a strong meta-description are:

1. Keep them 160 characters or less.
2. Make sure it provides a quick summary.
3. Make sure it is specific and makes readers want to read more.

Social Sharing

Social sharing is so important because it puts your content in front of an entirely different audience. When creating your blog content, make sure that there is an image that will automatically populate, along with a short blurb that tells readers what the blog will be about when it is posted.

All of these areas live on the right-hand side in Twenty Over Ten’s blog editor, making them easy to fill out and find. Towards the bottom of the Page Settings window, there will be options to Upload an Image Thumbnail (the image that shows when the page is shared on social media sites) and to edit a Description (the description that shows when the page is shared on social media sites).

A relevant social sharing image is used along with a quick excerpt and meta description so readers will know what the will be reading about, as this short description will show up under the blog before even clicking on it.

Step 7: Add a Call-to-Action

If you aren’t directing your visitors to take the next step after landing on your blogs, then you are missing out on a very important aspect of your website. Adding at least one call-to-action to every post is so important so that someone can land on your individual blog post.

They could land on it based on their search query and not know a single thing about your firm, so use it as a way to guide prospects through your sales funnel and get them to take that next step. It can take on many different looks, such as:

• Book a complimentary 20-minute call
• Download a Checklist
• Complete a Questionnaire

Whatever it may be, you want it to entice your visitors to take that next step.

Twenty Over Ten client Highball Advisors who specialize in retirement planning for railroaders includes a CTA in their blog “Get Your Free Railroad Retirement Assessment” at the end of the blog post. It’s straightforward and offers value, plus it’s free, which is very hard to turn down.

Overall, a Strong Call-To-Action should be:

• Straightforward
• Stress the benefits to the user
• Visually eye-catching that compels the visitor to take action
• Located in an easy to find spot
• Action-oriented using verbs like “download” or “register”
• Large enough to see but not too distracting

In the Twenty Over Ten platform, you can easily create compelling CTA buttons with these easy steps:

STEP 1: Select a location to place your button and give your button a title.

STEP 2: Highlight your title and select the link icon to open the link upload menu.

STEP 3: Paste the link’s URL.

STEP 4: Click the box in the lower left-hand corner to open the link in a new browser tab. After you have made your changes, click the insert button.

STEP 5: To style that link as a button, click on the link and select the wand icon to open the button’s style menu.

STEP 6: You can manually choose the button’s style between a list of preset options. These are additive properties so in addition to selecting ‘button’, you should only select primary OR secondary (not both) to assign a specific style to that button.

STEP 7: After you have selected the button of your choice, click the Save Changes button.

Wrapping It Up

Constantly creating strong content while also keeping everything running smoothly is no easy task, but when you follow the above steps, it becomes much easier to manage. Strong content creation is so important when it comes to driving traffic and showing that you are a thought leader in the industry, so putting the work is definitely is worth it. Creating and managing compelling content in the Twenty Over Ten platform is simple and when utilized correctly, you will definitely see your SEO rankings soar.