Mastering Blogging with Stephanie Royer: Strategies for Teacherpreneurs to Amplify their Online Influence
Mar 04, 2024Season 4Episode 7
Lauren Fulton - The Rebranded Teacher
Step inside the dynamic realm of blogging for teacherpreneurs with my special guest, Stephanie Royer, and unlock the secrets to crafting posts that not only captivate readers but also climb the ranks of search engine results. Stephanie, with her deep joins me to dissect the art of SEO, discussing the fine balance between keyword richness and natural flow in our content. We guarantee that by the end of our dialogue, you'll be equipped with the tools to fine-tune your blog's appeal and ensure that your valuable insights reach the audience they deserve.
This episode is a masterclass in optimizing your digital presence, emphasizing the importance of strategic structuring, the magic of meta, and the pull of powerfully engaging titles and descriptions. Stephanie's wisdom is particularly potent for fellow teacherpreneurs aiming to amplify their voice and elevate their online influence. Tune in as we provide actionable strategies for transforming your blog into a bustling marketplace of ideas, driving organic traffic that doesn't just visit but converts into a loyal customer base.
Step inside the dynamic realm of blogging for teacherpreneurs with my special guest, Stephanie Royer, and unlock the secrets to crafting posts that not only captivate readers but also climb the ranks of search engine results. Stephanie, with her deep joins me to dissect the art of SEO, discussing the fine balance between keyword richness and natural flow in our content. We guarantee that by the end of our dialogue, you'll be equipped with the tools to fine-tune your blog's appeal and ensure that your valuable insights reach the audience they deserve.
This episode is a masterclass in optimizing your digital presence, emphasizing the importance of strategic structuring, the magic of meta, and the pull of powerfully engaging titles and descriptions. Stephanie's wisdom is particularly potent for fellow teacherpreneurs aiming to amplify their voice and elevate their online influence. Tune in as we provide actionable strategies for transforming your blog into a bustling marketplace of ideas, driving organic traffic that doesn't just visit but converts into a loyal customer base.
Welcome to the rebranded teacher podcast. My name is Lauren Fulton. I'm a full-time teacher, author and seller on teachers, pay teachers and I help other teacher entrepreneurs grow their TPD businesses in a way that's purposeful and sustainable. So if you're looking for actionable, step-by-step ways to grow your business, you're in the right place. Let's get started.
Speaker 2:
This week on the podcast, we have a special guest, stephanie Royer, and she is here to talk all about blogging. Now, this makes a price up of you guys, because if you've been here for a while, you know I'm not a big fan of blogging, or at least not for my own store. Like, I understand theoretically how it could be an absolutely incredible marketing tool for other people, but up until recently, I'd just never taken the punch for myself. But now, now you guys, you are listening to somebody who has a blog, if you can believe it, and I've actually got a few posts published. So it's really made me curious to learn more about the world of blogging.
Speaker 2:
And let me tell you, by the time I finished this interview with Stephanie, my mind was blown. I had so many incredible ideas. There were so many things that I identified like, oh my gosh, I did not know that that's what I need to do. And as you're listening to this, I believe that you're probably going to have some aha moments too. So, if you're not driving, if you're at a place where you can sit down and take notes, this is one of those podcasts that you're absolutely going to want to do that for, and would you guys to me Stephanie hey, stephanie, how are you? I'm doing great.
Speaker 2:
Lauren, how are you doing? I'm wonderful. I'm so glad that you're here and I can't wait to talk about blogging, which is something that I never really thought I would say, because I've always been not anti blog for other people but anti blog for me. So I'm really excited to have you here, as I've just recently kind of launched a blog and I'm trying to learn as much as possible, so super excited to hear from you today. Can you start by just telling us a little bit about yourself and how you got into the world of blogging and what you do? Absolutely.
Speaker 3:
So I was actually a special education teacher for 10 years and then stepped out of the classroom after a cancer diagnosis and treatment and just decided maybe the classroom wasn't the right place at that phase of my life.
Speaker 3:
So during that time I needed that creative outlet.
Speaker 3:
So I started what you might consider a mom blog and I learned all the things I needed to do to try and make that blog successful. I learned how to do Pinterest and from there I had a friend who was in digital marketing and she noticed the results that I was getting from Pinterest and asked if I would subcontract for her and work on her client's Pinterest accounts. That was news to me that you could get paid to work on other people's Pinterest accounts and so then my blog kind of got put on the back burner and I started with client work. And then over time I discovered the teacher-preneur community and that people needed help with Pinterest and blogging and it just kind of naturally happened. I found where I love to be and I'm writing blog posts for TPP sellers and I do their pins as well for those blog posts. So I've been doing that for several years now and at this point I've written hundreds of blog posts for TPP sellers, and they do well on Google, and so that's kind of where I am in a nutshell.
Speaker 2:
That's awesome and we're excited to hear from you. I'm excited to glean from all that expertise and that knowledge and experience that you have. So let's just dive in, okay, because I will. I'm going to be honest and just admit that this podcast interview is basically just for me. Like there are people inside of the rebranded teacher community who ask all the time. They ask about blogging, and I've always said blogging is not my thing, I'm not the person to go to for this.
Speaker 2:
But now this is like I'm curious, like I want to learn, and so I'm asking a lot of questions that didn't come from anyone else. But I'm assuming that if anyone else is new or to blogging, like me, that they're going to want to know these questions as well. So let's start from the very beginning. I want to write a blog post and I want it to get traffic from a search engine, whether that's Pinterest, google, whatever and I know probably the process is going to be different depending on where I'm trying to get that traffic from, but let's just say, like Google, for example. How do I do that from the very beginning?
Speaker 3:
Really, the first two things you want to do kind of go hand in hand at the same time. And the first thing is to really determine what is the purpose of your post. What are you trying ultimately to accomplish with this post? What is the call to action going to be at the end? Are you soft selling a product? Are you trying to get people on your email list? Are you just wanting traffic, like if your blog has an ad network?
Speaker 3:
Because that call to action is going to inform everything else that you do for this blog post. And so once you've identified that, then you can kind of start to look at well, what exactly can I write about? That will lead me to that call to action, and so we talk about user intent. So when you are writing your post, you want to write about a topic that people are actually looking for and that what they're putting in the search bar matches up to the action you want them to take. At the end we can talk more about user intent. But overall, that's the first step, is figuring out what's the whole point of this blog post going to be. Okay, that's easy.
Speaker 2:
We can do that. We first start by deciding what do I want my call to action to be. Then, from there, what do I do to determine what keywords I should use, what topic I should pick?
Speaker 3:
Yeah, that's my favorite part, which is keyword research. Really, what you do is you take that general topic let's say you have a product that you want to soft sell and you know that it's Halloween math you can just start taking that topic and just search for it online. When you go on to Google, there's usually a people also ask section and you can start to get a feel for the types of things people are asking in that area. This is where you might start using a keyword research tool. I like to use keywords everywhere. It's really user-friendly. It's a Chrome extension, so it's right there in the Google search bar.
Speaker 3:
You can just start to get a feel for the questions that people are asking about that topic and then you can really decide the angle you want to take. This is where user intent comes back in, because if I were to search for Halloween math worksheets, the types of websites that are ranking for that are going to be print and go worksheet websites, or TPT is going to be high up there in the list. Blog posts aren't typically going to be right there at the top. Instead, you want to use a keyword like Halloween math ideas for second grade a longer tail keyword and just start searching to see what's coming up when you search for those keywords, then, as soon as you find one where it's other blog posts that are similar to what you want to write about, you know you're on the right track for a topic.
Speaker 2:
Okay, that's really helpful.
Speaker 2:
I want to ask, because you mentioned two options there First, going to Google typing some things in experimenting, looking at other suggested keywords for what people might be searching for. But then you also mentioned using something, like you said, keywords everywhere, like an extension tool. Or I've heard a lot about Uber Suggest, like I've heard that one a lot One of those types of tools. Is there a benefit to doing the research on Google and paying attention to just what Google is doing, versus going straight to some place like Uber Suggest and just trying to type in different keywords and see?
Speaker 3:
what you find? Yeah, so that is a very good question, because you don't want to rely solely on tools. So even if you decide you're going to use Uber, suggest or keywords everywhere, or AHRF, all of these tools, there is no substitute for physically searching that keyword and seeing what pops up.
Speaker 2:
Because you see, this is like when you're talking about doing that research on Google, I'm like that sounds time consuming, right, and it's so funny to me because, like this is right up your alley. You're like this is my favorite part and I'm like this sounds like what's going to be my least favorite part, right, which is probably why people pay you to do this. But I get that question asked a lot in terms of, like people want to use Uber Suggest or they want to use some sort of keyword tool over using just the TBT search engine to figure out how to use keywords to list their resources. So I figured there's probably, even though I desperately want there to be a shortcut, it's probably not worth it to just take the shortcut. You just you still need to go ahead and follow up and do that research on Google and make sure that you're getting the search results that you want, like you're seeing blog posts that are similar to what you want to write about.
Speaker 3:
Absolutely and honestly. The keyword research part for me of writing a blog post takes maybe 15 minutes. It's really not too bad. So you find it on the tool, whatever it is, you decide to use, and then you just take it and you plug it into Google and just analyze it for a couple minutes and see if you're on the right track. Usually you are. I do have posts sometimes where the keyword research takes me about an hour, because I know what my client wants me to write about, I know what the goal of the post is and I am just not finding the right angle and so it does take time. But overall usually it's not too bad.
Speaker 2:
Okay, that sounds helpful. So, once we've got those long tail keywords, we know the keyword that we're going to use, we're taking that and we're saying, okay, like this is I'm going to use this keyword, this particular thing, like what you said. I think you said Halloween math ideas for second grade, right? So I can then create, I can say, okay, well, I'm going to do five Halloween math, I'm going to do math ideas for second grade classroom and that's my blog topic, right, I go to write the blog. Then what are some things that I need to keep in mind when writing the blog title, when writing the blog itself, in order to keep this search engine friendly?
Speaker 3:
So, over the years, google has become more, and you know, obviously, the algorithm is so sophisticated we don't truly know how it does its work right, but we have our best guests based on analyzing patterns, and people who are way smarter than me, telling us what it seems like Google is liking this, but what happens is that if you lean in too much to writing for a robot, then you kind of forget about the humans that are reading your post, and Google, the algorithm, is actually figuring this out.
Speaker 3:
They're finding patterns in posts that have been written just for ranking on a search engine, and they're penalizing those websites, and so it's really, really important to be writing for both humans and robots in your post, and the great part is, though, is that the things that you do for Google almost always benefit the reader, like outlining your post and having a really strong structure for your post, and that would be before you start thinking too much about your post. Take the time to do an outline, because that's going to really help you stay focused on your keyword. It will make sure that you are covering comprehensive content, because that's something that Google looks for is are you covering this topic well? And so an outline is a really important first step. So that's really helpful.
Speaker 2:
So an outline would just be for anyone listening who's like me and just wants to make sure you're getting this right. An outline would be I've got five ideas, so I've got those five ideas bulleted like a bulleted list of what those five ideas are. I've got a strong introduction and I've got a strong conclusion. Right, and that would be my outline for my blog.
Speaker 3:
Correct. Now there's one piece that you have to make sure that you do and that is to use the proper H1, h2, h3. So you've probably seen that somewhere on your blog post area where you write your blog post, and when I first started blogging, I just thought that that was a way to store, like for your website, to remember, certain font combinations like H3 is for my blue text, that's this size, and H2 is for you know, and it is not. It's okay. That's kind of the roadmap for Google. When they, when the bots, are crawling your website, those headers are essential to organize your content and so when you're outlining, I like to outline in Google Docs because you can assign those heading and then when you copy and paste onto well, I know it works for WordPress, gutenberg, but if you copy and paste, those headers stay assigned, which is nice and it saves you a few minutes.
Speaker 3:
So like header one would be your title and yeah, so your H1 is going to be the title of your post and you only have one of those. That's how you remember H1. You just have one, and then H2, those are the main sections of your blog post, and you always want to make sure you have your exact keyword in one of those. You don't have to put them in every single H2, because that gets spammy. That's writing for robots more than humans, and Google's smarter than that.
Speaker 3:
You can use variations. One might be Halloween math ideas for second grade. I'll make sure that's one of those headers. And then another H2 might be five Halloween math ideas. So that's your introduction. You're introducing that section, and then each of those five math ideas that you mentioned are going to be an H3. So you would have an H3 that says and make sure to number those, because Google loves that. So you'll put number one, spider web subtraction, and that's an H3. And then you'll do another H3 of two mummy multiplication, whatever it is, and so you'll just go through and make sure that each of your ideas are now H3s, and then you'll switch back over to doing your H2. So let's say, for your call to action, have a header there, an H2 for that section, and so that's kind of how that works.
Speaker 2:
That's okay, that's fascinating, that's super, super helpful. So I've got the blog post, I've made sure that it's SEO friendly and pretty much would you say, as long as we're writing on topic like there, we're writing our blog post, content isn't keeping with the keywords that we've chosen and we're writing to humans that we're pretty much going to be covered with the content itself, like ignoring the H1, h2, h3, right, ignoring those headings. That we're probably going to be okay. It's not like we have to think how many times did I use this keyword?
Speaker 3:
Yeah, no, so definitely you don't need to worry too much. Everybody has those plugins on, especially if you use WordPress. There's plugins like Yoast or Rank Math and they count up how many times you use the keyword. But the fact is is Google knows, they know if you're staying on topic, they know what you're talking about, and so just make sure that it's natural that you're using the keywords, or variations of the keyword, throughout your post without being like sounding like a robot.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, okay, perfect, love this. So what about after, like after I've written a blog post in Shopify? So I told you before we talked, like, my blog is on Shopify. I know that's probably not the best way to get traffic. I've heard that there are other things that are going to be more SEO friendly, more other platforms, but that's what I'm able to do at this point. And after I've done that, it gives me a section for SEO to edit the page title, the description that shows up on Google and the URL. So what do I do with those?
Speaker 3:
Yeah. So you definitely want as much as you can, your target keyword to be your URL. It's usually your keywords, with hyphens between that, that tail end of your URL, and you can usually omit small words like the or of, and then your title is just going to be that H one, and that should be your exact keyword, and then add any other words that you want to include to make it a little bit more friendly sounding. And then your description is an interesting one, because as much time and effort as you put into your we call it the meta description, google will pull whatever they want from your blog post. So I mean, it's good, it's a good place to add another keyword, but I can't tell you how many times I've seen people in masterminds that I'm a part of. They'll come in and say why is Google displaying this from my blog post? It's like because Google does what Google wants.
Speaker 2:
Don't stress out over that piece of it. Correct, yeah, gotcha, so that's really helpful. Are there any other tips and tricks for running a successful blog? Like I know, when I think about blogging for me and what I'm wanting it to accomplish for me, it's really I'm not looking at it and this is probably the wrong way to look at it, but I'm not looking at it as a way to connect with my current audience, because I feel like I'm already doing that really well through email marketing and I have a really strong email marketing game.
Speaker 2:
I would like maybe for it to be, from time to time, a place where they can go to get more information perhaps, but the biggest thing that I'm looking for my blog to do is to bring in organic traffic and direct that traffic to my store. So what tips, tricks, strategies, anything else you have, like I'll take it. What do you have for us?
Speaker 3:
I would say to keep that in mind when you're writing blog posts, because keep it in mind that these people are cold, they don't know you or your business and if, a lot of times, if they wanted to buy something, they would have been on TPT or your store already, they would have been searching those shoppable keywords and Google would have never shown them your blog post. So just keep in mind that the reason they're on your blog is because shopping is not their priority at this moment, and so then you are showing them through your content. It's like sitting down in the staff room with a teaching buddy and just saying, oh, I've got this math lesson, I don't know what to do. And they're saying, oh, my goodness, my kids loved, mommy, multiplication, they loved this and treating it like that, rather than I see so many times on TPT related blogs just saying, hey, check out this new thing from my shop. Here's page one, here's page two, here's page three.
Speaker 3:
If people wanted to buy your product, they would have been somewhere else, and so this is just a good way to show like. I know you have this problem. You're looking for ideas for Halloween in your classroom. I have all of these ideas, and one of these ideas you can actually find in my shop. You're not going product forward, you're going problem forward. Yeah.
Speaker 2:
Okay, I love that. One follow up question to that would be you know we've mentioned Halloween a lot and of course, by the time this airs will probably be January, february. So we'll be well past Halloween but not past all of the seasonal items. And I know my tendency a lot of times is to write I say a lot of times like I've been doing this for years, but I literally just started. My tendency is to write things as I need them, right, like I'm writing a Halloween themed email as I need it, or I'm writing a Valentine's email as I need it. With blogging, I know enough about Google to know that it takes it a little while to kind of get some traction. So if I'm thinking ahead and I'm trying, I want to perhaps rank for something at Valentine's Day. When do I need to post that blog?
Speaker 3:
You know it depends on a lot of things, especially how quickly your posts are ranking already, and that's just something you will know. The longer you blog you'll be. You'll just kind of sense a pattern of okay, google trusts me pretty much. My blog posts rank within a few weeks once they're indexed, once the bots have crawled it. But for some people it might never rank until it's been on the internet for a while, and so there really is no hard and fast rule, and so I always tell people don't stress too much about when to post, just post.
Speaker 3:
If it's not helpful for your audience this year, it might be next year, and you can also match it up with your email marketing. So if you know that you write a really good Valentine's email, then go ahead and have that post already published, but maybe you publish it in January or December, so it's there, you can reference it. You don't have to blog in real time necessarily or have it hard and set I have to write this six months before the season. Most often you get the best results. Especially if you use Pinterest in conjunction with blogging. You get your best traction the following year.
Speaker 2:
Okay, all right. So word is definitely. This is a long game for sure. Yes, absolutely. So before we get into where listeners can find you and all of that, I've got some fun questions for you. Stephanie, what is your favorite?
Speaker 3:
podcast. Oh goodness, that's hard, I think, right right now I have been really loving niche pursuit and that is just. It's a really great podcast for people who are interested in blogging. They use a lot of lingo very quickly, so if you're newer to blogging, it might be like drinking from a fire hose, but it is one of my favorite for sure. What about your favorite way to relax? My favorite way to relax is usually to play like board games with my family. Our go-tos are like cribbage and we like five crowns the card game. I don't know if you've ever played that one.
Speaker 2:
No, but I will. That sounds really that sounds interesting. Favorite show to binge watch currently.
Speaker 3:
I just finished up. I got tired of it. Amazing race I was watching that on repeat. It's a good one to have in the background when you're, you know, working on things that don't require a lot of brain power, that you can just let it ride and watch some of the antics that they have. But Gilmore Girls is always my go-to around this time of year. I just haven't started it back up yet.
Speaker 2:
I love that, yeah, the same way, I like to have a show that I'm serious about and then a show that I can just let run in the background, which right now is family feud, and my husband he's like you've turned into such an old lady who watches family feud, you like anyway. Okay, so you're handed a gift card to your favorite restaurant. Where are you going and what are you ordering?
Speaker 3:
Oh, that's a great one, think I absolutely love Cafe Rio. Okay, we don't have it anywhere near where I live, but I would order the pork salad with the creamy I don't I don't remember what they call it like the creamy tomatillo dressing. I crave that salad.
Speaker 2:
That sounds amazing. What's next for you and your business? So?
Speaker 3:
for my business, I am launching a course called bring your own traffic. It's basically taking all of the knowledge that I've gleaned over the years for both blogging and Pinterest and kind of just creating this course that walks you through blogging from A to Z and what are the most important things to focus on and what are the things you really don't need to worry about that much Like. There are so many things in the SEO world. There's so many tiny little things you could do that are kind of helpful but they're not essential, and so I'm kind of just sorting through that fluff for people and helping them write content that will get noticed on Google and Pinterest. I love that.
Speaker 2:
Well, where can listeners find you and connect with you, learn more about this upcoming course and maybe even hire you to write their blog posts for them?
Speaker 3:
Yeah, absolutely so. The best place to find me is Instagram. My business name is Stephanie Royer Solutions and that's how you can find me on Instagram, and in there you'll find my links to my website to see what my current openings are for blogging and Pinterest packages.
Speaker 2:
I love it and we'll have all of those links down inside of the show notes. Thank you, Stephanie, so much for being here. I know I learned a lot today. I'm anticipating that there are going to be people who are listening to that also learned a lot and hopefully get some really good ideas for how to improve their blog and kind of move that forward. So thank you so much for coming and for sharing with us. I sure appreciate it.
Speaker 3:
Oh, thanks so much for having me. I appreciate it.
Speaker 2:
Absolutely. Thank you guys so much for being here. We put out weekly content for teacher entrepreneurs, helping you grow your businesses in a way that's very purposeful and sustainable, and you don't want to miss any of these episodes. I'm going to see you guys. Ray Bake Share next week.