Should You Use ‘He’, ‘She’ or ‘They’ in Your Blog Posts?
The post Should You Use ‘He’, ‘She’ or ‘They’ in Your Blog Posts? appeared first on ProBlogger. Read the full post there. It is worth your time. Below is a summarized version of the post.
This is a post by ProBlogger writing expert Ali Luke
You probably already know you should use “I” and “you” in your blog posts. But how do you use “he”, “she” and “they” in your blogging?
It’s an important issue, and one bloggers don’t always think about.
Let’s say you’re working on a blog post and you’ve got a sentences like this:
If you want to hire a blogger to write for you, it’s important that [PRONOUN] can provide you with relevant samples of [POSSESSIVE PRONOUN] writing.
Option #1: Use “He” Because It’s How It Was Traditionally Done
If you want to hire a blogger to write for you, it’s important that he can provide you with relevant samples of his writing.
Option #2: Use “She” to Make a Point
If you want to hire a blogger to write for you, it’s important that she can provide you with relevant samples of her writing.
Option #3: Use “He/She” to Keep Things Equal
If you want to hire a blogger to write for you, it’s important that he/she can provide you with relevant samples of his/her writing.
Option #4: Use “They”, Either as a Singular Pronoun or By Rewriting the Sentence
If you want to hire a blogger to write for you, it’s important that they can provide you with relevant samples of their writing.
Some of your readers may not identify as being either male or female. This can be the case even if your blog is aimed at a particular biological sex. (If you’re writing about ovarian cancer or prostate cancer, some of your readers may well be non-binary. You might also have transgender readers.)
The preferred pronoun for most of these readers is likely to be “they” (though there are other options such as “ze”), so using it as your all-purpose neutral pronoun makes great sense. That way you’re including all your readers: male, female and non-binary.
Why This Matters (Even Though It’s Your Blog)
A few weeks ago the he/she/they issue generated a huge discussion in the ProBlogger Community group on Facebook.
One of the views there was along the lines of:
It’s my blog. I’ll do what I like, and if readers don’t like it then I don’t want them as readers anyway.
Another view was along these lines:
People get offended too easily these days.
While I can understand those perspectives, I disagree with them.
Source: Should You Use ‘He’, ‘She’ or ‘They’ in Your Blog Posts?
Image credit: Tim Mossholder
Eight tips to get the most from your Facebook business page in 2019
Among all social channels, Facebook is the one that has the most monthly active users, 2.23 billion.
This means more than 20% of the world’s population is active on Facebook every month.
Can you guess how many Facebook pages exist? 50 million? 60? 70?
Not correct.
As of May 2018, there were more than 80 million Facebook business pages.
And we as marketers have to try to be more unique than the other 79,999,999 marketers. Yeah, probably that sounds something impossible. Well, instead of being different, let’s try to give the best value we can to our audience.
Eight effective tips to help you as a marketer to get the most from your Facebook business page for 2019
1. Get rid of promotional content and make more educational, fun content
2. Only use Facebook ads for selling your product or service
You read it correctly.
We’ve already talked on the first point, that you shouldn’t put any promotional content in your organic posts. People hate that.
Instead of it, you can run engaging ads on Facebook and get new users/sales for your product or service.
3. Conduct webinars and provide valuable information to your audience
Webinars can help you to:
– Stay connected with your current customers
– Make announcements about your products or services
– Talk about niche related topics
– Connect with a wider/new audience and tell them about your services
Webinars are a little bit underrated among Facebook marketing, but they can become a huge weapon for increasing your engagement and driving more sales.
4. Use Facebook insights wisely and make decisions based on your data
Make the most of the data that Facebook Insights provides about your right audience for targeting and marketing. Here is a short list:
- Page views, reviews, likes, reach, recommendations, post engagements, and followers.
- Audience behavior, buying patterns, demographic, and geographic locations.
- Posts reach for both organic and paid strategy. Here you can also add custom timing, to better understand post reactions.
- Traffic source like Google or your website.
- Activity details such as “get direction clicks”, “website clicks”, and “action button clicks”.
- Post engagements and shares.
- If you often hold events, it will show “people reached”, “event page views” and more.
- Videos’ performance and engagements.
- There are also other statistics that you can find when going through Facebook Insights in order to make better marketing decisions.
5. Use Facebook polls and get feedback from your audience
Conducting polls is a very interesting way of engaging your audience. Why?
Let me give you a quick example. People love playing games everywhere. And why not think about a game idea and give your customers something each week?
Why will it work?
- It’s fun. People like to have fun on social media, and you can give them that opportunity by conducting one for them.
- They’ll get something in return if they win the game. You have to think of interesting rules of your game.
- Engagement rate for polls is really high. And if you make the content of your polls interesting, you really have chances for getting good results from it.
6. Build a Facebook group in your niche and discuss interesting topics there
Facebook groups are a little bit underrated nowadays. But I can’t really find the reason why.
WordStream reports that more than 100 million Facebook users belong to meaningful Facebook communities. Why not build another great community on Facebook who can ask questions, discuss some topics, and gather an active community around your brand name?
People love communities. They love to meet new people on social media and discuss their problems, ideas with others. And also they love to hear what other people talk about their minds.
7. Reply to any activity on your page positively
Whatever happens on your page you must react promptly before any other person․ Any activity should be under your control.
In the past, where bots or automatic answers weren’t available in Facebook, it was a little bit harder to react to all the activity happening on your Facebook page in a short time.
But now you can set chat-bots and automate the whole messaging process of your page.
8. Always analyze your competitors and keep an eye on them
Do you know what’s the ranking of your page among your Facebook competitors? There are several tools and ways that you can use to analyze your competitors for generating new ideas for your page.
If we start from the beginning, the first thing to analyze is the kind of posts your competitors making on their page.
Conclusion
Facebook marketing tips haven’t changed a lot since the last year. Usually, marketers underrate some tools Facebook provides, such as groups and polls. If you understand how you can bring value to your audience by using these tools, they’ll be effective for you.
Roman Daneghyan is the Chief Marketing Officer at Renderforest. He can be found on Twitter @roman_daneghyan.
Source: Eight tips to get the most from your Facebook business page in 2019
3 Marketers at Controversial Companies Explain Their Methods
In 2013, Andreas Johansson launched a new vodka for a celebrity who knows a thing or two about controversy. The client, Dennis Rodman, had just wrapped a season of Celebrity Apprentice, and he was making headlines as the first American who visited North Korea’s then-leader Kim Jong-un. “I think we launched Bad Boy Vodka right as he was coming back from his second trip to North Korea,” Johansson said. “At that point, feedback was still overwhelmingly positive.”
Marketing a dangerously misunderstood product
Michael Josem has marketed online gambling platforms for over a decade, and he knows how tricky the process can be. He worked in marketing and public relations for several online gambling companies, including PokerStars, for over a decade before switching to the agency world.
While working as the head of brand public relations at PokerStars, Josem oversaw a team dedicated to earned media opportunities, which included “finding, creating, and telling positive stories about the brand, and also responding to stories that were critical of the brand.”
PokerStars is the largest real-money poker game in the world. The brand controls over two-thirds of the market. Despite being a gargantuan presence that follows clearly defined gambling guidelines, PokerStars has been continually linked to lesser sites. Josem said some of these sites stretch the limits of ethical, legal gambling to the breaking point. That meant his job was differentiating the PokerStars brand from the herd.
To change that perception, PokerStars started by celebrating big winners locally, away from a computer screen. The company threw parties for winners in their communities, which accomplished two things. First, it played up the idea that the platform isn’t rigged, and anyone can win. Second, it challenged the notion that online poker is shady.
Marketing a product with changing legality
The editors at cannabisMD know what you’re thinking, but their brand is not another stoner haven. “We’re not talking about flower, smoking, or bud,” Jennifer Romolini, the site’s new editor-in-chief, said. “We’re not going to slap up some tie-dye. That’s a cool young hip space to play in, but we’re a very specific, higher-end brand, and our content is about healing and getting yourself some help.”
Romolini and her team publish articles on cannabisMD that break down complex medical insights on cannabis, sourced from clinical studies, and delivered in approachable language for an intelligent audience. The audience uses cannabis products to combat medical issues. But, that’s not to say the brand can’t have fun. Romolini likens cannabisMD to the health and wellness section of a women’s magazine, which is an industry she’s very familiar with, after twenty years of working in women’s editorial at Shondaland, Yahoo!Shine, and Timeout.
“A lot of publications address the recreational aspect,” she said. “So we believe the medical and wellness group is undeserved. There’s a way to marry readers to the data, based on what we’ve learned by surveying our existing audience and learning about SEO.”
How will cannabisMD’s team know that they’re breaking through the stereotypes of cannabis and reaching the right audience? It’s easier to tell than you’d think. “Digital lets you know pretty quickly if things are working,” she said. “There aren’t really any surprises in this industry anymore.”
Source: (Ad)vice: 3 Marketers at Controversial Companies Explain Their Methods
What is the Difference Between Posts vs. Pages in WordPress
In WordPress, there are subtle differences between posts & pages.
Often WordPress beginners get confused between posts and pages. By default, WordPress comes with two content types: posts and pages.
As a beginner, you are probably wondering what’s the difference between posts vs pages? They seem to look similar in the WordPress dashboard as well as on the website.
Readers often ask us: Why do I need both? When should I use posts? When should I use pages?
In this article, we will explain the difference between posts vs. pages in WordPress.
WordPress Pages vs. Posts (Key Differences)
To summarize, following are the key differences between posts vs pages in WordPress.
- Posts are timely vs. Pages are timeless.
- Posts are social vs. Pages are NOT.
- Posts are organized using categories and tags vs. Pages are hierarchical and can be organized as child and parent pages.
- Posts are included in RSS feed vs. Pages are not.
- Posts have author and published date vs Pages do not.
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Why You Shouldn’t Try to Rank #1 on Google
Here's why you shouldn't try to rank #1 on Google
Do you know what the number one email request I get is?
Come on, take a guess. What do you think it is?
Ok, its people asking me for money.
But, do you know what the second most common email request I get is?
Companies asking me to rank them number 1 on Google for a specific term.
And I have to say, it’s a big waste of time for you to focus all of your energy on ranking number 1 on Google for a specific term or even a handful of terms.
Just take a look at my site… here’s my Google traffic over the last 31 days:
As you can see from the graph, I’m generating 2,375,455 organic visits from search engines each month.
And can you guess how many keywords I’m tracking when it comes to my rankings?
A big fat ZERO!
I’m not saying I don’t do SEO, I’m saying I don’t focus on rankings.
Can you increase your search traffic without tracking rankings?
The short answer is yes.
As you saw from the graph above, I’m getting over 2 million visits from organic search each month. If you look back a year, I was getting 970,459 visitors a month from search.
Read more here.
Conclusion
Yes, you want to continually improve your search traffic over time, but obsessing over whether or not a keyword is ranking number 1 doesn’t mean much.
SEO has moved to a long-tail strategy. The goal isn’t to rank for one keyword, or even a hundred or a thousand… the goal is to rank for hundreds of thousands if not millions of keywords over time.
And as long as that trend is continually going up and to the right, you’re fine.
One way to see if things are going directionally right is to use Ubersuggest. When you put in your domain, you’ll see a chart that looks something like this:
You want the total number of keywords to increase over time and you want the small green bar to continually go up over time as that means a higher portion of your listings are moving up in Google.
So, are you going to continue focusing on rankings?
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