What The World Really Needs…
…Another Blog!!!
Welcome To The Blog – First Post 🎉🎉🎉
Thanks for checkin’ it out.
A warm welcome to the CJR Digital Strategy Blog, where I’ll be regularly posting:
- About Websites I’m working on
- Both clients & my own
- Why I’m doing what I’m doing, how I’m doing it & the results
- Documenting growing the CJR Digital Strategy Business & Brand
- Covering Digital Marketing (again the how’s, why’s & real world results)
- A bit of personal life musings & philosophies
All my posts will be written with an audience of small business owners in mind, so you don’t need to be a tech geek or coding wizard to follow along, understand what I’m up to and try out things for yourself.
I’ll also be building out a “Glossary Of Terms” as I go. Any technical jargon that I do use will be linked to a definition & explanation page that can easily be understood by a regular Joe, without the need for a computer science PhD ❌👨🎓
Way Later Than Expected
This first blog post was published muuuuuuuuuuuuuch later than I originally anticipated.
It feels like an eternity has passed since I conceived the vision that was to develop into CJR Digital Strategy, sketched out my plans for this website and wrote the first draft of my content marketing strategy.
It’s almost been a full year since I registered with HMRC (27th August 2020) and “officially” started trading as CJR Digital Strategy.
So why has it taken so long to post?
I’ve survived this long without a blog (and to be fair a website at all, other than the homepage), as of course client work always takes precedence.
Setting up client sites, complete with their own blogs, hasn’t left much time to do my own website the justice it deserves.
As other small business owners, freelancers & sole traders will appreciate, as well as servicing clients there are many other plates to keep spinning, especially in the first few months and years building out your business.
With my solo portfolio now gaining some fat, to go along with my meaty previous experience, it’s now time to devote some time and energy to my own website & blog.
Firm Foundations & Maintenance Updates
Until now this site has consisted of a single lonely hompage.
While all the foundations & infrastructure where in place behind the scenes ready to build out on top of, the public facing side of the website was just a few short pieces of written copy about the business together with a contact form on a solitary homepage.
Before structuring the blog over the last week, my first task was to do some general website maintenance by updating all the sites software to the latest versions.
Once my website was running the most up to date version of WordPress, its theme and plugins, it was time to turn my attention to setting up and structuring the blog.
Structuring The Blog
Before running 🏃♂️ (or typing ⌨️) headfirst into blogging, its important to have a plan (even if vague) as to where the blog is going.
- Who are the ideal audience?
- What will the blog likely look like in a couple of years from now?
- What topics will you start to blog about?
- What topics are you likely to later blog about?
These things should be taken into consideration from the get go, so that you can structure the blog in a way that is hopefully future proofed for when it scales and grows over time.
This will save you a lot of headache 😞, work and all the other negative consequences of restructuring the blog later 😔
With a little fore planning:
- You can just keep adding content over time with out reorganising the blog
- Your visitors can easily keep finding the information they want as it isn’t moving about
- Search engines like Google can make sense of how it all hangs together and serve it up as results.
Everybody is happy, even the robots 🦾🤖
I initially decided to divide and subdivide this blog into the following topics / categories . . .
. . . and have many of the potential future topics and subtopics sketched out in a rough plan.
Blog visitors will be able to see all the latest posts on the main blog page, or find posts on specific topics of their interest by heading to each individual topics page eg just seeing the Websites News Posts.
Each blog post will also be “tagged” with keyword terms from the blogs index, so visitors will also be able to easily find related posts that are tagged with the same keyword terms.
As the blog gains traction I also plan for it to organically evolve into an interacting community.
Rather than just a one way written monologue, the blog intends to serve as a place for people to connect, share, pose questions & help each other. Visitors can leave comments starting written dialogues at the bottom of each blog post page.
What’s To Come
Now the blog is in place, I’m ready to fill it with content, content, content.
Around client work responsibilities and other day-to-day business tasks, I plan to pump out as much content as possible for marketing, SEO & website traffic purposes.
The blog will be the central hub for all my online marketing activities and the primary home for all of my content.
I will be throwing as much digital marketing spaghetti at the wall as I can, and seeing what sticks. I’ll be keeping an eye on the analytics to see what’s going well, what’s not going so well and where the best return on investment is for the time and energy I’m ploughing into producing content.
With this real world feedback, from the analysis of blog post and content performance, I’ll adjust my direction and what I focus on accordingly.
To begin with the blog & vlog posts will mainly revolve around the website projects I’m working on and documenting the process of building the CJR Digital Strategy Business & Brand.
Overtime content will likely naturally expand out from building websites to cover digital marketing and other related topics more broadly.
Each post will aim to document what I’m doing (whether I be adding a new feature to a website or trying something new out in the business), why I’m doing it as well as reporting the real world feedback and results.
All of this should provide enormous value for others with their own small business or building out their own websites.
While the blog will be focused more on timely news stuff, I will also be building out a . . .
Knowledge Base & Resource Library
At the same time as building out the blog structure, I’ve also been beavering away on a knowledge base support area.
This resource library knowledge base will contain how to’s, help guides and instructional articles rather than news update blog posts.
This knowledge base help & support area of the site will be comprised of both original content and curated resources.
Just like the blog, the knowledge base resource library will be structured into topics & subtopics and each article will be tagged so that related articles can be found through keyword terms.
I will always mark curated content with the “Curated Content” tag as to distinguish it from my original content.
Final Thoughts
My Evernote (note taking, organising & archiving app of choice), hard drive & physical notepads are exploding with years of experience, ideas, thoughts & philosophies to implement and share 📚💥.
I’m looking forward to beginning to publish as much of it as I can here on the blog (well as much as time permits).
BIG LOVE and many thanks for reading this far. I hope you get as much out of this endeavor as I do 💙🧡💙🧡💙🧡💙
To easily follow along as I document this journey you can sign up for the newsletter, subscribe to the blogs RSS feed or bookmark the blog page.
Do leave a comment to let me know your thoughts, suggestions or just to say “hi”. Get in touch personally if I can help with anything and please share this resource with a friend who will find it useful.