Copywriting Game Plan, Team Management and Selection

Managing a copywriting team is a tricky business; each copywriter is an individual, has their own specific needs, nuances and their own style.

It is your job as their manager to understand them fully, know what their strengths and weaknesses are, and know what they will excel at and where there is room for improvement. Most of all get to know them.

Game Plan

You have now selected your new copywriters from the trials and they just as much as you are eager to get started. So what do you do? Do you ask them how many articles they want and pay them that amount? After all they are as eager as a beaver and why not get the most out of this fresh talent.

You couldn’t be more wrong! This from my experience is the worst possible thing to do. You have yet to build up a relationship with them, you still have an existing team who have been very loyal to you and should in my opinion get more of the articles.

A smart game plan

will ensure that you keep your existing first team well supplied and managed, and at the same time be able to provide for the first initial month 1-2 articles a week for your newer copywriter(s).

Code of Conduct

The lucky new members to your team have been selected, your keen and they’re keen, but hold your horses! When you started working at your current company, didn’t you have to learn your companies best working practices. Every group, organization club has their own style of working, training and code of conduct. What you may frown upon, someone else may think is a great way of working. You need to ensure that you and your team of writers are on the same page all working together with the same goal.  If you haven’t done this I suggest you get this in place immediately.

To get you started these are some of the things we have included:

Plagiarism: Basic but you will be surprised how often your writers can slip up. Let them know you will be checking your articles and encourage them to invest in a plagiarism checking tool as well, so that they can check their articles over before they send them in-sparing blushes all round. Do make sure all your team do check their content still. Things still slip through the net!

Deadlines: Your copywriters are human, remember that and like the rest of us they will from time to time be prone to illnesses and even quite severe personal problems. As long as this isn’t a regular event and they give you enough notice; I have set this as the morning before the due date as this will give you enough time to move deadlines. Help them out after all they are an employee of yours.

Authorship: Due to the nature of our industry we don’t give our copywriters authorship rights on articles we have published for them to use in their portfolios. This can be for many reasons and primarily client discretion is a big one. You need to make this absolutely clear from the offset. We do however ensure they get a reference from us for their portfolio. What is included in the reference is up to you, but if you are happy to allow them to claim authorship my suggestion to you would be to set up a supplier contract between you and the writer.

Disciplinary Action: A myriad of problems from lateness, non-communication for long periods of time, poor quality work and consistent personal problems have troubled this writer since you employed them. What do you do? As soon as you see the things happening even in the earliest of stages, be nice ask them if you can help them by decreasing their workload for a while, ask them if they are struggling with certain subjects. If this still continues remind them of the code of conduct that they were given at the beginning of their employment with you. That should make them sit up and pay attention. If it doesn’t go well then wish them all the best, give them a reference and say au revoir.

If this ever happens-it shouldn’t though because you would have picked the best writers initially, but humans being human it could. I guess you better go and get that Will Monitor pile back out.

Team Management

At the same time when you have handed over your articles, let’s call the newbie copywriters reserves and your existing squad of copywriters the first team; you must stay in contact with them regularly even when they do not have any articles.

I speak to my team of writers’ everyday; this is to deal with day to day issues, articles being sent through, queries or even a quick hello.

I also employ a more formal approach by emailing them every other day when they are writing for us first thing in the morning and ask the following:

a) How they are

b) Are there any issues with the articles they are working on?

c)  What article are they working on currently?

d) Are they on track to get the articles in on time?

This is something I discussed with my writers first as I didn’t know whether they had other freelancing work or whether they were also in full time employment.

It is also advisable to get as much contact information from writers; this can include things like Skype, another email address, twitter, linked in and the good old telephone number. This means if you don’t hear from them you have another means of contact if the articles have not arrived.

Match Day Selection

Each writer in the team has their own skills set and specialisms, much like a premier league manager selecting his team for Saturday’s derby; he isn’t going to play a striker in goal and a central defender in the position of a forward.

It is great to try and push the writers, but you need to ensure that they are played to their strengths in order to reduce frustration on both parts. You can try to introduce new subject areas or heavy research pieces to your writers but if you do this remember you must expect mistakes, help them do not lambast them, this will result in you losing a copywriter. Bear in mind that although you know how to find a replacement, you want them to remain loyal and build up a strengthened squad who are the best. How will that happen if you don’t put some effort in on your part.

This also applies to your new copywriters; you need to spend some time easing them in as you want to make sure their writing is consistent and they do not do a Houdini.

Game On!

I hope after reading this that you feel refreshed and positive towards your copywriters and managing them. They key things that I hope you have taken away from this article are to remember what your goals are, select your copywriters with that in mind, introduce your new writers slowly, nurture and develop not only your new writers but also your existing team; you need to keep things fresh like any relationship otherwise boredom sets in and things become uninspired.

If you stick to this and keep your goals in focus you will have a team of writers who not only produce great content but actually want to for you!

So this was the third and final instalment to my “How to Manage an Awesome Copywriting Team” series. I hope you enjoyed and thanks to everyone for all the love they have shown and the comments. Massive thanks to my copywriting team for being, well awesome. I would name them but I don’t want you guys trying to poach them!

If you would like to read the parts one and two they can be found here:

How to Manage an Awesome Copywriting Team (Part One)

How to Manage an Awesome Copywriting Team (Part Two)

How to Manage an Awesome Copywriting Team (Part Three) is one of our latest posts from: SEOgadget.co.uk.

Introductory video:

Video vs. Copy & Infographics

Since users only read an average of 28% of words on web pages, we can conclude that copy just isn’t a great conveyer of information online for human users (although I’ve had to use it along with videos in this post – I hope you read it all!). Copy’s weakness is one of the reasons for the infographic boom, yet video can go further than infographics at conveying information quickly. Consequently, I’m surprised videos aren’t used more widely in SEO. They are probably the most distributable form of content online – this video of a talking dog has 85million views!

The Next Video Boom

Another reason to start caring about video is that things are going to get a whole lot bigger. Since the birth of YouTube back in 2005, it might have seemed like we’ve already undergone a video boom online – YouTube even became the world’s 2nd largest search engine back in 2008. A few things are going to make it even bigger:

• HTML5 <video> element will make it easier to embed video
• Live streaming from mobiles will become commonplace
• Smartphone traffic will overtake desktop traffic by 2014 (smart handsets become ubiquitous)

Check out the projected growth in mobile traffic from Morgan Stanley’s Internet Trends 2011. 69% of mobile traffic (in a time when mobile traffic will surpass desktop traffic) accounted for by video consumption:

All of this points to one thing – massive growth in video consumption. If your content strategy doesn’t include video, then now is probably a good time to do something about it.

Let’s Get Started

The sooner you get video into your content strategy, it will probably be for the better. But before this you should make yourself aware of the common excuses for not doing video vs the actual reality:

Common reasons for not doing video are as follows:

It will be best to consider all of these in three categories – production, creativity and distribution.

Video Production Values

It is common thinking the way into online video is polished production values that are equal to TV. But this is a totally different genre. The first ever video on YouTube is testament to the crappy production values that are forgiven in online video. Think about this quote from Gary Vaynerchuck:

“Your content has nothing to do with the mic, the camera, the lighting or the set.”

To give you an example, check out this video from one of the Bauer accounts – Practical Fishkeeping:

Dull huh? And bad production values.But with 1.5 million views, we’re pretty happy with it. The reason for its popularity is because it serves up content that isn’t readily available, to a niche yet global audience who demand it. It would appear that lots of people want to know what Arowana, Flowerhorns and Parrot cichlids look like when they’re swimming around in a tank, so they search for it. We come up top of search as one of the only videos including these fish – 1.5 million times. It didn’t need production values to be succesful.

Motorcycle News is another of our Youtube channels that is a great example for this point. Visit the channel and consider the production values – there aren’t really that many in the top performing videos. It proves you don’t have to have polished creative to use it as a business tool.

Of course, sometimes it does help to have good production values, particularly for product videos. However, they don’t have to be of ITN quality. Zappos.com have 50,000 videos on their site – the picture quality, sound and music is well cut, and looks professional, but you could easily make similarly slick content with a half decent camera (£300+), Final Cut Pro or iMovie. YouTube now has an editing suite built in that you can use without the need for software.

The level for entry is low, but if skills are lacking and you see the demand (and you live in London), then there are short courses at University of the Arts London (Central Saint Martins) in Final Cut Pro. You’ll be a pro by the end of it.

Is it all About the Creative?

So you’ve got that you don’t need slick production, but sometimes it helps. What if your products are totally boring – like steam carpet cleaners? Recently I considered hiring a steam carpet cleaner to clean our grubby carpet (it was getting bad). I came across the below:

Boring Alert – this is not entertaining! However, this is a well-polished and well narrated instructional video on how to use the product. It absolutely serves its purpose, while not being particularly creative.

Inanimate Products

Some businesses sell inanimate products that just sit there – like audio speakers, desk tidies and ornaments. You’ll need a slightly more creative approach for these, because video demands stuff actually happens. You can’t just have a video of a speaker sitting there – you need to make the product come alive. I think this video from Ideas by Net makes a great point:

It illustrates its many functions in a manner that gives movement, with an appropriate soundtrack. It’s a great video of an inanimate object – and it got 50,000 views.

Make Me a Viral

So far we have low production videos you can just ‘put out there’ and test, along with better produced videos such as product demonstrations – the caveat of these are that they’re not going to significantly improve your reach, and give you earned media value. That’s what virals do.

But what is a viral really? I like Ciarán Norris’ definition of a viral, they are simply:

“Cool shit that people like to share.”

It’s a sound definition, but it doesn’t explain a formula. Fortunately I’ve come across a number of elements that create virality in online video (I’m sure there is more science to it than this, but let’s just talk content elements). Take a look at Time’s 50 Best YouTube Videos. All of these videos are ‘virals’ with huge numbers of shares and views. But what is it about them? It’s not just pot luck, most of these videos fulfil one or more of these criteria:

• Cute
• Funny
• Musical
• Technology focus

Animal (particularly cats) and baby videos are often viral gold because they are cute and funny. Keyboard cat (number 8 in the Time list) is cute, funny and musical. Let’s take this one step further, and film a cat playing a piano app on an iPad (which fulfills all of the criteria).

Lo and behold, 9,000,000 views.

Extraordinary Resolutions of Mundane Events

There is one element of virality missing from the list above, and we can consider this a ‘silver bullet’. Successful virals usually occur in familiar surroundings or with familiar products – mundane and every day. If you then take the mundane and every day, then give it an ‘extraordinary resolution’, then you have a potential viral silver bullet.

Take a mundane object or event, and then do something truly extraordinary with it, something that it would never be used for – the more elaborate the better. An example of this is Blendtech’s zany Will it Blend? series which earned Blendtech a vast amount of earned media value. They used their mundane product – a blender – to blend a number of normally inappropriate objects. This was both funny and had a silver bullet, but they took it further when they began to blend the latest Apple products. Here it is:

Content is King, but Outreach is Queen, and She Runs the Household

Virals are well known for their rapid natural distribution through email and social sharing, but it would be a mistake to think that people will do it all for you.

Consider these words from Steffan Aquarone for Econsultancy:

“Create something so compelling, so interesting, funny or insightful that people genuinely enjoy your content, and you’ll find that people might even recommend it around.”

So they might but there’s no guarantee. Video normally needs a distribution strategy. Thankfully, SEO skills are perfectly aligned to solid video distribution strategies. Basically you need to have a quality video, optimise your meta data and then consider outreach – it’s very similar to standard SEO.

Distribution Basics: Ranking on Search

Just like onpage SEO optimisation, video needs meta data optimisation too. Titles are vitally important for YouTube optimisation, but make sure you fill out the obvious forms such as video description and tags – as always, every little helps.

If you have a video on your site, then make sure the page it sits on has strong onpage optimisation. It will never hurt to build a few links to it either. User engagement is also a strong ranking factor on YouTube. If large numbers of viewers switch off after five seconds, then you will find yourself taking a nosedive. It means that the quality of the video itself is interlinked with the ranking of the video. For more on YouTube ranking factors, and a comprehensive guide to YouTube publishing, I recommend reading the YouTube Content Creators playbook.

Distribution Advanced: Finding the Tipping Point

The next part of getting your video found is more like link building, and it’s also wise to include link building in your distribution strategy. In a nutshell, you find relevant blogs and websites who would be interested in the video and hustle them into posting it.

However, having a far and wide distribution strategy isn’t really necessary when it comes to virality; basically you don’t need to please that many people to get ideas to tip. I’d suggest reading Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point to get a good understanding of how ideas spread, but one third of his theory is that ideas tip due to ‘the law of the few’. Ideas spread because a few extraordinary people spread them. From syphilis to Hush Puppies, Gladwell argues that it’s early adopting well connected individuals that make ideas tip – it is not a reliance on pleasing the everyman.

We can take this theory into video distribution by pin pointing major websites. You want to go well out of normal link building comfort zones and think the sky is the limit if your idea is good enough. Think about the big guys – if you make it onto just a few mainstream media sites, then you stand a high chance of getting your idea to tip. At Bauer, this occurred for our best ever performing YouTube video without us even realising it:

This will almost certainly be the raunchiest video to ever appear on SEO Gadget. I can think of two reasons why it’s been so successful!

Basically this video was a strong performer for a long time, but nothing particularly special. Our sites are quite highly trafficked, but the video got squirrelled away, and it gathered about 300,000 views in its first year. Then a large Dutch website picked it up and put it on its homepage. Thousands of amused Dutch people shared it and the idea tipped – after that it went viral, garnering millions of views a month. It was the law of the few in action.

Building Links through Distribution

While you don’t necessarily need to reach out to many people to get your idea to tip, you can also meld your distribution strategy with link building pretty easily – in a similar manner to distribution strategy for infographics.

Here you’ll want to target as many quality sites as possible, build a relationship and then send them the HTML of the video embed with link back to the page where you originally published the video. Make sure you have the video published on your site so you can link back to it – you won’t get much value out of linking back to your YouTube channel.

There’s a neat example of how to do this on the Distilled blog. In my experience, barely anyone bothers removing the embedded link when they place the video.

For more on distribution, I really like this video from Gary Vaynerchuck. Watch Chapter 6 – Hustle and the Work community – for what is the best explanation of the importance of distribution I’ve seen.

Conclusion: Start Doing Video!

It’s never too late to start, but the sooner you move, the stronger position you’ll be in when video gets even bigger. Just when you embark on a strategy, make sure you consider the following:

• Are you allowing low production values so you can create more?
• Are you ensuring product videos are of good quality?
• Are you regularly trying and testing new stuff?
• Have you tried a viral with the formulas mentioned?
• Have you optimised your video meta data?
• Have you got a distribution plan?

And here’s me again, thanks for reading (and watching)!

Why You Should Supercharge Your Video Strategy & How to Do It is one of our latest posts from: SEOgadget.co.uk.

Let the Trials Begin!

You know the saying “Try before you buy” – Well this applies to copywriters too! You want to make sure they can walk the walk not just talk the talk. You may find it useful to read the first post How to Manage an Awesome Copywriting Team (Part One).

So what is a Trial?

A trial at SEOgadget consists of writing a test article, in a set time and when we receive it we will read and decide whether they will get signed up or turned away.

Test Article Tips:

This should be an article that you would like to publish (this way the exercise has been cost effective). Do not use anything that is business critical. Content that is required by link builders immediately, or for clients who require a sign off or content for a new site, company press releases, articles for your news site and anything else that is important to your business on a critical level. If this writer turns out to be a complete Juan Sebastian Veron (a massive flop), you are now left with a dilemma of either:

a)      An angry Link builder

b)      Not Impressed Client

c)       Behind on deadlines

d)      Annoyed contact (awaiting an article that will now need a re-write)

e)      An angry Manager

f)       Delayed Website launch

g)      Out of Date News article

h)      Or worse still all of the above

My key tips for a successful trial are:

Initial Contact

Check availability with them to do the trial (test piece). You may find they now have a full time job, left on holiday, or have decided not to take part.

The email doesn’t have to be anything fancy just a quick hello, are they still interested and what’s their availability. Ensure they realise that they were selected from a whole host of other candidates (inflate their ego), and that you liked their profile/submission (more on why this is important later).

The Trial email:

This email should be set in the same manner as you do with your existing starting 11 (or however many you have) copywriters. Ensuring you keep things structured and simple means your writers will feel much more confident working with you.

At SEOgadget I have a way in which I manage the content from receiving the ideas from the team to how it then goes out to the copywriters.

I have a very basic set up in EXCEL where I have set up a table that looks like this:

I have further columns to the right in which I have the link builders name and the copywriter who this is assigned to. Simple filtering of the table, a quick copy and then paste into an email-that’s all you need to do. All the information is there for the copywriter in a nice clear layout.  The reason we ensure we give as much information for each article is to limit the need for rewrites, writers asking for extensions as they don’t understand or just ending up with something completely off topic!

Once you have put your email together ensure that you tell your potential new team member that you are really looking forward to reading their article!

The Results Are In!

Its judgement day and a few things can happen:

1. You wait all day and nothing; you then give them the benefit of the doubt and think if it comes tomorrow its fine.

2. it’s in your inbox on the date agreed – now that’s what I’m talking about.

Missed Deadline

If a person is late with their article and hasn’t told you a reason or notified you, read their article and no matter how good it is due to lateness let them know that you will not be taking them on board at present.

Poor Work

Well what can I say, other than make sure you mark them off your database and make a note as if in future someone else on the team is looking for copywriters they know who to avoid!

Try to give them feedback on why you think they are not suitable for your company, do not tell them they are rubbish and should never bother writing again! You never know they could go onto be the most influential blogger ever, the greatest writer or could be unhinged and may decide to do some mud-slinging via the internet to your lovely brand and personal name.

Excellent!!

This writer not only got the article in on time, they followed instructions and asked questions where needed and have produced a stunning piece of writing that has got you under the collar.

Before you email them back telling them how awesome they are you need to check their work over and over; after all this could be a special report, a how to guide or even a piece content for link building that will be going on your site or somewhere else. It will not be good for your reputation to be associated with poor spelling and grammar and overall poor quality. If you need to get someone else to check-that could be fellow team member, friend or partner.

Always make sure the content is unique!

Well that is easy, there are plenty of great tools out there and one of our favourites is Copyscape. But here are some others for you:

• http://www.smallseotools.com/plagiarism-checker/
• http://www.copyscape.com/prosearch.php
• http://www.scanmyessay.com/

Thanks for reading Part two of “How to Manage an Awesome Copywriting Team”, part three will be out in  a couple of days and will cover how to integrate your new writers with your existing Copywriters, and what to do if there are any problems.

Thanks for reading this post and I would love to know what everyone thinks of the first two parts so far.

How to Manage an Awesome Copywriting Team (Part Two) is one of our latest posts from: SEOgadget.co.uk.

When I started at SEOgadget back in July I was fairly green to say the least. In that time I am still learning but as well as being an SEO Executive I am now also Content Production Manager for SEOgadget. I have been given the opportunity to share with you guys some of the things I do in my role. This article is particularly focused on how to find, hire and manage a team of copywriters. This is the first of a three-part series, I didn’t realise when I started this article how much I had to say on this subject.

I would like to say a massive thank you to my copywriting team as they are simply the best writers you could wish to work with!

So let’s get down to business!

You have come to the realisation either through your own forward thinking (well done you) or as in the majority of cases through some unforeseen horrendous piece of misfortune that you need a copywriter; actually who am I kidding you need a few copywriters.

Cue a mad panic, a lot of scratching of heads and a long sigh as you think about how arduous this process is and how much you wish things could be easier.

So let’s make it easier…

Where to Start? Scouting For Talent

This isn’t as hard as you may think, once you know where to look. If done right you will have a constant source of copywriters available to you as and when you need to strengthen up the team.Scouting can be done in many different ways some of which I am going to cover below. If you have a tried and trusted method that you use and I haven’t included please let me know!

Hiring a freelancer online

• https://www.odesk.com
• http://www.studentgems.com/
• https://www.elance.com
• http://www.peopleperhour.com/

These are just some of the more well-known freelance sites.  Go have a look at the FAQ’s, have a read through the about page, check out the employer guides and the testimonials; if this is all to your satisfaction go set up an account and start either looking through the profiles or go post a job direct.

As you can see this is a similar set-up to internet dating (not from personal experience!) and just like internet dating you need to follow some simple safety tips. So here are mine for when approaching or advertising a job;

• Check out their profile is it filled in?
• What is their rating/score/review from previous employers?
• Have they got a portfolio
• Have companies got them on an on-going basis
• When was their last job

Odesk have a very good resource centre here https://www.odesk.com/help/ to help you get started, but remember before signing up to anything always read through any of the resources to get a better idea of how each site works and what the protocols are when it comes to content that is written so bad you know even Karl Pilkington could’ve done better.

University jobs boards

Find a University and look at their courses, if you really want to be specific get in touch with Student Union and enquire about how you can get a job added to their board-as easy as that! Guess what the beauty of this method is..you can find yourself not only students whose English is ace, you can get yourself a foreign languages student, and even find students who specialise in a certain topic all at a reasonably fair price! Also with the university doing checks on you before you post, students will feel they can trust you.

Social media

Love it or hate it, it’s here to stay just like Man City!

Twitter

Do you have a healthy amount of followers? If not does your company twitter account have a healthier number? Well there you go, throw together a little tweet and send it out there and sit back and relax as your followers retweet your tweet and the applications fly right in to your inbox!

You can also incorporate this into your Facebook and Google+ accounts to spread the word even further.

Now if you have done your social advertising right, you would’ve realised you need somewhere for all those copywriters to go and stick their details in.

Utilising your own website

At SEOgadget we have a copywriter application form which can be viewed here. This form was created using Gravity Forms.

You don’t have to follow our format; you can make this as playful as you like, much like our awesome job applications for example:

This is your opportunity to make the next stage a lot easier. You want to ask questions that will not only give you an insight into personality, rates of pay, portfolio but also their spelling and grammar!

Sifting the Wheat from the Chaff

Is your inbox overflowing? Have your retweets gone stratospheric? You have viewed so many profiles that you don’t know what to do? GREAT!!

Assessing your goals

If you can’t face doing this alone get some help in, as all great managers have back room staff. If you selected your questions correctly earlier you will be able to use these to measure a freelancer’s profile to get as much information as possible. You need to stay focused on what it is you want from your copywriting team.

Getting the right writers

Another thing to consider is that you may not want people who write articles that are humorous, you may need serious business writers, so anyone who has applied with experience in writing for celebrity gossip sites or articles to do with cooking isn’t going to be the one for you, no matter how pretty their profile or friendly they come across. By all means take a chance on a writer if they really stand out and their interests may include your target area but their overall portfolio doesn’t.

Cost of writers

Ensure you check out their pricing! Have they written per word or per article and is it fair? If it appears to be extortionate then look elsewhere, if it’s so ridiculously cheap I would be concerned over quality. It is now up to you and your number two to whittle it down.

Keeping this in mind you should have come to 3 neat piles; Want to Sign Up, Will Monitor and Not Good Enough.

Want To Sign Up

These are the guys that you want! Ahh the dream, what every site owner wants, a super fantastic writer who gets it and you don’t have to chase them up for re-writes…

Will Monitor

You can treat this pile as a back-up plan to the main wish list. These details you can keep on record and if you are clever:

1. Email all these guys

2. Tell them that you have selected them form all the submissions received

3. Tell them you were impressed and will definitely get back to them when you have work. You do not need to contact the freelancers from the hire sites just record their profile details for future reference. This way you have made them feel valued, and in these tough times when people aren’t even getting a response to an application, giving that person a response even if it is a no will make a lasting impression on them, so if you ever do require their services they will not have a negative memory of your lasting dealing with them.

Not Good Enough

I don’t care, you don’t care, just get rid!

I hope you enjoyed the first part as much as I did writing it. I will be posting part two over the next couple of days which will cover how to assess and evaluate your potential new copywriters.

I look forward to hearing what you think about my first post. Thank-you.

How to Manage an Awesome Copywriting Team (Part One) is one of our latest posts from: SEOgadget.co.uk.

For almost as long as SEOgadget has existed, there’s been a jobs section on our site. Having a way to get people to add content to your site has so many applications, but it can be a little difficult converting something like a form submission into a post, especially if you’re not a WordPress / PHP developer.

Image credit: Hello Turkey Toe

Today I’ll explain how the jobs board works on SEOgadget, which will (I would hope) give you enough inspiration to build similar sites in WordPress with no PHP or development skills.

There’s always a way with WordPress plugins

There have been a few different versions of the jobs functionality, with the earliest being based around contact form 7 and postie (a WP plugin that converts an email to a full WordPress post). Needless to say it didn’t feel entirely right to email a form submission to a secret email address, then publishing the contents of that email to a draft WordPress post using Postie. Fortunately, things have evolved a lot since then – thanks pretty much entirely to Gravity Forms.

Get Gravity Forms

Gravity forms is probably one of my favourite WordPress plugins. It’s well developed, flexible and supported well by the good folks at Rocket Genius. Carl even once logged in to SEOgadget for me to help diagnose a problem (which, by the way, was nothing to do with Gravity). Here’s the URL: http://www.gravityforms.com/ – I owe these guys a debt of gratitude and their plugin has paid for itself a hundred times over.

Stage 2 – Understand the post and title templates

If you want to create a form, and write the contents of that form to a WordPress post, Gravity forms has a few features that come in handy. The features are called post templates and title templates, and with them, you can write the contents of a submitted form field directly into a WordPress post and title. The sweet part is the fact that the templates can be constructed as a HTML template.

Here’s an example role: http://seogadget.co.uk/seo-consultant-east-london-28-33k/

Create a form

The contents of the job page (with the exception of the SEOgadget logo) were added to a post via a template using a predefined HTML template. Without boring you with all of the details, I’ll show you a few snippets:

Each form field you configure inside Gravity is assigned a variable name. “Job Title” for instance, has a variable name of “{job-title:12}”. If you imagine that each item of data submitted has a corresponding variable name, you can soon start inventing ways to play back that data in a WordPress post.

That variable can be pulled through into a post template, like this:

With the template configured to dynamically insert form data, we can create a post title using job title, salary and location data.

The same applies for the post template too. In essence you can create a HTML template and insert the variables you’d require to form a readable page. Jobs pages are an obvious example, but directory listings, guest blogs, reviews, personal profiles and the like all become a little bit more possible.

Redirect on form submit to take payments

What’s cool about Gravity is the degree of control you have when a user submits their data (in our case – a job advertisement). If you’d like, you can redirect your form to a PayPal payment page, just like ours does.

Other interesting stuff

There’s more to Gravity than simple forms and post submissions – in my “most useful” list I’d definitely include the ability to prefill a field in a form by passing a variable in a URL. The URLs can be formed based on variables passed into HTML templates, making call to actions such as “apply” and “reply” quite possible. I think the biggest lifesaver feature was the ability to export forms and upload them to a new WordPress installation – a lifesaver when we migrated to new hosting. Recommended.

Adding Pages To WordPress With Gravity Forms is one of our latest posts from: SEOgadget.co.uk. Going to this year's SMX Advanced London? Use this discount code - SEOGADGET011 to get 15% off your entrance fee!

We think the IIS Toolkit is absolutely awesome!

Image credit: Lumaxart

This post will provide a step by step guide on how to install the powerful IIS 7.0 toolkit from Microsoft, and show you some of the many cool features which can open up a whole new world for extracting information from a website (we are talking about a Xenu link sleuth beater here!).

Please note: IIS 7.0 is only compatible with Windows Vista or Windows 7

The program is quite simple to install but it certainly isn’t one of the most obvious, and when you need a helpful guide there isn’t much about, so here’s something to help get you started…

1. Install Web Platform Installer 2.0

By downloading and installing the Microsoft Web Platform Installer, the set up process of IIS Toolkit becomes a lot easier, so this is a good starting point.

2. Install ‘Search Engine Optimization Toolkit’

Once the web platform installer has downloaded and installed, navigate over to the Microsoft SEO Toolkit page and click on ‘install using web platform installer’ in the download extension box in the right hand column:

Or alternatively here is a direct download and install link for IIS toolkit.

Once the download has begun, the Microsoft web platform installer will take care of the rest and install the required components to set up IIS Toolkit on your computer.

3. Activating IIS Toolkit

Now this is the section which isn’t that clear, once the download and installation process has been completed, on the majority of occasions (unless you are one of the lucky few – if so, then IIS toolkit will appear within ‘All programs > IIS 7.0 Extensions > Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Toolkit’ ready to use) you will need to active the software.

To do this, perform a search on your computer for ‘Turn windows features on or off’, or go to ‘Start > Control Panel > Programs > Turn Windows features on or off)’

Once located a dialog box will be displayed, and under ‘Internet Information Services > World Wide Web Services’ double check that the check boxes have all been selected (see below screenshot for further guidance).

Once selected hit ‘ok’, and you are ready to launch IIS Toolkit.

Go to: Start > All Programs > IIS 7.0 Extensions > Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Toolkit 1.0

Using Microsoft’s IIS Toolkit

Now it’s time to let the fun begin. Once you have opened the program click on the ‘create a new analysis’ link underneath ‘Site Analysis’, and add in the details of the website you are looking to examine:

Clicking ‘ok’ will start the site crawl.

If you have used Xenu link sleuth you will immediately notice how much quicker and cleaner it is to crawl a website. Once the crawl has been completed you will be presented with a report overview with an indicator on the number of links crawled and errors encountered:

You can take a look in a lot more detail at the errors encountered within the violations tab (*cringes at the thought of posting this* If anyone asks it is not for seogadget!):

The summary provides a fairly detailed analysis of the types of errors (or potential errors) encountered and the number of occurrences of each type of error.

The Violations section also provides details on:

• Pages with the most errors
• Error levels picked up (number of errors, warnings and information)
• Categorises the errors (SEO, content, web mark up etc)

But the IIS Toolkit analysis doesn’t finish there, content, performance and links sections all contain their own extensive report data. Here are some bullet points summarizing these 3 sections of IIS toolkit:

• Content
  • Host summary
  • Directory summary
  • Content types summary
  • Status code summary
  • External links
  • Duplicate files
  • Duplicate titles, descriptions and keywords
  • Duplicate keywords
  • 404 errors
  • Large content areas
  • Broken links by page

• Performance
  • Slow pages
  • Slow pages by directory
  • Slow pages by content type
  • Pages with many resources

• Links
  • Pages with most links
  • Most linked pages
  • Redirects
  • Links blocked by robots.txt
  • Internet protocols
  • Link depth

You can then export all of this data into a single Excel file where you can hone in even further on the data, and Richard’s post last week on finding orphaned pages from your sitemap.xml using IIS toolkit is just one example on how to use this powerful piece of kit.

Now I have always been a Xenu link sleuth fan, but after using IIS SEO toolkit, let’s just say ‘times they are a-changing’.

How To Install and Use IIS Search Engine Optimization Toolkit (IIS 7.0) is one of our latest posts from: SEOgadget.co.uk. Going to this year's SMX Advanced London? Use this discount code - SEOGADGET011 to get 15% off your entrance fee!