Get Started Blogging With This FREE Tool!

Hey there. In today's podcast, I'm going to go over a free blogging platform and answer a couple of questions. I have had recently about blogging. So this episode's not going to be very long. I hope that, if you are curious about blogging, then you'll stick around and. Listen to this follow-up episode, all about. Vacation rental blogging, because it is definitely something that you should consider doing. And if you don't have a website for that right now, Or if you have a website, but you're not really sure how to use the blogging. Portion of it. Then this episode is really going to help you with that. Jolene and bait are here with me today in the background wrestling. And You may hear them, hopefully not because of, but they're playing right behind me. Bait is my daughter, Katie's dog and Katie and her boyfriend and bait moved in with me last month. And I'm super excited. Katie is my baby. She's 21 and she's a sophomore in college. And, it's been really nice to have her around. Even though bait and Jolene cannot sit still. They are always on the go they're both. Three-year-olds. And they play, play, which kind of gets annoying. It has been a crazy busy week for me. I participated in the direct booking success summit. And if you did not get in on that, you should definitely check it out with the all access pass. It was fantastic. This is the third year I've participated all three years. And I will say that this was the best year. There were so many great presentations I've watched about, I would say about a third of them. And then also watched some of the lives that were in the Facebook group. The event was live this past week, but you can buy the all access pass and get access to all of the recordings she had 22 different presentations and then there's also a lot of great freebies with that all access pass, including my content. Mapping toolkit you're listening to this before the middle of October, check it out, you can use my link is Jody borne.com. Back slash success. I'll put it in the show notes., I get a little bit of margarita money if you do that. So I'd appreciate you using that link. If you do. N the summit I presented on creating a content map. The content map is really a way to brainstorm so that all your content links together hits your perfect guest avatar. It's a way to map your content strategy and. It's what I use. When I start working with a client, a content map, I have a whole bunch of them. Saved in spreadsheets in my Google drive from years past, even going back to 2017, when I was working with a client in Hawaii. So it's definitely something I've evolved over time, if you did not get in on the book, direct success summit, and you would like a live presentation of the content mapping toolkit. Then check out Jody borne.com back slash workshop, because I'm going to be given that live. I own October 17th of this year, and I'm going to have the replace set up. At least through the end of the year. So even if it's after October and you want to join that workshop, Go ahead and sign up because it will be available as a replay now if you don't have a website, how do you blog? What do you do? There's lots of tools out there for creating a website. But they all are, have their own level of difficulty. A lot of people have this idea that they actually have to have the direct booking part of their website set up. Before they can do anything online other than social media. And I just wanted to let you know that there are tools you can use, just so you can go ahead and start blogging. Today, very quickly and very easily. And one of my favorite tools is called blogger. Blogger is owned by Google. It's one of the many tools that Google has for helping you create a successful business and it is free to use. It's almost as easy as creating a word document, to be honest. You jump in, you sign up or you connect with your Google email address. If you don't have a Google email address and you hate Google. You need a Google email address for so many things. You need a Google username. Go ahead and grab one. Because this is just one of the many tools that you can use with a Google account. So jump into blogger. And then you can start blogging. It's that easy blogger will allow you to use their free domain, whatever they give you. I think you can customize it with your name or with your business name a little bit. But you can also connect it to a pro domain. So if you buy a domain, which is like the www dot Jody, born.com or your business.com, you can buy that domain name and go ahead and connect it. Now to your blog. If you don't have a website, Then. It says easiest, starting, just jump in. This presentation that I just told you about will definitely help you with the jumping in process, but you can start creating content. Nobody even know has to know that you have it. Until you start getting better and better at blogging. And the only way to get better at something is to start. if you join the content marketing workshop, you'll see how your blog content can be repurposed over time to all sorts of other content. But jumping in with the blog right now, is the number one way you are ever going to get traffic. To your website. Now blogger does have some templates that you can use to make it pretty. If you want to, you can add images. You can add search engine optimization. To the blog because it will get traffic from Google. So it's really remarkable that this free tool exists to help you. Get started with this content planning. You can use internal links in the blog, so you can link your blog post to other blog posts. And I teach that in the workshop. You can link it to external content, which you should definitely do. So if you write an article about hiking trails, you should link to the hiking trails map. You can connect your blog to a MailChimp landing page or any email marketing landing page. So that you can get people to sign up for your newsletter go back to my email marketing podcast episodes. The most important reason. That you want to have content is so you can get people to interact and engage with your content. So you're going to link people to your email marketing signup form. You're going to link people to your listing. If you don't have a book direct website, then you can link people to your listing on Airbnb or BRBO. There's another really cool tool out there that I just found out about called Bookly. It is a basically it's a landing page that. Syncs with Airbnb. Things with VRVO. So you can actually bring in your reviews, your listing details, your photos. It's an easy one step process. I did a video in my reels that you can check out if you want to I'll link to that in the show notes. And I'll also link to Bookly because they gave me a 15% off coupon for anybody that signs up. So I'll put the details for that in the show notes, or you're welcome to email me or DME. To find out more about it, but it's a really cool tool that I encourage you to check out. If you don't have a website right now, And honestly, even if you do have a website, this is a great tool as a mobile friendly landing page. So if you're using social media, Or text-based marketing. This is a great tool for that too, because you can just really simply and easily click to a mobile landing page. Where they can read your reviews really quick, read more about you. And then click through to wherever they are most comfortable booking. No, there are other free blogging tools you can go to. You can use wordpress.com where you can actually start a WordPress blog. They also have free templates. A lot of people are intimidated by WordPress. There's actually two versions of WordPress. There's this that I just mentioned. That you can sign up for and it's self hosted. They, you can sign up and they will host it for you. But you can also like I build WordPress sites that just use the CMS, the content management system software from WordPress, and then you have to add it to your own hosting. So that's two different things. This work person I'm talking about is pretty simple to get started with just a blog. And again, they have templates. So it doesn't matter which one you want to use. I will see say if you're a tech newbie. And the thought of WordPress scares you to death. Then just start with blogger. It is seriously. As simple as opening up a word document and start typing. Now I wanted to answer a couple of questions that I've had recently about blogging. The funniest was a question that I had in another Facebook group that I did a free training for a week before last. And the lady asked the question, do I really have to blog? And the answer to that is no, you don't really have to blog. If you don't want to blog, if you hate the thought of blogging. You don't have to block, but having a blog is definitely going to help you. Have a long-term strategy. Once you write your blog posts, then your blog posts are going to be there forever. And they are going to just take a little bit of maintenance, yearly maintenance to keep them updated. So the second question is how do I find keywords to use for my bog? And the answer to that is there's a ton of tools out there. So I recommend a tool called keywords everywhere. You can sign up, pay in advance, and then it links with a bunch of other tools you can search keywords in. And YouTube Google all over the place. It's really a fantastic tool. The problem with using a tool that, that gives you some key that does keyword research for you is you really have to understand. Why keywords are important, what keywords are the best to use, which ones are going to work for you and your business. And it's much more difficult than just looking in Google to see how many searches a keyword gets. How competitive is it? How many people are creating content for it? Are people advertising for it? If so, what are they paying for ads? That tells you how hard it is to, it's going to be, to show up on Google for that. So there's much more involved with keyword research than just looking up, how many people search for a keyword. But if you're familiar with that, or if you're just curious about keywords in general, I would highly recommend getting that Chrome extension keywords everywhere. And then the third question. I received about blogging is. Is how do I use chat GPT for blogging? I would say the chat GPT is a great tool for brainstorming for outlining. For giving some feedback on your writing style, maybe for. Finding good synonyms for words that you frequently use, maybe for act. Adding some descriptive content to your blog posts. But blogging is really more about being yourself, being personable. Being real. And when you're real and when you're personable and when you're sharing content in your blog that is useful and informative and provides great value. Then that you're going to get readers and you're going to get people that are engaging with your blog. Using chat GPT is risky. You run the risk of plagiarizing. You run the risk of putting out content. That's not real. That doesn't exist because chatty PT will make up things. I've seen it. Do it. It's given me lots of content. That was not correct. So you really have the opportunity to write something great on your own and then use chat GPT to make it a little better I hope you'll stay tuned for another vacation rental marketing foundations episode. We've got two more weeks of these. In the meantime, I have a great week and check out the show notes to get links to all the things. And i'll see you later bye y'all