Katy Widrick is a multimedia producer and social media manager. She blogs all about technology, health, fitness, parenting and current events at katywidrick.com. She’s a certified personal trainer and group fitness instructor and she also shares tips and tricks for staying healthy in a hectic world. Katy also offers brand building and increasing blog traffic at makemediaover.com and is a syndicate living blogger for the Huffington post and fix.com. She lives in Petersburg, Florida with her husband and two beautiful daughters.
Tell us a little bit about you and what you do.
I launched my very first blog when I was 26/27, which like so many people started online and digital marketing was a terrible terrible blog. I had no idea what I was doing. In the years since I really reshaped who I am as a blogger and now I have launched several businesses from that. Ten years later I’m very different to the person I was when I first got to this business. I’m a personal trainer, fitness instructor and I’ve grown my family. When I started I was not married and now I’m married with two kids. I’ve developed a couple of businesses where I coach and consult people who want to start their own blogs. So much of what I do is built on new learning as I go. I back up what I say with either statistics or showing how they got through that journey
What is the most under utilized tool that entrepreneurs need to be using?
Search engine optimization. What can you do to your website or products to make them stand out in google? How can you make sure your site comes out ahead of other sites? It’s so much simpler than people realize. There’s great tools you can use. Search is pretty friendly to beginners if you do the right things. There’s also an art of storytelling that search engines reward you for also!
Do you have three suggestions to easily implement SEO on your website?
Yoast SEO: On wordpress, if you’re self hosted, there is a plug in called Yoast for SEO. It allows you to unlock a few new fields when you’re creating a blog post or posting a product. It asks you what is the headline, you put in meta-description with key words. The boxes tell you exactly what to put in. It’s like a game because when you submit it, it will tell you if it’s green, yellow or red and will give you changes to make to make it green!
Google Analytics: No matter what platform you’re on you need to understand you’re Google Analytics. That’s apiece of code you can put on your website to track your page views and visitors. You can see how many people are finding you through search and what keywords they’re using to get there.
Google Search Console: You can to verify it with a small piece of code. You can see what everyone is searching for in Google in reference to your niche. If you see you’re getting a lot of impressions but very little click through, then you can look at why. You can tweak things on your website to help you get more clicks.
There all user friendly and have an immediate impact on how you appear on search. At the end of the day as much as you can learn about your traffic and where it’s coming from and look for opportunities to get more of those people to click through; it’s easier and more effective than trying to these big community on social networks.
The rapid development of new things you have to be on can be overwhelming. Everyday there’s something new and shiny. Really prioritize what works for you and what’s fun. I make all of my clients answer two questions. Is it working and is it fun? Everything doesn’t work for everybody. It’s so easy to enter this space between wordpress, squarespace, etc. The barrier to entry is SO low. You don’t have to hire a developer. You can just jump in.
Focus on what’s working! If you try to be everything to everyone you end up not being successful on any front. I would rather see people pick one or two places and figure out if it’s working. Figure out what’s really working and let the rest of it go!
Is it working? Is it fun? SEO tips from @kwidrick on the #blissfulbitespodcast
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What are a few website changes you’ve made recently?
The changes I’ve made speaks to where I see my platform growing. I have been spending a lot more time in email marketing in the last month or two. I’ve really been doing a lot more templates for my newsletters I have been looking into automation which is a drip campaign. I’m really focusing a lot of my design work, a lot of my set-up on my newsletters campaign and I’m seeing a lot of success on that.
On my website itself I’m working on the idea of historical optimization. I told you I’ve been blogging since 2007, well a lot of the posts from when I first started are terrible. I’m going through and I’m taking some of the posts that I know would resonate with people today that I have written years ago. I’m cleaning them up, I’m fixing typos, I’m doing photography and graphics and I’m actually republishing them in my site.
This week I republished a post back in 2011 I put all new graphics on it. It’s a how to on being a good guest poster. When it got republished and re-pinned and re-shared, it’s like a brand new post except it actually took very little time to clean up.
How do you manage to juggle work especially being a new mom of 2?
First of all, I don’t know that I successfully juggle it everyday. I sometimes yell at my kids and feel terrible about it and there are a lot of times when I’m sitting around and laundry is not done, or meals that come from Chipotle just because I don’t have time to do all of the things that I loved to do.
I’m really organized, I like to plan my day, I have a to-do list, I may in fact reset my to-do list every single day on paper. I write out exactly what I’m going to do, when I’m going to do it, what I have to do leading up to it. I tried to stay organized as possible in that way.
I know for me to have the energy, the patience, the excitement over doing things like hanging out with my kids and doing puzzles or walking them to school or washing the dishes or whatever it is, I have to have some time in the day for me. In my case, that’s my workout.
What is your favorite social media platform for fun?
Instagram, a thousand percent!
What is one thing that you want our listeners to know about building a brand?
You have to look at your analytics. If you have nothing else to do after this podcast then go find your analytics, otherwise you are operating blind. You need to know if your users are looking at you on mobile or desktop. If they’re looking at you on mobile, how’s your site doing? Is it working? You need to know if they are coming to you from pinterest or Facebook or a referral source and then figure out how to reward those people or figure out how to get more of the people from the referral sites.
Where can we find Katy?
Katywidrick.com
MakeMediaOver.com
Instagram: @kwidrick
Twitter: @kwidrick
Facebook: Katy Widrick
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