Welcome to Wear Wag Repeat Podcast Episode 19: Jessica Williams of Pet Talk Media and the blog You Did What With Your Wiener? is talking about optimizing your message to get more people to your website. This blogging veteran has been at it for 7 years and now she helps brands reach their pet loving customers with strategic content. Of course, it’s all inspired by her two wiener dogs Chester and Gretel.

Listen to the Episode

INTERVIEW HIGHLIGHTS

Jessica Williams, the owner of PetTalk Media, is a bit obsessive about online communication and social media. She uses her life-long passion and talent for connecting with people to help pet-focused brands plan and craft content that resonates with their target customer and that inspires action. More importantly, she helps them get seen!

Her passion stems from her award-winning blog – You Did What With Your Wiener? – a pet lifestyle blog focused on climbing mountains, breaking stereotypes, and living the good life with her two Dachshunds. When she’s not consulting or managing her professional blog, you can find her hiking, camping, or traveling with her pups and husband.

Tori: What made you decide to use your blogging experience to start PetTalk Media?

Jessica: Years ago I was getting kind of burned out by my day job. When I adopted my 2nd dachshund I decided to start a dog blog to learn how to use WordPress. Through it I discovered that I love communicating and connecting with people. I tried to find a way to turn that into my job. I ended up going back to school and got my Masters in Digital Communications and recently used my blog experience to start Pet Talk Media.

Tori: What has changed the most in blogging over the years?

Jessica: Back when I started, blogs weren’t at all how they are today. It was really a personal journal primarily for friends and family to read. So I learned as I went, through trial and error. Now that kind of information is all available on the Internet. So people who start blogging now can hit the ground running with great traffic, paid opportunities, etc. I had to learn all that stuff on my own. Now I think it’s way easier to break into blogging.

Tori: I hear you just had a pin go viral. Tell me what you learned from that.

Jessica: Yes! Even before that happened I believed in the power of Pinterest. It’s really a visual search engine more than a social network. I was doing all the “right” things like making Pinterest optimized images, creating pins for old blog posts, etc. Then out of the blue, this one pin went viral! What happened was that I went into a blog post from last year and cleaned it up and created better pinnable images. The pin that went viral was from that post – it was about Pet Dental Health Month in February. I used Tailwind to pin it, so maybe that had something to do with the traffic. I ended up getting over 200,000 page views in 2 weeks!

Tori: What do you do to optimize a blog post?

Jessica: The number one thing is that the post has to be useful. You want to provide people with value. To do that you need to know what question they’re asking and what question you’re answering. In the beginning my posts were all personal stories. Now I use those stores as a lead-in and the rest of the post is about providing value. You also want to make it readable, so short paragraphs that are just 1-3 sentences. Think about how it will look on mobile. And use proper headers like the H1 and H2 tags that make the post more scannable. Formatting is one of the most important things.

FIND JESSICA

Pet Talk Media
www.facebook.com/PetTalkMedia
Twitter and Instagram: @pettalkmedia
You Did What With Your Wiener? 

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