The End of Another Year Filled with Christmas Cheer at KCBT

With Christmas only days away, all the staff and students at KCBT have been counting down to holidays, celebrations and good cheer. Early December, the students and trainers all came together to spread the spirit of Christmas in a variety of ways around the College.

Deck the Class with Boughs of Holly

Over the past few weeks, trainers and their students had the task of decorating their classrooms to create an atmosphere of Christmas. As you enter each classroom there is a different feel to Christmas, helium balloons and gigantic red bows, Santa, baubles, tinsel and Christmas trees can be found. It sure made studying in the last few weeks a lot more fun.

KCBT “Grateful” Christmas Tree

What is Christmas without a tree?  Well, the KCBT Christmas tree this year was put up in reception and has been covered not only in lights, but also in paper baubles with hand-written messages written by staff and students. The messages reflect something each person is grateful for this Christmas. Friends and family, love and friendship seemed to top the list. We had a lot of fun reading and guessing who wrote what.

Food Drive

Christmas is a time for giving, and yet again KCBT organised a food drive to encourage our students and staff to make some contribution to society and help those in need this Christmas. Under the KCBT tree is a basket hamper which is full to the brim. These non-perishable items will be delivered to food bank so they can be distributed before Christmas Day.

Christmas Buffet

Ending the year with a celebration or two, after many months of lesson planning and assessments was well-earned. It was time to come together and share a meal for Christmas. KCBT put on 2 lunches for the students of their VET programs and a dinner for the English evening students. There was a banquet of food and desserts, Christmas decorations, gifts, lights and carols. The students were so grateful to have the opportunity to share a Christmas meal with their KCBT family. There were some Santa bellies after eating and lots of smiles.

Staff Christmas Dinner

This year KCBT treated its staff to a delicious 3 course meal of amazing Indian Food from 2 Fat Indians Restaurant in Beaufort Street Mt Lawley. There was laughter, Secret Santa and lots of photos to cherish the memories of an eventful year in 2019. 

Potluck

It seems that food is always a common theme at KCBT. The last business day of the year was celebrated with a staff lunch here on campus. Staff contributed bringing a variety our food from their different cultural backgrounds. The last day was filled with joy as it should be.

Farewell to 2019

As we clean our desks and close the doors to our offices behind us, let’s reflect back on our year, the friendships we made along the way, the challenges and how we made it through knowing that there was always someone there to offer a smile on rainy days. Let’s cherish every day and be grateful.

Here’s to a peaceful and happy Christmas to you all. May it be filled with love and most of all kindness for a bigger and brighter 2020.

Many Blessings.

 

Top six blogging techniques to use in 2020

Content Marketing first became popular in 2008 when Marcus Sheridan of Riverpool & Spas used it to save his pool company from going bankrupt. The company used a new approach during that time to increase its reach, and today its website gets more traffic than any other pool company in the world.

With over 409 million readers viewing more than 22.2 billion blogs per month around the world, you’ll find that most brands do have a blog section on their website. Blogging is an essential part of any content marketing strategy of a business but, before getting into blogging techniques, why is it necessary for any business to blog.

  1. Blogging helps improve SEO of the website (obviously!)
  2. It is the most inbound way to talk about your products and services
  3. Showcase your company as thought leader in your domain
  4. The most affordable marketing activity that can reach wider audience
  5. It encourages inbound links

Using appropriate post length for blog posts

Google considers blog posts that have less than 500 words as thin, which is not a good sign for SEO. Most bloggers see strong results with posts that are information dense, typically over 2000 words get the best results. However, anything above 500 words will help you reap the benefits of the efforts that you put into a post.

Blogging word count

Source: https://devrix.com/tutorial/8-blogging-trends-2019/

Video and live streaming for the new generation

With the growing access of internet and decreasing attention span, marketeers have started to realise the need of video content in their blog posts. According to a statistics report by Orbit Media, while only 26% of a blog content contains video, 41% of bloggers that report strong response use videos. Contributor posts, statistics, audio and images are some of the other form of content that helps bloggers get a better response.

Blog Post elements

Source: https://www.orbitmedia.com/blog/blogging-statistics/

Frequency of posting a blog post

The frequency is very much dependent on how many resources you have with you. The more often you post a blog, the more likely you are to get more traffic on your website. But if you don’t update it then it gives people no reason to visit your site on the assumption that there’s nothing new.

This does not mean that you should be levying on the post quality just to keep the frequency flowing.

Source: https://marketinginsidergroup.com/content-marketing/how-often-should-you-blog-blog-post-frequency-research/

According to Marketing Insider group, companies get three times more traffic when they post eleven or more posts than posting just once a month.

Using the right number of images

One reason using images on blog posts helps, is having them can reduce the bounce rate and increase the time spent on the website. In fact, articles using images get 94% more views than without images.

Source: https://www.jeffbullas.com/6-powerful-reasons-why-you-should-include-images-in-your-marketing-infographic/

The average online views increase when including elements like photos, videos and others together with text. It also makes your blogs more appealing making it more likely to be shared.

Use catchy headlines that work

Your headline is your selling point for your blog posts. It’s the first thing that the person sees before deciding whether to read your blog post or not. Hence, it becomes important to understand the need of your target market while writing the headline for your post.

Examples:

  • Bad Headline: How to write a blog.
  • Good Headline: 10 ways to write a blog post that gets more clicks
  • Bad Headline: What are the ways to get more clicks on your blog posts?
  • Good Headline: Follow these 5 tricks to get more clicks on your blog posts

Source: https://bloggingwizard.com/write-better-blog-headlines/

Add CTA’s to your content

You have a quirky headline which gets users to open your post and the content that is good enough to keep them hanging on until the end, but they didn’t take any further action. Do you think it was worth it? Putting effort in getting users to your site is as important as them acting after it. This action needs to be predetermined by a marketeer while creating the post. This is when “Call to Actions” comes into picture and it doesn’t always have to be about “buying” or “selling”.  It can either be as explicit as this or it could be more implicit like inserting a simple link in certain sections to prompt them to browse other pages of your website. But the CTA must be consistent to the objective of your blogging strategy.

Examples of good call to action:

    1. Social Shares
    2. Subscription Pop Ups
    3. Internal Link to navigate users around the website

Content marketing is an essential element of any marketing or digital marketing strategy. One of our social media units (SMMBCM501A) specifically deals with planning, implementing and managing blogs for business. As the online world is always changing, we make sure to teach our students the most updated concepts they would need in order to become a digital marketeer.