Ideas for Blog Content

One of the main problems for bloggers is the constant race to add fresh blog content. The following are some suggestions for bloggers to conquer this problem and discover new resources for obtaining information about what is the hot topic of conversation.

Browse Various Sites to Find Out What is Discussed
You will become familiar with what people are discussing if you check out various websites belonging to bloggers who are successful. Once you are aware of the latest topics of interest, you can write about them yourself and your content will reflect what people want to read about. In addition, if you have an excellent writing style, you leave a good first impression with visitors to your website, encouraging them to come back for more.

Use Google to Find Hot Topics
By using Google, you are able to discover the most searched topics on the web. By examining these subjects and choosing one, you can begin work on creating content. These writing samples will draw in a larger audience. You should constantly be creating new material, which is a practice likely to increase your number of visitors and the amount of time they spend on your site.

Search Your Local Press
Local publications are a fine resource for getting a feel for what interest’s people and what would entice them to read about, particularly if your blog is aimed at the local population. In the event that your target readership is broader than your physical location, this might yet be helpful because an event in your area might be of value for discussion and may grab the attention of a global audience.

Invite Others to Contribute Material
If you are having trouble coming up with compelling content, turn to others who might have some ideas. You may extend an invitation to fellow bloggers or others with an interest in writing such as novelists, teachers, philosophy students, etc. to be a writer on your blog. You might supply them with a subject or allow them to select their own subject - which is still related to your blog - in order to write for you.

Write Reviews About Other Blogs
Another method of finding fresh ideas for your blog is to write reviews of other blogs.  This is beneficial for a number of reasons, initially because it provides a broad range of unique content; second, it encourages reviewed websites to link back to your own site, therefore supplying you with visitors from their sites who share an interest in what you might have to say about their preferred blogger. Should these visitors enjoy your blog, they might have a desire to return to it, therefore ensuring you of a faithful audience. In addition, the back links you acquire from different websites will enable you to get a better page ranking from Google. Doing this can increase the reputation of your blog.

Good luck with your blog content.

Membership sites are websites that provide a place for people with common interests to come together. Membership sites are attractive to users for a variety of reasons. Often people join in order to learn about a specific topic in greater depth. A person who is new to an area of interest may want to gather information by surrounding themselves with experienced individuals. The best and fastest path to learning is by total immersion. Some people who are experts in their areas of interest choose to help others by coaching and mentoring them. Some users just want to hang out in an online community and learn new things.

Why Should You Form a Membership Site?

People around the world are eager to create membership sites for a variety of reasons:

1. To generate a constant flow of monthly subscription fees. A consistent revenue stream is one of the best features of the membership site model. The revenue is more stable, avoiding some of the ups and downs of a more typical business venture.

2. To lay claim as an authority, or master, on the subject. People will believe you are an expert if you make yourself CEO of your own membership site. But remember, you’ll be expected to repeatedly justify this claim when the site is in full operation.

3. To find out more about your area of specialization. Even when you are teaching, you are sure to learn more about your topic. Belonging to a membership site will constantly encourage further research into your area of expertise.

4. To make contacts with other people. There are a number of reasons why people want to be in contact with others. Some people simply find online environments stimulating. You may be looking for a joint venture partner or seeking mentors or moderators who can make contributions to the site and handle some of the daily tasks. No matter why you are there, membership sites create an environment that encourages collaboration and cooperation.

5. To share your experience with others. Many individuals are simply driven to teach others. They believe they are handing down a legacy. The best way to further that goal is to start a membership site.

Before starting your own membership site, clarify your reasons for doing so. It’s your passion for your vision that will carry you through the difficulties that occur in any business. You need to know why you need to do what you are doing. Your clear vision is what will help you turn your dream into a large, successful membership site.

I’ve found this great info to help keep you on track…

“The entrepreneur knows that their biggest opportunity is always inside their business following their ideal strategy and not the hot product that everyone is mailing for this week”

The difference between productive and wasted time:
“Rich, what you need to do is go out and get a kitchen timer and set it for 60 minutes and then just work on building profit during those 60 minutes - nothing else”

Productive time is time directly generated to income
Productive time doesn’t appear like magic, you have to be focused and disciplined.

Examples of non productive time:

• talking to friends
• surfing the internet
• checking and reading email
• answering your phone
• studying and learning time
• checking web site stats
• organizing your desk
• clearing your office
• reading an ebook
• ALL THIS IS MAINTENANCE

Productive Time - must build a business, must increase your income
implementation from learning

• leverage someone else to do the work
• creating products
• marketing products
• improving your marketing process
• managing money making projects
• setting up joint venture deals
• creating scalability in your business

Super Productive Time

• when you create a system around any of your money making activities
• creating systems that create products
• creating systems that market products

“…most people never get close to making their hourly rate because they mistakenly believe that what’s keeping them from earning that kind of money is missing knowledge. And while there might be an element of truth to the missing knowledge theory….”

“stick to one niche, developing a full funnel of products and instituting cross-sell, upsells, and back ends to our audience.”

It is important that with each blog post you write these 4 highly effective steps are followed to ensure that you create income from your blog post.

1. Write an attention-grabbing headline. Don’t be too forgiving or conservative with your headline. Be as creative as you can when it comes to your blog title. After all, it is the first thing your readers see. There are different ways on how you can craft it. You can state the benefit, ask a question, and allow them to anticipate a very good reward, or simply tickle their imagination. When you have a good title for your blog post, it becomes even a lot easier for you to get noticed in social bookmarking websites where competition among bloggers and other article writers can be tough.

2. Make sure that your blog post is pleasing to read. Who likes to read a post where words are unclear, or paragraphs are scattered everywhere? You may be the best writer in blogosphere, but definitely no one will hear you if you don’t follow organization.

Now, when it comes to organization, you can simply allow your blogging platform to take care of that. For example, Wordpress can easily wrap texts and break lines so you don’t need to hassle yourself with HTML codes and manually adjusting the paragraphs.

But what is really important is this: allow your article to be convenient to skim. With that, make use of bullets or numbers, as much as possible and as often as you can. These tools can actually highlight important points in your post, so those who are truly busy too read the entire thing can still appreciate the information you’ve shared.

3. The headline and the body should agree. Don’t underestimate the intelligence of your readers. They can instantly know if you’re just trying to trick them to read what you’ve written or not. If you want them to trust, ensure that you can deliver the message you want to convey in your headline with the body.

Your blog post should not be too long either. The most important thing is you can deliver the point right on the dot—with preciseness and conciseness.

4. Be persuasive. Your post will be considered weak or not effective at all if you cannot compel your readers to action. You can either push them to click on your affiliate link and share your message to their friends and family.

To do this you need to understand your audience: what do they need? What kinds of copies would they react to? When you can give them what they need, it will be very easy for you to convince them.

Started by a college student, Facebook has grown tremendously for the past 4 years, and is definitely an essential tool for social marketing. Its success can be attributed to different factors, and one of them is that it allows businesses to connect with one another and build relationships.

Here are 4 ways how you can use Facebook for social marketing for your business:

1. You can find colleagues and business associates at Facebook.

With countless faces and names stored in the Facebook database, it’s very likely that you can find at least 40 to 50 percent of your co-workers or business associates blogging about their work. What’s more, if you’re in the sales industry, for example, you can build your contacts using Facebook, allowing you to promote your products and services, as well as establish credibility, a lot faster.

2. Building profiles and adding applications have never been this easy.

There are hundreds of applications that you can choose from in Facebook which you can simply add into your profile. One of my favorite applications that I find really useful is one that allows you to link your blog to your Facebook account. This helps me promote my new blog to my Facebook network.

3. You can promote events.

On Facebook it is very easy to set up events and promote them to all your friends. In a matter of moments all your business associates have all the information they need about your upcoming events.

4. You can formulate groups.

Why don’t you create your own group on Facebook? This is a great way to find others in your industry or who may be interested in your business. Participate in already active groups or start your own. The more groups that you are in the more opportunity there is for your network to grow.  Remember not just to promote yourself but to be a social and useful member of the groups.

As you can see Facebook can be a great social marketing tool for business.

BENEFITS OF EFFECTIVE SOCIAL MARKETING

As you complete steps one to five above, you will experience the following benefits for your efforts:

• Creation of brand awareness – the more people that see your name and your link, the more brand awareness you are creating.
• Establishment of Trust
• Traffic from niche conversations
• High quality incoming links to your site as other community members link to you
• Increased visibility in search engines
• Decreased dependence on search engines
• Your content will be indexed faster
• You’ll be better on track of what is going on in your niche and what products and services your target market wants
• Management of your reputation

• You will discover needs, desires and trends that move your market niche to spend

Advantages of Social Linking

One of the primary advantages of using social networking is the ability to obtain incoming links to your website and/or blog. When you publish content on a blog or website, you can then bookmark the URL with social bookmarking sites, news sites and/or content sites for exposure and relationship building. The links that naturally happen through social networks are strategically placed everywhere your target market is visiting on the web, which creates visitors to your site who are most likely to be your targeted customers.

For more information on social marketing and social networking please feel free to contact me as we are holding a number of seminars on these topics.

STEP THREE OF YOUR SOCIAL MARKETING STRATEGY

In order to benefit from social networking sites, you will need to find out where your niche audience socializes online. For example, if you are selling musical instruments, you’ll want to find communities of musicians, including niche social networking sites, forums and blogs that are on the topic and allow you to leave comments.

Niche social networking sites have more deeply involved members and better content than a general interest networking site, like Facebook or Myspace. The people you meet and develop relationships with on niche networking sites will be more targeted contacts, and this is exactly what you want as opposed to just contacting large volumes of people who may or may not be interested in anything you have to offer.

STEP FOUR OF YOUR SOCIAL  MARKETING STRATEGY

Join the social networking sites, create your profiles, and interact with others. Don’t think of this as marketing – instead, just mingle and participate in online conversations. In fact, you will gain the best results if you focus on building genuine friendships and sharing interests than you will if you attempt to use marketing tactics. Give, listen and help other people to connect with people who share interests or have something valuable to another person.

You will gain the best results if you set aside at least an hour at a time to work on your relationship building via social networking sites, several times per week. Use social networking sites to generously link to, promote and trade content with other people within your niche, and build traffic to all the pages of your sites that contain links to your web properties.

STEP FIVE OF YOUR SOCIAL MARKETING STRATEGY

After a few weeks of participating actively in social networking sites, you can step back and analyse where the majority of your traffic and profits are coming from. Once you have pinpointed what is giving you the best results, you can focus your time and effort into those areas ongoing.

Part 4 of Social Marketing Strategy coming soon

STEP ONE  OF YOUR SOCIAL MARKETING STRATEGY

A large part of social marketing involves the use of a blog. The blog can be seen as your social marketing tool, and certain technical functions of the blog are essential. Firstly, the blog should not only become a source for information, but also a place for niche oriented conversations. As you begin participating in social media site discussions and communities, you’ll want to carry over those conversations into your blog.

When you make your blog addictive and popular, people will want to come just to see what you’re saying and to join in the conversation. Are their blogs that you enjoy visiting on a regular basis? Consider what makes you read them or what makes you watch a tv show over and over again when you are writing your content.

Encourage people to leave comments on your blog posts by asking questions and directing them to answer within the comment section. The comments from other people serve as social proof to first-time visitors to your blog because they show that there are other people reading and responding to your blog. Keep track of which topics receive the most comments because you can assume that they are “hot topics” that people want to know more about.

Within your blog’s sidebar, you need to have links to your main social site profiles or feeds. Social sites often have widgets that can be included easily on your blog, but if not- you can link to them directly from your blog. You also need to link to your blog from your main website, shopping cart, social media profiles, within forum and email signatures, your eBay page – basically anywhere you go online that allows you to generate links!

STEP TWO OF YOUR SOCIAL MARKETING STRATEGY

Not only is it necessary to keep up with your own blog for social marketing, but you also need to find other high quality and popular blogs within your niche to visit and comment on. Leave insightful comments that are worth reading. From your blog, link to other blogs within your niche and they will likely return the favor by promoting you on their own sites and blogs.

Comments on blogs are how blogs are changed from articles to conversation. You can ask questions or leave funny or controversial comments when visiting other blogs.

Part 3 of Social Marketing Strategy coming soon