How to never run out of blog topics

Sep 29, 2009 Comments

There are torrents of ideas when you start a new blog and in fact you’ve got so much to write that you feel like publishing multiple posts in a single day. You have to forcibly stop yourself just to maintain a semblance of regularity. You start dreaming about featuring in the top 100 blogs of your niche and your traffic graph actually throws buckets full of encouraging numbers at you. It’s like a dream run.

And then you begin to wake up.

It’s not a sudden awakening. You toss and turn around, you try to keep the dream going. 5 posts a day get reduced to 2 or 3 and 2 or 3 get reduced to 1 and then, to your horror, you begin missing entire days. After sometime, it doesn’t even remain a horror, you have nothing new to write and you have lost enthusiasm. You wonder how come all those successful bloggers keep coming up with one killer post after another with phenomenal regularity and to add insult to the injury, they not only write great stuff for their own blogs, they also write awesome guest blog posts for other blogs. What are you missing?

First of all you have to realize that everybody runs out of topics, eventually, even the greatest of bloggers. So how do they get new topics? Here are a few things you can do to keep the streams of blogging ideas flowing:

Be a part of the community

When you work alone there is a far greater chance of you running out of blogging ideas. Visit other blogs in your niche and pay close attention to what people are talking about. You get lots of new ideas when you interact with people.

Give priority to building a community

It’s hard to run out of steam if you’ve got a vibrant community on your blog. It’s always very encouraging when people give feedback, whether positive or negative.

Encourage your visitors to ask questions

Once you’ve developed a community, encourage your visitors to post questions. If you write about a product or a service believe me, people will have unlimited queries, and every query can be turned into an engaging and useful blog post.

Get active on social media

Lots of interaction and stimulation takes place on websites like Twitter and Facebook. People are constantly posting interesting tidbits that can be easily turned into great blog posts. Even small exchanges can be transformed into full-blown blog posts with some effort.

Get ideas from your existing blog posts

Lots of sub-topics are hiding in your existing blog posts. Go through your old archives and try to revive your old blog posts with new perspective. A lot changes in a few months. You can also re-write your older posts with some new twists.

Add value to blog posts and articles appearing on other websites

Use websites like AllTop.com, Delicious, Digg, StumbleUpon and PopURLs to find new content relevant to your field and see how you can derive new content out of them. Don’t worry about always writing longish blog posts. Even if you have one paragraph to add, link to the original content page and add your bit. This way it won’t seem daunting. Besides, sometimes when you think of publishing just a single paragraph, it’s easier to writing a long blog post.

Learn and share continuously

Learning doesn’t just help you blog non-stop, it also improves you as a professional, but that’s a different point. It’s great fun learning new things about your niche and them sharing them with your readers.

The key to NOT running out of blog post ideas is realizing that everybody does, and you constantly have to keep this in mind and plan accordingly. How do YOU make sure that you don’t run out of topics?

What does content marketing actually mean?

Sep 23, 2009 Comments

Content marketing is one of the most popular buzz words these days on the Internet and surprisingly, it gets more traction than content creation, without which content marketing has no purpose to exist.

So what is content marketing?

It basically means promoting the right kind of content in front of the right kind of audience. Content is king is a clichéd expression but it has never been truer. Whether it’s the search engines or the social media websites, they survive and thrive on content: whatever format the content has. But is content marketing as easy as this?

Hardly. To create a solid content marketing strategy, you need to clearly define your audience, and have a lucid perception of what sort of content would tickle their buying buds. Whom do you want to target? Customers, clients, subscribers, advertisers or visitors who devote a fair amount of their attention upon your advertisers? Then you start creating content accordingly. If you are a web design company you want to attract prospective clients who would be interested in buying your services. If you are a content writer or an online copywriter (like yours truly) you would like to attract people who would want to hire you as a freelance writer.

In the early 2000s for nearly two years my website came on the first spot on Google for the word "web designing" because I had generated lots of content around this phrase. The problem was, my website mostly attracted people who wanted to learn web designing rather than hire me for their web design projects. The targeting was all wrong.

So when I started creating content for this website it was constantly on my mind that I shouldn’t end up attracting just "aspiring" content writers and work-at-home people who wanted to do something in their spare time. My content should attract prospective clients. Well-orchestrated content marketing can achieve this for you.

Once you have identified your audience and have created a significant number of blog posts or web pages, you must start promoting and marketing your content using the following methods:

• Opt-in email marketing: This is one of the oldest, and still one of the best ways of getting your word around. When people are on your website or blog encourage them to subscribe to your email updates so that they can receive the content you publish without interruption.
• RSS feeds: Encourage people to subscribe to your RSS feed by prominently displaying the RSS button on your website or blog.
• Social media, networking and bookmarking websites: Such websites can bring you tons of traffic. These websites include FaceBook, Twitter, Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon, etc. They may seem to be bringing lots of random traffic (and increasing your bandwidth costs in the process) without generating much business but they certainly increase your visibility and help you strengthen your brand presence.
• Online forums: Yes, they’re still popular and get lots of traffic from search engines.
• Guest posting and commenting on other blogs: Find blogs in your niche. Write guest blog posts for them (something I have never been able to do actually) and participate in their comments section. Again, this may not bring you direct customers but it does generate buzz and this leads to customers and clients.
• Search engine optimization: Some people believe in SEO and some don’t. The most logical thing to do is, produce highly relevant content using keywords your prospective customers and clients would use as search terms on search engines. This can draw lots of relevant traffic to your blog or website.

Content marketing is an ongoing process simply because there are always people competing with you. Ignore it for a few months and you’ll realize you almost have to start it from the beginning, unless you’re a celebrity.

When do you need content writing services?

Sep 12, 2009 Comments

When exactly do you need content writing services? When you need professional results out of professional writing. Websites no longer remain the way they used to be a few years ago. With the onslaught of blogging and social media websites, those 12-page websites are no longer viable. You constantly need to publish high-quality content on your website as well as your blog to give enough fodder to search engines and social media enthusiasts. No website can dream of succeeding today without publishing good content persistently.

A content writing service can provide you quality content on an ongoing basis at a great rate. Is it expensive? Depends on what sort of service you are looking for. Most content writing services — especially the ones operating from India, the Philippines, China, etc. — come quite cheap and they even provide great content, but I don’t promote myself as a provider of "cheap content writing services" per se.

I do provide bulk content writing at quite low rates but the quality is not good. It goes without saying that even low-rate content comes with spelling and grammatical errors. I do understand that the real benefit of hiring a content writing service is that you can get good-quality content continuously without feeling the pinch and that is why I’m constantly trying to find out ways to provide bulk content writing services at highly competitive rates. This involves closely working with writers that can write a lot in less time because the faster you can write, the more you can earn without charging much. Working on that.

OK, so coming back to the main question:

Why do you need content writing services?

Here are a few reasons:

• You need good-quality content on an ongoing basis. As I said, it does you no good to just have 12-20 pages on your website and then wait for the business to pour in. A lot of search engine traffic is lapped up by websites that constantly publish new content, because basically that is what the search engines are looking for. They crawl and index millions of pages on daily basis to make sure their users don’t get stale content every time they search for a particular topic.
• You want to improve your search engine rankings. Suppose you are a professional content writer working alone or running a service. With thousand of websites providing the same service, how do the search engines know that your website must be highlighted when people are looking for a good content writing service? They go through your various pages and then evaluate your significance both according to quantity as well as quality. Lots of content definitely improves your keyword density and also increases long tail traffic to your website.
• You want to run a successful blog. Your blog not only improves your search engine rankings it also helps you establish your authority. If you continuously publish useful posts (related to the theme of your business or passion, of course) you develop a dedicated fan base that eventually gives you loyal customers and clients. Some also prefer to sell advertising once their blog traffic picks up.
• You want to increase traffic from social media and social bookmarking websites. Content thrives a lot on social media and social networking websites. If people find your links useful they love to promote it and bookmark it.

Well-written content is the backbone of the entire Internet activity. May it be videos, images or text, it’s basically content that gets promoted and consumed. As a writer, for me what matters is the written content, and fortunately for me and other content writing services providers, it’s the written content that rules the roost.

Is your content a noise or a voice

Sep 09, 2009 Comments

There is content, and there is content. In the conversation economy (fueled by social media and social networking websites) the content you publish on your website can make or break your business. It depends on what direction you want to take, whether you want to be a noise, or a voice.

Low-quality content turns your content into noise. What are the traits that tell you that you’ve got low-quality content?

• Your search engine traffic doesn’t increase.
• Even if your search engine traffic increases, your conversion rate remains poor.
• Nobody finds it useful, relevant or topical.
• Your repeat traffic is very low.
• Nobody promotes your links but you.
• Not many people link to your blog or website.
• Nobody talks about what you publish.
• Even if people promote your link, it is due to some controversy regarding your views or opinion.

High-quality content on the other hand gives you a voice. Whereas people tend to ignore a noise, they pay attention to a voice. So what features of your content make it a voice?

• It improves your search engine rankings for relevant keywords.
• Your visitors find your content useful and they subscribe to your RSS feed updates or email newsletter, if available.
• People share your links with their visitors, followers, friends and colleagues using social media and social networking websites and they respect your opinion.
• The other bloggers and publishers love to link to your content as valuable reference.
• You are eventually able to establish your authority.

As a professional content writer and online copywriter I’ve observed client fall into the "noise" content trap when they quickly want to improve their search engine rankings without putting sufficient emphasis on the quality. Sure, noisy content does increase your search engine traffic, but then that traffic is simply a crowd. Only quality content, content that carries a voice, gets you customers and clients, and loyal readers.

Is your WordPress blog hacked? One of the solutions

Sep 05, 2009 Comments

To my horror a few hours ago I discovered that one of my major blogs — http://howtoplaza.com — was hacked (read about the latest hacker attacks on WordPress blogs). I did some research and most of the solutions I found were quite vague, and the WordPress website doesn’t even mention the attack, let alone the solution.

How do you know your WordPress blog is hacked? An obscure string is appended to your post URL. You’ll see something like:

/post-title/%&(%7B$%7Beval(base64_decode($_SERVER%5BHTTP_REFERER%5D))%7D%7D|.+)&%/

Simple solution if your WordPress blog is hacked

If you can log into your WordPress admin area you’ll notice there is another admin! Delete him or her immediately.

Please remember that this solution worked on my blog maybe because the hacker didn’t get enough time to mess around much.

• If you’re able to log in, immediately upgrade your WordPress installation files. I did an automatic upgrade from the Dashboard area.
• Then go to Settings and from there go to Permalinks. This is where you can rectify the problem. The active permalink has the extra string. Correct the permalink setting, and save it. Your blog starts working.

I don’t know if it is a permanent or a temporary solution, but none of my blog posts were loading, and now all are loading.

Why your website or blog needs unique content

Sep 04, 2009 Comments

There are basically two reasons why your website or blog needs unique, fresh content: the search engines prefer unique content compared to commonly and easily found content, and people who are active on various social media and networking websites prefer to promote something unique, something highly useful and something that attracts immediate attention.

Search engines looking for unique content

Various search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo! are constantly competing with each other. Just because they get millions of visitors daily don’t assume they have it easy. Even a small fluctuation means millions of ad dollars lost. So they are constantly trying to improve their ranking algorithms and trying to find and index content that is unique.

The uniqueness and the usefulness of the content they find for their users keep those users from switching over to another search engine. Why would the users use a search engine that finds the same stuff that can be found on scores of other websites? Hence, in order to get higher rankings you have to make sure that the content published on your website or blog is unique as well as highly relevant.

Social media users want to promote unique content

Nobody likes to promote content that is being promoted by 500 other users. Social media websites can bring you tons of traffic if you can lure their users to your website by providing highly interesting, topical and relevant content that they cannot find anywhere else. But do they promote your links just for altruistic reasons? Not at all.

Take for instance Twitter and Facebook. Why do people keep posting interesting links on these websites? They want to show that they can locate and share interesting stuff. They want to be useful to their followers and fans. This way, if they are posting 10 useful links from other websites and blogs, they can also post a few from their own website without looking spammy. Besides, on Twitter, interesting tweets get retweeted and this is beneficial both to the owner of the link and the one who tweets it because both gain exposure.

Then there is conventional logic too. When you publish useful content on your website it tells your visitors that you take pains to keep them informed. If you share important information with them you establish yourself as an authority, and in more than 99% cases authority brings respect and trust, and respect and trust leads to loyal customers and clients.

How I select and organize keywords for writing optimized content

Sep 02, 2009 Comments

Although SEO spammers have given a bad tinge to the art of using keywords in your web page copy, they are still as relevant as when the humans discovered their importance vis-à-vis search engine optimization. Really, it makes common sense. It’s the keywords and the key phrases that tell both the search engines and the visitors what you’re talking about in your web page copy or blog post. Miss the keywords, and you miss the whole point.

But aren’t there various ways of saying the same thing and wouldn’t you prefer to let the feral stallions of your imagination run wild on the meadows of writing, you may ask? Sure, but when you’re writing for your client, or when you’re writing for business (maybe yours), the need to generate business takes precedence over your proclivity for articulating psychedelic expressions.

You need to use the language used by prospective customers and clients.

Researching and selecting keywords and phrases

When I start a new optimized content writing project (to be candid, everything I write turns out to be optimized because of the way I write), I begin with a brainstorming on what sort of audience I’m writing for and this pretty much decides what keywords and phrases I’m going to use. This is often difficult and many content writers end up with near-gibberish content, but you can sort this problem out by making a list of benefits of the product or service you intend to promote through your writing. This may seem like a clichéd approach in the beginning but not every product or service is known by its name.

It is natural if people search for a "web designer" or an online "copywriter" because by now they are very known services, but there might be a few people who don’t know what SEO is and they may search for something like "improve my search engine position" or "get me on google first page". So aside from optimizing for a generic term like SEO, you also need to take care of people who conduct searches using direct benefits as search terms. Similarly if you are selling a mobile application that lets you manage your ERP system through a smart phone, there is a possibility that people look for "smart phone erp application" rather than the actual name of the software. Or for that matter people may search for "safest family car" instead of using known brands. If you are ignoring such search terms, you are missing the real traffic, whether you are a big business or a small business.

Organizing keywords

I use the main keyword in the heading and the title of the web page or the blog post. Although I use it just once in the first paragraph, if the context demands a repetition, use it again, but don’t use it more than twice. If you feel like using it more than 2 times, rephrase your sentence.

If your keyword is an expression comprising multiple words (for instance, online content writing services) you don’t have to use the complete expression all the time. Use it once or twice (try using it at least once in the first paragraph) in its entirety and afterwards, just scatter it across your remaining paragraph. You can repeat the complete keyword in the last paragraph too, but don’t force it if it doesn’t seem appropriate.

Aside from the paragraphs you can also use the keywords — partially or fully — in your headings and subheadings, bulleted lists, and even in your anchor text.

Is there some other way you feel the keywords can be researched and organized? Please share your thoughts in the comments section.

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