The 5 Stages Of Writing The Perfect Blog Post

What does it take to write the perfect blog post?

If you’re not a writer, chances are it can be the most difficult thing in the world. All kinds of questions run through your head:

  • What do I write about?
  • How do I find the perfect picture/graphic?
  • What about keywords?
  • How do people find my post online?

And that’s just with the first post. A few months down the road, after you’ve written post after post, the questions become even more difficult.

  • What do I write about now?
  • Are people really reading what I’m writing?
  • Does anybody care about my blog?

That’s when the majority of bloggers give up. They let the questions win, and they move on to other endeavors. Yet that’s the time when you need to keep it up, because you’re finally starting to gain traction with your blog posts. Here are some ideas to keep you writing.

Choose Your Topic

With every post you write, you should have a topic or one main idea. Think of your products and or services. Think of your many clients, and how each of them came to you for a different reason. This is a great way to start coming up with topics.

Write From Different Angles

While its important to have your blog cover a topic thoroughly, don’t forget that every service or product you offer can be broken down in many ways. Don’t cover every piece of your business within one post; instead break it down into multiple pieces.

For instance, if you have a blog on dentistry, it’s easy to write to choose to write a post on a topic such as wisdom teeth. Yet even this one topic can be broken down many ways.

  • What are wisdom teeth?
  • Can you live with wisdom teeth?
  • Why do you need to have wisdom teeth removed?
  • What does it mean when the dentist says your wisdom teeth are impacted?

And so on. See how I started with one topic – wisdom teeth – and quickly found four different posts from four different angles?

Include The Complete Thought

Once you have your blog title and concept in place, write a complete thought from beginning to end. Just because you know you’ve written five other posts on this same topic doesn’t mean the reader will. They are entering this post for the first time, and need a complete message, from beginning to end.

Target It Towards One Client

Want an even easier way to write up a post? Think about one client you are currently working with. What do you talk with them about? How did you sell them on your services? Write a post directly to this one person, and chances are you’ll reach a dozen others with the same concerns, questions and thoughts.

Dig Deeper: How To Stay Out Of Blogging Overwhelm

Refer To Other Sources

Don’t make your blog posts a single read. Instead, use hyperlinks to bring them to other sources both on your own blog, and to other resources online. Not only does this provide them with even more content and details, it keeps them actively reading and clicking to more resources throughout your blog. The longer you can keep their attention, the greater chance you have of turning them into a client.

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Finding Photographs and Graphics For Your Posts and Pages

With every post or page I create, I add at least one image that compliments the copy. I do this for a variety of reasons.

1. Photographs add visual space. People get tired of looking at long areas of copy, and photographs break up the monotony of the copy.

2. Graphics can give a reader an idea of what you will be talking about. For instance, when I used a photograph of a pet recently in my post Make Pet Personalities Steal The Show, readers could immediately assume what the post was to cover. It made people want to read further.

3. Graphics can give you an additional boost in SEO tactics for your page, post and site.

And while I mainly use photographs – I guess that’s the photography background in me – graphics of any kind can be just as beneficial. Using logos, charts, graphs, drawings, and illustrations can benefit the reader by adding visual depth, and you by giving you more opportunities to target your content. [Read more...]

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Goodbye Flip Video

As many of you know, I’ve been promoting use of Flip Video for years. It’s a simple video camera that takes great video, has pretty good sound capabilities, and is easy to plugin to your laptop or computer with a USB, and easily move your video over to YouTube or other social networks. Its cost made it one of the best blogging business tools around.

Yes, I know a lot of people are now using their smart phones for much of the process. You can completely bypass the USB, and send the video directly to YouTube from your phone. But for a variety of reasons, I still loved having a video separate from the phone.

Today Cisco announced it is realigning its business, and will no longer offer Flip as a product. So if you’ve been wanting one, wait no longer for they are about to disappear.

While they will support current owners, they will soon disappear.

Looking for an alternative? We also have a Kodak Zi8 video camera that we love. It’s similar to the flip, with its one big advantage of having a mic jack that allows you to plug in an external mic – perfect for improved sound quality when doing interviews or testimonials.

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The Best Social Marketing Tool Is…

So you are ready to spend some time working on social media this year. But what should you do?

Should you jump into Facebook, and learn all you can? With over 500 million users, that’s surely one of the best places to spend your time.

Or maybe it’s Twitter. It can be an incredible way to drive traffic to your sites.

Or is it YouTube? With millions of hours of video, you could quickly have a huge audience to your videos.

Yes, those are all great resources. And any one of them can leap you towards success.

Yet if I had to recommend one social marketing tool, if I had to start over today with just one tool, it wouldn’t be Facebook or Twitter or YouTube.

It would be a blog. Why?

Blogging is the perfect platform for all of your social marketing strategies.

It’s a way for you to control your content, prove your expertise, and make major headway into the search engines. You can speak directly to your audience, and provide detailed information to your specific niche or marketplace. Instead of listing all of your services, you can talk about each aspect of your services in separate posts, and tell specific groups of clients things that apply to them. In short, it’s a great way for conversational selling.

Then once you have a blog in place, the other social tools fall in to place. For example, you can incorporate Facebook into your blog posts, and give your readers an instant way to share your posts within their Facebook account.

So if you are going to invest in one tool, one direction for the New Year, what should it be? My advice would be to start blogging.

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Finding Photos For Your Blog – The Easy Way With Wylio

What makes an article or a blog post more readable? In some cases, it’s the white space, the photos and the graphics that accompany it. But how do you find the right graphics to go with your article?

While I’ve mentioned sites like iStockphoto and Dreamstime before, and Flickr is always great when you find an image with creative commons licensing, I recently found another site that makes adding photographs a snap.

Wylio has millions of photographs in its database, all of them with rights to use the image in your blog post. And what makes it easy is it does all the work for you.

Simply search for your keyword, and images will pop up onto the screen. View the images until you find the one you want. Wylio will open a window that shows you the placement of your image within the text and the sizing. Adjust until you have it the way you want it. Then copy the code and past it into your blog post. It’s that easy.

Wylio builds the frame, and includes the credit back to the photographer, plus a link to their image for copyright information. It’s all included in the code, so you don’t have to think twice about it. Just pick the image and go.

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How To Stay Out Of Blogging Overwhelm

How To Stay Out Of Blogging Overwhelm

How many hats do you wear during the day? Have you recently added “blogger” to the pile?

Everyone talks about the power of blogging – how you can quickly get ranked in the search engines simply by writing a blog post or two every week. But what they don’t tell you is how to do it effectively, and how to stay out of blogging overwhelm just a few short weeks after you start.

1. Start with a plan.
A plan isn’t “everyone says its great, so I want one.” A plan is “to write twice per week every week from now on because I know it will have a solid impact on my business now, in six months, and 5 years from today.”

Your plan has to answer two questions: the why, and a measurable outcome. In the plan “to write twice per week every week from now on because I know it will have a solid impact on my business now, in six months, and 5 years from today”, the why is building a solid, successful impact on my business. And the measurable outcome is twice per week every week.

2. Follow Through
Now that you have a plan, how are you going to stick with it?

If your goal is to write two blog posts every week, put them on the calendar and get them done. Having trouble writing? Hire a ghost blogger to ensure you have quality posts each week.

Just like you have to pay taxes, pay the bills, and get client work out the door, your blogging has to become a priority in order for you to succeed.

3. Refinement
Take a class, hire a coach, or read a book every once in awhile about blogging. Are you doing everything you can for traction? Are you writing your titles in the best way possible? Are your posts long enough? Are they written about things people are truly searching for?

Rules change every day in the online world. What worked 6 months ago may not work today. In fact it may even get you banned from Google. Because you have your business to run, you may not stay on top of the most current rules and advice, so it’s important to check in with the experts here and there, and make sure you’re doing things in the best possible way.

4. Baby steps
When I show people the results I’m gaining every day, they get excited. Its easy to get caught up in what’s possible, and expect it instantly yourself. Just remember your business didn’t go from $0 to $100,000 overnight, and it won’t go from nothing to top search engine rankings overnight either. I’ve been blogging for years. I’ve built success into my online presence because I do a little each day.

You have to start somewhere. So why not let it be today? Imagine where you’ll be a year from now?

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Blog Title – It’s More Than A Few Words

How do you choose a perfect blog title for your blog post?

In many cases, people barely think about it. I was on a wedding planners site recently, and one of her blog post titles was “Jessica and Andrew’s Wedding”.

But is that the best way to do it? Should your blog title just be an afterthought – something that gets your information on to your site with little thought to anything else?

If you’ve always done it this way, its time to give it more thought.

You can spend hours creating the perfect post. You can write, edit, and edit some more. Yet it doesn’t matter how much you put into your post if your title doesn’t accomplish two things:

1. Attract the attention of your readers
2. Attract the attention of the search engines

A blog title is important because: [Read more...]

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Instead of Selling, Blog The Story

What’s the one most common misconception of blogging?

Blogging is never about selling.

Many small business owners jump onto a blog, and start writing up all the benefits to their products, provide testimonials, and share information on why their business is the best.

If this sounds like you, you’re never going to make it blogging for your business.

Blogging is about telling a story. blog the story

Ultimately, you want your reader to be able to really get into your story, see him or herself in your writing, and have the desire to move to the next level. To take action.

The easiest way to become better at writing is to create your blog posts like you would be telling a story to a potential customer. How would you speak to them?

Let me give you an example. What if you had a coaching company to help people improve their selling techniques? You may put together something like this:

“Selling isn’t fun and most people don’t enjoy it.”

You may agree with that sentence, but does it really motivate you to want to take the next step or to find out more about what the person is saying? Compare that to:

“Jane hated selling. She hated it so much she almost decided to close her business because of it. She loved working with the clients, making them happy, and following up with them after the sale. But it was always the initial meeting that made her nervous. She never wanted to come across as a used car salesperson. She didn’t want people thinking she was pushy.”

If you hate selling, you can instantly feel Jane’s pain. You can put yourself into her situation, and feel exactly what she’s feeling. You also want to read more of the story – what happens next? Does Jane shut down her business? Or does she find a solution?

That’s the way you want to write. Let your writers feel what you are talking about. Bring out the details. Describe the situation how someone looking in would see it. Describe it from one person’s point of view.

Great books always pull you in because they tell a story. They make you want to read further because you want to find out what’s next.

Do the same with your blog.

Do this with every post. And do it between different posts. Make people move from one spot to the next.

The more you can pull them in, the greater they will stick to your blog. And the bigger the chance of them becoming customers in the future.

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Will You Fail At Blogging?

I was doing a little research this morning for a new client. We built a blog for them over a year ago. They liked the idea of growing their online referrals by reaching out and sharing information. They had good intentions of blogging regularly. But after one year – and six posts scattered across that one year period – they knew they didn’t have the time and effort to make a blog work. So they reached out for ghost blogging help. failing at blogging

As I started researching their industry, I found a few blogs in place amongst their competitors. And likewise, all of the blogs I found had a few posts scattered across a one year period of more.

Blogging works great if you work at blogging.

That’s really the secret.

Of course you need to understand keywording, how to create perfect titles, write about what people are truly searching for, and make your posts informative to the people who will read them.

But above all, you have to work at it. Regularly.

If you commit to blogging one a week, blog at the same time every week. Have more time? Add another day or two to your schedule.

I’ve been blogging for almost 8 years now, and the one thing that makes it work so well is commitment.

I keep a running file of ideas to blog on.
I write regularly and make time for writing.

I was talking with a photographer online the other day. She commented on one of my tips to gain more clients – I said to write blog posts every week. She stated she wasn’t a writer. I agree – not everyone is a writer.

But you don’t have to be a writer to communicate with your prospects and customers.

Grab a video camera and talk about what you do. Post that to YouTube and your blog, and you’ve just created a double strategy to reach out to new customers.

The key isn’t how much content, or how well its written. It’s how well you reach out to your customers, and give them what they truly want to read.

image source
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How To Design A Blog

How do you design a blog? What’s the best way to get started as a blogger?

First, decide what platform you’ll be blogging on. There are blog sites you can set up for free, like Blogger. Blogger is well known and has thousands of active bloggers blogging every day. It may be a great choice if you’re blogging for fun, or just want to give it a try. There’s no cost involved, just choose a template and start blogging. But its main advantage is also its main disadvantage – it’s free.

I know many horror stories of people starting up a business blog using Blogger. A few months later as they start building traffic and a following, someone begins spamming the comments section. Blogger shuts them down, and they lose everything they’ve spent months working for.design a blog

Instead I would highly recommend using WordPress – my personal favorite. If you understand programming, hosting, and can connect all the pieces, you can probably set up a WordPress blog yourself and customize it. If not, hire a professional blog designer who can customize your blog and give you the look and brand you’re trying to create.

Then get started with a blog strategy. Here’s some ideas to help get you started.

1. Design a blog that covers your interests, your niche, and can help you develop your business (or interests) to a higher level. Narrow your focus as much as possible. It’s hard to be good at everything. When you concentrate on one thing specifically, you’re more apt to get more business, and more exposure.

2. Do a little research. Find other sites and blogs that already exist on your niche, and that you think are comparable to your thoughts and ideas. What do you like about them? How can you improve? Subscribe to their RSS feeds, email notices, free ebooks, etc.

3. Write the first few posts, and get some content into your blog. The first few posts are the easiest. The idea is still fresh. The passion is still there. The excitement is high. The more you can create and post now, the easier it will be down the road when you have other commitments.

4. Discuss ways of making money through the blog. Two of the easiest ways to get products into your blog is by going to eBay or Amazon. You can always find a book or product related to your interest that can add to the overall structure of your blog.

5. Blog and network. This is where the social networking can really work. Work at adding content regularly to your blog, and share your information on other social sites and blogs. Tell your Facebook friends about your blog, and share the information with them. People are more interested in what you do when you’ve built up a relationship.

Then have fun with it. Remember to schedule time to blog each week. The biggest reason people fail is because they give up writing before they’ve gained attention. If you make it a part of your marketing routine, its only a matter of time before it pays off – big.

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