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.

Related posts:

1. Reusing Your Blog Posts
2. Are You Asking This Question Before You Hit Publish On Your Blog Post?
3. Do You Write A Blog Post For The Search Engines Or Your Reader?

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.

If you have a camera or a smart phone, you can quickly shoot photographs anywhere, any time. But on most days I’m sitting in front of my computer typing out a concept, and I just don’t have the ability to take the exact photograph I need to support my concepts. That’s when I rely on stock.

I’ve talked about stock photo sites in the past, and have gotten some great images from them. Stock photo sites online come in two ways: free or pay.

The problem with free sites is you have to wade through the muck in order to find the exceptional. And that can take time.

More than ever, I want the ability to find a great image quickly, and move on with the rest of my daily tasks.

Which means I rely more and more on the pay sites.

Fotolia is a site I’ve been using this past month, and have really come to enjoy not only the great photography and graphics, but also the ease of the site itself.

(Caveat: I am using a free one month account to try it out.)

I’ve used several of the other top stock sites in the past, and used several of them mainly because of habit. I had an account, and the site was bookmarked and ready for me to use.

With Fotolia, I’ve noticed some definite improvements over the other sites.

I love the searchability. In some of the sites, relevancy has always been key. When I search for certain topics, I wind up with results that are way off base from what my original thoughts were. I haven’t had that problem with Fotolia, and I’ve tried out many different search terms just to see what holds through. I’ve always been able to find something relevant to what I’m searching for.

I love the shopping cart feature. When I do searches in Fotolia, a page of results will appear. I can quickly glance through all of the images, hover over an image to have it enlarged to look at the details, and then click a button below the image to add to the shopping cart. I can work my way through a page quickly and efficiently. With other services, I have to click on an image, and then add it to the shopping cart. Which means it’s a much longer process for adding multiple images from the same search.

I also love being able to store photos in my shopping cart for future purposes. I can leave them there, and go back any time to make changes, or make a decision on purchasing or deleting. This comes in handy, as I like to write multiple posts at a time. And if I find photos that might be relevant, I can easily pop them into my cart system, and hold them for when my post is complete. This can be a huge time savor, as I often see photos that spawn ideas, and would love to store them for future use.

I’ve also come to enjoy the subscription feature – something I’ve never tried before. I’ve always purchased credits, and used the credits along the way. But having a subscription has given me flexibility to buy things for planning, and for use with future projects. No longer do I have to copy down URLs – I buy them and pop them into my draft copies so I can quickly see what I’m producing. It’s a much more efficient system when you use photography on a regular basis.

If you have any stock photography needs, I would recommend giving Fotolia a try. Start by browsing through their images, and buy a few credits. See how easy the system is. You’ll soon be on your way to bookmarking this fantastic site – just like me.

Related posts:

1. Finding Photos For Your Blog – The Easy Way With Wylio
2. Are You Using Photos And Video In Blog Posts – SOTB 2009 Day 3
3. Reusing Your Blog Posts

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.

Related posts:

1. The Flip Video – A Necessity For Any Business Owner
2. 5 Ways To Market Your Business With Video
3. Using Video On Facebook Pages

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.

Related posts:

1. The 7 Steps I’ll Be Using In 2010 For My Social Marketing Strategy
2. Which Social Site Should You Spend Your Time On?
3. Social Marketing – Are You Spending Your Time In The Right Places?

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.

Related posts:

1. Finding Photographs and Graphics For Your Posts and Pages
2. Are You Using Photos And Video In Blog Posts – SOTB 2009 Day 3
3. Are You Asking This Question Before You Hit Publish On Your Blog Post?

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?

Related posts:

1. Will You Fail At Blogging?
2. Reusing Your Blog Posts
3. Creating A Social Strategy Within Your Business Plan

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:

• It’s the first thing people see – they make a split decision to keep reading or not.
• Your title becomes your long tail – will it help find you traffic in Google and other search engines?
• Your title feeds into your title tags, and can also help you gain traffic in the search engines.
• It sets up your story. It’s what people see if you are using RSS to announce your information in other places.

So with that much riding on your title, saying more than “Jessica and Andrew’s Wedding” again and again should become your norm.

Name your post first
Before you even write your post, what will it be about? Let’s head back to the “Jessica and Andrew’s Wedding” idea. Jessica and Andrew will love the post. And they’ll send all their family and friends there. But who else will truly have a desire to read it?

This post was filled with photos and information about the wedding itself. But from a wedding planner’s perspective, she should want to share so much more with her prospects and clients. She should gear this post to future contacts, not completely with her current clients. How about renaming the post “Planning A Beach Wedding With Jessica and Andrew”? See how it changes the perspective? Jessica and Andrew will still love it. And yet it opens up the post to so many more readers.

Think from their perspective
When someone heads to Google to find information, they won’t know to type in your company name, or your clients’ name. Hence, the “Jessica and Andrew’s Wedding” title will never be found. But they will type in things that pertain to them. So they have every chance of typing in “planning a beach wedding” if that’s their goal.

By combining the two into a post title “Planning A Beach Wedding With Jessica and Andrew” you’re taking care of both sides – your potential prospects, and your current clients.

But now that you have a post title post “Planning A Beach Wedding With Jessica and Andrew”, don’t get stuck in the same title rut. In other words, you wouldn’t want your next five posts to be:

Planning A Beach Wedding With Anne and Jared
Planning A Beach Wedding With Amber and Michael
Planning A Beach Wedding With Bree and Justin
Planning A Beach Wedding With Melanie and John
Planning A Beach Wedding With Lauren and Conner

One look at that and your prospects would back out as quickly as possible. Boring.

Instead, play it up.

A Beautiful Sunset Ceremony With Anne and Jared
A Wedding In Cabo San Lucas: Join Amber and Michael
Bree and Justin – A Wedding At The Biltmore Estate

See the difference?

Your readers are your top concern.

Understand your readers. What do they want to learn, read about, and understand better?

Define your topics. If your blogging about photography, they want to see titles that give them more information about what they love. “The Fate Of Wedding Photography” was hugely successful on my photography blog because it captures the attention of my readers.

Be clear – but have fun too. What made “The Fate Of Wedding Photography” so much fun was it played on emotions. A lot of businesses are in trouble in this economy. Readers can clearly see what the post is about – wedding photography – and yet it’s asking a question that’s on a lot of studio owners’ minds. Of course they want to read to find out what my take is on the whole industry.

Be original. Your blog is your voice. It has your personality. People come to it because they like what you have to say. So keep saying it. The more you say it, the more they’ll read.

Related posts:

1. Do You Write A Blog Post For The Search Engines Or Your Reader?
2. Are You Asking This Question Before You Hit Publish On Your Blog Post?
3. What Does A Blog Writer Do?

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.

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.

Related posts:

1. Content Writing For Top Performance
2. The 5 Stages Of Writing The Perfect Blog Post
3. Reusing Your Blog Posts

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

Related posts:

1. How To Stay Out Of Blogging Overwhelm
2. Ghostwriting For Blogs
3. Blog Ghostwriting – Getting Help To Reach Your Prospects

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.

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.

Related posts:

1. Reusing Your Blog Posts
2. The 5 Stages Of Writing The Perfect Blog Post
3. Do You Write A Blog Post For The Search Engines Or Your Reader?