So what do you do? Give up? Yes sometime lack of motivation and inspiration can be a problem but it can be overcome. Everyone suffers from it. I am sure I am not alone in this and you have to equally sure. Blogs take time and energy and sometimes it can be difficult to sustain. I gave some tips about blogging block in a previous post and I am going to expand on those.

So sit down and work out how you are going to generate posts for the coming weeks.

Why not look at your previous posts. You may find that you have covered a lot of topics in your niche but every post you do ,can be expanded upon, rewritten or improved in some way. Try a different voice.If the post was a series of tips, then have a look at those tips and see if you can expand on one or two and make another post. For example I have talked about mindmapping in the past as a way of getting over writers block.It was something touched upon in a post but could easily form a separate post or number of posts.

Do you have some longer posts that with revision and expansion stand as another couple of posts?

Quite often going back over old posts gives the impetus need to restart. Things that you didn’t mention then or that have changed over time (the internet changes with frightening speed sometimes) might be the subject of another post. I call this mind tickling. You read something and it starts a scratch somewhere in your mind. Work on that thought and you might have the start of another series of posts.

Above all you should never give up. If you have managed to sustain a blog for months, it would be a shame to let that go.

Til next time

jane

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If you have had a blog for a while, I think a bit of jaundice can set in. If you are just starting a blog then you may be looking for inspiration. So to get you started, these are the things that have worked for me in the past and I intend to use them again.

My top 3 tips for starting or restarting your blog posts are an in no particular order:

1. Change your environment. This can work wonders. If you are getting stale looking at the same wall or view every day, move now and then. I have a laptop so it’s portable, if you haven’t; I suggest that you save up for one starting now. These are the things you might try;

• Internet cafes, great for coffee as well
• A friends house, preferably when they are not there to interrupt, offer you wine, gossip, food etc. Leave that till later!
• Another room in your own house. If you work at your kitchen table, go into a bedroom or the garden. This works wonders (particularly the garden)
• What about your local library. Mine has wifi (for a small fee) and it’s very quiet in there. Do people not read anymore?

My local café doesn’t have wifi but it does do fantastic cheese and tomato sandwiches so I work offline and then sort it out when I get back home.

2    Try free writing. It’s often difficult to get started but if you simply stick pen to paper (I find that this works better than typing) and just start scribbling. If you set yourself a broad topic and just jot down all you thoughts and allow yourself to go off at a tangent, it’s amazing how much stuff tumbles out. Some of it will be pure junk but I have often found a train of thought in there that has set off a whole series of blogs. This is one of them for example .I sat down thought about what I had read and written about this previously and started belting down words like, Where? When? How? Where do I write? When do I jumpstart my writing and how do I do it. This post stems from that

     The purists do say that you should write whatever comes into your heads but I find   that works sometimes, but you then have to work through a lot of gibberish.  Starting with a broad idea for a topic and then working within that can help

     3 Pinch other ideas. Well not literally. I find that if I am stuck for ideas, I visit a   few forums and see what is being talked about and then have a bit of a freewrite, think and start typing.

The best tip I came across is to write the post, just sit and write. You may not press publish but it can often undo that block and get you going again. Sometimes you just gotta take a break though!       

      Til next time

What do you need to look for when thinking of using a freelancer?

1. Don’t get too hung up on looking for someone who has loads of experience and “stars” after their name. everyone has to start somewhere and there are benefits in getting a relationship with someone who is newly starting as well. Take into account the following however.

2 Look for someone whose style mirrors your own.

3 Look for grammar and spelling and presentation.

4. Look at their previous work and feedback if there is any, and if not look at their writing style. Would it “fit” with your own? Can it sound like you? If you never intend to write then this might not be important but you need to have a “voice” of some description.

5 Above all be clear with your brief. Look at what other “buyers” have said about their needs and be specific yourself. It’s no good just asking for some articles, try and give some idea of subject matter, potential titles and some keywords. That way you and your potential freelancer will have a much cleared view of what it is you actually need.

There is an investment for this but the time saved when you could be doing something else can be worth it if you truly hate writing articles.

Another way of getting articles is to allow similar sites to submit articles to your own. This can only be a temporary measure because those writers will have their own resource boxes and link readers to their sites but at least it gives you some content and perhaps some ideas of your own?

There can’t really be a substitute for writing your own stuff but there are some pretty good alternatives out there.

Til next time

Jane

There are a huge variety of strategies you can try to increase the traffic to your website or blog, including paid advertising and affiliate marketing. Many of these techniques require payment. And if you are short of money, they can be minefield for the unwary. Nevertheless, there are ways to promote your website and increase your web traffic without spending anything. Writing articles is one of the best web site promotion strategies you can use, and it can be very effective.

The internet today is highly competitive and the importance of attracting highly targeted traffic is overwhelming. Getting a high search engine ranking without paying for it can be very difficult. There are a number of strategies you can use to try and drive traffic to your site and article marketing is one of the main methods. But how can writing articles improve your web traffic? Here are the top four ways in which it can help detonate your internet business.

1 Optimizes your site for improved search engine ranking

Making your articles keyword rich will greatly improve the search engine ranking of your site. You should avoid the temptation to stuff your writing with keywords. Good quality content is the key but you should pay attention to keyword density as well as this is one of the factors that the search engine spiders will use when crawling your site. Try and make the search engine friendly by using keywords and keyword phrases that optimize your site.

2 Speak to more people

When you write an article, post it on your blog or website and submit it to the online article directories like ezine or goarticles. There are loads out there. Include a link back to your site in the bio or resource box. You get free exposure and advertising. The advantage of posting articles to directories is the opportunity you get to attract links from other relevant websites, increasing your link popularity, thereby pushing you up the search engine rankings. People are always looking for quality information and if you can provide it you build trust and increase visitors to your site

3 Get Higher Search Engine ranking

If you optimize your articles by using high ranking keywords and meta tags, you will find that the search engine spiders will look through it and you can gain increased search engine ranking.

4 An increase in link popularity

By submitting your article and putting a link in the resource box, you automatically get a link and as other article directories publish it, more links are gained. This link popularity is one of the main factors used by the search engines in determining your rankings. The more informative your article, the more websites will publish it and the more links you will gain.

Writing articles can help you -

• Brand yourself as an expert in your field
• Get free advertising through your resource box
• Boost your sales and profits.
• Boost your Pagerank because of the links pointing to your website
• Get more traffic to your site, when it gets published on websites or ezines whose readers you want to target
  

Want more? Visit make money writing articles

]]> http://www.janerobinsononline.com/blogs/article-marketing/feed/ 0 http://www.janerobinsononline.com/blogs/using-titles-on-your-blog/ http://www.janerobinsononline.com/blogs/using-titles-on-your-blog/#comments Fri, 28 Nov 2008 17:09:32 +0000 admin http://www.janerobinsononline.com/?p=181 Been researching this recently whilst bogged down in looking at Keywords. The title of this blog probably wont achieve anything as I have not actually thought it through but you could.

Why are titles important? I hadnt given much thought to this at all to be honest. I simply sit down and rattle away paying scant attention to keywords or titles, but I realise that I should.

Why?

Looks like there are a number of very good reasons and some of them are:

• Search Engine Optimisation. Loads of factors apply in how your blog might rise in the search engine rankings,but titles do seem to play quite a part in that by default the blog will include that title tag in the the particular post (this one for example) and it forms part of the URL structure of your page as well. This one is  my domain name/using-titles-on-your-blog.  Its also the link that others might use to link to you and that will also increase your search engine ranking. Having learnt this, I am going to spend a bit more time on my titles!
• Associated with the above is the fact that you might get attention in the search engines. Anybody typing any word into Google will get a lot of results and there is little for them to go on apart from the title, the URL and a short excerpt.  The title could be a way of getting search engine referral visitors
• RSS feeds i havent actually got this on my blog at the moment though it is on my mind… No doubt when I get round to doing it, the titles have to be scannable and grab attention.
• Web 2.0 I suspect the same applies in social bookmarking sites like Digg and Delicious. Yes I know that the latter is typed in a different way and I have failed in my attempts to make this a keyword rich post but what the hell!

In any event, first impressions are important and I guess once your visitor likes the look of your blog, the titles of your posts come next.

Anyway off to do some more research on RSS and delicious now!

Til next time

jane

How can you write more effectively? It does seem to be the case that the readers’(yes I mean you) attention span is very short (I know you are reading every word but you may be on your own there). Scannable content is the order of the day.

What is scannable content? Well one of the most obvious techniques would have to be writing in

• Lists. Numbered or bulleted lists are scannable, easy to read and statistics appear to show are much more linked to and read
• Format. Use bold, color,,CAPITALS, underlining and any other formatting techniques you like to make it more pleasing to the eye.
• Borders and boxes
• Pictures. Can grab attention and split up the post
• Headings can be used to draw the eye down the post helping them to find important points
• Short paragraphs. If you break it up, it can be much easier to read. I plead guilty to this in past posts and I try hard now to break things down.

• Space can  keep the reader from feeling overwhelmed. Again guilty! Keep some white space in there and it helps it the whole thing to be easier on the eye.

It can be hard work but I think if you work hard at writing content that is readily scannable, your readers will appreciate it. Hope you do.

til next time

jane

I am no expert certainly but I have been looking at ways to get ideas for blogging generally as I am starting another unrelated blog and want to make sure that I have enough in me to keep going!

Article marketing or writing posts on blogs demands perserverance and commitment. I am sure that you will have heard the phrase ” content is King” and I think it is. The more I post and the more articles I write, the more traffic I get to this blog and the more people I get on my list. I cant lie and say that the numbers are overwhelming but they are increasing.

So what do you need to be thinking about?There are a lot of things that have come out of my research and I will be putting all of them into practice in my posts from now on.

Perhaps the most important thing to think about is what you are writing on your blog. One of the rules of marketing that I picked up is that you have to start with the customer, find out what they want and give it to them. Give them something unique and useful.

What is unique and useful is of course somewhat subjective but perhaps you could think about the following;

• Inform
• educate
• entertain
• inflame
• update

You probably cant do them all the time in every post but if you can keep some of those elements in then you may be giving good content. I try and inform and educate by giving information that I have gleaned over the last few months. Hopefully it is usually good content and I do try and inject some humour occasionally if only because I find it difficult to keep a straight face most of the time!

There are a huge number of blogs out there and it can be difficult to distinguish your own. Certainly I am trying to practice what I preach and write good content giving you some of what I have discovered in the last few months.

How do you find ideas for content then?

more on this in my next post

til then

Jane

If you are a complete novice to blogging then you are only around 6 months behnd me. I have learnt a lot over the last few months (and paid a lot!). I have distilled some of what I have learnt into a short email course that you can see on the right of this page or by clicking the freebie link in the pages above. Its all relevant stuff for someone new to internet marketing and I am in the process of getting a free short ebook together which I will give away to subscribers to my list. I intend to put a lot of what you will need to know to get going in that book so it will be onine before xmas. I will regularly update that with stuff that I have learnt and if I find any free programmes worth having I will pass them on.

I have enrolled on a new programme about IM and will pass on what I learn from that as well. Its costing me over $2000 so it had better be worth it! Anyone on my list will get the benefit of what I learn and put into practice.

Over the next few days, I am going to be looking at the content of this blog and my others and will be writing about how to do it. I have certainly gone through a steep learning curve and am still learning but I want to put some pointers in that might help you if you are starting out, wondering what to write, how to get ideas, and so on. I am no expert but I have made a few mistakes you might want to avoid!

Til next time

Jane

• use a proper domain name
• post at least once day in the early stages. Ok I know I havent done this over the last couple of weeks but I am on holiday!
• Comment on other blogs
• encourage comments on your own blog
• trackback and link to other blogs
• submit articles at least once a week to sites like ezine.com

Thats it for today. Just to get me thinking as well!

Til next time

jane