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

I have bought plenty over he last couple of years and I have a good idea what provides value for money and which may help you make money!

What is Affiliate Funnel System?

AffiliateFunnelSystem in Five Modules:
Module One: Total Niche Marketing Overview

Module one focuses on niche marketing.This is the basis of succesful affilaite marketing and making money online.If you get this wrong, you may never make any money, get it right and you can make tons with taking time and giving it some energy.
Theres some great advice on how ot find the right products to promote and where to find them and fantastic advice on what Saj the producer of this product, calls Total Market Research” and demographic research which is becoming increasingly important.

.
Module Two: Landing Page. Improving Conversion

Module two focuses on how to effectively use landing pages, including

* Review Pages
* Presell Pages
* Optin Pages

Very important information when marketing online today . Module 5 also gives some great templates.

Module Three: is called Opening the Valve

Thats driving highly targeted traffic to your webpages and ultimately to the products and a sale.There is afocus on PPC but also other methods.

Module Four: Launch Funnel

This is the launching of the Affiliate Funnel System and how the funnel and the valves work together.

Module Five: The Master Campaign Swipe Funnel
This is the Daddy of the system. You get 3 plug and play campaign funnels in moneymaking markets,including sales pages, ads,give away products and emails.The whole thing and much more.This is powerful stuff and in trainged hands could be dynamite!

This is a tremendous product.There are flaws as there are with all of these products and the newbie going straight to module 5 without putting the prep work in first may come a cropper but all in all its going to help a lot of people make a lot of money.

Does this mean this product is cmpletely flawed?Not at all. There is a lot of information to digest here but tons of helpful videos,pdfs and structured tutorials will help many people make their first dollar online.

This is a no risk product so if you arent satisfied, you can get your money back within the first 60 days which should give you plenty of time to have a good look at it and start putting some of the help into practice.Like anything else taking action is the only way forward.

Affiliate Funnel System will be available at the end of March.

Affiliate Millions

As an aide memoir to myself and for anyone out there struggling to make sense of how to make a clickable link for bio boxes in ezine articles for example, this is the code.

<a href=”http://www.yourdomain goes here”> write your text here</a>

the text is the clickable part but the click goes to your website (or another website if you want)

So if you wanted the text to say     how to train your dog   and the visitor to go to your website it would be

<a href=”http://www.blahblah.com”>how to train your dog</a>

Hope that helps.

til next time

Jane

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

If you own, run and maintain an internet based business or a site you will know you need to write articles. It’s as simple as that. Regular users of the internet know that as well. Articles are there to provide information, help and knowledge but for the website owner or blogger they have a much more important function.

Articles can move a site up the search engine rankings for particular keywords and phrases. The dual function is that they provide content for your site and help to build trust and confidence in the visitor. They can increase visitors to a site and that in itself can have benefits if that site is a promotional tool for selling products or building a list.

The problem is that article writing can be time consuming and an awful lot of people don’t like to write. I do but there are lots of people who don’t. So what do you do if you don’t like writing?

Well you could copy someone else’s work but that is a no no. There is no excuse for plagiarism. It’s dishonest and morally and ethically wrong. You can copy someone else but only if you copy the whole article in full and include the resource or bio box as well. That gives credit to the original writer and you can sleep easy.

So what other ways are there to write articles?

There are free articles in the public domain. Just look in Google. There is no problem with copyright but the problem with simply lifting them is that because they are freely available, others have gone before! You can however knock them around, edit them, put relevant keywords in and so on. You might find this easier than starting from scratch and very often by the time you have finished with it, you will have a unique article. It is often better than starting with a blank page.

If you have some spare funds you might want to invest in getting some articles written for you. I have to say I have had a mixed experience with this. You may find that you have to try a few freelance writers until you find one that “fits” There are many sites catering for this, such as elance and rentacoder.

Hunt around and I will see you tomorrow with some tips on using freelancers

Til next time

jane

]]> http://www.janerobinsononline.com/internet-marketing/writing-articles-when-you-hate-writing/feed/ 0 http://www.janerobinsononline.com/blogs/article-marketing/ http://www.janerobinsononline.com/blogs/article-marketing/#comments Sun, 01 Feb 2009 13:57:29 +0000 admin http://www.janerobinsononline.com/?p=209

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/keywords-and-links/finding-backlinks-to-your-blog/ http://www.janerobinsononline.com/keywords-and-links/finding-backlinks-to-your-blog/#comments Wed, 28 Jan 2009 08:43:49 +0000 admin http://www.janerobinsononline.com/?p=205 How do you find the backlinks to your blog? Do you know what they are and why backlinks are important?Backlinks are one of the best ways of pushing you up the search engine rankings and they come about when more and more sites and directories “point” to your and make Google become aware of you.

Content and lots of different methods of “pointing” are the way to do this. You could have a number of associated blogs with links to your main blog.Its common to get the main blog as the  “money” blog ie  thats the one that collects the list and sells the occasional product  (or in come cases not so occasional!). The other blogs have content that points to the main blog using keywords and other anchor text.

Other ways include,submissions to social bookmarking sites, to directories and press releases. There are a plethora of methods all of which involve some work to set up but can be automated ( for a cost).

One of the main methods of promoting your blog and creating links is article marketing. This does involve some work at least in the beginning but there are many ways to to do this. I have written about article marketing in previous posts and I will write some more on this on the next few posts.

Backlinks then, the lifeblood of internet marketing. More to follow!

Til next time

Jane

This is something that you can outsource if you feel unable to do it or just dont have the time. However there are some things to look out for if you are outsourcing it  and I can say from my own experience that you have to be careful.

1 . Grammatical errors and mispellings. Check anything written for you very closely. Before you use anyone else check their “voice”, how do they write?Is their style one that you  feel comfortable with, that fits in with your own writing.

2.  Superficial Content I would put this in with having an article which has a foreign style,one that doesnt fit. You need to write what your market wants to read.Its better to get your outsourcer to write in depth on a narrow topic,than spread it too widely.

3. Make sure the headline will grab the readers attention. Headlines should grab the reader. Power words like buy,free,etc. Also lists are good. 7 tips, 3 easy steps etc.

More tips to follow. All from my own experience. I have been very badly bitten outsourcing article writing.  These tips are from bitter experience!

Til next time

Jane