Month: June 2015

Blogging

How to Find Topics to Write About

business ideasThe best way to find topics to write about is to start from the beginning with the minutia about your niche. Don’t assume your audience has already seen everything or that you can’t tell them about it in a new way. Even if other people are talking about the same thing, you will do it differently and appeal to your own audience.

  • Forums and Message Boards – Find out which forums your audience uses and go there and observe. What are they talking about? What are the titles they give their new posts? Use this information to formulate ideas of what to write about.
  • Read Comments on Other Blog Posts – Read industry blog posts, and then read the comments. What is the audience saying? What questions are they asking? You can use these questions and comments as fodder for new blog posts and articles.
  • Questions Asked by Others in Groups – Both LinkedIn and Facebook have groups that you can join. Find groups that consist of your ideal audience and observe what they are talking about. These are all ideas for blog posts.
  • Read Industry News – Subscribe to online and offline magazines for your industry so you can keep up to date on new technology and information. This will help you with increasing your knowledge so that you can find more topics to write about.
  • Keep a Swipe File – You don’t want to plagiarize so be very careful, but use something like Evernote.com to keep a file full of interesting quotes and information that you can use to write about.
  • Brainstorm – At least weekly, sit down and give yourself 15 minutes on a timer to list everything that you can think of to write about. Keep in Evernote or on a publication calendar that you can make with Excel, and upload to Google Drive.

Finally, it can’t be said enough that it’s essential to keep notes at all times. If you don’t keep notes, you will not remember what you thought about while you were showering, shopping, or out with your friends. Keeping a running list of ideas that come to mind, then doing research on those ideas, you’ll be sure to have plenty of content to write about when you’re ready to sit down and write.

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Blogging

Blogging Your Way to Success

girl bloggingOne of the most popular methods of marketing on a shoestring is blogging. Blogging is a very powerful, though long-term, marketing method that gets results. It’s important that your blog is on your website and not on an external blogging site where they own the content. You want to own all your own content.

Nine Tips to Making It Work

Blogging is one of the most powerful ways to market your business on a shoestring budget if you know what you’re doing. It may take some practice before you get good at it, and it will definitely take perseverance. But if you have that, you can get a lot of business by simply blogging your way to success.

  1. Blog Regularly – It’s important that you update your content on a regular basis, and at first you should shoot to fill your blog with content three to five times a week. Once you have over 300 pages, you can cut down to weekly blogs.
  1. Know Your Audience – Before you write a single blog post, it’s essential that you know who your audience is, what their problems are and how you can solve them. Plus, you need to know how all that ties in with your products and services.
  1. Understand Your Niche – Study all you can about your niche, including your competition and the industry as a whole. The more you know, the more you can share with your audience, and the more valuable of a resource you become.
  1. Include Keyword-Rich Titles – Going nuts with keywords is no longer necessary, but you should still use them in titles, headers, and subtitles. This will enable search engines to locate the content but it will also intrigue your audience.
  1. Make the Content Unique – The content on your blog and website should be 100 percent unique to you. You can check it using software like Copyscape.com or Grammarly.com.
  1. Share Other People’s Content – An exception to unique content is that you can share other people’s content if you do it right. Include a blurb about the content you’re sharing, and link to it where it was originally posted.
  1. Keep Your Comments Open – A great way to encourage user-generated content is to ask for comments and then comment back to people. You can have entire discussions right on the blog in the comments.
  1. Use Relevant Images – An image is worth a thousand words, as they say, so you should be using them to help explain your message to your reader.
  1. Use a Variety of Formats – Don’t just use one type of blog post. Try to use a lot of different formats and types of content for your blogs, such as “how to” posts, long-form posts, guides, vlogs and more.

Using these tips will help you market your business on a shoestring using blogging. Blogging regularly, in a relevant manner, will bring your audience to you. But you also need to remember to promote the things you publish. Just like you promote your YouTube videos, promote your blogs regardless of which form or type they happen to be in.

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