The question I'm most often asked by my coaching clients about blogging is, "What am I going to write?" And because of this block in their thinking, they often shy away from having a blog at all.
Yet, blogs are the best way to communicate with your list. And... they're also awesome ways to get traffic.to your money site--the place where you make money. It can be your own website or an affiliate site. It really doesn't matter. An effective use of blogging for business is a very smart investment of your time and effort.
You see, search engines love blogs because blogs have RSS feeds. These feeds convert your blog posts into plain text, and is why when you subscribe to an RSS feed, you need a feed reader. Without one, the blog content looks like a jumbled mess of letters. There are no images, no code, and no formatting. Feeds are just pure words.
Search engine spiders love feeds because they aren't fettered by the limitations of the human eye. Spiders can breeze over the jumbled text very quickly and understand what the feed means. So, if you use the right keywords in your post, the spider will see them, and quickly learn what your post is about. This gives you a leg up with search. In fact, if you post with your keyword in mind, while keeping your posts readable and enjoyable, you can rank almost instantly in Google.
So, back to, "What is there to write?"
Blogging ideas are all around us. Surf the web for your niche and find interesting sites. Interview the site owners and use the interviews as blog posts. Record the interviews on a bridgeline like The Basement Ventures at TheBasementVentures.com, where you can get an .mp3 of your interview and just embed it into your blog.
Make a video with your web cam or flip cam. Or, you can report something cool that you find in the news and put your slant on it. This is very easy to do because there's a very powerful way to get news about your niche, and it comes straight from Google.
All you have to do is to set up a news "Alert" at Google, and you can have items mailed to any email address you wish. Then, you just take those stories and turn them in to blog posts. Rewrite the information in the news item and bang! You have a blog post, and depending on your niche, this could be every single day.
The first thing to do is to go to Google News at http://news.Google.com. In the left-hand sidebar, you'll see a hyperlink that says, "News Alerts." On that page, you just type in a general keyword for your niche, and Google will deliver the alerts to your inbox. You can have them as they occur, daily, or weekly. However, if your niche is very busy--say sports, for example--you could get a ton of email! So, set the alert, and if you need to go back and change the frequency of the messages you receive, you can do that whenever you want.
This is a great way to get your blog posts started! Find an interesting news story and describe what happened and add your thoughts about the situation. And here's the cool thing: If you post to your blog every day, you'll get tons of subscribers coming to you for up-to-date information. In the case of medicine or health and wellness, for example, this could be very desirable, and there are many niches where this could apply.
But don't allow not knowing what to write stop you from having a blog! Google Alerts is a great way to keep those creative juices flowing and for you to keep on blogging. So, set up your alert today and see how easy it is to make your blog a success!
Pat Marcello is an SEO, Blogging, and Social Marketing specialist and the content manager at Tellman Knudson's Overcome Everything, Inc. She loves to work with the people on her own list and her coaching clients about Internet marketing, especially blogging. Check out the generous package of information on blogging, delivered via video, articles, mindmaps, audios, etc. when you become a lifetime member of Blogging4Boomers at http://Blogging4Boomers.com |
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