Three Important Factors for Successful Content Writing
If you have a blog or any other type of website for your online business then you need to know how to write great content. At the very minimum you are going to be writing for your own blogs/sites. In addition to that, you will probably be writing for at least one of the following reasons, if not all of them; articles for promotion, press releases, guest posts for other blogs, information products, sales copy, and more.
Whatever the reason may be, it is vitally important to be able to write well if you plan to build a successful internet business of any kind. Here are 3 important factors for successful content writing on the web:
1) Write Frequently
If you want to become a sports superstar or a famous musician, or become successful at anything else, you have to practice. The same rule applies for writing high quality content. You need to hone your writing skills and keep them sharp. In order to do that you should write a bare minimum of 500 words every day. That might sound like a lot but it’s really not very much at all. The post you are reading right now is around that length. Really most days you should write up to five times that amount, or more.
Another thing you want to do that goes along with writing a lot is read a lot. Find blogs, articles, forums, books, and other things in your niche to read on a regular basis. Believe it or not but reading will help you with writing. And they don’t all have to be in your niche, you should read other stuff too. Any time you read good writing it will help you become a better writer.
2) Develop a Unique Writing Style
As you continue to write and read, you should be able to develop a writing style that is unique to you and doesn’t sound like everyone else out there. Be different and embrace the fact that you have your own unique style of writing. Stick with it and people will take notice. You can build up a very loyal following if you write in a way that people truly enjoy.
3) Be Valuable
A very important factor for successfully writing online is to be very valuable to your readers. How you provide value will depend on your niche and what you are trying to accomplish with your website. In general, this will usually mean that you either entertain or educate your readers with your writing. It’s even better if you can do both at the same time but you definitely need to at least do one or the other.
If you are just stringing words together for the sake of writing then you will never build up a readership. People either want to learn or be entertained, or both at once. If you can do that with your writing then you will do great.
So, three of the most important factors for successful content writing online are to write (and read) frequently, develop a unique writing style, and be valuable to your readers. If you keep those three factors in mind when writing then you should be able to create great content for your online business.
Up and Comers vs Established Bloggers
When you are starting out with a new blog, you might look up to other bloggers in your niche for inspiration and ideas about how you can reach those levels of success for yourself.
It makes perfect sense of course, you want to be as successful as they are, right? But you might just find that emulating them isn’t quite enough. Here’s why…
* Success breeds success
It is a shame but often very good blog posts will be largely ignored when they are published on small lesser known blogs, whilst posts that aren’t as good that are published by established bloggers will receive much more acclaim.
The fact is that a successful blog instantly has more credibility than a new one, sometimes almost regardless of quality. In the online world, first mover advantage is alive and well and if you are just starting out you probably don’t have it.
* How can you become established and credible?
Well firstly, you need to find your own angle. It is easy to think that if you can write as well as another blogger you can be just as successful. This isn’t true most of the time.
You need to either be better, or different. Ask yourself the question “why would people read my blog instead of theirs?” If you try to emulate a successful blog, you might find you can’t answer this question.
* Up and coming blogs
A really helpful way to find your own voice is to look at the up and coming blogs in your niche. These are the guys that are doing exactly what you want to do – they are gaining popularity and becoming established.
Each of these up and comers have one thing in common; they have found a way to differentiate their blogs (even if they don’t realize it).
Again, just copying them isn’t enough, but try comparing them to the big guys and try to figure out what their unique selling point is, what angle have they used to set themselves apart and how are they promoting themselves?
You can build up a very successful blog and become a professional blogger, but it will take a lot of time and hard work. You aren’t going to do it by copying others, you must find a way to be unique while still following the overall success recipe of the top blogs in your niche.
This guest post was brought to you by Alex from ToMakeALiving – A site dedicated to showing you how to earn money online.
7 Powerful WordPress Plugins to Turbocharge Your Blogs Performance
A key factor in both visitor satisfaction and keeping the search engines happy right now is making sure that your blog loads quickly. There should be no errors, no waiting – just click and boom the content is ready for your visitors.
If, for whatever reason, your blog is running slowly then it can affect your online business in a number of ways. Firstly people aren’t willing to wait around for pages to load anymore.
They used to say you had 30 seconds to grab a visitors attention and in the days of dial-up internet access that was true but today a guesstimate is that you have at most 10 seconds before the surfer hits the back button and goes looking somewhere else for what they want.
Secondly if your blog is loading slowly it can directly affect your search engine rankings. Slower sites don’t do as well in the search engine results pages (SERPS).
So it’s important that your WordPress blog is hosted with a reliable company that have no real latency issues but it’s equally important that you optimize your WordPress blog with plugins that help reduce the page load time as much as possible.
Before you get carried away just make sure that you test the actual speed of your blog first – you might not need to make any changes. You can run a speed test here -> http://www.iwebtool.com/speed_test
Then if you decide you want to optimize your WordPress blog speed here are 7 of the very best plugins you can use to help achieve this goal:
1. WP Smush.It – This plugin automatically reduces the size of image files on the fly so they will load more quickly. Very neat and very effective.
2. WP HTTP Compression – By outputting your pages in zip format to a compatible browser the WP HTTP Compression plugin can reduce your page size by up to 80% as well as increasing your download speeds by up to 4 times. It shouldn’t be used in conjunction with WP Super Cache however.
3. Hyper Cache – If your blog is hosted by a provider without a whole pile of cutting edge resources then this plugin is ideal for you. It’s very easy to configure and is automatically optimized to reduce disk usage for your blog.
4. WP Optimize – This is a very simple but very effect database clean up tool and allows you to run database maintenance without using PhpMyAdmin as well as clearing out your spam or comment queue with a couple of clicks.
5. WP Super Cache – This very neat plug created HTML files from your WordPress blog data and serves those instead. This reduces the overhead on the server dishing out the files because the SQL database for your WordPress install isn’t constantly involved or being queried. A very neat solution but check its compatibility with other plugins or themes you might be using.
6. WP Minify – This plugin helps you compress JavaScript and CSS files to make sure that pages load more quickly. Most theme developers don’t take the time to optimize their CSS so this plugin can really help with that problem and speed up your blog loading time as a result.
7. Hosting Monitor Plugin – This cool plugin allows you to check host up-time, hardware info, load average and the current users. Basically it allows you to keep tabs on your web host to make sure they are not the cause of your blog suffering from any speed problems. It’s one thing for a web host to claim 99.9% up-time… But it’s another thing to actually do it.
Hopefully you’ll find at least some of these plugins useful for when you’re doing your best to optimize your WordPress blog. Remember that the overall visitor experience is critical to you achieving the kind of massive and loyal online audience that you want.
Don’t let the fans down eh?
This guest post was written by Lior Levin, an internet marketing consultant for a website that lists the top 10 website hosting companies.
Web Hack: How to Embed Facebook Videos
YouTube makes it easy to embed videos. All you have to do is copy and paste the code and you’re done. But what can you do if you come across a Facebook video you would like to share with your readers? Unfortunately Facebook is not quite as a accommodating as YouTube and they only provide the ability to share their videos in the Facebook world.
So, does that mean there’s nothing you can do? Of course not. Remember, where there’s a will, there’s a way and that includes embedding Facebook videos. However, before you embed any Facebook video into your website, it is important that you remember that Facebook videos are private property and aren’t part of the public domain. As a result, you should get permission before embedding anyone’s video, especially if you want to avoid a law suit. Plus it’s just good web etiquette to ask first.
Anyway, on to embedding a Facebook video…
So, you’re watching a Facebook video in your profile or news feed and once it reaches the end, you have three options:
- Share
- Play Again
- Go to video
Now, you need to get to the page where the video is being hosted, so hit “Go to Video.” Once the page loads, you will need to look in the browser bar and copy the URL address of the video. At the moment, it looks something like:
http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=12345678901
Unfortunately, this URL is the address of the Facebook video page and not the video itself, which means that it can’t be embedded. This address will have to be edited so that the actual URL of the video will embed and you will be able to play a Facebook video on your website. So, the edited URL will look like this:
http://www.facebook.com/v/12345678901
If you analyze the new URL, you will find that the number hasn’t changed. That’s because this number basically identifies which video you are looking at. So, essentially, when you look up at the browser bar, all you have to do is copy the ID number and replace it in the above URL. Simple and quick.
Now, let’s look at how to actually embed the video. You’ll be using the standard code that’s used to embed shockwave flash videos. Don’t worry, you don’t have to turn into a genius programmer just yet. I’ve included the code for you.
Upon closer inspection, you will find that this is the embed code for a YouTube video, which is exactly what we are looking for. You’ll have to replace the YouTube URLs with the Facebook URL you modified. So, in line 2, after value= replace everything in quotes with the edited Facebook URL. Likewise, you’ll have to do the same thing in line 5, after src= and that’s it. The final code should look something like this:
Once you’ve modified the code accordingly, you simply need to switch your post to HTML mode and paste in the code. Publish the post and you’ll soon have your very own embedded Facebook video.
It’s not as difficult as you might have thought at first. However, it is important to remind you again that you need to ask permission from the owner of the video before embedding their work since it is copyrighted material. The last thing you want is to have any trouble when all you need to do is send a quick message asking for permission. It’s much better to be safe than sorry.
This guest post was kindly sent by Lior Levin who is a marketing consultant for iAdvize.com and also provides marketing advice to a psd to xhtml developer that does psd conversions.
Five Excellent Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Blog
When you first start blogging, you need to fill your blog with plenty of good content. That is very important and it’s something you will continue to do for the life of the blog. After you have made several good posts, your next step is to start driving traffic to the blog. You need to do this so you actually have visitors to read your content. There’s no point in having a blog if nobody reads it. And hopefully you will make money from your readers and visitors.
You may have even found this post by searching for ways to make money blogging and the main thing you need in order to that (other than the blog itself) is lots of people visiting your blog. There are many good ways to drive traffic to your blog, and more keep coming out all the time as the internet evolves and new online properties are developed and expanded. But below we’ll share some of the most popular and easiest traffic generation methods, and they are all free…
1) Article marketing
Writing and submitting articles to directories (article marketing) is a powerful way to start driving targeted traffic to your blog. It’s also an excellent way to build up backlinks to help your blog rank higher in organic search results, which brings in even more visitors and more money. Basically all you do is write informative articles related to the topics of your blog and submit them to some of the countless online articles directories.
Every article you submit should contain a simple author “bio box” that includes a short business description and one or two links to your blog. Keep it fairly short and simple, you don’t need to put a lot in there. For example, it could be something like this… “For more useful tips about how to make money online check out my top ranked blog at http://www.gr1innovations.com and subscribe to get a free copy of my internet money tips report.”
Notice how I put one keyword anchored hyperlink and one regular link? I like to do it that way to help ensure I get at least one link from the article if other bloggers republish it on their blogs.
2) Guest posting
This is one of the best strategies available to drive traffic to your blog. The reasons are simple; you will get targeted visitors from the post itself to your blog as well as very high quality backlinks to help with your search engine rankings. In addition to that, you are doing a form of networking with other bloggers in your niche by writing for them, so it helps tremendously in making friends for future partnerships. They may also recommend you to their readers in other posts of theirs or link to your blog in their sidebar.
The strategy is fairly straightforward, just find blogs in the same/similar niches as yours, and check to see if they accept guest posts. Often times it will be obvious if they do because they will have a link on their home page to another page explaining their guest blogging rules and how to send the post. Other times it won’t be so obvious and you will need to contact the owner to ask if you can send them a guest post.
It’s important to write very high quality original posts that the blog owners want to publish and their visitors want to read. Become familiar with the content they have on their blog already so you are sure to write something that they like. Match the quality of their posts or even go above it to ensure you are up to their standards and set yourself apart from other people who might also be sending them guest posts.
3) Social media marketing
There is a seemingly unlimited supply of social networking and social bookmarking sites on the internet right now and more are being created all the time. Almost all of them are free and you can use them to drive traffic to your blog fairly easily. Some of the more popular social media sites include; Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Delicious, Stumbleupon, Mixx, and LinkedIn. But there are many more that are very popular and work well for getting traffic to your blog.
Also, if you have a WordPress blog, there are several great plugins that you can install to make it very easy for your visitors (or yourself) to share your posts on social sites. A few of these popular plugins are Sociable, SexyBookmarks, Digg Digg, AddtoAny, Socialize, and several others. They all basically do the same thing and can be helpful for getting more traffic to your blog.
You can also use a free service such as socialmarker.com or onlywire.com to submit your posts to many of the top social bookmarking sites all at once. These can save a lot of time and make your social media marketing strategy much simpler.
4) Blog commenting
Interacting with owners and readers of other blogs via comments is a great way to start attracting attention to your own blog too. Visit popular blogs that are related to your niche and comment on their posts. Most blog comment forms allow you to include your name and a URL, so put your information in those fields.
Be sure to make your comments valuable and relevant to the post — don’t just spam your blog link everywhere, and don’t be a blatant self-promoter by writing something stupid like, “Great post, come visit my blog!” — Doing those things will get you nowhere and can actually do more harm than good. Read the entire post first then make an effort to share your thoughts and ideas, compliment others on theirs, agree or disagree with the content, and generally be a valued contributor.
5) Forums
Forums can be great places to interact with like-minded people on your topics of interest and the topics of your blog. Most forums allow you to include a signature that automatically appears below every post you make, which can (and should) contain a link to your blog. If you help and interact with other members and share good information, many of them will be interested enough to start visiting your blog.
There you have it, 5 excellent ways to drive traffic to your blog on a daily basis. Using these internet marketing methods regularly will bring lots of traffic to your blog and increase your profits if your intent is to make money blogging.
