Archive for the 'writing' Category

How To Come Up With Post Ideas

One of the hardest things, for some bloggers, is coming up with new things to post about. Sometimes you find yourself with writers block, or sometimes you think you’ve run out of topics you could possibly talk about, but that isn’t the case! Read on to discover how to come up with more post ideas than you can keep up with…

First thing to do is look at what your blog is about. For this example, we’ll pretend we’re blogging about “places to travel in Asia”, but it doesn’t matter whatever you’re writing about, the first thing you should do is google it. But don’t just google “Places to travel in Asia”, try other similar phrases as well. For this example, we tried:

  1. “Places to travel in Asia”
  2. “Top destinations in Asia”
  3. “Asia Destinations”
  4. “Travel Asia”
  5. “Travel In Asia”
  6. “Sights and Activities in Asia”
  7. “Asia Holiday”

The list could go on, but you get the picture. Now, if we take a look at a page of google search results for “Travel Asia” we get this:


As you can see from this image, I’ve highlighted just a few of the sponsored results. You’ll notice some keywords in their like GAP Adventures, Tours, Flights and Malaysia (as well as “Travel Asia”). This means that people are paying google to show ads whenever people search for the keywords “Travel” and “Asia” or both together, so if you can write about these subjects, you’ll hopefully get those same ads on your site, which can earn you some money (if you’re using AdSense). Now, we can use these keywords to come up with a list of possible things to write about:

  1. GAP Year Adventures in Asia
  2. Tours in Asia
  3. Tours in (Asian Country/City)
  4. Holidays To Malaysia
  5. Cheapest Flights To Asia (Maybe a weekly/monthly feature)

As you can see I’ve already come up with 5 different ideas. I could even do separate articles for different tours of Asia, and do separate articles for tours in each country or city, and I could even turn “Cheapest Flights To Asia” into a weekly or monthly series. On top of that, I could write about the cheapest flights from the UK, UK and Australia, as these are the countries people are most likely to be flying from, OR i could analyze my traffic and write about the cheapest flights to Asia from the countries that most of my visitors come from.

The next thing I’ll want to do is have a look at my incoming searches. This means having a look at the terms people were searching for when they ended up at my site. If you are running Wordpress, which chances are you are, I suggest you install the stat-monitoring plugin called Statpress. It will automatically track all your statistics for you, including the latest Search Terms used to find your site.

Now, take a look at the top results on all of the search results you’ve looked at. Look at the content of these pages. What are they doing that you aren’t? What content do they have that you don’t? You can write about anything that is even slightly related to your site.

Another place to find articles ideas is from the news. Look at, for example, your local news site, or even cnn or the bbc. Look for any news about the subject your blogging about. For example, I could blog about the recent Earth quakes in China or the Tsunami in Myanmar (Burma) because they would effect travel in Asia. Remember to credit any sources of information though. Finally, you can also try looking at similar blogs. If your blog’s “niche” is quite a crowded niche, why not try doing a best-of-the-week type post? Summarize all the best posts of the week in your niche, so then visitors can go to your blog not only for your own original content, but also to have the best related posts served up once a week with no effort at all.

So through just a few easy methods, you can come up with dozens, or potentially hundreds, of new posting ideas.

Done.

How to engage your audience when writing about yourself


You’ve seen those work-from-home mom blogs, right? Or those I-Make-$30,000-A-Month-On-The-Internet blogs? Well all of them - every single one - is about the author. It’s not like it’s about cars, for example, or gadgets or politics. It could feature some of those topics, as a side note, but it’s mainly about them. If my mum was to set one up now it would be about how she is a work-at-home-mom (even though she isn’t). So what exactly makes these people and their lives interesting enough to read about? Envy.

When we read about that guy or gal who earns $30,000 from writing about how much he earns online (john chow ring a bell?), what do we feel? We feel envy. We think to ourselves boy, i wish i earned that much doing that - that’d be the life. Well, guess what? That’s Interesting. It’s interesting to read about the life of someone we’d like to be. What about that work-at-home-mom? She stays at home, looks after a kid or two and makes some dosh by blogging about…how she stays at home and makes money. People want to be like her. They want to sleep in, look after the kids at home, spend an hour or two blogging and make money doing so.

So how do you make people envy you and read your blog? This simple answer is; blog about something they want to do. People like to earn money. Blog about that. People like to travel and escape their day jobs. Blog about that. People wish they were famous. Blog about famous people.. I guess it’s been said before, but you have to find your niche. A cosey little subject that you know about, your interested in and, more importantly, other people are interested in.

Go find your niche’s people!