Archive for How to…Tips – Page 7

How to Write an Expert Ebook

Computer and EbooksI get calls from executive coaches and consultants who want to publish an ebook. They ask me for help, to ghost write either for or with them.

The answer is yes: in certain fields, I am a ghost writer. I read a ton of books on leadership, and study how the big sellers on Amazon are written in this category.

Some people have clear ideas of what they want to say. They may even have an outline. Some have already published books themselves (“Never again!” some say). But most don’t have an outline, a story, a message, or a clue.

But they’re right about one thing: If you’re an expert, you should publish an ebook. It will help you get found, get known, and get clients.

I thought I’d put my best steps for writing an expert ebook into a blog post here, and create an ebook later. If I were  to write an ebook about how to write an expert ebook … how would I do that? What would I say?

First, remember that writing an ebook is not the same thing as publishing one. Two separate activities…

  • Each are important and each need a lot of time and expertise
  • Not everyone should write their own book
  • Not everyone should publish and market their own book
  • Decide which you want to do and outsource the stuff you’re not good at doing

If you want to write a book, start asking yourself some hard questions: Read More→

How to Blog without Boring Readers in the Holiday Season

HoidaySeasonsHow do you blog about the Holiday Season – without boring your readers?

It’s no secret that the holidays are upon us! With one less week between Thanksgiving and Christmas this year and Hanukkah already in full swing, the holidays have arrived.

So what does the holiday season mean for your blog? Several things! The holiday season provides a lot of opportunity for keyword-rich blogging.

  • Put your own spin on popular topics and it will help bring traffic to your site.
  • You can use this seasonal opportunity to feature charities that you support.
  • You can expand topics beyond your core business services to what truly matters in life. Read More→

Common Mistakes Made by Beginning Bloggers
…and 5 Tips to Fix Them

How-to-BlogWhen you first start a business blog, it’s easy to make a few blogging mistakes. While it seems like nearly every business already has a blog, new blogs are popping up every day. If you’re just getting your blog up and running, here are a few common mistakes that can be detrimental before it gets off of the ground.

Seasoned bloggers are wise to take note of these tips as well; even the most professional of us can use a reminder every now and then!

Here are a few things not to do with your blog:

  1. Not making sure all of your content is original. While most of us understand the ramifications of plagiarism when it comes to writing papers in college, it can be more of a grey area when it comes to blogging. It is possible to get into legal trouble for stealing someone’s ideas and re-printing them word for word. Just be careful to keep your blogging original, even if you are taking inspiration from something that someone else wrote.
  2. Using recycled content. Many blogs do use the content of others, with due credit given. This is particularly true of things like news articles or announcements. While it’s fine to include things like this from time to time, don’t fill your site with outside content. Your readers will get bored quickly and abandon your blog for something better.
  3. Not writing about something you know. Picking a blog topic that is completely outside of your realm of expertise is unwise. Writing about something that you are interested in and are familiar with will come across to your readers as more natural. That’s not to say that you can’t explore new topics, just make sure that you understand that your blog readers want to see you as an expert.
  4. Not researching what you’re writing about. In addition to checking out your competitors, you can also see what topics in your planned area of expertise have already been beaten to death, so to speak. Coming up with a new spin on an old topic or touching on an issue in your field that hasn’t been covered much is more likely to gain readers for your blog.
  5. Not making sure your blog is visually interesting. A good layout is key to get people to come back and keep reading. Seasoned bloggers are wise to evaluate their visual interest occasionally as well. Another way to keep people interested is to use lots of images, graphics, and infographics.

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About our Guest Author:

Megan Totka is the Chief Editor for ChamberofCommerce.com. She specializes on the topic of small business tips and resources. ChamberofCommerce.com helps small businesses grow their business on the web and facilitates connectivity between local businesses and more than 7,000 Chambers of Commerce worldwide.

6 Easy Tips to Write a Blog Post in 30 Minutes

Blog-WritingCan you write a blog post and publish in under an hour? How about 20 minutes? That’s my record. But as anyone who’s ever made love knows, fast isn’t always better. And sometimes it is.

There’s usually too much for small business professionals to handle. If you want to stay on schedule, you’ve got to learn to “just do it!” and do it fast.

Here’s how I research, write, add an image, compose a compelling title, and optimize for SEO and publish a blog post in under an hour. Read More→

5 Ways to Make Your Business Blog Remarkable

Blog-VisibilityHow do you make your business blog really remarkable? Like, fascinating?

The main goal of writing a blog, whether for business or otherwise, is to get people to read what you write. Seems pretty simple. But attracting readers to a new blog (or even an established one) is easier said than done.

So how do you build a readership base and continuously gain new readers to keep your blog and your business going. Here are a few ways to make your business blog one to watch.

1. Keep up with current events – while you shouldn’t always write about what’s going on in the world, using relevant examples and anecdotes lets your readers know that you are knowledgeable.

2. Pay attention to your social media networks – what are people talking about on your social media pages? What are they asking you as a business? Consider using these questions and discussions for blog topics. You’re more likely to engage your customers by writing on topics they clearly are interested in than developing your own. Read More→

4 Tips to Attract More Readers to Your Business Blog

Attract-more-Readers-Blog-LikesHow can you attract more readers to your business blog? Blogs have become a social media platform for everyone. When you know how to blog, you can write about anything relevant to your business’ audience that will enrich customers’ knowledge and show how your business will be beneficial to them.

You can provide information on your blog that solves people’s key problems in your field, and they’ll keep coming back and become regular readers.

When your business website has a well-defined blog, and if you write or hire a writer to frequently update new content on it, you can be sure that your website traffic will go only one way – up.

But coming up with a successful blog can be a tough job. You need to make sure that your blog content stands out among other similar blog content on the web. The following tips will help you increasing traffic to your website through successful business blogging.

4 Creative Tips to Attract More Web Traffic Readers

1. Promote articles and posts on a variety of platforms

Social media has become an ever-present phenomenon now. You can’t expect your website to draw in huge numbers of visitors if you don’t have a visible presence on various social media platforms. Facebook, Google+, Twitter, LinkedIn are some names that come to your mind when thinking about content marketing for your website. But these are only a few among the vast resources available online.

Granted these platforms have a large online presence, but if you really want your business website to grow, you should consider specialized niche forms of social media also. Some of these lesser known platforms include Quora, Tumblr, and Empire Avenue. These platforms have a specific crowd following and due to the less competition on these sites, you are likely to have a greater penetration over the market. But search ones that attract your kind of customer, in your target audience.

2. Use SlideShare

SlideShare is another platform that doesn’t have all the hoopla surrounding bigger social media platforms. You, as a content writer, can easily create smaller and sharper overviews for your posts and upload those on SlideShare. These to-the-point overviews will appeal to a larger audience base and you can easily put links of the slides on your website that can be followed to read the overview on SlideShare’s website. Read More→

Google Images: How to Add Great Images to Business Blogs

Infographics-for-bloggingBusiness blogs are better when they lead with a spectacular eye-catching image. But are you bored like I am with the standard business photos offered on free photo sites? How many happy smiling people have you actually seen in a business meeting lately? Give me a break and some more coffee.

I’ve got a new toy: Google Images. I was researching planning models for a client ebook I’m writing, and discovered a page of diagrams and charts people have contributed: Google Images for Planning Models. Check it out, there are 3-D pyramids, bar graphs, circles, arrows: wow.

So I wondered what images I could find for illustrating a blog post on how to write and post on a business blog. Not so hot… boring and confusing. Apparently images are best when steps are clear and everyone has a similar process. However, there were some great images for “infographics + blogging.”

Here are some guidelines for adding great images and infographics to your business blog, to attract readers and get their attention.

  1. I did a search on my own blog, WritingontheWeb.com for similar posts on adding images. What I noticed was that posts that combine blogging tips with celebrities and their photos were well viewed. It helps to have a celebrity name in the post title. (“Oscar Wilde: Advice for Better Blogging“). Read More→

Business Blog Writing: Must You Write It Yourself?

Content-Matters-Blog-Writing-TipsDo you do all your own blog writing? If you’re a lawyer, financial adviser, doctor or consultant, should you write your own blog? Or can you outsource it to writers and guest bloggers? One of the main reasons to have a blog and publish frequently is because it helps you get found, get known, and get clients. Yet professional service providers are often pressed for time.

Visitors to your blog want to know more about you, your expertise, your talents and focus. They expect to read what you write to get familiar with you before they call or consider hiring you. This means you will need one or two hours each time you write a fresh post. And a good blog has fresh content at a minimum once or twice a week. How can you ensure you’ve got the time for blog writing so that you build up quality readership?

The solutions: The systems I’ve found to work best with the clients I serve involves a combination of learning to write quick posts, getting contributions from qualified guest authors, and using an appropriate content subscription service. I’ll explain each. Read More→

Business Blogging: How to Optimize Older Posts

Link-to-older-postsClearly, one of the most important things that you can do when it comes to a business blog is to share new content. But what about those older blog posts that are hanging out on your blog somewhere?

Why not make good use of older content? Make it easy for your blog readers to learn more about your solutions to their problems. This requires that you do more than just write an article from the heart. Yes, writing with passion is great, but as long as you’ve got readers on your blog, lead them to older posts.

For business blogging, you’ll need to become keyword-savvy, and use a plugin or two will help make it easy and automatic.

The screen-capture image at the top is a sample from Chip Scholz’ LeaderSnips blog showing how at the end of each post you can provide suggestions for related posts. It uses the YARPP plugin.

Business blogs can be tricky creatures. While it seems like blogging should be pretty straightforward, there are a lot of nuances to building a successful business blog that your potential clients can actually find. Read More→

Top 4 SEO Tips for Small Business Blogs on a Shoestring Budget

Shoestring-Budget-SEOThe Search Engine Optimization landscape has changed dramatically over the last couple of years. One of the side-effects of these changes has been the fact that many low-cost SEO tactics have lost their effectiveness and power.

Consequently, a lot of small businesses and professionals today are struggling to achieve their SEO goals on a restricted budget. After all, for small companies, hiring an expensive agency is often not feasible. Having said that, there are still a lot of smart yet pocket-friendly SEO tips that businesses can implement on a shoestring budget.

Here are 4 top SEO tips for small businesses on a shoestring budget:

Contribute to High Authority Blogs in Your Niche

Aim your energies at quality blogs. This will help you to develop referral traffic, cultivate thought leadership, and garner authoritative and quality links. Of course, you’ll only be able to do that if you generate remarkable content that offers actionable information.Here are a few strategies that can help you identify quality blogs:

a) Create an account on platforms like myblogguest, etc. These platforms create a meeting point for bloggers and blog owners looking for guest blogs, so you can easily identify quality opportunities.

b) Download the Google Chrome PR plugin. It will let you see the PageRank of every blog you visit instantly. While PR is not the sole indicator of a blog’s quality, PR 2+ blogs that show regular updates and host quality posts, can be good prospects.

c) Run a Google search for potential high authority blogs by using the niche areas you want to blog about with the keyword “guest blogs”. For example, let’s you want to write posts about e-cigarettes, your search query could be “E-cigarette guest blogs”, “quit smoking guest blogs”, etc.

Publish Quality Content on Blogs by Content Curating and Accumulating Content

Content curation is the act of collecting, discovering and offering digital content that surrounds some specific subject matter.Content is the most effective SEO tool there can be, if used right. But, the major problem that a large number of business owners or bloggers face is the lack of quality blog content. Luckily, there are gazillion resources available that can be used to generate interesting content ideas.That’s where content curation comes in. Simply put, content curation involves:

a) Researching and putting together top blogs on a subject.

b) Quoting important paragraphs from the blogs, and giving them proper citations and credit.

c) Adding your own spin, or interpretation to what’s already been published.

Conduct Competitive Link Analysis Using Free Tools

One of the things that helps your website rank higher is the number of links from other reliable and reputable website that link back to your website. There are two ways you can do this, either get someone to do it for you or do it on your own.

Look for websites that are linking back to your competitor’s website. You may use Open Site Explorer, to do this. With OSE’s free services, you may not be able to get all the data, but you’ll still be able to gather information to get started with your own link building activities.If you can stretch your budget a little, you may as well opt for paid membership for detailed information about your competitors link-building activities. There are lot’s of tools like, SEOSpyGlass, Majestic SEO, etc, that you can use.

Use External Proficiency and Expertise Tactically

Before engaging in a complete retainer based relationship with an agency, seek out the following kind of arrangements:

a) Monthly consultancy: Some SEO agencies or consultants do sell hourly consultations, which is a very smart way to garner some useful insights for a lesser fee.

b) DIY SEO audits: You may use free tools like Seoptimer, WooRank, Goingup, etc to do a review/audit for your website, so that you can identify the areas that need improvement. Then hire contractors and assign them specific tasks suggested by the tool, and implement the changes that require minimal technical expertise in-house.

c) Use free SEO tools to keep track of your performance: Free versions of tools like Ranking Checker by SEOmoz.com, SEO Analyzer by Sitening.com or SEO for Firefox by SEOBook.com, can all be of great help.

When it comes to budgeting, you have to make a choice between investing time or money. For small businesses, these cost-effective SEO tips make a lot of sense, however, if you adopt them you have to be prepared for some time investment, especially if you plan to implement all of them in-house. Good Luck!

Emma-Julie Fox writes for Pitstop Media Inc, a Vancouver company that provides SEO services to businesses across North America. If you would like to invite the author to write on your blog too please contact www.pitstopmedia.com.

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