Are you an independent professional who provides services? For example, are you a coach, speaker, consultant, or some kind of marketing specialist? Do people pay you for your expertise? And are you pretty much working solo?

2nd question: Do you need marketing content for your online sites? Like web pages, sales copy for landing pages, white papers, special reports and cornerstone content?

3rd: What's stopping you from writing great content that brings in clients?

Here's what I think… and I could be wrong, but based on what my clients tell me about why they don't write better online content:

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How do you know if you're doing the right things in your business? Even if you follow best practices, there comes a time you look at the numbers, and decide what's wrong, what's right, and what you need to eliminate or do more of, right?

There's a few measurements that baffle me for my own business. The more I blog, the more traffic I get, and the more I hear from people, whether it's for a business related (money-making) project or not.

So that's a good thing, any way I look at it. It's all good. But that doesn't tell me what direction to go in, what kinds of things to blog about, or what kinds of products and services to offer.

I'm sort of guessing what people need and want, based on previous sales of what I offer. But that's looking at the past to figure out what to do next. I'm going to bring out a survey soon to find out more.

In a way, building a business is like predicting the future. I remember being asked to project sales figures once… how can anyone do that? I've watched my husband do that for several of his entrepreneurial start-ups with utter fascination.

I have no idea. I wasn't trained in business, rather in psychology. That's a field that gives me clues about what to do, where to go in business. But is it enough?

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How much time and effort do you devote to Outreach – connecting with others, leaving blog comments, responding on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn? This is an essential key to successful blogging, and essential to making your content marketing efforts profitable.

If you're like me, not enough, I'll bet. We (I mean me!) are so driven and task oriented that it's easy to forget to reach out to others.

I'm really writing this for myself, you see, but maybe you can relate. For example, I have a list of things to do, and I plow through those things, checking off as I go…and I'm pretty good about getting most things done.

But the one thing that often gets left til last is reaching out to others, finding out what they're doing, reading their blogs, commenting, and checking their tweets on Twitter.

I should take that back, it's not entirely true. I visit Twitter daily, sometimes 2-3 times. I get several emails a day from a service SocialOomph which gives me all the tweets in certain keywords I track.

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