Successful Blog

26 Needle In The Haystack Blogging Topics

by

cooltext455576688_blogging

By Terez Howard

If you’re just starting out blogging or you want to create an additional blog, here’s a word of advice:

Find a needle in the haystack.

Beginner bloggers probably have heard the terms “niche” and “micro niche.” A niche is a distinct segment of a market, while a micro niche is a more specific form of a wider market. For instance, green living is a niche, and green living with pets is a micro niche.

As a blogger, you want to find a topic that you already have contained a wealth of information, or at least you have a lot to say about the topic. Sounds easy enough, right?

It is pretty simple. Keep in mind that you not only go as tight as possible, but also make sure that you’re writing about something that people want to read about.

That’s where research comes in. Pay a visit to the Google Adwords Keyword Tool. Type in a desired keyword to get an idea of what people are searching for, and then head over to Google to see what you’re competition is like.

This method does not always give you a clear picture, though, since you’re keyword might be too broad, but you’re topic could be perfect. So check through several keywords and remember that a keyword alone should not decide the fate of your blog. It is just a piece of the puzzle.

There are various free and not free software programs that go into greater depth in spotting a niche. You could choose to invest in one if you plan on using it to generate blog topics or post ideas. However, in my opinion, it isn’t necessary.

My short blogging topic list

I was thinking about topics that I would like to write, as well as blogs that I would like to see and/or enjoy reading. I came up with the following list of topics about blogging:

  1. Blog writing tips
  2. Blog design
  3. Unpaid blog marketing
  4. Paid blog marketing
  5. Sponsored blogging
  6. Blogging for businesses
  7. Blogging as a source of income
  8. Blogging with babies
  9. Blogging basics
  10. Corporate blogging
  11. Video blogging
  12. Blogging for fun
  13. Blogging about news
  14. Blogging for newspapers
  15. Where to find best blogs of a certain topic
  16. Affiliate marketing and blogging
  17. Social media marketing
  18. WordPress plug-in reviews
  19. WordPress template reviews
  20. WordPress graphic designer reviews
  21. Ghost blogging
  22. Before you blog, you should know
  23. The blog that responds to the best bloggers
  24. Personal branding
  25. Blog that reviews blogs
  26. Blog strictly about blogging topics!

Within my list, I can see these topics can be even tighter. A blog about unpaid blog marketing could be cut down to only include how to market via Twitter. A blog that focuses on affiliate marketing on a blog could solely discuss using Commission Junction.

Are you thinking that a super tight micro niche blog will run dry on topics? It may. But the odds are slim because within one topic is the possibility of hundreds of posts.

So yeah, you’re trying to find a needle. It’s also a needle with a billion atoms on its point. You won’t run out of material.

What kind of blogging topics would you like to read or write about?

—
Terez Howard operates TheWriteBloggers, a professional blogging service which builds clients’ authority status and net visibility. She regularly blogs at Freelance Writing Mamas . You’ll find her on Twitter @thewriteblogger

Thanks, Terez!

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

Beach Notes: Up and Away

by

Up up and away

Last week at the beach we saw this vapor trail going almost totally vertical. It was quite impressive to see the plane climbing and climbing, ever upward.

We’ve seen plenty of fairly horizontal vapor trails. Neither of us had previously seen one like this.

Business thought. Maybe it doesn’t take much more effort to go vertical and high as to trundle along on the horizontal?

up-and-away

Suzie Cheel & Des Walsh

Cool Tool Review: Toggl

by

Todd Hoskins Reviews Tools for Business

cooltext451585442_tools

Todd Hoskins chooses and uses tools and products that could belong in an entrepreneurial business toolkit. He’ll be checking out how useful they are to folks who would be their customers in a form that’s consistent and relevant.

Cool Tool Review: Toggl
A Review by Todd Hoskins

I have a confession: I am an obsessive tracker and quantifier. As much as I love art and language, I find some comfort and satisfaction when numbers tell a story. Perhaps this explains my love of baseball and its box scores, or why I love web analytics. For over a year, I experimented with assigning prioritized value to daily tasks, tracking my success or lack thereof. I stopped when I realized my creativity was being hampered by my desire to improve my average weekly scores. I was looking down too much, not looking up enough.

Still, tracking, whether it be your blood pressure, web traffic, or time management can be valuable information. Toggl, a time tracking tool, makes it easy to capture this information. If you bill by the hour, you should definitely be using some type of time tracking tool. Even if you don’t, it’s a useful exercise to check in for a week or a month and see how you spend your time. (The book Lifelong Activist makes a strong point that time tracking is an important measurement in personal development, and offers great tips on interpreting the results and implementing change).

Toggl can be installed or run on about any platform. It’s simple – a running clock that allows you to assign projects and clients to time spent. Start the clock. End the clock. But you do have to remember to do this with every project transition. Of course, there are pretty charts and graphs, especially useful if you have the whole team collaborating on various projects.

toggl

Word of warning: If you impose time tracking on employees who are not billing by the hour, make sure you jointly establish some reasonable expectations. It’s not good for the soul to feel like every minute is being monitored. Nor is it good for the soul to play the workplace role of hall monitor. For example, in an eight hour workday, you may expect web developers to spend 6 hours on specified projects.

There is a free version. The paid version, starting at $5 per month, has more features. For a team, it may run up to $100 per month. A good value for the information you receive.

Summing Up – Is it worth it?

Enterprise Value: 3/5 – Good programming tool, but doesn’t replace the elegance of Pivotal Tracker

Entrepreneur Value: 3/5 – Freelancers gain credibility when they can show their client when hours were worked

Personal Value: 3/5 – Commit a week. See what you learn. With the iPhone and Android app, you don’t have to limit your tracking to work. How much TV do you watch? Time spent wiith kids?

Are You Allowing Your Blog To Be Spamtastic?

by

cooltext455576688_blogging

By Terez Howard

Spamtastic is not good.

I went on vacation for one week and didn’t touch my blog. When I returned home, I found 112 comments on my blog. Do you know how many I approved as legitimate? Two. And I wasn’t even sure if one of those two was just really good-sounding spam.
Last week, I talked about making valuable comments on other people’s blogs. What about your own blog? Do you give just any comment a passing grade?

 

How can you determine if you’re receiving an actual comment to your work or plain old spam?

Here is one basic rule of thumb: Approve a comment if it contributes to your discussion. If it doesn’t say anything meaningful, trash it.

Some spamtastic comments that don’t belong in your blog

The empty compliment. Perhaps you’ve seen the commenter who says this: “Sweet post.” I’ve gotten that one dozens of times. There’s nothing wrong with a compliment. We all love to get them. But it does not contribute to your blog’s discussion. It doesn’t say anything at all.

Here are a couple comments from my blog that I sent to the spam folder (I did no editing to these comments):

“I found your blog on Yahoo , this is a good blog , i will come back.” People like to say they bookmarked your blog and will return for more. Check out what website they link to, and you might find that exact same comment over and over again waiting for approval, linking to the same blog. That’s what I discovered.

“Keep posting stuff like this i really like it, Good job My friend” This direct quote was from sunglass. I don’t know who sunglass is, but I oftentimes (not always) will not approve authors who do not provide a name. Sunglass, Pc tv and replica handbags have not as of yet provided anything that contributes to my blog. Yet, they keep continuing to post their spam.

Unrelated nothingness. I cannot stand the person who goes off on a topic that has nothing to do with my blog. Perhaps such comments would be of value on another blog, and perhaps not. I’m not really sure. I know one thing: They do not fit my blog.

Let me share some of this nonsense:

“If you are willing to buy real estate, you will have to receive personal loans (There was a link on the keyword personal loans). Furthermore, my mother commonly utilizes a financial loan, which is really useful.”

“Kyle Shelley of All in Education has given me very substandard service. I am amazingley angry in the data that he has provided.”

String of html text. Lately, this has been the most popular form of spamtastic comments on my blog. I will get seven or eight of these in a row every other day. They say absolutely nothing. Their obvious sole purpose is to provide the webmaster with endless links back to their site.

English, people! Besides English, I have gotten comments in Spanish. I can only tell because I know un poco from my four years of high school Spanish. I also get comments in what appears to be German. Isn’t it obvious that these comments don’t contribute to my English-speaking audience? I would post some examples of these, but I have no idea what they say.

Be fantastic, not spamtastic

Don’t approve every comment that comes your way, just so it looks like your posts are getting tons of conversation. It’s not conversation if there is no real communication.

Make your blog a high quality one by encouraging discussion with your readers. When those comments appear, savor the real contributions and don’t hesitate to trash the garbage.

What kinds of spamtastic comments do you avoid?

 

—
Terez Howard operates TheWriteBloggers, a professional blogging service which builds clients’ authority status and net visibility. She regularly blogs at Freelance Writing Mamas . You’ll find her on Twitter @thewriteblogger

Thanks, Terez!

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

Why Guest Blogging is Fun and Extends the Value of What You Do

by

A Guest Post by Jessica Cortez

cooltext455576688_blogging

Many articles here on Successful-Blog have addressed the importance of guest blogging. Some have pointed out the advantages of getting your work and your name out there when you’re just starting out. Writing about topics you find interesting is a great writing motivator, too. And the instant feedback a guest blogger receives in comments is central to blogging and general writing improvement. These are all great reasons to go out there and knock on blog doors, asking for a place to stay and sit awhile.

But perhaps we can take a step back and ask ourselves a bigger question — What is the greatest motivator in any of life’s endeavors?

  • Is it the promise of future career success?
  • Praise from others or external assurance that what we are doing is in some way worthwhile?
  • Money?

To be sure, these are all valid sources of inspiration. But what I’ve found is that the most successful people I know are those who are simply enjoying what they’re doing. In short, the greatest human motivator is an intrinsic sense of fun.

The logical next question, then, is how is guest blogging fun?

For one, writing a guest post is an inimitable opportunity to explore the mindset of a particular type of reader. Every blog has a specific audience, and by writing a guest post, you have to do some digging into each blog audience’s psyche. Read through the blog’s previous articles, especially the more popular ones, and imagine what kind of person reads the blog and finds value in it. This process in itself cultivates human empathy, a quality that can be beneficial to anyone’s life overall.

If you’re a blogger, you probably take an interest in the act of writing, too. And good guest bloggers not only take into account people, but they also take into account tone. Just as every audience has a particular mindset, every audience member also has a specific style of writing to which she responds best. Catering to this style enhances your flexibility as a writer.

Employing several different stylistic tones makes you more adept at the use of words. The exploration of writing voices is like a little puzzle in that you have to figure out which grouping of suitable, carefully selected words goes where. And the challenge inherent in solving any puzzle is what makes it fun.

Seen in this light, guest blogging may be more than just a chance to “spread the word,” as it were. It’s a dynamic form of communication that stretches and strengthens your social understanding and technical skill. While developing your personal blog is rewarding on so many of its own levels, guest writing presents unique challenges that even the most accomplished blogger should indulge in on occasion.

How might a go at guest blogging expand and extend the value of what you do?

——–
Jessica knows a think or two about understanding her audience. Why not comment on what she said?

Jessica Cortez writes on the topics of online degree programs. She welcomes your comments at her email Id: cortez dot jessi23 @ gmail.com.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

Buy the ebook. Learn the art of online conversation.

I’m a proud affiliate of

third-tribe-marketing

Cool Tool Review: Creative Commons

by

Todd Hoskins Reviews Tools for Business

cooltext451585442_tools

Todd Hoskins chooses and uses tools and products that could belong in an entrepreneurial business toolkit. He’ll be checking out how useful they are to folks who would be their customers in a form that’s consistent and relevant.

Cool Tool Review: Creative Commons
A Review by Todd Hoskins

Open Field by kathrynstar at DeviantArt http://kathrynstar.deviantart.com/art/Open-Field-20924389
Open Field by kathrynstar at DeviantArt http://kathrynstar.deviantart.com/art/Open-Field-20924389

Creative Commons is not a tool, but it’s important for every blogger, editor, and author to understand the licenses made possible by the non-profit founded nearly ten years ago. It makes the world a better place for both businesses and artists by enabling the free and easy use of creative materials.

If you are a business looking to include photography, artwork, or even music in your printed materials, ads, or website, you may want to contact a stock photography house. But if you’re a small business or individual working on a tight budget, it makes sense to find works available in the commons.

You can do a metasearch directly on the Creative Commons website. For example, if you want some imagery of an open field to illustrate an aspect of your business, choose your keywords, and search. Once you find an image, you can download it and use it with the restrictions provided by the license. The most typical license allows reuse with attribution, meaning you need to acknowledge the person who created or obtained the original work.

Here’s some helpful tips for giving credit to the author and publisher:

Creative Commons Attribution

It is the spirit of the web that makes Creative Commons great – that we can share, mix, and give credit to the people who influence, assist, and improve our own business and creative pursuits. For white papers and any creative materials that you or your company create, consider putting it out in the Commons as well. It may create some visibility, but more importantly it makes you more of a participant in the exchange rather than just a buyer and seller.

Summing Up – Is it worth it?

Enterprise Value: 4/5 – There are many places to source creative materials (I love Veer), but it also is valuable to know and use Creative Commons and participate in the larger community.

Entrepreneur Value: 5/5 – No attorneys needed. Period.

Personal Value: 5/5 – Never before has so much material been available to mix and reuse. Have fun and share.

Photo