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Featured blog posts

Mining Topics to Write About

Google Alerts – http://www.google.com/alerts Google alerts will send you an email as often as you would like about topics that you incher into their search bar.

So if you’re interested in purple unicorns… every time someone mentions purple unicorns on their blog, website or press release or whatever else they may do to publicize purple unicorns, you’re going to get an email saying that someone’s talking about unicorns.

Other Blogs – make sure you read other blogs in your industry and look for stuff that you can snipe.  Regurgitating news is okay, so long as you add your opinion to it.  So if you think Justin Bieber’s being a douche bag, say so.

Blog Search Engines – there are couple of search engines that will let you search directly for topics within blocks.  Technorati is one of these services and so is the Google search for blogs.

Technorati – http://technorati.com

Google Blog Search – http://blogsearch.google.com

Social Tags – when people publish blog post to social media sites, they usually add tags of some sort to identify what the subject matter is about.  On StumbleUpon and delicious, you can search by tags to reveal sites that are related to those terms.

Stumbleupon – http://stumbleupon.com

Delicious – https://delicious.com

News Stories – News stories are great way to find content for your blogs.  The faster you can get the information out there the better.  The Google news search is a great way to find stories related to just about any topic.

https://news.google.com/

There are other sites such as Techmeme for tech news and Memeorandum for political news.

http://techmeme.com

http://memeorandom.com

POPURLS – This site shows you everything that is trending. They give you everything ready to go.

http://popurls.com

Google Trends is another great place to find what’s hot on the Internet.  Google Trends will not only show you what’s trending right now, but show you a graph of how popular it has been over the past several months and years.

http://glui.me/?i=hyr4et3w4ohbquy/2014-01-28_at_5.15_PM.png/

Mining Topics – Mind Reader

Here’s a great little exercise to help you come up with topics to write about.  Take out a sheet of paper.  Draw a line vertically down the middle.  On the left side I want you to list out all of the problems that your audience currently has or might have in the future.  On the right side, fill in all of the possible solutions to those problems, even if you currently don’t possess knowledge on the solutions.  This list will resonate with your readers.  When you write about these topics, they will think you are a mind reader.

Mining Topics – Ask Your Audience

Don’t forget that your audience is your biggest asset.  If you please them, they will come back for more, piss them off and you might be blogging to an audience of one.

You could do a sidebar survey that asks your readers what they want to hear about.  Make it multiple choice so it’s nice and easy, but you could give them a space to fill in any other requests as well.

Often times they will tell you in the comment section without you ever asking.

When it comes to comments, here are a few tips…

1. Leave them open so people can communicate many-to-many (readers to readers) rather than one-to-many (you to your readers).

2. You want to make it as simple as possible for people to make comments.  If people need to make a new account, you might as well ask someone to get you a beer from a popsicle truck, because it’s probably not going to happen.

When you install a WordPress blog on NicheBuilder, you have a comment engine included that allows comments from Facebook, Twitter, Disqus and Facebook all in one module.

It used to be that you would have to pass commenters through a captcha image to prove they are real.  My suggestion would be to just approve all comments before they are posted live on your site.

That wraps it for getting topics.  You can either go ahead and put these strategies in play, or continue on to our next video where we’ll tell you how to Get the Word Out about your new blog.

Crafting Your Blog’s Voice For Your Audience

Where large companies have a website that speak to folks in a corporate tone, blogs are where you can really connect with your reader on a human and personal level.  Sure, you might be conveying business tips and how-to strategies, but your blog is where you can also appeal to your reader’s emotional side.

Write with an opinion already.  Have you ever read a book that merely states the facts and then it’s up to you to memorize the content?  Yeah, me too.  It was called school and I hated it.  Maybe you did to?  The problem was the method of delivery.  If they used crafty analogies and humor to teach you micro-biology, guess what, we’d all know it.  Instead, you are forced to learn in a traditional format that puts the best of us to sleep in minutes.

Give people you write about nicknames, make fun of people, things, tactics and whatever else.  You can always write a retraction later, which means guess what, more and more readers.

If you are boring, and most people’s blogs are, then no one is ever going to come visit or more importantly, stick around to digest a lot of it.

Eben Pagan (a dating and business guru) is one of the more drab robotic marketers I’ve ever met, but he shared with me a tactic that moved his money needle.  He started making fun of one of his readers publicly.  Which is kind of a prick thing to do, and another reader called him out on it.  So what did he do?  He started making fun of that guy publicly as well.

What happened?  About $30,000 in additional sales that week, that’s all.

In one of the acting books I was reading, they had these acting students reading lines, and it was coming off horribly.  As they read, it just wasn’t believable.  So the instructor asked each of the groups to take turns reading the same lines, but with one person assuming the role of higher social status.  All of a sudden everything clicked, the whole scene made sense and the actors looked brilliant.

So when writing to your audience, try and write from a position of higher social status.  In other words, be a little bit better than them.  Choose the high road.  Often times people will try to drag you to their level.  Either delete the comment or better yet, just don’t respond.  That will not only drive the commenter crazy, but convey to your readers that you’re not willing to stoop to your critics level.

Often times other readers (fans) will come to your defense.  This happens when you polarize your audience.  People should either love you or hate you, but not simply tolerate you.  Why?  Because love and hate are emotions, and emotions are memorable.  Tolerate is bland and easily forgettable.

More than half of the searches on the Internet are entertainment based.  So create an entertainment style category and thread that through your blog’s home page.  Remember that people mostly are on the web doing research and looking for entertainment.

TMZ is one of the most visited blogs on the Internet.  They discuss celebrity news and gossip as it happens.  Hundreds of thousands of people follow that site like a religious cult so they can be the first person at the water cooler talking about John Travolta’s latest skirmish or scandal with a bellboy.

For Internet marketing, the Salty Droid offers a unique perspective on info marketers.  The guy is a natural born critique and you can tell he really enjoys spreading any dirt or exposing any major marketer he can find.  That gossip attracts a certain mentality and I’ll admit, on a few down-trodden business days, I’ve enjoyed reading that all the top guys are scammers.  Somehow it makes me feel better, like I’m riding the ethical high horse.

So then, figure out who everyone is watching in your industry and dedicate a section of your blog to making fun of them, giving them praise or otherwise feed the love-hate relationship that people have with them.  Don’t think anyone hates them?  You’re wrong.  Just the fact that they make untold millions alone is reason enough for 80% of your market (give or take) to hate them.

People are inherently jealous, but they never would admit it.  In fact, they’ll probably be quick to chastise you for even suggesting they possess such a horrible emotion.  Feed into that.  Tell them “why” Mr. or Mrs. success is so wealthy (aka better than them) and the haters will be out in a minute with their ‘cut them down to size’ comments.

See they can’t help it.  Cognitive dissonance, which is a fancy term for, you’re not better than me, won’t let them leave it at that.  If your reader simply accepts what you write, then they will feel inferior to the market leader.  Instead they’ll post a quick jab just to remind you that that a-hole only got that way because he filed bankruptcy and got divorced.  And now it’s on.  That can easily turn into a post with 50+ comments.

Kick the hornet’s nest, then kick it again!

Customer Trends

You need to pay attention to what your customers are trending towards.  Watch your readers responses… what are they interacting with.  If they are reacting to posts about “Russian guns” or “Russian brides”, then write more about it.

If you are sending emails on an autoresponder (and you should be), pay attention to which emails people are opening up.  That means they want more of that topic.  That’s a simple concept, but commonly overlooked.

However, if you start writing about guns and girls every single day, your readers will become immune to it.  Instead, if you have a great topic that’s getting a lot of clicks, save it.  Send an email about it once every other week or once a week so that people keep continuing to open up your emails.

Within your blog, also pay attention to what is holding your users attention.  You have to adjust to what is keeping your users interests.  If one of your articles is getting a lot of clicks, make it sticky on your blogs homepage.

Get it in front of as many people as possible.  Where does your audience hang out online?  Where are they offline?  Who is your customer avatar?  What is his or her name?  We developed a customer avatar in-depth in our info product module if you want to refresh yourself over there.

You need to learn as much as you can about your customer.  Then test and re-test what you think is working…

It’s possible that you may need to completely overhaul things depending on what is getting your customers attentions.

What’s good today, might suck tomorrow.  Always be ready, willing and able to evolve.  Great writing does not happen overnight.  You’ve got to be patient.

Each morning, open up all of the websites that have trending news in your industry.  If you haven’t already done so, now would be a great time to add some RSS feeds into your NicheBuilder dashboard.  That way you can get a real quick overview of your market each time you login to post on your blog.

Pay attention to what is headlining in your industry.  If you’re going to be an authority blogger, you have to be current.  While you shouldn’t feel that you need to be the person that is breaking the stories, what you should do is curate the available information and then apply your unique spin or how it applies to your readers.

So when Facebook makes it’s latest change, don’t expect that you’re going to be the person that breaks it to the industry.  Companies like Mashable and TechCrunch are being invited to the live press release.

Nobody wants to know about something that’s boring, they want to know what is going to make them popular at the water cooler.

Don’t reinvent the wheel, you don’t have to.  There are plenty of people doing interesting and stupid things for you, every single day.

With the Huffington Post, when an article is trending, they move it to the front.  So if an article is on the homepage, you can bet that it’s trending.

But be original, voice your voice… the Google is watching

Your blogging has to be a little bit more aggressive.  You have to be willing to have a group of people looking at you like you’re the devil.  Be willing to make your audience angry with curiosity.  Take a position.  You do have to take a position, and you have to be comfortable with disagreement.

The blog posts that you see that have 230 comments on them, aren’t all comments saying “wow this is great, you guys are really smart.”

Not at all.

When you see a post going viral with comments, it’s usually people saying, “You are so clueless!  Looks like you didn’t read this or that.”  And then someone else chimes in to defend the original author, or to make a point in support of the initial post.

Most of us, like being liked.  So if you’re the type of person that likes starting fights, you’re going to be hugely successful as a blogger.

Divide and Conquer!

Without conflict, it’s going to be boring and it’s going to lack engagement. As a blogger, you have to be comfortable with disagreement.

Personalize, Personalize, Personalize.  Speak directly to your most active readers.

You want to cater to short attention spans.  Write for the person that has a four-year old draped around their neck, the cell phone buzzing in their pocket and dinner on the table.  Sound familiar?  It should, that’s most of us, give or take on the four-year old.

People desperately want to be led.  Show them the way through your blog and help them “assume” your opinion as their own.  Think it through.  Sometimes we have our own opinion, but most times we’re simply repeating the opinion of someone that we respect and or admire.

Follow The Opposition

You want to pay attention to what the opposition or “the other guy” is doing.

Here’s an example… If you are a hard-core liberal, you can learn more about how to invoke reaction within your reader by listening to Rush Limbaugh, then by doing all of the research in the world.

If you are a hard-core conservative, watching Bill Maher, an extreme liberal, will give you topic after topic after topic that will invoke reaction within your reader.

Think about your own reaction.  To understand the mental framework of getting a reaction, picture yourself in a bar… and ten feet away you’re listening to a drunk guy talk about beating his wife and kids on a regular basis.  And then he justifies it by saying they deserve it or it makes them stronger people.  Then he burps a long beer infested belch to his satisfaction.

You cannot help but feel emotion inside.  Ninety-eight percent of us want to at least talk to him and chastise him for his view of family and marriage.  Those of us who can might provoke him to beat on somebody who can actually fight back.

THAT…that is the desired result of the successful blogger’s mindset.  You can’t help but react.

It doesn’t always have to be a “fighting words” position, but you do have to take a stance.  Attack the sacred cow, and go to places that people don’t normally go.  That’s what gets reaction among your readers.

Haven’t you ever read a Facebook post that compels you to respond?  It might only be three sentences, but somehow it puts you on the defense and you want to get this guy.

I remember one post where this character, Omar Martin, was condoning the killing of a 19-year old by the police.  The boy’s father had called the police to help him with his rebellious son who had stolen his car.  He felt the police did nothing wrong.  No excessive use of force.

Let’s just say it ruined my day.  I lashed out at him, both on facebook and the original website.  I couldn’t just let this guy affect public opinion like that.

That’s the type of writing I’m talking about.  He kicked the hornets nest, and as a result, I got stung.

If you’re going to take this blogging thing seriously, here are a couple of quick easy sentences put on your wall…

No Guts, No Traffic
Expect To Be Hated
Prepare To Be Loved

That’s it for this section on ‘crafting your voice’.  Please feel free to start implementing these strategies right now, or we’ll see you in the next video.

More Content Strategies

Don’t Just Blog, Build an Online Presence

To add more readers to your blog, you’re going to have to show your face in a few other places besides your blog.  You’ll want to comment on other blogs, guest post, Tweet and follow other tweeters and drive traffic back through whatever means possible.  When people find you through other sites, there is a process of discovery that can help build them into long-term fans.

You’ve Got to Be Patient

When working on a new blog, you have to remember that it is hard to get started and readers will come in trickles and droves at the same time.  On one day you might have a few 100 visitors, but then not have any traffic to speak of for a few more days.  Hopefully, using the traffic strategies we teach you that won’t happen.

You don’t want to just read the current events within your industry, you also need to look at these people as competitors.  If people are reading other sites, then they aren’t reading yours.

If you have a killer article that is trending across the net, you might want to consider running a press release through PRWeb or one of the other press release organizations.

Also try to team up with other guest bloggers, who are basically just other authors in your niche.

There are two models that are successful in blogging.

1. On your blog you want to post one amazing piece of content every week.  Make it a fairly long post with a really really good content.

2. Post several times today, but cover things from multiple angles with multiple writers.  This is where guest bloggers and hired guns come in.

Those are the two models that you want.

Prices that you would want to pay someone for a guest blog on your site would be… $100 for 1500 words from a great author.  You also want to ask them to publicize your article to their list, blogs etc.

Why is this so good?  Because, you couldn’t pay this person $100 for a banner ad on their site for more than a week. But here they are writing a ton of content and also telling people about it on their blog.

Where you could probably get $100 article written for five dollars on fivver, you wouldn’t get the traffic. What you’re really paying for is the traffic in addition to the quality content.

Then if you’re going to get content from non-professional bloggers, that don’t have a following, you don’t want to pay more than $20 for a 500 word article.

  • Redirect people from the Blog to your landing pages and/or direct to a sales page.
  • Entice guest bloggers to submit content on your blog
  • Stay on top of the comments

Syndicate your blog content to Facebook and Twitter, as well as notifiy subscribers when a new post is avail via email broadcast.  Aweber can do this for you.

RSS feed your latest blog posts and comments into the footer of your main company website, if that main site isn’t your blog.

Photos On Your Blog

Everyone of your blog posts needs to have a picture associated with it.  Perry Belcher is known for saying, you really are being paid to show people pictures.

Make sure that all of your pictures have alt text attached that is relevant to the post.  So for example, if your post is about universal remote controls, then your picture should be of a remote control and also have the alt text “universal remote control”.

A lot of times people do image searches when they’re looking for various terms. Google tracks how many times a picture is clicked on an image search and more importantly how many times it’s not clicked on.

You can steal photos to put inside of your posts, but I don’t recommend you do that.  Google has an advanced algorithm that can tell if the photo you are using is copyrighted, protected, watermarked or otherwise belonging to someone else.

So while you can grab other photos and simply put them on your site, the better way would be to change them up by at least 20% and then resave them before posting.

Normally we would list all of these in additional resources, but they are so important going to go ahead and go through them now.

Photo and Image Editors

Pixlr – Pixlr is an online photo-editing platform that allows you to change photos in multiple different ways.  You can do this by making them black-and-white, stretching, skewing or adding light, shadows, etc.

Ipiccy – http://ipiccy.com/ is an online retouching tool that lets you make changes to photos like a professional photo editor, with an extremely easy to use interface

Screenshot Apps

LightShot App – http://app.prntscr.com/  Screenshot software for PC and Mac.  You can make your own photos by taking screenshots from your monitor.

Glui – http://glui.me/ Screenshot software for Mac…saves to Dropbox

Puush.me – http://puush.me/ Screenshot software for PC

Royalty Free Stock Photos

Dreamstime – http://dreamstime.com/ royalty free stock photos for a fraction of the price of iStockPhoto.

Every Stock Photo – http://www.everystockphoto.com is a mix of paid and free to use photos for your website.  Just make sure to credit the source when using them.

Adding Content and Tweaking Your WordPress

So now that your blog is up, let’s talk about what you going to put on it.

You want to think of your blog as an entry point to your funnel.  There may be advertising pages, related content or other traffic magnets in front of your blog, but your blog is where people are going to really get to know you.

Your blog is where you will host your opt-in form that puts people on to your mailing list.  Your blog is where you will share personal stories, triumphs and losses with your readers.  Your blog is where you will tell people about your products and services.

Know Your Niche

As you build your blog, initially you will be sharing your personal experiences and opinions related to your niche or industry.  And that’s great, the human element is what people are going to really connect with.  But you also need to back up some of your opinions with facts and figures, and share that info with your readers as well.  It will also help you to cite this information if you decide to get into a debate with one of your commenters.  If people get the sense that you’re not truly knowledgeable on the matter, they may bail for greener pastures.

What About The Theme?

Using NicheBuilder, we have several WordPress themes available to you when you select your website.  After clicking Create Website, click the WordPress or Blog category across the top of the screen.  From there you can click the individual theme names to see what they look like.  Remember all of the plugins we discussed earlier?  Those plugins will come pre-installed on any of these themes.  But more importantly, we’ll also have installed a child theme so you can make changes and tweaks without risking your initial theme installation.  Child themes are a bit of a complex subject, but what you need to know is that when your theme updates, if you don’t have a child theme in place, then you’re going to lose any changes you made to the theme.

My recommendation would be to try and work with one of the available themes.  If you do decide to install a different theme, make sure to create a child theme for any changes.

Focus on your content, not on the ‘design’ of your blog.  Get lots and lots of content published, that is what readers care about.  That is what will grow your audience.  You can always update your design down the road.  And it becomes a whole lot easier to make good design decisions if your blog is kicking off a few hundred bucks a day.

Plan Your Categories and Fill Em Up

As you setup your blog, add a category for the major items that you’re going to write about.  But don’t just add thirty categories.  For every category that you add, make sure to have at least one blog post.  Imagine if they hit your site from Google and it’s a category page, with nothing there.  Fail.

Within those categories, you’ll want to create a SILO structure for your content.  That means if your main category is Weather, your silo’d content would be Crappy Weather, Awesome Weather, Freeze Your Tuckus Weather, and so on.

On each of those pages, you’ll want to add keyword related content to the pages within your SILO’s.  This builds the overall strength of your blog.

So now let’s get in to how we actually do some of these things.

H1, H2 and H3 Title TagsYour posts should have specific title tags.  The H1 is your main title and is located at the top of your post.

Keyword-rich URL’sThe URL is the bar at the top of the page.  URL is an abbreviation for Uniform Resource Locator.  Each of your posts should have the keyword or keywords present that you would like to rank for.  This is accomplished by configuring the WordPress SEO plugin to show post titles rather than post number sequence.  That means your page will show a nice title at the top, as well as in google.

http://yourdomain.com/your-keywords-go-here

Meta Tags

Your meta tags are your keywords.  You are going to enter them in the “tags” section of your blog post.  This helps Google and other search engines decide what is relevant in your posts.

Meta Descriptions

Your meta description is the description of your post in Google.  It is usually limited to 160 characters and it should include your keyword as well.

Using the SEO plugin in WordPress, you should enter a unique meta description for each post.  A trick to this is to re-arrange the order of your keywords so as not to over-optimize your site.  This is helping us rank for difficult terms at the moment.

Those are the basics of getting your WordPress blog up and tweaked.  Follow these simple rules and you’ll be off to a great start.  Go ahead and start implementing a few of these strategies now.

Let’s Get Your Blog Up!

Let’s Get Your Blog Up!

In order to put your blog online you’re going to first need to select a blogging platform. Some of the different platforms out there include WordPress, MovableType, TypePad and Blogger.

Well there are a lot of different blogging platforms available, at NicheBuilder we have focused completely around WordPress.

Why WordPress?

WordPress has the most complete set of templates and plug-ins available, more so than any other Content Management System (CMS)

For whatever reason, they also seem to do very well with SEO in Google.

Because we focus on one platform, using NicheBuilder you are able to do a few things exceptionally well within WordPress.

The first being installation. Using niche builder you’re able to rapidly install and configure your WordPress blog with all of your details in a matter of 2 to 3 clicks.

We have also taken a lot of the stress out of getting your initial plug-ins installed and configured.  Here is the current list of all of the plug-ins that come preconfigured on your WordPress blog…

Akismet – Used by millions, Akismet is quite possibly the best way in the world to protect your blog from comment and trackback spam. It keeps your site protected from spam even while you sleep. To get started: 1) Click the “Activate” link to the left of this description, 2) Sign up for an Akismet API key, and 3) Go to your Akismet configuration page, and save your API key.

Video User Manuals – A video manual consisting of twenty-four videos for using wordpress.

WordPress SEO – The first true all-in-one SEO solution for WordPress, including on-page content analysis, XML sitemaps and much more.

WP-FileManager – FileManager for WordPress allows you to easily change, delete, organize and upload files.

To get started, simply log into NicheBuilder and go to your builder tab on the homepage and then click the button that says, New Website.  This will open a dialogue where you select your website type.  In the tabs across the top select WordPress and you’ll be presented with a list of various WordPress blog types.

Choose the blog type that is best suited for you and click the Create Website button.  That’s it, no your WordPress blog is completely installed and will open to the main dashboard.

From there we have several how to training videos that will walk you through adding a post, adding tags, configuring your blog, etc.  Several of those videos are located right within your WordPress blog on the video tutorials tab. And several of those videos are located on your primary NicheBuilder dashboard under How-To training.

So now that your blog is up, let’s talk about what you going to put on it.

You want to think of your blog as an entry point to your funnel.  There may be advertising pages, related content or other traffic magnets in front of your blog, But your blog is where people are going to really get to know you.

Your blog is where you will host your opt in form that puts people on to your mailing list.  Your blog is where you will share personal stories, triumphs and losses with your readers.  Your blog is where you will tell people about your products and services.

Know Your Niche

As you build your blog, initially you will be sharing your personal experiences and opinions related to your niche or industry.  And that’s great, the human element is what people are going to really connect with.  But you also need to back up some of your opinions with facts and figures, and share that info with your readers as well.  It will also help you to cite this information if you decide to get into a debate with one of your commenters.  If people get the sense that you’re not truly knowledgeable on the matter, they may bail for greener pastures.

What About The Theme?

Using NicheBuilder, we have several WordPress themes available to you when you select your website.  After clicking Create Website, click the WordPress or Blog category across the top of the screen.  From there you can click the individual theme names to see what they look like.  Remember all of the plugins we discussed earlier?  Those plugins will come pre-installed on any of these themes.  But more importantly, we’ll also have installed a child theme so you can make changes and tweaks without risking your initial theme installation.  Child themes are a bit of a complex subject, but what you need to know is that when your theme updates, if you don’t have a child theme in place, then you’re going to lose any changes you made to the theme.

My recommendation would be to try and work with one of the available themes.  If you do decide to install a different theme, make sure to create a child theme for any changes.

Focus on your content, not on the ‘design’ of your blog.  Get lots and lots of content published, that is what readers care about.  That is what will grow your audience.  You can always update your design down the road.  And it becomes a whole lot easier to make good design decisions if your blog is kicking off a few hundred bucks a day.

Plan Your Categories and Fill Em Up

As you setup your blog, add a category for the major items that you’re going to write about.  But don’t just add thirty categories.  For every category that you add, make sure to have at least one blog post.  Imagine if they hit your site from Google and it’s a category page, with nothing there.  Fail.

Don’t Just Blog, Build an Online Presence

To add more readers to your blog, you’re going to have to show your face in a few other places besides your blog.  Comment on other blogs, guest post, tweet and follow other tweeters, drive traffic back through whatever means possible.  When people find you through other sites, there is a process of discovery that can help build them into long-term fans.

You’ve Got to Be Patient

When working on a new blog, you have to remember that it is hard to get started and readers will come in trickles and droves at the same time.  On one day you might have a few 100 visitors, but then not have any traffic to speak of for a few more days.  Hopefully, using the traffic strategies we teach you that won’t happen.

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