This post on generating blogging ideas was contributed by Graham Jones from grahamjones.co.uk.
Most bloggers give up after a short while; even though there are millions of blogs online, few are updated regularly and most have been abandoned. The difference between success and failure in blogging is often down to persistence. But, when I speak at meetings about blogging, people often come up to me afterwards and say “Ah, yes, that’s all very well, but I run out of ideas after a while, so I can’t blog regularly”. So, how can you be sure of coming up with a constant stream of blogging ideas? How can you be certain that when you open your blogging software you will always have something to write?
If you think about your daily newspaper it does not have a choice. The number of pages is set by the amount of advertising space they sell. Each day, though, has varying amounts of news - some days, very little happens. But it would be no good the journalists filling up the first few pages and then printing a notice on all the others saying “if we’d been able to think of anything to write we would have put it here”. No matter how little is going on around them and no matter how much space they have to fill, newspapers simply have to fill the space allocated to them - plus they simply MUST do it before a specified time. The only way they can achieve this is to have a system.
Develop a blogging planning system
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Over the past week I’ve shared
five strategies that I’d use to promote my blog if I were starting from scratch again today.
We started off by looking at how the majority of your efforts need to be focused upon Readers You Don’t Already Have (obvious but important) and then looked at the five strategies of:
- Guest Posting
- Networking
- Advertising
- Social Media
- Viral Content
Together I believe that these five strategies pursued together would give a new blog a good start (note: pursuing just one of them might have some impact but together they are more effective).
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While hunting down some groovy looking
WordPress themes I came across
Milo’s site and was pleasantly surprised. Milo is a graphic designer based in Munich, Germany and she has created some 100
WordPress themes that are available for download on her site.
Milo is a master at flash and many of her themes look rather groovy. They are certainly less conventional than most of the free WordPress themes we see on the market and would suit an artist perfectly. While her themes are all available for show, none of the demo links actually seem to work. From what I have seen, there is no other way to demo the themes than to see them on the sample page.
I kept going round and round until eventually I just gave up. Below is a screen shot of the sample page where
all the themes are listed. If you click on it, it will lead you to the same page.
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First of all not everyone knows or understands what Web 2.0 actually means. It is essentially the ability the visitors of many web sites to contribute their own content. Web site technology now makes it easy to create your very own web site, write your own blog, post comments on others blogs and write book reviews among other things. All this content creates a trail of information that you can use to your advantage.
Take Amazon as an example if you have read a book recently and you visit Amazon you can leave a review of the site. By including information about yourself as to why your review should be credible, you are creating a perception of your own credibility. Not only that but your review can appear in search engine results, further improving your digital foot print and online personal brand.
Web 2.0 is important so that you can stand out, and also demonstrate our areas of expertise. We have spoken about “Googling yourself” before, Web 2.0 creates a space for self-promotion (personal brand development) and the ability to research colleagues, peers, partners, suppliers e.t.c.
So Web 2.0 is simply a fancy way of categorising the ability for all of us to contribute to the world wide web. Used in a consistent manner these user based contributions makes the Internet an indispensable tool for ensuring you promote yourself effectively online.
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For some time I’ve been wanting to do a major overhaul of my visual identity online.
So this year I am planning to develop a number of my personal website and business blog sites and try to bring them back to the core of my personal brand.
I would always recommend that you start with looking at the corporate identity of your business and work from there, but since my personal brand is so intertwined with the corporate identity of my business and the fact that most people come to know me through “Biz Growth News”, I made a decision to start with a redesign of this site.
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If you are looking for ways to embed documents into your website or business blog, then you might be interested in the solution offered by Scribd - iPaper.
This tool allows you to take Word, Powerpoint and even PDF’s and upload them to your website - in fact there are a host of formats you can upload
I uploaded as an example the details of the forthcoming Association for Coaching in Ireland Masterclass which I had created in Word to see how easy the tool was to use. Check it out below.
Some of the great things about iPaper is that you can:
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