I’ve really been in a writing funk lately.
Part of this has to do with my notorious tendency to juggle ten too many responsibilities at once, but part of it is that I just haven’t felt positive about my writing lately.
So what do you do when you’re down on yourself? When you feel like you don’t have anything worthwhile left to say?
Alan Johnson lays down some hard truths about non-productivity, in a guest post at Daily Blog Tips. The fact is that some people haven’t found their calling and thus won’t find much productivity in their current work. That also applies to blogging, especially if you’re not working in your dream niche. (Though I should point out that in my experience, freelancers tend to be generalists and thus enjoy NOT focusing on a niche.)
This post triggered a thought I’d had recently, that many new bloggers seem to be relatively fresh out of college and some have never held a job offline post-college. Call me a pessimist, but I think it’s a bad idea not to work offline for at least a while before trying to become a full-time blogger. At least unless you’re absolutely certain you have a gift for entertaining through writing, and/or you’re an experienced entrepreneur, in case blogging doesn’t work out for you.
In a related vein, Daniel Scocco wrote at Daily Blog Tips recently, asking do you really need to go to university if you want to work on the Internet or be an entrepreneur? He listed later in the comments several successful, mostly American entrepreneurs who did not get a college degree. But some of these people came from money and others simply had entrepreneurial minds before entering college. Most at least attended college.
I know Daniel via online communication, and I know him to be very intelligent. Maybe he was that way before he entered university, maybe not. For me, going to university taught me very little that I didn’t already know, and having a degree has been a liability for me during past recessions, before the Internet offered career opportunities. It was hard being told, “You’re overqualified, and you’ll probably run when the recession is over, so I can’t give you a job.”
Nevertheless, despite the fact that I was brought up to be a critical thinker, and despite the fact that I’ve always known what I wanted to do careerwise (all of which I’ve done except one), if I had to do it all over again, I would still go to university/ college. However, most people go to college to “find themselves,” to determine what they’ll do with their lives. The question is, if you believe many top bloggers who say that most bloggers will not succeed (and I believe that), then what can you do and what skills will you need?
This is simply my belief, but I’m inclined to think that most of the online career opportunities will fall into a variety of non-blogging categories, some of which might be technical, all of which will require intelligence or the ability to acquire it. Which might or might not require a college degree. I’m still of the belief that having a degree will serve you well long-term, provided you study a subject that you’re interested in.
What do you think? Should aspiring web workers get college degrees? Should they work offline before going full-time online? Feel free to answer our poll question about how much work and education experience you have.
There are nearly an unlimited amount of reasons why you might not read this, but if you want to know some tips on making your introductions stand out from the rest, then you should take the time to read it. Do I got your attention? Well, good, then let’s jump right on in.
The purpose of the introduction within any article should be to generate interest while informing readers of what you are writing about. It very well might be the single most valuable part to all articles, and because no matter how much effort you put into writing, if it does not grab the reader’s attention, it wasn’t much of a worthwhile attempt. In other words, you wasted your time. Make it habit to focus on creating a killer introduction for all your articles so that doesn’t happen.
Many people might not realize this, but most magazine editors judge an entire article (even before its creation) from one or two paragraphs that introduce the article in question. It is, essentially, the primary selling point for the rest of the writing. Just as is the case with magazine editors, it is also true for the readers. You want to generate interest, but also generate the desire to read more. If your introduction is appealing to a magazine editor, then it is should be appealing to the reader. It is something to think about.
Paint a Picture and Appeal To The Senses
What better way to intrigue someone than by painting a picture for them. Create the situation so that the reader can understand and visualize it in their mind. “The sights of flashing neon lights, the sounds of money falling from slot machines, and the pleasure of experiencing the city of Las Vegas was absolutely phenomenal, and you would be a fool to never experience what I did this past week.” If I was thinking about doing research about visiting Las Vegas, then seeing that would just beg me to read on. It is certainly a lot better than “I really enjoyed my summer vacation at Las Vegas….”
Take It Back
I’ll never forget about America Online, 9/11, and Michael Jackson’s Thriller video. These things are events that most people know about, and if you can appeal to someone’s memories, then it is a great start to a great article. This method of writing seems to be used more within magazines, but I think it can be applied to blogs as well (if done correctly). If your blogging within a certain niche (which should be true in most cases), and your readers are fairly smart, then you could bring up events that are even more relevant. For example, if you are writing about video games, you can’t go wrong with bringing up Mario.
Shockingly, it Works
The purpose of writing something shocking in an introduction might be a cheap way of getting views, but it certainly can get people’s attention. It is pretty much common sense as to how you would approach this. Just make sure to avoid upsetting people with irrelevant introductions.
Statistically Speaking
Hitting your readers with some statistics right off the bat is another great way to generate interest. People love to eat — feed them. Statistics don’t lie (depending on who you talk to) so they can be a great way to reach out to your readers. I am envisioning a blog out there that starts every post with a statistical figure, and I am sure it probably does exist. However, statistics get the point across, and it can generate interest in the rest of your article.
Relating To Your Readers
Last, but certainly not least, you should try to relate to you readers with whatever you are writing. I can relate to all of you reading this, because most of you interested in writing/blogging. However, there are other topics that might require more effort to relate to others. The greatest writers can do this with ease.
This might be the end, but it should be the beginning of writing quality introductions for your content. Got some more tips on writing a killer introduction, be sure to post them in the comments section below. Get involved!
There are only a handful of people on the Internet that I really pay attention to. Aaron Wall is one of those people.
He’s a legend. When it comes to search optimization and marketing, A-Wall might just be the Michael Jordan of SEO. He’s pretty much in a class by himself, and just like Drudge drives the news cycle, I don’t think it’s an understatement to say that Aaron Wall is the leading edge of the SEO industry, setting precedents, methods and standards that the rest of us will use for years to come.
In addition to his legendary status, Aaron Wall also hosts some of the industry’s best free online seo tools and just recently he opened himself up to virtual apprenticeship (who wouldn’t want to study with the master!) through his online training class. If you haven’t visited SEOBook…let’s just say you should. Just like every Wii owner MUST own Mario Galaxy and Smash Brothers, every Internet Professional MUST follow Aaron Wall.
So enough of the gushing;-) This past week I asked Aaron Wall a question that has been pressing on my mind for the last few months. He took the time to give a very insightful and thorough response. The moral of the story for the average blogger stays the same: create quality editorial content that differentiates and “thickens” your site and you’ll most likely survive any major changes to search that occur in the future.
Pease enjoy.
Will the semantic web change search? Yes. Will it have much effect on the average blogger or small time webmaster? Probably not, IMHO. Will it have much effect on larger website? Yes.
The thing about semantic search is that if it is widely adopted, it keeps pushing more value away from end publishers and toward the central information aggregators. This, in turn, kills thin listing styled businesses by sending all of their value to the search engines. Just look at how Google local recently expanded to show 10 local results above the organic search results for local search queries. That expansion occurred AFTER traditional yellow page companies like RHD and IAR lost over 90% of their market value (by stock price) in the last year. So if you are running a thin listing type website make sure you thicken it up with unique editorial content and/or user reviews.
Google mobile recently quietly launched a mobile directory service ( http://www.google.com/m/lcb ). If you are a local business you can try your best to make sure that it is categorized properly in these databases.
Shopping related search queries are about 10% of all search queries. Where I see semantic search eventually heading is some of the larger merchants will plug their inventory into Google and tell Google to sell it at x price and to target ads which guarantee y % profit margin. That is perhaps 5 years down the road though.
So if semantic search keeps driving value to search engines which types of sites will withstand the gravity of such a move? Likely sites that are destinations themselves, which have great editorial content that people subscribe to, and thought leadership positions over important keywords.
Semantic search is all about tags and language. If you know your market well you can profit from the mutation of language and growth of new words. Give trends a meaningful idea worth spreading and when the ideas spread the value of your market position goes up. In addition you can register associated domain names to further cement your position as having some form of ownership over certain keywords.
Some independent entrepreneurs will create vertical search engines based on semantic web information. Most of them will fail, but perhaps a couple of them will win enough marketshare to get bought out by Google or another large web company. The ones that do gain enough marketshare to get bought out will likely have an embeddable feature that many other webmasters use to embed the content into their sites.
cheers
aaron
Why should anyone bother linking to other content on another website? Why send people other places when you could include internal links only? These readers should stay on my site! So, forget about linking out, and as a result, those visitors should stick around longer. Well, not so fast — if that were true, then why would any site have external links?
This all leads up to the question of why should a blogger even bother with linking out to other pages? Well, there are plenty of reasons, and some of you might be shocked to learn that outbound links can actually help your blog to grow in more ways than one. It might take time, but here are a few reasons why linking to other quality content is a great idea.
Communication
Most smaller sites owners would very much appreciate a link to them for the hard work they must do to stand out in the crowd. I made it a habit when I started blogging to check my visitor statistics on a daily basis, and I took note of any larger blogs or news sites that would link to me. However, I noticed that I would acknowledge this with a link back to the referring article. Now, regardless of whether or not I’m just a nice guy or was hoping to get future links from any particular site, at the very least it established some communication.
Appreciation = Backlinks?
If you think about it, this is an excellent way to build links to your blog because if your blog is larger than that of the one you are linking to, the blog owner might be inclined to simply post a link back to the article that was referencing his or her blog. If you use your imagination, you can imagine how many links can be built back to your site simply by linking to another author’s content. Do this long enough, and all those generated backlinks will be valuable in the long run.
Giving Credit and Fact Checking
Remember back in school when you had to include a works cited page for your reports — I generally disliked (okay, honestly, I flat-out hated) creating those, but thankfully, with the development of the internet, we rarely have to deal with those nowadays. A link can act as verification and fact checking for your work — it is all inline. If your writing an opinionated article, you could use links to reference other material that will help you support your argument. Again, it is also a way to allow your readers to check the facts as well.
Sharing Great Content
There just comes a time when a blogger needs to share something amazing he or she has discovered on the web. This happens a lot on the blogosphere as word travels quickly (especially with sites like Digg and Reddit around). Directing your readers to amazing content will give readers the opportunity to see the other author’s hard work, but will also add value to the referring blog. It could generate backlinks, and the readers will likely appreciate the discovery of quality content elsewhere.
Other creative reasons for linking out:
So, as you can see, linking out can be a great way to help out readers, but also a way to help a blog to grow. Keep in mind that links should be beneficial to the readers — if a particular link is not useful, then don’t use it. Far too many links can appear overwhelming or even spammy. Not many people would appreciate that. However, using links correctly is just one more step to becoming a great blogger.
As most of you reading this will know, search engine optimisation, or SEO, is the art of promoting websites in order to achieve high levels of traffic and visibility from ‘organic’ web searches. The ideal outcome of good SEO is to appear as high as possible in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) for key words and phrases.
I am not an expert on SEO. Until two weeks ago I couldn’t have told you the importance of good SERPS (or even what that meant!), how simple SEO changes can make a difference or even who Matt Cuts or Rand Fishkin or Aaron Walls are. I am most definitely not a substitute for top quality SEO training. What I can offer is a fresh pair of eyes and a beginners perspective on SEO and some of the most important things to take away in the early days when faced with massive treasure trove of information that is available.
There are three principles that are central to most SEO texts I have read:
A top notch collection of SEO tools to help you practice these core principles are available at SEOBook.
If you’re as new to this as I am, talk about ‘white hat’ and ‘black hat’ SEO can be confusing. Just like in a classic Western flick, white hats are the good guys and black hats are the bad guys. If it seems very Spy vs Spy well, that is because it sort of is when you think about it.
White hats tend to follow the guidelines of a search engine and try and stay within the rules. The aim here is to have quality content for users as a base and then work out the best way to make the site attractive and accessible to spiders and other search engine crawling mechanisms. The aim of the game here is to build authority. White hat is the long term view with the long term payoff.
Black hat activity is all about circumventing the rules, often for short term gain. Short term gain is the key here as black hats have to keep one step ahead of the game as the search engines keep changing the rules and tweaking their algorithms to shut them out. Some black hat techniques include using hidden text (for example tiny fonts or text the same colour as background) and ‘cloaking’, or making a web page look totally different depending on whether it is being looked at by a spider or a normal web surfer.
There is an excellent conversation between a black hat SEO and a white hat SEO at SEOmoz that should provide you with a good overview of the different philosophies.
My short summary above covers only a small part of the SEO industry but is a good place to start for the complete SEO newbie like myself. In the future, I will look at some basic design and optimisation issues that can make a substantial change in your blogging philosophy while remaining simple enough that even I can implement them without too much hassle.
With Adsense lowering payouts and Adwords upping their strictness, and more and more advertisers moving to a CPL model, everyone who bought into the content site dream are now feeling the squeeze. If you’re in that boat as I see it you have three options:
If (C) looks like the best choice to you, one of the best alternatives is turning to affiliate sites as a hedge. For anyone who has navigated the worlds of online education, dating, insurance, debt consolidation, and other affiliate verticals, you’ll know that probably the most accessible and established vertical in true affiliate marketing is credit card leads.
Setting these sites up is relatively simple and straightforward, but there are a few information hurdles you’ll need to get through to be able to do so. So if you’re planning on entering the affiliate space, you should definitely read:
The Credit Card Affiliate Site Setup Toolbox: 70 Essential Tools
The article walks you through the various available affiliate programs as well as as how to setup a site running them. I can say from personal experience that actually getting these affiliate program people on the phone and getting yourself integrated into their programs is easier said than done. CardOffers in particular is very hard to get a hold of. But this article will at least give you the lay of the land, and you’ll know enough to set up the sort of basic credit card reviews sites like the one this article is produced on. In addition, here are a few more regular reads for those who want to educate themselves on entering the affiliate world: