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If You’re Stuck for Blogging Ideas, Write the (Killer) Headline first

When faced with blogger’s block, the only way to beat it is to buckle down, force yourself to write and push through the rough patches (actions produce motivation). However when you run out of ideas (or if your ideas aren’t clear enough), then here’s an effective technique to focus your mind and let your blog post write itself.

Simply put, craft your killer headline first. Simply writing any ordinary headline won’t cut it – you need to dig deep, hit the headline swipe files and spend time creating a gem of a headline.

How this helps bloggers:

  • Forces you to focus on the main idea behind your post, which in turn helps the internal monologue run clearer.

  • Guides you towards the type of post you can / should write. If the headline is designed to create a discussion, then you can write a conversational post. On the other hand, a list headline can help you focus on creating a list and perhaps fleshing it out to create cool linkbait.

  • Allows you to get off a good start – a great headline with an average article will do better than a great article with an average headline in terms of social media. You might think it’s unfair but that’s how our minds work especially in an attention-starved economy. The headline is king, and everything else leads from there.

  • If you find the basic idea not interesting enough, you’ll be able to stop there and not waste time writing a long post only to find out later that it doesn’t get a good response from readers.

  • You may end up with several headlines, leading to several concrete post ideas instead of a jumbled up bunch in your head.

The next time you’re stuck for ideas, try this approach – write the headline first, and shape the article accordingly. If it works for sales copywriting (where success is measured in hard numbers), it works for blogging as well.

Further reading:

101 Great Posting Ideas That Will Make Your Blog Sizzle
Posting Tactics for a Well Rounded Blog
10 Killer Post Ideas

How Social Networks Teach Good SEO

When most people think about ‘SEO’, they think of link requests. While that is a basic part of SEO, it’s also insulting to the practice of search marketing. IN comparison, it’s a bit like saying that mathematics is about adding and subtracting numbers, or that playing the guitar is all about strumming a few strings.

Such views give an incomplete picture and oversimplify the subject to a point where it becomes open to ridicule. For me, SEO (or search marketing) has always been about figuring out what the search engines will want tomorrow, what their endgame, their main goals are and how they plan to rank websites in the future. As the algorithms evolve, my aim is to have my sites rank higher automatically through smart SEO and working on those factors that will be valued more and more in the future.

So what are the search engines aiming for? Beyond the strict academic citation model, an easier way to understand search engines is to study real-world social networks.

A social network at its most basic level is a collection of people you know and are in contact with. You share ideas and information, give and receive recommendations from your friends, and you can let your network stagnate or choose to grow it by meeting new people.

One of the most important ways of finding new information and meeting new people is through recommendations provided by people already in your network. Also known as ‘word of mouth’ marketing, this process works on the basis of unbiased recommendations from known (i.e. trusted) sources.

The sharing of ideas and information withing social networks (i.e. recommendations) functions on the basis of trust – you either trust the recommendations given to you by your friends and family or you don’t. The criteria for trusting these recommendations comes from those two metrics: whether the recommendation is unbiased (that is, no ulterior motive involved) and whether the recommendation is from a known source (so you can evaluate if that source’s judgment can be trusted or not).

If a recommendation is biased, it loses value (but isn’t completely worthless). if a recommendation is from an unknown source (you don’t have to personally know the source, you just need to know / have previous experience with that source and their recommendations), you can’t trust their judgment (but maybe their argument is very compelling).

So how do you raise your search engine rankings?

The most valuable recommendations are those that are unbiased, compelling and come from highly trusted sources (that is, sources known to be trustworthy from past experience). With the right quality and quantity of recommendations, any service or product can beat its competition (provided the user experience matches the hype).

Replace ‘recommendations’ with ‘links’ and you have your answer.

The Single Biggest Challenge To Building Equity On the Web

My strategy for making money on the web has been to pursue long-term equity in several money-niches. What exactly is long term equity? It’s the value that a thing acquires over periods of time and it is typically associated with the amount of profit that the thing is able to produce.

While many people make plenty of money flipping blogs, or pursuing short-term high-value income in short-life niches (the hottest tv show), my preference is to avoid the roller-coaster ride and massive startup effort, and instead own web properties that will make more and more money each year.

Having been successful in building some strong income-producing equity fairly quickly, I do have a few lessons I’ve learned that I’d like to share with the Performancing community.

The human brain often takes the current moment or “state of affairs” and projects it onto the future. The naive assumption, that everyone is naturally prone to make because of human biology and the brain, is that what works today will work tomorrow.

By and large, most things stay the same. Human beings love to communicate with each other. That will probably never change. However, what has changed is the medium of communication. So a company that bets on “communication” as their business offering will be much more successful then the company that bets on the analog phone.

Well, I should qualify that last statement. Let’s take a look at Verizon Communications. The two companies that merged to become Verizon became billion dollar companies because of dominating the local and long distance phone service in huge markets.

From what I understand, both companies had the foresight and the capital to adapt to new communication technologies (not easily or painlessly though). Even today, Verizon is slowly unleashing a wide-scale Fiber Optic network that’s been on the back-burner for over 20 years. The point isn’t the delay, but that a massively successful, multi-billion dollar company has been forced to confront change and not sit on their ass while the world passed them by.

The fact of the matter is that Verizon, and it’s ancestors, were forced to put a whole lot of money and a whole lot of work into adapting to change: a changing communications market.

The long-term equity investor normally desires to identify and stick with “what works” over the long haul. But a long-term thinker like myself can be blinded by the naive operating assumption that what works today will work tomorrow.

The world is not a static place. It is constantly changing. Especially on the Internet. Long-term equity investors like myself need to take change seriously. So how do you take change seriously? By thinking about it and preparing for it.

  1. Predictive Intelligence: Manage change by focusing on forms of content and content delivery that are not likely to be short term fads
  2. Contingency Planning: Be intentional about the future and the fact that change will happen. Develop strategies for adapting to both minor and major changes both in product demand and delivery infrastructure
  3. Experimentation: Dabble in, but don’t get overwhelmed by, new ideas and approaches. Dedicate a subset of your resources towards “experimenting with the future”
  4. Diversification: As you experiment, pick out the things that work and consider expanding upon them. In doing so, make sure to diversify in product offering, revenue sources and delivery method

I still believe that a long-term approach towards acquiring Internet equity is the best, most consistent way to gain wealth on the net. But I also admit that I was a bit naive when I first started and assumed that as soon as I identified something that worked, I could simply dig and allow it to keep working. That was a mistake.

EatonWeb Blogger Wanted

The EatonWeb Blog Directory is looking for a part-time blogger who knows a thing or two about SEO and blog submission.

The blogger will be responsible for regular updates at the EatonWeb Blog: http://portal.eatonweb.com/ewblog/

The position will pay $100 per month for any of the following services:

A) Four 800 word columns
B) Two 800 word columns and four 400 word columns
C) Eight 400 word columns

This is a great opportunity for anyone looking to establish a strong, notable voice in the SEO space.

To apply, either PM me or send me an email to [email protected]

Does Persistence Always Pay? What to do when a virtual economy is on the verge of collapse

In case you haven’t noticed, the latest Toolbar PR rollout has been abnormal and slow. In the grand scheme of things, Toolbar PR is close to meaningless (Argument From Absurdity: it tells us that Performancing is more important than the DrudgeReport).

Yet as things go, hundreds of thousands of bloggers and website owners are attached to the hip of this stale, useless tool. Why?

Simplistically, the story goes like this.

Google literally came out of nowhere (a garage) to dominate the search space. The reason? They filtered search results not just by on-page text but by off-site “voting” in the form of links.

PageRank is the term that Google invented to describe their “importance” metric. While their filtering systems have changed dramatically since their emergence into search dominance, PageRank is a simple icon of Google’s successful formula.

Despite the fact that Toolbar PageRank is often 3-9 months stale, and despite the fact that Google now intelligently buffers the importance of raw links based on a number of smart factors, Toolbar PageRank is still the king of the hill…the center of gravity for thousands of web publishers and seo artists.

Because of this, a massive virtual economy has built up around PageRank in the last half-decade. Some web publishers make upwards of 5 (and for all I know, even six) figures per month simply by selling this awkwardly valuable commodity.

Rightly so, Google sees the buying and selling of PageRank as a negative manipulation of their once innocent metric. In reaction, Google has implemented a number of temporal buffers to deter the text link ad market. So far, they have not been successful.

But as rumors build that Google is either completely dropping or radically altering the way they tabulate, update and display PageRank, lots of people are scrambling to adjust their web publishing business models. Whether its site consolidation, ad diversification, or complex SEO subtleties like anchor text variation, deep-linking or post-level link buying, it is clear that Google has succeeded in stirring a whole slew of people from their slumber. And that should be expected. We are, after all, talking about people’s livelihoods.

Having set the stage, I now want to address the two issues I raise in the title of this article.

1. Does persistence always pay off?
2. Preparing for the busting of a fairly silly virtual economy built around a meaningless metric

The answer to these questions isn’t as simple as yes and no. After all, persistence does not pay off if you’re trying to dig a tunnel from California to China. But what about persistence in web publishing and monetization? Does persistence always pay in this domain? Yes and no. Yes if you’re open to adaptation and strategical re-evaluation. Yes if you focus on the fundamentals and forget the fads. Yes, if you focus on building long-term equity. In other words, persistence pays if you’re smart and you know what you are doing.

But persistence does not pay over the long haul if your long-term plan is not fundamentally sound. If you build your entire web publishing business around a lot of ephemeral PageRank, you are doomed. That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t pay attention to PageRank. You should, but only as one among many indicators of a site’s quality. The point is that instead of PageRank, you should be looking to build Authority. And Authority is built by becoming part of strong, quality niche neighborhoods. This is a fundamental fact about SEO and linkbuilding that will never change. Even if the TLA market collapses.

This brings me towards an answer to the second issue. How do you prepare yourself for the collapse of an economy that’s not built on strong fundamentals? Well, the answer is to start focusing on fundamentals. Quality. Branding. Niche Marketing. Niche Networking. Web publishers who focus on these 4 fundamentals will be building a solid foundation for the future. Those who continue to go down the PR only route, might be successful in the short-term, but are destined for longer term failure…

…Unless…

Here’s a tip for those of you, like me, who enjoy a nice chunky TLA check each month. Take the money you make from TLA each month, and instead of padding the personal bank account, or perpetuating your addiction to PageRank by buying more links, start focusing on the four fundamentals: quality, branding, marketing and networking which all work together to build long-term equity and an attractive target for diverse advertising sources.

PR6 WordPress Theme release site for sale

Ryan’s Note: Just a reminder that we have some top notch blogs pass through our blogs for sale section. Keep your eyes peeled.

I am looking to sell a WordPress theme release site. Back in March, Cory Miller and I started RockinThemes.com as a hub to release free WordPress themes that he and I had developed.

Here are the details of the blog…

– PageRank of 6
– Technorati rank of 111 (this blog could easily crack the top 100 with new theme releases)
– 134 subscribers from feedburner (currently)
– Thousands of backlinks
– 10,000+ unique monthly visitors
– 50,000+ monthly pageviews

Google Rankings
#4 for “free wordpress themes”
#2 for “custom wordpress theme”
#5 for “custom wordpress themes”
#1 for “suckerfish wordpress theme”
#2 for “web 2.0 wordpress theme”

The main source of revenue for this site is the custom WordPress theme requests that come in. This site has consistently earned me $5000 per month in custom requests. However, the site has never been properly monetized. It could also earn hundreds passively if it were monetized well based on the number of unique visitors coming from google.

This is one of the most well known WordPress theme release sites in the community. You’re getting both traffic, and reputation with this purchase.

This purchase would include the domain, the blog database export, and the design. The themes are not included in this sale, however an agreement may be negotiated for the inclusion of individual themes after the sale. If you purchase the themes, we are willing to update all the themes and fix any bugs. We will also stay on for 1 month to handle comment support for the themes (no custom work). We would also be willing to develop themes for release on RockinThemes to generate new traffic (new themes help boost the custom requests). If the new owner wanted to have us release new themes, we would negotiate a price per theme after the sale.

Bidding starts at $5,000. Public bids are preferable. Private bids will be made public (number only) for the sake of the auction process. There is a private reserve price that must be met in order for the sale to take place.

Tell Your Readers To Vote.

Unless your crowd is a bunch of social media hounds, putting those little social media icons at the bottom of your posts doesn’t achieve much of anything (accept maybe some PageRank leakage).

Want to run successful social media campaigns that involve your readers? Then tell them to vote. Again and again and again. You should even have a “Voting FAQ” that explains how your readers can get involved. Spell it out. Give them a cause to fight for. Make it simple. And soon you just might have a social media army.

In fact, the same goes for almost any action that you want your readers to perform. You’re looking for subscribers? Then don’t just put up a little orange icon. Give your readers instructions such as “Subscribe to this blog” – maybe even have an entire page dedicated to explaining exactly what subscribing is. You’ll get more subscriptions when you give instructions.

The same goes for affiliate sales. Tell them over and over and over how good hosting company X is, and some of them will listen to your advice.

The same goes for donations. Ask them to buy you a beer, or your favorite Starbucks drink… in every post … and you’ll get some.

But if you’re like me, you’ll probably just slap up some icons, but a banner in the sidebar, and pray to the God of Automation.

Unfortunately for me, the God of Automation doesn’t answer very many prayers these days.