3 Unexpected Ways to Find Blogging Inspiration

Listen, it happens to the best of us: you just don’t feel inspired to blog today.

Maybe you’re tired, maybe you’re bored. Maybe you’re just feeling like you’ve got nothing to say this time.

Not a problem! Try one of these simple but unusual ways to get your idea machine running again, and you’ll soon have more fresh blogging ideas than you need.

1. Get Big Ideas from Very Small Things

Literally or in your imagination, take a look at how things work on a very small scale. This is more fun with a real microscope, but you can also use documentaries, YouTube videos or photo collections for microscopic inspiration.

When you see the world on a tiny scale, your viewpoint changes and you begin to get a feel for the tiny events and issues that affect the smallest things. Because small things can be the cause of much larger events, what you’re looking at through a microscope lens represents the underlying workings of the larger whole.

Now take this perspective and apply it to your blogging. Choose a topic, if one hasn’t already popped into your head during your microscope adventures, and drill down into it until you see the building blocks and processes that make it what it is. All you have to do is convey that small-scale insight to your reader so that they can understand it without breaking out the science equipment!

2. Use Opposites to Attract Inspiration

It’s a weird thing about the human mind: thinking of something often makes us think of its opposite, too. You don’t know what light is unless you compare it to dark.

Use this phenomenon to draw new insight and inspiration out of any topic you choose:

First, what’s your blog or post topic? Next, what ridiculously opposite or different things can you think of to that topic?

This isn’t always easy, so let’s run through some examples:

• My blog/post is about hair and beauty, so mud wrestling is different or opposite
• My blog/post is about business software, so circus clowns are different or opposite
• My blog/post is about outdoor sports, so channel surfing is different or opposite

All you have to do is write out some potential headlines that use one of those opposites to attract your attention, interest and inspiration, like:

• How Mud Wrestlers Scrub Up for Red Carpet Glamour
• Warning: Your Business Software is Being Coded by Clowns
• Why Channel Surfing Makes Your Outdoor Activities More Fun

From that point on, those posts will pretty much write themselves! That’s the power of a good opposite – it provides surprise and curiosity for you as well as for the reader, and gives your thoughts something to latch on to.

Steal From Your Readers

Let’s call it borrowing instead, shall we? The point is, your readers give you feedback all the time with their comments, emails, tweets and so on. Take a look through the comments on your most recent and most popular posts – you’ll discover a goldmine of new questions to answer, fresh angles to approach, and opportunities to be inspired by your readers’ personal stories.

Inspiration isn’t something that comes and goes. It’s all around you all the time, like the air we breathe.

All you have to do is open up to unexpected sources, and let a nice refreshing breeze of inspiration into your blog.

You’ll be surprised how easily it flows!

How to Use Blog Traffic?

So you have a good blog, responsive design andgetting steady traffic, the question is –

“What are you going to do with all that traffic?”

Sounds stupid? Not at all.

Much of the information found on the blogosphere is centered around how to get traffic and not its other facet, how to use blog traffic.

5 Ways to Use Blog Traffic

Here are my recommendations on using blog traffic.

• Build an Email List

If you are into long term blogging strategy, building an email list will be high on your agenda because you would want to use the email list for blog monetization. Personally, I recommend using a subscription form below the post or the sidebar but never as pop-ups.

• Sell Product

You can direct the incoming traffic towards a landing page or change your homepage to a landing page. Either way, if you have heavy traffic knowing what the readers expect from your blog and can weave a product around the same, you will see a lot of conversions, engagement and $$$.

• Collect Leads

You can also use blog traffic to collect leads for product pre-launch. For instance, if you are planning to sell a product for $3.99, you can create a special page where those who will sign up will get the same product at a reduced price of $2.99. If you want to use this list of collected leads for future product launches, make sure it’s mentioned in your blog’s privacy policy and disclaimer.

• Offer Coupons

If you are into affiliate marketing and have some awesome coupons to share with blog readers, it will give positive results. Create separate page to redeem coupons or disclose the coupon on the sidebar linked with your affiliate link. Those who will click on that sidebar and purchase will make you money. Of course, ensure that the product is relevant.

• Get Advertisers

If nothing else, you would definitely want advertisers to use your blog for sponsored posts, banner advertisement, paid reviews and others. You can use blog traffic data to convince advertisers for placing ads on your blog. Advertisers always look into blogs stats like traffic, geo-stats, Alexa rank, Page Rank, outbound links and blog quality before advertising.

• Use AdSense

Lastly, you can insert AdSense ads and when any visitor click on it, you earn money. Its one of the oldest ways to use blog traffic and make money online.

How do you use your blog traffic? Do share.

I’m Afraid To Quit My Day Job For Blogging (Here’s why You Need to Quit)

Do you want to become an internet entrepreneur?

Are you tired of your boss at work?

Do you desire to quit your 9-5 day job and start a blogging business? If you answered ‘‘NO’‘ to the above questions, then I’ll give you 8 vital reasons why you need to quit your job and start blogging.

1. You can work while on bed or in your Pajamas

Think about this: Won’t you love to work while on bed rather than wake up by 5am rushing to the office?

I’m not saying this to convince you into quitting your job but because, I want you to live a stress-free life and at the same time, earn more money.

Pro tip: You could use your bedroom as your office so you’d be able to work more productively.

2. You can choose your own working hours

In your company or place of work, your boss determines your working hours and you dare not go home without the authorization of your boss. But in a blogging business, no one has control over your time and you’re at your own free will to work anytime or anywhere you want!

3. You could triple your paycheck and promote yourself three times in a month!

The highest amount you’ll ever get if you’re promoted in your place of work is a 10% increase in salary. And even if you were promoted, you have to wait for another 1 to 2 years to get another promotion but as a blogger, you can triple your paycheck four times a month! You determine your pay!

Pro tip: You can’t control or determine your pay as an employee– but you can control the amount you make with a blog. Though blogging is profitable but it really takes a lot of hard work to makeBIG FIGURES…

It’s advisable to quit your job when your blog is earning two times of what your job pays you.

4. No experience or qualification required

You don’t need a Masters or PHD to start a blogging business. In fact, you don’t even need an high school certificate. All you need is hardwork, the willingness to learn, and the determination to succeed.

That’s what will single you out from the crowd!

5. You’re not on any work pressure

If you work a 9 to 5 day job, you have to follow the instructions of your boss, accomplish the task you’re assigned to do and also meet deadlines but with blogging, you’re not under pressure. You can work anytime you want to and you can even decide to go two days off work.  That’s the beauty of being a blogger!

6. You Determine Your Pay

In a 9 to 5 day job, your firm determines your salary but yourblogging salary depends on how much effort you put in. There’s no limit to what you can earn with blogging. You can earn $3,000 today and $30,000 dollars tomorrow.

7. Go For Vacations Anyday, Anywhere, Anytime…

If you work 9 to 5, you can’t plan your vacation anytime. You have to get approval from your boss but with blogging, you can decide to go on vacation anytime. In fact, you can even go on a 6 months vacation!

8. A secured Financial Future

If you’re planning to secure your future financial with your 9 to 5 day job then you’re joking with your life. A 9 to 5 day job can never give you financial freedom even if you work for decades…

Whereas, on the other hand, you can make more money for the rest of your life by blogging.

All you need is hardwork and persistence.

Are you ready to quit your job and start a blogging business?

The above question is meant for you to answer.

Save your future by starting an online business.

P.S.  kindly share this post with your friends and let me know what you think in the comments section.

3 Simple and Easy Ways to Use Social Media to Promote Your Blog

Social media has opened a lot of possibilities for bloggers to reach out to readers and forge relationships that are going to result to a loyal following and even lead to more profits.

Today, it’s important to know how to use social media to promote your blog. With the amount of competition out there, you’re not going to matter if you’re not active in social media. Without an online presence, which social media can do really well, no one’s going to know about your blog.

The interesting thing is although all of us have used at least one social network, not everyone knows how to use social media the right way.

And that’s what can make your blog fail.

You may feel you have the best posts but it’s not enough to make it viral. There may be a few people who’ll stumble upon your blog and like what they read, but that’s not going to drive tons of traffic.

You need something that will allow you to connect to millions of readers quickly and effortlessly. That’s social media.

Here are 3 simple and easy ways on how to use social media to promote your blog:

Make sure that your blog displays social media icons prominently

Make it easier for readers to like, share, and tweet your posts. Put the social media icons in a place where people are going to see them quickly. You can put them at the top of the page, right below the post, and on the side bar.

Why do you need to do this? Social media is the second biggest source of traffic. It’s also going to help you grow a loyal fan base.

Here are some great plugins that you can use:

• Sociable
• Sharebar
• Shareaholic
• Social Toolbar
• Slick Social Share Buttons
• Getsocial
• Insitebar
• Social Pop

Create a Facebook fan page

Generating exposure is one of the best benefits of having a Facebook presence. Today, companies invest resources to ensure they’re visible in Facebook so they can reach out to their target audience.

Blogs can tap into Facebook’s immense power by creating a fan page. A fan page will establish a stronger brand, increase traffic, and provide an effective avenue for communication with readers.

Facebook fan pages can improve your blog’s performance simply because there are millions of users who log in each day. Plus, the fact that there are already more than a million fan pages just shows how effective this can be.

However, simply creating a fan page is not enough. Make sure that you optimize it well. Here are some tips on how you can do that:

• Create relevant and engaging content
• Make sure to post regularly
• Engage your audience by posting questions, responding to comments promptly, running contests or polls, and giving away free stuff

Interlink your most active social media profiles

This is a smart way to promote your blog because every time you post something new, it automatically gets published in your Facebook page, Twitter, and even LinkedIn accounts.

You can easily interlink your accountsin these websites.

But you have to be cautious because not everything you post, like in Twitter, would be something your LinkedIn contacts would find relevant. And you surely don’t want to turn off some potential clients or employers because they saw something that they didn’t like in your profile.

What you can do is use the hashtag #in for tweets that you’d like to get published on your LinkedIn account.

These simple and easy ways should better help you use social media to promote your blog.

A Compendious Navigation To The Google Disavow Links Tool

After the Google’s Penguin update, have your web site got affected? Is this attributable to the spammy links that you have on your website, which you are not able to take off? If yes, then you need not to worry any more, because Google has made it attainable to dig out those spammy links that are affecting the reputation of your site, with the help of their “Disavow Links Tool“. This great tool has been launched by the Google’s web spam team Matt Cutts in October 2012.

In order to fight against various link spammers, Google is constantly updating its algorithms. As many of us have noticed that after the Penguin update, countless websites have been caught up in link spam, and several webmasters have received the messages in Webmaster Tools regarding “unnatural links” pointing to their site. This tool is especially created for those who were encountered by the Penguin Update as a result of purchased or spamming links. Before using this tool, one should be clear about a few things such as:

Who all required to Disavow links?

Those who have suffered from the unethical SEO back linking tricks can use this disavow tool to clean up spammy back links. Especially the folks, who have purchased links by violating the Google’s policies and can be suffered a penalty if links not get removed, need this tool. Moreover, the people who have gained the links from participating in bad link networks may require this to disavow.

How Google designed its endemic Disavow Links Tool?

Google’s disavow links tool is created with an aim to clean up and improve the link profile of a particular website. As soon as, Google started considering the bad links, a kind of a negative vote, it introduced this tool. This is created in order to prevent the spammers from being able to harm your ranking.

How to determine if you are having spammy links to your website’s link profile?

There are mainly two methods using which you’ll be able to determine the spammy links to your site:

1. Download Your Link Profile in Google Webmaster Tools
2. Make use of SEOMoz’s Open Site Explorer to download your link profile.

No matter, whatever method you are choosing from the above methods, the result that you’ll get after reviewing your downloaded CSV link profile will make you able to identify the spammy links if any. After receiving the result, you can start contacting those websites directly and try to make them take down the link. Because, even after using the Google’s disavow link tool, the actual link will still be there on your website and can be clickable by the users.

Proper System to yield for enduring links to the Disavow Links Tool:

The process is quite simple:

1. Develop a “.txt”, document that you will be acknowledging to the tool
2. Copy the spammy links from your exported CSV file that you couldn’t get extirpate
3. Paste them inside your “.txt”, file, one link for each line. You can avail distinguished language to disavow links from whole domains a lot like you do with the “robot. txt”, file
4. Once you have a saved “.txt”, file, check again all the links in this file that you want to clear
5. Go to the Google disavow link page and select the site you’d like to disavow links from
6. Flip through Google’s small cautionary message and click “Disavow Links”
7. Choose the “.txt”, file of the links you’d like to remove and upload.

In this way, you can choose to opt for using this tool. If you like to make some changes in the submitted links, you can do so as Google keeps the “.txt”, file available for download. You can download the file, add another link to ignore and then re-upload the “.txt”, file for Google to process.

Some important deliberations to comprehend formerly using this tool:

Before opting for this tool and submitting the links, there are some important things to be kept in mind such as:

a) It should be used only when you are engaged in SEO efforts and have spammy link profiles that you need to clean up.

b) This tool should be used as a last option when you are not able to clean these links manually.

c) Be very cautious while using this tool, first have a careful research of all the spammy links.

How does this tool operate?

If you are bothered that due to some backlinks, the reputation of your site may get affected, you can go for the disavow links tool. You can submit those links to this tool. It will be like an indication to the Google that these links should not be considered while ranking a site. Using this tool is very simple, you just have to be logged in your Google Webmaster Tools. Now, you can enter the particular URL that you want to disavow in the disavow links page. After entering the URL, you are required to upload the particular pages or whole web site for which you would like to disavow links. It is advisable to the average users who haven’t used or been hit by the aggressive SEO tactics, shouldn’t use this tool.

How much competent this Disavow Links Tool is?

Although, submitting links to disavow links page is considered as a strong suggestion by the Google to ignore these links, but it doesn’t give a guarantee that these links will be ignored fully. Therefore, there is a need to pay a great attention while using this tool as your one wrong step can have, devastating consequences on your Google page rank. This is because, you may by mistake disavow links that were working in favor of your website and by disavowing them, you could end up lowering your ranking.

Why it is worth to employ Disavow Links Tool?

It is better to try to remove bad links manually, if your site has not been penalized yet by the Google. Furthermore, if the ranking of your site has already suffered from the bad links, Disavowing these links could be a good option. It may take some time to see the significant changes in your ranking after using this tool, but after re-crawling and re-indexing all the pages, Google will surely let you notice the boost in the ranking of your site.

Motivation: One of the key ingredients for content writers

The other day, a friend’s girlfriend asked me what I did for a living and when I told her, she said:

“That sounds great. It must be so much easier working from home.”

And that set off a carefully measured response—one of those almost political diatribes about how it was great to be your own boss, but at the same time how there were a whole new set of parameters that you couldn’t see coming unless you’ve worked in cyberspace for any length of time. I’m sure I wound up babbling and looking like some kind of geeky whiner, so it’s better if I write it all down and tell her to read this column.

Scheduling is the first one that might get overlooked when someone is looking from the outside in at working on the Internet, and there’s a whole new level you need to juggle. I’ve got a BlackBerry with a great calendar, three different sized dry erase boards with six different colors of suitable markers and, just because I get nostalgic for paper and pens every once in awhile, a Day Planner. All because I’m afraid I’ll miss something and (more to the point) because I will if I don’t write it down in at least three places.

It would have been hard to explain to my friend’s better half that I filter all my working days through that little black box called a laptop and I’m quite often dealing with requests—and yes even demands—from far reaching parts of the globe. It’s all sort of like trying to strain lake water through a garden hose some days and equally hard to explain.

Motivation needs to be realigned too. Used to be I needed to allot my time for getting ready for work, getting to work and then working until the corresponding breaks and lunches rolled around. Weekends, of course, were the end goal. With my online business, I think about what I need to do twenty-four seven and have worked every day for the last five years. At first, those hours were to get the business up and running, but now they’re needed to keep the wheels spinning.

To answer that well meaning girl’s question, it is easier to work from home in some ways and much more demanding in others. There’s no cutting corners when you start your own business just because the orders and clients are coming from inside that little black box on your desk in your home office, but there’s no other feeling like being your own boss either.

How to Get 23,752 New Blog Visitors with Just 1 Click!

How many times have you seen the headlines, blog posts and spam emails that you can purchase software or some magical program that will allow you to pay $79 and “click one button” and magically have thousands of people flooding to your site and making you money while you sleep?

Every day no doubt!

Unfortunately these are all lies and nothing is that easy… the only thing easy about it is how many people are scammed into paying for the programs that promote these garbage offers.

Here’s how simple it really is to start a blog.

1. Select a domain name
2. Create a hosting account
3. Install WordPress

Yes my friends… that’s as close as you are going to get to having a magic button and full proof system… there is nothing else you can do to make the process more simple.

However, just having a blog isn’t going to do anything magical for you!

The real work and success behind every well known and authority blog is the massive hours of content creation, link building, networking, branding and monetization that really goes into a site.

That’s the exact process that I am teaching through my completelyfree blog case study.

The only people who are ever going to benefit from “push button” for results technology is the people who are selling it.

Expect nothing from these software…

There are exceptions however…

There are many programs out there than can help you with the process of researching keywords and content to write about on your site… but again, you need to put the work in.

More than anything else… this is just a simple reminder that NOTHING IS EASY and there is NO PUSH BUTTON SOLUTION out there.

Grow a blog from the ground up, know what you are writing about and creation quality content that people find value in.

Don’t forget to follow my case study as I lay out all of these exact processes for you.