Blogger Profit

Posts Tagged ‘Inspiration’

1. Be Creative! The best part about blogging is that it’s completely you! You can express yourself, your ideas, and your opinions. But not just that, everything on your blog represents you. Get to know the tools, widgets, and options you have to change the layout, color, background, text. Make your blog undeniably you!

2. Change it up! Not only can you find a perfect layout, you can change your appearance and themes as often as you like! Go with the seasons! Go with your mood! Add and change up your pictures, music, and other elements to keep things upbeat and interesting.

3. Try multiple blogs. You don’t have to stick to one blog. Say you have a blog that all your friends and family know about, and there’s certain things you can’t say or write about because of who might read it. Or say you started this blog with a certain theme or tone, so you can’t write about other things because it doesn’t fit the blog. Well, why not have two? You can even use a pen name and be completely anonymous on the second blog. You could have a deep, intellectual blog and a bright, entertaining blog. You could have a dark, moody blog and a witty, professional blog. Who says you can only express one side of yourself?

4. Blog on the side. Perhaps you’re not a big blogger and, although you enjoy an occasional post, you don’t have the time or energy to update very often. Try a social network instead of a blog network. Most social networks, like Facebook and MySpace, have the opportunity for blogging, but there’s other things to do as well. From games to simple status updates to messaging friends, you can maintain an account without having to constantly write blog posts. Yet, you’ll still get a chance to write a post where your friends can see it whenever you want!

5. Look around! You can always get ideas from other seasoned bloggers. You can get inspiration on what to write about, how to design your blog page, and even ask questions from seasoned bloggers all over the Internet. Check out Technorati.com or perform a Google Blog search to find all kinds of blogs on the Internet.

6. Stay safe! Keep in mind that your posts are completely open to the public. You should be careful how much identity information you post on your site. Even if you put in small bits of information here and there, all someone would have to do is read all your entries to piece together quite a lot of information about you! You are certainly free to use a pen name and fictional names that would give away your location, school or work name to avoid sharing too much personal information. In many cases, this would probably be recommended.

7. Join the community! There are many bloggers like you out there who have some interesting stories and posts you might be interested in! From the home page of your blog host provider, you can often search for blog with similar topics or interests. You can read and comment on other people’s posts and subscribe to their sites to get updates when they post again. The more you connect with others, the more they will connect with you, read your posts, and subscribe to you!

It’s well known that the search engines are suckers for fresh content. Sites that are updated regularly fare better than those that remain static over long periods of time. This has always posed a problem for us store owners, because simply adding a few new products each month just isn’t going to suffice in competitive markets. Nor is shuffling the featured products around on our home pages every now and again!

Thankfully blogging goes a long way toward solving this dilemma. Get into the habit of making frequent, regular posts to a blog and sites soon take on that fresh, organic quality the search engines love.

Of course, as well as helping rankings, blogs are also great way of interacting with clients. Sharing views and news with visitors and allowing them to comment on posts creates a sense of community around a store. This does wonders for conversion rates.

So blogs and ecommerce are a healthy combination – but what about the writing itself? It’s vital that a blog is kept ticking over but posting fresh material every few days can soon become taxing! So here a few tips and ideas for when you run out of inspiration.

1.Product news.

The arrival of new product lines should always be announced on your blog. If nothing else it provides an ideal opportunity to get keywords into action, so use them in the titles of your posts as well as the body. Similarly you can also use your blog to inform customers when a particular item is back in stock.

2.Additional product reviews

Not everyone likes long copy and you may prefer to keep your actual store’s product descriptions short and to the point. But your blog provides an ideal opportunity to pull out all the stops for the more obsessive customer. Add extra photos, tell anecdotes – use all that extra space to your advantage. With a little care and attention you can nail plenty of keyword variations.

3.Apologies

Whenever there’s a problem with your store or something goes wrong, address in it your blog. Say sorry if necessary. Customers will appreciate your honesty!

4.The future

Good websites are always a work in progress and you should keep your customers informed of any changes on the horizon. So if you are planning on offering another payment method in a few months, talk about it. Say why you’re doing it and when it will happen.

5.We’re great!

Create a a blog category exclusively for your customer testimonials. Then whenever you receive a complimentary email, ask the customer if you can post it. You should be able to collect a nice backlog of such comments for days when you don’t have any news. Then you can just post a testimonial to keep the spiders happy! Of course, this tactic also serves a double purpose in that you’ll soon have a fully functioning testimonial page which you can link to from the main site.

6.Sales and promotions.

Offering any discounts this week? Don’t just tell your newsletter subscribers, post it.

7.Happy holidays!

There are countless different festivals, holy days and holidays celebrated at different times throughout the year. Mention them. Your customers may be of various nationalities and religious persuasions so don’t limit yourself to Happy Christmas and Happy Halloween!

8.News close to home.

You should never approach your store’s blog as a personal diary. After all your customers don’t want to hear about what you had for breakfast. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t mention momentous or life changing events. Maybe a member of your staff is getting married or expecting a baby, for example. Depending on the overall personality of your store this may not be something that you’d like to do, but in the right circumstances mentioning this kind of news can endear you to your customers very effectively. Everybody likes to be reassured that they are dealing with 3 dimensional people, not just a faceless money making machine. Just don’t overdo it.

9.Current bestsellers.

If a particular product is really popular, it’s worth mentioning for two reasons. Firstly it can create a sense of urgency in your customers if they think that stocks may be getting low. Secondly, if a lot of people are buying a certain product there are probably a lot of people searching for it as well. When you’ve got a hot keyword, pepper a post with it and then feed it to the spiders!

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Millions of people our there want to do something and make it to the top of their life. But waiting for inspiration and ideas on how exactly to achieve their dream. My dream is to help them winning.Kindle blogs are fully downloaded onto your Kindle so you can read them even when you’re not wirelessly connected. And unlike RSS readers which often only provide headlines, blogs on Kindle give you full text content and images, and are updated wirelessly throughout the d… More >>

How to Create a blog and make money blogging.

Time magazine has labelled Yoani Sanchez, a Cuban blogger, one of the world’s 100 most influential people. Al Jazeera met her in Havana, the Cuban capital. She told us how being a blogger in Cuba can bring both inspiration and frustration. This is her story in her own words.

Bloggers Are A Lot Like Pigeons

So I’m sure many of you read the title and thought, “Where is he going to go with this one?”

Okay, I agree it sounds corny, but it is amazing how your mind frames things early on a cold, wet Midwest winter morning walking to the train station (remember, a perfect morning involves staying in my sweats, not leaving the house, working on the computer). Now granted, I do hope most of us are potty trained better, have a more permanent residence and a sharper mind when it comes to avoiding traffic, but stay with me and read on.

Both bloggers and pigeons are:

1. Vastly colorful and individual.
The flock of pigeons that served as my inspiration reminded me of how unique each one was physically. At a glance they may appear similar when you see a flock together as a tapestry, yet, it is remarkable how distinct the markings are to each bird. Just like our blogs; each possesses personal font-image-layout-color preferences, variances and nuances specific to distinguish us.

2. Tend to bobble, hunt and peck.
I don’t know about you, but I feel I resemble a pigeon as I hunt and peck across the keyboard with my head bobbling most the day! It’s crazy too how their always pecking at something they can see on the ground, or think they can see, and I can’t see it! Do we do that?

3. Friendly and respectful.
Pigeons and bloggers are a genuinely friendly, communal group. Even when pigeons are being fed they are respectful to one another as they go in for their share–unlike seagulls. Granted, every now and then, one in the group gets a little “randy” and starts climbing on the other, but we know the motivation behind that behavior. Overall, they get along tremendously.

4. Very vocal.
Ever notice how much cooing goes on-especially when they congregate? I am amazed everyday as I sit with my feed reader at the wealth of intellect and insight shared daily amongst us all! Maybe that’s why pigeons huddle too, because they have so much to share with one another!

5. Free to travel.
Well, bloggers can travel anywhere Wi-Fi to blog, but isn’t that almost the same today as having wings? What a beautiful thing to no longer be bound to a brick and mortar model and be able to blog from the beach (its really funny here in Chicago along lakeshore beaches we have both pigeons and gulls out in the sand!).

6. Helpful.
Fellow worldwide bloggers I have been privileged to “meet” are some of the most amazing people I have ever had any fellowship with. Although most bloggers are willing to lend a hand with information or a project, if they have the time, don’t forget that they might have to refuse or even not reply because of time constraints, heavy workloads, set principles, or a simple distaste with your lack of proper etiquette. You know what I am saying, don’t get so consumed with your own needs that you behave or come across disrespectfully to your fellow bloggers. Even pigeons do get ruffled and fly away.
Let me know what you think!

Derrick Sorles
copyright 2007