Written on 11/19/2011 at 12:06 am by

3 Secrets to Not Getting Discouraged as a Blogger

Filed Under: Writing Content 90 Comments

This is a guest post by Jeff Goins of Goinswriter.com.

The other night, I was catching up with a writer friend who is taking his first steps towards becoming a professional blogger.

He was frustrated and upset, wanting to quit.

Listening to him, I realized something: writing is discouraging work. It’s a time-consuming, underpaid, solitary activity. No wonder so many authors turn into drunks and most bloggers don’t receive their due appreciation.

If you’re feeling discouraged, you can breathe a sigh of relief. Relax. This is normal.

For most of the time I’ve been blogging, I’ve felt like my friend. Frustrated and discouraged, I’ve often wanted to quit. But recently, things have started turning around. And it’s all because of three very important secrets.

1. Automation is key

Step away from Twitter, Facebook, and any other online distractions long enough to actually get something done. You need time to concentrate and create.

If you spend all your time on maintaining your community, you’ll never able to grow it. You have to create margin in your schedule to do things like write guest posts.

I do this by writing weeks in advance for my blog and scheduling posts well ahead of time. I also use tools like Timely.is and Bufferapp.com to schedule tweets without having to think much about it. And lastly, I turn off most email notifications and alerts (including Twitter follows and unfollows and Facebook messages).

Don’t get me wrong. I still spend time on social media, but I don’t allow myself to be interrupted every minute of the day. Automating these practices helps me focus on what I need to spend most of my time doing: writing.

2. A bias towards creating keeps you focused

There are a hundred ways you could make money online. Why blogging? Probably because you enjoy creating.

This may fly in the face of conventional wisdom, but you should not be spending most of your time promoting your blog.

You should spend most of your time creating.

Writing comes first. Everything else (including marketing and promotion) comes second. If I’m not delivering the very best content I can every time I hit “Publish,” I don’t have any reason to promote my work. Similarly, if you’re not finding ways to add value to your readers, customers, etc., then you have no business trying to sell anything.

In this world of tweets and texts and blog comments, it’s easy to get distracted. To focus merely on the platform you’ve built, instead of on expanding its reach. The way that you do this is by creating compelling content, day after day.

You only have a limited number of hours in the day. Make them count.

Doing this will also keep you busy enough to ignore the jabs of critics, keeping you caught up in what you love.

3. Stop checking stats

In my experience, checking blog stats is a pointless exercise. These numbers can be a subtle form of procrastination, tempting you to “check in” multiple times per day, without actually doing any real work.

Of course, analytics are helpful. They allow you to identify overall growth trends of your blog, as well as keywords readers are interested in. But on a regular basis (i.e. hourly or even daily), they can be discouraging.

If someone doesn’t immediately read your writing, it may lead you to false conclusions. You may convince yourself that no one cares about what you have to say. Your inner critic might take over before you give your work time to make an impact.

Remember: if you’re writing posts that are optimized for search engines, then you’re not writing for today. You’re writing for the long haul. Constantly checking stats can undermine that purpose.

When someone asked Seth Godin how many blog subscribers he had, he responded, “I don’t know.” And neither should you.

Of course, you need to be available to your audience and to know how your blog is performing. But before any of that, you need to just write.

There are forces out there that would discourage you. I hope you don’t let them.

Because we need your voice.

We need your words.

Jeff Goins is a writer and marketing consultant. On his blog, he shares writing tips for new and aspiring writers. For a limited time, you can download his free e-book The Writer’s Manifesto. You can also follow him on Twitter @jeffgoins.

Written on 11/18/2011 at 6:01 am by

Questions My Dad Would Ask Before You Started that Ebook

Filed Under: Blogging for Dollars, Writing Content 25 Comments

This guest post is by Barb Sawyers of Sticky Communication.

The pitches go like this: turn your archived content into an ebook that will rake in bucks while you sleep. Invest a weekend, maybe a few weeks, and you’ll have a book that will establish you as a thought leader and open the flood gates to new revenue streams.

But as my 85-year-old Dad asked when I told him I was writing an ebook: “Why would you write a book, now that everyone with a computer can?”

You’ve got to admit, that’s a good point from my 85-year-old Dad, who still makes money on his investments but sometimes can’t find his slippers.

Because everyone can now publish a book, lots more will. So your book has to be great. Make that spectacular. And don’t forget that you’re not only the source of the expertise and probably the writing. You will also be responsible for editing, page formatting, cover design, sales and much more.

Depending on your skill set and budget, you can pay for help from Createspace and other self-publishers, people you stumble across on the Internet or a marble-lobby public relations firm.

But for more of the work and most of the decisions, you are on your own.

Don’t get me wrong. I am tickled pink that more people can share their wisdom or art through ebooks and on-demand print. I’m simply advising you to go in with your eyes wide open, avoid the sleazier pitches, and think about some of these questions my Dad would ask.

  • Are your goals achievable? If you want a book that makes money, it has to be good enough to compete with traditional publishers and the coming flood of self-published ebooks. If you are only interested in raising your prestige among a smaller group of people, you may set the bar a little, but not much, lower.
  • Are you an expert? Ideally, you’ve been accumulating knowledge for years and updating your wisdom daily. If you’re not already passionate about a specific topic, don’t charge in.
  • Do you have a unique approach? Like a product, your book has to offer something people can’t get anywhere else. In a world of countless niches, that might be relatively easy for you.
  • Are you willing to invest time? If you are smart enough to have the expertise that makes a book worthwhile, likely you are not going to fall for the get-rich-quick charlatans.
  • Can you write well? If you want to sharpen your skills, you can learn from many blogs, courses and books, including mine, Write Like You Talk—Only Better. If you’re a blogger, figure at least 30 to 50 quality posts on your theme that will then need to be edited, packaged, and sold.
  • If your writing doesn’t measure up, are you prepared to spend the money and time on someone whose does? Most successful nonfiction authors who don’t eat, sleep, and breath writing pay big bucks to professional ghost writers, not a stranger whose site trumpets their rock-bottom prices. You get what you pay for, as my Dad would say. Unless you can find a 24/7 psychic ghost writer, you’ll also spend lots of time thinking about the theme and feeding your ghost writer your knowledge and revisions.
  • Can you design the pages, cover and marketing collateral? Again, be prepared to pay for the kind of quality that will compete or at least spend the time to find the right online sources. Yes, templates are available, but much of what I viewed were woodlands or other looks that do not work for my cover. Right again, Dad. People do judge a book by its cover.
  • Do you have a content marketing machine? You’ll need to spend lots more time feeding and building your social networks, courting legacy media and pursuing other strategies for marketing your book. Competition is stiff and getting stiffer. You have to do a lot more than sneeze in an elevator to go viral.

If there’s an ebook in your soul, go for it. I’m thrilled that the doors have opened. Just be prepared to pour in years of learning, months of prep time and days of fretting.

It has to be your best, not something you knocked off over a rainy weekend.

That’s how real money is made. Just ask my Dad.

Barb Sawyers, who blogs at Sticky Communication, is almost ready to publish in print and for ereaders the second edition of Write Like You Talk—Only Better. Preview it here.

Written on 11/18/2011 at 12:08 am by

Why Bloggers Should Self-Publish

Filed Under: Blogging for Dollars, Writing Content 47 Comments

By James Altucher of jamesaltucher.com.

I’ve published seven books in the past seven years, five with traditional publishers (Wiley, Penguin, HarperCollins), and the last two I’ve self-published.

In this post I give the specific details of all of my sales numbers and advances with the traditional publishers.

Although the jury is still out on my self-published books, How to be the Luckiest Man Alive and I Was Blind But Now I See (the latter was just published last month and is #2 for Motivation on Amazon’s Kindle store as I write this), I can tell you these two have already sold more than my five books published with traditional publishers, combined.

Self-publishing

Image copyright photogl - Fotolia.com

The rest of this article is really three discussions:

  1. Why self-publish, rather than use a traditional publisher?
  2. Why bloggers should self-publish.
  3. How to go about self-publishing.

Why self-publish?

  • Advances are going to zero: Book publishers are getting more and more squeezed by declining booksellers so they, in turn, have to squeeze the writers. Because there’s so much free content on the Internet, the value per unit of content is going to zero unless you are already an established name-brand author.
  • Lag time: When you self-publish, you can have your book up and running on Amazon, paperback, and Kindle within days. When you publish with a traditional publisher, it’s a grueling process—book proposal, agents, lawyers, meetings, edits, packaging, catalogs—that ensures that your book doesn’t actually get published until a year later. Literally, as I write this, a friend of mine IMed me the details of his book deal he just got with a mainstream publisher. Publication date: 2014.
  • Marketing: Publishers claim they do a lot of marketing for you. That’s laughable. I’ll give you a very specific example. After I published with Penguin, they met with a friend of mine whose book they wanted to publish. They didn’t realize she was my friend. She asked them, “what marketing did you do for James Altucher’s book?” They said, “Well, we got him a review in The Financial Times and we got a segment about his book on CNBC and an excerpt in thestreet.com.” Here’s what’s so funny. I had a weekly column in The Financial Times. I wrote my own review. As a joke. I also had a weekly segment on CNBC. So naturally I spoke about my book during my regular segment. And I had just sold my last company to thestreet.com. So instead of doing my usual article for them, I did an excerpt from the book. In other words, I felt the publisher did nothing, but took credit for eveything. Ultimately, authors (unless you are, for example, Stephen King) have to do their own marketing for books. The first question publishers ask, even before they look at your proposal, is, “How big is your platform?” They want to know how you can market the book and if they can make money on just your own marketing efforts.
  • Better royalties: When I self-publish I make about a 70% royalty instead of the 15% royalty I made with a traditional publisher. I also own 100% of the foreign rights, instead of 50%. I hired someone to sell the foreign rights to my work, and they get 20% (and no upfront fee).
  • More control over content and design: Look at this cover, designed by a traditional publisher for me (this was my third book). It’s hideous. Now look at the cover for my last book. You may or may not like it, but it’s exactly what I wanted. Publishers even include in the contract that they have final say over the cover, and this is one detail they will not negotiate. Also, when you self-publish, you don’t have any teenage interns sending back editorial comments that you completely disagree with. You control your own content.

Why should bloggers self-publish?

  • You have content: I have enough material in my blog right now (including my “Drafts” folder, which has 47 unpublished posts in it) to publish five more books over the next year. And I’m sure that number will increase over the next year as I write more posts.
  • You have more to say. If you just take the posts (mentioned in the point above) and publish them, people will say, “he’s just publishing a collection of posts”. A couple of comments on that.
    1. So what? It’s okay if you are curating what you feel your best posts are. And for a small price, people can get that curation and read it in a different format. There’s value there.
    2. Don’t just take a collection of your posts. A blog post is typically 500-2000 words, but usually closer to 500. Do a bit more research for each post. Do intros and outros for each post. Make the chapters 3000-4000 words long. Make a bigger arc to the book by using original material to explain why this book, with these chapters, presented in this manner is a different read than the blog. Have a chapter specifically explaining how the book is different from the blog. With my last book, I had original material in each chapter, and several chapters that were completely original. Instead of it being a collection of posts, the overall book was about how we have been brainwashed in society, and how uncovering the brainwashing and using the techniques I describe can bring happiness. This was covered in a much more detailed fashion than the blog ever could, even though the material was inspired by several of my posts.
  • Amazon is an extra platform for you to market your blog: Or vice versa. You won’t make a million dollars on your book (well, maybe you will—never say never) but just being able to say, “I’m a published author” extends your credibility as a writer when you go out there now to syndicate your blog elsewhere, or to get speaking engagements. And when you do a speaking engagement, you can now hand something out—your book! So Amazon and publishing become a powerful marketing platform for your overall writing/speaking/consulting career.
  • Nobody cares: Some people want the credibility of saying “Penguin published me”. I can tell you from experience—nobody ever asked me who was my publisher.
  • How will I get in bookstores? I don’t know. How will you? Traditional publishers can’t get you there either. Often bookstores will look at what’s hot on Amazon and then order the books wholesale from the publishers. In many cases, traditional publishers will take their most-known writers (so if you are in that category, congrats!) and pay to have them featured at a bookstore. As for my experience, my traditional publishers would get a few copies of my books in the bookstores of major cities (i.e. NYC and that’s it), but nothing more.

Okay, I’m convinced. How do I self-publish?

There’s lots of ways to do it, but I’ll tell you my experience.

First, write the book

For my last two self-published books, as I mentioned above, I took some blog posts, rewrote parts of them, added original material, added new chapters, and provided an overall arc as to what the book was about, as opposed to it just being a random collection of posts.

But, that said, you probably already have the basic material already.

Use Createspace.com

I used Createspace because it’s owned by Amazon and has excellent customer service. The team at Creatspace let you pick the size of your book and then have Microsoft Word templates that you download to format your book within.

For my first book I did this by myself. For my second book, for a small fee, I hired Alexanderbecker.net to format the book, create the book design, and create the final PDF that I uploaded. He also checked grammar, made proactive suggestions on fonts (sans serif instead of serif), and was extremely helpful.

Upload the PDF

Createspace approves it, picks an ISBN number, sends you a proof, and then you approve the proof.

Within days your book is available on Amazon

All of the above (from Createspace) was free. If I didn’t hire Alex to make the cover I could’ve used one of Createspace’s possible covers (I did that for my first book) and the entire publishing in paperback would be free.

Go to Kindle

With Kindle, Createspace charges $70—and they take care of everything until it’s uploaded to the Kindle store. Now your book is available in paperback and Kindle versions!

Marketing

  • Readers of my blog who asked for it got the first 20 copies or so for free from me. Many of them then posted good reviews on Amazon to get the ball rolling.
  • I’ve been handing out the books at speaking engagements. Altogether, I’ll do around ten speaking engagements, handing my latest book out.
  • I write a blog post about how the bo0k is different from the blog and why I chose to go this route.
  • Writing guests posts for blogs like ProBlogger helps, too, and I’m very grateful.
  • Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, and Google+ are also very helpful.

    • Promotions

    You’re in charge of your own promotions (as opposed to having a book publisher handling them for you). For instance, n a recent blog post I discussed the differences between my latest book and my blog, and I also offered a promotion that lets readers get my next self-published book (Bad Behavior, expected in Q1 2012) free.

    Over the next year, I have five different books planned, all on different topics. I’m super-excited about them because I’m allowed to push the barrier in every area I’m interested in, and there’s nobody to stop me.

    You can do this also. And you should do it. There are no more excuses in this environment. Do you have questions about self-publishing? Let us know in the comments!

    James Altucher has written 7 books, has started and sold 3 businesses, and has blogged successfully this past year at jamesaltucher.com. He also writes for the WSJ and other media outlets. He exposes himself way too much on his blog.

Written on 11/11/2011 at 6:02 am by

10 Writing Mistakes that Will Guarantee Your Blog’s Failure

Filed Under: Writing Content

This is a guest post by Gregory Ciotti of SparringMind.com.

You have the ideas.

You have the expertise.

You have the ability to project them well on your blog, and you are quite confident in your writing ability.

Yet, unknowingly, you could be building a sinking ship, punctured by these ten writing mistakes that will doom any blog to failure.

You needn’t be disheartened, however, as any blogger can avoid them. It just takes awareness of their existence, and a keen focus on giving the reader what they want, at all costs.

Do you make any of these ten fatal writing mistakes on your blog?

1. You have nothing to say

When blogging, you have to understand that in order to succeed, you need to give your readers what they want.

So then, what is it that readers really want?

They want you to provide them a solution to what they are seeking, even if what they are seeking is nothing but entertainment.

They also want to hear what you have to say. This doesn’t mean that they are intrigued about what you had for lunch. But they do want a personality behind the words they are reading. Otherwise, there is no connection that they can make to the words, and what they are reading becomes empty.

Making sure you have something to say makes writing easier and faster. When you have nothing to say, you are forced to write sentences that sound meaningful but deliver nothing.

2. You’re not specific

Consider the following two headlines:

  1. How I Got A Lot Of Facebook Fans
  2. How I Grew My Facebook Fan Page To 6,683 Fans In 4 Months

Which one of those do you think is going to offer the most in-depth information? The second one, as it called to our innate desire to hear the specifics.

The reason readers love to see details and examples is because they value their time, and they are not interested in hearing another cookie cutter “how-to” that provides no examples to show whether or not it works.

In your writing, your examples can sell your whole post. If you can back up the claims of your headline with a detailed example, you will have your readers reading from top to bottom, and then anxiously awaiting your next post.

How can you lead your readers if you don’t lead by example?

3. Your word choice is too complex

Almost any time I encourage people to write simply on blogs, they always disagree by saying that simple writing is boring. But they fail to see my point.

Articulate and meticulously crafted writing very much has its place, but sometimes bloggers fail to realize their medium and their audience.

It’s not that the web is only suited for simple writing, but it definitely benefits from it.

Getting your point across can be much more effective if you cut out the fluff, and will guarantee more people will read your posts from beginning to end—a critical part of being a successful blogger that people await updates from.

Why not put this to the test yourself? In your next post, keep it simple, using longer words only when other more direct options will not do. I guarantee you will find writing on your topic more enjoyable, and you will get to the point of each post far more quickly.

4. Your paragraphs are too wordy

This point is very closely related to the one above. Again, I feel a disclaimer is needed here. I’m not saying a long, comprehensive post is not suited for the blogospohere—in fact these types of posts add a lot of value and are often a great way to show your talent.

What I’m talking about is the dreaded fluff. In the same way fluff causes you to write with unnecessary adjectives and words you had to use a dictionary to look up, it can also wreak havoc on your writing structure.

In blogging, you should keep your paragraphs short for the same reason you should keep your wording simple: they are easier for people to read and understand.

The last thing you want to create on your posts is confusion. Your writing style needs to give people what they want, and people do not want to be confused—they want information. Give it to them.

5. You keep using the passive voice

Speaking of what readers want, did you know that in English, readers prefer the Subject, Verb, Object sentence structure? This is called the “active voice.”

“Long sentences annoy readers.” English readers like that.

“Readers are annoyed by long sentences.” That..? Not so much.

Did you also notice how the second option there—the passive voice—makes simple statements use a couple of unnecessary words? This can add up over a long blog post.

Although you cannot always use the active voice, as a blogger, you should try to as often as possible.

6. Your descriptions are empty

Worse than lacking details, is trying to force descriptions onto examples that don’t need them.

In writing these are known as “qualifying words,” and they include the likes of: very, little, rather. They add nothing to the meaning of your sentences, and take away their impact by lengthening them for no reason.

For instance, you could say this style of writing “is basically a little annoying, rather, there is very little reason you should be writing like this.”

Yikes! As Mark Twain once said:

“Substitute ‘damn’ every time you’re inclined to write very; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.”

7. You don’t embrace what works

Surprisingly, in a world where many bloggers try to copy the success of others, a growing problem that has recently surfaced is the faction of bloggers trying to be too “different,” embracing the call of being a “purple cow” while ignoring the tried and true standards that work.

Simply put, your blog shouldn’t be above doing list posts, round-ups, interviews, and so on.

These methods work, and writing to give your readers what they want isn’t a bad thing. Don’t think you won’t stand out just because you create a few posts using formats that have been proven effective time and time again.

8. You often ramble in your writing

Let me tell you about rambling, it’s like this one time I was trying to come up with a post for problogger.net about huge writing mistakes bloggers make, and the power ended up going out before I could save my post, and I thought maybe I should write an entire post about saving your writing, because it’s really important for bloggers to make sure that there best thoughts aren’t erased by some sort of haphazard…

Okay, I’ll stop.

Notice a trend in these writing problems? You aren’t giving readers what they want. Maybe, maybe, you run a blog where readers come around just for your rants. Most likely, however, you don’t—your readers come for information, and they come for examples, as always.

Don’t ramble: give them what they want.

9. Your blog is repetitive

Bloggers with specific niches everywhere just did a double-take.

No my fellow blogger, you can keep writing about tech, food, fitness, or naked skydiving until the end of your days for all I care. The danger in repetitiveness is not the subject matter, but the presentation.

How-to posts, all day, every day, may be what you want to do, but it can become a drag for readers who come back often. As you progress and continue writing for your blog, you may find yourself sick of writing these posts as well.

Instead, mix up the type of posts you put out. Text interviews, critiques, a huge resource list—the types of post that you can write are endless. Even better, change the entire medium in which you present your writing. I’m talking about writing for podcasts and videos, specifically.

Writing a script for a podcast or a video session can be a totally unique take on your writing.Not only that, it gets your blog out on different media, allowing people to discover your site through your external videos and podcasts, and gives long time readers another way to “hear your voice,” quite literally in this instance!

So don’ be boring, mix up writing style, and mix up presentation media. Your writing, and your blog, will be better for it.

10. You don’t edit

Have I driven the point home that you need to be thoughtful of your reader? Maybe I should re-read my section on repetitiveness!

Honestly, it may feel good to simply “crank out” a successful post, but you are placing too much faith in your talents and not enough importance on your reader if you don’t go back and edit even your best “one-shot” works.

This goes beyond simple grammar and spelling edits as well. No reader of yours will ever expect for you to be the perfect writer, and it’s okay to add a touch of personality into your blog. In fact it is quite welcome.

You should, however, not be afraid to edit your own thoughts. Re-read posts and cut out anything that doesn’t add to the post in a meaningful way.

Read the post as best as you can from the perspective of a reader: “Would I care about this section?” is a question that should come into your mind often.

Write for your reader

The running theme through all of these mistakes is the lack of attention being paid to the reader.

While writing may be an expression of your†thoughts, you won’t be the only one reading them (if you aspire for your blog to be read by more than you and your cat, that is!).

Sit back after each post, after each line, and ask yourself: does this benefit my reader? Do they get something out of this line? Is it needed for the post as a whole to be a success?

You can’t make your blogging style flawless, but you can darn well try to make your reader happy!

Are you a WordPress user like Darren Rowse? Then you definitely need to check out Sparring Mind, the WordPress content marketing blog, which shows you that you don’t need to be a tech geek to create amazing content on a superb WordPress site.

Written on 11/8/2011 at 12:02 am by

10 Steps to Writing Mindfully for Your Blog

Filed Under: Writing Content

This guest post is by Sean Madden of Mindful Living Guide.

These past few months—in my summer and early autumn creative writing classes—I’ve not focused so much on the mindfulness aspect of my teachings. Perhaps this had to do with the energetic pace of summer, which only recently faded here in the South East of England. Just last week autumn seemed finally to arrive and with it the cozy, heartwarming smells of wood and coal smoke rising from the chimneys of local cottages. The end of our unseasonably warm Indian summer ushered in that back-to-school feeling of my childhood days growing up on the South Shore of Massachusetts.

And so it was just last week that I made explicit the intended theme of the six-week course which got underway in mid-September. That theme’s perhaps best conveyed by the course title, Write Your Way into Autumn. I had everyone spend about ten minutes in class writing a list of autumnal-inspired words, phrases and snippets of language. We then read aloud the words we each gathered.

Mindfulness

Image copyright olly - Fotolia.com

This brief exercise promoted a feeling of turning within, of slowing down, of simply witnessing the world around and within us. And this brought that sense of presence, that magical spark, back into our shared time together.

This week, in both my Monday evening and Wednesday morning classes, we read from Deng Ming-Dao’s Everyday Tao, specifically the “Source” and “Return” entries of this book, which is chockablock with wisdom.  Here’s how Deng (last name) closes the former entry:

“If you want to know Tao at its most fundamental, go back to the source. If you do go back to the source of Tao, you will also find the source of all your questions.”

To help my writing students better understand what Deng means by source, we then read the “Return” entry which closes thus:

“Our essential nature, our innocent self, is always in us. Everyone has one, and we need only return to it in order to understand it. Just as the spiral eddies toward the center, we proceed from outer to inner to find the ultimate source.”

I then asked my students to write for ten to fifteen minutes on the following question: “What is our essence, our original nature, our innocent self?”  As with last week’s autumnal word hoard, this brought mindfulness back to center stage, and, again, the results were magical.

Here’s what one of my students, writer-animator Carl Sullivan, said about yesterday’s class:

“The last session for me had the most depth. To breathe into the now and find a moment of stillness before the pen starts moving gives you a chance to bypass the person who wants to be a writer, and to just write. Much as when I draw—I really don’t have an idea of what’s going to appear. To approach writing from a no-mind ‘now’ point lets the words be as free as a doodle. To doodle words in playful creativity with just a gentle expectancy, no pressure, just wondering what’s going to be revealed is as fun and free as drawing.”

What else is there to say, really?

Well, here’s what Carl wrote in response to the aforementioned question about our essence, our original nature, our innocent self, this final piece marking the end of our six weeks together:

inner smile purity
the Adventure of the Heart in child felt wonder,
joy springs dancing inside,
still as Now
mind at rest—being at peace,
real eyes to see
releasing tears of
remembering
cleansing the wounds
to be
held whole and happy
grateful and true
home again

10 Steps writing mindfully for your blog

  1. Find a still, quiet place within which to write.
  2. Before you begin writing, take a few minutes to ground yourself in the present moment by bringing a simple, uncomplicated awareness to the whole of your physical body.
  3. Simply observe what it feels like to inhabit your body, without mental comments or judgments.
  4. If you notice your mind wanders, that’s fine. Gently return your awareness to your body.
  5. When you feel centered, relaxed, and reconnected with your essence, slowly begin to move your fingers, toes, and limbs, and with a feather-light touch begin—with all your senses—to observe your surroundings while positioning yourself comfortably to begin writing.
  6. As you start writing, promote a sense of doing so with the whole of your being, with the whole of your physical body, rather than purely with the intellectual, wholly rational mind.
  7. Allow for writing to flow in imaginative, playful ways. Be curious, childlike.
  8. Try to maintain a general, global awareness of your body throughout the time you’re writing.
  9. Reawaken your mind, body and spirit by taking frequent breaks to stand, stretch and bring movement back into your body.
  10. When you’ve finished writing, gently take this mindful approach into the rest of your day.

As a Creative Writing & Mindful Living Guide, Sean M. Madden offers Writing, Literature & Mindful Living courses and workshops in the UK, and one-to-one guidance & mentoring worldwide. Sean invites readers to follow him on Twitter @SeanMMadden.

Written on 11/5/2011 at 12:09 am by

How to Attract Your Perfect Reader

Filed Under: Blogging for Dollars, Writing Content

This guest post is by James Chartrand is the owner of Men with Pens.

One of the greatest challenges of writing for your business is figuring out your ideal reader.

It’s tempting to think that everyone will read your work—and that creates a problem, because your mindset shifts to thinking that everyone is your audience. After all, you reason, everyone is a potential customer, right?

Nope. Not even close.

Let’s say I started writing exclusively about training horses. Now, you might like horses. You might enjoy riding them.

But unless you’re intensely interested in the actual training of horses, my words and my business aren’t for you.

Attracting the right one

Image copyright Ron Rowan - Fotolia.com

The same is true in any industry, and especially so for any niche. Only a select group of people will care about what you write, simply because it directly applies to their interests.

No one else gives a damn.

This is a very good thing.

What would you rather have? 500 loyal customers constantly spreading the word about you, your products and your business because they love what you write?

Or two million faceless consumers who show up to your website, read what you have to say and realize it doesn’t concern them?

Think further. What would you rather have? Customers who rave about your business after buying your products because it was exactly what they expected and needed?

Or people who buy and then demand a refund because your content wasn’t supposed to loop them in and this was the wrong product for their needs?

If you’re thinking, “Hey, but at least I got sales!” then you’re clearly missing the point.

Building a successful, sustainable business isn’t about scooping as many random people as you can into a giant net. It’s about targeting a specific group of consumers at the intersection of their problems and your solutions.

And your writing is the key to unlocking that place.

How to unlock the intersection

To help you unlock that mystical intersection, you need to figure out the exact type of potential customer you’d love to meet there.

  • Go through a list of your best customers—the people you loved working with, the ones you can’t wait to do business with again.
  • Write down what you liked about working with them. Why are they your best clients?
  • Write down commonalities—are these people all in a specific industry? Do they come from the same age group?
  • Write down similar traits these people share. Do they all act a certain way? Carry a similar tone of voice? Behave in common ways?

Figure out as many similarities as you can. Figure out what you liked about these people and working with them.

Maybe they have go-getter attitudes and make decisions quickly. Maybe they give you clear instructions and pay on time. Maybe they’re friendly and warm, or helpful and forgiving. Maybe they’re Baby Boomers. Or Gen Xers. Or work in a field you find interesting and challenging.

List it out. Build a portrait of your ideal customer, the type of person you wish all your customers would resemble.

This is your ideal reader—the person your content should attract.

The list you’re building can be as long as you want, but the key is to learn what you love about these people so that you can decide how to write in a way that pulls in more potential customers just like the ones you love working with.

For example, writing in a bold, authoritative style might attract the go-getters… and turn off the simpering, unsure customers you dislike dealing with. Or maybe writing in a warm, friendly way pulls in kind, caring souls that make you feel good about your job and wards off the authoritative, pushy types.

List in hand, you’ll be able to formulate a very accurate portrait of your best possible reader—and your most ideal customer.

Then you can begin writing in a way that appeals to them, reaches them, and attracts them closer to you—and to your business.

James Chartrand is the owner of Men with Pens, and the writer making waves at Damn Fine Words, the most innovative writing course completely designed to help bring you business results. Sign up now for the DFW newsletter for more writing, blogging and content creation tips and techniques.

Written on 11/3/2011 at 12:01 am by

How to Write Posts People Will Remember

Filed Under: Writing Content

I am fortunate enough to meet quite a few of my blog’s readers face-to-face at conferences. It’s always a surreal and enlightening experience.

One of the most interesting parts of the experience is having readers share with you the posts that you’ve written that they remember most. On some occasions they remember things you’ve written years in the past!

Funnily enough, though, these often are not the posts that you want them to remember.

What people don’t remember about your blog

As a blogger who focuses mainly upon how-to and informational posts, I find it fascinating that people rarely tell me that the post they remember most fits into that category. It’s rare that anyone comes up to me at a conference and says:

“I remember that post on dPS from 2009 when you taught us how to use longer shutter speeds to create motion blur! I loved it!”

Or

“I’ll always remember that post on ProBlogger when you listed ten ways to use images on posts. What a great post!”

It’s not the how-to or informational posts that people remember.

What people do remember about your blog

Writing a post

Image copyright Christopher Nuzzaco - Fotolia.com

The posts that people come up to me at conferences and remind me about are:

  • stories
  • playful posts (humor, or writing in a different voice)
  • rants and emotive posts
  • inspirational posts
  • opinion pieces
  • posts about failures, problems, and needs people have

While informational posts are important as they help people on a day-to-day basis, it’s the more heartfelt posts that create memories for people, and make them feel a connection to you as a blogger.

What posts do you remember?

What is your most-remembered post by readers?

What posts do you remember that others wrote long after they were written?

What others said on this topic

I had a discussion on this topic on Google+ (connect with me here) recently. Here’s some of what my smart network there said:

“People appreciate helpful posts, but they bond over what you put some of your guts into. That’s where an emotional connection is formed.” Dixie Vogel

“Thinking back to the memorable posts by bloggers that I follow… They are often the ones that connect me as a person to that blogger.” Brett Morrison

“Posts where my opinion is clear.” Gary Hayes

Written on 11/2/2011 at 12:03 am by

3 Powerful Reasons Why Taking a Break Will Refuel Your Writing

Filed Under: Writing Content

This guest post is by Paul Jun.

Coffee has been consumed (and hopefully breakfast).

Brain is revving, fingers are warm, your neck just cracked in the most awkward way, but it feels great.

Writers block

Image copyright tlorna - Fotolia.com

And . . . Go!

Go! . . .

G– . . . Sigh.

Nothing. Nothing is happening, fingers are paralyzed, brain feels disconnected from the spinal column, and the constant scratching of your head has turned into an everlasting burn.

Writer’s block.

We all suffer from it time to time, and we don’t really know how to overcome it when our nerves are constantly jumping one way and our brains are in sleep mode.

This is a subtle beeping in your body asking you to walk away from the computer or desk and get your mind off writing for a few hours, maybe even a few minutes if you’re lucky.

The outcome: clear head, clear thoughts, and a clear vision of what your next post will be.

Exercising both brain and body to mitigate stress

If the releasing of endorphins makes a person happy and feel better . . . need I say more?

If you aren’t the type to work out or do any physical activity, then I’m assuming you also can’t find the time to read..?

I noticed when I don’t do any exercise, my brain feels clouded, my mood is spontaneously foul, my attitude can change from positive to lackluster at the flick of a switch, and nothing ever feels okay.

When is the last time you had your heart pounding, or sweat dripping down past your eyebrow, and down your nose? If you’re familiar with the feeling, you know it’s incredible. The shower you take after: bliss.

You clean up, put on fresh clothes, sit in your chair and your mind is just empty. The nerves are calmed down, endorphins are flowing, and now you’re prepared to write . . . or at least begin the process.

I cannot stress enough how important it is for a writer to exercise both their brain and their body. That buildup of stress and constant weeks of working without exercise greatly impacts your train of thought.

You don’t need a gym membership. Go for a nice 20-30 minute run or walk. Punch a punching bag until you think it’s talking to you. Do as many pushups as you can until you fall flat on your face.

Do whatever you can to release that stress, and I promise when you begin writing the process will seem less dreadful.

Maybe today isn’t the day

There is a time and place for everything, and today may not be the day for you to write a thousand-word post.

If your attitude isn’t positive, do you expect your message to be?

Maybe it’ll motivate you to write a post on how to change that feeling. Give it a try.

But if today doesn’t feel like the day, then it isn’t.

In that case, today is a day for reading, gathering notes, doing something other than what you’ve been religiously doing. Watch a favorite movie or TV show. Finish up your reading or catch up with some friends.

Maybe sit in complete silence and meditate.

We are walking batteries, and over time, throughout the day, that battery gets drained by the minute. Being stressed is not a solution to this problem.

Today is just not a good day, so it’s time to redirect that energy to produce some productivity.

Notes on napkins

My PC tower and the thin border around my monitor have become a wall full of post-its.

If you’re like Don Draper, and you write random notes and ideas on napkins, today is the day to bring all that together and review what you’ve written down over the past few weeks or days.

Old ideas are the fuel to the flame. You can potentially create an incredible blog post, just with a few simple words or phrases you’ve jotted down. It’s almost like magic: hard to believe and at times shocking.

Organize your ideas and notes for relevant categories on your blog. Sometimes the notes that I write down are usually headlines or the first sentence of a blog post—the rest naturally flows, or at least kick-starts an idea.

Writer’s block can be mitigated and eventually overcome. These painless steps have proven to work wonders for me, and they don’t really cost you anything (unless I convinced you to sign up to the gym).

As writers, we overwork our brains and we don’t realize it. We are constantly thinking, constantly brainstorming, and constantly flooding our heads with superfluous information from blogs to books.

It’s not up for discussion—it’s time for you to take a break. Go to your room . . . or get out of it!

Paul is a writer/blogger on http://junhax.com. He focuses on sharing insightful stories and advice for writing, blogging, and personal development. You can also follow him at @junhax

Written on 10/29/2011 at 6:01 am by

How to Write a Year’s Worth of Posts in 30 Days

Filed Under: Writing Content

This guest post is by Kelly Kingman of eBook Evolution.

Last year, I took part in a writing challenge called National Novel Writing Month, which is also known as NaNoWriMo. The challenge? Write 50,000 words—all during the 30 days of November. Until then, my personal length record hovered around 10,000 words for a single project.

Amazingly, I did it. And instead of fiction, I wrote a memoir. Which is why this all matters to you, dear bloggers.

On the NaNoWriMo forum, there’s a section just for the “NaNo Rebels”—those of us whose work doesn’t qualify as lengthy fiction. On the site’s FAQ, the party line is it doesn’t technically matter what you write: “We just want you to be excited about writing.”

If I could use NaNoWriMo to write anything, why not blog posts?

If you average 1,000 words per post, you could write 50—just two shy of a post per week for an entire year. Of course, you can’t anticipate everything you’ll want to blog about—but core content? Sure. Write shorter posts and add ebooks, guest posts, sales pages to the mix—the possibilities are endless.

So I decided to use this November to generate 50,000 words of raw, unpolished content in 30 days. I’ve started calling my parallel challenge Contentpalooza. Friends and readers have enthusiastically chimed in with support and their own content-creation goals.

38,000 people completed NaNoWriMo’s challenge last year. There are two primary reasons the structure works so well. First, it’s a sprint. We can push ourselves harder, writing far more than we’re used to (1,666 words per day, including Thanksgiving) because we know it’s temporary. Second, it’s a crazy goal, and sometimes they are more effective than “sensible” ones, they excite us and motivate us to go beyond our comfort zone.

Should you also choose to hack NaNoWriMo this year in order to boost your blogging, I offer the following advice to help ensure your success.

Find your formula and tracking tool

50,000 words is a lot of written content, but what if you want to create podcasts, videos or graphics? My goal formula this year is: 50 blog posts (about 700 words = 35,000) plus an ebook (approx. 15,000 words) and then the balance of words with guest posts. You don’t have to decide on everything in advance, but I suggest you decide what your equivalencies are if you’ll be venturing into other media.

It’s also important to have a way to keep track of your word count from day to day. This helps you stay motivated, see your progress and plan. This could be a simple word processing document that you pile everything into, or a website like 750Words.com. If you want to recalculate the daily minimum you must write, try WriteTrack and yes, there’s also an app for that.

Stock up on idea seeds

So many of us get hung up on coming up with high quality ideas before they begin writing, when really you just need idea seeds. Half-formed thoughts, hunches and questions are all seeds that you can grow by exploring them through writing itself. You don’t need to know exactly what you’re going to say or the point you’re going to make. In fact, writing is a great way to figure out what you think.

Capturing your idea seeds is critical—in a notebook, on your smartphone, wherever. Just don’t let them get away and keep them in the same place so you can grab them during November as needed. I love Evernote for this. I have clipped over 150 items—other posts, articles, and other content that I can use to seed my own thoughts and opinions.

Remember to write, not edit

We often forge that writing and editing are distinct activities, a lot of us write and polish as we go. But the lesson of NaNoWriMo is that to achieve the sheer quantity necessary, you must bind and gag your inner perfectionist. Don’t tempt yourself into fixing spelling and grammar, finding images, brushing up the formatting. Embrace mistakes and false starts (don’t delete them — they count towards your goal) and press on. Polishing is for December or later.

Find a buddy or two (or more)

Our chances of success at anything go up dramatically when we find others who share our goals. Writing, especially blogging, is too often seen as a solitary pursuit. But we absolutely need other people—to bounce ideas off of, to cheer us on, to convince us we don’t need that much sleep anyway. Trust me, this is crucial. Do not go alone. Find others in your area via the NaNoWriMo forum, get on Twitter, and find people who are participating (search #contentpalooza) or recruit them yourself.

What could you create for your blog in 30 days? Why not start now?

Kelly Kingman is a content visionary and the co-creator of eBook Evolution. If you want to join her in the quest for 50,000 words, follow @kellykingman on Twitter or connect with her on Facebook where she’ll be providing daily pep talks and tips.