Bloggers have a distinct disadvantage.

When someone hires an expert in — oh, let’s say marketing — that expert can dispense the same information she did for the last client.

And the client before that one. And the one before that.

Not bloggers. Blogging is about breaking down everything you know into bite-sized chunks so that people can learn it all over a period of time. If they look back through the archives, they can often see the entire breadth of your knowledge.

Then one day, your well runs dry.

This is a scary moment for any blogger. It’s not like running out of inspiration or having writer’s block. This is when you’ve said it all. Your blog contains absolutely everything you know.

And let’s be fair — it’s a lot of knowledge. But you simply don’t have anything new to say.

What do you do?

Go get yourself some new knowledge

I’m always amazed by how few people continue to educate themselves on their topic after they’ve become an acknowledged expert in it.

Hey, everyone knows me as the number one guy on naked mole rats! Clearly, I know everything there is to know!

But as an old coach of mine used to say, you’ll never know everything there is to know in your field of expertise, and there’s always something new to learn. People make new discoveries and innovations every day. You have opinions about those innovations. You agree or disagree with them. You try them or manage to take them a step further.

Of course, if you don’t find out what those discoveries and innovations are, you don’t have anything to say about it. No wonder you’re stuck for posts.

Actively pursuing new knowledge about your area of expertise has a side benefit: it provides more value for your clients. You may find the inspiration for a new ebook or web course to help newcomers understand and benefit.

New knowledge could be the next big thing for your business — if you go out and find it.

Doctors are one of the few professions actually required to update their knowledge of their field of expertise continually. If a doctor doesn’t know the latest innovation in surgery, his next patient might die from the lack of that knowledge. That’s a huge incentive for the doctor to always be learning and for the patient — and the medical board — to insist on that continual education.

No one is going to force you to attend conferences or read books or take courses, but you’ll be much more respected as an expert if you continually update your knowledge. Your client’s life may not be on the line, but their business, their financial goals, and their happiness probably is — at least, their happiness with your products and services.

Where can you find new knowledge?

Well, you may not have heard about this gizmo called the internet, but it’s pretty handy for that sort of thing. It seems silly to mention using the internet to upgrade your knowledge on an online blog, but shocking numbers of people don’t use it for this particular purpose — even those who practically live online.

Libraries are an awesome (and free) resource for new knowledge too, and so is your local bookstore. Go pick up some new literature and get someone else’s perspective on what you do.

Magazines and trade journals, of course, are terrific for more recent innovations and information. Find ones that focus on your area of expertise and stay on the lookout for new ideas that sound interesting or innovative. Once an article grabs your attention, go do some independent research on that topic and find new resources to pursue.

Actively pursuing new knowledge won’t just make you a better businessperson — though that’s reason enough right there. It’ll also pretty much guarantee that you’ll never run out of blog topics ever again.

About the Author: For new knowledge that makes you a better businessperson — and that helps you hit the bullseye of success for your freelancing career, check out Men with Pens — or better yet, grab the RSS feed here.

I recently came across blogger and copywriter Ryan Healy, and really enjoyed his blog. I took the liberty of sending him an email with a few questions, and what follows are Ryan’s responses…

Hear Ryan’s top 3 tips for growing your online business, and why copywriting is an important skill for all bloggers to learn!

Hi Ryan! You have an impressive history of working online as a copywriter for the last 8 years. What was it that inspired your transition to working online?

When I went freelance back in 2005, I had already been doing a lot of online marketing for the company I worked for. Plus, online advertising was exploding. So it seemed to make the most sense to focus on helping online businesses to improve their marketing.

Of course, I’ve been fortunate to have been involved with a few off-line projects as well. But to this day most of my work is online.

In addition to being a highly referred Direct Response Copywriter, you’re also known as a Business Growth Expert. Do you focus mainly on the growth of online business?

Yes. I help online businesses get more sales from their current advertising efforts. If they’re making 1 sale for every 200 visitors, I want to help them make 2 or 3 sales from the same volume of traffic.

Most times I’m hired to write a direct response sales letter. Sometimes I’m hired to do a copy critique or write emails or run some split-tests. Every situation is unique.

I’ve also helped a few off-line businesses in the sense that they generate leads online and close them off-line. Or vice versa: They generate the lead off-line (through direct mail or space ads), then bring them online.

With every year that passes it becomes harder to define businesses strictly in terms of “online” or “off-line.” Many businesses choose a hybrid approach. And why not? There’s money to be made in both places, and it’s silly to cut off one or the other “just because.”

What 3 tips would you share with ClickNewz readers to help them grow or improve their online business?

Only three?? Just kidding.

Here are three tips that come to mind…

Improve Your Online Business Tip #1:
Master the Execution of Fundamentals

The fundamentals of building and growing an online business never change. The basic formula is:

Targeted Traffic + Conversion + Remarkable Product = Sustainable Online Business

What have you done today to get more targeted traffic to your site? What have you done today to improve your conversion rate? What have you done today to make your product better?

You don’t necessarily have to tackle all three areas in a single day. But I believe you should be doing one of these things every single working day.

It’s work — but it works.

Improve Your Online Business Tip #2:
Automate What Can Be Automated

If you were a door-to-door salesman, you’d have to knock on dozens of doors every single day to have even a fighting chance at earning a living. This is not something you could automate. You’d have to do it yourself.

One of the advantages of running an online business is that many sales functions and even fulfillment functions can be automated.

For instance: You can load up an autoresponder sequence with quality content and a few sales messages mixed in. The emails will be sent out automatically on the schedule you determine.

Surely I’m not telling you anything new. Most people who’ve been online for more than a couple months understand the importance of an autoresponder sequence. And yet very few people actually build out their follow-up sequence like they know they should.

This gets back to Tip #1. You need to become an expert at execution.

Here are a few things that can be automated: follow-up emails, opt-in processes, delivery of electronic products, delivery of physical products, etc.

If you begin to automate your business, you get to do the work once and then enjoy the fruits of that labor for a long time. (There is almost always a degree of ongoing maintenance involved, but it’s minimal compared to the initial work.)

Somebody will point out: “But Ryan, you’re a copywriter! You’re just trading hours for dollars!”

Point taken. And it’s something I continue to work on: Shifting my income away from activities that pay only once and toward activities that generate income for the long-term.

Improve Your Online Business Tip #3:
Avoid Unnecessary Distractions

There are a million and one things demanding your attention when you’re online.

There are emails, Facebook updates, news alerts, RSS feeds, tweets, etc. If you’re not careful, an entire day can flash by — without you getting a single thing done to advance or improve your online business.

So whereas the first two tips I shared were “offensive,” this one is “defensive.” It’s imperative that you stay focused and cut out unnecessary distractions.

Do you have email alerts turned on? Turn them off. Does Tweetdeck run in the background alerting you to every new tweet? Turn it off.

Half the battle is usually just managing and controlling the tyranny of the urgent-yet-unimportant things that crop up every day.

Do you feel copywriting is important to bloggers, since they don’t create products & sales letters?

Absolutely! After all, every blog post title has to “sell” people on taking the time to read what follows.

(I’ve actually studied the most popular posts on my blog and on other people’s blogs and have made some interesting discoveries, particularly about blog post titles.)

One commonality among all top bloggers is their ability to write well and be entertaining. Too many blogs have no life in them, no passion. They just bore me (and everybody else) to tears.

Plus, there’s much to be said for learning how to engage people. By studying copywriting, you can learn a lot about how to capture people’s attention and engage them — both important skills for bloggers.

You offer a Free 39-Point Copywriting Checklist on your blog. Who is this checklist best suited for, and can you tell us what to expect from the download?

The check list is specifically designed for people who are selling things online. But affiliate marketers and bloggers can pick up a few good ideas as well.

When you get the check list, you’ll see that each item is phrased as a question. And there is a check box next to it. After you read the question, you can then check it off if it is complete.

For instance, the first question is, “Does your headline enter the conversation that’s already happening in your prospect’s mind?” There’s a check box to the left of the question so you can check it off.

There are 38 more questions like this. And while there isn’t a precise order, the check list is organized so that things you should think about first are at the top, and things you should think about later are at the bottom.

The 39-Point Copywriting Checklist is available for free (with opt-in). Or feel free to simply peruse the 200+ free articles on my business growth and copywriting blog.

Ryan M. Healy

“““““““““
TELEPHONE:
Open call-in hours 2-4 p.m. MST,
Monday-Thursday: 720-344-7788

“““““““““
WEB SITES:
Blog – http://www.RyanHealy.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/healymonster
Copywriting – http://www.CopywritingCode.com

How I used a blog to attract thousands of subscribers my first week.

Why I make six figures and you don’t.

How I quit my day job and now I work all day in my robe and slippers while my wife brings me lattes.

Ever seen headlines like these before? Find them at least a little compelling?

Like every good headline, they exist to attract attention and convince you to keep reading. They’re trying to get you thinking about how to use a tool like blogging to make lots of cash.

But there’s something in those big promises that misses the mark.

Now that I have some experience under my belt as a blogger making an online income, I’d like to talk about the missing ingredient of those pitches.

It’s not about your blog

Lance Armstrong has a great book out called It’s Not about the Bike.

In his case it’s about one of his testicles. To be more specific, the one he no longer has.

The book is about how his bike became a vehicle in a bigger race than the Tour de France or his Nike deal, how his bike is a metaphor for life.

Lance and his tragic disease wouldn’t be famous without his bike. And as an online entrepreneur, you won’t be famous, either, without your blog.

That said, it’s still not about the blog. Not at all. The day you realize that fact is the day you’ll turn an essential corner toward reaching your goal of making a living online.

So what is it about, if not the blog?

It’s about your business.

Your blog and your business are different, yet related, things. The former is a sub-set of the latter. The difference is sometimes subtle, but it’s a critical one.

Your blog is a strategy, a branding and marketing vehicle, a means toward an end.

Your business is the money-making model. A product or service for sale.

Your blog isn’t for sale. It may be of service, but it’s a service you’re giving away for free.

Which means, if giving out free content is all you’re doing, or if your blogging has become the core deliverable of what you believe to be a business, your strategy is upside-down.

There’s nothing magic about a blog

When I started out, blogging not only seemed like a good idea — especially with all the voices that suggested you could get rich doing it — it was also incredibly rewarding right out of the gate.

Not monetarily. It was rewarding because of how it felt.

Connecting with people. Helping them. Sucking up all that nice feedback. Participating in a community, being part of a meaningful dialogue.

Those are, and should remain, part of the reasons you blog.

But if they aren’t your real objective, your end game — if making a living is an element you want to add to that mix — it’s time to take stock. Because it’s so easy to get lost in all that community stuff, the warm and fuzzy elbow rubbing, the sense of doing something helpful and worthwhile.

Which doesn’t pay you a dime until you actually sell something.

There will come a day when it hits you

You’ve been getting up in the middle of the night to perfect a post that will go out via Feedburner at dawn. You’ve sweated the syntax of your opening line and polished those nouns and verbs until you found yourself dreaming of your old high school English teacher.

You really care. You’ve become your blog. Just possibly, at the expense of your business plan.

It hit me recently in a post from David Risley, who is one of those “pro bloggers” who, if you don’t read him closely enough, or if you only hear what you want to hear, could lead you to believe that blogging will be the source of your new income, and sometime soon.

But on this day I did read closely, and what I saw there rocked my blogging world.

David, in essence, said this: blogs don’t make money. Businesses make money.

(You’ve seen that message here on Copyblogger as well.)

Your blog is the face of your business, the voice of your brand, the bait that attracts a following.

And yes, you give away as much as you can with it, selflessly and abundantly.

But until you have a product or service to sell, and until the blog connects to that enterprise in a way that actually begins to generate actual revenue in addition to pumping up your online reputation and ego, your blog is nothing other than you expelling positive energy into the universe.

Or, to put it another way, just so much hot air.

Looking for a free online resource that will teach you to think like a businessperson, not just another struggling blogger? Check out Internet Marketing for Smart People, the Copyblogger email newsletter.

About the Author: Larry Brooks is the creator of Storyfix.com, an instructional resource for novelists and screenwriters. His book, The Six Core Competencies of Successful Storytelling, will be published by Writers Digest Books in early 2011.

I’ve always been of the opinion that if Carrie Bradshaw had popped onto our television screens in 2010 instead of 1998, she would have been a blogger. But alas, she didn’t, so she wrote a (gasp!) print column for the fictional New York Star newspaper.

Yes, before there were blogs, there were newspaper columns – where readers couldn’t talk back or share good content. ‘Carrie the blogger’ would have been huge.

Though the words of Carrie and her cohorts have not been etched in permalink stone, their messages linger on. And despite the fact that Carrie was allergic to the internet and only used her Apple Powerbook for word processing her articles, the lessons, ideas and, more pointedly, the actual quotes that came barreling out of Sex and the City still speak directly to us Copybloggers.

“You sleep with someone, all of a sudden you start rationalizing all of the red flags away.”

Now, hopefully, you aren’t sleeping with your clients, readers or other bloggers (on a regular basis). Typically, the copybloggers’ dangling carrot (no pun intended, I swear) isn’t sex, it’s money. The woo of money or product can, sometimes, have a debilitating affect on a blogger and their writing. Recently, an intern at TechCrunch got into heaps of trouble for exchanging a blog post for a laptop – for example.

But what about these red flags? For Carrie and the girls, the sex pulled the proverbial wool over their eyes, for bloggers, it’s the cash. These red flags could be anything from illicit blogging behavior, a client that is extremely difficult, a blog that practices black hat SEO, selling a product that might do harm or agreeing to write really bad copy. Will we rationalize these red flags away for income? Heck, will we even rationalize the rationalizing for income?

“The only thing you need to get a date…is another date.”

No truer words have been spoken. How do you get traffic to your blog? With traffic. How do you get guest posting opportunities? By guest posting. How do you get more followers on Twitter? By having a lot of followers on Twitter. How do you get a lot of inbound links to your blog? By having quality inbound links that tell more and more people about your blog.

The concept is based on two facts. One: people are followers – not everyone – but the majority of folks. They hear that Copyblogger.com is a great blog so they stop by and see that there are 100K+ subscribers and so they subscribe, because if everyone else thinks this blog is great, well then, it must be.

And two: success makes us pretty. When you feel good, when things are going well, it shows. Think about being in love – you look handsome, you feel thin, good hair days abound, you have that ‘glow’. When things are going well at the old blog, it’s contagious. Your writing flows, the comments are long and thoughtful, your sidebar fills up with stylish ads, quality inbound links stream in. And all of this makes people step up their level of engagement with you. They want to be around your success, they’re attracted to it and hoping your hotness will rub right off onto them. Like a moth to a flame, and your flame is on fire.

“Coulda, woulda, shoulda…”

Have you noticed that the blogosphere moves fast? Someone recently remarked to me that, ‘Yes, everything has already been created – but not by us.” It is the plight and rabid complaint of the blogger to say that everything has already been written about. To me, that’s the equivalent of saying that all of the letters in the alphabet have already been used, so there is nothing left to write. Are you kidding me?

You are unique. Sure, a zillion people are writing about SEO or hats or astrology. But there is only one you – with your experiences and thoughts and context – writing about it. So don’t live to see your ideas under someone else’s byline. Don’t say, coulda, woulda, shoulda. Seize the moment of inspiration. Write it down. Publish it. Share it with your community. Blogging affords us each ‘our moment’ of opportnity 24/7/365. Take it.

“Everyone thought Batman could beat the Green Hornet, but the Green Hornet won because he had Kato.”

Blogs are the ultimate platform for the underdog, the every person, the ‘nobody’. You don’t have to be batman to win – even the Green Hornet has a fighting chance. Yes, we do have our blogebrities, but new ones are ‘making it’ everyday. Remember two years ago hardly anyone had heard of Twitter. Blogs have made it possible for a broke, depressed woman to cook and share a la Julie Child and get a book deal and a movie option. And a couple of dudes made an online college yearbook that, within a few years, has grown to hold the pictures and information for a gazillion users. While we all can’t reach superstardom, many of us leverage our blogs for decent product sales, service business platforms and advertising traffic.

And don’t forget the Green Hornet’s secret weapon. Yep, Kato – the sidekick, the friend…ah, maybe even the JV partner? Blogging is simply not a solo pursuit. We need readers, we need community, we need mentors. If we’re really lucky, we have a partner or a small crew of people that support us, send readers to us, have our backs and generally serves as our ambassadors in the world. We do the same for them. I don’t know about you, but if I was going up against Batman, I’d want Kato on my side.

“The flowers were supposed to say ‘I’m sorry, I love you’ not ‘You’re dead, let’s disco!’”

When Miranda’s mom dies, Charlotte arranges to have flowers sent for the casket. Obviously, it didn’t go well. There are two issues at play here. The first is about being appropriate. Know your audience and community, know the blog that you’re writing for, know the product or service or person that you’re selling. If you don’t take the time to listen and get your context, you’re liable to send a wildly ill-suited message – the equivalent of showing up at the school dance in a tux when everyone else is wearing jeans.

The second issue is that Charlotte gave specific directions to the florist on what sort of flower arrangement she was looking for, she trusted they would listen and get it right…and they failed. As bloggers, we have to trust writers that we hire to create copy for us, guest bloggers whose content we rely on to feed our pipeline and other bloggers who promote us. These people bring their own personalities and agendas. Sometimes their arrangement is a match, sometimes it’s a disaster. When you depend on others, calculate the risk.

“Monogamy is fabulous. It gives you a deep and profound connection with another human being, and you don’t have to shave your legs as much.”

Monogamy is like the ultimate in stickiness. It happens when you find someone who is so irresistible that you want to be with them and only them all the time. We all want a blog that sticks. One that people read religiously every day, one that they love so much they tell all of their friends on Twitter and Facebook and Stumble and Digg about us. And when our content and design and value is as sticky as can be, what we really have is a deep and profound connection with our readers. We have trust, we have two-way communication – and hopefully resulting sales.

The end of this quote deserves a closer look. If you stop shaving your blog’s legs – if you let the content get stale, get lazy with your tags or compromise the UI, you’ll likely weaken these relationship bonds. Your value will go down in your readers’ eyes. Sure, no one will bat an eye if you forget to shave a few times, or even if you grow a little stubble…but, if I were you, I wouldn’t let the hair get so long you can braid it.

And those, are words to live and blog by…

Want more Sex and the City? Me too, always. Check out Jeff Sexton’s Copyblogger take on the four temperaments, the SATC ladies and what they tell us about headlines and titles. Good stuff!

About the Author: Lover of butter, wordplayer, marketing writer, ghostwriter, Julie Roads is the owner/founder of Writing Roads. Follow her on Twitter @writingroads.

If I asked you to define what an A-list blogger actually is, what would you say?

I’m sure the usual thoughts like “thousands of subscribers,” “lots of comments,” and “large influence” come to mind.

While these may be things that many of us agree on, they aren’t really about the blogger, they’re about the blog.

Yet it’s the writers behind the blog that position it at the top of an industry and gain so-called “A-list” status.

Now, of course, if you’re sitting on a feed count of 400 subscribers today, there’s no magic bullet that’s going to get you 4,000 subscribers tomorrow. But the key to building those numbers is to be the kind of blogger who attracts plenty of subscribers and links.

Today I want to offer the suggestion that instead of focusing on all the factors that define an A-list blog, let’s look at the factors that define an A-list blogger. The characteristics behind the men and women who build massively popular websites.

While I don’t personally think of myself as anything special, I have managed to build two blogs to a combined audience of 10,000 subscribers, and I call a few A-list bloggers my friends. Four years of blogging and interacting with thousands of people have helped me to see what it is about the “big guys” that makes them successful.

Now I’m going to share those findings so that you really can have the qualities of an A-list blogger, today.

Make content your # 1 focus

When it comes to blogging, there are plenty of important factors. Having a unique and professional design, a viable topic, a brandable logo, and clear options for subscribing are all important.

But without one factor, none of the rest of them matter.

All A-list bloggers recognize content as the biggest factor to their growth. As a quick scenario, let’s imagine that Brian Clark owned your website. Do you think if he wrote the high-quality content he did for Copyblogger and applied the same marketing strategies, that blog would go nowhere? Of course not. Copyblogger’s excellent content would do well on any relevant website and is what has kept people coming back here for more than four years.

I’m someone who gets obsessed with designing and tweaking sites for maximum conversion, so it took me a while to really implement this. In fact, I would say that I was blogging for almost two years without giving writing the focus it deserved.

It was only after I eventually took my head out of stats programs like Crazy Egg and BLVD Status (which are both fantastic, by the way) and put my effort into writing that I managed to build a 4,000-subscriber blog in 12 months.

Content is your main way to shine in an increasingly competitive field. Make sure that it’s getting your full attention.

Stick to your own guidelines

I believe that most bloggers reading this could eliminate all blog reading from their lives and still do well online.

Sure, it’s great to read the stories of people doing well and gain nuggets of knowledge that will help to improve your current offering.

But this knowledge-seeking becomes a problem when you allow your search for great information to change how you operate.

In the social media space, I am always changing, because it’s my job to be active on the latest service and see how it can best be used to connect with others in my niche.

My blogging strategy, though, rarely changes.

If you look carefully around your niche, different bloggers write very differently. You’ll find variations in things like:

• Posting frequency
• Writing style, tone, and voice
• Article length
• Use of images

In the internet marketing niche, the common length for most blog posts tends to be around 500-800 words. If you look at my own articles though, you will see that I regularly surpass 2,000 words. This is completely different from anyone else in the niche, but because I provide a lot of value in one place, it’s working well for me.

Just like you’ll probably never see Brian start publishing two or three posts every day, I’ll rarely write less than 1,000 words on my own website. You lose your winning difference the moment you do something because someone else is doing it.

Set your own guidelines and you’ll build an audience that will not only love what you have to say, but stick around because they expect more great things from you in the future.

Recognize your own influence

Everyone has some influence online, even if some have more than others. Growing that influence involves a lot of effort and a lot of time, but losing it can happen overnight.

Even if you only have 10 twitter followers and your blog hasn’t yet received its first comment, you still have influence. And that means you have a responsibility to give people the best advice and value that you can.

If you care about your audience and put value first, your influence will grow more quickly than you might think.

Look at “who,” not “what”

Looking at who is behind a blog and trying to model how they achieved what they did, rather than focusing on the end result as we usually do, has been a big game-changer for me.

I hope I’ve helped you see that most of you are A-list bloggers already — you just need to leverage that talent. Focus on your content, stick to your own guidelines, and use the influence you have today to help your audience.

Those thousands of subscribers are waiting for you. You’ve just got to be ready for them.

About the Author: Glen Allsopp is a 20-year-old who travels the world and makes his living online. If you like what he has to say, check out more of his work at ViperChill.

This morning I grabbed a copy of Chris Garrett’s new guide on Guest Blogging from http://guestposting.info.

It’s a 20-page detailed PDF for only $10, which gets you a membership with even more helpful guest blogging tools & guides to come.

Guest blogging is actually one of my favorite marketing methods. It’s one of the best ways to gain exposure, build a list, grow a readership, and get high quality one-way inbound links for traffic and search engine rankings.

You don’t even need a blog of your own to put this strategy to work for you. It’s a great way to get exposure to any website or offer online. And offline businesses would do well to work with local community bloggers…

This video explains exactly what you can expect for your ten bucks:

I decided to grab this great resource in addition to Nicole Dean’s guest blogging guide, as I like to learn from a variety of resources. Put together you’re spending less than 30 bucks for something that can dramatically increase your traffic, readership, search engine rankings – and ultimately your online sales.

Chris Garrett is the co-author of Problogger the book alongside Darren Rowse. Darren also has an amazing special going on, which actually ends later tonight. The last I checked there was about 15 hours left to go…

http://www.probloggerworkbook.com

If you order now, you’ll get 3 new exclusive bonuses:

1. a report: 9 Things to Do to Get Your Blog On Track in The New Year
2. a 55 minute podcast with successful blogger Leo Babauta
3. a 45 minute podcast with successful blogger Neil Patel

All in all the extra content is a bit under 2 hours of audio and an extra 9 days of teaching and exercises – it is a content rich bonus offer on top of the existing 1 hour Question and Answer podcast that he’s already been offering.

See http://www.probloggerworkbook.com for the details on each bonus. The price is still under 20 bucks!

3 great blogging resources to make 2010 a huge success

Best,

As bloggers, we all occasionally run out of gas when it comes to new content. We’ve been writing about the same topic, some of us on a daily basis — how are we supposed to find something new to say?

The trick is in finding a new way to tell an old story — and when it comes to finding new ways to say the same things, I find it’s best to defer to the experts.

And by “the experts,” I mean “people who were insightful enough for their words to be quoted to this day.”

That’s right, you want to break out that dusty copy of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, people. Great quotations are the richest goldmine for blog post ideas you’ll ever have. (Wikiquote works just as well, but it’s hard to “break out” Wikiquotes unless you’re willing to sacrifice your computer screen to your cause.)

No, I haven’t gone all sensitive arteeste on you. You’re not looking for literary gems, you’re looking for a good practical technique to get that blog post written.

Allow me to demonstrate

Let’s say you want to write a blog post about, oh, success. Faulkner says:

Don’t bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.

What do you think about that? Can you create a blog post about success from that idea? Can you talk about how you’ve spent time trying to be better than this blogger or that blogger, but that you should really just try to be better than you were six months ago?

What about this one?

I couldn’t wait for success, so I went ahead without it.
~ Jonathan Winters

Agree or disagree, that’s a pretty profound idea. Keep moving forward even though you’re not a success? Does that mean you attain success only when you stop pursuing it? What does it mean?

Whatever pops to mind when you think of that quote, go write about it.

Great quotes will crush writer’s block no matter what the topic. Let’s say you blog about movies.

Photography is truth. The cinema is truth twenty-four times per second. ~ Jean-Luc Godard

If you can’t get a blog post out of that statement, refuting it or agreeing with it or just getting your own take on it, then something is seriously wrong.

Don’t limit yourself to quotes about your specific topic

If you write about blogging, for example, you’re not going to find a ton of quotes on that topic, for the simple reason that it hasn’t been around all that long.

That doesn’t mean quotes can’t help you burst through writer’s block, though. You just have to apply some universal concepts to your topic.

Try this as an exercise: Below are five quotes about topics general to the human experience. Whatever you blog about, no matter how obscure, see if you can’t apply at least one of those quotes and get a blog post out of it.

I bet you will. What’s more, I’ll bet you’ll be back to Wikiquote next week looking for new sources of inspiration. And you’ll find them, too. All those quotes were written down because the people who heard them knew they would continue to inspire thought, debate, and new wisdom for future generations.

Five to get you started

So here are your quotes. May you get at least three blog posts out of every one.

1. The funniest things are the forbidden. ~ Mark Twain
2. The freelance writer is a man who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps. ~ Robert Benchley
3. Business, you know, may bring money, but friendship hardly ever does. ~ Jane Austen
4. The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity. ~ Dorothy Parker
5. Over the piano was printed a notice: Please do not shoot the pianist. He is doing his best. ~ Oscar Wilde

And to give your fellow bloggers even more to work with, how about sharing your most bloggable quotes with us in the comments?

About the Author: For more excellent cures for boredom, head on over to James Chartrand’s blog at Men with Pens, where no one shoots pianists but where everyone gets a shot at reaching better freelance success. Or, you can grab the RSS feed here.

First, let’s get one thing out of the way. A blog alone, no matter how popular, isn’t enough to score you a book contract. It’s not quite that simple.

In other words, it doesn’t quite work the way it does on television.

“Did you hear that Random House gave me a million dollars for a book based on my blog?” chirps the hipster starlet as she emerges from a crowded Starbucks, caramel macchiato in hand. “And we’re working on the movie rights. Hey, let’s go for a ride in my Jag.”

But you already knew that real life is more complicated than a sit-com. So let’s talk about the critical role a blog does play in securing a book deal.

Here’s how it went down for me.

A book deal is made up of several moving parts

First, any successful book proposal needs a credible, straight-line, value-promising connection to a hungry target audience.

In other words, exactly the same kind of well-defined niche expertise that makes most blogs work.

Remember our sit-com blogger with the book deal? She got there because she’s oh-so-witty and wise. Think Carrie Bradshaw.

That’s not the real world. Unless your book is about collecting Manolo Blahniks, real-life book deals are about having something valuable to offer a reader, not how fabulous you are.

And because of that, you don’t need huge numbers to make it happen. What you do need is cachet within the niche you’ve defined.

Before my own deal, I’d assumed I would need a subscriber base big enough to fill the Rose Bowl. Why else would a publisher be interested?

And sure, a massive Feedburner number helps.

But in my case, my subscriber base today would fill the conference room at your average Marriott. Not that I’m complaining — after only six months it’s growing just fine, thanks.

But it does illuminate the point: Raw numbers aren’t as important as making a solid connection with a well-defined audience around a valuable niche topic.

My own blog-to-book deal

Before my site launched I was just a crusty old copywriter and a mid-list novelist who had almost, but not quite, hit it big. Not John Grisham big, more like Kyle Mills or Lisa Jackson kind of big.

There are lots of us in that category. Fiction has more near-misses than an American Idol audition.

Lucky for me, though, hardly any of those writers are blogging about it.

While teaching writing on the workshop circuit, I developed a proprietary story development model called The Six Core Competencies of Successful Storytelling.

My blog is about that well-defined niche, within the larger topic of writing. And without that angle, no matter how popular a blog I might build, there would be no book deal.

One quickly notices that my book deal isn’t about my brand as a fiction writer, which frankly has seen better days. It’s not even about my journey as a writing instructor.

It’s about my story development model. My niche expertise.

Neither my blog nor my forthcoming book are about me. Never have been. They’re about you, the writer with a dream.

In other words, people don’t come to my site (and they won’t read my book) because of my novels. They come because of their novels.

A platform is essential

Today, you need an “author platform” to successfully pitch a book to a publisher.

What’s an author platform? It’s how you’ll be doing the promotion for your book. Nine times out of ten, it means your blog.

No blog, no deal, unless you’ve got another great way to get the word out about your book. (For example, you’re a celebrity or a popular speaker.)

That wasn’t the case as little as two or three years ago.

These days, you don’t just pitch a detailed idea for a book. You also pitch the audience that’s going to buy that book. Not only does your platform provide a built-in group of buyers, it also shows the publisher that your ideas resonate with the audience you’ve defined.

The formula for a successful blog-to-book deal

Solid author platform plus unique value proposition equals marketable book. The formula is really that simple.

If both are in place, you don’t need to be a famous blogger with big numbers to score a book contract.

You just need to write a killer proposal, with a well-defined niche topic focusing on your audience, fortified by a successful author platform in the form of a growing blog.

This formula might not get a book publisher to throw sit-com dollars at you. But it gives you a much better chance than even the most fabulous designer wardrobe.

About the Author: Larry Brooks is the creator of Storyfix.com, an instructional resource for novelists and screenwriters. His book, The Six Core Competencies of Successful Storytelling, will be published by Writers Digest Books in early 2011.

Hello there. I’m Scott Tousignant your guest blogger for the week, helping you become super-focused and highly productive by incorporating home office fitness into your busy workday. Today I’m going to share a quickie cardio session that will help you burn off some of that Thanksgiving turkey and stuffing. You will also discover how living an active lifestyle can create greater networking opportunities, which can really give your business a boost.

Let’s talk networking since the NAMS 3 workshop is just around the corner. I absolutely love attending live events. It’s one of the best ways to connect with like-minded entrepreneurs.

If you have been to a live Internet Marketing event I have a question for you. Have there been people at these events that you found yourself immediately attracted to? I’m not asking whether or not you thought they were ‘hot’. I mean, did they radiate positive energy and come across as someone that you immediately wanted to learn more about.
Read the rest of this entry

With all this talk I’ve been doing about guest blogging & blog interviews, and one way link opportunities…
I completely forgot that my dear friend (and brilliant marketer) – Nicole Dean – recently published a complete guide on that very topic!

It’s called the Blog World Tour Planner and it comes with a 38 page detailed guide, an idea generator, research worksheet, sample email for contacting bloggers, and a “blog tour” planning spreadsheet.

The price? Only $17!

Not mentioning this earlier was a major oversight on my part. I’ve been a bit out of the loop lately after that spell of my daughter being ill, and in a mad catch-up phase ever since. At any rate – my apologies. This is definitely something you’ll want to hear about, so I sat down last night to give it a proper Lynn-style review…

Nicole Dean’s Summer Blog Tour

You may recall that Nicole was a guest blogger here at ClickNewz for an entire week over the summer. My blog was just one of her many stops in what she called her Blog World Tour where she made appearances as a guest blogger across popular blogs all over the web, week after week.

It was a huge success in many respects – from high-quality inbound links to tons of exposure & traffic, and even setting up long-term passive streams of income.

Nicole is brilliant like that, coming up with creative new ideas and documenting every detail. Not only do I like and respect her as a friend, but as a marketer – I pick her brain every chance I get!

The Blog World Tour Guide for Guest Blogging

As I mentioned, this package comes with a detailed guide and a number of super-helpful bonuses to help you take immediate action and get started with your own guest blogging venture.

Sure you can go it alone, and figure everything out as you go – or you can take all the guesswork out of it and just get started for only 17 bucks. That’s kind of a no-brainer, if you ask me.

The guide starts out giving you some insight into how people think, and how Nicole’s idea was born. If you’re smart, you’ll read those couple of pages carefully and consider other ways you can apply that to your business. It’s a simple but brilliant thought process – just one of the things I love about Nicole.

Even though I was part of her summer blog tour, I never knew exactly what all went into it – or that she ultimately wrote 75 blog posts across 15 different blogs (not including her own). Wow!

Obviously you don’t have to go to that extreme – or you could set out to out-blog Nicole Dean if you like – but either way just ONE of those blog posts is worth way more than 17 dollars. Consider that just one post on one blog equals a permanent high quality one-way inbound link.

Or let’s say you have a product of your own that you sell, and your guest post ranks high for a specific keyword phrase. That one blog post could result in ongoing product sales for months – or even years…

Nicole discusses the benefits of guest blogging, or doing a “blog tour” as she calls it, and she also discusses the benefits to the bloggers – why they would agree to let you guest blog, and how to make the offer even more enticing to them.

Having been involved in her blog tour personally, I can tell you that what she did was a HUGE benefit to me. I’d let her come back and guest blog here anytime! And my personal experience from that side of her guide gets me even more excited about using her methods myself…

By the way – she details out tips for you in the guide that make blog owners LOVE having you as a guest, and BEG you to come back and write for them again. Obviously those tips worked on me, so I paid special attention there!

The guide is laid out in steps, starting with choosing your commitment and your objective. You might need inbound links, or you might use this as part of a pre-launch buzz campaign for your product, or you may be recruiting affiliates.

There are a number of reasons to consider guest blogging, and a variety of ways to use it for major leverage and advantage.

Nicole goes through the process of finding the right blogs in great detail, as well as which blogs to avoid (and why). She also gives you a spreadsheet to keep track of each blog and their details, with screenshots of how she used it herself.

Organization & scheduling is covered as well – such as creating an editorial calendar you can share with an assistant, if you choose to outsource some of the groundwork. Even if you’re doing this on a small scale and managing the details yourself, this part is very helpful. Nothing like dropping the ball on a promise made…

By the way, Page 18 shares 3 resources I had NO idea even existed. Be sure to check those out

The Bonus Planning Tools

The guide itself is incredibly rich in ideas and step-by-step instructions, but the tools included is where this product really overdelivers. The “idea generator” that I mentioned earlier is a brainstorming resource for coming up with topics to blog about. Very helpful for those that struggle with writing but really want to make this work for them.

Also included is a guest blogging planner – particularly helpful if you’re going to be doing a full-on blog tour like Nicole, but also a very handy spreadsheet to use as an editorial planner for your own blog plus your guest blogging opps.

To recap the bonus tools included, you get the 38-page guide plus:

• Content Idea Generator
• Blog Research Spreadsheet
• Same Email To Bloggers
• Editorial Calendar Spreadsheet

All that, for only $17. Click here to get started!

Best,

p.s. I was hanging out with Nicole over the summer, during her vacation here in TN and at an event where we roomed together in early August. She was right in the middle of her now famous Blog Tour both of those times, so I got to see her in action firsthand.

That’s in addition to seeing how it all worked when she made her stop here at my blog – and experiencing the sales & traffic that she brought to ClickNewz. Nothing short of amazing. But what was most amazing about it was that, while Nicole IS brilliant in her creative marketing ideas, she simply rolled up her sleeves and did it.

And that my friends is what sets Nicole Dean, and other successful online marketers, apart from the rest- apart from the hopefuls and wannabe’s.

You can sit around and need inbound links, want to sell more product, or wish you could recruit more affiliates- or you can download these tools and take action.

I’m off to quit talking about it, and get started setting up these awesome tools…