There’s little doubt that blogging is a terrific way to accomplish many objectives in your online business. You can inject regular, relevant streams of content, communicate your ideas, aims, and feelings about almost anything to your readership, and even use your blog as a selling platform. All this and more is easily accomplished. What is harder sometimes, is actually finding topics to blog about. As easy as this may seem, there are times when the well seems to have run dry, and you’re stuck for ideas. Here’s what to do when this happens!

Keep Up With the Jones’s

Scour your market and field for news, launches, research, and any thing else from thought-leaders in your space. These people have something to say: and perhaps some of it actually shapes who you are becoming. Sometimes a person you are following has a great piece on something that rings a bell with you, and you are uniquely positioned to not only comment on it, but give it your own spin. This works well with your competitors also. Just make sure to attribute anything you directly  use, and you’ll be fine.

You can find items like these by setting a Google Alert, or simply by subscribing to the feeds of the leaders in your industry. This will give you plenty of fodder for your blog posts!

Beyond The News

Beyond any news items, check the social networks to see what people are talking about in the market. This is also a great way to give the people what they’re interested in, and put yourself in the position of someone who has some of the answers!

Consider a series. Sometimes a topic is too broad to be covered in the space of one blog post, so try to break it up into as many parts as makes sense. This also helps bring people back, particularly if you are sharing socially.

Finally, care about your audience enough to ask their opinion. Chris Brogan always likes to sign off his posts with a question posed to his readers, thus encouraging comment and conversation. I can only imagine the number of ideas for posts this small device has given him! What do you think?

You may have heard the term “guest post” before. Website owners are always in search of great content, and if you are one, you know this all too well! Writing a guest post for another blog in your market is a terrific way to not only help them with their content dilemma, but also for you to realize some very real traffic and backlinks in the process! Let’s look at some of the things you’ll want to consider when choosing to make a guest post!

• Find a High-Profile Blog – You don’t want to make a guest post just anywhere. The point here is to find a blog which accepts guest posts and that has a large, active,  and involved readership. There are blogs out there that get tens of thousands of visitors a day. A popular post on one of these (which, remember can also be syndicated or otherwise referenced out to other, equally as popular blogs), can bring a huge influx of visitors to your blog in a flash, not to mention a large number of very natural backlinks!
• Develop The Relationship – Start by interacting on their blog. Making insightful comments, contribute to the conversation, become a part of their community, and look for ways to connect with the blogger in a more personal way. Follow  up this activity with an email to the blog owner, who should, by now, be familiar with at least your name if you’ve been active on their blog. Ask if they would be interested in a guest post on “your hot topic.” You will very likely be accepted, upon approval of the quality of the post, and start the beginning of a wonderful blog to blog relationship.
• Do Your Best Work! – This should go without saying, but here I am saying it! It’s vital to present your best work, because not only are you putting it on someone else’s blog, it’s your big chance to get a large return in visitors and links with a relatively small investment of time and effort! Give it your best shot!
• Promote Your Guest Post -  This is one that most guest bloggers neglect: promote your own guest post on their blog. Yes, their blog! Send out the word to your Twitter and Facebook and start pumping the promotional engines. This will work in concert with whatever the other webmaster has in  place on their blog, and could effectively double your return.

Using guest  posts is a terrific way to get links, visitors, and enhance your own reputation. Make sure it’s a part of your marketing arsenal!

There’s just really no way to get around it –if you are hoping to create an online presence that in any way includes yourself, you need to have your own blog from which to build your online persona and brand. There is simply no easier or more efficient way to spread your message and content around the web than by utilizing your own blogging platform for all it’s worth. Fortunately for you, doing this is drop dead simple, and your biggest challenge will not come on the technical side, but rather in consistently adding great content to give your readers something to talk about! Let’s talk about how you get started.

The easiest way to get started is by installing a WordPress blog on your own site. I say this knowing full well there are multiple options for free blogs out there, and while they are very useful for many marketing purposes, having your own business on a site you don’t own is simply not a good idea. So, spend the $5 a month extra it will take and put up your own blog that no one can tell you what to do with! Moreover, besides the obvious ownership issues, you will be able to market more effectively from your own site, while on a free blog you are extremely limited.

Once you’ve got the blog up, set about making it as social as humanly possible by linking it to other sites you own, particularly any social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, and others where you may already have a following. These sites can help one another in your marketing efforts and you will benefit from the interplay. Then, get busy creating great content and sharing other terrific items you have found from around the Web. The more you help others with the information and usefulness of your blog, the more popular you will become, and in the long run this translates into more subscribers, followers, sales, and so on.

In time, you will find that the time you spend cultivating your brand on your blog will pay off in increased authority and visitor trust — two critically important elements of building any online business. Don’t put it off another day!

Every now and then you’ve probably come across the concept of syndicating your content onto a blog network. There are many of them out there, (we have a blogging network here, for instance) some for commercial purposes, but many more of a private nature. Many of the uber-successful internet marketers have their own networks that they have been nurturing for years, and they are able to use them to point serious link juice to any property they wish. Let’s take a closer look at how they work.

Blog networks serve several purposes. First, they are a source of incoming links to your blog, usually using anchor text links with your keywords. This can be a big benefit for several reasons. The links are in the body text, not as a linkroll or sidebar, and thus prized more by Google. They are focused on your keywords, which will help you in ranking for that keyword phrase, and they are far more likely to be read and found when in the body of the article than if they were sequestered on a sidebar somewhere.

Other reasons include the direct traffic you receive, (while not usually a lot, having your content on a lot of them can make a difference) and the realtionships and conversations that may involve you and even make their way onto your blog.

Many blog networks are little more than link farms, and those should be avoided. Google will eventually find them out and kill their effectiveness. The primary giveaway is the quality of the content and the spammy nature of not only the blogs themselves, but the links and the sites they link to.

The best blog networks do work very well, and the reason they do is that they are selective about the types of sites and content they allow in, and enforce strict rules about this. They have been around a while, have page rank of their own, and are able to pass this on.

If you are thinking of utilizing either a public or private blog network, aim high as far as quality goes, and you may be well rewarded down the road!

Blog commenting used to be a terrific way way to get some juicy, high-quality inbound links to your site. You could sit down and in an afternoon, come up with a bunch of high PageRank (PR) links that could really help your link profile. And the best part of it all was it was so doggone easy!

Notice I said “used to be” and “was.”  Today with the advent of the “no-follow” attribute, much of the lustre of blog comment links for passing link juice to your site is gone. Most popular blogs now have that tag in place, and while the jury is still out as to whether or not the link is counted, the consensus seems to be that while it is noticed and catalogued, it does not pass PR. The easy days are over.

But hang on here. The links are still there, and what remains is the reason blog comments were created in the first place; to foster communication and build relationship. So for me, blog commenting remains a terrific way of getting your site noticed, whether or not a search engine cares. The key lies in using them to create relationships and buzz where you’d like to be known. You can find ways to comment and insert yourself into the conversation on blogs and forums you really like. They may be industry leaders, marketers you respect, niche leading sites, or any other place where it would be advantageous for you to be found. Likewise, your link is also found, and you’ll be surprised at how effective this can be.

You will start to be known as someone who is serious about the subject and has something to offer (even if at first that’s merely questions). Plus, the best part of the deal is that occasionally you’ll strike a chord and get a spike of traffic to your site, resulting in more good things, whether they be sales, opt-ins or bookmarks. The ultimate prize should be, in my opinion, a link within a blog post recommending you or your site. This can only be accomplished if you take the time to write thoughtful comments, and become part of the community (this can also lead to opportunities to guest-post, which is incredibly more valuable than a blog comment).

While we all want and need incoming links to our sites, you would do well to lose the obsession with garnering only no-follow links, and focus instead on using comments for what they were intended for. Everybody wins!

Oh, and as always, comments are welcomed and appreciated!