One of the first things every blogger needs to do is decide what topic their blog is going to focus on. For some people this is a no brainer because they are so passionate about one particular subject but there are many people (like me) who have a wide range of interests, so the decision becomes a little more difficult.

I’m thinking of starting a new blog and have been doing some research into several topics so I’d like to share with you all some of the factors I have been considering.

• Are you passionate about the subject

  This has been said many times in the past but it is by far one of the more important factors to consider when choosing a blog topic therefore it’s something you need to remember – You need to be interested in the topic you are blogging about. It is very difficult to find any motivation to blog about a subject you have no interest in. Blogging about a topic you have no interest in is the number 1 reason bloggers lose interest in blogging.

• Will it be easy to find inspiration for posts

  You may be passionate about a subject and have a lot of knowledge about it though there may come a time when you will have said everything you can on the topic.

  Which is why you should research every topic and find out what your inspiration for posts will be. Will it come from news stories, magazines, books or life experience. Spend some time thinking about what articles you could write on your blog if you focused on a certain subject. It will give you an idea of what you will face if you do launch it.

• Time

  How much time would I need to develop this blog? Some topics will require more research which means you will have less time to work on your other projects. Bear this in mind.

• Competition

  Study the successful blogs within the niche. Why are they successful? Can you bring something extra to the table? Researching the competition will give you an idea of what you will need to do make your new blog a success.

• How can you make money

  In the short term your main focus should be about establishing your blog and gaining readership. However in the medium to long term you need to try and make your blog profitable, therefore you need to have some sort of plan of how to do this from the very start. Will it purely be from advertising, will you sell a product, will you create a premium members area etc.

  You also need to remember that some niches are more profitable than others. I would never blog about a subject purely because it had better advertising rates because as I noted earlier, you need to be passionate about the subject. Though you should be aware of the ad rates within the niche.

Finding the Right Topic

If you are struggling to think of a topic to blog about then my advice to you is to research, research research. Think about where your inspiration for posts will come from, think about how you will launch the blog and how you will make money from it in the long term.

You may be tempted to rush in and start your blog though I encourage you to take your time so that you make the right decision. An extra week of research isn’t long when compared to the years you could be running the blog so take your time.

I have shared some of the factors I consider when looking into what niche to develop a blog in however I am sure that many of you look at different factors so I’d love to hear the steps you take when choosing your new blogs topic.

Good luck,
Kevin

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How to Find the Right Topic for Your New Blog


A selection of e-books to help you improve as a blogger. Find out more at www.bloggingtips.com/books/

You could go through the trouble of manufacturing and marketing a physical product, but there are so many additional logistics that you’ll need to handle as a result. That’s why so many Internet entrepreneurs have turned to the digital marketplace for selling their digital products.

The great thing is that you don’t need to be a coding wizard to set up an online storefront for your various products. Instead, you can turn to a convenient service like DPD: Digital Product Delivery. It’ll take care of the entire shopping cart experience, including the hosting of your digital products.

Selling E-Books, Video Courses, and More

Digital Product Delivery (DPD) looks like a very robust service, marketing itself as the “easy way to sell downloads.”

In short, you sign up for an account, set up your websites within the system, and upload your digital products accordingly. Each digital product can only consist of one file, so if you have a multi-file product, you’ll need to compress it into a single ZIP or RAR file.

One of the great things about this shopping cart utility is that it can handle products sold across multiple websites. This way, you don’t need to set up separate accounts for each of the websites that you own. It can also handle multiple products per site, offering full analytic data for each.

For more on DPD and what it has to offer, check out the features and options page on their website.

How to Add a New Product

After you establish your first website within the DPD user dashboard, you can go to the page to add your first product. This offers a simple form with plenty of fields for your customization desires.

Each product will be associated with a specific storefront (website). That field is pre-filled. Other fields include product name, price, SKU, product description, product image, and the return URL where customers are sent after they have completed downloading the product.

In the universal settings for the site, you can define the payment processors (like PayPal), purchase download limit, download time limit, and tracking HTML. It would have been nice if these settings could be overridden for individual products, but the universal settings will fit for most circumstances.

Front and Backend Support

To help you with sales, DPD also comes with several additional features.

Choose from numerous “buy now” buttons to embed on your various websites, including those that work with an “add to cart” (multi-item checkout) configuration and those with a “buy now” (single item checkout) configuration. You can also establish affiliate programs for your various products, further helping to promote their sales.

Plans for Business of All Sizes

Unlike some other digital marketplaces that charge you on a per transaction basis, DPD offers flat rate plans. All plans come with unlimited bandwidth and transactions, and only the smallest plan limits your product space.

Monthly prices range from $5 to $30, making for a very affordable e-commerce solution, especially since it can handle multiple sites and multiple products.

Link: DPD

* This was a Paid Review. If you are interested in having your site reviewed on Blogging Tips, please check out our Advertising Information Page.

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DPD: All-in-One E-Commerce Solution


A selection of e-books to help you improve as a blogger. Find out more at www.bloggingtips.com/books/

Of course blogs aren’t the only type of content on the Internet these days and more and more companies and individual business owners are asking for articles. These generally get distributed to websites that scatter them across ezines and other locations, so if you can adopt some kind of formula to write these you’ll produce professional results when you need them.

Most good articles present the facts in descending order of importance. This allows the reader the advantage of getting the most important information right away so they can make a quick decision about whether they want to read the entire piece or not.

This model also allows you to trim from the bottom of the story if you go over the allocated word count without changing the meaning.

The Lead Of The Article

The lead of the article should interest the reader by highlighting the most important parts of the story. It should be a maximum of one paragraph long for most of the articles that you’ll write for the Internet. Remember here that shorter is better; when most internet readers see large blocks of type they tend to shy away from reading the whole piece.

The Body Of The Article

The body of the article should develop the lead by providing more detail. This is the point where you can sharpen the piece by adopting a few tricks of the trade.

1. Remember not to cram too many diverse ideas into one paragraph. When you’ve got a lot of good information about what you’re writing about, there can be a tendency to want to share all of it at once to make yourself look thorough. Hold back a bit and try to use only one or two of those pieces of information. That way the reader has an easier time digesting them.
2. Paragraphs should also be limited to one to three sentences in length. Remember the average web reader will scan over the article for interesting information before deciding whether they want to read the whole thing or not. Providing them with short brief sentences helps them to digest the information.
3. 3. The right detail makes the article vivid.

She did a number of different things before becoming a writer.

sounds better as:

Before starting a career writing science fiction, she worked on a cruise ship and     as a short order cook in a fast food restaurant.

It’s also a good idea to use quotes when possible.  A good quote tends to change the flow of the article and provides the reader with an informative break from the text.

Finally you’ll need to tie things up at the end with some kind of summary or ending. If you feel that you’ve adequately gone through all the points that you need to in the body of the article, there are other ways of ending the piece other than the summary. A final note highlighting one final aspect of the topic of the article is a good alternate.

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Constructing A Good Article


A selection of e-books to help you improve as a blogger. Find out more at www.bloggingtips.com/books/

Since I’m constantly searching the Web, I’m always looking for tools to help me keep track of things I find along the way. I currently use Read It Later and Speedtile for saving web pages and Amplify for sharing parts of web pages on my social networks. Well, gotProject is a new tool that also comes in handy for clipping parts of web pages, and definitely worth a look.

By simply adding a bookmarklet to your browser bookmarks bar, you can clip and save web pages, text, images and videos with just a few clicks. You can then go back to your gotProject dashboard to view all of your content and even organize them into projects.

Clipping content is easy. Once you click the bookmarklet you’ll get a popup in the top right of your window. This is where you can edit the title of your clipping or share it on Twitter and Facebook. If you just want to clip the entire page, there’s nothing left to do but click on “clip”. If you want to clip some text or an image it takes an additional step.

To clip text you simply highlight the text you want to save after clicking on the bookmarklet. The great thing about selecting text is that after you highlight it and it’s automatically added to the box, you can edit and add to the text. To clip images you’ll need to click on the image you want to save after clicking on the bookmarklet.

From your gotProject dashboard you’ll see all of your clipped items on the left hand column. In the main area is a search bar. Once you have a lot of clippings, I’m sure it will be hard to find specific items; this is where the search bar comes in handy. The main content area is also where projects are displayed. A project is basically a folder that you create and then you can add clippings to it.

There is also a note feature that lets you add notes directly on the site, which will display along with your clippings. You can double click on anything in that left hand column, in order to open it up.

gotProject is in beta so I’m sure that more features are sure to come. I would definitely love to see an option for sharing projects with friends and even a way to collaborate with friends with be nice. Even if this doesn’t happen, it’s still a great, useful tool that I plan to use quite often.

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Clip Content from Around the Web with gotProject


A selection of e-books to help you improve as a blogger. Find out more at www.bloggingtips.com/books/

We all get them. It doesn’t matter how well written an article is, how much you’ve researched and gotten the facts down, there’s always someone out there just looking for a someone to attack. I get my fair share. I’m almost sure I will get nasty comments on this post.

Why?

I’ve come to several conclusions.

1. They’re just looking for a back link and traffic any way they can get it; even at the expense of a writer. Unfortunately, there are people in the world who thrive on chaos and stirring up a fuss.

2. They can’t think of anything intelligent to say in response to your material so they have to rip you apart for being a human writer.

3. They have no tactful way of pointing out an error you’ve made. This is either due to limited vocabulary or intelligence.

4. It’s easier to point out someone else’s fault than it is to look at your own.

5. Some people have nothing better to do.

I’ve been chided for missing one word in an entire article. Do I take these seriously? It really depends on who’s doing the chiding and how well written the comment is.

How do you handle these people? Here’s a few of my best tips. If you have others, please feel free to share them.

1. If it’s your own blog, you have several options; you can simply delete the comment, retaliate and defend yourself or ignore it.

I often choose to ignore them. Most readers are smart enough to spot those types of people who are just looking to stir something up. I leave the comments to let the readers judge the intelligence (or lack thereof) for themselves.

Yes, it is possible the readers will click the profile link and give them the traffic they seek.  But it’s short lived traffic.

Defending yourself in these matters can be tricky business. You don’t want to present yourself in a bad light with the readers. Stooping to someone else’s level rarely gets you anywhere. It simply brings you down. If the comment is bad enough to force your hand into action, it’s best to delete the comment and be done with it.

2. If it’s a guest or paid post on another blog, you still have basically the same options as above, except you will need the blog owner to investigate and make the decision if the comment should be deleted.

I also suggest that you not argue with the commenter on someone else’s blog. In my personal experience, I’ve always thanked the commenter for pointing out something I’ve missed. I am human. I’ve also had the same commenter return and keep trying to rile me up; obviously showing my appreciation to them wasn’t enough. In those cases, I ignore any other comments from them.

Simply thank them and move on. If they return, ignore them or bring it to the attention of the blog owner. The majority of other readers and commenters simply ignore these types of people as well.

There are NO perfect writers in the world. I’ve seen mistakes by writers with a degree in journalism and/or majored in English. I’ve seen mistakes by #1 New York Times Best Selling Authors and I’ve seen mistakes by writers who don’t have a degree but are still great writers. I have many writer friends who hold degrees and have an exceptional grasp of grammar and punctuation. They make mistakes as well. We miss things. We are human.

I personally find it quite inspirational to find a mistake by writers I consider better than I am, writers who have more education and are experts in their field. Why? Because I know I don’t have to live up to some invisible standard that doesn’t really exist in the first place. It’s also refreshing to know that, yes, writers are human. We are not robots or pre-programmed computers. We make mistakes. Sometimes we miss those mistakes. If you want to point them out, feel free to do so. We’d appreciate it, especially if you do so out of kindness instead of meanness.

Unfortunately, there are those who’d rather look for and point out a mistake than to take the context of the material and use it. We can’t stop or avoid those people, but we don’t have to acknowledge them either.

Allow me to repeat something extremely important: There are NO perfect writers in the world.

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Dealing with Rude Comments


A selection of e-books to help you improve as a blogger. Find out more at www.bloggingtips.com/books/

DoYouBuzz is a quick way to create a social media friendly online resume. It offers a lot of tools that can be used to create that perfect resume while helping you build your own personal brand and buzz on the Web. DoYouBuzz is stylish, very easy to use and a great way to WOW future employers.

When you sign up you’ll be asked to enter your name. The name that you enter will also be used for your personal URL. So, your URL will look like this: www.doyoubuzz.com/firstname-lastname. This is not something that can be customized unless you decide to get a premium account. You’ll also enter some basic info such as your desired position, professional status and availability. Lastly it will give you the option to import information from LinkedIn and/or Viadeo.

If you choose to import from LinkedIn or Viadeo, you can choose the info you want to import. Options for this are: about me, professional experience, education, interests and/or skills. This only takes a few seconds. After it’s done imported, all of your information will be available on the home tab of your resume. This information can be moved around, edited or deleted.

Even though your resume home page shows everything at a single glance, each section is actually broken up into tabs and can be viewed separately. The tabs on your resume will depend on which modules you decide to use. There are many modules to choose from such as contact information, links, your blog RSS, photos, videos, doc & pdf documents and even presentations. This really gives you a chance to showcase what you have to offer.

You also get to choose a design for your resume. Live previewing is available, so you can see how each one will look before making a final decision. There is also an export section that lets you share your resume on your Facebook profile. The DoYouBuzz Facebook applications allows you to add a tab to your profile displaying your resume. There are also badges available that can be used on other profiles to let people know about your resume.

Under settings you can add a description that will be displayed in search engine results. If you don’t want your resume to be displayed in search engines, you can easily turn this option to “no”. If you’d rather protect your resume with a password, you can do that as well.

If you are looking for even more options, DoYouBuzz Premium lets you have your own domain (www.firstname-lastname.com or www.firstnamelastname.com). If you don’t like either of those you can choose your own custom domain. You’ll also be able to create your resume in multiple languages, access premium designs and get unlimited portfolio storage. This is all for $49.00/year.

I think DoYouBuzz is great for those really wanting to make an impression on employers. You really have nothing to lose with the easy to use interface, numerous modules & settings and social integration. Plus it helps to give you a boost in search engines. In my opinion, DoYouBuzz is definitely a win-win resume creation tool.

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DoYouBuzz – A Professional Online Resume in Minutes


A selection of e-books to help you improve as a blogger. Find out more at www.bloggingtips.com/books/

The term “link bait” or “Digg bait” is sometimes used in a negative light, meant to indicate a type of post that is meant to pander to a lower element than most blog posts. But while this can be true and often times is, it is also not always the case.

What the term “link bait” actually means is that the post is the type of work others will want to link to. The types of content people want to link to is as varied as the types of content available on the Web, ranging from pure garbage to enlightened discussion.

However, creating a link bait post is not something that just happens by accident. It requires both a good idea, great writing and a structure that is easy to read. However, if you can master the art, you can literally grow your site overnight by generating countless Twitter mentions, inbound links and even social networking references.

In short, link bait posts may not be the reason regular readers hang around, but they are often how they find your site in the first place.

Step 1: Know Your Audience

Before you put the first word down on paper, you need a good idea and, to get that, you have to know what your audience wants to know more about.

Specifically, you need to know the topics and keywords they are interested in and you can glean that reasonably easily by looking at your site’s statistics and see what people are searching for when they find your site and then using a keyword research tool, such as the one available for Google Adwords, and see what comes up.

These are the terms you are going to want to include in the headline or headline of your post, ideally also mixing some in as subheads. You want this information to be front and center, both to make sure it ranks well in the search engines and that readers know instantly they have found what they were looking for.

Step 2: Craft a Catchy Headline

Though the debate about whether it is better to write the title before or after the body of the post will rage on, with link bait articles, you almost always want to start with the headline as it is the most important part of the work.

Your headline should use the keywords you gleaned from step one and should find a way to focus on conveying a message that the article both A) Has the information they desire and B) Doesn’t require too much effort to get it.

The easiest way to do that is to either phrase the headline, and thus the article, as either a list or as a comparison. A “Top X” list “X Steps” or “How X is Like Y” articles do very well as they are easily understood and viewed as being informative but easy to read.

Step 3: Include Visuals

Though including at least one image in your post is a good idea all of the time, it is especially crucial with posts you want to serve as link bait.

Images help posts stand out in RSS readers and also give social networking sites, like Digg and Reddit, something to use for thumbnails when displaying links to them. In short, a good visual helps a post get noticed almost everywhere it travels.

If you can include more images, it is usually better, but don’t throw in needless images that distract from the content. It is important to remember that the goal is to get the reader into the article, give them the information they want and get them out quickly so they can link to it.

Step 4: Break the Post Apart

Carving the post up into bite-sized chunks not only makes the article easier to read and more skimmable, but also more visually appealing. As I discussed in my previous article, writing for the eye is crucial for getting content read as few will sit down and parse through a mass of gray text.

Use large amounts of subheads, short paragraphs and a clear structure when writing your post. If you chose to go with a list format, this is likely done for you but you can follow it with almost any post type.

Failure to do this risks turning readers away and certainly discouraging them from sharing your link with others.

Step 5: Write Good Content

If you’ve done everything else, you have a good headline, a visual and a solid structure to your post. All you need to do now is fill in the blanks with good, useful information.

Though it is useful to be a talented writer, it is more important to be succinct and knowledgeable. If you stick to topics you know well or have researched heavily, you can add what the reader needs/wants to know and do so with a minimal number of words.

Though heavily-linked posts come in all lengths, most fall in the middle range, neither too short nor too long, but packed with enough information that they feel “dense” and useful.

Bottom Line

If you do these things will you be guaranteed a link bait post? Absolutely not. If you don’t do these things will a post never get linked? Of course not.

Simply put, there is no way to be completely sure that a post will attract the wanted level of attention when you hit publish. Sometimes, despite all of your best efforts, it just doesn’t work out and other times, when you aren’t trying, it does.

Instead, the goal of these steps is to give your post the best chance possible for success.

However, you probably will not want to use this formula for every post on your site (unless you are Cracked.com) as you need to cater to your regular readers and try to attract new ones at the same time.

But, if you do link bait very well, you can actually create articles that both generate a lot of links and are still useful to your regular readers. Those posts, as rare as they are, are truly the pinnacle of blog writing.

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Copyright © 2010 Blogging Tips. This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact us so we can take legal action immediately.

5 Steps to Write a Link Bait Post


A selection of e-books to help you improve as a blogger. Find out more at www.bloggingtips.com/books/

A couple of weeks ago, someone introduced me to Chrometa. It’s a time tracking application that aims to let you ’set it and forget it’ so you can see where you are spending your time. With Chrometa you can be sure that no action will go unrecorded as it tracks actions by the second. Unlike other similar apps, Chrometa includes the names of documents you have open plus the titles of your open browser tabs and, important for bloggers, the names of open documents in Windows Live Writer.

The program starts with your computer in the morning and resolutely tracks all your activity – and your inactivity. There’s no longer any need to guess how much time you spent away from your computer that you counted as work time. Chrometa logs inactive time too, and offers you the chance to tag it as meeting, phone or lunch – or input a custom tag.

Setting Up Chrometa

Let me describe how my Chrometa setup to illustrate how useful this is for professional bloggers. The first thing I did was create labels for all my main blogging and writing clients. I also created a label for myself, with sub-labels for common tasks such as checking email and doing my banking. it’s important to have these setup to take advantage of Chrometa’s killer feature – timestamp tagging. Click on the Timestamps button to see the time tracked that day. You can then apply timestamps to particular activities (such as logging when you worked on a post for a client) or applications (such as tagging Skype as phone calls). You can either apply timestamps individually to particular actions, highlight a group of actions to tag, or tag a particular group. Whichever you choose, you will find that there’s less tagging to do after a few days of using Chrometa.

The application’s options allow you to change the interval that’s logged as away time and to block tracking for certain applications.  You can navigate through different dates to see what you have done in a particular period or select day, week or month views to check activity for those time spans. You can even set custom date ranges. Oh, and you can pause tracking manually at any time.

Reporting and Exporting

Chrometa features a handy Excel export for keeping your data outside the application, but I find this less useful than the window view which shows me what percentage of my time is spent where.  One thing’s for sure, you won’t be in any doubt when you use Chrometa. The fact that it tracks every second makes it a real winner.

And now for the niggles – I find the timestamp tagging a bit fiddly – it’s easier to tag uncategorized actions in the main window than in the timestamps window – and I’d love for it to recognize all instances of my Gmail inbox tab as email, rather than having to retag it each time.  Those are small things, though, and I think the application’s usefulness far outweighs them. Chrometa is available on a 30 day trial, after which you can purchase it, though special educational and non-profit deals are available.

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Copyright © 2010 Blogging Tips. This Feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this material in your news aggregator, the site you are looking at is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact us so we can take legal action immediately.

How Much Time Do You Really Spend On Blogging? Find Out With Chrometa


A selection of e-books to help you improve as a blogger. Find out more at www.bloggingtips.com/books/