eXtra For Every Publisher

Daily Web Ideas recently posted an article about increasing your PageRank. I have written about PageRank before a little bit in my review of Text Link Ads and my post entitled Introduction to Things That Effect Your Page Rank.

They list ideas like writing comments on other blogs, purchasing text link advertisements, exchanging links with related websites, posting on forums, joining a website network, and writing quality content.

While all of these ways are great ways to increase your PageRank, most of them can have some negative side effects, especially as search engines like Google get smarter, so always do research before taking advice seen on any site.

The best tip though, and something that is hidden in plain sight in the Daily Web Ideas post is that networking is your best way to build a site. Connect with people on forums, other blogs, and owners of sites in a similar niche.

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LifeSpy, a site I used to own, has a great article on how to look for a new and better job. The article could be used for finding any type of job, even one in online publishing as a paid blogger.

Broadcast. Your boss is probably not the person to know that you’re looking for a better, higher-paying job, but tell your colleagues and friends that you are on the lookout for another job. Your friends/colleagues may know people who can help you get a job interview. If you’ve been wise enough, you should probably now have a good base of contacts. Some of the companies that you’ve dealt with may have openings here and there.

Surf. The internet has an amazing network of resources and you can maximize your internet connection by checking out sites which have regular job postings. If you feel guilty doing job hunting during office hours, do it in between breaks so you can search for available jobs without using up your work time. Now if you know that the office network’s a secure one, for the love of all that’s living, do it elsewhere. Your snotty network administrators may intercept your activity and get you fired in no time.

Searching for a job can be difficult, but if you take the time to search around online, there are some great resources. I know a few people that have found decent blogging jobs on the Problogger Job Board so check it out if what you are looking for is a problogging job. I, personally, couldn’t recommend this career path enough.

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For many people, it is not the blog that brings about a change in the person’s life, but instead the secondary benefits of blogging.

Secondary benefits include book deals, invitations to speak at conferences, free products to review, and even employment opportunities.

I haven’t yet experienced most of the above list, but I have watched as the bloggers that I enjoy have continued to climb the social ladder and gain access to some of those great benefits.

I have, however, been given products, and access to services due to my standing in the blogging community, which was really exciting. I was able to give my opinion to my readers allowing them to make an informed decision. It also allowed me to “geek out”, which is something I don’t get to do often enough.

Why does blogging bring about such things? Blogs can allow a person interested in you, what you do, or what you have to say in a very quick, and focused way. Most blogs will give an overview of the writer’s work ethic, writing ability, and most importantly, your personality.

So, don’t think that just because you don’t know how to monetize a blog, that nothing will come from your efforts. From what I have read, more people are able to gain access to the secondary benefits of blogging than living off the money they make directly from their blog. Either way, it sounds like a good deal to me.

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One of the things that happens to bloggers far too often is writer’s block. People run out of ideas, and almost always it is because they did not plan ahead.

Once you select a niche, you need to spend some time mapping out your ideas, goals, and things you need to do. For this site, I spent about two weeks creating a long to-do list of the things I needed to do to launch the site, as well as writing up around thirty sections, and hundreds of post ideas.

Some post ideas are just subjects, or titles, and others have a few sentences or bullet points to make sure I remember what I wanted to say.

Why did it take me so long?

I wanted to make sure I had enough source material to really make a go at this site. I didn’t want to be all dried up in a week, and leave you all hanging until I found something new or interesting to say.

So many bloggers skip this step and get right into producing content, and they eventually have huge gaps in their publishing, or close down their blog, and neither route will bring you closer to becoming a reasonably paid blogger.

How do you come up with ideas?

The simplest way to come up with ideas is to create a list of twenty or thirty keywords to describe what you want to cover.

Say you picked shoes as your niche. Well, brand names would be a keyword, manufacturing would be another, and you could keep expanding into sub-keywords. Some of these will become your categories, and others will just be articles within your site.

Another step that you can take is to look at competing sites. Many times you will see something your competition has missed, or their information is so old that it isn’t relevant. I have come up with dozens of posts thanks to my competition.

How many ideas do I need?

Well, this is definitely personal, but I would say that you should have enough post ideas to last you three months of posting, whatever your post schedule may be. So if you are going to do thirty posts a month, you might want to write out a list of ninety items that you want to touch on.

You don’t have to systematically go through the list you’ve created; in fact, you would be better off to only use list items when you can’t think of anything better to write about. This will mean that you will have a much longer lasting site with an idea well to come to.

I also recommend adding new ideas when you have less than a months worth left, as you never know when you will come across writers block, or a super dead news week.

Summary

So if you are going to start a site, and you want it to be successful, planning is the key, and a list of post ideas will bring you much closer to your goals as a blogger, and set you apart from your competition.

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Copyblogger’s, Muhammad Saleem, has put up a great post on how you can reword sentences and remove extraneous words in order to shorten posts, and since pretty much everyone that reads blogs has no attention span, this should be required reading.

Is it worth the extra effort to ruthlessly edit? Well, if we take the time to omit needless words, sentences and paragraphs from an article or landing page, we communicate more concepts in less time and space. The point of brevity is not to say less, it’s to say what needs to be said effectively and concisely.

Editing, cutting out words, or even rewording sentences to reduce their length is something I still have to work on, but it is nice to see some easy to understand guides being written on the issue.

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