Archive for March, 2010

Help! I Can’t Think of Anything to Write About – Ideas for Blog Posts

Friday, March 12th, 2010 at 9:49 pm  
Comments (28)

When it comes to blogging one of the things I find the most difficult is finding ideas for blog posts. I seem to get a block every now and then where I sit and wonder what to write about next. I’m sure it happens to most bloggers at certain times.

So what I have done is develop a process that enables me to have plenty of ideas on hand when I need them. Now I’m not about to tell you anything new that you haven’t heard before because my process is simply a matter of writing down any ideas as I think of them. Actually I don’t write them down, I just add them to my iPod Touch so I can access them at any time.

Prior to this, I would think of an idea at the most inopportune time and then by the time I got around to needing to write up a blog post, I would have forgotten that fantastic idea and I’d be back to staring out the window again wondering what to write about. So since I carry my iPod Touch everywhere I go, there is no excuse for me not to keep track of those light bulb moments.

My ideas don’t always just come out of the blue however. A lot of the time, I get ideas from other bloggers. So I’ll keep note of these ideas as well as I visit other blogs on the net.

So my list of potential ideas is growing but even so, I thought it might be worth checking out other methods to see if there are other worthwhile techniques used by bloggers around the net. Here is what I came up with:

Are You Getting Results from Your Online Business?

Friday, March 5th, 2010 at 4:36 am  
Comments (35)

Well it’s been a while since my last post. It’s not that I’ve been busy…it’s more the fact that I couldn’t be bothered writing for this blog.  Sounds bad doesn’t it? But when it comes down to it, this blog isn’t how we make our money. In fact, it makes us nothing at all except when we write up a review for something (which is few and far between) or when someone pays for advertising space.

For now, this blog really is just a way of expressing my views of this online business I am in and also provide advice to others who are wanting to make a living online.  So I personally don’t want to have to feel forced to write every day for it simply to keep the traffic coming in order to make sales.

But not only that, I find this business model for making money online quite time consuming. It also requires consistent action in order to maintain the momentum and quite a bit of networking in order to build a following.

In contrast, I find that the model we use to make money online is so much easier and once set up requires minimal work.

For instance, to get this particular blog up and running to a level of making a consistent income I would probably need to do the following on a consistent basis:

  • leave blog comments on other peoples websites
  • leave forum posts
  • tweet regularly
  • regularly post on Facebook
  • write at least one blog post a day
  • network, network, network!
  • regularly post to my email list
  • check RSS feeds on a daily basis (something that I don’t do at all by the way)
  • write guest posts
  • work on JV’s

That to me is a lot of work.

On the other hand our model requires the following:

  • find a product in Amazon
  • do a bit of keyword research
  • write up a really good review for that product and post to one of our blogs
  • get traffic to it

The difference between the two is that the first model requires consistent effort (usually daily) whereas the second model requires a one-off amount of work. The only consistent work involved with this is getting the traffic and even then once a level of traffic is achieved we don’t have to worry too much about it.

So we can take a week off and not do any work without it affecting our business. In fact, we can take a month off because the pages we have set up already get traffic and don’t need constant work to maintain that traffic. Obviously we can’t neglect those pages totally but the work involved with maintaining them doesn’t have to be done on a daily basis nor on a weekly basis once the traffic is there.

When it comes down to it, you only need a handful of good pages to make a full time income online. We have individual pages that consistently make over $500 a week and that is without ongoing effort on our part. So we don’t need to blog consistently or leave blog comments or check RSS feeds or post regularly on forums or Twitter constantly. All we really need to do is get traffic to our top product review pages and that really is just a handful of pages per website.

I’m on a mission at the moment to simplify everything we do. I want the The 4-Hour Workweek lifestyle…who wouldn’t?…but the only way we are going to get that is to consistenly analyze what we do to see what is working and what isn’t and then refine the process.

What me and Wanda do is get out the butchers paper and write down the tasks we do on a regular basis. We then go through each to see whether each task is actually worth the effort. For instance, at this moment in time we don’t see the value in spending hours a day on Twitter. It brings in minimal traffic for the amount of time and work that is involved. So you’ll notice the Twitter account for this blog has been pretty quiet these days as has the rest of our Twitter accounts. That’s not to say that Twitter doesn’t have value but for us it’s too much work for the results we are getting.

So what about you? Have you thought about the effort you put into your online business? If you are new to making money online then obviously you are going to have to do a bit of work before you see results but what about those that have been online for a while. Are you actually making any money for all the work you are putting into it? If not, then you need to step back and look at exactly what tasks you are doing on a daily basis and see if they are getting you the results you desire.