ContentRobot

In our last few posts we have gone back to basics, as our clients have been clamoring for better approaches to blogging. Today, ContentRobot offers some inspiration for generating ideas for your stories in hopes to create conversation and that all-important buzz.

1. State Your Beliefs
What do you believe in? By telling these types of stories, you can connect emotionally to your readers. Help them to see into your (or your company’s) soul, they’ll know what you are thinking and why.

2. Be a Newsbreaker
Let your readers know about what’s happening at your company or in your industry first. By having the inside story before it’s widely known and intelligently speaking about the new ideas, you’ll lay a foundation for viral and pass-along effect that can will encourage people to come back for more.

3. Be Controversial
Be bold with contrarian, counterintuitive, or challenging views. Provide opportunities for debate and discussions with angles that are not commonly stated or well-known. Without being cruel, tap into anxieties, desires, and other strong emotions to get people fired up to offer up their own positions.

4. Offer How-to Stories and Advice
Get down to business with pragmatic how-to advice. Tell your audience how to solve problems, find next (or best) practices, and overcome common obstacles. Offer some life lessons, tales from the trenches, and solutions that you and your company can provide. Try to be fresh and original by providing a new twist to what people already know.

5. Be Seasonal or Relate it to an Event
Tie your topic into seasonal or major events. For example, discuss industry predictions around the New Year, advertising during the SuperBowl, or being thankful at Thanksgiving.

The above was inspired by a post at Robert Guy Kawasaki’s excellent blog as he described insights from Lois Kelly’s book, Beyond Buzz: The Next Generation of Word-of-Mouth Marketing.

Lately, our clients have been asking us what makes up a good blog post and how can they get some inspiration for creating interesting and relevant content.

What is Good Content?

What is going on in your industry right now? Look for interviews given by leaders, tips, opinion pieces, research, news, and posts from bloggers. Who are the main players in your field? What are their positions for popular issues? What context can you provide?

These all can spur ideas for your posts. While you might not be “scooping” big news, you should concentrate on generating thought leadership by stating your own view of what’s going on.

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Did you create a document today? ContentRobot bets you wrote it using Microsoft Word.

This easy-to-use, ubiquitous software, allows business people to compose their thoughts and produce fairly decent looking documents, complete with formatting (think bullets and bolding) and pretty pictures.

It’s so simple to cut and paste your document into your blog software, but its a disaster to author blog posts using Word. Why?

Microsoft copies all of its formatting to the blog’s WYSIWYG editor. And while it might look OK in the authoring window, it creates messy HTML and ugly posts.

If you are curious, you can click to view the HTML behind that blog post, and you may see the many Microsoft remnants in the code.

Let’s talk more about the potential problems by authoring in Word.

Fonts
In particular, the way that Word formats fonts causes havoc with the design. While the blog’s look (usually done with CSS) might format fonts using Verdana, Word’s use of the font tag will overwrite it. This means that your post might render in Arial or Times New Roman - not exactly want the design may have intended. You need to be concerned because a clean, uniform design looks the most professional.

On top of that, behind the scenes in the HTML, you’ll see these huge MSONormal font tags that go on and on for three lines of code. This may not seem like a big deal, but it can slow down the page load times of your site and you may lose some readers.

Let the CSS render your fonts, colors, links, etc. - your readers will thank you.

Curly Quotes and Other Random Characters
Word has a feature where if you use quotes in the document, it will render them to wrap nicely around the quoted text. (Also true for apostrophes as well, but many malformed characters such as ampersands can cause problems.) What happens is that your RSS feed may become invalid and/or the post may display with weird characters.

Div Tags
To create the blog’s structure, often the designer will use div tags. Well, because Word tracks your every move (like spaces and paragraph returns) it can throw in a random div tag, which can blow out the columns and ruin the overall design.

Word also formats tables and bulleted lists, for example, with nasty, over-bloated code.

Images
Images are still best handled with the blog software. You’ll have more control on how they look, where they are stored, etc. Word was never intended to be used as a design tool (for print or web) and it remains true for blogging.

What if you still want to use Word to write your blog posts? Unfortunately, you have to be aware that any blog WYSIWYG editor will have troubles rendering your Word doc. So what to do …

Use a Text Editor
To remove that rogue Microsoft coding, use a text editor like Notepad, Text Wrangler, or BBEdit. This will strip the underlying formatting that often causes the problems. One caveat, however, you will need to go back and reformat your post, which includes adding font attributes (like bold), recreate your tables and lists, relink, and upload your photos.

External Blog Editors
Most external blog editors are built off the Tiny MCE technology, which doesn’t strip off offending Word formatting. Two editors that worked decently in testing:

• The free Performancing for Firefox editor did a decent job when pasting in a Word document into it.
• Adobe Contribute was the best ignoring Microsoft formating. Not perfect, but pretty nice, this editor costs $99 per copy.

Use the Blog’s WYSIWYG Editor
Consider writing directly in the blog software. While you still might need to learn a bit of HTML, your blog will stay error free.

To write an interesting blog (or anything of value) you must be able to go beyond regurgitating what others have reported and be curious enough to find the real story.

How can you do that? Ask questions like these.

• How Does it Really Work? - Test products (and assumptions) to find out what works and why. You might even find delicious, unexpected uses that you share with your readers.
• What Needs Improvement? - Be on the lookout for outstanding solutions to persistant problems. It’s OK to not have all the answers, providing bridges and stepping stones are equally important.
• What Do I Know About It? - After doing your homework, try to understand what can you add to the discussion. Then take the time to creatively present your findings.
• Who Else Knows About It? - Seek people out and network to share information with others. The more you exchange ideas, the more interesting everything becomes.
• Are There Parallels in Other Industries? - Use your interest in other disciplines and bring together disconnected ideas. Maybe rocket science and cats don’t have anything in common - or do they?
• Is There Something More? - Don’t accept the spin and dig deeper than the issued press releases or RSS feed items. Who knows you just might scoop something.
• What If or Why??? - Keep chipping away with these types of questions to make progress to solving problems. It doesn’t always have to be serious - you can even make a playful game out of it. At the very least, you’ll be lead toward journeys and discoveries of unexpected places.

Though it takes time to write interesting posts, you’ll be rewarded with a loyal following - and maintain a more satisfying blog to boot.

The way Search Engines index your blog is by sending “robot” crawlers to your site to track what you’ve written and follow the links. Here we discuss how linking both inside and outside your blogs can help you with search engine optimization.

Part 2 of 4: Linking Strategy

Get Inbound Links
Every link to your site is seen by the search engines as being a vote of confidence in your site. The best inbound links? These are from higher ranked sites than your own, that are relevant to the topic you are writing about, and who link to you using relevant keywords. Find them and try to get them to link to you.

Use Outbound Links
Linking out to quality relevant sites that your readers might find useful can also help search engines index your site. While this can be an effective strategy, remember to weigh this against the fact that this may end up sending some traffic away from your blog.

Also keep in mind, too many outbound could have detrimental impact upon your blog. Above all, don’t forget to link to only reputable and relevant sites.

Interlink Your Site
Make it easier for those robots to get around your blog by using internal linking wisely. You can do this simply by providing some sort of a site map or listing your blog’s categories in your sidebar.

Further, make sure every page or post links back to your main page and/or any other important pages on your site with an intuitive navigation scheme. Note by highlighting them this way, they can become some of the most highly ranked pages simply because they are linked on every page of your blog.

Finally, consider linking to older posts (or use the ‘other relevant posts’ feature) to point readers to a topic you’ve previously written about before.

Buy Links
Some professional webmasters purchase links from other highly ranked and relevant sites. If you have the budget, you may want to consider this as part of your linking strategy.

Bottom Line
In sum, think about your links as part of your search engine optimization strategy.

Next up, we’ll have Part 3: Site Submission Techniques. And don’t forget to see Part 1: Quality Content.

Thanks to Problogger for inspiration on this series.

Because blogs naturally offer new content to search engines, you might think you can skip optimizing your blog. In our latest series, here are some ideas you can use to attract search engines to your blog.

Part 1 of 4: Start with Quality Content on a Specific Topic

Quality Content
The best way to get links to your blog is to write quality content that people will want to read. This is still the cheapest and probably safest approach toward to build inbound links in a natural organic way because others want to link to quality content.

Keyword Rich Content
Consider: “How will I want people to find this post in Search Engines?” What will readers type into Google to find the information on the topic you’re writing? Use your answers to identify a few keywords (go for 3-5) for the article you hope to get highly-indexed. Then pepper those keywords throughout your post, as well as in titles, heading tags, image alt tags, and meta tags.

Try for One Topic per Post
The more tightly you focus the theme of a post, the better for Search Engine ranking. If you find you are writing a long post that covers a number of loosely-related or different topics, contemplate breaking it up into smaller, more-concentrated pieces. Note that research shows that longer articles can have a pretty steep drop off rate in readers after the text gets below the ‘fold’ or to the end of the first screen of article.

Write Optimal Length Posts
Now that you don’t want to write posts that are too long; don’t make them too short either. Search Engines just might pass them over. A good rule of thumb: 250 words per post will give it some length, meatiness, and keyword density.

Bigger is Better
It’s true that bigger sites tend to rank better than smaller sites because Search Engines see your site as more comprehensive. Also, the more pages you have, the better your odds of being found in Search Engines. However don’t just to put up random junk content be or be spammy and duplicate your content everywhere either. Work at building a large site over time.

Update Regularly
The more you update your blog, the more often Search Engines will send their crawlers to your site to index it. This will mean your new articles could appear in the index within days or even hours rather than weeks. This is a natural benefit of blogging – make the most of it!

Next up? Part 2: Linking Strategy

Thanks to Problogger for inspiration on this series.

Sometimes you hit some writer’s block and you need a bit of inspiration for writing your next post. Where should you go?

• For links and sources, check out del.icio.us, yahoo news, or google groups
• For inspiration from other blogs in your niche, go to technorati or icerocket
• Do an image or video search at flickr, photobucket, or youtube
• To find out what are people thinking about, surf over to yahoo answers

Inspired yet? Happy posting!

It’s summertime here and the living is easy … but is your blog suffering from sporadic posting?

Do you feel that you’ve written about everything that needs to be said on your topic or niche?

Did you know that many bloggers hit a dry patch 6 to 12 months into their blog?

Unfortunately, a large number of bloggers tend to give up on their blog when they feel they’ve ‘covered everything’ and think their content is getting thin.

But you can bring your blog back!

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Problogger has written a great post on why blog projects might lose steam after running for a while. Don’t let this happen to you!

You bit off more than they can chew
Did you start multiple blogs that the same time and find you can’t maintain them? Or did you pick a topic that is just too wide and, therefore, overwhelming?

Tip: Focus on what you enjoy most and put your heart and writing into it - it may mean dropping a blog or two, but remember that better written blogs get better results.

You ran out of things to say
Did you pick a topic that is too narrow and now you can’t find much to write about?

Tip: Find a new twist on what you’ve been talking about and see if that can revitalize your creativity and perhaps expand into new territory.
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Many bloggers spend a lot of effort into writing engaging and interesting posts, but then just slap any old title onto it.

Take your time with your titles and treat them as “mini advertisements” for your work. Make sure your title is going to do everything it can to maximize the chances that people will engage with what you have to say.

While there is no real right or wrong way to create a “good title,” you might find these five tips for writing titles for your blog posts helpful:
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