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Finding Content For Your Blog

After you have been blogging for awhile one of the biggest problems becomes “where do you find things to write about?”

Here are several techniques that I personally use to find content for my own three blogs.

1. Start a note card and keep it with you when you are out and about. When you think of an idea jot it down. Some of my best ideas come to me while I am sitting watching my kids at a soccer game or sitting in a waiting room in the doctor’s office. Another great time is while I am walking on my treadmill. I keep a card and pencil there to jot down new ideas.

2. I have a list of 10 topics written in advance and I have broken them into my various blogs and if I need a topic, I just pick up my list and start writing. As most of my blogging is done first thing in the morning before I start work and coffee has not cleared all of the dust from my brain my advance topic list is a lifesaver.

3. Use Google News. When I have to write and I am totally tapped out, I go to Google News and enter my top keywords. There is always something in the news that pops out. Although I may not blog on that topic, sometime the article gives me a new topic, viewpoint, or spin-off idea.

4. Subscribe via feeds to at least one professionals forum in your industry. I can easily follow what is happening and is the buzz in my own industry by rapid scanning topics and the first 250 characters of the posts using My Live as my RSS feed portal. I like My Live as it has no ads and is totally customizable. This provides a wealth of content ideas and new topics.

5. Write ahead if you can on the weekend. If you are using WordPress, I have found that to write ahead on the weekend and set your blogs for a future publishing date help to keep the pressure off of you. When you blog from your topic list and publish ahead, blogging stays fun and easy.

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Organic Vs Paid Listings on Google

Consistently I have run into confusion on clients’ parts thinking that participating in sponsored search or paid advertising listings on Google, Yahoo or MSN will raise their organic ranking. This is not true.

Paid or Sponsored Search
These are the text ads that appear on the right side of the search query results screen and at the top of the page typically in a colored box. How one appears here is to use a paid advertising service unique for each search engine for Google, it is Google AdWords, for Yahoo, it is Yahoo Sponsored Search, and for MSN it is Microsoft adCenter. To get top ranking in the results you must have a higher than you competitor maximum cost per click setting and a”satisfactory” click through rate. You also must have a Good or Great quality score. Quality score is the factor of a tight match between your landing page content, ad text and keyword trigger list. To get in the colored boxes you need typically a click through rate of over 2.5%.

Organic Search Listings
This is also know as the SERPs (search engine results placement). Organic listings are determined by each search engine’s algorithm. Google has over 150 different factors which it will consider to determine your site’s placement on the page. Some of these factors include size of your website, how frequently you update your content, how many quality sites on your topic link into yours, the keyword density of your keywords on the page and their match to the search query, how long you have held your domain name, the length of your renewal, and many other secret factors known only to Google.

Organic and paid results do not affect each other. They are entirely separate and participation in one has absolutely no bearing on performance in the other.