Make Money Blogging

6 tips for beating writer’s block

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Does your mind go blank as soon as you click ‘new post’? Here are 6 tips for beating writers block.

Tip 1 – Pick a subject you enjoy

Choosing the wrong subject is the fastest way to guarantee failure. It is hard enough to schedule enough time to spend on our home businesses as it is, without picking a subject we find about as enjoyable as root-canal work!

My husband is a huge fan of football (that’s real football, not the variety of tank warfare the Americans play, lol).

I ‘could’ produce a website about his favourite team – Manchester United. They are a hugely popular team world-wide (demand), there is plenty of branded merchandise (opportunity to earn money), they seem to play quite a lot (source of fresh material) and my husband would be happy to fill in any gaps in my knowledge (expert advice to fall back on).

To say my eyes glaze over when he starts rambling on about football is a massive understatement. That’s pretty much the same reaction as I get from him when I try to interest him in my home business, come to think of it!

As a wife and mother I have to be able to fit my business round my family commitments and for me that means a 4am start. What are the chances of me getting up that early, day after day, to write about football? I’m pretty disciplined yet I would imagine a week at most!

Pick a subject you are enthusiastic about – it’s far easier to come up with words about a subject you enjoy!

Tip 2 – Don’t wait for inspiration

The process of writing is what triggers creativity so it’s no good waiting for inspiration. Just start writing and see what happens. One idea will lead to another and soon you’ll start making connections that inspire yet more ideas. Before you know it you’ll be amazed at what you start to produce.

As you write and the ideas start to flow you will get a great perspective on what your reader wants from you. You will naturally write about the topics that are most relevant and you consider most important. Your target reader is likely to agree with you!

Keyword lists can be a great starting point but they are also very limiting. People don’t think in a linear way, we are masters at linking seemingly irrelevant topics. To return to the subject of football (very briefly, I promise) a typical keyword list might include obvious topics such as ‘players’, ‘results’, ‘fixtures’. If you did a Google search you might also look for ’satellite TV’ (to watch more matches), ’sports-wear’ (‘cos you’ve got to have this year’s football shirts, apparently) maybe even ‘flights to Russia’ (or wherever that crucial final is).

Tip 3 – Don’t sweat the small stuff

When you start writing, don’t think about spelling, grammar, keywords, optimisation, formatting, headings etc – just write as if you are having a conversation with your readers down the pub. Nothing kills creativity faster than stopping to nit-pick how you are writing. There is plenty of time to tidy it up once you’ve got it all written down.

My favourite tool when writing blog posts is Notepad (if you haven’t tracked it down yet it’ll be lurking in the Window’s program list under Accessories). Once you have all your words down then you can paste it into Blogger or WordPress, without anything too odd happening to the formatting, then turn the spell-checker loose on it and tidy it all up.

Tip 4 – Set a deadline

If there’s one thing I hate even more than football it’s ironing. Thinking ‘I should tackle the ironing mountain – it’s starting to take over the whole kitchen’ rarely moves me to action. Change that to ‘I’ve got to iron the kids school uniform – there’s none left and they leave in an hour’ and that ironing board is whipped out pronto. Set specific goals in your writing and stick to it! Define what and by when and you will start to develop good self-discipline in your work.

You’ll also appreciate the value of every hour and every minute in the day – good time-management skills are essential to the home business owner.

Focus like a laser beam and try to complete your writing project ahead of schedule. Manana (tomorrow) generally translates into never!

Tip 5 – Make it comfortable to write

If you are perched on the edge of a stool in the kitchen then it’s far harder to write. Trying to write when the TV is blaring and the kids are pestering you every five seconds is never going to be easy. Try and find a place that is physically comfortable to write in and a time when you can focus without interruption.

I may be a little old-fashioned but I much prefer to write on a desktop PC at my desk. If I’m only checking emails or browsing forums then the lap-top in bed is fine. Especially if it’s while the football is on!

Successful writing is all about letting the ideas flow. If you use the ‘hunt and peck’ style of typing then writing is likely to be slow and painfully awkward – hardly conducive to creativity! There is nothing to stop you writing the old fashioned way with paper and pen to produce your basic content.

There’s no need to be an expert typist but life will be far easier if you master at least the basic skills. Spending a little time learning how to type ‘properly’ will pay dividends.

Tip 6 – Stop making excuses

It’s always easy to come up with excuses! If your excuses to not do something are stronger than your reasons to knuckle down and do it then guess what, you don’t do it.

“I don’t have enough time to write”

Does this mean you really don’t have enough time or you don’t want to spend the time you have on writing? If you don’t have the motivation to do something then you’ll never find the time to do it.

Do you really not have enough time to run your business anyway or do you need to use your time more efficiently? If you are sitting in front of the TV for hours every night then you could use that time more productively. You could always tape your favourite show to watch as a reward for completing a task….

Where does your time go? Spending a lot of time doing something because you find it easy does not necessarily mean that you are working efficiently. Spending time in forums and checking email is important but do the results justify the time you spend on them? More crucially, does the time you spend on them develop your business more than the things you aren’t doing potentially could?

Is it true that you really can’t squeeze 15 mins, two or three times a week to spend writing? That’s plenty of time to make two or three blog posts a week (yes, really!). Even if you do have time to write something that rivals ‘War and Peace’ in length, do your website visitors have time to read it? Probably not so little and often is the way to go.

Thinking that writing is a good idea just because you read that it is a good idea doesn’t mean you are committed to doing it. Be crystal clear about what you are hoping to achieve by writing. Examine the alternatives carefully.

1) You could just copy/paste other peoples work onto your site. If you use other people’s work then you must give them credit. Even if your reader’s don’t know that you have stolen someone else’s words, Google certainly will.

2) You could hire a ghost-writer – Elance.com is a good place to go if you choose this route. This is clearly preferable to option 1 above but is far from ideal. Writing your own material tells your reader far more than your words say – it gives them an insight into who you are by the words you use and the style you write in.

In the often faceless world of the Internet marketing this is of key importance. People do business with people first, then look at the product. Whether you are primarily an affiliate or network marketer, other people are offering something very similar, if not identical, to you. How can you make yourself stand out from the crowd? By offering something unique – YOU!

Commit to spending 10 mins a day writing, every day, for the next two weeks. You don’t have to publish what you write, just spend time writing something. This will build the habit of writing regularly into your schedule. Who knows, you might even find you can spend a little more time writing and you may even start to enjoy it…..

“I’m no good at writing”

You may well be correct and you are no good at writing…….yet! Even if you are born with a talent for something you still need to work on it. We are all born with the talent to walk yet our early efforts were hardly accomplished, were they?

Be realistic about what you need to achieve. I’m not expecting Gordon Ramsey to come begging me for cooking tips yet my family are well nourished. Imagine I put off feeding them until I had perfected a recipe…..

You are not writing a text-book. You are not writing a scientific paper that will be critiqued by your peers. You are writing stuff that normal, everyday folk will find interesting and/or entertaining.

Write the same way you talk. Don’t use language or words that you wouldn’t normally do. Write the same conversation you would have if you met your reader in person. That’s what people, and especially blog readers, are looking for. There’s plenty of information online already that’s dull as ditch-water so lighten up a little.

Don’t try too hard. We’ve all met people a little like this at parties and what do we do? Don’t you think your readers will do the same thing? They don’t even need to worry about offending you as they can slip away completely un-noticed. Who wants to listen to an endless lecture on a subject, no matter how technically perfect? Nobody!

There are certainly things you can do to improve your writing such as good grammar and spell-checking. Good formatting of your content makes your writing easier to read and basic SEO skills will improve your search engine rankings but all of these technical things are far less important than you may think.

You may think you are no good at writing but you are wrong! It ain’t broke so don’t try and fix it – you can smooth off the rough edges later.

Beating writers block: summary

The most important tip for beating writer’s block is to start writing! Just get something down, make a habit of doing it regularly and before you know it, you’ll be churning out words at a speed to make a newspaper hack jealous!

What’s in it for me?

“What’s in it for me?” This question, often abbreviated to WIIFM, is a crucial question to consider when writing your blog content.

Not what’s in it for us, the blogger, but what’s in it for our readers?

Give people what they want, the way they want it and you can get (almost) everything else wrong and still be a success.

If you’re blogging for business then it’s very easy to concentrate on features, rather than benefits. Features may well be tools that help us close a sale but they don’t answer the crucial ‘What’s in it for me?‘ question.

If I’ve got a headache then I want it to stop. I don’t particularly care that your headache remedy comes in eco friendly packaging and you operate a fair-trade policy. Sorry, but I don’t – I’m in pain, so cut me some slack here.

I don’t care that your product contains 37 natural products derived from ancient Amazonian folk-medicine, one of which can only be harvested from a yellow-spotted beetle during a full moon.

Your product makes my headache go away? Great! Now that’s the benefit I want. The rest of that stuff is just features.

The 60 million dollar question is “So What?“. Your product contains 37 natural ingredients? So what? One of these ingredients is really difficult to get hold of? So what? Your product will cure my headache, and do it faster than anything else on the market? Gimme, gimme, gimme……NOW! (Please notice, I didn’t even consider asking the price.)

Using a washing-up liquid that cleans the dishes without destroying all the wildlife in a 50 mile radius makes me feel better than one that is an eco nightmare. Me feeling better is a benefit.

How, exactly, your washing-up liquid cleans dishes without poisoning the waterways are features, not benefits. If your washing up liquid cleans dishes and makes me feel good then I will probably pay more for it – the benefit of feeling better is worth the extra pennies to me.

In other words, if you can touch it, it’s a feature. If you feel it, it’s a benefit.

If you are blogging for fun, then good for you but this doesn’t let you off the WIIFM hook. Presumably you would like people to read your blog. ‘People’ does not include your long-suffering partner or your Mum, I mean people you can’t emotionally bribe to read what you have written.

Even though you may not think you are selling a product, you are – YOU! If you’d  like people to spend some of their precious time reading your blog content always think about what’s in it for your reader.

What does your reader want from your blog content? Are they looking for a quick ‘tea-break’ from life? Are they expecting a humorous anecdote? Have you offered to answer the eternal ‘what the *^%! do I cook for the kids dinner’ question?

Make no mistake, every blog writer faces huge competition so have something to say, say it in an interesting way but above all, make sure your readers know exactly ‘what’s in it for me’!

Amazon Product Links

Time to get some bigger cheques from Amazon, I thought. That meant rolling my sleeves up and cracking on with my niche blog

Eco Friendly Family Guide

I’ve had all sorts of fun researching keywords and come up with some new ones that look like they will actually generate some income, as well as traffic.

With that in mind, I delved into my Amazon affiliate account looking for products to drop into my niche blog posts.

Naturally there is a huge selection to choose from and having made my choice I copy/pasted the code into Wordpress and…..

…….NOTHING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

It un-helpfully deleted all the code

Being firmly of the belief that there is a plug-in for almost everything (haven’t found one that makes tea or tidies the kids room yet) off I went on the hunt.

Good news – found the perfect one so if you are a fellow Amazon affiliate and have had the same problem with your Wordpress blog then read on:-

The plug-in you need is Amazon Widgets Shortcode

To activate it you will need to choose the region of Amazon you are affiliated with and enter your user code.

Adding the product to your blog posts is then pretty simple – click the A button, paste the code into the second page and presto, the magic happens.

Take a look at this page with the widget installed (opens in a new window)

Cotton: Why choose organic cotton?

I’d like a little more padding round the widget but at least the darn thing is showing!

If you read this and use the plug-in please do paste the link here in the comments section

Plug-Ins

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I’ve been asked about what plug-ins I use so here’s a list of my current Wordpress Blog ‘toys’.

Don’t forget to keep you Plug-Ins (and WordPress itself) updated.

If you need any help using these plug-ins, or have a better suggestion please leave a comment!

Essential Plug-Ins

Askimet Unless you like your blog filled with comments promoting mortgage services and ‘adult’ products then this is one of the first plug-ins you will want to activate. You will need to get an API key from Wordpress but this is simple to do (and free!)

Google XML Sitemaps Install this plug-in, activate it then submit the URL in the Webmaster Tools section of your Google account and presto, job done!

FD Feedburner Utilise this free Feedburner plugin and email and RSS subscriptions are simple to handle. Perfect if you haven’t got/don’t want subscriptions handled by an Auto Responder Service.

Social Networking Plug-Ins

MyBlogLog Widget: My blogLog is a service I’m new to so I’m only just starting to realise the power of this social networking resource. To be honest I only joined because I didn’t want to spend money submitting my sites to Yahoo but I’m spending more and more time joining in with the communities and meeting fellow marketers.

Post To Twitter: There are pages of plug-ins to integrate your blog with your Twitter account. I only wanted one to ‘tweet’ my new posts so I picked the simplest one I could find. If you want all your Twitter activity posted on your blog then there are many other plug-ins that will do this for you.

Sociable: Automatically add links on your posts, pages and RSS feed to your favorite social bookmarking sites.

Marketing Plug-Ins

Traffic Exchange List: If you ever blog about traffic exchanges then this is THE plug-in for you. Once it’s installed, every time you mention a traffic exchange  it will grab your referral details from your TE List account. Just think about how much copy & pasting this saves you!

Recently Installed Plug-Ins

Simple Tags: Autocompletion, Suggested Tags, Tag Cloud Widgets, Related Posts, Mass edit tags – looks great doesn’t it. I just need to get my head around using tags…..

WordPress Automated Online Backup: Having lost my sites to a hacker recently, backing up my blogs is something I am now a bit fanatical about. This automated service is something I am trying out at the moment – I’ll let you know how I’m getting on!

While we are on the subject of disasters, I recommend you take a look at this site I was introduced to just today – Site Scanner. Something a bit dodgy happens to one of your sites and you are emailed with an alert straight away. There is even help putting it all back together again. Pick the level of membership that works best for you – start for free

One of the  first things I did with Site Scanner is enter the URLs of my lead-capture pages. As it costs me time and/or money to promote them I want to know immediately if something’s gone wrong with them!