How do you get ideas for blog posts and RSS feed posts?

The best blogs and feeds are those that contain unique, fresh, compelling, content. So where do these prolific posters get their ideas? I talked to a handful of bloggers to determine where their inspiration originated for their content.

Not surprisingly, ideas for blog posts or RSS feed items originate or are influenced by other web content. The following are venues for finding your online muse:

1. Google News
   Monitor Google News for keywords related to your industry. If you find a story you disagree with or wholeheartedly agree with write about it. Add your thoughts, and editorialize the content. This does not mean you should just repost Google news summaries. The value is not only in the news aggregation, but in the commentary that you provide. Tie news items to specific events, conditions, or the impact of specific news on the industry. Adding a view point or reference to a news article adds genuine value.


2. Web Logs
   Look at your websites "long tail", and examine your web logs. Find phrases that are relevant to your website and write in-depth information about those subjects. This is particularly helpful if the blog or RSS feed is used as a marketing tool for the website. By focusing on obscure or less popular search terms and phrases that are found in your web logs, you will not only find that you provide content of interest to your readers, but you will attract additional web traffic.


3. Collate
   Many bloggers have established themselves as "experts" by simply amassing and organizing a large collection of information that relates to a specific field. Use the blog or feed to announce and organize information, new products or services in an unbiased way within a specific industry.
   


4. Search
   Most people assume that there is information on every subject on the Internet, but that is not necessarily the case. If you stumble on an area where there is minimal content, consider it an opportunity. Continue developing content. Chances are if you were searching for the content someone else is as well, develop a blog post or RSS feed for information that find inaccessible.
   


5. Untouchable Content
   Consider tackling all of the content that many other publishers find difficult or uncomfortable. Controversial or content that is difficult to write about is often overlooked, look at challenging content as an opportunity.


6. Monitor Authority Blogs
   Watch authority blogs for developing industry news. Comment on any breaking news or editorials that you either agree or disagree with. This may attract the attention of an authority blog and could result in a link to your commentary. Be sure to credit the source of any blog posts that you comment on or quote.
   


7. Advice
   If you are an expert? Consider developing an advice column. Let readers send you questions and post the questions and answers in your blog or RSS feed. This allows your readers to direct your content.


8. Conversations
   Many bloggers and publishers discover topic ideas from conversations. Create dialogue with both individuals familiar and unfamiliar with your blog topic, the questions that come up could be good fodder for posts.
   


9. Forums/ Newsgroups / Usenet
   Forums are great places to find topic ideas. Read topic specific forum posts then editorialize and summarize the posts.
   


10. Look Outside the Box
    Do not constrain your thinking to parameters found online. The best RSS feeds and blogs are targeted, clear, consistent, and unique. It is okay to occasionally step outside your comfort zone to find appealing content.
    

While breaking news has obvious value, so to does timeless content and "how to" posts. Don't be afraid to mix it up and provide readers a combination of the two.

Blogging For Success and Money

Blogging seems to be the prime topic of everyone's discussion these days. Blogs appear to grow more popular by the month, as they continue to expand across the internet. A major reason for this increase is due to the prosperous benefits that come along with blogging. When done correctly, implementing this popular method of online communication into your website could bring forth much success. Many of the internets most prominent businesses realize the importance of a blog; some say it is a must. This powerful tool is much more dynamic than the traditional website. What has made it so attractive is the convenience and freedom of user interaction. It is practically an open forum where individuals get to express their opinions and receive a wide range of feedback If you are familiar with the concept, then blogging may seem simple. While starting a blog is no difficult task by any means, turning yours into a money-making machine requires a dedicated effort.

Monetizing your Blog

In order of a blog to generate income, you must develop a strong strategy for monetizing it. There are several different venues which you can employ to monetize your blog:

• AdSense
• Advertising space for banner ads
• Donations
• Affiliate programs
• Paid third-party product reviews / pushes
• Selling your own services or products
  

Deciding on what monetizing strategy you employ depends upon the goals for your blog and its target audience. Each target audience will respond differently to your different monetizing strategies; for example, a humanitarian blog audience may be more receptive to donations, while a cooking blog audience would click through your banner ads for an organic recipe cookbook. You should develop an initial strategy, keeping your targeted audience's psychology in mind. The design and layout of your blog should reflect your monetizing strategy; for example, if you will be employing AdSense, then you may want to use a column layout with clean colors and lines. You want to ensure that your monetizing efforts are optimized in the layout of your website. As you progress with your blog, do not be afraid to test the water and adjust your monetizing strategies based upon feedback and performance results.

Generating Traffic

You may have the best blog and monetizing strategy in the world, but without traffic, your bank account will not grow. To begin making money with a blog, one must first generate traffic. Establishing a stable list of loyal readers has been easier for some than others, but it is the key to running a successful blog. When you are first beginning your blog endeavors, it may seem daunting to generate traffic when there is not a single visitor to your website. However, with a bit of strategy, you can quickly build traffic and a returning base of readers.

Write What You Know

You should consider writing your blog on a topic of your specialty or passion. The more you know about the subject matter of your blog, the better; you will be able to establish yourself as an authority and readers will come to learn from you. Content and traffic have a very strong symbiotic relationship.

Remember what you learned about in advertising class in college? Viral marketing is the most effective form of advertising - period. If people like your blogs, they will refer it to their friends, and in the internet, friends can add up to millions of people.
Regularly Updated Content

Yes, you have heard it before, and you will hear it again - content is king! Readers will flock to your blog if you provide them with insightful, unique, and relevant content that is updated regularly. In addition, when you consistently publish quality content that is rich in keywords, the search engines will frequent your site to update their indexing, which then leads to more traffic coming into your blog. The better, more frequent posts you publish, the more other sites will link to you, thus again bringing in more traffic and increasing your search engine rankings.

Linking With Related Blogs

Linking is another way to generate traffic and add to your blog's success. You want your site to be viewed by as many readers as possible.

Exchanging links with another blogger is a great way to make that happen. Surf the web for similar blogs that relate to your specialty and host the same audience you are seeking. Linking relative sites on your page also displays credibility to readers.

They will view you as a main source, referring other interested parties to your blog for that relative info. Friendly links also improve search engine ranking and increase the chances of someone stumbling across your blog. All novice bloggers looking to make money should know this: success is hard work. Devotion and great patience is required if you want a blog to work for you. The most comforting fact is that many people are taking advantage of this tool and creating mass revenue. While nothing is promised, applying sound search engine optimization strategies to your blog speaks volumes in the way of success.

Combining this with good old fashion communication can help return profitable results in the long journey with your blog.

by : Vasilis Pasparas, President, Strategic Planning of www.bloghology.org, the only Print and Digital publication covering the Blogging industry.

Template ol-bisnis.blogspot.com Hasil Copas

Postingan kali ini mengenai tampilan baru dari blog ini, telah lama saya memendam keinginan dalam hati untuk mengganti template blog ini dengan skin seperti kepunyaan o-om yang tampilannya seperti ini. Keinginan itu semakin memuncak setelah saya terdampar ke blog ini dan ini, dimana kedua blog tersebut mempunya layout template yang notabene sama degan blog favorit saya milik o-om.

Berbagai usaha saya lakukan untuk mendapatkan skin model o-om tersebut, dari searching via Google hingga meninggalkan pesan di ke 3 blog tersebut dimana isi dari pesan tersebut pada intinya saya meminta kode HTML dari template yang mereka pakai, tapi apa daya dan apa mau dikata ternyata tidak ada respon dari mereka. Dalam keputusasaan saya tersebut iseng2 saya mencoba untuk "mengintip" source dari blog milik o-om dan mencoba untuk meniru CSS dari template tersebut. Tidak terlalu sulit memang karena blog saya ini sebelumnya juga telah menggunakan template buatan o-om yang saya download dari sini, dimana template ini mempunyai struktur yang hampir sama dengan template blog yang digunakan o-om saat ini.

Apa boleh buat karena keterbatasan ilmu khususnya mengenai CSS dan HTML CSS template saya yang lama saya ubah menjadi sama dengan kode CSS milik templatenya o-om dan anda bisa lihat hasilnya sekarang, memang mungkin masih belum sesempurna milik o-om yang asli dan masih memerlukan perbaikan disana-sini, tetapi paing tidak sampai dengan ini saya sudah merasa puas karena blog saya ini karena sudah mempunyai "kulit" yang selama ini saya idam-idamkan. Kepada yang terhormat o-om di o-om.com saya secara pribadi minta maaf kerena telah melakukan copy paste pada source blog o-om tanpa seizin o-om. Dengan segal kerendahan hati saya hanya mengatakan bahwa keinginan ini sudah tidak dapat dipendam lagi, saya harap o-om dapat mengerti, sebelum dana sesudahnya sekali lagi saya mohon maaf. Buat mas thom saya juga minta maaf karena belum sempat mengerjakan PR yang si serahkan kepada saya, sesegera mungkin saya akan mengerjakannya. Akhir kata semoga dengan template yang "baru" blog saya ini bisa mendapatkan lebih banyak lagi pengunjung dalam rangka monetize. Salam...

3 Overlooked Ways To Get Hundreds Of Links And Prospects To Your Blog

Did you know that there are free ways that you can get links back to your blog overnight? That after a few days they can number in the hundreds?

No matter what you market on the internet at some point you'll face the issue of increasing the number of visitors to your site. What most people don't know is that there are literally hundreds of ways to get free traffic. Here we'll focus on three overlooked ways to get additional traffic to your site using a blog.


The third most overlooked way to bring traffic to your site with a blog is to read and comment on other blogs.

Now, maybe you've done this before but stopped, because you're becoming concerned about being considered a link-spammer. In that case, leave a link to your site after your comments, instead of in the comment form that hot links it.

In the near future, blogmasters will be able to use special code to prevent spam in their comments section, so this will become less of a concern.

Besides, getting clicks from people who read comments, or visits from search engine spiders through your comments, isn't necessarily your direct objective, though it's definitely a plus.

What you want to do via commenting is to enter the blog community that corresponds to your target market. Get to know who the players are and make agreements with them to cycle traffic between you.

Or lurk to find out where your target market typically hangs out when they're online ? you'd be surprised at how many inexpensive and targeted advertising sources you can find through this method.

(If you're looking to get linked, there's another way that we'll go over next.)

This tip alone has earned me a few dozen links from prominent blogs in the past four days alone.

These links are worth ten times a reciprocal link because they send targeted traffic from established sources, and come from experts with records of proven results.

You can be sure these kinds of people will check you out before they linked to you, since they may be judged by the quality of the information they share.

The second method to more
blog traffic is the most confusing for newer people, and this is probably the reason its benefits remain overlooked.

In the simplest of terms, Trackback is kind of a remote commenting system that incorporates linking. It allows the reader to follow a topic around the web to see other bloggers remark on the same subject. It enables the publisher to remotely cite references to the issue on which they've written.

Once you've made yourself familiar with the blogging community you have entered, you can often pick up the pulse of conversations within your site's theme. Then, when you see issues that you want to expound on, you can send the other site a notification to let them know you cited them on your blog. That link will appear on their site, and often draws visitors to you.

Bloggers who use Trackback often enjoy greater control over this function in their blogs than they do over linking, as they have the option to reject your reference - so there is a lesser incidence of fraudulent linking. That also gives your link a greater chance of being displayed.

So why don't more people use Trackback?

One reason is that what is arguably the most popular free blog system, Blogger, doesn't have Trackback. However, Haloscan.com can remedy this with their free service ? it's a cut and paste away.

Many new bloggers don't get what it is and how it differs from commenting. And of course, the dynamics of it are a little more complex than I've stated. But learn to use Trackback properly, and you won't need to beg for links to your site ever again.

It's harder to estimate an exact number of visitors that come as a result of trackback links. But if you posted five days out of seven, and was able to get a trackback link to your site three times a week, by the end of the year you'd have almost 150 topical links back to your site, which are more valued by search engines than a typical link trade with an unrelated site.

The most overlooked source of traffic for a blog is through article submission. To start with, turn your longer posts into articles and submitting them to ezines or directories. Look especially for directories that ask for the direct link to the article on your own site, and input the permanent link to the post on your blog.

Make sure that your Auto-Discovery tag is in place and it can mean hundreds more prospects, links and subscribers.

By using these simple strategies can still get you more exposure than you have now.