Business Blogging
5 Tips to Help You Barrel Through Writer’s Block
Copyright © 2004 Tinu AbayomiPaul
It’s inevitable. Everyone hits the wall.
Whether you’ve been blogging ten weeks, ten minutes, or
ten months, eventually you’ll find yourself with absolutely
nothing to say.
Or so you think.
So what in the world do you do when you’re
stumped?
1- Talk about what you’ve already
talked about
Pick a topic you’ve gone over before and
give it some spin.
Try a new angle, like playing devil’s
advocate. For example, if you are a search engine journalist,
and last week your position was that most mainstream sites need
Google traffic to survive, try proving your point from the “con”
perspective, instead of the “pro” position.
There are dozens of ways to write about the
same thing. By putting your point another way, you might give
someone in your audience what a client of mine referred to as
an “Ah-ha!” moment. That's when they realize the
true value of the items for sale at your site to them and their
business.
2- Talk about what someone else is talking
about
If you want to have a popular blog, find other
bloggers in similar areas, and talk about what they said in
their posts. Friendly debate can often spark the soap-opera
like drama that will have both your audiences visiting both
blogs to see what “the other fella” had to say.
As an added bonus, if both of you are using
Trackback in your blogs, you’ve got yourself a mini-link
party that other people who are speaking on similar topics will
want to join..
3- Have yourself a good rant
The intimate nature and voice of blogs lends
itself well to the opinionated, angry ramble. But as a professional,
don’t let yourself get too unfocused, and remember to
back up your opinion with facts.
4- Feature someone, something or somewhere
I like to call mine “of the Day”.
As I zip around the Net conducting my business
and research, if my attention is called to a resource or tool
that my audience might find useful, I hit my blog bookmarklet
and save that bad boy for later.
Then when I get too busy for a full blown tip,
I’ll crown the resource, feed, tool, download or freebie
the featured “Deal of the Day”, changing the word
deal to something else more appropriate as needed.
After a while, my audience started to look for
it as a feature, as opposed to being upset at the interruption
in my mad, mad rambles.
5- Let someone else talk for a change
Invite a guest blogger, or post an article that
offers free reprint rights, the same way you would in a newsletter.
Of course you want to leave the resource box intact, or let
the guest promote their site, which brings me to the most common
complaint about this tactic.
“But I don’t want to send people
away from my site.”
Guess what? You’ll never believe what
I found out. Ready?
In a recent startling discovery, I’ve
found that 100% of my visitors eventually turn off their computers
or take otherwise drastic measures that cause them to leave
my site. Apparently this is beyond prevention, though you can
stall them for hours sometimes with good content.
Of course you don’t want to send them
on their way prematurely, but if you’re a good blogger,
and have done what you can to make sure they sign up to your
blog email updates or site feed, they’ll be back. Just
be sure that you’re giving them a good enough reason.
In the meantime, since they’re going to
leave anyway, it might as well be somewhere that gives you some
direct or in-direct benefit.
So there you have enough material for five more
days.
Happy Blogging!
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