All about share

Problogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income is not your average get-rich-quick paperback. You won’t find any outrageous and sensational claims in this book. In fact, authors Chris Garrett and Darren Rowse are quick to make the point that blogging isn’t a magical cash cow but something that can fill your bank account only if you know your stuff. Then they proceed to teach you all the techniques they themselves have used to achieve wealth through blogging.

Making money from a blog is no different than any other career-you need the right tools and techniques in order to be successful. The book offers a very brief explanation of what blogging is then moves on to help you choose a topic that will draw in the traffic you need to make it profitable. You’ll also be taught how to properly set up a blog, making it visually appealing as well as interesting to your target audience.

Of course, marketing your blog is essential if you want to profit from it and Garrett and Rowse teach their readers how to analyze the market in order to take advantage of it. Unless you know how the market trends and what consumers need you won’t be successful no matter how good your blogging skills are! They then go on to teach you a number of ways to promote your blog. After all, without promotion the only traffic you’ll have is accidental surfers and that’s every blogger’s nightmare.

Many people start blogging without no idea as to what blogging topics they want to write about. That’s perfectly alright. As the saying goes, spontaneity is the spice of life? Or was that variety? Something like that.

Inevitably when that first rush of creativity ebbs away, bloggers find their muses abandoning them on a dry but surprisingly crowded island called Writer’s Blocktopia. Here are a few ways to flag down the rescue ship of inspiration and come up with some great blogging topics:

* Look over the blogging topics you have already covered and approach them from a different angle. This is what professional writers do. They take a topic that has been flogged within an inch of its life and look for a new whip to beat it with. So if you have been writing about how politicians are driving their constituents crazy with their antics on Capitol Hill, you could flip it around and talk about how the people are driving the politicians crazy.

* Sign up for social media sites like Twitter, Digg, and Facebook. People post links to all types of content they find on the web which provide an almost bottomless well of hot blogging topics. Another option is to visit meme and quiz sites like BlogThings and Know Your Meme that provide databases of quizzes and memes you can participate in.

* Although forums are not as popular as they used to be, they are still a great place to find great blogging topics, particularly if you are writing on a niche subject. The trick is to find an active forum in your niche with lots of diversity. With all of the opinions flying around, you will certainly find something to blog about.

Several of you have written asking me to share some of my ideas and tips about blogging, so here goes.

Observation leads me to believe many bloggers do not know a good sentence from a turnip. If I find myself rewriting someone else’s sentence instead of reading their blog, I quit reading.

Another observation I have made is many people who consider themselves writers do not know how to tell a story. Now, I am not talking about Mark Twain kinda’ storystelling, just the basics.

Writing is difficult-those who would have written “writing is hard”-just proved my point. The task is difficult; the object is hard-eighth grade English class.

If you want to write well, be prepared to work. One of my favorite sayings is “if I had more time I would have written less.”

My overriding rule to myself is not to be redundant. If all I am doing is writing about the same topic as others, or offering the same perspective, I am just wasting air. I go out of my way to be contrarian, and I do so for the same reason.

Just because Word or dictionary.com warns you that the word you just typed is not a word is irrelevant. If it helps tell the story, use it. Also, only people with small minds believe there is only one way to spell each word.

I write conversationally, and I do so purposefully. I find it helpful to use tools-analogies and allegories to tell a story, to set a stage, or to draw in the reader. I use other such devices, but I do not know the names of devices any more than I know participles.