Find A Topic

Consider your reader for a moment. What is he looking for? What’s bugging him? Go to his favorite online hang outs and look for questions. Fire up keyword tool and find out what he’s been typing into search engines. Make a short list of your findings.

Look over your list and see if there’s one idea that you know about. If you can answer questions about that subject without doing too much research, then you’ve found your article topic.

Now, you may find that you’d rather write about other ideas because they seem more interesting. But maybe with these subjects, you don’t have much experience. That’s not too big of a problem; you’ll just have to do a bit of research.

Brainstorming

Take out a sheet of paper and a pen and write down anything that comes to mind about your article…ideas, concepts, words, symbols, doodles and phrases. You’re not writing the article at this point, so don’t worry about making sense or being neat. Be sloppy and scribble if you’d like.

Three Point Outline

Once you’ve dumped a bunch of insights and thoughts onto your paper, take a look at the mess you’ve made. Remember, all these scribbles should be directly related to your article idea. Look for three points that you’d like to cover in your writing. These should be closely related ideas that are simple and that look easy to explain to your reader.

Words, Sentences, Questions

Write these three ideas in a simple outline; just one to three words each. Don’t make it complicated…no more than three words for each element of the outline.

Now expand on each phrase in your outline. Flesh out the idea behind the word or phrase and write a complete sentence.

After you’ve turned each phrase into a complete sentence, change those sentences into questions.

Answer Each Question

Once you’ve completed your questions, answer them.

This preparation takes a bit more time than just jumping into an article and writing free form. But, after the prep work is finished, your article will be far easier to write. All you have to do is react to the questions as you would were someone to ask them in an interview or on a forum.

Using this method, you may find that you’re able to produce more writing in a shorter period of time. You may also find that you have fewer problems with writer’s block.

Write Headline, Intro, And Summary

All that remains is to write the introduction and summary.

I’ve saved the intro and headline until this last step because it’s easier writing them at this stage, since you know exactly what your article is about.

To write the headline, read your article once more and think about the central idea. Connect this idea to your reader. What’s he really going to get by reading what you’ve written? Turn this idea into a reader centered statement or question and you’ll have your headline.

For the introduction and summary, simply state in a few brief sentences the subject matter the article covers. In the introduction, you will use future tense language…”This article is about so and so.” (Just be a bit more creative than that.) And for the summary, you’ll use past tense…”This article covered so and so.”

Include in the intro and summary exactly why your reader should care about your main idea…how this information impacts him or benefits him.

So for your next article, pick three points on a topic you’re familiar with, turn those three points into questions and then answer them. Give the article a simple introduction and summary and move on to the next article. How much easier can this get?

There are some pretty large photo collections available online…some are free and some charge a small amount per photo.

Since you can’t legally grab any old photograph from someone’s website, you should check into these stock photo resources. They’re royalty-free, which means you pay for them once and can use them without paying anything further, all nice and legal.

Of course, usage rights depend upon the license attached to the photos…in certain projects you can’t use them absolutely freely and without limitation. But for most ordinary projects, you can simply pay the fee, download the pic and drop it into your article or ad. As with anything, be sure to read the usage limitations.

This post comes from the following discussion found on the Warrior Forum…

Google Image Search

The first place you may want to look is on Google’s Image Search.

Once there, go to the advanced search page put your search terms into the appropriate box and select “labeled for commercial reuse with modifications”.

Here’s some info on usage rights.

Commercial Stock Photos

My favorite stock photo site is iStockPhoto.

And here’s a handful of quality commercial sites…

http://www.shutterstock.com/
http://www.bigstockphoto.com/
http://www.jupiterimages.com/
http://dreamstime.com/

Free Stock Photos

Photo Rack appears to be a higher quality than usual free stock photo site.
http://www.photorack.net/

Here’s an interesting free collection of photography intended for web site designs…
http://www.designpacks.com/

Bonus: Free Stock Video Footage

And here’s one for stock video footage…
http://stockfootageforfree.com/

So that got me thinking about adding a closing logo to my videos…you know the kind…UBU Productions’ Sit Ubu Sit, Good Dog! Or Newhart’s kitten meowing with Bob Newhart’s voice. These end of show logo screens are called vanity cards or production logos and serve as a jazzy end credit for the production company and associates.

I haven’t seen anyone else add one to an online video, so I thought it would be neat to include one in my videos.

I’m still in the design stage of my vanity card development, but in case you’d like to see exactly what I’m talking about, here’s a montage of these cool closing logos from past TV shows…

If you’d like to take a look at even more of these vanity cards, here’s a few links to collections of them found on YouTube…

Production Logos Search Results

Production Logos Playlist

Other Production Companies Playlist

To read more about these production logos, head on over to MSNBC and see if you can remember the logos mentioned in the article. Here’s another one, although there’s a bit of overlap.

And here’s the excellent Warrior Forum thread that got me thinking of doing YouTube videos:

Biggest Mistakes I See in Videos on YouTube

Let’s say you’re trying to sell posters. What can you possibly say about a poster? And what if you have several different posters on your website? Not much to say, is there?

You can’t simply say each poster is the best one. That’s not really that emotional, any way. That’s just empty bluster and won’t get you anywhere. Emotional selling of posters has more to do with touching your customer’s connection to the person on the poster. What is it about the singer they like? Why does a certain movie excite them?

You first have to describe the subject of the poster, and not the poster itself. No one wants to buy a piece of rolled up paper. What they’re buying is some kind of fantasy connection with the singer, actor, or movie. Use evocative language…describe the scene the poster represents…put your reader in that scene. Make it come alive with action.

And then give them a way to capture a moment frozen in time with that singer or actor…all they have to do is buy that poster and they can feel that special connection with their favorite star.

Your goal is to reach into your customer’s mind and connect him with your product.

Another thing you can do is to somehow emotionally describe the physical product itself. Seems impossible…how can someone use emotion to sell the physical features of anything? No one is going to feel a chill go down their back because of the high gloss of the poster paper…the crisp colors made possible by some exotic printing process…the rich depth seen in the image itself…or the playful way the dolphins in the poster swim through the ocean’s warmth. (Okay…that last one was more about the content of the poster than the ordinary physical facts about the poster.)  Nah…you couldn’t really emotionally touch anyone with something so ordinary as the physical features of your product or how it was made. Or could you?

See, the emotional touch isn’t about writing a romance novel or making them cry. It’s about using words that put the product in their hands and in front of their eyes, even though they’re sitting in front of the computer in their underwear and needing that first cup of coffee.

It’s about reaching into them and pulling on their inmost desires related to that product. It’s painting a rich, smooth picture for them using more lively words and sentence structure than just a boring list of bland features. And by doing so, you can even make a mundane feature come to life right in front of their very eyes. Ricardo Montalban did just this by describing a certain car’s upholstery in terms of “soft, Corinthian leather”.

With emotion laden copy, you can take even lifeless feature lists and make them compelling, living micro-stories that move your reader to actually want what they’re reading about.

So this post is the solution. (Well, it’s a solution on paper, since we actually have to put it into action…but that’s a completely different story.) The simple solution to this dilemma is the niche marketing strategy.

Niche Marketing Strategy

Niche Research

Take yourself to Clickbank and run a search on whatever kind of product interests you. This will be your niche. Sort by gravity. Go to the websites of the top three gravity products and copy their addresses into a notepad file. (You can use other affiliate programs besides Clickbank, of course.)

Keyword List Generation

Go to http://www.google.com/keywords and select “Website content” under “How would you like to generate keyword ideas?” In the text area box in the right hand column, paste one of the addresses you snagged from your Clickbank research. Click the “Get keyword ideas” button.

Your search should produce a big list of keywords. Add all these and then click the “text” link under “Download these keywords” in the right hand column.

Open that new file and take a quick look at that list. Remove any keywords that appear to have nothing to do with your chosen niche. Eliminate duplicates and plurals. Keep synonyms, though. Save the file.

Open up http://www.google.com/keywords again. This time we’ll be entering our keywords into the text area box of the “Descriptive words or phrases” tab.  So, put one keyword from your new list into the text area. Enter the CAPTCHA text into the security field and click “Get keyword ideas”.

Once again, you’ll get a large list of keywords. Under “Choose columns to display”, select “Show estimated avg. CPC”. Under “Match Type” select “Exact”.

Look for keywords that have over 1,000 searches per month as listed under the heading “Global Monthly Search Volume”. Go through the entire list and save these. There are two lists, actually…the top list is made up of keywords related to the keyword you entered into the text box. The second list contains keywords that are more distantly related. Just make sure you’re saving keywords that have a moderate to strong relationship to the keyword you originally entered. Now, click the text link in the right hand column to save your new keyword list. Use the subject keyword to name the file.

Repeat this process for your entire original keyword list. Yes, it will take a long time. And yes, it will take effort and you probably won’t finish in one sitting. This is important work, though. Your money is made in the research phase of a project, so do good work.

Eliminate The Competition

Once you have several (several dozen?) files full of keywords that Google says get over 1,000 searches a month, go through each of them one more time and check the competition level. Go to Google and enter each keyword, one at a time. I like to check with and without quotes. I also check with the search modifier “allintitle” to see how many pages are even moderately optimized for my search term. To use this, in Google’s search bar, just type allintitle:”keyword phrase”.

We’re looking for keywords that have less than 20,000 competing exact match pages. 10,000 would be better, but even with 20k pages, we’ll end up with a fairly small list. You can compete against exact match competition of over a million. I wrote a quick, once page website with a new domain name that’s hanging around on the bottom half of the front page for its search term. It showed up after about a week and hasn’t slipped in over two months. I only have about five back links pointing to it, too…so you certainly can outrank even a million other sites and show up on page one. But for now, focus on keywords with low competition.

You’ll be pleasantly surprised by a number of your search terms…they may have over a million broad match competitors, but by the time you do an exact match and then an allintitle search, that number could easily drop to 15,000 or 8,000 or even 3,000 or less. There are thousands and thousands of keywords that just haven’t been picked over yet, even to this day. You just have to do the work to find them. (And then never tell anyone what they are! Not even your mother!)

(This is a work in progess…more to come soon…)