Blogging Tips

In marketing and advertising, a ‘call to action’ is a message or statement which encourages the prospect to perform a specific action. Most of the time this involves buying a product, making a donation, subscribing to a newsletter or requesting for more information. The specific action to take is defined by the marketer in accordance with his/her goals.

If you think about it, call-to-actions are really a natural result of most human interactions. You call a friend to chit-chat and before you hang up, you ask her to have lunch together tomorrow. She thinks about her schedule for a moment and says “Sure, let’s do that”.

The ability to write well is very useful for our personal and professional lives. It helps students, business people, politicians, writers,  bloggers, marketers and everyone who has ever needed to arrange words together to convey ideas or opinions. The written word has become an essential means of social communication: mastery of it helps you to enthrall and  persuade an audience that would look upon you favorably in return.

It goes without saying that learning how to create compelling content is a part of one’s success as an online publisher. Reading widely and deeply while consistently honing your writing skills helps a great deal in bettering your prose. Sometimes, it doesn’t hurt to read a few stylebooks/essays on writing by professional teachers or authors.

Blogs are quite often a one-person show. The owners maintain the blog, write the content and promote the site themselves. They switch between different roles whenever necessary and that’s the natural result of a DIY system where one is personally in charge of everything. Sometimes, we tend to see themselves more as writers and less as executive editors.

We are more occupied with the process of developing an article idea, writing the blog post and then doing some minor editing to correct inaccurate usage of grammar, spelling or punctuation. To us, editorial work mainly involves prepping a post for eventual publication.

A comment left on a popular blog may be viewed by a few hundred people in one day. Multiply that by the lifespan of the blog and you’ll see that a simple comment may say a lot about you. Every blog comment is usually permanent. It’s not just a hyperlink but a long-term representation of your brand.

Too many webmasters view blog commenting as only a traffic or link building strategy. This rigid marketing emphasis has led to certain modes of behavior. For example, one might make the effort to comment exclusively on blogs with nofollow turned off, while using keyword names in order to increase the search engine ranking for one’s website.

I’m busy with some other projects now and instead of leaving the blog alone for several days, I thought I’ll do a quick post on a helpful tool that I’ve been using for more than a year.

It’s called Dark Room and its a minimalist fullscreen word processor which forces you to focus on the writing process and nothing else.

This free Windows/.Net application transforms your entire computer screen into a dark background and removes all the usual word processor toolbars and quick buttons. The only thing you’ll see is the words. I feel that it really improves my ability to concentrate on the blog post or school essay I’m writing.

News blogs are fast-paced blogs which track, aggregate and disseminate current news on a set range of topics. Their main selling points are comprehensiveness and timeliness: a good news blog must cover the field throughly and speedily by pointing readers to new information or developments.

Content for news blogs is published regularly on a daily basis and sometimes multiple times throughout the day. Apart from the value of the actual opinions offered by news bloggers: people subscribe to or follow these news blog largely because they help them to stay on top of current issues, innovations or ideas concerning a industry.

A private diary is tremendously powerful. It can help you to greatly improve your business or website. If you want to be a success, you need to think and act strategically. At the very least, you should keep your goals in mind in order to work towards them daily.

And a private journal achieves all this more effectively than a static to-do list, which only lists end goals and results to be achieved.

Unlike a to-do list, a well kept journal provokes introspection. It is a liberating and productive outlet for random ideas, thoughts and feelings.

I didn’t write any articles in the last few days on Dosh Dosh because I didn’t feel that I had anything interesting to say. It’s not entirely self-censorship: I just don’t like to write when there’s no way to inject a new perspective on any topic.

Many will publish content regularly because they feel a necessity to generate pageviews and maintain site freshness. Some fear that their subscribers will go away if they don’t update their site.

They don’t mind repeating the ideas of others and writing variations of the same topic again and again. Some will tirelessly create resource lists every week for links.

Online content is usually created to express opinions or share information with others. For entrepreneurs and web publishers, content is developed as a means to generate direct/indirect income.

However, one should not only view content as a means to receive immediate benefits like traffic or revenue. It is not just fodder for pageviews but a tool to enhance more abstract factors like reputation, reader trust and peer relationships.