Sharing content through social networks is not a new concept (infact nothing is really a ‘new’ concept anymore!). You will have seen blogs with lots of sharing options to bookmark the blog, to retweet the blog & to share links on Facebook – something that is used a lot on this blog too in order for our readers to easily share this content.

Until recently, sharing a blogpost on Facebook has been slightly clunky in that you had to use Facebook Connect to share the content as a status update.

Last week, Facebook users will have noticed a few changes recently to some features, most obviously the change that got rid of the ‘Become a Fan’ on Pages and replaced it with ‘Like’. The ‘Like’ feature is now pretty much uniform across Facebook – incorporated into status updates, wall posts, individual pictures, photo albums etc..and now Pages.

Those of you who have WordPress.org blogs setup can now install one plugin which puts a ‘Like’ button into your blog posts so that your readers can ‘Like’ your post and it will publish the fact that they like your post on THEIR newsfeed. This instantly gives the blog post viral & sharing possibility through facebook unlike before where sharing on facebook was always a little clunky (clunky being a technical term, of course). It is now on par with the TweetMeMe button and others on blogs to share on Twitter etc. You can see this in action on this blogpost. Why not click on the Like button so you can see how it works.

Here are two places you can get this plugin - here or here (two versions, essentially the same thing though). You can choose to put it at the top or bottom (or both) of your blog posts & pages.

Add Facebook’s ‘Like’ button to your blogs is a post from: Internet Marketing Highway

It has been said that you have about 3 seconds to capture the attention of a visitor to your website or blog.  The most powerful part of your blog that will help you achieve this is your headline.  I’m no copywriter but I know how important a skill it is to be able to write effectively in order to compel your visitors into reading your content. It is a skill that I am learning & practicing all the time.

There are several elements in creating a compelling headline and here are a few tips to help you create better headlines for your blog posts.

1. Tap into Your Visitors’ Emotions

Psychologists say that people’s buying decisions are based first and foremost on their emotions.  Use headlines which trigger an emotional benefit or reaction with your visitors & readers.

Emotions & feelings that you can tap into with a headline are a desire to feel:

• Attractiveness
• Sexy
• Assertiveness
• Confidence
• Energetic
• Pampered
• A sense of belonging
• In control of their own destiny
• Wealthy
• Proud
• Respected
• Safe

2. Make it Active

Headlines need to be compelling so it is important to use active language – i.e. language that shows movement and commands attention.

For example, ‘Stop Smoking Cravings With This Simple Step’ is an acceptable headline for a blog post, however it does not command any action nor does it tap into any emotions.  However, ‘Conquer Your Smoking Cravings With This Simple Step’ can make a big difference.  The word ‘Conquer’ is an active and emotionally powerful word and readers receive the benefit of feeling powerful and in control and it commands action.

3. Let Your Reader Know They’re Important

The word YOU is a very powerful word.  You want to try and make your readers feel as if you are talking to them directly and are genuinely interested in solving their problems and helping them achieve their goals. Instead of using I, Me or We in your headlines, use You where possible.  Using the headline example above compare the two options to see which one looks more personal & compelling:

Conquer Your Smoking Cravings With This Simple Step

Stop Smoking Cravings With This Simple Step

Your readers want to know what’s in it for them and when they can assess that information in the headline, theres a much higher chance that they are going to be compelled to continue reading your article or blog post, and possibly making a purchase from you.

Here are three more ideas for powerful headlines:

1. Make a promise or offer a desired outcome – i.e. Stop Smoking
2. Make it newsworthy – i.e. New smoking cessation tool makes it easy for you to stop
3. Ask a question – i.e. Do you want to stop smoking?

Three Simple Steps to Write Headlines That Sell

So now you have some ideas about what types of headlines can compel your visitors to continue reading your blog, how do you begin to write those powerful headlines?

Step One

Get to know your audience intimately. What are their hopes, dreams, desires, and problems?  Understanding your visitors will help you create an emotional and powerful headline directed specifically at your audience.

Step Two

Determine how your products or services are going to help your prospects solve their problems.  For example, if you sell gym & fitness equipment and your audience struggles with feeling attractive then you can create a headline that highlights a specific benefit that your fitness equipment offers to solve that problem.

Step Three

Write ten to twenty, yes twenty, possible headlines.  Not only will this give you practice writing compelling headlines, it will help you hone your copywriting skills.  And if you think you have a few winners you can always test them for conversion rates to find out which headline is more effective.

Marketing and copywriting experts consider your headline to be the most import element of any effective marketing piece.  Take the time to craft a compelling, and selling, headline and you will reap the benefits for years to come.

Create Your Own Powerful Headlines For Your Blogs is a post from: Internet Marketing Highway

A blog that I follow recently published this article about a blogger (Glen Allsopp) who hated writing at one point, but who went on to love the process of writing and blogging…ended up making a whole lot of money in doing so.

A great read if you are blogging and getting bored or frustrated writing your blogposts. Take some inspiration from Glen’s article below…

Instead of me sharing my biggest tips about blogging, I just want to show you what is possible. After all, you can read tips on writing scannable content, creating killer-headlines and promoting your blog posts anywhere. However, at times all we really need is a little inspiration from somewhere who has been there and done that to get us going again.

If you’re losing a little bit of motivation for blogging or don’t really think you can achieve what you want to, then this post is for you. Allow me to start this story with a little of my background. In school, I absolutely hated writing. Despite being in the ‘high flyers’ class which meant that myself and 20 others took their English exams a year before anyone else in the country, I was definitely struggling. Computers were far more my thing and I would rather type out an essay than write it.

Being handed another assignment which involved 3,000 words, hand written, just drove me insane.
Over the next two years, I went through college and built up websites (some of which were blogs) on the side. In fact, three years ago, my first ever blog was the one I now write for full-time after giving it a recent resurrection: my site on viral marketing. For a year, I wrote on the site purely as a way to build up search engine traffic. I didn’t care about making my articles sticky or how viral they were; I simply cared about search engine rankings.
Of course, how search engines work and what I focus on has changed a lot, but even after a year of pushing myself to write and hoping that I would start to enjoy the process, nothing seemed to be helping.

Then something changed…

I slowly let my marketing blog die and wasn’t writing much online until I launched another site, PluginID. In just over a year, the site has gained over 6,000 subscribers and is viewed as a top 10 blog in the personal development industry.

If you’re wondering what changed between a guy that hated writing to one that makes enough money through blogging to support himself full-time, then let me tell you:

I Started Writing What I Want To Read – I decided this would be the best way to judge whether I was writing excellent content that my audience would care about. Instead of writing things for search engines, or for teachers (like in school), I simply focused on writing what I wanted to write about. And, miraculously, I started loving it.

I Realised the Importance of Content – Some people get so caught up in SEO, design and their analytics stats that they completely forget about the most important aspect of blogging: your readers. And, your readers are simply on your site for one thing: your content. Instead of writing for search engines, I started to realise that my blog would only grow if I provided massive value to my readers, so I started putting a lot more time and attention into my writing.

I Stopped Caring About Things Out of My Control – After pumping out articles for a few months, it suddenly hit me that there is just no way I can ‘control’ whether people like my work. At school, I could study as much as possible and try to produce the best work that I can, but at the end of the day it’s up to the teacher to decide on my grade. Focus on what you can control (writing and promoting the best content you can) and then remain indifferent to how ‘well’ that article does. When you eliminate the number of things you focus on, you naturally start to enjoy the things you do.

I Left Editing Until the End – Typically, with written content, I would edit as I go because I didn’t want to make a mistake on paper and have to start again. As you would expect, when I jumped into the online world, I kept this same method (as many people do). I now find that it’s much more enjoyable, and produces much better results, if you try to get down everything you want to say and then come back and edit the content later. This allows you to stay in the flow and enjoy two separate modes when writing your posts.
Each of these 4 things, individually, had a big impact on how I now operate online. Combining all of these changes meant that I went from literally dreading having to write posts, to living what I do and now enjoying writing as my favorite medium.

If you ever find yourself down about your writing ability or demotivated to write your next post, then keep these in mind. I went from someone who hated writing to making over $50,000 with my blogs in 2009. There’s no way you can’t do the same.

This article is by Glenn Allsopp and all credit goes to him for this great bit of inspiration.

Bored writing blog content? This guy was too… is a post from: Internet Marketing Highway

So you’ve got a website or a blog…great. You are already one step ahead of millions of others who don’t even get to that stage (i’m not even kidding).

The biggest misconception out there is that by simply putting up a new blog or website that you will suddenly get bucket loads of traffic and visits quickly. I won’t beat around the bush on this point – that’s not how it works.

Having a blog is a great way to improve your online presence for both business and also personal reasons. You can build a blog for free using tools such as WordPress, Blogger and Typepad and begin posting content right away. However, if nobody is reading that content that you spent ages creating, then what’s the point of it all?

I hear people saying things like “blogging doesn’t work” all the time. It turns out that they tried blogging for a few weeks, published a few random blog posts and then expected the traffic to pile in. No wonder blogging didn’t work for them! My advice, which is hardly rocket science, is that you must treat your blog/website almost as a business in itself: you need to put the time and effort in and treat it seriously to make a success of it.

Here are ten things you need to be aware of when blogging for business or personal reaons:

1.    Fresh Content

Have you ever been to a website that said ‘last updated 1997′ or ‘last updated 254 days ago’? What impression does that give the reader? Nobody wants to visit a blog to see the same content all the time. Update your website and blog content at an asbolute minimum of twice a week to keep your content very fresh and current. Your content can be things like industry news, tips, advice, warnings, an update on your work/projects, feedback received from clients..etc.
It’s perfectly fine to write content and upload it to your website/blog and set it up to publish every few days. This way, you do all the hard work at the beginning and put your updates on auto-pilot whilst you research more ways of improving your blog.

2.    Article Marketing*

This is where you write articles not only for your blog content but also to distribute to article submission websites. You can usually put a link back to your website or blog within your article (usually in the author’s bio box). Article marketing is a great way of putting yourself “out there” as the authority and go-to person for your expertise area.

There are thousands of article submission websites that you can use to distribute your articles, but to start with i’d recommend Ezinearticles.com

*The same applies for Video Marketing

3.    Social Networking

The buzz word for the past few years. Incase you’ve been living under a rock recently this includes Facebook, Twitter, Squidoo, LinkedIn, MySpace etc. Social networks are great to find like minded people who you know would be interested in your content. It’s very easy to target the demographic of your ideal blog reader using different social networks and by connecting with those people and sharing your thoughts you can easily gather quite a following.

It’s also very easy to link your blog to all your social networking profiles, so that when you update your blog all the other profiles get updated too.

4.    Viral Marketing

Ever seen one of those videos that everyone is talking about? Viral marketing is when your content (article/video/audio etc) is passed on from one person to their friends & contacts to see. Then those people will tell their friends about it, and so on. Before you know it, hundreds or thousands (sometimes millions!) of people have seen your content.

A good way of making your content viral is by discussing topical issues or adding some controversy into your message – it’s sneaky, but so what!

5.    Use RSS Feeds

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. The visitors and readers of your blog can ‘subscribe’ to your RSS feed and get an email update whenever new content is posted on your blog. It is an easy way for your readers to keep up with your blog without having to actually go to your blog. RSS feeds can also be used to update other sites and social networks.

6.    Submit Your Blog to Search Engines

By manually submitting your blog to search engines helps your website/blog to be indexed and get ranked. Google and Yahoo! are the most popular search engines you want to ‘crawl’ your blog pages. Manually submitted your URL does not guarantee top ranking or indexing…there’s much more you can do to get your blog indexed quickly.

7.    Joining Forums

Relevant forums are full of your target readers. You are marketing yourself to find traffic to your website because people are interested in what you have to say. Become a member of a relevant forum for your industry connect with new people and share ideas. You can add a link to your blog in the signature line so others can click on it and read & subscribe to your blog.

8.    Visit other blogs

If someone comments on any of your blogposts, show your appreciation by also posting comments on their blogs. This helps form relationships with other bloggers. Also, you can add a link back to your own blog when commenting on someone elses!

9.    SEO Marketing

SEO is an entire industry in itself but a quick word on it here. Do ensure you use your relevant keywords in your content to attract the search engines. Getting a keyword density (ratio of keyword text to all text) between three and ten percent is recommended by most schools of thought (although this can totally depend based on what your competitors are doing on their sites). Don’t forget to do your keyword research first though – it’s pointless doing SEO for a keyword that nobody is searching for!

10.    Social Bookmarking

Not to be confused with social networking. Social bookmarking is when you submit your posts to sites which allows others who are members of those sites to track you back to your blog. For example, sites such as Digg, Delicious and StumbleUpon are social bookmarking sites.

10 Quick Ways to Boost Traffic to Your Blog is a post from: Internet Marketing Highway