It’s almost time for the 2008 BlogWorld & New Media Expo.

And yes, I will actually make it this year. Really.

BlogWorld is happening September 20-21 (Executive and Entrepreneur option on the 19th) in wholesome Las Vegas, Nevada. You can check out the entire conference schedule here.

I’ll be participating on two panels:

Making Money Online with a Blog (9/21)

I’ll be speaking alongside these fine gentlemen:

• Darren Rowse
• John Chow
• Zac Johnson
• Jim Kukral

Search Engine Optimization, SEM & New Media (9/22)

I’ll be trying to hold my own with:

• Michael Gray
• Lee Odden
• Stephan Spencer

The Super Secret Discount Code:

Discount pricing is good through August 22, 2008 (this Friday), but Copyblogger readers can save an additional 20% off those discounted admission prices (but only through 8/22/08… so you’ve got to get moving).

Just enter this code when you register:

CBVIP

Hurry! :-)

Register for BlogWorld here.

I think there should be a notice that appears when installing WordPress or setting up your shiny new account with Blogger.

It would show up somewhere before you complete the final steps of setup, but before the long drawn out terms of use that nobody ever reads.

“WARNING.”

“Blogging is not easy. You may experience unexpected droughts of inspiration, difficultly maintaining a schedule, or succumb to the pressures of always needing fresh content.”

Understandably, awash with the desire to share their great ideas and unique perspective with the world, most people would ignore this little nougat of wisdom.

But maybe it would seep its way into the subconscious. Maybe, a few months later as they were staring at a blank page trying to come up with something witty or informative to write, it would come back to them.

Told you so.

One Blogger’s Confession

Several months ago, I started a blog called Pop Culture Tees.

I had been blogging off and on for years, both professionally and personally, but I had never stuck it out longer than a few months. Usually I grew sick of the site or discovered that I really didn’t have anything I wanted to tell the Internet. I chalked these attempts up to being experiments in the medium rather than real stabs at being a blogger.

But this time I was serious. I had a simple idea: find and highlight cool t-shirts and give aspiring t-shirt artists the inspiration and the knowledge they needed to be successful.

I figured that keeping this blog up-to-date would be easy. After all, I was picking a topic I was passionate about (I worked as the lead artist at a screen printing company for four years), and there is an endless supply of new shirts out there to talk about.

I was kept psyched for the first month by the excitement of having my newly designed blog live and getting some early attention for it’s design.

Diligently, I would do a little bit of research each day to find a t-shirt I wanted to highlight, prepare the post and publish it. I wrote the first article of was going to be multi-part series and planned to post each subsequent part over the course of the next weeks. I even came up with a list of special articles/interviews I wanted to do over the next few months.

Then, just when I began to start getting traffic, it started to happen.

One day, I was too busy to post. The next day, I was unmotivated and tired.

Suddenly, my daily posts trickled down to 3-4 a week. The second article of my series was languishing half-finished. There were one or two emails I hadn’t responded to. And then, finally, I logged onto the site one day and realized the last post I had made was dated over a week ago.

5 Ways to Fight The Blog Updating Blues

As any expert on web publishing will tell you, the single most important thing you have to do to build a new blog is to post regular content. I was failing miserably.

After that one week of silence I saw my traffic cut almost in half and while RSS subscriptions weren’t dropping yet, they weren’t increasing either.

I had a decision to make. I could let my site join the thousand of other abandoned blogs out there, or I could change how I was doing things to do a better job keeping things up to date.

I chose the later, and here’s what I’ve learned over the past few months:

1. Decide on a realistic posting frequency

For me this was every day, except weekends. Ironically, it’s easier for me to handle posting during work days because I was already in “work mode”. On the weekends, I just wanted to be able to kick back and not think about anything work related.

For you, it may be every other day or twice a week. Whatever you decide on, announce it to your readers on your blog.

Announcing it accomplishes two things.

One, you’re creating and managing your reader’s expectations of when new content will be posted.

Two, you’re making yourself accountable to your readership. It’s harder to blow off posting when you know there’s a bunch of people out there who are expecting to see something new on a given day.

2. Accept that there will be days when you don’t have time to update your blog, or you just won’t feel like it. Then prepare for it.

Most blogging systems have an option to schedule posts in advance. Take advantage of it.

Work with your natural cycles of productivity and write some extra posts when you’re in the mood. Schedule them to post automatically on the days you know you’re going to be busy, or just keep them “unpublished” for the days when you aren’t motivated to write something new.

Generally, I follow this rule of thumb to generate a weeks worth of posts ahead of time and schedule them out, one per day. Then I can forget about posting for a while.

You’d also be surprised how much content you can find and want to share once you’ve already fulfilled your “quota”. Many times I wind up upping my post output to 2-3 per day once the pressure to get something published is gone.

3. Always keep your eyes out for new content and have a way to capture it.

It’s easy to miss opportunities for new content if you’re not looking for them or if you’re not prepared to record and save them for when you’re ready.

You’d be surprised how many times I’ll be surfing another website or reading a blog (many times on totally unrelated topics) and find something relevant to my own site.

Get in the habit of having online and offline means to capture information that will be useful later to your site. I use the following tools:

• Delicious with the Firefox add on for bookmarking things I find while surfing the net.
• A text file with various notes, urls, and article ideas.
• My iPhone camera for snapping shots of cool t-shirts I see around town.
• A small notebook (I like Field Notes) to write ideas down when I’m not anywhere near a computer.

I also save time on researching posts by using a few different methods of getting relevant information delivered to me, instead of having to go look for it.

• I subscribe to the RSS feeds of a half dozen industry sites/blogs via Google Reader, and star entries that I think will be useful.
• Delicious allows you to select tags of your choosing, and then subscribe to the resulting RSS feed. I’ve set up a few separate RSS feeds for relevant phrases and added them to Google. I get some of my best content from what other people have bookmarked.
• I’ve set up daily Google Alerts (one of the more obscure features of the Google empire) for relevant keywords and get them sent to my inbox. This is a fantastic source of actual news stories on any given topic.

4. Find something small that you can easily cover on a daily/weekly basis.

Every day on Pop Culture Tees I feature a different t-shirt. The post format is pretty simple: name of the design, picture, blurb about the shirt, price and a link to buy it. Doing the post doesn’t take much time at all, in fact, sometimes I’m lucky and people will send me shirts to review and I can skip the whole research part.

Find something to be your equivalent of the daily t-shirt.

Why? It’s a quick and easy way to build your archives, provides fresh daily content without a huge time investment, and fills the gaps between any larger features you might plan to write.

Need some ideas to get started?

• If your blog covers art/design: every day, link to a different image that has inspired you for some reason. Include a short bio of the artist, a link to their website, and some examples of their work.
• If your blog covers technology: find an interesting news story and write an opinion piece on it.
• If your blog covers your life: post something funny/interesting/crazy that you overhear from friends or strangers.
• If your blog covers music: recommend a new song each day and compare it to something people will have heard before.

5. Encourage readers to contact you.

One of the best things about blogging as a publishing medium is the ease in which people can respond to what you write. Writing becomes less a practice of lecturing and more an invitation to start a dialogue. And you never know where that dialogue could lead.

Include a contact form (never just your email address, unless you have some brilliant spam filters) someplace visible on your blog and encourage feedback, rants and submissions from your visitors. Also encourage users to post comments, and make sure you respond to them, especially in the beginning. Same goes for the emails.

I know, you’re wondering how user feedback will help you maintain your blog. There’s two simple reasons:

• Readers are sometimes the best sources of new content; and
• Knowing there’s a real live person behind a blog develops loyalty and relationships.

Thing is, they’re passionate enough about whatever you’re writing about to be reading your blog. Solicit their input and you may be surprised to find your readers linking you to relevant content, sharing experiences that you can write about, or just letting you know that the last article you wrote was awesome.

You’d be surprised how much that kind of response helps motivate you.

Beating the Blogging Blues for Good

At the beginning of this article, I said blogging wasn’t easy. And now that we’re at the end of the article… blogging still isn’t easy.

The suggestions here aren’t by any means a cure-all to the struggles that come from trying to produce content on a regular basis.

There are still days (though they are a lot fewer and farther between) when I don’t post, and I still have that half-written second article of my series still sitting my drafts folder.

But through a combination of preparation, structure, and the encouraging feedback of awesome readers, these guidelines have made blogging easier and a lot more fun for me.

I hope they do the same for you.

About the Author: Liz Fulghum has creative ADD. She’s worked at one time or another (and sometimes all at once) as a web designer, developer, illustrator and writer. Check out the t-shirt blog that inspired this article.

Now that’s an odd question, right?

We all know that websites don’t smell (at least not literally).

But if you’ll bear with me, I’d like to demonstrate the importance of emotion in your copy, and what types of emotional imagery your copy needs to conjure up.

To understand why emotion matters so much when selling online, all you have to do is observe almost any shopper in a physical store. Watch what the person does and the behavior the individual has.

On arriving inside the store, a person performs a lightening fast perception check. Within split seconds (so fast no one notices), the person’s brain processes all the data it can gather. Temperature. Lighting. Odors. Sounds. Movements. Space. Colors. When you think about it, the amount of information we take in is amazing.

Onwards. It’s time to shop.

So our shopper grabs a basket and heads off, navigating people and store layouts. It’s not long before something catches her eye—a bottle of shampoo, perhaps. The bottle is a neat color, it’s nicely shaped, and it looks appealing.

She slows; she stops. Sold? Not yet. But the shopper has had her senses stirred. It’s a beginning.

Our shopper picks the bottle up. She hefts it a little, flips it over and reads the text, then snaps the top and takes a quick sniff. Ah, Island Breezes. Very nice. It makes her think of the beach and a sunny day. There’s a song she likes playing overhead. Life’s good.

Now our shopper turns to her companion, a friend or maybe a family member. “Did you smell this?” She offers over the bottle, and her friend takes a sniff. They talk over some other shampoos they’ve used lately, their hair care problems, and the benefits offered by this new brand of shampoo.

Finally, the shopper makes a decision. Sold.

It’s the moment stores yell, “Bingo!” Using sales and marketing tactics, they’ve managed to create desire and possession. They’ve conveyed to the shopper that life changes will happen - if only she brings Island Breezes home.

She wants it. It’s hers. She owns that shampoo, and she hasn’t even paid money for it yet.

Imagine that shopping experience online. There are no smells, often no sounds, nothing to touch, and no friend to talk with. All there is to create a shopping experience is a flat screen, an image or two and some copy.

This is a bit of a problem.

People try to satisfy every sense they can while shopping. They analyze visual, auditory, tactile, and emotional data and more to make a purchase decision. The more senses people use, the better it is for sales.

Your copy needs to help a person see, touch, hear, feel, and even smell—if only in the mind. You can do that, too. Adding emotional imagery is easy through the power of words.

• Tell a story.
• Use Language that appeals to the senses.
• Work in fears, pain, conflict, desire and the promise of a better life.
• Draw the shopper in and enhance the ability to imagine positive changes that will (not could, will) occur—if only the shopper clicks to buy.

No emotion? The only click that happens is the one that lets shoppers leave your site.

About the Author: For more advice that doesn’t stink from James Chartrand, check out Men with Pens. Or grab the highly-emotional Men with Pens feed.

Does this sound familiar?

You’ve picked a topic that your ideal readers are dying to know more about. You can write about the topic with authority. You’ve even chosen an interesting angle. In short, you’ve got a killer post that should bring your blog thousands of new readers.

You’re also smart enough to realize that you need to tell other people about it. So, you send an email to all of the top bloggers in your niche, pointing them to the post. Then you sit back and wait for the links to come rolling in.

But nothing happens.

You don’t get any links. You don’t even get a reply from any of the bloggers you emailed. You check your stats, and none of them even clicked the link that you sent them.

No, you got ignored. And worse, you now realize that no one is paying attention to you. You wonder, could you really be that much of a nobody, that no one would even read your email?

Yep. You could.

The Oldest Blogging Myth

“Content is king.”

It sounds good in principle. Produce a truly great piece of content, and you’ll get all the links you could ever hope for.

Maybe it worked too, several years ago. The Web used to be a fairly quiet place compared to what it is now, and it was easier for people to notice great blog posts.

But not anymore.

Now great is no longer good enough. The Web is full of so much remarkable content that bloggers don’t have enough time to read it all, much less link to it.

If you want links now, you need to be more than great. You need to be connected.

The Secret to Building a Popular Blog

Remember the saying “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know?”

Well, it’s kind of true. A mediocre writer that’s friends with every member of the Technorati 100 will become a popular blogger faster than a brilliant writer with no friends at all.

Why? Because bloggers link more often to their friends than anyone else. If you write a reasonably good piece of content that interests their audience, they’ll link to you, mainly because they like you.

The secret to building a popular blog isn’t just writing tons of brilliant content. It’s also having tons of well-connected friends.

How to Make Friends with Popular Bloggers

So… how are you supposed to make friends with all of these popular bloggers and get them to link to your best posts?

Traditional wisdom says you should link to their posts, hoping they’ll notice you and start reading your blog. Sometimes it works, but in my experience, you need to be a little more creative. Here are some ideas to get you started:

• Write a guest post that gets lots of traffic and adoring comments
• Attend conferences that all of the “Who’s Who” of your niche go to and network your tail off
• Volunteer to “vote” for any posts that they’re pushing on social media sites like Digg, Del.icio.us and StumbleUpon
• Email them an irresistible question, hoping to spark a discussion
• Leave lots of truly memorable comments
• Interview them in either a post or a podcast, making sure to ask lots of intelligent questions
• Join their private membership program (like Teaching Sells) and make lots of smart posts in the forums

Give and Ye Shall Receive

We’re not talking about anything new here. Really, it comes down to one of the oldest principles of persuasion: reciprocity.

Contrary to what many people think, A-list bloggers aren’t islands, separate and self-sufficient. They deal with problems and annoyances, just as much as anyone else. If you can help alleviate them, they’ll thank and remember you for it.

The key is finding ways that you can be genuinely useful to them. Make yourself relevant and then use that opportunity to start building a relationship.

Give it a few months, and then start pointing them to your best and most relevant content. They’ll probably link to you anytime you do anything interesting, bringing you lots of readers. They’ll also introduce you to other popular bloggers, giving you a chance to do more favors and expand your network.

It’s hard work, but it’s worth it. If you put as much effort into building relationships as you do writing great content, you’ll have a popular blog in no time.

And better yet, you’ll have made friends with some of the most interesting people on the web. That’s a reward in and of itself.

About the Author: Jon Morrow is an Associate Editor of Copyblogger and co-author of Keyword Research for Bloggers.

If you’re trying to sell products and services online, you’re probably looking for that one magic key to make your business work.

You buy CDs and DVDs that will tell you the secret.

You subscribe to sites like Copyblogger to study the secret.

You look at mega-successful sites in your market and try to reverse engineer the secret.

After all of this searching, you may be tempted to believe there is no secret. But the secret is real.

Actually, there are three secrets that work together. To be blunt, these three magic success secrets separate the winners from the losers. Master them and you’ll start to move forward. Slowly at first, then you’ll pick up momentum and things will start to move amazingly quickly. No baloney, no tricks. These three secrets are . . .

Success secret #1: Take action

Every year, hopeful entrepreneurs buy millions of dollars’ worth of “how to succeed” or “how to start a business” products. The market isn’t limited to doing business online, but the idea of working at a computer making “six-figure incomes in our pajamas” is especially irresistible.

95% of the customers for these products will spend thousands of dollars, then turn around looking for the next magic pill before their credit card gets a chance to cool off. So are online marketing products all garbage? Are they just hype and spin?

There are some junky products out there, but the truth is that many of them are excellent. The “gurus,” as they’re (not always affectionately) called, have a lot of sound advice to give. Their advice can make you lots of money, if you know the success secret:

You actually have to do something with the advice.

Most customers for “business opportunity” products value the dream more than they do the result. They want to get out of the cubicle, out of their crummy apartment, out of credit card debt. They might even want it desperately. But they don’t take action.

I’m not saying this to be flippant or harsh. It’s not actually all that easy to go from advice to action. If you don’t have a good track record for that, if you’ve spent a lot of time or money on how-to products but never really done anything with it, you may believe you’ll never master it.

That’s BS.

Your new productivity methodology

Get a little notebook. This is your to-do list for your project.

If you’re a content marketer, most of your actions will revolve around creating content, creating products, or delivering services. Be sure and maintain a long list of content ideas, so you’re never at a loss when it’s time to knock out a post or a podcast.

Write down all the actions you must take to get you to the next step. Add more actions as you think of them. Cross them off when you’re done. When the list is a mess, rewrite it.

You don’t need an elaborate system that wastes more time than it frees up. Your system only needs to help you know what to do next.

Work every day (7 days a week, no exceptions), even if some days you only have 15 minutes. Working every day will increase your productivity by spurring your unconscious mind to come up with more ideas. This is helpful for entrepreneurs, and critical for content marketers.

Make a daily habit of one hour of action on your biggest goal. You’ll be astonished at how quickly you start to make progress. Ready, Fire, Aim author Michael Masterson recommends an hour of work on your dream goal every morning, as a way to start your day with a terrific rush of productivity. I’ve been doing just that for the past few months, and I’m starting to get used to the “whooshing” sound as the pieces fall into place. Not only does it work, it feels great too.

You can spend that hour all at once, or divide it into two or three pieces. Make it work for you. And once you develop the hour-a-day habit, you’ll actually find yourself making excuses to do more work on your project.

Success is built on lots of small steps. Start taking them. You’ve built this up in your head to be 1,000 times harder than it is. The fact that you have historically been terrible at getting stuff done is not relevant at all.

Just start taking action. It honestly is that simple.

Success secret #2: Have a plan

The down side of “just taking action” is that if you do a lot of random tasks, you tend to get a lot of random results.

You need to put together a simple, reasonably logical plan. If you want notoriety and attention for its own sake, put together a Paris Hilton sort of plan. If you want credibility and trust from your customers, make it more of a Copyblogger kind of plan.

There’s an old saying that when the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem tends to look like a nail. Fight that kind of thinking as much as you can. Your plan may call for expertise you don’t have, or actions you aren’t very good at. So make some room in your plan to partner with someone else. If you’re great at connecting with customers but lousy at technology, find a partner whose strengths and weaknesses perfectly complement yours. Believe me, that person is out there and wants desperately to work with you.

Making too many plans can be the enemy of success secret #1. Be sure your plan has plenty of room for “actions I will take.”

For most of us, grandiose plans don’t get implemented. It’s great to have spectacular goals, if that inspires you. But put together plans for relatively simple, manageable projects. A dumb, simple little project that gets done is infinitely more valuable than an impressive one that gets 99% done.

The reason “back-of-the-napkin” project planning is a cliché is because simple, compact plans tend to get put into action, while 1,000-page strategies to create business empires tend to gather dust.

Keep your project plan in your little notebook. If your plan doesn’t fit into a small notebook, make a smaller plan.

If you want to make a million dollars online, start with a project to make $10. Figure that out, then scale it. It sounds simplistic and even silly, but it works.

Success secret #3: Your secret sauce is you

This is the one that’s going to take #1 and #2 to a completely new level. Success secrets #1 and #2 can make you a decent living. Add #3 to those and you’ll start to create an extraordinary business that supports a meaningful life.

As a content marketer, you’re going to need to create interesting, useful and compelling content pretty much every day you’re in this business. Your blog posts, free reports and email newsletters all contribute to one goal: to establish you as a trusted authority on your topic.

If you’re just going to regurgitate the usual stuff in a lame me-too blog, you’re not going to find too many customers. You’re betting off spending your time surfing or skateboarding—at least with those, you’ll get some exercise and you might meet somebody cute.

You have a unique view of your market’s problems. You have a unique set of techniques and approaches to solve those problems. You have a unique set of experiences to put the problems in a fresh light. Share those unique perspectives in your content.

If you need more expertise to establish yourself as a credible authority, get out and start asking questions. Be a reporter. Look for case studies. Look for real-life examples, even if they’re tiny. Look for lessons in your own life. Make connections no one’s made yet. Bring someone else’s expertise to light in a new way.

If you’re a Franciscan monk, write about the Franciscan monk’s guide to brewing better beer. If you’re a doting parent, write about the toddler’s guide to success. If you’re an indentured servant for a big corporation, write about how to avoid doing all the really dumb stuff your company does.

There will always be people—often thousands of people—who know more than you do. Acknowledge that so you stay humble and open. Then put it to one side and speak up anyway.

Keep whittling down your topic until you’re speaking with an authentic voice about something you genuinely know and care about. Stay curious and you’ll find the path that works for you and only for you.

The real secret

Nearly everyone will read this, feel inspired for about 45 seconds, then go off to hit Starbucks and check out what the hottie on the 2nd floor is wearing today.

But you’re going out at lunch today to pick up your small notebook. As soon as you get back, you’re going to scribble a simple plan and a good handful of actions that will make the plan happen. You’re going to put some thought into how you can execute this plan in your own inimitable way.

You’ll make 10 minutes and take an action today, even if it’s small. Tomorrow morning, you’ll start working for an hour every day, 7 days a week, toward your biggest goal. And just like that, you’ll be on your way to true, meaningful success, however you define it.

Send me a postcard when you’ve reached your dream. I’ll be very jazzed to hear from you.

About the Author: Sonia Simone is an Associate Editor of Copyblogger and the founder of Remarkable Communication.

I’m getting older. You are too. It’s a fact of life that no matter how young we are now, one day we’re going to start feeling the creaks and groans of age settling in.

I can’t stay up as late at night. I’m a little slower to get going in the morning. When I’ve been writing for a long time, I feel stiff as I rise from my chair. Oh, yeah, and my eyesight is going, too.

Somewhere about the time we realize that we’ve flipped into middle age, little physical effects of aging sink in. They’re small at first and what gets noticed is what hurts most. Then other changes come to light, slowly but surely.

Lately, I’ve noticed I’m squinting a little more to read text on my monitor. I’m not keen on grey fonts and black on white serves me best. I don’t like Arial 6 (or 8 or 10, for that matter) fonts on websites, and I have to lean in and strain to read or give up and click away.

That’s important. How you write is key to online success. What you write is even more so. But what your content looks like has a huge, huge impact on your future.

I won’t dig up stats and facts on an aging population. It’s common knowledge that there are more people in the Baby Boomer generation than any other age group. These great people who gave the world so much change, innovation, and freedom are…

Well, getting old.

They’re also retiring. They’re looking for something new and fun or maybe investments for their future. They’re dabbling in hobbies and experimenting with all sorts of things.

They’re coming to an Internet near you - and they won’t be very happy when they have to squint, strain and lean forward to read your content.

You won’t be happy either. How will this age group’s needs affect your site traffic, conversion, readership and sales? Make no mistake – it will be affected.

That means you need good content, and you need readable content too. Think you have it already? Run through this quick list and see:

• Use shorter sentences and concise copy
• Describe less; integrate emotional impact instead
• Break up paragraphs into two or three sentences at most
• Use bolded headings and bullet points in your content
• Use a sans serif font that isn’t thin or wispy
• Choose a font size of 12 point or more
• Avoid italics, changing fonts or colored fonts
• Use a black or very dark font on a white or very pale background

Formatting copy for easier screen reading and accessible content is a challenge. It’s not easy to apply a larger font into the limited real estate space of a computer screen and convey the same message.

It can be done. And if your content is good, limited space and big fonts or not, you will engage your reader and compel the person to scroll down to read more. And that’s exactly what you want.

About the Author: Want to see more great content worth squinting at? Head on over to James’ blog at Men with Pens. Better yet, get easy-to-read content right here with the Men with Pens feed.

I went to a restaurant that serves “breakfast at any time”. So I ordered French Toast during the Renaissance. ~Steven Wright

Comedian Steven Wright is often credited with launching an entirely new genre of stand-up comedy. His dead pan, monotone delivery of clever and kooky one-liners is always with a straight face, and no one had seen anything like that before he burst on the comedy scene in the 80s.

You might assume that Wright’s style is a concocted stage persona, but the truth is a bit more interesting. Wright delivered his jokes that way when he first started simply because (a) that’s the way he speaks, and (b) he was trying to get the words out right.

According to Wright:

In my early sets I would have a straight face because I was scared of being onstage and I was trying to remember my act so I was just concentrating seriously on saying the material the right way. And when you do something serious, that’s just how you look.

In other words, content matters.

Here are five of Steven Wright’s wisecracks that contain wisdom for content marketers:

“Ambition is a poor excuse for not having enough sense to be lazy.”

You’ve heard all the blogging nonsense… post every day, post five times a week, post twice a week, but always on the same two days. Bah.

Post when you’ve got something interesting to say. Post when you have content that furthers the aims of your business. Post when you’ve got something that will go viral and bring you tons of links and new subscribers. Most of all, post something of value to your intended audience.

Or don’t post.

“To steal ideas from one person is plagiarism; to steal from many is research.”

If you’re staring out the window waiting for a great new idea, I’m afraid you might be in for a content dry spell. Great ideas come from discovering new perspectives in your field of expertise, and making new connections with concepts and ideas outside your subject area.

Dig deeper than everyone else for a fresh angle. Broaden your perspective by immersing yourself in the ideas of people you don’t agree with. Read more fiction, subscribe to unrelated RSS feeds, go watch a comedy show.

How else are you going to notice the cowbell?

“Everyone has a photographic memory. Some just don’t have film.”

My guess is you’re noticing interesting connections and potential hooks several times a day, but you’re just not getting them down on paper for later use. “Sitting down to write” is the last part of the process… the ideas have to come first.

Here’s what Wright says about it:

Whenever anyone wakes up in the morning till when you go to sleep, like a thousand pieces of information go past you. Like, you’re going to get coffee, you read something on a bulletin board, you have a conversation with someone who says a word, or you hear some concept and just some of those things just jump out to me as jokes. I can’t sit down at a desk and write jokes. They come from me reacting to my surroundings.

Unless your memory is exceptional, don’t let your best content ideas slip away during the course of the day. Preserve them in a way that works for you.

“Experience is something you don’t get until just after you need it.”

To be an effective content marketer, you’ve got to try new things. Not everything will work as well as you might hope, but if you don’t try unique new things, you’re doomed to wannabe land. The key is to try things out, and pay careful attention to what works and what doesn’t. Your audience will tell you.

Don’t get attached to a certain tactic or approach if the audience doesn’t respond. Wright, like all comedians, tries out new material on stage. His rule is that if a new joke fails to get a laugh three times, it’s gone—no matter how funny he thinks it is.

I don’t think it’s wrong; it’s just that they don’t agree. They being the audience. They’re like a bunch of editors and they don’t know it.

“The problem with the gene pool is that there is no lifeguard.”

Content marketing within the realm of social media is extremely powerful, but it does have a downside. Any time people are involved, there’s room for ugliness and stupidity.

Whether it’s the hateful little boys from Digg, or comment spammers, or clueless types who don’t bother to read your content carefully before commenting, such is the life of the content marketer. Don’t let it get to you… its all part of the game.

At the end of the day, you’re building an asset with your content. With that perspective, it’s easy to ignore the flotsam in the gene pool.

Finally…

Remember that you produce content for a reason, not for its own sake. You’re doing a lot of hard work as a content marketer, and it’s easy to get distracted by the ancillary aspects of blogging (like trying to impress your peers instead of speaking to your prospects). Your content is designed to promote you or your business… all the other stuff is just excess baggage.

Or as Wright says:

You can’t have everything. Where would you put it?

About the Author: Brian Clark is the founding editor of Copyblogger, and co-founder of DIY Themes and Lateral Action. Get more from Brian on Twitter.

Have you ever stood in a store with something in your hand and then looked up to see if there was a clerk nearby you could ask for help?

Sure you have. We all have. Good help is hard to find.

Companies have been cutting costs by moving towards self-serve more than ever. Depending on where you live, you may have to bag your own groceries, pump your own gas, or bottle your own water.

Put yourself in the mind of the consumer. Consider what happens at that very moment you realize you need help. You were focused on buying two seconds ago, but then something happened—something very important.

Your brain skipped a beat.

“Find someone,” it said.

“Don’t buy. You have questions. Get answers.”

Your focus shifts. You aren’t thinking about buying anymore at all. You were almost ready to shell out your money, but now you’re in search mode. Now you’re seeking answers.

“Hello… Can anyone help me? Anyone at all?”

Now, think about your website. There are no clerks. No sales associate lingers nearby. The store aisles are empty and the cashiers are gone. There is no one who can help – not immediately, anyways.

The copy on your website is the single solution. Useful content mixed with meaningful messages is the only salesperson on staff. If your site content isn’t meeting, greeting, and convincing people, then it isn’t doing its job.

You need more than a website… you need a website that sells.

And to help you sell more, here are seven copywriting tips for a website that operates like a well-staffed store:

1. Get a professional salesperson – Overexcited content full of exclamation marks and sunshine-bright enthusiasm very often has the opposite effect of calm, confident copy. It just doesn’t work well. Tone down the cheerleading and collect your wits.
2. Eliminate the dress code – Calm and collected doesn’t mean bland and boring. It’s fine to show some personality, so get naked with your content. In fact, most consumers enjoy a good peep show (minus the pom-poms, that is).
3. Tell staff to talk less– Readers quickly lose interest in long, verbose paragraphs and end up walking away. No one likes the guy who can’t shut up, after all. Trim your content. Use concise sentences that create impact - not unnecessary fluff.
4. Inform consumers better – Tell consumers about your company. They want to know your story – the way they want to hear it. What makes you special? Why should they choose you? What can you offer more than the competition?
5. Bring in the specialist – The quality of your content reflects on your business image. If it isn’t well written, it isn’t going to help you sell. Do-it-yourself copywriting is fine for people with the skills. But if that isn’t you, then hire a writer to help.
6. Hire a clerk – Make sure people can contact you quickly and easily with a visible contact form. Ditch the coded (emails) supposed (to) cut spam, as well. That just forces consumers to take extra steps to contact you – steps they may not be interested in taking.
7. Don’t goof off on the job - There’s a time and place for playing the class clown. Snagging a customer lead isn’t that time. Give straightforward information, offer a clear message and cut the clowning around.

About the Author: For more copywriting tips visit James’ blog at Men with Pens. It’s the best advice retailer on the ‘net. Like to shop for yourself? Grab the Men with Pens feed here.

“How to Become an SEO Ninja” is the tagline for Naomi Dunford’s ebook, SEO School. Since I’ve promised to do more book reviews around here, I figured giving you the scoop on a new ebook about search engine optimization would be of interest.

Ever since Aaron Wall joined Teaching Sells and four months later transformed his profitable SEO Book into an interactive training program, there’s been a void in the “SEO ebooks you can trust” market. While I’m sure there are others, I haven’t read those… but I have read SEO School and it’s solid.

Let’s take a look at the particulars.

Will You Really Become an SEO Ninja?

I happen to know a few true SEO Ninjas, and they’re on an entirely different level of existence. So, if you look at it that way, obtaining Ninjahood might be a lot to ask from an ebook about the fundamentals of search engine optimization.

But since we’re talking Eastern stuff here, I’ll paraphrase Buddha:

You’re asking the wrong question, silly.

Those at the highest level of SEO do truly impossible tasks… like salvaging and optimizing a 150,000 page ecommerce site that’s invisible to searchers thanks to 6 years of bad advice and worst practices. A true SEO Ninja can devise black hat moves that Matt Cutts hasn’t imagined yet, and discard the technique 20 minutes before Google catches on.

If you’re the average small business owner or online entrepreneur, that’s not what you need.

Three Reasons Why SEO School is Worth It

I’m going to cut to the chase on this one, since none of us is getting any younger. If you’re looking to eliminate the confusion and contradiction that inevitably surrounds the SEO field, SEO School is worth buying because it is:

1. Easy to understand. Naomi lays it all out in an easy-to-understand and conversational style. She had both her 9-year-old son and 70-year-old father read the book before release, and they both got it. Naomi does tend to use colorful language, so if naughty words are an unbearable distraction to you, take that into account.
2. Comprehensive. Naomi covers all the bases, from the psychology of search to keyword research to the Google Sandbox to competitive intelligence and more. And she gets to the point instead of padding the book with theory. It’s just “here’s what to do and how to do it.”
3. Inexpensive. It’s only $39. Enough said… grab a copy.

But here’s the rest of the story.

Two Ways Naomi Screwed Up

Like I said, SEO School fills a void left when Aaron Wall switched to a more profitable business model. And keep in mind that Aaron was charging $79 for SEO Book, yet nearly went insane because he promised lifetime updates and email support to his buyers.

As mentioned above, Naomi is only charging $39. She’s clearly leaving money on the table, and that’s mistake number one (but good news for you).

To make matters worse, Naomi is not only charging less, she promised support to her buyers as well. So, she makes less, but gets to experience first hand what Aaron went through. That’s mistake number two.

Luckily, Naomi is not going to let things get out of control. Aaron almost shut down his business due to the volume of email from often cranky book buyers, because SEO Book had grown too big for too long.

That won’t happen with SEO School, because it’s off the market tomorrow.

Buy SEO School Today… Because It’s Gone Tomorrow

SEO School has been out for a couple months, and it’s sold really well. To avoid a customer service meltdown, Naomi is taking the ebook off the market tomorrow (that’s Friday, August 8th).

For the small business owner or budding online entrepreneur, SEO School combined with a user-friendly and search-optimized WordPress theme like Thesis will have you set up and on your way.

All except for content, links, and conversion, that is… which is why you’ll want to stay tuned to Copyblogger. :-)

Buy SEO School today.

About the Author: Brian Clark is the founding editor of Copyblogger, and co-founder of DIY Themes and Lateral Action. Get more from Brian on Twitter.

Content marketing and copywriting is all about crafty persuasion, right?

We’re changing people’s minds so they see things our way and buy our stuff.

Not really.

Changing people’s minds can be extremely difficult. And when core beliefs and values are involved, it’s downright impossible. Let’s face it… it can be tough enough to persuade people to act when they already agree with you.

Why make things tougher than they already are?

You don’t want to challenge the core beliefs and values of your prospects, because they’ll tune you out. Instead, yield to the bundle of beliefs that are common among your prospects, and you’ll find it much easier to keep their attention and prompt them to action.

The Art of Marketing Ju-Jitsu

Ju-Jitsu (or Jujutsu) is a martial art in which a smaller fighter can dispatch an armored opponent by using an attacker’s energy against him, rather than directly opposing it. The art was developed by the samurai of feudal Japan for situations where the use of weapons was not feasible or permitted.

Marketing Ju-Jitsu (a term I first heard from Clayton Makepeace) follows the same principle. You’re acknowledging and using the core beliefs and values of your prospects to persuade, rather than trying to change firmly set minds.

Taking a Kung Fu approach to marketing these days won’t cut it. Your direct persuasive strikes are easily rebuffed by today’s heavily-armored consumers, and if you challenge core beliefs too strongly, you’re the one who’ll take a beating.

But if you align yourself with the core beliefs and values of your prospect, then you have that existing momentum on your side. Rather than striking against today’s marketing savvy consumer, you employ their existing energy to take them in the direction you want them to go.

To give an over-simplified example, which of these two assignments would you rather tackle if next year’s salary depended on your success?

1. Convince Mac users to switch to a PC.
2. Convince Mac users to buy an iPhone.

Swimming against the tide of strongly held convictions is a quick way to sink. And it’s getting tougher every day, especially online.

They’re Not the Enemy (and Neither Are You)

Using a martial arts analogy for marketing may seem like prospective customers are the enemy, but nothing is further from the truth. What you want to accomplish is a level of empathy and identification that establishes that you are not the enemy.

In most cases, this means that your prospect’s enemies become your enemies. Having a common enemy with your prospects is invaluable, even if that enemy is an abstraction.

We live in a highly polarized world. People have strong opinions about anything that comes near their core beliefs and values, and the web allows them to seek out like-minded communities that further reinforce and insulate those beliefs.

What this means is by identifying and aligning yourself with your prospects on this emotional level, you’re naturally alienating others. That’s ok… in this world, you create enemies simply by being of service to the group you choose.

In other words, to be a hero to your tribe, you become a heretic to others.

Effective Marketing Ju-Jitsu requires three things:

1. An understanding of who your prospects are and what they believe
2. A relationship that allows you to bond with your prospects over time
3. The courage to annoy or alienate those who are not your prospects.

That’s a tall order, and it’s tough to manufacture. So why not seek out groups who already share your own core beliefs and values? Group’s you already belong to?

Why make things tougher than they already are?

About the Author: Brian Clark is the founding editor of Copyblogger, and co-founder of Lateral Action. Get more from Brian on Twitter.