One Stop Web Support Newsletter #75
September 28, 2008
Last week we started looking at what article marketing can do to bring you more visitors.
This week we start at the beginning and look at how to find ideas for articles.
Driving Visitors to Your Site With Articles - Getting Ideas for Articles
No question about it. Article marketing is an effective way to attract visitors to your site.
But what if you are one of the MANY people who feel intimidated by the idea of writing an article in the first place?
You think about writing something and, boom, you feel yourself transported back to fourth grade. All those fears of what grade your fourth-grade teacher would give you for the writing assignment you had no idea what topic to write on come racing forward and strangle your creative juices.
OK, let's come back to the present. So what can you write about? Even today, those words cause any hint of an idea to flee for the back of your skull and send an unpleasant tingle down your spine.
Finding topics to write about is not as hard as you might think, though. I write a lot of articles. Wait a minute, let's restate that. I write A LO-O-O-O-T of articles.
I write them for multiple newsletters. I write them for clients. I write them for blogs. I write them for syndication.
And even though I've written professionally for a long time, coming up with ideas for that many articles can strain my creativity. So here are five ways I use to identify new article ideas. Try them out and see which ones work also for you.
Get ideas from problems you solve
As you do a task or tackle a problem that your target audience also experiences, write down what you do. As you answer a question that one of you target audience asks, write down the advice you give.
Stuff like that is a goldmine for articles. Not only does it give you a great idea, but as you write out your answer, you end up with a complete article that merely needs a little polishing in order to present as a quality article.
Break down something that you know a lot about and write multiple articles as a series
Do you have knowledge in your subject area about a topic that is too broad to work for a single article? Break it down into pieces and run it as a series.
You're reading an example of this idea technique right now. I broke down article writing into a series. Not only does it give readers a reason to come back week after week to catch the next installment, but it also gives me a clear guide of what to write about for several weeks in advance. That's a big relief when you're always looking for new ideas.
Get ideas from other writers
You can get ideas from other people's articles, too. Don't get me wrong on this. I'm not suggesting you plagarize other people's work. You can, however, take an IDEA from somebody else's article and take that idea in your own direction.
Don't copy their words. Don't even paraphrase them. Take the idea and use your own experience with the subject to give it a completely different perspective.
I find that doing this not only gives me a lot of article ideas that I wouldn't have identified on my own, but it keeps me from beating to death a lot of the pet subjects that jump into my brain when I try to generate an article idea off the top of my head.
Get ideas from quotes, products, and news
Another place to get article ideas are from quotes that particularly strike you. You can use an insightful statement from someone in your industry and create an entire article off of your reaction to it. What emotional response does it trigger? What further insights does it generate in you?
If your industry isn't one in which insightful quotes abound, you can write about your reaction to news, to products, to trends. If you have a good pulse on your industry, you should find no end of topics to write about.
Get ideas from classic stories
Another good source for articles is by taking a universally known story, like a fairy tale, and drawing a connection between it and your area of expertise. Classic stories resonate with people because they touch a familiar chord in their own experience, even if they've never stepped through a looking glass or done a taste test of porridge in a house built by three bears.
Tap into the shared experience that cause people to connect with those stories. Tie those shared experiences in those stories to your topic and you'll engage people's curiosity to see what new insights you're leading them toward.
Get ideas simply from being observant
This is one of my favorite ways of finding a topic for articles -- and an absolute staple of my blog. I love to find connections to new business insights in such mundane things as watching a bridge being built, walking past an unrented storefront, passing a business sign that someone has covered with a tarp, or the change in household duties required by my wife's broken wrist.
If you can keep track of the ideas that unconnected events trigger in your mind, you can have an almost unlimited supply of engaging article ideas that you can share with others.
The problem is not that no ideas exist about which you can write an article. The problem usually is that we simply haven't trained our minds to recognize the multitude of article ideas that bombard us every day.
Train your eyes to see those ideas. Now, go out and write some articles.
We'll continue this series next week with tips on how to write an article that effectively attracts visitors to your website.
Q and A with Jeff
In this section, Jeff answers your questions about starting a business online. Here's this week's question.
Where do I find products that fit my business idea?
OK, after two weeks of laying the foundation for how to identify the types of products you have the highest potential for success with, you've accomplished two things. You've:
- Identified the skills, passions, and experiences you have that will give you a greater chance of success at your business
- Identified the problems that those skills, passions, and experiences make you uniquely qualified to help others solve
That puts you at a point where you are ready to look for products to offer to people who have the needs that you identified.
What kinds of products best solve the problems you can help people solve?
So now comes a choice. What kind of product can you offer?
Your choice breaks down in two directions:
- Information products
- Physical products
Information products
If the areas where your skills, experience, or passions can benefit others fall into the area of advice, you're best off looking for an information product.
You don't have to write out everything you know about the subject before you start your business, though. Even if it seems that your best way to fill people's needs is with your own unique experience, you can always start with affiliate infoproducts in your area of skill or passion. That way you can take time to learn what running your own business is like before you give yourself the added challenge of writing your own.
Some good places to look for affiliate infoproducts are ClickBank and PayDotCom. You can search their sites for infoproducts that deal with your expertise. You can offer these products as long as you want. Offer them as your regular offerings. Or you can eventually replace them with an infoproduct that you create out of your own experience.
Physical products
If your experience and passions lend themselves better to recommending physical products, you can also go the affiliate route. My favorite place to go for physical products that sell on an affiliate basis is Commission Junction. They have a great selection of quality products. They also consolidate all your affiliate reports from multiple suppliers in one place.
You can also sign up for the Amazon or eBay affiliate programs to get a similarly great selection of physical products in almost any product line you want to sell.
The problem with selling physical affiliate products is this, though: You get such a small percentage of every sale that it's hard to build a business that can do much more than generate a little side cash with it. It's pretty hard to build a lasting business that can support you.
You can make a much better profit by buying products wholesale. If you're just starting out, though, you probably don't want the hassles -- or the risk -- of buying products in bulk and then having to store and ship them.
One way to get better-than-affiliate profits without taking the risks involved in buying products in bulk is to go with a dropshipping arrangement.
Dropshipping physical products
Dropshipping works like this:
- You sign up to sell the dropshipper's products
- You offer their products on your website as your own product rather than sending the customer to the manufacturer's site as you do with an affiliate product
- Each time you make a sale, you contact the dropshipper and tell them what you sold and where to ship it.
- The dropshipper packages the item with your business name as the return address and ships it to your buyer; as far as your customer is concerned, their order came directly from you.
- The dropshipper charges you a wholesale price and the shipping cost. You keep the rest as profit.
Where can you find companies that dropship products for you? My favorite is Worldwide Brands. It provides contact with prescreened manufacturers who offer millions of products in just about any product line you could want.
It also provides access to bulk wholesalers and importers if, in the future, your business expands to the point where you want full control of the products you sell.
And Worldwide Brands also offers great training to help you start your business with the knowledge you need to succeed at selling other people's products.
Final thoughts
Ultimately, your best chance of success comes from starting a business that draws from skills and experience you already have. Once you have identified a market that could use your experience to find the solutions they need, you'll find plenty of resources like these that can help you find the specific products you can sell.
Hottest Offers
Each issue, I feature what I consider the best offers available each week on worthwhile business-building tools. Check here to see what's hot this week.
http://www.OneStopWebSupport.com/hot-offers.htm
Or check to see my growing selection of ebooks and training tools that you can use for free to build your Internet business.
Free Ebooks:
http://www.OneStopWebSupport.com/dir-ebooks.htm
Free Training tools:
http://www.OneStopWebSupport.com/ongoing-bargains.htm
Success quote
'The well of Providence is deep. It's the buckets we bring to it that are small.'
Mary Webb
This newsletter is published by One Stop Web Support, where our business is helping your business succeed.
http://www.OneStopWebSupport.com/
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Helping you become the successful business owner you want to be.
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