Posts Tagged ‘Blogging’

Many home business owners spend a good deal of their time working on the content of their website/blog/internet marketing efforts. Whatever your niche having a strong internet presence is essential and in the world of Web 2.0 that often means a blog, a Facebook page, a Twitter account, Ezines articles, and the list goes on.

Whatever online trends come and go original, engaging content that informs, entertains and educates your potential  customers is essential. But how do you do that when you’re already slammed trying to  run a home business? There are ways to create a lot of good internet content with far less effort than you might imagine. Here are some ways you take a single article or blog post and make it work extra hard to promote your home business:

Youtube it – There are two ways you can turn a single article into a promotional video to upload to YouTube and other video sites. First if you are comfortable being the star of the show invest in one of the new FLIP video cameras and record yourself reading your article. These little wonders are practically idiot proof and uploading your final product takes just a few minutes.

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As blogs and article marketing have become essential for home business marketing many people who haven’t really put pen to paper since high school find themselves faced with writing fresh and engaging content on a daily basis. If you are one such person there are a few easy steps you can follow in order to become a better writer, whether you are writing a daily blog post or just trying to come up with 140 engaging characters on Twitter:

Step 1 Just Write! – Many people get stuck because as they are trying to write a creative and intelligent set of sentences they get bogged down, by editing each line as they go along. When you first sit down to write, do just that. Don’t worry for the time being about spelling or comma placement, get your ideas down first.

Step 2 Edit – After you have all your thoughts down and your draft is completed is the time to begin editing in earnest. Read your piece through once and immediately make note of any required changes that are glaringly obvious. Consider your initial choice of words too, could the prose be better, does what you have written actually make sense?

If you rely on a spellchecker to catch your errors be careful. The average program will catch most of them but if you wrote “your” when you really meant “you’re” it won’t correct you, the word is spelt right and this a computer, not a literature professor.

Step 3 Read it Out Loud – Read your piece out loud, either to yourself or to a friend. This will help you catch what you may have not by just visually reading the piece through, especially when it comes to proper punctuation. If you are not under a huge deadline put your work aside for an hour or so and then go back and read it through again. Does it still sound as good as you thought it did?

Follow these simple guidelines and you should find that writing for marketing purposes becomes easier every day, until one day you wake up and its almost second nature.

Many home business owners maintain a blog as part of their overall business efforts, and for many affiliate marketers it is the lifeblood of their business. A number of successful bloggers are also now being sent dozens of products to review on their sights or are paid for their opinions.
New rules (not laws yet) that the Fair Trade Commission intend to implement on December 1st 2009 may change the face of the blogging business for good. According to the new rules a blogger must state clearly in their posts if they are being paid for their opinions or if they have received goods or services for free for review purposes. The penalty for non compliance with these rules could be a fine of up $11,000 per infraction.

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Starting a blog is a great way to work from home. Most bloggers these days use a platform called Wordpress. If you’re not sure what platform you’ve picked out yet, take a look over here and see if Wordpress is right for you.

If you do pick Wordpress, then you’ll want a good theme.

There are plenty of high quality, free Wordpress themes available for download. I’ve compiled a list of some of the best resources for good themes.

• 100 Excellent Free Wordpress Themes
• Wordpress Magazine-Themes
• 83 Beautiful Wordpress Themes You Probably Haven’t Seen
• Beautiful free Wordpress themes
• 60+ Unusual WP Blog Designs
• ThemeHybrid