[Back to Course Outline]

Write Content on Hot Trend Topic

This lesson focuses on finding ideas and writing the content for your blog.

View Lesson 2 (Opens in New Window)

Download Lesson 2

Action Steps:

1. Write an article related to your subject (around 400 words is best, bare minimum of 200).
   • Use other blog posts and related websites for ideas on content
   • Find another article or piece of news and write an article discussing its merits, agree or disagree, etc.
2. Write more articles

Richard’s Notes:

• As the video states, don’t write an article like the “2009 Rose Bowl Tickets” example shown in the video.  This is keyword stuffing and Google does not like that.  Even more important, humans don’t like that and will just click off your page without reading further.
• The key to all web pages is good content.  Spend the extra few minutes to write a decent article and you will reap the benefits for years to come.  I have some articles that I wrote 2 years ago that are still getting search engine traffic to this day.  All because I wrote a real article that the search engines AND humans both found valuable.
• Think about basic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) when writing your articles.  We will be going into more depth on this in other courses, but here is the 30 second SEO plan:
  • Put the keyword for this article in:
    • the title, first sentence, h2 tage or subheading, bolded, last paragraph and sprinkled throughout
    • Remember the key is to make this look natural.. no keyword stuffing allowed.
• I disagree with the suggestion to grab a news article and put it on your site in its entirety with a reference back to the article at the bottom.
  • I think its much better to do a brief synopsis of the article, discussing your thoughts on the article – agree, disagree, why this is interesting, reference other sources, etc. -  and then link back to that article.
  • You can even add a quote or two from the article and discuss those in further detail.
  • This way you get to reference the article, get some great ideas for easy content to write, but the bulk of your article is still “original content”.
• I also disagree with the suggested article length.  The video states you should aim to write a 100-200 word article.  I suggest writing your articles in the 400 word range, with 200 being the bare minimum.  Google loves content.. the more you give them the better they will “like” you.  As I mentioned above, a little more work here will pay dividends for a long, long time.  The articles are mentioned above that are still ranking after two years are around 500 words in length.

• Ideas for Content
  • Clicking on the word in the hot trend list will show you a list of articles and blog posts on that keyword.  This is a great place to start.  Review the articles here and start gathering ideas of what you can write on.
  • Go to EzineArticles and search for the keyword you are researching.  This will pull up a list of other articles on that topic.  As stated above, I would not copy these articles or steal the content in any way.  Just get ideas for your own article based on bits and pieces of others.
  • You can also just go to EzineArticles and search for “Ideas for Articles”, a great list of ideas right there.
  • Try Yahoo! Answers.  If you have never been to this site you are in for a treat.  The entire site is simply folks entering a question they want to know (a pain in the marketplace) and others providing answers to that questions (the solution for the pain in the marketplace).  Pretty much a marketers dream come true.
  • Simply search for your topic in Google.  Instead of just typing in your keyword and hitting return, try these searches to dig a little deeper:
    • Search for “yourkeyword + forum”.  This will return a list of forums for your topic area where you can read through posts and find topics and content that is relevant to that niche.
    • Search for “yourkeyword + blog”.  This will return a list of other blogs on your keyword topic.  Once again, don’t just take their content.  Review the blogs for what they are writing about and put your own spin on it.
  • Once you have a good topic and set of keywords to focus on, Google Alerts is  great place to get a continuous stream of content ideas…. delivered straight to your inbox.

[Go to Lesson 3 ]            [Back to Course Outline]