5 Ways to Avoid Writers Block
Filed under: Affiliate Marketing, Internet Marketing, Marketing, Marketing Strategies
But often coming up with ideas about what to write about is difficult. It’s not unlike the novel writer who has started a book but then sits down at their computer and then can’t think of a thing to say.
Welcome to the world of “writer’s block”. We all have it from time to time and while it might be difficult to get those wheels turning in your mind as to what to say, here are some tips to keep those wheels well-oiled:
1. Visit blogs that talk about your topic. Oftentimes you’ll find a topic on another blog that you hadn’t considered yourself. Take a look through their archives and see which topics are getting the most discussion. Jot down some ideas that you think may be interesting to your own readers and then use that as a springboard for your own ideas.
2. Check your email. You likely subscribe to other people’s newsletters within your industry. What kinds of information are they sending you? Are you interested in that information as well? If so, it’s likely your readers are too.
3. Visit Google. Visit Google and do a search for one of your keywords then take a look at the links that show up on the left hand side of the page. Here you will have the option of searching blogs, videos, and discussions on the term you searched on. Visit each of these to see if you can’t get a spark going as to what you can write about.
4. Visit your RSS Reader. Many people use RSS readers which help them to keep up to date on what other people are discussing online. A quick visit to your own RSS reader will give you a wide array of ideas that you can use on your own site.
5. Visit Article Directories. Most article directories have a section that showcases the most published articles within a certain area of expertise. Find out which of these articles have been published the most and then write your own take on that topic for your own site or newsletter. This is usually a great indication of what is popular right now.
Writer’s block affects everyone. But thankfully the Internet has provided us with a vast amount of resources that can help us break out of our slump by simply doing a little bit of investigation ourselves.
Making Sense of Google’s New Privacy Policy
As you may have heard, Google is updating it’s privacy policy on March 1st, 2012. So I thought I’d take a look at it and see just what’s changing, how it affects us, and what we can do (if anything).
Essentially what Google is doing is consolidating over 60 separate privacy policies into one which will cover all of their products.
The biggest issue that many people have with this new policy is that there is no way to opt-out of it. There are ways to opt-out of certain items yes, but for the basic privacy policy, Google has pretty much left the impression with users “if you don’t like it, don’t use Google”.
The bottom line is that Google has been tracking what you’ve been doing online for a very long time. Every time you used YouTube, Google Docs, Gmail, Blogger, etc., and signed into Google in order to use these services, Google has been keeping data on you. This might surprise you and if it does, you wouldn’t be alone. Just think of how often you opt-in to use any service not just Google’s and just automatically click the box to agree with a privacy policy without reading it?
Google’s new privacy policy really isn’t all that different from what they’ve been doing except that it takes it a bit of a step further. In essence, if you view a video on YouTube while signed into Google, the video that you viewed may be shared across other Google platforms such as Google+ for example.
If I had to put it all in a nutshell it would be this: Google wants to identify you, as a single user, and track everything you do across all of their properties so that they can better gear their advertising towards you.
Essentially, the information they’re collecting about you is:
- The information you provide to them; name, email, telephone number, credit card, etc.
- The services that you use and how you use them.
- Information about your devices such as computers and mobile phones (including your mobile phone number).
- They’ll log information such as the phone number of who called you, how long the call was and the type of call that it was.
- And a lot of other things…
So what CAN you opt-out of? And what exactly does Google know about you right now? Well, the first thing you can do is visit the dashboard and see all of the services you use within Google as well as what Google knows about you.
Next, you can visit the tools page and opt-out of some of the services you don’t want Google tracking you on.
Within this tools page there’s an ads preferences manager which will give you an overview of who Google believes that you are – for instance, they think I’m a 35-44 year old Male because of the sites I visit. Evidently, lots of us gals in technology are being referred to as “males”. Is Google stereotyping? LOL!!! I digress…
Now, if you so desire to just simply quit using Google all together before this new privacy policy goes into effect on March 1st, you can visit http://www.dataliberation.org/. What this service will do is let you download and move all of the data you currently have on Google to a new location.
And if you do want to close your Google account, then visit these instructions.
Remember, the new rules won’t go into affect until March 1st, 2012 so you’ve got a little bit of time to make up your mind as to what to do.
Convert Your Website to Mobile and Make it Mobile Friendly
It is estimated that by the end of 2012, 23% of the population will be using Smartphones and those users will expect the websites they visit to be mobile friendly, easy to read and easy to use.
If you’re one of those who has yet to convert your website over to a user-friendly format, I’ve got some good news for you. It’s very easy with just a few clicks of your mouse or even an install of a of a WordPress plugin can instantly make your website mobile friendly.
First, let’s take a look at some WordPress plugins for just this purpose:
One of my favorites is WPTouch.
- You don’t have to do anything fancy to your blog in order for it to work.
- Works on iPhones, iPod Touches, Androids, Palm and BlackBerry OS6 devices.
- You can customize the appearance.
- It won’t affect the way your site currently looks.
There are also:
If you want to turn your static website into a mobile friendly site, there’s a little bit of work involved but probably not as much as you might think.
As a matter of fact, Google offers a lot of help in this process. They offer a free “10 Mobile Site Best Practices“, and offer a complete step by step process to creating your very own mobile site here. If you’re curious as to what your current site looks like right now to a mobile phone user, use this testing tool.
There is no doubt that as a society, we are all moving towards becoming a far more mobile society. And it’s more important than ever to make sure that you’re getting traffic from all possible angles.
