This is my second attempt at writing this post this evening.  The first was rudely interrupted by a power cut.  I think it’s time to thinking about a UPS and a more robust backup solution…

So it’s time for blogs of the week again!  Your weekly fix of what’s hot in the Internet Marketing world and who we should be keeping an eye on.  To be honest, I’ve found it harder than normal this week to pick good quality posts out of the many that I’ve read, although I think you’ll enjoy the five that I’ve found.

Where Will You Be In 100 Days? – This is an interesting and very timely post from Connie Ragen Green where she’s challenging people to drive their businesses forward over the next 100 days.  It’s interesting to me both because it coincides with a push to deliver better content on my blogs, and also as she mentions mentoring.  I’ve been asked in the past to mentor several people and have always said yes.  In each case I’ve requested that they perform a few simple tasks so that I can be certain that they’re serious and I usually never hear from them again.  That changed this week when I was overwhelmed by the sincerity and commitment shown to me by somebody looking for a mentor.  I won’t mention him by name here, but I know that he’ll be making a name for himself in the very near future!

Ebooks And Affiliate Marketing Go Hand In Hand – I’m a big believer that we can all have whatever we want in life as long as we’re willing to put in the work.  It doesn’t have to be hard though, as Connie Ragen Green explains in this great post.

How To Write A Killer Blog Post – This is a great guest post on SearchEngineJournal.com.  We all like to think that we write great posts, but if we’re honest with ourselves we often could do better.  This post breaks everything down into the component parts that are important and I believe we can all learn from this.  Check it out!

Remember These 5 Copywriting Formulas – Michel Fortin is an incredible copywriter so when he gives copywriting tips, I listen, and I would recommend that you do too!  In this post, he pulls together 5 top techniques for writing great copy, all of which link onto more comprehensive content.  I’ve printed it all out and added it to my copywriting file before he realizes what he’s giving us and starts charging for this great content.

SEO being trademarked, AGAIN!?! – Finally, this post caught my eye yesterday.  Apparently, someone’s actually trying to trademark the term “SEO”, even though he seems vague about what SEO really means.  Have a read – it’s actually quite funny!

Do you find these weekly posts valuable?  Please let me know in the comments below.

I’ve been using Submit Your Article now for about 3 months and have been very impressed with their service.  They are a service that allows you to upload an article and have many different versions of that article sent to a huge raft of article directories.

I’ve used article spinners in the past as well as article submitters, but I’ve never found anything that works this well at doing both the spinning and the submission.

If you’re not familiar with the concept of article spinning, it’s essentially a means by which the original content is re-written prior to submission so that each directory has a slightly different version of the article so that the search engines don’t see it as duplicate content.  This works by providing alternatives to a variety of sentences or phrases throughout the article so that when they’re mixed and matched, no two versions are the same.

By the way, please don’t use the comments for this post to start challenging my views on duplicate content!  My view is that we can’t really be sure.  I know that some people feel very strongly that duplicate content isn’t an issue, just as some feel equally as strongly that it is.  In my view, if there’s a chance that it is, then I’ll take steps to avoid it where practical.

In the past I’ve worked with 2 main types of article spinners – automatic ones and manual ones.  The automatic spinners were a disaster in my opinion.  They worked at getting different versions of the content out there, but the resulting articles were often hard to read.  The manual ones produced good results, but they usually had to be created by embedding all the many versions of a sentence in the content, making proof-reading really difficult.

Submit Your Article gets around this by allowing us to upload the article first, then breaking it down behind the scenes and presenting us with sentences to re-write.  This means that the original article is always perfectly readable yet we retain the benefit of manually writing the alternatives.  Following their guidelines, I typically end up with an average difference between a sample of spun articles of 40-50%, which is pretty good!

The other huge advantage that Submit Your Article has over other submission engines that I’ve used is the possibility to set a distribution timeframe.  The opinion in SEO (Search Engine Optimization) circles is that if a huge amount of content all linking back to one site appears too quickly, then it could be that the site owner is trying to manipulate their rankings (which is entirely the point of SEO!).  By spreading the distribution over a longer timeframe, this is less likely to become an issue.

It’s not all roses though.  The one thing that really frustrates me is how Submit Your Article handles sub-titles.  I like to break up my articles with sub-titles as I believe it makes them easier to read, as well as easier to write.  However, unless you put a full-stop (period) at the end of them, they’ll be included in the subsequent paragraph when being presented for re-writing.  To deal with this you have two options:

• Use full stops at the end of sub-titles (which looks messy, but works)
• Keep a copy of your article to hand whilst editing the alternatives so that you can easily identify these titles.

I’ve tried both and they both seem to work so at least we have a solution – although I’d prefer it if this wasn’t an issue in the first place!

I’ve noticed a huge benefit since we started using Submit Your Article in a brand new niche.  After uploading just 6 articles, we were seeing our content appearing multiple times on each of the first 3 pages in Google.  This started bringing us organic traffic much quicker than I’ve ever seen it before and is something that I’ll be exploring further.

In my opinion, Submit Your Article is the best article submission service currently available and I would encourage you to have a look at what they can offer your business.  Go there now and take a look:

http://www.johnlandells.com/Recommends/SubmitYourArticle/

As bloggers, we’re constantly looking for inspiration and new ideas to write about.  Sometimes we’ll find things present themselves to us naturally and other times we have to go searching.  To be honest, writing to a calendar is great as the regularity and organization associated with it make it easier to come up with ideas.  In fact, I have some great ideas for several series that I want to write, but I’m struggling to fit them in now over the next few months as I’ve got so many other posts planned!

For my own writing, like I said, a calendar is probably my most valuable tool as it helps me to see what’s going on and what’s planned.  These events often lead to great inspiration for what to write about when applicable, but often we’re still left staring at a blank screen.

Another idea that I got from Copyblogger is to look to quotations and see how we can work our posts around them (see the full article here).

However, my favorite approach is to be more scientific.  I start by thinking about keywords that I want to write about.  I have a list of keywords and themes that I’m working on getting my blog known for and these can often inspire posts all by themselves.  Other times, I’ll go into EzineArticles and search using my keywords.  This invariably leads me to more content that I’ll ever need – all with great titles that I can use for inspiration.

Just to be clear, I don’t use the articles from EzineArticles (although I may read a few if I’m having a really bad case of writer’s lock) I simply use them for ideas.  That way, my articles should always be fresh and in my own voice.

Other ways that you could apply this idea would be to use other sites such as YouTube or even something more obscure like Twitter.  The trick is to get creative about how you find your inspiration, and your writing will reflect that creativity.

I’d love to read about how you come up with ideas for your own blog.  Please share in the comments and let’s see how many other creative techniques we can come up with!

There were a lot of great blog posts out there this week on the subject of Internet Marketing so rather than share a whole list, I’ve been selective and brought you just my top five.

Is Your Blog Really Sick? 8 Health Check Points – I’ve mentioned Patsi’s blog in the past and it says something about the quality (and abundance) of her writing that I’m continually including her posts in my blogs of the week.  In this post, she’s taking a quirky look at how we can measure the ‘health’ of our blogs.  I can certainly relate to some of the sicknesses that she’s alluding to with my own blog and I’m sure that you’ll relate to it too!

One Foolproof Trick to Blast Writer’s Block – As bloggers, we all know what it’s like to sit in front of the computer screen and have nothing to write about.  I’ve partly overcome this by scheduling my blog posts in advance (see ‘Organize Your Blogging‘) but even this strategy leaves us vulnerable to the dreaded writer’s block.

Another of my strategies is to regularly read blogs related to copywriting such as the excellent Copyblogger.  In this guest post, James Chartrand (who’s actually a woman) shares a great strategy for beating writer’s block that I’ll be putting to good use in future posts.

Create A Blogging Strategy & Avoid Burnout – It’s taken me some time (about 3 years to be precise) to realize that a blogging strategy is key to successfully growing your blog.  Don’t you love it when you think you’ve got something figured out then you read something that blows your preconceptions out of the water?  Well, that’s what Lynn Terry’s blog post did for me!

I consider myself well read in terms of what makes up a successful blog.  I know that consistent, regular quality content is all that you need.

Wrong!

Want to know why this is just the tip of the iceberg?  Read Lynn’s post…!

18 Blog Tips to Help You Succeed in 2010 – In this guest post on DailyBlogTips, Tony Hue share with us the basics for having a successful blog.  In my opinion, if you take everything in this post and combine it with the content in Lynn Terry’s post (above) you can’t fail to make it as a professional blogger!

Use it or lose it! 5 Tips on How to Keep Your Blogging Regular – Darren Rowse knows a thing or two about blogging.  In fact, he was co-author on THE book on blogging professionally!  One of the things that I really like about him is that he’s just s quick to share his failures and his successes.  When he does this though, he always does it in a way where we learn the lesson with him and come to the end of his post with new knowledge to apply to our blogging.  This post is a case in point – check it out to see what I mean.

That’s it for this week.  As ever, I’d love to get your thoughts about the posts that I’ve shared as well as any that you think I’ve overlooked.  If you have a blog of your own and you’d like me to consider including your posts in the future, please let me know.  The best way to get in touch regarding this post is via the comments below.  I personally read and reply to every comment.

Have a great week!

If you’ve been interested in Internet Marketing for any length of time you’ll probably be aware already of how powerful video can be.  However, many of us avoid it due to the costs and complexities of getting setup with good quality camera equipment, lighting, editing software and so on.  Apart from all this, many people simply don’t like to be on camera!  I hope I can show you then, that it doesn’t need to be this complex and the video is within reach of any of us.

Why is Video Important?

First of all though, let’s take a moment to look at WHY video is so important to Internet marketers.  The key here is search engine rankings – in particular, Google.  Search engines love video and if you upload a short movie to any of the popular video sites (such as YouTube) you’ll find that it’ll get ranked very quickly – particularly if you use your keywords wisely.  I recently created a video for one of our niches and uploaded it to just 6 sites and within 24 hours, it was on page 1 of Google for our main keyword!

OK, but What About the Costs?

As I already mentioned, video doesn’t need to be expensive.  Sure, it would be amazing to be able to go out and buy a top-end pro-spec camcorder like this Sony, but who has that kind of money???  And that’s without any lights, microphones etc!  We need to be conscious that we’re creating short, informative videos for the Web – not a blockbuster film for your local movie theater.  The purpose really is just to get the message across in a cost effective manner, and crucially, to get links back to our revenue generating sites.

So What Are Our Options?

The deciding factor is whether you want to go for captured video footage, or whether screen capture works for you.  Regardless of which you decide, you’re going to need a microphone.  You can opt for something relatively inexpensive here, however I would urge you not to skimp and to look at something like the amazing Audio-Technica AT2020 USB mic which will give you studio quality and plugs straight into a USB port without the need for any fancy audio hardware.

Now that we can record professional sounding audio, we need to consider our video capture solution.  If we want to simply capture what we’re seeing on our screen, the best software for this in my opinion is Camtasia.  It’s quite expensive but is incredibly powerful and will do pretty much everything you want including some very slick editing.  If budget is an issue, then you could consider the free CamStudio software, which is based on the original Camtasia product.  It’s nowhere near as versatile as Camtasia, but if you’re happy doing what you need to do in a single take, then this might be a good start.

The other option then is to buy an inexpensive camera.  There’s been a lot of buzz around the Flip HD cameras, but in my opinion, the new Kodak Zi8 is far superior.  These little cameras will produce perfectly adequate results for Internet marketing purposes and won’t need you to take out a second mortgage to pay for them!

Remember, it’s the content that’s important – not how flash the video looks.  In fact, do you not find that the really flashy, clever videos can often detract from the message that they’re trying to convey?  Keep it simple and your videos will work for you and help you to get the rankings that you desire.

I’d love to read your thoughts on using video in Internet marketing.  What products do you use to create the videos?  Do you use a camera, or do you like me, prefer to stick with Camtasia?  How do you upload your videos?  Do you use a service like TubeMogul or Traffic Geyser, or do you do it all by hand?  Please let me know in the comments.

When you’re trying to maintain multiple blogs as well as a full time job, it pays to find ways to organize your blogging!  As I mentioned in my blog strategy post last week, one important element is to use a blog calendar to plan ahead on the topics that you’re going to write about.  Take this post for example – I planned to write this at some point between Christmas and New Year, just as I planned out the rest of this month and most of next!

I feel that by staying at least one month ahead in my planning, I can never use the excuse that “I’ve got nothing to write about” or that “it’s hard to come up with ideas”.  My ideas are on paper already so now I just have to write.

On top of this, by working ahead in this way, whenever I’m feeling creative I can sit down and plan a little further.  My goal is to always have the current month and next month fully planned so at the end of January, I’ll sit down and finish at least through to the end of March.  Of course, at any time I can add ideas to future calendar points as the idea strikes me, or I can add additional posts if I want to get something timely out.

In terms of finding the time to write, the trick here is to use the tools at hand.  I work with Wordpress which allows me to save posts before they’re finished and come back to them later.  It also allows me to write a post and schedule it to be published at a specific time.  For example, I’m writing this post on Saturday evening but have scheduled it to publish mid-morning on Monday.  I’d actually like to get Wednesday’s post written before Monday so that I have time to work on other things during the week!

If you consider that I work full time, this means that I can use my time very effectively on a weekend to produce the majority of my content for the coming week, and have only minimal work to do on an evening to keep everything ticking by nicely.  If you consider that this is for 2 blogs, you’ll see just how effective this strategy can be.

I would encourage you to look at your own blogging and consider how you can apply these ideas to become more organized.  I’d also love to read any tips and tricks that you use to keep your blog growing consistently.  Please use the comments to share these ideas – I’ll read every one and may even include some of the best ones in a future post!

I spend part of each day reading various industry blogs and I find this can be a really helpful way to not only keep up to speed, but also to get inspiration for new blog posts of my own.  Here are the best posts that I’ve come across this week.

The Blah Blah Blah Blogging Rules. F It. – Long time readers of this blog will know that I’m a fan of ProBlogger.  I particularly like his maverick style and this post really sums it up!

Without Backlinks, You Have Nothing. – Lynn Terry has a reputation for being one of the top affiliate marketers of today so I’m a regular reader of her blog.  This week she pre-launched a fantastic new service that aims to give you thousands of backlinks to your site.  Read the post to find out more…

The Oft-Confused Features And Benefits – One thing I can’t stand in a sales letter is when it sells nothing more than features!  This is not only irritating for the reader, it also kills conversions!  Learn from Michel Fortin, one of the Internet’s top copywriters, how to make sure you get your sales copy right and sell only benefits.

Dumb Excuses for Not Blogging – I’m sure everyone finds blogging a bit of a drag sometimes.  However, if we’re relying on it to support our families or to maintain our brand, then we have to make ourselves do it.  This post from Patsi Krakoff reminds us of the importance of our blogs and encourages us to give them the priority they deserve.

21 Outstanding Wordpress Plugins – I love a good, effective Wordpress plugin, don’t you?  This post describes 21 of the best – some of which I already use, and some that need some investigation.  If you use Wordpress as your blogging platform, I’d encourage you to check this post out!

It’s All About Free, Baby! – You’ll hear a lot of successful Internet marketers talk about giving stuff away.  Some refer to it simply as ‘freebies’, others as ‘paying it forward’, and the fancy guys out there call it ‘moving the free line’.  In this post, Jessica Swanson (the Shoestring Marketer) gives us her take on the part that free products play in your marketing strategy.

Get More Subscribers: Seal the Deal with Incentives – I recently started using Aweber for all my new mailing lists.  This week, they posted as item on their blog dealing with how to incentivize people to sign up.  I figured that if I’m going to learn about sign-up rates and how to improve them, then Aweber is as good a place to start as any!

Finally, I wanted to share one more post with you.  This one is not something that will make you more money, but it’ll give you a good laugh:

Advice for Bloggers: Karate Kid Style

Enjoy!

“ProBlogger – Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income” by Darren Rowse and Chris Garrett is a practical guide on what it takes to build a strong, profitable blog.  The authors are both professional bloggers – Darren is best known for his ProBlogger blog, and Chris can be found on his New Media blog at ChrisG.com – and in writing this book, they’re making their combined experiences available to us mere mortals to enable us to learn from them and to take our blogging to new levels.

The content of the book takes you right through from the basics of setting up your blog to all the various ways you can earn an income from blogging.  It looks at buying and selling blogs for a profit, as well as how to promote your blogs effectively.  As far as I’m concerned, they’ve pretty much covered everything you’d need to know to get into blogging full-time.

This book is ideal for all level of bloggers – whether you’re just starting out or already have an established blog.  However, in my opinion it’s most appropriate for people who are looking to lift their blogging to a new, more professional level.

One of the reasons that I follow Darren’s ProBlogger blog is that I really enjoy his relaxed style of writing, as well as the good use he makes of lists (”Top 10 this” or “Best 5 that”, for example).  This style has been carried through very effectively into the book in a way that makes it a very light and easy read, whilst still putting across great information.  I particularly liked their thoughts on focusing on a niche, which really helped me to understand where I was going wrong with my own blog!

I think that the only challenge with a book like this is that with the speed that blogging technology changes, it can never really be considered 100% up to date.  To give you an idea what I mean, the Wordpress examples use screenshots from version 2.3 and the current version is 2.9.1 (although with the rate that Wordpress comes out with new versions, that feels like just a few months…!)  This however, will always be a problem with books focused around Internet Marketing technologies and in my opinion, the content is in-depth enough that anyone who takes the necessary action will be able to apply what Chris and Darren are teaching and relate it to today.

From my own perspective, I bought this book at a time when I was considering shutting down my blog.  I was feeling unfulfilled, was struggling to find content and definitely wasn’t making any money!  After reading the book, I realised that my main issue was that my focus was way to broad and my concept was something that I was becoming less and less interested in (technology for technology’s sake) which is why I switched my focus to Internet Marketing.  This is something that I’m interested in and that passion makes it easier to do the other thing that I learned – blog regularly!  (See my previous post for more on this)

Why Should You Buy This Book?

If you have a blog or are thinking about starting one (which I would strongly encourage you to do) then this book should be considered essential reading!  Whatever level you’re at and regardless of how experienced you are, I’m convinced that you’ll find something in ProBlogger to improve your blogging.

Buy your copy here

As we start the new year, I’m making a commitment to you, my readers, to deliver more from my blog.  More useful information, more how-to articles, more reviews – more of what you need to be more successful with your Internet Marketing.

In order to achieve this, I’m having to get über-organized!  To start with, I’ve downloaded the fantastic blogging calendar from BlogEnergizer.  This calendar not only has space to plan out all blog posts for the coming year, it also has all important dates and events included to help you find inspiration.  I’ve printed this out and started a new folder for each of my primary blogs and am planning to work at least a month in advance in terms of planning.  I’ve already completed my plans for January and February for this blog and my new self help blog and will complete March once this month draws to a close.

The other major thing that I’m looking to introduce is some regular features:

• Book of the Month – This is where I’ll write a review of a book that I’ve found useful in my own Internet business so that you can find out if it’s right for you without having to spend any money.
• Top Blogs This Week – I spend a lot of time every day reading other peoples blogs.  Occasionally, one of the posts will stand out and I’ll be collecting these and bringing them to your attention towards the end of each week.
• Product of the Month – Just like the Book of the Month, I plan to write detailed reviews of products that I either use on a regular basis, or have at least bought myself so that you get to find out the pros and cons without parting with cash.
• Mini-Series – A Mini-Series is a great way for me to deliver more content to you without you having to wade through one long post.  I already have a few planned for the coming months, and I think you’ll find them beneficial.

Of course, with all of this extra workload that I’m putting on myself I need to step up my discipline and start working ahead on my posts.  Having the calendar helps of course, but I’ll need to start focusing my daily work more effectively in order to keep things moving.  I have some ideas on how to approach this and I’ll share what works and what doesn’t once I’ve been doing it for a while.

In the meantime, I’d love to hear from you.  What do you think of my new strategy?  Is there anything else that you’d like to see in addition to what I’ve mentioned above?  Do you have any tips for time management that you’d like to share?

Whatever your thoughts, please don’t be shy – please share them in the comments below.

As a slight digression from Internet Marketing today, I thought you might like to learn about my new blog – Self Help with John.  As well as the obvious self promotion, you might like to learn that the theme that I’m using is built entirely on the free WP-Framework.  This has been a valuable learning experience for me as I’ve previously only ever tweaked pre-built themes to suit my purpose, just like the theme you see here.

In the longer term, my plan is to have a dedicated, custom theme for this blog too, so it was important to me that I could have a new blog where I could play with themes.  Ultimately, I plan to have a similar look and feel on all my related blogs to create a sense of branding.  This is something that you would do well to consider on your own sites, too.

I’d love to get some feedback on the new site, and would love it even more if you’d care to sign up for updates!  In any case, please leave feedback in the comments to this post, as well as any questions that you might have.  Also, if anyone’s interested in the plugins that I use on all my new blogs, please drop me a comment and I’ll write a post on it in the new year.