We get asked something like this quite often. When you first have an idea for a niche, it certainly can seem hard to come up with consistent content ideas for blog posts, audio and video. Yet, consistent content creation is one of the most dependable ways to build a profitable business.

The irony is that I have been stewing for two days to come up with an idea for a blog post. Sometimes you just get blocked. So I thought it would be helpful to remind myself (and share with you) of proven tricks for generating instant content ideas.

1. The 5 and 5 Method

Imagine you’re sitting in a coffee shop with you ideal audience member — the kind of person that you would really like to do business with. This person really wants to know more about what you do and how you do it. It helps to even thing about someone that you know (e.g. a client, friend, colleague, family member). It might even be a “past version of yourself.”

What are the five questions this person is likely to ask you? Write those down.

What are five questions they should ask you, but don’t know to ask. These are five questions that you wish they would ask you. Write those down.

You now have ten questions. The answer to each of those ten questions is a blog post, audio or video for your site. You’ll notice that I started this post with a question.

2. The Amazon Stealth Swipe

This is s fancy name for a simple idea. Here’s how it works.

• Go to Amazon
• Search for your topic
• Click on a book that looks interesting (make sure it is one that has the Look Inside logo)
• Click on the book cover (where the Look Inside logo appears) and this will bring up a table of contents
• Copy down the chapter headings

3. Call Up Your Avatar

One thing we teach in depth in the Academy is how to create a specific definition of your ideal customer. This make it a lot easier to attract an audience and to do business with them. Your avatar is a description representing this ideal audience member and customer (like the person you use for idea #1 above).

Think of someone that you know that fits this description. It should be someone that you know is interested in the topic that you have chosen. Call them up and have a 30-minute conversation. Listen to the things they ask and the words that they use. You should have at least one, if not several, ideas for content come up in the conversation.

4. Visit Similar Blogs in Your Niche

Use Google or a site like AllTop to find a popular blog in your niche. Blog will often have a list of their most popular content. If not, do some browsing and look for posts that have the most comments. If it was popular for them, likely it would be popular for you. You don’t want to copy their post word for word. Just note the topic and title. Then come up with your own title and start creating a post of your own.

5. Survey Your Following

This one works well if you have developed a regular readership (even if it is a small focused group), have a Twitter or Facebook following or an e-mail list. Send out a simple message or e-mail asking them what topics they would like to see talked about on your site. You can also ask them what their biggest questions are about the topic or what roadblocks they are currently running in to.

This provides a list of questions to be answered and problems needing solutions — perfect content for your site.

What Else?

What other tricks do you have for generating blog content ideas? Share your suggestions and questions in the content below.

Thank you for subscribing to Internet Business Mastery feed. For instant access to your free audio gift and a risk-free trial of our proven step-by-step program for starting your own profitable internet business, please visit http://www.freeaudiogift.com.

At the end of that post I realized I didn’t have anything like enough room to share more than two tips, so here as promised is part two of the series, where I will share my top six tips to creating a powerful, engaging and above all successful blog.

Before I go any further, I must quickly credit people in the UK who have generously shared their content with me, and enabled me to learn so much additional stuff so quickly, particularly Sarah Arrow of Birds On the Blog.  She is a fine example of the free content model!

OK, Enough Talk, Cut to The Tips…

Ok, here we go…

Tip Number One – Plan Your Blog

You need to decide what kind of blog you’re going to write. For example, is it going to be a showcase for your product, a standalone platform allowing you to air your views, or a business in its own right?

Once you work this out, you can start to decide who your ideal reader is going to be and what their profile will look like.

Tip Number Two – Traffic.

Here’s a revelation.  Traffic is Not Important.

Really?

No it isn’t.  Relevant traffic is.

Having profiled your ideal reader, you need to talk to them in their language, and make them feel welcome on your blog.  Don’t overwrite just for key words, write to be read.

Don’t lurch straight into trying to make a sale, provide valuable content they will like and which will make them want to come back to you again and again, and share you content with others (which also helps you of course!) and in good time come back and buy something.

Tip Number Three – Share The Love.

Ask yourself – how easy are you making it for people to share this great content you’ve created?

Have you added Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn buttons to the site?  Make it easy for people to spread the love by liking, retweeting and sharing your stuff.

Tip Number Four – Appearance Is (Almost) Everything.

Much as I like to go on about the quality of the content, in reality if you site looks awful, people will click away pretty quickly, and they will never get to appreciate your writing genius.  That’s their loss right?

Wrong. Its yours.

So make sure your theme is clean, functional and easy on the eye, as well as being contemporary.  It is well worth investing a small amount of money in a new one if the old one looks a bit tired.

Tip Number Five – Content Marketing.

This is a subject close to my heart – as my marketing business is a heavy promoter of content marketing. This is a system whereby you establish yourself as the expert in your market by providing high quality mostly free content.

Be careful not to duplicate content everywhere as the search engines will pick this up and it will do much more harm that good.  If you get in touch with me I will explain how this works, as there isn’t enough room to cover it properly here.

Tip Number Six – Don’t Forget the Call To Action!!

Very important tip, this.

You’ve done all the hard work.  You’ve written great, well targeted and useful content, got the reader to a nice clean site and got their attention.

And guess what happens next?

If you don’t tell them what to do next, they leave.

Make sure you include a call to action, whether that is following you in Facebook or Twitter, clicking on a link to buy yours or an affiliate product, or subscribing to your blog for more content.

So what’s my call to action here? Well it would be great if you scanned the QR codes below and followed me on Twitter and Facebook, so I can share more with you in the future.  Thanks!

————

Phil Clark is a prolific blogger and marketer who is spreading the word to businesses about the power of content marketing.  Phil is also heavily involved in local search and mobile marketing, as well as a convert to the power of QR codes in campaigns!  More at www.abcmultimedia.co.uk

Join Phil on Twitter: Join Phil on Facebook:

Thank you for subscribing to Internet Business Mastery feed. For instant access to your free audio gift and a risk-free trial of our proven step-by-step program for starting your own profitable internet business, please visit http://www.freeaudiogift.com.

You can find the first four installments in this series at the following links:

1. 4 Surefire Ways to Make Money Online
2. 5 Ways to Boost Web Traffic
3. Boost Web Site Conversion, Boost Your Income
4. Raise Retention and Reap the Rewards

Offer New Value, Make More Money

One of the things I like most about internet business is it is like alchemy. It feels like you can make money from thin air. If I want to boost profits, I simple create a new product or service that offers new value to my market.

The easiest way to do that is to simply ask them. Our favorite way of doing this is to send out a survey to our e-mail list using a free tool such as Survey Monkey. This gives you a formula for virtually writing your own checks (i.e. alchemy) any time you want to boost your income.

What I also love about this model is that your income is not limited by how much effort you put in or how many hours you work. It comes from how much new VALUE you offer to your market. You can scale it as big as you want and the bigger it gets, the more impact you have in your market and the world.

Let’s take a look at five income streams (value-adding offers) that you can make to your market. These are the five that have brought the most success in our business.

1. Affiliate Product Offers

This is a great income stream to start with. You don’t have to make your own product. You simply find someone else’s product that fulfills what your following wants. With each sale, you make a commission as an affiliate.

Every month we get a steady stream of checks totaling thousands of dollars from recommending product and services that our market needs. It’s become an automated part of what we do.

The ideal place to start this is in your e-mail auto-responder series. Set up and e-mail or two that your subscribers automatically get. Answer one of their top frustrations by recommending a quality product through an affiliate link. Before you know it, the passive income will flow.

2. Entry Level E-Book

When the time comes to offer your first original product, and e-book is the easy place to start. It doesn’t have to be very long either. Create a 30-40 page document that provides your market with a step-by-step system in a PDF file. Answer  one of their most pressing questions. Sell it at a price under $100 as an easy entry to get people buying from your business.

3. Series of Phone Calls

This is a fantastic income stream because you can sell it before the content is even created. You sell access to the calls, but the content is made after you’ve already been paid. This could be a limited series of weekly interviews or Q&A calls. Use a free teleseminar service such as FreeConference.com.

4. Coaching Course

The idea of a coaching course is to guide an exclusive group of high-paying customers through an entire system to get a desired result at the end (e.g. launching a new business, writing a book, building a classic car, etc.)

This usually works best if it consists of the following:

• Weekly content in the form of audio or video
• Q&A calls with you on a regular basis
• Access to a forum or site for interacting with others in the course (Ning is an easy solution for providing this)

We’ve sold spot in our coaching courses for prices between $2000 and $6000. This is a high-end, high margin product that can bring a six-figure paycheck to your business. It takes a bit more time to implement, but given the potential profit it’s well worth it.

5. Membership Sites

This list would not be complete without our top money-maker — the membership site. The Academy is the core of our business. It provides a regular stream of new income into the business. We can sell more value to more customers without it taking anymore of our own time. It can scale as big as we want it to.

The content can even be the same as your coaching course, but spread out over time. The best way to launch a membership site is with WordPress and WishlistMember (an easy member management plug-in).

What do you think?

Which income stream do you plan to start next? What other income streams have worked well for you? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Thank you for subscribing to Internet Business Mastery feed. For instant access to your free audio gift and a risk-free trial of our proven step-by-step program for starting your own profitable internet business, please visit http://www.freeaudiogift.com.

Your writing instructors loved to give the best grades to the students who could write as if they were some floating intellect in space. Even better if this floating intellect had no form or personality. Instead, it just dispassionately put pen to paper to write about whatever the topic of the day happened to be.

To them, cold and clinical was the best way to write.

But now you’re in business. You want to communicate with your customers. To make an honest living you need to excite your customers and motivate them to buy your products.

And you’ve probably realized by now that the old style of writing you learned in school isn’t cutting the mustard. Customers are ignoring your message.

So how can you spice up your writing to make sure it gets read? Just follow these two easy steps…

STEP 1: BE INTERESTING

I’d bet my last dollar that when you have the opportunity to sit down face-to-face with someone interested in your product, it’s easy for you to be passionate and compelling.

You’re able to communicate everything about your product, how it will help them, and why that person’s life will be better by owning your product.

But when it comes to getting that down on paper, you probably crash and burn. You wonder, “how on earth can I put everything I know into words?”

Easy – just follow the next step…

STEP 2: WRITE HOW YOU SPEAK

This is when you need to banish your writing teacher to the past. Don’t be afraid of her anymore. She’s not here to grade you ever again. In fact, the only people who will grade your writing are your customers – if they like your writing, they’ll give you their credit card number. If they don’t, you’ll be eating ramen noodles until you figure it out.

People want to read interesting things said in an interesting way. No one has the time or desire to wade through “academic speak.” They want you to solve their problems and prove that you can do it easily.

One of the easiest ways to get started doing this is to make an audio recording of your sales presentations. Voice recorders are inexpensive, and most cell phones now have the ability to double as voice recorders.

If you don’t often give actual sales presentations, have a friend sit down and listen as you tell him about your product and your company. Don’t worry about formalizing it. Just talk from your heart.

Whenever possible, tell stories about how the product was created, why it’s so important to the world, and how it will change someone’s life when they get it.

After you have a few of these presentations recorded, have them transcribed so you can read them on paper. Make a few copies of the transcription and pass them out to new people. Give them a highlighter and ask them to mark the sections they think are most interesting.

Now you have some material to use in your sales copy. Try to use as many of your real “spoken” words as possible. Don’t smooth them out!

————

Mike Denison is a freelance copywriter with over 20 years experience in direct response marketing, including print advertising, direct mail, online sales letters, and email campaigns. More info at www.logikmarketing.com

Thank you for subscribing to Internet Business Mastery feed. For instant access to your free audio gift and a risk-free trial of our proven step-by-step program for starting your own profitable internet business, please visit http://www.freeaudiogift.com.

• An easy way to immediately make your blog content more effective
• The fastest, simplest way to add quality images to your blog
• A quick tip for boosting the search engine power of your content

What other tips or questions do you have about using images on your blog? Share in the comments below.

Thank you for subscribing to Internet Business Mastery feed. For instant access to your free audio gift and a risk-free trial of our proven step-by-step program for starting your own profitable internet business, please visit http://www.freeaudiogift.com.

Here are the three things that make us the
most money on the Internet.

FIRST is our membership site, the Academy.

SECOND is our group coaching courses.

THIRD we earn commissions from recommending
and selling products and services as an
affiliate.

But just knowing the revenue streams is
not enough to mimic this profit model.

We apply this simple formula to actually
bring in the cash.

C + C + C = $$$

Lots a lot of C’s!

Here’s how it breaks down.

1. COMMUNITY

The first C is a COMMUNITY of loyal customers
that look to you as a trusted advisor.

Our business magnetically and continually
attracts people to our community by offering
stellar free content through our show,
Internet Business Mastery.

Through the content they come to see us as
trusted advisors because we offer great value.

2. CHANNEL

The SECOND C is CHANNEL.

Channel is the way you communicate with
your audience to build trust and get them to
take action (buy).

The most effective channel for making money
online is an e-mail list.

The show attracts people to our community,
but it’s the e-mail list that gets people
to click and buy.

So the primary goal of your content should
be to get people on your e-mail list.

3. CALL TO ACTION

The third C is CALL TO ACTION.

Once you build influence, your community
will be ready to take action (buy).

The most effective way to get people to take
action and buy is using a launch sequence.

We learned this from Jeff Walker. He just
released a video answering the biggest
questions about launch sequences.

Watch it here now

Launch sequences are a powerful way to make
as much money in one week as you might
have made in one year otherwise.

So here’s the formula that you can put into
action today.

Community + Channel + Call to Action = $$$

Definitely check out the video from Jeff.
It’s worth submitting your e-mail to get
access.

He’s very candid and gives some shocking
insights into product launches.

Watch it here now

At the end of the video, Jeff talks a bit
about his upcoming Product Launch Formula course…
and some of the REALLY new stuff in it.

We’ve taken the course several times and the ROI
has been huge.

Here’s the link again.

Watch it here now

.

Thank you for subscribing to Internet Business Mastery feed. For instant access to your free audio gift and a risk-free trial of our proven step-by-step program for starting your own profitable internet business, please visit http://www.freeaudiogift.com.

For those of you who don’t already know me, my name is Pat Flynn. I’ve been mentioned here on Internet Business Mastery a number of times, and was even featured in a case study video interview by Sterling and Jay last year.

Most of my internet success has come from eBooks that I’ve written. In 2009, for example, my business grossed $162,192.85 in eBook sales alone, and that’s just from two products. I’ve also written an eBook for my entrepreneurial blog, which helped me generate over 2000 email leads in less than two months.

The power of an eBook to expand your business and brand, whether you sell it online for profit (the ROI is ridiculous!), or give it away for free to generate leads, is heightened by the fact that you can automate the entire process. So, if you don’t yet have your own product for your business, I definitely recommend writing an eBook.

And the best part is…it’s easy!

Using the following process, you can virtually have an eBook write itself.

Step One: Mind Map it Out

You’re probably already familiar with mindmapping because Sterling and Jay talk about it all of the time. If not, it’s basically a visual way of brainstorming, using bubble diagrams to show how ideas relate to one another and a hierarchy of strings of your thoughts. You can do this on paper, or use software such as Mindjet to make it easier for you – it’s up to you.

Start with your central topic of choice and just branch out from there, mapping out all of the related ideas, thoughts, potential topics and sub topics that surround your topic. I recommend getting as detailed as possible, and don’t be afraid to branch out far from the central topic – it’s all important information if you thought of it.

Here’s an example of a mindmap for part of a potential flyfishing eBook, just so you can see what it looks like:

As you can see, mindmapping is a great way to organize a ton of ideas and categorize them in a way that’s easy to understand.

Get as deep and as detailed as possible, because the more you write at this point, the easier the eBook will create itself in the following steps.

Step Two: Create an Outline

Using your mindmap as a guide, write an outline of what to include in your eBook.

The only real difference between the mindmap and the outline is that the outline should be parts of your mindmap listed in an order that seems logical for a person totally unfamiliar with the topic. Put yourself in the shoes of a newbie and try to determine the order of information that makes sense.

Don’t forget to create topics and subtopics in your outline, just like you did with your mindmap.

At the end of it all, you’ll have what looks like a Table of Contents for a book. In fact, that’s exactly what it becomes!

Here’s part of an outline that can be created from the flyfishing mindmap above:

• Chapter: Fly Fishing Equipment
  • Section 1: Fly Rods
    • Part 1: The Flex
      • Stiff
        • Pros
        • Cons
        • Recommendations
      • Flexible
        • Pros
        • Cons
        • Recommendations
    • Part 2: Care For Your Rods
  • Section 2: Fly Reels
  • Section 3: Flies

…and so on and so-forth.

Step Three: Treat Parts of Your Outline as Individual Blog Posts or Articles

At this point, you can turn your outline/table of contents into a checklist of articles to complete. If you think about each part of your outline as an individual blog post or article, finishing the entire eBook won’t seem that far out of reach.

The nice part about this process is that you can choose which parts of your eBook to write first. You don’t have to start at the beginning, which is often the hardest part. Choose an “article” that you feel the most comfortable with, crank it out, and move on to the next. Literally crossing them off the list as you finish totally helps for motivation too.

If you’re not a writer, or don’t want to write the eBook on your own, you can easily hire a ghost writer to complete the job for you. It will be easy for them, since they have a detailed outline of exactly what’s needed already.

This three step method is what I used for all of the eBooks I’ve written, and it works like a charm every single time.

Good luck!

————

Pat Flynn is a successful entrepreneur, blogger, author, husband and father who writes transparently about what he does online. You can read more about his online adventures at The Smart Passive Income Blog.

Thank you for subscribing to Internet Business Mastery feed. For instant access to your free audio gift and a risk-free trial of our proven step-by-step program for starting your own profitable internet business, please visit http://www.freeaudiogift.com.

It’s time to reach further and take our message wider with other channels like blogging.

Though we have blogged some in the past, it’s never been focused and consistent. We know there are a lot of people that we’re not reaching because we haven’t had a well-defined blogging strategy.

So we’re developing a focused strategy now. As with any strategy, it’s a good idea to ask why are you doing it. What is it that we want to gain as a result?

Without going into much detail, here’s what I came up with today.

1. Organic Search Traffic

Posting frequent, valuable content has proven to land higher rankings in the search engine results, hence bringing in more targeted, free traffic from the search engines.

2. Attract More Links to Your Site

The more you post valuable content, the more opportunities there are for sites to link to you. This in turns brings in more click traffic. In addition, it affects the higher rankings mentioned in #1.

3.  Engaging Followers and Building Relationships

Once someone has opted to follow your content (whether through Twitter, Facebook, E-mail, RSS, etc.), the goal is to engage with them regularly to build a relationship of trust.

While we have experienced a powerful level of relationship building by delivering content through the audio podcast, some people prefer to connect through blog updates.

4. Progress the Sales Process

One thing that we have done with our blog is use it as a tool in our sales process. Blog posts can be used to build anticipation for a launch or deliver content that prepares a follower to buy.

The Purpose of Our Blogging Strategy

Every entry on our blog should fulfill one or more of those four purposes. If it doesn’t, then it’s really a waste of time. In fact, the same four purposes apply to our audio podcast or live video show.

Before designing the other pieces of our strategy (e.g. frequency, types of content, length of posts, etc.) it was important to have a well-defined purpose.

Why Do You Blog?

Am I missing anything? Is it different for you? Why do you blog?

Please share your thoughts in the comments below.

Thank you for subscribing to Internet Business Mastery feed. For instant access to your free audio gift and a risk-free trial of our proven step-by-step program for starting your own profitable internet business, please visit http://www.freeaudiogift.com.