The fifth in a 5-part series, together we will add great content to your blog to keep your visitors coming back for more. You should have installed wordpress by following the steps in our featured video, chosen a theme and the best plugins.
You may have noticed a trend if you have spent anytime reading blogs or just surfing the net; multimedia is becoming increasingly popular, especially videos. And adding videos to your blog is a great way to create more engaging and more interesting content. But what if you have no idea how to create a video?
Either read an earlier post on creating youtube videos, or much easier, search youtube for a video that matches your topic and embed it within your post. 100 million videos are viewed on youtube every day, so you’re sure to find what you want. And once you’ve found it, viewed it and decided you want to feature it, just under the description and subscribe box is the embed code. Click on it, copy it and paste the HTML code into your post. When you publish it, the video will appear. Simple. Youtube videos are meant to be shared so you don’t need to ask permission.
The other way to make your posts stand out and look professional is adding photographs or images. There are plenty of places to find great photos, but my favourite is flickr. Flickr is possibly the biggest photo sharing site on the web. The photos belong to the many people who add them to the site, but you can use them on your blog. Use advanced search for ‘creative commons-licenced content’ and click the ‘find content to use commercially’ box. There are still plenty of choices and you are not infringing anyone’s copyright. Or you can buy royalty-free photos from istockphoto for as low as $1.
What if you are stuck for something to write about? Darren Rowse has written a post with a video to explain how to use google’s wonder wheel to find topics to write about. It’s worth spending a little time on Darren’s Problogger blog. He has lots of advice on how often to write, what to write about, different posting styles, and much more. Darren Rowse is a ‘six figure’ blogger and well regarded in the blogosphere. He also has an ebook called 31 days to build a better blog workbook. It’s also worth buying and reading.
But despite all the multimedia you can use, writing skills are still important. So, becoming a better writer should be one of your goals. And the best place to learn this skill is by following copyblogger from Brian Clark. You will find hundreds of articles, mostly about writing and copywriting. Interesting and well written artcles too.
And if you decide you want to write or add new content every day, it can be a tall order. Where do you get inspiration from to create a fresh, new article or engage your readers consistently? I find Daily Blog Tips is a terrific resource. The blog is written mostly by Daniel Scocco and it’s full of daily inspiration.
I also use google’s web-based RSS reader, or google reader and subscribe to the best blogs in each niche topic. I then get daily articles. This is a double whammy because I am always learning about my subject and I get plenty of inspiration too.
