1.) The Google Wonder Wheel

One of Google’s latest keyword research tools called “Wonder Wheel” will help you come up with fresh new blog ideas.  All you need to do is type in a vague keyword or phrase in which you want to blog about and the tool will provide you with eight relevant and popular terms you can turn into blog topics.  The great thing about this tool is you can start out as broad as you want.  Say you have a blog about food and need a direction to go.  All you need to do is type in the word “food” and the Wonder Wheel will give you eight topics related to food that are also popular Google searches.

Wonder Wheel Search Results for "Food"

Here is an example of the Wonder Wheel search result for “Food“.  As you can see the topics the wheel provides are quite different but also very popular.  You then have the ability to click on a new keyword which will break off into eight new topics.  In just a few clicks you can have a narrowed down blog topic related to your initial keyword that you never would have considered writing about.  If you know a general area you want to write about use Google’s Wonder Wheel to narrow down a Brilliant blog idea!

2.) Google Trends

A proven strategy for driving traffic to your blog is to write posts about the hot topics or trends.  Google Trends offers a tool that allows you to search what the current interests of the world are at that time.  This is a great way to get ideas for blogging about what others are interested in.

In Google Trends there is a section called “Hot Searches” & “Hot Topics” in the US.  Google basically gives you 6 – 10 topics under each of the most searched trends.  Once you click on one of the links you get detailed information including when search activity peaked as well as a list of related searches.

If you are looking to write about the hot topics of the day/week/month use Google Trends to come up with a brilliant blog idea!

3.) Yahoo! Answers

What could be better subject to write about than providing answers to people’s questions?  Yahoo! Answers is a great source to discover topics in which people want answers to.  Website Magazine says “one of the most popular blog posts on the Web are those that provide real solutions to people’s pain points”.

To use Yahoo! Answers simply search for a topic you want to blog about.  The results will be actual questions people have asked about that topic.  It is so easy to get a brilliant blog idea once you see actual questions people have asked about a topic.

For more blogging tips, check out SEO information to learn how to use a blog for your internet marketing campaign.  Make sure to check our blogging section of our blog as well~!

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Some of the most common performance indicators for writers are:

Writer Impact – This can be measured as simply as reads per writer. For commercial sites, conversions per article and length of visit are good metrics. You can tie a custom variable to the page that records an article as read once a viewer is on the page for a specific amount of time.

Writer Cost per Reading- Many news and other content creation sites have writer quotas. A more effective measurement is cost per reading. This calculated by dividing writer cost by the number of readings generated.

Time Spent Writing compared to Reading- If you spend more time creating content than people spend reading it you have either failed in marketing or creating appealing content. This is valuable with websites with low traffic. This will evaluate how writers are spending their time, but can only be accurately measured if all writing time is done through one piece of software.

Satisfaction Surveys- This is the old-school survey. You can integrate individual ratings into a page, or have the page pop-up a survey after viewing a site. These can be annoying, so use with discretion.

Unread Page Counter – Large sites with thousands of pages will have problems with sites that do not get any views, because these sites do not show up in Google analytics. Filtering out unvisited websites will significantly skew data. You will need to do a match list of pages from your CMS with the analytics page-view data. A simple list of unread pages is also useful in determining why those pages do not receive any traffic.

For a blogger, conversion means, turning a random visitor to a loyal reading. This could be done by offering him your blog’s free subscription or connecting with him so that you can offer your blog’s content to him.

What is A/B testing?

A/B testing simply means testing different things and tracking which one works well. Like, if you are offering a Free Email Newsletter and 1 in 100 visitors sign up for it. You can try different placement of your Newsletter for better results.

For example: Use one method for a week and then use other for one week. Track the conversion. See which one is working well. Then get the best placement and try to compare it with other. Just keep trying until you find the best.

Which is the best placement for it?

Well, it totally depends on your blog layout. Few put it in the sidebar, few in the navigation bar on the top. According to me, the best position is where most people can see it, that is, below every post. You can try this plugin called Wp Greet Box for it.

Download the Free A/B testing tool

I haven’t used it at all, but it was mention on a trustable blog, so I would recommend it here to my readers. Google Website Optimizer.

This is it from my side. thanks for reading.

Well, let’s talk about the much hyped Twitter.

Personally, I don’t like twitter, and that’s the reason I am not very much active on it. But still, twitter is like life to many bloggers. They get excited when someone follows them without any hard work.

How to get twitter followers

This is the most important part of the twitter game, if you don’t have followers ( say readers) you probably are wasting your time tweeting about your daily life. You need to have followers to read your tweets. Here are few things to do for getting followers

1. Follow as many people you can, the more you follow the more likely you get followers, in simple math, and it will be the 10% of the people you follow.
2. Exchange followers, yes, followers can be exchanged too, make friends on twitter or Facebook or whatever you use and mention each other in your tweets, if really works great if you both are in the same niche.
3. Publish your profile link, yes, share it everywhere, not only on twitter but also on Facebook, MySpace or whatever you use.
4. Ask your readers to follow you, what people do is that they stick a badge of twitter to their sidebar and never talk about it, you can go ahead and blog about your twitter profile and ask people to follow you, tell them you will be worth to follow.
5. Invite people on twitter, have you ever tried to invite people by importing your emails contacts, this is a great way to get plenty of followers. You will see a lot of people in your list have twitter profiles but they are not following you because, like you, they also don’t know that you are on twitter.
6. Get new people join twitter, oh yeah, there are still many people who don’t use twitter, some of them don’t just get it, teach them how to use twitter, bring them on twitter and you will see them as your most loyal followers.
7. Follow other people’s followers, I have been trying this right from the beginning, go to the profile of a successful guy in your niche and start following his followers, for example, if you niche is an Underwear ( just kidding, don’t shoot me) include this keyword in your profile, people will come to know that you seller better quality underwear, they will be following your for sure.
8. Reply and Retweet, use these two things on a regular basis, your username will be all over the place, few random people will be following you in sometime.

Well, this is not it, there are many other ways, like if you are really desperate about getting followers, work hard on it, you will definitely going to get it. That’s all for today, we will be talking about something else in the other post.