Introduction The whole point of public relations and marketing is to make the public aware of the particular company, product, service or person that the marketeers are paid to promote. Increasingly these consultants are using the web as a tool to increase their clients business. As a blogger you can take advantage of all the online, publicity material that is on offer from these people. Until you become a well-known and successful blogger few publicists are going to mind if you use their work within your blog. The book market Part of my role on a website I was working on was to write book reviews. I then had no problem with going to the publisher's website or the publisher's blurb on Amazon and cutting and pasting the text and images onto the site. After all the purpose of the site I was working on was to sell their books. By playing around with the text I could very quickly produce around 80% of the required review. I could then quickly look through the book and then add my own personalised comments. I would occasionally take a clip from someone's personal review on Amazon. In this case I would always give the name, (their Amazon nickname), next to the quote, pointed out that this was an Amazon review and give a link to the Amazon page. No sensible company will be unhappy if you are providing them with free publicity. Although I have heard some bizarre, heavy-handed behaviour from some companies. I can't track down details but one publisher forced an eight-year-old Continue Reading
Writers’ Block: Three techniques to generate ideas
Introduction Reading comments, tweets, from Twitter; or free article directories can easily spur ideas for excellent posts. Comments and discussions on other blogs. Read posts on blogs that are in, or close to your niche. Read the comments. Look at blogs in your niche or subjects that are close to your niche. You will often find that the comments expand the topic or come up with unusual angles on the niche. You will find yourself agreeing with them and you can soon develop these into the outline of a post. Other comments will make you mad, angry or you feel contempt for the writing. OK use these emotions to write a better post, a post that make sense or a post that explains the issue properly. You can also combine ideas from two or three posts and make three or four points and - you've got a good post. Twitter Use a package, such as Tweetdeck, to monitor a set of keywords that are important to your blog. Scan the tweets and you may get inspiration for a great post. Alternatively follow the links to blogs - read a few posts, combine ideas from two or three and you then come up with an outline, with a twist, that will lead to you approaching the subject with yet a different angle. Free article directories Do a search on your topics relating to your blog. Scan through the shorter, often badly written articles, often crude, marketing message. Combine the ideas from two or three articles and you have a great structure for a great new post. Over to you What Continue Reading