We all understand that a blog is an easy way to continuously update a website and to share information. We also know that an updated website is better indexed by search engines and is more likely to get found when people search the Internet and that blogs can be written on any subject that interests an audience and pertains to a business.

You want to blog and to blog regularly, but finding relevant topics for content is challenging and it takes a lot of time to write well. Your creative juices don’t always flow when you need them most. To help you blog better, we have assembled a bunch of helpful tips, websites and ideas for you. Keep reading to find which ones will work best for you.

Needing blog ideas, seeking inspiration? Here are a couple tools that will help kick-start your creativity:

  • Quora – Quora is a social platform like Facebook or Twitter, but it is built expressly for its users to ask, and answer, questions on pretty much any topic. You can find trendy conversations and then use those topics to generate blog content. You’ll get responses to your questions from anyone who is familiar with the topic, along with subject matter experts.
  • HupSpot’s Blog Topic Generator – A handy new topic generator into which you enter one, two, or three terms (nouns) you’d like to blog about and it produces several topics. The topics aren’t always precise, but you can modify them to make them fit your needs.

So, now you have ideas. Here are a few resources to help track and organize those ideas:

  • Evernote – Evernote is a suite of software and services designed for note taking and archiving, letting you easily collect and find everything that matters. You can use it to manage your personal workflow. You can store blog post ideas, collect various post components, even set up a blog template, and then write the post itself.
  • Cloud Storage Services – The concept behind ‘the cloud’ is that an off-site data storage facility auto-synchronizes and backs-up your files for you via a remote server. This way, even if you lose your device, you can still access your files through another. These also work great as a file-sharing tool for extremely large files. Three of the most popular are Google Drive, Dropbox, and Skydrive.
  • Google Calendar – Editorial calendars are a great way to plan content ahead of time. It takes some time to plan out content in advance but knowing where your content is headed will help reduce writer’s block that can come from a lack of ideas. Calendars can also help guarantee that you have a good amount of variety on your blog as well as resulting in posting blogs more consistently. For those with busy schedules, Google calendar has a “reminder” feature that will send you an email when you have a blog deadline coming up.

Keywords help readers find you! Here are tools to help optimize blog content:

  • Google Keyword Planner Is a free Google AdWords tool. To access this tool, you’ll need to create a Google Adwords account. Keyword Planner is used for building new campaigns or expanding existing ones. You can use it to search for keywords, ad group ideas, and historical statistics. It can also be used to see how a list of keywords might perform and even create a new keyword list by multiplying several lists of keywords together.
  • Google Authorship – Authorship allows you to link content you publish on a specific domain (such as your website or blog page) to your Google+ profile. You want a presence on Google + (Google’s social networking service) as it is the second-largest social networking site in the world and is crawled by Google’s search engine looking for content! First, you need to sign up for Google+ and create a Google+ profile.

The adage says a picture is worth a thousand words… but it hasn’t been easy or cheap to find them.

Photo Pin – Photo Pin is a free image service. They use the Flickr API (Application Programming Interface) to help you find ‘Creative Commons’ images just like using Flickr directly, but you’ll find that searches on Photo Pin turn up images faster and the interface (the point of interaction with software) is so much better. Once you select an image, you are presented with up to nine size options, and you also get a box with the HTML (main markup language for creating web pages and other info that can be displayed in a web browser) you need to use for attribution (giving appropriate credit and provide a link to the license). WordPress now allows you to put HTML in the caption box of an image, by simply copying code from Photo Pin and pasting it into the caption and you have perfectly formatted attribution with links embedded.

Contracting for web marketing support addresses limited talent and time concerns.

With limited staffing or limited time, consider engaging a strong web marketing team for support. A good web support team should include skilled copywriters who can help you set up an editorial calendar and can edit, write and post meaningful content. They work with you to develop good topics, incorporate keywords, and execute the posting of your blogs. Your web marketing team should offer many different levels of engagement.

Let your better blogging begin today. Feel free to contact the Everbearing team and see how we can support you.

Please share your challenges, questions, or experiences about blogging in the comment box below.

photo credit: <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/krossbow/376349599/”>krossbow</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/”>cc</a>

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