Tag Archives: Content Development
Suffering from writer’s block after a long weekend of sun? Don’t worry – it happens to us all! The following are some useful tips to get back on track.
Tip 1: Improve Your Focus
Sometimes it can be extremely difficult to sit down and simply focus. In order to improve your focus, find out which time of the day works best for you to sit down and write your most productive work. For some, this may be the wee hours of the night, for others it may be first thing in the morning. Once you’ve identified when your best writing time is, it’s important that you make an effort to schedule that time as working time. Another way to improve your focus and avoid writer’s block is to eliminate all distractions. For example, sign off of Facebook and close your Internet browser, don’t check your e-mail, don’t Skype your friends. In order to be truly productive it is best to avoid your Internet browser when working on online marketing writing.
Tip 2: Generate Ideas
To get started, come up with a good headline or title. A catchy title can help generate ideas and help you to formulate what your main points are going to be. Next, make sure that you have done thorough research and have enough background information necessary to begin your online marketing writing. An easy way to check to see if you have done enough research is to have a friend ask you simple questions about the topic. If you cannot easily answer the questions, you need to keep educating yourself. When conducting research, read an article that is similar to the type of writing that you are doing so that you can look to it for inspiration and assistance, but be careful to avoid plagiarizing facts.
Tip 3: Be sociable!
Still suffering from writer’s block? For online marketing writing, it is helpful to get online and ask for assistance from friends! Reaching out to your social circle can be very effective in generating ideas that can eliminate your writer’s block. Question and answer sites such as Quora or Aardvark can be helpful, and don’t forget about your Twitter and Facebook friends too! Software is also available to assist in the feedback process. These programs, (Wridea is a popular option) can help you search ideas on the web and then enables you to ask your friends for feedback.
Tip 4: Stretch and Exercise
A simple task, like stretching, can be of great assistance when trying to overcome writer’s block. Working at a computer all day can leave you hunched forward with a back ache. Stand up and reach your hands to the ceiling, then straighten your shoulders and push your shoulder blades together. This stretch, along with deep breathing, will help to stimulate your brain and get your thoughts in action! Another way to get your ideas flowing is to go for a walk or a run before starting to write. Statistics have shown that we think well when we are moving, so exercising is a great way to get your ideas going and avoid writer’s block.
Tip 5: Reward Yourself!
After 30 minutes of solid writing, reward yourself by checking your Facebook page or e-mails, calling a friend, or watching a bit of TV. As well, if you convince yourself that you only need to write for ten or fifteen minutes straight, you will often find that you will have enough momentum to continue writing for longer periods of time. By rewarding yourself, you will be able to reach your deadline faster!
How do you tackle writer’s block? Share your tips with the CIK Marketing blog readers.
After hours of slaving away at your keyboard, you’ve finally done it – you’ve completed what could possibly be the world’s most perfect blog post. Your arguments are solid, your sources make complete sense. You were clever, but concise; articulate but understandable. As you click the publish button, you lean back in your chair and sip your coffee, waiting for the inevitable flood of traffic to your site. Ah yes, life is good…. until ten minutes later when you notice some nondescript spam blog has pilfered your content and is trying to pass it off as their own!
Why I oughta….
If you regularly publish content to a small business blog or website, chances are good you’ve had your content stolen at one point or another. If you haven’t yet, just wait… your turn is coming. Internet plagiarism is an ongoing problem, one that hurts not only your feelings but also your website’s search engine rankings. So, what should you do to protect your content?
Take Precautionary Methods
First things first – always start by protecting your content from the moment it’s published. There are two ways you can do this:
1. Specify Your Canonical
The rel=”canonical” attribute was created by Google back in 2009 to help deal with duplicate content issues (see the official Google Webmaster blog post for more details on this issue). This attribute allows you to specify your preferred version of a URL if your site features identical or vastly similar content on numerous pages. Specifying the canonical version of your text helps Google understand which version it should index and which versions it should ignore. While this attribute is really only intented to catch duplicate content on your own site, who’s to say it doesn’t help across the Web? If someone copies and pastes content from your website onto another domain, it might not be that big of a stretch to think that Google will notice the canonical attribute on your site and provide you with some hard earned ranking juice.
Want to use the canonical attribute on your next post? The following should be included in the <head> area of your code:
<link rel="canonical" href="URL of your post" />
2. Experiment with the “Original-Source” Meta Tag
In case you missed it, Google announced another crime-fighting coding strategy in November of last year. And while this meta tag is still in the testing stage, it has some pretty interesting perks. A post on Search Engine Land states that “The original-source meta tag can be used by publishers wanting to claim their article as the original version.” The official Google Blog breaks it down as follows:
Original-source indicates the URL of the first article to report on a story. We encourage publishers to use this metatag to give credit to the source that broke the story. We recognize that this can sometimes be tough to determine. But the intent of this tag is to reward hard work and journalistic enterprise. For example, to credit the publication that broke a story you could use a metatag like this:
<meta name="original-source" content="http://www.example.com/burglary_at_watergate.html">
So, if you want all the credit for the content in your latest post, try inserting the original-source meta tag into your next article. Again, if someone nicks your content, Google should be able to sniff out the thief by looking for the original-source meta tag. If your site syndicates content, make sure you read up on the experimental syndication-source meta tag to ensure you’re receiving the proper credit.
Now, clever content thieves could technically insert the original-source meta tag into their copy of the content, changing the link to the location of their plagiarized post… hence, Google still has this tag in the testing phase. But let’s be honest, if content thieves are as dumb as the vast majority of normal thieves, there’s a pretty good chances this new original-source meta tag could help keep your content out of enemy hands.
Will you use Google’s new original-source meta tag?
