In order to bring your blog posts to life, it’s important to add images. Images add interest, color, and even more understanding to the reader of the information you’re trying to convey. But there is a lot to know about using images to ensure that you get the most from them on your blog.

Understand Copyright Laws

You can’t just find any image you want by searching on Google and using it. It’s important to understand about how copyrights work. Read the fine print no matter where you find the image, so that you get permission and give credit appropriately.

Where to Find Images

You can buy royalty free images from stock photo sites like iStockPhoto.com, and stockfresh.com, or you can find free images from morguefile.com. These are only a few examples. Royalty free does not mean an image is free; it just means you can pay one time, and if you use it according to the licensing agreement you don’t have to pay per view.

Links:
iStockPhoto – http://www.istockphoto.com/
Stockfresh – http://stockfresh.com/
Morguefile – http://www.morguefile.com/

Formatting Images Properly

You want to ensure that your images aren’t too big to suck up bandwidth and make your pages load too slowly. If you use WordPress, you can get a plugin for images like Hammy to help ensure that images are sized right for the browser viewing it.

Link to Hammy – https://wordpress.org/plugins/hammy/

Ensure That Your Images Relate

Adding images to your blog posts will, if you choose right, make the blog posts come to life for your audience. If the image advances the story of your blog post, it’s going to mean a lot. They say an image is worth 1000 words, and it’s true if you choose well.

Add “ALT” Tags to Your Images

Many bloggers think that tags are old-fashioned and unnecessary, but if you want Google to index your images right, you’ll need to add the alt tags as well as a good description, using keywords that fit your website and blog post.

Keep Pictures on Your Own Server

It’s tempting to house images on another server because of space, but it’s best if you house the images for your blog on the same server. If you use WordPress, just upload them in the media section to ensure fast loading of images.

Use Screen Shots or Make Your Own Images

Sometimes, the best images are the ones you create yourself using screen shots. This is especially true if you are creating a how-to post that needs images to help lead the blog post reader to follow the directions carefully. You can make your own images easily by taking pictures with your phone and using software like Canva.com to edit the picture for posting on your blog.

Link to Canva – https://www.canva.com/

Be Consistent

It can be hard to be consistent about how your blog posts are laid out if you don’t create a guideline for yourself (and others if you have guest bloggers). But, you don’t want to confuse your readers by making your website look messy without any order. Try to place images logically on each blog post.

Using images on your blog posts is important. In fact, most experts say you should never post any blog post without an image included. WordPress has an area that allows for “featured image” for each post that will let the image share with the blog post. Posts with images are more likely to be read, so it’s important to include them.

Good storytelling includes bringing facts to the table along with the extra information that brings the reader closer to the storyteller. The aim is to weave a compelling story that pulls the reader in so that they really care about the outcome of the story. The more a customer cares about your story, the longer they will remain customers and demonstrate brand and product loyalty.

* Create an Email Series – A good way to get your audience primed for an emotional story is to start small and deliver the story in pieces via an email series. Keep each email short, about 350 to 450 words, and to one small point.

* Incorporate Video – Using video for part of or even your entire story can help bring more emotion to the story because people generally feel more emotional when looking at people and images than just by reading text. Using both text and video can be the best of both worlds.

* Include Testimonials – Text and video testimonials from your satisfied customers can evoke emotion from those who haven’t purchased from you yet, because they will want what your satisfied customers want. They will also trust you more when the videos are very authentic and real.

* Put Customers First – In every story it’s important to put your customer first. Get to know everything you can about your customers and incorporate the things they care about within your stories. This shows that you know them well and can speak about the things that concern them the most.

* Get Attention with Negative Stories – Pull the emotional strings to get their attention with negative aspects of a story that will be resolved by using your products or services. You don’t want to traumatize your customers, only evoke emotions.

* Calm Fears with Positive Stories – Tone down the negative with some positive stories of people who have used your products and services with good results. Bring them back up after you brought them down.

* Reinforce with Neutral Stories – Tell them the “who, what, when, how and why” of your products and services using stories to guide the discussion that are less emotional and volatile.

* Recognize the Relationship – When you are telling any story, it’s important to recognize the relationship between you and the receiver.

* Remember the Imagery – It’s important to ensure that the images you use match the emotions you’re trying to evoke, otherwise your story will be confusing to the reader/viewer.

The fact is that emotions drive us to do more than we would like to think. From buying a house, to choosing a book to read on the weekend, we are driven by our emotions more than we are by logic.

However, as you try to evoke emotions in your viewers, it’s important to also bring in elements of logic so that your viewer or reader trusts you to buy what you’re offering. Otherwise, they might feel as if you’re manipulating their emotions too much.

One of the biggest mistakes people make when trying to promote their business is that when they get busy they give up on blogging. One of the best tools you have at your fingertips to build traffic to your website is your blog. The blog is almost always the number one way that people find their way to your website.

* Great for SEO – Your blog is perfect for improving search engine optimization because you can write keyword-rich, authoritative articles full of information that your audience wants to read and needs to know about. Search engines like often updated websites and the easiest way to update a site often is via the blog.

* Connect with Customers – A blog is a great way to connect with your customers. If you open up the blog to comments, then it’s more like a busy message board or forum, provided that you answer and enter into discussions with everyone who comments on your blog posts. Not only that, those comments are also great for SEO.

* Build Authority – When you blog about things in your business, your audience will get to know you better and realize that you’re an authority for the niche and topic that you’re involved in. Proving it over and over again through your choice of words on your blog will build that up even more.

* You Can Create New Products – Through blogging, you’ll be able to analyze problems your audience has, then come up with solutions for them. As you develop a problem and solution format, you’ll be able to use those blogs as future products.

* Offers Free PR – Few things in life are free, but your blog, if you write the posts yourself, is about as free as it gets. Not only that, it’s also a very effective form of marketing. You can use the blog to reach out to others and even open doors for you for other types of publicity.

* Build Relationships – Your customers will come to expect your blogs, and they will look at you as the person they want to learn more from. This is a great way to build relationships because if you post to your audience with them in mind, they feel like you’re thinking of them when you say something.

* Provides Audience Insight – When you blog and open up your comments to your audience, you can get a lot of insight into what they want. Just ask for feedback from your audience when you want more information from them. Then you can use that information for future blog posts, and products.

* Allows You to Tell Your Story – Aside from a great source of traffic generation, blogging is also a way to tell your story through your website. You can post about personal information that you might not normally do when it comes to business. But, do be careful and make sure you can somehow relate the personal insights to your business and audience.

When you start a blog, it seems to move slowly at first. But after you’ve managed to post on a regular basis for a few months, you’ll start to see a steady trend upwards for site visitors, comments, and engagement. The upwards trend will not slow down if you never stop blogging.

Coming up with content every day can be difficult if you don’t know creative ways to bypass “writer block” or “idea block”. One such idea is to interview experts. Not only will the interview become a blog post, or even part of an eBook or report, it can also help you generate more content ideas for future content needs.

Collect Data to Use for Memes and Infographics

When you interview a number of people, asking them the same questions such as in a survey, you can extract the data to use on memes and in infographics. A meme is a picture, usually with one quote on it, which is shared on social media. An infographic is a much larger depiction of multiple figures of data. You can use software like Piktochart.com or Canva.com to help you make these types of content from free to very inexpensively.

Link to Piktochart – http://www.piktochart.com/
Link to Canva – http://www.canva.com/

Elaborate on Something the Interviewee Said

Once in a while someone you interview will add additional information, provide insight into something in a new way, or even turn you on to an entirely new thing that you haven’t heard of before. In this case, take the information you learned and form a new piece of content with it, by starting with what the interviewee contributed and expanding on it. For example, if your interviewee told you about a product they use that you’ve never heard of before and you checked it out and loved it, do a product review on it. Maybe they’ll even have an affiliate program.

Combine Interviews to Make New Content

You can combine interviews in different ways to create entirely new pieces of content. You can pick one answer and combine all the interviewees and the one answer together into one long blog post, adding your thoughts to what each person answered. Depending on how many people participated it may be a very long post, which is great for SEO. You can do this for each question.

If you asked ten questions, you could create ten long blog posts by simply sending out a survey (interview) to other experts or even to your audience if you change the questions.

Develop an eBook or eReport

Using the interviews as a starting point, you can create an eBook or eReport. Organize the interviews in order of how you want to present the information into the report or book. Many books are like this. The author talks about a point, then uses the interview answers to stress the point, and then provides more information for the reader based off what the interviewee said, plus research conducted to fill out the book with a lot of facts and figures.

You are just as capable of doing this as any other author. The difference between you and an author is just the fact of publishing. They’re not better or smarter than you.

Publish Your Findings via the Amazon Direct Publishing Program

You can also combine your interviews into a book much like above, but instead of selling it off your website you can format it for selling on the Amazon Kindle through the Direct Publishing Program. It’s free to participate, and then you simply collect the money. They handle all payments, returns, delivery and everything.

You may earn less per book using this method, but it’s likely you will sell more books due to how many people love downloading and reading books on their Kindle. What’s more, people don’t actually need a Kindle to read your work, so no one is left out.

Link to Amazon Direct Publishing Program – https://kdp.amazon.com/

Turn Each Interview into One Blog Post

You can spotlight each person you’ve interviewed by publishing their interview as is. Ask for their headshot, contact information, and a more complete bio, and then publish the interview as a blog post. You can also take this future by promoting something they sell, or adding affiliate or links to any products or services that they use to make more bang for each post.

Tell a Story with the Interview Results

Often when you send out an interview with all the same questions, you can see the start of a theme or story forming for at least one of the questions. This can be inspiration for telling a story based on the interview question and each interviewee, as well as yourself. Weaving a story and connecting important points will make a huge difference in the quality of content you put out to the world.

Plan a Webinar or Round Table Based on the Interviews

If the interview turns out something you want to explore more deeply, invite those particular respondents to be part of a webinar or round table. You can do this on  via GoToWebinar. It’s another way to take one bit of work and turn it into something that pays off over and over again.
Link to GoToWebinar – http://www.gotomeeting.com/online/webinar

Content doesn’t have to be in written forms. It’s important to realize that it can come in many different formats, and then be repurposed into other formats to make it like new content. It may seem strange to produce content about the same topic over and over again, but each new way the idea is presented will give your audience more information. Plus, each individual learns and understands information differently. By providing many forms of content on the same subject and topic, you’re helping more people.

Scaling content adds a new way to use content in all the information you gather in your business. You may already be doing a lot of this without realizing it is content scaling. Ideas such as repurposing, sharing, and curating have been around for a while. But, often it’s not done with much intent. Content scaling allows you to start thinking of your content strategy in a new light and affects content creation positively.

Improved Idea Generation

Scaling content forces you to give each piece of content a lot more thought and consideration and planning ahead. With the additional planning and reimaging of the content, you will come up with more ideas because you aren’t thinking of each piece of content as one thing anymore.

Instead, each piece of content becomes not just a blog post, but research for future pieces of content such as an eCourse, or a video education series, or a podcast. Now that you can look at content differently you’ll be able to bring more creativity to all the content ideas that you generate.

Get More Bang for Your Buck

By strategic rewriting, reformatting, and reusing the content that you have spent a lot of time, money and effort creating, you’ll actually get a lot more bang for your buck.

If you can pay a content creator for 40 or 50 pieces of content each month, based off your product funnel and the information you want to impart on your audience, and then each of these pieces of content are recreated into other formats, and each new creation is shared multiple times on social media, via email marketing and via your affiliates, how much more will you earn off each piece of content?

Get Your Ideas to More People

When you spend time reproducing your content into many different forms, and even languages, and sharing it often through social media, email marketing, and other means, you’re going to get your ideas to more people than you did before.

The more people who see your information, the more leads you’re going to get, and the more creditability you will get for the work that you do. Strategic content creation, curation, and sharing across multiple networks will work in concert with your overall marketing plan.

Develop Thought Leadership

One of the ways in which you become a sought-after person in business is to become a thought leader. Scaled content allows you to become a thought leader by helping you make the most of the content you are creating, plus the content other people have created through curation.

By showing others your expertise through sharing your thoughts on other people’s content, and choosing the right content to share with your audience from other authors, you will become known as a thought leader within your community. This can boost your credibility exponentially among your audience members.

Make Competitors Allies

A great way to bring competitors to your side of the road is to start curating their content. Share their content with your audience with your commentary and thoughts. You can use as much as 50 percent of your content as curated content as long as you add in your own thoughts, link to and provide attribution to the original creators of the content.

Now competitors will see what you’ve done and they may feel a need to comment on what you said, or bring you into a cross-blog conversation that can bring you brand new traffic from their audience. Plus it turns your website or blog into a hub for information revolving around your niche, a one-stop shop for your audience to find the information of the day about your topic.

Multiply Your Message

Once you’ve developed a piece of content in any format, you can immediately multiply the message by reproducing it into new formats. You don’t want to copy and paste the information into a new format; you want instead to use the work as research, and reimagine it into a new format.

The blog post becomes a slide share, and the slide share becomes a YouTube video, and so forth. Use some creativity when moving content to a new format. You want to consider the personality of the network that your content will be pushed out to when crafting the new format. Also, give the new format some of its own personality and creative changes to ensure that it’s not cookie cutter.

Become a Global Brand

Most people read content or use content only in their own language. If you want to reach other audiences in other languages, you can duplicate your content into new languages by having it translated into entirely new websites. This will attract the audience you want to promote your products and services to.

Don’t just use the same content in a different language, but also be sure to consider the values and personalities of the audience that speaks that language. You may need to change more than just the words to make it work. However, adding more languages can boost your selling potential and your reach. Consider English, Spanish, French, German, and any language that has freedom of use and purchasing power on the internet.

Empower Brand Ambassadors

Affiliates, employees, contractors, friends, colleagues…they all need to feel as if they can share the work that you do without concern. Make it easy for them to share your content in their own words on their social media accounts, blogs, and among their contacts.

Push out content that can be edited by your affiliates, employees and contractors to make it original yet still carry the message you want to get out. Teach them how to use the information to make the most of it.

When you are trying to come up with content ideas for your niche, you can use a few basic starters for the content that will work for literally any niche. Once you have these nine ideas, you can break them down into individual points for blog posts, podcasts, videos, eBooks and more.

1. Make a List of Good Points – Every niche has some good points about it that make people feel good. You can write Seven Awesome Things about XYZ and it always fits. Seven Awesome Things about Eating Veggies works, so that means any type of idea will work.

2. Make a List of Bad Points – Just like the good points will work, you can twist it and write the opposite. Using our veggie idea from above, assuming your niche is a vegan blog, you can turn it into Seven Reasons You Don’t Want to Eat Veggies – then make it a funny article saying things like “You hate being healthy” or something like that.

3. Ask (and Answer) a Question – This is a great way to come up with ideas to create content. You can use questions actually asked directly of you, or you can search for questions on any website, blog, forum or social media network that you’ve seen within your niche.

4. Make a List of Facts – This can work really great for content ideas since in reality there are going to be far more than seven or ten facts about your niche. You can literally do this trick as often as you can come up with a list of facts in relation to your niche.

5. Make a List of Misconceptions – Just like there are facts, there are almost always misconceptions about your niche. Perhaps you host a niche website or blog about the subject of bird watching. You can write many articles or create many YouTube videos addressing misconceptions about various breeds of birds or even misconceptions about equipment used in bird watching.

6. Give the Best Advice for Solutions – For each niche there are various problems with corresponding solutions that you are likely offering to the audience. You can use this fact to help create content focused on the best solutions and the best advice for using the solutions properly.

7. Give the Worst Advice for Solutions – Conversely, there are always some solutions that don’t work or that are a bad idea. Why not write about the bad ideas, the bad solutions, and the answers that don’t work, and then turn it around to offer your own solution after talking about what’s wrong with the other ideas.

8. Tell the Top Three Beginning Ideas – In any niche there is a very basic beginning to consider. Starting at the very beginning is often forgotten because it seems so elementary to you, but to someone who is new to the niche it will not seem like minutia, it will seem super interesting and important.

9. Be Controversial – Sometimes, being controversial is a great way to get more ideas for content. You can find a blog post that a mover and shaker talked about and tell why you agree or disagree. You can connect some content with current events. For example, if you run a dieting website or blog, you can discuss a famous person’s weight issues, and give them advice even though you don’t even know them.

These content ideas can work for any niche. Just plug in your niche to the ideas and see for yourself. You’ll soon have a plethora of ideas and will never run out of them, so that you can generate content on a regular basis for your niche.

Guest blogging on popular blogs can help you spread awareness as well as help you build up your reputation as someone with knowledge and authority. But first you need to know the best way to approach a blog owner with your pitch. There are some pitfalls to avoid and some ways to frame your offer so that they can’t refuse.

The first thing you want to do is send a personal email. The personal email needs to cover the following points of fact.

1. Have a Proper Salutation to the Owner of the Blog – You want them to know that you know who they are. Do not write to dear blog owner or some other generic term. Do enough homework that you know who you’re writing to. In fact, if you know you will have to email a gatekeeper first, address the gatekeeper directly.

2. Introduce Yourself – Let them know who you are and what your expertise is and how it relates to their audience. They will want to understand how you can help them, not how they can help you.

3. Educate Them – Not just about you, but about what you know about them and their visitors. If they realize you know a lot about their audience, it will impress upon them how much you can probably teach their audience.

4. Promise Originality – The days of writing one guest post and sending the same post to everyone is over. Therefore, you should tell them that you’ll write each post for them and only them.

5. Fill the Gaps – Every blog owner has a gap of content to fill. If you can identify that for the blogger, you’ll be able to break in to blogging for them. If you’re not sure, offer to guest blog within a certain topic where your expertise lies, but to their specific order.

6. Explain How You’ll Promote the Blog Post – Don’t stop there; explain to the owner of the blog how you’ll promote the blog post that you write to your audience too. That will bring more visitors to their site since you share a common target audience.

7. Supply Images – In addition to a blog post, tell them you’ll supply original images; not just stock photos that may or may not be legal to use, but images that you have made or make yourself just for the post.

8. Offer an Affiliate Program to Them – Most bloggers who take guest blog posts also offer a biographical box at the end of the blog post where you can post a link to your website or sales page. Offer that the link can be an affiliate link where appropriate.

Finally, let them know that you will follow up with every comment on the blog post, and continue to promote it for a specific period of time. If you follow through with everything you say, it’s more than likely they’ll ask you to guest blog again and again. Becoming a regular guest blogger on a popular blog can expand your credentials and ramp up your authority exponentially.

It can seem daunting to write an entire eBook. But, the truth is that writing an eBook is no harder than writing a blog post. Just learn to take it one page at time and not worry about or think about the entire thing at once. These tips can help you create your first eBook without breaking a sweat.

1. Come Up With an Idea – Before you even begin with writing a book, you need to know what the idea is. Come up with an idea for your book that fits your target audience’s needs and solves problems for them.

2. Brainstorm Your Idea – Once you come up with an idea, brainstorm the idea in order to come up with enough content ideas for an eBook. Some people like writing outlines; other people like using mind maps. You can brainstorm however you want, but give yourself a time limit to cut down on procrastination.

3. Write Down Main Points to Cover – One you’ve fleshed out your idea, write down some main points to cover. The main points should become different chapters for your eBook.

4. Name the Chapters – Once you know the main points you want to cover, turn them into compelling chapter titles.

5. Write a Summary for Each Chapter – As you write the chapter titles, ensure that you can write a short summary of what will be included in each chapter.

6. Flesh Out Each Chapter – Make a list or small outline for each chapter with the points you wanted to cover in the summary.

7. Write an Intro and Conclusion for Each Chapter – It might seem odd but writing your intro and conclusion first can help you stay focused on what you are supposed to cover within each chapter.

8. Format the Book – Make your book look pretty now so that the formatting flows from one page to the next without worry. Remember to use headers and subheads so that you can easily insert the page of contents.

9. One Day at a Time – Remember to take your book writing one day at a time. If you’re writing a 10,000 word eBook, and you only write 500 words a day (about the length of an average blog post), you will only take 20 days to finish your eBook. Not bad.

Creating an eBook isn’t really any different than writing many different blog posts about the same topic. In fact, you could technically take old blog posts, organize them in a cohesive manner, update them for the new format and publish that as your book. If you take it one day at a time and break it up into small pieces, you’ll have your book ready for publishing in no time.