One of the hardest parts about video blogging is coming up with topics appropriate for video. But, it’s likely you already have plenty of good topics; you just haven’t thought about it properly yet. Coming up with video topics really isn’t much different from coming up with text blogging topics.

* Know Your Audience – Everything starts with your audience because without them you have no business and no blog. Think about them first in everything you do. Will they want to know this information? Do they need to know what you want to tell them? If you can identify problems for your audience, these can be topics for future vlogs.

* Know Your Niche – Aside from being able to help your audience, you need a wide variety of knowledge about your niche. Read about your industry every day, take notes, and figure out how you can give the information to your audience in a new and interesting way.

* Understand Your Products or Services – Only you, the creator of your products and services, can know the true value of your products and services. Be able to explain your solutions inside and out and always mention them when relevant in your vlogs.

* Brainstorm – Take some time each day to brainstorm topics. Write everything down without any thought. Simply taking five minutes to write down whatever comes to mind, another fifteen or twenty to flesh them out, and perhaps thirty more minutes to organize them and match them with products and services is all you need.

* Create a Content Calendar – Using the information you gain from above, create a content calendar to ensure that your vlogs match your product promotions as well as sales you have scheduled.

* Start with the Minutia – If you’re still stuck, you can always start from the beginning. What are the first things your audience needs to know about your niche? What are the very small topics that you can answer such as definitions, terms, and jargon?

* Repurpose Old Blog Posts – If you already have blog posts, go through them and consider turning them into video blogs. Keep the original on your blog, and make a new post with a vlog instead of text.

* Answer Questions via Video – When you are reading social media, look for questions that your audience has that need answers. Answer on the social media network, but also make a vlog about it and answer it that way too.

You can have a never-ending list of ideas and topics for videos so that you’ll be able to put out regular videos that are on topic and directed toward your audience. It just takes a little brainstorming and planning and you can be very productive and successful with video blogging.

Publishing content these days isn’t enough. There is no such thing as “build it and they will come.” In fact, if you really want a successful blog, you’re going to have to spend time promoting each piece of content that you create. There are several ways to promote blog posts and for best results, be sure to try all of them.

1. Write Awesome Blog Posts – When the content you create is awesome, you’re going to be much more likely to want to promote it. Work on each blog post to make it the best that you can. These days, in-depth authoritative content is more important and “Google worthy” than shorter “keyword” blog posts.

2. Don’t Leave SEO Out – While the most important part of the blog post is the content, you should still concern yourself with using keywords properly and naturally. Do keyword research occasionally to find out which keywords you should be using. Remember to look for low-competition keywords for best results.

3. Include Relevant Images – They say an image is worth 1000 words, and that’s likely very true. Therefore, include relevant images in your blog posts that help advance your meaning and purpose of your blog.

4. Build Relationships – Believe it or not, part of your blog’s mission is to build relationships with your audience. Ask questions at the end of each blog post, give them something fun to do, ask them to share something with you, or conduct a poll. Find ways to build your relationship with your audience.

5. Build an Email List – One of the most effective forms of marketing is email marketing, and bloggers should build email lists too. When you have an email list it’s a good way to inform regular readers about your new blog posts, promotions and events.

6. Be Courteous – A really good way to promote your blog posts is to promote other people’s blog posts too. When you share other people’s content, they will return the favor and share yours too.

7. Use Social Media – Create varied blurbs introducing your new blog post for different social media accounts to help them click through to read the blog post. A good way to do that is not to finish your sentence in the blurb; instead put dots to get them to read more.

8. Know Your Audience – It may sound like old news but it’s very important that you know your target audience, including where they hang out, what they like to do, and when. That way you’ll know where to promote your posts for maximum impact.

If you’re not proud of the content that you’re creating, why would anyone want to read it or share it for you? Share it first, yourself. Tell everyone about it. Be proud of the blog posts that you publish so that you want to share them with everyone, and you’ll be a super successful blogger.

Blogging is a great way to earn income, promote your business, or just have a venue to discuss your passion. One way to keep up with blogging is to create a blog publication calendar. A blog publication calendar will take into consideration important upcoming events, product launches, and other issues, helping you work in advance to keep your blog full of interesting and relevant content.

All successful bloggers have three things in common:

1) They post blogs regularly
2) They post unique content
3) They post audience-focused content

If you do at least these three things, you can have a super successful blog. You can have a blog that attracts an audience who wants to read what you have to say and take your advice, and who comes back for more on a regular basis.

In order to make a blog publication calendar, you need to first make a few determinations such as:

* How Often You Will Blog – First determine how often you plan to publish a blog post. This could be daily, weekly or whatever your choice. This helps you know how often you’ll need to write blog posts, and when you’ll need to publish them or schedule them.

* Who You’re Blogging For – Write down a few different personas for your audience so that you can know to whom you’re writing the blog posts. It can help you keep focused better if you can look at these personas when you are ready to write.

* Which Blogging Categories You’ll Use – Depending upon your niche, you’ll need to choose some categories that a post will go under when you blog. Spreading out the categories can help you come up with more interesting content. For example, if you have a blog about Labrador Retrievers, some categories might be Rescued Labs, Feeding, Exercising, Training, Chocolate Labs and so forth.

* Upcoming Events or Product Launches – On the calendar you may want to list any upcoming events related to your niche. For example, is there a conference coming up, or are you launching (or someone else) a new product that is perfect for your niche? Keeping up with these dates can help you create content that will entice readers to buy the item at launch.

* When Industry News Is Released – You’ll want to keep up with the industry news, too, so it will help you to know when the different online magazines or blogs release new information for you to use. For example, if the state of your industry is released every quarter, keep that in mind as you create the publication calendar so you can include important information.

Once you have determined this information, you can start brainstorming content ideas to match upcoming events, product launches, and industry news. In between those types of blog posts, you can put other types of posts up such as educational, informational, interesting and fun blog posts. List these ideas in the calendar so that you can then use the calendar to generate a list of timely titles and subject matter for your blog posts.

Creating content that speaks to your audience on a regular basis can sometimes seem like a chore that never gets done – sort of like the dishes in the kitchen sink. Once you clean them up you’re already making new dirty dishes. Once you push out new content, you already need more new content. It never ends. But, it doesn’t have to be a chore. It can be interesting and even fun. After all, a solid content marketing plan is going to produce serious value for your business.

1. Know Your Why – Not just why you have to create content in general, but understand why you’re creating this one piece of content. What is the point of this article, white paper, blog post, or vlog? What do you want to convey to your audience, and why do you want to do it? If you can answer that for each piece of content and know what you want the results to be from pushing out any piece of content, you’ll be able to stay better focused.

2. Understand Who Your Audience Is – Everything you do needs to center on your audience. You should know who they are, what they want, what they need, and why they need it. Each time you produce content you need to know exactly who it is directed to so that you can word everything in a way that resonates with them.

3. Plan Ahead – Don’t create content from the seat of your pants. Instead, craft a plan in advance based on the time of year, holidays, celebrations, and products and services you’re pushing out. Knowing in advance what types of content you need to produce will actually aid creativity, not stifle it.

4. Craft Compelling Titles – Once you know the topics you need to produce content for each week, you can create titles to work with. You can use the titles yourself or send them on to your ghostwriter to do it for you. But, having the titles gives you the keywords and subject matter that the content should be about, to help you get started when it’s time to produce.

5. Mix It Up – Don’t think of content as just articles, or just blog posts. Content can be in any number of forms. By creating many different types of content you will keep the creativity flowing. Some types of content are best suited for a blog post; others are best suited as a podcast or video.

6. Ask Questions – When you’re unsure about what to do, ask a question and then answer it. Often you can use questions that your audience is asking on social media and in forums to frame your content to be something they want to consume. You can bet if one person has asked the question, more than one wants the answer.

7. Make Lists – When you produce content, from blog posts to videos, lists work well. Each point in the list gives your audience a chance to digest the information, and then the next point drives them forward to consume more. Titles that have numbers in them also get a lot more views than other types of titles.

8. Edit Carefully – Nothing can ruin a compelling piece of content more than lack of editing. One misspelling or misused word can ruin your credibility and reduce the trust the reader has in you as an expert. Not only that; check your facts to ensure that the information you pass on to others is accurate.

9. Stick to a Laser-Focused Topic – Your title should guide you to what to discuss in the content you create. If the content doesn’t relate to the title or starts going off into left field, pull it back to ensure that every word of the content relates to the title. People expect the information they’re reading or watching to relate to the title.

10. Show Instead of Tell – This is a composition principle you may have learned in high school English classes. All it means is to employ action words, to evoke thoughts and feelings to convey the message you want to get across to your audience.

11. Use Words to Evoke Feelings – Copyblogger.com has a list of 50 trigger words. If you can find a natural way to use these words, you can trigger the right feelings in your audience to make them act in the way that you want them to act.

Link – http://www.copyblogger.com/trigger-words/

12. Curate Creatively – Don’t just make lists of other people’s contents; add your thoughts about the content you’re sharing, too. Add new insights to the content subject matter that bring something new to the table.

13. Include Relevant Images – An image, as they say, is worth a thousand words. When you can put an image that relates to the content and pushes the story forward, it will mean a lot more than any words you can write about a topic.

Finally, consistently producing engaging content requires you to adhere to a schedule of some kind. Many people think they can’t produce creatively on a schedule. But the truth is, you can train yourself to be creative by doing it consistently, even when you think you don’t feel like it.

The plan of action that you create, based on the products and services you want to promote, along with the titles, will help you move forward creating consistently engaging content every time.

Once you have created a course and set it up on a delivery platform, you need to start promoting your course. If you don’t promote your course, then no one will purchase it and you won’t earn money. Promotion is when the real work of the entire course happens. There are multiple ways to promote your course.

* SEO – Search engine optimization is very important to ensure that people find out about your course. There is on-page and off-page SEO to consider. In short, SEO when done right can enhance the ability of your audience to find your sales pages, blogs, and course.

* Social Media – Use social media to promote your courses. Hint about them and give a sneak peek into them. Pull out quotes from your course to promote with memes on social media, using images that relate to your course.

* Blogging – Write a series of blog posts about the problems that can be solved by taking the course. If you educate the audience on their pain points and then give them the solution to solve it, the course, they will sign up.

* Interviews – Conduct interviews with people who have radio or podcasts. During the interview, mention your eCourse, offering a special coupon code for listeners.

* Testimonials – Give your course to a few good people in order to collect testimonials for the course so that you can put them on your sales page. People like proof that your program works, and this is the best way to gather that proof.

* EBook – You can actually turn the course idea into an eBook which you can use to promote the course. Make an eBook that discusses the pain points and potential solutions to the problems, including your eCourse.

* Webinars – Have a webinar to talk about the pain points and problems of the audience the course is for. Then give them a special offer they can’t refuse if they sign up right now for the full eCourse.

* Sales Page – A really awesome sales page can help you promote your eCourse. You want a page that is totally focused on your audience, their pain points, and how the course will solve their problems.

* Affiliate Marketing – You can use many affiliate networks in addition to your sales page to promote your course. It depends on how you set up the course but you can use aMember.com, ClickBank.com, and other affiliate software to help promote your course. When you have other people helping, you’ll sell a lot more courses.

* Giveaways – You can give away small reports, small segments of the course, and other information to get people to sign up for an email list where you can promote the course in more detail.

It’s important to do a combination of every one of these ways to promote your eCourse if you want to earn you a lot of money from it. A course can earn hundreds and even thousands of dollars if you do what it takes to get the word out to the audience.

Everything about online marketing needs content. You need content for social media posts, blog posts, guest articles, white papers, eBooks, and more. Use many types of content to help get the word out about your products and services, while educating your audience about the issues in your industry. This will help you develop yourself as an authority and your business solutions as answers to your audience’s needs.

The best way to accomplish this is to develop a content marketing plan. You can create a content marketing plan for any type of business quickly and easily.

* Set Goals for the Future – What do you want to accomplish with each piece of content that you want to create? First write down some ideas, such as increase traffic by 50 percent within 6 weeks, increase sales by 60 percent within 4 weeks, or get more targeted newsletter subscribers within a specific period of time. Be specific about your goals in terms of the exact results you want to achieve and how you’ll achieve them.

* Assess Where You Are Today – Everyone has to start where they are today. How many subscribers do you have now? How many people have purchased your product or service to date? What type of content do you have and what types of results is it producing right now? Can you pinpoint exactly which pieces of content are getting the type of results you want? Perhaps none of your current content is getting any results. Note that, so that you know where to begin.

* Know your Target Customer – Take a closer look at who you want your exact customer to be. Create a persona describing that perfect customer so that when you create any marketing content you know who you’re creating it for. You may find you have several subsets of audience personas for the same product; that’s okay, but looking at them will help you develop even better content.

* Understand Your Sales Funnel and Your Audience’s Buying Cycle – You have your product / sales funnel, plus your consumers’ buying cycle to consider. Content should be created for each stage of the funnel and the cycle, because each type of content has a different purpose.

* Know the Purpose of Each Piece of Content – When you know the purpose of each piece of content you create, you’ll be able to direct it to the right person, at the right time, and put it in the right place. These actions will ensure that you receive the results you’re looking for.

* Create an Editorial Calendar – Once you have an idea of what type of content you want to create, get out a calendar and start writing in what needs to be written or created. For example, if you’re promoting a video eCourse, you may need to produce some shorter videos along with articles to give your audience the information they need to choose your course.

* Have the Content Developed – Once you have a calendar, you can just go day by day and create the content you need. Or you can send it to someone else to do it for you such as a contractor. If you want to hire a contractor, you’ll need to create content in advance to allow for the turnaround time of each contractor that you hire.

* Promote Your Content – Don’t just post the content and leave it at that. Instead, once the content has been published tell everyone about it. Promote it to your list; promote it to your social media followers. You may want to try using Twitter Ads and Promoted Posts on Facebook. Also ensure that you set up SEO on your site using a good plugin like SEO Yoast.

* Measure the Results – Using the analytics systems that you have already in Google Analytics, your email marketing software, and any other software that you use for your business, test and measure whether what you’re doing is working or not.

* Optimize and Adjust – When you look at the results of your work, take a look at what you can improve upon and adjust. Try changing one small thing, or doing more of something that is working really good to improve your content marketing plan.

* Rinse and Repeat – Like with most things that work, you should do it again. Keep the process moving forward month after month, year after year, based on analytics and the products and services that you want to promote.

Creating and following a content marketing plan will improve your business exponentially. You’ll be able to stay ahead of everything based on your products and services, including planned launches and so forth. It’s important to be proactive to ensure that the results that you want are obtained.

The most important part of creating content is ensuring that you have a plan to follow. You need to know who your audience is, know the keywords you need to use to attract them, decide upon content types and topics, and then plan when and how they’ll be created and pushed out to your audience. The most actionable content will be the most meaningful content to your audience, which is why they play such a central role in your content development.

* Create Audience Personas – Your audience consists of a specific type of person. You should know their demographics, location, profession, learning style, and more if you want to craft content that people will act on. If you can create audience personas for each type of content you want to produce, you’ll be able to better form your content.

* Know Why You’re Creating the Content – Each piece of content that you create needs to have a reason for being. This may be to sell a new product, promote a new service, and get more subscribers, or something else entirely. It’s important that you know why you’re creating the content so that you can use the right words to encourage action.

* Keep It Simple – The KISS method works for a variety of issues and it’s no different for creating actionable content. Explain jargon to your audience and define terms to them, so that there is no confusion about what something means and no mistake about what you want them to do to follow through.

* Lay It Out Correctly – How something is laid out depends on how the audience will consume it. Will they be reading the content on a Kindle, in a book, or online? Understand how people read books versus how they read content online. For example, online content needs plenty of white space and other factors that break up the content to make it easier to understand.

* Provide Clear Examples – When you tell people how to do something, they’ll respond better than just telling them what to do. It’s the difference between an expert and someone who is just regurgitating information.

* Use Visual Cues – Images can evoke feelings as well as help explain more than words can. You can use graphs, memes, infographics, and other types of images to get your point across and inspire your audience to take action.

* Answer Burning Questions – Your audience has burning questions that need to be answered. If you’re aware of these questions, not only will your audience feel as if you can read their mind, but they’ll also make you the go-to person when they do have a question that needs to be answered. Find questions where your audience hangs out, online and offline, and then start producing content to answer the questions.

* Think Outside the Text Box – When most people think of content creation, their first thought is almost always blog posts or articles. But, there are so many other forms that your content can appear in. Be innovative and think of new ways to present your information and your audience will be transfixed.

Finally, remember that your job is to create value for your audience. To create a loyal audience you need to deliver excellent content every time at the right time. By developing a plan of action and planning your content out strategically with purpose, you can deliver value to your audience every single time.

When it comes to building traffic to your website, the thing to remember the most is that quality matters more than quantity. You’ve likely heard before that “less is more,” and that’s definitely true when it comes to building traffic to your website using methods like blogging, social media marketing and more. But, in some ways the idea of quality over quantity is not even a real choice.

The Importance of Quality

The real questions you should answer are:

* What is your purpose? – Explain the reasons behind doing what you’re doing in one to three sentences.

* Who is your audience? – Explain who you’re doing it for by creating a persona of your ideal client or customer.

* How fast do you want to succeed? – What is the timeline of your success story?

The thing is, high quality should be a given. The next question is how much time you have to devote to producing the type of quality that you want to produce, and how quickly you want to experience success. It’s all a numbers game and easy to break down if you understand your niche and industry.

A Plan of Action

When you determine the type of traffic you want, it will dictate the type of content you create for your audience. Then, figure out how many visitors you need to get to your website to convert to a certain number of sales. Work out how each piece of content you use, and each pay per click you add, affects those goals, and from this you can create a plan of action.

That plan needs to include both quality and quantity, at least up to the point where you are generating the amount of traffic you need to generate in order to earn the amount of money you’ve planned to earn.

For example, suppose in your niche an average daily visitor total is 200 a day, your product costs 20 dollars and your conversion rate is 5%. This means that for every 200 visitors, you’ll make 10 sales. That would be, in this case, $200 dollars per day gross earnings for your efforts. If you want to have more results, you’ll need to produce above average traffic or increase the price of your product.

The best way to increase traffic is to increase the amount of activity on your website through blog posts and various other types of content that you offer your audience, but to keep the quality high. So, that’s why the idea of a choice between quality and quantity is really not a real choice. Depending on your goals, you may have to do both. You’re always going to need to produce high quality information or products – that’s expected. But, you may bring the quantity of the content you add to your website or the development of new products up faster or slower depending on your goals.