Tag Archives: power

The Power Of Asking Questions… and Getting Answers

Posted on by

Or should I say, the power of asking questions with a browser and then having users provide their own answers (content). From TechCrunch: WordPress developer Automattic has acquired Plinky from Thing Labs, the creators of social media application Brizzly. Plinky essentially aims to inspire content creators. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Plinky’s technology prompts you with an intriguing question or challenge and (like a question, or a challenge) and you have to answer. Depending on the prompt, your answer could contain photos, maps, playlists and more. You can then share your Plinky answers on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and others. For example, a sample question prompted from Plinky is “What’s your favorite summer memory?” WordPress has already added Plinky as a feature of its blogging platform to help writers get their creative juices flowing. Thing Labs, which was founded by a former Googler who worked on WordPress rival Blogger, actually started as “Plinky” and then changed its name last summer after shifting focus to developing Brizzly. The Power of Questions What other forms of online content could be generated by the Question and Answer format employed by Plinky?

the power of questions The Power Of Asking Questions… and Getting Answers

See original here:
The Power Of Asking Questions… and Getting Answers

20 Warning Signs That Your Content Sucks

Posted on by

Admit it … you’ve wondered. You’re writing and writing and writing, and a few people say they like it, but you’re just not getting results. Traffic is coming in at a trickle, links are hard to come by, and your comments section is about as lively as a nightclub at breakfast. And you can’t help wondering … Do you just need to be patient, waiting for your traffic to snowball? Or could it be possible that, really, your content sucks , and everyone is just being nice so as not to hurt your delicate artistic feelings? The hard truth: there’s no way to know for sure For one, we’re talking about quality, which is subjective by definition. One man’s junk is another man’s treasure, and all that jazz. It’s also a matter of scale. This isn’t American Idol, where you have 30 million people voting, transforming a singer into a superstar through the power of public consensus. If you’re a beginning blogger, you might have fewer than 100 regular readers, and 20 of them are your friends and family. And let’s face it; your mother is going to like everything you do, no matter how bad it is. That’s her job. So who are you supposed to listen to? Well … nobody, and everybody, all the same time. The maddening thing about creating anything is no one can tell you how to do it, and yet everyone’s opinion can teach you something. There aren’t any rules, no, but there are warnings. If your content sucks, you’ll see dozens, maybe hundreds of telltale signs, hinting that something is wrong. I’ve collected 20 of the most common here. Take a look through them, and see if any describe you: 1. You think your content is “good enough” If you had to rate your content on a scale of 1 to 10, what would you give it? A 6? A 7? That’s what most bloggers say. But here’s the problem: you can’t really grade content on a scale. You’re either blowing people’s minds or putting them to sleep, and there’s nothing in between. Put another way, content graded as a 6 or 7 gets the same reaction as a 1. It’s a waste of time to publish it. 2. Your posts read like journal entries Not too long ago, most people used their blog as a sort of online journal, where people took a few minutes every day to write down their thoughts. But blogs have evolved beyond that. Now they’re more like online magazines, with highly polished content. If your posts look more like “Dear Diary” than a magazine you would see at the newsstand, you’ve probably got a problem. 3. You’re not getting many (or any) comments Comments are one of the best ways to measure reader engagement. If you have a few hundred subscribers, and yet none of them are commenting, then it might be because they find your content unworthy of their attention. Translation: it sucks. 4. Your visitors stay less than two minutes, on average Install Google Analytics, and look at the average amount of time visitors are staying on your website. For most traffic sources, anything less than two minutes is bad. If you are at less than one minute, then your content is repelling people. You can do better. 5. You spend less than an hour on each post Yes, it’s possible to write a great blog post in 15 minutes, but I can tell you with absolute certainty that it doesn’t happen very often. Most of the popular bloggers I know spend anywhere from 2 to 10 hours on each blog post they write. If you’re not, you should be. 6. You’ve never received fan mail If your content is good, people will go out of their way to tell you how good it is. We’re not just talking about nice little tweets; we’re talking about five page e-mails where they tell you their life story and thank God for your existence. No, you won’t get much of it when you’re a beginner, but you will get some . If you haven’t, then your content isn’t as good as it should be. 7. You’ve never received hate mail The opposite is also true. If your content is good, you’ll always have a small but vocal group of people who think you’re wrong, rude, or inconsiderate. They are the righteous majority for moral authority, and nothing you can say will appease them. So don’t try. Their mockery and screams of outrage are merely signs that you’re headed in the right direction. 8. You focus on SEO before you get your first link Whenever a newbie starts asking me about SEO before they’ve even written a post, I always know they’re doomed. There is no better way to write horrible, crappy content than to deliberately stuff it with keywords in an attempt to boost your search engine rankings, when what you really need is for people to link to you in the first place. If this is you, immediately throw salt over your shoulder, turn around three times, and spit. Then forget everything you think you know about SEO. Study smart SEO instead. (But pay attention to the next item.) 9. You believe SEO is the secret to building a popular blog First, let me set the record straight. I am a big fan of SEO. I’m just not a fan of the pedestal many beginners put it on. SEO can’t, by itself, make a popular blog. First, you need remarkable content , and then you optimize it for search engines. Skip the remarkable part, and all the optimization in the world won’t help you. 10. You’re saving your best ideas for later Are you planning to do an e-book or course, and you’re holding back all of your best ideas, waiting for your blog to get popular before you publish them and make gobs of money? If so, stop. To riff on Warren Buffett, waiting until your blog is popular to publish your best ideas is like waiting until you’re old to have sex. Get your good stuff published today. 11. Your blog is about … well … everything One of the quickest way is to frustrate your readers is to write about everything that’s on your mind. Here’s why: people don’t come to your blog to find out what you think. They come to your blog for solutions to their problems. The moment you stop talking about them is the moment they stop reading. 12. You don’t know the benefit Pop quiz: one year from now, how will your reader’s life be better? What specific, measurable results will you have helped them obtain? We are not talking about “Having a greater sense of fulfillment and prosperity.” We’re talking about “They’ve lost 20 pounds” or “They’ve brought in five high-quality new clients.” If you can’t put your content in these terms, you’re setting yourself up to fail. 13. You think you deserve more traffic than you’re getting Do you feel annoyed that no one appreciates the value of the knowledge that you’re giving away for free ? I know I used to, and it took several years of struggling to realize no one is entitled to attention . You have to earn it, day in and day out. No exceptions. 14. You have a science, engineering, or technology background I know, it sounds horribly prejudiced. But here’s the deal: scientists, engineers, and other types of technologists are trained to be objective, passive, and detached — all three of which will destroy you as a blogger. No, you’re not doomed if you have a background in one of these disciplines. But it is a handicap, and you need to be aware of it. 15. You’ve never read a book on copywriting Writing a blog post without studying copywriting is like hunting for buried treasure without a map. You might be able to do it, but you’ll have to get astoundingly lucky. If you haven’t studied copywriting , you should. Like right now . 16. You have no idea what keeps your readers up at night Great writing is about intimacy, and nothing is more intimate than knowing what keeps your readers up at night. Find out what makes them afraid, find out what makes them excited, find out what’s going through their mind at 2 a.m. Then use it in your blog posts. You’ll be communicating with them on such a deep, emotional level that it will be impossible for them to ignore you. 17. You write less than 1,000 words per day Of all the warning signs, this is probably the biggest. If you’re not writing at least 1,000 words per day, it will be difficult, if not impossible, for you to write anything but mediocre content. Try writing at least 1000 words every day for 30 days, and see what an impact it has on your writing. You’ll be astounded. 18. You read less than 10 hours per week Besides writing a lot, you also need to read a lot. It exposes you to different writing styles to learn from; it gives you new stories and metaphors; it keeps you abreast of what’s going on in your field. In my opinion, 10 hours a week is a bare minimum. If you really want to be good, think more in the range of 20-40 hours a week. 19. You’ve never talked to a reader on the phone or in person A one-hour conversation with one of your most ardent readers will teach you more about how to communicate with your audience than anything else you can do. If you’re not doing it at least once every month or two, there’s a good chance you’re falling out of touch. 20. You’ve been blogging for less than six months Okay, we’re at the end, so I’ll go ahead and admit it: not everything is your fault. If you’ve been blogging for less than six months, there’s almost nothing you can do; your content is going to suck to some degree. Keep your chin up, expect to be ignored, and just keep going. You’ll get good soon. The bottom line I’d love to tell you that producing great content is easy. I’d love to tell you that there are shortcuts. I’d love to tell you can do it with your brain on auto pilot. But I won’t, because we’re being honest here, right? Producing great content is work. No, it’s not building a pyramid or putting a man on the moon or curing cancer, but it does take time, energy, and dedication. If you’re sitting here, right now, worrying about whether your content sucks or not, that’s actually a good sign. If you’re worrying about it at 2 in the morning, that’s even better. Achieving greatness in blogging is the same as anything else. You have to work your butt off. If you’re willing to do that, then there will always be a place for you on the web. You’ll always be in demand. You’ll always be able to stand out. It’s tough, yes, but it’s worth it. So, what are you waiting for? Hurry up and get started. About the Author: Jon Morrow is Associate Editor of Copyblogger. Get more from him on twitter .

ew 20 Warning Signs That Your Content Sucks

See the rest here:
20 Warning Signs That Your Content Sucks

5 Reasons Why Trying to be Successful Will Keep You Poor

Posted on by

Dave Navarro wrote recently that worrying about what you’re doing (or not doing) is the surest way to keep you poor and unsuccessful. It’s a cracking article with a heap of good points, one of them being that the key difference in the way successful people operate is that they see failure as an integral part of the process of achieving success. That’s true. Unless you plan on spending all your time underneath your duvet, failure is in your destiny. Trying to minimize or avoid failure will not help you be successful. But here’s the thing. Trying to be successful will not help you actually become successful, either. The problem with success You’re probably here because you want to be a successful person. You want the material and emotional benefits that come with that. That’s awesome and I want it to happen for you. But while there’s nothing wrong with success, there are five important reasons why success for its own sake is the wrong focus: 1. Success is a moving target Be honest, what’s success for you? Is it about launching a product and having people buy it? Is it about having respect from your peers and mentors? Is it about doing what you love so you can care for your family? Too many people don’t create their own definition of success. They chase an idea they’ve patched together from what they’ve read, observed, or think they should be aiming for. Do you know the feeling of not being wholly convinced that you’re pursuing the right success for you, but you’ve carried on regardless? That’s not how real success is achieved. Because even if you’re outwardly successful, you’ll feel disconnected from it. Achieving the wrong kind of success will always feel hollow. 2. Success is the wrong motivator It’s too often based on extrinsic factors — the things you believe success can deliver. Whether it’s physical goods, the feeling that you’ve “made it,” or thinking you’ll be free of worry and stress, these are all externalized projections about what a successful lifestyle will bring you. When you make decisions based on an external motivator, it’s much easier to second-guess yourself. Motivation that comes from within is much more grounded and more powerful. 3. Success isn’t here, now If you’re working hard to make something happen, it’s easy to dream about the moment you become successful. We all tend to fantastize about that big pay-off for all our hard work. That kind of success is always elusively around the next bend. Just a few more weeks or months away. Just a bit more work, and you’ll finally be successful. But what about now? What’s stopping you from feeling like a success right now, this very moment? Waiting for success in the future takes you out of the game in the present. 4. Success does not eliminate worry or fear Being successful does not change how your brain works. Success often increases worry and fear, as you question how you can repeat it or worry about losing it. What eliminates worry and fear is shifting the patterns of thinking that result in self-doubt and second-guessing. 5. Success is limited by confidence Perhaps most important, any success you might experience is limited by your self-confidence . If success is achieved by taking repeated, meaningful action, then what happens if you’re not confident enough to take the actions that scare the crap out of you? What will you do when things go wrong? Without confidence, you’ll be more inclined to retreat, beat yourself up, and reinforce a negative self-image. Nasty. Placing your efforts on being a “successful person” is putting energy into the wrong place. It’s allowing in the complications I’ve listed above (and there are more that I haven’t listed) and ignoring how you’re thinking about what you’re doing and how you’re doing it right now . Instead, what I’m suggesting is that you place your focus squarely on becoming a confident person, rather than a successful one . To borrow from Dave’s article: Success is not a person. It’s an event. Shift your thinking from being a successful person to a confident one, and you’ll experience more success events and more failure events, both of which have abundant rewards. Here’s how to do it, right now. Engage, today I’m always banging on about playing a game that matters , for the simple reason that it forces you to deeply engage with something that has personal meaning. It aligns your efforts with what matters to you and ensures that you’re intrinsically motivated to play to the best of your ability. If you want to be the best tennis player you can be, it will only really happen if you get enjoyment from the act of playing tennis . Start off with the aim of winning a shiny cup and you’re setting yourself up for struggle and second-guessing. Forget the rules, just play Rolling around in your head are expectations about what you can and can’t do, should and shouldn’t do, must and mustn’t do. Then you add in all the expectations you have about other people. And most brain-numbing of all, you have expectations about what other people expect of you . Forget all of that and just play. The best tennis players aren’t darting around the court thinking about how they should play the game. They use natural ability and learned skills and strategies to play to their best level. Take confident action Confident action is about making deliberate choices. Confident action is using your values, strengths, and talents to support your decisions and the actions that follow. Confident action is trusting yourself to make the next decision, no matter how this one turns out. Listen to the voices Those voices in your head can be confusing, but you need to listen to them (unless they’re telling you to set fire to the town hall), because that’s the only way to recognize what’s real and what’s imagined. You don’t want to let those voices control your thinking, or you’ll be running in circles forever. But you do want to start paying attention to them, noticing the difference between the voice of fear and one of your best assets, your intuiton. It’s by acknowledging what goes on in your head that you learn about what serves you well and what holds you back. You learn the voice of imagined fear , you learn the voice of solid doubt (and can take appropriate action in response to those risks), and you learn the still, quiet voice of intuition that will always tell you what you need to know. Decide what’s important Don’t shoot the messenger, but things will go wrong and you will screw up. The good news is that you always get to choose how you think about what goes wrong. A screw-up is only a big deal if you decide it is. By looking at it in a different way, there’s no need to retreat or beat yourself up. Plus, simply because you’re intrinsically motivated by playing a game that matters, the idea of “failure” has far less power than if you’re extrinsically motivated, and sometimes the power of “failure” disappears completely. You get to decide what’s important. The real difference that makes success happen Don’t think in terms of successful people or unsuccessul people. We all experience success and failure throughout our lives — remember, success and failure are not people, they’re events . People experience success because they’ve achieved a level of natural self-confidence that allows them to take meaningful action. They’ve achieved a level of natural self-confidence that allows them to trust their behavior, rather than focusing on the outcome of that behavior. I want to know what you think. How do you see confidence and success? Let us know in the comments. About the Author: As a leading confidence coach with clients around the world, Steve Errey has a reputation for talking sense and getting results. Get more from him at The Confidence Guy .

dc06b3eb20jeans.jpg 100x150 5 Reasons Why Trying to be Successful Will Keep You Poor

See the original post:
5 Reasons Why Trying to be Successful Will Keep You Poor

Engage Today 2009

Posted on by

Engage Today 2009 is the live event that gathers top Internet marketers who sum up their first steps into the journey of making money online. Engage Today 2009 is developed by Greg Habstritt. The product is also called “The Power to Engage”. The purpose of engage is to bring the world together under one simple

More:
Engage Today 2009

Is F.E.A.R. Holding You Back?

Posted on by

I’ve written in the past about the nasty effects of fear – how it can lead to procrastination , creative blocks , and unremarkable content . It’s our sense of fear that derails success more often than actual failed attempts at success. Looking deeper into the topic, however, I’ve discovered that often it’s not actual fear we’re dealing with. It’s something much more ridiculous. It’s not fear that holds you back. It’s F.E.A.R. Fear is a Good Thing Fear is an emotional response to an actual threat, and it’s a fundamental survival mechanism that’s served us well throughout human history. When you’re in immediate danger, fear tells you to get yourself to someplace safer. Once our ancestors saw a few friends and relatives devoured by lions, fearing lions became a smart move. Nowadays we react in a similarly legitimate fashion when faced with an AK-47, a car veering toward us, or a film starring Jessica Simpson. Fear is also a true emotional response when we’re about to lose someone or something that’s important to us. So it’s not just about our personal safety – we can fear the loss of a loved one to illness, or our home to foreclosure due to unemployment. Here’s the problem. The sensation people experience in the face of taking action to achieve their dreams – business, personal, spiritual, whatever – is usually not true fear. It’s F.E.A.R. What is F.E.A.R? F.E.A.R. is an acronym for False Evidence Appearing Real . There’s no true threat of immediate physical danger, no threat of a loss of someone or something dear to us, actually nothing there at all. F.E.A.R. is an illusion. Something we fabricate in our own minds and pretend is real. It’s a fairy tale we tell ourselves that keeps us from doing what we really want. False evidence appearing real . The common label for F.E.A.R is anxiety, a less fundamental emotion that arises purely from our own thoughts, not external reality. And 50 years of cognitive psychology research demonstrates that while we can’t always control how we feel, we do have the power to choose how we think and act . How to Conquer F.E.A.R. “Anxiety is nothing but repeatedly re-experiencing failure in advance. What a waste.” ~Seth Godin Are past failures real evidence that justifies fear of future failure? Nope, because unless you keep doing the exact same thing over and over and expecting different results (one definition of insanity), you have no real evidence that your next approach will fail. Past failures generate false evidence appearing real . To the contrary, it’s likely you learned things from your past failures that instead provide evidence that your odds are now better than ever. The worst-case scenario, of course, involves those who’ve never failed, because they’ve never tried. These people have zero real evidence of anything, and are living in the purest imaginary prison of the mind. Guess what? Healthy, well-adjusted people take risks, without all this deep dread over specific outcomes. The journey is what you’ll relish, and it just might take you somewhere better than you initially hoped. No matter what, each journey teaches you what you need to know to take the next one. So, the formula for conquering F.E.A.R. is simple: Try + Learn + Adapt + Try = Success Or who knows . . . it might just be: Try = Success One thing’s for certain, though . . . you won’t have any real evidence of anything until you do that try thing. And guess what? Since we’re not publishing on Monday due to Memorial Day, we’ve got another article for you today. This next one gives you specific advice on how to get writing done even when you’re feeling the F.E.A.R. Stay tuned . . . . About the Author : Brian Clark is founder of Copyblogger and wants you to know that Thesis + Scribe = SEO Made Simple. Get more from Brian on Twitter .

67e2b27f1bFEAR.jpg 150x105 Is F.E.A.R. Holding You Back?

Visit link:
Is F.E.A.R. Holding You Back?