New Topics to Blog About - at the Click of a Mouse

Now I'm not the most frequent of bloggers - as any readers of this blog will know.  I write when I've got something to write about.  But other people, I know, like to write regularly, producing a post once a week or more.

And while that may be easy if you're working in the thick of an industry where things are constantly happening and changing, it may be difficult if you're working on your own or in a field where changes occur less frequently.  Finding new topics to write about is not always easy.

But now help is at hand with Hubspot's new Blog Topic Generator.  You put in up to three words, click the button and it instantly comes up with five suggestions.  Obviously, it's been produced with social media and internet marketing blogs in mind, so I thought I'd try it out with something a bit different.  I put in the word 'antiques' and got:

1. 15 best blogs to follow about antiques
2. 10 Signs You Should Invest in antiques
3. Why We Love antiques (And You Should, Too!)
4. 10 Things Your Competitors Can Teach You About antiques
5. What Will antiques Be Like in 100 Years?

I was surprised to find that, of the five, only one (the fourth) was inappropriate, being too biased towards marketing.  But the first three would be perfectly useable and the last one could result in an interesting essay about which of today's artefacts are likely to have survived and to still be valued in a hundred years' time.

Encouraged by this, I put in something a little more arcane - the word 'tarot'.  And I was given:

1. The history of tarot
2. 20 Myths About tarot
3. 14 Common Misconceptions About tarot
4. 5 Tools Everyone in the tarot Industry Should Be Using
5. 10 Signs You Should Invest in tarot

Even here there were some useable titles.  The first three could yield interesting articles.  The fourth, of course, is not appropriate.  But the last one, even though it's finance and marketing based could be tweaked to produce something useful, since many tarot decks that have gone out of print in recent years have appreciated enormously in value and have proved a good investment for those collectors who bought them at the time.

Underneath the list of five suggestions (where you could miss it if you didn't know it was there) is a form you can fill in to receive a year's worth of ideas on your topic.  Of course, they're not all going to be appropriate to your field, but it's free - and it certainly beats sitting in front of a blank computer screen wondering what on earth to write about.

Content Curation - or Cloning? What Price Originality?

Content curation is all the rage.  Just recently the process was described by Carrie Morgan in an article on Business2Community.com:

You provide value by identifying a specific target audience, filtering through relevant online content, then sharing only what you find most interesting, trendy or applicable to that audience. Nothing else, just what you feel is most meaningful to that particular audience, then adding in your own expertise and opinions as you share what you’ve curated.
Read more at http://www.business2community.com/social-media/understanding-content-curation-how-it-applies-to-social-media-0575832#0KD3K43cC8wrd43H.99

"You provide value by identifying a specific target audience, filtering through relevant online content, then sharing only what you find most interesting, trendy or applicable to that audience . . . then adding in your own expertise and opinions as you share what you’ve curated."

And, put like that, it does seem to have a purpose and a value.  And, certainly, I use my weekly newsletter to tell people on my list about the best articles on aspects of internet marketing that I've come across in the previous week.

But, in trawling through numerous blogs to find those articles, I am all too frequently coming across what I can only describe as clones.  Someone will bring out an infographic - and suddenly there are six or eight articles by different authors, using the infographic as the core, with an added paragraph or two of comment.

Or there will be a sudden glut of articles on one subject.  This may occur when there has been a recent change that affects internet marketing - for example, the recent introduction of 'tabs' by gmail.  A lot of people have been writing about whether it will affect email marketing (some say yes, others say no) and, if it does, what marketers can do about it.  And a few days ago, after changes to the Facebook news feed were announced, one multi-contributor blog carried four articles on the subject, by different authors, in quick succession.  Sometimes, though, a clutch of articles seems unrelated to any changes and, here, I suspect that one good article has led to a load of copycats.

When I left school, and before I went to medical school, I trained as a journalist.  This was in the pre-internet era when news was provided in large part by newspapers.  And the thing that every journalist wanted was a scoop.  Because if you were writing about something completely different from your competitors, you were likely to sell more copies.  But if your stories were just a variation on those of everyone else, then readers had no incentive to buy one paper rather than another.

And, of course, newspapers (unlike blogs and the internet itself) have finite space.  They can't afford to fill that space up with run of the mill articles.  As a journalist, you can't keep writing about the same thing or copying the rest.  You've got to be original.  And originality is something we seem to be seeing less and less of online.  Unfortunately, this is inevitable if we follow the frequently-given advice that we should blog every day in order to keep our audience.

As you will have realised, I don't blog every day.  I write only when there's something I want to write about and something that I think may interest you, my reader.  I don't want to be a bore!

So, to anyone who is thinking of starting a blog, I would say:

• write only about those things that interest you
• write only about those things that will interest the audience that you are aiming for
• don't worry if your opinions differ from those of other people writing online - your opinions are what people will come to your blog for
• keep up to date with what is going on in your niche but don't write about a subject just because everyone else seems to be writing about it
• be original - express your own thoughts, not thoughts regurgitated from other people
• and don't try to write every day if you haven't any original thoughts to write about.  Of  course, you don't want to leave it too long between posts but I believe that you are far less likely to lose readers because you only post once a week or once a fortnight than because you're constantly writing about the same thing as everyone else.

You provide value by identifying a specific target audience, filtering through relevant online content, then sharing only what you find most interesting, trendy or applicable to that audience. Nothing else, just what you feel is most meaningful to that particular audience, then adding in your own expertise and opinions as you share what you’ve curated.
Read more at http://www.business2community.com/social-media/understanding-content-curation-how-it-applies-to-social-media-0575832#0KD3K43cC8wrd43H.99

You provide value by identifying a specific target audience, filtering through relevant online content, then sharing only what you find most interesting, trendy or applicable to that audience. Nothing else, just what you feel is most meaningful to that particular audience, then adding in your own expertise and opinions as you share what you’ve curated.
Read more at http://www.business2community.com/social-media/understanding-content-curation-how-it-applies-to-social-media-0575832#0KD3K43cC8wrd43H.99

You provide value by identifying a specific target audience, filtering through relevant online content, then sharing only what you find most interesting, trendy or applicable to that audience. Nothing else, just what you feel is most meaningful to that particular audience, then adding in your own expertise and opinions as you share what you’ve curated.
Read more at http://www.business2community.com/social-media/understanding-content-curation-how-it-applies-to-social-media-0575832#0KD3K43cC8wrd43H.99

You provide value by identifying a specific target audience, filtering through relevant online content, then sharing only what you find most interesting, trendy or applicable to that audience. Nothing else, just what you feel is most meaningful to that particular audience, then adding in your own expertise and opinions as you share what you’ve curated.
Read more at http://www.business2community.com/social-media/understanding-content-curation-how-it-applies-to-social-media-0575832#0KD3K43cC8wrd43H.99

You provide value by identifying a specific target audience, filtering through relevant online content, then sharing only what you find most interesting, trendy or applicable to that audience. Nothing else, just what you feel is most meaningful to that particular audience, then adding in your own expertise and opinions as you share what you’ve curated.
Read more at http://www.business2community.com/social-media/understanding-content-curation-how-it-applies-to-social-media-0575832#0KD3K43cC8wrd43H.99

It's not easy to find time to read everything

There is a huge amount published every week on the internet on the subject of internet marketing, affiliate marketing, using social networks, blogging . . . and the all the paraphernalia of making money online.  Some of what's written is interesting, some is informative, some is both interesting and informative. 

I read a lot of it and, as you'll know if you read this blog regularly, I like to share things that I find helpful.  So about three months ago, I started to compile a weekly newsletter containing twenty of so of the stories and articles that had caught my eye during the past seven days.  I offered it to the people who were already on my list and, three months on, more people are reading it each week.

I haven't advertised it at all but the response I've had to it has now prompted me to mention it here in case any of the readers of this blog would like to subscribe to it.  It's free and all you need to do is click here and then fill in your name and email address on the form and click 'sign up'.

Recent articles have included:

• 5 easy ideas for increasing blog traffic
• 7 reasons to join Pinterest for Business
• A report on the new Facebook purchase tracking tool
• The secrets behind great business websites
• Best practices for SEO content writing
• Making money with social media
• 6 Insider Secrets to a Winning Affiliate Marketing Program
• How to Build an Online Business From Scratch
• 10 reasons for using videos for marketing
• How to Get Started with Affiliate Marketing on Pinterest
• 10 ecommerce turn-offs to avoid
• Why businesses fail online
• How to make your online branding brilliant

The Sphinx House Newsletter comes out every Monday.

Oh to have a printer now that April's here!

My printer has packed up.  I can't complain - it's done valiant service.  It wasn't an expensive model - an hp deskjet actually - and I must have had it at least ten years.  I've ordered a new one but, what with Easter being this weekend, it won't be arriving until Tuesday.  So, meanwhile, I'm without a printer.  And I've had quite a lot that needs printing.

I suppose the sensible thing would have been to stick the files onto a memory stick and then load them onto my husband's computer and print from there.  But it seemed easier just to email the files to him.  Hmm . . .

He (for reasons best known to himself) uses rocketmail.  I've tried a Yahoo mail account before now and discovered that it often took days for something to arrive, if it arrived at all.  So when half an hour had passed and my emails to husband still hadn't arrived, I looked for other ways of getting them there.  (As to why I didn't use a memory stick at this juncture, your guess is as good as mine . . . but I didn't.)

So at this point it turned into a major operation.  I emailed the files to a hotmail account that I use occasionally.  Then I shut down microsoft outlook on my computer and sent the files from the hotmail account to my own email account.  Husband then logged into my email account via mail2web and - glory hallelujah - downloaded the files onto his machine.  What a palaver!

Meanwhile I have a memory stick sitting on my desk, looking at me reproachfully!

I shall miss my old printer - it was so simple to use, had good print quality, was fast and would print double-sided (although this was something I didn't discover until I'd had it quite a while).  I hope the new printer will be as good - although I doubt it.  I read numerous reviews of a wide variety of printers and this was the one that had the fewest negative reviews.   Although, come to think of it, there was one that had 100% positive reviews but it's no longer available - go figure!