Blogging with Beth » Writing Content

Want to Learn How to Write Sales Pages?

Beth — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 06:05:23 +0000

I know many of you out there are business owners as well as bloggers, and many of you may be trying to sell an online product from your website or blog. If that’s the case for you, then you may have already bumped up against one of the biggest struggles in the online marketing world – writing the dreaded sales letter. Most of us have seen those cheesy, seventeen-page letters filled with yellow highlighter and over-hyped headlines. You may be sitting there (just like I was a few months ago) wondering if maybe that was truly the only way to write a sales letter for a web audience – to be a cheesy used car salesman. And you may be sitting there thinking that maybe all that cheese really is the only way to have your sales page convert into actual SALES. Because heck, that’s what we all want, right?

Well, fret not, dear readers – Dave Navarro has come to our rescue, just in the nick of time. He’s created a fabulous hour-long (!) video that describes how to create a sales letter that won’t keep you up at night wondering if you’re actually a slimeball. Your sales letter will be one you’ll be proud to send to your readers (and your mailing list). And this sales letter that Dave will help you create will actually CONVERT into sales of whatever product you’re looking to sell.

Dave’s video (which apparently will only be up on his site for a short time) also includes a full transcript, the audio-only version of the training, a supporting workbook in PDF format, and more. Check out the whole shebang here. If you’ve been struggling with sales letters, Dave’s approach is going to change your way of looking at online marketing – and it’s going to make the whole “sales” thing a lot more fun. Enjoy!

Top Four Reasons to Get a Blogging Buddy

admin — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 03:32:36 +0000

I’m an extrovert, so I think everything is more fun with other people. But just in case you’re not, and you need to be convinced that getting a blogging buddy is a good idea, here are the best reasons why you should:

1. A blogging buddy will give you someone you can brainstorm with, and someone who can help you sort your through your ideas. I call my blogging buddies when I’m in or rut or I’ve completely lost my blogging direction. I also email them when I have a far-out idea for a post and I’m not sure how it would go over with my audience.

2. Your buddy can link to your best posts (and vice versa) and you’ll both benefit. It’s true – we link to people we like, whether it’s an “A-List” blogger or our best blogging friend who we go to coffee with every Friday morning. Links to your blog mean traffic and more rewards from Google.

3. Blogging with a buddy is FUN. I schedule regular content writing sessions with my blogging buddy. We sit in a coffee shop, write for a few hours, then go grab dinner. It’s a lot more fun than sitting at home staring at a blank page.

4. Your buddy can keep you from feeling overwhelmed. You’re gonna have tough days as a blogger – days when you feel like you want to quit. Maybe you’re not getting enough traffic, or not enough comments, or not enough….satisfaction. if you’ve got someone on your side who knows why you’re blogging and what your goals are, it will make you feel better. I just read in Oprah Magazine about a really cool study published recently in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. The study asked participants to stand at the base of a really steep hill and rate how hard they thought the hill would be to climb. People standing at the bottom with a friend consistently rated the ascent to be less steep compared to those standing solo. (Side note – this study can teach us huge lessons not only in blogging, but IN LIFE, my dear readers!!). Interestingly, the longer the friends had known each other, the less steep they rated the hill. So find those blogging buddies and HOLD ON TO THEM.

Convinced? Great. Look for my post later this week on the qualities you should look for in a good blogging buddy. In the meantime, start looking around for possible friends to add to your blogging support network.

How a Blog Connected Me to an Eight-Year-Old Boy on the Other Side of the World

Beth — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 18:57:46 +0000

On August 24th, I discovered the extraordinary story of the Kopila Valley Children's Project when my friend Rebecca posted a link on Facebook. I was immediately enthralled by the story of Maggie Doyne, an young American woman who started a home for kids in Nepal after visiting the country and recognizing a BIG need that wasn't being filled. Maggie says:

"I was trekking through the Himalayas in war-torn Nepal, where I began to meet hundreds of orphan children. I fell in love with their bright eyes and beautiful smiles, but was shocked to see them barely surviving without the most basic things that I had grown up with as a child.

As I shared my dream to build a safe home for these children, with my hometown in Mendham, NJ, I was astounded by the outpouring of support. This past year, I officially opened the frontdoor of Kopila Valley Children's Home, built brick-by-brick, by me and the local community in Nepal. There are now 28 children living in our home. We have been able to enroll eighty children into school, facilitate life-changing operations for children in need, and create a village outreach program to improve schools in remote areas. I truly believe that if every child in the world is provided with their most basic needs and rights—a safe home, medical care, an education, and love, they will grow to be leaders and end cycles of poverty and violence in our world."

The day I saw Maggie's blog and discovered her story, I e-mailed her and asked if I could sponsor one of the kids in her house. I am delighted to report that as of September 6th, I am now sponsoring an eight-year-old boy named Ansuraj, who has bright eyes and a smile that goes for miles (Maggie sent me a picture).

Maggie is also helping Ansuraj correspond with me over email, and there are just no words to describe how cool that is.

And then tonight, I visited Maggie's blog again (she publishes regular updates about what's going with the Children's Home, including her recent attempts to try to buy land for a new school). Her latest post was all about how she had to travel to a nearby city for her yearly audit by the Nepalese IRS, and it was a funny story about how she and the treasurer of her school's board triumphed over red tape with the help of a kind-hearted official.

And I was reading along thinking how cool it was that she didn't have to sit in a hot auditing office for five hours going over annoying paperwork. And I kept reading. Then Maggie told the story about what the kids in her school were doing when she got back from the IRS office. They were flying kites.

And all of a sudden, there was Ansuraj, the little boy I'm sponsoring, right smack dab in the middle of this great story – he was actually the HERO of the story – and I was just overcome with how incredibly cool it is that Maggie and Ansuraj are in Nepal and I'm in Colorado and I'm sitting here in my living room reading this story about something that happened YESTERDAY at this school on the other side of the world. I didn't have to wait six weeks for a letter in the mail. I didn't have to receive a note via passenger pigeon or messenger or any other mode of transportation that would've taken 1000 times as long.

I got to read about it right here on my tiny little computer screen with just a few clicks of the mouse. FOR FREE. I can read it, my readers can read it, and everyone else who wants to feel inspired and realize how lucky they are – and how much a difference one person can truly make in the world – can read it. Maggie became a global publisher the day she started writing her blog, and her readership is now growing exponentially, every time someone passes on a link to her site – just as I'm doing here. People all over the world can read regular updates and how her kids are doing and what adventures they're having, from our LIVING ROOMS.

That is the power of blogs. Maggie's blog made it possible for me to find her story, write to her, sponsor a child so that I can contribute to making sure he has food, clothes and school supplies, and then read a marvelous, inspiring story about that child. Powerful, powerful stuff.

Blogs are important, and they are a powerful medium for communication and change in our world, so please don't let anybody tell you that blogs are just "online journals" or any other such nonsense. Blogging is changing the world – one hyperlink, one post, one child, and one kite-flying story at a time.

If you'd like to donate to the school, please go to the school's How You Can Help page. And thanks to Rebecca Self of XpatAdventures for passing along this amazing story.

Why Writing Great Content is the Most Important Part of Blogging

Beth — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 21:31:18 +0000

I'm not just interested in blogging, but also the art of running a successful small business. I've got a passion for learning about personal finance, specifically how our conversations about money affect how much we earn.

I'm a big fan of both Barbara Stanny and Money magazine, and I can't remember which one of them led me to a great blog I've just started following: Get Rich Slowly.

The author, JD Roth, gives sensible, practical advice on personal finance, wealth-building and debt elimination. He's a terrific example of how bloggers can build a big audience and a huge, loyal following by publishing great content.

Today, for example, he published an interview with author Scott Burns, who wrote "Spend 'Til the End: A Revolutionary Guide to Raising Your Living Standard [Today and When Your Retire]". Burns says:

The task of a personal finance writer is to write things in an
non-intimidating way so that you can reach the broadest number of
people without degrading your content. If you insist on dumbing down —
the usual route used to degrade the content — and, that doesn’t work.
What we need is to be as lucid as humanly possible, have some amount of
levity so that people won’t feel that they’re being punished, and get
people to say, “Oh, money! This is another tool for adaptation! This is
another way that I can improve my life. This is another way that I can
escape having a life that consists of a long series of unpleasant
surprises.”

Love that last line. Roth publishes original, useful and timeless content, which is exactly what you should be striving for as a blogger. He's also got a nice, clean, straightforward site design that's easy to navigate and isn't overwhelming. Roth seems to know that publishing great content is the most important part of running a great blog. Obviously he's doing a lot right here – he's recently been named "Most Inspiring Money Blog" by Money magazine. Congrats, JD – and please keep up the great work!

Getting it Down on Paper

Beth — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 12:06:55 +0000

Staring at a blank page again? I know the feeling. Writer’s block can be crippling, and in the blog world – where there can be significant pressure to publish, publish, publish – the stakes seem high.

One tip is to always keep a running list of blog post ideas, so that when it comes time to churn out this week’s post, you’re not scrambling around for an idea. Chances are, as you move through your daily life, you come across lots of great blog post ideas. Are you writing them down? If not, is it because you don’t have some sort of mechanism for recording them? It sounds basic, but make sure you keep a small notebook with you to write these ideas down. In her fantastic book on writing, Bird by Bird, author Anne Lamott says she always carries an index card and a pen with her. And that means everywhere – in the grocery store, on nature walks, to the movies – everywhere.

Once you’ve got an idea, Anne Lamott also advises starting with what she refers to as a “shitty first draft”. Anne says, “All good writers write [shitty first drafts]. That’s how they end up with good second drafts and terrific third drafts.” I’m a fan of this practice. Just write SOMETHING. Write the first draft just to get the ideas from your head to the page, then clean it up later.

Writing teacher and author Natalie Goldberg also uses what I refer to as the “ten minute write” rule. She advises opening the page of your journal or document and writing non-stop for ten minutes. Don’t edit, don’t cross things out, don’t clean it up, and for heaven’s sake, don’t listen to the little critic in your head that tells you that you actually haven’t got anything interesting to say. Just write. Keep the pen moving, whether literally or figuratively. You can even set a timer if it helps.

This is how it works for me – if I want to publish up a blog post, I go to my list of post ideas and pick one that sounds interesting. I’ll open a new document in Word (I always write in Word first and save my posts on my hard drive so that I’ve got a back-up).

Once I’m ready, I’ll look at the clock, note the time, then start writing. I don’t stop for ten minutes. At the end of the first ten, I might do another ten minutes if there’s more to say. Or I’ll grab a book or a link or some other supporting information if I need it and add that in to my post.

Once I consider the first draft pretty much completed, then I’ll read the article again and clean it up. Sentence structure and flow usually come for me at this stage. Then I read it again for grammar, spelling, and punctuation. For everyday blog posts, I usually don’t have an outside editor look at it, but if I did, I’d pass it off at this stage (my editor is Toby Rogers, a talented progressive blogger and editor extraordinaire). Then I take one last look, save it, then post it to Typepad, who are the folks who make this blog possible. Viola! Shitty first draft to blog post in under one hour.

Don’t be frightened by the process of writing – it can be enormously satisfying and lots of fun. Remember that your readership wants relevant, interesting, enjoyable-to-read content, and you’ve got more ideas than you think up there in your head. So grab one of your ideas, set the timer and get started. Ding!