Bad Content Finding Its Way Into Mobile Apps and RIM Owes Big

There’s always a good side to things and a bad side and that includes the ever-expanding world of mobile apps. A recent news article in the Washington Post talks about inappropriate content finding its way into mobile apps that are geared towards children. Violent and suggestive content are the culprits here and parents are complaining they don’t have any real way to monitor what their kids are exposed to.

The Federal Communications Commission keeps an eye on more traditional forms of media but as far as mobile apps are concerned, developers are still in charge of giving themselves ratings. More fodder for those who say it’s the parent’s responsibility to stay on top of what their children see and do.

As you might expect, recent reports are saying that RIM could owe tons of cash to right the fallout from their recent outages. The recent numbers are $100 million US in lost revenues and there’s more to it than that, none of which is good for the Canadian company that was the biggest hope that country had since the Avro Arrow.

Making the problem worse for RIM is the fact that wireless carriers worldwide have promised to compensate their users for the downtime. The whole mess couldn’t have come at a worse time for the beleaguered company and worst case scenarios for the estimated 70 million users worldwide put refunds to 35 million as the number bantered.

The whole Blackberry mess has some interesting spinoffs when it comes to how people deal with even the temporary loss of this kind of technology. Consider a recent article from a New Jersey professional who writes that people should know someone they can call in their office to check emails on their computer there when the BlackBerry network goes down. The article goes on to point out the obvious fact that you can send a text, but I think something even more relevant is being missed here.

Maybe the whole idea of having a Blackberry is overkill and being constantly hooked up to emails 24/7 from a device that you carry around with you is a case of too much technology. I mean, how many people can really do anything about even the most urgent email until they get back to the office anyway? I’m not talking out of school here because I have one and I find myself constantly looking for the little red light that tells me I’ve got mail like one of Pavlov’s dogs. I have to admit too, I did get a little nervous when my emails weren’t getting through regularly but I’ve still got to wonder if we all don’t need some kind of safe zone away from all of these things once in a while.

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Profiting with Content

Content helps drive traffic, boosts credibility and authority, and helps you build a community of followers. It can also help you increase your search engine ranking, and should provide valuable information for readers.

Content can also have an impact on your cash flow if done properly. Here are some simple ways you can profit with content.

1. Write reviews.

You can use content to generate affiliate commissions by writing good reviews on the products you’re promoting as an affiliate. Many people search online for quality reviews before they purchase a product. It helps them make an informed decision about the quality of the product and if it will be useful to them.

When people are reading reviews, they are already in a buying mode. They simply need compelling information to help them complete the sale. If you write a detailed review, from your personal perspective, they are more likely to purchase the product. Include your affiliate link so they can click through to buy the product.

There are several things to keep in mind when writing reviews. First of all, always be honest in your assessment of the product. Describe who the product is for, who it will benefit and also cover who it may not benefit. Also remember to mention anything negative about the product, things you didn’t like. Many people think that giving some negative points will hurt their review, but in truth it makes your review stronger. It shows you are being honest. The things you didn’t like may not even apply to the prospective buyer.

2. List Building.

Use email marketing as another avenue of making money. Give out a free report, an incentive for people to join your list. Make sure it is directly related to your content and the things you share and promote. This gives you another way to reach them and another way to promote affiliate products or your own products.

Never bombard your list with useless promotions or daily promotions. Only send out important content that you think they may find useful and valuable. However, you still need to be consistent with contacting your list. You can send out weekly tips or articles that you write specifically for your list. You do not need to attempt a sale in every email, but you do need to stay in touch with them. Show them you care and over deliver with valuable content.

When you do this, they are more likely to buy from you when you promote quality products.

3. Sell Ad Space

You can sell ad space on your blog or even in your newsletter. If you have a large list of followers, some advertisers will pay you so that they can reach your audience every week.

Make sure the ads are relevant to your list and your content. If you don’t have advertisers you can start with a Google ad and remove those as other sites start purchasing those ad slots.

4. Use Article Directories.

If you have your own product or service, you can use articles posted at directories to drive traffic to your sales page. Use the article as pre-sell material so when the prospect clicks the call to action in your bio, they are already wanting more information. This can increase your conversations from those click throughs.

5. Establish Authority with eBooks.

Ebooks are a great way to establish authority in your niche. If you’re extremely knowledgeable in a certain area, you can write an ebook for people to purchase.

You can sell your ebook from your own website, through Clickbank or you can even have it published on Kindle. This allows you to reach more people in your field.

Sales from ebooks not only boosts your income, but it can also increase traffic to your site which can give you future income,  more prospects to reach out to and help you profit with content.

There are many ways to use content as a means to increase sales. Implementing just a few of them can increase your popularity, your bottom line and establish your credibility. Try some of these methods, give them time to work and see if they don’t increase your income.

Another great thing about content is it can work for you for many years. You do the work once and it keeps working for you.

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Are You Utilizing a Content Strategy?

Many bloggers just seem to go through their daily writing and posting routine by winging it. They don’t achieve the success they see other bloggers attaining. What’s the secret? What are other bloggers doing differently? It’s possible that successful bloggers are simply using a content strategy in their marketing efforts. They give each piece of content a purpose and use it to its maximum ability.

In simple terms, they plan their content and their strategy.

What Is a Content Strategy?

It’s merely a plan to create, organize, market and maximize content. You can use one to plan a week in advance, a month, a quarter or even a year if you’d like.
A plan makes creating content much easier. Instead of fighting the daily, “What do I write?” syndrome, you already have a list of topics to pull from and a strategy to make that content work for you.

Later, when you decide to outsource some of the writing, a content strategy makes it easier to let your writer know what you want from them and when it’s due.

Things you should ask yourself when creating your content strategy.

What types of content do you need to create?

Before you can work on content, you need to know what types of content you’ll be using. Will you write blog posts, articles, information products, or reports?
Do your readers respond better to list type posts? Do they like checklists? What kind of content do you get the most response from?
Knowing what your readers like will help you plan your content.

Where do you plan to publish each piece of content?

How much content will be for your blog or website? Will you use any of it for guest posting, newsletters or article directories? If it’s an information product, do you need extra content to promote it? Where will you post the extra content?

Does your content have a goal or a purpose?

If you want your content to be more effective, it needs to be given a goal or purpose. In a sense, content is a lot like people. It works better if it has a goal.
Decide the purpose of your content. Is it to drive traffic, establish your credibility, promote products, or build your list?

You need to know these things before publishing your content. Giving each piece of content its own purpose will help it to work better for you. It will also keep on working for that purpose over and over.

How can you maximize your content?

Maximizing content can be a difficult step if you’re not sure what it is or how to do it. You want every thing you write to work as hard for you as it can. To do this you simply repurpose some of your content. Do a few minor rewrites and post it in another location.

You can use repurposed content as another blog post later on, in your newsletter or save it in a folder for a future information product. Once you’ve gathered several of your best content pieces together, turn it into an ebook that you can sell or give away.

Do you have a marketing plan for your content?

Marketing your content is getting the word out about it. You can use social networks to post links to content. You can use article directories to get attention and point to more content on your blog or website. You can write guest posts and link to content on your own site.
This is where your content planning and strategy really comes in handy. If you have it all planned and written out, you can visually see where you need to cross promote your content so it gets more exposure.

When will you write your content?

Once you’ve decided what content you’ll write and how you’ll use it, you need to start scheduling when the writing will get done.
Will you write all of the content yourself or outsource some of the writing?
If you plan to write it yourself, you need to create a schedule that you can stick to easily. If you write best in the mornings, schedule writing during that time. If you’re a night owl, use that time to write.
Try not to schedule too much writing in one day. This can get overwhelming. However, for something short like blog posts, there’s no reason you can’t write 2 or 3 per day, if your time allows.
When creating your writing schedule, try to space it out so it’s manageable but keeps you with fresh content being posted to your blog.

When will you publish?

You may need to use two calendars for these schedules. One to determine when you’ll do the actual writing and another to determine when you’ll post the content. Of if you use a dayplanner with lots of room to write on each day, you can use one color of ink to write your writing schedule and another color to write your publishing schedule. Whatever works best for you.
You’ll also want to decide if you will upload several posts at once into your blog and schedule them to publish at later times. It can be a big timer saver to set up several posts at once and schedule them.

If you’re writing some content for article directories or as guest blog posts, you’ll also need to set up publishing times for that content.

Once you start planning out your content and get the hang of it, it will become an easy process. A major benefit to creating a content strategy is knowing there’s always a steady stream of work and content. It can also be a great way to avoid writers block and not knowing what you’ll write from day to day.

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Ten Ways to Maximize Content and Take Your Business Places

If you’re here, chances are you create and use a lot of content for your blog and to build your business. Are you getting the best mileage you can from all of your content? Here are the top ten ways you can let your content do double duty.

10. Chop it up. Use snippets from your content and publish them as tips on social networking sites. For example, a single article might have five to ten tips. You can schedule them to be posted on Facebook and Twitter with links to your website.

That can equal at least a week’s worth of tweets going out to your followers. Be sure to post them at different times each day, or even twice a day. Not all of your followers are on at the same time.

9. Collect it. Collect similar articles and/or blog posts to create a larger downloadable product. For example, you might collect ten articles on the topic of organizing your closet and create a report for your visitors. It’s a nice way to offer something for free and provide your readers more value.

Plus, since it’s already been posted on your blog before, you don’t have to write all the content. Just add in some new tips, a few transitions between the articles and you’re good to go.

8. Piece it out. If you’ve written reports to give as free gifts you can separate those into smaller articles or blog posts and share them on your ezine.

7. Weekly wrap up. Create teaser paragraphs for each article or blog post you’ve published the past week and create a weekly wrap up. You can post it as an article and/or send it to your subscribers so they don’t miss a word.

6. Reuse social networking snippets. If you’re using social networking to grow your business consider pulling comments you’ve made or content you’ve published and use it on your blog or as an article marketing piece.

5. Give answers. You can also use any questions you’ve answered via comments on your blog or social networking sites and publish them on answer sites like Yahoo answers.

4. Link it up. Always strive to include a link. You can link to your website to drive traffic to a specific page. Or you can link to an affiliate product that relates to your article. Just don’t go overboard with linkage.

3. Newsletters and ezines. Repurpose or expand on articles or blog posts you’ve written to provide your subscribers with more information and value.

2. Syndication. Consider syndicating your ezine content. Syndicating your ezine content can help drive traffic to your website or blog and build awareness.

1. Rewrite it. Rewrite any and every article or blog post you publish and use it for article marketing purposes. Republish it on article marketing websites or as guest blog posts. Make the most of your writing efforts. In fact, you can hire a Virtual Assistant to rewrite your existing content and double the results.

Always think about maximizing your content. Every time you write a blog post or article think about how you can use it and its content in other ways. Give it more than one purpose.  Let it do the legwork for you.

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My Secret Formula for Creating Super-engaging Blog Content

This guest post is by Kiesha of WeBlogBetter.

Many of my readers have asked how in the world I come up with such creative ideas for my blog content.

If you’ve read:

“The Walmart Guide to Increasing Time spent on your Site,”“Can your blog Pass the Salad Test?”“Attract Readers to your blog like Mosquitos“What the Sims Taught me About Social Media”“How to Solve the Blogging Puzzle” (a post that compares blogging to a jigsaw puzzle)

…then you’ve probably figured out by now that there are no limits to the subjects I’ll squeeze a blog post out of.

I often challenge myself to find the most unlikely subject and see what blogging lessons I can squeeze out of it. While some things are a complete stretch and really won’t work, there are some surprising lessons you can pull from just about anything, if you’re creative enough.

I’m going to be honest: I’m using the phrase “creative enough,” but really what I mean is this. If you have a brain that has the capacity to think deeply enough to write a coherent paragraph or two, then you’ve got “enough creativity” to pull this off.

I’ll tell you how, but first let me tell you about a book that I read that really informs how I write today. It’s called The Medici Effect. This book talks about how it’s not completely new ideas, but the intersection of two seemingly unrelated ideas, that make a real difference in innovation.

I’m really simplifying the complexity, so you’re going to have to check this one out yourself to really get this and fully grasp the secret to creating meaningful and engaging content.

Here’s my secret formula for creating those zany analogies and surprising comparisons that I write about.

Every good writer is so because they pay attention to the details of life around them. They use those details and describe them with words that evoke the five senses: sight, smell, taste, sound, and touch.

Being able to describe an experience is key to hooking readers and keeping them engaged.

This is a direct extension of step one—if you’re paying attention your environment, you’ll discover that life’s lessons are everywhere. Blogging, like Kung Fu, is in everything!

You can pull lessons from any subject and then think about the ways they are similar to your blog topic.

This is easier if you make a list. For example, think of all the ways your experience in college is similar to your blogging experience. If I were to list mine I’d say:

Both were baffling at first.Both required time studying alone.Both required commitment and dedication to a schedule.Both required one to stretch his or her thinking beyond the ordinary.

This list could go on and on. I might start with a really long list, but then I would narrow it down to the most important points, since only so much can go into a blog post if it’s to remain engaging.

This step is extremely important. If you’re sitting there worrying about how crazy people will think you are or how much someone might think your analogy sucks, you’re not going to be able to do much writing. When you kick your inner critic to the curb and decide to just have fun with writing, it will come through in your writing. Confidence or lack thereof can be sensed and can weaken your credibility and authority.

If you’ve selected an interesting topic, then half of the work is done for you. At this point you just need to think of ways you can capitalize on those phrases that people love and that are also search engine friendly.

This works best if I’ve allowed the post to sit for a couple of days. This gives me fresh eyes and since the mental load of revision is far less than writing, it also allows me to think of ways to inject humor, think of details I’ve left out, choose better words and also consider ways to extend the post if possible.

Randomly pick two items and think of ways they are similar and can complement each. Then boldly consider ways you could use the combination to your advantage. You may need to try this exercise a few times before you arrive at something you believe to be true genius that you can passionately use to separate yourself from your competitors.

It was the combining of seemingly random, unrelated ideas that sparked the idea to change up the blog contest game and do something different. I suddenly got the idea that I should host a reality blog contest where bloggers will team up and work together while simulaneously competing for a Grand Prize. I got that idea while reading The Medici Effect, specifically a passage that talked about what makes a good contest. It discussed the evolution of the game show over the years until it eventually turned into reality contests and shows—that immediately sparked a eureka moment for me!

That’s what combining unusual ideas should do for you and your readers. It will help you create super-engaging content that your readers won’t be able to resist.

Kiesha blogs at WeBlogBetter, offering writing, social media and blogging tips. She’s currently holding an exciting new type of contest on her blog—the first ever reality blogging contest called “Surviving the Blog”. Visit her blog for details.

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How to Write & Sell Simple Information for Fun and Profit: Your Guide to Writing and Publishing Books, E-Books, Articles, Special Reports, Audio Programs, DVDs, and Other How-To Content

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Content Rules: How to Create Killer Blogs, Podcasts, Videos, Ebooks, Webinars (and More) That Engage Customers and Ignite Your Business (New Rules Social Media Series)

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