Note: I’ve posted an update to this post to reflect Google’s new interface.

Here’s a tip for you to get ideas for content for your blogs, articles and products.  It’s using Google to find the latest chatter about your topic.

Let’s say my topic is “motivation”. I want to write a chapter or article with suggestions on “how to stay motivated”, but I’m not really sure what would be a good, realistic example or what angle to take.  So my first thought would be to find out what people are having trouble staying motivated to do these days.  This is what I’d do:

I’d go to Google and search for “how to stay motivated”.  What’s going to show is a list of the most popular articles or sites, most linked to sites, and most SEO’d sites.

This is not what I want. I want to find the most recent chatter and discussion about “how to stay motivated” – what people are talking about and asking about motivation. Where can I find that?  Blogs of course!  So I’d click on Show Options.  Then select Blogs.  Now, to find the most recent discussions, I’d click the Past 24 hours.  This will let me see what the most recent blog posts and comments have been about my topic.  Also, I want to make sure the results are sorted by relevance.

It appears here that people are really wanting to know how to stay motivated to lose weight.  There are a few posts about staying motivated for your business and sticking to your goals, but most of these are about fitness and losing weight!  That’s what I’d probably write about.

Now, when taking this approach, keep in mind that there are many people who create niche sites using Blogger and WordPress. They will highly optimize their articles in order to gain high rankings in the search engines.   If you search for a popular keyword phrase, like “how to lose weight” you might want to check out to make sure it’s not a niche blog because these won’t truly represent what people are really talking about.

I hope this helps!

I just wanted to announce that EzineArticles.com is about to start their next #HAHD – that is their 100 Articles in 100 days challenge!  They are daring you to submit at least 100 articles in the next 100 days.  If you’re really ambitious they are upping the challenge – 200 articles in 100 days!

So, as we talked about before, you can repurpose your content.  Imagine how much content 100 articles contains!

• FIRST you can make 10 short reports of 10 pages each!
• THEN you can take that same content and plop it into your blog for 100 days of content.
• THEN you can take those same articles and make 100 videos and post on them on YouTube.
• THEN you can take those 100 videos and bundle them in groups and sell them as video courses!
• THEN you can take those 100 articles and create a weekly podcast for TWO YEARS!

Do you see the possibilities?  That’s five different products that you will have the ability to create if you simply make a goal of creating 100 articles in the next 100 days.

Of course you can do this by yourself, not in the midst of a challenge – but ask yourself  ”will I really do it if I go at this on my own?”  My own answer is “nope, it will never happen.”  These public challenges are so helpful because they bring together a large number of people who are focusing on the same goal, so you get a lot of motivation and inspiration – and competition!

Check it out, the 100 articles in 100 days starts on Saturday, May 1.  You can follow EzineArticles at #HAHD to see whats going on.  I know I’m gonna do it (the 100 articles, not the 200 LOL).

Well I finally decided to try my hand at inserting a YouTube video in my blog.  This is a video by the one and only Kevin Riley of ProductCreationLabs.com.  In this video he’s giving a great tip about “stealing” other peoples ideas.  It’s not really stealing, just watch the video

Do you want to insert your own YouTube videos into your WordPress blog?  I’ve included the steps you need to take below.  First, find the video you want on YouTube.com.  Just do a search for the topic you want.  When you find the video, then follow the steps below.

Locate the Embed button beneath the video. You need the embed code so that the video will display in your blog post. If you copy the URL, you will only be making a link, you wont see the video play on your site.   Find the embed code. It will automatically be selected, so all you will have to do is copy it. You can do this by right-clicking and selecting Copy, or using CTRL-C. If you are on a Mac, it will be Command-C (the little propeller button near the space bar).

Once the embed code is good and copied, then return to your blog and create a new post.  Click the HTML tab (make sure you are not in the Visual tab, it must be the HTML tab).  Paste the embed code.  It will look like a bunch of non-sense letters and numbers, but that’s OK.

After you do that, then save your post and you should be able to see your video when you visit your site.   Now, after you’ve experimented with embedding other’s folk’s videos in your blog, the next natural step will be to create your own and post those!   Please let me know if you have any additional questions.

Let’s say that you picked your topic, researched it and finally finished writing it. It’s PDF’d (this is a common format used to protect your ebook and make it compatible with virtually all computers) and you are ready to put it up for sale.  I’m sorry to say, you still aren’t finished writing just yet!  Here are some things I don’t want you to forget about, and you might want to work on these right along with your main product:

1. Sales page. This is where you announce to the world what your product is. You make your sales pitch on this page. You explain the benefits of your ebook and how it’s going to help buyers solve a problem.  You talk about why you are the one that’s best to teach them whatever it is you’re teaching them. You can provide testimonials and your money-back guarantee on this page as well. Most important, this is where your  order button will be displayed!

2. Some type of opt-in treat. Now, you want to take advantage of all the traffic you get to your page. All visitors are not going to buy your ebook (sorry), but you can at least try to capture their email addresses. They visited your page for some reason (curiosity, interest in your topic, or they were just tricked into clicking on your page), so while they are still there you at least want to get their email so you can contact them again. You can do this by trading  a free report or perhaps a 7-day email course for their email address.  Make it good so you can entice them to sign up to your opt-in list.

3. Download page. Once someone purchases your ebook, you will need to deliver it to them. You will have some kind of  ”thank you” or “download” page. On this page, at minimum, you should have a few paragraphs thanking them for their purchase and full instructions on how to download and open your ebook. In some cases you may have a second product you want to sell, a customer’s list you want them to opt-in to, or any other number of options.

4. Affiliate materials (optional).  If you are selling your product through ClickBank, I highly recommend you create a number of affiliate materials such as blog posts/reviews, email reviews, articles, banners and other graphics. ClickBank affiliates are very savvy and eager, but lazy. If they have to write their own articles or reviews about your product or make their own graphics, then they probably won’t promote it. There are 1000s of other products for them to promote that have these materials created.  That’s just the culture of ClickBank.  If you are promoting through your own affiliate script or another program, then these materials may not be as important, but still a very good idea to have available.

So what do you think?  Are you ready for all of the “extra” work outside of creating the ebook itself? I know it’s a lot. Creating the affiliate materials is my least favorite of all for sure.

Did you know that Google Docs provide most of the basic tools that can be found in paid programs such as Microsoft Office? Google Docs includes a basic word processor that functions similar to Microsoft Word without all of the unnecessary bells and whistles. So you can easily use Google Docs to write your ebook, for free.

All you really need to do to create an ebook is type up the words of the document and do some formatting (e.g., bold, italics, change font size). In some cases you might want to insert a table or a picture, and spell check.  You might also want a highlighter to mark the places that you need to revisit or touch-up in your ebook. Google Docs provides all of that with the additional advantage of having your ebook online and available to work on wherever you happen to have access to the internet.

You will need a free Gmail account to use Google Docs.  Once logged in, click the link that says Documents and you will be in  the Google Docs interface. Here is where you will create a new file and begin writing. Depending on they layout for your ebook, you can either write your ebook in a Document format or in a Presentation format, it’s up to you. If this is your first time using Google Docs, I suggest you go with the Document format because it has all of the tools I mentioned earlier (especially the spell check!).

When you create a new Document, you will see the screen is pretty much laid out like Microsoft Word or OpenOffice Writer. Simply start typing and formatting your ebook the way you want and inserting any images. Just remember to save often just like you would in any other program. Your document will be auto-saved, but it’s still good to save it yourself regularly.

Here’s another benefit:  If you need your ebook proofread or edited, simply go to the Share menu and give your editor (or a very good friend) access to your document to review. It’s all online, so there is no need to email your ebook. Once the ebook is complete, go to the File menu and select Downlad as a PDF. Yes, that’s right! Google Docs will convert your ebook to PDF for you as well.

So don’t worry about not having fancy software, or not having the extra cash to spend on expensive applications. There is always a way to get your product created for free!

ProBlogger always has some great advice.  Today I wanted to write about a ProBlogger post from yesterday, but I ran into today’s post, How Small Victories Help You Create Big Products for Your Blog.  So, I decided to write about this one instead.  In this guest post by Paul Cunningham from Blogging Teacher, repurposing your old blog content into a new info products is discussed. The point is that you have content – why reinvent the wheel? Just use what you have, you’ve already worked hard enough!

I’m going to summarize some of his tips:

Grab some of your old blog posts and repurpose into a killer info product. He’s right, you will have new visitors to your blog, but they will never see your great info from months, or even years back. They will only read the new stuff.  So bundle up that old stuff and create an ecourse or free short report or if you have a great many posts, maybe your first ebook! Use that new product to build your mailing list.

My advice is if you go this route, do more than just copy and paste your blog posts in to Word and PDF them.  Take the time to format them correctly. Add in some nice images and get an ecover made.  Then setup a separate URL specifically for the product, in addition to your blog URL – even if you’re giving it away for free. This makes it a true “product” and it’s easier to promote: “Go to www.improveyourinfoproducts.com”   vs. “Please visit my blog at www.gwentanner.com, then look in the right menu and find the link that says improveyourinfoproducts.com and click that and follow the instructions…”

Create a membership site centered around your old blog posts. Now, here’s a nifty idea. Take your old, but awesome, content and enhance it with multimedia.  Convert it to video tutorials or supplement the text with video presentations. Convert old posts to podcasts, or just add a downloadable MP3 file to go along with the post (super easy because all you have to do is record yourself speaking).  Then get a simple to use membership script (this allows your buyers to create a user name and password to access your protected content) and start selling access to your membership site. You can even have a number of different membership levels that can access different content types.

The key here is that it’s content you’ve already created, you’re only enhancing it. So most of the work is done, you just have to decide on which membership script to use.

With all of that said, are you now going to go through all of your old blog posts and see if you can get started on your product?

Have you taken a look at the Networked Blogs application in Facebook? It allows you to follow all of your favorite blogs, similar to using an RSS reader, but within your Facebook account. You can add your own blog(s), or even the blog of your favorite blogger. Then they are all merged together in a feed in your Facebook account. It took me a while to figure out exactly what was happening, but now I get it.

I went into my blog “home page” over in Networked Blogs and I realized people are talking about a lot of interesting stuff that I might want to blog or write about.  I happened to read ProBlogger’s latest post and while I don’t necessarily have the issue he’s talking about at the moment, I can definitely relate it to something I’ve written about before, hence my next post will be inspired by ProBlogger     But more can be taken from this than ideas for your next blog post.  You can find ideas for content for your next product. Here are some examples:

• Shotmeloud has published a post called 3 Softwares to Compress and Resize Images for Your Blog – perfect if you are writing a course called “Power Blogging for Non-Techies”
• GetRichSlowly has published a post called Can You Afford to Go Green? – great information for an ebook on “Living Green in Today’s Economy”
• Mashable has published a post called Google Places: Google’s Local Business Center Gets an Upgrade – are you creating a video on “Making Your Little Shop POP on the Internet”?

Here’s a tip: Another thing you will want to do is read any comments on the blogs for questions/responses from readers who were obviously interested in the post topic.  This can be great guidance for your product!

Also notice that if you “Like” a post on the Networked Blogs page, your picture will appear beneath the post. If you have an interesting enough picture, I’m sure you will get a few clicks from it as well to your profile.

Here’s my link if you’d like my blog in your network:  http://networkedblogs.com/blog/gwens_blog/

Please share your Networked Blogs link as well.