Blogging involves various tasks, but one of the most time consuming events for many bloggers is procrastinating when you just can’t seem to think of a blog post idea. You either hope an idea will come to you eventually in a random moment of inspiration, or you delve into your RSS feeds to try to find something that sparks your imagination.

The Word That Ensures 100% productivity

Routine

Example Of Routines In Physical Health:

Have you ever found that during the commercial breaks on TV you start feeling hungry despite them being every 10 minutes and find yourself repeatedly raiding the fridge even though you know you ate the last pickled pepper (or whatever) 2 trips ago?

If that’s you, then the chances are long time ago you were genuinely hungry but waited till the commercial came on to find food. After doing this enough times the body gets confused and thinks that it is the ads that are making you hungry, so you become used to rushing out to get food when the ads came on and now it has become a force of habit.

Studies show that a large part of why people become obese is because they are used to eating at certain times of day (e.g. in the ad breaks on TV). Once that time is reached again the next day the person is ‘told’ by a part of themselves to go and eat something.

How To Apply It To Blogging

I believe this also works in reverse but for the mind. If you force yourself to write a blog post every day at a set time, the first few may not be good enough to publish, but after a while your mind will automatically start coming up with creative writing ideas at that time of day. Eventually You will find that if you try doing something else at that time you wont be able to help but jot down blog post ideas that are flowing out of you.

A Common Mistake

This is why it is a bad idea to lie in bed trying to think of blog post ideas for the next day because your mind will start to think of the bed as a place to think rather than sleep, making it harder to get to sleep.

Summary

In a day without routine your mind needs constant stimulation in order to be productive. By creating an effective daily routine and sticking to it you can train your mind to do things at certain times of the day.

This post was written by Matt Jones.

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Silly easter egg wordplay aside, networking with bloggers is all about giving in order to receive. Even if all you are after is a plug from them to your blog, the best way to break the egg ice is with an act of kindness. Manipulation and being friendly are surprisingly similar when the gains to be made are so obvious. Ambitious (or already successful) people understand this anyway and they are the exact people you want to get acquainted with.

5 Ways to Earn The Respect And Attention Of A Blogger:

1. Become well known on their blog by regular commenting. Your comments have to be insightful or useful in someway, starting a debate counts even if it means disagreeing with the bloggers post. You don’t have to be the blogger to be a known personality on that blog. If you are well known by their community the blogger has to pay attention to you. When you come to pitch your linkbait/blog to them it will be a whole lot easier if you can honestly say you are a long time reader and commenter.

2. Be the submitter of their best posts to social media sites. As well as earning brownie points from the blogger, your presence and credibility on that social media site increases (be it algorithmically or socially). This should only be done with appropriate posts to the correct social media site.

3. Offer them a killer guest post. Most bloggers are happy to save some time and energy by publishing a guest post, providing the content is up to their own standard or better. The traffic you receive from the guest post is a bonus.

4. Give them something to give away to their readers for free. This requires you have slightly more than a blog at your disposal. Sponsoring contests is often written about as a great promotional method, but the fact you as sponsor are gaining the favour of the blogger you are sponsoring for longer than the period of sponsorship is often missed. The bloggersis far more likely to mention you if you were a previous sponsor, even if your contract has expired.

5. Blog about them. This is by far the most obvious way to get on a bloggers radar and as a result is often over used. Linking to the same blogger in every post makes it look like you don’t read any other blogs.

Conclusion

By far the most effective way to network is at real live networking events, but for many bloggers traveling round the world for these is too expensive. Ultimately attracting the attention of bloggers is just like advertising because frequency and reach is vital. Not putting all your eggs in one basket in this circumstance means networking with a select group of bloggers in lots of different ways. Being an active member if your blogging community is often the difference between a successful and a failed marketing campaign.

This post was written by Matt Jones.

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Valleywag has some screenshots of the future Yahoo Buzz, a future competitor for Digg. With its huge user base, Yahoo has a very good chance at making it popular, but there is something that bothers me.

At the start, Yahoo Buzz will feature stories from a limited number of sites, 100 to be exact. Later they will open the site for submissions from all sites accepted in the Yahoo Publisher Network. So, again, only US bloggers and sites will be able to use this Yahoo site to get traffic.

Here’s the scenario that bothers me: a blogger that doesn’t have YPN breaks the news about an event. On the front page of Yahoo Buzz would get someone that isn’t the original source, just someone that stole the story. In this aspect they would be inferior to Digg, as they can’t ask for original sources to be submitted to the site. If Yahoo Buzz gets enough traffic, one can build up a site just by rewriting great stories that hit the front page of Digg or Reddit and can’t do the same on Yahoo Buzz because of the nationality of the blogger.

If YPN isn’t open to the entire world in the future, this can really be a problem as far as I can tell.

Also, the algorithm for reaching the front page is a mix between popular searches and user votes. It’s an interesting connection with the Yahoo search engine. A surge in searches for a term can boost a story to the front page much easier. I wonder if this can be manipulated.

For example, when a celebrity gets married and their name is searched a lot for a few days, mention their name in the story/description/tags of the story even if it’s not about that celebrity, and if Yahoo Buzz picks up the keywords, it gives a boost to your story because it seems related to the surge in keyword searches.

What do you think? It seems pretty nuts to me to limit the sources for such a site only to those that have YPN.

Pics first published by Valleywag

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