How Running Helps You Improve Blogging By Over 200%

Running is not only good for your health but also for your blog. Running can help you improve blogging. It does not directly contribute to your blog. You will benefit indirectly in blogging by running. How does that happen?

Image Source: Jog by AlphaTangoBravo / Adam Baker

I am a huge fan of cardio and love to run a 5k. But I am no where near it. I started running only to reduce weight. Surprisingly it helped me improve blogging. I could easily brainstorm blog posts by running few minutes a day.

You don’t necessarily have to try for a 5k run but there is no reason why you shouldn’t. If you are new to running, I recommend you to read this blog post on Beginner’s guide to running by Leo at Zen Habits, which encouraged me to run.

Without further ado, let’s discuss the benefits of running and how it will improve your blogging skills:

1. No More Blogger’s Block

Blogger’s block is a term which you would have heard very often in the blogosphere. It is something that people always find it tough to avoid. But the truth is that there is no such thing called blogger’s block. It is just a mental perception. You are imagining things. To prove my point, let me give you an example:

Would you not write a post if Darren Rowse went for a holiday and requested a guest post from you?

How is that you are able to write now? It is only your attitude towards blogging. But I accept I’m also a victim of it. I tend to imagine things that are not real. I have had days when I cannot sit down and write a blog post. Things have changed now. One of the reasons for it is running. Let me make it clear for you:

When you start running, you will never have blogger’s block.

As Will Smith says in this video called “Key To Life”

When you’re running, there is an inner person that talks to you, which says “Oh I’m tired. My lungs are about to pop off. There is no way I could possibly continue.” You want to quit. If you learn how to defeat that inner person, you’ll learn how to not quit when things get hard in your life (I haven’t transcribed that perfectly).

Watch the video here.

2. Spend Time Off from Your Computer

If you are like ‘previous me’, you would spend most of the time in front of computer. Let me tell you, it isn’t good for health. It is also not good for blogging. When you are always sitting in front of computer, you cannot think to your full capabilities. You have to give your mind some rest and getting off from your computer for a run will help you a lot. You will become more creative and your posts will have much better impact.

3. Brainstorm Topic Ideas

I can tell you frankly that most of my articles are brainstormed when I am either running or walking. I rarely get a blog post idea when I am sitting in front of computer. As Robin Sharma says in his book called Greatness Guide: The best thing you could do is, spend time thinking. Spend time brainstorming blog posts. You could do this effectively when you are running. When I am running, I think about blog post ideas or a social media plan.

4. Things around You Helps

When you are running or jogging, look around you. Take a quick note of things around you, in your mind. Come home and write everything you saw in a real notebook or Google notebook. Write down everything, from a baby playing with a ball to a dog chasing someone. Don’t leave out anything that you saw. This increases your memory power and also helps you create more blog posts. How does this help? It’s very simple logic. You should try to relate everything you see outside with blogging. You could write “Why blogging is as awesome as seeing a baby smile” or “Why you should run away from (something here) as if a dog is chasing you”. These are just small examples. You can brainstorm at least five blog post ideas everyday.

Have you ever had the feeling that you can not post on a specific day because you don’t have the mood for it? If you are already running, have you felt an increase in your blogging skill? Please share your views in the comments.

P.S: Connect with on twitter and friendfeed so we can carry the conversation there

Do You Use Twitter Auto Follow? 3 Reasons Why You Should not

Update: Jesse Stay, who is the founder of socialtoo – the site that offers the twitter auto follow service, posted a reply in the comments of this post and also in friendfeed share (posted by Louis Gray of Louis Gray.Com). SocialToo also offers auto unfollow option, which I forgot to mention in this post. Please see this friendfeed share for more information.

Twitter is becoming famous everyday with so many people joining. You can find me in twitter here – Ramkarthik. All the new users need twitter followers to make sure their words are noticed by some people. Every twitter user likes to have many followers. Sometimes people don’t spend time to learn about twitter and spam the place. In this post you’ll find why you shouldn’t use twitter auto follow.

People, who join twitter, add the ones they know. Later they start to add new people. There is nothing wrong with this. But when people get over excited about twitter, they start following too many people in a single day or spam the community with tons of links.

Coming to talk about twitter auto follow, it is a service that let’s you follow twitter users automatically, once they follow you. Any person, who follows you, will be followed back automatically. You do not have the option of selecting whom to follow.

Image Soure: Twitter Influence by mil8

Here are 3 reasons why should not

1. All Links And No Real Update
There are twitter users who post every link of their blog post and do nothing much other than that. They add people in bulk; say 2000 twitter users at once. When you use twitter auto follow, you will be automatically following them. Why would you want to read tweets with links to blog posts all the time? If the profile created is on the name of a blog, you can expect them to tweet only blog post links. But some twitter users have their own names and do only blog promotion in twitter. I’m not saying that these people are bad. It is just that they haven’t understood twitter properly and will take time for them to learn about it.

2. Irrelevant Tweets
When you follow everyone who follows you, you are not using twitter efficiently. Let me give you an example. You have a blog probably (If you are new to blogging, I recommend you to read this free ebook). Even if you don’t have, assume that you own one. You write good blog posts and people are reading it. They subscribe to your blog. Will you subscribe to all of your subscribers’ blog? Of course not. If it was that way, Darren Rowse would have to subscribe to 7000 blogs, even if one tenth of his subscribers have a blog. So to make your twitter page relevant, follow only people who talk about things that interest you.

3. Follow And Unfollow
Twitter users who want to have many followers, add many twitter users. Once you follow them back, after a couple of days, they unfollow you. What’s the disadvantage here? Well, you followed a user because he/she followed you and now they have unfollowed you. When you are using auto follow, you automatically follow these people who unfollow users once they have added them. To avoid this, you should stop using auto follow, wait till the twitter user tweets you or tweets something interesting and then add him/her. Sometimes, you cannot avoid people by doing this too. You should start using Qwitter which will help you to know, who the users that are unfollowing you are.
Do you use auto follow? Why do you use auto follow? If you have valid points, I’ll include it in the next post. We could write a post on the advantages of using twitter auto follow. Please share your views in the comments.

P.S: Don’t forget to add me in twitter. My user name is Ramkarthik.

P.P.S: The link to the free report is an affiliate link.

3 Ways You Can Use Free Wordtracker Keyword Questions Tool To Earn Money

Free Wordtracker keyword questions tool is the latest tool from wordtracker. Wordtracker also has a normal keyword research tool with both paid option and free option. For doing keyword research, the free wordtracker tool is well enough and I use it. The paid wordtracker keyword tool is only for those who are into niche blogging or article marketing. These people need more information on keywords and the paid option delivers just that.

Let’s talk about the latest wordtracker keyword questions tool. The free wordtracker keyword questions tool helps you to find questions related to the keywords that you enter. If your keyword is weight loss, you will see questions that people search for. See the below image which shows you the questions for the keyword weight loss (They are number of searches per day).

You get more results than what is shown above.

So how can you use the free wordtracker keyword question tool to earn money?

Here are the top 3 ways you can earn money using the tool:

1. Blogging
There are always times when you don’t have anything to write about. At these times, go to the keyword tool and search for a keyword that is related to your niche. If your niche is personal development, don’t enter personal development. It won’t help you in anyway. Search for a much clearer term. If I’m a personal development blogger, I would search for something like “exercise” which is clearer. Once you have found a couple of good keywords, you can write articles and post them to your blog. Search engine traffic is the best when you want to earn money. Using this tool properly, you can get ore search engine visitors to your blog and as a result, earn more money.

2. Create A Product
Once you know what people are asking, it is easy to create a product. When you are creating a product, the first thing you want to check is, whether there is a buying market. Since you have found out that people are asking questions and need help, your product have a high chance of doing well. For blog posts, you should go for less competitive terms while for creating products, you can go with search terms with more competition. Products tend to rank well in spite of the competition.

3. Article marketing And Squidoo
If you don’t have a popular blog or if you want to write articles in different niches, you should go for article marketing. I talked about the benefits of article marketing in the blog post I wrote the past week at Blogging Tips. Article marketing and squidoo can be used to earn money. Choose a good affiliate product for the topic you are writing articles on. Join as an affiliate and promote the product in the articles you have written or in the squidoo lenses you have created.
Have you been using the keyword tool already? How are you going to use the tool to earn money?

P.S: I will write a follow up post on how you can find the best products to promote. It will reveal the same methods that I use to find the best affiliate products. Don’t forget to subscribe to the blog so that you will not miss the article.

5 Lessons Learned From John Reese’s Blog Rush Project

“Blog Rush is shutting down”. You would have seen that message in many of the top blogs. Blog rush was a nice concept but I didn’t try it in my blog. It indeed helped many bloggers to increase their traffic.

For those who are asking me who John Reese is, he is a top class internet marketer who owns products like traffic secrets. You can call him the “traffic guy” because he knows a lot of stuff about getting traffic to a blog/website. Also he is popular for his “million dollar day”. He earned one million dollars in one day and that day is August 17, 2004. One of his recent projects is blog rush, which was closed down recently. Though it didn’t work as expected, it did have a lot of plus points in it.

I hear you say “That’s enough. Get me to the lessons which he is teaching.” He is neither teaching any lesson directly here nor did I attend any of his one-on-one coaching. I’m just an admirer of this guy. This post is about the lessons John Reese indirectly taught me with his blog rush project.

Image Source: JasonRogers

1. Be Creative
In the internet marketing world, you have to be creative. You have to come up with something unique to become a famous person. You have to represent yourself and you should not change or act like other person. Be creative and be unique in whatever you do. You have to think. Thinking has a lot of power. When you sit in a calm place and think for a while, you can come up with great ideas. So the first lesson is ‘be creative’.

2. Hard Work
You cannot expect to become successful without doing any hard work. A lot of hard work has been put to make blog rush work. Though it was shut down recently, it doesn’t mean the idea didn’t work. All the hard work reaped good results. It was brought down because some people tried to game the system. Over all, the system was perfect and all credits to the hard work of John Reese and co. Believe in the saying “The harder I work, the luckier I get”.

Image Source: JakoJellema (7j.nl)

3. Failure
John Reese pulled down blog rush and it didn’t work as expected due to the reason I have stated above. So the project is, to some extent, a failure. This brings you to the third lesson John is teaching us. Failure is something even the successful people experience. Every single arrow that is hit in the bull’s eye is a result of hundred misses. You should dare to try. As Robin Sharma, an internationally acclaimed leadership guru, says “The only failure in life is failing to try”. So never worry about failure.

4. Fame
John is already a famous person in the internet marketing world. He multiplied his fame by launching blog rush. Hundreds of blogs wrote about him. Almost the whole blogosphere was talking about him. This increased his fame by many times. It didn’t stop there. Even when blog rush was brought down, all the top blogs wrote about it and added much more fame to his name. Right now, many bloggers know John. The lesson is, whether you are doing it right or wrong, you will be noticed. You will get popular everyday if you are acting on your ideas. Let me warn you that doing something wrong or facing a failure is not same as committing a mistake repeatedly.

5. Learn
John would have had a good experience with blog rush even though it didn’t work quite well and he, now, knows what will work and what will not. You can learn only through experience. It can be either through your own experience or by watching others. When you want to know whether something would work or not, try it. Even if it doesn’t work, you will not have the guilt of not trying.

Even though John didn’t have expected level of success with blog rush, he at least had the confidence to try it. Though he didn’t earn any money from blog rush, he has earned enough fame.

What do you feel about the blog rush project? Do you think John would have had the happiness for at least trying it? Please share it in the comments.

P.S: Never get bored in twitter. Follow me and I’ll keep you engaged (at least when I’m awake). I’m Ramkarthik in twitter.

Syte Black Review: How You Can Instantly Create Profit Pulling Websites

How much will you be earning if you can build websites in 5 minutes with adsense, amazon and clickbank installed in it? Adam Carn, a successful internet marketer and graphic designer, has come up with this product called syte black and he was kind enough to give me a syte black review copy for writing a review about it in my blog.

What Is Syte Black?
Syte Black is a product that helps you create websites in 5 minutes with adsense, amazon and clickbank inserted in your website. Once you create a site using syte black, you will be able to make money online just by promoting it.

How Does It Work?
When you create a website using syte black, you will be asked for your adsense, amazon and clickbank ID. Once you have entered these, ads with your ID will be shown in your site. By promoting it, you will be earning money.

How To Set It Up?
This is easy and that is one of the main reasons why I am recommending syte black. All you need to do is, get a domain name, add it to your hosting account, and use this software to create a site in 5 minutes. You will be asked for domain name. After that you will be entering your affiliate and adsense ID. To create pages, you will be able to enter the specific keywords and you are also given the option to select the article that you want to appear in your pages from ArticleDashboard. Once you have done this, you can enter your host username and password. Verify whether everything you have entered is right and click on upload files. You website will be ready in few seconds.

Fine, I hear some of you complaining that you don’t understand. You will get an in-depth tutorial on how to setup your websites when you buy syte black.

How Do You Promote Your Site?
There are so many ways to promote but for best result, join forums and use your site as your signature link. Don’t spam forums. Post useful threads. You can also try Yahoo! Answers which works just like forums.

Let’s Do Some Math
You get a domain for $3 (.info domain would be fine since you are only going to promote and make money). You can get hosting account for less than $10 and host unlimited number of sites. Let’s say you promote your site and get 50 people to your site every day (that’s not a lot). 50 visitors a day would mean 1500 visitors per month. Let’s say 1% of them buy a click bank product. Clickbank products will earn around $10-$100 per sale according to the price of the product. 1% of 1500 is 15. Say you make $20 on an average per sale. It would mean $300 per month. To be honest with you, I don’t know how adsense converts since I haven’t used them much. But I’m sure you could easily earn your initial costs from adsense (domain and hosting).

So wouldn’t you be happy with extra $300 per month from one site on which you spend less than an hour to promote?

What I’d Like To See In The Product
To be honest, the product was very good. But there were indeed a few things that I would like to see in the product. There was not an option to handpick the products that I wanted to promote. This will make things easier for me. I will choose the products that have the best sales letter. It would have been better if there was an option to include my own affiliate banners or links in the site using the software. This would give more exposure to my promotions. But overall, the product was very good and if you are a person who can do all the promotions but find it hard to create good looking websites, syte black is for you.

The product is not launched yet and as I said in the starting of the blog post, I have been lucky to have a syte black review copy to write about it in my blog as it is a nice way to make money from home.

P.S: Don’t expect my math to work for you. You may earn more than what I have said or you may earn less. But if you are not taking any action, you cannot expect to earn money. This is just like any other make money online product and you need to act to earn money. Creating a site will not make you money but promoting will.