A recent post discussed the idea of being consistent – and persistent – with your marketing activities. Today, I want to talk about updating your blog regularly.

As you can see if you look through the archive at my site, posting on my blog regularly is often a challenge for me, so I’ve given this topic a lot of thought. What tools, techniques, and habits can one use to generate a consistent stream of blog posts?

Let’s start with tools – always the way to my techie heart. One very cool WordPress plug-in is called Editorial Calendar. This plug-in is only used within the Dashboard. You can choose to see between 3 and 5 weeks at a time and each post you’ve created appears on the calendar. This allows you to schedule posts weeks into the future. They don’t even need to be completed posts. You could layout your intended content just by creating future dated posts with nothing but a title, which can be changed later.

By creating a schedule of blog post topics, it’s easier to see what you plan to write and when each post is needed. As long as you get the post written before the future date you’ve scheduled, you’ll be good.

Another tool I recommend is perhaps the simplest – a text editor. I use TextPad (http://www.textpad.com/), but Notepad or any other text editor will work as well.

I use the text editor to actually write my posts. I don’t like to do it right in the WordPress Dashboard because I may not always have an internet connection when I’m writing, and God forbid I somehow lose the connection – and all my work! – before I save it. Working locally in my text editor – where I frequently save the file – is safer.

The reason I use a text editor rather than MS Word is that it’s much easier to cut and paste from a text editor to WordPress than from Word. Word often inserts a lot of unnecessary formatting garbage into the post under the hood. In the best case, it’s a lot of extra stuff the browser and search engines will need to sift through to get to the actual content. In the worst case, it will mess up the formatting of your post. I can’t tell you how many times a client has asked me to fix the formatting of a post after they’ve pasted its content from MS Word. So use a text editor, not Word, to write your posts!

The last resource I want to discuss today is a good royalty-free stock photo site to get images for your blog posts. Images make your posts more interesting for your audience to read.

I’ve used iStockPhoto (http://www.istockphoto.com/) for years. They have a large selection and a good search mechanism. Their prices for small photos has gone up considerably recently, though, so I also look for images in free galleries. These sites may not have as wide a variety of quality images, and the search function may not be as helpful, so it can take more time to find an appropriate image. Your trade-off is time vs. money, so you decide. Another paid site I’ve found good images at recently is PixMac (http://www.pixmac.com).

Are there tools you use to help generate your blog posts? Leave a comment and share with the class!

Next time, I’ll go over some techniques and habits that can enhance the likelihood of generating blog posts regularly.

We all know how important building an opt-in list is to your success online. The majority of visitors to your site don’t purchase or contact you on their first visit, so you are losing them forever.

Popups to the rescue! A popup is a smaller window that appears on a page where you convince a visitor to opt-in to your list so you can contact them later.

Action PopUp is a very cool script that can appear when a visitor
is about to leave your site or when they enter your site. The popup is unblockable since it uses HTML layers instead of actual pop-up windows.

A lightbox effect dims the screen behind the popup to prevent visitors from being distracted by what you have underneath. They fill in that info, the popup disappears, and Action Action PopUp submits that info to your autoresponder in the background while your prospect continues to read the sales message.

You can use any autoresponder you want with Action PopUp.

Action PopUp has a built-in sales letter personalizer. After they fill in their first name in the Action PopUp, the sales letter will change to match that first name. If the visitor typed “Steven” as their first name in the opt-in box, then hit submit, the opt-in form would invisibly submit the information to your newsletter, close the popup, and suddenly the sales page would say “Steven” wherever you’ve put the special code on your page.

Action PopUp can work as a WordPress plugin so you can add popups to your blogs with just a few clicks.

Best of all, this tool comes bundled with two other complementary tools!

Action Opt-In allows you to use your existing opt-in form on your site and makes it disappear after people subscribe.

Under normal circumstances, placing an opt-in form on a sales page is a definite no-no in Internet Marketing. When a visitor is about to buy, and they decide to sign up to your list instead, they are taken to a “thank you for signing up” page where they can’t order. You just lost a sale!

With Action Opt-In, once your prospect has filled out the subscription form, it vanishes and they can keep reading the current page.

Action Opt-In remembers if your visitors have already subscribed to your list and will hide the subscription box on repeat visits so they won’t be bothered again and again.

Action Opt-in can also work as a WordPress plugin.

The second bundled tool is Action Comments, a WordPress plugin. When someone fills in the comment form on your blog, they type in their first name and e-mail address. So why not ask these already-interested people if they’d like to subscribe to your mailing list?

You can pitch your newsletter to commenters using either a checkbox or a popup dialog box.

You can see all three of these tools working here at my site, and it’s true – my opt-ins have increased since I started using these scripts!

All three tools are very easy to install and the developer provides PDF installation guides for each. They’re particularly easy to install as WordPress plugins. But if you’re interested in using one or more of them and would like help installing and configuring them, I’d be happy to help you with them.

Learn more about Action PopUp, Action Opt-in, and Action Comments here.