The best way for me to describe this book is as the “Chicago Manual of Style” for the digital publishing age.

While available as an eBook, you’re going to want to go ahead and get the hardcover version to keep within easy reach of your desk.

It’s that useful.

Everybody Writes contains six main parts:

Parts 1 (How to Write Better) and 2 (Grammar and Usage) cover some basic writing rules anyone producing written content should be aware of.

Part 3 covers the importance of telling a story through your content and how to do that most effectively.

Part 4 covers a long list of “Publishing Rules” where Ann discusses topics like fact checking, interview tips, and finding and properly citing sources.

I envision most online marketers wearing out and having to replace Part 5 of their books multiple times over the years.

In this section Ann covers “13 Things Marketers Write” and she gives tips for producing better blog posts, writing for social platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, as well as covering tips for landing pages, headlines, and more.

Part 6 is also a great resource called “Content Tools” which points readers to some of the best research, writing, editing and productivity tools available today.

Go pick up your copy of Everybody Writes today.

The post Everybody Writes appeared first on Ryan Erisman.

This $3 eBook is a special edition of Jay’s New York Times Bestseller Youtility: Why Smart Marketing is About Help not Hype.

If you don’t “get it” already by the title, the central idea behind the book as Erica writes in the foreword is that “if your content provides useful information to the consumer, you can worry less about selling, and more about teaching better.”

As it relates to real estate marketing, Jay writes that his concept of “youtility” has three parts: self-serve information, real-time relevancy, and radical transparency.

Jay makes great cases for all three facets of “youtility” in the book, but I can personally speak to the third part, radical transparency.

One of my sites is focused on The Villages, a large active adult community in Central Florida.

The Villages also happens to be prone to sinkholes, a fact most real estate agents would prefer not to discuss or feel uncomfortable talking about at best.

On my site I have an article that tackles the issue head-on, and because of my “radical transparency” consumers reward me for being helpful. Check out this lead I received because of my sinkhole article:

This person went on to buy a nearly $300,000 house, and they found me all because of this one transparent article.

Being up front with the readers of your site builds trust.

So if you take nothing else away from this, think of some ways you can apply “radical transparency” to your content strategy and consumers will reward you.

The post Youtility for Real Estate appeared first on Ryan Erisman.

I get it. It’s kind of a rush to see validation that people are coming to your site and consuming the content you’ve created.

I’m definitely guilty of it too.

To help overcome this massive time suck, I came up with an analytics dashboard that contains just the stats you need to see at a glance to know how your site is performing and what you can do to make it better.

I recently set a few consulting clients up with this dashboard and it seems to have helped them get more out of the analytics data already available to them, so I wanted to share it with you too.

I’ll go a little further into detail on each widget below, but if you want to save time and just get the dashboard for yourself, click here, then choose which of your analytics accounts to add it to.

Meet the Widgets

The first few widgets you’ll see in the dashboard are what most would call vanity metrics. They’re good to know, and fun to look at when the numbers start to get big, but, its not really what you’d call actionable data.

You’ve got Total Visitors, Unique Visitors by Day, Total Active Visitors and Top Active Pages on the site right now.

Like I said you can’t really do much with this data other than look at it, but most people check these metrics first, so I placed them at the top of the dashboard so you don’t have to hunt for them.

Next you’ll see the Top Organic Landing Pages, Which Search Terms are Used to Find You, and How Did People Find Your Site widgets.

Let’s dig a little deeper into each of these and find out why they’re important and what you can deduce from the data in each.

Top Organic Landing Pages

These are the pages that are bringing in the most search engine traffic. It doesn’t necessarily mean these pages rank high, but it could. For instance you could be ranked #9 for a particular term, but still get a lot of traffic because of the sheer volume of searches being performed for that term.

But this information is important to have so that you can sort of do that detective work to figure out the why and how these pages are performing well, and hopefully use that information to replicate the effect across other pages on your site.

Which Search Terms are Used to Find You?

These days Google is keeping a lot more of your website data, particularly what terms people searched for to find you hidden. For most people the top two line items in the “search terms used to find you” report are (not set) and (not provided). For more on this particular topic check out the posts here and here.

So for the purposes of this widget, you’ll see I’ve edited those two out, so you’re just seeing actual keywords people searched for to find you.

How Did People Find Your Site?

This widget shows which sources drive the most traffic to your site.
It shows the amount of visitors as well as the “% New Visits” which tells you what percentage of those visitors have never been to your site before.

Which posts are most popular?

This differs from “Top Organic Landing Pages” in that it encompasses all traffic, not just search traffic. But, if search is your predominate traffic source, these two widgets might look very similar.

What Are People Searching For at Your Site?

This widget provides a great way to figure out what kind of information your readers are looking for and hoping to find at your site. In order for this widget to work, you need to have the ability to track site search set-up. Here’s a handy tutorial if you don’t yet have that set up.

More so than anything else what I like to pay attention to here are the items that start with “no-results”. These are terms readers searched for on your site that didn’t return any search results. These are gold as far as coming up with new topics to write about is concerned.

Where are your readers located?

I like this widget because it gives you an “at a glance” look at the geographic make-up of your audience. This is useful data in many ways.

Are you trying to attract people from outside of your area that might be moving to your area soon?

Or is your site strictly for the locals?

This widget helps you figure out how well you are reaching those desired audiences.

It’s also good if you are running any kind of paid promotion, be it search or social, because you can get a good idea of where the highest concentrations of your audience are, and thus, where to target your ads geographically.

Grab this Dashboard

Again, if you’d like to add this dashboard to your analytics account all you have to do is click this link, choose the profile you’d like to add it to, and that’s it. You should be all set.

Modify it to fit your exact needs. This might not suit your needs forever, but as your site and analytics needs grow you can add to it over time.

Further reading…

There’s so much more you can do using Google Analytics dashboards. If you’re interested in learning more, here are a few other resources for you to explore:

Dashboard Junkie – Many of the widgets in the dashboard I’ve provided here were inspired by widgets I learned about from Dashboard Junkie.

Going Beyond Standard Reporting with Google Analytics Filters, Segments, Reports, and Dashboards – This is a great post from KISSmetrics with some great tips on getting the most out of GA.

The post Minimum Viable Analytics Dashboard appeared first on Ryan Erisman.

In May, my sister and I were tasked with selling a house that we came to own together after our mother passed away last year.

In addition to the usual methods of putting a sign in the yard, placing an ad in the paper and throwing it up on Zillow (keep in mind I was not an active Realtor like I am now at the time), I figured hey, why not write about it and send a link out to my email subscribers?

You can see the article I wrote here: http://www.floridaforboomers.com/key-colony/

I sent about 4,000 emails to my list from FloridaforBoomers.com, and I also sent out to a list of about 6,000 from TheVillagesFloridaBook.com.

My Florida for Boomers list is made upon more than 35,000 people interested in moving to Florida, and even though the house I was selling is about 2 hours away from The Villages, I know that one thing people considering The Villages struggle with is that its so far away from the beach, so I decided to send to them to. My thinking was that this house would be a perfect weekend getaway for someone with a home in The Villages.

Here’s the text of one of the emails I sent to my list:

Right inbox at the right time?

Thousands of email subscribers clicked through to view the article, and from that I had a total of 4 people fill out the form I placed at the bottom of that post seeking more information.

The fourth person to contact me happened to be the personal assistant to someone on my Villages list who got my email, lives in The Villages now, but “might be interested in a beach get-away.”

I set up a time for him to come see it, he shot a video of the house using his iPad, took it to the interested buyer (his boss), she liked it, made an offer and we accepted.

The buyer never even set foot in the house herself.

Awesome. I just sold a house through my email list!

But wait, there’s more…

I was curious, where exactly did this person come from…how did she get on my email list?

So I fired up aweber and searched using her email address, and here’s what I saw:

Holy cow…not only did I sell a house via my hyperlocal site, but this person joined my list from an ad on FACEBOOK back in July of 2012. I spend thousands of dollars a month marketing on Facebook, and this is precisely how this particular buyer got on my email list.

After this experience, here are a few takeaways…

1. Focus on building your email list. Your site exists to build your list. Without my email list, this particular sale doesn’t happen.

2. Don’t under estimate the power of what you are building with your hyperlocal site. I think you’ll be amazed what your site and resulting email list can accomplish for you. Yes, there is a sizeable time and monetary investment involved with getting it off the ground, but focus on the long game.

3. Let’s hear it for Facebook ads. It’s easily the marketing channel with the highest ROI right now, and we should all take advantage of that fact while we can.

The post A Strong Case For The Value of Your Hyperlocal Site and Email List appeared first on Ryan Erisman.

I get it. It’s your job to promote the area and tell readers and potential customers just how great it is.

You don’t make money when people decide not to buy in your area.

But this strategy can make for a pretty boring blog. It gets boring to read and I’m willing to bet it gets pretty boring to write too.

But I can tell you that it actually pays to talk bad about your market. Not your market as a whole … otherwise why are you there … but certain aspects of it.

See, our readers are smart. Smarter than we give them credit for most of the time. They know when something seems too good to be true, it probably is. By highlighting some of the “not so good” aspects of your area, you can build up incredible loyalty and trust with readers.

They’ll know you’re going to shoot them straight, and not just shovel them a bunch of bullshit about what you want them to hear.

Is traffic bad in some areas? Is there higher crime in some areas? Are some places run-down and, well, just not so nice? Your readers deserve to know the bad just as much as the good.

I love the market I write about. Even though I’m far too young to live there, I think its paradise for the right kinds of people, and so my enthusiasm about the place shines through in most of my posts.

But there are definitely some issues, and I’ve never been afraid to point those out.

For instance, there’s an ongoing IRS investigation into how certain things were financed and paid for.

Certain amenities that first attracted people to the community are being phased out.

There was even a meth lab bust a few weeks ago in this quiet little retirement community I cover.

Look at this one which resulted in a $253,000 sale:

(Here’s the article they were referring to in their comment.)

Now when you create content that runs counter to the “rah rah rah” and “everything is just peachy keen” thoughts that some people want to harbor about their town, you’re bound to get some haters:

One of these days you just might print something good about The Villages. All I see is negative publicity for The Villages or stories about other retirement places that someone should check out. What exactly is your agenda?

But don’t let that stop you. For every one person who hates what you’re doing, there are a multitude of others out there who will appreciate your honesty:

From a prospective resident:

For what it’s worth, Ryan, my husband and I think you are doing an awesome job.  TV is truly Disneyland for adults, however, it is definitely not for everyone.  We want to hear the good, bad and ugly as there is no such thing as “perfect” in this world.

From someone who is already a resident:

Keep up the good work in keeping us Villagers informed as to what’s going on. I believe that it is helpful in knowing how some people try to take advantage of we senior’s generosity and compassion. The approach of our local newspaper in only telling stories that paint The Villages in a rosy hue does a disservice to its readership. A famous eastern newspaper’s motto: “All the News That Fit to Print” is in line with your publication’s approach.

And I have many many more I could share, but I think you get the point.

The bottom line is this: Don’t be afraid to write about things that might be unpopular with a segment of your audience or things that may even turn people off about buying in your area. Chances are, they’ll find out about whatever it is soon enough, and be pissed that you never told them.

Honesty is always the best policy, and it can also pay pretty well too when you use it to your advantage.

The post Sometimes It’s O.K. to Talk Bad About Your Market appeared first on Ryan Erisman.

And it’s one most agents field every day.

The knee-jerk response is to cast a wide net, and rattle off just about any city or town within a 10-20 mile radius.

I serve Daytona Beach, Ormond Beach, Port Orange, New Smyrna, and Orlando.

Follow the herd. Everybody else is doing it, so I should too.

Wrong answer.

This is terrible positioning.

You may very well serve all those areas, but clients want specialists, and whether they know it or not, subconsciously its what they’re trying to figure out when they ask “What market do you serve?”.

What message are you sending out?

Last month I had a lead come in from someone interested in 5 neighborhoods within one very specific community.

The agent I gave the lead to (let’s call them Agent #1) followed-up with the prospect in an email, saying:

I can help you find a home in [specific community] but also [other community], [other community], [other community], and [other community].

Raise hand. Place palm over face.

Contrast that with another agent, let’s call them Agent #2, when I asked if they would be interested in a lead for a certain area responded with:

I work mostly with [specific type of homes] in [specific area].

Short and sweet, but very powerful in the eyes of your potential clients.

They even qualified the response with “mostly” and it’s still powerful.

Now let me ask you, do you think this Agent #2 turned down my lead because it only met one of the criteria they “mostly” work with?

Heck no. They accepted this lead and several others I’ve sent since then.

The point here is not to exclude prospects if they seem like they’d be good clients but otherwise don’t meet all of your criteria.

After you attract them, you can decide whether or not you want to work with them.

It’s totally o.k. to be a generalist with a specialty. Just be careful how you position yourself.

While prospects are still “playing the field” it’s in your best interest to project to them that you’re a specialist, and not part of the herd like all the other agents they run into.

The post What Market Do You Serve? appeared first on Ryan Erisman.

The sport consumed me. Whether it was baseball season or not, I could be found practicing my hitting, throwing balls onto the roof and catching them as they rolled off, or pitching to my mom or dad in the backyard. If I wasn’t playing baseball, I was watching it, following the Braves in the days of Bob Horner and Dale Murphy.

I played short stop and pitcher. Because of all the work I put into it, I was on the All-Star team every year except maybe my first.

One year, because I was such a good pitcher, I was asked to move up to a higher level league with kids that were a year or two older than me to play. Despite the age difference, and playing with kids bigger and stronger than myself, I was still in the top 3 pitchers in that league.

When it came time for All-Star team selection, I was shocked and disappointed to learn that I could not be on the All-Star team that year because I was not old enough. Looking back, I guess when you’re 11 or 12, you don’t quite understand things like that.

I was so upset that I vowed to quit playing baseball. I just thought that being left off the team because of my age was so unfair, and besides, I had recently found a new passion in tennis.

Coaches, not just my own coach but others from around the league, visited with me at my home and tried to convince me to reconsider. I was a stubborn kid and wouldn’t hear it.

I never played baseball again. It’s one of the biggest regrets I have in life. A fine example of what I like to call “Little League thinking”.

The only reason I’m writing this is because I think there are a couple lessons here that I hope my own kids can learn from:

#1: Don’t let other people’s rules determine your future. I let one silly rule make the decision for me that I was not going to play baseball again. What if I had stuck it out and come back next year more determined and driven by my anger? Would I have been an even better pitcher? You bet. Who knows how far I might have gone in the sport.

#2: The younger you are, the more you need to listen and at least consider the words of people older than you, especially when you know they are just trying to look out for you. Looking back, this was true when I was 12, and it’s still true as I write this today at the age of 32.

The post Little League Thinking appeared first on Ryan Erisman.

Lead generation is an often overlooked but very profitable way to monetize a niche site. Most commonly, niche sites are monetized with Adsense, affiliate links, and even some private ad sales. While Adsense and affiliate links work to a certain extent, it can be tough for a fairly new or even well established niche site to get interest from private advertisers.

I’ve used lead generation to overcome this on some of my niche sites, and my income from lead generation now surpasses what I bring in from Adsense and affiliate links.

I first became aware of lead generation after reading this Shoemoney post a few years ago. Now, the type of lead generation Jeremy suggests is slightly different than what I’m describing here in that his strategy involves building a site for one particular business or client, whereas what I’m going to talk about below involves using your existing niche site to generate leads for a variety of businesses or clients. But I definitely tip my hat to his post which turned the light on in my head regarding the possibilities of lead generation.

The Basics
My simplistic definition of lead generation is gathering someone’s contact information and selling it to someone else for a fixed fee. You could say that its similar to affiliate marketing, but usually with affiliate marketing you are paid on conversion, meaning someone has to actually purchase before you get paid. Not so with lead generation. Companies simply pay you for the lead, then the onus is on them to convert that lead into a sale.

For example, I have niche sites about retirement communities. I know…contain your excitement. It just happens to be a topic I’m extremely familiar with, so it works for me. My website visitors are looking for information on the communities available to them, so in a nutshell, I collect their contact info., send it to the community for a fee, and the community sends them more information and gets in touch with them to try and make a sale.

You can learn a lot more about the basics behind lead generation from Shoemoney’s post I linked to above. When I was just starting out I also purchased and learned a lot from Chad Frederiksen’s Local Lead Plan. Local Lead Plan is definitely geared toward working with local businesses and building sites specifically for them, but I am applying a lot of what I learned in that course to my niche site lead gen activities. There are also some sample contracts provided in the course that I have put to good use when signing up new clients.

The Approach
Email is the quickest way to get your proposal out to several businesses for consideration. Here’s a rough email template that I’ve had success with. Feel free to use/modify it to fit your niche:

XXXXX,

Hope the new year is off to a great start for you.

I wanted to run a unique idea by you. I own the website, xxxxxxxxx.com and most of my website visitors are looking for more information about communities just like yours.

In addition to traditional advertising options, I also offer a “pay for performance” lead plan.

Here’s how it works:

If someone wants more information I have them fill out a form (name address, email, phone, etc.) which is then forwarded to you (or the sales office) to follow-up.

I charge $XX for any lead sent. Currently there are XX communities listed there now and they are getting around XX-XX leads per month.

The model works great because you only pay for actual leads sent, not “clicks” or “impressions” that end up being of little value to you.

My question is, would this type of model be of interest to you guys?

Would you be willing to test out the concept over the next month? I wouldn’t ask for payment for any leads sent the rest of this month. This would give you a chance to test it out and see if the leads are worth it to you.

Let me know what you think!

Thanks,
Ryan

Direct Mail has also been good to me for getting new clients signed on. I usually send a two page letter, the first being an introductory note introducing myself/my site and the 2nd page goes into the details of my lead generation program. Here’s an example of what I send:

Download sample letter

Now, I just send this in a standard #10 envelope, but if you want to step up your game you might consider sending your letters out priority mail to get a little more attention.

You may also want to test who you send it to in an organization. Sometimes I send it to the owner of the business, and sometimes I address it to the “Director of Marketing”. I’m still trying to figure out what works best.

Initial Offer
You’ll hopefully start to get some call or emails from interested businesses. If this is your first time doing lead generation and don’t have any prior results to share, you might consider letting them test out your program for a few weeks for free or at a reduced rate. Be sure to cap their trial at a set number of leads. This will give them a chance to determine the quality of the leads you’re sending, and assuming all is well, you’ll have no problem convincing them to participate long term.

After you have a few clients running in your lead gen program, you should use your best judgement as to whether to offer a free or reduced trial to convert new prospects. In most case you can just reference the success others are having and more or less say “take it or leave it”.

Collecting and Distributing Leads
I use Wufoo to create forms to collect and distribute leads. I like it because it keeps track of all leads that come through the system and notifications of new leads can be automatically sent to me and the business I’m promoting.

The more information you collect from the visitor, the more valuable your lead will be to the business paying you for the lead. I require all my leads to include name, mailing address, phone number and email address. In my mind, and in the mind of the communities I work with, if someone is willing to give up all that contact info. they are a serious prospect. Much more so than say, someone who provides a fake name and a throw-away email address.

You’ll have to figure out what works best for you and the companies you choose to work with.

Landing Pages
I try to keep the landing pages that my lead gen forms appear on as simple as possible. I use the “full width” page template so users don’t get distracted by links or ads in the sidebar. I’ve still got the regular header/navigation on the page though, so I’m sure I lose some conversions because of that. But most of my forms average between 20 and 30% conversion.

I’ve tested having just the form vs. a few pictures with a description of the information they will receive then the form and have found that the pictures and description version seems to convert better. I also include some “trust signals”, letting people know that their information will only be shared with the company they want information about. Here’s what one of my lead gen pages looks like:

Maximize the Opportunity
There are a few steps you can take to maximize the number of people seeing and filling out your lead forms. Here are a few ideas that have worked for me.

On-site
You want to highlight and make your lead gen forms more noticeable to visitors to entice them to take action and fill one (or more) forms out. I have links to lead gen forms where appropriate on my site based on the business and their location, but I also have a “Featured” page that lists all of them. After reading this article over at DIY Themes I’ve recently started using a Hello-Bar on my site which links to my “Featured” page and so far it seems to be working well.

You could also try a sidebar ad, a banner ad, or an ad at the end of your posts promoting your “Featured” page or individual lead gen forms.

Newsletter/auto-responder
One of the best things I’ve done to increase the amount of leads is to add each business individually as an auto-responder message to my newsletter subscribers. Because I have several clients I’m generating leads for, I have to be careful to spread these out, and be sure to intersperse them with pure content messages. This isn’t difficult, and even the messages that promote these businesses are seen as valuable content by my readers. I rarely get a spam complaint from these messages.

PPC
Most niche site owners don’t promote their sites via PPC. Since most niche sites are monetized with Adsense, it doesn’t make a whole lot of business sense to buy clicks from Google just to sell them right back to Google. But with lead generation, it’s different since you have the opportunity to buy clicks for much less than what your pay out per lead is. Just make sure you have your pages dialed in and converting at a rate you’re comfortable with before going down this road or you could lose your shirt.

Getting Paid
On the first of every month I send my clients an invoice for all of the leads that were sent in the previous month. I use Freshbooks for this because it allows clients to easily pay online through PayPal or credit card, and I can also schedule late payment reminders to go out at set intervals (I use 5, 10, and 15 days) to clients who are slow to pay.

Most of my clients pay online but I do have a few that have to have a check cut by their accounting department and send to me via snail mail.

Advancing the Relationship
After clients see success from all the leads you’ve sent them, it makes it a lot easier to discuss other ways that they can put their business in front of your readers through banner ads, newsletter or e-book sponsorships, and the like.

It also makes it easier to approach other businesses to advertise on your site when you have a few “wins” under your belt that you can reference.

You now have a basic understanding of what lead generation is and how it can increase the profitability of your niche site, how to approach and land new clients, how to collect and distribute the leads, and how to get paid and advance the relationships you build with these clients.

The next step is to put it all into action. I’m interested to hear about your success, so drop back by sometime and leave a comment about your experiences with it.

Good luck!

The post Monetizing Niche Sites With Lead Generation appeared first on Ryan Erisman.

I’m really looking for spare parts.

What I mean by that is I’m looking for ideas, tools, and concepts that I can combine with my own ideas, tools, and concepts to create the next BIG idea, tool, or concept.

In Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation, Steven Johnson writes that “good ideas want to connect, fuse, recombine”.

Johnson tells the story of the incubator, an invention that has helped millions of low-birth weight babies around the world survive the first few weeks and months of life and go on to live normal lives. He explains how the idea came about (someone saw a similar application outside of a healthcare setting), and how the idea continues to evolve (with incubators being built for hospitals in Third-World countries out of…wait for it…SPARE car parts).

Where’s My Tip came to be because of my practice of looking for spare parts. I combined my experience and knowledge of the web and e-commerce with a real life problem that many travelers face, to create one of the 9-Best Travel Related Businesses of 2010.

So the next time someone gives you a hard time about surfing the web, reading other blogs and websites, or even dabbling with creating your own sites or projects, just tell them you’re looking for spare parts.

Image credit: Spare Parts by pabloneco on Flickr

The post Looking For Spare Parts appeared first on Ryan Erisman.

Alright so no extensions, you’ve got to get these articles done. I know the feeling. A few days ago I was under the gun and had to write 24 articles including Title tags, meta descriptions and headlines for a client and only had 48 hours to do it. Here’s how I got the job done.

Clear all distractions

This one might be easier for me than some because I live an hour away from Disney World. So I shipped the wife and kids off to Disney for a couple days. Sure this cost me some good money, but it was a heckuva lot less than I was being paid to write the articles, so… distractions cleared.

But it can’t stop there. If you are going to get your work done on time, you have to be vigilant against ALL distractions. Close Tweetie. Close Facebook. Your friends will still be there when you get back. Minimize your email window. NFL games on Sunday? There’s always SportsCenter. Only allow yourself to check these things when you are on a defined break (see below).

Take the first step

Getting started is probably the hardest part. Taking the first step and getting to work on the first article is a lot like Forrest Gump hobbling down that old dirt road in Greenbow when slowly but surely he picks up speed, the leg braces fly off, and he is off to the races. Just make sure you keep the momentum once you get going.

Just like a runner, when you stop for an extended period of time you’ll stiffen up and getting started all over again will be a challenge.

Use The Pomodoro Technique

(No tomatoes were harmed in the production of these articles, even though Five Guys erroneously slipped some onto my Bacon Cheeseburger…bastards.)

24 articles in 48 hours is literally a race against the clock. I use the Pomodoro Technique to make sure that time does not get the better of me. The Pomodoro Technique is a time management tool developed by Francesco Cirillo. I encourage you to click through and learn more about this fascinating method of time management, but in the most simple terms you are required to work uninterrupted for 25 minutes (considered 1 Pomodoro), followed by a 5 minute break.

I use the handy online app Focus Booster to keep track of the time.

After every 4 Pomodoros, you should take an extended break. The 5 minute breaks between Pomodoros and extended breaks after every 4 Pomodoros are the perfect time to check Facebook, check Twitter, and see how your NFL fantasy team is doing. Better yet, go for a walk or get a bite to eat. Before long you’ll need to get back to work.

Use A Writing Frame

Chris Brogan has written about how he uses a writing frame to produce his blog posts. I was using a writing frame long before Chris became an overnight success, but his advice is spot on.

A writing frame is basically an outline. If you organize your writing in such a way and break it down into sections of content before you begin writing, the process will go much faster. You will feel more like you are filling in the blanks as you go along, rather than feeling like you have to come up with the next big idea for the next paragraph.

Scribe

As I plow through the articles, I worry more about getting them done than SEO. That’s where Scribe comes in. Sometimes, usually depending on the client’s needs, after I finish all the articles I’ll take 5-10 minutes each to run them through Scribe and polish up the rough edges to make sure they are top-notch from an SEO standpoint. Just make sure you wait until the very end when all of your articles are complete to do this step. Otherwise it will disrupt your writing flow.

Dropbox

None of us think that hard drive crashes will ever happen to us. But hard drive crashes seem to know (and love it the most) when you’re up against a deadline. I use Dropbox to keep this from even becoming a concern. Every article I start gets saved to a folder on my Dropbox, and my client can even keep track of my progress should I choose to share the folder with them before I’m done.

So there you have it. That’s how I recently wrote 24 articles in 48 hours. If you’re ever under the gun like I was I hope you’ll apply some of the techniques I’ve outlined here. Good luck!

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