One of the biggest challenges for new article writers is coming up with topics to write about. The key to developing great article topics is to ask yourself the right questions. Using the topic of “Coaching”, pull out a sheet of paper and a pen, set aside 15 minutes to brainstorm, and jot down answers to the following questions:

1. What are the five most common questions people ask you about being a coach?
2. What are the top five things you wish all your new clients knew about working with a coach?
3. What are the five biggest lessons you’ve learned about working with your clients?
4. What are the top five things you can help your clients with?
5. What are the five biggest benefits of working with a coach?
6. What are the five biggest challenges to working with a coach?
7. What are five things every new coach needs to know?
8. What five things will make it easier for a business owner to work with a coach?
9. What five tools does every coach need to have?
10. What five questions should every business owner ask when  interviewing a coach?
11. What five questions should every coach ask before taking on a new client?
12. What are the five biggest mistakes business owners make when hiring a coach?

At the end of 15 minutes, you should have a list of at least a dozen article ideas. But don’t stop there! Remember, articles for submission to article directories typically average around 300-500 words, so each one of the five answers in each question above can be turned into an article, digging a little deeper.

Another easy way to generate article ideas is to keep a notebook by your computer, and every time someone asks you a question, write it down. At the end of the week or month, look through your list for additional article topics.

By keeping your eyes open in your everyday life as you go through your own coaching responsibilities and tasks, you’ll soon have an endless supply of fodder for your article marketing.

Believe it or not, there are still many business owners who do not have websites. The Internet has dramatically changed the way people communicate, send and receive information, and shop. If you do not have a website, you are hurting your business.

A website makes you look like a professional. If you wanted to do business with someone, especially if it was business done long distance, you would expect them to have some type of website that gave you information about the type of services they provide. The costs for registering a domain and building and hosting the website are very inexpensive. Without a website, your business can look second rate.

Another reason why you need a website is so people can find you. If someone is sitting at home trying to find a good copywriter, they will more than likely turn on the Internet and perform a search. If you are a copywriter and you don’t have a website, they cannot find you. And if they cannot find you, they cannot hire you.

Even if you decide to build your business locally, it helps to have a website. You can distribute resumes, business cards, and flyers with your phone number, and you may receive some phone calls. However, if you have a website where people can get a glimpse of what you do, you will earn more business. Plus, some people would rather pop onto your website and email you versus picking up a phone and calling you.

Your website will also let people know exactly what type of services you offer and how much you charge. People do not want to wait for that information. They want to know things now. You can also include an online portfolio where prospective clients can view work that you have completed and read past clients’ testimonials. This can help them decide if you are the person who can handle the project they need completed.

Having a website will also allow for automated ordering. If you sell cosmetics and one of your clients is having a bout of insomnia and decides to surf the web at 2:00 in the morning, they can happily shop for your products at home. They do not need to wait until the next day to call an order in to you.

Websites also allow you to do business globally. Instead of focusing on your local area, people from all over the world can view your site and do business with you. This opens up a whole new base of clients and opportunities.

Having a website, even a simple one, will only help your business. Without one, you are going to be losing out on many prospective clients and sales.

Google is by far the largest search engine on the planet. Though Bing and Yahoo have merged, they still haven’t made a dent in Google’s market share. If you want to get free traffic, optimizing your site for Google is the most important thing you can do.

By and large, what you do that benefits your Google ranking will also help you improve your rankings with other search engines.

Here are a few tips for optimizing your website for Google SEO.

Start with High Quality Content

The content in your website is like the engine of a sports car. It’s what truly matters. Having great artwork on a sports car is a nice touch, but without a good engine, it doesn’t matter.

Marketers who focus on things like link building or SEO tactics at the expense of content will inevitably lose out. Google is constantly updating their algorithm to separate the high quality content from the chaff.

Design Does Matter

In addition to creating high quality content, aim to create a high quality website overall.

After Google’s “Panda Update,” the quality of your web design is starting to play an important part (learn more about how Google Panda has changed SEO). You can read more about Panda on Web Pro News here and here.

Google knows that great websites have great design. Without getting too much into the technical details, Google has essentially trained a complex artificial intelligence robot to spot the difference between good design and poor design and reward good sites accordingly.

Hire a professional designer to do your site. Or, if you’re doing the site yourself, at the very least hire a designer to do your header or look over your site.

Build a Variety of Backlinks

Build backlinks to your site using a variety of different tactics and methods.

There is no “golden method” when it comes to link building. Sometimes getting one PR 5 link is what it takes to get to #1, at other times you need 200 PR 0 to PR 1 links.

The best way to take your site to the top is to throw in a mix of all different kinds of tactics.

Use traditional press to get high quality backlinks. Do guest blogging on high PR related websites. Use low quality backlink tactics like social bookmarking or article marketing. Throw them all together and see what sticks.

When you get backlinks, optimize both your home page and subpages within your website.

Pay Attention to Internal Linking

Internal linking matters. It matters a great deal, in fact. Try to interlink all the pages on your website through a “related articles” section at the bottom of your post.

Silo your content so that different topics on your site are split into different “groups.” Grouping your articles is one of the proven methods of effectively passing link juice throughout a website.

These tips will help you get legitimately ranked in Google, which will help you rank in all the other search engines as well. Lay the groundwork and don’t take shortcuts with SEO. It’ll take a little while for your site to really get traction, but when it does, it’ll be unstoppable.

One of WordPress’s most innovative capabilities is “widgets.” Widgets allow you to customize your WordPress sidebar layout with a number of different pre-programmed options.

You can also expand your widgets to include all kinds of other features. Everything works through drag and drop and is extremely easy to design.

To get started, go to “Widgets” under “Appearance” in your WordPress set up. Here are a few of the most common options.

Archives

The archives shows a backlog of all the posts you’ve made this month, as well as provides direct links to the archives of previous months.

This is extremely useful for helping people find older content.

Calendar

The calendar is similar to the archive, except it lists your posts on a calendar. This can be useful for more visual people who are looking for content on your site.

Links and Blogroll

Are there other resources people in your industry should know about? The links and blogroll section makes it easy to link to other sites.

Links that go into your blogroll are site wide links, meaning every page from your site will point to that link through your widget. For other webmasters, it’s extremely valuable as it passes a lot of link juice.

Categories

If you have clearly defined categories, you can put them in the sidebar to make your site easier to navigate.

Tag Cloud

The tag cloud is one of the most visually stunning widgets you can choose from. It takes all your tags, which are like keywords you use to describe posts, and creates a “cloud,” a formation of different sized words. The more often you’ve used a tag, the larger the word.

This creates a very Web 2.0 kind of look, while giving people an easy way to find posts they’re looking for.

RSS and Social Media

By default, WordPress comes loaded with an RSS widget. The RSS widget makes it easy for people with RSS readers to subscribe to your blog.

WordPress doesn’t come out of the box with social media widgets, such as Like buttons or Follow buttons. However, there are plenty of plug-ins out there that can add this capability.

Raw HTML for Everything Else

Finally, you have the raw HTML option. This option gives you complete flexibility for what you want to put in your sidebar.

If you wanted to put a large banner image in the sidebar, how would you do it? One easy way would be to just use straight HTML code.

What if you wanted a subscription box? All you’d need to do is edit the boxes to be small enough to fit and put the HTML code in the side.

These are some of the most common WordPress widgets you can choose from. By mixing and matching widgets, you can create a highly unique and personal design that’s also very easy to use.

Is the thought of blogging for business stressing you out?

Is your blog neglected and in dire need of refreshment?

Do you want to attract the right type of client to your website?

If you answered YES to any of these questions have I got a treat for you! Janet Slack of Solopreneur.biz giving away ONE seat to Laurie Foley’s class “Blog More, Stress Less: Six Steps to a Sustainable Blog” valued at $497. You can find out more about the program here but now for the best part…how YOU can WIN!

There’s going to be a contest and here’s how it’s going to go:

#1 – To enter, simply create a post on your blog about why you would like to be in the class “Blog More, Stress Less”. You’ll even get bonus points in the contest if you link to Solopreneur.biz and the “Blog More, Stress Less” websites here:

http://www.solopreneur.biz

http://blogmorestressless.com/

#2 – After you post to your blog, simply go to our contest page on Solopreneur.biz on Facebook and post a live link to your blog post.

That’s it! You’ll be entered into the contest. They’ll be reading your posts everyday and promoting them on the Solpreneur.biz on Facebook Wall and they’ll pick the final winner on Friday, March 2nd.

You’ve got nothing to lose (except perhaps STRESS) and everything to gain. Have fun and be creative, which relieves stress too!

About Laurie Foley:

Laurie Foley is an online business coach with a thriving practice that specializes in branding. She got off to a rough start with her blog – Laurie wanted it to work but felt clueless and unsatisfied for months and months. Then she read in the New York Times that 95% of blogs are abandoned within 4 months, and she knew she wasn’t the only one who had been struggling to sustain a creative and helpful blog.

Laurie then spent a solid year (and a lot of money!) studying blogging to learn how to create a blog that is easy to sustain and helps you achieve more in your business as a coach or consultant. She put what she learned into practice and was awarded one of the “Top Ten Coaching Blogs” from the School of Coaching Mastery in 2009 and 2010 for her blog at lauriefoley.com

About Janet Slack and Solopreneur.biz:

Janet is a Professional Certified Coach, well-known author, speaker and blogger on topics related to running a successful small business. She has mentored, coached and supported hundreds of others as they started or grew their own small businesses. Her passion is coaching people to succeed in life through seeking fun, challenges and rewards whether they are small business owners, women in transition or even those conquering fear and learning to find joy. Her first book, Mind Your Own Biz, is a guide to starting and developing a coaching business. Janet is a coauthor of How the Fierce Handle Fear.

To have a successful coaching business you need to get noticed. No one will read or buy from you if they can’t find you right? But, how do you get yourself out there so people CAN find you? That is where search engine optimization, more commonly known as SEO, comes into play.

SEO What?

Search engine optimization, or SEO for short, is a series of tools, or thought processes and tasks completed on your web pages, that help your website or blog to get noticed by the search engines. Search engines use clever things called bots and spiders to crawl sites for anything that makes them relevant to search parameters entered by Internet visitors.

Most people either don’t know what they are looking for or they don’t know where to find it on the Internet. They rely on the search engines to do the work for them. The words that visitors use in the search boxes are termed “keywords” by Internet marketers. When you use the same words in various places on your site, search engines will rank your web pages in relation to others using the same keywords. The one’s who use research and optimization techniques the best, will end up on top of the list. Why does being at the top of search engines matter?

Research has found that 60% of all web searchers will click on one of the top 3 sites they are presented with. The majority of those will choose the number 1 ranked spot. Having one of the top three positions, therefore, can results in a much greater amount of traffic. It’s not just the amount of traffic that’s important to note, though. After the 3rd spot, the response from search engine users diminishes greatly. This means that the visitors that you get from position 4 and below are less likely to become paying customers.

How to Use It

So, how exactly do you get to the top spots for your coaching business in the search engines? There are several tools and resources that can help with creating top notch SEO for your websites. They revolve around keywords and keyword phrases but the problem is what words to use for your particular business niche.

Think like a customer. After all, you own a business but at times you are also a customer. If it were you, what words would you enter to find the information that your potential customers are trying to find? This will be a short list but one that you can start with.

From there, use some online keyword software to get more ideas.  Many marketers use WordTracker’s Free Keyword Tool to help them determine which keywords are hot. These keyword programs get their results from various search engines so you can be assured that your keywords represent current parameters.

Search engine optimization is useful for content but that is not the only place. Use keywords to get ranked through other places on your site and other sites too. Here are just a few:

• Headlines (for each web page and article)
• Anchor text (for links within articles and elsewhere on the page)
• Picture tags
• Tabs (pulldown menus)

Search engine optimization helps you to create a relevant website for the search engines. After you take the time to set up your website with all the information customers will want to see when they visit, use your keywords. This gives the search engines what they need to rank you well so that those customers can find your products or services when it’s most important – when it’s time to buy!

It almost goes without saying that one of the main reasons you run a business is to make money. If you have a traditional store with a physical location, you can always accept payments from your customers simply by getting yourself a cash register or cash box.

Yet many businesses are exclusively on online. Then you need to figure out a way for your customers to pay for the goods and services you sell. For many businesses, PayPal has been the answer.

PayPal’s “Website Payments Standard” product is what many businesses use. There is no monthly fee associated with the service. It also allows businesses to accept customer payments via credit card.

The service works by providing customers a clickable button or link that takes them to the PayPal website when they are ready to purchase. The customer enters their information on PayPal, and is then returned to the business’s website after the transaction is completed. PayPal provides the shipping and other information to the business to complete the transaction.

Basic PayPal Set-Up

Set-up is relatively simple. Begin the process by signing up for a website payments standard account on PayPal. Provide your business information, including the bank account you want to link to your PayPal account. PayPal then provides you with tools to create the HTML code for the “Buy Now” or “Add to Cart” buttons. You can insert this code on the appropriate page of your website.

For an additional fee, PayPal also allows you to set up subscription services that your customers can buy. For example, a business that provides monthly reports can sell a subscription to customers who are willing to pay a certain price each month. Customers only have to provide their credit card information once.

PayPal also offers a service called “Website Payments Pro.” This provides you with the ability to accept customer payments directly on your website. This service costs $30 a month. It does require that you manage your own credit card data security infrastructure. This can be a daunting task for many small businesses. There are strict laws and regulations that apply. However, high-volume businesses may consider it worth the additional time and expense.

PayPal’s Fees and Charges

PayPal charges a fee for each transaction. The fee is based on the volume of your monthly sales. If your business does a monthly business of 50 transactions for $20 each, PayPal will take $44 of your $1000 as a fee. The fees generally decrease as the dollar value of your business increases. However, each individual transaction triggers a minimum 30 cent fee. If your business does lots of very low price or “microtransactions” online, then PayPal might not be an optimal solution.

PayPal has proven to be the convenient, reliable and reasonably priced service for a significant number of online businesses. It’s convenient for your customers. And it’s a fast and easy way to collect payment.

Affiliate marketing basically means selling other people’s products for a commission online. Affiliate marketing is similar to offline sales where sales people earn a commission for selling a product; the difference is that all selling is conducted online.

As an affiliate marketer you will research and find products to promote on your website. Each time you make a sale through your affiliate link you will earn a portion of that sale. The commissions can vary from as low as 7% to a generous 50%.

The sales are tracked through your unique affiliate ID which is assigned to you at the time you sign up for a specific affiliate program. Your unique affiliate ID is tracked and each time a sale is made through your link it is recorded. A good affiliate program will give you plenty of tools for promoting their products as well as a comprehensive member’s area where you can track your affiliate sales and commissions.

Affiliate marketing is a good way to get started online. You can be set up and ready to go within a few days and there is no need to spend any time creating your own products or purchasing inventory. You are simply promoting other people’s products, which means the vendor is actually responsible for order fulfilment, customer service and anything else related to the sale – you simply refer the sale to them and get paid for doing so.

For example if you have a love of cooking, you can create a website around cooking related topics and include tips, recipes, and reviews of all your favorite cooking gadgets. You can then find affiliate programs online and promote some of those products on your website. You can find programs by doing a search under your chosen topic such as “cooking” and adding the words “affiliate program” to that term.
You can also find affiliate programs at places like CJ.com.

Although affiliate marketing is an easy way to get started online, there is a little more to it than just throwing up a few links and banners and waiting for the affiliate check to arrive. A good affiliate marketer knows it takes time and effort to make sales.

A good way to do this is by providing quality information on your website and only linking to affiliate products where appropriate. Another good tip is to review the products you promote so that you can accurately describe all the features – good and bad. Your customers will appreciate honest feedback and will be more likely to buy from you if you give them good quality information and honest reviews.

Link building is an important aspect of a successful search engine optimization (SEO) campaign. The more quality links you have coming into your site, the better. It the sites linking to you are quality sites and contain your keywords, even better. However, on the path to the number one spot on the page rankings, many business owners make a few common link building mistakes.

Limiting the sites you target for backlinks – Yes, high page ranking websites and pages are lucrative opportunities. However, don’t neglect the smaller businesses either. Focus on getting a wide variety of links from relevant websites.

Not using keywords, anchor text, in your backlinks – Keywords are your bread and butter. Not only do they help motivate actual clicks, they help the search engines index properly. And they boost your search engine ranking, which is of course the ultimate goal. Skip using anchor text like <Click Here> or <Download Now>. Use your keywords!

Too many links on a page – Too many links on the page confuses not only the website visitor but also the search engines. It divides the power of your links and minimizes their effectiveness. Instead, choose your links wisely. Choose the ones that seem to carry the most weight.

Counting on social media to provide links – Social media links are not considered quality links. And most networking sites nofollow external links. (A nofollow is when a webmaster tells the search engines to essentially not pay any attention to links.) However, don’t neglect social media as a tool to generate awareness for your content and your website.

Placing backlinks only to your homepage – One rule of thumb is to identify key strategic pages and work to increase backlinks to those pages. Your landing page likely already receives an abundance of links.

There are of course other mistakes which it shouldn’t be necessary to mention. However, just to make sure we’re all on the same page and striving for success, these mistakes include linking to link farms or link exchanges. They also include avoiding any black hat or spammy behaviors. And no cloaking.

Link building is about creating great content, building relationships online with your associates, prospects and customers. It’s about planning and creating a strategy. The old “throw spaghetti to the way to see what sticks” approach won’t get you where you want to go. Avoid these mistakes, create a link-building plan, and regularly assess your success.

The WordPress Thesis Theme is one of the favorites among site owners with minimal technical knowledge. Basically, it makes it easier to change your site without knowing PHP or even HTML.

There are many themes to choose from. Here are five reasons you might want to use the thesis theme:

Ease of use

This is a great platform that allows you to have a good-looking site with minimal technical know-how. It is easy to change, no matter how little knowledge you have.

It contains a panel on the side that enables you to alter the theme without the need to change the code. If you want to make more advanced alterations, you might need to know some PHP and HTML. However, for most changes this isn’t necessary. It’s much more customizable than the free themes.

And even more complex jobs are relatively simple. You might have to change the code a little, but when compared with other themes, it’s not hard.

Just be cautious. You still have to know what you are doing. While this theme is simple to use, like any theme it’s possible to mess things up if you get reckless. For this reason, take time and read online instructions about working with thesis theme before you start experimenting.

Inexpensive

The thesis theme will run you $87 dollars to use it on a single site, and $164 for multiple sites. Considering how easy it is to use, this is very reasonable. It’s certainly pricier than some themes out there, but the quality more than makes up for it.

Support

The main site has a responsive support forum. Should you run into any difficulties, your question will be answered very quickly. The main developer, Chris Pearson, even answers the questions himself on occasion. This is one of the main selling points of this theme.

Instructions

As mentioned before, there are sites online that have in-depth instructions on how to use it. This isn’t the case with a lot of themes. This makes using it much simpler than one of the lesser-known themes.

SEO friendly

One of the big benefits of this theme is that it is easily optimized for SEO. The code is not complex, which means the site is much more likely to get ranked than other themes. Uncluttered code is always well liked by the search engines.

Some bloggers have reported an increase in traffic largely from using this theme. It’s not magic, so you can’t expect to just install it and see instant results. However, it certainly won’t hurt your efforts, like some of the free themes.

The bottom line is, the WordPress Thesis Theme is one of the better ones out there. if you are looking for an easy to use theme that is relatively affordable, look no further.