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

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.

Press Releases can help your business gain publicity through the media. Having media attention gives your business credibility. Here are some tips to boost your press release’s appeal.

Correct Format: There is a format that press releases need to follow. Make sure your yours is written in the correct format, as you will want it to look as professional as possible. It is also a good idea to double-check the grammar, punctuation and spelling before you send it in for submission.

Keep it Clear and Concise: Your press release should be no longer than two pages. Media outlets receive lots of press releases and don’t have time to read a ten page report. Keeping your writing clear and concise allow you to fit in the important facts without going over the two page limit. As you decide what information to include, answer the following questions: who, what, why, where, when, and how.

What Is The Reader Going To Gain: Give your press releases a call to action. Include something that is going to inspire readers to go to your event, visit your website, attend your grand opening, etc. Writing a blatant ad will be obvious. Incorporate the features and benefits of what you are promoting, and give information on what it will do for your target market. If you are promoting a new in-person retreat, simply stating that it is new and improved isn’t enough. However, writing the information as “the new in-person retreat is relaxing and life changing, allowing you to create your own perfect day and make the most of it” lets the reader know how the new retreat will help them.

Make It Interesting: If your writing is boring, no one is going to want to read it. Try to find a balance between straight facts and excitement. Using the example of the in-person retreat above, announcing that “our new retreat will be available this spring” isn’t as catchy as “our new brand new in-person, personal intensive will be available this spring, just in time to help you “spring” into action and start anew.”

Remember Your Target Market: As you write and submit your press releases, keep your target market in mind at all times. By keeping your audience in mind, you will be able to focus on what information to include and where to submit your press releases. For instance, if you are promoting an event related to children’s health, submitting a press release to the travel editor of your local paper isn’t going to help you.

The media cannot run a story on every press release they receive, but implementing these tips will help you write press releases that grab, and keep, the media’s attention. The old saying “practice makes perfect” rings true for press releases; the more you write them, the better you will get.

WordPress is a powerful infrastructure that can be used to make a variety of different types of sites. WordPress is most often used to make blogs, of course, but it can also be used as the foundation for business websites, e-commerce websites and even educational websites. Another powerful, but lesser known, type of website that can be created with WordPress is a “multiuser blog.”

A multiuser blog isn’t simply a matter of allowing different individuals to play different roles (such as an author or an editor or an admin) in running a blog. Rather, a true multiuser WordPress blog is a website where multiple users can each have their own blog, and all of the individual blogs will run under a single WordPress installation and on a single domain. This can make it very easy to administer a large number of related blogs and to achieve a wide range of business objectives.

Creating this type of multiuser set-up used to require the use of a plug-in, but standard WordPress installs that are at least as recent as version 3.0 now support a multiuser set-up with just a little bit of effort to modify your underlying code.

The first step is to enable multisite on your WordPress installation. Unfortunately, there isn’t a way to get multisite up and running solely from your administrative panel. You’ll need to go into your wp-config.php file and manually add this line:

define(‘WP_ALLOW_MULTISITE’, true);

immediately before the line that reads:

/* That’s all, stop editing! Happy blogging. */

Now save the updated wp-config.php file. You won’t be able to access that file from within WordPress. If you need help locating it on your server, then contact your web hosting provider or webmaster.

Once you’ve made that change, you’ll see a “Network” selection in the “Tools” portion of your administrative menu.
After you click the “Network” link you’ll be taken to the screen through which you’ll set up your multisite network. The first thing you’ll have to decide is how you want the domains for each user’s website. You can choose for the addresses of the sites to be structured as subdomains, like:

http://site1.website.com

http://site2.website.com

http://site3.website.com

You can also have each of the websites set up as subdirectories, as follows:

http://www.website.com/site1

http://www.website.com/site2

http://www.website.com/site3

After you make that choice, you’ll choose a title for your new network and the administrative email address you want to use. Then click the “Install” button and WordPress will help you make a new folder in your main blog folder, identify a number of new lines that you’ll need to add to your wp-config.php file, as well as new lines that you’ll need to add to your .htaccess file.

When you log back in to your blog (making changes to the wp-config.php and .htaccess files will likely have the effect of logging you out), you’ll see a new Super Admin menu. Click the “Sites” selection in this new Super Admin menu and you’ll be taken to a form that lets you create a new site that will have its own set of logins and its own administrative dashboard.

This summary walks you through the process of setting up a multiuser blog, but for more details you can consult the underlying WordPress resources at: http://codex.wordpress.org/Create_A_Network

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!