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Some days it can be hard to think of anything to write.  Been there, done that. Maybe you are trying to think of a topic for a new blog or website and the creative juices just won’t flow.  Here are 8 methods that I use if I get stuck, in no particular order:

1. Take a break and go for a walk.  Exercise moves blood to the brain (or something) and I get most of my best ideas walking.  Even if you don’t get any ideas, you needed to lose a couple of pounds anyway. Some people swear that their best ideas come while in the shower.  Walk naked in the rain and get a double benefit.

2. Write down stupid ideas.  Lots of them.  Don’t just think of them, write them down.  However stupid they sound.  This puts your brain into idea mode and the good stuff will start flowing. Unless you only ever have stupid ideas.  In that case, you are screwed.

3. Avoid alcohol.  You may think you are brilliant when you are drunk, but to other people, you are just a drunk.

4. Stop trying so hard.  Read a book.  Talk to somebody. Go for a walk (see 1).  Often if you ease off on trying so hard, the ideas will start to flow.

5. Switch off the television.  Better still, give it away.  Scientific studies have shown that brain capacity is actually lost while watching TV.  Try this experiment at home:  Stand behind somebody while they are sitting watching a soap opera.  Shine a bright light on top of their head.  You will soon notice a fine gray dust around the side of their head.  This is their brain cells dying and leaking out of their ears.

6. Always carry around a notebook (or PDA if you prefer) and jot down any ideas you have, whenever you have them.  Most of mine are complete rubbish but every now and again one is worth pursuing.

7.  Read more in your field.  See what others are writing about.  See what they are discussing in the forums.   I’m not suggesting you plagiarize ideas, but somebody else’s writing will spark your creativity.

8.  I can’t think of an eighth idea.

My dictionary describes parochial as being very limited or narrow in scope or outlook; provincial: parochial views.

Sometimes it’s hard to remember that the internet is truly global in scale, not just American (or British, or Russian, or French).  Could you be missing out on thousands of visitors from the rest of the world?  It’s quite possible that you only want visitors from the US, but unlikely. 

English has become the language of commerce throughout the world and I find that many of my visitors are coming from traditionally non English speaking countries such as Sweden, Bulgaria, Thailand and The Philippines to name but a few from yesterday’s website log.  I also have hundreds of visitors from Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom.

To use a simple example, most countries spell some words differently than in US English.  The United Kingdom, Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and India all use the traditional British spelling and not the US version which was only introduced in 1828 by Noah Webster.  The main differences included changing “-our” to “-or” (favour/favor),  “-re” to “-er” (theatre/theater), “-ence” to “-ense” (defence/defense)   and “-ise” to “ize”  (monetise/monetize), plus some random other changes including using a single “l” for inflected forms. Leveled instead of Levelled.

If your website is about coloring leather, who is finding your site when they search for “how to colour leather” in Australia?  I’m not suggesting mixing spellings on a single page, although I’ve done this myself, but how about some articles with the alternative spelling?  Maybe everybody is promoting a particular Clickbank product using the US spelling and leaving the field wide open for the rest of the world?

I recently started to think about which affiliate programs(s) to add to the Warcraft blog I created last week on blogger.com to test for Google indexing speed. The blog is now getting over 100 visitors a day, which is where I start considering monetization.

Because I’m inherently lazy - which is why I blog for money instead of working for a living - it was tempting to go straight to one of the affiliate networks like Clickbank (or CJ, Linkshare, Shareasale etc) and browse their marketplace for a couple of ebooks to stick in the sidebar. The trouble with this is that everybody and their brother are already desperately trying to promote Clickbank products, either through Adwords, or these daft Clickbank malls you see everywhere. The internet is saturated with thinly disguised affiliate “reviews” for this stuff and potential buyers have either already purchased the product or, more likely, decided they don’t need it.   Nothing wrong with Clickbank or their products but there’s just an awful lot of competition.

The world doesn’t need another pitch for the same old products, so I started to think about independent affiliate programs. Google to the rescue. Just type in one (or more) of your target keywords and visit any site that’s selling something. Scroll down to the bottom of the page and click on the link that says something like “Affiliate Program”. Using this I managed to find three independent affiliate programs in 10 minutes. On one of them I was affiliate number six! A quick search revealed absolutely no other affiliate promoting this product.

Here’s another way to find affiliate programs.  Put the dreaded Adsense on your site for a couple of days and see what ads are showing and if you get clicks.  If the visitors are clicking on the Adsense ads then there’s interest.  Go visit the sites being advertised (no, don’t click on your own ads, type in the URL directly) and see if they have an affiliate program.  Chances are that somebody is advertising them on Adwords which is why they are appearing on your site.  Cut out not one, but two middle men and keep all the profit for yourself.

There are some potential problems with going with the independents:

1. They might not pay you. I generally send a couple of sales their way one month to test this, and their tracking.

2. Some ask for your social security number if you are in the USA, which is required if you earn over $600 a year. This is not something I would give out without good reason to an unknown organization. The workaround is to get an EIN online.

3. It’s a pain to monitor a dozen different programs, rather than just login to Clickbank (or Adsense) each day.
Worth it? Yes, I think so. Both the conversion rate and the number of sales are far higher when I use an independent. No affiliate competition makes sales a breeze.  There’s no reason you can’t still promote products from the major networks alongside the independents, just don’t make them your main focus.

Spam blogs, or splogs, are blogs created for one purpose - to fool the search engines.  Normally they are used to gain links to equally spammy websites selling Viagra type products or are plastered with Adsense.  They are either full of complete garbage, random sentences, or steal an RSS feed to provide content.

I know that nobody reading this blog is really creating splogs but could your own blog be mistaken for one?

There’s a four part article over at wired.com identifying the characteristics of splogs:

In real blogs, the hyperlinks’ anchor text – the word or phrase users click on – is generally something innocuous like “previous post” or “interesting discussion.” Splogs, by contrast, often have search terms in the anchor text…

These sites, moreover, often have odd-looking, superlong URLs that are packed with keywords…

Another giveaway: … links to had Web addresses in the .info domain. Spammers flock to .info…Splogs so commonly have .info addresses that many experts simply assume all blogs from that domain are fake…

The links in ordinary blogs usually take users to well-known sites like Flickr and YouTube or prominent blogs like Talking Points Memo and Boing Boing. By contrast, each link in Some Title takes the user to a spam Web page or another splog…

 If it’s a Blogspot blog with more than two dashes, it’s spam,” Mullenweg says.

I sure have some awesome SEO talent.  This blog is ranked #1 in Google for mesitholemiamathoma

I must rush off and write a $97 ebook revealing how you, yes you, can also be #1 in Google for any search term of my choice.  In fact, if you don’t buy the ebook right now, the price is going to go up to $197, then $297 tomorrow then I’m going to take if off the market completely.  You will lose out FOREVER on these ground-breaking secrets.

Click here to order now, even if it’s 3am in the morning…

On a more serious note, this is exactly what some of the more unscrupulous SEO firms are doing.  You send them $5,000 (no kidding) and they will guarantee you #1 position on Google by adding some meta-tags to your site.  Unless you read the small print very carefully, and believe me there’s a lot of small print, you won’t know that it’s a search term of their choice.  Usually your company name in quotes.

Easy money but I don’t think I could sleep at nights.

Actually, that’s given me an idea for another ebook. I can see the title now… “How I make $5,000 a day sitting in my underwear at the kitchen table… learn how you too can work at home with just a computer and internet connection with this amazing $5,000 a day opportunity.  Become respected in your community as a Search Engine Optimizer.”  I’ll have to sell this one for $497 and limit the number to 100  96  92 56 (only 12 left! Order NOW!) sales to prevent competition. 

Saturday 8:40 am Mark recently made a comment about a delay in getting blogger.com blogs indexed in Google.  As an experiment I’m going to create a new blogger.com blog and see how long it takes big G to find it.  I’ll report real-time in this post on progress.  I’ll also use most of the $1 a day blog techniques (sorry, I know I haven’t published the doc yet) to get the blog listed in the search engines.

I will spend this weekend writing some content and start the indexing on Monday.  Normally I would do it all on the same day but apparently it’s some sort of convention to spend time with your family at weekends.  So my wife tells me anyway.

I’ve also created an account at Statcounter to track traffic.

I will add a link to the blogger.com blog here on Monday since I don’t want Google to get a head start on a link from this blog.

Saturday 12:30pm I’ve written 3 posts for the new blog this morning, but my wife is now insisting that I go shoe shopping with her this afternoon (ugh!)  Like 296 pairs of shoes isn’t enough for one woman. 

I decided to create a blog about World of Warcraft.  If you aren’t familiar with the game, it will probably be total giberish to you, but I did this for two main reasons:

1.  You should write about what you know and, with a little bit of effort, you may even add some content to the web rather than yet another spam blog.

2.  There are enough blogs about mesitholemiamathoma (or whatever it’s called) already and I’m hoping it will get a decent ranking in big G for a less competitve term.

I will try and add another two posts this evening or tomorrow ready for indexing on Monday.

Saturday 12:45pm  Official retraction and apology. Apparently the Wife also reads this blog.  She has asked me to point out that she only has 262 pairs of shoes (not counting sports shoes obviously) and that my claim that she had 296 pairs was scurrilous and defamatory and makes her look like some sort of shoe addict. I apologize unreservedly and withdraw that remark.

Saturday 6:00pm back from the trials of shoe shopping with only 3 new pairs.  265 and counting.  I’ve posted a total of four short articles on the new blog today.  I’ll go into a why, what and when explanation when I link to the blog on Monday. Tomorrow I intend to write and post another four.   This seems to have turned into a blog promotion example as well as a “how long to blogger.com indexing” experiment.  Hopefully we will all learn something.

Sunday 07:00am Man, it’s called Blogger BETA for a reason.  I’m spending more time dealing with bugs than writing posts.  Why does anybody use blogger.com?  I managed to get one post added after a struggle, now it’s giving me a 404 page not found error when I try to login.

Monday 6:30am I’ve added a couple more posts to bring the total to 7.  I have 3 more short posts to add today.  I’ve spent a total of about three hours creating content and will spend another hour or so promoting the blog.  When I’m properly awake, I will make the blog public (one neat blogger.com feature), ping the world using pingoat.com then add each of the permalinks for the posts to the social bookmarking sites. Since this is a timing experiment, I won’t do anything else until I see that the blog has been indexed in Google.  Once it has been indexed by big G, I will attempt to promote the blog to reasonable traffic levels.  Assuming this works, I will then go through the steps to monetize the blog. 

Monday 9:50am Three of the posts have been added to Del.icio.us, Furl, BlogMarks, Reddit and BlinkList.  No particular reason I used these except they happened to be on my toolbar links.  I’ll add the rest over the next hour.  I’m checking Google every couple of hours to see when the links themselves get listed.

Tuesday 8:00am No links showing on Google or MSN yet but it did receive 162 unique visitors yesterday from the bookmarks.  It’s listed in Technorati search and links are listed in Yahoo.  I would normally be getting an EzinesArticle published and submitting it to Netscape at this point, but I’m restraining myself since I want to see what effect the bookmarks alone have.

Tuesday 10:00pm I received the first visitor from Google at 7:02pm today.  That makes it about 34 hours from blog go live to the first search-engine visitor.  I’m not sure when exactly the blog was first listed but probably not long before 7pm.   Normally a new domain gets listed within 24 hours, but I suspect the fact that blogger.com blogs are on a subdomain may slow things down a little.  I will submit an article to EzineArticles and some other stuff in the morning and see what sort of traffic I can generate.

Wednesday 7:00am 70 unique visitors yesterday including 12 from Google.  Article submitted and waiting for review.  Netscape appears to be broken this morning. I will try this again later.

Friday 3:00pm An average of 60 visitors a day over the last 3 days, mostly from “long-tail” queries on Google.  Still waiting for the article to be approved.  If it isn’t approved by Monday, I will submit it to the second tier article directories.

Monday 7:30am 130 visitors on Saturday and 209 yesterday, so everything is going to plan so far.  Almost all from Google.  I find that they are the quickest to start delivering traffic, with the other search engines following two to three weeks later. Traffic would have been better if the article had already been approved.  No doubt the EzineArticles editors have been slowed down by turkey overdose.  I added links to three affiliate products yesterday morning and got $32.30 in commission yesterday so this is also off to a nice start.

Tuesday 9:00am Only 146 visitors yesterday but another $32.90 in affiliate commissions.  Hmm, if it keeps up at the current rate that’s $11,900 a year.  Not bad for 4 hours work.  I really don’t expect to earn anything like that from the blog of course, it’s just a fluke.  Really.

Thursday 8:00am I emailed EzineArticles support last night. more in hope than expectation, about the lack of approval.  This seemed to have worked since it was approved a few hours later.  131 visitors yesterday including the first non-Google search from AOL. 

It’s a Wrap This will be the last entry in this post.  The blog has been online for 2 weeks and is getting a regular 150 a day, almost all from Google.   In the end, I created a total of 14 posts, some of them trivial.  All posts were original content.  I submitted one article to EzineArticles and a slightly modified version to GoArticles.  I bookmarked most of the pages on the social bookmark sites I mentioned and pinged using Pingoat twice.  Total time spend on building and promoting the blog was about 5 hours. It was indexed, and received the first Google visitor after 34 hours.  Total affiliate commission for the two weeks was $195 and change, about $14 a day.  

Latest update here.