Step 1: Generate Content

You can generate content in 1 of 2 ways, or both.

You can O.P.W. which is an acronym for “Other People’s Writing”.

Or you can O.O.W., and acronym for “Our Own Content”.

O.P.W. - Other People’s Writing

Let’s explore O.P.W. (Other People’s Writing).

Why is this important and effective? It’s because you save hundreds of hours having to write it yourself, which translates to productivity in other areas that really matter. Plus, its easier to edit someone’s work, than it is to create from scratch - do you find this to be the case? I do too.

How can you implement O.P.W.?

Here are some examples of OPW. You have options such as:
- Private Label Resale rights ebooks, newsletters, salesletters, audio, video and more
- Public Domain ebooks, articles, journals, audio, video, software and much more, plus
- Engaging the writing services of a VA or a ghostwriter, to write content for your topic

Let’s look at option 2, which is to write your own content.

O.O.W. - Our Own Writing

Let’s explore OOW (Our Own Writing).

Why is this important and effective? Your topics may require context-sensitive data and information that only your in-house team or you know, eg. medical and legal sectors. In addition, writing your own content also provides you with consistency of voice, personality and brand.

How can you implement O.O.W.?

If you have an in-house team, you can assign them to begin outlining a series of content pieces that follow the ideas I’ll share in a moment. The content can be interchanged between text, audio and video formats.

If you require the services of a virtual assistant or ghostwriter, you can seek out
freelance talent at online service marketplace websites like guru.com, elance.com or rentacoder.com.

OK, let’s recap what we’ve learnt so far, before diving into the many varieties of content that you will begin to leverage.

You’ve learnt that there are 2 ways to generate content:

OPW - which is “Other People’s Writing”, and
OOW - which is to write your own content.

Let’s begin with the second step - Leverage Content.

Step 2: Leverage Content

Here’s a long but not exhaustive list of resources you can begin to gather research and to generate ideas of where to locate relevant content for your topic.

RESEARCH

affiliate material
article directories
ask campaigns
autoresponders
blogs
books
case studies
coaching + mentoring
discussion groups
ebooks
expert interviews
ezines
forums
i.m. chats
industry news
info product
mastermind
membership content
mini-courses
news alerts
newsletters
podcasts
podcast transcriptions
press releases
private label resale
public domain
reports
research
salesletters
seminars
social media
speech
opt-in pages
transcriptions
teleseminars
tips
tutorials
videos
video podcast
video tutorials
websites
white papers
workbooks
workshops
etc etc etc

How you assemble your research is dependent if you’re going to OPW or OOW your research content to your output formats. Once you decide if you’re going to OPW or OOW, then these next steps fall in place quite easily.

Here are additional words that can also help you trigger ideas for the type of content you can generate:

brainstorm
benefits
facts
history
how to
ideas
problems
questions
quotes
thoughts
tips
topics

Once you gather your research content, you can begin to decide how your content will take shape. Here’s a long but not exhaustive list of content types you can choose to create. Note that it may be similar to the Research list, but the key is that all your research can be developed into interchangeable text, audio and video content.

OUTPUT

advertising
affiliate content
articles
ask campaigns
autoresponders
blogs
books
case studies
coaching + mentoring
discussion groups
ebooks
expert interviews
ezines
forums
industry news
info product
mastermind
membership content
mini-courses
news alerts
newsletters
opt-in pages
podcasts
podcast transcriptions
press releases
private label resale
public domain
reports
salesletters
seminars
speech
social media
transcriptions
teleseminars
tips
tutorials
videos
video podcast
video tutorials
websites
white papers
workbooks
workshops
etc etc etc

For starters, print these lists and tack it up on a wall close by your computer. Scan the “RESEARCH” list for ideas, keeping your 1 business topic in mind, with the intention that you want to repurpose your research into a variety of formats listed in “OUTPUT”. Then get started in developing your content.

May I suggest that you consider how you can leverage your content for your blog, the social community websites you participate at, and for video. These are platforms that deliver strong return-on-your-time-investment for a large percentage of topics. Naturally, you want to consider your customers’ buying and research patterns so you can add value wherever they congregate.

Imagine the convenience and ease of looking at this list, and moving forward with confidence in generating an endless supply of content for your business topics.

Imagine publishing and promoting your content, building your subject matter expertise, developing your base of subscribers and customers, and boosting your conversions and profits because you generate quality content easily.

This is a strategy that you can take action on today. Go for it!

Google Friend Connect lets you grow traffic by easily adding social features to your website. With just a few snippets of code, you get more people engaging more deeply with your site. Attract more visitors. Visitors bring along friends from social networks like orkut, Plaxo, and others to interact on your site. Enrich your site with social features. Choose engaging social features from a catalog of gadgets provided by Google and the OpenSocial developer community. No programming whatsoever. Just copy and paste snippets of code into your site, and Google Friend Connect does the rest.

Background

Websites that are not social networks may still want to be social. But the barriers to offering social applications on the site have been considerable. Google Friend Connect changes this by enabling any site to offer dozens of social gadgets created by Google and OpenSocial developers to their visitors. This means more visitors spending more time on a more engaging website -- with absolutely no programming required to make it happen.

What the site owner sees

As a site owner, Friend Connect provides you the ability to add social features to your site, without writing code. Here's how it works.

Google Friend Connect Administration site. The Friend Connect administration site presents a catalog of social gadgets provided by Google and other developers. You choose gadgets based on your site's needs. Simply copy code snippets for these gadgets and paste them as desired into your site.

Social gadgets created by Google. Google Friend Connect provides a core set of social gadgets such as member management, message board, reviews, and picture-sharing. The key gadget is the members gadget. This gadget provides core social features for your visitors:

• sign-in with their existing Google, Yahoo, AIM, or OpenID account
• invite and show activity to existing friends from social networks such as Google Talk, orkut, Plaxo, and more
• browse member profiles across social networks
• connect with new friends on your site

Social gadgets created by other developers. For the past year, the developer community has been creating hundreds of applications for OpenSocial, an open standard for social applications. Once you have added Friend Connect to your site, you can offer many of these applications to your users, simply by pasting the relevant snippet into your site.

Once you have added the members gadget, and the additional social gadgets, your visitors can start inviting their friends and more deeply engage with your site.

Reaping the rewards

Google Friend Connect integrates with contact lists for social networks like Plaxo, orkut, and Google Talk. This means users who join your site are instantly connected with friends who are already members, and can invite friends from other networks to visit. They can opt in to broadcasting their activities to friends in their social networks. A post to your message board, for example, can instantly be visible to people in multiple social networks, along with links leading to your site. These instant networks, combined with the wealth of OpenSocial gadgets, can form potent new online communities, very quickly and very easily.

And when a visitor goes to a second site with Friend Connect, the process is even simpler. The visitor simply clicks "Accept", sets privacy options for the site, and they're in. There's no need to set up their account or link in their social networks again.

There are two easy ways for members of your site to bring their friends:

Invitations. Clicking on the invite link presents your visitors with all their contacts and friends from their social networks. Invitations are delivered to friends within their respective social networks.

Activity feeds. Your visitors may also opt-in to publishing activities to their social networks. A post to your message board, for example, can instantly be visible to people in multiple social networks, along with links leading to your site.

Some quick examples

Here, to spark your imagination, are just a few more simple examples. Frankly, we expect the countless developers and site owners to come up with far better ideas:

• A cooking site - Review a recipe and provide comments which clarify or improve it. Add a recipe to a social recipe box that appears across multiple cooking sites.
• A musician's site - Post pictures from your latest concert on the band's site, and communicate directly with your fans.
• An extreme sports site - Play a motor cross game, then compare your score to friends and other site members.
• An academic site - Discuss and review articles in context with colleagues and the broader community. Filter the discussion to colleagues only, or widen your view. Forge connections with new participants whose comments seem particularly insightful.
• A shopping site - Read expert reviews and tips right next to the camera you're thinking of buying, and find a friend who has already purchased the same item.
• A philanthropic site - Cultivate a community around your cause, post pictures at fund raisers, let donors connect, and involve their friends.
• Your site - ???. We hope you'll have fun experimenting with Google Friend Connect.

Wrapping up

Everyone wins in a friend connected web:

• You, the site owner - Google Friend Connect gives you a snippet of code that, when put into your site, will equip the site with social features, including the ability to run third-party social applications. Moreover, it enables your visitors to log in with existing credentials, see who among their friends is already registered at that site. It also gives them one-click access to invite friends from their existing friends lists on other sites, such as Plaxo, or orkut.
• Your site's visitors - Visitors no longer need to create a new account or develop yet another friends list just to use the social applications on your site. We create the infrastructure that allows one login to be used across multiple sites and the ability to reuse existing friend relationships that the visitor has already established elsewhere.
• OpenSocial developers - With Google Friend Connect, any website on the web can become an OpenSocial container. Their social applications can now run on social networking sites and anywhere else on the web that uses Google Friend Connect. By placing these applications on sites where users already visit, these application will be seen and used by more users more often.
• Social networks - With Google Friend Connect, social networks thrive as hubs of activity while giving their users more opportunities to bring their friend relationships to other websites while simultaneously bringing their friends and activities from outside the social network back in -- with people having the ability to publish their activities across the web into the activity streams of their social networks.

The new release enables Blogini to continue providing bloggers with effective marketing and optimization resources they can use to enhance the popularity of their blogs and Web sites.  Blogini 3.0 builds upon the strengths of the original service, but also introduces important usability and scalability enhancements.

“We have also very much expanded the core feature set originally introduced in August of 2006, which we hope will allow us to refine the excellent marketing model our subscribers have relied on for the past two years,” says Kenneth Fox, Blogini founder and lead developer. “We also look forward to serving a larger number of subscribers with our expanded network and resource capacity.”

Blogini enables bloggers to effectively build incoming links to their blogs, including link directories, social bookmarking sites and other pre-arranged link exchange agreements. The blog network also hosts and manages the actual sites of their subscribers, as well as provides users with site templates, themes and the blog software required to get up and running quickly and easily.

Blogini has introduced many new benefits in there latest membership update. Blogini 3.0 will simply give our users more power to compete in the online marketplace, no matter what niche or business they are involved in. One of our new features is the multi server and class c ip web hosting. This is a huge benefit for members with multiple websites and link building strategies.

Our new re-launch blog will explain to our future members exactly what Blogini 3.0 is all about and how it can help them succeed in a very competitive online marketplace.

Revolutionary and Twitter-geniuses, Deborah Micek (@coachdeb) and Warren Whitlock (@bookwarren), passionately describe the dynamic, expressive, and fast-moving nature of Twitter, which brings to it’s users pioneering new ventures, tantalizing conversations and new friendships, all at the same time.

Twitter is impatient (you must write your message in 140 characters or less), and brings out our creative potential, while developing our natural (or unnatural, as the case may be) gift for words.

With enthusiasm and fired-up charms, Deborah and Warren reveal the emotional power and inner Nobility of Twitter, which allows every single human emotion and thought to surface.

The book is playful and has youthful energy. It’s clever and imaginative. And as “The Twitterverse”, at times, does not suffer fools gladly and may lack patience with those who cannot keep up with many of the quick, mental responses, Deborah and Warren guide us, with their book, to become successful Tweeters.

Thanks for writing the Twitter Handbook. I am certain it will serve the many.

TwitterHandbook.com

Angela
@AngelWickenberg
formerly @ebizmom
on Twitter