This is a guest post by Jon Gordon. Jon is the Wall Street Journal and international bestselling author of a number of books including The Energy Bus: 10 Rules to Fuel Your Life, Work and Team with Positive Energy, and his latest, The Seed: Finding Purpose and Happiness in Life and Work. Learn more at www.JonGordon.com. Follow Jon on Twitter @JonGordon11 or Facebook at www.facebook.com/jongordonpage.

“Vision without execution is hallucination.” – Einstein

I believe every one of us has a desire to accomplish great things, to do something meaningful, to have an impact. Yet, so many of us don’t take the actions necessary to create the success we desire. Then there are others who are very busy taking actions but the actions have nothing to do with their vision and goals. They’ve become lost in the busyness of life.

In my work with sports teams, businesses and organizations I have found that the key to individual and team success is to Zoom Focus. Zoom Focus helps you turn ideas and goals into reality and results. Zoom Focus helps you focus on your priorities, execute, and create success. Zoom Focus helps you take daily steps towards your big picture vision.

Now more than ever it is a time for action. It is a time for getting things done. It is a time to tune out the distractions and the noise from the doomsdayers and the naysayers and focus on what truly matters and what truly will help us create success. In this spirit here are a few ways to put Zoom Focus to work for you and your team.

Create your Big Picture Vision – This might be a goal or a dream. It might be a project that needs to be completed or a sale you are trying to close. It might be a company objective or a team mission. It might be a book you want to write, an initiative to improve your community, or a championship you want to win. Identify your vision and then you’ll be ready to Zoom Focus and take the necessary actions to get you there.

Ask One Question – Each day when you wake up in the morning ask the question, “What are the three most important things I need to do today that will help me create the success I desire?” Then each day take action on those three things.

Tune Out the Distractions – Turn off the television. Stop answering the phone. Don’t answer the email right now. Talk to your friend later. First, get things done. Execute, accomplish and then feel free to embrace the distractions.

Say No and Yes – My friend once told me, “If the devil can’t make you bad, he’ll make you busy.” He reminded me that we need to stop scattering our energy and wasting our time on trivial things that have nothing to do with our vision and goals and start saying yes to our priorities and to what truly matters. Each day we must make choices and those choices including saying “no” to people and opportunities so we can say “yes” to the work we are meant to do and the success we are meant to create.

Focus on Daily Improvement – I see it in sports all the time. Teams focus too much on winning the championship and forget to Zoom Focus each day in practice. They are outcome focused not process focused. The key is to focus on improving each day and take the necessary action steps. If you incrementally improve each day, each week, each month, each quarter by the end of the year you’ll see remarkable results and growth. When you Zoom Focus on the process the outcome takes care of itself.

Photo Credit: Lululemon Athletica

 

Summary: Using web-based services InboundWriter and Scribe, you can refine your copy and get real-time results on the effect it will have on search engine optimization of your website content—making the process more fun!

Bloggers who are seriously about getting search engine traffic always make sure they include the right “phrases that pay” when they write. They understand the underlying principles behind content/search engine optimization or SEO: Create relevant, quality content that is indexed properly by Google and Bing, and as importantly (perhaps more so) get backlinks from other well ranked websites as “social proof” that your content is rank-worthy in the first place.

Optimizing your website content for search engine optimization purposes strikes many people as a huge (and often mind-numbingly boring) challenge. But it doesn’t have to be.

Fortunately, there are some very good, affordable tools to speed up the search engine optimization process and give you more peace of mind vs. guesswork.

InboundWriter: A Fun Way To Achieve Search Engine Optimization

A web-based SEO service that I really like is Inbound Writer (affiliate link). They recently launched a WordPress plugin, and I’m using the free version now for content optimization on this post.

With InboundWriter, you either go to their site and optimize your documents there (similar to Scribe), or install the WordPress plugin. Here’s a YouTube video that shows how the InboundWriter WordPress plugin works:

Using InboundWriter, the content optimization process starts with identifying a select number of “focus terms” (relevant keywords) you want to rank for. Once you pick these, InboundWrite will whir and hum, then offer a laundry list of terms to include in your copy for  ideal search engine optimization. As you refine the text, you see  real-time results on the effect it will have on search engine indexing. You get a Document Score gauge that updates in real time as you write, which really makes writing seem like a game!

Two Ways InboundWriter Optimizes Search Engine Content: By Search/Social Or Reader Targeting

InboundWriter has two built-in ways to help you optimize your content. Their Search & Social is called a “balanced” strategy or you can choose selective demographic/reader targeting. Depending on which strategy you select, it will affect your real-time results. I haven’t played around with these enough to know how much of an impact either has, though I’m more inclined to go for the “balanced” approach unless my content was super-specific to a niche.

The free, web-based version of InboundWriter limits you to optimizing eight documents per month. Their single paid level, the Professional Plan, is $19.95/month and includes content optimization for unlimited documents.

Click here to try out InboundWriter.

Using Scribe SEO For Web Content Optimization

Another solution, Scribe (affiliate link), is very good at analyzing your content and suggesting keywords and phrases you may have overlooked. Using a web-based version (for use on any website regardless of the content management system), or plugins for WordPress, Joomla and Drupal, you use Scribe to create search-optimized content. Before you start to write, you can do keyword research to determine the best phrases to target for a particular article. Next, as you write the system prompts you to fill in proper information such as title tags, meta description on other “on page” factors relevant to search engines.

Scribe also has a neat feature that helps you build backlinks to your site, which are crucial to getting better search engine rankings. It will look for search engine optimization opportunities for you to cross link with other posts on your own site, external sites and even influential Twitter users you may want to share with.

Scribe’s “platform-agnostic” version is especially good if you are a writer providing content to multiple sites. You can use it to optimize your content before posting it elsewhere.

The system also lets you quickly create Content Optimization Reports to send to your clients. This is a fantastic way to demonstrate your value beyond simply writing “good” content.

Scribe has four packages ranging from $17 to $97 per month (with a 30-day, money back guarantee). Their pricing is based on how many “evaluations” and keyword searches you get in a month. In Scribe, each time you analyze your content using their algorithm, you use one evaluation. They claim it takes about 3-5 evaluations per page, so you can quickly burn through these.

Click here to try out Scribe.

My Initial Takeaways

Based on my preferences, I like the non-WordPress version of InboundWriter better than the WordPress plugin, which doesn’t offer all the bells and whistles. Plus, I hate writing directly in the WordPress editor.

I will say the process adds to the time I would normally spend in terms of worrying about search engine optimization. It also feels unnatural to me to keep repeating keywords just for the sake of moving the SEO needle. After several minutes piddling around with this post, for example, I settled for a 67 out of 100 score from InboundWriter—and I went with a crappier title and more repetition overall than I’d like. Sorry, Google, but I’m not gonna write like a machine just to appease your robots. My valued readers will likely abandon ship.

There’s also the issue of what you’re targeting in terms of keywords. Some phrases are just ridiculously competitive in terms of search engine indexing. I don’t care how many times I say search engine optimization here…the chances of this article ranking on page one of Google is very slim. However, if I’m going after a less competitive phrase, my chances are greatly increased by focusing on my word choices and placement in the title, URL, headers and body content.

I wouldn’t necessarily use either Scribe or InboundWriter every single time to massage my content. But certainly for “pillar” type content that I really, really want to rank for, I’d spend the time working with one of these tools. Both InboundWriter and Scribe make it more of a game and less drudgery to try to figure out how to appease Google and get your content better indexed.

For More Information

Click the links to learn more about InboundWriter and Scribe. Please note, I will make a small affiliate commission on these if you decide to buy through my links. If so, I thank you—and my wife and kids thank you!

A few years ago, I decided to write an ebook. My objective at the time was pretty simple: give away the ebook for free, in order to gain more followers (i.e., email subscribers).

Back then, Twitter was just getting hot, so I decided to make the e-book about how to master Twitter. I came up with a clever title, wrote and formatted the book fairly quickly, and put it on my site.

The results were pretty good. I got a few hundred new email subscribers within a matter of months. It got a lot of retweets, naturally.

But…

The results could’ve been a lot better.

• The book itself probably could’ve been better organized and written
• Iinstead of just giving the book away, I could’ve charged for it. (I even had several people tell me they would have paid for it!)
• Or…I still could’ve given it away, but potentially made money by including sponsored ads or affiliate links within the e-book

Avoiding Rookie Ebook Mistakes

Fortunately, I will not make these rookie ebook mistakes the next time around.

I had the good fortune of meeting mom blogger extraordinaire Angela England a few months ago. Ang was just finishing up her own e-book, appropriately titled 30 Days To Make And Sell A Fabulous Ebook (affiliate link). I was excited when it came out and dutifully bought a copy. (After all, she helps support a family on her blogging efforts!)

This is a wonderful 52-page ebook, chock full of stuff that will make your first (or next) ebook better.

Ang talks from her own experience and explains first of all how to discover what you’re good at and what you’re “known” for. She also talks about:

• Better ways to research topics using Google, Amazon, blogs and other tools
• How to price your e-book
• How to avoid writer’s block
• Multiple ways to monetize e-books (including free e-books!)

But perhaps the coolest feature if you buy the book is that you get free membership in a private forum with access to Angela!That is the first time I saw that tactic used, and I admit it’s pretty clever.

Trust me, Ang is a dynamo who gives excellent, no-nonsense advice when it comes to marketing yourself or your business online. Her ebook is well worth the money, and even better she opens herself up for direct communication in her free ebook forum. Here’s the link once more to buy 30 Days To Make And Sell A Fabulous Ebook.

I get asked this question a lot:

What is the easiest and quickest way to start a web business?

The answer really depends on a lot of things.

For many purposes, it is pretty easy to actually launch a website. If you are publishing mostly content (text, photos and videos), then a simple WordPress theme will likely suffice. If you are going to be selling anything, you may need to look at an e-commerce solution like Shopify. Or for more complex applications, you might look to hire a professional web designer and/or developer.

The real issues revolve around the business side of the question. Is this just a personal hobby you are trying out, or are you serious about starting a business? If the latter is the case, you will want to spend time reviewing the different types of business entities. There are a lot of options, and trying to figure out what is best for you can be challenging.

Different Business Structures

Incorporation
C-Corporation
S-Corporation
Professional Corporation
Non-Profit Corporation
LLC Limited Liability Company
Professional Limited Liability Company
LLP Limited Liability Partnership
Sole Proprietorship
General Partnership
LP Limited Partnership

My advice is to seek out an expert like MyCorporation to answer your questions and help you decide. Note: I have not used them personally, but several friends have. There are many other online services, or you can meet with a local lawyer or accounting firm that advises startups.

I have started both an S-Corporation and an LLC and there are pluses and minuses to every business entity. For many reasons, you should not just operate a business as “yourself” (unless you’re set up a legitimate sole proprietorship) as there are plenty more risks associated with that. Not to mention, various business types may benefit you with certain tax advantages.

The best structure for you will also depend on the type of business you have and where you are located. You may consider meeting with your local Chamber of Commerce, tax department or Small Business Administration (SBA) office.

The main thing is to not simply rush out and launch a website; carefully consider what type of business you are going to operate. Get this structure in place early on, not after the fact. This is crucial for ensuring you are not caught later with tax liabilities that could not only threaten you financially but could get you fined or put out of business.

Photo credit: Dierken