Writer’s block may affect a lot of us, especially when writing is what wins us our bread-and-butter. But what about when you just can’t write? In other words, what do you do when you have the infamous writer’s block?

Writer’s Block Can Stem from Being Overwhelmed

As a writer, I often find myself facing writer’s block. Mostly it’s a result of thinking a lot about things that affect me, but over which I have little or no control – like world peace, or the meaning of life. But no matter what the cause is, you can’t afford to have writer’s block when your livelihood depends on it. Here’s a few ways to write when you can’t write!

6 Sure Tips to Beat Writer’s Block

1. Listen to Music

I like to listen to Buckethead or Plini while writing, since they both produce instrumental music. But even when I’m not writing, music plays a special role in my life – and then especially when I have writer’s block. Music helps you declutter your mind and relax it to an extent, wherein you can be free of everything causing the block.

2. Play Games

From computer games and outdoor sports to toys and board games, gaming always helps in filling you up with a lot of positive energy. I prefer playing soccer, since even if you don’t have a wide space, you can do a lot with the ball right where you are. If nothing, you can juggle the ball, which requires a lot of concentration and balance. Anything that gets your blood flowing helps.

3. Talk

A lot of times, writer’s block is the result of something that happened to you or might happen to you. And the best way to get over this cause is to talk things out. You could talk about it to a friend or a family member – or even your cat! Just make sure that you let it all out.

4. Pen Your Thoughts

There are certain situations where we aren’t comfortable discussing things going on in our heads with people we know. If that happens to be the reason behind the block, then by all means, go ahead and jot down your thoughts. You could even type your thoughts on your mobile phone or your laptop if you wish to. Just get it all out of your head.

5. Go Out for a Walk

There is absolutely nothing that can change your mind as quickly as nature can. Go out for a nice walk in the garden or a park nearby, and enjoy spending some time with Mother Nature. I’m sure you will return with a different perspective.

6. Eliminate Distractions

A cluttered work desk is more likely to lead to writer’s block than a clean one. I used to have a habit of keeping everything on my work desk. I thought I might need anything at any time, and should have everything right in front of me to make sure I wouldn’t spend time searching for things. However, I still often found myself with writer’s block. But when I finally decluttered the work desk and put things in separate drawers, the whole work environment changed for the good. All the extra space I saw made me feel like the place was a lot more open. And guess what? Ideas have been coming to me a lot more freely since then.

Writer’s Block Is Only Temporary

Starting to write is the big thing – now you just have to keep at it. The above tips are just some of the ways that you can overcome writer’s block when it occurs. I think we’d all agree that taking a walk away from your desk is necessary at times. Even Leonardo da Vinci said to “go away, have a little relaxation” so you could return to your work with “surer” judgment.

You can also establish your own new and innovative ways to overcome writer’s block. Just make sure your way of overcoming your own writer’s block doesn’t actually create a writer’s block for someone else. Find the tip most convenient for you and put it into action – and when in doubt, reach out to me on social media!

Writer’s Block is Painful – Get Unstuck with 6 Actionable Tips by @SAMLovesSan96 #RocksDigital
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Do you deal with writer’s block on occasion? Have any favorite tips of your own to contribute? Share a suggestion in the comments – we’d love to hear it!

The post Writer’s Block is Painful – Get Unstuck with 6 Actionable Tips appeared first on Rocks Digital.

There is absolutely no doubt about the importance of good content for the success of your website – and optimizing content that you create is an important part of the success equation.

When Optimizing Content, Start with Strategy

The thing about content is that while your paid marketing efforts – such as ads – provide results for the short term, good content can bring you leads for months after posting it. It can help you out with SEO, and can be used to build brand identity. Good content can also help in ensuring the loyalty of your users.

Zone in on the Right Keywords

For content to work, you need a keyword strategy. You need to zone in on a few keywords that you feel would be the right ones, which means they resonate with your company’s ideals. Once that’s done, you need to ensure that the content you put up on your website resonates with those keywords.

Keywords can let you know what your audience wants to know, and can be used as an undying source of content ideas. They can even let you monitor your competition!

The approach to keyword research has changed a lot over the years, with search engines becoming smarter over time. So how do you keep up with smarter search engines? By keeping up with the trends.Get current and “keep up” by reviewing the up-to-date analysis below.

Setting Goals for Each SERP

It’s tempting to just focus on being in the top results positions, but that doesn’t work anymore.

Earlier, you could create a single content asset that could help you achieve search visibility. Now however, that simply isn’t enough. Being on the first page of SERPs is not enough anymore, as it may not be able to provide you with the level of visibility you’d require to gain the amount of success you want. You need to approach every single SERP in a different manner.

For example, try searching “buy X online,” where X could be any object you wish to buy. You would see that the results are no longer the simple website links. Before you even reach those traditional results, you’d see a segment where Google presents you with the images of the products and their prices, followed by the website on which they are available.

Put yourself in your buyer’s shoes, and you’ll know how much easier this has made things for buyers overall. Seeing the products on the top enables them to buy things quickly, and frees them from the hassle of checking out each website individually.

As someone who buys almost everything online, I simply look at the prices offered by different websites and go for the one I find best. And even if I end up buying from Amazon, I still get an idea about the prices other websites have to offer.

Hence, you now need to approach every single SERP differently and come up with tactics to rank in different sections of each set of search results.

Optimizing for Things Instead of Strings

Earlier, people used to try to rank their websites on certain strings such as “top destinations for backpackers,” and it used to work out for them. But since Google is evolving, if you search for the same query now, you would find results such as “top 10 cheapest countries to backpack” and “The 18 Backpacker Destinations You Need to Visit in 2018.”

As you might notice, the results still have the essence of the query but they don’t have the exact strings. Why? Google now understands queries better and gives you personalized results.

Therefore, you should now optimize the content on your website according to concepts instead of strings.

When Optimizing Content, Play the Long Game

The strategies above will help you rank content in the top of SERPs for the long haul, not just for occasional time-bursts. As new content creators publish and continue to publish, you’ll need to rely on a long-game strategy that sustains your efforts – and rewards you and your audience!

Play the Long Game in Optimizing #Content – Here’s How by @SAMLovesSan96 #RocksDigital
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Are you up-to-date on the strategies for optimizing content? Let’s hear your POV in the comments!

The post Are You Caring for Your Content? Play the Long Game in Optimizing Content – Here’s How! appeared first on Rocks Digital.

Social media is undoubtedly one of the best platforms available to promote yourself or your brand, so staying current with social media tips is a must.

In this era of technological advancement, we tend to stick to our mobile phones almost all the time. Nearly everyone you know can be found on some social media website or app, and the app/website could be used as a great medium for conversing with them.

Help Users Discover Your Brand with Social Media

Having been an introvert for pretty much most of my life, I have found social media to be a life-saver. It has been my face and my voice for a long time now. Being an introvert gives you ample opportunities to come up with innovative ways to avoid meeting people in person. Social media provides opportunities to be social without becoming an extrovert or an ambivert.

While a lot of my time on social media websites has been spent watching memes, I have come across some great local brands on these websites. I would follow them depending on how I found their products or services. And as of now, more than half of those brands have risen to more fame than I could have expected back then.

Such is the power of social media. But becoming successful on social media isn’t easy; there’s a lot that goes down in making someone or something famous.

3 Social Media Tips to Cultivate Online Success

So here are three quick tips which I believe would help you become successful on social media – or at least stay on the right path!

Be Yourself

While it seems to be something that is applicable largely to people, businesses also need to “be themselves” out there. There’s no point in portraying yourself as the next Google, when being XYZ is all that you would need to be. But do make it a point to be clear about what you stand for, and stick to it.

If you’re faking it, audiences will get to know that sooner or later, and the losses you would incur in that case would be a lot more than monetary! There are influencers who start off by helping people out with what they’re best at, but then eventually shift to fields which pay more. But what they lose out in that process is the audience that actually followed them and cared about their take on things in the first place.

I’m not saying that it’s bad to explore other fields. Change is always good – just don’t get so carried away that you forget what you were really here for. So if there’s one tip that you absolutely must walk away with after reading this blog, it is this: Be Yourself. And trust me, the right audience will appreciate you for that.

Experiment

Your million-followers idea might just be a sentence in your diary right now. Unless you experiment with different ideas and methodologies, chances are slim that you’ll make a unique personality for yourself. Know that your uniqueness has a huge impact on your success. In fact, every successful person/brand on social media has something unique they have to offer to the audience.

Experiment with everything you can. You can always try out different timings to suit your audience better, or you could go ahead and increase or decrease the frequency of your posts.

Whatever you do will have consequences which can be analyzed to extract useful information. Based on this information, you can choose actions to take to boost your online presence.

Be Regular

People who like your page on Facebook or follow you on Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr, or just about any social media website, follow you for a reason. They are interested in what you have to say about things, and they will wait for you to come up with something new. Nobody follows you for that single image you posted – they follow you to see more of such images.

Hence, be regular. There’s nothing wrong with giving your audience just one post per week. Trust me, your audience will love your work even if it is just one post per week – just make sure that you never miss out on that post! Most people are active for a few days on social media websites, after which they lose interest and end up quitting. Being regular will help your audience look forward to your posts, and will definitely help keep your audience engaged.

Put these Social Media Tips to Work for Your Brand

The three social media tips we discussed could be classified as common sense things to do. But as we know, sometimes the obvious can be overlooked. So just remember: Be yourself, experiment, and post regularly. Your audience will appreciate it, and your brand will thrive!

Get #Business Traction with these #SocialMedia Tips by @SAMLovesSan96 #RocksDigital
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Does engaging your audience seem easier now? Share your thoughts in the comments!

The post Seeking Social Success? Get Business Traction with these Social Media Tips appeared first on Rocks Digital.

Your website is often the first place your customers go to see how good you are. Great, you have a site – but as we know, there’s usually room to improve your website! As the saying goes, the first impression really is the last impression, and it’s totally up to you to decide how this impression goes.

The 1–2–3 to Improve Your Website

Luckily, it isn’t overly difficult to improve that first impression. Using the following action steps, you can make your website stand out from the rest of the sites on the internet!

1. Add Call to Action Text

So, you want your audience to perform certain tasks? Let them know you want them to do that. And let them know about it in such a way that they feel it’s a rewarding task.

One of the best ways of doing this is by using a Call to Action, or CTA. Mostly, a CTA is text which says in plain words what you want your audience to do. For example, if you’re a mobile app development company and want people to send special requests to you, you could create a pop-up asking them if they have an unmet need. This would enable them to reach out to you easily with the specifics.

Be cautious when making CTAs, since more often than not, people end up filling their websites with more calls-to-action than what is considered acceptable by the user. I have been to many sites where there were full-page pop-ups which asked me to fill in my email ID to subscribe to their newsletter. The worst part was that these websites never gave me an option to close the pop-up!

It’s always advisable to make your CTAs in such a way that users can choose to not act on it. While it might sound counterintuitive, your users would totally love the experience. And those who need what you’re offering would go ahead and ask for your services anyway!

2. Embrace White Space

While they might not look like best pals, good performing websites and white space go hand-in-hand. White space helps your content stand out so that users can focus more on elements around the text. In fact, when used around text and titles, white space can increase user attention by 20%.

White space makes your website look fresh and open, and even “modern” if you’re doing it right. If your branding is in sync with this, then you can communicate to your users better with the help of white space. The only drawback you’ll face with white space is that it does take up space. What I mean by that is that you can’t put any text or image in the space where you intend to have white space, so yes, white space covers up space!

3. Speed Things Up

If I have to wait for it, I would become Barney Stinson from How I Met Your Mother. On a serious note, if I have to wait for a long time for your website to load, I would probably Google similar sites and visit one of those instead. Unless of course, yours is the only website that does what it does.

Because of this, my suggestion is to speed up your website as much as possible. There are multiple ways to do it. A few of the simplest ways include:

• reducing server response time
• enabling compression
• minimizing HTTP requests
• enabling browser caching

These are just some of the ways to speed up your website. A simple Google search would give you thousands of ways of speeding things up. So go ahead – put your website on the Autobahn!

Improve Your Website – Site Visitors Will Thank You!

As you read through these simple (yet often overlooked) 1-2-3 tips, did you consider your own experience as a consumer or user? You’ve probably benefited from the skillful use of white space on well-designed sites, for example, but didn’t think critically about it at the time.

So get your CTAs right, speed things up, and use that white space – now that you understand why white space is your friend! Remember, make that first impression a positive and your user – and your brand – both come out ahead.

There are No Do-Overs – Simple Ways to Improve Your #Website by @SAMLovesSan96 #RocksDigital
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Can you think of a great first impression that really stands out? Or perhaps an unfortunate one that’s stuck in your memory? Share your thoughts in the comments!

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