10 seconds. It isn’t enough time to publish a Tweet or respond to a Facebook comment, but it’s one of the most important metrics online. According to Microsoft research, that’s all the time you have to impress visitors to your web pages.

The average length of a website visit is between 10-20 seconds, but most decisions about the value of a page’s content are made in around 8 seconds. As Marketer John G. Olsen points out, there’s certainly no time to impress anyone with the main body content of your blog articles. You’ve got to capture interest with a dazzling title, intriguing introductory paragraph, and achieve stickiness with a concluding call-to-action.

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“The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” – Lao Tzu

Mastering blog writing can seem hard and time consuming. Well, actually it is.

Writing is a skill, so it takes a lot of hard work and dedication to become a better writer.

It doesn’t mean it’s impossible, though!

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Blog successfully and you can smile all the way to the bank. Your website traffic will grow, your company will flourish, and your reputation could swell to the point where business finds you. Bloggers like Tim Sykes rake in up to $1,000,000 per month!

But it’s not quite that simple. In order to achieve success, there are things every blogger must have – things you can’t blog without. In this post, I highlight five of the most important. If you’re just starting out with blogging, hopefully you will find this useful.

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On the Internet, there’s just about 1 billion websites and 4,350,000,000 pages of information.

Fact: There’s more than enough content on the web already. Way more than enough.

In blogger terms, that means that if the only content you publish is rehashed themes already found all over the blogosphere, then don’t bank on success. Maybe that strategy worked back when there were only 10,000+ Internet users per website, but today, there’s only 4 for each.

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Breaking Down a Perfect Blog Post

When your blog just isn’t taking off or seeing the readership you hoped for, It can be easy to blame low numbers on outside factors when the actual problem might be your blog writing methods.

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Quality isn’t always a measure of whether content is going to go viral. Actually, neither is budget. Studies have found that 60% of viral advertising isn’t created by Fortune 500s. It’s crafted by smaller brands. You have the power to earn thousands of Facebook shares, ReTweets, and +1s. And today, we’ll share some tips on how you can unleash it.

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One of the best things about content marketing is how it builds credibility, amplifies authority, and makes you a thought leader.

But what exactly is thought leadership?

Wikipedia defines a thought leader as someone who “is recognized by peers for having innovative ideas. Thought leaders often publish articles and blog posts on trends and topics influencing an industry.”

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Coming up with new ideas can be difficult at times. Here are 15 great ways to come up with inspiration

1. Within Yourself

Personal life events, past mistakes, and future goals can and should be your greatest source of inspiration. Think of a life event that has taken place recently: Is there anything about it that would be greatly beneficial for your followers?

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The ancient saying that a picture is worth 1000 words comes as no surprise to content marketers.  Images arouse emotions, set the tone for your writing, help you tell a better story, and aid your readers in “seeing” what you’re trying to convey in words.

It’s certainly possible to buy images. In fact, it’s easy. However, it can get expensive pretty quickly, especially if you’re committed to delivering quality visual content. If your budget is tight, you’ll be thrilled to learn that there are places to find images on the web for free.

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Picture this: You are surrounded by numerous cups of coffee, staring at a blank Word document on the computer screen, where you have been stuck from the get go. Being overwhelmed by the intention to create a stellar piece of content, you cannot narrow it down to just one topic. Or the opposite: You have exhausted every option and are out of things to write about. We have all been there. Writer’s block hits everyone at one point or another.

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