The first major struggle for business owners who want to use a blog for content marketing is creating content. With the dearth of content being created daily, it's certainly a challenge to come up with anything helpful and interesting to say. The second major struggle for business owners is getting people to actually visit their site and read their blog posts. The most brilliant writing in the world won't do you much good if no one reads it. And the third major struggle for business owners is keeping that content fresh. Google rewards sites who have fresh content because that's what readers want. Read more »

One of the tools I talk about all the time for blogging, one that I used to type this post, is Evernote. You can use Evernote to tap out your ideas and great content for blog posts wherever you're at, even if you're sitting in your car in a parking lot, waiting for your wife, as I was.

When was the last time you watched Star Wars? Do you remember the first scene where we were introduced to Darth Vader? These scary "stormtroopers" had just assaulted and boarded some kind of transport spaceship, anhialated a bunch of other guys in a laser gun fight, and then in walks the scariest guy of them all. Dressed in black form head to toe, complete with cape and a full helmet that accentuated his breathing, in walks Darth Vader. Dum dum duh dum goes the music, right?

While I love Star Wars, the point of this article is less about the films and more about the brilliant musical score from John Williams. John Williams has composed such memorable film soundtracks as Jaws, Jurrasic Park, Harry Potter and more. He is known as "America's composer" and has five Oscars, two Emmys, three Golden Globes and eighteen Grammys.

The content marketing strategy that I teach my clients is designed to give them a variety of kinds of content that they can create. By incorporating blogs and articles, videos and podcasts, presentations, white papers and more into the plan, business owners can be more flexible in their content creation. Depending on how much time they have in a given week, and what topics are top of mind, the business owner or writer can tackle the kind of content that makes the most sense at that moment.

So we have talked before about Newsjacking, and I had promised to go into more detail. We first brought it up when I reviewed Newsify and how bloggers can use that tool to monitor RSS Feeds. And then just recently we mentioned it as a great way to earn co-citations for improved SEO. Newsjacking is when you have an opportunity to blog about a current news event and add your own perspective.

As you add more and more content to your website and blog, you will slowly begin to attract more interested readers. If you really want to rapidly increase your readership you need to use social networks.

However, there is nothing more discouraging than to spend a lot of time writing and perfecting your blog post, only to watch and wait for the Facebook Likes, Google +1's and Twitter Tweets that never come.

Why aren't people tripping over themselves to share your content? It might be your fault, but these five tips can help you quickly.