With literally hundreds of millions of blogs in the vast blogosphere, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to develop a unique brand for your blog by writing posts that are unique, creative and entertaining. The next time you find yourself in a rut, try these 7 blog copywriting ideas for creating fresh and interesting content:

1. Start With the Headline

It might seem logical to write the body of the post first. After all, length-wise, it’s the most significant piece of the puzzle. Instead, try coming up with the most creative, most intriguing headline possible. Then design a post around that inspirational headline. Similarly, you could choose an image or create a call to action first. Whatever your typical process, turn it around to inspire some fresh thinking.

2. Tell Your Story With a Graphic

Instead of using words to convey a concept that’s perhaps been covered by other bloggers — or even your own blog — rely on a custom illustration to tell the story. This tactic can have some SEO benefits, as well. A creative, useful graphic or illustration can have the potential to go viral, with readers linking to it and sharing it.

FeedBurner has an easy way of promoting a blog post though FeedFlare. FeedFlare simply adds a few social options to each post. You can choose to add a Digg link, del.icio.us link, ‘email this post’ option, share on Facebook and a few other handy choices. However, there are many more possibilities as you can create custom FeedFlares.

The other day Danny Sullivan put together one for StumbleUpon. He said it was quite easy as even a non-techie like himself can do it.

Here is how you’d get the StumbleUpon FeedFlare working for your site:

1. Log into your FeedBurner account.
2. Click on your feed.
3. Click on the Optimize tab.
4. Click on FeedFlare
5. Copy this URL http://searchengineland.com/stumble.xml and past it into the ‘Add new Flare’ box.
6. Hit the ‘Add new Flare’ button and you’re done.

It is really simple to add and helps give your blog one more area for added exposure.

Have you created a FeedFlare? Or know where to get more custom ones? If so, do share.

[tags]StumbleUpon,FeedFlare,FeedBurner,Danny-Sullivan[/tags]

In case you haven’t noticed, social media optimization (SMO) is the new big search marketing term. I think you’ll be hearing a lot about it this year and thought I’d give you an easy tip to get started.

First thing you need to know is what social media optimization is. Basically, it’s just getting exposure and traffic from social media sites like Digg, del.icio.us, MySpace and many others. For a more in depth explanation, check out the new rules for social media optimization.

What I’d like to share with you is one extremely easy way to get some social media exposure. It’s as easy as photo sharing.

Using photo sharing sites to host the images you use in your blog posts will give your site added exposure on other sites. Some photo sharing sites to check out include Zooomr, PhotoBucket and Flickr.

Flickr is one of the main photo sharing sites. Once you add your photos, they can be found by not only Flickr but also Technorati, Serph, the Flock web browser, Netvibes and other services that integrate with Flickr. It’s a quick and easy way to get in to lots of other sites.

A lot of people on the internet understand that links are an important part of being found in search engines, what they don’t understand is that some links are more valuable than others.

Jane from SEOMoz came up with a great way to say it.

“Some links are Benjamins. Some are Washingtons. Some are pennies that, even after a year, a whole collection of them will only get you a couple of bucks at CoinStar. It isn’t hard to tell the difference.”

So to elaborate a bit lets take a look at a few examples.

Any link exchanges, or sites that except any links no matter what, are pennies. You can do as many as you want, and you can find them pretty much everywhere, bu they aren’t going to do you a lot of good.

Link exchanges and easy submissions to directories in your related industry can be dollars. Since they are directly related, and not just taking any link, they have a bit more value. Just don’t expect to be a millionaire anytime soon.

“Why should I use del.icio.us?” is a question I got the other day. It seems that del.icio.us provides no search engine love as it blocks the bookmarks with nofollow tags, yet it is very valuable.

What del.icio.us is good for is exposure. Lots of people use del.icio.us to not only store their own bookmarks but find new and interesting websites. I know that sites like LifeHacker sometimes posts on what is popular in del.icio.us too. This then turns in to a very valuable link back to your site.

What you are really doing is trying to create buzz and visibility for an article or a site that you think is interesting. It’s not about spamming link building for search engines.

Lets not forget that del.icio.us is owned by Yahoo and who knows what Yahoo might do with del.icio.us. They could do away with the nofollow tags or possibly use it to influence their own rankings. Only time will tell.

I would continue to use del.icio.us as an avenue for social bookmarking and exposure because it’s the most popular and most used social bookmarking site out there. However, also look into other services too. Sites like Spurl.net are more search engine friendly and can actually dual post to del.icio.us also. Now you are hitting two good sites with one bookmark.

[tags]del.icio.us, spurl, social bookmark, yahoo, lifehacker, nofollow[/tags]

On one of my other blogs, I received an interesting email today. The offer was not to exchange links, but they offered to write posts for me, about their topic, and they’d link back to their website.

Now, have to say, it’s an interesting idea and, if it wasn’t so far off topic, I might consider it.

The Email:

I got interested in your blog (blog url) while reading it.

And I have a mutually convenient proposal to you.
Also a good team of talented content writers provide me with high quality unique content.

My offer to you is to write some unique watches and jewelry relate posts for your blog. In your turn you would post two text links to one of my sites posted with article.

I’ll be waiting for your opinion. Please, feel free to contact me if you need more details. I am open for other ideas or offers.

I have to give them credit for trying! Actually, if this sounded more professional, and was ‘on topic’ I could see this kind of link building tactic working quite well. Think of it, everyone wins. You get unique targetd content, they get a link from unique targetd content.

Maybe instead of creating your own blog to drive traffic, you should work with blog owners to create content for them while still reaping the benefit though embedded links.