I’d like to highlight some of the top things that I’ve taken away from Ed Dale’s latest version of Challenge.co

The Internal Talk Of A Writer

The first things in The Challenge that helped me identify with Ed Dale, was his description of things he would be thinking within his own head about the content he was writing. Ed recognized the workings of his ego, and shared how he worked past this point – and kept writing.

Ed went into detail about his writing process as he was writing an email he sent out during an early part of the fist modules.  It’s been something that has really stuck with me – I identify with this mental battle, and while sometimes, it gets the better of me – it was encouraging to read through Ed’s candid conversation about how he thinks, feels and reacts while he’s going through the writing and creating content for his blog or website.

Market Samurai

Market Samurai, of course, is a very powerful way to find the best keyword phrases in a market that’s has a good commercial viability – and it is fantastic for reviewing the depth of the search engine optimization that has you keyword’s competition already has on the search engines. In other words, when you are researching the competitiveness of a particular keyword, market Samurai gives you a bird’s eye view of how organized the competition is.

Research, Writing and Editing Content

The most important thing I learned from Ed Dale’s Challenge 2010 is a writing technique that I’m using right now to summarize this article. Briefly, Ed packages his research, writing and editing into three different phases.

Research

Ed is teaching a few great techniques for finding conversation and questions about your topic area using social media – and he calls this his research, or fueling phase. Once you know where to look for these conversations, this research phase of the writing process runs for about 10 minutes. Just enough that you’ve gathered a few things to talk about.

Writing

next, Ed teaches to start a minute timer, and writing about the information you were just reviewing. Free form write whatever comes off the top of your head about your opinion or view about some of the questions and concerns you were just reading about.

Keep in mind that you are writing a solution and providing something of value for your readers, and this will help build an audience of people who are actually going to subscribe and come back to read more.

Editing

Third, and finally, Ed makes a specific point of keeping the editing part of your writing on a completely separate day from the writing part.

You may do an number of writing sessions to create some content that will be edited later, but you always must edit work from previous days. He speaks a number of times – with emphasis – about the importance of leaving your work alone for a period of time before going back to edit it.

If you are in the Tourism Marketing niche, then you know the general topic that you are blogging about.  I recommend you simply following Ed’s method of creating content – it can really transform your blogging, as well as improving the quality of the content you publish!

If it works for Lodge Owners, then it’s gotta work with other Niches too.

Research And Development

In order to answer the question “Do These Social Media Strategies Work?”, Quetico Internet Marketing has invested heavily in research and development over the past few months, setting up several variations of nearly identical social media strategies in several unrelated niches.

Learning From The Best

One of the greatest personal benefits I experienced from working with Social Media sites was the ability to learn from the Gurus. Twitter and Facebook let you get upclose and real-time with the people you follow – it almost seems personal.

I didn’t use Twitter as a means to chat with people, instead, I used it as a way to monitor the people and topics I was interested in learning about.

Right off the start I met and followed @marismith, and I’ve been creeping her profiles ever since – often gaining a boost by her sheer energy and enthusiasm – then a great social media tip to ride the wave with – and to create something productive out of!

Work At Your Own Pace

For Tourism Operators who must learn about Blogging:

Learn about Social Media from Mari Smith. Mari offers a number of outstanding course options that I’d like to pass along:

FREE Facebook Tips

Social Marketing Method – INTRO PROGRAM.

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NEW: Social Marketing Method – QUICK START PROGRAM

The Social Marketing Method Quick Start Program includes three LIVE 90-minute webinar sessions. By popular demand, Mari put this program together specifically to help with more hands-on training. (Don’t tell her I said this, but you get three sessions for much less than the price of one individual session with Mari!) Here’s just a peek at what it includes!