I don’t care how much of a writing machine a person happens to be.  Even those ferocious and seemingly unstoppable bloggers that routinely crank out up to three full posts per day occasionally find that they simply can’t find anything to write about at the moment.

Every writer has faced the dreaded blank page.  Each of us has found that we just don’t have any words, no matter how hard we try to coax our muse out of hiding.

Sometimes all it takes is a spark of inspiration to get your creative juices flowing and in that bent, I’ve started trying to find new inspirations for this and my other blogs.

I’ve found a few great sources of inspiration and I felt compelled to share them, so here you go:

• 100 Sources of Blogging Inspiration,
  A great article at Ink Rebels with a full hundred ideas to get you more motivated
• 100 Blog Topics Chris Brogan hopes YOU write
  If there’s anyone you want to learn from, it’s Chris Brogan, and he has ideas for you
• Keep it going: Blog inspiration
  A good article by Elliot C. Black with tips for keeping that content flowing
• Hot Topics
  An unusual tool that opens seven pages of related topics from a keyword search, possibly useful, kind of fun
• the LinkBait Generator
  If you’re the kind of writer that absolutely must have a title before you can write, this might just be the tool to help you out.
• 7 Places I Find Blog Topic Ideas
  A good article on SitePoint on how one blogger keeps his content fresh.
• Prompts, Story Ideas and Photo Inspiration
  If you’re a visual person, having a picture to spark your creativity can be just the thing
• Using Google Alerts for Blog Post Topic Inspiration
  Automate your inspiration process with Google Alerts.
• 25 Great Sources of Blog Ideas and Inspiration
  Comprehensive and insightful article by SiteSketch
• The Cosmo Headline Technique for Blogging Inspiration
  Trust Coppyblogger to have a great tip for getting inspired
• Unusual, Cheeky and Fun Ways To Get Inspiration For your Blog Posts
  A good collection of tips for finding new post ideas
• The Imagination Prompt Generator
  Really stuck for an idea?  This can help you out
• Get inspiration from blog comments when writing your next post
  We should already be doing this, but it’s good to keep in mind

I could go on, but with several hundred (or thousand) ideas already included in this list, I’m sure you’ll find something to get you motivated. I know I did.

Now get out there and Blog!

Answering questions in forums in your niche is a great way to generate targeted traffic to your blog, all the while becoming recognized as an expert on your chosen topic. Every time you provide a useful answer to a forum member’s questions you position yourself as someone who knows what he or she is talking about.

Forum posts can be visited by hundreds of people each day, so the more often you post, the better your chances of gaining new readers.  The bonus to this is that these people are already interested in what you’re writing, all you have to do is show up and comment.

Finding Forums In Your Niche

If you have an interest, you can just about guarantee that others share it and that somewhere out there is a forum that has active discussions on that topic. The most difficult part of posting in forums isn’t sharing the knowledge you already have, it’s finding forums to post in.

Let me take the guesswork out of that portion of the equation for you.  Just go to BoardReader, click of Forums and search for the subject you write about.  I’m sure you’ll find more than one forum you can become a member of.

From there, take a few minutes to read some older posts.  Learn who the moderators are and who is already posting good content or knowledgeable answers.  Find which types of posts draw the most views and which get the most comments, good and bad.

Once you’ve done the research, sign up, make sure to add a signature file with a link yo your blog (if it’s allowed) and start answering questions and joining discussions.  You’ll be amazed how quickly your traffic grows!

While it is important to optimize the content of your blog posts  for search engines, and we’ll talk about this later, your main focus should always be writing for humans, not search engine bots and spiders.

Always look at what you write as if you were reading your own post the same way a new reader would.  Ask yourself what you would do if you arrived at page that promised you the information you’ve been searching a half-hour for, only to discover that the page you arrive at is nothing but a barely readable hodgepodge of keywords with almost no meaningful content.

I doubt that you would stay on that page for any length of time at all.  You can guarantee that your readers, or the people that might have been your readers aren’t going to take the time to decipher something meaningful out of  all the keyword-loading that you’ve done.  They’re going to head straight back to their favorite search tool and find a site that actually delivers the information they’re looking for.

Always try to keep these things in mind while you’re writing. Don’t repeat your keywords all over your blog posts to the point that they don’t make any make sense.  If you do, you run the risk of a page that looks like the one in the following illustration:

Notice how difficult it becomes to read what they are trying to tell you after the first few occurrences of their chosen keywords? (In this case “Aruba Caribbean.”)  It quickly becomes nearly impossible to see anything but the keywords themselves. They overwhelm any actual benefit of the content on the page and make reading difficult if not impossible.

Please Don’t Feed The Spiders!

Pages like the one above provide a lot of food for search engine spiders, but in this case, feeding the search engines is detracting from the reader’s experience.

This tactic might work for short-term search engine placement and you may get some extra traffic, but human beings won’t stay long if the content is obviously geared for search engine ranking. People have a short attention span and won’t waste it on junk.

Likewise, Search engines constantly check what they’ve indexed to see if the content is overly keyword heavy.  Pages that have obviously been padded are eventually penalized and pushed down in the rankings. Even if this tactic lands you in the top three results for your chosen keywords for a short time, it will eventually be banished to page thirty where it will do you no good at all.

We’ll go over the right way to optimize your blog posts and pages for search engines in the next chapter.  For now it’s much more important to know what not to do than what it is acceptable.  It’s a lot easier to crush a bad habit before it can develop than it is to retrain yourself after you’ve gotten used to doing things in a certain way.

I spend a lot of time here talking about ow to make money online, the tools required to do so, and what it takes to make those things work together to give you a measure of success.  For me, these are the tools that pay my bills and their use is nearly second nature to me, but let’s face it; there are people who have absolutely no interest in using the Internet to make a living.

If you are one of those people, you may consider a regular brick and mortar business as your method of gaining independence.  One of the easiest way to get into the world of owning your own business is through franchising.  A franchise may limit what you are able to do, but it also comes with the security of a known brand, marketing and respect that a new start up business just does not have.

If this sounds good o you and you love people, why not think of working with children, families and weeing parties by opening your very own Partyland franchise in your town?

There is always a need for party supplies.  They are needed for weddings, anniversaries, birthdays, you name it.  It’s one business you can be sure will be around for a long time to come.

If you’re a people person and love seeing satisfied looks on the faces of others, this one may just be perfect for you.

Coming into the beginning of the year, I was the guy who told everyone that I saw a check deposited in my account every single day of the month.  That’s still true, but the amount of those checks has dwindled appreciably.  It isn’t as easy to make $100 to $200 dollars per day as it was then.  There are days when I’m happy to have made $30.  The money keeps rolling in, just not as quickly as I would like it to.

Of course the money keeps rolling out, too.  Hosting fees, rent, utilities, expenses, fuel, food, these things don’t stop needing to be paid.  Neither do my loan payments and my credit card statements.  Each requires my attention monthly, but the current state of the economy hasn’t bounced back enough to make it simple. For a while we just used credit to fund some of the extras, but those days are gone as well, we’re maxed, but still moving.

My wife and I have considered many options, from consolidation loans to credit management over the past few months.  For now we’re hanging on, but if times get slimmer before they get fatter, we may have to take one of these routes to keep ends meeting while we wait for her promotion to go through. (She’s Military.  Ranking up can take some time.)

For now there will be less steak and more hamburger.  Ramen has found it’s way back onto my menu as well, but there is no option to stop trying.  I’ll still make money each and every day and diversify sources until that happens.

And I’m putting the credit cards into forced retirement for a bit.

It was bound to happen.  The get rich quick crowd has found twitter, so now I find myself having to wade through the same chaff I find in Search engine results, only this time it’s in the twitter streams of people I’ve decided to follow.

Of course I unfollow these fools as soon as I realize what’s going on, but it’s still annoying.  The thought that there is no really safe place to be, that these predators of the uninformed will stop at nothing to grab the last dollar of someone who is struggling to make it with their false promises and techno babble just makes me a bit ill. I’ve seen this sort of thing for my entire career in the Internet industry.  They just. Don’t Stop.

If there weren’t people out there gullible enough to buy into these schemes then the morons who propagate them would simply go away.  The irony of it all is that most of the people touting the latest and greatest get rich programs are people that were suckered into a pyramid schemes themselves.  They’re just trying to make back the money they spent on the initial investment.

Most of them never will.

99% of the people who buy into these schemes will never, ever make their money back.  they’ll try for a while to get a few signups and get discouraged before they ever come near what they’ve already spent.

Remember: If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

If you're a serious muxic lover like I am, I think you'll like what I have to tell you in this installment.  I'd like to take just a moment to tell you about HD Radio.  HD Radio is pure digital quality music, but not from some location ignorant satellite system.  This is radio the way it should be; local and relevant to your area.  It's broadcast by the same stations you know and love, but with benefits that no radio station has been able to offer in the past.

You can probably tell from that last statement that I'm not a huge fan of satellite radio, and I'm not.  Not only are the selections they play generally generic, but there's no local news, road condition information or alerts/  you don't even get some cool local DJ to love or hate. The only plus to satellite radio until now has been the quality vs. traditional broadcast radio.  This is no longer the case; HD radio stations broadcast in digital music quality just like satellite radio, but on a much more personal level.

Local radio stations are now broadcasting in high-quality digital audio, this kills the issue of quality, but there are other perks as well.  If you own the right HD Radio tuner, like the JVC KD-HDR20, you can also get a list of songs to download to your iPod with the click of a button from anywhere at any time.  No gimmics, no loging on to a website.  No having to remember the name of the song or band you were listening to.

This is called Song Tagging or iTunes Tagging . When you hear a song you like on the radio (assuming it's got an iPod port), just press the "tag" button to automatically add that song to a playlist called "tagged".  When you get back to your computer you can easily jump over to the iTunes store and grab a copy of the new songs you like and buy them when you're ready. Just tag it and get it later.  Simple!

I know a lot of my readers are serious about their iPods and iPhones, so I thought I'd share.  Hopefully most of you will find this as interesting as I do.

At least I hope so...

Or perhaps I should call this post RedHat vs. Debian.  In any event, my own experiences lead me to the conclusion that Debian is the hands down winner in usability.

I know that ther are a lot of Redhat users out there that would probably tell me that their distro is more powerful, more secure and more robust overall.  They might even be right.  The problem is, I don’t want to have to be a Linux expert to use the operating system and I definitely don’t like to be forced to visit the terminal to install simple software.

Unfortunately, my recent experiences with Fedora forced me to do just that. Installing Adobe Air applications required the use of wget and admin privilege hacking for proper operation, whereas in Ubuntu all that was required was to grant the application permission to continue with what it needed to do.

I understand the opinion of the RedHat crowd in regards to security.  It makes sense to be leery of allowing applications to install files in system folders.  Unfortunately this practice is common. Requiring your users to have the experience and know-how to get around it rather than just presenting them with a dialog asking if it is acceptable is archaic, not inherently secure.

In the end, I must conclude that , at least for the moment, Debian based distributions like Ubuntu provide a better user experience in the realm of day-to-day computing.  Whether they are better at secure computing or server applications is a different question, but as for a desktop that actually has a shot at competing with Windows or Apple, Debian is the best choice out there.

In my hot little virtual hands I hold a PayPerPost v4.0 Alpha key. I’ve got to admit that I’m excited to check out the new features in PPP and so far I see some good things and some things I’d like to see changed, but to be honest, I havent had enough time playing with the system to give an honest opinion.

Over the next few days I’m going to get as deep into the system as possible and write a detailed report of my findings, both positive and negative.  I’m sure there will be planty of both at this point, since they’re still in the alpha test phases.

My initial thoughts?  The look of the site is a massive impovement over the old PPP, but it seems that they have opted for an advertiser driven system, which may limit the number of opportunities for blogs that aren’t in mainstream niches.  Again, I’ll delve deeper into this subject over the nex few days.

Want an alpha key of your own?  Leave a comment on the PPP blog over at Izea.com and maybe they’ll hook yo up too.

For now I’m off to play with features, get some screenshots and gather my notes.  I’ll get back soon.

Peace, I’m out.

(And yes, this post was sponsored by PPP V.4 Alpha)