In 2002 Brett Tabke and Tara Calashain wrote a book called “Google Hacks” where Brett makes this guarantee:

If you write an article each day (200-500 words each), in a year’s time, you’ll call your website a success. Google will refer 500-2000 visitors each day to your site. With each visitor looking at 4-5 pages, you’ll have about 15,000 page views each day.

That’s inspiring. Imagine what you could do with that many people looking at your website!

From what I’ve seen, this method is still working. Heavy-weight blog author Steve Pavlina got serious traffic within about 4 months of starting his blog.

See how fast Steve made money with his website. You just might be able to do a lot better. Steve said he seriously under-monetizes his website.

More recently, John Pozadzides has also had success with his blog in a short time.

How in the world, though, can you think of enough ideas to produce 200-500 quality words each day?

Here are 20 tips to help you achieve this in just minutes a day. In fact, when you get used to applying these suggestions, you can publish a great article in about 20 minutes:

1. Be a reporter: keep a notebook and pen handy everywhere you’re at during the day, ready to write down website URLs, what you see on TV, what people say, and anything that pops into your head.

2. Keep an idea folder of magazine articles that have inspired you - rip them right out of the magazine and into your folder.

3. Use other people’s stuff, but be sure to re-write and add enough of your own words to it - only about 30% of what great bloggers write is truly their own ideas.

4. Read/see a lot on the internet - StumbleUpon, Digg, YouTube, Google News, even The Onion - and keep good records of what interests you.

5. Do NOT just research for today’s article - get plenty ahead: start listing ideas and putting together partial articles you can whip into a full-blown post in 20 minutes. Aim for at least 100 articles ahead of the one for today. This is an incredibly powerful internet marketing strategy.

6. If you don’t have something ready that’s truly quality, (something you yourself would like to read), don’t post anything - that’s why you get ahead - so you just don’t let yourself miss a SINGLE DAY of posting an article. Commit to this - you’ll thank me over and over for it.

7. Make a list of keywords related to your topic - Google has a handy keyword tool to help you.

8. Sprinkle keywords from your list throughout your articles and be sure these keywords link to an authority site, which is a site that’s listed high in the search results for that keyword.

9. To improve your quality, look not only at what other people write, but look at the style good writers use.

10. Review products you’ve purchased as well as write research articles on products you want to buy.

11. Use extensive links and multimedia - enough to make your articles authoritative so no one wants to go elsewhere to read on your subject.

12. Oprah doesn’t stick to one topic. Why should you? Being “off-topic” once in awhile makes you more real. Writing for a year on the same topic would probably make you really boring.

13. Be thorough when you write - someone will enjoy what you have to say, even if not all do.

14. Select 10 to 15 tips for your article - readers seem to love lists, and so do search engines. Eliminate a couple of your least important tips so your list is tight and useful.

15. In article planning, write a brief introduction in a sentence or two. When completing your article, you might want to expand this into 4-12 sentences.

16. Don’t write too much in one article - people don’t read, they scan. If you absolutely must write War and Peace within one blog post, be sure to break up your text with lots of pictures and bold headings, making it easier to read.

17. If your article is too short, turn each tip in your list into a question and answer this question. Ask: Who, What, When, Where, Why, How …about each item in your list.

18. Write a closing paragraph that wraps up your article.

19. Rate each sentence in your opening and closing paragraphs from 1 to 10. Strive to improve each sentence a point or two. Here’s where you want to impress your reader.

20. Try to include an important keyword from step 7 in your article title.

You are the CEO of your own life. Whether you apply these suggestions or not is up to you.

Whether your site is successful or not is probably not dependent on any one single tip in these 20 (except, maybe for Tip #6).

So be consistent, and as Zig Ziglar says, “I’ll see you at the top.”

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