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“Brainstorm” feature is pre-moderated meaning that the editors will be reviewing your request and, if necessary, ask for revisions. We might reject your request because we prefer this section to feature more established sites and bloggers. If your blog is new and you were rejected, please don’t be offended: Join our forums and we’ll help you grow!

The best thing about MyBlogU “Brainstorm” feature is that it’s really flexible. You get to decide which kind of help you really need.

Examples:

• Request ideas and unique angles (For example, if you are writing about Facebook Advertising, you may found that this topic has been largely covered already all over the place, so ask our members how you may make it a unique and truly original idea)
• Request to share related tools and resources (Finding a unique and helpful tool is not easy. You can ask our members to share what they are actually using and what problems this tool is solving)

Mind:

• If you are planning to write an article by a set day, specify the deadline in the Request title
• Always be very specific: The more details you give, the more chances there are your request will be found by our members using “Search” feature

This section will be largely improved over the next future months. See some ideas we are going to work on here.

Please tweet your feature ideas to @MyBlogU and they will be added!

How “Brainstorm” works in more detail:

MyBlogU Brainstorm is the free feature that lets you crowd-source your content ideas. Use it whenever you hit the writer’s block or whenever you feel like you need a more unique angle.

Nowadays that everything has already been covered, it is hard to stand out. The “Brainstorm” section of MyBlogU helps you pick other people’s brains and get inspired.

Additionally you can help others brainstorm as well and get cited for being helpful!

To start a new brainstorming project:

• Add and verify the blog – this is how our members will see what you are looking for help for
• Then, go: Brainstorm -> and click Submit a New Project button

You can ask for any brainstorming help you want. For example, “I am covering WordPress plugins and I am not sure what to blog about. There are too many and everything has been written so far”. Or, “I am running a Technology blog, please help with some unique angles for ”Google search” topic”

* Make sure to add a good description mentioning any specific info that would help our members. For example, “My blog traffic comes mostly from Google and I noticed that my old article on Advanced Google Search operators is getting some good referral search traffic, so I want to post a follow-up but I don’t want to cover the same topic.”

Also add as many tags as you feel necessary. Remember that a good description and relevant tags will help our members to find your request.

Once your project is added, a moderator will review it to make sure it looks good and most likely approve it.

Once approved, you project will start receiving ideas. Feel free to keep your project active for as long as you want. You are likely to get quite a few ideas for writing several articles thanks to our members.

Mind that all the approved and rejected ideas will be saved in your archive, so you can always get back to the collection to re-use any.

Please do approve any idea that you use in your articles. This way you will notify the users of your published article and encourage them to go ahead and share it across their social media accounts.

We want you to both get inspired and build traffic and relationships as well!

You can also help others: Just browse the Brainstorm section of MyBlogU and see where your expertise and experience may come in handy. Feel free to share related links, stats and screenshots.

For example, you could share a screenshot of the interesting Google Search result and suggest the author write about all different ways Google gives your instant answers right within the search results. Isn’t that a great idea?

Let’s brainstorm together! Together we are better and stronger!

Join MyBlogU.com

More articles on using this feature:

• MyBlogU Idea Database: Your Ultimate Free Writing Productivity Tool
• Send Ideas through MyBlogU Brainstorm: Best Practices!
• What to Ask for in MyBlogU Brainstorm Section
• Are There Any Requirements for Blogs Starting Brainstorm Projects #MyBlogU?

Media Gallery is the live user-generated collection of infographics, videos and eBooks you can upload to bring them in front of the content creators

You can:

• Offer your blog to publish any pre-written description of what is depicted on the infographic
• Request a new description to be written by the infographic author
• Click the source link to access the embed code and use it in your article

=> Visual appeal is highly important for the success of your content; therefore adding useful cheatsheets and infographics is so essential.

Our platform is still being developed; you can check our plans and status updates here.

Join MyBlogU.com

Blog Expert Interviews is the section where you can:

• Request others’ opinions on the topic you are working on;
• Contribute your own experience / take / case study to others’ requests

Expert interviews have been one of the most effective ways to create content that goes viral:

• It’s a great way to get cited on various blogs and show your expertise on the topic
• All the contributors are willing to share your article where they were featured
• Readers love seeing the article author did their homework and cited different opinions from the industry experts

Group expert interviews section is the great source of free content to enhance your article as well as connect to industry experts and content creators.

Here’s how it works in more details:

Group expert interviews are a great way to connect to influencers, build you brand and diversify your blog content.

On the one hand, it’s a great way to add high-quality (and trusted!) content to your blog while engaging those people who shared quotes to promote it.

On the other hand, being featured in the group interview is a great way to build your personal brand and get cited.

MyBlogU “Expert Interviews” feature makes collecting quotes and participating in group interviews much easier.

To add your interview request:

• Please add and verify your blog (for your interviewees to know where their quotes are going to)
• Go to MyBlogU Interviews tab and click “Submit your interview request”

There, you’ll need to give your interview request title, tags, deadline, minimum number of words, category and a short description

Then please add the actual questions that our members will be answering.

• MyBlogU users will be requested to answer all or any of those questions (whichever they like)
• Don’t add too many questions, as members will not answer all of them.
• Keep your questions intriguing and interesting to get better answers

Mind that MyBlogU group interviews feature can also be used to get a quick quote for your upcoming article to make it look more trustworthy and professional.

Once you have enough answers (or once the interview is past deadline), you can select the answers you like and generate the HTML to embed them in your blog editor

Only answers longer than 200 words will go through the built-in duplicate content checker to make sure they are original, so we encourage our members to check the originality using a search engine.

To do that, simply grab a sentence from the answer, put it inside the parenthesis and search your preferred search engine.

Once you publish your interview or your article containing quotes, provide the URL inside MyBlogU. This will notify our users of the published interview and encourage them to share it with their social media followers!

Here you go! You have a cool, viral and original article for your blog! That’s a great way to build readership and traffic!

Participating in group interviews is one of the most “unintrusive” ways to get your name out there. You put yourself in the spotlight and position yourself as an expert in the niche by being listed in the blog article as the author of the quote

To participate…

Go through the available interviews and click “Add your answers” button. You’ll need to first specify your name, title and site URL – these will be used for quote attribution.

You can select a question (or a few questions) to contribute to or you can answer all of them.

When typing your answer, keep an eye on the word counter to stay within the specified word limit.

Once your interview is live, don’t forget to share it with your micro community via social media!

Good luck getting featured!

The best part is, this feature is absolutely free!

Join MyBlogU.com

More articles about making the most of this feature:

• How to Format an AWESOME Group Interview for Best Results Using
• How to Get Your @MyBlogU Expert Interview Retweeted Like Crazy
• How to Use #MyBlogU Interviews Section to Enhance Your Content Marketing Strategy
• Are There Any Requirements for Blogs Starting Interview Projects
• How to Ask Good Questions to Create an Outstanding Expert Interview

I get this question from time to time:

“I sent this user my interview answer three weeks ago. The interview is past deadline now but I haven’t heard back yet!”

Having grown a few communities, I must admit this is something we’ll have to accept. People get sick, blown away by day job, busy… they may have personal issues, they may have gone away traveling,… There are so many reasons why people may go MIA..

That’s something that’s going to happen and please don’t feel bad about those fellow community members. After all, we never know what’s holding them back!

Having said that, there are still ways to avoid or minimize cases of non-response:

1. [Brainstorms] Pay attention to the User’s Response Rate

This feature has been suggested by our brand ambassador @YoavEzer and we love it!

We give any project 2 weeks: If the project creator hasn’t replied to any ideas after that, his/her “Response rate” drops.

Once the pending ideas are reviewed (Approved, rejected, requested a follow-up), the response rate grows.

The response rate is for the user (ALL her/his projects), not for an individual project. So if you want to fix your response rate, you need to review ALL pending ideas (you can do so here)

Note: If the user hasn’t have ANY ideas to approve / reject in the past 2 weeks, there will be no response rate found on the project listing

2. [Brainstorm and Interviews] Mind the Last Login Date

We display this information for each project:

So if you know today’s date, it will be easy to figure out if the user has recently logged in to the site.

Note: The user may have used the site through our official plugin, so he may have been active without actually logging in.

3. [User profile] Check the User Rankings

MyBlogU User Rank consists of lots of actions this user has taken, including the ideas and interviews he/she published (NOT just reviewed but actually marked as published).

This is a great way to tell how actively the user has been reviewing and publishing MyBlogU users’ submissions!

4. [User profile] Follow up on Social Media

Many of our users connect their social media accounts to MyBlogU to be able to build up their interactions and Klout. Just check the user’s profile page and quickly follow up on your preferred social media site (Twitter is the easiest for that)

Your @MyBlogU rank grows when you mark an interview or idea PUBLISHED (you actually use it in the article!) #myblogu

— Ann Smarty (@seosmarty) January 22, 2015

Emails may go to spam. PMs are easy to miss as well. An alternative method to follow-up may be a good idea. Plus, you’ll get a chance to make a friend with that person on social media!

5. Contact us

Our team will be happy to help you get in touch with MyBlogU users. Our powers are still limited but we’ll do our best!

If you have more ideas on how to minimize non-response cases, please let us know!

MyBlogU offers a good set of collaboration and brainstorming tools:

• You can request for pretty much any brainstorming or content creation help in the “Brainstorm” section
• You can collect opinions and expert quotes in the Interviews section
• You can find some media assets to build your article around it at the “Media” section

Today we are officially introducing a new tool in your arsenal: Article Collaboration

Working together on drafts

Let’s say you have an article draft that you’ve always meant to complete but never had time to…

Let’s say you have an article draft that seems to be missing any originality or “meat”…

Let’s say you can’t come up with a better, catchier, “more viral” title for your article…

Let’s say you have an article draft that seems to be missing interesting visuals and tools…

Go ahead and upload it to MyBlogU Articles section and add your own comments what kind of help you are looking for.

Please read my own earlier case study here: How to Write a Great Article Even When It Doesn’t Seem to Work

The platform lets you invite collaborators to your drafts asking them to:

• Suggest a better (catchier) title for your article
• Add a section or several sections that you may have missed
• Add resources they see fit (videos, infographics, etc)
• Correct any mistakes they may have spotted and you have missed
• …Pretty much anything else you need help with…

Inviting collaborators / editors to your draft

Once your article draft is saved there, you can easily invite collaborators and editors: Search MyBlogU users by tags or choose from best-rated members.

You can also invite any of your friends using “email option”

You’ll also get editing applications from users you didn’t invite but you’ll be able to approve / reject any!

Reviewing collaborators’ notes

The invited and approved collaborators will start sending you notes and suggest snippets of text to add to the article.

You’ll be able to approve (and edit if needed) all the notes or reject them.

All approved snippets will be added to the final HTML code which you can grab to publish on your own blog or elsewhere at any time.

Finding people who care about your article!

Once an editor’s note is approved, he/she becomes the approved collaborator which means he/she will get automatic email once your article goes live anywhere on the web.

This means, they will go ahead and share your article around and comment on the actual result of that collaboration.

That means, you’ll have people who care about your article: You are no longer alone!

You’ll see more shares and interactions for your MyBlogU collaborated content than any other content you published previously.

You’ll learn to love your blog again!

When you create a new Brainstorm or Interview project, you never know how many ideas you are going to get.

Some requests sparkle so many ideas that they just keep going. Others may remain pretty inactive and there can be various reasons for that:

• MyBlogU doesn’t have too many people who actually know the topic (Or this category has too few subscribers)
• Your question is unclear and people are concerned as to what you need
• You sent your request over the weekend or during the holidays and most people were away or too busy to brainstorm!

If you wait for a couple of days and see that your project isn’t receiving too many contributions, here’s what you can do:

Update Your Project

In many cases, MyBlogU members may be unsure what you expect, so they just shy away from contributing.

Consider tweaking:

• Title and description to make them more specific (maybe provide some examples)
• Tags
• Deadline (for interview projects)

Not only will this help more people understand what you mean, this will also bump your project on top giving it more visibility.

MyBlogU users will also be notified of it in their email digests

Tweak the Category Project

Please make sure the project is submitted to the most relevant category: Our users are subscribed to the categories they specialize in, so once you change the category, this project will get included in the next email digest.

Sometimes one project can fit into several categories, so it’s a good idea to give one category a chance for a couple of days and then try changing it to another one.

Let Us Help!

Please contact us and we’ll help find some experts! Our mods will get back to you with some recommendations on how to edit the project to make it clearer. They will also suggest your project to some interested folks to help generate some buzz.

What To Do with Ideas that Keep Coming?

Here are some creative ways you can use MyBlogU ideas and quotes:

• Update your currently live article with more tips (Thus creating an “ultimate continuously-updated resource”)
• Create a follow up article sharing more tips
• Break the tips into newsletter blasts
• Create a series of “bite-sized” tips on your blog, etc

Do you have your own tips on how to generate more ideas using MyBlogU? Found some hacks? Please share them!

Put some thought and effort into your description for a MyBlogU interview. #myblogu

— Don Sturgill (@DonSturgill) February 11, 2016

Ditto on thought and effort for the questions… and don't make the length requirement burdensome. #myblogu

— Don Sturgill (@DonSturgill) February 11, 2016

Invite them to your next one! RT @DonSturgill: stay in touch with the folks who help with the interview. Be a good neighbor. #myblogu

— Ann Smarty (@seosmarty) February 11, 2016

One of a most frequent questions we get asked at MyBlogU is “How do I stop ideas coming but keep the old ideas before I can use them” or “How do I pause/archive the projects without approving the ideas (because I haven’t yet used them)”

Why Cannot I Archive a Project Without Approving / Rejecting Ideas?

Let us first explain why we require approving / rejecting all the ideas before archiving the project: We strive more communication between the project owner and the contributors.

If you could shelve a project with active ideas in it, it would be too easy to forget about ever updating the contributors on the status before starting a new project.

MyBlogU members help each other for free: The least you can do is to reply to them promptly saying if you think the idea or the quote would work for you.

Here’s How to Pause a MyBlogU Project

You don’t need to use the idea in content right now: We understand that brainstorming and inspiration often need time before they result in the content. Approving an idea is a way to say “Thanks”!

• If you cannot provide a link to the published content now, you can still approve the idea (Thus giving the user heads-up) and say that you’ll provide the link later.
• If you plan to use the idea in your article:
  • Add a “To-Do” item with the future article title.
  • This will email you the reminder that you were planning to write an article (Another incentive to get this done!)
  • Also, using “To-Do filter”, you’ll be able to find those ideas you were planning to use in that article!
  • Please read more about “To-Do” items here: #MyBlogU Idea Database: Your Ultimate Free Writing Productivity Tool

• Then archive the project.
• Once your article is live, you’ll go to your brainstorm archive and use “Provide URL” field to copy-paste the URL. This will send another email to each user automatically!

Use this field to provide the URL to the published content where you used this specific idea (and properly credited the contributor). This will:

• Send an email update to the idea author
• Increase your MBU rank!

Yes, these steps mean that you’ll need to go back to update the status a few times but keep in mind that someone may be waiting to hear from you on what they contributed. Let’s keep each other updated! The more communication, the stronger the relationships! That’s what’s building our community!

Our no-nonsense TOS:

NO NONSENSE. Be kind and considerate. Do not promote any illegal, pornographic, gambling, or otherwise adult-only material (we don’t screen members for age). No scams, pyramid schemes, or any activity that can harm others in any way. Our basic guidelines are honesty, transparency, and community. Let’s help one another make the Internet a better place to work and play.

Best practices:

• If you are using PRO requests to get your platform or tool reviewed, grant the full free access to the reviewer (and provide help and support)
• If you are requesting some type of coverage (for your infographic or app), don’t get too specific with how you want your tool to be reviewed: Don’t mention the type of links or blogs you are looking for. Be flexible to open up yourself to more opportunities and attract more bloggers
• Don’t just ask for promotion: Show how much value your request is adding to the web (or which problem it solves).

Disclaimers:

MyBlogU team pre-moderate ALL the (paid and free) requests but that does NOT mean we endorse any of them. MyBlogU has no affiliation with any offers you may find on our platform

We don’t do incentivized/sponsored opportunities in return for search engine link juice passing through links. Deals made outside MyBlogU’s environment is not within our control