Bear with me as I demonstrate a writing technique of two United States presidents. The content of excerpts that follow have absolutely nothing to do with what I'm trying to show you. But three paragraphs when looked at sentence by sentence do have one thing in common.

See if you can discover similarity of each example. Never mind words and that they were written by highly educated, famous men. Look only at structure of each paragraph.

"THE WORLD is very different now. For man holds in his mortal hands power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life. And yet same revolutionary beliefs for which our forebears fought are still at issue around globe--the belief that rights of man come not from generosity of state, but from hand of God."

John F. Kennedy Inaugural Address Friday, January 20, 1961

"THE MONEY changers have fled from their high seats in temple of our civilization. We may now restore that temple to ancient truths. The measure of restoration lies in extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit."

Franklin D. Roosevelt First Inaugural Address Saturday, March 4, 1933

Okay, what in world am I talking about? Here's how to find out. Open a word processing file and do this little exercise.

For each paragraph, type these headings:

"Topic Sentence" "1." "2."

Then copy and paste first sentence of each passage after heading "Topic Sentence". Finally, place second sentence after number 1 and third sentence after number 2.

Can you see a simple pattern developing? Notice that each paragraph has only three sentences. The first is topic sentence, or main idea, and next two are supporting sentences.

Now, get out a blank sheet of paper and write our three headings, leaving a little space between them. Then do this little exercise.

One of biggest mistakes a fledgling publisher can make is to focus their publication on something they don't know much about. While it is possible to get content from contributing authors, which does add a great deal to your publication, if you are to succeed, you must have original content.

Many people can write an occasional article that is excellent. Writing an article or column however on a regular basis, is a demanding task. But some folks like Rozey Gean at: http://www.marketing-seek.com and Larry Dotson at: http://www.ldpublishing.com have found secret to doing just this.

The hardest thing is to get ideas for articles. It seems that once you do get an idea, article then flows rather easily.

So, where do you get ideas?

Actually ideas can come from anyplace. Many come from questions your readers might ask. Sometimes a simple question can blossom into a full blown article. Email you receive, even spam, can contain a keyword that sets your creative juices flowing.

Browsing web is a great place. Discussion sites, where people are talking about something might give you an idea. Many times people get into rather heated discussions and controversy itself might breed an idea.

Articles by other authors can stimulate your thinking, but you have to be careful here. While we all know you can't take another's work and claim it as your own, you also can't take their idea and simply rewrite it a bit. There is a gray area here, and sometimes you may be taken to task even if you have never seen their work.