How to Improve as a Problogger, Part 2

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Last week, I talked about step one for improving as a problogger. I argued that it was a foundational step to believe that you could improve in any skill and natural talent was mostly a myth. If you are poor at a skill right now, you can become competent at it through practice and effort.

Today, let’s look at the next steps for improving as a problogger. These steps provide a blueprint for shoring up your weaknesses and becoming even better at your strengths.

Step 2: Learn.

As you seek to improve, you need a starting point. In this step, look for sources of expertise to guide you in your journey.

For example, let’s pretend you want to grow the search traffic of your blog. You could do several things to start the process of learning about SEO. You could buy an ebook, read blogs, watch a video course, or pick the brain of friend who’s good at SEO.

It’s not enough to learn from the initial information you come across. You need to find trustworthy sources. With all the misinformation on the web, you should do enough research to vet the credibility of your sources.

Avoid the sources who offer empty promises and guarantee quick results since improvement usually takes time. Don’t be like the bloggers who are always looking for the latest shortcut to online riches. While they are being scammed by the latest “guru”, you should be learning on a deep level from the real experts. The most credible sources will be realistic with the speed of improvement. They will place a premium on hard work because they know that becoming competent in the skill takes effort.

Once you’ve found some credible sources, start learning but don’t get stuck on this step. There are too many bloggers that do a lot of reading but barely put any of their knowledge into action. I used to be one of them. I used to spend most of my time reading about problogging instead of actually working on my blog. I learned a lot but I didn’t have time to implement my knowledge since I was spending so much time reading. Therefore, I removed all the problogging blogs from my RSS reader to encourage me to move from learning to doing. I made a list of useful things I learned and set out to apply them to my blog.

Step 3: Take action.

Once you have a solid grasp on a new concept, it’s time to try it out.

Let’s go back to the SEO example. You do some reading and discover that building links on authority sites is very effective. You find some suggestions on how to build these links and try them out.

At this point, it’s important not to expect too much from your efforts since you’re just starting out. You will probably fail a lot in the early stages but with each attempt, you’ll gain valuable experience and knowledge as long as you heed the next step.

Step 4: Evaluate.

In this step, take a look back at your efforts and evaluate them.

You will need some metrics to help you determine if your efforts are succeeding or not. It can also be helpful to set some realistic goals to motivate you.

There are many metrics you can look at depending on the skill you’re trying to improve. Here are some common metrics to consider:

• traffic
• links
• published guest posts
• comments
• retweets
• search engine ranking

During the evaluation process, examine your successes and figure out why you were able to do well. Your aim should be to recreate your successes until the skill becomes second nature. That’s when you know you’ve achieved competency.

Of course, you will also learn from your failures but your successes will be much more informative. Within your successful efforts, you can find a blueprint for further success whereas failures just show you what not to do.

If you want a more accurate evaluation process, I recommended joining a reputable paid forum and getting personal feedback on your efforts from people who have more ability than you. It’s great to have access to experts that can tell you what you’re doing right and what you’re doing wrong. Also, they can give you valuable ideas to consider that you may not think of.

You can try free forums if you don’t have money but this method has some risks. Free forums tend to have a much lower signal to noise ratio than paid forums. Also, the quality of information is usually much higher at paid forums.

Performancing offers blog management services.

How to Improve as a Problogger, Part 1

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Well, this is my second to last post for Performancing. I recently landed a new job that’s taking up a lot of my time. It’s a profit share position so the more time I work on it, the more money I can earn as passive income. Also, I’m starting to run out of stuff to say about problogging. I started writing about the industry about three years ago and it sometimes feels like I’ve said everything I’ve needed to say.

I’ve definitely enjoyed my time at Performancing and I hope Splashpress can find a great replacement for me.

Anyways, since I’m leaving soon, I thought I’d share some principles that have really helped me in my three year online career.

One of the main things that’s important to learn in problogging is how to improve your skills. If you’re not seeing the results you want from your online endeavors or you’ve hit a plateau, you need to improve your skills to attain better results. If you don’t seek to improve, if you keep doing the same actions, you’ll keep getting the same results. This may seem obvious but I haven’t seen much content about the process of improvement.

In this post, I’ll just talk about step one, since the step is so foundational and requires some elaboration. If you don’t get it right, then the other steps will be ineffective. In my last post next week, I’ll go over the other steps.

Step 1: Believe that substantial improvement is possible in any skill.

I think one of the things that holds many probloggers back is their perception of talent. Like many other people, they believe that talent is mostly a natural innate thing. You either have it or you don’t.

So for example, if you’re not good at writing, if you don’t have that talent, then you probably shouldn’t try being a problogger.

Or let’s say you are good at writing so you started a blog. You feel good about your blog posts but you don’t have a lot of traffic. You do some research and discover that SEO is an effective way to drive traffic. You try SEO on your blog for about a month. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work out. You think, well I guess SEO is not my talent. Time to stop doing it and look for another method.

The problem with this mindset is that it doesn’t reflect the reality of how talent, skill, and ability works.

Carol Dweck is a psychology professor at Stanford University who has done a lot of research on the area of success and improvement. She published what she learned in a great book called Mindset. In the book, she talks about two different mindsets, fixed and growth. People with a fixed mindset believe that ability is fixed and innate. On the other hand, those with a growth mindset believe that you can become competent at any skill. Yes, it will take some hard work, practice, and effort. And you will fail a lot in the beginning. But after some time, you attain a new skill.

My Own Story

I’ve seen power of having a growth mindset in my own life.

Before I knew about problogging, I was unhappy as a cubicle drone. As my unhappiness grew, I started doing research on making money online so I could leave the corporate world. My brother pointed me to ProBlogger and I started learning about the industry.

Now if I had a fixed mindset, I would’ve rejected problogging as a viable option. See before I started blogging, I had no relevant writing experience since my college years. But even in school, I did not do much writing. I was an accounting major so I didn’t have many papers to write. Also, I never really liked writing. I never wrote in my spare time like people who keep a journal. My least favorite classes in high school and college were the ones where I had to write a bunch of papers. I even repeated one of my English classes because I dreaded writing the term paper so much that I dropped the class the first time around.

But fast forward to today. I’ve made my living as an online worker for the last 3 years and about 80% of my work involves writing.

How did I get to this point? The foundation of my problogging journey was the growth mindset. Also, I had a lot of motivation since I was pretty desperate to leave the corporate world. I always thought even though I don’t like writing if that’s what it will take to be my own boss, then I’ll become good at it and learn to like it.

And that’s what I did. I made myself write a personal blog to get some practice before launching more commercial blogs. I read books on writing to guide me. I asked some friends who were better writers for feedback. One of my best friends was a journalism major and my sister was an English major. They gave me great tips and I looked at their work as inspiration.

Did I experience a lot of failure? Yes. In the beginning, I didn’t get any compliments about work but as I learned the tips and tricks and got more experience, people started liking my content.

The same process applied to SEO. I didn’t get much traffic to my blogs so I immersed myself in the field of SEO. It took me months of reading, trial and error, and learning from my mistakes before I felt like I knew what I was doing with basic SEO principles. It took over a year before I was competent on the advanced stuff. Even now, I know that I have a lot of room for improvement.

I think that’s the best thing about adopting a growth mindset. If you have this mindset, you always feel like there’s room for improvement but you’re not intimidated by the process of change. Instead, you feel like you can reach new levels of skill and ability. You’re always seeking to grow and as a result, your blog is always improving.

Rethinking Your Weaknesses

With a growth mindset, you can look at your weakness differently.For example, you may struggle with monetization but with enough effort, practice, and knowledge, you can become good at extracting money from your blog. You don’t have to be mediocre at monetization for the rest of your life.

If you’ve tried to improve your weaknesses but you failed, ask yourself if you gave yourself time to learn the skill. Maybe you let the early failures get to you. Maybe you expected too much too soon.

Also, don’t be afraid of failure. In fact, expect it especially in the early days. Any new skill will be difficult before it become easy. It took me many tries before I started getting a lot of traffic from SEO. I failed a bunch but I’m glad I stuck with it because now SEO is my most effective traffic technique and I’ve gotten job offers for search specialist positions.

If you have a fixed mindset, there’s good news. You can switch to the growth mindset and reap the rewards of believing you can overcome your weaknesses and turn them into strengths.

Tune in to my post next week where I’ll talk about specific ways to apply the growth mindset to problogging.

Update 4/29/10: Part 2 is up.

Performancing offers blog management services.

Where to Find Writers for Your Blog

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One of the best ways to scale your problogging business is to hire competent writers. With other writers on your blog, you’ll be able to generate more traffic and revenue.

But it can be difficult to find writers you can trust that will keep the quality high on your blog. There are many writers out there for hire but only a few of them will be a good fit for your blog. If you get the wrong kind of writers, you could waste your time and have a lot of headaches dealing with them. Plus, your brand could suffer.

Below are some places where you might look for a writer to hire. I’ll share my thoughts on each place.

Job Boards

Job boards are the first places many bloggers look when they want to add a writer to their blog. It could be a general job board like Craigslist, a more specific one for online workers like Elance, or one geared toward bloggers like the board on this site, BloggingPro, and ProBlogger.

In my opinion, most of the writers at the general and online worker job boards are not what you’re looking for. I’ve used these places to find writers for one-of articles like linkbait but I haven’t found success with finding good staff bloggers.

In my experience, the writers at these places tend to be generalists that write about many topics. As such, they probably won’t have a lot of knowledge and experience in your niche. And since they write about different topics for different clients, they typically have not developed their own unique tone and personality in their writing. Their content tends to be boring and dry, like something you would read on a college textbook.

Of course, this is not what you want on a blog. Blogs work best when they are personable. As the writers share relevant experiences and the readers get to know them, the blog becomes a trusted authority site.

On the other hand, the job boards that cater to bloggers are great places to find competent writers. Several of my friends have found great writers on these boards. Many of the writers that scour the boards have a lot of experience blogging. They understand the blogging culture and have developed their own unique write style.

However, if you’re in a smaller non-mainstream niche with fewer writers, you may not find a suitable candidate from the blogging job boards. If that’s the case, I recommend looking within your niche’s blogosphere.

Bloggers in Your Niche

I think the best place to look for competent writers is the blogs in your niche especially if you’re in a smaller niche that may not really know about the blogging job boards. One of the benefits of examining the blogs in your niche is that you can have a good idea of what you’ll get from them if you hire them. You can see which bloggers create similar content and target a similar audience as you. These blogger are prime candidates for your writing position.

One blogger in my niche started a blog just a couple months ago. With her hard work, quality content, and regular posting schedule, she quickly made a name for herself in the niche. After a couple weeks, two established blogs hired her. She’s flourished in her new positions and helped those two blogs grow their audience. Now that my blog has a solid income stream, I’ll probably send her a job offer some time this month.

The top blogs tend to hire other bloggers whenever they want to expand. Copyblogger is a good example. Brian Clark is the founder but he brought on Sonia Simone, who has a great blog at Remarkable Communication. She writes posts and helps edit the site. Her work has helped Copyblogger grow and she is definitely now a well-known part of the Copyblogger brand.

Other Places

Forums are another place to consider if you’re looking for a writer. This is similar to check out your blogosphere since forum members are creating a lot of content. While visiting a forum, you could come across members that regularly leave insightful forum posts. These members may be open to writing for you. Also, you may discover new blogs by browsing through a forum.

The comment section is a place where I did not expect to find a prospective writer. I just made an offer to an active commenter on my blog. Along with being a regular in the comment section, he occassionally leaves long comments that could easily be repurposed into solid blog posts. He has a great personality and I find his comments helpful. Other commenters also like what he has written and they interact with him in a positive way.

Over to You

Where else would you look to find writers?

Performancing offers blog management services.

How to Leverage Inspiration to Achieve Actual Results

Inspiration is a tricky thing. It comes and goes but even if you get inspired on a regular basis, translating that inspiration into actual results can be difficult.

I’m passionate about the gaming niche I work in. I have a lot of experience and knowledge so I rarely get writer’s block. In fact, I have a list of blog post topic ideas that spans multiple pages. I jot down these ideas whenever I get a flash of inspiration, which happens often as I read other blogs.

Here’s the problem though. The vast majority of my ideas never become blog posts. What usually happens is I look at my list but don’t get the jolt of inspiration that I had before. The ideas have gotten stale.

Inspiration Can Rot

I’ve written before that inspiration can rot like milk going bad. You can lose inspiration for something that you were pumped up about if you don’t take action over time. That’s what was happenning to the ideas on my list.

I didn’t have an effective process for turning my ideas into actual blog posts. However, I’ve learned from my mistake and figured out a way to leverage inspiration to achieve actual results.

Less is More

I realized I was spending way too much time trying to capture every passing idea that seemed like a good post topic. Most of my ideas would get stale by the time I reviewed them. So what was the point in writing them down?

I’ve started focusing on execution and implementation instead of inspiration. Here’s my theory:

Ideas are plentiful, but taking action is rare. Execution and implementation is where you can gain a competitive advantage, because most people don’t take action on their ideas.

I started a new list of post ideas. However, this list is much different from my old bloated list. My new list is capped at just three ideas.

I won’t write down any new ideas until I’ve turned one of the three ideas into a blog post. This new habit has helped me become more productive since the lag time between inspiration and action has been lessened. I’m sticking to a few ideas and working on them to completion before adding something new to my plate.

It’s ironic but the key to leveraging inspiration is to somewhat minimize it so that you have time and focus to implement your existing inspiration.

To help with this new habit, I stopped using an RSS reader because of the information and inspiration overload. I realized that most of my inspiration was coming from only five sites, so if I need inspiration, I just visit them.

Action Triggers

I talked about action triggers in my last post and that technique also works well for leveraging inspiration.

My advice is to write down the times and places where you will work on your blog post ideas. For example:

On Tuesday, I will work on [idea #1] at my home office after I pick up the kids from soccer practice.

On Friday, I will work on [idea #2] during my lunch break at work.

Overcoming Analysis Paralysis

Also, with a smaller list, you’ll be more likely to take action. Numerous psychological studies have shown that if you give someone a lot of choices, they will be much more likely to not take action. You may have heard the phrase “analysis paralysis”, which describes this phenomenon.

One of the best ways to cure overanalyzing is to cut down the number of choices.

Over to You

Half the battle in blogging (and life in general) is just showing up and hopefully my tips can help you make your ideas a reality.

What tips do you have for leveraging inspiration?

Performancing offers blog management services.

Lacking Inspiration? Read A Blog to Write A Blog!

This is a guest post by Cori Padgett, the creative brains and dubious brawn behind the blog Big Girl Branding.

Alright, sometimes blogging isn’t easy. One day you get stuck and at a loss as to what to write about. Another day you feel like what you’re blogging about is just dull, dry and boring. Still another day rolls along and you feel you wrote something spectacular, but the rest of the world doesn’t happen to see it that way.

Wind meet sails. Sails… meet deflation.

It happens.

But it doesn’t spell doomsday for your blogging career. It just means you need a little inspiration. You need a little sumpin’ sumpin’ to get your creative juices flowing, to unblock those clogged neuro-pathways and unleash your inner blogger rockstar. [Read more]

How to Encourage People to Read Your Blog Posts

This is a guest post by Phyllis Zimbler Miller,s co-founder of the social media marketing company www.MillerMosaicLLC.com, where she also writes a blog.

All bloggers share one main goal – having as many people as possible read the blog posts. Leaving aside search engine optimization, links from others blogs, etc., what is the number one way to encourage people to read blog posts?

Make reading those posts as easy as possible, which isn’t always as automatic as it sounds.

The truth is that bloggers are often unaware that their posts need to be served up with elements that encourage people to actually read the posts.

Here are recommended steps on which elements should be used to encourage people to read your blog posts:

Step 1: Make the font size large

No matter what a website design book says about how big the font size should be, you should choose a font size that is easily readable.

I once had trouble reading the content on someone’s blog and politely emailed the site owner suggesting larger type. I got a nasty reply saying that 11 to 12 pt. type was recommended and her type was 11 pt. and it was fine.
In truth, what is fine is font size that is easily readable, not a size that a reader has to work to read. [Read more]