Blast From The Past – Monetization
Monetization sure is a popular topic, one that Performancing has covered time and time again with awesome in depth information. Today, we’ll take a trip to the past to rediscover this great content to help you monetize your site or perhaps, spring to life some new ideas.
- How to create Intelligent Blog Ads – Chris Garrett
Takeaway:
If you want to squeeze every last drop of revenue potential out of your blog without annoying your loyal visitors then you need to be a bit clever about the way you display advertising.
- How to create Intelligent Blog Ads – Part 2 – Chris Garrett
Takeaway:
What can we do about recognising first-time readers versus regular readers? The idea is a first timer is more likely to click ads and less likely to sign up, while a regular reader is more likely to subscribe to your feed and also more likely to get annoyed by over the top advertising.
- How to add E-Commerce to your blog – Chris Garrett
Takeaway:
So you want to sell products directly from your blog? We have already decided it could be a great idea for creating revenue, let’s take a look at how exactly we add ecommerce capability to your blog.
- Monetizing through packaged content – Chris Garrett
Takeaway:
Aside from the community aspects of blogs one thing blogs generate is a lot of content. While most bloggers will at least consider advertising to generate revenue, are you missing a trick by not packaging and selling your information as a product?
- Make money blogging via paid subscriptions – Andy Hagans
Takeaway:
Yes, you can make money by charging for some of your content.
- Monetizing your Blog Archives – Nick Wilson
Takeaway:
Using time-sensitive advertising to profit from blog archives.
- Affiliate Tips for Bloggers – Chris Garrett
Takeaway:
10 excellent tips to get you started on affiliate marketing.
- Supplement your blogging income with e-reports – Raj Dash
Takeaway:
If your topics are timeless, over 3-10 years you may earn some nice returns for 10-20 hours of work per month. So in the second year, you’ll have sales of new reports and older reports. In a couple of years, you could very well commit full-time and not have to rely on contextual advertising.
- How To: Create Intelligent Amazon Associates Ads – Chris Garrett
Takeaway:
Using a bit of PHP programming, geo-targeting and creative solutions, you can maximize your affiliate earnings.
- How To Squeeze More Income Out Of Your Blog – Ryan Caldwell
Takeaway:
The basic way to monetize your site is through a couple of ads on it, but if you plan things ahead and think in terms of monetizable ‘regions’ and ’sections’ instead of one ‘blog’, it will change things completely.
21 Ways to Build a Better Blogger
When we talk about ‘creating’ better blogs, there’s an underlying assumption that it’s only the blog that needs improving.
The reality is, us bloggers could use a huge kick up the ass once in a while as well. We get sloppy, we sometimes let our standards slide and worst of all, when it comes to making improvements we look at external factors, not ourselves.
Last month I started compiling a list of ’strategies’ to improve my own blogging – I’m sharing that list here. We can’t become better bloggers overnight – it takes a lot of hard work, just like a blog – but like working on a blog, the best results are achieved when you stick to it and work at it for a long time.
1. Create a Commitment to your Blog – and then keep it
In simple terms: right now, someone else who is just as smart as you is working hard to get their blog to the top. They’re committed to the vision they’ve set for their blog, and they’re doing whatever it takes to make it a reality.
The big question is, why aren’t you?
Find that one target for your blog that you are willing to work the most for, and then get busy doing it.
2. Focus on the Conversation on your Blog
Blogging is a one-to-many medium, but smart bloggers know who to turn it into an active group conversation between the readers and themselves. This requires the ability to communicate effectively – and it’s something that us bloggers can train ourselves to do better.
If you want to engage your readers and improve the conversation on your blog, you have to a) be clear, b) refocus your attention towards the audience and c) become credible.
3. Don’t Settle For Being Good Enough
If you’re a good writer (and a good communicator), you should be able to talk the talk when it comes to blogging about a particular subject.
But can you walk the walk? For a blogger dealing with subjects that involve practical application (self help, any skills-based area (SEO, web design, wood-working, photography, fitness, self defense, etc), competence in your chosen field goes a long way in establishing your credibility.
4. Love Your Blog, Love Your Blogging
A blogger’s passion for his subject and his blog shines through his writing. If you have passion, your words will carry conviction, your ideas will be persuasive and you will come across as someone who cares about his work. Without passion it’s quite hard to maintain the drive and energy needed to work on a blog day in and day out (not all of us are blessed with god-like self-discipline).
And if you’ve lost your passion one day (it happens to the best of us), here’s how (and why) you can continue blogging without losing your step.
5. Be Positive and Trust Yourself
Blogging is a tough gig. It takes a lot of time and hard work to be successful and if that wasn’t enough to make you glum, there is always a snarky commenter or two (or hundreds) lurking around who have little else to do but send negative thoughts your way.
It’s easy to throw in the towel when the going gets tough, however if you approach blogging with the knowledge that a) it will be tough and b) your reaction to problems (and therefore the likelihood that those problems will be solved) will depend on your attitude, it becomes clear that you have to stay positive.
Successful people don’t get to where they are by accepting defeat when they get knocked down. Dust yourself off, get back up and go at it again. It sounds a bit cheesy, yes, but as long as you believe in what you’re doing and believe in your own ability to make your blog a success, you’ll do fine.
6. Problem Solving
There are two kinds of people – those who deal with their problems and those who use them as an excuse not to move ahead in their lives.
This doesn’t mean that you turn into a robot – in fact I would strongly recommend having channels / avenues through which you can vent about your problems. It helps to clear your head and to focus on the solutions instead of your emotional reaction to it.
However, if you’re not dealing with your blogging problems intelligently, you’re just holding yourself (and your blog) back from it’s true potential. Find a solution, outsource it if you have to but fix it if it’s important (and stop worrying if its not).
Part of the philosophy of giving a project your 100% every day is that you are always pushing for improvements. At one time or the other, this push will require you to take risks, and it is at this point in time that you will feel the most resistance, when you will find it most difficult to ‘bring your A-game’ to the table.
Look at your blog and your blogging efforts and pinpoint the risks that you’ve been avoiding for the last few weeks or even months. Pick one of these risks, discuss the options with your friends and family (or people who know your business) and if it’s the right thing, do it.
8. Learn the Art of Self-Promotion
Self-Promotion is something most of us are uncomfortable with – and it’s not just the prospect of ’selling’ that turns us off, in reality its insecurity (cleverly dressed as modesty) that holds us back.
As a blogger – whether you want to promote your own services or you’re promoting your blog – you have to learn to blow your own horn. No one else will be doing that for you, so celebrate your success (small or big), talk up your achievements and put yourself firmly in the minds of your readers (and anyone else who wants to listen).
You’ve heard many bloggers talk about how you should ‘focus’ on a few key projects. Trouble is, not everyone intuitively knows exactly how to turn that ‘focus’ knob up to 100%, and even if you know how to do that, what do you focus on?
The two keys to having a clear focus in your blogging are ‘priorities’ and ‘concentration’. If you have priorities but no concentration (like me), you’ll know what to do but never get anything done because you’ll get distracted all the time. On the other hand, if you have concentration but no clear grasp of your priorities, you will be excellent in something but won’t make much progress (because you’ll be focusing on the wrong things).
10. Instill Character In Your Blog
Character in a blog means:
- Delivering on what you promise
- Doing what you do to the best of your ability
- Staying true to your purpose in face of adversity or success
You don’t build a successful blog by copying the top bloggers on what they’re doing right now – you look at what they did at the start, what type of ‘foundational work’ they did to reach this level.
Getting the foundations of your blog and removing the cracks in it should be your first and foremost responsibility – everything else flows from that.
11. Adopt Othermindedness to be more Charismatic
The four steps to being more charismatic on your blog:
- Be Passionate and Positive
- Expect the Best of People
- Give People Hope
- Share Yourself
When it comes to being charismatic, the bottom line is othermindedness.
If you’ve read “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion” by Robert Cialdini (highly recommended), you’ll know that ‘Reciprocity’ is one of the six key ways to influence people (the others are: Commitment / Consistency, Social Proof, Liking, Authority and Scarcity). When you give first, you create a subconscious debt on the other person’s conscience which they will feel the need to repay or risk suffering from guilt. It’s how we are socially wired.
What we’re NOT socially wired to do is to give first and ask later – in fact, we’re selfish (like it or not) and do exactly the opposite. If you want to succeed as a blogger, want to grow your blog and want to do both of these things super-fast, bite the bullet and invest in your future. The relationships you build as a result, with your readers and your friends, will be the foundation for your rapid growth in the future.
13. Go For Broke
They say that “good things come to those who wait” – and while I value patience, it has its place and it is often a convenient rationalisation for people who are afraid to take risks. There are times when you have to grab the bull by the horns and attack an opportunity with full strength.
In simple terms…you can’t wait for opportunities to knock on your door. You have to put yourself out there, put your blog out there, and make sure that you’re first in line when any opportunity comes up. You’ll take risks. You’ll make mistakes. But you’ll be much better off at the end of it than when you started, which is where you would have stayed stuck if you hadn’t moved in the first place.
14. Learn the Art of Listening
As bloggers our job is to talk – we talk to our readers, we talk to advertisers, we talk to our employees, we talk smack with competitors – it’s pretty much a full-time talking job, blogging.
However, in all this talking we need to find the time to shut up and listen to the people around us – to learn what they want, to learn from their suggestions, criticisms and support, and to spot ideas in what they do and say. Listening to others (and more importantly, to the right people) gives you the kind of knowledge few people can hope to attain, and with that comes the ability to do make a genuine difference in your own life and that of others.
15. Build Relationships
We all know that it’s important to build relationships as bloggers but do you do it unconsciously or do you take out time each day to dedicate to networking?
Some of us are naturally better networkers than others. For the rest of us, it would be advisable to take out time every day and spend it on networking. Whether you do your relationship-building through forums, social networks or person to person, it’s important that you take out at least an hour a day for it.
Like almost everything else in blogging, it won’t pay off immediately but once you’ve been doing it for some time the results will bring in many blogging and money-making opportunities and you’ll start getting a lot of help in your blogging efforts.
16. Learn Your Trade
We’re not talking about being competent in your area of interest; learn your trade as a blogger. You don’t have to be a crack designer but you need to know basic design principles and understand aesthetics. You don’t have to be a WordPress guru but it pays to understand how themes and plugins work and how you could work with them in a cinch.
Monetization, SEO, networking – learn the skills and tools of your blogging trade, and you’ll invariably improve as a blogger.
17. Vision
A top blogger without vision is like a top athlete running at full speed backwards on the track. He may be the fastest (and you may be the best at what you do), but if he doesn’t know what his prime objective is, he’ll keep going in circles.
The same goes for you as a blogger. Define your vision, understand it and integrate it in your life – you need to know where you are going, and you need to keep it in mind whenever you work on your blog.
18. Know When to Stick or Fold
Sticking to your guns (self-confidence) and working hard on a project when the going gets tough are admirable traits, and worth cultivating. However, as a blogger you must also know when to cut your losses and move on.
Your decision may be based on your financial situation, the amount of time you have available, new opportunities knocking on the door, etc. Whatever you base your decisions on, don’t base them on your emotional attachment to a blog, or your ego which tells you that you can do everything at same time.
19. Stop Controlling Everything
If you’re really good at what you do (writing, monetization, design, SEO, etc), you might get stuck in a pattern of trying to do everything yourself.
As a pro blogger, you don’t have the time to handle all the writing, the design, the research, the promotion and administration of your blog yourself. Outsource as much as you can (you can always outsource your blogging chores for free), hire help so you can get more work done.
20. Patience
What you’re working on now will not pay off tomorrow but in a few months. What you accomplish this month will pay you back 10x in one year.
The effect of cumulative growth is stunning, but to reap the full benefits you have to be (you guessed it) patient.
This doesn’t mean that you should sit back and wait – no, patience here means being patient with results, not with your efforts (you should still be going for broke).
21. Have Fun
The good thing about self employment is that you can choose to have fun on your own time, on your own terms. Take time off from your blog (not too much time!), change the pace on your blog (write something light hearted once in a while) and most importantly, if you find yourself thinking that your blogging is a chore, step back and re-evaluate what you are doing.
Bonus #1: Self Discipline
You’re not going to last a day as a professional blogger if you cannot discipline yourself to practice new habits and improve your blogging consistently.
Bonus #2: Balance
Blogging is fun and games sometimes but that doesn’t mean that you throw away all that you’ve earned and accomplished in the name of fun.
Find balance in your blogging – from varying the depth of your articles to dividing time between blogging and promoting to finding some personal time in all the blogging mayhem (take Sundays off, for example).
You’re not going to read this list and become a better blogger overnight – it takes time and commitment, and it works best if you take one strategy at a time and apply it purposefully in your life until you have mastered it.
3 Ways to Immediately Increase Search Engine Traffic
Amongst the commercial blogosphere there is huge interest in the dark, and mysterious art of SEO, or Search Engine Optimization. There shouldn’t be. Not because paying attention to Search traffic is bad, or that wanting to rank higher in Google is evil, simply because it’s not rocket science, and anyone can do it. Even you.
If you want get more traffic from Search engines, this post is for you. Read on….
The Big SEO Secret: It’s Easy
Before we get to the list, (I don’t mind if you scroll, but this next bit is important too…) let me explain what i mean by “it isn’t rocket science”: Manipulating Search engine rankings for sites that naturally find it difficult to get incoming links and attention, say affilate sites, many ecommerce type operations and much of the web1.0 shopping experience sites is very hard, and it takes a lot of skill and knowledge to achieve.
It’s become harder and harder over the last few years to game Google, and many SEO’s are now wondering if it’s time to give up trying to “manipulate” G results and simply start feeding Google more of what it wants — the unfortunate result of which is a huge increase in workload, namely copywriting and Linkbaiting.
That’s the thing most SEO’s won’t want to tell their clients. That there is no magic wand, mystical powers or Search engine hoo joo to be had anymore, it’s all down to 3 things:
- Copywriting
- Links and
- Networking
That’s not to say those tasks don’t require skill, but it really is that simple.
I’ll give you a full checklist in just a minute…
Avoid the Snake Oil Merchants
There are still die hard SEO’s out there that spend all their time trying to game the system, but most of them are pretty shit at it, only a very few have enough resources to manage it. There are also, a whole slew of con merchants masquerading as SEO’s, just as there are fake designers in the web design field, basing their credentials on the fact that they’ve read a few articles, or bought a keyword tracking tool.
These people are idiots, and should be avoided at all costs.
At the end of this article I’ll point you in the direction of a few quality resources for further reading.
3 Ways to Immediately Increase Search Engine Traffic
Now you’ve patiently read though all of the above, or impatiently skimmed to the bottom, it’s time to get into this list.
1. Write Better, More Specific Copy and Linkbait
Good copywriting encompasses many things, titles, subject matter, the post and url’s to name the most important. It also goes hand in hand with The Art of Linkbaiting. Here’s a checklist for more search engine friendly copy:
Title’s are everything.
- Titles should be short, snappy, and attention grabbing – think about how you skim through your RSS reader every day, and bear that in mind when writing titles.
- Preferably, title’s should contain keywords related to your topic — that should come naturally, if you have to jam them in there, its either a bad title, bad copy, or you’re a lunatic.
- If your blog software writes titles like this: My Blog Title | My Post Title, you need to change them to this: My Post Title – My Blog Title. Many people will tell you it’s even better to ditch the “My Blog Title” bit all together, in order to not dillute the important keywords in the title, but they’re forgetting the importance of branding, and with blogs, establishing some brand recognition goes a long way toward gaining links and attention.
- Titles are akin to advertising, and the best ones make promises, and deliver
By far the best resource out there for blog titles is Brian Clark’s Magnetic Headlines series of posts on the excellent Copy Blogger site.
Body Copy
There’s been much written, both online and off about copywriting, and as a writer of small talent, it’s not for me to get into the in-depth details of it. I am good at linkbaiting though, and am constantly studying what kind of post are being linked on del.icio.us, Digg and other “link sites”.
It’s the much discussed art of linkbaiting that this post will focus on. Remember, we’re talking about getting search engine traffic right? Here’s a checklist for writing good linkbait (we’ll discuss why links are important a little further down).
- Study the popular bookmarks on del.icio.us to get a feel for what people are linking to
- Such things as HowTo’s and Lists are always good fodder for linkbait and you should be aiming to get onto those pages by writing appropriate copy. (you want to be there, because being there will gain you links, and links = traffic, more on that soon…).
- Use html lists, headlines and other visual means of breaking up posts in order to make them easier to read and skim
- Link out, link often and link generously — Really, forget any rubbish you may have heard about depleting page rank, or any concerns you have over sending away traffic, and work on providing links to great resources your readers will love — they’ll thank you for it, and link to you for it.
- Fight bloggers block by getting inventive, and doing some research.
Some of the best blog specific resources for copy writing, and linkbaiting are:
2. Make it Easy for People to Link to You
All of the above tips on writing more attractive, useful and linkable copy are geared to two things:
- Providing what your readers want
- Gaining links
Links are the currency with which one trades on the web, the lingua franca of the internet and key to ranking, and traffic. Hint: They’re really, really important ok?
Essentially, you’re looking for this:
- Links coming to your posts, from many different sources
- Links preferably have relevant keywords in the text used to make the link and again preferably come from sites on a similar topic
- Links from trusted, authoritative sites
Apart from writing great linkable copy, there are a few things you can do to make sure that your posts get linked, and hence ranked aswell as get more bang for your buck per link.
- Encourage readers to submit your posts to Digg and del.icio.us, or more specific link sites depending on your subject matter. Those categories in del.icio.us for example, are exported by users to their own blogs (targeted, keyworded link text = good), and they often kick off a knock on effect [pdf] that can have wild implications for your Search traffic.
- There are varios widgets for most blog software to do the above for you, just have a search through your blog softwares list of plugins.
- Where possible, make sure your urls contain your keywords. Contrary to popular opinion, this is not because Search engines pay particularly more attention to urls with keywods, but because people often just paste urls into comments, blog posts and forums where they are automatically linked by the software. Those links, contain the keywords, and it’s keywords in links, from authoratitive, trusted sites, that are what we want.
- Place a “link to this post” widget on your blogs templates
- Ask other bloggers in your niche for links — but don’t make a pest of yourself, nobody likes to be hassled, and some people turn down link requests on general principle (me for example..). See Trisha’s thread in the Performancing forums on link exchanges for a lively discussion on the merits of the dreaded link exchange. — My personal advice is dont bother, do the other things listed here and all of it will fall into place.
- Network like crazy, see below…
Although there are lots of posts out there on links, I couldn’t find much that would add value to what i’ve written above. If you have resources to share, please post them in the comments.
3. Networking, the Unsung Hero of Blog SEO
You read little about networking in this context. Many bloggers into SEO are facinated with the technicalities, despite it being a very simple thing to do and thus miss one of the biggest opportunities to gain links, readers, and traffic.
Done right, a well built network of contacts, friends and like-minded bloggers can seriously help you get the link love you need, both directly and indirectly. Here are a few tips and resources for working your network for better Search traffic:
- Read Chris Garrett’s Networking for Blog Success
- Comment and participate on blogs within your niche — Get to know the people around you
- Email with them, LINK to them, they’ll reciprocate, trust me.
- Expand outside of blogs — find forums, newsletters and groups in your topic
- Use social bookmarking sites to discover related topics (see right hand side) and hence expand your groups, newsletters, forums and blogs search even further
- Above all: Be generous. If you respect your network, and work hard to be part of the community surounding your topic, the rewards can really pay of — never abuse it, it tends ot backfire in all kinds of horrible ways.
4. Bonus Tip
There’s always a bonus tip, didn’t you know?
If you’re really set on learning more, more than my overview here — and if i really can’t dissuade you from getting caught up in what i consider a massive waste of time for the majority of bloggers (technical seo) then at least pay attention to the right people 
Here’s a list of my favorite, and most authoratitive SEO blogs:
The Art of Linkbaiting
Ever found it hard to get other bloggers to link to a new blog? Sure you have, it’s not easy sometimes. Even established blogs need to expand their traffic and influence on a regular basis, and linkbaiting is one way to do it. It’s not without potential perils, but the time honored tradition of being contrary, in order to get attention is well proved, and done right, it’s a killer way to break into a new area. There are also safer ways of linkbaitng, they’re just less fun
In order to bait a link, you need a hook. Hooks come in variety of flavors, some of the more popular would include:
- News hook
- Contrary Hook
- Attack Hook
- Resource Hook
- Humour Hook
There are others, but you see the point. There are two main types of hook in there, the nice hook, and the nasty hook. I’d say in most cases you can get away with a contrarian viewpoint, but not an attack. No one likes an arsehole, so there’s no real benefit, as sure you may get a ton of links from outraged blog peers, but they’ll likely ignore anything else you write.
Saying that though, it’s a judgement call. I’ve often slammed someone on a blog, but you need to be able to judge it very well. Go just a little too far, and you’ll do more harm than good.
The easiest, and safest is the nice hook. And when i say easy, i mean it. Have a look at some examples of each type of hook i’ve listed:
Resource Hook
- A comprehensive list of blogs in your niche – link out, and links will come in, i promise.
- A practical/useful or even fun tool related to your niche
- A How To based on your niche
- A compilation of news stories on a theme. Sprinkle a little analysis in there, and you’re good to go.
News Hook
- A genuine Scoop. Get to the news first
- A compilation of news, as above, its a resource aswell as a news hook.
- Expose a story for a fraud, or to be flawed. You really have to know your subject to do that, but links flow like water if you can debunk a popular meme
Contrary Hook
- Be the only one in your niche to find something to not like about a story, or like about a story/product.
- On the same theme, post “Why <insert prominent blogger name here> is WRONG about…”
Attack Hook
This works much the same as the contrary hook, you just get to be much, much ruder. It’s a tough one, because just posting about such a thing could land me in hot water. But then im not here to play nice, i’m here to talk about gaining traffic, and whilst an attack hook is 99/100 NOT the way to go, sometimes it’s absolutely killer, and can gain you credibility and reputation overnight.
Really though, careful with that one. It can just as easily go the wrong way.
Humor Hook
These kinds of hooks are just too easy.
- Search flickr, or photoshop a bizzare pic of your subject
- Post “10 thing i hate about…”
- Post “You know you’re a <insert here> when…”
Funny thing is, those things always get links, it’s like people never seem to tire of them.
Give and thou wilt receive…
All of the above is utterly useless without being seen by your peers though. Link to them in your post, then click those links if you have absolutely no traffic. You need to get their initial attention.
Send emails, post to delicious, myweb2 etc – just make sure that at least one prominent blogger in your niche reads and links to you and the rest will follow.
Now, what i want to hear is this: What other types of link bait do you use?
3 Steps For Writing Good Blog Posts
Thord (he of Swedish descent and bearing a reputation for ‘crack’ design skills) writes about the two most important skills a blogger can have.
#2 is knowing how to blow your own horn (‘toot’ is so politically correct it gives me a shiver). Thord discusses it in some detail, and I like this part best:
Some of us have some kind of roadblock built in that stops us from promoting ourselves. Get over it. Or get run over.
The #1 skill Thord talks about is knowing how to write good blog posts. Seeing as how T left the door open there, here’s my two (or three) cents on how one may go about writing ‘good’ blog posts.
Like all good 3 step lists, this one is a model of simplicity:
- Define what ‘good’ is – use concrete measurements instead of an arbitrary feel-good factor
- Learn how to achieve the results defined above
- Execute (and then some).
If it was as easy as writing it above, no blog consultant would have a job. As things stand, there’s a lot more to it under the surface although as I’ve discussed below, once you internalise this formula (or you start writing for a blog that gets tons of traffic) it becomes effortless.
So let’s get started with step 1 – defining what a ‘good’ blog post is.
Step 1: Set Standards for ‘Good’ Blog Posts
‘Good’ is an arbitrary, unclear objective. One man’s ‘good’ is another man’s masterpiece, while the rest of the population may consider it absolutely crap. You need a precise measurement of what a good blog post is, and for this you will need to know your blog’s key objectives (and your role in achieving them).
Different blogs measure success in different ways. An established celeb gossip blogger would judge success in terms of sheer traffic / long-term search rankings a post brings. A budding car blogger could measure success in terms of the links a post gets. Someone writing on a sports blog geared towards building a strong community could measure success in terms of the # of comments each article generates.
And while we’re at it, there’s also a difference in scale – Seth Godin receives a minimum of 10-20 links for each post that he writes. His baseline for a ‘good’ post would be far higher than for the owner of a newly-launched blog who’d consider 5 links to be a home run.
If you own your blog, then you’re likely to have several different objectives that define success. Comments, Traffic / Pageviews, Links, RSS Subscriptions and Search Rankings are the most common, but you may have something different based on your specific situation. It’s a good thing to have different objectives – it gives you space to write different types of posts and be successful as opposed to doing the same thing over and over again.
If you are blogging for hire / guest blogging, you will most likely have a brief or some instructions on what the blog owner wants from you (you should ask if you’re not told). For example, for one of my blogs I tell my writers that they have to meet one of 3 objectives with each post – get X number of comments, Y amount of traffic or Z number of links.
Set out your stall in terms of the objectives you want to reach, and then attach concrete values on them. You can get a good idea for what values to use if you look at your blog’s recent history and pick out the most successful posts (according to different objectives). For a new blog, you’ll probably have to set a conservative number and then readjust as you go along.
Step 2: Learn How To Achieve Each Objective
Do you know how to get more comments to your posts? Do you know how to write posts that attract links?
This step is perhaps the easiest of all 3. There is tons and TONS of blogging advice on the Internet (the fastest way to get started is to head over to the Best of Performancing page), it’s only a matter of finding the right information and using it.
Want more RSS subscribers? Got them here and here. Want better search engine rankings? Got that too.
For any objective that you set yourself in Step 1, you’re likely to find quality, executable advice for achieving that objective on the Internet. And here’s an open offer – if you don’t find it on the Best of Performancing page or by searching through Google, drop a line in the comments and I’ll hunt it down (or write it up) for you.
Step 3: Follow the Formula
In Step 1, you defined your goals. In Step 2, you figured out how to get there. Now all you have to do is connect the dots. It’s as easy as it sounds, but there are a few things you should be aware of at the start:
- A good blog post is mediocre on a poor blog, fabulous on a good blog. Learn how to build a kick-ass blog.
- You’ll probably need to revise the targets set in Step 1 soon after starting on this path. That’s ok, don’t fret – if you’re going in the right direction, you’ll only be revising them upwards.
- Being a good blogger means building a skill-set. Build your skills, and you’ll have less difficulty in writing good blog posts.
- You’ll probably fail miserably in the beginning, or hit a home run and then tank. Whenever you hit your first ‘valley’, don’t give up – that valley is designed by nature to weed out 90% of the ‘cant-hack-it’ folks from the mix. Once you’re able to push through and rise again, you’ll not only be a better blogger but you’ll also be better than most (90%+) other bloggers out there.
- Sometimes the hardest thing to do is to follow the rules. In this case, following the formula works for a reason. Innovate if you have room for error, play it safe when you don’t (unless you’re feeling lucky )
So there you have it. Three simple steps to write ‘good’ blog posts. These require some work at the start but once you’ve internalised Step 2 (through practice, experience, research and judicious use of bookmarks), it’s simply a matter of picking a target and applying the formula.
At this stage, you might say:
“Ok, so I know how to do all this, but what do I write about?”
Well, I’ve got you covered there as well.
What Do I Write About?
Here are a list of posts that I feel can solve any and all of your blogger’s block problems. Seriously.
- 10 Killer Post Ideas
- Finding and Writing Fresh Blog Content
- Blog Pulling Power – Create Flagship Content
- How to Beat the Blank Page of Doom
- How to Turn Link Posts into Linkbait
- 11 Reasons to Write When You’ve Misplaced Your Passion
- 3 Ways to Engineer Good Content
- 12 Tips for Battling Blogger’s Block
- 100 Blog Topics I Hope You Write
And since we’re talking about setting objectives and meeting them, I’d appreciate it if you guys could bookmark this post in del.icio.us or give it a good Stumble. Thank you.
Smacking $100 per day in the AdSense Ass: 7 Things I’ve Learned
Raj’s article entitled Hitting $100/mth in AdSense: 7 Things I’ve Learned prompted me to write this article with the slightly more provocative title.
My first goal was to make $100/month. Then $10/day. Then $20/day. Then $50/day.
Then $100. That was the last goal I reached. Now I’m closing in on four figures in AdSense alone (well, not that close, but close enough;-) …
- Pick the Right Niche: I can’t overstate this. Traffic=Money. Your niche should be capable of driving a lot of traffic.
- Bait Like Hell: SERPS drive traffic and bait drives the SERPS.
- Be A Freak of Nature: Get up at 3am, start working and don’t stop until 10pm. If you don’t have enough to do, then either you’re not in the right niche, you’re lazy, or you need to educate yourself on how to…
- Build Your Footprint: Interact, interact, interact. With people and social media systems. Comment. Vote. You know the drill. Just don’t stop.
- Target Powerful Eyeballs: You know your niche and you know the important people in your niche. Make sure they know you. And don’t stop there. Make sure Fox News knows about you too.
- Link-Out Like A Loose Lemon: Just keep linking to other sites in your niche. They might or might not link back to you, but they can’t ignore you…12 months later…
- 12 Months Baby, 12 Months: Work like a horse for 12 months. If you make it, you can start to relax…cuz everyone’s coming to you now.
Bonus: Make a friend every day.
Those are the 7 things I’ve learned. Pick the right niche and put all your energy into it for 12 months. There are other important factors like outsourcing to free you up to do what you do best…but at the end of the day, it’s focused, freak of nature exertions of energy in the right direction that win the day….
…at least that’s how it’s worked for me.
Hitting $100/mth in AdSense: 7 Things I’ve Learned
Today is a milestone day for me, and it’ll surprise some people. AdSense gave me a nice treat for Hallowe’en – but it doesn’t make up for the trick of my pagerank dropping on several sites I spent good money buying and/or building. At any rate, I finally cracked $100 in Adsense earnings in a single month, for the first time since I started using the ad network around April 2005. That’s a very long time, and has allowed me to reflect upon it. Here’s what I’ve learned:
- Focus. Stick to building one site at a time and reach a modest amount of success before starting another site.
- Build traffic. You need a lot of traffic to monetize through AdSense, especially in competitive niches and obscure niches.
- Fine tune. Don’t run AdSense on sites that are giving you low ad CTR (Clickthrough Rate). Try it out, but if after a couple of months the CTR is low, stop using it until you determine why.
- Refine. Make sure to blend ads into your blog/ site theme. Don’t hide your ads but don’t make them stick out like a sore thumb in terms of colors and borders.
- Refine some more. Try the rectangular and square AdSense formats. These apparently have higher CTR, though I didn’t keep track of any AdSense channels to prove it.
- Improve quality. Write quality content that you can promote with social media, and keep it up or you’ll lose readership. This will give you the traffic you absolutely need to monetize CPC advertising. If you have older posts you’re embarrassed to have, don’t delete them. Instead, when you can’t think of what to write, browse your archives and see if you can write a better version of a bad post.
- Choose the right niche. Consider that some niches simply don’t monetize well with any sort of PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising. One such is the “how to blog” niche. You’re better off running appropriate affiliate offers. It helps considerably if you some how introduce discussions of gadgets or software no matter what your niche. Any niche that has higher priced items tends to also have higher CPC (Cost per Click) ads.
But I don’t consider this by any means a success. That $100+ isn’t for a single site, it’s for about 50 sites. What’s more, it includes sites that I’m partnered on, and have paid bloggers – who will eventually share in the revenues.
My problogging goal is to build up to at least US$3000/mth in ad revenue by making sure less of my sites suck. I get paid in US dollars, and the Canadian dollar’s current exchange rate is cost me several hundred dollars per month. The film school I want to enter in 2009 costs Cdn$5,000/term [updated] and lasts for six terms over two years. Because I refuse to ever get in debt again, I have to come up with my own cash. And since I only work online at present, freelancing, consulting and ad revenue are my only income sources.
My approach will be to continue the way I’ve be going: maintain freelance revenue and increase ad revenue by putting more effort into my own sites. It’ll be quite some time, if ever, before I earn money making movies.
What are your pro blogging goals, and how do you plan to use your earnings? Will you use them to support a career change or some other dream that you have?
41 Reasons Why Your Blog Probably Sucks
This list originally started off with 22 common mistakes that new bloggers tend to make. But while writing the list, other mistakes I’d made – and corroborated by other bloggers – came back to memory.
No blogger makes all of these mistakes, of course, but the list serves to help those of you who are still establishing your name in the blogosphere, and to remind you that you’re not alone.
Design, Platform, Architecture, Hosting
- No banner/ header graphic. Having a header graphic on your blog gives you a brand, even if it’s simple. Not having one makes a page look odd and makes your site less memorable.
- Choosing a poor blogging platform. It’s important to choose the right platform. This will be hotly contested, but I believe the best blogging platform is WordPress. It’s readily available, has literally thousands of free themes, hundreds of plugins, and is available for automatic installation with most popular hosting plans.
- Poor blending of ads. I’ve seen evidence that even a targeted article in a high-CPC niche getting 3,000+ pageviews in a single day is no guarantee of getting high ad clicks. Especially if the ads on the page are poorly placed and/or not color-blended into the theme. (Keep in mind, too, that with some ad networks, high pageviews and no clicks reduces the CPC of those ads on your other sites – if you have others.)
- Poor hosting. Good content and poor hosting makes for negative results if you become popular. Think Digg effect: if someone submits your content to a popular voting site and the story goes popular, expect your site to crash if your hosting sucks.
- Using a really bad theme. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but there are some truly bad themes out there. Having a nice theme has a psychological effect on visitors and increases the quality of your blog – at least in a perceived sense.
- Cluttered themes. Keep your theme at least semi-attractive and uncluttered enough that it’s easy to find things – such feed subscription buttons.
- Not emphasizing your best content. Do what you have to highlight your best articles, including plugins to show the most popular posts, those with the most comments, links to similar posts, lists of recent posts, etc.
Of course, design isn’t everything. You’ve heard the saying “content is king”…
How to Make Money from Projects You’ll Never Have Time For
Have you ever had one of your ideas ’stolen’ and used by someone else soon after you shared them in a public setting? If yes, you’ll know the frustration and anger that accompanies such a case. It could have been when you were in school and someone else stood up and took the credit for your work, or in a professional setting where a colleague took your idea and ran with it (and thus took the credit).
It’s always about ‘the credit’, isn’t it?
Experience tells us to keep our best ideas to ourselves – why give away the store when you can profit from it in the future, right?
The only problem with this approach – the hoarding approach – is that we don’t always have the time to work on all of our ideas. And that means that for every project that we work on, 20+ others go undone, because of a lack of time. So at this point, we’re at a cross-roads – you don’t want to share freely because those are your ideas but you also don’t have the time to work on them.
I don’t believe in giving it all away for free – sure, to some it may sound noble but in terms of value you know that your ideas are worth something, and in most cases, worth more than the goodwill that will be generated from giving them away for free.
An acceptable alternative may be to develop your ideas and then distribute them, for a price. For example, think of Private Label Rights (PLR) products. In theory, PLR products are components of a ready-made business that you can take, personalise and get started with almost immediately (a good example of this would be the PLR articles provided by PLRPro).
Depending on the time available to you, you could develop your ideas to the point of a short 10-page report ($7 value or even free), into a 50-100 page ebook ($19-$49 or again free), into full-fledged running blog (which you can then sell to make a nice profit) or anywhere in between.
Let’s say that I want to get into the self-help niche but don’t have time for it. So what do I do?
27 Tips for Building a Kick-Ass Blog
If you’ve been blogging for a while, you probably have certain blogging ‘habits’ and tips that you swear by. This article is a collection of such tips, designed to help you build a better blog.
Warning! You may have read some of these before – heck, all of these will be familiar to you. There’s a very good reason – they work extremely well for the bloggers who swear by them and while it’s hard to get bloggers to agree on what the important tip of them all is, they will agree that IF you take out XX days and implement each of these tips ONE day at a time, your blog will be be kicking ass in your niche, in your blogging community and in the search engine results by the end of it.
So let’s get started.
1. Mine your search engine referrals
Your search logs are a gold mine. They tell you what people are looking for. And since you most probably maintain a blog with the intention of growing an audience, your search logs give you a priceless view of what your audience wants. Your task is to feed your audience what they want.
Spend at least twenty minutes each day analyzing your search logs for new and exciting topics that you haven’t thought of before. Your search results allow you to reverse engineer the thoughts of your target audience.
2. Duplicate other people’s success
Start paying attention to the successful blogs (and not just those in your niche). Read the premier blogs and look at their headlines, their posting frequency, their tendency to post easy-to-digest lists, article series, exhaustive how-to guides – in short, observe and figure out what type of content succeeds, and then adapt it to your own blog.
3. Duplicate your own success
As you blog, you’ll discover your strengths and your weaknesses. Capitalize on your success by finding your voice and sticking to it.
There’s a temptation to feel like you’ve always got to do something new and original. Most of the great things in life are variations on pre-existing themes. There’s nothing wrong with sticking with what works. The important thing here is to not run away from you own success – instead, learn from it and repeat with variations as necessary.
4. Learn how to Position your Blog
More and more blogs are competing for attention. Most are instantly forgettable, simply echos of every other blog in their niche. One or two stand out and stick in your mind. Great content is one reason, necessary as great content is it might still be not enough. People have only so much time and attention to share, if they already have three excellent gadget blogs on their OPML why should they add yours?
Learn how to differentiate your blog and make your content unique.
5. Outsource Your Blogging Chores
As your blog grows you’ll find that you are short of time and that you can’t do everything that you want to by yourself. Short of cloning yourself, the right thing to do at this point is to outsource certain aspects of your blog. What you decide to outsource (blogging, design, promotion, administration, etc) depends on you – the key is to help you free up more time you can scale your blog and make it more successful.
And you don’t always have to pay for this – it’s possible to get your readers (the community you’ve built around your blog) to help out in many things from article contributions to design upgrades to administrative tasks.
6. Learn how to Make your Blog Sticky
Getting visitors isn’t enough – otherwise the nice buzz your blog traffic got on the first day from the $30 you spent on BlogExplosion would have made a lot of difference to your blog’s success. You want your visitors to stick. If your blog is the beneficiary of a massive traffic surge (say through hot current issue for which you rank well in the search engines or a post of yours that got Stumbled or Dugg by a lot of people), you need to be able to convert a good percentage of those visitors into regular readers.
So learn how to make your blog sticky – and these two articles will tell you everything you need to know about blog stickiness:
10 Ways to Make Your Blog Sticky
Convert One-off Visitors into Regular Readers
7. Master the Art of Linkbaiting
There’s a reason why bloggers evetually turn to linkbaiting (the art of writing content that generates links) – when done right (and promoted right) this is the most time-effective method to:
a) promote your blog
b) create good content
c) establish blog authority
d) gain new readers
Read the pioneering article on linkbaiting, and make a commitment to write at least one linkbait for your blog this week.
8. Start Guest Blogging
The one blog promotion strategy that I’ve always seen under-used is guest blogging.
There are no downsides to it – guest blogging can, off the top of my head, help you build links, attract new readers to your blog, position you as an expert in your niche, acquire consulting gigs and help build close relationships with fellow bloggers.
Usually we hold back from guest blogging either because we’re lazy or because we’re hung up on our own egos to go anywhere else and write. In some cases the later can be a good thing in a person who is talented and motivated enough to build a #1 blog, but usually it’s a case of limiting your blog promotion options and being too pig-headed to take advantage of what’s on offer.
9. Sweat the Details
Many bloggers have become successful by getting 80% things right and ignoring or not worrying about the other 20%. That’s not what I’m talking about. The same bloggers, when they’re doing the important 80%, put their 120% in it. They work hard at it, they go the extra mile and their efforts speak to you when you read their articles or visit their blogs.
Sweat the details – there’s no harm in spending time perfecting what you’re doing right – it will only improve your blog’s brand and give people more reasons to come back and even to link to you.
10. Establish a Blogging Rhythm
If you take time out to analyse what the successful blogs and bloggers are doing online, one thing that will stand out is the various blog posting rhythms that you will find.
And yes, the posting rhythm actually means something – it’s a clear indication of how the blog relates to its audience. If you can understand what different posting rhythms accomplish, you can match the right posting frequency with your blog objectives and write accordingly.
Overall, it’s a good idea to set your posting frequency before you start your blog and stick to it unless there is a drastic change in plans.
11. Develop a Blog Exit Strategy
Where do you see yourself and your blog in 2 years?
This isn’t about setting goals for yourself – it’s about knowing what you want to achieve with your blog, and planning for your exit if circumstances require you to do so.
Your reasons for leaving / ending a blog could be positive or negative – the idea is to be prepared so when the time arrives, you are prepared to hand the blog over to someone else, sell it off or further ‘automate’ it so that it takes less of your time.
Done right, you could stand to make good money from your blog in a couple of years. This doesn’t mean you should plan to ‘quit’ from the start – however, the beauty of preparing for exit is that once it focuses you to develop a business model that is efficient, has optimal monetization and is capable of running without you being involved in day-to-day decisions
12. Be Technically Efficient
You don’t need to be a CSS / PHP guru, and you don’t need to know SEO like the back of your hand. You should, however, know the basics of everything from blog design to image editing to blog promotion to using traffic analysis tools – it’s a job requirement for being a competent pro blogger.
Later on (or even from the start) you can outsource sections of your blog management – but you still need to be able to understand what’s going on in order to improve / manage your blog.
13. Create Intelligent Blog Ads
Two of the most under-rated articles in Performancing history are Chris G’s 2-part series on creating intelligent blog ads.
The basic idea is this – you should treat different visitors differently, and therefore you should be treating first-time readers, visitors hitting old posts in your archives through search engines, regular readers, visitors from Digg, registered users and visitors from other websites differently (well, you may not have that many divisions, but you get the point).
Once you extend this to advertising, a lot of things change. Regular readers don’t click on your AdSense, so why waste impressions on them? Search engine users hitting your archives are the most likely candidates for clicking on your AdSense, so why not optimise things so that they say more AdSense than usual?
In addition, you should also be able to treat visitors differently (in terms of what ads to show them) based on their geographical location and the time of the year (different ads around Christmas than in June, for example).
It’s possible to automate most of this using cookies, search referrer strings and detecting the geographical location of your visitors.
Learn more about creating intelligent articles here:
How To: Create Intelligent Blog Ads
How To: Create Intelligent Blog Ads – Part 2
14. Crush Your Own Expectations
Usually when I tell people to ‘lower’ their expectations from blogging, they call it conservatism and still go on expecting to be an overnight success. It doesn’t work like that – it’s bloody hard work, and even then the only thing you know is that it won’t be quite what you had imagined.
It takes a lot of patience, it won’t happen overnight and you certainly won’t help yourself by throwing your laptop out of your window when no one comments on your articles after the first week of blogging (although you should probably look again at what you’re doing to promote your articles).
If you’re a beginner blogger, it would pay to read Deb’s article titled: Before you Begin Blogging.
15. Learn How to Write Magnetic Headlines
Headlines are the most important aspect of blogging both from a reader standpoint and an SEO standpoint. Brian Clark has written the authoritative guide to headline writing, and if you haven’t read it yet, let me just say that you should easily be able to double your readership and search traffic just by following his suggestions.
16. Learn to Write Scannable Content
This is perhaps the one article that will make the biggest immediate difference. Visual display is to blogging like curb-appeal is to real estate. Bloggers should be constantly thinking about the curb-appeal of each article. It really makes a difference.
Writing for the Internet is far different to what we’re used to in college or in the offline world – you have to keep things simple, understand that people will ’scan’ most of the time so you also have to break up your content into easily digestable chunks (visually as well as structurally) and provide plenty of visual cues to guide readers from start to finish.
Make sure you read Darren’s article on scannable content and implement this TODAY in your blogging practices.
17. Establish Yourself as an Expert
Developing your personal brand as that of an expert will give not only give your blog legitimacy in the eyes of many readers but it will also help you get much closer to being #1 in your niche. If you’re starting out, adopt a long-term vision for becoming an expert blogger. If you’ve been blogging for a while, rejig your efforts and focus on being recognised as an authority.
How to do this?
Better bloggers have already written about this – make sure you read the following two articles and then implement their advice in your blogging.
How Can 10 Simple Articles Change Your Life?
Be Recognized as an Expert
18. When Stuck, Change Your Context
If you’re stuck (with blogger’s block, for example), or if you just find that you lack the motivation to start work, change things around. Move to a different location (get out of your study and work somewhere else for a couple of hours), take a break, or start working on something else. Sometimes changing your location works, sometimes you just need to work on something lighter to get your creative juices flowing.
19. Always have a Backup Plan
You should always have a backup plan – whether it’s for a project, an income source, a writer, an idea….have more than just one thing lined up.
A corollary of this would be to ‘be prepared’, but you don’t always have to prepared for everything (especially for times when you can just ‘wing it’).
As I wrote extensively in “Will the Google Bashers Please Shut Up?“, things will always go wrong. Google will dump your site. Someone will hack your blog. AdSense could ban you. Your $10k check could never arrive.
Whatever it is, don’t risk everything – be prepared and cover your ass.
20. Fire, Aim, Deal
The usual quote is ‘Ready, Fire, Aim’, meaning that you should get out of the blocks quickly and not worry too much about getting things right.
However, I think we tend to take too much time in the ‘ready’ phase. Online, news spreads almost instantaneously. It is a far more viral medium than, say, spreading ideas person to person (unless you’re a rock star performing in front of a million people, in which case send me a couple of tickets, will ya?) and you need to move very fast.
An idea adequately executed today is better than a plan perfectly executed tomorrow. Being first, and being first in people’s minds, is crucial if you want to capture mindshare.
So shoot first, make course corrections later, and don’t worry too much about whether you’re prepared or not – as long as you know what you’re talking about, you’re liable to improve as you go along.
It’s likely that there will be times when things will go wrong – however, we tend to worry too much when there is very little under our own control. So stop worrying, learn to move fast and deal with the problems that crop up as they happen, IF they’re worth dealing with.
In any case, most people won’t notice if you screw up and if they do notice (and it’s a big boo-boo), you can fix it on the way. This approach will take care of 90% of the times you hesitate because of the fear of things not working or making a mistake.
21. Make Yourself Big
Some bloggers suffer from a lack of self-confidence when they start out and it shows in their blogging. They’re not sure of themselves, they’re not confident in what they say and the readers pick up on it and automatically assume that this person doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
Make yourself big – exude confidence in your words and your blog design (that’s all your readers will see most of the time, so you need to make it count). Fake it if you have to, but do not portray a picture of self-doubt and uncertainty through your blog.
Humility has its place and I believe that to be successful you have to be humble, but there’s a difference between being arrogant and being confident. For a live lesson in being confident without being brash (assuming you don’t want the rock star personality, because that takes a bit of arrogance), read Chris Garrett.
22. Record All Your Ideas
Always keep a notebook handy to jot down ideas as they come to you. You never know when inspiration will strike, and in most cases you’ll lose that great idea if you don’t write it down immediately.
It doesn’t matter if you key in the ideas in your cellphone, write them in a notepad file on your PC, carry a pen and pad with you at all times or use a voice recorder to gather your thoughts for end-of-day processing – whatever you do, make sure every idea that comes to your mind gets noted.
23. Give Before You Get
Most people don’t understand the natural value of this ‘law’ (it works wonders if you adopt it as a law in your daily life), so let’s look at it from the perspective of how people ‘tick’.
If you’ve read “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini” (highly recommended), you’ll know that ‘Reciprocity’ is one of the six key ways to influence people (the others are: Commitment / Consistency, Social Proof, Liking, Authority and Scarcity). When you give first, you create a subconscious debt on the other person’s conscience which they will feel the need to repay or risk suffering from guilt. It’s how we are socially wired.
How do we use this in blogging? By giving first (providing value to your readers) and giving a lot (don’t assume that you can ‘ask’ them for something after just one week’s of good blogging). And what are you ‘asking them’? Their trust, their loyalty and their support. You won’t ask for it explicitly, but once you’ve given a lot to your readers you will notice that your readers will start giving back – in terms of comments, praise, feedback, mentions on other blogs and forums, respect, and if you’re selling something, money too.
24. Backup
Backup, backup, backup. If you’re making any decent money at all (heck – even if you aren’t), you MUST have a plan to backup your data.
Imagine what would happen if you were to lose your blog’s database (and the hundreds of images you’ve uploaded to it) right now? Chances are you don’t have a decent backup solution to fall back on.
You can use WordPress to email you daily backups of your database and you can configure your webhost to make daily backups of all your files in case something goes wrong. I believe in plenty of redundancy, so have a 3rd-party solution doing the backups as well as yourself and your webhost.
The backup policy applies to all your login / password information as well as any offline information that you need to keep handy. Putting them all together will make for easy access so I would definitely recommend that and you can protect yourself against a major screw up by backing everything up and storing it in a safe place.
25. Manage Your Time
Time mismanagement is perhaps the biggest thing holding bloggers back. Checking your email, stats, blog comments, feeds – all the time, throughout the day – is not only a waste of time at that moment (you’ll still make the same money whether you check it 5 times a day or once a day) but it also distracts you from the work you could be doing at that time (blogging, promoting, managing, etc).
Have you ever had a day when at the end of it, you realise that all of it was spent reading and replying to emails, dealing with blog comments, reading news in the feed reader and checking stats?
Don’t get stuck in wasteful habits and time loops – do whatever you have to in order to wean yourself from stats (uninstalling that AdSense Notifier plugin for Firefox), from email (Do you have your inbox open 24/7? Sticky a note on your laptop / monitor to ‘close’ the window whenever you see that note) and from feed reading (I ditched feed reading completely and now just visit the sites themselves).
26. Remix Old Content
There comes a time when you run out of new ideas (new for your blog, that is) to talk about in your niche – this happens to everyone sooner or later and is nothing to worry about. What’s far more important is what you do afterwards. Some bloggers get distracted and branch out to parallel topics, which is sometimes a good idea but can also dilute your readership who are still coming to you for news about subject A.
My preference is to take the same ideas and remix them according to specific situations (or new developments). For example, if you’ve written about how to get comments to your blog, in the second iteration you could give more tips, or you could dicuss new plugins that make it easier for readers to comment, or you could take a specific niche, discuss it’s problems and give specific advice on how to attract comments in that niche, OR you could discuss the different levels of a success for a blog and share how ‘comment attraction’ works on these levels.
As long as you’re adding a unique angle, it doesn’t matter if the idea is old or new.
27. Get help
Blogging may sound like a solo flight, but it doesn’t have to be this way. Learn to get help (like we discussed above, you’ll have to ‘give’ first) – whether you ask your community to help with growing your blog or you’re asking your fellow bloggers to help promote your new project OR you’re just asking friends for ideas and advice.
It always helps to get a fresh perspective on things, even if at the end of the day you’re going to do things your way
Bonus: 28. Separate Writing from Editing
Writing and Editing are 2 different beasts. Writing involves a creative process and requires you to take everything you have inside your head and funnel it out into words. Editing on the other hands requires you to be critical, to prune, to cut down.
The two are fundamentally opposing tasks, so don’t do them at the same time. Write first, then let your article / blog post be (unless it’s breaking news and you have to break it, like, right now) and come back to it a while later to edit.
Your blog posts will be more professional, your writing will be more polished and your readers will appreciate the time you put into the blog for them.
Bonus: Further Reading
While compiling this list, I came across several excellent articles that deserve a mention – and every single one of them will help you improve your blog.
3 Ways to Engineer Good Content
10 Articles All Bloggers Should Read At Least Once
10 Killer Post Ideas
5 Surefire Steps To Increase Readership 300% (or more)
Why Live Blog Stats Matter
5 Simple Ways to Open Your Blog Post With a Bang
Credits:
Many thanks to Brian, David, Deborah, Randa, Ryan, Raj, Hart, Chris, Dee and Charlene for their contributions to this list – couldn’t have done it without you guys.
Your Contributions
This list is by no means complete. Hopefully you can add a blogging tip or trick of your own to supplement – in that case, fire away in the comments. I’ll be upgrading the best tips from the comments into this list and linking out to the contributors as well.
