Yesterday I talked about how bloggers should be more generous; how they should learn to give more instead of just asking for favors.

Before you can be all 'giving' though, you need to know exactly what you're going to 'give'. Doing favors blindly doesn't make any practical sense - ideally you want to make a meaningful contribution to someone else's life, and to figure out what matters to people in your social circle, you have to listen first.

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.

So who should you listen to? Here are a few ideas:

Your Readers: Blogging is about relationships (we keep saying this over and over again), and if you're not in tune with what your readers want, you won't be able to serve them properly and you will, sooner or later, end up loosing them.

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I was going to title this one "The Secret to Earning $10k/month from blogging in just 6 months", but that might have been a bit too much :)

If you want to make $10,000 / month from blogging in 6 months, here is a quick formula for you:

1) Figure out how you can make this a reality (freelance work, build a site to sell it, affiliate marketing, using PPC to sell your own ebook, blogging for hire, create your own site, etc) and create a detailed, step-by-step plan for it.

2) Go for it, now. Don't stop for anything, even for this article to end - just start executing that plan right now.

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.

For your blog, this means positioning it to benefit from trends in your niche. For example, for my football blog, I tend to get plenty of search engine traffic for matches as well as for any key incident that happens (celebrity gossip, in-game violence, etc). There are two reasons for this - one, I'm covering these events (taking initiative) and two, my blog ranks high in search engines naturally so that helps individual pages rank highly as well.

If you think about it, all progress on your blog is a function of you taking initiative and going out seeking opportunities instead of sitting at home waiting for them.

That $10k isn't going to come to you if you wait for it (unless your blog earns that much in a month, in which case add a couple of zeros at the end of the number and start over) - you have to get up, get out and work for it, and quite often that means being in the right place to take advantages of the opportunities that arise.

I've talked about this more in my "tips for building a kick-ass blog" article, but I'd like to expand on the idea a bit more.

The basic idea is that you cannot grow as fast by yourself as you can with the help of others (leverage other peoples' resources). There are two ways you can get the help of others - ask them (nicely, of course), or get them to volunteer to help you. Asking (especially if you're paying for it) works wonders, but right now I want to focus on the second option - having people help you of their own accord.

How do you do this as a blogger?

By helping other people - your readers, fellow bloggers, your contacts, your advertisers and your employees. In terms of your relationships, this means going out of your way to help others, doing them favors when asked, and being there for friends when they need your help. You'll have to give first before you can expect anything and for someone who's impatient for results (like me), it would help to remember that this isn't just you giving the store away, it's you investing your resources in your future. Investments, when done in the right place and the right time, can bring about fantastic returns down the line, and so it is with people.

In terms of your blog, this means 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.

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If you chase two rabbits, both will escape.

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).

It's clear then that we need a strategy for focusing our time and energy. I would recommend using the following model:

Focus 70% on Strengths

Take stock of your strengths as an entrepreneur and blogger (make sure you ask your friends and co-workers for input as well). Are you good at monetizing your blogs? Do you have a knack for creating social bait (linkbait)? Are you a good designer?

The first step is knowing what you're good at. The second step is to ensure that a major portion of your working time is spent focusing on these activities - this is what you're good at, so make sure you profit the most from it.

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Yesterday I talked about competence and excellence - it's a theme you'll be hearing a lot in the next dozen or so articles from me. The basic idea is that "good enough" is never satisfactory - to be successful and to keep moving forward, you have to give it your best shot every single time.

Sometimes you might find it difficult to show up with your "A" game - however, if something is difficult it isn't an excuse for not making it happen. If you find it difficult it just means that you either need to find a shortcut (work smarter) or dig deep and push through (work harder).

Today I want to talk about something related to competence - risk-taking.

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.

Risk-taking is an integral fact of business and blogging. Every day we're faced with choices that require us to leave the comfort of the familiar and venture into the unknown.

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Today I'd like to ask you two questions:

One - What is your most important goal for your blog?

Two - How committed are you to that goal?

The thing is, we make a lot of promises - but it's the easiest thing in the world to say something, and the hardest to make it happen.

I think it's important to establish what you want to achieve, and what you're willing to do to achieve it, from the start. Sometimes your actions won't match your words, so you may talk about wanting to do one thing (write linkbait) and end up doing the other (write about your cat). By taking out time to analyse your own words and actions, you can understand:

a) what you're doing
b) why you're doing it
c) whether your commitments are realistic or even desirable
d) what you really want to do

The first time you'll do this, it should cause a major paradigm shift in your blogging focus. When I talked about character yesterday I mentioned that part of your blog's character was staying true to your purpose and being in it for the long haul instead of short-term distractions.

It's strong commitment to your blog's purpose that helps you maintain that part of its personality, its character.

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How can you have charisma? Be more concerned about making others feel good about themselves than you are making them feel good about you - Dan Reliand

Most people think of charisma as something mystical, almost undefinable. They think it's a quality that comes at birth or not at all. But that's not true. Charisma, plainly stated, is the ability to draw people to you. And like other character traits, it can be developed.

And as I've discussed earlier, your blog (and you) have a certain personality, a brand that can be nurtured, cultivated and molded into anything that you want it to be. Because the personality of a blogger can be one of the biggest 'crowd-pullers' for the blog, it's important that you get it right.

To create a blog that attracts others, you need to integrate the following points into your blog's philosophy:

1. Be Passionate and Positive

Who would you rather spend time with - someone who is grumpy, bitter and depressed, or someone that is cheerful, positive and passionate?

Blogs are the same - most people get turned off from whiners and are attracted to those who have a positive approach towards life (I wouldn't say optimistic - there's a difference in having self-belief and in distorting reality). Or, as they say, when you set yourself on fire (passion), people love to come and watch you burn.

Being positive is more than just avoiding the urge to criticise - it's a conscious attempt to focus on how things can be made better instead of focusing on what's wrong, it's the drive to focus on the good rather than on the bad. You cannot be blind to a fault or a mistake, but you can choose what you spend your time on - pointing out what's wrong or showing people how to fix it.

And just about every successful blogger I know speaks with passion and conviction - it's not an add-on trait, this is perhaps the single-most important ingredient to blogging success (and success in life).

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Your blog has its own personality, regardless of whether you actively cultivate it or allow it to develop haphazardly. Your readers are attracted to your blog for a reason, and its personality plays a pivotal role in attracting visitors and converting them into regular readers.

When your blog slowly converts passerbys into regular readers, a relationship of trust develops between your blog and them. It is this trust that forms the basis of how your blog deals with its readers and as such the blogger (you) must do what it takes to establish and maintain that trust.

This is where your blog's character comes in.

Let's discuss for a minute what I DON'T mean by character:

• I'm not talking about being morally right (immoral content goes, as long as that's what the blog is designed for).
• I'm not talking about reporting only the facts (rumours work, as long as that's what...you get the idea).
• This has nothing to do with the blogger (well, maybe a bit) - quite often the blog takes on a completely different personality from the blogger, and if that sells, that's fine too. You don't HAVE to be your blog, and your blog doesn't HAVE to be you.

So what am I talking about?

Character in a blog means:

• Delivering on what you promise (integrity and reliability are cornerstones for building trust).
• Doing what you do to the best of your ability (effort and quality will be your secret weapons for converting visitors).
• Staying true to your purpose in face of adversity or success (don't allow short-term results to distract you from long-term objectives).

You may not have the most popular blog, or the best looking, or the most profitable. All those things are important, and we've talked about how to achieve all these things at Performancing. 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.

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.

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There are two popular views on 'being successful':

One says that you should look at the best in your industry and copy what they're doing (and try to improve that while you're at it). The theory goes that you can't fail if you do what's already working.

The second says that leaders are more successful and as a result you should strike out your own path and not copy others. Be an innovator, in other words.

Which one works? The reality is that both strategies, on their own, don't work as well as when you combine the two.

Learning from your competition is smart because it shows you what you're missing out on. Better yet, when you're analysing your competition you invariably find things that they're NOT doing well, which gives you more areas in which you can improve. Innovation comes from finding gaps in a niche and dominating them - however you don't dominate in a vacuum; the lessons learned from observing your competition (especially how they've risen to the top) can be used by you for your own success.

Learning from others requires humility. Striking out your own path requires courage. Being #1 requires you to move fast and take risks.

And you need all 3 to be successful.

How do you dominate a niche? Do you build 1 mega-resource website using categories / subdomains for your subniches, or you do you build a separate website for each niche?

Both approaches have their pros and cons.

A single big site benefits from economies of scale, is cost-effective, allows for a focused use of resources, requires less manpower to manage, can easily dominate search engine rankings in the long run, and can perhaps earn more revenue thanks to direct advertising deals.

On the other hand, if you have several small sites, it is easier to build a passionate user-base, it's easier to be #1 in the sub-niche and there is no single point of failure where income, traffic or search engine rankings are concerned.

In comparison, both approaches offer strategic and financial advantages. Which one would you choose?

We had a discussion on this topic last week and we took one of two positions (I sided towards the 'one big site' method). However, what struck me this morning was that there was no reason for us to make an 'either/or' decision - we could just as easily combine the two approaches and build a crack network to dominate any niche.

The basic idea is to use a hub and satellites approach - the big, general-niche site being the hub and the specialised sub-niche sites being your satellites.

How does it work?

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No one starts a blog aiming to be #2 in their niche, or worse, to be completely unknown and an invisible part of the blogosphere.

On the other hand, not many people start with a clear vision and a step-by-step, executable plan to be #1 in their niche. And from the few who do so, hardly anyone stays the course in the first 6 months.

Now before we talk about blog positioning and working to be #1, here's a question for you: For the last blog that you started, what was your plan to make it #1 in it's niche / subniche?

There are two ways of being #1:

One: You can use the bulldozer approach, where you go up against established competition and then try to steamroll over them by spending more money, more time, getting more links or just getting dugg more than them.

Two: You find an angle, a facet of the niche that does not have a clear #1 blog, and you jump with both feet in it and from day one, you act as the authority in that niche (and deliver on it).

Usually, the most successful blogs use a combination of the two approaches, and when you ask people about their approach, they are as liable to mention the second approach as they are to mention the first one.

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Domain names and quality content go hand in hand - it's not a case of one over the other, rather it's a case of getting both together to make a kick-ass blog.

However, depending on which stage you are at in your blog's life-cycle, each factor will have a different role to play and understanding that role can help you make your blog more successful.

In the short run, right after launch perhaps, the name of the blog is perhaps one of the most important selling and branding elements available to the blogger. You can do more and go further with a good name and average content as opposed to an average name and good content (I'm talking about short-term results, the first few days or weeks after a blog's launch). Since it's a new blog, people will give you some leeway when it comes to product quality. However, if you are average in your brand (name), people won't remember you as easily as they would remember the other blog with the cool name.

In the long run, however, product quality always trumps the 'cool' name. So while having a good name will help you in the beginning, in the long run you can have a successful blog by taking an average name (not a bad name though) and build a brand around it simply by consistently providing your readers with quality content.

So how important is the blog name and blog branding for you?

In Chris Garrett's article, "How to choose a perfect blog name", he talks about the difficulties of selecting domain names (especially since the good ones seem to be all taken) and suggests strategies on how to pick a good blog name.

One of the things Chris mentions is the different characteristics of a good domain name:

1. Readable
2. Pronounceable
3. Spellable
4. Memorable
5. Concise
6. Unique

Now while it's easy to recognise a good domain name and then identify why it's good, it's much harder to generate such a name (I'll deal with the options of buying domain names in a future article). Let's face it - some people are not great at thinking up of cool / memorable domain names, while others can do it naturally.

Personally, I'm average or slightly above-average when it comes to picking names (I can recognise winners but find it much harder to think of them). I have a friend though, a fellow blogger, who's quite good at brainstorming for domain names and there have several occassions in the last year or so when we have chatted simply picked excellent domain names out of thin air.

What I'm getting at is that you will have, in your circle of friends or acquaintances, someone who is naturally creative and clever and as a result is good at picking names, taglines, ideas for logos, etc. Just like you would think of your SEO friend or your PHP expert as being part of your brain trust, the guy who helps you brainstorm is and should be a key part of your brain trust.

We spend so much time and energy after finding domain names, that sometimes we forget that it's much easier to ask for help from the right person.

Do you have a 'brain trust' that you bounce ideas off or have success brainstorming with? If you don't, maybe it's time you started.

In the 'Ask Your Blogging Questions Here' thread, franky asks:

How do you really start a new (niche) blog? Many times the '10 articles' and 'establish yourself as an authority' is managed, but what pace to set during the first period?

There are two established strategies to successfully launch your blog - the big bang model or the bootstrapping model - and these differ in terms of resources available to the blog owner.

The Big Bang Approach

If you have any one of these two:

• a lot of money
• plenty of good contacts in the industry

This is the ideal way to go. You can write a lot of quality content in advance (around 30-50 articles), and around launch time either spend big or network big and get the word out as quickly and as widely as possible.

Lots of good content + a lot of eyeballs generally translates into a good, successful launch, but there are two factors that you have to cater for.

One, make sure you're working in a profitable niche.

Two, make sure you have a 'phase 2' - a plan for what to do and how to manage your blog after the launch. It won't be possible to maintain the same blogging rhythm as during launch, and you'll have to find a solution that scales and not just eats up your time.

Bootstrapping Approach

Best if you don't have much time or money. Simply start blogging, putting out 1-2 articles per day and posting them on your blog. Promote your blog but at this stage focus on the key activities - attracting attention of the top blogs, writing linkbait, getting links from trusted sources, etc.

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