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Dee Barizo

How to Improve as a Problogger, Part 2

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Image by svilen001

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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Image by svilen001

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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Image by nkzs

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

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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.

Here’s a Sure-Fire and Simple Way to Increase Your Post Frequency

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Many bloggers struggle with low post frequency. They know they can post more often but for some reason, they don’t get around to posting as much as they should.

For example, some bloggers average one post a week but they feel like they can do better. They think they have time to publish two or three posts a week.

If you want to post more frequently, here’s an easy way to boost your post count. I found this tip from Switch, a great book about making successful changes in your life.

Action Triggers

You may have heard that written goals are accomplished more often than unwritten goals. You can take this technique further. Studies have show that written goals become even more effective if they are related to a time and place. In other words, the more specific your goal, the more likely it will get done. These goals are called action triggers because they remind you to act at specific places and times.

For example, let’s say you have a goal to publish three posts per week. At the beginning of the week, you should write down when and where you will write the posts.
Your notes could look like this:

After work on Tuesday, I will go to my favorite coffee shop and write a blog post.

After work on Thursday, I will go to my favorite coffee shop and write a blog post.

After breakfast on Saturday, I will write a blog post at my home office.

It’s important to write down your goals. If you don’t write them down, you can easily forget about them. Plus, you have to keep reminding yourself about them so you won’t forget. That takes unnecessary mental effort that can be put to better use.

Making your goals more concrete is also key. When you write down a posting appointment with a time and place, you create a trigger in your mind. When the event happens, you’ll remind yourself of what you need to do without spending much effort. In fact, the action trigger will interrupt your normal stream of consciousness. You don’t have to strain your mind to remember your goal.

Finally, action triggers work because you make deliberate decisions beforehand. I think much of our shortcomings when it comes to not achieving our goals is because we don’t really make decisions.

Your desire may be to post more often but do you really decide to do it? Many of us are basically just hoping we’ll get around to blogging more often. But if we write down our goals and make them specific, we create tangible decision points. Instead of hoping, we’re making decisions and taking control of our future.

Over to You

Create an action trigger today and let me know how it works for you.

Also, what strategies do you use to post more regularly?

Performancing offers blog management services.

How to Get More Blog Comments

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Many bloggers are looking to increase the comments on their blog so I thought I’d share my experiences in this area. Number of comments and comments per post are popular stats to look at because they can show how well your blog is doing in developing conversation and community with readers.

My stats are not that great. I’ve published 173 posts so far on my gaming blog and received 443 comments. This comes out to just a little over 2.5 comments per post. But over my last 15 posts, I’ve been averaging over 8 comments per post. That number has been encouraging since I only have 120 RSS subscribers.

Based on my experience, here are some tips to consider:

Drive more traffic. Unsurprisingly, my high traffic posts tend to have the most comments. With more eyeballs to your posts, you have more chances that some of the visitors will leave a comment. That’s why you’ll find a lot of comments on the top blogs even though some of their posts may not be that deserving of a comment.

Write longer posts. I have a few posts that haven’t received a lot of traffic but they still attract many comments. Most of these posts are longer than the average blog entry. They are at least 1000 words. It makes sense that longer content attracts more blog comments. The more info you have, the more chances your readers have of finding something interesting in the post and responding to it. They may not find the post as a whole very remarkable but a small section in the post could entice them to comment.

Of course, don’t just write more words when a few will do. You don’t want to be like the long-winded college student trying to meet a word requirement for a term paper. Instead, think of a topic you can elaborate on, a topic that will take more than 500 words to explain. Then, explain it as best you can.

Give the conversation time to develop. Tim Ferris, author of The 4-Hour Workweek, says you should space your posts at least 3-4 days apart. This gives your audience more time to converse in the comment section since the latest post tends to get more attention than the other posts. At first, Tim tried posting more regularly. However, he felt like the post frequency cut off the conversation of the older post too soon. His readers would stop focusing on the previous post and move on to the newest post. He did a test and sure enough he found that he got more comments per post by publishing them farther apart.

Fortunately, I stumbled on this strategy by accident. I initially wanted to post every weekday or every other weekday. But I realized I was too busy and 1-2 posts per week was the best I could do.

Create unique content. Unique content gets people talking because it jolts them out of their comfort zone and makes them think. But make sure your content is conceptually unique – not just a rewrite of existing stuff your audience already knows. Check out Sugarrae’s classic post, When Unique Content Is Not “Unique”, for more information.

Reply to your comments. If you want to provide a place where people feel free to discuss, you should provide a good example. Respond to your comments especially the ones from your regulars. Make them feel like you value their interaction. Realize that many of them will revisit your blog to see if you will reply. If you don’t, they may stop leaving comments.

Include a call to action. If you want your readers to leave comments, ask for their opinion at the end of the post. Also, tell them they’re free to ask questions and you’ll do your best to answer them.

Over to You

How do encourage comments on your blog?

Performancing offers blog management services.

Long-Term Vision Should Trump Reader Feedback

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In July 2009, a new blogger entered the same gaming niche as my blog. His blog looked like it had a lot of potential. He posted daily including several 1500+ word posts. He was very active on Twitter. He wrote several guest posts. He scored an interview on a popular blogging blog. With these efforts, he quickly made an impact in the industry and his traffic and Twitter followers grew quickly.

You could tell that he spent a lot of time building his blog and it seemed like it would only be a matter of time before he became a top five blogger in the niche. However, his initial enthusiasm only lasted three months. After that time, he started posting less and less and in December, he made his last post – one short of the 100 post milestone.

What happened? How did the promising blogger end up in the wasteland of abandoned blogs?

Too Much Feedback is a Bad Thing

One thing I noticed was his obsession for feedback. He was always asking his blog readers and Twitter followers for topics to write about. Also, he used polls all the time to determine the topics of his posts.

He had a diverse audience who wanted to talk about many different topics. He didn’t filter his feedback and wrote about all the different topics. As such, his blog became very unfocused. I stopped reading it because I never knew what to expect.

He catered to his whole audience but his traffic plateaued once people realized that he was going to serve everybody. Without a strong focus, people liked his blog but no one really loved it. And ironically, less and less people responded to his requests for feedback.

What’s Your Long-Term Vision?

I think it’s important to have a long-term vision for your blog that trumps reader feedback. You shouldn’t give up too much control to your audience. You are the expert.

Apple didn’t ask their customers for feedback on the iPhone. If anything, they probably would’ve requested too many features and made the iPhone just like the other smartphones. The iPhone works because it has less features which makes it easier to use than its competitors. This was the vision of Apple and they weren’t going to let feedback change their course.

Consider the creators of popular TV shows. I bet their shows would be much worse if they implemented audience feedback on a regular basis. Before the actors were even hired, they had a vision for their show and they knew that straying from that vision would hurt their show.

Therefore, have a concrete vision for your blog. The blogger I first mentioned didn’t have one and it cost him.

This is not to say that you shouldn’t listen to feedback. Feedback can be useful. Just don’t let it trump your long-term vision.

Performancing offers blog management services.

Book Review of Rework, a New Bestselling Business Book

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Rework is the new business book by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, the executive team of 37signals.

I’m a big fan of their blog and Backpack, one of their products, so when I found out they were releasing a business book, I had to check it out.

The release date was yesterday so I went to my local Barnes & Noble, found the book, and read the whole thing there in two hours. Yes, the book is short compared to other business books but I liked it so much that I bought it for reference sake.

Even though the book is not a book about blogging, I think the book has many great tips for probloggers.

Basically, it’s a manifesto for doing work differently. Written from their experience, Jason and David blow up many of the workplace norms you find today in most companies, big and small. For example, here’s a look at some of their chapter titles: Learning from mistakes is overrated, Planning is guessing, Meetings are toxic, and Underdo your competition. Also, they claim that workaholism is a bad idea.

As you can tell, Rework is not the typical business book that reminds people of boring college classes and stuffy professors.

Jason and David have figured out how to run a wildly successful business in the new media, internet-based world we live in without the negative aspects that people normally think of like long hours, ineffective bureaucracy, and cutthroat tactics. Their company, 37signals, has only 16 employees. But even though the company is not big, they have a big impact with over 3 million people using their products.

The employees are very autonomous. They can work at their own schedule and can choose to work at home. In fact, half of their employees don’t even live in the same city as the company office.

Here’s a telling quote from Jason in Inc. Magazine:

Employees come to the office if and when they feel like it, or else they work from home. I don’t believe in the 40-hour workweek, so we cut all that BS about being somewhere for a certain number of hours. I have no idea how many hours my employees work — I just know they get the work done.

Therefore, I think Jason and David’s experience of running a business is great for the average problogger. You don’t need the typical business book that caters to offline businesses and big corporations.

Also, 37signals understands the power of blogging. As a small business, they don’t have a sales team or a marketing department. In fact, most of their business comes from their blog. That’s how I found out about them. Their blog, Signal vs. Noise, is very popular with over 100k RSS subscribers.

The book can help you get into the business mindset, which is the mindset you need to be in to really make money – not the blogging mindset.  A blog is a great marketing channel but you need a strong business as a foundation to have the best chance of quitting your day job.

There will be sections in the book that may not apply to your situation right now. For example, it has some essays about hiring employees but most bloggers I know are not in a position to hire. Still, the other sections are well worth the price of the book and who knows, in the future, you may want to hire employees or freelancers for your blog.

Learn more about Rework.

Performancing offers blog management services.