How much time do you need to put into a niche before you can declare yourself an expert? Well, many bloggers seem to disagree, judging by their self-proclamations after only a few months, but once upon a time you were classified as an expert if you had spent roughly 10,000 hours on a skill, in a focused, structured manner. If we’re referring to a career job, at roughly 40 hours/week, that comes out to about five years. But when it comes to working online and establishing your expertise, the Web doesn’t wait around. Five years is too long, since Web technology is always changing.
[Read more…] about 5 Tips For Building Expertise Through Blogging
Blog
7 Tips for Bootstrapping Your Blog Traffic
Any time you start a new blog, the biggest concern tends to be “how do I build traffic?” Unless you’re hiring or have a crack team of web gurus who know the tricks for building up your blog fast, you’ll just have to do it yourself. However, if you haven’t luxury of a big budget and have minimal time, one recourse is to bootstrap your blog traffic with the same general principles with which entrepreneurs bootstrap their startup businesses with minimal funds and resources.
Here are some tips for leveraging your publishing and promotional plan to build initial trickles of traffic into much more.
- Write content and publish consistently. It’s easy to come up with a plan, even create an editorial calendar. It’s much harder to actually stick to a consistent schedule. This is a common area of difficulty for bloggers, but important to master. Let’s just say that search engines and readers both love consistency of frequency. Unless you’re running a news site, you don’t necessarily have to publish tons of content daily.
- Tweak your content to searches. You don’t want to cater entirely to site visitors’ searches, but do focus on search keywords that are relevant to your site’s niche. If visitors are reaching your site via a particular search but the “bounce” (leaving) rate is high, then they probably didn’t find the content they were seeking. Mine your site metrics for the most popular search terms for the recent past, then see if you can write content to match, while staying within your site’s niche.
- Build up your posting frequency. Start small, build up your content as time, resources or budget permits. Additional content will bring additional readers, especially if you’re leveraging your social media channels.
- Build your social networks. There are a variety of social networks, including social bookmarking sites (Stumbleupon, Delicious), social voting sites (Digg, Sphinn, Mixx, Reddit, Propeller), Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, other blogs, forums, media sharing sites (Flickr, YouTube, Scribd, Slideshare) and so on. Don’t forget to factor in the time it takes to build your social networks, so work at it daily if possible. Of course, having these networks is useless unless you leverage them to promote your content.
- Promote content on at least two social media sites. There are a variety of ways to promote your content, including the social media sites mentioned above, as well as a variety of non-social profile pages that are free for use. These methods differ in the amount of Web traffic they each bring, though collectively they can make a tremendous difference to your site. You don’t have to use all of these methods, especially when you’re starting out. Bloggers differ on what they feel is most important, but if you have to pick just two to start with, a few of my blogging colleagues have variously suggested the following pairs as being “most” effective, in their experience:
- Stumbleupon and Digg.
- Stumbeupon and Twitter.
- Twitter and Facebook.
- Twitter and Digg.
Personally, I’d pick Twitter and Facebook, but it really depends on your content and your social networks. Promoting content successfully online really is about who you know and whether they’ll share your content. If you can get them to do it regularly, even better. Your Facebook Wall or a Fan Page serve as great reminders. Just don’t overdo it, and learn to balance promotion and social network building tasks when you’re not writing.
- Deep link to your older content. For each new post that you write, you should try to link to at least two older posts in your own site’s archives. If your post is sufficiently long, you can link to more than two. Remember to link with appropriate keywords in the anchor text. The cynic might say that this is a cheap way to get more page views for your site, but linking to your own existing content from each new post serves multiple purposes
- Keep readers on your site. Yes, that gets you more page views, but is there really anything wrong with that if you’re giving readers what they want, possibly in your archives?
- Expose older content to readers who might have missed it.
- Build authority for your site for the keywords and variations used in link anchor text (more on this in a later post). From a search engine perspective, keep in mind that they all want relevant links to give to search users. If your site happens to have relevant links, why not emphasize that by deep linking? This potentially helps to reduce the waiting time it takes to rank in search engines.
- Throw a whammy at site scrapers who grab your content. They might steal your content but having a link to your own posts means you’ll at least know who did it and be able to take action, if desired.
- Use target=”_blank” in your hyperlinks. If you don’t know what this means, don’t worry for now. If you do know, then use it for any links that go outside of your sites. This way, the main browser window/ tab stays on your site, hopefully keeping readers there longer and potentially building traffic.
If you are bootstrapping with limited resources and funds, you can ease into your publishing and promotion plan. Though the more effort you put in early on, the sooner you hit the point of exponential growth. If you have a blog for your business, build it steadily, keep costs to a minimum, bootstrap your way to higher blog traffic to gain leads and sale. If you get too overwhelmed, hire an intern until you can afford to hire staff or an agency such as Performancing Services.
Image: Flickr.
Blogging Workflow and Productivity: Alternate Bookmarking Tip
If you have a Mac or PC computer, there’s a simple way to locally bookmark Web pages that you’re browsing or researching en masse that keeps you browser-independent: file folder shortcuts. This method keeps you from having to open multiple Web browser tabs or bookmark all the URLS or worse, copy and paste links into some sort of list. It is a simpler former of bookmarking, but avoids some of the other methods’ limitations. Note: I haven’t tried the following tip on a Linux system, but it might work similarily. I tested on a Mac (10.6.x Snow Leopard) and a PC (Win Vista).
First, let’s look at the objectives we’re trying to achieve:
- Browse lots of pages daily, to find ideas and references for blogging.
- Locally bookmark web pages independent of any browser, to preserve them for that day and beyond, if necessary.
- Minimize the number of open browser tabs, to save the amount of RAM memory your computer is using at any given moment. This saves an immense amount of wasted time.
- Reserve the ability to group links as necessary, and move links around for regrouping.
Sources that I refer to daily for finding blog post ideas and references include:
- Favorite sites you’ve previously bookmarked.
- RSS readers (e.g., Google Reader).
- Portals and aggregators (Alltop, Techmeme, Megite, WeSmirch, etc.).
- Social voting sites (Digg, Mixx, etc.).
- Social bookmarking sites (Delicious, Stumbleupon).
- Microblogging sites (Twitter).
- Social networking sites (Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Ning).
Typically, I’ve used mind mapping software and other tools for bookmarking or recording interesting links for later use. Specifically, I’ve tended to favor Mindjet’s MindManager on a PC for about three years, and particularly love this tool. However, when I switched my main laptop to a MacBook Pro last December, I was hugely disappointed to find that not only is the interface for MindManager different than on a PC, but the workflow is different. That’s also true on the Mac for all the other mind mapping tools that I tend to use regularly, such as XMind.
I still love MindManager and other mind mapping tools, but for now, they don’t work for me on a Mac. After wasting a lot of time going back to opening up multiple browser tabs while researching, I managed to crash my Mac (yes, a Mac!!) too many times. Purely by chance, I accidentally discovered a simple trick: drag Web page links from your browser to Explorer (PC) or Finder (Mac) applications to create a link shortcut. I’m honestly surprised that I never knew this before, and actually have Mac OS X’s general interface to thank for the discovery.
What happens is that both apps store link information in the form of a “shortcut,” which you can later either drag into a browser or double-click on to open the content page. It’s really quite simple and I’m actually surprised not to have discovered it in the past. Note that with Macs, clicking on a link stored in a Finder folder opens the Safari browser, and that as far as I know, this cannot be changed. If you prefer a different browser while using a Mac, you can use your mouse to drag shortcut links from Finder folders and drop them into your browser of choice. With PCs, you can configure the default browser, so clicking a saved shortcut will open whatever browser you’ve configured.
Caveats
You can end up still accumulating far too many link shortcuts that you’ll never use, and create multiple daily folders, thus finding yourself just as overwhelmed with information overload as with other blogging research methods. So discipline is independent of blogging workflow, and something you’ll need to discover for yourself.
The fact is, I still open far too many browser windows and tabs. For example, at the time of this writing, I have probably 60 tabs open overall in Firefox, Chrome, Flock and Safari. It may seem like a bad habit, but is often a necessity when working with multiple clients and using multiple Web profiles for social media and other services. Using the “bookmark-within-file-folder” trick simple reduces the number of browser tabs I need to open. As a result, I’ve managed to be more productive again for two key reasons. One is that my browser windows hang less often because of more free memory. The other is that I now focus on one browser tab at at a time. Overall, this means less time spent researching/ browsing and restarting browsers and more time for writing.
6 Tips to Make the Most of Your Blog Writing Time
Blogging can be an enjoyable experience or it can be a draining time-suck. Which would you prefer? Whether you’re blogging for your own reasons, freelancing, or doing it for your business, finding the time to write can be difficult if you’re juggling it amongst other work. Here are a few tips to leverage the time that you do have.
[Read more…] about 6 Tips to Make the Most of Your Blog Writing Time
Does Your Business Need a Blog?
There’s a growing segment of bloggers who fall into the “business” category, who blog for the purpose of promoting a business, and you might be or become one of them. Businesses are realizing the value of blogging, especially if they’re hoping to establish an online presence.
Does your business need a blog? The short answer is “maybe.” Not every business needs a blog, just like not every business needs a website. However, if you are building any sort of presence online, then a blog is a very good idea.
Why? A website on its own simply isn’t enough to establish an online presence, unless your domain is “aged,” has tons of high-ranking content (from a search engine perspective) that other high-ranking sites have linked back to, and has consistent new content. Many search engines favor sites with regular fresh content — which means the likelihood of more Web traffic.
While you CAN publish lots of regular content on a non-blog site, the tools for managing non-blog content — e.g., a CMS (Content Management System) — are often far too complex and expensive for the needs of smaller businesses. Blogging systems (a lesser form of CMS) may have their limitations, but as most of the best are free and have supportive communities, they can be a benefit when you’re on a tight budget. A few such as WordPress can even be used as a low-end CMS in incredibly versatile ways.
Simply put, your business website needs a blog because if it’s leveraged properly, your site benefits in terms of Web traffic. Readers also benefit, and if they become regular readers due to regular content, their trust grows and they’re more likely to convert to customers. It’s a win-win situation.
So how do you decide whether to have a business blog or not? Here are a few questions you can ask yourself.
- Do you have a bricks and mortar ‘local’ business that would benefit from a broader market?
- Do you already have a website that brings you customers or leads?
- Do you want your customer base to be more knowledgeable about your product or industry?
- Do you want to establish an online presence?
- Do you want to sell your business’ products or services online?
- Do you know about social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook and want to leverage them for your businesss?
There are other questions you can ask yourself, but this is a starting point. If you’ve answered yes to any of these, then having a blog might benefit your business. If this is something you’d like to explore further, search our article archives for other helpful content relating to writing, creativity, productivity and other aspects of blogging. If you have decided to build a business blog and need some help, feel free to contact Performancing Services.
How to Improve as a Problogger, Part 2
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
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
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.