This post is the 3rd in a series of posts by Hendry Lee. Check out part 1 and part 2.

Whether or not your like it, blogging is going through an evolution. Although it has only been around for less than a decade, we have seen quite a lot of impacts it brings to businesses and publishers. In the upcoming years, more radical changes will be happening, as blogs are going to be around for quite some time.

As a blogger, you have no choice but to adapt your strategy accordingly. Technology-wise, blog software is going to be much easier to use. It will also be seamlessly integrated into other tools such as micro-blogging and social networking.

However, the most prominent change for web publishers is strategic wise. While site building through unique and quality content production is still the way to go, and although link development and site promotion are still very much the same old advice, how bloggers should execute them have pretty much evolved.

This means that not only new bloggers need a whole new set of strategies to get across their messages and be noticed, but existing bloggers also will see a large shift in how they reach their audience including new ways to tap into new audience that is otherwise not available before.

Building Strong Foundation – It Starts Within

Blogging is easy, but that doesn’t make the foundational part optional. Many new bloggers overlook this part because they don’t want to waste time but in return they go in circles trying to figure out how to grow their blogs to get more traffic and revenue.

Your blog is the only thing that you have full control of. It just makes sense if you start there. Once you get a head start by getting the house in order, it feels better knowing that whatever you plan from there is likely to have more impact. Even a little boost in search engine position is worth it, if you take into account the traffic and revenue that you’re going to generate for years to come.

One thing you should be aware of though, it is easy to over-organize your house that you never move beyond those activities. That happens to all of us, even to go getters who persistently take action. It’s just natural because as human being, taking actions to grow a business often put us outside of the comfort zone.

Brand Your Design

When Kubrick was first introduced as the default WordPress theme, everyone thinks it is cool but nowadays whoever uses it — even if he modifies the header color or image — is at risk of turning off the visitors.

Boring themes make people want to click the back button of the browser. First impression counts so it is worth it that you hire a designer to create a brand new design from scratch.

If you are tight on the budget, pick a design that suits your blog best and customize it. A good theme designer is able to turn an existing design into entirely unique work.

No matter which way you choose, just remember that while design is important, it is not everything. Most successful blogs have been through a redesign or two. While optimizing your blog design is necessary, it is not that critical when you are getting started.

Just get a unique one up and move on to content production and promotion. A makeover can come later. Again, prioritize.

It is critical that you don’t skip this step though. Although there are ugly sites that work very well, it can be hard to establish credibility or show to others that you are serious about your business unless your design is professional. Moreover, bloggers will be more hesitant to link to amateurish blogs.

Related articles:

• Blog Design for Beginners
• How to Choose WordPress Layouts (Themes) in 7 Simple Steps

Optimize Your Blog Theme

When it comes to blog theme design, less sometimes means more. Know which elements you want on your site and add nothing else to your design.

If you are to sell advertising space or earn money by displaying ads, you may want to reserve space for those ads, but avoid burying your content for ads. Remember that visitors come for content, never ads.

Your goal with site design is to keep the readers on your site or blog as long as possible or take whatever action you want them to take quickly.

Steve Krug has written a superb book on web usability. It is considered a must read for whoever wants to create a web site or blog. The title is Don’t Make Me Think.

Another thing to optimize is search engine wise. While the visitors must be at the top priority, you should also optimize your blog so it benefits your rankings. Although more and more the criteria for rankings are external — things you have no or very little control about — never underestimate on-page factors too.

For long tail keywords, on-page optimization and site authority may get you to the top spot on the search engine listing almost overnight, if done right.

I’ve put up quite a lot of articles and pointed to resources about blog SEO on my site. Take a look if you find this a challenge or if you need to improve on your search engine optimization.

Tweak the Back-End (Dashboard)

WordPress is now the dominating blog software, so this post presumes that you want to use it for your site. Out of the box, WordPress is already very usable but there are a few things you should tweak to optimize your blog.

Some of the things you should pay attention to include:

• Allow post notification. This may slow down posting but you should enable the option to attempt to notify any blogs you linked to from your article. It sends pings to the corresponding blogs so the bloggers are aware about you referring to their work. This is often a great way to start a conversation, especially if you publish insightful post on your blog.
• Populate update services. WordPress has a list of blog pinging services you should have on your blog setting. By default it is only one entry, i.e. rpc.pingomatic.com, which pings other services on your behalf.
• Optimize your permalink. Permalink is the URL that identifies your blog post, category, archive, etc. Search engines are now able to index dynamic pages with simple parameters but you should take advantage of clean URLs to make your URL friendlier. Remember that if you include keyword in your URL, it may appear as bold in search engine listing, which increases click through from search users to your site.
• Publish full feed. This is enabled by default but you should make sure you have it selected. There was a debate about whether to use full or partial feed of which hands on I think the winner is full feed. If you are reader-centric, there’s no argument about it. Period. And in the long run, loyal subscribers will also benefit your traffic wise.

Keep Up to Date on Industry News

Whether you have been following the niche for some time or you are new to it, there is one thing bloggers should be good at. Getting up to date on the industry news is necessary if you want to be the go to person for your niche.

It is also very likely that you have a list of favorite blogs and news sites. Add them to your favorite RSS reader and make sure you make time to go through the list. If you haven’t made your decision about which news reader yet, you can’t go wrong with Google Reader.

Look for filters in your niche or learn how to create filters yourself. There might be blogs or web sites out there that track events and news around your industry. You will save a lot of time going through tens, if not hundreds, of RSS feeds yourself.

News sites usually allow you to filter your favorite news and grab a customized RSS feed. Learn how to do this effectively. Remember this is a one time process that may save you time repeatedly.

By using news reader, you are able to keep up with the news more efficiently compared to visiting every site. That saves you a few hours a day.

Learn How to Monitor Brands

Just like news, you also need to monitor certain brands. By brands, I mean any name that you are interested to keep track of. If your are an individual blogger, your name is your brand.

Basically what you do is to create RSS ego-search feeds. Rather than doing it regularly, you let news readers fetch the search result automatically to your news reader.

What is an ego search? Simply put, it is a search you perform to monitor for mentions of your product name, personal name, or company name.

The usage, however, is beyond egocentric though. Nowadays, it is absolutely impossible to visit each site just to see if it mentions the name you care to track. By performing ego-centric search via RSS feed, you will be able to know if someone happens to be interested in the topic you are writing, link to your blog, or mention your name somewhere in the post.

In other words, this is also important for conversations. Isn’t it one of the reasons you blog in the first place?

Plan Your Response Mechanism

Conversations may only happen if two or more parties are participating in it. With a blog, you may join conversations at any time, both as a conversation starter or to respond to other bloggers.

I’m also partially guilty for this in the past but responding to a conversation is important and may benefit bloggers. You can use it as a way to establish relationship with other bloggers but also to manage your brand and straighten the issue when — not if — one surfaces.

Nowadays, micro blogging tool such as Twitter is a quick way to credit people and quickly respond to conversations. A blog is necessary only for comprehensive response that doesn’t fit into 140 characters.

As you go, you will discover brand monitoring tools that will help you become more responsive to on-going conversations but I recommend starting with Technorati, Twitter Search and Google Alerts.

Become an Expert on Your Topic

No matter which niche you decide to blog about, it pays to become an expert on that topic. Being a thought leader certainly helps in building your audience, but if that’s too high a goal, at the very least you want to be resourceful.

That doesn’t come out easy. A bunch of articles don’t help at all unless they are really useful. Ability to reach out is also necessary. Spend some time to research on a topic that you like but rather than paying attention to the information, examine which content you really like as a consumer.

If you find that you could improve what you’ve found, you are ready to compete for the long haul.

People go online to find information. Even when they are ready to purchase something, they want to know if there is a better deal elsewhere.

Your role as a blogger should be to publish good information the visitors enjoy reading. That’s how you become the go to person, build your audience base, and finally monetize your traffic — if you aim for the long term instead of just expecting the visitors to click away and earn you advertising revenue.

It is astonishingly easy to become an expert nowadays. Go to Amazon.com and purchase 5-10 books about the topic you are blogging. Spend some time to read it. Surf web sites and blogs. Think about various issues related to the topic. Get involved to get hands-on experience. The more you immerse in the topic, the better expert you become. But reading is a great way to start.

Review

If you have been accustomed to traditional method of web publishing, some of these may be new to you. Blog software, for many of us, is an awesome way to get content up online but bloggers should know more!

Blogging is about joining conversations and if you read Cluetrain Manifesto, markets are really conversations.

Starting conversations is one thing but being proactive in responding to the market is necessary. You want to immerse in the market instead of broadcasting your message out aggressively.

Also in this post, you’ve learned why you should brand your design and optimize your blog properly. With that, you are ready for content diversification, which is exactly the topic for the next post.

Hendry Lee helps bloggers overcome strategic and technological challenges in starting and growing their blogs. He also writes about make money blogging on his blog Blog Tips for a Better Blog – Blog Building University. While you are there, download your free eBook and subscribe to his blogging e-course where he reveals his secret about blogging and content writing!

Follow Hendry on Twitter (@hendrylee).

This post is part of the series (by Hendry Lee) about how to survive the blogging evolution in 2009. If you haven’t done so, you want to read the previous article about my take on niche blogging trends. It was based on analysis rather than predictions. That is important because if you ask me, I’d choose to base my business decision on sound strategies than pure speculations that may or may not work at all.

The future of niche blogging, as it always has been so, is about gradual growth. Bloggers who have found that out and focus their efforts on long term strategies will reap the benefits and those who tried to hit a home run may end up wasting a lot of time, effort and perhaps also a small fortune.

For this reason, whether you are just planning to get started in 2009 or you already have a blog, I present you with a comprehensive list of steps, tips and strategies that if carried out correctly, will propel your blog to a big success this year and beyond.

I’m the first to admit that very few of the strategies below are entirely new, but I’ve done my best to emphasize on current and upcoming trends in order to maximize results. Bloggers are already swamped with things to do and failure to prioritize can make a difference between taking your blog to the next level or let it fade into oblivion.

Getting Your Plan in Order

As the saying goes, “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.” Despite what others have said about blogging, it is still a complete strategy that needs planning. It is my intention to get this time of the year to help you get your house in order and create strategies to go forward.

New year for many people is a great way to get a brand new start, but there’s nothing more common than broken new year resolution in the first week of January. Although the majority of people abandon their resolutions within days of making them, that doesn’t mean it is not worth the effort.

A plan, when accomplished, lets you feel good about yourself. It also puts you in a position to set and achieve higher goals.

What I learned throughout the years is that, resolutions don’t have to be declared during a special occasion. So, even if you are late, every day is still the best day to make a decision about the direction you want to take your business.

Just that no matter what you do, plan ahead!

The Art of Setting Realistic Goals

To help you gain perspective about planning, allow me to be upfront about it. Just recently I read in an Internet marketing forum a post from a newbie about his plan for 2009. He was quite knowledgeable about the latest buzz words like social media, Twitter, and so on, of which I saluted him for his broad range of knowledge about Internet marketing. However, when the post came to the part about goals…

Here’s a partial list of what he included as the goals for 2009:

1. Start writing a novel and finish it.
2. Be completely debt free.
3. Earn $300,000 online by launching 3 more products.
4. Start a blog and grow traffic to 3,000 visitors a day.
5. Fulfill a dream of owning a boat.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t try to discourage by saying those goals are too good to be true. In fact, many individuals are able to set higher goals and get them all.

I’m also not oppose to goal setting at all, but at the same time I don’t think that new year resolution is made to be broken.

One particularly important factor of goal setting is to be realistic. Your goals need to put yourself outside of your comfort zone, but not too much that you feel unrealistic about them. For instance, without staffs or at least virtual assistants that help you with various tasks, creating and marketing products will consume a large portion of your time already, let alone launching three products, maintaining a blog and writing a novel in the same year.

To quote Jim Rohn, “Most people overestimate what they can do in their first year, and greatly underestimate what they can do in five years.”

The point is, by all means set a longer term goals but refrain yourself from aiming too high a goal at first.

Starting a blog with the intention to making money blogging is still possible but it takes more dedication than ever.

An extreme example may be a blog called Bankaholic by Johns Wu. BankRate acquired his blog for up to $15 million in October 2008. At that time, he had only been blogging for that blog for a bit more than two years.

As a solo blogger, this is a huge amount of money but I bet he didn’t make $7.5 million in his first year of operation. Traffic and revenue grew gradually and when the right time comes, the blog bloomed.

I hope I got the point across well about setting realistic goals. Each time I talk about this, some people defend their goals aggressively as if I am going to take their dreams away. Deep down inside every one of us, we still want to believe that overnight success is still possible online. No wonder, everyone seems to fall victim of one type of scam or another.

But I digress…

So, How’s a Blogging Plan Looks Like?

It doesn’t have to be tens of pages. After all, this is not a formal business plan. When it comes to starting a blog, most people don’t start out by hiring people to blog. By keeping the operational team small (or most likely a solo player) this type of business doesn’t need venture capital to finance.

My personal business plan adapts the popular one-page business plan format.

The plan consists of five major parts, namely:

1. Vision. Your vision should answer the questions of who is your target audience and what you will offer.
2. Mission. Be concise and clear instead of clever. Use this part to clearly convey your unique value proposition.
3. Objectives. What are you trying to accomplish with your blog? How do you know if you’ve accomplished your goals? Objectives are your milestones. They may not be the end-goal. As you reach your objectives, you may have higher-level objectives.
4. Strategies. What are your strategies to accomplish the objectives above? Being strategic means working on your blog based on certain principles and values. That also helps you focus on reaching your vision and mission.
5. Actions. This part outlines your actions that support the vision, mission, objective and strategies.

Personally, I prefer to create a one- to two-year plan. Beyond that, it is hard to predict the right strategies because of the rate of changes happening online. Ask any blogger if she still follows her plan two years ago when she got started. I bet the answer is no. A plan needs to be flexible to new strategies but nevertheless you need it to stay focus so that every day you do something to move yourself closer to the objectives.

A plan should allow you to quickly glimpse through it, perhaps on a daily or weekly basis. For me it is a reminder about where I want to go and avoid spending time on whichever activities that don’t benefit my blogging business on the long run.

Note: Darren has written a blog planning post and his steps are very similar to mine. Seems like we adapt the same concise system for planning.

Focus on Your Blogging Business Model

If you see it from the publisher’s standpoint, a blog is nothing more than a publishing tool. It helps you get content online. In other words, instead of focusing on the intricacies of getting a piece of content online, you can concentrate on content production and promotion.

Based on that, there really is more than one way to create a blogging business. I’ve written about 8 blogging business models in the past. If you are confused about which way to go, that post certainly can help.

The fact that you can combine one or more of those into your blog means there are really many ways to create a business based on a blog.

Before you go ahead and get your first message out, it is necessary that you pick the right business model and focus on it.

For instance, if the affiliate model suits you best, your strategies should revolve around content creation, relationship building with both merchants and your audience, trend spotting, etc.

I won’t get into much detail in this post, but those by themselves already demand much of your precious time. By working closely with a merchant, for example, you will be able to spot new products and help them test new ad creatives.

And if this is how you strategically separate yourself from your competitors — by building closer relationship with merchants, get new updates of products before anyone else, able to request for higher commissions, etc. — you should be prepared to help those select merchants.

Just so this is clear, testing and tracking new ad creatives and at the same time work on your content creation and promotion may already overwhelm most affiliates.

Remember that with more samples, testing will be scientifically more accurate. Perhaps you also want to help the merchant test email offers. For that, you’d better have built quite a significant amount of prospects or customers and send e-newsletter regularly.

If you are not prepared strategically, most likely you will not be able to take this route by doing it yourself, especially if you still have to struggle through technical stuff to get things done.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not trying to scare you off but just because publishing with a blog is easy doesn’t mean that you are able to throw a few content pages and ads out and immediately earn money that way.

More and more it will be about optimizing your sites to get more traffic and then convert those visitors into paying customers. That separates the winners from the average and if you start doing it right now, you will be on the right track to dominate at least a segment of a larger niche.

When it comes to link development, a fellow blogger I know of spend eight hours per week to create highly linkable content. If you think you can do this in 10-20 niches, you are stretching yourself too thin.

Think outsourcing is the answer? Think again. Outsourcing is another buzzword nowadays. It can be a very solid strategy if done right. However, it also requires that you are good at managing resources as a project manager, not to mention that most people don’t have enough fund to hire others at the beginning.

Just as an example, if you seek for a professional help to create a linkbait plan — consulting, not actually creating the linkbait — expect to pay between $750 to $2,000.

So, that depends on your plan and strategy and I hope I drive the point home that planning has to come first if you are going to get significant result this year. Competing is still possible if you pick the right field to play and take massive actions.

I hope by now you agree that hiring $5 article writer is not the only thing you’ll need to get tons of links and traffic. You need much more than that.

And that’s what you should expect if you are to build a business.

Review

Many bloggers avoid planning because it is boring. However, by approaching it from the correct angle, this can in fact turn into one of the most exciting part of your business.

When you are just about to launch a blog, usually the excitement fills in the atmosphere. Planning is the stage when you can see your dreams and goals come into fruition, at least in your mind. With strategically created plan, the only gap that separates you from achieving your goals is action.

For you who are a bit desperate right now because of the hard truths that I revealed above, don’t give up! It is still possible to grow a blogging business, just that the model may be much different from what’s in your mind. But still, working from home or from any of your favorite place, doing what you enjoy and making money from it is still an attainable goal if you finally direct your efforts on the right track.

Plus, I’ve just saved you time and money buying e-books and jumping from one thing to another every two weeks. By starting now and focus your effort on one thing, you will be way ahead others by the end of this year.

In the next few posts, I’ll go into more specifics about activities related to blogging, including content production, optimization and promotion. If you are still unsure about the strategies and actions to go to where you want to be, those articles will be of help.

Hendry Lee helps bloggers overcome strategic and technological challenges in starting and growing their blogs. He also writes about make money blogging on his blog Blog Tips for a Better Blog – Blog Building University. While you are there, download your free eBook and subscribe to his blogging e-course where he reveals his secret about blogging and content writing!

Follow Hendry on Twitter (@hendrylee).

Today Hendry Lee from BlogBuildingU starts a series on building a blog that grows in 2009 that we’ll feature here at ProBlogger Blog Tips over the coming 2 weeks. Make sure you subscribe to ProBlogger to get the full series.

Just another day, one particular news item caught my eyes again. Every year, I always look for the so called Gartner Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies so when it appeared again, I can’t resist but take a look.

I know, the Hype Cycle for 2008 had been released in July 2008, but after looking at the diagram after browsing through my RSS feed items recently, I noticed something particularly interesting. To be exact, there is a technology half-way pass the Trough of Disillusionment phase, labeled as Corporate Blogging.

Although corporate blogging is different from “make money” blogging, I noticed a few similarities in current perception about blogging.

By no means, I am an expert that understands everything in the hype cycle thoroughly, but based on my years of observations in the blogging industry, this post describes some of my thoughts.

At the same time during this time of the year, seems like it is a good idea to get your house in order and prepare a plan to move forward in 2009.

But before that…

What is Gartner Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies?

Before I get started, allow me to elaborate quickly about the hype cycle. Basically, this report is a yearly view of current technologies defined in visibility and years to mainstream adoption.

According to Gartner, although this is not always the case, new technologies tend to gain momentum quickly as the result of the excitement involved with them. The sad thing is, as the name of the report implies, part of the growth is due to inflated expectations.

Depends on the technology, it may eventually reach the peak. When this happens, the phase Trough of Disillusionment starts. Adoption slows down tremendously but as the technology proves itself, it becomes more visible again but now at the rate that is much slower than when it was introduced for the first time.

Note: Corporate blogging disappeared from the hype cycle in 2007 — don’t know if it existed in the paid report — but reappeared in 2008. For four years, it has been progressing slowly in the Trough of Disillusionment phase.

If it doesn’t accelerate any time soon, it should get pass that stage on to the Slope of Enlightenment in 2009 or at the latest 2010. Certainly we are in interesting years of blogging, especially corporate blogging.

Corporate Blogging and Niche Blogging

Corporate blogging and niche blogging are two different strategies, although they may share the same tactics. For instance, for corporate who are looking to extend their reach by blogging, they may use search engine optimization to get their content found in search engines.

Some marketers and bloggers claim there is no such thing as corporate blogging. Companies who are going to blog should have made sure they are not speaking to the audience while hiding behind corporate walls. It must be a message from an individual, much like a personal blog. We are not into that discussion in this blog post though.

Most importantly, both of them use the same technology to get the message out and reach readers. For this reason, when blogging at first went from a personal publishing platform to a professional publishing tool for business, at least the hype impacted both side of the blogging applications.

If case studies from the corporate world almost concluded that every company needed a blog, many of the so-called “gurus” in Internet marketing approached blogging as the cure to make money online for everyone, including a newbie.

Due to the fact that a blog lets anyone to get their content up online too easily, they claimed that everybody was able to follow a step-by-step system and just magically make money, even automatically.

Both of these, in my opinion, were in the hyped-up phase — either in the first or second phase.

Let’s Sum up Those Years…

Blogware amazes a lot of web publishers because of its simplicity to get content online. Because this is one of the biggest challenges for people who want to make money online, it sounds like an ideal solution.

No longer would you need to hire webmasters or wait for weeks just to fix a few typos on the web sites. Add to the fact that virtually the cost of getting published was nothing but a few bucks to cover hosting fee.

During those times, early bloggers also bragged about blog software as being search engine magnet. It was like if you blog, magic would happen to your domain and blog in terms of search engine visibility and traffic.

Of course, this is only part of the myths that were circulated around at that time.

Soon, people found out that they could get into search engine index in 24-48 hours by pinging major blog services. That sounded perfect and with a bit of a twist, blog and ping method was born.

Before this, webmasters have to wait for weeks, if not months, just to get their sites in Google. With blog and ping method, the inclusion was like instant.

Also during those years, bloggers may get tons of inbound links by creating splogs on Blogger.com. Several programmer took it to the next level by scraping web content and RSS feeds, scheduling those contents, and making the entire blog publishing process automatic (auto-blogging).

No wonder, people actually believed that a blog was the be-all and end-all solution to web publishing and making money online. With so much traffic, they could just slap up AdSense — I mentioned it to represent all ad networks — and made crazy amount of money without lifting a finger. It truly happened for a few lucky “publishers.”

Note: It is not my intention to make the story lengthy, but I’d think it should be obvious right now how the industry was stirred up with misconceptions about blogging.

On to the Next Phase…

But the above situation didn’t last… because ad networks are smarter. They have to be. Advertisers didn’t want to waste money on unproven sources of traffic. As the customers of those ad networks, they deserved better services.

Now AdSense advertisers are able to pick web sites in the content network (with site targeting) to display their ads. Just one example of features that change the scene big time.

Also according to Gartner, technologies are moving at different speed and not necessarily always to the right side of the diagram. But for blogging, this was true, at least so far.

As bloggers realize they could not build business around uncertainty, some of the smarter ones changed direction. At last, the basic principle of making money had been proven once again. In order for money to exchange hand, bloggers have to provide value.

People who get it decided to stick with the technology. After all, a blog is just a tool. I like to use the analogy of hanging a picture on the wall to illustrate the point.

Unless you know what to do (hang a picture) and where to hang it, you should not hold a hammer yet. If you want to cook, hammer is not the right tool to do it.

A blog also is not an answer to every publishing and marketing problem.

Blog evangelists are real bloggers who understand the tool thoroughly. As they continue to discover new things, the entire make money blogging industry soon will enter the Slope of Enlightenment phase. In fact, looking at the amount of quality content published, I think it has already entered the early phase, which in this case is faster than corporate blogging.

What Does It Mean to You

If you heard from people in forums or other places that making money is no longer possible right now or in near future — with a blog or any other means, avoid them. Certainly they distract you more than they help.

Being around these individuals may be unhealthy financially. They also kill your dreams.

It is true that in 2009 and beyond everything will become harder. If all you’d do is quoting a few sentences from other blogs and add one short paragraph of comment, that no longer works. Bloggers who add little or no substance are forced to give up and quit, but that doesn’t mean it is too late to make money blogging.

In the future, not only more people will use Internet frequently, they will also spend more money online rather than offline.

Yes, even during the so called hard times. Although not every site is doing better, online sales generally are going strong despite the economy. A lot of people still spend money and they are shifting the trend from offline to online shopping to save on gas and to avoid the queue.

In the next posts in the article series, I’m going to do my best to show you the strategy you could use in the upcoming years to achieve your blogging goal. My intention is two-fold:

1. Describe actionable and doable plan that allows you to start, build traffic and turn your blog into a real business.
2. Help you create a plan that is recession proof so instead of nosediving, your business actually thrives.

Two big things to chew on at the same time, I admit. But the results hopefully will benefit some readers who are just getting started, or plan to take their blogging business to the next level.

Don’t forget to subscribe to ProBlogger to get upcoming posts in this series.

Hendry Lee helps bloggers overcome strategic and technological challenges in starting and growing their blogs. He also writes about make money blogging on his blog Blog Tips for a Better Blog – Blog Building University. While you are there, download your free eBook and subscribe to his blogging e-course where he reveals his secret about blogging and content writing!

Follow Hendry on Twitter (@hendrylee).

This is a guest post from Laura Roeder, creator of The Dash.

As I’m writing this, I just got off the phone with the famous Gary V. We spoke for less than ten minutes and now a fun collaborative venture is underway. You should know that before today I had never spoken with or met Gary. In fact, before we scheduled this call he had no idea who I was!

No One Is Out Of Your League

I used to think that people like Gary were “out of my league”. If you feel the same way, you need to drop that ridiculous thought like a hot potato! Once I changed my view I started befriending some of the brilliant entrepreneurs that I used to admire from afar. No one is too important for you to contact. It’s always worth a shot, and if you follow the communication plan that I’ve outlined below your chances of success will be much higher.

Your Seven Step Communication Plan

Here is how to achieve the results you want in contacting important people, or proposing that people help you. Just use this step-by-step guide to model your call or email.

1. Keep the chit-chat to a minimum. Follow their lead if they want to make small talk later, but in the beginning you should get to the point quickly. If this feels awkward to you, start the call by saying “Alright, let’s get right to it!”

2. Do not assume that they know who you are or have read materials you’ve sent them. I started the conversation by asking Gary if he would like a brief overview of the project I was proposing. (I like to ask this first so that I don’t launch into a 10-minute spiel of information that they already know.) Do not take it personally if people have no clue who you are, they are taking the time to speak with you because they want to know who you are!

3. Tell them exactly what you’d like them to do; NEVER contact someone and say “Hey I thought we could do a joint venture, any ideas?” NO NO NO! Don’t make them work for you, always come from the position that you are working for them. The benefit is two-fold. One, they will be happy that you came to the table with something. Two, it is much easier to agree to an idea (especially an awesome one) than to think of an idea on your own. Make it easy for them to say yes! Which leads to my next point . . .

4. Give them an original, creative idea! How often do you think Gary is contacted with “Hey, why don’t you do a show on merlot!” That is BORING and he’s done it before. Don’t waste people’s time. Come to the table with something exciting, and do your research.

5. Ask if there’s anything else they would like to discuss. You are leading the conversation, not dominating it. Make sure you give them a chance to ask clarifying questions or throw in their own ideas.

6. GIVE NEXT STEPS! So many people overlook this and finish a call with “Um, then I guess we’ll get back in touch in a few months?” I ended my call with Gary by confirming exactly what both of our next steps would be. You need to take ownership of putting your plan into action.

7. Follow up with a thank you and a summary of your correspondence. Then follow up regularly via email, weekly or monthly as appropriate to the timeline you discussed. Following up is not bothersome, it is essential.

Laura Roeder is the founder of Roeder Studios, a boutique firm specializing in digital publicity. Her free program, The Dash, provides weekly step-by-step video instructions on how to rock out your web presence. To become a member, go to GetTheDash.com.