Darren Rowse : @ProBlogger

Written on 3/19/2013 at 1:52 am by Darren Rowse

Group Writing Project: Write a ‘How To…’ Post

Filed Under: Writing Content 168 Comments

Update: the competition aspect of this project is over. I’ve listed all the posts submitted (and the winners) here.

Years ago here on ProBlogger we used to run ‘group writing project’ where I’d nominate a style of posts and then all readers would go away and write a new post in that style to practice their blogging… and then would come back here and leave us a link to the post.

The Project had a few benefits:

first and foremost it gave us all a chance to practice a certain style of writing
secondly it was an opportunity for bloggers to show off what they could do
bloggers reported seeing more traffic arrive on their blog
bloggers reported making great new connections with other bloggers

So… it’s time for another group writing project!

This week we’re going to do one of the most popular ones from the past – the theme is ‘HOW TO…‘.

Yes – your challenge is to write and then come back and share a link to a ‘How to…’ post. Update: I’ve since published a 7 step guide to writing How to content on a blog.

Please note – for this project to be of any real benefit to you as a ‘writing’ project it is about writing a new post – not just sharing a link to an old ‘How to’ post that you’ve already written.

Feel free to write a ‘how to’ post on anything that is relevant to your niche.

Prize

To give you a little added incentive to participate I’m going to put up a little prize for one participant who submits a NEW post (sorry but you’re ineligible if it is an older post).

One person who writes a new post and who shares a link to it in comments below before Friday 22nd March at midnight (US Eastern time) will be randomly drawn to win the full library of 6 ProBlogger eBooks (worth $250 if you bought them all separately).

Here’s How To Participate

Here’s how to participate and put yourself in the running for the prize (please note – one entry per person – not per blog and please only submit NEW posts).

1. Write a ‘how to’ post

Be as creative as you’d like – take it in any direction you want – it can be on any topic (keep it clean and ‘family friendly please), it can be any length, it can be serious, funny, it can be a list post, a rant, an essay, a pictorial or video post… etc
Give your post a good title. Once all the posts are listed it’ll only be your title that sets it apart from others. It doesn’t have to have the words ‘how to’ in the title – but if can if you wish.
Feel free to write your post in your own first language – I’ve previously included a number of non-english posts and am excited by the prospect of making this a multi-lingual project.
Please consider putting a link back to this post on your post so that your readers know you’re participating. You don’t have to do this – but it’d be appreciated to help grow the project.

2. Let us Know about your post

Once you’ve posted your How To post let us know about it by leaving a comment below. Please make sure you include your name, your post title and the URL to your How to post.
Comments must be received by midnight on Friday 22nd March to be included in the prize draw.

3. Surf Surf Surf

This is where the project has potential to get pretty cool. Surf the submissions received in the comments. Leave comments, make connections with other ProBlogger readers and enjoy reading what others have to say. By surfing each others links you’ll hopefully find some cool new blogs but also make some new connections (which may well lead to people visiting your blog too!

4. Link, Tweet, Share

There is no formal ‘judging’ of the ‘how to posts’ received as this is not a competition. Instead – I encourage you to surf through the links left in the comments below and not only comment but share those with your own network that you like the most. Link to them on your blog (you might even like to write a ‘top 5′ post), Tweet out some links to the ones you like or share them on Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn etc. Share a little love and you might find it comes back at you!
Probably the best part of the last group project was the amount of inter-linking I see happening between participating bloggers as a result of their posts. It’s obvious that people found new blogs through it and that the benefits of participating was way beyond getting a link here on ProBlogger me but flowed on to a lot of new connections and links between other bloggers.

5. Prizes

Over the weekend after this ends I’ll randomly draw a winner and announce them on the blog. Depending how many submissions we receive I may even try to compile them all into a list (although last time we had ALOT so that may be beyond me).

I can’t wait to see how this week’s project goes – your time to start writing starts…. now! Have fun!

Update: the competition aspect of this project is over. I’ve listed all the posts submitted (and the winners) here.

Written on 3/15/2013 at 1:23 am by Darren Rowse

What’s Your Reaction to the Retirement of Google Reader?

Filed Under: General 153 Comments

Yesterday Google announced the retirement of their Google Reader RSS reader product.

I’ve tweeted a little about it but thought it might be interesting to see the response of readers to this news. it seems at least some people are concerned (with thousands signing this petition already).

For me it is annoying to lose the RSS reader that has become a part of my daily reading of new content on the web – however what is of greater concern to me is the impact it could have upon blog readerships.

Last time I surveyed ProBlogger and dPS reader Google Reader was the #1 reader for subscribing RSS feeds among our readers. While there are many other options out there and some of our readers will no doubt switch to another RSS reader I suspect that some will simply give up on RSS.

Last time I checked ProBlogger’s Google Analytics stats around 7.5% of our traffic was classified as ‘Feedburner/Feed’ traffic. By no means the majority of our traffic – but significant (more than comes from either Facebook or Twitter).

While not all of the 7.5% of traffic will be the result of Google Reader it’ll be interesting to see how much of it is once Google switch it off in July!

What do you think?

Do you use Google Reader?
If so will you stop reading RSS feeds or will you switch to a new reader (if so, which one)?
As a publisher are you concerned that many of your own readers will be lost due to the retirement of Google Reader?
If you’re concerned – what steps will you take to try to ensure readers transition to other ways of following your site?

Written on 3/14/2013 at 8:28 am by Darren Rowse

ProBlogger Training Event: A Last Release of Early Bird Tickets Today

Filed Under: ProBlogger Site News 1 Comment

UPDATE: the 2nd round of early bird tickets (100 in all) also sold out in about an hour. We’ll have more full priced tickets in the coming months. Please sign up below to be notified when they go on sale.

This post was intended to let you know that last night we released a round of Early Bird Tickets for our upcoming Training Event on the Gold Coast in Queensland (Australia).

However the 100 tickets we released yesterday all sold within an hour of us releasing them (without really us promoting it beyond the email list of people who’ve attended before and who expressed interest a couple of months ago).

Tickets sold out so quickly that we’ve had a heap of emails and Twitter messages from people who missed out so we’re going to release one last batch of Early Bird tickets today at 11am (Australian Eastern time).

We will release more full priced tickets in the coming months but if you’d like to come to our event and would like to save $50 add your email address to the form below and we’ll email you with a link to the ticket sales page when they go on sale in a few hours.

About the Event

Dates: 13-14 September (that’s a Friday and Saturday)
Where: QT Hotel Gold Coast (Surfers Paradise, Queensland, Australia)
Price: Early Birds today at $299.99 (see what that includes below). Full price is $349.99
What: 20+ sessions of content on many aspects of building profitable blogs, networking events, a digital pass (audio recordings of the event) and much more.

The price for these Early Bird Tickets is $299.99 (a saving of $50 on full priced tickets) which will get you:

2 full days of training (20+ sessions to choose from)
Digital Pass – audio recordings and PDFs of presenters presentations – so if you miss a session you’ll get to hear it later
a standup networking breakfast on the first morning
lunch on both days
morning and afternoon tea on both days
networking event in the evening of Day 1 (including drinks and some food)
an opportunity to network with hundreds of other Aussie bloggers

Speakers

We’re still locking on our schedule but you can see the announced speakers on our Speaker page. They already include:

Jonathan Fields
Amy Porterhouse
Tsh Oxenreider
Shayne Tilley
Clare Bowditch
Bernadette Jiwa
Justine Bloome
Darren Rowse

We’ve still got a lot more to announce though!

This year’s event will include a mix of keynote/single speaker sessions, a handful of panels, a few workshops and we’ll also be doing a few short case studies where you’ll hear from bloggers on interesting successes they’ve had in the last 12 months.

What you will Learn at PBEVENT 2013

Topics that we’ve got in our soon to be released schedule include:

Building Community and Deepen Reader Engagement on Your Blog
Facebook Marketing for Bloggers
How to Create Your First eBook
How to Create an Effective Media Kits
Search Engine Optimization
The Keys to Telling your Brand Story and Building an Iconic Brand
Blog Design and User Experience
How to Build an Editorial Strategy for your Blog
Advertising Models – from AdSense to Your own Ad Network
What Product to Sell from Your Blog
Using Video on Your Blog – Creating, Editing and Publishing
The Nuts and Bolts of Selling Products From Your Blog
Google Analytics – Understanding Metrics

Plus much more – we’ll have 20 sessions in total!

So if you’re interested in coming along – add your email address below and I’ll shoot you an email when the tickets go on sale:

Lastly – a special thanks to Virgin Australia who have come on as an Event partner this week.

Watch this space for an exciting opportunity to win flights with Virgin Australia!

Written on 3/12/2013 at 1:19 am by Darren Rowse

11 Tips to Breaking Bloggers Block Through Solving Reader Problems

Filed Under: Writing Content 29 Comments

Have you ever had bloggers block? If so – you’re not alone. Almost every blogger I’ve ever asked has admitted to having it at least once!

Below is some practical tips on how to break through it (including a little homework to action it).

Recently I was speaking with a blogger of a ‘how to‘ type blog who told me that he’d been struggling over the last few weeks with coming up with things to write about.

We chatted for 15 or so minutes about a range of things he could do to break through the problem but one that we kept coming back to was the idea of identifying problems to solve for his readers.

“Each problem has hidden in it an opportunity so powerful that it literally dwarfs the problem. The greatest success stories were created by people who recognized a problem a turned it into an opportunity.” Joseph Sugarman

It’s not rocket science but almost every time I sit down to write any blog post on my blogs I start off by identifying a problem that I or my readers have and then try to write a post that solves that problem.

In my experience – when you solve a person’s problem you’re going to create an impression upon them and have every chance of them thinking of you (and your blog) next time they come up against a problem.

Solve enough problems over time for a person and you’ll find them coming back again and again… and bringing others back with them too.

Of course for some bloggers identifying a problem that readers have is easy but for others coming up with a problem every single day to solve is tougher.

7 Ways to Identify Readers Problems to Solve

In my ‘31 Days to Build a Better Blog’ eBook Day 16 is all about solving a readers problem and in it I share 7 ways to identify these problems.

Here’s the headings (I write more on each one in the eBook but hopefully just the titles will give you some clues):

Solve Your own problems (what problem did you have a year or two ago that you’ve solved?)
Look for questions in search referrals (what people search Google for to arrive on your site can give insights)
Analyze internal searches (use a tool like Lijit to track the internal searches on your site)
Ask Readers for their Questions (run a survey, poll or even a focus group with readers)
Look on other Sites in your niche (the questions people ask on forums can be particularly good)
Use Social Media to Gather Questions/Problems (this is a gold mind – just do a search on your topic)
Ask Family and Friends (the people around you will often give you great ideas on this)

4 More Tips to Breaking Bloggers Block Through Identifying Reader Problems

Here’s four more tips on how to identify problems among your readers that I’ve not written about previously:

I personally find that coming up with ‘problems’ to solve is easier done when you put aside half an hour or so and come up with a whole heap of them. Put aside time to ‘Brainstorm’ or ‘Mindmap’ the problems your readers might have and come up with a list of them so that you’ve always got a supply of them when you need to write a post.
I would also highly recommend that you create some kind of system for capturing and recording the problems you see your readers having. I have a folder inside dropbox that I constantly am adding notes to which contain topics, questions, problems etc that I could write about one day. I know other bloggers use physical notebooks while others use apps like Evernote.
As you’re writing posts be on the look out for tangents or questions you ask yourself while you’re writing. I often find that when I’m writing a post that there are ideas hitting me that I can’t include in the post that I’m writing but that could be good to do a followup post on – capture them!
It is more than ok to come back to an idea that you’ve written about before to build upon. In many ways that is what I’m doing with this post. I took 7 ideas I’ve written about before above but am also adding new material to it based upon what I’ve learned since writing previously on the topic.

HOMEWORK for Bloggers with Bloggers Block

If you have bloggers block I challenge you to put aside 15-30 minutes to go on a ‘problem hunt’.

Choose a couple of the 7 places I mention above (my favourite is starting with identifying my own past and present problems) and see how many you can come up with.

In doing so you’ll also be creating a list of posts to write.

Let us know how you go in comments below!

Written on 3/1/2013 at 12:03 am by Darren Rowse

The 3 Essential Components to My Online Publishing Business: Blogging, Social, and Email

Filed Under: Blog Promotion 38 Comments

As bloggers, we’re always under time pressure to do more. Whether it’s releasing a product or engaging with users on a new social network, the blogger’s task list can seem overwhelming sometimes.

I think some of that overwhelm comes from the granularity with which we tend to look at our work. While breaking big challenges down into littler ones is a good way to tackle things, focusing on the little bits and pieces of our work can stop us seeing the bigger picture, and the natural connections between the individual things we’re doing.

Recently on #blogchat we had a discussion about where social media fits into blogging. If you look at that question on a really granular basis—”What will my next status update be about?”—then it can be difficult to see where social media might or might not work well. But if you look at the bigger picture, you’ll probably be more likely to ask, “Where doesn’t social media fit into blogging?”

Of course we need a bit more direction than that to work out how best to spend our time as bloggers, so today I thought I’d explain a bit about my approach to linking blogging, social media, and email.

Image by Phillip C, licensed under Creative Commons

1. Blogging

Blogging is at the heart of what I do. My blog is my home base and is where I put most of my efforts. My blog is a place that another company like Twitter, or Facebook or G+ can’t take away from me if I break their terms of service or if they change their approach. It’s in my control and it’s where I ultimately build my brand and community.

My blog is a place where conversation and conversion certainly happens, but if I had to name my primary focus for my blog it would be that it is a place which I use to produce content that’s useful to my readers.

My hope is that every single day on my blogs, I help solve problems big and small for my readers through the content I produce there.

My blog is a place that is often the first point of contact with people. It’s a place where I hope I’m able to create an impression upon them that will drive them to connect more meaningfully in some way.

2. Social media

Social media is a place which I primarily use for conversation and community. While these things also happen on the blog in comments, I find increasingly that people want to connect and converse off my blog.

I tend to focus on Twitter primarily, but Facebook has increasingly become a place where my photography blog readers go and G+ is also growing for me in this way.

I do use social media for other purposes—I use it to drive traffic to my blog for example, I occasionally produce content on it (particularly on G+ where I often think out loud), and I even promote my ebooks on it from time to time too (although I find it doesn’t convert anywhere near as well as email—more on that in a moment).

All these things can be done on social media, but for me it is more a place for conversation and interaction.

3. Email

I’ve written about the importance of email many times on ProBlogger—it is the single most important element I’ve added to my blogging since I started out ten years ago.

Email does many things for me—it’s a great way to drive traffic, it can help with building community and driving people to points of engagement, it can even be used to deliver content. But for me its stand-out benefit has been around driving sales: conversion.

Check out this graphic which shows where sales of our ebooks come from.

You can see here that:

87% of our sales come from email
7% come from our blog posts
3% come from social media
3% come from our affiliates.

Since we started to publish ebooks, I’ve tried many ways to promote them, but the top-converting method every time I’ve tested has been email.

3 Kinds of media working together

Blogging, social media and email have all become really important aspects of my business. I can’t imagine leaving one of these elements out.

Each of them is useful in a variety of ways—in fact, I often use each of the elements to promote the others, as I find they really work well to reinforce one another.

For example, when someone signs up to our newsletter on dPS they get an email shortly after that tells them about our social media accounts. From time to time on our social accounts we promote the email newsletter, and we regularly promote the blog posts we publish there, too.

In sending people back and forth to the different elements of what we do, I find they become more integrated into the community. The brand’s popularity grows among a broader audiences this way, but individuals’ connections with the brand deepen, too.

In taking this discussion a step or two further, tomorrow’s post looks at some great case examples of the ways email and blogging can be integrated to support a successful product launch, so I’ll be interested to hear what you think of those approaches.

And next week, we’ll be taking an in-depth look at how bloggers are using social media—specifically Pinterest—to support their blogging goals.

The integration of social media and email with blogging is a pretty topical dilemma for a lot of people, so let’s hear your views in the comments.

Written on 2/27/2013 at 6:08 am by Darren Rowse

ProBlogger Census: We Need You!

Filed Under: Blog News 10 Comments

It’s that time of year!

We’ve set our plans, shifted our focus … and now we’re running our ProBlogger Census.

I’d love to hear your feedback on the change of approach on ProBlogger, but I’m also really keen to hear what topics you’d like us to explore in the coming months.

The 2013 ProBlogger Census is a short survey to capture your thoughts, ideas, and wishes so that we can help to serve you better in our blogging.

I’d love it if you could take a few moments to fill it out.

I look forward to reading your thoughts!

Written on 2/23/2013 at 12:06 am by Darren Rowse

Would You Buy or Sell a Blog? [Discussion]

Filed Under: Other Income Streams 46 Comments

This week, we’ve looked at the blog sales market from all sides:

We also spent some time yesterday putting a value on your blog.

So today, I wanted to open the blog up to discussion.

Has a blog or site you loved ever changed hands? How did it feel for you as a visitor to that site?
Did yesterday’s challenge change how you felt about selling a blog? I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Have you ever bought or sold a blog? Share your tips and tales with us.
Many of you have mentioned over the course of the week that you’d like to see more on this topic: what kinds of information do you need?
…and if you’d like to see a series like this one on another topic, let me know below!

I can’t wait to hear your thoughts on blog buying and selling.

Written on 2/22/2013 at 12:00 am by Darren Rowse

ProBlogger Challenge: Put a Value on Your Blog

Filed Under: Featured Posts, Other Income Streams 48 Comments

This week we’ve heard from blog sellers, and blog buyers. Whether or not you’ve been inspired by what they’ve had to say, I’ll bet that the conversation has raised one key question in your mind:

What is my blog worth?

Image courtesy stock.xchng user ba1969

These days, we’re seeing blogs being recognised as valuable business tools, both for business-to-business as well as business-to-consumer connections. So if you own and run a blog, it makes sense to understand its value.

Today’s challenge is to do just that.

The basics

If you’ve been following along this week, you’ll already have a few of the key metrics for a blog valuation in mind:

the age of your blog
uniqueness and quality of blog design
traffic levels, sources, and quality
visitor stats: bounce rates, time on site, conversions, and so on
current monetization approaches and levels
associated social media footprint.

Andrew Knibbe of Flippa recommended that we use the marketplace as a yardstick by which to value a blog, but what other factors should we take into account before we start doing research there? Let’s step through the process of getting a rough idea of your blog’s value.

Vital stats

First, make note of these vital stats for your blog. You could do this on paper, but I recommend a spreadsheet, because that’ll make it a bit easier when it comes to comparing your site to others down the track.

Blog age: Andrew from Flippa mentioned earlier in the week that older blogs tend to be given higher valuations.
Domain: If you’re selling the domain with your blog, a shorter or more memorable domain is probably likely to be looked on more favourably than a longer domain, or one that contains hyphens, for example.
Platform: The platform on which your blog is hosted might not in itself raise or lower your blog’s value, but it might impact the types of buyers who’d be interested in it.
Theme: If you’re on a WordPress blog, paid or unique themes are more likely to attract more serious buyers.
Alexa rank: We saw earlier in the week that Alexa rank also contributes to a blog’s value, so if you don’t know where yours sits at the moment, find out.

By this point, you should be off to a good start.

Traffic stats

Next, it’s time to open up your Analytics tool and take a critical look at your blog stats not just for the last month, but over the last few months.

Monthly traffic: Note down the total traffic levels first.
Traffic sources: Next, allocate portions of traffic to the relevant sources of those visits.
Landing pages: Look at your key landing pages. Shahzad mentioned yesterday that some of the most popular landing pages on the blog he was buying were off-topic posts. How relevant are your main landing pages to your blog’s brand and niche?
Bounce rates: It’s important to look at this data over time, and to work out which traffic sources have lower or higher bounce rates. This can help you get an idea of the overall value of your blog’s traffic.
Time on site: This is a good measure of engagement and, again, it’s worth looking at the average time on site for each different traffic source, to see which visitors are more engaged.

This information should help you get a feel for the value of the traffic your blog attracts, and the content you’ve developed. It might also help you identify places where there’s room for improvement, but for now, let’s keep going with our valuation.

Monetization

If you’ve monetized your blog somehow, you can be sure that potential buyers will be interested to know how you’ve done it, and how successful you’ve been. Let’s pull together the data—if you don’t already have it at your fingertips.

Monthly revenue: Add up your revenues for the last three months and divide by three to get a monthly average.
Monetization sources: Make a note of the ways you monetize your blog. Have you created unique products from scratch? Do you use certain advertising or affiliate networks?
Conversion rates: Look at your conversion figures for the last three months, and compare them with your last three months’ traffic to calculate your average conversion rate.
Value per visitor: Take your average revenue figure for the last three months and divide it by your average traffic figure for that time period. This will give you an average visitor value, which will be really helpful in assessing your site against others for sale in your niche.
Profit: You might not be able to calculate this figure until you complete the next section, but do be sure to subtract your costs from your revenue figure to get a profit figure. Again, this will make for easy comparison between your blog and others. If it’s good, it could also go a long way to tempt potential buyers.

Note that at this point, you can calculate a valuation based on a multiple of your revenue—either 12 or 24 months, say. This will give you a good reference point for the research we’ll do on Flippa in a moment.

Costs

Whether or not you’ve monetized your blog, potential buyers will want to know how much it costs to run, so they can compare it with other blogs they might be considering buying. Make note of the costs you pay for:

Hosting: Note monthly or annual figures.
Design and development: Unless you have regular maintenance charges, you might want to add up what you spent on your blog’s design and development in the last year as a more objective figure than your expenditure for the last three months.
Content: Do you pay writers? Buy content? Add up those costs—along with your own time cost for writing and editing your blog’s content.
Marketing and customer acquisition: If you spend money on advertising—or time on guest-posting and content marketing—again, add up those costs for the last three months.
Time: Don’t forget to tally your time for other blogging tasks, like social media, affiliate and ad management, and so on. Try to get a clear and honest picture of how much time it takes you to run your blog on a monthly basis.

Comparing blogs in your niche

This basic information shouldn’t take you too long to collate. And once you have, the real challenge begins! Try to find at least two other blogs for sale in your niche to compare yours with.

Go to Flippa.com. You can, of course, search for sites for sale in your niche on Google too. That can be a good way to find out what’s for sale, but as those sites may not give you an indication of how much they’re hoping to sell for, a visit to Flippa for research is a good idea.
Find sites for sale and auction in your niche or a similar niche. I’d recommend you look at finished sales, since that’ll give you the figure the sites sold for, rather than just their current bid price, or Buy It Now price. Recent sales will give you the best indication of what the market is actually willing to pay for a blog like yours.
Assess the sites. Go through the checklist above again for each of the sites you’re looking at. Make a note of the prices they sold for. See if you can spot any trends that can indicate what the market values in blogs within your niche, and think about how your blog stacks up on these points.
Settle on a price range in which you think your blog might sit. Rather than picking a single figure that you think you’d accept for your blog, I think it’s probably a better idea to use your research to work out a range in which that price might reasonably fall. You’ll have a figure you wouldn’t sell below, and a range in which you can set your expectations.
Compare the range with your multiple-of-revenue price. If you calculated a multiple-of-revenue price above, compare it with the price range you’ve arrived at to see if the figures are in the same ball park.

By the end of this challenge, you should have a rough valuation on your blog. If you’re game, share it with us in the comments below. Or, if you’d rather, you can just let me know if you were surprised—or disappointed, or inspired!—by the price range you arrived at.

Group Writing Project: Write a ‘How To…’ Post

So… it’s time for another group writing project!

Prize