While at Blog World Expo recently I recorded this video interview with Abby Johnson from Web Pro News. We covered a variety of topics including why email marketing is not dead – internet marketing for smart people – the new FTC regulations and touched on a new project I’m working on with Brian Clark and Chris Brogan.

Read other recent email marketing posts on ProBlogger:

• 6 Reasons Why You Need to Consider Email as a Communication Strategy on Your Blog
• How I Use Email Newsletters to Drive Traffic and Make Money

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

Email Marketing is Not Dead

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I’ve read a lot of blogging success stories in my four-year blogging history. Sadly, they’ve always been about other people, rather than me. And, when I do see them, although they are real, I get a sense that the owner didn’t have to work as hard as I have. I see people getting big on Digg yet my domain is banned for no reason or linked to by Seth Godin and getting ‘famous’ overnight. I don’t want to sound bitter, but it just seemed like success was happening to everyone else.

Once I had this realisation, I decided that if I wasn’t going to get featured on Digg or Delicious for my new site, I would work on:

• Being the most authentic blogger in my niche
• Providing the best content that I can
• Interacting within my community as much as possible.

And what happened? In one year I managed to build my blog to just over 4,000 subscribers. Sure, it isn’t the success story that everyone else raves about, but it’s realistic and it is attainable. Or maybe I’m being hard on myself, because I don’t see that many blogs reaching these numbers either.

1. Getting 500 Subscribers is Much Harder than 1,000

Some of you might be completely confused by that statement and to others it will make perfect sense; let me explain. When I look at my own stats, I can see that it took me 5 months to reach 500 subscribers (which isn’t a bad rate of growth at all). Can you guess how many it took to reach 1,000? Just two.

You see, when I first started out, I was a complete nobody in my niche. I was fairly known in the internet marketing industry but totally unheard of when it came to personal development. Because of that, I had to establish a brand. I went with a logo people would remember, a unique design, and a desire to focus on content that simply helped people be who they want to be. Everything I would write would have the focus of helping people get what they want out of life.

From there I started commenting on other blogs, being active in Twitter and writing the best articles I could. I worked hard, but within a few months I was at the 500 subscriber mark. Once you get to this stage, things start getting much, much easier because when you’re trying to promote content that has no audience, you have to find people who might want to read it and show up where they are. Once you have an audience and write great content, they’re going to start sharing it for you.

If you’re struggling to get your first few hundred subscribers then don’t worry, as they’re far harder to get than the next few hundred. With the 5 months left in the year I managed to grow my site by another 3,000 subscribers. How’s that for exponential growth.

2. If You’re Going to Guest Post, Vary Your Audience

I have been one of the most active guest posters on the internet in the last few months and for one simple reason: guest posting works. It gets you out there in front of a new audience and just as importantly, an audience that understands blogs and what they are all about. If someone subscribers to another blog in your niche, there’s a good chance they will subscribe to yours if you’re writing great content. One thing I have noticed some people do is “piggyback” off a certain blog and try to write there as often as possible.

This is usually for big blogs which can help you get a lot of traffic and subscribers quite quickly, but things will soon die down. If someone has seen you guest post on a site 5 times and still haven’t subscribed, they probably won’t when you write your 6th article. There are a few benefits to varying your guest posting which include:

• Reaching a new audience: If you’re going for the same sites all the time, you’re going to reach the same readers. By varying your activities you can reach new eyeballs that want your content.
• Creating new connections: Guest posting shouldn’t just be thought of as something you can do to benefit your own site, but also something you can do to help the author of another site. Most bloggers love free content in return for a backlink so if you can help as many people as possible, there’s no harm in that

3. Find Ways to Collaborate with Others

As a blogger, I’m quite sad about the rise of Twitter in a way. Instead of the hundreds of backlinks a good blog post could get a few years ago, it will now get hundreds of tweets. Sure the tweets can bring you traffic, but they are not going to help your post move up the ranks in search engines. Even as a way for collaboration, people are focusing on twitter communication rather than working with people via their blogs. Usually these writers are coming from the scarcity mindset and if they link to other bloggers they’re going to lose readers and help their “competitor” grow.

First of all, if you think of other bloggers in your niche as competitors then you have a totally backwards mindset. Secondly, I’m here to tell you that collaborating with other bloggers in my niche has been one of the best things I have done. To begin with, I created a list of the top Personal Development Blogs. This ranks all of the blogs by their statistics and of course helps my site visitors find other amazing blogs to read. This page has been linked to by hundreds of websites and it has helped put me in touch with tons of other bloggers.

On top of that, I also ran a series called the Personal Development face-off. I had the idea thanks to Daniel Scocco doing this in the blogging niche and thought that the content generated here would be excellent. Even though I was featuring two other bloggers on my site every week, hundreds of people emailed me to say how much they loved the series. This positioned me as someone who was at the top of my industry because I had all of these top bloggers taking time out to work with me and because I was sharing the best content in the niche.

Don’t be afraid of promoting other bloggers. These days, I try to promote great content on other sites as much as possible. It will come back your way.

Glen is the author of ViperChill, a blog on Viral Marketing. He aims to help people create remarkable websites that others just naturally want to talk about.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

3 Lessons I Learned Building 4,000 Subscribers in 12 Months

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If you knew that your blog was vulnerable to hacking or some similar security breach, would you take the time to secure it?

I ask, because I want to warn you about a greater, yet almost unknown threat to your blog’s growth and success.

That threat is stress and as today is National Stress Awareness day in the U.K, I would like to share with you why I believe how you respond to stress is perhaps the most critical factor in determining the future success of your blog.

We’re all gathered here because we share a common goal. To grow our blogs to be more successful. And what’s at the core of a successful blog, is a Blogger that has developed a high level of skills at;

• Traffic generation
• Community building
• Writing attention getting posts
• And the other tasks involved in a popular blog

Put more bluntly, a Blogger with 100 Readers and averaging 3 comments a week is at an entirely different level of skill and capacity than one with 1 million Readers and 3,000 comments a week. The difference isn’t just luck. If you have the skills and capacity of a successful blogger than success is only a matter of time.

However, in the case of most of us, success is a journey of mastering these skills. That doesn’t mean we are less worthy, less capable or have any less potential, only that we need to develop new skills that we haven’t yet developed. Isn’t this why we read Problogger?

And as any journey involves uncertainty, risks and hazards, so too does our journey to success. In order to grow our blog, we have to grow our skills to a higher level. In the course of this, it is natural that you will experience stress because you are stretching beyond your comfort zone and developing new or refining existing skills.

In fact if you don’t experience stress on a regular basis, then you either don’t care enough about what you are doing or you aren’t coming close to your potential.

Re-framing Stress

Let me give you a new way of looking at stress, that will be more useful in aiding your evolution as a Blogger.

Stress is like the river between two lands. On one side is your current situation. On the other, is the end result that you dream of. If you refuse the risk of getting to the other side, success will forever evade you and you will have to resign yourself to this being as good as it gets. But if you are successful in your attempts, you get to live your dream.

Therefore the key to your success (and that of your blog) is going to be entirely determined by how you respond to stressful challenges.

Every stressful situation is actually an indicator of where you need to upgrade your skills in order to be more successful. You only feel stress because the road to your goal is blocked. And when you are capable of overcoming the block, the stress will dissolve. And you are closer to reaching your goal.

Let me try to make this clearer with some concrete examples. Say your stress seems to be about dealing with negative comments or wondering if your next post will be popular.

Sometimes negative comments or unpopular posts are helpful because they guide us back when we get off-course.

Mostly though, negative comments are just someone who isn’t really our audience reading or someone misunderstanding. Equally unpopular posts are often those too simple or too complicated for our Reader’s level of understanding so that they don’t see the relevance in it.

These only really bother us, when they hit upon something we doubt in ourselves.

What it’s really about is gaining the clarity to know what your purpose is and who the right audience is for you. When you gain conviction and clarity in what you believe and what you are doing, it is like standing a flag in the ground and so the Reader’s that are right for you will gather around it.

If instead, you are all the time only seeking praise and approval from everyone, then there is nothing solid, consistent or certain about your blog and so ultimately it will never gather a sizeable core of die hard fans. Only drive by Readers who scan a post and never look back.

Or maybe, most of your stress comes from having too much to do and too little time to do it in.

In this case, your success depends upon you resolving this conflict. Which ultimately means identifying the critical core tasks, finding more efficient ways to get them done and being capable of doing all that needs to be done.

The Mistake Most People Make In Dealing With Stress

Typically people see stress as an irritation that interrupts them. And so almost all stress management materials are focused on stress relief. Go for a walk, exercise, breathe deeply etc. These are all tactical ways to deal with stress. Which is perfect if you are stuck in the swampland of stress and need to get some perspective. But tactical stress management, in itself will never lead to growth and development.

What if your stress is caused by the problem above, of too much to do and too little time to do it in. Well feeling stressed about it, is only going to make things worse and so you’ll end up running around like a headless chicken and getting nowhere.

Relieving the feeling of stress will be helpful, as it can enable you to look at the situation more clearly.

But the only way of resolving the situation, once and for all, and so growing your blog, is by getting clearer about what should be done and becoming more productive.

So as a Blogger looking to evolve you are really needing to develop your skills at strategic stress management.

What Is Strategic Stress Management?

Say you are struggling for ideas to write original posts. Tactical stress management would try to dull the pain or ease your emotional discomfort about the situation.

Yet the fact that you have a problem bothering you, indicates a deeper problem that it is critical to your success. So changing the way you feel is only part of the problem.

Strategic stress management focuses on identifying what caused the problem and why. In addressing the root core of the problem, you not only overcome the emotional discomfort, but you become a stronger and more evolved person. Which in the case of your blogging leads to a more successful blog.

How can you use this new perspective on stress to grow your blog?

We are as successful as our limits allow us to be. And so as we remove our limitations, we become more successful. Stress is an early warning indicator of a problem, or problems, that will limit you, or your blog, from growing.

1. So take a few minutes to think of the most stressful issue in your life.
2. Then you need to separate your feelings from the issue. It is getting stuck in strong negative emotions that pulls us into the grip of stress, from where we can see no resolution, which is why many people get great results from coaching and consulting that they cannot achieve alone.
3. Now try to identify and analyze what limitation is causing the issue.
4. Solve that limitation and your potential for success is much greater.
5. Repeat for continual growth.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

Why Stress Can Kill Your Success Or Help Your Blog Succeed Wildly

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In marriage they talk about a seven year itch. It’s the time when people get restless and think about giving up on their relationship.

For bloggers that itch and desire to give up comes sooner. In fact, most bloggers give up on their blogs after only 6 months.

I’ve been writing my blog for 6 months now and I can relate to people quitting at this time. It seems as if you have put a lot of time and effort into your blog, but it’s still to early to reap the rewards of that hard work. It seems as if you’ve made every mistake in the book but you still have so much to learn about blogging.

According to psychologists having grit, or persevering with a project, is more important than intelligence or any other personality trait when it comes to success.

With that in mind, I’d like to tell you why you shouldn’t give up on your blog and how you can find the motivation to carry on.

Why you should carry on blogging after 6 months

• You’ve already invested a lot of time and energy into your blog.
• Your blog may not have been ranked with the search engines yet.
• You may have been working hard but there’s still a lot to learn. It would be impossible to learn everything there is to know about blogging in just 6 months. Even pro-bloggers are still learning and many of them have been writing blogs for years.
• Your readers are growing slowly but steadily.
• Your content is also growing and the more content you have on your blog, the better it will rank with the search engines.

How to find the strength to carry on blogging

• Enlist help. Talk to friends, colleagues and relatives. Get their advice and feedback. Actually watch them using your blog. Set challenges for them to find a certain piece of information on your blog and see how easy it is for them. This will help you learn what improvements you can make to the blog to make it easier for your readers to use.
• Relook at your goals for the blog and reassess them if necessary. Have your blogging goals changed? If so how? What did you readers enjoy best? Which were your least popular posts? Make adjustments to your blog based on these findings.
• Do a survey on your blog. Ask you readers for feedback. What would they like to read about most? What topics have you covered that the would like to read about more?
• Play to your strengths. Do a skill swap. If you’re great at writing content but the technical side of blogging frustrates you, find someone with the opposite skills to you and trade off. You’ll both end up with a better blog and a blogging ally too.
• Stay motivated by using Twitter or the power of co-motivation with a like-minded blogger.
• Understand that success will only come from preserving. Most businesses make little or no income in the first year and your blog may not either. To gain benefits from blogging you need to carry on for more than a year. Congratulate yourself on how far you’ve come with your blog so far and resolve to keep up the good work.
• Stop comparing your blog to other people’s. Rejoice in their success, congratulate them on it and see what you can learn from them.
• Compile a testimonials page with all the positive comments people have left on your blog. It will cheer you up and impress new readers too.
• Learn from your mistakes. We all make them. Successful bloggers learn from their mistakes and press on regardless. They don’t give up blogging at 6 months and neither should you.

Look at anything you’ve achieved in your life. It probably didn’t come easily. There may have been times when you wanted to give up. But you’re glad you didn’t. Take heart from that and carry on blogging.

Press on writing and improving your blog for another 6 months and then another 6 months after that. It will be worth it in the end.

Annabel Candy writes Get In the Hot Spot: a blog to inspire and inform people on how to live their dream. If you dream of travel, writing, self-employment, or just being happy then Get In the Hot Spot by email. If you know someone who dreams of change or wants to be more daring with their life, please tell them about it so they can stop day-dreaming and start living their dream.

Annabel has four obsessions: writing, travel, Internet design and helping people follow their dream. Annabel ran a successful Internet marketing company in New Zealand for 10 years before following her dream and goofing off to Central America with her husband and three kids. After 18 incredible months in the jungle the Candy family moved to Australia where Annabel is now doing what she does best: writing  and exploring.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

Getting Over the Blogger’s 6 Month Itch

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Do you ever have those moments when seemingly random, unrelated thoughts kind of merge together in your mind? This happened to me a couple of weeks ago.

I remembered a documentary I watched on the space shuttle years ago. Something was said about the percentage of fuel it burns within the first two minutes of liftoff. It stuck in my mind and I tried to find the information on Google. No luck. Then I remembered that one of my family members (Dale Hutchens, Ph.D.) works with NASA. He is a chemical engineer who was directly involved with developing the shuttle’s solid rockets. He gave me a quick estimate:

For launch, the solids provide the vast, vast majority the total LAUNCH thrust. The solids burn out in 2 minutes and 12 seconds, if memory serves. Each solid holds 1.1 million pounds of propellant. Therefore, in the first minute, you probably burn something more than 50% of the solids, or 41-ish % of the total fuel. A more certain number is that in 2 minutes and 12 seconds you have burned all the solids (2.2 million pounds) and close to 380,000 pounds (out of 1.6 million pounds) of the liquid, for a total of 67% of the total fuel.

The space shuttle burns most of its fuel within the first two minutes of flight! The science geek in me thinks this really cool.

What does this have to do with blogging? Stay with me.

I began thinking about some things I’ve learned on this blog. A few weeks ago Darren said problogger.net is kind of in maintenance mode (my paraphrase). In other words, it doesn’t require the same amount of work it used to. John Chow said something very similar in his video seminar—he now works about two hours a day.

But both bloggers spent a lot more time and energy getting things started.

In some ways, blogging is like the space shuttle—a great deal of effort is required to get it “off the ground.”

Think about some of the steps a typical blogger would take during the first six months of creating a new blog:

• Choosing a topic (big one).
• Choosing a platform and design.
• Choosing a name/domain.
• Writing/creating a hundred posts (assuming an average of four posts a week).
• Registering with digg, stumbleupon, twitter, etc.
• Participating in forums.
• Leaving comments/backlinks on other blogs.
• Writing guest posts for other bloggers.
• Registering with directories (such as blogcatalog).
• Spreading the word on social networks (facebook, etc).
• Developing a core of followers.
• Setting up a newsletter.
• Printing business cards with your blog address.
• Telling your friends about your new blog.
• Finding appropriate affiliate programs.

These are just a few steps that come to mind. When you think about the cumulative effort, it’s a lot of work.

Maybe this is one reason some blogs never make it very far—some bloggers just don’t realize the initial effort that’s required on the “front end.” Or maybe they don’t realize things will get easier (or at least more productive) over time as their blog gains momentum.

As I’ve mentioned before (both here and on the forum), it took about six or seven months for me to see significant traffic on Strong and Fit, my fitness blog. It still requires effort, but I’m now seeing more results with less work (in terms of traffic and income).

OK, I’ll admit it—blogging isn’t really rocket science. But we sure can learn from it.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

Blogging is Rocket Science

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I’ve been blogging since June 2007 when I launched my beauty site . In April 2009, I launched a healthy eating site with the encouragement of my Internet coach Yaro Starak and in the last few months I’ve noticed a shift in the way I deal with publicists.

When I first started blogging, I actually went out and bought beauty products to review them on the site.

During a conference, an exhibitor told me that in my position (promoting skincare and make-up brands on the Internet at no cost to the manufacturer), I should never have to pay for products and I should be getting them for free by contacting the companies.

I didn’t need to hear that twice. On the following Monday morning, I started calling and emailing skincare and make-up companies to get review samples.

I crafted an introduction letter with the most important points about my blog and the reason why I was asking for samples.

In very little time, I started received samples and before I knew it, I became inundated with products from the U.S., Canada and as far away as the U.K.

It got so bad, that the guys at my pick-up area (I rent a UPS address) started complaining about the number of parcels (I’ve received several thousand dollars worth of samples) I was receiving and they were threatening to seriously increase my yearly fee. Luckily I received a few samples I could share with them and they quickly forgot about the idea of increasing my fees.

The samples were taking over my home and I couldn’t give them to friends and reviewers fast enough. In order to keep up with the flood of samples, I started running contests on the blog in order to give away products to 1) clear my home 2) put my readers to work so they could write reviews that I could post on the blog 3) secure some sponsorship dollars from beauty companies to keep up with these contests.

In 2007 and 2008, publicists (who I dealt with to get these samples) would email me to let me know they would gladly send me the samples I requested and asked that I email them once the post was up on the blog.

In many cases, publicists liked the concept of the product review so much that they would recommend my site to their marketing departments for paid reviews or other paid advertisement opportunities that were incredibly lucrative to me.

I still remember that in 2008, I got a really incredible contract via my ad service company (I have a company that takes care of selling ads on my blog) with a large pharmaceutical company to write six posts for them to try educating readers on the benefits of their product. The deal was to net me $8,000 for those six articles and the only thing I had to do was to get the copy reviewed by the pharmaceutical company to ensure that I wasn’t using any medical words in the wrong way.

This was an exciting point in my blogging career since that type of contract is far more lucrative than running site ads or Google AdSense ads.

Everything came to a stop in October 2008. As the stock markets were tumbling, panic was setting in, real estate prices were falling, companies were laying off workers and hard copy magazines were folding, I received an email from my media company informing me that the pharmaceutical company was ceasing the campaign I had started and that they had to cut back on the fees I was supposed to get (I only got $1,600 in the end for three features).

It was a devastating moment for me, but I thought things would get back to normal soon. I don’t think at that time that I understood how things were going to change.

Life as a blogger since the recession and my relationship with publicists

It took me some time to realize that things where changing; but because I was so busy working, I had not noticed the signs of change.

It’s only spending 90 minutes in one day answering emails from publicists that it hit me.

>>> Here’s what I was observing:

1) I was getting at least two to three times the number of pitches to review products. I was spending a lot of time emailing back publicists asking them to send basic essentials like photos, a press releases and price information. Some of these emails from publicists contained only a few short lines “we love your blog, will you feature our product, here’s a link.”… that’s not much to work with.

2) I was getting more requests from non-bloggers looking for link exchanges. These requests were coming from companies that had sites which sold beauty and hair care products on the Internet. They wanted me to add them to the front page of my blog, while they would give me a link on their blog on a page that was almost impossible to find and not visible from the homepage. This happened a lot and it floored me that these companies didn’t get that I didn’t want to give them free publicity while my site was buried somewhere on their site.

3) I was no longer receiving ANY offers for sponsorship opportunities on my site.

4) The few requests for free samples that I had sent were returned to me with a long string of questions:

• “How long have you been blogging?”
• “What’s your PR rank?”
• “Are you on Twitter?”
• “Are you on Facebook?”
• “How many unique users?”
• “How many page views?”
• “How fast can you get our review on your site?”
• “Have you won any awards in the past?”
• “Send us links to past reviews you’ve written.”
• “What angle will you take with this feature?”
• “I need all your company details before we release any samples to you.”
• “Will you promote this on social media networks?”
• “Are you going to shot a YouTube video like you did for other brands?”
• “You said the review would be up last week, WHERE IS IT?” … etc.

As you can see, I’ve started dealing with really demanding publicists and in some cases rude and impatient publicists. I was never asked so many questions in the past when I requested samples.

>>> Samples are being denied or scaled back:

I’ve contacted companies that in the past had sent me boxes and boxes of samples (and I do mean full-size products) and when I contacted them recently, they would say “sorry, we’re not sending any samples right now, but if you want we can provide you with information for you to write a review on your site”. Well, it’s hard to be excited about a product you’ve not tried.

In some cases, companies were sending those ridiculously small samples you get at your department store and it’s still unclear to me how they expect me to write a review when I can only test the product for two days (we usually test products for two-to-three weeks before writing a review.

Here’s a photo of products I received the same week for review:

As you can see one company sent me the smallest possible size while the other company sent me full size products.

Maybe it had to do with the niche?

The interesting thing is that I launched a new blog on healthy eating and healthy lifestyles in April 2009 (www.EatSmartAgeSmart.com) and my relationship with publicists is vastly different from one niche to another. The blog tackles healthy eating, but I also focus on fitness. The fitness publicists have not been really easy to deal with during this recession.

One company (which manufactures supplements) that contacted me to send products for review also wanted to know how much it would cost to sponsor spots on my site. They actually wanted to pay to have banners on my site and not only receive a free review!

I remember that when I sent them the finished post I wrote for them, the publicist sent an email thanking me for getting their company circulating in the social media networks. They were thrilled and I was thrilled.

In contrast, I’ve contacted a number of fitness companies who have said “NO, we don’t send samples to bloggers. We only deal with major media. If you want to test the product, you’ll have to buy it”.

In the cases where a fitness company was willing to send me samples, I’d be subject to daily or weekly emails asking: “When will our review be up?” to “The client is getting nervous and impatient, WHERE IS THE REVIEW?” to “I saw the review and there are things that you wrote that are wrong.” to “We don’t like ‘this word’ you need to change it in the review NOW”.

Most fitness reviews have been received with a string of negativity, while my healthy eating reviews are usually quite well received and the publicists or owners of companies jump for joy at the idea that I’m helping get the word out.

So how am I dealing with publicists since the recession?

• In the case of negative backlash, I’ve decided to ignore those publicists and not let them affect me or affect my work. I usually won’t work with that publicist anymore.
• When I get praised for a review, I quickly email the publicist and company back and thank them and I’ll usually get my traffic assistant to take that link to more social media networks.
• I’ve created an auto-reply that delivers an email with a link that takes publicist straight away to a PDF they can download that gives them all the requirements we need to write a post. If we don’t get all those elements, I will pass on the review and will not chase after publicists. This also has helped cut back on the number of follow-up emails I send publicists.
• I’ve set clear expectations in that PDF and do make it clear that a review will take eight weeks before it’s featured on the site. And that once the review is up, I will send them a link.
• I’ve said ‘no’ many times to publicists who had a burning deadline to meet if I couldn’t make it fit in my publishing calendar and if that would be adding to my stress level.
• When I contact a company for samples, if I feel that getting samples is hard work and I’m being asked loads of questions and am given tons of excuses why they don’t release samples to smaller media outlets, I’ll usually walk away and find another product to review or another topic for my blog post.

I’m not the only one finding it hard dealing with publicists these days

I’ve spoken to other beauty bloggers and editors of magazines (who were not bloggers) and they’ve also found that more and more publicists are being quite pushy, demanding and sometimes rude.

They also feel things are quite different since the recession and they’ve found themselves having to put their foot down and ask the publicist to no longer contact them on a daily or weekly basis and tell them that once the review is ready, they will be contacted.

My theory is simple: Publicists and companies now know that bloggers have a lot of weight on the Web and with the recession hitting advertising budgets really hard, publicists are turning to bloggers to get the word out about their products and also as quick way to getting into social media networks without having to spend any money.

Manufacturers realize that buying a full page ad in a magazine that would costs several hundreds of thousands of dollars will affect their profits if they aren’t able to calculate the rate of return on investment, while hiring a PR firm to get a few samples (that costs very little to the company) out to thousands of bloggers and demanding quick turn around on the features is much cheaper.

They get their new launches to circulate all over the Internet and thousands of bloggers telling their readers to go out and buy the product, and they don’t even have to write a cheque to the bloggers.

This situation could be quite specific to lifestyle bloggers, but I’d love to know if other bloggers also feel more pressured when dealing with publicists since the beginning of the recession.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

PR People Getting Pushier with Bloggers Since the Recession

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Today I want to show you exactly how I do it.

Firstly a word about technology – I use Aweber to deliver my emails (I talk about why here). However you can use pretty much any email newsletter service for the process I outline below as long as it allows you to set up an auto-responder or sequence of emails.

I should also say that the process I’m about to share has evolved over time. It started out very very simple and has slowly developed with time – in fact it continues to develop as I learn more and by no means is where I want to take it…. yet.

Lets start with a visual on how my process looks (click to enlarge) before I explain the elements:

Reader Subscribes

Because email newsletters are such an important part of my site I put a lot of emphasis upon getting this conversion moment with those who come to my site. There are a variety of places around the blog where I attempt to get readers to sign up – some are more subtle than others. Some are anything but subtle including a popup signup box that readers see 20-30 seconds after they arrive on the blog.

The pop-up is set to only show once per visitor (unless they’re blocking cookies) and while it is intrusive and I was very hesitant about adding it – it’s incredibly effective at getting readers to signup.

I switched to using this Pop-Up signup technique just on a year ago and at the time wrote up how it took me from getting 40 confirmed signups a day to 350 over night here. Since that time subscriber numbers have continued to climb – I now get around 500 new confirmed subscribers a day. This adds up to around 180,000 a year which is exciting growth. It does annoy a handful of readers (I get an email or two per month) but for the payoff it’s something I’ve decided to continue with.

Welcome Email

When someone signs up and then confirms their subscription by clicking a link in an email they’re then sent (double opt in is required by law) the new subscriber is immediately sent a welcome email. This email is all about making them feel good about subscribing and giving them a quick introduction to the site.

I’m presuming that most people who sign up for the newsletter are new to the site so it’s a great opportunity to introduce myself, show them around and help get their expectations right about the site.

This welcome email has a site logo, my picture, some links to key parts of the site like the forum, some suggested reading for catching up on key posts in our archives (I send them to a few ‘sneeze pages‘ that send them deep within the archives and get them viewing multiple pages) and shares what the subscriber will receive in the coming weeks in terms of future emails.

The email also asks people to add the email address that emails are sent from to their white list/contact list to help ensure emails are delivered.

It’s written in a personal and friendly style and seems to connect as I get a lot of replies to this email from new subscribers thanking me for the personal welcome.

Weekly Updates

As you’ll see from the chart above – weekly updates are what readers get the most. They’re largely updates on what has happened on the blog/forums in the past week.

You can see one of my more recent ones here (although it loses some of the formatting in the web version) where you can see that these emails have a bit of a structure. I usually have the following sections in these weekly updates:

• Welcome: usually just a sentence that intros the week. If there’s something important I’ll often highlight it here. Sometimes I’ll also do a quick update on something cool that happened on the site during the week (record day of traffic, milestone in terms of subscribers, a mention in the press – this kind of update seems to build morale/momentum among readers)
• Quick Links: here I share the weekly assignment, any discussion oriented posts/polls, any competition announcements and occasionally a ‘featured post’ that I want to especially push traffic to etc
• Tips Tutorials and Techniques: new blog posts of a more general nature
• Recommended Resource: in this case it’s an affiliate promotion (a great product) but occasionally I swap this section to be a ‘message from our sponsors’ and have it as a sold ad position.
• Post Production Tips: updates from this section/category of the blog
• New Gear, Tips and Reviews: again, updates from this section of the blog
• Hot Forum Threads: a bit of a summary of key threads happening in the forum
• Reader Images: Being a photography site visuals are important and the images get clicked on a lot. They also give readers some incentive to post images in the forums as they could get featured in this newsletter that goes out to over 200,000 people..

I do mix things up a bit. Some weeks I’ll run a little promotion of our Twitter of Facebook accounts, other weeks I might throw in some older posts form the archives that people may not have seen and sometimes I’ll run a promotion encouraging readers to forward the email onto a friend. Really anything can go in these emails as long as they’re on topic and useful

The main goals of these weekly updates are to:

• Drive traffic to the site
• Build Community, reinforce brand with readers
• Make money through the promotions

Readers love these newsletters because while they’re largely links to the site the links are all content rich and useful resources. I title these emails ‘Photography Tips for Your Weekend’ and that’s how many of our readers use them – as a spring board into their weekend with their cameras.

Note: these emails are manually put together. They take me an hour or two a week to do. There are tools that will send out automated update emails (Aweber has one) but I prefer to do it manually to ensure that the emails are tailored for maximum impact and usefulness.

Themed Updates

I’ve written about this concept once before here on ProBlogger in a post titled How 24 Hours of Work Will Send Millions of Readers to My Blog.

The idea really came about when I realised that the majority of my blogs thousands of pages of content was going largely unseen by new readers to my blog. While I would occasionally link back to key posts most of my archives don’t get a lot of traffic.

These ‘themed updates’ are all about sending readers back to old but useful content around a single theme. Here’s how they work.

I use the ‘auto responder’ or ‘followup’ feature of Aweber to set up these emails. This means that they go out at pre-determined intervals to readers a certain number of days after their last scheduled email.

The first email in the sequence is the ‘welcome email’ that I mentioned above. 8 Days after that email goes out the subscriber receives the first ‘themed’ email. The topic is ‘portraits’ and is a newsletter that contains a short intro to the topic and then some links back to some of our most useful portrait photography tips. It also has a few recommendations of good books on portraiture (with affiliate links).

30 days after this portraits email they get another themed email (remember they’re getting weekly updates in between). This email is about ‘exposure’ (pictured right – click to enlarge) and contains links to some of our best posts on subjects like Aperture, Shutter Speed etc. It also contains a couple of recommendations to good books on the topic (with affiliate links to Amazon).

30 days later they get an email on composition (same format as above with links to archive posts and books). 30 days later they get another themed email.

The main goals of these weekly updates are to:

• Drive traffic to the site – particularly older posts
• Make money through the affiliate links – while they’re not big ticket items they do convert

These emails do take some time to set up but once they’re set up they become automated and go out every day without me ever having to think about them. With 500 people signing up for my newsletter every day I know that 500 people are getting each of these emails on a daily basis. I have 6 of these emails set up in a sequence at present and add more to the list every now and again so I know 3000 people in total get them each day of the week – forever.

Promotions

This is the most recent addition to my sequence of emails and I’m still perfecting their use but the signs are very promising already.

I use the auto-responder sequence mentioned above to deliver these (they’re going to go out every month or two) and the content of these emails is to highlight a resource or product that I recommend to readers.

The products are affiliate products that I take a commission from any sale of. We disclose that relationship in the email and get a lot of positive feedback on the disclosure from readers.

The key with these promotional emails is to choose products that you genuinely recommend. The reason for this is that at any point subscribers can leave your list – if you push too hard or recommend dodgy products they can leave (with a bade taste in their mouth).

It can be hard to find quality products – I’ve found there to be a lot of junky products in my niche for example – but when I recently found a product that I believed in (123 digital imaging) I knew I had my first product to add to the sequence.

I only sent this first promotion email 17 days ago so it’s yet to go out to everyone on the list but it’s generated 500 or so sales and will continue to sell as long as the product is on the market as it goes to another 500 people every day. In many ways it’s become a nice little passive income with a few sales every day being generated.

When we release our first ebook in the coming weeks it will also be added to the sequence of emails in a similar way.

The main goals of these weekly updates are to:

• Make money through the affiliate links – the money these earn starts with a bang when you send it out to the bulk of your list on the first day but after that it becomes a steady trickle. The cool thing about it is that once you have a few of these set up in your sequence you can be having a number of affiliate promotions paying off each day.

Summing Up

All in all I find that the above mix of emails that we send out to our list gets very positive results. I work hard to keep them a ‘win/win’ for both our readers to get useful and relevant information but for me/the site to generate income. So far I think I’ve got the balance right – I regularly get emails from readers saying thanks for the newsletter and if I’m even an hour or two late sending it get people emailing to ask where it is. On a revenue front it’s increasingly profitable – between the sales of products and the ad revenue increases from the increased traffic it certainly has become a central part of my income stream to have this email list.

With the cycle as it is readers do occasionally get 2 emails in a week – however it’s never more than that and on most weeks it is just the one weekly email. I make it clear when they signup that it’s at least weekly to get this expectation right as I don’t want them feeling duped into signing up.

I also use Aweber’s scheduling feature for the auto responder emails which allows you to specify what days of the week they can go out. I schedule the sequenced emails (the themed and promotional ones) so that they never go out on a Thursday or Friday (the same day as the weekly ones).

Lastly I generally focus my efforts with this list on HTML emails. Aweber does give you the ability to send out a text email as well for those subscribers whose email system doesn’t allow HTML. For the text version I usually just send out a short email that links to a HTML version of the email. I did use to send out a full plain text email for these people but found that when I switched to a shorter email linking to the HTML version that most readers clicked through and appreciated seeing the images (this might be particular to my niche).

So that’s how I’ve set up my email newsletters on DPS. It takes a fair bit of work to get some of it set up but as I mentioned in yesterdays post – the pay off has been great and continues to grow as we recruit new subscribers to the list.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

How I Use Email Newsletters to Drive Traffic and Make Money

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• How do I expand my blog?
• How do I move beyond the basics of making money with AdSense on my blog?

I’m asked these two questions a lot and in this post I want to share, with some visuals, how I do it on one of my own sites.

While at Blog World Expo last week I was asked to present to a small private group on how I make money blogging. As part of the presentation I put together some basic graphics that attempted to visualize how Digital Photography School works. With the permission of the clients I presented to I’d like to share them here.

Lets start with a basic rundown of what the site is made up of – or at least where I’m interacting with readers both on and off the site:

The site started as a simple blog. In time I added a forum and a newsletter. The forum added a more communal element to the site while the newsletter both gave a secondary connecting point with readers, drives significant traffic across to both the blog and forum but also opens up other ways to market to readers. In more recent times I’ve started using social media by creating a Twitter account and Facebook page.

In this next visual I highlight four of the main tasks that I focus my energies on with DPS. While there are other things that one must do to keep a site going, these are the main things I focus my time upon at present.

1. Creating Compelling Content – this is the foundation of the site and particularly in the early days of DPS was what I spent most time doing. Ultimately it is about creating useful content that solves problems and meets needs for people.
2. Build Community – getting a reader to your blog is hard so it makes a lot of sense to work hard on keeping the readers you have and doing whatever you can to keep them visiting again and again. One of the main ways to do this is to give them a sense of ‘belonging’.
3. Monetize – a site with great content and community is fantastic – but unless you can monetize it in some way it isn’t sustainable. As a result a percentage of my time and resources goes towards making money from the site.
4. Marketing – to make money from a website you need people to read it and to have people reading it you need to step outside of your own site and market yourself in some way. Great content and community is not enough. I’d include SEO in this category as it’s largely about driving traffic.

There are obviously other tasks that a blogger needs to work on (such as design, maintenance etc) but broadly speaking these are the four things I’m working on each day in some way or another.

Lets see how the two graphics above interact with one another. Below is a visual of the four areas of the site and the four ‘tasks’ that I do – it shows WHERE I’m doing each of the ‘tasks’ on the site.

OK – so I’m doing everything everywhere.

The reason I include this graphic is that I hear people talking about how certain types of media are only suited to some goals.

For example I heard one presenter at BWE talk about how social media is just for marketing or community building – however I think it can be used for monetization also. An example of this was when I launched the 31 Days to Build a Better Blog workbook. I did launches for the ebook both here on the ProBlogger blog and also on Twitter – Twitter generated over twice as many sales as the blog.

While social media may not be as effective for everyone when it comes to monetization there are certainly ways to do it. The same goes with other mediums.

I won’t go through how each of the four areas achieve each of the four goals or tasks but the take home lesson here is that if you have a variety of goals for your site that there can be multiple ways to meet them.

Lets move onto monetization. The next visual highlights the four main ways that I make money off DPS (or at least the four ways it will make money shortly).

1. Ad Networks – in some circles these are looked down on as an inferior way to make money but on DPS they work. Running AdSense and Chitika in particular have been very profitable for me on DPS. Sure you share the revenue with the network but when you’re unable to fill your inventory with directly sold ads they can still work out for you. You should be looking to expand your focus and diversify but don’t write it off altogether – keep testing the options to see what converts on your site.
2. Direct Ad Sales – the obvious advantage of selling your own ads to an advertiser is that you’re not splitting profits with Google or some other ad network. The downside is that it can take time to find advertiser and negotiate with them to really get the return that you could get. This can get a little easier when you’ve got significant traffic but depending upon your niche and where the economy is at it can also be difficult – particularly to attract the bigger brand advertisers unless you have relationships with them or are well positioned in the advertising sales game.
3. Affiliate Marketing – this is something that I didn’t focus upon a whole lot on DPS except for using Amazon’s Associate program. However lately there have been a few quality photography products launched that have opened up opportunities on this front.
4. Products – this is the ’soon to be’ element of the monetization mix on DPS as I have two ebooks in development – one to be released in the coming weeks. I’m still yet to see how well products will work on the site but there’s significant potential if we can convince readers that paying for some content is worth doing (I’m sure I’ll write more about this in the coming weeks).

You’ll notice that there are other monetization streams that are not mentioned and that I don’t do at DPS – such as text link advertising, paid reviews etc.

Here’s one last graphic that overlays the monetization streams with the areas of the site.

Once again you’ll see that each of the areas of the site are involved in at least two of the monetization streams – although not all. Some of the exceptions are simply that I’ve not had time to try them but some I’m not sure will ever happen (either because I doubt that they’ll work or because they can’t – such as Ad Networks in Social media).

Again – the reason I include this graphic is that opportunities do exist to diversify income streams between mediums. For example newsletters are a great place to monetize. While you can’t run AdSense in a newsletter you can sell an ad to an advertiser. You can also use a newsletter to do affiliate marketing (in fact I find it works better in newsletters than anywhere else on my site).

I hope the visuals above are a little food for thought and make sense without the context of the rest of the presentation.

A few Take Home Lessons:

Let me try to pull together a few of the main take home lessons that I’ve been learning:

• Know your goals – having identified that main tasks that I want to be involved in has given me a structure and helped me develop strategies to take my site forward.
• Expand and Diversify – Adding different areas/mediums to your blog can help to make your site multi-dimensional and opens up new ways to achieve your goals. It is also good in turbulent economic times to have a site with a variety of different areas but also income streams.
• Don’t Ignore AdSense – ad networks have their pros and cons. If you write them off completely you could be leaving money on the table. The key is to have an open mind, test what works best and revisit your decisions over time as different monetization streams will suit your site differently at different stages of its life cycle.
• Don’t get lazy and rely upon AdSense – many bloggers get lazy and rely upon the same old way that their site has always made money to continue to do so. Keep testing, hustle to find new advertisers, test different affiliate products to promote, watch what your competitors are monetizing with and consider launching your own product.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

How I Diversify My Site and Income

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If a tree falls in a forest, I don’t know if anyone hears it – but when your blog crashes or takes forever to load, I guarantee you nobody is reading.

When you work hard on your content, but aren’t able to capitalize on the attention because your blog takes too long to load you are throwing away hours of hard work and thousands of visitors. I know because I’ve been there. I’ve had multiple performance issues over the past year where SidSavara.com was unable to handle some of the traffic spikes that came my way – and believe me, it is soul-crushing to see your site doing well on social media sites, and knowing that many of those readers will leave before your article loads. It’s not every day you get 250,000 visitors to your blog.

Optimizing WordPress is a thankless, but necessary job. When your site is running quickly people don’t notice – but if your blog is down or slow, visitors will complain or worse (and much more frequently) just leave. In fact, if the very first page a visitor sees takes even a second too long to load, they are likely to leave instantly without reading anything – on to the next shiny thing that has caught their interest, and on to someone’s blog that is optimized.

I recently decided to dedicate some time to deal with this. After trying out many plugins, crashing my website a few times due to plugin incompatibilities and reviewing my results here are my recommendations – and it’s easier than you think.

5 Plugins To Make Your WordPress Blog Blazing Fast

• WP Super Cache by Donncha O Caoimh- A very fast caching plugin for WordPress. This is what has been saving me from traffic spikes. In a normal WordPress install, every time a visitor comes to your site WordPress builds the webpage for them from scratch by pulling information out of the database and processing a variety of things in the software. The bottom line is, this is time consuming – and usually after you’ve published a blog post, it doesn’t change very much except when people comment. When a page is loaded, WP Super Cache caches a static (one time generated) copy of that webpage, and then every time a new visitor comes, it preferentially gives them the cached version of the page. This is much faster, and has totally saved me when a rush of people come from one of my posts going viral.
• GZIP Output by Austin Matzko- This plugin automatically compresses CSS, Javascript and HTML output, allowing it to travel faster from your blog to a visitor’s browser. According to Best Practices On Yahoo! Developer Network: “Gzipping generally reduces the response size by about 70%. Approximately 90% of today’s Internet traffic travels through browsers that claim to support gzip.” This is a simple change that will not affect what your readers see at all – except that it will load in their browser faster.
• WP Minify by Thaya Kareeson- This plugin uses the Minify engine to combine and compress JS and CSS files to improve page load time. Like the previous plugin, it also automatically shrinks the size of your files without you having to do anything.
• W3 Total Cache by Frederick Townes- If I was starting a brand new blog today, this is what I would use on day one – and then go with a more complicated set up (like I have currently) after it grows. This plugin is amazing. It includes minify capabilities, caching (but less aggressive than WP Super Cache) and GZip compression.
• Free CDN by Phoenixheart- If you have static files (images, javascript, css) taking a long time to load and slowing your site down, you may benefit by installing Free CDN – especially if you have large images. Briefly, a CDN is a content delivery network. Static files are cached on the CDN and pulled from their servers instead of your own – which means that your server has to do less work, and potentially can serve more people at once, faster.
• Bonus: Upgrade WordPress! This isn’t a plugin, but every time a new version of WordPress there’s a good chance they’ve optimized the software so it runs faster than before. Be sure to test your blog after you upgrade to make sure everything still runs smoothly.

Firefox Plugins To Test WordPress Performance

You can check for yourself how fast your WordPress blog is and instantly get recommendations on what you can do to improve it with some free software. I use Firefox with the Firebug and YSlow plugins installed. The YSlow user guide is excellent and will give you all the tools you need to see where your site is slow, and what can be done to improve it. Darren has also previously written about 5 Methods to Enhancing Page Load with some best practices for ensuring your blog loads quickly for visitors.

This is a guest post by Sid Savara, whose main passion is personal development and personal productivity. For new email subscribers, he is offering a free copy of his new ebook The Little Book of Big Motivational Quotes.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

5 Plugins To Make Your WordPress Blog Blazing Fast

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It seems more and more bloggers are looking to expand in this way – whether it be by setting up teaching courses, starting paid forums or setting up areas where they offer subscribers exclusive content to paying subscribers.

By no means is it the only model to make money online – but it is one that more and more bloggers are looking towards and one that we’re even seeing more mainstream media doing also.

Yaro has this week relaunched a free report on the topic of Membership Sites – The Membership Site Mastermind Report.

The reports shares how Yaro uses membership sites to make a six figure income, how he runs the technology side of things, gives insights on how he gets members to stick on his sites and more. It’s a free report to anyone who gives an email address.

Yaro will be relaunching his Membership Site Mastermind course in the next week or so – but this report is free and contains useful information even if you go no further than downloading it and not going on with the full course.

PS: Get more free teaching on Membership Sites from Yaro in these two videos here and here. Also check out an interview Yaro did with Daniel Scocco on his $10,000 a month membership site.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

Learn How to Create Your Own Membership Site – Free Report

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I discovered the power of online community on the very first day that I went online (I think it was in 1996).

Up until that point I’d always been quite sceptical of people who talked about ‘relationships’, ‘friendships’ and ‘community’ when they talked about their online experience.

I just couldn’t see how people could ever call online interaction any kind of community – but I quickly discovered how wrong my assumptions were.

I still remember the moment – the guy who’d come to install my new computer and modem (dial up) gave me a quick tour of how to access the web – Netscape, hotmail and then he opened up a little program called Comic Chat and told me it was for chatting to people online using a system called IRC.

I promptly told him that I wouldn’t be wasting my time with that and closed it down.

Later that day on a whim I opened it up and joined the first ‘room’ that I came across – an Aussie chat room. I used the handle of ‘oziii’ on a whim and entered the room. Within seconds I’d been noticed, welcomed and drawn into the conversation.

3 hours later my view of how community could be developed online was completely changed. 3 months later I’d spent an hour a day (minimum) in this room since that first day. Over the year or two that followed I’d personally met 20 or so other members, had attended one wedding from group members, had helped conduct an online memorial service for another who’d passed away and had become close friends with a number of others.

Was it true community? I’m not sure – perhaps a sociologist out there can fill us in on that – but what I am sure of is that people found a sense of belonging in that simple IRC chat room.

Of course we’ve come a long way on the internet since those days. The mediums have evolved (although I have to say that some of what I see on Twitter reminds me a lot of IRC) but one thing has not changed – people are still going online to connect and find community. In fact with the explosion of social media the web has only grown in the way that people are using it to connect, relate and find belonging.

My own story of learning about building communities online continued to grow with my own stepping into the blogging game – in fact it was one of two things that attracted me to blogging the most (the other one was the way blogs amplify a person’s voice).

I still remember the experience of reading my first ever blog and marvelling at the way that this medium not only gave an individual the ability to communicate with thousands of people around the world but the way that it enabled those same people to add to the conversation. I was amazed by the sense of belonging I saw among readers on the site, the way that they improved the site with their ideas and the way that around the blog was a community of other bloggers engaging with one another’s ideas.

As I began to develop my own blogs I saw this community first hand for myself and discovered that one of the secrets behind growing the readership of a blog is to give people ways to participate in it, ways to belong to it and ways to make it their own.

Over the last 7 years I’ve started over 30 blogs – the three that became most successful for me were the three that became communities rather than just information portals.

Yes some of the ‘information’ sites did get some search engine traffic and made a little money – but they never built a brand, they were never recommended by one person to another, they rarely generated comments and they never opened up opportunities to create indirect income streams like writing a book, selling an ebook or doing consulting or speaking.

I put down the failure of these 27 or so blogs down to numerous reasons – but the main one was that they failed to grow a community around them.

So how does one grow build a community around a blog?

This is an important topic and one that I really do recommend bloggers grapple with because it’s so important in a blog hitting the tipping point of becoming successful.

I’ve written numerous posts previously on the topic so won’t rehash them all here but do recommend that you read at least one of them – 8 Tips for Building Community on Your Blog – a post in which I attempted to summarise my own experience and advice in building online communities around my blogs.

Tip #9 – Play Match Maker with Your Readers

There’s one tip that I want to add to the 8 tips in the previous post and that is to work at helping readers to connect outside your community. This can seem a little counter-intuitive for a web publisher because we often feel like we want to keep people on our site and get them interacting more and more on our turf – however what I’ve begun to discover in my blogging on Digital Photography School and even here at ProBlogger and in the ProBlogger Forums is that when you give people a secondary connecting point with one another that it deepens their connections (and therefore the community) that happens on your own blog.

A quick example of this: earlier this year on DPS I asked readers to list their Twitter accounts. To this day over 630 readers have listed their accounts. Many have also gone through the list and added every other account.

What happened in the weeks that followed this post was that I noticed more and more of our readers getting to know each other on Twitter. While it’s difficult to measure the anecdotal evidence that I’m seeing is that it’s improving the quality of comments being left on DPS. I’ve also had numerous thank you emails from readers who tell me that they’ve met great new friends as a result of that post. There have even been a few readers who’ve started working together as a result of these connections.

As I say – it’s difficult to measure the impact but from what I’m seeing the community on my site has improved because I’ve played match maker with our readers and helped them to get to know each other.

While it’s still early days on the ProBlogger.com forums a similar thing has happened there with a thread asking members to share their Twitter accounts. I figure the more connected people are with one another the more likely they are to stay connected with the community.

More Suggested Reading

Check out Dan Blank’s post – Group Hug: How to Build Community Using Forums and Social Media -while not blog specific it contains a lot of Gold on building community online.

More Advice from YOU

I’d love to hear your advice on how to build community on a blog. I’d also like to highlight some advice from my Twitter Followers who answered this question on building community on Twitter last week. You can see a collection of their suggestions here.

Over to you – how do you build community on your blog? What’s worked for you and what hasn’t? Looking forward to seeing your ideas and experiences!

Read the full series on how to build a successful blog.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

Community – Principles of Successful Blogging #4

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Starting a blog was one of the most exciting things we have ever done. Building a loyal audience, gathering intelligent subscribers with insightful comments, and making plans for the future were all part of a wonderful first year blogging. The problem for us was that reading about blogging and actually blogging are two entirely different things.

Blogging is hard work. Much like becoming a parent, all the warnings in the world do little to prepare you for the reality.

No blog becomes famous overnight unless its author happened to be famous a couple nights before. Blogging requires hard work and diligent effort for a sustained period of time. Many bloggers give up in the first few months and the majority never see their sixth. I can sympathize. With all the blogs screaming for attention, how are you supposed to know if your work is going to pay off or if you‘re wasting your time?

Outside of tons of visitors, or lots of ad revenue, success is defined differently by different people. Some bloggers are seeking a path to money while others are more interested in simply connecting or sharing their voice. The list below is simply a way of gauging whether or not people are connecting to your blog.

Five ways to tell if your blog has what it takes:

1) Comments

Comments can be both an empty measurement and a solid indicator that things are going well. If your blog is receiving a lot of comments, that’s probably a terrific sign. However, if the majority of those comments ring to the tune of “great post!” then even 100 are rather meaningless. A couple of valuable comments that provoke discussion are far better than double digit comments that are only there for the benefit of a link. It means that people are finding value in your content and interested in engaging you and other readers regarding that content.

Darren previously wrote on 11 ways to get your comments noticed on a popular blog. Use this information to help you determine the value of the comments you’re receiving, while helping you to learn to make your best comments.

2) Subscribers

All growth is progress. If your subscriber count is growing, then you can consider yourself on the right track. Slow and steady wins the race and it can take months blogging to break into the triple digits. Many people, ourselves included, set unrealistic goals for their subscriber counts. This only leads to disappointment and frustration. Be realistic and remember, blogging is a process, not an event. If your numbers show steady growth, then you’re doing something right. If not, then you need to reevaluate your content, posting frequency or perhaps your social media strategy.

Darren has written many times on getting more RSS subscribers. This post has 9 tips to help you find more with a nice video and link roundup.

3) Links

Links are the currency of the net and help to pay for whatever it is your blog needs: traffic, social proof and search engine rankings; all are the direct result of high quality links. And one of the best ways to generate quality links is to produce quality content (and make sure that content is seen). The more recognized you are, the more links you will receive. The beauty of incoming links is that they carry a cumulative effect. After a while, people will start linking to you simply because others are.

Getting links is important. Here are 11 ways to increase your chances of being linked to by a blogger, as previously written by Darren.

4) Friends

With blogging, an ever expanding web of friends and blogging buddies is essential to long term success. You could even make the case that who you know is sometimes more important than what you create, though I do believe the quality of your work must always stand on its own. Strive to meet new people and widen your network as best you can. I’m not saying to strike up phony friendships with people you’d otherwise have no interest in. Rather, find people you are genuinely interested in and can learn from. You will have created a network of mentors that can teach you a lot more than a dozen courses. If there is a natural complimenting of each other‘s strengths and weaknesses, all the better.

As part of Darren’s excellent 31 Days to Build a Better Blog series, he ran a post on Day 15 about finding a blogging buddy.

5) Niche

Many bloggers make the mistake of not clearly defining their niche. I know I’ve made the same mistake several times myself. If you are blogging as a hobby, it is unnecessary to build a fence around your ideas. If you are looking to turn your blogging into profit, or a full-time living, it is essential that you understand the audience you are targeting and how best to market to them.

In this previous ProBlogger post, Glen Allsop talks about how to find your passion and know what you should be blogging about.

Remember, we all define success differently. However, paying attention to the above list and the advice linked within can help ensure your blog lives up to its fullest potential.

Question: How do you define blogging success? How have your opinions of success changed since you first started blogging?

David Wright and Sean Platt are the team of direct response copywriters behind GhostwriterDad.com.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

5 Ways to Know if Your Blog is on the Right Track

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Every blogger quickly learns the reality of hard work in blogging. After the “make money fast” hype has wore off and the reality that blogging is a great way to earn an income if you work for it has set in, you are left with a choice?

The choice is whether to stay in blogging or not. Many bloggers decide to stay but are again left with another extremely important decision. Should I put the effort into become a great blogger or just try to still do things the easy way and hope things will be different for me?

Those choosing to work hard begin the process of learning and eventually find success by learning, networking and earning their way to better blogging. Bloggers who are unwilling to face reality either quite or eventually become spammers, scrapers, or beggars.

I am not going to address the problem of bloggers who beg for help without working for it, but I do want to talk about spammers and scrapers. Most importantly, I want every hard working blogger to know how to stop selfish bloggers trying to use your work disrespectfully to help them.

Stopping Spam

The easiest way to stop spammers who are trying to get you to link to their blog/site is by controlling your comments and trackbacks. Although essential to building a great blog community, comments must be moderated to ensure your actual readers feel comfortable with the discussions on your blog.

Captcha

Commenting at first was easily controlled by forcing commentators to put their email address into the comment form. Spammers quickly got around this and now a very easy way to stop spammers is by adding a captcha feature to your blog comments.

Captcha is already used by Blogger and easily adds to Wordpress and other blogging platforms with plugins. The way it works is that you put in a series of numbers or letters from a visual image in order to post your comment. Other systems require you to add the numbers or fill in the form based on another easy question. Using captcha is a quick and easy way to minimize your blog’s spam, but it may also be annoying to regular readers.

Plug-ins

For many blog platforms, like Wordpress, a simple plug-in will solve many of the spam problems. The most common spam blocker is Akismet, which is now available for over 20 other blogging platforms besides Wordpress. Using this plug-in on your blog is simple and requires you to only check to make sure occasional comments are not being counted as spam. In addition to the normal comment protection it provides, it goes above and beyond captchas by protecting your blog against unwanted trackbacks.

Stopping Scrappers

Scrapers are bloggers who steal content you produced and put the entire work on their own blogs and websites. The practice sadly is common and creates reproductions of your content around the web. Luckily most search engines are good at recognizing the original content, but scrapping is illegal and damaging to the blogger and blogging.

1. Identify: The first step to stopping scrappers is by identifying your content and checking for copies. An easy way to do this is by using the sites CopyGator or Copyscape to check for the originality of your content and any potential duplicates.
2. Ask: Once you have found scrappers who have copied your material [note: the content duplication should be significant and their reasons should be to represent your content as their own, not to promote yours] email the owner or comment on the blog/site where the duplicate is found. In most cases the scraper will take it down and apologize for misrepresenting the work. Always try this first so that the blogosphere can stay friendly and young bloggers who might be making an innocent mistake will learn without being accosted.
3. Block: The next step if they are unresponsive or belligerent to your requests is to use .htaccess to block the scrappers from your blog. This can be a little bit tricky for anyone who has never done this before, but here is a great link to learn how to stop scrapers [item #9]. Basically you are blocking the access of the scrappers from receiving your blog and rss feed.
4. Take Action: At this point you have been nice, notified them of their misdeed, blocked their access and still the content is ripped off and on their site. The next way to get your content off of their site is by contacting the site’s ISP or hosting. The easiest way to find that out is by using Who.is and just inputting the site’s web address into their search bar. The hosting information will then show up with the rest of the site’s information. Once you have the host information contact them with a formal letter or email specifically claiming what and where the content originated and where it has been reproduced. The host will then quickly take down the content and offer the site owner a chance to explain themselves. Warning, this is serious for everyone involved so do not use this lightly. If this does not work there is yet one more option. This is legal action. Filed suits can be taken up depending on the scrapper’s home country and legal system.

Stopping scrapers and spammers will not only protect your work but also encourage the internet to be a better place. Every time a spammer is thwarted, other bloggers win too. So be an internet community builder by taking the proper steps to stop content thieves.

Seth Waite is Editor at Blogussion.com and enjoys helping every blogger reach their blogging goals. to contact Seth directly, just find him on Twitter @Seth1492

What’s Your Approach

From Darren: as mentioned in the introduction to this post – there are many stances that bloggers take on these issues, particularly when it comes to scrapers. Many take a similar line to Seth while others are more lenient and take the approach that as long as someone’s reading their content somewhere that it doesn’t worry them. What do you do? What tools do you use?

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

Stop Scrapers and Spammers Fast

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I’ve said it many times on ProBlogger but if your blog is not solving a problem or fulfilling a need or desire among your readers then you’re unlikely to see them return.

The needs, desires and problems you can be meeting need not be large ones – but if you’re connecting with people on these levels you’re being useful and this goes a long way towards making the type of impression on someone that draws them into a loyal relationship.

Better still – if you’re useful to someone they’re often going to tell others about it which is a big part of the growth of many successful blogs.

Examples of Useful Blogs

Being useful can take on many different forms. Lets looks at some examples of fairly well known blogs:

• Mashable – gives people the latest news on Social Media but also teaches them how to use it.
• Boing Boing – a blog that gives a laugh and looks at curious trends in technology
• Lifehacker – helps people become more productive and be better at different technological pursuits
• TMZ – feeds people’s desire to know the latest gossip and celeb news
• Seth Godin – teaches on the topic of Marketing
• I Can Has Cheezburger – gives people something to giggle about
• Treehugger – resources people to live green
• Seeking Alpha – gives financial news and advice
• Zen Habits – helps people be more productive
• CopyBlogger – helps bloggers write better

Now you might not read all of these blogs (and there are many thousands more that we could use as examples) – but they all have many thousands of devoted fans and daily readers, because they’re producing content that meets some kind of need, fulfils some kind of desire or solves some kind of problem.

The ways a blog can be useful are many – but here are some of the basics (taken partly from ProBlogger the Book):

• Entertaining – increasingly blogs are being used as entertainment. People are going to them for laughs, for gossip and for fun conversation.
• Educational – many successful blogs teach people to do or be something
• Informational/News – these blogs might teach you any practical skills but they keep you up with the latest on a particular topic, location or trend
• Thoughtful – some readers want a place where they can have their minds open to viewpoints.
• Debate – some blogs serve as places for people to come together to have dialogue and debate around a topic.
• Community – many blogs are build more on people having a sense of belonging and feeling that they’re a part of a community than the actual content.

Of course this list could go on and on and will vary from blog to blog with some meeting multiple needs and others just targeting one.

How is Your Blog Useful?

This is a question that I think bloggers would do well ponder before they start blogging as well as during the blogging process (in fact it’s probably a question to ask every day before you publish anything). Strive to meet a need and enhance people’s lives in some way and you’ll be taking a step closer to connecting with people in a way that will hopefully be part of a lasting relationship.

Further Reading

• How to Get in Tune with Your Readers Needs [and Produce Compelling Content]
• Solve a Problem – 7 Ways to Identify Reader Problems

Read the full series on how to build a successful blog.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

Usefulness – Principles of Successful Blogging #3

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Have you ever had a moment in your life where everything changed?

You might not have known it at the time - but the moment was defining, it changed the course of some area of your life in a way that turned things upside down.

I had one of those course changing moments early in my blogging. It was a moment that resulted in my blogging moving from being a hobby that generated a nice bit of secondary income into a full time business.

It was a moment that at the time didn't feel life changing - but it was.

The funny thing about this moment is that it wasn't a discovery of some secret way to make money blogging, it wasn't the day I started one of my blogs… in fact it was a moment that didn't immediately lead to any particular change on my blogs - because it was largely something that happened in my mind - a paradigm shifting moment.

It all started with 9 words from my wife (V)

'You've got 6 months to make blogging full time.'

She then told me that if I didn't get it to this kind of level I'd have to get a 'real job'.

Up until this point I'd been talking about how blogging could one day provide us with a full time income. I'd been showing her the growth of the earnings from the blogs so far and projecting forward to what they might be in the future if things kept going.

I'd been on about it for months and things were going OK - the earnings graphs I kept showing her were trending up - I could see the possibility of one day being a full time blogger.

But I'd been talking a lot…. dreaming a lot…. creating a lot of pretty graphs…. and not really DOING a lot.

I didn't really see it (I was too close and too caught up in my dreams) but V knew it and so she set me an ultimatum - a deadline that changed my thinking and more importantly led to me changing the way I went about my blogging.

In the moments after V's ultimatum I had a realization that while I dreamed that one day my blogging would become a business that I'd been treating my blogging like a hobby.

I knew that if I were to succeed in going full time in the next six months that that had to change. I needed to start looking at my blogging as a business now - even though it was only earning a day or two a week's income.

That moment changed everything.

That was the day I....

• started putting serious time aside for blogging
• became more focused upon my core tasks of creating content
• wasted less time on distractions
• became more strategic in my thinking and set myself goals to work towards
• began to look for new income streams - beyond AdSense
• started hustling for advertisers - ringing up businesses in my niche and pitching my blog to them
• began to seek out guest writing opportunities on other blogs and even in main stream media
• started setting myself deadlines for posting a certain number of posts a day and developed an editorial calendar
• I started networking more with other bloggers
• began to invest more time and even money into my learning of different aspects of blogging
• started to look for a business coach who could teach me how to look at what I do as a business instead of a hobby

That day began the process for me of looking at what I do as a business.

While not a lot changed on my blogs that day - the impact over the last 4-5 years has been significant. I've not looked back and many of the things I changed back then have become patterns and a natural part of my blogging work flow.

The #1 reason my blogging grew into a business was that I began to treat it as one.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

The #1 Reason My Blogging Grew Into a Business

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For those of you who’ve not heard about BWE – it’s going to be a great event with thousands of bloggers coming together to talk blogging and social media. I’ll be there and speaking on a number of panels including:

• Internet Marketing for Smart People – with Chris Brogan, Brian Clark and Sonia Simone.
• How to Make Money Online – at WordCamp Las Vegas with Jeremy Wright and Chris Garrett (yes I’m finally going to meet me coauthor of the ProBlogger book)
• Blogging Super Panel (Live Feedback Site Reviews) – with Jim Kukral, John Chow, Zach Johnson and Brian Clark

OK – onto the first competition

The prize is a chance to win a weekend pass to attend. It’s worth $495 (see full details of what it includes here).

Please only enter this if you’re able to get to Vegas for the weekend and cover your own accommodation. This prize only gets you into the conference (and to a couple of the parties).

To enter you have to do two things:

1. Either write a blog post that links to Blog World Expo saying why you want to attend OR tweet a tweet that says why you want to attend and includes the #bwe09 hashtag (choose one of these options, not both).
2. Come back to this post and leave a comment with a link to your post or tweet to prove you did it. (Update: Make sure you leave the link to your actual tweet, and NOT just to your twitter account. We won’t have time to hunt down the tweet itself! Your comment here should look something like this: http://twitter.com/problogger/status/4807468828)

We’ll close off entries for this competition at midday on Wednesday Vegas time/ (yes you need to get your skates on). There is one entry per person (so don’t set tweets to go off every minute til the closing time).

Thanks to Blog World and New Media Expo for putting up this prize. If you’re coming along I do look forward to seeing you!

*Comments are now closed. Winner shall be notified via email!*

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

Win a Weekend Pass to Blog World Expo Worth $495

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Do you want to see your blog on the side of a milk carton? No? Then keep reading because…

It is very likely this will be the most important article you read all year. Of course you can choose to skip this article, but you will regret it, especially since I am such a groovy kind of guy. Ok, I hate bellbottoms and green furniture, so maybe I’m not so groovy. However, I am going to show you an easy way to protect your most valuable marketing asset – your WordPress blog.

If you understand the difference between how to backup both your MYSQL database and your standard Word Press files, congratulations! You don’t really win anything, except peace of mind, which I consider invaluable. However, there are literally thousands of WordPress users who are in the dark about the proper way to backup their blogs (yes, I’m probably talking about you).

Unfortunately, even experienced online marketers are making this same mistake. My partner, who makes hundreds of thousands of dollars every year online, was also totally clueless. When I asked him to backup one of our membership site blogs, he sent me a zip file that just included the main WordPress files. When I asked where the database file was, he got a look on his face like he just French kissed Jabba the Hut. Since I couldn’t stand the look on his face for a minute longer, I had to explain why it was so important to have the database file.

Now this is where you should start to pay attention *cough*

Your Word Press blog is powered by a MYSQL database. This database stores all of your content and the settings for your blog. Without this database, your blog would essentially be a black hole lacking any content. Now what most people don’t know is that this database resides on another part of the hosting server. Since the file is in a different location, it needs to be backed up separately from your standard Word Press files.

So here is what all of this means; if your host has a server crash, you will not be able to restore your blog without the MYSQL database. Basically, you will be up a creek without a paddle, a boat, any food, no mapÖ you get the idea, right?

At this point you are probably telling yourself that your hosting company will backup this file for you, right? Not exactly. Many hosting companies are not responsible for backing up your files. I found this out the hard way several years ago, and it could easily happen to you next. So don’t be foolish enough to rely on your Website host to do this for you.

Now here is the good news – you can backup your MYSQL database in three easy steps by following this simple plan:

Step One:

Go and download the “Word Press Database Backup” plugin here.

Step Two:

Install the plugin on your blog.

Step Three:

Set the plugin to your desired specifications. It really is quite straightforward to setup, but you can always refer to the plugin documentation for help.

I personally set the plugin to make either a daily or a weekly backup for each of my blogs. If I post to a blog frequently, I make a daily backup. If I post infrequently, that blog is backed up on a weekly basis. I then have the backup file sent to my email. However you wish for the file to be saved is entirely up to you though. Simply use the method you are most comfortable with.

From start to finish, the entire process takes about 10 minutes per blog. That is of course if you grab a snack to slow you down. So there is absolutely no excuse not to set this up today. I would think ten minutes of your time is well worth the peace of mind you will feel when it’s done.

Now you could be lazy and find out the hard way how much fun it is to have your entire blog wiped out, with no hope of ever seeing it again.

Is ten minutes of your time worth going through that?

Discover the little known money making ideas used by the experts in my hot new ebook ‘Secret Lives of Internet Marketers’. You will discover the successful blueprint seven famous marketers used to become financially independent and how you can easily apply it to your own online business! To download my FREE REPORT instantly, follow this link below

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

How To Backup Your WordPress Blog In Three Easy Steps

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Long term readers of ProBlogger will know of Andy Wibbels – the two of us put together a course a couple of years back called Six Figure Blogging – one of the best learning experiences of my life.

Funnily enough we’d never met until this time last year at Blog World Expo but it felt like I knew him really well as we’d spent so much time together.

Andy went on to work at SixApart (makers of TypePad and MovableType – among other products), he’s the author of one of the first blogging books ‘Blog Wild’ and he has a wealth of knowledge in the space of blogging.

Andy’s about to run another course called Blogs and Social Media for Instant Global Impact and is offering a free one hour call on the topic. The call is on Wednesday for those who register (there will be a recording for those who can’t make the live call). I’ll be listening in myself because Andy’s got a habit of packing his calls with useful stuff.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

Free Hour Long Call with Andy Wibbels on Blogs and Social Media

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Let’s mash up reality and assume that Dorothy wrote The Wizard of Oz and it is a memoir told through the lens of pharmaceuticals and it is to be published next year.

Dorothy has written a great book: part trippy fantasy, part freudian/jungian/wonky archetypical therapy, part love letter to friendship, and a prefeminist, feminist, post-feminist meditation on the nature and power of femininity wrapped in a trendy, little-dog-carrying, hot-shoe-wearing package. It is Sex and the City meets Eat Love Pray meets Little Red Riding Hood, on acid. It is a journey. It is a great book. It must be read.

Dorothy knows this. She feels it right from her soul to the soles of her ruby red shoes. She can see the future: a movie. Musicals. The talk show circuit. Oprah. Much money, much love, much conversation, and a place in popular imagination.

It can be all of these things, not because she promotes the flying monkeys out of it – which she will, and absolutely should do – but because it offers a watery answer to our thirsty, questioning souls: you are the author of your own affair. Plus there are weird scary creatures who learn to love each other and grow as twisted, maturing moral entities and we all know that stuff sells. I hear a little book called Twilight is doing quite well these days.

So this book should sell. It needs to sell. Dorothy wants it to sell. Even more than that, Dorothy wants it to be read, to land, to take root, to grow, to inhabit, fertilize and animate our popular imagination.

If I was Dorothy – and I am – I would start a blog before I even started writing the book. I’d go all Seth Godin and build a tribe on Twitter. I’d find my people. I’d give them somewhere to find me. I’d get on the cluetrain. I’d Oprah. I’d firestart. I’d listen to Leo Babauta when he says he doesn’t believe in SEO. I’d make friends. I’d work the aich-ee-double-hockey-sticks out of ProBlogger and spend serious time with Outspoken Media. I’d figure out the lessons learned by our pantehon of blog gods and best-selling writers. I’d figure out the mechanics of demand and distribution and audience and I’d build it and they would come. And if they didn’t come, I’d go get them and then hug and pet and feed them because that is the purpose of promotional tricks and lassos and rodeo ponies and hoopla.

But I would only do that if, like Dorothy, I had something wizardly to offer: the journey. The passion. The learning. The love. The living. The lessons. The magic. The really, really great content. Please.

And this is what exasperates me about the ‘blogging and social media for money’ superhighway. So many times I follow the yellow brick road laid by an enterprising blogger who’s working the system – rocking the comments, manufacturing controversy, guest posting, paper-training SEO, tweeting – and when I get there and pull back the curtain…nothing. No wizard. No magic. No message. Just a lot of mechanics and whirling buttons and a robotic, soulless special effects machine.

Honestly, that’s what a lot of problogging and blogs and social media enterprises are looking like these days. It is turn-key blogging. It is execution unsparked by ideas. It is a waste of time and tweets and it won’t make you money.

Straight up: I don’t make a cent from my blog and I’m certainly not disparaging bloggers who do. I LOVE money. I want money. I want you and Dorothy and every other problogger out there to have as many tiny dogs – more! – as you and your minions can carry. I just want you to make it from selling wisdom, truth, experience or sparkly scarlet maryjanes (and if you are, I’m ALWAYS in the market for red shoes, so please put me on your mailing list). I want you to make an offering. I want you to have something to offer. I want you to be a Red Shoe Blogger. I just made that up.

A Red Shoe Blogger is not blogging exclusively for money. A Red Shoe Blogger has a mission and is animated by passion and all the tips and tricks and hacks and tools and tweets are harnessed in service of that divine, cosmic, helpful, genuine, meaningful objective. That mission is Home.

So this is what I want from all the Red Shoe Bloggers out there: I want you to buck the system, or work the system, but know that the system is not a slot machine that will pay off if only you keep pulling that arm and never ever run out of nickels or take a pee-break.

Success is not just about the systems. The home address of success is passion, talent (let’s be honest), creation, contribution, collaboration, conversation, and community.That is where hot sweaty abundance and cold hard cash reside (FYI, they’re totally a couple) and I wish more bloggers lived there too.

Because, after all, there’s no place like home.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

Why Blogging is Like The Wizard of Oz and There’s No Place Like Home. A Polemic or Maybe a Manifesto. For all the Red Shoe Bloggers.

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My answer usually revolves around the question of ‘what audience are you trying to reach?‘ Let me explain.

When I first secured my own domain name I chose a .au (Australia) domain without really giving much thought to it. I figured as I was an Aussie I might as well include that in the domain and as the .com version of the domain was taken I though it was the next logical step. That was a naive decision and one that I regretted later (although it did have some benefits too).

There were a number of impacts of having a local domain:

• the blog ranked relatively well in Google.com.au’s results – being an easily identified Aussie site it seemed to get priority when Aussies were searching for terms related to it
• the blog didn’t rank as well on Google.com - .com domains (and other non localised ones) seemed to get ranked higher in other international versions of Google
• confusion with readers - time and time again I heard from readers that they kept forgetting to add the .au. As a result they ended up on other sites and some gave up on even coming to the site.

Ultimately it was a mistake for me because my goal was to connect with an international audience rather than just and Australian one. I ended up with some good Aussie search traffic which was nice but it could have ranked better internationally which probably cost me traffic.

Take Home Advice: As a result, I generally advise people to go for a local domain name IF they are trying to reach a local audience. If you’re looking to connect with an international audience go for the .com or another non localised domain like .net or .org (.com is my #1 preference though).

The other reason to get a localised version of a domain in addition to the .com is as a defensive move OR if you think you might produce a local version of your blog at some point in the future. Having the local domain means someone else can’t get it and it gives you the option of expanding into local markets (as Gawker blogs have done with some of their more popular blogs).

Do you use a local domain name? What are the advantages or disadvantages from your perspective?

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

Should You Use a Localized Domain Name?

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