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Written on 11/5/2012 at 12:02 am by

Did Sandy Affect Your Blog?

Filed Under: Miscellaneous Blog Tips

Last week’s Hurricane Sandy really had am impact on those in the United States.

Sea

Image courtesy stock.xchng user piuse

While obviously it affected those in the East most of all (thankfully, I was holed up, safe in my hotel in New York City; so many others were not so fortunate), the connectedness of the US to the rest of the world meant that the implications of this storm stretched not just across the country, but all over the globe.

This was particularly true for industries that rely on technology—from Wall Street to the blogosphere.

Here at ProBlogger, we noticed a significant flattening of traffic in the days leading up to the storm. This, I expect, was the result of readers in areas expecting the storm heading offline to get prepared.

Sandy traffic

Ordinarily,  we’d have seen an upswing on that day. Here’s what the same days in the previous week looked like:

Typical Monday

Whilst we all know that the web brings us closer together, it can come as a surprise to see that your little old blog is impacted by a weather event on the other side of the world. If this is how it impacted my blog, I can only imagine how it affected local businesses in those areas—even those who managed to survive the storm physically, and keep on serving customers.

These kinds of traffic blips are something we might be used to seeing around festive times of year, though. Here’s what happens to ProBlogger traffic in a typical December, as most of our readers (in the US, the UK and Australia) gear up for Christmas and New Year:

December traffic

We might be tempted to think that the Web soldiers on regardless of what’s happening in the world, but the truth is that the web is a critical part of the world. It doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Events like these can impact traffic, sales, signups, social networking opportunities, and so on.

The good news is that as the events pass, and people’s lives return to normal, they’ll want to get back into their old routines—including seeing what they’ve missed online.

Depending on where you’re located, and where your target readers live, a range of events—local or global—could impact your blog. It’s important to remember that sometimes, our readers have more important things to worry about.

Did Sandy affect your blog—either because your readership is located in the Eastern US, or because you were one of the millions caught in its path? We’d love to hear your stories in the comments.

Written on 10/30/2012 at 6:09 am by

Beat Your Fear of Technology, and Grow Your Blog

Filed Under: Miscellaneous Blog Tips

This guest post is by Ayelet Weisz of All Colores.

As Matt Setter recently pointed out here on ProBlogger, pretty much anyone can set up a blog these days without worrying about technical mumbo-jumbo.

Yet as I learned when I transferred my blog from WordPress.com to WordPress.org, sometimes the technical mambo-jumbo will haunt you regardless, and your choices will be to learn its language, to pay highly for others to handle it, or to give up.

Did you, like me, turn to a free platform such as WordPress.com because you didn’t want to deal with technical set up? Are you holding back on transferring to your own domain because you’re afraid it will cost you a fortune to hire a webmaster, or wear your nerves if you do it on your own? Is WordPress refusing to create space between lines no matter how many times you log in, log out, save?

Fearing the dive into the world of technical activities makes sense.

If every past encounter with technical challenges left you feeling frozen, or was easily resolved by someone else in your office or home, it makes sense that you won’t necessarily feel comfortable in this area just because you’re now a blogger. If you’re not used to dealing with technicalities, fear will show up to remind you you’re doing something new.

Give yourself a pat on the shoulder to congratulate yourself for sailing off to a life of online entrepreneurship, then commit to stepping out of that comfort zone to a place where opportunities await. You must be willing to practice feeling more comfortable in the technical platform on which you base your business.

Here are a few easy ways to do just that.

Count to 10 before asking for help

Asking for help is a valuable skill to posses and can help you a lot in life. You will learn things faster this way, and perhaps save yourself some heartache.

Yet if you’re used to running to someone else any time a technical challenge arises, you’re not giving yourself the opportunity to test the waters yourself. Did a keyboard button detach? Is your phone acting crazy when you need to make an important call?

These days, information is more available than ever before. Take a moment to Google the problem, or do a search on YouTube and see if you can find a tutorial. Start with small projects—many times they’ll be easier to resolve than you expect.

Overcoming these problems yourself won’t only save you the money you would have paid the technician, or the time you would have waited for a sibling to come from another city—it will give you proof that you can learn new things. And it will give you courage to keep learning about more aspects of your blogging business—SEO or social marketing, for example.

Take a class

Be it online or off, a class enables you to learn from an expert and get feedback on your work. It will usually involve homework, “obligating” you to face your fear and practice feeling comfortable. You can find classes in colleges and universities, at community learning centers and, of course, online.

Real-world classes usually take place at set times, enabling you to pick the one that best fits your schedule. Alternatively, many online classes allow you to tune in to the lessons’ recordings whenever it’s convenient for you. Some of these provide message boards where you can get feedback, even though you won’t meet your teachers and classmates face to face.

Classes don’t always come with an exam at the end, so don’t be intimidated. Focus on the process and the opportunity to grow beyond your past limits.

Hire a private teacher

If you feel you need more personal support, hire someone to work with you one on one. If it’s a friend or a relative, you can meet at home. If it’s someone from your community, you can meet at your local library. In today’s world, you can hire someone from the other side of the world and make a new, long-distance friend while you’re learning.

If you hire someone to work only with you, it will be easier to share your concerns and discomforts. Make sure to tell your teacher why you’re hiring her or him (for example: you’re a blogger, you want to set up a blog, or you want to make changes to your blog’s design), so that the teacher can provide you with the information you really need.

Hiring a private teacher won’t necessarily be expensive. Email the computer science department in your city’s college to find a student who’s more skilled than you—or hire someone for a quick, $5 session on Fiverr.

Work for a tech support department

Many times, you can get into a tech support department with little or no experience in the area. This is easier to achieve if you find a general customer service department that also provides tech support.

In these departments, there are usually supervisors available for serious technical challenges, while the everyday challenges—those that can be solved relatively easily—are handled by the general staff. The department will usually teach you everything you need to know before you start attending to customers’ needs.

Note that “relatively easily” doesn’t mean it will be easy for you right away. When you go in for your training, it might all sound like Chinese (unless you’re already in China, in which case it might sound like Icelandic). When you go through your first call, you might politely put the customer on hold to get support from your supervisors and fellow employees.

Yet pretty soon you’ll find yourself helping people who are even less tech savvy than you are, and you’ll start to realize you can handle bigger tech projects than you could ever have imagined.

Many tech support positions enable you to work part-time, leaving you plenty of time for your blogging or other, better-paying job. If you find a company that specializes in your niche, working for them could provide you with priceless industry information and connections. Perhaps you can even pitch that company your blogging services after a while, or create some other collaboration between this company and your blog.

Create a learning group … and network while you’re at it

You might think you’re the only one who’s scared, and that others have it easier, but I guarantee you there are many more people—even bloggers—who are just as terrified or uncomfortable as you are at the thought of becoming even a bit tech savvy.

As a group, you can set goals. You can search for information online, look up tutorials on YouTube, consult with one another, and hold each other accountable. You can do all this by yourself, yet if you’re a ProBlogger reader, you know you can’t make it on the blogsphere on your own. Networking is key. Why not create a learning group and invite bloggers in your niche to participate?

You’ll be able to check two goals off your list at once.

Leverage what you’ve learned—and learn even more

Once you know the information, you can use it to grow your business. If you document your process, you’ll be able to know what worked and what didn’t, and what you learned along the way. You’ll also be able to look back and acknowledge how far you’ve travelled along the technical road.

Then, you’ll be able to teach it. Teaching others strengthens your confidence in what you’ve learned and encourages you to keep on learning. Knowing you’ll be sharing your experience or knowledge will give you the courage to keep moving forward.

To leverage what you learned, you don’t have to a class, though you could. You could also create a blog to document your progress and improve your learning process. You’ll attract people just like you, who are interested in the value you can now provide. Heck, maybe they can even teach you a thing or two by commenting on your posts!

Of course, leveraging your knowledge can be as simple as creating one single post and submitting it to a big blog as a guest post. Maybe even the blog you’re reading right now? Facing my fears of technical mumbo jumbo got me published on ProBlogger twice—three times if you count the post you’re reading now.

The result? Not only does Google love me more (aww, Google!), but the feedback I received for the tutorial series I published here earlier this year encourages me to keep challenging myself, and make this technical mumbo jumbo a little more Ayelet-friendly.

If I can do it, you can do it! Do you know any other ways to overcome tech fears? Tell us in the comments.

Ayelet Weisz is an enthusiastic freelance writer, blogger and screenwriter. She celebrates the everyday and extraordinary joys of life on her travel blog, All Colores. Be sure to stop by and connect with her on Twitter.

Written on 10/28/2012 at 12:09 am by

Why My First Blog Failed … and What You Can Learn from My Mistakes

Filed Under: Miscellaneous Blog Tips

This guest post is by Ali Luke of Aliventures.

Where do you hope blogging will take you?

I’m thrilled that blogging’s got me to where I am today—with a successful full-time business, a bunch of ebooks, a membership site, guest posts on major blogs, two speaker appearances at BlogWorld, and a published book Publishing E-Books For Dummies).

To other bloggers, it might look like I’ve been successful.

And I have definitely had my share of success … but, like every single blogger you can think of,I’ve also had my share of failures.

Today, I’m going to tell you about my very first blog. It failed … but I learned a huge amount from the experience.

Here’s how it happened, and what you can learn from my mistakes.

Where I began

Like most new bloggers, I had a day job when I started out. I wasn’t too happy in my day job, and for a while, I’d been thinking about ways to make money doing something I loved—writing.

I came across the idea of “pro-blogging” online—and promptly devoured most of ProBlogger’s archives. I was fired up with the idea of becoming a blogger, and immediately pictured a book deal and a six-figure income.

But I made three big mistakes…

Mistake #1: Too much of a focus on money

Instead of thinking up a topic I could write on for years and years, I chose one that I was sure would make money: healthy eating and weight loss.

This was back in late 2007, when the conventional blogging advice was to choose a niche – as narrow a niche as possible.

I named my blog The Office Diet (if you’re really curious, it’s still online—www.theofficediet.com) and focused on writing about healthy living for office workers. For me, this was too narrow a niche: I was starting to lose interest after a few months.

Learning point

Money matters—but so does love! Don’t just choose a blogging niche because you think it will be commercial … choose one that gives you room to grow.

You might even want to go for a blog title that gives you scope to shift and change your perspective, in case you start to lose interest in your initial topic.

Mistake #2: No real business plan

I was very keen to monetize my blog … but I didn’t have much idea of how to go about that. I’d been reading Steve Pavlina’s blog at the time, and he made most of his money through advertising, so I decided to go down the same route.

I signed up for Google AdSense, popped some ad units into my blog’s sidebar, and waited for the money to start coming in.

And waited.

And waited.

In the end, it took me eleven months of blogging—five times a week at first (I later dropped to three posts a week) before I got my very first check from Google.

Since then, I’ve become much more business-savvy. Instead of seeing my blog itself as something that will produce money, as if by magic, I’ve realised that I need to use my blog as a marketing tool to support my business.

Learning point

Blogs are a wonderful way to market and grow your business—through writing great content that draws people to your products or services.

Advertising can bring in some extra cash, but it’s not going to be a big revenue stream unless you have a massive blog. For most of us, it’s much easier to build a successful small business than to build a blog with hundreds of thousands of subscribers.

Mistake #3: No interaction with readers

When I began my blog, I decided to switch comments off. I’d seen some big bloggers do this due to being overwhelmed with comments—and I figured I might as well do it at the start. I was convinced that before long, I would have tons of traffic, and hundreds of people commenting on every post.

Looking back, I can’t quite believe I was so big-headed! Of course, my blog didn’t take off overnight … and I lost out on a potentially very useful resource: reader feedback.

Believe it or not, I managed to take this mistake even further. By this point, I’d realized that I was making just pennies with Google AdSense (partly due to my niche – weight loss ads don’t pay well – and I hadn’t thought to research this before starting the blog).

So, I launched an ebook.

It didn’t occur to me to ask my readers what they might want to read. I just wrote the ebook that I thought they needed.

Of course, it went down like carrot sticks at a chocolate-lovers’ convention. I made a few sales, but nothing like what I’d hoped for (even after I cut the price from $10 to just $4).

Learning point

Your readers are the lifeblood of your blog. Treasure their comments—especially in the early days of your blog. Seek their feedback when you’re deciding what to post about, and always survey them when you’re at the brainstorming stage of creating a product. You might well find that what they want is very different from what you thought they’d want!

As you can imagine, by this point, I’d become a bit disillusioned with my blog. I was struggling to come up with ideas for new posts, because I was losing interest in my topic.

I’d tried pitching a book idea, but (unsurprisingly) the publisher just wasn’t interested—my readership stats really weren’t impressive.

And, of course, I wasn’t making much money.

The blog had failed.

But … that’s not the full story. Because some very good things had come out of my blogging, despite all those mistakes I’d made.

This is what I’d managed to get right.

#1: Guest posting led to freelance blogging

I started guest posting very early in the life of my blog (about a month after launching it). By the luck of being in the right place at the right time, I landed two paid blogging gigs.

I managed to build on these to get more paying, regular writing work … and about nine months after launching that first blog, I quit my day job. My blog itself wasn’t making money, but my blogging for other people had resulted in a steady income.

While I had a bit of an advantage here over some bloggers – I have an English Literature degree, and I’ve always been a confident writer—I strongly believe that paid blogging is accessible to anyone with a good standard of English.

#2: Freelance blogging led to my first successful ebook

I found that people were very interested in how I got paid blogging work, so I wrote an ebook about that – and this one was much more successful. (I updated this ebook last year—if you’re interested, it’s The Blogger’s Guide to Freelancing.)

By this point, I was beginning to get a name for myself as someone who wrote about blogging and writing, which led to…

#3: My ebook led to my blog

In 2009, I launched a new blog, Aliventures. I already had the domain name, as Aliventures was the name of my business.

Of course, I made plenty of mistakes with that blog too – but I managed to apply all the things I’d learned from my first blog, The Office Diet, and from my second blog (that lasted all of a couple of months), which was called Alpha Student.

I was able to get readers much more quickly, plus I had lots of strong connections through guest posting and through Twitter.

Even better, I now write about topics that inspired me. To begin with, I focused on personal development, but then I switched my focus to writing, blogging and publishing. Because the blog had a brand-style name, Aliventures, rather than a keyword-rich name like The Office Diet, it was easy for me to make this shift.

And four years on from starting my very first “pro” blog, I finally got that book deal I’d been hoping for. My book Publishing E-Books For Dummies came out last month, and it’s wonderful to be an author for such a major brand.

What I want you to remember

This post has been very much about me, so I wanted to end with what’s important for you. If you don’t remember anything else from this post, remember this part:

It’s always frustrating when things don’t go as well as we’d like, and if you’re struggling to get more than a handful of readers, you might well be tempted to give up.

Don’t.

Even small successes count. If you only have ten people on your mailing list, or ten subscribers to your blog, that’s still ten people who are enjoying your writing. Imagine sitting at them with a table in a restaurant—it’s not such a small number!

And every time you step outside your comfort zone and try something new—from joining Twitter to writing your first guest post—you take a step that could lead to somewhere amazing.

Thomas Edison, who invented the lightbulb, didn’t get it right the first time. Or the tenth time, or even the hundredth time. But he didn’t give up. He said, “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”

Whether you’ve been blogging for a few days or a few years, you’ll have had some successes—even if, like many of mine, they were a bit unexpected! Even if you’ve made a few mistakes, you’ll have learned a huge amount.

Share your best blogging experiences with us in the comments, so we can all learn from one another, and celebrate our successes together.

Ali Luke is a writer and blogger from the UK. If you’d like to take your writing and blogging further, join her newsletter to access her library of free mini-ebooks, including Ten Powerful Ways to Make Your Blog Posts Stronger, Ten Easy Ways to Attract Readers to Your Blog … And Keep Them There and more!

Written on 10/27/2012 at 6:02 am by

How to Fail Productively as a Blogger

Filed Under: Miscellaneous Blog Tips

This guest post is by Bea Kylene Jumarang of Writing Off the Rails.

During one of my blocks of free time, I found myself watching a video from Tim Harford, an economist and a writer. In it, he was discussing his three rules for failing productively, and those rules were the beginning of a love affair for me.

Before you think I fell in love with him, that’s not it. I fell in love with the rules, and they’ve changed my life for the better.

Today, I’d like to share those rules with you, along with a concrete process for applying them to your blogging. It’s my hope that if you care to listen to what this post says, the rules and the process will change your life too.

What you’ll need

  • a spreadsheet or a pen and notebook for your log, though spreadsheets are better
  • the faithfulness to actually log things (more on this later)
  • honesty (very important).

Tim Harford’s three rules—blogger’s edition

1. Be willing to fail a lot

If you’re blogging for the long haul, I can guarantee that you’ll run into hundreds, if not thousands of setbacks. Dozens of your posts will languish without comments, your analytics will be a constant flatline, and it will seem like no one really gives a darn. What matters is that you’ll chug on despite everything.

In simple words, be willing to fail—a lot.

2. Fail on a survivable scale

This rule can mean two different things, depending on what stage you’re at with your blog.

If you’re still a beginner, congratulations. You’re already failing on a very survivable scale. It’s unlikely that a bad post will kill your blog, so you’d better appreciate the benefits of smallness.

On the other hand, if you’re a big blogger, you’ll take a little bit more care. Hopefully, you’ll use your experience to the full, and by this time, you should already know what works along with what doesn’t. If you plan to take a risk, put thought into it so you’ll fail in a way that you and your blog can survive.

3. Make sure you have what it takes to spot a failure, and fix it, early

Don’t let issues or problems fester. As soon as you identify something that needs correction, get to correcting. The faster you respond to a crisis, the faster you can learn and deal with its potential repercussions.

Also, don’t close yourself off from the problems other people point out. When they tell you something needs action, act on it, instead of pushing your own primacy over the situation.

A process for productive failure

1. Know your systems, behaviors, and habits

As I said in the introduction, failures are incredibly important as revision triggers. They tell us that something needs to change, and that action needs to be taken. That said, you’ll never maximize a failure’s usefulness if you just let it pass you by like a little tumbleweed.

Instead of pushing the failure to the back of your mind, bring it to the forefront. In fact, log it.

Remember the notebook or the spreadsheet? This is your time to use it.

For the next week, just log your failures. Relevant data points include the following, though this list is just a suggestion. Feel free to customize and add!

  • Time in/out: useful to see how much time you actually spend on a task
  • When you did the task: so you can see when you’re most productive
  • Type of task: post writing, editing, formatting, research, etc.
  • Word counts: to see how much you achieve
  • Remarks: note any important details about a task
  • Failures: whether you were able to do something needed, or not
  • Length of material: you might log based on the length of a Kindle book (e.g. 790 locations), or how long a PDF is (e.g. 210 pages).

For the Failures part of your log, you can do the logging in a text editor or something like that. Just make a note in your log whenever you didn’t do something you were supposed to. You’ll see why this is important in Step 2 of this process.

How can you keep up the motivation to log stuff? Make things easy for yourself. As soon as you boot up your laptop, open your spreadsheet. Before you start a task, enter your time in, and remember to enter the time out when you’re done.

In my personal experience, just seeing the spreadsheet on my taskbar has been enough motivation. There will be times when you forget to log things, and that’s alright. Don’t beat yourself up, but keep logging as much as you can.

As an important note, don’t do anything to your log yet. Logging is not the time to reflect. Like Tony Stark says in the Avengers movie, “I can’t do the equation unless I have all the variables.”

Wait for the variables, alright? No equations yet.

2. Make sense of the data

After one week of logging, you should have a pretty detailed spreadsheet, with all the data points that matter to you. Now that you have enough information, it’s time for analysis and reflection. Below are some suggested questions to ask yourself as you review that data.

  • How much time does it take me to write n words? This is useful for future estimates to clients who ask you how long a project will take, for example, as well as for your own time planning.
  • How much  time do I usually spend on email and other online tasks? I can guarantee, this will probably be a shock to you.
  • How much time does it take me to do research? Again, useful for future time estimates.
  • What times of the day am I most productive? This can be a general answer, like “in the afternoon,” or a specific answer like 4:30 to 5:10 pm.

Once you’re done with these questions, you probably have a reasonable overview of your real behaviors and limits. What you discover may be intuitively known to you, or it may come as a complete surprise. The point is, now you finally know the truth, and you can back up what you know with data.

As far as your failures go, this is the time to be honest with yourself. Find the real reasons for why you failed. No one will see your log anyway, so there’s no reason to lie. What matters is that you’ll finally get an idea of your real excuses, strengths, and pain points, which will be valuable in the quest for improvement.

3. Adapt

There’s no point in all your logging and reflection if you aren’t willing to act on what you’ve just learned. All the data in the world won’t matter if you just let the information languish. Because of that, it’s time for you to create your plan for improvement, and to chart your new course based on the realizations you’ve arrived at.

Below are some actions you can take.

  • Revise schedules: commit more or less time to certain tasks.
  • Take on more or fewer clients: this is linked to the data on how much you can actually handle without failing too much or being too stressed out.
  • Lower or raise your word count goals: if you see that you can’t handle 2000 words in one session, then lower your word quota.

The last thing to do, of course, is to implement your action plan, and then log the results. See if you’re less stressed, happier, or anything like that. Just make sure to note what happens.

4. Keep failing

Tim’s first rule is to be willing to fail a lot. Inherent in that rule is the need to keep trying new things, and yes, to fall in love with trial and error.

You see, according to Tim, complex things often benefit from such an approach. In the first place, trial and error gives you a very definite result, e.g. it worked or it didn’t work. And though it may sound pretty surprising, blogging is actually a complex thing. In fact, I view it as a complex system, and evaluating my results often makes me use systematic thinking.

If you don’t believe me, have a think about how many variables are in the equation. You have things like search engine optimization, social media influence, number of newsletter subscribers, heck, even the keywords in your domain are a variable.

That said though, maximizing trial and error necessitates having many things to test out. If you’re wondering about how to do that, I have short process outlined below.

  • Brainstorm a list of new actions or directions you’ll take. Examples might include “I’ll publish an infographic instead of a text post” and “I’ll do a shorter post than usual.”
  • During brainstorming, don’t let fear crush you. Just let all the ideas out. Ideas don’t need to be subjected to judgment during the initial stages.
  • Refine your list. Select the directions that are appropriate for your present situation.
  • Apply your selected actions and monitor the results. If you want to be able to evaluate things more effectively, see the resources heading on systems thinking below.

Resources for further reading

This resource list introduces you to systems and design thinking plus the work of Tim Harford. Taken collectively, these resources have made my blogging and my life infinitely better.

  • Trial, error and the God complex: This is a talk from Tim Harford, delivered at TEDGlobal 2011 in Edinborough. It remains one of my favorites from TED, and I listen to it every day.
  • Tim Harford’s books: I love these. The one that applies most to this blog post is his book titled Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure.
  • Design thinking … what is that?: This piece is from Fast Company, and it’s best used at stage 4 in the productive failure process.
  • Introduction to systems thinking: From Pegasus Communications, this is an excellent overview of the subject. It’s best used to learn better ways of evaluating your results.

Please feel free to comment and share your thoughts. Do you do any of these things already? Are you conscious about learning from failure in a systematic way? Let us know in the comments.

Bea Kylene Jumarang is a blogger and fiction writer, obsessed with connecting writing to everything else. When she’s not writing at Starbucks, she’s investigating fonts for her upcoming e-book, Techified : Silicon Valley’s Secret Guide to Writing. If you want first dibs at the book, head on over to the Facebook page for her new blog’s launch. Once the blog goes live, you’ll be the first to know. You’ll also get the e-book, along with even more free stuff!

Written on 10/27/2012 at 12:00 am by

Weekend Project: Learning to Fail

Filed Under: Featured Posts, Miscellaneous Blog Tips

This weekend, we’re taking a different approach with our weekend project, and touching on a topic that I think is overlooked a lot in blogging.

Escape key

Image courtesy stock.xchng user michaelaw

And that’s failure.

In a world like this, where it’s so easy to try new things out—new social networks, new product ideas, and so on—it’s also very, very easy to fail.

Gone are the days when we’d get a standard education before we went out to work in a particular field. In fact, as I explained at a recent careers night, my Marketing degree was the first big thing I failed in!

…but it wasn’t the last. As I explain in that interview, I spent my early years in a kind of “chaos” as I pursued all kinds of different interests. Many of them didn’t end in great “achievements”, which I guess you could take to mean that I failed in them, too.

At the time, my parents were eager for me to settle down—to pick something and stick with it. We’ve probably all heard this advice at some point, and in some ways it seems very closely related to this idea of not “failing.” For a lot of people, simply following through with something—whether it’s working, or whether you enjoy it or not—is better than “failing” by dropping it. Dropping something is often seen as giving up, even when it makes perfectly good sense to do so.

So there’s a lot of baggage around failure. And this weekend, we aim to clear some of it out, so you have room to fail—and learn—in your blogging journey.

The half-full glass

It sounds patronizing, but I’ve found that when it comes to failing at something, a good way to stop yourself from focusing on the negatives is to look at what you’ve learned.

I know that can sound trite‚ especially if the thing that hasn’t worked out is something you’re heavily invested in—financially or personally.

But it’s true. I’ve started more than 20 blogs now, and obviously most of them haven’t lasted. Does that mean they’re failures? To you, maybe. To me, they were part of the proving ground that helped me develop the skills to become better at some things, and even have some successes later. In this way, blogging’s kind of like being employed—each job you take on helps you build skills that lead to the next job, and over time, help you develop a career.

Of course, within each job—or each blogging task—there are plenty of opportunities not to succeed, and as they say, you can’t win them all. If you did, you wouldn’t be learning anything.

Now, you might be thinking, “That’d be great—I’d love to know it all!” But we all have to start somewhere, and the only way to progress is through good old trial and error.

The important thing, though, is to learn from those errors, and to feed back those learnings into what you do next—or next time.

Surf the learning curve

It can be tough to handle failure—and in blogging, failure can be a very public thing. Even if your failures aren’t major show-stoppers, it can be really hard to persist when you seem to be faced with little failure after little failure. Sometimes we go through phases where nothing we try seems to work. And if we don’t know why, that can be very disheartening.

That’s why it’s so important to learn to manage failure as a blogger. At any one time, you might have several fronts to fail on—you might be trying a new ad network or a different post style, tweaking your social media strategy, floating a new product idea with your audience, trying to grow your subscription rates—the list goes on.

My approach is always to try to learn something from the failure. Even if I can’t work out what went wrong, I try to use the failure to direct my future efforts. So maybe I’ll try a different approach to using the same process or tool next time—or maybe I’ll decide to try a different approach or tool altogether, in the hopes of finding one that works for me and my blog.

I think taking the time to reflect on the failure is important, too. Otherwise, you can easily fall into the trap of just banging your head up against a brick wall, rather than thinking creatively about other ways you could achieve your goals.

There’s certainly a lot to think about when it comes to blogging failure, so I hope you’ll enjoy this weekend’s posts. In them, we’ll cover:

But first up, I’d love to hear how you handle failure as a blogger. Be honest—we’ve all done it, and we can all learn from each other. So we’d love to hear your stories and secrets for learning to fail.

Written on 10/22/2012 at 12:08 am by

Bounce Rates High? Why?

Filed Under: Featured Posts, Miscellaneous Blog Tips

Most bloggers I know want to reduce their bounce rates. Sometimes it can seem as if it doesn’t matter what the bounce rate for a page actually is, we want it to be lower!

Bounce

Image courtesy stock.xchng user ColinBroug

While it’s a stretch to expect we’ll hit a zero bounce rate, for most bloggers, it is worth looking at your bounce rates regularly, and trying to find ways to reduce them where appropriate.

While blogging’s about people—not just numbers—bounce rates can give you hints about the ways individuals are using your blog, and where you can help them out. In this post, I’d like to explain that in a bit more detail.

What is a bounce?

You undoubtedly know what a bounce is—a user who lands on our page from an external source, then leaves our blog without looking at any other pages. It’s a “single pageview” usage of our site.

But what does a bounce mean?

  • Did the reader get what they came for, and leave?
  • Were they disappointed by what they saw on your blog page?
  • Did they arrive at the page expecting to see something else?
  • Is the content current and compelling—and clearly so?
  • Is it clear from a single glance at the page what your blog is, does, and delivers?
  • Are there clear paths from that page to other actions or information that are likely to meet the needs of target users?
  • Are the bouncers regular readers who check out all your posts, so each time they just come to the latest one, read it, and go again>

Understanding the possible reasons for the bounce is an important step in doing something to reduce the bounce rate itself. Let’s look at a case study from ProBlogger to see exactly how the diagnosis of reasons for a high bounce rate can go.

The bounces, and the page

On a usual trawl through the site’s stats one month, I spotted this:

Bounce rate stats

These stats were for a single month. As you can see, this page attracted some good views, and almost 95% of them were from new visitors! But the bounce rate was really high, the time on site low, and the average visit duration? Terrible!

My first thought was to visit the page itself. It didn’t take me long to find a few issues—let’s step through some of the main ones I found (note that I’ve updated the post since, so these items have been addressed on the live page):

  • The opening dated the article. This piece has a publication date of 2008, but even if the new visitors didn’t see that, the opening, which would have been fine at that time, was written when I was a Twitter newbie—not ideal these days!
  • This problem was amplified by the outdated Twitter follower number I’d quoted. I mentioned in the post that I had 5500 followers; now that number’s over 160,000.
  • I’d included a link to Twitip in the opening. This immediately pulled readers through to one of my other sites, which doesn’t generate any income. While the content had been valuable, that site’s a bit dated now, due to a lack of regular updates. It certainly seemed smarter to try to keep these new visitors on problogger.com a bit longer, rather than syphon them off to Twitip.
  • Much of the content in the article itself was dated.
  • The post didn’t provide many links to other great articles we have on topics like Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and other social networks, and social network engagement strategies, here at ProBlogger—simply because that information wasn’t available back in 2008 when I’d written the post.

Yep, this page was pretty outdated! But I bet most sites that have been around for a while will probably have a page or two that are in a similar state.

Sources of bouncing traffic

Okay, so I knew I had a problem with the content of the page—and there were plenty of opportunities to improve it. But in order to make the right improvements—improvements that would give me the best chance of reducing that bounce rate by actually meeting individuals’ expectations—I wanted to know what the users were expecting to see when they came to the page. What needs did they have?

So I took a look at the traffic sources for the page:

Traffic sources

This was interesting. For any blog that gets a lot of its new traffic from search engines, you might expect the main traffic source to be Google. And when I first looked at the page in question, I’d imagined that most of the traffic to this page was coming from search and being pulled to Twitip. In fact, the traffic was coming from Twitip.

Understanding how the page is being used

Now I was getting a pretty clear idea of how this page was being used, and why the bounce rate was so high.

Twitip users were following a link from that site to this article. The second paragraph of the post was directing them right back to Twitip. In that case, would they feel that ProBlogger was more of an authority on Twitter than Twitip? Not likely. No wonder the bounce rate was so high!

But, as expected, Google was also among the top three referrers, and that traffic had a bounce rate of more than 90%.

Beyond content

Knowing that this page was being visited mainly by new users, it was worth looking beyond the content itself, to the page’s layout, branding, and design.

This page is laid out in the same way as the others on my blog, many of which—even if they mainly attract new users—don’t have such high bounce rates. This suggests that the layout probably isn’t the problem.

Now, the major call to action—the main point of engagement and interaction—on my blog’s content pages is to comment. Comments had long since closed on this post, so users may have struggled to find their way to other relevant content on the site at the post’s end. I’d included a Further Reading list there, but the articles were no longer current.

Yet, given how outdated the post was, and the tiny average visit duration, I guessed the visitors I was getting probably weren’t making it that far through the post anyway.

Understanding your bounces

As you can see, a little sleuthing can go a long way in helping you to understand the reasons for high bounce rates.

I try not to be thrown into a panic by the numbers alone. When I look a little deeper, I usually hit on more information that can help you take action on the bounces—if indeed that’s what you want.

In the case of this page, we made some tweaks to bring the content up to date an try to draw search traffic more deeply into the site.

But the reality for the high bounce rate from Twitip users is this: Twitip targets a different audience from ProBlogger. While it’s not unlikely that bloggers will read Twitip, that site is at once far more focused (Twitter tips only!) than this one, and more broad (it targets anyone who wants to use Twitter better—which could include casual, social users of the network, right through to online marketers in corporate environments).

So while ProBlogger contains Twitter tips, to try to convert traffic from Twitip into readers of this blog is probably a bit of a challenge. The two audiences want different things. While it was definitely worthwhile updating the ProBlogger post, the Twitip audience, on the whole, probably isn’t going to be interested in what we’re doing over here.

And that’s an important thing to realise: not all bounces are bad, and not all need addressing. Many do and will, and they’re the ones you’re better to spend your time trying to fix. But you won’t be able to work out which ones they are unless you take a few minutes to dig into the facts behind the bounces in the first place—to think about the individual users behind the numbers.

What do you do about your blog’s bounce rates? Have you been able to lower bounce rates through any specific tactics? I’d love to hear your tips in the comments.

Written on 10/21/2012 at 12:07 am by

What New Bloggers Can Learn From Some of History’s Greatest Minds

Filed Under: Miscellaneous Blog Tips

This guest post is by Kate Miller of BestWebsiteHostingServices.org.

Today’s new bloggers are a fortunate group. The blogging community is swarming with a plethora of experienced bloggers who they can turn to for advice, tips and DIY tutorials. These bloggers are the thought-leaders, renegades and early-adopters of the industry. Turning to them to learn the ropes of the blogosphere is a no-brainer.

But what about those thought-leaders and renegades for whom the concept of blogging, much less computers, was inconceivable? Believe or not, there is much to learn from some of the greatest minds in history when breaking into the blogging world. Just take a look at some of this advice.

“One can win the attention and time and cooperation of even the most sought after people by becoming genuinely interested in them.”—Dale Carnegie, How To Win Friends & Influence People

One of the most valuable assets for a new blogger is having someone they can turn to as a mentor who’ll take them under their wing. Nothing can beat the one-on-one personal advice of an accomplished blogger.

Have a blogger you admire and wish you could learn from personally? Do as Mr. Carnegie suggests and become genuinely interested in him or her. Read every blog post he publishes and comment in a relevant, valuable way. Don’t hesitate to reach out with a thoughtful email, but don’t become a nuisance.

You just may be surprised by the attention and willingly helpful attitude you are met with in return.

“Opportunity is missed by most because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.”—Thomas Edison

Any weathered blogger can tell you that there is no such thing as overnight success. Blogs that are worth reading don’t just emerge without a lot of hard work and dirtying of the feet going on behind the scenes.

Between learning your way around whatever blog platform you use, deciding on your niche and content, researching the nuances of html, learning to decipher the lexicon and so much more, the work can seem endless. However, the payoff can be immense and those that are willing to don their overalls and jump right in will be the ones to enjoy the fruits of their labors first.

“I have been up against tough competition all my life. I wouldn’t know how to get along without it.”—Walt Disney

In March of 2012, Nielsen published findings which tracked over 181 million blogs around the world. That’s a lot of competition!

Fortunately, there is an infinite amount of space on the web and as such, there is room for all bloggers. No matter how saturated you feel your niche may be, you can carve out your own spot for success. Accept that you’ll have competition, embrace it, and learn how to get along with it. It will push you in new ways as you strive to rise above the fray. Keep at it and someday you’ll not know how to get along without it either.

“The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.”—Martin Luther King

Unless your blog readership consists of only your cats and your grandma, it’s safe to assume that you will, at one point or another, be challenged by a reader. Facing controversy is a very likely scenario as well. Just ask any blogger who has unwillingly become the center of a firestorm of internet criticism.

When you begin blogging, remember that you are putting your thoughts and ideas out into a public space. Just as you wouldn’t yell fire into a crowded room without expecting some kind of outrage, so should you approach your blogging. But also realize that challenge and controversy is nothing to fear. In fact, many a blogger has a made name for him or herself because of controversy. Be prepared for it and then write away!

“The most effective way to do it, is to do it.”—Amelia Earhart

Just get out there and do it! Hesitating to pull the trigger on making your blog live because the layout isn’t quite right? Nervous about leaving a comment or joining a link-up? Scared that your first guest post attempt will be rejected?

Let go of all of that and just do it. You will most certainly never become an effective blogger if you don’t get out in the blogging world to begin with. If Amelia Earhart could get up in the air; you can absolutely hit the Publish button!

Do you know any other quotes or advice from great minds throughout history that you think would be helpful to newbie bloggers? If so, share them in the comments.

Kate Miller is a blogger and writer for BestWebsiteHostingServices.org, a site dedicated to helping users find their ideal web host through the web host match survey, a tool that automatically compares hundreds of hosting providers to find the best one for the user.

Written on 10/20/2012 at 12:03 am by

How to Work With Technical Contractors

Filed Under: Miscellaneous Blog Tips

This guest post is by Neil Matthews of wpdude.com.

The majority of work to run a WordPress blog can be done by non-technical people, but about 20% of the work requires in-depth knowledge of the technology that sits underneath the hood of a WordPress site. This is when many blog owners call in technical support from developers.

There is a good chance that you have never hired someone to provide technical support for your blog, so this post is designed to give you pointers to successfully work with technical contractors when the time comes.

Set a project specification

The specification you pass to your contractors can make or break the project. Here are some pointers to help you create a foolproof spec.

Be thorough

The spec needs to be detailed enough so that your contractors can translate your requests into technical action items.  This is often overwhelming for people who are trying to convey technical information, but don’t have the technical vocabulary to do it.

The good news is that you don’t need to get technical if you are working with a good team. They should have enough experience to translate your request into geek and fix your problems.

The simplest way to start is to break down your project into manageable chunks and list them, with a brief description for each.

Sometimes I receive one-line vague requests or imperious demands to “call me” as a specification. That is always a red flag to me. If a potential client can’t spell out their requirements, it usually means they are going to be difficult to work with. Keep your techies happy by spelling out your needs thoroughly.

Use screen grabs or screencasts

I recommend adding screen dumps and screen casts to your specification, it helps to stop a lot of misunderstandings. A great free tool for this is Jing, which allows you to grab areas of your screen to send to your contactor as a link, or even record quick videos of your screen to point out exactly what you need.

Some of the best project specifications I have received are two- or three-minute screen casts of the problem my client wants fixed.

Point to examples

If you want something for your site that you have seen on someone else’s blog, send a link.

Your technician should be able to reverse-engineer how that feature was implemented and suggest a plugin or other solution to give you the same results.

Ask for confirmation they understand your spec

Ask your contractor to confirm that they understand your specification and for them to explain what they will do in technical terms to meet your requirements.

This is particularly important if you are outsourcing to countries where the native language is different from your own.

Use their expertise

If you are not sure how something can be done (or if it it technically possible) spell out what you want and ask if it can be done.  Your developer should be able to make a recommendation and give you a price.

Get fixed-price quotes

If you are new to outsourcing technical work, get a fixed-price quote rather than by-the-hour work. This will prevent any unpleasant shocks at the cost of your project.

There are unscrupulous techies out there who will run the clock up on people who don’t understand the technicalities of development. The solution is a fixed price project. Don’t pay for everything up-front (but expect to pay a deposit), and only pay the balance upon completion to your satisfaction.

Also look for some sort of guarantee. If the techie can’t fix your issue, expect a no-fix, no-fee guarantee. It is for them to decide if a project is feasible; sometimes it cannot be fixed and your money should be refunded.

Information you need to supply

There are certain credentials and other information that you will need to pass to  your contactor so they can work on your site.

Admin-level login

Your developers will need an admin-level user id and password so they can get access to your site to make any changes. 

I recommend to my clients that they create a new user ID for the duration of the project and pass that to me and my team, rather than giving out their own admin user ID. Then they can delete this login ID once the project is complete.

Control panel hosting login

If your contactor needs to work on the database or backend items such as the DNS setup of your system, they will need to have access to  your backend database and hosting account.

Again, I recommend creating a new user ID for the duration of the project. Check out your hosting setup: some companies like Godaddy or Dreamhost allow delegation of the control panel to other users so you don’t need to create a new ID.

If you have to pass over your hosting credentials, change the password during the project and swap it back once the contactor is done.

FTP details

If your contractor needs to upload any files to your site, they will need to have FTP credentials. Most hosting control panels have an area where you can create a new FTP user.

Create a specific user for your developers, don’t pass over your main FTP credentials.

Security

I’ve talked a lot about temporary passwords, so let’s talk about broader security issues.

I’m not suggesting technical people are nefarious by nature and will try to hack your site once your back is turned, but if you passwords start to be passed around and shared with contractors, the chance they might be compromised increases.

Ask your contractor to delete all references to passwords from their inbox. We do this as a matter of course, but many people simply archive details in their inboxes.

If you are concerned about this, check out Lastpass.com. This service keeps your password safe while allowing you to share them with contractors.

Managing expectations

If you’ve never hired someone to do technical work for you, then you will have no idea what kind of communication to expect. It’s a good idea to spell out to your contractor what kind of communication you would like, to keep you in the loop.

Managing that expectation can help to alleviate the stress of outsourcing technical work. Often it seems the contractor has disappeared into a black hole and no progress is being made. This is probably not true—they may be working on a development version of your site, or the work may be invisible to you.

There’s nothing wrong with asking your contractor to report in at the end of each day with a progress report on what they have achieved and what still needs to be done.

If you’re outsourcing across time zones, more communication is vital.  I’m based in the UK and most of my clients are from the US, so I find being open and communicative about time zones and when I’m ending for the day is very helpful.

What not to do

If you want the relationship with your technical team to work, there are a couple of things you should avoid:

Avoid scope creep

Write your specification correctly from the beginning of the project. If you forget something and try to slip it in mid-project, you might get push back from your contractor.

It’s a common tactic by some shady characters to add items mid way through a project to try and get them done for free. I’m sure you are not one of those people, so include them in the spec at the project’s beginning. If you forget it, ask your contractor to update the original quote.

Don’t micro-manage

Hand over the project and relax a little. Micro-managing your contractors and monitoring every aspect of their work is a pain in the behind for you and for them.

You are paying professionals to do a job, so don’t give yourself more work managing them. They don’t need hand-holding—let them do what you paid them to do.

Don’t double-guess project time and costs

Nothing annoys a techie more than someone saying “I’m sure this will only take you 30 minutes since you are the expert.”  You should expect to pay for their expertise, not their time.

If you are worried about run-away costs, ask for a fixed price quotation.

Make the daunting manageable

Outsourcing technical work can be daunting the first time you do it.  Trying to work with someone babbling in octal when you want to achieve blogging business results can be tough.

Get the spec right from the beginning and be prepared to pass over control to the technical team. It can save you a lot of headaches, and help you get the best job for your money.

This is a guest post by Neil Matthews, owner of wpdude.com, a WordPress technical support firm.

Written on 10/19/2012 at 12:02 am by

Blogging Isn’t a Numbers Game: It’s a People Game

Filed Under: Featured Posts, Miscellaneous Blog Tips

Last month I had the privilege of attending one of the biggest events in Australia—the AFL (Australian Football League) Grand Final. For those of you outside Australia, it’s kind of like the Superbowl of Aussie football (without all the cool ads and wardrobe malfunctions…).

Anyway, I was a guest (with my wife “V”) at the event of Virgin Australia and it was quite the experience.

The game is held at the MCG (a stadium in Melbourne) and was attended by 99,683 people.

During the Nathional Anthem moments before the game started

I don’t know if you’ve had the experience of being in a crowd close to 100,000 people, but it is a pretty amazing thing to be a part of—especially when so many of them are so passionate about supporting their team to win the season’s ultimate prize.

The game starts

As I sat there in that frenzy of flag-waving, face-painted, screaming fans it was easy to look at the crowd and almost see them as a single unit. Within an hour or so, the stadium had been transformed from a quiet, empty place into one that was teaming with life.

Buddy Franklin (one of the biggest AFL stars) takes a ‘Mark’ early in the game

However that crowd was actually made up of almost 100,000 small parts. Each person in attendance had entered through the turnstiles that day, one by one, having made their way to the stadium from around the city (and in some cases, from around the country). Each one came in their own unique way, with their own unique story, and their own unique expectations of what was about to unfold at the Grand Final.

Within seconds to go the game was tied up – this vital contest led to a goal that sealed the match for the Sydney Swans.

Each one also had their own experience of the day. For some, those expectations were exceeded as their team won. Others left the stadium dejected after seeing their team lose.

This was highlighted to me at the end of the game, particularly when I watched these two fans celebrating with such emotion.

Tension – it went down to the wire

Emotion – the win is in sight

Jubilation – the final siren sounds and pandaemonium breaks lose around us

It strikes me that all this is true for the “crowds” that read our blogs, too.

I was chatting with one blogger at the ProBlogger Training Event in Melbourne recently and they told me that they’d just passed the 100,000-visitors-in-a-month milestone. As we chatted, I told her that that’s enough people to fill the MCG, and an amazing thing!

However it is good to also remember when we celebrate these milestones that the crowds (whether they be 100, 10,000, 100,000, or 10,000,000) are actually more than just a number—they’re made up of individual readers.

The total “unique visitors” stat that many of us use to measure the success of our blogs is actually made up of real people who arrive, one by one, on our blogs.

  • They have unique journeys, and arrive from different places.
  • They each arrives at a different part of our blog (many on our archives).
  • They each come with their own set of needs that they’re looking to fulfil.
  • Each person has been shaped by their own stories and experiences.
  • Each has his or her own expectations of what the experience of your blog will be like.

Keeping this in mind as you blog is so important—it should shape the way that you write, the way that you build community, the way that you find new readers, and even the way that you monetize.

Don’t get too wrapped up in the overall number of visitors (big or small). Instead, focus upon the individuals who make up the crowd, and you’ll create something that not only grows, but really impacts the lives of those who read it.

A big thanks to Virgin Australia for the experience of going to the Grand Final – an experience of a lifetime.