In my last video post I spoke about the benefits of using talking head video posts on a blog. Today in this video I want to respond to many questions I get about the technical setup that I use for my videos here on ProBlogger.

My set up is very basic (and I’m sure it can be improved), but the results seem to work well. I get a lot of comments on them, and questions about factors like which camera I use, what lighting I have, whether I use a microphone, and so on. As I say, I’m no tech-head so I go with the basics, but I hope you find it useful.

I’d love to hear what setup you use for your talking head videos too!

Related video: What Camera Am I Using for My Videos?

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

The Technical Setup Behind My Videos on ProBlogger

One of the types of posts that I’ve created quite a few of over the last few years here on ProBlogger is the “talking head” video post—like the one you see above.

In this video I talk a little about some of the benefits of using video in this way on your blog.

In a couple of future videos I’ll be giving some tips on how to create these videos (or at least show you how I make mine), plus some ideas about how to talk to camera without feeling completely awkward.

I’d love to hear if and how you use video, particularly talking head videos, on your blogs too.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

The Benefits of Creating Talking Head Videos for Your Blog

I tweeted the above statement a few weeks back and it got so much traction I decided to create this video on the topic.

The idea for the video came out of the a Skype chat session I had with five readers who all worked through the 31 Days to Build a Better Blog workbook together. Their feedback was that they felt like they’d all signed up to the gym together and had just had a month of intense training. In each case, their blogs had grown (both in terms of content and traffic), and they’d come to the realization that daily blogging exercise was what had led to the results.

Transcription of Building Blogs is like Building Muscles

Hi. It’s Darren from ProBlogger here. Today I want to talk about a principle of blogging that I think most people understand but many bloggers I come across don’t actually do anything with that knowledge. And that is this: a blog is like a muscle, it only grows when you use it.

Most of us understand that to have a successful blog you need to actually blog. You need to actually create content. You need to do the activities of a blogger in the same way that if I want to grow my biceps I need to actually pick up something heavy and I need to exercise those biceps. If I’m just passive with them they won’t grow at all.

So most of us understand that, but most of us also just let our blogs happen when we feel like blogging. Most bloggers I interact with? You ask them, you know, “what is your blog posting schedule like?” and they kind of look at you a little bit blankly. “Well it’s kind of like when I sit down at my computer and I think maybe I should come up with something to write about”. It’s very impulsive, and it’s not very strategic.

Now, using this exercise metaphor, I’m actually someone who doesn’t exercise very well on an impulsive basis. I actually need to be a little bit strategic about it.

The times in my life where I’ve been the most fit and most healthy are the times in my life where I’ve actually put a plan in place to become fit and healthy. They’re the times in my life where I’ve enrolled in a program of some type to exercise. They’re the times in my life where I’ve enrolled in a gym and talked to a fitness instructor and got them to devise me a plan of the type of exercises that I need to do. They’re the times in my life where I’ve talked to a dietician who’s helped to put together a plan of foods that I should be eating at certain times of the day. They’re the times where I’ve been intentional, and have actually done something and put something in place to help me to be fit and healthy are the times that I’ve actually been fit and healthy.

And the same is true with my blogs. I remember in the early days understanding this principle for the first time, and noticing that the more I posted, the more readers would come to my blog. The more I posted, the more people would leave comments on my blog. The more I would interact with my readers, the more they would interact with me. The more you use your blog, the more successful it becomes. And so when I began to notice this, I started to put some plans in place to help me to blog.

I remember the first time, about three months into my first blog, I developed an editorial calendar. I didn’t call it that at the time—I had no idea what an editorial calendar was—but I got a spreadsheet out, and I put down the different days of the week, and the different activities that I would do on my blog. At that point I was posting on a daily basis, but I began to think, “Well, on Mondays I could ask a question. On Tuesdays I could do a “how to” type post. On Wednesdays I could link to another blog and bounce off something that they’d written and link back to them.”

And so I began to think about different types of posts for different days of the week as a strategy to get my blogging regular, and to be a little bit more strategic about it in some ways. In many ways it was kind of like an exercise plan for your body, but it was an exercise plan for my blog.

Over the years I guess that editorial calendar has developed, and has changed at different times depending on the different stage that my blogs are at. There are other activities as well—it’s not just the content that you write that you need to be a bit strategic about. It can also be about promoting your blog. So you may add in to your schedule, “In Tuesdays, I will visit five other blogs in my niche and I will watch what they’re doing. I will email their authors. I might leave comments on their posts.” Those type of activities can be things that you can be a bit strategic about as well.

Another area that you can be strategic about is around building community on your blog. So you may say, “On Thursdays, I’m going to email three of my readers and just say ‘Hi, I appreciate you reading, is there anything I can do for you?’” You can interact with your readers in the comments of your blog—that type of activity can be scheduled in. You can be a bit strategic about it.

Similarly you could add in activities around doing search engine optimization if you want to grow your readers through Google, or you could schedule in things about monetization, you know—looking at how your ads are placed on your blog, and doing some optimization of that on a regular basis as well.

None of these things just happen any more than muscles growing without exercising them, so be a little bit strategic about it. Now you may have the incentive and the initiative to be able to do that for yourself, or you may need to do one of two other things.

You might get a program like ProBlogger’s 31 Days To Build a Better Blog or ProBlogger’s Guide to Your First Week of Blogging. The reason I actually created those ebooks was to get people doing daily activities that would get them in the rhythm of blogging. So you may choose to use a program like that, or you may devise your own, or use someone else’s.

And the other thing I’d say is: don’t do it alone. One of the things I know about health and my body and being fit as a person, is that I’m much more likely to exercise if I’m somehow doing it with another person. Whether that be a fitness instructor, or whether that be a friend who I go for a run with, or a friend who I might play a game of tennis with. When we are social in what we do with our bodies, for many of us it’s easier, and the same I think is true with blogging.

When you join with someone else to work through a program like 31 Days To Build A Better Blog, or some sort of other program that you devise to take your blog to the next level, you’re more likely to actually put that into practice. There’s that sense of accountability. It’s a little bit more fun, and you can help each other and resource each other through that as well. So I’d encourage you to think about not only being strategic about your blogging and putting a plan in place for it, but to also think about how you can do that with someone else. How you can build some accountability and cooperation with another blogger to build your blog.

So I guess I’d encourage you with that advice again: a blog is like a muscle. You need to use it to grow it. And for most of us, that means actually being a little bit strategic and putting some sort of a system or a rhythm or a routine in place to help us to go to the next level. Whatever you do, don’t just leave it to chance. If you want your blog to be successful, if you want it to achieve certain goals, you need to put some systems and rhythms in place to take you to those places.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

Building Blogs is Like Building Muscles

I recently had a conversation with a friend who has just started out with making money from blogging. He had been struggling to get over the initial hump of getting things going and wanted to pick my brain on the “secrets” of how to do it.

Of course I struggled to answer at first—there’s simply not a simple equation on how to blog that will guarantee results—however, I did put together some thoughts for him that he found helpful. In this video, I summarize what I said.

While it’s fairly general in nature, I hope it’s helpful as we enter into a new year.

Secrets to Making Money Online Transcription

I had a conversation earlier today with a new friend who’s just started to blog. He’s been going for a couple of months now, and he’s a little bit frustrated. He’s hit a couple of brick walls, and he wanted to sit down and just sort of pick my brain on the secrets to making money from blogging and making money on the Internet.

And, look, it’s question I get asked a lot—particularly in interviews. You know, “What’s your number one secret to making money online?” And I always struggle to answer it, because ultimately there is no secret and there’s no one way to do this. You can look at the variety of Internet marketers and see a whole heap of different methods to do it and approaches to do it.

But I began to share with this friend some of the things I guess that I’ve learned, particularly in the last year or two, about making money online. And I asked him for his notes, because he was writing everything down, so that I could share it in a video. And this is kind of the stuff that I said to him.

Number one, I talked about trying to do something online that you really love. Choose an area, a topic, a niche, an industry, that you have some resonance with, some appreciation for, some passion for. There’s a whole heap of reasons for doing this. One, it’s much easier to stick with it for the long term. Two, those who read what you produce and come across you will feel much more drawn to you if you are passionate about it yourself. And I just personally find it much easier to make money from something that I actually have a genuine interest in, because I’m able to produce products and blog posts and content that connects with people, because I know what turns those people on, and I know what will get them reading. I know what will get them purchasing.

So if you have an interest, if you have a passion, then try to center what you do online around that. That doesn’t mean you can’t make money from something you’re not interested in or that you don’t like; it’s just a lot easier to do it that way.

The second thing I’d say—and I repeat this over and over again on ProBlogger, but I think it just needs to be said—is be as useful as you possibly can. One of my most recent videos on ProBlogger was about my son telling me, “Tell the world something important.” And really, that is it. That is what it’s all about for me.

Again, you can make money online by doing things that aren’t useful, that aren’t important, that aren’t really enhancing people’s lives, by ripping people off, but it’s much more satisfying if you’re doing something that is actually useful, and it’s much more sustainable in the long term if you want to build a business, rather than just make a quick buck, if you actually make connections with people and be useful to them.

The third thing I said was that you need to be confident. Once you’ve chosen something to produce and to focus in on, and once you are starting to be useful, it’s much easier to be confident—but you still need to work on that confidence. Many people get online, and they feel that they’re not able to sell themselves, they’re not able to sell the things that they do. And, look, that’s difficult to do, but you need to learn how to do that.

You need to approach this confidently. You need to make offers confidently. You need to approach other potential partners confidently. If you are nervously doing those things all the time, people will sense that.

Now, that doesn’t mean you have to be an extrovert and you need to hype things up. A quiet confidence will go a long way for you. So work on that aspect of things. Push yourself forward, if you aren’t one of those confident people. Get people around you to encourage you in that as well. So be as confident as you can.

The other thing I talked about with my friend today was diversifying what you do, and not just focusing upon one income stream. Now, this is a bit of a tricky one, because if you diversify too much you can end up not really doing anything very well. But what I’ve tried to do over the last eight or nine years now is diversify on a number of fronts.

One, diversify the topics that I write about. Now, I have four different main blogs that I produce content for, four different interests for me, and by doing that I’m diversifying, and if one doesn’t go so well I’ve got the three others to back it up.

But I’m also trying to diversify the income streams. And you’ll have seen, I’ve produced a breakdown of my income streams over the last couple of months. And you’ll see in that eight or nine different areas of income. I’m not just relying upon ad networks like AdSense, or I’m not just relying upon my own eBooks. I’m trying to build in different income streams so that if one falls over, or if one takes a little while to take off, there are other things there to supplement that income.

In the early days of my own blogging and making money online, I diversified by having a real job as well. When I first started I had three jobs, so I had this diversification, I guess, of the income streams, and that helped me to be much more sustainable in the long term.

Speaking of long term, the number five thing that I’d say is that you really need to take a long-term view of this. You can make money fast on the Internet, but it generally comes after years of building foundations. A number of times, I feel like I’ve made a lot of money really fast on the Internet, but as I look back on it there’s usually been two or three years of work, of building relationships with readers and producing content for free, that have led to these bursts of income. And so you do need to take a long-term view of things.

You need to see it as an investment. A lot of the times, when you make investments, you don’t get a return on those investments for a number of years, and the same is true on the Internet. See the time, the energy, and perhaps even some money that you’ve put into these things as an investment that hopefully, one day, will pay off.

The last thing I guess I said to my friend was that you really need to treat it as a business rather than just an event. Making money online … again, it can happen as an event, it can be these moments where you make money, but most online entrepreneurs actually see it as a business. It’s not just a one-off thing where they make money, and then they go and try something else. What I’ve tried to do is to build a business that has this diversity of income, but is also growing over time. As you release a new product, you need to think about ways of driving traffic back to that product over time. As you do affiliate marketing, you need to build systems that will continue to promote things to your readers using, say, an autoresponder.

You need to think a bit strategically, I guess is what I’m trying to say. A lot of people get online, and they produce content, and they think that it will make money by just getting readers. You need to think strategically about how you’re actually going to monetize it. So you need to think about it as a business, you need to think about it strategically, and probably one of the main things for me in terms of building a business rather than just having a job online is to actually build products into what you do. Don’t just rely upon advertising revenue, or marketing other people’s products. Whatever you do, try and work towards having some products that you can sell of your own, and then develop systems around those products to sell them, not just when you launch them, but in an ongoing way.

They’re some of the secrets of making money online that I guess I’ve been thinking about, particularly over the last year or two. There’s a whole heap more of course, but I’d love to hear some of your secrets to making money online. You can leave them in the comments below this video, and I’d love to connect with you there.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

Secrets to Making Money Online

In October I was involved in a Keynote at BlogWorld Expo, where I told the story in this video of my son who reminded me of a powerful principle of successful blogging.

So many people have since told me how much they enjoyed and were impacted by the story that I thought I should capture it on video and share it here on the blog.

I hope you enjoy the wisdom of my four-year-old son.

Transcription of “Tell the World Something Important”

About three months ago now, I was sitting here at my desk, typing away, blogging, and it was in the afternoon—about three-thirty, four o’clock.

Now, in my house around three-thirty, four o’clock, things get a little bit crazy. I have a four-and-a-half-year-old boy and a two-and-half-year-old boy. And in the afternoon, after sleeps and after a long day, they can get a little bit silly. So around this time of the day I would normally hear, you know, a bit of shouting, a bit of screaming. And sometimes I’d hear the footsteps racing down the hall towards my roo,m and I’d see the door burst open and all manner of strife would happen in my offices. Cords get pulled out and my kids demand that I make videos of them, and all kinds of stuff and it’s kind of a fun but also a bit of a crazy time of the afternoon.

On this particular day, things happened a little bit differently, though. I did hear some footsteps walking down the hall towards my room but there was no accompanying shouting or shrieking or laughter or giggling. It was just these quiet little footsteps padding down the hallway.

And then I heard the door handle creak and the door slowly open. And out of the corner of my eye I saw my four-year-old son Xavier standing at the door. I didn’t look around: I wanted to see what he would do. He very quietly and gently got down onto his knees and then he got down on his tummy and he began to commando-crawl into my room.

Now Xavier has this perception that if he can’t see you, you can’t see him. And so he had his head buried down low so that he couldn’t see me and he began to crawl into the room. And he crawled up my right hand side and then he crawled in front of my desk in plain sight for me, but he thought he wouldn’t be seen. Then he crawled down on my either side and then he stood up very quietly and gingerly behind me.

Again, I could kind of see him out of the corner of my eye and I could feel his presence there at my left shoulder, and he just stood there for 30 or 40 seconds as I continued to type. I was trying to finish a blog post before whatever happened was going to happen.

And as I was sitting there writing, he just watched. And after a moment or two I felt him lean into me, and I felt him begin to breathe on my neck and on my ear. And as he leaned in he just whispered in my ear “Daddy, what are you doing?”, and then he leaned back again.

Now I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to describe blogging to a four-year-old. It’s not something that I really know how to do, so I just said “I’m writing a message to the world.” And he seemed to accept that.

Again there was silence for a moment or two and again he leaned in close to me and he said “Daddy, make sure you tell the world something important.”

And then he leaned back and he got back down on his knees again and he commando-crawled back in front of me and out the door and shut the door behind him.

And it was kind of a bizarre little moment. For one, I wasn’t quite sure why he wasn’t in his normal hyper mood, but as I began to think about what he’d actually said to me, it kind of, it was a moment that I found actually quite challenging as I began to think about the type of blogs that I was writing and the information that I was putting out there.

I’ve been blogging now for eight years, and I’ve always wanted to tell the world something important. I’ve always had a motivation of trying to help people. But as someone who makes a living from it also, there are these other motivations. You want to make money out of it. You want to build some credibility and you want to build your profile. And so all these other motivations creep into it.

And so for me, that little moment where he whispered, “Tell the world something important”—for me it was kind of a challenging moment as I began to think “Yeah, that’s so true”.

That was the reason that I got into blogging in the first place but it’s also the secret to any success that I think I … success that I have had. The times where I’ve actually told the world something important rather than something that I think might be profitable, they’re the times where things begin to take off for me. The times where you’re actually are solving people’s problems, when you’re actually doing and saying things that matter. They’re the times that people seem to respond the most, and they’re the times where the profits actually do come down the track—for me, in my experience, at least.

And so I guess my message to you as I tell the world a message today is to keep that in the back of your mind. For one, it’s much more satisfying to be a blogger who’s actually saying something important, who’s making a difference. But two, a successful blog is actually built on that. If you’re actually doing something that matters to people, if you’re doing something that’s real and that is actually impacting people’s lives in some way, you’re much more likely to build a blog that people are going to take notice of, and that people will trust, and that people will keep coming back to.

So from the mouths of babes, from the mouth of my little guy Xavier who’s coming up to four and a half now, I’d encourage you to keep that in your focus. Tell the world something important.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

What My 4-Year-Old Son Taught Me About Successful Blogging

Many bloggers develop products as a way to monetize their blogging, but one problem that more bloggers are running into is that they become very dependent upon product launches.

A product launch can bring a lot of profitability to your blog, but what happens when things die down after that launch? For many bloggers, the income dries up after a launch, so they’re forced to start thinking about the next one. Once things die down after a spike of traffic from that next product, they’re again forced to starting thinking of another … and another…

Not only can this be an exhausting process (developing products takes a lot of energy), but it can actually give your readers launch fatigue:  they become frustrated with all your promotion and less responsive to your offers.

While there’s nothing wrong with offering multiple products, perhaps it’s worth considering some strategies to maximize the profitability of the products you already have. In this video, I share one tactic that has enabled me to increase sales of products over the long term, rather than just live off the spikes in profit that come after launch. In the video, I also mention an article that explains the topic in detail: it’s How to Extend the Profitability of an Ebook Beyond Launch Week.

See the full-sized video here.

Transcription: Extending the Life of Products After Launch

Today I want to talk today about products. A lot of bloggers have released products, whether they be ebooks, courses, membership sites, software, t-shirts—whatever it might be. A lot of bloggers have been releasing products in 2010. But what I’m seeing is some bloggers getting trapped into this cycle of launching products, and to stay profitable they feel like they need to be launching product after product after product after product. It’s understandable that they do that—and by “they” I mean “we,” really, because this is something that I’ve fallen into and have been challenged about recently.

The reason we do it is that when you launch a product, a good product launch should be a profitable thing, and it will see a spike in your revenue. I’ve posted my income trends over the last six or so months, and you see these months when I launch an ebook, there’s a spike in revenue. It can be an exciting thing, an exhilarating thing, and it can be quite addictive to see the dollars roll in when you launch a product. So if we want to see our income remain high, one of the things that we automatically think of is, well, if I had great income in July, and that spiked my revenue, maybe I need to launch another product to match it.

Whilst there’s nothing wrong with launching product after product after product, one of the things I’ve been challenged about lately is actually maximizing the profitability of the products that I already have. It can be easy to get trapped into this mindset of “I need to launch another product to increase my revenue,” but really there are ways of increasing your revenue by better promoting the products you already have. Rather than just seeing a spike in sales, and then seeing it dropping back to normal, what would happen if you could drive sales every day from your ebook?

Now one of the most logical ways to extend the profitability of a product is to do another promotion, and we’re seeing a lot of bloggers do that at the moment: Black Friday sales, where you can get discounts on products, and Christmas sales are coming up. We’ll see a lot of this sort of promotion at this time of year. That’s great—that’s one way of extending the profitability of a product. But again, it just leads to another spike in sales, and then things drop back to normal. So how can you actually increase the volume of sales of your products on a day-to-day basis?

The most obvious way to do this is to simply be promoting it in your sidebar, or in your navigation area, to be promoting the products that you’ve already released. That’s a great way to do it, and if you’re not doing that already, you really should be. Advertise your products where other advertisers would be advertising theirs, or instead of other advertisers advertising theirs. That’s a no-brainer.

Another great way to do it is to go back through the archives of your blog to old posts. Your old posts are still being read by people: people will be arriving at them from Google, they’ll be arriving at them from other blogs that link to them. They’ll be arriving at them from all kinds of places. So if there are relevant topics covered in your archives—they’re relevant to the products that you have—you really should be promoting those products on those particular pages, too.

So if you go to Digital Photography School and you look at a lot of the portrait articles that I’ve got there—free articles on the blog—you also see alongside them promotions of the portrait ebook that we produced. Now it’s a bit painstaking to go back through all your archives like that. You may want to find a way to do it by automatically inserting them into a category.
But even if you do go through them all manually, it’s well worth doing. Because, over the long haul, even if those links just bring you one or two sales extra per day, that can be hundreds over a year, and that can really prove to be a very profitable exercise.

Another way of doing it is to write future posts, and when you write about topics that are relevant to your products, again you should promote those products. Just have that mindset as you’re writing things, is this relevant, is this an opportunity to promote one of my products?

Another thing that some bloggers do is run advertising campaigns. I know of one blogger in particular who’s using Facebook ads and Google AdWords to promote their products. They’re not just relying upon the organic traffic coming into their blog—they actually know that those particular pages on their site where they’re selling products convert very well. They’ve fine-tuned their sales pages, they’ve worked out how much it costs them to get people to view those pages, and they’ve worked out that it can be quite profitable to pay for traffic to come to their site, and then sell their products there.

So there are some of the ways that you can do it. The most profitable thing that I’ve done is to actually be doing what Jeff Walker calls a perpetual promotion, or perpetual launch of products to your email list. If you have an email list where you have maybe a newsletter that goes out on a weekly basis, like I do on Digital Photography School, you can build a promotion into the sequence of emails that people get. Using an autoresponder, you can introduce an email that promotes one of your products.

So when you sign up for my photography newsletter, about nine days into the sequence you get an email thanking you again for signing up for the newsletter, reminding you that you’ve already had one of our weekly email updates, and offering you a 25% discount on one of our ebooks.

Then at the six month mark (so I’ve spaced them right out), six months after you’ve joined our list you get another similar email, just saying again thanks for sticking with us for six months now, we hope you’ve had some value out of our newsletters, and again, as another thank you for subscribing, here’s another discount code that you can use to get a discount on another one of our ebooks.

Those emails have converted really well for us. They’re very low sales-y, they’re not high, you know, high pressure—they’re simply, “here’s an offer, if you’d like to take it, please do, if you don’t want to take it, then no hard feelings at all. It’s just a simple thank you for being a subscriber to our list.”

So every day we get several hundred people sign up to our newsletter list, and so nine days after they do, those several hundred people get an email offering them a product, and then six months later, they get another one. So every day, not only do two or three hundred people get an email, five or six hundred people get an email, with those two products. Then we’ll add another one a few months later, and then there’ll be close to a thousand people getting an email every day, being reminded about our products.

Now you may not have that volume of subscribers subscribing every day, but even if it’s just ten every day, that’s 3,600 people over a year that will be getting those promotions, and that can really boost your sales. And in the long run, you can see more sales from that type of approach than the initial spike that you get from a launch of a product.

Now I’m going to link to a post below this video, which gives you more and will show you how I’ve actually done that. It’s an older post on ProBlogger but it’s really relevant to this topic, and I’ll show you how I have set up those emails in my own sequence. So if you’ve got another way of promoting a product that you might have for the long tail, not just for the spike, but to maximise sales over the long tail, if you’ve got a tactic along those lines I’d love to hear about that in comments below.

Thanks for listening and we’ll see you on ProBlogger.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

How to Increase Product Profitability After Launch

View this video at full size here.

Looking for a little inspiration for your blog? Check out this simple exercise that I do from time to time, particularly if I’ve got a little time to spare and a magazine handy.

Note: pick a magazine that relates to your topic—unlike I did in this video!

Transcription of “How to Use a Magazine to Improve Your Blog”

Today I want to do a little exercise with you that I’ve done from time to time over the last few years. Often when I’m sitting in a food court or something like that, I’ll grab a magazine from a newsagent or a newsstand. And then just whip through it, particularly looking at the front page of it and just sort of seeing what I can pick up. We’re in the publishing game, and so it’s worth taking a little bit of time from time to time just to see what others in the publishing game are doing in terms of promoting themselves and the content that they’re writing.

So what I’ve done today is I’ve grabbed a magazine off Mrs ProBlogger’s bedside table, and it’s a magazine that I’ve never really read before, but some of you may be familiar with it: Marie Claire, the Australian edition. And I want to just whip through some of the elements of this front page here, because I think, in terms of content and even the layout, there’s some things that we could learn as bloggers.

So obviously, I guess probably the most eye-catching thing, at least for me, is Jennifer Lopez there. I think one of the things about images on magazines, on blogs, that I’ve heard a number of studies on, is that faces—eyes—are the most eye-catching thing. I know in the photography magazine space, I’ve heard a variety of photography magazine editors who’ve talked about how they see much higher sales of magazines when there is a person on the front cover, rather than a thing or a scene. So that’s one thing.

I think the other thing about having Jennifer Lopez, having a name, on the front page is that people really do like to read about people. I know a lot of the content that I’ve written on my blogs over the years, when I interview someone, when I tell the story of someone, those types of posts tends to go quite well. We have this, I guess, voyeuristic kind of thing inside a lot of us that we like to see.

Let’s look at some of these titles here. “Look younger longer; cosmetic treatment tried and tested.” This looking younger longer, that’s tapping into sort of an aspirational thing, an inspirational kind of article, and it’s obviously something that is a felt need or desire that a lot of people have. And to put that with the “cosmetics treatment tried and tested” sort of article there makes sense. You’ve got the aspirational, but you’ve also got sort of a research-y type article—the results of a test. And again, I find those types of articles can work quite well, particularly if you can put it with an aspirational kind of theme.

“Catwalk cartels; models lured into drug smuggling.” There’s a story that’s a little bit sensational, I guess. Makes you wonder what is behind that story. “Desperate to be a dad; the desire men don’t talk about.” This is a women’s magazine, but obviously a lot of women would have an interest in finding a man that’s desperate to be a dad, and that sort of story can do quite well in that it’s talking about the desires of people, the needs of people.

“‘Fed and wed-off; where women are forced to be fat for marriage.” That’s certainly a story I’m going to have a flick through later to see what that’s about. There’s “438 sexy new styles”—a typical list post that many blogs would be familiar with. It’s a very comprehensive article, by the looks of things. I suspect it’s probably not that comprehensive, but 438 is a massive number there. And the “sexy new styles,” again, taps into this aspirational-type thing.”The work wear made easier; the style guide.” That, again, taps into people. It makes it sound a little bit easy, doesn’t it? This is the style guide. This is just what you have to follow.

This—”winter beauty SOS: ten simple ways to get your Glow Back”—this is an example of a seasonal article. This magazine came out sort of in the middle of the Australian winter, so it’s sort of seasonal. And again, it’s a felt need that people have in the middle of their winter doldrums. Then we have “What to buy now: the nine key pieces you’ll want this season and how to wear them.” Again, it’s sort of a seasonal thing. It’s a how-to article, and it’s very much about: this is just what you need to do. It’s instructional in some ways.

Now, this topic, this magazine’s probably not going to relate to many ProBlogger readers and the type of blogs that you have, but it’s just an example. If I was in fashion or beauty or that type of a niche, I’d be looking at these sort of titles to see what’s working for other people. And you can of course extend this further by opening it up and going through and looking at the way they lay out their articles, the headlines that they own, I think this type of thing can give you all kinds of ideas for your own blog.

So go out, find a magazine on your topic—or at least that relates to you—and see what they’re doing. You may reject some of it. It may not be your style, but you may also get some great ideas.

Hope that this has been helpful for you.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

How to Use a Magazine to Improve Your Blog

Lately I’ve been chatting to a number of bloggers whose blogs have dropped off the radar. I’d been disappointed (as a reader) that they’d stopped blogging and I’d secretly been thinking of it as a “failure” of sorts….

But I was reminded by those bloggers that in many ways that they’d actually succeeded with their blogs and that stopping blogging was a sign of that success.

In this video I explain more.

Notes

• View this video full size (in HD) here
• Video shot on a Panasonic Lumix DMC GF1 (aff) – here’s why I use that camera to shoot my videos.

Transcription of “The Five C’s of Blogging: Reflections on Eight Years of Blogging”

I’ve had this video transcribed below for those who prefer to get it that way. The transcription provided by The Transcription People.

I was having a chat to a blogger that I really admired and was writing some incredible content a couple of years ago. I was chatting to her a couple of weeks ago now, and she kind of dropped out of the blogosphere and wasn’t really writing any more—just the occasional post.

I used to really love her content, and it was almost like a daily experience of wonderment and learning just logging in to see what she was writing. And then she kind of disappeared; one of her posts said that she’d just got a new job, and the posts kind of disappeared after that.

And I was always disappointed in that; and I said to her, when we caught up for a coffee recently, “What happened to your blog? It was so great; it had so much potential.” And as we were chatting she said, “Well, I got a job. And the reason I started a blog was that, you know, I wanted to land a job, I was out of work, and the blog was never really going to be anything beyond an online résumé, a place for me to build my profile and build some credibility, and potentially meet some employers.”

And it kind of was interesting to me, because I’d always sort of seen it as a bit of a failure—as a disappointment—that she’d stopped blogging; but, the more I chatted to her, the more I realised that a temporary blog, a blog that just had the goal of landing her a job, is really an okay thing. And whilst it was disappointing for me as a reader that she disappeared, she actually had landed her dream job as a result of her blog.

It reminded me of another interaction that I had with a blogger who, off the back of his blog, launched just a very small piece of software. And it was a piece of software that really took off and got used a lot; and as a result of that software, he then went and launched another piece of software and another piece of software, and then ended up with a software company which employs ten to 15 people.

And I remember having this similar sort of conversation with him: “Why don’t you blog any more? Your blog was great; I loved it; I really found your ideas interesting.” And he reflected back to me that again, his blog was a means to another end—he was never going to be a professional blogger, that wasn’t his model; his model was to launch a software company, and he used his blog to do that.

And again, there’s a whole heap of stories I could probably tell along similar lines. And I guess these sort of conversations are reminding me that there’s not just one model for blogging and for making a living from blogging. And your blog doesn’t have to go for many, many years to be successful. If success for you is landing a job, or launching another company, your blog can actually be a stepping stone for you.

And whilst I’m disappointed that these people aren’t blogging anymore, I’m really excited that blogging is a medium that can be used to help people achieve their goals beyond having a successful blog.

This is just something I’ve been thinking about the last few days, and I’m interested to hear your comments. What’s the goal of your blog? Are you blogging for blogging to be the end, or is it a stepping stone to something else for you?

Love to hear your comments.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

Temporary Blogs: Blogs as Stepping Stones

6 years ago today I imported a series of posts that I’d written about blogging on my previous blog over to the ProBlogger.net domain – ProBlogger was born. I look back on that time and while I was almost making a full time living from blogging there was so much about the medium that I didn’t yet know. I still feel I have a lot to learn but thought I’d take a few minutes out today to reflect on some of the lessons I’ve learned about blogging.

I’ve identified 5 things that I’d concentrate (I only started this video with 3 but by the end had 5) on if I were starting out again today. They all begin with ‘C’.

Thanks to everyone for making ProBlogger what it is today – 6 years on from that first day!

Notes

• View this video full size (in HD) here
• Video shot on a Panasonic Lumix DMC GF1 (aff) – here’s why I use that camera to shoot my videos.

Transcription of – The Five C’s of Blogging: Reflections on 8 Years of Blogging

I’ve had this video transcribed below for those who prefer to get it that way. The transcription provided by The Transcription People.

Today as you, as this video goes up on ProBlogger, it’s the six year birthday of ProBlogger. Naomi Dunford emailed me last week to remind me of the birthday. I think she started blogging on my third birthday, so she remembers it every year. She reminded me of it and offered to put a guest post up on that day, a birthday post which will go up later today.

I wanted to take a few moments out today to reflect upon the six years of ProBlogger and the almost eight years that I’ve been blogging. I started in 2002, and I wanted to reflect on some of the lessons that I’ve learned and particularly how I’d go about it if I was starting out again today.

Whilst what I’m going to share today isn’t really rocket science, I think it’s good to be reminded of these things, whether we’re new bloggers or older bloggers because whilst we often know this stuff, we don’t actually always do it – and I find myself in that category as well.

If I was to start out again today, there’d be three or four different things that I would be focusing upon.

1. Content

The first one is content. Now, that’s a bit of a no-brainer in many ways. Of course you’d be focusing upon content as a blogger, a blogs not a blog really without some kind of content whether that be video or text or audio or images.

But really, your blog’s success hangs upon what you put up on to it.

As I’ve said many times on ProBloggers over the years, if it’s not enhancing someone’s life in some way, the chances are, they’re not going to come back again. That enhancement of their lives, solving problems, meeting needs in some way could be a big thing. It could be helping them to be a better Dad or a Mum, or helping them to learn something that will help their career.

It could be big things like that, or it could be small things. Giving them a chuckle, giving them a laugh. Helping them to know that they’re not the only person with a problem. Giving them a sense of community, a place for them to connect with other people. These are problems that you can be solving with your content. Your content needs to be useful in some way. And really I guess a lot of what I would be doing if I was starting out again today, is identifying the problems that people have, needs that they have and trying to work out how I can develop content that is meeting those needs on a daily basis. Just putting content on a blog that doesn’t really mean anything, that doesn’t actually help someone in some way, it’s kind of empty, and as a result, most blogs that do that don’t really reach the heights that they could.

2. Community

The second thing that I’d be putting a lot of time into and I guess I did this particularly in the early days of my first blogs was community.

Helping people who come across your blog to feel like they’re being noticed, feel like they’re being heard, and giving them opportunities to meet other readers of your blog. It’s just such a vitally important thing.

People don’t go online just to consume content any more. They’re actually going online to belong and we’re seeing this with the rise of Facebook and Twitter and social media. The popularity for many years now of forums and chat, and all this web stuff that we’re seeing, it’s all about community, it’s all about belonging.

This is what attracted me to blogs in the first place, is that one, they would give me a voice, but two, they would enable me to connect with real people who shared my passions and interests in life. And yeah, so I guess, starting out again today and even tomorrow as I continue with my blogging, community is something that really I think needs to be a priority for us.

Taking notice of your readers, valuing your readers opinion, including that in some way. Valuing that in a public way on your blog is really important.

3. Connection

The third thing I guess I’d focus on, and this is something I didn’t really focus on that much for the first few years on my own blogging, was, is, I call it, to keep the “C” theme running, the content community, I call it connection, and giving people connecting points for you.

It’s perhaps not the best word for it, but if we want to keep the “C’s” rolling, then that’s what we’ll go with. Really it’s about capturing people’s email addresses, a place where you can continue to have that connection with them, it’s about getting them to subscribe to your blog in some way, it’s about connecting with them on Twitter or Facebook, wherever it might be that’s relevant for your niche.

This is so important. I look back on those early days on my first blogs where I didn’t focus on this, and I think of all the tens and hundreds of thousands of readers that came through my blogs that I didn’t actually offer them a way of an ongoing relationship.

For many years, I was just satisfied that people were reading it, and that’s a great thing, but what if I could get those people back again? Those hundreds of thousands of people who kind of just slipped through my fingers over the years and that didn’t connect in some deeper way. Now many of them did, they went out of their way to find ways of connecting with me, and I’m grateful for that.

It was only in the last few years that I began to offer people newsletters or connection points on Twitter and Facebook and that type of thing. So, whatever it might be for your niche that’s a relevant way of communicating with them and connecting with them, go out of your way to find ways of connecting with them. Don’t rely on other people going out of their way to connect with you.

4. Cash

The fourth thing I’d say is, again, keeping with the “C” word is cash, is money, is it monetising. Now this isn’t a goal for every blogger, but for me, as someone after a year or two decided that I wanted this to be my way of making a living, I began to have to think of ways about monetising my blogs and really, it’s about sustainability.

If you’re able to sustain your blogging in some other way and don’t need to make money out of it, then that’s fine. But for many of us, we want our blogs to at least break even, we want to be able to pay for the costs of the blog. We want to be able to, you know, pay for a nice new design or the hosting and that type of thing. And for many of us we actually want to make a living out of that as well.

In this regard I’d say, experiment with different ways of monetising your blogs. Many of us start out with AdSense or an ad network or Amazon’s affiliate program, and these are great starting points, but don’t just be satisfied with, you know, doing it in one way. Actually be constantly on the lookout for new ways of monetising, and be on the lookout for ways that you can directly monetise, and you don’t have to rely necessarily upon an ad network, or some other third party to help you monetise your blog.

Be thinking all along of, ‘could I write an eBook? Could I run a course? Could I have a membership site? Could I sell myself as a Consultant? Could I write a book?’ These types of things that you can more directly monetise your site also.

5. Contribute

And I guess the last thing I’d say, and it’s not really a “C” thing at all, and it really comes down, it really incorporates all these different things is, actually do something that’s worthwhile. I come across bloggers from time to time who create blogs that kind of are, they’re just about making money and they’re not actually about contributing anything to the world that we live in. And whilst I kind of understand that on some levels, you know, we all need to make a living, I kind of went through a phase where I did that myself. I had blogs that were just creating noise, and, in the hope of, you know, getting a few readers from search engines and making a few dollars on the side. And I actually found that to be a really empty process.

Creating blogs that are just sort of spammy, adding random content on to the web may actually make you a few dollars, but make it your ultimate goal to contribute.

If we’re going to use a “C” word, perhaps it’s contribute. Do something that makes a difference in this world.

It strikes me increasingly as I do my own blogging that people are coming to read my stuff every day and I’m helping through my content, but perhaps there are ways I can contribute and make the world a better place as I’m also doing that in different ways. I, early next year I’m going to Tanzania with a charity to actually look at one of their projects and to capture the story of that in video and image and to share it on my blogs. And whilst that’s not really on topic in some ways, I kind of feel like as bloggers we have a responsibility to use the voices that we’ve been given and to use the profile that we have and the credibility that perhaps we have and to actually use it for good in some ways. And I think that’s a responsibility for us as bloggers, and I’d love to see us as bloggers really take this more seriously. And for me that’s something that I want to do over the next few years in particular.

So, there are my five “C’s”, content, community, connection, points of connection, cash and contributing something of value to the world and the blogosphere. They’re some of the, I guess, the lessons that I’ve learned. The things that I am wanting to inspire, re-inspire myself to continue to build on as I go forward in to the next six or so years of ProBlogger. And I’d love to hear some of your feedback in comments below.

Hope this has been of some value to you as you continue your own blogging.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

The 5 C’s of Blogging (What I’ve Learned Over 6 Years at ProBlogger)

Is your blogging getting a little dry? Perhaps it is time to become a bit more playful as a blogger.

One of the things that I’ve learned over the years is that the more I ‘play’ and experiment with my blog the more I learn that helps me to make my blog better.

Experimentation helps you not only learn what works in the blogging medium – but also what works with your audience.

Notes

• Watch the full sized version at Become a Playful Blogger
• Video shot on a Panasonic Lumix DMC GF1 (aff) – here’s why I use that camera to shoot my videos.

Become a Playful Blogger Transcript

I’ve had this video transcribed below for those who prefer to get it that way. The transcription provided by The Transcription People.

Today I want to talk about being playful. I’m standing in front of some of the artwork that my four year old has done at Kindergarten. It’s been interesting to watch the progression of his artistry over the last couple of years. He’s a very artistic, creative little guy and he loves to paint and he loves to make things and he loves to basically create stuff.

But, the development in the quality and intricacy of his work has been fascinating to watch over the last few years.

What I’ve noticed is that the more he does it, and the more he experiments with different mediums and different ways of holding a brush and using his fingers and different types of paints and cutting up stuff and sticking them on, the more he experiments, the more he learns and the more he develops.

I think this is really true for blogging as well.

One of the things that I’ve learnt over the years is that the more I try and use stuff, the more I discover what works and what doesn’t work for me in my style, but also for my readers, for blogging and the medium itself.

So, I’d like to ask you today:

• how have you played on your blog?
• How have you experimented?
• What have you tried?
• What has worked and what hasn’t worked?

I’d like this to be a discussion. For me, I’ve tried lots of different styles of writing over the years.

For example, I’ve done a few rants on my blogs. I discovered that, you know, me ranting doesn’t really work. Occasionally it does because, I guess I really believe in what I’m ranting about, but as a rule, ranting doesn’t really work for me.

I’ve also tried writing in the third person at times that sometimes has actually worked for me. It’s had a real impact upon people.

I’ve also found asking questions like this video post itself works for me.

It’s just about experimenting with different ways of communicating. With using images, with your design, it translates across your blog in lots of different ways.

So, what have you played with on your blog? How have you been a bit playful? How have you experimented? What have you learnt? What has worked for you in your style and what doesn’t work for you in your style?

I’d love to hear your comments in the comments below this video.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

Become a Playful Blogger and Inject Some Energy into Your Blogging

Many times we see successful product launches being talked about and are so dazzled by the huge sales numbers and income generated but fail to see all the hard groundwork that has been done behind the scenes for months and years before the launch.

Sometimes this is because those talking about their product launches don’t want those considering buying their ‘how to make money’ products to know its actually hard work and sometimes they do tell us but…. well we only hear what we want to and the dream of fast money makes us deaf to the reality.

The reality is that behind every successful online launch there is a lot of groundwork. It might not be as sexy as the actual launch process and it’s result – but it’s just as important. This video encourages bloggers to keep the glamorous big picture launches in mind but to also do the unglamorous daily things that take you closer to the big pay day!

Notes

• Watch the full sized version at What they Don’t Tell You About Successful Product Launches
• Video shot on a Panasonic Lumix DMC GF1 (aff) – here’s why I use that camera to shoot my videos.

What They Don’t Tell You About Successful Product Launches Transcript

I’ve had this video transcribed below for those who prefer to get it that way. The transcription provided by The Transcription People.

Have you ever seen a product launch that has done particularly well? We see it a lot in the Internet marketing circles, people selling their own information or products on how to launch a product by talking about how much they made. You know, hundreds of thousands of dollars in a launch or millions of dollars in a launch. These techniques to show what you’ve made are fairly typical in this Internet marketing space. But one of the things that I’ve noticed is that a lot of times when these big launches are being talked about, they’re not talked about in terms of the journey that has gone before the particular launch.

I recently had a big launch on digital photography school, we launched a travel photography book, I’ve talked it about a couple of times on ProBlogger.

The book did really well. We sold 5,000 or so copies in the first week and a half over the launch period and since then have sold another five or six hundred, so it’s, it’s probably around the six figure launch mark, which for me that’s a fairly significant amount of money. As a launch event it was really quite profound, it was quite powerful and it was quite fun to be involved with. But that launch was built on the back of four and a half years of other stuff. It only succeeded and got to that six figure level because I put in four and a half years of work on that particular blog, and even before that four and a half years I’d been blogging about photography on another photography blog for two years, so six and a half years to get a six figure launch. I guess if you were to do the figures on that it probably doesn’t add up to six figures in a month, it kind of adds up to maybe five figures a month if I’m lucky (I never was good at maths).

So what are the foundational things that you need to be working on as a blogger?

You know sometimes we hear about these six and seven figure launches and think there’s no way we could ever do that, but the reality is that you can but, but you need to look it at as a journey, and there’s a whole heap of things that you can do every day to take you a little bit closer to some of these bigger launches that you might want to do one day.

Build a Content Base

Every day over the last eight years on my blogs I have put up content and I’ve tried to make that content the most useful content that I can. So that for me is probably one of the most basic things that you can do every day on your blog to take you closer to that big launch that you might have, useful content, keep adding it to your blog whether it be video, whether it be a pod cast, whether it be a post, whether it be just tweets and, and adding content into the web in different ways.

Build Relationships

Another foundation for me has always been about relationships. Every day you have the opportunity to take yourself closer to that big launch by getting to know someone else on the web, whether that be a potential reader, whether that be another blogger, whether that be just someone who’s interested in the same kind of stuff as you on Twitter, you never know where those relationships will take you. You never know whether that one reader may lead you to thousands of other readers, you never know whether that person may be someone that you can collaborate with later on a particular project. It’s about building relationships. So not only should you be adding content to your blog every day, I’d be searching out for at least one other person that you can connect with, someone that you don’t perhaps know yet that you can begin to get to know. Not with any agenda just to get to know them because who knows where that might end up.

Build Your Skill Set

Another thing that take you closer to these big launches is building your skill set. Adding to your repertoire of things that you can do, your abilities to, to patent design your blog perhaps master a different type of social media so getting, getting to the point where you understand and can use Twitter better. Maybe it’s around video, whatever it might be. There’s so many different things that you can learn, and yeah it’s great to outsource some of these things but it’s also good to learn and know them. If you can add to your own knowledge base you will be taking yourself closer to that big launch one day. You can add to your brand, just little things like, you know, tweaking your design, changing the brand that you have, thinking through what it is that you stand for as a, as a person and as a brand, all of these things can take you a little bit closer to that, that big, that big launch.

Build Your Email List

Another Foundation for me has been about building my email list. Building the number of people who are subscribing to my blog and finding new ways to do that. This is something that you kind of have to set up and let it run to some, some degree, but it’s a day by day thing. Every day as you add people to your list whether they be email subscribers or Twitter followers or RSS subscribers, as you grow that network your influence grows and the potential to have a bigger launch and to have a bigger impact upon more people grows also.

I guess the point of this video is not to come up with a conclusive list of things that you can do that will take you closer to your, your goals one day, but it’s to get you to think about what you can do today, what you can do tomorrow and to think about some of those little things that will take you closer to your ultimate goals. Set yourself some tasks this week. Just little things that you can do, posts that you can write, people that you can interact with, just features that you can add to your blog, new skills that you can learn. All of these things will take you closer to that ultimate goal. It’s great to have the idea of a big product launch in the back of your mind, but at the front of your mind needs to be these sorts of daily activities that will take you closer to that.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

What They Don’t Tell You About Successful Product Launches

“Being good on social media really has a lot to do with being good in relationships and conversation.”

I made this statement in a presentation really and have been pondering it ever since. While there are a lot of great techniques for increasing the effectiveness in your use of blogging or social media – much of it does really come down to relational skills.

This video explores some of the similarities between being the type of person people are attracted to talking to in ‘real life’ and being the type of person people want to interact with on blogs and other types of social media including:

• Being interesting and interested
• Being engaging
• Having something unique to say
• Taking initiative and not just being passive

Notes: See the full sized video here. Video shot on a Panasonic Lumix DMC GF1 (aff) – here’s why I use that camera.

Transcript of Video

I’ve had this video transcribed below for those who prefer to get it that way. The transcription provided by The Transcription People.

Last week I was at a conference speaking about social media – half way through I made a statement off-the-cuff that being good in social media or in blogging was really just about being good in life and good in relationships.

Social media is, as its name suggests, the social interaction that one person has with another person or a group of people. It’s a communal activity and, as a result, a lot of the things that apply to just being good at relationships apply to social media as well.

This morning I was thinking about what makes someone attractive in terms of conversation and what makes someone good at being in relationships. I was thinking about when you go to a party and you come away from that party either having had really good conversations with people or really bad ones and I’m beginning to think about some of the dynamics that make a someone the life of the party, someone who is, that draws others to them at a party because a lot of those same characteristics actually fit within the social media space as well.

Now, I’m not saying that you need to be an extrovert to be good at social media, but some of the things about good party-goers actually do apply.

Something Interesting to Say

I was thinking back to some of the parties that I’ve been to recently and the people that I’m drawn to at parties are people who are, one, they’ve got something interesting to say. They have experiences or they have a knowledge or they have just the ability to be able to talk about interesting things. Sure, it’s fun sometimes to talk about rubbish and to have a bit of fun with that but, really, I come home from parties thinking about the good conversations that I’ve had that have actually been interesting, that have been about things that I perhaps didn’t know before.

Interesting but also Interested

So, these people are interesting but they’re also interested. They’re people who are not only willing and able to talk about themselves or to be able to talk about life from their own perspective but they’re actually interested in what others think, in what you think. They look you in the eye, they ask you questions and then they listen to what you’ve got to say and then what they have to say builds upon what you’ve said.

They actually show you that they’ve listened to you and are able to build upon that and that’s what a, that’s when a good conversation happens is, it’s not just when two people talk in monologues and then don’t interact with what each other have said; it’s actually something that builds, that gains momentum and that takes listening, it takes being interested as well.

They’re entertaining, quite often, they’re willing to be a bit playful and perhaps have a joke at themselves, at you and in a friendly kind of way.

They’re engaging, they ask questions.

They’re personal, they don’t just talk as if they’re talking to strangers in a room, a crowd of people. They actually look you in the eye, they actually will share something of themselves in a personal kind of way and add to the conversation in that way.

They’re inclusive, and this is one of the things that I think really is applicable to social media is that these types of people, they quite often will not only be talking to you but they’ll be engaging others around you in the party. They’ll be making introductions, they’ll be making, they’ll be connecting other people together and in a way that actually sets those two people up for a conversation, by introducing two people and pointing out some common interests and facilitating conversations not just between them and one other person but they almost create a community around themselves at parties.

And this is one of the things that I think is particularly applicable to the social media space is that, not only can you have a great conversation with an individual, but you can actually create a community and introduce your readers, your followers to one another.
I’m seeing this happen at the moment through the 31 Days to Build a Better Blog Challenge that’s being run by SITS Girls. There’s this community happening there and, sure, I’m a part of it – 31 Days to Build a Better Blog’s going on – I wrote that, I’m trying to participate in that, but there’s this whole thing happening almost without me participating at all and it’s really a powerful thing to see a community build up around something that you’ve created.

These type of people, they take initiative. They don’t just let conversations happen and then chime in where they want; they actually drive the conversation forward. They’re taking initiative and thinking about what else they could say, what questions they could ask. They’re not passive in that way. And sometimes they’re actually quite surprising in the directions that they’ll take in a conversation. It’s often those conversations that end up in a completely different place that I think about as being good conversations. They’re not just predictable, they’re unique. They’ve got something unique to say and they’re quite willing to go and explore those types of angles to the conversation.

These people, they’re not arrogant, they’re not aloof and they’re not boring, they’re not passive; they’re actually taking initiative, they’re interesting and they’re interested. They’re the type of people I’m interested in chatting to at parties and also in social media. I’d be interested to hear about some of the characteristics that you find attractive in, both in real life but also in the social media space. If you’d like to leave a comment, we can interact around those in comments below.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

How to be the Life of the Social Media Party

On Sunday I preached a sermon at my local church. I used to do this weekly when I worked as a minister years ago – but it’s been a while since I had to do it (funnily enough I find it a lot more nerve wracking getting up in front of a couple of hundred people to speak than writing a post for tens of thousands!).

As I was preparing for preaching last week it struck me how similar my ‘workflow’ for it was to putting together a blog post (although a blog post is usually a lot quicker in my experience).

This video identifies some of the stages I went through last week that are similar to how I go about writing many blog posts.

Notes: See the full sized video here. Video shot on a Panasonic Lumix DMC GF1 (aff) – here’s why I use that camera.

Video Transcript

I’ve had this video transcribed below for those who prefer to get it that way. The transcription provided by The Transcription People.

Hi. This is Darren from ProBlogger. Welcome to another video post. Over the last week or two I’ve been doing something that’s a little bit out of the ordinary for me, but something that I used to do all the time. Those of you who know me and have been reading ProBlogger for a while who’ve read the book will know that I used to work in churches as a Minister and as part of being a Minister I was delivering Sermons every week or two to a few hundred people in a church. Whilst things are a little different now in that I’m speaking to a lot more and I’m writing using text rather than voice, there’s some similarities that I’ve noticed this week in preparing a Sermon, a one off Sermon, to the way that I write blog posts and so I thought I’d share some of the process that I go through in creating a Sermon which I think transfers fairly well over to writing a blog post or preparing a video post.

Selecting a Topic

The first thing that I noticed I was doing last week was just selecting a topic. Actually that was a bit easier for me with this Sermon that I was, I was preaching in the last day or two, because I was given the topic.

The Minister of the church that I go to said, “Darren I want you to speak about work and faith and how they intersect together”.

Selecting a topic can be one of the biggest problems for bloggers, just trying to work out what to write about on a day by day basis. I, what I do is have a folder on my desktop on my computer which just has lots of different text files which have, have titles or main points that I might write. Really what, what those text files are is just identifying big problems that my reads might have. So whether it be my blogging readers on ProBlogger, how to start a blog, how to get traffic, how to monetise a blog, the big sort of picture problems that people have.

On my photography blog it’s, it’s more about how to choose a camera, what lens you might want to add to that camera, how you might hold that camera, how to compose a picture. These are sort of big picture topics that I write about and I identify.

Refining the Topic – Break it Down into Smaller Problems

Then it’s about refining the topic and beginning to think about what you can say in it, and for me this is about breaking the topic down into smaller problems that people might have, and so in the Sermon that I was writing about this week which was on the topic of work and faith, I began to identify some of the key problems that people might have in that area, you know, when their, their work and the choices that they are, are making in their work, clash with their values for instance. Thinking about those sorts of issues within the larger topic, and the same thing’s true when I write a blog post. I try and break it down and identify, you know, maybe two or three or four problems that people have when it comes to that larger problem, larger topic, and what I find is that if you can identify two or three problems, small problems that a reader might have is that you then have your points that you can then work through in the post.

Identify What People Already Know

After that what I then try and do is actually try and work what does my reader already know. A lot of people skip this type of thing but I think it’s really important to acknowledge what your readers already know, because then you can build upon that. They may already know it because you’ve written about it previously and then you can link back to that so that you can build a little a, extra depth into your post, but then, then you can then identify what they don’t know.

Put the ‘Bones’ into Place – Your Main Points

Then what I do in the preparation of a Sermon is start to put the bones into place, I then look at it almost like a skeleton, I try and put some main points in place. It may not be very exciting points at this point, it may not be interesting yet, but they’re main points that I want to make through the preaching of that Sermon or the writing of that blog post. So as I’m writing a blog post I try and break it down into four or five points that I might to communicate over that post.

Flesh it Out – Add Interest and Depth

Once I’ve got that skeleton in place, once the bones are there, you then flesh out and this where it gets fun, this is where you can add illustrations, this is where you can add metaphors or analogies or you can tell a story, this is where you can use pictures so for me this is the part in the creation of a Sermon where I’m, I’m thinking about my PowerPoint and how I can make it visually interesting.

This is where I’m thinking about, you know, bring in Bible verses or quotes from people, this is where you’re fleshing it out, you’re adding muscle, you’re adding depth to your sermon or your blog post. For me as I write blog posts I’m looking at what other people are writing in this area and trying to add quotes, or I’m trying to find a famous person’s quote, or I’m trying to add a photo. This is where you’re trying to make it interesting. Quite often bloggers just communicate their main points but they don’t actually go to the trouble of making it intriguing, making it enjoyable for your readers to, to read.

Refine, Focus and Cull

Once you’ve started to add that depth, what I usually find, particularly when I’m preaching a Sermon is that I usually have too much stuff. Yesterday I preached the Sermon, I had 22 minutes to speak. Once I got the bones and then added flesh to it, I had 45 minutes worth of content, so this is where I began to practice it, I began to actually verbalise it and I began to refine and cull it. This is where I started to remove some of the things that I’d added to add interest because they were actually distracting from the main points and they were making it too long.

So as I’m writing a blog post quite often I do a similar thing. I start to add content to it and then I get to a point where I’m about to publish and then I, I read through it with quite critical mind and look for things that I can take out, things that might be distracting from the main point, things that might be making the post too long. You want to be useful with your posts but you don’t want to actually go over the top with it.

So then you’re at a point that you’re able to deliver it and hopefully if you’ve been practising it, if you’ve refined it you’re able to do that, you know, in a good way on your Sermon and hopefully as your blog post, you’ll have something that people not only can learn from but they also find interesting and intriguing to read. I hope that gives you a bit of insight into how I go about it. That’s the type of blog that I write, I write how to contents so that probably applies a little bit more to that type of content than some other types, but I’d be interested to hear about the processes that you go through in, in the creation of a blog.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

How Preparing A Sermon is Similar to Writing Blog Posts

Ever sat down at your computer to blog for an hour only to find that when you get to the end of that hour you’ve done anything BUT what you sat down to achieve?

If so – you’re not alone. This video talks through some of the distractions that bloggers face as well as my simple 3 point strategy for staying focused. It’s not rocket science but as bloggers we need to be reminded of this type of thing from time to time.

See the video at full size here.

Video Transcription

I’ve had this video transcribed below for those who prefer to get it that way. The transcription provided by The Transcription People.

Hi it’s Darren from ProBlogger here.  Today I’m in the last stages of putting together a product launch and have been spending my day writing a sales letter for this particular e-book on my photograph blog and as happens when you have a deadline like this looming, it’s amazing the distractions that come your way.  All day I’ve had little beeps go off on my computer as people have messaged me on Skype, I’ve had questions coming in on social media, my phone’s been ringing, I’ve had all kinds of ideas for things that I could do, new projects, posts that I could write videos that I could record, and it’s just been quite amazing to see all the things working against me.  It’s almost like the world is conspiring to distract me from the task at hand.  In reality it’s probably a fairly normal day in that way but I guess I’ve become much more aware of these distractions as I feel the pressure looming to get this task done.

And so I’ve been thinking about and I’ve actually got most of the sales page written now which is great so I thought I’d just talk a little about this idea of distractions because there are so many and it’s one of the big challenges of bloggers, is that I find that we are so tempted to get off those core tasks that we have at hand, all day we are being interrupted and distracted.  Sometimes we’re being distracted by tools.  This week I got an iPad.  I’ve been so distracted by this new tool, this tool which has all kinds of possibilities but really none of them are really taking me towards my goals.  I can see potential for it to help but it has been a bit of a distraction so we’re often distracted by the hardware tools but also the software tools, the new tools that we can use on our blogs, testing new plug ins, new tool bars, that type of thing.

We can also can be quite distracted by ideas.  I am constantly distracted by ideas.  Ideas for new projects, big projects, new blogs, new forums, new partnerships that you can start, new products that you can start.  All these things are good but they can actually take us away from the thing that we need to do now, that number one thing right in front of us.  So we can become distracted by ideas.  We can become distracted by the tweaking, and it’s very easy to tweak a lot of things on your blog whether that be your design, your tool bar, even tweaking posts and headlines.  Tweaking your SEO, testing different alternatives on your blog, putting up new idgets, new logos, all of these things, and again they’re all good things and it’s worthwhile tweaking and a lot of good can come from that but it also can be an incredible distraction, and one of the other things that I’m often distracted by is networking.  Even now I just heard my Skype ping.  Someone’s trying to interact with me and that could be really great interaction.  The Twitter interactions that we have, Facebook, all of this networking can lead to great things but it can also distract us from those core things that we need to achieve today.

So the distractions they come constantly.  For me there’s probably three things that help to keep me on task.

The first one is to know and identify my goals, and to know them on a big picture so every now and again every six or so months I’ll sit down and I’ll write my goals.  I know my overall objections for myself as a person, but also my objectives for my blogs, and then I begin to do some strategic thinking about the things that I need to do in the next few months to achieve those things, and so having a bit of a framework for thinking about goals and strategies is really important because then as you’re playing with the iPad you can be constantly filtering, you know, is this actually going to take me closer to my goal?  As you’re tweaking your SEO you can ask yourself, “Is this actually taking me closer to my goal?”  It may actually be but then you need to start thinking about the priorities of your goals as well, and making a list of the things that you need to achieve.

So that’s the first thing; is actually having a good awareness of what it is that you’re trying to achieve.

Then it comes down to boundaries and boundaries around the core talks that are going to take you closer to your goals.  So one of the core tasks that I need to achieve every day as a blogger is creating content.  So even on a day when I’m writing a sales page I also need to be thinking about, “Okay, my next post, it’s due midnight tonight and I have a deadline, how am I going to produce that”, and so on.  I’m putting boundaries around that and I’m setting time aside to achieve those core tasks and creating content is one of those core tasks.

The other type of boundary that you do and this is what I do is actually creating boundaries around the distractions. 

You see it is good to have ideas, it’s good to play with tools, it’s good to do networking, it’s good to do all of these things that I’ve talked about which can be distractions, but it’s also good to limit them.  I could spend all day thinking about ideas, and that could be a good thing every now and again to spend a whole day doing that, but if I spend every day doing that, it would be become a distraction.  It’s not my core task, and so I need to create spaces in my life to do those things which are good but which also can be distractions. 

So for me it’s about knowing your goals and creating boundaries both around your core tasks and the distractions.  How do you keep on task?  How do you keep focused and stop those distractions actually taking away from the things that you need to achieve today?  Love to hear your comments on that.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

How to Stay Focused and Avoid Distraction as a Blogger

A couple of weeks ago I posted a video post on family blogging balance (see the full sized video here). While my son stole the show in the video a little one of the main questions I was asked after posting the video was ‘what camera did you shoot it with?’

This prompted me to shoot this video – one that answer the question. The camera I’m now using (and I switch to it halfway through the video) is the Panasonic Lumix DMC-GF1. It is a still camera but the video it shoots is lovely.

The main thing people seemed to like about my original video was the depth of field (or the out of focus background) – something that is made possible with the GF1′s 20mm lens large aperture (f1.7). It also is a HD camera and the glass on that particular lens is a high quality. I’ll let you check out the comparison of the video for yourself.

Watch this video at its full size at Panasonic Lumix DMC-GF1.

PS: for a review of this camera see it at Panasonic Lumix DMC-GF1 Review on my photography blog.

Video Transcription

I’ve had this video transcribed below for those who prefer to get it that way. The transcription provided by The Transcription People.

Darren: Hi there. It’s Darren from ProBlogger here. Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been experimenting with a new camera for these video posts. You’re actually not viewing video taken with that camera right now because I want to show it to you in person. The camera is a Panasonic Lumix DMCGF1, the Lumix GF1. The reason I’m talking about is … is the amount of people that emailed me after I put up my first post with it, asking me what the camera was. Obviously the video that it was producing was a little bit clearer, and thing that people were commenting about, particularly with the video and I’ll link to it, was the depth of field. What you will notice with this camera on the video and perhaps I’ll insert a little bit of it into this clip, is that the background was really out of focus in comparison to this video released on … assuming this video will be.

The reason for that is that this camera comes with this lens. It’s a prime lens in that it doesn’t have a zoom. It’s a 20 mm lens so it’s a reasonably wide-open lens so you get quite a wide angle on it, but its aperture is 1.7. The aperture is how big the lens opens up and really this lens is a very fast lens, what they call a fast lens because it allows a lot of light in at once, and when you open up the lens that big, it actually makes the depth of field a lot shallower, so what I am here, I’m in focus but what’s back there will be out of focus when you’re shooting with this lens.

The lens I’m shooting with now, this camera that you’re viewing me on now, is a Canon S90 and it’s aperture I think is, let me have a look here, I think it ranges from 2 to 4.9 depending on the focal length. So it’s not as fast and as a result you’ll find that the depth of field is less shallow and so you get more in focus back there, which is fine if you want to keep everything in focus, but to get everything out of focus back there actually makes you as the subject stand out a little bit.

I am now shooting on the Panasonic GF1. This, the camera that I was shooting with before, much smaller camera – a Canon – and really does take a reasonable quality video. But the other thing that I like about the Panasonic is because you’ve got this really wide aperture it lets a lot of light in. You can actually shoot video in a darker room, without quite as much light. At the moment I’m shooting and it is sunny outside so I’ve got a fair bit of light coming in, but the video that I first shot this on, it was on quite a gloomy day and I wasn’t sitting in really open light situation, and yet because of that nice wide open lens it let a lot of light in. So hopefully you can see a bit of difference between this video and the one that I shot before on this. Both, personally I could go with either one. This one to me is just a little bit nicer and like I said before it’s a little bit sharper and that depth of field gives it a nice effect as well. So I hope you can see a bit of the difference now so I might just go back to the other video.

So anyway, it’s a Panasonic Lumix DMCGF1. It’s not the cheapest camera out there. It’s what they call a “micro four thirds” camera so it’s a new type of camera sort of in between the point and shoot and the digital SLR. It takes a really nice still shot as well. It’s a little bit smaller than a full sized digital SLR but it has a little bit more power than something like the Canon that I’m shooting this on at the moment.

I personally prefer to have a still camera that takes good quality video over having a good still camera and a good video camera separate, I like to have them in the one thing so I can just carry the one thing around. The good thing about this camera is that it’s got detachable lenses so you can add other ones.

The reason I’ve got this one is … is because it is so fast and really all the reviews that I’ve read of all of the other lenses that fit on this, this one leaves them for dead. It’s the 20 mm 1.7. So you can get this as a kit together. It’s not the cheapest camera in the world but the quality of it is really great.

Anyway, that’s the camera I’m using at the moment. I’d love to hear what sort of camera you use in the comments below.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

What Camera Am I Using for My Video Posts? The Panasonic Lumix DMC-GF1

It’s been a couple of days since we launched the 2nd edition of ProBlogger the book and I’m hearing from many of readers who bought a copy that they’re finding parcels with it enclosed in their mail boxes.

The above video was produced by our publishers (Wiley) and is both a preview of the book but also holds some tips for bloggers from my co-author, Chris Garrett and I (filmed in Austin earlier in the year – one of the few times Chris and I have met in person).

In it we talk about some of the new stuff in the book but also talk about the challenges and benefits of blogging as well as each sharing 3-4 tips for bloggers wanting to make a living from the medium. View the video at full size here.

Bonuses for Owners of the Book

In my post earlier in the week when I launched the 2nd edition I mentioned some bonuses for those who buy it yet I failed to mention what they were. There are a growing numbers of bonuses included.

The bonus area includes:

• a number of interviews with bloggers making a living from blogging
• a video on installing WordPress
• a pdf report with 102 headline ideas for posts
• a pdf on blog traffic strategy.

Chris and I will be recording a few others in the coming week to add to this list. There are details on how to get access to the bonuses in the book itself.

If you don’t yet have a copy – it’s just $16.49 on Amazon.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

More on Why You Need ProBlogger the Book [Video Tips and Bonuses]

One of the things that attracted me to blogging as a way to earn an income was the flexibility that it gave me and the opportunity it gives me to work from home and be involved in the lives of my young family. While my wife is the primary care giver and I’m full time as a blogger I am pretty hands on where I can be and there are days (like today) where I look after the boys.

Of course working at home – whether the work is blogging or something else – is not only a great opportunity but also a challenge. The line behind work and family can sometimes blur.

By no means have I worked it all out – but this video is a bit of an attempt to record a few of the lessons I’ve learned working at home and an invitation to others who work/blog from home to share what they’ve learned also.

See the full sized video at YouTube at Family/Blogging Balance.

PS: this video was recorded on a Panasonic Lumix DMC-GF1 Digital Camera (love it).

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

Tips on Getting the Family/Blogging Balance Right

One problem that I see a lot of bloggers falling into the trap of doing is simply writing what everyone else is writing about on their blog – and doing it in the same way everyone else is. The term ‘echo chamber’ comes to mind.

I think we’ve all done it (or have been tempted to) – a news story breaks, we report the news, perhaps with a quote and link from another source and we’re tempted to leave it at just that.

In this video I share 11 ways to add to the conversation happening in the blogosphere by adding something extra to the topics everyone else is reporting on. In doing so you add something unique and raise yourself and your blog out of the echo chamber.

Watch this video at full size at How to Add to Conversation in the Blogosphere.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

11 Ways to Add to the Conversation of the Blogosphere and Stand Out from the Crowd

Over on Twitter last week @JapanNewbie asked me about how to get people viewing old posts on your blog once they drop off the front page. In this video I tackle the question with 5 suggestions including using:

• Best of Sections
• Autoresponders
• Related Links
• Best of Posts
• Repost Old Content

I’d love to hear your suggestions on how you drive people back to your older blog posts?

Related Reading:

• Updating Old Posts on Your Blog – how and why.
• Interlink Your Old Blog posts

Watch this video at full size on Youtube at How to Get People to Read Your Old Posts.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

5 Tips for Getting Readers Viewing Your Old Blog Posts

Have you ever been ‘talked at’ instead of had someone ‘talk with’ you in a real life conversation? It doesn’t feel good to have someone talk AT you.

It leaves you feeling like you might as well not have been there at all.

Blogs can be like that and in this post we explore the power of asking questions on your blog and I share 7 types of questions you can ask to increase reader engagement.

The 7 questions are:

• What Do you Think?
• How Do you Feel?
• What Will You Do?
• What is Your Opinion?
• What is Your Story?
• What is Your Experience or Example?
• What Have you Been Working On?

Of course there are plenty of other types of questions – what type do you ask and how do you find people respond?

Note: you can get the full sized version of this video at YouTube here.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

7 Questions to Ask On Your Blog to Get More Reader Engagement