Produced by Dr. Micael Wesch and his team at Kansas State University - via David.

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It is a question that comes up fairly regularly in blogging circles and one that different bloggers take different approaches to.

• Most bloggers have them - they’re on by default when they set their blog up and they never switch them off. They see the comments as adding a lot to the blog - making it a place of shared learning, interactivity and dynamic conversation.
• Other bloggers decide not to have them. Their reasons vary from not having time to moderate them to being frustrated by comment spam.

Between these views other bloggers take a variety of other approaches ranging from:

• having comments on some posts but not others
• switching comments off over a certain amount of time (to protect from comment spam)
• to not having comments in the early days of a blog and switching them on later once there is a big enough audience to justify them (this is what I did on DPS).
• to requiring membership for comments (thereby effectively switching them off to the general public and reserving the privilege to comment for those willing to sign up).

There are many options - but I thought it’d be interesting to open it up for some discussion.

• Do you have comments on your blog? Why or Why Not?
• Do you think a blog is a blog without comments?
• What are the advantages of having or not having them?

Interested to see where this discussion leads us.

Further Reading on Comments on Blogs:

• Blogging with or without Comments?
• Should Low Traffic Blogs Disable Comments
• 10 Techniques to Get More Comments on Your Blog

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I sent this months email yesterday - but if you are not yet subscribed you can get a sneak peak of it as a html version (the formatting doesn’t convert perfectly from the email version) at:

October ProBlogger Newsletter

If you like what you see and want to receive future editions via email you can sign up by adding your email address here:

Free Bonus

As a small thank you bonus for subscribing - on the thank you page for subscribing there is a link to a one hour podcast interview that I did a few months back with Denise and Patsi from The Blog Squad. In it they interview me about my journey as a blogger and I share a lot of tips on how to improve your blog.

This is not available anywhere else on the web for free so the only way to get access to it is via the newsletter. Enter your email and you’ll have immediate access to the podcast.

Lastly - I’m hoping to expand ProBlogger later in the year. I’ll be inviting those subscribed to the newsletter to beta test the new features before everyone else. So if you’re interested in getting access before everyone else the only way is to be subscribed.

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At the end of that post I said that I would post some tips today for affiliate marketers on how perhaps they should engage in the practice on Twitter (if at all).

As I mentioned in the previous, post I’m not anti affiliate marketing or doing it via new media - but I think the ‘method’ and ‘attitude’ of the marketer is very very important. It can mean the difference between conversion or not - it can also mean the difference between keeping followers and losing them.

Before I get into some Twitter specific tips let me share a previous article with some general affiliate marketing tips for bloggers.

Let me also say that I’m still not convinced that Twitter is the best place for affiliate marketing. However if you do choose to do it on Twitter here are some starting points:

Tips for Promoting Affiliate Products on Twitter

1. Relevancy is Key

One of the things that I noticed earlier in the week about those who were promoting the affiliate product on Twitter (an AdSense tips product) was that quite a few of them were not normally writing about anything to do with AdSense. Adding a link to an affiliate product that has little to do with what you normally write about on Twitter is not smart. For starters it won’t convert and secondly it potentially will annoy your readers. If you’re going to directly promote products from Twitter make sure they are relevant to the followers you have.

2. Personalization Matters

Another obvious flaw in many of the tweets that we saw in the example mentioned in the previous post were that they were identical to everyone else’s. We saw Joel Comm set up a system where he pre-populated tweets with a script that simply told those reading it to go download a product. Joel actually stopped by my previous post and reflected (among other things) that those who personalized their messages converted better than those who did not. I think this says a lot. A personal recommendation is going to get a much better response in terms of actual conversions and it is far less likely to hurt your relationship with your followers as the tweet will be in your voice and hopefully out of your experience with the product.

3. Genuine Recommendations

My policy with affiliate marketing is to only recommend products that I have used or have had someone close to me who I trust use and recommend. This is again something that will add weight to your recommendation and increase conversion - but it’ll also help your reputation and stop you from promoting products that are rubbish. Recommend a product that doesn’t work and your own reputation and any trust you’ve built up with those who follow your advice will suffer. Don’t sacrifice your own brand for the sake of a few quick dollars.

4. Be Conversational

I have used affiliate links directly on Twitter on three occasions (from memory). In each instance they were Amazon Associate links and they were a part of a conversation that I was having with other Twitter users (from memory they were at times when followers asked me for recommendations on products). The links that I left were relevant, the conversations were started by others and they fit naturally into the conversation. From memory I declared that they were affiliate links on at least two of those occasions. The opposite of this ‘conversational’ tweeting is the ‘cold call’ tweet which comes out of the blue.

5. Link to Affiliate Products Indirectly

If I were to recommend one tips above others it would be this one. I think it would be much more effective and less intrusive with the culture on Twitter to tweet a link to a post you’ve written on your blog that includes an affiliate link - than to tweet the affiliate link directly. Write up a review of the product on your blog, give a balanced review, share why the product is relevant to your readers, tell them who would benefit most from it etc. And THEN tweet a link to the review. The problem with Twitter is that you’ve got 140 or so characters and to really do the product you’re promoting service and to give your readers a well balanced review you need more than that.

6. Moderation is Important

In any affiliate marketing (and perhaps all types of marketing) those who you are speaking with will begin to ’switch off’ and become blind to your promotions if you hit them too many times with marketing messages. This will especially be true on Twitter where I see the audience is highly skeptical to marketing messages, are attuned to transparency and where they can very quickly opt out of receiving future communication with you. Not only can they opt out when your messages get too much - they often subscribe or follow you on the basis of what you’ve already written. If all you ever do is promote products (or yourself) you’re unlikely to grow a readership or become anyone with any kind of influence on Twitter.

7. Listen to Your Followers

The thing I love most about Twitter is that it a listening device. A lot of people use it and promote it as a broadcasting tool (which is can be useful for) but I’m increasingly finding it to be a fantastic way to hear what people are thinking - both about life in general but also you. If you engage in affiliate marketing on twitter make sure you stay in tune with how people respond. This doesn’t just mean watching what people ‘reply’ to you but also means watching what happens to subscriber numbers after you tweet and also watching what people say about you without using your @username (you can set up an RSS feed on Twitter search to watch for keywords like your name).

8. Be Useful

This is a fairly general Twitter tip but it applies to affiliate marketing. If you’re going to promote a product on Twitter make sure it’s highly useful to your followers. This is connected to being relevant - but goes beyond it. I find that the more useful my Twittering is the more positive feedback I get from followers. The same is true from blogging and interestingly enough it applies to the products I’ve promoted over the years. The best feedback that I can possibly get after an affiliate product campaign is from someone who bought the product and thanks me for recommending it because they found it useful. To me this is the ultimate feedback because it means I’ve not only made a little money, but more importantly I have a reader who is happy, who remains loyal and who is perhaps even more loyal than they were before I made the recommendation. This really comes down to smart selection of products to recommend - make sure that they are the best!

There you have it - my guide for Affiliate Marketing on Twitter.

Have Your Say about Affiliate Marketing on Twitter

I’m aware that some will still be pretty anti the idea of promoting affiliate products on Twitter (and I remain unconvinced except through the indirect method of promoting links on your blog rather than direct ones that I mention above) but IF you’re going to do it - those are my starting points.

I’d love to hear more discussion on this topic though. Marketing on Twitter (and all kinds of social media sites) will only continue to happen more and more so the more we discuss it the better!

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To get the information they approached 20 top-tier tech bloggers and social media consultants, half of them responded (so this isn’t a massive sample).

While the sample size is small the results revealed:

• Most bloggers getting paid about $25 a post (with the full range being between $10-$200 a post).
• In house/Full time bloggers earn annual pay of between $45,000 to $55,000 (with benefits) and up to $70,000-$90,000 with bonuses.
• The real money seems to be in consulting with hourly rates not below $150 an hour and $300 an hour the most common rate named.

Read the full report and analysis at How Much Do Top Tier Bloggers and Social Media Consultants Get Paid? We Asked Them!

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I’m excited to announce today that World Vision Australia and more specifically their blog Learn About Poverty (a blog that they have specifically set up for Blog Action Day which contains some fantastic resources for all bloggers wanting to participate in that very worthwhile project) are offering one Australian ProBlogger reader the chance to travel to Sydney on 29th October for an amazing day of Digital Training. This prize is quite amazing and I’m actually quite disappointed I can’t win it myself!

Please don’t just read the prize details - also read the rules to put yourself in the running to win!

The Prize

The prize includes multiple parts of a day of digital training on 29th October.

1. Flights to and from Sydney from your nearest capital city (you need to get to the airport yourself), accomodation overnight and transport on the day are all provided for you. I’m sure they’ll probably buy you lunch somewhere along the way too :-)

2. 4 ‘classes’ of digital training. The classes are:

Class 1 (10:30am-11:30am) Microsoft Surface

Spend an hour with the only Microsoft surface machine and experts in Australia.

Class 2 (11:45-1pm) Digital Strategy & Creative

Learn about the trends and attitudes that drive the one of the premier digital agencies in Asia Pacific: Amnesia.

Class 3 (2pm-3pm) Yahoo!7 SEO Training

Tutorial with Yahoo! 7’s SEO and SEM expert.

Class 4 (3:30pm-5pm) Google Australia

Finish off the day at Google’s Sydney office. Dialogue session with the digital experts at Google Australia.

3. It’s important to note here that World Vision has been able to provide this incredible prize through the generosity of the organisations providing the associated prizes. They have not needed to spend a dollar, and these organisations should be congratulated for their involvement.

The Rules

To put yourself in the running to win you need to do the following:

• Be in Australia and be willing to get yourself to a capital city (or major airport).
• Leave a comment below in this post that helps about how World Vision Australia can develop a better blogging and social media strategy. I’ve included some more information from World Vision below to help you with this.
• The winner will be chosen by World Vision based upon your comments. So make them as helpful as possible and make sure you look over what they’re already doing and what their goals are (see below).
• Entries need to be received by 5pm Melbourne time on Thursday 16th October. The winner will be announced in the days that follow.
• Please confirm that you live in Australia in your comment.
• Please use the word ‘poverty’ in your comment - this will help us make sure comments don’t get filtered into our spam filter

Information About World Vision Australia and Learn About Poverty to help you in your entry

The blog Learn About Poverty has been specifically set up for Blog Action Day (happening later this month). It is one of World Vision’s first blogging efforts and is being developed to give bloggers video and other types of resources to help them with their posting on Blog Action Day.

Here is some information provided by World Vision Australia that might help you in giving them the most helpful advice in your comment:

Goals as an organisation: We’re really trying to help ignite a social movement. Poverty is such a massive issue, that no one product or campaign will solve it, so our focus is very much becoming how we can help create/participate in the momentum already happening in society. This is a key for us moving forwards.

General direction of online: We’re moving towards a place where we can better tell our stories with anyone out there. We have a huge number of latent stories and information that circles around World Vision - literally, we walk past people in our office how are changing the world. We’re trying to come up with how we, as a large organisation, can begin to show people more of the amazing stuff we do. I’d be keen to hear how your readers think we might be able to do this and still remain authentic at the same time.

What kind of ideas: We would love ideas on how World Vision could implement more blogging and social media activities. Blogging for us could be tricky, as in some cases we can’t talk openly about our work for fear of putting governments where some of our staff and stakeholders work off-side, bringing about obvious safety issues. This has been especially tough with Learn About Poverty. But we realise we need to be much more connected with the public, in order to better communicate the urgency of the issue of global poverty. We’re really keen to hear from the probloggers our there how we could tailor a social media/blog strategy to help ignite a social movement that acknowledges this.

There you have it - please let me know if you have questions and good luck to my fellow Aussies!

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This is just a short note to say that until next Monday you can get an unofficial discount of around 35% off the price of the course - simply because the Australian Dollar sucks at the moment!

Here’s why.

Yaro set up the price of Blog Mastermind in Australian dollars rather than US dollars (he’s an Aussie living in Canada). At the time he did this the exchange rate between the two currencies was almost dollar for dollar (the AU$ was slightly less).

Over the last couple of weeks the Australian dollar has quite simply taken a nose dive! Yesterday it hit $0.66 USD (as I write this it is 0.67)!

This means if you buy Blog Mastermind today you’re getting between 30-40% discount (depending upon what financial markets are doing at any given moment). Instead of $97 USD for the month it is actually around $65 USD.

This ends on Monday as Yaro is switching to charging in USD (and I can understand why - the Australian dollar is not a good one to be earning right now). He is also ending the month by month payment option for those who sign up after Monday.

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Here’s how it looks.

So I have two reactions to this.

1. How much more politics does Twitter need?

I’m sick of the ‘election bar’ that continues to appear when I visit Twitter. I’ve closed it many times but it continues to appear. I thought perhaps it was just me or at least just a frustration that other Non US Twitter users had seeing that Election promotion - but when I tweeted about it I only had 2-3 out of 50-60 responses that were positive about the election bar (including US Twitter users).

WIth the election bar and now a sidebar link Twitter seems to be moving away from their ‘what are you doing’ type focus. Sure a lot of the world is ‘doing’ elections but a large number of the world is also sick of them.

I do think that the US election is important but I’d love to see them give us the choice to opt out of this type of ‘promotion’ or at least to know if it’s an ad or not. But maybe that’s just me?

2. Is this a partnership, paid link… or?

My first reaction when seeing the link was that it looked a lot like an advertisement. There’s no marking of it as such but it does seem a little odd to just have an unexplained link to a political site just sitting there on the sidebar of a social media site under one’s stats.

When you look at the ’source code’ of a twitter page you see that the link is tagged as a ‘promotion’ (click to enlarge the source code):

Interesting…. but what is a promotion?

On the site it links to (Current.com) it says that Current and Twitter have ‘teamed up’ - so it looks like some kind of ‘partnership’ but that doesn’t really explain it fully.

Now I’ve got nothing against Twitter monetizing with advertising, but I’d love for them to disclose whether that is actually an ad or not. If it is - they might want to ‘nofollow’ it or they might just find themselves penalized by Google for trying to game them (or for helping someone else game them at least).

What do you think?

Update - Evan Williams from Twitter has kindly commented below clarifying the situation. You can read his comments here. The most important clarification (in my mind) is that the link is not a paid link at all but a voluntary link. Thanks Evan!

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What do you think about affiliate marketing on Twitter?

Lately I’ve noticed more and more affiliate marketers getting onto twitter. There’s been a real buzz about it actually in many internet marketing circles - almost like it’s the latest ‘new’ thing (I guess it is relatively new).

The unfortunate thing is that the model I’m seeing some internet marketers use on Twitter is quite spammy. Some have spammed Twitter so much directly that they’ve been booted off.

Today I got an email from Joel Comm. I’m one of his affiliates and have promoted some of his books and ebooks previously. We’ve met in person and I admire his knowledge of internet marketing greatly. However todays email didn’t really sit that well with me and I’d love to hear your opinion on it.

Joel is currently promoting an AdSense Secrets ebook. I actually like his writing on AdSense and some of what he teaches helped me a lot in the early days of getting into blogging.

I’ve promoted his AdSense stuff before and would probably do it again - but not in the way he’s asking his affiliates to do it this time.

The promotion he’s asking people to do is to Tweet a link to his book. Not only has he asked us to tweet about it (something I wouldn’t be anti doing to some extend) he’s given his affiliates a link to make the whole process automated.

All you have to do is click the link and it sets up a tweet in your own twitter account (if you’re logged in) and it embeds an affiliate link into the tweet automatically for you so you can earn money if people make a purchase of one of Joels products as a result of clicking on your link ($10 a month for each month they stay in his program).

Looking at Twitter Search just now it seems that his tactic is working - to some extent.

I wouldn’t call it a raging success (yet) but with 30 or so people tweeting about it (largely using the automated script Joel’s provided) there’s been some take up of it.

Now on some levels I don’t have a problem with Joel’s campaign. I am not against affiliate marketing, I’m not against promoting products in new media - however there’s something that has been playing on my mind about this all day.

To be honest I’m not completely sure why I don’t like it (as I say above I don’t have a problem with some of the principles behind it) but there’s something that doesn’t sit well with me about this.

Risky Behavior and Spam

I think one of my main problems with it is that it almost seems like Joels asking others to engage in a little risky behavior for him and putting them a little at risk. Twitter is pretty anti spam and while he’s not done it directly the search results do look quite spammy when you line them all up and see the exact same message over and over and over again. I wonder how Twitter will respond to this and who will suffer? Joel or those who tweet it?

Impersonal Marketing

Another thing that I am reacting against with this strategy is that the tweets Joel is suggesting seem very impersonal.

“Download Joel Comm’s Adsense Secrets For FREE! “

This just doesn’t resonate with me as the type of message that would do well on Twitter. A message out of the blue about someone encouraging a download. I’m not sure it’s where affiliate marketing is going online either.

My own experimenting with affiliate marketing over the last few years is that it works best out of relationship and trust with those that you recommend products to. I find that promoting products do best when you are able to give an honest review of them, when you’re able to tell people who they are best suited for etc

This is actually why I think blogging is an ideal message for affiliate marketing. It’s a great place to build trust, fully review a product and give a balanced recommendation - 140 or so characters just doesn’t seem enough to do much to do most of that.

I guess what I’m coming to is that a tweet like this doesn’t really sit comfortably with my style of affiliate marketing.

What do you Think about Affiliate Marketing on Twitter?

But that is just me - what about you? Does affiliate marketing belong on Twitter? If so - how would you do it?

To be clear - I’m not wanting to start an anti Joel Comm thread of discussion here - like I say, I like the guy and don’t have anything against his products, but I am interested to hear what you think about the topic of affiliate marketing on twitter (and other forms of social media). Over to you….

How Affiliate Marketers Should Use Twitter?

It’s pretty easy to say you don’t like affiliate links on Twitter and not say anything constructive. So tomorrow I’d like to attempt to put forward some ideas on how Twitter (and other social media sites) could be used by affiliate marketers appropriately and effectively. Keep an eye on my RSS feed over the next 24 hours to see when the post goes live.

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You may be a blogger that thinks they have a pretty popular and well created blog - if so, well done. But remember every blog is a work a progress, and there is always room for improvement. Here are 5 great ways to help optimize and improve your website, and inspire new visitors to become repeat visitors:

1: Track your Internal Search Results

One of the easiest ways to gain insight into your blog and improve it is to track your internal search results. You can easily do this using Google Analytics (learn how to track this), or use this cool wordpress plugin. It’s very important to identify your top searched keywords - it helps you identify what’s popular with your visitors (write more content relating to these), and also, just as importantly, what visitors are failing to find on your blog (look for keyword searches that have zero results and create a post about them - as long as you can make it relevant to your blog). The more relevant internal search results the user finds, then the more chances of them signing up to your feed and coming back for more!

2: Reduce the Bounce Rate of your Articles

The best way to stop someone from leaving immediately after reading your blog articles (i.e. bouncing) is to expose them to as much of your blog’s great content as possible, or by getting them to sign up to your feed. And what is the best way to do this? Immediately after the visitor is done reading the blog entry they arrived at (and remember, most visitors don’t arrive at your homepage - they get deep linked in from search engines or other blogs), at the bottom of the article place prominent text links to subscribe and links to read related content (problogger.com actually does a great job of this). Just don’t fail here and bury these important links away on the right hand column, or at the bottom of your comments, like I see so often.

3: Survey and Learn from Your Website Visitors

What’s another great way to improve your blog? This one is simple, yet many blog owners don’t do it - you need gain feedback from your visitors! Simply sign up for a free survey tool like 4Q, and get to know your visitors better. It allows you to ask your visitors questions in the form of a non-obtrusive pop-up survey. Here are the 3 main questions you need to ask your visitors in order to gain insight for optimizing your blog:

• What was the reason you came to this blog?
• Did you find what you were looking for?
• What else would you like to see at this blog?

Asking these questions allows you to gain some real insight into your visitors and their needs - and remember, a blog that doesn’t meet the needs of visitors could spend all the money in the world to get new traffic, but it wouldn’t get many repeat visits (way cheaper) because the visitors aren’t finding what they want. And don’t just survey your visitors - act on what you find! It can often be very revealing…

4: Build a Community into your Blog

Want to get as many repeat visits as possible, without having to rely on RSS feeds to pull visitors back? Then build a community for your blog, and engage not only yourself with your readers, but allow your readers to engage with each other. This is particularly a great idea if you are niche blogger and you have a small but captive audience. There are a number of ways to create this community for your blog - the basic way is to setup and install ‘MyBlogLog‘ or ‘BuddyPress‘ as a widget on your blog. The more advanced way to build a community is to create a social network around your blog using Ning or KickApps. Both of these are free and allow you to fully customize, brand and create your own community, and use your own blog feed as a main ingredient of the community. Win-win situation for you and your readers!

5: Setup Goals and Begin Testing to Improve Them

Lastly, one of the most important things to remember for blogging success is to set goals and try and beat them. And for blogs, your goal is likely to get as many readers as possible. But be more specific and actionable. For example set a weekly goal for new readers, i.e. 100 new subscribers per week. Then, test elements of your website (using Google Website Optimizer) to try and improve your subscribers and reach your goals. One of the best things to test is the ‘subscription’ area, usually found to the top right of your blog - where your RSS feed links and newsletter signup form usually is. Test different calls to actions, different images and different copy. See which one drives the most goal conversions. And for the goal conversion to work, you will need to tag your thanks page with tracking code (which is easily done if you use AWeber to manager your feed readers). Here is a cool plugin to help you use Google Website Optimizer on your blog. Also, if you are selling a product or giving away something like an ebook on your blog, you can track that as a goal and test to improve sign up rates.

So there we have it. And remember, don’t ever think your blog is ‘done’ - always keep striving to improve your blog. If you don’t, before you know it, a competitor will appear out of nowhere and start stealing away your beloved visitors. For more ideas on how to help improve your blog (and websites in general), and to find ways to stop wasting so much money on online marketing, consider checking out my new free ebook all about this.

So, what are you waiting for? Use these tips and start improving your blog right now - and who knows, it may end up being as successful as ProBlogger one day!

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This post is an attempt to make some sense of it. I’d value your thoughts in comments to help me take these half thought through ideas to something more concrete.

Those who have been following me for a while know that I not only spend a lot of time on my blogs but also invest significant time on sites like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn…. (the list could go on).

What’s my strategy? Why invest so much time into sites that I don’t actually own?

To be honest there are days when i wonder if I have a strategy at all. There’s so much I don’t know about social media and how it fits into what I do - some days it just feels messy. However in the midst of it all there are moments of clarity.

Home Bases and Outposts

Today I was watching a video of a presentation by Chris Brogan and a short segment of it resonated strongly and put words to the way I use social media. He talked about:

• Home Bases
• Outposts
• Passports

He’s used these concepts numerous times on his blog before (here and here for example) but today it got my attention a little more than previously - particularly the idea of the ‘Home Base’ and that of the ‘Outpost’.

A home base is a place online that you own, that is your online ‘home’. For me I have two home bases - ProBlogger and Digital Photography School. For me my home bases are blogs but for others they will be other types of websites.

Outposts are places that you have an online presence out in other parts of the web that you might not ‘own’. I’d previously being using the word ’satellites’ to describe this but I think ‘outposts’ works better.

Outposts will mean different things to different people and businesses. Here’s how it looks for me as I think about my home base of ProBlogger.

As you’ll see, most of my ‘outposts’ are social media sites - however for others an outpost could also include forums, other community sites and even the comments sections of other blogs.

Each of the outposts that you see above are places that I have accounts and am attempting to grow my online presence (some better than others). These ‘outposts’ are sites where I:

• add content
• build relationships
• test ideas
• grow a profile
• listen
• experiment
• make connections
• try to be useful
• play

Out of this combination of activities many things come. Relationships, ideas, traffic, resources, partnerships, community and much more emerge from the outposts - much of it making my home base stronger.

Two Way Streams and Outposts Taking on a Life of Their Own

The outposts do drive some traffic back to the home base, but many of the benefits are less tangible and have more to do with building the brand and influences of my blogs.

Also worth noting is that the outposts don’t just feed the homebase (it isn’t just a one way thing)- but the homebase feeds the outposts and sometimes the outpost seems to take on a life of its own and becomes the real place of action where without really trying a community emerges.

For example this week I discovered that a small (but growing) group of ProBlogger readers had been interacting with my content and one another on my Facebook Profile - despite the fact that I’d not spent more than 20 minutes on Facebook in the previous three months. Just the fact that I link to Facebook and pull in my Twitter activity means that the ‘community’ there has sprung up (now that I’m aware of what’s going on I can participate and feed the community.

This Post is Half Finished

I laugh when people occasionally refer to me as a social media expert.

You see while I’ve managed to grow a reasonable social media presence over the last few years there is still much to learn. As a result I’d love to here your thoughts on what I’ve written and how you see and use social media in your blogging and business. Your comments will take this post a step closer to completion - looking forward to how it ends!

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In this post Brian Armstrong from StartBreakingFree.com shares some tips on getting free books to give away on your blog.

If you’re like most people, you haven’t had time to write a great book to give away as a sign-up bonus. Well, today I’m going to show you two very easy ways to get such a book:

• Create your own with an e-book template
• Use someone else’s book that is in the public domain (you’d be amazed how many great books are out there for free!)

Create Your Own eBook In 48 Hours With An E-book Template

About a year ago I stumbled across these excellent e-book templates which were being given away by Eben Pagan (he is a successful internet marketer and deserves all the credit for these, I didn’t create them!)

They have a professional design in nine different colors, come with instructions, and make it super easy to get a book done quickly.

Here are the steps which I’ve personally used to create an eBook in less than 48 hours:

• Use a “top 10″ formula. Writing a book from scratch sounds hard but anybody can come up with 10 tips in their niche. Even if it ends up being only 20 or 30 pages that’s ok for an eBook.
• Create a catchy title based on the top 10 theme, such as “10 Ways To Raise Your Grades By Studying Smarter, Not Harder” or “10 Secrets To Making Money Online”
• Come up with the 10 tips by brainstorming and looking at the best posts on your blog.
• Put the tips in a logical order and include several sub-points under each one.
• Now plug your tips and sub-points into the template and write a paragraph or two under each one (copy and paste text from blog posts you’ve already written when appropriate).
• Summarize your main points in an introduction and conclusion and you’ve got a book!
• Use Adobe Reader to convert it to a PDF for distrbution.

You should also familiarize yourself with Microsoft Word’s “styles” to keep your formatting consistent. If you want to change how a subheading looks, for example, you shouldn’t change it manually. Instead, you should edit the “subheading style” and it will apply your changes to all the subheadings. This will save you a lot of time down the road.

Finally, upload your PDF to your server and find a way to automatically send your eBook to new subscribers. In Feedburner you can include this link in the confirmation email (login to Feedburner and go to Publicize -> Email Subscriptions -> Communication Preferences). Similar options exist for Aweber and other newsletter providers. Some people also include the link in the bottom of every RSS post.

Second Option: Get Free Books To Give Away!

The second, and perhaps easier, method is to use a book that someone else has already written.

There are an amazing number of books in the public domain (and also under the creative commons license, more on this later) which you can give away on your site. For example, in my niche of entrepreneurship, I paid good money for three books years ago that I heard were excellent: Think and Grow Rich, The Richest Man In Babylon, and The Way To Wealth.

Imagine how surprised I was to discover that all three of these books were now available online for free! I found PDF copies using the method I describe below and started giving them away on my website. My subscribers started going up immediately!

So how do you find these books? Well, according to Wikipedia…

In the United States, all books and other works published before 1923 have expired copyrights and are in the public domain. In addition, works published before 1964 that did not have their copyrights renewed 28 years after first publication year also are in the public domain…

Many books which are not in the public domain can still be found under the creative commons license. The Creative Commons license is somewhere in between a full copyright and a public domain work. Many times, the work can still be given away for free, but you are not allowed to sell it and you must pay attribution to the original author. This still works fine for our sign-up bonus however.

I’ve had the most success finding public domain and creative commons works at a site called Scribd.com.

They have tons of PDF’s of various works. And it’s easy to see the the copyright at the bottom of each page. Many of them use the creative commons terms like “attribution” (meaning you must keep the original author’s name in there) or “non-commercial” (meaning you can’t sell it). It’s probably a good idea to familiarize yourself with these terms by visiting the creative commons definitions page.

Once you’d found a PDF you like, you can download it directly from Scribd.com and use it in the same way described above.

Conclusion

Now you have no excuse NOT to give away a great sign-up bonus for your new subscribers! Set aside some time this week to get this together, and start watching your subscriber numbers climb!

To get more tips like these, check out Brian Armstrong’s blog at StartBreakingFree.com. It’s full of great advice on how to quit your 9-to-5, start your own business, and achieve financial freedom. He’ll even send you 3 of the top 10 books ever written on building wealth for FREE when you subscribe, instantly delivered to your inbox!

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Did you know that you can get your site featured on major news sites like CNN, CNET, Newsweek, USA Today, and even the Wall Street Journal. It’s one of the best kept secrets in the blogosphere and I’m going to reveal it in this article.

There are actually three ways you can get your blog articles published on major news sites.

1. BlogBurst

The first technique uses a site called BlogBust. BlogBurst is a blog syndication network that places the best blogs on mainstream media sites like Reuters, USA Today, Fox News, and the Houston Chronicle.

Join the BlogBurst network and start getting picked up by some of the world’s most popular media sites. Keep in mind that they only accept full text feeds. No partial RSS feeds are allowed.

Once your blog has been accepted, you’ll gain increased visibility, branding, and traffic. This is an easy and automated way to increase your exposure. Plus, you’ll be associated with some of the best websites online and you’ll be able to tell your readers that you’ve been published on USA Today, Fox News, and other high-profile websites. Just think how much more credibility this will give you.

2. Blogrunner

My second strategy allows you to get links from the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. You do so with a service known as Blogrunner.

If you go to the New York Times website, you’ll see the Blogrunner widget integrated into almost every page. This is a news aggregator that collects related headlines from news sources and blogs. Each of the news stories in the Blogrunner widget is ranked by its popularity.

Sources are selected based on an automated process so you won’t be able to submit your blog directly. However, they currently monitor thousands of blogs and media sources, so it’s likely that your blog is already indexed.

Now you simply need to write on topics related to those published in the New York Times and get some extra buzz to get linked.

3. Sphere

There is a third and final way to get your blog featured in major news sites like CNN, The Wall Street Journal, and Newsweek.

All you have to do is link to a story on one of these major news sites and they will link back to you at the end of the article.

This is all automated by a site called Sphere.com, which matches mainstream news items with related articles in the blogosphere. For example, you can go to the bottom of any CNN story and see a drop-down box that says: “From the Blogs”. This box includes stories that have linked to this article. You can get hundreds of extra visitors by positioning yourself to show up here. All you have to do is link to a CNN story and you’ll get your own spot of fame.

The mainstream media is really starting to embrace the blogosphere and you can join in on the fun with these simple strategies.

Sphere is also being used by TechCrunch, Time, Reuters, CBS, AOL, the Washington Post, WordPress, GigaOm, Newsweek, and ZDNet, allowing you to get your blog featured on any of these prestigious sites. In fact, there are over 100,000 web sites using Sphere, providing you with almost unlimited link opportunities…

The key to getting picked up is to write content that adds to the conversation on partner sites. Your articles need to be highly relevant and add value to the article your linking to.

All you have to do is make a post to your blog, include a link to one of the stories on a site that uses the Sphere plug in, get a link inside the sphere widget, and watch the traffic roll in.

Kim Roach is the hip marketing gal at BuzzBlogger.com. Grab Front Page Rankings in 24 hours with her Free Google Domination Videos.

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Take for instance two well known bloggers - Timothy Ferriss and Gary Vaynerchuk. Both take different approaches but both have been very successful in building strong online presence.

Timothy is famous for his book The 4-Hour Workweek a book looking at the simplification of life, outsourcing and focusing upon the important tasks at hand. Tim certainly works hard for his money but his approach is certainly a little different to Gary’s.

For example Tim has written here at ProBlogger about how he finds that posting every 4-6 days on his blog is enough (and actually beneficial).

On the other hand Gary Vaynerchuck’s inspirational keynote at Blog World Expo showed a different approach with a guy working massive hours, arguing that you should respond to every single email you get and that you need to be producing content every day.

Both of these guys have built successful businesses and great online presences through their blogging and social media (and I’m sure that there are some similarities between them also ) but both have done it differently.

To me this is encouraging. There are not ‘formulas’ and there is room for a diversity of approaches!

Which bloggers approach do you resonate with most - Gary or Tim?

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Before you start reading this, take a quick look at something very important: your own blog. What do you see when you glance at the Categories list? If you’re anything like most bloggers, it will include categories which:

• You used a couple of years ago but don’t use any more
• Have only one or two posts in
• Have names that aren’t self-explanatory
• Seemed like a good idea at the time, when you added them for one specific post

There’s plenty of blogging advice about how to craft posts, how to gain readers, and how to start your first blog - but surprisingly little has been written about how to choose your categories. The only advice I could find was from Lorelle on Wordpress:

Most people add categories on the fly or list everything they want to talk about in their categories and then work to fill them up as they go. I made a plan for this blog’s articles and I wanted to keep the focus narrow and the structure clean. I believe working from a very specific plan helps keep a blog on track and more successful. Plans can change over time, but start your journey with a good map.

I’ve just launched a new blog (Alpha Student), which has meant a lot of planning, brainstorming and head-scratching. One of the biggest puzzles has been how to choose suitable categories - which has led me to think hard about how I use categories as a reader, and how categories are typically used in the blogosphere.

I thought a good place to start was my first blog, The Office Diet, where I followed a similar process to most bloggers:

• I entered the categories that I thought I might write on when I launched the blog without putting much thought into it.
• I added more categories as I went along (for series, or any post which didn’t fit an existing category).

In doing so, I unwittingly made a number of common mistakes. I’m going to go through four big ones - and bring in some examples from other blogs where I think the categories list could have been more effectively planned.

And once I’ve shown you some of the mistakes, I’ll explain how you can choose your categories effectively in order to avoid making them.

Mistake 1: Failing to Plan

The mistake which most bloggers make is failing to plan at all - and, if they do plan, failing to adjust that plan to fit reality!

With The Office Diet, I knew I wanted to create a few downloadable resources for readers in the first month (January) - such as a food diary template. So I had a category called “Resources” which was supposed to hold this sort of posts. In practice, though, I’ve only written a handful of these.

I suspect some other bloggers have met similar problems, when they’ve either not planned ahead (ask yourself “Will I use this category frequently?” if you add one for a specific post) or where their plans haven’t quite matched up with what really happens.

For example, on The Simple Dollar, Trent has the categories “Décor” and “S&P 500” which only have one post in each. “Sunday Conversation” only has three posts. Although this is conjecture, I think Trent probably added those categories on a day when he wrote on those specific topics - and didn’t plan ahead for whether he’d use them again.

Mistake 2: Using Categories for Series

Lots of big blogs, including ProBlogger, Daily Blog Tips and many more use categories for series. I did the same on The Office Diet, when I wrote the “Basics”, “Healthy Mind” and “Excuse-Busting” series. I now think that this was a mistake.

Readers who come to a blog for the first time are likely to use your categories to navigate to posts that they’re interested in. Category names often aren’t self-explanatory, and if the series ran a year ago, all the posts in that category will be old. If you run a lot of series, your category list will quickly become cluttered up. And navigating through a series by clicking on a category often means scrolling through multiple pages of posts - often a pain for readers.

I would suggest that, for the majority of blogs, posts in a series should be categorised “normally” just like any other posts. Each post in the series should have a link at the top and bottom going to an index post (or even a page) which holds links to the whole series. You might also want to include a link to the previous and next posts in the series from each.

For a shortish series (under 10 posts), you could even put the index at the top of every post - the Men with Pens do this to great effect on their Guest Posting series (as an aside, this is a great read for any blogger thinking about writing guest posts). Or put it at the bottom of every post, like Sonia on Remarkable Communication is doing with her Objection Blaster Series.

Mistake 3: Categories at Different Granularities

A very common problem with categories is not keeping your categories at the same level of granularity. By that, I mean that some of your categories are probably very broad and others are very narrow. This is often caused by failing to plan: it’s a good idea to sit down for an hour or two and decide roughly how many categories you want, and how broad or detailed that means they’ll be.

Blogs which are narrowly focused on a niche will probably have narrow, specific topics as readers are likely to be looking for expert advice in particular areas. Blogs with a very wide remit need broad categories to help readers weed out the areas that aren’t interesting to them.

On Problogger, I would suggest that the categories list has some items which cover too narrow an area. For example, “Yahoo Publishing Network” is very specific when compared with categories like “Advertising” and “Blog Networks”.

Mistake 4: Inconsistent Category Naming

I’d bet good money that, at some point, you’ve come across a categories list on a blog and wondered what the heck some of the categories meant. Perhaps most were self explanatory, like “Reader Questions” or “Content Writing” but then you came across “Special”. Special what? Try to make sure your category names can be understood without the reader having to click on them to figure out what they might mean.

Or maybe you see a blog which has a nice neat list of one-word categories, then one which is five words long so gets a disproportionate amount of space compared to its importance. (Usually, the shorter the name of a category, the broader its remit and the larger the number of posts it contains.)

This is a tiny point - but be consistent with capitalisation. One of my favourite blogs, The Change Blog, capitalises all the categories except two (“blog carnival” and “personal growth”) - to me, this looks a little odd.

Another problem is when some of the categories have quite formal names (“Finances, Frugality, Investment”) and others are slangy or chatty (“Quick tips”, “Easy wins”). The way in which you name your categories is important in setting the tone for your whole blog. On most blog templates, the categories list displays on the front page: that means you need to put at least as much thought into the wording of your categories as you do into the wording of your headlines.

Doing It Right

Now that I’ve been through the common mistakes people make with categories, you might be looking at your own blog in dismay - or rethinking your plans for the one you’re about to launch.

I mentioned earlier that I’ve just launched a new blog which took a considerable amount of planning. You can see the categories page at www.alphastudent.com/categories (I chose not to list the categories on the front page).

Rule 1: As Few Categories As Possible

Due to my blog design, I needed to keep the number of categories down to make sure they fitted comfortably in the list. I also wanted room to show the latest post from each category.

Most bloggers would benefit from using as few categories as possible. This avoids blog clutter in your sidebar, and avoids presenting readers with a forbidding list of dozens of different topics.

Alpha Student has a wide remit - “Helping you make the most of your time at university” - and covers everything from advice on exam technique to lists of flash games to play when you need a break. I decided on the categories:

Academic
Career
Financial
Personal
Practical
Social

When you’re planning your blog, think about how many categories you really need … can two of your topics be conflated into one are?

If you’ve got an existing blog, take a look at your categories list and note any which are superfluous.

Rule 2: Don’t Be too Specific

Try not to be too specific, at least to start with. I deliberately kept my topics very broad. I could have broken down “Academic” into “Essays”, “Exams”, “Lectures”, “Seminars” and so on. When your blog is new, having dozens of categories means that lots of them will only contain one or two posts for a while.

Even if your blog’s been going for a while, you’ll find that some categories are too narrow - anything which contains under 5% of the total posts on your blog can probably be ditched.

Rule 3: Think Ahead

I know that with Alpha Student, I’ll want to run some series. For example, I’m going to do a series on essay writing with posts on topics like “Planning your essay”, “The first line of your essay”, and so on. But I don’t want to introduce a category just for a short series.

So I’m planning to categorize all those posts under “Academic”, which means readers browsing the academic section can find them easily. (Bear in mind that the majority of your readers won’t sit down and follow a whole series from beginning to end - they might only read one post from the middle.)

I’ll also have a single post announcing the series which will contain a list of the posts in the series, linking to each one. The individual posts in the series will link back to this index post.

How do you (or how will you) manage series on your blog?

What about competitions, giveaways and other one-offs? Think about how you can make these easy for readers to follow without using a category.

Over to You

As I said at the start of this article, little has been written about choosing categories for your blog. I’d love us to start remedying that here!

What are your thoughts on this topic - do you have a particular plan behind the categories on your blog? Do you think that categories aren’t really that important? Is there anything you wish you’d done differently with the way you’ve used categories?

Ali has just launched Alpha Student, a blog aimed at helping students make the most of their time at university.

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Bankaholic has a staff of 1 (Johns Wu) who will remain on at the blog.

If this price is true it’s a fairly decent sale for Mr Wu (understatement of the year) - the blog has an Alexa ranking of 42,168 and averages less than 20 comments per post. The blog does seem to rank very well for a lot of bank terms and I’m sure drives targeted traffic and would convert well with affiliate products - but this is still a fairly inspiring sale!

Here’s the Google Trends chart of the blog showing a steady growth over the last year.

Hat tip to Patrick who was first to let me know of this.

updated for accuracy

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The update is all about tracking what’s hot around the blogosphere and presenting stories ranked in 11 different categories according to how many other blogs are linking to those stories. You can then drill down and see the blogs that link to the story and a chart of how many did over time.

It isn’t a new concept - TechMeme, Technorati, Blogs.com and others have been doing it for years - however what strikes me here is just how comprehensive