Video: How do bloggers make money?
July 29, 2008 | Posted by InvestorBlogger | Comments Off
I’ve not done too badly over the past two years making nearly $11,000 on this blog and various other ‘related’ and ‘unrelated’ activities, but then I started watching this video by Yaro Starak as part of his promotional efforts for his Blog Mastermind Mentoring Program.
This method describes how he goes about making money and is totally worth watching though you may need to be patient if you can’t download fast enough! Then I started watching the other video about how much he can make … it’s staggering just how much he can bring in! Truly staggering. But like he says, watch this one first! It makes better sense!
If you want to know more about how he did it, you can sign up for the newsletter, get a free e-book and watch a more detailed video about making money from blogging.
Driving Traffic: Ten Tips from Yaro Starak
July 29, 2008 | Posted by InvestorBlogger | Comments Off
In every bloggers life comes a special day - the day they first launch a new blog. Now unless you went out and purchased someone else’’s blog chances are your blog launched with only one very loyal reader - you. Maybe a few days later you received a few hits when you told your sister, father, girlfriend and best friend about your new blog but that’’s about as far you went when it comes to finding readers.
Here are the top 10 techniques new bloggers can use to find readers. These are tips specifically for new bloggers, those people who have next-to-no audience at the moment and want to get the ball rolling.
It helps if you work on this list from top to bottom as each technique builds on the previous step to help you create momentum. Eventually once you establish enough momentum you gain what is called “traction”, which is a large enough audience base (about 500 readers a day is good) that you no longer have to work too hard on finding new readers. Instead your current loyal readers do the work for you through word of mouth.
Top 10 Tips
10. Write at least five major “pillar” articles. A pillar article is a tutorial style article aimed to teach your audience something. Generally they are longer than 500 words and have lots of very practical tips or advice. This article you are currently reading could be considered a pillar article since it is very practical and a good “how-to” lesson. This style of article has long term appeal, stays current (it isn’t news or time dependent) and offers real value and insight. The more pillars you have on your blog the better.
9. Write one new blog post per day minimum. Not every post has to be a pillar, but you should work on getting those five pillars done at the same time as you keep your blog fresh with a daily news or short article style post. The important thing here is to demonstrate to first time visitors that your blog is updated all the time so they feel that if they come back tomorrow they will likely find something new. This causes them to bookmark your site or subscribe to your blog feed.
You don”t have to produce one post per day all the time but it is important you do when your blog is brand new. Once you get traction you still need to keep the fresh content coming but your loyal audience will be more forgiving if you slow down to a few per week instead. The first few months are critical so the more content you can produce at this time the better.
8. Use a proper domain name. If you are serious about blogging be serious about what you call your blog. In order for people to easily spread the word about your blog you need a easily rememberable domain name. People often talk about blogs they like when they are speaking to friends in the real world (that’’s the offline world, you remember that place right?) so you need to make it easy for them to spread the word and pass on your URL. Try and get a .com if you can and focus on small easy to remember domains rather than worry about having the correct keywords (of course if you can get great keywords and easy to remember then you’ve done a good job!).
7. Start commenting on other blogs. Once you have your pillar articles and your daily fresh smaller articles your blog is ready to be exposed to the world. One of the best ways to find the right type of reader for your blog is to comment on other people’s blogs. You should aim to comment on blogs focused on a similar niche topic to yours since the readers there will be more likely to be interested in your blog.
Most blog commenting systems allow you to have your name/title linked to your blog when you leave a comment. This is how people find your blog. If you are a prolific commentor and always have something valuable to say then people will be interested to read more of your work and hence click through to visit your blog.
6. Trackback and link to other blogs in your blog posts. A trackback is sort of like a blog conversation. When you write a new article to your blog and it links or references another blogger’’s article you can do a trackback to their entry. What this does is leave a truncated summary of your blog post on their blog entry - it’’s sort of like your blog telling someone else’s blog that you wrote an article mentioning them. Trackbacks often appear like comments.
This is a good technique because like leaving comments a trackback leaves a link from another blog back to yours for readers to follow, but it also does something very important - it gets the attention of another blogger. The other blogger will likely come and read your post eager to see what you wrote about them. They may then become a loyal reader of yours or at least monitor you and if you are lucky some time down the road they may do a post linking to your blog bringing in more new readers.
5. Encourage comments on your own blog. One of the most powerful ways to convince someone to become a loyal reader is to show there are other loyal readers already following your work. If they see people commenting on your blog then they infer that your content must be good since you have readers so they should stick around and see what all the fuss is about. To encourage comments you can simply pose a question in a blog post. Be sure to always respond to comments as well so you can keep the conversation going.
4. Submit your latest pillar article to a blog carnival. A blog carnival is a post in a blog that summarizes a collection of articles from many different blogs on a specific topic. The idea is to collect some of the best content on a topic in a given week. Often many other blogs link back to a carnival host and as such the people that have articles featured in the carnival often enjoy a spike in new readers.
To find the right blog carnival for your blog, do a search at blogcarnival.com.
3. Submit your blog to blogtopsites.com. To be honest this tip is not going to bring in a flood of new readers but it’’s so easy to do and only takes five minutes so it’’s worth the effort. Go to Blog Top Sites, find the appropriate category for your blog and submit it. You have to copy and paste a couple of lines of code on to your blog so you can rank and then sit back and watch the traffic come in. You will probably only get 1-10 incoming readers per day with this technique but over time it can build up as you climb the rankings. It all helps!
2. Submit your articles to EzineArticles.com. This is another tip that doesn’t bring in hundreds of new visitors immediately (although it can if you keep doing it) but it’’s worthwhile because you simply leverage what you already have - your pillar articles. Once a week or so take one of your pillar articles and submit it to Ezine Articles. Your article then becomes available to other people who can republish your article on their website or in their newsletter.
How you benefit is through what is called your “Resource Box”. You create your own resource box which is like a signature file where you include one to two sentences and link back to your website (or blog in this case). Anyone who publishes your article has to include your resource box so you get incoming links. If someone with a large newsletter publishes your article you can get a lot of new readers at once.
1. Write more pillar articles. Everything you do above will help you to find blog readers however all of the techniques I’ve listed only work when you have strong pillars in place. Without them if you do everything above you may bring in readers but they won’t stay or bother to come back. Aim for one solid pillar article per week and by the end of the year you will have a database of over 50 fantastic feature articles that will work hard for you to bring in more and more readers.
I hope you enjoyed my list of traffic tips. Everything listed above are techniques I’ve put into place myself for my blogs and have worked for me, however it’’s certainly not a comprehensive list. There are many more things you can do. Finding readers is all about testing to see what works best for you and your audience and I have no doubt if you put your mind to it you will find a balance that works for you.
This article was by Yaro Starak, a professional blogger and my blog mentor. He is the leader of the Blog Mastermind mentoring program designed to teach bloggers how to earn a full time income blogging part time.
To get more information about Blog Mastermind click this link:www.BlogMastermind.com
Get Started Blogging #3: Writing Content
June 1, 2008 | Posted by InvestorBlogger | Comments Off
We’re now into Lesson #3 in our Quick Guide to blogging. In Lesson #1 we looked at how to get started blogging, and what it’s worth. In Lesson #2, we examined some of the different choices bloggers who want to get started blogging have.
In Lesson #3, we are going to have a look at writing that first post, what you can blog about, and so on…
Writing that first post
When you sit down to write your first post, no doubt your head fills with the countless blogs and examples of great articles that you have read in your excitement to get started. You sit down to draft your first blog post, and bam! all those thoughts and ideas that you have been collecting just evaporate leaving you staring at your monitor, and your fingers poised over the keyword. “What on earth am I going to write now?”
Step 1: Put your keyboard away and get out your pen and paper.
There are a lot of bloggers who fail at the first post. So let’s make it easy: you’ve probably got a simple idea of what your blog is supposed to be, but you may not be sure of what to write - try listing. That’s it: simply list all the ideas you have on a piece of paper for that first post. Spend five minutes simply listing the ideas. After you’ve reached the time limit. Stop.
Step 2: Examine your list.
You’re going to look through your list of ideas to see if you could find something you could blog about. The criteria should be simple, too: can you write 100 words about it? Do I feel comfortable to write about that? Once you’re done, see which of the topics you feel more strongly about.
Step 3: Choose your topic and write 100 words.
Your first post needn’t be long, the whole point of blogging is that you get into the habit of writing your ‘journal’ on a daily basis. So, write that 100 words or so. Don’t forget to hit ‘Save’ so that you can return to your post later. It’s amazing how many people forget to do that, then there’s a power cut, an accident, or you just close your window. Woops! It’s gone! - I know I had to rescue a post from somewhere else once!
Step 4: Edit it, esp. if your writing is weak - do pay attention to spelling and grammar.
It’s worth checking your spelling or grammar. If you’re intending to be serious about blogging, you will need to put more emphasis on this. Nothing is worse than a blog that is carelessly written. Really. But it’s crucial: you should only edit the text when you’re pretty satisfied with WHAT you want to say. If you try to edit as you write, you will find that you don’t write very much.
Step 5: Hit “Publish”.
Re-read your post once you’ve checked the grammar, spelling and so on. Then hit that button. Don’t dilly-dally. Hit it. Once you hit that “Publish” button often enough, you will stop feeling self-conscious such that pushing the ‘Publish’ gets easier. You’ve got no idea how many great writers have got novels stuffed inside their disk drives, in old parchments, in notebooks, … great writers who never had the confidence to publish their writings. Hiding your posts in your ‘Drafts’ section will ensure that you get NO recognition, NO traffic, NO comments, and NO readership!
Finding other content
Publishing content may not come easily at first, most likely you will want to stick to short posts until your comfortable with the technical side of things at the very least. In the meantime, you can post a wide range of intermediate posts, while you struggle over your longer postings. This is a short list of things you can post without much work. As you get more confident, you’ll find it easier to add extra comments.
- Picture of the Week from snaps that you have taken yourself.
- Video from YouTube on music, products, or whatever.
- Quotations from people you are interested in.
- Buzzes for sites and products you like.
- Good Reading for articles that you thought worth reading and sharing.
These are some samples for content. Of course, if you are interested, download my top 20 money making feeds and see how the top 20 bloggers deal with this, what they post, and what works.
Look out for lesson 4 soon, which looks at some ways to get traffic for your blog and which ways are a waste of time in this regard! I’ll be posting this shortly.
Four solid reasons to start a blog: audience, content, skill and a feel for business
February 19, 2008 | Posted by InvestorBlogger | Read these 4 comments
A couple of months ago I got together with Steve Sutherland, one of my friends in Taipei, who was wondering if he should start a blog or not. If you remember from earlier posts, he runs the Education Agents website, AgentsChat dot com. He was thinking about installing the WordPress software on a separate domain, and starting a blog about the World of Education Services. So should he run a blog? That got me to thinking: should he?
I can outline four reasons (and two caveats) why I think he should consider starting blogging:
1. He has an audience: His community already has 1500 members and it is growing constantly. In the forum, there are ample opportunities for writing post like articles, and in fact, Steve has already done some writing in the forums. It’s quite clear that while forums are good for chatting, longer articles are often the backbone of a good community as they allow writers the space to expand their ideas, develop their content, and write top quality articles. With an audience already present, he’s got an easy start, and by integrating SMF with WordPress, he’d be able to take advantage of the strengths of both applications.
2. He has something to say: As you’ve seen, Steve is already well capable of writing good pieces that his audience would enjoy reading. I’ve spoken to Steve on many occasions, and I think he has a lot of incredible ideas about his industry that would easily find an very specific niche. In fact, I have a strong sense that with his insight into his industry, his blog would quickly establish itself as a top blog because of its first-mover chance. I amn’t aware of any blogs that would be competing for his space.
3. He has the technical skill to manage a blog: Learning WordPress can be a little daunting at times for new users, but in general the principles of managing a blog are similar to, and easier than, managing an online forum. By fine tuning the operation of the blog, you can be left with the primary task of just focusing on writing. He’s also familiar with many of the Internet resources that he would need to develop a blog properly.
4. He has the business skill to run it well: Many bloggers (myself included) started blogging without much concern for the business side of it. For the most successful ones, monetization almost came as an afterthought to the blog itself. This isn’t necessarily the best way to build a business. Steve’s got a rich experience, and knowledge of, running businesses, advertising, marketing, etc., all of which would serve him well to get started. Combined with an established audience, advertisers, and networks, he’d likely have a solid foundation for the blog to be successful in the long term.
So I believe that these four “Winds of blogging” are all blowing now and it could be the perfect opportunity for him to start. But I also know he has reservations about blogging, especially on the commitment side; and the confidence side.
So, let’s deal with the confidence issue first. Most people, when confronted with the idea of ‘having’ to write, react in a similar way - with HORROR! And, rightly so.
Your words, ideas and organization are all going to be read by dozens, possibly hundreds of readers, are you good enough? Is your writing good enough? Do you really have something to say? To which I have only one thing to say: blogging is pretty much an adventure… as such, you’re allowed the space to develop as a writer (hey, look at my posts a year ago, and you’ll see what I mean!).
Too often to new writers, the goal is to write the perfect piece of writing with the best organization and best content. Well, it isn’t going to happen any time soon. So quit worrying! Once you quite worrying about your writing, you’ll really begin to enjoy the process, the adventure of blogging.
To progress as a writer, and as a blogger, you DO have to make a commitment: with yourself, with your blog, and with your audience. What the nature of that commitment is can be totally up to you! If you want to post daily, then you can. If you want to post weekly, or even monthly, then you can. Obviously, you’ll experience different results whichever method you choose. But there’s no obligation to post on a daily basis. But like most skills, the more you practice, the better you will become.
So, in short, to people who are considering blogging, and can’t decide. Perhaps this post will help to clarify what it is that is holding you back. For me, though, it was a nexus of different things that helped to get me posting regularly: I already had a blog and a hankering to write something, I also had a strong motivation in my content area, then I discovered BlogDesk, and later Payperpost. Somehow all of this coalesced last year, when my daily posting schedule came about.
What helped you to get started blogging? When did it happen? Share with us in our comments section below.
Saturday Reading: InvestorBlogger’s Top Ten Feeds
February 16, 2008 | Posted by InvestorBlogger | Read these 3 comments
I’ve been reading a number of blogs for quite a while, and for my readers I’ve decided to export and save an OPML file of my favorite blogs for sharing. There are only ten feeds currently in the file, and as I read more blogs in the coming months, I’ll surely be expanding my list to 25 feeds.
If you’re interested, download the file (in zip format) and upload it to your favorite OPML supported FeedReader. The file is generated from Google Reader, and does work well with that and, of course, BlogLines Feed Reader.
Happy Reading. Oh, and do share what feeds you like! Perhaps I’ll add one or two of them!
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