“Blogger to Watch: Torre de Roche talks about her journey to big publishing deal” plus 2 more |  |
- Blogger to Watch: Torre de Roche talks about her journey to big publishing deal
- 3 Ways to Get More Subscribers for Your Blog
- AdSense Turns 10 Years Old: Why I’m Grateful for it!
| Blogger to Watch: Torre de Roche talks about her journey to big publishing deal Posted: 21 Jun 2013 08:48 AM PDT This is an guest interview by Jade Craven. It is my honour to share the story of Torre De Roche, and her journey from blogger to author with an impressive publishing deal. I first mentioned her on Problogger as one of the bloggers to watch in 2012. I was impressed with her self-published memoir and her creative approach to blogging. In 2011, she sold the rights to three publishers and sold the movie options. Torre is a natural writer. Her memoir, Love With a Chance of Drowing, is one of the best books I’ve ever read. In this interview, I talk with her about her creative process and the books journey to publication. I recommend you check out the blog posts I’ve linked to; her story is really compelling. You've previously said that you put a lot of effort into developing your personal brand. Can you walk us through the process?Before I sold the book to publishers, I learned through my research that agents and publishers look for authors with platforms, like popular blogs. So I began brainstorming blog ideas that would: (a) Fit with the theme of the book, (b) Inspire, or offer the reader take-home value, and, (c) Align with my voice and my self-deprecating sense of humour. One day, while touring New Zealand by van, an idea struck out of the blue: the Fearful Adventurer! This theme would allow me to be open about my fears, while gently inspiring other fearful people to take leaps. Once I had that idea in place, I began designing a look and feel to align with that theme. You write less frequently then most bloggers, but your posts are of a very high standard. How much effort do you put into the average blog post?I don't use a timer because that would be like weighting myself after a large, delicious meal, but yes, I always put a lot of effort into my posts. Some of my posts contain illustrations and when there is paint involved, a post can easily take me 16 hours or more. I don't plan them out—I let them evolve on the page. Sometimes that happens quickly over four hours, sometimes they're created slowly over a week. I don't call it 'work,' though. It's creative play. Tell us more about the concept of creative play. How can non-artistic bloggers be more creative with their blog?I don’t believe in the term ‘non-artistic’! Everybody is artistic. Creativity comes easier to those who embrace that trait in themselves and exercise it daily, but it’s a core part of who we all are. Stephen Colbert once told a story about an epiphany he had in being able to fully be himself on stage: “Something burst that night, and I finally let go of the pretension of not wanting to be a fool.” One more thing: ease off on reading How-To guides, and start filling your creative piggy bank with stand-up comedy, art galleries, books you wouldn’t usually pick up, and independent films. To be creative, you have to surround yourself with creativity. There is no How-To guide that can replace that. You've written about the difficulties trying to blog and travel at the same time. How do you manage to write such captivating blog posts while living a nomad lifestyle?It's tough to surrender into a ruminative creative headspace if you're moving around a lot or worrying about where you're going to sleep at night! Travel gives me a lot of inspiration for what I create, but generally I have to wait until I'm fixed in one spot before I can process those ideas into any kind of art. I wrote Love with a Chance of Drowning a year after the voyage was over. By that time, I'd had a chance to process the experience retrospectively and make meaning out of the whole experience. There's a lot of value in fully experiencing the moment while you're in it, and then turning it into art later on when you have the time and the headspace to spare. Read: The Problem with Being a Travelling Writer You've talked about how you suffered from creative blocks, something that many bloggers would sympathize with. How did you overcome this?Art is uncertain. Sometimes, in order to feel the delicious comfort of certainty, you might try to make art while grasping onto some idea or technique that seems safe. If you do that, your writing will come out stiff and contrived because you're not creating, you're imitating. Loosen your grip. Let go of control. Embrace the freefalling sensation of having no idea where you're going with something. Good art comes from risk, experimentation, and play. A good way to discover this again is to take up a new form of art, one that you can't control: sculpture, life drawing, ceramics… Squeeze some clay between your fingers, laugh like a child, and remember what it feels like to play without all that seriousness. Now, create from that space. Read: The Trouble With Blogging The bookYou were gaining traction for the self-published version of your book during 2011. What motivated you to accept a traditional book deal?Before the book went to auction, I did some numbers to work out what the book was worth to me. I'd already invested a considerable amount into the self-publishing process, so it wasn't good business sense to take a token advance just so that I could call myself a 'published author.' I also tallied up what I could reasonably expect to earn as a self-published author, factoring in all the limitations with distribution, etc. That's how I got my magic number. When the first offer came in, it was right on my number. I couldn't believe it! We negotiated up from there. So I took the deal because the advance was considerably high, and because it was well above what I felt I could earn as a self-published author. One of the things I loved about your book was that it was extremely polished. I've found that this is a rare quality in many of the self-published books and ebooks I read. How important is the design and editing? Was it daunting investing so much without knowing how people would react?I spent several years writing my book and, while I doubted myself daily, I wouldn't have written it if I didn't believe in it. Investing at the end stages was a small price to pay on top of the time and energy I'd already spent writing the book. Design and editing are extremely important! We live in an era of information overload, and people are now extra precious with how they spend their time. The cover has to immediately communicate one firm promise: This will be worth your time. Your purpose for getting the book professionally edited is so that you can come good on that promise. You should strive to make your book worthy of the reader's time from the moment they first lay eyes on your cover, to the moment they turn the final page. Otherwise you're just creating noise. What role did your blog play in getting the book deal?I wouldn't have sold the book without my blog. It helped in several ways: 1. A Hollywood film producer randomly discovered my profile on Twitter two weeks after I self-published. He clicked through to my blog, read an excerpt of Love with a Chance of Drowning, and DM'ed me to request a copy of the book. I sent him a copy, and he ended up buying the film option. 2. A UK publisher chanced upon my book in much the same way: through random clicking that led her to an excerpt published on my blog. She also ended up putting in an offer to buy the book. 3. When my agent was pitching the book to Australia and the US, publishers could see that I had a blog and a following. This upped the value of the book. It has since sold to five publishers. More about her book:
What bloggers are you watching?I follow a lot of blogs, but there are only a few that I visit regularly: Hyperbole and a Half – I discovered Allie Brosh a few years ago, and no other blogger has since made me spray tea out of my nose like her. It is, without a doubt, the most hilarious blog in the world. Almost Fearless – I've been following Christine Gilbert's blog for several years now. Her life story is interesting to follow and she's also damn good at the business of blogging. World Tour Stories – This is a blog about a really, really good looking couple who are sailing the world. They are exceptional at telling a story through stunning photography. A city girl with a morbid fear of deep water, Torre DeRoche, confronts her deepest fears after falling for an Argentinean man with a leaky sailboat and a big dream.Set against a backdrop of the world's most beautiful and remote destinations, Love with a Chance of Drowning is a sometimes hilarious, often moving and always breathtakingly brave memoir that proves there are some risks worth taking. Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger Blogger to Watch: Torre de Roche talks about her journey to big publishing deal     |
| 3 Ways to Get More Subscribers for Your Blog Posted: 20 Jun 2013 08:26 AM PDT “I have hundreds of readers coming to my blog every day – but nobody ever subscribes to my newsletter. Help!?!” This request came in via email today and I thought I’d share my reply with the 3 suggestions I offered. —– Thanks for the question – I suspect you’re not alone with this problem. While a lot can probably be written on the topic, let me suggest 3 things I’ve found helpful increasing subscriber numbers. Note: the #1 thing I did to building subscriber numbers on Digital Photography School was introduce a lightbox subscriber box. I spoke about this in my 10 Things I Wish I Knew About Blogging webinar so I won’t rehash it here. 1. Ask People to SubscribeThis sounds a little too simple to be effective but I’m amazed how many people do subscribe once you mention you’ve got a newsletter. I’m also amazed how many of our regular and loyal readers don’t know we even have a newsletter, despite it being promoted around the blog. Some semi-regular calls to subscribe can be very effective. You can do this in a number of ways, including:
The key to remember, when mentioning your newsletter regularly, is to find fresh ways to talk about it. Don’t just have the same tweet to subscribe every 2nd day.
2. Start a SeriesAnnounce that you’re going to be doing a series of posts, on your blog, on a topic that you know will really be useful to your readers. I remember the first time I announced that I was going to run the 31 Days to Build a Better Blog series (the series that later became the eBook by the same name) I was amazed at how many people subscribed to my blog over the next 24 hours. I was signalling to readers that I was going to do something that would serve them and in doing so, created anticipation among my readers. This anticipation (as I’ve written about in the past) is a key reason people will subscribe to your blog. 3. Place Calls to Subscribe in ‘Hot Zones’One last tip is to identify some ‘hot zones’ on your blog, to place calls to subscribe. These zones are either places that your readers will be looking or pages that they’ll be visiting. Let me suggest a couple: 1. Under PostsI’m not currently doing this on my blogs, as I use the space under my blog posts for other things, but I’ve found over the years that the area under your blog post (and directly above comments) is a ‘hot zone’ where readers often look for what to do next. Put yourself in the position of a reader. You’ve read the post and have found it useful. This is the perfect time to ask readers to subscribe because they’re hopefully feeling satisfied, stimulated and helped in some way. A bold call to subscribe can work wonders here. 2. On Hot PostsDig into your blogs analytics package and identify which posts are the most read posts on your blog. You’ll probably find that these posts are receiving traffic from search engines and are likely being read by first time readers to your blog – people that are often quick to leave again once they’ve got what they’re searching for. These posts are a real opportunity to make your blog a little more sticky and to hopefully call some of those first time readers to subscribe. You can do this either by adding a call to subscribe directly to the posts – or you might like to link from these posts to a ‘sneeze page’ (see below). 3. Sneeze Pages
This page is a page in which I link to 33 of the best articles in our archives for beginner photographers. It is a page that ‘sneezes’ readers deep into our archives to good quality content. It is a great page for driving traffic and getting readers deep into the site but you’ll also note we have a couple of strong calls to subscribe on that page. People click those calls to action like crazy because they can see on the page that we’ve created a heap of useful content. We link to this sneeze page prominently in the navigation areas all around the site to drive traffic to it and regularly promote the page on social media (as I write this it has received over 90,000 ‘pins’ on Pinterest for example). Take home lesson – create a sneeze page with a strong call to action to subscribe and drive as much traffic to it as you can! Note: Sneeze pages are written about on day 18 of 31 Days to Build a Better Blog. How Have You Increases Subscribers to Your Blog?I have barely scratched the surface here on how to increase subscribers to a blog and would love to hear your suggestions and experiences on the topic in comments below. What has worked for you? Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger 3 Ways to Get More Subscribers for Your Blog     |
| AdSense Turns 10 Years Old: Why I’m Grateful for it! Posted: 19 Jun 2013 08:37 AM PDT
While they launched AdSense in June of 2003, I first began to experiment with it on 7th October that year. I had been blogging for around 11 months by that point and had begun to experiment with the Amazon Associates Program as a way to help me cover my costs of hosting, domains and design. So I signed up as an AdSense publisher and set up my first ad to put on my blog. I had no idea what I was doing and so put the ads at the top of my right hand sidebar to see how they would perform. At that tim,e the only way you’d earn anything from AdSense was if someone clicked the ads so I made them bright pink and green to stand out. Boy, were they ugly! The next morning, I woke up to discover that I’d earned my first $7 USD from AdSense. I was pretty amazed by this as it was significantly more than I was able to make from Amazon. Over the coming days, I watched in amazement as I continued to earn a few dollars here and there. It turned out that that first days earnings were artificially high as some of my loyal readers thought it was a good idea to click the ads repeatedly to make me money. Things quickly settled down and by the end of the month I’d earned $42 USD. By no means was it spectacular money but it was enough to give me a little hope. I began to experiment with placing a few more ads on the page and tweaking the design and colours I used. I discovered that blending ads into the design of the blog was better than making them stand right out. I also discovered that putting ads into the middle of blog posts worked well. The results of my experiments were that I quickly saw my income from AdSense rising. The next month I made around $90 from AdSense, the following month – December – around $170 USD. I began to experiment with a new blog in the months that followed – a camera review blog. This really helped things to grow a lot faster and blogging was fast becoming something I saw as a part time job.
While there were ups and downs in my earnings over the coming months (in January it all took a big dive due to me falling out of Google Search results for 6 weeks) since then I’ve continued to earn a monthly income from AdSense. The combined total of what AdSense has earned is well in excess of a million dollars! Yes – I’m glad I started using AdSense back in 2003! In 2005, I posted here that Blogging had bought my family a house, something that a year before was not even in our wildest dreams. The bulk of that came from AdSense. These days I don’t put as much focus on advertising revenue (Advertising revenue makes up about 25% of my business revenue these days) but the bulk of that revenue still comes from AdSense. While I know AdSense is at times looked down on by some bloggers and online entrepreneurs – I for one am grateful for it. Happy birthday AdSense! Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger AdSense Turns 10 Years Old: Why I’m Grateful for it!     |
Let me show you a page on dPS, which is a page that generates a large number of subscribers. It is our 
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