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“How to Harness Your Personality and Become a Better Blogger” plus 19 more

Posted by work smart

“How to Harness Your Personality and Become a Better Blogger” plus 19 more

Link to ProBlogger

How to Harness Your Personality and Become a Better Blogger

Posted: 31 Aug 2017 07:00 AM PDT

Understand your personality to blog better

This post comes to us courtesy of ProBlogger psychology expert Ellen Jackson

Are you a scheduler? Or do you publish as you write?

Do you delegate? Or is your need for the nitty-gritty too great?

I'd love to be the writer with the annual content calendar, or the leader who entrusts my big ideas to others. I’ve filled a thousand spreadsheets with good intentions, only to find them languishing and incomplete months later. I’ve dabbled with VAs, and had my control freak tendencies laid bare.

It took a while, but I've learned that I'm wired to work the way I work best. Other people's systems and successes may seem appealing, but unless they fit in with my modus operandi I’m trying to fit square pegs in round holes.

Personality is what makes you, you.

In psychology, your personality is defined as ‘the combination of characteristics or qualities that form an individual’s distinctive character'. It describes who you are, and what makes you, you.

It also shapes the way you work.

Think of your personality as your unique operating system. It’s the software that manages your thoughts and behaviour. It directs your energy and attention, and defines which systems, processes, people and environments are most compatible with you.

When your operating system fits your work and work environment, tasks are seamless. Sit me in a café with a notebook and pen and ask me to generate fifty ideas, and I’m a machine. Sit me at a desk with a spreadsheet and ask me to fill in the boxes and you'll be tearing your hair out at my slowness and ineptitude.

How well your personality matches your tasks, team and goals is often the missing link between overwhelming frustration and intense productivity. When we have insight into our unique operating system, we can create the interface we need with our world to make work easy and fun instead of being filled with stress, bugs and crashes.

Understanding your personality

While there are many ways to describe personality, today’s experts believe there are five broad, basic dimensions known as the ‘Big 5’ personality traits. Unlike models such as Myers-Briggs or DISC that assign people to ‘types’, the Big 5 depicts personality as five spectra:

  1. Openness to experience
  2. Conscientiousness
  3. Extraversion
  4. Agreeableness
  5. Neuroticism

We all exist as a dot somewhere between the two extremes of each dimension. And those billions of dots represent billions of wonderfully unique, complex people.

You can get an insight into your personality through online questionnaires such as the Truity Big Five personality assessment. They're quick, reliable, and give you a detailed report that includes your score and description for each dimension.

You can also uncover your personality type with a little introspection and a guide like the one I'll share with you now.

Which of the following best describe you?

Openness to experience

High: People at the ‘high’ end of openness like venturing outside their comfort zone. If this is you then you love novel experiences, variety, and coming up with new ideas. You might be described by others as imaginative, insightful, curious, creative, or even intellectual.

You love the creative side of blogging and business, but the routine and repetition of everyday tasks bores you to tears. Scheduling is tedious, and you don't have the patience for spreadsheets. You are an ideas person who struggles with following through.

Low: If you're at the ‘Low’ end of the openness dimension you enjoy routine. You stick to what you know, and you do it well. You're practical, down to earth, and happy doing the same task time and time again. That's how you get so good at it.

Conscientiousness

High: Highly conscientious people are persistent, self-disciplined, reliable and persevering.

If this is you then you're organised, you work within the rules, and you excel at delaying gratification.

Getting the job done is never a problem for you, but you may turn yourself inside out getting it done. (Stress head alert!)

Low: Are you a major procrastinator? A little bit flighty? Impetuous and impulsive? If you are, then you may be sitting at the other end of the conscientiousness scale. You're fun and spontaneous, but find it hard to actually get the job done. (That whooshing sound was probably another deadline flying by.)

Extraversion

Chances are you'll recognise this spectrum – extroversion at one end, introversion at the other.

High: If you're high on extroversion you're sociable, assertive, outgoing, talkative and socially confident. You're the team player who wants to collaborate with everyone. You love your colleagues to bits, but you will never be left alone.

Low: At the low end of the extroversion scale you'll find the introverts, although most of us sit somewhere in between. True introverts are quiet, introspective, reserved and thoughtful. They are people of few words but many thoughts. They're writers, not networkers, and group work sends shivers down their spine.

Agreeableness

How are your people skills?

High: People high in agreeableness are trusting, patient, tactful, kind and considerate. If this is you then you're well-liked, respected, and sensitive to other people's needs.

You might blog to help and spread happiness. No cynics or ranters here.

Low: Not everyone likes to be liked. If you're low on the agreeableness scale you're happy on the edge of social acceptance. You can be rude, antagonistic, and maybe sarcastic. You'll make enemies as well as friends, but you won't care. You're much better at saying "No" than your highly agreeable mates, and no-one will ever take advantage of you.

Neuroticism

If you Google it, you'll see it defined as 'mentally maladjusted' – pretty harsh.

High: Those high on the neuroticism scale tend to be over-sensitive, nervous, anxious, self-critical and insecure. They're also easily angered and temperamental. If this is you, then you might find yourself embroiled in regular battles – online and offline.

But there's an interesting twist. Parts of your personality can interact with varying results. And if you're high on neuroticism and conscientiousness, you may end up channeling your anxious energy for good. Healthy neurotics take action to address their worries rather that ponder and plot. If this is you, then you may actually have better health habits and greater motivation to succeed in all areas of life than your less conscientious counterparts.

Low: Finally we have our emotionally-stable peeps. They're adventurous and unflappable. Unencumbered by worry or self-doubt, it's hard to rattle them. They'll try anything once, and no problem is too big. If this is you, then you're optimistic, self-confident, reliably even-tempered, and will cope with any crisis that's thrown.

3 Tips on Using Your Personality to Blog Better

Do you know where you sit on each of the Big Five dimensions? If you do, try these tips to work and blog better.

  1. Take note of the characteristics that make you great at what you do. These are your strengths, and you should use them as often as you can.
  2. Make a note of the characteristics making work difficult right now. Are you a creative type struggling to narrow yourself into a niche? Or perhaps you're an extrovert weary from working alone. What can you change about the way you work to find a better match between who you are and how you work?
  3. Stop fighting your operating system. You work the way you work because that's the way you're wired. It's who you are. Fighting your natural preferences is energy-sapping, and robs the world of your unique and fascinating contribution. Don't let that happen. Go forth and be the crazy, exceptional individual you are. It will make your work (and your life) a lot easier.

Are you in tune with your personality? Have you figured out how you work best?

Photo credit:
Pablo Varela

The post How to Harness Your Personality and Become a Better Blogger appeared first on ProBlogger.

      

6 Reasons Why Your Blog Needs an Email Newsletter

Posted: 29 Aug 2017 07:00 AM PDT

6 reasons why your blog needs an email newsletter

Do you email your blog readers regularly?

Maybe you put 'set up email newsletter' on your ‘someday’ list ages ago, but still haven't done it.

Or maybe you have a newsletter list, but you haven't sent one in months.

You might think it's optional – something you can do once you finish everything else on your to-do list.

You even think email is dead (or at least old-fashioned), and that you're better off building connections through social media. (Which is nothing new, by the way. I was talking about bloggers having similar concerns nine years ago.)

The truth is, email is still one of the best ways (if not the best way) way to connect with your blog's readers. And if you're not using it, you really are missing out.

But before I start talking about the benefits of using an email list to connect with your readers, let's get one misconception out of the way.

Does it Have to be a 'Newsletter'?

In the blogging world, you'll hear people talking about "email lists" and "email newsletters" as if they're synonymous.

You might think of an email newsletter as a weekly content-rich email complete with feature article, links to your recent blog posts, and maybe a round-up of what's been going on in your niche.

But that's just one example, and there are plenty of other ways you can run an email list.

Some bloggers send out their newsletter once a month. Others may email irregularly – an  email every few days in the run-up to a launch, but otherwise only every month or two.

You might decide to send out your blog posts by email, maybe as a weekly digest like we do on ProBlogger. (I'll be talking about that, plus other options for your newsletter, in next week's post.)

Whatever you decide, here are a couple of suggestions:

  • Email at a frequency that suits you and your readers.
    If they want a weekly newsletter, and you can comfortably manage that, then go ahead. But if you can only manage one a month, then make it a monthly newsletter. There's no point sending one a weekly newsletter that's full of careless mistakes because you had to rush to get it finished on time.
  • Whatever sort of email list you run, make sure your emails aren't too infrequent.
    If you don't send an email for six months, many readers (especially ones who've just joined) will forget who you are. They may even mark your emails as spam, which can have a serious impact on them being delivered.

Why Emailing Your Readers is So Important

Some bloggers – especially newer bloggers – find it hard to see why emailing readers is so important. To them, bringing in traffic through good SEO or building their social media following makes more sense.

But here are six crucial reasons why email is still important.

#1: Emails Give You Control Over Your Own Traffic

With a big email list, you can easily drive lots of traffic to your posts simply by sending out an email. If you're relying on Google, you're competing against lots of other blogs. And if Google decides to change its search algorithm you could lose a lot of traffic very quickly. (This happened to me way back in 2004, which I wrote about a couple of years later.)

Social media isn't much better. You probably already know that only a fraction of your Facebook page's followers will actually see any given post. To reach lots of people you need to either "boost" your post (which costs money) or run a paid ad.

But with email you have full control. Even though they can get caught in people's spam filters, most of them will get through. And even if only 25% of your subscribers open their emails (which isn't a terrible open rate), they can still drive a lot of traffic to your blog.

#2: Emails are a Great Way to Build Relationships and Engage with Your Readers

Emails feel personal in a way that blog posts rarely achieve. They're also private. Your readers can reply to you, and you alone – a far cry from a comment that everyone can see.

So when you write your newsletters, try adding a bit of personal information that you wouldn't share on your blog. Emails are more ephemeral, so they're a great place to drop in a few words about your life and what's happening around you. (You can talk about those things on your blog, but the post could be found and read years later.)

For instance, here's how I started our weekly post round-up back in July:

It’s a hive of activity at ProBlogger HQ today because we’re less than 48 hours from this year’s first ProBlogger event in Brisbane!

I’m excited to meet those of you who are coming along for the day of learning and our first ever mastermind! For the rest of you – here’s our latest blog posts and podcast episode.

Of course, engagement goes both ways, and you can encourage readers to email back. You may find some readers who've never commented on your blog, but are very happy to engage with you by email.

#3: Email Drives Sales of Your Products and Services

While social media can be a great place for conversations, it's typically not a good place for sales. It may help people find out about your blog and connect with you, but email is a great place to ask for the sale. Brad Smith's post on why social media sales suck (and what to do instead) on AdEspresso explains how you can use social media to get people to subscribe to your email list.

The cost of an email list can be a bit off-putting when you're starting out. (We'll be taking a look at the costs involved in a couple of weeks' time.) But the power of email to drive sales should make it far more worthwhile.

#4: Emails Let You Point Readers to Where You Want Them to Go

Email is a brilliant way to direct readers to where you want them to go. For instance, you can:

  • Link to your blog posts. Not just the recent ones, but also posts in your archive readers may have missed or forgotten about.
  • Link to your Facebook group, Twitter account, etc. If you've set up a new Facebook group your readers might be interested in, you can promote it in your newsletter.
  • Link to a survey or poll. This can be a great opportunity to find out more about your readers, and ask them what sort of content they'd like to see more of. I've been doing this since 2010, and it's been an invaluable way to find out what readers want.

#5: Email Lists Let You Target Different Groups of Readers

When you publish a post on your blog, it goes out to everyone who's subscribed for updates, via RSS or email.

But with an email list you can 'segment' the list into smaller groups.

For instance, you might create segments for:

  • People who aren't subscribed to another list you have. This can help you avoid sending too many promotional messages to the same people (e.g. those who have signed up for both your "newsletter" list and your 'waiting list' for an ecourse.)
  • People who joined your list at a specific point in time – within the past month, more than a year ago, and so on.
  • People who joined from a specific page on your website. If you're using social media ads or guest posting to drive sign-ups, you can target your messages or promotions to each segment's interests.
  • People who haven't opened your emails recently (or at all).
  • People who've looked at specific pages on your site, or who've bought a particular product.

#6: Email Can Lead Readers on a Journey

You can design a series of emails to take readers on a journey, whether it's teaching them something new or helping them come to a better place in their life.

It could be something quite straightforward and practical, such as teaching them how to play basic chords on the guitar. Or it could be something more personal and in-depth, such as  teaching mindfulness and meditation.

You can use autoresponders to send a sequence of emails – say, one every few days for two weeks. (If you're not sure what an autoresponder is, I explain what they are and the benefits of using one in this episode of the ProBlogger podcast.)

Most bloggers use an autoresponder at the start of their relationship with a new reader (i.e. when the reader first signs up). But you can also create different lists that readers can opt into separately.

It can be a great way to get readers used to opening your emails (they won't want to miss a step on the journey), and to link to your blog posts or even paid products and services where appropriate. For example, you could "upsell" the reader on a related ecourse or product at the end of the series.

In Summary

If you haven't set up a newsletter yet, or you never saw the value of having one, I hope this post has been helpful. And if you already have a newsletter list, but haven't sent anything in a while, I hope you now understand how worthwhile emailing your readers can be.

I know it can be easy to focus on a blog at the expense of your newsletter. A blog is more visible and public, which can make posting there more motivating. But your newsletter may be the key to driving greater engagement and, ultimately, more sales.

Over the next few weeks, I'll be covering what your newsletter should include, how you can set it up, and some fixes to common problems. I know the process of creating a newsletter can be a little daunting when you're starting out, but don't worry – I'll be walking you through it all.

And just a reminder: to make sure you don't miss the rest of this newsletter series, or any other ProBlogger posts, make sure you're on our email list, "ProBloggerPLUS". You can subscribe for free here.

The post 6 Reasons Why Your Blog Needs an Email Newsletter appeared first on ProBlogger.

      

208: 5 Actionable Tips You Can Use to Get Better Results on Your Facebook Page

Posted: 28 Aug 2017 02:09 AM PDT

Get Better Facebook Page Results With These 5 Actionable Tips

Today, I want to present you with five actionable things you can do to increase the effectiveness of what you do to build your business on Facebook – particularly from Facebook pages.

I know there's a lot of pain and frustration among bloggers when it comes to Facebook pages. Just a short year or two ago FB was a major source of traffic, engagement and even monetization for many of us. But increasingly over that time FB has been making organic reach and engagement harder and harder.

So today, I've invited someone who understands FB as well as anyone I've ever met to chat with us about how to approach the social network.

That person is Rachel Miller from Moolah Marketing, whose teaching has had an incredible impact my own FB strategy in the past six months.

Rachel began her journey as a blogger, but in more recent times has created FB pages that reach millions of fans. She has a real knack for building audiences and then monetizing them.

I met Rachel back in 2015 at a conference, but it wasn't until earlier this year that I really dug into what she does. Rachel has an amazing Facebook group that is dedicated to helping online entrepreneurs with their FB pages. I joined it six months back and immediately started to get actionable tips from Rachel.

I was so impressed with what she offered that when she opened up a FB training course I immediately signed up.

The course is brilliant. I've learnt so much, and ever since I've wanted to get Rachel on the show to share what she knows with you.

Of course the topic is massive. We could quite easily have talked for days about this, which is why she offers training courses. So to bring some focus to today's episode I pulled out five actionable things I loved about Rachel's training that I think you could start implementing straight away.

These are all things you can do without spending money and which I've found helped me grow my pages.

Links and Resources on 5 Actionable Tips You Can Use to Get Better Results on Your Facebook Page

Disclaimer: I am an affiliate for Rachel's course. But I’m also a paid student, and personally recommend it based on my experience as a student.

Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view

Darren: My name is Darren Rowse, and welcome to episode 208 of the ProBlogger podcast. I'm the blogger behind problogger.com, a blog, podcast, event, job board and series of ebooks all designed to help you as a blogger to grow your audience and make money from your blogs. You can learn more about ProBlogger over at problogger.com.

Today, I want to present you with five actionable things that you can do today to increase the effectiveness of what you do on your Facebook page. I know there's a lot of pain among your audience when it comes to Facebook pages. I see it all the time in our Facebook group. A couple of years ago now, Facebook was a major source of traffic and engagement for many of us. It even helped us monetize our blogs directly in many cases but increasingly over the last couple of years, it's so much tougher to get organic reach and engagement on Facebook. You can certainly pay to get it but that organic reach is disappearing for many of us. We hear that pain from you, our audience, quite regularly.

Today what I've done is invited someone who understands Facebook as well as anyone I've ever met, to come on to the show, to talk to us about how to approach Facebook. That person is Rachel Miller from Miller Marketing whose teaching has impacted my own Facebook strategy over the last six months, quite incredibly in fact. She's taught me so much.

Rachel began her journey many years ago now as a blogger, but in more recent times has created Facebook pages that reach millions of fans and she talks about some of them in today's episode. She has a real knack for building audiences and monetizing them directly on Facebook itself.

I met Rachel back in 2015 at a conference. We had a nice breakfast together and a few other people, and I was really impressed by what she was doing back then. It wasn't until earlier this year that I really dug into what she does. Another friend had recommended her Facebook group, which I'll link to in today's show notes. It's a Facebook group dedicated to helping online entrepreneurs with their Facebook pages and I joined it. I'm a member of many Facebook groups and this is probably one of the most valuable ones that I've ever joined. I joined it six months ago and immediately, within a couple of days, I was getting tips and ideas from Rachel and the other members of that community, that led to real growth on my Facebook pages. It was immediate, like within a day or two. Me taking action, very important, on the tips that I got in that group, I was amazed. I was so impressed with what she offered that when she opened up her Facebook training course, I signed up to it.

The course is really brilliant, but so is a lot of the free advice that she gives as well. That's what I want to do today. I want to get her on to share some of what she knows about Facebook. Of course, this is a massive topic and we could quite easily talk for days on this topic which I guess is why she offers a course. But I brought her on to today's episode to really talk about five actionable things. I asked her to nominate five things that really will help people without having to pay money, without having to boost your post, without having to advertise. Five things that you can do today, that's the focus of this episode. There are of course many things that you can do to spend money on Facebook, but there are five actionable things that are going to help you to get better results from your Facebook page.

I will say before we get into the conversation that there is a downloadable for today. Rachel's put together what she calls an audience growth pack which has three resources for you on helping you to create better titles for your Facebook, start better conversations on Facebook and also some words to avoid on Facebook as well. If you want to get those downloadables, it's over at problogger.com/growth. I'll link to them on the show notes as well. You can see today's show notes over at problogger.com/podcast/208, that's the episode 208 today. You'll also find this over on iTunes.

I really do you hope you enjoy this conversation. I literally just got off it from Rachel and I have a pad full of ideas that I've jotted down as we talked and you'll hear me talk about a couple of things that's I'm going to do as a result of today's show as well. I hope you enjoy it. She's got so much energy and enthusiasm for this topic. I'm sure you'll get a lot out of it as well. Here we go.

Rachel, this conversation comes at a really good time because on two Facebook groups that I'm a part of, I have just seen people going on massive rants about Facebook and how it is dead to them because their organic reach is plummeting, particularly this week there seems to be quite a few people really struggling with it. I'm really grateful for you spending some time with us today to talk about Facebook. I guess my first question for you is should I be giving up on Facebook? Is Facebook pages dead?

Rachel: I strongly believe no! I've seen people grow so fast, and even just this last six weeks, we had a student explode their page. I don't know if she is the record because I have to verify but she tells me that she's grown by over 100,000 fans. She might just be my new record. It's been insane seeing the growth that people have had. It's a thing right now.

Darren: Is that translating across to their websites or their blogs or whatever it is that they're building as well?

Rachel: Yes. I have one girl who just a couple of weeks ago, she told me she was making $1,000 off of her website. After taking the course, she would now make $8,000 this last month off of her website and she was like, "Oh my Lord! I never expected this!" It just came from ad revenue because she had more people seeing her content.

Darren: She was happy to drive much more traffic across.

Rachel: Yes. She had a couple of virals and that helped her just explode her ad revenue.

Darren: Great. Alright, I was hoping you'd say that because otherwise this interview is dead. I really want to dig into some of the teaching that you do.

Rachel: We've had businesses. I know your audience's bloggers and I actually was a blogger for ten years. That's how I got started. But we've actually had stores who've had even greater results. We had one author, it was their second book on CreateSpace. I can't remember exactly how many books on CreateSpace but he sold $71,000 worth of his book last month. He checked everywhere. It was so exciting.

Darren: That's exciting. I've done half of your course, and I was seeing some benefits starting to flow into our pages as well. I really love the journey you take students through, and I wonder if we can move through some of the things that I think most bloggers could really benefit from. Five things, five actionable tips, we're calling it, that people can use to build their audience as well without spending money which is the other important factor.

First one was building your niche neighborhood, you talk about that early on in your course. I wonder if you could give us a definition of what is a niche neighborhood and what can we actually do to build that?

Rachel: When I think of niche neighborhoods, I like to think of this is a family instead of a competition. This was me three years ago, I was like, you know what? I don't want to tell the DIY people what I'm doing because they might copy me. And then we'll all have the same front porch post and it'll be really frustrating because we all have the same post, we won't grow together.

Self-protection is like, I'm not going to share all of my knowledge, and then I realized that wait a second, if I open it up and I connect with my competition, I don't just grow, they grow and when they grow, they pull me up farther with them. When they're having a viral explode, I can tag along with their big viral. When I am having a big viral, they can tag along because the reality is the DIY person who loves DIY house projects, they're not following one blog, they're following 15. I notice that actually in the crazy cat sphere which I'm not actually a cat person, it was kind of a joke that I started it and then it was super successful so I was like I guess I'm a cat person now. I found multiple fans that love six crazy cat lady pages. They're named the same name! It's crazy.

Darren: It's about identifying other Facebook pages in your niche. What do you actually do once you've identified them?

Rachel: There's a couple of different tricks that you can do. You want to use Facebook like it's a search engine. Just like in Google, you want to have different links coming from different places going to your website. You want them to come with different terms to your website. It's the same thing in Facebook. Facebook's an algorithm, it's like a search engine, it's a computer. You have to speak the computer's language. Things like finding a cat page, I'm a cat page interlinking my post with their Facebook post. You can do this even if they're not participating, although it's a whole lot more fun if they are, your best buds in your neighborhood and you're popping over at their house.

It's a lot easier when you have collaboration where they'll say, "Hey I'm going to share your post and you're going to share mine," but at the same time you can do this without them participating by leaving a link as a comment or as a visitor's post or tagging your page on one of their photos that they have, if they have open tags. Leaving them a message from your page, writing them a message from messenger. Anything to say my page I just like that page.

Darren: These are all little signals to Facebook that you should connect your pages in some way.

Rachel: I'm the same as this page so that audience from that page will also like my content. When that person runs out of their cool content and my content's trending, Facebook's going to show my trending post to them because Facebook wants to keep those people on Facebook. Once my post is doing well, Facebook's like, "Woah, wait a second. All these neighbors, they're going to want that post too because it's keeping people on Facebook."

Darren: It's the other part when someone likes their page then Facebook's says there are other pages like this one, then they give that little personal recommendation as well.

Rachel: Right now Facebook's giving that recommendation to groups but three weeks ago, it's pages. My guess is that in two months, it's going to change right back to being pages again and then two months later, groups. Goes back and forth between the two. You can also niche neighborhood with groups. You don't just have to niche neighborhood with pages. That concept works with groups and we actually have groups that connect with pages as part of our system.           

Darren: The actionable thing that people can do is to identify some other pages in the niche, can you give us any suggestion on which ones are the best ones to do? Should we be looking for the biggest ones, should we be looking at others around your size or smaller ones?

Rachel: I look for the smaller ones that are the most active. Because the smaller ones that are the most active are the easiest to game. Just like in keywords, you go for the long tail because no one else has it. If I go after the big dogs, everybody's going after the big dog. Everyone's trying to promote their content on theirs. The little dogs, they're so thankful to have a visitor's post, they're thrilled. I connect with the smaller pages first and then grow to the bigger ones.

Darren: Actually we'll identify and engage. Whilst you say you can do this without them really even knowing what you're doing, the ideal is really to build that relationship with other page owners and then to be able to collaborate and look for ways to support one another, to build a win-win relationship then.

Rachel: Yeah, totally. At the same time, even if some people say I don't have any friends or I feel awkward writing them, you can still connect with other pages without necessarily their permission.

Darren: Number one is build your niche neighborhood. Number two is around sharing the right content. So many of us have Facebook pages but we spend all our time sharing our own content. I'm guilty of this. I don't look at my pages at the moment because I just got this really high rotation of my own content. I got thousands of post in my archives. This used to work really well. It drove a lot of traffic to our pages and to our blogs, but hasn't been working as well lately as a technique. One of the things that you do in your teaching is talking about finding content and sharing content that's been blessed by Facebook's fairy dust. Wonder whether you can talk to us about one, what is the Facebook fairy dust? None of us had heard of it before and what do you actually mean by that?

Rachel: I like to call it fairy dust because it's a little bit magical. I can't quite quantify it but yet it's dust, you can't collect it, you can bank it and you can cord it and you can spread it, you can sprinkle it on different things, and you do collect it. That's one of those things, it's a little bit of magic so I call it fairy dust. Some people call it Facebook juju or the juice or 'oh I got the blessing' or 'I won the Facebook lottery.' Basically, these are the posts that Facebook is sending more organic traffic to. Facebook tells you which ones they are because you can just go to the Facebook search bar and type in 'cats' and you could see all the cat posts that Facebook says is trending right now.

Darren: It's about working on what you want to share on the topic and then just simply doing a search for that. Are you looking there for links or photos or videos or all of those things?

Rachel: I do a mix. It depends on what sites and pages. With my newer pages, I want to share whatever's getting the most likes. When my page is over 100,000 now, I want to share something that I'm getting more shares than likes. I also want the content to come from me if possible. I would see a photo that's getting a lot of shares right now and say hey, why don't I contact that person and say, "Hey, can I put your photo up on my page?"

Darren: Okay and then you're crediting where you got it from.

Rachel: Sometimes, if it's just people, they just give me their video and they say, "Yes, sure." I don't offer credit unless I know it's a blogger. If it's a regular person, they often are like, "Yeah, you can show my cat drinking milk from that food bowl and link to that Amazon product. That's awesome! My cat's on your page." They're totally happy! I just say it's reader submitted.

Darren: We're looking there for content on Facebook. Already loving, blessing, fairy dusting and then sharing that, is that part of the mix? Are you also including some of your own content in the mix? Getting this mix right I think is something that a lot of our readers do ask about, how much of other people's content should we be sharing? How much of our own? Does that change over the last of your blog as well?

Rachel: It does a little bit. It depends on your engagement. When you're smaller, I like to share three-quarters of other people's content because then I'm training myself what's popular. I have no clue what's going viral in my niche until I interact with so many virals. As I grow over 50,000, I want to start doing more posts coming from me, from my page. I might have two out of every four coming from my page. That doesn't necessarily means it's my post, but it's originating on my page. It's a video cross post uploaded, it's a photo that I've uploaded onto my page. That way, the juice leads back to my page. Then out of 100,000, I want three-quarters of the content to come from my page, and a quarter to come from other sources.

Darren: In terms of getting traffic to your blog, because this is what a lot of bloggers want. Ultimately I guess it's about earning. Whether you get people to your blog or not, doesn't really matter but a lot of bloggers do want to increase their traffic. Can you give us some tips of getting that traffic back to our blog?

Rachel: Yeah. A lot of it's the way you feed Facebook. If you use Bitly links, those have no social proof so Facebook is not going to show it to as many people. If you add multiple links to your post, instead of having one link that leads to your blog, you have a link and your PiNet link, that's driving people, it's going to lower your reach of your traffic to your website. A lot of it's things like the words you're using, the titles, the photos. If you're feeding your reader, if you're giving them the things that make them happy, and you've optimized your page with other content, you're already engaged, it's like a rising tide, your content will also grow. Once you grow your engagement, traffic comes.

Darren: That's what I found in doing your courses. Once I started to share a bit more of other people's content and a bit more of that viral content, and even creating a few more of the meme type content from myself which I've always resisted, I always find it a little bit corny, but there are ways if you work at it. You can create that kind of content that has the potential to go viral. It then impacted the rest of our content which was links to our blog post and that type of thing.

Rachel: Exactly! It's kind of looking at it as a whole picture. Because if you just focus on just getting your traffic to your site, you're not going to grow your audience. If you grow your audience, it trickles down and you will rise in your traffic because you have more people seeing your content now.

Darren: It's a bit of a mind shift for a lot of bloggers because I have this sense of I want to drive traffic to me. I don't want to highlight other people's stuff but it does have a flow and effect.

Rachel: It totally does! Know too, it's about your reader, because if you make it about your reader and you serve your audience, you can drive traffic to them with your blog or you can make money anyway. Once you have that audience, you can do anything with it. It doesn't just have to be the blog, the blog's one way to make money but ask your readers, "Do you want to consume content on a blog or do you want to consume content in a different way?" "Oh, you like memes, I have affiliate links and you buy products that are also unrelated to the meme because they had an affiliate link in it." Okay, not a problem. I can make money that way. If your audiences have different things that you can serve them with, they'll tell you what they want.

Darren: Great. You mentioned titles, that's the third thing I wanted to ask you a little bit about. One of the things that I've noticed makes a huge difference when I'm sharing content, whether it be photos or back to my own site is that the engagement can vary wildly, depending upon which words were used in our titles and the descriptions as well. I wonder if you can give us some tips on how to create more effective copy, it's not just the title, it's all of the words you use around your updates. I'd love to get some tips on that.

Rachel: We've got three different parts of a post. You've got the description, that's what you type into the status update. And then you've got your link, and then you've got your actual title of the post. In the description section where I'm talking about the post that I'm sharing, I like to talk from my reader's perspective. I don't want to tell them about this apple pie I made with my Aunt Cindy because no one else has an Aunt Cindy. That's not their experience, they can't connect to it. Does that make sense?

Darren: Yeah, yeah.

Rachel: But if I can say the apple pie that totally made July 4th or totally made your memorial day weekend or whatever, labor day is coming up, totally made that weekend, that makes sense for them because oh, that could be my story. You want to say it like it's their story. That's my first tip, in your descriptions, putting them into the reader's perspective. Not about you.

My next tip would be to speed Facebook with that and don't look like a brand. Which I guess we're going to talk about in just a few minutes. But not looking like a brand means what do brands do on Facebook and how can I look like a person and not the brand, like a reader essentially, like the people that we're reaching. They're probably not filling their feed with lots of hashtags, they're probably not tagging 1,500 things. Just like the reader would use hashtags, you want to speak like them. That would be my second tip, is to avoid hashtags and then those links that Facebook doesn't like.

My third tip. I have a formula for my titles. It's like a trust factor and then an emotion and you, because I'm talking to the reader and then the result. Trust factor would be something like the number or guarantee, or these words that instil I believe in you. If you tell them a number, like there is 15 ways. Fifteen is telling them what they're going to get, that's establishing trust with them. If I cut this, I'll see 15 things, I can trust it more because I know what I'm going to get. It just gets a little bit of a trust factor.

The next part is emotion. Fifteen totally awesome or awe struck. Fifteen emotion and then you, anytime you use the word 'you' in your titles, you'll do better. You won't believe what happened when, and then the results.

Darren: Yup, okay. We got trust factor, emotion, you, as in the audience and then the result.

Rachel: Think of that as the number if you can think about another.

Darren: Something concrete so they know what they're getting on the other end of it.

Rachel: Yes, yes! We've got variations of this. I went through actually and I looked at my virals. Last year I had 29 virals. Those are the virals that each of the post got over a million eyeballs on individual posts. I went through those virals and I was like okay, what's similar about these posts? What made these go viral versus the other ones? I collected all the titles and put them into a spreadsheet for you guys. You could take out the words, I say "15 Ways Your Husband Could Wash the Dishes Better" and I take out the words "Your Husband Could Wash the Dishes." Fifteen ways something could blah blah blah better. You can switch out the words for your own, basically still those viral titles. I give that to your audience as a freebie.

Darren: We do have the audience growth pack which we'll talk a little bit about at the end of the call but that is part of that. It's a downloadable, you can find it on our show notes today. Today's Facebook posts all got viral titles.

Rachel: One of the people that I'm friends with and is in the course, she took these titles and she gave them to her VAs, she said okay, this is the first one, the second one, the third one. She said that she was able to sketch out her content for a week in 30 minutes because she had all the titles. I'm like, "It works!"

Darren: What we've noticed with ours is that there are other trigger words that no one else is using. They just seem to work with your audience, so you really do want to do that exercise that you said and analyze the top post, the most engaged post on your page to then work out which was the common things and we found that every time we mention "10 Mistakes That Will Stop You From Taking Great Photos." People click that like. Crazy because I want to know that mistake and there's a benefit there, we use the personal term 'your photos' a lot. Works.

Rachel: The result! The result is no mistake. That's a really killer one, that's awesome.

Darren: The other thing we've found worked really well with our audience is anytime you mention any kind of pain or any kind of gain. Using the pains and gains really work well.

Rachel: Have you tried different synonyms of mistake? Like failures? Avoid these Photography Failures?

Darren: Yeah, it doesn't work as well. We have tried a bit. I guess the other thing that we really want to be careful of is we don't want our page to be negative as well. Mistakes can bring things down a little bit. How to Avoid Them titles work as well. There's an upside, that's not just Don't Do This, But Do This, that works too.

The other type of thing we've noticed working well is really targeting in on the type of users. Digital Photography School, there's lots of people there. There's Photoshop users, there are Lightroom users, they use different things. Sometimes for us, starting with Lightroom users, and then getting into the pain. Actually, since we target the right person, we've seen our audience a little bit more.

Rachel: Yeah. When your page is over 100,000, you do need to segment your audience a little bit in order to continue to get that engagement. I love it.

Darren: It's just an intuitive thing. I think we noticed as we did some analysis. The other thing you've almost hinted on there is number 14, to avoid certain banned words. There are words that I've noticed on our page, even before I came across your teaching, that just seem to kill our reach. Anytime we mention a product or a sale or discounts or any of those sort of words, what's going on there?

Rachel: Instead you can say, "We'll make your pocketbook lighter." Or you can say, "Your wallet will love this." You could do that without saying discount, you use the word 'discount', your buyers will kiss that post goodbye. I've noticed that anytime you use those ad or sponsored, those can lower your reach. You have to put a couple dollars on it to try to boost it, to tell Facebook, yes, I'm making money but you can make money too.

There are some little tricks you can do if you have to use those banned words. Banned words are something like, 'like this', 'share this', 'tag your friend'. Instead of that, say, "Know someone who?" and then they'll tag their friend for you. Or 'You'll want this later.' Now, they'll save it or they'll pin it. 'Bookmark it because you'll need this.' These are all different ways that you can attract them without being bossy. People don't want to be bossed. If you're saying like this, it comes across as bossy and scammy. I think it's even against Facebook's Terms of Service. They redid the terms of service, I think it's even in there. You're not supposed to request that. Facebook doesn't like them too much.

Darren: In their perspective, leads to organic activity coming on. People gaming the system a little bit. As part of your audience growth pack, we've also got some words to avoid as well as part of that download.

Rachel: I forgot, we had a powwow where I brought in I think it was like 58 frugal bloggers. The frugal bloggers were just having the hardest time getting their content out there. We're like, "Okay guys, let's look at the words together." We're looking through all the words. I'm like, "These are the words that are tanking. Free works, but only if it's near the word gluten. If it's not near the word gluten, you're tanking." You want to look at how you're putting the phrases together. We collected those phrases and then we also thought of different ways to say the same things. Instead of 'buy one get one free', 'have one and you could have another.'

Darren: That's a little awkward.

Rachel: It's a little awkward but it worked! The posts are being seen and they're even able to get more traction on their coupons.

Darren: This really ties into that last point as well. You do the analysis on what's working but also do some analysis on what's not working and look for patterns in that as well. Maybe there are some words that you're using that are triggering Facebook to go yep, we're not showing that, that will be well worth doing.

The last thing that we've got here is to stimulate conversation. This is something I've noticed ever since I started on Facebook is the more conversation you get, the more engagement you get, the more engagement you get. Conversation attracts conversation.

Rachel: You're telling Facebook who you are and Facebook needs conversation. There are people that are up at 2AM in the morning that are bored out of their skulls and they've seen everything and they need some more engagement content. Facebook depends on us, pages and groups, to keep that person looking at something at 2AM. What we've done is try to make our pages a little bit more like groups and our groups a little bit sometimes like pages so that we can bolster our businesses. We've got these conversation starters.

You basically ask a question like something that people don't have to spend any time thinking about but that hopefully has more than three words in that answer. Because if they have more than three words in the answer, Facebook ranks this higher, or if it uses a photo. Using gifs or hey, show us a photo of your kids today, who is your super kid? Or how old are your kids. I need help with supper, what are you eating for supper? All of these are ways to get people to just make a small simple engagement on your page. When they do that, not only do they see your content more often, all of their friends see that page more often. Any of their friends that also like your page, you now jump up in their feed.

Darren: I certainly noticed that and I didn't seem to see your next posts as well. I know that anytime I engage with any post, I quite often won't engage with the post that I want to engage with because I don't want to see more from that page.

Rachel: Totally, totally.

Darren: Again, we've got that as part of our audience growth pack to download as well, 25 conversations starters there. You've got those three, Rachel. It's a great little pack to have and I've had those three resources open on my browser ever since I downloaded it. I just constantly go back to them.

Rachel: It just doesn't work on Facebook pages, they also work on Facebook groups. We have got a guy, Daniel, said that his group went from crickets to highly engaged in just two or three weeks from putting one of those up every single day.

Darren: That's great. Actually what we do on ProBlogger is we got those massive long spreadsheet of questions that our audience have asked us that now we ask them. Every time we get asked the question, we just put it in our spreadsheet and one, we use that for blog posts or for content that we could do on Facebook Lives. Also, we just put those questions back to our audience because our audience actually know the answers collectively.

Rachel: I love it, I love it, I love it.

Darren: It must be 300 or 400 now, we've got enough that we could do one a day forever.

Rachel: You can schedule up to a couple of months in advance. Schedule them out. The cool thing is, this ecosystem, the copy, the headlines and then the words I've given you, the conversation starters, you can really just copy them, put them in the schedule and turn it on autopilot. That lets you now have two posts that you don't have to fight about. You don't have to think about, they just come.

Darren: We've got build your niche neighborhood, share the right content, use effective titles, avoid banned words and stimulate conversation. Five things that you can go away and do today.

Rachel: Yeah, I love it.

Darren: Yeah, that's great.

A few other questions that we had coming from our group members because I said we're doing an interview today and they thought they'd throw some questions at you too. Some of them relate a little bit to some of the things we've talked about. But one that I get asked all the time is how many times a day should I be posting onto my Facebook page? Is there too much? Can you get to a point where it's too much? Is one a day enough? Is one a week enough? What's the ideal or is it different for different pages?

Rachel: It's different for different sizes of pages. The bigger you are, you can post more posts because Facebook's not going to show the original post to all the people in your audience. There is a point where you can be too many because that will hinder your ability to have virals. One of the things we depend on in the course that I teach is virals because when you get a viral, it levels you up really fast in your engagement, in your audience and in the potential that your business has. We want to protect how many times we post so that we can still have enough ability to go viral. If everyone in your feed that likes your page has already seen all your content that day, Facebook's not going to let a post go viral because they've already seen it, they want to spread the love so they just don't see one person in their feed all the time.

When you're under 25,000, I suggest posting four times a day or less. Two to four times a day. And then when you get to about 25,000, you can start adding up to six. And then 50,000 to 100,000 you can start moving to posting eight times a day to even up to 24 when you're over 100,000. But it depends on your audience. When you're over 100,000, you'll have to test your audience and see. Some audiences can still go viral when they have 8 posts a day and some go viral if they have 24. It just depends on you. If you're not getting any virals, at that point, if you have any problems with engagement, back off.

Darren: Okay. If you are seeing dips, that's a good thing to take away. Maybe pull back, you think that's a signal.

Rachel: If you're 150,000 followers and you're not having high engagement, go back and look, what posts are tanking? They have a schedule system, you could see what kind of content is doing well, what kind of content is not doing well. You're noticing that any time I put a link up that's about flashes, it's not doing well. You know what, I'm not going to put another link. We're going to take that section that I talk about flashes off and now we're going to talk about natural lighting or whatever it is that you have in your spreadsheet. You want to take what's not working and do more of what is.

Darren: Another question that actually came in this morning from Andrea was, "What mix of posts shall we be doing? We've got sharing other people's content, sharing your own content on your own blog, there's a link, you've got video that you can upload, images or graphics or quotes or memes. Live video would be another one, what's the ideal mix?" Again, that probably depends. You can just give us the answer that you got.

Rachel: I know. I have a formula and so far the formula's working. What I like to do is feed Facebook. Facebook likes to have comments. What gets comments? When you give a status update with no links, no photo. That's "Hey. What are you eating for breakfast today?" That feeds Facebook comments. Check, I did that today.

Next one, Facebook likes, shares. Meme photos tend to get more shares than any other type of content. I'm going to put a meme up because I want to make sure I'm feeding Facebook shares. What gets comments? Videos and photos of certain different types of things. Lives sometimes get comments. I want to do those to make sure I get comments. I want to have every different type of comments of engagement.

In addition to that though, when you're under 100,000 fans, you also want to focus on getting more likes on your content and the other type. While I still want shares, I still want comments. I don't want to say I'm never going to post this status update because I never get likes on those, I still want to have those but I want to make sure I put a little bit extra content that tends to get more likes. That tends to be both videos that you've uploaded or photos you've uploaded or that you're sharing videos or photos. Those get more likes because I can then invite people who like that content to like my page and then I can grow so fast because you can invite up to 500 people a day from each admin of your page to like your page.

As soon as you get a post that's going bonkers, you can put some ad dollars on it and I'm talking like $2 in ad spend. Get that post to even higher levels just to invite every single person. You do that every day and you've grown greatly without even realizing it.

Darren: This is something that I think a lot of people have no idea that they can do. Anytime anyone likes your page, you click on those, that number of likes and it opens up who has liked you page.

Rachel: It's content. Liking your content.

Darren: Yeah. Like any post or any content. You click on the number of likes and it shows you who has liked you page and then it has a button that you can press that invites them to then like your page. If you do that within the first few hours, or first 24 hours of them actually engaging with your content in that way, a lot of them come back and like your page. This is brilliant.

Rachel: It's really cool. I've had people that have gone back and I invited them weeks later, and it still works. The thing is you have to have a page that people can identify with. As long as your page have a gut reaction of, yeah, I like that. Then they're going to like you. Like ProBlogger, I consider myself to be a pro blogger so if that popped up, I don't remember necessarily the content that I liked from you but I say I'm a pro blogger so I'm going to automatically say heck yeah, that's me. I like that.

Darren: This only works with pages under 100,000 fans. If you're bigger than that, bad luck.

Rachel: If you're close to 100,000 there are a couple of tricks you can do to make it last a little longer but yeah, pretty much it's gone after 100,000.

Darren: Yup, okay. I'm approaching that. In the ProBlogger page, I think I have 93,000 or something like that. I know my days are numbered there.

Rachel: I'll send you a little hack in a little bit.

Darren: Another one that I've got to ask, you've alluded to this. How should your strategy change as your Facebook page grows? Obviously we just talked about pages under 100,000 can do their invites for likes. I guess once you get over that 100,000 mark, are you then looking for more shareable content rather than getting content that's going to get likes as much?

Rachel: Facebook's algorithms changes that and sees you as an established page. I know we're established when we've gotten 93,000 likes, we all know that. But in Facebook's world, you're still in that growth phase when you're under 100,000 fans. They give you extra growth abilities. When you're over 100,000 fans, they throttle you, they start to throttle you a little bit. At that point, you depend more on shares to continue to grow. But you have more audience so those shares can totally explode your page. It's not like you're done growing, it's just your tools change a little bit.

Darren: Have you seen people have multiple pages, once they get over that 100,000 mark, really targeting on specific niches within their overall topic? This is something we've been talking about with Digital Photography School. We've got post processing, we've got camera gear reviews, maybe we should be having multiple pages.

Rachel: Yes! When you get over 300,000. This is getting into that powwow phase. I have a Facebook group that's got 13,000 people in it and it's too big to connect with everybody. We do break out powwows whenever I feel like it. It's not very often. Every now and then, we'll have powwow. When you're over 300,000, all those people get together and you start to have problems with being targeted, you have problems with sometimes your content is not doing well or you're feeling like I'm having the link to other people, and what's in it for me a little bit. If that makes sense.

Become your own neighborhood. Done! We've got people who have vegetable gardening, regular gardening, organic gardening, outdoor fun in your home. Now, he's got five pages that are over 100,000 each. Now whenever he's sharing pages, he's just sharing his own. He's his own Facebook ecosystem. The cool thing too is there's not that much of a difference between the reach of a 500,000 fan base and a million fan base. The amount of potential proposed is the same. When you're at that stage, instead of growing to the million, which is still really cool to get that number. I was really excited when one of my pages got to a million. That said, it's just as powerful to have a 300,000 or 100,000 and 500,000 page because you have more collective reach than you did if you had a million.

Darren: That's right. What about those really at the beginnings of their Facebook page? We've talked up to 100,000. They should be doing that likeable content inviting people? Is there anything else that real new Facebook pages should be focusing upon?

Rachel: There's a completely different strategy for the little guys and the little pages. We've got little pages, we've had a person just a couple of weeks ago, she started her page brand new, and I checked the stats this morning, because something tagged me. She's at 180,000 fans. This can happen really fast. You can start in six weeks and grow fast. Anyways, she started her page and she followed what I called The Fast Trap Plan, which is you want to be very sure to only attract who wants your content. You're almost hyper selective when you're beginning to not accept the fake fans. You don't want to invite your mom, you don't have your friends from your PTA liking your page. You want the actual fans who can't wait to have that content in front of them.

And then you tell Facebook who that person is a little bit. With my cat page, I'll put six posts up and I'll have different types of posts and I'll tell Facebook I want all of these to go to cats and then we'll put $2 on each of them or a dollar on each of them. However low Facebook lets me go because I don't want to spend much money. Just enough to see what content does well.

And then I see, okay, anytime I talk about my cat, I say it's a kid. For some reason that's what cat people want, their cat as a kid. That's what they want, now where are those cat people. I do another couple of rounds of boost, just so I can find where those people are that are insanely passionate about my niche.

When it's crock pot cooking, I found a religious minority group that loves crock pots. I thought maybe soccer moms would be the crock pot people or busy working moms, the Mormon Church has a lot of people that love crock pots. When I start targeting them, they shared my post to everybody and they keep commenting on it. Next thing you know, I exploded because I found who was most passionate.

With the cat page that I have, I found them in no-kill shelters. You got to find who that person is, and once you find them, you can be like best ideas for kids and explode your page by over 100,000. She did that though by finding what type of content they wanted and almost getting rid of the people that aren't her fan.

Darren: This really comes down to a lot of what you do teach, is really doing a lot of work on thinking about who it is that you want to reach and understanding them and interviewing them which is something that our listeners would have heard other guests talk about a lot as well is really focusing on who it is that you want to have on your site and really position your page very well for them. I think it's really great advice to have.

Rachel: Once you can serve those people that love cats and you love on them, they're going to love on you with your content. They're going to spread your content, they're going to notice when you forget to post and you've left your schedule empty that day. They will literally stalk you down because they found your address at the bottom of an email and let you know, "Hey, just FYI, haven't heard from you, did you disappear?" It's building a community with your readers and they will love you back and share your stuff and buy from you.

Darren: Two more questions. Actually it's three, but one is connected. People have been asking. Pages versus groups is the question but also live video is another one that got weaved into that question. Shall we be doing live video, if so, for what? Are groups an alternative to a page or do they really work hand in hand?

Rachel: I use them all the same. I probably have seven groups that are not part of my marketing. I'm talking about groups that I'm admin over and that I created one. I also have pages that I've created and run dozens of them. You need all three, there are three ways that people interact on Facebook and to be an influencer, you need to know and interact on all three levels. That's your personal profile and then your page and then a group. It doesn't necessarily have to be your group, a lot of groups are open to bloggers. I have groups that I let any blogger promote their own content any time they want to as long as they follow these rules.

There are other groups that are like that for bloggers too. On your personal profile, you want to interact with other brands in your niche that establishes you as an influencer, that then raises your admin ranking in your topic area. Next one is your page. That's where you can target new people, it's either go to your group to join your email list to do anything to send you products but you have to do targeting from inside of the page. That's where you tell Facebook who you're going to be reaching. With moolah, I have a bigger group than I do my page but I need my page. My page is crucial, because I would not be able to drive new people to my group if I didn't have my page.

The group is where you can get that community. We've had people, the Decluttering Club, she grew her Facebook page to 20,000 but then exploded her group like almost within two months to 16,000 and it's from her group that she's monetizing now. It's interesting but she wouldn't be able to do that if she didn't have the page to feed the group. You need both. I typically monetize more personally from my pages than I do my groups as a blogger. There's different monetization methods for everyone.

Darren: Maybe that's a question for another call, how to monetize this.

Rachel: I made a couple hundred thousand just off my blogs last year. It's really fun.

Darren: We need to book in that call. Live video is the other question as part of that. What's its place in all of this?

Rachel: Facebook loves live. It has a short term lifespan. I don't suggest pages start doing lives until they got 4,000-10,000 fans because in my mind, if you have an hour, spend that hour finding what's viral, spend that hour in other ways. Once you've got 10,000 fans that you can engage, start doing lives and using those lives to build that future post. Uploading video is also important because that has a longer tail. It lasts on Facebook longer. Something from two years ago can go viral again today. Whereas live video, in two weeks, it's pretty much dead, unless you're continuing with ads, which you can totally do. I do suggest doing 1-2 lives a week if possible from your page once you're between 4,000 and 10,000.

Darren: We have actually found live video is great if you want someone to do something now, like right now, we are launching right now, it's happening now, come and join us. But a video is much better if we want them to do something over the next month or so. But we've got a launch starting, we'll do a live to announce it but then we'll put a video up that we then allow to continue to grow momentum over a month or so.

Rachel: For me, as a blogger, I prefer uploading videos because I want to do that hour of work one time and not have to do it all the time. I do lives whenever I'm demanding an action but on my 500,000, my 200,000 pages, I'm not doing lives regularly because I don't want to have to be a slave to my page. I turn the videos on. I still come in but…

Darren: Yeah. I've seen a few people recently do the live and then download their live or get the video of the live and chop it up. They get rid of the start and the end which is more interactive and they just have the middle bit which is a teaching part and they use that as an uploaded video later on and that seems to work quite well.

Rachel: That only works if you don't have the same first ten seconds. Facebook tracks the first ten seconds of your videos. If you had a video go viral, or you've had a live, you can chop it up as long as it's not the same first ten seconds, you can recycle it as much as you want. Repackage it and now you have two viral videos, it's really fun.

Darren: Yeah, that's great. Last question was around boosting. You've mentioned a few times, you boost a dollar here, $2 there. If bloggers do have a little bit of money to throw, what's the best way to use those dollars to build a page and build a blog?

Rachel: There's a whole strategy too, but because of the time, I'll just give you a couple of do and don't rules. My first tip with rules is to always use the ads manager to boost. Don't use the boost on your page because you're going to cannibalize your page, unless you have custom audiences and stuff set up. Always boost with ads manager and make sure that you exclude your page whenever you're boosting. That way, your boost goes to people who don't know who you are. Facebook still sends out your organic traffic to the people who like your page but people who don't know who you are now get a glimpse of how awesome your page is and why they should love you.

Darren: Great, excellent. Good first tips there. Thank you so much, Rachel, we will have links to the audience growth, you'll get the 25 viral titles, 25 conversation starters, you'll get a list of banned words as well. Thank you for providing that. I know our listeners are going to really enjoy.

Rachel: Darren, this has been a blast! A blast!

Darren: I loved it. I've got about ten other questions I'll need to ask you for next time. I've been writing them down and I've got a couple of ideas that I'm going to go and implement myself. I think I need to start some more Facebook pages.

Rachel: You won't regret it. If you're over 100,000, it's really easy to start your second one now because Facebook gives all that juice so you could share from that little page. It's fun to see them rise together.

Darren: Yeah, very cool. Thank so much.

Rachel: Yeah, thank you, Darren. I appreciate it.

Darren: Wow! Rachel has to be one of the most enthusiastic and knowledgeable Facebook presenters that I've ever come across. She's actually presenting at our Dallas event later in the year as well. If you have been thinking about coming to the Dallas event Success Incubator, I'll link to it on the show notes as well but you can also find more information on that at problogger.com/success.

Rachel does pack a lot of value into what she shares on her Facebook group and in her training as well. What I love about what she said today, and I really want to emphasize this, is that you really need to work out what Facebook wants. You heard her say it a couple of times in today's episode. Work out what Facebook wants and give Facebook that.

Facebook wants content that will be shared, that people will comment upon. Start with that. Many of us as bloggers look at Facebook through the lens of what we want. We want traffic, we want engagement, we want comments. Some of those things Facebook wants as well, but when you start with what Facebook wants, and importantly and you heard her say this a few times today, start with what your readers want. That's a much better place to start with your strategy on Facebook. Don't start with what you want, start with what Facebook wants, what your readers want and work from that place because it's going to give you a great foundation.

Rachel's Facebook training course is opening up again in the next week or so. I'll link again where you can join a waitlist for that training course if you'd like to do that. But whether you take the course or not, I really would recommend you get into her Facebook group. I'll link to that in the show notes as well and download those downloadables too.

Today's show notes, where you can get all the links to all of what Rachel's doing, her course, her Facebook group and the downloadables are at problogger.com/podcast/208 and get those downloadables at problogger.com/growth. I am an affiliate for Rachel's courses, I want to disclaim that right now, upfront. I want to be very transparent about that. But I will emphasize that I paid for her course myself when I first saw it and I did the course personally, my team haven't done it, I did it and I would highly recommend it from having engaged in that as well. Again, if it's for you, that's great but there's a lot of great free stuff there as well.

Thanks for listening, I look forward to chatting with you next week in episode 209 of the podcast. Again, today's show notes over at problogger.com/podcast/208. Thanks for listening!

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The post 208: 5 Actionable Tips You Can Use to Get Better Results on Your Facebook Page appeared first on ProBlogger.

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How to Work Productively on a Plane

Posted: 24 Aug 2017 07:00 AM PDT

How to work productively when flying

If I look back at the key products and services I’ve created, they’ve all been influenced by productive groundwork done while travelling. Australia is a long way from most places, so when travelling to places like the USA, there are plenty of hours on the plane that can be filled with deep work.

I realise not everyone will want to spend time working as they travel. But it can be a super effective way to be productive. There are still distractions to deal with, such as meal trolleys and the other people around you. But your commitment and responsibility to them is completely different to those around you at home or in the office. These distractions are much easier to ignore.

But you can’t just hop on the plane and expect to work productively. You need to be prepared, and undertake a little bit of planning before you go.

Here are some steps you can take to give yourself the best chance of making the most of your in-flight time.

Book an aisle seat

Most people have a definite preference for where they want to sit on the plane. But if you want to work on the flight, I find an aisle seat works best. You’ll be awake for long periods, and as you’ll see from points below, being able to move about will be important for staying focused on the task at hand.

Have a plan before you go

A week or so before the flight, plan out the work you’ll do on the plane. Start getting together all the notes, documents and spreadsheets you’ll need to complete the work. Remember, you may not be able to get online.

I’ve found planes to be perfect for both creative and planning work. On flights I’ve completed:

  • Blog content plans. Creating a yearly content plan for your blog takes hours, and being able to focus on it for several hours without interruption has huge benefits. You can take a top-level view of the content over the year, and then narrow down to topics by quarter, month and week. Creating topics is taxing work for the brain, and a natural reaction is to switch to an easier task when you start to run out of ideas. But if you push through the resistance because you’re stuck in your seat, you force your mind to become more creative and think beyond surface-level ideas. And that can help you come up with some very unique and creative blog post ideas.
  • Online course content outlines. Creating an online course can be broken down into many mini projects, including creating the course outline. Working without distractions or the internet means you can’t escape the task by doing more “research”. Chances are you already know everything you need to put the course outline together. You just need to focus and stick with it. And a long plane flight can be perfect for that.

Rest first if you need to

A lot of people wake up early to catch a flight, or stay up late the night before the flight getting everything ready their trip. Either way, you can find yourself sitting in your plane seat feeling very tired.

If you have a long flight ahead of you, take a nap before you start working. It can be tempting to do it the other way round. “I’ll get through the work quickly, and then I can nap as long as I like.”

However, the reality is your productivity decreases in proportion to how tired you are.

Concentration, working memory, mathematical capacity, and logical reasoning are all aspects of cognitive function compromised by sleep deprivation. {source}

You’ll get less work done than you normally would, and the work you do get done probably won’t be  as good. So recharge your batteries before you get started.

Have all the tech gadgets you need

Write a list of all the tech gadgets you’ll need to work productively on the plane. As we tend to be using them until the moment we leave for the airport, it’s easy to leave them behind. Make sure they’re fully charged before you leave, and double check your list to make sure you’ve packed everything, including headphones, battery packs, charger cords, etc.

It’s important to know the battery life of the devices you’ll be using, and what (if any) charging facilities are available on your flight. For instance, while most planes have chargers for phones/tablets on the back of chairs, very few will have a way for you to charge your computer. This information can help you plan out what work you’ll do on what device. For example, I could write a short document on Google Docs offline or a blog post on my phone. But I struggle with anything more detailed than that, and so I  save the battery on the computer for more complicated work.

Go without wifi on the plane

Some flights now offer wifi, either for free or for a fee. I highly recommend not connecting to the wifi. Chances are you’ve created an out of office reply to let people know you won’t be answering your emails. Take this opportunity to disconnect and do some creative/complex work without interruption.

Take breaks

Just as you would when working in your office, make sure you take regular breaks and get out of your seat. I’ve yet to see a plane that lets you work in an ergonomic position, so you need regular movement to offset it, not to mention the potential issues with deep vein thrombosis on long-haul flights.

It may feel a little weird, but you can do some mini exercises at the back of the plane—calf stretches, twists to get some movement in your back and arms, etc. This post lists seven exercises (with pictures) that you can do on a plane. Movement like this will help invigorate you and give you more energy. The break from focusing also gives your brain a rest so you can let it recharge a little before you get back to work.

Load up your devices

Is there an online course you signed up to but are yet to complete? Many courses let you download the materials onto your computer, which means you can finally start the course that will help you in the next step of your business while flying to your destination.

You probably have loads of books and podcasts you want to listen to. Load up your devices in advance, and create a list of what you’ll listen to. Prioritise them according to how they’ll will help you with your blogging goal for the year. And don’t just listen passively. Take notes on what actions you can take once you’re off the plane.

Take along pen and paper

While some of you happily take notes on your device, pen and paper can also be a great option on the plane. You can map out your notes and your next action steps. It’s also useful to have pen and paper in case technology fails you. While it may be a little slower and require typing up later, you can still plan and create on pen and paper if the battery in your computer has run out of charge.

Drink and eat well

To work productively, it’s important to eat and drink well. Skip the free alcohol, and have extra water instead. It’s easy to become dehydrated on long flights, so making sure you drink plenty of water is important. Hence my first point about making sure you get an aisle seat. It gives you easier access to the toilet, which you’ll need when you drink more water :) .

Consider taking some snacks with you on the plane, or even meals. Your brain uses more energy than any other human organ, so it’s important to keep it well fuelled on long-haul flights so you can work as productively as possible.

What other tips would you add to help bloggers work productively on flights?

Photo by Bambi Corro on Unsplash

The post How to Work Productively on a Plane appeared first on ProBlogger.

      

How To Achieve Your Goals – Hint #1

Posted: 22 Aug 2017 07:05 AM PDT

Friend – ‘Darren, I never seem to reach any of my goals.’
Darren – ‘What are your Goals?’
Friend – ‘…ummm….. ‘
Darren – ‘Do you have any goals?’
Friend – ‘Yes – at the start of the year I worked some out’
Darren – ‘So what are your goals?’
Friend – ‘….ummmm…. I don’t remember them exactly – there was one about making more money…. I think there was another one about going on a trip overseas….’
Darren – ‘Did you keep a record of your goals anywhere?’
Friend – ‘No – I thought I’d remember them.’
Darren – ‘Did you remember them?’
Friend – ‘Sort of…. Not really….’
Darren – ‘Do you think that remembering your goals might help you achieve them?’
Friend – ‘Hmmmm…..’

“Only goal setters who are goal writers are truly goal achievers.” – Darby Checketts’ Leverage: How to Create Your Own “Tipping Points” in Business And in Life (aff).

Update: Hint #2 for Making Goals a Reality

This post was originally published 11 years ago (almost to the day) after I had a conversation with a good friend. After I posted it (with his permission) I promptly forgot about it until a few days ago.

Earlier this week I was speaking with the same friend – someone who since that time has gone on to become very successful with his career (offline).

I was reflecting back to him that I was amazed how well he’d done and asked him what his secret was.

He reminded me of this blog post and told me that the secret was to get serious about identifying goals and writing them down.

After I published the post and shot a link to it to my friend he decided to take action and set aside half a day to think about and to write down his goals.

He decided to buy himself a dedicated ‘goals diary’ in which he would record the goals he set – so that he would be able to keep track of what he decided to do.

In the goals diary he records ‘life goals’ (his big ones), ‘medium term goals’ (his goals for the next 12 months) and ‘short term goals’ (his goals for the coming month, weeks and even days).

He now sets aside time at the start of each year to look at his ‘life goals’ and time at the start of each month to assess his medium and short terms goals.

I asked my friend what he’d add to the original post above and he mentioned one thing that he thinks the post was missing – he called it ‘hint #2’.

Hint #2 was to go beyond writing down the goals but also to write down action items that would move you toward the goals. To quote my friend:

“Having your goals written down is so important – but more important is knowing what you need to do to achieve them.”

"A goal without a plan is just a wish." ― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

So each time my friend sits down to identify and write down his goals he now also starts mapping out the a plan of what he needs to do in the short and medium term to make those goals a reality.

In practical terms this means he’s plugging such action items into a to-do list on his phone and assigning deadline dates of when things need to be done which then also come up in his calendar.

So every day when he sits down to work he’s got things to do already in front of him that he’s 100% satisfied will take him towards his goals.

I love this and hope it helps you make your goals a reality too!

The post How To Achieve Your Goals – Hint #1 appeared first on ProBlogger.

      

207: Smartphone and Tablet Apps for Bloggers

Posted: 21 Aug 2017 02:00 AM PDT

Blogger Apps for Smartphone and Tablet

Today, I want to take you on a tour of my iPhone and iPad, and talk about the apps I use most in my blogging and online business activities.

One of the biggest changes that has happened in my blogging since I began back in 2002 is the technology I use. In the early days it was all done purely through my old desktop PC (and by old I mean really old) and via dial-up internet.

Things were so simple. I started on Blogger and everything that went on my blog was written directly into it. Adding images or video to my posts were not even something I considered as my internet speed was too slow and my computer not really powerful enough to do anything with them.

But since that time a lot has changed. For me, it started with an upgrade of computers (I bought myself a little white apple iBook with my first earnings) and upgrading to ADSL internet.

I also remember around that time I got my first phone (a Nokia if my memory serves me correctly) that allowed me to go online and look at websites. It had a built-in browser, and while the user experience was horrible I remember looking at my blog for the first time on it and even managing to find a way to log in to the back end of my blog which enabled me to edit a spelling mistake.

I thought that ability was so cool, even though it took ten or so minutes to login, find the mistake on that tiny screen, make the change (using the keypad) and save the change.

Of course 2007 came around and changed everything when the iPhone was released, and I began to realize that life was about to change for bloggers. Higher resolution screens, touch screens instead of buttons, and these 'app' things that while at the time were pretty basic I could see would have amazing potential.

I'm not sure how many iPhones I've had since 2007, but apart from one 12 month period when I tried an Android I've stuck to Apple products.

I have also had a number of iPads in that time (although I never actually bought any of them – I managed to win them all in affiliate promotions). My first iPads were used more for entertainment – reading Kindle books, watching movies, playing games – but in the last 6 months I have started using an iPad Pro (10.5 inch) which I won and am starting to realize that that device can actually replace my notebooks for some circumstances.

So today I want to talk about the smartphone and tablet apps that I use most regularly.

Of course as an Apple user they'll be iOS specific, although quite a few of them can also be found on Android.

It's also worth noting that increasingly I'm using apps that allow me to sync up with my Apple computers. Cloud computing is of course one of the other big changes that has happened, and I LOVE that I can work on my desktop and then keep working on another device.

Links and Resources on Smartphone and Tablet Apps for Bloggers

Productivity and Planning

Analytics

Content

Communications

Other

Other Apps Mentioned by Our Community

Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view
Hi there. Welcome to episode 207 of the ProBlogger Podcast. My name is Darren Rowse. I'm the blogger and the podcaster behind problogger.com, a site that's really dedicated to helping you to start great blogs to serve your readers and to build profit around them. You can learn more about what we do at ProBlogger including our events, upcoming in Dallas, over at problogger.com.

Today, I want to take you on a tour of my iPhone and iPad and talk about the apps that I use most in my blogging and online business activities. One of the biggest changes that has happened in my blogging since I began back in 2002 is the technology that I use. The early days, it was all done purely through my desktop PC, a very, very old machine and dial-up internet. Obviously, things have changed since then. I'm not on dial-up anymore, thank goodness. Things back then were so simple. I really had no tools apart from the fact that I had that computer and I did everything through Blogger because that was the platform that I am set up on.

Everything that went onto my blog was written directly into Blogger. I didn't have any images, I didn't have any videos because that was just not possible on the machine that I use, which really could not handle anything much more than text. Also, my internet speed was so slow. There just weren't any other tools to really edit that video or even edit images. There was no such thing as text overlay really going on in blogging back then.

But since that time, a lot has changed. For me, it really started with an upgrade of computers. I bought myself our first little iBook, one of those little white iBooks with some of my first earnings on my blog. I saved up a few months worth, actually, it was probably after six months worth and bought that iBook then I upgraded to ADSL internet. I also remember, around that time, getting my first phone which I think was a Nokia, from memory, that allowed me to go online. It was this amazing thing to be able to get online. It had its own little browser built into it on this tiny little screen. I remember looking at my blog for the first time on a phone. I remember thinking this is just unbelievable that I can read blogs on my phone.

Of course, it took me ten minutes just to get it uploaded onto my site because the internet was so slow. There was no wifi. It's all being done through the 3G or the 2G or whatever it was at the time. I thought to myself, "What would it be like if I try and login to the backend of my blog?" It took me an hour to work out how to do it on this little phone. I had to input everything by the button because there was no touch screen on the phone so it was very, very basic. But I remember, eventually, being able to login to the backend and edit a spelling mistake on a blog post which I'd seen.

I thought this was amazing. This was a game changer for me because I thought, "Now, I'll be able to edit my blog from the road if I was traveling." Of course, I never really did that because it did take so much time to make those edits, it was all done through that keypad but I could see that things were changing. I began to dream about the fact that maybe one day we would have technology to be able to do this more easily.

Of course, 2007 came around and that changed everything. We have iPhones in our pockets. When that first iPhone was released, I began to realize that life was about to change for bloggers. We had high-resolution screens where you could actually see what was going on our web browser, touch screens instead of buttons, and then these things called apps that at the time, were pretty basic and couldn't really do a lot but I could see that this was going to change everything. I'm not sure how many iPhones I've had since 2007. It's probably been one a year, almost, maybe not quite.

Apart from one 12-month period where I tried an Android, I've got a Samsung, I was stuck to Apple products for most of that time. I've also had a few iPads over the years although I've never actually bought any of them. I managed to win all of them as an affiliate in affiliate competitions. My first iPad though were used more for entertainment, reading Kindle books and watching movies, playing games. But over the last six month, I've actually started to use my iPad, I've got my iPad Pro, I won it, 10.5 inch screen.

I'm starting to realize that it is a device that is now starting to replace some of the things that I used to do on my notebook computer, particularly when I'm traveling. Today, what I want to do is really talk about some of the smartphone and tablet apps that I use most regularly. They are changing our lives as bloggers, and I'm getting asked quite regularly what apps do I use. Some of the discussions we've had over in the Facebook group over the last few months show me that you are interested in talking about this too.

Of course, I want to say right up front I am an Apple user so all the apps I'm going to talk about today are iOS specific, although quite a few of them also do have Android versions as well. It's also worth noting that, increasingly, I'm using apps on my devices, my phone and my tablet, that allow me to sync up with what I'm doing on my computer. This is one of the other big changes that massively happened over the last ten or so years, this Cloud computing which enable us to start doing something on one device and end up doing it on another. That would be a theme in today's show as well.

You can find today's show notes where I'll list and link to all of the apps that I mentioned. You can go to problogger.com/podcast/207. You can follow along there and check out the apps that I mention. Also, there are a couple of really good discussions going on in our Facebook group, which I will link to in the show notes as well. One of them where we talk about our favorite apps from a month or so ago and then also, a more recent discussion where we talk about the apps we use to take notes. There's been quite a robust discussion on that front as well. Let's get into today's show. I'm going to take you through some of the apps on my phone.

What I've done in going through these apps is to try and classify them into different types of apps. I want to start off by talking about productivity and planning apps. There is a little bit of overlap. Some of these apps probably fit into two different categories but bear with me, I thought it might help give a bit distraction to the show today. The first category, productivity planning. One of the apps that I love is Wunderlist. This is a to-do list type app. It's a little bit heavier, more feature rich than some of the other to-do lists that I've come across.

It allows me to have different categories in my to-do list. I'm looking at my phone right now and I have a category that's for personal, for family. That's where I put on my shopping lists and all of those types of things. I have a list for our events and that's where in the lead up to our events, I was putting all specific things for the event. I've got a list there for the DPS, a list there for ProBlogger. I'm able to categorize those lists but it also allows me to see all the things on my to-do lists which allows me to get the big picture, the fire host type list of all the things that I need to do.

Each of the to-do items, you can just have no data. It could just be something you need to do once and it doesn't really matter, or you can set yourself a reminder and deadlines as well. Once you do set those deadlines, you can look at the full list and see what you need to do today. This really does help to get those things done. You can also share your lists with other people, not that I use that, you can email yourself tasks. For each of the items on your list, you can also add notes and comments and I love that as well because I will set myself the task to write a blog post but I can also begin to outline that blog post in the note that is associated with that task.

Wunderlist sits on my iPhone, it also syncs with the app that I put on my iPad and also there are apps for my computers. I love this that I can have all of that in one place. This is something that I use everyday. It's very handy for me and it's something I really can't imagine living without in many ways.

Another productivity and planning app that I use is Notes. I use, actually, the Apple Notes app that came with my iPhone. This has been the subject of a lot of discussion in our Facebook group at the moment. I actually started a thread, which I'll link to on today's show notes, asking people what they use because I'm not completely satisfied with Notes. I used to be an Evernote user but because I'm using four devices, two computers, an iPhone, and the tablet, that changed, I guess, six or seven months ago when Evernote changed their pricing model and I'm a bit cheap. I'm reluctant to pay for a notes app. For me, it's not something that I feel the need to pay for. Although, because I'm not satisfied with any of the other apps that I've tried that are free, maybe I do need to go back to Evernote.

Apple, in their new version of iOS, iOS 11, have said that there are some changes coming with notes, particularly in the iPad which allow you to draw and that type of thing. I'm going to stick with it for a little bit longer just to see how those changes impact the app but I might need to go back to Evernote as well. I will say, on the side, some other note taking apps that I've tried recently, there's one called Bear which I like a lot. It's a markup-based app though. You actually see the markup code in your note. For me, that clutters the note a little bit and it wasn't an intuitive experience although I did like the way the app looked.

Simplenote is another one that many in our group have been saying that they love. For me, it feels a little bit too simple. It just didn't quite work for me as well. Awesome Note is the other one, and I really liked Awesome Note when I tried it but it doesn't have a computer version. To do anything with that on the computer, you have to use Evernote, which is a bit of a pain. Last one that many number of people have been recommending to me is OneNote, that's Microsoft's note app. It is feature rich but to me, it just doesn't look nice. It's a bit clunky and a bit corporatey. I'm a bit fussy. This is probably the only app that I'm still looking for the perfect fit for me. I'll move on from note taking apps. If you've got a suggestion, feel free to add it in the Facebook group.

Another app that fits into this productivity area is an app called MindNode, which I have mentioned before on the podcast in the episode where I talked about mind mapping. MindNode is a tool that enables me to create mind maps. I love the visual maps that it creates. It's very clean, very easy to use. Again, it works on my computer, it works on my iPad, it works on my phone and through iCloud, it syncs together so I can see all my mind maps on all my devices.

The last app that I'll talk about when it comes to productivity is my calendar app. I actually use Fantastical 2. It's from a company called Flexibits and it's a calendar app. For many years, I actually used Apple's native calendar app which is called Calendar. I quite like that but Fantastical 2 does give me some different options that I really like. I love that I can add in new events very intuitively. I can actually type in, "Meeting with Laney at 2:00PM." It actually puts it in at 2:00PM. I don't have to then click something and say 2:00PM. Just adding in the events is easier.

It has a view that allows me to see everything that's upcoming and it also has something on my computer that allows me a little icon in the top menu bar which allows me to click it. I'm clicking it right now and from that, a little popup appears where I can either add something or I can see my upcoming things. It's just a cool little tool. I wish Apple's Calendar allowed me to do that type of thing. For me, it is a paid tool but, again, it syncs across all my devices. There's an app on my iPad, an app on my iPhone, and an app on my computer. It really does work beautifully. Syncs in with Google Calendars, Apple's Calendar, those types of things as well. If you already have calendars in different places, you can just use this app to pull in those calendars. There are four apps that I use for productivity.

The next category I want to talk about is analytics. Probably the app that I use the most on my phone as it pertains to my blogging, apart from Gmail, I think I'm probably in Gmail more, the second most would be Google Analytics. If you haven't got this on your iPhone yet, you probably need to get it. It allows you to get a lot of the stats from Google Analytics that you would get from accessing it on your computer. It doesn't give you everything, you can't dig in as deep but the thing that I use it for is real time stats.

I can click the app on my phone and within seconds, I can see how many people are on my site right now. I just clicked it now and I can see that there's 300 people in Digital Photography School viewing now. I can actually dig in and see where are they. I can see things like where they're coming from, the source of those readers. I can look at any keywords that they might have used to get in there and it does allow me to see quite a bit. I can also dig into the main categories of Google Analytics, your audience, your acquisition, your behavior.

As I said, it doesn't really dig in as deep as you can on your computer but for that type of stuff where you want to just see what's happening on your site today, it gives you enough information. It allows me to, I guess, see if there's a problem on my site. I probably would check in on Google Analytics on my phone 10 times during the day, just a really quick check, it's a health check. Is everything okay? It's okay, I move on, I'm not digging in too deep but it's just good to know.

Previous to this, there would be times where I wouldn't even know that my site has gone down or that there might be that there was an issue on my site because an alert that I might have set up didn't come through. It does really allow me to get a sense of the health of my site.

The other app that I would put into these analytics category probably would also fit into a monetization category is AdSense. There's an app that allows me to check in on my AdSense earnings, again, in the similar way to Google Analytics, it's more of a health check for me. In the past, there have been days where there's been a problem with my AdSense ads on Digital Photography School and I wouldn't know there was a problem until the next day when I happen to check my AdSense stats on my computer. I'm not checking it all day everyday on my computer but just to know that I can check in at any time during the day, I have a sense of how much my AdSense should be at any given time of the day. I'm looking in there now and I can see that the total of the day so far is about normal and so, everything is okay. It allows me, I guess, to find those problems a little bit more easily as well. There are two apps that I would put into this Analytics category.

The next category I want to talk about is content. Of course, there's different types of content. I'll go through a few different types that I create on my phone. The first one is the CoSchedule app. I'm not going to talk too much about CoSchedule because we did a whole episode on this just a few episodes ago in episode 195. We use CoSchedule on ProBlogger as an editorial calendar and also for social sharing as well. It enables us to do some of that on the phone. I have to say I don't use it a great deal on my iPhone, it is a little bit bitsy but on my iPad, I use it a bit. It is nice to know that I can go into the backend of my blog and edit posts and schedule posts and that type of thing through the CoSchedule app as well. It's not something that I wouldn't use everyday but it's good to have it there when I need it.

One app that I do use everyday when it comes to content is Adobe Spark Post. Adobe Spark, again, it's something we've mentioned a couple of times in the past. Adobe Spark is a great tool and in fact it's a series of tools. There's three, I think, Adobe Spark Post, Adobe Spark Page, and Adobe Spark Video. I use the Post one a lot. I use it to create social graphics and text overlay type images for blog posts as well. I love using this app on my iPad, especially. It's nice on the iPhone but having that extra screen size on the iPad is just gorgeous.

The images that it allows you to create are fantastic. It's a free app. I think you can pay to get an Adobe creative cloud account which does give you a few more features. But really, it's amazing, what it allows to do. The quality of the images that it allows is just amazing. You can bring in your own images to use in a collage but there's also some free images in there that you can use. Some of the images that are in that free library are pretty cool as well. I'm using Adobe Spark Post a lot.

I have also used the Adobe Spark Video app. This allows you to create short little videos that you might want to share on social media as well. It's similar in some ways to the app that I talked about a few episodes ago, Lumen5, but it allows you to bring in your own audio clips as well. You could use it if you've got a podcast. You could bring in some of your audio and then put some images over the top of that as a teaser for your podcast as well. Adobe Spark Post and Video.

They do have another one called Page but it's not something that I really need to use at all because it creates a little website for you and really, I don't have any need for using that one.

Another one that I would use in the content section or two that I would use in the content section are for image editing, I use Snapseed and Lightroom. Adobe Lightroom, another app that you can use for editing your photos. It's actually the tool that I use on my desktop to edit my real photos. I use that regularly on my desktop but also would occasionally edit photos on my phone using the Lightroom app. Snapseed is the other one. I love Snapseed. It's a Google product. They bought it a year or two ago now. I used to pay for it and then Google made it free so it's a free tool that you can use.

For me, it's just very good for any editing of the images that you've got. Touching them up, adding a vignette, those types of things. You can do a little bit more on that than you could do through Instagram itself.

The last one that I'll put into the content section is Google Drive. We, as a team, share most of our documents on Google Drive, whether that's word processing documents, spreadsheets, most of that goes onto Google Drive as a team and to be able to access that on the go from my phone or iPad is great. I do use it to write blog posts into, particularly now that CoSchedule and Google Drive or Google Documents work quite well together. It's just a seamless way to write a blog post. I don't write blog posts on my iPhone but I do on my iPad. I've got a keyboard for that as well. If I'm writing something on my iPad, it goes into a Google Doc.

The next category that I talk about is social media. There are so many apps that you can use for your social media for scheduling, updating social media but what I actually do mostly is use the native apps to do my updating. I'll talk about some of these a little bit later. When I asked in the Facebook group what apps people use, some people were using apps like, there's one called Tailwind, which allow you to schedule posts on Instagram and Pinterest. If I'm putting something on Pinterest or something onto Instagram, I tend to use the Instagram app and the Pinterest app, probably because I'm not scheduling too much into those spaces.

I use the Facebook app for updating into Facebook. I use Facebook Pages as well to update into my pages. I use Twitter, the native Twitter app. I use the native Instagram app so I don't really have anything to share with you on that front that's going to be too groundbreaking, I have to say. But I'll mention a couple of the other apps that other people use later.

Communications will be the other category that I want to talk about. We use Slack, as a team, for all our day-to-day chat, amongst ourselves as a team. We have a team area setup for ProBlogger, for those in my business who are working on the ProBlogger side of the business and another team area for Digital Photography School. Within each of those team areas, we have channels for specific aspects of the business. In the Digital Photography School team area, there's a channel for development where our developers in there, Laney, who manages Digital Photography School's in there, and anyone else that part of the business that's relevant to be in that area, sees those messages.

We have an editorials channel as well. Our editor, Darlene, is in there, myself, and anyone else that's relevant to that. We have a marketing channel which is just for those who need to see those sorts of messages. It allows us to have different chats going at any one time and not annoy everyone. It's not like we just have a Facebook group for all of our team and everyone sees every message, we want to be able to really be specific with the types of chats that we're having. There's also private chats that go on as well between individuals or if I'm talking about an operational thing that's not relevant to the rest of the team. It allows us to have those sort of the privacy types things as well.

Slack is the tool that we use as a team for all of that type of thing. It has lots of different integrations with other things as well so you can integrate it with Google Documents and that type of thing as well so you can be sharing documents in there.

Other communication tools that I use, Gmail. It's probably the app that I use the most in my phone. I know there are plenty of other email providing tools out there but I find the native Gmail one really does it well for me. I guess the other apps that I'm using for communications would be Facebook Messenger. I don't do a lot on there these day. It's not so much for internal team communications but it is a useful tool from time to time to be chatting with other people or readers from time to time as well. I find most people have a Messenger account or Facebook account.

I do, from time to time also, use the native message app and phone app on my phone as well. But, interestingly, I don't really use my phone app a whole heap these days on my phone. I use my phone other things these days as, I guess, as most of us do. I might prefer to talk via text if truth to be told.

A couple of other apps that I use in my business would be Google Chrome. It's the browser that I use across all my devices. Again, I love how it increasingly is allowing what I do on one device to be seen on another device. If I bookmark things, say passwords, those types of things that can work across the different devices. Seeing history from one device to another is also great as well. I tend to use Chrome across all those devices. Safari would be my backup when occasionally, I would do need to jump into Safari if something is not rendering right on Chrome or if I'm having issues on Chrome.

The last app that I would use everyday is my Podcast app. Again, I know there are plenty of great podcasting apps out there but I tend to use the native Podcast app that Apple gives us as well. That's probably because that's what I started out using and everything is already in there and that's already set up. But I find that it's pretty intuitive to use as well and I don't really have any problems with that. It's something I use everyday, I listen to a lot of podcasts.

They're the main apps that I use. In the Facebook group, I did ask a question, what apps do our community use. I found that really interesting. I actually created a bit of a word cloud of all the different things that people said, there must've been 60 or 70 people suggest, four or five apps each. There was a lot of apps mentioned. I created a word cloud and it was interesting to look up the most mentioned words and the most mentioned apps.

Number one on the list was Instagram, which I was kind of surprised about. I thought Facebook maybe, or Gmail, or that type of thing but Instagram definitely was number one. I was really surprised that Twitter was number two. A lot of people are talking about how Twitter, that people are moving away from it but it does look like a lot of people are still using the Twitter app as well. Interestingly, they are the native apps as well. Whilst there's plenty of other tools out there that are available for people, they are certainly the most common apps mentioned.

Number three on the list was Evernote. It does seem that a lot of people are persistent with that particular app. I would be too if it was just on a couple of devices and getting the free version, I might end up going back to that. Pinterest wass number four, Google Analytics was number five and Buffer was number six.

Buffer does allow you to do some social sharing and scheduling as well, great tool. One that I have used over the years as well but, I guess, now that we do use CoSchedule for our social sharing, we haven't had any before that. There are a few other apps that were mentioned in the group as well that I do want to touch on.

Trello was one that a number of people mentioned. Trello is a great tool. It's not just an app, it's actually a project management system, I guess. We've used it in our business in the past to manage some of our bigger projects. For example, when we were doing our redesign of ProBlogger and Digital Photography School, we setup a Trello board. It's a difficult one to explain without you actually seeing it but I do encourage you to go and have a look at Trello if you haven't heard it before.

It is great or managing projects amongst your team but I know a lot of bloggers do use it individually as well because it can be really useful in brainstorming and setting up systems for yourself, setting up to do lists. I know a lot of our readers use Trello for to do lists, for planning, for brainstorming. It's a very visual tool that allows you to set up lists but then to move things around. Do check it out. I think it's well worth looking at and it has apps for different devices as well.

Two tools that people mentioned in the group for scheduling on social media particularly on Instagram and Pinterest, for one of them, is the tool that I mentioned earlier, Later. Later allows you to schedule to Instagram. Tailwind allows you to schedule, I think, to Pinterest and Instagram, maybe some other social networks as well.

A couple of others that people mentioned, Google Keep is an alternative to a note taking app that allows you take notes, lists, to do list and also, I think you can add in images and those types of things as well. Pocket is another one that quite a few people mentioned in the group. It allows you to save articles or videos to view later, which is quite useful if you're consuming a lot of content.

Two tools that people mentioned to create social graphics, Word Swag and Typorama. I have used both of them and have worked really well. Particularly if you want to do something more of a text overlay type social graphic, I would use those over Adobe Spark. Adobe Spark for me is better for simple text overlays but also for collages. I use Adobe Spark more for the collages. Something like Word Swag or Typorama are really good if it's a more font rich experience, social graphic that you're trying to create.

Dropbox is another one that quite a few people mentioned. We use Dropbox as well in our team although I don't tend to use it on my phone a lot unless it's an emergency. If I'm on the road and really need to access a document or something, I would use that app but it's not something I'm using everyday.

Lastly, quite a number of people mentioned Asana. Asana is, I guess, an alternative to Slack in many ways. It's a project management team communications kind of tool. I guess we haven't used it because we have invested ourselves into Slack but it does look like a really great tool as well.

They are the tools that I use, the tools that were most mentioned when I asked our community in our Facebook group but I would love to hear what you use. What's the top app that you use on your phone or your tablet, whether that'd be an Apple or whether that'd be an Android or something else. I would love to hear what you use. Head over to the Facebook group and I will link in our show notes today to a discussion that we're having in the Facebook group at the moment on this particular topic.

You can find today's show notes over at problogger.com/podcast/207, where I link to all the apps that I mentioned today and I'll link into the Facebook group as well. Lastly, I just want to let you know that next week's episode is going to be a great one. I'm really looking forward to presenting it to you. I've got Rachelle Miller, who is brilliant at Facebook, coming onto the show to talk about how to increase your organic reach in Facebook.

If you're listening to this and this episode's just come out, do look out for that one next week. If you are listening to this after it's been already been released, you might even find the next episode there waiting to listen to as well. It's episode 208 which will be coming out in a week's time from today. Head over to the Facebook group, join the group if you're not already in there, there's over 8,500 people in there at the moment. Daily discussions going on where we're sharing our challenges, our tips, and asking questions as well.

I look forward to chatting with you there. I hope you found today's show useful. I'll chat with you next week while we're talking about Facebook.

How did you go with today's episode?

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The post 207: Smartphone and Tablet Apps for Bloggers appeared first on ProBlogger.

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Check Out These 5 Noteworthy Blog Design Trends

Posted: 17 Aug 2017 03:35 PM PDT

5 noteworthy blog design trends

Blog design sure has come a long way since I started doing them 6-7 years ago. Back then the designs were very … bloggy.

The most recently written post was given all the prime real estate on the home page, with the next most recent posts appearing beneath it. Sidebars were crammed full of stuff that would take you away from the site (blogrolls, sponsor ads, Google Ads) along with things that really didn't need to be there (remember tag clouds?).

We then experienced the 'magazine site' evolution. Bloggers realised that serving up just one visible post on their home page was folly. What if a new reader wasn't interested in that post? They'd be gone in an instant. Magazine style sites allowed a new reader to scan all the most recent posts, and/or the recent posts from major categories, decide where they wanted to start, and dive in there.

Today we're in the midst of a new evolution for blog sites. Blogging has become a crowded and noisy space and to stand out from the crowd, bloggers now have to act and treat themselves like brands.

Which is why most of the world's top blogging sites now look like brand websites where the blogger is the star of the show. This has helped give rise to the following trends.

1. It's all branding above the fold

For years, big brands have been using the area above the fold on the home page to make it really clear what they stand for, who the website is for, and what the website is about. In the past few years, bloggers have used the same to differentiate themselves.

Gabby Bernstein's design is a great example of this:

Video is used cleverly to both show the face of the site's author while conveying her unique energy and vibe. The tagline overlaying the video dictates quite clearly who the site is aimed at.

Planning with Kids' Nicole Avery takes a similar approach on her site.

She's seated at her kitchen table, has a lovely smile on her face, and is offering the reader checklists to simplify the repetitive tasks of family life. If you're in Nicole's target market (overwhelmed parents), you immediately feel at home.

What if there's no face to your blog's brand? Then you'd do as Copyblogger has done and use a relevant image plus on point copy to ensure if someone in your target market lands on your site, they know this is the place for them:

2. Credibility counts

Another way to stand out from the crowd today is to display the logos of media outlets where your work has appeared or where you've been featured. These all fit neatly under the header of 'As Seen In', as Nicole has done on Planning with Kids:

Or 'Featured in' which is what Ramit Sethi uses on his site:

Displaying these logos gives you and your site instant credibility. It shows that well-respected media brands rate you highly.

3. Professional imagery

I've been banging on about the importance of imagery for years. Today, more than ever, it's crucial to the success of your site. You can see above that Gabby, Nicole and Ramit have all brought in professional photographers to capture them and their brands.

Nikki Parkinson is another who's always prioritised high-quality imagery when it comes to her personal brand:

And the Merrymaker Sisters show how great images can have people salivating over your blog posts too:

4. Wayfinding

If you've been blogging for five years or more, there's a good chance you've created content that covers quite a wide range of categories. Using 'wayfinding' design elements to quickly and easily direct people to the right content for their needs is a smart way to help people find their way around your site.

On Michael Hyatt's homepage he asks people, 'What can I help you with?':

Nicole Avery takes a similar approach:

5. Loads of whitespace

In design, whitespace isn't just 'any space that is white'. It refers to space in general.

When elements are crammed close together, there's not much whitespace and this makes the reader subtly anxious because they don't know where to look first.

When the elements on a page are given room to breathe, the eye is more easily directed to the things that are important, and the brain feels happier because it knows what to do.

Chris Ducker uses whitespace really well on his home page.

Here is an example where the background is a coloured image:

Having all the text justified left leads the eye naturally down the line of text … and then over to the right where the image is able to come through because there is not text there. The image, despite being subtle, neatly supports the word 'community' in the heading.

Notice also that the Youpreneur logo, heading and button are given fairly equal weighting as far as the eye is concerned, but the brain is able to easily process all three, in the right order, because of how nicely spaced they are.

Here's another nice example of whitespace on Chris' homepage:

Again, it's clear to see how the spacing of all the elements allows the eye to track around easily, and for the brain to process which thing it wants to click without too much angst.

When it comes to implementing good whitespace on your own site you want to look at the space between everything; images, lines of text, headlines and the text below, your logo and the top of the screen. Ensure every element has an appropriate amount of room to 'breathe'.

In summary

As mentioned at the top of this piece, the blogging world is a noisy and crowded space today. Great design allows you to differentiate yourself to readers and show them you take your work seriously. Cover off the five points above on your site and you'll be well on your way to standing out from the crowd.

Are you using any of these design features on your blog? 

The post Check Out These 5 Noteworthy Blog Design Trends appeared first on ProBlogger.

      

3 Ways to Turn Blog Posts into Engaging Instagram Content

Posted: 15 Aug 2017 07:00 AM PDT

3 Ways to Turn Blog Posts into Engaging Instagram Content

This is a guest post from Jonathan Chan of Foundr Magazine.

You are probably here because you are a proud blog owner.

Your content is consistently fresh and up-to-date, your mission statement is on point, you've managed to create a brand from scratch and everything is going swimmingly. But you're still not using Instagram to promote your ground-breaking content.

If that sounds like you, we've got great news. 700 million monthly users are waiting for you to reach out to them.

In one of their articles, Forbes compared promoting content on Facebook with Instagram. The results showed that a promoted post on Instagram gets 4x more likes than the average Facebook ad. The interesting thing is that the number of impressions isn't drastically different between the two, but Instagram users engage with content much more than those on Facebook.

This means it's time to make the leap and look at Instagram as a full-fledged content platform; not an afterthought.

To help you do that, we're sharing 3 highly effective ways that are guaranteed to turn your already engaging blog posts into even more captivating Instagram content.

#1 Pull Quotes

The brain reacts to visual stimuli in as little as 13 milliseconds. This means you have a fraction of a second to grab a viewer's attention – and pull quotes, i.e. visual representations of key points – are the perfect way to do just that.

In order to create an engaging pull quote, pick an image you think will grab a person's attention and add to it an engaging quote from your blog post. The best way to make these posts interesting is to keep them short and sweet, like so:

The extended version of that same quote, or a short paragraph explaining the quote, should go in the description section below the image. Note that you have 2200 characters to get the user to click on the shortened link you're attaching with the image; plan ahead to make sure you don't run out of space!

Chances are, you've seen plenty of pull quote posts on Instagram. This makes sense: according to Yotpo, Instagram drives the most engaged traffic compared to other social media platforms (including Youtube and Pinterest). This means that text, which may scare less engaged users away, works extremely well on Instagram. This is huge for your marketing – and here's the reason.

People are likely to remember 10% of the information they hear and read several days later. But if you pair the same information with an image, you are likely to remember 65% of it.

Yes, folks, vision is the sense to exploit in content marketing – and pull quotes are an easy way to turn text into visual content.

Next on our list, let's take a look at…

#2 Infographics, data visualizations, and beyond

According to eye-tracking studies reported by Nielsen Norman group, internet users prefer looking at images that carry information. The same study found that infographics and data visualizations get 3x more shares than other images on social media.

In other words, infographics and data visualizations aren't just a powerful way to convey all the information you want to show your followers in one image. They're also a highly engaging form of content on their own!

The catch is that you don't want to make infographics too complicated or have them give out too much information. The best thing to do it is give the users a little snippet that has them wanting to know more. The idea is to "wow" them, drive them to your core piece of blog content – and hopefully convert them into subscribers or followers!

Alternatively, you can place an entire infographic on Instagram using their slideshow feature, like so:

Now, to the fun part. Here are 3 tools you can use to make infographics, data visualizations and other data + text images for free:

  • Canva is a great app for creating engaging graphics tailored to the social media platform you want to share it on. Whether you're creating an Instagram post or want to include the graphics on your blog, Canva is easy to use and has great design options.
  • Piktochart → According to Facebook Marketing Strategist Amy Porterfield, Piktochart is an easy tool for people who want to create viral infographics.
  • Many content creators like WordSwag: an app that lets you add text to any image within seconds. It also features a massive library of 290,000 free images you can use for your pull quotes and more!

Last but not least, let's cover…

#3 Videos

We pretty much saved the best for last. Why is it the best, you ask?

Because 4x as many consumers would rather watch a video about a product than have to read about it. Yes, we have become a community of skimmers and slackers. This is why video content, like this post from Sir Richard Branson, works so well:

Having understood the effectiveness and potential of video content, Instagram now allows its users to use the 1-minute per video option. If you're wondering how to get more Instagram followers, you should be actively using the video feature. Here are some key tips to doing this well:

  • Avoid being too commercial and keep it personal. Videos are the best way to really connect with your followers, and posting too many ads and salesy content could ruin that feeling for your followers. Show a snippet of what is coming and get them excited!
  • Use hashtags! This is the most effective way to entice users that are outside of your follower base. Experiment with popular hashtags that describe your content in a nutshell.
  • Use the "swipe option"!! Posting a link through Instagram stories gets publishers 15-20% more clicks. It's never been more simple, guys, Instagram is helping you out. Create personal posts through stories and make sure to include a "swipe" option that transfers the user to the blog post itself.

This is a great time to jump on the video marketing bandwagon and use the video content tools brought to you by Instagram. KPCB reports that 74% of internet traffic will be video content this year!

Let's wrap it up

We probably lost you at "700 million monthly users". Here's what you really need to remember:

  • Pull quotes are a great way to grab the attention of your followers quickly. Select a good photo, add a short but powerful quote to it, and attach a description with a short link in the comment section.
  • Infographics and data visualizations are powerful. Keep them simple, but make the reader want to know more.
  • Videos, videos, and more videos. Whether you are posting Instagram stories (regularly, no less) or videos on your page, make them personal and make sure to attach links to your blog posts.

If there's a 65% chance you'll remember these last points, our job here is done. Good luck!

Jonathan is the Content Crafter and Marketer for Foundr – place dedicated to empowering each and every entrepreneur out there with the best knowledge, tactics and actionable advice on the planet. Whether it’s finding out the latest productivity hacks, or figuring out the best startup business models, Jonathan is all about making sure that anyone that calls themselves an entrepreneur has a chance to continuously improve. You can check out more of his writing, and more about Foundr itself at: foundrmag.com

The post 3 Ways to Turn Blog Posts into Engaging Instagram Content appeared first on ProBlogger.

      

206: Personal Brands vs Business Brands for Blogs

Posted: 14 Aug 2017 02:00 AM PDT

Is There a Right Way to Brand Your Blog?

I'm just back from our Aussie Problogger training events where we ran masterminds with around 40 bloggers per city. In those days speakers spent time with small groups of attendees in round table discussions where attendees could ask us any question they liked.

One of the questions that I got asked repeatedly through both masterminds was around whether it is better to give a blog a personal brand or more of a business brand?

blog brand personal or businessIn one case the questioner was about to start a new blog and was wondering if they should set it up on a domain that was their own name or if they should choose a name that was nothing to do with them.

Another blogger asked what to do when they felt trapped on a blog with a personal domain – but they wanted to introduce other writers onto the blog.

Yet another blogger had the opposite issue – they had set up their blog on a domain and with a brand that was very niche specific but now felt trapped because they wanted to change their focus and evolve the blog beyond what the brand might allow.

I've been pondering these questions a lot since our event so wanted to explore it today in this episode.

There is right way to brand your blog – there are extremes where you can go one way or the other and also there are ways of doing both a personal brand and a business brand – and that's what we're going to explore today.

 

Examples Mentioned for Personal Brands vs Business Brands for Blogs

Personal Brands

Business Brands

Personal Business Brands

Doing Both Personal and Business

Join our Facebook group

Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view
Hello there. My name is Darren Rowse. I'm the blogger behind ProBlogger, a blog, a podcast, event, job boards, series of ebooks and other resources all designed to help you as a blogger to grow your audience, to produce great content and to make money from your blog. You can learn more about what we do at ProBlogger over at problogger.com.

I'm just back from our Australian ProBlogger event where we ran a couple of masterminds this time around for the first time ever. We did two masterminds, one in Brisbane and one in Melbourne and we have 40 bloggers who have come to each of those sessions.

As part of the day, we had some teaching from our speakers like Pat Flynn and James Schramko and Laney Galligan and then Kelly Exeter. We also spent time, as speakers, circulating through the tables, around tables, around the room. We, each, got to spend about 30 minutes being peppered with questions by these small tables. Something made me a little bit nervous because I'm not the fastest thinker but I love that.

What I found really interesting over the day was that I was asked some questions on almost every table that I went to. That may have been partly because people thought I could answer those questions but also, some of the questions were quite random. One of the questions that I got asked a lot over both cities, multiple times in each day, was around how to brand a blog in terms of whether it should be a personal brand or whether it should be more of a business brand. I'll get into some examples of both of those types of options later on today. It was a question that I got asked repeatedly in different ways.

One person asked, they were thinking about setting up a new blog, whether they should set it up on a domain that was their own name or whether they should choose a name or domain name that was nothing to do with them personally at all. That was a question I got asked a couple of times.

Another blogger was asking questions around how they felt trapped on a blog with their own personal domain. They'd set up a couple of years ago on their own name and now they wanted to introduce other writers unto their blog, they were questioning, "How do I do that?" I feel like it has to just be me. My readers, every time I introduce another voice, push back. They're wrestling with it in hindsight wondering what they should have done and wondering about how they should transition that brand.

Another blogger had almost the opposite issue, they'd set up their blog on a domain that was more of a business brand. It was very niche specific. Now they felt trapped on that domain because they wanted to change their focus, they felt that they had personally evolved in what they believed, some of their values and their interests. They wanted to pivot their blog but now they felt trapped on this other domain that was not personal, it was a business brand. They wonder whether they should go to a personal domain.

We got the same question from different angles and I've been pondering these questions ever since. Because I heard that same question over and over again, I wanted to do a little more thinking about it both for those people so that they could have some further thinking on it but also because I know many others of you probably would be thinking the same thing.

There is no right way to brand your blog and there are extremes. You can personally brand it to the extreme, you could put your face all around it, you can call it your name or you can go the other extreme and not have your name on it at all and purely make it a business brand or a niche specific brand. They're the two main options but there are other options in between.

Episode 206 is an opportunity to explore some of the different options, to talk about the pros and cons and ask the question, "Which one is better for you?" That's what we're gonna do. I hope you find it valuable.

You can find today's show notes over at problogger.com/podcast/206. You'll also be able to find the link to where you can comment on that show notes to our Facebook group as well. Thanks for listening and let's get into some exploration of this topic, Personal Brands Versus Business Brands.

Personal brands or business brands, which one is better? That's the question I get asked a lot. Of course, there is no right answer to this particular question. The answer will depend upon you, your goals, your personality, and I guess ultimately, the way that you're gonna blog and the type of mediums that you want to use as well. All of these things can come into finding the right answer for you. Of course, as I hinted in the introduction, there are two extremes but there are plenty of other things between those two extremes that we could do as well and you can transition through that process as well.

To explore today's topic, I thought I'd be interesting to start off by looking at some of the pros and cons of each different approach. The pros and cons of a personal brand versus the pros and cons of a business brand and then we'll get into some of those other options between the extremes as well.

Let's start off by talking about personal brands. These are brands at the extreme where everything is about you. You would go to these blogs and you've seen them, they're usually on the person's domain, the domain is their name. It might be darrenrowse.com if I was to set one up and it would probably be a very personal blog in terms of my face on it, branding might be my head which I kinda do on Prologger as well. But ProBlogger, I would say, is somewhere between the two extremes. It's very personal.

There are some definite benefits of a personal brand, let me run through some of them. Firstly, it can bring some flexibility to what you offer. If you want to start out offering advice on bird photography and then your interests changed and then suddenly you wanna give parenting advice, a personal brand may be one way to do that. We, as human beings, evolve in what we're interested in, what we think, what we believe, and the way that we live our lives.

Having a more personal brand can offer you some flexibility in that as opposed to a brand like ProBlogger where you start talking about probloggerish type of things, blogging type advice. Most of the business brands don't give you that type of flexibilities. If you're the type of person who thinks that you've got lots of interests that you might wanna pivot in what you focus upon, a more personal brand might be one option for you.

Another benefit of a personal brand is that they are great if you have a goal of selling yourself in some ways. If you have the goal of becoming a speaker, a writer, an author selling books, an artist, a consultant, a coach, or some kind of freelancer, a personal brand could be one way to do that because people in each of those cases are buying you. If they come to your blog and they see you, they see the brand of you, that's gonna speed up the process of them making that leap to hiring you, to buying you in some capacity. That's not to say that you can't sell personal services on a more business related brand but I think it could speed up the process a little bit.

They're also great if you want to be seen as an expert or an authority or a thought leader in an industry, if you want people to see you personally as the authority, having it on your own domain, your own name domain and having your face there and branding it as you and your ideas is certainly going to help with that. Personal brands are certainly great if you personally want to be involved in serving your audience, in making personal connections with your readers and customers. They are great if you really enjoy that personal communication, if you want to use mediums that are very personal as well. Live video, podcasting, these are mediums that probably lend themselves to it, or they'll have a more personal aspect to them.

Again, it's not to say that you can't explore those mediums and you can't be personally engaging with your audience on a business brand but it certainly lends itself to that type of thing. I guess it builds the expectation that you, personally, are going to be the one who's going to be producing that content and you, personally, are the one who's going to be engaging with your readers. If you're the type of person who likes to get your hands dirty, you like to do the engaging, you are a very personal kind of person, then a more personal brand might work for you.

Personal brands are also great for helping your readers feel more connected to your brand. People do business with those that they know, like, and trust. My suspicion is that people are more likely to go through that process of know, like, trust if there's a human being on the other side rather than a logo. It's certainly possible to know, like, and trust a business but I think it probably is going to be sped up if it's a more personal brand, if you yourself are very present in your brand as well.

You can probably think of examples of brands that are not personal that you feel very invested into that you know, like, and trust. Apple is a brand that many people are raving fans of but even that, has over the years, used personality and people to help grow that brand as well. That's probably an example of a more gray area in some ways. If you want to build a blog that is about community, is about people feeling like they belong, then a personal brand might be one way to speed that process up.

Personal brands are also really great if you have lots of interests that you think might evolve over time as I mentioned early on today. If you look at someone like Gary Vaynerchuk, he started out using his Gary V social media accounts to talk about wine and today he talks about entrepreneurship. He's been able to pivot using that more personal brand. If he'd set himself up purely using the Wine Library TV, I think that's the brand, if he purely gone with that and that had been all his social media accounts, then that pivot would've been much harder. But right from day one, he used Gary Vaynerchuk and Gary V as his personal brand to promote his businesses, it enabled him to pivot in some ways as well.

They're some of the pros of using that more personal domain, that personal brand. On the flipside of that, there are some negatives of going that more personal brand route as well. For example, your brand, if you use darrenrowse.com, doesn't say anything about what you do. This can have an impact upon the early days of building your brand. People are going to take longer to start associating your name with the industry or topic or field of expertise that you're talking about.

If I started darrenrowse.com instead of problogger.com, it would've taken longer for people to arrive on darrenrowse.com and to work out, "Oh, he's talking about blogging." It wouldn't be immediately apparent to people that this is a site about blogging whereas if people arrive on ProBlogger, right from the first moment that they're there, they see the hints, they're seeing the name itself, this is about blogging. If you do have more of a niche that you're interested in, an industry that you wanna talk about, a personal brand can sometimes slow that down, the building of that brand.

It's not to say that you can't achieve becoming a thought leader in a particular topic using a personal brand but it may take longer. It can also have an impact upon your search engine optimization, certainly having keywords in your business name, in your domain, can help. It's harder for darrenrowse.com to rank for photography tips than Digital Photography School having that brand with photography in it. Photography school helped us to rank very highly for that particular term. I don't think I ever would've been able to rank as highly for photography school using darrenrowse.com. Again, another impact, another negative of going with that personal brand.

It's also potentially harder to sell your business down the track if you're a personal brand. If I set up darrenrowse.com instead of ProBlogger, I don't think I could've ever have sold that particular domain to people. I can think about a handful of examples of personal brands that have sold themselves down the track and you probably can think of some too but it's much harder to do that. If you have an exit strategy in mind, then perhaps you want to go more for a business brand.

It can also bring some challenges to have a personal brand to scale your business. It can be done but customers and readers will come to your site if it's a personal brand with the expectation that they want to connect with you, that they want to hear your thoughts, they want to have access to you. That can be a challenge. If you are on darrenrowse.com, people are gonna wanna show up expecting to hear from Darren Rowse. If you wanna bring in other authors, there can be some tension there, there can be some pushback from your readers around that as well.

If you want to scale what you do, if you wanna step back from what you do, either to sell or to allow others to take on aspects of that business, it can be a little bit tricky if you are stuck on a personal domain. You may be able to bring in team members to do aspects of your business but certainly with the content, with the community, with the engagement, people are going to expect you.

The last thing I would say as a negative of a personal brand is that it can bring a lot of scrutiny upon you, it puts you in the spotlight. You need to be on, you need to be able to respond to things that go wrong. If you mess up, you will be held personally accountable. If your business brand screws up, you, personally, are going to have less of the spotlight upon you and it enables your business to respond.

Some people really like being in the spotlight, some people really like being on all the time, that's just their personality, they're a charismatic kind of person. Other people, I met a few of these at our event last week, really don't want to be in the spotlight at all. It would be pretty obvious that they probably wouldn't wanna set up their domain that is their name. Many bloggers don't even like to use their real name on their site at all and like that anonymity. Again, there's another factor to consider, do you want to be in the spotlight, do you not wanna be in the spotlight? That will help you make that decision.

Let me give you a few examples of personal brands, particularly in this blogging online entrepreneurship space, the most obvious one to me is Seth Godin, sethgodin.com. Seth's site is all about Seth. He is known as an authority in marketing but his brand is all about him, it's his ideas, it's his books, it's his courses, it's his speaking. He has used sethgodin.com to launch some of the business brands that he has launched and he has launched a number of those over time. But essentially, if you go to his site, it's all about him and he's used it to build his authority in the marketing space. Seth is a great example.

Amy Porterfield, many of you know Amy Porterfield. She is on amyporterfield.com. If you go there, you'll see that she uses the tagline Amy Porterfield-Online Marketing Expert. She's a great example of someone who uses her name, her face, her personality, her voice with her podcast, her face in her live videos to build a business. She has evolved her focus over time, this is a really good example of someone who has changed, they have pivoted over time and have been able to do that because it's been a personal brand.

Amy started out very much focusing upon Facebook. She was the Facebook person, she would train you how to use Facebook. But over the last few years, she has really broadened what she has done to teach about webinars, email lists, courses, and much more. She has been able to evolve and has been able to evolve much more than if she registered the Facebook Expert. She would never been able to talk in this much depth about the things that she now talks about today. She's not hampered by the brand itself, she's got freedom to explore what she wants to teach.

She also uses personal mediums like podcasts, video, and events, live events to teach as well and it's a really highly engaged audience, people really respond to her. If you see her speaking at an event, you normally will see her speaking to a packed, highly engaged audience as well. I think that's because people really feel connected to Amy, that flows from that personal brand.

Similar to Amy would be Michael Hyatt, michaelhyatt.com. He's been able to use his personal brand very effectively over the years. He, too, has evolved his focus over time as trends changed and as his passions and interests changed, he has changed the focus of what he does on michaelhyatt.com and has been able to evolve the mediums he uses and the income streams he monetizes as well. I think just having that very flexible brand has enabled him to do lots of things over time.

Also, in both Amy, Seth, and Michael's cases, these highly engaged audiences, they come to the site to connect with those people rather than because they're just talking about a topic. There's some real advantages, I think, you can see them in those examples of having that more personal brand. But it does take a certain type of person. Again, you need to be comfortable being in the spotlight and you need to be comfortable using some of these more personal mediums and putting yourself out there. Although interestingly, Seth doesn't put himself out there a lot in terms of engaging in comments or social media. You don't have to take that route as well.

Personal brands, they are some of the pros and cons. That's one extreme. On the other end, we've got business brands. In business brands, there's a definite pros and cons as well. You might be thinking, "I've gotta do a personal brand." Wait, there's a few things that you need to consider for personal brands as well. A business brand can be much easier to scale. Again, you can scale personal brands, Amy has done it, she's got a team working with her now.

Michael's done it, he's got a team working there but those brands really do rely upon Amy and Michael and Seth. If went away, if they wanna take a year off, it's gonna be tougher for them to continue. It also does bring some tension around scaling, there is an expectation with the personal brand that you show up all the time. In the business, there is an expectation that a business is run by more than one person.

One of the advantages of having a brand that is not personal is that people probably are going to be expecting that there's gonna be different voices and different team members who are prominent within that brand. There's less of an expectation that you have to do everything. This means that you can build a true business that doesn't rely upon you, it can be built upon the team, the systems, and I guess the products that you have as well.

The best example I can give you of this is Digital Photography School. I started out Digital Photography School by doing everything, I did it all but I didn't promote the fact that I was doing it all. I used my name in the posts that I was writing but that's about all, there was no photo, there was no expectation that it was about me. It enabled me to add authors, it enabled me to an editor, it enabled me to use community managers, it enabled me to get setup a customer service person. There is no expectation amongst our readers that I show up on that blog at all.

There are periods, depending upon where we're at with our team, where I do almost nothing on that site. It is run, many times, many weeks without me at all, occasionally adding in my advice or my ideas but that's all. If you want to scale and step away from your business in some way then a business brand is definitely one way to go.

They're also much easy to sell. This is not something I've had personal experience with because I've never sold any of my businesses or any of my blogs to this point. If you wanna make me an offer, feel free. Down the track, I think, Digital Photography School is a great example of a business that I could sell because it's not reliant upon me at all.

On the flipside, if I setup darrenrowse.com, it would've been impossible for me to sell that down the track, very few exceptions to that. If you do want to extract yourself from your business down the track, you want to set it up so that other people can run it for you or you wanna sell it, then definitely, a business brand is a better way to go.

A business brand can also tell your customers, potential readers what your business is about and who it serves very well. Digital Photography School, ProBlogger, they immediately communicate something to those who show up or to those who even hear about it in conversation, it immediately becomes apparent. Of course it has the advantage of helping with search engine optimization as well.

A business brand also takes some of the pressure off you in terms of the day to day running of the site as well, we've kind of touched on this already. But for me, on Digital Photography School in the early days or ProBlogger, it enabled me to take time off and there was less expectation that I had to show up as well. That certainly helps in sustainability of the business as well.

I've talked to a number of people who are on personal brands recently, one of the things that they do feel that is really tough for them is that when they wanna take an extended break, it's very apparent that they're not there on the site and they're not doing live videos. Having a business brand, you can have one of your team do the live videos, you can have one of your teams send the emails, you can have one of the team write the blog post. In terms of looking after yourself, it can take its toll on a personal brand unless you can spread that load on a business brand.

Some of the negatives of having more of a business brand, they may not be as flexible if your interests change, you may find it tough to pivot. This is one of the things that I heard from a number of people at our masterminds these year is that they had started out their brands too narrow. In one case the industry evolved and the niche that they had chosen was less relevant than it used to be. In another case they had evolved as a person, as a blogger, and they wanted to talk about other things and they were not able to do that because of their very narrow business brand choices that they had made in the early days.

Again, it may not be as flexible if you have a business brand. If my interests change and I don't wanna talk about blogging anymore but I wanna talk about Instagram or I wanna talk about live video, I can do that a little bit on ProBlogger but I couldn't pivot ProBlogger to be just a live video blog. Having something that is a little broader and less focused as a brand may be a better choice. That's one of the negatives of a business brand.

Another one is that business brands will generally need to work harder to get people to feel a personal connection with the business. This is the flipside of the advantage that I talked about earlier of a personal brand being one that people are much more ready and able to connect with.

When a reader comes to Digital Photography School for the first time, they don't immediately imagine that there's a person on the other side of that brand. People come to Digital Photography School and imagine that we've got a school somewhere. We get emails saying, "Where is your school? Where is the facility?" That is what they imagine, they don't imagine a person, a teacher. A more personal brand will speed that up.

Of course there's a gray area here, ProBlogger is a good example of one that sits in the middle. ProBlogger is a business brand, it signals that it's about blogging. Because it's the word ProBlogger, you imagine there's a pro blogger there as well. Because I brand it personally, it's got a bit of both, I'll talk a little bit more about that in the moment. But if you go to business brand, you may need to work a bit harder to personalize that brand in some way. It can definitely be done, you can show your team, you can show yourself or you can tell your stories, all of these things help to personalize that business brand but you might need to work a little bit harder.

Let me give you a few examples of business brand blogs. I've already mentioned Digital Photography School, my main site. I wrote a lot of that content in the early days but I was very careful not to personally brand it because I, from day one, knew that it was something that I wanted to extract myself from partly because I didn't see myself writing on that topic for the long term, I enjoy photography but it's not something that I could see as a lifelong thing that I wanna write about. It's not my vocation, it's not my calling by any means. I also knew that my expertise would take me to only to a certain point, I needed to get other people in to teach at a higher level. I, from the early days, worked really hard to keep my brand out of that, to keep my face out of it. It allowed me, as I said before, to really pull back, to set my team up and maybe, down the track, one day sell it.

Another example would be a blog called Nerd Fitness whose founder is Steve Kamb started quite some time ago. Steve, if you go and look at the site, you'll see that he is a big part of it. It's not a purely business branded blog but he's not the face of it. His face is on it, there's photos there with him on it, there's content that he has written but he has other authors. He has got a team of ten people working full time on his blog now, he runs events and the team is running the events. Steve has personally branded it to an extent but it's not reliant upon him. I can imagine that Nerd Fitness is the type of brand that he could get setup and running with a team down the track or that he could sell at some point.

There's plenty of other examples, blogs from my early days of blogging like Mashable, GoKa, TechCrunch and Gadget, Lifehacker, Gizmodo, even SEO Moz, Smashing Magazine, these all started in a more personal way than they are today. For example, Mashable was started by Pete Cashmore and he wrote a lot of the content in the early days. TechCrunch was started by a guy called Michael Arrington, SEO Moz was started by Rand Fishkin. But because they were not setup on their domains as their names, they were set up as sort of a business brands, they were able to grow, they were able to scale, they were able be setup as businesses with teams of people running them and writing them.

In each of those cases, they have enabled the founders to step back. In some cases, they've enabled the founders to sell the business. I think TechCrunch, Michael Arrington sold that. They've enabled the founders to step back out of the business in different ways like Rand with Moz, still involved in the business, still there adding content but now being run by other people as well. Some good examples there of more business brands as well.

The last one that I wanna talk about, last option that I wanna talk about is where you do a bit of both. I think most blogs probably fit more into the middle category. These two extremes, personal, all on domain, all personally branded, and then there's the business where the author really isn't there or the founder really isn't there at all like Digital Photography School. But between them, there are many personal business brands, that's what I would say.

Most bloggers I come across have a blog that is not called their name but where they are present and where their readers feel a connection to them. This is where most bloggers fit, this is how I would describe ProBlogger. It's got a name that is more about the topic of blogging than anything else. But if you land on ProBlogger, you'll see my face straight away, you'll see my name, you hear my voice, you see videos with me as well. It's very intentional from day one to be a better topic but also to include my story and to build a personal connection with me. This is a bit of both.

There are some pros and cons of this model as well. In some ways, on the positive side, it brings you some of the best of both worlds. It means that I can make that first impression with people, I can communicate what the site is about very quickly, it's got the personal connection but it also communicates what the site is about, it's good for SEO but it's also good for connection. I get a bit of both on that. Someone landing on my site sees very quickly what it's about but also hears my voice. Again, both of those things.

It's also enabled me to bring some other voices in. ProBlogger, there is an expectation that I am present. If I withdraw for too long from ProBloggers, readers say, "Where's Darren?" But it also enabled me to bring other voices unto the blog. We have many posts that are written by other people and there's no pushback on that as long as the quality of the content is good, that's fine. I've even given this podcast over for a few episodes, purely to other people. I introduce them, here's Kelly to talk about blog design. We had an episode on that. It enabled me to bring in other voices without that tension. If I was on darrenrowse.com, I would have to work harder to introduce those voices. It could still be done but it is certainly easier on that more personal business brand.

On the negative side, though, it does sometimes feel like I'm a bit trapped in terms of topics. I can, from time to time on ProBlogger, talk about other topics of interest. I've talked about broader topics of entrepreneurship, I have done a podcast on luck, I've done a podcast on health, but I've always had to work hard to tie those things back into blogging. If I go off topic for too long, my readers would push back. I can't go too far off topic for too long.

I think the advantage is that I can go a little off topic because my readers forgive me if I go off and explore a topic of passion. If I had a purely business blog, it's harder to go off topic. Again, it's a bit of an advantage but it does sometimes mean I feel a little bit trapped by having ProBlogger. There is some tension there in terms of bringing other authors on as well. Whilst I can bring some other voices on, if I bring too many other voices on, there's a pushback. It's a fine line to walk, it's an advantage but also a disadvantage.

Sometimes I wish I started ProBlogger not personally branded at all. There's other blogging tip sites out there that are not personally branded and I look at them sometimes and I go, "I wish I could do that because I wouldn't need to be there, I could take six months off." That's a negative, I've personally branded to some extent. It's a fine line that I try to walk.

It also means that I, on Problogger, need to be part of everything that I do. I couldn't get a team member to this podcast 100% of the time, I couldn't stop writing on the site 100% of the time, I couldn't not show up at my events, I couldn't let someone really moderate all my comments and do all my social media, I need to be there at least to some extent. Again, you can see that there's some advantages of this middle ground but still there's some tension, there is no perfect model here.

Some other examples of people who I think have done a good job of building a business brand that is personal, the most obvious one to me is Pat Flynn, I just spent two weeks with Pat at our event Smart Passive Income. It's setup as a topic, you look at Smart Passive Income and you think, "I know what that's about." But then you go to that site and you'll see Pat Flynn all over. You hear his voice, you see his videos.

Another good example from a recent podcast is Nikki Parkinson from Styling You, Aussie blogger, fashion blogger. Styling you, it's very much a business brand but again you see Nikki all through that site. It kinda spans both of those options.

I don't want people to come away from this podcast thinking I have to have purely a personal brand or I have to have purely a business brand. There is some gray are in between.

The last theory that I wanna talk about is where you do both, where you actually, actively build a business brand but you actively also build your personal brand, you do both. You use that personal brand to build the business brand. This might sound like it's double the work, in some ways it can be, you might need to get your personal social media accounts and maintain your business ones as well, that can add to the work. It can also add a bit of confusion from your readers on where should I be following this person.

A few good examples of people who do this, Chris Ducker would be one. Many of you will be familiar with Chris Ducker, he's on chrisducker.com. If you go and look at his site, you'll see that he's all over it, it's very personal, his face is there, his videos are there but he uses it to promote his businesses that he started over the years. His businesses have changed, his topics of interest have changed. He has had a couple of different types of events, Tropical Think Tank, In Days Gone By, and now he's got Youpreneur which is an online community for people who wanna have a personal brand but he's also doing events with that.

It's allowed him over time to evolve what he is known for. In the early days he was known very much for giving advice on outsourcing, on virtual assistants. These days he is more known for talking about personal branding. By having chrisducker.com, he's able to change his focus and they launched different businesses offered back of that. In some ways, it's similar to the way Seth Godin has done it. Seth has set up this personal brand but he used it to launch different businesses over time.

Another good example of this would be Gary Vaynerchuk who has used his personal profile brilliantly. He's got a personal blog and he uses it to launch his businesses. In the early days, he used his personal profile to launch his wine business or build his wine business. More recently, he uses it to promote VaynerMedia which he has as well.

Richard Branson would be another example, very high profile example. He does do some blogging, he uses Richard Branson to promote Virgin. He's actually building both of those brands simultaneously, or his team is.

Syed Balkhi is another good example. Syed speaks at events regularly. He's building his personal profile as he speaks but he's using that personal profile to promote his businesses. He owns WPBeginner, a WordPress site, OptinMonster, a tool for bloggers to collect email addresses. He uses that personal brand to build his businesses.

Lastly, Neil Patel is another person who does this very well. He writes prolifically, he has got his own blog on neilpatel.com but he uses his personal profile to build the businesses that he owns. Crazy Egg, KISSmetrics and other businesses as well.

You can do that as well, you could have a personal business brand like Nikki Parkinson or Pat Flynn or you could have both. You could build that personal brand, be in the spotlight but use that spotlight, use that profile to build the different businesses that you have. That's particularly useful if you do think that you're going to evolve your interests. If you're that type of person, a little bit like me who does have lots of different passions that you think over time, your interests are gonna change, that might be one good way to go.

Just to wrap it up, a few things to consider. Firstly, are you comfortable being in the spotlight? Are you comfortable being the face of your business through the good times where you'll get praised and through the tough times where you'll get critiqued, or do you prefer anonymity and being behind the scenes? That's probably the first question you wanna ask. Are you comfortable being a personal brand? If you can't answer that in the affirmative, don't set yourself up as a personal brand.

Do you wanna be locked into the day to day running of your business long term or do you see yourself stepping back out of it to allow it to run itself or to sell it down the track? Another good question to ask, in the early days of your blog, if you don't see yourself for the next 20 or 30 years being hands on in that business, you probably wanna choose more of a business brand rather than a personal one, particularly if you wanna sell it down the track.

Do you enjoy getting involved in the nitty, gritty of engaging with readers and being involved with meeting them and building community? Do you wanna be the person who's gonna create all of the content? If not, you will probably wanna bring some element of a business brand in it as well because it will enable you to step back a little bit but also introduce other voices as well.

Another question, are you the type of person who has lots of interests and might wanna evolve your business over time? Again, that was a hint to you that you maybe you want more of a personal brand or at least building that simultaneously as you build your business as well.

Last question is what kind of a business model do you wanna grow? Is it based around services that you yourself will offer? Freelancing, speaking, writing, particularly speaking and writing, you can't really outsource those things easily. If your business model is built around you selling yourself, again, it could be an advantage to have more of a personal brand. Or is the business model that you've got, will it need to scale? Maybe your goal is to run events but not show up at those events, maybe you wanna have events running around the world, in lots of different places. That kind of business model is gonna give you a hint that you probably need more of a business brand.

These are some of the questions, I'm gonna summarize those five or six questions for you on today's show notes. I would love to hear a little bit about your brand. If you're an established blogger, what have you done? Have you got a personal brand? Do you have a business brand, or do you do both or have a personal business brand? They're the four options that I talked about today.

Tell us what you've done over on the show notes at problogger.com/podcast/206 or head over into the Facebook group and tell us a little bit about your brand there as well. We'll have a discussion setup for you where you can do that. The Facebook group is at problogger.com/group. Love to hear what you've done. I'll learn from you and hear about some of the frustrations of the choices that you made, some of the advantages of the decisions you've made as well.

Thanks for listening today, I look forward to chatting with you next week in episode 207 of the ProBlogger podcast.

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What you Missed Last Week at ProBlogger Evolve

Posted: 10 Aug 2017 07:00 AM PDT

Opening keynote at this year’s ProBlogger Evolve event. Photo credit Grace Henley Photography.

ProBlogger training events have been something I’ve been running for bloggers here in Australia (and the region) since 2010.

They started that first year with a hastily arranged event (in just a few weeks) for 120 bloggers who crammed themselves into a little suburban hotel here in Melbourne. The day was simple – 5 sessions that walked attendees through the four main pillars of profitable blogging – content, traffic, building engagement and making money.

The first event was so well received that I immediately began planning the next one.

Every year since 2010 we’ve run an annual event and have evolved the event. We went from a 1 day event to 2 days (and then later added on some half day workshops), from 1 stream of content to 5 running simultaneously, from no sponsors to many, from 120 attendees to over 750 and from 5 speakers to over 40.

Things changed over the years – a lot.

Every event was ‘the best event yet’ but every year our events became more and more work to run, more overwhelming for new attendees and in the last couple of years a little less focused as we tried to cover more and more topics and meet everyone’s needs.

Last year’s ‘best event yet’ was great – but I came away from it knowing something needed to change.

ProBlogger Event – Our Pivot and Evolution

Despite our attendees rating the event extraordinarily high in their surveys I knew we needed to shake things up in 2017 and my amazing team and I began to dream of a new kind of event.

Interview with Pat Flynn at this year’s event in Brisbane. Photo credit Grace Henley Photography.

Our goal was to return to some of our roots by putting on an event that was simpler to organise, and that went back to our core topic of building profitable blogs.

We wanted to step away from running a sponsored event to enable us to get back our focus upon serving attendees.

We wanted to get back to the four pillars that we’ve built so much of ProBlogger around – content, traffic, engagement and monetization.

We wanted to strip back some of the parties and razzle dazzle (as fun as they were) and get back to solid training.

We wanted to provide those who are at a higher level and who wanted more personal attention, with the opportunity to mastermind.

We wanted to bring some of that intimacy to the event – to take away the overwhelm, to let our attendees be less worried about missing out on choosing the right session and to be able to sit with a single stream of quality content and to get to know bloggers around them.

We wanted to attempt to make the event more accessible to those unable to travel by running the event in more than one location and over a weekend rather than mid week.

Recap of our ProBlogger Evolve Events Last Week

Jadah Sellner shares advice on how to monetise a blog through building community. Photo credit Grace Henley Photography.

Over the last two weekends we ran our new event – twice (first in Brisbane and then in Melbourne). We called it Evolve – partly because it was an event that had evolved but more so because we want to challenge and equip our attendees to evolve what they do with their online activities.

The events were both the same format and structure. Day 1 was a larger gathering (around 170 bloggers) all in a single room for the day to hear 6 speakers – largely structured around our 4 pillars.

Our speaker and organising team (from left to right) Pat Flynn, Shayne Tilley, Kelly Exeter, Grove Galligan, Laney Galligan, James Schramko, Jadah Sellner and Darren Rowse. Photo credit Grace Henley Photography.

  • I kicked the day off with a talk about the importance of evolving and suggesting some areas to consider evolving what bloggers do.
  • I then interviewed Pat Flynn about his own journey of evolving what he did.
  • Kelly Exeter share some tips on monetising through content.
  • Jadah Sellner spoke on the topic of monetising through building engagement.
  • Laney Galligan shared tips on traffic and how it monetises differently depending upon it’s source, intent etc (including a great case study interview).
  • James Schramko spoke on the art of how to selling without coming across like a jerk.
  • Pat Flynn finished the day off by talking about validating ideas.

The simpler format for the day flowed really nicely and the smaller numbers meant we were able to seat people around tables which opened upon opportunity for a little workshopping and discussion which had a nice feel to it.

Pat Flynn shares a ‘playbook’ session with the Brisbane Mastermind group on his editorial planning process. Photo credit Grace Henley Photography.

Day 2 was smaller – 40 attendees in both cities and very much focused upon masterminding and workshopping with our speakers from day 1 and other attendees. Pat, Jadah, James and Shayne Tilley also did some short practical/tactical playbook teaching sessions.

While there’s always things you can do to improve, I’m very satisfied to this new format of event and the response from attendees was incredibly encouraging too.

The response particularly from mastermind attendees was amazing. At both events we’ve seen attendees come away with plans and even taking action on those plans before our team got back home. Two attendees in Brisbane had designed a course and launched it within a week – making over $18,000 in that first week!

Other attendees got clarity around pivots in their businesses, how to scale their teams or knowing what new monetization strategies to try next.

While I was slightly nervous about the mastermind format (as I’ve not done one before) I’m convinced now that we need to do more of these smaller masterminds going forward and now just need to work out what doing that will look (stay tuned).

Laney Galligan shares tips on monetising with different traffic streams. Photo credit Grace Henley Photography.

Are you interested in future ProBlogger Events?

While our events were on I received a lot of messages via social media asking when we’re doing our next events.

If you’re in the US (or able to get there) I am co-hosting a similar event in Dallas. It’s a collaboration with online friends and we’re calling it Success Incubator. It’ll be slightly different to our Aussie events but will have some similarities. For starters both Pat Flynn and myself will be speaking but we’re also building some masterminding/workshopping style sessions in to day 2 for everyone.

There’s more details of the event, speakers, agenda on our Dallas event here (but don’t wait too long as tickets are limited).

If you’re interested in our Aussie events next year – sign up to get notified where and when our next events will be in the form below.

I LOVE our ProBlogger events so much. It sure is something special when our community gets together in person – so I hope you might join us at an event in the future!

(Special thanks to Grace Henley of Grace Henley Photography for our Brisbane event photography)

The post What you Missed Last Week at ProBlogger Evolve appeared first on ProBlogger.

      

3 Ways to Make More Affiliate Income as Bloggers

Posted: 08 Aug 2017 07:00 AM PDT

3-ways-more-affiliate-income

This is a post by ProBlogger expert Jerry Low.

Promoting affiliate products is still one of the most effective ways to make money from your blog.

Jayson DeMers points to affiliate marketing as an excellent entry-level place to begin monetizing your blog in this Forbes article, because it is easy to implement and free to start up (just taking a bit of your time).

One of the great things about affiliate income is that it works well with a blog with either high or low traffic. The key is promoting your blog and the products to the right audience – people who need the products you are promoting. With the right marketing tactics, you can make money from affiliate products.

Even better, choose a trusted affiliate program that you already know and love.

If you promote it properly, you'll find that you can create a long-term source of residual income.

This article will focus on how to make more money blogging via affiliate marketing.

1. Pick the right niche and products to promote

There are two key elements to making good money from affiliate marketing.

First, you have to find a profitable niche. Second, you have to promote the right product.

To accomplish this requires time and research before you jump into the affiliate game. Don't worry, if you are already promoting affiliate products, I will help you refine what you're already doing.

How to find a profitable niche?

Finding a profitable niche requires a bit of research.

Here are some tools that will come in handy:

1- SpyFu

Use SpyFu to check advertisers’ spending on a niche that you wish to tackle. If advertisers or merchants are spending big money on that industry, it means there is money to be made.

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For example, advertisers are paying $5.60/click and almost $70,000 per month on the search term "payroll software".

2- Google Search

Do a Google universe search (search at .com, add &pws=0 and &gl=us at the end of your search strings) on the niche you are interested in. View the search results carefully. Are there any advertisers in the mix?

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3- CJ.com

Login to CJ.com and search for relevant merchants. Use "Network Earnings" (the green bar) as a potential earning indicator. The higher the green bar, the more merchants are paying affiliates.

4- Impact Radius

Login to Impact Radius. Check the "30 days EPC" (affiliate earnings per hundred clicks) for relevant merchants in your niche.

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Example of merchant listing at Impact Radius.

5- Use Common Sense

What do people buy online? What kind of information do people search for online? Are there any information gaps you can fill and monetize?

Once you've chosen a niche area, it is time to move on to the actual products you'll promote.

How to find the right products?

Once you've decided on your niche, it's time to find the right products to promote within that niche. There are some specific steps you can take that will help you narrow down your choices.

Method #1- Study others

The first step is to look at what other bloggers are promoting.

There are two messages behind this: one, the product is good; and two, there is money to be made with that product.

The next thing to do is to study and try that product out and find a unique angle to "soft-sell" (more about this later) it.

Method #2 – Soft products

Generally speaking, digital products and services are usually easier to sell.

Think digital downloads (i.e. eBooks, mobile applications, movies), online training courses, professional services (i.e. designers, marketing services, accounting or legal advice), e-commerce platforms, and web tools (site builders, lead generation services, email service providers, etc.).

Method #3 – Products/services that are already in demand

Find a product that already has an existing demand.

Use SEM Rush to see if people are searching for more info about the products. Tip: We often use 'review' or 'compare' in our searches when we want to buy something. Check search volume for those search phrases when you wish to find out if there's sufficient demand.

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SEM Rush example 1 – Low search volume for the search term “Bit Defender Review.”

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SEM Rush example 2 – Higher demand (search volume) for MacPaw Clean My Mac software”

Method #4 – Promote products you already know and love

This is probably the most common way bloggers get started with affiliate marketing. You become an affiliate for something that you've used yourself, had a good experience with, thoroughly tested and feel good recommending. You should be fairly confident that others will get the same results you did (or better), as long as they do the work.

2. Be unique and irreplaceable

With affiliate marketing, it is vital that you "soft sell".

This allows you to influence and drive users to buy what you are promoting. Basically, the soft sell proves to the consumer that the product is what she needs to solve a problem.

The Blogosphere is a crowded space these days. There are over 1 million blog posts written every day on the Internet. That is a lot of noise to sift through. It is easy to get lost in the massive information dump that occurs every minute of every day.

Soft-selling: #1 overlooked online marketing skill

With soft-selling, the key is to be subtle about the fact that you’re selling, yet to think through ways to persuade the site visitor.

So, your main focus is going to be on developing a relationship with your readers and building trust. Once they trust you, you can sell them a product or service you believe in.

The key, however, is to make sure you truly do believe in, or better, love the product. The last thing you want to do is recommend something that isn’t high quality. That will cause you to harm the relationship you have with your readers and they will no longer trust you if you’re just trying to turn a fast buck.

Even though affiliate marketing is lucrative, it is also quite competitive with the numerous blogs on almost any topic you can imagine. The best digital marketers are in the game because the money is good. To stand out from those mega name players, who are pretty hard to compete with, you have to differentiate yourself.

How?

Method #1. Become an expert

Develop yourself and become an expert in your industry.

Stand out as a leader and help others prosper.

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One example of a blogger who has become a known name in the blogging industry is none other than the owner of this blog – Darren Rowse. He developed his name as a blogging expert by helping hundreds of thousands of bloggers via his blogging guide and training events. In 2002, Darren read an article about “blogging.” By the next day, he’d started a blog of his own. His blogs grew from a hobby he enjoyed to part-time income to full-time income.

Write definitive and knowledgeable content on the related topic. Include basic info as well as unique info no one else is talking about. Or look at it in a unique, new way.

Grow your presence on social media networks. Interact with influencers in your industry. Post regularly. Interact with others. Remember that social media is a give and take environment.

Guest post on sites where your readers can be found. It won't do you much good to post on a crochet and knitting site if your niche is personal finance. Seek out related blogs where your target audience is likely to hang out.

Attend conferences and speak at them as a specialist in your area. Network with other influencers at these events. It's amazing what you can learn over a cup of coffee. Most successful bloggers are happy to share tips to help you succeed as well.

Method #2. Provide unique information that users can't get elsewhere

Let's revisit the idea of providing unique information that no one else has covered before.

For example, I went undercover and tried out dozens of hosting companies' live chat support systems. The results were quite enlightening and I've not seen anyone else cover this particular topic or go this in depth on an undercover review.

My readers now know which hosting companies are most likely to provide instant live chat support when they need it.

What can you cover that no one else in the industry has covered?

Tactic #1 Look at what topics your competitors have covered

What is missing? What isn't covered deeply enough? Is there another way to look at the topic? For example, if you search the phrase "how to improve your golf swing," some of the top results that pop up include an article titled "5 Beautifully Basic Golf Swing Tips Every Player Should Know,” but directly under that result is “Top 10 Golf Swing Tips.”

As a reader, which would you rather have – 5 tips or 10? You certainly don't have to cover the same topic, but this is just an example of how you can expand on what others are doing.

Tactic #2 Use tools such as brainstorming to come up with unique ideas

The simplest way to brainstorm is to write a single word in the center of a paper in a bubble and then begin drawing lines and words as they come to mind.

Don't stop to think, but let the thoughts and the words flow freely. Do this for about 10 minutes and then study the paper. What words are unique? How do they tie into your niche? Which ones can be turned into an article that hasn't been covered before?

Tip: Also try these 180 blog post ideas by Darren Rowse.

Tactic #3 Tie your personality into your blog posts.

Do you absolutely love to watch Star Wars movies? What about an article on how being disciplined in your golf game is like learning to be a Jedi? Just make sure that it is something most of your readers can relate to and that you tie it back into your niche.

3. Focus on winners

Would you like to instantly make more affiliate income from an existing blog? The trick is to spot your winners, in various aspects, and double down on them. This strategy works in various aspects in businesses and has helped us improve our blog tremendously well.

Spotting the winners in various aspects

To spot your winners, you first need to track your blog and affiliate stats closely.

In the past, advertisers threw out a bunch of radio, television, magazine and newspaper ads and hoped something would resonate with potential customers.

We all knew the expansion of the Internet has changed all that.

As an affiliate marketer, all of your advertising will naturally occur online. The difference is that you have many tools at your disposal today to figure out which advertising is successful and what just isn't working.

Pay careful attention to:

  • Traffic source: You can find this information from Google Analytics or the control panel of your website.
  • Performing search keywords: Google Analytics can help you with this type of information and tell you which pages are performing best.
  • Advertising statistics. If you take out an ad on Facebook, you'll gain the ability to check statistics on the back end. You can not only target your ad to a very specific audience, but you can also look and learn more about the people that shared your post, liked your post, or somehow engaged.

Affiliate winners

Which of your affiliate products are selling the most?

Which ones are the "winners" in the affiliate marketing game for your particular site?

Focus on who's paying you the most money.

Find out why that product is selling so much better than others.

Now, build content around that product. For example, build a video tutorial on how to use the product, write a detailed FAQ on the product, and explain the problem users deal with and how the product can solve that problem, etc.

Content winners

In addition to looking at the affiliate products that are winning, you'll want to focus on the blog content that is winning.

Use Google Analytics to figure out which of your blog posts is getting the most traction.

Which one is getting traffic, but also has a decent bounce rate? Which pages are people actually staying on for a while?

Find the blog posts that are already performing well for you and ask yourself these questions:

  • Why are your readers spending more time on that post?
  • Is there a problem you solve in that post?

Now, can you spot a gap and recommend a product that suits your readers' needs from that post?

Winners in traffic

Figuring out where your traffic is coming from can help you increase efforts that make sense.

Traffic source

Do you know where your blog traffic is coming from? Is there a traffic referrer that is sending lots of traffic to your blog?

Once you know where the traffic is coming from, you can increase that traffic in a number of ways.

Say blogger X is sending you the most traffic last month – Invite him/her to guest post on your site. Trade links to his blog so his/her users can find your blog easily. You can even take out a banner ad on his blog to encourage even more click throughs.

Traffic that converts

Did you set goals in Google Analytics?

You can track more than just successful transaction or newsletter signup with goals. For example, if you have written a product review page that converts well – your goal can be driving your readers to read that particular review.

Once you have set the right goal – it's time to look for traffic source that converts the best. To see this, login to Google Analytics Dashboard > Acquisition > All Traffic > Source / Medium. Find out which traffic source is converting the best – find ways to get more traffic from that source. For example, if Facebook is performing best – spend money and advertise on Facebook. If you are getting hits from Google, take out a few ads on Google, etc.

more%20affiliate%20income/winningtraffic.jpg

To investigate your blog traffic, login to Google Analytics Dashboard > Acquisition > All Traffic > Source / Medium. In this example, traffic organic search and Facebook mobile are converting exceptionally well – logic sense tells us that we should work harder and invest more in these sources.”

In Summary…

Affiliate income as a blogger is just one piece of a larger puzzle, but it is the quickest way to start building an income and helping your blog pay for itself.

Once you gain the skills needed to attract a larger audience and also a targeted audience, you will be able to grow your income exponentially.

The post 3 Ways to Make More Affiliate Income as Bloggers appeared first on ProBlogger.

      

205: 5 Obstacles Bloggers Face (And How to Get Over Them)

Posted: 07 Aug 2017 02:10 AM PDT

How to Overcome 5 Blogger Obstacles

As I record this, I'm just home from our first ProBlogger event of the year in Brisbane and am preparing for our next one in the coming days in Melbourne.

The Brisbane event was really worthwhile. We heard from Pat Flynn, Jadah Sellner, James Schramko, Kelly Exeter, Shayne Tilley and Laney Galligan and had a couple of days of great teaching and inspiration – including a day with a small group masterminding their businesses.

overcome-5-blogger-obstacles

Each year at our events, I open the event with a keynote. This year I spoke about evolving your blog rather than getting into a 'revolving' pattern (or going in circles). I will share more on that topic on the podcast in the future but as we're very much focused this week on our events and serving our attendees I wanted to give you another taste of what we do at our events and share with you the opening keynote from a previous year as this week's episode.

I did this in the last episode too and got a lot of positive feedback and hope you'll enjoy this one too. It's from 4 years ago but I think it's spot on in terms of a message for today too.

The bloggers interviewed on stage:

Further Listening and Reading on 5 Obstacles Bloggers Face (And How to Get Over Them)

Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view
Darren: Hey there, my name is Darren Rowse. I'm the blogger behind ProBlogger.com, a blog, podcast, some events, a job board, and a series of ebooks, all designed to help you as a blogger to grow your blog, to start it up, get content on it, build community with your audience and to make some money from it as well.

You can learn more about all we do at ProBlogger over at problogger.com. As I record this episode, episode 205, I'm just home from our first ProBlogger event of 2017. This year was in Brisbane, just in the last weekend. We're getting ready for our next one, experimenting this year with two in two weeks. The second one will be in Melbourne. By the time this episode goes live, we will have that one as well.

Our Brisbane event was really worthwhile. I'm so excited about what we did this year. We heard from Pat Flynn, Jadah Sellner, James Schramko, Kelly Exeter, Shayne Tilley, Laney Galligan, and had a couple of really great days of teaching and inspiration, including a day with a small mastermind group. Really working through 40 or so blogger's businesses.

Each year, at our events, I open the event with a keynote. This year, 2017's event, I spoke about evolving your blog rather than getting into a revolving pattern. I guess the catch was to evolve, not revolve, because many times, we go in circles. I'm going to share more about that topic on this podcast in the future, another reason to subscribe if you haven't already.

As we're very much focused upon our real life events this particular week and serving our attendees who come along to that, this week in the episode in the podcast, I want to give you another taste of what we do at our events and share with you another opening keynote from a previous year, as this week's episode. Now, I did this last week as well. If you haven't listened to that back in episode 204, got a lot of positive feedback in the last few days about that one and so I hope you enjoy this one as well.

The one I'm about to play for you is from four years ago, 2013, but I think it's spot on in terms of message for today. It's one of the more evergreen ones that I've ever done. But, this one's a little bit different. It's different in two ways. Firstly, in this keynote, I went to a place I normally don't go to in an opening talk. Normally, for an opening talk, you do something really positive, very constructive. In this one, I share some deeper stuff. I talked about some things that I knew going in could touch a nerve with some bloggers.

I was a little bit nervous about it, to be honest, because it goes to the heart of some things that I know many of us, and I'm talking about myself here, feel that holds us back in our blogging. I actually share in this episode five obstacles or roadblocks that bloggers face and then give some tips on how to overcome those hurdles, those challenges. In this particular keynote, I talk about feeling like you don't have enough time to blog, we talked about feeling like you don't have the skills that it takes, maybe you're not technical enough.

In this one, we talked about fear. We talked about building something that's sustainable or feeling like you're not building something profitable and lastly, I talked about that trap that many of us fall into, the comparison game, where we look at what others are doing and compare ourselves to others.

This might all sound a little bit negative, but the result of this talk was pretty remarkable. This event was one of the most powerful ones that I've ever been to, all that I've held. People at this event, including our speakers and attendees, shared vulnerabilities and really went deep. As a result, we saw some really great results in the months afterwards.

The second thing that's a bit different about this talk is that you're not just going to hear my voice, we actually hear the voices of myself but also five other bloggers, five of our speakers in fact. Three of them, our international speakers, we had Amy Porterfield this year and you'll hear from her in a moment. You'll hear from Trey Ratcliff from Stuck In Customs, Tsh Oxenreider, and then two Aussie bloggers, Brooke McAlary, who you heard in previous on this podcast, and Phoebe Montague, a fashion blogger from Melbourne as well.

You're going to hear me talk and then each of these are going to chime in as well, as I invite them onto the stage. If you want to follow along with the slides that I share for this talk, and I just summarized some of the points that I make in these slides, I'm uploading them to this week's show notes. You can check them out over at problogger.com/podcast/205. I'll also, on the show notes, link to some further listening and reading for you as well. We'll link to each of the five bloggers that I interview because they're all doing really remarkable things and I think are well worth checking out. Without further ado, I'm going to get into this keynote. I hope you enjoy it. I'll wrap it up at the end to mention a couple of other things that you might like to go and listen to next.

This morning, I want to start by talking about the obstacles that we face as bloggers. It sounds like a bit of a downer to start off, thinking about the things that hold us back and the things that block our way. Thus, I reflected in the lead up to this event. I reflected on my own almost 11 years of blogging. Whilst there have been a lot of highs, there's also been a lot of bumps in the road for me over that time.

Quite often when I come to a conference like this, either as a speaker or as an attendee, I start thinking about what will I talk to people about. A lot of the time, I think of the positive things that I want to share and the successes that I've had and kind of gloss over those hard things. But I want this conference this year to be a place where we talk about the good stuff, but also the challenges that we face. I want this to be a conference this year where we talk about our vulnerabilities, our anxieties, and really, are honest with each other, both as speakers, but also as attendees.

I guess I want to model that a little bit this morning by talking about some of my obstacles over the years because I think a lot of them are things that I know others face as well. I want you to think about answering this question. What is your number one obstacle that you're facing at the moment as a blogger, whether you are 10 years into blogging, whether you're just starting blogging, whether you haven't even started a blog. Every year, we have pre bloggers come to ProBlogger as well. What obstacle are you facing at the moment as a blogger?

I want you to write it down. I want you to get your iPad out or your iPhone out, write in on your hand, wherever. I want you to write it down because I think by writing down these things, they become a little bit more crystallized in our mind. As you head into the next two days of teaching, I want this thing to be in the back of your mind. I want to inform the sessions you go to, the questions you ask speakers, the questions you ask fellow attendees, the conversations that you have.

Don't just talk about the good things that are happening, the highs, but also, talk about these challenges. Quickly, just in a word or two, write it down. What is this challenge that you're facing? What's blocking your way at the moment? What's holding you back at the moment? Just one thing would do. I know we've probably all got about 10, but what's the number one thing for you?

Now, you've written it down, I want you to jump out of your comfort zone a little and turn to someone next to you and tell them. If it's a highly personal thing, you don't have to share at all. You got one sentence to say it so you don't have to go into great detail. Just in one sentence, say what it is. Let the other person say what it is. You got one minute.

Please continue that conversation because it seemed important conversation. The way you're going to breakthrough those barriers, you've just done part of it. I think by verbalizing it, by writing it down, you're crystallizing it in your mind but you also may have just created an ally to help you to jump over that hurdle. I really encourage you to prolifically tell people about your problems at this conference. You have my permission to do that. That's the kind of conference I want. I want us to be smashing through these barriers. That's my aim for this conference.

What do you reckon the number one thing was that you just shared then? Anyone? Oh my gosh, time. I asked that question on our Facebook event page, if you haven't found it, we've got one, and on Twitter the other day. The number one thing that came back was time. It was expressed in a whole heap of different ways, I don't have enough time to blog. Life gets in the way. We all have other things and they're important things in our life, like children, partners, friends, jobs, studies, hobbies, volunteering, and all kinds of other stuff that compete for our time.

We have distractions. As bloggers, we live in perhaps one of the most prolific place for distractions. How many times have you sat at the computer to write a blog post and just followed a link and end up watching about funny cats on YouTube. We're just surrounded by them. Not only do we follow other people's links, we create our own and just make other people distracted. This is just distractions all around us.

There are opportunities too. I was talking to a blogger the other day and she said to me, "I get invited to seven events every week." Seven events every week so that's one a day on average. They're good things. They're opportunities. They're fun. Some of them could open up opportunities to earn an income. But if she went to them all, she'd have no time to actually blog. There are opportunities.

And then there are these demands that we put upon ourselves. And these expectations that we put upon ourselves. I have to post everyday. I have to tweet this many times. I have to be involved in these 42 social networks. There are all of these demands that we place upon ourselves as well, which crowd out our time.

I wish I had the answer for you on this front. I don't. This is one of my big struggles. From the very day I started blogging to today, it's been a juggling act for me. When I started blogging, I was working three part time jobs. I was working in an in flight catering kitchen, putting food on trays on a conveyor belt. That was one of my jobs. I was working in a warehouse. I was working in a church as a youth worker. I was also studying at the time as well.

So blogging for me was just something I did in between times. It was what I did in lunch breaks. I took a notebook everywhere. I was writing blog post ideas as I was putting orange juice on trays. It was somewhere feeding around the edges.

Within the first week of blogging, I thought to myself, "Wouldn't it be nice to have half a day a week or a morning a week just to dedicate to blogging?" I was lucky enough about a year later when my blog started to make a bit of money to get to the point where I could put half a day a week into blogging. At that point, I thought to myself, "I can't get it all done. I wish I could have two mornings a week."

Gradually, over time, as my blog grew in income, I was able to dedicate more and more time. One day a week, two days a week, three days a week. A couple of years later, I was working 40 hours a week on my blog. It's seems like an amazing luxury to have 40 hours a week but you know what, I couldn't get it all done. I started working 50 hours a week and started saying up till 2:00AM or 3:00AM and getting up early in the morning. I've got to a point where it started to impact my health. I could see it started to impact my friendships because the only friends I have were my readers. I saw that it could have potential to impact family and other important things to me.

I guess the first thing I want to say about time is that there will always be more that you can do. You just need to come to a point of making peace with that. You'll never get it all done. I'm sorry but you never will. There will always be another blog post you could write, another tweet you could do, another blog that you could read, another blogger that you could network with, another advertiser you could approach, another ebook that you could write, and the list goes on and on. I'm sorry if that depresses you but that's the reality. You just gotta make peace with the fact that there will be things that you can't do.

For me, changing that mind shift for me was probably the time I started to become more effective with my time, because I realized there was a limit of how much time I could put into blogging. I needed to be smart with the way that I used it. For me, probably knowing your goals is probably the thing that's helped me the most with my time management.

By having a goal, something that I'm aiming for with my blogging, suddenly I'm able to filter out the distractions, suddenly I'm able to judge whether the opportunities are worthwhile opportunities to take. Is this opportunity going to take me towards my goal or take me away from it? By knowing my goals, I suddenly become more time efficient. Still challenges of distractions but it helps.

The other part about goals for me is I've noticed that if a goal is a meaningful goal to me, if it is significant to me in some way, I'm much more likely to be efficient with my time in doing that. About eight years ago, I had 30 blogs. I was trying to post to them all everyday. Ridiculous. Stupid. This is when I was working 60, 70 hours a week. It was just dumb. 28 of those blogs, I had no passion for, whatsoever. They meant nothing to me. I just thought they might be profitable.

I told you last year about one of them, my printer blog. A blog about printers. I hate printers. I was writing a post everyday about it. I struggled to dedicate the time to that blog. Of course it died because it didn't matter to me. But ProBlogger is a blog that matters to me. It matters to me and thankfully, it matters to other people as well. Someone came up this morning and said ProBlogger helped them to grow an income for their family. Something that they never thought would happen. That means something to me. That's exciting to me. That motivates me to keep on keepin on with that blog. It makes me much more disciplined with that blog as well.

Choose goals that are meaningful to you and others and I think that helps you to become more dedicated with what you're doing. And then choose things that will move you towards those goals and spend 90% of your time doing those things. This is not rocket science but we need to hear it.

I was talking to a blogger recently and she told me that she just didn't have enough time to blog. I said, "How much time do you have to blog?" She said, "30 hours a week." I'm like, "That's a fair bit of time. What are you doing with that time?" She said, "I don't know. I'm doing stuff." I'm like, "What do you do with that time?" I set out a task of noting down everything she did for a week. She set up a grid and she filled in every block, she wrote down what she was doing. She's probably spent most of the week writing down what she was doing. But she got to the end of the week and I said, "Now, add it all up, the different activities, and work out what you're doing to your time." She was spending about 80% of her time on social media.

Then the question is is that taking you towards your goals or is it distracting you away from your goals? Social media, you could say it's helping you reach your goals but there comes a point where it actually takes you away from your goals. She was confronted by this and she completely redid the way she uses her time. Now, she spends about 10% of her time on social media and she spends 90% of her time writing blog posts and doing things to monetize her blog and building community on her blog. She's seen her blog take off by just changing the things that she's doing and making them things that take her towards her goals.

You noticed I said there's 10% left for you to become distracted. I actually think being distracted is a good thing. It lets your mind wind down and often, when I'm distracted, I get ideas as well. Let your mind have those moments to have fun and do those sorts of things. But this takes a bit of discipline as well.

Identify sticking points out there. I wrote a post on ProBlogger the other day, how over the last 11 years, I've had these different bouts of blogger's block. It's tough. I used to just call it blogger's block but I what I've realized is there are different types of blogger's block. For me, identifying exactly what the problem is, then unleashes me to flow in other areas.

For me, one of the things that I struggled with in 2006, 2007 on ProBlogger, was coming up with ideas to write about. I've been blogging for two and a half years on ProBlogger and I felt like I'd blogged everything there was to blog about blogging. I was blogging two or three posts a day. That's a lot of posts. That's a lot of topics covered.

I really struggled to come up with something new and fresh. I just thought I had blogger's block but when I realized it was about idea generation, I decided what am I going to do about it, I found two friends and we spent a morning together. They were also going through the same issue. They had blogs on different topics. We just brainstormed together for a morning. They told me what to write about and I came up with almost 30 or 40 posts and so did they. We did it again for a full day. A couple of months later, I came up with hundreds of ideas.

By identifying the sticking point, I then released myself to actually write. Another sticking point I had was in creation of content. This is a more recent problem for me. About a year ago on ProBlogger, I just did not have time to write posts because the opportunities were starting to flow over, running this event, which kept growing. Sponsors wanted to talk. We were publishing ebooks. I'd hired some team members and I was managing them. I just wasn't writing anything.

By identifying the sticking point, I was able to re-do how I use my time. And so I dedicate Monday and Wednesday mornings to write. I turn everything off, I don't answer my phone, I work offline, and I just write. They're my golden hours for writing content.

The other type of blogger's block that I had was completing posts. Who's got 30 or 40 posts half written? A year into writing ProBlogger, I had so many ideas to write about. It was fresh. It was new. It was exciting. The blog was going. At one point, I had 93 drafts in the backend of ProBlogger. I just would start a post and I'd get distracted and then start another post and then I'd never finish anything. Again, the sticking point was finishing posts and it was publishing posts and getting them ready to publish. And so I dedicated an hour every afternoon to polishing posts and getting them ready.

It's not rocket science but for me, I guess it's about identifying what is the point that's holding you back and re jigging your time to dedicate some time to those sticking points. Those points will change over time for you as well so just be aware, where's the blockage and how can I unleash that?

This morning I'm going to get five people up to talk about their challenges with these topics. I'm going to talk to you about five obstacles and I'm going to interview five people. Tsh. I'd like you to welcome Tsh. Many of you know Tsh runs a blog called Simple Mom. She's from Oregon, although from Austin, Texas before that. She's come like 36 hours to be here. Tsh, can you tell us a little bit about a time where you struggled with time and what you did about it.

Tsh: I've been blogging about five years and I would say all of that time is a struggle for time. When I started, I had a newborn and a two year old. My kids are now eight, five, and I also have a three year old. That, in itself, means I don't have a lot of time. We also homeschool. I don't know if that's a thing in Australia. It just means I don't have a lot of time.

                    What I have learned that really helps me a lot is to think about how I made, think about when I work best, what's important to me in terms of more lifestyle and not so much on the blog. When I started thinking about such as I tend to think better in the morning. I'm a morning person. After 4:00PM, most of my writing is just crap. So I learned to okay, let's take advantage of that time. I now wake up at about 5:30AM or so and write until about 7:30AM. I don't get online at all. I just write.

My big fuel and my passion is the writing part of it so that's where I want to spend most of my energy. I take advantage of that early morning hour or two hours when no one else is awake and it's nice and quiet. Nobody needs me, for the most part, you got little kids so that still happens. I get most of my writing done before my family even wakes up. By breakfast time, I've already written. I feel that sense of accomplishment for my day that if everything else doesn't happen, at least I've gotten something written.

By about 4:00PM, if I want to get more work done, it's usually kind of the mindless tasks, the things I don't need to spend as much energy on: editing photos, just the manual editing of posts, getting them scheduled, things like that. Taking advantage of my natural rhythm has helped me a ton. The hours you do spend blogging matter more for me.

The other thing I've realized, kind of what Darren was saying, the idea of never having enough time to do it all. Nobody ever says, "Well, I finished Twitter today so I guess I can move on." It never stops. That's the nature of the internet.

For me, it helped me a lot to realize that "no" really, a lot of times, means not now. It's just not a good time for that project, that idea, that whatever it is now. I might be able to do it later but "no" is not necessarily an end to a dream, an end to an idea. It's just means now is not a good time. That just mentally helps me, I guess, not feel so depressed about the whole never finishing the internet thing.

The last thing that really helps me is getting offline. That seems so counterintuitive because shouldn't you be online more to get more done? But you know how you don't feel like you need any clothes until you go to a store and you start seeing all the stuff and you're like, "Oh, I could use that. I could use that." It's the same things in some ways being online. You don't really think about all these things you want to do and get accomplished until you get online and you see all these other great things happening and all these other people to talk to.

Something about just being offline, being around 3D people, being outside in nature, all those things just cleared your head and you stop feeling that anxiety about time and the lack of it and needing to get everything done. Those are my main three things I do to stay sane and have enough time.

Darren: Lack of skills. I love Napoleon Dynamite. He's the coolest. I must have watched that so many times. Skills, it's hard when you start at blogging. I said all of those things that are on that list. That's my list. I can't write. I really didn't really write very well, I still don't think I write very well. I don't know enough about social media. I didn't know anything about blogging. I used the internet for research and email. That was pretty much all I did in the early days. I didn't know about publishing. I didn't know how to get a domain name, a design, or any of these sorts of things.

                    This is something I see a lot of bloggers really struggle with even though the tools have improved a lot. In the early days, you had to know how to code to do a lot of stuff and the tools have improved a lot. My wife started blogging three weeks ago, which is kind of fun. She's coming this afternoon. Please be nice to her. It's been interesting to be reminded of those things that you take for granted when you've been blogging for awhile, like aligning images and some of those sorts of things. She said all those things as well.

                    This can stop you in your tracks. It can stop you in your tracks at different times in your blogging as well. I'm still not taking enough. I still don't think I can write well enough but I guess it's about how do you breakthrough this sort of obstacle. My thoughts on this, again, you never know it all, you'll never have enough time but you'll also never know it all. No blogger that I know knows it all. You have to come up with a strategy to cope with what you don't know.

                    I guess in the same way that corporates put time aside for professional development, I want to encourage you to do the same. I'm preaching to be converted here because you're all at an event, which is about blogging. I don't want to hop on that too much. Continue to think about maybe 5% to 10% of your time, maybe an hour a week to reading an article on a blog like ProBlogger, for instance. Buying an ebook maybe. There are heaps of resources out there, there are heaps of webinars out there to help you with these sorts of skills. And really, the next two days is about skills.

                    Collaborate, cooperate, barter, outsource. What I found in my first three weeks of blogging was that there are these other community of other bloggers who know stuff. For me, I had to make text fold on my blog for the first month or so of my blogging. Back then, you couldn't hit the B button and highlight things. You had to know code like these html stuff. I was too embarrassed to ask anyone about it. I made friends with a couple of New Zealanders, Rachel and Reegan. They were really friendly and so one day, I got up the courage to admit that I didn't know how to make text dark or I didn't even know what to call it. I asked Rachel and she giggled and said, "Here's the code that you can do." And sent me to a site. And so I began to learn the skills.

                    Getting the courage to ask someone how you do something was something for me that was actually a bit freaky. It took me out of my comfort zone. But you know, by asking her that, that question led us to a partnership. We actually started a little blog network together and then became business partners. Her husband and I started my first money making blog, which was a blog about the Athens Olympics. We blogged all through the night as the Olympics happened. It led to a profitable sort of mutually beneficially win-win relationship.

Those sorts of little questions you ask and relationships you have with others, try to make them win-win. You don't have to pay everyone. You'll find a lot of people will want to just help you and a lot of people will want to collaborate and find win-win. I also sent a lot of traffic to them over the years, as thank you for their help. When I started to earn an income, I started paying Rachel to design my blogs as well. Over time, you'll find new ways to be able to outsource, whether they're just bartering or whether they're actually in pain. Be open. The person next to you may actually be able to help you.

I can't think simple. This is what I've been saying to Vanessa, my wife, who started blogging. Let's start simple. She looks at social networks, there's Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, YouTube, and all these different things, she doesn't know how to use any of those things. She doesn't know how to use Twitter, which I'm kind of happy about at the moment because I can tweet like crazy and she doesn't know how to follow me. Gradually, she's going to learn those things. One thing at a time. One step at a time.

I guess the thing I learned about ProBlogger is by being transparent about what I don't know, you actually become more relatable to people as well. In ProBlogger, I was terrified when I started ProBlogger because I didn't know how to design a blog. I didn't know anything about SEO. I didn't know anything about analytics, that side of things. I thought to myself do I bluff my way through it or do I say what I know and say what I don't know, and that's what I decided to do. I found by showing people what I didn't know, that I actually made a lot of friends and became more relatable. Be a bit transparent, particularly those of you who are starting out. And practice, you just have to practice. The only way you improve to write, you can learn a lot about writing but unless you actually practice it, you won't.

I want to get Amy up, another one of our international speakers. Welcome Amy. Amy's coming all the way from San Diego. Is that right?

Amy: Yes.

Darren: How long were you on the flight?

Amy: It's a lot of hours. I think 14.

Darren: Oh my gosh.

Amy: Yes.

Darren: I've done that trip many times.

Amy: Many times, so I can't complain.

Darren: No, you can. Anyone who's on the trip can complain. Can you tell us a little bit about you, your confrontation of lack of skills and what you did about it?

Amy: Yes. I used to work for Tony Robbins. He's a motivational speaker. I traveled the world with him and was behind the scenes for many, many years. That's a big guy to be behind the scenes with. I was really behind the scenes. I remember about a year before I went out on my own, I looked at a co-worker and said, "I know nothing to start my own business." I wanted it so bad but I told her I know nothing I can teach out in front of what I do here at Tony Robbins. She said I was crazy but basically, over that year, I had this desire to have my own business. The word freedom kept going in and out of my head daily.

                    When I thought I didn't have any skills, what I did is I took action and I call it total immersion. I immersed myself in everything social media for about a good year, 5:00AM to 7:00AM, every morning, Monday to Friday. Basically, I just had to move forward. When you're thinking I don't have the skills, I don't know what I'm going to do. Everybody has somewhere to start and you've just got to actually take action. Total immersion, learning everything I could get my hands on free and paid, came to events, I'm going to talk about that today, basically everything I could.

                    What's interesting is I think it comes back to mindset. My desire to have the freedom and not have a boss anymore had to outweigh the fact that I actually didn't know what I know now and what I teach now. At the time, I knew nothing about Facebook marketing. That was a year before I actually went out on my own. It really moves fast when you go for total immersion.

                    What's interesting is when Darren asked me to come to the Gold Coast to speak about Facebook marketing, it was really full circle because I've been to the Gold Coast three times with Tony Robbins. If you told me a few years ago that I'd be on stage talking about Facebook marketing, I would say you belong in the loony bin. That would never happen. But it's funny how when your mindset and you actually put your desire in front of your fear, what can happen. Total immersion, taking action, and saying, "Okay, if I don't know it, how am I going to know this? What do I need to actually get the knowledge to move me forward?" A combination of that but I really think it comes back to mindset.

Darren: Fear, this is a big one. This is my big one. If you could've seen me two weeks ago thinking about this event, I was almost in the fetal position. I was thinking about all the scenarios, all the things that could go wrong with today. I'm sure most of my team know the day I'm talking about. But I almost became paralyzed by fear and the things that could go wrong.

                    The fears that we face as bloggers are varied. I'm sure the list I've got there is just a very small sample. I suspect that a lot of you shared about fear before, when you talked to one another. These fears that haunt us. What if no one likes me? What if no one notices me at all? What if I look stupid or make the wrong choices? What if it's not perfect? That's my big one. I'm a bit of a perfectionist. What if I've got nothing to say or run out of things to say? What if I don't know enough? What if? What if? What if?

                    The fears can grind us to a halt. I've seen this happen for many bloggers. They just become almost paralyzed by it. Again, I don't have the answers to this. it's something I struggle with a lot of the time. I've overcome some of the fears but other ones sort of pop up and replace them. Here's a few of the thoughts I have on fear. Fear is a signal. It's a signal that something important is about to happen. As I look back on all of the life changing moments in my life, fear was present. I think it's a signal. I think it's designed to make us fight or flight. There are times for both.

                    Fear can be a good thing. It can warn you to run away from something that's about to kill you. It gives you that adrenaline and helps you to run faster, I think. It can also be there to give you adrenaline to fight your way through something and to pay attention. If you're feeling fear about blogging, that's because you're about to do something important, something life changing. Let it be a signal to you. This is a mind shift thing. This is something you need to learn when you're feeling, "Okay, I'm not going to let it paralyze me. I'm going to make it allow me to pay attention to what's going on in this situation."

                    For me, that's what I did this week. I said to myself, "I'm feeling really scared about ProBlogger event. It means something important is going to happen. I need to focus." That's what I allowed the fear to do for me, rather than to distract me and to paralyze me. I made it make me focused. I want to suggest three questions to ask when you're feeling fear. What's the worst thing that can happen? It's a cliché, I know. You hear it a lot. But it gives you perspective.

I use this on my seven year old son all the time. Swimming lessons, he can swim. He was swimming in his lessons in water up to here but for some reason, for a patch, he wouldn't take his feet off the bottom. We talked our way through it. What's the worst thing that can happen? "I can die." I'm like, "The water is only up to there. You've got your teacher next to you. I'm watching from the edge. I'll tell your teacher to jump in and save you. What's the worst thing that could happen to you?" I put my feet down. The situation is putting into perspective. What's the worst thing that could happen?

That's a good question to ask. Sometimes the answer is I could die. And so, it's good to know that. Fear might be telling you to do something about that. What's the worst thing that could happen? What would you do if that happens? How would you recover from that? I think this is a really important question to ask. I asked myself this question two weeks ago when I thought about this event. What's the worst thing that could happen? Amy, Tsh, and Trey could be caught in a volcanic ash cloud and not be able to get out of America. That's one of the worst things that can happen. I might forget all my clothes and have to wear a dress. There are all these things and you begin to work through them and then you begin to think about what I do.

As a team, we started to think what would we do if all our international speakers couldn't get here. We came up with a contingency plan. By asking this question, you're better prepared and you do what you're about to do, better.

The last thing is what could be the best thing that could happen? I think we dwell on the first one a lot. We allow our minds to go there quite a bit. But if we also go to the best thing that could happen, we actually find perspective. Because the reality is it's probably something in between. You've got just as much of a chance as the best thing happening is the worst.

For me, these three questions together can help me to work my way through fear. I guess the other thing for me is talking to other people about it. Get out of your comfort zone. It's the place that sparks. Last year in my keynote, I talked about how the big things that have happened to me have often started as little small sparks of opportunity. Those sparks for me usually fly when I put myself out of my comfort zone.

One of my fears is meeting new people. Hi, 450 new people. This is my worst nightmare. But what I've discovered is that when I force myself to walk up to a complete stranger and introduce myself, sparks fly. I remember going to my first conference in the US, travelled there by myself, freaking out, sitting in the back corner. The stupid speaker made me talk to the person sitting next to me in the opening session. Terrible thing to do.

I did it. I talked to the guy next to me. He became a business partner three years later. Sparks flew in that conversation. We discovered, we shared an interest and interesting things happened as a result of that. Get out of your comfort zone. I know a lot of you are doing that this weekend and I celebrate that you are doing that. That's fantastic.

The last thing I'll say about fear is even wobbly courage is courage. A lot of people say to overcome fear, you need to become a warrior. I don't feel like a warrior but I pushed myself with wobbly knees and legs and feeling nervous into situations. And that's courage. That's when sparks fly.

Brooke's going to come up. Brooke is another one of our speakers. Brooke came last year to our event. You may have seen the video that she made, which we used to help promote this event. She's going to speak to us later. Brooke, can you tell us a little bit about fear for you, when you faced it, what you did about it.

Brooke: Apart from now?

Darren: Yeah.

Brooke: Probably one of the things that sticks out in my mind the most is the moment I realized that every single number on my analytics page was a person and they were judging me, in a nice way, I'm sure.

Darren: No, they get together.

Brooke: It's a forum. It just caused me to question what I was writing about and question my voice. As a result of that, I got really boring. I started to write in the middle of the road. That was just purely based on fear because I didn't want to offend anybody. I wanted people to like me. It took me quite a while to figure out that was the problem because I started to procrastinate. I didn't write so well. I didn't write with passion.

                    But once I figured out that that was the fear that was driving it, I wrote a post called 10 Things I'm Afraid to Tell You. I just put it out there. The response was amazing. I had lots of emails from people thanking me and thanking me for facing up to my fear. Because I actually spoke about things, some are small things and embarrassing things like enjoying 50 Shades of Grey.

Darren: It's a bright book.

Brooke: It's a fantastic book. But other things were quite big: struggled with depression, things like that. As a result, people really responded incredibly well. My main tip would be initially figure out what the fear is because you may not be sitting there and thinking, "I'm terrified of being judged." You may be sitting there thinking, "I don't want to write anymore. I'm a bit sick of this." You just need to look deep into that and figure out if it's a fear and then face it. As long as you're not going to die. Face up to it.

Darren: Thank you, Brooke. Another obstacle, we've got two more to go, is sustainability. This is around profitability. A lot of bloggers I meet, particularly at this sort of conferences, how am I actually going to keep this going? How am I going to make it pay its way? This is certainly something I know is on the top of a lot of your minds at the moment. You may have built an audience. You may have built some community. You might've been able to get traction. You may have started to get interest from PR companies. But you can't live off of free stuff. How am I actually going to make this pay its own way?

                    I'm not going to talk a whole heap about this now because this conference is on this particular topic and there's a whole heap of sessions that can help you with it. There are a few things I'll say. I'm just going to flip past this because we all know it takes a lot of time and work but there are probably 1.1% of my readers who think it's easy and it's going to be easy. If you've got that expectation, sorry.

                    There are no formulas and blueprints. That's usually the same 1.1% who think that there's a formula they can follow. I'm sorry. There's not. Every successful blogger I've met has forged their own way. There are certainly principles that you see in a lot of them and we'll talk about some of those over the next couple of days but each blogger is quite different and each situation is different.

                    Over time, things change as well in the wider context. A few years ago, sponsored posts weren't that big in Australia but now, they seem to be being presented all the time. Things change in the wider context. And also, things change depending upon the stage of your blog as well. The way I used to monetize, it was only a limited option of ways I could do it in the early days but today, because my audience has grown, opens up new opportunities.

                    Profit usually comes around in exchange of value, I found. If you're just thinking at the start of your journey of business model, ask yourself these sorts of questions. I think somewhere in the intersection of these things, you may find some ways of making profit. Who are your readers? What are their needs and challenges? How can I deliver value to those? Usually, the answer to profitability is somewhere in the midst of those. Your reader's needs and serving your readers. That's certainly the case if you have your own product. You can serve your readers needs and challenges by creating a product or a service to sell to them.

                    Same is true with advertising. Finding someone else's product and selling space or affiliate marketing, it's usually somewhere in the intersection of those things. Really, the key thing is to understand your readers and what they want and what they need.

                    For me, I guess monetization is just being a series of experimenting and tweaking of these. I reckon I've monetized my blogs or tried to monetize my blogs in about 40 ways over the last 10 years. Today, I do about seven. I've tried a lot of stuff and a lot of stuff didn't work. But I found a few things where there were glimmers of hope and I continued to work on those things and tweak them and evolve them.

                    Over time, the more you experiment, the more you learn and the more you learn about your readers, the more you'll start to logically see fit about how you can monetize your blogs. Again, we've got a whole heap of sessions on monetization so I'm not going to talk too much about it. But I'm going to get Trey up. Trey's another one of our international speakers. He actually lives in New Zealand, but came in from San Fran and in two days, is going back again and then coming back to New Zealand.

Trey: Three.

Darren: Three trips in a week.

Trey: Yeah.

Darren: To and from America. Thank you.

Trey: Sure.

Darren: We're all on camera. What are you doing? He's got a Google glass. Trey, he's a great photographer. He runs a great blog called Stuck in Customs. But a whole heap of other stuff has sort of flowed out of what you do. I know this is a massive topic to talk about in two minutes but can you tell us a little, maybe a story about when you faced sustainability and what you did?

Trey: Yeah. This is a story, it's a nice story. When I was in college, I went to school in Texas at SMU. I was in computer science and math. That was sort of my thing. I was a huge Star Trek fan. I love The Next Generation. I especially love Patrick Stewart. I love that guy. Remember back then we used to watch TV and we won't have a laptop on our laps. We would just watch TV. You just pay attention so you would really drink these guys in. I love that guy.

                    I was walking to a student union and I saw there's a flyer on the wall that Patrick Stewart was coming to my college and he was going to be doing Shakespeare live on stage. I guess he's staying true to his roots even though he's doing the sci-fi stuff. But he loves Shakespeare so I got to go see him. I'm not in the theater department so okay, I'm going to go sneak in there. I headed and marked on my calendar. I went and I went the side door. Huge theater. Meadows auditorium, seats thousands and thousands of people.

                    I go in there and it's completely empty except for two people that are sitting in the front row. I thought, "Oh my gosh, what's going on? This is weird." I went in and I sat down. And then I realized, "Oh my gosh. They're just so bad at marketing this thing. Nobody actually came." Patrick is going to be mortified. I felt really embarrassed for him and it was just a weird bouquet of feelings inside me. I was excited to see him but if felt bad.

                    So anyway, he came out. He's like, "Oh." And then he went off stage for a second and he came back and he brought three chairs. He says, "Would you guys like to come on stage with me?" We're like, "Yes." We all went up there. There were four seats all pointing at each other. He says, "Do you all mind if I perform The Merchant of Venice?" No. That would be great. He did the whole thing from memory. Acted the whole thing. every character, everything.

I'll never forget it. At this one time, he started doing the soliloquy from Shylock and he's wearing this old tweed sport coat. He was at this point and he slapped his chest and this dust just blew up and the lights were burning down. He was like acting to the dust. I was like, "Wow. This is so awesome." Looking back on this, I realized, "Look, it doesn't matter who shows up. He just loved Shakespeare. He was so happy to do it. There's a purity to it there."

I realized this. I did the blog. It's been like seven years now. I did it forever. Just me and my mom showed up on the lonely thing. I did it because I loved it. He did Shakespeare because he loved it. He doesn't really make his money from Shakespeare, does he? He just loves acting even though the core is this very niche thing that he got into, Shakespeare. He made his money from Star Trek and doing other shows that's dealt on the ancillary of this.

The two lessons I pulled out of this are one, you just do what you love. It doesn't matter who shows up. You just can't help but do it. This was very much his essence. The other half of it is that even on the core was this tight, niche-y Shakespeare thing that only he and very few other people actually really care about in the world, that is what drove him and he took ancillary things to make money that are related to that.

There's a whole lot of ways to make money on the internet. As long as you get really tight into your core and experiment, that was perfectly said. Just massive amounts of experimentation around things that are directly or indirectly related to this area of expertise that you accidentally fall into just because of love.

Darren: Thank you very much, Trey. It's so true that most of the people I see making a living from blogging actually started out just talking about their love. They say it's a bonus that they get paid to do what they used to talk to their mates or annoy their mates with, talking about all the time. That's certainly my case. That's great. Thank you, Trey.

                    The last obstacle, and I almost didn't want to talk about this one because I say it in the Australian blogger sphere quite a bit. I know it causes angst and I know sometimes it causes a bit of controversy but I just see so many bloggers get caught up in this and I have at times, and so, I want to go there. I hope you'll let me.

                    The comparison game. I'd say it's a comparison trap. I wrote about this on ProBlogger the other day. It's probably the biggest read post on ProBlogger over the last year. I talked about the story of one blogger who I called Selly, but that's not her real name. She's an Aussie blogger who started a blog and three months later, her blog died because she fell into the comparison trap. She started her blog because she admired another blogger and she came across this blogger and she admired her. And so, she was inspired by her. She started her blog and modelled herself on this blogger and then gradually, day by day, she became more and more in the comparison game.

                    She started to look at how this other blogger wrote and felt insufficient in the way she wrote. She worked and worked and worked on posts, and sometimes, there'll be a week between posts because she was trying to perfect it to get to point where it was like this other blogger. And so, her writing stopped over time. She began to compare how this person used social media and she started to want to emulate her and then started to become jealous of her and started to become angry because this person did it so much better.

                    The comparison game led her down this path where she compared herself in so many different ways. She became not a blogger, but a comparer. She actually became more obsessed with the comparisons than the actually blogging. It's a fairly extreme example of it, but I think most of us at one time or another, if we're honest, we'll know that we played this game. It can take us in terrible directions to do some things that we're not proud of as well. I certainly have gone there myself.

                    I felt this when I first started out. I used to admire some bloggers who inspired me to start my first blog and I used to try and write in their style. Their style was very deep and analytical and thinking type post. I don't even know the words to describe their style of writing because I'm just not that kind of person. I remember writing, trying to write those type of posts in the early days and those posts were just the worst posts I've ever written. No one ever commented on them because I don't think anyone understood them.

                    I discovered after a few months that my style was more conversational. I'm really glad I did. I'm glad I didn't continue to go down that path of comparing. I guess I forged my path in different ways. I want to encourage you if you're in this tempting area and it's tempting. You go on Twitter and you think, "I'll just see what they're saying today. I'll just see if they're saying something about me or that could be about me."

                    If you're that type of person or if you're a comparer, if you're looking at other people's stats or how many comments they get, I want to encourage you to realize the comparisons you're making are just not fair. You are comparing everything you know about yourself to snippets of what they're showing about themselves. It's not that they're hiding themselves, those other things about themselves, they're just showing naturally the things that they're proud of. And so, your comparison is not fair. They're showing the best of what they're doing and you know everything about you. It's not just the best. It's the worst as well. The comparison's just not fair.

                    If you're going to compare, compare yourself  to yourself when you started out. That's one of the things that I didn't actually realize I was doing, this is what I did in the early days of my blog. What I used to do is at the end of every month, I look at my stats and I compare them to last month's stats and I tried to get my personal best. In the same way an athlete uses their personal best, I use my personal best with my blogs.

                    When I started to earn income, that's when I started to compare my income to myself last month. I went for my record month. That became my obsession. Maybe that was a little bit unhealthy in some ways but I think it's probably a better obsession than trying to beat someone else. Compare yourself to yourself.

                    You are unique. Use that as your competitive advantage. That's hard to do. It's hard to find how to do that but most bloggers that find their voice, that's what they do. They actually use their weaknesses. They use their failures as part of their story to actually make themselves unique. Everyone's writing about the same things but no one has your story. Use that story. It's what makes you unique.

                    The last thing I found is you are so much more than your successes and what other people say about you. I think as humans beings, we naturally compare ourselves all the time. We naturally think about our self worth based on whether we succeed or what other people say about us. They're the two things I think most of us judge our self with on. We feel good about ourselves when we succeed and when other people say good stuff about ourselves.

                    If that's where we get our self worth from, we're in for trouble because we all fail. At times, other people won't ever say nothing about us or crap about us as well. You've got to get your self worth from somewhere else. For me, that comes from spirituality, comes from spirituality, comes from a whole heap of other things. I'm not sure where your self worth comes from but I encourage you to look elsewhere than how well you're doing on your blog, how many Twitter followers you have, how many readers you have, how much money you have, and what other people say about you. You're so much more worthwhile than any of those things so don't allow yourselves to compare in that way.

                    I want to get one last person up, Phoebe. Phoebe is going to come. Phoebe is from Melbourne. Phoebe spoke at our second ProBlogger event. I remember I was in the other room when Phoebe got up to speak and tweet out when completely off in the next room, as Phoebe talks.

Phoebe:         I still do.

Darren:         You still do, thank goodness. Can you tell us a little bit about the comparison game? You're in the fashion blogging space. That wouldn't be a comparative sort of…

Phoebe: Oh no, that's not judgmental at all. Are there fashion bloggers here? Are there people that maybe don't blog about fashion but put photos of yourself? Yeah, okay. I know you're out there. What you find when you put yourself online and put photos of yourself online, that you're open to judgment and you're open to compare yourself with other people. I am seven years into my blogging career and last year, a new blogging fashion network opened up, called Felt, which is based out of Sydney.

                    It was based on an American business model where it was exclusive. It was invitation only. They only worked with, at that stage when they started, I think five bloggers, fashion bloggers. I wasn't invited. I always like to think that I was somewhat at the top of my game, that I still had a readership a long time into my blogging career. I was just scratching my head, what have I done? What am I not doing right? Why don't these people like me?

The girls that were chosen were very young. I'm over 30, believe it or not. They were all about 18, 19, 6ft, two of them ex models, weighed 50 kilos. Not me. I had read and followed their blogs. I just sat with my head in my hands and I thought, "What is my value? Why am I doing this? If this is what is being held up as a pinnacle in my industry and within fashion blogging, what is my value?"

I rang one of my girlfriends and she said, "This is just bad for your health. You need to stop this." She said, "And of all people, Phoebe, you should know better." I said, "Yeah, I know but it just gets me. It got to me." She goes, "What are you going to do about it?" I said, "Lose 10 kilos and grow a couple of feet." She said, "No, you're not going to do that." She said, "You need to write about it," And so, I did. I wrote a two part series because the fashion blogger sphere and Twitter sphere went nuts when it was launched.

I've always seen blogging as community based. I'm very generous with my time, knowledge. I'll tell you anything you want to know about blogging. I won't charge you unless you're a corporation. It had always been about positivity and fostering inclusion. It went against this very tight exclusive group, everything that I thought blogging was about, so I wrote about it.

I turned inward and I switched off. I unfollowed them all on Twitter. I unfollowed them on Instagram. I switched off from their blogs for a while. I looked inward. I wrote a two part series. Those blog posts were picked up by AAP and Patty Huntington, who's one of Australia's most well known fashion bloggers. She's a former journalist and she actually referenced that post just last week, again.

What I had perceived as a comparison that really got me down, I turned into a positive because I thought, "If I don't do this, it's going to throw up every other fear we've talked about today. Fear, roadblock, writer's block, and it's not going to be sustainable for me.

Darren: Thanks so much, Phoebe.

Phoebe: You're welcome.

Darren: Thanks Phoebe and thanks to the other people who've come and shared. I really appreciate people going to those places and sharing those sorts of things, honestly. I hope that that encourages you. We all face these obstacles that we've been talking about today.

                    How are we going to finish this off? I was talking to a hurdler recently at a party. Kind of lucky talking about obstacles, hurdles, and things like that. He's not an Olympic hurdler or anything like that, he competes in a local competition. I said to him, "So tell me, how do you become a great hurdler?" He said this, "You jump over a lot of hurdles." Effectively, what he told me is that to become a great jumper of obstacles and hurdles, you need to jump over a lot of obstacles and hurdles.

Every time you jump over one, you exercise your muscles and they become stronger. You learn how to keep momentum going when you jump over hurdles. Sometimes, you jump into hurdles and you crash and hurt yourself and you learn how not to jump in over hurdles. The only way we get through this stuff is to confront it. The only way we're going to face our fears and stop comparing ourselves with others, to actually about and to do it. I really want this event to be an event that challenges us to do that. I really would encourage you as you go into the next couple of days to keep these obstacles in front of your mind and to talk about them and ask questions about them and to take them on rather than run around them.

You can see obstacles as hurdles or you can see them as fences that contain you. When you start seeing them as fences that contain you, you actually stop yourself and you contain yourself. So I encourage you, over the next couple of days, we're going to get through these obstacles and I really hope that that's the case for you.

That wraps up our keynote from 2013. I hope you found it beneficial for the different challenges that you face at the moment. I would love to hear what you think about this week's episode. You can leave a comment over on our show notes over at problogger.com/podcast/205 or you can check out our Facebook group. If you just do a search on Facebook for ProBlogger community or go to problogger.com/group, you'll find it. Just apply to join if you haven't already and you can leave your reaction to that episode, that keynote there as well.

Also on the show notes, I'm going to link to some further listening and some further reading as well. As I said at the top of the show, I'll link to each of the five bloggers that I interviewed: Tsh, Amy, Trey, Phoebe, and Brooke. All of their blogs in details will be listed there as well. Also, I'll link to the blog post that Brooke mentioned in her interview, the 10 things that she was scared to tell her readers. You can go and check that one out as well if you'd like.

Also, I've got some further listening for you. If you want to learn a little bit more about blogger's block, I did mention three different types of blogger's block in that particular episode, go and check out episode 83, where I talked about those three types of blogger's block. And then in episodes 84, 86, and 87, not 85, there's a bit of a break in that series. I did talk about the three types of blogger's block and give you some tips on how to get through it.

If that's something you're facing at the moment, go look at episode 83 right through to 87, really. And then episode 54, I talk about fear. I go deeper into those three questions to ask when you are facing fear. Lastly, there is a post over on the show notes about the comparison game if that is something that you are struggling with at the moment, comparing yourself to other bloggers.

Whatever it is that you're facing at the moment, I really do hope that today's episode has helped you just to push through it a little bit, to keep going, to persist, some of the things that we talked about at this year's event as well was persisting and really going through those tough times, it's when we lean into our fear. It's when we push into those challenges. It's when we exercise jumping over those challenges that we do really often see growth come out of these periods that could stop us from blogging. If you're in one of those spaces at the moment, it could actually be just one of those things that you need to push through that's going to grow your blog, that's actually going to grow you as a blogger as well.

Love to hear from you. Come and join us in the Facebook group and next week, we'll be back to our normal schedule. No more event keynotes. I've got some stuff planned for you. We've got some interviews and we're going to talk about some cool tools as well in the coming weeks as well.

Thanks for listening. Chat with you next week in episode 206.

How did you go with today's episode?

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The post 205: 5 Obstacles Bloggers Face (And How to Get Over Them) appeared first on ProBlogger.

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Community Discussion: Should Bloggers Ask For Donations?

Posted: 03 Aug 2017 05:00 PM PDT

Bloggers calling for donations or reader contributions like "buy me a beer" or "buy me a coffee" have been around for over ten years, as has the debate over whether they should.

Now however, with more mainstream media putting up paywalls, the growth of subscription based content providers and the rise of crowdfunding, is it a better time for bloggers to put their hand out too?

As an example, it appears Guardian News and Media (Guardian and Observer) is trying to monetize its content every which way. It produces a variety of content from outside parties, categorising it as either:

  • 'Supported by' – editorially independent content, produced by journalists, funded by foundations and the like;
  • 'Paid content/Paid for by' – produced by the paper's commercial department not journalists; or
  • 'Advertiser content/from our advertisers' – produced by the advertisers themselves.

Whilst they are earning money from advertisers and sponsors, the Guardian also asks its readers to 'Become a Supporter' (subscriber) or 'Make a Contribution' (donate).

Paypal has long had a 'donate' button you can put on your blog and even set up a recurring subscription-like donation. How would this go down with your audience?

Similarly, I've seen many bloggers disclose affiliate referrals to their readers as a way to 'donate' to help them keep the lights on or pay their internet bills.

Patreon claims to have sent over $150 million to creators using its membership model whereby your fans pay you a subscription amount of their choice. This model seems to be growing in popularity for creators of all kinds, but particularly podcasters and YouTubers.

Inklpay is a new player offering $0.10 micropayments either in the form of voluntary 'tips' or an enforced paywall per piece of content. Would this work for you?

At ProBlogger, we occasionally run blogging events and often receive feedback from attendees that we should charge more given the value of these events. We noticed that the event ticketing system Eventbrite now also offers a 'donate' option alongside its free or paid ticketing. This concept seems like those restaurants where they don't have prices on the menus and instead ask you to pay what you think the meal is worth or what you can afford.

So, what about you? Have you ever asked for or received donations on your blog? What system do you use? Do you donate to others? Would a voluntary subscription fee, once-off contribution or a micropayment per piece of content work for you? More importantly, would your audience see value in that?

Please contribute to the production of this content by leaving your ‘tip’ in the comments below (see what I did there?!). 

(Photo by Thomas Malama on Unsplash)

The post Community Discussion: Should Bloggers Ask For Donations? appeared first on ProBlogger.

      

5 Critical Elements You Need to Check Off for Every Blog Post

Posted: 01 Aug 2017 07:00 AM PDT

5 critical blog post elements

This post is by ProBlogger subject matter expert Ali Luke

Over the past few years, I've conducted a lot of blog reviews for fellow writers. It's always great fun to read other people's posts … especially when they're on topics that are totally new to me!

Along the way, though, I've noticed that there are five critical elements that far too many bloggers miss out of their posts.

Could your posts be missing any of these too? They are:

1.       The Hook

2.       Subheadings

3.       Transitions

4.       Links

5.       The Conclusion

#1: The Hook

I've never seen a blog post that didn't have an introduction. I've seen plenty of posts, though, that had over-long introductions without a hook: a compelling reason for the reader to keep going.

Here's an example of a good hook, from Laney Galligan's post 5 Ways You Can Use Facebook Groups to Benefit Your Blog:

That's right, more than 1 billion people are using Facebook groups. That's where the conversation and community is happening and it's something you can easily create for your blog.

Laney makes the benefits clear (Facebook is where "the conversation and community is happening") and also makes an implicit promise that this post will teach the reader how to "easily create [that] for your blog".

The first few sentences of your post, too, need to convince the reader that your post is worth their time.

#2: Subheadings

Very short blog posts (say, under 400 words) don't need subheadings. Anything longer, though, can normally benefit from being broken into sections.

If your post is missing subheadings, it's easy for the reader to get lost midway.  When that happens, chances are, they'll stop reading. Subheadings help because they act like signposts: they tell the reader where they are and what's coming next.

For more help with subheadings, check out my podcast for ProBlogger, How to Use Subheadings to Add Structure to Your Blog Posts.

#3: Transitions

A transition is like a little bridge from one thought to another. Sometimes, you don't need a transition at all (a subheading can essentially serve the same purpose). If your post feels disjointed or abrupt in places, though, you may need to add in a quick transition.

Often, a transition is helpful before any major new section of your post. They can also be used to introduce lists.

Here are some examples, from Nicole Avery's post How to Reduce Your Time on Social Media to Increase Your Blogging Productivity – you might want to read the whole post to see how these work in context:

There are two different ways that I see social media impact bloggers’ productivity negatively.

 

How does this behaviour on social media impact their productivity? It impacts it in three key ways:

 

It doesn’t mean that you can’t be on social media, it just means you need to take a more planned and proactive approach to how you go about it. Here are two actions you can take to help you:

#4: Links

While it's not absolutely essential for your post to contain links, it's almost always a good idea to include at least one. Both internal links (to your own blog) and external links (to other websites) matter.

  • Links to past posts on your blog help readers dig in … and stick around.
  • Links to posts on other people's blogs position you as someone helpful and knowledgeable.
  • Links to your products or services help you make more sales.
  •  Links to books on Amazon can bring in affiliate income – and also make you look helpful and well informed.

It's often appropriate to include links throughout your post, usually to give more information about a particular point. If you quote someone or give an example, you should provide a link too.

Sometimes, you might not have many opportunities to link within a post (or you may not want to distract readers – e.g. in a how-to post): if that's the case, you could include some "further reading" or "where next?" suggestions at the end.

#5: The Conclusion

Of all the missing elements, this is probably the one that seems to get left off the most! If you finish your post too suddenly, though, it not only seems weirdly abrupt to readers … it robs you of a great chance to direct their next actions.

There are several ways to tackle the conclusion: personally, I think it's good to sum up briefly (if only in a sentence), and to give a "call to action". You can find out more about those in the ProBlogger podcast episode How to Write a Post That Contains a Call to Action.

Here's an example of a conclusion that encourages the reader to take action based on the content – this is from Colin Gray's post How to Get Your First Podcast Sponsorship:

If you're looking to dip your toe in the waters, but sponsoring your blog is a step too far, then try your podcast. Build a relationship there and who knows, it might lead to your blog, your video channel, your social media.

If that gives you the time and the space to spend time on the content you love, offering more and more value to your readers, then it's worth an ad spot or two. Give it a shot!

When you're busy writing a blog post, it can be difficult to think about everything you need to include … you're probably hurrying just to get all your ideas down.

As you edit, though, use these five critical elements as a checklist: make sure you've included each one – or that you've got a very good reason not to!

Which of these five elements do you find yourself inadvertently missing out? How could you include it in your next post? Share your thoughts or tips with us in the comments!

Photo by Thought Catalog on Unsplash

The post 5 Critical Elements You Need to Check Off for Every Blog Post appeared first on ProBlogger.

      

204: 6 ‘Ordinary’ Things That Will Grow Your Blog into Something Extraordinary

Posted: 31 Jul 2017 02:00 AM PDT

How Ordinary Things Can Lead to Extraordinary Results With Your Blog

This week and I'm excited to be spending time face to face with quite a few ProBlogger podcast listeners and blog readers at our Aussie blogging events.

We've been holding annual Australian events since 2010 and it is a highlight of my year each time. It's fantastic to put faces to names, hear the stories of what bloggers are learning and to get inspired by meeting many of you.

So because I'm away this week and busy with the event I thought it might be fun to give you a taste of what happens at a ProBlogger event and to play you a talk I gave at one of our events a few years ago.

6 ordinary things for extraordinary blog growth

So for today's episode (#204) I'm going to play you a full opening keynote talk that I gave in 2014.

It's a talk I gave which explores how doing ordinary things consistently over time leads to extraordinary results in blogging.

Often bloggers look for the ‘secret’ strategies that will launch their blog into a viral success. However the reality is that most successful bloggers spend more time on small, ordinary things – it’s these things that really lead to success.

In this talk I outlined 6 of these 'ordinary things'.

This is a talk I hear attendees referring to quite a bit – so I hope you enjoy it too.

Links and Resources on 6 'Ordinary' Things That Will Grow Your Blog into Something Extraordinary

Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view

Hey there and welcome to episode 204 of the ProBlogger Podcast. My name is Darren Rowse and I’m the blogger and podcaster behind ProBlogger.com, a site that’s really dedicated to helping you to grow an amazing blog, that serves your audience, that creates great content, and that builds some profit around what you do online.

You can learn more about ProBlogger and all of the different things we do including our ebooks, events, the podcast and blog itself over at problogger.com. And then, have a dig around. You’ll find a lot of information on our Start Here page there as well so look for that in the navigation.

This week, I’m really excited because I’m spending time face to face with quite a few ProBlogger podcast listeners and ProBlogger blog readers at our Australian blogging events. We've got two events this year, Melbourne and Brisbane, and they’re going on pretty much as this podcast goes out. We’ve been holding these events since 2010 and it is the highlight of my year every year because I get to put names to faces, hear stories of bloggers and what they’re learning, and see the growth in our attendees from year to year as well. I always come home inspired although a bit tired from these events as well.

Because I’m away this week and not at my office, and not able to record too much in terms of a podcast, I thought it might be fun to give you a taste of what happens at the ProBlogger event. I’m going to play you a keynote presentation I gave at one of our events a few years ago. It’s actually completely relevant for today and hopefully, you find some inspiration in it as well.

This episode, episode 204, I’m going to play you the full opening keynote of the talk I gave in 2014, three years ago now. It’s a talk in which I explore how doing ordinary things, consistently over time, leads to extraordinary results. Often, bloggers come to ProBlogger and I get emails all the time and people will say, “What is the secret strategy, what's the secret sauce that’s going to launch my blog into being a viral success?” The reality is that it’s not the secret strategies that tend to lead to that viral success. It’s some of the smaller ordinary things.

In this talk, I shared six ordinary things that are going to help you to build something quite extraordinary. This is a talk I actually get a lot of feedback from, even three years later, I get bloggers come who heard this talk at our event and they refer back to it. I really do hope that it is useful to you as well. If you like to follow along with the slides for this talk, I actually had a set of slides, I’ve uploaded them into this week’s show notes and you can scroll through them as I talk, if you like. They are over problogger.com/podcast/204 and I will also upload them as a PDF if you want to download them.

If you are also interested in coming to our events, of course, this year’s events, you can’t really get tickets for anymore for the Aussie events. Although, you may be able to get one to the Melbourne event if you are able to act fast. There is always information on our upcoming Australian events at problogger.com/events. Our Dallas event later in the year that I’m running with some friends called The Success Incubator. There will be details of that at problogger.com/success.

I’m going to hand over to me and this is a live recording so you're going to hear a little bit of audience. You're going to hear me embarrass myself along the way a couple of times as well as I stumble over my words. I get a few laughs at my own expense during this one but hopefully it’s clear enough for you. The slides will certainly help at times but I think most of it would be understandable if you’re just listening along as well.

Thanks for listening and I look forward to hearing what you think about this particular keynote. You can always give us feedback on the show notes or over in the Facebook group. Thanks for listening and here I am.

This event, I’ve been trying to work out what to talk about for the opening session of this event, and I want to do something a little bit strange. I want to start with a confession. It doesn’t usually happen at the start of an event that the founder gets up and reveals something about himself that perhaps isn’t overly positive or has a bit of a negative vibe but this is my confession to you, I sometimes feel like this guy. Some of you are groaning internally because the Lego Movie is on the high rotation at your house. Anyone? My house we’ve got three boys – they’re three, six and eight, and Lego is huge and it’s often embedded into my feet late at night.

The Lego Movie, the main character of it is this guy here, Emmet. I really resonate with his character which is strange because he has a luscious head of hair and my boys did too. After we took them to see the Lego Movie, my two eldest, I found them in one of their bedrooms fighting over who is going to be Emmet in their imaginative play.

I thought this was a little bit strange because there’s other really cool characters in this movie, there’s Batman and Superman, and Wonder Woman, and all kinds of amazing characters but no,  they wanted to be Emmet. I asked my middle boy, he’s now six. He’s slightly philosophical, “Why did you want to be Emmet?” He thought about it for a little while and then he said, "He’s just ordinary but he still did something really cool.” My boys resonated with this character and I do too.

When you first meet Emmet in this movie, he’s very ordinary, very average. He just tries to fit in. He’s a construction worker, follows instructions, blends into the crowd. In fact, later in the movie when his friends are interviewed about him, some of them don’t even remember that he exists. He’s very ordinary, very average. Through circumstances, he finds himself surrounded by these extraordinary characters called “The Master Builders,” the exact opposite of him. There’s Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, Abraham Lincoln, the NBA All Stars, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles – these big characters but they also have amazing abilities to construct whatever they want, almost out of thin air, just using their imagination and the bricks that they find around them. Emmet is the exact opposite of this. He just wants instructions.

A prophecy is made about Emmet, that he is the special one who’s going to lead The Master Builders. There’s this scene in the movie which is on the screen now, where Emmet is in this coliseum like gathering of Master Builders and he’s introduced as The Special One who is going to lead them.

He walks up onto the stage and everyone falls silent waiting for magical words and he pretty much says, “Hi! I’m Emmet. I’ve got no idea what’s going on here.” In the next couple of moments, he pretty much reveals that he’s anything but special, that he’s anything but a Master Builder, that he’s anything but a leader and, of course, the Master Builders decide not to follow him.

That moment in the movie is kinda like the dream I have every night for two weeks before this event. Every event I go to where I’m invited to speak, something in the back of my head says, “You’re too ordinary. You’ve got nothing to say. You’re too average.” I’m not saying that to make you feel sad for me. There’s actually a few reasons that I’m saying this.

Don’t worry, the founder hasn’t lost his mind. It’s cool.

The reason I say this is that every time I come to this conference, I have conversations, usually before the conference, where people say to me, “I feel like I’m a bit out of my league.” “I feel like I shouldn’t be here.” Someone said to me this morning already, “I haven’t even started my blog yet.” “I haven’t posted for six months,” someone else told me this morning. “I don’t know if I should be here.” “I’m not very good at writing.” “I’m not very technical.”

These little voices go in the back of all of our minds. We're actually a community of Emmets. I want to start off by saying today, we all feel these things. We all feel average. We all feel ordinary. We all, at times, feel out of our league. It’s interesting when I talk to speakers of this event, they say the same things. We’re all feeling these same things.

I guess the first reason I wanted to give my confession this morning is that I think that it’s actually a collective confession and I want to put it out there right up front that this is how we sometimes feel. After we come to a conference and we tell everyone why they should listen to us and what we do know, I think this is a place where we can say what we don’t know and it’s totally fine to do that. It’s totally fine to feel these things.

The second reason I wanted to give this confession today is that we live in amazing times. We live in times where ordinary people here in Australia are doing extraordinary things. There’s a movement happening and it’s happening in this room. Ordinary people doing extraordinary things often think, what would someone coming into this room, who didn’t know what this conference was about, think this conference is about just looking at our attendees? I think I wouldn’t have any idea. I think I would be amazed when I start to hear some of the stories in this room. Our community is doing amazing things.

One of the things I love to do is to go overseas and speak at events and tell stories of Australian bloggers. Over the last year, I’ve told 12 stories of Australian bloggers, people who’d come to our event, people who’d spoken at our event and the things that they have done.

I told this story earlier this year of a guy called Chris Hunter. Who remembers Chris? He spoke like three years ago. I think some of you, now, remember him. Chris was one of our panels and he’s just a lovely guy but he’s just a guy that you walk past on the street, not really noticed. He’s unassuming. He’s quiet. Chris has achieved a lot but he’s overcome a lot, too. He immigrated from the UK to Sydney and now, I think, he’s gone along to New Zealand. He’s hearing impaired and overcome some challenges in that area of his life. He was working in an advertising agency and doing quite well for himself. But every night he would go home and he would do what he really loved, he had a secret passion, it was classic motorbikes – custom motor bikes.

He started a blog called Bike EXIF and he started to post pictures of classic motorbikes. At our event, he told us the story of how he started it. Chris is now a full-time blogger just a few years later. He has over two million Pinterest followers. Pinterest isn’t just for girly things, it’s for motorbikes! He is an influencer in his industry. He has advertisers paying him money to appear on his blog. He’s an authority. He’s a normal person doing something quite extraordinary.

I love to tell the story of Christina. I saw Christina. She’s here somewhere. I’ve been telling Christina’s story when I travel as well. Where are you, Christina? I like to look at you. I don’t like to look at you. I would like to see you. Oops! Suddenly, my mouth is very dry. The first time I met you would have been three years ago, probably the same event that Christ was at. The night before our event, someone sent me an email and said, “You’ve got to check out this blog. There's this woman, Christina, who's posting pictures of the back of her head and people are reading her blog. She was posting pictures of her hairstyle." I think it just started off at the back of your head, and gradually it was the side and in the end, it’s the front as well.

I immediately knew something was happening here because I can see the engagement in the comments. Christina has spoken in a number of our events and told her story, and now a full-time blogger. I love watching Christina’s Instagram feed as she goes traveling around the world to fashion shows and released an ebook, and this week, released your book here in Australia. Jim, now, husband, is also working with you as a blogger. I just think this is amazing that you can start out posting pictures of the back of your head and a whole business opens up, something quite extraordinary.

I love telling the story of Gavin. He’s from Zen Pencils. He also spoke probably at the same event, I reckon. He told his story about how in 2011, he quit his job because he wanted to become a comic. He was working as a graphic designer. They sold their house so that he had a bit of a buffer and he tried all these different ways of becoming a comic. Two or three times he tried, nothing worked. Until one day he had the realization that he could combine two of his passions, one was comics and two was inspirational quotes, and he started Zen Pencils. He now has hundreds of thousands of social media followers. He’s now traveling the world speaking at conferences. He was recently speaking at Comic-Con, that’s a dream come true for a comic.

I love the fact that normal people are doing extraordinary things. These are just three of literally hundreds of stories in this room of people who are doing amazing things, and we really want to hear your stories this week. There’s going to be some opportunities to do that.

Collectively, I did the sums the other day, you have 30 million readers. That person coming into this room would have no idea who they’re seeing in the middle of normal people doing extraordinary things.

Over the last year, I asked from Facebook the other day, “Have you launched something this year?” These are just some of the ebooks and books that have been launched this year. These are just some of the businesses that have been launched this year that train people in social media and blogging. These are just two of the possible Kickstarter campaigns that have happened this year. These are just one of the apps that just happened to get to the top of the App Store. A couple of the events that are being run by bloggers this year. You’ve achieved so much this year and I can’t wait to see what is achieved in the next year.

The third reason I wanted to share my confession of feeling ordinary is really what I wanted to talk about for the rest of this time we’ve got today is that in my experience, success is really about doing ordinary things. A lot of times, people come and want the secret, sexy, sort of strategies on blogging. The reality is, most of the reasons why bloggers succeed is they do ordinary things and they continue to do them really well. Success is more about doing the ordinary thing so that you already know than discovering the secrets that you don’t yet know. That is my experience over the last 12 years.

What I want to do today is to share with you six ordinary things that you already know that you need to keep doing.

The first one is the most ordinary of them all, and it's to start. I know 90% of you guys have done that, I want to say something to you in a moment, but for the 10% of you who haven’t yet started your blog, you are completely welcome here and that’s totally fine to not have a blog. But if you go home and you don’t start something, I’m going to hunt you down.

I love the fact that even this morning a couple of people said, “I didn’t have my blog last year, but I do now.” Congratulations, that’s fantastic.

I love this quote, before I tell my story, “Don’t wait until you know who you are to get started. The way you figure yourself out is by making things.” That’s Austin Kleon, who wrote a book called Steal Like an Artist. This quote pretty much sums up my own story.

Back in 2002, I started a blog. Many of you heard my story, I’m not going to tell it in great detail but I started a blog after seeing someone else’s blog and being inspired by it. 30 minutes after I saw his, I knew I had to start a blog but I also knew I had a long list of excuses going through my head. I didn’t know what a blog was 30 minutes before so I had no experience. I had no skills. I’d had 20 jobs in the last 10 years, I don’t really stick at things too well. I had a shed in the backyard full of sporting equipment that I used once, sometimes I hadn’t used them at all. We didn’t have any money. We were nearly married. I had no network. I didn’t know any other bloggers. No niche. Had fear. What if my wife reads this? What if my mom reads it? What if no one reads it? What if everyone reads it and I make a mistake? All these little fears, these little niggly voices.

I had this perfectionism. I don’t think I’m actually a perfectionist but when it came to blogging that first blog post, I remember looking at it and thinking, “This is too short in comparison to the one I’ve seen earlier.” As I looked at my free blogger template, which in 2002 was ugly, I think it was purple and orange, and big ugly fonts. I looked at it and thought, this just isn’t going to do. But for one reason or another I hit publish on that first blog post 12 years ago.

As I did, my excuses literally began to dissolve. In the 20 minutes it took me to get that blog set up, I learned skills, I gained the experience. That first short, embarrassingly simple blog post, I gained skills and I began to take a step towards developing a voice. In that next week, I began to find a reader or two as I began to read their blogs and leave comments, my network began to open up. The excuses dissolved, but they only dissolved because I started.

Inaction breeds doubt and fear, action breeds confidence and courage. If you want to conquer fear, don't sit at home and think about it. Go out and get busy. That’s my experience.

Starting leads to our concept of opportunities and I could fill a page full of the opportunities that have come. I still remember the first time I’ve got an email from this guy in the States, from a company I’ve never heard of before. I was living in a bit of a cocoon. The company was Wiley, which is a fairly big publisher, one of the biggest in the world. They said, “We want you to write a book.” I thought it was a friend playing a joke on me, and said, “Yeah, right.” He came back and said, “No, really. I’m from Wiley. I’d like you to write a book.” The same thing happened when someone asks me from overseas to come and speak at an event about blogging. I’ve only been blogging for a couple of years, why do you want me?

These opportunities came, but they only came because I started. The best thing about starting for me is actually it lead to self-discovery. Sorry about the big head picture but I didn’t know how else to visualize it. But for me, starting lead to this whole journey of my ideas. The little embryonic ideas that I had actually began to grow bigger. What I found is that when you put even your tiny, little thoughts and ideas out there, they crystallize, they actually grow stronger, by verbalizing them, by letting other people see them.

Starting lead the growth of ideas, that actually lead to discipline. This is the first thing I’ve stuck at for more than a year of my life, and it’s been 12. I can’t believe it that I’ve actually been publishing posts every day for 12 years, lead to a development of a voice and passions emerged. The peace kind of killed the fear. The fear is still there but it enabled me to deal with that. A whole new vocation, I guess, emerged.

For those of you who've already started, here’s the thing, starting isn’t just something you can never take off your to do list. It needs to become a mind set. It needs to become something that you revisit constantly. I sat down on the couch a few months ago and I drew a line on a page and I put 2002 on one end of the page, 2004 on the other end and I analyzed all the times that I’d started things over the last 12 years.

I came up with 100 starts over the next hour. I visualized a few on the screen. Some of these starts are new blogs, I’ve had 30. I only have two today. That shows you my ratio of success. Some of these starts are business partnerships, some of them went on to do really great things, some of them ended very badly. Some of these starts are ebooks that I’ve written or starting on social media, new platforms. There’s been heaps of starts.

Some of these starts started as tiny, little ideas that grew into bigger things. As I said a couple of years ago on one of my keynotes, “Your next big thing might be the little thing that’s staring you right in the face right now.” Look at those little things and act upon those little ideas that you have.

The number two obvious thing you already know that you need to continue to do is to put your readers first.

We’ve all said this as bloggers. I hear it all the time but it’s so tempting to put other things first. This is the key question. If you come to a ProBlogger event before you’ve heard me talk about this idea of asking this question: Who are your readers? Who are your current readers? Who are your potential readers? The more you can define who they are, get clarity about who your readers are, the better position you’d be in to create content for them that’s useful, the better position you’d be in to build community with them, the better position you’d be to go and find them and the better position you’d be in to monetize your blog.

Get to know your readers, understand their needs, their problems, their challenges, their desires, their dreams and their fears. Those things are incredibly powerful to understand. It takes time to understand these things, but do anything you can to meet a reader whether it be online or offline and to understand these things about them. Understand their goals, the language that they use, how they use the internet, their habits, their loves, their hates, and their passions. These things are incredibly important. Those of you who've been along before have heard me talk about these things.

But there’s another question I want you to begin to ask as well and this is a question I’ve only been asking for 12 months, at least explicitly, I’ve been asking this question in my mind. Get clarity around who your readers are but then also get clarity around the change you want to see in those readers. This is incredibly powerful. Understand the change in your readers. You know who they are now, but where do you want them to be? What’s your dream for your readers? Define that, that’s a powerful thing.

What I’ve discovered is that powerful blogs, blogs that have a huge impact upon people, they’re the blogs that actually leave a mark on people, they're the blogs that actually leave their readers different from when they arrive to when they leave. If you can have a blog that changes people, you have the start of something pretty amazing.

Ask these three questions: Who are my readers? What are their needs? How are they going to change as a result of reading my blogs? Spend 10 minutes doing that and you’ll come up with your mission statement or your purpose statement for your blog.

On my blog, Digital Photography School, my readers are people who own digital cameras, who aren’t using those cameras to their potential, that’s their need, and we give them creative control of their cameras. Very simple, kind of, statements but those statements have changed the way that we’ve built our blog over the last year. We now pass this onto our writers and their content has improved incredibly since they knew what we’re on about. Our readers are now starting to feedback to us that they’re getting creative control of their cameras. We never told our readers this is what we’re on about, but they’ve started to notice. Spend time doing that exercise, it’s quite profound.

Put your readers first is one of those things we always say but the problem is there’s all these other temptations and it’s very easy for other things to become first. For some of you, it’s the strategy, it’s looking at the Google Analytics and trying to get your page views up, repositioning your logo and putting your social media buttons in different places, all these sorts of things can cloud out the fact that there are actually readers looking at this stuff.

Sometimes, it’s the profit and this, for me, there’s been a number of times over the last 12 years where I got so into the AdSense numbers are going up, and what if I put my ads there and you actually lose sight of where your readers actually are in the process. Sometimes, it’s traffic. Sometimes, it’s building your own profile, “I want to be bigger than that blogger.” You begin to network, it’s about the request you get from media or that they’re getting it or you’re not getting it. It’s very easy to become distracted by these things. Sometimes, it’s the crafting of the content itself. Sometimes, you can get so into writing amazing content that you actually forget anyone’s reading it and that you’re there to serve them. Put your readers first.

The third thing that you already know is so powerful and you're going to hear this time and time again over the next few days is that usefulness is king. Over the last 12 years, I’ve seen so many articles written about how content is king, how community is king, how WordPress is king, how Twitter’s king or Facebook’s king, how blogging is king. How all of these things are the most important thing. None of them are king. Usefulness is king. Those things are just different ways of being useful. Whatever you do with your blog, be useful in some way. For me, ultimately being useful comes back to that change that you want to bring. If you can define that change and then begin to break it down, you are actually going to be useful.

For us, we want to give people creative control of their cameras so we begin to break that down. There are different things that our readers need to learn to get creative control and these become categories on our site or blog posts on our site. They need to know technical things like what is aperture, what is shutter speed. They need to know other things like how to get confident with your camera, how to actually take pictures of people without feeling awkward about taking pictures of people. Things they need to learn about how to see and compositions. All of these things and there’s probably a hundred things that we can add to this list are actually how we deliver this change that we want to bring to people.

Some of you heard me talk about this post I wrote back in 2006. I started Digital Photography School in 2006 and one of the first posts I wrote was this one. It’s the most basic post I've ever, ever written. I wrote it because people were sharing photos on our Flickr group, which were really bad and the photos were bad because they weren’t holding the camera still when they took the photo. They were holding the camera up and when they hit the shutter speed they push the camera down and it would be blurry.

I saw our need. I thought I’m going to write a post on that. I looked at the post that I’ve written, I thought, "I’m going to get laughed down about this post because it’s just so basic. People are just going to look down their noses at this post." But I saw the problem that people had so I decided to publish it anyway. I looked at the stats a month ago, on this post. It's had over 610,000 people view it. I’m glad I wrote it, now. It’s not the biggest post, it’s never had a huge spark in traffic at that time. All of that traffic, almost all of it has come from Google and almost every search has come with the words: How do I hold my camera?

People go to Google to ask the questions that they’re too embarrassed to ask their friends, write that stuff. The stuff you have forgotten that you know is useful. Sometimes, it’s about going back to the basics and providing that kind of information.You don’t have to know a lot, you don’t have to be an expert. I’m not a photographer, a professional photographer. I wrote for people who were behind me in the journey. Be useful to people behind you on that journey.

The fourth thing that you already probably instinctively know is that you need to develop a rhythm of usefulness. I think rhythm is really important. This is another lesson I’ve learned over the last year, regularity is really important. It’s important for a number of reasons.

On Digital Photography School, we’ve developed quite a complicated rhythm. It’s been eight years now since we started that site. It started out much simpler, one post every two or three days. Today, our rhythm kind of looks like this, we publish two posts a day, which is much more than a lot of you post and that's totally fine to post less. The important thing is the rhythm.

We post five times on Facebook every day, that sounds like a lot, it is. I do it every night at 9:00PM, schedule the next day’s five posts. We publish one challenge to our readers every week. We say, “Go away and take a photo on this theme and come back and show us your photo.” We post one newsletter per week, every Thursday night. It went out last night, Thursday night. I was sitting in my room getting it ready. We send out a newsletter every single week.

We do an annual holiday program every year that lead up to Christmas, the 12 days of Christmas. It’s happened four or five years now. We do ebooks. Every four or five times a year, we publish ebooks. Not necessarily seasonal, but they kind of happen when the seasons happen.

That’s a fairly advanced rhythm, some of you who are just starting can go, “That’s too much for me.” That’s totally fine. But what I found is that the rhythm is really, really useful. It’s useful for me as a blogger and my team because it gives me a deadline. I find that if I’m writing regularly, I write better. It’s easier to come up with ideas. If I’m writing once a month, it’s very hard to get going again. Rhythm is really important for you but it’s also really important for your readers.

I’ve started to notice, even though we’ve never told our readers that we publish two a day, our readers know that. They show up at the times we publish. We get tweets from people if we are an hour late. Same with today’s post. The other morning I’ve got an email from someone, actually it’s a Facebook message from someone, saying, “The 6:00AM Facebook post you do didn’t come up today in my feed.” It’s not my fault Facebook didn’t show it was there, but an interaction with that person, they sat down every morning with a cup of coffee to look for our latest Facebook update.

Your readers begin to show up when you post with a rhythm. It’s really powerful. They begin to gather in the places that you show up regularly so build a rhythm of usefulness in your site.

The other thing about rhythm is that it adds up over time and the accumulated effect of it is amazing. We publish 730 posts per year now, that’s 730 doorways into the site, 730 posts that could be shared on Twitter or on Facebook. Again, 730 is probably too much for many people but even 52 a year. It begins to add up over the years.

That last one there, we've published 20 ebooks over the last five or so years. If you told me 5 years ago we’re going to publish 20 ebooks, I would have fallen over. The first one almost killed me. But when you get into the rhythm of it, it actually becomes easies and you begin to develop a system, and it becomes much more achievable. Over time, that gives you an incredible amount of things to offer your readers so rhythm is really important.

Epic blogs are built on lots of little regular useful actions. I don’t know a blog that made it off a single post, it’s about regularity of useful stuff over time. Yes, have these big dreams of the things you want to achieve but know that you going to have to take lots of little useful steps to get there.

The fifth thing that I want to say, it kind of ties into usefulness but I think this really needs to be said particularly at the moment.

As I look around the web, as I look at my Facebook stream, there’s so much fluff being produced at the moment. The other day, I almost cried at that crap that was being shared in my Facebook stream. Someone shared a video of when an elephant met a cat and you wouldn't believe what happens when they meet. You go and watch the video because I want to know what happens. An elephant walked down the street, there was a cat in the corner of the frame, the elephant went and then it walked on. You wouldn’t believe it. There’s so much fluff.

I don’t want to pick on BuzzFeed, I don’t want to pick on Upworthy or any of these sites that do it. They’re onto something and it’s working for them. They’re driving a lot of traffic but what worries me is that I’m starting to see this appear on blogs who used to publish really good, useful, original content.

In the photography space, I can think of two or three blogs that used to publish maybe one or two useful tutorials everyday, they were growing their readers, lots of community, lots of engagement, they were helping a lot of people and now they’re publishing 15 to 20 pieces of fluff every day, other people’s stuff. Some of the stuff they share is kind of useful but they’re not actually taking their readers on a journey anymore. They’re actually abandoning their readers and they’re not being meaningful. I see it because their readers are coming to our site saying, “Geez, nice to read some tutorials that actually help us rather than just seeing this sort of stuff.”

Brian Solar, he’s a blogger in the States. He came to Melbourne recently and he said this quote, “Don’t compete for the moment,” which is what these sites are doing. They’re just trying to get people there for the moment because that loads another ad.

“Compete for meaning.” He said it for two reasons. One is it's really hard to compete with Upworthy and BuzzFeed because they’re doing it so well, but two he was talking to business people and said that it’s very hard to sell stuff to people who were just there for a fleeting feel good second and then not back again. It’s much easier to sell stuff to people and to build a relationship with people who you’re actually changing their lives in some way and you’re taking them on a journey.

I love this quote from our very own, Shane Tilley, who said this to me the other day and I’m like, I’m going to write that down, “The trend is to chase eyeballs, they can have them. I care about the hearts and the minds of our readers. This is where it’s at.”

This is where it’s at whether you’ve got an advertising model because advertisers, they want to advertise on sites where readers are engaged, where they love the content, where they love the people behind it. This is where it’s at if you want to sell a product because your readers are much more likely to buy something if you've actually got a history of changing their lives in some way.

I actually think there is an incredible opportunity at the moment particularly, with all this fluff around us, to create content that has quality, to create content that has soul, to create content that has meaning, to create content that brings about a lasting change in people and that takes them on a journey. I think that type of content stands out, at the moment. That kind of content creates trust. That kind of content creates authority and influence. Spend your time doing that, you might publish a little less, but you’re going to publish content that actually makes the world a better place and that opens up opportunities for your monetize.

The last thing I want to say is, again, this is something that you already know but so many people don’t act upon it and it’s to persist. This is the lesson that applies to all areas of life. Good things come when you persist. Success usually only ever comes when people persist.

My experience is when you do these six things and you continue to do these things, that you build those things like credibility, and trust, and authority.

Put your readers first after you start. Be useful, develop a rhythm of usefulness. Create meaning and then keep doing it, and then keep doing it, again and again. It’s out of those things that this thing transactional value happens. That’s where profit, I think, for most of us is going to come.

But the other thing that happens when you build this cycle of usefulness and meaning is that you find your readers start to tell other people about it. They evangelize what you are doing.
This is something we’ve noticed on our Facebook page recently. We get threads like this. This has come from earlier in the year, I just posted a link on Facebook this day. It wasn’t a very special link. This little stream of conversation happened afterwards. Nany said, “Halona, here’s that page I was telling you about.” Cody said, “Kyle, this is the page I was telling you about.” Mark says, “Matthew.” Didn’t say anything, just tagged the guy. We see that every day. Brandon did the same thing. Elizabeth said, “Jason read this.” Jason said, “Thank you.” Anna says, “Thank you.” I don’t know who she came into it but she said thank you too. Lorenda said, “Check out this Facebook page, like it and get their daily articles. They’re very good and I pick up a lot of good info here.”

This happens every day, now. It’s happening particularly in the last year since we’re sort of changing our approach, thinking about the change we want to take people on and delivering content that does that. This is how you grow your site, it's through this cycle of usefulness and meaning.

Here’s the thing, the thing I’ve noticed about people who are actually doing amazing things in our community. They’re actually doing this stuff already. Many of you are doing it. I guess, I just want to encourage you, if you’re in that journey of building usefulness, it takes time. I know some of you are frustrated at the moment. Facebook keeps changing the rules and things don’t always go right, and challenges come our way but persist with this stuff. It’s when we do it that we build something that actually makes the world a better place.

I want to finish with this last thought before we move on. 99.9%, probably, 99.99% of great bloggers are not awesome on their day one. Their awesomeness is the accumulation of the value that they create over time.

I really look forward to the next year. I can’t wait to show the slides of what you’ve achieved over the next year through providing value.

Well, there you have it. That was my keynote address from 2014 at the ProBlogger event which I think was being held up on the Gold Coast here in Australia. It was a great event and I hope you enjoyed listening along to that.

If you’ve got any feedback on today’s show, you can head over to the show notes where you can also get those slides at problogger.com/podcast/204. You could also give us some feedback over in the Facebook group, as well, problogger.com/group. We’ll get you into that group.

Next week, I do have another little recording for you of another one of our sessions because we’ll be holding our second event next week and after that, we’ll be back to the normal show. I hope you enjoy what I’ve got for you next week. I’ll be chatting with you in the upcoming episode too.

Thanks for listening! Chat with you, soon.

Before I go, I want to give a big shout out and say thank you to Craig Hewitt and the team at PodcastMotor who’ve been editing all of our podcasts for some time now. PodcastMotor have a great range of services for podcasters at all levels. They can help you set up your podcast but also offer a couple of excellent services to help you edit your shows and get them up with great show notes. Check them out at podcastmotor.com.

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5 Essential Blog Foundations for Strong SEO

Posted: 27 Jul 2017 07:00 AM PDT

5 Essential Foundations for Strong SEO

This is a post by ProBlogger's SEO expert, Jim Stewart.

Many bloggers start a blog with gusto, rushing to establish a blogging website and share their opinions and knowledge with the world. They choose a popular platform to build on, select an attractive theme with all the bells and whistles, sign up for hosting that appears value for money, before finally writing awesome content and waiting for the audience to explode and their rankings to rocket.

Then reality often sets in.

They slave away for months with much optimism only to find themselves languishing in the dark recesses of page two (or worse) on Google, while their competition revels in the attention lavished on those that sit comfortably in the top three spots on page one.

So what went wrong?

Well it's often because they've built their blogging site on foundations made of sand; unstable foundations that are at the mercy of Google's ever-changing algorithms, ones that can transform ranking stability into ranking free fall in the blink of an eye.

So what can you do to avoid the pitfalls when establishing your blog? Well, there are tried and trusted strategies to building a blog that can create robust SEO for future growth. These strategies should be the cornerstones of any new blog, ones that will create and maintain a strong foundation that will withstand and protect your blog from the fickle nature of Google updates.

1. Content Management System

Choosing the correct Content Management System (CMS) is imperative. I cannot recommend WordPress highly enough. Its popularity is such that it reportedly powers over 22% of all websites and is a widely used CMS blogging platform for good reason.

wix-vs-wordpress.png

Wix vs WordPress

WordPress is an open-source program that offers you the freedom and flexibility to customise your site to your liking while leaving you room to grow, there are thousands of free and paid plugins, and best of all it contains an in-built blogging platform.

Simplicity is the name of the game with WordPress. It is easy to download and install and just as easy to operate. WordPress also utilises search engine friendly code that not only makes it appealing to Google, but also easy to adjust your SEO with a multitude of plugins.

The admin control panel makes it easy to maintain updates and backups for both plugins and themes and can manage many media platforms, perfect for promoting your brand.

2. Yoast SEO

There are many useful plugins for WordPress but few more important than Yoast SEO. You could spend countless precious hours poring over your site, making adjustments and monitoring results. Yoast SEO will save you that time.

It is arguably the most important, not to mention effective, tool your site can wield. Yoast streamlines your site's SEO functions via one easy to use control panel where you can follow recommendations to effect real change to your SEO. Yoast SEO is not a one-size-fits-all plugin, and therefore will need some customisation to suit your individual site needs. Never fear though, as the process is simple using the inbuilt dashboard.

Once set up, Yoast SEO can be commanded to check each of your blog posts for SEO friendliness and report back using a sequence of coloured dots, green for good and red for, well, not so good! Yoast offers the ability to focus on areas of your site where SEO improvements are needed the most and can yield fantastic results when fine-tuned. (If you need help installing and setting up Yoast SEO, we have a comprehensive breakdown here.)

3. Hosting

Spend some time selecting your hosting solution. A poor choice, often based on price, can have a detrimental effect on your blogging site, whereas a fast hosting solution can result in huge increases in traffic. If you heed my advice and build your blog using WordPress then it is advisable to have your site hosted by a WordPress specialist.

For that, WP Engine (aff) is unbeatable. They are a dedicated WordPress host with satisfied customers in over 120 countries. Being an open source program, WordPress can be susceptible to certain flaws, such as security. That is why WP Engine is the trusted hosting name for the platform. Their custom designed architecture delivers a seamless and smooth running website that will grow with your blog.

Others benefits include superb customer service, all-important backups, high-level security, and a unique front-end that can help your site run up to six times faster. Site speed cannot be overstated as it contributes heavily towards a great user experience, one that Google values and can help your rankings. An optimal load time is under 0.5 seconds. A fast Domain Name System (DNS) lookup is also important. This system translates an easily remembered domain name into an IP address used for communication between computers. This conversion process takes time, so the faster your DNS, the better value for your blog.

4. Theme

There's a great thrill when it comes time to selecting a theme for your blog. WordPress has a theme for every blog, from photography to eCommerce and there's sure to be one perfect for you. These themes require no coding experience, as most include a control panel where you can customise colours, layouts, background images and the like.

While there are thousands of free and paid templates to choose from, you should not select one on design alone. Behind the theme are codes and architecture that will affect your SEO. Select a template that uses heading tags properly and not for aesthetics, otherwise you may be unwittingly harming your SEO.

An SEO Friendly Structure

From How to Select the Perfect Theme for Your Blog

No matter what other website owners are saying, SEO still is, and will remain, a very important element for the whole "getting popular on the internet" thing.

An SEO friendly theme is a really valuable asset. If you're planning on doing any kind of SEO work around your site, then such a theme is essential. And even if you don't have time for SEO, an SEO friendly theme can do a surprisingly big part of the work for you anyway.

Good SEO always starts with getting the basic characteristics of your site just right. Only then you can tackle link-building and other off-page SEO tasks.

How can you find out whether a theme is SEO friendly or not? Unfortunately, you can't know for sure until you start working with a given theme. However, there are still some things to look for when you're playing with a theme's live demo, or analyzing the screenshots of a theme.

  • Is there the ability to set the titles and descriptions for every post and page individually (including the homepage)?
  • Does the theme use <H> headings?
  • Are the categories and tags visible?
  • Is the layout clean and simple?
  • Does the theme support major SEO plugins?

Some of these factors can be seen when you're looking at a theme, while others are simply listed in the promotional materials of the theme. Make sure to pay attention to these considerations, though. The more SEO features a theme has, the better.

5. Brand

I'm a firm believer that brand is a ranking factor for Google. By that I mean that Google admits popularity is a ranking factor, saying, "URLs that are more popular on the Internet tend to be crawled more often to keep them fresher in our index."

Build your brand. Gone are the days of focusing on building backlinks. Increasing your audience will in turn increase your brand popularity, sending the Googlebot crawling your way more often and increasing rankings in the process. If your brand becomes synonymous with a product or service then Google will trust you and direct traffic your way.

You must also focus on building your brand and growing your audience outside of Google. Social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Twitter will all contribute to your brand's authority in the marketplace and will help drive rankings.

These five factors are prerequisites for building a healthy, stable, and durable blogging site. Rush in and sign up for items based on price, appearance or convenience and your blog will stagnate and possibly die. Get them right and you will have a stable platform that is flexible enough to grow with your blog and take advantage of Google updates long into the future.

The post 5 Essential Blog Foundations for Strong SEO appeared first on ProBlogger.

      

How You Can Use Your Influence to Help

Posted: 25 Jul 2017 07:00 AM PDT

Today on the blog we have Sarah Rosberg who founded the Australian Headquarters for charity Rafiki Mwema. I've interviewed Sarah to get a charity's perspective on how you can best help them with your influence as a blogger. Sarah's tips include the kinds of activities you can do that help (with some great examples), how to choose a cause to support and how to overcome some of the challenges of working with a charity.

{trigger warning to child sexual abuse}

LG: Tell us a little about how you started Rafiki Mwema and what it does?

SR: Rafiki Mwema was born from the need to support very young girls in Kenya who have been sexually abused.

Rafiki Mwema is a therapeutic safe house to help these little girls make sense of the horrors that have happened to them; allow them access to any medical treatment they need; support them through the court system; allow access to therapeutic support; and where possible to work with their families for a safe return to the home.

Photo of girls when they were going to close down the house

I worked in Kenya for many years (with another home) and I saw Anne Marie (from Play Kenya) do play therapy with some of the home's most abused children.  What I witnessed Anne Marie and Play Kenya achieve with their therapy gave me the  utmost respect and admiration for what they were doing.

We stayed in touch for years and one day; about 3 years ago she told me that they had run out of funds for Rafiki Mwema.  I knew closing down this home meant these girls  would have to go into other homes or back to their communities (most filled with huge violence and abuse) and wanted to do what I could to help

I decided to hold an online auction via my business page to raise funds for them. My aim was to raise 2 months' running costs ($10K) to get them out of trouble.. I asked for people in my online community to donate items that I could auction off.  I had a wonderful response and was able to raise $17K!

My auction banner for FB

This was a great result and it would keep Rafiki out of trouble for 3 months but what would happen then?  I had fallen for the girls while pouring myself into this auction and couldn't get them out of my head so I considered starting a charity in Australia for Rafiki Mwema to help keep them open long-term.  I had done started a charity  before for another organisation, so I knew how to do it, but with so many other obligations in my life… I DON'T HAVE THE TIME.. but I also realised, I DON'T HAVE A CHOICE.

Our first board meeting!

I started Rafiki Mwema and within 3 months from starting we had all of the girls fully sponsored.  The WWW is an amazing thing most of the time!!

LG: How did you reach out to bloggers to help raise awareness for Rafiki Mwema?

SR: When I was initially looking for help with the auction I was reaching out from my business page (web designer – Castle Design). I knew many bloggers from working over the years, so reached out to my clientele and friends via my Facebook page.

[Laney] It's worth noting that many larger charities and causes outsource their outreach to agencies. This can be confusing and conflicting for bloggers when they think the agency is being paid by the charity and yet there is no budget for the bloggers. In this case, please remember a) that a PR agency’s principle remit is to get free exposure for their client and is possibly doing it pro bono,  and b) charity is about giving. If you wouldn’t write about a charity unless you were paid to, maybe it’s not the right fit for you.

LG: What do you look for in an "influencer"? Does size matter?

Yes, of course, size does matter (in that the larger the reach the more potential awareness for the charity), but you only need ONE person to make a difference. You could help to reach the ONE person that could change everything. If a blogger came to me wanting to help my charity and they had 100 followers or 100,000 followers, I would treat them the same and welcome them with opens arms. What I look for in an influencer is someone who really cares. Passion and dedication to the cause matters more than audience numbers at the end of the day.

LG: What are the most valuable things bloggers can do to help a charity? What activities have the most impact?

SR: Raising awareness for a charity is invaluable because you never know who could see the information and fall in love with the cause. Bloggers could have an ad for the charity in their sidebar or regularly do shoutouts to their followers or include information in their newsletter.

Letter Campaign

Chantelle from Fat Mum Slim has done many different activities that I just LOVE. Mine and the kids' favourite campaign has been Letters for my Rafiki where she did a post about our kids in Kenya and how they love getting letters in the mail. She suggested people could write letters and send gifts or donations to them and used a hashtag #lettersformyrafiki. We still get letters in Kenya and it still makes the kids happy each and every time.

Some of our girls with their letters.

Gift Exchange

Another wonderful thing Chantelle has done each year is the gift exchange which is such a fun thing to do.

The Gift Exchange is a really fun, feel-good exercise where I partner people up so they can send on gifts to people they've never met before. People make new friends, receive happy mail, and just have a good old time.

On registration people donate $5 (more for accountability) and that comes straight to us for Rafiki Mwema!

Crowdfunding

Crowdfunding is a strange one – it can go either way. We did a crowdfunding campaign with blogger Constance Hall  and we absolutely smashed it. $200K in a matter of weeks ($150K in 1 day!). But, making a crowdfunding campaign successful really does depend on numbers and a reputable cause that has trust. If people looked into Rafiki, they would see the history, the following, the updates and the success stories. They can also see (and call/email) myself and my team so they know it's legitimate. All these things will make a crowdfunding successful. Constance also has a following unlike many others – they love her and trust whatever she trusts and loves. We are lucky she found her way to us (via one of my sponsors). ONE person can change everything.

LG: What do you think the bloggers you've worked with would say are the benefits of helping Rafiki Mwema?

SR: The ONLY benefit of helping Rafiki Mwema is the good feeling of making a difference. Being able to see the change first hand and knowing that was because of YOU. There is no better feeling, and no amount of money or payment could beat that.

LG: How should a blogger go about choosing and approaching a cause to support?

Of course it depends on your love/passion. Mine is children and Kenya. I can't explain the  Kenya side, but knowing children are suffering, I cannot sit back and do nothing.

Figure out  what your passion is – Animals, Education, Children etc – and then start looking for a charity that helps. It's pretty easy to look in to a charity and see if they are legitimate. Check their Facebook, Instagram, website and go from there. There are so many charities out there. If you don't find the one you are passionate about helping, then why don't you start one? Trust me, if I can do it you can do it!

LG: Are there any barriers, difficulties, negatives that bloggers should be aware of?

SR: Keeping in mind if you help one charity you will get requests to help more (I get asked all the time to help other charities even though I run one myself!).  I have seen this time and time again and huge guilt does come with having to say no.  My suggestion is to find your charity and stick with that one.  You can't do everything.  I WANT to help everyone out there who needs help but that is impossible.  But what I CAN do is help these 66+ kids in Kenya and I can do it really well. I have to focus on them and just politely decline and explain that it takes all my energy.  You can just say that you have your charity of choice that you support.

If you ever post something that is hard to read it is very important to begin the post with something like a {trigger warning to child sexual abuse}, as relevant to the content.

No doubt you will have some followers who don't support your cause, or argue with you why you support this cause and not that one. If you are passionate about your cause and why you do support it you will be comfortable with your reply to them.

You will never please everyone and that is not what charity is about.

LG: Do you have any final advice for bloggers?

If anyone would like advice on how to help a charity or even start a charity I would welcome they get in touch with me.

I will continue to fight until the day that I die.  I will speak up about the unspeakable, I will continue to make people uncomfortable and I will always be the voice for the children that the majority of the world has chosen to ignore.

If I can teach my daughter one thing, it would be to honour the wonderful life she has been given by helping those who have not been so lucky.  No matter who they are or who you are, cut us open and we are all the same.

Every single one of us.

Sarah runs a design company called Castle Design as well as Rafiki Mwema.

You can find out more about the work Rafiki Mwema does here. You can also follow their journey on Facebook and Instagram.

 

The post How You Can Use Your Influence to Help appeared first on ProBlogger.

      

203: How to Approach Influencers in Your Niche

Posted: 24 Jul 2017 02:00 AM PDT

how to reach out to influencers in your niche

How to Connect With Influencers in Your Niche

Today I want to share some teaching on how to approach influencers and other well known people in your niche (or outside it too).

One of the most powerful ways to grow your profile, audience and brand is to connect with others in your niche. The benefits of doing it can be many and varied – the opportunities that flow from these interactions can be pretty cool for the growth of your blog….

BUT doing it the wrong way can also hurt your blog and brand – so I want to share what NOT to do.

Links and Resources for How to Approach Influencers in Your Niche

Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view

Good day there. My name is Darren Rowse. I'm the blogger behind ProBlogger.com – a blog, podcast, event, job board, and a series of eBooks, all designed to help you as a blogger to grow an amazing blog, to create great content that's going to change the life of your readers and to build profit around that blog too. You can learn more about ProBlogger and our upcoming events over at problogger.com.

In today's episode, episode number 203, I want to share some teaching on how to approach influencers and other well known people in your niche or even outside your niche too. Some of what I'm going to share today actually works really well on a personal level if you admire a comedian, or a musician, or that type of person as well.

One of the most powerful ways to grow your profile, and your audience, and brand is to connect with others in your niche, particularly those who are prominent themselves. The benefits of doing this can be many and varied. The opportunities that can flow from these interactions can be pretty cool for the growth of your blog, but doing it the wrong way can also hurt your blog and brand as well.

Today, I want to share some things to do, the approach that I take with approaching influencers but also some things not to do.

You can find today's show notes over at problogger.com/podcast/203 where I will share some further reading as well. There'll also be links on the show notes to our Facebook group, which you can find at problogger.com/group, a thriving group and community of bloggers. We've got some new things going in there at the moment which I'll tell you about at the end of the podcast today.

Also, you'll find on our show notes today the last chance to get tickets for our Aussie events which are happening in the next few days in Brisbane and Melbourne. You can find more details on those Australian events at problogger.com/events and our Dallas event in Dallas, Texas later in the year, in October at problogger.com/success.

Now, let's talk about approaching influencers in your niche. Today, we're talking about how to connect with influencers in your niche. Today's podcast really comes about after earlier in the week, I listened to a Facebook Live talk by someone else. I'm not going to mention who they are because I'm going to critique what they say. This person was talking about this very topic, how to leverage influencers to grow your blog.

Now, the topic is a good one. As I said at the top of the show, I think that getting to know other people in your niche can bring many benefits to your blog. It's not just about growing traffic and them sending you traffic. It's also about growing your profile, growing your credibility, making friends, and helping them as well. It's a mutual thing in my mind. But after 15 minutes of listening to this Facebook Live, I found myself getting very frustrated, and the reason for this was that the person described a system, a systematized approach that was incredibly formulaic and it was anything but personal.

They actually used a tool to run all of their approaches. The tool I'm not going to name because I really don't believe in this approach. But the tool itself allowed you to create a sequence of emails that is going to be sent to influencers to get their attention. The emails were all set up ahead of time and depending upon whether the influencer responded to you, it would then send them more emails at different intervals. You can set them up for every 24 hours or every 48 hours.

For example, the first email might be a friendly introductory email where you mention that you're a fan of their site. If they don't respond to that, a second email might be, "You might have missed my last email." The third one might be something funny but a little bit more direct to about, "Why you were ignoring my emails?" The fourth one could be a more direct one, perhaps even strongly worded that you're disappointed that they didn't respond.

The person who was teaching this system actually had these templates. As he went through them, I recognized the emails because I get these emails everyday. If the influencer responds at any point, then you can have other emails in the system that you go back, these canned responses asking them to do whatever it is that you're trying to get them to do. Or you can take over and get a little bit more personal with your responses at that point.

As I listened to this presentation, on some levels, it made sense. I could see how it might work in some cases but what annoyed me most about it was that this person said that once you've got this email setup, that you can then scale it and then you can put in 10, or 20, or 100 influencer's names and email addresses and then get this system going with hundreds of people at once. All you have to do is add in their first name and their site's URL and then email address and it will just take over and it will run the system for you.

As he described this, it made me remember all the emails that I've received that have been the same templated formulaic response. The person doing the Facebook Live said, "If you buy this product," and it was hundreds of dollars to get this and it was a monthly product as well, they also include all the email addresses of influencers as well, which annoyed me even more because I know I'm on some of those lists. I was pretty annoyed with this presentation.

I guess the main reason that I was annoyed is that I get these emails everyday. I can spot them a mile off. Whilst I didn't know the name of the tool, I could see what was going on. It might be that these emails are slightly personalized. They usually have my name. Sometimes, they don't. Sometimes, they say, "Insert name here." You can see that they forgot to insert the name. They might have my site's URL but they're obviously not personal.

When they come at predetermined intervals, every 48 hours in a sequence, I simply trash them and mark them as spam. I don't like to do that because I like to reply to emails that I get. I do as much as I can. It begins to clutter the inbox and I get 10 or so of these everyday and it wastes a lot of my time.

Here's the thing though. I know that the bulk of people who are sending those emails and buying these very expensive tools have good intentions. I know some people listening to this podcast probably use them as well. They're being sold these tools, which can be very expensive and promised amazing results but without knowing it, I know these good people who are using these tools are potentially hurting their brand.

Here's what I want to say today, is that there are better ways to do it. I talk to big influencers. I'm a small fry but I talk to big influencers and what I experienced personally is just the tip of the iceberg. I spoke to one big influencer last week. He actually asked me not to mention his name but he told me that he gets over 100 emails everyday that are the same formulaic approaches. Many times he looks at the emails and can see that people haven't even bothered to customize the emails. They're exactly the same for multiple people. They're using the swipe files.

It was interesting to chat with him because whilst he was really angry about getting all of these emails and wasting so much time, on the other hand he said, "It's actually not that hard to get on my radar." He's actually someone who is very easy to get in touch with, someone who has collaborated with people many times over who have approached him the right way. But people who go this new automated route never, ever succeed with him. He just trashes them. He marks their emails as spam. It really doesn't build their brand at all to approach him in this way.

I actually asked this influencer if I could interview him for this particular podcast and he was a bit hesitant to do that because he didn't want to trigger hate amongst people who were using those tools and he also didn't want to trigger a flood of people trying to approach him because he's a very busy guy. He did give me some advice. I've compiled it into today's topic and added some of my own thoughts as well. I really do genuinely hope that these help you, for those of you who are trying to reach out to influencers.

Let me go through some of these tips. The first one is to have realistic expectations. Let me start by saying that whether you use the automation route or whether you take the approach that I'm going to talk about today, not all influencers are going to respond to you. They get a lot of approaches and they have a lot of interactions everyday.

The person that I am actually talking about, this anonymous influencer that I'm basing today's podcast on, he has over a million social media connections. In fact, there's several million when you add all the networks together. He gets a ton of approaches everyday, not only the automated one, but other ones as well. He does actually interact at a remarkable level. I just looked at his Twitter account. He replied to over 100 people today in the last 24 hours on Twitter so he's interacted a lot there. He also did a one hour Q&A session on Facebook Live today.

He does a lot of interacting but even at that level of interaction, he tells me that he's aware he can't get back to everyone. He feels bad about it. Now, not at all influencers come anywhere near what this influencer does. They're busy people. They get approached all day, everyday so don't be surprised if you either hear nothing back or you might get a response back that isn't what you hoped for. They may be shutting you down in some way, or are saying no to you, or maybe you got something bad from an assistant and not them personally.

But don't let this stop you. You never know who you can interact with. Make the approach and try to build a relationship with these influencers but know that not all of them are capable. They just don't have enough hours in the day in many cases. Don't let it stop you making the approach but also go in with realistic expectations.

As I said at the top of the show, I've actually had some amazing interactions over the years with people that I never thought would respond to me, people in my niches who are much bigger than me, movie stars, singers, comedians, business people, really a variety of different people who I thought would probably ignore my approach but who did get back to me. It's amazing how approachable people are. It's amazing how interactive some people are but go into it with realistic expectations and knowing it may not work the way that you expected it. That's my number one tip. Be realistic.

Number two, don't stalk. Don't be stalker. All of what I'm going to share with you today is about being useful, it's about helping influencers, it's about reaching out and helping to give them a win, about helping them to achieve what they want to achieve. But if you're not careful, some of what I'm going to share today can look a little bit like stalking. Yes, be enthusiastic, reach out, but be aware of not overstepping boundaries and maybe have an accountability buddy that you share what you're doing with them, bounce your ideas around so that they can maybe say to you, "Hey, that's starting to look a bit stalker-ish." Just be aware that when you are reaching out, people are willing to interact with you but don't overstep the boundaries. I'll touch on that a few times during today's episode.

Number three tip is to be someone worth knowing, which sounds a little bit odd. When you reach out to someone, the chances are that before they respond, particularly if you're asking them something, asking them to do something, or approaching them in a personal way, many times, before they reply to you, they will do a bit of digging. They will check out who you are. They will do some research. They might check out your blog. They might look on your social media accounts. They're going to want to know who this person is that's making an approach.

I guess the question I want to ask is what are they going to find? Perhaps the best thing you can do before you start reaching out to people is to build something worth being found. Show that you're a genuine person, that you're a credible person, that you're a trustworthy person, that you have expertise perhaps, or that other people like you. Build some social proof. I know this is hard if you're just starting out. You can't just conjure this stuff up but the more that you can show that you're a worthwhile person, that you're worth being known in some way, the more likely they are to respond in a positive way. This takes time to build of course.

Even if it's your Twitter account, does your Twitter account look good? When they look at your Twitter account, are they going to see you complaining all the time about things? Are they going to see you talking about the topic that they're interested in? You can think about what are they going to think when they dig a little bit deeper? Work hard at creating a great blog or a great podcast, a great Twitter account, a great whatever it is that you do so that when they do a little bit of digging, they will be interested, they'll be intrigued. They will see you as a potentially credible source of information and worth being known.

This is all before you even make the approach. This is something just to keep working on, I guess.

Number four tip is to know them before you know them. That is to do a little bit of research, to do a little bit of preparation. Most of what I'm going to share today can be helped a lot by doing a little bit of work before you make the approach. Try to understand who the person is. Try to understand what their goals are, what their motives are, knowing a little bit about their history. What is their story? What are their values? What do they like? What do they dislike? Knowing all of these things will help you to create a better impression and to serve them better. It will inform the approach that you take.

Do a little bit of digging. Look at their social media accounts. Read their blog if they've got one. Listen to their podcast. Try to understand who they are underneath the fact that they're an influencer. Again, this is one of those areas you don't want to be stalking them. You don't want to be trying to hack into their Facebook account or getting too personal, but having an understanding of who they are is going to go a long way.

The other thing that's a part of this is to do a little bit of research into where they engage most. This is really important. They might have a Twitter account but do they engage on their Twitter account or are they using it more to broadcast? They may actually prefer to do their engaging on LinkedIn, or they may prefer to do their engagement in Facebook group, or they may prefer to do it via Facebook Live. Really, most influencers have a variety of social media accounts but if you go and do some analysis, you'll find that they have a preferred place that they like to interact.

Sometimes, they communicate this. Sometimes, if you look at their contact page on their blog, they might say, "Hey, I hang out in this Facebook group a lot. Come and ask me questions there." Sometimes, you need to do a little more digging as well.

I'm a good example of this. I have a lot of social media accounts. I don't use Instagram very much at all. I do have the account there. When I go on holidays, I tend to post more there but I don't tend to interact much there. I've got a Twitter account where I interact a little bit more but for me, Facebook is where I interact more: Facebook group, Facebook Lives that I do on certain times at the week as well. If you were to dig into me, you would find that Facebook is probably a better place to begin to build those relationships. I'm trying to communicate that more and more as well to help people to find me where I'm most accessible.

Do a bit of research into who the person is.

Once you've done that research, one of the key things that you should be thinking about is what are the goals of this influencer? How can I serve them? I guess the fifth thing that I want to say is to serve. Serve first, ask later would be the tip that I'd give you. In your research, what are they trying to achieve? What are their goals? What are their passions? What are the outcomes that they are looking for? Most influencers, it's fairly obvious what they're trying to achieve. There might be an offer. They're probably trying to sell more books. They may be a podcaster. They're probably trying to get more listeners to their podcast.

Begin to think about what is it that they want, what is a win for them, and how can I give them a win in some way. Some of the wins that online influencers are wanting are going to be pretty obvious. For example, if they're a blogger, most of them are going to want to increase their reach. They're going to want either more traffic, or a bigger audience, or a bigger profile. That's something that most online influencers are going to want. That doesn't come and go. It's just something that they all typically want.

Most online influencers want engagement. Most online influencers want some kind of conversion, some sort of monetization. They're trying to sell something whether it's a product, or a service, or getting people to a website where they convert by getting people to look at their ads. Most online influencers are also trying to create content. These are things that influencers are interested in. I guess the question is how can you serve them? How can you help them to achieve those goals? I'm going to dig into those things in a moment.

There are also other times in an influencers life where they will want something specific, something that's a little bit more time sensitive, that they may be looking for a particular outcome over the next week or over the next month. These are really key things to latch into and to understand. Are they launching a new book? Are they launching a new product or a new service? Are they supporting a not for profit project that they're passionate about? Are they launching a new social media account or exploring a new medium that they're trying to get more traction on? Maybe they're launching a YouTube account or they just started doing Facebook Lives.

When influencers are starting new things or they're promoting something specific, two things happen. One, they get really busy but two, they often become very open to being approached if you can help them with that particular thing. If you noticed an influencer doing something time specific, this can, at times, be a great time to approach them. They may be more open to engaging in some way if you are in a position to help them with an outcome that they're looking for. Be aware of their ongoing wins that they're looking for, the outcomes that they're looking for, but also, be really aware of those key times when they're about to launch something. Often, they'll tell you when it's coming.

I was looking at one online influencer the other day and he said he's got a new course coming out next month. That's a signal that maybe I should be reaching out to him and saying, "Hey, I noticed you've got this launch coming up. Can I interact with you? Can I support you in that in some way?" Be aware of those types of things. What I want to do now is just look at some of those objectives that an influencer might have. Some of them are more of the ongoing ones. Hopefully, this will give you a few more tangible tactical things that you can do, although I hesitate to use that word, tactical, because I really do want this to be about relationship.

Don't systematize it. Don't see this as a tactic. Actually be a good human being and build a relationship with them in some ways because ultimately, that's going to give you and the other person the biggest win and it's going to be a lot more fun and satisfying along the way as well.

What are some of the objectives that an influencer might have that you could help with? The first one might be that they are looking for engagement. They might want more engagement in some way. The influencer might be a blogger. They might be a podcaster. They might be a video blogger, doing a live video. In all of this cases, one of the things they want is people to engage with what they do. It's just not satisfying as a blogger or a live video to create great content and to have no one interact with it in any way.

One of the simplest things that you can do is to comment. Leave comments, leave replies on their blog posts. Reply to their social media. Don't just say that was good, nice post. Go the extra mile by being constructive, by adding something to what they're doing. If they ask questions, answer the questions. If they're teaching something, give some examples of their teaching. Ask questions of them.

One of the things that I think can really get on people's attention is when you go above and beyond with the comments that you leave. I can think back a number of times over the last year where people have gone above and beyond leaving comments on my blog, on my Facebook, in the Facebook group, actually showing that they are not just reading and saying nice posts but that they're actually interested in engaging in some way. That's one of the most satisfying things for a blogger, a podcaster, or someone on social media.

Be highly engaged. Add to the conversation in some way. That's great. Being a highly engaged audience member is great but you can actually take this further when it comes to this idea of helping someone to build engagement. You can actually help them to build community as well. One of the things I've noticed is that there's real opportunity to join in and help influencers build this community around what they're doing.

Let me give you a really good example of this. This is about six or seven years ago. I noticed a blogger was running a Twitter chat. It was a Twitter chat that was fairly well attended in their particular niche and I decided to join in on that Twitter chat. This blogger had never run a Twitter chat before and so I decided to make myself an unofficial community manager for this Twitter chat. I know I didn't tell the blogger I was doing it and I didn't want to be too over the top with it so I kind of restrained myself a little bit.

But I decided I was going to ask some good questions and I was going to respond to as many people as I could in that Twitter chat. My goal is not to build my profile. My goal was to make it the best Twitter chat that it could possibly be. At the end of the Twitter chat, the other blogger messaged me privately and said, "Hey, that was amazing. Could you come back next week to do it as well?"

They didn't actually know me from ProBlogger. They didn't know my profile whatsoever. It was actually completely off topic and random that I was on this particular Twitter chat but I had participated in Twitter chats before. I knew what made a good Twitter chat and so I decided just to be the best participant in that community that I could.

By me doing that, it actually drew others into the conversation. They actually really value that. If someone's doing a Facebook Live, don't just leave comments answering their questions or asking them questions. Take notice of the other people on the chat and respond to their questions. Say, "Yeah, that's a good idea." Not just to the person doing the Facebook Live, but to other people who are commenting as well. Ask them questions. Try and engage them. Welcome them into the community.

You want to be a little bit careful here. You can go too far with this. This is where you can be seen to be almost trying to take over someone else's community. You want to be very careful there. Don't stalk them. Don't come across in a way that you're just trying to build your own profile. You want to be really careful that you're being seen as someone who's serving that community in some way.

Another thing that could work at this kind of juncture is to actually volunteer in some way. It maybe after you've done some of this type of thing and try to build engagement, you might want to reach out to the influencers and say, "Hey, I've really enjoyed your Facebook Lives. Would it be helpful if someone was to assist you in them in some way? I'm happy to volunteer my time." Or maybe it's a Twitter chat, "I'm happy to participate in that. Could I prepare some questions for you? Can I serve you in any way to help you to make that Twitter chat run better?" It may be that it's better to participate and then volunteer to take on those type of roles as well.

Another role that you might want to volunteer to participate in is to moderate in the Facebook group as well, although you probably want to be a good, active member of the community before you'd make that kind of volunteering offer.

Help someone to build engagement I guess is the first thing that is going to help them to have a win. Another thing that many influencers are trying to do is to build traffic and reach to build their profile. This is a goal that most online influencers want to achieve so how can you help them to do that? You may not have a massive audience yourself. You may not think that you're going to be able to send them any traffic but even you attempting to help them can be a powerful thing, something that's going to get on their radar.

A few practical things that you can do to help them to grow their audience, share their stuff, share their content, retweet their tweets if you think it's going to be relevant to your audience, and take their blog posts and share them on your social media, link to them from your blog. You may even want to reach out to them and ask, "Can I interview you on my blog to introduce you to my audience?" Sometimes, that may not be possible. They might not be willing to invest the time into an interview but even just sending them a simple question that you get their opinion on, a one question interview, "Hey, could you answer this question? I would use it in my blog." Those types of things expose your audience to this particular influence and help them to grow their profile.

If they're not interested in that type of interview type of thing, maybe just do a case study on them. Maybe you can find enough information on what they've done and what they've achieved in the past so you can write a case study on who they are, how they've grown their business, how they've grown their influence. You might find a quote and use one of their quotes in your articles.

Link to them from other places. Maybe you write guest posts for other blogs. Don't just link in your guest posts to your own content, link to other influencers. This happened to me a few years ago now. A blogger that I've never heard of before wrote a post in a big business publication. It was a guest post. It wasn't something that were paid for. That link in their article, I think it was from Businessweek or Forbes, one of those, that sent a ton of traffic across to my site. This blogger could never have sent me that much traffic but by getting an article in a bigger publication and linking to me from that, they certainly got on my radar. You're writing guest posts, don't promote yourself, promote other people. See that as an opportunity to help someone else achieve their goals as well.

Maybe giving a talk, a presentation, mention these influencers in those talks as well. It's amazing how many times people will tweet the influencer that you're talking about in a talk on those occasions. It may be that you can introduce that influencer to someone else that they need to meet, that might help them. Be a connector. Perhaps, you can't send them traffic directly but perhaps, you could suggest to another blogger that they link to something that this person has written. Actually be the connector. Help to set them up in some way.

Maybe you could recommend that someone in mainstream media interview them. I remember years ago now, a reader of Digital Photography School, when I was just starting out that blog, they got me an interview in The New York Times. Just as I was starting my blog, this reader thought I was doing something interesting and so they sent a random email to a reporter at The New York Times and that reporter emailed me and asked me to interview me. Maybe you could be that type of person to help them to grow in some way.

Help them to build their audience. When you do these types of things, let them know what you're doing. You don't need to boast about it, but if you've linked to them in your blog, if you've linked to them in a guest post, just send them an email or send them a message saying, "Hey, I mentioned you here." That is enough. That will get on their radar. Send them a quick message, those types of things.

The accumulation of all those little things that you can be doing, that actually has a big impact. If the influencer is trying to sell something, how can you help them to sell more of that thing? Maybe you could become an affiliate, maybe you could write a review of their products and services, maybe you can recommend their product on social media, but here's one of the cool things that you can do. Send them a testimonial. People who are selling stuff, they love getting testimonials that they can use. If someone's selling an ebook, buy the ebook and send them a paragraph of what you think about that ebook that they can then use.

You may even want to send a photo. But here's even cooler. Send them a video. Send them a video testimonial. Send them an audio testimonial if they have got a podcast. These types of things are going to help them to sell more of their thing. Again, it's all about trying to work out what is it that they're trying to achieve and how can you be useful in that.

Another last thing that you can do, many influencers are trying to create content. You can participate in the content creation process. It may be that you have an idea for a blog post that they could write, something that they've never written about before. You may even go to the effort of putting a title and three points that they could cover into it. Actually help them to create that blog post. Maybe it's about asking them questions that they might want to write about.

Maybe, you could actually create some content for them as well. Maybe, you could create a little jingle for their podcast. Maybe, you could create a meme that they could share on social media. Maybe, you could create a social graphic that they could share that promotes one of their posts. Create some little pieces of content that they can share. It may not be much, but even just little things that can be useful to them, little graphics that they can use on their Twitter account, for example. Things that they can use in their own content, to improve their content. It's actually going to make you the impression.

Maybe, it's doing research for them into a particular topic. Maybe, it's finding some data that they might find useful. Maybe, it's even letting them know if there's an error in their content, a spelling mistake or something that's not quite working or a broken link. You need to be a bit careful about those ones. You want to probably do it in private if you can, not call them out, be polite, and be kind in a way that you critique those types of things. But those are the types of things that help them to create better content. That makes an impression upon people.

A few more tips. This is a big one. This probably already comes through a few times in what I've said, but it's to be human. Whilst I'm calling these influencers influencers, they're not really influencers. They're human beings. They have good days. They have bad days. They get hurt. They get angry. They feel joy. They have questions and problems of their own as well as questions and solutions that they give other people, so answer their questions.

If they are tweeting that they've got a question or they've got a problem, research the solution to that problem, actually serve them in that way. Support the courses and passions that they have. Encourage them when you notice they're going through a tough time. If they're tweeting about a problem they've got, send them a word of encouragement. Celebrate their wins. Notice their efforts. Notice the things that they're trying to do. Notice their strengths. Laugh with them.

One of the best things you can do is people often blow off steam on Twitter. They might mention that they're watching Game of Thrones, the season opener of that. Some light hearted banter, a well timed pun, sharing a funny GIF or a meme can go a long way, even if it's completely off topic. If they have shown a part of themselves to be human, show a part of yourself to be human as well. Maybe even send them a gift. You want to be a bit careful about gifts. You don't want to do anything too creepy there, but you know, a meaningful gift, something physical that you can send them in the post, can actually go a long way as well.

I did this a few years ago. I noticed a movie star. I'm not going to mention who it is because I don't want a big note, but this particular movie star was starting a blog. This was 10 years ago now. I decided to send this movie star my book in the post. I didn't really do it with the agenda that they would link to it or anything and they didn't but I got this really nice email back saying, "Hey, thanks. No one else really noticed I started my blog. It didn't really work but I appreciate you reaching out in that way." Those types of things can really create a big impression. Be human.

Another thing to try is to be memorable where you can. This is really hard. It's not always possible to do. But if you could do something out of the blue, something surprising, or something funny, or something really smart, or something really generous, that can actually create a memory that can be a very powerful thing. It may also be a part of your brand. It can help you to stand out.

For example, I know one blogger who's brand is that he always wears bright colored eyeglasses. He must have 50 pairs of them. Almost everyday, he wears a different pair of glasses. It's part of his brand. It's the type of thing that people remember. Again, it's not something you can just do but if you can build something memorable into the approaches that you make, that can really go a long way not only to a first impression, but to create a first impression that lasts in some way. Maybe, it's the way you use your sense of humor.

This is another one to be a bit careful about. But I know one blogger who's very good at giving constructive criticism. He gets on really big influencer's radars by doing something that feels really risky. He points out things that they could improve upon. He does it in such a way that the person actually feels really good about it. You might find a mistake in something that they've written or an improvement that they could make to some content that they've made or to a product. He points out what are their weaknesses but he has this way of doing it that the person actually feels like he's being very constructive, very generous, and very helpful.

If you want to take that approach, it feels risky to do it but it can actually create a massive impression. I've seen this happen to me a number of times. One example that comes to mind is when I started this podcast. A few weeks after launching this podcast, I got an email from one of our event attendees at an Aussie ProBlogger event, an attendee called Rachelle Colbert.

Rachelle has experience in radio and television and so she's someone who I knew about. We've not really spoken a great deal but she sent me an email on this day, a few weeks after my podcast launched. She had recorded me a personal podcast. It was like 20 or 30 minutes of advice, of ways that I can improve my podcast. She pointed out the things that I wasn't so good at and things that I wasn't doing in a good way. She's actually a radio person so I knew she had some credibility there. One of the reasons I probably did persist with all 20 minutes of that recording was that I knew she was going to give good advice. But I could also tell through her recording that she genuinely wanted to help and she wasn't just being critical, she was being constructively critical. That really came across in the way she said it.

If you do it, if you want to stand out and be memorable by pointing out criticism, be constructive, show you care, and do it in private where you can as well. Be genuine with your criticism. This example really leads me to my next point, is to personalize your approach.

In this world where influencers are being bombarded by automated personality-less approaches, make your communications as personal as you can. Rachelle sending me a 20 minute personal podcast that no one else would ever listen to, for her going to that length to send me a message, no one's ever done that for me before. 20 minutes may have been too long if I hadn't known who she was in the past and we've not interacted before but the medium she chose was really smart. Record an audio that allows the person to hear your voice, to understand you are genuine, to hear some of your personality, and to be reminded that it's a human being on the other side of the approach and not just words on the screen.

Sending audio is so easy to do. Facebook Messenger now allows it. You can record it on your computer and send it in an email. There are so many ways to send audio. Another option is to record video. I'm seeing this more and more lately, people sitting in front of a webcam or a phone or even doing a Screencast and sending that video. It shows that you've gone through some effort and that you're a person as well.

Lastly, I guess, with personal approaches, when possible, meeting the person in person can create a really positive impression too. Just don't stalk. Here's my advice again. Don't stalk. Also, be aware that if you're approaching someone at a conference, it may not be the best time for them to remember you because they're probably being approached by a lot of people. If they're a speaker at a conference, often, they're being bombarded by people asking questions. So, yes, meet them but follow up with another message, whether it be text, or video, or a message on social media in some way.

A few last tips, a really quick one. Where you can leverage mutual connections, sometimes, getting someone else that the influencer knows to introduce you, can speed things up. I find that really works a lot. Using something like LinkedIn which allows you to do that can be one way to do that, but I personally would try and do it in another way because a lot of people are introducing people on LinkedIn that they don't really know. If there's a mutual connection, leverage that in some way if you can.

One of the last things I want to say is to really focus upon building these kind of relationships before you need something. This is the last thing I would say is I get a lot of first contacts from people that come with an ask. Whilst I certainly am open to responding and working with people that I've never heard of before, the reality is I'm much more likely to want to connect with someone and help someone that I feel like I've had an ongoing connection with. I'm much more open to people asking me to do things or asking me for a favor or asking me to participate in what they're doing if that relationship didn't start with that.

Start these relationships with an open ended attitude. I really love what Sonia Simone over at Copyblogger writes on this particular topic. She actually has a really great article that I'll link to in the show notes today, with 10 tips for connecting with influencers. Some of it has got some overlap with what I've said today but she actually uses some tactical advice as well that I haven't covered. But the last thing she says, I want to read it to you. I hope Simone doesn't mind. Her last point is it doesn't always work the way you thought it would.

This is what she wrote. She says, "Way back when I started my first blog, I secretly imagined that one day, I was going to have tea and crumpets with Seth Godin everyday. Turns out, I can't really eat crumpets. All that gluten is not good for me. Also, possibly more to the point, Seth just wasn't that interested. To be clear, he's always been very nice, just not on the daily crumpets level nice. On my path, one of my goals was to someday develop a good working relationship with Seth Godin. Things didn't work out exactly as I had visualized but a bunch of other good things happened on that path and I did end up building great working relationships with lots of other amazing people. You have to follow the path you're actually on, which sometimes bears only slight resemblance to the one that was originally in your head. The plan is nothing. Planning is everything, Dwight Eisenhower once said. Do have goals. Do have some folks in mind that you'd love to create professional relationships with and then do a bunch of epic stuff. Be a good egg. Know your topic and make yourself useful and see where the real path leads. It's going to be somewhere good. Just be ready for a few interesting twists."

I think this is so important and it really comes back to I guess what I said at the top, many times you'll try and get to know someone, you'll reach out to an influencer, sometimes, they won't reply, sometimes, it will lead to nothing at all, but sometimes, it will lead to something that you didn't expect. Many of the times that I've approached people, I've approached with one thing in mind and something else comes out of that interaction as well. It may be that that person is a stepping stone to meeting someone else. It may be that what you pitch that person, ask that person, they say no to but they have another idea that could end up being a fruitful collaboration in some way.

Build the relationships first. Actually reach out to people and who knows where these things will lead to.

Now, last thing I want to do with this episode is to finish off with some words that my anonymous influencer friend wrote down for me to share. It's his list of five things to do and five things not to do. This is what he writes. He says don't be a robot. Don't give false flattery. Don't be negative or a gossip. Don't be a fan boy or a fan girl. Don't be selfish.

And then his do's, he says be generous, be constructive, be confident, be engaging, and be human. I hope something of what I've shared today is helpful to you. Reach out to influencers. You never know where these things may lead to.

You can find today's show notes with that link to Sonia Simone's amazing article over on Copyblogger. The show notes are at problogger.con/podcast/203.

Last thing I'll say, and I hinted this at the top of the show, is that we've made some changes in our ProBlogger Facebook group over the last week. The group is now growing. It's almost up to 8,000 members. As things grow, we need to adapt, evolve, and change things up. A few things that we've done, firstly, we have changed it from being a public group to a closed group. It's not secret but now, if you'll look at it and you're not a member, you can't see what's going on inside, which makes it a little bit more private. A few people were reporting that threads were showing up in their friends' feeds and things like that. Now, that won't happen. If you want to ask questions and you don't want your readers or other people to see it, only people in the community are going to see them.

We've also started using hashtags in our group a lot more. I've asked people to only start new threads that start with one or two hashtags. Either ask, #ask, and in that case, you are asking a question or #tip, where you are leaving a tip. We really want the group to be a place where people help one another. So they're asking questions, talking about the problems that they have, and sharing tips that they've got as well.

We also asked people not to share links in the group as well. We've all been part of Facebook groups where it's just the link sharing goes on and on. It becomes a very self promotional place. We've asked people to actually share the advice that they've got in the thread itself with the tip rather than sharing a link to something that they've written elsewhere. That certainly helped to cut down the amount of threads that we've got, but also made the threads we've got more useful.

The last thing we've been doing in the Facebook group is regular thread. Every Monday, we're now doing goals. What's your goal of the week thread. I start that or Laney, who works with me starts that off and then everyone responds to that. That's Mondays. Wednesdays is hump day hurdles. What is the biggest challenge you've got this week? What's the problem that you've got this week? It's about sharing those problems but then we encourage people to be the solution to the problems that each other has and so you share your problem then you look through the list and find someone else that has a problem that you can be a solution for. That's on Wednesdays.

Fridays is win day. That's a day where we invite you to share something that you've done during the week that has been a win. That is an opportunity for you to point at a post that you've written or to link to something that you've feel proud about. We are allowing you to share your links and those types of things, but only in those types of threads as well.

We had some really positive responses to what we're doing in the group. I get a lot of personal messages from people saying, "Thank you. This group has helped me level up in my blogging." If you are looking for a community that's supportive, that's really positive, very constructive, do join the Facebook group. Go to problogger.com/group and you'll be forwarded into the Facebook group, or you'll find a link to that in our show notes, or if you do a search on Facebook as well.

Thanks so much for listening to this podcast. I'm amazed every week when I look at the stats of the amount of people who are engaging, listening, and sharing the journey with us in this. It's a real honor to be a part of that and I look forward to connecting with you maybe at one of our events in the coming weeks or in our Facebook group as well.

The last thing I'll say is that over the next couple of weeks, I will be at our Australian events as this podcast goes out. We've got a bit of a special treat for you for the next two episodes of the podcast as well. Be a bit different to normal so I hope you enjoy what we've got planned for you while I'm off at the ProBlogger events. We're going to give you a taste of what goes on at our events in this podcast.

Thanks for listening and I'll chat with you next week in one of those episodes, episode 204.

How did you go with today's episode?

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How to get Your First Podcast Sponsorship

Posted: 20 Jul 2017 07:00 AM PDT

How to Get Your First Podcast Sponsorship

This is a post from ProBlogger podcasting expert, Colin Gray.

Advertising is a sensitive subject for a lot of people. It's a step into the 'money stuff', into earning cash from your loyal audience, and it can feel like sullying your beautifully crafted content. Who enjoys the sight of a banner ad sticking out like a sore thumb, after all?

On a blog, it's hard to run ads or sponsorship in a subtle way. No matter what you do, it's usually as obvious as that 'sore thumb', and twice as painful for the loving content creator. But, there is one way to deliver ads to your audience in a more natural, less… grating… way. And that's through a podcast.

Sponsorship in podcasting is long established, and bloomin' effective! Why? Rather than seeing that money grabbing advertiser's message in cold, stark letters, instead it's delivered by your warm voice, dripping with personality.

Some podcasters make an art of the advert. For example, Mark Maron creating hilarious skits out of his sponsor slots, Gimlet Media crafting highly produced, entertaining content out of sponsor interviews, or every good podcaster everywhere who simply tells a story about the time they recently used the product and how it helped them.

In Podcasting, you can put the sponsor in context and make it more honest. That's why it works.

What's it Worth?

The first question: is it worth it?

Running sponsor slots takes time, including finding sponsors, maintaining them and delivering the spots.

If you can find a long-term, loyal sponsor, that's great. It becomes an efficient machine where you slot them in, every episode, telling a new story about them every now and again. But, at the start, when you're running 2-week or month-long campaigns, it's a treadmill of chasing, contracting, maintaining and recording. So the obvious question is, can you earn enough to justify it?

The rates vary, as you'd imagine, but we've got a decent 'average' these days when it comes to sponsorship costs. Normally, they're based on a CPM rate, which means 'Cost per thousand' and refers to listeners in this case. Here's how it breaks down - all times are approximate and costs in USD:

Podcast Sponsorship Rates

  • Pre-Roll: $20 CPM

This is a 15 second sponsor mention during the podcast introduction

  • Mid-Roll: $25 CPM

This is the main sponsor slot, around the middle of the show, 60 seconds long.

  • Post-Roll: $20 CPM

Again, a 15 second mention, but at the end of the show.

So, if you run a show that's grown to 3000 listeners (a great milestone, and achievable for most), and you run a pretty standard pre-roll and mid-roll package, you're looking at $20 + $25 x 3 (for 3000 listeners) = $135 per episode. That's $540 per month for a weekly show. Not a bad wee extra income!

There's also the fact that most shows can stand to take two sponsors without diluting their content too much. This depends on the length of your show and how good you are at making entertaining sponsor slots. But, if you manage that, then you're doubling the income right away. Then add post-rolls for some, and it ramps up a little more. Remember, though, with every 'extra' you're also increasing the work. But, it does get more efficient, the more you do, so it can be well worth it.

Of course, a 1000 listener show (closer to the average listenership out there) is looking at $180 per month for 1 sponsor, or $360 for two. The work is the same as with 3000 listeners… So it comes down to the time it takes to manage, which will be really individual to your show.

Is My Niche Worth More?

The qualifier here is that some niches and some shows can be worth a lot more.

For example, let's say you run a show on Mountain Biking. I can't imagine who'd want to talk about Mountain Biking, but hey, it takes all sorts, huh?

Assume you've got an audience on the smaller end of the scale: around 500 subscribers. But, do you know what, people who like mountain biking, really really like mountain biking. It's a niche with fanatical fans. It's also a niche with people who like to spend money. You don't get into a sport like that without developing a serious shiny gear fetish, as my own wallet can testify...

You've also spent the months, the years even, developing a relationship with these people. So, they know you, they trust you. That's one thing Podcasting is really great at: trust.

Those three elements - fanatical users, a spending audience, and trust in you - combine to create a dream audience for anyone who sells mountain biking kit.

If they pay to reach your 500 listeners, they know three things.

  1. Their product is ideally suited to every single person in that group
  2. The audience are ready and willing to buy good products
  3. The audience trusts your recommendation.

The conversion rate on an audience like that can be mental. Perhaps 50 to 100 sales from just a couple of mentions, and more after long term sponsorship. That's worth a LOT more than the mere $22.50 per episode that the standard CPM would suggest in this case.

So it's up to you to find an advertiser that's relevant, and convince them how great your audience is.

So, how do we go about finding and managing sponsorships?

Three Approaches to Podcast Sponsorship

1. Media Hosting

The first option is to let your media hosting take care of it. BluBrry have been brokering sponsorships for years, notifying their show catalog whenever a deal comes up. Libsyn, too, run both a self-service and a fully managed programme with dynamic ad insertion.

Some hosts even offer free hosting if you'll move your show to their service, and allow them to manage your sponsorship. Acast is one such host, and they'll take on the whole process, finding sponsors, inserting them into your content and sending you the proceeds.

The downsides? First, they'll take a pretty significant chunk of that payment for the work involved. Second, you tend to get offered a lot of ads that might not be the most relevant to your audience.

Acast and other dynamic ad servers tend to require bigger audience numbers before it's worth their time. Expect to be turned down if you have less than a few thousand. Blubrry and Libsyn offer their sponsorship services for smaller audiences, though.

If this is the option for you, then you'll find our podcast hosting roundup here which has a lot more detail.

2. Sponsorship Agencies

If you'd prefer to keep your hosting and your sponsorship separate, then a dedicated sponsorship agency might work for you. They often offer a very tailored service, including more options and flexibility around how you run your campaigns.

One of the biggest names in this area is Midroll, who hold some of the biggest shows on the web in their books.

Again, an agency of this type will take a significant chunk of your revenue as payment, and they tend to require a minimum of 3k to 5k downloads per episode to get involved, although it can vary by niche. The work they do is significant, though, and can be well worth the fee. It's hard work running your own sponsorship campaigns, and their contacts list can be a huge advantage in finding good sponsors.

3. Do it Yourself!

Yep, it's possible: you can manage the whole process yourself, and many shows do.

The upside here is that you have ultimate control. You can determine pricing, location, length, and be really flexible in how you work with every sponsor you encounter. You can search out really relevant ads, only including products that you know your audience will love.

You can build relationships with sponsors, offering more and more value, getting more in return. And you can easily include much more than just the sponsorship, such as social media, newsletter mentions, sponsored blogs, video clips or consultancy.

To be fair, some of this you can do with your hosting, or with an agency. They can never force you to take an irrelevant ad, for example. But going DIY means there's no minimum audience numbers to get started, and, importantly, you get 100% of the ad revenue.

But, like I said, it's a lot of work. Finding sponsors, negotiating a deal, signing contracts, inserting the ads, following up, re-negotiating, ending the relationship, searching for a new sponsor, and on, and on… If you treat it as a job, though, and you have the networking, sales and negotiating skills to pull it off, then it's entirely manageable. Done well, the time can be well worth the extra income not lost in agency commission.

How Can I Find My own Sponsor?

If you want to use your podcast hosting company or an agency, the way is clear. Sign up, and let them take care of it. But, if you want to go for glory and take the DIY route, how do you start? Here are some tips on finding and closing a good sponsor.

1. What Products do YOU Use?

The first, and most obvious, is to look around your house. What products do YOU use? Often, you're a member of your own target audience, so you love the products they love.

For example, take my mountain biking show, hinted at above. If I were to start sponsorship for that, I'd go no further than my own garage. I'd look around at the kit I use, the shorts, the shoes, the bags, the helmets, the bike itself. Every single one has as manufacturer or a retailer which you can approach.

It's the same with Podcraft, my show about creating great podcasts. I just need to look in my bag, or around the studio to find dozens of products and manufacturers to approach, from microphones to software.

The big benefit here is that if YOU use a product, then you can honestly talk about how great it is. You can tell stories, give examples and generally enthuse about how much you love it. That honesty and passion translates to the audience, making your ad spots more entertaining, more useful, and far less grating on the listener. As a bonus, it also makes it more effective. They're more likely to buy something that you obviously love.

Whatever subject you talk about, think about your favourite things related to it. It could be gadgets, books, courses, services or something else entirely. Whoever makes that thing, they're your sponsor.

2. Who's Spending in Your Niche?

Another place to find likely sponsors is in the ad spots you see every day.

Search your subject keywords in Google and see what pops up. The sponsored results will show companies that are already spending on advertising and targeting your chosen topic.

Similar with Facebook: next time you're wasting your life gazing at your ex's holiday pics, keep at least half an eye on the ads that pop up. Facebook is ridiculously good at knowing what you like, and will show ads to match. As I said, if you're part of your target audience, then those ads will match your listeners. That means they'll serve up even more relevant companies that are already investing in advertising.

Finally, get onto the big websites in your niche and check out the ads. Most big magazine sites include banner ads at some point and, again, these might showcase some inspiring products.

3. Old School: Print!

Do you still buy magazines? If not, you should! They might be on the decline (or are they…?), but most industries still have a few good mags. There's something about the printed word and tangible products that keep people buying.

Magazines survive on advertising, too. Inside those glossy pages you'll find hundreds of ads, from full page to tiny little boxes. Start contacting those companies and selling them on the benefits of new media sponsorship!

4. Offer a Test

Once you've started negotiating, a great way to close the deal is to offer a test. This is even more useful if you're new to the game, since you'll not have much of a track record to show potential sponsors.

You might offer a half price rate for the first two episodes, for example, reducing their risk in 'trying it out'. If you're confident that you have a relevant audience and they're likely to take action, then the results should speak for themselves. Win the sponsor a few sales and you'll have no problem charging the full rate from them on.

Better yet, if you're really confident, then offer a money back guarantee. Tell them, "If I don't deliver X sales or X amount of referrals, then you can have half (or all!) of your money back." Of course, you need a great way of tracking this, like an affiliate system or offer codes, and even then it's never 100% accurate. But if you account for that in the numbers and stay realistic, then it can work well.

Give it a Shot

The aim in sponsorship is to build long lasting relationships. If you can find two or three sponsors who are super-relevant and who get consistent results with your listeners, then it can lead to a hugely beneficial relationship for both parties. Less chasing, less negotiating, and more creating great content, attracting an even bigger audience.

If you're looking to dip your toe in the waters, but sponsoring your blog is a step too far, then try your podcast. Build a relationship there and who knows, it might lead to your blog, your video channel, your social media.

If that gives you the time and the space to spend time on the content you love, offering more and more value to your readers, then it's worth an ad spot or two. Give it a shot!

Image credit: Teresa Kluge

The post How to get Your First Podcast Sponsorship appeared first on ProBlogger.

      

A Guest Post Follow Up Strategy for Maximum Success

Posted: 18 Jul 2017 07:00 AM PDT

GUEST POST FOLLOW UP STRATEGY FOR MAXIMUM SUCCESS

Once you've understood why guest posting is important, got your pitch accepted, and written the post … you might think you're done.

A lot of the success of your guest post, though, comes from what you do after it's published.

There's plenty you can do to get the most out of your hard work, including steps you can take:

  • On your own blog
  • On the host blog
  • On social media
  • On other blogs

Even if you have very little time to follow up on your post, don't worry: a lot of these activities are ones you'd be doing anyway – like posting on your own blog, or scheduling content for social media.

On Your Own Blog

Hopefully, your guest post will result in a traffic boost to your blog. Those readers enjoyed your guest post, so have follow-up posts ready to go: this will encourage them to stick around.

These follow-up posts can go deeper into the topic you covered. For instance, if your guest post was titled "Ten WordPress Tricks to Try Today" you might follow that with these posts on your own blog:

  • Three Must-Have WordPress Plugins That Every Blog Needs
  • Five Mistakes You're Probably Making with WordPress … and How to Fix Them
  • The Pros and Cons of Drafting Straight into the WordPress Visual Editor

It helps if you have them at least drafted before your guest post goes live, so you can post consistently over the next couple of weeks. (You may want to make tweaks to your drafts based on the comments on your guest post: try to answer any questions that were asked.)

Link back to your original guest post from the posts on your blog, too: this is helpful for the host blogger and lets your regular readers know that you've been featured on a big blog.

On the Host Blog

One of the most important places to follow up is on the host blog where your guest post is published.

You should respond to every comment left on your post (unless a comment looks like spam – in which case, leave it and drop the host blogger an email so they can deal with it).

Remember, your reply won't just make a good impression on the reader who left the comment - lots of other readers will see it too.

Take note of any comments that ask questions or that spark off an idea for you. Respond to these, of course – but also keep a list of them for potential future blog posts.

Most guest posters receive a very warm welcome, but if you do get a negative comment, you may want to ask the host blogger how they'd like you to handle it. I'm sure it goes without saying, but definitely don't start a huge fight in the host blog's comments … that won't get you welcomed back!

After your post has been up for a few days, drop the host blogger an email. Thank them for running your post, and offer to write another for them. By writing multiple posts over weeks or months, you'll find that the blog's readers get to know you, and are more likely to come back to your own blog.

Writing several guest posts will also ensure that the host blogger remembers your name. On some blogs, a handful of guest posts can even lead to a paid blogging job.

On Social Media

Promote your guest post on the social networks that you belong to (without going over the top). This means that:

  • The host blogger can see you're going the extra mile … so they'll be more likely to welcome you back to guest post again in the future.
  • Your guest post will get more traffic … helping it to succeed. You may also want to use your posts on social media to encourage readers to comment, or to point out an interesting discussion developing in the comments.
  • Your existing audience will see that you've been featured on a big, reputable blog … boosting your credibility with them. (Even if it's a small blog, your readers will likely be impressed that you've been invited to write for another site.)

Don't see this promotion as a one-time thing to do on the day your post goes live. Keep it up, especially if the post is evergreen: build it into your regular social media scheduling. 

On Other Blogs

You can use your guest post as leverage for others, by linking to it when you pitch for other guest posting opportunities (e.g. "You can see an example of my work on ProBlogger…")

As you write more guest posts over time, link to them where relevant from your other guest posts. This can often be more valuable to the other bloggers than links from your own blog would be … plus, interlinking your guest posts in this way helps new readers to discover your body of work and view you as an established expert in your niche.

If you've built up a strong relationship with some other bloggers, you may also want to email them to let them know about your guest post and to invite them to link to it. This approach will be more effective (and less likely to annoy your blogging friends!) if you only do it occasionally, and only send people a post that is really on-topic for their audience.

The more you can do to follow-up after a guest post, the more successful that post will be.

If you're feeling a little daunted by everything I've covered here, create a list of simple tasks you'll complete after each guest post. 

Example Post-Publish Task List

  1. Reply to comments on the post
  2. Write one post (on your own blog) that ties in with and links to the guest post
  3. Tweet about the post and share it on Facebook
  4. Email the host blogger to thank them and ask if you can write for them again

That's the last post in our series on guest posting. If you're looking for or have guest posting opportunities, join our Facebook group and do a search for #writer or #host. Good luck with your guest posting – I hope you see great results.

Guest Posting Series:

7 Powerful Non-SEO Reasons to Try Guest Posting

Find and Pitch the Perfect Guest Posting Opportunities

How to Craft an Outstanding Guest Post

The post A Guest Post Follow Up Strategy for Maximum Success appeared first on ProBlogger.

      

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