How To Autopilot Your Blog

Posted on January 4, 2012 by admin

For so many reasons, I decided to change my strategy for my online business in 2011.

I realized, if I ever wanted to sell my online business, it couldn’t require ‘me’. Michael wasn’t for sale, just the business. That’s something a lot of top bloggers get wrong. They work on building their brand, they make it all about them and then when they lose interest, they aren’t able to do anything with their blog.

It wasn’t just so it would be easier to sell, I just didn’t want to have to focus on it, day after day.

I decided I wanted my business to run on autopilot. Basically, It had to grow month after month, with no work required from myself. So..

I didn’t want to have to write posts
I didn’t want to manage blog post schedules
I didn’t want to have to work with advertisers and continually monetize my site
I wanted to continue to get lots of traffic
I didn’t want to have to draft emails to subscribers, do my social media etc.

So who’s now doing it and how did I achieve what I have?

1. Getting People To Write For Your Website

I didn’t want to deliver content that was less valuable than what I have published before. That wasn’t something I was prepared to do. I firstly tried guess bloggers, people I didn’t pay to write, but they got a link to their site. I got a few people ask to write but the majority were really bad. I found a couple good writers but they couldn’t prioritize me at all, which is understandable as they weren’t being paid.

I then decided to pay people to write. This has worked rather well. I have a set price and I tell my writers I want a post every Monday morning drafted so that we can schedule it during the week. I’ve had some ups and downs with this but overall it’s been quite successful, hopefully with in a month or so, I’ll have it nailed. One thing that has really helped is getting someone to manage it. My brother does this for me and it doesn’t take much of his time. If they don’t draft their post, he will get on them and make sure they do.

I have found a few good writers who don’t charge. Like I mentioned above, they can’t prioritize me. However, I think if I can get 8 good free writers, to publish one post every 2 months. It will be a day a week that I don’t have to pay for a post.

2. Publishing & Publicizing Your New Posts

A few months ago, I hired my brother to work for my business. Regular readers will be use to his blog posts. I installed a WordPress plugin called WP Editorial Calender and what it allows you to do is put blog posts in the calender and publish it at those set times. So for example, I can drag a post to a Thursday and then choose the time. By doing this we can see which posts go live when, we know posts wont conflict and we know they will automatically be published for us.

The majority of my regular readers subscribe via email for updates from the blog. Every time I publish a post, I had to draft and send the email via Aweber. Aweber rocks and does what I want it to, however, It was taking me 20 or so minutes each time to get the email out. What I decided to do, was to start using their blog broadcast function. It automatically emails your list every time a new post is published. It’s highly customizable which you will see below, I was able to make it look like I have written it, not only that, I got my web designer to design a great looking newsletter.

Every time a post is published. We automatically post a link on our Twitter feed. Details on this here.

3. Monetization & Passive Income

I knew that one thing that stressed me out and took up time was monetizing a site. If you have advertisers, you have to firstly find them, negotiate, work with them to get the deal and then they change their mind regularly, so you have to constantly, add/edit/delete the advert and sometimes, more often then not, have to start over again with the next person.

Affiliate marketing doesn’t require you. You link to a product, if a reader buys that product, you earn a commission. It’s not a guaranteed set income, however it saves you a lot of time and takes the pressure of you.

I also use a lot of space to advertise two of my products. Digital products don’t require any real support. If they don’t like your eBook, they can automatically get a refund via the merchant. Once purchased, the thank you page will notify them how to download the eBook. All very straight forward.

I do have one advertiser. Every month, he sends me a nice sum of money and he has his ad on my site. He’s been advertising since April and hasn’t been any trouble. What I recommend is go for one advertiser and charge threw the roof but at the same time, make them a priority for ad space. When I brought out my newsletter, I added his advert to it for free. Since he started advertising, the traffic has gone up a lot, the price has stayed the same. I know that money pays for my writers and It’s important he stays.

You could argue that an affiliate product could out perform an advertiser, this is true. But often, it’s not. Who knows? Who cares? It’s more important to me to diversify my income so I’m not reliant on one income stream. You can only promote an affiliate product so many times before it becomes irrelevant for a lot of readers. A great way to make adverts more relevent to readers and more successful for advertisers is by rotating 2 adverts with 2 different landing pages. This way your advertiser gets a much higher click through rate.

4. Conclusion and Moving Forward

I hope these quick tips helped. Month after month I grow my business yet I’m not around.

My main focus in 2012 is to get more writers and more blogs online. Writers are a large cost but for me it’s worth it. At least long term. Nick Tart wrote on his blog about how every new post is worth 1320 new visitors a year. For me it’s a lot more. Every time I publish a post, thousands of people rush to my site to read it. Out of all those people, I only need 3 to buy an affiliate product and I’ve made a profit on the post. Sometimes this isn’t the case but sometimes it worth a lot more. The importance of me telling you this is, you may not make your money back in the first day or even the first month but over a year, buying an article pays for its self and by not doing it, is really stupid.

INVESTMENT is king. People thought I was made spending so much on redesign after redesign, blog post after blog post. But looking back, if I didn’t do it, I’d not be reaping all the rewards I am today. An almost passive income.

Let me know your thoughts in the comments below, I’d love to hear how you think the site has progressed.

How To Make Money Online

From Blogger to Book Author: The 4-Step Guide

Posted on January 3, 2012 by admin

This guest post is by Jeff Goins of Goins, Writer.

Some bloggers don’t start a blog to make money. They start blogging, because they have a message that the world needs to hear. In other words:

Some bloggers blog to get published.

Recently, I signed a contract with a book publisher. I had always hoped to one day publish a book, but I never thought it would happen in a few months.

What made this possible? In a word: blogging.

Image copyright Lasse Kristensen – Fotolia.com

If you want to go from blogger to book author, you’ll need to do a few things. But the pay-off can be significant.

Why you should publish a book

With the rising popularity of ebooks and self-publishing, why should you go with a traditional publisher?

Why even write a book at all? Doesn’t a blog suffice?

Well, no. Not always. In some cases, self-publishing (especially your first book) may not be a good idea.

Reasons to work with a publisher

Although self-publishing can work just fine, there are still some legitimate reasons to go traditional:

Marketing: A publisher will offer its resources and knowledge to help you not only promote your book, but consider the marketability of it before it’s published.
Editing: A publisher will help you with the actual writing, as well as proofreading and copyediting. Normally, you would have to pay someone to do this or do it yourself.
Authority: There is still a great deal of social clout when it comes to having a published book from a reputable publisher. Publishing a book will make you more of an authority in your niche.

Of course, some authors make good money off ebooks without ever going through a publisher. So this may not be for everyone. But it’s at least worth considering. (Even Darren and Chris G. released their Problogger book through Wiley. It’s not about money as much as it’s about influence.)

If you’re interested in becoming a published author, there are the three steps you’ll need in your path to publishing.

Step 1: Build a platform

All publishers want to know the same thing: Do you have a platform?

In other words, are you “legit”? Do you have the audience and authority to speak on a particular topic? Money is so tight in publishing that if authors don’t bring their own marketing chops, they have little hope of succeeding.

A platform can range from a podcast to a television program; however, in our case, we’re going to assume it’s a blog.

Why a blog is a great platform

Blogs are great for authors, because of the following reasons:

A blog allows you to practice writing.
A blog allows you to capture email addresses (with a service like Feedburner or Aweber).
A blog allows you to communicate a core message over time.

My blog has been instrumental in helping me find my voice as an author, as well as providing some content that I’m actually re-purposing for my upcoming book.

Step 2: Release a manifesto

Once you’ve built a blog and starting building a decent audience, you can now work on something that articulates your core beliefs: a manifesto.

A manifesto is a short, actionable ebook that you give away for free. The point of it is to spread idea and help you connect with your tribe (i.e. people who share your beliefs).

This can also be a great way to capture attention, by exchanging the ebook for people’s email addresses. I grew my email list from 75 to 1000 subscribers in a week, thanks to a manifesto. And it also caught the attention of my publisher. It works.

If writing a manifesto sounds hard or overwhelming to you, don’t worry. It’s not.

The DIY way to publish a manifesto

Find the content. Dig up an old blog post or series of posts that resonated with your readers.
Develop it. Build upon your original idea and edit out what’s irrelevant.
Finish writing. Shoot for 1000-10,000 words long. It needs to clearly communicate one, important idea. The shorter you can make it, the better.
Create it. You can do this through a program like Word or Pages (for Mac), or you can use a slide presentation program like PowerPoint or Keynote and export as a PDF. Michael Hyatt also has a great seven-step tutorial for how to do this. (Note: This may create a huge file, depending on the length of your e-book. If you get something that’s over 10 MB, you can use the program PDFshrink to make it smaller.)

Alternatives

If you’re looking to spread an idea quickly, you can even publish the manifesto through a site like ChangeThis.com. Seth Godin, Chris Brogan, and Guy Kawasaki have all done this. Only the best ones make it, though, so this doesn’t guarantee you’ll get an ebook published through them. (See mine here.)

You can also hire someone to do it for you, if you have the budget.

Step 3: Connect with people through social media

Social media is a great way to find fans and create advocates that will spread your work for you.

The great thing about social media is that it’s social (obviously), which means it can lead to other meaningful interactions, including real-life relationships.

From follower to friend

I’ve connected with more people through Twitter than any other way. This has led to grabbing coffee with other writers, picking up freelance gigs, and even getting to meet some of my heroes. It’s the best networking resource I’ve found.

Starting a Facebook page for my blog has also been a great way to share content and connect with my audience.

The people you connect with through social media may begin as followers, but they can quickly become friends and even patrons of your work. If you do it right—by adding value to your readers and followers—these people can become life-long supporters of you.

What better asset to have before publishing your first book than an already large and growing fan base? The publishers will be fighting over you.

Step 4: Establish your brand by adding value

Every author needs a brand—an established voice that makes his or her content unique.

Blogging can help you do this, because it allows you to practice in public. It also attracts an audience, which can help you in defining (and building) your personal brand as a writer.

Serve your way into influence

The best way to earn trust and establish a brand is to serve people.

Do the grunt work. Hustle to help people, and you will get noticed. In a world full of self-promoting sleaze bags, if you add value to people’s lives, you will never have a marketing. People will come find you.

This is a great way to brand yourself as an author, too. Someone who serves others doesn’t have a hard time selling books. People know you’re going to help them, so they’re eager to pay money to hear what you have to say.

And if you can demonstrate that, a publisher will be honored to work with you.

Interview experts

Another way to do this is by interviewing experts. You can seek out other authors and bloggers in your niche and ask to interview them. Do this over time and you’ll not only deliver value to your readers, you’ll also build relationships with influential people.

Pretty soon, people will come to think of you as the expert—which is exactly what publishers are looking for.

All of these relationships (if founded on serving others) will come back to help you. It’s true what they say: what goes around comes around.

You’ll be publishing a book in no time.

Jeff Goins is a soon-to-be-published author, blogger, and nonprofit marketer. You can connect with him on Twitter @jeffgoins and Facebook and get his free, weekly newsletter. You can also find out more about his path from blogging to book contract by getting his eBook Every Writer’s Dream: How to Never Pitch Your Writing Again, which is free for a limited time.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

From Blogger to Book Author: The 4-Step Guide

ProBlogger Blog Tips

20 Best Designed Pricing Comparison Tables

Posted on January 2, 2012 by admin

One of the most effective things you can do to help a customer buy from you is help them choose what to buy.

When you have multiple options for them to consider, the best way to help them make a decision is to communicate the differences between the various packages with a pricing comparison table.

Here are 20 of the best designed pricing comparison tables that will inspire you to create your own.

Aweber

Aweber has done a good job of taking a complex pricing model – with monthly, quarterly, and yearly options coupled with subscriber pricing – and communicating it in an easy to understand way. They also simplify it by giving you the only option of signing up for just $ 1.

Basecamp

Basecamp actually has five account options but they emphasize the three most expensive ones. When you hover over the details, they give you a more in-depth explanation so you can make an educated decision.

Crazy Egg

Crazy Egg does a nice job of subtly emphasizing the plan they’d like you to sign-up for with nifty shadows that give it depth. Notice the call-to-action for all plans is to, “Sign Up Free.”

DIYthemes

DIYthemes has a simple pricing comparison table for the Thesis WordPress theme. Obviously, they encourage you to sign-up for the Developer’s Option by putting it on the left and making everything larger.

Dropbox

Dropbox also has a very simple pricing table that complements their simple pricing strategy.

Formstack

As soon as you see the Formstack pricing table, your eye is drawn to the Professional plan. Every other option is grayed-out while their most popular plan is their signature green. Also notice how the “Sign Up” button is larger, a different color, and the bottom of the button lines up with the rest of the table.

FreshBooks

Similar to Aweber, FreshBooks has a pay-as-you-grow pricing strategy where you pay more as your business can afford it. No matter the plan you want, every customer signs up for their free trial.

HostGator

HostGator doesn’t have a particularly beautiful pricing table, but it communicates everything effectively. I like the drop-down menus that give you even more options.

LightCMS

Contrary to HostGator, LightCMS has a gorgeous pricing table. Notice how they emphasize the features by bolding and enlarging the specifications so it’s easy to compare.

Livestream

Livestream also has a beautiful, yet simple pricing table with images, shadows, hover-overs, fancy typography, and red savings reminders to encourage you to pay for a year upfront. Also notice how they split their plans up based on target markets. If I’m an organization, I know which plan is best for me right away.

PandaStream

PandaStream has a neat pricing slider to show you how much their software will cost as your business grows.

Salesforce

For a large company, Salesforce does a nice job of communicating their different packages for all of their different products.

Shopify

Shopify has, perhaps, the best designed pricing comparison table on the internet. Every option starts with a free trial which makes the decision simpler for their users and there are eight different places they can click to get started.

SlideDeck

Similar to DIYthemes, they emphasize the pro option buy putting it on the left and including copy detailing, “Why Pro is Better.” The selection option at the bottom is also flawlessly integrated.

Squarespace

The nice thing about Squarespace’s pricing table is option to choose monthly, 1 year, or 2 years and the table updates without refreshing the page.

Typekit

Similar to Basecamp, Typekit has five options and they emphasize three. And instead of offering monthly options, they require you to pay for a year upfront.

WooThemes

Which one do you think WooThemes would like you to sign-up for? Their table does a good job of communicating the differences between the various options and it’s obvious they want you to click the “Find Out More” button.

Wufoo

Wufoo has a notoriously swanky pricing comparison table. Unlike most tables, from left-to-right, they list the most expensive to the least expensive. This makes you look at the free option as the last resort rather than the starter package.

YepText

Our friend, Adam Horwitz, has done a wonderful job with his pricing comparison table at YepText. Headline, price, features, and call-to-action. Plus, they have even more pricing options if you click, “More Plans Here.”

Zendesk

Zendesk takes the “Free Trial” option one step further by only offering it to people who sign up for their “Best Value” package.

Pricing Comparison Table Commonalities and Takeaways

Free Trial – Get people started with a free trial or freemium pricing strategy.
Button at Top and Bottom – Put the call-to-action at the top and bottom of the pricing table to make it easy.
Best Value/Most Popular – Emphasize your best value or most popular option by making it slightly larger or adding box shadows.
Hover-Overs – Clarify their questions and answer their objections with hover-over detail boxes when they hover over the features.
Big Price – Make the different prices big.
Call-To-Action Colors – Use a different, outstanding color for your call-to-action buttons.
Pay-in-Full Pricing Options – Offer a discount to encourage them to pay for 1 or 2-year packages upfront.

What other pricing table commonalities do you see between these 20 examples?

How To Make Money Online

Why I Haven’t Made a Dime From My Blog—and How You Can

Posted on January 1, 2012 by admin

This guest post is by Alexander Heyne of Milk the pigeon.

When I first started my blog, I wrote a series of posts I was sure would resonate with thousands all over the world, create a movement, and bring massive traffic over to my site.

Except when I published the posts, they went to the black hole of the Internet.

No one heard them. No one saw them. Just a couple Facebook friends and maybe my mom.

Image copyright Renee Jansoa – Fotolia.com

Suddenly my idea of writing about what I enjoy, and making a living (however small) off it was shattered. It was time to regroup and start over.

A model for making money

Just as you need to have a serious game plan to ensure your success blogging, including a master plan and many smaller plans, you need to have a model to work with for monetization.

You need a simple path that gives you a general idea of where to go and what to do, and in what order.

Following the next six points will ensure you’ll be six months ahead of where I was when I started, and you’ll no longer be writing for “someone”. You’ll be writing for your future massive, engaged audience willing to buy your products.

1. Create a list and engage your audience

This is blogging 101 to most bloggers now—especially those who are planning to release a product or course to their audience. But it wasn’t to me. I mean, I figured I would just write some good stuff, and maybe some advertisers would contact me, and then I’d somehow end up making $ 2,00 or $ 3,000 a month from advertisements.

Rookie mistake.

Make an email list as soon as you start your blog, and start collecting subscribers. But unless you have an established reputation people most likely will have a hard time forking over their email address to you, so what do you do?

Give them a reason to subscribe, like a free ebook or a mini course. The sooner you start building your email list, the better. Because the sooner you have a list the sooner you can start building trust with your audience and establish yourself as having expertise in some area.

What I did: waited until month three to make an email sign up list, and offered no incentive to subscribe.

What I should’ve done: I should have signed up on day one with an email subscription service like Aweber, and offered an ebook or mini course for subscribers.

2. Fine-tune your content

Sometimes your niche is pretty clear—blogging, marketing, or running, for example. But sometimes it’s not and covers a wide range of things—lifestyle design, location-independent work, or self-help.

Assuming you fall into the latter categories, you are probably going to need to do some content fine-tuning. That means testing a variety of closely related topics and seeing which ones resonate best content-wise and message-wise with your audience. You can test those qualities based on re-tweets, views, shares, and comments, although these metrics alone should not be the be-all end-all.

Just remember that in the beginning it’s going to be harder to work out what your audience likes and doesn’t like, because you may not have an audience yet! Just have fun at the beginning and experiment a lot.

What I did: Wrote about a variety of topics, and kept no analytics on what was popular or why.

What I should have done: I should have deliberately tested various types of content with my audience and used those results (Google Analytics) to hone in on what I should’ve written more of in the future. It also gives you potential product niches.

3. Show some link love

One of the worst, most sinful mistakes I made was not reaching out and trying to connect with others in my niche, not trying to follow people who had already achieved the goals I wanted, and not establishing other relationships with people in the online world.

It goes pretty much without saying that you can’t make it alone in the blogosphere—and that nurturing genuine relationships will be the single most beneficial thing you can do to help your business take off.

The following three types of people you should make a list of and establish friendships with:

people in a niche somewhat similar to your own (peers)
people who are doing what you hope to be doing one day (mentors)
people who you see will be up and coming and need to be heard (pupils)

What I did: Believed I could succeed alone, and made no effort to connect with others.

What I should have done: I should have networked until my eyeballs hurt, shared as much as possible with my peers, share posts by people whose mission I believed in, and established several people as mentors who have attained the goals I am striving for.

4. Consciously build your audience and list

There are three ways you can deliberately build your list and audience more rapidly than letting them organically grow:

getting better exposure via guest posting
holding a webinar where people need to subscribe to participate and get more information
offer exclusive content or a free additional course that requires a sign up. For example, on your products page you can have a “free marketing 101 course.” You could then have a ten-part auto-responder course (or ebook) that gives great content, for free. And in return you get someone’s email address added to your list.

What I did: Thought that the “crawlers” would just find my content and it would go mainstream.

What I should have done: I should have guest posted as much as humanly possible, combined efforts with other bloggers to hold webinars, and given away tons of free, extremely valuable content (in various forms).

5. Do some spy work (probe your audience members’ brains)

At this point you should be asking yourself, “What am I doing with all these people? I have been giving them great content, building relationships with others around me, and now have a list of quite a few people. What’s next?”

Here’s one of the next steps to take: find out what specifics your audience wants and what problem of theirs you can solve.

I’m going to work with the assumption that you don’t have three to six months of free time to make a product that flops, so here is one way to test for demand. Offer free or paid consulting. At this point, your audience hopefully respects you and sees you as somewhat of an authority. So why consult for free?

You will acquire some experience which you can later use to transfer into paid consulting.
You’ll realize patterns of problems that your audience has, and you can begin to develop a product tailored directly to their needs.

What I did: Assumed I knew what my audience wanted.

What I should have done: I should have done a number of things: given out a questionnaire, consulted (free/paid), asked directly (via a blog post), or researched what other people are selling in the same niche.

6. Make a product or promote a product

As far as products go, the historic route that people have taken is to make an ebook. Ebooks work well and lend themselves to automation, but there is one other product recommendation that tends to work better for some others.

Launch a limited-time program or online course, for example, once every four months. The reason I suggest making an online course is that it helps you jump exponentially over time (both in terms of influence as well as financially).

Every time you launch your course, you build your email list, you get feedback, and you find out what updates your audience wants. And then you can launch the course again—and, assuming you have received feedback, you can update it. And, assuming you did a good job developing your product, you now have a bigger list, more exposure, and a larger audience. The benefits grow over time.

The other option is to promote someone else’s product. I know quite a few people who made their first dollar online by promoting a product they tried and thought their audience would like.

If you know of a product (ideally that you have tried) that genuinely provides a solution to a problem your audience has, write a post reviewing it. State clearly what your audience will get from the product, let them know that you’ve tried it, and keep your promise. Afterwards, you can keep a smaller banner advertisement or list it on your products or resources page.

What I did: Got half way through an ebook, realized it probably wasn’t going to sell as much as I wanted, and went back to the drawing board.

What I should have done: I should have #1 followed through, because even if your product only makes five sales, you are getting some feedback and now have experience making a product.

I should also have decided if I wanted to make this an ongoing product with support and feedback options. If you want a product that requires no updating and support, go with an ebook. If you want a product that has much more potential for growth but will require a larger time investment, go with an online course.

What next?

So why go through all these steps? Why bother with an elaborate checklist of things to go through?

The reason is because if you don’t have a model, you’ll be taking shots in the dark. Your work is going to be all guesswork, and guesswork is going to lead to disappointment. You’ll be running your blog with the same intentions I had: “Do a couple posts here, a couple posts there, maybe get some ads on there, write an ebook, and then I’ll be making $ 5,000 a month.”

Save yourself from the same silly assumption I made: otherwise you’ll end up like me—never making a dime from my blog.

Milk the pigeon is about killing that lost feeling, standing out in the crowd, and living a life of greatness. Download a free copy of Milk the Pigeon’s manifesto here: Killing Your Old life and Living the Dream

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

Why I Haven’t Made a Dime From My Blog—and How You Can

ProBlogger Blog Tips

12 Essential Tips for Revitalising Your Blog in 2012

Posted on December 31, 2011 by admin

This is a guest post by Gregory Ciotti of Sparring Mind.

As 2011 comes to a close, now is a better time than ever to evaluate your blog, its performance, and most importantly, what you can do to improve your blog in 2012!

A point I always like to drive home is that you will never find blogging success by turning into an “eternal student”, one who always consumes information but never creates or takes action.

Image copyright mipan – Fotolia.com

As I am in the process of taking a step back from my own blog to reevaluate what things I could do better, I wanted to present Problogger readers a list of actionable tips that they could act on right now to improve their blog for the new year.

So check this list out, bookmark it for later (or tweet it out to your fellow bloggers), and make sure you go through and see what quick actions you can take to improve your blog!

1. Optimize (or start) your email list

Had you email list become stagnant, with a slow trickle of subscribers rather than a huge flow of new signups? Have you not even started building a list yet?

Now is the time to take action, because your mailing list is the most important aspect of your blog’s long term success. So if you haven’t already, create one now.

If you have a list, let’s think of a few ways to optimize it…

Make sure sign-up forms are in the best locations (sidebar, feature box, at the end of posts).
Create a “toolbox” of freebies that only subscribers get access to (think of it like the free ebook strategy, only kicked up a notch).
Create newsletter only content just for subscribers (makes the newsletter more worthwhile for them).

Last but not least, make sure there is an option to subscribe on the pages of your site with the most traffic. I’m talking about your intro/about page, your resource pages, and any other pages that visitors often visit from your homepage.

Start building your list now the right way. You won’t regret it in 2012!

2. Make a list of every blogger (who writes quality content) in your niche

You might be wondering why bother to do this. Certainly if you at the intermediate stage of blogging, you already know about the power of guest blogging and the kind of traffic and subscribers it can bring you.

The thing you have to realize though is that as powerful as guest blogging is, it is only one part of being good at networking in your chosen niche.

In order to truly succeed as a blogger, you are going to need important people who are truly rooting for you. The best way to do that? Network.

Most bloggers are afraid to start, so by creating a list like this, you are already on your way, and it takes far less time than you might think. Simply use sites like AllTop and Technorati, along with the blogs that you regularly read, and create a comprehensive list of the best ones in your niche.

Plan on emailing each one, maybe breaking the ice with a completed (and awesome) guest post. From there, stay in touch, actively support the other bloggers in your niche, and in time, you’ll find yourself getting links naturally, it won’t take a guest post for your fellow bloggers to mention you…

They’ll be doing it because they support you. And that is an essential ingredient to growing a popular blog.

3. Re-evaluate your blog’s unique offering to readers

What about your blog makes it distinct? What are readers getting there that they simply cannot get on the hundreds to thousands of other blogs in the same niche?

For 2012, you should take a look at your blog, and really evaluate what you are adding to the web that nobody out there is doing exactly the same.

The key word there is “exactly”, because your blog doesn’t have to be a totally unique experience that is doesn’t compare to anything else, it just has to be a twist on existing topics.

For instance, there are a lot of blogs for people who love blogging, but how about people who love Tumblr? Heck, your twist can just be what medium you use to create content.

For instance, there are a lot of personal fitness blogs that use video, that makes sense. But what about a finance blog that uses a lot of video? What about craft blog that uses a lot of video? How about a marketing blog that focuses on podcasts? How about a personal development blog that utilizes SlideShare?

The point is: it’s not too hard for you to put a “twist” on your niche, making it something that adds value and that also helps you stand out from the sea of others.

4. Try new content types to keep your blog fresh

Speaking of different content media, a lot of bloggers get so overwhelmed with different traffic methods and writing techniques that they fail to realize that they could be putting their efforts to a medium they might be better (or more comfortable) at.

Maybe writing posts really is the thing you feel most comfortable at, but I’d definitely suggest giving a few other mediums a try. They can bring extra traffic from being hosted on the parent site (like YouTube videos) and can give your blog a appeal by creating content in an unusual form.

Here are some great content types you can try:

video (on YouTube or Vimeo)
audio on SoundCloud (or by starting a podcast)
ebooks
slideshows on SlideShare
workbooks
infographics
webinars.

See if some of these suit you better from time to time, and you’ll likely be one of few blogs in your industry doing them!

There’s also another great post idea I want to discuss…

5. Interview someone influential in your niche

Interviews are a blog kickstart technique that seriously work for any niche—at least, I’ve yet to encounter one in which they don’t work well!

Interviews are great for a few reasons:

The person you are interviewing will notify their following of the interview, bringing you traffic.
People will respect you more for getting the thoughts from an influential person, and be more inclined to check out your self-made content.
Interviews add instant social proof to what you are saying, and if you can even add small parts of an interview to back up your own claims, readers will appreciate it.

Scared to ask someone for an interview? Don’t be! Research has shown that people are more likely to help you out than you think.

They key: keep your emails short and your requests reasonable. Also, never send the questions in the first email, ask for permission first!

I’ve used interviews with people like Brian Gardner (owner of StudioPress) and popular musicians on my electronic music blog to get, literally, thousands of new visitors in days, not weeks or months.

And this is on entirely new blogs!

Trust me, finding a good person to interview (an interesting or unusual expert is always good) and creating great questions for the interview will likely be a huge benefit for your blog. It’s a must-try technique in 2012.

6. Clean up your sidebar: show what matters

If there is one part of a blog that typically turns into a complete mess, it’s the sidebar in the typical content/sidebar blog layout.

Bloggers (especially newer bloggers) are tend to add way too many widgets and sections on their sidebar, and instead of making their site better, they end up making it far worse!

How? The first thing is site speed. I’ve written about how to speed up WordPress before, and the conclusions you can draw from other website owners and SEO experts is this:

People won’t wait for slow loading sites, general wait time is as little as a few seconds (that’s single digits).
Site speed has an impact on SEO, affecting your rankings.
A fast-loading site is apart of a great user experience, and users appreciate fast page loads far more than you realize.

Those are some pretty important reasons to be concerned about your site speed… But there are even bigger concerns that you should be worried about!

In addition to slowing your site down, the results from this research study have shown that too many choices can actually decrease conversions!

What that means is that a cluttered sidebar is likely to decrease your conversion rates on new subscribers! This is bad, bad news for your blogs potential success.

Fortunately, this can be fixed quickly, by scrapping all of the junk in your sidebar and including only the essentials, which are:

sidebar opt-in (must be at the top!)
list of popular posts (shows readers your best content, right away!)
resource sections (these sections showcase a lot of info on a single topic, or including things like what blogging tools you are partial to using)
…nothing else!

Honestly, having only these three items in this list might make you think I’m crazy, but hear me out: those really are the only essentials!

Of course, if you blog offers a product, service, or advertising, these need to be included, but for most people, the three I mentioned will increase your conversion rates after you get rid of the junk.

Unless your blog as 1000+ posts, you don’t need a search bar, categories—none of that stuff. What you do need is a fast loading site that converts well, so make it happen.

7. Improve your knowledge of SEO and SEO copywriting

If you are running a WordPress blog, understanding the fundamentals of WordPress SEO is essential to succeeding as a blogger (I’d highly recommend starting with SEOMoz’s Beginner’s Guide to SEO, it’s a great read that’s highly detailed and includes great visuals).

More importantly though (and non-platform-specific), you need to learn more about SEO copywriting if you don’t know about it already.

The process of effective SEO copywriting is far less confusing than you think. In fact, even if you just learn the basics of good interlinking habits (linking to old posts of yours in new posts, naturally) you’ll already be more skilled than most bloggers in your niche.

It is essential to understand good SEO copywriting as a blogger because it allows your site to do better in search rankings, offers a better user experience for readers by involving your old content in a natural way, and adds a new skillset to your blogging knowledge—one of great importance.

8. Add social proof where it matters

Bloggers sometimes get too caught up in social networking proof, rather than what social proof really means (and when it’s actually useful).

Social proof can be as simple as quote from one of your readers/fans on what a great blog you are running, how you helped them, or how your content has benefited them in some way. This type of social proof is often as powerful as a big Facebook following, and it’s much easier to get legitimately!

Here are a few easy ways to get a powerful statement for your blog:

Ask! Ask one of your readers if they’d mind giving you a quote to use on your blog as social proof. Most people will be glad to provide one!
Use a comment. Take a comment from a reader on your site that states something positive, and use it as social proof.
Quote someone else. Has anybody else mentioned your blog or writing before? Quote them, whether it’s from Twitter or their own site, people will usually have no problem with you quoting them for social proof.

Okay, so we have some ways to get social proof that’s outside of a big social networking following…

Where should we put it? Here are the two best spots to put social proof:

anywhere there is an “opt-in” form
anywhere you ask users to purchase something.

Simple, clear use of social proof boils down to this: any time you need someone to trust you (to opt-in to your list or to buy something from you), social proof is king, and those are the locations in which you should use it.

9. Start a “post ideas” journal

I’ve discussed the importance of using journals (or some storage device) in order to break through writer’s block, as they can serve as a growing list of ideas (that may come at any moment) you can access when you need to write a new post.

Writing down great posts ideas as they come in your head will not only benefit your own blog, it will help with writing all of those guest posts to get your name out there!

The thing is, great posts ideas could come to you at any moment. The problem? You are not always in a position to expand on those ideas or to see if they’d really make for a great post. The solution? Write any decent ideas down, and save them for another time.

This way you can keep any ideas that you might have lost if you relied on your memory, and you also get to work on great ideas later that might turn into dynamite posts.

10. Guest blog using the “funnel” technique

If you are going to utilize guest blogging to build your blog (and you definitely should be), you should start approaching your guest posts with an actual strategy, rather than relying on blind writing.

The best (and easiest!) strategy to try is the “funnel” technique of guest posting. The funnel method involves writing a guest post that has to do with one of three big aspects of your blog:

your blog’s unique offering (discussed above)
a free ebook/guide you’re giving away
an opt-in webinar or course you’re offering.

How and why does this work so well? Simple: you are priming readers with a post about a specific topic. Then, you offer them additional content (via your email list) by offering one of the three options listed above.

In case you still don’t get it, think of it like this: I’m a personal fitness style blogger, but I only focus on writing about high-intensity interval training (HIIT for those familiar with the acronym).

So, it would make sense for me to post on fitness blogs, but to focus on writing an article like “5 Reasons Why HIIT is the Best Form of Cardio.” The reason this makes sense is that anybody interested in Fitness and HIIT would go to check out my blog, where they would be greeted with more content on the subject. This would make them more likely to subscribe.

This also works with the other two methods: offering a freebie such as an ebook or Webinar on the topic that my guest post was about. Try this and I guarantee your blog will see maximized conversions for all of your blog posts in 2012!

11. Evaluate your social media buttons

What do I mean “evaluate” your social media buttons? Simply put, you need to take a step back from your blog and look at the buttons that you are using on your site.

Many bloggers just plaster up whichever buttons they can without really evaluating what’s been working in their niche. The key point here is that you most likely don’t need all of those buttons! It’s been proven time and time that too many options can decrease conversions, and this applies to social sharing too.

The reason bloggers get misled is because they see big sites like Mashable using every button under the sun, but what they don’t seem to get is that Mashable is about social media, so a majority of their traffic and “subscribers” are social media users.

It makes sense for them to have tons of social media buttons, but for a blog like yours, which is most likely concerned with growing a stable and profitable email list, you need to evaluate which buttons work best for your audience.

For instance over on my electronic music blog, I immediately removed the LinkedIn and Google+ buttons when I found out that they weren’t being used. It made sense, but I wanted to test things out first.

The thing was, my audience was younger, and not interested in tech or business aspects as much as most LinkedIn and Google+ users are. Generally, they stuck to Facebook, and used Twitter slightly less.

So I updated the social sharing buttons to include only those two, and guess what? My traffic didn’t drop by a single visitor. In fact it increased, all while I was speeding my site up!

Make sure your social buttons are actually being used by your readers.

12. Utilize the most powerful social network of all

When most people think about networking these days, they tend to think about social networks.

While social networks (especially those like Twitter) are indeed extremely useful for establishing connections, in reality they better serve as icebreakers for real planning on the most powerful social network of all…

Email.

That’s right. All of your guest post submissions, all of your interview requests, collaborations, joint ventures, product launches, everything will be happening behind the scenes through email (or at least the important stuff!).

What else will you be doing to revitalize your blog in 2012? Share your plans in the comments.

If you are a blogger who wants to tap into the psychology of successful content marketing, you need to check out Sparring Mind, where Greg prefers to write about what works (backed with research and data) and avoids the fluff. Find out more here and start marketing your blog the right way.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

12 Essential Tips for Revitalising Your Blog in 2012

ProBlogger Blog Tips

10 New Year’s Resolutions for a More Successful 2012

Posted on December 30, 2011 by admin

The New Year is a fresh start.

The person you were last year no longer exists. All that matters is who you are on New Year’s Day and who you become by the end of the year.

January 1^st is a perfect time to make a personal change, but it’s also a perfect time for entrepreneurs to make big changes to their businesses.

The 12 resolutions below are for entrepreneurs hoping to help their business thrive in 2012.

#1 Resolve to Finish Every Project You Start

I’ve written previously about how most entrepreneurs have so many good ideas, that it can be difficult finish one project before starting the next one.

Don’t make that mistake this year. If you decide to develop a business, commit to seeing it through completely.

#2 Resolve to Start Charging Your True Worth

When trying to get your business on its feet, sometimes you have to charge less than your product or service is actually worth. It’s a good way to gain clientele and experience. But it’s not a good way to get rich.

Eventually, you’ve got to start charging clients for the actual value that you’re providing.

If you’ve been working for less than you’re worth, then 2012 is the year to make a change.

#3 Resolve to Keep a Clean Work Space

It’s hard to be productive in an environment that’s cluttered and disorganized.

Look around your work space right now. If it isn’t clean and controlled, then make a commitment now to maintain a focused work space for the next year.

#4 Resolve to Improve Work Systems

When Henry Ford implemented an assembly line in his factories in 1913, he completely revolutionized the automobile industry. By making the production system more efficient, The Ford Motor Company was able to produce more vehicles for less money – and profits went through the roof.

A business is only as efficient as the systems it employs.

Some systems are simple, like the way you organize your inbox. Others are very complex, like your step-by-step approach to completing a project over the course of a month.

We often create systems without much thought and then take them for granted once they’re established. As long as a system works, what’s the point in meddling?

But this is one thing where you really need to put in the extra time and make sure you’re doing things right. Take a step back and look critically at the systems you implement regularly with your business.

Systems are so important because their effect is cumulative. If you improve a system one time, that improvement continues to benefit you every time it’s implemented.

If you haven’t paid much attention to your systems lately, then make a point to focus on them in 2012.

#5 Resolve to Be Authentic

People are spending more time online than ever before. By now, they’re pretty adept at recognizing who’s being genuine and who isn’t.

2012 is a great year to tune out the voice in your head that tells you to pretend to be someone you’re not. Instead, communicate online with your authentic voice. People will take notice and respond.

#6 Resolve to Keep Track of Your Hours

How many hours are you putting into your business a week?

It’s not necessary to have a set schedule or to work eight hours every day. That’s part of the joy of being your own boss. But it is important to be aware of your work hours – and four hour days aren’t going to cut it (at least not at first).

When you begin to keep track of your hours, you start to understand where you’re time is going and how you could use it more effectively.

If you’re doing freelance work and you’re being paid by the project, this will also help you in pricing your services.

A Time Tracking Tool

There are many applications out there that help you keep track of how you’re spending your time on your computer.

Rescue Time is free software that automatically tracks which programs and websites you’re using throughout the day. Over the course of a few weeks, you begin to get a clear picture of how efficient your computer time is and how it compares to the work habits of others.

At the end of the month, take a look at the data. You may be surprised to realize how much of your time goes to work that doesn’t actually you earn you any income (like answering emails or being active on social media).

#7 Resolve to Redesign Your Website

Even if you’re website is up-to-date now, it won’t be in six months. The Internet keeps changing and the most successful online companies will continue to change with it.

Don’t risk becoming outdated. Make sure you update and improve your website at least once this year.

#8 Resolve to Eat Right and Exercise

Okay, okay – I know these are the two most cliché resolutions in the history of New Year’s. But they’re cliché for a reason.

Eating right and exercising are great resolutions for anyone who operates their own business. It will give you more energy and focus to make the most of your work day.

Of course, it will also make you healthier and it may even help you look better in the bathroom mirror.

#9 Resolve to Spend 20 Minutes Actively Learning Each Day

Solo entrepreneurs must be proficient in many different fields. In any given day, you may work as a designer, marketer, salesperson, and writer.

There’s not always time to master each of these skillsets. When you’re just starting out, sometimes all that matters is that the task is completed. Whether or not it’s completed perfectly is beside the point.

So entrepreneurs tend to become jacks of many trades, masters of none.

The good news is that means there’s a ton of room for improvement. And even if you’re getting by with your current ability-level, honing your skills will make for better and more efficient work.

That’s why it’s such a good idea to spend 20 minutes actively learning every day.

Ways to Learn

Podcasts

This is a great learning solution for the time-crunched entrepreneur. Maybe you’ve got a full-time job, run your business on the side, and you don’t have 20 minutes to spare.

Pop in a pair of headphones and start learning while involved in an activity that doesn’t require your full attention. Suddenly riding the bus, doing the dishes, and exercising are opportunities to become a smarter, better entrepreneur.

Video Tutorials

While audio is a great learning tool, actually seeing something is often the most effective way to understand it. There’s simply no substitute for watching a pro as they complete a task, talking you through every step of the way.

In the last few years, a huge number of quality video tutorials have been posted on YouTube. Simply search for a subject, press play, and start learning.

Video isn’t the best if you’re just looking for a few bits of essential info. You can’t skim a video like a written tutorial. But they’re an ideal method when you need to sit down and learn a process from front to back.

Books

Ink and paper may be old-fashioned, but a big “how-to” book is still one of the best learning resources available.

Even if all of the information within its pages is available online, that’s no replacement for having it right there in your hands. You won’t have to search the web for quality instruction and you can take it with you wherever you go.

A 500-page tome can set be pretty expensive, but the cost is small when you think of it as an investment in your business. Check out your local bookstore or Amazon to find a compendium on whatever subject you want to master.

Refresh, then Rest

If you really want to get the most out of your daily lesson, revisit it for a few minutes right before you go to sleep. If you read an informative article, skim through it again. If you learned a new technique in Photoshop, create something simple with it.

Not only will this reinforce what you learned the first time around, the new knowledge will sit at the fore front of your brain as you prepare for sleep.

Sleep is your brain’s opportunity to organize and store all of the knowledge it gains throughout the day. So you stand a better chance of actually remembering your daily lesson if you revisit it before you call it a day.

If you resolve to devote a little bit of time to learning every day for the next year, you’ll be see a huge improvement in the quality and quantity of your work by the end of the year.

#10 Resolve to Keep Your Resolutions

Every January, people across the world make resolutions to change the way they act.

Every February, many of those resolutions have been broken or forgotten.

It’s only over the course of the whole year that a change can have any real impact. But if you do stick to your resolutions, they will eventually become habits that will improve your life (and business) for years and years to come.

So, the most important resolution you can make is to really stick with whatever changes you decide to make this year.

What’s Your Resolution?

Let us know how you’re going to make 2012 the best year yet.

How To Make Money Online

20 Bloggers to Watch in 2012

Posted on December 30, 2011 by admin

This year, I tried to go outside of the social media echo-chamber and focus on people who are expanding beyond their blogs. As Michael Stelzner said at Blogworld, “You’re not a blogger, you’re a publisher!”

These are 20 people who stood out to me this year. There is no ranking, nor is there a competition. If you are after more variety, I’ve included links to other round-ups at the end of this post.

Do you know of someone that has really stood out in 2011? Let us know in the comments, or create and link to your own list post. Enjoy!

Maria Popova

Maria Popova describes herself as “interestingness curator and semi-secret geek obsessed with design, science, storytelling and combinatorial creativity”. She is the editor of the much-loved Brain Pickings, which she described as a “a destination for indiscriminate curiosity.”

I love Maria’s work because talented curators are needed in this cluttered blogosphere. Maria goes beyond the collection of links and ideas, and provides a narrative that just enchants you. In the aforementioned interview, Maria said that “curation is all about pattern-recognition, seeing how various and diverse pieces of content fit together under the same taste umbrella or along the same narrative path, so the guiding principle has to be the sole storyteller with a strong point of view.”

I think Maria will be an influence on curators for years to come.

Kristi Hines

Kristi Hines is a freelance writer, online marketing consultant, and social media enthusiast that blogs at Kikolani. She has become famous for her weekly resource posts, Fetching Friday, and is a prolific guest poster on many high-profile sites. Her work is highly regarded in the social media community and she was recommended multiple times in the comments section on last year’s list.

Her book, Blog Post Promotion, is extraordinarily in-depth for a book at its price point, and is something I’d strongly recommend to those who need help getting more attention for their posts. You guys may also enjoy her post about making money online through blogging and writing.

Corbett Barr

Corbett Barr is someone I’ve been watching for a few years. He had a popular blog, Free Pursuits, but focused on creating a legacy rather then just being a blogger. He started Think Traffic in 2010, and quickly built a solid reputation for building quality content. In 2011 he created the Million Dollar Blog Project and launched his case study blog, Expert Enough.

I like Corbett because he’s one of the people who evolved with the challenges that blogging presented, rather than giving up. Some of the best discussions of 2010 came from his blog and I believe that the Million Dollar Blog Project will result in a few more bloggers to watch.

Marcus Sheridan

Marcus started a swimming pool company in 2001. Thanks to his blog, and inbound marketing, it grew to be one of the biggest companies of its kind in the world. Marcus had amassed a large amount of knowledge about content marketing and created The Sales Lion to teach others about the power of community.

I love his blog. He isn’t a pseudo-guru testing his theories—he only teaches about stuff he’s personally experienced. He also has a talent for community engagement. Many of his posts contribute to the conversation surrounding many facets of our industry, which encourages related companies to adjust their model to serve bloggers better.

Hands down, Marcus is one of the coolest guys online. He helps so many of us when he already has a successful business and doesn’t need the social validation. I hope we’ll see a lot more of him in the coming year.

Alexis Grant

Alexis Grant is a publishing powerhouse. She describes herself as a “journalist, blog & social media strategist and a budding entrepreneur.” She has been experimenting with digital products and micropublishing, such as her popular eguide on building a Part-Time Social Media Business. She’s also the managing editor of the Brazen Careerist blog.

I’ve had the pleasure of being friends with her for past few months, and it’s been fascinating watching her grow. She has a unique work history, starting out in traditional journalism and evolving until she landed a job editing a popular blog. I think we will learn a lot from her experiments in digital publishing, especially during the latter part of 2012.

Colin Wright

Colin Wright intrigues me. He runs a popular blog, but I wouldn’t called him a blogger. I don’t think anyone really knows what to call him. Every four months, his readers vote on the next country he’ll move to. He has an everlasting ebook called Exiles, runs a T-shirt shop called I Have No Shirt, and has published six ebooks.

I like Colin because of his constant experimentation with micropublishing and entrepreneurship. He closed eBookling because he’d achieved what he had set out to do, despite having a profitable model. He was one of the first in my community to experiment with Kindle publishing. He’s a genuinely cool guy with a thirst for knowledge, and a desire to improve on existing creations. I think that’s an attitude we all can benefit from.

Torre De Roche

Torre De Roche is the Fearful Adventurer. While overseas, she “fell for a 31-year old Argentinean man who had a humble sailboat and a dream to set off exploring the world.” She accompanied him on his trip across the South Pacific which led to her blog and later, a book about her journey. Within two months of self-publishing her book, she landed a big publishing deal. Her book, Swept, will be out in 2013.

I think that Torre will be one of the writers that will really stand out over the coming years. She has such a natural talent, yet is still a bit of an unknown in the blogosphere. I’m confident that will change over the next year and I think that we are in a fortunate position to watch her evolve.

Deb Ng

Deb is an accomplished blogger. Previously she was the founder and owner of the Freelance Writing Jobs network of blogs, as well as the community manager for Blog Talk Radio. Now, she is employed as the conference director of Blog World Expo and has released her first book, Online Community Management for Dummies.

In 2012, she’ll be just as busy. She’s authoring her second book for the Dummies brand and planning is already well underway for Blogworld in New York.

I love her work, and her contribution to the industry. I especially enjoy her blog, Kommein, where readers are fortunate enough to get an insight into the work of someone whose career spans multiple areas of the blog industry.

Jen Bishop

Jen is mostly known as the publisher and editor of Dynamic Business magazine in Australia. Part of what makes the magazine so successful is its prominent web presence, which feature a wide range of bloggers. But I’m not including her because of that. I’m watching her based on her work at her new blog, Interiors Addict.

Interiors Addict is a blog that curates a lot of the best information her passion, interior design. She’s leveraged her skills as a journalist to get access to industry news and interviews, and has turned her hobby blog into a very prominent force.

One of my favorite trends this year is how journalists are dabbling in creating their own digital presences. I believe they enjoy a lot more success, and learn more, when their blog is based on an obsession rather then just their personal brand. I’m also enjoying how Tumblr is aiding bloggers that focus heavily on curation.

Derek Halpern

Derek runs Social Triggers, a site that “breaks down psychological research and business case studies into simple, actionable steps that can help you improve your online business.” His content isn’t the reason I’m watching him, although it is high-calibre and he only publishes his best work. No, the reason he’s gotten my attention is because of how he got noticed.

Early in 2011, he did blog reviews of popular sites such as Chris Brogan, Think Traffic, Smart Passive Income, and David Risley. He showed both the blogger and those who watched the videos how they could increase conversions, which resulted in massive word of mouth from both the readers and his peers.

2011 was the year he spent working hard, and getting attention. I’m curious to see how he leverages his brand in 2012.

Jenny Blake

Jenny Blake is an author, blogger, life coach, and sought-after speaker who helps others “Wake up, live big! and love the journey.” Jenny recently took her own great leap by leaving Google after five and a half years to pursue her passions full-time.

I’ve enjoyed watching Jenny evolve as she released her first book, Life After College, and expanded her digital offerings. She is fast approaching the end of her first year of self employment, and I think she’ll really start to shine during the latter half of 2012.

Yasmine Surovec

Yasmine is the creator of the popular web comic Cat Versus Human. She documents the everyday realities of living in a multi-cat household via a series of hilarious drawings. In late 2011, she released her first book, Cat vs. Human.

I read a lot of web comics, and I enjoy the fact that they don’t do many of the things that bloggers typically recommend. She has a cat’s bottom in her sidebar, a self-deprecating about page and a contact page that had me hunting for tin-foil. I think that we can all learn from her example and poke more fun at our work, while maintaining a growing brand.

Molly Maher

Molly Maher is the founder of Stratejoy, a positive corner of the Internet that provides thousands of women the tools, strategies, and camaraderie to lead authentically joyful lives. There are many career blogs targeted at people in their twenties, but hers is focused on helping people through their “quarter-life crisis.”

I think her blog is fantastic. She invites a number of people to blog for her for a “season,” so that readers can follow their journeys over a five-month period. It’s a great way to build community, encourage new voices and make sure her content is always interesting to that demographic. I’ve heard so many good things about her blog, and how it’s helped people.

Kristin Glenn and Shannon Whitehead

Kristin and Shannon started {r}evolution apparel, a sustainable fashion company based in America. They came up with the idea for their fashion line but knew they had a lot of work before it could reach the market, so they decided to blog about their journey. Thanks to their blogging and networking efforts, they’ve had massive success with their fundraising to launch their first product. At the time of writing, they have reached double their target for their kickstarter campaign and still have a week to go.

They focused on building their community while building their business. As a result, they had a lot of people willing to help them when they asked for support. Their story shows that you don’t need to wait until your product is ready to get your message out there.

Young House Love

Young House Love chronicles the story of two DIY dorks who are turning their house into a home, and sharing every detail as they learn. The content is great, but what I really loved was how they delved into their personal lives and shared the personality behind the bloggers. Their stories are compelling and somewhat harrowing, such as the details of their daughter’s traumatic birth.

I love how they’ve transformed a personal blog into an amazing resource. Look at how they changed the sidebars for the mood board section. They are incredibly savvy. Their work highlights the potential to build your brand beyond a blog, and shows how you can leverage your archives.

I’m embarrassed that it took me this long to discover Young House Love. I plan to spend many hours delving into the archives after finishing this post.

Lingerie Addict

Treacle is the founder of The Lingerie Addict. She started her site in 2008 because she couldn’t find any resources for people like herself—women on a budget who wanted honest, objective lingerie advice, reviews, and suggestions. She has since turned it into the #1 resource in her niche, attracting over 100,000 readers a month. In October, she quit her job to offer her consulting services.

I think Treacle has done an amazing job empowering women to embrace their body shape and buy underwear that makes them feel gorgeous.

Nerd Fitness

Steve Kamb is the founder of Nerd Fitness: a community for nerds, desk jockeys, and weekend warriors looking to level up their lives. He built up a strong following and has since expanded with Nerd Fitness Message Boards, a clothing range, and several useful products. He is a natural leader—just look at how he doesn’t pressure people to join his rebellion.

I enjoy his work because he is incredibly savvy, yet has a very friendly/casual tone on his blog. He makes new visitors feel very comfortable in a niche that can feel rather alienating.

Sarah Peck

Sarah describes herself as a storyteller who communicates ideas through words, pictures, and other visual media. Her blog, It Starts With, started as a column about making the transition to the professional world and finding out what’s important for you and your career. It has evolved into a blog on business, generating ideas, entrepreneurship, management, and design. She also leverages blogging for her professional work, and is the founder and editor of Landscape Urbanism.

Sarah emerged in the blogosphere early in 2011 and is shaping up to the one of most unique and inspiring voices online. Her content is always thought-provoking and will force you to confront the challenge of executing your best ideas. She studies where great ideas come from and help individuals and businesses do great work. Every blogger has a tipping point and her post on 28 in 52 Notes made Sarah a blogger to keep an eye on 2012.

Tara Gentile

Tara Gentile is the editor of Scoutie Girl, a daily zine with the aim of getting you thinking about your creative life and the changing world around you, and the owner of a boutique web design business. She quickly built a reputation as a DIY lifestyle design expert. She has transitioned to consulting and writes about the philosophy of the new economy, creativity, social media, value and meaning, and wealth.

I really resonate with Tara. She has empowered a huge segment of the creative community to take pride in the marketing of their work. Her work has affected an entire industry. I can’t wait to see what she does in 2012.

Joel Runyon

A year ago, Joel was just a guy with an inspiring blog. He wasn’t satisfied with that. He expanded his original blog to create Impossible HQ, a hub that incorporates a separate motivational community, a T-Shirt line, and a manifesto. He also created a separate site, NerveRush, to cater to the adrenalin-seeking segment of his audience.

I think Joel is just getting started with what he has to offer. He is always adding new ways for his community to engage with his site and, as a result, is creating an increasingly passionate readership. I’m really excited to see where he takes the ‘Impossible’ brand in 2012.

More bloggers to watch

Want more? Take a look at these blogging round-ups:

And don’t forget to give us your suggestions in the comments!

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

20 Bloggers to Watch in 2012

ProBlogger Blog Tips

IncomeDiary: A Year in Review

Posted on December 29, 2011 by admin

Income Diary has come a long way in the past year, with the hiring of writers who can take the strain off of Michael, so that he can focus on other aspects of the website, meaning that there’s less of a strain on him, which ultimately results in better content from everyone. The workload has been shared between four people this year, and the quality, and regularity of content, has certainly improved.

Traffic

When we look at traffic, it’s always relative, but the trick is to know what you’re comparing it to. If we were to compare our traffic to Google, then that would mean nothing, but fortunately we’re at a point now, after a few years, that we can compare ourselves to ourselves, to see how we’ve improved, and more importantly, where we’ve gone wrong. I suggest that everyone does one of these for their website every few months, because it’s only by doing a full analysis that you can really tell how well your website is doing – you might be surprised by your results. For example, did you think that IncomeDiary’s top 3 referring cities are New York, London, and New Delhi?

Comparison of Traffic

We can start by simply comparing the amount of traffic we’ve received this year, to the traffic we had last year. No surprises here really that the website has grown, I mean, you’d expect nothing less from people who run a blog about blogging and making money online. The most important elements to study here is not how much traffic we’ve had, but where it’s come from. Only when you start to study your referrers will you truly understand how your website has grown, and how you can help it to grow in the future.

As you can see, we’ve had 370,000 more visits this year than last year, which is quite an astounding improvement. I should think that most people would love to even see a hundred thousand visitors in the year. The improvement is largely down to the improvements we’ve made in SEO, which we’ll get to later on.

Unique visitors help us to understand how strong ID is at building a following, because it’s the number of different people that have viewed the website, which means that if we have 50 unique visitors, and 100 visits, then those visitors are coming back twice. ID has a very strong list of around 50,000 people, but the large majority of our traffic comes from search engines, so the likelihood is that the majority of people who find us have not been to the website before, which is why the number is so high.

Pageviews are up this year, but that’s to be expected when there’s an increase in traffic. Be careful to note that a pageview is different to a visit. A visitor might have one visit, but three pageviews, which is what accounts for the higher number. This isn’t really the most important figure though, it’s the pages per visit statistic below.

Pages/Visit is down by quite a substancial amount this year, which is not what you want, but it really depends on your monetization method whether it affects you or not. If we were running AdSense, it would make a big difference because you want as many impressions as possible, and sure, we link to our own products, but there’s nothing to say that those extra pages per visit would be product pages. Either way, we want this to be as high as possible, and there are steps that we can take to reaching that, such as updating SEO smart links, and using more keywords in our content. A good reason why this statistic may be lower is because we post more content now, so people are regularly updated and don’t have to explore the site as much.

Average time on site can be a little bit misleading if you don’t fully understand the implications, and where the traffic comes from. The time on site has reduced, but we’ve started posting content five times a week, so with updates that regular, people are less likely to explore the site. A large part of our traffic comes through Google, and these people have likely found for that they’re looking for, so there’s less reason for them to browse the website. There’s also no search function on IncomeDiary, so there’s less ways for people to explore the site, which would both increase the time on site, and the pages per visit.

I think that our success this year with search engines is a good explanation as to why the bounce rate has increased. For those that don’t know, the bounce rate is the percentage of people who leave the site without looking at another page. Because people are more likely to find what they’re looking for with Google, there would be less reason for them to explore the site; they’re much more likely to just leave when they’ve finished reading what they came for.

Not surprisingly, the percentage of new visits this year has gone up, which again is down to the success we’ve had with Google, which makes it easier for people to find us that have never heard of us before. This helps us to grow in a big way, and adds new subscribers every day to our lists.

Traffic Sources

When we start to look at traffic sources, we start to understand how we’ve become so popular, and what we’ve been doing right. It also exposes the areas where we’re not getting much traffic, and we need to improve. By far the biggest referrer this yeah has been Google, and it’s up by 150% from last yeah, which is a huge growth, and worth a lot of money to us. Google is my favourite form of traffic because there’s around a 75% chance that when someone comes to the website, they’ve never visited it before, which only goes to help grow the website by exposing it to a larger audience.

As you can see, we’ve had over 400,ooo people visit us from Google, which is quite astounding really, and that’s the result of an investment into an SEO specialist. The investment has clearly paid off though as we rank very highly for many different terms, which I’ll cover further down the post.

Other noticeable differences are that our direct traffic is up too, by 58.86%, and that would likely be accounted for by the increased list size, because the majority of people who click on links, would do so through a mail client, and that counts as direct traffic, rather than referred traffic.

There are four other main referrers that are worth mentioning, the first of which is Facebook. IncomeDiary relies so much on a list, and Google, that Facebook isn’t really a big part of how we get traffic, or at least it hasn’t been in the past. This is because joining a mailing list is much like Facebook, and we would rather have a list than Facebook, so that has been our focus. In the past few months though, I’ve been focusing a lot more of my attention on growing Facebook, and getting the numbers up, because it can never hurt. Traffic from Facebook has gone up this year by 145.65%, from 7,001 to 17,198. If you like our content, then I would encourage you to like us on Facebook and take part in some of our polls and conversations.

Twitter has been another big contributor this year, providing us with nearly 6,123 this year, compared to nothing last year. There’s a reason for this. When Twitter first came out, you could market much more aggressively, following hundreds of people a day, which helps to build your following. Because of this, we now have over 15,000 people following us, which are all people we can market to. This was left alone for a while, much like Facebook was, but unlike Facebook, as soon as you start Tweeting again, people will see them, and you don’t have to wait to be deemed worthy enough for your followers to see your content. Since I took on the Twitter marketing in August, I’ve started setting up Twitter to automatically tweet around 5 times a day, as well as tweeting whenever we publish new content. 2 simple plugins are doing all the hard work, and contributing to our traffic like this:Our traffic from Reddit this year is up by 6,613.75%, but before you get too excited, it’s not as special as it sounds. Last year we only got 80 people from them, but this year it was 5,371. That’s the great thing about Reddit though, it’s bonus traffic if you’re not submitting it yourself. Someone else had submitted an article related to how much Google was making per second, and it got lots of upvotes on Reddit, which meant lots of traffic for us. Whether that provided us with more money is hard to tell, but it exposed our website to people who may not have seen it before.

StumbleUpon also provided us with some traffic this year, but it’s noticeably down from last year, by just over 60%. SU is hard traffic to predict, because it’s mostly used as a time waster, so it’s dependant on the content that you’re writing at the time. As you start to exhaust the basics in your niche, you’re forced to slightly diversify your content, which means that certain referrers are less interested, which is what happened here. It’s no secret that SU isn’t the best quality of visitor in the world, so it’s not really much of a problem.

Search Engine Traffic

Search engine traffic now makes up for roughly half of all the traffic that we receive, which I’m sure you’ll agree, is quite an achievement. By studying the search engine traffic, you get a really good sense of how people browse the internet, and what they’re mostly searching for. Have a look at the comparison between the last two years worth of search engine traffic, and you’ll see lots of little, regular grooves in the timeline. If you haven’t worked it out already, these grooves are the weekends for every week. It just goes to show that weekends are bad times to be sharing content, because people are using their computers a bit less. Note* The dip in September was because we changed themes and forgot to include the GA code.The most important aspects to understanding your search engine traffic is to look at the keyword phrases people are using to get to your website. Phrases such as ‘income diary’ and ‘michael dunlop’ don’t mean anything to us, because they’re people who have been to the site before and are trying to get back here again; they’re using Google as a lazy address bar.

The results you want to look out for are ones that sum up what you do, rather than just your content. For example, when you remove the terms that relate to our website, the top three results are ‘online earning sites’, ‘top earning websites’, and ‘entrepreneur quotes’. Now this is always good to have for traffic, and has fed ID with thousands of visitors, but they all relate to specific posts that we have written. They have all had an improvement in traffic in the past year, ranging between a 36% to 440%. The thing about these search terms though is that they relate to largely out of date posts; ones that have since been replaced with new content, but more on that later.

The best search term that we have going for us so far is ‘how to make money blogging’, which comes in at number four (after you take out the irrelevant terms). This terms sums up our website, so to know that we’re ranking for it is a really good thing. I would love to rank for ‘photography tutorials’ on ExpertPhotography. Think how good your website would do if it ranked for a term that was relevant to your website like that. We’re not the top search result, but that’s not important, as for now, getting ranked at all is the important part. We’ve gone from 11 hits for this term last year, to 2600 this year, and judging by the graph below, I expect it to grow further. The most interesting factor to consider here is not the number of results, but the type of people they’re reaching, which in our case this year, is 81.61% new visitors. We also rank for ‘make money blogging’ and ‘how to make money online’.

Quality of Visitor

This is something that I’ve become a little bit obsessed with recently because I have a small following compared to some other photography websites, so I try to focus on a quality following. By this, I mean people who stay for a long time on the site, and people who look at more than one page. As you may expect if you’ve ever looked at the engagement statistics for your website, the majority of people who view this website stay for 10 seconds or less. This is standard for most websites, and there’s a variety of reasons for this ranging fromthe loading speed of the page, the accuracy of the page, to the size of the post, and the style in which it’s written. Not forgetting peoples attention spans.

The quality of visitor has actually deteriorated over the past year, with more people staying for 10 seconds or less than the year before, and less people staying for more than a minute. This isn’t too much of an issue for us as it’s pretty standard for any website which receives hundreds of thousands of visitors each yeah – when the majority of visitors is poor, it stands to reason that you’ll start to see more of them as your website grows.

When you look at the frequency at which the visitors view your website, you can start to gather how engaged a reader is, and how likely they are to come back again, whether it’s of their own accord, or they sign up to a list. The results fluctuate between the different bands of frequency, but when the views start to get up between 9-50 views in a year, this year has improved on last year, and accounts for around 10% of our visitors.

How we can Move Forward in 2012

After everything that we’ve learned by studying our traffic for the year, we have a much better understanding of what works well for our website, and what we need to do to improve. Firstly, the SEO side of the website is clearly working really well, but there’s still a way to go to really compete with some other sites in our niche. SEO is a huge part of how we reach our traffic, so this needs to be focused on, but not so that we ignore other elements. First of all we need to start building on our Facebook following, because even though we have a huge email list, it can never hurt to receive extra traffic. Seeing as we can post links on Facebook five times a week, it would be a shame to miss that. I’ve recently been looking into the effectiveness of Facebook ads, so that’s something we can try, and then write about in the future, to hopefully benefit you.

It’s the referral traffic that we need to work on, so as well as working on our Facebook, there are a few new techniques I want to try with Twitter in the new year. I won’t go into the details here, but it should prove to be very powerful. People often underestimate the power of Twitter, for both providing traffic to a website, and also convincing people to like your fan page. With a little bit of experimenting over time, I think we can get both Twitter and Facebook to a point at which it’s growing at a much more regular pace. Every little helps.

There’s no search feature on IncomeDiary, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it does mean that once something leaves the home page, it’s usually lost to most people. You could find it through SEO smart links, or by exploring the author’s posts, but visitors will most likely be missing content that may be of use to them. I have the same problem with ExpertPhotography, the only difference being is that I do have a search feature, it just sucks. What I propose is that we find a reasonable way to archive these different posts, through the use of categories and keywords, and then should someone want to explore the articles, it will be very easy to do so.

Overall, 2011 has been a very good year for IncomeDiary, and when you work hard on the internet, particularly something that’s your own idea, it gives you inspiration for new projects that are even better than the one you have. We’re always coming up with new ideas for content, or development of the website, such as the new answers section, so there’s no doubt that 2012 will be even more successful.

To Your Success, and Happy New Year,

From the IncomeDiary Team.

How To Make Money Online

A Quick and Dirty Guide to Your First Guest Post

Posted on December 29, 2011 by admin

This guest post is by Neil Patel of KISSmetrics.

You can’t really turn anywhere these days and not hear somebody telling you that in order to grow your blog, you need to guest post.

I know you’ve heard that before, but have you actually done it?

Or are you looking for somebody to tell you how to actually go about creating a guest post content strategy, finding the right blogs to guest post for, approaching that blogger and actually writing that post? If so, then you’ve come to the right place.

Develop your guest writing strategy

Your first step is to create a content strategy. There are a couple of decisions you need to make. Listen: guest posting is not easy work. If you have a full schedule and your own blog to keep up with, you now need to find the time to write posts in addition to your regular guest posts.

There are two common approaches:

Slow and methodical: This is very strategic and targets one, maybe two blogs and dishes out guest posts for them at least once a month. This is a really great way to ease into the habit of guest posting. You’ll stay sane with this method, but results will build up more slowly over time.
Fast and furious: The other method is simply to write as many guest blog posts as you possibly can in a short period of time. The way to make this happen is to blast an announcement to your social media sphere announcing that you’d like to write a guest post for anyone who signs up. You’ll be surprised how many takers you’ll get. People are desperate for content. Next, set aside large chunks of time … like every night of the week from 6pm to 10pm, or devote your entire weekend to it. Then write non-stop. This was The World’s Strongest Librarian’s approach when he wrote 42 blog posts in a seven-week period. It’s one that may make you go nuts, so don’t over commit.

Which approach you choose will determine the quantity and quality of your guest posts, so choose wisely.

Brainstorm for fresh, relevant guest posts

It doesn’t matter which approach you chose above, the following brainstorming ideas will help you come up with ideas for your guest posts.

Mind mapping: Mind mapping is the concept of starting with a central idea and then branching out from there into subsets. FreeMind is an open source program that will help you do that. It even allows you to add images and hyperlinks so you can track all your ideas.
Time machine: Another creative way to brainstorm unique ideas is to pretend you step into a time machine. From there imagine how someone from the 70’s might solve a particular problem. Or look to the future and make a prediction about how particular problems could be solved.
Push the envelope: One of the reasons I like to guest post is because it forces me to push my boundaries of thinking. It’s a great way to see how far you can go with an idea. When you think you found an idea’s limits, take it farther.
Role play: You can do this either alone or with a partner. Alone, all you need to do is just put yourself into someone else’s shoes, like a child or client, and try to imagine how they would approach a particular problem. If you have a creative partner, ask him or her to play the devil’s advocate and have a conversation about your topic idea. Take note of all the ideas that pop up.
Hot potato: This is a great one to use when you are hanging out with a bunch of friends. This brainstorming technique basically involves someone starting an idea … and then passing it on to the next person. Use a timer and some kind of object to pass around so you can keep track of whose turn it is. This technique is great for getting everyone to pitch an idea.

Build a social media presence

If you choose to go the slow and methodical way, then when it comes to guest posting, it’s helpful if you build your reputation with the blogger you hope to write for before you ask to guest post. The best way to do this is to start following him on Twitter, Facebook or Google+ and interact with him. Here are some other things you must do:

Comments: Start to leave thoughtful comments where you are asking questions and engaging with the blogger on his site. But don’t ignore everyone else. Answer questions that other readers leave. Busy bloggers love it when someone comes along and starts answering questions that allows him to not to worry about following up on every comment.
Join forums: If there is a forum to join, join that. Subscribe to his email newsletter if he provides one, too. Occasionally it’s a great idea to reply to his or her email newsletter. Do it from your inbox so he or she will see your email signature, which should have your blog address on it. Hopefully they’ll take the time to look at it. I’ve had a few bloggers invite me to write guest posts for them after exchanging emails.
Email: At some point you should directly email the blogger. It doesn’t have to be about guest blogging. It could be just to ask a legitimate question. For example, you could compliment them on their writing and then ask where they learned how to write. You want to build that relationship.

Of course, some blogs like problogger.net have guest posting guidelines that you can follow and skip the above process, but most don’t. And don’t think of this as a waste of time just to get the guest posting opportunity. This is really about building long-term relationships, so it helps to do it whether they have a policy or not.

Master the components of a guest post

Is a guest post different than a post you’d publish on your own blog? The answer is yes. See, when you are posting on somebody else’s blog, you need to put your best foot forward. Your hope is that the guest post will generate some subscribers to your own blog, so you better be on top of your game.

Here’s what you need to think about:

Links: Bloggers like it when you write a post that has links in it, both internal links and external links. When you create a blog post that links to the blogger’s own content, it shows that you’ve done your homework. And he or she appreciates the external links because that builds his credibility with those bloggers.
Advanced blog posts: The jury is still out about whether you share your best stuff or not on guest blogs, but my view is that you write a damn good post no matter what. This means give the host blogger something unique to his sight. This won’t work if you’ve decided to write fast and furiously, because advanced blog posts take time.
Create a conversation the audience: Your post must answer some question relevant to the host blogger’s audience … not yours.
Demonstrate you are an authority: Don’t be afraid to casually mention the reasons why the audience should listen to you. You won’t be bragging if it’s true and part of the conversation.
Hook headlines: Although there is a good chance the host blogger may change your headline, give him or her the best one. Yet, give them three to choose from. And remember, a great headline is unique, useful, ultra-specific and urgent. They’re the four Us. Use them!

Conclusion

That’s it. If you follow those steps, you should be on your way to your first guest post gig in no time. All you have to do is start pitching bloggers.

When pitching bloggers make sure you play the numbers game, as everyone won’t say “yes.” What other tips do you have for guest posting?

Neil Patel is the co-founder of KISSmetrics and blogs at Quick Sprout.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

A Quick and Dirty Guide to Your First Guest Post

ProBlogger Blog Tips

	As you can see, we’ve had 370,000 more visits this year than last year, which is quite an astounding improvement. I should think that most people would love to even see a hundred thousand visitors in the year. The improvement is largely down to the improvements we’ve made in SEO, which we’ll get to later on.
	Unique visitors help us to understand how strong ID is at building a following, because it’s the number of different people that have viewed the website, which means that if we have 50 unique visitors, and 100 visits, then those visitors are coming back twice. ID has a very strong list of around 50,000 people, but the large majority of our traffic comes from search engines, so the likelihood is that the majority of people who find us have not been to the website before, which is why the number is so high.
	Pageviews are up this year, but that’s to be expected when there’s an increase in traffic. Be careful to note that a pageview is different to a visit. A visitor might have one visit, but three pageviews, which is what accounts for the higher number. This isn’t really the most important figure though, it’s the pages per visit statistic below.
	Pages/Visit is down by quite a substancial amount this year, which is not what you want, but it really depends on your monetization method whether it affects you or not. If we were running AdSense, it would make a big difference because you want as many impressions as possible, and sure, we link to our own products, but there’s nothing to say that those extra pages per visit would be product pages. Either way, we want this to be as high as possible, and there are steps that we can take to reaching that, such as updating SEO smart links, and using more keywords in our content. A good reason why this statistic may be lower is because we post more content now, so people are regularly updated and don’t have to explore the site as much.
	Average time on site can be a little bit misleading if you don’t fully understand the implications, and where the traffic comes from. The time on site has reduced, but we’ve started posting content five times a week, so with updates that regular, people are less likely to explore the site. A large part of our traffic comes through Google, and these people have likely found for that they’re looking for, so there’s less reason for them to browse the website. There’s also no search function on IncomeDiary, so there’s less ways for people to explore the site, which would both increase the time on site, and the pages per visit.
	I think that our success this year with search engines is a good explanation as to why the bounce rate has increased. For those that don’t know, the bounce rate is the percentage of people who leave the site without looking at another page. Because people are more likely to find what they’re looking for with Google, there would be less reason for them to explore the site; they’re much more likely to just leave when they’ve finished reading what they came for.
	Not surprisingly, the percentage of new visits this year has gone up, which again is down to the success we’ve had with Google, which makes it easier for people to find us that have never heard of us before. This helps us to grow in a big way, and adds new subscribers every day to our lists.