Hot Tip of the Day

Building Niche Twitter Empires – The Next Internet Rush

Now that Twitter has finally unveiled how they plan to make money, everyone should start rethinking how to also make money on Twitter. In the beginning all the buzz was about how to get followers and the approach was to get anyone with a pulse to start following you on Twitter.

I started out in the real estate profession and always loved the concept of building equity from property value. This is likely why I became interested in Twitter and influence of Tweet value. Not to mention the financial industry booms and busts totally shattered my real estate business model.

With a passion for building equity I set out to target the Twitter industry and create online empires. Quickly I discovered that how many followers you have on Twitter did not matter as much as how much influence you had over those following you on Twitter. Leading me to build niche Twitter empires focused on content engagement for specific subject matters. A business model that involves creating numerous niche Twitter profiles.

To simplify things how much influence you can create through Tweets is what determines the value of how much credibility you build. Then it became crystal clear to me that niche Twitter profiles would be the next big Internet rush. The need to be able to engage followers and influence buying decisions is likely why everyone is on Twitter or at least considering joining the social media network.

Say you market and promote products, goods, or services it would be smart to have a niche Twitter profile that Tweets about those products, goods, and services. I have a Twitter profile that talks about building website traffic on Twitter my handle is @TrafficOpps. I love video games so I created a niche Twitter profile where my handle is @PCVideoGamer. The point here is to target and attract Twitter followers interested in unique subject matters.

Are search engines taking interest in niche Twitter profiles? With the help of my team we even created a niche Twitter profile that is focused on urban luxury and the Twitter handle is @UrbanLuxury.

If you do a key word search on Google, Bing, Yahoo, or Ask for “Urban Luxury” you will find @UrbanLuxury in the top 5% indexed over millions of websites.

Twitter is the universe and the greatest place on earth to deliver a message to the most amounts of people in the fastest amount of time. Building niche Twitter empires are the next generation for Web 3.0!

Building Niche Twitter Empires – The Next Internet Rush

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Posted on 11.12.10 · Tagged with

Hot Tip of the Day

Why Social Media Is a Better Investment than SEO

Posted by jessica · Leave a Comment

This guest post is by Gary Arndt of Everything-Everywhere.com

As a blogger, you probably do not have the luxury of having a staff of people to work for you. As such, your time is very valuable and you need to spend it where it will do the most good. We have reached a point in late 2010 where the work required to generate traffic for a normal blog via search engines is much greater than that required to generate an equal amount of traffic via social media.

My thesis is simple: for the majority of bloggers, the time and effort invested on social media is better spent than time spent on SEO.

This post will probably generate controversy. There are an army of people out there who make a living selling SEO products and services. To use an old adage, when you only tool is a hammer, every problem is a nail. To them, SEO is the beginning and end of traffic generation.

To be sure, search engines do drive a lot of traffic, however, with the increasing pollution of search engines with content farms, Google’s love of big brands/big media, and the increasing amount of work required to rank for ever longer keywords, SEO is no longer worth the effort for most bloggers.

The power of brands

Google loves brands. The reasoning behind this actually makes some sense. An easy solution to the problem of spam websites was for Google to give extra authority to sites that have large, established brands. This doesn’t bode well for bloggers, however.

To given you an example of how much authority brands are given, several months ago I conducted an experiment. I had an article that I had done some link building on. After several months the article ranked #3 for the keyword I was targeting (behind two large media properties). I had an opportunity to put some content on the website of a very large media brand. I put that article, word for word, on their site to see how they would rank for the exact same keyword. Within an hour, they were ranked at #4, just behind my original article. In a day, they were ranked above me, even though the same content had been on my site for months and I had gone through the effort to do link building.

I realize there is a new content bonus that Google will give articles for a while, but the fact they were able to rank so high, so quickly, even against a previously indexed article with links, shows just how much the deck is stacked against blogs. Google can’t easily tell the difference a legitimate blog from a made for Adsense spam site. If they could, there would be no spam.

If you are in a niche that doesn’t have a large traditional media presence (niches like Internet marketing, SEO, or social media) you might not notice this because there is little media competition. However, if you are in a niche with a large traditional media presence (like travel, politics, news, sports, or food) you might see on a regular basis how difficult it can be.

Brand vs. individual authority

You might think that Darren Rowse has a great deal of authority on the subject of blogging. You would be correct. However, in the eyes of Google, Darren doesn’t have any authority; ProBlogger.net does. This is a fundamental problem with how Google works. People invest trust and authority in other people while Google puts authority in URL’s.

As a thought experiment, lets say Darren sold ProBlogger.net and started up a new blog called The-Blogging-Pro.info (a horrible domain name, but just stay with me). Everyone who reads this site, subscribes to the newsletter or follows Darren on Twitter would know to now go to the new site to get Darren’s advice on blogging. The authority that Darren has developed over the years would stay with him, even if he moved to a new domain. Google, however, would still put its trust and authority in ProBlogger.net, even though the real authority has moved to a different domain.

Social media solves the authority dilemma. You know who is authoritative and isn’t. I often ask people how many people they can name who have written an article for National Geographic in its 122-year history. Most people can’t name a single person. Yet, if I ask them who is behind their favorite blogs, almost everyone can give me a name. We trust the New York Times or National Geographic because of the reputation the brand has developed over the years. Even if the author of a given article knows nothing about the subject (which does happen), they are assumed to be authoritative just because of the brand they are writing under.

Writers will usually give a list of the publications they have written for as their credentials. Their authority is a second hand authority derived from the publications they have written for. (“I am a successful author because I have written for large, successful publications.”)

Blogger authority is first hand authority. It comes directly from the reputation they have developed over time from their audience.

The power of individuals

The fact that people know who bloggers are is exactly the reason why blogs have a comparative advantage in social media. The New York Times Twitter account might have millions of followers, but they can never do more than pump out links to articles. It can’t have a conversation, talk or listen. If it did, who would be the one doing the talking on behalf of the brand?

The part of social media that actually builds trust and authority is totally absent from most large media properties. They are simply not able to engage in a conversation as a brand. Some companies like ESPN have banned their staff from using Twitter precisely because they didn’t want their employees to develop their own authority outside if the network. If they did, they’d become too valuable and they would have too much leverage when it came time to negotiate contracts.

Bloggers have the ability to do an end run around traditional media precisely because we are capable of having a conversation. That is something a faceless brand can never do.

SEO is time consuming

Critics of this article might point out that if you just worked harder, you could rank for anything you want. They are probably right. It isn’t a question of what is possible. It is a question of the return on your investment. The concept of time ROI is absent from almost any discussion on SEO.

As I stated above, the deck is stacked against the little guy in SEO. Google loves brands and can’t associate authority with individuals. To just keep pace with media brands, you have to put in much more work. The New York Times doesn’t have to bother with link building. You do. That alone should tell you how fair the playing field is.

Bloggers have a comparative advantage in social media. We can appeal to human notions of authority, not algorithmic notions. We can have discussions and conversations, and brands can’t do that. Moreover, it isn’t hard to do. All you have to do is talk and most of you are probably doing that now.

Already you are seeing a shift in some media outlets to superstar journalists. What is happening is the same thing you are seeing in the blogging world. People are putting their trust and authority into people, not the brands they work for. It will only be a matter of time before the superstar journalists realize they don’t need their media masters anymore.

Writing for humans vs. writing for machines

Despite what Google says, the key to good SEO isn’t writing for good content for people. This is a bald-faced lie which anyone who has spent time trying to rank for a keyword knows. Human beings enjoy alliteration, puns, jokes and other forms of word play, which are totally lost on an algorithm. What makes for a good article from a content farm is exactly the thing, which you should not do if you want to covert readers into subscribers. Content created with SEO in mind is more often than not fun to read.

Google’s original rational for the “create good content” argument was that people would naturally link to good content. That is no longer true. People share good content on Twitter and Facebook, which is either closed to Google, labeled as “nofollow”, or doesn’t have anchor text. The world Serge and Brin wrote their seminal paper for in the 1990’s doesn’t exist today.

Traffic as a means vs. traffic as an end

Newspapers have developed an obsession with visits and page views. Many bloggers have the same problem as well. They view raw traffic as the end game because they view the world though an advertising model. Under this paradigm, the more traffic you have the better, regardless how you get it or for what reason, because it will lead to more ad clicks.

Many bloggers have wised up to the fact that advertising isn’t the best way to make money. CPM rates keep falling and will keep falling so long as ad inventory grows faster than online advertising budgets. It has reached a point where to make money via advertising you have to either have an enormous media property or have an incredibly targeted site devoted to a very niche keyword.

Most blogs don’t fit into either category. They don’t have millions of page views per month, and they don’t niche themselves into talking about only instant coffee makers. In this middle space, what matters aren’t raw page views to generate advertising revenue. What matters is growing a loyal following of people who view you as authoritative in your area.

In this model, traffic is just a means to an end, not an end in itself. The real end is getting traffic to convert to subscribers and loyal followers. You will be more likely to get a follower from someone who views you as having authority rather than someone who is just looking for bit of information with no idea of who you are.

Google-proofing

Google changes their algorithm all the time. There are companies who have been destroyed by changes made at Google. Fortunes rise and fall based on how Google decides to rank sites. A major question you have to ask yourself is “how dependent do I want to be on Google?”

All the hard work you put into SEO can be destroyed, or at least significantly altered, but changes at Google. Authority and reputation with other people, however, doesn’t change on a whim.

Also, knowing that Google is going to change in the future, in what direction do you think it is going to change? My bet would be towards a greater reliance on social media and less reliance on links. I’m sure there are engineers at Google right now trying to figure out how to translate the authority and trust that individuals have into their search results.

Choose social media for greater ROI

I am not saying you should block Google from indexing your site. I am not saying search engine traffic is bad. In fact, there are blogs out there that would be best served by an SEO strategy.

What I am saying is that outside of a few things you can do in the creation of your blog, don’t worry about SEO. Make sure your permalinks make sense, create a site map, install the appropriate plugins … and then stop worrying about it.

Invest your time where it will give you the highest return. Today, I believe that place is in social media. Do you? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

Since March 2007, Gary has blogged from over 70 countries at Everything-Everywhere.com. He was also named by Time Magazine as one of the 25 Best Blogs of 2010.

Post from: ProBlogger Blog Tips

Why Social Media Is a Better Investment than SEO

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Posted on 11.12.10 · Tagged with

Hot Tip of the Day

7 Self-doubts New Bloggers Can Beat

Posted by jessica · Leave a Comment

This guest post is by Scott McIntyre of Vivid Ways.

You’ve just launched a shiny new blog and you’re buzzing with excitement about sharing content and building an audience. At first, it requires a lot of time and effort to get things off the ground, but your confidence is sky-high that this blogging thing will take off and push you straight up to the A List.

Image by R'eyes

Then, slowly but surely, you begin to doubt what you’re doing. Success doesn’t come quite as quickly as you’d hoped, despite your hard work. Disappointment sets in. You lose motivation. After a while, this lack of self-belief causes you to ask yourself if it’s even worth publishing another post.

Did you ever feel this way?

Perhaps you’re a more experienced blogger who still remembers when you questioned what on Earth you were doing and whether you were any good. Or, maybe you’re facing this crisis of confidence right now.

If that’s the case, you need to tackle these self-doubts before they sabotage your blogging dreams!

Self-doubt and the New Blogger

I recently started my first blog, and one of my initial articles looked at how to conquer self-doubt in general. This got me thinking about the specific doubts new bloggers come up against, and the ways in which a lack of self-belief can negatively affect our blogging activities.

Feelings of self-doubt have little to do with how good a blogger you really are—they’re about how not-so-good you perceive yourself to be. There’s a crucial difference.

So, there’s no shame or weakness in admitting that you experience self-doubt (I’m sure even top bloggers suffer from the occasional wobble in confidence). In fact, the opposite is true: you have to be willing to recognize and shine a light on your doubts so you can deal with them head-on.

Here are seven of the biggest self-doubts you can face as a new blogger, and useful tips on how to beat them before they crack your confidence.

1. Have I chosen the best topic to blog about?

At some stage early on, you nervously wonder if you’ve chosen the right topic to blog about. Of course, you’ve done your research and opted for a subject that’s a good match for your knowledge, experience, and passion. But, until you start seeing results, how can you be sure it’s the best niche for you?

The fact that you decided upon a topic based on your interests is a reasonable indication that you’re on the right track. As you’ll be producing content for a long time (hopefully), you need to maintain an enthusiasm for the subject matter from the outset. That way, you’ll want to learn more so that you can pass on new insights to your readers in the future.

If, however, after only a few months of blogging you find yourself struggling to come up with ideas for posts, or you haven’t the heart to publish regularly, this is usually an early warning sign that you have to rethink your first choice of blog topic. Do a reassessment of your current interests against a range of different niches.

Don’t panic too much if you decide to change to another topic. Your blog is still in its infancy, and it’s better to alter your course sooner rather than later.

2. What if no one wants to read what I’ve got to say?

When you start off blogging, you could very well find that there’s a readership of only one: yourself! It’s all too easy to become disheartened when you see your carefully crafted content languishing with no comments and very few visitors.

Don’t be tempted to throw in the towel quite yet. Rather than it being the case that no one is interested in what you’re publishing, it’s more likely that you’ve yet to reach your target audience. It’s your job to get out there and help those ideal readers come across your blog.

People always want to discover fresh, useful, and thought-provoking content online and that’s a huge opportunity for you to tap into. No one, however, says that attracting readers is easy—it’s not.

There are, fortunately, many tips and techniques you can use to help increase your readership. Experiment with these proven methods, or be brave and go do something unique that draws in your special crowd. It’s far too early to give up until you’ve done everything you possibly can to entice those ideal readers back to your blog.

3. Am I just saying the same old stuff in the same old way?

You’re concerned that when you follow the trail of links to other blogs within your niche, everyone seems to be talking about exactly the same things you are. With so many blogs creating so much content, it can be very difficult to come up with original ideas that haven’t been explored a million times before.

The blogosphere loves original thinkers with fresh perspectives. Any blogger can gain popularity when they stand out from the crowd by both a) what they say and b) how they say it. When you deal with a subject, remember that it’s never been addressed from your viewpoint before. That’s why telling your own personal story and sharing your opinions breathes energetic life into what could simply be run-of-the-mill content we’ve all seen before.

There’s always going to be a unique angle on whatever topic you look at, because the knowledge and experience you bring are different to those of the next blogger. With practice, you’ll learn how to build your blog’s voice in a way that sets it apart from all the other sites out there.

4. Is my writing all right or all wrong?

You’re eager to get your thoughts out there, but you’re afraid that people will criticize the amateur writing style and rip apart the spelling and grammar.

It’s reassuring that writing content for blogs is very different from anything you’ve ever written before. Every new blogger can learn how to adapt these tried-and-tested techniques for themselves.

Sure, some folk will point out your mistakes—there will always be critics lining up to take a shot. Correct spelling shows you care about attention to detail, while good grammar helps the reader more easily grasp the points you want to get across. Bear in mind, though, that what you write is just as important as the way it is written.

Put it this way: wrongly spelled words and awkward grammar can hinder the reader’s understanding and enjoyment of your post, so try your best to get it right. But don’t allow this concern to stifle your creativity or limit what it is you desperately want to say. The more you write, the more confident you’ll become in expressing yourself through the medium of a blog post.

5. Am I getting too personal?

Sharing your experiences in life is a critical part of connecting with an audience on a deeper level. Readers respond well to a blogger who can show first-hand that he or she understands the challenges they face. Yet, how can you be certain that you don’t reveal “too much information?”

Personal story telling works best when it brings home a learning point that the reader needs to know. The lesson has to be relevant and appropriate to help someone solve a specific problem or deal with a particular issue. In other words, the personal information you share has to be of benefit to the reader in some way. Otherwise, it could be seen as irrelevant and self-indulgent.

Ultimately, it’s down to your individual judgment: you choose exactly what you tell your readers about your life in a blog post. Before hitting the Publish button, ask yourself this: “Do I really want the whole world (literally) overhearing that fact about me, or my family and friends?” The old saying holds true: If in doubt, leave it out.

6. I’m nervous about networking

You realize that it’s essential to build relationships with other bloggers to get ahead in blogging nowadays. However, this is easier said than done: you feel awkward about getting in touch with them. What could a newbie like you possibly have to offer a big-name blogger?

Well, if you feel like this, instead of contacting A-list bloggers straight away, reach out to others who are at the same stage of their blogging journey as you. You’re bound to have a lot in common, giving plenty of opportunities to assist each other as you grow your blogs together.

The main priority of a blogging-based relationship is to provide mutual value and benefit to each of you. That’s why linking up with bloggers in a similar position can work so well—each can appreciate the other’s situation and provide the same kind of support.

Forming strong bonds with other bloggers online is basically no different to the way you’d get to know someone in the real world. Courtesy, genuine interest in what they’re doing, and offers of help go a long way! Don’t be shy to make the first move, as it could very well be the start of a very productive partnership.

7. Will I ever be a success?

This is probably the biggest single doubt that keeps popping into your head as you try hard to kick-start your blog. After all, it’s the reason you’re doing all this work, isn’t it? Constant worrying over whether you’re ever going to make it gradually eats away at your self-confidence. How you define “success,” and how long you’re prepared to wait for it, will help you cope with this doubt—one that’s felt by nearly every new blogger.

What success means to you will be different from the criteria set by another blogger. Getting subscribers, attracting thoughtful comments, reaching a target of earnings, and establishing a reputation as an industry expert are only a few examples of possible performance benchmarks that you might use. Pinpoint your own measures of blogging success. This exercise provides concrete facts on which to assess how well you’re doing, rather than having to rely on your own opinion and impatience.

Successful blogging also requires a considerable investment of your time. While we’d all love quick wins, overnight success is rare. It’s much more realistic to assess your blogging activities over a period of at least six to 18 months, rather than a few weeks. Adopting a longer-term view relieves the pressure on you to meet an overambitious deadline, and lessens the likelihood that you’ll become depressed when you fail to meet it.

Beating self-doubt as a new blogger

We’re most vulnerable to self-doubt at the beginning of our blogging journey. When you feel a lack of belief in yourself, take time to identify the knowledge and skills you need, as well as the practical steps you can take to overcome that doubt. Have a browse through the archives here on ProBlogger to get ideas and encouragement.

Your loyal readers of tomorrow will appreciate that you stuck around and persevered…

Have you faced any self doubts as a new blogger? How did you beat those doubts to keep on blogging? Please share your experiences in the comments section. Let’s encourage each other!

Scott McIntyre aims to encourage ordinary people to do great things every day. You can learn how to live a colorful life—right now—at Vivid Ways. You can also add color in your life by following Scott on Twitter.

Post from: ProBlogger Blog Tips

7 Self-doubts New Bloggers Can Beat

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Posted on 11.11.10 · Tagged with

Hot Tip of the Day

How to Increase Affiliate Income by Hitting the Affiliate Marketing Sweet Spot

Posted by jessica · Leave a Comment

At BlogWorld Expo this year, I presented some tips on affiliate marketing in one of the sessions I ran on monetizing blogs.

One of the most powerful affiliate marketing concepts—one that can make or break an affiliate campaign—is summed up in this slide:

Screen shot 2010-11-05 at 1.23.05 PM.png

The key is to find the overlap between the intent and need of your reader, the product you’re promoting, and the message you use to promote it with.

To say it another way, the product, reader need, and your promotional message need to be related. The product needs to relate to your audience, and you need to promote it in a relevant way.

Let me give you an example of an affiliate promotion on a blog that I saw recently where there was no sweet spot.

Missing the mark

I won’t reveal the blog because I don’t want to embarrass the blogger but the blog’s topic was beauty and fashion.

Reader Intent - The blog’s content focused on the topic of beauty and fashion, and the blog’s comments revealed that readers were there to explore that topic (so the reader intent was to learn and talk about beauty/fashion).
Product – The product being promoted on the blog was my 31 Days to Build a Better Blog ebook. While I’m flattered that the blogger wanted to promote my book, there’s not a great deal of immediate overlap between the reader intent/need and the need that my product solved. My ebook helps people improve their blogs; the reader intent was to talk lipstick, skirts, and stilettos.
Message – The promotion was a banner ad. There was no in-content promotion—the blogger had simply used one of our default banner ads in the sidebar. As a result there was no tie-in, or message that tried to close the gap between reader need and the product. Perhaps if the message had been a blog post written to highlight how the product could be helpful to other fashion/beauty bloggers, or a call to fashion/beauty bloggers to work through the ebook together (making things more relevant to the audience), the promotion might have been more successful. However, the banner ad alone provided no obvious tie in.

There was no sweet spot here. As a result, the promotion saw no conversions.

Take-home lessons:

Know your reader intent and needs.
Find affiliate products that solve those needs.
Promote products in a way that’s relevant and that communicates how the product will solve reader needs.

Six Benefits to Using Twitter.com Instead of an App

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There are often comparisons between various Twitter apps and discussions about which is better; however, there are several benefits to using Twitter.com without using an app at all.

One benefit to using Twitter.com is the ability to send and receive Tweets more quickly. Apps can only retrieve messages in intervals so there is usually at least a short delay in receiving messages. Users of Twitter.com can send and receive instantly without having to wait.

Another perk to using the website is that there is no limit to the number of times you can Tweet. Apps have API limits which restrict how many times data can be retrieved per hour. That limit has been decreased recently which makes it more likely a user will see an “API limit reached” message when using a Twitter app.

A third perk to using the Twitter website is the ability to use the new Retweet functionality. This functionality allows users to directly send a Tweet with the click of one button. Many apps don’t contain this functionality and won’t allow users to see Tweets that have been sent with this method.

The ability to see special hashtag functionality is yet another benefit to using Twitter.com. On special occasions, Twitter will sometimes enable special functionality that will appear when a specific hashtag is used. For example, using the hashtag #WorldCup during the World Cup made a soccer ball icon appear in the Tweet. This was only visible to users of Twitter.com.

A fifth advantage for Twitter.com users is being able to view the customized backgrounds of other users. Many individuals and businesses customize the backgrounds for their Twitter account which can give you important contact information as well as other details about the user. Many users think carefully about their background image but app users are unable to see this image from within their app.

One last bonus for users of Twitter.com is being able to view information more easily. This has always been true but it is especially true now that Twitter.com has been updated. Users can now easily view trending topics, see which friends are recommended to them and have easy access to list functionality. Some app users will be able to see the same information but it may be located in a few different places within the app.

Although many Twitter apps contain functionality that Twitter.com doesn’t, there are many benefits to using the site that are often overlooked. These benefits should be considered when trying to decide which Twitter tools to use.

Six Benefits to Using Twitter.com Instead of an App

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Posted on 11.10.10 · Tagged with

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Why Your Blog Is Not Going to Make You Rich (Or Pay the Bills)

Posted by jessica · Leave a Comment

This guest post is by the Blog Tyrant.

$100,000 a year? $500,000 a year? A million? These are figures I bet most of us think about from time to time. But I’m here to tell you a sober truth—something that you probably won’t like the sound of.

Your blog is not going to make you rich. It might not even pay the monthly bills.

But don’t lose hope yet. There is a (very shiny) silver lining to this article: I am going to show you what you need to do to get up to those wonderful figures. In this post I’m going to give you a few important facts and tricks that my multimillionaire uncle passed on to me; facts and tricks that translate to the blogging world very very well.

Aston Martin V8 Vantage
photo credit: Ed Callow [ torquespeak ]

The millionaire property tycoon’s advice

Let’s start this post with the advice that my uncle gave me. When I first heard it I think I was around 15 and probably told him to “go away” under my breath. But as I grew up and started my own business, I realized how insanely important the advice had become. Especially because I learned the hard way. Let me illustrate.

My first blog was a fitness blog that I ended up selling for $20,000 after just eight months. Before that time, however, the blog paid my bills with a consistent AdSense income. It wasn’t a lot of money but it met my needs at the time. That was until Google banned it from the search results without warning, and without reason. I woke up one day and my excellent rankings for some super-high traffic keywords were gone. And so was my money.

Right at the moment my uncle’s advice came floating back to me:

You must always have a short-term source of income that pays the bills, two medium-term projects that supplement the income, and one long-term project that’s a year away from fruition. Always.

It is powerful advice that every rich person I know pays attention to (consciously or not). I, however, had totally ignored it in my youthful arrogance. I had put all of my eggs in to one basket and as such I had nothing to fall back on, and nothing to look forward to. I was in trouble.

Applying the advice: diversifying my business

So what did I do? Well I went out and cleaned toilets. I worked at a gym as a cleaner for over a year while I built up a new empire. I worked at the gym in the mornings and then came home and, after sleeping for an hour, plugged away at blogs and my other online businesses.

It was different now. Now I was applying the advice. Instead of just building up one blog, I was working on several while building small product websites. I was also working on ideas for the long-term project so that I had something to look forward to.

And this part is important. As the medium-term projects began to fall into the short-term income category, I created new medium-term projects. The trilogy of short-, medium-, and long-term must always be in play. I am trying very hard to remember that.

Why you need to diversify to be rich and safe

Adidas Pro Model
photo credit: Julien Menichini

Your blog, as it is today, is not going to be enough to make you rich and safe. Okay, you might get lucky and be the next Huffington Post or Mashable and never have to worry about money again. But the chances are good that you’ll be like me; you’ll have to be smart about your future and your income. And to be smart you need to develop projects: one short-term, two medium-term, and one long-term project.

1. The short-term income

The short-term income is the work that pays the bills while you work on your other projects. The important thing to remember is that it doesn’t need to be blogging. It doesn’t even need to be glamorous. Like I said before, I worked as a cleaner at a gym in the mornings. It was one of the smartest business decisions I ever made, because it allowed me to still have a full work day to devote to the other projects, since I worked from 6am to 11am.

It also got me a free gym membership, which, trivial as it might seem, allowed me to work out daily and completely de-stress my system. That is a very important thing to do when you’re worried about money. Lift weights and run. If you just sit at home all day in your own company, you won’t realize how stressed you’re actually becoming.

2. The two medium-term projects

The medium-term projects are those that you’re working on to eventually take over your current short-term income. Remember, it’s a good idea to generate your short-term income from more than one source: the more diverse it is, the better. These medium-term projects should be no more than a year away from turning consistent revenue. They can take the shape of:

blogs
product websites
affiliate websites
content creation deals
partnerships
etc.

As they start to make money, you can put them into the short-term category and begin to create new medium-term projects. Perhaps these will come from your long-term category or perhaps you will see new opportunities that you can place directly into the medium-term area.

3. The long-term project

Your long-term project should be ambitious but achievable. It should be one of those ideas where you sit down and think about how much money it would make if only you could get it off the ground. Well, partner, the money coming from your short- and medium-term gigs is what you’ll use to get this idea running.

What I’ve come to discover is that it’s all about these long-term projects. The toilet cleaning, the short-term, the medium-term—all this is a method that gives me the finances and experience to get my big ideas happening.

Blog Tyrant is actually a long term project of mine; it earns me no income at the moment, but I have something absolutely massive planning, which will be launched in a few months’ time. At that point, the blog will fall into my short-term group.

How to make it all happen

photo credit: Brian K YYZ

Sure, this approach sounds good, but how do you get it to work? How do you divide your time, and how do you manage all of the different problems that arise during the process?

Here are a few of my own suggestions but I would love to hear any advice that you might have — please leave a comment and let us hear your thoughts.

1. Focus on helping others, always.

The very first thing I want to mention is that you have to focus on helping others. This is both a marketing and an ethical concern.

Why is this important? Firstly, the products and websites that do the best are the ones that solve a need in a person’s life. I talked about this a lot in my article on how to make your blog addictive. Today a lot of products are created that don’t solve a need — instead, they create a new one. Forget it. Help people.

The second reason why this is important is because if it all fails you will have no regrets. And if it succeeds, you will spend your life helping people.

2. Take risks.

When you go to invest money in the stock market, the broker will say something like “the biggest returns come from the biggest risks”. At some point you have to decide whether or not you are a risk-taker. If you want to be making $100,000+ a year from the Internet, you’ll need to take some risks. You need to risk your time, maybe some of your savings, and definitely some of your sleep. But these risks should be managed and controlled — and well thought through. This isn’t like buying a lotto ticket: it’s like making an investment in the near future.

3. Stick to a routine.

Make a routine and stick to it. Don’t deviate from it at all — if you do, sooner or later the whole thing will fall in to a heap. Divide up your day or your week into the different categories. For example, I spend the weekends working on long-term projects, the mornings on medium-term projects, and the afternoons working on my short-term stuff. It works well. It works best when I stick to it.

4. Don’t give up early.

One of the biggest mistakes I’m guilty of is giving up before I’ve seen an idea through. For example, a few years ago I bought a whole bunch of domain names with the intention of creating a little group of product sites to dominate one particular niche. It didn’t pay off right away so I put less and less time in to it. Now, when I look back, I realize that these websites would be making a huge amount of consistent money without much work at all. The problem was that I didn’t keep my long-term motivation in check.

5. Use verticals.

A vertical is a product that you launch to compliment another product that you already have. A good example of this is the iPod, which makes Apple more money from iTunes, product cases, headphones, etc. If you can use your existing projects to help launch new products, you can cut out a lot of the hard work.

Conclusion

Your blog is not going to make you rich unless you diversify. Darren does it, Shoemoney does it, and my multimillionaire uncle does it. If you want to have longevity in any business, you need to make sure you’re diversifying your assets so that you’re not left high and dry if one of those income streams suddenly dries up.

If you have any stories about this approach, or advice on starting new businesses, I’d love to hear them in the comments.

The Blog Tyrant has sold several blogs for large sums of money and earns a living by relying solely on the internet. His blog is all about helping you dominate your blog and your blog’s niche and only includes strategies that he has tried on his own websites. Follow him on Twitter and Facebook or subscribe to his feed for all the juice.

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Why Your Blog Is Not Going to Make You Rich (Or Pay the Bills)

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Posted on 11.09.10 · Tagged with

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Free Download: .Psd Buttons

Posted by jessica · Leave a Comment

A free download of web 2.0 style buttons in .PSD format for whoever wishes to download it.
You are welcome to use this file for whatever you wish (personal or commercial).

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Posted on 11.08.10 · Tagged with

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Create a Web 2.0 CSS3 Button

Posted by jessica · Leave a Comment

For a new project I am working on, I thought to myself “why use images for buttons when I could use CSS!” So I thought that I would just create them in pure CSS.

VIEW DEMO

To start, we need to generate the CSS:

.button {
  padding: 5px 12px;
  margin-left: 10px;
  background-color: #1f1f21;
  background-image: -webkit-gradient(linear, 0% 0%, 0% 100%, from(#2a2b2d), to(#222222));
  border: 4px solid #1f1f21;
  border-radius: 8px;
  -webkit-border-radius: 8px;
  -moz-border-radius: 8px;
  color: #fff;
  display: inline;
  font-size: 16px;
  cursor: pointer;
  -moz-box-shadow: inset 0 1px 1px #444444;
  -webkit-box-shadow: inset 0 1px 1px #444444;
  box-shadow: inset 0 1px 1px #444444;
  text-shadow: 0 0 1px #111;
  -webkit-transition: text-shadow 0.30s linear; }

.button:hover,
.button.active {
  background-image: -webkit-gradient(linear, 0% 0%, 0% 100%, from(#222222), to(#222222));
  -moz-box-shadow: inset 0 1px 6px #111111;
  -webkit-box-shadow: inset 0 1px 6px #111111;
  box-shadow: inset 0 1px 6px #111111;
  color: #fff;
  text-shadow: 0 0px 6px #198ce5;
  -webkit-transition: text-shadow 0.20s linear; }

Ok, so now that we have the CSS in place we have to include implement it into our website. Now for the easy part, just add the following DIV Class tag into your HTML or PHP document for the buttons to show up.

<div class="button" href="#">Button Name</div>

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Posted on 11.08.10 · Tagged with

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The Big Decision: Personal or Corporate Brand?

Posted by jessica · Leave a Comment

This guest post is by Luke, an IT-and-business nerd from Melbourne, Australia.

I started dating my wife when we were both pretty young and she still lived at home. My wife’s dad, Bob, was a very successful businessman and his daughters all inherited their dad’s intellect. The dinnertime conversation often turned to their studies, and one of Bob’s favorite theories was about personal branding at school and university.

The theory went like this. The most important thing to do initially is to get noticed by the teachers. It doesn’t matter what you do. In fact, it might be easier to do something wrong in order to gain attention. Once you have attention you then have something to work with, and it’s easier to do well when the teachers know who you are.

I think I recall this advice because it seemed highly unorthodox to me at the time. If I’m honest I probably still wonder if it’s wise to instruct your children to misbehave. But, if you stop and think about it—he was probably onto something.

In a society obsessed with celebrity, you don’t have to look far to find individuals who have turned themselves into household brands. And it’s often the case that their brand achieved prominence because of bad behavior (yes Paris and Lindsey, I’m thinking of you).

That there is incredible power in brand is something I’m going to assume is agreed. What I’m more interested in at the moment is whether it’s better to build your blog around your own personal brand, or is it smarter to establish a separate brand for your blog that is not directly attached to your personal identity.

The benefits of the personal brand

I think the most obvious benefit to a personal brand, is that it is easier to make personal. Most people easily empathize with other people. By putting yourself out there it gives readers something to connect to that is easy to understand and relate to. It is easier to agree (or disagree) with a person than it is with a faceless company. It is a smaller step to engage with a person than it is to leave a comment for a logo.

A good personal brand is a clear projection of you, what makes you an individual and what makes you different from others. Done well, it will consistently convey your unique personality and approach to those you encounter. It will help you stand out from the crowd, and hopefully mean that people think of you first when they start thinking about becoming a customer or partner.

Hopefully you don’t need to spend too much time formulating what you stand for before embarking on a mission to establish your personal brand. I believe it works best when rooted in authenticity. People have a sixth sense for what is credible and what is not. The contrived approach will ultimately smell a little bad if you’re faking it. The good news is that being yourself should be easier than working to a script—which is what you’ll have to do to some extent when inventing a corporate brand.

Fame can also be a benefit. It’s a two-edged sword for sure, but who’s going to deny that it’s nice for your ego to have a personal fan base? Who out there doesn’t enjoy a little bit of attention? Before you tell me that it’s not your thing, how often to you check Google Analytics to see how many people tuned into your last post! If you’ve never had your name on the door at an exclusive party, I’ve heard that it feels great to walk past the queue.

If you become popular enough, there are also other perks out there. If your personal brand is strong enough, others will pay simply so you can be seen to be endorsing another brand or product! More of this goes on than you might think, and if you’re smart about disclosure and being ethical about it, why not enjoy the fruits of your labor?

But back to the business upside. Because your brand can and will help you open doors—if you want to approach another company, website, or blogger, and you’ve established a strong personal brand—you’ll find that it’s a little like being on the guest list at that exclusive party. Once you learn to leverage that brand power, a momentum can be built that continues to lever your business up from one level to another.

The drawbacks

Human Frailty

I am not perfect all of the time. In fact, forget perfect. I’m not even close to being consistently good or bad at the same things. The only reason I haven’t given up entirely is because, thankfully, most of the people I know share some or many of my faults. I also think life would be pretty boring if there was nothing left to work on.

“Why use this post as a confessional?” I hear you ask. Well, if I’m doing the personal brand thing and people have a sixth sense for authenticity, this reality does not bode well for me. Sooner or later, I’m going to do something stupid, say something insensitive or just screw up royally in front of everybody. And my personal brand is going to suffer for it.

If I have taken the time to establish a corporate brand and one of the staff does bad, there is an inbuilt form of containment that offers more protection than a personal brand offers. Ultimately a corporate brand has some redundancy. The implication is that any single screw-up is just the action of an individual. It doesn’t make sense to extrapolate one person’s actions into a statement about a whole corporate brand. Do you think this could ever be true for Tiger Woods?

Scaling up

If your blog is based on your personal brand, and you are fortunate enough to enjoy success. The day might come when you can employ others to run your blog. You might now have a challenge.

Chances are that your audience is there because they like something about what you do. They relate to you. They are your fans, your tribe. When that first guest post goes up, even though you think it’s better writing than you ever did, it flops. The first comment asks when your next post will be, and the next five chime in supporting the sentiment. There go your plans for that extended vacation, because what you just learned is that it can be hard to scale a personal brand.

Said another way, it’s very difficult for a personal brand to truly outgrow the person.

Privacy and personal exposure

If you’re going to enjoy fame, it’s probably a good idea to start getting used to the idea that your privacy is going to take a hit. This will bother some people much more than others, but privacy is something I think we should be taking more seriously. After all, as Mark’s ex-girlfriend explains to him after he blogs her bra size on The Social Network, “Everything on the internet is written in ink” (If you’re a Sorkin fan like I am, go see it).

A friend who follows my wife on twitter (@drcris) remarked to me the other day that he was amazed at how I had no privacy. Cris talks about our home life a lot on twitter. It initially struck me as a strange comment because neither of us have that many followers. I suspect many of them don’t listen anyway. Who wants to know about how our house cleaning is going, seriously!? I also made the observation that I had always pretty much shared more than I should have whenever somebody would listen, so I guess it made little difference.

I wonder if I had 200,000 followers, would my attitude to privacy change? It probably would. I suspect your first stalker changes your attitude as well.

If you take the time to establish a corporate brand, you will likely have a lot more control about what you can keep personal and private.

The other thing many bloggers know all too well is that putting yourself out there can have its downside. Those snarky comments can sting badly. If you don’t have a thick skin, it might be a good idea to hide from the trolls behind a more generic brand.

The big decision

I haven’t decided if there is a right answer about whether or not you should pursue a personal brand or start work on a corporate brand. There are upsides and downsides to both, and ultimately I think it comes down to what it is you’re trying to achieve.

I’ve mentioned what I think are some obvious points, but I’m hoping many more come out in the comments and any discussion. Is your brand a personal one, or a corporate one? Why did you choose it? And do you have any regrets?

Luke (@lukie) started life as a young corporate IT nerd, who then got interested in running a business. He spent the last five years as CEO at SitePoint, and has just made the move to start working on something of his own. Luke is an Aussie who lives in Melbourne and is married to Cris (@drcris). They have three kids under five and no spare time!

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The Big Decision: Personal or Corporate Brand?

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Posted on 11.08.10 · Tagged with

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How To Develop An Online Presence For Your Business in 4 Easy Steps

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This is a guest post from Dillon McEvoy designed for anyone who has a small-to-medium sized business and wants to develop an online presence. It is designed for business owners with a limited budget and experience with online marketing but applies to all business owners.

All of the steps outlined in this post, except for the first one, can be completed for FREE. If you’ve constantly been hearing about Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare ‘and social media’, and don’t know what the heck any of it means, or worse, how to use it, fear not, you’ve come to the right place.

This post will guide you through, from scratch, how do get your business online and how to start growing it’s online presence. The internet and social media is a way for potential customers to find you, to connect with you and for you to communicate with them.

1. Get a website.

If you haven’t already got one, your first step to developing an online presence is to get a website for your business. First you will need to register a domain name – make sure it is relevant and easy to remember. There are lots of agencies and independent web designers who will be able to register and develop a site for you. This shouldn’t be too expensive and depending on your site, development shouldn’t take longer than 2 weeks.

Make sure you approach a few designers before you decide on one to use. Take a look at their portfolio of work, and make sure their websites are in line with what you want in your site. Compare their portfolios and quotes, and ensure you can have a good working relationship as you will need to communicate with them on an ongoing basis in order to update your site. Use a site like eLance.com to post your needs and find a designer. I usually follow 3 rules when determining a site design, these are:

• Simple. Keep it simple. Only use relevant, interesting and eye-catching text and pictures. Do not bombard your viewer with an abundance of content. Include information that will be of use to them but will also set you apart in some way (highlight your USPs).

• User-friendly. Make sure your site is easy to navigate and not cluttered. Your products/services and any information relating to them (price, color, size, etc.) should be readily available. IMPORTANT – ensure your contact details are easily found.

• Stylish. I do not mean stylish as in fashionable or cutting edge, but rather that your website conveys quality. It must look professional. Your website is the online face of your business, and the internet is increasingly the first stop for people interested in your business. Therefore it is crucial that your site conveys a great first impression, it needs to communicate that your product/service is of a high standard.

2. Register your business and website on directories.

There are a number of online directories that range from very broad and general (Yellow Pages) to product and location specific (Restaurant Directory in New York). Do a thorough search of all online directories relating to your business. For example if you are a plumber in London, do a thorough search for all London directories and then for all service and plumbing specific directories. Take your time to register your details and website on these directories. This will help your business get found and also improve your website’s search engine rankings.

Some of the bigger global online directories are:

• www.anywho.com/

• www.dmegs.com/

• www.phonenumber.com

3. Get your business on the map.

More and more people are using Google Maps and MapQuest to locate businesses in their area. Firstly, do a quick search of your business on Google Maps. If it is located with the correct address; congratulations. If not, you need to get it on Google Maps also known as Google Places.

First register your business at Google Business Center. Google Places aggregates a number of popular directory’s addresses in order to position places on its Map. Again registering your business on relevant directories (Step 2) will help with this and imrpove your rankings on Google Places.

There are large number of reviewer based community sites, such as Yelp and CitySearch, that are used to position business and give them ratings and reviews. Get a friend to write a quick (positive) review about your business on these sites and submit all the correct details (address, opening-closing times, services, etc.). Encourage any friends and family to start logging on and writing reviews of your business. This will help your rankings and your business will come across in a genuinely positive light to anyone who reads the reviews (free marketing).

4. Create a Facebook page

By now I’m sure that you have your own personal Facebook page, if you don’t you will need one in order to register a Facebook page for your business. A ‘page’ for your business is not the same as a personal page. A personal page will more often than not require an ‘accepted friend request’ before someone can view information on your page and post comments, whereas a page is easily found by search engines and can be viewed by anyone with a Facebook account.

Setting up a Facebook page is slightly different than setting up a profile page, but is easier. Go to this page http://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php and follow the very easy steps. Make sure you enter your business’s address and website correctly.

You can now link your website to your Facebook page, with a simple ‘like’ button. The html code is easily available. Speak to your web designer in order to set this up. It should take less than 10 minutes.

5. Open A Twitter account

Social Media, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Foursquare, blogs, etc. all seem to be the current buzz word. A lot of brands and business are panicking and not sure what to do. Don’t worry, as long as you have a Facebook page and a Twitter account where people can easily find your business you are in good shape.

You can also set up a Twitter account and link this to your Facebook page so when you update your Facebook status your Twitter account is updated simultaneously. This is particularly useful in helping potential customers find your business, and provides a fast and easy 2-way communication channel. Keep in mind that you don’t need to constantly update your status. Rather use it promote any specials, deals or interesting news about your business. View your Facebook and Twitter as another line of communication between you and your customers. If they compliment you, thank them. If they express a complaint make sure you deal with it quickly and effectively.

You now have the option of using Facebook ads. These are very effective in targeting your specific market segment and will ensure your page increases the number of ‘Likes’ but will not necessarily lead to more sales. I would recommend initially growing your page organically, get your family, friends and associates to ‘Like’ your page and recomened it to their friends and so on.

Congratulations! You now have a significant online presence for your business. You should set yourself a time limit of 3 weeks to sufficiently complete these 4 steps. It will take about 2 weeks for Google, Yahoo! And Bing to start ranking your sites and pages.

This is a beginners guide and only covers the basic steps to initiating and growing your business’s online presence. In a few weeks I will be looking at how you can further your online presence using blogs and Facebook ads.

Guest post from Dillon McEvoy. Dillon is from Cape Town, South Africa. Dillon recently graduated from UCT in 2009 with a degree in Marketing and Economics. He currently resides in Dublin, Ireland after completing a marketing internship at a prestigious software firm and is studying web and graphic design at the Dublin School of Business. Check out his latest project or follow him on twitter.

For more free marketing advice, visit the marketing experts at http://www.MarketingScoop.com.

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Posted on 11.07.10 · Tagged with

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Awesome WordPress Plugins to Empower Your Visitors

Posted by jessica · Leave a Comment

This guest post is by Jeff Starr, co-author of the book Digging into WordPress.

Helping your visitors get the most out of your site benefits everyone. Visitors get more relevant and useful content, and you enjoy better statistics and more exposure. Unfortunately the game is set up to keep people away from your site. Think about it:

Search engines are used to find your content
Feed readers are used to read your content
Social media is used to share, tag, and organize your content

These are major obstacles, certainly, but they don’t have to work against you. People use search engines, feed readers, and social media because they provide functionality missing from most websites. By integrating some of that same functionality into your site, you empower your visitors to maximize its usefulness. This may sound like a tall order, but if you’re using WordPress, improving your site couldn’t be easier. Let’s look at some awesome WordPress plugins to make it happen.

Google-power your search results

People will always use external search engines like Google to find content on your site. That’s a good thing, but you also want to empower your users with the best possible search results. WordPress’ default search is limited in several ways:

does not do “exact-match” searching
only searches posts and post titles
only searches your current WordPress installation
can be painfully slow, gobbles resources

Fortunately, we can harness the power of Google and empower your users with the most accurate, comprehensive, and speedy search possible. Integrating Google Search into your site provides the following benefits:

exact-match searching (i.e., using quotes to match specific phrases)
searches your entire site plus any other desired sites or directories
usually works pretty quickly – much faster than WordPress default search
optional additional revenue through Google’s AdSense program

Sound good? Here are some of the best plugins to make it happen:

Google Search for WordPress

This beautiful plugin works silently behind the scenes to replace WordPress’ search results with Google’s search results. You simply install the plugin and enter your Google API Key in the Google Search Settings. If you don’t have an API Key, it’s free and easy to get one. The only other requirement is to include “Powered by Google” next to your search form and on the search-results page. Once it’s installed, all search results will be replaced by those from Google. No code-wrangling required.

More information and downloads are available at the WordPress Plugin Directory.

Google Custom Search Plugin

The Google Custom Search Plugin is another excellent way to integrate Google Search into your WordPress blog. Instead of signing up for an API Key, visit Google Search and create your own custom search engine by walking through the steps. After setting up your own form, grab the generated code and paste it into the plugin’s Settings page.

More information and downloads are available at the WordPress Plugin Directory.

More from Google

The More from Google plugin works a little differently by adding to your default search results instead of completely replacing them. After installing and configuring the plugin, your search results will include matches from both WordPress and Google. If Google has yet to index your entire site, this may be the perfect way to ensure that visitors are getting the best search results.

More information and downloads are available at the WordPress Plugin Directory.

Other Ways to Improve WordPress Default Search

If Google Search isn’t for you, don’t fret. Here are two additional plugins that will vastly improve WordPress’ default search:

Search Everything – literally searches everything in your database, based on your preferences
Better Search – highly customizable solution for improving WordPress’ default search

Regardless of how you do it, improving your site’s default search functionality is a great way to help your visitors use your site and find the content they crave.

Socialize and communitize your WordPress site

Bring the excitement of social-media to your WordPress-powered site! There are so many reasons to empower your readers to favorite, share, and rate your content directly on your website, and just as many awesome plugins to make it super-easy to do. Here are some of the best plugins for making your site fun, social, and more interactive.

WP Favorite Posts

WP Favorite Posts is a popular, five-star plugin that enables your visitors to add favorite posts to their own list of favorites. Installation is easy, and the plugin is straightforward and easy to modify and customize to fit any design. I use the plugin on my Angry-Birds fan site. You can see the “Add to Favorites” link in the upper-right corner of any post. There is also a link to “View Favorites”, where each user can view (and delete) their favorite links. And even cooler than all that, you can display a list of everyone’s most-popular favorites, very similar to how Delicious works.

More information and downloads are available at the WordPress Plugin Directory.

Star ratings and reviews

Post ratings are a fun and informative way to engage visitors and promote content. And there are many post-rating plugins to choose from.

In terms of functionality and customization, the GD Star Rating plugin can do just about anything, but the endless configuration options may be overkill. On the other end of the spectrum, you’ve got the elegant simplicity of the Vote-the-Post plugin, which is lightweight, flexible, and easy to customize code-side for tight design integration. I use this plugin to enable voting at Angry-Birds.net (see any post for example).

These plugins also enable you to display lists of top-rated posts anywhere on your site, so you can uninstall that most-popular-post plugin you no longer need.

Chat forum

Chat forums aren’t for every site, but when done right they’re great ways to build community and facilitate conversation. As with post-ratings, there are many chat plugins available in the Directory, but there are two that stand above the rest:

Both of these plugins are popular, highly rated plugins that provide flexible, customizable chat functionality. WordSpew is great because it uses Ajax to refresh everything automatically, keeping the chat window flowing in real time. Pierre’s Wordspew works without AJax, but it also uses a Flash .flv file that prevents it from working on devices like the iPad and iPhone. You can see a highly customized example of the WordSpew plugin at Dead Letter Art.

Show online users

Just like showing off counts for feed subscribers, Twitter followers, and Facebook fans, you can also show off the number of users currently online. An excellent plugin for this is WP-UserOnline, which provides several templates for easy configuration of how and where the user-online count is displayed. You can also set up a “Who’s online?” page that shows detailed statistics of where your visitors are on the site, who they are, and where they came from. This awesome plugin takes only minutes to implement using template tags and/or widgets.

Social media

Even after socializing your site, you want to make sure that visitors can easily share and bookmark your content on their favorite social-media sites. I tell you the truth, there are a gazillion plugins and widgets for adding every social-media site under the sun, but you really only need one plugin to do the job. Just install and configure WP Socializer and done. Any combination of social-media buttons, icons, links displayed virtually anywhere on your site. Tons of options yes, but they are all well-organized and easy to configure from the comfort of your WordPress Admin.

Wrapping up

No matter how awesome your website, there’s always room for improvement. With the techniques and tools described in this article, empowering your visitors to get the most from your WordPress site is as easy as installing and configuring a few choice plugins. As you go, keep an eye on site performance. Loading up with too many plugins can burden your server and slow things down for visitors. All the functionality in the world means nothing on a slow-loading website. A good strategy is to cherry-pick a few choice plugins and watch the results. Remember the goal is to help visitors get into your site and really use it for all it’s worth.

Jeff Starr is a web developer, graphic designer and content producer with over 10 years of experience and a passion for quality and detail. Jeff is co-author of the book Digging into WordPress and strives to help people be the best they can be on the Web. Read more from Jeff at Perishable Press or hire him at Monzilla Media.

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Posted on 11.07.10 · Tagged with

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Return of The Blog!

Posted by jessica · Leave a Comment

I have now finally launched the long awaited return of the Blog at iintense.com. In the recent past, the Blog at iintense.com had regularly received 1,500-2,000 unique visits a days for it’s website and internet tips & tricks.

I appreciate the patience from all of my readers, but now the wait is finally over!

What should you expect to see in the future? I write what my readers want to know and want to read about. So if you have a question about CSS, stumped with your new WordPress project, or a rookie that wants to know how jQuery works, let me know!

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Posted on 11.07.10 · Tagged with

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This Sunday You’re Invited to #Blogchat to Talk Monetizing Blogs

Posted by jessica · Leave a Comment

One of my favorite times of the week on Twitter is on Monday mornings, my time (Sunday night for many of you), when Twitter comes alive with #blogchat.

#blogchat is a hashtag on Twitter that ties together hundreds of bloggers all talking about a particular aspect of blogging for an hour or so. It starts at 8pm Central US time, and usually revolves around a specific topic and/or guest host. Bloggers exchange ideas, ask questions, and network. It’s a frenzy of activity, which can seem a little overwhelming, but once you get into the swing of it, it’s a lot of fun.

You can learn more about #BlogChat and how to participate here.

This coming Sunday/Monday (depending where in the world you’re located), I’m cohosting #blogchat and we’ll be looking at the topic, “How to Monetize Your Blog.”

I’ve got a little information prepared to share, but the hour (and I’ll probably hang out for longer) will largely be an exchange of ideas. I’m happy to answer as many questions as I can during the hour—so if you have any, do come prepared.

I’ve also promised a few people to give a bit of the backstory behind my upcoming project, @Feelgooder (which I hope to soft launch in the coming week).

Remember: it’s on at 8pm Central US time on Sunday night. So mark it in your calendar, set up a way to follow the #blogchat hashtag, and follow me on Twitter at @ProBlogger!

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Posted on 11.06.10 · Tagged with

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Marketing Forum Now Ranked #3 On Google

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About a year ago I received a comment on this blog about creating a Marketing Community. After giving it a moment of thought, I realized that there aren’t too many places that a marketing person (from advertising to Internet marketing to marketing management) can have a healthy dialog, learn, and get answers to their most difficult marketing questions.

I thought to myself that if the number one ranked marketing blog on the Internet couldn’t create a community, who can? Well, after making an investment in a marketing forum and asking fellow marketers to spread the word, the Internet Marketing Forum is now in the #3 position on Google for the keyword “marketing forum” and in the #1 position for “Internet marketing forum.” What excites me is not the ranking but the fact that we are reaching more people than ever interested in marketing, internet marketing, and promoting products and services.

The Marketing Forum offers a variety of topics including Internet marketing, Special Offers for the marketing community, PPC, Search Engine Optimization, Programming, Affiliate programs, Internet marketing product reviews, and much more.

I’m writing this post because I’d like to invite you to join the conversation. The marketing blog and now the Marketing Forum is all about you. Your ideas, your questions, your thoughts. Share your passion with others who have similar interests.

I know that trying to solve a marketing related problem can be frustrating. At times you may not know where to turn or simply want to tap experienced marketers for their thoughts or guidance. The Marketing Forum is your source of access to experienced marketing professionals that can help you succeed regardless of the challenges you face.

Start the conversation – join the conversation – get involved. The Marketing Forum is waiting for you!

For more free marketing advice, visit the marketing experts at http://www.MarketingScoop.com.

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Posted on 11.06.10 · Tagged with

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Writing Killer Content in 140 Characters or Less

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How do you say what you want to say in less than 140 characters? Ask any writer out there. Writing short is difficult.

But it’s something comedians have been doing for years – writing short, pithy punch lines. Ask Comedian Michael Ian Black who recently decided to add advertisements to his tweets. Black wrote in his blog “As of today, I’ve written 2,655 tweets. That’s a lot of free material, all of it contributing to the entertainment of the 1.5 million people who follow me, as well as the multibillion dollar capitalization of Twitter itself.”

Yes, comedians have the art of writing short down. But so do poets. Talk about imbuing thought-provoking meaning with as few as characters as possible! I don’t know if anyone does it as well as E. E. Cummings.

Whether comedian or poet, writing short is a good skill to have, especially if you have a Twitter account (and who doesn’t?) which caps posts at 140 characters. I once had a mentor who told me the best writing uses the most effective language with the fewest words possible. A good goal whether character restricted or not.

The trick is getting your message across in 140 characters or less without sounding like a monkey with a computer. They say even a monkey with a keyboard can eventually spew out Shakespeare, but I think he might lose his audience first.

Michael Pollan provides a great example of writing meaningful but short content with this 7-word manifesto: eat food, mostly plants, not too much.

Those 7 words say a lot.

That’s what we’re looking to do with Twitter. Say what you need to say in as few as words as possible. The trick is to find ways to let people get to know who you are, what you have to offer, and have a little fun in the process. Writing with only 140 characters can be a limiting handicap.

Or not…getting rid of the necessary words and characters can also be freeing!

I gathered some of my favorite Writing Killer Twitter Content tips, added some of my own, and came up with this list. Here’s Tips on Writing Short in the Twitterverse:

Choose Your Words Wisely. You want to pick the right words that evoke the right amount of meaning with as few as characters as possible. A thesaurus can help with this. For example, if you have a choice between two words, “lighthearted” and “fun,” go with the latter!
Get Verbal. Select verbs that are more emotive to get your message across. An example would be to use a word like “leap” instead of “jump.” They’re both energetic verbs with equal characters, but “leap” implies more emotion.
Lolly, lolly, lolly leave your adverbs here. Dustin Wax suggested on Lifehack that one way to shorten characters is to leave adverbs to a minimum. Adverbs use up important real estate and your content will be perfectly fine without it. Well, there’s an example of an adverb right there. I didn’t need to say “perfectly and fine” to get my point across. Don’t use two words when you can use one.
KISS. Have you heard the saying, Keep it Simple, Stupid? That notion works here too. One way of doing that is to do what Dom Sagolla recommends in his book 140 Characters, keep your tweets focused on one thought. Hey puts it this way, we need to learn to “say more with less.”
Writing is in the rewriting. The folks at ReadWriteWeb ask an interesting question. Maybe we should all learn to read and write in Mandarin where each character is actually a word. That’s a great idea, but in the meantime try this tip. Write exactly what you want to say, then begin the process of rewriting; paring it down while keeping an eye on that character count.
Know the lingo. Twitterville has it’s own grammar. Use it. I promise there will be no school marms tapping your hands with rulers. And if there are, you can ignore them. Some examples of Twitterville Grammar is leaving out unnecessary words such as “that” and “which.” People understand what you’re trying to say without them.
It’s not about you. Leave out personal pronouns. You can just say, “Going to BlogHer Food!”
It’s all about you. Lisa Barone reminds us in her post How to Write Better Tweets to be sure to keep Twitter posts personal so people will want to read them.
Don’t beat around the bush. Tweeting is not the time to be cryptic. Say what you want to say, but leave out the “I think” explanatory phrases. Of course you think it, otherwise you wouldn’t be tweeting it.
The Link-anizer. If you’ve got more to say than 140 characters allows, write a provocative intro and then link to the rest of it. There are oodles of link shorteners out there – Tinyurl, Hootsuite, Bit.ly, etc. Pick your favorite and use it!
Alternate Universe. Mark Fulton explained in a recent post on TwiTips that “Twitter accepts more than just normal characters.” Most keyboards allow you to create symbols with special “alt” characters. Fulton recommends the tool TwitterKeys to have all these symbols at your fingertips. Thanks, Mark! We ♥ you!
Size Matters. Copyblogger suggests using small words. They say “…simple words work better than big ones. Write ‘get’ instead of ‘procure.’ Write ‘use’ rather than ‘utilize.’ Use the longer words only if your meaning is so precise there is no simpler word to use.”
Be Creative. Mark Twain once said, “I don’t give a damn for a man that can only spell a word one way.” Twains words ring true today. English is a living language and Twitter is just the place to have some fun with your word choices.

I hope these tips help you be expansive in your Twitter thoughts while at the same time minimal in Twitter characters!

Writing Killer Content in 140 Characters or Less

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Posted on 11.06.10 · Tagged with

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The Blog Is Dead: Long Live the Blog

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Image by @lox

How do you define what a “blog” is? Back in the day, a blog was a weblog—an online journal. This definition had connotations of timeliness, of narrative, and of a personal focus.

But these days, blogging has expanded. Bloggers may be hobbyists or corporate CEOs. Blogs may be personal or professional. Even the tools that bloggers consider decidedly blog-focused, like WordPress, are used increasingly on news and other content sites.

So what is a blog? Where are the boundaries around blogging? Do they even exist any more?

Blogging is about content and community

This may be true, but it’s also true for much of the web. To say bloggers are content creators is a bit irrelevant: journalists are content creators, and so is your next-door neighbor who uploaded a video of his cat to YouTube.

If we break the web into the categories functionality-based sites (like online banking and ecommerce stores) and content-based sites, we see that there’s often not a whole lot of difference between “blogs” and other sites in the content category.

Whether we’re blogging with words, videos, audio files or images, regular updates to a site—even one like microblog Twitter—are generally regarded as “blogging”.

There are a few delineations, though. Wikis can be updated frequently, but they’re usually updated by users of the wiki itself, and they’re most commonly used as references. That said, many blogs seek to act as references of points of authority on their topic, as do wikis. Wikis may also provide a narrative if they’re used to store progress information—details about the evolution of, or updates to, a project, for example, or meeting minutes. This also reflects one of the common goals of blogging.

Forums, which can also be considered within the content site category, tend to be more conversational, and less get-the-facts-to-you focused. And the information they communicate tends to be less time-relevant than that on blogs or news sites. However, they, too, share some similarities with blogs: they aim to create community, and individual threads generally have a sense of narrative — a forum thread usually tells the story of a discussion.

Blogging is about publishing

A blog is a regular publication, and it’s true that there isn’t a huge variety of site types in the “regular online publication” category. There are ezines and electronic newsletters, and there are news sites. Other than that, the only regular publication site type is probably the blog (if you have others, add them in the comments!).

What unites these communication types is that they present content from a position of authority. In the publishing model, the publisher is the brand and the authority, and any authors they present have the backing of the publisher. They usually publish on a specific topic for a specific audience, and they do so regularly. Their publication is effectively a product, which sets these site types apart from information repositories like wikis, forums and work folios.

Blogging is about meeting a need for information

Again, meeting a need for information isn’t something that’s unique to blogging. Even sites that offer pure functionality, like Delicious or Google, can fit this description. Forums, wikis, classified sites, and news sites are all focused on meeting a need for information. So are many emails, newsletters, RSS feeds, and so on.

So what’s unique about blogging? What defines blogging from any other kind of online content creation? Is it that blogging is a unique combination of factors — content, community, temporally-relevant publishing — or is there something else at play? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

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Posted on 11.05.10 · Tagged with

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How to Set Up Your First Blog the Right Way the First Time

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Are you convinced you need to start a blog, but you’re overwhelmed by the setup process?

If this describes you and you’d like a little hand-holding in setting up your own blog, I’ve been secretly working with Chris Garrett on a free resource that’s designed just for you. It’s called:

Getting Started Blogging

It is a six-part course that will walk you through everything you need to know about setting up your blog the right way, the first time.

Set up your blog with good foundations

In a recent survey of ProBlogger readers, I discovered two fairly large groups of visitors with similar needs:

Group 1. Readers who were yet to start their first blog.

I was a little surprised to find this out at first, but it makes sense. Many people reading this blog are PreBloggers—they’re convinced that they need a blog, and they’re now researching how to do it.

When I drilled down into the needs and challenges of these bloggers, I found that many felt real apprehension and fear about the setup process, and wanted some hand-holding in getting started.

Group 2. Readers who had started their first blog, but had regrets about the way they’d set things up.

This group had taken action on their desire to start a blog, but they’d done it in a way that left them with regrets. Perhaps they’d made poor domain choices, hadn’t thought through platform selection, or hadn’t thought carefully about content and technical issues that hampered them as their blogs grew.

Many of this second group were reading ProBlogger as a way to research setting up their second blog in a way that was better than their first.

Getting Started Blogging

Whether you’re just starting your first blog, or you’re setting up your second, third, or fourth, you may be feeling a little overwhelmed by the options and how to do it right. Chris and I would love to walk you through the process and help you set up a blog with good foundations.

This course will walk you through six lessons:

Preparation. In this lesson, you’ll get tips on naming your blog, keyword research, and domain names.
Platforms. Where will your blog live, and which platform is right for you?
Types of Blogs. This class is an introduction to some of the different blogging approaches you might consider.
WordPress. Here, we cover how to install and customize WordPress.
Adding Killer Content to Your Blog. This lesson is an introduction to the types of content you’ll want to add to your blog.
Introduction to the Pillars of ProBlogging. Once you’ve got the foundations right, I’ll walk you through four areas you’ll need to work on moving forward to build a successful blog.

Lessons contain a mix of both video content and articles. This course is completely free and is being run over at SitePoint’s courses area. And you’ll get immediate access to it all six lessons when you sign up.

We’ll send you daily reminders over the week to help you keep on track, but you can take the course at your own pace—all in one go, or over a longer period if you choose.

Interested? Sign up for Getting Started Blogging now.

Too Basic for You? Check out the ProBlogger Academy

getting-started-blogging-academy Getting Started Blogging is unashamedly for those at the beginning of their blogging journey—those who are starting their first blog.

If you’re more experienced, you’re still welcome to take the course, but you might also be interested in a new series of short courses that Chris Garrett and I are putting together at the ProBlogger Academy.

These four courses can be completed as a bundle, or you can pick and choose the topics that are most suited to your needs from the following:

Creating Killer Content
Boosting Your Blog Traffic
Building a Community on your Blog
Monetizing Your Blog

Each course will be held over a week, and will have a forum area as well as Q&A sessions with Chris and myself.

These courses are not live yet, but they will be rolled out in the coming months. You can sign up now or leave your email address to be notified of them as they go live.

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Posted on 11.04.10 · Tagged with

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Scribe SEO Deal Closes November 5

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Scribe SEO’s special Step Up deal is about to close. If you haven’t taken advantage of it yet, time is running out.

According to Scribe, “SEO is not rocket science … You know you have to create valuable, reader-focused content, and also:

You’ve got to do keyword research.
You’ve got to optimize your reader-focused content.
You’ve got to build links to your site.”

While it can’t create valuable, reader-focused content on your behalf, Scribe (a great Plugin for WordPress, Joomla and Drupal) can help you with the other three tasks in this list.

Until Friday 5 November, you can get better value on Scribe for less: “step up” your number of monthly Scribe content evaluations and keyword searches without paying the higher price for the next-level plan.

That means you get a higher value Scribe plan for the price of the plan below it. A good deal? We think so. Have a look for yourself. The promotion code you’ll need to get the special offer is STEPUP.

Has Scribe helped you attract search traffic to your blog?

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Posted on 11.03.10 · Tagged with

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Using Css3 Text-Shadow

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We are all familiar with CSS and some of the amazing things that we are able to accomplish with it. However, many of us aren’t familiar with the cool new features that Css3 now gives us to play with.

One of those features is giving your text a shadows. In the past if you wanted a shadow on your text you had to create an image, however this is now a thing of the past with the new text-shadow function.

Css3 function example: text-shadow: 0px 1px 1px #FFFFFF

To create a shadow in the text, the Css is written as text-shadow: Apx Bpx Cpx #xxx;

Apx = x-axis
Bpx = y-axis
Cpx = cast length/feathering
#xxx = color of shadow

An example of what your Css would look like:

.cssclass {
text-shadow: 2px 2px 7px #111;
font-size: 3.2em;
color: #f5f5f5;
}

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Posted on 11.03.10 · Tagged with

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Which Domain Is Right for You?

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This guest post is by Karol K of newInternetOrder.com.

If you’ve ever wondered about domain name selection, you probably already know that there are basically only three main types of domain names. And they are:

semantic names
unusual names
combined names

Which will be best for your next blog? If you’re not quite sure yet, read on! In this post, we’ll consider each of these options in detail.

A semantic name

This is a name created from one specific word, or several words put together. What’s important is that the domain uses existing, well-known words. Here are a few basic examples:

Cars.com
Pizza.com
Toys.net
VintageElectricGuitarBlog.com

There are a number of advantages to using such a name:

It specifies the theme of the website/blog.
It clearly defines the niche which the blog touches upon (everyone knows what they can expect to find at toys.com).
It’s easy to memorize.
It makes your job easier when it comes to getting good ranking in the search engines for the keywords that are included in the domain name.

Of course, there are some disadvantages to using a semantic name:

Many basic semantic names are already taken.
There’s often no direct connection between the domain name and your company brand, which can make the task of brand-building more difficult. Blogs using this type of name can be literally replaced overnight with different blogs on the same topic and many people wouldn’t even notice.
A semantic name makes it hard to expand the theme of the blog to other areas. It’s very unlikely that we’ll see a catalog of garden furniture on pizza.com anytime soon.
Semantic names don’t assist with building trust, since they don’t define a brand: they’re usually very generic. For example, if I name my website WeWillStripYouOfAllOfYourMoney.com, I probably won’t gain as much trust as I would have if I’d given it band named like BWin.com. The difference is similar to making a statement like, “we’re a sports betting site” rather than “we’re BWin.com, a sports betting site.”

An unusual name

Unusual domains usually employ a brand name. Think of domains like:

Google.com
Amazon.com
Yahoo.com
Mashable.com

To create such a name, you need to find or create a semantically empty word—a word that has no meaning among the target audience—and give meaning to it.

As you can see from the list above, some of the biggest players in the online game use semantic names.

So there are, obviously, some advantages to this type of domain name:

It’s characteristic. It can’t be confused with the competition. Google is Google, and Bing is Bing—there’s no way of mistaking these two even though they both do the same thing.
It doesn’t create a brand—it is the brand!
It’s easy to get good rankings in the search engines for the name itself. And if the word you’ve chosen doesn’t already exist, the competition won’t be too strong for the domain name itself.

As you’d expect, there are disadvantages to using this type of name:

It doesn’t define the niche, nor the theme of the blog. If this kind of name is attached to a new blog, and no one really knows about it, it can easily be overlooked by a potential visitor—even if they’re looking for the kind of content that the blog publishes—simply because they won’t be able to guess what the blog’s about.
Since it’s usually harder to say or communicate the name orally, it’s easy to get it wrong. When my friend first told me about ebay.com years ago, I fired up my browser and typed “ebuy.com.” I’m sure I wasn’t the only person who made this mistake.
It’s harder to gain good rankings in the search engines for specific keywords using an unusual name than it is with a semantic name. If you write about computer hardware, then it would probably be a little easier to get good rankings for the keyword “computers” if you had a domain like “computers.com” rather than “compunationgeorge.com.”

A combined name

Facebook.com
Problogger.net
Friendfeed.com

…are all combined names. These domains combine semantic and unusual names. Although the name may have little meaning on its own, as soon as you visit the site, you grasp what’s going on—and recall the domain—very quickly.

I think that these are the hardest types of names to come up with. You really have to think outside the box to find an existing word or several words, and then give them a unique meaning that binds them somehow with the theme of your blog.

If you succeed, you can expect some benefits:

A combined name defines the brand in a unique way that’s similar to an unusual name, only better.
Visitors can quickly grasp the concept of the blog even though it’s not as obvious as it is with semantic names.
A combined name clearly differentiates your site from the competition.
It’s usually easy to memorize.

And as for the disadvantages:

A combined name can make it harder to get a good search ranking for specific keywords (similar to having an unusual name).
It’s easier for your competition to imitate this kind of name. This usually happens when we’ve used an obvious framework to create the name. For example, if our car-related blog is called “4wheeldrive.com” then somebody could try to copy our success with a domain like “rearwheeldrive.com”.

Which one is the best for you?

Here’s my advice. If you want to create a small blog targeted at the members of a small, precisely defined niche, then I think it’s probably best to use a semantic domain name. You have a better chance that interested people will find your blog in the search engines, and that they’ll actually visit it, because the URL itself will tell them what the blog is about.

If you’re aiming at taking over the world with your blog, then you should probably choose an unusual or combined domain name. As I’ve already said earlier, the biggest players in the game use such names, and we can learn from them. There’s nothing better when it comes to building a brand than a good, unique name that’s easy to memorize.

So go on and try to choose one of these three types. And if you’ve already done it, congratulations. You’ve just started a marathon in which your domain name is the first step. This is just the beginning.

What do you think about this classification? What’s the type of your blog name?

Karol K provides blogging and marketing tips at newInternetOrder.com.

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Posted on 11.03.10 · Tagged with

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How Long Does It Take? SEO and Organic Marketing Results

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A question I seem to be getting a lot these days has to do with search engine optimization (SEO) and how long it takes to see tangible results from your focused SEO campaigns. As is true with most things that are not directly in your control, the answer is, “it depends.”

Now I know what you might be thinking. My initial response may appear to be a bit of a lame answer but let me explain. Ask the SEO experts how long it will take to acquire #1 rankings for a particular keyword and you probably won’t get a direct answer. In fact, some may not even respond at all. This is because any experienced SEO knows that predicting when a site may achieve a particular ranking is suicide.

What happens if rankings come sooner… or later? Although SEOs know the best way to improve a website’s ranking for a particular keyword phrase, they can never predicts what Google is going to do and how long it will take them to do it. That being said there are a few guidelines to use when determining the competitiveness of a particular keyword phrase.

Assuming you apply some of the basic SEO best practices such as keyword research, on page optimization and off page optimization techniques (link building), you can judge the competitiveness of a keyword by:

1. The Google PR of sites ranked in the top search result positions. The higher their Google Page Rank the more difficult it will be to outrank them.

2. The Age of the domain for the top ranked search results. If the top positions are controlled by sites that have been around for a while, this is another sign of strength.

3. The number of inbound links to the top ranked web sites for your keyword phrase. Quality inbound links are directly correlated to rankings. The more sites linking in to the top positions the more difficult they’ll be to outrank.

4. Number of competing sites. This number which is displayed by Google when completing a search shows how many other sites have the keyword you’re searching for. The greater the number the more competitive the term may be.

5. The number of monthly searches. Generally, terms with higher search volumes are more competitive from a ranking perspective. Not always but generally. If you’re researching a frequently searched term, chances are that many strong websites are competing for the top rankings.

Now that you have a better understanding of ranking factors, you probably understanding why predicting top search results is difficult. In my experience, top results can happen anywhere between 30 days and 12 months. It largely depends on how competitive the term is; how long competing sites have ranked in the top positions; and their relative strength – based on the factors noted above.

Given the complexity of rankings in general and the explanation above, you should have a better understanding of how difficult it is to determine how long it will take to achieve top rankings for a particular keyword. So the next time someone asks you how long it will take to achieve #1 rankings, you can let them know that it really all depends!

For more free marketing advice, visit the marketing experts at http://www.MarketingScoop.com.

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Posted on 11.02.10 · Tagged with

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Google Feedburner Delivers Real-time Traffic Stats

Posted by jessica · Leave a Comment

This week, Google unveiled an upgraded Feedburner stats package that provides real-time data on clicks, views, and podcast downloads.

For the social media fanatics, the Feedburner team add that, “if you use the FeedBurner Socialize service, and your platform uses PubSubHubbub or you ping us when you post, you can for the first time get stats on how much traffic your feed items are receiving from Twitter, as well as feed reading platforms like Google Reader in one place.”

Looks like those Refresh buttons are set to get a workout… Have you tried the new stats? What are your thoughts?

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Posted on 11.02.10 · Tagged with

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The Goal Post: Why Goals Matter More than Ever

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Image by Iguana Jo.

Overheard in Vegas at BlogWorld Expo:

“I just started a blog and I’m excited to see where it will lead me.”

Have you ever said something like that? When I started out, it was certainly something I remember telling a friend. Nobody really knew where the medium of blogging would lead—we were all quite happy to let thing evolve and see where we ended up.

There was actually some sense in this approach: blogging was still evolving, and because the space wasn’t overly crowded or competitive, many bloggers were swept almost accidentally into amazing opportunities.

The problem that today’s beginning bloggers face is that the see-where-it-will-lead approach doesn’t always work. There are many millions of blogs, mainstream media is investing serious cash into the space, and some of the everybody-wins style of collaboration that used to go on in the blogosphere has disappeared.

While good things still come when you let your blog evolve, and luck still plays a part, many of the more successful bloggers that I meet today are strategic about what they’re doing.

One of the themes I taught at BlogWorld Expo this year focused on goals.

Knowing what you want to achieve and where you want to end up will make you more likely to end up achieving those things.

Conversely, setting out on a path with no idea of what you want to achieve leaves your destination purely up to chance. It could end up being good—or it could end up quite the opposite.

“If you don’t know where you are going, how can you expect to get there?” – Basil S Walsh

The blogger who didn’t set goals

I told this story at BWE last week.

A number of years ago, a young blogger burst onto the scene in one of the niches I wrote in. They got noticed faster than almost any blogger I’d seen before: within weeks, their blog was getting hundreds of comments and being talked about on many other blogs.

The reason they were noticed so quickly was that almost every post they wrote took a pot-shot at another blogger in their niche. Posts on the blog were critiques, rants, and personal attacks on other key people in the niche (including me). And as a result, the blogger got noticed very, very quickly.

The blog grew over the coming months, largely based upon this snarky philosophy. Other bloggers saw the strategy working and new snarky blogs sprung up. The niche wasn’t a particularly pleasant one to be a part of for a while there.

I always thought it was a pity—the blogger was actually a smart person and when they wanted to, they had good things to say. But the blog always seemed to be seasoned with a toxic edge which detracted from what I thought could have been achieved.

One day, the blog that started it all stopped publishing. The blog went silent.

A few months later, the blog disappeared altogether. All traces of it vanished (although I’m sure it still lives in those Internet archiving sites).

I always wondered what happened to the blogger, until a few months ago, I found myself in a chat room listening to a webinar and recognized their name as one of the other participants.

I managed to get the blogger to jump on Skype with me and asked what had happened. Why had they stopped blogging?

The story the person told me was that they’d started blogging with one very vague goal: to get noticed. Beyond getting noticed, they didn’t really know what they wanted to achieve. It was only after they’d gotten noticed that they realized their ultimate goal was to be an authoritative voice in the niche. The blogger wanted to be someone that people looked to with respect. They wanted to be someone who’d be asked to speak and write books on the topic.

The problem was that the way they’d initially gone about their blogging had actually taken them away from their belatedly identified goals. They’d burned bridges and become known as the snarky blogger, rather than the authority blogger.

“Without goals, and plans to reach them, you are like a ship that has set sail with no destination.” – Fitzhugh Dodson

I don’t have goals!?

I’m very aware that many bloggers start blogs without hard and fast goals. They take the I’ll-see-where-it-leads approach. This was my approach, too—and good things did come from it.

However, the reality is that as vague as they were, I did have goals even back when I started eight years back.

They certainly weren’t long-term or far-reaching grand goals about where I’d be today. Rather, they were goals about the next steps—where I’d be in the coming days and weeks.

Over time, I achieved some of what I set out to do. I abandoned other goals and set new ones—some of them for the longer term. The key was to identify a direction to head in, and start moving.

You don’t always need the ultimate destination in mind, but if you can identify some next steps to work towards, at least you’ll be heading somewhere with intention.

“Progress has little to do with speed, but much to do with direction” – Unknown

Do you have goals for your blogging or are you seeing where blogging will lead you?

The 5 Foundations of Social Media Success that No One Talks About

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This post is by Clare Lancaster, of WomenInBusiness.com.au.

As I was sitting down to write my first social media column for ProBlogger I was thinking about the best place to start. Should I do a run through of the basics or jump right into reporting on my latest experiment?

My sense of flow and logic won over and here we are at the beginning, a very good place to start.

The rave, by leocub

I could talk about the things we’ve all heard before. Such as how important it is to observe the etiquette on social networking platforms—to behave like you’re at a friend’s cocktail party, not a sales conference.

Or the fact that you should build your network slowly, with focus, and engage people in conversation—not drill out your sales message and expect people to pay attention.

Or that networking platforms like Twitter are a communication tool—not a marketing tactic.

But that’s not very exciting, is it? Instead, here are 5 foundations of social media success that no one talks about.

1. Nice guys finish first.

Just as building your blog business is a marathon, not a sprint, so is your path to social media success. Resist the urge at all times to automate your network building. People want to do business with people they like. Be a nice guy and help people out. Answer questions generously. Connect people who would benefit from knowing each other.

2. People like people who like them.

This one’s all about ego (theirs, not yours). The first thing businesses want to know when they come to me for advice is, “How can I get the attention of my audience? No one is talking to me.”

I say: talk to audience; don’t wait for them to talk to you. Notice individuals and what they’re doing before you expect anyone to notice you and what you’re doing. Don’t just notice them, promote them.

3. Transparency isn’t everything.

There’s a lot to be said about transparency. Again, something we’re told all the time is that transparency and authenticity are key to social media success. Yes, people like to see behind the scenes of your business and what you’re creating. Yes, they like to know the human side of your brand. No, they don’t want to know what you had for breakfast. Or that you’re broke. Above all, don’t be boring.

4. Position yourself.

We’ve established that people do business with people they like. So does your network know what you do? You want to position yourself to be top of mind for a topic, and the easiest way to do this is to live and breathe it. If you’re blogging about your passion, this will come naturally.

5. Pay special attention to your fans.

Do you know who your fans are? Now before you get all Rock Star on me, I mean the people who comment on your blog and your Facebook page, retweet your posts and always open your emails. Know them, connect with them, and make them feel special.

So how did I go? Are there any questions you have about the basics of social media? Are there any topics you’d like me to talk about in more depth? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

Clare Lancaster offers blog reviews to help improve the business performance of your blog. She is passionate about helping people make their own path in work and life and can be found on Twitter most days (@clarelancaster).

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