Folks, you’ll know today’s guest contributor author Gretchen Rubin from her bestselling books on happiness, habits, and human nature, her inspiring talks, and her popular daily blog GretchenRubin.com. Gretchen also shares practical, manageable advice on her podcast Happier With Gretchen Rubin. We are thrilled to have Gretchen on ProBlogger today, giving us her best tips on how good habits can help you stay sane and on track when your workplace is also your home.
If you’re a blogger, and you work from home, it can be tough to stay productive and creative. You can always knock off some household chore – or take a nap on the sofa!
5 Ways I Use Habits to Stay Creative and Productive When Working From Home
In Better Than Before, my book about how to master habits, I identify the 21 strategies we can use to make or break our habits. I use many of these strategies on myself, to keep myself on track as a blogger.
1. I use the Strategy of Safeguards to put myself out of the reach of temptation.
To do the serious work of original writing—my most challenging kind of work—I take my laptop to a library that’s a block from my apartment, and there, I don’t connect to the internet. It’s easier physically to remove myself from the lure of my three monitors than to use self-control. Many people accomplish the same thing by using software to shut down the internet for certain intervals every day. Look for stumbling blocks, plan for failure!
2. I use the Strategy of Scheduling to do certain tasks at certain times.
It turns out that working is one of the most dangerous forms of procrastination. So when I tell myself, “at 10:00 a.m., I’m going to write that blog post,” at 10:00 I don’t allow myself to think that while I’m writing, I can also clean my desk, check email, post on Twitter, go over my calendar, or indulge in my personal favorite, do “research.” At the designated time,I do the task that I’ve identified, or I stare at the ceiling. Even when I don’t feel like working, I soon buckle down, out of sheer boredom.
3. I use the Strategy of Foundation to make sure that I move around a lot during the day.
Some days I go to the gym, or take a yoga class, or have a strength-training session. We also just got a new puppy, so I’m going for many more short walks during the day. Research shows that exercise helps me stay energized and focused—and for me, it also helps me keep my rear in the chair when I’m working, because otherwise I get very restless. Plus, as Nietzsche wrote, “All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.” I often find that I get a big insight or make an important connection when I’m out for a walk.
4. I use the Strategy of Monitoring to keep track of how much I’m posting.
How many posts am I really doing each week? We do a better job with just about everything (exercise, diet, spending, etc.) when we keep close track of what we’re doing.
Weirdly, I’ve found, it’s easier to post just about every day than to post some days. I usually post 5-6 times a week, so it’s part of my ordinary day. I don’t agonize, “Should I write something? I wrote yesterday and the day befofre, shouldn’t I get today off? I have a good idea for tomorrow, so should I take today off? I didn’t sleep well last night, I’ll write better tomorrow”, etc. But if I posted, say, three times a week, I’d go through that every time, I’m sure.
As it is, I just have to post. If you want a daily time log, to help you monitor how you’re spending your time each day, download it here.
5. I use the Strategy of Treats to make plenty of time to read.
The Strategy of Treats is the most funWe should load ourselves with healthy treats, because when we give more to ourselves, we can ask more from ourselves. Reading is my favorite thing to do, and when I give myself plenty of time to read for fun, I feel energized and cared for. Also, my reading gives me new ideas, illustrations, and insights, so it makes blogging easier, too. But I spend a good amount of time each week reading exactly what I want to read, not what I think I “should” read.
BONUS
Here’s a strategy that I don’t need, but many people do: the Strategy of Accountability. In Better Than Before, I divide people into four categories: Upholders, Questioners, Obligers, and Rebels. (Take the quiz here.) For people who are “Obligers” (which is the largest category, by the way), the Strategy of Accountability is crucial. Key. Essential!
If you’re really good at meeting other people’s expectations, but find it hard to meet your expectations for yourself, you must give yourself outer accountability. Start an accountability group (starter kit here, if you want to start one) where people hold each other accountable. Work with a coach. Find a client. Report to a buddy. Do whatever it takes—because for many people, writing regularly on a blog is something that just won’t happen, no matter how much they want to do it, if there’s no external accountability. Know yourself, and plan accordingly!
If you’d like to read more about how to use habits to make your life happier, healthier, and more productive, check out my book, Better Than Before. It turns out that it’s not too hard to change your habits—when you know what to do.
This Guest Post is from email marketing expert Krystin Ruschman, owner of Email2Inbox.
Gmail is implementing stricter email requirements for senders who send 5,000 or more messages per day. Maybe your mailing list isn’t quite at this volume yet, but bloggers with any size email list and/or just using Gmail themselves should take note…
Starting February 1, 2024
Email senders will start getting temporary errors (with error codes) on a small percentage of their non-compliant email traffic.
Starting April 1, 202
Gmail will start rejecting a percentage of non-compliant email traffic, and they’ll gradually increase the rejection rate.
“Enforcement will be gradual and progressive.”
So to make sure bloggers keep on the right side of these new email rule changes, let’s dive into some details…
WHAT is happening?
Google is rolling out guidelines for all email senders in an effort to:
Help protect recipients from malicious messages, such as spoofing and phishing messages
Help protect you and your organization from being impersonated
Help decrease the likelihood of your emails being rejected or marked as spam
WHEN do these guidelines start?
These guidelines took effect on Thursday, Feb 1st, 2024.
The enforcement will be gradual and progressive according to Google, with temporary errors first, then a percentage of non-compliant emails will be rejected until, eventually, the guidelines will be in full force and effect.
WHO do these guidelines affect?
Anyone who sends email messages to personal Gmail accounts
A Gmail account is defined as an email recipient with an email address ending in @gmail. com or @googlemail. com
Google has divided email senders into 2 groups:
1. All (Non-Bulk) Senders
2. Bulk Senders
A Bulk Sender is a domain that sends 5,000 messages or more to personal Gmail accounts within a 24-hour period.
All messages sent from the same primary domain (even if through multiple subdomains) count toward this limit. (make sure to read that again… the 5k limit is attributed to the root domain/TLD)
For example, if you send 1500 messages through your reply.yourdomain. com sending domain, and another 3500 messages through your replies.yourdomain. com sending domain you are considered a Bulk Sender because all 5,000 messages were sent through the same primary domain.
Senders who meet this definition of Bulk Sender ONCE, are classified as bulk senders, PERMANENTLY
So, if you’re not a BULK sender already, as a blogger the chances are that you will be.
WHAT’s included in this rollout?
Well… there are 9 guidelines (at the time of this post)…
I’ll rattle them off here, but stay tuned…. because, as you can imagine, the guidelines and definitions have been changing as we march toward the deadline and I’d expect more of that over the next several months.
This is the gist of it:
1. SPF/DKIM (DNS records):
At least one for non-bulk senders, both for bulk senders.
Google and Yahoo both prefer DKIM if you’re only doing one.
2. DMARC (DNS record):
Bulk senders requirement
DMARC is intended to “protect your brand” according to Marcel Becker, Senior Director of Product at Yahoo.
The record Google and Yahoo are looking for is a TLD record (for your root domain, not your subdomain).
So, according to Mr. Becker, while you can definitely add a separate record to your subdomain this is not best-practice, nor what they are looking for.
3. 1-click Unsubscribe (header):
Optional for non-bulk senders, required for bulk senders
There are lots of different ways to configure an unsubscribe.
For the purposes of this guideline, it’s referring only to the header unsubscribe (according to RFC 8058), and Google/Yahoo are specifically NOT telling you what to do inside your email with your regular unsubscribe link or footer.
They call out that there are too many regulations around that one, and they’re different in every country, so they want to stay away from dictating that.
The unsubscribe header is the one they’re looking for and it’s generally controlled on the backend of whatever software you’re using – not something you, yourself, can configure.
4. Internet Message Format (RFC standard):
Required for both.
There’s a lot to this standard, most of which is controlled on the backend of the software you’re using, but there are a couple notables I’ll call out here:
– Web links in the message body should be visible and easy to understand. Recipients should know what to expect when they click a link.
– Message subjects should be accurate and not misleading.
5. TLS Connection (encryption):
Required for both
Transport Layer Security (TLS) is a standard internet protocol that encrypts email for privacy and secure delivery. This needs set to HTTPS for each subdomain.
There’s a TLS configuration for your regular email account, too, but we’ll leave that for another post.
6. NO Gmail/Yahoo Impersonation
(Sending from one of their free email account addresses): required for both
Other than within your own personal email account, using a free from address like @gmail. com, @googlemail. com @yahoo. com, @aol. com, @verizon. net, etc. to send bulk email communications is a big no-no.
Currently, Yahoo blocks these emails entirely, and Google will now be sending them straight to the Spam folder.
(Mapping your sending domain with your dedicated IP, and your dedicated IP with your sending domain): required for both.
This requirement ONLY applies to people who use dedicated IPs
Basically, this is an A record you put in, then you have your SMTP put in the PTR record and you’re all set.
If you have a dedicated IP and you don’t do this you may find your emails getting rejected.
8. DMARC Alignment
(Domain match between your From domain and your SPF or DKIM root domain): optional for non-bulk senders, required for bulk senders
Each ESP handles this differently, so I’ll save the details for another post, but the gist of it is you need to be who you say you are when you show up at the door.
Your from address domain should also match either your Return-Path or Mailed By (SPF) root domain or your Signed By (DKIM) root domain.
For Highlevel this means using a dedicated sending domain for each subaccount, which is also a great way to get better deliverability, so it’s a 2-fer.
THIS requirement is probably 1 of the top 2 requirements that really needs your attention right now. There are nuances to making this switch that you don’t want to miss such as carrying forward any Suppressions history on the previous domain (if you have your own MG account) and warming up the new domain.
9. Keep Google Spam Rates Low
Below 0.10% and avoid ever reaching 0.30% or higher (as reported in Google Postmaster – not to be confused with the Complaint Rate you see in your email marketing software or SMTP): required for both
This is a biggy.
It changes the way email marketing is done for most people.
Gone are the days of holding on to every contact on your list for dear life or “opting in” a contact to a bunch of email communications even though all they did was request your lead magnet or fill in a Contact Us form.
HOW do you meet these new email requirements?
I admit the list of requirements does get quite techy. Fortunately, most Email Service Providers are on top of these changes by providing their customers (you) with step-by-step instructions to become compliant.
If you’re after more detail and guidance on meeting these new Gmail requirements specifically or want to learn how to increase your email deliverability, open rates and conversions, follow my Email2Inbox Facebook page.
Krystin Ruschman, owner of Email2Inbox, specializes in email marketing and deliverability. She’s historically focused on strategies for getting email, not just TO the inbox, but more importantly on what it takes to STAY in the inbox. She works with marketers and business owners alike, to reach conversion rates they never thought possible, and ultimately grow revenue for themselves and their clients through the power of email marketing.
This is a guest contribution from Joen Rude Falsner.
Most of us have been there: we’ve all had this job where the financial compensation was the absolute single motivation to even show up.
Luckily for most people this, usually, low-compensated, uninspiring and numbingly boring job is characterized by being temporary. Something we do only for a short period of time.
Not for me.
For five full years I was rocking the position of a full time phone supporter specializing in assisting surprisingly helpless people with their TV setup and broadband service subscription.
“Have you tried turning it off and on again?”
I hated it. Oh my God, how I hated it.
A little bit about me
So I’m Joen. A now 30-something-year-old dude from Denmark who has an opinion about most things in life. I wrote this article a few years ago but the story is still relevant today, because my blog is going strong and continues to support me and my lifestyle.
Whether the topic is bear hunting in Alaska or how to keep tropical flowers alive in a costal temperate climate, I will find a way to ask questions that I am genuinely interested in knowing the answers to while also insisting that I know a thing or two about the subject.
The struggle of saying no to the system
This is who I’ve been most of my life. In my mind I have always had all the answers, but never when the topic landed on me. When the topic was ‘Joen’, I instantly became mute.
I was okay with this for a few years, but then I started to realize that my friends were moving up in the world.
Everybody around me seemed to be thriving with fancy degrees, fancy grades and eventually fancy titles. They had their life paved already, while I was digging my own hole deeper and deeper using faulty modems and TV boxes as a shovel.
At age 25, it would be fair to describe me as a rather depressed individual primarily due to the fact that I didn’t seem to have much of a bright future.
I didn’t have any formal education other than high school and a 2-year-short piece of garbage degree in marketing that was worth nothing more than a seat behind the register in your nearest supermarket.
See, that’s the thing. I never wanted a formal education, because it simply wasn’t for me. I just couldn’t care less about it.
I wanted to create. They wanted me to read.
Saying no to the system was a huge deal that I am forever grateful I did. It was also something that was incredibly difficult. Everybody expects you to do what society expects you to do.
Because if you don’t do what society wants you to do, then what are you going to do?
Entering the digital universe
Regardless of my state of depression I was eager to dig my way out of the hole.
My close friend, Frederik, who is kind of a SEO and PPC hero told me about blogging and affiliate marketing. He actually introduced me to the whole digital universe a few years earlier, but it took me two years before I summoned the courage to act on it.
Finally, I decided to start a blog.
February 7, 2014, I started Stayclassy.dk, a fashion and lifestyle blog with focus on quality over quantity and the good life.
I was determined to be successful.
From dinosaur to digital dude
Back in 2014, when I started my blog, I think it would be fair to say I was kind of a dinosaur.
Of course I knew how to work my way around a computer and I have always been pretty handy with ‘basic stuff’, but I had no idea just how big the difference was between casually using a computer and understanding the incredible opportunities the Internet offers.
Getting started with blogging
When I started blogging I was only familiar with basic tools.
I knew that it was important to make a keyword analysis in order to identify the best keyword for an article so that it would be easier for it to rank. I also knew it was important to create a lot of content.
Quality content of course.
But that was pretty much it. Those were my tools. Creating content and using the right keywords. Looking back, I actually like the simplicity of my starting point.
Because creating content is really the most important part of getting started with blogging. Forget link building, guest blogging and what else you got.
There’s no point of reaching out to people if you haven’t already built a solid platform to show.
My goals when I started the blog
I’m not gonna lie.
Getting into blogging was mainly incentivized by the possibility of earning money. I wanted to get out of my day job badly and in order to do so I had to earn money.
I started the blog while also working my full time job. In other words, my schedule just got a lot busier. It was three hours of blogging before work and 3-4 hours of blogging after.
All together that made my average day ~3+9+3=~15 hours long.
The goal from day 1 was to create one quality article a day. An article that had to be at least 1000 words long.
I knew that text heavy articles weren’t necessarily a goal in itself, but setting this rule was important as I was also forcing myself to write.
A lot.
You have to remember that when I started blogging my only writing experience was chatting to girls on Tinder. I had zero experience, although I’ve always been all right at putting together a sentence or two.
The strategy
By writing an article a day, and sometimes even two, I knew that in a year I would have 365 articles in the bank. That’s 365,000 words or the equivalent of 3-4 good books. I liked the sound of that.
Content before anything.
That was my basic strategy to begin with. It wasn’t until I had +45 articles that I began thinking in terms of getting links.
With 45+ articles I had something to show. I had already created a blog that I was really proud of. People would also take my blog seriously and that made my link-building effort a lot easier as more of my guest post enquiries were granted.
Along with the consistent output of quality articles I started getting links. My blog started to become authoritative-ish.
I remember how much I hated the link-building game.
I thought it was so lame that links were the all-important factor in getting those much desired organic rankings. This was also one of the reasons that I didn’t put too much effort into it at that point, which, in hindsight, was a really bad decision, but more on this later.
Affiliate blog posts for the win
That was my mind-set.
If I wanted to earn money, I had to monetize as much as I could without of course making my blog appear spammy.
So the majority of the articles I wrote were affiliate blog posts, however I would complement them with lifestyle blog posts of various sorts in order for my blog to maintain a dynamic range of content.
Mainly it was affiliate articles in the fashion department where I had one particular affiliate program that would turn out to perform extremely well.
I already knew that, as this was the online go-to-fashion retailer for most Danes, but I didn’t know that it would become ~70% of my combined affiliate income almost three years later.
Spending a lot of time analyzing all the available affiliate programs as well as testing them out has been of great importance to the success of my blog.
If you don’t keep a close eye on this, you will consequently earn less money. Less money that over time will accumulate to a huge loss.
Earning my first dollar
Exactly 14 days was how long it took me to earn my first affiliate dollar after having started the blog.
My first sale was worth exactly 7 euros.
I was ecstatic. Just two weeks in and here I am already living the passive income dream.
Okay not really, but I could immediately see that this “earn money online blogging”-thing wasn’t just a fairy tale pipe dream.
It could be done if using the same technique as Andy Dufresne in Shawshank Redemption (best film ever by the way), who dug a hole through the wall by applying only pressure and time.
Pressure and time
That is all it really takes and although there isn’t any hole to be seen right away, you will eventually hit the other end of the wall.
Although I was seeing dollars only two weeks after getting to work, things were moving slow. Painfully slow actually, but it was easy to stay on track as I continued to grow my audience month after month.
The first 11 months of Stayclassy.dk
The first dot on the screenshot above marks the very beginning of Stayclassy.dk with virtually no traffic. Eleven months later the dot had jumped 16,193 steps in the right direction.
This was the time where I finally quit my beloved phone supporter job.
And not only did I quit. I moved to Australia. Away from icy Denmark and on to the deliciously warm continent where endless summer is always thriving.
I was not earning a full time living by any means at that point, but it was enough to get by as I also had saved up a bit of money.
Suddenly Joen was moving up in the world. Life was looking up. It felt great, to put it mildly.
Affiliate Marketing is great, but…
… it takes time and an abundance of hard work to get there.
Being one year into my blogging journey I was still not making enough to fully rely on it. Far from it actually, but I was okay with that. I knew it was only a matter of time, if I kept doing what I was doing.
Nonetheless, it was time to diversify my income stream.
So I engaged in sponsored content. I was getting more and more enquiries from businesses who were seeking promotion.
This was terrific as I was able to supplement my affiliate income with a tangible here-and-now income. They would pay me immediately as opposed to the hundreds of affiliate articles where I was still waiting to reap the true benefits of my hard work.
Given my blog’s good image I didn’t even have to approach businesses. They approached me. That was a solid pat on the shoulder and a strong indication that I was doing something right.
So I carried on.
The digital dude
That’s who I was starting to feel like. After a year of hard work, I was beginning to get a real grasp on blogging and this digital universe in general.
I was suddenly able to have “academic discussions” with my friend, Frederik.
I knew what was going on in the world of blogging and the wide variety of things you need to consistently keep an eye on.
After just one year I felt like I had learned incredibly many things that no school could ever teach me.
The main reason for this was that every time I wanted or had to implement something on my blog, I had to learn about it. Combining theory and practice was apparently the way to go. At least for me.
Becoming a successful blogger
So basically, in year two of my blogging career, I was kind of living the dream. I was travelling around Australia living in Darwin (not that much of a dream spot by the way), Cairns and Melbourne. I also spent six weeks in Bali and a month in Thailand.
Was this it? Had I made it?
I think most people would agree that I had indeed become a successful blogger, but to me I was only getting started. I was comparing my blog to a successful start-up. Things were going just fine, but it was nowhere near enough.
In short I kept maintaining the outlook of treating my blog as a real business: that strong growth was the only acceptable outcome. I think this has been an essential ingredient in getting to where I am today.
Being a successful blogger isn’t a static thing. It’s a constant battle that requires a continuous effort.
Very quickly things can go the wrong way. You can get hit by the Google bus (yes, that was a metaphor for losing rankings) subsequently affecting your income. There can be a drought where businesses are not interested in having sponsored content on your blog.
So many things can go wrong along the way.
I’ve been through all of this.
Several times. Up and down. Down, down and then up, up and up. It’s a never ending rollercoaster that will sometime make you feel sick and other times euphoric.
Dealing with the hardships of blogging
So yeah, blogging is no walk in the park. I have been through quite a few hardships.
Oh God, the discipline…
Call it what you want, but I call it hardship. One of the biggest challenges I have faced, and still am facing, is discipline.
It is so much easier to get up in the morning when you have a boss, who expects you to be there at 9am sharp.
When you are your own boss, it is so easy to allow yourself to sleep way past 10am. It is so easy to browse through hilarious cat photos instead of doing what you should be doing.
I have definitely not solved the problem of procrastination. I have, however, become more self-disciplined. I am constantly trying to improve my self-discipline by the use of various techniques.
Urgency
Because life seems so long, it is really hard to work towards your goals with a sense of urgency.
The mind seems to think that there always is plenty of time to do something else, which is why it is okay not to do what you should be doing right now.
I tell my brain every day that I need to have a better sense of urgency. This actually helps me with being more disciplined.
Mental toughness
Everybody talks about motivation. “You need to stay motivated”. “Read this book so you can get motivated”.
Of course motivation is a good thing, but I have come to the realisation that motivation is something that comes and goes as it pleases. It is a temporary state of mind and you have no control over it.
Instead, I have learned that the key to becoming a disciplined blogger (and person in general) is to work on your mental toughness.
Convincing yourself to write when you reeeaally don’t feel like it. Convincing your mind to finish a blog post although it tells you to stop right now. You get the point.
It is a draining exercise that will only be fruitful if applied repetitively.
It is a quite complex topic that I am by no means an expert on, however I have found it easier to work on my mental toughness when combining it with meditation and cognitive behavioral self-therapy.
Yeah, that was a pretty advanced word, but it’s actually not that complex.
In essence, it is about analysing your own thoughts and rationalising the why and what’s: why am I feeling this lack of doing anything productive? What is the consequence of not doing this work and what is the positive outcome if I do? By working right now, I will move closer to my hopes and dreams.
This exercise is really helpful as I simply get more shit done.
Delayed gratification
It’s about working hard now and then at some point later be rewarded. It makes sense, but the waiting time can be daunting. And it usually is.
At least for me as I am notorious for being impatient. When I hit publish on a blog post I want it to rank immediately, but fact of the matter is that it usually takes months before it sits on page 1, IF at all.
When getting into blogging you really have to be okay with delayed gratification.
I have been dealing with this hardship by always celebrating the small victories. It can be a little improvement in my rankings. It can be a few new e-mail subscribers, new fans on Facebook, a little increase in affiliate sales and so on.
Don’t be too hard on yourself just because you have yet to reach your big milestone.
Surviving ‘the dip’
You are probably familiar with Seth Godin’s terrific book, The Dip. Basically it addresses how every new project, business and hobby is all fun and games in the very beginning.
It’s exciting and you are as motivated as can be.
Pretty fast, though, the excitement fades. Suddenly obstacles are starting to build up. It’s not as easy as it was yesterday and you actually have to work hard.
Few people are lucky enough to avoid the dip and I sure as hell wasn’t one of them.
When I started the blog I had already read Seth Godin’s book, so I was aware of the concept.
That was a good thing as I therefor was expecting the dip. I was prepared for it and knew that this was simply just a state I would have to hustle my way through.
By keep telling myself that surviving the dip is an essential part of becoming successful, I was able to power through.
Having to do everything yourself
Most bloggers who start out have very limited resources. That means they have to do everything themselves. Outsourcing is generally not an option.
Right from buying the domain, setting up the first blog post to sending business proposals to potential partners, fixing various technical aspects and understanding how SEO works, everything is on your plate.
And you have to be really hungry if you are going to chew your way through all of it.
Having to do everything yourself has been one of the most valuable things I have had to do. You learn so incredibly much so incredibly fast simply because you have to.
The downside, however, is that you easily will find yourself overwhelmed. You don’t know where to start and it all just seems too much.
What I have done in order to not go down Overwhelm Lane, is to break down the tasks in what is super important and what is not so super important.
Then I will start with the number one super important task and solve it. When I have somewhat solved it, I move on to the next one. And then the next one.
It’s so much easier this way as opposed to starting from scratch with five different things you have zero grasp on.
From successful to thriving blogger
Even though I felt like a successful blogger after only twelve months of blogging, I wasn’t thriving. The blogging hardships were still of too great proportions.
I was still waiting for the blog to properly take off. I also still had so much basic stuff to learn.
Fast forward to the beginning of 2017
That’s today.
2 years and 10 months later I am still blogging away. I have written more than 700 articles. I have published more than 700,000 polished and edited words.
Stayclassy.dk has become the largest men’s fashion and lifestyle blog in Denmark with more than +60,000 monthly readers.
Blogging is my bread and butter, but my blogging income allows me to eat steak and béarnaise – and quite often actually!
I feel like I am thriving. I understand the blogging business. I know how it works. I generally just find it easy to connect the dots. Getting to this point has also sped up the growth of my blog.
2024 Update
In terms of age, I am in my early 30s. Geographically, I now live in Portugal. On a daily basis, I deal with various things and cases, which can probably best be described as a mixture of ideas and developing concepts as well as online marketing.
Alongside Stay Classy, I also help my girlfriend’s blog, AmalieRohde.dk , which has since become an integral part of Stay Classy – namely Stay Classy Kvinder . Likewise, we also run Stay Classy Vlog , which is the associated website for our YouTube channel , Stay Classy Vlog.
The most valuable tools I use
Consistency
It might seem self-explanatory, predictable and whatnot. I don’t care. Consistency carried out with persistence is by far the best path to destination successfulness.
And everybody knows that, right?
I think they do. The problem is that most people don’t understand just how important it actually is.
Or maybe they do.
They just don’t have the stomach to stay on course by moving one feet in front of the other every day. Because it is by no means an easy tool to use. It requires self-discipline on a daily basis, and yeah, we’ve already been over that.
The most incredible SEO-research tool available
Right up until six months ago I have been a cheapskate when it comes to the many online research tools available. No way I was paying $200+ a month just so I could look at competitor backlink profiles and keyword rankings.
Boy, has this been a poor decision, and not only a poor decision, it has also been an expensive one.
I’ll tell you why.
In the jungle of SEO-tools I was referred to Ahrefs.com by a friend of mine who was doing an unbelievable job with building links and domain authority for his own site.
I signed up with a paid profile and started looking at backlink profiles of competitors and people in the Danish SEO-industry, who I knew were building lots of links.
Immediately, I saw how many quality links that were just laying there. Up until July 2016 I really hadn’t done much about building quality links to my blog, so I figured it was well overdue I put in an effort.
And so I did.
I picked all the low hanging fruits to begin with, however sticking only to relevant and natural ones. I moved on to approaching strong websites where guest posting made sense.
Quickly, I got into the game of doing white hat link building. So many strong websites were suddenly pointing to my blog and then, BAM, I saw the effect.
The annotation next to July 2016 marks the day I started putting effort into link building. Two months later my blog took a massive jump. And then again.
Essentially I had doubled my organic traffic. This naturally had a pleasant effect on my affiliate income.
It was great to see this boost in traffic and earnings, but I am still cursing myself for not putting in this effort much earlier. I wonder how much money I have lost.
Oh, well.
Expensive lessons are sometimes the most valuable ones. And here the lesson was that links are ever important, whether you like it or not.
I know that everybody knows this. I’m not sharing any wild information that will shake the blogging or SEO industry. I just want to remind people that as ridiculous it can seem to spend an entire day on getting a single link, it is most likely worth it.
Another great thing about Ahrefs…
… is that their ranking system works as daily motivation for me.
Being able to see your Ahrefs rank, but also domain rating and organic search movements is fantastic.
It makes me want to work even harder as the daily effort I put into my blog translates to these Ahrefs statistics. Everyday they are updated.
Here is one of the Ahrefs graphs I follow religiously. Notice how it started going upwards in July, when I signed up.
What blogging has given me
Getting into the blogging business was in many ways a desperate measure.
Back in 2014, I would never have guessed just how many good things that would come out of it.
Because fact of the matter is that blogging has done so much more for me besides giving me juicy do-follow links, a bunch of traffic and a passive income.
I’ve become an independent dude
Almost three years of experience with running my own business has made me very independent to the point where I will never work for another person.
The joy of seeing my own business grow and grow is more fulfilling than anything I can think of.
The independence has also given me clarity.
I am more focused on what I want to achieve with my time on this little planet of ours. I will always have doubts about the decisions I make, but I have become confident enough to follow through and take the risks regardless.
Being a good writer is incredibly valuable
I will probably never be the Mark Twain of the 21st century, but I think that I have become a pretty decent writer in the course of the last three years. A writer that keeps improving.
One of the things that I have realized and thought a lot about lately is how valuable it is to be a good writer.
Writing not only allows you to tell a compelling story, it enables you to reach out to other people with a much higher rate of success. Here I am talking about creating appealing proposals to businesses, but also communication in general.
Additionally, writing has made me much more creative simply because I have forced digital ink on the screen every single day. Coming up with blog post ideas and putting them to life is one of the best ways to exercise your brain’s creative muscle.
Freedom to do what I want to do
Although blogging is no 4-hour-work-week gig, it comes with a tremendous amount of freedom.
Yes, you have to spend a lot of time in front the screen, but having the freedom to choose where in the world you want to sit and when is priceless.
In many ways it is the ultimate thing in life. Being able to do what you love from anywhere in the world.
I wrote this sitting on a roof top bar in Melbourne with the sun in my face.
I moved back from Australia to Denmark in December last year as I wanted to have a steadier base to work from. That hasn’t stopped me from bringing my laptop around the world.
In the last 12 months I have brought my laptop to Dubai, Italy, Greece, Berlin, Switzerland and now Melbourne where I am spending two months before moving onto an epic road trip around the southern parts of Australia.
The doors that have opened
Blogging has opened so many doors for me. It has led me to bigger and better on a continuous note. I get to work with amazing companies.
One of the best experiences was a company that wanted me to do an article on their insane collection of whisky, rum, cognac etc., where I was literally paid to taste some of the most expensive drops in the world. Is this real life?
I have established a network with talented, interesting and reputable people that stretch much further than the blogging environment.
My blog has given me a strong résumé that makes a formal education irrelevant. Although long educations in Denmark are free, I have also saved a lot of time and money by not wasting the last three years on a bachelor degree that won’t serve me.
Most importantly, blogging has made me a happier dude
And not just happier. Happy.
Blogging has given me a sense of purpose in life. I feel like I make a difference doing what I do, which is a feeling that gets emphasized by the many messages I get from inspired readers.
Okay, I’m gonna stop now with the happy camper poetry. It gets a bit much, doesn’t it?
Is blogging for everyone?
Certainly not. And I don’t mean that as in ‘not everybody is talented enough’. I am pretty sure most people could create a blog with decent content.
The problem is just that blogging is much more than creating content. As we talked about earlier there are so many strings to pull, if you want to become successful.
Of course everybody can blog on a hobby level. Nothing is stopping you from writing about your love of gluten free unicorn shaped candy, but if you want to make a living off of it, you will have to go beyond the content.
You will need to treat it like a business. Are you up for starting a business?
What’s next?
For me, you might ask? Only three years in, I still have a lot to learn. I feel like I am still just getting started. After all, three years really isn’t that much.
But to answer your question, I will continue to create content relentlessly although things are beginning to head in new directions. Directions where the format isn’t necessarily text-based, or at least where I don’t have to create all of it myself.
This means that I am in the process of expanding the team from 1 (me) to 2 or 3. This would allow me to take things to the next level and move closer to the ultimate goal, which is becoming the leading fashion and lifestyle magazine in Denmark.
Right now I am in the early phase of starting a vlog.
Something that scares the shit out of me. Putting myself in front of the camera and figure out how to tell a story. Am I even interesting enough? Hardly, most of my friends would probably say.
But I don’t care.
It’s time for Stayclassy.dk to work on even higher engagement. In a world where people can’t seem to get enough of videos, it is increasingly difficult to keep your audience interested only via text formatted content.
People want variety.
Although I have zero experience with recording I decided to jump straight into the vlogging world. I bought a Canon 70D, Røde VideoMic, various tripods, lenses and the whole shebang.
I am on really deep water, but I think I will manage to find my way to the shore.
This is the first vlog of Stayclassy.dk. One of many adventures to come.
So this turned out to be quite a long read. 5000 words actually. That’s a pretty good length if you want it to rank high. Google loooves rich content.
Remember, though, it’s not about the word count. It’s about the message.
I’m sure you got what it takes to become a successful blogger. Really all it takes is to get started, be consistent and passionate, and carry on.
Joen is the guy behind Stayclassy.dk, which is the biggest fashion and lifestyle blog for men in Denmark. He writes articles with the main purpose of inspiring his readers to become the best version of themselves. Connect with him on Facebook, Instagram and YouTube.
Say you’ve done all of the above. Now, the only remaining step is to get the sale. Sounds obvious, but all the preliminary work means nothing if you don’t close. You need to tell people to buy, rather than just crossing your fingers and hoping that they might.
It’s not just writing…
There’s a certain finesse required with this. You don’t sell in the same voice in which you entice, cajole, or inform. Lots of bloggers have trouble making the transition. If you’re going to put yourself out there as a seller of “you-branded” content, you don’t have the luxury of stumbling through and hoping that your sales pitch falls on receptive ears.
At this point, considering how much you’ve put in, selling yourself is mandatory, not optional. You have to use language forcefully, more forcefully than you do in your blog posts. Burrow into your prospect’s head, and by extension, your prospect’s wallet.
Focusing on the benefits
There’s a timeless axiom in the advertising business: People don’t want a bar of soap, they want clean hands.
The benefit of the product is far more important than the product itself. When you instead start focusing on the product—which, granted, you expended considerable effort to create—you’re not exactly empathizing with your clientele. It’s supposed to be about them, not you. No one cares how many hours you spent interviewing people for the DVD series you’re selling. Nor could anyone be less interested in how many pages your ebook is. (Beyond a certain point, of course. If you’re going to charge $329 for a three-page ebook, it had better contain the GPS coordinates for the Ark of the Covenant.)
No, cost-conscious buyers—any discerning buyers, really—want to know the answer to the universal question:
What’s in it for me?
How are you going to make your readers’ lives easier/simpler/richer? State how you’re going to do it. Yes, it’s great that you poured your heart and soul into your work, but that doesn’t necessarily make it sellable.
The human tendency is to concentrate on oneself, rather than other people. Which makes perfect sense—of course you’ll brush your own teeth and wash your own windows before doing the same for your neighbor. But if you want other people’s money, you have to force yourself to think about them first, as unnatural as that might sound.
Here’s an example of what not to write to get people to buy your products. The example is technically fictional, but it’s a composite of other bloggers’ calls-to-action:
“Starting today, I’m running a discount on my latest project. You can get my 36-page, 8,459-word ebook for just $11.99. This ebook, Car Noises And How To Diagnose Them, is the result of many months of research, and is now being made available to you for a special introductory price.”
Wow. Thanks for doing me the favor of offering to take my money. This is like the employee who walks into the boss’s office requesting a raise, and the first point he cites is how many hours of uncompensated overtime he puts in. Or that he has a baby on the way. You need to give your employer, or anyone else in the position of enriching you, a reason for doing so. Again, concentrate on the end users here. Without them, you and your product are nothing.
Here’s an alternative sales script, one that focuses on the buyer. It’s longer, but it also (hopefully) appeals to the buyer’s senses:
“Your car makes an unfamiliar noise. So naturally, your first reaction is to drive to the nearest mechanic, and waste maybe half an hour in the waiting room, putting yourself at the mercy of a professional whose livelihood rests on finding as many things wrong with people’s cars as possible.
For the love of God, don’t. Stop throwing your money away. That knock you hear doesn’t mean you need a new $1400 transmission assembly. It means you need to spend a couple more dollars on higher-octane fuel. That ear-splitting undercarriage rattle can be quieted in seconds, with the appropriate ratchet and a quarter-turn of your wrist.
My new ebook, Car Noises And How To Diagnose Them, breaks down the most common, least pleasant sounds that can emanate from your car. It tells you where they originate, what they mean, and how to prevent them. Some will require a look from a technician, but you’ll be amazed how many won’t. Fix them yourself instead, and you’ll save untold time, money and aggravation.
Car Noises And How To Diagnose Them includes sound files of dozens of the most common noises, along with complete directions on how to locate and assess them. Download it here for just $12, and I’ll include a mobile link for iOS and Android (because very few car noises occur when you’re sitting in front of your computer at home).”
Obviously that sales treatment isn’t going to be suitable for your blog and its products, but you get the idea. People are more budget-conscious these days than they’ve been in some time. They will part with their money, but you need to give them a compelling reason to.
Drawing the line
This doesn’t mean you should be penning advertising copy with dubious assertions. (“Scientifically proven to regrow hair!”) Quite the contrary. If there’s ever a time to be honest, it’s when you’re explaining to your readers what your products can do for them. Your readers will respect you for it, and if you give them value, they’ll spread the word.
For an established blogger, creating products that extend that blog can be a rewarding way to engage your readers and foster an ever-growing audience. For an up-and-coming blogger, selling a worthwhile product can cement your reputation as an authority in your field all the more quickly. Creating blog products takes plenty of time and effort, and while selling them in a rough economy can be a challenge, it’s such challenges that separate the average bloggers from the remarkable ones.
Say what your product’s benefit is (not what your product is, what its benefit is.), and sell.
Key points
Understand that writing sales copy is different than blogging.
Don’t write about yourself.
Don’t write about your product.
Write about your product’s benefits.
Practise makes perfect: keep trying to improve your sales writing skills.
That’s it for our tour of the tricky business of building blog products that sell. How are your products selling at the moment? We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.
Greg McFarlane is an advertising copywriter who lives in Las Vegas. He recently wrote Control Your Cash: Making Money Make Sense, a financial primer for people in their 20s and 30s who know nothing about money. You can buy the bookhere(physical) orhere(Kindle) and reach Greg at [email protected].
Did your latest post get all the readers, comments and tweets that it deserved?
Probably not. You wrote a great piece, but somehow, it seemed bland. Your ideas were good, but the post lacks a little something. What you need is more spice.
Here are nine ways to add some heat to your post, and grab readers’ attention.
#1: Add a snappy title and subtitles
You know that posts need great headlines. Often, the headline is all that a potential reader can see before clicking through to read the whole post—on Twitter, for instance, or in a CommentLuv link.
When you’ve got a post ready to go, though, it’s easy to just hit the Publish button, leaving it with whatever title first came to mind. Don’t do that. Give yourself time to pause and rethink. Is every word in the headline pulling its weight?
You might think images don’t really matter. After all, you’ve written great content—surely no-one cares whether or not there’s a pretty picture with it?
The thing is, images are eye-catching. They can make your posts look more polished and professional. And a great image can even set up the mood or tone of a post.
You’ll want to include at least one image per post—probably at the top. But if you’ve got a longer piece, it’s often worth adding several images to help break up the text. You can see how I did this in a huge post, Freelance Writing: Ten Steps, Tons of Resources, with ten images, one for each step.
Your readers don’t just want interesting information. They want posts which solve a problem. That could be something simple and basic (“How do I hold my camera?”) or something huge, like “How do I get out of debt?”
If you know your readers well, you’ll know what their common worries and struggles are. You can use these in your post, by empathizing with how they feel and by showing them the way forwards.
This isn’t a technique which you’ll want to use in every single post, but it’s very powerful when used sparingly.
Readers love stories, and they love to feel a sense of connection with another person. By telling a brief story from your own life, you hook the reader on an emotional level, not just an intellectual one.
Sometimes, you’ll have a great post packed with useful content—but without anything for the reader to really grab hold of.
To help your reader engage, offer “take home” points, summing up the post, or “action” points: something that gets the reader thinking or some next step they can take. I’ve noticed that when I do this with posts, I get more comments and retweets than otherwise.
This is particularly crucial if you’ve written a post which is heavy on theory. There’s a great example here in Charlie Gilkey’s The Four Key Dimensions of Business, where he ends with four straightforward questions to help people start using what they’ve just read.
Sometimes, bloggers aim to use the power of reaction in quite a cynical way. They post rants—angry pieces which are just intended to start an argument or to get attention.
But when you encourage thoughtful reactions, you help readers to share their ideas—and to share your content. You turn them from passive consumers of your content into active engagers with it.
Getting readers to react might be as simple as asking “What do you think?” In most cases, though, you’ll want to pose a question or ask their opinion on something specific.
When you’re reading blogs, you might come across a great quote—a sentence or a paragraph which really resonates. Why not share it with your readers?
Including quotes from other bloggers can help you to back up your own opinions and facts: it proves that other experts in your field are saying the same thing as you.
Plus, quotes help break up a long blog post. They allow you to introduce a different voice into your piece, and can provide a starting point for discussion.
Maybe you’ve written a great post that explains exactly how something works, in painstaking detail. The problem is, your readers aren’t engaging with it—they’re not even reading it.
Can you come up with an analogy that helps the reader to understand?
A good analogy gives your reader a picture in their head, based on something familiar. It can give them that “Aha, I get it!” moment. It can help them look at something in a fresh way, like Starting a Successful Blog is Like Planning an Invasion. You can keep the analogy going as a running metaphor using language that relates to it (like “allies” and “skirmishes” in that post).
You’re a blogger—which means you’re a writer. You need to make every sentence and word work for you.
By “punchier”, I don’t mean you should be aggressive. I mean that your words need to be strong and engaging.
Cut out unnecessary words and phrases, like “it may be the case that” or “In my opinion” or “it’s quite probably true that”. You don’t need these wishy-washy qualifiers, and your sentences will reader more strongly without them.
Use everyday language. Short, simple words can convey your points far more effectively than grandiose, convoluted ones.
I’ve given you nine ways to spice up your posts. Now it’s your turn! What’s your number 10?
Ali Luke is a writer, blogger and writing coach. She’s just launched The Blogger’s Guide to Freelancing, a fully updated and expanded version of her popular Staff Blogging Course. Grab your copy today for $29, and start using your blogging skills to make serious money.
So finally, after approaching this scientifically and methodically, you’re there. You’ve created a product built on the expertise your readers have expected from you and your site. And you’ve priced that product (or series of products) at a level that will generate income without scaring off too many potential buyers. Now all you have to do its open up the storefront and watch the money roll in.
If only.
The good news is that at this point, most of the work is done. But you still need to build your clientele beyond its traditional bounds. To amass your army, if you will.
Flipping the switch
After you’ve created products and made them available for purchase, a radical shift occurs. Whether you realize it or not, you’re now (at least) 51% entrepreneur and (at most) 49% blogger. The set hours that you spend updating and freshening your blog every week are now secondary to your sales efforts. Once you’re committed to creating and selling your product, people will identify you with it, for better or for worse.
If your product is, say, a collection of spreadsheets you can use to organize your home and eliminate clutter, then sink or swim with it. Henceforth, home organization will be your blog’s primary focus. Even though you may love collecting miniatures, and have occasionally blogged about it in the past, your days of doing so are now over. Apple used to sell stand-alone digital cameras. Not anymore.
You’re now a salesperson, and the more seriously you take your new job, the better you’ll do.
For generations, your typical commission salesperson was given a list of leads and an admonition to break a leg. If the new hire didn’t work out, no big deal. There would always be plenty of others willing to step in. Unfortunately, your incipient business doesn’t get that same luxury. The sales staff is you, as is the product.
And your current audience, regardless of its size, is limited. Some of your longtime readers might buy out of a feeling of allegiance or mild obligation. If they do buy, it probably won’t be because they’d been dying for someone to create whatever it is you created. And while your loyal readership may have given you the impetus and spawned the idea for your product, they’re not the only ones you’ll want to buy it.
So where to find a lasting and larger clientele? It involves expanding your horizons, but not in a rote way.
Finding customers
If you blog long enough, eventually you’ll be approached by similar bloggers offering you various stratagems for mutually benefitting your sites. A link exchange, a guest post exchange, and so on. Those are all well and good, if you enjoy the novelty of exposing your blog to an audience that is already loyal to another blogger who operates in the exact same field of interest that you do.
One fellow personal finance blogger, who seems to be an awfully agreeable fellow, recently offered to create a discreet badge allowing me to sell my products on his site, and vice versa. I trust that he accepted it as a business decision and didn’t take it personally when I told him I wasn’t interested.
Why not accept the exposure? Among other reasons, his blog has fewer readers than mine does. Many of those readers of his already read my blog anyway. Besides, what’s to stop him from making a similar offer to other bloggers with greater readerships than his, diluting the impact of his agreement with me?
Also, to put it kindly, he’s not an authority. He’s a guy with a blog, and a relatively new one at that. My products will be an afterthought on his blog, as his would be on mine. That won’t do.
A passionate evangelism
In selecting and pursuing offsite promotional opportunities that will actually help you find customers, you need to be a passionate evangelist for your product. Whether you’re considering buying ad space, using email marketing, social media promotions, or even creating a physical promotional freebie to give away (which we’ll cover on ProBlogger later today), you need to advocate strongly for your product, all the way.
My products need to be advertised in a place of prominence, because I care about them. Not just in and of themselves, but for a more pragmatic reason: it sounds obvious, but every item I ship makes me wealthier. I don’t want the seminars I hold and the ebooks I create to be just another offering in a catalog, vying for attention with someone’s unreadable treatise on dividend investing and the overpriced collection of Visio diagrams that someone else slapped together.
I want my products to stand front and center. I also want to remind potential buyers that no one else’s work can substitute for what I’ve created. If you want to know The Unglamorous Secret to Riches, no one else has it. If you want to know how to get out of whatever unhealthy relationship you have with your employer, that outspoken guy who runs Control Your Cash is the only one who’s going to show you how.
Just another vehicle
That’s why you have to acknowledge the limitations of your own blog. Most of your buyers aren’t there. They’re on unrelated sites, where it’s your job to get their attention and show them what you have to offer. It takes time. In my case—and you can apply this to your own situation—it means posting regularly at major, well-established blogs in my area of concern. It means guest posting at general-interest blogs where I know I’ll reach a diverse and erudite audience. My business model is predicated on the following belief: if people like anything I have to say, once they find out a little bit more, they’ll like everything I have to say.
Which means your blog becomes just another vehicle for selling your product(s). Once you sell to someone unfamiliar with your blog, you then sell that buyer on your blog itself. Anyone who buys your product should immediately become a subscriber. Now that buyer knows where to find your entire oeuvre, including the subsequent products that you’re doubtless working on.
Key points
Once you launch your product, you’re a salesperson. Be prepared to put your product first.
Recognize that the bulk of your buyers should not come from your own site: if you’re to give your product the best chance of success, you’ll need to sell it to people who have never visited your blog … so far.
Be choosy about the promotions you use.
Become a passionate evangelist for your product. This will help you sift the great promotional opportunities from the not-so-great.
As your promotional efforts gain traction, you’ll begin to see your blog as just another vehicle for sales. Importantly, those customers are becoming subscribers … which will help when it comes time to sell your next product.
Still, buyers in 2023 remain wary. They have less money available to spend in an ever-growing market. With more vendors making their products available for sale every day, the successful sellers aren’t necessarily the ones who shout the loudest or the most frequently. Instead, the ones making sales are the ones who communicate the most effectively. Next week, we’ll find out how they do it.
Greg McFarlane is an advertising copywriter who lives in Las Vegas. He recently wrote Control Your Cash: Making Money Make Sense, a financial primer for people in their 20s and 30s who know nothing about money. You can buy the bookhere(physical) or here (Kindle) and reach Greg at [email protected].
If you’re late to this particular party, we’ve been spending the last few weeks examining ways to monetize your blog in an era when readers are holding onto their wallets more tightly than ever.
Sure, you can make money by selling ads if all you care about is revenue. Any link farm can do the same thing. But by extending one’s blog into different media, a diligent blogger can create and sell products that no one else can duplicate.
The process we’ve stepped through so far has been fairly straightforward. First, coldly assess what makes your blog distinctive. (If the answer is anything other than “Nothing” or “I don’t know”, proceed to the next step.)
This is precisely where many would-be entrepreneurs get smacked in the face with the harsh truth of the marketplace: putting a dollar figure on that product.
How much should you charge?
Not to turn this into a university-level economics lesson, but the tricky thing is to set a price that maximizes revenue. Sure, you can sell your ebook for 10¢ and theoretically reach the widest possible audience. But if you could charge three times the price, and still retain half your audience, wouldn’t that make more sense?
Ideally you’re doing this to turn a profit, which isn’t necessarily the same as generating as much revenue as possible. You also need to factor in your expenses. Otherwise, this is just a pastime or a vanity project. Creating products certainly requires time, and possibly requires materials.
That means that before you sell your first unit, you’ll already have spent money that you’ll need to recoup.
Say you’ve spent 30 hours writing a plan for a coaching program you plan to sell via your blog. Is $20 an hour a fair assessment of your worth? (That is, could you have earned that much doing something else?) Then you’ll need to sell a single copy for $600. Or two for $300 each. Or three for $200. Or…
You can see where this is going. It’s tempting to lower the price as much as possible, in the hopes that every reduction will attract more buyers. That’s largely true, but a) the relationship isn’t linear and b) there’s a limit—otherwise, you could give your product away and an infinite number of people would use it.
Finding the balance
How many unique visitors do you have? If you don’t know, Google Analytics can give you an idea. What proportion of those are invested in your blog and read it regularly? And what proportion of those will cough up a few minutes’ worth of wages in exchange for the promise of you enriching their lives somehow?
On the flip-side are blogging entrepreneurs who charge too much for their services. They’re like the commission salesman who wanted to get a job at Northrop Grumman, selling B-2 Spirit heavy bombers at $1 billion apiece. (“People have been slamming doors in my face all week, but I get 10% of each sale. And all it takes is one.”)
To avoid this, you need to find a comfortable medium between how much you’re willing to accept, and how much your product can realistically benefit its user. That sounds obvious, but most sellers don’t even bother weighing those variables. They just conjure up a price and hope for the best.
What does your product do … for whom?
Be honest with what your product can do. It won’t make the blind walk and the lame see. But will it show readers how to declutter their lives once and for all? Can it teach them how to change their car’s oil and tires themselves, instead of relying on costly technicians? Can it help readers travel to strange places inexpensively, and does it include an appendix that will teach those readers how to keep their cross-border hassles to a minimum?
Then say so. You don’t have to work miracles. You just have to make some aspect of your readers’ lives easier, less complicated and/or more fulfilling.
More to the point, remember who you’re selling to: your readers, not yourself. No one cares how much asbestos you inhaled in the mine, they just want the diamond. It’s a cardinal rule of civilization that results count, not effort.
One famous globetrotting blogger has recently diversified, and now sells a guide that ostensibly tells artists how they can throw off the shackles of poverty and start making money. He’s certainly appealing to his clientele’s emotions—what’s a more accurate stereotype than that of the starving artist?
Never mind that this blogger is not an artist, and that his background consists of little more than that educational punchline, a sociology degree. His blog’s sales pitch details how many painstaking hours he spent writing how many words and conducting how many minutes of interviews in the creation of his guide, as if any of that matters to an artist who just wants to know how to locate buyers for her decoupage and frescoes.
Keep scrolling down and you’ll find out that for just $39, you’ll receive “15,000 words of excellent content”. No one buys this kind of thing by volume. Xavier Herbert’s Poor Fellow My Country runs over 850,000 words. That’s 90 times longer than Richard Bach’s Jonathan Livingston Seagull, which sold far more copies and was far more influential.
Don’t hide your price!
That brings us to another thing not to do: treat the price as fine print. Which is to say, don’t build to a crescendo and make your readers sift through paragraph upon paragraph of hard sales copy before finally deigning to tell them how much your product is going to cost them. To do so is insulting. It’s the tactic of someone who has something to hide.
(There’s one exception to this rule. That’s when you’re using the late-night infomercial strategy, saving the price of your product until the very end because it’s so shockingly low. That almost certainly doesn’t apply in your case. You’re not an experienced marketer with a reputation, hawking indestructible knives and superabsorbent towels that suck up ten times their weight in liquid. You’re a blogger looking to turn your followers from loyal readers into paying customers.)
Getting back to the real blogger in our example, if you spend another $19 on the deluxe version, he’ll throw in three more audio interviews. There’s nothing quantifiable here, just a collection of messages that differ by media. (Incidentally, I asked this blogger how what kind of volume he does. I wasn’t expecting an answer and didn’t receive one, but it was important to make an effort to see if his methods worked.)
Given the choice, I’d rather take my chances giving my money to a blogger with authority and experience, who’s offering me something believable, and who’s not afraid to tell me how much it’ll cost me and how much it’ll benefit me. Is that you?
One more thing. If you’re creating a series of products in which each builds on the previous ones and no individual product can stand alone, you’re putting yourself in a fantastic position. You can give away the first and then start charging with the second. If you do, that’ll give you an accurate gauge of how many people are legitimately interested in your product, as opposed to just being curious.
Accounting for expenses
Once you make the decision to sell, and to price, you’ll have to account for expenses you’d never imagined. Maybe you’ll need to move from a shared host to a dedicated one. Or pay for a business license in your home jurisdiction. Or hire a graphic designer after concluding that your own Adobe Illustrator skills are wanting. A few hours of planning and estimation now can save you weeks of frustration down the road.
Speaking of quantifying, here’s a sample budget (in PDF) that you can adapt for your own use. Be conservative with your revenue estimates, liberal with your expense estimates, and you can get a better handle on how much you should charge when your products finally make it to market.
You might also find the formula presented in The Dark Art of Product Pricing useful. It integrates many of the considerations I’ve outlined here but, like this post, that one can’t definitively tell you what you should charge either. Ultimately, that’s up to you.
Key points
Cover your expenses. Don’t set your prices so low that you’re losing money on every sale.
Don’t set your prices so high that you need to camouflage them, either. Be direct.
Honestly assess what your product can do for your customers.
Explain to your customers what they’ll get for their money.
Like anything else, first plan, then execute.
Next week, we’ll discuss how to increase your potential clientele beyond its traditional bounds.
Greg McFarlane is an advertising copywriter who lives in Las Vegas. He recently wrote Control Your Cash: Making Money Make Sense, a financial primer for people in their 20s and 30s who know nothing about money. You can buy the bookhere(physical) orhere(Kindle) and reach Greg at [email protected].
Welcome to the third weekly instalment in our series on how to sell products of your own creation, via your blog, in a world in which everyone’s reluctant to spend money. If you’ve been following the series so far, then you’ve learned how to conceive of a product and conduct market research into its viability, at least in theory.
In the process, you’ve learned how to identify your clientele, and create a product that:
has unmistakable value
people will want
is a natural extension of your blog itself, and
no one can duplicate.
Today, we’ll look at actually developing the product you’ve been thinking about.
Making time for product development
Identifying what your product should be is one thing; actually creating your product is something more. It’s a laborious process that requires you to devote hours that you’d otherwise have spent on your blog’s day-to-day upkeep, your sleep, or your work schedule.
Do yourself a favor and choose the first of the three – your blog’s day-to-day upkeep. A weary blogger is an inefficient blogger, and a blogger who leaves the office early to work on his blog every afternoon will soon see his mornings free up, too.
That doesn’t mean you should let your blog go dormant while creating your ebooks, online courses or series of webinars. Far from it. Instead you need to leverage your time, which is a skill that every successful person on the planet has mastered. That applies to bloggers as much as it does to anyone.
With a little planning, you can maintain your blog’s relevance and timeliness. A few minutes of prevention are worth hours of cure.
Accept guest posts
If you’ve ever been approached by people wanting to write guest posts for your blog—and I think almost all of us have—there’s no better time to take them up on it than when you need to commit resources to creating your suite of products. Let someone else do the work, at least temporarily. Besides, guest bloggers don’t exactly drive hard bargains. A backlink or two should be enough to keep them happy.
Toil away on the task at hand while you delegate what can be delegated, and your readers will marvel at how you managed to create sellable products while your blog never missed a perceptible beat.
Publish timeless content
But what if you’re the kind of blogger who considers every post a uniquely crafted representation of your ability to persuade or engage, and who would no sooner have someone else write for your blog than have someone else raise your children?
You can still leverage your time, by breaking out timeless content.
To give you an example, I update my blog with long-form posts three times a week. Occasionally the content is topical and temporal, but most of it is evergreen.
Write in advance
When you know you’re going to be immersed in creating your product for the next few weeks, write as many blog posts as you can, as far in advance as you can. I always have at least a month’s worth of posts ready to go in my content management system, even if I’m not working on a product.
Not only does it give me peace of mind, it gives my blogging partner plenty of time to shop around for a replacement should I get hit by a train.
Write hot; edit cold
Creating a sellable product from scratch takes more time than does creating a blog post, so you want to be able to set aside sufficient hours to work on said product without thinking, “Alright, that’s enough. I have to stop so I can get to tomorrow’s blog post.”
The author’s directive to write hot and edit cold applies here. When you’re sufficiently motivated and your muse is feeling prolific, that’s the time to knock out as many days’ worth of blog content in advance as you can.
Get committed … and disciplined
If any of this sounds daunting, rather than inspiring, save yourself the energy and don’t even waste your time getting started. There are countless bloggers who sell (or more accurately, can’t sell) redundant, uninspired products. Don’t be one of them. Be at least as passionate about any products as you are about your blog itself. You need to have a more compelling reason for selling products than “I probably should” or “everyone else is doing it.”
Creating my own products forced extra discipline on me, which is never a bad thing. Instead of writing until I’d lose interest, I had no choice but to devote certain hours every day to building and formatting my ebooks. For me, that meant 6 a.m. to 9 a.m. for writing, editing and researching products. If I needed to, I’d work on my blog itself later in the day, a few hours removed from the pressing problem of completing each ebook by my self-imposed deadline.
Maintaining the other parts of my life (physical activity, earning money, feeding the pets) prompted me to get as much production as I could out of the finite time I’d allotted for ebook creation. If I hadn’t, I’d have fallen behind schedule and possibly never recovered.
Test marketing
So, you’ve done everything according to plan, and you’ve finally managed to create a product that you think has real value. As far as you know, your brainchild is ready for its formal debut. The readers you’ve spent years building a relationship with should be ready to overcome their inherent frugality and spend a few dollars patronizing you.
But how do you know they will? Or at least, how can you increase the likelihood of them doing so?
You test market your product, just like a major conglomerate’s sugar-free soda or exotically flavored toothpaste. At this point, your product is a hit only in theory, and you need to determine via a sample of people whether you’re ready for the marketplace at large.
This is the hardest part of the process for many. Most people feel uncomfortable having their work criticized. And among the few who think that they’re beyond that, most of those handicap themselves by selecting test marketers who’ll give them the answers they want to hear.
Here’s how you test how feasible the first draft of your product is.
1. Choose your testers
First, determine whom your 12 most critical friends and acquaintances are. You want the ones whom are unvarnished, even caustic in their opinions. Candor counts even more than objectivity does, because the former is a harder quality to find. The fawners and sycophants have no place in this experiment, and your mother will be of little value. They’re not going to help you, and they’re not going to help the only people who matter here—your readers.
Assess your potential test marketers honestly. The absolute last thing you want is respondents who are going to tell you how awesome you are and wow, you created a blog and every post you write is magical and it’s only a matter of time before the International Herald Tribune comes calling and asks you to share your opinions on budget scrapbooking with a worldwide audience.
Why do you want 12 test marketers? Because six of them are going to agree to critically assess your products, yet never get around to doing so. Bribe them if you have to. Offer to buy each one lunch or something.
2. Send them your product
Now, give them your product, with explicit instructions for them to be as critical as possible. Tell them to try to find something wrong even in the parts they like. A third party (or the fourth through 14th parties) will notice mistakes and omissions that you’re too close to the action to see for yourself.
Never send anything to market too early. If you’re a blogger looking to extend your brand (and line your pockets), that might mean nothing more than adding or rewriting a few lines of code. It is far, far better for everyone concerned to improve a product before it goes live, rather than after.
As far as can be determined, no prototype in the history of commerce has been better than the finished product slated for release.
Key points
Don’t sacrifice your income to develop a product: plan development up front.
Accept guest posts, publish timeless content, write in advance, write hot and edit cold, and develop discipline and commitment to what you’re doing.
Test market your product with actual readers of your blog.
Take their feedback and use it to improve your product. Run the tweaked product past your most reliable testers again if you wish.
Alright, enough about “what?” and “why?” Next week we address the most critical question of all: “How much?” But stick around, because later today, ProBlogger will be taking a closer look at a technique to help you generate an unending stream of post ideas. It might just help you save some time to put toward developing your product.
Greg McFarlane is an advertising copywriter who lives in Las Vegas. He recently wrote Control Your Cash: Making Money Make Sense, a financial primer for people in their 20s and 30s who know nothing about money. You can buy the bookhere(physical) orhere(Kindle) and reach Greg at [email protected].
Copy from one, it’s plagiarism; copy from many, it’s research.
—Attributed to Wilson Mizner (1876-1933), among others
…Or you can take it a step further. If you research many, and then forge something original, your readers will take notice. And then, if you market yourself in the right fashion, they’ll buy what you’re selling. In the meantime, though, look out later today for a post that explains how you can use video testimonials to set yourself apart from the competition in your niche.
Last week we began our examination of not just how to sell products via your blog, but how to do so when customers are watching their dollars, pounds, euros, rands, pesos and zlotych like never before. As the very concept of “disposable” income becomes less realistic, it’s imperative that you provide real value for your customers instead of just a product that you slapped together out of boredom.
Last week’s post was designed to help you identify what you offer that’s unique. It also helped you to consider that unique offering in reference to your audience’s present, most pressing needs.
Competitor and market research—seeing what else the marketplace is already offering—is a good next step to take. It shows you exactly what not to sell, and forces you to work a little harder to create something truly distinctive.
Assessing the competition
Candidly assessing your competitors isn’t plagiarism, but it’s unquestionably research. This isn’t a call to rip anybody off—quite the opposite, in fact.
Say you’ve got a blog that focuses on international train travel for the budget-conscious. Assume you’ve developed a dedicated and regular readership that considers you an authority on the subject. Would there be any market for a handy ebook that tells readers where to buy inexpensive tickets throughout the world?
Of course there would be. For the intrepid and peripatetic traveler, it’d be awfully convenient to know how to save money everywhere from the Camrail station in Yaoundé, Cameroon to the Trans-Siberian depot in Erenhot, China. The information clearly exists, albeit in diverse and unconnected places. For the hypothetical blogger in question, it’d just be a matter of taking the time and effort to compile and present it.
The idea is to create something that’s not only valuable, but unique and, ideally, impossible for anyone else to reproduce.
Again, drawing from personal experience but keeping it generic enough that you can apply it to your own situation, the primary products I sell on ControlYourCash.com are ebooks on selected personal finance topics. The ebooks are short (6000 words or so), easily digestible monographs illustrated with the occasional graphic and written in a style that hopefully serves to distinguish my blog from its myriad competitors. The ebooks are completely of my own derivation, and merge seamlessly with the content on my blog itself. They “extend the brand.”
Which, of course, assumes that the brand is worth extending in the first place.
Unique products are easier to sell
Creating products worth selling is only half the battle. You still need to make the sale. The list of worthwhile consumer items that never get sufficient exposure in a saturated marketplace is a long and depressing one. Marketing is an inexact science, but there are simple rules that you can follow to publicize what you’re selling. Those rules can be more self-evident that you might think.
I once worked for an advertising and marketing firm whose clients included a hot sauce manufacturer. The firm created multiple innovative, entertaining campaigns that attempted to position the company’s sauce as a bold alternative to Tabasco, Nando’s peri-peri and other competitors.
But the needle never budged. Countless man-hours and dollars went down a hole, sales remained static, and the hot sauce company’s representatives were ready to take their business elsewhere. They demanded an emergency meeting, and the advertising firm’s employees assembled for the inevitable dressing-down. Charts were presented, projections recalibrated, and (gasp) lawyers consulted. It looked as though we were certain to lose a lucrative client, one that was justifiably looking at other options.
Finally, the chief executive officer of the advertising firm—who probably wondered why he was bothering to pay the rest of us—stood up and asked, “Have you ever thought about widening the opening of the bottle by an eighth of an inch?”
Of course it worked, and the moral to the story is that it’s easy to unnecessarily handicap yourself right out of the gate. Many bloggers offer worthwhile products and services, yet treat them as afterthoughts, which is astonishing.
If you’re attempting to sell a product, Job #1 is: make it as easy as possible for customers to buy and consume said product.
Stand out, not beside
Remember that the market for bloggers selling products is amazingly segmented and diffuse. There are hundreds of thousands of diligent bloggers. Your blog’s area of interest is almost certainly well represented, if not overrepresented. Thus it’s important to market yourself aggressively and boldly. That being said, it makes less sense to contrast yourself with, or even acknowledge, your competitors.
Aggressive, confrontational marketing that draws a clear distinction between your product and someone else’s works fine if you happen to be major beer brewer or mobile phone service provider chasing market share. Everyone already knows the competitor exists, and pointing out the little differences counts when comparing essentially homogenous products.
Different rules apply when selling niche products of your own creation, especially in a climate in which consumers as a whole are cautious about spending money. Don’t avail your customers of alternatives. It’s best to pretend they don’t exist. Customers are a lot more likely to spend when there’s only one supplier. The power of monopoly is a formidable one, and no one else sells (or can sell) the properly conceived and executed products that make you and your blog distinctive.
Key points
Assess your competition closely.
Hone your product idea accordingly.
Ensure your product’s key benefits directly reflect your brand.
Make your product as unique and difficult to replicate as possible.
Don’t compare your product directly with those of competitors: design and present it as the best solution available for your target audience segment.
Selling a product takes time, but not as much as creating it in the first place does. Next week, we’ll learn how to develop your product and devote the appropriate time and resources to it.
Greg McFarlane is an advertising copywriter who lives in Las Vegas. He wrote Control Your Cash: Making Money Make Sense, a financial primer for people in their 20s and 30s who know nothing about money. You can buy the bookhere(physical) orhere(Kindle) and reach Greg at [email protected].
How do you get readers to part with their money, especially when said money is scarce?
This year has been particularly tough for businesses and individuals who are all dealing with rising interest rates and cost of living pressures. It’s difficult for most merchants of any kind to make a sale. It’s particularly so if you’re a blogger who wants to advance from engaging readers about your subject of interest to getting those readers to buy something. In an average-to-booming economy, it’s easier to get people to part with their discretionary income, and not that much of a deal if they don’t.
But when belts are tightening across the globe, how do you get readers to buy from you?
This post is the first in a series where we’ll systematically prescribe a foolproof way for you to create worthwhile, lasting products that your readers can actually use—and that they’ll pay for the privilege of owning.
If you’re blogging regularly, and are the kind of blogger who reads ProBlogger, it’s safe to assume that you’re at least amenable to the idea of a digital storefront. Yes, maybe you consider your blog to be strictly a labor of love: something that serves solely to convey your thoughts about woodworking, or Pacific Island languages, for the sheer satisfaction of sharing such with your readers. If that describes you, great.
Yet if you could monetize your blog—sell a product or service of your own creation—you’d at least think about whether any profit you’d make would be worth the effort, right?
We all want a bigger audience. But how can we turn regular readers into paying customers? Having half a million unique visitors means a lot more if even 1% stop to buy what you’re selling. Of course, that implies you’re selling something in the first place.
But what should you sell? Where do we begin?
You need an idea
It all starts with an idea. Really, it does. That’s not just an empty axiom.
(Apologies in advance. The next couple of paragraphs might read like an end-of-chapter exercise from a self-help book. That’s not the intention. Take them literally and don’t read between the lines.)
Answer the following questions, one series at a time. Explanations to follow:
1. What do I have to offer?
How am I different?
What makes me unique?
What can I offer to readers/customers that’d be hard for someone else to duplicate or automate?
Obviously you can only answer these questions for yourself, but I’ll walk you through it with my own set of answers.
My blog, Control Your Cash, is one of a few dozen personal finance advice blogs in existence. But “personal finance” is a wide umbrella. Most of my competitors can be placed into one of several subcategories. Some blogs focus on listing inventive ways to save money; others talk about personal finance exclusively from a Christian perspective; still others do nothing but spend every post comparing different credit cards.
Then there’s mine, which is probably most distinguished by a tone that readers have described as everything from “uncompromising” to “snarky”. Also, Control Your Cash explains complex and arcane personal finance topics in something of a readable and not altogether unfunny style, a skill that took a few years to develop.
That isn’t bragging. That’s determining what makes my site different, and what makes its author’s offerings of potential interest to a customer.
Understanding difference
My blog’s central feature is its thrice-weekly posts, there for the reading and delivered free to whomever subscribes to the site’s RSS feed. I also sell a full-length book on the fundamentals of personal finance for people who know that they know nothing about money, and a series of inexpensive ebooks, each of which deals with a particular topic. (How to read financial statements, how to buy a house, etc.)
The wonderful thing about taking the steps to create products is that few of my competitors, and presumably few of yours, are going to bother. The discipline required to write something 6000 words long, let alone 75,000 words long, intimidates most bloggers. The majority would rather just throw a bunch of unconnected thoughts on the page, run spellcheck (or not), then publish.
One of the elite bloggers in my field of interest is Mike Piper of Oblivious Investor. Even though we both write about personal finance, I hesitate to call him a “rival” because there’s little overlap in what we do. Mike’s tagline describes his site succinctly: “simple, low-maintenance investing.” To that end, he’s written a series of books—one on income taxes, one on accounting basics, and so on. As a certified public accountant, but one who can write captivatingly and with minimal jargon, Mike knew he could own that niche with little fear of serious competition.
You answered the questions, right? The ones at the start of the section?
If it took you more than a few seconds to answer them, stop. If you can’t effortlessly determine what makes your blog and your perspective unique, you can’t very well expect your readers to do it. Remember that they aren’t in the market for a faceless product that had dozens if not hundreds of hands in its creation, like a car or a jacket.
For better or worse, they’re buying you and whatever it is you’re identified with.
Accepting an ugly truth
If you answered the questions and came away with the conclusion that your blog just isn’t that distinctive, save yourself hours of frustration now by acknowledging that. It’ll be far better than creating a suite of products that hardly anyone will buy.
There’s no shame in coming to this realization at the outset. If anything, it gives you a chance to start afresh and establish your point of differentiation before you embark on anything else.
You don’t necessarily need a dedicated following to sell products—many of the people who buy my ebooks do so on their first visit to my site. (Which makes sense. What would compel an 89-time visitor to finally break down and buy something on his 90th visit?)
Now that you’ve determined what makes you different, consider your audience.
2. How can I build a following?
The speed with which people blog and get feedback makes it easy to confuse traditional roles in commerce. Just because someone leaves an insightful comment on your site doesn’t make him your confidant.
Keep it professional. Many bloggers forget that their customers, their advisors, their test marketers, and their collaborators should not all be the same people.
All too often, I’ll see bloggers make this dangerous transition when conversing with their readers. Don’t be afraid to solicit feedback, but on the other hand, don’t cede the responsibility of initiative by asking your readers, “So, what would you like to see?” That’s the equivalent of the chef coming out of the kitchen, wooden spoon in hand, going up to the couple awaiting dinner and saying, “Here, taste this. Tell me what you think.”
The above “strategy”, or non-strategy, is pervasive among bloggers, yet bears little fruit. Name a successful company—any company. Nike, for instance. Their research and development is a little more sophisticated than asking potential customers, “Would you like to see a running shoe with a waffle sole?” Or “How about workout gear that wicks away moisture?”
Sell yourself
If you’re going to sell via your site, you have to be bold. It starts with you, not your customers. Say “I’ve got a sales method that will revolutionize the industry. Here it is in four easy lessons.” Or “Sick of not knowing how to work on your car? Stop putting yourself at the mercy of repair shops. Download my series of instructional videos instead.”
Personalize it. Add value. Sell yourself. Take the examples from the preceding paragraph. Theoretically anyone could offer them. What makes your methods different? Is it your style and demeanor? Have you done research that no one else has done before? Are you creating a service or product that people don’t even know that they require, but won’t be able to live without once you’re done with them?
Ultimately, you want to understand what your readers want and need. But how urgently do they need it? When money is hard to come by, will they pay to have their pain assuaged? (People are much more interested in reducing pain than in embracing pleasure.) How can you improve their lives, and/or make their businesses more profitable?
Know your audience, and get inside their heads—specifically, the product-buying part of their heads. Read the comments they leave. Gauge their interest in and commitment to your blog. Only then can you create and sell content that resonates with and delights your readers, while staying true to your unique voice.
Key points
It all starts with you. Work out what’s unique about you and your blog.
Don’t be afraid to start again if your point of difference isn’t easy to define.
To build a paying clientele, offer something to your readers to gauge their interest.
Build yourself—your unique point of difference—into what you offer.
Use these offerings, and your blog as a whole, to get inside your readers heads, and understand how you can uniquely meet their needs.
Next time out, we’ll discuss how to research your competitors, and how to stand out from among them when readers are counting every penny.
Greg McFarlane is an advertising copywriter who lives in Las Vegas. He recently wrote Control Your Cash: Making Money Make Sense, a financial primer for people in their 20s and 30s who know nothing about money. You can buy the bookhere(physical) orhere(Kindle) and reach Greg at [email protected].
If you’re an ace at writing blog copy, you can write an excellent press release. Both have many of the same elements: strong headlines, top-down format (most important stuff up front), etc. You already know that press releases are a powerful way to promote your blog, and they’re an effective way to get your message out without duplicating content.
So, if you’re ready to put your news out there, here’s some basic steps to re-writing your blog post into a press release. To get started, take a newsworthy blog post and…
1. Make sure it’s news
A press release has to announce something. Unlike most blog posts, it’s not commentary, a how-to guide or a numbered list. However, the following blog post topics would work perfectly as the basis for a press release:
launch of a new company
client success story (“Client Doubles Income After Completing Online Course”)
new product, service or event announcement (e-book, webinar, meetup, seminar)
awards, either that you’ve won or awarded to others (invent some!)
new employees/hires/contributors
milestones (one year in business, subscriber growth of 500%, etc.)
survey results
If you don’t have any of the above news, come up with your own, like predictions (“ProBlogger Announces Top Blogging Predictions for 2024”), or a response to current news (“Company Provides Immediate SEO Assistance for Google’s New Algorithm”).
2. Change everything to the third-person voice
Both the headline and the body of the press release should be in the third person. Instead of “we” or “I” use the company name. Instead of “you” use “customers,” or “clients.”
3. Revise the headline
Both blog posts and press releases ideally should have keywords within the first few words of the headline. Unlike most blog posts, press releases also have a subhead, which either emphasizes the headline’s point-of-difference—whyyour news is so important—or provides factual backup for the headline.
To format the headline and subhead…
PRESS RELEASE HEADLINE: IN ALL CAPS
Subhead in Title Case, Except the Little, Non-Important Words
4. Rearrange the post to contain these press release elements
Dateline: If you use a press release distribution service they’ll make sure you get this right, but if you’re writing it on your own, the format is: “CITY NAME [all caps], State abbreviation (Month Day, Year) – “ So as an example, you’d have “POUGHKEEPSIE, N.Y., (Oct. 31, 2023) – [First sentence starts here.]”
Lead: The main news. You can be creative with your first sentence, but make sure you get the who, what, where, why and how in the first paragraph. Your keyword/s should be in the lead as well as the headline.
Quote: A quote isn’t required, but it always helps to illuminate the press release and give it some personality. Go ahead and use “I”s and “you”s here. The quote is usually the second paragraph, but again, not required.
Boilerplate: At the end of every press release, include a short paragraph about the company, again in the third person. Your website and phone number go here, too.
5. Get familiar with AP Style, at least the basics
AP (Associated Press) Style is the writing blueprint for journalism—every grammar and punctuation question you have, the AP Stylebook has the answer. When I’m working on press releases, several unique-to-AP rules come up again and again.
For example, the AP Stylebook says that state names should be shortened like the old-fashioned mailing names. Florida is not FL, it’s Fla. And some cities are so well known (Chicago, Denver) that it’s not necessary to include the state. “Email” doesn’t have a hyphen but “e-commerce” does.
For examples of press releases, go to sites like PR Newswire and PR Web and see what others have done. Some of these press releases are not great, so use a critical eye.
Many do not follow the “third person” and “AP Style” advice that I recommend (you’ll spot them right away … they look like blog posts), but please take a few minutes format your press release this way: it reflects expertise and professionalism, and in the end, isn’t that the image you want to portray with your blog?
Have you converted a blog post into a press release? What else would you recommend?
Erika Gimbel is a Chicago freelance writer who writes press releases as well as articles, brochures, newsletters, websites and blog posts for business and nonprofit clients. She loves helping clients figure out what to write about: if you’re stuck for topics, download her free report, 50 Ideas for Business Articles and Blog Posts.
This is a guest contribution by Charles Cuninghame, website copywriter.
I’m sure we can all agree that proofreading is the least fun part of blogging. But while it may be tedious, it’s well worth the effort.
Typos are not only embarrassing, they can also cost you money.
In a widely reported study, British entrepreneur Charles Duncombe found a single spelling mistake can cut your online sales in half! If you don’t have a product, then you could be missing out a blog subscriber or repeat visitor!
Here’s a tried and tested proofreading process that I’ve taught to many novice writers with great success. Once you get the hang of it, you should be able to thoroughly proofread an average length blog post in 5-10 minutes.
What you’ll need:
A printer
A red pen
A highlighter pen
Step 1: Set it aside
Time permitting, set your blog post aside for a while before you proofread it. An hour is good, a day is better. The more time you put between the writing and proofreading, the more refreshed you’ll be and better able to spot any typos.
Step 2: Print it out
Research has shown that proofreading on-screen is not as effective as proofreading a printout. So do yourself a favour and print your post out. But run it through the spell checker first, to fix any obvious spelling mistakes.
Step 3: Mark up your changes
Get ready by minimising distractions. Proofreading requires your undivided attention. So turn off your phone, close your email and switch off the music.
Read through your post marking up typos and rough spots with your red pen as you go. Force yourself to slow down and concentrate. Focus on each word and character as you read.
Make your mark-ups obvious so you don’t overlook them at the corrections stage. Punctuation marks (commas, apostrophes, full-stops/periods, etc.) are particularly easy to miss. So it’s a good idea to circle the mark-up for extra emphasis.
It’s also a good idea to put a cross in the margin next to a line that contains a correction.
Step 4: Read out loud
Once you’re been through your blog post once, read it aloud. Reading aloud helps in two ways. Firstly, your ears will often catch mistakes that your eyes miss. Reading aloud forces a higher level of concentration than silent reading.
And secondly, reading out loud helps you to write conversationally. If your post sounds clunky when you speak it, you need to revise it until it sounds confidently conversational.
Step 5: Double-check details
There are some details that are particularly embarrassing or troublesome to get wrong. So you should double-check the following:
The spelling of people’s names e.g. is it Janine or Jenean? Stuart or Stewart?
Ditto brand names e.g. is it Word press, WordPress or Word Press?
Telephone numbers and email addresses
Prices
Click links to make sure they go where you want them to.
Step 6: Make corrections
Make all your corrections in one go, not as you find them. Be very careful as you make changes. You don’t want to add in errors at this stage. Be especially careful with any sections you’ve rewritten. If you’ve rewritten a significant portion of your post it’s best to print it out and proof it again.
A common mistake is missing corrections you’ve marked up on your printout. So as you make each change mark it off your printout with your highlighter. When you’ve finished making changes, go over your printout to make sure you haven’t missed anything.
Step 7: Final check
As a final check, run the spell checker over your corrected post. Read it on-screen to make sure it looks OK. Break up any paragraphs that are longer than 5 lines. Now you’re good to hit the publish button!
Charles Cuninghame is a website copywriter. For important documents he usually hires a proofreader.
Is your blog getting the attention you know it deserves? Maybe you haven’t started your blog yet because you can’t settle on the right name or theme. Perhaps you’re thinking of starting a second blog, but want to “do it right” this time…
Whichever camp you’re in, you need to consider five basic factors in naming a new blog or business.
You’ll need to weigh up the branding pros and cons before you settle on a name. You’ve only got a few seconds to make an impression with your web site visitors, or potential visitors. If your blog or business name doesn’t capture what you’re all about, then chances are that people will just click away.
You didn’t start your blog to have drive by visitors did you? No, you want to foster a community, get comments, and get people to subscribe and come back for more. All of that starts with your branding, and more specifically, with your blog or business name.
Let’s look at the options together, shall we?
1. Just be yourself: the pros and cons of using your own name
There are many bloggers and business owners who chose to brand their blog using their own name (or a pseudonym). Blogs like Johnny B. Truant, Steve Pavlina and ElizabethPW come to mind.
The benefit of using your name as your domain or blog is that it’s not likely to change. Plus, you’re getting people to connect with you as a person and not a business entity.
Another benefit of using your name is that if ever you decide to switch gears and blog about new topics, your readers will stick around, because they’re there to read what you have to say. Oh, and you won’t need to have people change their links if you decide to stop writing about your chosen topic and start another blog.
In a way, using your own name is more about creating a strong connection with you as a person and blogger than it is about delivering a particular type of advice or information. This doesn’t mean that you can’t deliver value or targeted blog posts — it simply means that you’re not as tied down. You can always create a tagline that describes your main area of expertise.
The downsides of branding as yourself are that you need to train people to remember your name. If your blog name is memorable, you won’t have this problem. You also need to ensure that yourname.com domains are not already taken, and you might also want to buy common misspellings of your name.
When using your name, you also need to keep in mind that potential employers, family, and friends can easily find your blog. Now that might not be much of an issue, but it’s something to keep in mind if you aren’t ready to announce your blog to the world. Here’s more about whether you “Should You Blog Anonymously or Use Your Real Name?”
2. Picking a targeted name that’s catchy and relates to your topic
The other blog-naming strategy is to choose a name that describes the topic you’re blogging about. Some examples include Problogger, Ittybiz, and Escape from cubicle nation. You can tell just from reading the name of the blog exactly what the blog is about and what you can expect.
There are many benefits to choosing a targeted keyword and title. There’s definitely a search engine optimization advantage to including a common word or phrase in your title. Plus, people are more likely to remember how to spell your domain name.
If you come up with a fun, memorable brand and blog name, you can set a new trend in motion. Today there are people calling themselves probloggers, referring to the ProBlogger blog. Just like White Hot Truth started a tribe of “fire starters”.
The disadvantage of using a specific blog name is the limitation on what you can write about. If your blog’s name is Dolphin Rescue and you start talking about manicures, you might throw your your readers off course along the way … not to mention negate some of those SEO benefits we talked about earlier.
Another common issue with specific blog names is that we are all human beings who evolve and change. We can’t expect our blogs to stay static any more than we can expect our cells to stop regenerating.
One way to deal with your changing views is to expand your blog name — like the blogger who made the switch from Illuminated Mind to Illuminated Mind & Body.
You might also lose some of your blogging mojo if you get burned out writing about the same topics year after year. (Though there are great tips for battling bloggers block.) In the end, it’s best to pick a specific name for your blog only if you can see yourself sticking to your topic for at least a few years.
3. Pick a niche or market because you care — and not just about the money
Before you choose a blog name, you’re likely going to think through what you’ll be writing about. I want to caution you not to get sucked into certain topics or niche markets just because they’re currently hot.
There are definitely trends in the blogging world, and you don’t want to be one of the latecomers to the party.
Avoid choosing a topic because you think it will monetize well. If your heart isn’t in it, your readers will be able to tell. Nobody wants to spend tons of time setting up a blog and then giving up just a few months down the line.
Pick a topic that you’re really passionate about and that you can see yourself writing about long term.
4. Create a meaningful name that says something
Another thing I’d like to caution you about is picking a name that doesn’t really mean anything, or worse, that has a meaning your readers aren’t interested in.
Try to stay away from bland, no-real-meaning names like “Positive Living” or “Thoughts on Leadership”. You don’t want something that is so generic that people will forget it immediately. This isn’t to say that you can’t pick a great name that is both simple and conveys your topic well.
Let me tell you the story of how my old blog’s name came to be. I initially chose the name Raw Food Switch, because I wanted to help people make the switch to a raw food diet.
I discovered that I was actually antagonizing my readers, because I was assuming they wanted to switch their diet. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who was just itching to voluntarily change the way they eat.
Usually the changes come about because of a health challenge, or other life changing experience. So you see the name of my blog was not talking to my people the right way. That’s why…
5. Listening to your friends and family works … sometimes
At this point I had received a couple of suggestions from friends and family members about the name of my blog. In general I try not to be too influenced by people who aren’t in my target market (and some of my family members are not into raw foods at all!).
My boyfriend had a great insight. He suggested I move the “s” from the word switch to the word food, and become the Raw Foods Witch. At first I resisted his suggestion, since it’s hard to see the genius in someone who is so close and potentially biased.
Yet as soon as I took his advice and decided to make the witch switch, everything fell into place. Martin Whitmore illustrated my new witchy logo, and I got tons of great comments, new subscribers, and more overall connection with my readers.
So my advice here is to listen to your friends and family, because although they may be biased, they probably know you well enough to see things that you can’t see yourself.
Pick something and go for it
If you’ve been stuck in the planning stages of your blog and have yet to create one, there’s no better time than the present. You can always tweak your name over time, so dive in and create that blog of yours!
Remember that you can choose between branding as yourself or creating a memorable targeted name. Don’t pick a topic just because it’s cool, and plan to write about your topic for many years to come. Finally, listen to your friends and family’s input when picking your name.
In this post, I’m going to show you the exact steps one blogger used to earn over $1 million. That’s making some serious money blogging!
I interviewed Ramit Sethi of I Will Teach You To Be Rich and if you’re serious about making money blogging, then you need to read this interview.
But a heads-up: this post is long and extremely detailed. It took me over 20 hours to write. It will take you about 15 minutes to read.
I know you may be skeptical about the $1 million, so let’s start by looking at the facts.
Ramit Sethi and I Will Teach You To Be Rich
Ramit’s advice on money has been featured on CNN, Wall Street Journal, ABC News, FOX Business, PBS, The New York Times, CNBC, Yahoo! Finance, npr, REUTERS, and most recently in a major feature in Fortune Magazine.
His personal finance book, I Will Teach You To Be Rich, is a New York Times bestseller, and a Wall Street Journal bestseller.
IWTYTBR is ranked 19,466 on Alexa. It hosts over 250,000 monthly readers, and has 100,000+ newsletter subscribers. Prices of IWTYTBR products range from $4.95 to $12,000. But most importantly, Ramit’s tactics get his readers results. See this post, where over 500 readers wrote 54,818 words that say so. That’s as long as a novel!
Impressive, right?
Now, let’s break down Ramit’s five-step system for creating and earning immense value.
Do Research That Gets Inside Your Readers Head
Examples of research insights for IWTYTBR
Use surveys to uncover the words readers use
Collect words from your email subscribers
When to ignore your readers
Don’t refer to comments on other blogs
Collect all the testimonials you will ever need
It’s your birthday: ask for feedback
Target your customers closely
Write a sales page that makes your fortune
Naming your product
Answer objections before your customers even have them
Don’t waste time A/B testing: it’s about the offer
Understand the taxonomy of pricing
Write Super Specific Headlines
Give Your Product An Unbeatable Guarantee
What to do right after the customer buys
Using ethical persuasion
1. Do research that gets inside your reader’s head
When you can truly deeply understand people, even in fact better than they understand themselves, then your sales skyrocket.—Ramit Sethi
There are two reasons getting inside a readers head will skyrocket your sales.
First, you will use the information to create a product or service that matches their wants and needs.
Second, you can use their exact language in your copywriting to reach them at a deeper level.
A big part of selling a product is being able to understand your reader’s barriers. What’s holding them back from their goals? In terms of money, people already know they need to manage and invest it. In terms of weight loss, people already know they need to lose weight and eat better. And in blogging, you know it’s offering immense value to your readers that will make you a problogger.
But they aren’t doing it. There is something much deeper than this goal, which is the barrier to achieving it. You’ll only discover that by doing enough research.
Maybe you’ll find out that in finance, nobody wakes up in the morning and says, “I really need to study a compound interest chart and start investing!” Nobody. They say, “this year I am going to try harder,” or “yeah, I should probably do that, but first I need to figure it out.”
When you know that language, you are inside your reader’s head.
Imagine you are a weight loss blogger. I want you to write a headline for a coaching session on losing weight. Go!
Wait. You don’t have enough information to write an effective headline. The best you can do is generic stuff like, “Lose 10 pounds in 10 days with our experienced coach!”
“Weight loss” is too broad a topic. Maybe your reader wants to lose fat from a specific area. Or perhaps they want to lose weight for a specific reason. A 50-year-old mother of two will have different reasons than a 28-year-old guy living in Manhattan.
So, you do some research and find out your target customer is a single woman who wants to lose weight from her thighs. You could write a killer headline pretty quick, right?
Soon, you’ll be able to truly understand your reader’s hopes, fears and dreams—and articulate them even better than they can. That’s the power of research.
Examples of research insights for IWTYTBR
During our interview, I asked Ramit to share some of the specific insights he has applied from his research. Here’s a big one.
A couple of years ago Ramit was doing a book tour, and he’d ask readers what they really want to learn. Everywhere he went, people were telling him they want to earn more money. That’s why he decided to create his flagship course, Earn 1k On The Side.
But just like “I want to lose weight” is too generic, so is “I want to earn more money.” Here’s what Ramit thought: “I’m so smart. I know my audience so well! They want to live a better lifestyle—fly to Vegas for the weekend and drop a couple grand.”
Then he did his research.
It turned out the real reason his readers wanted to earn more money was so they’d have the option of quitting their jobs. Yeah, just the option. This insight profoundly changed how Ramit created and positioned his course.
By the way, take a look at the signup page for Earn 1k. How much do you want to bet “I can’t freelance … I don’t even have an idea” was one of the objections Ramit was hearing over and over?
So, how do you go about doing research that gets you inside your reader’s head?
Use surveys to uncover the words readers use
The beautiful part is that because so few people are doing this, if you do even a small amount—you completely stand out. You don’t need 25,000 data points. That’s ridiculous. It took me years to be able to get to that. If you have 20 qualitative responses to one survey question, that’s pretty informative.—Ramit Sethi
Before launching Earn1k, Ramit collected 25,000 data points, and then over 50,000 for version 2.0. He calls this his “secret sauce,” which allows him to be the “wife who knows her husband better than he knows himself.” Most of that data came from surveys.
He says that a lot of people don’t use surveys at all, so they come up with useless advice like “keep a budget.” So if you survey even a little bit, you’ll be way ahead of the competition.
Ramit starts with really broad surveys, and narrows the questions down over time. He asks the questions four or five times until he really gets at the truth. Sometimes it takes Ramit four months and 6,000 answers to get at a single nugget of truth. You don’t need that many responses, though: even 20 qualitative responses to one survey question can be extremely informative.
Ask open-ended essay-style questions. You aren’t aiming for statistical validity here.
Ask five questions. Keep them short and specific.
Include examples of the kinds of answers you want: really long, detailed responses, not one-liners.
The two most important questions are “What is it you’ve tried and failed at?” and “What do you want?”
Here’s an example of a question from one of Ramit’s surveys:
“In your own words, what skill would you use to earn more $ on the side? (For example, “I’m good at writing, but I just don’t know how to earn $1,000 using my writing skills…”)”
Download copies of Ramit’s surveys—and an audio case study that walks through an example step by step—here.
Never do this on your survey
I asked Ramit if there was anything we shouldn’t ask on a survey. Here’s what he said.
Don’t ask them what they would be willing to pay. They don’t know. They will tell you an untruthful answer, and it’s pointless to ask them. Okay. People don’t know how to do pricing, so they get lazy and they are like “hey, what would you pay for this special mastermind ebook bootcamp” and you get the worst answers in the world. By the way they are total lies. People aren’t intentionally lying, they just don’t actually know what they would pay for something.—Ramit Sethi
Another thing you shouldn’t do is try to sell. You are doing research. How do these two research questions make you feel?
If I told you I had an eight-week course that was guaranteed to make you 1k a month on the side, would that interest you?
Have you ever tried earning money on the side? What happened?
Aim for the second option. It’s like my mom always said: “treat people how you want to be treated.”
Getting people to take your survey
You write great material, you are adding value for your readers. They love you. They wake up in the morning and see you in their reader, or come to your website or see you on Twitter. They like you.—Ramit Sethi
The key to getting readers to take your surveys is that they have to like you.
If you don’t have a good relationship with your readers, then none of this stuff matters. You can stop reading this post and go read How To Build The Relationship With Your Readers instead.
But if your readers like you, you are set. You don’t need thousands of them either.
Step two is to reach out to your readers via email and social media, saying something like this: “Hey guys, I’m looking for some help here. I’m trying to figure out how I can help you best. Would you mind taking like 5 minutes to give me your thoughts?”
That’s enough. You are set to start getting in your readers’ heads via surveys. But there’s another way you can do it.
Collect words from your email subscribers
You can also use email to better understand your readers.
Here’s what Ramit does.
He writes a big, detailed email with a story about something that happened to himself or to a friend.
He finishes it with a call to action, “Hey, I’d love to hear your story. Please email me back, I read every one.”
He responds to some of the replies. The recipients of those personal responses think, “Wow, this dude actually reads his emails and he cares”.
That last point is pretty good for relationship building, too. These are the little things you can do that will bring you disproportionate results.
When to ignore your readers
Sometimes you’ll get reader feedback that you disagree with. Over time, you will develop a filter for what to listen to and what to discard.
Here’s a way to start developing your filter. When you get a good response, try to find out a little more about the person who wrote it. If everyone who buys from you is a 26-year-old man living in the USA, then listen to them. Ignore the 72-year-old grandma who’s complaining your font size is too small.
If you haven’t made sales yet, focus on getting to know your target audience. As Ramit advised in a previous interview, don’t write for everybody. For Ramit, IWTYTBR isn’t just another blog, so he isn’t interested in people reading just for intellectual entertainment. He wants people who will take action.
Don’t refer to comments on other blogs
You’ve probably heard this advice before: look at comments on other blogs in your niche, then blog about the questions they ask. Ramit says there is no value in this kind of research.
Why? Because audiences on different sites are so profoundly different.
Ramit recently wrote a post called The worst career advice in the world. It received over 200 long comments and was very well regarded. The article was syndicated by another site where the audience didn’t know him at all. On that site, the article got 24 comments, most of which were super-negative.
Your audience is unique and special—that’s why they are your audience.
Collect all the testimonials you will ever need
Another part of your research and development should involve collecting testimonials. We’ve all seen those generic testimonials that are totally contrived: “Oh wow, this is the best product I ever bought and it changed my life forever!”
You need real testimonials, and the best source is people that have bought your products. Send them an email that says, “Hey, hope things are going well. So happy to see how everyone is doing.” Then tell them to click the appropriate link: “If you accomplished x in 5 hours a week, click here. If you did y, but you were skeptical, click here.” This gives you testimonials for all those options.
Here’s another tip for getting rock-solid testimonials. As readers are going through you course, get them to fill out progress reports. That way, feedback is part of the funnel. Believe it or not, Ramit gets so much feedback this way he hired a guy whose sole job is to manage them.
And if you’re developing your first product, Ramit suggests two ways to get testimonials.
First, you may have some respondents you’ve never engaged with before. In your survey, include a comment like, “Hey, if you’ve used any of my free material for x/y/z, I’d love to hear your story. Please be specific”. All of a sudden you have 20 testimonials!
Another way is to offer free trials for your product. So, find five to ten friends or readers. Tell them “Guys, I’m planning to release this thing. It will be about $100. I’m looking for ten people to go through it and give me feedback. If you agree to fill out three surveys, you get this trial for free—and the final product as well.”
It’s your birthday: ask for feedback
During our interview, I asked Ramit about one other way I’ve seen him get people to leave feedback at IWTYTBR.
On his birthday this year, Ramit wrote a post and included this call to action at the bottom: “Nothing could be better than hearing how my material has helped you. Just leave a comment on this post. Or, upload a video to YouTube and tag it “iwillteachyoutoberich.”
“The more specific, the better Share a story. Tell us how IWT helped you hit a goal, pay off debt, earn more, get a better job — whatever. Provide specific, concrete #’s. Tell me what it meant to you. It would make my day.”
The comments are people saying things like “I’m earning $70k more than I was before”, “I was able to quit my job and move across the country” and “I was earning $10 an hour, now I’m earning $40”.
These comments weren’t destined to be testimonials, but here’s one way Ramit uses them. When he makes a post about how he’s able to charge 100x what others do, and why his students are delighted to pay it, he includes the link. It proves that he’s not just providing information, but is also delivering actual results.
2. Target your customers closely
We saw earlier that Ramit targets his customers closely. He targets people who take action. He says it’s better to have a small core audience that takes action, respects what you have to say and gets results from your material, than a massive audience that doesn’t open your emails.
Here is a way to filter them out. Don’t sell via a squeeze page. Ramit sends subscribers through weeks of free material before giving them a chance to buy. If people complain, he unsubscribes them.
Then he tells the subscribers who can and can’t buy the course. For example, people with credit card debt are prohibited from buying his courses. If he finds out they bought it, he will ban them for life. Why? For one, Ramit doesn’t believe it’s right to take that money when he knows it will end up costing the customer twice as much. Second: it sends a message to the other readers.
3. Write a sales page that makes your fortune
We’ve had pages that convert at 68.7%, which in the online world is unheard of.—Ramit Sethi
Ramit spends months (or even years) doing research and development. He spends a lot of time crafting his product and offer, and he has converted as high as 68.7%. In our industry the average is 2-4%.
Realistically, you won’t get conversions that high. But could you improve your sales? Of course. If you don’t you are leaving a ton of value on the table—not just money—but value that users aren’t receiving because you aren’t messaging correctly.
Your blog doesn’t need as big a following as IWTYTBR to implement this. The basic patterns Ramit uses are modeled by people in businesses much larger and smaller. To succeed, you need to deeply understand your readers, then spend time on stuff that matters, and avoid what doesn’t.
Naming your product
Naming your product is some of the most important language on your sales page. If you want inspiration, check out Chris Guillebeau’s work at The Art of Non-Conformity. Chris names products like The Travel Hacking Cartel, Empire Building Kit and A Brief Guide To World Domination.
Let’s look more closely at how Ramit names his products. Why did he call his earning money course Earn 1k on the side? Because $1000 is an achievable figure. A lot of students go on to earn much more. But Ramit says if you tell them they will earn $10,000 they go “I don’t believe you, I’m not the kind of person”. Earning an extra $1,000 a month is life changing for most people. And it’s “on the side” because to become richer, people tend to think that they have to quit their job and start the next Google. The vast majority will not and cannot. But anyone can do five to ten hours a week on the side.
For Ramit’s new Find Your Dream Job course the naming process was similar. Even though the long-term goal is to help people find their dream career, he is using their language. If you are sitting around with your buddies, what you actually say is “I wish I could find a new…” What?
“Job”.
And “dream job” is what people are thinking.
Answer objections before customers even have them
Remember all those testimonials you collected? Now it is time to use them, and they are very strategic.
Imagine you find in your research that people don’t believe they have enough time to implement your advice. Great. Now you go to customers who are really happy and say “Hey, I’m looking for anyone who thought they wouldn’t have time to complete this program, but now you’ve achieved x results.”
Add that testimonial to your sales page, and when the reader’s there, they’ll find an answer to their objection before they even had it.
Don’t waste your time A/B testing: it’s about the offer
So few of us are even spending time on language. We are spending time on things that give us a shiny pop. You know you might be able to measure an increase in conversion by 1.6%. But when you do can things like this you can increase every other conceivable measure. Revenues up 500%. Engagement up 750%. Because you are actually speaking to people in the language that works with them, and not at them.—Ramit Sethi
Ramit really emphasizes how you should spend your time on the things that matter. “My point is, focus on the stuff that matters and is going to make the biggest most valuable gain for you… don’t get caught up in this microtesting world. It’s sexy. It’s fun. We see a 1.3% increase in open rates because we tweaked our subject lines. Or, you can get a 500% increase in revenue because you came up with a better offer,” he says.
Why all the hate? Two reasons. One is that even if you change the color of your button and improve opt-ins by 24%, it doesn’t mean you are going to convert any more sales. Second, even if you do increase the conversions to opt-in, they will eventually regress to the mean. You know who actually gets results from testing button color? Amazon.com.
Ramit says one area to test that can skyrocket your sales is your offers. Do your research and find out what people want. Do they want a standalone ebook? Maybe, and they’ll be happy to pay $97 for it. Or if someone doesn’t want a full video course, maybe they do want transcripts at a lower price. Others want accountability, like live calls every week or even a one-on-one call. Ramit warns that people might say they want an ebook but they may really need someone to check in.
One way to craft your offers is to study people you admire in both the online and offline worlds. What do they offer and how do they offer it?
McDonald’s created the kids’ meal. That’s an offer. They packaged up certain things in a certain way. Offered bonuses. Changed pricing. And the kids’ meal is one of the most successful packages ever created in the history of business.
When I interviewed Neil Patel of Quicksprout he told me about a $199 traffic generation system he offered. He also gave buyers a 30-minute phone call, and after hundreds of sales, is buried in scheduled calls. Ramit says Neil learned two things: that he will never do it again, and that people want his time. That’s very valuable.
Understand the taxonomy of pricing
There is a taxonomy of pricing that is well understood in the information product world.
It goes like this:
blog post: no one will pay for
PDF/ebook: $27-$97
audio/video course: $497-$997
must have video or live component: $997+
in person, one-on-one: the most
If you are putting out a book, and all the others in the store sell for $10 or $15, it’s going to be awfully difficult to roll in and get $200 for yours. Stick to the taxonomy.
Write super-specific headlines
There are plenty of great posts on writing headlines, so I won’t dwell on it here. Check out Copyblogger’s How to Write Headlines That Work instead.
I will note that Ramit says headlines matter profoundly. So spend 50% of your time on them and get super-specific. Doing this, you might decrease conversions, but the people that come through are worth so much more—not just in terms of money, but also in terms of the value you offer them.
Then you want to start thinking about your guarantee.
Give your product an unbeatable guarantee
Offering a money-back guarantee forces you to step up your game, because if your product isn’t good, you don’t get food on the table. I think all of us in this market need that, because there have been so many sleazy people that released substandard products. So I’d like all those people to go out of business, and I’d like the best people, the ones who say “look, my product is so good you try the entire thing and if you don’t like it I’ll send all your money back, even the credit card processing fees.” I want more people like that, because that is a product with integrity versus a fly by night product.—Ramit Sethi.
A big barrier for business people who want to offer guarantees is that they are afraid people will rip them off. Guess what? Some people probably will. But the ability to get a refund will drive more revenue and expose you to many more great people than the few bad apples acting illegitimately.
People expect the opportunity to get 100% of their money back. If your product is good enough, why not let people try the whole thing and get their money back? You have nothing to worry about.
But you should monitor your percentages. On a $97 product you can expect a return rate of about 10%. If you are getting 40% of sales returned, your product is not good. If you are getting 2% returned, that’s a problem too. Why? You probably aren’t selling to enough people. Generally the higher the price, the more refunds are requested.
Ramit offered some tips on creating an unbeatable guarantee. First, the more powerful you can make your guarantee, the better. In The Four Hour Work Week, Tim Ferriss talks about offering a 110% money back guarantee.
Second, the best guarantees are very specific. So don’t just write, “if you are not satisfied for any reason, we’ll give your money back.” Instead try something like, “if you don’t get three paying clients within 60 days, then write me and I’ll send all your money back.”
Third, take as much risk as possible onto yourself. That means offering refunds greater than 100%, paying for shipping, whatever—as much as is economically feasible.
Neil Patel says you can reduce refunds by sending people free stuff you didn’t tell them about during the sale. Just before the refund period is up, send them an email that says, “Hey, next week I’ll be sending you a document that breaks all this down.” Or, “I’ve got a special bonus for you that I’ll be sending along next week,” for example.
So you’ve created a sales page that converts like crazy. But what do you do after your reader buys?
4. What to do right after the customer buys
When they buy, think through their experience. What are they feeling? Nervous. Don’t want to have gotten ripped off. Don’t want to have been taken advantage of. Don’t want their friends to think they bought a weird internet course.—Ramit Sethi
If you told your friends you bought a $2000 video course, they would probably say you got scammed. Normal people don’t buy stuff online, right?
So your newly acquired purchaser is nervous. And after you ease those nerves, they’ll be excited. They can’t wait. Where do they start?
Welcome your customers with a video—Ramit recorded his first one with his MacBook. Tell them something like, “You made a great decision. This is what you are going to get. If you ever have problems, contact us at…” Then give them the material.
It’s important to curate the material your customers see. If you ask people do they want all the information up front, they say “yes.” But if you give it all at once they will be overwhelmed and more likely to cancel or ask for a refund. So tell them, “Here’s why I’m not giving you everything—trust me, and take these action steps.”
I recently watched a Mixergy Master Class called Grow Your Recurring Revenue. It was about how to keep customers that signup for your membership site or courses.
Noah Fleming led the course and said there are three essential Cs: Character, Content, and Community.
In the case of IWTYTBR, the character is Ramit. He’s the personality that readers buy from. The content is what you offer—Noah also emphasized not dumping it all on new buyers all at once.
Community is the elements of your product that let buyers interact with each other. Noah says this is a great way to keep people around, and suggested the idea of forming small groups and giving them tasks: like creating a product together, or developing a landing page.
Ramit tried community by including a forum for Earn1K buyers. He took it down when he found people were spending more time on that than doing work. People still ask him for a forum. It’s what people want—but not what they need.
5. Using ethical persuasion
Life is not just about more conversions. You want to be classy. You want to be respectful. Yeah, you could make more money, but that’s not the goal—the goal is to help them make an informed decision.—Ramit Sethi
Why is ethical persuasion so important? Because now that you know Ramit’s techniques and frameworks for sales, you’d find it just as easy to implement them on the dark side. There are many ways you can use persuasion nefariously, like to convince people to buy things they don’t really need. Ramit says he knows of hucksters who find out how much money their leads have available on their credit cards, then charge that.
Here’s Ramit’s framework for knowing who to sell to.
rational (information + motivation) = decision?
Rational requires that the potential buyer is in a sound state of mind and able to make their decision. Someone in desperate financial circumstances might not be.
Information assumes the potential buyer has all the information in the world about Ramit’s product.
And motivation means it is something they want.
If those three criteria are met, and the lead would buy the product, then Ramit has the privilege to persuade them to buy.
For example, take someone who’s earning $60,000, has $25,000 in the bank and works 9-5 but really wants to earn more. The person has the time, energy, and no credit card debt. If they took the time to go through Ramit’s program, and they trust him, would they buy it? If the answer’s “yes,” it’s a sale.
If someone makes $30,000, has $20,000 in debt, and is looking for a magic bullet, Ramit won’t let the person make the decision to buy.
So, I asked Ramit about those guys who run sites like www.SuperInstantMoneyMakingMachine.com. You know the kind—the ones where they tell you about their life on the beach, drinking margaritas, and chasing women. And there’s a picture of the guy in front of a jet. There is always a jet shot.
Ramit says if that guy has a product that would genuinely change a customer’s life, and gives them an out in the form of a full refund period, then it’s ethical to aggressively pursue the sale. He warns that many pages of long copy, flashing icons, the jet shot, and highlights are scams. Those guys do it because it works, and there are deep psychological reasons for it.
Can you do me a favor and leave a comment sharing the most important insight you got from hearing what Ramit has to say? Be specific—tell us a story, please.
Blogging is not only about putting together 400-2,000 words of text and publishing them on your WordPress site. As a blogger, you can choose from a much bigger variety of possible blog post types (and content in general).
Let me be honest and admit that I’ve wanted to compile this sort of list for a long time. Coming up with new ideas for posts every couple of days might lead you to a hard stop on a brick wall very quickly… I believe writer’s block is the more politically correct name for such a situation.
One of the most effective ways of fighting writer’s block is having a big resource file, containing lots of ideas and frameworks for new posts. Besides, writing standard, old-school blog posts can get boring very quickly. That’s why every blogger needs some variety in terms of content if they want to be doing this for a longer period of time.
This list is divided into a couple of sections depending on the purpose and characteristics of each content type. Feel free to treat it as a resource file ≠ñ you don’t have to go through the whole list at once.
Article style posts (aka standard blog posts)
1. How-to/tutorial posts
This is one of the most popular post types and one that arguably brings the most value to the reader. The most important thing to focus on while writing it, is to give some specific information on how to do/perform/attain/reach whatever is promised in the title of the post. Videos and images work very well as additional resources for how-to posts.
2. News posts
Typically used by bigger blogs, leaders in a given field that have their finger on the pulse at all times. They are usually short (less than 500 words) and share an important piece of news in a given market. There are a couple of downsides if you want to make them an important part of your publishing schedule: you have to be fast (there’s nothing worse than yesterday’s news), news has a short expiration date (it’s hard to turn a news post into a piece of evergreen content), and finally, you have to be publishing them at least once a day.
3. Definition posts
A.k.a. Wikipedia-style post. What you basically do is choose a term that has a significant importance in your field and define it using simple language, so the term is easy to understand for someone who’s new to the topic.
4. Standard list posts
List post is one of the most popular post types in use today (you’re reading one right now). The basic idea is that you take a topic or a problem and you try to come up with a number of separate solutions to it. List posts are so popular because they are extremely easy to follow. Each point is usually not related to the other ones, which means that even a distracted mind can get a lot of value from the whole post. List posts are also great for bookmarking or sharing with friends—precisely because of their reader-friendly construction.
5. Resource/link list posts
Very similar to standard list posts. The difference is that now you’re not coming up with the content on your own, but searching for valuable information elsewhere and, in the end, sharing links to what you have found. This type of list post is very popular lately and many successful bloggers are using it as one of the most important elements of their publishing schedule. This kind of posts tend to get a lot of backlinks due to the fact that people who have been featured often like to let their readers know about that fact, so they go ahead and mention it on their blogs.
6. Profile posts
A profile is a post focusing on a specific person, usually someone famous or important in a given field. Profiles usually cover things like: why the person in question became famous, what’s so special about them, what they have accomplished, and what’s their history and background. There are no specific rules of creating a good profile post. You have to choose your target, find as much interesting information about them as you can, and combine it into an article.
7. Case studies
Case studies present a way of solving a problem based on a real-life example. They are usually constructed in a step-by-step manner presenting each step in a detailed way, and explaining why this specific solution has been chosen. Case studies usually end with a roundup of everything that has been done and present the final results.
8. Problems-and-solutions posts
This is similar post type to case studies, only here, the solution doesn’t have to be one that has already been applied. It can be a description of a theoretical solution to a problem, or an idea worth considering for other people struggling with the same problem. For example, let’s look at amateur bodybuilding as a topic. One of the most common problems in that field is gaining lean (fat-free) body mass. A bodybuilder-blogger might create a post targeting this specific problem by giving a number of possible solutions, like introducing a special diet, different workout regime, different hours of sleep, and so on.
9. Comparison posts
Every field has some specific characteristics or problems that can be solved by many different means. Comparison posts take two or more possible solutions and compare them to one another. Various aspects of these solutions need to be taken into account if the whole post is to be valuable. It’s also good to point out a winner at the end. Some of the things you can compare against each other are: software, books, courses, companies, etc.—even people.
10. Stories
There’s nothing like a good story. Stories are ones of the most reader-friendly types of blog posts. We ñ humans ñ are used to hearing stories ever since we were children. The power of stories lies in their ability of disguising certain messages while describing seemingly unrelated situations. You can create a story about someone who wanted to do something but failed because they didn’t know the most important elements of X, where “X” is the thing you want to share with your readers… Just an example.
11. Controversial posts
The truth is people like to read controversial articles even if they don’t agree with the author. That being said, not every author has enough balls to write such a thing. Interestingly enough, creating a controversial post is not that difficult. The easiest way of doing it is to pick a topic, write down your thoughts about that topic, and then sharpen them up to the point of absurd. You can use some sarcasm while doing so. Here’s an example. Instead of saying “some Internet marketing tips published online have very few possible applications in real life,” say “every Internet marketer knows nothing about real-life business”—strong, to the point, and easy to disagree with.
12. Inspiring posts
Usually an inspiring story about someone (hopefully, an underdog) achieving something. The main message here is “if he can do it, so can I.” The only problem is that it’s not that easy to find something interesting enough to be turned into an inspiring post.
13. Research posts
A step-by-step guide on how you are (or someone else is) researching a specific topic. For example, you can share how you’re doing your keyword research, or how you’re searching for a virtual assistant to hire, or how you’re doing market research to come up with a list of potential partners and competitors.
14. “What others are saying” posts
This is a combination of a research post and a link list post. The main idea is to find a topic and find other people sharing their opinion on that topic. Sometimes it’s better to not pretend that you are the most knowledgeable person in a given field, but share the opinions of other experts instead. It’s the thing Napoleon Hill was famous for.
15. “What if” posts
A hypothetical post about something—”What would happen if X?” kind of thing. To start, choose an interesting topic, find an element that’s certain to exist in that field, and try to write a post about what might have happened if that element never existed. For example: “What if WordPress was never invented?”
16. Parody posts
A satirical view on a given topic. The easiest way of coming up with such a thing is to choose another publication about something, note down some of the ideas presented in it, and extend them to the point of absurd. For example, many building-a-successful-blog gurus tell you about the importance of commenting on other blogs. In response, you could write a post on “why you need to comment on 1,374 different blogs a day if you want to be successful.”
Unconventional blog posts
17. FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) posts
I’m sure you know very well what this is about. The only problem with coming up with these kind of posts is the “frequently” part. If you want to create a FAQ style post you need to have an audience to get the questions from. Creating a fake FAQ containing only some imaginary “frequently” asked questions is the biggest sin of them all.
18. SAQ (Should Ask Questions) posts
A similar type to the previous one, but this time you, as the expert, provide a list of questions and answers your audience should be asking you. The trick here is that frequently asked questions are not always the ones that are the most important (that’s because people don’t know what they don’t know), so in a SAQ post you can present your expertise and deliver much value to your readers.
19. Reviews
There are tens of blogs that focus solely on reviews of various products and services, mostly in the tech/gadget niche. I’m not telling you to start posting only reviews from now on, but submitting one every now and then surely can’t hurt you. In addition, you can include your affiliate links and make some money along the way.
20. Interviews
I’m sure there’s a lot of potential people you can interview: experts, celebrities, ordinary people who have managed to do something significant, people sharing their success stories, companies, other bloggers. Just look around your niche and I’m sure you’ll find someone interesting.
The interview itself can be done in a couple of different ways. You can meet with someone in person (the traditional way). You can mail them your questions and they will mail you back the answers. You can call them via Skype or phone. You can do a twitter interview (tweeting back and forth questions and answers). Basically, there are no limits. Sometimes being creative pays a lot, so try to come up with your own ways of doing interviews.
21. Ebooks
Whenever you have a big library of resources, your own posts, notes, etc. you can combine them and turn into an ebook, and then announce its launch in a standard blog post. One of the best examples of using your existing blog posts to create an ebook is the work of Darren Rowse in 31 Days to Build a Better Blog. Once you have your ebook ready, the best way of delivering it is, of course, as a PDF download. In fact, creating ebooks can be fun—something I found out for myself when putting together my own ebook.
22. Special reports
It’s like an ebook, only smaller, usually focusing on just one aspect of a given field, and in most cases delivered free of charge. Other than that, you can approach it the same as creating a standard ebook, and once you have it ready, announce this fact in a blog post.
23. Cheat sheets
As Wikipedia defines it, “a cheat sheet is a concise set of notes used for quick reference,” and that’s exactly what it is. I’m sure that you can find many rules, tricks, methods of doing/using something that relates to your field or niche. You just have to put it all together in a neat PDF file and share it with your readers. Just to give you some examples of nice cheat sheets: Cheat Sheets & Quick Reference Cards for Developers.
24. Checklists
A checklist is a set of specific steps that need to be taken in order to complete a task. Next to the headline of each step there should be an empty box where the person using the checklist can put a tick once the step has been completed. This forces you to use the PDF format once again. Once you have the checklist ready, write a post describing what it’s for and how to use it.
25. Infographics
Infographics are very popular in today’s Internet. They are cool to look at, present information in an easy-to-digest manner, provide a lot of value, and have a high share-with-a-friend factor. The only downside is that they are very time consuming to create. And in most cases you have to delegate this work to someone (or work together with someone) if you want the final result to be exceptional. Nevertheless, they are worth to consider if you have the time and the resources. Here are some examples of great infographics: Infographics for Web Designers: Information You Ought to Know, 12 Amazing SEO Infographics.
26. Projects
In my opinion this is one of the biggest things you can do for your blog once you have a moderate readership. By “moderate” I don’t necessarily mean the numbers, but people’s engagement with your posts.
The basic idea is this. You announce a project that you will be participating in (or are an author of) and invite your readers to take part in it, and share their results. A great example is what Pat and Tyrone have done with the Niche Site Duel project.
27. Open questions to your readers
This is usually a very short post. Just a single question to your readers about whatever topic. But, of course, it has to be something related to your niche, and it has to be something that actually interests you, something you want to know … maybe as part of research for your upcoming post. Publishing this kind of post can help you tighten the relationship with your readers and encourage some of the quiet ones to speak up. The only downside is that you have to have a moderate readership in order to make this work.
28. Starting a debate
Similar to publishing an open question, only this time you are saying what’s your opinion at the beginning of the post, and let your readers pick a side, so they can share their own arguments in favor or against. One more time … you have to have an audience for this to work. Once you consider the debate finished you can shut down the comments and write a follow-up post pointing out some of the most important parts of the debate.
29. Presenting an existing debate
Let me just give you an example. A while ago, Corbett Barr published a post presenting a debate between Pat Flynn and Everett Bogue on whether or not you should allow comments on your blog. The debate has been prepared earlier by interviewing both sides giving them the same questions, and then letting them take a look at each other’s answers so they could react to them. This is a great idea and I have to implement it myself in the near future. I encourage you to do the same.
30. Surveys and polls
Yet another way of connecting with your audience. This time again you are the one asking questions. A simple poll consists of one question with a number of possible answers. For example: “Which member of the A-team do you like the most? 1. Hannibal, 2. Face, 3. Murdock, 4. B.A.” There’s a number of different WordPress plugins that can provide you with a possibility of creating a poll.
A survey is usually something a bit bigger. For instance, a questionnaire containing a number of poll-styled questions as well as essay questions, and simple fill-in-the-blanks. You can search the WordPress plugin directory to find an appropriate plugin for this too. Surveys surely provide much valuable information about your audience, which makes them worth considering once you have an engaged readership.
31. Crash courses/gathering posts
This is a kind of post consisting of links to other post within the same topic, and maybe some additional comment or content. For instance, this guitar blog sharing information on how to learn guitar chords. Each chord gets its own post, and at the end of the series there’s one big gathering post featuring the links to all the other posts and some additional tips and resources. In the end, the whole post looks like a kind of crash course on learning guitar chords.
32. Twitter posts
In order to create such a post what you need is a topic, preferably a trending/popular one, and some time. Just go to twitter search and find some interesting tweets about the topic. You may search by keywords or by hashtags. Once you have a set of 20+ tweets you can combine them into one “what people are saying” post. This may sound like an easy way out, but in reality these posts can be very informative and, in many cases, very funny.
33. Income/traffic/expense reports (monthly)
Very popular lately. Some of the best examples can be seen at Think Traffic and Smart Passive Income. What you do is simply take a look at your Google Analytics account as well as your bank account and report any changes comparing to the previous month. Of course, you have to be comfortable with sharing this kind of information. The other problem is that telling people that your traffic is at 346 per month and you income at $12 per month might not be the best social proof possible.
34. Contests
Contests are a great way of connecting with your audience or even getting an audience in the first place. The most important element of a contest is the prize. It has to be something worth competing for, which mean it involves spending some money or finding a sponsor. The theme of the contest can be anything. For example: “whoever sings the highest note wins an iPod”—you get the point. Entries can be submitted via email or, preferably, via a comment below the post. It’s up to you.
35. Draws
Something similar to a contest. The only difference is that the winner is not chosen by someone, but gets drawn randomly. Other than that, same rules apply.
36. Races
Another idea that’s similar to a contest. The main idea of a race is to give your audience a specific task to do, and the first person to complete it wins. It might be something like: “first person to publish 20 comments this month on my blog wins an iPod.” The main benefit of such a thing is that apart from the winner submitting 20 comments you may get the runner up submitting 18, two people submitting 17, and so on. So in the end, running a race might bring you many more comments than 20. Just an example. The rules of running a contest apply here too.
37. Quizzes
How is it any different from a poll or a survey? Well, a quiz is not a tool for you to find out something about your audience, but a tool for your audience to find out something about themselves, usually in a funny and entertaining way. A great example is a quiz that can be found at theoatmeal.com, titled How long could you survive chained to a bunk bed with a velociraptor?. It turned out to be a big link bait for theoatmeal and resulted in #1 ranking in Google for the phrase “bunk bed”, whether it was intended or not. Plus, at the end of the quiz you receive a cool badge which you can include on your blog or share on Facebook. I’m sure you too can came up with something quiz-worthy in your niche.
You can use a blog post to announce your new software, tool, plugin, service, etc. Share some information about the thing—what it can do, who it is for, how and when to get it, and so on. This might be a good way of notifying your readers of what’s going on in your business, what you’re up to, and what’s in it for them. You can get some ideas for new services or products by doing a brainstorm and researching what your audience might be interested in. Of course, to make it happen you have to know your audience first.
39. Comics
Every day more bloggers start to publish comics as a constant element of their publishing schedule. Take a look at Web Designer Depot. If you are, or can get, someone who can create the actual comics, it might be a good way for you to expand your audience and give them something that’s very easy to digest. It can be a nice link bait as well. Two examples of comics-only blogs: xkcd and Wulffmorgenthaler.
40. Jokes
No further explanation needed. Obviously, it’s not a good fit for every niche, but who knows? Maybe it’s perfect for yours.
41. Icons and other graphical freebies
This is something that works well in the design niche, which is not very surprising. Designers are always on the hunt for some fresh, preferably free, icons/buttons or other graphical tools. Try to adjust this strategy to your niche. For example, if you have a photography blog you might share some free stock photos on Creative Commons license. If you’re in the business development niche you could get some Microsoft Word templates designed for you and then share them with your audience. It’s not just about icons.
42. Presentations
If you’ve ever given a presentation on whatever topic I’m sure you still have the slides somewhere on your computer. You can upload them to Slide Share and then embed them in your blog post. Inside the post you can describe what the presentation is about, mention when and where you gave it, and encourage your readers to re-embed it on their own blogs.
Audio blog posts
43. Mp3 files (as a podcast)
First things first: what is a podcast? Quoting Wikipedia: “a podcast is a series of digital media files (either audio or video) that are released episodically and often downloaded through web syndication.” Translating it into plain English, a podcast can be a series of mp3s launched in a sequence. Probably the best idea is to register your podcast in iTunes and get some recognition there.
When it comes to the content itself, a podcast can contain whatever you want. You can give tutorials on various topics, tell jokes, even read poetry. Feel free to browse the iTunes directory to get some ideas.
44. Interviews
These are similar to text interviews, only this time you conduct them over the phone or Skype and record everything along the way. Then you share them as an mp3 on your blog or turn them into a podcast if you’re planning to release more than one interview.
Again, some people you can interview include: experts, celebrities, ordinary people who have managed to do something significant, people sharing their success stories, companies, and other bloggers in your niche.
45. Talks
Something similar to an interview, but this time you’re getting a number of people (three or four) on the line or Skype, and give them a topic to talk about. Of course, you record everything so you can share it with your audience later on. This kind of talk is more focused on a specific topic rather than on the people participating in the talk. This is a good idea if you have the possibility to convince a couple of influential people in your niche to take part in it.
46. Teleseminars
In order to pull this one off you need an engaged audience, or good marketing. The main idea is that first you announce you’ll be conducting a teleseminar on topic X and give people a link where they can sign up for it. Then when the time comes you give the seminar to a live audience. Of course, you can also record it and share as an mp3 later on.
The most popular way of running a teleseminar is to focus on a how-to topic. It should be something you can explain to your audience—something that’s really important to them, yet it’s not so easy to master alone.
Video blog posts
47. Talking head video
All video post types on this list have one thing in common: once you have the video made you can embed it in a normal blog post, or share it with your audience as a video podcast.
Now, the talking head video. It’s the simplest video to make. What you basically do is sit in front of a camera and talk about something. One of the most famous examples is Gary Vaynerchuk and the posts on his personal blog. Of course, the topic needs to be interesting if you want to have any kind of impact, and you have to be comfortable with the camera—something many people find challenging at first.
48. Screencast
Screencasting is another name for recording what’s happening on your screen. It can be done with software called Jing, for example. It’s a very easy-to-digest way of giving a tutorial on some technical things, like setting up WordPress or doing something in Photoshop. Sometimes it’s much easier to do a screencast than explain such things via text content. Usually the same amount of information can be delivered in a five-minute screencast as in 3,000 words of text. And the problem of you being uncomfortable with being in front of a camera doesn’t apply here, so it’s actually easier to make.
49. Presentation video
This is basically a kind of screencast. But it’s made by first creating a PowerPoint presentation (of course, you can use other software too), then firing it up and recording everything while you talk the viewers through the presentation. It’s very easy to make and the results can be great due to some of the PowerPoint’s fancy features.
50. Interviews
Nothing new here, except this time you’re not writing or recording audio, but shooting a video instead. Video interviews always look more professional because they have that TV-like feel to them.
51. How-to video
Shooting a how-to video is a good idea if you’re in a niche where it’s easier to actually show something than it is to describe it with words. The guitar niche is a great example. It’s much easier to show people how to play a specific chord than it is to describe this to them. The main problem here is that you have to be comfortable with being in front of a camera. If you’re nervous, people will notice.
52. Webinars
Similar to teleseminars, webinars use video as the main medium. Other than that, the same rules apply.
Recycling
The final advice I want to give you in this post is to recycle your content. Now, what do I mean by that? Whenever it’s possible and makes actual sense, try to take a piece of your content and repurpose it by turning it into a different medium.
For example, you can get your videos and mp3s transcribed and then share them as a regular blog post. You can also go the other way around: create an article first, then turn it into a script, and in the end shoot a video and upload it to your YouTube channel. Another idea is to take your email newsletter series, read every edition out loud and share the whole thing as an audio podcast on iTunes. I’m sure you get the idea by now. As you can see, the possibilities are endless.
What’s on your list? Do you have any interesting blog post type ideas you want to share? What’s your favorite type? Speak up in the comments: your input is more than welcome!
Karol K. (@carlosinho) is a 20-something year old web 2.0 entrepreneur from Poland and a grad student at the Silesian University of Technology. He hates to do traditional business but loves to train capoeira. Tune in to get his advice on blogging and starting an online business.
You may not realize it, but the font settings on your blog can have a huge effect on how many people read your content.
And how many people read your content has a huge effect on whether a post goes viral.
How huge? Well, by some accounts I’ve read, just one common mistake with colors could reduce readership by a factor of five. And if you’re not making that mistake, you’re probably making at least one of four others. So in this article, I’ll give you the five most important best practices for presenting text to keep readers glued to your content, and away from the old back button.
Font size—16px minimum
At the very top of the the pile of legibility problems is font size. Back in 2005, Jakob Nielsen reported that in a survey of web design problems, bad fonts got nearly twice as many votes as the next contender—with two-thirds of voters complaining about small font sizes.
Sadly, nothing has changed since then. A random sampling of new blog designs at SiteInspire (a web design gallery showcasing the best of the best designs) shows that the average font size for body copy is 12 pixels. Some as low as ten pixels. None over 14 pixels. Similarly, if you randomly sample offerings from the popular Elegant Themes or ThemeForest, you’ll find that every single theme sets post content at 12 or 13 pixels.
And of course, other theme creators tend to follow the lead of the bigwigs.
But as usability and typography expert Oliver Reichenstein of Information Architects points out, 16 pixels is the font size that browsers were intended to display by default—and it is not big. 16px text on an average screen looks about the same size as 12-point text in print. That’s the default size for most magazines, as well as all word processors, because it’s the size people find most comfortable to read. Many people—especially those over 40—find it very difficult to read smaller text. As Reichenstein observes:
There is no reason for squeezing so much information onto the screen. It’s just a stupid collective mistake that dates back to a time when screens were really, really small … At first, you’ll be shocked how big the default text is. But after a day, you won’t want to see anything smaller than 100% font-size for the main text. It looks big at first, but once you use it you quickly realize why all browser makers chose this as the default text size.
Use dark on light text—reversed is no good
Fortunately we’ve pretty much moved past the days when content authors thought that fuchsia on blue text was cool. But white on black text, known as reversed type, is still pretty common. As are variants like white on some other dark color.
Reversed type reduces not only the number of people who’ll bother to read your content, but also their comprehension of it. This is because it strains the eyes. Staring at reversed text for an extended period tends to create a kind of “glare” effect, where you feel like the letters are too bright to look at. Depending on what research you consult, studies show that light on dark text reduces your readership between 50% and 400%.
Why risk losing so many readers? Black or very dark gray on white looks clean, and there are plenty of great themes that use those colors.
Line width—45 to 75 characters
Here’s another little-known rule that a lot of blogs break. In order for your eye to easily follow one line to the next, you want no more than 75 characters in each line. This is called the line measure. Beyond a measure of 75 characters, it’s hard to track the end of one line to the beginning of the next without getting lost.
On the other hand, if you have a measure of less than 45 characters your eye will get fatigued quickly, because you’ve barely started to read one line when you have to jump to the next. You feel like you never get a chance to rest.
For this reason, your ideal post content area will have lines of text about 60 characters long. Of course, you do also have to take aesthetics into account. On many blogs, the “ideal” measure leaves a huge gap on the right margin, or makes the text seem squished into a tiny area. I use a measure of around 70 characters on my own website for exactly that reason. But if you’re pushing past 80 characters, you’re reducing your readership—guaranteed.
Line height—130% or more
Fortunately this is a less common mistake. If you’re using a professional theme, you probably don’t need to worry.
To give you an example, I’ve set this paragraph at the default line height (also called leading, after the strips of lead used to separate lines of text on old printing presses). It feels cramped and uninviting to read, and it’s hard to follow the lines from one to the next because they blend into each other.
On the other hand, this paragraph is set with a line height of 200%—equivalent to double spacing in a word processor. I’m sure you’ll agree that the lines here feel way too disconnected from each other, and unless you’re submitting a research paper this is not the way to go.
Finally, this paragraph is set with a line height of 150%. That means that for every pixel of font size, there’s one and a half pixels of distance between the lines. This turns out to be pretty reliable sweet spot for most fonts you’re likely to use on a blog—but feel free to experiment between about 130% and 160% to see what works best for your own content.
The left margin—don’t break it
This last tip isn’t exactly a font issue. But it fits into the same general category. Bloggers routinely include images in their posts. Whether or not that’s really a good idea is a topic for another time—but for now, let me just give you one piece of advice.
The left margin is sacred. It’s how we track text down a page in the Western world. It’s the “ground” out of which the lines grow (often to quite different lengths), and it’s the foundation for our eyepath as we read down the page.
But if you break the left margin, that all goes to hell. Your eye has to scan around to try to pick up the new margin, so you can keep on reading.
In other words, every time you left-align an image, you put a speed-bump in your reader’s path. And you’re compounding the problem by dragging his attention away from the text with your visually dominant image. Needless to say, readers who keep being distracted and having to relocate the left margin often don’t read to the end of a post—so they often don’re share it or comment on it.
Bonus tip: drop caps increase readership
By “drop caps” I mean initial capitals, where the first letter of the first word of your post stands out much bigger than the rest. According to research conducted by Ogilvy & Mather, this increases readership of a piece by an average of 13%.
Drop caps aren’t built into most blog themes, and they can be tricky to do on the web, but if you’re up to a little coding, check out this tutorial on how to create them.
Five mistakes: which ones are you making?
Now is the time to head on back to your own blog and see which of these five important best practices you’re not practicing. Then, fixum! But don’t forget to share the changes you’ve made in the comments below!
Bnonn is known in the boroughs as the Information Highwayman, he helps small businesses sell more online by improving both their copy and design. When he’s not knee-deep in the guts of someone’s homepage, he is teaching his kids about steampunk, Nathan Fillion, and how to grapple a zombie without getting bit.
Are your blog posts working well, or leaving readers unsatisfied? Is your About page enticing, or confusing? Does your Hire Me page do a great job of selling your services, or is it too bland?
Often, the only feedback that you have comes in the form of numbers. Maybe readers aren’t spending long on your blog. Maybe you rarely get comments. Maybe no one’s ever hired you.
The problem is, it’s hard to tell why. Without any feedback from readers, you don’t know what you’re doing wrong.
Honest, constructive feedback isn’t the same as a comment saying “great post!” Good feedback:
tells you exactly what’s working, and what isn’t
offers suggestions on how to fix any problems
encourages you to make the most of your strengths.
Perhaps you’re reading this and thinking no one will give me any feedback. I don’t have any readers yet. Or maybe your blog isn’t even online—you’re struggling away with your posts and pages, trying to get your core content together before you launch.
Don’t give up. I’m going to give you six easy ways to get feedback.
Six ways to get feedback
1. Look at your current comments
If you’ve received any comments on your blog, look at the following.
Which posts have the most comments? These will, in some way, have struck a chord with the reader.
Are there any suggestions that you can use for future posts? Sometimes, commenters will tell you exactly what they’d like to read. Other times, they’ll mention what they’re struggling with—and you can use that as the basis for a post.
Did any posts get negative or confused comments? If a reader leaves a comment to say that they didn’t understand, you might want to take another look at that post and make sure it’s clear.
2. Ask around on Twitter or Facebook
If your blog is new, you might well have a bigger following on Twitter, Facebook, or other social networks. Try asking there for feedback: post a link to a particular post or page and explain that you’d welcome any constructive criticism.
You’ll be surprised at how generous your friends—and even complete strangers!—can be. Don’t discount the opinions of non-bloggers, either; they might not “get” the technology, but they’re likely to be representative of your general audience.
3. Find a blogging partner
Some bloggers like to swap posts with one another. If you’ve got any blogging friends, ask around and see if anyone would be interested. A blogging partner can do a lot more than just read your posts, too—check out Find a Blog Buddy [Day 15 – 31DBBB].
If you don’t know a single blogger yet, try looking in the comments sections of relevant blogs (ProBlogger might be a good place to start). Find someone who seems to be at a similar stage to you, and drop them an email.
4. Post a message in a forum
When I’ve been looking for feedback, often on sales pages, I’ve posted in the Third Tribe forum. I’ve always had great responses from other members, with plenty of insightful feedback. When you put out a request like this, it’s often helpful to specify what particular areas you want feedback on. You might ask questions like these:
Many ecourses will include some element of interaction—that might be live calls with the tutors, or forums where you can easily interact with other members. There’ll often be a chance to ask questions and get specific feedback.
Even if it’s a big course without any individual instruction from tutors, you’ll find that other members are very willing to help out. People taking an e-course are often more engaged (and at a slightly further stage) than your general audience on Twitter or Facebook.
Checkout ProBlogger’s Courses, where they have both free and paid courses, including several on creating content.
6. Hire a writing coach
For really in-depth, expert feedback, look for a writing or blogging coach. They’ll work with you to help you shape and polish up your content, and a good coach will be careful to preserve your own voice and style.
Coaching is definitely an investment, but many bloggers find it a very worthwhile one. That applies even if you have a strong writing background. One of my own coaching clients, Prime Sarmiento, is an experienced journalist. She wrote about the benefits of getting coaching in a guest post for Men with Pens: Why Hiring a Writing Coach Can Help You Build Your Business.
The review
So, you’ve found someone willing to give you feedback. What should you ask them to look at?
I think there are several key areas where you’ll want to make sure your writing (and formatting of posts) is as good as it can be.
Your cornerstone content
If you’re creating a series of posts as cornerstone or pillar content—posts that readers will go back to again and again—then you want them to be as good as possible.
It’s worth asking someone to read through the whole series, so that they can help you both with the small details (like typos and clunky sentences) and the big picture (making sure that all the posts fit together well).
Your About page
Did you know that your About page is probably the most-read page on your blog after your home page? (Check your Google Analytics if you’re not convinced!) It make sense—new readers will often read a blog post or two, then click on “About” to find out who you are and what the blog’s purpose is.
A great About page can turn a casual visitor into a subscriber. A poor About page might lose you that visitor completely. About pages are really tough to write, so it’s definitely worth getting feedback and even some help with the drafting.
Your Services or Hire Me page
If you’ve got any services (or products) for sale, you want to make sure that your sales page does a great job of drawing potential customers in. That means, at a minimum, being totally clear about what you do and who you work with.
I’ve read lots of incoherent and confusing sales pages—and even decent sales pages often don’t sell the blogger as well as they should. You should always get feedback on a sales page, to make sure that your offer is totally clear.
Your next steps
Pick one page or post on your blog, and find someone who can give you feedback on it. That might be a friend, a forum member, a coach … the important thing is that you get a second opinion. Ideally, it should be someone who understands your audience (even if they’re not part of that audience themselves).
And if you’re not sure who to ask, why not pop a comment below? You might just find a new blogging friend…
Ali Luke is a writer and writing coach, and author of The Blogger’s Guides series of ebooks. She has a weekly newsletter for writers and bloggers, and has just released a mini-ebook How to Find Time for Your Writing–click here and sign up for her newsletter to get your free copy.
This is a guest contribution by Nicholas Whitmore.
The title: What on earth does it mean?
Well, recently it seems like a lot of bloggers fancy themselves as marketers. You can’t read a post on a blog without seeing a load of other bloggers commenting at the bottom, with a link back to their own site. Of course other bloggers use black hat SEO tricks and other shady tactics in order to drive traffic to their blog. Each to their own you might say, but at the end of the day life can be much, much easier.
If you publish blog content that’s truly awesome, everyone else will market your blog for you.
If you seem to spend half your life trying to promote your blog with your efforts never coming to fruition, now’s the time to stop. There’s a reason why things aren’t working out – and you can bet your bottom dollar that it’s the actual content in your blog posts.
Sorry to have to break it to you, but your blog posts suck.
It’s time to go back to basics because if you’re guilty of trying to build links and force traffic to your blog, you’re trying too hard.
Building links and driving traffic to your website does not fall under the blogging remit – that’s marketing, something different altogether.
Good things come to those who wait
Starting a successful blog is not something that you can do overnight. In fact, it can take months or even years before you start to see traction and those crazy traffic figures you’ve dreamt of. If you’ve got a short attention span or you’re incredibly impatient, the chances are that you won’t make it as a blogger.
Whilst some bloggers out there make a living from their sites, don’t go quitting your day job and blowing your life savings just yet – getting a blog to the point where it can be successfully and sustainably monetized takes a very, very long time.
Expedite success with more awesome blog posts
The only way in which you can expedite the success of your blog is to publish more high quality content. Be careful not to inundate your visitors with too much content to digest though in your race to the top. Careful balances need to be struck between quality and quantity – a balance must also be struck between too many and too little blog posts.
Rarely will you see a sparsely populated blog that’s extremely popular. One of the core ingredients of a successful blog is frequent content – there’s no getting away from that fact. You don’t have to post 10 new blogs each week, but it would help in a lot of cases.
Hard work always pays off
On my desk is a mug that my father used to drink out of. It says: “Hard work always pays off” – I find that little saying resonates around my head at least one million times each day. There are few things in life truer than this saying – and it can of course be applied to the world of blogging.
Be prepared to spend a good few months writing awesome posts that few people will read initially.
Keep plugging away – keep publishing great content and your blog will be recognized. The pay off comes when the recognition that your blog receives snowballs – links from other blogs start rolling in, and people recommend your posts on social media.
Recognition usually starts like a little trickle of water – gradually it will build up into a raging torrent. The more recognition your site receives, the more people will read it. As more people read your blog, it’ll receive further recognition. It’s an infinite loop of goodness for you as a blog owner!
In Summary
When you write and publish awesome content on your blog, good things will come your way.
When you write and publish boring content then spend hours on end building links to it, trying to force people to your website, good things will never come.
Spend your time blogging – not marketing. The marketing side of things will be taken care of for you by your visitors if the blog posts that you publish are good enough to be recommended and shared across the internet.
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with sharing posts you publish via social media with friends and followers – it’s the ideal way in which to generate that initial buzz and interest about your blog. When the marketing of your posts takes longer than it does to actually write them however, you’ve almost certainly lost your way as a blogger.
Nick is a freelance journalist and website content editor from http://www.contentwriting.org. He writes extensively about the art of blogging, as well as online marketing techniques such as SEO, PPC and SMM.
We all had that fire, that passion when we first started a blog. The excitement of creating content and putting it out into the world was tangible… that feeling (and motivation) to publish a few posts and see what everybody thinks.
Fast forward a few months: what happened? Where did all that motivation go!? Now that excitement somehow turned into: “I just have a blog that nobody reads, I’m tired of updating, and I’m wondering if it’s even still worth it.”
We’ve all been there.
Life gets in the way, our kids get sick and keep us from working on our blog that ONE day we had free, or we come home from work dead-tired and fail to write even the first sentence of a new post.
I certainly know I have. I first started my blog Nerd Fitness fourteen years ago, and I can probably count on my fingers and toes how many times I sat down to write simply because I was motivated to do so. More often than not, writing was the last thing on my mind. And yet, here I am: now a pro-blogger (750 published posts, most of which are 2000+ words), and a published author!
I’m not saying this to brag, but to prove a point: I didn’t rely on motivation, but instead put a superhero system in place to make sure I stayed on target.
After all, we all know how awesome superheroes are, and influential they can be in our lives. Just ask Darren!
Today, I’m going to share with you a 4-step system that will help you finally crack the code and consistently improve at your efforts to become a superhero blogger. It’ll help you stop relying on motivation and instead use rock-solid strategies to take over the world…or save it.
BATMAN: Hack Your Batcave to Win.
One of the most important ways I’ve learned to manufacture discipline in life (instead of relying on willpower and inspiration) was through hacking my Batcave.
Bruce Wayne, AKA Batman, is unique in the superhero world in that he doesn’t have any special powers. He can’t fly, he can’t teleport, he can’t regenerate or shoot lightning out of his fingers. Instead, he’s a regular guy that uses his gadgets, gizmos, and a normal mortal body to fight crime.
Since we’re also mere mortals, it’s time to start thinking about your own bat cave (your surroundings) to help you effortlessly stay disciplined like Bruce Wayne.
Your Batcave will probably be your apartment or home office, your kitchen table, or wherever you set up shop to work on your blog. Ask yourself: is this Batcave designed in a way to help me get closer to crushing it as a blogger, or farther away?
Because we are products of our environment, everything around us is subtly pulling us in one direction or another. That TV in your living room is saying “watch me! I have reruns on my DVR!”
While at your computer, Facebook is saying “check me! quick! You might have more likes on that cat video you posted!” Your phone might be next to you might have a notification about a new comment on Instagram, or an email about a sale at JCrew.
If you are going to succeed as a superhero blogger, it’s time to get serious about putting systems in place that work for you. Willpower (aka the power to say “I will write and I will not do all of the other amazing distracting things around me) is a finite resource, which means the more you have to rely on it, the more likely you’ll be to fail.
So stop relying on willpower. Create a lifestyle that sets you up to blog consistently.
I start by adding steps between me and the bad habits that keep me from writing:
Cancel your cable. Those shows are useless anyways.
Put your TV in your closet. Or at the very least, far away from where you write.
Install Freedom.to on your computer and block time wasting websites until you’ve written your 500 words for the day.
Uninstall all social media apps from your phone (life will go on), and turn off all notifications.
Find other creative ways to limit the powers of distractions in your life.
I then decrease the number of steps between me and the writing habit I’m going to build:
I write first thing in the morning, before I check email (don’t even keep the gmail tab open!)
I have a blank document open on my computer before I go to bed so as soon as I sit down, it’s the first thing I see.
I set a daily goal of 500 words. It doesn’t matter if it’s good content, or if I want to write, I have to write 500 words.
You need to cultivate discipline, and your environment needs to work for your writing, not against it.
SUPERMAN: Recognize and understand your kryptonite.
Next, we turn to one of the most powerful superhero ever created: Superman!
This dude is faster than a speeding bullet, can leap over tall buildings in a single bound, and shoot freaking lasers out of his eyes! There’s a reason many on earth consider him a god.
However, for all of his powers and abilities that are unlike anything else in existence, he can still be undone by a substance: KRYPTONITE! This glowing green mineral can be used by bad guys to keep Superman at bay.
We all have kryptonite in our lives too that can keep us from becoming Superhero Bloggers if we’re not careful. Not only do we need to recognize our kryptonite, but we need to prepare for it too.
Again, we’re not relying on willpower here, but rather we’re going to kryptonite-proof our lives so we can work daily on our blog.
Let’s start by identifying what your Kryptonite is: this is something that you have almost no chance at withstanding. For me, it was video games: I had purchased NerdFitness.com and did nothing with it for two years because I was too busy playing video games online with my friends and never “found time” to write.
FORTUNATELY, my computer broke, and I couldn’t afford to fix it, so I told myself I couldn’t play another video game AT ALL until I made my first dollar through my website. For the next 18 months I came home work and wrote articles for Nerd Fitness, eventually making money through ebooks with the site. Only then did I allow myself to play games, as I was better equipped to handle them properly.
What is your kryptonite, and how can you fight it?
Do you come home from work exhausted and all you want to do is plop down on the couch and watch TV? That’s okay! Recognize that writing after work isn’t an option for you, and build the habit of writing BEFORE you go to work.
Are your kids your kryptonite? I don’t mean they’re glowing and green, but I bet it’s quite tough to focus on blogging and building a side business if you have kids and a family to take care of. So wake up before they do. Yup, it might mean waking up at 5AM to be able to write for 90 minutes uninterrupted before they come jump on your bed.
Is it TV? Video Games? Negative people in your life? Get rid of them. Life goes on without TV, Netflix, or Fallout.
Maybe your kryptonite is self-doubt. You’re afraid to hit publish because things aren’t perfect, or you are afraid of what people will say, or what if nobody reads it. Seth Godin said it best: “Be judged or be ignored.” People will say anything and everything, so might as well get them talking about you and your work!
If you know where your energy is going to get zapped from, you can prepare for it ahead of time and make sure you get the important stuff done before that kicks in.
WONDER WOMAN: Fight with Passion and Strength
After the Man of Steel and the Caped Crusader, we turn to a female badass: Diana Prince, better known as her alter-ego, Wonder Woman!
This Amazonian goddess has gone through many iteration over there years, but a few things have stayed tried and true throughout her comic book career: her inner and outer strength (I mean, come on…she’s WONDER WOMAN!), determination, passion, and compassion.
It starts by being honest with yourself: are you in this for the right reasons? I think a lot of people like the idea of running their own business, buy a course on blogging, and then try to go into a niche they have no idea about because they’ve told “this is a profitable part of the internet!” These are the people that give up after a few months when they realize money doesn’t just magically start shooting out of their computers once they publish a few blog posts.
The truth is this: becoming a professional writer, running an online business, or being a problogger is a lot of freaking work. I love The Four Hour Workweek as much as the next guy (I bought NerdFitness.com after reading it!), but many people took it the wrong way in assuming they were simply a few weeks away from making a living online with a tiny bit of work. If you are blogging about something that you don’t care about, eager to make money immediately by creating a product before you even have a site worth reading, you’re setting yourself up for a short (and quick) trip back to reality.
Instead, pick a subject you are passionate about. I hate to use the word “passion,” as it gets thrown around by Internet Marketers looking to get you to buy their course on hopes and dreams and unicorns (apologies to any unicorn bloggers), but there’s an element of truth to it. You have to LOVE the topic you’re writing about and the community you hope to build, because you might be writing on that subject with no audience and no money for a long long long time.
Help people. Wonder Woman is known for her humanity: feeling compassion and giving love without discrimination. If you’re struggling to figure out what to write about, solve a problem. When in doubt, help people. Sure, it would be great if you could get paid to eat pudding and watch Netflix, but who will pay you for it? Start creating an insane amount of uniquely helpful content that solves a specific problem for people, and answer every email without discrimination: whether or not that person every pays you a dime, improve their lives in some way.
For the first 5 years of Nerd Fitness’s lifespan, I answered every email that came into the inbox, and the autoresponder people got when they signed up asks “what’s your biggest struggle when it comes to getting fit?” Everybody got a response, and today we have 750 free blog posts, free message boards, in addition paid courses and events. We still answer each email and help each person regardless of who they are or where they came from.
Help people. Write about things that you are fired up about. And expect to do it, thanklessly, for a long time.
JUSTICE LEAGUE: Surround yourself with powerful allies to keep you accountable.
These days, bands of superheroes are everywhere, from the Avengers Movies to the upcoming depiction of the origins Justice League in Batman vs Superman.
Real life allies can be incredibly powerful – the difference between success and failure.
Think of it this way, if you skip your blog writing today to watch TV, nobody would know, and who does it hurt, right? But now imagine you’re in this with a friend who is also writing, and they notice you didn’t have your blog post up and give you a call. This is the beginning of introducing some accountability to your system.
I got a bit extreme with this, and gave a coworker $500 of my dollars, and for every day a blog post was late, she would donate $50 to a cause I HATED. Of course, I couldn’t possibly live with myself knowing my money funded something I disliked so much, so I had to get my blog posts done on time. Sometimes it was at 4AM, other times it was seconds before I had to hit post… but I got them done.
So form your own Justice League!
Follw the Problogger Facebook Page: It’s a community of people who are struggling with the same things you are!
Build your own mastermind group. Online or in person, group up with others who share your excitement about building a business and holding each other accountable.
Find an accountability buddy…aka accountabilibuddy. A single person that will call you on your excuses can an incredibly long way in holding you accountable when you need to get shit done.
I’m not quite sure if Batman gives Wonder Woman homework, or if Superman makes sure Bruce Wayne gets to his workouts on time, but I like to think they do!
The world needs more heroes. Will you heed the call? I’d love to hear from you. Leave a comment below with:
1 environmental hack you can use to stay on target with your blogging
Your blogging kryptonite and how you will fight it off.
One way you can be more helpful and serve your audience better.
1 friend you can recruit to your Justice League
Steve Kamb is the author of Level Up Your Life and creator of Nerd Fitness, a worldwide community of average joes and jills looking to live better lives.
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