Tag Archives: Blogging

The Smart Way to Start a Project

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Your next amazing idea doesn’t need to be a big project with a ton of investment. Sometimes people jump directly to the website building part of their next big venture, when really that’s more like a mid-point. You can build an amazing website that costs thousands of dollars and looks pretty, but if it doesn’t attract any users or doesn’t convert, you’ve wasted your time and money.

Have a plan.

People skip the planning stage too often. It’s hard work and they don’t want to do it. They just want to jump right in. A plan doesn’t need to be some 30 page business plan, but it should fill a certain amount of criteria. It also doesn’t have to be that detailed. It should answer the 5WH criteria at least:

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Series: 7 Weeks to a Successful Blog: Week 6

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Get attention and be successful.

I recently read Jim Kukral’s book ‘Attention: This Book Will Make You Money‘ and loved it. I gave away a copy of the book to a reader yesterday. He really sums up what a lot of other people say about websites in a different way. Most other people discuss how traffic is the driving source behind revenue on a website and they’re totally correct. Some people say that in order to drive traffic, content is king and marketing is the queen (I actually think that was Gary Vaynerchuk, but I’m not sure). What it really comes down to is attention. If you want attention, build a good product. If you don’t have a product (or a good product), you can make up for that and get attention by doing something out of the ordinary or outrageous. Just don’t go after negative attention.

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Series: 7 Weeks to a Successful Blog: Week 5

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Stay focused and have a backup plan.

During the last three weeks, I’ve been going to trade shows, getting sick, and having family issues. On top of all of that, I started two additional business ventures, and started dumping more time into an existing one I was already working on that. Needless to say, my time has been limited and I’ve been slacking on posting to my case study blog, as well as this one.

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Series: 7 Weeks to a Successful Blog: Week 4

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Spread the word. Build links.

Now that you’re interacting with the community, you need to get out to other sources of information and spread the word. What will happen is you will increase your relevancy in SEO and generate some buzz about your blog project while you’re at it.

There are some shortcuts too, but they really detract from the authenticity of your venture. If you’re purely business minded, you can’t argue with the results though. One of the big lessons we learn in this post is that money and paying for advertising are great ways to accelerate the growth of your blog.

Commitment

15 hours or more and/or article creation/submission fees.

Produce Fresh Types of Content

This is no different than last week or the week before. I’m only going to mention it this less and less, but I don’t want to undermine how important it is. This is why people come to visit you and it’s why they’ll come back. Don’t disappoint them.

Always be creative with your content and do new things. Try a series like this one, make lists, solicit guest posts, or do interviews. Remember to always be changing things up and keeping things new for your users. When you’re developing your plan for posts each month, before choosing your topics, try determining the types of posts you’ll do.

Writing and Submitting Articles

The best way to do attract attention is to write for other people and get websites to talk about you. Write articles for article directories and do guest posting. Spend all of your time writing articles, but not for your own blog. Submit those articles to article submission sites and other blogs for guest posts.

You’ll have the most success writing 500+ word articles and pounding the pavement. That should cover most of the article directories out there in terms of minimum requirements and is a decent enough sized post for most blogs to accept it as a guest post. Make sure each article is unique, but about similar or the same topics. Link back to your websites main page or specific posts in every article.

If you’re not a great writer (you should probably reconsider doing something like a blog, but that’s for a different day), you can pay copy writing services to write for you. If you’re looking to go the even cheaper route, you can pay a service to build links for you. I’ve had amazing results with seolinkwheelers.com. I don’t really feel like link building services and copy writers are authentic to a real product, but one really must argue for their effectiveness and they do have their place.

I’ll hopefully be doing a post on link building later this week, so keep an eye out for that.

Problems I Had Last Week

My biggest problem last week was staying on track. I had a lot of business and life things happen, and the week just flew by. Life can be tough sometimes and it will catch up with you, but you need to push through! Be committed and don’t fall behind and you’ll be successful.

Last week, did you have any problems? successes? failures? Let me know.

Series: 7 Weeks to a Successful Blog: Week 3

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Get social.

Now that you’ve laid the groundwork for your blog, it’s time to get engaged.  You have great content and you’re tracking your visitors. Now you need to get out to the community and interact. If you’re focusing on the gaming niche, do things like hit up gaming forums and talk about the games you’re playing. Don’t blatantly advertise your blog. Just put it in your signature. People will click on it, I promise.

Be creative when you’re baiting people to come visit your site. Back on gaming: if you’re playing, why not set things up to do live casts of whatever you’re playing. People can interact with you while you’re trying games out and that entices users to visit and subscribe. You can take the archived video and turn them into posts later.

Commitment

12 hours or more.

Constantly be Producing Content

Back to that content thing. You’ll most likely see this every week for the rest of the series and then beyond. This is the groundwork and foundation that your website rests on. Without nice, high quality content people won’t have a reason to visit. Try to vary things up a bit. I have three major topics I focus on with mine: diet, exercise, and motivation. I try to hit at least one a week, and never three of the same one in a row.

Twitter

Search.Twitter.com is a powerful tool to interact. You can use this to find out what people are talking about in your niche(s) and correspond with them. You want to be spending at least an hour a day doing this. If you’re not an expert, use it to find experts and ask questions. You can also aggregate news stories in your niche that you find. This will provide value to your followers as well.

There are some more advanced ways to interact with Twitter that I won’t go into here. There are all sorts of things you can do, like setting up bots to aggregate information for you to using services to respond to high volumes of followers. I just want you to know that they are out there and I might cover them in the future.

Facebook

You should definitely have a fan page for your blog. You can do one of two things: if you have brand awareness already you can just create a page for your blog; if you don’t, you can create a page about the niche for your blog. What does that mean? It means that if you’re in the gaming niche and you blog is: MyGamingSite.com you could either make a fan page called: 1) MyGamingSite.com or 2) Playing Video Games. The latter will attract more likes from people that don’t know who you are.

You can then leverage that population to advertise your site. When you reach a higher level of traffic, you can create a new fan page for the same blog and name it whatever the site is. That fan page will be much more targeted and convert better when you’re soliciting your fans, followers, and users. You should spend at least an hour a day conversing with people on Facebook and creating awareness of your pages.

Problems I Had Last Week

I didn’t really have any problems last week. I did change my mind about some plugins, etc. That was mostly a function of response to the post I did about plugins. That wasn’t anything major. I’m mostly talking about plugins that added widgets that could easily be HTML in a text widget. For example: Feedburner subscription boxes.

How are things going so far?

Please let me know if this was useful to you and how things are going. I’m truly interested in helping you do this and want to help you along the way.

Series: 7 Weeks to a Successful Blog: Week 2

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Get your house in order.

You’ve written content going back ten posts, so now your blog has some roots.  You don’t look like you just started that’s good.  Now you need to do the additional setup to get things going.  Setting up tracking, search engine submission, comments, spam protection, and a slew of other details is next. First, though, you need to write some more content, because, well, that’s what having a blog is all about.

Last week I intentionally didn’t tell you what domain I registered, because I didn’t want everyone to flock there before everything was at least partially set up.  I was still on the fence about giving out the domain name, because I didn’t want traffic from this blog to boost traffic to that blog. I want to grow it naturally without any help from my other online properties. That being said, I am going to tell you, but only so you can keep your eye on what I’m doing. I’m only going to mention it this once though, and it might be the end of the project later if everyone copies the strategy. It’s CoreFitnessBlog.com.

Commitment

13 hours. $0.

Next Wave of Content

You should be doing at least one post a week with a minimum of 2000 words per month. Never do a post under 200 words.  What does that mean? Do 1 post a week with a minimum of 500 words each, or Do one a day that is at least 200 words.  I prefer to do longer, less frequent posts, so I’m opting for the 4×500 method. Also: one minute of video is worth about 100 words, so feel free to do video posts as well.

I find it’s best to sit down for 4 to 8 hours and bang out all of the posts for the month, assuming that your niche isn’t based on the news.  You can then drip those posts out scheduled on specific days. Remember: you can always add posts on the fly when breaking news in the niche comes up.

Subscriptions

Set up a Feedburner account and start soliciting subscribers. There is a plugin for adding a subscription widget and changing your WordPress feed URLs to Feedburner URLs that I talk about below.  The best visitors are return visitors and RSS and Email subscriptions is the easiest way to keep people updated and make them return visitors.

If you’re feeling ambitious, set up an account with Aweber too. It’s never too early to start your email list. You might be jumping the gun just a smidge, because there is so much more to set up and get going.  This will be covered in a later post and if you already have an account, it’s really a no-brainer.

Plugins

I did a post last week, listing all of the plugins I use on this blog. Go read that post and install the ones that are relevant to what you’re doing. You need to be especially aware that you need to install the Google Analyticator and Feedburner Subscription widgets to make sure you can track what’s going on and start building a subscriber base.

One plugin I forgot in the post I did last week was FD Feedburner, which changes all of your WordPress URLs to Feedburner URLs. This is essential, because if you want to track RSS feed. I actually made that mistake when I started this blog and couldn’t figure out why I couldn’t get subscribers.  The minute I installed it, my subscriber count went up by 500%subscriptions, you need to use make sure people are going to Feedburner and not your WordPress. My subscribers didn’t actually change, but I could see the data.

Here’s a quick list of plugins that you need, no matter what your vertical is: Akismet, Google XML Sitemaps, FD Feedburner, and Sociable.

Problems I Had

The biggest problem I had was when I wrote a post highlighting other blogs. I quickly realized that I only read one fitness blog. I didn’t want to make poor recommendations, so I spent almost 5 hours reading fitness blogs trying to find some that I would actually stand behind. I picked some that seemed great, but we’ll see how that turns out.

What I should have done was table that post until later in the blog when I was reading other peoples’ information and got to know the players in the niche. Don’t stay on projects that are time sinks. I could have easily written an extra 3 or 4 posts in that time.

How did your first week go?

Please share your success or failure stories with me below.  If you have questions about how to do something, please feel free to contact me in the comments or via email. I will help you set everything up. Also, if you haven’t nailed down hosting yet, remember you can always contact me.

Series: 7 Weeks to a Successful Blog: Week 1

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I’m starting a new blog series called 52 Weeks to Success.  It’s going to be about starting a blog and building it up, start to success (notice I didn’t say finish).  It will make decent money online and detail every part of the process from conception to execution to making money.  Without further adieu:

Commitment

Time: 7-10 Hours; Cost: $11

Research a Niche

I’ve been losing weight for about 3 months now and I’m down about 25 pounds.  I’d like to lose about 30 more, so I’m going to focus on health and fitness as my niche I think.  Notice I said I think, because I haven’t done any research yet.  I’m not a fitness expert, nor am I particularly fit.  I do know from hearsay that gaming, fitness, dating, and finance are great niches to work in, but they’re extremely competitive.

Since I know I want to do something in Fitness, I’m going to pull up GoDaddy.com and Google External Keyword Tool.  I’ll start with the keyword tool and check for phrases that are in my niche.  I like phrases have a lot of words and a lot of searches.  3 words and over 5,000 searches usually means it should be easy to reach number one.  On GoDaddy, I’ll try domains that match the keywords that show up in the External Keyword Tool. It’s absolutely important that you know what keywords you want to rank for, because if you don’t you might be wandering a bit.  This allows you to focus.  I found that this is ultimately what lead to my success in building websites.

After an hour or so of playing with variations on diet, health, fitness, exercise, and blog, I ultimately chose “core fitness blog” as my keyword of choice.  It has 27,000 searches and is extremely competitive, but I’m ambitious.  This may blow up in my face later, but we’ll see what happens.

Get a Domain Name and Set Up Hosting

Now that I’ve selected a niche and some keywords, I need to buy a domain.  I just happened to find the perfect one that includes both of my keywords and another fairly relevant keyword.  I registered the domain and proceeded to set up my hosting.

If you have questions about how to set up a domain or hosting, just shoot me an email or leave a comment.  I can help you with that.

Install WordPress on the website and stick with the generic template.  Design doesn’t matter right now.  What you need is content.

Start Writing Content

Write 10 articles, spending about 30 minutes each on the articles.  Don’t go straight from one article to the other either.  Take 5 minutes or a day in between to take a break.  Have some food, surf the net, work, sleep, play Tetris, or do something else that gets your mind off of writing.  If you don’t do that, you’ll burn out.  Remember: this is supposed to take about a week.  Once all of your articles are written, go back and read them all out loud.  I don’t care if it’s awkward.  Also: if you can have someone else read them – do that too.

Once you have all of your articles written, load them into WordPress and date all of them 15 or so days apart going back in time.  If you need help doing that, just let me know.  The reason you do this is to give your blog some long term relevancy right now.  People tend to trust a blog that has been around for a while and has multiple posts.

Get the Word Out

Any time you’re not working on the things mentioned above, you need to be discussing your niche with like minded people.  I’ll be detailing specific effective ways to get the word out in later posts, but in general, just get a conversation going.  Use social media like forums and other blogs to drive peoples’ interest in your direction.  You could easily spend 40 hours a week on this specific part of development.

Concluding Week 1

You should have more than enough work with these tasks.  Always remember that if you have extra time, you can move on to next week if it’s out already, or you can fill your time with spreading the word.  Everything listed in this post should take about 7-10 hours (less getting the word out) to do and cost $11.  You can use this method to build 4 blogs simultaneously as your full time job, or one blog after work.  Tell me how your first week went in the comments below.

Review: Make Money Online

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“Make Money Online” by John Chow with Michael Kwan was an interesting book.  I’ve been doing the online marketing thing for a little while now, so the book had a lot of things I already knew.  That being said, there is still a ton of value in the book, especially for new users.

The price of the book, a cool $10.85 on Amazon as of this post is great.  For that price, why the hell not buy it?  I learned a few tidbits that I didn’t already know, and I consider myself an expert, so I’m sure that if you’re just getting started you’ll learn something too.

Basically the book outlines the tools you need to make a blog, fill it with content, and then promote it.  You’ll find lists of useful links and tools in the appendices of the book as well.  There is a nice balance of physical real world tools, detailed steps, and concepts for success.

You aren’t going to get advanced PPC techniques with this book and you’re not going to get the big scoop on the affiliate game.   The book should really be called Make Money Online Blogging, because the book doesn’t really even touch the tip of the iceberg in terms of making money online.  It does do an excellent job of explaining how to make money from blogging though.

Overall, great book for the price.

Luck is Just Being Prepared for Opportunity

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Many people think that hitting home runs in business is quite a bit about luck.  I hear all the time that I’m lucky I work for myself and I can live the way I do, making my hours, etc.  My first response is usually: “yeah I make my own hours, but usually it’s 16-20 hour days.”  What really happened is I prepared myself mentally to start a business for some time.

When the opportunity presented itself, I was ready to execute.  I knew I would be changing jobs soon, and so I decided to take a leap of faith and depend on my ability to execute.  It worked.  Since then, I’ve started and joined many ventures with many people, some of which didn’t work out, but others that worked tremendously.  Most of all I learned something from every single venture.

I’ve started or joined businesses making t-shirts, building websites, fixing computers, doing real estate, Internet Marketing, general sales, creative writing, fine art, and some other things I’m probably forgetting.  The first extremely sustainable was my main business, Acute Technology, which started as a hodgepodge of IT support and website development, but is now building enterprise level applications for businesses, educational institutions, and government.  I was able to leverage my clout with Acute Technology to get into other projects that I’m passionate about as well.

Luck doesn’t just apply to the large victories, but the small ones as well.  Just the other day, I heard through Twitter that Brian Brushwood was looking for someone to help with Name That Autocomplete, and was on a very tight deadline.  I was able to make things happen for them and make some friends along the way.  I think the ROI on my few hours worth of work will pay off, and that small victory makes me feel lucky, but really I was just listening at the right time, with the right knowledge and skills (preparedness).

What are your thoughts on luck?

Shoemoney System Review – Week 9

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I’ve been using the Shoemoney System for about nine weeks now.  I’ve seen all of the videos up to the ‘Facebook Ads Results’.  I personally love Facebook advertising and it was a great experience seeing some of the training videos, because I could pick up things I hadn’t known about.  I consider myself a fairly advanced user and was still able to walk away from the Facebook series with some new knowledge of FBML and Split Testing.  If you don’t know what those are, you really should be a member. Jeremy does a pretty great job teaching you about it.

Other points:

  • The $50 Facebook coupon was released finally in week nine. This means you should expect to see your coupons about two months after you start the system.  We all look forward to seeing the other $2450 in coupons.
  • I can’t comment on the quality of their support, because I haven’t needed to use them yet. I’ll addend this post if I do need to though.
  • In week 9 I’ve seen 27 Videos. Of those videos, I found that seven were useless (i.e. they were how to sign up for something), 4 were entertaining but not really educational (i.e. interviews and tours), 3 were great for beginners, seven were great for novice/intermediates, and five were advanced.  Overall, I’d say the best customer of the Shoemoney is a beginner to intermediate user.

Looking through the comments from the last review I did, some questions came up that I’d like to answer here:

  • Do you recommend this course for a newbie? Yes.
  • Does anyone know if the people that were allowed to join yesterday [Week 7] are already caught up to the people that joined on day 1? No.  The content is slowly released over time, so people that joined on day one will always be ahead (until they finish).
  • …The ShoeMoney System is now permanently open from Jeremy, I thought it was a exclusive program only for 500 student[s]… The first 500 people were just a test group.  I’m sure he doesn’t want to limit his potential to just 500 people.
  • I am seriously thinking about joining the Shoemoney system but not too sure whether it is actually any good at teaching about Adsense? In week 9, Adsense hasn’t been covered.  If you’re looking for something specifically for Adsense, this may not be the program for you.
  • Do you guys have any idea how to cancel you shoemoney system account? I can find the freaking cancel-button…

Here you go dude. Its all handled by Clickbank:

The ShoeMoney System billing is handled by ClickBank. Unfortunately we have no way to initiate a refund to you from our end, but it’s very easy for you to initiate the refund request and get the funds credited back to your bank account in 72 hours.

All you have to do is go to http://www.clickbank.com/orderDetail.htm

Entetr your Order number (this will be in the email you received from ClickBank when you purchased the product) along with your email address and click ‘Submit’

Then follow the step-by-step instructions for requesting a refund.

  • So I guess it is not possible to just get the whole thing, all 12 months, right away by paying all the money up front? True.  You’ll need to wait for the videos to be released.  This may change in the future though.

Have more questions?

Ask them below.  We’ll get them answered for you!