ProBlogger Podcast: Blog Tips to Help You Make Money Blogging

How I Doubled My Blogging Income to Achieve the Most Profitable Month In today’s lesson, I want to talk about my blogs monetization strategy that is responsible for our biggest month of profit every year. Back in December 2010, I rather impulsively did something on my photography blog that led to our biggest month of earnings ever. It almost doubled a normal month of earnings on my blogs. It was our very first 12 deals of Christmas campaign. In this episode, I want to walk you through exactly what I did that first year and talk about how we’ve evolved that campaign over the last 6 years and have expanded it to run other campaigns and to start a whole new sister business for Digital Photography School. Listen to this podcast in the player above or here on iTunes. Further Resources on How I Doubled My Blogging Income and Had My Most Profitable Month Ever Check out Digital Photography School where the 12 days campaign is kicking off Here you can see the deals in our first year: 24 Hours Left to Save on our End of Year Photography Deals A podcast in which I talk about my first eBook/product and give tips on how to create your first products too.   Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Welcome to episode 171 of the ProBlogger podcast. My name is Darren Rowse, and I’m the blogger, founder of ProBlogger.com – a blog, podcast, event, job board and series of eBooks all designed to help you as a blogger grow your audience, to create content that helps that audience, and to make money from that blog – to build a profitable blog. That’s what ProBlogger is all about. You can learn more about it and find all those eBooks and the job board over at ProBlogger.com. In today’s lesson, I want to talk about a part of my blog’s monetization strategy that is responsible for my biggest month of profit every year. Back in December 2010, I rather impulsively did something on my photography blog that led to our biggest month of earnings ever, to that point. In fact, it almost doubled a normal month of earnings on my blogs in two weeks. It was our very first 12 Deals of Christmas campaign. I’ve talked about 12 Deals of Christmas or 12 Days of Christmas numerous times on ProBlogger, but never really gone into the specifics of it. I kinda mentioned it and kinda described it in a sentence or two, but in this episode, I wanted to walk you through exactly what I did on that very first year and talk about how we’ve evolved that campaign over the last six years, have expanded it to run other campaigns during the year, and also how we expanded it to start a whole new sister business for Digital Photography School. As I’ve said, I’ve never talked in this detail about these 12 Days of Christmas campaigns before, so I hope you find it useful to you. I’m going to share the shownotes as well as some further reading and some links to some of what we’ve done over on the shownotes at problogger.com/podcast/171. Okay, let’s get into it. As I said, today I wanna talk to you about 12 Days of Christmas, the campaign that we’ve been running on Digital Photography School. Now the idea for this particular campaign back in 2010 really started quite simply. In the lead up to Christmas that year, I wanted to put some of our eBooks on special on Digital Photography School. Digital Photography School to this point had been running for about three to three-and-a-half years, and we had launched three eBooks in the previous year-and-a-half. I’ve talked a little bit about the first eBook that we launched Portrait Photography eBook in the previous episode, which I will link to in the shownotes today. Really the idea was to find a way to put that eBook and the other two that we launched since on sale the week or so before Christmas because I was thinking it might be something that people might give to friends and is just is a good time of year to be promoting something. Now at first, I was thinking out loud that I was gonna put them all on sale together for a week before Christmas and just put up a blog post saying, “They’re on sale. They’re 50% off or 30% off (or whatever the percent-off would be).” I would just put them on sale for a week. But as I thought it through and as I brainstormed about how I would do it, I began to talk with a few friends, one of whom was Shayne Tilley, who worked with me for numerous years after that, but at that time was working for a site called SitePoint. As I was tossing the idea around, the idea for a 12-day campaign came to me. Twelve Days of Christmas is a song that I grew up singing, and so I began to think, “What if we did 12 different deals over 12 different days?” From memory, Shayne, who I mentioned before was working at SitePoint at that time, and I’d seen him in the previous year run a 25 Days of Christmas campaign at SitePoint, which he’d mentioned had gone really well. I guess, I got a bit of inspiration from that and from the song Twelve Days of Christmas, and the idea kinda came together. Now it was all very hastily arranged. If you had heard me talk about my entrepreneurial ideas in the past, you can see a bit of a pattern here. I tend to get an idea, and if I don’t do it quickly, it tends to be something that I procrastinate on. So, I’ve learned that if I’m gonna get something done, I need to just do it. This is one of those occasions, where I didn’t procrastinate, and I just got excited about this idea so I began to arrange it. I did a bit of brainstorming, talked to Shayne a little bit about it, talked a little bit about how they ran their 25 Days of Christmas campaign, and I decided I was gonna do a deal every day for 12 days before Christmas. Three of the deals would be on the three eBooks that I had already launched on Digital Photography School. That left me nine other days, and I was like, “What am I gonna do with these nine other days?” I began to look around at what affiliate products I might be able to promote. To this point, on Digital Photography School, I had done a number of affiliate campaigns in the past, and so I had a bit of a head start there. I had some previous relationships in place with people who had products that I could promote. So I began to email out to all of these previous affiliate partners saying, “Are you able to put together a deal for my audience on this particular day?” I was looking for them to put a product on sale at a percentage off.         I hadn’t really thought much about it, and so I was really just open to anyone about the idea. Just before the 12 days came up – I guess, it was the 13th of December – I had worked out my 12 deals. They were three of our eBooks. There was one deal on a physical product. We had a partner who offered a lens and some camera bags. That was another day. We had a training course. That’s five deals. Then we had six software products, mainly relating to post-processing of products. There were three eBooks. There was the lens and camera bag. There was a training course and then the software products. I had 11 deals, and I decided that on the 12th day, because I didn’t have a 12th deal, would bring all the deals back. The idea was that every day of the 12 days before Christmas, I would publish a blog post, announcing that day’s deal. The blog post itself would be the sales page for that particular day. I would also send an email out to our list saying, “Here’s today’s deal.” Each deal ran for 24 hours only, so the email would be, “Hey, we just launched Day 2. It’s a camera bag.” Or “It’s an eBook, and it’s 30% off.” We’d send that email out, and I would point people to the blog post. As I mentioned, Day 12 was an “all deals back,” and we opened up all the deals at the end for a week, until New Year’s Day. From Christmas to New Year’s, people could get the deals again. Then we sent out a final email with 24 hours to go, just before New Year’s Day. You can kind of get the flow for it there. There was a daily deal. Most of the deals were about 30% off. I’ll actually link in the shownotes to a post I wrote at the end of this campaign, which sort of highlights the deals, and you can actually see there the 11 deals that we’d arranged. You can see that most of them were about 30% off – maximum of 30% off. Some of them were 10% off. They weren’t massive deals, but they did pretty well for us. Actually, the week was massive! As I mentioned before, it doubled a normal month of earnings for us. I didn’t really get too many records of our sales back then. We do it a lot better – with keeping records of these 12 Days of Christmas campaigns today. In that first year, I think it was about $87,000 profit, from that 12 Days, and that kind of blew me away. It was a lot of work putting it all together, negotiating it all, but it was well worthwhile. I immediately started thinking about next time. Man! Started thinking about how could I improve this. Some of the lessons I learnt in that first year – firstly, physical products were not really working. We had to run it on Day 1, that lens run, so that people could get that product before Christmas. Our readers didn’t really respond well to it, and those products sold out pretty quickly as well, which frustrated some of our readers as well. Having a virtual product, like an eBook – you’re just not going to sell out of that product, but a physical product – you will sell out. So that was one of them. We were like, “Maybe we shouldn’t do that next year.” It actually turned out we did the same deal the following year, but that was the final time we’ve ever done a physical product. The second lesson I learnt was that the bigger the discount, the better our deals typically went. You’ll see, if you go and have a look at those 11 deals, that 33% off was the biggest deal we had. That worked quite well, but I had in the back of my mind that maybe a bigger discount would work better. I’d actually talked to Shayne about that and what they’d done on their 25 Days of Christmas campaign, and certainly that was something that he reflected back. So I resolved that I wanted to try some 50% off or even more type of deals the following year. Another lesson I learnt was that some of the affiliate partners that we’re working with were offering really quite small commissions. Some of them were offering 50%, which was great, but some of them were only offering 10% commissions. That might have been because they had less margins to play with, particularly with physical products although I couldn’t understand that, but it made those deals, those days – they weren’t as profitable. We were able to generate income for that partner, but we were only taking a small cut of that. So I resolved that in the following year, I wanted to work with partners, who could offer higher commissions, and ideally, 50% commissions because that’s typically what you can earn on an eBook, particularly when you are in a position of power and being able to drive quite a bit of traffic. So I started to look for affiliate partners, who were willing to negotiate on the commission and offer up to 50%. Another thing that I noticed in that first year was that we probably could do better if we had a central page for it. The idea was every day I sent an email out, and I had a blog post. That was pretty much all we did every day – or I did because I ran most of it that first year. So I had a blog post, and I had an email that went out. The idea kind of came that maybe we should have a central page, a 12 Days of Christmas campaign page, where all the deals were listed. This would particularly help when we brought all the deals back, and so that was something – I was like, “we really need to bring in the following year.” The last thing I decided as a result of that first year was that I needed some help to run it. It was a lot to juggle. I was writing blog posts every day. I was writing emails every day. I was negotiating with partners. I was trying to iron out problems with coupon codes and doing all the social media, and I needed someone to help me with it. So the following year, I decided I wanted someone to help me. The next year, I implemented all of those changes. I can’t actually point you to the sales page that we implemented, as it no longer exists unfortunately, but I will put a screenshot of it for you in the shownotes today. Basically to describe it with words though, if you can’t get to the shownotes at problogger.com/podcast/171, it was basically a WordPress page, which featured the deal of the day, and that would change every day. It had little kind of Polaroid pictures of all of the other deals that had been and that were coming. All those little Polaroid pictures were kinda greyed out if the deal wasn’t live. Then on the last day, they weren’t greyed out, and you could click on them to change the featured deal. It was just a place that I can point everyone to every time I mention 12 Days of Christmas, and it kind of was this central place, where people could find all of the deals. That worked quite well for us. I got some help that year. I actually brought Shayne on, who ran that SitePoint 25 Days of Christmas campaign on. He actually came on to run the 12 Days of Christmas campaign for me, which was amazing. He actually did the next few years as well, which took a load off my shoulders. I focused more on writing the blog posts. He focused more on writing the emails and getting that sales page together. We also knew what worked in terms of products in the second year, so we’re able to say to some partners, “No, we don’t wanna do that one anymore because it didn’t convert. We’d rather do different type one.” I was able to negotiate a bit better with some of the partners as well. We negotiated quite a few big discounts, so if I can find the page, I’ll link to it in the shownotes, but the second year, I think over half the deals were over 50% discount. That worked really well. We’re also able to negotiate some bigger commissions from most of our partners as well. It certainly helped that we’d done the 12 Days of Christmas the previous year. We’re able to say to partners, “Hey! This is what we did last year. These are the products that worked. We think we’ll be able to do pretty well.” We’re able to negotiate some pretty good deals and some pretty good commissions as a result. Another change that we did in Year 2, which we’ve continued to do ever since is that we noticed in that first year, when we offered a bundle of products together, that our readers really responded quite well for that. I think in the first year, we offered a few eBooks together. You can buy a library of eBooks, and that converted very well. There’s something about getting a number of things together that our readers really responded to. It also meant that we could charge a little bit more for some of the products. When we offer the higher value product, we’re able to earn more per sale, so we didn’t have to sell as many to get a reasonable return. The second year, over half the deals were actually bundles. We would say, “Buy this eBook and this eBook together.” That really did work very well. Of course, by Year 2, we also had a few more of our own eBooks to promote, which helped as well. I think that year, in Year 2, four of the days where our products, as opposed to three the previous year, and seven of them were partners. We’d also grown our list over that second year as well, and so that helped to contribute to better results. In Year 2, we almost tripled our profit from the first year. That was the biggest leap that we’ve ever had in terms of the returns on these. That was the first two years. Now I’m gonna fast-forward to today. We’ve now completed five of these 12 Days of Christmas campaigns, and in the coming couple of days, we will start our sixth one. If you’re listening to this a couple of days after this podcast goes live, it will already be going, and if you just go to Digital Photography School, you’ll be able to find where the campaign is running. The concept today is very similar. We still do daily deals. We still email our list every single day during the campaign. It is worth saying that the first email we send – we actually send an email before the first day, so we send an email on Day 0 (we call it). In that email, we let our readers know what is coming, and we give them a way to opt out of getting those emails. Some of our readers just don’t want the deals, and so every email we send, we give them an option to unsubscribe from getting any more deals. That enables them to unsubscribe without unsubscribing from our regular newsletter, so we acknowledge that some of our readers just don’t want to get these deals. We don’t wanna annoy them, so we allow them to unsubscribe at that point. We still do a mix of our own products and other people’s affiliate products. I think this year, we have five internal deals (these are our own products). We also have five affiliate products. And this year, we are bundling together one day, where we are putting together an affiliate product with some of our own products. We’ve got a course and some ebooks that we’re putting together. That’s a little bit different again. Takes a little bit of a hack to put that together in our backend, but we found a way to do that. A few other things that we now do that we didn’t use to do that might be interesting for those of you who are thinking about doing this type of thing – one of the big things that we try and do is to really shape the 12 days. We think about the flow of the 12 days, and there’s a number of things I guess that we are factoring in here. We treat the 12 days as an event for our readers. We want to take our readers on a journey, so one of the things you’ll notice, if you do get our emails, is that quite often we will refer from one day to the next. We’ll say something about yesterday’s deal in the introduction, and towards the end, we might point to what’s happening the next day. We don’t reveal the next deal, but we actually, I guess, get our readers used to the idea that there’s more coming and that we’re building some momentum with this thing. If we have a deal that really works well, the next day, we’ll mention the fact that yesterday our servers nearly crashed, if that was the case, or if there’s a big deal coming the next day that we think’s really going to be great for anyone liking portrait photography, we might mention that to build some expectations. We’re thinking about how we take our readers on a journey a little bit more. We’re also thinking about the days of the week. Now, we’re running this over 12 days, and we’ll generally finish the campaign on Christmas eve, Australian time, which isn’t a great way to celebrate Christmas eve, let me tell you. It’s a lot of work, and we typically send our emails at 10:00pm so I am up until 10:00pm on Christmas eve, as is my team. But we’re also thinking about the days of the week, and so during that campaign, depending upon what day of the week Christmas falls, we will be sending some emails on weekends and some on weekdays. Some years – we actually send out three or four emails over weekends. We find weekends are slower, so we try and put deals on the weekends that we don’t think will convert quite as well. We put our proven winner deals – deals we’ve had in the past or deals that we think will really appeal to our readers – we try and put them in the midweek. So we’re shaping the flow of the week that way. We’re also thinking about not putting too many of the same type of product in a row, so typically we will have a couple of courses, some eBooks, some software, and we don’t wanna have three days in a row of ebooks or three days in a row of Lightroom presets. We wanna mix things up on that front, and we also wanna mix things up in terms of the topic. We don’t want three days in a row all on portrait photography. If we’ve got more than one portrait photography thing, we do this year, we try and split them apart a little bit so there’s variety there, so our readers aren’t getting bored. I guess, we’re trying to do the same thing with price points as well. We don’t want four really expensive products in a row. We wanna break that up with a cheaper one. One of the things actually I will mention in terms of price points is that the first year, most of our products were quite cheap. We did have a couple of expensive ones, but most of them were kind of under $15 in that first year. One of the things that has changed a little over the years is that we do have more in the medium price range. This year, our first day is a $5 product, so it’s more of an impulse buy, and we’ve put that on Day 1 to kinda ease our readers into it. We’re putting a cheap one right up front. We also have a cheap one right at the end as well. We have what we call our “$9 eBook Day,” where we put all our eBooks on sale for $9. Bringing those ones under $10, tends to bring a bit more of an impulse buy. It removes one of the barriers from people engaging with this campaign, but in between those, most of our deals actually are in the medium to more expensive price range. They’re $29 up to $90. Some years, we have them over $100, and these are a little bit more expensive, but one of the things that we’ve noticed is that our readers do respond well to bundles of products, as I’ve mentioned before. They also do seem to respond in their price range, once they warmed up, once we’ve given them a few cheaper ones at the start. I guess that’s something that I would encourage you to look for: what price points are people responding well to? For example, Day 1 is a $5 eBook. Very cheap. Very impulse buy. Day 2 is actually a more expensive one, and what we’ve done with Day 2 is we’ve put a cause together with six eBooks so it’s really quite a big bundle. It usually would retail for $414. It’s a portrait photography bundle, and we’re doing it for – I think it’s probably gonna come out at about $90, so it’s a fairly large discount. $90 though – it’s a fairly significant price. It’s not an impulse buy, but I guess, one of the things that’s good about having a $90 product is you don’t need to sell as many as you do when you’ve got a $5 product to make a certain amount of money. Mix up your price points. Work out what works well. The other thing I’ll say that we do differently this year is we have a mix of products that are single products and bundles, and we also give people an “and/or” option. This year we have one day, on Day 4, where you could buy our Lightroom presets for $19. These are plugins that you get for Lightroom, and we offer three of these products. You could buy each one of them or anyone of them for $19, or you can buy all three for $49. That’s another variation. Rather than having just a bundle, you can actually buy that one as single products as well. We find that’s good because some of our readers have already bought one so they don’t need the whole bundle. They just need the extra one that they haven’t got yet, whereas some of our readers haven’t got any, so giving people options on that front sometimes works as well. We’re mixing things up. We’re always trying new things. As I mentioned before, we have our $9 eBook Day right at the end. It’s our last day, Deal 11, and that’s where we put all of our eBooks so there’s 30 or so eBooks. They’re all on sale for $9, and the beauty of that day is that some of our readers actually end up buying four or five of them. They add a number of things to their shopping cart, and that day works quite well because people are picking up multiple products in one transaction. That’s some of the things that we’re doing to shape our 12 days to mix things up in terms of what people can buy, different price points, different options to buy different types of things. A few other things that we do today that we didn’t do in the past – now we really put a lot of effort into promoting the deals around the rest of the site. Everyday on Digital Photography School, we’ll have over 100,000 people come to the site, and only a small percentage of them would ever have found those deals because they were just blog posts. So this year, we actually have a small hovering bar across the top or the bottom of the site, depending on which page you’re on, which will feature the deal. So anyone arriving in from Google or from another site or from social media will see the fact that we’ve got a deal on, and the hovering bar will have the product featured but also have a countdown ticker showing how long there is on the deal. We also promote these days to social media everyday during the deal. A blog post goes up. An email goes out. I’m sharing it on Facebook once a day. I’m sharing it on Twitter multiple times a day as well. We’re driving people to those deals a lot more. Last year, we also did a big opt-in push to our list in the weeks before the deal, before 12 Days of Christmas last year, we gave away a PDF, like a little mini eBook on how to photograph the holidays. We gave it away to all of our current subscribers, and that was just like a gift. We positioned that as, “Hey there! The holidays are approaching. Here’s a gift to help you to photograph.” That helped increase readers’ sentiment from our readers. We actually had quite a few really nice emails from readers saying or subscribers saying, “Hey, thanks for that. That was really good.” I guess, in some ways, that primed them a little bit for the deals that were coming, and we mentioned the fact that there were some deals coming as well. We also offered that guide as an opt-in as well to new subscribers. We worked I guess for the weeks before this campaign to really grow our list as much as we possibly could. Another thing that we do that might be interesting to those of you doing this type of thing – the first few years, we tried to send emails or I tried to send emails that were html emails, that had the graphic. They had a picture of the product in the email. We found that html emails didn’t really convert for our audience, and so we switched to sending very short sharp, plain text emails for these 12 deals. That was a bit of a surprise for us, but we found when we did that – when we split test that, that we converted a lot better. So the emails we send to our audience over those 12 days are very short, to the point. They’re informative. They’re polite. They’re not very sales-y. They’re very simple. Our readers seem to respond well to that, and those emails seem to get delivered at a higher rate than the html ones did for us. That’s one thing that we have changed over the years. We’ve tested a variety of different approaches with email, and our plan text ones always seem to go better. Another thing that we’ve put more time into over the years is to only try to promote things we know will work. This is really hard to get right. Every year, we have products or deals that unexpectedly flop and deals that unexpectedly fly. Last year, we had one day, which just blew us away. It unexpectedly blew us away. It was a product that we weren’t completely sure of, but it just flew. It did really well, and then we’ve had other deals, where we thought it was gonna be big. We had a big discount on a product we thought really would appeal to our readers, and it just didn’t. Sometimes you just don’t quite know, but wherever possible, we try and test the deals or the products in the year before we do the 12 Days of Christmas. We do this a number of ways. We do do some affiliate campaigns during the year, where I’ll be able to test it a little bit. We’ve got a sister site for Digital Photography School called SnapnDeals, which I’ll talk about in a few moments, where we’re able to test some of the deals as well. I guess, we’re also looking at our own products and what’s worked well for us in the past, what type of bundles are working. We really are trying to think very carefully about the deals that we put together and try to put together deals that have a proven track record. Everyday during this campaign has the potential to make us really quite good profit, and if we have a flop day, that hurts the business so we try and test as much as we can beforehand. The other thing that we do differently today, that we didn’t use to do, is that if we’re promoting an affiliate product, we no longer send our readers from our email to a landing page on our site. We send them directly to the affiliate’s page, so we’re trying to get people directly to the page they’re gonna purchase from, rather than put another page in the middle of that process. Rather than sending them to our 12 Days of Christmas page, we’re just sending them straight to that site. That really has eliminated the need for our readers to click an extra thing. It’s one less hoop that they have to go through to get the sale, and as a result, we get less readers getting lost. We get higher conversions, so that works quite well for us. A few other things that I would encourage you to know about this campaign – I really want to emphasize – firstly, it takes an enormous amount of work, and whilst it’s very profitable for us, it is worth acknowledging that it kind of destroys the lead up to Christmas for us as a team on some levels. It is hard work. As I said before, we actually send our emails at 10:00pm Australian time, and that’s because a lot of our audience is in the US. We want to get those emails to our audience as they’re waking up. Now we could schedule a lot of that, but we don’t wanna send our emails until we know the sales page is perfect, so we’re staying up. We’re making sure that when the pages change over from one product to the next, that everything’s working, and then we send the email. That does mean a lot of work both during the day, but also some late nights for us as well. I typically give the team a bit of time off after Christmas, but it is worth acknowledging that it’s a lot of work to do. In the lead up to this campaign, we are negotiating deals with partners. We’re writing sales copy, setting up sales pages, setting up our own products. During the campaign, there’s a lot of work, getting emails ready to send, writing blog posts, and getting them ready. We can do some of this beforehand, but some of it just needs to be done at the last minute. Getting social media ready, changing prices on products, making sure that everything’s working, monitoring social media, and then there’s the customer service that comes with this as well. When you are doing a lot of sales of your products, you get a lot of emails from people saying, “How do I download it? It’s not working for me. The PDF isn’t opening” – those types of little issues that people have when they buy your products, and so there’s a lot of work during the campaign and then after the campaign as well. You’re looking after the partners, sending them their revenue share, refunding customers who aren’t satisfied, and changing everything back on your site to the way it should be. So there’s a lot of work in it, and it’s worth acknowledging that. Yes, it can be very profitable, but you are going to work out a lot on this type of campaign. Another thing worth knowing is that you will get some pushback from your readers. As I mentioned before, we put a big button in the first email, where readers can unsubscribe from getting any more deal emails. That’s totally fine. Some of our readers do that, but some don’t press “Unsubscribe” and then complain to you and get annoyed even though you’ve given them a way out. You are going to get some pushback. We find that it’s a relatively small percentage of our readers, who push back or unsubscribe from everything and never come back again, but you will get some of that. That can hurt. You’ll get some nasty emails. You’ll get some people telling you that you’re greedy even though this is the way you produce free content for them for the rest of the year. So you kind have to psych yourself up for a bit of a battering on that front. I guess, thicken your skin for a little bit for that as well. The way I kinda look at it is that these 12 days does enable me to put together all the free content on my site for the rest of the year. This is a big profitable time for us, and it’s the way that we monetize our site and keep it sustainable. So that’s typically what I go back to. Any reader who pushes back – if I get a nasty social media comment, I try and explain that to them. Some people get it; some people don’t. Unfortunately, that’s just the way it is. Keep that in mind. It’s for that reason, we try and actually keep the weeks before 12 Days of Christmas fairly low key on the site. We don’t tend to do much promotion on the site. We don’t tend to launch any products in the month or so before 12 days of Christmas. The month after 12 Days of Christmas is pretty low key as well. One, it’s for us as a team to recover. We typically take some holidays over the summer period here in Australia, so January’s a fairly low time for us. But it also gives our readers a bit of a breather as well. They’ve just had 12 emails from us in 12 days, so we wanna pull back a little bit on that front, and it’s worth keeping that in mind. The other thing I’ll say is during the 12 days, I try and keep the rest of the site as normal as possible. I don’t want the whole site, the whole blog to be all about the daily deals. We still do a blog post everyday about the deal, but we still also publish the two normal blog posts we do everyday. There’s two normal tutorials going up on the site everyday, in addition to the promotional stuff. So anyone coming to the site for the first time’s not just gonna see 12 promotional posts on the front page. They’re gonna see some of that, but they’ll also see some other good content as well. That’s also a good thing to come back to. Readers, who push back and say, “All you’re doing is promotion.” You can actually say to them, “Actually, no. We’re still doing the same amount of tutorials in addition to the promotional stuff.” Last thing I wanna talk about is how we’ve kinda extended the 12 Days of Christmas. We’ve done that in two ways. Firstly, we now also do a midyear version of this. We call it our “Summer Sale” for those in the northern hemisphere. We also call it the “Midyear Sale,” and it’s not as long. It’s not 12 days. It’s actually a 7-day campaign. We typically do it at the start of July, so it’s kind of right in the middle of the year. It’s seven days with seven deals. We did this for a couple of reasons. One – it’s a revenue-earner, doing these types of campaigns so we started to wonder, “Could we do this again during the year at some point?” so we tested it a few years ago. It worked quite well. I guess, the other reason that we wanted to do it was to have a place, where we could test some of the deals that we might feature at the end of the year. We actually wanted to put more sure bets up in 12 Days of Christmas, and so this is one place where we can test a few of these deals and also make some extra income. You don’t have to do this in 12 days before Christmas. In fact, if you’re hearing this and thinking about doing it this year, may be too late to pull it together. You might better pull something together like I did in my first year relatively quickly, but maybe you could do a campaign similar to this for New Year’s. Kick your year off with a bang, with seven deals. Or maybe if your site’s related to relationships, you could do 12 Days of Valentine’s Day or 7 Days of Valentine’s Day, sort of a lead up to Valentine’s Day. Maybe you could do something midyear like we do or maybe there’s some other event in your calendar, seasonal event in your calendar that’s relevant to your readers. I know some parenting blogs do these types of deals in the lead up to school, going back. It could really be anytime of year. I guess, I wanna put that out there, that it doesn’t have to be 12 Days of Christmas. It could be shorter. It could be a longer campaign. You wanna be careful not to tip your readers over too much, and it could be any time of the year. The other thing that we did in 2012, we’d run two of this – 2010, 2011, but both worked really well for us. We started to talk as a team about the fact that there seems to be a segment of our audience that really wanted deals. They were responding to these deals in the lead up to Christmas, and we actually were getting emails from some of our readers saying, “Can you do more deals?” Now that kinda frightened us a little bit cause it was so much work to do, and we also knew that some of our readers didn’t want any deals so there was this bit of a tension between two types of readers then. We started to ask ourselves, “How could we do more deals without annoying our current readers?” So we came out with this idea that instead of doing weekly deals or monthly deals during the year, that we would do a whole new site called SnapnDeals. This was around the time that Groupon and other daily deal sites were starting up, and we started to kind of think, “What could we do that’s like a Groupon for photographers?” That’s where the idea for SnapnDeals came about. I registered the domain, and Shayne, who was working with me at that time, set it up. Basically if you go to SnapnDeals.com, you’ll find there our response to the fact that we saw amongst our readers, people who wanted regular deals. We do two or three deals a week there that all relate to photographers. We send an email to anyone who signs up from that site, that wants the deals, and so we do a weekly email there. We promoted it that first year very lightly to our audience on Digital Photography School. We didn’t really push it too hard during 2012, but at the end of 2012, when we did our 12 Days of Christmas, we added a 13th email to our campaign. This was an email that we sent our readers on New Year’s Day. Once the deals had all finished, and it was like an email that said something like, “Do you want more deals? We know some of you don’t, but if you want more photography deals, we set up this new site that has weekly deals for you.” Anyone who was interested went and had a look at the site. We actually found out first year that 4000 people from our list signed up to get weekly emails that were purely deals. Now 4000 is not that many in comparison to how many we have on our full DPS list. We’ve got hundreds of thousand of people. It’s a relatively small audience, but every year, since we’ve done that, we have seen that list grow. I think we’re approaching 20,000 people on that list now. Now that’s a more smaller list, but it’s a list of people who have self-identified as wanting more deals. As a result, it is a very responsive list, in comparison to our general Digital Photography School list. If you think in your audience that perhaps there is a segment of your audience who want a lot more promotional type of stuff – it won’t be everyone. It’s probably not the majority of your readers, but there might be a segment of people there who do want more promotional type material. Then maybe, there’s some sense in setting up another site or maybe setting up a list that is purely for those types of people, that you can promote a little bit harder, too. This is a little business that started in 2012. It started relatively small, but every year it grows. I would think, over the years ahead, that every year that we continue to do 12 Days of Christmas and finish off with that type of email that it will continue to grow even more. It’s just another idea that might be an extension upon this type of concept for you. I really hope you found something useful in what I’ve talked about today, whether you do a 12-day or 12 deals of Christmas campaign or whether you take it and run with it in a different direction, this has been an important part of my business over the years. It continues to be the most profitable month of the year for us. We have had some years that have been bigger than others. It all really depends on the deals, so we have our fingers crossed that this year, we have some great deals. If you are interested in checking them out, it goes live on the 13th of December at Digital Photography School, and you, like some of my readers, know what some of the deals already are if you’ve listened carefully today. Check that out. I will link to it in the shownotes as well. You can find today’s shownotes with some links to some examples of what we’ve done in the past at problogger.com/podcast/171. You’ll get a full transcript of today’s show there. You’ll get some links, and you have the opportunity to leave a comment. If you have any questions or if you have any examples of similar types of things that you’ve done, I would love to hear about them. Share the knowledge. Share the tips. Share the things that you’ve found that have worked well there, and we’ll all learn as a result of it. Again, the shownotes are at problogger.com/podcast/171. Thanks again for listening to the ProBlogger podcast. If you like to be updated every time we publish a new podcast, you can subscribe to our ProBlogger Plus newsletter on the shownotes, if you go to problogger.com/podcast/171 and scroll right to the bottom of the shownotes. You’ll see a yellow button, and if you click that, you can add in your email address. We will send you an email once a week that has a link to the new shows in the ProBlogger podcast, as well as any new ProBlogger blog posts that we have published and the occasional promotional posts. We will promote occasionally an affiliate partner deal that we have arranged. Speaking of deals, after today’s show, or if we launch a new product, which we do plan to do – early new year, you’ll get notified of that. We don’t spam you with lots of deals. It’s a very occasional thing. Really, what you will be subscribing to there is the free weekly ProBlogger Plus newsletter, which comes out every Thursday night, Australian time, Thursday morning if you’re in the US. Anyway, if you want to check that out, look for the yellow button at the bottom of all our shownotes, and you can subscribe and get notified of all new episodes. The other way to do it, of course, is to subscribe to our podcast over in iTunes. While you’re at it, if you leave us a review and a rating – that would help, too. Thanks for listening. Chat with you next week on the ProBlogger podcast.  How did you go with today’s episode? Enjoy this podcast? Sign up to our ProBloggerPLUS newsletter to get notified of all new tutorials and podcasts below.

How to Stay Inspired and Avoid Bloggers Burn Out In today’s lesson I want to talk about blogger burnout and how to avoid it. Most bloggers start out blogging with an incredible burst of passion, excitement and energy with their blogging, but usually at some point within the first year or two, many bloggers come up against their first bout of blogger burnout. It can happen in different ways and for different reasons. Some bloggers push through it and others get stopped in their tracks by it. Most successful bloggers go through it numerous times – I certainly have. So in today’s episode, I want to share 9 strategies for staying fresh and inspired with your blogging so that you can avoid bloggers burn out. So if you’re feeling burnt out at the moment or you want to get ahead of your next blogging slump and develop some strategies for avoiding it altogether – this is for you. Note: listen to this episode in the player above or here on iTunes (look for episode 170). Further Resources on 9 Ways to Stay Inspired and Avoid Bloggers Burn Out The Biggest Lesson I Learned About Building a Profitable Blog in 2015 7 Productivity Tips For Bloggers Battling Blogger’s Block – Where do you get Stuck?   Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Welcome to Episode 170 of the ProBlogger podcast. My name’s Darren Rowse, and I’m the blogger behind ProBlogger.com – a blog, podcast, event, job board, series of eBooks, and a real book as well – all designed to help you as a blogger to grow your audience and to make money from your blog. You can learn more about ProBlogger at ProBlogger.com. In today’s lesson, I wanna talk to you about an issue that impacts most bloggers at one time or another – blogger burnout. I wanna teach you how to avoid it, give you some strategies that you could put in place when you’re facing bloggers burnout at the moment or whether you want to stop it happening to you in the future. Most bloggers do start out blogging with an incredible burst of passion, excitement, energy, with lots of hopes and dreams of where their blogging will take them. As a result, they start out really strong, but usually at some point, within the first year or maybe two years of blogging, they come against their first bout of blogger burnout. It can happen for different reasons and happen in different ways. Most bloggers tend to push through it, or at least try to push through it – that first bout. But some, even at the first time they hit it, gets stopped in their tracks. Now, most successful bloggers go through this numerous times, and I certainly have. I can think back over the last 14 years of blogging. I’ve hit bloggers burnout many times. In today’s episode, I wanna share with you nine strategies for staying fresh and inspired with your blogging, so that you avoid bloggers burnout. I’m gonna speak from my own experience of having gone through this or having seen bloggers burnout approaching me, and I’m getting better now at seeing it coming before it actually hits and putting things in place as it approaches to actually stop it hitting in full force. So if you are feeling burnt out at the moment with your blog – it does happen at this time of year for many of us – or you wanna get ahead of your next bout of blogging burnout, I wanna share with you some strategies for avoiding it today. This episode is for you. You can find today’s shownotes at problogger.com/podcast/170. Yesterday, I celebrated my blogger-versary. I might sound like a bit of a crazy thing to do, but I do have a little alert in my calendar that goes off on the 27th of November every year. It’s actually the 28th today, and so last night, I turned to Vanessa and said, “Guess what? It’s my blogger-versary! It’s been 14 years since I started blogging to this day.” Started in 2002. Blogging has been very good to me in so many different ways. I don’t really have the time to go through them all, but it has given me a place to express myself and find my voice. It’s helped me to develop confidence in myself, helped me to think through my ideas and improve those. It’s opened up opportunities that I’d never dreamed of: to meet amazing people, to travel around the world, and to build a business out of the ideas in my head. That is a strange thing to say, but out of ideas has come a whole income. It’s enabled me to create work with real flexibility that allows me to spend time with my family and friends and to volunteer my time to causes that I believe in. Hopefully that allows me to make the world a better place, as I’m doing all of that, through the sharing of my story and what I know with others. I love blogging! It has been so good to me and to many others that I see, but I would be lying if I said that blogging was always easy. It hasn’t always been this amazing time of opportunities falling in my lap and fun times. The reality is that publishing a piece of content almost everyday for 14 years is both an amazing privilege and a lot of fun but is also incredibly challenging at times. Almost every year since I’ve started, over those 14 years, I’ve had periods of time where I felt doubt and where I’ve wondered whether I should give up or where I felt burnt out by blogging. Whilst I do sing the praises of blogging in many episodes, I really want to go to this place today, because it’s often these tough times that don’t get talked about on podcasts about blogging. Most bloggers do have patches like these. If you’ve been blogging for a year or two years or three years, you probably had one yourself or have come close to burning out. Bloggers burnout comes in different forms, and it comes for different reasons. It can be that it comes when you run out of things to say on your topic, when you feel like you’ve said everything there is to say. You suddenly have this block. Sometimes it comes because you’re feeling disillusioned with your topic, for one reason or another, or maybe you’re becoming disillusioned with blogging or the niche that you’re in and how other bloggers are treating one another. Sometimes it comes when you feel like you’ve been doing a lot of hard work and it’s not paying off. You’re not reaching the goals that you set for yourself. Maybe it comes when you’re feeling worn out, where you’ve overworked yourself. Or maybe it comes because you started blogging for reasons of creativity and self-expression, but then you feel like you’ve built a machine that you have to keep feeding in order for it to attract a readership or to be profitable. Many bloggers start out for one reason and then end up with a blog that really doesn’t serve why they started it. Or maybe it’s just you’re feeling overwhelmed by all the things that you need to do to keep your blog running. I could go on and on with this list of types of bloggers burnout that do come and the reasons for it. But, as I say, over the last 14 years, I’ve noticed particularly at this time of year, at the end of the year, when many bloggers have been busy all year, and now they’re reviewing their year or they’re seeing other people review their year and talk about their successes. It’s so easy to feel a bit down about your blog. So today, I really do want to share with you some strategies for keeping yourself inspired and fresh, particularly as you head into the new year, next year. I’ve got nine things I wanna go through with you. Some of these will be more relevant to you than others, but hopefully there are things that you can keep in the back of your mind for the next time that bloggers burnout does approach you. The first thing I wanna talk about briefly is to know your limits and set realistic goals and expectations. Many bloggers that I talk to feel pressure to have to blog in a certain way that’s just not realistic for the amount of time they have or the resources that they’re currently able to put into blogging. For example, a lot of bloggers that I talked to have this expectation that they have to post daily. This is something – I don’t know where it came from, but there’s this expectation amongst some bloggers that they have to post everyday. It’s just not feasible for many bloggers to do. I actually remember when Vanessa, my wife, started blogging a few years ago now. She was juggling a part-time job. We still had one of our boys at home; the other two boys were at school, but it was a short day. She’s got a busy life, full of friends and family and other interests and passions that she pursues. When she started her blog, I remember having a chat with her about how often she was going to post, and whilst on one hand, she did have this idea that a daily post would be a good thing, she was really smart in that she set herself the goal to do just three posts a week. I don’t mean “just” because they were three pretty meaty posts. She’s a fairly detailed writer. She decided three posts a week was more realistic for her, and whilst daily posting was probably tempting for her at the time, I’m so glad she made that decision to do three good posts a week because it’s a decision that has made her blog sustainable now for the two or three years that she’s been at it. I look into the future and I see that she could continue to keep that amount up. She set herself a goal that was realistic. Now there’s also been other times, where she said, “Well, this week, I’ve got a really busy week” or “This week we’re away” or “This week I’ve got these other demands in my life, so I’m only gonna post two times or even one time.” She’s flexible with that goal, and I think this is something that many bloggers need to really grasp onto. The sky won’t fall on your head if you post a little less one week, or even if you take a full week off. To have some realistic expectations and goals that are based upon your actual reality and your availability I think is really important. The other part of it is your expectations, and I think a lot of bloggers do get into blogging and then get depressed, disillusioned, and dejected when their expectations are not met. I’ve seen this in many areas of life. Often it’s our expectations that get us into trouble when things don’t hit what we’re hoping for. I see bloggers starting with unrealistic expectations all the time, dreaming of millions of readers, millions of dollars in short amounts of time, but the reality is: if you’ve been blogging for a while now, you know that successful bloggers are almost always built on years and years of consistently producing useful content. It takes significant time and energy to build that. I guess, one of the things I wanna say is if you are feeling a bit burnt out, maybe you need to look at your goals and ask yourself – are your goals realistic? Also your expectations of the results – are they realistic? Chances are, if you’ve been blogging for a year or two now, you need to change some of those things because most of us do. Most of us start out with some sort of unrealistic goal or expectation, so it’s about trying to find that middle ground of having big dreams but also grounded expectations. That was the first thing. Know your limits and set realistic goals and expectations. Number 2: find your groove with a routine that works for you. Now, I find that blogging is more effortless (and it’s never completely effortless), but I find it easier when I am in a groove and a rhythm with my blogging. I find that, if I set myself some kind of a rhythm for my week and for the way that I produce content, that I’m much better at producing content. Then there is much less tension about my blogging. I’m not going to go into great depth here because in Episode 40 I did share my weekly schedule, my weekly template, where I talked about the times that I write content, the times that I edit content, and the times that I come up with ideas for blog posts. I think if you can design yourself a rhythm like that, it can really help a lot. I’ve actually got it in a spreadsheet, in an actual calendar. You don’t need to do that. In the old days for me, it was simply about me deciding that in the mornings, I was going to write, and in the evenings, I was going to edit. I had limited time, and so I had an hour or so in the morning, an hour or so in the evening. Then I had to go and do my real job, so I set myself that rhythm. It was very simple in those early days. Write in the mornings; edit in the evenings. That might be all you really need to do. I found that once I got into that rhythm, it was easier, and it would flow easier. Now there are still tough times, but that was half the battle – getting into the rhythm of it. The same is true for my exercise. I know that if I go on a holiday for three weeks and don’t exercise for three weeks, it’s really tough to exercise, but if I get into the rhythm again of walking everyday at midday and going to the gym Tuesdays and Thursday mornings – once I’m in that rhythm, it just becomes what I do. So it’s about establishing that type of rhythm. I think that really does help you to keep things sustained – helps you to have that well-oiled machine. Think about the things that you need to do and when you could place them into your week, whether you need to create that calendar or whether you just need to decide that “Monday mornings, I’m gonna do this. Tuesday mornings, I’m gonna do this, and Thursday evenings, I’m gonna to do that.” That might be enough to help you to get into that groove. Number 3 thing that I would encourage you to do is to identify the sticking points, to identify “where am I getting stuck?” Usually, when you have bloggers burnout, there’s a particular area where you’re getting stuck. It may be that you have a lack of ideas to write about; that might be the area. That might lead you to feel really disillusioned about your blogging, which leads you to feel unmotivated, which leads you to other things, but really, at the core of it, is that you are lacking ideas. Or maybe you are really stuck on feeling like you’re comparing yourself to other bloggers, and that’s the core of it. You’re comparing yourself to others, and then you’re realizing you’re not meeting your expectations. Then you’re feeling dejected, and you can kind of see that there’s a root cause of your blogger burnout. It could really be so many different things that are at the cause of it, but it’s really important to try and to identify what that particular thing is that is starting it for you. Back in Episode 83, I actually talked about blogger’s block and getting stuck in the creation of content, and in that particular episode, I talked about three different types of blogger’s block: idea generation, being one; the creation of your content, getting into writing of your content; and then the other part is completing your content. They’re three very different types of blogger’s block. I talk in that episode about if you are just trying to fix your blogger’s block without identifying the particular type of blogger’s block that you have, you’re gonna get yourself into trouble. What I’m trying to say here is if you’re feeling burnt out, try and dig into what exactly is causing it. What is the core thing that is holding you back, getting you down, and burning you out? It may take you a little while to dig into that. You may need to have a chat with someone about it. You might wanna even find someone who can help you – some professional help – to actually dig into those types of issues. If you can identify the exact issue that is holding you back, it puts you in a much better position to be able to come up with a strategy to fix it. To be really transparent here, I’ve actually been approaching blogger’s block over the last couple of months. I’ve actually been feeling like my energy and motivation has been lacking these last couple of months, and part of that is because we had our ProBlogger event. Usually I go into a bit of a slump after that. It’s the highlight of the year, and everything seems a little bit greyer after the event because the event’s so much fun. The other thing I realized is that this year I haven’t had as much time off. The more I thought about why I’m feeling like I’m feeling like, the better position I was in to do something about that. As I was chatting with Vanessa the other night about how I was feeling and feeling a bit dejected and unmotivated, we dug into it, and after half an hour or so of really talking it through, we realized that I just haven’t had enough time off this year. So having identified that, I’m in a much better position to be able to do something about that, so we’re already beginning to plan the breaks that we’re going to have as a family next year. Identify where you’re getting stuck. What is the core thing that’s facing you because burnout really can be the end result of lots of different things that could be going on for you. Really dig into that and talk to someone about it. Number 4 thing I wanna talk about in avoiding bloggers burnout is to look after your body. I’m not going to go into great depth about this because it is something that I’ve done a whole episode on in the past, but as I’ve said before, you’ll only ever be able to sustain having a healthy blog over the long haul if you’re able to maintain a healthy you. Behind a healthy blog, I believe, needs to be a healthy you. One of the biggest reasons that I see bloggers burning out is that they’re just not in a healthy place themselves. Of course, this can happen on a number of fronts. It could be your physical health. It could be your mental health. It can be your brain health and its learning. It could be your sleep. All these different areas do play into it. For me, physical health is a big part of it. I realized about three years ago now that my blogging was suffering incredibly because I wasn’t looking after myself on a physical front. My diet and my lack of exercise were really beginning to take a toll on my body and how my body was performing, but it was also impacting my outlook and my positivity, my mental health. It was also beginning to have an impact on my creativity, as well, and my alertness and my ability to output great content. I’m not gonna retell the whole story about how I pulled myself out of that because I did it back in Episode 38, except to say that your physical health is one thing that you need to pay attention to, if you are feeling burnt out. It may be that you need to start to exercise, build that into your routine. It may be that you need to change that diet in some way. I have to say – it’s not easy. We all have these temptations and struggles in getting the balance right with our physical health, but it’s definitely connected. I’ve talked to a number of bloggers since I’ve shared that story back in Episode 38 of me losing some weight and getting some exercise into my life and changing my diet. A number of bloggers have reported back that that inspired them to go on and do the same thing for themselves, and they’ve seen it flow-on effect into other areas of their life: their blogs being one, their relationships being another, and other aspects of their lives as well. Look after your body. I think it’s really important. One of the best things that I’ve ever done to improve my blog is to build a walk into my day and to get a stand-up desk. It really has changed things quite a bit. Another thing that I’ve been doing over the last few weeks is going out and playing basketball. While my kids are at school, I go out and play on their basketball ring in the middle of the day, just five minutes. Just to run around, shoot some hoops – actually gets the blood pumping a little, come back to blogging in a fresh way. It really does help. That’s number 4: look after your body. Number 5 is all about taking breaks, developing a system and a rhythm for your day, like the calendar I talked about before, my weekly template. That’s great. That helps me to be more productive. That’s about how to work better and work smarter, but I think just as important is to think about rest – is to think about when you are going to not work on your blog. I’m a strong believer that if you get rest right, if you get sleep right, if you get taking a break from your blogging right, it will help your blog in so many different ways. The better you rest, the better you work. For me, I’m thinking about rest and taking time away from my blog on a number of fronts, different time frames. For me, the daily rest. I work business hours; I try and work 9:00 to 5:00, but I take a walk in the middle of the day. I take a break in the middle of the day. I take a break at the start and end of the day. A weekly basis for me – and it’s gonna be different for everyone because we’ve all got different commitments – I try not to work on weekends. I have a couple of really short bursts on a Saturday morning and on a Sunday evening, but everywhere in between is a time off. That weekly rest is really important. Then on a yearly front, I’m trying to take time off. I’ve just admitted to you that this year I wasn’t as good at it, but I try and take a couple of weeks off in January and a couple of weeks off in the middle of the year as well. Then we have a couple of long weekends as well. These are things that we schedule ahead of time as a family. These offline times are so important, being unplugged, not thinking about your blog all day every day. These rejuvenate you. They’re also good for other areas of your life as well. They’re good for your relationships, which I think also has an impact upon your blog. If things are good in your friendships, in your family, then that frees you up to think creatively about your blog as well. Take breaks. Number 6 is to look after your relationships, and I’ve just talked about relationships, taking breaks with family, friends is good for your relationships. We work in a space, which is very often described as social media, as being a social space, but most of our interactions if you’re like me are online and in virtual nature. I remember when I started blogging, I’ve discovered this whole community of people that I could connect with, and I became almost too virtual in my relationships. It was kind of a strange thing. I just got married, and I had this really wonderful relationship with my wife, but many of my other friendships were coming from the online space. It turned out for me – that wasn’t an overly healthy thing. Now, online relationships can be very positive, and I do think there’s a really good argument for finding some good online friends to share the experiences that we have as bloggers, but I also think it’s so important to have good, grounded, real-life relationships as well. This is particularly important when you are feeling burnt out in the online space, particularly when you are feeling burnt out because of some online relationship. I know, for me, there’s been a number of times over the last 14 years, where I’ve been on the end of some pretty vicious online attacks from strangers usually, from trolls that left me on the verge of giving up blogging. Whilst I had some good online friends at that time, who supported me through those times, it was actually my real-life friends who were able to give me the real support and respite that I needed from that online stress. I’m so grateful for the fact that I have real-life friends to debrief and to escape from the online with. It’s so important to have those offline places and spaces and relationships to get energy, to retreat from that stress. Having emphasized the importance of real-life relationships, I think it’s important also to say that it’s important to find those online relationships and to try and build strong online relationships because the reality is your friends and family may not understand what you’re going through as a blogger. They may not understand what it is like to get a comment that’s unfair or to be attacked by an anonymous troll. To have the combination of strong online and offline relationships – for me, there’s been a number of times, where I’ve gone through really tough stuff in my business, and to be able to have someone else who’s going through similar things or who’s been through similar things is really important. For that reason, I actually think one of the best things that I’ve ever done is to go to blogging events, where you could actually spend real-life time with people who understand the online pressures. And if you have the chance to go to a blogging event, I know it’s a tough thing to get to. There’s an investment there. For me, that’s one of the big and best reasons of going to those types of events because you’re able to solidify some of those online relationships and take them into the real world. And to spend time with people who understand what you’re going through is really a very powerful thing. The last thing I’ll say about relationships is that there are times where they get unhealthy. They can actually be the reason for your burnout. What I’m thinking of here is this thing that many bloggers go through is the comparison of themselves with others. This can be a really unhealthy thing, and it can actually lead you to a pretty dark place. It’s something I think most of us as bloggers can relate to. It’s very easy to look at other bloggers in our niche or other bloggers in our area and to see their successes, to see their achievements, and to compare them with ourselves. This is probably the topic for a whole other podcast, so I’m not gonna go into great depth there, but I really want to encourage you, in your burnout, to also ask yourself: are you comparing yourself with others too much? That can actually be the source of unrealistic expectations and can lead you to pretty dark places, so monitor your relationships. Are they taking you to a healthy or an unhealthy place? It’s really important to not allow yourself to do that comparison thing. Three more to go here. The seventh thing is to charge your day with inspirational moments and times of learning. Actually build into your life inspiration. I think, for me, this is one of the most powerful things that I do. I try and schedule at least 5-10 minutes everyday, where I am putting myself in a position where I will be inspired. A few years ago, I was an avid watcher of TED Talks, and I would watch random TED Talks. A lot of these had a more positive kind of inspirational aspect to them. In more recent times, it’s been listening to podcasts. I’m trying to put myself in a position to listen to two types of podcasts: firstly, inspirational ones, and secondly, learning ones. I think both are really important because they stimulate different parts of your brain, and they give you energy in different ways. It doesn’t even matter if what you’re listening to is connected to your blog’s topic or blogging itself. To me, it’s anything – being inspired about anything. Watching a documentary about wildlife and being inspire about the beauty and the intricacy of how the animal kingdom works. That can be inspiring, and that lifts your mood. That has an impact upon your blogging. Learning about that type of stuff stimulates that part of your brain, where you are learning, you are connecting new pathways in your brain. I think that has a flow-on effect into other areas of your life. Then of course, being inspired and learning about your niche is a very powerful thing. Build into your day moments – it may not be long moments. It might be 10 minutes to watch a video, 10 minutes to listen to a podcast, where you are stimulating those parts of your brain, where you’re inspiring yourself about big things and inspiring yourself to dream but also learning – really important. The eighth thing I wanna talk about is to play, pivot, and evolve. Those three words may feel like they’re disconnected, but hopefully you’ll understand what I mean in a moment. One of the things that has pulled me down into a blogging slump over the years is that I tend to get bored. If I get bored, I tend to get a bit dejected. Now this might just be my personality type, but I find that doing the same thing the same way day in and day out is almost always going to kill my passion for that thing. As a result, I’ve learned over the years that I need to look out for new ways to do things and for ways to play and experiment with what I do and to change things up. One of the great things about the space that we operate in as bloggers and as people in podcasting and on social media, is that we are operating in a space that is always changing. There’s always something new to try. This can be a problem because we can spend our whole lives playing with the new tools and new toys and not actually doing anything, but I do think it’s important to bring play and experimentation into what we do as bloggers. For me, this happened many times over the years. Many of you will be familiar with the fact that I’ve started a podcast; you’re all listening now. I started this about a year-and-a-half ago. That was 12 years into my blogging, and I’d already been blogging about blogging for 12 years and suddenly to start a podcast about blogging gave me a huge rush of energy and motivation. Simply by changing the medium that I was using to communicate was really important. I spoke with another blogger recently, who had the exact same experience, when she started creating videos on her blog. She’d been blogging for 10 years about her topic. As she was feeling a bit burnt out; she’s feeling like she’d said everything she needed to say so she decided to start a video, a weekly video, where she repurposed some of her old blog posts into videos. She found that simply by changing the medium, even though she was writing about the same things and creating content on the same things, it gave her a huge rush of energy. So this experiment with a medium might be one thing that can help you to find new energy for your topic. There are other ways of pivoting and evolving what you do and changing up what you do in different ways. It might be simply adding a category to your blog. This is what happened a few years ago for me on Digital Photography School. I have a blog about photography, how to take photos, for a long time, and one of the things I just decided to do is to add a whole category to the site about post-production, how to process your photos in Lightroom and Photoshop. This brought energy to me and to my readers. It gave me new motivation to explore a new area. Whilst I continued to write about the other things, adding something new stimulated that part of me and helped me not to be as bored with the topic that I had. Changing up your categories could be good. Starting a new series of content – this is what happened when I did the first series of “Thirty-one Days to Build A Better Blog” many years ago now. One of the reasons I did that series was I kind of feeling a little bit stagnant with the blog. I wasn’t feeling as motivated, and so to try a series of content to start this event on my blog gave me a lot of energy. It also gave my readers a lot of energy as well. Might be that you wanna try a new way of monetizing your blog. I remember when I first launched my first eBook. It gave me a rush of energy for my blogging. It’s this new way of monetizing; it impacted the way I wrote content and the energy that I brought to my blog. I remember even before the eBook, I’d been monetizing my blog with AdSense, and then I found a new ad network to put on my blog alongside that. Simply by adding a new ad network, I suddenly have this excitement. What was gonna happen to my blog? I had this more motivation to drive more traffic to my blog, to write better content for my blog. So changing up the monetization might be useful. Changing the design of your blog. Getting a new logo. Doing something with new colors on your blog. These simple changes that you can do on your blog, that evolve your blog, that improve your blog, that pivot your blog in some way. These playful moments can really give you energy as a blog. They can help you to see your blog as a little bit new, a little bit different. The great thing about these is that not only will it energize you, but many of these little pivots and little changes will actually keep your blog fresh for your readers, which has another flow-on effect. If you start getting emails from readers saying, “Hey, I love the eBook” or “Hey, I love the new design,” that gives you energy. This to me is probably the most important thing I’ll say today. I probably should have said it right up front. Number 9 is to do something that matters. This is probably the best way to stay inspired; the best way to stay fresh is to do something that matters to you and to others. When you are doing something that you have a genuine interest in and a genuine passion for and that you believe in, you’ll find that 99% of the time, you can keep the momentum going. As I look back over the last 14 years that I’ve blogged, I’ve had over 30 blogs, and I only run 2 today. And the two that I have today are the ones that I had the most genuine interest in, the most passion for myself. Those two blogs that I still have today Digital Photography School and ProBlogger – they’re the ones I get personal satisfaction. They are meaningful to me. I have a genuine love for blogging. ProBlogger is a blog that – once there are tough times, generally I love to create content about blogging. The other blog I have – I have a genuine interest in photography, so it’s easy for me to put aside time to create content on these topics and to learn more about these topics and to stay fresh in these things. It’s meaningful for me, so I’m energized by it. You’ll notice before, I said that if you have a genuine interest, 99% of the time you’ll be able to keep the momentum going, while there’s still this other 1%. This is the times that you do get the burnout, but the other part of the factor for me in doing something meaningful is to choose something that is meaningful for other people. This is what gets me through the other 1%. When you are making other people’s lives better, you’ll find you get energy and inspiration from that. I know there have been tough times in my own blogging, in building up ProBlogger for instance. The last 11 or so years of building up ProBlogger – those tough times, where you’re wondering, “Should I keep going?” It’s the emails or the comments that you get from readers, letting me know that I’ve done something that’s had a tangible impact upon them. Those are the things that really helped me through. Spend your time creating something that is real, something that makes your readers’ life better in some way, and you’ll find that that will feed you through those tough times yourself. Do something that matters. Do something that’s meaningful to you and to other people, and that hopefully will get you through that next blogging slump, that next bloggers burnout that comes your way. Now I guess, the last thing I’ll say is that there’s nothing wrong with taking a break. If you’re right in the middle of a bloggers burnout at the moment, take a break. It’s totally fine to do that. Maybe put a limit on how long that break will be. Maybe, say, it’s only a one-week break or a two-week break. Put a boundary on the other end of it, so you do have a point where you are going to come back to it, but take a break. It may be you need to find someone to help you to write some guest posts during that time or maybe simply that you say to your readers, “Hey, I’m taking a bit of a sabbatical. I’m taking my annual leave, and I’ll be back in a couple of weeks.” You will find that your readers will understand that because they instinctively know that if you don’t look after yourself, you can’t really look after them either. I hope that somewhere in the midst of those nine things that I’ve shared with you today will be something to get you through the tough time that maybe you’re going through at the moment as a blogger or the next tough time that you go through as a blogger. Number 1: Know your limits and set realistic goals and expectations. Number 2: Find your groove with a routine that works for you. Get into that groove. Number 3: Identify the sticking points. Actually identify the things that are holding you back at the moment. Number 4: Look after your body. Look after your diet. Look after your exercise. Number 5: Take breaks – daily, weekly, monthly, yearly breaks. Number 6: Focus on relationships. Build strong offline and online relationships, and particularly be aware of comparison that we so often do. Number 7: Charge your day with inspirational moments and times of learning. Number 8: Play, pivot, evolve. Try something new. Number 9: Do something that matters. I hope that you’ll stop by the shownotes at problogger.com/podcast/170 and tell me which one of those nine things works best for you and suggest anything else that you think might help other bloggers going through a burnout period at the moment. I’m sure there’s a lot more that can be said. Tell your story. When were you burnt out, and what did you do about it? I’d love to hear a little bit more about that in the comments of this podcast in the shownotes at problogger.com/podcast/170. If you’re going through a tough time at the moment, I just wanna encourage you to really look after yourself – so important. And if you need any more advice, please drop me a line at darren@problogger.net. More than happy to listen to what you’re going through, and if I can give you any more advice than I already have, I’d love to speak into your situation in any way that I can. Thanks for listening today. I hope you’re well, and I’ll chat with you next week on the ProBlogger podcast. If you’re looking for something else to listen to at this point, I did mention a few episodes during this last episode. In episode 38, you might wanna listen to that one if health is something that you know you need to put your finger on. I tell my story of getting myself a little bit more in shape and some of the other things I did to improve me, improve my health. It had a flow-on impact for my blog. In episode 83, I talked about blogger’s block, and this is one part of burnout that many bloggers go through. I talk about those three types of blogger’s block. In the ongoing episodes after 83, we talked a little bit about each one of those and gave you some strategies about how to really break through that. Then I also mentioned in Episode 40 about my weekly rhythm, and that was much more about being productive with your time. I hope you find something useful in those. The last thing I’ll say is if you enjoyed this episode, I would love it if you would give us a review and ratings on iTunes or your favorite podcast app, and also I’d love it if you know someone else who you think might benefit from this particular episode – if you would share it with them. You can share it by sending them to the shownotes at problogger.com/podcast/170 or tell them to search on iTunes for ProBlogger. Thanks for listening. Chat with you soon.  How did you go with today’s episode? Enjoy this podcast? Sign up to our ProBloggerPLUS newsletter to get notified of all new tutorials and podcasts below.

Transitioning From Single Author Blog to Multi Author Blog In today’s lesson, I want to talk about hiring writers for your blog. In order to do so, I want to share a case study of how I took my own photography blog from a single author blog, publishing 3 posts a week, to a blog that now has around 50 writers, and I don’t write anything. Most bloggers start out blogging as single author blogs and many remain that way. Even so, I’m regularly asked by bloggers how to add new writers to their blog without putting off their readers. So in today’s episode, I want to share a few reasons why a multi-author blog might be worth considering, and I want to share the 3 stages I went through to make the transition from single author blog to having a paid team of regular writers. Listen to this episode in the player above or here on iTunes. Some of the topics discussed today include: How I found my first guest writers Where I currently find new writers How I transitioned from relying upon guest posters to having a writing team How I took readers on that journey So if you’ve ever wondered if you should consider adding new voices to your blog – this is for you. Further Resources on Strategic Blogging Combined with Blogging from the Heart Create 10 Blog Post Ideas for your Blog ProBlogger Job Board Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Hi there and welcome to episode 169 of the ProBlogger podcast. My name is Darren Rowse, and I’m the blogger behind ProBlogger.com – a blog, podcast, event, job board, and a series of eBooks all designed to help you as a blogger to grow your audience to create great content, to build your readership, and to ultimately make money from your blog, if that is your goal. You can find today’s shownotes over at problogger.com/podcast/169, and you can learn more about ProBlogger, the brand, and all the things that we do at ProBlogger.com. Now in today’s lesson, I want to talk to you about hiring writers for your blog. To do so, I want to share a case study of how I took my own photography blog, Digital Photography School,  from being a single-author blog, where I published three posts a week, to a blog that now has around 50 writers and an editor working for me, in which we now publish 14 posts a week, and I don’t write a single one of them. Most bloggers start out blogging as a single-author blog, and most probably remain that way. That’s totally fine, but I am regularly asked by bloggers if they should add new writers, and if they should, how to actually find those writers, without actually putting off their readers and disillusioning their readers. That’s what I want to talk about in today’s episode. I want to share a few reasons why a multi-author blog might be worth considering, some of the costs of doing it, but I also want to share the three stages I went through to transition from being that single-author blog to having a paid team of writers. I want to talk about how I found my first guest writers and share some techniques in getting some user-generated content, content that you don’t have to pay for, at least not in financial terms. I want to talk a little bit about where I find my new paid writers, and I want to talk a little bit about that transition from single-author blog to multi-author blog and how I took my readers on that journey. So if you’ve been wondering about whether you should add new authors to your blog, this is the episode for you. You can find today’s shownotes, where I will have some further reading, and there’s a full transcript of what I have a feeling might be a slightly lengthy show. There’s a lot of information I want to take you through. You can find those shownotes at problogger.com/podcast/169. Grab a drink perhaps because this is gonna be a meaty episode. I’m going to walk you through a lot of information now. Let’s get into it! This episode was actually stimulated by a question over at my Facebook page from one of our readers, Mantas, who said, “Hello, I know a lot of marketers and bloggers want to know: How did you attract so many people to write for DPS?” DPS being Digital Photography School – my main blog. “What were the steps that you made, and what was your position then? Were you working alone or with a team in the early days?” Thanks for the question, Mantas. I appreciate that. If you do have a question, feel free to pop it over on the Facebook page. Let me first take a step back from Manta’s question and just ask the question, “Is a multi-author blog right for you?” because I, by no means today, am saying that every blogger should have more than one voice on their blog. It’s not going to be right for everyone. If you have a personal blog, it’s probably not something you want to explore. You may wanna have the occasional guest post, or you might wanna interview someone to get another voice on your blog, but if your blog’s a personal blog or even if it’s a personally branded blog, you might find that it may not just fit with you. But if you do want to add more voices to your blog, it can add a lot of benefits to you and to your readers. The thing I like about having a multi-author blog is that it adds so much more to the content. I think it helps my readers to get smarter, if you do it the right way. You can bring in a new mix of personalities, different experiences, different skills, different styles of writing as well, and this can make your blog more appealing to some of your readers. It can enable you to produce more content, if that’s something that you want to do, but also more specialized content. This is something that will come through in the case study that I wanna take you through. One of the reasons I added more authors onto my photography blog is that there were areas, where I didn’t feel comfortable writing. I didn’t know much about those particular topics, those aspects of photography, and I wasn’t at a level myself, where I was comfortable in writing advanced content. So it can allow you to do that. It can also be great if you don’t have a lot of time to write, or if you take a lot of time to write. You may be someone, who really takes a lot of time to write content, and it may be one way that you can produce more content and not have to spend that much time. Having said that, it’s gonna cost you. It may cost you time, because when you bring in people to write for you, there’s time associated with that, but also could be potentially money as well because you’re probably gonna wanna pay your authors. But it will take you time to find them, to hire them, to train them, to oversee them, and to, I guess, keep them accountable and maybe to edit their work as well, if you take on that role as an editor. The other cost, of course, is that it could potentially – if you get the wrong kind of person – dilute your brand or impact your brand in a negative way. Bringing on an author is great, if that author is great. If that author’s not great, if it doesn’t work well, if you’re not willing to put in the time to oversee them, to edit their work, it could actually make your blog suffer in terms of the quality of what you’re doing. And it can also confuse your readers potentially as well, if you don’t find the right people. So ultimately, what I want to talk about today is “How do you find those right people and do it the right way?” I will say again – if you have a personal blog, you probably won’t wanna move it to a multi-author blog, unless your readers are there really. They’re not really tied to you. Maybe they’re just tied to your topics in some way. Look, it probably can be done, but I would say, “Do it gently and slowly.” That’s part of the story that I wanna share today. Let’s get into that case study. As I thought today about answering the question and of the own journey that I’ve been on with Digital Photography School, I’ve identified that there are being really three stages of the journey for me. For me, stage 1 was that the blog was really just me writing on it. When I started Digital Photography School back in 2006, I was writing three posts a week, and it was very beginner-oriented content, which I had no problems writing because I was an intermediate kind of photographer. The site is about how to help people take better photos, and I was at an intermediate level. I was an enthusiast as a photographer. I’d photographed a few weddings, and I was comfortable writing for people a little bit behind me in their journey. I didn’t really know what the site was gonna turn out to be, but I typically start all my blogs in the same way. I write all that content. I start low and small-budget; I don’t have the dollars to invest into a writing team. I found a free WordPress theme for my blog, so I didn’t even invest much in terms of design. I just did it all. I did all the writing, all the social media, all the marketing – everything. My goal in that first stage was really to build my traffic, to build up my archives of content, to rank in search engines, to hook people into subscribing to my blogs and email lists, to build my brand, and, I guess, to build a bit of engagement as well. One of the best things I did, in terms of finding new writers for my blog down the track, was to start to build community because my first writers actually came from being readers. So if you do want to build a writing team, or if you wanna hire people, if wanna get guest posts – one of the best things I think you can do is to build your traffic, but to build engagement on your blog. One of the best things I did in the early days was to start a group on Flickr. Now I would probably recommend you don’t start a group on Flickr because Flickr is for photographers, and unless your blogs are about photography, it’s probably not the right place for you. But a Facebook group might be the place, a LinkedIn group – somewhere where you can build engagement with your readers. It may just be having a Facebook page. It may be engaging in some other network, but as much engagement as you can get because you are going to find it so much easier to get people to write for your blog, if you’ve already had some sort of an engagement with them and if potential writers come to your blog and see engagement as well – because that’s something that will attract them. So one of the best things I did was to start this Flickr group. Today, it will probably be a Facebook group or some other kind of interactive space as well. Now, I didn’t know where I was going. I didn’t really even have the goal of hiring writers, but I was confident that I could produce probably around 200 articles myself on that blog for the first couple of years. And I actually came up with the topics for 200 articles, and if you listen to episode 11 of this podcast, you’ll know the exercise that I went through, where I kind of brainstormed these 200 topics. I knew that I had enough in me to write that blog and just really focused on creating that content in stage 1. Stage 2 really came as a result of doing the hard work in stage 1. Stage 1 was building the foundations. The first couple of years in my blog, I did all the writing. I did all the marketing. I did all the social media. I did all the community management as well. And as a result of all that hard work, I began to see my readership grow. It took time; it didn’t happen overnight. It took a couple of years to kind of build it up. I began to see that I was attracting readers to my blog, who were engaging in the Flickr group and engaging in the blog post comments, and I was beginning to see, in those comments and in that engagement on the group, that we’d attracted not only beginner photographers, but also a higher level of photographers. There were more intermediate level photographers like me. People were starting to leave some really good comments on the blog. I was very proactive about trying to get good comments. I asked a lot of questions. I asked my readers to add their tips a lot. I began to also see in the Flickr group that people were starting to share really beautiful photos, so I began to wonder, as I saw these more experienced, regular readers, whether maybe some of them might be interested in sharing their knowledge. Now at this point, I kind of had in the back of my mind that I wanted to see them start to write guest posts, but it was a bit of a big leap. They were just leaving comments on the blog, and they were sharing photos in our Flickr group. How could I take them on that journey to get them writing guest posts? I could’ve just emailed them and said, “Hey, do you wanna write a guest post?” Maybe that would have worked, but I actually thought I’d do it a little bit more gently. And this, I think, can be a good way to get your readers, your highly engaged readers to begin to think about creating guest content for your blog. There’s a few gentle ways that you can do that. Let me just run through four or five of those, and these are things that I would encourage you to think about – how could you apply these on your own blog, if you do wanna have other authors? Firstly, I saw people leaving quite detailed comments, and these were usually when I finished an article, “What would you add to this? What would you disagree with this?” Or I sometimes wrote posts that were purely discussion style, and I’ll talk about that in a minute. I began to see people slightly more detailed comments that were answering questions from other readers or my own questions. What I did was begin to email some of those readers, and I would ask them if they would allow me to use their comment as a blog post or part of a comment as part of a blog post. Now I’d already put the content into a public forum on my blog, and perhaps I didn’t even need to ask that permission but I wanted to do that because I was interested in them knowing that I was using their content because it was a step towards getting them to write a blog post. Most of them were totally fine with it. What I would do is either use their whole comment as a blog post. I might put an introductory sentence at the start, “Hey! Darren here. I saw this comment on the blog the other day about this, and I really loved it. Here it is.” Then I might write a sentence or two at the end of it, just to sort of wrap it up because the comment itself was really useful. It might have been a tip on an aspect of photography. Or I might have used a part of a comment, so I might quote my readers. The idea here was that I was actually showing my readers that I value their thoughts. And this is partly to get our readers to start leaving more comments and to build that engagement, but it was also starting to get my readers used to the idea of seeing their content in blog posts themselves. In the Flickr group, I also set up an area, where I ask my readers to submit a tip into the group. I made it really clear that I would use some of their tips as blog posts, and this worked really well. People were much more comfortable with adding a tip – might be a couple of paragraphs long – into a Facebook group than they were submitting a guest post. What I would do then is to take some of those tips, and I combine them together into a longer post. I might say, “I need tips on portrait photography,” and 10 of my readers would submit their paragraph-long tip on taking great portraits. And then I’d combine that into a longer article. Again, my readers were writing the bulk of that content; there was 10 of them – all contributing to it. The other thing I might do occasionally, if a reader left a long, detailed tip in the Flickr group, is just to use that as a whole post in it of itself. Another thing we used to do quite regularly was run weekly challenges with our readers. We still do this today – every Thursday or Friday, we would say, “Hey, the theme of this week is slow shutter speeds or large apertures,” or some kind of photographic technique. We’d get our readers to submit a photo they’ve taken using that technique. What I would do if I saw a beautiful photo being submitted by one of our readers would be to email that reader and say, “Hey, I love that photo! Can I use it in a blog post? And would you mind answering a couple of questions for me about how you took it? What settings did you use? What’s the story behind the image? How did you compose it?” They would respond with maybe three or four sentences, and that would then become the blog post – the image, a few tips, a few thoughts from them behind that image. Again, it was just about creating some user-generated content, that was inviting our readers to begin to see themselves in the blog posts, and this began to change the culture of the blog. It didn’t happen overnight, but gradually over time, readers began to expect that other readers would be in the content – it wouldn’t just be me all the time. I began to weave this in. Another thing I’d begun to do is to do these discussion posts. A blog post would purely be me asking a question, “What type of camera do you use? What type of lens is your favorite lens, and why? How would you go about photographing a wedding?” These types of question-oriented posts. The discussions that would come in as a result of that. If it was a good discussion, I could then take those comments and weave them into a blog post and create a blog post on that topic. It was really the blog post – this is what our community thinks on this particular topic. Again, just about getting our readers’ content onto the page. The last thing I did is I began to approach people who were engaging in the Flickr group and sharing photos or engaging in comments. I would approach those who I thought knew something about a particular topic, and I would ask them, “Could I interview you on that particular topic? I see you take a lot of really beautiful wedding photos. Can I ask you five questions on wedding photography?” I would actually reach out to them and interview them on a specialised topic. Again, this is an easy way to create some guest content. They don’t have to come up with a structure for the article. They don’t have to think of the questions. “I just have to answer some questions.” This was the beginning again of relationships with a few people, who later on became guests posters – is getting them used to the idea of writing some content, as brief as it might be (and I would add in some of their photos as well), and get them used to being on the site and seeing some of the benefits of that. All of these techniques that I’ve just talked about helped my readers to begin to feel like their ideas were important to my site, began to build a community and a sense of engagement as well, got them used to seeing themselves and other readers on the blog as well, and as I said, it builds this culture of interaction and reader involvement. Now none of this happened overnight. It took months. It took actually years to do this, and it became something that, as I got used to looking for opportunities to get my readers into blog posts, it opened up all kinds of wacky ideas as well. As you begin to do it, you see more and more opportunities, and so that’s one way to kind of approach this. Now a few people who was featuring in these ways enjoyed the process, particularly some of the people I interviewed. They enjoyed the process so much that I would then follow them up and say, “Hey! If you enjoyed that – our readers obviously enjoyed that – if you’ve actually got any ideas for a longer article that you might like to write, feel free to shoot me an email with the idea that you’ve got. We can work out whether you could write an article.” Often the interviews would lead to a longer form article – and some of the other techniques that I mentioned did as well. I was writing most of the content, still at this point, but I guess I was looking for any opportunity that I could to involve people in writing posts, particularly moving them towards writing a feature piece content, a longer article in some way. This whole process, after a while, a few people did start to write a few guest posts, and that led me to putting up an actual page on the site. I created a WordPress page titled “Write for DPS” (Write for Digital Photography School), and I actually called my readers to submit. I gave them a process where they could begin to submit ideas as well. I did this because a number of people were starting to contact me. They were seeing different voices on the blog, and they were like, “Well, I could write something. I wonder if he’d take my post.” After I got a few of those, I began to put this page together, and it was really just me saying, “Hey, we can’t pay you at this stage. We’re not making enough, but if you’re interested in contributing to the site, here’s how to do it.” I put light at a few expectations and a contact email address as well. That generated some submissions as well. I actually put that link in the navigation area on the site. One of the things I am really glad I did also around this time was anytime anyone wrote for us in anyway, whether it was a guest post or I interviewed them or I featured them in any other way, I would put them on a spreadsheet that I created. It was a spreadsheet of contributors to the site. Whether they’d just done an interview or written an article or was just someone I thought might be a good contributor, I would put this spreadsheet together. I made it my goal that I would touch base with everyone I put on that spreadsheet at least every couple of months. Just keep in touch with them. And I would also put next to their name, any contribution that they’d done, any link, any topic that I saw that they were interested in. I guess, I was building up this little bit of a database. It was a pretty disorganized database, but it was a database of people who might write. So if I did wanna write an article on some aspect of portrait photography, I could look on that spreadsheet, and I knew there was someone there who I could ask for a quote or involve in some other way. It really was about trying to just keep that relationship going in some way, so if an opportunity did come up to feature them, I could. I also would share the stuff they were doing on our social media accounts to build that relationship in some ways as well. Now as a result of all this, I began to get a few of the people, who did eventually write guest posts, say that they were interested in doing more. By this stage, a couple of years into the site, the site was starting to get some traffic, and people who did contribute began to see that when they were featured on the blog, they were getting traffic as well. So some started to return, and they would come back and say, “Hey, I’d like to do one every couple of months or one every month.” That was great. That was, I guess, the beginning of the next stage, which was all about trying to build a team. At this stage, I still didn’t have much money to invest into writing. We were beginning to make a little bit of money from AdSense. I hadn’t created our first eBook now, by this stage, so there wasn’t a lot of money. Paid writers weren’t really on my radar, but I did begin to form this idea that maybe I should get some regular writers into the site because I could see my readers were beginning to recognize some of those people who did come back again from time to time. The other thing that I began to do, as traffic grew, was – traffic is great because it’s good for building revenue, but it actually makes it easier to find new writers for your site as well. After a while, people began to know the brand of Digital Photography School in the photography circles, so it started to make it easier to approach people. Up until this point, I kind of have been looking at my readers, but as our brand grew, I began to see opportunities to approach other photography bloggers as well. These were people who perhaps had a little bit bigger profile, they had their own network, and they had expertise as well; so I began to reach out occasionally to a photography blogger and say, “Hey, would you be interested in writing an article for us? Or could I interview you?” The interview was often the first step. The same thing happened with other photographers – photographers who might be quite well-known on Flickr. Flickr was huge at that time. There’s other photo-sharing sites now, but I began to see some of the Flickr users really had big profiles. I began to reach out to them and ask, “Can I interview you or would you be interested in writing for us?” Then I also started to realize that I saw the same names over and over again in photography magazines, and these are offline publications that people were writing in. I realized a lot of them weren’t actually employed by the photography magazines; they were just writing guest content or writing as freelancers. So I began to reach out to some of those as well, and I would usually approach all of these people, whether they be a photography blogger or a photographer or a freelance writer, by introducing the site, talking about our traffic numbers and how much profile we could help them to build, and then making a broad invitation to be involved in creating content in some way for us. I would give them some examples of what others had done, usually others who had a bit of a profile as well, to build a bit a of social proof. As I mentioned, many times I would reach out and say, “Hey, could I interview you? Or could I do a case study on one of your photos?” but sometimes they actually would come back and say, “Hey, I’ve written this article for a magazine. Could I rewrite it for you?” That was actually something that happened a number of times as well. Some people did prefer an interview ‘cause it felt easier, but some people who were writers actually found it easier just to write an article for us. Now up until this point, everyone is guests on the site; they’re not paid writers. They’re all doing it for free, and they’re all doing it because (1) they want to give something back to the site if they’re our readers or (2) they’re doing it for profile and to grow their reach. By this stage, I was standing to earn money from the site, and I didn’t feel comfortable just taking guest contributions. Actually some of our writers didn’t want to be paid at all. They just did it because they enjoyed the process, but a number of our writers, I thought, “Maybe I could actually begin to pay them.” That really is stage 3. Up until this point, stage 2 has really been all really about building guest contributors to the site. Stage 3 really is a time, where I was starting to have decent traffic to the site, starting to get revenue to the site, and I was starting now to think, “I need to build my regular writing team.” By this stage, as I mentioned before, I have a few guest writers, who were writing submissions once a month, but when you’ve got a guest writer – even if they’ve committed to writing once a month – it’s really hard to keep them to that. You can’t put too many demands on someone doing something for free for you, so in the back of my mind, I was like, “Maybe I need to start paying people. That way, I might be able to enforce a deadline a little bit more.” I wanted to increase the frequency of our publishing. When I started the site, I was publishing three times a week. I moved it to daily by the time I built this sort of little team of guest writers up, but I wanted to get to two posts a day. I wanted to get 14 posts per week, and to do that, I knew I needed a consistent stream of articles coming into the site. I knew I couldn’t write them all, so I thought one way to do that is to start to hire some writers. I also wanted to lift the quality and the level and expand the topics that we were writing about. Some of our best authors, by this stage, were actually growing their profile so fast that their own projects were beginning to take off, so they weren’t writing for us anymore. To get a high quality of writer, I knew I’d probably need to start paying people to attract those high caliber of writers, and also I wanted to start attracting intermediate and advanced writers as well, and people who specialize in topics like post-production (how to use Photoshop) or people who were willing to write reviews of cameras, which take a long time to do. I knew to attract those types of writers, I was going to have to start to pay for those writers. I also wanted to have regular writers. I didn’t want to just pay for one-off writers. I wanted people who would come back and contribute on a regular basis because I saw that when we did have regular writers on the site, my readers actually responded really well to them because I felt like they knew who they were and relationships between my writers and readers were important. So I made the decision, “I’m gonna put some investment into paying writers for all my sites.” The first two people that I hired actually turned out to be people, who had been writing as guest writers. I probably could have gotten them to keep writing as guest writers, but I went to them and said, “Hey, you write once a month for us. I love the content that you’re doing. You’re writing on a topic that I don’t feel comfortable writing about. Would you be willing to write on a more regular basis?” I actually went to both of these writers and said, “Hey, I’m willing to pay you to write a weekly article. You’ve only been doing a monthly article, but I want you to do a weekly article. And I’ll pay you.” At that time, I didn’t have a lot to invest into it, so it was 50 USD per article, while also giving them lots of exposure in the articles linking to their own projects. Both of them actually had their own products to sell as well. Both of them had eBooks, and so I allowed them to promote their eBooks. They were actually earning more than that $50. That’s where we started out. You’ve really got to work out what the right rate is for you. This is like eight years ago. I acknowledge that really probably wouldn’t cut it today if you’re trying to hire someone at a high quality, but that’s what we started out. We’ve certainly increased since that time. Initially, I just hired the two, but gradually as I was able to drive more traffic and more revenue in the site, I was able to increase that group of writers and went to three, to four, to five. We gradually went from 7 posts a week to 10 posts a week and then to 14 posts a week. I would usually hire internally, so my guest writers who might write the occasional article, I would hire them in the early days. I would only ever pay someone if they could commit to writing at least once a month. I wanted that regularity. I wasn’t gonna pay someone just to write a one-off article; I wanted the regular writer so my readers could get to know them. Initially, it was all about promoting people, who were writing as guest writers, but at times, I began to realize that my pool of people that I could hire was not really that big. That was around the time I decided I needed to start advertising for writers for the site. Now it just so happens that on ProBlogger, we have a job board, so I was able to advertise on my own job board for writers. I wasn’t really sure the first time I did it, how it would work, because I didn’t know how many photography enthusiasts read ProBlogger and subscribed to those job boards. I put up a job. I can’t remember exactly what year it was, but I was amazed at how many applicants we got. I think the first job I put out – must have been six or seven years ago now – got 80 applicants, and about half of them, I would have hired. They were incredibly high-quality. If you haven’t checked out the job board, it’s at problogger.com/jobs. It’s a great place if you’re looking for work as a blogger, but it’s also a fantastic place to advertise for bloggers to actually hire. Seventy dollars ($70) will get you a job that lasts for thirty days. We get quite a few of our advertisers emailing us within a few days, saying, “Take the job down. I’m getting too many applicants.” Anyone can advertise there, if you wanna check that one out, if you are looking to hire people. So I advertised there. I was getting quite a few applicants, and the quality was really great. Today, we probably put a job up there every two or three months, and these days, we get over 100 applicants to many of the jobs that we advertise. And as I said, a lot of them are very high quality. We typically will hire five people at a time. We kind of wait until some of our writers will have left and moved on. They only write for a period of time, and so we’ll wait until we need to hire a few more. Then we’ll hire in batches in that way. If you do want to advertise on the job boards or anywhere else, the key is to be really clear about what you’re looking for. You don’t wanna just do a broad ad, or else you’ll get a broad number of applicants. You’ll get more applicants, but they won’t be as targeted so be really clear about what you’re looking for and the process that you will work through to hire them. We typically will put a job up – even though the job lasts for 30 days, we typically have a cut-off date of the week. We say, “You’ve got to get your application in within a week.” Then we ask them for examples of their work as well. The other thing that I would encourage you to do is to think ahead of time, before you place your ad, about the process you wanna take your applicants through. We actually have this little process that we’ve developed now that we’ve probably done this about 8 or 9 or maybe even 10 times over the years. This is the process. Firstly, we place the ad, but we also have two emails ready to go. The two emails are for different scenarios of applications. The first one is one that we send to people, who we just know straight away aren’t suitable – either they apply ignoring some of our criteria, or we can tell through their application that their writing isn’t great or they don’t seem to have the right experience for us. This is our “Thanks, but sorry” email, that we send out straight away as soon as someone applies that we know isn’t a fit. We just send out an email saying, “Thanks for applying. We’re really sorry, but we can’t progress your application.” A second email is a “Thanks! We will be in touch,” email, because we typically have a deadline of a week. We know that we’re gonna get a lot of applicants in during that week, so we send this one out to anyone who we think we might be interested in, anyone who’s at least at a quality where we should consider them and we need to look a little bit deeper into them. We collect everyone’s emails that’s in this second category, and we send them a quick email just saying, “Hey, thanks! Here’s the process. From here, we will be in touch in a week or so.” The next step is that we begin to sort those applicants into groups. I guess this is like a triage type scenario. The applicants, who we immediately feel are a good fit or could be a good fit, we put into a “great” pile. Then we put the rest into a “good” pile, and then maybe if there’s sort of a lower quality, we might put them into an “okay” pile. It really depends how many people we’re looking to hire and how many applicants we get, but we generally go to anyone in that “great” pile and maybe some of the people in the “good” pile. We will reply to them with an email that invites them to go to the next stage. Anyone who we don’t invite to go to the next stage, we of course send an email saying, “Thanks, but we can’t progress any further.” Anyone we invite to go to the next stage, we send them an email. We tell them a little bit more about the job: what it entails, what it pays, what are the benefits they get. “We’ll give you links. We can promote your stuff.” And then we invite them to write a trial post for the site – a paid trial post for the site, one-off trial post. We invite them to nominate a topic that they want to write about and to come back to us with that. We give them approval or we adapt it if we don’t think it’s a good fit. We may have written about that topic in the last week already, so we ask them to come up with another one. Then we set them a deadline and ask them to write that post and to submit it. Then we might go back and forth a little bit on any edits, and then we publish the post. We do this trial for a few reasons. Firstly, it shows us the quality of their work. Secondly, it shows us what they’re like to work with. Can they deliver on time? Are they high-maintenance? Do they seem to understand what WordPress is and how to write for that audience? Will they follow up with comments that are left on their articles? Will they promote the posts on their own social networks? I guess, we’re really looking here to see, whether they’re just going to submit us a piece of content and then leave it, or they’re going to take it to the next level. This gives us a chance to see whether their style fits with our audience – what voice they write in, how accessible, how inclusive they are, how clear they are. And it also gives us a chance to see how our audience will respond to them. Do they get a lot of comments? Are they writing in a way that is really engaging and gets lots of shares? You get a real feel for people through this process. And I guess the other side of it is that they get to see what we’re like to work with as well. What are the benefits of working with us? What are our systems like? That can give them a sense of what we’re like and whether we’re a good fit. This trial process – and we do pay them. We pay them the normal rate that we would pay them normally. It helps us just to really work out whether it’s a good fit or not. So we might invite 10 or 15 people from all the applicants to go through this process. Then we might hire the best 5 or 6. The other beauty of this is that it gives us some other content that we can use on the site as well. Even if we don’t go on to hire these people, we’ve got a piece of content that we can use as well. That’s nice to get some extra voices on there as well. We publish pretty much everything that’s submitted. We do go back to some people and do some edits and revisions on it, but the process really does work very well. It takes us a couple of weeks to go through that process. From the time they see the ad to the time we hire them might take three or four weeks. It is quite a long process, but it does tend to get quite good quality of writers. As I mentioned before, the people who we do offer the job to, we always ask them to write regularly. We won’t hire anyone to write less than once a month because it’s gonna take an investment of time to get them trained and integrated with the way that we do things. So we don’t wanna train someone who’s just gonna write one article for us every couple of months. We usually ask them to write every couple of weeks or at least once a month. That’s quite good. Once we’ve hired someone, we’ve got a bit of an initiation process, and this is something that’s come in the last couple of years as I’ve hired an editor, who I’ll talk about in a moment. We send them out a handbook, and the handbook’s a nine-page document. It’s got a lot of guidelines about how to use images, what size images, whether they can use watermarks, how they should name their files, their image files. We give them some tips and guidelines for writing articles (US spelling versus UK spelling, how to format posts, how to use headlines) – sort of a style guide in many ways – some information on how we title our posts, some tips for using WordPress and formatting the posts, some tips on how to write their author bio, other expectations that we have for them, as well as some contact details for us as a team, a little bit about who we are as a site, and also some information there about our readers because we want them to be writing for the right level of readers. This handbook has been really great, and it’s evolved over the years. It started out very simply. Now when someone comes onto our team, where I would hand this to them and walk them through this process, it really helps them to be lifting the quality of their articles, but also helps us in our editing. If we’ve taught them how we want them to submit our content, we don’t have to spend as much time fixing the things that aren’t formatted in certain ways. We also have a little Facebook group for our regular writers, where we build a bit of community. If we’ve got a camera that we want someone to review, we might put it in there. We call out topics; we brainstorm as a group, and a little bit of community going on in there. Some of our authors that we hired have worked out brilliantly. We’ve had authors that have written for us now for five or six years, and others stay for a time. They might stay while they’ve got extra time on their hands and then they get busy and move on. Some of them don’t work out at all, they might last three articles and then think this isn’t for them or we might look at their articles and think this isn’t really right for us as well. Because we don’t have people who are relying on us for their full time income, we don’t have to give them three months notice or anything like that. We’re fairly quick to work out whether we’re a good fit and they are as well. Typically, things do tend to work out well as a result of the process that we’ve got. As I look at our Facebook group today, I think we’ve got about 50 members in that group, 47 of which are writers. There’s myself, our editor, and our site manager as well in that group. There’s 47 people in there who are writers. I mentioned our editor a couple of times in the last few minutes. Eventually, it must be three years ago now, I realized that I could not manage this whole process. It actually had gotten to a point where having 40 or 50 people to manage, that’s too much for me to do as well as all the other things that I do. I’ve got Digital Photography School and ProBlogger. I decided I needed to step up and hire an editor as well as writers. We hired Darlene who lives in Canada. She actually started out as a writer who I promoted. I saw in her an attention to detail and some of the skills that we would need as a writer. She was also someone who’s a photographer, so she is operating at a higher level of expertise in photography which I knew would help as well. The idea here was that she would be able to take things to the next level in developing a team of writers to be able to communicate more regularly with them and better with them, to streamline some of the processes that we had, to keep our writers to the deadlines that they committed to, to think a little bit more strategically about the editorial direction and to increase the quality of the articles as well. I’m not a details person, the idea of me editing someone else’s work is kind of laughable because I’m really in need of that myself. I’m not the best speller or the best in grammar. It really has lifted the quality of our articles quite a bit. As I mentioned, she’s a professional photographer. That’s kind of the process that I’ve gone through. Just to give you a bit of a sum up, a few other tips that I give, and just to recap a couple of the things that I think have been important. In terms of taking your readers on that journey, some of the people I talk to who are thinking of having other writers on their blog are really worried that their readers will push back. I was too. I was worried when I did this on ProBlogger as well as on Digital Photography School. To be honest, there were some readers who did push back. Some readers started reading my blog because I wrote every post on the blog. It was less so on Digital Photography, more so on ProBlogger. ProBlogger is a bit more of a personal brand. Digital Photography School, I never really injected my personality into that content. It didn’t really get so much push back there. I did get some readers who are all these other people. One of the things I would say there is the thing I like on Digital Photography School about the work I did is that it really did take a few years. It actually probably took me about two years from the time I had my first guest post to the point where my guest posters were writing more than me. For those two full years, I was still writing three posts a week. I didn’t change how much content I was writing over those two years, I just added in some other articles. It was a bit of a transition. Today, I don’t write any articles on the site. Again, that was a bit of a transition. I went from three posts a week to two, to one, to none. That, again, took several years to get to that point. Take your readers on that journey and introduce new voices slowly, that can work quite well. Build a sense of community and collaboration on your site. You’ll see back in stage one, I found it was really important for me to be asking my readers questions, having discussions, getting them into a Flickr Group, getting them engaging with me in some way. Even if it wasn’t creating content, it was so much easier to get people to create content for me because they felt like they’re in a relationship with me in the early days. That was really important. The next thing I’ll say is some of your best writers down the track will be readers today. Look at your readers, start with your readers, take them on a journey. Look for the people who are contributing at a higher rate than other people in the comment section in your blog. Look for the people who are being helpful on your Facebook page or in the groups that you have. Actually really pay attention to your readers because in your readers, you probably have potential writers. Always be on the lookout for ways that you can promote what they’re doing in your comments into blog posts, even if it’s just adding a quote or showing something that they’ve done or doing an interview of them in some way. Look for those gentle ways to help them to create content for you. It does take more work to do that. To do an interview with someone, you got to think of the questions, you’ve got to edit their answers, you’ve got to format it all. But in the long run, if that person ends up becoming your writer and that process is well worth the time. Do look for gentle ways of promoting your readers into creating content for you. When you’re hiring people, be careful of the voice. This is one of the things I noticed. In the early days, I did hire a couple of people who wrote in a very different style to me. That can be good but it can also clash. There are a couple of people who I hired in the early days who had a much more aggressive tone. I’m a much more gentle conversational kind of person; I don’t like to offend people, I’m not really opinionated. Whilst I think having people with opinion can be a good thing, it can actually clash as well. Be really careful of the voice. Watch really carefully to see how your readers do respond to the different styles of people that you write. You’re never going to hire someone who’s exactly the same as you. Be careful when you do hire someone who clashes with your voice and see how your readers respond to that. It could end up being a good thing but it could also be something that really hurts your brand. Be careful of voice, be careful of values, you want to hire people who share values with you, who have the same kind of goals as you. That’s something I’ve really paid attention to. Having said all that, variety can be good too. I’m a guy and my first two hires were women. I didn’t do it because I wanted to add women into the site, but it actually benefitted my site. It made my site a little bit more inclusive and I started to notice that we attracted a different audience. Gender might be one of those things. The location of your writers might be another thing. I’m in Australia, I’ve hired some US writers, I’ve hired people from the UK, I’ve hired people from different parts of Asia and Africa. I think that can have an impact upon your site as well. Maybe that’s a positive impact, it has been for us, but again it’s got to be something that you watch to see how people react to that. In terms of the topic, variety can be good again then too. I didn’t know much about how to use Photoshop, so my first hire was a woman who wrote about the topic of Photoshop. That broadened our topic and that went down really well with our readers. Think about variety in terms of the level that you write at, I’m an intermediate kind of photographer, some of my early hires were people who were at a more advanced level, one that again went down really well with my readers. Be careful of voice, be careful of value, you want to hire people who are going to add to your site and take your readers and your site towards your goals. Be also open to variety because hiring people who are different to you can actually add a lot of depth to your site as well. The last thing I’ll say is that if you hire someone or if you bring someone on as a guest and it’s not working, and you’re seeing that there’s a real pushback from your readers, you see a clash of values, of voice in those kinds of ways, be quick to end that relationship. You don’t want to have someone who is on your site for years to come just because you’re a bit nervous to say this isn’t working out. You want to be really clear right upfront that you’re hiring people as a trial and that’s one of the things I probably should’ve mentioned earlier. We generally say to people let’s start this paid relationship out for three months and then we’ll assess how things are going, and then they become permanent. That gives you a chance to have an out if it’s not working for you and to have some expectations around that. I’ve certainly made that mistake, I’ve had people who have worked on my sites over the years. I really should’ve ended those relationships faster and it would’ve benefitted me and my readers, and it would’ve benefitted them in the long run as well. I am aware that I’ve talked a lot today and this is probably one of the longer episodes that I’ve done. It is a question I get asked a lot, how do I find more writers for my blog? I really wanted to really walk you through that process because it’s not something that’s just happened over night. I started Digital Photography School in 2006 and ten years later it’s very different to how it started. It actually took me probably nine years to really make that journey from being a single-author blogger to having a team of paid writers as well. I should actually say that we do still have some people who prefer to just be guest writers. We do have some guest content still on the site, but the bulk of our content on the site now is from our paid team. Hope that’s been helpful, I would love to hear your insights on this process as well. Perhaps you’ve made that transition or perhaps you’re mid-way through it. What have you found worked? Where have you found your writers? What tips would you give in integrating those writers into the system and actually initiating them into writing for you and taking them on that journey? How have you taken your readers on that journey? Have you had pushback? Any of these questions that you feel like you want to chime in on to help us all to learn a little bit more about this whole process, head over to problogger.com/podcast/169 where you can get a full transcript of today’s very long show but also leave any questions or comments that you have. If you are looking to hire bloggers, of course head over to problogger.com/jobs where you can place an ad for a writer for your site. We just actually redesigned the job board in the last few months, I hope you liked some of the added features we have added there. We actually have a new feature there where you can pay a little bit more and get a featured ad. Unfortunately, they’re all taken though, they got snapped up within a couple of weeks. There will be some more ones coming up in the coming weeks as well. Thanks for listening today and I will be back with you next Monday night for the next episode of the ProBlogger Podcast. How did you go with today’s episode? Enjoy this podcast? Sign up to our ProBloggerPLUS newsletter to get notified of all new tutorials and podcasts below.

Edit Your Blog Posts With Seven Simple Steps A lot is taught about the importance of writing great blog posts, but it is in the editing of your writing that your post can really be made to shine. If left unedited, it can create a very different impression that can hurt people’s view of you and your blog. In today’s episode, I want to share with you a simple 7 step process to editing  your posts. We’re going to talk a little about proof reading but also some bigger picture editing too – because really fixing spelling and grammar edits are just a small part of this. So, if you know your posts could be lifted in quality by having a simple process to walk through to edit your posts – this one is for you. And if you know a blogger who could benefit from this episode – please do share it too. Listen to this post in the player above or here on iTunes. Further Resources on 7 Steps to Editing Your Blog Posts 9 Crucial Tips for Self-Editing Your Blog Posts (That Every Blogger Can Use) Making your content sound more human Crafting irresistible blog intros and openings Crafting great titles How to create great calls to action Visual editing and polishing your posts 10 Points to Pause as you create blog posts Last week’s Million Dollar Blog Post and Challenge Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Hey there and welcome to Episode 168 of the ProBlogger Podcast. My name is Darren Rowse and I’m the blogger behind problogger.com, a blog, podcast, event, job board, series of ebooks and a real book as well which you can find on Amazon all designed to help bloggers to grow their audience and to make money from their blogs. You can learn more about ProBlogger at problogger.com. You can also search for that book over at Amazon, just searching for ProBlogger. In today’s lesson, I want to talk about something that I think is really important for bloggers, and that’s something that I know some of us attend to avoid. That is editing our blog posts. Let us talk about the importance of writing great blog posts and creating great content which is definitely important but it’s the editing of our writing where our post can really be made to shine. Left unedited, it can be kind of left pretty average. Not editing our posts can really hurt the impression that people have of us and our blog. It can come across as really careless when we don’t edit. In today’s episode, I want to share with you seven simple steps to editing your blog posts. We’re going to talk a little bit about proofreading which I know is what many of us think about when we think about editing but we’re going to get way beyond just proofreading our content because editing really is a much bigger picture thing. Fixing your spelling and grammar is important but it’s just a small part of the process. If you know, like I do, that your post could be lifted in quality by having a simple process to work through to edit your posts, this episode is for you. If you know a blogger who could benefit from this, please do share it with them. You can share it by sending them to problogger.com/podcast/168 where I will have lots of further reading for you as well. I’ve got quite a bit of material that I want to point you to. Editing is so important. I want to present to you seven steps for editing your blog posts. The first one is something that you need to do before you start writing. One of the things I’ve learned over the years is that good editing starts with good planning. Planning before you write will help you so much in the editing process. The more planning you put into your blog post, the better it will be in terms of structure, quality, and the more benefits you’ll have for your readers as well. One of the things I try to do before I create any blog post, before I create any podcast, before I create any talk is to outline the content that I’m trying to create, to come up with the main points and to come up with some sort of structure and to know the journey that I’m going to take my readers on. To actually thought through the structure means that when I come to writing and creating the content, I’m in the flow. I don’t have to be using that part of my brain that’s thinking about structure. I can just write because I’ve already got it sitting there in front of me. I can really just create. One of the things I’ve learned and I have talked about this in previous episodes is that I think, and I don’t know this because I’m not a scientist, but I think we use different parts of the brain for different parts of the creating process. Planning is one part of the brain, we use one part of the brain. Writing, creating is another part, and editing is another. I really do think it’s important to separate out those tasks, to actually put some time aside before you write to outline. Then, to put some time aside to create. And then, the next part of course is to put time aside to edit. First step, make sure you’re outlining your post. This doesn’t mean that you can’t add to your outline later. This is something I do all the time while I’m in the flow, I’ve got my outline in front of me, and then I’ll think on the fly of another point that I can make. There’s no problem with doing that. At least having some idea of where your post is going to head will help to create something that won’t need as much editing later. Point number one, good editing starts with good planning. Point number two, put some space between when you write and when you edit. I’m a big believer that we use different parts of our brain for the writing and the editing. When we’re writing, we’re in the creative flow, hopefully that’s where we’re aiming for at least. Sometimes it doesn’t quite get there, sometimes it does feel like it’s a hard job. We all know that feeling of being in that flow. That’s where we’re aiming for. When we’re editing, we use a different part of our brain. Really, what I’m doing when I’m editing is I’m still trying to be creative, I’m still trying to improve, but I’m using a part of my brain that is a little more judgmental. I’m trying to look a little bit more critically at the content. Sometimes, I find it really hard if I’m in the middle of the flow and then I start editing on the go. This is what you definitely want to avoid, editing while you’re writing. That’s something that I think really can stop that creative flow. That’s not to say that you can’t fix a spelling mistake that you see while you’re on the go but really allow urself just to write in that writing process and then edit it once you’re done. I do think it’s important to have a little bit of space between when you edit. Now, that might simply be getting up and walking around your desk three times and then sitting down to edit. Probably a little bit more time might be useful, you can go up and get a coffee, have some lunch, even sleep on it. Having said all that, I do think there’s some arguments for not leaving it too long. I personally find that if I write something and then I leave it for a week to edit that I come back to it and I’m not really as energized by the topic. I’m not really as excited about the topic. Sometimes, if I leave it too long, it means I never actually finish it. There’s a bit of a balancing act there, you want to have some space between your writing and editing but you don’t want to leave it too long. Separate out those tasks. Number three, let’s actually get into some editing now. The first thing I do when I’m editing a blog post, I will say that I have people who help me to edit my content now, particularly some of the fine tuning stuff. One of the things I always try and do when I’ve written a piece of content is to do some big picture editing first. I don’t start with spelling, I don’t start with grammar, I don’t start with the visual editing and trying to format the post. I’m thinking in a bigger picture. Ali Luke wrote a really great post which I will link to in the show notes. She wrote it back in 2014. She actually goes through nine steps for crucial self editing of blog posts. One of the things I love there is that she really does talk about stepping back from your content and not going straight to the spelling and grammar and thinking on this big picture. I would recommend you read that. One of the things I try and do in this bigger picture editing is ask myself a series of questions. I haven’t ever written it down but the questions I’ve just gotten the habit of asking are these ones. Firstly, does my post have a point to it? – I think it was Chris Garrett who once said that you should always, as you read your blog post, ask yourself the question so what. Does this post have any benefit for my readers? It’s surprising how many times I’ve written a post and I ask myself that question at the end and I go there probably wasn’t any benefit, I’m probably just getting something off my chest here. Sometimes, I will at that point then say well, I’m just going to scrap this post. That’s the ultimate edit, delete. Many of the times, you can reshape your post to really bring a benefit to your readers. You want to bring some benefits to your readers. How are you going to change their life in some way with your blog post? That’s one of the questions I’m asking. I’m particularly asking that because I have teaching blogs. You might have a different goal with your blog and so your so what might be a little bit different. Is it a good post? This is big picture questions here. This is part of the editing process. Is it something that your readers are going to want to share? Is it something that they’re going to wow, that’s life changing, or I’m glad I read that. If your answer to those questions is no, then you need to do some big editing on your content. It may even be editing your idea of the post. Other questions you can ask about the big picture is is this post meaty enough? Could I add some depth to it? Could I add some more information? Does it need a story? Does it need an example? Does it need a quote? Does it need some further reading, links to make it more understandable and to make it more useful in some ways? Again, here we’re not talking about the nitty gritty of the post, we’re actually trying to judge is this post good enough, is it deep enough, is it meaty enough, is it gonna be useful to people? Another question to ask is is this post too repetitive? Am I repeating the same thing over and over again in different ways? Could I take something out to stop that repetition? Is the ordering of the ideas right? Do I need to shift a paragraph around? Is it a logical flow? Am I actually taking my readers from one point to another and building my argument, building the idea, or should I present it in a different order? Is there a relevant information in the post? Have you written a paragraph or two that’s really in a side, a tangent that doesn’t really enhance the post in some way? Another one that I try and ask in this sort of big picture thinking is does this post sound human? Is it in the right voice? I did a great interview, I think it was a great interview, with Beth Dunn back in Episode 52. It’s one of the most popular episodes I’ve ever done. Beth Dunn is an editor at HubSpot. She presented ten tips on how to write in a more human way. I would encourage you to go back and listen to that, make a note of that one. You can go to problogger.com/podcast/52 or iTunes. She talks about ten things that can help you to write in a more human kind of voice. I think this is part of that big picture, sometimes you get to the end of the post and you think that’s just a bit too formal, it’s not as conversational as I might normally write. Asking yourself some of those sorts of questions, she gives some really practical tips about using contractions, using can’t instead of cannot, using you’ve instead of you have, those types of words. Using short, clear words instead of fancy ones, avoiding jargon. She’s got some really great tips in that particular episode. I guess ultimately there, we’re trying to understand is it written in the right voice and a voice that’s consistent with your blog. The last thing I’ll say about the big picture editing is an exercise that might help you. Try and put yourself in the shoes of your reader. Actually imagine one of your readers reading your post from their perspective. You might actually have an actual person in mind or you might just imagine one of your readers. Put yourself in their shoes and read the post. Would they understand it? What questions might they be left with at the end of the post? What objections might they have? How would they feel as a result of reading it? Have you written it in a way that’s uplifting or one that’s gonna leave them feeling a little down? Asking those types of questions, reading a post through the eyes of one of your readers can really change your post and inform the way that you need to edit it. It might also help you to write a more comprehensive post because you suddenly realize that they have a question that’s not answered in the post. Maybe this exercise will help you to write in a more conversational, personal, emphatetic tone as well. Step number three is to do some big picture editing. It probably means reading through your post without really being drawn to the nitty gritty and asking yourself some of those big questions. Once you’ve done that, you might be changing some paragraphs around, you might already be starting to cut some things out, you might be adding some things in, adding some examples or story. I don’t really know what the result of that will be, it will be all kinds of things. The step that I do after that is to try and really focus on cutting stuff out. This might be just be but I find most of the time when I create a piece of content, I look at it in a critical way, I realize there’s stuff that I could remove from it. I find that I overwrite. I can, with an edit, make my content simple and briefer. I think it was Albert Einstein who said make it simple, as in brief, but not simpler. You wanna make it briefer, you wanna get to the point quicker, but you don’t want to cut the meat out of it, you don’t want to dumb it down. I’m certainly not saying cut out the good stuff, I’m just saying there’s a lot of words that you’ve probably used that you can cut out. In that article that I mention from Ellie before, she suggests particularly focusing upon your introduction and refining that. Your introduction is all about hooking people. If you get too vague or too wordy or you don’t get straight to the point, you’ll need to rewrite it. You’ll lose people in that first paragraph. Really, your whole blogpost could probably do with some cutting down. Many times, I actually find that my first paragraph, I can almost delete it because I’ve waffled there. I’ve tried to explain why I’m writing the post when I should just get straight to the meat. Sometimes, my second paragraph is a better first line than my opening one. Really, you want to look at that opening, I’ve got some further reading in the show notes about writing great opening paragraphs. Look critically at your whole post. What could you cut out? What is unnecessary? What’s repetitive there? Step number five is now to start to look at the details. This is where we get more into the nitty gritty. Up to this point, we’ve been looking at the structure, we’ve been looking at paragraphs and the ideas in the content and editing those things. But now, we really do need to turn our attention to some of those details. One of the things I like  to do when I’m doing an important one and I really want to edit it well and I don’t have one of my team to help me, ideally I do like to get someone else to look at my content. If I have to do it all myself, one of the things I like to do is to print out my posts. I will print them out on a piece of paper and I will grab myself a red pen or a green pen or something that’s really bold. I will slowly read through my post, sentence by sentence. I force myself to do it slowly. This is the first pass. As I’m doing it, I will mark up my post. I’ll circle things that have spelling mistakes, I will highlight punctuation that’s not right, and I’ll make any edits on the page. I don’t like to do it in the post, I like to have done this all on the page first. The second pass for me is I read it out loud. When I read things out loud, I always pick up things that I would never have seen by just reading silently in my mind. I also find as I read it out loud, it helps me to make my content sound more human and write in a more conversational tone as well. If you really want to take it up for a notch, and I will do this for an important post, if it’s a guest post on someone else’s site or it’s one that I really feel passionate about, you can take it up another notch and read it a third time to someone else. I find this really does change things. You’re very conscious about how your content sounds when you read it to another human being. From time to time, I might say to Vanessa, “Can you listen to me read this post?” I will pick up things in that hat even she wouldn’t pick up as she’s reading it. Ideally, you probably want her to read it as well. She’s a lawyer so she picks up those nitty gritty things. Reading it out loud to another person will help to highlight things and it will help you to work out whether your post is written in an understandable way because you’re thinking about how they’re hearing it. There are particular some things that I’m looking at as I’m doing this process of printing it out, reading it out loud. I’m looking at the headline, I think it’s so important to get that right. Obviously, you don’t want a spelling mistake in your headline. Also, you want to spend some time getting the headline just right. I’ve got some further listening tips for you to do, I think it was Episode 156 where we talked about headlines. I’m particularly looking at that opening paragraph. I’m also looking at the conclusion and any calls to action that we have. Again, back in Episode 23, I did a whole episode on calls to action. You want to ask yourself, do I have a call to action? It’s amazing how many blog posts you’ve written and you don’t ask your readers to do anything. You should always give them something to read or ask them a question to comment on or ask them to do something in some way. Could your call to action be clearer, do you have too many calls to action, is it confusing? Really hone that. The other thing to really pay a careful attention to and that I always try and do before I publish a post is to give it a visual edit, to preview the post before you publish it. In WordPress, you hit the preview button. How doe the post look? Is it interesting? Does it create a good, strong first impression? Could you add a beautiful image or an intriguing image right up at the top of your post to make people look twice at it? Does it need better formatting? Do you need to use headings? Are those headings edited right? Are they intriguing? Do they make people wanna read the content after those? Visual edit is really important and again I’ll give you some further reading on the show notes on that. The last thing I’ll say about the nitty gritty is are you being consistent in your post? Ideally, you probably want a style guide for your overall blog so that you can have consistency in your editorial style between posts. We talk about that in the interview with Beth Dunn. Within the post, it’s really important that you have consistency. People are going to be reading your post. If you use a different spelling of a word, say you might use the US Spelling of one word, color for instance. US versus UK, it’s got an extra U in it. If you use two different versions of that, some people are going to pick that up and it’s going to create an impression. Stick with one style of spelling. The formatting of words like the word ebook. Sometimes, people use it all lower case. Sometimes, they put a capital B, sometimes they put a hyphen in it. You can really do whatever you like there but stick to it. If you use the word three times in your post, don’t write it in three different ways. Another one is are you writing in the first person or are you writing in the third person? Sometimes, you skip between the different persons that you’re writing and the position that you’re taking with the article. You want some consistency in that. Consistency is certainly part of that detailed edit that you do. The second last thing that I do is an SEO edit. I don’t tend to spend a lot of time on this but one of the things I do ask myself before I hit publish is what would someone be searching for on Google to find this content? Really for me, I’m asking that question as I’m thinking about the headline of the post. Before I hit publish, I’m asking myself could I weave those words, those keywords into other parts of the article? Headings into the content itself. Ultimately for me, I’m writing for people first and Google’s machines later. Ultimately, you can do a bit of both and that’s a great thing. But ultimately, you really do want to serve your readers, you don’t want to make your content awkward but there are some times some ways to weave in your keywords a little bit more and to optimize your post for search engines. The last thing I do is to publish. That’s the last step. I will say that I think it’s really important not to let this whole editing process stop you from publishing. I know there will be some of you who will be listening to this who have had the experience that you get so caught up in perfecting your post that you never actually published it. I guess what I would say to you is you can always improve it after you’ve published it. You can always go and do another edit once it’s live, you can always fix that typo that you missed, you can always add another paragraph or take something out, it’s totally fine to do that. It’s your content, you can do what you like with it. Don’t get caught up in this whole editing process, don’t feel that it has to be perfect before it goes live. I do find that for some bloggers, and I have had this experience myself, that the editing process can actually kill your passion and excitement for your topic, for the content that you’ve just written, but also for your whole overarching topic. If that’s you, you need to really set some limits on how much time you’re going to spend editing. Maybe a deadline might help with that, and maybe outsourcing might help with that as well. That certainly has helped me to be able to say to my team I’m going to do some big picture editing on my content, but I really want you to focus on the small picture stuff. That’s probably another topic for another day. Good editing starts with good planning. Number two point was to put space between when you write and when you edit. Number three was to do big picture editing first. Number four was to cut down your content, to really look at what you can take out of it without taking the meat out. Number five was to look at the details, to print it out, read it out loud, read it to another person. Pay attention to your headlines and conclusions and visual editing, consistency in your writing. Number six was to do an SEO audit and then number seven was to hit publish. I would love to know what you would add to this process because I’m sure there are different approaches to editing, maybe you do find that you edit best straight after you write. I’m open to learning from you if you’ve got any other ideas. You can find all the further reading, and there’s quite a bit of it today, and leave a comment to let us know how you do your editing over at problogger.com/podcast/168. As I’ve mentioned, I’ve got a great article there from Ali Luke on editing and some further listening and reading on things like getting your titles right, getting your openings right, getting calls to action right, and quite a bit more. Thanks for listening. Before I go, I will say last week’s episode, Episode 167 was a challenge episode. It was all about getting things off your someday list onto your today list. I’ve just been overwhelmed by the amount of people who have sent me emails this week and people who have been leaving messages in the ProBlogger Challenge Group about the things that you’re getting done. I’m so excited to hear so many of you kicking goals. Some of the emails that I’ve had this week have been just mindblowing, the things that you as a community are doing. I’ve had people say that they’ve started vlogging this week, I’ve had numerous people say that they started a blog this week for the very fist time. Some of you are launching new websites and completing redesigns of your blog. I have one person writing a resume to get back into the workforce, another person who’s hiring a VA, someone else who’s created an opt-in this week, someone who just switched their email providers, someone who cleaned their desk which is exciting, someone who’s entering a contest for the first time writing a new series of content, someone who started a new strategy in promoting their blog and someone else who’s just started to plan and publish a series of blog posts. One more person who just literally emailed as I was recording now who just said that they’re finishing an ebook which is exciting. If you’ve got stuff on your someday list, if you’ve been procrastinating on something, please go back and listen to Episode 167 and please join our Facebook group and let us know what you’re going to get off your someday list and put on your today list. Thanks so much for those of you who are reporting back, I’m looking forward to seeing you actually get the things done that you’ve nominated. You can update us over in the Facebook group as well. Just search Facebook for ProBlogger Challenge Group. Thanks for listening today and I’ll chat with you in a week’s time. How did you go with today’s episode? Enjoy this podcast? Sign up to our ProBloggerPLUS newsletter to get notified of all new tutorials and podcasts below.

How to Overcome Blogger Procrastination In today’s lesson I want to talk about an issue that I think is at the heart of why many blogs don’t reach their potential. In fact it’s an issue that I think is at the heart of why many people don’t reach their potential in many areas of life. Listen to this episode here on iTunes. I want to talk about procrastination and why we so often don’t do what we know we should do. In this episode I’ll share a quote from my mum that changed my life. In this episode I’ll share a couple of stories of my own procrastination and how I pushed through it to achieve some pretty remarkable things. In this episode I’ll share with you a challenge that I hope will help us all to get something off our ‘someday’ list and put it onto our ‘today’ list If you’re someone who procrastinates and perhaps feels that they’re letting opportunities pass them by because you’re not taking the action you know you should take – this episode is for you. Further Resources on How Procrastination Stopped Me Writing a Million Dollar Blog Post How to Start a Blog 10 Surefire Ways to Overcome Blogging Procrastination 7 Tips for Avoiding Procrastination. Without Delay is the Easiest Way. Inside the mind of a master procrastinator | Tim Urban Video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arj7oStGLkU Challenge: Identify one thing that you have been avoiding. Tell someone about it – tell someone in your ‘real life’. Tell us in the Facebook Challenge Group (here’s the specific thread to comment on) Put a date on it of when you are going to do it by Get to work!   Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Hi there and welcome to Episode 167 of the ProBlogger podcast, an episode that I think could just be the most important episode I’ve ever done. My name is Darren Rowse and I’m the blogger behind problogger.com, a blog, podcast, event, job board, series of ebooks and a book all designed to help you as a blogger to grow your audience and make money from your blog. You can learn more about ProBlogger at problogger.com. In today’s lesson, I want to talk about an issue that I think is at the heart of why many bloggers don’t reach their potential. In fact, it’s an issue that I think is at the heart of why many people don’t reach their potential in many areas of their life. Today, I want to talk about procrastination and why so often we don’t do what we know we should do. In today’s episode, I’ll share a quote from my mum that changed my life. In today’s episode, I’ll share a couple of stories of my own procrastination and how I pushed through that to achieve some fairly remarkable things. In this episode, I’ll share with you a challenge that I hope will help us all to get something off our someday list, something we’ve been procrastinating on and to put it on our today list. If you’re someone who procrastinates and perhaps feels like you’re letting opportunity pass you by because you’re not taking action that you know you should take, this episode is for you. I want to start today‘s show with a quote from my mum. I quite often quote Pablo Picasso and Albert Einstein and other such people on my Twitter account at @problogger but I added to my tweets recently this quote from my mum because I realized that it’s something that had really shaped me and really put the finger on an issue that had been a bigger part of my life and that had potentially held me back in many ways. This is the quote, “Your life will be better if you take action on the things you avoid.” It’s a very simple idea. Your life will be better, your blog will be better, your business will be better, your relationships will be better if you take action on the things that you avoid. That’s a bit of a paraphrase because my mum used to say this in many different ways and she started saying it as, I was probably around the age of 4 or 5 and she began to notice that I was a procrastinator. My earliest memory of procrastination was when I used to get a 20 cent piece for pocket money on every Friday morning if I’d clean my room and my other chores for the week. And of course, as a procrastinator I always left thing to the very last minute. I’ll get the pocket money at 8:30 am just before we left the school. If I had not cleaned my room by that point, I didn’t get the money. But I always got the money because I had this little deadline and I worked towards it. But I never cleaned my room until 8:25, it was always left to the last minute and this is around the time that my mum began to say, “Your life will be better if you take action on the things that you avoid.” I’m sure she began to say it about other things because I was that kind of kid who always left things the last minute, I left my paper around to the last minute when I got that, I left homework to the last minute, and when I got a part time job in the supermarket I left getting there to the last minute, I left studying for essays and exams in high school and university to the last minute. I even avoided getting to work when I got my first full time job until the last minute. I usually got things done because there was a deadline. Unfortunately, because I left things to the last minute, the quality of what I was doing wasn’t always great. The natural enemy of procrastination of course is the deadline. This is the way most procrastinators kind of get by. This is the way we do get things done. It’s the way I pay my taxes. It’s the way I get my keynote talks done when I’m presenting at a conference. That’s the way I buy Vanessa a christmas present. Deadlines really help us as procrastinators but here’s the thing, this is why I think my mum used to say this to me over and over again. There are many things in life that simply don’t have deadlines. They don’t have a natural deadline to them, or they do might have a deadline but they’re so skewed and so far in the future that they don’t actually impact the way we live our life. Some of you might have heard my thoughts and my own progression on health. Health is an area where there is a deadline but the delaine is so far in the future for those of us who are young-ish that we don’t actually get motivated by it. The deadline is when we’re 70, or when we’re 80. It’s not impacting us now even though we know we should eat well, we should exercise, we should look after our mental health, we should look after our education and those types of things that help us to be healthy people. We’re not really motivated by that deadline because it’s in 40, 50 years in the future and so we tend to procrastinate. We tend to put these things in our someday least. This is something I think we all do in different areas of our life, for many of us it is in health. One of the things that I’ve learned over the last few years is that there are many aspects of blogging where there are no deadlines as well. There are many aspects of business, there are many aspects of creating pursuits like podcasting and YouTubing where there are no actual deadlines, or when we have these fuzzy deadlines and as a result we’re not motivated by them. Let me share a story with you that I’m sure some of you will relate to. I was recently going through my desk which has a drawer dedicated to notebooks. I don’t know if you’re a notebook kind of guy or girl but I have this drawer in my desk that is full of notebooks particularly from the early 2000 and that’s how I pretty much took notes at conferences, I kept my ideas. It was almost like a journal or diary in many ways but it is also where I did a lot of my planning. I found this notebook from 2009 and it was full. It was full right from the first page right to the end. Towards the end of it, I had a page dedicated to my goals for 2010. Obviously, it was probably November, December that year of 2009. I was beginning to think about what I should do next year. Right at the top of my goals list for 2010 was the words, and I’ll post this in the show notes an actual picture of my journal, “Start ProBlogger podcast.” That was right at the top of my goals list. Underneath that, I had a little description of what the show would be like. I said it will be a weekly show with tutorials on growing profitable blogs and then I named some of the categories, starting a blog, finding readers, building community, making money, creating content, then I said it would have some interviews but it would be mainly talking head, me, delivering the content which is actually how it turned out to be. Then I also had a little bullet point, “Challenges?” Obviously I was thinking about maybe doing some challenges. I don’t exactly remember how I put that on my list back in 2009, my goals for 2010, but I presume it was because I was seeing some of my friends like Pat Flynn, Aimee Porterfield, Chris Dhaka, some of these people starting to talk about podcasting and actually starting their own podcasts. I remember a number of times, people like Pat and Chris particularly, saying, “You really should start a podcast.” There it was at the top of my list for goals for 2010. 2010 rolled around a month or so later and from my memory of 2010, life was really busy. I had a lot of excuses why I didn’t get my podcast launched in 2010. We had two little kids running around the house, I think we’re moving home around that time. I had two successful blogs already, we’re in our second year of the ProBlogger Event. Life was busy. Also, alongside it, there were times where I remember feeling fear when it came to the podcast. I remember thinking to myself what if no one listens, what if I sound stupid, what if no can understand my accent, what if I suck at podcasting? And then there were other excuses as well, you know, I don’t know how to set it up, I don’t have the right microphone, I’ve never done this before. The excuses went on and on. I also didn’t tell anyone about my goal and for all of these reasons, it slipped onto my someday list. “Yeah, I’ll do that one day,” and this is what I tend to do as a procrastinator, I say to myself, “Yeah, I’m not going to rule out doing this thing that I know I could do, or should do, but I’m just going to put it on my someday list. I’ll do it one day.” For all of these reasons, it didn’t happened in 2010. At the end of 2010, I hadn’t done it and I came to write my goals for 2011 and actually found this in another notebook. There at the top of my list of goals for 2011 was start a podcast. Of course, 2011 came around and life got even busier. We had a new baby, our third boy in the house. The fear was still there, the excuses remained, I didn’t do it. The cycle of procrastination really set in. Of course at the top of my list of goals for 2012 was start a podcast. I didn’t do it. At the top of my list of goals for 2013, 2014, 2015 was start a podcast. I didn’t tell anyone and I allowed my business, my fear, my excuses, to let it slip off my things that I would do in those years. I continued to put it on my someday list. Last year, 2015, I went to a conference in the Philippines. It was Chris Dhaka’s conference, Tropical Think Tank. It was the 13th of May that I arrived at this conference. I was late to the event because the first day of the event I think was Mother’s Day and I wanted to be home for that, Mother’s Day here in Australia. I got to the event a little bit late. It was actually, I think from memory, the second last day of the event. This is kind of my worst nightmare as an introvert because everyone already knew each other, they had shared experiences of a couple of days of the conference together and I was walking to this event cold not really knowing too many people at all. The night I arrived, there was a networking party going on. There was a lot of drinks and lots of people having fun. There I was feeling a bit nervous and very, very jetlagged. I just spent over 24 hours on planes to get to the Philippines. I had met a couple of people but I didn’t know too many people. I walked into this party and I met a few people but one of them did something that really jumped out at me and helped me to integrate into the party. She asked me if I would partner her in a game of billards. The person who did it was Lane, Lane Kennedy. It was one of those billards games where it goes on forever because no one was really that great a player. Sorry Lane and the others we’re playing with and probably because we were drinking as well but it was a fun game. It went on for over an hour. We basically just hit balls around the table for a while but it did give us a really good chance to start to get to know each other and to chat. At one point during the game, Lane turned to me and she said what are your goals for 2015? Remember, I was completely jetlagged and by this stage probably had a couple of beers and was feeling a little light leaded. I just said the first thing that came to my mind. It was the thing that I’d had on my goals list for four or five years now and had never really told anyone. I said to her, “I’m going to start a podcast. By the end of the year, I want to start this podcast.” She began to ask a few questions about that and expressed some enthusiasm toward it and said, “Yes, that would be good. I would listen to that.” I don’t know whether she was just saying it to give small talk but it was enough encouragement that I began to get a bit more excited about it. I began to tell her that I was going to launch this podcast with 31 episodes in 31 days. It was an idea that just came to me in that conversation. I was going to base it on my ebook 31 Days To Build A Better  Blog. Again she was enthusiastic about it, she went and played another shot and then she came back to me. She said something that I to this day see as a real gift. She gave me a gift by asking me a very simple question. Her question was this, these exact words, “When are you going to do it by?” That question I think is the reason I launched my podcast. I was jetlagged, couple of beers in me, and at the top my head I said, “I’m going to launch it by the first of July.” I didn’t really put much thought into that date at all and in hindsight it was a crazy date to say because it was six weeks after that point.I had just told her that I was going to launch his podcast with 31 episodes in 31 days and anyone who has launched a podcast knows that that is crazy. I also realized a day later that most of my team were involved in other projects and they wouldn’t be able to help me that much in setting this podcast up. I needed to learn how to set up a podcast, I needed to learn to edit a podcast, how to record a podcast, and the equipment I needed and all of these things. But it was the best thing that I ever did to set myself that deadline. By me telling someone I was going to do it and putting a date on it is the reason I got it done. I’m not even sure if Lane remembered the date that I’d said or if that conversation even had much of an impact upon her but it was something that I remembered and I was motivated by. Lane didn’t keep me accountable, she didn’t actually ring me up and say it’s almost the first of July, have you got it done?  Simply by me knowing that I’d expressed that to another person, I get myself a deadline and I killed the cycle of procrastination. I’m happy to report that on the first of July last year, I launched the podcast. Over the next 31 days, I actually launched it with 32 episodes and it was one of the best things that I ever did. Starting this podcast has been fantastic. We’ve almost hit 1.9 million downloads which is great but more importantly to me, it’s opened up all kinds of opportunities and conversations with my readers and my listeners. Podcasting is such a personal medium. I’m getting emails from people everyday who are saying things like, “I feel like I’m having conversations with you.” People who feel like they know me in deeper ways. I’m meeting people at conferences who are very familiar with me and it’s only because they are listening to the podcast each week. It’s such a personal and conversational medium. What other medium allows you to whisper directly into someone’s ear each week? Last week alone, we had one episode that was listened to 10,000 times. It was a 20-minute episode. When you add that up, that’s 3,333 hours of people listening to my voice and that has a massive impact. I’m so glad that I ended that cycle of procrastination and I’m so grateful that Lane asked me that question, “When are you going to do it by?” Here’s my question for you today, what do you have on your someday list? What have you been procrastinating on? What have you been avoiding? This time last year in episode 66 of this podcast. I started a whole series of podcast where I issued you with a challenge to get things off your someday list. If you have been listening for about a year now, you will remember that series, it was ten things that I encourage you to consider getting off your someday list. I particularly encouraged you back in episode 66 to focus upon things that you’ve been procrastinating about but also things that you could do once that could have ongoing benefits for your blog. I think from memory I talked about creating products for your blog, I talked about email and starting an email list of building engagement on your email list by using autoresponders. I talked about design, that’s one thing many people procrastinate on, redesigning their blog. I talked about optimizing your use of social media. I talked about creating a resource page for you blog. I talked about mapping out a monetization strategy and creating an editorial calendar. There were 9 or 10 things in that series that I said that you can do today that are going to have ongoing benefits from your blog and there were things that I saw a lot of bloggers procrastinating on. The list could go on and on. That’s just 9 or 10 things and one of the things that I loved about that series was many of you took the challenge but you did something else. I had people emailing me and saying the thing that you got off your someday list were things like starting a blog, creating an avatar for your audience, diversifying your income streams by adding a new income stream, running a challenge for your readers, moving to your own domain or server, getting off Blogspot onto WordPress. Someone else reported during SEO on their blog and giving their blog an SEO audit. Someone else said that they actually started a podcast as a result of that challenge. Someone else said that they started to experiment with Facebook Live. The list could go on and on, there are many things that we as bloggers procrastinate on and only you really know what’s on that someday list. But today, I want to challenge you to do one thing that you’ve been avoiding and only you know what it is. I really want you to do three things with that one thing. First, I want you to tell someone about it. I want you to tell someone in your real life what that thing is that you’ve been procrastinating on. Do what I did with Lane and actually name the thing that you want to get done. It’s so powerful to have that little moment of accountability. You can tell somebody in your real life but also want to encourage you to come over to our Facebook group, the challenge group that we’ve got running. Tell us there what’s the one thing you’re going to do. Number two, here’s the gift I’m giving you now. Put a date on it. Tell us when you’re going to do it by and tell that person that you’re telling as well. Tell someone about what you want to do and put a date on it and then get to work. I want you to come back and report when you’ve done it as well in the Facebook group. Pay particular attention when you’re choosing the thing that you’re going to do to things that you can do once that have ongoing benefits and I want to share a quick story of something that I did in that regard, but also pay attention to the things that you’ve been avoiding. Like my mum said, “Your life will be better if you do the things, take action on the things that you avoid.” If you’ve been avoiding something and it’s still in your mind, it’s probably an important thing. It’s probably something that you really should do. Also, pay attention particularly to the things that you’ve got a bit of fear about. As I’ve said in previous episodes, fear is a signal that something important is going to happen. Pay attention to things you’ve got fear about, the things you’ve been avoiding, and the things that have ongoing benefits. Let me finish with one other story that shows my amazing abilities as a procrastinator but also shows what you can do with this challenge. Late last year, as a result of this very series that I just talked about, The Today Not Someday series of podcast, I was feeling so motivated by the things that I saw you as listeners doing. I decided to take the challenge myself. I made a list of things that I’ve been avoiding doing. I made this list of things that I’ve been saying, “Yeah, I’ll do that one day.” Some of the things were really big like redesigning ProBlogger. That actually took me 6 months to get that off my list. We did a lot of work on that this year and that was probably the biggest thing on my list, redesigning ProBlogger. The other things I noticed about creating that someday list was that many of the things was really small things. One of the things at the top of my list was to write a new piece of content for ProBlogger. It was actually a piece of content that I thought about writing way back when I started ProBlogger in 2004. I started ProBlogger back in 2004 because I wanted to read a blog about blogging and how to make money blogging but no one was writing that blog at the time. I remember as I started that blog, brainstorming ideas for topics, for that blog, and I came up with all of the normal things that you would expect. How to find readers for the blog, how to monetize a blog, how to write great content for your blog. At the top of that brainstorm list that I came up with was the idea for a post called how to start a blog. That’s probably the most logical idea for a blog about blogging. You would expect to have a post called how to start a blog and you’d expect it to be one of the first posts that you’d write. I had excuses for writing that post and I procrastinated on it. I had all these little voices going through my mind and most of the voices centered around the fear that I had around that post. The little voices said things like you’re not technical enough to write that post. I had at that point already started a number of blogs. I knew how to start a blog but I had this little voice at the back of my head that said, “You’re not technical enough. What if you make a mistake in that post? No one will believe anything else you say. You need to research more, you need to get some advice on that.” All of these little voices made this thing a bigger thing than it needed to be. I put it on my someday list. At first, I probably thought to myself I’ll do that in a couple of weeks or next month or maybe in 2005 but gradually it slipped off my list. If you go through the archives of ProBlogger, you’ll see that I’ve never written a post on how to start a blog in the first 10 or 11 years of ProBlogger. We’ve published over 8,000 posts. Whilst we’ve had a few other people write posts similar to that and talking about starting a blog, I’d never written that post and it was missing. I used to have readers email me and say, “Hey, I’m sure you’ve written on this topic. Can you point me to the article on how to start a blog?” I would point them to other people’s articles either in our archives or other people’s blogs. I began to feel guilty about doing that. I would actually lie in bed at times and think to myself, I really should write this post. I had guilt, I had this kind of tension within me that said I should write it but the voices continue to say, “You’re not technical enough.” Last year, end of last year when I created this list of things that I knew that I’ve been procrastinating on, this was at the top of my list, write a post on how to start a blog, and I did it. It took me three and a half-hours to write the post and as soon as I started to write it, I knew that I built this thing up to be bigger than it was. My excuses began to melt away because I instantly, as soon as I started writing it, realized that of course I knew how to write this post. Of course I had the ability to do it. I’d started 30 blogs over the years and of course I could write this post and so I wrote the post and got it out there. The results were immediate. Firstly, I knew I’d created some useful piece of content and so I started to share it. I knew this piece of content was going to help people step by step. Five Steps To Starting A Blog, I’ll link to it in the show notes today. As a result of me feeling confident about this piece of content, I began to share it. I began to share it on social media, and I if you go to any post on the blog at ProBlogger you’ll see in the sidebar we link to it. It’s linked to on our Start Here page. It’s something that I talk about in conferences, I talk to people in conversations. I link to it a lot and as a result it gets traffic. It’s not ranking number in Google but we’re starting to see some search traffic from it as well. As a result of all this traffic, it’s starting to be one of the most read posts on ProBlogger. This post has a few affiliate links in it, we link to some server providers, we link to some WordPress templates, we link to where you can get a domain name. As a result, every single day I get emails from our affiliate partners saying “You’ve earned money as a result of this post.” We also, at the end of this post, link to one of our ebooks, What To Do In Your First Week Of Blogging. It’s a natural flow once you started a blog, you want to know what to do in your first week. Every day we see ebook sales as a result of this post. This post in September earned almost $8,000 which I think is just remarkable. One post made that much of money months and months after I released it as a result of all that traffic. When I saw that figure, I had two simultaneous reactions. On one hand, I was ecstatic, $8,000, that’s close to $10,000 Australian. Over a year, it has the potential to make over $100,000. That’s amazing, a single post making that much money, I was ecstatic. But then I had this simultaneous realization that I could have written this post in 2004, 12 years ago, this post by now could potentially have been a million dollar post. Why didn’t I do earlier? I had regret and this is one of the things us as procrastinators have to realize that we’re going to live with. We’re going to live with regret and there are many stories in my blogging career like this one; excitement simultaneously coming with regret. Why didn’t I do it earlier? This why I want to talk about this today because I don’t want you to have that regret. I want you to do the things that you know you could do, that you know you should do, that you know that will benefit your blog. There has been some great things about this, there’s been some regret as well. This post drives traffic around our blog, the secondary page views because we linked to further reading. This post has led to me getting a lot of emails from very happy readers who are proudly showing off their new blogs. The other great thing about doing this and knocking it off my someday list is that there’s a relief associated with it. I don’t have to lie there in bed at night and think, “I really should write that post.” I don’t have to send people away from my blog anymore to get this kind of information, it’s there and there’s relief associated with that. What do you need to do? What do you need to knock off your someday list? Something that is going to have ongoing benefits from your blog potentially. Something that you’ve been avoiding, something that you’ve been procrastinating on. What is it? Only you really know what it is but today I want to challenge you to face the fear, face the fact that you’ve been avoiding this thing and get it done to stop the cycle of procrastination. Identify what it’s going to be, tell someone about it, come to our Facebook group. Tell us what it is and when you’re going to do it by and then come back and report. Celebrate with us. I cannot wait to see what collectively we get done as a result of this podcast. I really do look forward to that and so I encourage you. You can do it in the show notes, leave a comment at problogger.com/podcast/167 or search in Facebook for the ProBlogger challenge group and share with us your thing there. I will set up a thread dedicated to this episode where you can share the things that you’re going to get done and I look forward to celebrating those things and maybe helping out in any way that I can with you to get some of these things done as well. I hope that somewhere in the midst of my stories today, you have felt that you’re not the only one perhaps who procrastinates but also found some motivation to getting things done. Thanks for listening, I look forward to hearing from you as a result of this challenge. If you are a procrastinator and you’re sort of wondering what you should choose to get done as a result of today’s challenge, you might want to go back and take a look at Episode 66 of this podcast where I do I introduce that Today Not Someday Series. If you are wondering what you should do, there are 9 or 10 episode straight after episode 66 where I do talk about 9 or 10 different things that I do see a lot of bloggers procrastinating on. You might want to go and have a look on the show notes there and choose one of those episodes. That might give you some ideas to participate in this challenge. Again, look forward to chatting with you further about this idea, chat soon. How did you go with today’s episode? Enjoy this podcast? Sign up to our ProBloggerPLUS newsletter to get notified of all new tutorials and podcasts below.

Factors to Consider When Shaping Content Strategy for Your Blog In today’s lesson, I want to share 11 factors to consider when thinking about developing your blog’s editorial strategy and thinking about your blog’s editorial style. The success of your blog hinges on many factors but among the most important of them is your content. Putting thought into what content you want to focus upon creating is crucial. What I share with you today will help you to create a framework for content that not only serves your current readers, but will hopefully make your blog stand out from the many other blogs in your niche. This episode is perfect for anyone just starting out with blogging, who is thinking about content for the first time, but I also think it’s great for anyone who has been blogging for a while who wants to review and renew their editorial strategy. Further Resources on 11 Factors to Consider When Shaping the Content Strategy for Your Blog Vanessa’s Blog Style and Shenanigans Why Evergreen Content is the Best Investment of Time for a Blogger How Inspiring Your Readers Drives them to Search for Information (and Interact) 52 Types of Blog Posts that Are Proven to Work How Many Posts Should a Blogger Post? [Pros and Cons of Daily Posting] How Often Should You Blog? (Hint: The Answer Might Surprise You) ProBlogger FAQ: How Long Should Posts Be? Series of Blog Posts vs Long Blog Posts – Which is Better? How to Decide if You Should Start on a New Social Network or Medium Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Welcome to Episode 166 of the ProBlogger podcast. My name is Darren Rowse and I’m the blogger behind problogger.com, a blog, podcast, event, job board, and series of ebooks all designed to help bloggers grow their audience and make money from their amazing blogs.  You can learn more about ProBlogger over at problogger.com. In today’s lesson, I want to share 11 factors to consider when thinking about your blog’s editorial strategy and coming up with your own unique blogging style. The success of your blog really does hinge on many factors as you’ll know from listening to previous episodes. There’s many things that do help to grow your blog but among the most important of them is obviously content. Putting thought into what content you want to focus upon creating is so important. What I want to share with you today will I hope help you to create a framework for content that not only helps you to serve your current readers but also to help you to create a blog that stands out from the many other blogs in your niche. This is a question I get asked a lot is, “How do I make my blog stand out?” Whilst there are many factors, I think ultimately it will come down to your content as one of the most important factors. This episode today is perfect for anyone just starting out with blogging who’s thinking about content for the first time. You may be starting a blog and thinking, “What should I be writing about?” This episode will help you. I think it’s also perfect for anyone who’s been blogging for a while where you want to review your content and to renew your editorial strategy. I do have a lot of further reading today and I encourage you to open these notes up as you listen if possible over at problogger.com/podcast/166. Let’s get on with today’s show. It was recently asked a question on a podcast interview that I really struggled to answer. It stumped me even though the question was quite simple in some regards. The question was this, they asked, “In the early days of your blogging, how did you develop your blog’s editorial style and strategy?” Whilst on the surface this does seem like a very simple question to answer for someone who’s been blogging, I’ve really struggled to answer the question because I knew the interviewer was looking for some practical strategies to develop an editorial strategy. The reality was in the early days of my blogging, I wasn’t overly strategic about my own content. I wasn’t intentional about it in the early days of my blogging. My first blog was a personal blog and I don’t ever remember sitting down to come up with an editorial strategy when I started that blog. The content on that blog just came out of me. I wrote about what I was thinking about on any given day, I followed my interests, my passions and as a result, the content flowed. It was a personal blog too because I was writing all kind of topics. It was okay to experiment with different voices and to experiment with different topics. I guess in time, my style of content did emerge as I began to focus upon creating content that gave me energy that I could see my audience seemed to respond to but there wasn’t really any strategy there, the style just sort of happened to me. That was my first blog and it was a personal blog. I suspect many bloggers who start with personal blogs have similar experiences to that. In many ways, I guess the big picture advice I could give and that I did give in my answer was to do just that, create content based upon your passions, interests, and pay attention to what’s giving you energy and to what’s giving your audience energy. That’s the answer I gave, but ever since that interview I’ve not felt completely satisfied with the answer I gave because I realized that while in the early days my blogging I don’t ever come up with a strategy, I didn’t really sit down and think about, “This is my strategy.” I did make a series of decisions in that blog and in my other more niche focused blogs that I guess did shape my style and strategy. Whilst it wasn’t intentional, I was making decisions along the way. What I thought I’d do today in today’s episode is to kind of reverse engineer my experience and to go back through some of those decisions and to put them all together so that you can be a little bit more strategic about this type of stuff. The 11 decisions that I want to run through today, I made them on the fly. I made them without actually even knowing I was making them in some cases. That doesn’t mean you have to be on the fly, you can actually take these 11 decisions and make them about your blog today. As I said at the top, these are 11 decisions that a new blogger, I recon, if you are making this quite intentionally and experimenting with these things, they could actually help you fast track your own blog’s growth. These 11 decision are also great for anyone who’s been blogging for a while, who wants a bit of a framework to think about what they’ve been doing on their blog. You’ve probably already made these decisions without even knowing it but sometimes it’s worth just assessing how are we going with our editorial strategy and do I need to change directions in some of these areas. I hope that makes sense. Hopefully as I get into the 11 things, you’ll begin to see what I mean by having already made these decisions. Let’s get into them. Probably the best way to really explain what I’m doing is to share it with you and I hope it makes some sense to you. The first decision that most bloggers make, and it often happens to you, is to think about your voice. What voice do you write in? What voice do you want to write in on your blog? I’ve talked about voice in previous episodes and I will give you some further reading on this. One of the most helpful frameworks for thinking about voice that I’ve ever seen is something that I saw Jeff Goins presenting in an event that we ran in Portland a couple of years ago, ProBlogger day that we run off the back of World Domination Summit. At that event, Jeff talked about five platforms or five positions that you can come at blogging from. He said that pretty much any nature, any topic, you can write a blog in this five different voices. The first voice, the first platform is the voice of the professor. The professor is someone who researches a topic, who studies that topic and it comes up with a hypothesis and then teaches in a fairly authoritative type voice. The professor is often seen as an authority, as a thought leader in their particular industry because they’ve done a lot of research and they’re really developed their ideas. When I first came across blogging, this was the type of blog I saw when I started out. I thought everyone was a professor. I thought everyone who had a blog was writing in this style. I started out trying to be the professor and very quickly discovered that that wasn’t the right voice for me. That’s one type of voice that you could really put into any type of niche, you could be the professor of photography, you could be the professor of blogging, you could be the professor of any topic really. The second voice, the second platform that Jeff talked about at our conference was the artist. The artist isn’t a teacher, they’re someone who’s more interested in the beauty of a particular niche and a particular topic. They’re telling stories, they’re really trying to inspire people. They’re I guess tackling the topic more in a heartfelt way than a hid kind of way that the professor might. The artist is someone talking for more beauty in the topic. The third type is the profit. The profit is someone who tells the cold, hard, ugly truth about a particular topic. They are busting myths, they’re telling it like it is, they’re calling people and ideas out. Sometimes they’re not the most popular blogger in the world because they sometimes do say things that are uncomfortable for other people in that particular niche but that’s the approach that they take. They can really be tackling the same topic as the artist or the professor but in a very different way. The fourth type is the journalist. This is probably what I’m a little bit more like. The journalist is someone who gathers ideas, curates ideas together and then presents a story. I think I’m somewhere between the journalist and the professor, if I had to choose from these particular types. The journalist is someone whose gathering ideas, they’re writing a story, and they’re presenting ideas. A lot of the ideas may not be their own ideas but they’re gathering them together from different sources and from their own experience I guess, and then putting it out there. The fifth type is the celebrity. The celebrity isn’t someone who’s famous, they’re someone who’s more charismatic. I guess people read their blog because people want to know what they think about the niche. Those types of blogs is more about the personality and how they intersect with the topic. There’s five different voices that you can use in your blogging that Jeff puts out there. He says mort bloggers really fit into one or two, it might be a combinations of those things. They’re just five words that you can describe your voice. You may not be comfortable with some of those words. I know some people don’t like the word profit, some people don’t like the word celebrity, last time I talked about these. That’s totally fine but you can be intentional about your voice. You might be the companion, you might be the mentor, you might prefer to be known as the entertainer, or the reviewer, or the curator, or the storyteller, you might be the guide, the teacher, the tough leader. Any of these things might be your voice. On some level, sometimes the voice just comes out of this like I described earlier but sometimes you can be intentional about that. As I think back to starting Digital Photography School, my main blog, I actually was intentional about it. I made a decision, I looked around the photography space and I saw that a lot of photography teaching type blogs were using the professor’s voice, that were authoritative and there are the feely high level. They were talking using words that a normal person perhaps couldn’t really relate to. I decided I wanted to be a teacher, but I also wanted to be a companion. I wanted to be someone who was speaking in a more conversational voice, who was talking to someone who maybe was just behind me on the journey. This is what I’m learning about photography, I’ll try this out. And actually trying to use language that was a little bit more accessible to people. My voice was more the conversational voice, the companion teacher. If I had to describe it, it would be the companion teacher as opposed to the professor. That helped me to stand out because there weren’t many blogs writing in that voice. Sometimes voice happens to you, it just comes out of you. You just start writing in a certain style but sometimes you can be a little bit intentional about your voice as well and make a decision based upon that. The first area, the first factor to consider, the first decision to make if you like is what voice will your blog be in. Some of you already have a voice and you’re very comfortable with that but maybe you want to go through that list of professor, artist, profit, journalist, celebrity, companion, mentor, entertainer, reviewer, curator, storyteller, guide, teacher, thought leader or something else. I’ll include all of those in a little slide that I’ve got in today’s show notes. The first area is the voice. Second area that you might want to make some decisions about is whether you want evergreen content or whether you want more time sensitive content. Again, this isn’t an either/or type decision, you may have a combination of them. I think most blogs probably do have a combination with that. Most bloggers I know tend to major on one or the other. On my blogs, I tend to create more evergreen content. I actually spoke about evergreen content just a few episodes ago, probably about 30 episodes ago now, in episode 136. I’ll link to that in today’s show notes. I talked about why I love evergreen content and the power of evergreen content. On Digital Photography School, I’ll use that as an example again. Most of the content there is evergreen. I’d say 95% of it, the day it was written, whether that was 10 years ago when I started the blog. A lot of that content I wrote back in 2006 is still relevant today. In fact, it gets a lot of traffic today. One of the reasons it gets a lot of traffic today is because people still find it helpful and they’re still sharing it. They’re spending a lot of time on it and Google sees that and they rank it high. Evergreen content is great if you can write that but it’s not the only type of content that is a legitimate strategy for your blog. You can be more of a time sensitive content. As I think about my wife’s blog, Vanessa, her blog is Style & Shenanigans, and I can link to that in the show notes as well. It is more time sensitive. She’s writing about style, fashion, books, movies, what’s on Netflix, those type of things. As a result, some of those things date, the books that are new and current. She occasionally writes about a book that’s been out for a few years but most of it tends to be the books that have come out in the last few months, what’s on Netflix now. Particularly, you have fashion posts, fashion dates so quickly and so she’s more focusing upon time sensitive content. From time to time, she throws in an evergreen post and they do quite well as well. On both of our blogs, we have a combination of them. I occasionally will do a review of a camera or might write about a new camera that’s coming out that’s more time sensitive. But most of the content is evergreen, where most of her content is time sensitive. There’s no right or wrong answer here, it’s just a decision that I guess I made in the early days without really thinking about it in much depths. Again, what kind of content do you focus on, do you want to have a combination of both, would you say a certain percentage of the content needs to be one or the other and you may actually be really intentional about that. You may actually say I want four posts a week that are evergreen, one post a week that’s time sensitive, or you might flip it around. That’s the second area, evergreen versus time sensitive. The third one, I find it difficult to actually come up with a label for this. I’ve said it’s the intent of your content. Some of you have heard me talk about how every week on ProBlogger and Digital Photography School I try to create content that informs, inspires, and interacts. There’s three different intents in terms of the content that I’m trying to create, I’m trying to give information, I’m trying to give inspiration, I’m trying to give interaction. I’ll link to a post that I wrote a couple of years ago now on ProBlogger about how I do all three of those types of post. Information, it’s more tutorials for us, it could be news, it could be a review. That’s more of an information type post. I guess it’s more aiming at the head. I’m trying teach people or give people the information to make a decision. Inspiration for us is more image based first. Here’s a beautiful photo, hopefully that inspires you to go and take better photos. It could be here’s a story of how I overcame a challenge and hopefully it inspires you to overcome that challenge. The interaction posts are more asking outrageous questions, or getting them to do a little bit of homework, or to show off something that they’re done to share their experiences. Those three types of posts work quite well on Digital Photography School but we’ve decided to be very intentional about majoring upon information. Every week on Digital Photography School, we publish 14 posts, we’re very intentional, about two posts every single day. The only week that we don’t do that is between Christmas and New Years, we scale it back to one post a day. Over the normal week, we would do 12 posts every week that are information posts. They’re either a tutorial, or a review, or occasionally a piece of news. It’s all information, those 12 posts. Once a week, we do an inspiration post and this is usually for us a collection of beautiful images that relates to one of our information posts. It might be here’s 12 images that illustrate this technique that we just talked about in a tutorial. The last post of the week is an interactional post and that’s where we do a challenge. We say, “Go and take a photo.” It usually relates to the inspiration post which relates to that tutorial. We create three posts a week that relate to each other but have different intents. Your blog might be a different combination. You may say, “I want to be more of an inspiration blog, and occasionally sprinkle in some information, or some interactions, or your blog might be more about the conversation, it might be more focused upon the interaction and trying to get discussion going in and occasionally sprinkling in one of the others. Or you might choose just to do one of those things and not bring in the others. These are decisions that you might make. Again, you might make these decisions without actually knowing you’re making a decision. You might just look at the content on your blog and realize that it’s all information. You never do an interaction post, you never do an inspiration post, and that might be totally fine. You might also decide to experiment with some of these different types of posts. You might even, like we have, work out what ratios you want to do. We’ve talked about voice, we’ve talked about evergreen versus time sensitive, we talked about the intent of your post. Now I want to talk about the format of your post. This does relate a little bit, it flows from the decision you might have made about the intent of your post. The format of your post might be it’s more about are you writing reviews, or are you writing how to, or are you writing opinion posts, or are you writing resources and links post, or are you doing interviews, or are you doing case studies. There’s so many different types of post that you can write. These are more relate to the format. Again, you can be very intentional about this, you may actually just come up with a weekly format for example. You might say every Monday is an opinion post, every Tuesday is a tutorial post, every Wednesday is a link up post, every Thursday is an interview. Some bloggers are very intentional about that, others let it flow a little bit more. These are decisions and you will find that most blogs tend to go with two or three different types of posts. Some blogs just choose one and that’s all they do. Again, this is something you can be intentional about. Maybe to add a little bit of spice to your blog and then freshen up your editorial style and strategy, maybe you need to try a new type of post. Again, in today’s show notes, I’ve got a link with 52 different types of blog posts that we’ve published on ProBlogger as well. The fifth decision that you can make is about the authors, who is going to write the content on your blog. For most bloggers, it tends to be that they are the only author on their own blog. Most bloggers start out that way. When I had Digital Photography School started in 2006, I was the only author on the blog. In time, I began to get readers volunteer to create some content. I began to see that we had some really good photographers reading the site so I’ve reached out to some of those and said, “Hey, would you be interested in contributing an article for the site?” Gradually over time, we got more and more submissions from people wanting to write as guests on the site. We turned slowly over a couple of years into a multi-author blog but it was mainly guest contributions. Multi-author blogs can be guest contributions where you have lots of different authors on your site. The other option is where you might have regular contributors. I guess really the three options that I would put forward to you today is that you might have a single author blog, or you might have a multi-author blog. If you have a multi-author blog, you might have guests, lots of random guests, or you might choose to have regular guests, so there are the three options. Digital Photography School kind of evolved through all there. We started single author, then we started to do more guests. In more recent times, over the last five years really, we’ve developed a writing team. We have a team of about 20 authors who most of them contribute once a month, some of them do once a week. The same thing has happened on ProBlogger. When I started ProBlogger, it was just me for the first few years. Then gradually, I approached other bloggers to do some writing for us and they came in as a guest posts. We went through a phase where pretty much everything on the site, apart from an occasional post from me was guest content. In more recent times, we’ve developed the team of subject matter experts. I have Jim Stewart who chimes in and does an SEO post every now and then. We have other experts who come in and they own the category, they’re the voice of that particular category. There are advantage for each type of blog. There are certainly some advantages of being a single author blog, your readers begin to get to know you but having other voices on your blog does bring other areas of expertise and other perspectives as well. There’s no right or wrong answer here but these are decisions. Maybe that your blog evolves through a number of different options or maybe it’s a combination, maybe you are a multi-author blog who has guests and regular authors. That’s what we currently do on ProBlogger but we’re moving more and more to that regular author model. The sixth one is making decisions about the frequency of your content. Again, this is something that probably with most blogs evolves over time. I’ll get some reading for you in the show notes on how many posts you should do on your blog. Again, there’s no right or wrong answer here. I talk about in one of them the pros and cons of daily posting. There certainly are some upsides of lots of content on your blog but there’s also some downsides of that and some warnings in that particular post as well. You might have a blog that is daily, you might have weekly posts, or you might even have a monthly post, or you might go more frequently than daily. Like on Digital Photography School where we have two posts every single day, 14 posts a week. On ProBlogger, we tend to do five or six posts per week. That is a cross of both a podcast and a blog. We made that decision partly based upon our own capacity to create content but also came down to how much content our readers wanted to consume. Frequency of a post is another decision to make to factor into these matrix of decisions that we’re coming up with. The seventh one is probably the most obvious, it’s the topics and categories of your blog. You will find over time if you have a niche focused blog that you tend to focus upon different subcategories within your overall niche, or maybe you have a multi-topic blog and you do have different categories within that. Again, there’s no right or wrong answer there but it’s a decision that you gradually make over time. It’s one that most blogs will evolve as well. Most blogs, there’s an emerging category in your niche. In the photography space, one of the emerging niches over the last four or five years has been a new class of camera. People have gradually been moving away from digital SLRs and they’re moving to smaller format compact system cameras, little mirrorless cameras like the ones that Olympus and Sony make. Still interchangeable lenses but they’re smaller format, they’re not technically digital SLRs anymore because they don’t have mirrors in them. This has been a new emerging category. The same has happened with smart phones. People aren’t using point and shoot cameras anymore, they’re now using smartphones. That’s a decision we’ve made over the last year. On Digital Photography School, we’re going to start a new category of smartphone photography. These are things that you will be making decisions about over time on your blog. There will also be categories that die. You may actually find that there’s just a category that’s not relevant anymore. It might be that you yourself have a new interest in your particular topic so you want to add a category not because there’s an emerging trend going on, but it’s an emerging passion or interest for you. This is something to return to time and time again. When you’re starting out, you certainly will be looking at the top topics and categories but over time it’s something to make a decision about as well. The decision to make about your content is the length of your content, this is number eight. Again, there’s no right or wrong answer here, there’s plenty of examples of blogs that do lots of short posts. I think a lot of the gadget blogs like Gizmodo and Engadget. Back in the day, particular Engadget was publishing 10 to 15 posts a day but most of them were 200 words and they were more just news posts like here’s a new camera, here’s a new tablet, here’s a new smartphone. They might list the features but they were short shot posts. Whereas other blogs on the same niche might be doing long form content, that might be really digging in, doing a deeper review. I think of a photography blog deep review, it was doing posts at the same time as Engadget on the same topics on cameras and gadgets but they were doing 5,000 words reviews of a particular camera, it’s a very high end type reviews. The length really, there’s pros and cons of doing different lengths as well. Again, I’ve got some reading for you in the show notes about some of the pros and cons of long and short content. Related to that is the ninth decision to make and that is whether you do content that is stand alone or a series of content. Sometimes when you have a long piece, you are confronted with a choice, “Do I want to break this up into a series of posts or do I want to just do one long post?” This is a decision that you’ll find different bloggers take different positions on. I know a number of blogs who just do one post a week and it’s just a mega long post. Other bloggers say hey, for a whole week I’m going to explore a topic and they break their long post into a series of smaller pieces of content. Their editorial style is every week or every month we explore a new topic. We create content that builds upon what happened the day before. That can really ultimately end up is being exactly the same content as a blog that has long form content but it’s just a different way presenting that becomes part of your style and a part of your strategy. No right or wrong there. It may be that you want to experiment with a bit of both on your site. This is something that we do on both of my sites at the moment. Most of our posts are probably seated around 800 to 1,000 word length which is sort of a medium length but occasionally we’re throwing in mega long posts. We just published one on Digital Photography School that I think was about 5,000 words long that we offered our PDF version of it behind an opt in as well. Mega post can really work very well. We find that they get shared around a lot but our short shot post gets consumed a little bit more as well. We’re doing combination but I know other blogs will take the decision to just focus on one type of content. The tenth decision is around the medium that you use. Again, no wrong or right answer here. You might focus on written content, you might choose to do more video based content, you might want to do audio in more of a podcast, you might want in your video to do live video, or more of a recorded video, or you might want to do visual content, infographics, or a combination of all of those things. Again, this is something that we make decisions about on ProBlogger particularly. At the moment, we’re doing three or four written pieces of content per week and we’re doing two podcasts a week, and I’m trying to also do a live video once a week as well. Although I’m not doing a great job with that at the moment. Again, you can be very intentional about these types of things. Really, the decision will come down to your skills and experience, ability, personality, so you. It also comes down to the topic, some topics relate better for video, or written, or visual. Also your audience, what type of content do they consume, what are they wanting, what are they responding to. I go into much more depth on how to make that decision in Episode 134 of the podcast as well. The last area, the eleventh area that will relate to some blogs but not all is the level of your content. Are you trying to create content that is for beginners, intermediate, or more advanced readers? This is perhaps a little bit more relevant to people who have a teaching focused blog, or maybe even a news type blog, people who are just exploring the news of a certain level. It may not be as relevant for some niches as others but in my blogs, I started out both ProBlogger and Digital Photography School very much focused upon the beginner. As I said before in the photography space, there were a lot of very advanced photography teaching sites around but no one really catering for that beginner. The first post I wrote on Digital Photography School were very much focused upon things like how to hold on a camera, what is aperture, what is shutter speed, very beginner-y type posts. This has changed over the last few years though. One of the things that I’ve noticed is that my audience was growing up. This might partly because in general culture, people perhaps are becoming more used to taking photos and some of the concepts that I’ve been talking about perhaps they were more commonly known. Also, I think my audience grew up because I was teaching them. This is what I’d want them to do. I think those long time readers, they should know by now how to hold a camera, what shutter speed is. This is something I decided to make a bit of a decision on a few years ago is to do more intermediate level content. From time to time, we also throw in a more advanced piece as well. Again, this is something you’ve made a decision on probably three quarters of our posts still have that more beginner-y type content. Another 20% probably is more intermediate and then maybe once a week we’ll throw in something that’s more advanced. There’s 11 things and you can probably think of some others and I’ll be interested in what you’ll add to these 11 decisions that you could make. As I said at the start, some of these decisions you make on the fly without even really thinking about it. I do think from time to time, it’s worth going back to these 11 things. Ask yourself, how are we going with them, do we want to change our approach in some way? Let me revise them really quickly, the voice you write in. Whether your content is evergreen or time sensitive. The intent of your content, information, inspiration, interaction. Fourth one was the format, the type of post that you’re writing, opinion versus list, person’s resources versus interviews versus how to content. Number five was the authors, are you a single, multi-author blog. Number six was the frequency of your post. Number seven was the categories and topics that you might cover. Number eight was the length of your content. Number nine was whether you do stand alone posts or whether you do series of post that build upon each other. Number ten was the mediums, written versus video versus audio. Number eleven was the level of your content. As I said along the way many times, there are no right or wrong answers in any of these areas. In fact, the thing I love about going through this is that when you put your answers together to those 11 different factors, the chances of you creating a blog that’s exactly like someone else in your niche are slim, this is how you can actually stand out in a very crowded niche as you begin to look at what other people are doing, how they’re answering that. Making some decisions not only based upon what you want to do but actually you can make some decisions to stand out from what everyone else is doing in each of these areas. It maybe that you take a really different approach in voice, or evergreen versus time sensitive, or the intent, or the format, or how many authors you’ve got, or how frequent you are. You can make decisions in each of these areas that help to make you more unique. Also, that help to serve you readers better. As you’re going through that list of 11 things, just monitor you, how you feel, how much time do you have, how much energy have, how much passion you have, what your skills and experience, your personality. Also monitor the content, the topic as well that you’ve got. Different niches will sometimes determine your answers, different topics will lend themselves to different mediums, and different styles of content, different frequencies of content even. Of course, be monitoring your audience, particularly monitor your audience. How are they responding to the decisions you make? It might be that you decide to experiment with some long form content. Watch to see how your audience responds to that, do they share that content more, do they ignore that content, some other reaction happened there. You can monitor that in terms of all of these 11 decisions. I hope that’s been helpful. I would love to hear what you would add to that. I’m sure as I’ve gone through those 11 things, that you are thinking, “There’s another one that you could have added.” Please leave a comment over on the show notes. Add in what you think you could add and I’d love to hear your decisions on these things. Which ones do you really focus upon? How has your blog changed over time? Have you evolved in you approach? I’d love to hear your reflections on that today. Thanks for listening. There are plenty of things that you can read and listen to over on the show notes. Again, it’s problogger.com/podcast/166, for all of that further reading and listening. Thanks for reading today and listening today. I will chat with you in a few days’ time in episode 167.  How did you go with today’s episode? Enjoy this podcast? Sign up to our ProBloggerPLUS newsletter to get notified of all new tutorials and podcasts below.

An Interview with Daniel Flynn – Co-founder of Thankyou In today’s episode, we hear from Daniel Flynn, co-founder and Managing Director of Thankyou  a social enterprise that sells consumer products like water, nappies, hand sanitiser and much more here in Australia and soon to be New Zealand. They give 100% of their profits to end extreme poverty. Daniel closed day 1 at our event, a couple of months ago, with the most remarkable of keynotes. The title of his talk was Turning Stumbling Blocks Into Stepping Stones and he spoke about the story of Thankyou, from the very beginning (8 years ago), when Daniel and his co-founders were in their early twenties and stepped up to start Thankyou. His session was remarkable and the most highly rated session of our event this year. In fact, it was right up there with the best session we’ve ever had in terms of ratings. In this interview Daniel shares a few highlights from the event but also gives advice on: Comfort zones The importance of being a learner Celebrating the wins before moving on to the next thing A powerful tip for those struggling to have enough time A tip for confronting fear The other voice you’ll hear in this interview is Karly Nimmo who helped me out by interviewing some of our speakers from the event this year. Karly is another of our speakers and is from Radcasters.com – a podcasting school. There’s lots of goodness in this interview! It goes about 14 minutes, and at the end I’ll chime back in with a few thoughts on what they covered. Further Resources on an Interview with Daniel Flynn Co-founder of Thankyou.co Thankyou Radcasters ProBlogger Event Virtual Ticket   Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Daniel: I know it’s a numbers game in blogging and online it’s all about the numbers. When it comes to making a difference, I love the thought of the one. If we can impact the one person, it doesn’t sound like much. If everyone did that, our world would look completely different. Darren: That was the voice of Daniel Flynn, founder of an amazing organization by the name of Thankyou who we are so lucky to have as a guest on our episode today. Welcome to episode 165 of the ProBlogger podcast. My name is Darren Rowse. I’m the blogger behind problogger.com, a blog, podcast, event, and job board as well as a series of ebooks, and I keep forgetting to say a real book that you can find on Amazon called ProBlogger. They’re all designed to help you to grow as a blogger. To create your audience, to build engagement with that audience, and to make money from your blogs. You can find all the information you need about ProBlogger over at problogger.com. Particularly look for the start here page if you’re new to ProBlogger. In today’s episode, we do hear from Daniel Flynn, the Co-founder and Managing Director of Thankyou, a social enterprise that sells consumer products. They started out selling water but have moved on to many other products like hand sanitizer and even recently have launched a whole baby line of nappies and other baby products. They sell here in Australia and soon to be in New Zealand and I suspect you might see them oversees internationally over the years too. They give 100% of their profits to end extreme poverty. Whilst they started out small as just a three young people in their early 20s, they have really found a foothold here in Australia and they’re in all major supermarkets. Daniel closed day one of our event a couple of months ago, the ProBlogger event, with the most remarkable of keynotes. The title of his talk was Turning Stumbling Blocks Into Stepping Stones. He spoke about the story of Thankyou and took us right back eight years ago when they started out, when he and his co-founders were in their early 20s and they stepped up and started Thankyou. His session really was remarkable. He was the most highly rated session of our event this year. In fact, it was right up there with the best sessions we’ve ever had over the seven years of the ProBlogger event in terms of ratings. In today’s interview, Daniel shares a few of the highlights from the event but also gives us some advice on getting out of our comfort zones, the importance of being a leaner, celebrating the wins before moving onto the next thing which is something I’m guilty of. He gives a powerful tip for those struggling to have enough time in whatever it is that you’re doing. Whether you’re starting a startup like he has been for the last eight years or whether you’re a blogger or podcaster or something else. He also gives a tip on confronting fear. The other voice you will hear in this interview as you have heard in a few previous interviews is Karly Nimmo who helped me by interviewing some of our speakers at the event this year. Karly is another of our speakers and is from radcasters.com, a podcasting school. There’s a lot of goodness in this particular interview. It only goes for about 14 minutes but they do pack a lot into it. I do encourage you to stick through to the end. I would chime in at the end with a few thoughts of what they covered. There’s a few things that he said that I was furiously taking notes on and want to apply in my own business and life. I hope you will enjoy this interview. If you do want to find out a little bit more about Thankyou, you can find them at thankyou.co. I’ll talk to that at the end. I’m going to hand over to Karly and Daniel. Daniel: My name is Daniel Flynn, one of the Co-founders and Managing Director at Thankyou. We’re a social enterprises that sells consumer products and gives 100% of the profit to helping end extreme poverty. Karly: You were totally a highlight, by the way. I went to your session. Can you tell us a bit about what was it on? Daniel: I ought to share our journey, of Thankyou really. The theme of the talk was around turning stumbling blocks into stepping stones. I think our journey like maybe many people listening, it wasn’t a smooth sailing. We had so many moments where we wanted to give up. These stumbling blocks for us were big enough to give up but we pushed through. We learned from them each time and now we have a pretty interesting story that is succeeding in some of the biggest supermarkets in Australia, products that are outselling global competitors. We hear a lot of nice things that about the organization which is amazing but that’s after eight years. The journey of  persistence, of getting up and going again. That’s what I shared today, and also just really putting the thought out there that we can all make an impact bigger than just us. I know where it’s a numbers game in blogging and online, it’s all about numbers. When it comes to making a difference, I love the the thought of the one. If we can impact the one person, I know it doesn’t sound like much. If everyone did that, our world would look completely different. We can never just look at big problems and be paralyzed, we’ve got to take a step out, share some stuff like that. Karly: My next question was really what would be one thing that you want them to take away? I guess that would be one person can make a difference. Daniel: Look, one person can make a difference. It’s the thing really of our organization and our brand. It’s a real takeaway. I think the other thing, the event, not a business head on but essentially that growth mindset on. We talked about getting out of your comfort zone and staying out of your comfort zone. Really, that’s our journey. Even today, we do launches that get great PR, great marketing, and great cut through but they are so uncomfortable. They really stretch us but if you’re going to make your idea and dream reality, you’ve got to get comfortable with that very uncomfortable feeling. Karly: Yeah, for sure. For me, what I took away was that idea of disruption. You’re like, “How can we do this differently?” “How can we cut through?” That was so powerful to hear. Also, I just think like that story of failure. Everyone on the stage, myself included, have had that. That slugging that through but moving forward regardless. Then not allowing failure to define your future and make that up yourself. Daniel: I think it is the story of every great organization, dream persons. Some people get a quicker trajectory, a quicker initial launch. I definitely sat back for years in the edge and then going how come they got to just year one, a million this or that. Everyone has a different journey, a different story. We got to embrace the uniqueness. Karly: What has been a highlight of you from the comfort so far? Daniel: At Thankyou, we talk about learning. It’s one of our values which sounds like a bit of a boring value for such a disruptive organization. Learning is what we had to do at the beginning because we didn’t know what we were doing. It’s what we have to do now still because we still don’t really know. We know more than we knew, but every single day is an opportunity to learn.   I think for me, I was in Nathan’s session yesterday and I was literally just like, “My mind’s going to explode with all the things we need to do to improve.” He’s just sharing all the journey of founder and essentially all the case of success. I’m messaging a marketing manager. Do we have this? Are we using this? Are we using that? She said yes to a lot of stuff but there are still things that we learned. I think conferences, podcasts, blogs, it’s about continuing to develop because if you don’t grow, you will not be able to grow your idea kind of further than you grow. Karly: I think it comes down to session here or the conferences. This reminds you of the possibility and opportunity. Daniel: Yes, it does. I think when you see someone else’s story, you bump into someone else, they could be a speak, they may not be. I’ve had some great stories off the stage that you go, “Huh, that is awesome.” It motivates you, inspires you, or it challenges you. How can I think different? Karly: Cool, love that. Have you had any major a-ha moments while you’ve been here? Daniel: When I got up on that stage, I thought to myself a few things, one this is a big room of people. I’m new to blogging. You’re interviewing a blogger here, don’t ask me too many questions about. We have an organization that’s parting with bloggers, parting with influencers. I say influencers, I mean like you could have ten people following you, that’s influence. You have 100,000, that’s influence. To stare down that stage and to see how many different influencers are in different circles? This is amazing, so cool as a community. For me, it’s like Thankyou could go so much further if this community backs it. For me, I was like, “Wow, our world is big even here in Australia.” It’s just so cool to see the diversity. Karly: One tip for someone who’s just starting out on their journey, whether that be a blog, a podcast or a startup venture. Daniel: So many tips, I’m just going to give this one. The tip to get started is get started. Get out, get off, just do it. It is the hardest part. There’s so much build up to that moment of actually starting. In fact, I met a girl yesterday. She was like, “Ohh yeah, I’ve got a blog post.” She hasn’t publish them yet. I get it, it’s a scary moment, the very first post, the very first page, it’s so scary. If you don’t hit that hard, you’re delaying your learning process, you’re delaying everything you need. At first pitch, I was so nervous about it eight years ago. Really, it wasn’t that pitch that made or broke Thankyou. It’s everything that came from that. If you get started now like as in the moment you stop listening to this, get out, start the new idea or the new part of your venture. That’s one of the greatest case. Karly: Totally. What do you wish you knew in the beginning? Daniel: I think a lot of our failures now have really defined us and we really learned from them. I wish we knew some stuff that we didn’t have to fail so many times. I actually don’t think we’d have the strength we have now. In fact, Apple, they just launched chapter one. The only reason that’s even a book or it’s content is because we just failed so many times. Now, there’s a great story to spread. I don’t really want to undo that. I got really challenged by our mentor once we caught up, it was the first catch up. He’s the chairman of some huge investment bank. His opening question, “Do you celebrate the wins?” I was like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Cool.” “What was the win? What day did you celebrate? How did you celebrate it?” Karly: Yeah, that’s a big A because usually I’m like, “Wooohhh,” then move on to the next thing. Daniel: He caught me on it. I looked at him blankly, I had nothing. Essentially I was like, “Wow.” I was the guy and sometimes I still am. I’ve got to get this out of me but when we think of wanting to grow in vision, it’s like, “Ohh yeah, it’s cool. We got a product in this one way retailer. Now, we need to outsell competitors.” Then, we need another retailer and you’re always moving forward. If you don’t stop and celebrate the wins, you will not enjoy the journey. More importantly, the people around you won’t either. For the sake of our team, we had to stop and celebrate the wins. We got a celebration on Monday morning, two days time, three days time celebrating the big win we’ve had with our chapter one launch and baby range. We got 50 staff stopping. We’re all going out for breakfast, we are going to hang out and celebrate. You have to do it. Karly: Totally. Actually, that just reminded me while you were speaking about that, you’ve got a young child. I have a toddler. We celebrate those moments in our lives, don’t we? Daniel: Yeah, so true. Karly: We really sit in it. But then when it’s our own stuff, we just move on so quickly. Daniel: I think we move on because in our minds, people around us will celebrate, “Ohh great effort, great post, great engagement. That went viral.” You’re like, “Yeah, yeah but you don’t know how much more work there is. You don’t know how far I’ve got to go.” Sometimes just because we know that, it robs us of the moment. We got to stop to celebrate it and then go again. Karly: Love it. What do you think has contributed to your success so far? Daniel: Other people. I think other people have contributed to our success so far. I think from mentors as I mentioned, people who have decades of experience willing to drop one line either in person or over coffee or through a book. Some of my greatest lessons learned, I’ve never met the people but I feel like I know them because I’ve read their story. That is contributed to me which is contributed to the vision. The Thankyou story is it’s a collective of people. From now, hundreds of thousands, really even millions of consumers to creative designers, to videographers. Helicopter pilots that once backed out our campaign flying helicopters for free with huge signs. I look at the collective of other people. That’s what made this successful. Sometimes, it feels really lonely, especially early days. It’s like, “No one gets it. No one gets me. No one understands.” Actually, if you can move past that, for us we realize this is huge. There are so many people involved and that’s what’s built to our success. You’ve got to tap into it, focus on that. Karly: Cool. What did you really suck at in the beginning? Daniel: In the beginning, I really sucked at detail. This is on a personal level and I still do. I’m trying so hard. I lost my room key last night. I couldn’t find my wallet, I left my lanyard. Detail is for me a bit of an Achilles Heel. In the organizations, as we have, that’s pretty dangerous. We’ve got a phenomenal team around me who are great with detail. That’s backing kind of my weakness. I think in the early days, as an organization, we didn’t know what we didn’t know. In one sense, we said things in meetings that we should know so it kind of sucked out knowledge. At the same time, I loved it, I love it. Because it was like, what was our weakness became our strength. We asked the things we shouldn’t have, we pitched things we shouldn’t have, and we got them. We try and replicate that now years later now that we’re growing up and we’re getting all more professional and stuff and we’re trying to keep that. Karly: The naivety. Daniel: Yeah, the naivety. Karly: Lastly, there’s two main things that we kind of see. Anyone who is trying to move forward, whether it’s a blog, or a podcast, or doing a Facebook Live, that is like the time factor. Time is an issue, the other one is fear. I’d love it if you could give us a tip on how to move through both. Daniel: I think the most powerful word in building ideas, running businesses, organizations, blogs and anything, the most powerful word is no. I know it’s wishing gets the opposite, it’s yes. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes I’ll do it, yes to opportunity, yes, yes, yes. Actually though, if we become yes people, and I was one big time. Now, I say no a lot. It kills me but I want to say yes to that person or that opportunity. If you do, you rob yourself of the time it takes to deliver what you need to deliver. You might be pleasing a whole bunch of other people and other groups, but you’re not actually delivering what you know you need to deliver. The power of saying no to something else to protect your time is so crucial. That’s time. When it comes to fear, this is really personal. I bumped into [00:16:43] yesterday who’s on the panel about 15 minutes. She’s on the panel with our brand director Justine and my wife. She said, “I’m on a panel with you and your wife and I’m so nervous.” I said I know what you mean, she’s a bit surprised. The fear thing, it can get all of us. In the early days, I said I’d never do public speaking. I shared this is the room yesterday. That for me was in year 10, 11, I haven’t develop this really strong list. I’m so self conscious of my words. I did speech pathology and that eventually kind of helped. I didn’t want to get up in front of more than three people. What if I messed up my words? I think now I get invited, sometimes they introduce me as a professional speaker. I’m just thinking LOL in my head, like this is ridiculous. I’m speaking to a few hundred or ten or a few thousand people. I’ve had to overcome this fear. We all must. I think, how do we overcome fear? Of course, surround ourselves with great people who believe in us. There are moments before a talk and I’ve looked at Justine who’s one of our co-founders but also my wife. I’m like, “Man, I’m scared.” “I know you’ve got this.” I should know I’ve got this but that encouragement to kind of push that fear aside is really powerful. Protect your time, say no. Get great people around you because fear does come after all of us but we have to push through to achieve anything remarkable. Karly: Cool, thank you. Darren: I just love that interview with Daniel and Karly and love the session that Daniel did at the event. You can actually get access to that session by purchasing the virtual ticket for our event which gives you access to that session and all the others that we did over the two days. You can find more information on how to grab that at problogger.com/virtualticket. There are a few things in that particular episode that I felt almost compelled to write down and really ponder. One of them particularly was the idea of celebrating the wins. For me, that was something that I found really hit home for me because I’m someone who does celebrate the win in the moment but always am looking on to the next thing because I do have fairly long term plans. I think I need to perhaps just pause and celebrate a little bit more particularly with my team. It’s something that I’m going to take away from that particular one. Also love the idea of making a difference to one person. I actually said this at a conference a few years ago. If your blog just has one reader, that might be enough. That one reader might just be the reader that takes your advice and changes their life because of something that you say. That one reader might be the person who has an amazing network and passes on word to their network of your blog and could be that one person that you need to tip your blog into having lots of readers. That one reader might be someone who becomes a friend, a partner, business partner, personal partner. That one reader might be enough in many ways. Many times, we do as bloggers struggle with the idea of needing lots of readers. It might just be that the one that you have is the right reader. For a variety of reasons and particularly in terms of making the world a better place, Daniel is certainly on about. The advice of getting out of your comfort zone and get comfortable with feeling uncomfortable is so important. I particularly liked his tip about saying no. Again, that’s something I struggle with. I’m a yes man. Often really struggle to say no and it really reminded me of what I was talking about just an episode or two ago about me creating my schedule. Really, I guess in creating a schedule, for me to manage my time, I’m thinking about what are my priorities, what do I need to get done. Creating a schedule around those things, in many ways, that was saying no to other things, other things that would cramp those priorities out. For me, that’s a practical way of saying no. I don’t have an opening in my schedule to be able to take on the opportunities that come my way if they’re not aligned with my priorities. Maybe that is a way if you do struggle to say no, maybe you could put a schedule together that helps you to say no and to gather those things that do really need to happen. If we become yes people, we rob ourselves of the time it takes to deliver what you know you need to deliver. Those were the words that I wrote down from Daniel. I hope you enjoyed today’s episode. If you want to find out more about Daniel and Thankyou, please check them out at thankyou.co. If you want to connect with Karly and learn about podcasting, you can check out radcasters.com. If you want to check out the virtual ticket for the ProBlogger event, it’s problogger.com/virtualticket. I hope you enjoyed today’s interview. We’ll get back to you in a couple of days time with another teaching episode here at problogger.com. Thanks so much for listening. I’ll chat with you soon. How did you go with today’s episode? Enjoy this podcast? Sign up to our ProBloggerPLUS newsletter to get notified of all new tutorials and podcasts below.

3 MORE Tips to Help You Increase Your Productivity In today’s episode, I want to continue on from the previous episode and share 3 more thoughts on how to become more productive and build healthy habits around your blogging and in your life. While normally our episodes are designed as stand alone episodes this one really does build upon the last one, so I would encourage you to listen to that one first if you haven’t done so, yet. In it I talked about: Starting with your why and building goals around it The power of saying ‘it’s just what I do’ and ‘normalising’ the habits you’re trying to build through making appointments with yourself Building Systems rather than thinking just about building ‘good habits’ Today I want to extend upon these ideas and talk about how I got my own weekly system or routine to the point it’s currently at – because it didn’t just happen! Listen to this podcast here on iTunes (or in the player above). Today I’ll share: The power of ‘leveling up’ your habits My approach to when you can’t keep your schedule up And how I stay sane as someone who doesn’t like systems – but has one! So if you’re someone who struggles with managing your time or have tried to build good habits but have failed to stay on track – this episode is just for you. In Today’s Episode 3 MORE Tips Productivity Tips to Help You Build Healthy Habits Start with Small Things and ‘Level Up’ Never Miss 2 in a Row Create Space to play   Further Resources on 3 MORE Tips Productivity Tips to Help You Build Healthy Habits 3 Productivity Tips to Help You Build Healthy Habits    Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Hi there, it’s Darren Rowse from ProBlogger. Welcome to Episode 164 of the ProBlogger podcast. I’m the guy behind problogger.com, a blog, a podcast, an event, a job board, and a series of ebooks all designed to help you to grow your blog and to achieve your dreams as a blogger. You can learn more about ProBlogger and see all our latest episode and the tutorials that we publish every couple of days on ProBlogger at problogger.com. In today’s episode, I want to continue on from the previous episode and share three more thoughts on how to become a more productive blogger and how to build healthy habits that help you to achieve your blogging goals, but also goals in other areas of your life as well. Normally, our episodes are designed to be stand alone, you can just listen to one and then move on. This one today definitely builds upon the last one. If you haven’t listened to Episode 163, I do encourage you to go back and listen to that one first because everything I say today builds upon that. In that previous episode for those of you who need a recap, because it’s been a few days, I talked about starting with your why and building your goals around that why. I talked about the power of saying, “It’s just what I do,” and normalizing the habits that you’re trying to build through making appointments with yourself. Lastly in the last episode, I talked about building systems rather than just thinking about building good habits. Today, I want to extend upon those ideas and I want to talk about how I got my own weekly system or routine to the point it’s currently at because it didn’t just happen. Today, I’m going to talk about the power of levelling up your habits. I’m going to talk about my approach when you can’t quite keep that schedule up for different reasons. Lastly, I want to talk about how I stay sane as someone who doesn’t like systems but is living my life by one. If you’re someone who struggles with managing your time and you try to build those good habits in the past but have failed to stay on track, this episode is just for you. Continuing on from that last episode, today I want to start by talking about starting with small things and levelling up. Most of the good habits and elements of the system that I’ve built for my week started off not as you see them today, but they started off really quite small. There have been a few times where I’ve started big. For example, deciding to walk 10,000 steps a day, that was a pretty big thing. Most of the time, my habits, the things that I do, have started off by being quite small to start with, and I’ve evolved them, I’ve levelled them up. As I mentioned in the last episode, I talked about my health journey in that particular one. I want to go back to that. Made a series of small changes to help me get where I’m currently at today in my health journey. It started actually even before I started walking with my diet. As many of you know, I use the five two diet, it’s intermittent fasting for a period of time. I don’t practice it anymore because I actually lost too much weight on it and it was starting to waste away but it was a really good starting point for me to get some of those extra kilos off. For me, that was the starting point, actually doing that. I worked on that for a few weeks, a few months, and then I decided to start to level things up because I knew I was addressing my diet but I wasn’t addressing my exercise. That’s the time that I started to walk, and that was 10,000 steps a day. That was pretty much as far as I went for six or seven months with my health journey. Getting the diet under control and getting the walking. The reason I did that, I just didn’t level up too quickly after that. I wanted those things to become normal for me. I wanted to normalize that as I talked about in the last episode. After six months of walking, I decided that the next thing for me to level up was to get a stand up desk and to spend more of my days standing rather than sitting. You will probably have read lots of articles on the why of that so I’m not going to go into great depth. Again, this was something I started really small. I bought the desk, I brought it home, I set it up, and I decided that I would spend the first hour of every working day standing up, that was all. I would sit for the rest of the day. It was a small step. I went after a while, after I got used to that. It does take a little while to get used to. I decided to do an hour in the morning and an hour in the afternoon, then gradually I moved it to a whole morning and an hour late in the afternoon. Gradually, I’ve been able to move to a point where I spend most of my day standing now. Again, it wasn’t something I just decided to do straight away, I worked my way up. The next element was to add in some gym work and to get a personal trainer. I go two days a week to my personal trainer. That’s getting to the point where that’s starting to be normal for me. I’ve been doing that for six months now. I’m now considering my next level up. Going to a gym by myself to do a bit more cardio work because most of the work I’m doing at the PT is strength work. For me, it’s been a really gradual thing. It’s taken me two years to get to the point that I’m at. I’m gradually levelling up. I don’t know where this all going to end in this health journey for me. If you had asked me two years ago to walk 10,000 steps a day, to stand up most of the day at my desk, to go to the PT twice a week, to go to the gym on other days, I don’t think  I would have done any of it. It would have been too much for me. Small steps, normalize that behavior, then level up. I think the same thing applies in the work that you’re the doing, the habits that you’re trying to build in your blogging. Really, I guess that’s what this part is, what this podcast is about. Your goal might be to eventually be writing everyday but to suddenly go from no post a day to a daily post, that might be too much for you. You might need to do one post a week, you might do two, you might do three, you might gradually level things up. The same with your social media, the same with running a podcast, there’s different ways to go about it. Sometimes to get to that end result that you want, you need to take a small step and then to level up. Levelling up is the first thing I want to talk about today. The next one is kind of a little rule, another little mantra that I have. The mantra is never miss two in a row. Let me explain because kind of is a bit cryptic. The reality is that that schedule that you see, I cannot keep it up every single day. There are things that get in the way of that. The reality is for 10,000 steps a day, my walking, I can’t do that everyday. I travel, I’m getting on a plane next Tuesday to go to a conference in Orlando. I’m going to sit on planes for 36 hours to get to that conference. That period, I’m not going to be able to do 10,000 steps unless I have a long layover in an airport where I can walk around. I’ve done that plenty of times in the past. There are sometimes some ways to weave in the walk around some of these things. Travelling, going on a holiday, getting sick, family commitments, these things all get in the way. Sometimes I can weave them in like walking around an airport, I remember doing that once at Singapore airport, going for a really long walk. I also don’t want my schedule to rule my life. I give myself permission from time to time to have time away from my routine. The little rule that I do have is that I try not to miss two in a row. This means different things for the different habits. For example, my walking, if I miss a day, I try not to miss the next day. That’s my rule. I try to walk at least every second day. My goal is to walk everyday but sometimes things happen. Earlier in the year we’ve been to Thailand as a family for holiday. It was tough to get my 10,000 steps in a day there. We were in a resort, it wasn’t a very big resort, it didn’t lend itself to long walk, hated the weather, lots of rain, it was hot, and plus I was on holiday so I gave myself some days off but I still managed to go every second day. With my personal trainer, means that when I’m travelling I can’t go. I’m going to be away for a whole week next week but what I’ve decided to do is to find a gym locally that I can go to once while I’m away. I’m not going to do my normal two sessions a week, I’m going to do one, I’m going to miss one. Giving myself permission to do that. With creating content on my blog, I may not be able to keep up the normal routine while I’m away at the conference but I’m going to try and reach my goal every second day. Write half the post that I would normally write, I would create half of the podcast. For me, the key I guess here is to try and find ways to keep the practice of what I’m doing going, to keep those muscles working even if it’s not at the frequency that I am aiming for. I guess what I’m trying to do is to keep it normal. It’s just what I do, I create content, I walk, I go to the gym, I do these things, these are normal. For me, where I get into trouble is where I have extended breaks away from things. I try and find ways to keep things going. Whether that’s not missing two in a row, maybe there’s some other way to do that for you. That works for me, the state I’m in at the moment. I will say when I first started walking 10,000 steps a day, I didn’t want to miss a day. That’s where I did walk around Singapore airport and did my 10,000 steps anyway. Sometimes in the early days or building habits, sometimes you get excited and you want to keep pushing through, and that’s totally fine. I became a bit obsessed, I wanted to keep my unbroken record of days of getting 10,000 steps going and that was part of my motivation in the early days. You don’t have to build a system that rules your life. The system is there to help you achieve your goals, sometimes you need to be a bit gracious with yourself. The last that I want to talk about in this little mini series that I’m doing is to create space to play. The first version of my weekly routine was wall to wall activity. I packed every minute from 8:00AM to 10:00PM full of activity, trying to be productive all through the day. I realized that that was going to kill me. Really, as much as I was getting a lot done, it wasn’t something I could sustain. As I mentioned in the last episode, my myers-brigg personality type is to be a P on that I’m part of the spectrum there. I’m naturally very spontaneous, impulsive. Sometimes where I’ve got space to play, that’s where I get my best ideas. For me to not leave time to be spontaneous and impulsive squashes some of those good ideas out of my life. It also squashes up space that I get energy. I know I get energy when I have a space to dream, to think, and to play with ideas. If you look at my schedule today, you’ll see that I’ve now created space in my schedule to play. Some of that happens at the end of the day, some of that happens on the weekends, but I also put aside Monday afternoons for this exact reason. For me, every day is different how I use my playtime. Sometimes it’s reading a novel, sometimes it’s watching something on Netflix, other times it’s going to a movie, or going to a café, or having a date with Vanessa, or having a sleep. Other days it ends up being a working kind of thing where I write something that is a bit more playful or something that’s more of a passion project. For me, I really need that time to play. That may just be my personality type but I suspect most of us need that time as well. To schedule time for rest, for play, for dreaming, for imagining, that blue sky thinking is a really important thing as well. If you want to be productive, I think it’s really important to build those things in as well. They’re my six things I’ve kind of gone through over the last couple of episodes. I would love to hear what you’ve got to say as well. My six things were to start with your goals and your why. Number two was the power of normalizing things, it’s just what I do, scheduling the things that you want to build into good habits. Number three was to think about systems, not just the habits, and actually schedule the important things that you want to build into your life. Number four was to start with small things and then to level up. Number five was to never miss two in a row, might be three. And number six was to create space to play. I would love to hear your thoughts on these. Do one them resonate with you? Do you disagree with one? Or is there something else you would into the mix? You can tweet me at @problogger, or leave a comment at my Facebook page at facebook.com/problogger. Love to hear what you think about this, what has helped you, and what you’re going to do as a result of this as well. Love to chat with you more on this particular topic. It’s one that I’m constantly learning on as well, so do be in touch. I’ll chat with you in a couple of days time in Episode 165 where I’ve got an amazing interview to share with you from one of the most popular speak is that we have ever had at the ProBlogger event. Tune into that in a couple of days time. How did you go with today’s episode? Enjoy this podcast? Sign up to our ProBloggerPLUS newsletter to get notified of all new tutorials and podcasts below.

3 Tips to Help You Increase Your Productivity In today’s lesson, I want to chat about how to be more productive in your blogging (and life) through building good habits and systems into what you do. It’s so easy as an online entrepreneur to slip into bad habits when it comes to using our time or to lead a life where we spend our time frantically moving from one urgent thing to another without really putting much thought into what we need to get done. So today, I want to share with you 3 things that have helped me to begin to form good habits in my blogging, business, and many other aspects of my life. So, if you’re someone who struggles with managing your time or have tried to build good habits but have failed to stay on track – this episode is just for you. In Today’s Episode on 3 Productivity Tips to Help You Build Healthy Habits Start with your goals and why. The power of saying ‘It’s just what I do’. Think Systems – not habits. Further Resources on 3 Productivity Tips to Help You Build Healthy Habits Is Your Blog Being Hurt by Your Obsession to Create New Content? Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Welcome to episode 163 of the ProBlogger Podcast. My name is Darren Rowse and I’m the blogger behind problogger.com. I blog, podcast, event, job board and series of ebooks, all designed to help you as a blogger to grow your audience, building engagement with that audience and to make some money from your blog whilst hopefully making the world a better place too. You can learn more about ProBlogger at problogger.com. In today’s lesson, I want to chat to you about how to be more productive in your blogging and life through building some good habits. In fact, I want to talk about building a system around these habits in what you do. It’s so easy as an online entrepreneur, as a creative, to slip into bad habits when it comes to using our time and to lead a life where we spend our time frantically moving from one urgent thing to another or really responding to the agendas of other people without putting too much thought into what we need to get done. Today I want to share with you three things that have helped me to begin to form good habits in my blogging, in my business, and to be honest, many other aspects of my life because these things really do apply beyond blogging. If you’re someone who struggles with managing your time or have tried to build good habits in the past but have failed to stay on track like I have many times in the past, this episode is just for you. I’ll link also to the next episode once it goes live because this is a two-parter. I’m going to share three tips for you today and then we’re going to build upon those three tips in episode 164. If you’re listening to this a week or so later, you can listen to two today. Let’s get into talking about how to build good habits for your blog, business and life. Anyone who’s been listening to this podcast for a while now knows a few things about me. In fact, you probably know quite a few things about me but two of them in particular which have been recurring things. Firstly, I’m not a naturally organized person. If you’ve done the myers-briggs personality assessment, I have IMNINFP. The P part is the bit that’s off the charts for me. That P aspect of my personality, it’s me not being a great planner, it’s me not being naturally ordered, it’s me not knowing from one moment to the other what I’m going to do next. I’m an impulsive kind of person and I don’t like to be pigeon holed. I joke quite a bit with my team who are all the opposite to that P part. They’re all J personalities and that they all love spreadsheets and I don’t and they’re much more ordered. In some ways, I’ve hired the right kind of people because it really does help me to keep on track. But on the flip side of that part of my personality is that I’ve managed over the last few years to build my business through building certain kinds of systems, habits, and routines that enable me to get things done. I guess I’ve had the realization, growing realization over the years, that because of that P part of my personality, that disorganized and spontaneous part, my business was always going to be limited unless I actually got my act together with some of those sorts of routines. That’s what I want to talk about today. If you listened to episode 45 quite a while ago now, I talked about Seven Habits of Lucky Entrepreneurs and you would have seen and heard about in that episode me sharing my system for my week. You can actually see that system in the show notes of that episode and I’ll also include them today. It’s a calendar that maps out what I do between 8:00AM and 10:00PM every weekday. It’s pretty crazy. I’ve mapped out everyday from 8:00AM to 10:00PM and I’ve shared this weekly routine a few times recently and I’ve been getting a lot of questions about it. I wanted to dig a little bit deeper into that. How did I actually build that system? How did I actually build some of the good habits that I’ve managed to build to enable me to grow my business? This will be particularly relevant for those of you who share that personality trait that I have, that spontaneous, impulsive and not a planner. We naturally don’t like to build routines and systems and build those sort of habits. That’s what today’s episode is really all about. I want to share a few thoughts on how to build some of these habits into your life particularly around your blogging and business. Before I get into the three things that I want to say today, I want to say that I am not a productivity expert. This is still a daily struggle for me. Whilst I’ve got this great template for my week that has helped me so much, I’m not always perfect at keeping it and I’m constantly tweaking it as well. I should probably also say that what I’m going to share with you today is probably going to appeal to those of you who do share that sort of personality trait. Those of you who are highly organized naturally may not find as much use in what I’m going to say today because you probably got a lot of these under control. I hope that you find some gold in this as well today. The three things that I want to talk about today. The first one is something you’ve probably heard before. It’s so important. The first one is to start with your goals and why. There’s no point in thinking about building good habits if you’ve not thought about your why, your motivation of why you want to build those things. There are things in life which most people universally agree are good habits but I’ve never personally had any success in building any of them into my life until I’ve connected with my why and I’ve set myself at least some kind of fuzzy goal to aim for. My health journey over the last few years is perhaps the best illustration of this. Some of you have heard me tell my story of my health journey over the last couple of years and I’m going to tap into that a few times during today’s episode. Since I was a kid, right from a little age, I knew what I needed to do to be healthy and we all do. We get taught at school, even at kindergarten, my five-year old has been taught this. I knew about diet. I knew about exercise. I knew about sleep. I knew these all were good habits. There are points over my journey where I’ve had these little health kicks to try and build some of this habits but my heart was never in it. I never really connected with my why. I understood it on a head level but I never really had a heart connection to diet, exercise and sleep. As a result, I was never able to really keep those habits going for too long. I would last a few weeks, maybe a month but I would never get beyond that. It was going through a cycle of diets or little exercise kicks. This coming January, in a couple of months’ time, three months’ time will mark my two-year anniversary of walking 10,000 steps almost every day. I can’t believe I’m at this point, two years of almost every day walking 10,000 steps. I’ve had a few occasional days where I’ve missed it and I’ll talk a little bit about that in the next episode but I rarely miss it. I’ve also been eating healthier for about the same amount of time and I’ve been consistently going to the gym for six months. I’ve built some good habits in this and the habits have not gone away. This is the longest I’ve ever lasted on this type of thing. I’m not perfect with my exercise or diet but as I say this is the longest period I’ve ever managed to keep it going with this type of focus. For me, one of the key things that I believe strongly that has helped me this time around is that it all started with my why. I had the realization at the start of 2015 that I was in a slump and that my future wasn’t looking great as a result of that. Physically, emotionally, socially, spiritually, I was unhealthy in all of these different areas and I realized something needed to change or I wouldn’t be around to see my kids growing up. I’ve talked to a lot of parents who have this motivation, I guess, for getting their act together is that it’s really often connected to children or family or a partner and willing to be there. For me, that was a big part of it. For me, confronting the slump I was in and really connecting with those motivating factors helped me to make some of those first steps towards good habits. Some of my early goals, I talked about having a why but also having some goals, for me some of those early goals were about losing some weight and also increasing my movement. For me, it started off with 10,000 steps a day which was something that a number of my friends had these goals as well. For me, really it was about addressing the why but also having some measurable goals really helped me through the tough times that followed in making those goals a reality and building those habits. For me, that’s the first thing I really want to mention today. It’s all well and good to say we want to build good habits but why, why do you want those good habits, what are your goals. Really important to do that ground work before you start to try and build the good habit. The second thing is there’s a lot of power in a little mantra that I have. The mantra that I have is to say to myself, “It’s just what I do.” I don’t remember where I got this or who I got it from. It’s been at least 10 years that I’ve been saying this but this is one of the little mantras I say to myself numerous times every day, particularly when I’m trying to build a new habit. I say it a lot more. “It’s just what I do.” Building good habits doesn’t generally come easy for me. Maybe, again, it’s my personality type that doesn’t gravitate towards a routine or having a system or habit but I suspect most people struggle to find a new habit. I come up against a resistance every time that I try and build a good habit. There’s a resistance every time that I’m confronted with that idea of going for that walk in the early days of beginning to walk every day. Sometimes, the resistance is a little temptation to do something the opposite of the good habit that I’m trying to build, to eat something unhealthy or to lie down and have a snooze when I should be up for a walk. Sometimes the resistance is simply me trying to talk myself out of having to do it today, let’s just have a day off today. One of the things that I’ve tried to do over the last couple of years particularly is every time I come up against that resistance, every time it feels hard, every time it doesn’t feel like it’s going to happen, I try and give myself a little bit of self-talk with that mantra. “It’s just what I do.” “Walking. It’s just what I do.” “Eating healthy. It’s just what I do.” In the early days, it doesn’t come easy. You’ll say that to yourself and you go, “No, it’s not.” In the early days of me walking 10,000 steps a day, the reality was it wasn’t just what I did. I actually tracked my walking for a couple of weeks before I started to do 10,000 steps a day and I was doing 1,300 steps a day which is really embarrassing to admit because I basically never left my house. I was in that much of a slump. My goal of 10,000 a day, it wasn’t just what I do but I forced myself out for that first day and I achieved the goal, I got to 10,000. It took me an hour, an hour and a half of walking which in the scheme of things wasn’t that much. The next day when I was confronted with that little bit of resistance to go out for a walk, I could legitimately say to myself it’s just what I do because I’ve done it, I did it once. It may not have been the most convincing mantra that day but the next day when I’ve done it twice, it was just what I did. The next day when I’ve done it 3 times and the day a week later when I’ve done it 7 days in a row and when I’ve done it 10 days in a row, it did gradually bring truth because it was just what I’ve been doing. I actually talked to a friend recently who does almost exactly the same thing. They actually have a meditation at the start of the day where they name the things that they are trying to build into their life and the actually chant almost to themselves and they say it’s a bit of a Buddhist practice that they do. They described it as changing the way you see yourself. The goal, I guess, here is that through self-talk and a bit of repetition of the habit, that you slowly eliminate the need to make a conscious choice about it and you begin to see yourself as a person who just does that thing and you don’t have to summon that willpower to get something done. It becomes natural, I guess. It kind of reminds me a little bit of why I brush my teeth every night before I go to bed. I actually brush my teeth in the morning as well but for me, growing up, it was just what we did in our family. I remember my parents drumming it into us in that time where there was resistance as a child of not wanting to brush my teeth. They used to just say something like, “It’s just what you do before you go to bed.” And gradually over time and through repetition, it was just something that I do and today every time I go to bed it’s something I do without thinking. I don’t have to make a choice to do it. I don’t have to summon willpower to do it. It’s just what I do. I guess ultimately here this is what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to normalize the habit, the thing that we are trying to build into our life. That takes a choice early on but sometimes this self-talk can help. The other thing that really helped me is that I used to schedule the things that I was trying to normalize. I’m a big believer in making appointments with myself. My diary, I don’t tend to put a lot of things in there, other people want me to do. I put in the things that I want to do and a lot of it is trying to build habits. When I started walking every day, I used to put into my diary at 12:30PM, walk. I set myself an alarm. It was on repeat every weekday, actually it was every day at 12:30, an alarm would go off and it would say walk. Making an appointment with myself, it actually helped me to get into that rhythm and for it to become a normal thing. In time, I began to arrange my work day and my days around the walk because it was in my diary. It was the thing that I’ve scheduled. And then gradually over time, I was able to stop using the alarm because my body started to anticipate the walk and my brain started to anticipate it. In fact, if I didn’t go for a walk, I would start to feel a little bit edgy. In whatever way works for you, try to normalize it. Maybe some self-talk. Maybe it’s through scheduling it and making an appointment with yourself for a particular thing. I’m going to talk a little bit more about that in the next thing that I want to say. Number one, start with your goals and whys. Number two, it’s just what I do. The third thing I want to talk about today before I let you go and have a bit of a ponder of these stuff for yourself is to think about systems. Think about systems, not necessarily habits. The word habit to me, it’s a loaded word. It’s a good habit or it’s a bad habit. These words are loaded and for me there’s a lot of guilt attached to habits. I didn’t do the good habit. I am doing the bad habit. To me, it’s not really the most helpful word in some ways even though I am talking about habits today. I try to neutralize that word by thinking about a system, by thinking about a routine. When I actually had that idea a couple of years ago now to come up with my weekly schedule, I challenged myself really to build a system, a machine if you like, that would help me to achieve my goals in life but particularly around my business and other important parts of my life. I started with my goals. I started with my why and I asked myself what tasks, what practices would need to happen every week for me to reach my goals. As you look at my schedule, you will see that every single thing in that schedule relates to goals that I have in my life and my motivations as well. If you look at that schedule, you’ll see that I have identified that as a blogger I need to create content. It’s an important thing for me. I can’t be a blogger unless I’m creating content. I can’t be a podcaster unless I’m creating content. For me, I realized that I needed to block out some fairly significant chunks of my time and you’ll see as you look at the schedule five times a week, I’ve blocked out slabs of time, whole mornings of time, whole afternoons of time to create content. There’s different aspects of creating content that I do at different times. It’s a whole other topic but for me that’s a goal and so it gets scheduled in. You’ll see I’ve also got times in there for learning to keep abreast of my industry, to stay mentally stimulated. I know I need to dedicate time every week to learn and so you’ll see I set aside time each week for reading, listening to audiobooks and listening to podcasts. It just so happens that that happens at the same time that I exercise. I am able to do a lot of listening to podcasts and audiobooks while I’m exercising so I’m multitasking and that’s a good one. You’ll also see there I put aside time every day to do administrative tasks. Email, my social media, team related stuff. You’ll see there that I put time aside every day for family, every morning, every night. That’s another of my important goals at the end of every day. There’s time for meditation and again this is related to my goals. What you’re seeing here are not a list of habits that I want to have. It’s a system and I’ve scheduled all of the things that are there. It’s not just a matter of saying, “I want to build this habit.” It’s actually about scheduling that habit and building a system, building a routine. And then it becomes what I do because I’ve got the system. It’s designed based upon my goals and my why and rather than me just getting up every day and doing what I feel like today. Which habit should I work on today? I’ve actually built a system. For me, one of the reasons that I’ve been able to raise my productivity as a blogger and achieve some of the other goals in my life along the lines of exercise and diet is actually really systematizing a lot of the things that are important to me. It’s about coming up with a schedule that is all about reaching my goals very intentionally. There are the three things I wanted to leave with you today. As I said, I’ve got three more for you that I want to talk about in the next episode but just to recap, start with your goals and why. That maybe something you, as soon as this podcast finishes, maybe you need to go back and actually do some thinking around that, do a bit of a journaling around. What’s your why? What are the important things that you need to do and to set yourself some goals. As a blogger, it may be that you need to create some content and maybe you want to put some numbers to that. Maybe you want to create three posts a week. Starting with that is really important rather than just saying I need to create some content. Actually putting a measurable thing on that. Number two was the power of just saying it’s just what I do. Maybe you need to actually do some self-talk around that. Maybe you need to actually write those things down next to your computer. You just create content, three posts a week. It’s just what you do. It’s just what you do. You don’t have to summon that willpower. It’s just what you do. Then it’s about building a system around that. when are you going to write those pieces of content? When are you going to do those things that you need to do to build the business that you want to have? Actually begin to build that schedule. I will share with you a version of my schedule in the show notes,  I do tweak it from time to time. The one I’ll share with you today is probably, by the time you listen to it, going to be changed a little bit but it will show you what I’ve done, what I aim to do every week. I will say it seems overwhelming and I’m going to talk a little bit about how I got to that point in the next episode because it didn’t just happen. I want to talk about how to actually start out and take it to that level. You can listen into episode 164 if it’s already gone live. You can go straight and listen to that or you can wait for a couple of days. I hope you found this useful. I really would love to hear what you think about this because I’m sharing my tips today based upon my personality. Maybe you’ve got a different way. Maybe you could teach me a thing or two about how to do this better. Let me know what you think about the three things I’ve said today. Tweet me at @problogger or find us on Facebook, facebook.com/problogger. Thanks for listening today. Hope you have a productive day and I’ll chat with you in a couple of days time in episode 164. How did you go with today’s episode? Enjoy this podcast? Sign up to our ProBloggerPLUS newsletter to get notified of all new tutorials and podcasts below.

How Lisa Corduff Took Action and Built a Six Figure Business In today’s episode, we hear from Lisa Corduff from lisacorduff.com in an interview that Karly Nimmo from Radcasters recorded at the ProBlogger event a few weeks ago. Lisa spoke at the event in one of our most highly rated sessions titled ‘Anyone Can Create an Online Product’. It was a session that resonated with a lot of attendees. Lisa is a whole foods blogger who had been blogging and had a facebook page for a couple of years without tremendous growth but decided to ramp things up. She started a free 21 day challenge which really took off and then created a paid 8 week program to offer to her community called ‘Small Steps to Whole Food’. This led to her building a six figure business – all with 3 kids aged 4 and under (one a baby of 4 months). This episode is now available for listening to in the player above or here on iTunes (look for PB162) In this interview Lisa shares a few highlights from the event but also gives advice on: What to do when you feel tempted to compare yourself to others The power of taking action What to do when fear shows up What she wishes she knew when she was starting out The power of having a ‘posse’ And how to make the most of the time you have Also note – Lisa is one of the most effective users of video that I’ve seen – she uses it to drive sales of her products, build reader engagement and grow her brand. This week just just announced a new course on how to use video that I highly recommend you check out. If you sign up before the end of October you’ll save $50. Please note: I’m an affiliate for Lisa’s course but also make this as a genuine endorsement. Lisa’s the real deal and gave some amazing advice at our event. Check it out if you want to learn to use video better. Further Resources on How Lisa Took Action and Built a Six Figure Business Lisa Corduff Lisa’s Video Course Karly Nimmo of Radcaster’s Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Lisa: I still wouldn’t have done anything if I didn’t have a deadline. Launching that free challenge, giving people a date that they could expect that something was gonna get in their inbox, made me move. Darren: That was the voice of Lisa Corduff who is the feature of today’s podcast. Welcome to episode 162 of the ProBlogger podcast. My name is Darren Rowse and I’m the blogger behind problogger.com. A blog, podcast, event which you’ve just heard a snippet from, job board and series of ebooks all designed to help you as a blogger to grow your audience, to build engagement with that audience and to monetize your blog. You can find out more about ProBlogger at problogger.com. As I just mentioned, today, we have a special interview with Lisa Corduff from lisacorduff.com. It’s an interview that Karly Nimmo from Radcasters recorded at the ProBlogger event after Lisa had just gotten off stage after presenting at the event. Lisa spoke at the event and was one of our most highly rated sessions. She did a session entitled Anyone Can Create An Online Product. That was a session that really resonated with a lot of our attendees. You’re going to hear why it resonated in a moment with this interview. Let me tell you a little bit about Lisa so you’ve got the backstory of it. Lisa is a Whole Foods blogger who has been blogging and had a Facebook page for a couple of years without tremendous growth, she talks a little bit about that during this interview but she decided to ramp things up and started a free 21 day challenge which really took off with her audience. Off the back of that, she created a paid eight week program to offer to her community called Small Steps to Whole Food. This process lead her to build a six figure business while she had three kids at home all under the age of four, one of them was a baby of four months she told me when she launched that free 21 day challenge. She had a lot going on but managed to build something quite significant. Now, she’s done I think six launches and has really built an amazing business around her. I really loved going to her session at the event but also relistening to it as well. In this interview today, Lisa shares a few highlights from the event itself but then  goes on to give some really great advice. She talks about what to do when you feel tempted to compare yourself to other which is something that I know many of us as bloggers struggle with. She talks about the power of taking action. She talks about what to do when fear shows up. She talks about what she wishes she knew when she was starting out, the power of having a posse around you to support you and how to make the most of the time you have which I think is definitely something that Lisa has worked out well with all the things that she’s done as well as having those kids at home. There’s a lot of goodness in today’s interview. I just want you though to be aware that if you are listening with kids around, and I know many of you do listen to this podcast in the car with your kids, there is a little bit of language throughout this episode. If you wanna shield your kids from that, you may want to listen to this when you’re alone a little bit later. It’s not too heavy but there are a few moment where you might want to cover your kid’s ears. I’ll also mention that Lisa in her session at the event spoke a lot about how she uses video as part of her products but also promoting her products. In fact, her sales videos are some of the most effective sales videos that I’ve ever seen. I played one at the event and it was hilarious but it was so effective. I wanted to buy her product simply by watching the video. We don’t get into too much about video in this particular interview but Lisa is launching a product this week called Keeping Video Real in which she does share how to use video in your marketing. It’s a four week course where you can learn the basics of shooting, editing, presenting and then how to use it on Facebook and how to use webinars as well. If you are interested in learning a little bit more about video, you can check out her course at problogger.com/lisa. She tells me if you sign up before the end of the month, the end of October 2016, you’ll save $50 on that. At the end of it, I’ll pull out a few things that I most appreciated from what she said as well so tune in to the end of today’s show. Thanks for listening and let’s get into the interview with Karly and Lisa. Karly: Hey, Karly Nimmo here from radcaters.com, launch, leverage, love your podcast. This year I made the switch from attendee to speaker at ProBlogger and I was super on it when Darren contacted me to ask if I’d be willing to sit down with some of the keynotes and have a chat. I mean, amazing That’s what I did. I pulled all my gear together, set it up in the green room and sat down with some of the most incredible people I’ve ever met to have conversations about ProBlogger, what makes them tick, and what they contribute their level of success to. I’m sure you’re gonna get heaps out of this. Enjoy. Lisa: I’m Lisa and I’ve got a Wholefoods blog. I blog at lisacorduff.com at the moment but that will be changing soon. I run an eight week online program called Small Steps to Wholefoods. I basically help real people eat more real food in the real world without all the jargon and fancy pants photoshopping of meals. I cook food for my family and I share it, that’s basically cool. Karly: What was your session on today? Lisa: Today, my session was on anyone can create an online product but it was kinda like, seriously if I can, anyone can create an online product. I shared my story of how I took my blog and my Facebook page which I’ve been working away on for a few years while I was having babies. I just decided I needed to make some money from it or else I was gonna have to go back to work. When my youngest turned one, didn’t wanna do that so I just took a big fat leap, I launched a 21 day challenge for free. That went off and from that I created my eight week program and my business was off and I really wanted to share that you don’t have to be the most organized person, you don’t have to have all your children in school, you don’t have to wait until you’ve got a lot of money to invest in a business. Karley: Or have your shit together in any way, shape, or form. Lisa: Absolutely no shit together here. You can just still do it. I was really here to share my story and inspire other people to just take some action. Karley: Yep, totally worked, by the way. Lisa: Thank you. Karley: What has been your highlight of the event so far? Lisa: My talk, I was amazing. No, not really. It was the feedback after my talk. Karley: You go maniac. Lisa: You know what, I just love rocking up and meeting people, people who’ve just been names on Facebook profiles and all that kind of thing, I love the connecting. Karley: Yeah and everyone is super friendly, right? Lisa: Everyone is here to actually meet people. It is such an easy place to make friends. Karley: Totally. Have you had any aha style moments while you’ve been here? Lisa: Look, listening to Brian Fanzo and what he was talking about the power of sharing authentically, I’m like, “Yeah dude, that’s what I do.” And when he was talking about the power of video, I’m like, “Yeah dude, that’s what I do.” And I have connected with Engrown, a community, very authentically, via video and Facebook Live is the shit. I love it. I’ve been tinkering away creating an ecourse on how to help people just get the frick over their worry about video and start doing it. That’s really given me him and his presentation just helped me realize that there was a real need for it. I’m feeling super confident in that now. Karley: If you could’ve had one thing that people walked away from your talk with, what would be the one thing that you’d want them to kind of go away with? Lisa: I think so many of us in the blogging space are looking around at what everyone else is doing. We are so scared, always so frustrated because things aren’t growing as fast as other people. It would be to stop looking around, to start thinking about what you’re really good at, to get to know your community and what they’re struggling with and then serve them in a way that also rewards you with income. That’s not a deadly thing to do, in fact it’s awesome and so many other good things happen from that. It would just be really learn about your community, be in conversation with them authentically, find out what their needs are, and then work out a way to package that together in a product. Just take some freaking action. Karley: Totally. I just wanna add that Lisa and I came to ProBlogger last year together. We both said, “Next year, we will be on stage.” And this year, we’re both on stage. I’m working on Darren’s podcast, the most amazing things happen when you take action, when you decide what you want and then you just go for it, right? Lisa: You just have to. I was so freaking scared before that speech and it was so fun in the end. The fear shows up all the time, every single time you do something new. I can’t believe where I’ve come in two years. It was actually crazy to stand on the stage and talk about it and see it. Karley: And rock it. Lisa: And rock it. Karley: What would be one tip for those who are just starting out? Lisa: Everyone hears crickets in the beginning, everyone talks to no one for a while, but keep talking, keep showing up, keep consistent. Everyone thinks that I kinda came out of nowhere and had all this overnight success but in fact I was on Facebook a lot for a years but all of that time was just helping me craft my message, craft what was unique about me.                     Wholefoods bloggers and food bloggers in general are damn freaking dozen. What different did I had to have to say about it? I worked that out by showing up and getting to know my community. Karley: What do you wish you knew that you know now back then before you launched a product or even before you launched the blog? Lisa: I wish that I knew that I was enough, that me, who wants to share, has something of value that people will vibe with. I didn’t know that. I kept on thinking all of this was a fluke. Even after the success, I kept thinking this is just gonna go away, I’m not all that. What I realized was that we are all actually enough, we’re all all that. If we can sit in it and if we can feel groovy in that, then anything is actually possible. Most of the time, it’s just us telling ourselves stories about why we can’t do things. Karley: Totally. What do you think has contributed to your success the most so far? Lisa: I think having my bitches. Having a posse of chicks who get it, having friends in the online business world, not trying to do exactly what I’m doing but who understand the space, has been the secret to my success. Having women around me who I can cry ugly tears and talk about the shit parts, the good parts, and who just genuinely are there cheering you on. You got their back and they’ve got yours. Karley: Where did you really suck at at the start? Lisa: Technology. No, I really lack, I still do. I really don’t have the attention span or desire to understand the technology. I knew enough to get started. I told everyone in the talk that my online program was run at the start on MailChimp and Vimeo. It didn’t have a membership site. There was nothing fancy about it, yet people bought it. A lot them bought it and then a lot of them bought it the second time because they liked the feeling, they liked the transformations that they were making and the way that they received it wasn’t important but that was two years ago.                     I still get surprised that I’ve got an online business for someone who has a bit of an aversion to technology. I absolutely love it now. I can see how much it can do for me and I outsourced that bitch as soon as I could because I wasn’t gonna sit there banging my head against a laptop. Karley: One last question for you. One of the key things, I think there’s been a couple of key themes that have been going throughout ProBlogger and one of them for me has been I see a lot of bloggers not moving ahead due to two main factors. One, there’s obviously fear and one is time. Could you let us know maybe one tip for each? One way that you could move through fear and one way that you could save yourself a bit of time. Lisa: The fear one is interesting because I was feeling fear before my talk. It shows up all the time. It actually does never go away. I’ve launched my Small Steps to Wholefoods six times and I still get nervous every single time. I do loads and loads of webinars but I still get nervous before them. That’s cool. I’m just not going to let the fear win. It’s like what Louis Guilbert says, fear can get in the backseat but I’m gonna drive, I’m gonna do this anyway because I’m never gonna get anywhere, I’m never gonna grow and stretch if I stay stuck in the fear. My advice, just do it. In terms of time, because I have three young kids, I did a lot in nap time, I do a lot in nap time. Working in small, little increments has been amazing but I still wouldn’t have done anything if I didn’t have a deadline. Launching that free challenge, giving people a date that they could expect that something was gonna get in their inbox, made me move. I have a bit of a background in journalism and I love short  deadlines, I actually need short deadlines. Find out the best ways that get you moving without totally overwhelming yourself. Karley: Cool, thanks. Lisa: Right on. Darren: Wow, what a great interview. Thank you so much Karley and Lisa for putting aside the time to record that for us. There are few things in that interview that I particularly loved. I loved the advice that Lisa gave for those of us who are tempted to compare ourselves to others. The advice to instead of looking at what others are doing, to put that energy into learning more about your community, to be in the conversation with that community authentically and to find out what their needs are, to package up a product, something that meets those needs, to take action. I love that. I really encourage you. If you are someone who compares yourself to other people, every time you catch yourself doing that, just focus yourself back on your community. Don’t analyze what others are doing, analyze your community and force yourself back into conversation with them to serving them as best you can. I love that. I love what she said also about fear. I don’t know if you heard this but I jotted this down, fear shows up every time you do something new And also about the sounds of it with Lisa, every time you do something that’s not new, doing a new webinar, doing a new launch, I can really resonate with that. Fear is something that I guess we need to learn to live with, it never goes away. Nerves come every time you do something new and every time you do something big. Don’t let it win. Fear can get in the backseat, I think she said, I’m going to drive and I think that was a great one as well. And then that advice that she said for those of us who are starting out. This is advice, again, I really resonated with. Everyone hears crickets in the beginning. Everyone talks to no one for a while, so keep talking, keep showing up, keep being consistent. It’s those years before Lisa did her launches that were really the basis of the launches. While she had some overnight success, it was built on those years of showing up, being consistent, getting to know her audience, understanding their needs. She was in a much better position. I hope you got some encouragement out of those messages today. I certainly did. I’m feeling motivated to get into my work today right now. Again, if you are interested in checking out Lisa’s site, it’s lisacorduff.com, I’ll link to it in the show notes and also check out her course that she does have launching this week as well. If you go to problogger.com/lisa, you can save $50 on that. We are an affiliate for that but it’s a course that I will be doing myself as well so join me in doing that because I’ve got a lot to learn about video. I hope you enjoyed today’s show. Take action, take action friends, that was the big message for me from today’s interview. I’ll look forward to chatting with you in the couple of days, time in the episode 163. If you’re looking for something else to listen to now and you enjoyed the interview format, we’ve got a few interviews in our archives that you might wanna go back and listen to. Episode 157 was an interview that Karly also did with Brian Fanzo from iSocialFanz, just a few episodes ago now, same sort of format as today. Back in Episode 99, I talked to Tim Paige from LeadPages and we talked a lot about landing pages and how they can be useful for bloggers. You might wanna listen to that one if landing pages is on your radar. Back in Episode 85 was one of our most popular interviews that I did with Pat Flynn on how to get entrepreneurial ideas out of your head. That’s probably enough for you today. You can listen to those particular episodes if you like the interview format. Otherwise, dig back into our archives over on iTunes or over on problogger.com/podcast and find something that is of interest to you. I’ll chat with you soon. How did you go with today’s episode? Enjoy this podcast? Sign up to our ProBloggerPLUS newsletter to get notified of all new tutorials and podcasts below.