ProBlogger Podcast: Blog Tips to Help You Make Money Blogging

Three Things That Could Be Limiting the Potential of Your Blog In today’s lesson, I will highlight 3 things that I see a lot of bloggers ignoring – or not paying enough attention to – that could be limiting the potential of their blog. Note: this podcast is available here on iTunes. Subscribe there to get notified of all new episodes. It can be difficult to know where to turn your attention to when it comes to blogging. While we do each need to work out our own priorities with our blogging, these are 3 things I think most bloggers wanting to build traffic and income should focus their attention on. If you’re interested in traffic and blogging income – today’s episode is for you. I was on a panel at an event recently and the moderator asked the panel to name 3 things that most bloggers don’t pay enough attention to on their blogs – things that could be limiting their potential. Today I want to share the 3 things I said. Each of them are things that if ignored won’t kill your blog – but could be really limiting the potential of your blogging. Each of them have the potential to bring a lot of life to your blogging. Further Resources on 3 Things Most Bloggers Don’t Pay Enough Attention To 5 Mistakes Bloggers Make with SEO and What To Do About Them Create an Opt-In to Increase Your Email Subscriber Numbers How I Increased the Subscriber Rate on My Blogs by 80-1000% How to Drive Traffic and Profit in your Blogging with Autoresponders How to Create Your Blog Content Calendar Email Services and Tools Mentioned on 3 Things Most Bloggers Don’t Pay Enough Attention To AWeber MailChimp ConvertKit SumoMe OptinMonster Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Hey there bloggers, it’s Darren Rowse from ProBlogger here. Welcome to episode 161 of the ProBlogger podcast. As I said, my name is Darren and I’m the blogger behind problogger.com. A blog, podcast, event, job board and series of ebooks all designed to help you 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 want to highlight three things that I see a lot of bloggers ignoring or at least not paying enough attention to. These are three things that by ignoring, you could be actually limiting the potential of your blog. It can be so difficult to know where to turn your attention to when it comes to blogging, what you should be focusing upon. Whilst we need to find out our own way through this, we need to work out our own priorities based upon our blog’s goals, these three things I think are very important when it comes to building your traffic and building an income from your blogs. If that’s what you’re interested in, building traffic, building a blogging income, today’s episode is for you. Recently, I was on a panel at a conference and was asked by the moderator to name three things that most bloggers don’t pay enough attention to on their blogs, three things that could be limiting those bloggers in their blogging. The question was one that I really enjoyed pondering. Luckily, I was the second person to answer it so I did have a little bit of time to consider my response. In today’s episode, I wanna share the three things that I said. Each of these three things are not things that will kill your blog, not like if you ignored them, they’re not gonna kill your blog. I have three things that could be limiting the potential of your blog and how far your blog could rise. They could actually on the flip side bring a lot of life to your blogging if you do focus upon them. Let’s get into them. The first one is search engine optimization. Before some of you are ready to hit pause on this podcast because it’s something that you just started a lot to do, can I encourage you to listen on just for a few minutes? I want you to answer this question, where do you put most of your effort in terms of building traffic to your blog? Currently, where do you put most of your time in terms of driving new traffic into your blog? I asked this question to a group of bloggers at the ProBlogger event, we’re having lunch together and we kinda went around the circle and answered it. Where do you put most of your attention in terms of building traffic? The responses were really varied. There was like seven or eight different responses from seven or eight different bloggers. One blogger said they put a lot of time into Pinterest. Another one put a lot of time into Facebook, another one LinkedIn, one other was guest posting, another wrote on sites like Medium and all put time and effort into advertising their blog and driving traffic with paid advertising. Another one put a lot of time into networking with influencers. I love the answers. I love the variety of the answers. I actually think that there’s a really good spectrum of places that we could be focusing upon to drive traffic. I found it fascinating that not a single blogger in that group, including myself, said that search engine optimization was the number one place that they put time into driving traffic. I then asked the same group another question. I asked, “Where do you get most of your traffic?” And it was fascinating to hear the response. Most of the bloggers said that their number two wave driving traffic was the thing that they just mentioned that they put time and effort into, but most of the bloggers around that table said that their number one source of traffic was Google. They were putting time into something else but number one was Google. I kind of liked the fact that they were putting time and effort into something else other than Google because I do think we need to diversify traffic. That strikes me that there’s this amazing source of traffic from many bloggers but we’re not really putting any attention or time into driving traffic from that source. I wonder what would happen if we put more time into SEO, whether we could actually drive even more traffic from Google. It strikes me that most of the full time bloggers that I’ve ever met, their number one source of traffic is definitely Google. In many cases, it’s between 40% and 60% of their traffic, this is full time bloggers. My two blogs, it’s around that kind of mark. On Digital Photography School last month, Google sent me 47% of my traffic. On ProBlogger last month, Google sent me 42% of my traffic. Search is not going away. Whilst so much energy and effort is put into giving tips on how to drive traffic with social, I wonder whether we need to go back to search again. It’s sometimes seen as an old fashion source of traffic but I actually don’t think it’s going away. I really do think that as bloggers we should be putting a little bit more time and effort into thinking about search engine optimization. Social media is great. Don’t ignore it. Don’t ignore it as a source of traffic. Don’t focus upon it obsessively because there are other great sources of traffic out there. I see a lot of bloggers putting hours and hours everyday into their Facebook in the hope that one of their posts there might go viral and that they might get a big spike in traffic. That’s great. If that spike comes, good, that’s great. Leverage it. I personally would rather put a little bit of time everyday into SEO and increase my traffic everyday from the search by 10%. I think that’s a much better investment of time than going after that one big spike in traffic from Facebook every now and again. To me, I’m trying to get that going viral on social is almost like buying a lottery ticket. It might happen but it’s not likely. Maybe a better way to earn money is to get a job. For me, SEO is a little bit more like that. I’m not sure whether that was the best metaphor but for me, social media being like a lottery ticket sometimes, there’s definitely that feeling about it. SEO, I think it’s really important. For many bloggers, it’s something that we considered to be too hard or too technical. The reality is that it need not be that way. I’m the most non technical person I know and yet I’ve seen the benefits over the last year or so of putting a little bit of time everyday into SEO. You can spend a lot of time on SEO and you can become very obsessed by it. I do know a few technical bloggers who do get a little bit obsessed by it. For most bloggers, I think there are a few simple things that you can do to increase your traffic from Google. Number one, get your blog set up the right way. I can link in the show notes today to some articles on that. At the very minimum, get a plugin like a SEO plugin installed and get it set up the right way. Number two, learn how to optimize your content, learn how to use headings and get your keywords in headings and get your keywords in the title, get your keywords in different parts of your site. Again, I’ll link to some further reading on that in today’s show notes. Number three, think about the keywords people would be using to search for your content. As you’re writing a blog post, be thinking at the back of your mind, what’s someone going to be typing into Google to find this content? Then, use those phrases in your content, in your title. Get in the habit of putting yourself in the shoes of your reader and what they would type into Google. The fourth thing I would encourage you to think about is just how can you get a few extra links into your site. I talked two episodes ago, Episode 159, about a technique that I’ve used over the last few months to get more links into my site. That helps a lot. I had this realization late last year that I was spending several hours a day on social media and no time at all on SEO. I decided to flip that around a little and begin to focus more on SEO over that time. For me, five or ten minutes a day of that link building exercise I mentioned in Episode 159, that was part of it. Another part of it for me was learning how to optimize my content to appear in Google’s featured snippets. That’s something I can share a link in the show notes today. Just by spending a few minutes everyday on those two things, I’ve definitely seen an increase in our SEO traffic already. I really would encourage you to learn those things and to implement those things too. If you want to learn a little bit more about SEO, there will be some links in the show notes today. Also, listen to Episode 94 of the ProBlogger podcast in which Jim Stewart and I go through five SEO mistakes that bloggers make. SEO is the number one thing that I think most bloggers don’t pay enough attention to. I really would encourage you to dedicate some regular time to it. Number two is email. Another source of traffic that many bloggers ignore is email. Most bloggers I know have some guilt around email. We know we should be doing email because we hear everyone talking about how powerful email is but we tend to get stuck at one of four places. These are the four places that I want to go through. Before I do, I want to just share with you how important email is. It is such a powerful and important part of my own business. Most full time bloggers that I meet, it’s a very important part of their business as well. For me, it drives traffic not as much as search, perhaps not even as much as social, but it drives traffic with intent. People come from my emails with intent to either read content or to buy a product or to engage in a community discussion. It drives traffic with intent. Number two, we use it to drive people to community and to areas of engagement. We use our email to drive people to our Facebook group. We use email to drive people to comments on a blog post or to our Facebook page or to other social activities going on. Email is very important for building engagement on our sites. Number three, email really is the ultimate source of sales of our own products and our affiliate promotions. Even you can drive it to sponsored content as well if that’s the way that you monetize your site. Email is so important if you want to monetize what you’re doing. For me, it’s also just great at building a brand. For me and my readers, email is probably the most regular touchpoint for many of our readers, particularly those of our readers who aren’t as social media savvy. Some of our readers do see our stuff on Facebook or Twitter everyday but many of our readers aren’t on Facebook everyday, many of our readers aren’t on Twitter at all or on Pinterest or on Instagram. Email is the number one touch point for those readers. I think people like my father, he’s on Facebook every now and again, it’s probably once a week, maybe twice a week, and he’s unlikely to see a message in there because he’s not on it a lot. He uses it more to interact with his family but he gets our email every week. That builds our brand, that’s so important. Email is so important. Many bloggers get stuck in one of these four areas. Either they get stuck in starting with email, it’s just so important to start your list, to start collecting emails. When you start out with email, it feels like a bit of a waste of time. I remember when I first started my email list for Digital Photography School, I started that list because of my dad. He didn’t know how to subscribe any other way, he wasn’t at the time on social media, and so he wanted to get our tips. I started this little list for him and people like him. I remember that first week that I started the list, it came time for me to send my first newsletter. It’s been a week, I’ve been collecting emails, and I had 17 emails on the list, one of whom was my dad, one of whom was me, one of whom was my wife who sneakily unsubscribed to make sure it was working. Then, there were 14 other people that I didn’t know. I remember pausing before I put that newsletter together. I remember thinking to myself, is it really going to be worth my time to spend an hour putting a newsletter together for essentially 14 people? I decided to do it and I’m so glad I did because the next week it was 30 people, the following week it was 45, and it gradually grew week after week after week. I’m so glad I started to collect those emails and I started to send regular emails as well. Today, we have over 700,000 subscribers to that list. It started with 13. Can I encourage you to start? It will feel slow in the early days, it will feel like a bit of a waste of time, but it will grow over time. The more you use it, the more you use that list, the more powerful it gets. Start. It will feel small but get started. Sign up with a service provider like AWeber or Mail Chimp or Convert Kit, there’s plenty of others out there, I’ll link to some of the providers that we recommend in the show notes. I really encourage you to start collecting. That’s the number one area, the number one thing you need to do. If you’ve already started, can I encourage you to optimize how you collect those emails? This is another area that many bloggers get stuck with, they start collecting but they don’t actually optimize how they collect it. Most bloggers have a widget in the sidebar and that will get you some subscribers but it will only be a small percentage of what you could get. There are many other ways to get those subscribers. You can call them to subscribe regularly in your content, you can put a widget underneath your content, underneath blog posts. You can use a tool like SumoMe or OptInMonster. Again, I’ll link to them in the show notes today. They have a variety of different methods for collecting email addresses. You could create an opt-in, this is where you give something away for free in exchange for the email. We’ve done previous episodes on this very topic. If you want to go back and listen to Episode 68, I talk about tools like SumoMe and OptInMonster. In Episode 69, I talk about opt ins. The key here isn’t to copy what I do, it’s to start to experiment, to see how you can increase the rate of subscribes that you get. This is something that I see so many bloggers completely ignoring. To be honest, it’s something that I ignored for many years as well. Optimize how you collect those emails. The number three area I see a lot of bloggers getting stuck with email is sending emails. They collect emails, they’re not actually sending anything. I talked to a blogger the other day, they had over a thousand subscribers to their list. They added a few everyday, three or four everyday. They’ve been doing it for over a year and now had over a thousand. I said, “How often do you send emails?” They said I’ve never sent an email, I’m going to send my first email when I’ve got something to sell. The problem with that is that those people who subscribed over a year ago have no idea that they’re on your list, they’ve forgotten. That list is cold, it’s not going to be effective. You need to get into the rhythm of sending emails. Don’t just use your email when you’ve got something to sell. Even those who do remember are going to feel ripped off because you’ve never delivered them any value with your email. It’s really important to get in the regular habit of sending emails, useful emails to people. Develop a rhythm of that. At least once a month, if not more if you can. We send a weekly newsletter and it’s basically just an update of the content that we produce on ProBlogger and on Digital Photography School. I know many of you subscribed. Sometimes, we add in a little bit of extra content and a little bit of bonus content. Sometimes we highlight some of the content in our archives, sometimes I send out a promotional email as well. Get in the habit of sending emails. The more people hear from you with regular useful, valuable content, the more warm they are and open to hearing from you. The fourth area that a lot of bloggers get stuck with email is automation. This is something that many bloggers kind of do the first three things but they don’t actually automate anything. Every email they send, they have to manually put it together. That’s fine on some levels but you can achieve so much more if you build a little automation into what you do. Simply using a sequence of the emails that get your readers on board and introduce them to your site, highlighting your best content in your archives. These types of things don’t have to be manually done. You can set up a little autoresponder to help walk through that process. Again, if that’s something you’re interested in learning more about, go back and listen to Episode 70 of this particular podcast. That will help you learn how to drive traffic and sales and to make income through autoresponders. Email is so important. If you’re feeling stuck in one of those four areas, can I encourage you over the next week to just push through it? Start that list, optimize how you collect emails, start a regular sending of emails, or build some automation into what you do. It’s a scenario that you can really lift your blog a lot. The third area that I see a lot of bloggers not putting enough effort into is what I described on the panel as the big picture of editorial. I see a lot of bloggers are really good at creating daily or at least weekly content. Most bloggers, their habit of creating content and the system of creating content for them, is very much done in the moment. It’s I’m going to sit down and I’m going to write a blog post today. I’ve got to think of what I’m going to write about and I’m going to write it and I’m going to publish it. We do this all within half an hour or an hour or within the day. We don’t actually think ahead about the content that we’re going to produce over time. One of the things I see a lot of bloggers implementing that brings life to their blog is the creation of an editorial calendar or simply thinking ahead about the content that you’re going to produce over the next weeks and months and even years. I came across a blogger the other day who thinks two years in advance with their editorial calendar. For me, that’s a little bit too advanced. We think a few months in advance on my blogs. But simply by thinking ahead about the content that you’re going to create, it helps you to be more thoughtful with your content and to create content that’s going to take your readers on a journey. I like to think about it as creating a pathway for your readers. What’s the path that you want to lead your readers down over the coming months? Thinking about it in that way, you can create content that builds upon each other, takes your readers in a journey in that way. Way back in Episode 11, I ran through a simple exercise that can do this for you if you want to go back and listen to that. I suggested creating a before and after description of your reader. Who are your readers before they come to your blog, who do you want them to be later. And then thinking about that change or that pathway that you want to lead your readers on, you can then begin to create content that leads them down that pathway. Before your readers come to you, they’re in one situation and you want to change them in some way, you want to help them to become that second person, the after shot, what content do they need to create to get to that point? What do they need to know? What changes do they need to make? How do they need to be inspired? What skills do they need to develop? What confidence do they need to develop? Simply by identifying those things that you want to see change in your readers, you can then begin to create content that takes them on that journey. Map out those things, map out how you want to change your readers and begin to plug in those changes that you want to see and the things that you want to build into your readers into an editorial calendar. It can really help you to create that content that doesn’t just help people in the moment but gives them a sense that you’re going to continue to create content that builds upon what they’re reading in that moment. That’s the kind of content that people will want to get more of and that’s the type of thing that will drive them to subscribe and become a regular reader of your blog. There’s three things that I think most bloggers could put more time into. Search engine optimization, email, and creating a bigger picture of their editorial. Actually, mapping out a pathway for their readers and creating an editorial calendar. I would love to hear which of those you’re going to spend a little more time on over the coming weeks. Also, what you would add to that as well? What do you think most bloggers should spend some more time doing as well? They’re just the three answers that I gave, the other panels gave other insights as well. I’m open to hearing from you on that. Hope you found today’s episode useful, I’d love to hear what impact it has had on you and what you’re going to do as a result of it. Leave a comment over at problogger.com/podcast/161. 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.

Challenge: Write an Opinion Post on Your Blog In today’s episode, I’m issuing you with a challenge to create a piece of content that centers around your opinion on a topic relevant to your audience. Adding your opinion to your content is such an important way to make your blog more useful to your audience, and it also makes it stand out from the crowd. Today, I’m going to share with you not only why opinion posts are so important, but I also want to give you some practical tips on how to structure your opinion post. I’m also going to give some tips on what to include in your piece of content. This is one of our monthly challenge posts, so I’m not only going to teach you how to create on opinion post, but I’m also going to challenge you to create one. Challenge: Publish your post. If you think this challenge would be interesting to your audience please link to this episode of the podcast/shownotes – we would love more bloggers to join. Once you’ve created and published your opinion post – head over to our Facebook group and look for the thread for this challenge and share the link to your content. Once you have – please check out some of the posts other people have created. Then please visit, like, comment, share,  and encourage others to do the same. Further Resources on How to Write an Opinion Post on Your Blog Facebook Challenge Group How to Write an Opinion Piece for a School Newspaper How to Write a Strong Opinion Piece How to Write an Opinion Essay Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Hey there and welcome to episode 160 of the ProBlogger podcast, my name is Darren Rowse and I’m the founder of problogger.com. A blog, podcast, event, job board, a series of ebooks and numerous other things all designed to help you as a blogger to grow your audience and make money from your blog. You can find out more about ProBlogger at problogger.com. In today’s episode, I’m going to issue you with a challenge. It’s part of a monthly series of challenges. Today’s challenge is to create a piece of content that centers around your opinion on a topic relevant to your audience. Adding your opinion into your content is such an important way to make your blog more useful to your audience but also that might get standout from the crowd, I strongly believe that. That’s my opinion. Today, I want to share with you not only why opinion post is so important but I also want to give you some practical tips on how to structure your opinion posts and also some tips on what to include in the basic content that you’re going to create for this month’s challenge. This is one of our monthly challenge shows. I don’t want to just teach you how to create an opinion post but I want to challenge you to create it and to share it with our other ProBlogger podcast listeners in our ProBlogger Challenge Group on Facebook. I will link that to our Facebook group or you can head to Facebook and do a search for the ProBlogger Challenge Group and join that group. Okay, some of you will have no problem with this particular challenge whatsoever. You have lots of opinions and you do not mind sharing them at all in your conversation but also on your blog. This is the central type of post that you create on your post, on your blog but for many bloggers, myself included, sharing your opinion is something that may not come naturally for you. I was brought up by my parents, who I love dearly, to keep my opinions to myself. As a result, it’s something that I found as a blogger took me way outside my comfort zone particularly when I first started. I was always thinking to myself as I was considering sharing my opinion, “What are other people going to think about this opinion?” “How are they going to react?” “Are they going to share their opinion?” “Will their opinion differ to mine?” I guess, for me mostly, I was always wondering how am I going to be perceived by sharing my opinions. As a result, I often held my opinions back from my audience. I think in doing so, I did my audience disservice. I was always wondering I don’t want to come across as opinionated. I don’t want to come across as bossy or as forcing my opinions on others. I don’t want to be seen as arrogant as if I’m the only one who has the right opinion. I didn’t want to be seen as attacking other people’s ideas and so I didn’t share my opinion. Here’s the thing. Your opinion is something your readers want. To hold it back from your readers is as a simple fault to do them a disservice. Also, your opinion is potentially what is holding your blog apart and setting your blog apart from the rest of the pack. There are thousands of blogs on every single topic. Your opinion can actually set you apart from those. You can also do it in a way that’s not arrogant, not bossy, not rude and not opinionated. I think opinion is a really important ingredient for our blogs. Just to give you a few really quick reasons as to why opinion matters before I get into sharing some tips on how to express it. Firstly, it makes your blog more useful. Your readers are not just looking for news or entertainment, they actually want to know how that news actually affects their lives. To share your opinion on what the news means can be a very powerful thing. Your opinion makes your blog distinct. There are probably, as I mentioned, thousands of blogs in your nation, maybe more but your experience, your story, your opinion, these things are what makes your blog unique. Don’t be afraid to share them. I told this story before but I remember when I first started my first camera blog, I reported on the news of new cameras being released and also write some reviews of cameras. The problem was that there was so many other blogs doing exactly the same thing and it was the only one so I started to add my opinion into the news posts and a stronger opinion into the reviews I was writing that my blog began to take off. When a new camera was released, I didn’t just say, “Here’s the new camera hits its features.” As I used to do. I started adding in a paragraph or two at the end of that news post saying, “This is who I think is going to benefit from this camera.” Or, “These are the features I’m surprised it doesn’t have and I think it should have.” By adding those little things, my post became more useful and I began to stand out from everyone else’s post which were just the list of features. Another reason that I think opinion is great is that it draws people into conversation. In sharing your own opinion, people will naturally share theirs. This can be a bit frightening for some of us who don’t like confrontation but this is just good. This is how we all learn. This is how conversations happen, we’re wired to do it. When someone expresses their opinion, other people feel almost like they have to share theirs and I this think is actually a really good thing that you want on your blog. You want conversations, you want diversity of opinion. As long as it is done in a graceful and constructive way, I think it really adds a lot of life into your blog. I actually wrote this in the 31 Days to Build a Better Blog ebook that you can find over in problogger.com. Alright, this about opinions. Expressing opinions on your blog is like adding seasoning to food. Without opinion, your blog could end up being quite bland, blending into the crowd. Adding your opinion helps to give your blog a unique flavor. There’s some good reasons there to add opinion into your content to take today’s challenge but how do you do it? I want to give you some tips by some reading that I’ve done and also on my own experience on how to write opinion posts. The first thing I want to encourage you to think about is to determine what type of opinion piece you’re going to write or create. Now, I found this really helpful article over on makemynewspaper.com. They argued in their post on opinion pieces that there are four main types of opinion pieces and I never really thought about this. I actually really like the way they have done it. This might actually be helpful for some of you who feel a bit confronted by the idea of putting your opinion out there because some of these are little bit more confronting than others but there are still ways that you can share your opinion in a non-confrontational sort of way. The first one that they mentioned is the clarification piece. This is an opinion piece which is more about clarifying something. This is a way you give your opinion on what something means or way you interpret or clarify something for your audience. For example, to use a current example and I hesitate to add this one in because I know it’s going to spark a little bit of passion in some people but you could write a post on what the rise of Donald Trump means for the future of politics in America. Now, in your post, you probably wouldn’t even need to take a position on Trump himself but you interpret what his rise and potentially fall of popularity means for future election cycles. Here, you’re not taking an opinion on Donald Trump, you are talking about the situation of Donald Trump and you’re expressing an opinion that arises from it, you’re interpreting what it all means rather than taking an opinion on him. It’s still an opinion because other people might interpret the rise of Donald Trump differently but it helps your readers to understand something that is relevant to them. This is kind of what I used to do in my camera review post. I would say, “Here’s the new camera, here’s its list of features and here’s who I think it is useful for.” That is my opinion. This camera is good for beginners or this camera is good for wedding photographers. That’s just opinion but it actually helps to interpret that news or that situation. For me, the clarification piece is one that I think is really important. It is going to share your opinion but it may not be quite as confrontational as some of the other ones that we’re going to talk about now. In fact, the next one is probably the most confrontational type of opinion post that you can write. Makemynewspaper.com says the second type is the critique piece. This is where you become a critique of something or someone or a situation. It might be a product that you think isn’t good that everyone else’s is good, it might be a policy that you disagree with, it might be a movie that you dislike. It doesn’t really matter what it is. It’s where you critique something. To take it run with the election example again, this might be the post where you look at the policy of a candidate and you critique it or you critique the candidate themselves. The point here is to say why you disagree with them or the policy and then bring some facts and arguments to the content, to disapprove their approach, to be critical of their approach. This is a more negative spin on things and it is going to probably get reactions from people and strong reactions from people who take the opposite view. The third type of piece that you want to think about might doing is the flip side of the critique and this is the commendation piece. Here is where you take a more positive spin on things. You find something that you agree with, that you can endorse. Something that you can defend, something that you put your stand of approval on. Again, to take the election thing, this is where you might choose a candidate or policy or an approach. This is who I stand behind. This path is a little bit of a more positive weight, still confrontational but it’s not going to the negative all the time. This is another way that you can do that if you want to be a more positive type of thing. I know a lot of bloggers that don’t want to go to the negative all the time. They want to be constructive inside. Potentially, here is a way that you can be a little bit more constructive. That’s the third type. The fourth type that this article talks about is the convincing piece. This is where you try and convince or sway your reader to your particular viewpoint. This is very clearly about persuading your reader to move their position, something that can really be difficult to do. You might be taking a viewpoint that’s contradictory to a commonly held idea and trying to explain why your position is better. Now, the convincing type of post, I think can actually be molded in together with the other three types of post as well but it might stand alone as well. We’ve got there four types of posts. I guess the first thing I’m trying to get you to think about is, what are you trying to do with your opinion piece? What is your intent? Are you trying to clarify something? Are you trying to critique something? Are you trying to commence something or are you trying to convince? Or maybe you’re trying to do a bit of a combination of each of those things. It’s the first thing, I would say is think about that style of post. Now, another article I came across today was from an author by the name of John McClain who wrote a really interesting piece over on a site called Write to Done. John actually shared sixteen tips on writing an editorial piece of content and opinion piece of content. I’m not going to go through all sixteen but there are few of them that stood out to me that I wanted to emphasize that I feel a bit quite good. Firstly, he really emphasizes that you want to choose something this topical and relevant to your audience. Obviously, we don’t want to just create an opinion piece on a timely topic just because everyone else is talking about it. It might not be relevant to our audience. As you think about the challenge, choose something that’s going to be relevant to your audience. It may be a timely post, it might be a something that is big in conversation at the moment like an election, if that’s still on when you’re listening to this but it’s more important to choose something that’s going to be relevant to your audience and that you can tie into your audience. Most of the reading that I did on the opinion pieces said this, “Start with your conclusion. Make your strongest point up front and then spend the rest of the post making the argument, sharing supporting facts.” Start your first sentence, probably, it should be, this is what I think, this is my opinion and then back at us, spend the rest of the article really proving the point or arguing that point. John talks about being personal and conversational can really help you to make your point and stop it from coming across as sensational or opinionated if you somehow weave your own story into it. Share why the topic matters to you. I think this is really a useful piece of advice but it also shows your readers why the post should matter to them. Stories can really be useful on this. John talks about using humor and particularly irony can be a very powerful tactic to persuade people but you want to be a bit careful with that too. Sarcasm for example, can be difficult to convey and sometimes can do more harm than good. John talks about having a really strong editorial viewpoint, come down hard on one side of the issue or the other don’t be a fan sitter. Share facts, provide insight, educate your reader on the topic. Facts can be really useful in opinion pieces. He also talks about how to finish the opinion piece. You want to state your opinion right up front and then spend the rest of the article presenting the facts and supporting evidence. And he says, “Then you want to also conclude your article or your post with your opinion again.” You want to restate your opinion at the end. Essentially, what you’re trying to do is top and tell the content with a very clear statement of your opinion and then fill in the gaps with the arguments. As one person said many years ago, “Tell them what you’ll tell them then tell them and then tell what you tell them.” Really, this top and tell approach of stating your opinion, bookending your post with your opinion makes it really clear on what your post is about. I came across another little article from the Murphy Center. They have this five paragraph format or structure for a good opinion piece and it’s very similar to what John wrote. They’re saying paragraph one, state your position and briefly, in a couple of sentences at the most, outline three reasons you hold your opinion. State your opinion and three reasons you hold the opinion. That’s one paragraph. The next three paragraphs, you should expand on each of the reasons. Add the facts, build some arguments. Each of those paragraphs. Really expand those three reasons. Your fifth paragraph is the conclusion. Tell them what you tell them. Restate your opinion, remind them of the reasons and tell people what to do next. That’s just the five paragraph structure that you might want to take today. This doesn’t have to be a long piece of content. In fact, short can often be better with this type of thing. Many of the articles I’ve read over the last day about opinion pieces say that the longer your article is, the more you dilute your arguments. Choose the best three reasons and don’t feel you need to go into much more detail than that. A few last tips before you get into writing your piece of content or creating your piece of content if you want to do something that’s not written, that’s totally fine too. Firstly, include in your posts some reference to other people’s opinions. I actually really appreciate when someone is sharing their opinion and they reference the opinion of others. This signals that you are across those arguments and that you flawed about both sides of the arguments for what you’re talking about. This is also useful for those readers who perhaps hold a different opinion to you. It shows that you’ve at least considered that and maybe it gives you advices for convincing them and bringing them across to your way of thinking as well. Another thing I think is really important, particularly if you’re doing the critique. If you’re doing that more critical approach to an opinion post, is to give some realistic alternatives or solutions or some positive options for people to consider. One of the dangers of opinion post that are more critical is that they can become very negative and really drag people down. I was watching the panel show here on the stream television a couple of weeks ago where a panelist spoke for five minutes in a rant about a particular policy issue of the Australian government. I critique the policy so well. I made some really convincing points and poked a lot of holes in this particular policy. As I was listening to others being convinced by it, it was quite negative the way they were talking but it was good. They really were quite convincing except for one thing. At the end of her rant, another panelist who supported the policy, took the opposing view, simply said to her, “What would you propose? What solution would you propose as an alternative to the policy that you just been five minutes critiquing?” She just looked back at him and said, “I don’t have one.” Her argument from not having an alternative began to unravel. If only she had an alternative to suggest, something positive as another way forward, then her argument would have been so much more convincing and pretty much ever a lot to that point and they forgot her arguments I would say. Her arguments were great but that didn’t really have anything as an alternative. I think sometimes by taking that critique, be prepared to say something positive as an alternative can be really good. Couple more last tips. Write with some passion, bring some energy to your post, and don’t be ashamed of having an opinion or reserved about expressing it. If you want to convince people, you need to bring some passion to your argument, you need to show that you feel strongly about it. That type of argument is going to be more convincing to people but on the flip side of that, write with some grace. This might be the first time your readers have ever heard you share your opinion and that’s totally fine but you might want to ease them into that. I guess it’s really important to be inclusive and gracious and constructive even when you do argue something with passion. I think, still you can show that you’re open to other ideas and use language that is inclusive in different ways. That’s personally the way that I tend to approach this. Lastly, invite other people’s opinions. Your opinion is just your opinion and one of the best ways to be gracious and to show your readers you’re open to other ideas is to invite them to express theirs and that openness to sharing of ideas can actually set the tone for the discussion that happens as a result of you sharing your opinion. I guess the last thing you need to be aware is that when you do express your opinion, others will probably express theirs as well. You want to be around to watch the conversation that comes out of that type of post. I hope some of that has been useful and hopefully, you’re beginning to think about the piece of content that you are going to create as part of this ProBlogger challenge. I don’t want to just teach you. Today, I want you to do the best why you can learn how to create an opinion piece of content is to do it yourself. Over the next week, I want to challenge you to create a new piece of content for your blog that is centered around your opinion. The topic can be anything at all. Totally anything at all, as long as it really relates to your readers. That will be the one qualification that I will put on that. This will be easy for some of us than others. A few suggestions, if your blog is about products, go beyond reporting on a new product. Tell people what you think about it or compare two products, that’s another way to do an opinion post, is to say this versus this and give a verdict on which one suits your readers’ best. If you blog is about books, write a review of a book. If your blog is about nutrition, share what you think about a popular diet. If your blog is about tech startups, talk about why you think a startup succeeded or failed. If your blog is about travel, share why you think a destination is a great place for your audience to visit. Really, it can be on anything big or small. It can also take a variety of formats as well. It could be a written post, it could be a video, it could be an info graphic, a podcast, really, it’s totally up to you as to the medium and format of your post. Write an opinion post and ones you’ve created it, once you’ve published it on your blog, I want to encourage you to share with the rest of the listeners of this podcast, I think there is a lot to be learned from watching how other people approach this type of thing. If you’re feeling stuck, you can also hit into the Facebook group that we’ve got set up to see what other people are creating as well. I will set up a thread on our Facebook group, the ProBlogger Challenge Group, if you do a search on that you’ll find us. I encourage you to look for that thread and to share your post in that thread. Please don’t start a new thread, just look for that post and share your post in that. You’re totally welcome to share a link in there. We actually want to see the content you create. Once you’ve shared your link, please check out some of the other post that other people have created. I encourage you to visit them, to like them, to comment on them, to share them and to encourage those other listeners of this podcast. As I said before, you can find the ProBlogger challenge group by searching for ProBlogger Challenge Group on Facebook and you should find us. There are, as I am looking at it right now, 2,089 members already in there so there’s a lot of action happens around this challenges and I really can’t wait to see the opinion post that you create over the next few weeks. 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.

Link Building Tip – Generate Hundreds of Links for Your Blog in 5 Minutes a Day In today’s lesson, you are going to learn a simple technique that has generated 100 new links for my blogs in the last month. This technique is fairly simple, and it only takes me about 5 to 10 minutes to do it. Yet, this technique is quite powerful. Incoming links to your blog are important because they drive traffic to your site from other parts of the web, and they also help you to rank higher in search engines like Google. Higher rankings also lead to more traffic. So, if you want more traffic and a bigger profile in the search engines this episode is for you. Further Resources on How to Generate Hundreds of Links for Your Blog in 5 Minutes a Day The Simple Tip That Gained Us Over 200 Backlinks WPBeginner Find Readers for Your Blog Through Commenting and Relationships 5 Mistakes Bloggers Make with SEO and What To Do About Them Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Welcome to episode 159 of the ProBlogger podcast. I’m your host, Darren Rowse, the founder of problogger.com, a blog, podcast, event, job board, and a series of ebooks all designed to help bloggers to grow their audience and make money from their blogs. If you want to know more about ProBlogger, you can check it out at problogger.com. In today’s lesson, you’re going to learn a simple technique that has generated 100 new links for my blogs in the last month. It only takes me about five to ten minutes a day to do it so it’s fairly simple and yet it’s quite powerful. Incoming links to your blog are important because they drive traffic to your site from other blogs, other parts of the web. They also help you to rank higher in search engines, Google in particular, which again leads to more traffic. If you want more traffic and a bigger profile in the search engines, this episode is for you. Let’s get into the tip for the day. Today’s tip is really quite simple. It’s not rocket science at all yet it’s incredibly effective as I mentioned in my introduction today. I first came across this one from our friends over at BuzzSumo. I’ll link to the blogpost because it is a few weeks old now, actually it’s probably a couple of months old now. They in turn got the idea from Syed Balkhi from WPBeginner. The tip is really simple and in essence it is to look for mentions of your blog or keywords that are relevant to your blog and articles on your blog on other people’s blogs and to reach out to those bloggers to see if there’s an opportunity for them to link to you. As I said, this is not rocket science but it really does work and I want to walk you through the little system that I’ve built, the workflow I guess that I’ve built to do it. This is something that I think many bloggers probably have done once or twice but what I want to suggest to you is that it’s useful to put aside five or ten minutes a day, longer if you’ve got it, to do this because it really is quite effective. I use a tool called BuzzSumo. I use the paid version but there’s a 14-day trial as well so you can see if it suits you. There are other tools around that do similar types of things. For example over at Mars, they also have a tool as well. I think there is this called Link Opportunities. It doesn’t really matter what tool you use, but I use BuzzSumo so that’s what I will refer to in this episode. I’ve got no affiliation with them whatsoever, it’s just a tool I like and it is a tool that has other features as well. What I do with BuzzSumo, they have a little monitoring tab and in that monitoring tab I plug in a few things. I’m monitoring a few different words. Firstly, I’m monitoring my brand names, ProBlogger and Digital Photography School. And then I’m also plugging in some keywords that are relevant to my niche. As I’ve said before, BuzzSumo has quite a few features but to find this one, just look for the monitoring tab when you sign in. I think it’s up towards the top, maybe from the right hand side from my memory although they tend to move things around. Again, it lets you monitor those two things, either a brand or a keyword. Then once you’ve got those in there, BuzzSumo goes to work and it starts to monitor thousands and thousands of blogs and websites around the web. It doesn’t monitor every single blog on the internet but it monitors a lot of them. It puts together a daily report for you that shows you any new content that it sees that uses those words. I have it set up to send me an email once a day with this little report. I think there’s different frequencies that you can set up for that email as well. The thing I would say is that if you’re setting up using a keyword, you want to be a bit careful about making the word too broad. For example, if I put in the word photography because it’s relevant to my photography blog, it would generate thousands of results every day and that’s too much for me to be able to handle. The results might be irrelevant. But if I put in a term like food photography and with quotes around it to get those specific words in that order, it generates a more manageable amount. I put it in the other day and I think I got 40 or so results for the day. You want to really just experiment with the keywords you put in there so make sure you’re not getting reports that are just overwhelming and to really focus in. I particularly would encourage you to think about what are the key articles on your site that you want to build the search engine profile of and articles that you know are going to be most helpful for people. And then think about keywords relating to those particular articles. Don’t put too many keywords in or else you’ll get so many reports that you won’t be able to handle it. I suggest starting with maybe two or three of those articles you’re trying to build some links to and what are the keywords relevant to those as well as your brand name. Each day, I get these reports emailed to me from BuzzSumo. I’ll spend five or ten minutes digging into the reports. Sometimes I save up a couple of days at a time. This week I actually did three days at once so I probably spent 15, 20 minutes on it and that maybe something that you want to do. Every day or every time you’ve got the time, dig into those reports and look through all the content listed in it. Basically, it’s a link of content that uses those particular keywords. There’s a couple of things that I’m doing as I’m looking through it. I’m ultimately looking for opportunities that might get me a link. There’s a couple of obvious things that you should be looking for. Firstly, the brand name monitoring. If I see someone has used the word ProBlogger, there’s two things that might be happening there. One, they may be just using the term ProBlogger to describe themselves or blogging professionally and they may not be actually talking about me or my blog. But on occasion, they are actually talking about ProBlogger the blog or the podcast or the job board. In those cases, I’m looking for opportunities for links. Many times people when they do mention ProBlogger, they link to us and that’s great. That’s kind of interesting to see those articles and to be able to go and comment on them and find out what they’re saying about us, that type of thing. That’s really useful in it of itself. It’s amazing how many people mentioned ProBlogger the blog or the podcast or even a specific article and may even quote us without adding a link. Many times, it’s probably just that I don’t think to do it or they forget to do it, whatever the reason. BuzzSumo actually in their report tells you whether there’s a link to your site or not. This is really useful. If someone mentions your brand and they don’t link to you, it’s very easy to shoot them a polite email that firstly thanks them for mentioning my brand so I’d say, “Thanks for mentioning ProBlogger. I really found it interesting what you said.” I try and personalize it there and then I politely ask if they’d mind adding a link to ProBlogger. It might be, “Hey, thanks for the article I saw. It was really interesting what you wrote about blah blah blah blah. Would you mind adding a link back to my article that you mentioned there?” And then I usually make some sort of lighthearted little joke that says, “You know, every link helps.” And then wish them well. Maybe even offer to share that post. It depends really what the situation is. If what they’ve written is really useful I might even just share it on Twitter anyway. I’m trying to personalize the approach there but I’m trying to point out that there’s an opportunity for them to link back to us. That’s particularly relevant if they’ve quoted us or they’ve mentioned a particular article but if they just mentioned us in passing sometimes it’s relevant there as well. I don’t do this with every single mention of the site, we get quite a few everyday but in some cases I guess I see this is more of an opportunity than others particularly if they mentioned a specific article. That’s one thing I’m looking for there. Not every blogger is going to get mentioned. Your brand may not get mentioned a lot. ProBlogger is fairly well-known and so it does get daily mentions on other blogs. What I think is probably more useful is the keyword monitoring. I also monitor a number of keywords that are relevant to articles on my site. As I dig through the reports that BuzzSumo sends me there, I’m particularly looking for opportunities in content that’s been written where I think we’ve written something that could be useful for either the readers of the blog as per the reading or for the blogger themselves. Let me give you a couple of examples of what I’ve done over the last few days. For example, I monitor the keyword food photography. I found an article written on a parenting blog that was about recipes that the blogger enjoyed. They shared some recipes, they shared some photos of their food. I thought the photos were okay but the reason I found the article is that they mentioned that they were sorry that the photos weren’t as good as they could be and I mentioned that they wanted to learn how to improve their food photography. When they mentioned that food photography, they came up in my results. I noticed this mention and I shot them an email and told them that I thought their post was really good, I thought their photos were pretty good as well. I noticed that they wanted to improve their food photography and so I simply shot them some links to a couple of articles that we’ve written on the topic of food photography. In this particular email I didn’t ask for a link, I simply reached out because I thought the articles we’ve written might be helpful to that blogger. I had no idea who that blogger was. We had no previous contact whatsoever. I’m pretty sure they’ve got no idea who I am and they replied within a few hours just simply saying thanks. And then I went back to the article and noticed that they had actually updated the article with a couple of the links that I’ve sent them. And then interestingly a week later, I noticed that they wrote a whole article about photography and they not only mentioned the links that I’d mentioned on food photography but they also did a section on kid photography, taking photos of kids and they linked to us there. Simply by me emailing that blogger and saying, “Hey, here’s a couple of articles you might find interesting. You might find them useful. I noticed you wanted to improve in this area.” I had no mention of them linking at all. It wasn’t even my intent to do that. I just wanted to be helpful. It took me two minutes to send them that email. It led to links and it led to an ongoing conversation as well because then I was going to email them back again and say, “Hey, thanks for that. I really appreciate it. I wasn’t expecting it.” And now we’re conversing backwards and forwards and now they’ve actually asked us to write a guest post for their site as well. You can see here the opportunities that sometimes open up when you start to see people mentioning things that are relevant to you and things that you can help them. The other thing that I’ve done has been a little bit more cheeky and specifically asked for links when I noticed people writing about keywords that we have articles for. For example, I found an article a couple of weeks ago now on a blog about dogs. It was a dog blog. I’ve never seen the blog before but I noticed, and it came up in my BuzzSumo report because they had written this post Three Tips for Beginners Photographing Dogs or something like that. The article is really good but it was short and it was simple. It was light and it was for beginners. Whilst that post was totally fine for beginners, I saw it and I thought to myself, “Okay, what could I suggest here? There’s an opportunity here.” And so I sent them an email, a very short email and said, “Noticed your article. It’s a great article. I love the images in it. It was a beautifully illustrated article.” And then I politely mentioned a couple of links to articles that we’ve published on the same topic that I thought might be good for their reading. They were I guess more for intermediate photographers. It was kind of like the next step. If your readers like those three tips, they might also like these. I made it really clear in the article a few times that there was no pressure at all to us them but I just thought they might be useful either to the blogger or to their readers. I try and thread really gently with these emails where I suggest further reading because I know not all bloggers are going to be open to that. I don’t want to seem spammy but in this case that blogger again replied with a thank you and added a couple of those links within a few hours of them getting that email. It again led to a couple of links back to our particular site. You can see there a few different opportunities. I guess it’s about looking for those keywords and then reading the article and thinking is there an opportunity here. I have to say in some of those reports I probably get maybe 20 or 30 different pieces of content that mention those keywords and I’d probably act on two of them a day. I’m really looking for something that I know I can add value for. I’m not just sending every single piece of content, the owners of that blog, generic swipe file of please link to my site. It’s not like that at all. I’m trying to tailor it in every situation. A few last thoughts. Firstly, monitoring your brand is not going to work for everyone. Obviously, my site has reasonable profile so we get more mentions than a new blog. That monitoring thought for your brand is something I definitely would encourage you to set up because I think any mention of your brand is good for you to know about. It may not be because of the links but just because of the relationships. I think any blogger, big or small, can have some benefits from monitoring keywords associated with your particular blog even if you don’t ever email and take the link building approach. Simply by seeing what other people are writing about those particular topics will give you all kinds of ideas for content and potentially build relationships with those bloggers as well. Even if you just use the 14-day free trial on BuzzSumo just to check that out, you’re going to learn a lot about your niche by doing that. The second thing I’ll say is that, and I want to emphasize this again, I pick and choose who to email and I thread so gently with those emails because I don’t want to come across as spammy. I only send a couple of emails a day, maybe three or four a day. Actually, it’s probably a little bit more than that but I’m really trying to pick and choose very, very carefully. I get about seven reports from BuzzSumo every day and from those seven reports I’m probably sending less than 10 emails out over a day. I typically, on a good day, get three or four links per day as a result of those emails. I get a lot of people just not reply and that’s totally fine but three, maybe four links a day which doesn’t sound like a lot but over a year that adds up. Over the last month, it’s probably been about 100 incoming links and over a year that’s like 1,200 links coming in. As I mentioned in my intro, that’s good on two fronts. It drives traffic directly from those other blogs. The content alerts that you get are for fresh content so that content is getting read by those blog’s readers and so you’re getting direct traffic thread but you’re also getting some boost for your search engine optimization. Last thing I’ll say is this is something I would encourage you to build into your routine to some degree. Set aside five or ten minutes a day or maybe set aside half an hour a week, maybe Friday afternoons or Monday mornings, whatever suits you. It is a sort of administrative task it doesn’t need a whole lot of creative thought and maybe put it in one of those areas where perhaps you’re not as creative but put aside time to do it. I challenge you to do it for a week or two. Maybe for the 14 days that you get for that free trial at BuzzSumo and see how it does for you. If it works for you then it’s going to have some accumulative, positive benefits on your site over time. SEO does take a little time to build but it’s something really useful. And lastly, try and personalize those emails that you’re sending. Actually, I approach people not only via email but sometime on social media as well. I’m sometimes sending them a message on Facebook or even just shooting them a tweet, beginning that conversation can be a less sort of spammy way of doing it. Certainly, I would encourage you not to use a swipe file for those approaches but to try and personalize those email as much as possible. Refer to the article they’ve written or say why you like it. Point out something that you do like about it and then politely, in a no pressure kind of way, suggest some further reading for them. I hope you found that useful. You can actually see that BuzzSumo wrote up their tip as well on the blog. Can I suggest a couple of other podcast that you might find useful that are on the similar topics? Firstly, Episode 94 is Five SEO Mistakes That Bloggers Make And How To Fix Them. That might be useful if you do want to improve your search engine optimization and then also way back in Episode 36 we had a podcast on how to build your blog through relationships with other bloggers. Networking and commenting on other blogs and that relates to this as well. I think this is a really great way to find out which other blogs maybe you should be linking to and building those relationships with. Lastly, if you know any other blogger that could benefit from this episode, can I ask you to share it? Can I ask you to share even if it’s just sending them an email or tweeting them, DMing them in some way? If you’re on your iPhone right now, you can simply open up the podcast app that you’re listening to and open up the episode. Look for the little three dots at the bottom right of your screen, hit that share episode button and it will open up some options for you to either email it, tweet it, Facebook it. Thanks for those of you who do share it. I really do appreciate it and I do also appreciate those reviews. I see reviews coming in every couple of days on iTunes and I appreciate all of those. They give me the energy to keep on going. Anyway, thanks for listening today and I’ll be back with you in a couple of days’ time with our next challenge. Episode 160 is going to be another ProBlogger challenge so tune in for that in a few days time and I’ll give you something else to go away and work on and then you can share it in our ProBlogger Challenge Group. Thanks for listening. I’ll chat with you 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.

Feeling Stuck? How to Regain Momentum Are you feeling stuck with some area of your blogging or business life? If so, today’s episode is for you because I’m going to talk about getting unstuck and building momentum.   What we are going to talk about today applies to many areas of life, but we are going to focus particularly on blogging and business. I am going to share with you a simple tip to help you get unstuck. Take imperfect action is a theme that came up numerous times at the ProBlogger event.The first time I heard this term was a few years ago from Jadah Sellner of Simple Green Smoothies at the World Domination Summit, and it has stuck with me ever since. Many bloggers can relate to getting stuck. Whether it is fear, perfectionism, or analysis paralysis stopping us. Taking imperfect action can get us moving forward again.   Further Resources on Feeling Stuck? Here’s How to Get Moving Again Listen to this episode here in iTunes. How to take imperfect action 3 Questions to Ask When Facing Fear Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Are you feeling stuck with some aspect of your blogging business or life? If so, today’s episode is for you. My name is Darren Rowse and welcome to Episode 158 of the ProBlogger podcast where today I want to talk about getting unstuck, building some momentum. What I want to talk about today really applies to many aspects of life but I guess we’re particularly focusing in on blogging and business. I want to share with you a simple tip to help you to get unstuck. One of the themes at this year’s ProBlogger event that we didn’t plan but came up in many of the presentations that happened was take imperfect action. It came up numerous times. The first time I heard the term or the phrase was at the World Domination Summit a few years ago where Jadah Sellner from Simple Greens used it. I’m not sure where it originated from, I’d love to credit the original source of it. Ever since I heard Jadah use it, it stuck with me. I shared about it a couple of years ago at the ProBlogger event. Ever since I shared it, it’s been a recurring theme at the event as well because many bloggers really relate to this feeling of getting stuck. Many times as bloggers, we feel paralyzed with different aspects of what we do. As I said before, this applies to many areas of our life. It’s a human feeling in many ways. For some of us, it’s fear that stops us and paralyzes us. For others, it’s perfectionism, that’s a big one for me. Sometimes, it’s analysis paralysis. We get so stuck in trying to work out how to do something that we never actually take action. For some of us, it’s because we don’t have a clear idea of the big picture of where we’re headed, sometimes we can’t take action because we don’t know our final destination. For others of us, we feel we need to know more. We need to develop a skill or we need to develop confidence or we need to meet more people or we need more money before we can take a certain action. For others of us, it’s a problem of comparing ourselves with others, it’s a problem of feeling like what we want to do has already been done by everyone or everyone else does it better than us so we can’t achieve a certain standard. For some of us, it’s just an overwhelming feeling not knowing what to do first. There’s a whole lot of different reasons that we could be stuck in not taking action and for some of us it’s a combination of these things. I really relate to a lot of the things I’ve just run through there. For me, I guess I sometimes get so many ideas that I feel a little bit confused about which ones to do first. That’s a strong one for me. Another one for me is fear, I often worry about what people will think about me, how I will sound, how I will come across, what if I make a mistake. The other big one for me as I mentioned before was perfectionism, I have a tendency to get things perfect inside my head, to get them just right there in my brain to imagine things perfectly but then action feels a little risky. To do what I’ve dreamt up and perfected in my mind is a risk that things might not quite turn out the way I imagined them. As a result, I tend to be pretty good at perfect inaction. I get things so perfect in my mind that I don’t actually take action because I could never measure up to the way that I imagine things. Whatever the reasons, whether it’s one of the ones that I’ve mentioned or something else, getting stopped in your tracks is a real problem when you’re in business of any kind. But particularly in the online space where things move so fast, it’s particularly important that you keep active and keep moving. Momentum really is very important in the business that we’re in. Imperfect action is better than perfect inaction every single time. In fact, it turns out that imperfect action is the only kind of action there is if you really think about it. No one ever takes perfect action, nobody ever takes perfect action. The only kind of action there is is imperfect action. There are a few benefits of imperfect action and this isn’t really rocket science but I want to go through them because I think it can hopefully help you through this little hump that maybe you’re feeling at the moment. Imperfect action gets things done, action is the main thing that separates dreamers from those who accomplish great things. Imperfect action gets things done. Imperfect action creates momentum. Very often when you take a small imperfect action, the following next steps reveal themselves. I mentioned before that some people don’t take action because they can’t see the big picture, sometimes you will never see the big picture until you start taking steps, the next steps reveal themselves once you take that first small step. For me, sometimes when I take that first step towards a fuzzy goal, it’s where the goal becomes clear for me. It’s also where I get energy to move me even further towards that goal. Related to this is that imperfect action builds confidence and courage. I love this quote from Dale Carnegie, he says, “Inaction breeds doubts and fear, action breeds confidence and courage.” If you want to conquer fear, don’t sit at home and think about it, go out and get busy. Imperfect action teaches you the best way to learn something is to do it. Don’t feel you have the skills? Take imperfect action, you’ll quickly learn a lot. The day I started my first blog was the day I probably learned the most about blogging ever since. In the last 14 years, it was that first day when I took a step out of my comfort zone and started a blog. I learned so many skills about blogging, I understood so much more than the day before. You learn so much, you learn skills, you gather knowledge by taking imperfect action. Related to this is that imperfect action leads to self discovery and self improvement as well. You will learn so much about yourself through taking action, stepping out of your comfort zone will force you to think about who you are and how you react in those types of situations. For me, again, starting my blog helped me to develop my ideas. It helped me to develop passions that I never would’ve even known I had within me simply by starting, by putting myself out of my comfort zone in that way. The last thing I’ll say about imperfect action is that it’s relatable. This is something I think a lot of bloggers and podcasters and online business people should really understand. Sometimes, the temptation is to get everything perfect when we’re creating products and we’re creating blog posts and we’re creating sales material, when we’re putting ourselves out there. We want it to be perfect. We’re told that it should be excellent, it should be as perfect as it can be. Sometimes, we get things so perfect that it’s actually not relatable because it loses some humanness. One of the things I’ve realized is that with this podcast particularly is that I know my episodes aren’t perfect, I stumble, and I don’t edit out some of my mistakes or most of my mistakes. I think that makes me a little bit more real, it makes me a little bit more human. I’m flawed, I’m just like you are, we all make mistakes. I think sometimes by leaving out imperfections in, it makes us a little bit more relatable. It shows that you’re human. This is what people are looking for increasingly online. In an age where everything is so polished and professional, I sometimes think that humanness, vulnerability, imperfection stands out and can be a little bit relatable. I’m not saying here that you shouldn’t aim for excellence, you do want your blog posts to be edited, you do want things to come over as slick and as professional as you can, but don’t edit out your imperfection. Sometimes, imperfection is relatable and it makes you stand out from everyone else. Imperfect action gets things done, it creates momentum, it builds confidence and encourages, it teaches you, it leads to self discovery and it’s relatable. Here’s my call to action, take your next best step. You don’t need to arrive at your destination today, you just need to take your next best step. The best of your ability is all you can really do. I came across a really interesting little article by Donna Arrogante. As I was doing a search before for imperfect action, I came across a post that she wrote with some steps into how to take imperfect action. She goes through six steps. I thought it might be helpful to go through them really briefly. She says here’s six steps to help you gracefully take imperfect action. Step number one, identify what you’re feeling stuck about. Step two, what are one to three ways you can move forward, even if you don’t have all the pieces together yet? Just come up with three things that can help you move forward, even small steps forward. Step three, choose one of those three ways that you are willing to take action on now. It could just be a tiny, small thing. Step four, what are resources and information that you need that will give you more confidence to take the next step? What do you need to gather in order for you to take that step? Step five, what imperfect action will you take next once you’ve taken that first step? Step six, repeat step four and five until your goal is accomplished. I’ll probably add a couple of little things into Donna’s list there. Firstly, I like to tell people what action I’m going to take. For me, accountability, even if it’s just a little bit of accountability with someone who’s going to encourage me can go a long way into helping me to get things moving. Telling someone the step I’m going to take and most importantly for me, telling them when I’m going to take that step, gives me the accountability. Another thing I like to add into the process is celebration. Sometimes, I think a little celebration can be in order after you’ve taken some kind of action. High five, a fist bump, some sort of an acknowledgment of the steps we take can be good particularly when we have push through fear and it’s a big step for us taking us out of our comfort zone. Don’t celebrate because it may actually stop you from taking the next step as well. Last thing I’ll say is that remember, as I said before, action is a risk. It’s usually going to be accompanied with some fear but that’s normal. It’s a sign that you’re doing something important. One last little tip for you, I sometimes think if you’re really stuck, it can be useful to set aside a longer period of time for burst of imperfect action. Late last year, I realized I was losing a bit of momentum in a number of things in my business. I’ve been putting off and procrastinating about a few different tasks, in fact a lot of different tasks. I’ve been putting things on my someday list. I talked about this at the event recently. I decided to set aside a whole week to get things done, to move things off my someday list onto my today list. I came up with a list of about ten things that I really needed to do, things that I’ve been avoiding and that I wanted to achieve over a week. I set aside a whole week to start ticking those things off. They were all ten relatively small things, thing that I could achieve in half a day or less. That week turned out to be a really great week, I also in that week turned off a lot of the input in my life. I decided to stop consuming for that week, no reading blog posts, no listening to podcasts, no social media, and very limited email. I turned off a lot of those instant messaging tools as well. I didn’t watch Netflix that week, I decided to stop consuming for a week and start creating for a week. For me, actually putting that time aside and putting some boundaries around it, protecting my week in that way, really helped me to achieve a lot and to get momentum back. I achieved a lot in that week but I found that the second week, the week after, was also a really productive week because I was in creating mode, I was actually in getting things done mode. I confronted some of those things that I was avoiding because I was scared of them or because I thought they were too overwhelming and I got things done. Let me finish with a small quote from Mark Twain. He says, “Twenty years from now, you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. Take imperfect action.” Are you feeling a little bit scared about the action that you know you need to take? I’ve got one more podcast for you to listen to, it’s Episode 54. In it, I give you three questions to ask yourself when you’re facing fear. That’s in iTunes, PB54 or problogger.com/podcast/54. 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An Interview with Brian Fanzo – Perfection is a Fairytale Today, I have a great conversation to play for you. It’s a conversation that we recorded at the ProBlogger Event with our opening keynote speaker, Brian Fanzo from iSocialFanz. Brian is someone that I’ve admired for the last couple of years. I happened to stumble upon Brian on Periscope, where he was discussing using live video and high level methods of using newer social platforms. Brian knew what he was talking about at a technical level, but he also really had heart. I think that is what attracted me to subscribing and following Brian around the Internet. He not only knows video and social media like Snapchat, he also lives it in a meaningful way. That is why I wanted to interview Brian and get him on the podcast. I was busy being a host at the ProBlogger Event, so I asked Karly Nimmo of Radcasters to conduct the interview. Over the next few weeks you will hear a number of interviews by Karly that were taken at the ProBlogger Event. Today Brian and Karly cover a lot of ground, and Brian shares a lot of tips about perfectionism, fear, productivity, and more. Enjoy! Further Resources on Perfection is a Fairytale – An Interview with Brian Fanzo Brian Fanzo at iSocialFanz Karly Nimmo at Radcasters Podcasting School Virtual Ticket Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Darren: Hey there friends, it’s Darren from ProBlogger here, welcome to Episode 157 where today I’ve got a great conversation to play for you. It’s a conversation that we recorded at the ProBlogger Event with our opening keynoter, Brian Fanzo from iSocialFanz. Brian is someone that I’ve admired for the last year or two years. I first came across him on Periscope where I just happened to stumble onto this channel where this guy wearing a baseball cap was talking at a really high level about using live video and some of the newer social platforms that were coming out at the time. Brian was a fast talker and he knew what he was talking about on a technical level but also had real heart. I think that’s what really attracted me to Brian and to subscribing to him and then following him around the internet wherever he went for a while afterwards. That’s the reason we wanted to get him out at the event today because he’s someone who not only knows a lot about live video and some of the newer forms of social media like Snapchat but he’s someone who lives it and he’s someone who uses it in a good way, in a heartfelt way. We wanted to get Brian into the podcast like a number of the other speakers that we had at the event this year, we decided that maybe we could get them in front of a couple of microphones at the event itself. I wasn’t the best person to visit the event because I was being a good host so we asked Karly Nimmo from Radcasters if she wouldn’t mind doing a few of these interviews. Over the next few weeks, you’ll hear a number of these. Today, we feature Brian who was the opening keynote, he’s probably the best one to do as an opening interview. They cover a lot of ground in the next 17 minutes. They start off talking a little bit about the event itself on what Brian talked about but then they get into some tips. Brian shares a number of these key messages of his presentations, he talks particularly about perfectionism which I found really useful. It was interesting during his opening keynote when he talked about perfectionism, people started taking notes and tweeting like crazy. He’s got some good stuff to say on that. They talk about fear, they talk about productivity, they talk about many different aspects of trying to be in lots of different places online. This is something that Brian does have some expertise on. I encourage you to sit back, grab a cup of your favorite beverage, and have a listen to Karly and Brian. At the end, I’m going to pull out a few of the themes that I really found beneficial in this particular talk. The last thing I’ll say is that if you want to hear Brian’s sessions from the event, we do have a virtual ticket. You can go to problogger.net/virtualticket. That’s where you can get full access to not only Brian’s three sessions for the event but also all of the other sessions. I think in total we had close to 70, you actually get last year’s event as well. Without further ado, I’m going to introduce Karly who’s going to get us going with Brian. Karly: Hey, Karly Nimmo here from radcasters.com, launch, leverage, love your podcast. This year, I made the switch from attendee to speaker at ProBlogger. I was super honored 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. 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. Brian: Brian Fanzo, better known by a Twitter handle as @iSocialFanz. I’m a change evangelist which really means I help brands embrace change and integrate technology, social media, I’m a speaker, proud dad. Karly: You’re doing a couple of sessions, right? Brian: Three sessions. The first one, I did the opening keynote on digital storytelling and relating with your audience. It comes a little bit around my think like a fan philosophy of how do you put yourself in those shoes. I did a panel yesterday afternoon on working with brands as an influencer. I had the luxury of being an influencer of about four years and now I build influencer strategies for brands. I get to come at it from an influencer perspective and that was a lot of fun, it was a great panel. I just got off stage just now talking really the practitioner side of using some of these new digital media live video, Snapchat, some of the new things that are coming out, Instagram and Twitter as well. Karly: If you can have the audience walk away with one key thing from all of your presentations, what would that be? Brian: I would say perfection is a fairytale. We no longer believe anybody is perfect. We also realize that we don’t trust people that claim to be perfect, but yeah we still try to convey a perfect message or we want to be perfect on live video or perfect on podcasting. I think perfection is no longer the goal. I think for a lot of people today, the rate of change is so fast. New technologies, new apps, the Facebook Live app was updating today and I was like, “I don’t even want to look at it because it’s going to get in my head.” I think the only way we can stay on top of this change is we have to remove perfect from the equation and start focusing on what’s the right time for me to deliver a message. It doesn’t have to be perfect, it just needs to get out there. Karly: Totally agree. What has been your highlight from ProBlogger so far? Brian: My first time in Australia, and I think for me, I talk about just on stage at the beginning of my last one, the ability for people to ask questions that were actionable about their own work. It was amazing. I have a lot of people that come up after the events and say things are great, what my takeaway was. So many people said, “Okay, I know that you said this, you talked about this piece, but I’m a blogger in this demographic. How would you implement it?” For me, I love that because to me that means they resonated but they’re also willing to learn. I think for a lot of events I go to, people are taking notes, people are nodding their head, but they’re not willing to take that next step. For me, that’s probably my favorite part. I told Darren I didn’t want to leave yesterday, I ended up having to move an interview that I had till this morning because I just love being able to bring that insight. For me, it’s been the audience. Karly: Cool. Have you had any big a-huh moments or key learnings while you’ve been here at ProBlogger? Brian: It’s interesting for me because I’m definitely not a blogger. Saying that I hate writing on stage, I warned Darren, I don’t know if this is going to be okay. For me, I think one of the takeaways was really Darren’s opening keynote on walking through some of the—I overlooked a lot of things and take things for granted and SEO. You don’t have to be perfect in those areas. As much as I talk about not having to be perfect in social media and not having to be perfect on video, I do attempt to be perfect and not implement things in the nuts and bolts, the behind the scenes of my website. I was messaging my team during and I was like we need a welcome mat on our site, why don’t we? She’s like, “I’ve given you six and none of them were approved.” I was like I’m trying to be perfect. For me, I think that was an eye opening one. The thank you water thing. I really love great people. Great people, great causes, that was a really cool cause. I think I’m going to do some stuff with them because I do a lot of presentations around when someone’s zigging you zag and you just do something that no one else is even thinking about. They have about eight examples of that that has worked out. Karly: Yeah, for sure. For me, I think the key thing was that idea of disruption. He didn’t use those words but that’s kind of what he’s doing. Brian: I think I loved it more that he didn’t use disruption. My keynote next week is about disruptive technologies. When I said that, I was like what does that mean? But you’re right, his ability to convey the ability to make change. One of my biggest presentations I give is We Are Greater Than Me. I always say you have to be a great me before you can even participate in a we. He proved that. It’s amazing, I love the idea that they’re starting small but they went across demographics. I got some time with him last night for about an hour and a half and I’m going to try to integrate some of that into my content. The thank you story, the message, kudos to Darren putting that at the end of the day. Everyone was tearing up before the end of the day. Me too, I was sitting on the side, this is tugging at the heartstrings. Karly: Oh my god, I cried ten times. Brian: Very cool. Karly: What a cool dude too. I think the thing I like most about him is he’s almost child-like. He’s just like let’s just try different things. I think that’s a key message for all of us. Brian: Yup. You hear the idea that you have to ask the question again. It’s a different point when you ask the question again and then you go implement it. I think he’s done that more than once and the amount of failures he shared also brought you on that journey. That’s part of what I was trying to share as well, I share a lot of things in my Snapchat account that I would’ve never dreamed I would share. For me, it’s reminding other ppl that want to follow my footstep, people that are mentoring, that it’s all not just what I’m doing on stage. I have low days as well. I think that message threw thank you as well, he was really good. Karly: What would be your number one tip for someone just starting out? Brian: Be yourself. I think it’s really easy to read books, really easy to see what other people are doing. I spent the first year and a half that I was on social media working really, really hard to do what other people were doing. I hated social media, I almost quit because it was so much work. My dad said, “Brian, your strongest suit through school and everything you’re doing was you’re not afraid to be yourself. You wear the clothing you want to.” I was like I’m not doing that online. Social media was hard, I would spend 15 minutes crafting one tweet and over thinking and not even sharing the true who I was. When you are able to be yourself. For me, it’s probably my favorite quote of all the things. My dad was watching this show and my dad is not a social media user but he just sent me a text message, I was live on the air and he said, “Son, love what you’re doing with social media, will never replace a handshake.” I read that out loud and I said dad, you’re right but for me it’s giving me the ability to have new handshakes and turn some of those into hugs and selfies. My world, my life has changed because of social media. But I would actually say it’s because I’m myself there and people are hiring me to come here, and that’s my favorite compliment. If someone comes to me and says, “Brian, you’re the same person online as you are offline,” I’m winning. If you start there, it’s a lot easier to keep going. I think the second tip on that beyond be yourself is found out what your story is. I think it’s easy to say tell your story, share your story, but if you don’t really know what your story is, take some time. There’s lots of books, lots of things. Understanding what your story is makes it a little easier to create content and do those things as well. Karly: Yeah, for sure. What do you wish you knew in the beginning? Brian: If I would’ve looked at relationships in social and digital space and prioritized them or understood that you’ll have relationships that will be beneficial in your business, you’ll have relationships that will be beneficial for your visibility, beneficial for your entertainment. They all don’t have to reach the same expectation and give you the same value. For me, I felt like I had a lot of pressure as I was rising that I kind of put everybody equal. “Hey, you’ve been a friend of mine for three years but yet we’ve never done anything in business together.” I think looking back, if I were to understood that a little better, I think I would’ve managed expectations which would allow me not to get so upset with certain things. I think the other thing I wish I really would’ve known early on was just that true value of community. Community takes so much to build and to invest in it. I think when you hear that and you see the follower counts and vanity things that are out there, it’s easy to get caught up in there. If you’re tweeting or you’re posting on Facebook and you’re getting no comments, I don’t care that you have 20,000 likes, I would rather someone has 1,000 likes in their Facebook page and they get 8 comments in every single post. To me, that’s the ultimate value. I definitely did not realize that early on. I was really focused on every network has to have a lot of followers. Now, I have a community that’s across all channels. I don’t even really look at one platform as where my community lives but it’s amazing when you invest in your community. Karly: Actually, one of the key takeaways I took away from your presentation, the keynote one, was that idea of consistency. I think sometimes we think consistency means sending an email out to our list three times a week, week in week out, when it’s actually something that is set by us, we set the expectations. We really just have to deliver to those expectations, not the ones that we think we should, the expectations that we set. Brian: It’s also defining your own success. I’m on every platform because part of my goal is to understand what’s the value there, present it to my clients, and they decide where they go. I think too many people say I want to be on every platform. Even if you’re there and you’re not engaging or providing the same quality, it’s even better to be on there and like you said share that expectation. Say I posted on the air, my favorite one is a very popular YouTube channel now but she put on, everyone thinks I only reply to comments on Fridays. Everyone flipped out, why would you do that? She’s like I don’t want people to think I’m ignoring them Monday through Thursday but I don’t have time. Now, she’s one of the most engaged comments on all of YouTube because she just told her audience, that’s the only time I have. For the audience, it was kind of like if that’s the best for you, we’re okay. It’s amazing how that is by just setting an expectation. I’m glad that resonated. Karly: That was cool. It’s like you’re not actually letting people down by doing that, you’re actually providing them with what they want but just at a time that’s convenient for you. It works for everyone. Brian: Even that element for me, I’ve been a byproduct of I want to please everybody and make everybody happy. I definitely realized that I make nobody happy when I’m making everybody happy, it still hurts. My team has to reply to emails that I turn down speaking gigs because I don’t like saying no to even an offer, even if they’re not even coming close to offering the money and things that I want, I want to be able to do that. For me, managing that expectation as well is okay that I don’t make everybody happy, it’s okay that someone got on Periscope and said, “You talk too fast, I can never watch your Periscope.” I agree, I do talk fast. If you can’t consume what I’m doing, I apologize, there’s plenty of other people talking. I think when you get comfortable, it works a lot easier. Karly: Totally. What do you think has contributed to your success so far? Brian: I will say celebrating others. For me, I didn’t have a blog, I didn’t have a lot of content that I was creating, but I had a lot to say. For me, I started curating a lot of content. I would take a great blog post and my LinkedIn post about it would be four paragraphs. It would be me sharing my thoughts on that blog post. What I started to realize was me celebrating all these people that shared my passion had a similar purpose, I got on their radar before I even knew I needed to. By celebrating others, people are going to look at you and say you’re willing to do that? It almost allows people to understand what your message is without even creating content. I did that early on, I spent a lot of time. I do that for a brand when I want to work with a brand. I’ll spend a year sharing their content, writing blogs about their content without ever making an ask. For me, I’m going to make them realize they care about me before they know they should. When I go and say, “Hey, I would love to work with you.” “You’ve been creating so much for us for a year, I want to work with you.” For me, that’s creating the non-cold call. Celebrating others has been my secret. For my first show that I had, I was like I want a show about social business. They’re like what do you know? I was like I don’t need to know anything. The guest that I have on the show are going to know everything. I had every big named social business person you can imagine come on that show, we got rapport, now I go back to them and say hey, that place you’re speaking at, any chance you can get me on stage? “Of course, Brian. That interview was so amazing.” For me, all I did was celebrate their story. For the most part especially early on, I didn’t do much of my own piece, I just allowed them to tell their story to my audience. Karly: Love it. What did you really suck at in the beginning? Brian: Prioritization, I still suck at it today. For me, prioritizing everything across the board from time management, prioritizing who to reply to, when to reply, that’s the thing I’ve struggled with for a long time. I look at prioritization and outsourcing or asking for help as something that especially as an entrepreneur, the term solo-preneur should be scratched from everything because it makes you feel like maybe I should do this alone and you realize doing it alone is just instant failure, it’s the worst road you could ever imagine. I deploy collaboration tools for enterprise companies. I went as an entrepreneur and I attempted to do everything myself. It’s taking me a while, it wasn’t even control. It was that prioritization where it’s my favorite chapter title of my book, Just Because I Can, Doesn’t Mean I Should. YouTube can pretty much teach us everything. I was a web design major but it was before WordPress. I still was managing my own site, doing all my WordPress but it was taking me three to four hours where I could’ve been even replying or creating other content. Bringing those people in. Prioritization and really outsourcing the stuff that even if I can do it, I probably shouldn’t be spending my time. Karly: There’s kind of two key things that get in the way that we see get in the way of bloggers or podcasters or startups from actually starting. That is time and fear. I kind of feel like they’re a bit the same because it’s like the time is really just the fear that you don’t have enough time. We all have enough time. Brian: Correct, and we all have the same amount of time. That’s always the reminder. Karly: Exactly. I would love to hear one tip for both. One tip for time, one tip for fear. Brian: For me for time, even that prioritization conversation that I’m doing, I do a lot now on what needs to be done in the nearest amount of time. Even though I’ve had emails in my email box for two weeks if they don’t need an answer for two more weeks, that doesn’t need to have a higher priority than something that needs a shorter amount. For me, time is being strategic. I like to say finding pockets of time to do the stuff you love. I reply to every single tweet that’s ever been tweeted out of my account. People are like how do you have the time for that? For me, it’s sitting at the doctor’s office, you’re sitting around there. For me, I open up Twitter and I go reply to all those people. Sometimes I’ll send a Twitter video because it takes me ten seconds. Kind of finding those pockets of time in your day. I was laughing, I was cooking macaroni and cheese and I replied to about 30 comments on my blog just while I was waiting for the water to boil. What do you normally do during that time? I think for people that busy is an excuse, I think busy is something that we use as a crutch. For me, time is finding that there’s pockets of doing it. When you find to do what you love, you’re going to make time. Karly: Yeah, you prioritize things. Brian: For sure. For me, failure doesn’t scare me, it still hurts every single time I fail. Something that my parents instilled in me was I know with my heart of hearts that I would never settle for failure. Failure is never a long term thing, I’ve had ups and downs. I look at fear, if you’re able to look at it and say I’m a huge fun of risk first reward. If you look at something and say what’s the worst possible scenario, what’s the best possible scenario? If you look at those and the worst possible scenario is really not worth it, Gary V even talks about this. If you’re investing in something and you don’t want to go down to one penny and that’s the worst case scenario, don’t do that. But if you’re okay to risk that because the reward is so drastic and it has a higher percent chance of success, go for it. For me, just because a lot of these things in the failure side, when I fail yes every failure is a learning. There’s lots of those cliches but I think for me, failure has been one of those pieces where as long as I continue to know that it will not be something that will stop me forever, it doesn’t care me at all. I fail on a regular basis because of that but I also feel like I learn fast, I will say things, I will make statements and I’m not afraid for that statement to be proven wrong because for me in that risk versus reward, the risk is I have to write a blog that says I’m sorry I was wrong. If you look at my blog, the tags on there is I’m sorry, there’s about 20 posts, I had one about Snapchat. For me, that’s the worst case, why not do it? Even though on live video, I do a lot of live video, I tell people just press the button. They’re like what if the lighting is not good? I’m like what if it’s not? You look at it and it’s not good, you hit delete video and it’s gone. You look at a lot of these things as never ending and usually they’re just short term. Karly: Yeah cool, thank you. Brian: My pleasure. Darren: I love that conversation, I was actually taking notes, I’ve got quite a few of them that I jotted down of things that I actually found really interesting and challenging myself. One of the things I particularly liked was that example that Brian gave of the YouTuber who set an expectation with her audience about what day she would respond to questions. I think that’s just brilliant and that’s something I think I might try and do myself, I’m not sure about that. It’s something I know a lot of bloggers, particularly once you get a lot of comments, some really struggle with that. To be able to batch them in that way, set that expectation, maybe that’s a good way forward something I really enjoyed. I always enjoy when people talk about fear and juggling time as well. I’ve got some good stuff out of that one as well. I think for me, ultimately the message I love about Brian is that it’s all about relationships and it’s all about being yourself and not being perfect. Really, that was a major theme in a lot of the talks that were given this year at ProBlogger Event. We had a number of people talk about get it done, it doesn’t have to be perfect, it just needs to be done. In fact when it’s not perfect, that shows a little bit of your own humanity and that really can create a relationship with your audience. It reminds me of an interview that I was doing in front of a thousand people online, it was a webinar actually. I’d arranged for my child who at the time was two and a half to be looked after by my mum. He was being looked after at the other end of the house. I said to her, “You really need to keep him quiet because I’ve got thousands of people on this webinar.” Halfway through the webinar, I remember hearing my little two and a half year old running down the hallway screaming, “I hate grandma!” And then he burst into the room and screamed that out again. It was one of those moments I was like, “Oh my goodness, this could’ve just destroyed my brand, this is a big deal for me to be interviewed in front of all those people, and I just quietly excused myself from the webinar and said, “I’ll be back in a moment.” I muted myself, dealt with what was going on, got everyone settled, went back to the webinar. It was actually the best thing that has ever happened to me on a webinar because the rest of the webinar, the person who was interviewing me interviewed me in a whole different way. He was a dad too and suddenly we had this connection. He could relate to that. I got on Twitter after that webinar and found literally hundreds of tweets to me from people saying, “Wow, he’s so like me, he’s so human, he’s so normal.” It really broke down that brand that maybe I tried to build up of ProBlogger being professional and proper. Actually, that moment broke it all down for me and illustrated to me that it’s so much more powerful to be yourself and to not have to be perfect all the time. I love that message from Brian, I hope you enjoyed that particular interview. Thanks so much Brian, thanks Karly as well. We’ve got more interviews with some of our keynoters including Daniel who was mentioned during that podcast when they were talking about the thank you keynote. We’ve got that interview coming up in a few week’s time as well. Do stay subscribed to this podcast over on iTunes and over on the show notes as well. Thanks for listening today and we’ll be back to a normal podcast in a couple of days time.     How did you go with today’s episode? 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11 Techniques for Writing Great Blog Post Titles Today, I’m going to talk about crafting the titles for your blog posts. This is such an important topic, and I can’t believe I haven’t done a podcast about it in the last 155 episodes. This is a topic I get asked about quite a bit. Get your title right and it will completely change the destiny of your blog post. This may sound a little bit grand and overstated, but it is true. People make a decision on whether they will read and take action on your post purely based on the title. It’s crucial that you spend time on your title and get it right. Note: this podcast can be listened to on iTunes here (look for episode PB156). Further Resources on Tips for Writing Great Blog Post Titles How to Write Catchy Headlines and Blog Titles Your Readers Can’t Resist 10 Sure-Fire Headline Formulas That Work 5 Easy Tricks to Help You Write Catchy Headlines Here Are The 101 Catchy Blog Title Formulas That Will Boost Traffic By 438% Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Hi there, it’s Darren from ProBlogger. Welcome to episode 156 of the ProBlogger podcast where today I want to talk about crafting the titles for your blog post. This is such an important topic and I can’t believe I haven’t done a podcast on it in 156 episodes so today is the day because I do get asked about it quite a bit. Get your title of a blog post right and it can completely change the destiny of that blog post. That might sound a little bit grand and overstated but it is completely true. People make a decision whether they will read your post, whether they will take action ultimately on your post many times purely based upon that title. People make decisions about whether they will share your post very often without even reading the post, simply by the title. It’s crucial that you spend some time on it and you get it right. Those few words at the beginning of your blog post that are a little bit bigger than the rest of your post, that are in bold, that are in heading tags at the top, that title of your blog post can be the difference between your post being read and spread like a virus through the internet like a wildfire or it languishing in your archives never to be read, ever. The difference is stock. A good title can really change the destiny of your post, as I said in my introduction. Your blog post title matters for a few reasons. It is going to be in search engine results. Apart from a small description underneath it, there’s very little for someone to go on as to whether they’ll click your link or the link below or above it. Your title will appear in RSS feeds. Again, depending on how much information you have in your RSS feed, they may only see the title and perhaps the opening lines of your post. It’s important to make a decision as to whether they will click through and read the full post based upon that title on that opening. Very often when other bloggers link to you in social media or on their own blogs, they simply copy and paste your title and then add the link. Again, people on social media reading other posts will make a decision as to whether they will click that link based upon the title. Of course, even on your blog, your title is really important as well. If someone clicks a certain category depending on how you have your blog designed, they very often will only see maybe featured image and the title of your post. They will click around on your site based upon the title. In each of these occasions, the title can be one of a couple of things that people will see and make a decision upon. It’s probably the most important factor in terms of getting people to read a post. If you write a boring or a complicated or a confusing title, or one that is so intriguing but doesn’t actually have any compelling reason to click on it, people will really never click that link. They will never read that post. So much has been written on this topic and I’m going to link in the show notes today some articles on the topic of writing titles. You will see as you click around, as you do some searches on how to write a great blog post title that there are many theories on this and there are many formulas that have been written. There are many, many swipe files that you can go and find. Whilst I think there’s a lot of good advice in some of these articles, it can be a bit confusing as well. One of the things I would say to you is you want to just avoid being a bit formulaic. Whilst I think swipe files can be a useful place to start, a lot of those formula that do get used get overused. I suspect a lot of our readers are getting a bit over them. You really do want to be a bit careful about using those formulas too much on your blog. Go read them, look at why they work but try and adapt them for your readers. Ultimately, what you’re trying to do with your post title is get people to read your opening line. I think it was David Ogilvy who wrote a great book called Ogilvy on Advertising. It’s a great copywriting book. He kind of uses that idea in that book where he talks about the headline of an ad is really there to get people to read the opening line of that ad. The opening line is there to get people to read the second line and to read through the ad. The same is true for a blog post. The purpose of your title is to get potential readers to read the first line of your content. There are many ways that you can do this. I’m not going to go through all of them. There are probably 50 different things that we could say about this but what I do want to share with you today is how I approach the task in crafting titles for my blog posts. This is just one approach but I hope it’s going to be helpful for you. I want to say 11 things in this podcast and I’m going to whip through them fairly quickly. Some of these contradict each other I’ll have to say. Generally when I’m sitting down to write a blog post title, I’m trying to pull in at least a couple of this things into the title but I would never do all 11 in every title. Let’s get through them. Number one, and this is the most common thing that I’m trying to do in pretty much every title that I craft. I try and communicate a benefit or make some kind of promise as to what the benefit will be. This is ultimately what I am doing in every post. I want someone looking at a title to know by looking at the title how they will benefit from clicking on that link. A lot of people try to intrigue people or make people curious, which is certainly something I’ll talk a little bit about later. Sometimes, trying to intrigue people makes them so curious that you don’t actually communicate what they’re going to get out of reading that article. Ultimately for me when I’m deciding whether I’m going to read something, I’m always asking the question subconsciously what’s in it for me. What am I going to get out of clicking this link? What am I going to get out of spending these couple of minutes reading this site? That might sound a little selfish but I think that’s how most people go through the internet. What’s the benefit? Am I going to be entertained? Am I going to be informed? Am I going to learn something new? Am I going to hear something that is newsworthy? Am I going to feel inspired? There’s a whole heap of benefits that we can have. What is that benefit? For me, a good title that’s worked quite well on Digital Photography School is How to Take Sharp Images. It’s a very short sharp excuse upon a title but it shows the benefit of clicking that link. How to Take Sharp Images, or Four Easy Photoshop Techniques to Make Your Pictures Pop. Making your pictures pop is the benefit there. It might a bit obscure but that title worked very well. There’s probably a few other reasons that title worked very well. It’s one of the earliest post that went almost viral on Digital Photography School. I think that word pop is a good one and we’ll talk about a little bit about some of those words that can work for us there but there’s a benefit right out their front. Okay, number one, communicate a benefit or make a promise of what the benefit will be, will be another way to talk about that. Number two and this is something I’m pretty much doing every post that I write as well is trying to think about keywords. This isn’t the sexiest technique out there but search engine optimization is the number one source of traffic to my blogs, both of my blogs. It accounts for almost half of my traffic which is pretty amazing. I said this at the ProBlogger event recently that I think social media has alluded many bloggers away from a very important source of traffic. There’s been so much emphasis on how to get traffic from Facebook, how to get traffic from Twitter, how to get traffic from Pinterest or Instagram. Whilst I certainly don’t think we should avoid working on those areas, the reality is that most people come to most big websites through search engine optimization or through search. We really didn’t need to think about keywords there. We need to think about what people are searching the internet for. I do believe that you can get traffic from social and search and perhaps some of these techniques will help more with social but don’t ignore search engine optimization. Every time I’m writing a post title, I’m asking myself the question, what is someone typing into Google to find this information? If I don’t at least ask that question and let the answer to that question inform how I write my post title, then I’m potentially ignoring half of the traffic that could come into that site. In fact, it’s probably more than half because social traffic for me brings in a lot of initial traffic. Every time we publish something, we see in the first few days a lot of social media traffic but ultimately for the next ten years of the life of that blog post, most of the traffic, 90% of it, 99% of it comes in from Google. Don’t ignore people who are coming to your site from search engine optimization. Ask yourself the question what will someone type into Google to find this article and use that in your title if you can in some way. The thing I guess you’re trying to do as you’re thinking about search traffic is also you’re trying to create a title that is going to stand out perhaps from some of the other post that come up in search results. You don’t want to just have the same title that everyone else is going to have. This is the challenge, really. You want to find something that’s going to rank but also that will stand out. Some of the other techniques I’m going to talk about in a moment will help you to stand out. Simply asking the question what are the people going to search for to find this article will hopefully help you to rank. One of the titles that did really well for us from search engines was simply How to Photograph Firework Displays. I came up with that title purely by saying what is someone on the fourth of July, in the afternoon on the fourth of July going to type into Google. I suspected most people type in those very words, How to Photograph Fireworks. Some of them might use the word display but I think How to Photograph Fireworks is just what people type in and we see a big spark of traffic as a result of that. That’s my number two technique. Communicate a benefit, number one. Use keywords, think about search. Number three is curiosity. A lot has been said about curiosity over the last few years. It I think has been overused and it has been used to manipulate readers as well. You can go overboard with making people curious by trying to tease them into your site. The term clickbait is one that people use to describe a piece of content these days in a negative way. Ultimately, we do want people to click and we do want to bait them to click but we don’t want to manipulate them to click. Because if you do, if you intrigue them to come and have a look at your post and then don’t satisfy that intrigue or don’t satisfy that curiosity with the actual post you’ve got, then you’re actually going to frustrate your readers as well. I think e do need to evoke a bit of curiosity with our post titles. We don’t want to give all the answers in the title for example but we also don’t want to tease people. We don’t want to manipulate people or else we might get the eyeball but it’s going to hurt your brand. Some titles that have worked well for us that I think evoke a little bit of curiosity have been titles like this one, Three Lenses Every Photographer Should Own. To me, that makes me want to know what does this author think the three lenses are. It communicates what the post is about, there’s some benefit there but there’s also a little bit of intrigue there as well. I know going to that article I’m going to learn about three lenses that travel photographers should own. I’m being told what the article is about but I’m not being manipulated and I’m not being told the answer there. You can use curiosity without manipulating people. The trouble with some of those curiosity formulas is that they can also get a bit long and you can lose the benefit as well. I’ve seen articles from sites like Upworthy and BuzzFeed over the years who have such long titles, they almost tell the story but they don’t give you the answer. They say things like you won’t believe what would happen at the end of this video. They can actually end up being quite long and it can also get a little bit overused. Another way to evoke a bit of curiosity with your readers is sometimes to take the negative slant on the post that you’ve written. One of the post titles that worked quite well on Digital Photography School is a formula that we’ve used few times now, Mistakes Beginner Travel Photographers Make or Mistakes Wedding Photographers Make. Using that ‘mistakes’ word is something that’s worked quite well for us and I think because it gets people a bit curious. People want to know what to avoid, they don’t want to make mistakes. Writing about mistakes and putting it in that negative slant can evoke a bit of curiosity. Another formula might be something like What the Pros Won’t Tell You About Photographing a Wedding or Five Uncomfortable Truths about this particular topic. You can see all of these titles have a bit of a negative slant to them and they’re really there to try and make people a bit curious about things that they might want to avoid. You want to be a little bit careful about getting too negative all the time. We certainly don’t use these types of formulas too often but they do work quite well when we do use them. I’ve read a study a while ago. I can’t actually find it now but the study said that words like stop or avoid or don’t, those sort of negative words have also been shown to work quite well. Another way of getting people curious about your post is to use surprising headlines. Surprise grabs people’s attentions, they make people look twice, they elicit curiosity. Doing something that’s different to all the other headlines that you would normally do might be one way to do that as well. Sometimes playful headlines can work well as well. An example from ProBlogger’s archives, I can’t remember exactly but it was something like What You Don’t Know About My Dad, the ProBlogger. It was written in a more playful tone. If you’re going to read the post in the voice of my child who, my eldest son who is I think two at the time. It’s a playful post but I think that that post did so well because the headline made people curious, obviously made people curious what you don’t know about Darren the ProBlogger but also by the fact that it was written in the voice of my son was surprising. A lot of people clicked on that for that reason. Barack Obama did really well with his email subject line, “Hey”, or “Wow” or “Join me for dinner.” He did those three and apparently they worked quite well. I think because it’s surprising, you’re getting an email from Barack Obama, for one that’s pretty surprising but him using that casual type of tone was I guess a little bit out of character, a little bit surprising, made people curious. The last thing to say about curiosity is that I have also read a few studies over the years that show that too much curiosity doesn’t work. People actually like certainty. They don’t want ambiguity so a title that tells them exactly what to expect sometimes can be the best option as well. This is where you almost ignore that curiosity playing. You say this is exactly what you’re going to get in this post. This is some of the examples that I’ve talked about before, How to Take Sharp Images for example. It doesn’t really elicit too much curiosity, it’s exactly what to expect from this post. That’s why I probably tend to move more towards that approach. Communicating the benefit using the SEO, the keywords. For me, that’s where I do probably 80%, 90% of the articles that I publish. Curiosity can work in some situations but I prefer just to tell my readers what they’re going to get and I think that has worked very well for us in the past. Technique number four is to use questions. This can be combined with some of the other things I’ve already talked about. I’m not going to go into great detail here. People type questions in search engines all the time. As I mentioned before, I’m asking what is someone going to type into Google. Very often, I will come up with a question that they’re typing into Google. There’s a couple of ways that you can use that question. Firstly, you could use the question itself as the blog post title. One of the questions that we wrote an article answering was What Do the Numbers on My Lens Mean? That’s what I know a lot of people are typing into Google. What do the numbers on my lens mean? We actually published I think a post with that exact title, with the question mark. A flip side of that would be to then answer the question. You could title that same post, What The Numbers On Your Lens Mean. Either way can work but it really did start with the question. Asking questions can be quite good. If you’ve got a post that you’re trying to get a discussion going on, maybe a debate, maybe a this versus that type article, writing about two different cameras or two different options for people. You could put that in the form of a question as well. That’s more likely to get comments as well. You just need to be careful when putting a question in the title that you’re going to answer that question because again you don’t want people coming and expecting an answer and then you don’t give it to them. Number five technique is to use subheadings. This can be a good way to do two things in one headline. This is what we do with a lot of our ebook titles. We want to convey in our ebook title some aspirational type stuff. We want to talk about the beauty, the gorgeousness of photos but we also want to communicate exactly what the ebook is about. Couple of our bestselling ebooks, one was titled Natural Light: Mastering a Photographer’s Most Powerful Tool. We kind of put it in the first part natural light. This is what this book is about, it’s about natural light, signal right at front but then we put the subheading Mastering a Photographer’s Most Powerful Tool and there’s something more aspirational about that. Mastering this powerful tool, and I think that worked quite well. Another example would be what we called Living Landscapes: A Guide to Stunning Landscape Photography. Living landscapes, if you see the cover the of this book you’ll see the landscapes we teach in this book of living. They are all of long exposure techniques. They make out landscape come alive. That’s what we’re trying to convey there. We’re trying to convey some aspirational elements there but we also wanted to say exactly what the book is about as well. A guide to stunning landscape photography. Sometimes a subheading can work, can enable you to put the benefit right upfront or make a promise right up front and then do something that is more advocative and aspirational as well. Technique number six. This is another favorite from me. It’s partly because I have blogs that are teaching blogs but many of the articles that I’ve published over the years used a how to element in the title. That’s because as I say, they are teaching sites and it taps into the intent of our readers. I think it also lends itself to the benefit that is included. How to Take Photos of Fireworks, How to Take a Great Portrait. There are other ways of signaling that it’s a how to type post. You don’t probably want to use how to in every single article you do because that can get a little bit boring to look at. Sometimes as I’m putting together a newsletter, I go to myself, “Oh my gosh, we’ve published seven articles this week with the word how to in it.” You want to avoid that. It can look a little bit tired. There are other words that signal that it’s a how to. Tips would be a word that you could use. Techniques. Steps. A guide. Even words like rules or secrets or hints can promise people to communicate something to them that is going to help them to learn something. I find that quite work quite well. And again with how to or words like tips or techniques. These are words people type into Google. Again, you can see there that I’m really trying to position these articles for search results. Technique number seven is we use a lot of numbers in our posts. Now, listicles, post with numbers get used a lot and as a result people tend to dislike them. Bloggers tend to dislike them. They get a bit tired of them. As I’ve said in previous podcast, they work and studies show again and again that titles with numbers in them tend to get clicked on more than titles without them. It’s not always the case but certainly it is a technique that works. There’s been a whole heap of theories about why this works. Numbers make a post perhaps feel bit more manageable. There’s a sense of certainty or expectation that they bring to readers. There’s ten points in this articles. I know what I’m going to get through this. That certainty is very specific and that’s something that certainly appeals to people. Numbers can sometimes signal that a post is going to be digestible or achievable. There’s three points in this. It’s not a long article, I can manage this. That can also signal a comprehensive post. We’ve done quite a few articles that have 21 points and for some reason 21 works well with our audience. Maybe because it’s signaling that this is a meaty post. There’s 21 things here. This is going to be something that’s going to take you on a bit of a journey. Maybe that works as well. I think numbers certainly set some expectations for your readers. Maybe they stand out a little bit as well. Numbers can work well. Probably don’t want to do them in every post. Sometimes we actually don’t, sometimes we have the opportunity to use a number but choose not to because we’ve had too many other number type post that week. Another technique that you might want to use, and this one won’t appeal to everyone or every article but it’s where you do comparison titles. One of the things that I’ve noticed people tend to use Google a lot for is to compare things. They’re doing this versus this type searches. Should I buy a Nikon D50 or a Canon 5D, they’re two different cameras. I’m trying to work out which one to buy. I’m trying to work out whether to use WordPress or Blogger. I’m trying to work out whether to go to [00:25:02] or Bali. There’s different options that people are trying to search through. When you write posts that compare things and when you put those in your titles, that can position you for traffic and grab attention of those who are making that particular choice. It also signals a benefit and a promise in that you’re going to help someone make a decision but you of course got to have the answer to that in your post. Comparison titles can work quite well but of course you need to write a comparison post as well so it’s going to depend upon the content. Three more techniques just to whip through and number nine is put your audience in the headline. There are a couple of ways that you can do this. First that you can use personal words. Using the word “you” can really personalize a headline very well. Instead of writing a post Ten Mistakes Photographers Make, you can write a post Are You Making these Photography Mistakes. Simply by adding the word “you” does personalize it. It takes it from being an abstract theoretical thing into something that is relevant for you. I’ve used this a lot in my titles. Just adding the word “you” or sometimes even adding the word “me” or “I” to show that I’m telling a story here and this is a person writing a story and not just a theoretical type of thing. Using those personal words can work quite well. The other way to do it is to describe who the post is for in the headline. What Beginner Photographers Need to Know About the Camera. That signals that this is an article for beginner photographers. Whilst it will mean advanced photographers won’t read the article or intermediate photographers are probably not likely to read the article,  it cuts down this potential size of the audience, it makes the eyes light up or the ears kind of light up of anyone who puts themselves in that category. It’s going to peak the interest of that type of person. We find that beginner articles work very well. Sometimes on flip side, we do articles that are, we promise are advanced. Advanced Composition Techniques. They do very well as well because anyone who feels they are advanced is going to be more interested in that article. Putting your audience into the title, you could say something about accountants if you’re writing for accountants or lawyers if you’re writing for lawyers or moms if you’re writing for moms. Actually putting that in the title can really make people pay attention to that. Number ten technique is to use power words. I didn’t really know what to call them but some words just work really well. It might be that they’re aspirational words like we use the word gorgeous quite a bit in our photography articles, How to Take Gorgeous Photos of Your Newborn Baby. That kind of makes it a bit aspirational. I guess it hits the emotion. You can use words like breathtaking or beautiful or sensational. You just want to be a bit careful about going overboard with the superlatives. It can actually turn people off if you include too many of those words or if you use the same words too many times in all of your articles. It can come off as a little bit hyped up or a little bit fake perhaps. Be a bit careful with it but they certainly do work. There are other words that perhaps we’re just wired to take notice of, the word free for example or secrets or mistakes or easy. These sort of words that make something sound a little bit more appealing and a little bit more intriguing. Again, be a bit careful of them. Some of those words will actually trigger spam filters and emails. Using the word free or discount can put you into the promotions tab in GMail. You want to be a bit careful about some of those words but they can actually get people’s attention. Then there are other words that set expectations of the style of article. For example, we find that when we brought in articles that are step by step guides, they work really well. A step by step guide to a particular topic signals to your reader that you’re going to really walk them through it. It sets the expectation of a certain style of article. We use those words semi regularly in our articles as well. Other words ignore that something’s going to be very comprehensive or have authority. We use the words essential guide to. The Essential Guide to Black and White Photography is the name of one of our ebooks. We don’t use that all the time because not everything that we write is a mega long comprehensive guide. But when we have written something that is meaty, that’s a good way to signal that to people, and it will make people come with that expectation. Over time, you begin see patterns in what words are working with your audience, just pay attention to those words that you see working repeatedly, that will give you some ideas. Again, you want to be a bit careful about overusing those words because it becomes a little bit monotonous and predictable but certainly pay attention to those words that are working quite well. The last thing I want to say is a technique of making a big claim about something. This I guess can be the benefit of the article but making a big promise or a big claim can work quite well. I’ve already shared a couple of examples of this but one that’s worked quite well for us was post 21 Techniques All New Camera Owners Should Know. It worked I think because of all new camera owners. This is the stuff that every new camera owner needs to know. This makes it quite a bold statement there. If you don’t know these, you’re in trouble. Some of those big claims can work as well. That title also elicits a bit of curiosity. Do I know those 21 things? There are the 11 things that I tend to draw on as I’m crafting a headline. One, communicating a benefit. Two, using keywords. Three, using curiosity from time to time. Four, basing titles upon questions. Five, using subheadings, breaking the headline into two parts. Number six, using how to. Number seven, using numbers in the title. Number eight, using comparisons in the title, this versus that. Number nine, putting the audience into the headline in some way. Number ten, using power words and number eleven, making big claims. A few last things that I do try and keep in mind. One, I try and keep them short for search engine optimization but also in social media particularly on Twitter where you’ve only got 140 characters and then I’ve got to put the link and a photo sometimes in as well. You want to try and keep your titles short, readable and clear. Know your audience. What worked really well with them. Don’t overdo the formulas. Sometimes they can be good but sometimes they can get overused so you want to be aware what you’re doing over and over again but also what other people in your niche are over doing as well. Watch what works and replicate it but try and find a fresh spin on it from time to time as well. Another quick thing I’ll say is that sometimes it’s good to have a headline for search engines and then to change it for social media. I think that’s totally fine. It is a little bit of a manual process. When I’m sharing something onto our Facebook page, sometimes I’ll look at the headline that we’ve chosen for the article and I thought that’s great for search. It’s got the right keywords. It’s the type of thing that someone will be searching for but maybe I could do something a little bit different for Facebook. Facebook allows you to click on the headline and to change it before you share it. I might use something that’s a bit more curiosity type of thing or maybe it’s a bit more aspirational there on Facebook. Because I’m sharing posts on Facebook more than once, I posted on Facebook the day that we publish the post, and then usually about a month later I’m publishing it again. I can try different techniques there and so that’s totally fine as well. It’s a good place to experiment with some different types of headlines as well. The last thing I’ll say is take your time with this. I think the best writers usually come up with 5, 10, 20 different options for a title. Sometimes they bounce them off other people and get other people involved. I think it’s well worth putting that extra effort into crafting your blog post title. Like I said at the start, it can be the difference between someone actually reading the post, taking action on it, taking the course of action that you have at the end of your post to buy your products or to change their life in some way. You really do want to get people reading that first line by getting that title right. I would love to hear your tips for crafting titles for your blog post. Do you use some of the things that I’ve gone through today? What is your go to formula? If you like, has there been a certain formula that’s worked? Are there keywords, certain power words that seem to work with your audience? Do you tend to go more for a search engine optimized title or something that’s more about curiosity? I’d love to hear what’s worked for you. Share the knowledge a little with the rest of our community and hopefully we can all learn as a result. Thanks for listening today. 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.

The 5 Top Tips from Full Time Bloggers Today, I want to give you some advice. It’s not advice from me. It’s advice from about 50 full-time bloggers that I surveyed about two years ago.  I was testing a survey software, and I sent the survey to some bloggers that I knew. I asked all of them one simple question What is the number one tip you would give a new blogger who is just starting out and dreaming of becoming a full-time blogger? In Today’s Episode 5 Tips from Full Time Bloggers Listen to this epsiode in the player above or here on iTunes (look for episode 155). Just be you. Speak in your own voice. Consistency Be persistent Give it a go Do something meaningful. Further Resources 5 Tips from Full Time Bloggers ProBlogger Virtual Ticket   Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Hi there, it’s Darren from ProBlogger here. Welcome to Episode 155 of the ProBlogger Podcast. Almost forgot what we’re up to there. Today, I want to give you some advice. It’s not advice from me, it’s advice from around 50 full time bloggers that I surveyed about two years ago. It’s about two years ago I was testing out a new piece of software for surveys. Whilst I haven’t gone on to use this software anymore, I did do one survey using it and it was a survey that I did send out to full time bloggers that I knew. I asked them a simple question, one question. Quite a few of them answered. The question was this, “What’s the top piece of advice, what’s the number one tip you would give a new blogger just starting out who had dreamed of becoming a full time blogger?” I thought when I sent this out that I would get all kinds of strategic advice, that I would get really practical, actionable advice. You know what came in? It really surprised me. I sent it out to 50 bloggers and almost all of them came back to me with five responses, five common answers. That’s what I want to share with you today, these five things that I think are great things for us to all hear as bloggers, whether we’re just starting out or whether we’re well on the road to becoming full time or whether we’re even full time. These are five great reminders that I hope will help to keep you on course towards reaching your dreams for your blog, whatever that might be. The first theme that I came up with as I looked at this 50 was to be you, just be you. In fact, this is what one person wrote. “Just be you. Speak in your own voice, and don’t try to be anyone else. Swim in your own lane.” Another person simply said, “Be yourself.” A third person said, “Keep it real.” A fourth person said, “Find your authentic voice.” Someone else said, “My best tip is to write about what you love and have experience in. Honesty comes out in your writing.” Another person said, “Only write about what you’re passionate about, your own unique experiences.” An eighth person said, “Don’t copy, find your own voice and use that. Remember, cover bands don’t change the world.” Two more on this theme, “If you are passionate about something, let that shine through in every aspect of your blog. Don’t be so caught up in watching stats, gaining followers, and forget why you began blogging in the first place. Be authentic and make those connections organically because those are the people who will stick with you over your journey as you go through your ups and downs, and it will be a rollercoaster,” they said. One more person said, “Write about something that you are genuinely interested in. In a crowded space, the best way to stand out is to be you. There’s no one like you. Your story, your opinion, your voice, your humor, they’re all unique. Tap into that.” I love that advice, be you. It gets said a lot and sometimes it takes us a little while to work out who we are. I do think, as I look at successful bloggers, that that last person was completely right. The way to stand out is very often to find out who you are and to let that come out in your voice. It takes some time but I think it’s really important to tap into that. That was the most common theme of the 50 responses that I had. A second one that came up time and time again, this is actually the reason that I am doing this podcast because I noticed this theme first. The theme was consistency. People used the word consistency 12 times out of the 50. Someone wrote, “People like consistency.” Another person said, “Be consistent and be yourself.” There’s the other theme as well. Someone else said, “Be regular with your writing. It really helps to keep the momentum going for both you as the writer and for your readers.” “Blogging is never about one post, it’s your body of work that you’ll be known for,” said someone else. “Keep going, keep talking, keep taking consistent action no matter how small. You’ll be amazed in a year when you look back at how far you’ve come.” Someone else said, “Be consistent with the content you deliver. Be genuine in what you write about and how you deliver your message. If you do those things, then the money and business side naturally starts to flow.” “Consistency, keep going and stay true to your voice and the info you want to provide.” Consistency came up time and time again. This is one of the messages that I’ve preached many times at ProBlogger. It is the accumulation of what you do, it’s the accumulation of the tweets, the blog posts, the videos, all of the messages that you have. That’s what makes a blog epic. It’s not an one blog post. Sometimes, you do have a break out post but really those posts are just part of the jigsaw puzzle of what you’re building. Consistency is so important. The third theme is kind of similar, it’s persistency, not consistency. I think they really do go together. Here’s what a few people said. Firstly, “It takes time to build a good blog.” That was the number one tip of one person. “Beware, it’s going to be a lot of work,” says another. “Slow and steady wins the race,” says the third. “Keep going, it can take time to grow.” “Keep going and keep learning,” says another person. This keep going thing comes up again and again. “Keep going. If you feel like quitting, reconnect with your why and keep going.” The last person says, “Persist for you, not the numbers.” This is a big theme in what I do teach people who want to make money from blogging. It’s going to take time, it’s going to take persistence, and it’s going to take that consistency, that was the other thing. Two more themes that came up numerous times, not quite so many times but these did come up enough that I noticed the recurring-ness of them. The fourth one is give it a go. Those were four words that came up many times in the responses. One person simply wrote, “Jump in and give it a go.” A second person said, “My biggest tip is to just start. So many people want to start a blog. They worry about how they won’t be good enough or they compare themselves to established bloggers. If you don’t start, you can never build it. Don’t ever worry because it will never be perfect no matter when you start so just start now.” The third person said, “If you haven’t started, start, stick at it.” This consistency came up in that last one again but the theme of starting out is really important. Ultimately, this is the thing, the only thing that I can find that all successful bloggers have in common. The only thing that every single one of them have done is start, ultimately. All of the full time bloggers that I’ve ever met, all of the successful bloggers I’ve ever met have found their own path, they found their own distinct way forward. There’s certainly some similarities but every single one of them has started. They all started with nothing, they all started when they didn’t have a post on their blog. They all started when they didn’t have a reader, the only person who knew about their blog was them. They all started at the same point. This is one of the things that I talked about at the ProBlogger event, there were many times as I look back over the last 14 years where I started something and I had nothing but I started. The first time I started my email list, I had no one subscribed to it. Then, I subscribed myself, then I subscribed my dad, then I subscribed my wife. I forced subscribers. When I first hit that first email, I only had 17 subscribers. I asked myself is this really worth it? Is it really worth it to send an email, to spend an hour sending an email to 17 people? The reality was that it probably wasn’t worth it in that first 17 because no one clicked any of the links in that first email. The next week when I sent it to 30 people, a couple of people did. The next week, I sent it to 45 people and a few more did. Years later, now I have 700,000 people subscribed to that email list which sounds mind boggling, it amazes me that that many people are subscribed. Now every week, we’re able to drive lots of traffic. You know what? It all started by me starting this thing and then subscribing my dad and my wife to it. I started it. Starting is just so important, whether it’s starting your blog or starting that email list or starting something else that you know you need to do. The fifth theme that I want to just briefly touch about, this came up in a few people was to do something meaningful. Here’s what three people said. “Reach the heart of your readers because the more hearts you touch, the more the numbers will start to follow.” The second person said, “Do something meaningful to you and your readers. If it means something to you, you’ll be able to get through the tough times. If you do something meaningful to others, you’ll do something that people will want to connect with and share.” One last person said, “Know your why. Know why you’re blogging, write it down, wave it in the air to anyone who tries to tell you that you should be doing something else. You might blog to make money, to draw up business, to help others, to connect with others, to simply be creative. Figuring out your motivation for blogging will help to prevent you from becoming overwhelmed by all the things you could or should be doing with your blog.” I love that last one, know your why. I think for me knowing your why really will shake the direction you go and it will help you to make wise choices about what to do. There you go, there’s five pieces of advice from full time bloggers that I’ve forgotten I even had sitting there on my hard drive and in this piece of software. The five pieces of advice, again, were consistency, be consistent, be you, be persistent, give it a go, and do something meaningful. I’d love to know what you think. Are you a full time blogger? What advice would you give beginner bloggers? Are you a part time blogger? What advice would you give? Are you a new blogger who hasn’t got any readers yet? What advice would you give your readers? I’d love to hear your advice on today’s show notes. Looking for something else to listen to? I might just have something for you that will give you almost 70 hours of listening, great advice from full time bloggers that gets a little more strategic than what you have just heard. I think the five things that those full time bloggers gave as advice were really good but sometimes we need something a bit more practical and actionable. ProBlogger Event, Virtual Ticket is now available for you to purchase. We’ve uploaded 70 sessions worth of advice from full time bloggers from this year’s event and last year’s event. You’re going to hear some great advice from people like Jedah Sellner from Simple Green Smoothies who talked about Instagram but also gave some great entrepreneurial advice. You’ll also hear from Dan Norris from WP Curve who gave a fantastic keynote on how to think like an entrepreneur. We’ve got a great keynote from Emily Watnick who talked about how to build a blog when you have multiple passions and interests, how can you combine them together? That’s a very common question I get asked a lot, “How do I blog if I haven’t got a niche?” We’ve also got sessions on YouTube, very strategic sessions. We’ve got sessions on Instagram, we’ve got sessions on Facebook Advertising, Facebook organic, sessions on podcasting, copywriting, all types of sessions. If you want to head over to problogger.com/virtualticket, you’ll be able to see a full rundown of what is included in that particular ticket and you’ll also get access to a little private Facebook group that we have running for just those who attended the live event and virtual ticket holders. Just a few hundred people in there, we’ll be able to give you a little bit more personal attention, you’ll be able to participate in some of the things that we’ve got going on in that group. Once again, head over to problogger.com/virtualticket to pick up yours today. 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.

Grow Your Blogging Income Today, I am going to continue on from episode 153 where I outlined a timeline of how I added different income streams over time.  I felt like there was a little more I could say about diversifying your income in that way and growing your income. I think there are some principles that you can pull out of the story. I hope that you find these observations and words of encouragement helpful. Further Resources on How to Grow Your Blogging Income How I Diversified My Blogging Income and Became a Full Time Blogger How to Make Money Blogging Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Hey there, it’s Darren from ProBlogger. Welcome to Episode 154 of the ProBlogger Podcast where today I want to continue on from the last episode, 153, where I outlined the timeline of how I added different income streams over time. I felt like there was a little bit more I could say about diversifying your income in that way and growing your income because I think whilst hearing a story, I think there are some principles that we can pull out of this story. I hope that you find these observations and words of encouragement helpful for you. Let me get into a few thoughts on that story I have told you. Let’s start off by talking about three ways that you can grow your blogging income. You will have heard in that story three things that I’ve done over time to grow my income. The first one, probably the most obvious one in that particular story, was that I diversified my income streams. I did this right from the start, I had AdSense and Amazon Affiliate Program. One earned me a dollar a day, one earned me a few cents a day. It wasn’t really that spectacular a story, I have to admit. Along the way, you heard me tell how I added a second ad network. That was a really important moment for me where I added Chitika on top of my AdSense earnings. That almost doubled my income over night. That was a really important moment, it was an exciting day. The same thing happened when I moved from just having advertising and affiliate promotions as the bulk of my income and then started to create ebooks. Within a couple of months, I again doubled my income streams. That was a little bit more spectacular than just going from a few cents a day to a dollar a day. Diversifying your income streams is something that I think a lot of bloggers who have been blogging for a while, most of them are really focusing in on one or two income streams. Maybe there is a way that you can exponentially grow your income in a relatively short time because you’ve done a lot of that hard work already of building your audience up. If you’ve got an audience, if you’ve got engagement, that is perhaps a bit of a shortcut. It’s still going to take you a lot of work but it’s definitely something to consider. A couple other things that you can do to grow your income in addition to diversifying your income streams. Firstly, and these aren’t rocket science but these are things that you need to be working on all the time. Grow your traffic, you heard me talk about that first year where I didn’t have any income streams, that was a year where I put time into growing my archives of content, building traffic, and deepening engagement with my readers. Growing traffic is something that’s really important. I realized very early on, literally within a day or two, that I could double my AdSense income by doubling my traffic. You can’t always double your traffic and that doesn’t always translate over because different types of traffic convert for different types of income streams at different rates. The principle applies through all the income streams that I outlined in the last podcast, all of them will grow up if you are able to increase the amount of traffic that you have and also the quality of traffic that you have as well. By quality, I’m talking there about getting the right type of readers to your blog and getting engaged readers to your blog. Work on growing traffic to your blog. This is something that generally for most bloggers takes time, it’s usually a gradual thing but it’s something you should be always focusing your attention on. That’s why I do so many podcasts on the topic of growing traffic to your blog. Traffic alone is not the only way to increase your income, the other thing that I found really does help a lot is increasing the conversions. The conversions mean different things for the different income streams but converting that traffic into the income, there are things that you can do to optimize that along the way. It’s different for the different income streams. I thought it might be worthwhile to just briefly touch on each of the different income streams that I’ve mentioned or some of them at least. Advertising networks, that was my first one. Google AdSense, Chitika. I realized very early on that more ads would lead to an increased amount of income. You don’t want to go overboard with that, I think AdSense has a limit, three or four ads per page. Different ad networks have different limits on how many ads you can have. If you have too many ads on a page, Google also penalizes you from a search engine optimization point of view as well. Don’t have too many ads, you don’t want to overwhelm your readers with ads. But certainly rather than just having one ad, try a second ad. You will increase your income that way. Also, different positions of ads work differently. AdSense for example, if you have your ads above the fold in the top half of your site, if you try putting an ad that floats in your sidebar and follows your reader down the page so they’re always seeing it, that can have an impact as well. Different positions of ads definitely will convert at different rates. Different sized ads, some ads, there are more advertisers targeting those sites. 300×250 pixel sized ad is one of the most popular ones. We find our 728×90, the ones across the top of our blogs, the header type blogs, they work quite well for us as well. Experiment with different sizes of ads. There’s all kinds of different technologies, even within AdSense. They now have traditional banner ads but they also have ads for mobile, responsive ads. Whatever ad network you’re using, if you’re using one, optimize it, learn about the different options that they have. Keep abreast of the new things that are happening and the new techniques that can be used because this is one way that you can significantly increase your income over time. Again, you have to have the traffic there for AdSense to work. If you’ve got the traffic, if you’ve got high volumes of traffic, you can actually see quite remarkable leaps in income from optimizing the way you do your advertising. Affiliate marketing, again there’s ways that you can optimize your affiliate marketing. One of the most simple ways is to think about where you’re promoting your affiliate links. In the early days of my own blogging, I had my affiliate links in the sidebar and they converted every now and then. But certainly when I began to write reviews of books and I put the affiliate links inside my content, I saw significant increases in the commissions that I was earning. Later on when I developed an email list, sending out emails that were promoting affiliate products, particularly ebooks and courses where it was a high commission, that again is a way that you can optimize your earnings there. Different calls to action, you over time learn how your readers work and what type of products work for them as well. Always be thinking about how can I increase the conversions. If you’re selling products, there’s lots of different ways that you can optimize that whole process. Changing and testing out landing pages or sales pages. We recently ran a test to different versions of the same sales page for one of our products. We had a Lightroom course that we did, a course that we’re selling on Digital Photography School. We ran one version of the sales page which we sent 50% of our traffic to, and then we ran alongside it the other half of our traffic from our email to a different sales page. They both had exactly the same copy on it but they were designed different; one was a lot cleaner, one had different positioning of the buttons, and some different calls to action on it. It turns out that there was a 30.4% difference between those two sales pages. This is another way that you can be optimizing the conversions of your site there. The same can be said for when you’re selling services on your site as well. There’s three different ways that you can increase your income, these are three different areas that I would be encouraging you to think about as you look to grow your income on your blog. Firstly, traffic, it should always be your goal to be increasing traffic to your blog. Don’t become obsessed with it. You don’t need millions of readers, but grow your traffic and grow the quality of your traffic, find the right reader and work on getting them engaged and getting them hooked into your site. Work on the conversions, work on optimizing your income streams or whatever they may be, and then also think about diversifying your income. There’s three things that come out of that story that I told you a couple episodes ago. A couple other things that I want to mention, firstly you will have heard me in that episode talk about that first year where I had no income streams and the reason I had no income streams was that I didn’t know you could have an income stream and that’s certainly the story of some bloggers. If you do know there’s some income streams, I really want to encourage you to resist the temptation to monetize too early or to put too much time into monetizing early. Really work a lot in those first few years of your blog on the other things that I talked about; learning how to blog better, creating great content, building traffic, and building community. When I started Digital Photography School back in 2006 it was, I spent the first two years really not monetizing that site very much. Yep, I had some AdSense ads on there, yep I occasionally linked to Amazon, but I did very little active monetization of that site. I kind of had those things there but I was more focused on the other things I just mentioned, creating great content, driving traffic, because I knew that if I really spent that time investing into those foundational things that I’d be so much more effective at growing an income later. Another thing that I want to say out of that story I shared was that most of the income streams I talked about there started as really small, uncertain experiments. All of them started small in some way or another. Yes, some of them had more spectacular starts like the first ebook I had which I mentioned sold $70,000, but that was still a very small nervous experient. It was repurposed content, it was me not quite knowing how it was going to go, so only spending a little bit on design. It was me signing up for shopping cart that cost $5 a month, E-Junkie. I could’ve put a lot more time, a lot more energy, a lot more effort into that income stream but I am a bit risk averse and decided to bootstrap it and to see what would happen. I’m so glad I did because I could’ve spent years developing that product and then find it didn’t work. I’d rather spend a few months developing that product, get it out there, learn a lot and then see what happens. Small experiments are totally okay. You’re much more likely to take action on a small step than a big perfect product which will never actually happen, you can’t develop a perfect product, it’s just impossible. Small experiments. In each case, I really didn’t know what I was doing. I want to be clear on that. A lot of times, you hear full time bloggers talking as if they know all the answers. I had no idea, those first ebooks I didn’t know whether they would work, I didn’t know whether anyone would buy them, I didn’t even know whether my readers would get angry, some of them buying something that was already on the site. That’s why I undersold it and I over-explained it in my first product. I had no idea whether they would work, I didn’t really understand the whole process but I did it anyway. That’s the important thing, taking action on these things. Another thing I really want to point out from the story is that everything I did, almost one thing led to another. It’s very easy to say monetize your blog with courses but I only did courses because I did ebooks. I only did ebooks because I did affiliate marketing of other people’s ebooks. I only did affiliate marketing of other people’s ebooks because I started doing affiliate marketing on Amazon. You can kind of see, yes I ended up here, but I only ended up doing what I’m doing today because I started with some of these other things. Treat this as an evolutionary process. The same could be said for selling ads directly to advertisers. I’ve done some big campaigns with advertisers over the years but they only came about because I rang a camera store a few years ago and organized a $20 on my site. I only did that because I stuck some AdSense ads on my site. I hope you can see here that there’s a progression. You don’t have to just jump straight to the end result. Learn by doing little things. As well as those little things bringing you income, you’re going to learn a lot. It’s the learning that’s as much the gold of all this as the actual income that you bring in as well. The last thing I want to touch on is I really want to talk to those of you who are wondering which income stream to try. This may be those of you who are just starting out and you want to add your first income stream, or maybe it’s those of you who have had some income streams on your site but hasn’t really worked and you want to find one that’s better suited for your blog. One of the things I would encourage you to do if that’s you and you’re trying to work out which income stream, I want you to really try and put yourself in the shoes of your readers and try and get in touch with their intent and ask yourself the question why are your readers on your site? Why are they there? Try and get in touch with their intent, what are they doing there? Are they there looking for information, are they there looking to learn something, are they there because they want community? Are they there because they’re researching something and are in the process of buying something? Are they there because they want to be entertained? The reason I really think it’s important to dig into the intent of your reader is that different reader intents lend themselves to different types of monetization. I learned this the hard way. My first digital photography blog, which doesn’t exist today, was a digital camera review blog. It was one where I reviewed cameras, I talked about new cameras that were being released, and I aggregated reviews that other people were writing around the web. You could come and find a particular model and then go and easily be able to find out what other people are saying about it. The reader intent of that first blog was that my readers were on my site to research a purchase of a digital camera. They were there trying to work out whether they should buy the Canon or the Sony. They were there trying to work out whether they should buy the A70 or the A90 camera. They were there basically in a research mode. What worked really well on that site was affiliate marketing where I’d link to camera stores or Amazon where they could then buy the product. They’re researching it, we give them a recommendation one way or the other, we tell them which camera is right for what type of person, and then they are like okay, I’m going to buy that camera. There’s a link to where I can buy it. A high percentage of them bought those cameras. Affiliate marketing worked really well. Advertising also worked well, both ad networks but also working directly with advertisers because advertisers who sold digital cameras wanted to have their brands and wanted to have their stores in front of our readers at the time they’re buying a product. The reader intent really worked well for affiliate and for advertising, particularly around gear and cameras. What didn’t work well on that first photography blog was us promoting products like ebooks on how to use cameras. Even though they were still about photography, people were not there looking for that type of information. They were there making a decision about buying a product. Ebooks did not work at all on that particular blog. I tried quite a few them out, let me tell you. Later on, I started Digital Photography School. Digital Photography School how to use cameras and the intent of our readers on Digital Photography School to this day is they want to learn how to use cameras. Any kind of information product, our own or an affiliate’s, works well. So does software or some sort of prop that’s going to help them improve the end result of their photos, that’s what our readers are there looking for. Some of them have a secondary intent as well, some of them are actually looking to improve their photos by upgrading their camera gear as well. Affiliate links and advertisers looking to sell gear kind of work on our side with some of our readers. Your blog might have major intent, they’re there looking to learn but then they might have a secondary kind of intent as well. Other income streams may work as secondary income streams as well. Get in touch with the intent of your readers and that may give you a hint as to what income stream might be useful to your readers. The last thing I’ll say particularly if you’re in the early days and you’re trying to work out what income stream might work for you, one of the quickest things you can do is to look at other blogs in your niche and particularly other blogs that have similar reader intents to you. Look around, see what other blogs are using, what ad networks are they using. You can often tell if an ad is from an ad network, there’s often a tiny little icon in the corner of the banner ad which will tell you which ad network it is. Check out what ad networks they’re using, what sponsors are they directly working with. These might be people that you can directly reach out to as well. What affiliate products are they promoting, what products of their own do they have? You could become an affiliate for those products or you could develop something similar as well. Look at what they’re doing, what services are they offering as well would be another one. Check out what others in your niche are doing, it’s just an easy way to work out what income streams might be worth investigating as well. I hope you found that useful. I look forward to chatting with you in the next couple of days, I hope you’re doing well. Let me know in the comments on the show notes if you’ve got any questions. If you wouldn’t mind popping over to iTunes and leaving a review, that would be greatly appreciated as well. Chat with you soon, bye! 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.

My Blogging Income Streams Today, I’m going to talk about my income streams. In episode 150 I talked about how I make money blogging and broke it down by percentages. Today I want to follow that episode up with the context. People may think that my report seems big and unattainable. People also have a tendency to compare themselves which isn’t a fair comparison because it is just a snapshot at the end of a journey. In today’s episode, I am going to walk you through the last 13 years of my life, and through the timeline of how I have added income streams over that time. Update: I’ve continued this mini series of posts with one more in episode 154 in which I talk more about how to grow your blogging income further. In Today’s Episode How I Diversified My Blogging Income and Became a Full Time Blogger Note: you can listen to this episode here on iTunes (look for episode PB153). November 2002 – I get an email from a friend that says, check out this blog. I liked what I saw, and I began blogging. I had no idea that you could make money from blogging. I just did it because I enjoyed it. I spent a whole year learning about blogging. I wrote a lot of content and got better as a writer. I built traffic to my site. I built engagement with my readership. Years 2 and 3 – I started experimenting with monetizing. I built a second blog where I reviewed digital cameras. The reason I began experimenting with monetizing was that my blogs were costing me money and taking up a lot of time. Google AdSense – Text based ads that I started putting on my blog. I was earning a few cents a day. Amazon Associates Program – Link to products on Amazon and I earned a few cents a week. I was mostly linking to books. I learned that if I was going to make more than a few cents a day, I needed to grow my traffic. Optimizing income streams. Optimized AdSense – more ads, change size, change position and colors. Better placements and calls to action with Amazon affiliate ads. With those 2 income streams, my income became close to full time. Now, I’m going to talk about ProBlogger and Digital Photography School Years 4 and 5 – I added a few more income streams. Direct ad sales – Advertisers were targeted my site. I knew Google took a cut, so I reached out directly to advertisers. $20 a month on first one. Other affiliate programs Promoted eBooks and products for other blogs Added other advertising networks. Yahoo and Chitika At first, I thought it would decease my AdSense, but it held study. Light bulb moment – my income will increase with adding income streams ProBlogger Book Published by Wiley ProBlogger – 6 Figure Blogging Course Years 6 and 7 – I added 3 more income streams Paid speaking Experiment with some consulting – Blog Coaching – didn’t really suit my personality Adding in the ProBlogger Job Board – small income at first, it has grown over the years and it gets 4 – 7 new jobs a day Years 7 through 11 – I really focused on building products. First one was an eBook – For Digital Photography School – It took me 4 months and I had to learn about shopping carts and everything else involved. It sold $70,000 in the first 11 days. This was a culmination of years of building engagement and putting it all together. Launched an eBook on ProBlogger A brand new income stream in a few months. Having my own products opened my eyes to a whole new world. We have since launched 35 eBooks. A membership site on ProBlogger – a closed community with webinars etc. Not a lot of engagement, and I didn’t feel like I was contributing a lot of value. May tweak this idea in the future. 2007 – First ProBlogger Event – These have a lot of expenses, but they are an income streams. Printables on Digital Photography School Years 12 and 13 – The last two years. Extending the idea of eBooks and creating products Courses on photography Lightroom Presets Most of these income streams started out as little experiments. Some of them have taken off and grown and others have not. I hope this has been helpful for you and gives you some ideas for your monetization strategy. Further Resources on How I Diversified My Blogging Income and Became a Full Time Blogger Profit Streams Revealed: How I Make Money Blogging Yahoo Ads Chitika ProBlogger Book ProBlogger Job Board Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Hey there, it’s Darren from ProBlogger and welcome to Episode 153 of the ProBlogger Podcast where today I want to talk a little bit more about my income streams. Back in Episode 150, I outlined in some kind of an income report how I make my money blogging. I talked about the first half of 2016 and where the income came from. I broke it down not in terms of total numbers of how much money I earned but in terms of percentages. I talked about how 46% of my income or my profit from that particular time came from affiliate commissions, 31% came from product sales, ebooks, presents, and those types of things. 8% came from AdSense, 6% from sponsorship, 5% from a job board, and 3% from our event, and then another 1% from other miscellaneous things. You can listen in a lot more detail to that income report. I want to follow that particular episode up because one of the things that I’m really aware of as you get that snapshot of my income streams today. One of the things you don’t get when you get that snapshot is the context for it and how it came to be. I think that’s personally more useful to hear about. Hopefully, it will help those of you who feel a bit overwhelmed by that. Every time I do get that graph out and that chart out that I shared back in Episode 150 in the show notes there, I do get people going whoa, that just seems so big, so unattainable. How could I ever possibly get to that point where I’ve got all those different income streams? The other thing that I do notice when I share this type of report and when I see other bloggers talking about their figures is that sometimes people feel like they just are comparing themselves. It’s very easy to do. I know I do it when I see other people income reports. It’s not really fair to compare yourself to other people because what you’re comparing yourself to is just a snapshot at the end of their journey or along their journey. I think it’s more useful to hear about how things came to be. In today’s episode, what I want to do is just talk you through the last 13 years of my life which might sound like it’s going to be a long episode, it won’t. I just want to walk you through the timeline of how I added income streams in over that time. I’ve done this a few times in talks, this is what people actually find more helpful than just hearing the snapshot. I hope that those of you who are interested in how to get that point of a full time income from your blogs might find it useful to hear about the journey. Let’s walk back in time to 2002. It’s 2002, November, I’m sitting at a desk of one of the part time jobs that I had. I was also doing some study on the side. I get an email from a friend saying check out this blog. Many of you heard the extended version of this story, I’m not going to go through it completely but I ended up on this blog and see something there that I want to do. I decided that day I was going to start a blog. For the next year, I blogged on that blog. I began to experiment with a few other little blogs on the side but for the first year of my blogging I had no idea you could make money blogging and I had no idea that’s what I would end up doing. I just blogged because I enjoyed blogging. I’m doing a bit of an income timeline here and so it could be very easy to skip over this first year but I actually think it was really important, it was an important year for me. It was a foundational year. The income that followed, some of it came because I spent a whole year not making money from my blogs and focusing upon other things. Firstly, I learned a lot in this year. I spent a year learning about blogging, learning about the tools, culture, how to communicate, learning was one of the big things that I invested a lot of time into there without even really thinking about it, it just happened. Secondly, I wrote a lot of content in that time. I got hopefully a bit better as a writer but I also built up an archive of content which began to get indexed in Google and that drove some traffic. That’s the other thing I worked on for that year, I worked on building the traffic to my site. Lastly, I worked on building engagement with my community and with my readership. None of these things I really was that intentional about. I didn’t say I need to learn about blogging or I need to drive traffic and instinctively happened. For that first year, I think I built some really great foundations to then monetize my blogs. I shared this because I think bloggers starting today should be investing significant amounts of time into those activities as well. Learning about blogging, understanding how to use the tools, understanding how to use your voice, those types of things. Building up an archives of content, driving traffic to your blog, beginning to grow your readership, and deepening the engagement that you have with your readers. It’s not to say that you can’t monetize from day one, you can. I actually think it’s probably good for you to put a little bit of time into monetizing early but I think it’s much better for you to spend the bulk of your time really investing into those four areas; learning, content, traffic, and community. That was year one, no income. I didn’t even know you could. It was in years two and three where I began to experiment with making a little bit of money on my blogs. It was around this time that I started a second blog, it was a blog where I reviewed digital cameras. It no longer exists today because I or someone else let the domain slip. It was something I’d been transitioning away anyway by the time that domain disappeared. Years two and three, I began to experiment with monetizing my blogs. The reason I started to monetize was that my blogs were starting to cost me money. I had service, domains, that were taking up a lot of time, taking me away from the other work that I was doing. I began to look around to see was there a way I could cover my costs in blogging. I discovered this advertising network that existed called AdSense. AdSense is Google’s ad network. You would’ve seen their ads almost everyday of your life over the last few years because they are everywhere, all over the internet. Many times, you don’t actually know who’s serving the ads but you’ve seen the ads. They started out back in 2002, a lot of them were text based ads. They were pretty ugly, you could change the colors of them but that’s about all. You could have different sizes. I started to put these ads on my blog. From day one, they started to earn me a little bit of income. By little, I mean a few cents a day. That wasn’t enough to buy coffee but it did drive a little bit of income into my blog. It was around the same time I started to experiment with Amazon’s Affiliate Program or the Amazon Associates Program as it’s known. This is where you link to a product on Amazon with a special link and you earn a commission if someone buys that product based upon your link. Again, the income in the early days from Amazon was literally a few cents every week. It wasn’t even everyday. I was linking particularly to books which was what Amazon was all about back then, still is largely but they’ve got so many more products today. I was earning 4% or 5% commissions on these $10 books. You can say it wasn’t much but it was the start. I learned so much by experimenting with these two income streams. I also learned that if I was going to ever make more than a few cents a day, I needed to do a few things. Firstly, I needed to get more traffic to my site. Both of these income streams and all the others I’m going to mention will go up if you grow your traffic to your site. This is something I did years two and three. I really worked hard on growing my traffic. I now had a bit more incentive to do that. It didn’t just make me feel good to know that people were viewing my site, I could see it was directly impacting how much money I was able to make. That helped me to grow towards a part time income. The other thing I worked really hard on on those two years was optimizing how I was using these income streams. AdSense was something that I gradually over time learned. You could do things to impact how much you earned. You could, one, put more ads on your site. I think you can have three on each page. You could change the size of the ads, there were new ad unit sizes coming in. You could change the position of the ads, you could put them high up on the page, you can put them underneath your blog post, there were different positions and they each would help you to earn different amounts. You could back then particularly change the design of your ads as well, change the colors of the text ads that appeared. You can’t do that so much anymore but there are plenty ways that you can optimize that income stream. Same with Amazon Affiliate Links, I learned how to call people to buy those products better, experiment with different places on my site to promote the products as well. Years two and three were a big learning time for me as well, I still can really put a lot of effort into creating lots of content, driving traffic, building community, but I also increasingly put a little bit more of my time into working with these different income streams. That was the beginning for me. With those two income streams, I got close to getting to a full time level. It was around that time that I started ProBlogger. From now on, I’m now just going to start talking about income streams that were both on my photography blog but also ProBlogger. Year four and five, this is where I began to build on AdSense and Amazon by adding a few more income streams. There was actually five in these two years. The first one was direct ad sales. I realized that advertisers were now beginning to target my site. I could see the same advertisers appearing on my site all the time. I knew that Google AdSense was taking a cut of all those ad revenues. I began to reach out directly to some advertisers to see whether they wanted just to work with me directly on my site. We’re not talking big bucks here, don’t think I was earning tens of thousands of dollars from these sponsorships that I was selling on my site. The first one, I earned $20 a month. That was a camera store here in Australia that decided to advertise on my site. It was small amounts and I sold the advertising on a monthly basis. You would buy a certain type of ad in a certain position on my site for a monthly fee. I would charge more for a banner ad in a prime position and I would charge less for a sidebar ad in a less seen position. It started small as did all of these income streams but it gradually grew as my traffic grew and as I was able to send more people to these advertisers. I also began to experiment with some other affiliate programs around this time. I began to see other blogs creating ebooks of their own and so I joined some of their affiliate programs and began to promote their ebooks and their products. That did okay for me in the early days, I learned a lot by doing it. I also added in other advertising networks, it was around this time Yahoo! had a publishing network, an ad network, and another one that I came across called Chitika. They’re still around today, they’ve changed quite a bit since the early days. I added Chitika ads onto my site alongside my AdSense ads. At first, I thought it would decrease my AdSense ads. Turns out, it didn’t. My AdSense stayed steady but I added this whole new income stream. Really, that was a lightbulb moment for me as I realized that one of the fastest ways that I could increase my overall income was to just add a second income stream alongside my previous ones. It didn’t quite double my income overnight but it came close to doing it. That was a really exciting day. It was as I said a lightbulb moment and I began to think really strongly about how can I add some new income streams as well. It was around that time I got approached by Wiley, the publisher in the US, to write the ProBlogger book. That was another small income stream that was added there. That only really came about because I’ve been blogging on ProBlogger for a couple of years and I’ve grown a profile on that particular topic of blogging. That approach came out of the blue. Also for a little while there on ProBlogger there, we had a course which I ran with another blogger called Andy Wibbels. We ran a course, I think it was called Six Figure Blogging back in the day. It’s no longer in existence but that was my first experiment of having my own product. It’s something that I am really glad I did but I felt a bit out of my debt within those early days as well. There was certainly no software around to help you run courses like there are today. It was a big commitment to get that up and running at that time. In years six and seven, I added three more income streams on top of some of the ones that I already mentioned. Firstly, I started to do some speaking and get paid for it. This is another one of those ones that came to me, I remember the first time being asked to speak at a conference. I was about to say yeah sure when the person said what’s your fee? I was like oh, you’re going to pay me to speak at a conference? Suddenly again, another income stream opened up. It’s something I haven’t done a lot of. I get asked a lot but being here in Melbourne, Australia, it’s hard to travel around the world to speak at these conferences. I say no more often than not but it’s something I really do enjoy. Alongside that, I also began to experiment with some consulting, particularly off the back of ProBlogger. This is where I would do blog coaching. It was a service that I started back then. I didn’t do a lot of it, I very quickly discovered it wasn’t really for me, it wasn’t something I felt like I could add a lot of value to. I knew a lot about blogging but I didn’t feel that it really suited my style, my personality, and I realized I could probably have a bigger impact by creating lots of content for lots of people. That’s what I’ve done by later on creating some of the products I’ve created. The last one in years six and seven was adding in a job board. If you haven’t seen it already, it’s at jobs.problogger.net. This is where people looking to hire bloggers pay $50 to get their ad in front of bloggers for 30 days. At first, that was a very small income stream, it was maybe two or three jobs per week on the job board, a few of my friends I used to give freebies to just to get a few more jobs on there. Gradually, over the years, it’s grown quite a bit. Now, it’s two or three jobs a day. Some days, four or five, or six or seven jobs. That’s a fairly passive income stream, it’s probably the most passive income stream that I have. Years seven through to ten was a time where I really focused a lot of attention on building products and different types of products. The first one was an ebook and it was by this stage I started Digital Photography School which was kind of an evolution of my first photography blog and it was more of a how to take photos type blog. I put off doing an ebook on there even though I knew I probably should do one, I put it off for a couple of years by this point and eventually decided I’ve got to get my act into gear and I started to put aside 15, 20 minutes per day to create my first ebook. I was a busy person so I basically got up early every morning and took a lot of the content that was already on the site, a lot of the posts that I’ve written personally about the topic of portraiture, how to take good photos of people which I knew was a popular topic in our audience. I compiled those together, I got them edited, I found a designer who would design the book for me. I learned about shopping carts and how to get a sales page up and all these things that I felt like I was completely out of my depth with and I launched this ebook. It took me about four months to get it together. I was worried that no one was going to buy it because a lot of the content was already on the site and I was really upfront with my readers about it. I probably undersold it, I kind of said you may or you may not want it, I didn’t really sell it very well but it sold a ridiculous amount of copies. We sold $70,000 worth of copies in the first 11 days. That sounds like a lot of income overnight and it was. A lot of that came in literally in the first 24 hours, it was a wild 24 hours let me tell you. As I reflected on it, it really came about because I’ve invested all these years of building my audience, we had fairly significant traffic by this point. I built engagement with that audience, they trusted us, they liked what we’re doing. It was the perfect time to launch this product. Then, launched a product and ebook over on ProBlogger, very similar story, repurposed content, 31 Days To Build A Better Blog. It was a series of blog posts that I’ve written, launched it again and it outsold even the first one. Suddenly, literally within a few months, I had this brand new income stream. It was another of those moments where the income pretty much doubled within a few months because up until that point, I’ve been relying so much upon advertising and affiliate marketing. Suddenly, to have my own products opened my eyes to this whole new world. That’s what I then spent quite a few of the next few years working on, really those first two ebooks worked so well that I was like let’s do more ebooks. We’ve since that time launched I think 35 other things on a broad range of topics on both ProBlogger and Digital Photography School. Ebooks became a very big focus for me, almost too big a focus. It closed me off a little bit to some of the other products that we’ve since launched. It became a bit of an obsession to be launching four or five ebooks every year. Another income stream that I had going for a little while in this period was also a membership site over on ProBlogger. This is where people were paying a monthly fee to get access to some premium content in the form of webinars, closed private communities, plugins that we developed as well. That membership site was quite profitable but it wasn’t the most satisfying site for me to run because I didn’t see a lot of engagement there. We had a lot of people sign up and I didn’t quite know why they signed up to be honest. Like I said, it was profitable, we’re making good money, but I didn’t feel like I was really contributing a lot of value. I decided to close that down and to rethink that model. Out of that came this podcast which doesn’t make a lot of money but on the flip side it feels like it’s having more of an impact upon people. For me, it’s not just about the money, it’s actually about what impact do you have. We may revisit the membership idea and tweak that in the future but for now that’s an income stream that didn’t work out for us. It was also in these years, I think it was 2007, I ran the first ProBlogger event. The first three, four years of that event it didn’t make any profit. I didn’t really try to, it was something that was more of a labor of love. Unfortunately, running events that have 400 or 500 come to them get quite expensive so it got a bit risky to run it so I started to build some income streams around that as well now. It’s not a big income earner or profit earner because there’s a lot of expenses but it’s certainly a new income stream that I developed in that time as well. Then, there were printables. Printables really could be anything really but they’re things that you sell for your readers to print. I guess in some ways, they’re like an ebook but for us on Digital Photography School they’re some our posing guides where we got someone to do some hand drawings of different poses for taking portraits of people so you could print them out and take them on location with you and show your subjects, “Hey, pose like this.” They did quite well for us as well. The last two years, years 12 and 13, have been extending the idea of the ebooks and creating some more products of our own. These were courses, I’ve done three courses now on different aspects of photography particularly and Adobe Lightroom presets, little plugins that you can put into that software to help process images in a click. There are the different income streams, most of which I mentioned in Episode 150 but I hope it is a little bit useful for you to hear them presented more as a timeline rather than a snapshot. Most of these income streams actually started out as little experiments as little hunchers, little let’s see what happens if I add this, let’s see what happens if I invest a bit of time to create that. Some of them worked really well, some of them have not worked at all. Some of them have been slow burners like the job board, even AdSense, just a few cents a day, gradually grew 10% this month, 10% that month, and gradually added up over time. I hope it’s been helpful for you to hear that story presented in that way. Hopefully, it gives you some ideas of some of the income streams that maybe you can be adding into your own blog as well. As I’ve said previously, there are plenty of other different types of income streams that you can add to your blog as well. I would love to hear your own timeline, and you could just do it in a simple bullet list, year, what income stream you added, I would love to see that because I think I’ll find it fascinating to see how bloggers grow their income streams as well. If you like to do that, I’d love to see it. You may just get an email from me because I’d love to do some more podcasts interviewing people to hear about these stories as well. If there’s some interesting responses there, maybe you can become a guest on the ProBlogger podcast. The next thing I’ll say is that I’m going to do a follow up to this episode in the next episode, Episode 154. Those of you who are listening to this just the day it goes live, you’ve only got a couple of days to wait. Those of you listening to it a week or so later, it’s probably live so you can go and listen to that straight away. In the next episode, I really want to give you a few observations of things that I’ve learned about adding income streams particularly. I want to suggest three ways to grow your income, I want to talk about some of the foundations that you should build before you grow income, I want to talk about the idea of experimenting with income streams and I’ll also give you some hints as to how to work out which income streams to try first. If that sounds interesting, subscribe to this podcast over in iTunes. While you’re there, leave us a review, I’d love to hear what you think. Or, subscribe to the ProBlogger Plus newsletter which will be linked to in today’s show notes as well. Thanks for listening today and I’ll chat with you in a few days with some more on this topic of adding income streams to your blog. 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.

Embedded Content Challenge Today, I want to give you a challenge to create a certain type of content. This is in the vein of our blogging groove challenge which we did about six weeks ago. I’ve just returned from the ProBlogger Event, and I am inspired. I received a lot of listener feedback about how the podcast has helped listeners and how the challenge series have had a positive impact on listeners. I hope to do one challenge a month. Instead of completing the content in 24 hours, I would like to give you seven days to complete the challenge. The new challenge is to create a piece of content that features embeddable content. Then share it on our facebook challenge group.   Further Resources  7 Days to Getting Your Blogging Groove Back 31 Days to Build a Better Blog How to Cut Out the Subject From the Background in Photoshop 9 Composition Techniques to Use to Improve Your Photography Review: Light Painting Brushes – Tools for Creativity Tips on Taking Your Blog to the Next Level With Embeddable Content Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Hey there, it’s Darren from ProBlogger. Welcome to Episode 152 of the ProBlogger podcast where today I want to issue you with a challenge to create a certain type of piece of content in the vein of our Blogging Groove Challenge which we did about six weeks ago. Before I tell you about today’s challenge which I know many of you are looking forward to and have been asking for, I want to just let you know that the ProBlogger event just finished in the last few days. I’m just back from it, I’m feeling both excited and exhausted. Most of my team are as well, but mainly excited and mainly inspired. I’m probably going to do an episode in the coming weeks on some of the themes of the event because there were quite a few themes that many of the speakers really referred to without us really coordinating those messages at all. Today, I want to just mention one thing that I noticed. One of the most common things I heard at the event this year was about this podcast. We did have quite a few tracks on podcasting at the event this year. I was amazed how many listeners of this podcast there are. I see the stats everyday and I know that we’ve had close to 1.6 million downloads over the years but it’s kind of nice to hear the voices of people who listen to the podcast because you hear mine everyday. It was really nice. Quite a few people told me they actually came to the event because they found ProBlogger through the podcast and that was really nice to hear. I often wondered how do people come to ProBlogger and was the podcast bringing new readers in. I knew it was reaching existing readers, so it was nice to see some new readers coming in. People typing into iTunes search terms and using iTunes as a search engine, that was a nice reminder to me. Also, people who found me through interviews that I’ve done on other people’s podcast. That was interesting to me. Quite a few people told me about certain episodes that have brought about real change in their blogging. One of the things I did notice was that many people told me that it was the series of challenges that we’ve run that really have had a big impact. The most recent one, the Blogging Groove Challenge that we did back in Episode 137 forward. It was quite a few of you who really benefitted from that. One of the old series that we did, in fact the first series that I did back in the first episodes, 31 Days to Build A Better Blog, was something that quite a few people said that they’ve been going back to and doing again and again. I thought it might be worth just mentioning that early series that I did on this particular podcast because I know many of you have not started working your way backwards and through the episodes, the most recent ones. Right at the beginning of the podcast, I did do 31 episodes in 31 days and was all about issuing challenges. They weren’t just content related challenges like the Blogging Groove Challenge, some of them were challenges to find readers, to build community on your blog, and to think strategically about your blog as well. If you did miss those episodes, it’s there, you can do it anytime, just go back to the start of our episodes in iTunes, if you listen in iTunes or any of the other podcast players. Or, you can go over to problogger.com/podcast/31days. There, I have outlined the full series, you can actually listen to them all on that particular page, I’ve got a playlist there for you. I just wanted to mention that because I know many of you are newer listeners and may have not seen that we’ve done that 31 day challenge. Thanks for listening, thanks to those of you who were at the event and came up and told me about where you listen to me. I had someone who said that they trained for a marathon while listening to me the whole way which I just wish I got some benefit out of that myself because out of the exercise you did, I had other people telling me about the fact that they listen to me with their kids in their cars, listen to me at the gym, listen to me in the shower, in bed falling asleep at night, all kinds of stories which always amuses me. Anyway, thanks for listening. I’m going to give you a challenge now so stay tuned. It’s been about six weeks since we’ve finished the Blogging Groove Series which if you missed it was a week long series of daily challenges where I issued you with a challenge everyday to write a certain type of content and then to come and share it in our Facebook group which is called the ProBlogger Challenge Group if you want to search for it on Facebook. It’s a private group so you need to apply to join and I will approve your joining of that within a day usually. I wanted to continue the challenge because we’ve got over 1700 of you in that group now and probably the most common thing I’m asked by people in it is when is the next challenge. I probably won’t do them daily, I know I won’t do them daily. They probably won’t even be weekly but I do want to do at least one challenge every month. One of the things I want to change up this time is instead of you having to do your piece of content within 24 hours, I want to give you seven days to complete the challenge. You don’t have to really rush it, hopefully it will let you create a piece of thoughtful content, craft that piece of content to really serve your readers. For those of you who didn’t do the Blogging Groove Challenge, I nominate the type of post and you go away and choose a topic and create that content that’s going to be relevant to your readers, and then you go to the ProBlogger Challenge Group and then you share your piece of content. That way, you’re not only creating a good piece of content but you are hopefully getting a few visitors to it as well. We really do encourage you to visit what other people in that group are producing, comment, like, share if it’s relevant to your audience. The challenge of today is to create a piece of content that features embeddable content on it. Embeddable content is what we want you to put in your blog post today. There’s a few different ways that you can tackle this and I want to give you a little bit of a background. I have done a podcast in the past on this particular topic. If you do want to dig deeper into the topic, I will link to that in the show notes. The reason I want to issue this challenge today is that as I was preparing for one of the talks that I was doing at ProBlogger Event, it was a talk I gave on finding readers for your blog. I did some analysis of the most shared pieces of content on Digital Photography School. One of the things I noticed as I did that analysis was that over the last 12 months, some of the most shared pieces of content that we have published were actually posts where we embedded some curated pieces of content. These are pieces of content that other people had created but had made available to embed. We took the embed code, put it onto our site, gave the people credit, and those were some of our most popular pieces of content. One example that I’ll give you was a piece of content, a post that we published back in April. It was called How to Cut Out the Subject from the Background in Photoshop. It was a Photoshop type post. You don’t really need to understand the post except to say that you can go and look at it. It was a relatively simple post, it was only 232 words long. Darlene, our editor, posted it in April this year. She basically, as you look at that post, you’ll see that she had a couple of introductory paragraphs introducing the topic of using Photoshop to cut out a subject from its background. Then, there’s a video which illustrates how to do it. After the video, there’s a little bit more content written expanding upon some of the ideas in the video and linking to some further reading on our site which I think is really important. I’ll talk about that in a moment. After that, there’s a second video which illustrates how to do it. Someone else’s video. Both of the videos in this piece of content were produced by different people and they were nothing to do with Digital Photography School, my site. None of my team created them, we just found them on YouTube or Darlene found them on YouTube after probably identifying the topic she wanted to do a post about and then she went hunting on YouTube for useful videos on that topic. She ended the post with a couple of questions to our readers to get them commenting. It’s a very simple post, it’s a short post. The vast majority of the post is really content that other people have created. This might seem a little bit lazy but it turns out that this is the third most shared piece of content that we’ve produced over the last 12 months on Digital Photography School. There are plenty of other posts in our archives that have done similar type of things. We do this type of post once a week. We do 14 posts a week, one of them is always a video that we found on YouTube. The vast majority of YouTube videos allow you to embed posts on your blog. Some video creators don’t allow it but everyone else does. The reason that they allow it to be embedded on any blog or any other site is that it gets them more views to their video. It helps them to grow their profile and it can even grow their revenue if they’re running ads on the videos. The reason I like to do it is that it’s a relatively easy piece of content to produce. If the videos are good videos like the ones that I’ve just mentioned, it actually benefits our readers as well. We get a lot of our readers saying thanks for finding that video, would’ve never found it, would’ve never learned this without this. The other reason I like video is that it appeals to a different type of reader. We don’t tend to produce our own videos, most of our content is written content. It gets a different type of content in front of your readers. It’s a win for the video producer, it’s a win for you as a blogger, and it’s a win for your readers. I like win, win, win kind of scenarios. In our case, we’re looking for videos that are educational, that are actionable content, and that help our readers improve some aspect of their photography. That is not every blogger. You may try and find content, might be video, might be something else that taps into the style of blog that you have. There’s plenty of videos out there that are more inspirational for example, if you’re more of an inspirational blog. There’s plenty of videos out there that tell stories. If you’re a storytelling blog, there’s plenty of videos that are entertaining, more newsworthy, more opinion related. I guess it’s about trying to match the video or the content that you’re going to embed into your piece of content with the style of blog that you have. As we’re looking at videos, I’m going to get onto some other types of content that you might embed as well. We try and always find a quality piece of content. We’re always looking for videos that are not overly promotional. We do want the video creator to get some benefit out of it as well, they put in the work to create the video. Sometimes, YouTube videos can be so full of ads and self promotion, big long intros, more about something else than the actual topic. We tend to avoid those types of videos. We’re trying to find videos that are really actionable, that aren’t too self promotional, and that don’t contain big calls to action to buy stuff, that type of thing. The reason that we do that is that even though we want the video creator to get some benefit out of it, if they’re too salesy, that comes off on our brand as well. Sometimes, our readers think we’re being salesy if there’s too much sales sort of stuff in the video. Just be a little bit careful about what you do embed. You want it to align with your brand is what I’m saying there. YouTube is of course a very good place to find embeddable content. Most of the videos there are embeddable. Other video sites also like Vimeo might be worth looking at to find pieces of content, you often get a slightly different style of video there. Video isn’t the only type of content that you might want to embed. In fact, there are many things that you can do in today’s challenge. You may even want to include a few types of embeddable content in your post. Back in Episode 97, I talk quite extensively about embeddable content. You might want to go back and listen to that particular episode after this one if you’re struggling, you want some more ideas. As I mentioned in that episode, there are 17 types of content that you might want to embed on your blog. I’ll go through that list really quickly in a moment. Just a couple of benefits of using this type of content. Firstly, it can, if you choose good content to embed, increase the usefulness of your site, it can appeal to different learning styles and personality types if you choose a different style of content. It shows your readers that you’re willing not only to promote yourself but someone else in your industry and that you’re connected, you can almost borrow some of the influence of other people if you choose a video from someone who is quite well known. That can rub off on you in some ways. It can add different voices and opinions and experiences to your blog, different perspectives which I think is really great. One of the big benefits is that it increases the amount of time that people are on your site. If you have a three or four or five minute video, your readers are sitting on your site for that five whole minutes. That gets them looking around your site as they’re watching the video, it just keeps people on your site that little bit longer. One of the side benefits of that is that it can help with search engine optimization as well. The longer time on page is a signal to Google to rank your site higher. It’s also one of the factors in Facebook as well. If you get people visiting from a Facebook link to your site and they’re staying on your site for a long time, that’s a signal to Facebook that they’re engaged. Time and page can be quite good. There’s a few different types of embeddable content that you might want to consider today. Video is perhaps the most common one but you could also use slides from SlideShare and go have a look there for content that relates to your niche. There’s usually some pretty good content. You can embed Facebook updates that you’ve done or that someone else has done, you can even embed tweets. One of the techniques that I’ve used in the past is to ask a question on Twitter and then to take the answers of my readers and embed those answers into content which can be quite useful or shoot some influences in your niche and tweets saying hey, I’ve got this question, could you answer it? And then embed the responses from those influencers. You can embed audio files, you can embed cartoons using sites like Andertoons. You can embed live streaming replays. If you do a Facebook Live, you can take that video and embed it on your site. You can embed Instagram pictures, you can embed slideshows of pictures from photo sharing sites like Flickr. You can embed infographics, bookmarks from Pinterest, Google Maps or Google Earth. You can embed polls and quizzes from sites like Quizzer, mind maps from Mindmeister, google docs, podcasts, a variety of different podcast players and animated gifs from Giphy. They’re just some of the types of content that you could be embedding into your site today. The key is to make it useful, to ensure the quality is high. The other thing I’ll mention, you’ll notice this in the post that I mentioned earlier, that Photoshop post, one of our most shared pieces of content. We link in that post, even though it’s a very short post, number times to other posts on our site. The post I mentioned is quite short and it could be the type of content that people would bounce away from quite quickly. Linking deeper into your site drives people into your archives which gets them sticking around longer and more likely to subscribe to your blog. Do consider trying to not only get people to watch that video or listen to that audio or look at the infographic that you’re doing but also because that content could sometimes be a little bit fluffier, try and direct them to a deeper piece of content that relates to it. Let me give you another example of a post where we did this. It was one titled Nine Composition Techniques To Use To Improve Your Photography. Again, I’ll link to it in today’s show notes. In this one, we feature a fantastic video that very quickly goes through nine different composition techniques. Underneath the video, I put a screenshot from each of the nine techniques. This is a screenshot from the video for each of those techniques. Then, I point to a tutorial relevant to that technique in our archives. People watch the video, it’s quite short, it’s very good, high quality video. It doesn’t really go into great depth into how to do the nine techniques. Underneath it, we give people the tutorial. We’ve already written, we’ve got thousands of posts to draw on. That gets them deeper into our site. That post did really well for us, I think it was the combination of a really good video and then breaking it down and providing more meaty content that went down really well with our readers. It did very well for us. This brings me to my next point. The first video that I talked about, the photoshop one, we had two videos and then just 235 words. You might be thinking that’s just too short, that’s not meaty enough. There’s nothing to stop you from writing a really long piece of content of your own and then using a video almost like an example or just another short perspective. You can use embeddable content either as 100% of your blog post and the main feature or you can use it as a secondary example in your posts. Let me give you another example. It’s a tutorial called Review Of Light Painting Brushes, Tools For Creativity which sounds a little bit obscure but it’s a review of a product that we did. It also has some tips in it. It’s 1400 words long and it’s all about how to do light painting which is a technique in photography. It features a product that you can use as well. Our writer writes some really useful content, reviews the product, also gives some tips on how to use the product. The post itself I think is 1400 words long. As you scroll down, you’ll see that there are a couple of video examples that he’s found to show what he’s talking about. The videos aren’t the main point of the post, they’re just there if you want to learn a little bit more about one of the things that he’s talked about. One of the videos is from the product creator that we’re reviewing and another one is just almost like a tangential kind of thing, a little example that he’s included to show a technique. The embeddable stuff doesn’t have to be the main feature of the post. I know some people don’t like this type of post because it just seems a bit lazy. You can really write a very meaty post that has embeddable content. I judged a competition earlier this year, it was a blogging competition on the best social media blogs. One of the things I noticed was that the best blogs, the blogs that won not just from my judging but other people’s as well, were blogs that regularly used embeddable content. The embeddable content was often just an example or was just a tweak that someone had gone and found, just a little extra thing. It just makes the content a little bit more interesting. It breaks up the written word and it shows your readers that you’ve gone to that little bit extra effort to find something that’s going to be useful to them. Last thing I’ll say about embeddable content is that you probably don’t want to go overboard with it. This type of post where we feature a video, we only do it once out of every 14 posts. Generally, our posts would only usually have a couple of pieces of embeddable content in them. I have seen posts that work really well with lots of embeddable content, might have some tweaks, videos, infographics, but you can go overboard there. It can end up looking a bit cluttered and confusing. Just be aware of that. That’s the challenge. Over the next few days—I’ll give you a week—I want you to create a new piece of content for your blog that features embeddable content in it. It could be video, it could be slideshare, it could be any of those different types of content that I mentioned before. It could be someone else’s content that you embed or could even be something that you’ve created yourself in the past or specifically for this. You may actually want to go and create a video that you then insert into your blog post if you really want to take things to the next level. It doesn’t have to be someone else’s content. Once you created your piece of content and published it, publish it on your blog and then come to our Facebook Group. It’s the ProBlogger challenge group. If you do a search on Facebook, you’ll find us. Ask to join it if you haven’t already. Once you have joined that, once you’ve published your piece of content, come in and just share the link. There will be a thread where I call you to share these types of piece of content and just add a link there. Once you’ve added it, you’ll find that hopefully people will come and visit it from other bloggers in the challenge group. I encourage you just to check out some of the other posts that people are sharing, to like what they’re doing, encourage them, you might want to leave a comment on their post, you might want to even share if you think it’s relevant for your particular audience. The key with these challenges is that it’s about creating a piece of content that perhaps you wouldn’t have published before, maybe a new style of post that might become a regular part of your schedule but it’s also I guess to get to know each other as bloggers as well and to encourage each other and maybe help each other find a little bit extra traffic. I look forward to seeing your embeddable pieces of content. I just created one for this challenge and I will share it in the Facebook group as well. I’m looking forward to seeing what you create. Can’t wait to see your posts and I’ll chat with you in a few days time in 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.