ProBlogger Podcast: Blog Tips to Help You Make Money Blogging

Build Trust With Your Blog Today, I’m talking about how to build trust with your blog, podcast, YouTube channel, and social media. This question came in from Stacie. “I’ve heard that blogs are great for building trust with potential customers – how would you suggest speeding that up?” – Asked by Stacie I’m going to tackle this question today and talk about how trust is built using content online and give you some tips on how to maybe speed it up a little bit. Although, it does need to take some time, but I will give you some thoughts on how build trust with your blog. Further Resources on How to Build Trust With Your Blog Strategies to Help Convert First Time Visitors Into Interested Readers of Your Blog Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Hey there, it’s Darren from ProBlogger here. Welcome to Episode 151 of the ProBlogger podcast where today I want to talk about how to build trust with your blog, podcast, YouTube channel, and social media. This question came in over the last couple of weeks from Stacey. She wrote, “I’ve heard that blogs are great for building trust with potential customers. How would you suggest speeding that up?” I want to tackle this question today and talk about how trust is built using content online and give you some tips on how to maybe speed it up a little bit. I think it does need to take some time, there’s a bit of a spoiler. I’m going to give you some thoughts on how to do that. Today’s question came in from Stacey and she’s touched on a really big reason that many businesses start blogs. They hear that blogs help to build trust with customers and potential customers and as a result can drive sales. It reminds me of Bob Burg famous quote who once wrote, “All things being equal, people will do business with and refer business to those people that they know, like, and trust.” It’s become a bit of a mantra in marketing circles. Ultimately, Bob here is talking about relationship, about connection as being the basis of how people make their decision on where to spend money in many instances. If you’re anything like me, you know this is true for you. We look at our own spending habits and we know that there’s some truth in this, we don’t just make purchasing decisions based upon features or prices, we often make our purchasing decisions based upon other factors including whether we feel a connection with the brand, whether we feel we trust the brand, whether we like the people selling us the product or creating the product. What’s this got to do with blogging, you might be asking. I found that this exact principle applies to blogging. My experience with blogging over the last almost 13 years now has been that it is one of the best ways by far of building a connection with potential customers and people. When you create content on a daily or even just a regular basis that brings about the change in the life of those who read it, then over time they really do begin to feel like they know you. They really do feel like they like you and that they trust you. Some kind of relationship opens up, as virtual as that might be. As strange as that might seem, people do feel this connection to you when you enhance their lives with regular content. I’ve lost count of the times that I’ve been at a conference and I’ve literally just got home from the ProBlogger Conference, it happened again. People come up to you at a conference when you’ve been blogging for years and they speak to you in such a personal way that sometimes it can be really confusing as to whether you’ve met that person before, whether you’ve had some memory lapse which is quite common for me because memories are not my strong suit. Many times, there’s people who talk to you and you realize you never met them before. This is the first time they’ve met you but they feel like they know you, they feel like they’ve got a connection with you, they might even feel like they’ve had shared experiences with you because you’ve been walking them through a problem that they’ve had or a challenge that they’ve had. Or they’ve been admiring you, they’ve been inspired by you, they felt like they feel the things that you feel and have experienced the things that you’ve experienced as well even when it’s your first meeting with them. This has particularly happened for me since I started the podcast. Whilst I don’t reveal a whole lot of my personal life in this podcast, I think simply by listening to the voice of the person speaking, there can be a deeper connection perhaps with some listeners. Yes, blogging, podcasting, YouTubing, whatever it might be that you do has the ability to help build that kind of connection with your readers or listeners where they feel like they know you, they like you, they trust you. How can you speed that up? That’s what Stacy’s asking today. There’s a few things I do want to say here. The first one is that it just has to take some time. As with any relationship, trust takes time. Sometimes, people warm up faster than others. I know friends of mine who just warm up to people, they tend to trust people almost on their first meeting. But for most of us, it takes a few times where we meet the person before we begin to warm up to them. That’s certainly the case for me. I’m an introvert, I’m a little bit shy, I’m a little bit stand-offish, but it’s not because I don’t want to trust you, it’s just that it takes some time for me. Sometimes for me, it takes meeting a person a couple of times, sharing a couple of experiences with them, and then a natural progression of trust slowly builds over time. I think this is the case for most people. It’s true of real life encounters but also with blogging. The idea of getting trust fast is probably not a good thing to go after on a blog. Rather, it’s about building a solid foundation. The way I see it is that every blog post I write has the potential to build the trust between me and my reader a little bit more. It’s unlikely that any one post or any one podcast episode is going to take a reader to fully trusting me in a single step. I don’t really even want to do that, I’d rather take things slow. Step by step, you’ve got to take a long term view of this. The second thing I’ll say is that trust is earned. Think about your real life, think about the people you trust the most. Why do you trust them? For me, it comes out of the many small interactions that I have with that person and me asking myself subconsciously perhaps are the things that they do and is the way that they treat me trustworthy? Is it worthy of my trust? It’s moments of people being generous, dependable, honest, accountable, vulnerable, true to their word. The same is true in your blogging. What makes you trustworthy is the accumulation of what you offer your readers overtime. It’s your track record of creating content that’s useful, that’s generous, that’s transparent which serves the people who read it. It’s the consistency, the dependability of your message. It’s that accumulation of what you do over time that earns you trust from your readers, it shows them that you care about them and that earns the trust. There’s nothing you can do today that guarantees that everyone is going to trust you tomorrow. You need to invest your time today into creating content that makes people’s lives better. Make people’s lives better. For me, ultimately that’s what this comes down to. The best thing you can do is to think about what value you bring and how you try and change the life of those who read your blog and listen to your podcast and watch your YouTube channel. Every time you sit down to create content, have that in the front of your mind. How am I going to change the life of my reader today? Maybe just a little way, maybe just going to say something that encourages them. Maybe you’re going to equip them with some new information, maybe you’re going to tell them the latest news or translate that news for their own situation. Maybe you’re going to make them feel like they’re not alone in the situation that they’re in. Those things all change their life in small ways and accumulation of that type of content builds trust, builds a connection that’s hard to describe. It’s for these two reasons, trust takes time and trust is earned, that I’m really a bit hesitant to respond to Stacey’s question on how to speed up growing trust because it does take time. Having said that, I think there are a couple of things that I can say about maybe how this can be sped up a little bit. I say this with the word of caution that you don’t want this to happen too quick, you really want it to naturally happen. Here’s a couple of things that do come to mind though. Firstly, what other people say about you counts a lot. One thing that can help someone to trust you or be open to trusting you a little bit more is when another person that they trust trusts you. To illustrate this, if Vanessa, my wife, introduces me to someone that she knows and likes and trusts, an old friend that I’ve never met before—I think I’ve met them all. But if she was to introduce me to someone today and she says I trust this person completely, I won’t probably immediately trust that person but I’ll be perhaps more open to trusting them and have a little bit more peace of mind in entering into that relationship. The same thing happens online. Social proof certainly is one factor, it’s a word that gets used a lot. You probably have experienced it yourself, you are more likely to probably read a blog that looks like it’s really active and has lots of readers already. You’re likely to go into a restaurant that has a lot of people in it than has no one in it already. There’s this element of social proof there and this certainly can come into play with the beginnings of relationships. People might be a little bit more open to trusting you if they do see some social proof. If you have a community of readers already interacting on your site, things can sometimes snowball a little bit faster. One of the things I would say about maybe helping people to be more open to you is to focus a lot of your attention on building community and engagement with your readers. When you’ve got that warm community, people will be more open to trusting you because they see other people doing that as well. Also when other people of influence interact with you, or speak about you, or trust you in a public way, sometimes that can speed up the process as well. This is why interviewing other people on your blog that maybe have influence, this is why having guest posts from other people on your blog that maybe have influence or guest posting on their blog, these types of things can build a little bit of social proof as well. It doesn’t guarantee trust, but it may actually help people to be a little bit more open to you if they see someone that they know, like, and trust liking you and trusting you. Sometimes, it’s good to highlight that social proof in some ways. If you want to hear a little bit more on social proof, I really do recommend you go back to Episode 114 where I, in passing, talk about four types of social proof that you can use on your blog. Here’s the thing about social proof, it  really can only take you so far. Perhaps it can speed things up a little bit, particularly in the opening stages of your relationship with a new reader, but it only does take you so far. You need to earn the trust, you need to take that opening that maybe social proof gives you and then run with it. The other thing I’ll say, the second last thing I’ll say about trust, is that in my experience, trust grows faster when it’s reciprocated. I spoke on this in the past on this podcast but I love Bob Burg quote, people do business with those that they know, like, and trust. I think that’s completely true but I think that quote can also be flipped around. People don’t just do business with those that they know, like, and trust. I think people are more likely to do business with you when they feel like they are known, when they feel like they are trusted and they are liked as well. Show your readers that you know them, that you like them, that you maybe even trust them. That’s the kind of interaction that you want to have. You don’t want just them to know, like, and trust you. You need to show them that you know, like, and trust them. I guess ultimately you need to ask yourself the question, do you know, like, and trust your readers? Do you show them that you know, like, and trust them? Know them is pretty easy, you can kind of find out the demographics, the language they use. That’s fine. Do you like your readers? Do you really like them? I have to say I really love my readers on ProBlogger. One of the reasons I love to go to the ProBlogger event each year, one of the reasons I started the ProBlogger event, is that I wanted to get to know my readers. When I’m there, I feel like I really like them. They’re fantastic people, we have a lot of fun, we enjoy each other’s company. I really like my readers and I trust them as well. I trust particularly the people that come to my event and I tell them all kinds of stories and I’m vulnerable with them at times as well. Do you know, trust, and like your readers? Do they feel like you know, like, and trust them? Do you express that to them? I think you need to express that to your readers in different ways. The content that you create on your blog shouldn’t just be about what you know, it should be about how you feel about those who read it. Express your feelings to your readers. If you’re writing about a problem that your readers have, don’t just say you’ve probably got this problem. Show them that you know that problem, show them that you have a feeling about that problem, that you want to help them overcome that problem in some way. You may communicate good information but your readers may feel at a distance from you unless you communicate it in such a way as they feel like you know their needs and that you genuinely want to help them. When you write in that way, they’re much more likely to feel like they’re in a relationship with you. Here’s my tips on creating content. Create content that’s warm. The tone of your content, using personal language. This is why I love podcasting so much. I hope that you can hear my voice that I generally like you as readers. Create content that’s vulnerable. Talk about what you’re learning, about what you’re trying, about what you’re making mistakes in, about the values you have, about the questions that you don’t know the answer to. Those types of things show vulnerability and that shows your readers that you trust them. I wouldn’t tell people about my vulnerabilities and my insecurities unless I had some level of trust with them, your readers will value that. Create content that has story in it. One of the best ways that you can make a connection with a person is to tell your story. Whether they’re your own stories or someone else’s, just a story can open up that relationship, but particularly when you tell your own story. It doesn’t have to be deeply personal, just show them a little of who you are. The last thing I’ll say about the content you create is add a few personal touches, share a little bit of who you are. You do need to have some boundaries, but maybe you can share a little bit of your life in some way. A couple of podcasts ago, I let my five year old introduce my podcast. You know how many people sent me emails and messages based on that opening and the closing of that podcast? It was amazing. People felt like they saw this different side of me. I had someone writing, “I never really thought about you as a dad.” I talk about my kids all the time but that little snippet where my five year old talked to you, it opened up a relationship with that person. It showed them a different side of me. Maybe there’s a way to add a little bit of your personality and who you are outside of the topic that you’re talking about. I guess here what I’m trying to say is that you need to show your readers that you trust them, that you like them and you know them if you want them to know, like, and trust you too. The last thing I’ll say, I think I’ve said this in different ways already. It ultimately comes down to this, be trustworthy, be trustworthy. The best way to gain trust from people is to be someone who is worthy of trust. Ultimately, I think that’s the fastest way to grow trust, blog with transparency. Show your agendas, show what you get out of it, be responsible for your actions, act with integrity, treat your readers with respect, keep your promises, work hard to be someone who’s worthy of being trusted. Once you have trust, respect it, treasure it, care for it. As someone once said, and I can’t track down who said it, “Trust takes years to build, seconds to break, and forever to repair.” Once you’ve got it, treasure it, keep it. Your actions speak louder than your words and who you are will in the end shine through, so be trustworthy. I really hope that’s been helpful for you. I don’t know whether it has, I’d love to hear whether you find it useful or not to you, encouraging to you. I’d love to hear what you think about building trust with your audience. What have you done? What have you tried that has built trust with your audience? What have you seen other people do? Why do you trust some people more than others? I’d love to hear your comments on that over in the show notes at problogger.com/podcast/151. Thanks for listening, I’ll chat with you in a week’s time in the next ProBlogger podcast. In this podcast, I mentioned ProBlogger Podcast Episode 114 where I talk about four types of social proof that you can build into your blog. That part of the podcast is really quite small, the overall podcast really talks about strategies to help you convert first time readers into interested readers of your blog. It’s really about trying to create good, first impressions upon your readers. I do encourage you to go back and listen to that, social proof plays a really important part of that. A lot of the things I talk about in that particular episode are really about beginning the relationship and taking people to that first step towards trust. If you’ve got another 15 or so minutes and you want to listen to something else, head over to Episode 114. You can find it in iTunes, just scroll back about 36 episodes, or you can find it at problogger.com/podcast/114. Thanks for listening again, I really do value you tuning in today and I’ll chat with you in a couple of days. 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.

Profit Streams Revealed: How I Make Money Blogging Today, I’m going to go through exactly how I make money blogging. I’m going to talk you through the income streams that I use to monetize my blogs and build an income for my family. This is something that I have done on the blog, but today I’m going to give you the information on the podcast because some of you don’t read the blog.   Today’s podcast is based off of this article on ProBlogger, “My Blogging Income Breakdown for the First Half of 2016”. This report is for my total business including ProBlogger and Digital Photography School. I will give you a little insight as to what site each income stream I mention is generated from. I will also be talking about profit as opposed to revenue. I will also be talking in percentages because I don’t generally reveal my actual income. In Today’s Episode How I Make Money Blogging – My Profit Streams Revealed Affiliate Income – There aren’t a lot of direct expenses from affiliate income, so it is profitable. On dPS we do two big promotions every year. We have our 12 days of Christmas sale and our mid year/summer sale. In each of these, we have daily deals on photography products. On ProBlogger we have been focusing on affiliate income from some of the tools we use. Plus links to hosting and themes. On dPS we regularly link to Amazon. Products – These are eBooks, lightroom presets, courses, and printables. In 2009, I decided to invest time into creating my first products which were eBooks. AdSense – dPA has a large amount of traffic, so it pays to use AdSense along with other income streams. Sponsorships   On dPS we offer sponsorships to advertisers who want to work directly with our audience. On ProBlogger we have done a handful of sponsorship campaigns with companies like Meet Edgar and 99designs. Job Board On ProBlogger we have had the job board since 2006. At first, it was a trickle, but it has now grown to 6000 ads places. We plan on releasing an update to the job board in the coming weeks. Take a look at the How to Make Money Blogging page on ProBlogger for a good overview. Event This year will be out 7th ProBlogger Event held here in Australia. The event generates a large amount of revenue, but the expenses are huge, so the profit is about 3% of my blogging income. This year there is a virtual ticket available for those people who can’t make it to Australia. This should offer a revenue increase. Other – I have a couple of other small income streams. Speaking Book Royalties Other Royalties/Copyright payments such as when my content is used in schools in Australia. A Word on Expenses Even though our revenue has went up in the past 12 months so has our expenses. In the last 12 months we invested heavily into the development of our sites. Such as with the ProBlogger redesign. I’ve also expanded my team to include: 2 editors (one for each site) 2 business unit managers (one for each site) Admin/customer service team members (one for each site) Marketing (one person for dPS) All team members except for one are part-time. We also have a huge array of contractors who help with product creation, proof reading, podcast editing, etc. We also have to have dependable servers and a number of software subscriptions to keep everything running smoothly. You can find these on our resources page. To make money you have to spend it! Further Resources on How I Make Money Blogging – My Profit Streams Revealed The Ultimate Guide to Making Money with the Amazon Affiliate Program Recommended Blogging Resources & Tools How to Start a Blog in 5 Steps Why You Should Create a Product to Sell On Your Blog (and Tips on How to Do It) Discover Your Camera’s Potential With DPS Resources Digital Photography School Featured Presets Digital Photography School Featured Courses ProBlogger Job Board ProBlogger Training Event 2016 ProBlogger Event Virtual Ticket 6 Resources to Make Your Blog Successful – ProBlogger eBooks 67 PORTRAIT POSES (PRINTABLE) MeetEdgar 99designs Make Money Blogging Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view This is ProBlogger. Hi there, it’s Darren from ProBlogger. Welcome to Episode 150 of the ProBlogger podcast. Today, I want to go through exactly how I make money blogging. I want to talk you through the income streams that I use to monetize my blogs and to build an income for my family off the back of my blogs. This is something I have done from time to time over on the ProBlogger blog. Today, I want to give to you on the podcast. I know some of you don’t read the blog and prefer to listen. That’s what we’re doing today. Back in 2002 when I first started blogging, and then over the next couple years started to make money for my blogs, the first question I would almost always be asked when I say to someone I’m a blogger. The question was almost always, “What’s a blog?” It would usually come with sort of a glazed overlook. Sometimes I’d say, “What’s a blog ball?” There was just almost no comprehension back in 2002 what a blog was, at least here in Australia. Almost everyone asked it. I would have this little spiel about what a blog was for anyone who genuinely seemed interested in finding out what it was, which wasn’t everyone, I have to say. Over the last few years, when I say I’m a blogger and that’s how I make my money, most people now know what a blog is but the question I get asked more than any other is, “How do you make money from a blog?” Sometimes people know what a blog is and they may even have a vague idea of how you make money. The most common thing that people guess at is something like, “You make money like a newspaper from ads?” It’s rare that people know too much more than that unless they are a blogger, or have some online experience, or know someone that doing it full time. Even today, I was in a café getting my long black in the morning which is my coffee of choice. The barista there asked me the question again, “How do you make money blogging?” His brother actually was a blogger who wanted to go full time. He thought his brother was on a road to nowhere. He was amazed when I mentioned that I was a blogger making a full time living from it. He was amazed that someone was actually doing it full time. He asked the question. As I was explaining to him how I make money from my blogs, I realized I haven’t really talked about it explicitly on the podcast. That’s what I want to do today. What I’m going to share with you today is based upon a recent income report I did do over on the ProBlogger blog. I summarized my income streams of the first half of 2016. As I record this, it’s September. It’s a couple of months ago that I published that. I will link to it in today’s show notes. I thought it would be useful to go through because it does represent the last couple of months as well. Before I get into the nitty gritty of it, let me say three things. Firstly, this is for my total business. It’s a combined profit for both ProBlogger and Digital Photography School that I’m talking about. I have two main blogs, my biggest one is Digital Photography School. It’s about eight times bigger than ProBlogger. The bulk of what I’m talking about today in terms of income is from Digital Photography School but I will be referring to ProBlogger from time to time as well. Think of it as the overall. For each income stream that I mention, I’m going to give you a little bit of insight into which of the sites I’m talking about. Hopefully you can get it straight in your head. The second thing I’ll say is that I’m talking here about profit rather than revenue. These things are very different. I see a lot of people doing their income reports based on revenue but it doesn’t really take into account the expenses. I don’t know that that’s overly helpful. What you’re going to hear me go through today, I’m going to give you a percentage of what each income stream makes in terms of profit. The reason I do this is there are elements in what I do that generate a lot of revenue but which also have significant expenses. The main one I’m thinking of here is the ProBlogger event which is happening in the next week. That bring in a lot of income. We have hundreds of bloggers paying $300 or $400 a pop, $400 or $500 a pop. That brings a lot of income. It mounts up very quickly but the reality is we have massive expenses as well. When you hire a hotel for two days for 500 people, the mind boggles at the bills you get. There’s a lot of revenue there but it’s not as much profit. You’ll see how little the profit is in a few minutes. The last thing I want to tell you is that I’m not going to tell you my actual income in this particular podcast. I don’t generally reveal specifics of how much. Rather, I’m going to talk in percentages here. I do this for a couple of reasons. One, I always found a little uncomfortable talking publicly about exactly what I earn. It’s probably just the way I was brought up. Also, sometimes I think when people share the figure, people don’t actually see the lesson behind that. Sometimes for a small blogger just starting out, it can seem, I think almost detrimental when you’re comparing yourself to someone who’s earning a lot of money. It can perhaps not be helpful. Really, the point of this podcast is to show you the diversity of income streams and how they are mixed together to build up a full time income for me. I will say in terms of how much, back in 2006 I revealed that my profit was over a $100,000 a year. It’s only gone up from there. That’s about all I’ll say on that particular front. I will say when I did the blog post, someone tried to calculate it based upon some of the publicly available information as well. You can probably dig in and find out a little bit more, if you did choose to do so. Let’s get into breaking it down, if you’ve got it in front of you, you’ll be able to see that the number one income stream for me for the first half of 2016 in terms of profit was affiliate income, affiliate commissions. It makes up 46% of my overall profit for the first half of this year. When I calculated this out, I was actually a little bit surprise when this category came up as high as it did. I knew it would be number one or two but I’d been thinking in terms of just basic revenue. Number two category is product sales. Usually, the revenue that products sales brings in is pretty similar to affiliate but there’s a lot more expenses with product sales and that’s why affiliates is number one because any earnings you make, you keep. There’s not really too many direct expenses with affiliates. That’s one of the reasons I really like it. As you look at that 46%, I will say upfront, it comes from both Digital Photography School and ProBlogger. I do some affiliate promotions on both. Generally, my affiliate income comes from three different sources. Let’s break them down for you. Over on Digital Photography School, we do two really big promotions every year. The biggest one is our 12 Days of Christmas Sale. We also do a mid-year sale, we call it our Summer Sale even though it’s winter here because most of our audience is in America. Our mid-year sale is the second biggest one. In each case, we for a week in our mid-year, and for 12 days Christmas sale, we release a new deal everyday. The deals are half our own products. We might reduce an ebook by 60%. Say for 24 hours, you can get now your book at 60% off. Or, it’s an affiliate deal where we negotiate with someone else who’s got a product. It might be a course, in might be an ebook, it might be a membership site, it might be some software that’s relevant for photographers. Again, we say for 24 hours you can get this deal. That’s where that affiliate income is coming from. These two promotions are our biggest earners of the year on Digital Photography School. They’ve done amazingly well over the last couple of years. Our ebook and courses, our products do pretty well but our affiliates, some of our affiliate deals do very well as well because they’re new to our audience. Many of our audience have already seen our ebook and might have them already but some of these affiliate things are really new. I think last year, the year before, we had one that just went massively huge. It was a presets package. The year before that, it was a course that we promoted. I can earn a lot of money very quickly in 24 hours. That’s the main source of a lot of that affiliate income. The second one is on ProBlogger, we do a little bit of affiliate marketing as well. We don’t do the deals like on Digital Photography School that has something we’ve talked about doing. We do have some partners like SumoMe who I’ve mentioned on this podcast. When I mention them on the show notes, there’s a link, an affiliate link to their product. LeadPages is another one. We also mention those on our resources page on ProBlogger as well. That resources page we linked to very prominently around the site so it gets quite a bit of traffic. We also have affiliate promotions on ProBlogger with Bluehost, a serve option which we mentioned in How to Start a Blog Page as well. There’s lots of mentions of the partners that we use, and recommend, and their affiliate links around ProBlogger. We don’t tend to do big campaigns like we do on Digital Photography School. There have been a few times where I’ve recommended training programs on ProBlogger as well. But in this six month period, there wasn’t any that were included in that. The other type that we occasionally will link to is WordPress themes on How To Start a Blog Post. As well, there’s links to StudioPress, I think there. That would be the second category that makes up this 46%. The third one is Amazon. I linked to Amazon a lot on Digital Photography School. Anytime I mention a camera, a lens, a photographic accessory, a photography book, anything that is mentioned on Digital Photography School that can be bought on Amazon, we link to it with an affiliate link. Amazon makes up about 9% of that 46%, just to give you an idea. The other 81% is ebooks, courses, software and online services that we recommend. Affiliate marketing is big. It does go up and down a little bit from month to month. Usually, it’s in our number one or two category for profit. It’s great. The other good thing about affiliate, I mentioned this a few times on the podcast is that, when you’re promoting ebooks, and courses, and software, and services with affiliate marketing, it gives a you a real insight into what your readers like, which might give you some insight into the type of products that you might like to create. The number two category that I’m going to talk about in a second is product sales. Most of the products that I’ve created to sell on my blogs, I’ve tested whether they will go over well with my audience by promoting a similar product that someone else has made as an affiliate. Affiliate marketing is great for that. It brings in an income, you don’t have too many expenses apart from actually writing some content to promote it. Number three, you can test a lot of ideas. You learn a lot about marketing as well. When you promote an affiliate product, you’re pushing people often to a sales page that someone else has created. By looking at those sales pages and seeing how they convert, it will help you a lot when you come to create your own sales pages as well. The other thing I actually would say about affiliate marketing is when you’re promoting someone else’s ebook, then later you create an ebook, sometimes the people you’ve promoted will then promote yours. You kind of end up with this win-win partnerships as well. Some of the people that we’ve promoted in the past have then created products for us as well. It’s all kinds of opportunities that come from doing affiliate marketing. Number two, income stream. I’ve already mentioned it a few times is product sales. You’ll see if you’re looking at the graphic that 69% of our product sales come from ebooks. For this period, 28% come from Lightroom Presets. Lightroom Presets are like a little plug in that you put into Adobe Lightroom to help you create different effects in your images. 2% came from courses, 1% from printable. Up until 2009, pretty much most of my income came from either affiliate marketing or working with advertisers or ad network. Mainly sponsorship and affiliate marketing. But in 2009, I decided to invest a little bit of time into creating my first product. They’re both ebooks. The first ebook on Digital Photography School was a Portrait Photography ebook which was largely a compilation of posts that I’ve already published on the blog with a little bit of new information. On ProBlogger, the first ebook was 31 Days to Build a Better Blog. Both of those ebooks did really well with my audiences. I saw enough profit from both of those ebooks to know that it was something that I want to do more often. Since 2009, we’ve released at least two or three ebooks every year since. I think we’ve done 35 or so ebooks now. Since 2009, ebooks have been one of our biggest income streams. Again, you’ll see that for the first half of this year, 69% of our product sales came from ebooks. 69% of the 31%, that is. Ebooks still are really great for us. Since 2009, we’ve started to experiment with other types of products as well. You’ll see in the list there’s printables, these are things where you just might create a few sheets where people can print them out at home. We had some posing printables. Our audience on Digital Photography School very often liked posing suggestions when they’re photographing people. We created a posing guide that they can print out and take with them. We also have had some courses. The reason that courses in this period were only 2% of that product breakdown is because we didn’t really promote them over the first half of this year. I will say courses have been quite profitable for us as well. To this point, we’ve only got three of them. We didn’t promote them in the first half of this year, but literally over the last month, finishing tomorrow actually, we’ve been launching a new course. If I was to do this breakdown for the second half of the year, I would suggest that courses would be a lot higher. Launching a course for us can be as profitable, if not more profitable, that launching an ebook. Usually they are higher price point. The other thing that you’ll see in that list is Lightroom Presets. We have, in this case, in the first half of this year, we launched one, out first ever Lightroom Preset bundle. Since then, we’ve launched another one. Again, they’ve been very profitable for us. Again, that’d be similar sort of revenue to a course or an ebook depending on the particular ebook I’m talking about there. Presets have been particularly popular for us. Courses have done well. Ebooks have done well. ProBlogger also had some ebooks, although we haven’t really release one for a while. That’s on my agenda for the month after the ProBlogger event is to start to create some courses and ebooks for ProBlogger as well. We’re looking at building some products. Watch this space on that front. Hopefully, there’ll be some income profit in next income report that I do. The third category, this one surprises a lot of people when I mention it. A lot of people don’t see that we do this one. We don’t do this one on ProBlogger so they don’t realize we do it. Our third income stream, third highest income stream is AdSense. Google’s AdSense program. Now I know some of you are literally dropping your iPhones right now. I can’t believe we’re doing it. It was the first income stream that I ever did back in 2004 or it’s maybe 2003 when I first started to experiment with it. It’s never gone away. It’s always work for us. I know AdSense doesn’t work with everyone and every type of blog. I know a lot of bloggers have never had much luck with it. Because Digital Photography School has large traffic, we get four to five million visitors a month, a lot more page views, that helps with banner ads. AdSense seems to like our site as well. We have had in the years gone by, AdSense has done just extraordinarily well to the point where people from AdSense can’t believe how much it makes. We’ve been used as a case study in different settings. I will say that our income from AdSense has decrease over the last couple of years. That has been for a couple of reasons. Firstly, we’ve been attracting a bit more direct sponsorship which I’ll talk about in a moment. Also, I’ve found just AdSense’s earnings have just been on a slow decline over the last few years. Our revenue per a thousand view RPM has just been declining a little bit. We’ve been working to try and pump it up a little bit more, we’ve had a little bit of success over the last month or so with getting a little bit higher but it’s something that has just slowly been sliding. I do find most people who use AdSense or other ad networks, there are quite a few around, have been finding that this income stream is kind of dying away a little bit. We’re now seeing a lot of the ad networks developing really quickly a lot of different products because they can see that this revenue is slipping. It’ll be interesting to see what they come up with next. AdSense makes up about 8% of our total income. That sounds small but it’s fairly significant. It’s certainly a nice direct deposit to get in my bank account every month. It doesn’t go up and down a lot. It just really depends on traffic. As I said, slowly declining as well. That’s income stream number three. The other good thing about AdSense is you’re not splitting that revenue with anyone. AdSense already takes their cut so you don’t have too many direct expenses from it as well. Number four income stream or profit stream for us is sponsorships. This is where we are working directly with a brand. This is something I started to do in the early days. I think it was back in 2004, 2005. I remember on my photography site back then, ringing up a camera store for the first time and saying, “Hey, would you like to reach people looking to buy cameras? Because I’ve got a photography blog.” Then I had to explain what a blog was. Eventually, I managed to convince a camera store to pay me $20 a month to advertise on my blog. It wasn’t much but it was recurring income because they signed up. Over time, as my traffic increased, I was able to increase that to $30 a month, $40 a month, $50 a month, $100 a month. I guess it’s kind of continued to grow since then. On Digital Photography School particularly, we offer sponsorship options to advertisers. We usually put the ads in the place of AdSense. We won’t sell any advertising, any banner ads, unless we can earn more from them than we can from AdSense. We know how much an ad will earn us in an ad slot with AdSense so we try to at least double that from a direct sponsorship engagement with a campaign. We’ve had companies like Canon, I think we had Tamron, we’ve had other photography education sites and centers like the New York Institute of Photography. We’ve had a variety of advertisers on Digital Photography School in the first half of this year. It’s not a massive amount for us, but 6%, again, it’s better than nothing. The other thing we do offer people who want to come on as a sponsors is not just banner ads. We offer them a placement in our newsletter. We have a newsletter that goes out to about 700,000 readers every month. We’re able to put that ad in front of that audience both as a banner ad in the newsletter but also a text ad in the newsletter. We also offer them the opportunity to do a competition on the site or even some social media advertising which we always disclose as well. On ProBlogger, we’ve not really done any banner advertising or any AdSense for many years now. We have done a few sort of partnership sponsorships campaigns. You will have heard on this particular podcast that we’ve featured 99 designs in the past. Edgar, Meet Edgar, the social media tool, they’ve been advertisers on the podcast as well. We’ve done a few sponsorships at our event. Our event’s profit largely comes from the sponsors. I haven’t included that profit in this category, I’ve included it later on in this income report in the event category. Sponsorship makes up about 6%. Not massive, but again all of these small income streams come together to add up. That’s one of the points that I want to get across to you today is the diversification of your income streams that actually can add up. The next category, I think we’re up to number five now. The fifth category is our job board on ProBlogger. Many of you will know that on ProBlooger, we have a job board. I’ve started it in 2006. It was a place where people looking to hire bloggers could advertise. You can find it at jobs.problogger.net. I don’t really say that link too much but it is linked to from all of the ProBlogger sites. We tweet out every job that gets advertised there. People pay us $50, US that is, for their ad to go up. It lasts for 30 days. When I first started it back in 2006, I remember the first week or two that I had the job board. We did have quite a few ads because I gave a lot of them away to friends to try to get a few ads on there. It kind of was a trickle. There might have been an ad every three to four days, maybe, if I was lucky. There would be weeks where we might only have one ad. Gradually over time, it’s grown. We are getting close, the last time I checked we’re getting close to our 6,000th ad placed on the job board. This is where you can probably do some sums. $50 times 6,000 ads. There were a few freebees in the early days but not really many at all. Considering the initial investment on the job board, which was minimal, I had someone code it. It wasn’t very well coded in the early days but it was there. It’s been a largely passive income stream. I’m very, very pleased that I started that job board back in 2006. As you can see, by doing those sorts of calculations, I probably spent several thousand dollars getting the thing up and running. It doesn’t really take that much work to keep it going. I do have occasional things that I need to interact with advertisers on. Occasionally, we need to delete an ad if it’s not appropriate and doesn’t meet our standards. But largely, it’s a fairly passive income stream. We’re actually at the moment investing some time and money into creating version two of it. It does need some updating. We want to give it some more features to advertisers but also applicants. Watch this space as well because we’ve got some new things coming on that particular job board. If you do want to advertise, $50 for 30 days, we do find a lot of advertisers email us a few days later and say, “Can you please take down our ad because we’re getting too many applicants.” We find a lot of people find really good applicants there. That was profit stream number five. Let’s talk number six which is our event, which is very topical, because as this podcast goes live, I’ll be packing my bags, the next day getting on a plane to go to our ProBlogger event, our 7th annual ProBlogger event here in Australia. Tickets are still on sale if you want to join us at probloggerevents.com. The virtual ticket really is where most of you would be able to get some value out of that. Our event is a massive focus for the ProBlogger team that I’ve got. It’s largely a labor of love. When I did start the event, seven events ago now, I did it mainly because I wanted to get Aussie bloggers together. I wanted to see what would happen when that happened. I saw a lot of value happening in the US events that I was going to. I didn’t really have profit in mind, I just didn’t want it to cost me anything. I wanted to breakeven. For the first three or four years of that event, it was pretty much a breakeven target every year. The problem that I had was that when 300 or 400 bloggers come together, you start having a lot of expenses. It became a bit of a risky thing to put on. I remember getting a bill from a hotel that was over $100,000. Thinking in my mind, if this doesn’t work, if people don’t show up, or if something goes wrong, it’s going to hurt a lot to put on this event that doesn’t work. I realized I needed to start to build some profit into the event not because I need the extra cash but because I didn’t want to hold that risk for myself. We have been trying to make it more profitable thing over the last few years. We’re still also really trying to keep it as affordable as we can. We always get comments from our attendees saying, “This is just so cheap.” We actually charge our attendees less than it costs us to put the event on. If we could break it down per attendee, we charge them about 80% of what it cost. We make out the risk, we make out the profit from working with sponsors. That’s where this profit comes from from the event. That goes up and down a little from year to year as different sponsors come and go. We’ve had some amazing sponsors over the last few years. Olympus is an ongoing sponsor for us, Olympus Australia, the camera maker. We’ve had a variety of different sponsors over the years. This year, we’ve got the virtual ticket back. That does help us to be a little bit more profitable. If you do want to give something back to ProBlogger and help us out to cover our cost, you can get that virtual ticket as well. The last category is other. There’s always another category in these types of of things. This is a very small amount. I think it was like 1%, yup, 1% of the income. It largely is speaking fees. Occasionally, I do speaking where I’ll get paid a fee. It’s book royalties from the ProBlogger book which was published years ago. I still occasionally get a little check, tiny little check. It was never a big one I have to say, if you want to make money, don’t write a book. It was better for branding and that type of thing. I still occasionally do get a little royalty there. I get out a check every quarter, or every six months from a copyright organization here in Australia. When a school here in Australia uses material on Digital Photography School, if you do, we get paid for that. That’s just something that happens here, I think, I guess through the Australian government. That’s a nice little bonus check. It’s never more than a thousand dollars or so at a go. There is other and occasionally I just get some other random things that come in as well. Those are the income streams. Every time I do an income report, I get asked about expenses. That is the flip side. I’ve tried to take those into account in just talking here about profit. Some of the things I do spend money on, it might be useful in sort of touching on that as well. It’s hard to nail some of them down specifically to the income stream because a lot of the expenses that I have, the biggest expenses that I have on my team. Some of my team work on different projects, some of them are just focused on the event for example. Some of them are just focused on the production of the ebook for example. But then, some of them work across different income streams as well. Let me just run through my team. We have an editor for each of my sites, they’re both part time. We have two business unit managers, one for Digital Photography School and one for ProBlogger. I have some administrative and customer service team members. I have a marketing person for Digital Photography School. All of my team are part time except for one. On top of that, there’s a huge array of other contractors. We hire people to proofread our ebooks, I hire people to edit this podcast, I hire people to write content on Digital Photography School, they get paid per article. We work with partners to create the ebooks, we work on a revenue share basis there as well. I guess on top of the people, the things like service, which are not cheap, the amazing array of software services and subscriptions that most bloggers have as well. For lending pages, email providers, and that type of thing as well. Most of which you can see over on the recommended blogging rasources page that I have as well. I guess my philosophy with the expenses is that you really do have to spend money to make money. I do that on people and tools as well. I guess there’s my time as well which is hard to put a value on as well but that’s certainly an expense. I work hard at what I do. There are my income streams. I know for a fact that what I’ve just shared then will resonate was some of you. Some of you will have very similar income streams. You might make most of your money from affiliate and product sales as well. I know on the flip side that many of our event attendees, their main source of income is working with brands and doing sponsored posts. I know others who have membership sites and that’s their number one form of income. There is a lot more ways that you can make money and I’ll link in today’s show notes to some further reading on all of the income streams that I’ve mentioned on how to build those. Also, some other recommended reading on other income streams that you might be interested in as well. I would love to hear back from you on how you make money from your blog if you are a full time blogger, or a part time blogger. You can leave a comment on problogger.com/podcast/150. Just one last call. Our event does happen the day after this podcast goes live or a couple of days after it goes live. If you’d like to be a part of that event virtually, you can get a virtual ticket. If you head over to problogger.net/virtualticket, you’ll be able to pick up a virtual ticket to that event and get all 50 sessions from this year’s event, including my opening keynote, including a keynote from Natalie Sisson from Suitcase Entrepreneur, from Bryan Fanzo talking about live streaming. We’ve got sessions on Instagram, YouTube, Podcasting, and many sessions on content creation, how to drive traffic to blogs. We got sessions on SEO. The list goes on and on. As a bonus, you also get 23 sessions from last year as well. All the audio files and slides from this year and last year. I look forward to chatting with you next week. Remember, we’re on a weekly schedule at the moment until the event’s finished where I will chat with you in another of our podcast. Thanks for listening today. I’ll chat with you then. This episode of the ProBlogger podcast was edited by the team at Podcast Motor who offer a great range of services including helping you to set up and launch your podcast as well as ongoing editing and production of the podcast that you produce. You can check them out at podcastmotor.com. 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 Pros and Cons of Long Posts Today, we have a question from Emma Cameron.  “Hi Darren, I love your podcast! I found your 7 day intensive blogging series very helpful, and it led me to write a post I might never have gotten around to otherwise. In answering my most frequently asked question, which is ‘What is Art Therapy’? This has turned into an incredibly long post which covers things which are not easily found elsewhere online. I have a question for you: is it better to leave it as a single, very long, authoritative and useful evergreen post, or should I split it up into several shorter posts? Which of those would be better for getting my website seen by more people, ranking higher in Google etc?” In Today’s Episode the Pros and Cons of Long Posts Writing a long post – Pros Readers get all of the information on one post It can increase reader satisfaction They can be quite comprehensive and authoritative Long posts get shared a lot Long posts can rank well in Google – possibly because of increased links or a ranking preference Writing a long post – Cons Long form content takes a lot of effort to research and write Unless you are an amazing writer, some of the readers may not get all the way through it Can be draining to the author when it comes to ideas for the long run Series of posts – Pros More posts to sustain you over time SEO advantage – the more focused your posts are there can be SEO advantages – A series of posts all linked to each other may rank for smaller key phrases Interconnected posts can help with SEO – Internal links A series can build momentum and give your readers a sense of anticipation A series may help build subscriber count Can help build more page views – good for stats A series may motivate a blogger to write more Can be used like a free course for your readers Series of posts – Cons Some readers will prefer to get it all at once Can sidetrack your whole blog for a bit Another option is maybe you can do both. Run a series, then compose all of it into a particular piece of content. This content can be used for an optin form or even sold as a PDF version. Further Resources on the Pros and Cons of Long Posts ProBlogger Event: Live Ticket ProBlogger Event: Virtual Ticket 7 Days to Get Your Blogging Groove Back 31 Days to Build a Better Blog Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view This week, I received a great email, a lovely email from Emma, one of our listeners of the podcast who asked me this question. She wrote, “Hi Darren, I love your podcast! I found your seven day intensive blogging series very helpful, and it led me to write a post I might never have gotten around to otherwise. In answering my most frequently asked question, which is ‘What is Art Therapy?’ this has turned into an incredibly long post which covers things which are not easily found elsewhere online. I have a question for you: is it better to leave it as a single, very long, authoritative and useful evergreen post, or should I split it up into several shorter posts? Which of these would be better for getting my website seen by more people, ranking higher in Google?” Great question Emma, and thanks for listening. I really do love that you enjoyed the Blogging Groove Challenge. I had a lot of very positive feedback and still can see in the Facebook group a lot of people still working through those seven challenges. This is a great question and I do have some thoughts on the topic and it’s one that I think bloggers should really ponder because there’s many times where it probably does make sense to write a long post and there’s some times where a series makes more sense too. I want to give you some thoughts on how to make that decision. Before I get into that, for the next few weeks we’re going to go back to a weekly show. We usually publish two podcasts episodes for week but while our ProBlogger event is on and it is going to be on in a week and a half from this episode goes live. I just want to scale things back a little bit for a couple of reasons. Firstly for those of you who are coming along to the event or who are buying the virtual ticket, I don’t want you to be too overwhelmed with the sound of my voice. But also for my own sanity and my team’s sanity, just want to scale things back a little bit while we do focus on getting that event up and running. The episodes will come out on a weekly basis for the next couple of weeks. Hopefully this will also give those of you who are still working through the Blogging Groove Challenge an opportunity to catch up a little bit and take a breath. We did do seven episodes in seven days starting back in Episode 137. This gives you a chance to really catch up on that. The last thing I’ll say speaking of the ProBlogger event, if you’d love to come along to the live event here in Australia on the Gold Coast, there still are a few tickets left for live attendees but you need to be quick and head over to probloggerevents.com. There’s an opportunity there to buy a live ticket. Those of you who want to join us at the virtual ticket, head over to problogger.net/virtualticket. You can get access to all 50 recordings and slides at the training sessions at the event, and you also get access to a Facebook group that we’ve got going for virtual ticket holders and live ticket holders and you also get access to all the recordings from last year’s event as well. Now, I want to tackle Emma’s question about long form content versus a series of shorter posts. The question of writing long posts versus breaking up posts into short posts and publishing them as a series is one that I do get fairly regularly. I know it’s something that a lot of bloggers invest a lot of time into writing a long post like Emma has. Often look at it and think this could be a whole month’s worth of content, this could be a lot of content that I could really break down. The temptation is many times to break it into a series. Sometimes, it actually is better for your readers if you do that and sometimes it’s better if it’s a long form piece of content. There’s no right or wrong answer on this one but there are certain situations where I think either one is probably the preferable thing to do. I want to give you some pros and cons of long posts and pros and cons of series of posts. Hopefully as I work through these, the answer will become clearer for you and for others who are asking this particular question. On one hand, we’ve got the option of writing a long post. The good things about long post, the beauty of this is really that your readers get all of their information on a topic in one uninterrupted post that they don’t need to keep coming back to over time and they don’t need to be clicking from one page to another to get all the information. I guess you really do need to keep in mind your readers on two fronts here. Firstly, you’ve got those who are reading your latests posts. Those of you who are coming to your blog, they don’t want to have to wait sometimes for the next three weeks to get all the information if you’re going to split it up. Also, those who are coming to your blog in a couple of months time and are finding your old content. Sometimes, it gets a little bit annoying clicking from link to link to link as well. The beauty of having that one post, that one long post, is that it can increase reader satisfaction and really make it easier for them to get all of your great information in one place. That’s purely from the reader’s perspective. The other good thing about long posts is that as you’ve mentioned in your question, Emma, there’s a sense that they can be quite comprehensive and authoritative. This gives you, the writer, some satisfaction that you’ve written something really helpful and it’s really impressive for a reader to come to a post that may be 2,000, 3,000, or 5,000 words long. There’s something very meaty about that. This can build credibility, can build authority, and it can also help to get your post shared a lot. What I found with a lot of our long posts, they do get shared a lot. I suspect that’s because people feel good about sharing something that’s very meaty and comprehensive. People notice the effort that you’ve gone to that is above and beyond to give them lots of good information. That’s another advantage of having a long post. I’ve also noticed some of our longer posts tend to rank really well in Google. You’ve asked about Google in your question. The reason that they’re raking well in Google may be that they get shared a lot more and they get linked to a lot more than some of our shorter posts. People are impressed by them but I have heard some SEO experts argue that longer posts can rank better than shorter ones as well. Certainly, there seems to be in my mind, in my experience, once you get past 500 or 600 words, Google does tend to take notice of the post as well. That’s not to say it has to be super long to get to that stage. There could be an argument there that longer posts will rank better as well but I have also seen some of our really short posts rank pretty well as well. I don’t want to just say long is the only way to go if you want to rank. A couple of good reason there to write a long form piece of content. One, it gives your readers a sense of satisfaction. It will impress your readers as long as the content is good and can help build some authority and credibility. It can increase your shares and it can also help you as a result of those shares and links as well as the length to rank a little bit better in Google. On the negative side of long posts, there are definition some things that you’ll want to consider. Firstly, this probably doesn’t really apply to Emma because she’s already written the post, but a long form piece of content can take a lot of effort to research and write, take a lot of time. I find some of my longer pieces have taken me several days and a lot of real effort and a lot of real intense effort to get them done and a lot of discipline as well. I remember writing one post that was over 7,000 words long and I knew from the start that it was going to take a long time to write it. I found motivating myself to write that piece of content a real effort, I’m not the most disciplined person in the world. That’s not to say that just because there’s a lot of work involved it’s a bad thing. Good things do take work. If you are someone who struggles with motivation and struggles with getting things done, they maybe there’s an argument for a shorter post. As I’ve said, in Emma’s case she’s already written it, so well done. Another challenge with long posts is that unless you’re an amazingly gifted and engaging writer, some of your readers probably won’t get through to the end of your post. A long form piece of content may not have as much impact for that reason on your readers. The reality is some people scan content online, some people don’t have much time, some people are on a mobile device where they may not feel like they really want to keep swiping and swiping and swiping. Some people get distracted halfway along an article. In terms of having an impact upon your readers, there might be an argument there for breaking things down into bite sized pieces so that readers can consume it in separate instances rather than expecting them to sit and wade through a long piece. That might be a factor. Some types of content will perhaps be a little more boring, a little more dry. You might want to break them down in some way. I’ve seen some studies talk about how people reading content online respond better to short, sharp pieces of content. Having said that, I’ve also seen some long pieces that have big impact upon people as well because they are written in a good way. There’s pros and cons there. Another problem with a long, comprehensive post is that they can actually drain you as the author of ideas that could sustain your blog for a longer period of time. Let me give you an example, I talked to one blogger recently who published his very first post on his blog. It was a mega post, it was 9,000 words long and it was everything he knew about his topic of his blog, about the whole niche. The post was amazing, 9,000 words of really useful, actionable content. He published it and then he sat down to start brainstorming ideas for future posts and he felt like he already wrote everything he knew. He had nothing left to write. Every time he would start to write a new post, he would say I already talked about that, I already gave all my tips on that in that first post. Sometimes, a long post can be impressive to your readers but it can drain you of all your ideas as well. This particular blogger wished he had written 20 to 30 shorter posts over his first month or so that contained exactly the same information as the big one. He realized he could’ve broken it down and had a whole month’s worth of content as well. There’s some pros and cons there of long form content. As I said, there’s no right or wrong answer. On the flip side, let’s look at the series of posts. Again, there’s some pros and cons. Some of the advantages of writing a series of posts gives you more posts to sustain you over time as my blogging friend found out in the example that I just gave, to be able to break that post down that you’ve written into maybe three or four posts might give you a couple of week’s worth of content which gives you a bit of a break from writing or enables you to prepare some other content or do something else on your blog as well. That’s an advantage potentially of having a series. On a search engine optimization perspective, I think there is an advantage of series of posts sometimes as well. The more focused your posts are, that can have some advantages with SEO. Instead of having one long post that might be quite broad and overarching in its topic, it might rank really well for that overarching phrase that you’re using but it may not be able to rank for some of the more focused keywords in your niche. A series of posts might allow you to rank for a lot of keywords over time. For example if I was on my photography blog to write a mega post on how to take a well exposed photo, that post might contain ten subtopics within it. It might contain information on shutter speed and aperture and ISO, seven or eight other topics. That pots might rank quite well for something like How to Take a Well Exposed Photo but it’s not going to ever rank for shutter speed or ISO or aperture. A series of posts that over time I roll out and they all link to each other might give the same information to my readers but I might be able to rank for all of those smaller key phrases. I guess here it really depends on what you want to rank for. If you want to rank for a really broad term, then a long megapost might be your best bet. If you are more interested in ranking for ten more focused terms, then a series might be better as well. A series of posts, there being more pieces of content, creates more ways into your site. Again, there’s some advantages and disadvantages there in terms of an SEO perspective. Other advantages of a series of posts, lots of interconnected posts can, some people argue, help with search engine optimization. Search engines tend to like links, they tend to like websites that are interlinked, lots of internal inks from one page to another can help Google to rank your site. One of the things I love about a series is that it can build momentum on your blog. Regular posts that build from one day to the next give your readers a sense of anticipation. They show your readers that you’re putting some thought, you’re taking them on a journey. Sometimes, readers can really respond very well to that. They feel like this blogger is really taking me on a journey, they’re really being thoughtful with the content that they’ve got. A series of posts can build anticipation in your readers as well and that can actually help you to get more subscribers as well. If someone comes across your first post in a series and it promises that tomorrow you’re going to write a second post, that builds anticipation and that might give them a reason to subscribe. One of the things that I do suggest if you have a series is always at the end of the post mention that there’s another one coming and then give people an option to subscribe so they can get notified when that particular post goes live. Series are great for building momentum, they’re also really good if you’re interested in getting more page views in your site. This is particularly relevant if you monetize your blog using an ad network like Adsense. It’s a CPM advertising where you get paid every time someone views the ad. This can be good for your stats and for earnings if you do monetize in that way. A series of posts can also motivate a blogger to write more. I talked before about how long form piece of content can be really draining to write and can take a lot of time and energy. If you struggle to write something of that size and to motivate your self, a series of posts might help you to break it down into more bite sized chunks. The idea for me of writing a massive long post that’s 9,000 words is not the most attractive thing, that doesn’t turn me on. I know I can sit down right now and write a thousand words on something, or 500 words on something. Breaking it down can help you to be motivated to write. One last thing I will say about a series of posts is that it can actually almost be used like a free course for your readers. This sense of building anticipation and building momentum with your readers can be really great. I’ve seen it work very well. For example if you announce you’re going to tackle a big topic over the month of September which is coming up, something that’s going to be valuable to your readers, offer to email them every time a post in that series goes live. It could be a really great way of building your email list and giving your readers a sense that they’re on an event. A good example of this is the challenge that we just did in this podcast, Seven Days to Get Your Blogging Groove Back. That was something I didn’t have an email list to associate with but by putting that on, it created this event for people to join and for people to get excited about. It’s hard to exactly explain why it works but it gives people a sense of belonging to something and they are participating in something. The idea of an event really can bring a blog to life. I’ve seen this happen many times with series of posts. 31 Days to Build a Better Blog started as a series of blog posts that we did over a month. It showed me just how powerful it was to create events on your blog that people can join into. Sometimes, a series, particularly if a series is a participatory type things like the Blogging Groove Challenge, 31 Days to Build a Better Blog, it wasn’t just about teaching people, it was about getting people to do something. A series that has some sort of action associated with it can be very powerful. Let’s lastly think about the downside of doing series. For me, the main downside of a series of posts is that some of your readers will simply prefer to get it all at once. It can be frustrating to have to wait for the next post in the series or to click from one post to another post to another post. All it takes is for one of those links from one post or the other to be missing or to be broken and then the person can’t find the end of the series. That can be a negative experience and very frustrating for ur readers. I know for a fact that I prefer to get all my information in one go in most cases. I don’t want to have to wait for the whole story. This becomes particularly frustrating when you get very bits with your content, when you do a series just for the sake of building more page views. We’ve all been to those sites which make you click the next button 40 times to get to the end of the piece of content and they break it down into such minute bits that it gets really frustrating. Another negative of a series is that it can actually side track your whole blog a little bit. If you have a blog which has normal content, every week you might have the same type of post and then suddenly you want to do a month long series that just looks at one aspect of your blog? For people who aren’t interested in what you’re doing in the series, that can actually be very frustrating. They don’t want that thing that you’ve gone off on a tangent, they just want what you normally do. A series can actually stop momentum for people who aren’t engaging in the series itself. I found this when I did 31 Days to Build a Better Blog, there was some of my readers who didn’t want to participate in that series. But for the whole month, that’s all I did. They were like where’s the rest of the stuff that you do? That was lots of short posts and they’re all activities that people can do, some people wanted longer form tutorials. You’ve got to think about do you cater for those readers as well, do you write extra content in there, how do you bring everyone along on the journey? You want to really think about how long your series is, is it going to be every post that you do, are you going to give something else for other people as well? How do you make the choice I guess is the last question. I’ve talked about the pros and cons of series and long form, there is no right or wrong choice here. Either one can work, I personally have had really success with both options. In my early days, I think I probably use series of posts more than I do these days. I really enjoyed writing in that way. I found it easier to write a series of short posts than one longer one. I felt that they created momentum, I found particularly when there was interactive components to them like 31 Days to Build a Better Blog and then Blogging Groove Challenge that people really responded well. I would put down some of the growth of my blogs to the fact that I did do those types of challenges and series of content. I also think there’s an advantage if you are tackling a big topic and you want your readers to be able to really digest the topic and do something with it. Sometimes, breaking it down can be good as well. Teaching someone something that’s very complicated and you want them to take their time in digesting that, sometimes it might be better to do that in a series of posts as well. I would really encourage you to think about a series of posts. I think from time to time, maybe a few times a year, a series can be really the feature of your year. Personally, I try and do two or three series of posts every year. They worked really well. I wouldn’t want every post I do on my blog to be a part of a series, I think there’s real value in sprinkling in some longer form content as well, or as your readers could end up getting a bit annoyed with you. You’re always leaving them hanging and waiting for the next thing. Definitely do a bit of both. The last thing I would say is that maybe you could do both with this piece of content that you’ve written, Emma. Maybe you don’t have to choose just one or the other. One of the approaches that I’ve experimented with a number of times is running a series of posts and then combining all the parts of that series into one other piece of content. You might do a series of five posts on this particular topic, run it over a week or two weeks, let your readers really digest that. At the end of that time, say for those of you who want the whole thing that you can print or that you can share with someone else, here’s a PDF version of it and actually give them the whole lot as a second piece of content. You might even make that a part of an opt in. You might say if you want the whole lot for printing or for sharing or for referring to later, just shoot me your email address and I will send you a copy of that. The other thing you might like to do is sell that long piece of content. This is what I did with 31 Days to Build a Better Blog. 31 blog posts that were combined together into a PDF, I added a little bit more content to it in that first version and then I offered it for sale. I was really skeptical that anyone would want that but it turns out that many thousands of our readers did want that long form piece of content that they can work through time and time again. I think the reason for that was partly that it was long form, partly that I organized that long series of posts into one easily digestible piece of content, and also it was a very interactive series as well. That might be one thing to consider that actually turned out to be my most profitable ebook on ProBlogger. Well worth considering and an option to really do both of what you’re asking as well, Emma. I hope that’s been helpful for you. If you enjoyed the ProBlogger podcast, I would love it if you would head over to iTunes and give us a rating and a review. I look forward to chatting with you next week. Thanks! 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.

Finding a Balance Between Family Life and Blogging Life Today, we are talking about family and blogging. One of the reasons I was attracted to blogging was because it seemed like something that would allow me to have some flexibility in my life and time for family. Today, I’m going to talk about how that turned out, and the struggle and tensions that can arise when blogging with family around. My blogging career didn’t turn out quite as we expected it would, but my full-time blogging does allow me flexibility and to be involved with day to day family life. By working at home, I can greet my kids at the door after school, attend daytime school concerts, give my kids rides when needed, and take my son to a cafe on Fridays. There are also challenges with working at home and being so close to family all of the time. Family and blogging demands can pull on each other and achieving balance can be a challenge. In Today’s Episode Family Life Blogging Life Balance – Tips on Getting it Right Set aside time for blogging or your business and set time aside for your family – Carve out times where you are 100% focused on each Become as organized as you can be – I get more done when I have less time because I plan better Communicate your boundaries – The schedule doesn’t work unless you communicate it to those around you I talk about my work and share with the kids Set up signals and reminders that I am focusing on work, if I’m in my office I am working – this will eliminate distractions – physical separation and signal – if the door is shut, I am not to be disturbed Have the ability to work outside the home – cafes, libraries, I rented a room in a church, I also found a co-working space – mixing up the working environment helps with creativity and eliminates distractions Have a way to capture ideas on the run – ideas and inspiration in the middle of family time – use a notebook or phone with apps like Evernote Extended time away from blogging is useful – I spend 3 or 4 weeks a year where I don’t check my blog at all – good to unwind – good for business to come back fresher Delegate and outsource – Getting other people involved in some of the work of my business has helped me considerably   Get help in other areas of your life – a cleaner or a gardener Make peace with the tension and be mindful and keep priorities in mind, there will be times that you get out of balance. Further Resources on Family Life Blogging Life Balance – Tips on Getting it Right Virtual Ticket for upcoming ProBlogger Conference Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Darren: You can do it. Mr. Five: I can’t getting it. Darren: Hi there, welcome to ProBlogger. Mr. Five: Hi there, welcome to Progg… Darren: Say it again. Mr. Five: Hi there, welcome to Pro…dagger Darren: ProBlogger. Mr. Five: Pro…B…Blogger Darren: ProBlogger. Mr. Five: ProBlogger. Darren: Pro, I said it wrong. ProBlogger. Mr. Five: Plo…Blogger. Darren: We should change the name to something else, what should it be? Mr. Five: Hi there, welcome to the Rowse Family. Darren: The Rowse Family, that would be much easier and nice to say. Mr. Five: Today we’re talking about family and blogging. Darren: Hi there, it’s Darren from ProBlogger here. That was Mr. Five, we’ll call him. He’s my five year old son. He’s home with me today. It made me think about a question that I get asked quite a bit. How do you juggle family life and blogging life? Ever since I’ve been in blogging, I blog from home. This has been a bit of a juggle for me because I started blogging when I was newly married. We were dreaming of having a family, having kids. Once we didn’t have them yet, one of the reasons that I was first attracted to the idea of blogging as a way of earning money and building a career in blogging was that it seemed like something that would enable me to have some flexibility and would enable me to have work but also be involved in my family and the raising of my kids. That’s what I want to talk a little bit about today. How did that turn out? Some of the expectations didn’t quite turn out to come true but some of them did. I want to talk a little bit about that juggle because there is some tension there. Most of you who are blogging and raising a family, or blogging at home where there are family distractions, noise around will know some of those tensions. As I said when I start blogging, one of the things I was attracted to was this ability to have some flexibility in my life. Our early plan, Vanessa and my early plan with blogging was that it would be a great part time job for me to have and we would both work part time and share caring for the kids. At that time, we had no idea really what blogging was going to lead to. We had no idea how big blogging would become as an overall medium but also for us in a personal way. As my income in my blogging grew, we quickly discovered that the income being generated by my blogging was going to exceed Vanessa’s earning capacity. Some of her dreams shifted as we began to have kids as well. In the end, we decided that she would be the primary caregiver of the kids and also do some part time work and I would work full time on my blogging. She’s now become a blogger as well but that’s another story for another day. I guess why I’m telling you this story is that things didn’t quite turn out as we expected with regards to blogging. But it certainly has been something that has given us as a family incredible flexibility. It’s allowed me whilst I do it full time on my blogging to be very involved in the day to day of family life. I work at home, which means I’m here when the kids leave for school and preschool. Mr. Five who you just met before goes to Kindergarten, pre-school here. I’m here when they return home, I usually make a point to greet them at the door when they come home and at least connect with them for a few minutes before I get back to work. I’m able to drop them off at school, pick them up from school when needed, and go to mid-week school concerts and activities from time to time as well. Be involved in classrooms as a volunteers at times as well. I love that. I love that. Today is actually a really good example of that. It’s Friday here. On Friday mornings, every Friday morning almost, I take my eight year old to a local café before he goes to school for some one on one time. That’s something I did with my eldest child who is now 10 for a couple of years as well. In this time we spend time doing his homework, or he does his homework, he reads to me, then we have a chat over hot chocolate. I’m not sure that that kind of time would have happened if I was working in another kind of job and I had to commute. Blogging’s been really flexible in that way. This afternoon, I’ve got Mr. Five at home with me. Vanessa’s taking an interstate trip with the girlfriend for a girl’s weekend. Again, it’s only because I’m blogging that I could see having the opportunity to be involved in this way and have some flexibility around that. Another great thing I love about blogging and the flexibility that it brings is that it can be done anywhere in the world that there’s internet, at least. There’s an opportunity to travel as a family beyond what annual leave of a job might be able to give us. Last year for instance, we took a month of traveling in the US. I went over to speak at Social Media Marketing World, then we continued to travel for three or four weeks after that. Also, I was able to blog from the road at night and then have fun during the days going to Disneyland and all of the other things that we were able to do over that particular trip. There’s definitely some upsides about blogging when it comes to family. These are things that do attract many people into blogging. Many people in fact start blogging in the time within a transition of family. Many of the attendees of that comfort start blogging because they’re home for the first time having kids after having a professional career. They want to engage some of the skills that they’ve brought up in that career. Blogging affords them the ability to do that. There’s definitely challenges also. Anyone who works from home whether they’re a blogger or have some other kind of business or work that they do at home knows some of those challenges particularly when there are kids involved. Today, I want to share with you a few of the lessons that I’ve learned along the way. I want to say really upfront is that I’m no expert in this. There are times where the balance for me between family and work gets out of balance one way or the other. Sometimes family actually competes with work. I don’t spend enough time working because things build up in family and have to be done. There are other times where work can get in the way of family as well. I do not want to portray anything today saying, “I’ve go this fully worked out.” But I have learned a few things along the way over the last thirteen years of juggling this. For those of you who don’t know, I’ve got three boys. You met Mr. Five before, there’s Mr. Eight and Mr. Ten. They’ve all just had birthdays in the last few weeks. Three boys, it’s a pretty crazy house at times but we have learnt a lot of things along the way. Here’s a few of those lessons for you. The first thing I’ll say is that I think it’s really important to set aside time for blogging or for your business, and time for your family. The temptation is to try blog while also doing the family stuff. There are times where you just have to do that. You have to blog when the kids are there in front of you, or while you’re supervising them, or while they’re watching a movie, or while something else is going on. But what I discovered is that I am a much better parent when I’m 100% focused on my kids. I’m a much better blogger when I’m 100% focused upon my blog. Not all of us have the luxury of being 100% focused on either of those activities at all times but I think it’s really important to try and carve out some times where you are 100% focused upon your family and 100% focused upon your blogging. For me, ultimately, my family is my number one priority. I would drop everything else for them if it came to that. But in order to serve them and to feed them, to cloth them, I have to have some kind of income. My family has to have income coming in. As a result, business also has to be a high priority for me and it’s also something I enjoy doing as well. For my own benefit, for my own mental health and satisfaction and having meaning in my life, I want to set aside time to blog as well. For me, we’ve come up with, or for us, we’ve come up with a bit of schedule in terms of the times that I blog, and in the times that I work, in times that are for family. For example, this is how it works for us at the moment. This is a bit of a fluid kind of schedule, different life stages, and on different days and different weeks, it does change a little bit. But in general, the time before 9:00AM in the morning is almost always 100% focused on my family. The time from 9:00PM to 5:00PM during weekdays is almost 100% focused upon my business. The time after 5:00PM until about 7:30PM, 8:00PM is almost 100% focused upon my family and particularly the kids. The time from 7:30PM, 8:00PM onwards, is usually dedicated to Vanessa although sometimes we mutually agree that it would be an evening that we dedicate to work because Vanessa works at home as well. There are probably two or three nights a week where we sit on the couch next to each other and work, and maybe have the television on in the background. And then there’s another couple of nights a week where we just hang out together and have a chat just watch together, or do something else. There’s the weekends. For me, most of the weekends are pretty much dedicated to family. Occasionally we will do a little bit of work, maybe on one of the evenings just to schedule some social media. But most of the weekends are pretty much dedicated to the family. That’s how it works for us. As I mentioned before, that’s changed over the years to suit the stage of life that our family’s at. Also on any given day, we may kind of talk about how things might run a bit differently from day to day. For example today where Vanessa’s out, I’m spending most of the afternoon with Mr. Five. It doesn’t really matter how you start through. I almost hesitated to share how we do that because every family will be different, every individual will be different. The key is to attempt to find some time where you can dedicate your focus purely to blogging, to business, and purely to your family. I think both your family and your business are going to benefit from that. The next thing I’ll say is that then it really becomes a matter of becoming as organized as you possibly can be particularly in those times when you’re 100% focused upon your work. Today for example, I’ve only got two or three hours this morning to purely work, to be 100% focused on my work. I had to make a decision this morning about how I was going to spend that time. I actually find the days where I have less time to work are the days that I’m usually most productive. I actually get more done when I only have a half day to work than if I’ve got a whole day. You tend to fill up your time when you’ve got lots of it doing all kinds of stuff that doesn’t really matter. Today, I came out with the list of the things that I needed to achieve today in those three hours. There’s a whole heap of tips that we could give around organization but for me it really boils down to working out what is important, making a list, and ticking off those things. Having said that, there will be times where you probably are doing a bit of a juggle. I know many of the listeners of this podcast listening to my show are going that’s totally unrealistic for me, I don’t have that much time. I don’t have the luxury of being able to focus 100% on my blog. I know a lot of parents are juggling a lot. It’s just unrealistic to do that, you might have little kids at home and not be able to have someone else help out in that way. There are, I guess, other things that you can do in those times when you are juggling things like today for example. Today as I looked at my time, I said to myself I’ve got these three hours where I can be focused 100% upon my business. In those times, you can be 100% focus, it may only be for 45 minutes when your kid has a nap. There are the times that I would suggest you put a time, that time aside to create. Personally, I find it really how to create content when the kids are there in the room with me. That’s the time where I, if I do have a 45 minute break where I can work, usually I will dedicate that sort of time to being creative. There will be other times in this afternoon, I’m sure there’ll be times where I’ll be 100% focused on Mr. Five and there will be a few other times where he’ll enable me to do a little bit of work and that’s totally fine. He’s quite content at times to play by himself, or he might watch an episode of one of his favorite shows, or play outside if it stops raining. There would be a few times where I know I would be able to do a little bit of work. It’s in those times that I won’t create, I’ll do my email, I will do social media. These are things that don’t take as much creative energy from me. I guess what I’m trying to encourage you to do here is if you’re juggling kids and work, and there are times where you can work but you also have to be aware of the family around you, I guess think about the activities that you do in those times. Try in the times where you can fully focus upon you work, you use those times to create and the other times to do more administrative type things. Another tip I’d give you is communicating your boundaries. I’ve just run through with you my schedule of how I spend my time knowing that is good for me. But it only ever really works if you communicate it with those around you. For me, that’s more of a conversation and me just sign to my family this is the way it’s going to be this week. Ultimately, it’s a conversation I have with Vanessa to work out those boundaries about how our family’s going to run. We do from time to time ask our kids and involve our kids in our family schedule as well. We think it’s important that they take some ownership over that. But then I guess it’s about trying to communicate to our kids the priorities as well. There’s a couple of things that I try and do here. Firstly, as my kids are getting older now, I’m trying to have more and more conversations about my business and what I’m doing with my business. They know I’m in my office a fair bit of time. I think it’s important that they know what I’m doing. I talk about my work. When we have dinner together as a family, we go around the table and everyone shares something that they did today. I try and talk about the types of things that I’m doing. What is a podcast? What am I talking about in my podcast? I’ll tell them tonight about this podcast. What is the work that I’m doing? Helping them to understand that, but also trying to help them to understand why I do it. I think that’s really important as well. They understand that the reason that I work is because I enjoy it, I’m trying to help other people through my work, but I’m also trying to make some money for our family. I think it’s important to share those types of things. That’s certainly the way that I was brought up. Second thing for me in terms of communicating with your family is we try to set up little signals and reminders to the kids particularly around those times that I am focusing upon my work. Now, for me, this mainly comes down to the fact that I work in my office. If I’m in my office, it’s a signal to them that I’m at work. I rarely work in front of my kids, in the family areas of the house. I generally don’t work in the kitchen, or in the laundry, in the living room. I generally work in my office unless they’re not home or they’re in bed. Sometimes, I would do work on the couch at night but they’re in bed. This is good for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it means when I’m working, I’m eliminating some of the distractions that come with working in family areas. Luckily, my office is at the front end of the house. The family areas are at the back. That does gives some separations. It also gives them the signal that I am working and that I need to focus. The other thing that I do is that I have this amazing tool, it’s called a door on my office. It’s great because it’s the signal. If the door is shut, my kids know that I need to focus, and I need not to be distracted, and I need them not to interrupt me unless it’s an emergency, unless it’s really important. If the door’s open, I keep it open quite a bit when they’re home, it means that I’m happy for them to disturb me. This is just a little signal that we’ve kind of built in. I communicate around. I remind them of it. There are times where they ignore it and they do burst in when I’m doing a webinar in front of a thousand people. That’s happened a number of times. But most of the time, they’re pretty respectful of that, even Mr. Five. It works out pretty well. It’s also good for Vanessa as well. She knows not to come down and ask what’s going on or to my arrangements for the evening when the door is shut as well. That’s particularly useful. I know other people have other signals in their family. I know one friend who puts on a shirt and tie when he’s at work even though he works at home. It helps him to get in the zone for his work, helps him mentally to kind of get in that zone but also shows his family that he’s in work mode. He has to work in a family area because they live in a small house. He’s got his tie on, occasionally even puts a suit on. That’s the signal to his family that he’s trying to work. I know someone else who has a little sign that they put on their office door. They actually work in the second living area in their house. That area sometimes is a family area, sometimes it’s a work area. He will shut the door and he’ll put a little sign on it similar to what you put on the hotel door to tell housekeeping that you want your room to be serviced. His sign says something like, “I’m at work” or “Come and say hi.” He flips it around depending on what’s going on at that time. These little signals to family to help put boundaries around that work can be useful as well. Another thing that I’ve tried numerous times over the years in different ways is to have the ability to work out of the home as well. There are certain times where it’s just too hard to work at home. I have the luxury of having Vanessa at home as  well so I can leave the home. I know some people don’t have that luxury as well. But for me, there’s been a number of ways that I’ve worked out of the home. For many years, it was working out of cafés. Many of you who are long term ProBlogger readers will have read blog posts where I’ve talked about working out of cafés. That’s been great. I quite like working in that environment where there’s some white noise, where there’s other people around, I find that kind of semi social. But then there are other times where I’ve worked out of libraries. Our local library has a nice little area where it’s relatively quiet. There’s desks, it’s a nice little environment to work. In more recent times, I found a room in a local church that I’ve hired for me and my team to work out of. Most Friday mornings is the time where, one it gets me out of the house, and away from family.  My son is usually home on a Friday morning so it gets me away from the family, gives them some space where he can be a little bit noisy but also it gives us a space to work as a team. Also over the last six months, I found a co-working space not far from where I live where I can pay a daily right to spend time. It’s got wifi, and a printer, and coffee machine, and all of that type of stuff. That’s a bit of a social environment as well. I find those types of environments good because they do mix up my working environment which I think helps me with my creativity but also gets me out of the home, away from some of those distractions at home. Particularly if I need to really get something done, if I’m working on a big project, if I’m working on an ebook that I’m writing, or a keynote that I’m about to deliver, I often will go up to the co-working space where I just find being away from the distractions of home. I’m able to be super productive on those days. Another quick tip that I’ll give you is to have a way to capture ideas on the run. As much as I try and separate out blogging and family times, I do find that I get all kinds of ideas and inspiration in the middle of family time. I used to always carry a little notebook around with me so that I could capture those ideas on the run. But these days, I use my phone, I use Evernote or other note taking apps. Occasionally, I’ll write those down, type them onto my phone. Other times, I’ll record them as a little audio file as well. I find capturing those ideas on the run is really useful. Many times, those ideas don’t come back again. I find my memory’s not that great. To be able to have them there to come back to after I’ve been with the family, when I’m back in the work mode, is good as well. I’ve got three more tips to give you. Firstly, I find extended time away from blogging to be really useful as well. I did mention earlier that I love blogging because I can do it from anywhere in the world, it enables me to blog while on the road, having vacations, have more vacations perhaps as a result of that. I think it’s also really important to have extended time away from your blogging as well where you can for an extended period of time just dedicate yourself to family and to other things in life. I try and have at least three, maybe four weeks a year where I try not to check my blog at all. There’s at least a week away from blogging. Usually for me, two of these weeks are over the Christmas break herein Australia in summer. We usually go away for a couple of weeks down to the beach. This is a just a good time because it’s for family, it’s for me to unwind, it’s good for my mental health, for my family, but it’s also I find good for my business as well to have a little bit of time where I’m not paying attention to it. I usually come back fresher. It is hard to completely get offline. For me, I find myself get a bit edgy over the first few days. But after a couple of days, I’m usually pretty good at. Also I think it’s probably a particularly useful thing if you blog about everyday stuff, or you blog about things like travel which could easily turn into content. I think having time where you’re not capturing and creating content is important for you, but it’s also really important for your family. Not every experience that you have needs to be captured and turned into content. It’s tempting when you are on holiday, when you are traveling and seeing interesting things, and getting ideas. But I think sometimes resisting that temptation to turn into content is good for you, but that’s probably even better for your family. I have talked to a number of bloggers and their families who feel the kids end up feeling like they have been turned into content. There’s a tension there around that. I guess create memories, not just content, when you’re away. I know that’s hard. I particularly now that’s hard being married now to a blogger who does blog about travel. There’s is a bit of tension that within Vanessa with that. I encourage you to wrestle with that particular one. Second last tip is to delegate and outsource. One of the things that really helped me so much over the last three to four years particularly is that I’ve been able to get other people involved in some of the work with my business. This has taken time. You obviously need to have some income before you can start paying people to help you. If you’re at that point where your blog has grown and you’ve got some income, consider investing some of that income into getting people alongside you to help you. For many, many years, probably the first eight or so years of my blogging, I tried to do it all which meant I had to be constantly online, I had to be moderating comments around the clock because the spammers were getting in and I had to monitor my tech, whether my servers are up, I was getting alerts during the nights saying my service were down. One of the best things I ever did was to begin to get other people to help me with my blogging. I think I spoke about in my last episode about how one of the best things I ever did was getting Simon on to help me with my customer support emails. That freed up so much time for me to focus upon the things that I was best at within my business but also freed up a whole lot of time for family and for the rest of my life. I’ve become less of a workaholic as a result of getting other people involved in my business. It does obviously add up to the expense of your business that maybe something that you need to be working towards. It’s I think enabled me to build a better blog which is better for my readers but also better for me and my family as well. I guess the other area that you might want to consider getting help in is other areas of your life. I’ve touched on this in other podcast as well. Again, you might need to wait until you’ve got some bit of a steady income from your blogs. Perhaps by investing some of that income into getting help around the home, maybe with child care, maybe with getting a cleaner, or getting someone to help with the garden. Maybe that will also enable you to find some more time for your business but also for you family. That’s something that may come overtime as well. We do a bit of that. We don’t have any full time help by any means around the home but we do from time to time have people come in and help us with gardening, and some cleaning. Occasionally, particularly when life is getting busy to help us to free up a little bit of time to do other work but also spend better quality time with our family. Those are the main tips that I’ve got for you today. I guess the last thing I’ll say is you’ve got to make peace with this tension that you’re probably feeling. I think it’s probably healthy to feel that. Most bloggers do have this tension. We have a limited amount of time. How we spend that, I think it’s good to have some tension around that. Good to be mindful about that and to be thinking about that and to be intentional about that. The key for me really is about communication and trying to keep your priorities in mind. There will be times where you will get out of balance. That’s natural and it may even be a good thing as long as you’re aware of where things are out of balance and you’re able to rectify that in times as well. I’d love to hear your tips on this particular topic. It’s one that I know many of our readers do struggle with. How do you juggle your business life, your family life, and the rest of your life as well? It may not be that you have kids, but maybe there’s tension that you feel like you could be doing more of other activities as well. How do you keep that all in balance? Do you keep it in balance? I’d love to hear your thoughts on that particular question as well. Mr. Five: Thanks for listening to my Dad today. Please buy a ProBlogger ticket so I could go to Disneyland. Darren: See you later. Mr. Five: See you later. Darren: Mr. Five would really love to go to Disneyland. If you’d like to help him get there, you can buy a virtual ticket for the ProBlogger Conference. If you head over to problogger.net/virtualticket, you’ll find all the information of the virtual ticket for the upcoming ProBlogger Conference which gets you access to 50 sessions of content recorded at the live event plus 23 sessions of great actionable content from last year’s event. All the information is available for you at problogger.net/virtualticket. How did you go with today’s episode? How do you balance your business life and family life? How do you keep it all in balance? Do you keep it all in balance? I’d love to hear your tips. Enjoy this podcast? Sign up to our ProBloggerPLUS newsletter to get notified of all new tutorials and podcasts below.

Tips on How to Manage Incoming Email Is email sucking away all of your time, and taking away from your blogging? Today’s topic comes from one of our readers. Phil says, “I’ve been blogging a couple of years now and in the last 6 months have seen quite a bit of growth in traffic to my blog. This is great but I’m noticing with it is coming a significant rise in the incoming emails I get. I feel like I’m drowning in it and that it’s taking me away from my blogging. “Do you have any systems or tools to help you manage incoming email?” Email is a challenge for most of us – whether we’re bloggers or not. But for those of us who have blogs with growing traffic it can quickly get out of hand. Today, I’m going to share how I deal with email. Listen to my thoughts in the player above or here on iTunes. In Today’s Episode Tips, Tools and Techniques for Managing Incoming Email I use gmail for my email I use canned responses in gmail – there is a setting under the labs link – canned responses save you time when you are asked the same question over and over again Have a FAQ frequently asked question page – Anyone who sends an email has access to the link to the FAQ page – this answers many common questions Contact Form – Have a contact form, where people can contact you with a link to the FAQ page – ProBlogger uses Gravity Forms Have a dropdown menu that directs where or who the email should go to. On dPS we have a dropdown menu with 5 options that the user can select after filling out the other fields. Have folders in gmail setup for each incoming email area – use filtering You can also put the answer to the frequently asked question on your contact form Link to social sites on contact form – or even push readers to your facebook page – be clear and set expectations Have help to respond to email – hire someone to help – customer support – We use a paid tool called zendesk, which also has canned responses – ticketed system Use filters on gmail – I have hundreds of filters on gmail – bulk for emails on products sales – keep records to serve customers – quick gmail search of transactions to see if customer purchases a product or not – emails you want to keep, but don’t want to read Tell gmail to skip inbox and mark it as read and put it in the ebooks folder – very powerful Filter emails for reading later – receipts for monthly subscriptions – only want to read these at tax time Unroll.me scans inbox and shows you subscriptions – give you choice to unsubscribe in bulk – or continue to receive them – or roll them into a digest Boomerang Chrome extension – set emails to appear in your ebox later or in the morning so that they don’t get lost – you can tell it when to send your emails – I don’t want to send email at night – tell boomerang to send email in the morning Further Resources on Tips, Tools and Techniques for Managing Incoming Email Tell me in 200 words or less your bravest story Canned responses in gmail ProBlogger FAQ page ProBlogger contact form page Gravity Forms dPS contact form with dropdown menu Zendesk Unroll.Me Boomerang for Gmail   I would love to hear what you use to manage your incoming emails. What are the tools and techniques you use? How many unread emails are in your inbox? Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Is email sucking all your time and taking you away from your blogging and other important aspects of your life? Today, prompted by a reader question, I want to share some tools, techniques, and tips for handling the overwhelming amounts of email that you will start to get once your blog begins to grow. My name is Darren Rowse and welcome to Episode 147 of the ProBlogger podcast. The topic I wanna tackle today comes from a question from Phil, one of our readers, who says, “I’ve been blogging for a couple of years now. In the last six months, I’ve seen quite a bit of growth in traffic on my blog. This is great but I’m noticing with it is coming a significant rise in the incoming emails I get. I feel like I’m drowning in it and it’s taking me away from my blogging. Do you have any systems or tools that help you manage your incoming email?” Thanks for the question, Phil. Before I start, I want to just mention a little personal project that I’m working on at the moment that I’m looking for a little bit of help on. If you’ve got a couple of moments, you can really help me to shape this little project that’s coming up. I want to hear your brave story, I want to hear the bravest thing that you’ve ever done. If you head over to problogger.net/brave, there’s a little opportunity there for you to tell me in 200 words or less your bravest story. We’re collecting these stories for an upcoming podcast project that I’m hoping to get underway later this year. The podcast has nothing to do with blogging whatsoever, the story doesn’t have to do with your online brave moments or anything to do with work at all. Your stories could be work related or they could be relationship related, they could be to do with your health, they could be to do with adventure. Fun, brave things that you’ve done. It’s totally up to you but I’d love to hear your bravest moment, the thing that you’ve done that took the most courage. Let’s get into today’s show where we’re going to talk about getting your email under control. This question from Phil is one that I want to approach today by telling you a little bit about what I do but I’m a little bit nervous in doing it because I know that this is an area that I constantly need to be working on. Email is not an area that I have a great track record with. I get thousands of emails every week. A lot of them are automated emails and many of you will be familiar with those, those sorts of emails that you get from social networks when someone follows you and all of those types of things. I’m going to tell you how I deal with those. I also get a lot of emails from readers. One of the things that I’ve noticed since 2002 is that my incoming email has just exponentially grown almost every year on year on year to the point where literally thousands of emails come into my business every week. I want to share today how I deal with email and how my business deals with email. Most of what I want to share today is relevant for you if you are a solo entrepreneur, if you’re just a blogger working by yourself, but there are a few things that I also talk about when it comes to having a team as well. I’m putting these into no logical order. There’s a number of them and I’m going to give you some techniques but also some tools as well. The first thing I’ll say is that I use Gmail for most of my email. Most of what I’m going to share today does have some relevance with Gmail although some of the tools will work in other systems as well. One of the things that I do love and the first thing that I thought of when I was thinking of Phil’s question is that I have in Gmail, I use canned responses. Some of you will be familiar with canned response whether in Gmail or other systems, and other systems do have this. One of the things I love about Gmail is that they have this little setting. If you go into the settings and then look for the Gmail Labs link, in that there are a number of features that people at Gmail or other people put together but they haven’t incorporated them into the main release of Gmail. One of the little lab feature that they have there is what they call Canned responses. A canned response basically is going to save you time when you get asked the same question over and over again. Many of the emails that I get from readers on ProBlogger or Digital Photography School are similar to one another, I get a lot of common questions, frequently asked questions. I have put together a number of canned responses that I can reply to those common questions within a click or two. To get into the canned responses setting, you go into your Gmail account and look for your settings. Look for labs and then enable canned responses. I’ll put a link in today’s show notes to how to set up your canned responses. Let me give you a really quick example of how I use it. I get a lot of PR pitches, people sending me all kinds of things or wanting to send me things, wanting me to link to them. A lot of the PR pitches that I get are completely irrelevant. For example, I won’t tell you the exact product name or manufacturer, but in the mail two days ago I got some hair wax from a PR agency wanting me to write about it. For one, I do not have a fashion or beauty blog. They should’ve sent it to my wife but it was addressed to ProBlogger. Two, I don’t have hair. I get a lot of pitches like that and most of them do come in via email, most people don’t just send me hair wax in the mail. One of the things I’ve done is I’ve created a canned response that I send to anyone who sends me an irrelevant PR pitch. It’s politely worded, as much as I would like to get a little bit angry with them and say hey, why don’t you look at my blog? I just have a polite declining of their approach. It’s really simple. Every time I get a PR pitch, I can just simply respond with a canned response for PR pitches. Another common one that I get is a lot of guest post pitches. Whilst occasionally we do have a guest post on ProBlogger, we get hundreds of those sorts of requests every month. We probably publish one or two a week at the most. We have to reject a lot of people and that can take a lot of time to write an individual response to every person so we have a canned response. I’m able to select that. I then usually will tweak it a little bit, add the person’s name, personalize it a little bit if I’ve got some feedback for them and a reason why. The bulk of that email is a canned response. We get a lot of SEO pitches, people wanting us to link to them. We get a whole heap of these common requests. The simplest way for us to do that is to simply select this canned response and hit reply. That saves me a lot of time, saves me having to write all of those answers one by one. Another thing that you can do if you do get asked a lot of the same question is to have a page on your site for frequently asked questions. This is something I do have on ProBlogger and I just updated it today because it was getting a little bit dated when I went to have a look at it. There were a few things on it that weren’t really up to date. We link to this from our contact form so that anyone who wants to send us an email through the contact form on ProBlogger, there is a request that they check out our FAQ page. Not everyone looks at it but it has reduced the amount of emails that we get because we answer a lot of the common questions on that particular FAQ page. If you go and have a look at my FAQ page, I’m just opening it now as I talk to you, you’ll see I’ve got different categories of questions. I’ve got some questions that I get about ProBlogger. One of the questions we get asked a lot is what blogging platform do you use? I’ve written a lot about WordPress and why we use WordPress. I simply have the question what blogging platform do you use and then I’ll link to some articles that I’ve written on that particular topic. Another question, can you link to my blog? I get that question quite a bit. I’ve written this thing, could you link to it? I have my response to that. Could you take a look at my blog and review it? Or, do you do consulting? These types of questions I get asked a lot. Underneath that, I’ve also got some other questions about my life. Where do you live? How long have you been blogging? How did you start? What did you do before you started blogging? All of these questions, I answer that. Try and add humor to it a little bit. As I’m looking at my FAQ page right now, I could probably update it a little bit further by personalizing it, perhaps even putting a video onto it. Simply by having the answers to those most frequently asked questions, I know I’m cutting down the amount of emails that I get. The key is to link to that FAQ page. Probably the best place to do that is from the place where people will contact you from, your contact page, if you do have one. Speaking of contact pages, I want to talk a little bit about our contact page as well. We use a WordPress plugin to run our contact form. It’s a plugin called Gravity Forms. It’s a very powerful plugin that does a number of things, one of those things is running your contact page. You can also use it to take guest post submissions and create content from it for your users, there’s a whole heap of things that you can use Gravity Forms for. We really just scrape the surface of what it is useful for. One of the things I love about Gravity Forms is that it allows you in your contact form to have a little drop down menu. I’ll link to the contact form that we have over at Digital Photography School, my main blog, and you’ll see that we have a number of different fields there, the person put in their name, their email address, what their email is about. Then, we ask them to select their subject. You’ve probably seen this in many contact forms before. We have five different options people can select. One is I have a question about a product. If they select that and then they send us an email, that email then is sent to our customer support team. Number two is I have a bug or problem to report. That is always sent to our tech support person, the person who operates our WordPress, installation, does our design and our service. Number three, there’s an option there I’d like to advertise on Digital Photography School. That goes to our partnership team, the person who sells advertising on our site. Number four, I’d like to write for Digital Photography School, these are people who want to submit guest posts and who want to become a writer and that goes to our editor. The last option is something else and that’s a bit of a miscellaneous and again it goes to our customer support and then they send it off to the relevant person in my team. Obviously, I have a team. I want to get the right email to the right person, I don’t want to be receiving all of those emails and then introducing people to the right person. I just want these emails to get sent straight to the right person. You might not have a team yet but this type of system is good because it enables you as your team grows and as you do bring on people to be able to send these emails really quickly out to the right person. You could also use this to get emails into the right folder in your Gmail, you could have a folder setup for each of these areas. For editorial requests, advertising requests, technical bugs, customer service. That will enable you to organize the incoming emails that you have there. I’ll tell you a little bit more about how to do that. I use filtering within Gmail and that would enable you to do that as well. By triaging the types of requests that you get and sending them to the right places, that can cut down some work as well. The other thing that I have on my contact form in addition to the link to the FAQ page is if there’s a question that you get more than any other, you could actually put the answer to the frequently asked question right there on your contact form as well. On the ProBlogger contact form, right there on the contact form I do say if you would like me to look at your blog and give you a review, I’m sorry I don’t offer this service anymore. That’s the most frequently asked question that I get. Whilst I’d love to do that for all my readers, I get so many of those requests every week that it would become a full time job just to look at people’s blogs and give them free advice. I wouldn’t write any new content. If you do have a question that’s asked all the time, you might even want to consider putting the answer to that frequently asked question on your contact form as well. Another thing that you can do on your contact forms that might help is if you have a place that you’d rather people ask you questions on social media for example, you could be pointing them to those places as well. On my contact forms, I also list where our Twitter account is, I also list where my Facebook page is, I also link to my Instagram page. All of these other places that I’m hanging out and say to the people where you are, where they might be able to contact you in a better way. You could even eliminate email all together and push everyone to your Facebook page and say send me a direct message there if you’d prefer to do that. Really make it clear to people on your contact form where they can contact you, set some expectations about when you’ll get back to people or if you’ll get back to people. I know some people in their contact forms say something like I get so many emails I can’t respond to everyone and sort of set that expectation that they don’t reply to everyone. If you do reply to everyone, maybe consider putting a time frame on there as well. Getting those expectations right could be useful in that sort of circumstance. Another thing that has helped me a lot, and I’ve already sort of touched on this, is that I have help to respond to the emails. This is something that only really happened in the last four or five years for me, up until the first eight or nine years of my blogging I was handling all my incoming email. It was a real challenge. One of the things I realized particularly after we started selling ebooks over on Digital Photography School is that that really ramped things up when it came to incoming emails. People would email every time we did a launch of a new ebook, we would get questions from people who didn’t know what an ebook was or didn’t know whether an ebook was a physical thing or a virtual thing or how to download it or how to open it. People were asking for refunds, people were asking questions about whether the product was right for them, people were struggling to get their payment through with Paypal or with their credit card. I could quite easily have spent my whole day just responding to requests. For a long time, I did. I did it all myself for a long time. It really took my focus away from the marketing of the products and the development of more products as well. One of the best things that I ever did was to hire someone to help me, particular on Digital Photography School, to manage customer support. As I mentioned before using the dropdown menu, we have emails going to a variety of different people in my team that’s relevant to them. The bulk of the emails that we get coming in go to my brother in law Simon who I hired. Simon’s part time, he’s not a full time employee. We gradually increased his hours over the years. Simply by sending all of those types of questions around products particularly and some of those common questions that people have, sending them all to him. He is incredibly efficient at responding to those. We use a tool called ZenDesk which is a paid service that we have. It’s not that expensive, I think it’s $5, $10 a month for one person to be able to access it. It also has canned responses, I think originally Simon was using Gmail to manage it all. But as the volume of incoming emails increased, we wanted to move to ZenDesk because it’s a ticketed system. Anyone who emails us gets a ticket. Simon’s able to look at their full history of emails that we’ve had with that particular person to really be able to track the issue that the person has and to see whether it’s resolved or not. He also can use a ZenDesk app on his iPhone or iPad while he’s traveling and out and about as well to be able to respond to people. Again, they have canned responses so all the common questions that he gets asked he can respond to in a click which saves a lot of time as well. You can pay more to have multiple users using ZenDesk but I think we’re set out with just one or two users. It’s a fairly affordable option for us. A couple more tips, techniques and tools that I use within Gmail. The first one, I’ve already touched on, it is filters. The reason I originally switched to Gmail in 2008 was this idea of filters. At that time, I remember really clearly being inundated with social media messages, some of which you couldn’t even turn off at that time. When you set up your Twitter account, you get the chance these days to filter how many emails you get from Twitter when someone direct messages you or when someone follows you. Back then, there were very limited amounts of filtering that you could do. You either got all the messages or you got none of them. Most of us left those messages on because we wanted to get notified when we got a direct message so we got a lot of emails from Twitter, Facebook, from all the different social networks in addition to all of the other emails that I was getting. The ability within Gmail to be able to filter messages to different folders, to label different messages and hide them and to skip the inbox, is a very powerful thing. I just looked this afternoon at my Gmail account at the filters that I have set up. I have hundreds of filters set up that I’ve set up since 2008. The bulk of the filters that I’ve got set up is emails that I get around product sales. I really like to keep a record of every email that I get when I sell an ebook, and that’s partly to be able to serve my customers. I love it when I get an email or a message on Twitter from someone saying, “Hey, I bought this ebook way back when. I’ve lost it, can I get it again?” I want to be able to really quickly check whether that person has paid for that product so I can send it to them again. The quickest way for me to check whether they bought it or not is to do a quick search in my Gmail account because I have a record of every single transaction that we’ve had, tens of thousands of ebooks that we’ve sold over the years. I don’t want all of those emails landing in my inbox. I want to keep them but I don’t want to read them. There are many emails that you probably get everyday that you want to keep but you don’t want to read. The quickest and the best way that you can do that is to set up a filter within Gmail. All of these emails that I get, I get two emails for every ebook sold. I get an email from Paypal and I get an email from our shopping cart system. I don’t want to see them so I tell Gmail with a filter to skip my inbox so it doesn’t go into my inbox. I want it to be marked as read and then put into a folder called Ebook Sales within Gmail. This all happens automatically. If I actually go into Gmail and hit the all mail tab, I will see most of my emails skipping my inbox because there are emails that I want to keep but I don’t want to read. This is really very powerful to do and Gmail is doing a lot of the work for me there. It’s really gold. The other thing that I love about this and filters is that there’s emails that I get regularly that I do want to read but I don’t want to read them until later. One example of this is that I get a lot of receipts from services that I subscribe to. I pay for SumoMe, Lead Pages, some of these services that as bloggers we pay a monthly fee for. I don’t need to read all of those receipts as they come in. But at tax time, I want to be able to find those receipts very quickly. I’ve setup a filter so that every time I get a receipt from Lead Pages or from SumoMe or from any of the other services that I use, they skip my inbox and they are put into a folder called receipts. At the end of every quarter when I do my tax, I can find all of my receipts in the one folder but I didn’t have to put them there myself. Then, there will be a variety of other types of emails that you might want to do the same types of things with. If you’re a batch processor, if you like to do all of the same tasks in a row, you could even do this on a daily basis. For example if you set up using Gravity Forms, if you don’t have a team to handle all of the different types of emails but you want to process those emails in batches, you could actually set up five folders in your Gmail. One for customer service, one for tech bugs, one for advertising requests, one for guest posts, and then you could tackle each of those categories of questions that you get at a certain time each day or once a week. You can use filters to really manage those incoming emails in different ways as well. Another tool that I use is Unroll Me. It scans your inbox for you, you have to give it permission to look at your Gmail. You may not want to do that if you have concerns around privacy but I’m pretty much happy for them to scan my inbox. It shows you the emails that you are subscribed to. One of the challenges when you’re in the space that we’re in is that we end up subscribing to a whole lot of news letters. Sometimes, we get subscribed to them without our permission as well. Unroll Me will come back to you once it scans your inbox and show you all of the subscriptions that you have and then give you a choice as to whether you want to unsubscribe from them and it will enable you to unsubscribe in bulk to a lot of emails that you are getting that you do not want to continue to get. Or, it gives you the option to continue to receive them, or for it to roll them up into a digest everyday. This is what I love about on Unroll Me is that every morning at 7:00AM, I get an email. It’s from Unroll Me, and it digests all of the emails that I do want to continue to get but I don’t want to interrupt me throughout the day. Before I was using Unroll Me, the emails would just come in and hit my inbox as they came in. I might get 20 or 30 emails during the day, emails that I do want to get. They might be newsletters from other bloggers, they might be alerts that I get from news alerts, or if I’m looking at real estate I get alerts from a real estate site that I’m following. I don’t want those emails to interrupt me everyday but I do want to see them everyday and Unroll Me puts them all into one single email so that I can very quickly scan those things when I get to my email first thing in the morning. You can set it up so that it sends them to you in the afternoon or in the evening. Just by having them all hit at once really saves me a lot of time. Every morning when I get that email, it usually has 20 or 30 emails and it’s digested for me. I can very quickly within a minute or two get all of the information that I need from those emails. Or, I can identify one of those emails that I really want to dig into further and then I can do that. The other tool that I use within Gmail is Boomerang. I know many of you use Boomerang already, it’s a Chrome extension that does a number of things. I use two of its features quite a bit. The first feature that I love is that if I get an email from someone and it might be at 9:00 at night. I just checked it and I’ve seen it and I’m not on my computer right now, I want to respond to this tomorrow morning but I’m not going to be online again until then. I want to mark this as done and I want it to appear back in my inbox tomorrow morning at 9:00AM so it’s at the top of my inbox. One of the challenges that I have getting so many emails is that emails do get lost, particularly at the end of the day. If I see an email come in at 9:00PM at night, by the next morning there’s another 50 emails on top of it. I’m able to say to Boomerang send this email back to me in four hours or send this email back to me tomorrow morning at 9:00AM and it will do that for me. The next morning when I get up, there it is sitting on top of the stack. The other thing I like about Boomerang is that you can tell Boomerang when to send your emails. Again, I might be working at 9:00 at night on my computer and I might want to send an email to Lanney who manages ProBlogger but I don’t want her to get that email at 9:00 at night, it’s going to interrupt her night or it’s going to make me look like I’m working too late and I don’t want her to see that I’m working that late. I can actually say to Boomerang hey, send this email to Lanney tomorrow morning at 8:55AM so it’s on top of her email stack the next morning. Boomerang, those are the two main features I use of it. It does have a number of other features as well. Check that out. There are the main techniques I use within Gmail to manage my incoming email. I’m very aware as I’ve gone through that that I’m sure there are plenty of other great tools that you use, I’ve tested some of them myself. The system I’ve just described to you works for me. I love to hear what you use. Leave us a comment, tell us the tools that you’ve tried that work well for you, tell us the techniques that you use, tell us how you minimize the incoming emails that do come in to you, how you respond to them as efficiently as you can, or tell us whether you are a complete failure at Gmail as well and maybe you want to tell us how many unread emails you have in your inbox, that could be fun too. Thanks for listening today and I’ll chat with  you in a couple of days time in Episode 148. I would love it if you have a moment to head over to iTunes and leave us a review and/or a rating, it really does help. How did you go with today’s episode? Enjoy this podcast? Sign up to our ProBloggerPLUS newsletter to get notified of all new tutorials and podcasts below.

How Being a Good Listener Can Help You Write Effective Sales Copy  Today, I want to talk about writing great sales copy. Whether that would be blog post, sales emails, creating a sales pages, or even selling on social media. A lot has been written about the topic particularly focusing upon techniques to use in headlines or titles, keywords, power words, and getting the call to action right. One of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever had when it comes to writing sales copy is something that doesn’t really involve writing at all. It doesn’t even involve saying anything or communicating anything. I want to talk about that today. What I want to talk about is to shut up and to listen. In Today’s Episode How to Write Effective Sales Copy Listen to this episode in the player above or subscribe and listen in iTunes here to get it delivered to your phone. The advice I’m giving today is to shut up and listen. It may come across a little bit blunt, and I hope I don’t offend anyone. I was given this advice many years ago. I came across a post written by Robert Bruce on CopyBlogger that really sums this up. The post says that before we do anything, we should take the time to listen to what our readers want and what we should focus on. The post is fairly short, but it sums up three different areas where we should listen before we write that blog post. Listen to whoever created the product you are selling. Ask why the product was created Who it is for What are the benefits of the product How does the product work What problem will it solve What are the limitations How can it be misunderstood Listen to your audience What are they telling you directly or indirectly Understand your audience Their needs, challenges, and words Who is the audience What are their pains and challenges What gains are they hoping for What dreams do they want to come true What are their fears, questions, and objections Listen to your competitors Have a view of the entire battlefield Competitors can also be collaborators Further Resources on How to Write Effective Sales Copy The Best Damn Copywriting Advice I’ve Found Everything You Need to Know to Master Lightroom 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 146 of the ProBlogger podcast where today I want to talk a little bit about writing great sales copy, whether that would be blog post, sales emails, creating sales pages, or even selling on social media. A lot has been written about the topic particularly focusing upon techniques to use in headlines or titles, how to use particular keywords or power words, how to get your call to action right, how to use video or change the color of your buttons or split test your pages. All of this advice is great and I really do encourage you to do a lot of reading and research on that. One of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever had when it comes to writing sales copy is something that doesn’t really involve writing at all. It doesn’t even involve saying anything or communicating anything. I want to talk about that today. What I want to talk about is to shut up and to listen. The advice I want to give you today is to shut up and listen. It’s a little bit blunt and I hope I don’t offend anyone by saying it. The advice I was given many, many years ago from numerous people and today came across an old post over at Copy Blogger which really summed up this lesson really well. It’s a post that Robert Bruce wrote three or four years ago now called The Best Damn Copywriting Advice I’ve Found. It really is a great post, it’s only a few hundred words long, it’s quite short. Really in this particular post, Robert Bruce says the same thing. You really need in your copywriting before you start copyrighting, before you start writing your sales page, before you start writing that blog post that sells something, before you start putting together tweets and social media updates to sell something, you really do need to shut up and listen. He suggests three different areas that you can listen. I want to read you just a paragraph on each of these three areas that Robert wrote and then I’ll elaborate on that a little bit more and give you some examples of how we’ve been listening to our audience particularly over at Digital Photography School to create our sales copy. The first thing that Robert talked about in his excellent post is to listen to whoever created the product that you’re selling. If you are a business person, you might have one of your team who has created a product or a service that your business is selling. If you’re a blogger and you are selling an ebook, maybe that product creator is you or maybe it’s someone else that you’re working with. On Digital Photography School, all of the ebooks and courses that we’ve created in the last few years have been created in partnership with someone else. Whether it is you or someone else, listen to the creator of the product. This is probably something that you’ve done to some extent but I think it’s really important to set aside some time to work with whoever has created your product. Robert writes this. He says, “Listen to the creator of the product. Let her talk (for hours if necessary) about what makes it work, why she built it, what she hopes it will do for her customers. This practice alone might give you the bulk of the copy you’ll end up using.” This has certainly been true for us on Digital Photography School. We try to involve the authors of our ebooks, the creators of our courses, of the software that we sell, very much from the very beginning of talking to them even before they create the product. We try to talk to them as much as possible to understand how we could market the product. Even before they’ve created it, we’re always thinking about how will we sell this product because how we sell the product will also shape the product itself in many cases. We’re asking the writers of our ebooks, the creators of our courses, things like why do you want to create this product, who is it for, or who have you created it with them in your mind? What are the benefits of the product in their mind? This is something to listen to, what words do they repeatedly use to describe it? The things that they constantly refer to the product as will help you a lot. How does the product actually work? How do you use it? What makes the product work? What’s the secret source in the product? What problem will the product solve? What doubts and worries do they have about how their product might be perceived? That can be really useful information to know what the limitations of the product are, how could the product even be misunderstood. What other products do they know of that their product is similar to but what are the differences? Understanding from the product creators, in their words or how they describe the product in these sorts of ways, can really give you a real understanding about how to sell that product. What we do at Digital Photography School is ask a lot of these questions even before they created the product, they create an outline, they create a description of the product, they tell us who the product is for. This helps us to work out whether we want to create that product in partnership with them and also helps us to shape that product a little bit because we know our audience and we know whether that will fit with our audience. But two, it does help us as we begin to plan about how we’re going to market that product. Once they finish the product, we also get them to do the same exercise. Sometimes, what they set out to create ends up being a little bit different to what they actually create. Get them to write a few paragraphs particularly about how they would sell the product. We talk to them in numerous conversations about what the product is like, asking some of those types of questions. I’ll give you a really practical example. We’ve just in the last few weeks launched a course over on Digital Photography School about how to use Adobe Lightroom. When we were talking to the creator of that course, Mike Newton, we kept hearing him use the words mastering Lightroom as a description of what the course set out to do. He wanted to help people master Lightroom. This mastering Lightroom was a word that he used quite a bit. We decided to pick up on that. We liked the idea of that mastering word. We actually decided to call the course Lightroom Mastery. We used the word mastering quite a bit in the sales copy. That’s just one quick example of how our author’s language actually shaped some of our sales copy. There’s many other examples that I can give you about that as well. The key here is to really work with the person who’s created that product. That, as I said before, maybe you. It might be useful to get someone else to interview you about your product, to see what words you naturally come up with in conversation and to get them to reflect back to you what you keep saying about that particular product. This also works if you are doing an affiliate promotion. If you are promoting someone else’s product as an affiliate, sometimes it can be good to jump on the phone with them and find out a little bit more about the product and why they created it. Just those sorts of conversations often get a lot of ideas for you as well. If you don’t have the opportunity to get on the phone with them, look at the sales copy that they use to describe their product as well. Look at the blog post that they wrote about their product, look at other interviews that they may have done on other people’s sites. These types of things will help you understand where they’re coming from with a product and often that’s a great place to start. The second type of listening that Robert Bruce talks about in his particular blog post is listening to your audience. This is what he writes, “Listen to your audience. What are they telling you — directly or indirectly — about what they really want and need? If social media has given us anything, it’s an unprecedented ability to hear the demands and desires of real people, in real time.” I love this idea from Robert of listening to your audience when it comes to sales copy. This for me is probably the most powerful thing that he writes in this post. A lot of what I do when I’m writing sales copy today really comes down to understanding my audience. This is something you don’t want to just do in the lead up to selling something to your audience. Obviously, the more you know about your audience the better when it comes to blogging, creating blog content, engaging with them but also selling to them as well. You want to be listening to your audience even before you start creating products as well because what you hear from your audience and their needs and challenges, the language that they use, these types of things will help you come up with ideas for products as well. When you do come to writing sales copy, ask yourself some of these types of questions. Who is the audience? Who is going to buy this product? What are their pains? What are their challenges? What are their problems? As they pertain to the solution that your product offers. Actually, understanding how they express those pains is really useful as well. What language do they use to express that pain that they have, all the challenge that they have. On the flip side, what are the gains that they are hoping for. What are the dreams that they’re hoping to come true as a result of using your product or a product like yours? Again, what language do they use to describe those games that they’re hoping for? Their language is really important. You may even want to do a little focus group with a few of your readers and get them to describe and sell the product in their own words. Some of the words that they use will be very important. What are their fears? It might be something else, what do they worry about as they look at your product? What are the questions that they have about it and what are the objections that they raise to the product as well? This is the type of data and feedback that you might get once your product is launched. This is really important I think, a lot of people write their sales copy and then they just release their product and then they never change their sales page. I actually think what you hear back from your audience in the hours after you launch either in emails that you might get or comments or things that you might hear in social media, the objections that people have, the questions that they ask about your product, they should be changing your sales page. You really should be in the hours after you release a product be tweaking your sales copy based upon those things. What we’ve done on a number of our sales pages is added a section on our sales page, frequently asked questions. This is simply to answer the questions that we hear that our readers are asking. For example in the early days when we first started to launch ebooks, we used to get a lot of questions about how can I read it, is this a hard copy thing or is it something I can download on my iPhone, what do I read it on, what devices is it compatible with? These types of questions were very frequent. We noticed every time someone asked them, they’re less likely to buy the product. They then have to wait for us to reply to them. We built a frequently asked question section in our sales pages now that answers all those questions so that as they’re reading our sales pages, they have those objections being removed from them. Really, it’s important to understand your reader’s objections in that type of way. Another example of how we try and hear from our readers as we’re formulating sales copy recently with this Lightroom course that we just released, I put a number of messages up on social media that were really just about probing our readers, asking them questions to find out how they used Lightroom and to understand the frustrations and challenges that they had with Lightroom. Obviously, the course creator had a bit of an understanding of some of those challenges, he based a lot of what he put together in the course based upon what he’d seen. I wanted to find out from our readers what language they use to describe those frustrations. A couple of themes came back. I very explicitly put out a question on our Facebook page, what are your frustrations and challenges with Lightroom? The two things that came back were people felt overwhelmed by the software, they would buy it but they didn’t even have any understanding on how to use and just felt completely overwhelmed by it and they’re not using it at all. Very common thing that came back. The other one was people had so many photos that they didn’t have time to process them. Not having enough time was another thing. We began to weave those two themes into our sales copy. If you were on the receiving end of some of the emails that we sent, you will have seen those themes. I think the tagline on our sales page is Master Lightroom: Tips and Tools that will Bring Your Photos to Life and Save You Tons of Time. Saving time is something that was repeated on the sales page a number of times. On our social media posts about this course, quite often I started those posts with the words, “Overwhelmed by Lightroom?” That really worked very well. Again, save time was something that we used again and again in our sales emails but also on social media. The other thing that we’ve used in some of our communications of sales on this particular course is we’ve really emphasized that the courses are step by step guide. Really, it’s about hand holding. This was something we’ve noticed has worked well. Our readers really want that. Some of them explicitly ask for a step by step guide. Again, that’s their language. We use their language to sell it to them. Understand what your reader’s challenges, pains, things that they want to achieve and the language that they used. In the post that I’m talking about, Robert writes this. He says, “Humble yourself and truly serve your audience, listen to their needs and desires, listen to the language they use. If you listen carefully, your audience can eventually give you everything you need, including much of your copy. Get out of their way…” I love that idea and this has certainly been true for me. Every time I come to sell something to our audience, I really try and get in their heads and understand the language that they’re using as much as possible. The third area that Robert talks about in his blog post is one that I think is brilliant as well. He says, “Listen to your competitors. It’s wise to have a view of the entire battlefield. What’s working in your market, what’s not? What can you learn from other’s success and failure (and the language that got them there)?” This is great advice as well. I would say particularly in the blogging space, you can learn a lot from your competitors. A lot of the time, your competitors will actually be collaborators as well. This has certainly been the case for us on Digital Photography School. Many of the products that we’ve created, we’ve actually created with competitors. The Lightroom course that I’ve referred to a number of times in this podcast today was created by Mike Newton who many people might say is a competitor of ours. He has a site which sells similar types of products to us. He came onto our radar a number of years ago when we were looking for other people’s products to promote as an affiliate. We learned a lot by looking at the way that he was selling his products which were competing products in some ways to ours. We loved what he was doing so much that we reached out to him to promote his product but also to collaborate with him on our product. Whilst Robert does talk here about competitors, I would say learn and listen from your collaborators as well. Knowing what other people are selling, how they sell it can really shape what you do.   Don’t just go out and steal what other people are doing and replicate exactly what they’re doing. Certainly, learn from what they’re doing as well. We constantly watch what other photography sites are doing. As I mentioned before, we actively promote their products as affiliates probably to make money but also it’s a great way of researching and again listening to shape what we then create as well. By promoting other people’s products as an affiliate, we see if our audience has an appetite for that type of product, that format of product, that priced product. We also get to test our own marketing, sales copy, and get responses from our audience on that. We also learn a lot by watching how our affiliate partners promote what they do as well. We analyze their sales pages, their sales email, their social media as well. Listen to your competitors, see if you can make them collaborators because a lot of learning will come out of that process as well. I really encourage you, if you are selling something at the moment, to do the exercise. Listen to whoever created the product whether that’s you or someone else. Listen to your audience, understand the language that they use, that’s really got to be the basis for the sales copy that you write. And then listen to your competitors and your collaborators as well. I hope you found this useful, I’ll chat with you in a couple of day’s time in Episode 147 of this ProBlogger podcast. Before you go, I want to call your attention to the virtual ticket that we just released for the ProBlogger event this year. Our event is on the 9th and 10th of September here in Australia but we understand many of you cannot get to Australia for the live version of the event. We’ve put together a great little virtual ticket for you over at problogger.net/virtualticket. When you go over there, you’re going to see what I think is a really great offer. We survey our readers every year to find out what they want at our event and we came up this year with what I think is probably one of our best schedules ever. We’ve got 50 sessions. There are six keynotes, there’s a number of workshops, there’s breakout sessions, a wide variety of topics from creating content for your blog and social media to different aspects of social media. We’ve got a session on growing your effectiveness of using Facebook both with organic Facebook use and also paid Facebook use. We’ve got sessions on INstagram, using email to sell, creating a great sales funnel. We’ve put together a whole schedule which is purely based upon what our readers express to us as their pains, the challenges that they have and their dreams as well. We’ve brought in speakers from around the world to help with that. We’ve also got some sessions on some of the newer forms of social media. We brought in Brian Fanzo from the US who’s going to talk about live streaming and influence. We’re doing some new stuff but also some of that tried and true stuff as well. I’m doing three sessions this year at the opening Keynote but also doing a session on monetizing blogs as well. Really introductory type stuff on this particular session. There’s a great variety of things that we’ve put together in this year’s event. We’re also adding in as a bonus for people that want to pick up that virtual ticket all the sessions from last year’s event as well. There’s 23 different sessions that we put together there. Again, I put together a few of those sessions but we’ve got other people as well who did fantastic keynotes. There’s a whole variety of sessions that you get between the two years, over 73 sessions. Most of those sessions go for 45 or so minutes, there’s a heap of content there for you to access both immediately and once our even happens in September. Of course, the other extra part of the virtual ticket is a private, exclusive accountability and networking group on Facebook where you’ll have the opportunity to ask questions, get to know other bloggers within your niche, and we’ll also be starting some discussions around your goal setting and try to keep you accountable to the things that you learn in the event as well. That’s completely exclusive to those attending via virtual ticket or live at the event as well. That’s another great way to learn and keep yourself on track. Before I go, I want to give a big shout out and say thank you to Craig Hewitt and the team at Podcast Motor who’ve been editing all of our podcasts for some time now. Podcast Motor has a great range of services for Podcasters at all levels. They can help you to set up your podcast but also offer a couple of excellent services to help you to edit your shows and get them up with great show notes. Check them out at podcastmotor.com. How did you go with today’s episode? As usual, I would love to know what you do to listen to your readers, content creators, and competitors. Do you shut up and listen? If so, how has it benefited your blogging? Enjoy this podcast? Sign up to our ProBloggerPLUS newsletter to get notified of all new tutorials and podcasts below.

Is Your Blog Being Hurt by Your Obsession to Create New Content? Today, I want to talk about an obsession that many bloggers have – an obsession with creating NEW content and want to suggest that we all take a little step back from spending quite so much time on that task and pay attention to something that might have a better payoff for us. I’m going to share with you a practice that I’ve build into my daily rhythm. You can listen to this episode in the player above or here on iTunes. But before I do – a couple of quick pieces of house keeping. Blogging Groove Update: Facebook group will remain live. We will do some ongoing challenges. You can take the challenges any time. I know a few people who have decided to keep doing them one a week indefinitely. If you enjoyed the challenge let us know by leaving an iTunes review. Virtual Ticket: ProBlogger Event Virtual Ticket 50 sessions – 6 keynotes, 24 breakout training sessions, 20 workshops Great speakers like Brian Fanzo (live streaming), Nathan Chan (growing your email list), Natalie Sisson (Sales Funnels), Nicole Avery (starting a blog), Emilie Wapnick (building community on your blog) and many more including me (3 sessions this year). Topics – beginner to advanced. Creating content, building your readership, monetization. Blogging, Podcasting, YouTube, Social (paid and organic). You Also get access to our exclusive event networking and accountability group on FB Immediate access to all the recordings and slides from our 2015 event (with Jadah Sellner, Heather Armstrong, Dan Norris, Ruth Soukup and many more). 23 sessions. $USD229 ($299 AUD). All 50 sessions from 2016 and 23 from 2015 are yours to keep and refer back to time and time again. A simple daily practice that I do: Every day we publish new content on dPS – two posts a day. We work on making the content as good as it can be. Useful, practical, well laid out, as few grammatical errors as possible, well illustrated, optimised for SEO, good headline, great CTA etc. We then think about how we share it – visual content, timing on social, craft the descriptions, get it into the newsletter etc. Our authors are then thinking about engaging with readers who come – trying to get good discussions going, watching social comments etc. A lot of effort goes into these things in the lead up to and for the days after a post gets published. This is all pretty normal – most bloggers do that. But here’s the thing – your blog post is on the web for a lot longer than that first week. That first week can definitely bring you a spike in traffic – but it’s just the beginning of the content’s life. I touched on this in episode 136 where I gave tips for creating Evergreen content for your blog – but today I want to share with you a daily practice that I’ve developed over the last 5-6 years that helps me to stay in touch with my archives. Your archives quite likely contain a lot of really useful content that your readers have probably not read – particularly your newer readers. If your blog is anything like mine your archives are what gets most of the eyeballs on your blog on any given day – not the new posts. I just looked at Google Analytics for today’s traffic on dPS – we’ve published 14 posts in the last 7 days and as I look at today’s traffic – those 14 posts got around 15% of my site’s traffic. 85% of my traffic was hitting my archives. I suspect most blogs are similar – yet most of us spend most of our effort focusing upon our new posts. Most bloggers spend 99% of their time focused upon their fresh content but their readers spend most of their time focused upon the archives. I think bloggers should allocate time to focusing upon their archives too. The daily practice that I do does just that. In Today’s Episode The Daily Practice I Have Built Into My Blogging Rhythm It happens at the end of my day (late afternoon or early evening) when I’m sitting down to schedule my FB updates for the next day. I first schedule the new posts we’ve published that day. Once the two new posts are scheduled for FB and added to my Meet Edgar library (see this post for how I use Meet Edgar) I then turn my attention to my archives. I look back at what I published this day 6 months ago. So today is 9 August – I look back at what we published on 9 February. We publish two posts every day of the year (except the week after Christmas) so there will always be two posts published on that day. The first thing I’m looking at is whether the content was evergreen and could be reshared. If it is I will schedule it to be published on Facebook tomorrow. Then I’m looking at other things: Are there any errors? Factual, spelling, broken images, broken links etc Could it be improved visually? Images, layout, headlines/sub headings? Could the post be updated? Is it dated? Is there a new technique/gear etc that has come out since that makes it look old fashioned? Have we published anything since that this old post could link to? Have we published anything since that could link to this old post? Could I update the visuals of this post? Social media graphics – pinnable images? Can I do anything to optimise it for SEO? Titles, keywords, alt tags in images etc Could we do a followup post? Could the post be repurposed into another medium? Could we add a CTA? Eg – a link to one of our products or an affiliate link. Were there any comments in the post that slipped through our moderation (spam, unanswered questions etc)? Is the post obsolete – should it be retired? Sometimes I dig into Google Analytics and see how the post has performed traffic wise. If it’s getting decent traffic I pay it more attention particularly for resharing, SEO, followup content. Not every post needs major updating – in fact most are ok. But even simply by eyeballing that post it puts it to the front of my mind and helps me to know its there which is useful for linking to it from new posts. Once I’ve done this for 6 months ago I do the same thing for 12 months ago. So I’m looking next at August 9 2015. I do the same process. Share it if it is evergreen but also look for any opportunities to update, optimise it. Then I look at 18 months ago – Feb 9 2015. Then I do the same for 24 months ago – August 9 2014. Then 2.5 years ago. I go right back to the beginning of the blog (2006). This way I know that every single post in our archives currently over 6200 of them gets my eyeballs on it twice per year. Every single post gets looked at every year twice and many of them get tweaks. Now I look back at 6 month intervals but when I started this practice I was only looking at 12 month intervals and that may be more manageable if you have a big archive and have limited time. The interval or the system you use doesn’t really matter – the key is to pay your archives some attention on a regular basis. By paying attention to my archives I’m: Improving them – making them more useful to readers Resurfacing them in social – driving traffic By driving this traffic we often see spikes of people resharing that content Optimising them for SEO Getting ideas for future content Have finger on the pulse of what is and isn’t working in terms of topics but also styles of posts etc Getting ideas for products and improving long tail sales of new products Getting ideas for which older posts we could drive people to from our newsletter/auto-responders Keeping our archives from looking really dated and out of touch Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Hey there, it’s Darren from ProBlogger here and welcome to Episode 145 of the ProBlogger podcast. Today, I want to talk a little bit about what I would call an obsession that many of us have as bloggers, an obsession with creating new content. I actually want to put forward an argument today that perhaps it would be in many bloggers’ best interest if we step back a little bit from spending quite so much time on the task of creating new content and pay attention to something that may have a bigger pay off for us as bloggers. I’m going to suggest to you today that you do a little practice that I’ve been doing over the last few years everyday to get the balance back in order. Before I give you the exercise and talk about what I’m suggesting today, I want to do a couple of couple of quick pieces of housekeeping. Most of you who’ve been following this podcast and subscribed to it know that the last seven episodes come out in seven days, we did the Blogging Groove challenge where I suggested a whole heap of different types of content for you to create on your blog over a week. I want to thank those of you who participated in that, we had over 1400 bloggers participate over the week and many of you are still working through those challenges, but anyone who is participating I want to say thank you. It’s been a challenging week for many of you, it’s been a challenging week for me as well to produce so much content and to manage the Facebook group but it’s been well worthwhile thing for us to do. I just want to let you know that the Facebook group that we’ve had going will remain live, we are going to do some ongoing challenges. I just need a week or so to be able to work out how often we’ll do that is and whether we do them on the podcast or on the blog. For those of you who haven’t taken part in it, you can continue to use those episodes and go back to those episodes and take the challenges at your own pace. The last thing I’ll say is if you have enjoyed the Blogging Groove challenge that was done over the last week, I really encourage you to head over to iTunes and to leave a review for us. It does help us to get a feel for what you like about the podcast but also does help us to grow and spread the news further. That’s the Blogging Groove challenge update. The other thing I did want to mention as I have over the last three episodes is that our virtual ticket for the ProBlogger event now is live. If you head to problogger.net/virtualticket, you will see all the details of our virtual ticket. It will go live in mid-September, it’s $229 dollars U.S. That’s around $299 dollars Australian. That gets you Access to 50 sessions that will be recorded in this year’s ProBlogger Event. Six keynotes, 24 breakout training sessions and 20 workshops. We’ve got some great speakers this year including Brian Fanzo who is speaking about live streaming. Nathan Chan from Founder and who will be talking about growing your email list. Natalie Sisson who is speaking about sales funnels. Nicole Avery who will be talking about starting a blog. We’ve got many, many speakers and you could check out all of the speakers and the sessions othat they are planning to produce this year over at problogger.net/virtualticket. Topics, beginner right through to advanced. We’re talking about creating content, building your readership, monetizing your blog, we’re talking about blogging, podcasting, YouTube, social media both paid and organic. You’ll also this year with our virtual ticket get access to an exclusive event networking and accountability group on Facebook as well. We’re bundling this in, you’ll get immediate access to all the recordings and slides from 2015’s event which is another 23 sessions. This ticket is available for $229 US up for a limited time, it’s not an indefinite thing. It will give you access to 50 sessions from this year and 23 from last year that you can refer back to again and again. I think that’s great value. Hopefully, we’ll set you up for a great second half of 2016 and into 2017 with your blog training. Head over to problogger.net/virtualticket for all the information and to secure your ticket for this year’s event. As I said in my introduction today, I want to talk about the obsession that we have many times as bloggers with creating new content for our blogs. Now, I want to say right up front it might be a bit of a controversial thing to say particularly after we’ve just had seven days focused on creating content for our blogs for me to say that we’re obsessed with that because perhaps I’ve fed that obsession a little. Bear with me for a moment. Everyday on Digital Photography School, we publish two blog posts. I think it’s important that we invest time and effort into creating new content for our blog. I think it’s worth paying attention to making those posts as good as we can make them. Over on DBS, we put a lot of time aside. Our writers put a lot of time aside to come out with good ideas to write about making our content useful, practical, making sure our posts are well laid out, that there’s as few grammatical errors as possible, that we have great illustrations and images, that we optimize our posts for search engines, that we think about our headlines. All those things are good. I’m not saying today that we shouldn’t put time aside for that. I also think it’s good that we think about sharing our content, this new content that we have. At Digital Photography School again, we think about how we’ll share that, what social networks we’ll put it in, how will we get it into our newsletter, how will we craft the descriptions in our social medias to get people to read that. And we also put time and effort into thinking about engaging with our readers who do come and read the post. We try to add questions to our posts to get people leaving a comment, to get discussions going. We want the comments to come in on social media and try to engage with those things. These are things that we put a lot of effort into, the lead-up to publishing a post, the sharing of that post, and then the engagement around that post. All those things are pretty normal, most bloggers do that.   But here’s the thing that I’ve realized over the last few years. Getting a post up onto the blog should take a lot of effort but it’s only the beginning of the life of that post. The first few days of your blog post being live can definitely bring you a spike in traffic. But when you think about it, it’s just the beginning of that content’s life. What happens in the months, the years and potentially even the decades after you hit publish on a blog post can completely dwarf that first few days of that content’s life. I spoke about this back in Episode 136 where I gave some tips for creating evergreen content on your blog. I don’t really want to rehash that idea of evergreen content. Today, I want to share with you a daily practice that I’ve developed over the last five to six years that helps me to pay attention to my archives, to help me to pay attention to the older content on my blog. Here’s the thing. If you’ve been blogging for a year now or a few years now, what you’ve got in your archives is an amazing asset. Your archives quite likely contain a lot of really useful content that can really help your readers. Most of your readers probably never read what is in your archives, particularly your new readers. If your blog is anything like mine, your archives are probably what gets the most eyeballs on your blog on any given day. It’s not the new posts that are probably getting most of your traffic. I just looked at my Google Analytics for today’s traffic, the last 24 hours traffic on Digital Photography School. We’ve published 14 new posts over the last 7 Days. As I look at today’s traffic, those 14 posts get around 15% of my overall site’s traffic. 85% of my traffic was arriving on my site hitting one of my archive posts, one of my posts that is more than seven days old. I suspect most blogs are similar, yet most of us spend most of our time focusing upon our new posts while our readers are spending most of their time focusing upon our old posts. To put it in a different way, most bloggers probably spend 99% of their time focusing upon their fresh content, the new content but their readers are spending 90% of the time focusing upon their archives. It struck me today that maybe our obsession with our new content, getting that new content ready, getting it published, getting it shared, getting engagement around it, maybe we’re slightly out of  balance with that. I want to say right upfront, I’m not saying today that you shouldn’t be producing new content, that you shouldn’t be putting time aside to that. But today I want to suggest to you a practice that can help you to pay attention to your archives and can bring many good things from doing that. The practice that I want to talk about today I have touched on in passing in a number of episodes in the past but I want to get a little bit more explicit about it, I want to get a little bit more detailed about exactly what I do. What I’m going to describe to you now happens usually at the end of the day for me. Usually, it’s late afternoon, just before I knock-off and have some dinner and spend some time with the family or just after the kids go to bed and it usually takes me about 45 minutes to an hour. I sit down at my computer and I look at what we published today on the blog. I usually schedule those two new posts that we publish on Digital Photography School onto social media. I schedule them on Facebook usually for early morning American time. And then, I also put them into Meet Edga which is a tool where we build a library of social media updates. I’ll link to a post in today’s show notes that talks more about Meet Edga. I first look at the new stuff that we’ve done, it usually takes me about ten minutes to get those posts up on the social media, scheduled so that the next day they’ll go up onto Facebook and on to Twitter. Once those two new posts are schedule for Facebook and Meet Edga, I then turn my attention to the podcast. This is where I spend most of the rest of my time as I’m doing this particular exercise. The first thing that I do is I look back at what I published on this day six months ago. As I’m recording this particular episode of the podcast, it is the 9th of August. It’s a Tuesday here in Australia. Tonight when I do this exercise, I will look back on the 9th of February, six months ago. I would have published two posts on Digital Photography School where we publish two post every single day of the year except the week after Christmas where we do things in a slightly different rhythm. I know that there will always be two posts that were published six months ago on the 9th of February. I look back at those two posts. The first thing I’m looking for is to whether the content was evergreen in nature. This is what I’ve touched in the past. If it is evergreen, I then schedule those two posts to be published on Facebook tomorrow. That’s the first part of it and that’s what a lot of bloggers do, they kind of look back of their archives and they re-share some of that stuff but that’s the system that I use. Six months ago, what did we publish, I’m going to put that onto Facebook. But then I start looking at other things. This is where I think we could really improve our archives. The first thing I’m asking is are there any errors in that post. While we do edit all the posts that go up live in Digital Photography School, it’s amazing how many little things slip through. Maybe there’s some factual errors, maybe there’s some spelling errors, maybe one of the images has for some reason broken, maybe we’ve used an embed from a photo and image sharing site, or maybe we’ve embedded a tweet or some other type of content and that has broken. That does happen from time to time. Are there any broken images? I’m looking for errors, things that are broken on the on the page that I could fix. This of course improves the post if anyone comes to it. After our Facebook share, they’re going to see a better post. I’m also asking could that post be visually improved in some way? Maybe a new image is something that we could add to it to make it a little bit better. Maybe some of the formatting is broken, maybe I could add some subheadings, maybe I could add a bullet list and change the formatting of the post and using some subheadings in some way. Could it be visually improved? Could the post be updated in some way? Is that post dated? Right now, six months ago it probably hasn’t dated too much but maybe something has been released that is relevant to the post since it’s gone live. Maybe it was a camera review and maybe there’s an update to the camera or maybe it was about Lightroom and maybe there’s been an update to Lightroom and we need to just tweak the post so that it becomes relevant for today. Is it something that is looking dated? Maybe one of the images that we used is a little bit dated, a little bit of 2015 instead of a little bit 2016, we could make it a little bit fresher in some way. A question I’m asking as I look at that piece of content that was published six months ago is have we published anything since that time that that old post could link to? Maybe we’ve published something else in the last week or two that we could link to from that old post. This helps to drive more page views around the site and also can help with search engine optimization a little bit. Google tends to like when you link your post from one to another. Another similar question, is there  something that you’ve published since that you could add a link to back to this old post. Maybe you published something in the last week and you can link back to this old post as well as further reading. The links can go both ways. Could you update the visuals of the post in some way? Maybe you could add a social media graphic so you might want to add something at the bottom of the post for people to pin and to share on Pinterest. Could you do anything to optimize that post for search engine optimization? You’ve probably already done some SEO on the post when you did publish it six months ago. How is it performing with SEOs? You might actually want to have a look on Google and see is this post ranking? Could you change the post in some way to optimize it better? Maybe tweaking the title, maybe adding some keywords, may be looking at something like the old tags in your images. There’s a number of things that you can do to make that post rank a place or two higher in Google. Another question I’m asking as I’m looking at the post that we published six months ago. Could I do a follow up post on this? Maybe that was a post that got to a lot of discussion going. Maybe there was some questions in the comments, maybe as I’m rereading I start getting ideas for posts that could be done, that follow it up, that update the idea that could be a new post, so that I can feed back to our writing team and say, “Hey, we did this post six months ago. It did really well. Can anyone do a second the post that really follows up on that old one or that takes the opposite viewpoint in some way?” Could the post be repurposed to another medium, maybe the post has done very well. We want to create an infographic version of it, or maybe the post did well but it could be repurposed into a Slideshare or maybe it could be done into a podcast or into a video in some way. Could it be repurposed into another medium? Could we add a new call to action the end of the post? Maybe that post went live six months ago. In the meantime, we might have started a new Facebook group or we might have released a new ebook that we could add a link at the end of that post to promote this new thing that we’ve started. Is the call to action that we did six months ago still relevant for today? Maybe we were promoting something back then and it’s not really relevant today, maybe it was an affiliate link that we had in there that isn’t really relevant anymore. Maybe there’s something we could do to tweak the call to action. I also look at the comments left on the post. Were there any that slipped through our moderation system? We try to get rid of all the spam but sometimes the spam slips through and maybe we can delete that. Or maybe there was a question that was asked by someone that we didn’t respond to. Actually paying some attention to the community aspect of that post, the engagement that was on that post could actually be a useful thing. Another question I’m asking as I’m looking at that post six months ago, is this post obsolete? Should it be retired, should it be deleted? Maybe it was a promotion that we ran or competition that we ran. Or maybe, it’s about a very dated thing that’s no longer relevant to our audience. Maybe it’s got a factual error in it that’s just so bad that we knew it would be better to delete that post. It’s weird that I would delete that post, but sometimes it just needs to be retired. Lastly, what I would do with some of the posts that I’m looking at from six months ago is ask the question how is this post performing? I actually will dig into Google Analytics and see how that post might have performed traffic wise. Don’t do this every single post. But sometimes if I see there’s a lot of comments or see that there’s regular comments overtime, that might give me a hint that maybe it’s attracting some ongoing search traffic. I might look into Google Analytics and see how well it is performing. If it is performing well, that is a signal to me that I do need to pay some extra attention to it. Could I get it ranking even higher in Google? Could I develop a content in some way? As I’m going through these 13 or so questions looking at the post from six months ago, in many cases the post doesn’t need too much updating. I would say the vast majority of the posts that I do this exercise with I might be only making very small tweaks. In fact, most of the posts are okay as far as they are. But simply by eyeballing that post even if I don’t make any updates, it puts it to the front of my mind. It helps me to know that it’s there which I think is really useful. We’ve got over 6000 posts now on Digital Photography School. It’s very hard to remember every single post that has been written, particular because we have a writing team now. I didn’t write all of those posts. But by simply running my eye over each of those posts, it enables me to keep my finger on the pulse of what’s going on on the side. It gives all kinds of opportunities later on. I’ll talk a little bit about some of the benefits of doing this exercise in a moment. Once I’ve done this, I’ve done this for the last posts from six months ago. I then do exactly the same thing for the posts that were written 12 months ago. So again, it’s the 9th of August 2016 as I’m recording this, I will have done the 9th of February 2016. Now, I go back to August 9, 201 and I do the same process. It probably sounds like I’m spending ten or fifteen minutes on every post that goes live. I have actually gotten so into the rhythm of doing this that I can do it quite quickly. It will take me a couple of minutes to look over a post to see if there’s anything that needs to be changed. I’m doing the same thing for two posts from 2015, August. And then I’ll look back six months before that so then I’ll look back to February 9, 2015. And then, I’ll go 24 months ago, August 9, 2014. And then, I go two and a half years ago, February 9, 2014. I go right back, six months and 12 months, right back to the start of the blog in 2006. It takes me about an hour to do this exercise but it’s one of the most valuable things that I do everyday. I know that by doing this that every single post in our archive which is over 6000, every single one of them I will eyeball at least twice a year. Every single post gets looked at at least twice every year and many of them get little tweaks along the way. I do this six months so I look at February and August. You might choose just to do 12 months ago or 6 months ago. It’s totally up to you what the intervals are and what the system is. I guess what I’m encouraging you today to do is to put regular time aside to pay attention to your archives in some way. By paying attention to my archives in this way, I know I’m improving them which makes them more useful to my readers. I’m resurfacing them in social which means I’m constantly driving traffic back to my older posts, posts that I’ve even forgotten that are there. This forces me to see those things and to be driving traffic back to them. By driving traffic back to those posts on social media, I often then see other people re-sharing them as well and that can bring second waves of traffic beyond what I’m able to share. I’m also optimizing my posts for search engines. Over the years, the post potentially is being tweaked many times for searching engine optimization. Simply by updating the posts and adding new content to them, adding new visuals, changing the posts, that also can be a signal to search engines as well. Search engines tend to like dynamic content, content that is changing. By doing this exercise, I’m getting ideas for future content which is really great when you have been blogging for so many years and you’re running out of things to say. By doing this exercise, I’ve got my finger on the pulse of what types of posts are working, what topics are working. That also informs future content but it also gives me ideas for new products that we get to be developing as well. If I suddenly see that certain posts are doing really well on a certain topic. For example 6 to 12 months ago, we realized a lot of our posts that were about Adobe Lightroom were doing really well, that gave us the idea to create a course on Adobe Lightroom. By paying attention to how posts are performing in this way, you beginning to see opportunities to monetize your site as well. But getting ideas for what older posts are working, we can also start to think about how could we share those posts again via email. One of the things that I do if I see a post that did really well 12 months ago, I will consider putting that into our newsletter, not just on social media again but actually promoting it via email as well. I guess the last thing that this whole process does is that it keeps your archives from looking dated and out of touch. If 85% of my traffic is hitting my archives, I shudder to think what would happen if 85% of my readers go to a post and go meh, this is dated, this is embarrassing, this is no good. By paying attention to your archives, you’re keeping them fresh, you’re keeping them up to date and you’re deleting the things that aren’t as good and that could actually be hurting your brand. This is an exercise that I do everyday or at least every weekday. On Fridays I usually do it for the coming two days as well, for the weekend. It’s not something I tend to do on Saturday or Sundays, because Fridays I do an extra batch of this. It’s something that takes me an hour or so to do every time I do it. I’ve developed and gotten into the flow with doing it. I’ve gotten better at doing it. It’s the type of thing that if you are doing it at least twice for every post every year, you will find that you don’t need to make as big of a change all the time. The first time that I started to do this, for that first year there was a lot of work to do everyday. But because I’m updating my posts and my archives regularly, that works isn’t as big because I’m kind of tweaking my posts every six or so months. I hope that this has given you some ideas. Again, if 90% of your readers and you’re spending 90% of your time creating new content, is that balance right? Is it time for you to dedicate a little bit of time everyday even if it’s just 10 minutes a day to one post in your archives that has the potential to bring a lot of life into your blog. I would love to hear what you do. Do you pay attention to your archives or are you a blogger that just pays attention to your new stuff? I’d love to hear what you do whether you agree with me or not. I would love to hear from you to hear how you approach looking after your archives and keeping them in shape. Thanks for listening and I’ll chat with you in Episode 146 in a few days time. How did you go with today’s episode? I would love to hear what you do? Do you pay attention to your archives? I would love to hear it whether you agree with me or not. Enjoy this podcast? Sign up to our ProBloggerPLUS newsletter to get notified of all new tutorials and podcasts below.

Challenge: Create a Link Post This is 7th and final challenge in ProBlogger’s 7 Days to Getting Your Blogging Groove Back Challenge that we kicked off back in episode 137. You can listen to this podcast in the player above or here on iTunes (please take a moment to give us a rating and review if you could). If you’re new to the challenge – this week I’m nominating a different style of content for you to create each day over the week and the challenge is to create a post within 24 hours of hearing about it and then sharing it with us in our ProBlogger Challenge Group on FB on this thread. All week hundreds of bloggers have been creating some great posts and today I’m going to present you with a last post in the challenge that has the potential to share the love around our community a little. Before I tell you about today’s challenge…. I also quickly want to tell you about something that is happening in a couple of days time – we’re putting virtual tickets on sale for this year’s ProBlogger event. We hold an annual event for bloggers here in Australia each year and this year – by popular demand – we’re bringing back our virtual ticket so that those of you unable to get out to Australia can come along virtually and get all the amazing teaching we offer live attendees. Today my challenge for you is to create a piece of content that links to someone else’s content. A link post. One of the reasons I was first attracted to blogging was its collaborative nature. Blogs linked from one to another freely and regularly. We linked out when we were inspired by another blogger, when we agreed with another blogger, when we disagreed, when we wanted to encourage them and sometimes just to be useful to our readers. That was back in 2002 but since that time link sharing has gradually gone to other mediums more and more. Today more sharing of links happens on Twitter or Facebook but less so on blogs. This is possibly for good reason, but I sometimes fear that perhaps in losing the link post that maybe we’ve lost something as a community and maybe our readers have too. Benefits of Linking Out to Good Content You Didn’t Create: If you link to good stuff it serves your readers It can show that you’re well read and add to your own credibility It helps you to get on the radar of others that you link to – good things can come from that – great for networking If groups link to one another it can help to pass traffic around I’m told it can actually help your Search rankings if you link to quality sites Approaches You Might Take with Today’s Challenge: Write something inspired by another blogger Find a collection of things to link to on a common theme Create a “reading roundup” Another idea – why not head over to the FB Challenge Group and find a few articles from this last week to be the basis of your link post. Find half a dozen articles that are relevant to your niche or that you got some inspiration in and create a post based upon that. The key 3 things I would encourage you to keep in mind: Keep it relevant to your audience/topic/niche Make sure you link to quality content Add a little something of your own – tell people why they should read it, add a thought or two etc. This makes it unique and shows you’ve actually read what you’re linking to and have your own thoughts on the matter. The challenge: Challenge – create a link post. It could be a blog post, video or social media post Share it in our FB Group Check out some of the other link posts that others have created – encourage, support etc. Lastly – thanks SOOO much for this last week. I hope you’ve got back into the groove. I’m going to keep the FB group open for at least a few weeks and I’m thinking about doing some more of these in the future so may keep the group open. We won’t do them daily but maybe once or twice a month. I’ll run a poll in the group in the coming week or so to get your feedback on that!   Update: Here are the rest of the Challenges in the Blogging Groove Series Challenge 1: Create a List Post – Listen on iTunes here – Submit to the Facebook Group Here. Challenge 2: Create a FAQ Post – Listen on iTunes here – Submit to the Facebook Group Here. Challenge 3: Create a Review Post – Listen on iTunes here – Submit to the Facebook Group Here. Challenge 4: Create a Story Post – Listen on iTunes here – Submit to the Facebook Group Here. Challenge 5: Create a ‘How to’ Post – Listen on iTunes here – Submit to the Facebook Group Here. Challenge 6: Create a Discussion Starter Post – Listen on iTunes here – Submit to the Facebook Group Here. Challenge 7: Create a Link Post – Listen on iTunes here – Submit to the Facebook Group Here. Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Hey there, it’s Darren from ProBlogger and welcome to the 7th and final challenge in our Seven Days to Finding Your Blogging Groove Challenge that we’ve been doing over the last seven days since episode 137. Everyday over the last week for those of you who are new to the challenge, I’ve nominated a different style of blog post for you to create on your blog. Those who’ve been taking the challenge this week have been creating those posts within 24 hours and then sharing it with us in our ProBlogger Challenge Group on Facebook. I know for a fact that many of you have decided to take a little bit more time with this challenge as well so if you are finding this particular episode for the first time today and the challenge for the first time today, do feel free to go back to Episode 137 and work through the last seven episodes in your own time. You can take as long as you like to really work through this. One of the things I will say about this particular challenge is that I think it will continue. We will not continue on a daily basis but the feedback over the last few days in the Facebook group is that people want to continue doing challenges so we’re going to keep the ProBlogger Challenge Group on Facebook running and we will be continuing to issue you some challenges in that group and on this podcast. Now, we do need to work out what the frequency of those challenges will be and I’ll be doing a bit of a poll on the Facebook group around those issues. Join the Facebook group, stay, engage there and continue to take the challenges. All week, we have had hundreds of bloggers creating some amazing blog posts, some amazing videos, some amazing Instagram, we’ve seen people doing this content creation challenge using Instagram’s new stories. I’ve seen people doing it on Snapchat. It’s been fantastic to see the variety of types of blog posts and content that have been created but also some of the content itself has just been such high quality and I want to congratulate those of you who have been keeping up with it and who’ve been creating content at a high rate than you normally would. Before I get on to telling you what the final challenge is and it’s one that hopefully will bring it all together in some ways and help us all to get a little bit more traffic to our blogs, I want to quickly tell you about the virtual ticket for the ProBlogger event. I’ve been mentioning this over the last couple of episodes. That virtual ticket is now live. As this podcasts goes live, you can head over to problogger.com/virtualticket and pick up that virtual ticket. It will give you a virtual access to our ProBlogger event which is being held on the 9th and 10th of September here in Australia. There are tickets still available for the live event as well if you are in Australia and you want to come out. For those of you who are unable to get here, this gives you access to all of the main sessions that we do at this particular event. We’ve got two full days of content that will be running and there’s three strings of content to add on so we’ve got all kinds of content on writing great blog post, on monetizing, on different forms of social media. We’ve got sessions on Instagram, sessions on YouTube. There’s a great deal of content that you will get access to with this virtual ticket so hit over problogger.com/virtualticket to get that. If you want to get today’s transcript of this episode and the show notes, you can head to problogger.com/podcast/144 to get all the details of today’s challenge which is what I want to get on to next. Today’s challenge is for you to create a piece of content that links to someone else’s content. You’re going to create a link post today on your blog or you can do it in other forms of content creation as well. One of the reasons that I was first attracted to blogging was that it was very collaborative in its nature. One blogger would link to another blog and talk about why they liked that blog or why they liked that particular piece of content that another blogger had written, and then someone else would link to them. There was this train of links from one blog to another. We link out when we’re inspired by another blogger, we link out when we agree with another blogger, we linked out when we wanted to add to what another blogger was saying. We link to them when we disagreed with them, we link to them when we want to encourage them or reach out to them and begin to build a relationship with them. Sometimes we just link out because we feel that what another blogger had written would be useful to our readers as a way of serving them. That was back in 2002 when I first started blogging and to some extent that continues today, particularly in some niches. I think it happens a little bit more than others but since that time, a lot of link sharing has gradually disappeared from blogging and it’s gone to other mediums more and more. Today, more and more we see people linking to other blogs and other content on Twitter or on Facebook and less so on blogs themselves. On one hand, this is a good thing. I think those mediums do lend themselves very well to sharing of the content that you’re finding but sometimes I wonder that perhaps in losing the link post on blogs that maybe we’ve lost something as a community and maybe we don’t serve our readers as well as we used to. Today is about sort of rediscovering the link post and getting back to our roots as bloggers even if you weren’t blogging back then. There’s a lot of good reasons to be linking out in the content that you create. Just briefly before I get into issuing the challenge, I want to talk a little bit about some of the benefits of doing what we are going to do today as this challenge. Firstly, if you link to good stuff, it serves your readers. A lot of bloggers say to me, “Oh, I don’t want to link out. I want to keep people on my blog. I just want to keep people to myself.” Whilst I understand that feeling, yes, we want as many readers on our blog viewing as many pages as possible. Your readers will thank you if you send them to good stuff. You will probably have noticed if you’re a ProBlogger reader that once a week we do a round up post where we link to ten great articles that we found over the last week that are relevant to our readers. We get a lot of feedback on those posts via email, messages on social media of people telling us thank you for sharing those links. It serves our readers. We know that there’s so much more being written every week on the internet that’s relevant to our readers than what we can produce. Other people have more expertise in other areas that we don’t have. Other people have more time than we have to be able to write that content so it’s one way of serving our readers. There’s another good reason for it as well. It can help to show your readers that you’re well read, that you know what you’re talking about, you’re connected to the rest of your industry and that can add to your credibility. It also can help you to get on the radar of others that you link to. One of the things that we’ve noticed since we’ve been doing our round up posts on ProBlogger, I used to do them all the time but over the last six months, we’ve been doing it more and more. We get emails now from the people that we link to as well saying, “Hey, thanks for the link. Haven’t checked out ProBlogger for a while and it was great to see that one. I went surfing as a result.” Good things have come out of those sort of emails and we’re now finding that some of the people we link to every week are linking back to us. They’re sharing our posts on their social media. It becomes of a bit of a win-win. It’s good for your networking, I guess. It also I guess is potentially good for your search engine rankings. I’m no SEO expert but the SEO experts that I’ve talked to do say that if you’re linking to quality content it can really help your own search engine rankings as well. I don’t understand exactly how that works but that’s what I’m told. There’s some good reasons there for linking out from your blog. That’s why I want to issue today’s challenge. Let’s make today a day where we reclaim the link post. The other reasons I want to do today is that over the last six days, over the last six challenges, if you’ve been in the Facebook group, you know that there are literally thousands of blog posts that have been written over the last six days by other bloggers who are taking part of this challenge. I really want to encourage you to find some content that’s been written by others taking this challenge and link to those posts if you possibly can. You can link to other posts as well but try to at least get one other blog post that’s been written as part of this challenge. Head over to the Facebook group today. Surf through the last six days of challenges and find some content there that you could link to. There’s a number of approaches you might want to take with today’s challenge in terms of the types of posts that you might want to write. Number one, you might want to write something that is inspired by another blogger and then link to them as a source of inspiration. Find a piece of content that you’re inspired by, that you agree with, that you would like to add to in some way, that you think your readers will learn from, and then link to that and then add a little bit more to it in some way. If someone’s written five points in their article, you might want to say, “Hey, I love these five points. Here’s a summary of them. Here’s a quotes from that post and here’s what I would add to it or here’s what I disagree with it or here’s where I don’t think it’s quite right.” Add to it. Be constructive with your post in some way. This type of post I guess us where you’re just linking to one other piece of content that you either agree with, are inspired by, you think is useful, or perhaps that you disagree with in some way. Write something inspired by one other blogger or one other piece of content. You may choose to share a video that someone else has done and even embed that video in your post if that video is on YouTube, or you may even want to link out to someone’s tweet or their Facebook update and embed that content as well. Embeddable content is great way of adding some different styles of content to your blog as well. That’s the first thing you could do. The second option that you might want to take today is a little bit more involved. It might take a little bit more work but that’s find a collection of things to link to on a common theme. We’ve done this at times on Digital Photography School where we find ten great articles that have been written on portrait photography. There may have been older articles, they may be new articles, a bit of a mixture. They’re probably from different blogs, maybe some videos, maybe a podcast, and then we link out to those. We create a collection around the theme. The post itself that we create has this list of ten great resources for you to check out on this common theme. That might be another approach that you take. It takes a little bit more work. You need to search around. You need to really find the best quality content that you can. I probably would make it a little bit more than just a list of ten links, you might want to add in a little extra content about why you think those links are worth reading. You might want to use a quote, you might want to use a screenshot, you might want to use the logo of the site that you’re linking to to make it a little bit more visually interesting as well. There’s a variety of approaches that you could take there. The last thing you might want to do is what we do on ProBlogger and that’s do more of a round up, a reading round up is what we call them. This is where you find a number of pieces of content that are just relevant to your readers. They may not have a common theme but they’re new pieces of content. This is what was published this week around the web that you think your readers would find useful. I’ll link in the show notes today to one of our reading round ups that you might want to check out to see how we do it. You’ll see that Stacey who puts that post together has the link, she has the title of it and then she writes a short paragraph about why she thinks that particular piece of content is well worth reading. Our readers can make a decision about whether it’s one that they want to click on and go and check out. Again, head over to the Facebook Challenge Group and try and find at least one post there that you could link to in what you do today. But, go beyond that if you need to as well. You might want to do some searching on Google, you might want to use a tool like BuzzSumo, buzzsumo.com is great for finding old things to link to. You can type in any keyword that you like and it will tell you the most shared posts on that keyword over the last week,  24 hours, or year. You can really find some interesting stuff there. That may actually be a useful tool for you today. But again, try and find at least one challenge that you could link today. I’d love to see that link. Three last things I’d encourage you to keep in mind as you write your link post today. Try to keep it relevant to your audience, to your topic, to your niche. You don’t want this to just be a link post to content from other challenge takers, that’s not going to be really relevant to your readers. You’re not really helping your readers that way. You’re not helping the people you’re linking to really that way either. Keep it on topic, make sure you link to quality content, do check out the post that you’re linking to, check out whether you do agree with it. It’s amazing how many people will link out to stuff on social media that you go and check it out and then you go, “That really wasn’t that good. I didn’t really agree with that. I don’t think the person would link to it as well.” Don’t just link to it because it has a good title. Actually make sure that you link to quality content and that it is a quality site. I guess the last thing I’d say is to add a little something of your own to it. If you’re writing a blog post, tell people why they should read it. Add a thought of your own. Make it unique. Show that you’ve actually read what you’re linking to and that you have your own thoughts on the matter as well. It’s very easy to just link out to someone else’s post and say, “Hey, read this.” Tell your readers why. Tell them your opinion on the topic. Show them that you’ve put a little bit of thought into your post and add a little value in that way. The challenge is to create a link post or a link video or a social media post that links out if you choose to. Create that content. Publish that content. Head over to the ProBlogger Challenge Group on Facebook. You can search ProBlogger challenge group on Facebook and then look for the post there where I call for people to share their link posts. Leave your link posts there, leave the link and then check out some of the other link posts that others have created and surf around through what other people are doing and encourage them in some way. You may want to share what they’re doing, you may want to leave a comment, you may want like what they’re doing. That’s the challenge. Lastly, I wanted to just say thank you so much for this last week. Some of you have really taken on this challenge and have done some amazing pieces of content. I want to congratulate you whether you’ve published all seven or whether you’ve just done a couple of them. Thanks for participating. I hope that you’ve gotten a little bit back into the groove of blogging. I came across a couple of posts even today in the Facebook group from people saying that they’ve fallen back in love with blogging. That just warmed my heart. It got me really excited to see that that was happening because that was the intent of this whole challenge. As I said at the start, I’m going to keep the Facebook group open at least for the next few weeks for those of you who are still doing the challenges. But into the future as well, we will continue to issue some challenges in that group. This podcast will return to normal. We’re going back to our twice a week schedule every Monday night and every Thursday night Australian time I publish a podcast and so we’ll get back to that and there will be more teaching and a couple of interviews that I’ve got lined up as well. Lastly, don’t forget the virtual ticket which went on sale today at problogger.com/virtualticket. Thank you so much for listening. I’ll chat with you in a couple of day’s time in Episode 145. In the meantime, create that link post, I look forward to reading it. Enjoy this podcast? Sign up to our ProBloggerPLUS newsletter to get notified of all new tutorials and podcasts below.

Challenge: Create a Discussion Starter This is 6th challenge in ProBlogger’s 7 Days to Getting Your Blogging Groove Back Challenge that we kicked off back in episode 138. You can listen to it in the player above or here on iTunes. If you’re new to the challenge – this week I’m nominating a different style of content for you to create each day over the week and the challenge is to create a post within 24 hours of hearing about it and then sharing it with us in our ProBlogger Challenge Group on Facebook in this thread. It’s Sunday for most of us as this goes live and so I’ve decided to make it a challenge that is potentially a bit more bite sized for most of us! Before I tell you about today’s challenge…. I also quickly want to tell you about something that is happening in a couple of days time – we’re putting virtual tickets on sale for this year’s ProBlogger event. We hold an annual event for bloggers here in Australia each year and this year – by popular demand – we’re bringing back our virtual ticket so that those of you unable to get out to Australia can come along virtually and get all the amazing teaching we offer live attendees. The virtual ticket will be available early next week at ProBlogger.com/virtualticket where you can now sign up to be alerted when they go on sale. My challenge for you today is to start a discussion and to create a piece of content that attempt to get your readers engaging in some way. Now this might be a bit daunting for some of you just starting out who might not have much of a readership yet – but it’s something that I used to do in the very early days of my blogs that I’m glad that I persisted with. You might only have 2 readers – but when you show them that you’re interested in engaging it can have a big impact. And remember – this challenge isn’t just about writing blog posts. You might choose today to create content in another format. Live stream Instagram Facebook Twitter 5 Quick reasons why asking your readers questions and starting discussions can be good: It gives readers a sense of Community and Participation – if you follow up when you do get an interaction it could be the beginning of a long term reader! It increases Blog Stickiness – people are more likely to come back once they’ve interacted These posts don’t take a whole lot of effort to write (although can take some moderation) They are great for helping you to gauge where your readers are at on certain topics and can even give you ideas for future posts. They open up opportunities for followup posts as you summarize the answers, pick up conversations and even answer the question yourself etc. What question should you ask? Keep it relevant to your blog’s topic Ask a question that builds on a previous post Ask questions that are answerable Ask questions that readers will want to know the answer to Suggest some possible answers Either or questions can be great for starting a debate You can use a poll plugin to give your readers a way to vote on options Controversial questions can be great for starting a debate Be willing to share your own answer Do this in the content itself Hold off and let your readers respond first Do you have a frequently asked question that you don’t know the answer to Sometimes more personal questions can be worth asking What is Your Favorite DSLR Lens? Most Popular DSLR Lenses Answer your own question in comments, specifically ask people to answer (friends, influencers, regular commenters), promote the discussion The Challenge: Create your discussion starter – publish it Share the link in this thread in our ProBlogger Challenge Group on Facebook – please look for day 6’s thread to do it in Check out what others are doing – please engage with as many as you’re able to – help each other get some discussions going Update: Here are the rest of the Challenges in the Blogging Groove Series Challenge 1: Create a List Post – Listen on iTunes here – Submit to the Facebook Group Here. Challenge 2: Create a FAQ Post – Listen on iTunes here – Submit to the Facebook Group Here. Challenge 3: Create a Review Post – Listen on iTunes here – Submit to the Facebook Group Here. Challenge 4: Create a Story Post – Listen on iTunes here – Submit to the Facebook Group Here. Challenge 5: Create a ‘How to’ Post – Listen on iTunes here – Submit to the Facebook Group Here. Challenge 6: Create a Discussion Starter Post – Listen on iTunes here – Submit to the Facebook Group Here. Challenge 7: Create a Link Post – Listen on iTunes here – Submit to the Facebook Group Here. Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Hey there, it’s Darren here from ProBlogger and welcome to the sixth challenge in our Seven Days to Getting Your Blogging Groove Back, a week where I’m nominating a different style of post everyday for you to complete within 24 hours. The challenge really is to create seven pieces of content over a week. Today, we’re going to do one that’s a little bit easier, I hope, because it is Sunday for most of you when this is going live. It’s a challenge to create a piece of content that is a discussion starter. I know some of you are going to freak out about this because you’ve got no one to start a discussion with so I’ve got some suggestions for you in this particular podcast. The challenge is to create that piece of content and then to let us know over in the Facebook group, the ProBlogger Challenge Group on Facebook and share the piece of content that you create. Whether it’s a big piece of content or a small one, we want to see it and we want to be able to visit it. That’s the third part of today’s challenge, to visit as many of the other discussion starters as you can. Because they’re discussion starters, I would really challenge you to interact with them, to leave comments, to like them, to share them if possible. Before I get into some tips for today’s particular challenge, I want to just briefly mention as I did yesterday the virtual ticket for the ProBlogger event that’s coming up in September. If you head over to problogger.com/virtualticket, you’ll find a little bit more information and the opportunity to sign up to hear about the virtual ticket when it is launched. We’ve got two full days of content, three streams of content running all day over the two days here in Australia at an event which we’ve been holding for years now. This event delivers a lot of actionable, practical content for bloggers and people who want to improve in their social media. This year, we’re opening it up to everyone around the world to be able to come to that particular event through a virtual ticket where you’ll get access to all the recordings and slides from all of our sessions. We will release a little bit more information about the virtual ticket in the coming episodes but for now you can head to problogger.com/virtualticket to sign up to be notified when those tickets do go on sale. We’ll have an offer for you in a few days time. Today, my challenge for you is to start a discussion and to create a piece of content that attempts to get your readers engaging in some way. As I said before, this may be a little bit daunting for some of you who are just starting out and who might feel like you don’t have much of a readership yet. It’s something that I want to say I used to do even right in the first week of my first blog when I had no readers except for my mum and my wife who really didn’t read that much at all. Right from the start, I tried to create content that invited engagement and invited answers to my questions and invited discussion. Looking back, I think it’s probably one of the best things I did. There’s a whole heap of really good reasons why you might want to do that. Even if you’ve got only a couple of readers, maybe just one, when you do this type of content you’re going to show them that you’re interested in engaging with them and it can have a big impact. Some of the people that I first engaged with in this type of content still read my blogs today 13, 14 years later. Whilst you might not have many readers, you may today do something that hooks them in for a long term relationship with you. Remember, this challenge today isn’t just about writing blog posts. You might choose to do that, you might want to do something on your blog or you might choose to do something else. You might choose to create a piece of content that goes into a social stream, you might want to do a live video, you might want to do some content that is on Instagram, you might want to use Instagram’s new stories feature to invite discussion, you might want to do a post on Facebook or Twitter where people are perhaps a little bit more used to getting interactive. Or, you may choose to do it on your blog and then promote that piece of content in those interactive spaces. Five really quick reasons why asking your readers questions and starting discussions can be good. Firstly, it gives your reasons a sense of community and participation. If you follow up with any comment you get today, it could just be the beginning of a long term reader. I’ve told this story before on this podcast but in the early days of my very first blog, anytime I got a comment from anyone for the first time that I didn’t recognize the name of, I would email them. I would send them a personal email saying thanks for the comment, just want to let you know I’ve responded to your comment. I would give them the link to the post that they had commented on and invite them to go back and have another look. It was amazing how much of an impact that technique had. What you do today could be the beginning of a long term relationship, I’ve said it a few times now. Second reason for doing this type of content, it increases stickiness for your blog. It might sound a little bit icky but people are much more likely to stick, to become hooked on your blog, and are much more likely to come back again for a second visit once they’ve interacted with you. They’re much more likely to come back and see whether you’ve responded to their comment, to see what other people have said. It will leave on in their memory if they’ve gone through the effort of interacting with you in some way. This type of content is really important for getting the repeat visitor. Third reason that this type of content works really well is that they don’t usually take a whole heap of effort to write or to create. They do sometimes take a little bit of time to moderate and to interact with and they can be a bit intensive that way particularly once you’ve got some readers but they don’t take a lot of effort to create and that’s one of the reasons I put it on Sunday today. Number four reason why this type of content works really well is that they help you to gauge where your readers are at and can be really useful to give you an understanding of who your readers are and what type of content they want in the future. If you ask your readers a question today that reveals some of their needs, then you might just be able to follow today’s post up next week or next month with a piece of content that really solves a problem for them and that builds upon what you discover from your readers today. This is going to give you a sense of who is reading your blog and hopefully what they want from you. The last thing I love about this type of content is that they open up opportunities for follow-up posts. Again, I’ve already mentioned it, you can follow up today’s post with an answer to a question that someone answers or responding to a need that they said. But, you could also take some of the responses that you get today and put those responses into a blog post. If you ask a good question today and get a really good discussion going, you may find that your readers know a whole lot about a particular topic and then you could repurpose those answers into a blog post and pick up there and do a follow up post. If you ask a question today in the form of a poll which is something that I’m going to suggest in a moment that you do, you could follow up today’s post with another post that shares the results of that poll. People really like that type of content, the results of a study or some research or a poll that you’ve run. We do that quite semi-regularly over on Digital Photography School. The polls do really well but also the results of the poll post do really well as well. Often as results poll posts, you actually get linked to from other parts of the web as well. We are fortunate that we do have a large readership so we get quite a bit of data from those polls. But even a smaller poll may present some interesting results which could be a follow up post for you. Some of you are asking right now what questions should you be asking, how should you start this discussion. Really, anything does go here. You can type this question and run with it in any way that you like, in any medium that you like. A few tips to help you to formulate effective discussion starters. Firstly, keep the discussion relevant to your blog’s topic. If you’re writing about pet care, do a question around pet care. If you’re writing about sports, do a question around sports. You obviously want to keep it within the flow of what you normally do on your blog. That’s probably a bit too obvious to include but last time I did this challenge, I saw a number of people asking random questions and I wondered whether it really added to what was going on in their blog. Second tip, you might like to try asking a question that builds upon a previous post that you’ve written. For example, earlier in this seven day challenge, I encouraged you to write a piece of content that answered a frequently asked question. Maybe you could ask your readers how they would answer that question. If the question that you covered earlier in the week relates to that, maybe you could follow up and say hey, I answered this question here, link back to your old post, how would you answer it? Or maybe you could ask your readers to review something related to the review you did earlier in the week. For example, recently we did a review of a new camera on Digital Photography School. We could quite easily follow that up the next day with, “Hey, we just reviewed this camera, what camera do you use? Tell us in a hundred words why you like it.” That type of thing might be a good follow up. Or, you might say as a follow up to the story post that you wrote a few days ago, get your readers to tell a story on a similar thing to yours or you might issue them a challenge to do something based upon the how to piece of content that you created yesterday. Maybe in the last three or four pieces of content that you’ve created, you can formulate a question that relates to those. This is great because it gets people back to that other content. It gets the second page view and it takes your readers on a bit of a journey. You could actually create two or three pieces of content over a week or so that all sort of tap into the same topic but tackle it from a different perspective. Ask questions that are answerable. It’s amazing sometimes the questions that I want to ask in a blog post, I think that’s too complicated. I just need to ask something really simple. Don’t make your readers jump through too many hoops to participate in the discussion. Ask them a simple question, a question that maybe they could answer in just a few words if they chose to do that. Just getting a couple of word reply is better than getting no reply. It may just show them how to use comments on your blog, it may just get them used to the idea of putting their thoughts out there, and then the next comment may actually be a little bit bigger. Simple questions are really great. Ask questions that your readers will want to know the answer to as well. If you ask a question on a hot topic that people are unsure about, that can be really good because people will not only share what they know but they’ll come back to that post again and again maybe several times throughout the next 24 hours to see what people have said about that particular topic. Asking questions that people not only know the answers to but want to know the answers to can be quite good as well. You might want to suggest to your readers some of the possible answers. You might say hey, what’s your opinion on US politics at the moment? Do you like Donald Trump? Do you like Hilary Clinton? Suggest three different options for them, that makes the question a little bit more answerable, particularly if it’s a tough question. That may not be the best example because that may start a bit of a fight and people will already probably know their answer on that particular topic but by suggesting a few different options, you may actually get a few more responses from people because you’re making it easier. Sometimes in the same way, you might want to ask an either or question. Say do you like this or do you like that. We asked this question a while ago on Digital Photography School, would you prefer Canon or do you prefer Nikon? That stimulated a whole heap of discussion because people are quite passionate about their camera brand and people who weren’t Canon or Nikon fans chimed in as well because they wanted to add in their thoughts as well. Sometimes an either or question could be quite good, sometimes you might like to start a debate in a similar way to what I’ve just said there. You just need to be a little bit careful about controversial questions because they can be a great way to get a discussion going but they can also get people pretty fired up. Perhaps, the example I just gave you of Trump versus Clinton might be one that you might want to avoid if you’re not going to be on your blog all day over the next 24 hours to moderate that discussion. You may want to use a poll today and there are plenty of plugins for WordPress that will enable you to do a poll. Polls are great because they don’t actually require anyone to write anything. They just have to click a button for the option that appears for them and they can be a really great way of getting a new reader’s first response from them. Sometimes, what we do in our posts on both blogs with polls is we have a poll and then ask for more information in comments. We might have a poll on which camera brand you use and then underneath that poll say something like, “Tell us in comments below why you like that camera brand.” Really, what we’re asking people there for is two pieces of information. We’re getting them to vote and then we’re bringing them a more open ended question to discuss. Not everyone will answer that second question, we’ll get many more responses on the polls than we do get comments. It gives people two different ways and they can respond to the extent that they feel comfortable responding. Some of your readers just will never comment but they will respond to a poll and again, they’ll come back to see the results of that poll as well. You may choose to use a tool, there’s plenty of WordPress plugins that enable you to do that. If you’re doing your content today on Twitter or on Facebook, there are poll options there on Twitter. You can set up a poll pretty easily if you’re in Facebook. Facebook groups I think have polls, I’m not sure that they do have them on most pages. Polls might be a good way to go. Another tip, be willing to share your own answer to the question. You could do that as the meat of your blog post. If you’re writing a blog post, you might want to write a few paragraphs on what you think about something and then ask the question inviting your readers to respond. The beauty of doing that is that if you don’t have many readers, at least you’re producing some content that has your opinion or has your view on a particular topic. That may be one way if you are a bit nervous about creating this post today and worried that no one will respond to it, maybe you just want to write a blog post that has a question at the end of it today. The other thing that you might like to do is to ask the question as the main part of your blog post or your Facebook update or your Instagram, whatever it might be. Then, answer that question as a comment. This is something I used to do in the early days of my blogs. I would ask a question and then I would say I’ll kick things off. I would be the first commenter. That showed my readers that I was willing to respond to my own questions, I was willing to have a discussion. It also got that magical number one next to the comment numbers so it wasn’t that daunting as a zero comments. The other thing I used to do back then was also email my friends and say hey, I just started this discussion. No one’s answering, could you chime in? That maybe something that you would like to do is to email a friend, you might even like to tweet and influence that in your niche and ask them to respond to the comment. You may like to promote the discussion you’re having on other social media channels. I think trying to get people to that discussion and highlight that you’re having it is great. Getting those first few comments and those first few responses is half the battle. Once you get a few, social proof kicks in and it’s easier to get the rest. I think they’re the main tips I’ll give you about today’s topic. Give it a go. You may not get too much in direction today but you’re going to learn something by creating this type of content. You are going to help yourself get in the groove of creating content. Once you’ve created your content today, your discussion starter, publish it and head over to the ProBlogger Challenge Group on Facebook and share a link to your discussion starter. Look for the Day 6 thread, I’ll have it pinned to the top of that Facebook page. I ask you to share your content in that thread, don’t start a new thread. Once you’ve shared it, I really would ask you today to check out some of the other discussion starters that people are starting. Share a comment or two in there and help to get each other’s discussions up and running. I challenge you to find at least three, go for five or ten if you can, but choose at least three other pieces of content that people have shared in today’s challenge and respond to them, encourage them in that way. Hopefully, they’ll check out yours as well. Really look forward to seeing the discussions that you start today. If you’re enjoying this series, I’d love it if you would take a moment today to head over to iTunes and hit subscribe if you haven’t already or on Stitcher if that’s your preferred podcast network and to leave us a review. I read every single review that comes in and it does help me to shape future shows as well. It’s very encouraging as well when I have those darker moments where I wonder whether anyone’s listening. Thanks so much for participating. It’s great to see that people are listening, we’re getting hundreds of people submitting their pieces of content. I love hearing the stories about how people are getting back into their blogging groove. This is really the point of this particular week. Any feedback you’ve got for me today, you can share that on the comments of today’s show notes or over in the Facebook group as well. Look forward to chatting with you tomorrow in the last challenge of this week’s amazing, epic kind of challenge that we’ve been doing. I hope you’re finding your blogging groove. Enjoy this podcast? Sign up to our ProBloggerPLUS newsletter to get notified of all new tutorials and podcasts below.

Challenge: Create a ‘How to’ Post This is 5th challenge in ProBlogger’s 7 Days to Getting Your Blogging Groove Back Challenge that we kicked off back in episode 138. If you’re new to the challenge – this week I’m nominating a different style of content for you to create each day over the week and the challenge is to create a post within 24 hours of hearing about it and then sharing it with us in our ProBlogger Challenge Group on Facebook. Listen to this episode in the player above or here on iTunes. This week has been amazing so far. In the first few days we’ve done ‘list posts’ (there were something like 300 posts written), FAQ posts, Review posts and Story posts. I’m LOVING reading as many of them as I can and encourage you to keep going. The weekend is upon us now so for some of us its about to get tough – but I encourage you to keep at it! Good things are happening – keep it up! Before I tell you about today’s challenge…. I also quickly want to tell you about something that is happening in a couple of days time – we’re putting virtual tickets on sale for this year’s ProBlogger event. We hold an annual event for bloggers here in Australia each year and this year – by popular demand – we’re bringing back our virtual ticket so that those of you unable to get out to Australia can come along virtually and get all the amazing teaching we offer live attendees. The virtual ticket will be available early next week at problogger.com/virtualticket where you can now sign up to be alerted when they go on sale. Today your challenge is to publish a ‘How to’ post. How to posts work well because: It’s one of the main reasons people go online – to learn, seek help As a result they tend to rank well in Search and can be really shareable They also tend to be evergreen in nature When you teach someone how to do something they tend to remember who taught them and have gratitude towards them. They also become evangelists They build credibility How to content can come in any form you like: Written – blog posts, articles, list posts, essays Video – can be great for walking people and showing them how to do something rather than just telling Screen capture video – for something you do online Images – a series of good images Gifs – putting a series of images into a gif Slideshow Podcast – most of my podcasts are how to Infographics A few approaches you might like to take: How you do something How to Build an Efficient Social Media Workflow to Increase your Traffic How you did something $72,000 in E-Books in a Week – 8 Lessons I Learned Share it in a story Analysis of someone else’s technique Content on the result of your research How to Cut Out the Subject From the Background in Photoshop Write about a very simple concept How to Hold a Camera Write about a very advanced topic 6 Advanced Composition Techniques to Improve Your Photos It could be a very practical tangible thing How to Clean Your Camera Sensor and Lenses It could also be something less tangible How to Overcome Fear of Speaking, Podcasting, Live Streaming, Webinars and More A post on straight theory, without inserting yourself How to Start a Blog in 5 Steps A few quick tips: Base it on a real world need Base it on an FAQ Break it down into steps Show as much as possible A Powerful Exercise inside Google Analytics to Set You Up for a Successful Year of Blogging Anticipate questions Add a call to action Add depth The Challenge: Create your ‘how to’ post – publish it Head to the ProBlogger Challenge Group on Facebook and share the link with us on this thread Check out some of the other ’how to content people have written. Comment, like, share Update: Here are the rest of the Challenges in the Blogging Groove Series Challenge 1: Create a List Post – Listen on iTunes here – Submit to the Facebook Group Here. Challenge 2: Create a FAQ Post – Listen on iTunes here – Submit to the Facebook Group Here. Challenge 3: Create a Review Post – Listen on iTunes here – Submit to the Facebook Group Here. Challenge 4: Create a Story Post – Listen on iTunes here – Submit to the Facebook Group Here. Challenge 5: Create a ‘How to’ Post – Listen on iTunes here – Submit to the Facebook Group Here. Challenge 6: Create a Discussion Starter Post – Listen on iTunes here – Submit to the Facebook Group Here. Challenge 7: Create a Link Post – Listen on iTunes here – Submit to the Facebook Group Here. Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Hey there, this is Darren from ProBlogger. Welcome to challenge five of my Seven Days to Getting Your Blogging Groove Back challenge where everyday for a week I’m nominating a different style of blog post for you to write within 24 hours of you hearing my challenge and then sharing it over in our ProBlogger Challenge Group in Facebook. This week has been an amazing week so far, some of you I know are exhausted by this stage. We’ve done four days previously of challenges and some of you have done all four and that’s fantastic, others of you are taking your time a little bit more and that’s totally fine as well. Others of you are probably hearing about this challenge for the first time today and it’s totally fine for you to join in any time. You might want to go back to Episode 138 to hear what the challenge is all about and then 139 to hear the first challenge and work your way through them in that way. On the first day, we talked about list posts. I asked you to write a list post whether that be on video, blog post, Instagram, all kinds of posts. Over 300 of them submitted in the Facebook group. Then, we did frequently asked question post where you had to write a piece of content based on a question. Then, we did review posts, story posts, and we have had hundreds and by the time this goes live, probably thousands of posts submitted already. I’m really loving seeing so many of them. The weekend is upon us, this episode goes live on Saturday night Australian time, Saturday morning for the rest of the world. It’s about to get tough for some of you. I want to encourage you to keep at it, push through the pain. Good things happen when we do that. One of the things I love about this type of challenge is that it shows us what we are capable of. We many types approach this type of challenge, seven days of writing a piece of content everyday. That can seem overwhelming, it can seem impossible. Sometimes, life does get in the way but sometimes we can achieve more than we think we can. I want to encourage you whilst you might be feeling the pain at the moment to push through it. You don’t have to write a long post today, there are a few ways that you can do today’s one in a fairly short way which I’ll give you some examples of in a moment. Before I tell you what today’s challenge is, I want to quickly tell you about something that is happening in a couple of days time. We are putting virtual tickets on sale for this year’s ProBlogger event. Many of you know about the ProBlogger event because we’ve featured some of our speakers in past episodes but we do hold an annual event for bloggers here in Australia every year. This year by popular demand, we’re bringing back our virtual tickets. Those of you who are unable to get to Australia can come along virtually and get all the amazing teaching that we offer our live attendees. The virtual ticket will be available next week so Monday. We will give you more information on that in the episodes that come up but I want to let you know that you can go to problogger.com/virtualticket where there will be a little bit more information and there’s an opportunity for you to add your email just so we can notify you when those tickets go on sale. I’ll tell you a little bit more about the virtual ticket in upcoming episodes but I want to put it on your radar so you can begin to consider whether that might be for you. Let me tell you about today’s challenge. Today, your challenge is to publish a piece of content that is how to in nature, a how to whatever it is that you write about. How to posts are pretty much what I’ve spent most of my last 13 years writing. How to posts, teaching posts, tip posts. You can really interpret these in a number of different ways but this sort of teaching type content is incredibly powerful. I know some of you already know this because it’s all you do and you’re going to find today easy. Some of you have resisted this sort of how to content and probably for good reason because it may not suit your niche but I think there are some ways that you can probably tackle this one today. I’m going to suggest a few in a moment. First, how to posts work really well for a number of reasons. Firstly, it’s one of the main reasons that people go online. You think about the problems that you’ve had, you might have. The other day for example, our washing machine stopped working. We kind of thought that maybe something was in one of the filters and I could not get the thing open, the area where this filter was. What did I do? I went online and I found a piece of how to content on YouTube where a very kind gentleman walked me through how to open the filter on my particular model of washing machine. Amazingly, even though that was a very niche-video, it was just a one model of washing machine. It had been watched over 300,000 times, that one very simple piece of content where this guy walked us through this how to. How to content is one of the main reasons that people go online. Anytime they’ve got a problem, they want to learn something, they need help with something, they need advice, they go to Google, they go to social media. As a result, how to content can be a great source of traffic for you. They tend to rank well in search, they can be very shareable and they can be evergreen in nature. That video had been live for two or three years already, it must have been an old washing machine. When you teach someone something, it also has a really big impact upon them if you teach them well. People tend to remember who taught them things, they tend to have gratitude towards those people. They tend to share the word about those types of people particularly if you teach them a number of things. Many of the emails that I get on ProBlogger from people who’ve been reading along since 2004, 2005, the early days, are incredibly great for the number of things that I’ve been able to teach them and some of our writers have been able to teach them. When people come up to me at conferences, it’s amazing how much gratitude they sometimes show. When you change someone’s life by teaching them something, it can have a massive impact upon them and also builds your credibility. There’s a whole heap of reasons why how to content can be a very good thing to focus upon. It’s for all of those reasons that I’ve been pretty much focusing most of my attention on how to content, whether it would be blogs in this podcast and in other forms as well. How to content come in many forms, I’ve already talked about video that I found the other day, video content is great for walking people through anything where you need a bit of visual help. It’s really helpful to see where exactly to open up that filter, how to do it, and how much pressure to apply. That would’ve been something that would’ve been more difficult to write about. Of course, written content can be very useful in a number of forms—whether it would be a blog post, an article, a list post, something written or in an essay form. Short form, long form, it doesn’t really matter. Screen capture video can be really good if you are wanting to teach someone something that you want to do on your computer. A series of images can work really well. You can put those images together into a GIF. You could produce a slideshow and put it up on Slide Share, you can do it in a podcast, you can create an infographic, all of these things are possible in terms of teaching people how to do something. You can choose any of those today, I really don’t mind. I’m loving seeing some of the best pieces of content in the last few days people have been doing on Instagram. I saw in the list post, one person just put up five bullet points on their Instagram account and that Instagram photo got a whole heap of likes. That maybe what you want to do today; teach someone something very simple on Instagram. Feel free to be as creative as you like. A few approaches that you might like to take—some of you already know what you’re going to write about. You’re probably going to pause this podcast and just go and do it. If you are struggling with that, how am I going to do this, I don’t usually write this type of content, let me give you a few ideas on different types of how to content that you might want to do. I’ll give you some examples as well from my two blogs and I think I’ve got a couple of examples from Vanessa’s blog as well. These will all be linked to in the show notes. First thing, you might like to do a post that is how you do something that you regularly do. What I found over the years is many of the things that I do everyday that I take for granted, I do this every single day, I don’t even think about what I’m doing. Many of those things actually are really interesting to other people. Maybe the way you process your email is something that could teach other people, “I probably need to learn how to do that, I’m hopeless at email.” You may have a system in place where you could actually teach me how to process my email and get my inbox down to zero. An example of this over on ProBlogger a year or so ago now, I did a post How to Build an Efficient Social Media Workflow to Increase Your Traffic. I walk people through in Screen Flow and in Screen Cast where I capture the process on my screen, me talking about what I was doing. The process that I show there is something that I take for granted. I’ve been doing it now for five or six years and whilst the process has evolved a little over the years and my tools have changed a little bit, what I do there is actually really useful to other people who are just starting out. Maybe it’s something that you do everyday. I remember Nicole Avery from Planning with Kids, the planning queen talked about how she makes lunches for her five children every week. I’m sure that’s something that she takes for granted but it’s something that other people who are overwhelmed by that process would find very useful. Maybe it’s something that you do regularly or maybe it’s something you did once off, a big event that happened in your life. Maybe you just had a 30th birthday party, how did you put that party together? That can be useful for other people who are going through that process. Over on ProBlogger, another example. Many years ago now, I wrote a post, $72,000 in Ebooks in a Week, Eight Lessons I Learned. Basically, that post was the story of how I launched my first ebook and some of the lessons I learned along the way. That post is written more in a story form with a few lessons that I learned but it’s still a teaching post. Another example of this is one that Vanessa wrote on her blog recently, How to Travel to Bali with Young Kids. It tells a story of us going to Bali and how we did it. She talked about accommodation, how to eat, where to shop, those types of things which was really more about what we did but it’s amazing how many people have saved that post and used that as the basis for their own trip to Bali with young kids. If you don’t usually do teaching content and you don’t think your readers are really going to respond well to a how to do this type post, maybe share a story. Tell the story of how you did something, how you achieved something, or how you failed at something and how you’ll do it differently. Those are still teaching posts. People can apply the lessons that you learned or the things that you did to their own situation. Maybe that will help you in that. Another approach you might want to take is to write about how someone else does something. How does Seth Gordon build his blog or create great content? Lessons that you can learn from another person. You might want to interview that person and involve them in the creation of your content, or you might just write about your observations of what this other person does or what other people do and use a variety of different examples to teach how to do that. Remember, we did a post on ProBlogger in the last year where we analyzed some of the best Facebook pages and we talked about what we were seeing happen on those Facebook pages and the types of posts that they were producing and why they did well. That too was a teaching post. We didn’t ask any of those people what they were doing, we just observed it. Maybe there’s something you can teach based upon what you observed someone else doing. In a similar way, you may choose to do some research on a particular how to topic. You might do some research and find five other articles that people have written on a topic and make your post more of this is what other people’s approach to this issue is or you might even find a piece of embeddable content that someone else has produced that teaches. For example, one of the best posts that we’ve done on Digital Photography School in the last year I think has been was a post that we published called How to Cut Out The Subject from the Background in Photoshop. It’s a bit of a technical post in some ways. If you go and check out this post, you’ll see there that Darleen, our editor, basically found two great videos that she found on YouTube. She took the embed code that is on pretty much every video on YouTube and put it into a blog post. And then, she introduced the topic with an introduction, added a bit of her own content as well. The bulk of what is taught in that particular blog post is actually curated content. You don’t even need to write all the content. If you can find some content that is available to be embedded, maybe that can be just as powerful. Why do you have to write a whole post when someone else might be teaching it just as well? That post actually drove thousands and thousands of visitors to our site because they were great videos and she added some valuable stuff as well. You may actually if you don’t have time today get onto YouTube or Slide Share or one of these other sources of great embeddable content and use some of that type of content. Of course, you want to acknowledge the source, you want to link back and give some love back to the content creator, but this can be a really great way of teaching your readers something. They’ll thank you for it but also delivering some useful content in a way that perhaps isn’t too onerous being a Saturday and all. Your post could be a simple post. Again, one of my best performing posts over the years has been a post How to Hold a Digital Camera. These things that we take for granted. Or, it could be a really advanced topic. We published a post on Digital Photography School, Six Advanced Composition Techniques To Improve Your Photos. The simple posts will have wider appeal, you may have if they work well, if you do manage to rank in Google for them, they can send you a lot of traffic. The advanced post can do really well for you as well because there may be less competition, there may be less posts online about those topics. It might be easier to rank higher as well. Whether it’s beginner, whether it’s advanced, it doesn’t really matter. Your post could be on a very practical, tangible thing. Something that’s very physical. For example, How To Clean Your Camera’s Sensors And Lenses was a post that we wrote. Or, it might be something less tangible, it might be more about a feeling or an internal problem that people have. For example of ProBlogger, I wrote a post How to Overcome Fear of Speaking, Podcasting, and Live Streaming. That didn’t teach how to make anything or how to do anything, it was more about how to overcome something. It was an internal problem that a lot of people have, the problem of fear. It might just be a straight theory post. For example on ProBlogger, our How to Start a Blog post. It’s just a process that people want to know about. I hope somewhere in those ideas, there’s some ideas forming in your mind about the type of content that you want to create. If you are struggling to come out with a topic today, head over to the Facebook group and ask in the thread that I’ve got for today’s topic, you can share your post once it’s live. But also if you’re struggling there, you might also just want to say hey everyone, I don’t know what to write about today. This is my topic, this is my niche, this is what I normally write about. Maybe someone else can give you some ideas as well, I’ve seen a few people doing that. Some few tips on creating your content. Firstly, base it on a real need that you see people having, a pain that they have or a gain that they want. There’s a great episode, Episode 105 of this podcast where I talk about an exercise for coming out with the pains and the gains that your readers have and the gains that they want to have. Include that pain or that gain in the introduction. You want to give people a reason to read your blog post or watch your video or interact with your content. Really pay attention to that need, the objective that your content is going to meet and the way that it will help people, include that benefit right up front. That gives people a reason to really engage with that content. Really focus upon that need. You may choose to choose a topic that’s based on a frequently asked question. One question you might want to ask is what do people frequently ask you about how you did something. For Vanessa of that post on How to Travel to Bali with Small Kids, she got a lot of questions while we’re in Bali from her friends on Facebook saying how did you do that, how did you get your three year old to Bali? Pay attention to those types of questions about how you do things. As you’re creating your content, really try to break it down if you can into steps. Most things that you’ll teach can be broken down into stages, steps, the parts of a process. It’s really useful to identify those things before you start writing. It really helps you to write the content but it’s also really helpful for people wanting to consume that content and to enact and take action upon the advise that you have. Really emphasize that step by step, the stages that you need to go through. I know the video that I watched on how to get that filter open, it really broke it down very clearly. He actually in the video just said there’s three things you need to do, number one do this. And then, he actually paused in the video and said you might actually want to pause this video and do that. Number two, do this, and he really walked me through it. For someone who is challenged in that particular area of opening filters on washing machines, that was really helpful. He obviously thought about structuring his content in a way that I could actually do it while I was watching it and take action in that way. Show as much as possible if you can. That’s why video works so well, but images can work as well. An example that I’ll link to in today’s show notes is a post that I wrote on how an exercise in using Google Analytics that I walked readers through. If you go and check out that particular post, you’ll see there’s probably twenty or so screenshots and I really get very detailed on how to do each step along the way and how I got to the particular part of Google Analytics. I said click this, click this, and click this and then showed an image of it. Really getting into the detail of how to do it, a lot of people really appreciated that. Another question and thing that you might want to consider is as you’re writing your content, be anticipating the questions that someone might be asking. As I was writing that exercise and using Google Analytics, I knew in the back of my mind that people would be saying how do I get to that part of Google Analytics? That’s why I really went into detail there. As you’re writing, ask yourself what would a beginner be asking at this point in the article? Then, try to build those answers into the article itself. You might want to do that by just adding more detail into your post but you might also have a frequently asked questions at the end of your post or anticipating the objections that your readers might be having along the way and talking about those. I think it’s sometimes really important to add a call to action at the end of these types of posts as well. Encourage your readers to give what it is that you’ve taught them a go and maybe give them a first step in how to do that. You might want to call them to show you or tell you how they went with it. On Digital Photography School, we often at the end of the week do a challenge for our readers based upon one of the tutorials that we did earlier in the week. If we’ve taught someone how to use long shutter speeds, we might do a challenge at the end of the week where we point back to that tutorial and say hey, what about giving this tutorial a go and showing us the images that you take as a result of that? You might want to invite people to leave a comment and tell you how they went with the process. That can really help you to not only get people to take action but also it will start to reveal how you can improve that content as well. If they all seemed to have a problem with one step, maybe you can address that and update your post. The last thing I’ll say, this is really a place to all posts. As you’re about to publish that blog post or video, ask yourself how could I add a bit of depth and how could I polish this? Really pay attention to the formatting of your post, the visuals in your post, but also give people some further reading whether that be archived post that you’ve got on your blog or whether it’s a further reading that they can read on someone else’s blog as well. Readers will really value the extra effort that you go through in making your post look good but also become even more useful. There are my tips, today is a bit longer, sorry for that. I really look forward to seeing what you come up with today. Remember, your challenge today, you’ve got 24 hours if you can do it in 24 hours—take longer if you need it. Within 24 hours, I challenge you to create a post that has a how to element to it. Teach something to someone. It doesn’t have to be a long one, it doesn’t have to be a mega post if you haven’t got time for it, it could be as simple as an Instagram post. The key with this whole week is to get into the rhythm of creating content in some way. Create your post, publish it, and then head over to the ProBlogger Challenge Group in Facebook. Share the link to your content in the thread that I will have there for you. I ask you please don’t start a new thread just with your content, look for the fifth day in this challenge. There will be a pinned post if you’re coming within 24 hours. If you can’t see that, look in the about section on the page and there’s a link in that section to all of the five days so far. Look forward to seeing what you share there with us. Lastly, the last part of this challenge, some of you have been doing this just brilliantly is check out some of the other posts that people are submitting there. It really is encouraging for people when they can see that there’s a bit of extra traffic coming along. Leave a comment, like their post, and consider sharing it as well. I think it’s really great to share the love if you can find a post in there that relates to your audience. Look forward to seeing what you come up with today in your how to content. Chat with you tomorrow with the sixth challenge in this week’s challenge. Enjoy this podcast? Sign up to our ProBloggerPLUS newsletter to get notified of all new tutorials and podcasts below.