ProBlogger Podcast: Blog Tips to Help You Make Money Blogging

Challenge: Create a Story Post This is 4th challenge in ProBlogger’s 7 Days to Getting Your Blogging Groove Back Challenge that we kicked off a couple of episodes ago. To recap – every day for the next week I’m going to suggest a particular style of blog post for you to create. My challenge is to create and publish that challenge – to join our ProBlogger Challenge Group on Facebook and to share your post on this thread and to check out the other posts others are submitting. Today your challenge is to publish a ‘story’ post. You can listen to this episode in the player above or look for episode 141 on iTunes. The challenge with stories is finding a way to tie into the rest of your blog and make them relevant and to ensure that they have some point to them that is useful to your readers on some level. In Today’s Episode 14 Types of Stories You Can Tell on Your Blog Personal Discovery Stories The #1 Reason My Blogging Grew Into a Business Stories as Analogies and Illustrations My Search for the Perfect Cafe [And What it Taught Me about Blogging] Success Stories How to Quit Your Job, Move to Paradise and Get Paid to Change the World Failure Stories How NOT to Send an Email: A Day We’d Rather Forget But a Story We Need to Tell Biography/Tell Someone Else’s Story Beginner Week – Katie180’s success story How I did it Stories $72,000 in E-Books in a Week – 8 Lessons I Learned Autobiographies Becoming a ProBlogger – A story in Many Parts Picture Stories Case Studies 12 Blogging Income Streams [And the Story of My 10 Year ‘Overnight’ Success] Fiction Reader Stories Collective Stories Imagine If…. Stories How to Craft a Blog Post – 10 Crucial Points to Pause A day in the life – Walk your readers through a typical day The Challenge: Create your story 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 reviews 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 friends, it’s Darren from ProBlogger. Welcome to the fourth challenge in ProBlogger’s Seven Days to Getting Your Blogging Groove Back. This is Episode 141 of the ProBlogger Podcast. As I said, I’m Darren Rowse, the founder of ProBlogger, a blog that’s dedicated to helping bloggers to get the most out of their blogs to create blogs that change the world but also sustainable blogs, blogs that are profitable. We’re over halfway not through this seven day challenge, a challenge where I’m giving you a challenge everyday for seven days to create a piece of content that has a different style. Everyday I’m giving you a style of blog post to create and allowing you to choose the topic and then asking you to publish that challenge within twenty-four hours and share it over with us in the ProBlogger Challenge Group on Facebook. It’s been great to see so many hundreds of bloggers participating in this particular challenge and I look forward to seeing what you come up with today because today is a style of post that I love. I think it’s a style of post that has the ability to really make a deep connection with your readers to create a memory in their mind and to bring about change in their lives. Today, I want to issue you with a challenge to publish a story on your blog, a story post, a piece of content that is about a story or at least that includes a story. As always, you can create a written story, use video, use audio, use visual content, be as creative as you’d like. Stories are my favorite type of content and they’re very effective for a number of reasons. Firstly, they engage the imagination of your readers. They go beyond facts and theories. They reveal something about you as a blogger, particularly if it’s a personal story. They trigger emotions and the senses in your readers. They are conversational, they stimulate other people to react and to tell their stories. They provide hooks for readers to latch onto your blogging in new ways in that they’re relatable. Stories grab attention and hold attention, it’s amazing when you tell a story how far people will read. Stories create memories, they’re the type of content that people can remember years after you tell them. They illustrate your points and help you to teach and to be more convincing and convicting in your content. Stories also get retold, they get re-shared. This is great if you want other people to find your blog, word of mouth kicks in with stories. The challenge with stories is finding a way to tie them into the rest of your blog and to make them relevant and to insure that they have some point to them that’s useful to your readers. That’s probably the biggest challenge for today for you is to find a story that you can tell that is actually on topic and that is relevant for your blogs. I’m going to give you some suggestions to help to identify those particular types of stories in a moment. While telling the story of how your dog dug up your vegetable patch might be interesting to you, the readers of your blog about makeup or cameras or traveling with kids might not be quite as fascinated so you do need to find something that is a little bit relevant. Back in Episode 81 of this podcast, I shared fourteen types of stories that you can tell on your blog. Rather than you going back and listening to the episode, I want to whip through those fourteen types of stories and hopefully as I do, some stories will begin to come to mind that you could tell on your blog. Your story need not be a deeply personal thing, it may not need to be hugely inspirational, there’s a whole heap of different approaches that you can take. Here’s the fourteen types of stories that I mentioned back in Episode 81. Firstly, there’s the personal discovery story. This is how you discovered a lesson. These stories show your readers how similar you are to them. It’s you giving some practical advice on how they might learn from your experience. An example of this on ProBlogger quite a few years ago now, I wrote a post called The Number One Reason My Blogging Grew into a Business. I told the story of my wife giving me an ultimatum to get my blogs to a full time level or to get a real job. It didn’t happen quite like that but it was a story where we kind of together, Vanessa and I, decided to really ramp things up with the blogging. I told that story and it’s amazing how many people related to that, it’s amazing how many readers related to that moment of having those sorts of discussions but it’s also a story that enabled me to teach an important lesson as well. It was a personal discovery story I guess in many ways because in making that decision, my eyes were opened to a whole heap of new things. The second type of story is a story as an analogy or as an illustration. This is where your whole post might not be a story, it might just be you telling a story to illustrate a particular point. Or, to use as a metaphor if you like. Another example of a post that I wrote on ProBlogger a number of years ago was a post called My Search for The Perfect Cafe and What it Taught Me About Blogging. I pulled some principles of the cafes that I was seeing and tied them to how to build a blog that’s welcoming and that people want to keep coming back to. The third type of story that you might want to tell is a success story. Tell them how you achieved something. These stories can be inspirational, motivating for your readers, and can also teach them along the way. On the flip side of that, the fourth type of story is the failure story. I find these stories are actually more powerful, they make you relatable, they show people that you’re not perfect, that you’re human but you can learn from your failures. Probably the classic example of this on ProBlogger was a post where we told the story of how we sent an email to a whole heap of more people than we probably should’ve, it was an email that we sent out by mistake. I think it was titled How Not to Send an Email, A Day We’d Rather Forget but a Story We Need to Tell. The fifth type of story is a biography. Tell someone else’s story, share their journey. Maybe something that you interview them to get their story or maybe just your observations of another person’s story or maybe you do some research on a historical figure. On the flip side of that, you might want to tell an autobiography. Tell your own story from start to finish, or at least part of your story. I’ve done this a number of times on ProBlogger for example with a post called Becoming a Blogger, a story of many parts where I walk readers through how I started a blog but how I became a full time blogger and the steps that I took along the way. Another type of story that you might want to tell is a how I did it story. These are autobiography type stories but they also can be more practical. Talking your readers through a process. Another example of this is a post that I wrote many years ago now on ProBlogger about the first ebook that I launched and how I walked through that. I talked about eight lessons that I learned through that process and talked about the step by steps of what I did in launching that ebook. Another type of story you might want to tell is a picture story. This is using images to tell the story rather than any words at all. This can be very effective. You may choose to mix up some words and images or even use video or audio as well. You’re creating pictures using something more visual to create your story. Another type of story you might want to tell is more of a case study. This is where you pull apart someone else’s experience in a case or your own experience. This, again, can be sort of walking through a process but also I guess telling the beginnings of stories. Often, people see examples of those that they admire, the end results, but they don’t know how they got to that end result. A case study can really walk people through that. Another example of a post that I did that I would consider to be a case study is a post I published on ProBlogger. Again, Twelve Blogging Income Streams where I walked my readers through how I added different income streams to my blogging over time. Really, a step by step type process. You might try a fiction story. A well written, made up and imaginative story can be a really good way to lead into a post. You might want to start a post with sort of a fictional story in some way, it doesn’t have to be a true one although you probably want to come clean about whether it’s true or not. Reader’s stories can be another type of story that you can tell where you tell the story of one of your readers, you might again want to interview them or you might want to get a reader to submit a story as well. That might be a bit hard for today’s challenge but it’s the type of story that you could tell in the future on your blog. What about writing a collective story? This is where you tell the story of a group of people or your industry or your niche. I saw someone do this a little while ago on the release of the new iPhone where they told the story of smartphones for example. It’s not a personal story, it’s the story of a developing product category. That would be another way of doing it. You might want to tell the story of photography, you might want to tell the story of a certain type of technology or a type of niche within the blogger’s field. Go back through the history of different blogs that have been invented. There’s a whole heap of different ways that you can do that collective story. The second to the last one, story number thirteen that you might want to do is an imagine if story. This is almost like a hypothetical where you get your readers to imagine their life in the future. It actually paints a picture of what could be. These are kind of fictional but they’re kind of in the future. It’s hard to explain it but I’ll give you an example of this in the show notes in a post I wrote on ProBlogger called How to Craft a Blog Post where I tell the story in the second person with the reader as the main character. These are useful to help your readers to feel something, to be in the shoes of themselves in the future. Difficult one to tell but check out the example in today’s show notes. The last type of story that you might want to tell is a day in the life type stories where you walk readers through a typical day for you. I have done this a number of times on ProBlogger, day in the life of a professional blogger, and readers love it. They love to see the work flow, the rhythm of my particular day. That might be a really useful one for you to show your readers what a typical day in your life is like. Or, you might want to document someone else’s day as well. Today, I’m issuing you the challenge to tell a story on your blog. Your story might be long, it might be short. It might be written, visual, audio or video. It may be the whole post or it might just introduce your post or be a part of your post. It’s totally up to you. Be as creative as you want. It could be a serious story, an inspirational story, a funny story. It’s totally up to you but I cannot wait to read it or to view it if it’s a video. Create your post, publish it, head over to the ProBlogger Challenge Group on Facebook and share the link to what you’ve created. It’s really important because you sharing your link is one, going to get you hopefully a little bit of traffic to your blog and help it to be seen, you never know who might see it and share it but it will also help the rest of us to get some inspiration and to learn how to create better content ourselves. That’s what this challenge is all about. If you’ve got a few moments today, check out some of the other posts that other participants have submitted in the Facebook group as well. Comment on them, like them, share them if you find them inspirational as well. We’d really love it if we could pay it forward a little bit with this whole challenge. I can’t wait to see what you come up with today. We are over the halfway mark in this seven day challenge. We’ve got three more to come and I promise you that one of them is a fairly easy one. You might be able to do it fairly quickly, I’ll save that for Sunday. That will come up in a couple of episodes time. Tune back in tomorrow. If you haven’t already subscribed to this podcast, subscribe now. You’ll get notified of when the next episode goes live in about twenty-four hours. Head over the the Facebook group and check out the show notes today where I do have links to the examples that I gave you over at problogger.com/podcast/141. Enjoy this podcast? Sign up to our ProBloggerPLUS newsletter to get notified of all new tutorials and podcasts below.

Challenge: Create a Review Post This is the 3rd challenge in ProBlogger’s 7 Days to Getting Your Blogging Groove Back Challenge that we kicked off a couple of episodes ago. To recap – every day for the next week I’m going to suggest a particular style of blog post for you to create. My challenge is to create and publish that content – to join our ProBlogger Challenge Group on Facebook and to share your post here and to check out the other posts others are submitting. Today’s challenge could be a life changing moment for some of you. That’s a big statement I know but I say it because I am where I am as a full time blogger today because I once wrote a review post on one of my early blogs. I had no idea at the time how writing that post would change my life but it did. In Today’s Challenge: Create a Review Post Listen to this episode in the player above or here on iTunes. Why a Review Post They get read! They have transactional value They are great conversation starters They build credibility Today’s Challenge Find something relevant to your niche/topic/audience to review. Write your 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 reviews people have written. Comment, like, share Further Resources on Creating a Review Post How to Write a Must-read Product Review How to Write Amazing Product Reviews 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. Welcome to Episode 140 of the ProBlogger podcast and to the third channel in our Seven Days to Getting Your Blogging Groove Back Challenge. Today, I want to issue you with a challenge to create a piece of content that is in some way a review. To recap, everyday for this next week I’m going to suggest a particular style of blog post for you to create. You choose the topic, I choose the style. My challenge is to create and publish that content within twenty-four hours if you can and then to share it over in the ProBlogger Challenge Group which I’ll link to on today’s show notes. Once you’ve shared it there, to check out some of the other posts that others who are participating in this challenge have also shared. Today, my challenge to you is to create and publish a review post. Again, you can do this as a written post, a video, a podcast, anything that you choose to do. I’ll probably talk a little bit more about writing, but you translate that into the medium that you want to use. Today’s challenge could be a life changing moment for some of you. I know that’s a big statement but I say it because where I am today as a full time blogger is because I once almost accidentally wrote a review post on one of my early blogs. I had no idea at the time that what I was doing was literally changing my life but it did. It was 2004, I’ve been blogging for a couple of years on my first personal blog. But on this day, I impulsively decided to start a second blog. It was a photo blog in which I wanted to share photos from a trip I was taking to Morocco with Vanessa. I just bought this new digital camera, it was a whopping 1.2 megapixels which is nothing, not even a tiny comparison to what’s in our iPhones today. I spent a small fortune on it but I was excited by this amazing, newish technology that would enable me to upload photos onto my new photoblog whilst on the road in Morocco. I had this visions of all my friends and family looking at these amazing photos while I was on the road. Before I left on the trip, I decided to post something on the blog because I didn’t have any photos yet to share and I decided to post a little first impression review of this new, little Canon Powershot Camera that I bought. The review was only three-hundred words long, it wasn’t really that detailed at all. I didn’t really expect much from it but I did want to have something up on the blog before I went off to Morocco. I very quickly discovered that photo blogging was not for me. For a start, uploading photos to a blog from a Moroccan internet cafe was a painstaking process. Secondly, none of my family and friends visited the site. None of the photos got viewed at all. I remember returning home after an amazing time in Morocco, Turkey and Portugal and checked my blog’s stats and was amazed to see that not a single one of my photos had been looked at while I was away. But, I was amazed to see that that little short review of the camera that I had taken the photos with was getting several hundred visitors a day to that review. I was amazed to see it ranking number one on Google for that camera name. I don’t know how Google ranked me so high for that particular review, but I remember the entrepreneurial lights going on in my mind as I began to wonder, “What would happen if I had a review of every digital camera?” There were hundreds of models already out back in 2004 and so I decided to write as many reviews as I could or at least to aggregate the reviews that other people were writing as well on their blogs. My photo blog was scrapped that day and I turned it into a review blog of digital cameras. To cut our very long story short, that short review was the first of thousands of reviews over the next few years. That blog, my camera review blog, became my full time income over the next couple of years. It became the basis for a lot of what I did for several years. I also had a camera phone review blog for a while, a printer review blog, and a number of others as well. My story is not unique. Over the years, I’ve come across many bloggers whose sole type of blog post is the review. These blogs generally choose an overall niche, a particular field, and then simply write as many different reviews of products and services that relate to that particular niche as they can. We’ve all seen them, there’s movie review blogs, restaurant review blogs, gadget review blogs, book review blogs, vacuum cleaner review blogs, TV show review blogs, candy bar review blogs, car review blogs, the list goes on and on and on and the topics are both broad as well as narrow. I’ve just come across some very narrow focused review blogs as well. I suspect some of you doing this challenge have blogs that are fully focused upon reviews. This challenge is going to be easy for you because you’re just used to doing it every single day. Most of you listening to this don’t have a review blog, you might occasionally review something or maybe you never have at all. This may be a little bit more of a challenge for some of you. Whether you post a review on your blog everyday or whether this is completely new to you, I really want to challenge you to do it. Reviews are great for a couple of reasons. Firstly, they get read. One of the most common things people do before making a purchase these days is obviously go online to search what other people think of it. Writing a review of a product or a service or a movie or a book or something else positions you to be on the end of that search. Secondly, there’s transactional value around reviews. When people land on your site researching a purpose, they have an intent to buy something. They’re in a buying mood. There’s opportunity if you want to monetize that traffic. People reading your reviews are in that mood where they want to actually buy something. This is a great thing for those of us who do want to monetize. You may turn that into income through an affiliate link for the product that you’re reviewing. It may be that you can even monetize it through selling advertising on your blog, or you may actually find after you write more and more reviews that you start getting approaches from people who want to have their product review. You could do that just to get the free product or you could do that to get a paid sponsored review opportunity from them. The third reason reviews are great is I think that they are great conversation starters. One of the things I’ve noticed when I do write reviews—I don’t tend to do too many these days but we occasionally sprinkle them into my blog—is that they do trigger people to share their experience of products as well. Sometimes, that ends up in a bit of a debate where people disagree but most times the conversation is really a fruitful one as people will share their experiences of a product. That makes your blog more useful for everyone. The last reason I think reviews are great is that they build credibility. When you write a good review, a well balanced review, a review that showcases what you know, people begin to take notice of you in your industry. This can open up all kinds of opportunities for you. I remember the first time that I wrote a book review of a book that I really loved and of an author that I really admired. About a week after I published that review, I got an email from that author, it opened up relationship with that particular person. They later became a guest blogger on my blog and a bit of a collaborator as well. That’s someone to this day that I continue to email back and forth with. You never know where things might end up when you do reviews. That’s my challenge today is to write a review. You could write a review on anything, it doesn’t have to be a product, it doesn’t have to be a service. It could be something that you use regularly or something that you’ve just started using. It could be a first impression review, it could be on a movie, it could be on a book, an ebook, a course. It might be on a conference or an event that you’ve been to, a concert. It might be a review of another blog, it might be a review of a restaurant, a song, a TV show, some clothes you own, a gadget, an app, a software that you have, a computer, the list goes on and on. Choose something that’s going to be interesting to your particular audience, something that I guess touches on the topic of your blog. I do have some further reading for you today. I know some of you have not had any experience in writing reviews so I’ve got a couple of posts on the show notes today which guides to writing product reviews. They will relate also to some of the other types of reviews that you might want to do today. The challenge today is to write and publish a review post. You can do it as a written post, a video, a podcast, anything you like. Then, head over to the ProBlogger Challenge Group on Facebook and share the link to the post that you have published, the new post that you’ve published that’s a review post. And then, check out some of the other reviews that people will be submitting as a result of this particular episode and this particular challenge. If you get a moment, share some of those reviews that relate to your audience. Encourage those who are participating in the challenge. We all get so much more out of this week of challenges if we share and encourage and support one another. Also, pay real attention in the Facebook group to anyone else who might be in your niche. You never know what collaborations might come out of getting to know someone else in your niche. You might end up doing guest posts for one another or even creating a product with one another, all kinds of opportunities I know will come out of this Facebook group. Thanks for listening today, I can’t wait to read your reviews. I’ll check out as many as I can and share a few over on my social accounts as well to spread a little love. I’ll talk to you tomorrow in Episode 141, the fourth challenge in the ProBlogger Seven Days to Get Your Blogging Groove Back Challenge. Thanks for listening! How did you go with today’s episode? I would love to hear about how product reviews affect your blog, and how the challenge is going for you. Enjoy this podcast? Sign up to our ProBloggerPLUS newsletter to get notified of all new tutorials and podcasts below.

Challenge: Create Content That Answers a FAQ This is the 2nd Challenge of our 7 Days to Getting Your Blogging Groove Back Challenge that we kicked off a couple of episodes ago. To recap – every day for the next week I’m going to suggest a particular style of blog post for you to create. My challenge is to create and publish that content – to join our ProBlogger Challenge Group on Facebook and to share your post on this thread and to check out the other posts others are submitting. In Today’s Episode Challenge: Create Content That Answers a FAQ Listen to this episode above in the player or here on iTunes (look for episode PB139). Some of my most popular blog posts have been in response to reader questions. If one reader is asking a question, it is likely that many readers have the same question. How to Find a Question to Answer Ask your readers Check your comments and email Check other blogs and forums Go to question sites like Quora Find and talk to a beginner in your niche Answer a question of your own Think back and answer a question you once had Today’s Challenge Write and publish a FAQ post Head to the FB group (search for ProBlogger Challenge Group on FB) and share your link on this thread. Share the link. Only new posts please. Take a few minutes to check out, like, comment on and share other people’s lists. Further Resources on Creating Content That Answers a FAQ Facebook Group ProBlogger Challenge How to Hold a Camera – Post that answers a question What is a Blog? – Post that answers a question Quora – Question site 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 Hi there, this is Darren from ProBlogger. Today, I want to issue you with a challenge to create a frequently asked question post for your blog. This is day two or the second challenge in our seven days to get your blogging groove back challenge that we kicked off a couple of episodes ago. To recap, everyday for the next week I’m suggesting a particular style of blog post for you to create. The challenge is to create and publish that post on your blog and then to join our Facebook group which is called the ProBlogger Challenge Group over on Facebook and to share the post that you created and to check out the post that others are submitting as well. Yesterday, I asked you to create a list post and it’s fantastic to see all of those list posts being submitted to the group. I’m reading every one that I possibly can and there’s been some great posts submitted. Today, I want to challenge you to write a post that is an answer to a frequently asked question. In today’s podcast, it will just take ten or so minutes. I’m going to tell you why I think this is a great post and give you a few tips on how to work out what question to answer. You can check out today’s show notes with all the details of the challenge as well as some further reading that I’ve got for you today over at problogger.com/podcast/139. Let’s get to the challenge. One of the easiest ways to find something to blog about that connects with your readers, that actually brings about change in their life is to answer their questions, particularly questions that more than one of your readers is asking. Even in the first few months of my blogging, I remember getting a few comments and a few emails from readers asking for more information on something that I’ve written or asking for my opinion or insight on the topics that I’ve been covering in the blog. Sometimes, their questions were quite to the point and bite-sized that I could answer in a sentence or two, and sometimes they’re more open-ended. Sometimes there were very beginner type questions and sometimes there were more advanced. When I first started getting these types of questions, I would attempt to answer those questions in the medium that they were asked. If it came in as a blog comment, I would reply to that via comment. If it came in via email, I would send an email back. I very quickly realized that I was being asked the same types of questions over and over again. The answers that I was giving to my readers one on one as I respond to a comment or via email might be relevant for a wider audience. I decided as a result of this amazing realization that we all have overtime that maybe I should be replying in a public way and make use of those answers and turn them into blog posts. That’s what I began to do. For a while there, I had a folder on my computer’s desktop called Reader’s Questions that I put text files in with the reader’s questions. I began to take note of the questions I was getting over and over again. I transitioned that system to Evernote and today have it all over on Google Documents because Evernote now are charging and Google Docs is free. That’s where I keep all my reader questions. What I noticed when I started to turn questions and turn my answers to questions into blog posts is that my blogs began to grow in terms of search traffic. It turns out if one reader is asking you a question, you can bet that they and other people are probably searching on Google, social media and other search engines like iTunes for those answers as well. As I looked today, my best performing blog post on both of my main blogs, a number of them are really just answers to questions. Over on Digital Photography School, my post How to Hold a Digital Camera is one example of that. It started as a question for a reader. How should I hold my camera? On ProBlogger one of my most popular posts for many years was a post called What is A Blog? This was another example where that came in. Particularly in the early days of ProBlogger, 2004, 2005, a lot of people just didn’t know what a blog was. It doesn’t get so much traffic these days because most people are familiar with blogs. Back then, it was something that a lot of people were asking. In both of those examples that I just gave you, the questions are very, very basic. They’re very, very beginner-y. In fact, in both cases I remember almost not publishing the post because I was a bit embarrassed about how basic they were. I’m glad I did because between those two posts, they’ve had over a million visitors. Imagine if I had not written them. Pay attention to the beginner-y questions that you get asked. You will find that there is a lot of demand for answers to those beginner-y questions but you also will get some demand for more intermediate and advanced questions as well. You’ll also find those more advanced questions, there’s less competition for them as well. The beginner questions like how to hold a camera, there are literally thousands of posts on the internet on those particular topics. There is more competition there. For your challenge today, I encourage you to go deep or to tackle something that is beginner-y. It’s totally up to you. For some of you, you probably already know the frequently asked question that you want to answer and so you might want to just stop this podcast right now and go away and write the post, come over to the Facebook group, and share it with us and check out some of the other posts that people have written. But if you are wondering what on Earth am I going to write about today, let me give you some tips on finding the question that you should answer today. I’ve got seven things that you could do to help find that question. Firstly, you could simply ask your readers what questions they have. It sounds a bit meta, I know, to ask the question to your readers to find their questions but it’s something I do semi-regularly on my blog and on my social. It could be as simple as putting a tweet out. “I want to write a blog post today based on your questions, what questions do you have?” You might do that on Facebook where people can see each other’s responses as well. You might also jump on Facebook Live and do an ask me anything live video. That’s something that I’ve done semi-regularly and it never fails to unearth a question that I could then later on write a blogpost about. You might want to email some or all of your readers and even send them a little survey, or just put out a call. “Do you have any questions that you would like me to write about,” if you’ve got enough readers. All those depend on you having enough readers to answer that question. If you don’t have any readers already, check out other people’s blogs, check out forums, check out social media pages or social media groups that you might be a part of that are relevant for your niche. It’s amazing how many questions get asked in those forums and it’s very easy for you to take those questions and write the answer. You may even have the opportunity to share the link in response to the question that gets asked in those forums or social media groups. You might want to check out your own comments on your blogs or emails that you’ve received previously from readers, they may unearth questions for you. You might want to go to a question site like Quora, I’ll link to it in today’s show notes, where you can type in any topic whatsoever and find what the most frequently asked question is on that topic. I just did it a few minutes ago and put in Photography and I came up with a list of three or four posts that we could write on Digital Photography School that we haven’t written before but they’re frequently asked questions. You could also choose to go to Yahoo! Answers which is another site dedicated to asking and answering of questions. You might want to find a beginner in your niche to question. Perhaps you know someone just starting out in your niche or maybe you’ve got a reader who’s just starting out, who’s left a beginner-y type question. It’s something like, “I’m just starting with this, this is really helpful.” Email that reader. If they’re local to you, buy them a coffee. If they’re not, get on Skype with them and pick their brain, find out what their biggest challenges and questions are. Another thing you might want to do is think back in time to when you had a lot of questions in your niche. When you were just starting out in your particular area of expertise, what was your biggest question? Write about what you’ve learned, how you would answer that question today. Another thing that you might want to consider doing is writing a post on a question you currently have today. You don’t have to have the answer to your own question to be able to write a post on that question. You could actually have a burning question of your own and then spend some time today researching the answer to that question, seeing what other people have written, and then write a list post or a link up post to where you link to the advice from other people. Maybe include a few quotes from their articles and of course link to the source of those quotes as well and present the answers to your own question according to other bloggers in your particular niche. There’s all kinds of ways that you can find a question today. The key is to identify one, and then to write your frequently asked question post. You may actually in thinking through this topic come up with a number of posts that you could come back to later as well. There’s a whole heap of different types of questions you can be asking today. On Digital Photography School we get asked a lot of comparison type questions. “Which camera should I buy, this camera or this camera?” That might be the approach that you take. We get questions like, “Should I shoot it as JPEG or should I shoot in RAW format?” Those are two different types of image files. You can do a comparison type post. You could answer a question like, “How do I do this or how do I learn this?” You might want to write more of a teaching question. You might answer a question like what is blogging or what is photography or what is the rule of thirds? These are definition type posts. You can see here there’s a whole heap of different types of posts that you could write in response to questions. My challenge to you today is to choose a frequently asked question if possible and to write a post or create a video or podcast that answers that question. Once you’ve written it, head over to the Facebook group. The Facebook group is called ProBlogger Challenge Group. Share your post, share the frequently asked question that you write, the link. Don’t share any old posts, just share the new one that you’ve written today. Then if you’ve got time, take a few minutes to check out, like, comment on other posts that people are submitting in the Facebook group as well. I’d love to see your posts as a result of today’s challenge. Head over to the Facebook group now and share them once you’ve written them. Tune in tomorrow because I’ve got another challenge for you to create for your blog. Looking forward to seeing what you come up with and chatting with you tomorrow. I link to the Facebook group in our show notes so you can find it that way. Also, you can find some further reading and links to some of the examples that I used today and links that I mentioned today. I really look forward to chatting with you in tomorrow’s podcast. In the meantime, if you’ve got any questions, ping me over on Twitter at @ProBlogger, more than happy to interact with you there or ask your questions in the Facebook group today. As yesterday, I encourage you to invite your blogging friends to be part of this challenge. They can join anytime they like and I’d really love to meet them and see what they come up with as well. How did you go with today’s episode? I’d love to see your post. Tune it tomorrow for another challenge. Enjoy this podcast? Sign up to our ProBloggerPLUS newsletter to get notified of all new tutorials and podcasts below.

Challenge: Create a List Post This is part 1 of our 7 Days to Getting Your Blogging Groove Back Challenge that we kicked off in the last episode of this podcast. To recap – Every day for the next week, I’m going to suggest a particular style of blog post for you to create. Create and publish the challenge post Share your post on This Thread in our ProBlogger Challenge Group on Facebook, and check out other posts fellow challengers are submitting. Today’s Challenge: Write a List Post In this episode I talk about different types of link posts that you might consider writing and given you a number of examples from my own archives to check out. Listen to it in the player above or check out episode 138 on iTunes here. Write and publish a List post Head to the FB group (search for ProBlogger Challenge Group on FB) and look for the update I’ve done there were I call you to share your list posts. Share the link. Only new posts please. Take a few minutes to check out, like, comment on and share other people’s lists. In Today’s Episode List Posts Can Take a Number of Forms A Simple List Post 21 Ways to Write Posts that Are Guaranteed to Grow Your Blog Longer List Posts How to Take Great Group Photos Wedding Photography – 21 Tips for Amateur Wedding Photographers Lists Within Posts Here’s one Vanessa published yesterday – 50 Family Friendly Dinner Ideas – which is a longer post with a series of lists and other content around it. Further Resources on Writing List Posts The Ultimate Guide to Making Money with the Amazon Affiliate Program 10 Steps to the Perfect List Post 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 and welcome to Episode 138 of the ProBlogger Podcast. This is challenge number one of our seven days to getting your blogging groove back challenge that we kicked off in the last episode of this podcast. If you haven’t listened to that episode, I really do strongly recommend that you go back to Episode 137 which just goes for 13 minutes, and it gives you an overview of what we’re doing in this challenge. To recap, everyday for the next week I’m going to suggest a particular style of blog post for you to create. It can be a written piece of content, it can a video, it can be a podcast, whatever you choose to do. My challenge to you is to create and publish that piece of content and to join our ProBlogger Challenge Group on Facebook and to share the post that you’ve written so that we can check out each other’s blog posts. You can find all the details of the challenge and today’s transcript and show notes at problogger.com/podcast/138. Let me tell you what today’s style of blog post will be for you to create in the next 24 hours. Today, I want you to create a list post. This is the easiest type of post that I could come up with for day one to help you ease into this particular challenge. I decided a list post would be a good one for a few reasons. Firstly, it’s something most of us are familiar with, we’ve all read them. Most of us as bloggers have probably created them. It’s also something that can be done relatively quickly depending on how you approach it and I’m going to give you some options that you might take with your list post in a moment. Also, in my experience, it’s one of the most effective ways of creating content and it’s something that appeals to readers. It can be the type of post that can attract a lot of eyeballs and it can be accessible to those readers. A list post works for a number of reasons. Firstly, they’re scannable. They tend to keep you from rambling although that does depend on the style of list post that you choose. I guess they do keep you a little bit more succinct, they’re readable. It’s very easy to consume a list post, particularly if you format it well. They can be comprehensive if you want it to be and they can also be pretty light. They can also be very persuasive, you can come up with twenty-one things in your list post that can really add a lot of weight over time if people get right through in that list. They can be easy to write, I actually find them quite easy to write because you come up with an outline first of your twenty-one posts or however many points you want to make. And then, you just fill in the blank after that. They’re very shareable and they’re the type of content that does get shared around a lot. There’s been studies done into that. They can enable you to communicate something that can be quite complicated in a fairly easy to understand way. They break things down just by the factor that they affect that they are a list. List posts can be a great type of content to write. Most of you have probably done plenty of list posts in the past and may not need to listen to anything else. But if you want a few tips on how to do it and how to approach this challenge, there are three types of list posts that I would suggest you consider. Really, I guess it’s about the complexity of the post. The first one that I would suggest you consider is the simple list post. This is where the vast majority of your whole post is a list. You might want to write a short introduction or a short conclusion with a call to action at the end. But the list itself makes up the bulk of the post. The post itself may not even have an intro outro, it might just be a list. An example of this is a post that I published on ProBlogger a little while ago now called Twenty-One Ways to Write Posts That Are Guaranteed to Grow Your Blog. When you go and look at this, the whole post is a list. It’s just twenty-one short phrases or sentences. Some of the only have three words, some of them have up to nine. It’s a very, very simple list. You could read it in fifty seconds even though there are twenty-one points there. You could probably read it in half a minute. This is an example of a very simple list post. That may be what you choose today. I actually find list posts, some of you might look at it and go, “Oh, that’s too light.” Sometimes, by the fact that they’re so few words in there, you get straight to the point in each point you’re making, they can actually be very powerful. I’ve seen a number of people use this technique to communicate really powerful things in very few words. The challenge when you’re writing such a short post is to choose the right words and to make them powerful words. You may choose to do that today. Secondly, you might choose to do a longer list post. The last example that I gave you, those twenty-one things that were just very short, light sentences and each point can be very effective because it’s so to the point, but it can also sometimes be too light to convey a more complicated message. You may actually frustrate your readers if you do too light a post. Most of my posts I would say are longer list posts that I’ve done. These are where you come up with your list and you might have a heading for each point which might be similar to that simple list and then you might write a paragraph on each of those headings. Or, you might write two or three paragraphs. Again, I’ll give you some examples in today’s show notes. Firstly, a post I wrote a few years ago called How to Take a Great Group Photo. This is on Digital Photography School. How to take a photo of a group of people. Whilst that title doesn’t indicate that it’s a list post, it actually has twelve tips. I could’ve probably titled it Twelve Tips to Take a Great Group Photo but I kind of sometimes don’t like numbered type posts. They tend to convey something to your readers, so I decided just to title it How to Take a Great Group Photo. But if you look at it, it’s a list post. There are twelve tips, each of them has a heading, each of them has one to five paragraphs under that heading and most of them has a photo as well to illustrate the point. Similarly, another post I did on Digital Photography School, Twenty-One Tips For Amateur Wedding Photographers. Again, very similar style heading for each of the twenty-one tips. Underneath, there was a paragraph or two as well. This is a bit more comprehensive than your simple list post, it allows you to go into more depth. Also, the thing I like about these is that they link out very often to other things that you’ve written in your archives. Particularly look at that Amateur Wedding Photography one, most of the points there’s links to other things that I’ve written. This is one of the things I love about a list post is that it enables you to sneeze people out into your archives. The third type of post that you might like to choose today is where you just use a list within a post. You might choose to write something more in the format of an article, or an essay, a long format piece of content and then use lists within that as well. That can also be very effective. I’ll share examples in today’s show notes of those types of posts. It’s sort of an essay but there’s these lists within it as well. That can help to illustrate several points along the way in your article. Now, I know some of you are listening to this challenge today and are cringing, you may even be crying. List posts are very popular with bloggers. As a result, some bloggers don’t like them because they can be overdone in some niches. Sometimes, people go list posts are too light, they’re too fluffy, I write much detailed content. Of course, it all comes down to how you want to approach it today. You could make almost any style of post lighter, it’s not just list posts. You can write an opinion post that’s light, you can write a review post that’s light. You can also make list posts very meaty as well. If you’re saying to yourself I’m not doing this, I don’t want to sell it, I don’t want to write a list style post, I challenge you to write a meaty, comprehensive list. For example, I’ve used this example before on this podcast, my post on ProBlogger My Ultimate Guide to Making Money with the Amazon Affiliate Program. I’ll link to it in today’s show notes. It’s actually a list post. In fact, it’s two lists if you look at it. There’s an extended introduction with newer sections in the introduction and then there are thirty tips that have several paragraphs of information. The total length of that article was seven-thousand and seven-hundred words long. As I said two episodes ago on this podcast, it’s an evergreen piece of content that continues to drive hundreds of visitors to my blog everyday, if not thousands. Hundreds of thousands of people have read that post, it’s seven-thousand words long, it’s a meaty post. I would argue it’s probably my most comprehensive post on the blog. It’s broken down into lists. I think that the list format of that post makes it much more readable, shareable, and much easier to understand. If I just chosen to write more of an essay style post, I don’t think it would’ve been read as much as it has. It wouldn’t have had as much impact upon my readers. I challenge you, if you are thinking no, I’m not doing a list post, they’re too light. Write a meaty one, write the most comprehensive list post you can possibly write if that’s where you’re heading. A few last tips on list posts. Think about your formatting, it’s really important to make it scannable, to use headings, to use bullets if that helps. If you’re doing a simple list post, one of those really light ones, it’s probably appropriate to use bullet points. If it’s a more comprehensive post, I would encourage you to use headings and subheadings and to consider breaking the post up with images as well. Adding further reading to the post, the points that you write can be a really effective way of making your post more comprehensive, more useful to your readers, but also getting people to visit other parts of your sites. Lastly, if you want some more step by step tips on how to create a great list post, check out today’s show notes because there I’m going to link to a great post that Ali Hale wrote on ProBlogger a couple of years ago now, it’s called Ten Steps to The Perfect List Post. Itself is a great example of a list post and it contains some really good advice from Ali there. Check out today’s show notes over at problogger.com/podcast/138 to get a link to that. Lastly, you don’t have to write your list post As I said in the introduction to this challenge, you can actually create a list post in other formats. A list could be the basis for a podcast. Ten Tips to something. A list could be the basis for a talking head video, it could be the basis for an infographic or some other visual content as well. Feel free to take this in any direction you want, the key here is that you are creating something in that format, in that style. Be creative, make it relevant to your audience. The challenge today, write and publish a list post. Head over to our Facebook group. If you haven’t already joined, search for ProBlogger Challenge Group on Facebook or look for the link in today’s show notes and look for the update there that I’ve done where I call you to share your list posts. Please try to get them all in the one spot there. Share a link to the post that you’ve written and please only share new posts that you’ve written for this challenge. Don’t just go into your archives and find a list post. We want you to do this challenge to create new content. And then, the last thing is to check out what other list posts people have submitted there and to like them, comment on them, share them if they’re relevant for your audience as well. I really look forward to seeing what list post you can create today. You can take this in any direction as well, you could write about five tools that you use, you could write a step by step guide. That’s something you could write about five habits of great photographers or great bloggers or whatever it is that you’re writing for. You could write five mistakes that new people in your industry make. You could write five books or blogs or YouTube accounts that everyone should check out. You should write five reasons that you love something or five values that shaped you. There’s a whole heap of different ways and it doesn’t have to be a list of five things. I look forward to seeing what you create over in the Facebook group and I’ll talk to you again in 24 hours. This is daily challenge for a whole week here on the podcast so make sure you’re subscribed to the podcast to get notified of that. Thanks for listening, I’ll chat with you tomorrow. If you know another blogger who you think should join the challenge, let them know about it. Share it. The more people that are involved in these challenges, the better. It’s amazing when we have a large number of people and they have shared niches, the collaborations that can come as a result of this. The last time I did a challenge like this, I saw a number of really amazing collaborations emerge. I saw people collecting products together as a result of some of the stuff that they did. I saw people partner up, I saw people become friends. Do invite other people, it’s great to have a large amount of bloggers participating in these challenges. Lastly, if you do think it’s relevant for your audience, I’d love you to link back to these show notes as inspiration for your post today. You don’t have to do it but if you think other readers that you have might find some value in participating in this as well, link over to the show notes so they can see where you get the inspiration for the post as well. Thanks for listening, I’ll chat with you tomorrow. How did you go with today’s episode? I look forward to seeing the list posts you create today. You could take it in any direction. I’ll talk to you in 24 hours. Enjoy this podcast? Sign up to our ProBloggerPLUS newsletter to get notified of all new tutorials and podcasts below.

Challenge: 7 Days to Getting Your Blogging Groove Back Have you lost your blogging groove? It’s easy to do – particularly in the middle of a year when so many other aspects of life compete for your attention and where motivation can sometimes go missing. If your blog is feeling a little stagnant – today is for you. In fact this whole week is for you because this episode starts a week long daily series that is all about getting back into the groove of creating great regular content for your blog. Whether you’re feeling disillusioned, uninspired, uncreative or just a little bored with your blog – over the next week I want to invite you to tune into this podcast for a series of short daily challenges to create some great pieces of content. Note: this episode can be listened to here on the shownotes (the player is above) or in iTunes here. Update: Take this Challenge at Your Own Pace This challenge was originally created to be taken as a group of bloggers live over the first week of August 2016. Over 1400 bloggers participated. Now that the live week has ended I’m leaving this series up live here for bloggers to take at their own pace. I encourage you to work through each of the challenges (listed below) and create the blog posts as I recommend. You can do them daily as we did in the live version or take it a little slower. The Facebook Group is still live and we’ll be doing ongoing challenges there – so feel free to join up here. How the Challenge Works Each day I’ll suggest a particular style of post to write. I’ll share a few tips on how you might like to tackle it and in the shownotes share a few examples of posts others have written in that style. Your Task Will Be to Do 3 Things: Write Your Post – Come up with a relevant topic for your blog and write a post in the style of the challenge and publish the post the same day Share with Other Challengers – Join the ProBlogger Challenge Group and share with others participating in the challenge. The group adds accountability and networking opportunities. Visit Other Challenger Posts – Leave a comment or follow on social media To Get Started: Join the FB group (search for ProBlogger Challenge Group) Make sure you’re subscribed to this podcast so you get notified when each episode goes live Clear a little time in your diary each day to listen to the challenge (I’ll attempt to keep them short) and to create your post. Update: Here are the Challenges 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 Have you lost your blogging groove? It’s really easy to do particularly in the middle of the year when so many other aspects of life compete for your attention and where motivation can sometimes go missing. If your blog is feeling a little stagnant, then today is for you. In fact, this whole week is for you because this episode starts a week long daily series of podcasts that’s all about getting back into the groove of creating great, regular content for your blog. My name is Darren, I’m the founder of ProBlogger. Today, I want to kick off seven days to getting back your blogging groove. You can find today’s show notes with links and all the information about this special challenge in the Facebook group that I’ve started to help us run this challenge over on today’s show notes at problogger.com/podcast/137. Most bloggers lose their blogging groove at one time or another. For sometimes, it’s because life gets busy. In other cases, they feel like they’re running out of things to say or that they’ve said everything before. In other cases, it’s because they’re not seeing the results that they were hoping for, their expectations don’t meet the reality, and sometimes it’s just not flowing. When those things happen, one of the first things to be impacted is our content. This is something I’ve been through many times before. I’m sure most of you listening, if you’ve been blogging for even just a few months, can relate. Sometimes, the quality of our content is impacted and other times it’s the quantity and regularity of our content. For many of us, it’s both. This happens to us all as bloggers. Sometimes, to get back on track, we need a little help to give our blogs a bit of intense attention, an intense burst of attention to get things firing up again. I remember when this first happened to me, the first time I had a blogging slump back in 2003. I’ve been blogging for about six months and after taking a two-week holiday with Vanessa, I came back to my blog feeling completely out of the routine and also feeling a bit disillusion with the progress that I made in those first six months. The first six months of your blog is typically a pretty slow, hard slug. I wondered at that point whether I should give up and found it really hard to get back going again after that break. I was particularly finding it hard to come up with ideas for the blog post that I wanted to write. I got onto the phone with a friend who was also a blogger. This friend actually had emailed me and said that they noticed I hadn’t been posting and wondered if everything was okay. I got on the phone with him, I explained my feelings and told him that I was thinking about giving up. He pretty much gave me a rev up, he told me to get back on my blogging horse. I remember those words. When I explained to him that I was just really struggling to come up with topics to write about, he offered to help. What he offered to do was to come up with ten blog post ideas that I should write over the next couple of weeks. He said trust me, I’ll choose something that’s relevant to what you’re writing about, what I think you can write about, ten topics. It was almost like an editor saying to a reporter, “Go and write this article.” This was something that appealed to me because I was struggling to come up with ideas. I was up for the challenge. There was something about working with someone else to help get going again that really did help me a lot. I have to admit, his suggestions stretched me quite a bit. Some of the things that he suggested I write I would never have naturally come up with myself. But because I felt a bit accountable to him, I decided to push through and I did all ten posts over the next twelve days which were actually more than I’d ever been writing before. I used to only write a few days a week at that particular point. Before I knew it, I was back in the groove. It’s this experience that gave me the idea for this next week of challenges that I want to issue you. Here’s the challenge that I’ve got for you. Whether you’re feeling disillusioned, uninspired, uncreative or maybe just a little bored with your blog, over the next week I want to invite you to tune into this podcast for a series of short, daily challenges to create some great pieces of content. Here’s how it’s going to work. Every day at 7:00PM Australian Time, I’m going to publish a new short podcast that will issue you with a challenge to create a piece of content in the next 24 hours. If that’s too much for you, you don’t have to do it within 24 hours, that’s just what I’m telling people to do. If you want to take it slower, you can. Each day, I’m going to suggest a particular style of post to write. I’m going to share a few tips on how you might like to tackle it in the show notes and in the podcast itself. I’ll give you a few examples as well of posts that I’ve written in that style and other people have written as well. The challenge is three-fold. You have to do three things to fully participate in this. Firstly, come up with a topic that’s relevant for your readers and write a post or create a piece of content in that style and publish it if you can on your blog on that day. That’s the first part, that’s the main part. This is a content creation challenge, it’s to help you get back into the groove of creating content. The second thing I’d love you to do is once you’ve written and published the post, the next part of the challenge is to share it with everyone else doing the challenge. To do this, I’ve set up a Facebook group that will be a temporary group, this is something that I don’t know will continue beyond the end of this week. It’s purely for those of you who want to participate in this. We’ve already had over 400 people sign up for it, and I haven’t even announced what we’re doing yet. The idea of the group is to keep us accountable to this challenge, to support each other through it, to help us get to know each other, and who knows? Out of this type of challenge, I’ve seen collaborations appear and friendships start as well. It’s really to keep us accountable, give each other a bit of support, and it might just help you find a few new readers and connect with some other bloggers who might be in your niche as well. I’m already seeing that in the Facebook group, people saying, “Hey, I blog about that too. Let’s talk.” To join this Facebook group, there will be a link in today’s show notes at problogger.com/podcast/137 or you can do a search on Facebook right now for ProBlogger Challenge Group and it should hopefully come up in the results. But again, they’re on the show notes. First part, you’ve got to write a piece of content or create a piece of content, it doesn’t have to be written. Secondly, I want you to come into the Facebook group and share that piece of content that you’ve written so that we can see it. This will help everyone because it will give us another example of that style of content but it might also just drive a little bit of traffic to you. The third thing that I would love you to do is to commit to reading at least four or five other posts that other people in the challenge have written. If we can all visit four or five posts a day and show a little bit of support to the other participants, we’re all going to get a little bit more traffic and we’re all going to get a few more comments hopefully in our blog. If you see a post that you really like, share it on your social network. Pay forward the love. Hopefully as a result of this, we will all get a little bit more traffic and we’ll all learn a bit more and ultimately get back in that blogging groove. To be clear, I’m going to suggest a style of post for you to create, a style of piece of content. You choose the topic that will be relevant to your audience. Some of the styles that I’m going to suggest are going to be very easy for you to do because you will have already written in those styles, in fact you might already write all your posts in that style. Some of them may take you into new territory, they may stretch you a little. That may be a bit uncomfortable for you but I encourage you to push through because you might just find in being stretched to write a new type of post that you’ll find a new post that might be a regular part of your blog. I know some of you are listening to this and going, “I cannot create seven pieces of content in seven days.” I completely get that. Life is busy. I will say that some of the things that I’m going to suggest are fairly easy to do, some of them are heavier than others. You may find some of them you can whip out pretty quickly but some of them you may need to take a bit more time on. You might like to spread this challenge out a little bit further, that’s fine. You can do it over ten days or fourteen days or twenty days. I’ll keep the Facebook Group live for at least a month so that you can get through it. If you’re listening to this and the challenge has already finished—a lot of our podcast episodes do get listened to months or years after I create them—that’s totally fine. All you really need to do is work through the next seven episodes of this podcast in order and you can do it in your own time. You may even like to find another blogger that you can do it with to support one another through it as well. My hope with this challenge is that in pushing yourself to create seven pieces of content in seven days or ten days or whatever you choose to do it over, that it will help you to get back into that creative groove. Perhaps, rediscover your love for blogging, perhaps find a new style of post that you can continue to produce. I guess another thing I do want to say is that you can use this challenge to create different mediums of content as well. You may choose to write all of your blog posts and that’s totally fine, most of the things I’m going to share with you I do have a written piece of content in mind that I have written in the past. All seven things that I’m going to suggest over the next seven days could equally be done as a video, as a podcast, or in some other form of content whether it would be an infographic or something else. Be as creative as you like. You might want to challenge yourself to do seven videos, you might want to challenge yourself to do one podcast, one video, and five blog posts; it’s totally up to you. I’m really excited about this next week. I actually did this same challenge with a few differences about five or six years ago now on ProBlogger. It brought all kinds of opportunities out for those who participated. I’m really excited to see what will happen over the next week. Here’s what I would encourage you to do to prepare for tomorrow’s first challenge. I suggest that you do three things. Firstly, join the Facebook group. Search on Facebook for ProBlogger Challenge Group or find the link on today’s show notes. Second thing I encourage you to do is subscribe to this podcast if you’re not already to get notified of when each episode goes live. The episodes will go live at 7:00PM Eastern Australian Time. I’m in Melbourne, that’s 7:00PM Melbourne time if you’re in Australia. It doesn’t really matter if you’re not awake right then, it’s gone come up 2:00AM in LA, 5:00AM in New York, 10:00AM if you’re in London, 5:00PM if you’re in Singapore, 2:30 in the afternoon if you’re in Delhi. It doesn’t really matter if you’re not there right at the moment. Just from when you hear that podcast, give yourself a 24 hour deadline to get a piece of content out. Make sure you’re subscribed, make sure you’re in the Facebook group. If you can, clear a little bit of time over the next week. Every day for the next week, it will be seven more episodes. To listen to the podcast, I’ll try to keep them to 10 or so minutes, and then to create a blog post. Create a little time if you can. Lastly, if you do get a little bit behind over the next seven days, I totally understand that. Life goes on, we have families, we have work, we have other commitments. That’s totally fine. Take your time through it and remember, this can be done later as well. You may want to come back to this or you may be finding this for the first time when it’s already finished, that’s totally fine to work through the next seven episodes at your own pace. Join the Facebook group, ProBlogger Challenge Group, make sure you’re subscribed to the podcast to get notified when they come through, and clear a little time in your diary each day for the next day to be able to participate in this challenge. Lastly, once you’ve joined that Facebook group, introduce yourself there. I’ve pinned at the top of that group a little place where you can introduce yourself and it’s amazing to see the variety of bloggers that we’ve got coming in from all over the world and participating. Lastly, this is completely free. I’m not going to sell anything to you at the end of this, it’s completely free. It’s really for me, for my perspective, to help me build a bit of community amongst the ProBlogger readership and to get to know you a bit more as well and to see what you do. I really get a lot out of just reading the posts that you write and that gives me all kinds of ideas for future content as well. Thanks for listening, look forward to connecting with you in the Facebook group over the next days. I’m excited to where this might lead for all of us. Thanks for listening, I’ll chat with you tomorrow, 24 hours from now. Enjoy this podcast? 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Why Evergreen Content is the Best Investment of Time for a Blogger “If you could only write one type of content on your blogs – what would it be?” I was asked this question while on a Q&A panel back in 2007 while at a conference in Las Vegas. It’s a question that I go back to again and again, and the answer hasn’t changed a bit. I also think writing this type of content is why I have had success over the last 13 years. One of the most important things I’ve done in my blogging has been to focus on writing one particular form of content above all others – that being evergreen content. Evergreen content is content that stays fresh for your readers. It’s as relevant years after being written as it was the day it was written. In Today’s Episode Examples of Evergreen Content This episode is available to listen to on iTunes here. ISO Settings in Digital Photography – I wrote this in 2007 10 Ways to Take Stunning Portraits – Introductory type guide post Rule of Thirds – Posts with varying lengths How to Make An Inexpensive Light Tent – Classic step-by-step post Long Exposure Photography: 15 Stunning Examples – 15 inspirational images Posing Guide: 21 Sample Poses to Get You Started with Photographing Women – Part of a series and all about images Can You REALLY Make Money Blogging? [7 Things I Know About Making Money from Blogging] – A frequently asked question The Ultimate Guide to Making Money with the Amazon Affiliate Program – A mega-guide How to Craft a Blog Post – 10 Crucial Points to Pause – Introduction to a 10-part series How to Quit Your Job, Move to Paradise and Get Paid to Change the World – Guest post that doesn’t ‘teach’ it ‘tells’ 10 David Ogilvy Quotes that Could Revolutionize Your Blogging – A light topic, but a popular topic when it comes to searches – quotes from David Ogilvy Examples of Evergreen Content Submitted by Facebook Followers What is the best age to go to Disneyland? 11 Habits of Successful Women DIY: Upcycle regular jeans into skinny jeans! Bunting Tutorial The Ultimate Guide to Airline Baby Bassinets The Two Types Of Data You Need To Know About Cleaning Mould off Canvas Fairy Playdough Recipe Foods vs. Supplements: The Turmeric vs. Curcumin Edition All of the Examples Submitted on Facebook Further Resources on Evergreen Content the Best Investment of Time You’ll Ever Make as a Blogger Tim Ferriss – Evergreen Content – 78th Episode Snippet Paleo Salted Choc Caramel Slice Recipe – Content people come back to 10 Sure-Fire Headline Formulas That Work – Content I’d go back to MacRumors Buyer’s Guide – Frequently updated Lifehacker Pack for Mac: Our List of the Essential Mac Apps – Updated Bali: Where to Shop – Updated annually The 19 Most Popular DSLRs Among our Readers – Most Popular on dPS The 30 Most Popular DSLR Lenses with our Readers – Most Popular on dPS The 19 Most Popular Compact System and Mirrorless Cameras with Our Readers – Most Popular on dPS Make Money Blogging What New (and Old) Bloggers Need to Know about SEO How to Turn Surfers into Blog Readers by Building a Sticky Blog Types of Posts That Can Be Evergreen Long Exposure Photography: 15 Stunning Examples – Inspirational Content Choosing a Blog Platform – Advice Different Mediums Secrets of Making Money Online – YouTube Long Exposure Photography: 15 Stunning Examples – Image Collection     Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Hey there, it’s Darren from ProBlogger and welcome to Episode 136. “If you could only write one type of content on your blogs forever, what would it be?” This is the question that I was asked back in 2007 while I was in Las Vegas at a blogging conference. I was in this Q&A Panel and I was asked this question by someone on the floor, I wish I knew who it was because it’s a question that I’ve gone back to time and time again. I’ve particularly gone back to the answer that I gave on that particular day. The answer I gave that day, I hadn’t really thought a whole heap about. It was just something that came to mind in the moment as I was asked the question. But in answering the question, I unlocked a bit of a secret. I had this realization that a lot of what I’d done over the last three years of my blogging already had set me up and had helped me to grow my blogs to that point. I’ve been blogging for four or five years at that point and in that moment in answering that question, I realized what I’d been doing. It really shaped the years that have followed. Over the last almost fourteen years of blogging now, I have focused almost 95% of my time creating a certain type of content and that’s what I want to talk about today. What type of content should you be focusing your time upon creating? If you really want a bang for your buck, if you really want a good return on investment in terms of the time that you put into content, I want to share with you the type of content that I think you should be at least dedicating some time to every week. You can find today’s show notes and there’s going to be quite a few of them today because this will be a meaty podcast, I’ve got a lot to go through with you today. I want to share with you what this type of content is. I want to tell you why it’s so powerful. I want to give you some examples of this type of content, a variety of different examples both from my blogs and also some of my readers. I also want to share with you some ideas on how to come up with this type of content for your own blog. There’s a variety of different approaches that you can have. Make yourself comfortable, grab yourself a beverage, and go over to problogger.com/podcast/136 where I will include all the show notes and there will be links to all the examples that I give you today. Thanks for listening and let’s get into this particular episode. What type of content is the best type of content to focus upon creating for your blog? Whilst there is never a single answer to this type of question because every blog is a little bit different, I want to talk about the approach that I have taken with the vast majority of the content that I’ve created. Over the last thirteen years, I tried to work out the other day how many pieces of content I’ve published on my blogs. I don’t really know because my first blogs do not exist anymore and I can’t actually see how many pieces of content are there, but it’s well over 20,000 pieces of content that I’ve created just on my blogs. You can add into that a whole heap of social media posts as well. There’s over 8,000 posts alone on ProBlogger, blogpost and podcast added together. There’s over 6,000 on Digital Photography School. Just on my main two blogs, there’s 14,000 pieces of content there and then I’ve got a whole heap of other content on previous blogs that I’ve had as well. One of the things I’ve done in preparation for today’s podcast is look back over some of the best content that I’ve created in terms of how many people have viewed it. One of the things that I’ve noticed as I look back at the most read content that I’ve created is that the vast majority of it is what I would call evergreen content. Evergreen content is a terminology that you may have heard before. For those of you who don’t, evergreen content is content that stays fresh for your readers. It’s as relevant today years after being written as it was on the day that it was written. It doesn’t date I guess would be another way to describe it. I want to say right upfront, I’m sure that there are plenty of examples of blogs that are very successful, that don’t focus upon evergreen content. I’m not saying that this is the only way to create a blog is to create evergreen content. I’ve actually had a blog, one of my first commercial blogs that was very much the opposite. It was very now content, it was about digital cameras and what was being released today. It was all about the new technologies. There’s plenty of examples of blogs that do well with that sort of more now focused content. As I look at my most successful blogs, the content that has been the basis for those success has been evergreen content. I’m going to share with you a whole heap of different examples of that type of content from both ProBlogger, Digital Photography School. If you’re looking at the show notes, you’ll also see I’m including some links to some of my readers’ evergreen content as well to give you some examples of that, hopefully to stimulate some ideas for your own blog. I’m not the only one who things that evergreen content is great, there’s been many blog posts written around the web for that and you can do a search for evergreen content and find a whole heap of great advice on it. I want to encourage you to listen to this really short snippet from Tim Ferriss’ Podcast. I’m using this with permission from Tim, thank you Tim for allowing me to share it. This comes from his 78th episode, it’s from May 27, 2015. It’s a really good episode where Tim is asked a whole heap of questions by his readers. In this particular segment, he’s asked how he would build his blog audience again if he was just starting out today. “If you’re building an audience, the most labor efficient way to build an audience over time is to have evergreen content. I write long pieces that will be more valuable from an SEO real estate standpoint two years from the day I write it compared to the week it launches, if that makes sense. Were you to look at my back catalog and the stats—I’m on WordPress VIP—or Google Analytics, you would see that my most popular post that each get hundreds of thousands of visits per month were written several years ago. That’s very much by design, I’m not upset by that because I fully expect that some of the articles I write this year, for instance my post on Practical Thoughts on Suicide which is a very intense post, I expect that will continue to gather steam and be spread around and shared and a year from now will be right in the Top 10 rankings which is very important to me.” Thanks again, Tim, for allowing us to share that snippet. I do recommend that you go and check out Episode 78 of Tim’s podcast. I’ll link to it in today’s show notes as well because Tim does go on to talk a little bit more about long form content which, the two elements for him, evergreen and long form content. That’s certainly a powerful approach. Today, I just want to really focus in on evergreen content. This is content, as Tim says, it’s going to be as valuable in a couple of years time, perhaps be even more valuable and getting more traffic in a couple of year’s time than perhaps it is on the day that he publishes it. Why is evergreen content a great investment? I think it should be already seeing it. It continues to serve your readers as much in the future as it does the days that you write it. The value that you’re creating. That is a powerful thing to know that the piece of content that you’re going to publish today is going to have a positive impact upon people in ten year’s time potentially is a pretty amazing thing. That piece of content has the ability to make the world a better place for a longer period of time. That’s purely just from an altruistic kind of perspective, I think that’s a great thing. In terms of traffic, and that’s what Tim’s really talking about here, it’s something that will continue to be searched for again and again. If you choose the right topics, something that is relevant today but also will continue to be relevant in the future, I’ll give you some examples of these in a moment. That potential lead can bring in as much traffic today. If you pick the right topic in an area that’s growing, you might be spotting a trend within your niche that you think is going to be the next big thing for the next ten years and it’s actually going to grow, then that is even better than something that’s just sort of already plateaued. Evergreen content is the type of content that you can refer people from future blog posts back to. Many of the examples that I’ll give you a little bit later, pieces of content that I’ve written on Digital Photography School and ProBlogger which are kind of cornerstone pieces of content that I continue to drive traffic back to from my future posts. It’s really useful to have those types of pieces of content in your archives ready to go so that you can link it back to those types of things. Evergreen content is the type of content that you can link to from your navigation, from your menus, from your side bars. If you go to problogger.net right now, you’ll see in the side bar of our blog post that from those blog posts we actually have sort of little banner ads for some of our evergreen pieces of content. We have a post that I wrote a few months ago now called How to Start a Blog in Five Easy Steps. That’s linked to from every blog post on ProBlogger, that’s an evergreen piece of content. I know that piece of content isn’t going to date. It may date slightly in terms of some of the technologies, but I can update that. My How to Make Money Blogging post is an evergreen piece of content. I’ve had that live on ProBlogger now for many, many years. Yes, I do update it from time to time, tweak it a little bit, but it’s an evergreen piece of content that I continue to drive traffic to from blog posts but also from our navigation. Evergreen content is the type of content that you can continue to share and re-share in social media. This is one of the frustrating things about having a blog that has very much “now” content, that dates very quickly, is that you may have a very short window that you can be sharing the content that you’re creating. If I do a review of a new camera, I can share that on social media for maybe a couple of months and it will still be relevant. Six months later, that camera has already been superseded by a new one, Canon will release a new one every six or so months so supersede their old ones. I can’t really continue to re-share that review. But if I have a blog post that is not dated at all, I can share that every month for the next ten years if it’s the right piece of content. Every month might be a little bit overkill but many of the pieces of content that I am sharing on Digital Photography School’s Facebook page were written ten years ago and haven’t been really changed much at all since that point because they’re on topics that are still as relevant today. That gives you a growing library of content that you can continue to re-share. If you use a tool like Meet Edgar, which we use on our Twitter streams, that can become a very automated thing. It can really help you to cut down the work that you’re doing in terms of the sharing of content. Evergreen content is the type of content that once you have it and it’s working in one format, you can also repurpose into other formats. For example, a couple of the episodes that I’ve done over the last few months here on the podcast started out as blog posts, evergreen pieces of content that I’d already published on the blog. Once you’ve got an evergreen piece of content that’s working, one of the things you should be considering is what other mediums could I be repurposing that content into? Evergreen content is also the type of content that you’ll find other bloggers will want to link to as well. That’s a good thing for you as well. There’s a whole heap of reasons as to why evergreen content is well worth investing your time into. How much of the content in my archives does fit this category? As I look back at the content and look at how it’s performed over time, many times it’s very steady in terms of the graph that we see in Google Analytics. It steadily tends to grow over time. I want to give you a couple of examples of this from Digital Photography School to contrast two types of content, the evergreen versus the now. Last year on Digital Photography School, we published a post that was all about Adobe announcing that they released a new version of Lightroom, Lightroom CC. We did a blog post on this. This is what I would classify as now content, this was big news in our community, Lightroom is the biggest post processing tool that our readers use. It was massive news. The post did really well for us. In the first week that that post went live, we had twelve-thousand page views. It was really good, it was a successful piece of content. The first day it went live, it had about three thousand page views. Later in the week when we sent our newsletter, it had three-thousand five-hundred, four-thousand page views, all during that week had a lot. Twelve-thousand in the first week. That’s what I would consider a successful post in its first week. But then, traffic tailed off. As I look back on it, it’s a bit over a year since that post was published. That post yesterday had two readers. One of them was me going back to have a look at the post, so it had really one reader. Since the time it was published, after the first week, it’s had probably a total of about a thousand page views in a year. Really, most of that came in the second and third week after it went live. That’s an example of a piece of content that dates and that’s pretty typical as I look at reviews of cameras, as I look at posts about breaking news. If you’ve got a blog that has that type of content, you’ll probably see the same trends. You might be able to lengthen the amount of time that people go back to that by re-sharing on social media a few times but it’s the type of content that doesn’t tend to attract much traffic. I want you to contrast that pattern of traffic with another post that I wrote back in 2007. This post is again on Digital Photography School and I’ll link to both of these in the show notes today. This was a post which was an introduction to a concept in photography called ISO. If you’ve got a film camera back at home, you’ll remember that film used to have ISO over a certain number. This is a blog post which explains what ISO means and what it particularly means for digital photography today. The day that post went live back in 2007, the blog was a smaller blog back then. It had 100 page views. Then, it tapered off. It actually went down after that first week, after it appeared in the news, it kind of tapered off. I was getting about 40 to 50 visitors a day. Fairly similar pattern to the second and third week to the Lightroom post that I just shared with you. But then, things began to grow. Twelve months after that blog post was published, in 2008, it was getting two-hundred to three-hundred page views per day. Two years after it was published, it was getting seven-hundred page views a day. Three years after it was published, it was getting one-thousand page views a day. Since that time, it’s remained at about that level between one-thousand and one-thousand five-hundred per day with the exception of a few days where I’ve re-shared it on social media because we do re-share this post at least a couple of times a year on Facebook because it’s as relevant today as it used to be. On those days, it can get up to ten-thousand if things really go well for it in a particular day. As I look back, since 2007, that blog post has continued to grow. It’s kind of plateaued a little bit now at a thousand to one-thousand five-hundred per day. That’s kind of where it’s still sitting today. As I look back over that time, it’s had over three-million page views to it. I wrote the post in 2007, it’s getting ten to fifteen times the traffic today as it did on the day that I published it. It continues to be valuable for my readers, it continues to drive traffic largely from search engines, but it’s also getting traffic every time I re-share it on social media and other people share it on social media. It’s the type of post that other people link to when they want to explain to their readers what ISO is which only continues to help it to grow. Both posts probably took me about an hour, maybe two hours to write. The first one, the Lightroom one, was actually one of our authors who wrote it. I don’t know exactly how long they took to write it, but that post was around eleven-hundred words long. My post on ISO, the evergreen one, was seven-hundred words long. They were fairly significant pieces of content but they probably only took a couple of hours to write. Obviously, the investment of time and effort on the ISO post, the evergreen piece of content, was much, much better than on the Lightroom post, the now piece of content. That’s not to say that there’s anything wrong with writing about the issues of today, things that will date. We do do those types of posts. The vast majority of what we focus our attention on on both Digital Photography School and ProBlogger is evergreen content. It just does not even compare in terms of the payoff from the investment of time. What I want to do now is share with you a few examples of evergreen pieces of content because I know every time I bring this topic up, some people say to me, “I just can’t do evergreen content on my blog.” I want to share with you some of the examples of content that I’ve created on both Digital Photography School and ProBlogger partly to give you a bit of an example of some of the types of things that were done and some of them might stimulate some ideas for you. After I give you the examples, I want to give you some tips on how to identify evergreen opportunities for content particularly on those blogs where it’s not as obvious. Let’s start with some examples. Yesterday, I spent a bit of time going back into Google Analytics and I pulled up the Top 10 posts on ProBlogger and Digital Photography School in terms of traffic. I pulled out the Top 5 from both ProBlogger and Digital Photography School to share with you. Let’s kind of work back through these from the most popular. The most popular post that I’ve published on Digital Photography School is a post called Ten Ways To Take Stunning Portraits. I’ll link to all of these in the show notes at problogger.com/podcast/136 where you can take a look at these. This particular post is pretty typical of a lot of the posts that we’ve got over on Digital Photography School. It’s a fairly introductory type guide to a subtopic in Digital Photography School. We talk about Landscape Photography, Macro Photography, but Portrait Photography is probably the biggest category of posts that we have on the blog. This post is an introduction to Portrait Photography. I have a lot of posts on Portrait Photography but this one kind of gets into some of the basics of that big topic. The post is long-ish, it’s probably around one-thousand four-hundred words. It’s not a massive long-mega post, but it’s meaty enough that there’s some content there. I do find that search engines do tend to like content that is a little bit longer. Anything over a thousand words is going to be treated as sort of a slightly more meaty post. You look at that post and you’ll see it’s in the list format. It covers ten points and for each point, I only really touch on the idea. I don’t go into great depth for each point. For each point, I link to further reading. This is a technique I like to use, I’ve talked about this on the podcast before. I would classify this as a sneeze post, the idea is that you’re sneezing people deep within your blog in all different directions. For everyone of the ten points that I make in the post, there’s a paragraph or two and then there’s usually a picture to help give it some visual interest and then I sneeze people deep into the archives. Hopefully by the end of reading this post, I might’ve read three or four or maybe all ten of the further pieces of reading which does increase the chance that they will subscribe as well to the blog. This post really worked really well because it was an introductory type post to a major category on the blog. I’ve done this same thing for Landscape Photography, Macro Photography, Wedding Photography. All of those main things that we find our readers come for, there’s this type of post on the site. It’s a topic that is not going away. People will always continue to take pictures of people and the principles that I talk about are evergreen principles. They’re not current trends in Portrait Photography, these are tips that you can use today and hopefully you’ll still be able to use in ten years. I think this post worked because it’s got some stuff in it that you can apply immediately after reading it. It’s actionable, it’s practical, and there’s more there if you want to read. There’s a further reading on each of the posts. Another reason that this one did well is that I followed it up with a second post, so there’s another post and you’ll see it at the bottom of the post as an update, Ten More Tips Or Ways To Take Stunning Photos. The reason that helps its evergreen nature is that that second post drove people back to the first one. People, when they link to my content here, this particular post, they have to link to both of them. That just drives more traffic as well. I think the last reason that this one particularly worked is because it was written in a fairly accessible style. People like lists, it’s scannable, there’s lots of images, it’s not too heavy. That’s the first post. It’s a teaching post I guess you would say, an introductory teaching post to the topic. The second one I want to share with you is a little bit different. It is titled The Rule of Thirds. This, I would say, is a little bit different for a number of reasons. Firstly, it’s not as long. It’s only about six-hundred words long so it’s getting towards the shorter end of the type of post that we write on the site. You don’t have to write long form content, I know Tim if you listened to the rest of his podcast, you’ll see that he writes fifteen page long articles. His podcasts go for an hour, two hours some of them. He really believes in long form content and I do too but I also think that you can do evergreen content that is shorter form as well. Again, it’s not super short but six-hundred words, we’re getting a bit shorter now. The other thing that this post is different for is that it’s not a teaching post, really. It does teach you but it’s more of a definition post. It’s not a how to do it type post like the first one, it’s more of a what is a type post. The rule of thirds is a principle of photography, many of you will have been taught it as kids, it’s a rule of composition. It does touch on how to apply the rule, it’s more about defining what this rule is. I find that definition posts are a great way of doing evergreen content in most niches. I would say there are terminologies, there are phrases that we use that an introductory type reader, a beginner reader doesn’t understand. I would suggest that most of the readers that have come to this post over the years have typed into Google what is the rule of thirds. We come up number one or two depending on how Google’s ranking is on the day for that particular type of term. On ProBlogger, we do posts like this as well. One of the good pieces of content didn’t make Top 10 but we get a lot of traffic to on ProBlogger is a post that I wrote called What Is A Blog? You might think that’s the most silly post to write but it’s amazing how many people type that into Google. Other terms that are relevant for your niche that you could write a post defining those words or explaining what those types of things are. This really can drive a lot of traffic. That post, the rule of thirds post, has had over two and a half million people come to it. I got a third example, another one from Digital Photography School is a post called How To Make An Inexpensive Light Tent. Again, link to it in the show notes. This one’s around eleven-hundred words long. This is a classic step by step post. It’s teaching people how to do something, lots of images at each step along the way. This post worked for a number of reasons. One, it’s a teaching post. Again, this is what I like to do. I like to teach people how to do things. Anything that’s a step by step guide works very well and these DIY projects really work for us as well. The other reason that I know this post has worked is a lot of our readers came back to it again. That just drives people back again and again over time. I know a number of our readers bookmarked this particular post. When they first read it, they didn’t want to make it straight away but they came back to it later. It’s the type of thing that they share as well which really does help with that evergreen nature of it. For some reason, this post really lived on in the minds of a lot of our readers and I continued to today see people sharing this post on Twitter with their friends. I guess if it comes up in conversation that one of their friends is wanting to have a light tent which is just a piece of equipment for photography, I guess it just comes to mind for people. So if you can create something that’s memorable and that people will refer back to again and again, that can work particularly well. Example number four is a post called Long Exposure Photography, 15 Stunning Examples. I wanted to include this one because it’s only two-hundred words long. This is really short form content here. I guess it is longish in some ways because it’s got images in it. This post is one that I have shared on the podcast before, it’s just fifteen inspirational images that illustrate a particular technique in photography. Evergreen content doesn’t’ have to be a teaching post, it doesn’t even have to have a lot of words, it can be purely image. I just wanted to include this one because it is an example of something that is a little bit different but it continues to be evergreen. Those images, if you choose the right images, they can live on as being something that inspires people for many years to come. I guess in some ways this is a bit of a case study post. Here’s what other people have done with this technique. Number five, this is the last one I’ll give you from Digital Photography School. I want to share some ProBlogger ones with you next. This one is called Posing Guide – 21 Samples Poses to Get You Started with Photographing Women. This is nine-hundred words long, getting a little longer here. But again, this one has lots of images. It’s got twenty-one images in it. This was actually part of a series of blog posts. Again, it’s another example where evergreen content within a series, or the links from one post to another, can really work very well. You end up with quite a large collection. I think we had eight or nine different posts in this series. We had Posing Guide – 21 Sample Poses To Help You with photographing women, men, couples, kids, and different situations as well. Again, this is an example where it’s words and images together. It’s not so much a teaching post, it’s more of a how I did it or a case study type post. The other thing that we found with this post is that it’s one that people save to their iPads and took out with them when they’re photographing women so they can show people the particular poses. If you can create something that people will read more than once, that increases the evergreen nature of it as well and increases the amount of pageviews that that particular post will get. That post had around two-million people hit it. I think it was published back in 2010, so it’s about five or six years old now. Five more examples, these ones will come from ProBlogger. The next one I’ll talk about is one called Can You Really Make Money Blogging – 7 Things I Know About Making Money Blogging. Many of you have seen this post over on ProBlogger because it’s one of the most read posts that we’ve ever done. It’s a longish post, it’s about two-thousand words long, fairly long form content there. This is an example of a frequently asked question. I think if you can identify any frequently asked question within your niche, any question that you get from your readers via email or comments or any critique that you have of your particular niche. I saw a lot of people saying you can’t really make money blogging so this was my answer to that statement or to those questions. It’s a list post so there’s seven things I know about this particular topic. It’s the type of post that I link back to constantly from other posts on ProBlogger. You will see me link to it, you will see me mention it in podcasts. I link back to it and that increases the evergreen nature of it by getting people back to that post again and again. Every time you get people back to the post, it increases the chances that you will be shared again or it might be linked to which then helps your SEO. It’s one of those things that can snowball over time as your post grows. The other thing I’ll tell you about this one is a bit of a myth busting post. If there’s a myth within your industry that won’t go away, that’s an ideal topic that you should be writing about because it’s evergreen. The next post I want to talk about briefly is my mega post, one of the longest posts I’ve ever written called The Ultimate Guide to Making Money with the Amazon Affiliate Program. Again, this is one that you will probably have seen if you’ve been reading ProBlogger for a while because it continues to rank really well in Google and it gets shared heaps. I know Amazon actually shared this with a lot of their affiliates because it was such a mega post, it’s seven-thousand seven-hundred words long. As a result of being so long, people bookmark it, they save it for later, they come back to it, they save it in Facebook which must be a signal to Facebook that it ranks well. It’s a type of post that people share like crazy, it’s been linked to a lot from different blogs including Amazon themselves. It’s also something I refer back to time and time again. Those things all come together to make it something that’s quite powerful. A few of the techniques that I mention in this particular post have slightly dated, I don’t do them anymore. I updated this post and that’s one of the things I’ll talk about in a moment. You can actually link from the evergreen nature of a post by changing it. I’m totally fine with that and I’ll talk a little bit more about that in a moment. The eighth one that I want to share with you quickly now is a post called How to Craft a Blog Post – 10 Crucial Points to Pause. This was a post that is a little bit different to some of the others because it’s an introduction to a series of posts that I published over several weeks. If you go and look at it, the post itself is just the introduction, it just raises what I’m going to do next. And then, I link to all the other ten posts in the series. As I release new posts, I would update this post to include the link to it. It’s kind of like the hub of a series. It doesn’t have a heap of content in it of itself, about eight-hundred words, it’s not tiny. It acts more as a central hub for the rest of the series. Again, it’s on a topic that’s evergreen, how to write a blog post. The ten things that I mention are all as relevant today as they were back in 2008 when I published this post. It’s one of those ones that has really steadily grown in terms of the traffic that has come to this post but also to the other ten posts in the series as well. I’ll link to this one particularly from the portals around ProBloggers as well so I’m not only relying upon Google to send traffic to it but I’m also sending traffic to it from navigation areas and our portals on the blog as well. I think that’s really important to think about not just relying upon Google but actually helping get people to these evergreen posts as well. The ninth one that I want to share with you is a little bit different again, it’s called How to Quit Your Job, Move to Paradise, and Get Paid to Change the World. It sounds like a bit of an aspirational post and it is. It’s actually a guest post that John Murrow wrote. I really would recommend that you go back and read it because it’s just a story. This is another example of a different type of content, it doesn’t have to be teaching, it doesn’t have to be a case study, it doesn’t have to be a definition type post. This is a story. If you’ve got a story or you know a good story that’s relevant for all time like this particular one is, that’s a great type of evergreen content that you could be creating for your blog as well. It doesn’t date, it inspires people as much today as it did in 2011 when we first published it on ProBlogger. The last one I want to give you is kind of one that was a bit of surprise. As I looked at the most read posts on ProBlogger, I didn’t realize this post was getting so much traffic even today. It’s Ten David Ogilvy Quotes that could Revolutionize Your Blogging. It’s a post I wrote back in 2011 and it was just a collection of my favorite quotes from David Ogilvy who’s sort of like the original Ad Man. It’s fifteen-hundred words long so I did add a little bit of my own content. It’s fairly large, it’s not a meaty post at all. I guess people still are searching today many, many years later for quotes from David Ogilvy. I suspect that’s where the traffic is coming in from. They’re just ten of the examples that I’ve done. As I mentioned earlier, I’ve got some examples on the show notes today from some of our readers, some ProBlogger readers. I actually put on my Facebook page a few days ago now that I was doing this podcast and I wanted examples of other evergreen content from other blogs. There’s a whole collection of all kinds of different content there. I wanted to include these probably to drive a little bit of traffic to ProBlogger readers, I love to share traffic with our readers. But two, also because I wanted to show you some examples of evergreen content from different niches. Some of these are teaching type posts and some of them are different styles of content as well. I know for a fact that some of you are still going, “This doesn’t really work for my niche.” I kind of want to address that a little bit now. Evergreen content can take all kinds of forms. You’ve already seen some of the different styles of content, the different types of posts that I’ve shared. We’ve got how to, instructional guides, that’s where I spend a lot of my time. You’ve got definition type posts, you’ve got inspirational content—some of those image collections that I shared but also the story that we shared—case studies and examples—sometimes, they can date a little bit but sometimes they don’t. Advice, we got a post on ProBlogger, How to Choose a Blog Platform. That’s a piece of content that hasn’t really dated a whole heap although some of the platforms have changed, we’ve updated it a little bit, but it’s a question that people continue to ask. It answers to frequently asked questions. The last type would be swipe files or templates. I’ll share an example in a moment from Copy Blogger that fits into that category. Again, you can also see this even in the examples I’ve given you. There’s been different styles or formats of posts as well. Step by step, list post, essays, articles, all kinds of image collections. We’ve got different mediums there, evergreen content can be written content, audio, many of the podcasts that I’ve created including this one remain as relevant today as they were when I recorded them and hopefully will live on for a long time to come. Video can be evergreen. Really, you’re not limited to just the written work here. I’ve got a post on YouTube, a video that I did on my secrets to making money from blogging. I referred to that a couple of episodes ago and it continues to get views even today. Video can work as well. Different styles, different mediums, different types of posts all can work as evergreen content. You’re not limited just to a written content. How do you identify evergreen content ideas for your particular blog? I want to make a few suggestions for you and hopefully some of these again will stimulate some ideas for you. The first question is what questions do you get asked today that you’ve been asked for a few years now? What questions do you get asked that just don’t go away. An example of that on ProBlogger was can you really make money blogging? That’s one question. Another one we get asked all the time is how do you make money blogging. Some of the best posts that we’ve got on ProBlogger just answer those frequently asked questions. What are the key challenges, obstacles, or problems that don’t go away for your readers? Again, on ProBlogger, one of the key challenges is that our readers have and hasn’t gone away is productivity. How do I fit it all in? How do I get it all done? You’ll notice a lot of the content that I’ve created on ProBlogger does take that angle. How do you get it all done? How do you decide which social media network to go on, that was two episodes ago. What are those challenges, obstacles, and problems that your readers have that just haven’t gone away? That type of content that addresses those types of challenges will lend itself to more evergreen content. What searches are people doing on your site to get to your site? If you can get some of that information from Google Analytics, you want to dig in a little bit too to see what people are searching for when they’re on your site. What searches are people doing on your topic elsewhere? You might want to look at Google Trends as a good tool for that. You can type in a keyword there and it will show you whether that keyword is being searched for on Google and whether that’s trending up or trending down type of topic. What are the cornerstone things that people need to know in your niche? A good example of that on Digital Photography School was that ISO post. I wrote a series of posts back in 2007 I think it was on Digital Photography School on the topics of aperture, shutter speed and ISO. Those three concepts are what I would consider to be cornerstone pieces of content. If you want to take a well exposed photo, you need to learn those three things. Those ideas are cornerstone to the topic. If there are cornerstone things that you constantly are referring to in your articles, then maybe you’ve never even written on those posts because you think they’re so basic for everyone. They’re the type of things that you should be writing content on. You should always link back to those things. What are the key categories in your niche that you could write an introduction on? What could you create that people will come back to again and again? A good example of this, when I do go on Facebook for people to share examples, Carla and Emma from The Merrymaker Sisters shared a recipe that has sent them heaps of traffic to their particular blog The Merrymaker Sisters. It’s called The Paleo Salted Caramel Slice Recipe. It’s such an amazing slice, I’ve actually tasted it, that I bet people are constantly coming back to it. It’s one that they would live on in their memories that they come back to again and again and again. If they don’t print it out and put it in their most used recipes. Those types of things that you create that people come back to is really important. Hence, swipe files is another example of this. Copy Blogger is one of my favorite blogs over at copyblogger.com. Brian Clark wrote an article back in 2008 or 2009 on his Ten Surefire Headline Formats that Always Work. These were just sort of little templates of headlines that you could use for blog posts. That post, it’s just become iconic. People constantly refer to it and I constantly go back to it. Every time I’m stuck writing a blog post title or trying to name an ebook or trying to come up with a headline for a landing page, I go back to that post. If you can create something that has some sort of a swipe file element to it that people will keep coming back to, then that’s the type of thing that maybe you should be trying to create on your blog as well. The last thing I’d say is to try to help you identify evergreen content ideas. What key stories have there been in your life or in your industry, in your niche, that continue to have relevance today, things that continue to teach and inspire your readers today. I think in most of our lives, there’s moments in our lives that have been turning point moments for us. We often refer back to them in passing. I really would encourage you to identify what were the turning point moments in your own life that you do occasionally refer to on your blog. Write that up as a blog post, write that story up, and then you can link back to that and drive traffic back to that over time. That’s another evergreen idea. The last question I want to touch on with evergreen content, it’s a question I get quite a bit. “What should I do if my content dates?” There are plenty of blogs as I mentioned before that just purely do now content. On one level, that’s totally okay. I want to say if you got a blog that’s all about now content, maybe you’ve got a news blog or maybe you’ve got a politics blog that’s all about the election that’s happening in the US at the moment, or if you’ve got a blog that’s all about gadgets and you have to just constantly write about now stuff, that’s okay. But, keep your eyes open for opportunities to add some evergreen content. I do think in most niches there’s opportunities to create evergreen content. What I would say to you is look for opportunities to mix it up. Not every content you write needs to be evergreen and not every content idea that you have needs to be now. Most blogs can create a mix of that. It will differ from blog to blog what that mix is. Over on Digital Photography School, I would say 90% to 95% is evergreen. We could write a lot more about the new cameras that come out and the new techniques that there are for getting certain styles of post processing and we do do a few of those types of things but we tend to leave that to other blogs that are majoring more upon that. On ProBlogger, we tend to do a little bit more now content because techniques do change. For example, we’ve written more recently about Snapchat. We’ve written more recently about Facebook Live, some of these emerging trends that are a heat for a while. I would say they’re still reasonably evergreen but they may be not as evergreen as some of the posts that we do on Digital Photography School. I guess that’s one of the things that we should acknowledge, really evergreen content is a spectrum. Some pieces of content that you write might last ten years, it might last a hundred years really. Some of those principles of life just don’t change but there’s a sliding scale. Some pieces are now and they’re today type content and they will not be relevant tomorrow. And then, a lot of pieces of content, on ProBlogger, posts about Snapchat may only be around for six months or so, that’s more evergreen than just a today type of content. Do consider those types of posts as well, the medium level evergreen. The last thing I’ll say is that you can update your content to make it more evergreen. I’ve already kind of mentioned this as well. Even the post that are dating, look back at them and ask yourself are there opportunities to go back to some of those olds posts and update them? A good example of this on ProBlogger is my post How to Make Money Blogging. I think you’ll find it at problogger.net/make-money-blogging. It’s about two-thousand nine-hundred words long. I can’t remember when I wrote that post, I think it must’ve been back in 2007, 2008 when I kind of summarized how I made money blogging. If you go back in the web archives and look at the different versions of that post that have been online, you will notice that they have changed quite a bit. I’ve gone back to that post again and again and again and updated it and changed it. Probably very little of it is still what I actually wrote when I first published that post. Yet, I would still consider that to be an evergreen piece of content because it’s still the same topic. Whilst the content on it has changed with the times, people still are asking about how to make money blogging. The topic hasn’t changed and the page URL hasn’t’ changed. It continues to rank well in Google as well. You may have some content in your archives that you could tweak and update a little bit and it becomes evergreen again today. Particularly pay attention to content that is doing well in Google or that is getting a lot of traffic from another blog. If you’ve got a hot post like that in your archives, really make it a high priority to continue to update that one. There are also other things that you might want to do some analysis on. There are things within your niche that readers continue to come looking for. I’ll give you a couple of examples of this. One of my favorite blogs to read is Mac Rumors. It’s a blog about the new things that are rumored to be happening with Apple and Mac, new iPhones that might be coming out, new features that might be on the next MacBook Pro. I would consider most of the content that goes up on Mac Rumors to be very now, it’s all now, it’s all stuff that could be obsolete tomorrow. As that rumor gets proved to be false or as the new iPhone comes out, those posts that are being written about it really become obsolete. But as I look at Mac Rumors, they have worked out that there are some things that people just come constantly looking for advice on. If you look up in their navigation area, they’ve got a link called Buyer’s Guide. It’s the buyer’s guide to all Apple Products. One of the things I guess they’ve realized is that their readers get really nervous about whether they should buy a product now or whether they should wait a month or two before the new product comes out. If you look at the buyer’s guide, it actually gives you the latest information on that particular product. This is a page that they’ve created that gives you up to date information on an evergreen topic. I guess that’s the point I’m trying to make here today is are there things that your readers constantly are asking, I suspect they created that page because people kept asking in their forms. It’s now the right time to buy this particular product. They created a guide for that and they constantly update it, it gets updated probably everyday almost. It’s an evergreen kind of page because it’s fulfilling a need that is not going away in their readers. You might find that there is just something that all your readers want to be kept up to date on so then you can create a page that’s a little bit evergreen there. Another example of a blog that I read quite regularly that does this is Life Hacker. If you go to Life Hacker, you will see different versions of Life Hacker depending on where you are in the world. If you go to the US Life Hacker page, you’ll find that they have some links to the most essential apps for Macs. I’ll give you the link to that in today’s show notes. It’s a post that they update constantly with their favorite apps for Macs. They’ve obviously worked out that there’s high demand that’s not going away for that particular topic. So if you look at that post, you’ll see that some of the comments are from 2013. That post has been live for a long time but it’s been updated in the last few days and they do say when they update it as well. If there’s something that people just keep asking you about, it’s a problem that your readers have that’s just not going away, consider creating a page that you’ll update that really fulfills the evergreen kind of need that people have as well. Two more quick examples. I’ll shoot you over to Digital Photography School again. We’ve got a couple of posts there that are our most popular Digital SLRs, most popular lenses, most popular compact cameras. I’ve shared the links in the show notes. These are posts that I update probably once a quarter, so three or four times a year. It just shows the current trends in those particular things. I noticed a few years ago that people are constantly asking what digital SLR should I buy? I could spend all day answering that question or I could create a page that simply answers the question for our readers. Again, it’s an evergreen question but I update the content. That might be something that you can do. If you’ve got a blog that is on one of these sort of now, now, now type topics, maybe there are some things that you can do to create some evergreen content. Last one I’ll share with you as an example is from Vanessa’s blog, my wife. Stole Shenanigans is her blog. She wrote a post called Where to Shop in Bali after we took a holiday there. I don’t know that she really expected that post to do as well as it has, but it’s one that has ranked pretty well in Google and yet it does date. Where to Shop in Bali does change from month to month, year to year. We’ve been back to Bali several times now, and she’s gone back even by herself on a girl’s kind of holiday for a significant birthday that she had. Every time she goes back, she collects more information on that particular topic and then updates that post. You might have a post that dates but are there ways that you can continue to update that one? There are some ideas on how to create evergreen content for your blog. Creating it is half the blog, the next thing you really do need to think about is how do you get people to it. Once you’ve written your evergreen piece of content, think about how you’re going to get your readers to it. Whilst some noble post might have a spike in traffic and then die off very quickly, the goal with evergreen content is to get a steady stream of traffic to it overtime. A few tips on how to do that. Partly, it’s going to be up to Google, Google does have their way of determining where to rank traffic. I guess the first thing is learn how to do some SEO, how can you optimize your post for SEO. I’ll link in today’s show notes to an episode that we did on search engine optimization that Jim Stewart on that particular topic. Optimize your post for SEO but then consider how you can get people to it from your blog, your existing blog. Your navigation areas, your menu, your sidebar. If it’s an important piece of evergreen content, you probably want to highlight that post in some way on your blog. On ProBlogger, I mentioned already on our sidebar next to blog post we have linked to some of our important pieces of evergreen content, we have portals, we link to some of our important evergreen pieces of content from the about page, the start here page. Also, underneath blog posts we have further reading which we recommend certain pieces of content that people should read as well. Go back through your archives and work out are there other relevant pieces of content that you could be linking to your new evergreen content from. Even if it’s just sending a trickle of traffic from ten different blog posts, that adds up over time. You can regularly re-share that social media content again and again. Build a system where you’re highlighting that type of content. One very simple thing that I do pretty much every day is go back to look at what I published this day last year and this day two years ago. The date today as I’m recording this is July 25. Tonight when I do my social media for Digital Photography School, I curate all the content that goes up onto our Facebook page, I will look at what I published on the 25th of July last year and every year over the last five or six years. I’ll be looking for opportunities as I do that to find evergreen content. I don’t share every post that we published on the 25th of July because some of it wasn’t evergreen. But if it’s evergreen and it’s still relevant today, I use that as a single to myself to re-share. I know every year, I go through every post on the site. If it’s evergreen, it gets shared at least once a year. Build a system where you can resurface that evergreen content. Keep in mind as you write future pieces of content that there will be opportunities to link back to your evergreen content in that. Before you publish any new blog post, ask yourself is there something I’ve written before that’s evergreen that I should be linking back to? You should be linking to your evergreen content in any promotional activities you do. If you are guest posting on someone else’s blog, don’t just link back to your front page in your bio. You might want to consider linking back to an evergreen piece of content that relates to what you wrote about in that guest post. If you’re interviewed on a podcast or if you get an interview in the media, try and find a way to mention that piece of content that you’ve created and drive people back from that. I guess the last thing is if you’ve got a piece of content that’s evergreen, consider who might be interested in that. Is there a social media influencer in your particular niche who might actually like and might share that piece of content as well? Promote your evergreen content. Don’t just write it, that’s half the battle, but get people to it and work it. It’s really important to continue to do that. The last thing I’ll say about evergreen content is that once you got people viewing it and once you have that steady stream of traffic to those posts, you’ve got to ask yourself what’s the point of that? If people are seeing that content and then they’re bouncing straight off your site again, that’s kind of a bit of a wasted opportunity so how can you leverage the eyeballs that that evergreen content are getting? You might want to consider creating an opt-in or lead magnet where you give something away in return for an email address from the people who do come to that. You might want to get people to read a second piece of content. If you’ve got an evergreen piece of content that’s getting lots of eyeballs, you might want to suggest some further reading on that to get a second eyeball on a second piece of content. You might want to call them to follow you on social media. Really, it’s about trying to make that piece of content that is evergreen, that is getting the traffic, as sticky as possible. I put together an episode purely on that topic of making your blog post sticky. It’s Episode 35 of the ProBlogger podcast and I really would encourage you to go back and listen to that one once this particular episode is finished. If you’ve already got evergreen content that’s ranking in Google, that’s getting traffic from social, that’s getting traffic from other blogs, you really need to take a good look at that piece of content and see how can I leverage that piece of content. You’re going to listen to Episode 35 on that. Just to sum up, evergreen content is one of the best investments that you’ll ever make in terms of creating content for your blog. Not every piece of content needs to be evergreen and not every piece of evergreen content that you create is going to work. Sometimes, they just don’t attract the traffic that we think. But the more evergreen content you create over time, the better. I shared with you earlier in this podcast ten pieces of content that have done really well for me on my blogs. Those pieces of content, some of them have had millions of pageviews but none of them have made up any more than 1% or 2% of my overall traffic. The reality is that all of the hundreds of millions of pageviews that I’ve had over the years, most of it has come from all the little pieces of content that I’ve created that have been evergreen. Really, it’s about the accumulation of what’s in your archives that matters with this. It’s not just those big posts that go viral, it’s some of those little posts as well that might attract an extra ten, twenty, thirty visitors a month to your blog; those add up over time. Every piece of content that you create is an investment that continues to drive the overall traffic that you’re able to drive to your blogs. I really do encourage you this week to make it your goal to create some evergreen content and identify some other topics that you might want to write that are evergreen in nature. Actually, come up with a bit of a schedule to create that content over the coming weeks and months. Thanks so much for listening to today. I know it’s been a long one. It actually took me forever to prepare this one, there’s so much to say on the topic. You can find today’s show notes with all the further reading, all the examples that I’ve given you, and a full transcription of this whole podcast over at problogger.com/podcast/136. Thanks for listening, I’ll chat with you in a couple of days time in Episode 137.  How did you go with today’s episode? I hope you are building evergreen content into your weekly or even daily schedule. I would love to know what type of evergreen content you have published and how it is working for you. Share your experiences below. Enjoy this podcast? Sign up to our ProBloggerPLUS newsletter to get notified of all new tutorials and podcasts below.

Setting Goals to Grow Your Traffic and Income Today’s podcast is about setting goals to grow your traffic and income. Pamela, one of our readers asked this question: “Darren I’ve been blogging now for 12 months and I’ve seen some growth in my traffic and more recently income – but I’m finding it hard to know whether I’m going well or not because I don’t know where a 12 month old blog should be at? Maybe it’s too hard to give a number but do you have any advice on what kind of goals I should be setting myself for my blogging when it comes to traffic or income?” This is a great question that ProBlogger readers often ask. It may be a bit hard to answer when it comes to specific numbers because no two blogs are alike. There are many factors that go into blogging. I do think it is useful to have goals. Today I’m going to make some suggestions on how to set those goals based on how I did it back in 2004 when I began to monetize my blog. In Today’s Episode Setting Goals to Grow Your Traffic and Income Listen to this episode in the player above or here on iTunes. In 2004, I started to experiment with AdSense ads and Amazon’s Affiliate program I noticed my traffic was growing, but I wondered how much traffic I actually needed This is before Google Analytics – most blog stats were freely viewable through Site Meter I knew I needed to do something different and stop comparing my blog to other blogs I decided to compare my monthly traffic to the traffic of my blog from the previous month My initial goal was any uptrend – I was happy with this for the first few months I realized my blog was growing about 5% every month – gently trending up over time I decided to set goals that were a bit more aggressive My first goal was to double my traffic percentage or to go up 10% instead of 5% There were times when 10% growth was easy, there were also other months where it seemed possible, but by having that goal, I could see if I was on track and it helped me grow my blog faster I did the same thing with my AdSense income – I knew AdSense income would increase with traffic increases, so I made my income goal more aggressive – if my traffic goal was 10%, I would make my income goal 15% I did this because I knew there were a number of ways to increase AdSense by using it better – changing placement, size, color, optimizing ads I also started selling ads directly through advertisers and using other networks like Chitika I found that by running other networks and optimizing AdSense sometime I increased my income by 50 or 100 percent Compare monthly stats from month to month or each month from year to year See how you are trending, then set goals that are slightly more aggressive Percentages will vary, at some stages growth is easier You can apply these techniques to many different stats – social media, subscribers, bounce rates, the goal is to be better each month Setting goals is fantastic – being aggressive and having something to aim for can stretch you Think about the strategies to get to those goals – not just the end result – where will the traffic increase come from? What blogs, content, posting frequency, etc. Further Resources on Setting Goals to Grow Your Traffic and Income How to Find Readers For Your Blog How to Use 2 Types of Content to Find Readers for Your Blog How to Turn Surfers into Blog Readers by Building a Sticky Blog How to Find Readers for Your Blog Through Commenting and Relationships Grow Traffic to Your Blog Through Guest Posting and Creating Content for Other Blogs, Forums, Media and Events How to Make a Full Time Income From Your Blog Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Hey there and welcome to Episode 135 of the ProBlogger Podcast. My name is Darren Rowse. Today, I want to talk about setting goals as a way to grow your traffic and income. The idea for today’s podcast was stimulated by Pamela, one of our wonderful readers, who wrote to me this question. “Darren, I’ve been blogging now for twelve months and I’ve seen some growth with traffic and more recently income on my blog. I’m finding it hard to know whether I’m going well or not because I don’t know where twelve months of blogging should be at. Maybe it’s too hard to give a number, but do you have any advice on what types of goals I should be setting myself when it comes to traffic or income?” This is a great question, thanks Pamela for asking it. You can ask your questions over on today’s show notes at problogger.com/podcast/135 where I do have some suggested reading and further listening on this particular topic. This is a really great question, thanks so much for asking, Pamela. It’s one that I know ProBlogger readers do ask, at least quite a few of them do ask me when I meet them face to face. I remember asking myself this very question. As I think Pamela gets to in her question, it is a bit of a tricky one to answer when it comes to specific numbers. I can’t tell you how much traffic a twelve month old blog should have or how much money it should be making because no two blogs are alike and no two businesses are the same. There are many factors that you would have to weigh up to give a specific answer like that. As I think I’ve shared before, I know bloggers who make a full time living from their blogs who got to that level with hundreds of daily readers and then others who were not full time until they had tens of thousands of daily readers. There can be that much variation in how much traffic you need to make a full time income. It depends a lot on the model that you have, the income streams that you use, the readers that you have, how engaged they are, how much work you put into your blog, there’s so many factors. I do think it’s useful to have goals. I want to make some suggestions today on how to set those goals for you by telling you how I did it back in 2004 when I started to monetize my blogs. It was 2004 for me, I’ve been blogging for about eighteen or so months when I started to experiment with putting some AdSense ads in my blog and started to experiment with Amazon’s Affiliate program. I remember at that very time asking exactly the same question, how much traffic do I need to get to a full time living for this? That became my goal. After a few months, I could see there was some potential there, my income was growing, my traffic was growing but how much traffic was I going to need? I remember hitting search engines to try and find the answer. I remember asking a number of website owners that I knew were monetizing their websites, how much traffic they had. I remember getting really frustrated because not too many people were willing to talk about that. The answers I was getting were very varied. It was really frustrating. The other factor was that as I looked around at other blogs—not too many blogs were monetizing back then—but I wasn’t able to see how much traffic they had because this was before Google Analytics. A lot of bloggers were using a tool called Site Meter back then to measure traffic. Interestingly, those stats were pretty much public in most cases. You had to upgrade and pay Site Meter to hide your stats. Most blog stats were freely viewable. It was really interesting, you could go to almost any blog and click the little side meter link and see how much traffic they had. This was interesting but it was also a bit of a problem that many bloggers fell into at that time because we spent a lot of time comparing our traffic with other people’s. This either left me feeling really depressed because my traffic was so small in comparison to these other massive blogs or it left me frustrated because I had similar amounts of traffic to these other blogs, yet they seem to be making a whole heap more, opportunities were landing in their laps even though we were similar sized blogs. I kind of fell into this comparison making game. It was a bit of a trap. One day, I realized that comparing my traffic or income to somebody else really wasn’t that helpful. I guess I knew it all along but I had this realization one day that I needed to stop doing that and start focusing on what I was building and start comparing myself to where I’d already been. I’d been distracting myself by clicking on those Site Meter links and comparing all the time. I decided to do something different. I decided that at the end of every month, I was going to compare the traffic that I had on my blog in that month that had just gone by to the traffic that I had on the previous month. At the end of April, I would compare my traffic for April to March, to the very month before, to see how that compared rather than comparing my traffic to another blog. When you compare yourself to another blog, you don’t really know the full story of what’s going on on that blog, you don’t know why they had that traffic, you don’t know how that traffic is converting in terms of income. When you compare to yourself, you’ve got something that you do know the full story on. I realized that if I set myself the goal of always increasing my traffic from month to month to always have my record month of traffic. That type of comparison was much more helpful and it would motivate me to work harder each month to build my blog. My initial goal was any trending up. So far, I beat last month’s traffic by one this month, then I was satisfied with that. That was for the first few months. Whether it was one extra reader or a hundred or a thousand, I was happy. But interestingly as I did this little exercise at the end of every month, comparing this month’s traffic to last month, I realized that my blog was naturally growing by about 5% every month. It was trending up. It was kind of towards the beginning of my blogs and I guess because I was adding more content everyday and I was getting a few new subscribers every day, it was just gently trending up over time. This happens for a lot of new blogs. That first month or the second month, most blogs do increase in size, it’s just natural. You have more content, you have a few more subscribers, things gently trend up. Once I realized that that was the normal level for my blog to trend up, I decided to start setting myself goals to get a little bit more aggressive than that. The first goal I set myself to increase my traffic was instead of 5%, I wanted to hit 10%. I wanted to double the rate of growth of my blog. That became my ultimate goal. If my blog had 3,000 visitors a month, I was aiming for 3,300 the next month. If I hit that 3,300 the next month, then the following month I wanted to hit 3,630, and the next month I wanted to hit 3,993, and so forth. I wanted to increase things by at least 10% every month because I knew if I could increase the rate of growth of my blog, I was going to get closer to becoming a full time blogger faster. There were periods where 10% increases were easy. There were times where I hit 30% from month to month growth. All it takes sometimes is for another big blog to link to you or for Google to change their algorithm or for you to write a post that gets shared around a whole heap. There were other months where 10% seemed like it was impossible, that was really hard. What I found is that by having that 10% figure in my mind, I could see every day whether I was on track to do that. By having that slightly more aggressive goal, it really did help me to grow my blog faster. That’s what I was doing with my traffic, I came up with this figure. Over time, the number did changes. 10% became 20% after a while and then it actually came back down to 10% for a while too. You’ll find the different stages in the life cycle of your blog, it is easy to grow. The other thing I did was the same type of thing with my income. Back then, it was largely AdSense. AdSense made up 95% of my income. I realized that if I could increase my traffic by 10% every month, then my AdSense generally went up by 10% too. I decided to set that goal at 15%, I wanted to get even more aggressive there. I realized that I could increase my AdSense earnings in a number of ways, one of which was to increase the traffic to my site. That was kind of underhand with increasing by 10% every month of traffic but I could also increase it even further by getting better at using AdSense, by positioning the ads better, by having ads in different sized ads, by changing the design of the ads. Back then, you could change the colors of them and that type of things as well. There were a number of things I could do to increase the effectiveness of those ads but I also learned that I could add other income streams. I began to focus more on using Amazon’s Affiliate program, I started to experiment with other advertising networks. One in particular back then was Chitika. I started selling ads directly to advertisers as well. I decided that through all of this, I should at least be able to get to 15% increase from month to month. It was more aggressive than my traffic growth but the traffic growth actually made it easier. If I could hit 10% traffic growth and increase 5% with tweaks of how I was monetizing the blog, then I should be able to get 15%. What I found again was that 15% was achievable at that time for me. Again, there are some months where I hit 30%, there were some months where it went up by 50%. I remember one month it went up by 100% because I found this whole other ad network, Chitika, and I had that running along side my AdSense ads. I was able to increase my income quite significantly that month. That’s kind of the advice that I would give you, Pamela. When it comes to traffic, when it comes to income, compare this month’s stats to last month’s. Similarly if you’ve been going for a while, you could be comparing April this year to April last year. In some ways, that’s a fairer comparison because April always has the same amount of days, February is the only one that doesn’t. Comparing April to June or July, there might be 30 days in one month and 31 in the next. Comparing twelve months ago, you’ll need to change the percentages as well. Hopefully in a year, you’ve grown by more than 10%. Compare this month to last month, aim for an increase. Once you see how you’re trending what is normal growth for you, you can then set some goals that are slightly more aggressive than what you are normally achieving in terms of growth. The percentage numbers will vary. As I’ve already said, at some stages in the life cycle of your blog, growth is easier than others. 10%, 15% might be way under what you could be achieving naturally. You might be wanting to set 20%, 30%, 40%. There are other times in the cycle of your blog where things haven’t been going as well or maybe is a seasonal time. Over the summer, some blogs do find that they drop off in traffic. Maybe you want to adjust that to take into consideration some of those types of things. The other thing I’d say about this type of approach is that you can apply it to many different stats that you have. As you look in your Google Analytics, you can be comparing this month’s bounce rate to last month. Have you improved your bounce rate? You could be comparing this month to last month in terms of how many pages each visitor viewed. Did they go up or did it go down? You could do the same thing with your social media stats. Was the number of new Facebook followers that you had this month higher than the number that you got last month? Was the rate at which people subscribed to your newsletter better this month than last? I guess ultimately, what we’re trying to do is each month be better than last month to hit our record for the stat that we’re looking at. The last thing I’ll say in terms of goal setting is that setting goals like this is fantastic, I’m a big believer in having something to aim for. It’s really good to get aggressive with that goal. Your goals need to be realistic which is why I suggest looking at what’s naturally possible, what you’re currently doing. They should also stretch you, so get a little bit aggressive with it. It doesn’t really matter if you don’t quite meet them, sometimes by just having that stretch goal it would take you a lot further. It’s also important when you’re thinking about goals not just to think about the end result but to think about the strategies that are going to help you to reach those goals. You might say I want 10% more traffic each month. Where’s that traffic going to come from? It’s probably more important for you to then ask yourself the secondary question, where is the increase going to come from? It’s not going to just happen because you have the goal, so what other blogs are you going to offer that you’re going to guest post on or what forums are you going to start to interact with, what influencers are you going to reach out to, what people are you going to send links to the things that you’ve been writing, what shareable content are you going to create? Just the frequency of your posting needs to change. There’s a whole heap of factors there that can increase the traffic numbers that you get. So yes, have the goal, have the number in mind that you’re after, that 10%, 15% increase. But more importantly than that, every month, sit down and come up with a little list of three or four things that you’re going to do over the next month to take you closer to that goal. If traffic’s the thing that you need to work on, I really want to recommend that you go back and listen to Episodes 33 through to 37 of the ProBlogger podcast. You can find them all in iTunes, just look for PB33, that’s the start of a little series that I did on finding readers for your blog. I highly recommend that you go back and listen to those four or five podcasts. You’ll see that they each take a different focus on building readers to your blog. If it’s increasing income to your blog, I really recommend that you go back and listen to Episode 48 because in that one, I talk about how to make a full time income from blogging by breaking down that goal that you have and by diversifying your income streams. I mentioned before that I have one month where my income went up by 100% from one month to the next and that was because I diversified my income for that month. Episode 48 is the one to listen to for that. Episodes 33 through to 37 are ideal if you want to increase the traffic to your blog. Pamela, thanks so much for your question, I really appreciate you asking that. As I said before, any questions that you have that you want me to tackle in a future podcast or in a future blog post, please ask them in the comments on today’s show notes at problogger.com/podcast/135. I’ll also link to some further reading and those podcasts that I just mentioned that would be great for you to listen to next. Thanks for listening today and I’ll chat with you in the next couple of days in Episode 136. Tweet us @ProBlogger. Find us at facebook.com/problogger or search ProBlogger on iTunes. 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 have 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. If you have a moment, I’d love it if you’d go over to iTunes or your podcasting network of choice and leave us a rating and a review. It does help us to learn what you like about our podcast and to improve it for the future but also helps us to spread the word a little bit further and to rank a little higher in iTunes as well. If you haven’t subscribed on iTunes, please do. It’s the best way to get notified of all our new episodes. How did you go with today’s episode? If you have any questions that you would like me to tackle please ask them in the comments below? Also, let me know how you set blogging goals to increase income? Enjoy this podcast? Sign up to our ProBloggerPLUS newsletter to get notified of all new tutorials and podcasts below.

How to Decide if a New Social Network or Medium is Right for You Today I’m going to help you decide if you should start on that new social network or that new medium like a podcast or a YouTube channel. As bloggers, we are constantly bombarded with choice as to how we can spend our time. There is an unlimited amount of things we could be doing to support our blogs, but not all of them are right for us. I am going to go through some areas where we can ask questions to determine where we really should focus our energy. Today, I received an email from a reader who was wondering if they should get on facebook live. It’s an emerging medium that many bloggers have been experimenting with. This is a very common email that I get. People are wondering if they should get on different social networks or take advantage of new mediums. In Today’s Episode Is It Right for My Audience, My Content and for Me? My Audience? Note: Listen to todays episode on iTunes here Is my audience there? Obvious example – LinkedIn is a great place if you’re wanting to reach a more business focused niche. (survey to find out) Not just where do they have accounts but also: where are they most active what are they using it for? (catching up with friends, research, sharing links etc) How long do they stay there? People’s intent and habits are important and will inform how you should use it but also if it’s right for you. For example – we noticed a lot of our readers use FB to share photos – so we started a FB group purely for photo sharing. If your readers are on a network more for personal reasons it could be a signal that it’s not a great place to sell. Rather – take a more conversational tone. If your readers are there to search for info – treating it as a Search Engine – then it might be a good place to be posting reviews, news, how to content. Are others in my niche using it? If so – how and with what results? If not – is there a reason (which might signal that it’s a place to avoid) or an opportunity? How much work does it take them? Do they use systems/automation? Are they around the clock or just certain hours? Are there certain techniques that they use that get results or that don’t? If you can ask someone that’s probably best – but you can learn a lot by observing what they do. Follow the biggest in your niche and see what they’re doing. What is working that you could emulate but what isn’t being done that you could try? Is the network/medium trending up or down? Is it a good time to position yourself for a mainstream audience. My Content? Does it suit my topic? eg in the photography space we need to engage in networks and mediums that are visual. Blogging, YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest, FB, G+ in its day, Twitter etc – but to this point I’ve avoided podcasting as it doesn’t seem as natural a fit (although there are successful photography ones that talk gear or video ones that do well that talk technique). Eg ProBlogger we’re talking more about concepts, ideas, techniques that don’t require visuals, so podcasting suits more for some – although there are some things that are easier to show with a screenflow video, a webinar etc. Does it suit the the style/voice of content I produce? Eg – I teach people – which lends itself to some networks and mediums better than others. I think it’s a good fit for podcasting. Eg – dPS is very visual so we’ve invested more time into Instagram. It also lends itself to longer form content as we produce a lot of tutorials which is why our blog is the main thing we do. Can I repurpose the content I create on the new network/medium in some way to make the investment of time I put into it doubly valuable? Eg – video you create on FB Live could end up on Youtube or you could pull the audio from it to put into your podcast or you could transcribe it and then embed it to your blog…. Am I creating content somewhere else that I could repurpose for this new thing? Eg – could I use articles I’ve previously written as the basis for a slideshare or for a podcast or for a video? For Me? Does it suit my style of presenting? Do I naturally enjoy it? Am I good at it? Do you feel energized by doing it? Does it fit with my current goals? (what is the priority for you right now. Finding new audience? Building Community? Developing a product? Pivoting topic? Some networks will help you do these things more effectively than others. Eg – if you’re just starting a blog you probably are in a phase where you need more eyeballs so it might make sense to engage in some of the new networks where there is less competition from the big players and where you can really stand out. For example, I saw a lot of people really establish themselves by being early adopters on Periscope and SnapChat. Others who might be more established might need to really buckle down and focus more energy on building engagement with the readers that they have. So it might make sense to put all your efforts into other activities like creating a product, membership area, newsletter etc rather than to start on a new network. Can you leverage the new thing to build your home base? Ultimately, the sustainability of your business hinges not on what you do in the short term on the social networks you’re on, but on whether you can hook people into a long term relationship. For me, that’s about getting people onto our email list. Some networks and mediums are easier to do this from than others. I’ve personally had less success doing this from Instagram than I have from the Podcast for example. Do I have time/energy for the new thing? If no – would I outsource or automate it (either the new thing or something else to free up time)? If it doesn’t take your personal interaction for it to be successful you could train someone to help you run it – you may not even need to be involved at all or could minimize the work. Podcast editing. I know of numerous bloggers whose Instagram accounts are not even touched by them. Using a tool like Meet Edgar I run one of my FB pages and supplement my Twitter account. What would I have to stop doing to start it? Can I afford to play there? Some networks (the more established ones particularly) are in a stage in their own life stage where you need to pay to reach the audience (increasingly) while other networks are younger and organic reach is still very possible. How many other new things am I starting? Some bloggers have a habit of going all in on every new thing that comes along and do so at the expense of what they’re already doing. This means they end up feeling overstretched and don’t stick at things long enough to become established. It takes time and focus to build up a library of content on a new network, to learn how to use it, to establish credibility there. You don’t have to do everything – probably a lot better to be active and doing an amazing job on one social network as long as it’s the right one and you’re achieving your goals than to be on every network. Similarly it’s probably better to be on one medium (blog, podcast) than to try to do everything. I typically try to have only one new thing on the go at a time. A Few Last Thoughts Keep in balance what you’re currently doing that is working and starting new things. If something is working well now – work that thing as hard as you can and for as long as you can until it doesn’t work any more. Don’t always be looking toward the ‘new’ and ‘emerging’ trends at the expense of the old things that actually work. For example – SEO, email, Facebook – these things are mainstream and they work. If you ignore them in order just to play on SnapChat, Instagram and to blog on Medium you might be missing out. Having said that you can become stale if you ignore the new and stubbornly hold on too long to something that is trending down and has no future. I remember way back when I started a couple of bloggers who resisted getting onto Facebook because MySpace had been so good to them… I’m not sure what they’re doing these days! ` If you do want to try a new thing treat it as an experiment. Allocate a percentage of your time to experiment. Put boundaries around it. Give yourself a deadline. A good way to do this is to create a season of a podcast. Do a series of Youtube/FB Live clips. Start a FB Group for a purpose for a particular time (FB: feelgooder 3 months). Lastly – Most of the really successful people I know focus on a small number of things and work hard on those rather than spreading themselves too thin. Yes some big players seem to be doing everything…. but many times they have teams helping them produce their content, they’re freaks who have more energy than most of us, or they do it for a short time and then burn out. Find out where your readers are Experiment where you think you can add most value and where you can play to your strengths Invest significant time into the places where you’re seeing results! Further Resources on Is It Right for My Audience, My Content and for Me? 31 Days to Build a Better Blog Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Hey there, it’s Darren Rowse here from ProBlogger and I’d like to welcome you to Episode 134 of the ProBlogger podcast. Today, I want to help you to decide whether you should be starting on that new social network that everyone else seems to be on at the moment or whether you should start that medium, would it be a podcast or a YouTube channel or something else that you’ve been wondering about lately. As bloggers, we’re constantly bombarded with choice as to how we can spend our time. There really is an unlimited amount of things that we could be doing to promote our blog and to support the business that we’re building but not all of those things are right for everyone of us. Today, I want to go through some areas that we can ask questions in to help us determine where is the best place to really focus our energies. You can find today’s show notes where I will have some further reading for you at problogger.com/podcast/134. Today’s podcast is brought to you by the ProBlogger Plus Newsletter. If you should go over to problogger.net/ideas, you can subscribe to our weekly newsletter where we’ll send you all our latest tips and tutorials, podcast episodes, and everything else that’s going on at ProBlogger. If you do so end up there at problogger.net/ideas, we’ll give you six months of content ideas. Every month for the next six months, we’ll send you a little email with 30 different ideas, 180 ideas in total over six months which will give you some ideas for blog posts that you can be writing on your blog. Again, that is at problogger.net/ideas. This morning, I got an email, a very common email from a reader over at ProBlogger. It was from a blogger who was wondering whether they should jump onto Facebook Live. Everyone’s been talking about Facebook Live, it’s an emerging medium that many bloggers have been experimenting with lately. I’m seeing a lot more of it in my Facebook feed and this blogger noticed the same thing, they noticed other people in their niche particularly getting into it and wondered whether they should too. In the email, there was some tension. If I get onto that, what should I give up to be able to do it? This is a very common email that I get not just about Facebook Live but about podcasting, should I start a podcast about YouTube? Should I start a YouTube channel? Should I get on Snapchat, Pinterest, Instagram? Should I be blogging? All these social networks and different mediums that are at our fingertips as opportunities but also potentially as distractions from what it is that we’re trying to build. These questions come in thick and fast over at ProBlogger via email and in the comments that we get. Today, I wanted to really delve into how do you make that decision about where you should be spending your time. As I said in the introduction, these are opportunities, these are incredible opportunities. Jumping to the right social network just at the right time, and it could be the difference between your blog having amazing success and failing. These things can also be incredible distractions so how do you make that decision? Today, I want to get you to consider three different areas that you might want to ponder to make that decision. You really need to choose the right one that is right for your audience, for your content, and for you. Over the next 15 or so minutes, I really want to delve into each of those three things—your audience, your content, and you, and put some questions to you that you can ask to help you to work out whether that new social network is the right one for you. Is it the right one for your audience? Is it the right one for your content? And is it the right one for you? I’m going to go through a whole heap of different questions here and they will all be summarized over in the show notes at problogger.com/podcast/134. You can get the full transcript over there as well, so let’s dig into those. The first one is your audience. Is that new social network or that new medium that you are thinking about doing right for your audience? There’s some pretty obvious examples that have been given many times before, perhaps one of the most common ones is LinkedIn. Should you be jumping into LinkedIn? Should you start a blog and be producing content on LinkedIn? The obvious answer is that if your audience is a business focused audience, then perhaps LinkedIn is a good place for you to be engaging. Same can be said for different social networks. Traditionally, Pinterest is seen as a great place to engage if you have lots of visual content and if your audience is women although I do know some big blogs that do very well that are focused on men over on Pinterest as well. That’s something you really need to do, some research. Your audience on these social networks, are they using the mediums that you’re considering using as well? Here, you really need to dig a little bit deeper than just do they have an account in these places. That’s not what I’m really asking here. A lot of people have a Twitter account but do they use their Twitter account? Why are they using it? What I encourage you to ponder here is where do they have accounts but also where are they most active? One of the questions that we ask in the surveys that we do is where do you have an account? We get all our readers to tell us all the difficult social media accounts that they are signed up for. Then, we ask them to tell us how often they use each of them. Are you using them daily? Are you using them weekly? Are you using them monthly, or do you never use them? That really gives you a lot more information about how active the people are there. How active are they on those networks, how long do they stay per session? You may need to dig in and do a little bit of research on that but there are a lot of studies that have been done into the session times that people typically have on different social networks. I remember talking to one of the founders of the live streaming service Blab and they found that people when they go onto Blab were spending hours there, typically. Whereas people on Twitter sort of dip in and out and have fairly short shot burst of activity there, Facebook might be a little bit longer. How long are they staying there? That will reveal to you a whole heap about that social network. What are they doing there? What is their intent on that social network? These are all things that you can do by surveying your readers and talking to your readers. Where are you active, what are you using these networks for? I think particularly it’s really interesting to see what they’re using it for. Are they on that social network to catch up with friends, are they there doing research for gathering of information? Are they there sharing what they’re doing, sharing the links? These things present different opportunities for us. People’s intents, their habits, how long they’re staying on these social networks will help us to work out whether it’s a place that we should be investing time. I’ll give you a quick example. Over at Digital Photography School, we did a bit of a survey of our readers and asked them where are they spending time. We found that Facebook is one of the places that a lot of our readers do spend a lot of time. When we asked them what they did in those places and what they did in Facebook in particular, we found that the lot of Digital Photography School readers were sharing their photos on Facebook. One of the things that we’ve been experimenting with over the last little while is a Facebook group that is purely there for the purpose of sharing photos. People can join it and they can share a photo just for the sake of sharing it or they can share with the question of can you critique my photo and then the community will critique their photo. We found that group has really worked very well but we would never have started that group unless we found out why people were on the network and what their habits were there, what were they doing there. That group doesn’t appeal to all of our readers, not all of our readers like to share photos but there’s been a segment of our readers that has been there. Why are your readers on that social network? Are they there purely for personal reasons, maybe they’re there just to catch up with their friends. That presents a bit of a challenge and that may actually be a bit of a red flag that maybe you don’t want to get onto that network to sell, maybe you do want to get to that network to be conversational and to build community and to build engagement because people are there to engage with their friends and to find community. If your readers are there searching for information, are they there to research? A lot of people go onto Pinterest to research and to get ideas. That maybe a really good place particularly for bloggers who have reviews of products or how to content because people are there with the intent of learning something or gathering information. Do some analysis, where are your readers hanging out, how long are they hanging out in those places, what are they doing in those places, what’s their intent when they’re on those places. That will give you some hints as to whether it’s a fruitful place for you and whether it might fit with what your intentions are as well. Another question you might want to ask kind of taps into where your audience is. Are the people in your niche using that social network or that medium? You want to be a little bit careful here because the answer yes could reveal a couple of things. It could actually reveal that it’s a good place or it could actually reveal that it’s too crowded as a place as well. Do some analysis. Are other people in your niche, are the bloggers, are the forums, are the influencers in your niche using that medium or that social network? If they are, how are they using it? What sort of results are they getting there? If they’re not there, is there a reason for that? There may be no one else in your niche on this social network and that might present an opportunity for you but it also maybe a bit of a red flag as well because it hasn’t worked there for other people. You might want to look at inactive accounts there as well. Have there been people there and given up? How much work does it take the other people that are there? What types of things are they doing there? Are they using automation, do they have a very personal kind of account in those places? How often are they using it? What’s the frequency of the content that they’re producing and the updates that they’re doing? Look at the different types of posts they might be doing and the different types of content that they’re producing and how well they have gained traction with those that are engaging with them there. It’s probably best if you can find someone else in your niche that’s willing to talk about it, and a lot of other bloggers in your niche will be willing to share their experience, it’s very collaborative in a lot of niches. But, you may just need to do some analysis and follow some of the big accounts that are relevant to your particular niche and just watch what they’re doing there, what traction they’re getting. You can learn a lot simply by following people and watching to see what they would do. Again, you want to be a bit careful about just emulating what other people do or copying what they do and you also want to be looking for opportunities of things that people aren’t doing as well. That may present some opportunities to differentiate yourself by trying some new things there. The last question I’d get you to ask in regards to your audience is is the network or is the medium trending up or is it trending down? At the moment, we’re seeing moments like Snapchat continuing to trend up. We’re seeing other networks like Twitter sort of plateauing and some people might even say it’s trending down at the moment. We’re seeing tools like mediums still seeming to grow. We’re seeing YouTube I think still presenting real opportunities as well so you might want to do some analysis there. We’re seeing other networks like Google Plus kind of fade away. You want to really think about how big is the network and the overall size of it is another factor I guess to consider, but is it something that’s going to go away? You really don’t want to be investing your time into a network that has already passed its heyday. Ideally, you want to position yourself into a network that is about to really go mainstream. Bloggers that jumped onto Snapchat a year or so ago now really were positioning themselves for a tsunami of good things to happen for them as well there. All those questions are really about your audience; where are they, what are they doing in those places, that’s some really good questions to ask. That’s not enough, don’t just ask those questions. The next area that I want to really dig into now is your content. Is the new medium, is the new network right for the content that you’re producing? The first question I want to put to you here is does it suit your topic? Does the new network, does the medium suit your topic? Again, let me give you an example from my own situation, my photography blog, Digital Photography School. It’s obviously a very visual blog, we’re talking about photography, we’re talking about images. We’ve learned the hard way over the years that any kind of medium, any kind of network that has a visual component is much more suitable for us. Blogging itself, we can have images in our blog post. YouTube is one that can be potentially big for us, we’ve chosen to this point not to have a YouTube account but it’s one that we really wrestled with over the years and we’d like to do at some point because it’s a great place to illustrate particularly how to process photos. There’s been a lot of YouTube accounts that have done particularly well in that space. Instagram obviously is another interesting space for us and one that we’ve been investing a bit more time into recently. It’s very visual, there’s some challenges there that I’ll talk about in a moment. Pinterest is one that we’ve had some success with over the years, Facebook we’ve had a lot of success with. The fact that you can share images there alone or that you can put images into the content you’re producing there is really great. Google Plus in its heyday was really good for us as well because there was lots of big, beautiful images. Twitter has been okay for us as well because you can use images. Those types of mediums where you can have mediums really suit the topic of our content as opposed to podcasting. We have talked as a team about podcasting as a network but one of the reasons I decided not to go down the path—at least in the short term—is that it doesn’t really lend itself to visual content very well unless you want to do video which is a whole other beast. Whilst there has been some success for photography podcasts, a lot of them talk more of idea rather than techniques and teaching people how to take better photos which is something that we’re more into. That’s been something that we’ve resisted for a while. ProBlogger on the other hand, a podcast works quite well for ProBlogger because it talking a lot of ideas. You don’t need to see the things that I’m talking about to get value out of doing it, at least I hope not anyway. Does the topic suit the medium? Does it suit the network that you’re considering? Also, does the style or the voice of the content that you’re producing suit that network or medium as well? I teach people, both of my blogs are all about teaching. We want to work in networks where people have the intent of learning but also that suit teaching as well. For ProBlogger, I think podcasting is a good tool for us to be using as is blogging itself because people really can learn by listening and by reading. That suits the style of what I’m doing. Again, Digital Photography School being more visual, we’ve invested more time into some of those visual forms as well. Also, I guess on Digital Photography School, it’s very much about teaching people and it’s about taking people through step by step content. The blog itself as a medium has worked very well for us there as well. Another questions that you might want to ponder when it comes to the content and whether it suits the network that you’re considering is about repurposing. Sometimes, you can start something new and then use the content that you produce in that new thing in other places. That’s a really great investment of time. For example, Facebook Live. If you invest time in Facebook Live, you can then take the video that you shot for Facebook Live and use it in other places. You could embed that video into a blog post, you could take that audio from that video and use snippets of that in a podcast. You could get the video that you produced transcribed and use that as a blog post as well. You could take the points that you are making in the video that you do and get them put into a Slide Share so it creates some slides about the things that you’re doing. There’s opportunities there to use that content in the new thing in other places. That is a great investment of time. I would be considering that. The other thing that you could consider as the flip side, could you use content that you’ve already produced somewhere else and then repurpose it into the new thing that you’re doing? If you don’t have a Facebook page yet, I know most bloggers do already but for instance if you didn’t, you probably as a blogger already have a whole heap of stuff that you could be sharing on that Facebook page. You don’t have to come up with completely new stuff all the time, it may actually be a really simple way to getting to Facebook. Another good example of that is this podcast. There’s been a number of episodes of this podcast that  have been based upon blog posts that I wrote for four, five, six years ago that I then updated and put into the form of a podcast. Repurposing is something that I would be considering with the new mediums and networks that you might be engaging as well. The last area that I would encourage you to think about when you’re considering a new medium or a new network is is it right for you? We’ve talked about is it right for your audience, is it right for your content, but is it right for you? The first question to ponder with regards to is it right for you is does it suit your style of presenting? You’re only really going to know that by giving it a go. For me, again, to use this podcast as an example, I thought podcasting would be something that I would enjoy and that I would be reasonably okay at because I’ve had some experience in public speaking before. I didn’t really know that until I started it. I knew pretty quickly that it would be something that I would enjoy and that did suit my presenting and that gave me energy. I think it’s really important to choose to engage in spaces that give you energy and that you feel good about because that will come through in the content that you produced there and the energy that you bring to those places. There have been a few times where I thought it would be really great to get into this new social network, Snapchat for me was one where I thought there was potential there. My audience is there, some of my audience are there. It does suit some of the content that we produce, particularly on Digital Photography School but you know what? I don’t really enjoy it. It’s been something that I’ve delved in but I’ve never really thrown myself fully into it because I don’t think it really suits me as such. It doesn’t fit the current time availability that I have as well. Does it suit your style of presenting is the first question. The second one is does it fit with your current goals? Your blog, your business is going to go through different stages of a life cycle. The different stages of that life cycle, you will need to do different things to help to build your business. What is the big priority for you right now in your business? Is it finding a new audience? Is it building community? Is it monetization? Should you be spending your time developing a product? Should you be doing any of these particular types of things? They will each mean that you should be focusing your energy on different types of things and different social networks will each have their strengths and weaknesses depending on the stage that you’re in. Let me give you an example. If you are just starting a blog right now, maybe two weeks ago you started a blog. You probably need a phase where you need to invest a whole heap of time into creating content for your blog, that’s one of the things that you should really be focusing on right now. You may need to do that at the expense of some of the other opportunities that are around you right now because you need to build up an asset, a library, an archive of good, solid content. The other thing that you need to be doing in the early days of your blog is finding new readers. It may make some sense for you to start engaging into the newer emerging forms of social media where there’s perhaps a little bit less competition where you can establish yourself as the go-to person in your particular niche. It may make sense for you to jump onto Snapchat because you need to get more eyeballs and that’s a place where there’s a lot of people at the moment and there’s perhaps less competition than a place like Facebook. You really need to ask yourself, what’s the priority for my business right now? I did a podcast a year ago probably now about Michael Hyatt deciding to get off Periscope. One of the things that I said about him getting off Periscope that I thought was a good thing is that he doesn’t need a whole heap of new readers for his blog right now, he’s already got a big list that he needs to focus more attention on building a product and monetizing it and building community with the readers he’s already got. There are other networks that are already working for him that he probably just needs to spend more time focusing upon because he doesn’t need those new readers. I thought Periscope at the time was particularly good for finding new readers. What are your current goals? Do the new things that you’re considering lend themselves to those goals? There are times where we just need to buckle down and work on what is working for us already rather than establishing new things. There are other times when new things are perhaps more suited to our goals. Does it fit with your current goals? Another question to ask is can you leverage the new thing to build your home base? Can you leverage that new thing? Can you leverage Snapchat? Is it going to help you to actually build your business and can you leverage it to get people onto your email list or over to your blog. Some social networks it’s easy to leverage them than others. Some of the social networks are very hard to get people away from the network itself because they’re such engaging places people just spend the whole time on there. A use of that social network may not ever visit your blog, they may not ever sign up to your email newsletter. Once you may be able to engage them in that space, I hope you’re able to get them to your home base. Ultimately, the sustainability of your business hinges not on what you do in the short term on that social network but on whether you can hook people into a long term relationship with you. There’s new emerging social networks and they may come and go. A lot of them won’t be here in two or three years. What’s going to happen? Are you going to start a relationship that will continue beyond the life of that social network? Really, one of the things I’m asking myself is is the investment at this time going to help to build my business in ten years or is it just gonna create a whole heap of buzz in the short term? Can I leverage those people or hook them into my email list? For me, my email list is number one. If I can’t get people onto my email list from the new social network, then I’m going to really strongly consider whether it’s worth my time doing it. Can I get them to visit my blog? Can I get them to buy my products? These are things that are not the most important but are important if I want to build a sustainable business. Is it just going to be fun? If it’s just going to be fun, I’m not sure that it’s going to be something that’s going to help to build my business. Another question to ask when it comes to you, do you have the time and the energy for a new thing? If the answer is yes, I’ve got a whole heap of time on my hands, go for it. That’s totally fine, experiment with the new things. If the answer is no, you even need to do one of two things. One, resist the temptation to do it or two, ask yourself, could I outsource or automate this new thing, or something else in what I’m doing to free up some time. You don’t have to personally engage in all the social networks that you jump onto, some of them can be automated. I know for a fact a number of bloggers who do very, very well out of Instagram by using automation but also using outsourcing and getting assistance to create the posts that they do Instagram. Podcasting, another good example. I cannot automate podcasting but I can outsource the editing of my podcast. That is one way that I can free up some time for myself. Do you have the time, the energy? If the answer is no, is there potential to automate or to outsource some part of it or all of it? There are some great tools around that will help you to do that. I’ve talked about Mit Edga who used to help run our Twitter accounts. There are some personal interaction that we do on our Twitter account but some of it is automated as well and that frees up time for some of the new things as well. Alongside this question of do you have time or energy for the new thing, you should be asking what would you have to stop doing to start the new thing? Sometimes, this is the crux of the matter for me. If I’m going to get into Snapchat, what do I have to give up to be able to do that? I probably have to give up my podcast or blog or Facebook and am I willing to give up something that’s already working to start something new. Sometimes, the answer is yes and sometimes the answer is no. Another question to ask when it comes to you is can you afford to play in that space? Can you afford to play in it? Some social networks, particularly the more established ones like Facebook are in a stage in their kind of own life stage where they’re charging people to play. Most bloggers now know that their Facebook pages are getting less organic reach and less effective organically than they used to and to engage in that space, you do need to start to consider at least paying. Same is happening now on Instagram, but some of the new social networks are still anything goes almost. There’s much more opportunity for organic use of those. That’s another thing to factor in, is it getting to a stage in the life cycle of that particular network where you do need to pay to play? If so, can you afford to do that? Are you willing to do that? The last question I’d get you to ask when it comes to you is how many other new things are you starting right now or have you started in the last little while? Some bloggers I know have a habit of going all in on every single new thing that comes along. They do so at the expense of the things that they’re already doing and they get to the point where this week they’re all in on Periscope, next week they’re all in on Snapchat, next week they’ll be all in on Facebook Live. They don’t really stick to anything for too long and this means that they can end up either feeling overstretched by trying to do too many things or they don’t stick at things long enough to become established in those new things that they’re doing. It takes time and focus to build up a library of content on any new medium or social network. It takes time and focus to learn how to use that social network and to experiment with different types of content on it. It takes time and focus to establish credibility and to get traction in the new things as well. Ask yourself the question, are you starting lots of things at once? If so, you may need to pull back. If you have started lots of things in the last six months, maybe your readers are starting to push back on that as well, they don’t know where to find you anymore for example. You don’t have to do everything. It’s probably a lot better to be active and doing an amazing job on one social network as long as it’s the right one and you’re achieving your goals there than to be on every one. Similarly, it’s probably better to have one main medium like your blog or podcast or your YouTube account, whatever it might be, than to be doing them all. Sometimes, I think there’s a big argument for having focus. I typically only try to have only one new thing on the go at any time. I find myself too distracted if I’m doing too many new things at once. A few last thoughts for you that hopefully you’ve already heard some of these things but I kind of think are really important. The first thing is keep in balance what you’re currently doing that is working and starting new things. Something is already working really well for you, you need to continue to invest a lot of time into that. Work at that thing as hard as you can for as long as it continues to work. If you’re already getting amazing traction from Facebook, then just keep investing into Facebook. You can still try some new things but that’s where your primary focus should be. If the blog itself is already bringing in lots of traffic from Google, then maybe that’s enough for you right now. You need to focus on just serving that audience while that is working. Secondly, don’t always be looking for the new and emerging trends at the expense of the old things that are actually working. For example, Facebook, email, SEO, these things are old. SEO, search engine traffic, that’s so old. The reality is that most bloggers get most of their traffic from search engines, so maybe it would be much better use of your time to be optimizing your blog content for search engines and increasing the rankings than going to play on Snapchat. Maybe you should be investing your time in converting some of that search engine traffic into email subscribers. Maybe that’s where you should be spending your time creating opt-ins. Maybe you should be spending more of your time building order responders to serve the people who sign up to you in newsletters, maybe that’s a better use of your time than the new cool thing that’s just out that everyone’s raving about. Maybe focusing upon the old stuff that actually works is a better use of your time than getting onto the new things. There’s got to be some balance here. I think if there can also be an argument that some bloggers ignore the new things and stubbornly hold onto the old things that don’t work anymore, I remember back in the day talking to a blogger who said I’m not getting onto Facebook because Myspace is still working for me. I haven’t heard from that blogger for many years. Maybe they still have their Myspace account, I don’t really know. You’ve got to hold a bit of tension there. Sometimes, you got to pay attention to the new things but don’t do it at the expense of what’s already working that might be a little less cool but still works for you. I guess for me, I’m always looking for the new thing but I’m focusing most of my time on the thing that’s already working. If you do want to try a new thing, treat it as an experiment. Allocate a small percentage of your time to the experiment, put some boundaries around that new thing. Give yourself a deadline perhaps. For example when I started the ProBlogger podcast, some of you will remember when I started it. I think it was June, July of 2015. I announced that I was going to do 31 podcasts, a series. 31 shows, that was all going to be over a month. I was pretty clear upfront that I didn’t know whether I would continue after that 31 days, it was a test, an experiment—it was a lot of work to get those 31 posts up but I knew that I had an out if it didn’t work, if I didn’t find it energized me, if it didn’t connect with my audience, if i didn’t get some signs that I was getting some traction. You might want to announce to people that I’m going to do this new thing for a season and then see what I can learn. Similarly, I started a Facebook group last year, it was the FeelGood Facebook group. It was about health and well being and I said I was going to do it for three months. I decided at the end of those three months that I didn’t really want to do that anymore. Because I’ve been upfront with the people that joined that group that it was for a season, I didn’t get any push back on that. Sometimes, setting yourself a deadline to do an experiment is a good thing as long as you get those expectations right with people who may join in on that thing. Last thought for you. As I think about it, most of the really successful people I know in blogging and podcasting, most of them focus on a small number of things and they work hard on those things rather than spreading themselves too thin. As I’m saying that, I can think of a few people who are big players, who seem to be doing everything. They’re on video on Snapchat, they’re on YouTube, Facebook, doing all of those things. Those people like Gary Vaynerchuk for example, he has an insane amount of energy—he has much more energy than me. He can sustain doing a lot of things but he also has a team behind him. He has someone helping him to produce some of the videos that he’s creating. Whilst he does do a lot of it himself which is amazing, a lot of these people who seem to be everywhere have teams of people behind them. A lot of them are repurposing content from one place to another as well. I would really encourage you to focus and to bring some focus to what you’re doing. Find out where your readers are, experiment in those places, find out where you can add most value, where you can play to your strengths. And then invest significant time into the places where you are seeing results and don’t do it at the expense of things that are already working for you. I really hope that something in what I shared today has been helpful for you in making decisions about where you should be spending your time and energy. I would love to get your feedback on this one, I’ve put a lot of thought and time into preparing this particular episode. I’d like to know whether it hit the mark for you. You can head over to the ProBlogger show notes, problogger.com/podcast/134 where I’d love to get a comment from you. Just let me know if it’s hit the mark for you, if you’d add something else to it. Let me know where you are focusing your time at the moment as a result of thinking about these types of things. I’d love to hear where you’re getting traction as well in the different networks and mediums that you are engaging with. Don’t forget, you can subscribe to the ProBlogger Plus Newsletter. It comes out every Tuesday, Wednesday depending on where you are in the world and it’s just a really quick summary of all of the new content that we’ve published on the ProBlogger Blog from our subject matter experts that we have in the different fields that we’ve focused upon and any new episodes that have come up on the ProBlogger podcast—we publish two of those every week. It’s a great way to get that information. If you head over to problogger.net/ideas you can sign up and you’ll also get six months of free content ideas for your blog. We’ll send out a monthly PDF with 30 ideas every month that will stimulate some blog posts that you want to write on your particular blog. Again, that’s at problogger.net/ideas. If you would review the ProBlogger podcast on iTunes or whatever podcast network you are listening to us on, head over to the iTunes Store and search ProBlogger, we’d love you to subscribe there. But also if you could give us a rating and a review, that would be fantastic. I do see every single one that comes in and read them all and get a lot of value out of that in shaping future podcasts as well. Thanks for listening, and we’ll chat with you in the next episode of the ProBlogger podcast. How did you go with today’s episode? I would love your feedback on this. I put a lot of time and effort into preparing this episode. Let me know if it hit the mark for you, or if you would like to add some other content. Enjoy this podcast? Sign up to our ProBloggerPLUS newsletter to get notified of all new tutorials and podcasts below.

The Seven Secrets of Making Money Blogging Today, I am traveling back in time and playing for you the audio of a video I made back in 2010. This video is called The Secrets of Making Money Blogging, and I share seven different secrets on how to make money blogging. Of course, these aren’t secrets at all since I shared them in 2010. A lot of this may be stuff that you have heard before, but I put it together for a friend that was really struggling and grappling with whether he should continue to blog or not. I put this video up on YouTube, and it is one of the most viewed videos that I have ever done. This video has about 50,000 views, and it also got me banned from YouTube for about a month. I assume it was because of the title. I guess secrets to making money could have been considered a little bit spammy in some ways. As you listen to this, you will hear that it is not a spammy get rich quick video. In fact, that is one of the points I make quite often. The things I do say are important for bloggers of all stages to hear, and they should help you along your path. In Today’s Episode The Seven Secrets of Making Money Blogging Try to do something online that you really love – choose an area you have passion for Easier to stick with Readers will feel drawn to your passion Be as useful as possible – tell the world something important Be confident – work on confidence – be able to sell yourself and things you do Approach and make offers confidently Diversify what you do – don’t focus on just one income stream Diversify topics Diversify income streams Take a long term view – money can be made fast, but it comes years after building a foundation – working and building relationships and content With investments – you don’t get the return for a number of years Treat it as a business – not as an event Most online entrepreneurs see it as a business Grow over time Releasing products – find a way to grow overtime Be strategic about how to monetize and think of it as a business Build products into what you do Develop systems around those products to sell them I hope you found that interesting. It’s kind of weird to go back in time six years. Just for a quick recap these are the things I found useful. Passion Useful Confident Diversify What You Do Long Term View Strategic Thinking Create Products Secrets of Making Money Online Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Hey there, it’s Darren from ProBlogger here, welcome to Episode 133 of the ProBlogger Podcast. Today, I want to travel back in time and play for you the video that I recorded back in 2010 on the topic of The Secrets of Making Money Blogging. I get asked all the time what’s the secret, what’s your main secret, as if I’m holding something back. I always find it really difficult to answer that question. What I want to play for you today is my attempt back in 2010 to answer this particular question in which I share seven different secrets about making money blogging. Now, of course, none of these are secret, I put them online in 2010 and a lot of it is stuff you have all heard me talked about before. I put this video together in response to the question that I got from a friend who is really struggling and who was really grappling with whether he should continue to keep blogging or not. I put this video up on YouTube and it’s one of the most viewed videos that I’ve ever done. It’s not gotten a million views or anything but I think last time I looked about 50 thousand views which for me is pretty good. The other thing about this video is that it got me banned from YouTube. This video actually got me banned from YouTube for about a month I think it was. I think it was because I had the title Secret of Making Money Blogging which was a little bit spammy I guess in some ways or maybe people thought it was a get rich quick kind of video. You will hear as you listen that it is not a get rich quick video, in fact it is quite the opposite. One of the points actually talks about the long-term value of it. I do share some things that I think are really important for bloggers of all stages to hear. Whether you are just starting out blogging and you dream of making money from blogging, these seven things I think will help you along that path. Or if you have been blogging for a while like my friend who’ve been blogging for a little while and was struggling with it and was wondering if there was a secret that you didn’t know, these are seven things that I think are perhaps helpful reminders. I will say this one thing that has changed from the video that you are about to hear or the audio that you’re going to hear. At one point in it, I talk about having four blogs. At the point that I had this video, I did have four blogs going, I had a blog, ProBlogger, I had Digital Photography School, most of you know that because I still have them today. Also, I had a blog on Twitter, so it was called TwiTip and I had another blog called FeelGood which was about feeling better. Those last two blogs are on pause at the moment, I haven’t had them for quite some time. If that is of confusion to you, that is the explanation for that. Everything else I mentioned in this video I think still really rings true today. In fact, as I just listen to it again, I think they’re really important things and I’ll pick up on a couple of them at the end of this clip. The last thing I’ll say is that I recorded this in 2010 with no microphone. I was sitting in my living room, on the couch and you can actually view the video if you like, I’ll embed it into the show notes. It is a little bit echoey but I hope you’ll forgive me for that because I think the information that you need is important. Also, I did consider kind of rereading it or re-saying it today, I think it’s kind of nice to hear it as it came out because it did come out of a real-life conversation that had happened just before I recorded it. Without further adieu, I am going to press play on it and it goes for about eight minutes. At the end, I’ll come back and recap it. You can if you prefer to watch it and I am just sitting on the couch, that’s not a whole lot of visuals in it. You can view that over at ProBlogger.com/Podcast/133 where today’s show notes are. Okay, let’s get into it. Hi, it’s Darren from ProBlogger here. I had a conversation earlier today with a new friend who’s just started to blog. He’s been going for a couple of months now, and he’s a little bit frustrated. He’s hit a couple of brick walls and he wanted to sit down and just sort of pick my brain on the secrets to making money from blogging and making money on the internet. It’s a question I get asked a lot particularly in interviews. You know, “What’s your number one secret to make money online?” I always struggle to answer it because ultimately there is no secret and there’s no one way to do this. You can look at the variety of Internet marketers and see a whole heap of different methods to do it and approaches to do it but I began to share with this friend some of the things I guess that I’ve learned, particularly in the last year or two, about making money online. I asked him for his notes because he was writing everything down, so that I could share it in the video. This is kind of the stuff that I said to him. Number one, I talk about trying to do something online that you really love. Choose an area, a topic, a niche, an industry, that you have some resonance with, some appreciation for, some passion for. There’s a whole heap of reasons for doing this. One, it’s much easier to stick with it for the long term. Two, those who read what you produce and come across you will feel much more drawn to you if you are passionate about it yourself. I just personally find it much easier to make money from something that I actually have a genuine interest in, because I’m able to produce products and blog posts and content that connects with people because I know what turns those people on, I know what will get them reading. I know what will get them purchasing. If you have an interest, if you have a passion, then try to center what you do online around that. That doesn’t mean you can’t make money from something you’re not interested in or that you don’t like; it’s just a lot easier to do it that way. The second thing I’d say—and I repeat this over and over again on ProBlogger, but I think it just needs to be said—is be as useful as you possibly can. One of my most recent videos on ProBlogger was about my son telling me, “Tell the world something important.” And really, that is it. That is what it’s all about for me. Again, you can make money online by doing things that aren’t useful, that aren’t important, that aren’t really enhancing people’s lives, by ripping people off, but it’s much more satisfying if you’re doing something that is actually useful, and it’s much more sustainable in the long term if you want to build a business rather than just make a quick buck, if you actually make connections with people and be useful to them. The third thing I said was that you need to be confident. Once you’ve chosen something to produce and to focus in on, and once you are starting to be useful, it’s much easier to be confident but you still need to work on that confidence. Many people get online and they feel that they’re not able to sell themselves, they’re not able to sell the things that they do. Look, that’s difficult to do, but you need to learn how to do that. You need to approach this confidently. You need to make offers confidently. You need to approach other potential partners confidently. If you are nervously doing those things all the time, people will sense that. That doesn’t mean you have to be an extrovert and you need to hype things up. A quiet confidence will go a long way for you. Work on that aspect of things. Push yourself forward if you aren’t one of those confident people. Get people around you to encourage you in that as well. Be as confident as you can. The other thing I talked about with my friend today was diversifying what you do, and not just focusing upon one income stream. This is a bit of a tricky one because if you diversify too much you can end up not really doing anything very well. But what I’ve tried to do over the last eight or nine years now is diversify on a number of fronts. One, diversify the topics that I write about. Now, I have four different main blogs that I produce content for, four different interests for me. By doing that, I’m diversifying, and if one doesn’t go so well I’ve got the three others to back it up. But I’m also trying to diversify the income streams. And you’ll have seen, even in the last weeks I’ve produced a breakdown of my income streams over the last couple of months. You’ll see I’ve got eight or nine different areas of income. I’m not just relying upon ad networks like AdSense, or I’m not just relying upon my own eBooks. I’m trying to build in different income streams so that if one falls over, or if one takes a little while to take off, there are other things there to supplement that income. In the early days of my own blogging and making money online, I diversified by having a real job as well. When I first started, I had three jobs, so I had this diversification, I guess, of the income streams. That helped me to be much more sustainable in the long term. Speaking of long term, the number five thing that I’d say is that you really need to take a long-term view of this. You can make money fast on the Internet, but it generally comes after years of building foundations. A number of times, I feel like I’ve made a lot of money really fast on the Internet, but as I look back on it there’s usually been two or three years of work, of building relationships with readers and producing content for free that have led to these bursts of income. You do need to take a long-term view of things. You need to see it as an investment. A lot of the times when you make investments, you don’t get a return on those investments for a number of years, and the same is true on the Internet. See the time, the energy, and perhaps even some money that you’ve put into those things as an investment that hopefully, one day, will pay off. The last thing I guess I said to my friend was that you really need to treat it as a business rather than just an event. Making money online again, it can happen as an event, it can be these moments where you make money, but most online entrepreneurs actually see it as a business. It’s not just a one-off thing where they make money, and then they go and try something else. What I’ve tried to do is to build a business that has this diversity of income, but is also growing over time. As you release a new product, you need to think about ways of driving traffic back to that product over time. As you do affiliate marketing, you need to build systems that will continue to promote things to your readers using an auto-responder. You need to think a bit strategically I guess is what I’m trying to say. A lot of people get online, and they produce content, and they think that it will make money by just getting readers. You need to think strategically about how you’re actually going to monetize it. You need to think about it as a business, you need to think about it strategically. Probably one of the main things for me in terms of building a business rather than just having a job online is to actually build products into what you do. Don’t just rely upon advertising revenue, or marketing other people’s products. Whatever you do, try and work towards having some products that you can sell of your own, and then develop systems around those products to sell them, not just when you launch them, but in an ongoing way. Those are some of the secrets of making money online that I guess I’ve been thinking about, particularly over the last year or two. There’s a whole heap more of course, but I’d love to hear some of your secrets to making money online. You can leave them in the comments below this video. I hope you found that interesting, a little bit useful. It’s kind of weird going back in time like that, six years, to hear myself. I guess I sound pretty similar, except for the echoes. But also to think back some of those things that I’ve learned back in 2010, just to recap. I talked about doing something that you love or something at least you have an interest in, something that you have a passion for. I talked about being useful, doing something that matters not only to you but to other people, that enhances their lives in some way, being confident with what you’re doing, actually approaching it with some confidence. As I’ve said in that particular clip, I don’t think that means being overly confident. You can still show when you’ve got your doubts, you can show when you’ve made your mistakes that makes you more human but be confident about what you’ve got to say, your story is important, it is your story so tell it with confidence. Number four was diversifying what you do. Number five was taking a long term view. Thinking about it strategically I guess was the 6th point that I’ve made and then 7th was I talked about products and creating something that is yours to sell on your blog. That may be a product, that may be an information product like an ebook or a course, or it could be a physical product or it could be you, your service and what you have to offer in terms of consulting or speaking on something else as well. I hope you found it useful today. I would love to hear your feedback on the seven things that I shared in this and any other secrets that you have found along the way, you can find today, show notes including a full transcript of the podcast today, and the video itself. If you want to check that one out over at ProBlogger.com/Podcast/133. If you’d like to leave a comment there, disagree with something that I’ve said, add to something that I’ve said, I’d love to hear your thoughts on that as well. Thanks for listening today, I hoped you enjoyed this little flashback to 2010, also and maybe you could tell us in the comments today what you were doing in 2010 and how’s it changed for you. I’d love to hear from you and I’ll chat with you in the next couple of days where I will talk to you in Episode 134 of the ProBlogger Podcast. While you’re just listening to silence, maybe you could head over to iTunes and leave us a review of this podcast. I would love to read what you think about the ProBlogger Podcast, it does help us to spread the news a little bit to other people who might find it useful as well. Leave us a writing, leave us a review and I will check it out, maybe I’ll even read it out in a future episode of the Podcast. Again, thanks for listening, see you. How did you go with today’s episode? I hope you found this useful. I would love to hear your feedback on the seven things that I shared, and any other secrets that you have found along the way. Enjoy this podcast? 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How to Use Subheadings to Add Structure to Your Blog Posts Today we are talking about written content. I have one of our regular contributors Ali Luke, from Aliventures.com on the show today to talk about subheadings. I haven’t talked much about using subheadings, but as I was listening to Ali it struck me that it is one of the most important techniques we can use when writing content today. Listen to this podcast in the player above or here on iTunes. Some of the Subheading Related Topics Ali Covers Today Include: Reasons to use them Why people don’t use them Should you use the on every post Tips on how to use them 2 good examples of posts with subheadings (one simple and one more complex) Technical tips for using them I’m turning the show over to Ali and giving her 10 minutes to share as much good advice as she can. I think it would be well worth your while to listen to what she has to say. In Today’s Episode Ali’s Tips on How to Give Your Blog Posts Structure By Using Subheadings Subheadings stand out because they are like mini titles. They make your post stand out and make it more readable. Subheading Not Formatted: Subheading Formatted: Benefits of subheadings: Break up the text on the screen, making it more attractive at a glance – long blocks of dark grey text aren’t very attractive to look at Add extra white space – so that’s the blank space above, below, around the subheading – to make for easier reading Act as “signposts” in the text, so that readers who are skimming through can easily stop at relevant points – would be lovely if everyone read every word but they don’t! Come out of your planning, which makes it easy to write the post Give the post a strong structure, so it’s easy for readers to follow – they don’t get lost or confused in the middle, so they’re more likely to keep reading So why don’t some bloggers use them? They forget! They don’t plan in advance of writing Do all posts need subheadings? No – a very short post probably doesn’t. I’d suggest using at least one subheading in any post over 500 words long, though. Think of subheadings as the key points in your plan. If you write a plan for your post and you’ve got four key points, you’ll likely need four subheadings. Basic structure with subheadings: Classic list post, with a subheading for each of the 7 Ideas. Each starts with a number too – ALWAYS DO THIS IN A NUMBERED LIST POST. I imagine that when Charles sat down to think about this post, he came up with a working title, then drafted a list of ideas – maybe the 7 in the finished post, or maybe he came up with a couple of extras then cut the weaker ones. He might have played around with the ordering of ideas. Then each of the ideas became a subheading. More complicated structure: The 4 Rs That Show a Brand Your Blog is Influential Again this is a list post with the 4 Rs: Reach Resonance Reaction Relevance But also has an extra section at the end of each of these four parts, with its own sub-subheading – “Reach Metrics”, “Resonance Metrics” and so on. The fourth R, Relevance, is a long section so has two of these sub-subheadings. This is really handy technique when writing a list post, especially if you want to go more in-depth than typical list post. You can add an extra section to every item – try to make it consistent. This should offer something extra, added value to the reader. Laney used “Metrics” here, but you could try: Further Reading Recommended Tools Top Tip Watch Out for Try This Techy bits about subheadings: Header 2 for subheadings. Header 3 for sub-subheadings. Techy tip: if you write posts in MS Word, “Heading 2” style corresponds to the “Header 2” – you can copy and paste your post from Word into WordPress and your subheadings and sub-subheadings remain intact! In wordpress, click on the subheading. Above the box when you write your post, you should see two rows of icons. If you only see one row, click on the right-most icon, the “Toolbar Toggle”. Then in the second row of icons, click in the dropdown on the left that says “Paragraph”. Select “Heading 2”. If you can make your subheadings consistent do so to really nail each section of your post with a real sense of flow. I hope you enjoyed that advice from Ali Luke from Aliventures.com. One of the things that we at ProBlogger have done to increase SEO and keywords is to use them in subheadings to increase rankings. I agree with everything that Ali said, and it is important to give your posts structure by using subheadings. It’s important as a writer to create content and fill in the gaps, but it is also important for the reader. Further Resources on How to Give Your Blog Posts Structure By Using Subheadings 7 Simple Ideas for Mailing List Opt-Ins The 4 Rs That Show a Brand Your Blog is Influential AliVentures Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Darren: Hi there and welcome to Episode 132 of the ProBlogger podcast. My name is Darren Rowse and I’m the founder of ProBlogger, a blog and a whole heap of other things that help you to improve your blogging and to build online businesses around blogs. Today, we’re going to talk about content. Particularly, we’ll be talking about the written word. I’ve got Ali Luke who’s one of our subject matter experts on ProBlogger to talk about subheadings. Subheadings is something that I’ve never talked about in this particular podcast before. As I listen to Ali’s tips, it struck me that we probably should’ve been talking about this earlier because it’s one of the most important techniques that you can use in writing content online today. Ali gives you a whole heap of reasons to use subheadings in this particular podcast, talks about why people don’t use them, answers the question, “Should you have subheadings on every post?” And then gives a whole heap of tips and techniques for using them, including two great examples of blog posts that do use subheadings in different ways, one of which is quite simple and the other one a little bit more complicated. And then, she finishes off her advice with some technical tips for using subheadings in your next blog post. I really do encourage you to have a listen to what Ali’s got to say today. It’s just her talking, I’ve given her ten minutes to give as much good advice as she possibly can. I think it would be well worth your while having a listen to what she’s got to say today. She does give some examples and also has included some screenshots of some of the tips that she uses. You can find all of those over at problogger.com/podcast/132 where there’s links to all of those resources as well as a full transcript of this podcast. Ali: Hello, I’m Ali Luke from Ali Ventures. I’m going to be talking about blog post structure, how to use subheadings to make your posts not only easy to write but also easy to read. As we go along, I’ll mention some examples. Do take a look at the show notes so you can see how this works in practice. I’m sure you’ve seen plenty of subheadings on lots of different blogs, they’re in a lot of fonts, quite often a different colored font from the main text. They stand out, they’re almost like mini titles for different parts of the blog post. Subheadings like this are great because they make your post easier to read in a number of ways. One, they break up the text of the screen making it more attractive just to glance at. If a reader comes along to your blog and they see long, long blocks of dark grey text, that’s not really going to encourage them to read on. It doesn’t look like it’s going to be an easy post to engage with. Number two, they add extra white space. That’s the blank space that goes around the subheading just above it and below it and to the side. That makes it easier to read your post. Number three, they act as signposts within the text. If somebody is skimming through your post, they can easily stop a relevant point. They can pick out the things that matter to them. Although I’d love to think that all my readers read every single word that I write, I know that’s not the case. People are looking quickly for information, they’re taking what they need from the post, and they’re moving on and I want to help them do that. Number four, subheadings come out of your planning process. This should make it really easy for you to write a good post. You won’t spend lots of time just staring at the screen trying to figure out what to write next. You won’t spend time writing paragraphs that you then cut because they didn’t really fit in with where you’re actually wanting to go with the post. Number five, subheadings give the post a strong structure. They make it easy for readers to follow. People aren’t going to get lost halfway through your post wondering where the hell you’re going with this and feeling confused or lost. You do not want your reader to give up halfway and go read something else. If subheadings are so great, why do some bloggers just not use them or not use them enough? I think there’s a couple of reasons. One is they just forget. There’s so many things to take care of when you’re blogging, but maybe you meant to go back in and put in some subheadings in the end and then you just didn’t remember to do it before publishing. The other is that they just don’t plan in advance writing the post. I’m a big fan of planning, I think it has to many benefits. When it comes to your structure in particular and to having subheadings in the right places in your post, then planning is pretty much essential and it will save you so much time in the long run because you’ll save a lot of time on editing. Do all posts need subheadings, then? I think that very short posts don’t, but it’s just if you’re writing anything over 500 words than you should probably look to include at least one subheading within that. Think of subheadings as the key points in your plan for a blogpost. If you wrote a plan and got four bullet points in that plan, then those four bullet points will most likely become subheadings. I’ll give an example of a basic blog post structure that uses subheadings just so if you’re feeling a little bit confused you can see what we’re talking about and you can see how this is working in practice. This is Seven Simple Ideas For Mailing List Opt Ins by Charles Crawford, a recent post on ProBlogger. You can find the link to that in the show notes. It’s a classic list post. It’s got as you might expect seven ideas and each of those ideas has its own subheading. If you scroll down the post, you can see those ideas very clearly because they’re in the larger subheading font. I think it’s important to note here that Charles has very sensibly started each of his subheadings with the number for that idea. We know we’ve got seven. I think this is really important if you’re writing a list post. If you’ve got a number in your headline for the post, then you really need to make sure that you follow through with that and you number all the points. Otherwise, readers like me will be looking at it thinking hang on a minute, you promised me 12, are there really 12, do I need to count them myself, where am I in the post, how do I refer to one of these in the comments? If I want to say I like number six, do I have to go back and count which one is number six and so on. Just number your subheadings if that’s appropriate to do for your post. I imagine that when Charles sat down to think about this post, he probably came up with a rough idea of the working title. He knew he wanted to write about different types of mailing list options that you can create. Maybe he knew from the start that he was going to have seven that emerged as he began to plan. I expect he drafted a list of ideas, I don’t think he sat down, wrote the introduction, and then came up with the ideas as he wrote the post. I imagine he had them in advance. Maybe he came up with just the seven that appear in the finished post, maybe he came up with nine or ten and then decided that some of them were a bit weaker than others or some of them can be fruitfully combined into one key point. He might’ve played around with the ordering of ideas and he might’ve maybe come up with a list that was basically seven bullet points which became the subheadings that you see on the finished post. That’s certainly the sort of process that I go through for a list post and I think that’s the process that a lot of writers would use. It makes it really easy to go from a plan to a draft to a finished edited post that’s great for readers to engage with. That’s a simple structure using subheadings, a list post with one subheading for each point in the list post. You can very easily take that kind of structure, write a post like that, and do perfectly well with it. But, there’s more you can do with subheadings. You don’t have to stop at just one level of subheadings. My next example is from Laney Galligan who’s the General Manager of ProBlogger. She wrote a fantastic post recently which is titled The 4 R’s That Show A Brand Your Blog is Influential. Again, there’s a link to that in the show notes so you might want to take a look at that while you’re listening along. You can probably see that it’s a list post, it’s got four items rather than seven. It’s a fairly short list but it’s still got the structure that you’d expect from a list post. It’s got those four subheadings. They are one reach, two resonance, three reaction, and four relevance. At the end of each of those four parts, Laney has an extra section with its own subheading. In fact, it’s what I would think of as a sub-subheading. It’s a slightly smaller font and it comes within sections. If you’re writing a plan, you could think about it as perhaps being indented from the key point. Within number one, reach, Laney has reach metrics. Number two, resonance, she has resonance metrics. If you scroll down the post, you can see those. The fourth one, relevance, is just a little bit different. It’s a long part of the post, it’s what Laney considers the most important part. She has two of those sub-subheadings within that. I think this is a really handy technique to use when you’re writing a list post, especially if you want to go a bit more in depth than you might manage with a typical list post. Instead of just having seven subheadings and some text each which is fine, you can go even further and for each of your subheadings have your main bulk of text and then a little sub-subheading and then a bit extra. I think this extra should be as consistent as possible. Laney’s done that using metrics for most of her. It should offer some added value to the reader. You don’t have to use metrics, obviously, you could use whatever is appropriate for your post. Some of the ones that I like are Further Reading, Recommended Tools, Top Tip, Watch Out For, or Try This. All of those are things that give your reader something they could really focus on within that list item, perhaps a little take home point or an activity to try out, or a new resource that they can check out. By including these in your post, it makes it really easy for you to write it. You know how each item on your list should be structured, so you know that if you’ve got item number one, reach, then you’re going to have a section explaining reach and then you’re going to have reach metrics and then you’re going to have a section explaining how to understand and interpret the metrics for that. As I say, this makes your life easier and it makes your reader’s life easier. It gives you a post that’s easy to write and structure and do well at, it gives your reader something that they can really engage with and feel they got true value from. Just before I finish, I want to give you the little techie bit about doing subheadings in case you’re not already comfortable with this. In WordPress or whatever blogging platform you’re using, you can use Header 2 for your subheadings and Header 3 for sub-subheadings. One’s nested beneath your main subheadings. If you’re writing a post in Microsoft Word, Word’s Heading 2 style corresponds to the Header 2 in WordPress. You can just put your subheadings into Word using Word styles and then copy and paste your post into WordPress. Like magic, your subheadings will appear correctly. That’s what I do. If you’d rather draft straight into WordPress, of course you can do that. Just click on the subheading which may just be put in plain text. Above the box where you write your post in the visual editor, you should see two rows of icons. In the second row of icons, click on the dropdown on the left that says paragraph and change that to Heading 2 or 3 as appropriate. One last tip about your subheadings. If you can make them consistent in terms of how they’re worded, then do that. You might start them all with the same letter like Laney used the letter R. You might make them all into questions, you might start all of them with a verb. Whatever it is, you just have that consistency running through your post which is reassuring to the reader, they know what to expect, and it can make it easier for you to just really nail each section of your post and get from the start to the end very smoothly and with a real sense of flow so you don’t lose your train of thought halfway and you don’t lose the reader halfway through as well. Use more subheadings, do try this out in the next post you write, take a look at the examples in the show notes, and I’ve also given you some simple templates there to just really help you get to grips with this. Good luck and do stop by and leave a comment if you’re having any difficulties or if you’ve got a tip about subheadings that you’d like to share. Darren: I hope you enjoyed that advice from Ali Luke. You can check her out over at aliventures.com. Before I go, I just want to add a couple of words to Ali’s advice. Firstly, an extra reason for you to be using subheadings that struck me as I was listening and also multitasking while listening to her advice, looking at an old book post that we’ve been trying to get to rank higher in Google. One of the things that we have used successfully to help us improve our search engine rankings is to use subheadings if you can include some of the keywords that you’re trying to rank for in your subheadings that can be another ranking signal to Google, you don’t want to go over the top and keyword stuff your post but certainly using some of those keywords in your subheadings can help with your SEO. I completely agree with all the other things that Ali said as well but particularly for me, subheadings give your post structure. I think it’s really important for you as a writer and I certainly start with my main points as subheadings and then fill in the gaps and write the content around them very often when I’m writing, but as Ali said, it’s for your readers, helping them to scan your blog post, but also knowing what those main points are that you’re making. Do give it a go. If you’re not using subheadings, it can be a great way to break up your content, give it a bit more visual appeal. I’d love to hear from you guys. As Ali said, if you’ve got any tips that you would add to this particular podcast or you want to share some examples or some blog posts that you’ve viewed subheadings in, feel free to head over to problogger.com/podcast/132 where you’ll see all the things that Ali mentioned in this particular podcast and you have the opportunity to leave a comment. Either an audio comment or a text one as well. Thanks so much for listening today. As always, subscribe over in iTunes so you get notified of all new episodes and leave a review if you’ve got a moment as well and if you’ve been enjoying this particular podcast, particularly enjoy those reviews. If you’ve got a suggestion of something that you would like us to do in the future, you can leave those in the review or comments or shoot me an email as well as darren@problogger.net. Thanks for listening, chat with you in Episode 133.   How did you go with today’s episode? I would love to hear or see some examples of how you use subheadings to create flow and readability in your blog posts. Enjoy this podcast? Sign up to our ProBloggerPLUS newsletter to get notified of all new tutorials and podcasts below.