ProBlogger Podcast: Blog Tips to Help You Make Money Blogging

Seven Areas on How to Conduct a Half Yearly Blog Review Many bloggers do an end of year review. It’s a logical time to do an audit of your blog and set goals. I also think that periodically checking in on those goals and setting new ones is a good idea. This being halfway through the year it is a logical time to do just that. This is a good time to just stop blogging for a day or just spend a few hours and do some analysis of your blog. How have you been traveling as a blogger? I’m going to run through one method I use to do a blog review, but I also have a second suggestion that ProBlogger Editor Stacey Roberts wrote in 2015 that a lot of readers found helpful. I was also thinking about the best way to conduct a blog review and I came up with seven different areas to focus on. In each of these seven areas there are four questions you  need to ask. Questions to Ask in Each of the Seven Blogging Areas What were my successes? What are the opportunities that come from those successes? What were the failures? What is my plan? I’ve also developed a worksheet that is a bit of a matrix that you can use to find the seven areas and ask the four questions within each one. In Today’s Episode: Seven Areas on How to Conduct a Half Yearly Blog Review Listen to this episode in the player above or on iTunes here. Content What did well? Posts, categories, topics, lengths, mediums etc. Did I meet deadlines? Plan – set an editorial plan – CoSchedule or Spreadsheet Traffic Traffic spikes and why – social network, blogs, seasonal Promote seasonal spikes and look for opportunities Dips and ways to minimize those dips Trending traffic – up, down, plateaus Promotional activities – guests posts, social, SEO, how did it go? Reader Engagement Health of your readership Are they engaging Comment numbers, share numbers, bounce rate Open rates on email newsletters Social media engagement What are you hearing from your readers? Have you delivered value? Giving more than taking Reader Survey – ask questions Run a community project or challenge to get engagement Monetization How is income trending? What has performed well? Where is income coming from – launches or long tail sales? Other monetization methods Plan What products to develop What sponsors to approach What affiliates Review media kit for sponsors Promotional calendar for products to launch or develop Set aside time to build a product or reach out to sponsors Tech Servers, outages, downtime Security, updates, plugins, vulnerabilities Broken features, new tools or plugins Design – Overhaul, review, is it dated or need tweaking Mobile responsive Tools – email, landing pages, do my tools still serve my needs? Do I need and get value from paid tools? Productivity How do you use your time? Workflows What takes the most time? Time tool like RescueTime You How are you traveling? How are you going? Do we ask ourselves this question? How are you going with your blogging, but your life as well? Physical, spiritual, mental, your energy levels and passion Do you need a break or to change direction? It’s important to ask deeper more personal questions Are you filling your cup? Professional development – solo entrepreneurs need to do this for themselves If you are not learning and developing your blog may suffer Further Resources on How to Conduct a Half Yearly Blog Review How to Do an End of 2015 Blog Audit: Take Stock of What You’ve Achieved and Where You’re Headed by Stacey Roberts Download the Worksheet Create Content – Content is the cornerstone of your blog. Here you’ll find everything to help you create great blog content. CoSchedule Promotion – How to Get More Eyeballs on Your Blog Find Readers – If you need to know how to find readers for your blog, check out all the resources below for our best tutorials and tips. Why You Should Make Building Community a Priority in Your Blogging How to Build a Culture of Community on Your Blog Build Community – An engaged community of readers is a valuable asset. Learn below how to build community for a more profitable blog. Make Money Blogging Make Money – Our most frequently asked question is how to make money blogging? Whilst it is possible there are no get rich quick promises. The resources below will get you started in the right direction. Recommended Blogging Resources & Tools Blogging Tools and Services RescueTime 8 Tips for Busy Bloggers – How to Make the Most of the Time You Have 7 Productivity Tips For Bloggers How to Work Out What To Focus Upon with Your Time Be Productive – If you feel like you never have enough time, or don’t know which blogging task to tackle next, learn how to be a productive blogger with the resources below. The Biggest Lesson I Learned About Building a Profitable Blog in 2015 Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Welcome to Episode 131 of the ProBlogger podcast. Today, I want to walk you through doing a half yearly review of your blog. It’s just past the halfway point of 2016 and so it’s a great time to do a bit of a review to help you understand how you’ve been traveling as a blogger but more importantly to tweak and change the cause for the next six months to make them the most productive and useful six months that you possibly can. You can find today’s show notes including a little download that I’ve got for you that I’ll talk about during the podcast over at problogger.com/podcast/131. Many bloggers do an end of year review at the end of a year or at the beginning of the year. It’s a logical time to do review and set some goals. I think it’s really useful to periodically check back in on those goals that we set. If we haven’t got any goals, to set some new ones. I think as I just mentioned being halfway through the year, this is a great time to just stop your blogging maybe for an extra day or two. Don’t post anything and spend a day—even if it’s just a few hours—doing an analysis of how you’ve been traveling as a blogger. There’s many ways to do a review like this. I’m going to run through one suggestion of it but I also do have another one for you that I linked to in today’s show notes. A review on order process that Stacy Roberts, the editor of ProBlogger wrote at the end of 2015. I’ll link to that because it gives you some really great questions to ask on a number of different areas for your blog. While I was out at my walk today, something that I do most days around mid-day to break out my day, I was thinking about how I would do a review on my blogs in the next week. I came up with seven different areas that I want to do some analysis on for my own blogs in the coming weeks. The seven areas that I think any successful blogger needs to be kicking some goals in, they need to be achieving in these seven areas if they want to build a profitable blog. If profit’s not for you, there’s six of the areas because one of them is monetization. Whatever your goals are, these are areas that I think you need to be asking the questions in. For each of these areas, I’m going to suggest that you ask yourself four questions. We’ve got seven different areas of your blog and then we’re going to ask four questions about each one. The four questions that you’re going to ask about each one, I’ve summarized in a little download that I’ve got for you over at problogger.com/podcast/131. It’s a worksheet that I’ve developed that’s got the seven areas and the four questions sort of set out in a matrix that you can print off and then use to answer the questions. Let me tell you the four questions and then I’ll tell you the seven areas. The four questions are pretty simple, really. They are: “What were my successes? What did I achieve over the last six months of my blog?” “What are the opportunities that come from those successes?” And then we want to look at the flip side, “What were the failures over the last six months? Where were the weaknesses, where were the things that I didn’t quite achieve what I was hoping to.” Lastly, “What’s my plan for the next six months?” Successes, opportunities, failures, and plans. If you want an acronym, it’s SOFP. As I’ve said, to help you visualize these four questions with the seven different areas that I want you to do some analysis in, I do have this worksheet that you can go and download right now at problogger.com/podcast/131. You don’t have to give your email address, it’s just a simple PDF that you can download. Very simple, I just whipped it up in five minutes. Don’t go expecting too much in terms of design. There are the four questions that you’re going to ask and I want you to ask those four questions about seven different areas of your blog. It might sound like a lot but you can whip through this fairly quickly if you’d like to or you can spend more time on each one as well. Let me present to you the seven different areas that I think are really seven areas that any blogger should be working on at any point in time on their blog. Area number one is content, pretty obvious. Without content, you don’t have a blog. Area number two is traffic. The eyeballs, the amount of people seeing your content which is something that as bloggers we hopefully are all fairly interested in. Number three is reader engagement. It’s the health of your readers whether they’re engaging with you, connecting with you, the feeling of community, the reader’s sentiment. I guess we’re not just looking at the numbers which is traffic but we’re actually trying to understand who is reading, how are they feeling towards you and your blog, and how they’re engaging with it. Area number four is monetization. Are you making money? Are you sustaining your blog? This is probably the optional one, I know some of you are not interested in monetizing. That’s totally fine, you might want to skip this particular one. Area number five is the tech, your blog running, service, tools, some of those types of things. Area number six is productivity, how are you using your time, what are your workflows like, what are your systems like, what tools are you using? The last area is one that I’ve thrown in there because I think it really is important. It’s you, how are you going? You as a blogger, your health of you is going to impact the health of your blog. I’ve got some things for you to think about in that as well. There are the seven areas; content, traffic, reader engagement, monetization, tech, productivity, and you. You may choose to stop this podcast now, go download that worksheet problogger.com/podcast/131, and then just do it. You can totally do that, there’s four questions there for each of those seven different areas. If you would like a little bit more, what I’m going to do next is just go through each of those seven areas again and just ask you a few other questions that you might want to ask to help you unpack that particular area. This overlaps a little bit with that post I mentioned earlier that Stacy wrote but there’s a few other questions that I want to share with you as well. All of this is in the transcript of this podcast which is over on the show notes as well. We’ve had transcripts on our podcast now for the last three episodes, so if you have been waiting for that, they’re now there over on the show notes. Let’s dig into each of these areas. You should be asking successes, opportunities, failures, and your plan but here are some extra things that you might want to ask and consider to help you work through these seven areas. Firstly, we’re talking about content. What type of posts did well for you over the last six months, that’s one of the questions I’m asking. By types of posts, I’m talking about the topic, the category of posts, but also the format of post. Was it a list type post, was it essay type post, was it rant, were they opinion pieces, were they interviews. What types of posts did well? You might also as part of that ask yourself what type of mediums worked well. Were you experimenting with video, live streaming, audio, podcasts, or was it all text, were there infographics, what type of mediums did well for you? Was it curated or was it original content as well. You might also want to look at the length of posts. Did you notice any trends as you look at the most popular posts over the last six months in terms of the length? I just did this recently, looked at my Google Analytics and realized that some of our longer posts did really well over the last six months for us. Again, that informs the plan that I’m going to make going forward, some of that longer form content is doing really well for us. Did the length of post seem to have any impact on traffic, comments, engagements, shares, those types of things. The last thing I would encourage you to think about was the frequency of your posting. What frequency were you aiming for? Did you meet the deadlines that you set yourself? Did you exceed them? How did your readers seem to respond whether you did a lot of posts or not many as well. These are some of the areas I’d be thinking about in terms of content. As you’re thinking about your plan, I really would encourage you to take this opportunity as you’re doing this analysis to set yourself a bit of an editorial plan going forwards. You may actually want to get a tool like coschedule.com which is what we use over at ProBlogger. I’ll link to that in today’s show notes. Or, you may choose to just get a spreadsheet and plug in the post that you want to be publishing, the types of posts maybe, the frequency of those posts. You may even want to set yourself some topics ahead of time to keep yourself on track with some of the things that you want to achieve. That’s content. I’ve got some further reading again in the show notes as well, you can check out our creating content portal on the ProBlogger blog. We’ve got a portal pretty much for each of the seven areas that I’m talking about today and I’ll also include some further reading for you in the show notes on content if that’s an area that you need to do some more work in. Now, we’re talking about traffic, area number two. Some of the questions that I ask myself as I look back on the last six months are things like did I have any spikes in traffic over that six months? Why did I have those spikes? Was it a rush of traffic from social network? Was it another blog? Was it a seasonal thing, for example in the last couple of days we just had a big spike in traffic on my photography blog all going to How to Photograph Fireworks being 4th of July in America. Sometimes, it’s a seasonal explanation. Why did those spikes happen and are there opportunities around those things? I actually noticed many years ago now, the 4th of July was a big spike in traffic for us on Digital Photography School. As a result, we now promote those posts that do really well very heavily around 4th of July, also around New Year’s Eve when people are photographing fireworks. We also have written some more content on that. When you notice spikes, you need to look for opportunities to increase the size of those spikes but also see if there are other opportunities around that. On the flip side of looking at the spikes, were there any troughs in traffic? Have you noticed that there’s been any dips, maybe weekends, maybe it’s a seasonal thing. We noticed after 4th of July, the day after, we see a bit of a lull because everyone’s having a bit of a day off after having celebrated. There again could be some seasonal explanations there and there may be some ways that you can minimize those troughs in traffic as well. Another question to ask, how is your traffic trending? Is it going up? Is it up on the last month, up on last year, or is it on the way down, or is it plateau in some way? That’s useful to understand and again to do some analysis on that. You may actually find that there are some things you can do to change those trends if they’re negative trends or to leverage them further. One of the things we noticed a couple of years ago now was that we were slowly trending down on our mobile traffic on both of my blogs. That was a bit of a signal and a wake up call for us that we needed to really do something about our mobile optimized design and get a responsive design on our blog as well and to do some work on getting our bounce rate up as well because we noticed that people were still coming to our site on mobile but they weren’t viewing more pages. How is your traffic training? Is it up? Is it down? Did you do any promotional activities over the first six months of this year? Did you do some guest posts? Did you change the frequency of your updating on social media? Did you do some increased focus on shareable content? Did you create an opt-in for your site? Did you do some SEO, some search engine optimization. Those types of things, how do they go for you over the last six months? What was a good use of your time, what was a poor use of your time? On the flip side, what could you be doing in the next six months in those areas as well? You might want to check out Episode 113 where I talk about four different things that you can do to promote your blog and get more eyeballs on your blog. That may actually help you to form a bit of a plan for the next six months. Some of the questions I would encourage you to ask about traffic, again there would be some further readings in today’s show notes and Episode 113 is probably a good one to go and listen to after this one if that’s an area you need to work on more. Area number three was reader engagement, how’s the health of your readership? How are your readers feeling about your blog? Are they engaging with you. There’s some pretty obvious things here to look at. Comment numbers, have they gone up or down? Are you seeing people sharing your content? Are you getting emails from readers? Are you seeing your bounce rate on your site go up or down? That can be a bit of a sign of when the people are open to getting more content from you when they first arrive and their feelings towards you as well. How’s your open rates on your email? If you send out newsletters, what type of engagements are you getting on social media? What’s the most frequent complaint of praise that you hear from your readers? If you hear the same thing from your readers a number of times, whether it’s a good or bad thing, that gives you a bit of a hint as to the sentiment of your readers towards you. I noticed that occasionally I would get an email from a reader saying you’ve been promoting too much to us. You’ve been trying to sell too much to use. If I hear that from one reader, I kind of pay a little bit of attention to that. But if I hear three times in three days that same piece of feedback from three different people, that’s a bit of a signal that maybe I’ve got my balance out of way in terms of how much content I’m giving away for free and how much I’m charging for. Those types of things will be things that I’ll be asking myself when it comes to understanding my reader engagement, health of my readers. I guess ultimately we’re trying to ask ourselves here have you delivered value over the last six months? Are people positive towards you or are they feeling like you’ve been taking more than you’ve been giving. One thing that you might want to do as part of your plan going forward if you struggle to do analysis in this area is maybe you want to do a survey of your readers. Halfway through the year might be a really good time to understand how your readers are feeling towards your site, ask them some questions about that. Another thing you might want to do in the second half of the year is to run some kind of a community project or some sort of a challenge that is all about trying to get engagement from your readers rather than selling, selling, selling to them or promoting things all the time, affiliate promotions, sponsorship type activations. Maybe you need this next six months to really focus on getting engagements with your readers. You can go over to I think it’s Episode 61 where I talk about how to build community with your readers if this is an area that you want to grow in. Also, we’ve got the community portal over on problogger.net/build-community-portal. That will take you through some further reading on building community on your blog as well. Now, let’s talk about monetization. Look up your successes, opportunities, failures, and come up with a plan. Some other questions you might want to ask in terms of monetizing your blog, how is it trending? Is income up, is it down, is it plateaued? That’s one thing you probably want to monitor a little bit more often than every six months but it could be a good time to really dig into some of the different income streams of your blog as well. This is something I did in the last couple of days in preparation for a post that’s going live on ProBlogger in the next few days where I really did some analysis of the different income streams on my blogs. What’s been performing well for you? Most bloggers who are full time have multiple streams of income in their blog. They might be running advertising but they might also do some affiliate promotions, selling their own products, selling their own services, there’s a whole heap of different ways that you can monetize a blog. How have you been monetizing and how have those different income streams been performing, are they up, are they down, are they plateaued? You might want to do some comparison to this time last year on those types of things as well. If you’re monetizing by selling a product or your services, one question that sometimes is quite insightful to ask is is most of your income coming from launches or is it coming from long tail sales? One of the traps that some bloggers do fall into is that they become launch dependent. They only make money when they launch a new product. And then the product sits there in their shop and no one ever buys it until they then discount it and do another launch or do another promotion. That might be a good question to ask, where is your income coming from? Is it coming in a massive spike when you launch something and then nothing, or is there a way that you can increase the long tail sales of that product or that service? Maybe you want to use an autoresponder so that when people sign up to your newsletter, they get an email a month or so later with an offer. That’s one way that you can get a longer tail sale on your blog and maybe looking at the design of your blog. Are people actually seeing that you’ve got products? Is there a way that you can use your design to get people into your store? If you don’t monetize with products and you monetize with sponsors, there’s good questions to be asking about that as well. Should you be approaching some new sponsors, are there new potential partners in your niche that are advertising on other blogs at the moment that you need to be building a relationship with in some way? This should all factor into the plan that you have. Maybe you need to do a bit of a review of your media kit as well if you’re doing more sponsorship type activations as well. One thing you might also want to do as you develop your plan is to do in a similar way what we did before with our editorial calendar. You might want to come up with a promotional calendar as well. Particularly if you’re launching products, you might want to plan the next six months of what products you need to develop and then launch. Slot in some time so that you can be working towards the creation and the launches of that products. In a similar way if you’re working with sponsors, you might want to plug into your editorial calendar when you want to do sponsored posts or other types of campaigns as well. Monetization is something that many bloggers want to do but they don’t set aside time to do it. I really would encourage you to set aside time in the next six months to build a product, to reach out to other affiliate partners or sponsors, to put time aside every day if you can to work on the monetization of your blog. It does pay off when you do that. Area number five was the tech of your blog, you want to be asking questions here about your servers. Have they had outages, downtime, are they still serving your needs, no pun intended. Is your blog secure? Do you need to update WordPress, do you need to update some plugins? If you have out of date plugins or an out of date version of WordPress, unfortunately you’re probably vulnerable to being hacked. That would be a really important thing to be updating as part of your plan going forwards. Are there features on your blog, perhaps plugins that are broken that you need to find a new plugin or a new tool for? How’s your design? Is it still working? Are there things that you could do to improve that? Sometimes it’s good to just give your design a bit of an overhaul or just look at it in the eyes of a new reader and ask yourself if there’s things that you need to tweak? Is it becoming day to day? Are there things that just aren’t working anymore, that are confusing readers? It’s very easy for a blog design to just not keep up with the times and not keep up with the things that you want to achieve with your blog. Is it mobile responsive would be another one here. Another question to ask on tech is about the tools and services that you’re using. Most bloggers today have tools that they’re using to send emails, you might be using AWeber, Convert Kid, or Mail Chimp or one of those. Landing pages, lead pages, and some of those types of things. Tools like Coshare Jewel, Sumo Me, which we’ve been talked about many times before on the podcast. Many of us subscribe to these tools and it’s good every now and again just to ask the question are they still serving my needs? Am I even still using them? It’s amazing how many services bloggers are subscribed to but they’re not actually using. They might be paying a monthly fee for it, and so this might be a good time of year just to do a bit of an analysis of what you’re paying for and whether you’re using it and getting value out of it. Do you need to stop those services or do you just need to start using them to get value out of them in some way? I’ve got some further reading on tools and services and the tech of your blog in today’s show notes. Second last area that I want to talk about is productivity. Again, really the questions here really about relate to how you’re using your time or the workflows that you have. Simply asking yourself how do I use my time over the last six months? What’s taken most of my time? You might know that just by having noticed that you spent a lot of time on a particular thing or maybe you don’t and maybe a tool like Rescue Time might be useful to install to really show you how you use the time on your computer. It’s a pretty confronting tool to use but it’s one that’s helped me a lot to realize where I was wasting time, even wasting time on things that kind of feel a little bit productive but aren’t really. Ask yourself those questions, ask yourself those sorts of tough questions. How could you use your time better going forward? Again, there’s lots of further reading that you can do over in the productivity portal on ProBlogger but there’s also a few episodes of the podcast, Episode 40, 65, and 82 all talk about productivity and productivity tips from my perspective. The last area that I really would encourage you to ask yourself some questions on is about you. How are you traveling? How are you going? It’s a question that we ask each other a lot. Here in Australia, it’s a greeting. How are you? We ask it all the time but do we ask ourselves this question. How are you? How are you traveling? How are you going with your blogging but just in your life as well. As I mentioned right at the start, the health of your blog is partly dependent upon the health of you. I’m talking here about your physical health, your mental health, spiritual health, the health of your relationships, but also the health of your relationship with your blog. How is your energy level feels blog? How is your passion for your topic going? Are there things there that are lacking that maybe you need to spend some time finding and working on? Maybe if the passion or the energy for your blog is missing, maybe that’s a signal that you need to take a break. Maybe you need a holiday, maybe you need to get some help, maybe you need to change the direction of your blog in some way. I think it’s really important to ask these deeper, more personal questions about how we’re traveling to help us understand how to improve our blogs as well. Another related question that you might want to ask here is are you filling your cup? In a lot of businesses, they tell their employees to go away and do professional development. They send them off to conferences, they send them away to seminars, they buy them courses and they allow them to do training. Most of us are solo entrepreneurs and we don’t have a boss to tell us to do professional development. Is that something that you need to do moving forward? Do you need to buy a book on the topic that you blog about? Do you need to go enroll at university or do a course in some way? Do you need to go to an event for bloggers in your particular niche or maybe a general blogging conference or online event as well? Are there things that you need to do to fill your cup? What goes in comes out. If you are lacking in this area, if you are not learning, if you are not developing in the areas that you’re blogging about and learning about blogging itself, then maybe your blog will suffer as a result of that. There’s some further listening on this whole area over on the 38th episode of this podcast. It’s actually the most personal episode that I’ve ever done because I talk about my own wake up call and how I realize I needed to get my act together not only in terms of filling my cup but also to do with my health, my mental health, my workflow’s health using my time. There’s a whole heap of different areas there that I realize I’ve been lacking in and it was having an impact upon my blogging, that’s episode 38 of this podcast. The seven areas that I really would encourage you to at least spend five minutes each on, you can do that in 35 minutes if you want. You could probably spend days on it as well if that’s where you’re at but I really would encourage you to ask some of those questions. How are you going in the areas of traffic? How are you going in the area of content? How are you going in the area of reader engagement? How are you going with monetization? How are you going with the text side of your blog? How is your productivity, your workflows? Lastly, how are you going? I really believe you ask some of those questions and you come up with even if it’s just one action item for each of those areas. Hopefully by the end of this year, end of 2016, your blog will be in a better position than it is today. I really would love to hear from you on this particular episode. What did you do? What did you find? What did you decide? What did you plan? What’s the one thing that you’re going to do as a result of this particular blog review. Maybe it’s seven things, I don’t know. You can tell me over at problogger.com/podcast/131 where there will also be the download of the worksheets and a turn of extra reading and listening that you can do in these seven different areas of your blog. I really wish you well with this particular challenge and I’d love to hear back from you on how it went for you. Thanks for listening, I’ll chat with you in a couple of days time in Episode 132. How did you go with today’s episode? Spend at least 5 minutes on each one of these areas and ask yourself how is it going? I would love to hear the one thing that you are going to do as a result of this podcast. Enjoy this podcast? 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When Should You Publish Your Blog Posts Today I am talking about when you should publish your blog post. What day of the week? What time of the day? For what timezone? Does it really matter at all? In the past when RSS feeds were popular, timing did seem to matter more. It matters when you publish social media, but I’m not sure if it matters with blog posts that much anymore. From the studies I link to mornings do seem to be the best time. Readers will read blog posts in the morning, but comment later in the day after business hours. Still studies need to be taken with a grain of salt. There are a lot of variables. Note: Listen to this episode above or over on iTunes. In Today’s Episode What Time of Day is Best to Publish to Your Blog Find where your readers live and you can time according to the dominant time zone My readership is all over the world, but 50% is in America, so I try to time my blog posts when the bulk of my readership is waking up Look at your analytics and facebook page insights, that can help you find out when your audience is reading, mine seems to peek at 10:00 am East Coast time I try to position my posts right before things start to heat up, so about 7:00 am East Coast time, then I promote them on social media when things are really hot Consider the type of post you are publishing, challenge posts are posted on weekends, engagement on blogs is higher on the weekends We publish tutorials and heavy posts earlier in the week, we do inspirational posts at the end of the week when people are looking for light relief If we have a key post, like a sales related post, we try to get those out on Mondays US time, plus it enables us to promote it for the rest of the week The timing of your blog posts is less of a factor than the timing of your promotion Timing of emails and social media matter We send out emails early in the week We want to get those posts in front of you earlier in the week Because we have a global audience we separate social posts around the clock – Twitter every hour and 7 or 8 facebook posts a day Timing and regularity and consistency matter a lot – people take notice of when you publish – We publish this podcast on Monday’s and Wednesdays Be consistent, get your content in front of your readers, and experiment to find the optimum times Further Resources on What Time of Day is Best to Publish to Your Blog KissMetrics Social Fresh Noah Kogan Track Maven Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Hi there and welcome to Episode 130 of the ProBlogger Podcast. My name is Darren Rouse and today I want to talk about the question of when should you publish your blog post. What time, what day? Does it really matter at all? What are the factors that you want to consider particularly if you have an international audience as I do. That’s what I’m tackling today. You can find today’s show notes over at problogger.com/podcast/130 where I’m going to include some further reading for you and some links to some studies that have been done on this exact question that I’m going to talk about in a moment. Welcome to today’s podcast. I am just back from Thailand. We’ve in the last couple of days come back from a break of a couple of weeks over in Thailand. This is the first page of content that I’ve created since coming back which worries me slightly, I have to say. If I’m sounding a little bit relaxed or confused, it’s probably because my head’s not quite back into work mode. We just had this great time over in Thailand, beautiful weather although we did have a couple of days of rain but really warm, beautiful, sort of tropical weather. Amazing food, very friendly people. It’s raining here in Melbourne when we returned, and it’s cold, so I’m trying to get my head back into work mode and struggle with the variation in temperature. It is good to be back as well, I’ve been looking forward particularly to getting back into the podcast. As I said in my introduction today, we’re talking today about the timing of your blog posts. At what time should you publish? What day should you publish? Does it really matter at all anymore? I paid a lot of attention in the early days of my blogging to the exact time that I published and I still do think about that but I don’t think about it as much as I used to. I think in days gone by back in 2005, 2006 when RSS feeds were really big, I particularly paid a lot of attention to the times that I published because it seemed to have more impact upon whether people would see my blogpost or not because they would check in the RSS feeds. If you could time your post to go live when people would be in the RSS feeds, that has an impact. Today, I’m not sure that the timing of your blogpost being published has as much impact as the timing of your social media post and your emails. They’re probably the big effectors today, but I guess there are a few things that you might want to consider when it comes to the timing of your blog post. In today’s show notes, I’m going to link to a number of studies that have been done on this particular topic over the last four or five years. I’m not going to go over them in great detail now because there’s some inconsistencies between the results in them. I kind of have a problem with studies into this because I think blogs vary so much. One of the things I will mention though in a number of studies that I’ll link to in the show notes is that mornings seem to be the best time. Of course, there’s some trouble with mornings because many of us have global audiences. A couple of the studies that I found, I found that most people seem to read blogs in the morning but they tend to comment in blogs outside of business hours; in the evenings, and particularly on weekends. That was one of the things that did seem to come up in a number of studies, but then there were a whole heap of other results where in there were inconsistencies. Take that idea with a bit of a grain of salt. The problem with studies is that there’s a lot of varying factors, it’s not just about when you publish your blog post, it’s also about when you share it on social media and also depends on the topic as well. I know a parenting blogger who finds that Monday mornings at 9:00AM is a great time to publish because that’s the first time that their readers have a moment to themselves after they drop their kids off to school. She finds that when she publishes around 9:00 AM on a Monday morning, a lot of her readers tend to show up with a cup of coffee, read her blog once they got the kids off to school. I know a sporting blogger who finds that Monday mornings is the worst time to publish. He actually finds that Saturday mornings is a great time because it’s just before all the games that he’s writing about are about to be played. He also publishes on Sunday night, at the end of the football round. He publishes about the games that have just been played. Obviously, it’s going to depend on your topic. This is where studies fall short because they don’t take those factors into account. One other piece of advice that I would give you in terms of working out the best time to publish your blog post is really to do some experimentation and it’s also to really do some analysis of when your readers are online and to do some experimenting around different times about whether you published just before they get online or just after or in the peak of it, a few things I would encourage you to do. Work out where your readers live. The bulk of your readers, where are they living? I talk to a lot of Australian bloggers who have a lot of Australian readers. Obviously, that is going to be quite helpful to know most of my readers are in Australia, in America, then you can kind of time things for that audience. But if you’re like me and you have a very global audience, around 50% of my audience is in the US but 50% of my audience is scattered around the rest of the world. That’s a factor that I need to keep in mind. That particularly is something I keep in mind with my social media updates. In terms of my blog posts, when they go live, because 50% of my audience are based in America, that’s where I’m focusing most of my attention when it comes to the timing of my blog post. I’m actually trying to time my blog post to go live just as America is waking up because that’s where most of my audience is. That’s not because I want to ignore the rest of the world, I’m an Aussie, I value people who live in Australia or around the world as well. That’s where the bulk of my readership are. Understand where the bulk of your readership are and plan for your blog post to go live when they’re most likely to be able to see it. The second thing I encourage you to do is to look at your analytics. Look at your Google Analytics and look at your Facebook Analytics. Facebook Analytics Page Insights, you’ll find in the analytics that Facebook give you, will give you some understanding of when your readers are online both in terms of the days of the week but also the time of day. That’s really interesting to look at. I find as I look at both of my Facebook insights but also my Google Analytics that my audience tends to come peak at 10:00AM at the East Coast of America, 7:00AM on the West Coast. That’s the peak of when my audience is online. That is partly influenced by the times that I post on social media, so you’ve got to be a little bit careful there. I can see as I look at both of my analytics on Google and Facebook that that’s the peak. Then for two or three hours on either side of that time is where my readership is at its biggest. It actually starts probably about three hours before that, 7:00AM on the East Coast, and then it goes for about five hours after the 10:00AM, 3:00PM on the East Coast. I guess it’s eight hours that my audience is really online. What I’m trying to do with my blog posts, publishing my blog posts, is to position them to go live just before things really start to heat up. As a result, we publish at around 7:00AM on the East Coast of America which is usually around midnight Australian time, that’s when I’m setting my blog post to go live. That’s just one of the timing factors that I’m taking into mind. A lot of the rest of what I do during that eight hour period is to promote those blog posts on social media. What I find really is to get the blogpost live just before things begin to ramp up, which then enables me to promote that blog post for the rest of that window where things are really hot. Tweets go out, Facebook updates go out for the rest of the peak. That’s the strategy that I use and it works quite well for us. One other thing to consider is the type of blog post that you’re publishing. We have on Digital Photography School, we publish discussion type posts and challenges. We give our readers a little bit of homework. We say go away and take a photo on this theme or using this technique. Those type of posts we typically do on the weekends. One of the things that I notice in a lot of the studies that I looked at around this particular topic was that engagement on blogs is typically higher on the weekends, people leave more comments on the weekends or outside of work hours. People are more willing to have discussions and leave longer comments on the weekends as well. What we do is on the weekends we’ll quite often put a blog post that is more asking a question and trying to stimulate a discussion or where we give our readers a little bit of homework and say go ahead and do this and share what you find. If you do those type of posts, you might find that they’re really go to do after hours so you might time them for 5:00PM or 7:00PM when your readers are on the couch at home or on the weekends. We typically publish our meteor longer form tutorials, the heavers posts, earlier in the week and during business hours. If we’re doing more of a lighter post, more of a shareable funny post and inspirational post, we tend to do them at the end of the week, later in the week when perhaps people are looking to escape work a little bit and looking for some light relief in their lives. That might go live on a Thursday or on a Friday, sort of the end of the week. Those are some of the factors that I keep in mind as well. The last thing I’ll say is we have a key post, like a sales related post that we really want to get in front of most of our audience. We typically try and get that out on a Monday, US time. The reason for that is that one, Mondays tends to be the day that we get a lot of traffic and a lot of the studies did find that. Two, it enables us for the rest of the week to continue to promote that and it gives us four days afterwards to drive traffic to that blogpost before the weekend comes. The weekend for us typically is a bit of a lull in traffic. If we’re launching a new ebook or a course or some software or doing an affiliate campaign, we typically launch that promotion on a Monday or a Tuesday and that gives us those three or four days to really promote that and get that promotion in front of people. Let me cycle back to something I said earlier in the podcast and that is that the timing of your blog post being published is probably less of a factor than the timing of the promotion of that blogpost. This is where you probably do need to do some more analysis to really get things right. What’s more important than the publishing of the blogpost is the timing of your social media and the time of your emails. Let’s just really briefly talk about emails. Typically on ProBlogger, we send out emails early in the week. Those of you who are subscribed to the ProBlogger Plus Newsletter know that if you’re in America, you usually get that on a Monday. If you’re in Australia, you usually see that on a Tuesday. Again, that’s because we want to get those posts in front of you early in the week, they’re usually meteor posts, and that enables us to get them to you when you’re looking for content. Digital Photography School is a little bit different. We usually publish our newsletter on a Thursday night, Australian time, or Thursday morning US time. The reason for that is that we found our readers typically take most of their photos on a weekend, that’s when they got most of their leisure time. We’re trying to get the tutorials in front of them so that they can then read them and use them on the weekends. We actually call our newsletter in the subject line Photography Tips for the Weekend. We time our newsletters a little bit different there and that’s come as a result of a lot of testing to see when people open them and when people click on the links in them. Time your emails, really important, and then social media as well. For social media, it really does come down to experimentation. What we’ve actually found works best because we do have global audiences on both of my blogs is to really separate our social media updates around the clock. It’s a 24/7 kind of experience. If you follow me on Twitter, you know that pretty much every hour to hour and a half, something goes live on the ProBlogger Twitter account, same happens on the Digital Photography School one. On Facebook, particularly on Digital Photography School’s Facebook page, we publish seven or eight posts per day. They are typically spread out every three or four areas although it does tend to be a few extra ones during the US day time. But again, that comes out of a lot of experimentation and watching what is working. The last thing I’ll say about the timing of your blog post is that I’m a big believer that regularity and consistency in the timing your posts really does matter a lot. People take notice of when you publish. Whether you tell them or not, they begin to take notice of it. I know for a fact that some of you who are listening to this podcast know that we publish every Monday and Thursday morning, US time. I’ve never announced that that’s what I’m going to do but there was a couple of weeks where our posts were delayed because iTunes wasn’t updating them. I got emails from people saying where is your Monday morning podcast? I’ll listen to it on the way to work, or while I’m driving to work, or while I’m in the cafe after dropping my kids off. I know for a fact that even though I’ve never announced it, we have listeners of this podcast who have noticed the rhythm of the publishing of this podcast and the same is true on my blogs as well. I think regularity and consistency is probably more important than the exact time. You might want to factor that in as well. I actually kind of like having a deadline. I like the fact that on Monday mornings if there’s a podcast that’s not ready, I feel bad about it so that gives me incentive to get that podcast recorded ahead of time. This is in my mind not a science even though a lot of studies have been done and people have tried to wake out the optimal time. I think for me it’s really about trying to be consistent, trying to position your content so that it’s there when your readers are about to be there, and to experiment with that and see what works for you. I’d love to hear your feedback on this, when do you publish your blog posts? Does it really matter to you? Do you publish them when they’re ready or do you publish them at certain times of the week? What other timings do you factor in? Do you publish your emails at the same time, do you publish your social media at the same time, your podcasts. I’d love to get your feedback on this. You can find our show notes today with the links to the studies that I did find on this topic if you’re interested in reading those over at problogger.com/podcast/130. Thanks for listening, hopefully this one went out on time and iTunes published it at the right time. I look forward to chatting with you in the next could of days on the ProBlogger podcast. When do you publish your blog posts? I would love to hear your strategy for publishing your blog posts. Do you publish them at certain times? What other factors do you consider? I’d love to get your feedback on this topic. Never miss an episode – Subscribe to the ProBlogger podcast on iTunes Got a Question You’d Like Me to Answer? I base many episodes of this podcast upon questions answered by ProBlogger Podcast listeners and Blog readers. You can use the following widget to ask a question. Please include your name and blog name (if you have a blog).   Enjoy this podcast? Sign up to our ProBloggerPLUS newsletter to get notified of all new tutorials and podcasts below.

Note: we’ve now started adding full transcripts to our podcasts. Scroll down to find todays one. Three Types of Ads to Consider When Creating Facebook Advertising Today we are talking about Facebook advertising. If you are all about organic, we also have a podcast about organic Facebook reach coming up. Facebook has been putting more emphasis on advertising, and I know it something that many of you grapple with. A nice thing about Facebook advertising is that you don’t have to invest a lot, and it can have immediate results. I have done some Facebook advertising, especially when I have a product to launch. But since I’m not an expert, I brought in one of our Facebook advertising subject matter experts. Angela Ponsford from Dotti Media. Today Angela is going to share some tips on how to create our first Facebook ad. Listen to this episode above here on the show notes or check it out over on iTunes here. In Today’s Episode How to Create Your Facebook Advertising – 3 Types of Ads to Consider Boosted posts Facebook tracks everything that you do It uses the information to build a database of your interests and likes It also measures what you do off of Facebook, like clicking on links or spending time on a website As a marketer, you have that information available to you Facebook determines objectives for each type of post The objective of a boosted post is to get engagement on that post within the Facebook platform, someone liking, commenting, or sharing that post If you want to get people to a blog post on your website a boosted post is not the best way to do that At Dotti Media, we used a boosted post to get feedback from our Facebook fan page because we wanted engagement on that Facebook post Before you click on the boosted post button, be sure of what action you want to take Clicks to website ads From Facebook’s perspective, these are designed to get people to click out to your website They will show the ad to people who have historically clicked out to other websites To set up a clicks to website ad Click the link in your status update Paste the URL of your website post in the status update box Then go to the Facebook Ads Manager or Power Editor to set up the Clicks to Website Ad Website conversion ads The difference between a clicks to website ad and a website conversion ad is that with the website conversion ad, you want a user to take an action on your website There is a bit more to set these up because you need to install the tracking pixel – a piece of code on your website that allows Facebook to track visitors on your website This is a powerful Facebook ad, and it can give you powerful insight into your audience Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Darren: Hi there, it’s Darren from ProBlogger here. Welcome to Episode 129 of the ProBlogger Podcast. Today, we’re going to talk about Facebook Advertising. I know some of you are probably about to hit the stop button because you’re not interested in Facebook in terms of advertising because you’re all about organic, that’s great, that’s totally fine. We’ve actually got an episode on organic Facebook reach coming up soon. But as most bloggers are aware, Facebook has been putting more and more emphasis into advertising as a way to reach your followers. So, it is something that I know many of you are grappling with. One of the great things about Facebook advertising is that it isn’t something you need to invest a whole heap of money into. It can be something that you can get into for just a few dollars and it can have immediate results on your side. I don’t do a lot of Facebook advertising, but we over the last year have put more emphasis into it particularly when we’ve been launching products or when I have a key blog post that I need to get out there, or a podcast episode for that matter. Some of you will have seen some of the advertising that we have done for the ProBlogger Facebook page. I’m not an expert in Facebook Advertising, so I brought in today one of our Facebook advertising subject matter experts from the blog, Angela Ponsford who you’ll be hearing more from on the blog in the coming months. Angela is also speaking at the ProBlogger event in September. She works at Dotti Media where you can find out more about her as well, dottimedia.com is the address for that. Today, what I’ve asked Angela to do is to just share with us for seven or eight minutes some tips on how to create our first Facebook ad. Facebook advertising can get very overwhelming and very complicated. You can waste a whole heap of money on this, so you do want to do it the right way. But in this particular episode, Angela explains three types of ads to consider for that first Facebook ad and talks about the differences between them. She talks about boosted posts which is the one that most of us are most familiar with because we see it every time we go to Facebook. On our page, we see the option to boost our post. There are times and places where boosted posts can work and Angela talks about what the boosted post is and when you should use it. She also shares two other types of ads which may be more appropriate for your first ad and may get you better results. Firstly, click to website ads and secondly, website conversion ads. These are two different types of ads which are not too hard to set up but may have much better results for you depending upon your goals. She gives you some examples of when you should potentially be thinking about using these. I’m going to leave it at that and hand over to Angela who’s prepared about seven minutes of content on this particular topic first, and then I’ll wrap it up at the end. Here’s Angela. Angela: Hey, it’s Angela from Dotti Media here. You can find me online at dottimedia.com. Today, I want to talk to you about some Facebook ads and just give you an explanation of some of the types of ads that you might be running as a blogger. The first one I want to talk to you about is boosted posts. One of the most common things that I hear from people that are running Facebook ads is, “I boosted my post but it didn’t work because nobody came to my website and bought my stuff.” Before we can answer that question and realize that it may not actually be a problem with your Facebook ad, you have to understand how Facebook ads work and how Facebook determines who to show those ads to. When you’re using Facebook, Facebook is tracking everything that you do. It’s tracking what photos, what videos you’re liking. It’s tracking if you’re commenting on things, it’s tracking if you’re sharing things. It’s using that information to build a database of your interests and your likes. The other thing that’s happening with Facebook is it’s also measuring what you’re doing off of Facebook. It’s measuring if you’re clicking on links and going to someone’s website. And then once you get to that website, it’s measuring how long you’re spending on that website and if you’re taking any actions on that website such as buying a product, signing up for somebody’s newsletter. Facebook really is the most amazing database of information on consumers that really exists in the world. As a business owner and a marketer, you have that information available to you to target your ads to. Let’s come back to the boosted post. Facebook determines objectives for each type of post. The objective of a boosted post within Facebook is to get engagement on that post within the Facebook platform. Therefore, it’s someone liking, commenting, or sharing that post within the platform. If you wanted to get people to see and read your blog post on your website, a boosted post is not the best way to do that. When would you use a boosted post? Well, if I gave you an example of when I’ve used one for Dotti Media, we wanted some feedback from the fans of our page. We asked a question on the page. I wanted as many people as possible to see that post so I boosted it. I boosted it to the fans of the page so that I could get engagement on that post. That’s an example of when you might want to use a boosted post as well. I know it’s really, really tempting to hit that boost post button because it’s right there in front of you on Facebook, but the one thing I really need to challenge you to do before you hit it and before you run any ads is to be completely clear on what action you want people to take once they see your ad. If you do want somebody to click through to your website, then you should run clicks to website ad. Let’s talk about click to website ads and how you set them up. Well, as I said, the aim of that from Facebook’s perspective is to get people to click out to your website. They are going to show that ad to people that have historically indicated within their actions on Facebook that they like to click on links to websites. I’ll give you an example from my own personal experience. My mom uses Facebook to connect with me and see my photos and my kids, but she never ever clicks through to our website. Facebook is not going to show her an ad or my new blog post because she’s not going to click on it. As I’ve said, it’s a super database for individuals and for marketers to tap into, although it does seem a bit creepy sometimes. When you set up a clicks to website ad, it’s essentially just you clicking a link in your Facebook status update. Often times I’m sure if you have your Facebook page, you’ll copy the URL of your latest blog post and you’ll just paste it onto the status update box. That essentially becomes the clicks to website ad. And then, you’d have to go into the ads manager to set it up as your clicks to website. The next one on from a clicks to website, and one that people often get confused about and they mix it up with the clicks to website ad is a website conversion ad. I like to look at these ads and instead you start with the boost post, and then the clicks to website, and then the website conversion ad. The difference between the website conversion ad and the clicks to website ad is that the conversion ad is when you want someone to take an action on your website. For example, you want them to give you their email address in exchange maybe for your free opt-in or just to get on your newsletter, or the conversion could be that someone buys your product. It’s an action that somebody takes on your website. As I said, Facebook is measuring and monitoring these things all the time so it knows the people that like to buy things online, that like to sign up for newsletters. If you run a website conversion ad, then it’s going to show your ad to those people that are most likely to take that action. Obviously, there is a little bit more of setup on your website because you have to be able to track that conversion. I haven’t mentioned the Facebook pixel. It’s basically a little piece of code, sits on your website, and it allows Facebook to track visitors from Facebook. That’s how it gets all this information. When you’re running the website conversion ad, there is a little bit more code that you have to add to your website. It’s a little bit more advanced, but I can talk about that in another session. But then, it really is a powerful ad and it can give you lots of insight into your audience and it can really help you narrow down who you wanna target with future ads. That’s a quick say into three of the most common ads that you might want to run as a blogger. Darren: I hope you found that useful. Thank you, Angela, it’s nice to have another accent on the show as well. I look forward to introducing you to her again in the future. She’s going to be writing some blog posts over on the blog. Also, I’d love to get her back on the podcast as well to take some of your questions. If you’ve got any questions about what she’s just said or the next steps, I would highly recommend that you head over to the show notes of this particular podcast at problogger.com/podcast/129. There’s an option there to leave questions in two ways. Firstly, you can leave a comment and ask your question there. Angela may be so kind as to answer that question live, but we’ll also take some of those questions in the next podcast episode that I do with Angela and do more of an interview style podcast. You can also leave a question via audio over on the show notes as well. You see a big green button which invites you to leave me an audio message. You’ve got a couple of minutes to share your message although briefer is better, and we’ll play that on that particular show as well if it’s one that we think is appropriate. Again, go to problogger.com/podcast/129 and let us know what your Facebook advertising questions are. We also will have an episode in the coming months on organic Facebook reach, we’ve got a social media subject matter expert on that particular topic coming up for you as well. I look forward to that one. Make sure you’re subscribed and you’ll get notified when that one goes live. Thanks for listening today and we’ll chat with you in a couple of days time with Episode 130. How did you go with today’s episode? If you have any more questions for Angela, please leave them here by comment or audio. We will answer some of those in the next podcast. Never miss an episode – Subscribe to the ProBlogger podcast on iTunes Got a Question You’d Like Me to Answer? I base many episodes of this podcast upon questions answered by ProBlogger Podcast listeners and Blog readers. You can use the following widget to ask a question. Please include your name and blog name (if you have a blog).   Enjoy this podcast? Sign up to our ProBloggerPLUS newsletter to get notified of all new tutorials and podcasts below.

Note: we’ve now started adding full transcripts to our podcasts. Scroll down to find todays one. Getting Started With Your Own Podcast Today is this podcasts first birthday! That’s right – I launched this thing with those first 31 daily episodes back at the end of June 2015 and while we quickly scaled things back to twice a week, I managed to keep things running for a whole year thanks to the support of my team! I’ve completely fallen in love with podcasting as a medium and thought about making this a show about the lessons I’ve learned podcasting in the last year but given that I did a show like that back in Episode 50, I thought I’d reach out to a podcasting friend of mine – Brooke McAlary from Slow Your Home who started 3 months before me as a podcaster after having blogged successfully for a few years previously. Brooke has fallen so in love with podcasting that she’s fully transitioned Slow Your Home away from being a blog to being a podcast and has gone on to start a podcasting network at JackRabbit.fm. The network has 6 podcast shows in it already with more to come. Her Slow Your Home podcast just went past the one million download mark already so she’s had some real success! This chat covers a lot of ground but largely focuses upon her transition to becoming a podcaster and what practical lessons she learned along the way about podcasting. It’s perfect for anyone wanting to start podcasting and covers: Brooke’s journey of going from a blogger to a podcaster Practical tips on how to get a podcast up and running The tools and technical aspects of Brooke’s setup that you should consider Thoughts on how to decide what content format to go with (interview vs talking head vs co hosted) How to push past the fear and other obstacles in your head How to launch with a bang to maximise reach How Brooke is monetising her podcast Why Brooke started a podcast network And there’s much much more! Listen to this episode above or over on iTunes. For those of you preferring to read – we’ve included a full Transcript of the show below! Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Darren: Hi there, my name is Darren Rowse and welcome to Episode 128 of the ProBlogger podcast. Today, I’m celebrating the first year anniversary of the start of this podcast. It was exactly one year ago, 30th of June 2015 that I kicked things off. I thought about doing a show today on what I’ve learned since then. I did a similar show back in Episode 50, but instead of doing that I thought what I would do is pick the brains of another podcaster who used to be a blogger, Brooke McAlary from slowyourhome.com and also the founder of the Jack Rabbit Podcast network.  She’s an Aussie blogger who lives in Sydney, a mom, a wife, a blogger and that’s what we’re going to talk about in today’s episode. Brooke has brought a wealth of information to today’s chat. I interview her over the next hour so you want to grab a cup of your favorite beverage and we’re going to talk about her journey from going from a blogger to a podcaster. She’s going to give you some practical tips on how to get a podcast up and running, particularly from the perspective of a blogger. We’re going to talk about the technical stuff you need to know, how to decide what content format to go with. We’re going to talk about how to push past some of the obstacles that are in your head, some of the fear associated with podcasting, some of those comparisons that we feel as podcasters and bloggers as well, how to launch your podcast, how to monetize your podcast and why she started a podcast network, and then there’s a whole heap of other stuff including a couple of attempts at humor which I’m not sure how that went but as I mentioned during the show, I’m getting tired, it’s getting towards the end of a busy time for me and we’re about to go on holiday so please forgive me for my attempts at humor during the show today. I hope you really do enjoy this. I had a ball interviewing Brooke and I encourage you to check out what she’s doing over at sellyourhome.com and the Jack Rabbit Podcast Network, jackrabbit.fm. You can also find today’s show notes over at ProBlogger.com/podcast/128. Thanks for listening and I’ll wrap things up at the end of the chat. Brook, how do you introduce yourself to new people? How do you describe yourself? Booke: That’s a good question. I do now describe myself as someone who runs a podcast network. I think that’s probably the thing that I usually lead with and then people will go either what’s the podcast or how do you do that and why is that a job? I’ll often then talk about my podcast and I guess how it sort of grew and I became more and more passionate about the medium of podcasting and decided to launch a network. That’s a way that I will introduce myself. Darren: Two years ago, how would you have introduced yourself? Brooke: I would’ve said a writer, two years ago. Darren: Okay, so there’s been a bit of a transition there which is interesting. I love your story in that you kind of started your online presence out of your own personal journey and time you’re going through. I wonder if you can give listeners just a quick insight into how you started blogging and we’ll slowly be digging into podcasting, but where did it all begin for you? Brooke: It was about 6 years ago and I was struggling significantly in my personal life. It’s like everything was good but everything was also not good at all. I was diagnosed with postnatal depression after our second child was born and as part of that process and the treatment, it was very strongly recommended to me that I start to chill out a little bit and simplify my life somewhat. That was not an easy suggestion for me to hear but I slowly started to recognize that something had to give and I was Googling, literally Googling how do I simplify my life and the ultimate irony is that that says 70 people have found me in the years after but I found Leo Debate’s blog, Zen Habits, and I realized that there was this whole group of people around the world who felt similarly and had decided that actually they’re going to live with less. It was yes, less stuff, but also less stress and less expectations and less commitment and less overwhelm, less debt and anxiety, and you know all these things.  I realized when I was reading this blog that I wanted to be one of those people and for the first time, the idea of simplifying and slowing down actually appealed a lot to me. From there, I started to make changes to our home and my life and I started to write about it. I had dabbled in blogging before but never anything with a real strong purpose. I launched Slow Your Horn in September of that year I think. I started writing about my own process of decluttering specifically and people started paying attention. I slowly shifted into the idea of slow living rather than necessarily simplifying and decluttering over the coming years. That’s really where I found my groove. Darren: Did you start with an audience in mind or was it more self-expression, or a bit of both? Brooke: It was a bit of both, actually. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t hope for it to grow and the audience to grow and people to start finding value in what I was writing, but it also helped me alot to—I guess I don’t really know what I’m thinking until I’ve written it. That’s really how I process information and transformation. Part of it was absolutely me just working stuff out and the other part was certainly to try and help people then eventually help more people. Darren: Did the content on the blog start what I’m discovering that type of content, or was it how to type content, and has it changed? Brooke: Definitely what I’m discovering kind of content. It was a lot more introspective and that I think is what initially drew people to my writing. But over time, people then started asking me how to do things because it looked like from the outside that I had this stuff sorted out and people are asking how do I do this, and how do I do that? Not so much why do you do that. You definitely shift over the subsequent use to be more about how I could help other people work through this stage that they might have found themselves in. I think I actually shifted back towards more of a personal style of blogging before I shifted to the podcasting and I think that was probably symptomatic of the fact that I was a bit burnt out on the how to stuff which then led me into podcasting which we can talk about later. It definitely changed over the years. Darren: It’s interesting. We get a lot of questions from people about do I need to be an expert in a field before I can start blogging. and I always talk about my experience at ProBlogger starting at telling my story of what I was discovering and it sounds like you had a similar experience and then became perceived as the expert as the result of sharing what you were learning. Brooke: Exactly, and I certainly wasn’t and still would not ever put myself out there as someone who knows a whole heap about simple living and slow living other than what I personally experienced. There was always the tension there for me in producing that how to content. I try for it to be as authentic and helpful as possible, but I also did feel like why would you listen to me because I’m only just working stuff out too. Darren: Yeah, it sounds like a bit of imposter syndrome. We just had an episode go live in the last couple of weeks, it was in that exact topic. Do you have any words of wisdom for anyone who’s struggling with imposter syndrome or are you the wrong person to ask? Brooke: I am so the wrong person to ask. I’ve got that episode lined up to listen to next but I’ve read through the blog post just yesterday. That’s actually me. I think I made strides against that over the past few years, otherwise I probably would’ve given up by now. I certainly do find myself full of self doubt on most days, but I find a certain amount of faking it until you make it helps. Not in a way that makes you inauthentic, but a way that kind of says alright, you can do this, and you take that wobbly carriage that you talk about and just grab onto that and don’t worry about being the inner mean girl who comes along later and tells you that you’re full of it. Darren: Everyone needs to go and listen to Episode 121 about the sounds of things. Actually listen to it again yesterday because as much as I just published that I had a day yesterday where I suffered with it and had to go and rev myself up by listening to my podcast. It’s one we have to keep coming back to, I think it will be listened to a fair bit, that one. You started with a blog, did you have a tipping point with the blog or was it a slow growth? Brooke: It was pretty slow growth, pretty steady over the years. I think once I started connecting with other people in my area like Joshua Becker and the guys from The Minimalist and Courtney Cober, we started to really share each other’s work and we found a commonality. Then, people started to become more aware of the blog and then my name started getting mixed in with those names of those people. I think that if there was a tipping point, that probably would have been it. That was really just a case of relationships and persistence and time and practice Darren: Things evolved from just a blog. How did you start the podcast? Why did you start it? Was there a moment of insight that really propelled you into that or was that a bit of a slow bend too? Brooke: No, actually it was the opposite. It was really almost an impulsive thing to try. I had been interviewed for quite a few podcasts over the last six months before we launched and really enjoyed it. I didn’t expect to enjoy it. I don’t love the sound of my own voice or anything like that and I’m constantly hoping that what I’m saying is useful. I’ve really enjoyed the process of getting to know someone and then people getting to know me by listening to me rather than reading my words. I’m a big podcast fan myself, I listen to a lot of podcasts and have done for years and really love the connection I feel with the people whose shows I listen to. I don’t know them but I really feel like I do know them at least in some way. I said to my husband I’m thinking of starting a podcast, he’s like cool. I recorded five episodes and they were not great, but I pushed them all in the first week and people seemed really excited about the prospect and I kind of just kept going and it grew from there. It was definitely something that I kind of weighed up a lot of the time, it was just try and see. Darren: That was April, 2015, you’re 15 months in now. Give us a before and after glimpse of what impact the podcast has had in terms of reach, and also impact that it’s had on your audience. Has it been indifferent to the blog? Brooke: Oh yeah, it’s been enormous. In numbers, sure, but more in the way people connect with me. I found that engagement on Facebook particularly has taken off and Instagram as well because people really feel like we’re friends, we know each other and that’s something that was very rarely there with the writing. People would write to me privately and say it’s like you’re in my head when I was blogging more regularly. But with the podcast it was something different, it was a real life connection that people had. I obviously still publish two blog posts a week when I publish episodes of the podcast. The numbers have jumped a little bit on the blog and comments and things like that have dropped right off which is to be expected because the different forms of communication. The show was just about to be downloaded for the millionth time and that is significantly more than the readers that I would have had a year ago on the blog. It’s changed my relationship with the people that read and listen to what I have to say. Darren: That’s fantastic. Congratulations, that’s awesome. Are you going to have a party? Brooke: Oh yeah, I think I will. Darren: I know as people are listening, they’re wanting to ask you questions so I’ve pulled together some of the most frequently asked questions that I get around the practicalities of getting a podcast up and running because I think a lot of our listeners are overwhelmed by the technology and some of these sorts of questions. I know it’s the wrong place to start talking about technology, everyone always wants to know what microphone we use. Maybe if we can start off with some of the technology type stuff, what do you recommend if someone’s just starting out, that they need in terms of the physical stuff but also some of the software and things like that that you would use or recommend? Brooke: Straight out of the gate, I still use an Audio Technica 2100 with the up filter and it’s just a run-of-the-mill USB mic that I bought on Amazon, about $70. It’s been fine. We will probably upgrade at some point this year because we know that this is a long-term thing that we’re doing now we can afford to put a bit more money into our sound and our equipment. But really, you just need some form of microphone to capture your voice to begin with. I know people who have started a podcast who was just using their mic on their laptop. I think it’s more about how you use the equipment that you have rather than the equipment itself. I would always say as important as your microphone or your recording equipment is the room that you sit in and the sounds that you get from the room that you sit in so nothing too echoey, not too many hard surfaces that sound bounces around off. I think as long as you have a way to record that and it’s listenable, it’s fine. There’s a handful of really decent USB microphones that you can pick up for between $40 and $100 if that’s something that you really do want to start with. You’re probably going to be quite happy using that for years. In terms of software, I record most of my interviews by Skype so I just use [00:15:52] call recorder to record both sides of the conversation. If it’s just a solo show or my husband and I are doing a host’s only show, we record in GarageBand. We’ve got two mics, obviously, and we just record straight into GarageBand. I do all of the production on audition now and Ben used to do all the production on Audacity but we’ve just changed to Audition recently, and that’s it. You need a host of some description, you can host your podcast on your own website but I wouldn’t recommend that because bandwidth and things like that will very soon get sucked up. I’ve just changed over to Omni for hosting, I was with Libsyn and there’s Blubrry, those are a handful of quite inexpensive media hosts. I think once you got a way to record and capture that audio, a way to edit even just very light editing, top it with some music and then a way to publish it. That’s really the three main things you need. Darren: Did you have any help setting it up or any resources that you found helpful to help walk you through the setting up of feeds and getting into iTunes and that type of thing? Brooke: I did and I’ve been a member of fizzle.co for a few years. They had a podcasting basics course which will talk you through the real essentials of getting the show recorded, basic editing and then publishing to iTunes add various other platforms. That was really helpful. I think the thing that I discovered was I thought that was it. Once I knew that, that was it. I think the more you learn, the more you realize there is to learn. It’s kind of important to not get too deep into the really nitty-gritty of the technical stuff, otherwise you can just get buried and it will be months before you emerge with the show. Darren: Yeah, I’ve seen people get so bogged down on which microphone to buy that it takes them three months to make that decision. You can start light. If you go back to the start of almost every podcast, you see that it evolves over time so much. The more you know, the more you need to know. There’s plenty of time to learn. What do you think aspiring podcasters should be asking about? They always ask about the microphone, what should they be really asking about? What’s more important in your mind that you should be thinking about before you launch or before you even start recording? Brooke: I think really the most important thing to ask is why you’re doing this. What do you want to create with the podcast. That really takes into consideration your audience. Whether or not you want to simply entertain people or educate or inspire them or a combination of all three, and then think about your message and what you want to share and how that is going to do those things for your audience. It’s also helpful I think to ask yourself what you want to get out of the project, if you want to increase your readership of your blog or sell more of your product or become known as an authority in your niche or your area of expertise. I think depending on what your answers are to those questions, that’s really going to shape the way your podcast comes together because I think—there is literally thousands of combinations of show formats and elements that you can pull in. The way your show looks is certainly partly what you enjoy and what you want your show to look like, but it’s also about the people who are going to be listening to it and what’s going to serve them well and what they are going to get the most out of it. I think the contents obviously is more important than the technology but it’s easy to kind of toss out decisions on microphones or editing software. It’s a question that people come to later or even on the fly as they’re starting to record. I think it’s definitely key to sit down and think about that stuff before you start recording. Darren: Your first question there was what are you aiming to do for your audience, educate, entertain, inspire. What did you decide for your first podcast because now you have six in the network, two of which you’re fairly heavily involved with on air. Let’s go back to the Slow Your Home podcast, what did you decide? Was it education, inspiration? Brooke: It was mostly the latter two; educate and inspire initially. It’s interesting to see how it’s changed over the past 15 months. I didn’t think that I necessarily had the chops to educate people myself, so I decided pretty much straight from the get go that I would be interviewing people who had insights into a certain area of slow living or something that was related to slow living, something that I knew my audience wanted to know more about and I didn’t have the ability to talk to them with any authority. That was one of the big reasons why I decided on the interview format. The entertainment stuff kind of came in a little bit later, but I realize that when people like you, when people feel warm about you as a person, they don’t have to think you’re awesome, funny, or clever but they like your company, then I think they’re going to stick around even more and listen to episodes that maybe they wouldn’t have necessarily thought would’ve been something they’re interested in which is something that people tell me a lot now. The entertainment stuff sort of came into it a little later. It’s not cracking jokes or anything like that but really just becoming more personable and not just about delivering information to the audience. Darren: Interesting. I love that you started with I want to educate and then the question came, the format. You felt you would I would educate, I suspect you’ve got a lot of information you could deliver so you went with the interview. For me, I decided I wanted to educate as well but had a whole heap of information that I knew was ready to go, so I decided on more of a talking head type podcast. We both kind of gone the same direction but decided based on our circumstances to format it in a different way. Brooke: I think part of that is also the topic as well. With the work that you do, there are areas of blogging and monetizing and working online that you can kind of deliver in almost tutorial style fashion.I I worry with Slow Living because it’s not as black-and-white and it really applies to people’s circumstances in completely different sorts of ways. I don’t like the idea of saying there’s only one way to do it. Darren: So you unpacking it with another person helps people to see different perspectives. I love that. The second question you said to ask was what do you hope to get out of the project, what did you want to get out of Slow Your Home when you started it? Brooke: I initially wanted to get out of writing blog posts. I thought that it would be less time intensive than writing my weekly blog posts. That is a completely honest answer. I also did want to connect with people, i wanted to try something new and also I had noticed that there weren’t many podcasts in my area of self-improvement I guess in Australia. I thought that did show that there was a real potential there to cut through and maybe get in touch with new people in a different kind of way. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t hoping to build a profile as well and all of those things have kind of played into it over time. Darren: Let’s shift to content. We’ve already kind of touched on format. You’ve got interviews, you can do a co hosted show, you can do a talking head type show and there’s probably others as well. How would you advise people to make that decision? We’ve kind of touched on some of it but do you have anything else that you’d add to that? Brooke: I think it also helps to know what you’d be comfortable with, I think some people are quite comfortable just sitting in front of their computer and delivering a talking heads show. They might map out what they want to say and just work through those points and be really comfortable with that, whereas other people feel more energized maybe, and energy is a really important part of a podcast. Some people feel more energized if they’re sitting with a co-host or they take turns presenting with a co-host. You can really mash them up together and try new things and see what works, but I think it is important to kind of question where your strengths lie and also understand where your strengths don’t lie and try and create a format that works to support both of those areas. Darren: I think probably looking around at what other people are doing is one to consider as well. If everyone is doing interviews in your particular topic, there’s probably an opportunity there to take a slight different approach. Brooke: Absolutely. Also what you enjoy listening to. I think that’s a big part bcos you’re going to be doing this long term. If it energizes you to be doing interviews, wonderful. If it doesn’t, if you find that really quite exhausting, then maybe mix it up or try something else. Darren: In your network at the moment, you’ve got six podcasts going, two of which are single host shows and four of which I think are co-hosted. Do you have any reflections from getting them together to the production level, what’s easier, and what’s done better. Have you noticed any results yet? Brooke: Some of the shows are only quite new, we’re only 10 or 11 episodes in so it’s hard to pull anything particularly concrete out of it. People do tend to want the conversational, co-hosted style shows because I think they enjoy the idea that they’re sitting in on a conversation between friends. That’s something that Carly and Stacy are getting really good feedback on. It’s like literally listening to a conversation about [00:26:33] with friends and having a glass of wine. It’s a real social feel. Then, you’ve got Nick Avery’s show, This Family Life or The Thoughtful Travel Podcast with Amanda where they are delivering pockets of conversation about a particular topic which is in an interview style, but then it’s broken up with solo hosted parts of the show as well. I think just in a practical sense, there’s more editing and post-production involved in those sort of shows too. They’re perfectly suited to the the topic that they cover because it really is informational and very kind of inspiring and educational and it just delivers them really sharply, those bits of information whereas the conversational shows might have a broader base of of topics and the subjects can be really quite wide-ranging. I think that suits that lends itself to more conversational co-hosted style show. Again, I think it depends on what you’re trying to to share with people and the style of the message and the style of the topic that you’re covering as well as the people involved and what they would prefer. Darren: I love in your network, you’ve got the co-hosted shows quite a different personality as well and I kind of—I know you and Kelly in yours come from slightly different perspectives, probably similar values and goals and that type of thing but very different personalities. I think that comes out of it really well, so probably one thing to factor into choosing a co-host if you go that direction. Brooke: There’s been a number of times that we’ve been told that it would be interesting if people would disagree, and that’s happened with Ben and I on our show too. People quite enjoyed the accidental relative and unedited show where we did have an argument. I think people get a better sense of you as a person and your relationship when they hear you coming out from a different point of view. It’s always fun to put two different styles of personality together. Darren: I think you’re completely wrong there. [laughter] I’m ready for a holiday, things are falling apart here. Let’s talk about getting going and I think a lot of the obstacles that I struggled with when I started my podcast were internalized obstacles, they were just the way I was thinking, insecurities. Do you have any tips on that beginning process, getting past those obstacles that come your way? Brooke: Those comparisons are really thought to let go of. I’ve felt the same thing and I think the only way that I got through it was to record those first five episodes and hand them to my husband and get him to edit them. I didn’t go back and I wasn’t at pains to listen to the number of times I said um or stumbled over my words or sounded like I was getting breathless. I just think at some point you need to commit to it, record them, don’t kind of go back over them with a fine-tooth comb and look at all the things you could have done better because I think when you’re doing that, you’re comparing yourself to maybe Amy Porterfield or Will Anderson or the guys that put together Cereal and things like that. You’re saying why aren’t I better? The reality is those guys are professionals and they’ve been pulling together audio programming for a long, long time. That was very much my headspace, I was comparing myself to these professionals. The way I got past it was to simply run straight past and get those first few episodes out as quickly as possible. You know what, I still haven’t listened to them, I will not listen to my own voice. Darren: That is a tough one. How do you get comfortable with finding your voice and style in terms of talking on your podcast? Brooke: I think there’s two elements to that. Part of it is just getting used to how you sound, which I have not been able to do so I just don’t listen to it and try not to think too much about it once it’s been said. The other part is those first episodes, those first months for me, it was sort of the first 12 months really where I felt I was still trying to find my feet and find my actual voice and my my energy in my presentation style and the way that I question people and to stop comparing it to the way other people do it. I don’t think that there is a shortcut to be honest, I think it’s just committing to those project long term and understanding that it will get better over time and being okay with that. I listened to Notice Podcast, it’s one of my favorites. They’ve been publishing for six, or seven years and someone asked Chris Hardwick recently how long did it take until you felt like you were yourself and you were doing a good job on air. He said at least two years. I by initially found that really disheartening, but it’s actually quite liberating when you think about it because you just allow yourself to basically practice in public and you know it takes time to find your feet and I think it was nice to realize that someone who I view as a professional who is a very skilled interviewer took that long to find their feet and start producing a podcast that he was really happy with, I figured that it’s okay for me. Darren: Malcolm Clowes always talks about 10,000 hours before you kind of are at a level where you’re capable of doing something, or an expert in something. I think with blogging, it’s certainly probably the first thousand posts you write really until you find your voice and probably the first hundred or 200 episodes of your podcast before you begin to feel comfortable with yourself and get over some of those insecurities. I don’t think they ever really go away. What about creating content? You hinted there with your first five episodes, you batched. Is that something you continue, batch create your work? Brooke: I do when I can. We do that for the other shows on the network, typically we’ll get together and maybe record two or three episodes at a time. We publish weekly, it’s really nice to kind of have two to four weeks in the can ahead of time. That’s something that I’m responsible for doing almost all the post production on all the shows, so for me that’s kind of a necessity just so that I don’t lose my mind every Friday making sure that everything’s ready for the following Monday and the following weeks really. That definitely just allows for people to get sick and allows for technical issues and for people’s internet to get cut off and it doesn’t ruin the consistency of publishing which I think is really important. With the Slow Home Podcast specifically, we started doing something new which is a monthly experiment. Every Monday, my husband and I will sit down and talk for 10 or 15 minutes about the experiment that we’re currently doing and how we’re finding it. That is pretty much recorded in real time, and that is definitely more stressful. I would always recommend, unless you’re doing something that’s super interactive and essentially recording a live podcast, then I would definitely recommend batching for the first six months until you find your groove. Darren: I think it really does help in those early times to get into the flow of editing, particularly if you’re doing your own editing. You need to build a system or a workflow almost, is that what you’ve got? Brooke: I do, I got it quite tightly locked down now, actually. Since bringing on the other shows into the network, it’s been very helpful for me because I’m communicating with the host and the creators of the show. I pulled together a workflow document that goes to everyone now. Everyone knows what needs to happen, when, and how much lead time we need, what documentation I need in terms of show notes and things like that ahead of time. It’s been so helpful now to be able to plot exactly where I’m at with every show for every week and to be able to get three or four weeks out is just my dream. Darren: One of the things that you touched on earlier was your energy level. Energy levels are so important when it comes to podcasting. I listened to your first episode, re-listened to it again recently, and I’ve noticed that you’ve changed a lot from those first ones. You seem to have a little bit more energy. Do you have any tips on how to bring a bit more energy to your shows? Brooke: The first ones I’m quite sure are horrifying. Darren: I really enjoyed them because it’s Slow Your Home. I think if anyone can get away with a slower, lower key podcast, it’s you. It’s your personality as well. Something has changed and I’m not really sure what it is. Brooke: I think it’s just confidence. Those first few episodes, I did pretty much read them which was fine because at least the solo show, the interview ones, I didn’t. The first solo shows I pretty much scripted out. In a way, that was fine because I don’t think I necessarily sounded like I was reading and there was certain bits of information that I really wanted to walk people through. It was kind of going back to that tutorial style show that you and I were talking about a minute ago because I wanted to give people valuable information and that was the only way that I could trust that I could get through all the steps and all the parts that I want to cover. I think that did reflect in my energy levels, and now I’m pretty much winging everything. I will usually have a list of general questions or talking points that I want to cover with a guest or even with Ben if we do a Hostful episode. I think that does just lend itself to more energy and a more natural way of talking. It does also help if I sit up straight, some people enjoy standing when they record. I’ve tried it, it doesn’t really work for me personally. Anything that gives you a bit of a lift, a bit of a boost. The other thing that I found, it’s just come with practice and I’m still not great at it but I’m certainly better. Those first episodes, I would record myself speaking for maybe two minutes and I’d be out of breath. I’d have to stop and I’d have to catch my breath. That doesn’t happen nearly as much anymore, and I think my husband does media training and he was watching me record one day. He’s like you’re talking out of the top of your chest, you’re not breathing into your diaphragm at all and that’s why you’re losing your breath. Having taken that on board has also helped me a lot and I’m a lot less breathy now. Darren: I think breathing is really important. I’ve never really had any training in it, but I think as someone who’s done public speaking, it’s something you learn to do. I never thought about that one. What about um’s and ah’s? Do you struggle with that? I find when I’m presenting solo, I don’t for some reason. But when I interview people, I do a lot more. Brooke: I think that’s partly just conversation as well. I think if you listen to a conversation with someone, there’s probably more stops and starts and um’s and ah’s than you actually think there would be. It’s not until you sit down and actually edit a conversation like that that you realize just how often they happen. That being said though, I have had to lock them down big time. The first 20 or 30 episodes, my husband obviously does the recording and he mentioned very kindly and gently that maybe I’d need to just start pausing a little bit if I feel an um or an ah coming on. That has definitely helped. That’s something that I say pretty much every new podcast, I have to work their way through. People will listen back to this show and just be horrified at the number of times I say um, or people have other verbal ticks. They’ll start every conversation with you know or well, or like like I just did then. I think it just takes time to recognize that coming on and to be able to come up with strategies to stop them from taking over your conversation. Darren: I practice it with my kids, actually. It’s a little game we play when they’re having their bath. We give each other a minute, and we have to speak for a minute without saying um or ah and we give each other a topic. It’s great training for them, they’ve improved so much with their own confidence, public speaking, I’m sure it will help them as well so maybe that’s a little game that people could play. Brooke: That is so cool, that’s a really fantastic idea. I would certainly benefit from that too with my kids. Darren: I say to them all the time there’s nothing wrong with silence as well, and silence can be a very powerful thing if you pause and then say something, then people are much more tuned into what you’re going to say next. Brooke: It’s so true. I think we’re terrified of leaving silence because it sort of makes us feel awkward or someone forgot to say their line. I think a well placed pause or even just a well intentioned pause can be really worthwhile and powerful. Darren: I’ve noticed, um. [laughter] I’ve noticed actually some of those more professional podcasters, they use silence from time to time and they stop the music and they stop everything and then they have this second or two seconds of silence and then they start. They do use it really well as an editing technique as well. Something to play with, I guess. Let’s talk about launching. We haven’t even gotten to launching yet. This might end up being a two-parter I think. Launching your podcast, any tips around getting that going? You seem to have come out of nowhere and it just seemed to be you’re new and noteworthy, you got features in a little bit more than that as well. Do you have any tips? I know that’s hard to have a tip on how to get featured, but any tips on launching it with a bit of a bang? Brooke: I think the more hype and excitement you can build in your audience if you have one before you launch, the better. There’s a few things that you can do when you’ve already got people in your corner that’s going to push you up as soon as you launch into either the chats or even you’re noteworthy. Something that I always recommend to people is to consider starting with an episode zero, and putting that out a couple of weeks before your actual launch week. That gives people the opportunity to see what you’re all about, get excited about the fact that you’ve got a podcast coming out. You can include in that episode zero just a basic introduction to who you are and why you’re doing the show, maybe a snippet or something like that of episode one to get people enticed, and then just ask people to subscribe. That means that when you do launch in a couple of weeks after that, the downloads first of all from those subscribers will be automatic so you’ll be getting a nice bump in numbers through iTunes straight away, and it also means that people are listening from day one. I think pair that episode zero with a strong launch week or a launch month. When I launched, I launched with five episodes in five days. After that first launch week, I went back to just one a week. You launched with 30 episodes in 30 days. Anything that gets people routinely listening to you and getting used to what you’re producing, and also practically speaking getting those downloads ticking over in the first month is going to help in getting you either on the chats or in Noteworthy. The new Noteworthy algorithm, I don’t know what it is, it’s a mystery. That’s Apple for you, they keep it all behind closed doors. It’s really helpful to be able to appear in the Note Worthy for your category or even across the whole iTunes store because then you’ll find yourself on the front page for up to three months I think is the maximum amount of time that you can appear. All of our shows on the network have found their way into Noteworthy and it absolutely makes a difference in picking up your readers and growing your audience that way. Darren: Do you have any views on how often you should publish once you get past that launch? Brooke: Not in terms of regularity. I think just choose a publishing schedule, and it’s really important to stick to it. I think that’s the most important thing. If you can only afford time-wise to publish one awesome podcast a month, the first day of every month, then make sure it’s there on the first day of every month and people will get used to it. If you’re going to publish twice a week, then make sure you have the time and the resources and the content to be able to publish twice a week for a year or six months a year, something like that. And then, you can get a feel for how people are listening to it and whether or not it’s enough or too much, and then you can shift it around. We launched in April and we took a few weeks off over Christmas of last year and then came back with two episodes a week. We were doing one episode a week and now we’re doing two. We wouldn’t have known to do that had we been playing around with our publishing schedule. Darren: Any view on length, an ideal length of show? Brooke: Interestingly, most people come to me and say I want to launch a show that’s about 15 to 20 minutes long, and then I’ll start producing shows and they organically become longer than that. I initially thought that the Slow Home podcast would be about 30 minutes, now our Thursday show runs anywhere up to an hour. The data that iTunes is sharing with podcasters is that long form audio is growing at a rate of nuts. Some of the biggest shows in the world are two plus hours long per episode. I think that’s really interesting, but I do also think there are some topics and some podcasts that are perfect at 10, 15 minutes, and there are some that are only five minutes long. There’s a long way of saying, there’s no perfect length. I quite enjoy long form conversations myself, and most of the podcasts I listen to run at about an hour. That’s just personal preference. Darren: I was talking to someone recently and they said they don’t like anything shorter than 20 minutes because they have to get their iPhone out and find another podcast and they might be on a walk or they might be washing the dishes or doing something with their hands and can’t change, so they won’t even listen to them if they’re short. I guess you gotta put yourself in the seat of your listener and think about what they are doing. One of the challenges I see a lot of podcasters having is that their listeners are often doing something while they’re listening and then calling them to do something else, calling them to some sort of action is tricky. Go listen to my show notes, most people can’t do that because they’re driving a car or they’re doing the dishes or doing the ironing or doing something else. Any tips on getting people to take action on your podcast? Brooke: That’s actually an interesting question. I think it’s part of the reason that I don’t see a huge flow over of people from listening to actually reading the show notes. I think more than anything, what I’ve discovered is it’s just repetition of a suggestion, of an action, rather than an immediate action that people are going to take. Similarly, were thinking Audible and Audible’s sponsorship code or something like that, people probably aren’t going to put down what they’re doing the second they hear it. But if they find themselves thinking about getting an audiobook from Audible, because it’s something that they’ve listened to maybe for the last three months. I do know a lot of people say that having a benefit, maybe a product or a download or something like that that people can only get from your website does help getting people over there. I do think that they’re just two completely separate mediums and sometimes it doesn’t cross over all that effectively. Just a consistent reminder rather than expecting people to go over and do that thing right now. Darren: Interesting. I guess most people are listening to a podcast on the mobile as well, so there’s another factor there that whatever you call them to do, they need to be able to do it probably on their mobile phone as well. Brooke: Exactly. Darren: You touched on Audible there as a sponsor. How do you monetize, how do you keep what you’re doing sustainable? You’ve got six of these in your network now, what’s the model? Brooke: That’s a tricky question. What we’re finding is we’re still working on it to be perfectly blunt and honest. It’s not something that is sustaining itself yet. I guess in a way, I find it trickier to work with brands because of my personal philosophy which is my personal brand of slow living and simple living, I’m not going to turn around and— Darren: Buy all this stuff! Brooke: Exactly. I do need to be and have always been really cautious about any kind of relationship that I have with brands. We’re finding though that as the network grows and more brands are interested in starting advertising on podcasts, the Australian brands particularly, they’re just really nervous about it. I think in the States, it’s not by accident that you hear the same 12 brands being advertised on most podcasts, it’s because of the vast majority of the other brands just aren’t there yet. We’re having to educate agencies and brands about the power of podcasting and it just came out in the last couple of weeks where people who listen to podcasts say that they are the least invasive form of advertising. I think that kind of stuff is really powerful for brands who do want to start advertising on podcasts. I honestly don’t think that’s going to be a long term thing that we’re going to pursue at all because I’m starting to see a shift towards people being really happy to financially support people who create the content that we listen to. We do have a patreon page for the Slow Home podcast, we’ve got already 50 people who contribute to that every month and that’s really nice, it helps cover hosting and things like that. I’m starting to get emails from people saying how can we support you which I think is a good sign. The other thing that we’re also looking at doing with most of our podcast is bringing on a product that the host or the creator of the shows has put together specifically for the podcast audience or that’s something that they produce already and advertise for that thought their podcast. That will be the way that most shows will be monetized. I’ve seen that in quite a few podcasts that I listen to where the creators have stepped away from the traditional advertising relationship and started to create something specifically for their audience. From what I’ve seen, that’s been quite successful. That’s probably the second and the bigger area that we’re starting to look into. Darren: That’s certainly something—we played around a little bit with advertising but probably of all the shows we’ve done, less than 10% has been sponsored by anything other than ProBlogger or our event or one of our ebook or something that we’re doing at the time. I think that’s definitely a worthwhile approach unless you get someone who perfectly aligns with your brand, and there’s probably a few of those as well that we’ve worked with. What’s your approach on show notes? Brooke: I pull them together, they suck the life out of me I have to say. It’s not my favorite job. I do think it’s important for people to get a feel for what your show is about. We’ll put together maybe two or three paragraphs of show notes just for iTunes and that will point people towards either the Slow Home website or to Jack Rabbit FM where all the show notes live. We’ll just do a basic rundown of the conversation and list any resources, any links, any books, any other podcast episodes and allow people to discover things really easily. I started out writing incredibly comprehensive show notes with bullet points for the entire conversation. I found I was spending maybe three hours doing that and I didn’t see much return on that. I think I did that mostly because I had a small group of readers who were just adamantly against listening to podcasts. They say we really want you to keep blogging, so I was trying to please them and provide value to them with the show notes while also pulling together the podcast. I just found it a really vexing task. It depends on the kind of conversation and shows. I listen to a lot of comedy podcasts and things like that, and they don’t need lots of show notes. But if you’re doing something that is very practical or a how to sort of episode or with loads of resources, then it could be really worthwhile for you to provide in depth show notes. I think that’s a long way of saying, it depends on the show notes. Darren: We’re moving towards more and more detail in ours, and that’s just a push back from readers or listeners. I suspect that’s because we did have a sizable blog reading audience and audience of bloggers who prefer to get the information that way. We’re definitely moving almost to a transcript of our shows. Probably one of our best read show notes recently was one that Kelly Hexeda did who is one of your podcasters. She recorded the podcast for us and then she rewrote her ten minutes of content as a blog post and that was the show notes. That went very well with our readers, it was a bit of a test for us. Brooke: That’s really interesting to know actually because transcripts and pulling them together into resources is something that we’ve been tossing about as well. So many of our shows are packed with nuggets of information and tips. Okay, that’s interesting. Darren: Some reasonable transcript services out there who will do a show for $20 if it’s an hour or so. It’s another expense, and it was one that I wasn’t willing to pay for in the early days of having a podcast that wasn’t making any money but it’s certainly something that we’re moving towards now with our editing system. Question that I get quite a bit from new podcasters is—I know what the answer is but I’ll ask anyway—what is a good number of downloads for an episode? What should someone be aiming for? Perhaps a better way of asking is do you pay attention, do you have a threshold in your mind as a successful show, are you paying attention to download numbers, how do you measure success of what you’re doing? Brooke: I used to pay much closer attention to download numbers and not dissimilar to what I was like with my blog. I used to check my analytics religiously for years and over the years as other metrics like engagement started to improve, I didn’t worry so much about page fuse and things like that. I’ve kind of been similar in my approach to podcast numbers. I will still check them, of course, to make sure that we haven’t had any massive dips or big spikes and try to figure out why that has happened. I started out with the number 10,000 download an episode in my head, and I think that was mostly from resources that I found online about getting sponsors for the show, 10,000 downloads per episode is really what a sponsor is going to be looking for before they start engaging with you. In my experience, that hasn’t really been the case anyway. It’s not some magic number where if you’re getting 9,000 per episode by the time you get 10,000 you got brands knocking on your door. I think it’s a nice round number that people like to be able to aim for and you’re going to give a brand or a partner a good decent return, they’re going to get in touch with a decent sized audience. Now, we’re kind of hitting about 15,000 downloads in the first week, and then obviously peaks out significantly after that. We’re still getting lots of downloads on our first shows which simply shows me that people are still discovering the show and enjoying what they hear, going back and listening to it from the beginning. I feel awkward talking specific numbers because it just doesn’t matter. If what you’re doing is helping the people who are listening, you could be connecting with 500 people in a really helpful, authentic, valuable way every week and changing their lives or changing their business or you could be speaking to 100,000 people who don’t care what you’re saying. I know which one I would prefer. I think it depends on your goal in terms of downloads and things like that if you’re looking to work with advertisers, then sure the higher the better as far as the advertiser’s concerned. In terms of engagement, I don’t think the numbers has got a lot to do with it at all. Darren: I think it probably depends on the monetization as well if you choose to monetize with your own brand and you probably have a more engaged audience and it’s perhaps easier to make a dollar off of it. Not that it’s just about making the dollar. Do you think you’re going to be podcasting for the long term? You’re obviously investing more and more time into it. You started as a blogger and you’re not blogging anymore. Is there some tension there with you? Are you comfortable with that? What’s next? Brooke: There is a bit of tension there. I found myself missing writing more recently, actually. That’s probably something that I’m not willing to kiss goodbye completely. I have fallen completely for the medium of podcasting. I can see us in this for the long haul. We’re also starting to work on podcasting in a different kind of way and taking it to larger organizations and using it as an internal communications kind of method because I think that the spoken word is so powerful and people connect with the information that they listen to in most instances more than when they sit down and read information, particularly for internal communications and stuff like that in an organization. That’s something that I can see a real potential with podcasting moving forward, using it in different sorts of ways. Just the way that you can connect with people and have a genuine impact on people’s days and on the things that they do. It could be an impact on their day in terms of making them laugh, but it could also be an impact on their day in terms of shifting the way they think about themselves, or their home, or their work, or their family. I just had never seen that to that extent when I was writing. I’ll be in it for the long haul, it’s going to be absolutely fascinating to see what the industry does and how it changes over the next four years because I think we’re just seeing it reborn in the past 18 months, two years. I think it’s going to change a lot. Darren: The network, why did you start a network of podcasts and would you recommend that for other people who maybe already have a podcast? Is there some sense in having more than one? Brooke: The network really was partly because I saw the impact that sharing a particular message or an idea could have. I knew personally a handful of people who would benefit from that and who we’ve had conversations about starting a podcast. The vast majority of them said I really want to, but I just don’t have the bandwidth or the capacity to take another project or I don’t have any idea about the technical side of it. I discovered over the past 12 months that I actually really like that side of it, I quite enjoy editing, I quite enjoy setting up the feed and all that kind of stuff. I saw that I could help people start to spread their message and their word around. It felt right as far as recommending it, absolutely. It’s really satisfying, but it is a lot of work. If you’re not scared off by the idea of all the technical stuff, then I would definitely recommend it. I think there’s power in pulling similar voices together and doing something as a group. That’s what we’re finding, they might discover one of our shows and as a result of that they then start to listen to another show and another show. Before they know it, they’re listening to all six. That to me is really fun. I really enjoy hearing that. Darren: Are you cross providing them? Brooke: Not a lot, not actively and not specifically. In probably a handful of shows across the network, we’ll mention—particularly with Kelly—Kelly and I host a show and then she and Carly Jacobs host a show. They will often mention each other’s shows and similarly with Carly and Stacy doing [01:02:14]. It’s sort of more an organic thing, I do think that that’s something we’ll start to do more of over the coming months. We’re also working on a network app which will help with cross show discoverability and things like that. Darren: I’ve discovered so many shows by them being featured on other shows. It kind of makes sense I think to have some sort of mentioning in a formal way, I guess. Brooke: Gimlet does that really well, actually, with their shows. Darren: It can almost get a little bit over if every guest is from the network. I think it’s certainly some benefits there. Do you think with the network it would make sense to have similar style shows or similar topics? Is that what you’re going to be doing? You’ve got a bit of variety there, but there’s perhaps some overlap between the shows? Brooke: There is overlap in most situations. It’s something Ben and I have spoken about a lot because we’ve got quite a few ideas for shows that wouldn’t necessarily fit in with shows that we’ve currently got. I think we’re going to try and see how it goes. The common point is us I guess and it’s things that we enjoy and we like. We’re not completely weird people, so I imagine other people with similar interests. We got to try and broaden the scope of the shows over the next 12 months. We’ve got another couple coming on in July which is really exciting. It may sort of fit in with what we’re currently offering, but I think by the end of the year we’ll have a bit of a broader base of subjects. We’re just going to see how it goes. Darren: Excellent. Where can people find you, slowyourhome.com is that. Where else should my listeners be heading right now? Brooke: They can head to jackrabbit.fm, it’s the home of the network. You can find out about our shows and a little bit about us. slowyourhome.com is the other place, and from there you can find all my social media accounts and all the other places that I hide out online. Darren: Thank you very much for spending the last hour with ProBlogger, I appreciate it. Brooke: Thanks, Darren. Darren: I hope you enjoyed my chat with Brooke McAlary today. You do have a lot to chew on in that one, but if you’re looking for something else to listen to now, I encourage you to go back and listen to Episode 50 of this particular podcast. It’s sitting there in iTunes waiting for you. In that episode, I share the lessons that I learned in my first couple of months of podcasting. A lot of them are quite similar, but there’s a few other new things in there that we didn’t cover in this episode with Brooke. Also, you might want to check out Episode 121 which we mentioned in today’s podcast on imposter syndrome. It’s probably the episode that I’ve had the most feedback on that I’ve recorded in the last six or seven months. You might want to check that one out if you missed it. I do encourage you to also check out Brooke’s blog or her podcast over at slowyourhome.com and the Jack Rabbit network of podcasts. She’s got six podcasts running in there at the moment, some great Aussie podcasters if you like the Aussie accent, you want to check those particular ones out. Many of them are ranking really high in the iTunes store here in Australia and for good reason. Even by the time this one comes out, there may even be a new one in there. Check out Jack Rabbit Podcast Network as well at jackrabbit.fm. Thanks for listening today, you can find the show notes where I will include a lot of the links mentioned and some of the tools that Brooke mentioned over in the show notes as well. They’re at problogger.com/podcast/128. Look forward to chatting with you in the next episode which we’re going to be talking about Facebook Advertising in. I’ve got a guest coming in to help us navigate how to set up those first ads, that’s something that a lot of bloggers do ask about. We’ve got Angela coming in to talk to us about that.Tune in in a couple of day’s time for that one. Thanks for listening today, we’ll chat soon. Mentioned in today’s show: What I Learned About Podcasting in my First 50 Episodes 7 Strategies for Overcoming Imposter Syndrome Slow Your Home JackRabbit.fm Zen Habits Joshua Becker The Minimalists Courtney Carver Audio Technica 2100 Pop Filter Ecamm call recorder Skype Garage Band Adobe Audition Audacity LibSyn Blubrry Omnis Hosting Fizzle Carly and Stacy This Family Life The Thoughtful Travel Podcast Amy Porterfield Wil Anderson Serial Nerdist Malcolm Gladwell Audible Kelly Exeter Podcast Blog Post Patreon Slow Home Podcast Gimlet Media Never miss an episode – Subscribe to the ProBlogger podcast on iTunes Got a Question You’d Like Me to Answer? I base many episodes of this podcast upon questions answered by ProBlogger Podcast listeners and Blog readers. You can use the following widget to ask a question. Please include your name and blog name (if you have a blog).   Enjoy this podcast? 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Writing That Develops a Personal Connection With Your Readers Have you ever felt a personal connection with a blogger who you’ve never met and have no real reason to feel a connection with?   You read their blog day after day and in time come to feel like you know them—as if their blog posts are almost written as private messages to you. This has happened to me numerous times over the years. I almost end up feeling that the blogger is my friend, even though I’ve never actually had personal contact with them. I’ve also been on the other side of that relationship quite a few times. I regularly meet people at conferences who come up and say that they feel like they know me even though we’ve never actually met. That personal connection can bring a blog to life! In Today’s Episode How can you foster this personal connection with readers? Listen to it here in the player above or over on iTunes here. Tell personal stories Sharing your own stories, not only shows you have knowledge, but you have experienced it too Stories make you more relatable to people Write as you speak This may not be everyone’s style, but I’m casual when I talk and I’m casual when I write How to Use Your Writing to Build Relationships and Build Your Brand Use personal language Incorporate language that makes the reader feel you are talking to them Use the word “you” when you write This moves the topic away from theory and makes it more applicable Picture a person while you’re writing A simple way to change the tone of your writing is to actually write your post with a person in mind. Chris Garrett talks about this a lot and encourages bloggers to visualize a person as they write. Similarly, I like to develop reader profiles, which I find helps me avoid writing for a nameless crowd of readers. Base posts upon REAL reader needs The more you write about real needs, the more you will connect People feel connected if they feel you understand what they are trying to overcome Get in the habit of asking your readers what their biggest challenge is Write about Your Readers Feelings, Fears and Dreams What really connects people is when you write about what they feel, think, fear, and dream. This makes your reader feel you are speaking to them on a deeper level An example of this was my last newsletter where I asked readers what their challenges were? The responses were fascinating, I analyzed them in a spreadsheet and even made a word cloud on the topics Strategies for Overcoming Imposter Syndrome was a topic I got from these responses After the show went live, I received messages from listeners that felt I was speaking directly to them This is the power of understanding your readers dreams, fears, needs, and challenges. Create that kind of content! Go Off Topic I try to keep my blogs on topic, but I do find ways to weave in other elements of my life My Instagram and Twitter accounts give glimpses into my life Occasionally, I’ll blog while on holiday or from my couch with a beer These things seem to show me as a real person Have an outlet to share a little about your life and “humanize: yourself as you blog Multi-media Different forms of media can also humanize you A picture puts a face with the name A podcast gives you a voice Video not only shows a face and voice, but body language too Attend events Attending events is a powerful way to build relationships Online events like a Ustream chat session or a Twitter #blogchat is also an opportunity to meet and relate with readers Get a reaction Readers will feel a connection when they comment or participate in some other way, such as polls, competitions, emails, sharing, etc. 31 Days to Build a Better Blog Write from the heart One of the best things I think you can do is to allow yourself to FEEL something about what you’re writing about. Write on topics that mean something to you. Write with passion. Include how YOU feel about a topic. Writing in this way takes some vulnerability but as Robert Frost says: No tears in the writer – no tears in the reader No surprise in the writer – no surprise in the reader. If you’re not willing to go to a personal place it’s unlikely your reader will either! Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Hey there. It’s Darren Rowse from ProBlogger here. Welcome to Episode 127 of the ProBlogger Podcast.  Today, I want to talk about how to make your blog, your podcast, your Instagram feed, your YouTube channel, your podcast, whatever it might be, a little bit more personal. To build a personal connection with those who are reading and following you in those different places. Having that personal connection is a very powerful thing. I want to give you 11 different tips on how to write in that way, and how to create content that is more personal. Before I do, I just want to mention one thing. First of July is just a few days away if you’re listening to this as it’s going live which means two things. One, tickets for our ProBlogger event are about to go up by $100. You can check out the details of those at probloggerevents.com.  Two, first of July might be a great time to start 31 Days to Build a Better Blog. Those of you who’ve been listening for a while know that I started this podcast with a series of 31 daily shows. Each one contained a little bit of teaching and a little activity, a challenge that you can go away and do that will improve your blog. Those 31 days are still sitting there in iTunes. They’re still sitting over in the show notes on problogger.com/podcast. I pulled them all together for you if you want to listen to them on the show notes at problogger.com/podcast/31days. You should bookmark that page and keep coming back to it. It’s got all of the episode. You can listen to them without leaving that page.  One of the things I loved about 31 Days to Build a Better Blog is that the activities that you can do over, and over, and over, again. If you’ve done that series in the past, maybe July is a great time for you to revisit it. Maybe, if you haven’t done it before, maybe now’s a great time for you to do it for the very first time. Head over to problogger.com/podcast/31days and you’ll find it there. Or, search on iTunes for ProBlogger and you’ll find if you go right back to the start of our feed, those 31 episodes sitting there, waiting for you. Let me know how it you go. I’d love to see you progress through those 31 episodes so tweet me @ProBlogger. Let me know which one you’re up to and any feedback you’ve got along the way. Without any further ado, I’d like to get into today’s show where we’re going to talk about building a more personal blog. Have you ever felt a personal connection with a blogger? Or a podcast? Or YouTube? Someone whom you’ve never met in person but you have a real feeling of connection with? Maybe you read their blog day after day. In time, you’ve come to feel like you know them or you listen to their podcast everyday or every few days. It’s as if they’re talking just to you. It’s like they’re almost privately messaging you with their thoughts everyday.  This has happened to me numerous times over the years. I always get this feeling that the blogger or podcaster is my friend. It’s almost this weird, familiar feeling that you have with a long lost friend that maybe you’ve never met before but you just feel like you’ve shared experiences with them. When you meet them in person, you’re all gushy and it’s a bit awkward because you feel like you know them but they have no idea who you are.  I’ve been on the other side of that a number of times now where I’ve met people at conferences who come up, hug me, or talk to me like they know me, like they’ve communicated with me many times before, like we’ve grown up together. It’s a very familiar feeling and it’s odd when you’re on that side of it, but it’s also a really wonderful thing. It’s something that I’ve seen happen many times, particularly in a blog. I guess in the last year, it’s happened to me even more and I think it’s because of the podcast. I think podcasts have this ability to do it even more. I guess that’s because we’re hearing the voice of the person we’re listening to and not just reading their words.  A number of people have asked me recently, “How can you foster this personal connection with your readers? How can you increase the chances of that happening on your blog?” I’ve got a bit of a theory that some people are just more naturally able to blog and create content in this way. There’s this sort of mojo that goes on with some bloggers. They seemed to be just talking that way where you feel like they’re talking to you.  It’s something, I think, that even if you don’t have that mojo (and I’m not sure that I’ve got the mojo), I’m also pretty sure that we can work on different ways of growing that in our own creation of content. Today, I want to share with you 11 different things that I think you can do to increase the chances of your readers, your listeners in your podcast, the viewers on your YouTube, and the people watching you on Instagram even, how you can use these mediums to make that personal connection with the people who follow you. Let’s get into them. Number one is all about telling personal stories. It’s not rocket science, is it? It’s pretty logical, really. I suspect one of the most powerful tools at our fingertips right now is that we have all got a story to tell. We’ve all lead a life. That’s one thing in common that we have with our readers. We’re all alive. We’re all led lives and we’ve all had these moments in our lives which connect with one another whether we know it or not.  Sharing your own story in your content, whether it be a blog or a podcast, shows not only that you have a knowledge of your topic but that you have experienced life, too, and there are these connection points with your readers. Stories make you more relatable. They show that you’re a person rather than just some brand, instead of just being some lofty, untouchable expert in your industry. Sharing of a story is a very personal thing and it will make people remember your content as well. This is one of the things I love about storytelling. When you tell stories, people remember those posts more than when you are just teaching them something. Tell stories as much as possible.  Number two, I think something very powerful happens when you write like you speak. This one suit everyone’s style of writing. Some people just write in a more formal tone, perhaps, but it’s what I aim for my own writing. When I started blogging back in 2002, the first blogs that I ever came across were written in a more formal tone. Now, it’s almost written like academic papers. Something in that appealed to me because I seemed very comprehensive and deep.  But when I tried to do that for myself, I discovered very quickly that I couldn’t do it. I just was not wired that way to write that kind of content. I kind of got down about that and I almost gave up blogging in the first couple of weeks as I just didn’t think I have what it takes to be a blogger because that’s what I thought a blogger did.  Then, I decided to write some posts that were just more conversational. It’s just me talking about what I did know. What I found is that those post got my first comments. I never had a comment until I started writing in that tone. I encourage you to think about your voice. If you can, to write like you speak. Now, I really would encourage you to go back and listen to Episode 52. I did an interview with Beth Dunn who works at HubSpot. She put together this, List of Things That Can Make You Sound Like a Human Being, I think that was the title. Episode 52. I’ll link to it into the show notes. It’s all about how to write like a human, not a robot.  Very simple things like using contractions, so using the word “I’ve” instead of “I have.” That’s how normal people speak. They say “I’ve,” “I’ll,” that type of language, those contractions. There’s a whole heap of other tips that she used in that particular episode as well. Write like you speak, not like a robot. Number three is connected to that. We actually did touch on that particular episode as well. Use personal language. This is a little technique that packs a lot of punch in terms of fostering a connection with people. Instead of writing in a third person, you can use the word “you” as you write. This is something I do all the time. Try and use the word “you” so my readers know I’m talking to an individual. I think that makes it more personal. Let me give you an example of that. Instead of saying, “Here are 10 Tips to Improve a Blog,” write, “Here are 10 Tips You Can Use to Improve Your Blog.” That simple addition of “you” and “you’re” personalizes it. I’m not just writing about this abstract topic, someone’s blog. I’m writing about your blog. When you use the word “you,” when you use the word “you’re,” it forces people to think about their situation rather than something abstract. That has a big impact upon people. Even using words like “we.” I’ve got an episode in the podcast talking about “I” and “we.” In this case, using the word “we” to talk about you and your readers together, can also be a very powerful thing. I’ve tried to do this in my podcast. I’m talking about an issue that my readers have and I include myself in the problem. “We often have this particular problem.” “We often talk in this way.” “We need to learn this.” That shows your readers that you and them are in the same journey. Using “we,” using “you’re,” using “you,” and that type of language can force people to think about their own situation but also feel like you and them are in the same type of boat. Tip number four, picture a person while you’re writing. This is a very simple technique that you can use while you’re writing that will help you to write in a more personal tone. Chris Garrett, who co-wrote the ProBlogger book, talks a lot about this (or at least he used to) back when we last met. He really encourages bloggers to visualize a person as they’re writing. This is something that I’ve done as well particularly since I started creating reader profiles or avatars for my readers.  When I first created a reader profile for my readers, I printed out the profile, and I put it next to my computer. I actually created three profiles. One of whom was Grace the Mamaratzo photographer. This is for my digital photography blog. It was a character that I imagined was reading my blog. The avatar was all about her needs, her problems, how she spoke, the type of photography she was into, and it talked a little bit about her. I put a photo of her there as well. I had this avatar printed out and stuck next to my blog.  Quite often, as I was writing a blog post, I would write, visualizing Grace, which sounds a little bit creepy. She wasn’t a real person so I wasn’t stalking her. I was visualizing this person and asking myself as I was writing, “What questions would she be asking at this point in my article? How would she be reading this? How would she be applying this? Is this relevant to her?” I found simply by visualizing this person, it made me write to someone rather than just to a group of people. I just came across in a more personal way. It enabled me to pitch my post particularly to her needs and her situation, at least what my imagined situation of her. Tip number five is to base post upon real reader’s needs. Grace the Mamaratzo was a figment of my imagination, although it did turned out I ended up having a lot of readers who were just like her. I think that was because I was writing for that type of person. Once you’ve got readers, you can begin to find out what their actual needs and problems are. Actually tapping into those challenges that your readers face is a very powerful thing.  This is one of the reasons that we on ProBlogger and Digital Photography School constantly are surveying our readers. We’re doing polls. We’re sending out surveys on ProBlogger every year. At the start of the year, we do a census. We try and collect as much information on who’s reading the blog. Also, really try tapping to what their current needs are, what their dreams are, what their challenges are. Those surveys turned into content. We take that content, those ideas, those challenges, and the needs that our readers have, the things that they feel, they have a problem with, and we turn that into content as well. Related to this is the sixth thing that I want to talk about. That is not just writing about the tangible needs of your readers but also writing about their feelings, their fears, their dreams. Some of these less tangible things. Writing about the tangible felt needs of your readers is important. But what makes people really feel connected to you is when you write about how they feel. What they’re thinking, what their fears are, what their dreams are. These are the things that they sometimes can’t even articulate. If you can tap into these types of things, this will take your content to a whole new level.  Let me give you a real quick example of this. This encapsulates both the last two points that I make. The ProBlogger Plus Newsletter is a newsletter we send out every week to ProBlogger readers and podcast subscribers. Usually, these ProBlogger Plus Newsletters are largely sharing links to the latest tutorials and podcast that we’ve published over the last week. A few weeks ago, I started the ProBlogger Plus Newsletter simply by asking those who were getting the email to send me an email back to reply to the email and answering two simple questions with a sentence each, telling me their biggest blogging dream and their biggest blogging challenge. I asked them to hit reply and in a few words describe their biggest dream and their biggest challenge. I’ve had several hundred people email me back. I took every single one of those answers and I put them into a spreadsheet. I had these two columns—the challenges and dreams. I’ve also pulled out all of the responses and put them into a little tool that created word cloud for me (which is fascinating.) It made the words that were most commonly used, big and bold, and all the other words smaller. It was fascinating to look at those word clouds and read through every single one of the responses which took me several hours. To see the things in that, there were some definite themes.  What I decided to do with those themes was to take some of them and to incorporate them into the podcast that I was planning for the coming months. Now, you’ve already heard one of them. Episode 121, if you listen to that one, it was about dealing with imposter syndrome. I created that podcast purely based upon some of the challenges that my readers were telling me about in that particular email that I sent them. We had a number of people sharing quite personally about how they felt like they’re an imposter, that they were a fraud, that they didn’t really know how to deal with that. What I did was I took those questions, those feelings, that tangible need, but also some of the feelings around that, some of the language that they use, then I turned that into the podcast. We use some of the actual words that readers responded with in the title of the podcast. I used some of the exact words, almost quotes from those responses in the episode as well to set the same forum.  What I found really fascinating was that for about 24 hours after that podcast went live, even since that time, I’ve had private messages, emails, public messages, on social media for listeners saying that they felt like I was speaking directly to them or that I was looking inside their brains. This is the power of understanding your readers’ problems and needs. Also their fears, the language that they use, the feelings that they have. If you create content based upon that, you are going to create content that makes a big personal impact upon them, and begins to build those connections. The seventh thing that I want to talk about is going off-topic. I try and keep the vast majority, if not all, of the blog post on ProBlogger and Digital Photography School about the topic that there are on ProBlogger about blogging, Digital Photography School about photography, and it’s rare that I go completely off-topic. I think there’s always ways that you can weave in other elements of your life into what you do. Even in blog post where you’re talking about something, you can weave in little anecdotes from you life about family or about places you’ve been or stories that you’ve experienced. Certainly, on your Instagram account, your Twitter account, there’s certainly ways you can weave in a more personal element that perhaps isn’t completely on-topic, perhaps it’s illustrating a point, or perhaps it’s just there simply to show people that you’re a real person. I’m a dad. I’m a husband. I’m a football fan. I’m a geek. I hope that comes through in some of the things that I share in my social media accounts, and from time to time comes through in the podcast and in my blogpost. Whether it’s on social media, whether it’s on the blog itself, I think there are always ways that you can just go a little bit off-topic and humanize what you do. Show that you are just a normal person, too. You will find every time you do that you will make a little extra connection with someone else along the way.  I think Pat Flynn does this brilliantly with his podcast in his introductions. Every introduction has a little facts that you may not know about Pat. While not everyone will relate to every single one of those facts, I bet that if you listen to many of Pat’s podcast, there’s a little fact that you know about him that is also relevant for you. I’ve been seeing people in person come up to me and say, “Yeah, I’m really into whatever it was that he’s into as well.” Make these personal connections with them. Maybe there’s a simple little way that you can go a little bit off-topic and share a little bit of who you are. Show your readers that maybe there’s a connecting point there within. Tip number eight is to use multimedia. Similar to using different types of content and going off-topic. I think we can mix up the type of media that we use and formats of posts that we use as well. Using a simple picture of yourself is a powerful thing. Using video. Using podcast. As I mentioned earlier, I think a podcast is a very personal medium. I have people come up and say that they feel like they know we so much better or even after reading ProBlogger for six or seven years, a few podcasts in, I feel like they know me in a different level.  Video is similar. When I started using video on ProBlogger, I started getting people leave comments, who’ve been reading for a long time but never commented before. It was because they saw me, they heard me, they suddenly feel like they have this deeper connection, and that they wanted to respond for the first time ever. Live video, I think, really ramps this up even further. That live interaction that you have, people not only see and hear you, but they get to talk to you. They get to see you react to the things that they say. That is a very powerful thing as well. It can really build that personal connection.  I understand that multimedia, using video, live video, particularly podcasting, is something that we don’t feel comfortable doing. It’s also something that, some people don’t have the technology to be able to do. Although, most of us who have smartphones these days, have the ability to record our voices and to record ourselves in front of video. These tools are increasingly accessible for more and more people. Give it a go, see what happens. The ninth thing I’ll say is attending events. Actually, meeting people in person is possibly the best thing that you can do to build personal connections. This is a big challenge, particularly for those of us who live in different locations to a lot of our audience. It can be tricky to meet our readers, but if you do have the opportunity to go to a conference that your readers might be at, or to even run a meet-up, or a live event of your own, then that could be a very powerful thing.  As I was saying before, live video, running an online event, could be something that you could do as well. I would encourage you to experiment with Facebook Live, but also, tools like […] where you get to see your readers as well, can be a useful one. We’ll link to a podcast that are recorded on […] a few months ago in the show notes.  Two more things that I want to say, the tenth thing is, getting your readers to do something, is one way that can speed up the personal connection, particularly leaving a comment. I spoke with one blogger recently, who came to an event that I was at. She told me that she never really felt like she was connected to ProBlogger until the day she left her first comment, which is kind of weird. I was like, “You know, just leaving comments suddenly made you feel like you belong to this thing and you understood it more?” There’s something really powerful about that. Taking that step in terms of adding something to the site made her feel more connected to the site and more connected to me because she was responding to a question that I’d asked in a blog post. I actually heard that a number of times now. Getting your readers to do something, makes them feel more connected to you. Probably, the best example of this that I can give you is, 31 Days To Build A Better Blog, which is why I mentioned it at the start of this particular podcast. 31 Days To Build A Better Blog, was 31 days where I got my readers to do something. They didn’t know why I always leave comments on my blog, although I invited them to do that. They took the information away and they did something on their own blogs. There’s something very powerful happened the first time I did 31 Days To Build A Better Blog. I started to get emails from readers who said, “You know? I so appreciate what you’re doing here because you are actually not only teaching me something, but you inspire me to do it and you got me to take some sort of an action.” There’s something happened there through that process that seem to build the relationship that we had. No longer where they’re just reading my stuff. They’re actually taking my teaching and implementing it. I could see the results of that. Getting your readers to do something, getting them to react to what you’re saying, getting them to engage in some way, whether it’s voting in a poll, leaving a comment, or doing something like 31 Days To Build A Better Blog, can definitely deepen the engagement that you have with your readers. The last thing I’ll say is, right from the heart. One of the best things that I think you can do with your content, whether it’s writing, or speaking, or in front of the camera, is to allow yourself to feel something about what you’re writing about, what you’re communicating. When you feel something, your readers are much likely to feel something. When you write about something that means something to you, your readers are going to begin to see that. When you write with passion, your readers will begin to read with passion. Include how you feel about a topic. I started it off earlier in this podcast talking about trying to understand the feelings of your readers. Also understand your own feelings and allow yourself to feel something about what you’re creating. I love the quote from Robert Frost who says, “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader. If you’re not willing to go to a personal place, it’s unlikely your reader will either.” One little trick that I will add, that I found helps me (I even did this yesterday), is to write while you’re listening to music. I don’t do this all the time, but sometimes, if I’m not really feeling engaged with what I’m writing about, what I do (and this sounds a bit corny, I know) I’ll find some really atmospheric, emotive movie soundtrack type music. On Spotify, there’s a whole collection of this type of music that I’ve bookmarked and I go back to. What I find is if I put it on, it’s violins in that type of thing. If I put on, it gets me in the mode and it makes me feel something. I encourage you to give that a go. If you’re not feeling you’re really projecting yourself into your writing, if you’re not really feeling anything as you’re writing, pop on some music that gets you going, maybe a bit of Eye Of The Tiger, or maybe it’s a bit of a movie soundtrack music. I don’t know what it is for you, let me know in the comments of this show notes. Do something to get yourself into that place. If you get yourself into that place when you’re feeling something, you’re much more likely to make that connection with your readers and create something that makes them feel something. I would love to hear what deepen this personal connection for you. If you read a blog and you feel a deep connection to that blogger, if you listen to a podcast and you feel really strongly connected to that podcaster, or if you get readers telling you that they feel really strongly connected to you, I love to hear what brings that about for you in the circumstance that you’re in. You can go to problogger.com/podcast/127 and let me know in the comments there. You can also tweet me at @problogger and I would love to hear what it is that builds that connection with you in your circumstance. Thanks for listening today. I do hope that you found this helpful. Please share it with anyone else who you think might be finding it useful as well. I will chat to you at episode 128. You’ve been listening to ProBlogger. If you’d like to comment on any of today’s topics, or subscribe to the series, find this at problogger.com/podcast. Tweet us, @problogger. Find us at, facebook.com/problogger. Also, it’s ProBlogger on iTunes. This episode of the ProBlogger podcast was edited by the team at Podcast Motor, who offer a great range of services including helping you to set up and launch your podcast, as well as ongoing editing and production of the podcast that you produce. You can check them out at podcastmotor.com. What else deepens personal connection for you? That’s enough of me talking. What has your experience been? Whether it’s your experience as a blogger reaching out to readers or as a blog reader feeling connected to other bloggers, what deepens that feeling of personal connection for you? Never miss an episode – Subscribe to the ProBlogger podcast on iTunes Got a Question You’d Like Me to Answer? I base many episodes of this podcast upon questions answered by ProBlogger Podcast listeners and Blog readers. You can use the following widget to ask a question. Please include your name and blog name (if you have a blog).   Enjoy this podcast? Sign up to our ProBloggerPLUS newsletter to get notified of all new tutorials and podcasts below.

Creating a Blogging Will Today, I want to talk about something that may come across as a little morbid or depressing, but something that I think is important – particularly for those of us who do generate a living from our blogs (or at least a decent part time income).  It’s all about how to prepare a ‘blogging will’. Note: this episode is now live in iTunes if you’d prefer to listen to it there. Have you ever wondered what happens to your blog if you were to pass away? Over the years, I’ve known a number of bloggers who have sadly passed. Many of them, I only knew online and didn’t know their families. While reflecting on their lives, I often wondered how their families dealt with the bloggers online affairs after they were gone. Every time I thought about this, I also wondered what would happen to my own blogs and business if I were to pass away. Ever since 2006, I’ve had a ‘blogging will’ to help my family work out what to do if that were to happen. As a solo entrepreneur, I realized that much of what was needed to run this business was locked up in my head—a dangerous thing if something happened to that head! I remember waking up in a bit of a panic one night wondering what would happen if Vanessa didn’t know how to access my blog or understand how I’d set things up business wise. I got up and created a little document for her to use in such circumstances. In Today’s Episode What Does My Blogging Will Contain? People Names and contact emails of people I trust and work with 15 people who I have different working relationships and friendships with who could help with different aspects of my business from: Server setup Income streams Business partners Team members And more I include a brief description of who they are, where they live, and what they can do to help With the right people around my business could be sustained at least to a point where parts could be sold Business overview General business structure and overview of blogs, eBooks, courses, sister sites, job boards, teams, and income streams. Advice In the will are a few paragraphs of advice about what I’d do if I was in the situation of having to run the business without much prior knowledge of it. I explain what I’d try to sell, who I’d try to convince to run things, what products I’d release, and so on. While none of it is legally binding, I want to leave my family in the best position to be able to sustain themselves in the long term if something were to happen to me. Passwords, login details, access codes Many parts of my business are reliant upon third parties, and anyone wanting to keep things running would need to access those services. For example, they’d need my PayPal account login details, affiliate program logins and ad network access details, domain name registration access, servers, bank accounts, email accounts, social media access and of course passwords to the blogs themselves. I guess ultimately email access is key as so many of the others can be accessed with being able to reset passwords and send them to that. Without these, it would be almost impossible to keep things running profitably. While I don’t include the passwords in the document (security reasons) I give information on how she can access them! Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Hey there, this is Darren from ProBlogger. I would like to welcome you to episode 126, of the ProBlogger Podcast. Today, I want to talk about something that is a little bit of a downer, in some ways. It’s a little bit morbid and a little bit depressing, but it’s something that I think is really important. I want to answer the question, what’s going to happen to your blog after you die and do you have a blogging will? I know it’s a bit of a downer, a horrific question to ask. Hopefully, it’s not going to be too depressing, but I think it’s a really important question to ponder, particularly for those of us who have built blogs that have become a business and an income stream for our families. I want to tackle that question in today’s podcast and give you some suggestions as to how to build a document, build a blogging will, not a legal document, but a document that can help your loved-ones, your family, your friends, to know what to do with your blog after you go. It is something that does happen to different people that I’ve come across over the last few years. How do you create that blogging will? Today’s show notes will be over at, problogger.com/podcast/126. This show is brought to you by the ProBlogger Events. It’s just a few days away now that we will be putting the price up for the event. First of July, the price will go up by $100. If you want to come out to Australia, to the Gold Coast, on the 9th and 10th of September of this year, 2016, head over to probloggerevents.com and you’ll be able to grab a $100 discount for that event. I’d love to see you there and spend some time with you in the Gold Coast in Australia. All right. Let’s get into today’s show. Like I said in the introduction, today, I want to talk about something that could be a little bit morbid, a little bit depressing, but it’s really is important, particularly for those of us who generate any income from our blogs, whether it be full-time or a decent part-time income. I know a lot of ProBlogger listeners of this podcast are at that level. They’re part-time. It’s like a part-time job. Look, as much as this is a bit of a depressing topic, one of the great things about blogging is that the income that comes in from a blog doesn’t have to stop when you stop, when you go away. When you set things up in the right way, there’s potential for a blog to continue to generate some income. Perhaps not at the same level, perhaps it could be. If your family and friends arrive with an access your blog, and know what to do with your blog once you go away. That’s something that both frightens me on some levels as I think about the end of my own life, but also, excites me that this potential for my blog to continue to enhance the life of my family, even when I’m gone. Why am I talking about this today? To be honest, it comes out of a bit of a painful place for me. An old friend of mine, did pass away in the last couple of weeks. It’s been one of those times where you do ponder your own mortality as a result of the passing of a friend. A friend who is the same age as me and who leaves a family, at a very similar age to mine. It’s been a tough couple of weeks, to be honest. Tougher for some of my other friends who are even closer to this particular friend. I guess one of the things that has prompted to do, is to look at my own blogging will. That might sound strange that I’ve got a will that’s all about my blog. This is something that I have developed since about 2006, when I first set up this document. From memory for me, it started around the time we started having kids. It was about 10 years ago, when we were having our first child. That was around that time that, blogging started to grow in terms of an income, for me. At first, it was part-time and then it grew to a full-time thing. I remember waking up one night, thinking, what would happen if I were to pass away? What would happen if I died? My wife, Vanessa, would have no idea back then in 2006, how to access my blog, how to access the income streams, how to understand what the business was in itself, particularly back then when she wasn’t a blogger. Today, she is a blogger. She would have some understanding of how to operate a blog. Still, there’s a lot going on behind the scenes that she wouldn’t be aware of today. As I reflected on that in a cold sweat in my bed that particular night, I realized I needed to create something that would help her and my family to be able to navigate what to do with my blog, particularly because it’s generating our family’s main source of income. It was paying the mortgage. Now, by no means is my blogging will a legal document (at least I don’t think it is). We have a real will for that. If you have a business, you need to seek some legal advice as to how you should set up that will and what it should say. Rather, this particular document is one which will help Vanessa to understand the business, to keep it running until such a time that she may be able to sell it, or close it, if there was a need for that as well. What I want to do in the next few minutes is just walk you through what my blogging will contains. It’s three main sections of it. Three main things that I think is important to include in that type of document. The first one is all about people. The most important thing in blogging will are the names, contact emails, contact details, phone numbers of the people that I trust, and the people that I work with. The list, as it currently stands—I probably do need to update it—mentions around 15 people that I have different working relationships and friendships with, who Vanessa could contact to get help from with different aspects of my business. Some of these people are the people that I employed to help me run my blogs. Obviously, she needs to be in touch with those. There’s also other people there who would be able to give her advice, perhaps advice on how to sell different aspects of the business or how to continue to keep things going as business partners, people who understand the server set up, and that type of thing as well. For each person, I included just a brief description of who they are, where they live, what they do, how they relate to the business, and how they can be contacted. Vanessa certainly does have some understanding at blogging, she certainly would need to have some advice to help her to sustain some of what I do. Some of what I do is different from what she does on her blog, for instance. For example, she’s not created an ebook on her blog. I need to tell her who to talk to about our ebooks in that.  The first section is really about the people. I’m pretty confident that the people that I’ve listed in that document could keep things running for her or at least give her advice on how to do that. The second section is partly business overview. It’s a description of the business. It struck me recently that, whilst I am a very transparent with Vanessa about what I do, there’s a lot of it that she doesn’t really know. There’s no secrets there, but it’s a pretty complicated beast. There’s blogs, there’s ebooks, there’s courses, there’s little sister sites, there the job boards, there’s a team of people who work on it. The blogging will give a few paragraphs on how things relate to one another. She’s got a bit of an understanding on that. As she’s getting advice from people, I would picture it in her mind. Also, as part of this section, there are some advice. A few paragraphs on, what I would do if I was in the situation of having to run the business without a […] prior knowledge to it. In this section, I’ll say which parts of the business I think she could sell and who to go talk to to help her to sell that. There’s a couple of things in there about what I would do in terms of releasing some new products. There are some things that she could probably do to release the best of Darren on ProBlogger. I know that might sound a little bit egotistical, but I think in the event of my passing, there would be some ways to pull together some stuff that maybe could sell, could give any income stream for our family as well in an ongoing way. None of the advice I give, of course, is legally binding, but I want my family to be in the best position to be able to sustain themselves long term, so I think I can certainly give some advice around that. The last section, I think, is really important. This is where I give some details of where she can access different parts of the business. It’s about passwords, log in details, access codes, these types of things. You need to be a little bit careful in this area. Obviously, you don’t want this information to get into the wrong hands of people. There are many parts of my business (and probably yours as well) that are reliant upon third parties and wanting to keep things running. If Vanessa does want to keep things running, she needs access to those third parties. For example, my PayPal account details, affiliate program login details, advertising network, access details, domain name registration service, bank accounts, email accounts, social media access. All of these things have passwords and log in details. You need to provide a way for people to get that information. Ultimately, a lot of it could be accessed if she simply has my email address, because a lot of those passwords can be reset with an email address. I think it’s good to be able to provide people with a hint as to where to go. Without these things, it’s pretty much impossible to keep things running profitably. It’s really important that those things are communicated. I don’t include the exact password details in the document itself for security reasons, but I give information on where she can access that information. I’m not going to tell you exactly how I communicate that to her, but you find a way. You need the person who is going to take things over, to be able to have access to those things. I guess along side of all of that, you may want to include some last messages or advice and express your wishes on what you want to happen with your blog after you’re gone. For example, if you have a personal blog, it may be that you want to close it, or maybe you want it to be opened up for people to express their wishes, or their messages to you and your family. You might want a certain post to go up. You may even want to leave a message for your blog readers in the event of your passing. Again, it’s really going to be up to you. Anything that you want to be done with the content that you’ve created in your life and how that is to go on should be expressed as well. What happens to you when your blog dies? Have you got a blogging will? Do you have any kind of plan in place? Have you communicated your wishes to someone else? Do they have access to be able to update it, to be able to close it, to be able to sell it, to be able to continue to use it in some way? Really, it’s going to depend upon your wishes. Do consider that question, what happens after you die, to your blog and your online affairs? I would love to hear what you’ve set up in the comments of this particular podcast show notes over at problogger.com/podcast/126. It’s an important question. I’ve actually come across a number of bloggers over the last couple of years who have passed away, unfortunately. It’s a sad thing and I’ve often wonder what has happened to their online affairs. In most cases, the blog has never been updated again. I guess it stands down or will continue to stand there forever. After that one, though, whether the family wishes they had access to it, whether the family even knows that it exists, and how important it was to the followers of it. I’d love to hear what your plans are and what you’ve got in place. Again, problogger.com/podcast/126. Thanks for listening today. I know it’s been a bit of a downer in some ways, but hopefully, it’s a helpful one for you, your loved ones, and has an impact. I think it has the potential to help a lot of people beyond ourselves. Love to hear your comments and I also love to get your review of this podcast. If you found this episode, any other episode that we’ve created helpful, head over at iTunes, makes sure you subscribed, and I would love to get a review from you. I read every review that comes in. I have got a little tool that enables me to see them when they left in the different iTunes stores around the world, not just the US and Australia, but all of them. I get an email every week, with those little reviews and that email energizes me every week. Please leave me a review, leave us a rating, and let us know what you think of the podcast. Look forward to chatting with you in episode 127, which is coming up in a couple of days’ time. Thanks for listening. You’ve been listening to ProBlogger. If you’d like to comment on any of today’s topics or subscribe to the series, find this at problogger.com/podcast. Tweet us @problogger. Find us at facebook.com/problogger. Also, it’s 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 podcast 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. How did you go with today’s episode? Do you have a Blogging Will, or any other kind of plan in place for your blog in the case of your passing? Never miss an episode – Subscribe to the ProBlogger podcast on iTunes Got a Question You’d Like Me to Answer? I base many episodes of this podcast upon questions answered by ProBlogger Podcast listeners and Blog readers. You can use the following widget to ask a question. Please include your name and blog name (if you have a blog).   Enjoy this podcast? 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Handling Critical Comments and Attacks from Blog Readers In my recent podcast on the characteristics of successful blogging, I touched on the topic a couple of times of putting yourself out there for public comment and critique. I suggested that having a bit of a thick skin might be useful because from time to time you’ll definitely get ‘feedback’ that may not be as a encouraging, helpful or constructive as it could be – and which at times may even enter into the territory of it being aggressive, attacking and personal. While I’ve only experienced this a handful of times in over 10 years the times that it has happened to me have rocked my world a little. So how should a blogger deal with criticism of their blogging? That’s what this episode is all about! In Today’s Episode How to Handle Critical and Attacking Comments from Blog Readers Note: This episode is now live in iTunes here. Embrace it – When you’re critiqued there is potential for growth from the encounter. Feedback of any type is a sign that someone has noticed what you’re doing and reading your blog. Consider the critique – When I get a negative comment, I try to step back and do a bit of analysis of what’s going on. Here are a few questions I consider: Is the comment within the boundaries of what I think is acceptable for my blog? Is there some truth in it? Are there some improvements you can make? Is there a misunderstanding you can clarify? Is this something I’ve heard before? Is there a common theme to the critiques? Is this from someone who I have interacted before? Were they having a bad day or is this ongoing? Was there anything positive? Is there common ground you can focus on? Is this a troll or someone seeking attention? Is the feedback anonymous? Is it a trouble maker or someone you know? What is the intent of the critique? Are there any signals that can give you context for the commenters situation? Sometimes looking at the links to their blog/social, previous comments or things said in the comment can give you an understanding of the agenda of the person. A lot of this is about trying to get to the heart of what’s going on with the comment. For me a lot of it comes down to trying to understand the intent of the other person and trying to respond to that rather than just the words that they’ve chosen to use. Sometimes behind the words that come across as a personal attack is something that you can take on board to learn from/improve what you do or the opportunity to help your reader and make a positive connection. Of course it’s not always easy to do this. You may need to give yourself a little time/distance (although you may need to act faster if things are blowing up). Step away from the computer! You might also find it helpful to involve another person. Ask a friend, family member, another blogger for their take. Sometimes someone who is outside the situation can reveal something about the feedback that you’re not seeing. Respond – With analysis and feedback, you are in a better position to respond. I have taken a few options to respond. Responding to trolls Delete it – I rarely delete negative comments but on occasion if a comment is left by someone who is obviously trolling and doing so in an offensive way I’ll delete it. Ignore it – If the feedback comes on social media and its troll like I usually ignore it. Overly polite kindness – Sometimes I take a kill them with kindness type response. I don’t tend to do this so much these days – it is a little passive aggressive but it can be effective at times. If there’s even some hint that the person is coming from a non-troll place I will respond with these options: Clarification – Maybe they misunderstood your point, clarify blog post Take responsibility – If you’ve made an error, take responsibility Debate – A robust discussion can benefit both sides Agree to Disagree – If the comment is in a very closed manner, debate won’t work, be constructive but agree to disagree Private responses – If they are intent on a non-constructive heated exchange, try to end it and offer a private conversation Many times these invitations go ignored which to me signals some of the intent of the other person. The times that the person does followup, I’m always willing to engage as they may have some genuine issue that they are looking for resolution around. In most cases, we’re able to come to some resolution but there have been a couple of occasions where we still come to an impasse and you need to disengage. Respond with Genuine Care –  Sometimes, you can tell from the comment/feedback that the other person is operating from pain/hurt. Sometimes emailing them simply to say that you noticed their comment and wanted to see if everything was ok can be the right response. If I’ve had other positive interactions with the person in the past and their comment seems out of character If their blog/social/comment shows that they’re going through something Many times when I do this I find that the person is going through something personally. Many times, they apologise and the fact that you responded with genuine kindness/care strengthens the relationship. Let the Community Respond – Sometimes the community notices and responds. Lastly – there are many times where the person’s negativity says more about the other person and their situation than it says anything about you or what you’ve written. “Thank you for your ‘gift’ – but I think you can keep it for yourself.” Further Resources on How to Handle Critical and Attacking Comments from Blog Readers How to Deal with Blog Hecklers What a Buddhist Monk Taught Me About Blogging Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Darren: Hi there and welcome to Episode 125 of the ProBlogger Podcast. My name’s Darren Rowse. Today, I want to talk a little bit about criticism. In my recent podcast, on the characteristics of successful bloggers, back in episode 120 I think it was, I touched on the topic a couple of times of putting yourself out there for public comments and critique. I suggested that having a thick skin might be a useful characteristic to have if you want to be a blogger, because you’re going to get feedback and not all of the feedback is going to be helpful or constructive as it should be perhaps, or as it could be. At times, it may even enter into the territory of it becoming aggressive, attacking, and personal. Now, whilst I’ve only experienced that kind of hateful feedback a number of times, just a handful of times in the last 13 or so years, there have been times where it’s happened to me. If I’m honest, it’s completely rocked my world. It’s a type of thing that almost has the potential to take over everything that you think about.  Today, I want to explore how to deal with criticism, and really the criticism that we’re talking about today can be constructive and it can be right through to that really hateful personal stuff as well. That’s what today’s episode is all about.  This particular episode is sponsored by the ProBlogger event, which is happening on the 9th and 10th of September on the Gold Coast here in Australia. I would love to meet you at this event. You get to spend the whole two days with me and several hundred Aussie and international bloggers on the Gold Coast. If you want to find out more about this event and how you can save $100 if you buy your ticket before the 1st of July, head over to probloggerevents.com and you can find out all the information there. We’ve got the full schedule and all of our speakers listed there. We’ve got some great speakers this year. If you want to get today’s show notes, you can go to problogger.com/podcast/125. If you’ve been blogging even just for a little while now, chances are you’ve had a comment left on your blog or an email from a reader that doesn’t agree with what you’ve written. I regularly see this happen on my own blogs, hardly a week goes by, probably not even a day goes by, where there’s not some kind of disagreement in the comments or someone taking issue with something that I’ve said, or pointing out an error that I’ve made. Most of the time, the comments are written and it’s fairly neutral or sometimes even helpful way, even when they’re disagreeing. There might be comments where people who disagree with what was written and may have a different opinion or experience from me. Maybe they find an error or something that I’ve omitted to say that perhaps I should have. Maybe even comments from people who misunderstand the intent of the post or don’t read it all the way through. In most cases, the exchange is at least relatively positive. The exchanging of ideas that sometimes leads to them, or me, or both of us, coming to a new understanding. That’s actually one of the things that attracted me to blogging in the first place. These robust discussions, these sharing of ideas and experiences. Without people pulling me up, adding their voice, sharing their perspectives, my blog would be quite one dimensional. I don’t know that I would’ve grown anywhere near as much as I could’ve. Constructive feedback is fantastic for a blog. It helps you as a blogger to grow and it helps you to serve your audience better too, I think at least. There are days where that feedback from readers is not always a positive or constructive thing. It has the potential to hurt both you and the other person who’s leaving that comment, your blog itself, and even your other readers. This sort of negative feedback from people, this criticism, particularly when it gets into the personal realm, has the potential to really drag you down but also drag the culture of your blog down as well Sometimes the comments left, or the emails sent, or the conversations that they had about you on social media, or other blogs, or forums even, can become really aggressive, and it can become attacking, and it can become personal. On those occasions, it’s very easy to allow the whole thing to drag you down and for you to be taken into a pretty dark and negative space. In some cases, I’ve even seen bloggers abandon their blogs and online pursuits as a result of the sort of negative feedback and criticism.  How can a blogger avoid this? How can we manage this criticism that is likely to come, that will come if we stick at this long enough? How can we avoid being dragged down and maybe how can we even turn that criticism around and use it in a positive way? Before I get into some tips on this particular issue, I want to cite a couple of things. Firstly, each circumstance is going to be completely different and you do need to handle criticism differently in each situation as well. I think back over the last 13 years, there’s been times where I’ve handled it really well and then taking the same approach in another circumstance and it hasn’t worked at all. There’s been times where I’ve handled it really poorly and then on the same thing with someone else, and it’s worked really well. There’s no one easy answer for these and you do need to kind of tiptoe through it a little bit and try and get a sense for the circumstance and how you might be able to navigate through it. That’s one thing I want to say, and the other thing I want to say is that what I’m about to share is going to sound very reasonable. It’s going to sound very considered. It’s going to sound very logical and clean, but when you’re in the middle of it, it is much messier. I want to acknowledge that right up front because I know some of you at the moment are probably going through this. Maybe some of you’ve searched iTunes and found this podcast on how to deal with negative comments and you are right in the thick of it. I want to acknowledge the pain that you’re in and the confusion you’re in, because I’ve been through it so many times. I’m thinking back to a couple instances where this kind of stuff would consume me. I want to encourage you to take a breath and to remember that you’re okay, and that you’ve got real friends and real family that do like you and that say nice things to you. You’ve probably got readers as well, most of your readers probably say good things about you. Part of what I’m going to share today is about trying to realign away from that one person who’s negative towards you at the moment and refocus some of your energy on other things. I kind of just want to say right out that I feel your pain, if this is something you’re going through at the moment. Okay, there’s three main things that I want to say today. In these three things, there’s a lot of information. We may pause along the way and take a breath. That’s okay, you might want to pause the podcast along the way and take a breath, too. The first thing that I want to say and this is—I really hesitate to even say this one because it sounds, to those of you who are in the midst of this, a little bit cliché, but I need to say it. Firstly, embrace it. This isn’t easy, but as I’ve said before when you’re critiqued, there’s  potential in that critique, there’s potential in that feedback for growth. Believe me, there really is.  I look back at some of those really hard times where I’ve been attacked, not just from one person, but groups of people. Whilst it was horrible and dragged me down, I look back on those times and they were times I actually grew and where my blogs grew as well, and where I learned so much. Be open to the critiques that come your way.  One of the things I’ll say to you, if you’re in the midst of this now, feedback of any kind is a sign that someone has noticed your blog–and that’s a good thing-and that they’ve noticed what you’re doing, and they’re reading what you’re doing, and they’re considering what you’ve written on some level. Even if they don’t agree with it, you’ve got people who are reading your blog and are engaged enough to want to give you some feedback. Whilst sometimes the feedback we get we’d rather not hear, and we’d rather those type of people who don’t agree with us to just go away somewhere else, at least you’ve got people reading your blog, at least people are engaging with you. Ultimately as bloggers, this is what we want. We want people to read our stuff. We want them to engage with us. Maybe I’m looking for the positives in a really negative situation and I am told that I am the eternal optimist. I’m regularly told not to look for so many positives, but I can’t help it and really looking for those positives maybe can help you to take the first steps into the situation and find some resolution from it. Do whatever you can to embrace that criticism, but the next step is really important as well. The second thing I want to say is consider the critique. Consider the critique. Don’t just write it off as soon as it comes. There will be some critiques that you get that I will tell you to write off and I’ll get onto that in a moment. There are some that you want to ignore. There will be some that you probably want to delete. Before you do, take a moment to consider the critique. When I get a negative comment, I try, and I don’t always succeed at this, but I try to step back from the feelings that come when I read that comment or that email, and I try to do some analysis on what’s going on behind it. There are a few things that I guess I try and consider as I look at that negative comment. Some of these are hard to do, and some of them will come automatically, and some of them you need to bring some thought too.  The first thing that I would ask myself is, “Is this comment within the boundaries of what I think is acceptable for my blog?” It’s good to have thought this through before the negative comment comes in. I think a lot of blogs could do well to have a comments policy, whether that’s a public one or whether that’s just something you used to filter your comments on. Things like the language that you think is acceptable. Some of you will be totally fine with any language at all being used. On my blogs, I try and keep them sort of family friendly. I certainly don’t allow racist commentary, discriminatory commentary, hatred kind of comments on my blog. That’s the first thing I’m looking for when I’m looking at a comment, is this within the boundaries of what I think is acceptable? Am I happy for this comment to be on my blog? The reality is it’s your blog, it’s your home and people need to behave in a way that is acceptable to you. That’s the first thing that I’m considering as I look at it. If it doesn’t meet what I feel is acceptable, I will probably delete it or I’ll at least edit it and make a note that it’s been edited to get rid of maybe a word that I think is appropriate on my blog. That’s the first thing I’m considering. The next ones are looking more at the comment itself and looking at the feedback itself. The next thing I would ask is, “Is there some truth in what has been said?” Maybe the person is pointing out that you’ve made an error. Maybe they haven’t pointed it out in a very good way but is there some truth in what they’ve said? Have you made an error? Was there a weakness in your post? Is there something that you could improve in your post? Is there something you could correct in your post? Maybe that would actually end the situation if you just correct the error.  Another question I ask is, “Is there some kind of misunderstanding behind their comment?” Sometimes, what I find is that people don’t read our posts. Some people don’t listen to the end of the podcast. Some people don’t go beyond the title of the post that we write. Some people don’t have the capability, perhaps, of understanding the full intent of what we’re saying. Maybe there’s a cultural difference there. Maybe there is a language difference, use of language in that type of thing as well.  Is there some kind of misunderstanding behind the comment? Again, it might not be expressed in the good way, but it’s good to understand really what is the point of what they’re trying to say and why are they saying it? Is there some sort of misunderstanding there? Could you clarify something for the person, I guess is another way of asking that question. Another question that I try and ask myself as I’m looking at a negative piece of feedback is, “Is this something I’ve heard before?” Is this person saying something perhaps in an inappropriate way, but is the intent of what they’re saying a theme that I’ve heard before from other readers? Is there a theme in the critiques that you get? Maybe this tells you something about your readers and how they’re feeling towards you and your blog. Maybe this is a common misunderstanding that people have about you and what you’re saying. Maybe there’s a lot of people out there who feel the same way. I think it’s kind of useful to understand that. Now, you still may not take a different approach, but if you understand that this is a common thing, you may approach this slightly differently. It might actually help you to improve your blog. I’ve seen this in some of the feedback that I’ve had if I’m honest about this particular podcast. One of the negative pieces of feedback that I get about my podcast, I’m being honest here, is that we don’t have transcripts of these podcasts. That’s something we’re working on at the moment and we hope to build into the workflow of this podcast.  The first time I got that piece of feedback, it wasn’t put in a very nice way, I have to say. I kind of wrote it off. I didn’t look at it, but now I’ve heard from a number of people and I’ve now heard that there are good reasons why people might want a transcript. People who are hearing impaired, people who have accessibility issues in terms of being able to download the podcast. Gradually, over time, if you hear the same piece of feedback over and over again, maybe it starts to ring true. Maybe there’s something you can change from your perspective that’s going to eliminate these issues that people are having. Is this something you’ve heard before?  Is this from someone you’ve heard from before? This, I think, is really interesting to look at. If you get a negative comment on your blog, most commenting systems in your blogs enable you to look back as to has that person commented before. You could do a search in your comments using their email address or even their name or their IP address if you have the ability to do that as well. Sometimes, it’s useful to look back on the past comments that that person has had, if it’s an email, have they emailed you before? That can be really eliminating. You can begin to see some themes. Sometimes in the feedback that you get, you can begin to see whether this person is maybe trolling you. Is the only comments they leave really nasty, personal attacking stuff, then that will say something. Is this comment inconsistent with previous comments? Sometimes, I really have found this to be true. This sometimes has really unlocked the secret of how to respond for me. If this is the first negative comment that a person has had and their previous comments have been really positive, then that gives you a hint that maybe the person is having a rough time, something else is going on in their life. Maybe something’s happened in the last time that they commented that you didn’t respond to in an appropriate way. You can maybe be able to find the source of their anger towards you. Have you heard from this person before? What were the previous interactions like? Were they positive, were they negative? Are they just having a bad day or is this some ongoing issue that they have with you? Another question I ask when I’m considering the comment that comes in is was there anything positive that I can take from the comment at all? Was there any common grounds that you could focus upon? Sometimes we’re drawn in a comment that might be 200 words long, to the 3 words at the end of it, which really fire us up and then forget to acknowledge the fact that they’ve also written 197 other words, that were actually quite good. Sometimes, by refocusing on the positive in the comment, you can find some common ground with the other person and respond to that first, and then bring up the three words that confused you or made you angry and address that. Sometimes, that is a better response to give to someone, “I think we agree on these issues, but here’s the area that maybe we need to talk more about.” Is there an attempt from the other person at reasonableness or any indication that they are up for a constructive interaction, I guess, is the other questions I’ve asked about that particular one.  The next question I ask and this is always pretty obvious, I think, is this person a troll? Is this the first time they’ve ever commented? Is the comment all about seeking attention or getting a reaction from you. If that is what they’re after, then you need to respond in a different way. If the person has had a long history of positive comments from you and then this is the first negative one.  I think we need to approach people differently depending upon who they are. Is this person a troll? Another question that might be related to that one is, is these piece of feedback anonymous? Sometimes, if it’s anonymous, that can give us a hint that maybe it’s a troublemaker, maybe it’s a troll, or maybe it’s a signal that you know the person, as well and maybe there’s some other kind of issues there, some personal issues going on. Is the person anonymous? Another question, which kind of ties into some of what we’ve already talked about but it’s worth asking, what is the intent of the critique? Is the person just looking for a reaction or is there some good intent behind? Are they actually trying to help you to improve in some way? I think, really, a lot of what I’m talking about in this particular section is trying to understand where the person is coming from and what their intent is.  The last thing I would encourage you to consider is are there any signals that can give you context for the commenter’s situation? Sometimes digging a little bit into the person, and I’m not talking about stalking them here or getting into privacy issues or anything, but sometimes looking at if they leave the link to their blog, if the link in the comment links back to their social media or you can identify their Twitter account. Sometimes any words they’ve used in the comment might give you an understanding of the agenda of the person.  For example, maybe you can look when you look at their blog that they’re a competitor to you and they’re feeling threatened by you in some way. Maybe by looking at their Twitter account, you can say that their dog died earlier today. Maybe they’re having a bad day. Sometimes just by digging a little bit into who the person is, you can begin to see some useful information that will help you to respond in a better way as well. Sometimes, it’s about understanding the person’s actually going through some pain at the moment. Sometimes, there is some competitiveness there or some threat that they feel toward you. I guess a lot of what I’m trying to say here is to try to get to the heart of what’s going on with the comment. For me a lot of it does come down to trying to understand the intent of the other person, trying to respond from that position, rather than just looking at the words that they’ve chosen to use. By looking at the intent, you can respond to the heart of the issue, rather than just through the words that they. As in the side, if you want some further reading on this, Jonathan Fields who I love, wrote a great guest post back on ProBlogger a few years ago now, I think it’s actually back in 2008, so it’s an old post now that you’ve probably not seen. He actually talks about understanding the intent of blog hecklers, so I’ll link to that in today’s show notes. I think it’s well worth kind of going back and reading. He kind of identifies these different groups of people who heckle you. Sometimes the words that come across as a personal attack is something that you can actually take on board and learn from in some way. Maybe there’s something in this analysis that will help you to do that. Now of course, it’s not easy to do and I would encourage you as you’re looking at certain negative things that come in, to give yourself in someone a little bit of time, a little bit of distance to process it. Sometimes, you just need to step away from the computer and not respond straight away. There’s been a few times where I have not taken that advice and it ended badly. Taking a step back, taking a breath, maybe having a chat with a friend. Involving someone else in it can really be helpful thing to get a different perspective on. Someone outside the situation taking a look at it might reveal something that you’re overlooking in the comment. I’ve had that happen to me a few times where I realized that I was just reading the comment wrong. If I have responded out of what I was seeing, it would have been the wrong thing to do, but someone else coming in says, “Hey, actually I think they’re right in this area and maybe you could improve in this way or you could respond in that way.” Involves someone else, take a little space from it, but don’t take too long as well because sometimes these things have a habit of blowing up and this is the danger, I guess. Particularly, if it’s a comment on your blog and your other readers start chiming in on it, sometimes you do need to act fairly quickly, even if it’s just to say, “I’m out at the moment, I’ve seen your comment. I’m going to respond a little bit later. Thanks for the feedback. I need to respond but I want to do in a considered way,” and actually put a little bit of a time frame around that. Sometimes that can help as well. Showing that you’ve responded and that you’ll respond more can be a useful thing as well. That’s number two, is to consider the critique, a tough one. I know, you may want to pause right now just to rant at me who hasn’t really understood your pain, but sometimes, you just got to step back from that comment. Look at that for what it is, try and understand where the other person is coming from, work out if the issue is theirs or whether it’s yours. That will give you a much better understanding of how to respond, which is the next thing I want to talk about. The third area is respond. Hopefully with some of the analysis of the feedback that you’ve done you’re in a better position now to respond to the person. The way that you respond is going to depend a lot on the circumstances. This is where you can end up responding in very different ways to criticism. There’s definitely a few things that I’ve done over the years and I want to run through some of them. The first two or three are particularly how I respond to trolls. Let’s address the trolls in the room first. Hopefully, there’s no one listening at this stage as a troll. Trolls don’t tend to hang around too long. The first thing that I would do if it’s a troll that I would consider doing, the first thing might be to delete it. I would say that I’ve rarely deleted negative comments on my blog, but there have been a few occasions over the years where I have. If it’s someone who is obviously trolling and they’re doing it in an offensive way, using language that I’m not happy about having on my blog, being hateful, being completely off topic, if they’re spamming and if they’re attacking another reader, particularly in a racist or discriminatory way. I will delete it. It’s my blog. It’s my home. I set the rules and if you can’t behave appropriately in my home, you can go somewhere else. I have to say it’s rare. I’ve hardly ever done that, but there’s been a handful of times where I’ve done it. It’s usually come after giving the person a warning as well. I would usually give someone a warning and I might actually edit a comment that they’ve left and just remind them that I expect family friendly kind of interactions. Because we do have students read our blogs. That’s the first thing, you may choose to delete it. Number two, you may choose to ignore it. If the feedback comes on social media, you can’t delete it. It’s obviously a troll. I usually ignore it. For example, if it’s on Twitter, I can see the other person’s account. Once I’ve dug a little, it’s full of similar stuff to other people and it’s pretty obvious that they’re just looking for a reaction, I rarely give them that reaction. If it happens repeatedly, I might block them, might report them. If it’s happening on my blog, I might delete them and ban them from the blog, but I’ve found the adage of not feeding the trolls to be a fairly good response. Usually, if you ignore someone once, they move on. They understand pretty quickly that you’re not going to give them what they want and they go find it somewhere else. Really, for the trolls, that’s generally what I do sometimes with a warning and add deletion or banning as well. The other thing I occasionally do with a troll is overly polite kindness. I sometimes find that to kill them with kindness kind of response does work with some trolls as well, and sometimes actually responding with a bit of human can work as well if they’re kind of having a bit of humor troll-ish kind of behavior. Sometimes, that disarms them as well, but it’s rare that I would do that. I usually just ignore the trolls. If there is even some hint that the person is coming from a non troll like place, if they’re on topic, if they’ve got at least something constructive to say or I can see that they’ve misunderstood something that the other responses that I want to go through now, I’m probably applying more in those sorts of situations. First one is you might need to clarify something. Sometimes the negative comment comes because the person has just not understood the post, maybe I didn’t express myself well, maybe I made a little mistake that kind of didn’t make it clear what I was saying, maybe there’s a cultural issue, or maybe the person didn’t read the whole post. You might just want to clarify what it is that you’re on about with another comment or an email. Maybe there’s something in what you’ve written that could be confusing to other people as well. Clarification may not just help that person and take the heat out of the situation, but it might actually help others in the audience who feel the same way.  Number two, things that you might want to respond back with is taking some kind of responsibility. If you’ve made an error, if you’ve made a mistake, if you’ve done something that’s hurt the other person, take responsibility for it. Even if they’ve expressed it in a really bad way, just apologize that they’ve taken it the wrong way, and that you did the wrong thing, and own it, move on. Fix it. Move on. Take responsibility. There’s times where you would need to do this and there are other times where maybe the person has overstepped the mark too much to just apologize and move on. Maybe you need to apologize and point out something about the way you’ve interacted, but really, I think taking responsibility when there is some legitimacy in what they are saying towards you. I think that can take a bit of the heat out of the situation as well. It’s not always appropriate. I’m not saying you always have to just treat the customer as always being right, or treat the reader as always being right, but there are times where you just need to own the mistake that you made and move on. The third option that sometimes I do is debate. Sometimes, if the other person seems to be up for a constructive robust discussion without getting personal, I might engage in that type of debate. Usually, this is where I’ll say, “I agree with you on this way,” find a common ground first, and then come back to them with, “Hey, you would disagree with him,” or your suggestion, or your side of the argument, your opinion,  your experience. This is I guess the ideal. This is what I’m really looking for with people. I think the sort of public debates, as long as they stay positive and constructive, you sometimes need to just sort of remind people to stay constructive. Sometimes, these kinds of interactions go really well and that can bring a lot of life to your blog. This is where I’m trying to get a lot of my discussions to go towards. Some of the people I’ve had these sort of debates would end up being guest bloggers on my blog, or people that I become friends with, because I’ve engaged in a positive way. It’s almost about trying to train your audience to have these types of discussions as well. What I find is sometimes you’d be having a positive debate with another person who has a very different opinion to you, but they’re being positive and respectful, and then other people begin to chime in and get personal. That’s where you need to just say to everyone, “Hey, we’re having a good discussion here. Let’s just keep it in a positive vibe,” and that’s where you can play the cop I guess. Trying to keep things within the boundaries of what you feel is acceptable. Sometimes you need to remind people that there’s young people reading or, “This is the boundaries of what I think is acceptable.” Most people respond pretty well to that. That’s what I’m trying to aim for. Sometimes, when I feel like the debate has run its course, or maybe the other person’s comment has been expressed in a very closed off kind of manner, sometimes I just take the agree to disagree kind of approach to it. I might respond with, “Thanks for your opinion. I respect that you have a different opinion to mine.” I might point out any positive or common ground that we have, but then just close it, say, “Let’s just agree to disagree.” A long, non-constructive personal attacking debates that are more about one upmanship tend to end badly. That can bring the culture of your blog down and sometimes by entering into that kind of non-constructive debate, it can just be a real downer for your whole blog and other people reading as well. I tend to try and close those ones down. If they’re not being closed down, I do the next thing, and that is to take the discussion private. If there’s any kind of negativity, any personal kind of attacking going on, that’s where I usually try and get things pretty quickly. If someone won’t let go of a conversation and seems intent on a heated personal attacking non-constructive exchange, I will almost always attempt to take it private. I usually ignore this in a public way. If it’s in the comment section, I will say something like, “I’m not willing to keep going over this here in the comments, but here’s my email address. Email me. I’m more than happy to talk to you privately. I’m more than happy to jump on Skype with you and have a call with you.” I always try and put that offer out there and I try to do in a public way, so that other people can see that I’ve made the offer. If I don’t have the email address of the person, that’s what I would do. If I’ve got the email address of the person, I might also say something like, “I’ve just sent you an email offering to have this discussion in a private way. Now, let’s take it private,” and I find in most cases, when I offer to take it private, people don’t, or that it’s resolved really quickly when I do. It takes the heat out of it. Anyone who is trying to just get a reaction and cause trouble doesn’t really want to take it private, because they’re not going to get that public reaction. The time that the person does want to take it private, there’s usually some intent on their part that they do want to get to the heart of it, and they are looking for some resolution as well. There’s been numerous times where I’ve taken it private with people and it ended really well, but there’s still a couple of people that I’ve taken it private with that still just not ended, and that’s where you just got to agree to disagree, and disengage from it. Life is too short to spend your whole life going down that negative rabbit hole with someone. There will come a point even in private discussions where you might just have to pull away and say enough is enough. The next thing also is not applicable to every situation, but sometimes, you just really need to respond with genuine care for the other person. Again, if you are digging around and you see that their previous comments have all been really positive and suddenly there is a negative one, or maybe you look on Twitter and say that they don’t dive, or maybe it’s just out of the character for them that they responded in this way, maybe something’s going on in their life that you just need to give them a bit of grace towards. What I do in that situation is say, “Hey, I saw your comment is a bit more negative than normal. Is everything okay? Have I done something to offend or,” and really approach it in a, “Hey, I’m just wondering what’s going on here,” and by approaching that rather than just responding with an angry comment, in most cases, the response comes back—I’ve had people come back and say, “I just got diagnosed with cancer,” or “My husband has just left me,” or “My dog did die,” or “My kids did this…” or “…did that and I responded in this way,” or “I was drunk last night. I’m really sorry.” In most cases where I’ve gone with a, “Hey, are you okay?” It’s amazing what comes back to you. It’s amazing how often you do find that the other person was literally just having a bad day. Sometimes, that can be the appropriate first response as well. Particularly if you have any hint at all that maybe something’s going on for that particular person. The last thing I’ll say is that sometimes it’s appropriate to just let your community respond. Sometimes, my readers notice a negative comment of another reader way before I do. Particularly from me living in Australia, this often happens when I’m asleep. There’s a negative comment and then I’ll wake up the next morning and find that my community has responded and fully dealt with the issue. Maybe they have helped clear up a miscommunication, maybe they have put the person back in their place if they’re a troll. It’s amazing how many times the community respond to this really well. If you’ve got any kind of other readers engaging in your blog, sometimes it’s okay just to let them deal with it and maybe you just want to chime in and say, “Hey, I see this has been resolved. Thanks everyone for getting on with that,” and reward your community for responding in that way. I think it probably is appropriate that you at least acknowledge what’s going on in your absence. The last thing I want to say on this whole issue and as I said before, this all seems very logical, and clinical, and reasonable, and it’s messy in the midst of it. The last thing I want to say is that there are many times where the other person’s negativity says more about that person and their situation than it says anything at all about what you’ve written and who you are. I wrote a post a few years ago now, this is back in 2007 of the advice that I got one day when I was talking to a Buddhist monk. I visited this particular monastery and had this chat to this guy. He was one of those calm and peaceful guys. We got talking about blogging and he asked me about this exact topic. He’d heard that the internet was a very negative place. We got talking about it and I said, “Well, what would your advice be from your particular perspective?” He says, “When someone is angry towards you, say, ‘Thank you for your gift, but I think you can keep it for yourself.’” I love that kind of response. This is what I wrote in that blog post back in 2007. It is easy to take the anger of other people and to wear it as a burden of your own, but it’s usually unhealthy to do so. Anger and hatred directed at you by another person is their anger, and their hatred, and not yours. Well, they may wish for you to take it upon yourself. Ultimately, it’s a gift that would be better not received. The blogosphere can unfortunately be a place of personal attack and anger. I think there’s a place for hearing the critique of others and taking it onboard in a constructive way, there’s also a time to let it go and move forward. Ultimately, that’s kind of the approach that I would take, is that sometimes you need to analyze that criticism, see what you can take onboard from it, see what you can resolve, but ultimately life is too short. Life is too short. You’re much better to direct your energy into a positive place. Creating new content that’s going to change the bulk of your reader’s lives. It may not serve that one person, but it’s time to move on, and it’s time to move out of that negative place, and to do something positive. Ultimately for me, the thing that gets me out of the funk, the negativity, is realizing that 99.9% of my readers are giving me positive feedback, and that I have an opportunity to make their lives better, and ultimately that is the best response to negative feedback that you can get. It’s to do something positive, to do something that makes the world a better place. That’s what helps me to sleep better at night rather than to dwell on that 0.01% of negativity that comes my way. I would love to hear your feedback on this particular issue. It’s been a long one. There’s been a lot of stuff that I’ve kind of gone through here and there’s going to be a bit of a summary of it over in today’s show notes. It’s not a transcript. The transcripts are coming, but you can find today’s show notes at problogger.com/podcast/125 where there’s detailed notes and there’s some further reading of some of the posts that I have mentioned in this, but most importantly, I love your feedback on this. I would love to know when you disagree with me. Please be gentle. Please be constructive, but whether you disagree, let’s have a discussion on this particular topic. Share the stories of when you’ve dealt with it well, when you haven’t dealt with it well. Check out the show notes and leave your comments over at problogger.com/podcast/125. Thanks so much for listening and again, if you are going through this at the moment, I feel your pain, try and take a step back from it, try and embrace it, try and analyze that, try and respond to it, but most importantly come to a point where you can move on from it and do something constructive, and do something that’s going to make the world a better place. Ultimately, that’s the best thing that you can do. Thanks for listening today. Chat with you in a couple of days. You’ve been listening to ProBlogger. If you’d like to comment on any of today’s topics or subscribe to the series, find us at problogger.com/podcast. Tweet us @ProBlogger, find us at facebook.com/ProBlogger or search ProBlogger on iTunes. This episode of the ProBlogger Podcast was edited by the team at Podcast Motor who offer a great range of services including helping you to set up and launch your podcast, as well as ongoing editing and production of the podcast that you produce. You can check them out at podcastmotor.com. How did you go with today’s episode? I would love to hear your feedback on this particular issue. Please feel free to respond and let me know when you disagree. Let’s have a discussion on this topic. Never miss an episode – Subscribe to the ProBlogger podcast on iTunes Got a Question You’d Like Me to Answer? I base many episodes of this podcast upon questions answered by ProBlogger Podcast listeners and Blog readers. You can use the following widget to ask a question. Please include your name and blog name (if you have a blog).   Enjoy this podcast? Sign up to our ProBloggerPLUS newsletter to get notified of all new tutorials and podcasts below.

In this episode, they discuss whether it is better to use 'we' or 'I' when blogging. The speaker shares their experience of using 'we' in the early days of their blog and how it became more justified as they expanded their team. They also talk about the importance of being transparent and relatable to the audience. The chapter ends with a call for input on this topic.

When is a Good Time to Monetize Your Blog Welcome to episode 123. Today I am answering a question that I get asked a lot. The question is how early should I monetize my blog? I know a lot of you are starting or relaunching blogs or starting second blogs. I want to outline a couple of different approaches that I see bloggers taking, and then give you some suggestions on how I would start to monetize my blog if I was starting again today. Currently, there is a $100 off special on tickets to the ProBlogger Event in Australia happening on the 9th and 10th of September. This discount ends on midnight of July 1st. NOTE: you can listen to this episode in iTunes here. Here are a couple of the recent questions I have received about the topic of when to monetize. “How much traffic should you have to offer advertisements on your blog?” or “How early should consider monetizing my blog?” In Today’s Episode: 2 Main Approaches for When to Monetize a Blog Wait – Some people think you shouldn’t waste your time by monetizing too early before you have traffic Takes traffic Will take time to implement Ads may put some people off Do It From Day 1 – There are reasons to wait, but I always monetize right away It’ll earn you a little bit from day 1 – even if it is a little bit, you are earning something, and if you get a traffic spike that money will go up It gets readers used to ads – I’m a little skeptical about how many people are really put off by advertising on blogs. I’ve also seen pushback from readers when bloggers put advertising up even later on. People who don’t like ads, just don’t like ads. You’ll learn about monetizing blogs – You’ll also learn a lot through trial and error. By putting AdSense up, you will learn things like which ads perform better and best placement, size, etc. This will position you well for other advertising options later on. A Couple More Thoughts on Blog Monetization Firstly, don’t invest too much time into too early – do so in a low level way, some methods will take more energy and time, look for easy ways to monetize Some monetization methods will probably be out of the question early on – sponsors won’t work from day 1 because you need traffic Some ad networks let you sign up early. AdSense does have some requirements. Do affiliate marketing – this is the monetization method with one of the lowest barriers to entry. For example, Amazon’s Associate Program can have you up and running with ads in minutes. If I were starting today, I would probably start with affiliate marketing. Depending on the topic of the blog, I would probably look beyond Amazon at eBooks, courses, and software affiliate programs where the commissions are higher. I would not only be doing this to make money, I would be testing out the following things: Test out promoting different types of products Test different price points Test different marketing (banners, reviews, emails etc) Don’t obsess about monetization too early. Profitable blogs are built on a number of pillars: Great content Traffic (promotion, guest content, SEO, social) Engaged Readers (building community, building email list, social) Appropriate Monetization Strategies Consider monetization early – but work on other factors as well. I did this on dPS and it set up the foundations so I could start to: Try other affiliate marketing (eBooks, courses mainly) Reach out directly to advertisers for sponsorships Develop my own products (eBooks at first, courses, software, printables later) Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Darren: Hey there and welcome to Episode 123 of the ProBlogger Podcast. My name is Darren Rowse. I’m excited today to tackle a question that I get asked a lot when I do Q&As. That is, “How early should I monetize my blog?” I know a lot of you are starting blogs, or are relaunching blogs, or are starting second blogs and are pondering this particular question at the moment. I want to outline a couple of different approaches that I see bloggers are taking and then give you some suggestions on how I would start to monetize my blog if I was starting again today. Before I do, I want to mention two things. Firstly, you can get today’s show notes at problogger.com/podcast/123 where I’ll link to some further reading for you. Secondly, if you’re pondering the idea of coming to the Australian ProBlogger event on the 9th, and 10th of September, just want to let you know that currently, you can get $100 of your ticket. That ends on the 1st of July. In fact, it ends at midnight the night before.  You want to go to probloggerevents.com if you are interested in checking out that event. It’s on the Gold Coast here in Australia. It will mean some of you will need to fly in for it which I think is well worth doing, spend some extra time on the Gold Coast, a beautiful part of the world. If you’re an Aussie, you’ve got a little less, hopefully, traveling to get there. I would love to see you there. It’s two days of great training with some amazing speakers flying in from around the world. You’ll meet hundreds of other professional bloggers and people who are on the way. We have a lot of people who haven’t even started a blog yet and who are right at the beginning of their journey, right through to people who have been blogging for 10 years or more. We try and put something on for everyone. There’s a whole track of beginner information, sessions, and a whole heap of workshops that are a little bit more advanced. Check that out at probloggerevents.com. Now, let’s get into today’s show. The question that I want to tackle today is a common one that I get about monetizing blogs. It’s about how early. It’s actually a question I got on this exact topic this morning, “How much traffic should I have on my blog before I offer advertising on my blog?” That’s one of the questions I got. Another one I got a couple of days ago now, it’s simply, “How early should I consider monetizing my blog?”  With most of these questions, there is no one answer to it. There’s going to be a variety of approaches that bloggers take. Having said that, most of the people I see talking about this topic take one of two approaches. The first one is you need to wait. You don’t want to monetize too early. I guess, ultimately, most of the people who say wait are coming from the position that unless you’ve got traffic, monetization, using almost pretty much any method is not going to work. You do need traffic and you need a reasonable amount of traffic. Different types of monetizing blogs, different approaches to doing that will take different amounts but all of them take some. The advice really does make sense on that level. You are not going to make much money on your blog until you got some traffic. Why would you spend a whole heap of time and effort trying to monetize your blog? No matter what monetization method you use, you’re going to need traffic. It does take time to set it up. Although, I would argue that some of them don’t take a whole heap of time. I’ll talk a little bit about that later. Ultimately, if there’s no chance of making money from your blog, why waste time on it? You’re better putting off your time and energy into other activities such as creating great content, building your audience, engaging with the readers that you’ve got because then you’re building the foundations to be able to monetize later. That’s good advice on one level.  I take a slightly different approach. Before I tell you what I do, the other reason I hear some people saying wait is that it might put off readers who come to your blog. The argument goes when you’re just starting out, you want to attract as many readers as you can to your blog. Any ads or any calls to action to buy a product or affiliate marketing calls to action are going to put people off and new readers off. Again, I can see some sense with that but I have another argument as well to make for you in a moment. That’s one approach—wait. You need to wait until you have enough traffic, until you’ve built the foundations to your blog. Then, you can think about monetizing later. That may be one approach you want to take. It’s not the approach that I take. My approach–and I’ve done this with every blog that I’ve started except for the first one. The first one was a personal blog and no one was monetizing blogs back in 2002, at least not directly. The approach I’ve taken is to always think about monetizing my blog from day one, or at least in the first few weeks of my blog. Sometimes, I’ve launched a blog without any monetization on it. But within a couple of weeks, I’m always thinking about, “How can I at least have some kind of monetization going on on this blog?”  There’s three main reasons that I would suggest that you consider doing these as well. I’m going to give you some qualifications. I want to give you my reasons and I want to give you some tips on how to actually do it. The first reason that I think it’s worth monetizing your blog from day one is that it will earn you perhaps a little bit of money from day one. Even if it’s just a few cents, even if it’s just a dollar or two, I remember the first day that I monetized my blog, I made a few dollars on it. Then, I realized, my wife is clicking all the ads, and that wasn’t a good thing. I told her to stop and it went back to $0.30. The next day it was $0.30.  That wasn’t much but $0.30 every day over a year actually does add up to a little bit. That’s money I wouldn’t have had otherwise. As your traffic grows, you find that that does actually grow. You’re positioning yourself to have a small income stream there. It also means that if you get a spike in traffic one day, you might get another blog linking to you. You may have a social media event that kind of happens around your blog. It means you’re well positioned to be able to monetize that particular traffic. You’re not going to earn a whole heap but it’s something.  Sometimes when you do earn that first $0.30, that gives you a little bit of energy, and it sparks you up. That gives you a little bit of hope that maybe if you make more traffic come to your blog, and learn to use the monetization strategies better, you can increase that.  I still remember in those early days of my own blog, that $0.30 turning into $0.40, that gave me motivation. That gave me a little bit of hope. Yeah, it wasn’t much. I couldn’t even buy a coffee with it but it gave me hope. It showed me that I was moving in the right direction. Then, it hit $1. Then, it hit $2. Then, it hit $3. It gradually grew. As that grew, so did my excitement, so did my energy for my blog as well. Yes, that’s my number one reason. It will provide you a little bit of income stream. That can energize you. Number two, this is probably more important in some ways. It gets your readers used to you monetizing your blog. I do understand the argument that I put forward before that you don’t want to put off new readers who comes to your blog by having monetization on it. I understand where people who argue that are coming from. However, I’m a little bit skeptical about that argument because if someone’s being put off when they first come to your blog because you’ve got ads on it or because you’re selling something, they’re going to be put off in years time when you start to monetize your blog as well. They may even be more upset at you—the fact that you are changing the rules of your blog. I’ve seen bloggers get into trouble with that. They might have been blogging for two or three years then suddenly they start to monetize. Readers are not used to that. I think there’s an argument for having some monetization on your blog from day one because when they first come, they see this ad, or they see this call to action, then they get used to that idea. They have no other expectations. They know that you’re in it to make a little bit of money. They know you’re in it to make it sustainable. If they hang around, then they’re cool with that. You don’t have to transition them later on.  Even if the ads on your blog or calls to action on your blog are not converting at a great rate, I think there’s an argument to be said there. It is helping your readers to come along the journey for whatever you do later.  The last reason that I think it’s probably a good idea to monetize from day one is that you’re going to learn a lot about monetizing blogs simply by doing whatever it is that you do. For example, if you decide to put some ads on your blog using an advertising network like AdSense, or Chitika, or many of the other advertising networks that are available, you’re going to start to learn about things like, for one, how to put those ads in your blog. Two, you’re going to start to see which ads are performing better than others in terms of the positions that they are, the unit sizes, those types of things. You’re going to learn how many people click on the ads in different parts of your blog when you start to analyze those reports. This positions you really well for later on when you might monetize in a more serious way, when you start talking to advertisers directly, for example. Another example, if you start to put a few affiliate ads into your blog early, you’re going to learn a lot about what your readers respond to, what type of products they respond to, what price points they respond to, what marketing messages they respond to. They may not convert in a massive amount but you’ll begin to get a little bit of information, you’ll get used to, and you’re gaining confidence in terms of using some of the tools that you will later use to monetize your blog. I guess you make your mistakes on monetizing your blog. Most of us make mistakes. Most of us put the wrong ad code in the wrong spot or forget to put the affiliate link in the right way or something like that. You make those mistakes in the early days when you don’t have a whole heap of traffic and you won’t be doing it in front of a large audience.  I think there’s three reasons there. One, you’ll earn a little bit from day one, that can give you a bit of energy. Two, it gets your readers used to the idea of you monetizing your blog. Three, you’re going to learn a lot by doing it as well. There are my reasons. That’s why I do it. You may take the other approach and that’s totally fine.  If you do take my approach and you do decide to monetize from day one, a couple of thoughts for you. Firstly, don’t invest too much time into it too early. I do think it’s worth monetizing early, I would do so in a low level way. Some monetization methods will take more energy and more time from you than others. I’ll be looking for some easier ways to do it. To give you an example, if you wanted to eventually gets sponsors for your blog, that’s probably not going to work from day one. A sponsor’s not going to give you money to sponsor a post or put a banner ad on your site until you’ve got traffic. Yeah, you probably couldn’t do that. You could sign up for an advertising network. Some of them do have some requirements in terms of how long you’ve been blogging. AdSense, for example, says that you probably have had your site live for six months or more although their terms and conditions page is a little bit vague on this. They mentioned that if you’re in China or India, you’ve had to have your site live for more than six months. Others, it kind of really doesn’t really say. They pick and choose a little bit from what I can see.  You can apply to join AdSense. You can apply to join another advertising network. They’re relatively easy monetization systems to use. You just copy and paste some code into your template. Then suddenly, the ads start appearing. You’re not going to earn a lot from that as I said before because those ad networks take a lot of traffic to earn a lot. You are going to learn about positioning ads and that type of thing. That’s one of the monetizations streams that I had on my blogs from the early days when I started Digital Photography School. AdSense was running on my blog. The other option is to do some affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing does take a little bit of work. You’ve got to research the right product and sign up for the program. It’s one of those things that doesn’t take as much effort as creating your own product. You could join Amazon’s affiliate program, their associate’s program. That’s pretty easy to sign up for. You’re just filling the form and apply. A day of two later, you’ll get approved for it. Then, you can start to generate affiliate links for it. That’s probably the easiest affiliate program to start up with.  Then, there’s others. You might look for courses, ebooks, that people are creating in your particular niche, and sign up for affiliate programs for those as well. There’s hundreds of those around, thousands of those around. This is probably where I would be starting if I was starting a blog today. Particularly with affiliate marketing, I probably wouldn’t go with AdSense from day one just because it takes so much traffic to make anything from it these days. I think with affiliate marketing, there’s potential there to do reasonably well. We’ve got some podcasts that I’ve recorded on affiliate marketing that I’ll link to into today’s show notes so if you want to learn a little bit more about how to do that.  Depending on the topic of the blog that I was starting, I’d be looking to signup for Amazon’s affiliate program. I’d be trying to find some books and products in Amazon that relate to my audience and recommend those. In some blog posts, maybe create some recommended resources, pages, for my blog, and feature those types of products. As I’ve mentioned before, I’ll be looking for ebooks, courses, or maybe some software that are related to my particular audience, and be signing up for affiliate programs for those. That’s often where you go to the actual provider, the creator of the book or the course, and they may have an affiliate program for that. That’s where I’ll be signing up. For those ebooks and courses, you earn a higher commission than you will with Amazon which is a good thing. You, sometimes, can build a relationship with the creators of those products as well.  As I said before, when you sign up as an affiliate for a product, the beauty of that is you’re going to learn a whole heap about what type of products you could potentially create as well. This is what I did when I started Digital Photography School. I, in the early days of DPS, had AdSense on my blog, did some Amazon affiliate programs. About a year or so later, I started to test different ebooks, software, and courses. Part of the reason I was doing those affiliate marketing pushes was to make money. Also, because I wanted to start to see whether my readers would buy those types of products, and how much they would pay for those products. This is where affiliate marketing is good in terms of the income that it brings but also what you learn from it as well.  The last thing I’ll say is don’t obsess too much about monetization too early. Profitable blogs are built on a number of things. Yes, you need to have some monetization on it. That’s one of the things. The other three things that you really do need to put effort into, particularly in the first few years of your blog, is creating as much great content as you can, building your archives of content, working or promoting your blog, and building traffic to your blog. Getting those first eyeballs into your blog. We’ve talked about that in some of the most recent podcast episodes as well. Promoting your blog, creating guest content to get off your blog, and have that appear on other people’s blogs, and in the forums. Working on your Search Engine Optimization, working on your social media, and driving traffic to your blog. The third area you really do need to work on is building engaged readers. Not just getting the eyeball but getting people subscribed to your email list, connected with you on social media, and building community with those readers. It’s not just about finding the right monetization strategy. You need to work on content, traffic, and engaged readers. I guess in my mind, the four pillars of building a profitable blog—content, traffic, engagement, and monetization strategies. Definitely do consider monetization early but you need to be working on those other pillars of building a profitable blog as well. Again, when I started Digital Photography School, I saw the first two years of that blog as the launch phase. Once I did have monetization going on during those first year and a half, I think. It probably was about 18 months before I did anything else other than AdSense and Amazon’s affiliate program. Up until that point, I really was putting most of my active energy into creating as much content, and building as much traffic as I could. That was where I was putting my active energy. I’d set up the AdSense ads.  Then, it became almost like a passive thing. I just sat there and gradually built up the income. I occasionally would insert an Amazon link into a post but it wasn’t something that I was actively spending a lot of time thinking about. I was being more active in these other areas. 18 months into using it, I began to get more active in monetization. Once I built the foundation, once traffic began to flow, then I could turn my attention into researching what products I wanted to promote from other people as an affiliate but also what products I should start creating, what ebooks we should start writing. Also, it was around 18 months in, we began to reach out to advertisers as well. We got a little bit more active in our monetization strategies in those three different ways.  That’s my answer. It’s a long answer to a simple question, really. You can wait. That’s totally fine. I see people doing that all the time but you’re also going to have some benefits of monetizing early. It’s totally fine to do it. In fact, it’s my recommendation that you do. Again, start with something simple. Don’t obsess about monetization. Don’t do it at the expense of creating content, building traffic, and building engagement with your readers. They are the foundations that profitable blogs are built on. I would love to hear what approach you took with monetizing your blog. If you’re a more experienced blogger, when did you monetize? Did you monetized from day one? What monetization strategies did you use in the early days? Two, if you’re starting again, what would you do differently on that particular front?  If you’re starting a blog and I know many of you are, we’ve had a bit of a theme recently in the podcast of How to Start Blogs, if you’re starting, what’s your intention? How do you want to monetize that blog? What are you doing from day one or you’re going to wait? I’d love to hear your feedback on that over the show notes at problogger.com/podcast/123. Thanks for listening today. I’m actually off to Thailand tomorrow for a bit of a holiday but guess what? I’ve recorded a whole heap of podcasts just to keep you going while I’m away. You can imagine me over the next couple of episodes sitting on a beach. I’ll be trying to keep my kids safe from the pool and probably out and about having a good old time in Thailand, eating some curry puffs and stir fry. I’m not sure what we’re doing but hopefully it’ll be a good time. I hope you’re having a good time. It’s halfway through the year now. I hope your blog is firing. You still got over six months to go for this year. There’s still time to make 2016 count. I look forward to chatting with you in the next couple of episodes of the ProBlogger Podcast. Thanks for tuning in and I’ll talk to you shortly. This episode of the ProBlogger podcast was edited by the team at PodcastMotor who offer a great range of services including helping you to set up and launch your podcast as well as ongoing editing and production of the podcast that you produce. You can check them out at podcastmotor.com. How did you go with today’s episode? I would love to hear what approach you took. When did you monetize? What strategies did you use? If you are a new blogger, what is your intention. I’d love to hear your methods and experiences. Never miss an episode – Subscribe to the ProBlogger podcast on iTunes Got a Question You’d Like Me to Answer? I base many episodes of this podcast upon questions answered by ProBlogger Podcast listeners and Blog readers. You can use the following widget to ask a question. Please include your name and blog name (if you have a blog).   Enjoy this podcast? Sign up to our ProBloggerPLUS newsletter to get notified of all new tutorials and podcasts below.

Do you associate your name with your blog? Today, I am talking about whether you should use your real name when blogging or blog anonymously. Often times, bloggers introduce themselves to me and then say they blog anonymously. There are definite advantages of using your name and definite advantages of blogging anonymously. I am going to talk about some of the different options that are open to you that may be in between each choice. This is one of the decisions that bloggers face when starting a blog. Most at least ponder the question. Many use their real names straight away, but others really grapple with this decision. Note: this episode can be listened to in the player above or on iTunes or Stitcher In Today’s Episode: Using Your Real Name and Other Options Blog under your personal name and promote it prominently on your blog (this is what I’ve done here on ProBlogger). Perhaps the most extreme version of this is when you make your domain name your actual name. Blog under your personal name but don’t really promote yourself (this is what I’ve done on DPS – my name is on the about page and on any articles I wrote but not much more. Blog under an alias or just part of your name and promote that name. Some examples of this – early on on ProBlogger we had a writer who wrote for us called Skellie. Her blog was the same name – but it wasn’t her real name. Aussie blogger Mrs Woog is another good example. She blogged as Mrs Woog at WoogsWorld. An alternative to this might be using a maiden name rather than a married name if you have one – or visa versa – one for personal use and one for professional use. Blog without any name on your blog at all – letting the content speak for itself. This anonymous blogging has been done by many people over the years – for different reasons. So which is the best option? On ProBlogger I’ve always been blogging under my name, including it in the byline of my posts, I have a prominent about page, the blog is written in a personal tone, including personal details of my life and video and pictures of myself. On dPS however I took a different approach from day #1. While I always used my name as bylines on my articles and had it on my about and contact pages. I never really went out of my way to make the blog about me. I guess this was even reflected in the type of name I chose for the site. Digital Photography School communicates a brand that is a center for learning while ProBlogger feels more about a person (whether that is the author or the reader). I guess my point is to say that a variety of approaches can work and the decision is totally yours. There Are a Number of Factors to Consider: The topic – as I’ve already said – some topics probably lend themselves more to being transparent about who you are. The style of content – DPS was never a story telling type blog. It was about the content. The medium of content – if you’re purely producing text content you may run into less issues around your identity than if you’re posting pictures and video. Your long term plans – try to picture a few years forward about what you want to achieve with your blog. While it can be hard to do if you have clear goals this can impact your decision. do you want your blog to be a multi author blog? If so it might be advantageous to not make the blog fully about you if you ever choose to step away from your blog and sell. It can be quite helpful to have a blog that isn’t all about you personally. Monetization methods – some ways of making money blogging might be more suited to a more personal and transparent approach Banner ads, no worries about who you are Consultant, speaker or coach, people need to know who you are Influencer, you need a personal connection Ebook, course, etc. Better to be more open about who you are Anonymous bloggers still may be able to do these things, but it is more challenging How Comfortable you are with Limelight – Choosing not to associate your name with your blog is not a glamorous approach. You might never appear on the top list of bloggers for your work or get written up in mainstream media. Personal safety/security/privacy – Sharing personal information can be a safety issue. There are many reasons to maintain privacy. I knew a health blogger who blogged anonymously because she felt revealing who she was would jeopardize her career. Another was a family lawyer who didn’t want past clients and work connections to find her. Another one who did not want to be identified by an abusive ex-partner. Blogging about an embarrassing health condition I knew another blogger who felt he would be more open about his life if he didn’t announce who he actually was. One last thought – you can always add your name later… but you can’t take it away. As I mentioned earlier – many of the anonymous bloggers I can think of are today not anonymous at all. I first came across Cora back in 2010 when she wrote a guest post on ProBlogger about how to blog anonymously. Cora (who at the time blogged as ‘Treacle’)  gave some great tips that I would recommend you checking out if you choose to be anonymous) but interestingly in 2012 decided to reveal her identity. Cora used to be a crisis counsellor and when she started her blog she didn’t really want colleagues or clients to know about her lingerie blog. I think she also had reservations about family members knowing. This is a story I’ve heard many times over. In fact while not on the same scale, it was also the story of Vanessa Rowse – who I used to go to great lengths to disguise the name of on my blogs and who affectionately became known as Mrs ProBlogger When she did start her blog – Style and Shenanigans – she did so without using her name or photo. This was a challenge as a style blogger who talked about the clothes she wore. She blogged this way for a few months but decided to reveal her name and face after a while. I wrote on ProBlogger about how her first selfie and revealing of her name was the beginning of a steady growth in her blog. Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Darren: Hi there, my name is Darren Rowse and I’d like to welcome you to Episode 122 of the ProBlogger Podcast where today, I want to talk about using your name on your blog or whether you should blog anonymously. Often people sidle up to me at a conference and quietly introduce themselves and say, “I blog anonymously. Should I?” Or, “I’m about to start blogging and I’m not sure whether to use my real name.” Often these conversations happen in the corner of rooms and people don’t really want to be seen having them for obvious reasons, they want to remain anonymous and sometimes they don’t even tell me their real name. Today, I want to tackle this particular issue because I think there are some different advantages of using your name and different advantages of being anonymous.  I want to talk a little bit about some of the different options that you have open to you that maybe are in between the two of either blogging anonymously or really promoting your name. You can find today’s show notes where I do have some further reading today at problogger.com/podcast/122, you can also subscribe there to get an email every time we update this podcast. I know some of you subscribe on iTunes and that’s a great way to get notified but we also send out an email to those of you who wish to do that and you can find that subscription option on today’s show notes. Again, at problogger.com/podcast/122 . Let’s get into today’s show.  One of the choices that bloggers face when they are starting a blog is whether they use their own name and most bloggers at least ponder this. I suspect most bloggers just go on to use their name straight away. But for some bloggers in different circumstances, it’s a really tough choice, and one that people really do grapple with. To what extent they should use their name as well is another thing that people will be pondering, and there are a range of options open to bloggers. At one end of the spectrum, you can blog under your own personal name, you can promote your name very prominently all over your blog. I guess the most extreme version is you may actually choose to use your name as the domain name and that’s probably a topic for another day. We will tackle that one at some point, but that I guess, obviously, is where you reveal who you are.  A good example of a blog where the blogger uses their own name quite extensively on their blog is ProBlogger. Right from day one of ProBlogger, I revealed my name is Darren Rowse. I had my photo in my sidebar from day one and was very upfront about who I am. In fact, sometimes I look at my blog and think it’s a little bit too Darren-y, but it has become a very personal brand, I guess. That’s one extreme that you might like to use.  That’s not the only way to use your name on your blog, obviously that blog is very Darren-y, ProBlogger is associated with Darren and that’s really what I’m trying to build there. But at Digital Photography School, my other blog, I still blog under my own name but I don’t really promote myself. This is the second option.  You don’t hide your name. You don’t hide who you are, but you don’t really make the vlog about you, you don’t really promote your name. If you go to Digital Photography School, you’ll see every blogpost that I’ve written as a By line with my name on it. I think the About page has my name on it somewhere or at least it did when I started out. But there’s no real pictures of me on the sidebar. The blog is not really a Darren type blog. It’s not a personal brand whatsoever, but I’m not hiding my identity there. People can find it if they want.  I’ll talk a little bit more about this in a bit, but really, the idea there is the content itself becomes the thing that people come for. It’s Digital Photography School, it’s not Darren’s blog. There’s another brand there that we are promoting. That might be another option that you want to consider.  I’m going to give you some reasons why you might want to do that instead of making your blog a real personal brand in a moment. Another option, a little further along the spectrum is to blog under an alias or just part of your name and promote that.  A couple of examples of this in the early days of ProBlogger, we had a writer who used to write fairly anonymously as Skellie as she used another name, someone else’s name that she just made up that is not her real name and her blog was under the same name. It was an anonymous blog, you might say. A little less anonymous is an Aussie blogger here in Australia who blogs as Mrs. Woog. She blogs at WoogsWorld. I will link to that in today’s show notes and she blogged there are Mrs. Woog for many years. I think from memory, Woog, was her husband’s surname so she blogged as that. I have a vague recollection that she did come out and reveal her name back in 2010, although I’m not sure whether that’s public or not so I won’t actually reveal her real name, but she used that alias for many years but still used her photo on the blog. This was a step between being fully anonymous where you don’t reveal anything about yourself. You don’t show your face, you don’t show a video. She does have a video. She does have her face on her blog as well.  There’s some element of privacy there because originally, she didn’t reveal who her name was but she showed herself and alternative to this might even be using a maiden name or a married name if you have used your maiden name in a professional context as well, if you have a maiden name, if you have chosen to go that way as well. I do know of a number of bloggers who use their maiden name for their blog, and for their personal life, they use their married name. I guess at the extreme is pretty much like Skellie as I mentioned before, blogging without any name at all on your blog other than an alias. You allow your content to speak for yourself. If anything, people come to know you as that alias. I’ll give you an example of that towards the end of this podcast as well. It’s interesting, most of the anonymous bloggers that I’ve come into contact with over the years, most of them have either stopped blogging because they found it really hard to be completely anonymous or became quite stressful for them because people started to work out who they were or they ended up revealing who they were as well. In most of the cases that I can think of, the anonymous bloggers have really great reasons not to reveal their name in the early days, but as their confidence grew or as fear begin to diminish, they decided to reveal who they were. I think that’s probably the most common story that I’ve heard with anonymous bloggers.  What’s the best option? Now, I’ve heard many people express opinions on this particular one because I think that several years ago being in a conference where I heard a speaker answer this question strongly arguing that the only real way to build a blog was to associate your name with it. In answer the question, they actually used me and Problogger as an example, saying something like, “When you think of making money blogging, who do you think of? Darren Rowse,” and they went off to talk about the advantage of that. I can see where they were coming from, but I don’t think associating your name has to be really the only option that you have. I do think the spectrum of options that I’ve just gone through really are  all legitimate depending on your circumstance.  It’s certainly nice, I think, to have your name associated with a niche. To be able to say, ProBlogger, Darren, that’s good. It opened up opportunities for me, but I don’t think it’s the only option. Again, let me just quickly use my own examples to go a little bit deeper on this. On ProBlogger, as I said, I’ve always used my own name. It’s in the By line on my posts, on my About page. I’ve thrown out videos of myself everywhere, obviously this podcast, I usually introduce myself with my name. As a result, it’s opened up some opportunities that perhaps wouldn’t have come if I haven’t used my name. Having my name associated with my blog has got me invitations to speak at conferences. I don’t know of too many anonymous bloggers who go to conferences because that entails them having to at least be there in person which reveals something of their identity.  It also helps me to pick up consulting work in the early days of ProBlogger. I don’t do it anymore, but it certainly helps in the early days where I did offer that. It’s allowed me to make business partners and start businesses with other people. It’s opened up the opportunity to write a book. Some of those things, you can probably do anonymously, but I think more opportunities have come my way because I’ve revealed my name on that particular blog.  I guess the other benefit of having revealed who I am and being upfront about that is that for some of my readers, that’s helped them to make a more personal connection with my blog. I guess through sharing my story, it makes ProBlogger a little bit more relatable. It’s not just a site. It’s a person behind the site and when I meet people at conferences, people come up in a very personal way.  I think that’s because they know who I am. As I say, some of those things may have happened by using a fake name perhaps, but perhaps not to the same extent. On Digital Photography School, my other blog, I took a very different approach from Day One.  As I said, I used my name on bylines of my articles, on my About page, and probably on my Contact page, but I’ve never really gone out of my way to make that blog about me.  This is even reflected in the name that I chose for the site, Digital Photography School communicates a brand that conjures an image of building a center of learning or a physical building. Some people even ask us where we are located, where’s the school. It focuses on a thing rather than a person. Whereas ProBlogger as a name, I guess, feels a little bit more personal. It feels like it’s either about a Pro Blogger or it’s for Pro Blogger. It’s a little bit more personal brand, even just the name of it as well.  Digital Photography School, not a personal blog at all. What impact has this had? It certainly has had some impact. I haven’t had any invitations to come speak at conferences as a result of Digital Photography School. I’ve never been asked to write a book on the topic although we publish ebooks on that particular topic and a couple of them I wrote, but it’s never opened up those opportunities for consulting or any of those other things, but it has grown and it’s grown far beyond what ProBlogger has grown. Certainly, if I were going to say which would have been a more profitable decisions? Digital Photography School has been a much more profitable decision even though I didn’t associate my name with it in a strong way whatsoever. I know that people still do have a personal connection with Digital Photography School, but they don’t have a connection with me. I’ve rarely had someone come up and go, “I just love what you’ve written on Digital Photography School.” They tell me about the site and about how the content has changed their life, or they tell me about one of our authors who I do have as a regular author and how they’ve changed their life in some way. Some of those longer term authors, we’re a multi author site now. Some of those authors have had connections with readers, but I don’t really get that a whole heap either. It’s more about the content and it’s about the community as well. I suspect some of our readers feel a personal connection with Digital Photography School because they are a part of our forum when that was active, or today they are part of our Facebook group. As I said before, in terms of traffic, Digital Photography School started two years after ProBlogger, I think it was 2006, but it’s about ten times bigger than ProBlogger today. Purely based on the stats and a profit perspective, I think either option can work. Some people may argue that if I had associated my name with Digital Photography School a little bit more, maybe it would have grown faster but I’m not so sure.  I guess ultimately what I’m trying to say here is that different topics or different styles of blogging might lend themselves to using your name more, but both can work. Both of the options can work and so can anonymous blogging. There’s examples around the internet of people who have built full time incomes from their blogs who blogged anonymously. I’m going to give you an example of that in just a moment. When you are making the decision about how much to tie your personal name to your blog, and if you should at all, there’s a number of factors I would encourage you to consider. Firstly, the topic. As I have just said, some topics probably lend themselves more to a personal connection in some way. ProBlogger I think lands itself. People want to journey with someone on this type of topic whereas Digital Photography School, it was more about the topic. It was about something else that wasn’t really relying on a person. The style of content is another factor. As you think about the blog that you are going to create, what style is it going to be? Is it going to be a story telling type blog like ProBlogger in the early days. ProBlogger was me telling my story and what I was learning as a blogger. As a result, I think it would have been weird if I hadn’t revealed who I was, whereas Digital Photography School is never a story telling blog. It was all about the topic first and foremost. Consider the topic, consider the style of content, consider the medium of content, is the third thing that I would encourage you to think about. If you are purely producing text content, then you may run into less issues around having revealing your identity. But obviously if you are posting pictures, videos, and even audio, these are more personal mediums, so it may make more sense to connect your name to it. People are going to be wondering who you are if they are listening to your voice, if they are seeing your picture, if they are seeing a video. The medium of content may be a factor that you want to consider. Another really important one to consider is your long term plans for the site. Try and picture a few years forward about what you want to achieve with your blog. I know when you are starting a blog, it can be difficult to do this. You don’t really know what’s going to happen with your blog, but if you have clear goals in mind about how you want your blog to be, that may have an impact upon whether you use your name. Let me give you a few examples. For example, if you want your blog to be a multi author blog, like Digital Photography School, it may be advantageous not to make the blog fully about you. That doesn’t mean you have to hide your name, but like I did on Digital Photography School, I didn’t personally brand it.  I’ve actually seen bloggers really find it difficult who started out with a very personal blog, a personally branded blog to transition into a multi author blog. We’ve actually had trouble with this on ProBlogger over the years.  People come to ProBlogger wanting me, but I know that it’s a multi author blog where we have a range of authors who are right there yet some of our readers really struggle with the fact that I’m not the only one creating content there. If you do want to have a multi author blog, you might want to consider from day one not promoting yourself as much as you might on a personally branded blog, and maybe even from day one including other people’s name on your blog as well in terms of the content that’s being created.  Other long term plans, if you dream maybe one day of selling your blog, it might be more to your advantage not to have a personally branded blog. If I was going to sell my two blogs today, it would be much harder to sell ProBlogger because ProBlogger is Darren. A lot of people come looking for me, so someone buying ProBlogger is going to run in the challenge of what happens when Darren is not there anymore.  Whereas Digital Photography School, I could sell that tomorrow. My readers won’t notice that I was gone from it. If you are thinking maybe one day you want your blog to be acquired, then you might just want to pull back a little on how personally branded it would be.  Another long term factor you might want to consider is if you want to monetize your blog, what type of monetization methods do you see you might want to do? I think some monetization methods lend themselves to anonymous blogging or having your name on your blog differently. For example, if you want to monetize putting banner ads using Google AdSense, you don’t really need to worry too much about your name on the blog because people are going to click those ads whether you’ve got your name on your blog or not, it has no impact whatsoever. If you choose to make your monetization streams on your blog more about selling your services as a consultant, speaker, or coach, you are probably going to have more success if people knowing who they are going to hire if they know your name, if they’ve seen your face, if they’ve seen some examples of you speaking, if they feel that personal connection.  If you chose to monetize your blog working as an influencer with brands, you may find it easier to make recommendations of products more authentically if people know who you are. I think it probably could be done anonymously as well, but I guess there’s more challenges there. Are your readers going to accept your recommendations as much if you are blogging anonymously as if they know who you are? If you are going to sell an ebook or a course, you might find it easier if people know who you are. I hope you are seeing here that having an anonymous blog may present some challenges with monetization. Having said that, again, I’m going to give you an example in just a moment now of a blogger who is anonymous, who got to full time level with her blog as well using some of the methods that I just talked about. There are examples of anonymous bloggers who still do well monetizing their blogs, but it depends a little on the income streams that you are wanting to build into your blog. Two more things to factor into your decision about whether you want to be anonymous or not. Another question might be how comfortable are you with the limelight. I always chuckle when I hear myself introduced at a conference as Darren Rowse, the guy behind ProBlogger. Whilst that’s completely true and I’m very proud of ProBlogger, Digital Photography School is obviously doing better than ProBlogger, but I never get introduced as Darren Rowse, the guy behind Digital Photography School. Sometimes it’s kind of mentioned as on the side, but I guess if you want to be known for something, it’s probably better to associate your name with it. But if you want to be anonymous, if you want to be out of the limelight, if you don’t really want to be associated with your blog. If you don’t really want to ever be listed in a List of Top Bloggers in your Niche or you don’t want to be invited to speak at a conference and that type of thing. If you’re more than happy to be in the background, then don’t associate your name with your blog as much. It’s pretty obvious, but I think it’s another factor that a lot of bloggers have a fear of being in the limelight. It might suit them to be a little more anonymous.  Then there’s the last factor, and I guess this is the reason a lot of people do choose to stay anonymous, is issues of personal safety/security/privacy. These are big issues for many bloggers who do grapple with these particular issues. It’s probably the main reason that people choose to stay anonymous.  A few examples, I know of one blogger who blogged anonymously for many years as she was a health practitioner and she blogged very honestly about her industry and she felt that revealing her name would potentially jeopardize her professional pursuits and she might get a lot of critique from her colleagues.  Another blogger who worked as a Lawyer for many years in Family Court matters, and didn’t want people that she represented or prosecuted to be able to find her for good reason. It was a personal safety issue. I know one blogger who feared being identified by an abusive ex partner online. Again, personal safety issues. Her blog was actually about how she left that relationship and had some recovery so she did want to talk about those issues, but she didn’t want to do it in a personal way for fear of being traced and tracked down by that ex partner.  I know another blogger who chose to remain anonymous because she was blogging about an embarrassing health condition that she had and she obviously didn’t want her friends and family to know about that.  I know another blogger who chose to blog anonymously because he felt that he could be more honest about his life and gave him more freedom in his writings. There’s a whole heap of different reasons that you may choose to factor into that as well. They are all completely legitimate. One last piece of advice before I share with you a couple of stories of bloggers who’ve blogged anonymously. You can always add your name later, but you can’t take it away from your blog. You could take it away from your blog, but it’s very hard to pull back your identity once it’s out there. Once it’s out there, someone is going to know about it. It’s going to be archived in the internet archive, or it might be mentioned on another blog or in social media and it’s very hard to pull back your identity from the internet but you can always add it later. As I mentioned earlier, most of the anonymous bloggers that I can think of are today not anonymous because they’ve decided to take a step out of their anonymity.  One good example of this, and this is the blogger that I’ve kind of been teasing you with is Cora Harrington from the Lingerie Addict. The Lingerie Addict, I’ll say upfront, is not a blog I read about every day and it’s maybe one you don’t want to open up at work, although it is very tastefully done, but it may not be appropriate for your workplace. I first came across Cora back in 2010 when she wrote an article on ProBlogger about how to blog anonymously because she was blogging on her blog, The Lingerie Addict, back at that time as Treacle. Her name was Treacle. That was the alias she was using and she gave some great tips and I’ll link to the post that she wrote on ProBlogger because I think it’s really relevant. If you want to blog anonymously, you need to read this particular blog post. She gave some great tips on how to do it and she reminded us that no one is ever truly anonymous online and you really want to be careful if you are going to do it, and she just gives you some good advice on that. But in 2012, Cora decided to reveal her identity and I’ll link to a post that she wrote on her blog where she revealed her identity as well. Short story of that post is that she used to be a crisis counsellor and when she started her blog about lingerie, she really didn’t want her colleagues or clients to know about that particular blog. Partly I guess, because about the topic and partly because she is working in a sensitive area. She also, I think reading between the lines, maybe had some reservations about family members knowing about that blog as well, partly I guess because of the topic. But in time, as her blog became her full time income, and she actually got to a full time level before she revealed who she was so it’s possible and she was using from what I can see, advertising and probably some affiliate marketing on it so she was able to monetize using those methods. But she gradually, over time, became more confident and because she wasn’t working anymore as a crisis counselor, she didn’t have colleagues and her family, partner, and friends became more comfortable with the idea, she grew in her own confidence and decided to reveal her name. I think it’s just a great case study and I encourage you to go and read that particular post that she wrote on how to be anonymous as a blogger, but also I tell that story because I think this is the story that I hear many times over for bloggers who start out one way and then transition to being more open with their identity. Another quick example, it’s not quite on the same scale because she hasn’t got to a full time level yet is the story of Vanessa Rowse who many of you know and for many years, Vanessa who is my wife, my partner. We’ve been married now since 2002, so over 14 years now. I used to go to great lengths to disguise her name on my first blog even before she was blogging and she became affectionately known by many of ProBlogger readers as Mrs ProBlogger, and she was quite happy to be called Mrs ProBlogger as well because it allowed her to be anonymous. The reason she wanted to stay anonymous was the kind of work she has done recently, I won’t go into great detail, but she didn’t want to be tracked down online even before she had a blog. Then she did start a blog, it must be almost two and a half years ago now. Her blog is called Style and Shenanigans, I’ll link to it in the show notes as well. She started that blog without using her name or her photo which was a pretty big challenge for a style blogger who talked about the clothes she was wearing. To not actually show her face, it kind of made things a little bit tricky but she blogged that way for several months before she decided that really she was confident enough now to reveal her name and her face. I remember the day she posted her first selfie on Instagram. It was the day which we can literally track back in her Google Analytics. It was the day things began to take off a little bit.  I write about this in a blogpost on ProBlogger back in 2013, so it must be almost three years ago now that she started and this post called ‘How Posting a Humble Selfie Grew Traffic Shares and Comments on a New Blog’, and it’s really about how revealing who she was, revealing something of herself including her name, including her face. Her readers did really respond to that.  It’s one option there if you want a little bit more engagement. If you want a little bit more connection with your readers, it might actually be a factor that you might want to consider as well.  But I share this story partly to highlight how being personal can help, but also to show you that you can start out completely private and end up being more public in time. There’s no pressure to escalate that and to do it at any pace. You may choose never to reveal who you are, but you can always add more detail of who you are onto your blog, but you can’t take it away.  I guess, I really want to put it out there. Do wrestle with some of the factors that I’ve gone through and hopefully somewhere in the midst of all of that, you’ll find something that you’re comfortable  with. I guess that’s my final advice. Go with what you are comfortable with. No one else needs to prescribe the way that you blog. There are no rules around this. Just be comfortable, be safe, and look after yourself first and then in time you may actually find that your confidence grows.  Do check out some of those further readings that I’ve got in today’s show notes. You can find them over at problogger.com/podcast/122. Particularly, I encourage you to check out that post that Cora, Treacle, wrote back in 2010. It’s a few years old, but I think most of it is really relevant for anyone even today considering anonymity in blogging.  It’s something you want to consider the right way. There’s some good advice in that particular post.  My name is Darren Rowse. I’m happy for you to know who I am and I really appreciate you listening today. I’ve appreciated over the last week or so checking out some of the reviews that have been left on iTunes. Some of you chose to reveal your identity in those reviews and I love that, but I also love the ones who used alias as well. If you have been enjoying the ProBlogger show over the last few weeks or months, I really would appreciate any review you could leave us on iTunes,or Stitcher, or any of the podcast listening channels that you use. Thanks so much for listening and I’ll chat with you in a couple of days time in Episode 123. Before I go, I want to give a big shout out and say thank you to Craig Hewitt and the team at PodcastMotor who has been editing all of our podcasts for sometime now. PodcastMotor has a 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 edit your shows and get them up with great show notes. Check them out at podcastmotor.com.   How did you go with today’s episode? Once again, I appreciate all of you for listening, reviewing, and leaving comments. Let me know if there are any new topics you would like to hear about. Never miss an episode – Subscribe to the ProBlogger podcast on iTunes Got a Question You’d Like Me to Answer? I base many episodes of this podcast upon questions answered by ProBlogger Podcast listeners and Blog readers. You can use the following widget to ask a question. Please include your name and blog name (if you have a blog).   Enjoy this podcast? 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