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Strategies for Overcoming Imposter Syndrome Today I’m going to talk about an issue I see a lot of bloggers struggling with. In fact, I see a lot of blogger’s really crippled by this. I am talking about imposter syndrome. Note: this episode can be listened to in the player above or on iTunes or Stitcher This is something I have suffered with quite a bit over the years. I’m going to get a little personal today and tell you about those times when I was pretty much paralyzed by it. I’m going to get a bit honest today, and tell you that these weren’t the best times of my life. If you want to hear about it, then listen on. I think if you’ve suffered with this imposter syndrome. Hopefully, you’ll get something out of my story that will help you get through it yourself. Today I am going to present to you 7 different strategies to overcome imposter syndrome. We are going to touch on fear, self-doubt and feeling like others think you are a fraud. We are going to get really raw today. Do you ever fear that you’re about to be found out and that everyone is about to discover you’re not as smart as they think you are or that you don’t really know what you’re doing in some area of your life? Do you feel this way about your blogging? If so – you’re not alone at all, but you may be suffering from Imposter Syndrome. In Today’s Episode 7 Different Strategies for Overcoming Imposter Syndrome Understand that you’re actually suffering from this because you’re a high achiever At least be comforted out of the fact that you are not willing to settle for poor performance This may not fix it, but it’s good to know You need to work on self acceptance and realistic expectations There have been a number of times that I have been paralysed by imposter syndrome (World Domination Summit) I wrestled with it and became stuck I had unrealistic expectations about the results of this talk Perfectionism taken to the extreme can paralyse you Perfectionism also starts to creep into other extreme realities like being booed on stage or destroying my business I talked myself down to a more realistic reality and realized I didn’t need to be perfect I needed to be honest and true to myself Don’t be too hard on yourself, treat yourself kind Focus on your audience – I realized worrying was incredibly selfish, it was all about me and not my audience I decided that every time I was worried about how I would be perceived, I had to stop thinking about myself and focus on my audience This is great advice for anyone creating something for an audience This is also why I’m trying to interact with my readers as much as possible One of the best things you can do to show that you are not a fake or fraud is to deliver value Be Transparent – The most powerful thing you can do to smash through imposter syndrome is to blog with transparency People can only call you a fraud or fake if you are trying to be something that you are not Show people who you really are I was at SMMW a couple of months ago, and Cliff Ravenscraft talked about imposter syndrome. You are only an imposter if you are lying about who you are or what you have achieved. His suggestion was to always be honest when writing content by revealing: This is who I am This is what I have experienced to this point and what I’m learning These are my hopes, dreams and goals for the future This particularly relates to bloggers who are blogging about topics that they are not qualified to formally write about yet. I get asked about this a fair bit by readers who ask ‘“should I start a blog on a topic that I’m still a beginner in?” My answer is to always tell the story of when I started ProBlogger back in 2004 I struggled with imposter syndrome at the beginning of ProBlogger. Even though, I was on my way to being a full time blogger. I worried that people would spot my weaknesses and gaps in knowledge I decided to be completely transparent and share what I was trying and what I was learning When you blog in this way, it is pretty hard for someone to call you a fake or fraud Own Your Successes – When suffering from imposter syndrome it is hard to own your successes. They write them off to be the product of luck, timing or some other factor. This is hard to combat, but for me it’s about becoming aware of the internal and external dialogue. We fall into patterns of thinking (and speaking) that we need to break, so try to identify the automatic thoughts that come and use them as triggers for more positive thinking. Next time you find yourself saying or thinking “I was lucky” replace that with “I work hard to take the opportunities that came”. Accept positive feedback, don’t try to deny or explain it away Record the positive feedback and testimonials of others – not to show off – but for you to help you internalise your success. Give those around you permission to help with this While we’re talking about success… on the flip side there are times when we fail too. Don’t see these – the key here is to not get bogged down in them but to reframe them as learning opportunities! Say Yes to Opportunities – That stretch you. I’m a big believer in saying yes to things that you are not sure you can do as long as you are transparent about it. The only way you are going to become an expert is if you know a lot about it. To gain knowledge, you need to learn and let the rubber hit the road. If someone else thinks you can do something, take that vote of confidence and learn how to do it Explain that you are going to learn how to do it, or that you might need some support, but take that opportunity to get out of your comfort zone By taking these opportunities, you are one step closer to being the person you want to be Live with it – I’m not sure imposter syndrome ever really goes away. We need to learn to live with it. We need to put it in it’s place and deal with it. We need to learn how to use it to grow, learn and serve. Above all – Don’t let it paralyse you. If it is – get some help. Talk about it and get some accountability. Don’t let it rob the world of what you do know, your story, and the potential you have to make the world all the better for your contributions! Here’s the video that was recorded of the talk that I eventually did give at World Domination Summit. While it’s not on the topic of Imposter Syndrome I hope it shows you what fun you can have by pushing through it! Darren Rowse from Chris Guillebeau on Vimeo. Further Resources on Strategies for Overcoming Imposter Syndrome 3 Questions to Ask When Facing Fear Afraid Of Being ‘Found Out?’ How To Overcome Impostor Syndrome 21 Proven Ways To Overcome Impostor Syndrome Struggling With Impostor Syndrome? 9 Ways to Deal With It (Before It Hinders Your Success) Learning to Deal With the Impostor Syndrome Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Hey there. Welcome to Episode 121 of the ProBlogger Podcast. My name is Darren Rowse. Today, I want to talk about an issue that I see a lot of bloggers struggling with. In fact, I’ll see some bloggers really crippled by this. It’s imposter syndrome. It’s something that I, myself, had suffered with quite a bit over the years. In fact, there’s been times—I’m going to get a little bit personal in today’s episode and tell you about this—where I pretty much been paralyzed by it. I look back and they weren’t the best times in my life. I’m going to be honest today. Listen on if you want to hear that. If you want to not hear that, then you might want to find another one. I think if you suffer with this imposter syndrome that, hopefully, you’ll get something out of my story that will help you to get through yourself. I want to present to you with seven different strategist for overcoming it. We’re going to touch on fear, we’re going to touch on self-doubt, we’re going to touch on feeling like maybe other people think you’re a fake or a fraud. We’re going to get really raw today, but I hope that’s okay with you because I think it’s really important. This is important stuff, whether you’re a blogger, a podcaster, or a speaker, a YouTuber, Instagrammer. If you’re putting stuff at different other people, then this is something you probably are going to grapple with one time or another. In fact, I recently read a study that said 70% of people suffer from this at one point or another in their life. If this is you, go listen on. If you know someone else who might enjoy this and find it useful, please feel free to pass it on to them as well. You can find today’s show notes at problogger.com/podcast/121, where I’m going to include some quite detailed notes of what I’m going through in this particular episode. If you do prefer to read, you can head over there. I’ll also include some further reading and some resources that I found helpful in dealing with this myself and also preparing this particular podcast. Again, it’s problogger.com/podcast/121. Are you ready to get a little personal? Let’s do it. Do you ever fear that you’re about to be found out and that everyone is about to discover that you’re not as smart as they think or that you don’t really know what you’re talking about on your blog? Do you ever feel that way about your blog? If so, you’re not alone, but you may be suffering from imposter syndrome. I recently asked some of our ProBlogger newsletter subscribers to send me a sentence about their biggest challenge. One of the common themes that came back was around self-doubt and the feeling like a fraud. Many bloggers definitely grapple with these feelings and I’m one of them.  As I look back over the last, and I’ll say, years of blogging, there’ve been many nights where I’ve laid in bed worried that people’s expectations of me exceeded the reality of who I was. Many times of these thoughts have come. Often, just before I’m about to speak at an event or when I’m about to launch a new product, usually when something big is about to happen. I’ll wake up in a cold sweat and have that moment. Imposter syndrome is a term that was first used in the 1970s by clinical psychologists, Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes (I think it is), who were studying high-achieving individuals, who had an inability to internalize their accomplishments, and who had this persistent fear of being exposed as a fraud. Despite their being really good evidence that they knew what they’re talking about. People suffering to this often dismiss their success as lack or good timing or had this feeling that they were deceiving people in some way. Now, I got that definition from Wikipedia. Thank you, Wikipedia. Sometimes this feeling is accompanied with feelings from people who are successful of just being lucky or I don’t really know what I’m talking about, I may have fooled everyone and there’s a counting fear of being found out.  This is a feeling that people across many different fears suffer from. I did a little bit of research today and I found actors talking about it, I found many public speakers talking about it, I found podcasters admitting to it, I found plenty of big examples on bloggers who also had this struggle with fearing that they’re about to be named as a fraud or a fake, even though there wasn’t really any evidence of that. If you’re feeling this imposter syndrome, you’re definitely not alone.  One of the things I’ve come to in my own imposter syndrome is that maybe it’s actually not necessarily a bad thing to think it. What is bad is when you let that feeling and thinking hold you back from some success or when that feeling sabotages what you do. Imposter syndrome, there’s an element of fear and fear is something I’ve talked about in many podcasts in the past. In fact, if you want to go back and listen to episode 54, I gave you three questions to ask when you’re feeling fear and maybe they’re applicable for this particular issue as well. Fear is something that is actually useful. It can hold you back and that is a bad thing, but it can actually prepel you forwards. I think with imposter syndrome, you can actually the same thing. When you feel like a fake or a fraud and you allow those feelings to paralyze you, or stop you, or sabotage you and your blogging in some way, then that’s a bad thing, obviously, and that’s something you need to deal with. On the other hand, when you’re able to take those fears and use them as a motivation to do better, to learn more, to be more thorough in your content, to serve your readers better, then your imposter syndrome can be put to some good news. That’s the first thing I really want to say about it.  Now, it’s a lot easier to say than it is to make that switch and make the imposter syndrome work for you. What I want to do today in this particular episode is give you seven pieces of advice for bloggers, podcasters, online entrepreneurs, speakers on the topic of imposter syndrome. This really does come out of a little bit of personal place for me. Please forgive me if I do get a little bit personal with this because it’s something I have really grappled with many times in the past. It’s not something that I think I’ve really even talked about much in public before.  Here’s a few things. I’ve come up with seven but it might actually turn into eight or nine, who knows where this is going to go. The first thing I want to say (and this is a bit of a word of encouragement for you if you are feeling this) is that you need to understand that you’re probably suffering imposter syndrome because you’re a high-achiever or you have the potential to be. Every piece of research that I found about imposter syndrome is always talked about as being a problem that high-achievers have or at the very least, people who have high expectations of themselves. If you listen in this particular episode and you’re resonating with your idea of imposter syndrome, you can at least be comforted by the fact that your feelings are probably coming out of a place where you’re not willing to set off a poor performance and you’re someone who wants to give your best and achieve something. I think that’s a good thing.  I want to start off with that. Not because it solves your imposter syndrome, but you’re feeling those things because you got standards. You don’t want to just get by. You want to achieve. Start with that. That’s a positive. That’s something that we need to hang on to. If we weren’t feeling these feelings, we’re probably just be willing to fly above the seat of our pants. That’s the first thing I want to say.  The second thing I want to say and this is one of the main things I really want to talk about is that if you’re feeling imposter syndrome, you do need to work and I need to work on self-acceptance and setting realistic expectations of yourself. As I look back over the years, there’s been a number of times where I’ve pretty much been paralyzed by imposter syndrome. One of them was in the lead-up to a talk that I was invited to give at the World Domination Summit a few years ago. I was invited by my friend, Chris Guillebeau, to give this talk in front of 4000 people in Portland, Oregon. Once I immediately let that opportunity, almost within seconds of saying yes to Chris, imposter syndrome began to sink in. I began to have these thoughts that haunted me and that would literally wake me up in the middle of the night with a cold sweat. I wrestled with the thoughts for months and at times I became really stuck in the preparation for this talk. I almost got to the point pulling out. I remember drafting an email to Chris saying, “I’m really sorry. I know it’s last minute but I can’t do this.” Now, I did end up talking myself down and delivering that talk and I’ll post a video to it because it was one of the best things that I’ve ever done. It is one of the best days that I’ve ever had and I’m so glad that I’ve talked myself down from this imposter syndrome. What I did in talking myself down was realize that a lot of what I was thinking was completely unrealistic and I was having unrealistic expectations on myself and of the talk.  Once standing in front of 4000 people is a pretty big thing. I pictured it in my mind even bigger than the reality. When I pictured doing that talk before I did it in my mind, I started to picture the perfect talk. I was picturing it as the peak of my speaking career. The thing that everything else in my life would hang on afterwards, a talk that would change the life of everyone in the room and that will make me look so great. Really, a lot of my expectations on that talk and a lot of the things I was dreaming of were perfectionism, but perfectionism way beyond what was possible. This perfectionism began to creep into my thinking.  I actually think perfectionism can be a bit of a good thing because it can help improve, but the problem with it is that when you obsess about it the way I was obsessing about it, is that you begin to realize that you just cannot possibly achieve what you are starting to think. Sometimes (and this is what happened for me), alongside that perfectionism thinking begins to creep in other equally unattainable realities that you began to think of. One of those for me was that I began to think that I was about to be exposed as a fraud because I realized I wasn’t able to deliver the perfect talk and I wasn’t able to do this thing that I was imagining, so I went to the other extreme and I began to imagine things like a crowd booing me and a hate campaign unraveling on Twitter because of something that I said, and that then lead to the crashing of my business, my family, and my life. I know it’s crazy, but they’re the kind of things that would go through my mind in bed at night as I began to talk. I’d be swinging between these two unrealistic realities. Perfectionism on one hand and my world literally crashing around me because I didn’t achieve perfectionism on the other hand. I would swing between these two things and neither was a reality, neither was realistic. In the end, I woke up to myself and I managed to talk myself down into a more realistic picture. I came to my senses by realizing that nothing I can do in that talk would be perfect but that was okay and that it wouldn’t lead to the end of the world. What I needed to be in that talk was honest and true to myself and to focus upon giving my best. I know a lot of people don’t suffer with this imposter syndrome, probably don’t relate to that at all. They’re probably wondering about my mental health, but this is the process that I went through. Really, what I want to encourage you too as you deal with your imposter syndrome is to try and take yourself to that place where you find a middle ground between two realities that you’re imagining. Ultimately, my advice here is not to be too hard on yourself and to do whatever you can to bring yourself to a place where you are kind to yourself in that.  The third thing I want to say—this is particularly relevant for bloggers, podcasters, speakers, anyone who has an audience—is that you really need to focus upon your audience. As I was coming out of this experience in the preparation for World Domination Summit, as I talk myself down, one of the things that really helped me a lot was that I had this really confronting realization that all of the worry I was doing was incredibly selfish. None of the things that I was doing in my thinking was focused upon my audience, it was all about me and how I was going to be perceived.  I don’t really like to admit the fact that that’s going on in my mind and I’m talking a bit of a punt here and admitting that to you and hoping that you’d be kind to me as a result. Ultimately, I’m being really greedy with my thinking. By thinking all that means how I was going to be perceived. The reality was that I have this incredible opportunity to give something of myself to these 4000 people. I realized that I was being selfish, I was being greedy, and I decided that everytime I found myself beginning to worry about how I would be perceived, that I needed to start changing the way I was thinking. I needed to challenge myself to think about who my audience would be, how they might be feeling, what the realities of their life might be, and how I might have an impact upon their lives with my words. I began to refocus my thoughts. This was a very powerful thing for me. It took me away from my self-centered, greedy, selfish thinking which was really not helping me anyway. It began to focus me upon what the whole point of that talk was, the people who were in the room listening. I think this is just great advice for speakers or anyone creating something where other people would be listening, reading, watching. Whether you’re a blogger, a YouTuber, an Instagrammer, a podcaster, a speaker, it’s so easy to allow our minds to wonder how our content makes us look. I found myself doing this as I write a blog post, as I prepare podcast and, “How is this going to make me look? Am I going to come across okay?” You really need to challenge those thoughts and ask yourself not, “How is this going to make me look?” but, “How is this going to make my readers feel?” and, “How is it going to change their life in some way?” I think it’s really important to refocus your attention upon your readers, your listeners. This is why over the last years over my blogging, I’ve really tried so much harder to interact with my readers as much as possible because I find that the more interactions I have with my readers, the better the picture I have in my mind of who they are and the more easy it is for me to focus upon their minds on creating content. This is why I’m doing more live video. This is why I’m doing more question and answer in a lot of the content that I’m producing. This is why I try to attend more events. I find the more I know you as my listener, the easier it is for me to focus upon creating content that is going to change your life, that makes you look good, and that makes you better in some way. The more I focus upon you, the less I’m thinking about me and that has really helped me a lot with my imposter syndrome.  One of the other things I would say on this particular topic of focusing upon your audience is one of the best things that you can do to show others that you are not a fake, that you are not a fraud is to deliver value to them. If you’re dealing with imposter syndrome, when you begin to think this way, let that propel you towards doing something of high value for other people.  This is another thing that I’ve started to train myself to do when I’ve seen myself falling into this pattern of thinking this negative way, this imposter syndrome thinking, I’m trying to use that as a signal to create a blog post that’s going to change someone’s life or create a podcast that’s going to have some content in it that helps people in some way. This is where I’m encouraging you to see imposter syndrome as your friend because it can be a signal for you to go and do something that is going to work against you over being accused of being a fake or a fraud.  The fourth thing that I want to say is to be transparent. That’s the most powerful thing that I think you can do to smash imposter syndrome is to blog, to podcast, to speak with transparency. Here’s the thing. People can only ever, really, truly call you a fraud or a fake if you’re trying to be something you’re not or if you’re hiding some reality of your situation from them. That’s the only time that you can ever really be a fraud or a fake, is if you’re hiding something.  I was at Social Media Marketing World a couple of months ago now, and Cliff Ravenscraft from the Podcast Answer Man briefly talked about imposter syndrome. He made this really quite quick observation that you are only really an imposter if you’re lying about who you are or what you’ve achieved. His suggestion was just to be as honest as you can when you’re writing your content by revealing three things, by telling your reader really transparently, “This is who I am, this is what I’ve experienced to this point, and this is what I’m learning, and these are my hopes, dreams, and goals for the future.” I think that is great advice. Let those things shine through in the content you create. I think this particularly relates to bloggers who might be blogging on a topic that they don’t feel they are qualified to write about yet and I get asked these quite a bit, people saying, “I want to write about this particular topic, maybe it’s accounting but I’m not qualified as an accountant. Can I legitimately write about that particular topic?” When I get asked this type of question, I almost always tell my story of starting ProBlogger. I started ProBlogger back in 2004 and once I was on the way to being a full time blogger when I started ProBlogger, I still felt like I was at the beginning of my journey and I suffered from imposter syndrome as a result. I’ve only been blogging for less than two years, I hadn’t reached the full time level (although I was on the way), I didn’t feel I have as much experience as other people, I didn’t feel I was technical enough, I didn’t feel I was a great writer. I did feel I’ve been a bit lucky and I’ve been in the right place at the right time. I worry that people would spot my weakness, insufficiencies, and the gaps that I had in my knowledge. The way I decided to combat that was to get in the front fort and to be very transparent about what I did know. For the first couple of years on ProBlogger, it’s really my story more than anything else. I shared what I was trying, I shared what was working for me, what wasn’t working for me. I pointed out the areas that I didn’t have skills in. I shared my own questions and asked my readers to teach me. I pointed out the failures I had and the mistakes that I made as embarrassing as some of them were. I admit when I didn’t know the answer to a question when people ask me a question. As I just said, in the early days of ProBlogger, the blog was more of a story of my own journey rather than a guide claiming to be the comprehensive and such all questions on the topic. If you feel like maybe you legitimately don’t have all the answers and legitimately you don’t have all the qualifications, just admit that. That takes any ammunition that anyone could ever have of accusing you of being a fake away from them.  When you bog in this very transparent way, it’s very hard for someone to call you fake or a fraud because you’ve been transparent about the things that they might want to accuse you of wanting to hide. So blog with transparency. That’s what I did. In time, you will gather the knowledge and you will gather some of the expertise that you might not have by simply blogging in that way.  The fifth thing that I want to talk about is to own your successes. Those suffering with imposter syndrome or those of us suffering with it have difficulty internalizing and owning our successes. This goes right to the heart of the definition of it. We have really difficulty owning the things we have achieved, the successes that we have.  We write off success as being the result of external things—lack of the people’s actions, good timing. It is hard to combat that because it’s a lot of just the way we think. Even just being aware of that problem that we have can help. There are some things you can do to combat that thinking. Often, I think it really is about patterns of speaking and speaking. We need to break those patterns. Begin to become aware of when you are saying things like, “I was lucky. I was in the right place at the right time.” Replace that thinking with other things. For example, when I find myself wanting to say, “I was just lucky.” I am trying to say, “I worked hard to take the opportunities that came.” Which is a more realistic and more true statement. I wasn’t just lucky. Yes, I was in the right place at the right time when I started blogging but I have worked my butt off everyday since that time. I’ve worked hard to take the opportunities that I was given. That is a more realistic, that is a more true statement than I was lucky. You need to own your successes, you need to own the work that you have done to achieve what you have done.  When people acknowledge your success or give you positive feedback, instead of trying to write it off and push it away, you need to own that as well. So, thank them rather than explaining away any success that you’ve had. Don’t deny your success. Embrace it in some way. Another way that you might want to help with this is to keep a diary of the things that you have achieved. It sounds very egotistical but it’s only egotistical if you show it to other people. It’s a private thing for you. It’s something that you need to be looking at over time. Record the positive feedback, the testimonials that others give you as well. Not to show off but for you to help you internalize your success. The other thing I’d say about this is to give other people around you permission to pull you up if they hear you not owning your success. This is something that I really would encourage you to do. You may not want to tell everyone to do this but maybe a part or maybe a family member, a friend when they hear you writing off your success, not owning your success, give them permission to pull you up on that. While we’re talking about success, on the flip side, there are times where we fail as well. My advice around failure—there are times when we fail—is to really try not to get bogged down in that failure because this can feed the imposter syndrome but rather reframe your failures as learning opportunities. Acknowledge the failure, don’t ignore it but use those failures as springboards into success. Again, that’s another way that you need to get yourself thinking and change your mindset.  Two more things I’ll say about imposter syndrome in terms of advice to overcome it. Number six is to say yes to opportunities that stretch you. This may sound a little counterintuitive but I’m a big believer in saying yes to things that you’re not sure that you can do yet as long as you bring transparency to it. Here’s the thing, the only way you are going to become an expert or the go-to person in your industry or niche is if you gather knowledge, if you learn, if you put yourself in a position where the rubber hits the road. If you are someone who lives in fear of being called out as a fake but you’re not willing to put yourself in a position where you will learn and you will develop, then unfortunately, you’re never going to move through that. Put yourself out of your comfort zone. If someone else thinks you can do something that you’re not so sure of, they give you an opportunity, take that as a vote of confidence from them and say yes to do it and then, learn how to do it. Now, you can catch your acceptance of the opportunities that come to you by being transparent and I do encourage you to do that. You might want to say, “Yes, I’m going to do this, but I’m going to have to learn some things along the way or I’m going to need some support in this particular areas where I don’t have any qualifications,” where maybe you don’t think you’re ready. But take the opportunity that takes you out of your comfort zone because you will grow so much by doing that.  Taking that opportunity to speak at World Domination Summit a few years ago, it gave me so much confidence of moving through that and I’m getting so much insight as a result of that. I became a better person as a result of that as well. So, take those opportunities that come and you’ll be taking a step closer to being that person that you want to be and making the achievements that you want to achieve. The last thing I’ll say about imposter syndrome is to live with it. I’m no psychologist, but I’m not sure that imposter syndrome really ever goes away. It hasn’t for me. I find myself thinking this way even after decades of dealing with it. Part of me has come to terms with the fact that I need to live with it. We need to put it in its place, we need to deal with it, we need to learn to use it when that’s appropriate to do so, to help us to grow, to help us to achieve, and help us to learn. Above all, we need to learn not to let it paralyze us. If it’s paralyzing you at the moment (and I know some of you listening to this right now are paralyzed by it), I want to encourage you to get some help to talk about it, to get some accountability around it. It might need to get some professional help or maybe it’s just about having a conversation with a friend who can talk you through it.  Above all, I just really, really want to encourage you not to let this fear, not to let this imposter syndrome rub the world of what you know, of the story that you’ve got to tell, of the potential that you have to make the world a better place as a result of your contributions. When you let imposter syndrome rub the world in that way, then that’s just such a shame. I want to encourage you to tackle it, to learn, to live with it, to put it in its place and to include the others in that journey if you can get the support that you need. I’m going to give you a whole heap of reading in today’s show notes. This is stuff that I’ve come across in putting together this particular podcast and I really would encourage you to check out those show notes and check out the links there. There are a lot of reading, you’ll see some of the things that I’ve talked about there as well as a whole heap of other advice from other wiser, smarter people than me. Not that I’m not smart because that’s feeding my imposter syndrome fear.  I hope you find these useful and I would love to learn from you. What has helped you with your imposter syndrome if this is something that you struggle with? What do you do? What ways of thinking have you developed to overcome this? Leave a comment on today’s show notes and let me know exactly what it is that has helped you the most. I hope you find today’s episode useful to you. It’s not always the easiest topic to talk about—fear, self-doubts—but I hope that’s been helpful and constructive chat to have.  If this is something you want to talk further about, I do encourage you to find a friend, find someone who might understand that you can debrief with on this particular one, to give you some advice, some accountability, and some support with it. Also, if you feel able, we’d love to learn from you and how you’ve dealt with this particular issue yourself.  You can head over to today’s show notes at problogger.com/podcast/121 where you can share your own tips, your own story. I would love to learn from you for the next time that this becomes a big issue for me. Thanks for listening today. I look forward to chatting with you again in episode 122. Lastly, if you do want to share this with someone, please do share those show notes. I would love anyone who’s struggling with this to hear this kind of information. Thanks so much for listening. I will chat with you in the next couple of days.  You’ve been listening to ProBlogger. If you like to comment on any of today’s topic or subscribe to the series, find us 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 of Podcast Motor who has been editing all of our podcast for sometime now. Podcast Motor have a great range of services for podcast 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? 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.

Discover 22 questions to determine if blogging is right for you. Topics include having a message, being a good communicator, handling criticism, self-promotion vs. humility, building a community, and proactive monetization.

How to Decide on a WordPress Theme for Your Blog Today I have a treat for you. Today we have a special guest, one of our new subject matter experts, Kelly Exeter from Swish Design. Kelly is one of those people who produces a heap of great content and also runs a business on the side. Kelly is one of the go to people in Australia when it comes to blog design. I received a question from Nils from Soul Thoughts who asks a question that many bloggers who are starting a blog. What is the best WordPress theme to choose for my blog (and how to make that decision). I’m not a designer, so I’m going to let our design expert Kelly share her tips on choosing the right WordPress Theme. You can either listen to the episode via the podcast player above or check it out on iTunes or Stitcher. Alternatively if you prefer to read – Kelly has written up the full show below for you to keep coming back to including all the links and resources mentiond in the episode. How to Choose the Right WordPress Theme for Your Blog Hello! I’m here today to try and answer this very big question: What are the best themes to use if you have a WordPress blog? And the very short answer to this is – there is no best theme. There are many themes out there that will work well for your needs. The hard part is narrowing down the list. If you type ‘WordPress themes’ into Google you will usually end up some place like ThemeForest where, at current count, there are over 6000 themes to choose from. Even somewhere with a slightly smaller selection like Elegant Themes has 87 on offer and Studiopress, the home of Genesis themes has over 50. So – how on earth do you choose the best theme for your needs from this wealth of choice? Well, my number one suggestion is to stop looking in those theme libraries and start instead with the blogs out there whose designs you love. Most WordPress themes these days are built on off-the-shelf templates which means that blog you love, you can access the same theme they’ve used. A quick word about this however – that blog you love – is it their header you particularly love? Or their typography? Or their imagery? If so, those are design elements that can be incorporated into any theme out there. When you’re deciding on a theme, you really need to choose one based on it having a layout you like – so you like how their logo and menu are placed, how their blog archives are laid out, how their blogs posts are laid out, and most importantly, what elements they have on their home page and where those elements are positioned. For example, if you choose the Metro Pro theme from Genesis – make sure you are choosing it because you like how it’s laid out … not because the demo has. So – let’s say you love the new Being Boss blog design at beingboss.club and you’re thinking that could work well for you. The first thing you want to do is find out what theme they’re using. You do this by viewing the source code of the website. To do this, type into your browser window: view-source:http://beingboss.club/ (NB: You can do this for any site by typing in view-source:FULLWEBSITEURL) Once you’re viewing the source code do a search for this: wp-content/themes. This will come up in a few places in the source code and the word that directly follows the word ‘themes’ in the source is the name of the theme. So for Being Boss, I can see their theme is called Art Mag. If you then Google ‘Art Mag WordPress theme’ you’ll see it’s a theme you can buy from Themeforest for $49. A word of caution. When you’re checking out your favourite website, loving how it looks and you’re thinking I’m saying just buy the same theme and your site can look like that too, there is a giant caveat here. If you’re loving how a site looks, it’s probably because they have killer imagery. If you don’t have the same killer imagery, then use the same theme as them all you like, your site won’t look like theirs. This, incidentally, is both a good and bad thing. The bad comes from the disappointment you feel because your site doesn’t look as as the one you like the look of. The good comes from the fact that you can use exactly the same theme as someone else but your two sites will look quite different because you’re using different imagery, logo, fonts and colours. Just make sure your site uses great imagery and fontography and you’ll be fine. Another thing that’s important to remember is that when you install a theme, any theme, on your website, it needs to be set up to look like either the demo version or the website you loved. In other words, it won’t look like that straight out of the box. If you’re able to follow instructions, then, using the theme documentation, you should be able to get the layout looking the way it was sold to you in the demo. If you’re struggling, get in touch with the guys at ThemeValet.com. For $99 or thereabouts, they will set the theme up to look like the demo for you. Another caveat – if your site has no pages and no posts (ie no content), it will be very difficult to get it looking like anything. So I always recommend creating at least an About and a Contact page and loading in 2-3 blog posts before loading in a theme and trying to make things look pretty. Now – what if there aren’t any sites out there that have caught your eye? Well, some fairly common themes doing the rounds currently are: Simple Mag which can be found on ThemeForest.com – this is particularly great if you’re looking for a magazine style layout. If you’re looking for a more bloggy type layout then Foodie, Metro and Lifestyle Pro are all great looking, easy to use Genesis themes and can be found on StudioPress.com. Note: with the Genesis themes you first have to install the based Genesis framework (which comes as a theme), then you install and activate whichever of the look and feel themes you’ve chosen. Another really important thing you need to keep in mind when choosing themes these days is that they are responsive on mobile. Happily, most themes in most marketplaces these days are. All the themes I mention today certainly are. Now, what about themes like Divi, Bridge and the X theme? These are themes that allow you to set up your site pages pretty much any way you like via inbuilt Page Builders that allow you to drag and drop elements. This sounds like a dream but in reality, I have found these Page Builders to be really slow and painful to use. You make a small tweak to say the padding around an image, or the size of a heading, for example, and then you have to save the draft of the page, and then preview it … it’s really slow going and frustrating. Also – as much as these types of site sell themselves on being easy for non-tech savvy people to use, they’re just not. Now, if you are quite tech savvy, these themes are amazing because they offer a huge amount of flexibility and design freedom. If you are not tech savvy, just do no go there – they will make you cry. Of all the ‘Page Builder included’ themes out there (and I have seen many) – the one that has impressed me the most is the X theme. At Swish Design (my business) we have the ability to design and build custom themes and this is what I intended to do with my own website re-design at kellyexeter.com.au recently. I did the page design, and then because I needed the new design faster than my guys would be able to code it, I actually rebuilt the site using the X theme (+ Beaver Builder instead of the X Theme’s inbuilt Cornerstone builder) as a temporary measure. And guess what, it did the job so well I haven’t bothered to get my guys to code a custom theme for me after all. No other theme like that – not Divi, not Bridge, not any of the several ones I’ve tried – have been as easy to use as X + Beaver Builder.    So there you go. As I mentioned at the start, pointing you in the right direction as to a ‘best theme’ for your needs is a very ‘how long is a piece of string’ question because there are so many variables to consider. My major tip in this regard is that, if ever you’re in doubt, choose the simpler solution. And remember, people are coming to your blog to read, and they’re mostly doing so on mobile. So as long as your theme is responsive, loads fast, and makes it easy to read your posts on mobile devices, you’ll already be ahead of the pack. ——- Kelly Exeter has been a web and graphic designer for 15 years and has worked with WordPress for over 8 years. You can find her at Swish Design by day, and tinkering with her personal blog design at night. How did you go with today’s episode? I hope this has been helpful today. If you have more questions, I would be more than happy to tackle them myself or enlist one of our subject matter experts. Disclaimer: ProBlogger is an affiliate for some themes and services mentioned in this article. We make a commission if you purchase these products which is how we keep the vast majority of what we do on ProBlogger free (and how Darren keeps his expensive coffee habit going). Affiliate products are carefully chosen and are always genuine recommendations of products that we either pay for and use ourselves or that come with strong recommendations from our trusted expert friends. Never miss an episode – Subscribe to the ProBlogger podcast on iTunes Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Darren: Hi, there. Welcome to episode 119 of the ProBlogger Podcast. Today, I have a treat for you. You don’t have to listen to my voice for the next 10 or 15 minutes. Today, I have a special guest. One of our new subject matter experts that we’ll be featuring regularly over at ProBlogger Blog and occasionally here on ProBlogger podcast as well.  Today, I want to introduce you to Kelly Exeter. Kelly is one of those people who just manages to produce a whole heap of great content, but also runs a business on the side. She’s one of the go to people here in Australia when it comes to blog design. Many of Australia’s biggest bloggers have been designed by her. She actually design Vanessa, my wife’s blog and has really helped hundreds if not thousands of Australian bloggers to get their blogs up and running. She’s a speaker at our ProBlogger event and today, she’s going to talk to you about choosing a great WordPress theme for your blog. We actually had a question come in (which I will play for you in a moment) from Nils from soulthoughts.com who asks about how to choose the best WordPress theme. When I got the question, I was like, we really need to do a podcast on this, but I’m not the right person to do this podcast because I am not a designer. While I’ve chosen WordPress themes, there are other people like Kelly who can give you much better expertise on how to make that decision.  She’s recorded ten minutes of just great advice when it comes to choosing a WordPress theme. If you are starting a blog at the moment and need to get a design in place, a premium WordPress theme or even a free one might be the best way to go to get things up and running, and Kelly really walks you through how to make a decision on what’s the best theme for you. This is also really suitable for anyone who’s wanting to do a re-design of their blog. I know a lot of bloggers, about a year after they start blogging, they look at their theme and they think, “Oh, it’s not quite working for me anymore. I’m going to redesign my blog,” and basing that on a WordPress theme might be the way to go. Kelly has also put together a blog post version of this exact podcast. We are going to publish that post, it’s pretty much a transcript of this podcast over at problogger.com/podcast/119.  If you do want to come back to her advice and there’s a lot in it, there’s lots of links that she mentions, lots of different resources that she mentions, I would encourage you to head over to the show notes where you can pretty much get all of these information in the written form. But for those who like to listen, I’m going to play it for you now Nil’s question (thank you Nils for asking it) and then I’ll get straight into playing Kelly’s answer to that and at the end, I’ll wrap it all up. Thanks for listening. Nils: Hi, Darren. My name is Nils and I’m a freelance writer. I blog at soulsthoughts.com. I’m just wondering what your thoughts are about the best themes to use for WordPress blogs? I currently use the themes called Hemingway. I just downloaded one called […] how to use it. I just want to get your thoughts on what are the best themes to use. Thanks very much. Kelly: Hey, guys. This is Kelly Exeter from Swish Design and I am here today to try and answer a very big question and that is, “What are the best themes to use if you have a WordPress blog?” The very short answer to this is there is no best theme, but there are many themes out there that will work well for your particular needs.  The hard part is really narrowing down the list. If you type, “WordPress themes” into Google, you’ll usually end up some place like ThemeForest where (at current count) there are over 6000 themes to choose from. Even somewhere with a smaller selection like Elegant Themes or Studiopress, those places have over 80 and 50 themes on offer, respectively. How do you narrow down from this wealth of choice? My number one suggestion is to stop looking at those theme libraries and start instead with the blogs out there whose designs you love.  Most WordPress websites these days are built on off-the-shelf themes or off-the-shelf templates, so that means that you’ve got access to the exact same theme that the blog you love used. You just need to figure out which theme that is.  Before I get to that, I do have to say one quick word about that blog that you love. You just need to check in and ask, is it their header that you particularly love? Or is their typography? Or is it their imagery? Because if so, these are design things that can be incorporated into any theme out there. When you are deciding on a theme, you really need to choose one based on having a layout that you like.  You like, for instance, in their header, how their logo and menu are placed side to side, or how their blog archives are laid out with the giant thumbnail image and their heading beneath, or how their blog posts are laid out with the featured image at the top.  Most importantly when choosing a theme, you are choosing it based on how that theme’s home page is laid out, where all the elements are positioned because most themes on the inside, especially for blog posts, you are going to have that content on the left, the sidebar on the right, the header at the top, and the footer at the bottom. But it’s really the home page’s layout is what you are looking at when you are choosing a theme. How do we figure out which theme our favorite website is using? Let’s say you love the new Being Boss blog design at beingboss.club  and you are thinking that one could work well for you. The first thing you do is view the source code of that website and if you are not sure how to do this, just Google, “find out website source code” and you’ll find instructions for your particular setup there.  Once you are viewing the source code, do a search for this: wp-content/themes. Just search for that phrase, it will come up in a couple of places in the source code and the word that directly follows the wod ‘themes’ in the source code is going to be the name of the theme that that particular website is using.  This is a quick word. If you are setting like the ProBlogger website or the Fat Mum Slim website, chances are when you see the theme that they are using, it will say, “ProBlogger” or “Fat Mum Slim.” That means they’ve had custom designs or custom themes developed for them and you won’t be able to buy those in any theme library out there. For the Being Boss […] however, I could see their theme is called Art Mag and when I Google ‘Art Mag WordPress theme’ I can see it’s a theme that you can buy from Themeforest for $49. Another word of caution. When you are checking out your favorite website, you are loving how it looks, and you are thinking, “I can just buy the same theme and my site can look like that too,” there’s a giant caveat here and that is, it’s probably looks the way it does because they’ve got killer imagery and if you don’t have the same killer imagery to use on your site, then it doesn’t matter how much you use the same theme as them. Your site won’t look like theirs. This incidentally is both a good and a bad thing. The bad comes from the disappointment you feel because your site doesn’t look as good as theirs. The good comes from the fact that you can use exactly the same theme as someone else, but your two sites will look kind of different because you are using different imagery, logo, fonts, and colours.  If ever you are thinking, “Oh, that person might hate me because I am using the same theme as them,” don’t stress because there are so many people using similar themes out there. You would be surprised. Another thing that is important to remember is when you install a theme on your website, any theme, it needs to be set up to look like the demo version or the website that you love. It won’t look exactly the way you want it to straight out of the box. If you are able to follow instructions, then using the theme documentation, you should be able to get the layout looking the way it was sold to you in the demo. If you are struggling to make that happen, get in touch with the guys at ThemeValet.com for $99 or thereabouts. They will set up the theme to look exactly like the demo for you. Another quick thing to understand or consider is that if your site has no pages and has no post, so no content, it’s going to be very difficult to get it looking like anything at all so always recommend creating at least an About and Content page and loading in two to three blog posts before they are loading a theme and trying to make everything look pretty. What if there aren’t any sites out there that have caught your eye? Are there any common themes out there that a lot of people are using?  Yes, there are. Simple Mag is one that can be found on ThemeForest.com. This is a particularly great one if you are looking for a magazine style layout. They offer heaps of different layouts for Home pages depending on how many things you want on there, how great your imagery is, how busy you want things to be. The Simple Mag Home page is going to be quite busy if you want them.  If you are looking for more bloggy type layout, then the Foodie theme, Metro theme, and Lifestyle Pro theme are all great looking, easy to use Genesis themes and they can be found at StudioPress.com. Just a quick note. With the Genesis themes, you first have to install the base Genesis framework which comes as a theme quite confusingly and then you install and activate whichever of those look and feel themes you’ve chosen on top of it. Another really important theme you need to keep in mind when choosing themes these days is that they need to be responsive on mobile. Happily, most themes in most marketplaces these days are responsive. It’s just something to check before you spend your hard earned on anything that you find. A quick word about themes like Divi, Bridge, and the X theme. Divi and the X theme are quite popular themes right now because they are Page Builder type  themes which means that you can set your pages up pretty much anyway you like and you can set different pages on that to look quite different to each other because they have this inbuilt Page Builders that allow you to drag and drop elements.  This sounds like a dream, but in reality, I have found these Page Builders to be very slow and painful to use. You make a small tweak to say the padding around an image, or the size of a heading, then you have to save a draft of the page, and then preview it, it’s really slow going and frustrating. The exception to these rules I have found has is the X theme with Cornerstone or the X theme using the Beaver Builder page builder. That combination allows you to make little changes and preview the changes like in real time without having to save, preview, or do any really time-consuming stuff. That’s more for the tech savvy people out there. These themes do try to sell themselves as being for the non-tech savvy people and I can assure you, I’ve been building websites for 15 years, I consider myself fairly tech savvy and I have troubles with some themes sometimes. If you are not tech-savvy, stay away. If you are very, very tech-savvy, then they do offer amazing flexibility and design freedom. Just a quick word about the X theme + Beaver Builder. At Swish Design, we have the ability to design and build custom themes and this is what I intended to do quite recently with my own website redesign at kellyexeter.com.au. I did what I always do. I did the flat sheet page design. I designed exactly the way I wanted it to look and then because I needed the new site up faster than my guys would be able to code it, I rebuilt it using the X theme as a temporary measure.  Guess what? it did the job so well. I haven’t bothered to get my guys to code a custom theme for me after all of that.  Just for those who are a little bit more tech-savvy, are looking for something that gives you quite a lot of freedom and the ability to build out pages anyway that you like, and people who are looking to build landing pages as well, the combination of X theme + Beaver Builder for me, I haven’t found anything quite like it out there at the moment. There you go guys. As I mentioned at the start, this is not an easy question to answer as there are so many variables that go into choosing a WordPress theme. My major tip is that if you are in doubt, choose the simplest solution and remember that people are coming to your blog to read and they are mostly doing it so on mobile devices. So as long as your theme is responsive, loads fast, and makes it easy to read your posts on mobile devices, you’ll be laughing.  Darren: I always love it when Kelly speaks. I hope you enjoyed hearing from here today. We will be hearing more from her in the future, particularly I run a blog where she will be contributing articles as one of our subject matter experts. In the meantime, you can find out more about Kelly. I’ve read her blog at kellyexeter.com.au where you’ll also find her fantastic podcasts and her book, A Life Less Frantic. You’ll also find more from her on a design front over at swishdesign.com.au. I highly recommend you to check out her and the resources and services that they offer over at Swish Design. I hope it’s been helpful for you today. If you’ve got more questions that you like us to address in a future episode of the podcast, I’m more than happy to tackle them myself for being in one of our subject matter experts.  You can find today’s show at problogger.com/podcast/119 where you’ll also find at the bottom of that shownote, a green bottom which allows you to record your question like Nils did today, and you might just find yourself appearing on the show. Just let us know what your name is and your URL and we’ll be happy to link back to you as well from the show notes. Thanks so much for listening today and we’ll be back with you in a couple of days time with Episode 120. Thanks for listening.  You’ve been listening to a 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. 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 podcast for sometime now. PodcastMotor have 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 to edit your shows and get them up with great show notes. Check them out at podcastmotor.com. 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.

Learn how to find time to create your blog's first product while juggling priorities. Strategies discussed include scaling back on blogging activities, batching content creation, using product content as blog content, and setting deadlines. Breaking down projects into smaller parts can lead to successful launches and feedback for improvement. Finding help in creating the product is important, such as seeking a co-author or getting assistance in other areas of life. The importance of generating additional income streams and building income-generating assets for your blog is emphasized.

A blogger shares how she made $28,000 using principles of warming up readers. She used a blog post, SlideShare deck, lead magnet, email sequence, and webinar. The podcast provides a detailed analysis of her strategies, including creating a marketing funnel, promoting an affiliate webinar, compiling expert answers, creating a successful SlideShare deck, using cheat sheets for lead generation, analyzing email lists, and using visual content in affiliate promotions.

The podcast discusses strategies to encourage reader engagement by building an engaging community, utilizing email lists and auto responders, and creating engaging content. It emphasizes the importance of starting conversations, asking questions, and introducing readers to one another to foster active participation.

Learn tips on how to get readers to subscribe and connect with the blogger. Importance of building a connection through email subscriptions. Examples of content upgrades to encourage subscriptions. Strategies for building anticipation and increasing connection with readers. Techniques to engage readers and receive valuable feedback.

Learn strategies to grab the attention of first-time readers by making a big promise in the tagline and differentiating yourself. Also, discover ways to guide readers to relevant content, increase blog engagement, and convert first-time visitors into interested readers with social proof and eye-catching designs.

Learn effective strategies to get more eyeballs on your blog, including creating guest content on other platforms, identifying your ideal reader, and leveraging shareable content. Discover the importance of SEO in driving traffic and utilizing Google's featured snippets for increased visibility.

Note: this episode can be listened to in the player above or on iTunes or Stitcher. How to Warm Up Your Blog Readers to Become Fully Engaged Welcome to Episode 112. Today I am kicking off a mini-series of podcasts that are designed to help you to move your readers from being cold towards you and your blog, to being fully engaged towards you and your blog. I’m going to talk about the benefits of getting your readers warmed up, and walk you through a series of steps to do that. Then over the next four upcoming episodes I’m going to get strategic and tactical and give you some practical exercises that you can do to help move your readers through these four stages. In the sixth episode, I am going to give you some case studies and examples. Go to iTunes and subscribe to the podcast, so you don’t miss any episodes in the series. In Today’s Episode – How to Warm Up Your Blog Readers and Make Them Raving Fans Why readers may be cold towards us Blog readers can be incredibly distracted They might be a bit suspicious of us They are just clicking links in a Zombie like state Short attention span Benefits of warm readers Readers that have warmed up to your blog return again and again This reinforces your brand and makes you more memorable Warm readers contribute to your site and comment or answer asks questions Builds social proof Share content and help to promote They trust us and take action on our calls to action How to warm up our readers Steps readers need to go through to get to this point The 4 Stages for Warming Our Blog Readers Challenge: Readers that are completely unaware that we exist. Objective: Get their attention. Challenge: The readers are not interested. Objective: Get them interested. Challenge: They are about to leave our site. Objective: Get their connection, or else they are gone. Challenge: Our readers remain passive. Objective: Get engagement.  Where Is Your Weak Link? I’m going to get into these tactics in the next episodes. Before I get into them I would like for you to ponder the question of “where is your weak link”? You may have had success with one or two of these tactics, so we want to focus on getting all of these stages working towards your blog. How did you go with today’s episode? I would love to hear your feedback of where you think your weak link is. I would also like to see examples of how you have overcome these weak links. Never miss an episode – Subscribe to the ProBlogger podcast on iTunes Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Hi there, it’s Darren from ProBlogger and welcome to episode 112 of the ProBlogger podcast. Today I’m kicking off a little mini series of podcasts which is designed to help you to move your readers from being cold towards you, and your brand, and your blog, to being fully engaged, to be raving fans of you and your blog. I’m going to talk to you about the benefits of getting your readers warmed up and walk you through a series of steps to do that. And then over the upcoming episodes of this little series, the next four episodes, I’m going to get strategic, I’m going to get tactical, I’m going to give you some practical things that you can do, some exercises that you can do to help you move your readers through these four stages. And then in the fifth episode, at the end, I’m going to give you some case studies as well. It’s really important that you subscribe to the ProBlogger podcast to get all of this content. It’s all completely free, but if you don’t subscribe you’re not likely to get the message that the new episodes have come out. Hit us on iTunes and hit that subscribe button. Subscribe to the ProBlogger Plus Newsletter on today’s show notes as well. I look forward to walking you through this journey. You can find today’s show notes where you can subscribe and you can find us on iTunes at problogger.com/podcast/112. Do you dream of having warm readers, hot readers, readers who are warm towards you, who feel like they’re engaged by you and who are engaging back with you, a community that is alive? If that’s what you want, then this next series of podcasts is designed particularly for you.  Over the next few episodes, I want to walk you through four steps to warming your readers up. To taking your readers from being unaware of you, very cold towards you, the first time they come across you, they’re cold for one reason or another. Taking them through to being warmed up to become interested, to become connected, and to become engaged with you.  This is the dream that many bloggers have and if you’ve said yes to my question of is that your dream, then you are certainly not alone. We hear case studies all the time of blogs and social media being used in this way to warm people up. I’ve talked about it myself and how when I first started blogging in 2002, I was a complete unknown. Apart from my real-life friends and the people that I work with, nobody knew that I existed. Everyone was very cold to me, except for those who really knew me. The vast majority of the earth’s population had no idea that I existed, they were cold towards me. But over the last almost 14 years now, I’ve gradually built an audience to the point where four or five million people a month show up on my blogs and have become warm to my brands. Not everyone in that four or five million readers are coming back every day, they’re not all hot, they’re not all highly engaging, but there are a growing percentage of them who are. How do you take your blog from having lots of cold readers to being warm? That’s what I want to focus on over these next four podcasts. I want to present to you four steps to doing it. Because the reality is that most blogs look like they should warm readers up, but they don’t actually do it. We end up with cold readers in one way or another. Cold readers can be the result of a number of things. Firstly, one of the big challenges that we have as bloggers is that we are trying to get people onto our blogs who are incredibly distracted. Even if we end up with people on our site, often they are doing two things at once. They might be watching television while surfing the web on their computer, answering messages on their phone, and their kids are in the background asking for dinner, or the boss is about to walk into the cubicle. We’re distracted. This is I guess the reality of life at the moment in the world that we live in. Another reason they might be cold towards us is they might be a bit suspicious of us. I talked about this in the last episode on start here pages, how often people come to our site a little bit suspicious, a little bit skeptical that we’re credible, that we know what we’re talking about. Or they’re a little bit skeptical that what we’re saying is relevant to them. Suspicion is one of the reasons that people are a little bit stand-offish towards us.   Another reason that readers might end up being cold is that they’re in that zombie state that we get into when we click on one link, after another link, after another link. I don’t know about you, but as I look at my Twitter stream there’s all kinds of things to read and it’s very easy to almost fall asleep at the screen as you follow the links. Related to this is the short attention span that some people seem to have today as well. This can leave people cold towards us because they almost wired these days to look at a site for three seconds and then move on to the next one. For whatever reason, the reality is that many of us have cold readers. This is a major challenge because we know there are many benefits in having warmer readers. When you get a warm reader, when you warm someone up towards your blog and your brand, you increase the chances of them coming back again.  When you get someone returning to your blog over and over again, this reinforces your brand in their mind. It makes you more memorable. Warm readers contribute to your site, this makes your site more useful. Warm readers who are answering other reader’s questions or even asking questions help to make your site more useful to other readers. That also helps to build social proof when you have people engaging in a warm way, it’s easier to attract new people. Warm readers also share our content, they help us to promote ourselves. Word of mouth kicks in when readers are warm towards us, warm readers trust us, they take action on our calls to action, they buy our products and services. For all of these readers we want to warm up our readers, but how do we do it? That’s what I want this series to be about. The first thing I will say is that it’s really important to think about the process that your readers are going to take to become warm. Lot of people have this idea, “I want an engaged community.” But I think it’s really useful to step back from that question to say, “Okay, that’s what we’re aiming for, but what are the steps your readers need to go through to get to that point?”  I’ve been asking this question in my own mind, with my team over the last year or two particularly. What’s the journey of my readers, those readers that do become engaged, how do they get to that point? I’ve realized slowly over time that there are different stages that our readers go through. Some of these stages happen very quickly. Readers who first arrive on your site make decisions very quickly and they move from one of these stages to the next within seconds sometimes. But some of them are quite slow as well. I want to present to you in today’s podcast four stages of warming up your reader. And then over the oncoming episodes, I want to dig deeper into each one and give you some strategies for moving your readers through these stages. Let’s get into these four stages. I want to say right up front that these stages are not rocket science. In fact, they are stages that you will have gone through as you think about the brands that you are warm to, the blogs that you read, the podcast that you listen to. You will have gone through these stages. I want to encourage you as I move through them to be thinking about what moved you through these stages, what made you warm towards your favorite blog, and your favorite podcast, your favorite social media influencer. What were the things that moved you along in the journey, because the things that moved you along are hints to the things that you can be doing with your audience as well.  Let’s move through to these four stages. Each stage has a challenge, a state that your reader is in, an objective, a goal that we have to move our readers through. Stage number one, we’re presented with the challenge of readers who are completely unaware that we exist. This should be a challenge for most us who’ve started a blog. The reality is when we start our blogs, no one knows that we exist or no one knows our blog exists. I remember the moment very well in 2002 when I hit publish on my first post, and I realized that whilst I created this blog and that was a bit of an achievement, no one knew it was there and I had to email my wife and say, “Hey, check out this link. It’s my new blog.” And then I had to explain what a blog was. Then, I send out the link to a few other friends, and family, and colleagues, and then I ran out of people to send it to.  I realized I had this massive challenge before me to go beyond just my own circle of influence to grow awareness of my blog. That’s the challenge, people don’t know we exist. This is the challenge that faces us all, it faced me again last year when I started this podcast. I remember the moment it went live in iTunes and realized, again, I was back at ground zero. No one knew it existed. The challenge is unawareness. The objective at this point is to get attention, to get attention. I want to present to you some strategies for getting attention. Another way to term getting attention is to get the eyeball, that’s the first stage.  Second stage is that even once we’ve got attention–people may now be aware that we exist, they may even be on our blog, they may be listening to that first episode of the podcast–the next challenge that we face is that they are disinterested. They’ve given us the eyeball, but because they are distracted by other devices, and their kids, and all the things going on in their life, or because they’re suspicious or because they’re in that zombie like state, they’re not actually fully giving us their attention. In some ways, they’ve given us the eyeball, but haven’t given us both eyeballs. Or they have looked once and they haven’t looked twice. The challenge here is to get them interested. This is the second key objective. We want to get their attention first, and then we want to make them look twice, we want to get them interested in what we’ve got to say. I want to present some strategies in a couple episodes time on taking people from first time viewers to a little bit more interested in what we’re doing, that’s a really important step along this journey. If we don’t get their interest, they’re never going to connect. They’re never going to engage. Step number three is we got them interested, now they’ve given us a second look, they’ve gone, “Huh, that’s interesting.” But they’re about to leave our site. This is a massive challenge and it can be incredibly frustrating for us as bloggers. We see people arriving in our site, but no one’s actually connecting to us. This is the third objective.  We get their attention, we get their interest, and now we need to get their connection. Because if we don’t, they’re gone. They will leave our blog and the statistics show us that most people never ever return again. Even if in the back of their mind, they’ve said, “I need to come back to this site,” they will not do it in most cases unless we got a connection. That connection—it can be email, it can be social media, it could be getting their business card if you’re in a real life event or something else. But the key objective is to get connection. It’s to get permission, as Seth Godin says in his great book Permission Marketing, to contact them again.  First step, we want to get their eyeballs. Second step, we want to get a second look. The third step is we want to get the connection. The fourth step is so important. This again is another major frustration. The challenge that we have is thought we might get the connection, but we don’t get the engagement. Our readers remain passive.  If you’ve been blogging for more than a few months and you’ve got a few subscribers now, you know how hard this is. You look at the email subscribers that you’ve got and then you send an email, and you look at how many people open those emails and you get depressed by the small percentage of people who opened the email or who even verify that they’ve subscribed. You look at your Facebook stats and you see all the people who have liked your page and the tiny percent who actually are reached by your messages, and even tinier percent who comment, or share, or retweet the social messages that we have. We see the amount of people who look at our blogpost in Google Analytics and then look at how many people comment. It’s less than 1% of people, the studies show, comments on blog posts. It’s probably even gone down further than that because commenting seems to be something that people are now doing more in social media. This is another massive challenge: passive, lurking readers. The objective here is to get engagement. I want to present with you in a few episodes time some strategies that we’ve been using on ProBlogger Digital Photography School to get the engagement. These other four stages, the four challenges that we are faced with and the four objectives that we have. Let me recap them. Firstly, our readers are unaware, we need to get their attention, we need to get their eyeball. Secondly, they’re disinterested, we need to get their interest, we need to make them look twice, we need to make them go, “Huh, this could be for me.” Third stage is they’re interested but they’re disconnected, we need to get connected, we need to begin that relationship, we need to get permission to contact them again, to speak to them. Number four is that they’re passive, they’re lurking, they’re at an arm’s length. We need to work on getting them closer, we need to work on getting them to engage with us, to talk to us, to share with us, to build a relationship with us. We know that if we can get their attention, interest, connection, engagement, they become a warm reader. That’s a very valuable thing, but how do we do it. That’s what I want to present over the next few episodes, but before I get into the techniques and tactics and the strategies that I’m going to present, I’m going to share two or three or four things on each of these areas in upcoming episodes. I do encourage you to subscribe in iTunes or however else you listen to podcasts so you don’t miss these four episodes. Before I get into those tactics, I want you to ponder this question. Where is your weak link? In those four different areas, where is your weak link? Most bloggers I talk to are pretty good at one or two or even three of these areas. They’ve worked hard on it. I know a lot of bloggers who are really great at getting attention. They create content that maybe is controversial, or humorous, or is very shareable, and that’s one of the things we’re going to talk about in the next episode. But that’s where it stops. They get a lot of eyeballs but they don’t get any subscribes. Maybe the weak link there is getting the subscribe. Or maybe they’re really good at the engagement end of things, but they’re not so good at getting the eyeballs in the first place. That really decreases the amount of people who end up getting to that engagement level. Over time, as I look back over my own blogging, there’s been times where I’ve almost obsessed over each of these four areas. I remember times in the early days in my blogs where attention was the big thing, it probably should have been. Because when you start out, that’s where you do need to start. I would work so hard on creating viral content. But viral content alone is not good enough. If all you do is get eyeballs, you’re never going to get anyone to leave a comment, to buy your product, that type of thing which comes out of engagement. There’s been other times where I’ve been so obsessed on the engagement side of things that I’ve actually stopped focusing on getting new readers. This is something that was kind of a bit more recent even for ProBlogger. We’ve put a lot of attention with ProBlogger in the last year or so into trying to get the connection, we’ve really done well in getting more email subscribers and trying to get more engagement, tying to draw people into conversation, using live streaming, that type of thing. I had the realization a few weeks ago that we hadn’t really been doing so much to get the eyeball, we’ve not really been creating as much shareable content, we’ve not really been addressing some of those needs so we need to put a bit more attention back into that area. My question is where is the weak link for you? Where are you falling short? Because you’re only ever going to get as far as your weakest link. You’re never going to really get fully engaged, lots of fully engaged readers unless you’re working on all four of these areas. Again, the key challenge, number one, is unawareness, you need to get their attention. Number two, you’ve got to get them interested. Number three, you’ve got to get the connection. Number four, you’ve got to get the engagement, which is your weak link? I’m going to get into each of these four areas over the next four episodes. I want to give you some really practical, tactical, strategical kind of things that you can be doing and give you some examples of things that we’ve been on my blogs over the last little while to move your readers through these stages. But before I get into them, I think it will be really worthwhile. You, number one, subscribing, so you don’t miss those episodes. Number two, asking yourself where have you been falling short. I’d also love in today’s show notes at problogger.com/podcast/112 to hear your feedback on where you think your weak link is and to see your examples of what you’ve been doing in each of these four areas. I actually asked this on Facebook recently and got some amazing responses on people who designed the whole almost processes to move people through this.  What I’d like to do at the end of the next four episodes is to get into some case studies and then share some stories of how people are using the techniques that I’m talking about. If you’ve got a story to tell about how you’ve gotten more attention, how you’ve moved people to get interested to connect and to get engagement, I love to hear from you. You can leave a comment on today’s show notes, episode 112 over at problogger.com/podcast, or you could shoot me an email at darren@problogger.net, or you could even leave a voice message on today’s show notes as well. But the number one question, where is your weak link? Love to hear from you. I look forward to taking you through this journey in the next four episodes of the ProBlogger podcast. Update: Here’s the next episodes in this series: Episode 113: How to Get More Eyeballs (iTunes) Episode 114: How to Covert First Time Visitors Into Readers (iTunes) Episode 115: How to Get More Subscribers (iTunes) Episode 116: How to Get More Reader Engagement (iTunes) Episode 117: Case Study: How one Blogger Created a Simple Funnel to Make $28,000 (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.