ProBlogger Podcast: Blog Tips to Help You Make Money Blogging

Three Breakthrough Tips That Helped a Blogger Become Profitable Here’s another episode from our Blogging Breakthroughs series, which features bloggers’ stories about breakthroughs in traffic, income, and other aspects of blogging. About two years ago, after a career in Air Traffic Control and dealing with health issues, Michele Robson decided to start a blog about luxury travel on a budget called Turning Left for Less. Michele had some writing experience, but didn’t really understand blogging. Her blog started out slowly, but has now reached a point where she earns a liveable income. Michele shares three breakthrough tips that helped her grow her luxury travel blog from just a few readers a day to where it’s at today. Post every day Befriend a blogger you admire and have them become your mentor Be first to market and review products and services Michele has built credibility, and industry leaders are now coming to her. She no longer needs to chase them for information. As bloggers, we all start with very few readers and doubts about whether to continue. Just think of Michele’s story, follow her three tips, and don’t give up. Links and Resources for Breakthroughs that Grew My Blog from 30 Readers a Day to Profitable in Less Than 2 Years: Turning Left for Less God Save The Points Further Listening 9 Types of Killer Filler Content that are Easy to Create How Often Should You Blog Courses Starting a Blog ProBlogger Pro – 31 Days to Build a Better Blog Join our Facebook group Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Darren: Hey there and welcome to episode 261 of the ProBlogger podcast. My name is Darren Rowse, and I’m the blogger behind ProBlogger. A blog, podcast, events, courses, ebooks, and lots more that helps bloggers to start blogs, to grow their blogs, and to build profit around their blogs. You can find more about what we do over at problogger.com. Now, today, we continue our series of blogger breakthrough episodes, where we’re hearing from listeners of the podcast about how they’ve grown their blogs, particularly focusing upon their breakthrough moments, the things that have helped them to do what I’ve just said, grow their blogs, start their blogs and to build profit around their blogs. Today’s story is one that I love. It’s from Michele Robson, who has a blog called Turning Left for Less, and the tagline of her blog is Champagne Travel on Prosecco Budget, which will give you the indication of what it’s about. It’s about luxury travel on a budget. It’s something that I think is a great topic, but also the story that Michele tells is really worth listening to as well. I’m sure a lot of people will relate to her story, as well. After a long career in one particular industry, air traffic control, and a tough time with health, Michele decided to start a blog. She only started less than two years ago, I think it was November 2016, so not long at it, but in that time she’s, despite not really having any experience in blogging, she’s been able to build her blog where she’s now earned enough to survive on the income from her blog, which is a great story. She’s gone from literally having a very few readers to having a significant readership as well, and really doing some amazing things. In her story today, she shares three breakthrough moments that helped her to grow from just a few readers a day to the point that she’s at today. I’m going to let Michele share her story, but I will come back at the end of her story, and just share a few of the things that I appreciated from what she shared, and give you a little bit more further listening on a couple of things she talks about as well. You can find a link to Michele’s to blog turningleftforless.com at our show notes which are at problogger.com/podcast/261 as well as a full transcription of today’s show. I’ll talk to you in a moment after Michele shares her story. Michele: Hi, my name’s Michele Robson and I’m from the UK. I run the blog Turning Left for Less. You can find the blog at www.turningleftforless.com. I started the blog in November 2016 after having had a kidney transplant. I had been working for 23 years in air traffic control and decided that the transplant was a way to do something different and actually write about what I really love. The blog is all about luxury travel for less, which is something I’ve always been passionate about. I like to travel in style, but I like to spend as little as possible, as everybody does, so I share my tips with my readers on how to travel for less. When I first started the blog, I literally knew nothing about blogging at all. I didn’t know how to use WordPress. I think pretty much all I knew was how to write an article. I’d written articles before in my previous job as part of newsletters, so I was quite confident with the writing side of it. But in terms of actually building a blog, it was very difficult. I remember setting it up and it took me something like two weeks just to work out how to center my logo, because there was virtually nothing online that seemed to work. I spent hours and hours, eventually I did it, and it was worthwhile, but it was very steep learning curve to start off with. I’m not particularly technically-minded, and to have to learn all the background WordPress stuff, and things like SEO, and obviously making readable articles, and social media, it was very difficult. I remember the first time I started to think, “Oh, am I actually going to carry on with this?” I’d only been going just over a month, but it was over the Christmas period, so of course it’s very quiet for blogs. I was getting something like 20 views a day, some days I used to think, “God, I’ve got more friends than that.” It was really difficult to keep going when you see such low viewing figures. What I decided to do, which was my kind of breakthrough moment, was to post every day. My competition does that. I had always wanted to ideally not do that because of the amount of work it takes, but I decided in the end, if you can’t beat them, join them. It was definitely worthwhile, me giving it a go and I could always stop, if I wanted to. I guess that was one of three things that really helped me have a breakthrough. One of the things I really recommend that worked for me, is if you have somebody whose blog you admire, try and befriend them. Try and get them to be your mentor, and that’s what I did. There’s a blogger called God Save the Points, Gilbert Ott is his name, and I’ve always been fan of his blog. Though we blog slightly differently, we’re in the same sort of genre, and I really liked the look of his blog and I could see he was doing well. He was really successful. I mean, nowadays, he has about a million views a month, which is pretty good after three and a half years. I was part of the same group as him on Facebook, so I messaged him. He knew who I was from the group, and I said how much I admired him, and I would really be grateful if he would be able to give me some tips. I offered to buy him lunch, which obviously did the trick in terms of him then wanting to meet up. I took him somewhere very nice and plied him with drink and a very nice meal, and he basically told me everything he knew about how he had got to where he was. Since then we’ve become good friends, and he has always been very supportive, and helped me every step of the way. I also have another friend who blogs in a different sphere, but had a lot of experience in the same sort of area I’m in. Again, I basically took him out, pumped him for information, and again, he’s always been very supportive, and he’s introduced me to other bloggers that are very well known. I think, for me, get yourself a support network and people who are mentors, because you can’t do it all by yourself. It can be quite lonely sometimes blogging, so having that support around you is really important. The other things that I did that I think are still useful was about making sure that I was first to market, as it was, with certain things. In there, I blog about business class travel, first class travel, and if I notice a new product coming out, say for example, I talk about British Airways a lot because that’s what most of my readers are interested in. As soon British Airways announced they’re going to launch something, whether it’s a new meal service, a new seat, anything like that, I make sure I’m the first one that actually reviews it. I will drop everything and buy a flight and get on it as quickly as I can. That was one of my other major breakthroughs because I wrote a very complimentary review, which was deserved, by British Airways, when they introduced their new food, and the company actually picked it up. I was still very unknown at that point, I’d only been going under a year, been going about 10 months, and they actually put my blog article on their website, and they promoted it through Twitter, and with a lot of their social media, pilots that post on there and a lot of them have like tens of thousands of followers, and that made a huge difference for me. It definitely got me a lot of views to the website, and that was the first time it really started to pick up for me, and started getting some really good traffic. Nowadays, I’m getting about a hundred and fifty thousand views a month after, not quite two years, which I’m pretty happy with, really. After my breakthrough, obviously I’m now getting very good views. I’m actually getting people approaching me, which is great companies approaching me to work with them, which is really good that I don’t actually have to chase it. I know I feel that I can kind of set my terms because I have that credibility. I’m being approached by industry people, like Runway Girl, to do interviews with them, which is really good. Again, it’s about credibility. The other thing that is different now is I’m making a regular income. I’d always done the blog full-time from the very start, but I am now actually at the point where the income is livable. Just, it’s still not a lot, but it’s enough to be able to survive on. That has taken quite a while and an awful lot of work in terms of affiliate links and advertising. I guess my tip would be for, to achieve a similar breakthrough is really just finding that person that’s going to be your mentor, that will help you, because there I’ve found there’s so much online, so much information it’s really difficult to pick out which bits you need to know. For example, for me, keywords, a lot of people concentrate on keywords, but in the niche I operate actually I don’t need to bother about it a lot of the time because there is very little competition for many things. Actually, I don’t bother with that a lot of the time, whereas I could have wasted hours and hours and paying for keyword tools. For me, actually I don’t need it, I’ve done alright without it. I think that is quite important, to make sure you understand your niche, and what is going to work for you rather than just trying to follow the generic advice that you find. You need that extra tip from people that know, not just the basics, you need the really sort of fine detail of your area to get it to working, and get it to the point you want it to be quickly, which I think, for me, I’ve achieved my target for what I wanted for you, too, already now without even getting to that point. It’s been very useful, for me, it’s made a huge difference. Darren: Thanks so much to Michele for sharing her story. I have really appreciated hearing the different accents, the different voices, the different experiences of those who are sharing in this particular series. I am really enjoying seeing the feedback from many of our listeners as well on this. As I said at the top of this show, I love this story. I’m sure many of us can relate to that feeling of frustration in the early days of getting the blog up, without much experience in blogging, that frustration of realizing that you’ve got more friends than you’ve got readers, which can be a bit confounding because you wonder why your friends aren’t reading your blog as well, sometimes. But those early days are tough. I guess, one of the reasons why I’m loving this series is that it reminds us that we all do start in that same place. We all do start with very few readers, doubts about whether we should continue, and frustrations in the technicalities of setting up a blog, and so I appreciate Michele sharing her story of that. I love the breakthrough moments that she’s picked out as well. As I look back over my own breakthrough moments, there are many things that we could talk about, and so, there’s just so many things that I’m sure Michele could have shared, but the three that she shared today will be helpful. The first one being: posting everyday helped her blog to grow. Now, I find this an interesting one because it’s something that I have taught in the past, but something that I don’t think is right for every blogger, but certainly seems to be the case that it was right for Michele. One of the good things about increasing your posting frequency is that you are increasing the amount of doorways into your blog. If you’re only posting once a week, that’s 52 doorways into your blog a year. If you’re posting every day, that’s 365 doorways into your blog. That’s doorways in from search engines, from social media, from the potential of other bloggers linking to you, and people coming in from your RSS feed. The amount of posts that you do is one way that you can increase your traffic to your blog. But it needs to be only done if you have the capacity to really do that, and you need to really think about your resources, the time you have, and your topic as well, so there’s a variety of things you want to consider in making that decision. What I want to do today is share with you, in the show notes, a couple of things that you can read and listen to on this very topic of frequency of posting. There’s a blog post that Ali Luke wrote on ProBlogger not too long ago, which I’ll link to in this show notes, where she talks about the different options you’ve got for frequency. Also, there’s a podcast, I think it was episode—it might have been episode 250, just going to check that for you, yup—which is about how to create more content for your blog in an easy way. Not every post you need to write needs to be a long, detailed post. In episode 250, I talked about nine types of content that you can create for your blog that aren’t too hard to create. Nine pieces of content that you can add to your existing content without too much work, of course, keeping in mind that you wanted to keep it high quality as well. Posting every day, I think, is a great tip. I would probably advise that you don’t have to be daily, you might actually choose to be more than daily. You might want to be two or three times a day. The actual frequency isn’t the key, the key is thinking about how you can increase the frequency a little bit, particularly in the early days of your blog, when you may not have many posts in your archives. The main breakthrough that I loved in what Michele shared today is the idea of befriending other bloggers, finding mentors. One of the things I do notice many bloggers, when they start out, is that they see other bloggers in their niche sometimes as their competitors. I understand why that might be. In business, we’d see other people doing what we’re doing as competitors, and we don’t tend to reach out to them and have relationships with them. But in the blogging space, there’s plenty of good reasons to be interacting with, befriending, and working with, collaborating with other people who are in your niche. Michele really tells the story beautifully there, of two bloggers that she reached out to, who have become friends, who’ve become collaborators, who have linked to her, who she supported as well, who’ve introduced her to other people in the industry. This is such a powerful thing. I’ve seen time and time again, where bloggers have moved past that idea of competitorship, or competing with others in their niche, and instead, working with them and befriending them, and that has helped so many bloggers, and it certainly helped me, particularly in the early days of ProBlogger. Twere other people who were blogging about blogging in those early days. In the year or so that I started, there were other people who started, Copyblogger was a great example of this. We helped each other to grow. We ended up doing quite different things, but there was overlap in our audience, and that is such an important thing. If you’re alright, I would befriend other bloggers in your niche, this is really important. If you were I, I would find a mentor, even if it’s just a one-off mentoring session, like Michele described, over a meal. That can be a very powerful thing as well. And then her last breakthrough was really, I thought, was great as well. Particularly if you are blogging about anything that’s to do with news, or product, as Michele is. Being first to market, being early in writing about something newsworthy in your industry is a great thing, it signals to your readers that you are first, that you are up with the latest, but it also gets on the radar of other people in your industry. Whether that be other bloggers who might link to you, or as in the case with Michele, other people in the industry like the people you’re reviewing the products of. Being first, being early, being positive, being constructive about the things that are happening in your industry will get you on the radar of others, and that then opens up all kinds of opportunities. When people see you writing about those sorts of topics, you’ll get invited to the press launches. You will sometimes have opportunity to work with brands in a paid capacity as well, to become an ambassador. So really important to do that, and Michele’s obviously worked that very well. Networking, being open to collaboration is a very powerful thing. I do encourage you to take those things on board, particularly if you’re in those sorts of industries where you can write about news, and what’s going on in your industry. It can be a very powerful thing. Thanks so much, Michele, again, for sharing. You can find Michele’s blog at turningleftforless.com. You can find a link to her blog in our show notes today, but also a link to those episodes that I talked about earlier, particularly episode 250, where I talk about tons of content that you can create that doesn’t take too much work. I think I called it Killer Filler Content, although it’s not really filler content, because it can actually be really valuable for your readers as well. Again today’s show notes are at problogger.com/podcast/261 is a full transcription there. Also dig back over the last few episodes as well, where we’ve got, I think we’re up to six other blogger breakthrough stories now. There are other variety of different topics as well, so it’s well worth digging back into those. Thanks for listening, chat with you next week in episode 262. How did you go with today’s episode? Enjoy this podcast? Sign up to our ProBloggerPLUS newsletter to get notified of all new tutorials and podcasts.

How a Mindshift Changed One Blogger’s Perspective This episode of our Blogging Breakthroughs series features eight-year blogger Sarah Cook. Her blog Sustainable Cooks shares recipes, gardening tips, and real food for food people. Sarah describes how a simple and practical mindshift recently ramped up her efforts as a blogger. She changed her mindset from “me” to “we”. Most bloggers put the emphasis on themselves, which is natural. But if you want to build a big audience and monetize your blog you should focus on your readers. You can still inject yourself into your blog. Just remember who is reading, what their lives are like, what role you play in their lives, and how you can help them. Create an avatar to learn more about your readers. If you have one, revisit and update it. Another option, depending on how brave you are, is to connect with your readers directly. Before each post Sarah asks herself, “How will this post improve my readers’ lives?” Keep it real, and show your readers what normal life looks like. Being vulnerable is powerful. Knowing more about your readers will help drive and reveal your blog’s design, branding, marketing, monetization and content. Never forget that your readers are human beings, not just numbers. Links and Resources for How One Recipe Blogger Turned Her Blog Around with a Simple Mindshift: Sustainable Cooks How to Create a Reader Avatar for Your Blog (with free downloadable template) Pat Flynn’s Blog Further Listening My Mid-Life Crisis and the Power of Being Vulnerable on a Blog Courses Starting a Blog ProBlogger Pro – 31 Days to Build a Better Blog Join our Facebook group Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Darren: Welcome to episode 260 of the ProBlogger Podcast. My name’s Darren Rowse and I’m the blogger behind problogger.com which is a blog, a podcast and a series of courses, eBooks and events even, to help you to become a better blogger. You can find more about ProBlogger at problogger.com. Now today, we’re going into our blogger breakthrough series where we’re sharing stories of bloggers who have had breakthroughs in some way. We’ve had three of these previously and they’ve been really popular. I’ve had a lot of really positive feedback about those episodes. People seem to like to hear from normal bloggers. I’m not saying I’m not a normal blogger, but normal bloggers who are at different stages of their journey. Today, we’ve got a story from Sarah Cook. Sarah has a blog called Sustainable Cooks. I guess, a bit of a play on her name but also the topic as well. She writes about recipes, and gardening, and I guess doing food from a family perspective in realistic ways. She will introduce that much better than I did. I love this story. It’s a really short one today and it’s simple on some levels, but it’s incredibly powerful. Sarah has been blogging for eight or so years now. Things have really ramped up in the last year as a result of a mindshift. Also something really practical that she did. As in similar stories, it is a mindshift type thing that needs to start with, but it’s also a practical. I’m going to let Sarah share that story. As I said, it’s not long. At the end, I want to come back and share a few thoughts and give you a free downloadable resource that you can also use to do the exact thing that Sarah did. You’ll find a link to that on today’s show notes, and you’ll find a full transcription as well as links to Sarah’s blog, the show notes are at problogger.com/podcast/260. If you want to look at Sarah’s blog as you listen, she is at sustainablecooks.com. Sarah: Hi, I’m Sarah Cook from Seattle, Washington and my blog is Sustainable Cooks. You can find it at www.sustainable cooks.com. I’ve been blogging for eight years though only seriously in the last 11 to 12 months. My blog is all about real food for real people. So we share healthy recipes and gardening tips with realistic expectations about what you can accomplish with kids and family, and things like that. What was blogging like before my breakthrough? Up until last summer when I started discovering awesome podcasts like yours, I didn’t know a thing about SEO. My photography was so bad that my friends now refer to an old post I have as the poop cookie post because the picture was so terrible. I had seven years of post without a single recipe card. I had self-changed my permalinks and screwed up the redirect, breaking all of my popular posts on Pinterest in the fourth quarter right in time for Christmas, and my site was so slow and not user friendly. At that time, I only wrote for me and not my reader. I never considered them when I wrote. I was ready to quit because I just wasn’t motivated, and I felt useless. My traffic and my income were a joke. I didn’t understand social media or promotion at all. I would publish a post, out it went, and why it never paid off is only a mystery to me. I put it out there and I figured that was it. So last May I had two paths in front of me, quit or double down and work really smart and super hard. So my breakthrough actually came about through one of your podcast. They mentioned doing Skype calls with readers and honestly, I thought it was really weird. But I needed practice for Skype for an upcoming project. So I sent it out to my list as a, “Hey, what’s up? Anyone wants to talk?” And I got a lot of interest. During a Skype call with the reader, she started off immediately by saying, “This is how your blog has changed my life.” Just like that I realized these were real people behind the Google analytics, actual human beings and not just numbers. From there I became obsessed about learning about my audience, what they needed, what made them tick, what made them laugh, and what made them cry. I created an avatar of my reader and I’ve even shared this avatar with them in a post and they all pretty much said, “Yup, that’s me.” Now I write to my avatar. I write to solve her problems and I write right to change her life. What has blogging been like after my breakthrough? The mindshift changed in combination with a giant rebrand, new site design, and professional SEO audit has completely changed the course of my blog. My traffic is up, I qualified for a premier ad company, and I have purpose and motivation again. I no longer sit down in my laptop and think I have to write a post. I open my computer and I think, this is how this post is going to help my reader’s life today. I am so fired up and I’m still ready to hustle. I never sleep but it’s always worth it because I love this job. What is a tip to share with your listeners? Shift your mindset from “Me.” to “We.” Think about how your reader will use your content to solve their problems. Maybe your post don’t need so much of a backstory that’s how I used to write, all about me. Because maybe your readers just want the recipe, or perhaps they’re just coming to you to be educated about something. Maybe they want and need new ideas for their family, but they don’t want to feel like Pinterest failures. So while you’re solving their problems, also show them what real life looks like, how it’s realistic. Be true to them by being true to yourself and be helpful. I have two small boys at home so Thomas, the tank engine is huge in our house, and every day when I sit down at my computer to write, I think tonight I will be really useful. Is there anything else I want to share? Just that your podcasts has been so instrumental in my change and thank you so much. Darren: What a fantastic story. Thank you so much Sarah for sharing it with us today. I love this story. I love that it’s something that came out of the ProBlogger’s podcast. It’s always really nice to hear those stories of how something that we’ve covered here on the podcast has helped people. Thank you for that. It’s very encouraging to me. I guess the other thing I love about these story is that it pretty much used a tip that I give every time I get up in front of an audience and talk. I always touch on this even if it’s just in passing. Firstly, work out who is reading your blog, and secondly work out how you can change their life. For me, this is just central in everything else, and really these are the two questions that I ask when I write a piece of content, but also do a redesign as I think about the products that we create as we do podcast episodes. I’ve got the audience in mind but also the change I’m trying to bring. And so it was really great to hear Sarah articulate that in a slightly different way to the words that I use. I just want to reemphasize some of Sarah’s points, but I also want to say that there is a resource that you can use to create one of those avatars. I’ll talk about that in a moment but you’ll find a link to that in out show notes as well. So if you want to do the avatar exercise, that is something you can grab for free and we’ll send that to you if you pop in your email address. A couple of things that Sarah mentioned that I loved. Firstly, change your mindset from “Me” to “We”. Most bloggers do start out with the real emphasis on me, that’s what I did. My first blog was a personal blog. It’s natural to do that. It’s natural to talk about yourself, your own experiences. Sometimes, I think it’s quite fine for a blog to always be about you. You expressing yourself, you will find some readers are interested in you. I do think you probably want to keep some of you in it forever. But if your goal is to build a larger audience, to monetize your blog, to sell products, to find advertisers, you’re going to have a much higher success if you do the work that Sarah described and make some transition through thinking about your readers. That’s not to say that you have to give up talking about you. You can still inject you into your blog but you need to focus more on understanding who is reading, who’s on the other side, who is behind those Google analytics numbers, what their lives are like, what role you’re playing in their life and if you can help them in some way? This is just such a powerful thing to do and to understand. It will reveal so many things to you. It will inform your blog design, it will inform your branding, how you promote your blogging, grow your audience. It will give you ideas for how to engage people and to get them commenting on your blog or commenting on your social media, they will give you ideas for the type of products you could create, or the type of advertisers that you might reach out to. It’s just such a powerful thing and I guess ultimately it’s also going to inform the content that you create. Once you nail who is your reader, and what is your role in making their lives better in some way, you need to keep it at the forefront of your mind and this is something I find a lot of bloggers do understand who their audience is, but they don’t revisit as much and it tends to slip off the radar. I love that question that Sarah asked herself before she writes a piece of content, “How will this post improve my reader’s life?” And that’s something that I would encourage you stick it on your screen, your computer screen, make it a screensaver, or do something that’s just going to remind you of who your reader is. One of the things that I used to do after I did my first avatars was to print them out and put them next to my computer. I would literally look up at my avatar as I was writing content. I would imagine that I was talking to them, and I found that that transformed not only the type of content I created, it suddenly started to be more useful. But it also made me write in that much more personal tone. Whatever you need to do to remind yourself who that reader is whether that’s jumping on a Skype call and like Sarah did with readers once a month. I know Pat Flynn does this every month. He rings up a reader and has a chat to them, or whether it’s printing out the avatars and keeping them at top of mind all out with it. Running some meetup events where you actually get to meet your readers, all of these things can just trigger you back to remind you of who is on the other side of your content So take home message today is to do the exercise Sarah mentioned. Create an avatar, if you have not done one before, I wrote an article on how I recommend you do that and that’s a link in today’s show notes, and on that post on that article, there is a downloadable template which you can fill in or use as a basis for your own avatar. Now if you’ve already done the avatar exercise, I encourage you to revisit it, update it. Your audience may be changing. You may be changing in your focus, you may be changing in how you are changing your reader’s lives. What I’ve found over the years is that my understanding of my readers has deepened. It has changed, my audience particularly on the photography blog has changed, their needs have changed. Revisiting that avatar is a really useful thing to do periodically. If you’re feeling extra brave, do that exercise that Sarah did. Get on the phone or Skype with a reader. It can be incredibly revealing, and lead to all kinds of unexpected things. If you want to read my article on creating avatars or if you want to visit Sarah’s blog, head over to the show notes at problogger.com/podcast/260. Again, Sarah’s blog is at sustainablecooks.com. Last thing, I love what Sarah said, in passing in her story about keeping it real and showing your readers what real life looks like. I’m kind of passionate about this topic at the moment for a couple of reasons. Firstly, I think it’s just a great thing to do if you blog. It really does build a connection with you and your audience. I can say on Sarah’s blog that she has what she calls confessions posts. She had one for August so this is a confession where she does a series of confessions to her audience and she tells her audience a few things about herself, what she thinks, and what she feels. I can see the reaction to that post is really positive. She gets a lot of reader engagement there. This is her showing her life as it really is. It’s not just, “Here’s 10 fabulous things I did over the last month.” It is, “Here are things that are going on in my life or things that I feel.” Some of them not just warm and fuzzy, some of them are a little bit more raw. This is something I’ve been reminded about a lot lately, being vulnerable is just so powerful. I did talk a little bit more about that in episode 255. So if you want to delve into that a little bit more, head over and listen to that episode as well. The other reason I just love this whole idea of keeping things real is that I just think that we are working in a space where it’s so tempting to just present the good stuff in our lives. The stuff that’s happy, the stuff that we’re proud of and I think that creates something in our culture that is really harmful. I’m just really passionate about this at the moment. We’ve got to be real with each other. We’ve got to be vulnerable. We’ve actually got a show each other what normal is because if we continue the way that we are at the moment particularly in social media, it leads to comparisons, it leads to unrealistic expectations, and I just think it’s hurting our culture. It’s going to hurt our kids, it’s hurting people around us and it’s leading to a whole lot of issues. I encourage you to be real. Be a part of breaking some of these stuff that we see going on around us. I think you will not only release yourself and hopefully find a happy place for yourself by letting people know what noble is for you, but I think you have a massive impact on your reader’s lives as well. Sorry for the side track there. It‘s something I’ve been thinking a lot about lately and particularly with the Spark’s 00:15:01 challenge that we’ve been running as a result of my midlife crisis post, it’s not something that’s come out quite a bit there and we had a little Facebook group of people sharing on a daily basis about their lives. Some of the things that people shared were vulnerable and I could see it impacting not only them in sharing it, but the rest of us as well. That’s my little thought for the day. I hope you do find some of that useful. Again, the show notes are at problogger.com/podcast/260 and lastly, thanks Sarah so much for sharing your story. I’ve got another one for you next week. 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. 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’s been editing all of our podcast for some time now. Podcast Motor has a great range of services for podcasters at all levels. They can help you to set up your podcast, but also offer a couple of excellent services to help you to edit your shows and get them up with great show notes. Check them out at podcastmotor.com. How did you go with today’s episode? Enjoy this podcast? Sign up to our ProBloggerPLUS newsletter to get notified of all new tutorials and podcasts.

How a Lawyer’s Home Cooking Blog is Helping Her Replace Her Law Income Libby Hakim features in the fourth episode of our Blogging Breakthroughs series, where listeners share stories about traffic, income, mindset, and other blogging areas. Libby has a new blog, Cooking with Nana Ling, which focuses on home cooking based on her great-grandmother’s recipes. Before her blog, Libby was working a part-time legal job and had two small children. But with her blog, Libby has experienced four mini breakthroughs: Mindshift: Presumed she would never make more than she would as a lawyer, but started to believe she could make a living by blogging. What to Blog About: Had heaps of ideas, but got tired of them. Her cooking blog gives her and others joy and happiness, so she has been able to sustain it. Overcoming Perfection: Launch deadline makes you commit to moving forward with your blog, even if you don’t think it’s good enough yet. Like-New Blogs: Don’t compare yourself to bloggers who’ve been around awhile. You’ll evolve your writing and the way your blog looks. With blogging, you’ve got to start somewhere to develop a sense of purpose and enjoy what you do. Don’t give up. Keep going. Breakthroughs lead to something special. Links and Resources for How This Home Cooking Blogger is Replacing Her Lawyer Income with Her Blogging Income: Cooking with Nana Ling Zoe Bingley-Pullin Courses Starting a Blog ProBlogger Pro – 31 Days to Build a Better Blog Join our Facebook group Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Darren: Hey, there and welcome to episode 259 of the ProBlogger Podcast. My name is Darren Rowse, and I’m the founder of ProBlogger. You can find out more about what we do in helping the bloggers start blogs and monetize their blogs at problogger.com. Today is the fourth installment in our blogger breakthrough series where we’re sharing stories from listeners of the podcast in how they had different kinds of breakthroughs in their blogging. Today’s story comes from a blogger who’s relatively new to blogging. She started blogging six months ago using our Start A Blog course, which you can find the link to in today’s show notes. The blogger that I want to introduce you to today, her name is Libby Hakim. She’s got a fascinating blog. I love the topic of this blog. The title is Cooking With Nana Ling. I’ll let her introduce where the blog idea came from because that is part of the breakthrough that she wants to share today. But I just love this story because it is from a new blogger who’s already got to a point where she’s reaching some of her dreams in being able to give up other work and focus on her blogging. She’s still got a way to go, but she’s well on the way. The blog itself is a beautifully designed blog and just has a great concept. You’re going to hear four blogging breakthroughs today–just four short ones. At the end of Libby’s story, I’m going to come back and pull out a few of the things that I noticed about it. Libby’s another Aussie, so you’re going to hear a bit of an Aussie accent. You might hear a few words that I use from time to time as well, which is fun and at the end, I’ll come back and share some thoughts. You can find today’s show notes at problogger.com/podcast/259. You’ll find a full transcript there as well. Thanks, Libby. I’ll hand it over to you. Libby: Hi, there. My name’s Libby Hakim, and I’m from Sydney, Australia. My blog is called Cooking With Nana Ling. You can find it at www.cookingwithnanaling.com. My blog is only six months old, and as you probably guessed, it’s about cooking, more specifically, it’s about home cooking. It’s based around the recipes my Nana Ling—who is my great-grandmother—wrote down in the late 1930s, and early 1940s. I inherited her vast collection of handwritten recipes. The blog is about recreating those recipes, but also inspiring other people to enjoy home cooking. My breakthrough story isn’t about one big breakthrough moment. I’ve broken it up into four little mini breakthroughs. It was those little breakthroughs that really took me from being someone who is skeptical about blogging, and thought basically, was a fantasy, to someone who can justify spending a day each week on a blog. I’m really hopeful, as time goes forward, that I’ll be able to devote even more of my working week to blogging. Just to set the scene, before my first mini-breakthrough, I was working part-time as a lawyer. I had two small children, and work-wise, I wasn’t feeling particularly satisfied. It was very difficult to work part-time in the legal profession, but that was something that I’ve trained for many years. It was something I’ve been doing for many years, and I didn’t really feel I had many other options. During my second round of maternity leave, I’d taken a course in writing for magazines and newspapers. That was going really well as a little hobby or side business, it’s something I really loved writing, and part of that meant soaking up lots of new information. I was listening to a heap of podcasts, and one of those was ProBlogger. I really loved listening to ProBlogger even though I wasn’t blogging. I think I always had that little dream that, well, imagine being able to blog for a living? But that was when I was still in this mindset that blogging was just a fantasy. One day, I was having a particularly bad day in my legal job, so I took myself off to have a lovely lunch at a restaurant in the Sydney CBD. I put my earplugs in, and I listened to the latest ProBlogger podcast to cheer myself up. As I was listening to that podcast, Darren actually described how he wasn’t really making any money from blogging in the early days, and his wife was the breadwinner. She was the lawyer. It came to a point though where he had to give himself a bit of an ultimatum, and start making money or actually get a real job. Then he described how he did actually start making money from blogging, and then he started making more money than his wife was earning as a lawyer. That was a real mind shift for me because I’d always just presumed that I would never make as much money doing anything else than I would by practicing law. I think in that episode, he also went on to describe how his wife actually ended up leaving law and becoming a blogger herself. That was just a massive, massive mind shift for me. I started to think, “Perhaps I could actually make writing and blogging a career.” It did actually take a couple of years, but I did end up leaving my part-time legal job to become a writer. I have my own copywriting and freelance writing business. I was writing blogs for lots of big business, big brands, and I really, really loved that career, but after my youngest daughter went to school, and I had a little bit more time on my hands, I kept going back to that idea that I would love to have my own standalone blog that I could learn from, that I could grow, and I could have fun with. Then I went into the next hurdle—which I had to go through with one of my mini-breakthroughs—the next hurdle was, “What to blog about?” I had heaps of ideas, but all of them I got sort of tired of after about a week. There was one idea that I actually got to the stage where I’ve built a blog, I wrote some posts, it was about juggling parenting and career. But I was just so tired of that topic by the time I was ready to launch it, that I never launched it, it just drained me of energy. I couldn’t be enthusiastic about going out there and putting this blog out. The idea for my Cooking With Nana Ling blog didn’t really come from sitting down, and brainstorming topics I could possibly blog about, it actually came to me from an Instagram post. Last Christmas, I remembered I had my great Nana Ling’s recipe books tucked away, the handwritten recipe books. She was very thorough. She’s dated all the recipes, she included all the instructions, and there are literally, hundreds of recipes there that she’s collected over the years. I sat down with those books, and it just filled me with such joy to look through these recipes. I ended up cooking up a Christmas pudding, and it went wonderfully. It was the first time I’ve ever had success cooking a Christmas pudding. Then, of course, I bragged about it on Instagram, and I also included the page from her recipe book. It just got this overwhelming response. Some actually wonder that I actually had these recipe books, and how lovely it was that I could recreate the recipe nearly 80 years later. That really was the start of my idea for the Cooking With Nana Ling blog. As I thought about the blog, I just had more and more ideas, and I got more and more excited about it. It just filled me with so much enthusiasm and happiness. That’s how I came across the topic and got past that hurdle of actually finding a topic that I knew I would stick with. In the early days obviously, you’re not going to have a lot of readers. You need to really enjoy what you’re doing. Otherwise, it can all feel a bit pointless. It’s very time-consuming, so you need to be able to justify to yourself why you’re spending so much time on a blog. Well, I did, at least, because I’ve got two young children. I need to earn money. In the early days and still, I don’t earn a lot from the blog. To have a sense of purpose, and to really enjoy what I do, is really important. This idea just fitted with the rest of my life. I always enjoyed home cooking. But the few years before I started the blog, I felt like I didn’t get enough time to actually, cook. The blog is also another way of getting me back in the routine of cooking and spending time in the kitchen. The next two breakthroughs were really about overcoming my sense of having to have everything perfect. The next breakthrough was actually, having a launch deadline. I enrolled in the Start A Blog course with ProBlogger, and that included a launch deadline which was really important for me because I probably would’ve spent the next six months or more getting the blog just how I liked it. I was adding little bits and pieces, always changing things. But to have a launch deadline mean that I can focus on that date and I was very committed to launching the blog on that date. But even though I had that date, I was still feeling really nervous about launching the blog. I felt it wasn’t good enough. My next little mini-breakthrough—the final breakthrough—came when Darren, actually reminded us during the course that our blogs would look like new blogs, they weren’t going to look like an established blog, and that sounds very obvious. But I was comparing myself to existing bloggers. I was comparing my blog to blogs that have been around for at least a few years. That made me realize, “I just had to launch this thing, and it’s going to look like a new blog.” that finally got me over the line where I actually, launched a blog. I can say now that you have to start somewhere. Since I started my blog six months ago, I’ve been on TV. I was on the Channel 7 program, and I had celebrity chef Zoe Bingley-Pullin visit my house and cook with me. Even to be speaking and asked to speak on this podcast, I just would not have imagined that when I first launched the blog. You just got to start somewhere. I’m really grateful that I just kept going with the idea of the blog and that I may not have had one big breakthrough moment, but I kept going, and all these little breakthroughs led to something that I’m just so excited about. Just to finish off, I guess my message would be, to just keep that dream of having a blog alive. Find a topic that you really, really care about, and that gives you lots of ideas and energy. Thanks, everyone for listening. Thank you so much, Darren and the ProBlogger team for having me on the podcast. Darren: Thanks so much for sharing your story today, Libby. That is a great story. I really love the way that you came along that topic. It really connects with a lot of what I have taught in the past about how to choose what to blog about. I’ve been through the process of starting 30 or so blogs over the years, and the ones that fell over quickly were all ones that stole energy from my life; the ones that have continued have been the ones that not only gave energy to other people but also gave energy to me. I really love that in your story that you did that little experiment in putting that Instagram post up there. Whether you thought that it could become a blog when you put that up or not, it gave you a spark, but it also gave your potential readers, your friends, and family a spark as well. They are the type of things that I really encourage people to take note of, “What’s giving you energy?” If it’s giving you energy, you’re going to be able to sustain it for the long term; if other people are getting energy too, then that’s the perfect storm, really. I love that also, Libby mentions in her story, that the first breakthrough was one in her mind–it was a mind shift. I really want to emphasize that because a lot of the breakthroughs that I’ve had over the years haven’t actually been about anything that I’ve done necessarily, but it’s a new way of thinking about things; so beginning to treat my blog not as a hobby but as a business, thinking about my readers and who they are—that was a new mind shift—not thinking about myself, but thinking about who my readers were–these types of mind shifts can really have a profound impact because it changes your actions. As you’re listening to this series, I encourage you to listen to the shifts that happen in the blogger’s minds that often precede the change in behavior. The third and fourth breakthroughs that Libby shared revolved around getting things launched. I love the fact that she did take notice of what we taught in the course–of setting a launch deadline. This is something that I’ve noticed, numerous times, when I’ve talked to bloggers who’ve gone through the full course and have actually, come out the other end with an actual blog is that they do set the launch deadline. One of the traps that many bloggers fall into is that they spend so long getting their blog ready to launch, that they lose the passion for the blog in the process. That’s something I’ve heard countless times over the years, so get something up. As Libby says there, you don’t have to have it looking perfect when you get it launched. It’s going to look like a new blog. All our blogs, when you first start them, they all look different to the way they are today, they all look different to a more established blog, and that’s only natural. You will evolve the look of your blog. You’ll evolve your writing. You’ll evolve your logo. Just get something online because that will enable you to start writing. That’s often where the energy begins to flow, and that will keep you going through evolving the rest of your blog, as well. Thanks so much, Libby for sharing today. You can find Libby’s blog  cookingwithnanaling.com. You’ll find the link to that in our show notes today, you’ll also find the link to our Start A Blog course which we’ve had so many bloggers go through. I’m just so proud of the fact that we’ve seen hundreds, it’s probably in the thousands now, of bloggers start a blog as a result of that free course. It’s completely free. You can find it at problogger.com/start-a-blog. I’ll link to that in the show notes as well because it is a bit of a mouthful. If you go to problogger.com, you’ll see our courses tab, and you’ll find a link to it there. It’s completely free. It’s quite comprehensive. It walks you through the technicalities of setting up a blog, but also some of the mind shift type stuff that you might want to think about as well. What I think is a good foundation, to be able to monetize later, we don’t get into monetization so much in the course, that comes later on. But you’ll set up a blog that not only is technically sound and stable but also hopefully, it will help you to choose a topic that could be profitable later, and could actually, be sustainable in the long term as well. Check out the Start A Blog course. There’s no cost at all, so there’s no harm in giving it a go. Thanks so much for listening today. Again, our show notes today are at problogger.com/podcast/259. Special thanks again to Libby Hakim. How did you go with today’s episode? Enjoy this podcast? Sign up to our ProBloggerPLUS newsletter to get notified of all new tutorials and podcasts.

How a Table Tennis Blog Allowed This Blogger to Quit His Job This is the third episode in our Blogging Breakthroughs series, which features bloggers’ stories about breakthroughs in traffic, income, mindset and other aspects of blogging. Today we hear from Tom Lodziak, who has the Table Tennis Coaching blog. He started with nothing – no income and no audience. He started his blog in the wrong way and, at times, felt like he was blogging to nobody. Tom found a way to get to the point where his dream of quitting his job to pursue his passion was possible. Tips: Focus on great, quality content to increase traffic and grow audience. Spend 90% of time on article that serves your audience, and 10% on income-generating posts. Experiment with content and income streams. Some income streams don’t work now, but may later. Monetize early with a small product to test the waters. Try something that’s easy to make and not too expensive to buy. When it comes to blogging, be persistent. It takes practice. Keep going. Just like table tennis, blogging isn’t easy at first. But you’ll have greater chances of success if you continue. Do you want to become a successful blogger? Then, try the Success Incubator. Use the code: PROBLOGGER until Aug. 31 to receive 25% off. Links and Resources for How My Table Tennis Blog Helped Me Quit My Job: Tom Lodziak’s Table Tennis Coaching blog Tom Lodziak on YouTube Success Incubator Event (use the code PROBLOGGER for 25% off) Ping Pong-A-Thon 2018 (sponsor me) Amazon Associates Courses Starting a Blog ProBlogger Pro – 31 Days to Build a Better Blog Join our Facebook group Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Darren: Hey there, welcome to episode 258 of the ProBlogger podcast, my name is Darren Rowse and I’m the blogger behind problogger.com. A blog, a podcast, events, job boards, and eBooks and courses, all designed to help you to build a great blog to build profit around that blog as well. Now, today is the third in the series of our blogging breakthrough series of content where we’re featuring stories of listeners of this podcast who’ve had breakthroughs in their own blogging, whether they be breakthroughs around traffic, income, mindset, building community, or other opportunities have come their way. This is the third in the series and we’ve had some really great feedback from previous ones. So, if you haven’t listened to those, do dig back after this one to episode 256 and 257 and you’ll hear those. Now, today’s story is actually from Tom Lodziak who has a blog called Table Tennis Coaching. There’s a URL in today’s show notes, which you can find it, if you want to check it out and I love this story because it’s a story of someone who started with absolutely nothing but a dream. He had no income coming in from another source, no audience, no real profile that he can build on and he started incompletely the wrong way, as he puts it, but he gets to a point with his blogging where he’s able to reach his dream of quitting his job to pursue his passion of table tennis coaching. You’re going to love this story, it’s got some really practical tips but very relatable as well. Certainly, there’s a few things that I want to pull out at the end this episode just to emphasize to give you some encouragement as well. Lastly, before we get into Tom’s story, I do want to mention your last chance to get discounted tickets for our Success Incubator event, which is happening in Orlando, Florida, pretty much this time next month, on the 24th and 25th of September in Orlando, Florida. Success Incubator is the event. If you go to the problogger.com/success, you’ll find details of the event and if you use the word ProBlogger in the check out, you’ll get a 25% discount on attending that event. The event is a Mastermind style event that would be half a day of teaching from other masterminders, which is kind of cool. Last year we had some amazing content presented and then there’ll be quite a bit of mastermind time, where you’ll be sitting with a group of other people or in similar boats to you in their online business and someone who’s got some expertise to share as well. Last year we had some amazing breakthroughs as a result of that Success Incubator event. Quite a few of the people who came last year are actually coming back. We’ve still got a few tickets left though. If you do want to grab those, check out problogger.com/success for all the details and don’t forget that code ProBlogger in the checkout cart on event part and it will give you give that 25% off but that’s only valuable to the end of August so don’t delay. Today’s show notes are at problogger.com/podcast/258 where there will be a full transcript of today’s show and some links to our event as well and to Tom’s blog. So, he is Tom Lodziak from Table Tennis Coaching. Tom: Hi I’m Tom Lodziak from Cambridge in UK. I’m a table tennis coach, blogger and YouTuber. You can find my website at tabletenniscoach.me.uk. I started blogging in 2015 and my blog is all about the wonderful sport of table tennis. Now, I started in completely the wrong way. I was working full-time for an education company. One toddler and a new baby back at home but in the evenings and weekends I would coach table tennis for some extra income and I really love doing table tennis coaching. I would wanted to do this full-time but I just couldn’t see a way of making a switch from a stable decently paid job to coaching table tennis as a living. It’s not a particularly reliable or well-paid career, so I started to look at ways I could earn extra income online. My first idea was create an online course where I taught the beginners how to play table tennis. I was convinced that this was going to be success and I spent ages doing it. I wrote all my scripts, I bought camera equipment, did lots of filming then I bought the best camera equipment, re-filmed the footage, I learned how to edit the videos then I re-edited the videos to make them better and after few months I had my online course, Table Tennis For Beginners, and I launched it on Udemy. I clicked the publish the button and I waited for the money to roll in and in the first six months, I earned and you better hold on to your seats for this, I earned precisely zero, nothing, not a single pound, ouch, and of course, the main I earned nothing was because I had no audience, I had no one to promote the course to. Just launching the course on Udemy wasn’t going to generate an income so I had to build an audience and this is when I started to blog. I thought the best for me to grow an audience was to write articles about table tennis—useful tips about how to improve, and stories for my own coaching and playing experience. The idea being that, if I could grow an audience, more people would visit my website, more people would find out about my course, and hopefully some people would sign up. So, I started writing a weekly blog post. Probably around 500 to 1000 words for each blog post and at first my audience size was tiny, 300 to 500 visits per month and certainly those early days it did feel as though at times I was blogging to no one but any small increases in traffic I did get gave me encouragement to keep going. After about six months of blogging, my traffic had increased to around about a thousand visits per month but I was still not earning any online income. At this stage, I pretty much gave up in the idea of earning an income through online courses. I teach plans for more courses and I started to look any other ways to earn an income online. I read an article about Amazon associates and how you can link through to put up an Amazon and get a commission on anything which is purchased. I thought, “Okay, let’s give that a try, got nothing to lose, let see if this works.” I wrote an article with advice on buying a table tennis bat and I’ve got a few recommendations on which best to buy linking to products I was familiar with on Amazon and within few days this article had earned a few pounds, breakthrough, my first online earnings and it was interesting because this article had taken a couple of hours to write and it had earned me more money that the online course which has taken six months to produce. Looking back is ridiculous—how excited I got about earning a few pounds but it gave me big motivation to keep going. Over the next few months I kept blogging, kept growing my audience, and my income from this article continue to grow. It was still only pocket money but I could see the potential. If this one article could earn me income and my audience is pretty small, imagine how much I could earn if I did lots of articles with Amazon links and my audience size was much larger. This small breakthrough let me to take blogging much seriously. I came across the ProBlogger website at this stage and I raided the archives, I read everything, learning from all of Darren’s successes and his failures and I learned a lot from Darren. The most important thing I learned and the thing which has worked most for me is focusing on creating good quality content. Good quality content which helps my audience in some way. Over the next three years, I wrote a lot of articles about all aspects of table tennis every week, a new blog post, 500 to 1000 words something to do with the table tennis – 90% of these articles, articles which just give helpful tips and advice about playing table tennis. I don’t earn anything from these articles and I don’t try to, these are articles which help me build an audience which helps to develop my authority and trust with my audience and help send more traffic to my website, and around 10% of my content is articles about table tennis equipment, about table tennis bats, balls, and tables –and these silly articles where I link to Amazon in which earned me an income but even with these articles, the focus is much more giving helpful information and pushing people to buy, buy, buy. Now, fast forward three years and I have a lot more traffic, I get 25,000 visits per month and most of the traffic is from Google and I haven’t use any special SEO tricks here, I just focused on creating good quality content. We’ve done a little bit of link building but honestly not that much. I take the approach that if content course is good, people will link to it anyway and Google loves good quality content, which answers people’s questions and which comes from an authority. So, this has been the approach I’ve taken. As my traffic has increased a lot so has my earnings from Amazon, I’ve gotten from 50 pounds per month three years ago to four figures per month and today. It’s a low four figures but for me it’s a significant amount. I’ve also set up a successful YouTube channel which earns me a small income and guess what—I also earn some money from the online course I set up four years ago. It’s not huge amount but nice to get some reward for all that hard work I initially put in. Now, putting all of these income schemes together, it was enough that I could quit my day job and focus full-time on table tennis coaching, blogging and making videos. There’s a whole of tips I could share, I’ve already mentioned about focusing on creating great content. I really believe this is a great approach to take. I mean if you create a great content, you’ll be able to increase your traffic and grow a loyal audience and when you have traffic and you have an audience, you have many more options to generate an income online and don’t afraid to try things and get things wrong and have failures. I’ve experimented with various income streams. Much of the stuff I’ve tried hasn’t really worked but a few things, Amazon, YouTube, and a couple of affiliate schemes have worked. If I’ve never experimented and failed with the online course in the first place I would have never started blogging and I would never have discovered about earning an income through Amazon. The irony is that the original online course actually wasn’t out and out failure. I just got the timing wrong. I should have built my audience first but now I have a good audience size and doing a new online course makes much more sense. So, at the moment, I’m actually working on a new course which would hopefully being much more successful as I have a bigger audience to promote to but the main tip I want to give is very simple, this is persevere, be persistent, just keep going. I see many people put a lot of effort early on with blogging and then they gave up as they don’t get the traffic or earnings they were hoping for but it is tough to begin with, it does take time to get decent traffic and earnings. You just have to keep going and going and going. It’s a bit like playing the table tennis, it’s not easy to begin with and the best places aren’t blessed with mysterious natural talent. They’re the place who just keep turning out, keep practicing, keep trying to improved, this is how they get good at table tennis same with blogging. If you put the effort in over a sustained period of time, you’ll have much more chance of achieving success. And the final thought for me, my audience size and my online income is tiny compared to other bloggers but that’s not really the point. I wanted to quit my job and work for myself as a table tennis coach, a blogger, a YouTuber and setting up my blog and writing a new post each week is help me to do this and if I can do it in a niche like table tennis then I guess you can do in any niche you want to. Thank you very much for listening and thank you to Darren for sharing all your brilliant tips on the ProBlogger website. Darren: Thanks so much to Tom Lodziak for sharing his story today. You can check out his blog at tabletenniscoach.me.uk. His blog is table tennis coaching. I love this story, as I said at the top of the show. It really tracks a very similar story to many bloggers, who do start out with nothing, I mean we all started with no audience really. Some of us do have the advantage of starting with a bit of a profile in an industry but I was just like Tom when I started out. No one knew my blog, apart for my friends and family who I shot an email out to, that turned out not to really help that much, not many of them ended up reading in the long-term. So, we all started out in that place and we all kind of feel our kind of feel our way through it. I love that line in his story. –” At times I felt like I was blogging to no one.” That’s certainly something I relate to, pretty much every time I started the blog, even when I have started with the a little bit of profile, it does feel like that. Sometimes you reach these plateaus no one is commenting, no one is emailing you, you don’t really know if anyone’s reading at all. I love the tips that Tom shared, number one tip there, focus on great content, really that is what is all about. It seems I haven’t actually dug too much deeper, a couple of times, he mentioned, he was just writing one article week and I think that’s just brilliant. You can sustain it, as long as it’s useful content that can be enough. Going full-time later on, you might want to increase that a little bit but a week is great because people get to know your rhythm. I love that he focused on—90% of his posts where about just writing content that was going to serve his audience and about 10% of them were income-generating posts, but he still mentioned that even those posts where about serving the audience, I think that’s a really great mix. So, I do see some bloggers particularly with the affiliate marketing side of things that every post seems to be just about trying to get people to their links. You must understand why you might do that. It comes across a bit of sale every single time, and so just sprinkle your content from time to time with those types of affiliate links, I think is a wise move as well. Tom talked about experimenting with content and income strains. Some of the income strains won’t work at all ever for you but some will work later on, you may be too soon. One thing I would advise if you are thinking of starting with creating a product of your own, it’s okay to have a product, ready to go when you launched your blog. I think that’s actually smart in some levels, so as your traffic grows you’ve got something to sell but make sure that first product isn’t something you overinvest in and that’s a sense I got from Tom is that it took a lot of time and energy and effort to that course together and maybe he could have come up with a different type of products in those early days maybe a short eBook. I’m really grateful that my first product of my own was a very simple eBook, it was a repurposed content from my blog. It didn’t really take so much work to get it together. It did take me awhile to get it together because I was busy and it was also content in and my readers work for me and so, it was more natural product for them as well. Of course, I did have some readers by the time I had it developed. Start with something smaller, test waters with those smaller types of products, and then later on you can invest more. Once you’ve got the proof of concept and an audience of course as well. The other beauty of waiting to build those bigger course s is that you can base the content in the course upon the questions your audience ask. Having that audience certainly can help you to develop a product that is actually going to serve them better. You’re not guessing quite so much in the early days. The other thing I’d advice of course, if you are creating a product, this affiliate marketing can be a great way to test what people are interested in as well. Now, in a niche like table tennis coaching, I’m sure how many eBooks or courses there would be out there but if there are courses out there, you might be able to test with the people interested in that format of product but also the topic as well. I love his last tip there about persisting as well and the idea that it takes practice, great analogy from table tennis. As someone who plays table tennis from time to time, my brother actually runs a charity that’s all about table tennis. He raises money and people doing a Ping-Pong-Athon, which I’m actually incidentally doing, I wasn’t going to promote it here but if you want to sponsor me for that, check out the show notes. There is a way to sponsor me for my Ping-Pong-Athon to raise some money for people caught up being in slavery, in some horrible situations. If you want to check that out, I will include a link the show notes to day, but as someone who does play table tennis from time to time, once a year, I know that I’m not as good as I could be because I just don’t practice. I only play that once a year and as a result I don’t improve. The same is certainly true with blogging—the more you do it, the better you get, not only in you writing but also in how you connect with your audience, that takes time. It takes time to understand who is reading your blog as well. It takes a practice to respond comments to engage in a deeper way. It takes time to learn all the different skills whether it be social media, creating graphics, designing a blog, all of these things take time. So, I do encourage you to put aside regular time to do that as Tom does as well. I encourage you to hit over to Tom’s blog if you are interested in that topic tabletenniscoach.me.uk, there will be a link in today’s show notes as well. Check him out, support him, leave a comment on the show notes as well and let him know what you think as well. Check out Success Incubator, as I said at the top of the show, There’s that 25% off discount and if you want support me in my Ping-Pong-Athon endeavors coming up, check out the show notes as well. I’m trying to raise a couple of thousand dollars and go to an amazing course and you can check out more of that later on as well. Thanks for listening today and I’ll chat with you next week with another blogger breakthrough story. Thanks for listening today, chat with you next week on the ProBlogger Podcast. How did you go with today’s episode? Enjoy this podcast? Sign up to our ProBloggerPLUS newsletter to get notified of all new tutorials and podcasts.

How One Blogger Grew Her Readership by 500% with Help from Three Practical Writing Tips In this episode we continue our Blogging Breakthroughs series, this time with a story from my friend Kelly Exeter. Kelly is a regular speaker at our events, has contributed ProBlogger content as a guest writer, and has been a guest on this podcast several times. Today, the story Kelly shares is a great companion piece to the “How to Become a Prolific Content Creator” episode. Her blogging breakthrough is about going from someone who is a good and proficient but bland writer with a plateauing audience to someone who writes with more personality and in a way that’s magnetic to readers. A lot of readers. To get to that point, Kelly was willing to find someone to critique her writing. We all know it can be difficult to accept criticism, but it’s well worth doing. Sometimes you write something that has good information and is well written, but doesn’t connect with people. It’s too vanilla. It isn’t read, commented on, or shared. The problems Kelly experienced are probably things many bloggers can relate to. Kelly describes three practical tips to improve your content: Messy drafts: Hand-write random ideas, previous stories, and tangents (some may not make it into a post). Form core idea with developed personality Don’t sit on the fence: You don’t need to be confrontational or controversial. But you do need to define your stance. Just be you Write the way you talk: Have faith in your voice, and let your personality shine. Use quirks, funny words and expressions you use when you talk in your content By improving her writing, Kelly increased her reader traffic from 2,500 to 15,000 a month – a 500% increase. It also helped her make about $100,000 in off-blog income. Links and Resources for PB 257: 3 Writing Tips That Helped Kelly Grow Her Readership by 500%: Kelly Exeter Success Incubator FinCon Further Listening How to Become a Prolific Content Creator (an Interview with Kelly Exeter) My Mid-Life Crisis and the Power of Being Vulnerable on a Blog Courses Starting a Blog ProBlogger Pro – 31 Days to Build a Better Blog Join our Facebook group Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Darren: Hey there and welcome to episode 257 of the ProBlogger podcast. My name is Darren Rowse, I’m the blogger behind problogger.com. A site dedicated to help you to create a great blog and to build profit around your blog. You can find at problogger.com where you’ll also our eBooks and more importantly probably our courses, our starter blog course for those of you who haven’t yet started, but also our 31-Days To Build A Better Blog course which is ideal for those of you who are early in the blogging or even intermediate, and advanced bloggers that need a bit of a kick start for your blog. Just look for the courses tab at problogger.com. Today, we’re going to continue our blogger breakthrough series of podcast with a story from my friend, Kelly Exeter. Kelly is going to be familiar to many of you because she has regularly spoken at our events here in Australia. She has contributed guest content on the ProBlogger, the blog but also has been on this podcast a number of times. I interviewed her back in episode 193 on how to be a prolific content creator. That was a hugely popular episode, one of the more popular interviews that I’ve done. You can find a link to that in today’s show notes. Today she’s going to share a story that I think it’s a great companion piece to that interview that I did. I do encourage you to listen to both if you haven’t listened to the previous one or if you want to relisten to it, too. Today, Kelly is going to share a story about how she went from being a good proficient, but a bit bland writer whose audience had plateaued, to someone who was writing with more personality and was writing in a way that was more magnetic to readers. Ultimately, it attracted a lot more readers. she’s going to tell you exactly how many readers she had, and how many she went to just by implementing these three practical tips that I love. I really love the way she’s expressed each of these, and I want to tease them at a little bit more at the end of her seven-minute story. Do stay tuned to the end, you’ll find out how much traffic she went from at the end, but also I will come back and wrap this show up with a few thoughts of my own. You can find today’s show notes where you will find a link to Kelly’s site, kellyexeter.com.au. You’ll also find a link to that previous interview I did, and a full transcript of today’s show, you’ll find it at problogger.com/podcast/257, now here’s Kelly. Kelly: Hi, my name is Kelly Exeter, you can find me online at kellyexeter.com.au and I have been blogging for eight years. Before I share my blogging breakthrough, I need to emphasize that the point of my blog is always being able to showcase my abilities as a writer. I’ve always known that one day, I wanted to be writing books, and making income from people buying those books. I needed people to fall in love with my writing. About three years into my blogging journey, I was pretty happy with where I was at. Some people seemed to like my writing, but I’d hit a bit of a plateau in that my readership wasn’t really growing anymore. This led me to seek out a writing mentor, someone I knew who wouldn’t sugarcoat anything and tell me straight, and well she told me straight and so she said, “Kelly, your writing is technically very sound, you communicate your points well, there are no wasted words. It’s good writing, but it’s not great writing. It’s very vanilla.” So, it definitely hurt to hear that, and what did she even mean by “very vanilla.” She meant that while my post contained useful information, they were quite bland and hard to distinguish from any other reasonably well written post on the topic. I was also writing in a very safe fashion because I was so scared of offending someone. My writing it was littered with caveats like maybe, and might. Finally, I wasn’t letting my natural voice come through. This is because there were writers I really admired whose tones and approaches I was trying to emulate. I was trying very hard to sound like them and not allowing my posts to sound like me. So, what did I do to make my writing less vanilla? The first thing I did was I started handwriting first drafts and those first drafts were idea dumps more than anything. So, previously I’d have an idea, and then I’d outline and post that idea, and then I’d write the post to that outline, and what emerged was something like a school essay. It’s very proper, it was good information, but there was no personality, and sometimes, the idea wasn’t actually that good, but because I’ve outlined the post, I would persist with it, and write it, and publish it anyway. What handwriting those first drafts did was it removed my ability to edit as I went. Instead of stopping, and starting, and finessing each sentence, and getting blocked when I couldn’t get a sentence right, I just wrote, just writing. Quite often I find myself drifting away from the original idea I had to a new much better idea or at the very least, a new much better way of saying the thing I was trying to say. Bottom line, approaching my first draft writing this way meant the core idea behind each post was stronger. The second thing I did was I stopped worrying about offending people, which is hard to do because I don’t like offending people. I once heard someone say that, “You know you stand for something when you become simultaneously magnetic and repellant.” Because I wasn’t willing to be repellant, because I would keep sitting on the fence not wanting to offend anyone, it wasn’t clear what I stood for. Before writing a post, I started making sure the idea I was posting was something I could stand behind very strongly and then I made it clear what my stance was. I didn’t vacillate, I didn’t say maybe, and might, and sort of every second sentence. Then finally, I let myself write the way that I talk, which is much harder than it sounds because I feel my natural tone is overly earnest, and I kind of wince a bit when I hear myself speak, and this is kind of why I was forever trying to emulate near the reflectiveness, and cleverness, and snappiness of my writing idols, but in trying to write like other people, the result always came across quite forced and inauthentic and a bit bland. Again, it’s entirely possible for your writing to be technically sound and convey great information, but also be very bland, and when this happens, it’s much harder for the reader to connect with you, and if the reader doesn’t connect with you, it’s going to be very hard to achieve any kind of blogging success. There’s so much competition for your readers these days. They don’t tend to stick around and read bland stuff. Even if they read it, they certainly don’t share it. So the upshot of all of this was, I started writing in my own voice rather than trying to write like other people. If you too feel your writing is a little vanilla, and you’d like to be able to differentiate yourself better, here is a quick summary of those three things I just mentioned about the three things that helped make my writing better. One, allow yourself to write messy first drafts instead of perfect first drafts because messy first drafts throw out much better ideas. For example, anyone can write a blog post around how to be more productive at work. When you go beyond that first idea and write a messy first draft as I did, you might find yourself writing, how I get all my work done in five hours a day. So it’s much stronger idea, and that idea led to a post of mine that has been shared thousands of times. Number two, don’t sit on the fence. When you have found your way to a better idea, stand strongly behind that idea because doing this will draw the right people to you, and repel the people you’re not trying to attract. Remember, we don’t want to speak to everyone, you only want to speak to your people. Number three, write the way that you talk. Have faith in your own voice. Remember, your voice is something no one else has. It’s the easiest way to distinguish yourself from others, and again, some people will love your voice, and some people will hate it, and that’s okay because it’s better to have 50% of people love your work and 50% of people hate it than have 100% of people being quite indifferent to not care in one way or the other. Now, let’s talk about results. What is the end result of me doing these three things that I’ve just outlined above. Well, within three months of implementing those things into my writing, my monthly readership jumped from 2500 readers a month to 15,000 readers is a month. It got the ball rolling towards a scenario where I was able to generate more than $100,000 on of blog income. It was definitely worth it for me, and I’m sure it’ll be worth it for you, too. Darren: Thanks so much to Kelly Exeter who has shared those tips, you can find her at kellyexeter.com.au. There’s a lot that I love about these particular episode and I knew that she would have a lot of good things to say and that’s why I invited her to help us kick off this series. The first thing I love and she didn’t really mention it as a tip at the end, but I think it’s a great tip, is to find someone to critique your writing. Kelly stepped out of her comfort zone into that uncomfortable space of asking someone to tell it like it is about her writing. This is not easy stuff to hear when someone tells you, “You’re a good writer, but you’re a bland writer.” That must have been hard to hear, but if she hadn’t have stepped into that space, she wouldn’t be where she is today. I think it’s well worth doing, finding that type of person who can give you that type of advice. I think the problem that Kelly has is something that many of us probably can relate to. I think most blogs go through this, whether they articulate it in exactly the same way. I see a lot of people with plateaued traffic that’s certainly something, it’s not always to do with your writing voice, but I also see a lot of writers and I include myself in this, you go through periods where you become a good writer, but your writing is bland, and it is vanilla. This is something I think a lot of us need to keep coming back to, and it’s easy to slip into this type of writing. Your blog always becomes a bit of a machine, you keep churning out content, and it can get to a point where it does become a little bit bland. It might have useful information, it might be technically well written, but I don’t know if you’ve ever had that experience, you put something out and it just doesn’t do anything, it doesn’t connect with people, as a result it doesn’t really get read, it doesn’t get commented on, it doesn’t get shared. This is one of those things that I encourage you to really go back to look at in your writing, if you have got to that plateau in your content, maybe this is one of the reasons that’s behind it. Kelly’s three tips are fantastic. First one, writing messy drafts. I’ve seen that in practice over the last few months of working with Kelly. I’ve been working with Kelly on a book and she helped me with the medium articles that I spoke about in episode 255. That article started really messy. In fact, we probably went through a few first drafts which were kind of random collections of ideas, previous stories that I told, and no real core idea. In playfully drafting that article, and exploring all kinds of tangents as it developed, many of which didn’t actually make it into the article itself, the core idea began to form. I don’t think it would have gotten to the point that it is, if we hadn’t have had sort of that messy start to it. I’ve never done what she said there, to handwrite the first drafts. I can see how that would really help. I personally fall into the trap of editing as I write. I try not to do that because I do know that it stifles my ideas in the flow, but it’s something like I naturally do because it’s so easy to do when you’re writing on your computer, you can just delete things, rewrite things, and it does stop the flow. It’s something I’m probably going to give a go to do that handwriting type of thing. I can see how that would work quite well. The second tip there was not to sit on the fence, and this is again something I can relate to. My temptation is to not to want to offend anyone. I don’t like to have people react negatively to a content. I think it’s a natural reaction, but as a result of that, I try to please everyone, and my writing at times can feel like it has lots of disclaimers, explanations, caveats, excuses through the content, and again, that’s not easy to read. I don’t think people want all of that, they want to get to the point. Getting past that and realizing that your content doesn’t have to please everyone is a great lesson. It does create stronger writing, it creates that reaction in your readers. That sometimes does magnetize people, and sometimes repels them but as Kelly says, it doesn’t leave them feeling indifferent, and that’s what you don’t want. You don’t want indifferent readers. It sometimes means that you need to push into I guess, areas that you feel a little bit more uncomfortable, but I don’t think it means you need to be confrontational, you can still write in a nice voice, you don’t have to be controversial just to the point of it and just be you which leads to that last tip that Kelly shared of writing the way you talk. This is the big lesson for me in the early days of my blogging. I tried for many years, not for many years but for many months at least to write in the style of other people that I saw and admired. I realized my voice was much more conversational as well. It’s something I’ve noticed many times with successful bloggers that I’ve met in person. Often there are little quirks and funny words and expressions that you see in their content, it’s just an extension of what they say in a conversation, and as I think about this, Vanessa, my wife, her blog, Style and Shenanigans, she uses a language that she talks in, and it’s kind of quirky at times, but I think it actually stands out. I’m sure it does annoys some people, but I’m sure, it also really connects with other people and that’s why she’s got a very engaged audience, it shines through her personality. I love the advice on that Kelly has given today. I’ve seen the results of these advice in her writing, it really has changed over the years. I’ve never heard the traffic change there from 2500 visitors a month which is great to 15,000 a month, that’s a 500% increase in traffic in just a few months. You can see there the impact that this has upon your readers. I know the times that I’ve gone with this advice almost intuitively, I’ve seen that same thing happened as well. Thanks so much to Kelly. You can find more from Kelly at kellyexeter.com.au. There’ll be a link in today’s show notes to that as well. I’ll also include a link in today’s show notes to the interview I did with Kelly back in episode 193 where she gave some really good advice on becoming a more prolific content creator. That was episode 193, you’ll find it in iTunes and in the show notes. The show notes are at problogger.com/podcast/257 there’s also full transcript of today’s show there. Thanks so much for listening. Next week, we’re going to get back into the blogging breakthrough series. You’re going to hear from some of the listeners of this podcast. The first two episodes have been friends of mine who I invited to kick off the series, but we’re going to get into some listeners in the coming weeks, looking forward to sharing some of those stories with you. Lastly, if you want to head to one of our events, Kelly is a speaker at many of our events. We’ve got an event coming up in Orlando, Florida, late September. If you go to problogger.com/success you’ll see the Success Incubator event that we’ve got running up. There will be some presentations at that event, but there will also be a lot of masterminding. So if you want to check that out as well. The event is actually happening just before FinCom which is a conference for financial bloggers, and if you’re one of those bloggers as well, I will be speaking at that event as well. Those two events held at the same venue, running into the other, our event is first, so that might be a good one to check out as well if you’re in that space. Thanks for listening today, chat with you next week on the ProBlogger Podcast. How did you go with today’s episode? Enjoy this podcast? Sign up to our ProBloggerPLUS newsletter to get notified of all new tutorials and podcasts.

How a Book Deal Launched the Career of a Blogger We’re kicking off our Blogging Breakthroughs series, where a variety of bloggers share their stories of breakthroughs they’ve experienced over the years with their blogs. We received submissions from numerous bloggers. And today I want to introduce you to Andrea Vahl. When Andrea started getting into social media, she realized nobody was teaching it in an entertaining way. So she invented a character: ‘Grandma Mary: Social Media Edutainer’. She’d even show up at events as Grandma Mary – a great way to stand out! Here’s Grandma Mary and myself at an event several years ago. Andrea is also the co-author of Facebook Marketing All-in-One for Dummies and a public speaker. She was a presenter at last year’s Success Incubator event. In her blogging breakthrough story, she describes how she started her blog in 2009 and how she got her book deal. She also shares some good blogging tips: Start experimenting with monetization early on Be open to where your blog may take you, and stay open to possibilities/opportunities Show up consistently and participate Network: Be well connected and relational, even if you have to wear a costume Her first eBooks may not have sold many copies, but they got the attention of a publisher. So she created more eBooks that were profitable, and created opportunities for her to speak, consult and teach. Much of what Andrea does today started as a simple blog. She pushed herself out of her comfort zone to do some great things. Links and Resources for PB 256: How One Blogger Landed a Book Deal That Launched Her Career: Andrea Vahl Andrea Vahl’s Facebook Marketing All-in-One for Dummies book Andrea Vahl as Grandma Mary Success Incubator Further Listening Why You Should Create a Product to Sell on Your Blog (and Tips on How to Do It) How to Create a Library of Products to Sell on Your Blog Blogging Breakthroughs – Your Invitation to be on the ProBlogger Podcast Courses Starting a Blog ProBlogger Pro – 31 Days to Build a Better Blog Join our Facebook group Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Darren: Welcome to episode 256 of the ProBlogger Podcast the podcast. My name is Darren Rowse and I’m the blogger behind the problogger.com. A blog, podcast, event, job board, and a series of eBooks, and courses all designed to help you as a blogger to start an amazing blog that’s going to help people, that’s going to give you an opportunity to make the world a better place in some way, and also that will hopefully build some profit for you as well, and give you an extra income stream. You can learn more about ProBlogger and check out our courses and eBooks over at problogger.com. Now, today we’re kicking off our blogging breakthroughs series where you’ll be hearing over the coming weeks from a variety of bloggers who are going to tell you their stories of breakthroughs that they’ve had over the years. I put the call out a couple episodes ago for this series, and we were inundated with amazing stories. We can’t use them all, but we are going to use quite a few of them over the coming weeks. We’re still working through those applications to be honest, there’s so many of them, but today I want to introduce you to the first of them, a friend of mine called Andrea Vahl. I actually asked Andrea to submit her story while we went through all the other submissions. Now, Andrea is someone I met many years ago now at a blogging conference, I think it was in Las Vegas of all places, but at the time of meeting her, she wasn’t actually Andrea Vahl, she was Grandma Mary, which is a strange one, and I was a little bit freaked out when I first met her because she was obviously someone dressed up in costume. Andrea is someone who had been doing improvisational comedy before she started getting into blogging. As she started getting into social media, she realized that no one was teaching social media in an entertaining way. She invented this character Grandma Mary to teach how to do social media via video. There’s actually a photo in the show notes of her and me from one of those early conferences, so you could see what she looked like. She would also show up at events as Grandma Mary, which was a great way to stand out. I remember walking through these conference halls with thousands of people in them, and everyone would be of course looking at who this person was and she was a kind of a bit of an outrageous, funny kind of character and got a lot of attention, a really great way to stand out. Anyway, Andrea has not only built Grandma Mary’s profile, but she also today is well known for herself. She’s the coauthor of A Dummies Book with Amy Porterfield and Phyllis Khare. Facebook Marketing All-in-One for Dummies, I’ll link to it in today’s show notes, and she also does a lot of speaking. In fact, last year she spoke at the Success Incubator event that I ran with some friends. In today’s blogging breakthrough story, she could really tell a lot of stories, but today, she’s going to tell you the story of starting her blog back in 2009, so she has been doing it for a while now, and also how she got that book deal which is a great story. She also shares some really good tips that I want to talk more about at the end of her story. This story goes for about seven minutes, so in seven minutes time, I’ll come back on and I want to kind of just expand upon a few of the things that she said and give you a little bit of further listening if it piques your interest. Today’s show notes including links to Andrea’s site at andreavahl.com, the show notes are at problogger.com/podcast/256. Okay, here’s Andrea. Andrea: Hi, this is Andrea Vahl, coauthor of Facebook Marketing All-in-One for Dummies and wig-wearing comedian. I just want to thank Darren for having me on the ProBlogger Podcast, and I want to tell my blogging breakthrough story. It really is about how I got the book deal to write Facebook Marketing All-in-One for Dummies through blogging, and through my social media connections. What happened is I started my blog as Grandma Mary, social media edu-tainer because I saw that there weren’t a lot of really fun entertaining blogs out there, and I started it more as a video blog. I used YouTube videos and also was blogging, adding some content with the YouTube videos, and I started blogging in about 2009. I started a video blog mostly because I didn’t like writing that much. It was a perfect combination for me to use my humor, and to create content quickly with a video blog, and I was initially putting out a lot of content, I was blogging maybe three times a week, it wasn’t super consistent as far as how many times I was blogging, but I knew I had to get a lot of content out there. I also knew that I wanted to have some products. I launched a product, and I launched some eBooks way before I was ready to do that. I kind of forced myself to get those out there, and I launched my first product and eBook in the fall. I started blogging in the summer, and right away started just launching because I knew that I would just get better at doing that. I was also at the same time making connections on social media, and showing up and doing regular things by commenting on people’s tutorials, commenting when people had maybe a live show going on, there was some live shows out there that were happening, and I was making those social media connections. One of the people I got connected to was Phyllis Khare, and she was also watching one of the live shows with me and we started kind of chatting and connecting through that, and because my blog is a little unusual, a little different, it kind of grew in the fans that I had, and grew the followers so that was really exciting and fun, and what happened was, a year after I had started my blog, it was totally unexpected and out of the blue, I was just starting to monetize it a little bit because my first few products and eBooks were not huge sales, but I knew that would change. It’s hard to stay in the course sometimes though, and what happened was a year after I started blogging, I got a call from Phyllis Khare, and she had a connection into Wiley who is the publisher of the Dummies series books, and they had seen my authority out there, seeing the fact that I created a lot of content, and also saw the fact that I had written some eBooks, and the combination of all of those things helped me get the book deal to write coauthor for Facebook Marketing All-in-One for Dummies along with Amy Porterfield and Phyllis Khare. It was just a total shock to me that that would happen. That wasn’t something I had on my radar was to write a book, I actually didn’t really like writing that much because I started a video blog, so you really never know where those connections are going to lead, and what might happen out there in the world. I kind of had the intention of starting my business as more of a part time thing. I had two young kids at home, and all I wanted to do was just earn some money on the side, I’ve been laid off from my job, but I wanted to stay home with my kids. I thought, if I could just earn a little bit of money on the side, that would really help our family and it would just make things a little more comfortable for us, plus it kept me sane which was a huge benefit to all of that. I ended up writing the book and I actually went on to write three editions of the book, and that experience has made me a much better writer. Now, I do enjoy writing a lot because I think that experience of writing the Dummies book while it was sometimes challenging because they have such strict requirements over how you write, it’s helped me be a better blogger, it’s helped me be a better writer, and what it did for me is really transform my business into something that was part time into something that is full time. Now, I get to travel all over the world, I’m speaking in places, I just was speaking in Aruba, I’m heading to Malaysia next week to go speak. I’m going to be speaking in the Czech Republic, and then a lot of places in the US, and I really never thought all this was possible from a blog. I also have much more successful products that’s one of the big ways I monetize my blog is through the products, the speaking is great as well, but I focus a little bit more on the products since some of the other things I do like consulting as well, but the products are what really drives my business. Now, the amazing thing is just not long ago my husband got laid off from his job, and really he doesn’t necessarily need to go find a new job, and that’s kind of an amazing thing is that, we can flip things around now, and my business can be what carries our family, and he can kind of find what he might want to do either online, or virtual, or something that might be a better fit for him, too. I am such a big believer in blogging, I think some of my key lessons are really to continue to show up consistently, and participate and make those connections because you really don’t know where those social media connections are going to lead, and then be open to where that journey might take you, and also don’t be afraid to monetize early, that was something that was really helpful in my journey because it takes a long time to get to a really profitable product. It really took me about six years before things really started kicking off, maybe it was really more like five, but it really takes awhile before you can see huge benefits, and it depends on how you work, but that was my experience and I know that I was doing a lot more things with my children as well, and that’s why I think blogging is an amazing business to be in. Thanks everyone, you can find me over at www.andreavahl.com. Thanks so much. Darren: Thanks very much to Andrea for sharing her story. I appreciate you taking the time to do that with us today. I’ve shared links to Andrea’s site and her books in today’s show notes, you’ll also see a couple of photos of her and myself including one of Grandma Mary from, I think, it was a Copyblogger conference that we were at at that one. A few things that really stood out to me in Andrea’s story, I really love the way that she articulated the tip of being open to where your blog might take you. When Andrea started her blog, she thought she was going to have one thing, a part time business, she didn’t know what would come from it, she wasn’t aiming for a book deal, but she did start to experiment with monetization with those early eBooks. As so often happens in these little experiments we do in the early days, things turn out different to what we expect. She wasn’t to know that that early eBook was going to get her on the radar of a publisher. I’m sure the eBook itself didn’t sell a lot of copies, but the book that followed then led to more opportunities. It gave opportunities to speak. It gave her more confidence to write more eBooks which were profitable. It built her audience. It opened up opportunities to network with other people. Today, she now has courses that she does as well as eBook, she does consulting, too. She wasn’t to know that just starting the blog would lead to all of these other things. She didn’t start with that plan in mind. She was just open to those possibilities and really, that is a story that I can relate to as well. I remember my first book deal, and my book deal for the ProBlogger book came about because I had previously started writing an eBook. When a publisher did approach me, I was able to show them the thing I was already working on, and I probably would have rejected a book deal to be honest if I hadn’t already started writing that eBook. You never quite know where things are going to open up, and while still I think it’s good, and it’s fine to start with a plan of where you might end up to kind of dream of some of those ideas, stay open to the opportunities, you might have some unexpected changes, or pivots, I guess in direction. What she started as a simple blog today really is so much more, and I guess the other tip that she gave there is that she showed up consistently, and that’s certainly another big part of Andrea, she’s not someone who just started a blog and then it all fell into place after that. She’s someone who has shown up consistently and I really admire the way that she shows up to live events. She puts herself out there as Grandma Mary, and she steps out of her comfort zone in those ways. She’s also shown up consistently online as well. She mentioned in her story the idea of networking, and I’m really glad she did this because it’s one of the things I’ve noticed about her from day one. She’s always been very well connected, very relational. She’s put herself out there. You might think someone that’s showing up as a Grandma to an event is a crazy out there kind of person, but if you meet Andrea in real life, while she has done some of those crazy thing, she’s actually a very gentle person. I would almost say she’s a little bit shy. She’s obviously got some confidence, but she’s not what you might think she is. she’s pushed herself I suspect out of her comfort zone and as a result, some great things have happened, last piece of advice that she gave I think was really interesting, to monetize early. I know some people who teach blogging say, you shouldn’t monetize until you’ve got an audience. I understand what they’re saying there, but I’ve been teaching for a while, that monetizing early is a good thing. It might not make you a lot of money, but as Andrea said, it can lead to opportunities, but more importantly, it leads to learning. No matter what way that you monetize early, whether it be with some AdSense Ads you’re going to then learn about ad positions, you’re going to learn about code and that type of thing, you’re going to learn about how to insert things into your template of your blog. If you monetize with affiliate marketing, you’ll learn how to do a bit of marketing. If you’re going to learn by creating a product, an eBook, you’re going to learn so much as well. I particularly think having a product of your own, creating a product of your own is a very important thing. What I would say you don’t need to create a big product. In fact, I don’t think you should create a big product until you’ve tested it with some little things first, and so an eBook is a great way to do that type of thing or some affiliate marketing of someone else’s product will teach you a lot as well. Now, I have done a couple of previous episodes on creating product, so if you do want to dig into those, I encourage you to head over to episode 67, which is an episode where I explore why you should create a product, and I’ll give you some tips on creating your first products. That was episode 67, and then a recent, episode 242 is on how to create a product library. This is more building upon those first products as well. That would be a couple that you might want to check out if you did want to begin to monetize. That wraps up today’s show. I will put the links to those previous episodes to Andrea’s site on the show notes. The show notes are at problogger.com/podcast/256. I’ll also link to Andrea’s site, it’s andreavahl.com and I’ll also link to our Success Incubator event, which is happening again this year in Orlando, Florida in late September. Andrea was one of our great speakers last year. We’ve begun to announce speakers for this year’s event as well. There’s also this year a lot of masterminding going on at event. If you are wanting a bit of good input, but more importantly, if you want mastermind type experience where you get to throw ideas around from your blog, check out Success Incubator, and I’ll link to that in today’s show notes, too. Thanks everyone for listening. I’ll be back next week with another blogging breakthrough story and if you do have a blogging breakthrough story, dig back a couple of episodes, and you’ll learn how you can submit your story, too. We may not be able to use it straight away, but this is something that we do think we will continue to run from time-to-time, so you’re more than welcome to at least submit something there via the form that we have in that previous show episode, I think it was episode 254. Thanks everyone, chat next week. How did you go with today’s episode? Enjoy this podcast? Sign up to our ProBloggerPLUS newsletter to get notified of all new tutorials and podcasts.

The Power of Being Vulnerable with Your Readers Have you experienced the power of taking a step out of your comfort zone and being vulnerable with your readers? I have long believed in the power of being vulnerable. It can be hard to be vulnerable. It feels very risky, but brings about a feeling of freedom. I’ve witnessed the power of vulnerability. But I am always wary about being too vulnerable. I worry that to show weakness might take away some authority I’ve built, or that too much vulnerability will frustrate some readers and listeners. I’ve built my brand around how-to content, and I know just talking about my insecurities, problems, and failures isn’t really going to help anyone. But I was recently reminded that allowing myself to be more vulnerable can make good things happen. You may have read the article I published on Medium about having a bit of a mid-life crisis. I don’t want to talk about that crisis, but about what happened when I did share this information with my audience. I put the post on Medium and not ProBlogger because although it touches on blogging, it’s not a post about it and relates to many, not just bloggers. The reactions were almost 100% positive. Stats since it was published: Almost 8,000 views, 1,400 “Claps” and 38 comments Resonated with a much wider age range than expected (20-85) People responded with personal, vulnerable, and in-depth comments More than 350 people have joined the Facebook group to discuss the article Real-life friends, family members, blog readers, and complete strangers are contacting me and talking to each other to form a community People find it refreshing that I’m transparent and don’t always have it all together Feedback creates energy and freedom The journey isn’t over. There are more parts that I want and need to share – in time. While I’m arguing the case for being vulnerable with your readers, I’m not saying  you need to strip yourself bare in every area of your life. Boundaries are a good thing. I also think there’s a time and a place for being vulnerable. There are things in my life that I’m not ready to talk about. I need to sort out my thoughts and feelings. Before being vulnerable, ask yourself these questions: Are you ready to share your story? Why are your sharing the story? Are you over-sharing? Will this story hurt someone you love? Quotes of the Week from Brene Brown, author of Daring Greatly: “Vulnerability is the birthplace of innovation, creativity, and change.” “Vulnerability is the birthplace of love, belonging, joy, courage, empathy, and creativity. It is the source of hope, empathy, accountability, and authenticity. “Vulnerability sounds like truth and feels like courage. Truth and courage aren’t always comfortable, but they’re never weakness.” P.S. Thanks to everyone who submitted stories about their blogging breakthroughs. We can’t possibly use them all, but we look forward to sharing some of them with you soon. Further Listening How to Build Authority, Influence and Trust when Nobody Knows Who You Are 9 Hurdles I’ve Faced as a Blogger and How I Got Over Them The Biggest Lesson I Learned About Building a Profitable Blog in 2015 My Million Dollar Blog Post (and How Procrastination Almost Stopped Me Writing It) Examples of My Mid-Life Crisis and The Power of Being Vulnerable on a Blog How I’m Dealing with My Third Mid-Life Crisis The Vulnerability of Blogging Kelly Exeter Courses Starting a Blog ProBlogger Pro – 31 Days to Build a Better Blog Join our Facebook group. Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Hi there and welcome to episode 255 of the ProBlogger Podcast. My name is Darren Rowse. I’m the blogger behind ProBlogger, a blog, podcast, event, job board, and a series of ebooks, all designed to help you as a blogger to grow your blog, to build an audience, to create great content, and to build profit around you blog, whether you’ve got one or not because we’ve got stuff on helping you to start too. You can learn more about ProBlogger at problogger.com. In this week’s episode, I want to share an experience that I’ve had in the last week, that has shown me the power of taking a step out of your comfort zone and being vulnerable with your readers. Many of you will know about the article that I published on Medium in the last few days, about having a bit of a midlife crisis. Something a little bit different from my normal publishing schedule, I have to say. In this episode, I don’t want to talk about the crisis itself as such but rather what happened when I put that article out there with my audience. You can get the show notes and you can find the link to the article that I’m talking about at problogger.com/podcast/255. Before I get into today’s show, just a brief administrative note. As regular readers know, I’ve been taking a few weeks off this podcast as part of a bit of a mid-year break. I will be coming back in the weeks ahead but I did want to pop in today just to give you an update after that article went live. When I do come back, we will start out with our blogging breakthrough series. We had a call for submissions, for bloggers to share their stories in the last episode, and had a ton of people submitting amazing stories. We’re currently going through those and we will be getting back to those who submitted shortly, so thanks to everyone who did submit a story. We can’t possibly use them all but we look forward to sharing some of them with you in the coming weeks. Again, let’s get on to today’s show. When I was a 16 year old, I discovered the power of being vulnerable in communication. I remember it very clearly, I was doing a course in public speaking. As part of that course, I was challenged to do a series of short talks. They were five-minute talks. The first talk I gave, I was very nervous, as you would expect. The talk was overly prepared. I tried to stuff so much into it. It was full of facts and theories, and how-to information. I think the information was relatively good but I distinctly remember looking at my audience and thinking, “Are they even listening to me here?” I got down after that talk and the feedback from the teacher was, “You need to include something a little bit more personal in your talk, a story. Share something about yourself.” The next time I got up to do a talk a week later as my next class, I shared a story and it was a story about a mistake I’d made. I remember the moment that the story started. The moment that I added a little bit of vulnerability into my talk by revealing that I wasn’t perfect. I remember looking at my audience and almost the whole room leaned forward as I began to talk and share that story. I realized the power of storytelling for a start but also a storytelling that shows who you are, and shows who you really are, shows an imperfection. That idea, that vulnerability is a powerful thing. I also learnt through that experience and many since, that being vulnerable can feel very risky, takes you out of your comfort zone, and can be hard to do. That first story was hard and many times since have been hard as well. The last thing I learnt in that instance was that after I was vulnerable, for a moment or two I felt very unsure, how do people receive that. But a few moments after that and seeing the positive reactions to that it was an incredibly freeing experience as well. As someone who has now been a communicator in different forms for 30 years, I can’t believe I’m saying that, and I’ve communicated in public speaking, in blogging and podcasting, in video, I’ve seen time and time again, I’ve witnessed the power of being vulnerable. I’ve tried to do it at different times in what I do. Even here on the ProBlogger podcast, I’ve tried to teach about vulnerability but also to be vulnerable. I think the last time I mentioned the word vulnerability and I did a search of WordPress to see it, it was back in episode 235 where I talked about authority, how to build authority, and how being vulnerable can actually help to build your authority. But also I try to be vulnerable. A few episodes come to mind, there’s probably quite a few where I’ve shared my own failings and weaknesses. Like in episode 57 where I talked about nine hurdles I’ve faced as a blogger, episode 38 where I talked about my health. Who would’ve ever thought I would talk about health on a blogging blog? My weight gain and how I moved through into a better place as a result of that. Then episode 167 where I revealed how terrible I am at procrastinating. There’s been many times where I’ve tried to be vulnerable with you. I know each of those episodes has had really good feedback but they’ve also come with fear every time I’ve done it. Part of me, when I’m preparing to do that type of show worries that showing weakness might eat away my authority. Even though I know at the back of my mind that it helps to build authority, it worries me that maybe being too vulnerable will eat away at that authority. It might hurt the brand that I’ve built in some way, that it might frustrate readers who come looking for how-to content and get me baring my soul. Part of me worries about what people will think. Part of me is probably just scared about admitting to myself, let alone my audience, that I’m not as altogether as I might like to think. Sometimes, these worries are valid. I’ve built my brand around how-to content. I know that me just sitting here talking about my insecurities, problems, and failures really isn’t going to help many people if that’s all I ever do. But I was reminded this week, again and again, that by allowing yourself to be more vulnerable, good things can happen to you and your blog. That’s what I want to talk about today. I want to share this story of this last week and the story of writing this article and putting it out there. I want to talk about what happened as a result of doing that but I also want to give you some advice on being vulnerable on your own blog because I don’t think it’s just as simple as just baring your soul about anything and everything. I want to give you some advice around and some questions to ask around working at what to share as well. But first let me tell you about this last week. I learnt this lesson because as I said at the top of the show, I published an article this week on Medium that was about a mid-life crisis that I’m currently finding myself in. The post actually took months to write and took weeks to decide what to decide whether I even wanted to publish it at all. I’ve been working on it with a friend, Kelly Exeter, who many of you would know because she’s been on this podcast a number of times in the past, and we’ve been talking about doing a project together. Particularly, we’ve been talking about writing a book together. As we have been talking this year, since the beginning of this year about the book, what it’s about, and how we might outline it, what sort of topics we might want to write about, as we talked that through, I’ve realize that if I’m going to authentically talk about the topics that we want to explore, that I’m going to be need to be vulnerable. I’m going to need to tell my story. I’m going to need to tell things about myself that I’ve never really talked about on a public level before. This is but frightening for all the reasons I’ve already spoken about, worrying about what people would think, but also it’s simultaneously felt really right to me. So we’ve begun to work on this project. The first thing that we wanted to do is to write this article that went live earlier in the week. The article is largely a story of a series of midlife crises that I’ve had over the years and my first one was when I was 18. Part of the story will be for me to some of you who’ve heard my story before, but the later parts of the story wouldn’t be because I’ve not shared them too much before. I’m not going to go into details of the crisis here because I think it would distract us from what I want to talk about and that’s being vulnerable. You can check out the article if you want. I’ll link to it in the show notes. It’s linked to my twitter account as the latest pinned post. It was largely written for people who are like me, who see themselves as somewhere in the middle of their life, whatever that might mean for you, and who are asking the kind of questions that I’m asking as well, about how they got to spend the rest of their life, how they ended up in the place that they’re at, I’m wondering if there’s more, wondering if they’re using their time effectively. All of these types of questions that people in the middle of their life at different times like to ask. I know some of you are probably asking, “Why did you put it on Medium? Haven’t you talked in the past, Darren, about always having control of your content? Putting on the blog where that you have the domain for? That you have a server of? And Medium doesn’t have those things? That’s something I did think about. Should we put it on ProBlogger? But it became pretty clear pretty early that this article is not just for bloggers. It certainly relates to bloggers, I had certainly talked a little bit about blogging in my story because that’s part of my story, but in my hope and Kelly’s hope is that we go beyond just bloggers reading this eventually, and that we want to write a book on a broader topic. Putting on ProBlogger didn’t seem like a good fit. Medium seem to be a good place. Medium has the type of content that this article is. We looked at a lot of articles that have been written there and the style, the length, the presentation on those types of things, and it felt like a good fit. There are things that I really do like about Medium and there are others that frustrate me like crazy but that’s probably a topic for another episode. The question that I’ll cover before I talk about what happens as a result of publishing this and why did we write this article. What’s the point of the article if you’re writing a book? I just wanted to cover that because I know a lot of you do have the dream one day of writing a book and maybe this is helpful. But really we wanted to see with this article where it was worth writing the book. On many levels, it’s a test. We wanted to see whether the topic, the themes, the ideas, the language we were using were resonating with people or whether we needed to go back to the drawing board and work more on refining that. The other part that we wanted from this article was to get feedback. Most importantly to me was to capture the reactions of those who read the articles as well. By their comments, through their ideas and their stories, their experiences, to see how people reacted to it is really important. The reason for that is that we think, I believe, at least that the reactions from this article will shape what we do next, not just if we continue to work on this idea but also what will come next. Maybe it will inform that we don’t write a book, really do a podcast, or maybe it will inform that it’s a series of articles, or maybe it will inform something else. But already, I can see that the feedback we’re getting is shaping that. To help us gather that type of feedback, we actually setup a little Facebook group for those who wanted to talk more on the topic. We set up a little month long challenge that we’re going to go through as a group as well. I submitted the story into a publisher on Medium. On Medium, there are publications and magazines that you can be a writer for and I decided to publish it both on my own profile but also in this publication called The Mission, which is a larger publication on Medium and the hope there was to get it to a larger audience. They very quickly accepted the article and they pushed it live very quickly late last Friday night my time. I think it was actually about 7:00 PM my time. In hindsight, it wasn’t the best time because it didn’t really leave me having a relaxing weekend as this post went live and start to go a bit crazy. But in some ways, it was a good time as well because I was out with friends at the time that it went live and because it went out quickly, I didn’t have time to worry about the article going live at all. As I’ve said, I was out with friends, I didn’t actually get home until about five hours after the article went live. I scheduled some tweets and promotions on Facebook and in email. By the time I got home at midnight that night, it already had some activity on it. I was really anxious to see what that reaction would be. The reactions have been almost 100% positive. In fact, they’ve all been positive really in some ways. People have asked some tough questions and pointed out some things but that’s been positive too. Before I get into the […], I’ll just talk about what’s happened since it being published. what’s been the positives of being vulnerable. Some of you are probably wondering about the stats. The article’s being viewed, I think it’s been about 8000 times. It’s had 1400 claps which is kind of like a likes. It’s had 38 or so comments on the article, which isn’t a massive amount but you do need to register to leave a comment. There’s been hundreds of other comments, though, on social networks, on email, via messenger, and in the group itself. There’s been a decent amount of numbers but the stats really for me aren’t what it’s all about. What’s most important to me is that the article seems to resonate with people and there’s been certain parts of the article that have really resonated in as well. I see this in the comments. A lot of people are picking up the same themes and ignoring others, which is really useful. One of the nice features of Medium is that people can highlight the bits that they like. You get feedback on where people actually being drawn to in the article, and that’s interesting to see as well. The reactions that we’re getting from people are incredible. One of the things I want to say is that when you’re vulnerable, people will be vulnerable back. This surprised me at first. Some of the comments that I received both on the blog post, on social media, and via messenger, particularly, have been very deep. Some of the people have shared personally as well and have been very vulnerable. Some of them have written long amounts of words back and that’s been amazing as well. Vulnerability is contagious. It’s infectious. When you are vulnerable, people will take your lead and respond likewise. Some people will, not everyone, but some people. This is something I think is both a positive but also you need to be a little bit aware of. You need to be willing to interact with people because when people are vulnerable back and you ignore that, when people are vulnerable back and express painful things, that opens up a can of worms for them. You need to be there to care for them, to respond to them, to acknowledge them, to value them in some way. That’s something I guess I spend most of my weekend doing is trying to be there back for the people who are sharing on those deeper levels as well. That’s a challenge because there’s so many of them. In terms of the group, we’ve had quite a few people joining our group. I think we’ve had about 350 people join, which is great. I wasn’t sure how that would go. The call-to-action to join the group is right at the bottom of this 2000 plus word article. […] people have responded there and already the interactions there are great. Interestingly, the group now contains real-life friends, family members, blog readers from ProBlogger, blog readers from Digital Photography School, podcast listeners, probably more of them after this, and complete strangers as well. My worlds are colliding, I guess you could say. That’s a strange feeling to have them in there together, sharing on a deeper level together, talking to each other, and supporting each other. That’s kind of weird but it’s kind of cool as well. Community seems to be forming, I guess, is the next thing I want to say. This is something I’ve noticed before about. When you’re vulnerable, people don’t just want to be vulnerable with you. They’re seem to be more open to connecting with other people on that same shared journey. There’s a real opportunity there to call people together, to journey together as a result of this vulnerability and community vulnerability as well. The second last thing that I’ve noticed which has been really interesting to me is that I’ve been getting a lot of comments that are very similar, not everyone expresses, but time and time again I’ve heard people saying things like, “It’s refreshing to see that you don’t have it all together, Darren.” This is kind of a weird thing to hear because I know I don’t have it all together. I guess I’ve realized that because I am a professional blogger, I’m writing about blogging, that it can come across as though I do have it all together. Whilst I know that, my family certainly know that, my friends know that, I guess it’s just been a reminder that, whilst I have tried to be vulnerable along the journey that people build an impression of us that don’t always match with how we feel about ourselves. I think it’s good just to keep in mind. Not everyone, as much as you think, your insecurities and your failures might be out there for everyone to see. Most people don’t actually see those things. For me, that’s actually a reminder that I need to continue to put myself out there and to be real with people because I don’t want to create those false impressions. I don’t want people to think that I have my blog perfect, my life perfect. It certainly isn’t the case. It should been a good reminder for me. The last thing I’ve noticed as a result of doing this is that I’ve been incredibly energized by the reaction. Before that post went live and those five hours while I sat at dinner with my friends, I was almost paralyzed. I was always wondering how it was going, how it would go. I was worried, I was fearful. But as soon as I got home, I began to see the reactions. I felt an incredible energy. I couldn’t sleep the night after I got home. In fact, the last two nights, I haven’t really been able to sleep and I’ve been up early in the morning writing. It was something that hasn’t happened for me for a while now, so being vulnerable can actually take you to that place of feeling freedom as well. I’m not saying that it is guaranteed to happen but for me, certainly, that has been a result of that as well. I’ve come away from this experience again. Again, being reminded to continue to be vulnerable, intentionally vulnerable. The road isn’t over. I know for a fact there are things that I want to share with my readers and listeners. That’s something that will come out in the book. There’s things that I need to share but I need to do in time. This is one of the things I do want to talk a little bit about. Now, I want to put a qualification on this idea, you can probably hear me talking about the pros of vulnerability here. Read someone like Brené Brown. She talks about the reasons why you might want to be vulnerable and has written some great material on this. I also want to put the qualification out there that just because I’m saying that doesn’t mean you need to go out there and just share everything and anything with your readers. You don’t need to strip yourself bare in every area of your life. There are good things to keep private. Boundaries are a good thing. I know different ones of us will have different boundaries and that there are bloggers out there who share anything and everything. Then there are others who are very private. Where your boundaries will be totally fine but it’s really important to have those boundaries and to know where they will be. There are things that I will never share on my blog in a public setting because they’re private to me and that’s totally fine. There’s also a time to be vulnerable and probably the right place to be vulnerable as well. Before you put things out there, really I want to encourage you to ask yourself the question, “Is now the right time to actually be vulnerable?” There are things I know that I’m going through right now that I need to process before I will share them. I need to sort through my thoughts. I need to sort through my feelings. I need to have conversations with certain people. I need to be in a better place. I need to have read some books. I need to process some things. The case wouldn’t be the same for each of us. Don’t just rush out and tell everyone anything and everything, at least not yet. Share in the right time. This leads me to some more advice that I want to give out. I’ve got three things that I really want to say before I give you a few questions to ask, as you think about should I share this or not. The first piece of advice I want to give you is that, and it taps into what I just said, you don’t have to reveal everything at once. Small steps can be a good thing. Get used to the idea of being vulnerable. Maybe just a small step towards vulnerability is what you need to do at the moment. Admitting that you made a mistake. You don’t have to share that you’re having a mid-life crisis. You can admit that you’ve had hurdles in your life. Even hurdles that you have now completely overcome. That is vulnerability in different ways. Take your time when you are crafting this type of content as well. This article has literally taken months to write and we’ve gone through many versions of it. In fact, it’s been started and rewritten, and started and rewritten, and started and rewritten at least three times, and there’s been many edits along the way. Take your time with it. You don’t have to share it all at once. Second thing I want to say is that vulnerability takes courage but it also takes practice. If you’ve never gone there with your readers before, it could take you a few gos before you begin to feel a little bit more at ease and begin to trust that process. I’m not saying that you ever feel it’s easy but it does take a little bit of time to get used to it and probably also takes a little bit of time for your readers to get used to it, too. If you’ve got a blog that has stuck to a very narrow niche for a long time, and then you suddenly lay everything bare to your readers, some of your readers will be totally okay with that, but you might need to bring your readers along a little bit on that road as well. Again, small steps can be a good thing there to actually get your readers used to that idea. The last thing I’ll say is there are things that are really important to involve other people in working out where your boundaries should be and to encourage you in this. We’re all wired differently. I know some of you are listening to this and thinking, “I don’t need to be vulnerable because I’m very vulnerable,” and maybe your tendency is to overshare. Maybe the people around you, you need to give them permission to pull you back a little bit. You need to run your article past them and ask them, “Do you think this is too much?” Others of you who are listening to this thing and going, “It just terrifies me.” Maybe the people around you, you need to give them permission to challenge you, to add a little bit more vulnerability, and to help you shape the vulnerability as well, to bounce the articles that you write around with them before they go live. This is what certainly happened with this particular article. Kelly’s helped a lot in this. Vanessa, my wife, has helped. We had other friends as well read the article. They’ve helped to pick up mistakes in the articles and proofread it. But they’ve also given advice and feedback on how to craft it, and how to make it appropriate. That’s been very helpful as well. The last thing I want to leave you with is four questions to ask. As you can see there’s, “Should I share a particular thing?” I actually have borrowed these questions from Aimee Beltran from a blog called BlogPaws, which I came across today as I was about to record this. I saw that it’s four questions and I just thought, “These are brilliant.” I’ll link to the full article in the show notes today. She poses these four questions to ask before you hit publish, before you decide what to share. The first one is, “Am I ready to share this?” and this taps into what I was saying before. Sometimes, we’re not in a good space. Sometimes, we need to process something. We might need to have a conversation. We need to be ready to share because when we’re vulnerable, that can sometimes bring up pain in ourselves but also other people as well. We need to be in a good place to be able to share this type of thing in many cases. I’m not saying you always have to be in a good place. Sometimes, being vulnerable it’s good to be in a bad place to do that as well but in appropriate situations, but are you ready to share this? Number two question Aimee poses is, “Why are you sharing this? What’s the reason for the sharing?” There’s no right or wrong reason here but I suspect some reasons are better than others. Are you sharing it to get it back at someone? That’s probably not a good reason. Are you sharing it just to get lots of traffic? Maybe that’s not the best reason. Are you sharing to help someone? Are you sharing because it’s a therapy for you? Maybe there’s a more appropriate place to share it. Why are you sharing it? That’s going to help you to work out if you should share it, but also how you share it, and where you should share it as well. Whether your audience is the right audience for that as well. Third question Aimee poses is, “Am I oversharing?” This is where maybe friends can help out with that. But if you are in doubt about whether you are oversharing, maybe sit on that article for a little bit, maybe show it to a friend, maybe test it with a smaller group of people and see what the reaction is. The last question Aimee poses, I think it’s brilliant and I think it’s really important, “Will this hurt someone I love?” It’s so important. This actually factored into my article as well because I was writing about periods of my life that I shared with people along the way, family and friends, and I didn’t want to offend them. I really had to craft parts of it, reword parts of it, expand certain parts so people could see what I was thinking, and delete certain parts. Again, that was helpful to have particularly Vanessa helping me shape that as well. So, am I ready to share? Why am I sharing? Am I oversharing? And will this hurt someone I love? Four good questions to ask. I hope this podcast has helped those of you who feel maybe you need to be a bit more vulnerable, or maybe you need to be a little less oversharing, or maybe it’s something you just file away for one day when you do feel that tension inside of you and when you start to think, “Should I be adding a bit more personal story into this content that you’re crafting?” Being vulnerable doesn’t have to be the whole post. It could be just a story that introduces something that you then go to teach on. It could be rather small thing but I hope this podcast does come back to mind as you come to those times where you have the opportunity to add a little vulnerability into your sharing. Before I finish today, a few quotes of the week. I couldn’t really have a quote of the week this week without quoting Brené Brown who has written a great book, Daring Greatly: How The Courage To Be Vulnerable Transforms The Way We Live, Love, Parent, And Lead. A few little quotes from that book. I could read the whole thing for you, basically, but, “Vulnerability is the birthplace of innovation, creativity, and change.” I love that one. And, “Vulnerability is the birthplace of love, belonging, joy, courage, empathy, and creativity. It’s the source of hope, empathy, accountability, and authenticity. It’s the birthplace of a lot of things.” And lastly, “Vulnerability sounds like truth and feels like courage. Truth and courage aren’t always comfortable, but they’re never weakness.” Thanks for listening today. You can find today’s show notes. I’ll put those quotes in as well, as well as the link to the article I wrote, and Aimee’s article, as well as some of those podcasts I mentioned earlier. The show notes and a full transcription of today’s show are at problogger.com/podcast/255. Look forward to chatting with you in the next couple of weeks when we start our blogging breakthrough series. Thanks for bearing with me over this mid-year break. Have been re-energizing myself as you can tell. I’m actually about to just have a short break to Hawaii. Never been there before and very much looking forward to that short break. There will be some podcast in the pipeline and I look forward to chatting with you shortly. Thanks for listening. Hope you have a good week. How did you go with today’s episode? Enjoy this podcast? Sign up to our ProBloggerPLUS newsletter to get notified of all new tutorials and podcasts.

Share Your Blogging Breakthrough on the ProBlogger Podcast Do you have a blog? Why not? It’s time to get started. Imagine the breakthroughs you could experience. And if you do already have a blog, have you had a breakthrough? You have? Then tell us about it. We’re seeking submissions of stories to appear on the ProBlogger podcast for the theme, My Blog Breakthrough. Our goal with this series is to feature bloggers from around the world telling stories about breakthroughs in their blogging. We want to inspire ProBlogger listeners and give them practical ideas to try with their own blogs. Your breakthrough can be about anything, big or small. For example: How an influencer helped you grow your blog A new income stream How you made your first dollars blogging How a post went viral An opportunity that arose from blogging A mindset shift that led to growth in your blog A tool you started using that led to new results Refocusing your blog on a new, narrower, or broader niche How you overcame fear or some other obstacle in your blogging We want to feature a variety of bloggers’ stories, including bloggers of different experience levels, countries, and niches. If you’d like to participate, submit your story and complete the form at problogger.com/breakthrough. You can be brief and only include: Your name Your blog URL Your blog topic What blogging was like before the breakthrough What the breakthrough was What blogging was like after the breakthrough A tip you’d give listeners that might help them with this breakthrough Anything else you think we need to know that relates to your breakthrough story If your story is selected, you will be asked to record your breakthrough story as an audio file. Ready to share your story and help others? Further Listening 10 Things I Wish I’d Known About Blogging My Million Dollar Blog Post (and How Procrastination Almost Stopped Me from Writing It) Why You Should Create a Product to Sell on Your Blog (and Tips on How to Do It) I Guarantee This Will Improve Your Blog Courses Starting a Blog ProBlogger Pro – 31 Days to Build a Better Blog Join our Facebook group Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Hi there and welcome to episode 254 of the ProBlogger Podcast. My name’s Darren Rowse and I’m the blogger behind problogger.com, a blog, podcast, events, job board, ebooks, and a couple of courses now that help you to start a great blog, and to build a profit around that blog as well. In today’s episode, episode 254 which you can find the show notes for it at problogger.com/podcast/254, I want to invite you to be a part of an upcoming show on this podcast. We want to do a series of shows actually called My Blog Breakthrough. We are seeking submissions from you, listeners of the podcast and readers of the blog, to appear on the podcast by submitting a short audio clip where you talk about a blogging breakthrough that you have had. My hope is that this series is going to both inspire our listeners by hearing some different voices from bloggers around the world, sharing their stories, but also giving a few practical ideas of things that other listeners could apply as well. If that interests you, listen on, and I’ll talk to you a little bit more about what we’re looking for and how you can participate in today’s challenge. Again, the show notes today where you find links to how to submit your story, the show notes are at problogger.com/podcast/254. As part of our Start A Blog course which we launched at the start of this year. We did a similar series to what we are planning with this new one–where we invited listeners to submit stories of them starting a blog and it was amazing. People really enjoyed that series. We featured, I think it was probably almost 10 different stories over a week or so of bloggers. It was really great to hear the different accents and the different stories of bloggers in different nations starting their blog and what the start of their blog led to. This really stimulated us with this idea today of doing a series of your blogging breakthroughs. We know, for a fact, because we hear about these little breakthroughs all the time in our Facebook group, and via emails from listeners and readers as well, that you are constantly, as a listenership, having breakthroughs in your blogging. Everytime we get one of the stories, we think, “Ahh, wish we could share this with a wider audience.” That’s what this series is about. I hope, as I said at the start, is that we want to inspire ProBlogger listeners with your stories—your big stories and your little ones as well because we all have different types of breakthroughs in our blogging. We also really would like this to be a practical thing as well. What we’re going to ask you to do is to submit your story but also share a tip that will help others make a similar breakthrough as well. Now, you’re probably wondering, “What could I do as a breakthrough?” Well, really it could be anything at all that has helped to grow your blog. Now, probably some of you are already thinking about how you’ve grown your traffic. We’re certainly open to hearing breakthroughs about traffic but we don’t want everyone to talk about the same thing. In fact, if everyone submits traffic, we’ll only probably be able to feature a few of them. There’s so many other breakthroughs that maybe you could talk about. Maybe it could be the story of trying a new income stream or even the story of how you made your first dollar blogging–that first income stream for you. Or maybe some are story about how an influencer has helped, or how you got featured in the media, or how a post that you wrote went viral for the first time and how you’ve replicated that. Or an opportunity that arose from blogging. Maybe a book deal came through, maybe an opportunity to be featured on someone else’s podcast–a big blogger’s podcast. Or maybe it was a mindset shift that led to growth in your blog in some way. Or a new tool that you started to use that led to new results. Or a new strategy, or a new social network that you tried. Or maybe it was you’ve refocused your blog, relaunched it. A new niche, or a narrower niche, or a broader niche. Or maybe it’s the way you overcame fear or some other obstacle in your blogging. Really, the breakthrough can be anything that you would like. Even if it’s something small because what I’ve learned over the years is that sometimes it is the small things that lead to bigger on-going results. I would love to hear some of those types of stories as well. But if you’ve got a big one as well, you’re more than welcome to share that too. Now, we do want to feature a variety of bloggers. We want to feature bloggers male and female. We want to feature stories from bloggers who sort of are at the beginning of their journey and more experienced bloggers. We want to feature some stories of bloggers that you may have heard of before and some new bloggers, bloggers from different countries, and bloggers focusing on different niches. If you’re thinking, “Oh, I’m not big enough. I’m not well-known enough.” We would love to hear your stories. Sometimes those unknown bloggers that the rest of us don’t know about, they’re sometimes the best stories of all. We’re looking for breakthroughs of different kinds. Again, we cannot feature too many on the same kind of wavelength. That’s why we’ve kind of chosen the way that we have for you to submit your stories as well because we don’t want you to start recording your story straight away. We’d like you to submit in a form your idea for the story, just to save you the work of recording something. We want to select and then we’ll commission the ones that we want. That way, we’d know we’re going to get a variety of stories, and we’re not going to waste too much of your time as well. If you’d like to participate, we are going to ask you to record a story, it’ll have to be within 10 minutes, and we would like it to be of a reasonable quality so that we can use it on the podcast. You need to be able to record a story. You need to be willing to have your voice on the ProBlogger podcast and heard by quite a few bloggers. There’s an opportunity for you here to share your link. Hopefully, it will help you to grow your blog and connect with other bloggers as well but we would love it if you head over to a form that we’ve set-up. We’ve set-up the form at problogger.com/breakthrough. We’ll link to it in today’s show notes as well. You will see there that I’ve written a little bit of information about what we’re looking for and there is a form there that asks you a few questions. It asks you, what is your blog name, what’s your blog URL, what’s the topic of your blog. Then it asks you some questions that again, help us to understand about what you are going to talk about in your recording. We want to know what was blogging like before your breakthrough, what was the breakthrough, and what was blogging like after the breakthrough. That’s really important for us because we want to see that this breakthrough actually led to some kind of transformation in your blogging or growth in your blogging in some way. You don’t have to write a lot in there. We just want to know the theme of your topic and any relevant information for you there. We don’t want a transcription of what you’re going to say, just the idea, really. We want to know what tip you will give our listeners that might help them with a similar kind of breakthrough. Then there’s also opportunity for you to tell us anything else that you think we need to know about your story. Now, keep in mind we’re looking for storytelling here that is going to inspire our readers. Again, it doesn’t need to be a massive story in many ways. It could be something small. In fact, sometimes those small things can inspire people the most because they think they can do it too. We’re looking for stories but also looking for something practical here as well. That’s something that I always try with the ProBlogger podcast to do. I want to inspire you but more than that, I want to give you something that you can go and do as well. Please don’t feel the need to write too much. I’m looking forward to seeing what you submit. Now, if I was doing this, as I thought about this, I really have done this with almost every podcast I’ve written out, I usually try and bring something into the podcast that is a story for myself. If I was doing this, a few things that I would—I’d give you some ideas, it might help to get the wheels turning in your mind—I might do a mindset shift that I made in the early days in my blogging where I decided to stop treating my blog as a hobby and it’s something that might, one day, become a full time thing. I made this mindset shift with Vanessa to treat my blog as a business today. I talk about that story in episode 100 of this podcast. That might be an example that you might want to listen to that could give you some ideas about a mindset shift that changed for you. Or back in episode 167, I talked about how I overcame eight years of procrastination to write a blog post that I’ve been putting off, that I’ve been too scared to write. Hell, that blog post, when I did write it, actually ended up helping me earn an income–a 5-figure income a month in some months. That was 167. Episode 67 was when I created my first ebook by repurposing a lot of the content I’d already published before. That was a breakthrough because it, one, it grew us an income stream but it helped open up a new type of income stream for me. That was the first of many ebooks that came or when I created the 31 Days to Build a Better Blog blog post series. The breakthrough there was really understanding that my readers didn’t want just information, that they wanted a challenge, they wanted something to do as well, and that in turn, let to the new course that we’ve just launched as well which you can listen to information about in our last podcast. These are types of things that I’m looking for. They could be mindset shifts, new tools, new strategies, and new understandings, new learning even. Again, head over to problogger.com/breakthrough. I will love to read your story and then we will be in touch with those that submit that. We want to actually record something as well. I look forward to presenting those stories in our future episodes of this podcast. It might take us a few weeks to go through this process and get them up and running as well. The other thing that I just wanted to let you know is that there will be a few weeks break on this podcast. It’s the middle of the year. We’ve had a fairly intense year so far and we think, as a team, we just need a little bit of break from producing the podcast for a few weeks. I know a lot of you are on a summer holidays in America or in other parts of the world. Here in Australia, we’ve in the middle of winter and it’s freezing. We’re just going to have a little bit of hibernation of the podcast for a few weeks while we get this new series up and running. If you’re missing the ProBlogger podcast, there’s 253 other episodes that you can dig around into. I mentioned a few of those today in the show. I do encourage you to dig around in the archives. Have a listen to something that you may have missed in the past. Thanks for listening. I look forward to chatting with you in a few weeks’ time in the upcoming episodes of the ProBlogger podcast. Thanks for listening. If you’re still listening and you are still thinking about your breakthroughs and wondering what breakthrough you could share, I know some of the biggest breakthrough you really need is to start a blog. It’s amazing how many listeners of the ProBlogger podcast who are in the same position as you. People who haven’t yet started a blog. If you are one of those, I do encourage you to check out our completely free Start A Blog course. It is designed to walk you through the process of starting a blog. It is a seven-step course. It’s very comprehensive but it will walk you through even the question of, “Is a blog right for you?” It will help you to define what your blog is about. It will help you work out what to call your blog, how to get a domain name set up, how to get hosting set up, how to get your WordPress theme set up, and a bit of a checklist there for getting your email and social media account set up as well. It is completely free. It can be found over at problogger.com/startablog. It will take you through there where you can signup and register for that free course. If you know someone who hasn’t started a blog, give them the gift of this course by letting them know about it as well. Again, it’s problogger.com/startablog. How did you go with today’s episode? Enjoy this podcast? Sign up to our ProBloggerPLUS newsletter to get notified of all new tutorials and podcasts.

What You Can Learn From the 31 Days to Build a Better Blog Course From a blog post series to an eBook and now a course, 31 Days to Build a Better Blog has certainly evolved. And in doing so it has helped many people. Today’s episode is based on information about the course. I created the course, which is a combination of repurposed teaching from places on ProBlogger and the blog post series, to: offer teaching that inspired action help people develop good habits give them a variety of things to try. The goal is to give you 31 modules that each contain teaching, a challenge, and further reading using a combination of videos, audio files, printable worksheets and links. There’s also a private Facebook group just for the students in the course to share what they’re doing and interact with each other on their journey. Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs): Who is it for? Those who already have a blog; beginners to advanced bloggers; and groups. Does it have to be done daily? No, it can be done at your own pace. How much work is it? It varies depending on the stage you’re at; it usually takes 1–5 hours a week. Tips for Taking the Course: Regularity is key Be accountable Take action We’re extending the Early Bird price of $49 until the end of June. When it turns midnight (Pacific time) on June 30, the price goes up to $99. So if you’re interested, sign up now. Links and Resources for I Guarantee This Will Improve Your Blog: 31 Days to Build a Better Blog eBook Courses Starting a Blog ProBlogger Pro – 31 Days to Build a Better Blog Join our Facebook group Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Hi there and welcome to episode 253 of the ProBlogger Podcast. My name’s Darren Rowse, and I’m the blogger behind problogger.com, a blog, podcast event, job board, series of ebooks, and courses all designed to help you to start an amazing blog that will hopefully change the world, change the lives of your readers, but also change your life as well both through the blogging experience which can bring you a lot of joy and ideas. Help you to develop your ideas, but also hopefully will become a profitable thing as well, that’s what we teach over at problogger.com. Today’s show notes are at problogger.com/podcast/253 that’s number 253. In this week’s episode, I want to touch base with you about our 31 Days to Build a Better Blog course, which I have mentioned a few times in passing over the last month or so. I’ve been talking about how it was coming and then last week, I mentioned that it was live and I had a number of you give me feedback that you needed a little bit more time to make a purchase. A couple of things I want to let you know, firstly we’re going to extend the early bird discount a little bit until the end of the month but I also wanted to answer some of the questions today that we’ve had about the course and also talk a little bit about the backstory of the course as well. I want to talk today about why I first came out with 31 Days to Build a Better Blog, how it has evolved, and particularly this last step in the evolution to bring it into a course rather than an ebook. I want to talk a little bit about why I think this format has helped so many people. I hope you find that interesting for those of you who want to build a course, or a product as well. We’re going to talk about what’s in it, who it’s best suited for, and I want to answer some of those frequently asked questions about who it is for, how much work is involved, and then also want to give you a few tips on taking this course as well. For those of you who’ve already purchased and there’s quite a few of you who are already enrolled in the course as well. If you’ve been wondering about whether this course is right for you, 31 Days to Build a Better Blog, or if you’re just interested in the back story, and journey of creating a product like this, I hope you find this week’s episode useful to you. It is worth mentioning we are extending this early bird bonus until the end of June, so midnight Pacific Time, on 30th of June this year 2018, the price will go up from $49 US to $99 US. You’ve got a 50% discount to get in early, and there’s one little condition on that, we do want your feedback on that. We’re sort of considering you as early bids as well so we want to gather as much information as we can from you on how we can improve that course. We’ve already been improving it from our early testers but we like to hear from you as well. If you do want that early access through the course, make sure you head to problogger.com/31days. It will also be linked in the show notes. The reason we are extending the price is for two reasons, really. One, to allow those of you who need a little bit of time to get that money together. I know a $49 now for some of you isn’t that much money but for others of you, it is a big deal, and you need that little bit of late time to grab that together, so we wanted to extend that to make it as accessible as possible, and also we’ve had a few server upgrades going on at the moment. There have been a few brief periods over last the week because our resources area has been down and we got a few emails from people saying that you’ve been trying to access it. We just want to make sure everyone gets access to that by the 30th of June. Let’s get into today’s show. The first question that I have had from a number of people is about the journey of 31 days. I know some of you are familiar with where 31 Days to Build a Better Blog came from. It really came from, I think it was back 2007 or 2006 even, where I came up with this idea for a 31-day blog post series. The reasons that I first ran that first series is that, I noticed that the things that really improved a blog, and the things that I’ve noticed in the journeys of other full time bloggers that I’ve met was that the secrets really were around, people were taking small consistent actions over time. In fact, the small consistent actions that they were doing, writing a new blog post, responding to comments, these basic things were actually more important than almost anything else. It was really habit forming, that was the big thing that I noticed that really escalated the growth of a blog. Setting up routines, getting into the flow of creating content, getting into the flow of interacting with your audience, having an editorial calendar, and experimenting with different types of content. What I realized is that while still a lot of people were coming to ProBlogger, looking for the secret sauce, or the secret technique, those things can be interesting, and they can be fun, but what really was growing blogs was the small consistent actions, and habit forming, and doing was more important than knowing. A lot of people came looking for the secrets of making money blogging at ProBlogger, but really, what I learned in the early days of ProBlogger was that, what seem to help bloggers the most was when I challenge them to take action rather than just to gain knowledge. I wanted to create this 31-day blog post series that was a little bit of teaching every day, a little bit of knowledge sharing, but was more based around challenging readers to take action. I came up with this idea, by the end of the month I want you to have taken 31 actions. I did this blog post series and it went viral. It went crazy, bloggers from around the world, thousands and thousands of them took this challenge that I put out there over a month. By the end of the month, I was getting feedback from readers saying, “My traffic doubled this month.” Or “I’ve had more comments this month than I’ve ever had before.” Suddenly, I know what I’m doing with my blog. I’ve got a vision for my blog and I started getting these feedbacks from people that they really saw a lot of benefit from the learning but more importantly the doing. I ran this series of blog post three times over a number of years, and every time I did this series, I updated it, I added more depth, I tweaked the challenges because over the years, blogging has changed and some of the things in that first challenge really didn’t relate three years later when I did it again. I tweaked it every year, and in the last year, I think it was 2009 or 2010, I turned it into an ebook, and that was based upon readers saying, “Hey, we know it’s all on the blog already for free, but we want it in the one kind of place where we can keep coming back to it. We want to be able to print it out, we want to be able to keep coming back to it, and doing it again, and again.” Because it was actually a 31-day process that you could do more than once. I turned it into an ebook, not really sure whether anyone would buy the ebook, but very quickly found once I released it that it was a very popular product, and we sold tens of thousands of copies of that ebook in the year or so after I launched it. I updated it again in 2012 because as I said, things were changing in the blogosphere, and some of the challenges were becoming a little bit dated, so I came up with seven new challenges for the second edition. Late last year, we realized, well 2012 when we did the second edition was quite a long time ago, six years have passed and again, things have been changing, and this product, this ebook needed to be updated again, and we began to ask ourselves, should we do it as an ebook? Should we do it as a course, or in some other format? We kind of landed on the idea all modernizing it, updating it, both in terms of the challenges. There are some new challenges in this one if you’ve taken it before, but also in terms of the delivery method. I realized that a lot of people were benefiting from the podcast that I’ve been doing, and a lot of people preferred hearing and viewing content teaching. My team and I begin to put together this new version of 31-days to build a better blog as a course. The course is a combination of a number of things, some of it is repurposed, you all have had little bits of it on that the podcast in the past. There’s some references and further reading to blog articles as well, there are some printable worksheets that we’ve put together for it. the idea is still the same, every day or every module I should say, you’ll get a bit of teaching, and then most importantly, you’ll get a challenge to go away and do, and you also get a little bit of further reading as well, and to actually share what you’re doing in our Facebook group as well. This has involved since the early versions of the ebook, some of the challenges are still the same activity but we’ve added depth, we’ve added some further reading, we’ve added some more suggestions, so it is a deep and different experience to those of you who have had the ebook before. Every module, you get a video presentation and you can also download that as an audio file if you prefer just to listen while you’re out on your walk, you get printable worksheets, and also some links to some further reading, and some for that listening as well. There’s also a private Facebook group just for course students where you can share what you’re doing, and interact with other students on the journey. A few other commonly asked questions that we have been getting about this, the number one is who is it for? ProBlogger listeners span the whole breath of experience. we’ve got people listening to this podcast right now who have not even started a blog, we’ve got others who have started a blog in the first month, and then others who three or four years in, and then others who listen to this who are 10, 12, 15 years in the blogging as well. So who is this course designed for? We’ve actually designed it for a number of groups, probably not everyone in that spectrum. Particularly those who are just starting out, so those of you who have a blog, and I need to emphasize that if you haven’t yet got a blog, this course isn’t for you. I would highly recommend you go back and start out, start a blog course, which is a free course that you can also find on ProBlogger. This course, 31 Days to Build a Better Blog is much better for those of you who have just started a blog, that’s one of the groups that I think it’s ideal for. If you’ve done the start a blog course, this is designed almost to take you on your next steps. We kind of almost toyed with the idea of calling this your first 31 days of blogging. We didn’t do that because I think it also is relevant for those of you who are a bit further along the journey as well. If you’re just starting out, this is a great course to follow on. It’s a good companion course if you like to start a blog course. Number two group that this is ideal for is anyone who’s got an intermediate kind of level of blogging but maybe your blog needs a kick start in some way. I can relate to this, it’s been periods in my own blogging even in the last few years where I’ve kind of just needed a burst of something to really kick start the blog again. I spoke with one blogger this morning who is loving doing the course. She’s been blogging now for four or five years, but her bloggers hit a plateau. It grew and grew, she’s a full time blogger but it’s just been slowing, and whining a little bit, and she realized that some of that was because of her, some of that was because she was a bit bored with blogging. She needed this kind of little injection of energy. She found 31 days as a good way to give her a framework I guess to be more intentional about her blog. I also spoke with another blogger who is using 31 Days to Build a Better Blog to re-launch her blog. Her blog has been dormant for a couple of months because she’s had some other stuff going on in her life, and so she is using this course to help her kind of get it back up and going again, and to refocus it in some ways. I do know a few advanced bloggers who also have used the ebook version of 31 Days to Build a Better Blog as something to I guess give him that little injection of energy every now and again to give them a little bit of inspiration. The way we’ve designed this is that you can take it as 31 days in 31 days if you like and I’ll talk about the frequency of how you need to take it in a moment. You can also come back to it again, and again, and one of the things I found really interesting, I was actually at a conference late last year, at a theme con and someone came out and said, “You know, I do 31 Days to Build a Better Blog every year.” And I was like, why do you do it every year? And they bought it in 2009, they’re doing the first version every year, and he said, that it was just something that he does every October, and October is the month that he does it, and he works through it and he’s found it really helpful to kind of just ask himself the questions around the daily challenges, and once he doesn’t learn a lot from it, the challenge of doing something in each of these 31 areas has been enough for him. It may be useful for those of you who are more at that advanced end, but we have designed it more for beginner bloggers and intermediate bloggers particularly, and that’s who we’ve seen getting the most value out of it. The other thing I mentioned is that it is also ideal for bloggers who want to do it together, there is a group, a very small group of fashion bloggers, we’re going through it together right now, I’ve had an email from one of those this morning. It’s just a little Facebook group of five fashion bloggers, and they’ve all enrolled in the course together. That’s something that I’ve seen in the past that has worked quite well, bloggers within a niche doing it together, or even bloggers outside of a niche. There’s a couple of Facebook groups around who have taken the ebook version together in the past. That’s one of the things I actually have noticed, and we’ll talk about this in a moment, when you do this together, when you have that accountability, it can really help to accentuate the good things that come out of it in some ways. The second most common question that I get asked is, does it have to be done daily? Absolutely not. Whilst we’ve certainly called it 31 Days to Build a Better Blog, that was because the first blog post series was rolled out on a daily basis. We’ve actually designed this course version to be taken at your own pace. We actually ran this course with about 100 beta testers a few months ago, and we’ve surveyed them, and most of the responses that came back is that they took it, or they’re expecting to take it over two to three months. So it seems like the average is that people are working through a module every two to three days instead of a daily basis. That’s possibly because we’ve added a little bit more depth into this version of the course. Also, we’ve all got plenty of other things going on in our lives, and really to take this course, you need to put aside a little bit of time for learning, to listen to, and watch the video presentation, and work on the worksheets, but then you also need to put aside a little bit of time for doing the activity, and some of the activities do take a little bit more time than others. Which leads me to the third question I get asked is, how much work does it take? Let me just say though, I do know bloggers who have taken this course faster than 31 days. If you do have a lot of time in your hands at the moment, maybe you are having a mid semester break at college, or university, or maybe you’ve got a couple weeks of work, you probably could do the whole lot in a couple of weeks if you really pushed hard, but most people do seem to be taking it at a slower pace. I know a number of people who are even doing it one module per week, and they got a list of to do after 31 weeks. That next question, how much work is it? That’s an interesting one, there’s no one answer to this. We’ve designed the module so that you can consume each module in terms of the teaching of the module in less than an hour, some of them are less than that, some of them are kind of pushed right up to the A mark. As I mentioned a few times, you’re not going to get a lot of benefit out of this course if you just do the learning parts of it, you really need to turn that into action. Every day, we do give you a challenge, and in a couple of days, we give you a couple of things to do as well. This will vary a bit, depending on the day. Some of the days take a little bit more work than others, some of the days, you probably could do in an hour, so the learning might be half an hour, the doing might be another hour. Some of the days, you might actually need to put aside a few hours as well. It will also vary a little bit as to whether you’re a beginner blogger or a more intermediate blogger because some of the things you’ll find, if you’re an intermediate blogger, you might have already done some of the challenges, and so, you may be able to use that day more to evaluate how you’re going. For example, day 19 is about email newsletters, and so, for those of you just starting out, the challenge is to start an email newsletter. You’re going to have a bit of work to do, we’ll give you some tips on things to think about in doing that. Now, if you’ve already got a newsletter, you don’t need to do some of that work, but you could use that day to evaluate how your newsletter has already gone. that might take less time, so it will vary from person to person, most of those who are already doing the course, again, we survey them, and most of them are saying they’re spending between one and five hours a week on the course. Again, it’s designed for you to take at your own pace. If you don’t have five hours a week, you could just slow the pace down a little bit and work through it, and move on to the next module when you are finished. We do have some emails that will go out during the process just to prompt you to keep moving for the course, we want to keep people moving through because we know the people who get the most value are the ones who complete it but really, you are able to take this completely at your own pace. Lastly, I want to just give you a few tips for those of you who are thinking about doing the course, those of you who are already signed up, the number one thing that I found in talking to a lot of students of 31 Days to Build a Better Blog is the people who do get to the end, the people who do get the most benefit are the people who seem to send a scheduled time to do it. I’ve been guilty of this, I’ve signed up for courses, I’ve taken ebooks, and I think to myself, well, I’m going to do that course one day when I get time, and I know that when I take that attitude with any kind of teaching, whether that be a formal learning qualification at a university or something else, like an ebook, or a course online, I don’t tend to move through it. I don’t tend to finish it unless I’ve scheduled time for it. I would highly recommend that you put in your diary a little bit of time every day, or a limited time every week, depending on your schedule but actually, put aside time to do it. Like I say, don’t just put aside time to learn, put aside time to do, that’s really important. The second thing I’ve noticed is that the people who seem to get the most out of this have accountability. Whether you are going to use our Facebook group for that, there’s a private Facebook group, or whether you’re going to take a buddy through the course, or do it as a group, or whether you’ve just got an offline friend who knows nothing about blogging who you ask to keep you accountable, I really encourage you to find some way of keeping accountable to keep you moving through this course, and to keep you taking action, and that’s the most important thing again and again. Which leads me to the last tip, the people who get the most out of this really do take action, the temptation is just to listen, just to learn, and then to put the doing aside for one day. As we all know, one day tends not to happen, and it leads to regret later on. Schedule time to learn, but also schedule time to do, and that’s really important. The last thing I will say is that we do have a 60-day guarantee on this product. We always have had guarantees, money back guarantees on all of our products. Personally, I would much rather have you as a happy, ongoing reader or listener, than having your $49—$49 will be great, that helps me to sustain ProBlogger to keep the podcast running, to pay my team, and fund my life and my children’s life as well. I much prefer to have an ongoing relationship with you as a listener, as a reader, than having your $49. Feel free to take advantage of that guarantee, to enroll, start interacting with the course, find out whether it’s for you or not, if it’s not quite for you, contact our support team and they will arrange a full refund for you, no questions asked. Do feel free to take advantage of that, and lastly, I really would love your feedback on how we can improve it if you’ve already taken the course, let our team know, just send our team an email via our contact form, or send it to help@problogger.com and let us know how we can improve that course as well. Lastly, remember the early bird price is $49 US, that’s 50% off, but that will go up on the 1st of July midnight, on the 30th of June. Again, go to problogger.com/31days for the link and more information on what’s included. I hope that answers all your questions, if you do have more questions on 31 days, any aspect of it, please shoot our team an email, help@problogger.com or you can shoot us an email via social media or in our Facebook group as well. thank you for listening today, we look forward to chatting with you next week in episode 254, and I look forward to seeing some of you in the 31 Days to Build a Better Blog Facebook group as well. Thanks for listening, chat next week. 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 PodcastMotor who offer a great range of services including helping you to setup and launch your podcast as well as ongoing editing and production of the podcast that you produce. You can check them out at podcastmotor.com. How did you go with today’s episode? Enjoy this podcast? Sign up to our ProBloggerPLUS newsletter to get notified of all new tutorials and podcasts.

11 Things Thomas Edison Can Teach You About Profitable Blogging If it wasn’t for Thomas Edison, you’d probably be sitting in the dark feeling quite bored. Edison was a prolific and influential inventor. He invented world-changing technologies including the light bulb, the phonograph and motion picture camera. And his views back then on emerging technologies can teach you about blogging today. Quotes from Edison and thoughts on how they apply to blogging:   Start with a need: “I never perfected an invention that I did not think about in terms of the service it might give others… I find out what the world needs, then I proceed to invent.” When building a blog, think about what problems it will solve, how it will serve people, and what changes it will bring.   Work smart: “Being busy does not always mean real work. The object of all work is production or accomplishment and to either of these ends there must be forethought, system, planning, intelligence, and honest purpose, as well as perspiration. Seeming to do is not doing.” It’s easy to fill your time with tasks that seem urgent but aren’t necessarily important. Avoid distractions. Write content, update archives, and drive traffic.   Work and wait: “Everything comes to him who hustles while he waits.” It takes time to build a blog to its full potential. While search engines index your blog, establish trust with readers and build a profile in your niche.   It takes work: “Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.” Coming up with a great idea for a new blog is just the beginning. It takes a lot of hard work to make it successful. Lots of little actions add up to a great blog.   Failure brings You closer to success: “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” Treat every post you write, every attempt you make to promote your blog and every tool you use as learning experiences that shape your future.   You are capable of astounding things: “If we did all the things we are capable of, we would literally astound ourselves.” You have incredible potential. You are unique. And you know something no-one else does. Tap into what makes you special, and don’t sell yourself short.   Sometimes failing is the start of success: “Just because something doesn’t do what you planned it to do doesn’t mean it’s useless.” Even when things don’t turn out the way you want, they can still be a success. What you include in your blog can rise to something new.   Don’t give up too early: “Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time.” Most blogs are abandoned after a month or two. The average time that it takes a blog to rise to the top is about 3 years or longer. Don’t give up on it.   Make it fun: “I never did a day’s work in my life. It was all fun.” Blog about something you enjoy and are passionate about. Readers pick up on your energy and love for the topic.   Have lots of ideas: “To have a great idea, have a lot of them.” Put time aside to dream, brainstorm, and wonder “What if?” Not every idea for your blog will work, so it pays to have lots of ideas. Practice the art of curiosity.   You don’t have to start with a finished product: “To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.” Don’t get trapped into thinking you need to start with all the bells and whistles. Most successful bloggers start with just the basics.   Links and Resources for What Thomas Edison Can Teach YOU About Profitable Blogging: What Are YOU About? [Choosing a Topic for Your Blog] What You Say is What You Are – The Problem of Blogger Inferiority Complex A Secret to Blogging Success – Build Upon What You Build Top 100 Blogs Have an Average Age of 33.8 months ProBlogger eBooks Courses Starting a Blog ProBlogger Pro – 31 Days to Build a Better Blog Join our Facebook group Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Hey there and welcome to episode 252 of the ProBlogger podcast. My name is Darren Rowse and I’m the blogger behind problogger.com, a blog, podcast, ebook, courses, events, and so much more that all help you to start a great blog, to create content for that blog that’s going to make the world a better place in some way, but also that will hopefully be profitable for you in some way. In today’s episode I want to do something a little bit different. Over the last few weeks, I’ve been sharing a quote of the week and I’ve had some really nice feedback on that. In fact, quite a few of you have been tweeting and sending me quotes that you love on Twitter, social media as well. This week is all based around 11 quotes from Thomas Edison. I want to talk about these 11 things that Thomas Edison can teach you about blogging. This is just a different way of talking about some of the principles of building a profitable blog. Thomas Edison was one of the most prolific and influential inventors that the world has seen, particularly for his time and has developed all kinds of amazing technologies. He’s also prolifically quoted. As I was digging around looking at some quotes, I came across quite a few his that I thought really did relate to blogging. We’re going to go through those. It will be a relatively quick episode today. You can find all of the quotes and full transcript of today’s show over at our show notes at problogger.com/podcast/252. I also want to mention today before we get into the show, that you can enroll in 31 Days To Build A Better Blog. This is a course that I’ve been talking about now for a few months which we have officially launched. If you go problogger.com/31days or you’ll find it linked to in our courses tab over at problogger.com. This course is an updated version of our incredibly best-selling ebook, the best selling ebook I’ve ever launched, 31 Days To Build A Better Blog, which I launched I think it was back in 2008. We did an update in 2012, and now 2018, we’re doing a complete overhaul of it and presenting it as a course. You get video, audio, you get all the slides, you get a whole stack of writable worksheets. There’s a Facebook group for some accountability as well. You get all that for $49. This is an early bird special for the next—as I recall this—seven days as this one goes live, it’ll only be for the next five days. So you want to head over to problogger.com/31days where you get it for $49. The normal price will be $99. This course is perfect for those of you who are either just starting out. You might have just started a Start A Blog course which is a free course. This is the perfect kind of next step. It will help you to set up some routines and rhythms in your first month or so of blogging. It’s also really great for those of you who’ve got a blog that has been maybe plateaued, that you need a bit of a kick start. It gives you 31 pieces of teaching, but more importantly, 31 pieces of action that you can take to improve your blog. It’s been done by over 20,000 people in the ebook version. I know it’s going to help a lot of you. We’ve just had over 200 bloggers go through the beta version of it and I’ve incorporated a lot of their feedback into improving it even further. Again, check it out at problogger.com/31days. Make sure you do that very fairly because it only lasts—for the early bird discount—for the next few days. Alright, today’s show notes again problogger.com/podcast/252. Let’s get into today’s show. What Thomas Edison can teach you about profitable blogging? Now you might think nothing at all because he was around way before blogging was invented. But just pointing out the wisdom from these 11 quotes, I do think a lot of them do apply to any kind of entrepreneurial activity, blogging being one of those if you are trying to do it for profit. So, let me go through them. Number one thing that I think he can teach us is to really have at the center of what you do the need of someone. Start with a need. This is the quote that I found: “I never perfected an invention that I did not think about in terms of the service it might give others. I find out what the world needs then I proceed to invent.” So, this sense that really does start with a need and then the invention comes out of that. This is certainly something that I’ve seen in many entrepreneurs over the years. Spot a problem, solve the problem whether that problem be someone else’s problem or your own, and then create a product or a service to solve that problem. Most successful blogs that I’ve come across succeed when they meet a need, when they solve a problem, when they enhance the life of someone. This is something that I took almost every episode over the years in some way or another. Whether it be your blog is to give people information when they don’t have information, whether your blog maybe is to entertain people when they’re feeling bored, whether it is your blog gives people a sense of community when they feel alone, when it gives them information that teaches them something, how to do something when they don’t know how to do something. Blogs succeed most when they meet a need, when they enhance the life of their reader in some way. The best place to start now when you’re building your blog is to think about that need, that problem that people have. Many times, many successful blogs start with a problem of the blogger themselves. They solve that problem and they talk out loud about how they solved their own problem, or it is spotting someone else’s problem. Certainly for me, ProBlogger was me trying to solve my problem; how do I build a profitable blog. That was a problem I had and so I started a blog about my journey in solving that problem. Digital photography school was me seeing the need that other people had, the questions that other people are asking. So I began to answer those questions, solve those problems of other people. I already had answers to those things. Really, this does apply on a couple of levels. Firstly, in a big picture way, when you’re choosing your niche, when you’re choosing your topic, when you’re choosing the focus of your blog, keeping the problem, keeping the need, keeping that gain that people want in mind, keeping that central when you’re choosing your overall theme, but also on a post-by-post basis. Every post I write, the goal that I have, and then I tell my writers is that we want to solve at least one problem with every post that we write. You could take it further. Every Facebook update you do, every Instagram post you do, every tweet you do. Really, you could be making it your goal to solve that problem in some way. The problem doesn’t need to be big. It doesn’t have to be life-changing in a massive way for your reader. But if it does enhance their life in some small way, that goes a long way in the long run to building a profitable blog–so, number one start with a need. Number two: work smart. This is another quote that I found from Thomas Edison: “Being busy does not always mean real work. The object of all work is production or accomplishment. To either of these ends, there must be a forthright system, planning, intelligence, and honest purpose, as well as perspiration. Seeming to do is not doing.” I love this quote because there’s a sense that, many times we fill our lives with things that seem to make us look busy but they don’t actually take us towards our goal. It’s really easy as a blogger fill your time with a lot of tasks that seem important, that seem urgent but they are not actually important in any way. It’s so easy as a blogger to build these machines of routines and things that we do that, when we first start doing them, we think maybe they could help us but they turned out not really to do anything at all. Social media can be one of these things. Social media can build our blog but we spend a lot of time doing it in ways that don’t always translate into growth in our blog. They can end up being a distraction from the key things that we need to do. Exploring the latest tools, the latest trends, these can all be distractions. They can be good things but if we spend all of our time, filling our time with these things that everyone else is doing, that everyone else is talking about, that can actually take us away from the core things that we need to do to build a blog. Really, ultimately the core things you need to do to build a blog are write great content, update your archive, working on that content side of things, working on building traffic to your blog, to activities that are putting yourself out there, building community engagement with the people who come to your blog, and then thinking about monetization. The tools, the social media, and all these things, they can play their part in that but many times we get distracted by it–so work smart. Be ruthless as you think about what you are doing with your time. If you are thinking maybe you’re not working smart, I challenge you, over the next week, to record everything that you do and take a look at that at the end of the week. Ask yourself at the end of the week, “How much of my time was spent on those core activities and how much of that time I’m spending on doing things that weren’t really converting, that weren’t really helping me to build my blog. Number three thing that I learned from Thomas Edison is work and wait, which sounds weird, work and wait, but here’s the quote: “Everything comes to him or her who hustles while he or she waits.” Everything comes to those who hustle while they wait. There’s this sense of hustling, working, striving, but also waiting. These things can actually sit side-by-side. Most bloggers that I meet—very quickly in their journey—find that to build a profitable blog takes both work but also time. You need to work. It’s not just going to happen. It takes action but it also takes waiting. It’s a waiting game. It takes time for the search engines to index you. It takes time for you to create enough content to have an archive. It takes time to establish trust with your readers. It takes time to build profile in your niche. It takes time to learn about blogging. It takes time to learn about your niche and to find your writing style, to find your voice. All these things take time. There’s this sense of having to wait but also there’s a sense that you need to be hard at work in the waiting as well, particularly in those early days of your blog, you need to not just wait, you need to work. You need to hustle as Thomas Edison said. Be busy but be patient. Busily wait, if you like. I love that kind of idea these two things that seem almost opposites but they both are true. Number four, and builds on this idea that I just talked about, it takes work. This is another quote from Thomas: “Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.” Coming up with great ideas for your new blog is great. You need to nail that. You need to work out what that focus is so that first idea you have is great. The inspiration you have, fantastic. I’ve met so many people who’ve got great ideas for blogs, brilliant ideas for blogs but they don’t actually do anything. They don’t actually perspire. To make a blog successful, it takes a lot of work. It’s the accumulation of all of those little actions that you need to do over time that add up to create an epic blog that’s going to be successful. If you want a profitable blog, yes, that first idea you have is so important, nail it but then follow it up with a lot of work. It takes so much work. Number five: “Failing takes you closer to succeeding.” Another quote that many of you will have heard before, “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” I’ve heard variations of this quote. Every post your write, every way that you attempt to promote your blog, every tool that you used, every question you ask your readers, all of these things that you do, treat them like little learning experiences that will shape your future. If you put something out there and it doesn’t work, you are one step closer to finding something that will work. To continue to put things out there, to treat everything you do as an experiment. The key with an experiment is that the experiment itself doesn’t always end up being the finished product. The experiment reveals something that can reveal the product that you want to create. Everything you do, treat it as an experiment. Many of the things you do will fall over, they’ll fail. Some of the things that you do will work and they’ll go okay. But a few of the things that you do, the few of those thousands of experiments that you do will fly. They’ll go viral and you build further on those things, you evolve those things even further. Pay attention to what is going okay and particularly what’s going brilliantly. Out of those little sparks that fly when you experiment will become the things you need to pay more attention to and then you need to put more work into those things as well. Number six, I love this one, “You are capable of astounding things.” I love this quote. If we did all the things we are capable of, we would literally astound ourselves. Don’t get trapped into limiting yourself as a blogger because you’ve not made it yet. You may look at your blog and you may think, “It hasn’t made it.” Or you may compare it to someone else and what they’re doing. Don’t limit yourself by what’s in front of you right now. You have incredible potential. Potential is a future thing. Something that’s not yet reached. You’re unique. You have something that no one else has. Your story, your experience, the combination of your personality and those things, so tap into those things. Tap into the things that make you, you. Hopefully, you’ll be on the way to building something valuable. Don’t sell yourself short. You’re capable of astounding things. Those things won’t just fall in your lap, though. You got to combine this one with some of those other things. There’s a lot of work. There’s patience. Busily wait. Remember that one. But don’t sell yourself short. You are capable of astounding things. Those things will hopefully reveal themselves to you particularly when you tap into what makes you, you. Number seven tapped into a theme that we did touch on a little bit before: “Sometimes, failing is just the start of success.” Another quote that Thomas said, “Just because something doesn’t do what you planned it to do, doesn’t mean it’s useless.” There’s the sense here in the experiments that Thomas did. Sometimes, he would start an experiment thinking it would turn out one way but it turned out the other way, and the other way actually revealed something else he could do. This is a thing that comes out many times when you talk to inventors. It’s how the microwave oven was invented. I can’t remember the guy who did it, but he was developing radar in weaponry. He was working in the US Department of Defense in radar weaponry and he was standing in front of this microwave unit that he was developing for a weapon and he notice that the chocolate bar in his pocket melted. This unexpected outcome of the experiment showed him potential in another area–heating food. You couldn’t get two things that are more different, but he took notice of this unexpected outcome and that actually sparked an idea that then became the microwave oven, and became one of the most successful inventions of all time, we’ve almost all got one in our family’s homes. One of the wonderful things about experiment is that you will have unexpected outcomes. One of the wonderful things about the blogging space is that sometimes you put things out there and they come back to you in a different way. Sometimes, you start out thinking that you’re going to serve your readers in one way and then you actually serve them in another way. There’s been many times in my own journey where the things that I thought I was doing actually didn’t work but they revealed something else. Perhaps the best example I can give you of that is my first ever photography blog. It was designed to be a photo blog. I was going to share photos of a trip I was taking to Morocco. I also wrote this little review of the camera I was using on this trip. Of course, went away on the trip, came home, and realize no one took any notice of my photos. It turns out my photos weren’t that great but the camera review took off. It was ranking high in Google and people were responding to that and that gave birth to a camera review blog. The photo blog became something else. I would never have discovered that if I hadn’t have done the experiment of the photo blog and taken note of the unexpected outcome. Take note not only of your failures, of things that don’t work, but also pay attention to what unexpected things come out of that failure. Maybe it will give birth to something new, that can become your new main thing. Number eight, don’t give up too early. Here’s the quote: “Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is to try just one more time.” Most bloggers abandon their blogs after a month or two. I actually saw a study a few years ago. I think it was two months was the average length of a blog. Here’s one thing for you; if you’ve been blogging for longer than two months, congratulations. You’re above average. You’ve done well. If you’re less than two months, persist. Get to that two-month mark to make yourself above average. But here’s the thing. Our most successful blogs, most profitable blogs actually take two to three years to get to that point where they’re beginning to take off. There’s this patch between that two-month mark where most people give up and the two, or three, or four-year mark where blogs begin to grow and take off–that is a tough time to get through. I remember that time myself, of wondering, “Is this going to work? I can see some little sparks and some things happening but I’m not full time. I’m not able to sustain it.” That time can be a hard time to push through. That’s why we started 31 Days To Build A Better Blog, to be honest. Because that’s where I find most people who are in that patch of just sort of wondering if they should just give up. Thirty-one days of intense burst of action and interaction on your blog can actually lift it a lot. Use 31 Days if you want. I’ll start a Facebook group and get together with a few other bloggers to get you through that patch. Because that is the number one I think that most blogs fall on is that bloggers don’t just doesn’t persist for long enough, so you need to persist with that. Number nine: “Make it fun.” I love this quote from Thomas. I never did a day’s work in my life. It was all fun. Blog about something that you enjoy. Blog about something that you have an interest in, a passion in, something that you would talk to your friends about, even if no one was paying, even if no one else is listening, you just enjoy it. This doesn’t guarantee success but it certainly makes blogging a more pleasurable and therefore a sustainable thing. If you are going to get through that, that tough patch between in the first two or three years, you want to be doing something fun. You’re not going to be making much money in those early days. You probably won’t have a whole heap of recognition. You probably won’t have a lot of traffic or people affirming you in those early days. But if it’s fun, if it’s the type of thing that you do for free—because you are doing it for free—then it will get you through that tough time. Choose something that you are going to enjoy. You also will find the other benefit of doing something that you enjoy. Those who do eventually read your blog will pick up on your energy. They’ll pick up on your enjoyment of your topic. They’ll pick up on the fun that you are having and increases the chances of them having fun too. I know when I read a blog for the first time whether the author is actually engaged with their topic. If they’re energized by their topic, it shines through in the writing. You can hear it in the voice of a podcaster. You can see it in the face of a video blogger. It shines through. You might want to choose something that you actually do enjoy and that will help you to sustain but it will also help you to grow your blog as well. Two more things that Thomas Edison can teach you about profitable blogging. Number 10 is have lots of ideas. This is the quote: “To have a great idea, have a lot of them.” The reality is—this does tap into some of the other things that we’re talking about with experiments before—the reality is a lot of the ideas that you have over time will go okay. Some of them will completely flop, but occasionally you’ll have one that just sparks, and that does really well for you. Again, I don’t want to talk too much about 31 Days To Build A Better Blog but it all started with a crazy idea that I had lying in bed at two o’clock one night, to do a blog post series of 31 blog posts over a month. This ebook that eventually sold 20,000 copies and now has turned into a course, all started with just this crazy idea I have one night to do a 31-part series on my blog. The unexpected result was my readers really loved it and they suggested I turn it into an ebook. That would never happened if I hadn’t paid attention to that crazy idea. But here’s the thing, I had hundreds of crazy ideas at 2:00 AM. That’s my best time of thinking of ideas. I sleep with a little pad and pencil next to my bed. Quite often in the morning I wake up and there’s an idea there that I’ve had during the night. I’ve had thousands probably of ideas in the last 15 years but only a few of them were really taken off like 31 Days To Build A Better Blog. Put aside time to dream, to brainstorm, to wonder what if, pay attention to those ideas and most importantly, capture them in some way. Having that piece of paper and pencil next to my bed is so important. Develop a way to capture those ideas and be willing to try ideas that may not work. It’s all about that prolific experimentation. Practice the art of curiosity–is something that I will encourage you to do. Schedule time for curiosity and for playfulness. Whilst you do need to work, I also do believe that it’s important to have a little bit of white space in your week as well where you allow yourself just to dream, to be curious, to ask questions, and to brainstorm things as well. You never know what might come out of that. The last thing that I’ve learned from Thomas Edison quotes is you don’t have to start with a finished product. This is the quote that I found to talk about this: “To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.” You’ll never going to start with a perfect blog. A lot of bloggers get trapped into this way of thinking that on the day they start they need to have a brilliant blog design, they need to have the perfect blog domain, they need to be using the perfect tool, they need to have all their tools installed, they need to have the opt-in, they need to have the product, they need a logo, they need to have all these things before they start. The reality is that–no successful blog ever started that way. I can’t think of one that launched and it was perfect out of the gate. I looked back on my first blog. It was on Blogger, it was on the Blogspot domain. I didn’t have a server, I didn’t have the best tool. I didn’t have a design. I was using this ugly navy blue default template that they had. I didn’t have any pictures or visuals on my blog at all. It was not perfect. I did not know what I was doing. I didn’t know how to make text bold, I didn’t know how to code, I didn’t know anything. But I wrote a post and that post led me to write another post. Gradually, I learned the skills. Gradually, I designed my blog. Gradually, I realized there were other tools that I could use and I learned how to use them. I learned how to make text bold. Gradually, over time, I added some bells and whistles. Even today, I look at my blog and it’s not perfect. There are still things that I’m learning and still things that I can add to it. The key is to experiment. It’s to start and to keep working. Gradually, over time, your ideas will be refined, your blog will begin to grow, it will improve, and you’ll get there. You’ll get to that point where you have a finished product but it all starts in a kind of an ugly, awkward way. That’s totally okay because over time, as you persist, as you experiment, as ideas turn out in unexpected ways, all of these things that I’ve been just talking about, as you have fun, hopefully it would grow. I hope you found a little bit of inspiration in these quotes from Thomas Edison. I’m going to include them all over in our show notes today at problogger.com/podcast/252. I really hope that something in that has sparked for you some ideas, and some inspiration, some encouragement to persist and keep working on what you are doing. If you’ve got a favorite quote, I would love to hear it. You can share it over in our Facebook group or on the show notes as well. You might just find it gets featured in an upcoming show as well. Lastly, don’t forget 31 Days To Build A Better Blog. As this podcast goes live, there’ll be only about five days to go, to get that early bird special of $49. It’s about half-price. Find it at problogger.com/31days. I look forward to seeing you in that Facebook group as well. Thanks for listening today. Chat with you next week in episode 253. 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. Before I go, I want to give a big shout out and say thank you to Craig Hewitt and the team at PodcastMotor, who’ve been editing all of our podcast for some time now. PodcastMotor 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? Enjoy this podcast? Sign up to our ProBloggerPLUS newsletter to get notified of all new tutorials and podcasts.