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Everything You Need to Know About Getting Started with Email Have people been telling you for years that you need to create an email list for your blog? Is it time to finally bite the bullet? Let’s talk about email – how to get started, email providers, types of messages, opt-ins, and sequences or auto-responders. When it comes to choosing an email provider, start simple You don’t need all the bells and whistles. Get subscribers used to hearing from you. Send a simple email message once a week or so to keep in touch with readers. The more useful and actionable the message, the better. Readers will look forward to receiving them from you. Once you have an email provider, you can start collecting email addresses of new subscribers. Grow your email list fast by using an opt-in, exit popup, sign-up form or incentive. While opt-ins can be good, some subscribers will sign up just to get whatever freebie you’re offering rather than what comes later. To increase engagement, make opt-ins related to what comes next: ongoing emails, increased engagement, long-term opens, and reduced annoyance. Email sequences and auto-responders to set up: exclusive content, best posts, affiliate promotions, product promotions, surveys and asking questions. Being able to segment your audience, and then deliver auto-responders based on their needs or situations, is very powerful. Email serves as a win-win-win for you, your blog, and your subscribers. Links and Resources for What You Should Know about Getting Started with Email: Members Download Area Blog Post Ideas MailChimp ConvertKit Drip Aweber Further Listening: 10 Things You Can Do Today that Will Pay Off On Your Blog Forever   How to Increase Your Email List Subscribers By 100% Or More Today   Create an Opt-In to Increase Your Email Subscriber Numbers How to Drive Traffic and Profit in Your Blogging with Autoresponders 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 251 of The ProBlogger Podcast. My name is Darren Rowse and I’m the blogger behind problogger.com, a blog, podcast, event, job boards, series of ebooks, and courses all designed to help you to grow a profitable blog. You can learn more about what we do at ProBlogger at problogger.com. In today’s episode, I want to talk about email. In particular, I want to answer three questions that I got from some of our Facebook group on the topic of email. The questions are coming from Marco, Lisa, and Lia. Marco asks some questions about getting started, choosing an email provider, and what to send in those initial emails. Lisa asked about tips for opt-ins to get more people to sign up. Lia asked about the sequence of emails that you might want to set up as an autoresponder afterwards. The questions do progress a little bit from the easier, beginner ones through to something a little bit more intermediate. You can find today’s show notes and there’s going to be plenty of extra reading for you. I’ve got some resources for you as well. You can find those show notes at problogger.com/podcast/251 and I will recommend that you get a problogger.com/members and that’s where you can get some downloadable resources, one of which is relevant for today’s show. There are six worksheets and guides that we’ve got there, they’re completely free. You just have to give us your email address and we’ll send them and log in through to you so you can access those and the new ones that we will be adding in there as well. Again, that’s problogger.com/members and that’s just a member’s area that we’ve got set up for you completely free. You will see our courses there as well, some of which are free and some of which are paid but that’s where you’ll be able to get the download, relevant to today’s show. Let’s get in to the question from Marco. Thanks for your question Marco. Marco wrote, “After years of hearing I should be using email, I’ve decided to bite the bullet and start an email list but I have some starter questions. Firstly, which service should I use? I know you get what you pay for but how much is too much for someone just starting out? Number two, what emails should I send? Any tips to help me get going?” A few thoughts for you Marco, it is a big topic so I will be referring you to listen to a few other podcast and to get that download that I mentioned before because a lot of ideas covered in those. I did some podcast—I think it was back in episode 66—I did a series on 10 Things You Can Do Today and then it’s going to payoff for the long term. I did three episodes in that series about emails. Number 68, episode 68 is about getting subscribers. Number 69 is about keeping subscribers and number 70 is about autoresponders, which will be relevant for Lia’s question later as well. Listen to those podcast. I’ll link to them in the show notes. Also there’s that download, the download in our member’s area at problogger.com/members is a comparison of email providers. In that we look at the most common email providers and the ones that we recommend and which level they’re best suited to. That’s going to answer some of your questions. I do recommend you to dig into those. The other advice I give you, Marco is to start simple and this really is advice that I want to give to Lisa and Lia as well. You don’t have to complicate things with email. Email can get very complicated and there are levels of complexity that are worth adding on but when you’re starting out, don’t over complicate it. Start simple. You don’t have to have all the bells and whistles from day one. You will see people writing guides to using pop-ups, opt-ins, segmenting lists, and all these things and they’re all great. They’re all things that you can learn but it’s so important if you’re in the situation that Marco is in—you haven’t yet started—sign up for a simple email provider. In our downloadable guide, we mention a few. MailChimp is one that many of our readers used to get started. I think they have a free a plan to start out with, for a certain level. ConvertKit is another one, it’s probably a step up from MailChimp. I think, it’s great for beginners and again, I think MailChimp has an account for up to 2000 subscribers. It can be free to start but you are going to end up paying for all of these. ConvertKit does have a little bit more power to it. The one that we use is Drip and whilst I’m in love with Drip. I highly recommend it for anyone who’s a bit more advance, who’s already got a list, and who wants to start segmenting and doing some of these more complicated things. I think Drip might be a little bit of overkill for someone like Marco who’s just starting out, unless you want to get really serious from day one. They’re the three of the ones that we can pay. We also have used AWeber for years as well and I think from memory, they have a bit of free services as well. Right at our little downloadable guide at problogger.com/members, you will see the features of each of them and the plans as well. Keep it simple. Sign up for something. They all have forms that you can put into your sidebar, or on your blog, or in a blog post that begin to help you collect emails. That is the first thing you need to do. You need to sign up and then you need to have a form somewhere in your site—the more prominent the better—and to start collecting the emails. That is the key and the third part is start sending some emails. Even if you’ve only got one subscriber, start getting into the habit of sending regular emails. There were things you can do to add complexity, to add a bit more strategy into what you do but start with the signing up, starting to collect emails, and starting to send an email every now and again to warm up your list. That’s the bare essentials and then you can begin to experiment with using different types of emails, sending different types of emails, and collecting subscribers in new ways and there are some ways to grow your list a little bit faster. If you want two starting points in terms of next steps, once you are setup, I would encourage you to think about an opt-in and we’re going to talk more about that in answering Lisa’s question next. This is where you offer something in exchange for the email address. The other thing you might want to begin to experiment with is new ways of displaying your signup form. Most people will put their signup form in their side bar. That’s the first place that most blogger will put it and that’s a good spot. People will sign up there but there are other ways of being a little bit more aggressive with that on putting, positioning the email form in places that people are more likely to respond to. The most aggressive one is the popup. This is where you come to a site and they ask you immediately or maybe after 20 seconds to sign up. This will get you more, you may not feel comfortable with that though. Perhaps, a better first step would be an exit popup and this is something a lot of bloggers are getting quite good success of light. This where instead of interrupting people as they arrive on your site, you interrupt them when they go to leave your site. That is still maybe a little bit aggressive for some of you but it might be a good first step. I think using that exit popup in conjunction with an opt-in, offering someone who’s leaving your site a gift—an opt-in can be a good strategy. In terms of sending your emails, Marco ask, “What should I send?” Again, keep it simple. You can add to this. You will change this probably over time but the key is to send something on a regularly basis, that is useful and that is really where it needs to start. It’s going to be something that is going to give the people receiving your email a quick win and that maybe simply, “Here’s a link to the new post on my site this week.” That’s typically what we do with The ProBlogger email that we send out ProBlogger Plus. I send out a weekly email and it’s really a list of our new content. “Here’s our latest blog post, here’s our latest podcast, here’s my latest video, and here’s something to think about—I might include a quote or I might include some further reading or something else.” That is all I send. I send it on a weekly basis so that my readers get used to hearing from me and I try and make it useful. All of the contents we produce has an outcome, has a win for our audience. That is something you could do. The other option that I see some people doing is sending out just an extra piece of content in the email itself. You might want to try a few paragraphs, “Here’s something I’ve learned this week.” And that email in and of itself becomes useful. Of course, there are other ways of sending emails as well and we’re going to talk about some of those in the moment with autoresponders but Marco, can I really encourage you, get started. Just sign up for one of those. You can always change emails service providers later. You can take your email addresses and put them in a new one later. You don’t want to be changing that too much but it’s totally fine to start it with one and then as you grow up, as your list gets bigger, as you learn how to use email better you can always change later on. Again, just head out to problogger.com/members to grab that download. Lisa’s question. Lisa asked about opt-ins and ways of collecting email addresses which flows on nicely from Marco’s questions. She says, “Hi Darren, you recommend adding sign up forms to a blog sites, do you recommend it offering an incentive to sign up? I know people are inundated with emails how best to entrust them into their email box.” Asking here about incentivizing the signup and essentially here what you’re asking people to do is to give their email address in exchange for something. Opt-ins, I think can be really good. I was actually very light to doing opt-ins though because I was always a little bit worried with opt-ins that people are going to give you their email address just to get the thing and not for what comes next. I guess, discontinuation of why they signed up and what they’re going to get in the long term. It was something that I was probably a little awkward about. One of the things I would encourage you to think about when you’re creating your opt-in is to make that transition from the opt-in to the next emails as seamless as possible. What can you create as an opt-in that you can then do some follow up on that makes the benefits of the opt-in flow even longer? This actually will mean that people want to get the next emails as well. Don’t just think about the opt-in. Think about what you want to do with your lists in the long term and how an opt-in could be the first step in that sequence of emails that you might want to send. This is where Lisa’s question flows in nicely, in the moment and that is about continuing that relationship. You want to continue that relationship and you might send a weekly email like I’ve just mentioned to Marco but what other sequence of emails can you flow into that as well. Think about the opt-in in terms of the beginning of a journey, part of the process, and also think about ways that you can then update that opt-in as well. One of the best opt-ins that we’ve had at ProBlogger is one that you can see. If you go at problogger.com/ideas, you will get our landing page there for an opt-in we created with 180 blog post to ideas. The idea of that is that we wanted to give people a quick win, help you to come up with ideas for your blog, and we wanted to deliver them over time. We originally rolled that opt-in out as six emails over six months. That kept people subscribed and also showed them that we’ve got lots of content for you here and the emails that all flowed from the original opt-in as well. That is one thing that you might want to be factoring in to your decision. Opt-ins do work but they don’t work brilliantly if the opt-in doesn’t reply to what comes next so make it that flow. The other thing that I see people debate when it comes to opt-ins is how big to make them. Probably, 90% of people that I see teaching about opt-in say, “Deliver a quick win with your opt-in.” You want to give away something that people, if they take action on it will get a quick win within 10 minutes of receiving it. Our 180 blog post ideas that delivers that quick win, you sign up for our ideas and you get the first email within a minute or two and this 30 ideas for your blog. That’s a quick win. That was relatively easy to create that opt-in and that’s great. That maybe one topic of opt-in that you might want to do but I actually wonder whether that type of opt-in is going to work in the long run as much as it used to because so many people, offering this little free downloadable things. “Here’s a list of tools that you could use, here’s a list of ideas, here’s a list of…” and it becomes this little ebooks or this little PDFs. It’s so easy to create them and they do work to an extent but what impact do they actually have on your reader. Is there an opportunity to go a little bit deeper and to create something that is more useful to them because, let’s face it, we’ve all got probably, a hard drive full of things that we downloaded on the internet that we never actually really go back to and use. The thing that we’ve been trying on ProBlogger this year is to create an opt-in that is a lot bigger and a lot more useful, and that’s going to be life changing in some way. The opt-in that we created at the start of this year was our Start A Blog Course. If you have enrolled in our Start A Blog Course, you know it’s a chunky opt-in, it is huge. There’s a lot of content. It took us months of months, of months, of months to create and it goes against all of the advice that people say—deliver a quick win—but we have seen the people who signed up for that course have stayed with us as readers and as listeners. They are grateful to us, and they’re engaged, and it has shown us the power of creating something for free in exchange for an email address. All what we’re really getting out of that is an email address and maybe a little bit of affiliating come as well from some of the things we recommend. About in exchange for that email address we’re getting an engaged, thankful reader, subscriber who is taking action on the emails who is sending as well. That’s the other thing that you might want to consider doing as well. I would probably say, go for the quick opt-in first if you are just starting out at this. Think about that but having the long run, what you could add that is a bit bigger, that’s a little bit more powerful, that’s going to change someone’s life and make them really grateful for receiving the thing that you create for them. The other thing that we’ve been trying on ProBlogger is something I mentioned earlier on this podcast—that’s we’ve created a members area. Again, problogger.com/members. We’ve actually created six opt-ins that are all housed in that one place and you could also access the Start A Blog Course there as well. What we are doing is creating a login area on ProBlogger where we keep our opt-ins because we have now multiple opt-ins. We’ve got our 6 Months of Blog Post Ideas, we’ve got How to Create an Avatar for the reader of your blog, How to find readers for your blog? We’ve got a worksheet on that, and a variety of other ones including that comparison of an email service providers. We’ve got now this collection of them and we decided that we’re going to create a space where they all sit together, where people can log in and grab them and any future ones that we’re adding as well. In a sense, we created this little membership area as an opt-in as well and whilst we haven’t really promoted this in great detail yet, it’s something that will roll up more and more and we’ll begin to promote more. Particularly, using exit pop ups. That’s something that we want to do. We want to—as people leave ProBlogger—actually offer them the free membership and these free downloads. It is something that we’ll roll up more and more of but it’s something that I think, even in the limit of promotion that we’ve done of it can work quite well, that maybe something else that you might want to try as well. Let’s finish out with looking at Lia’s question. Lia asked, “We setup a top 10 tips PDF giveaway.” She’s created an opt-in. “And we setup ConvertKit. Can you give us some examples of good email sequences that we can setup?” Lia, I would highly recommend that you go on this into the episode that I mentioned earlier. It was episode 70 and that’s about 8 Ways to Use Autoresponders to Drive Traffic and Increase Your Blogging Income. That does outline eight different types of sequences of emails that you can send out. There’s a variety of things that mentioned there, let me just mention a few types of things that you might want to include in your sequence but really, I guess the big thing that I would encourage you to do is to think about where do you want to lead your readers to with the email sequence. Do you want to turn them from a subscriber into a customer? Do you want to turn them from subscriber into an attender of one of your event? Do you just want to use that sequence to get more eyeballs on your site because maybe you’re monetizing with advertising? Are you wanting them to buy an affiliate product? There’s a variety of things that you might wanting to do with your reader and it’s really important to understand what the goal is of having a subscriber. A lot of it will come down to the model that you have on your site. If you’re selling something, if you’re selling a service, if you’re selling an event, if you’re just trying to build your profile, if you’re trying to get people to buy book, whatever it might be. Nail that first. I think that’s the most important thing and then you can just design as sequence of emails that has the potential to take someone from being a first-time subscriber who doesn’t really know who you are—put yourself in their position. What is going to stop them from becoming what you want them to become. The other thing to consider of course is what benefit they are going to get from being a subscriber as well. It’s not just about how them—being a subscriber—is going to benefit you. Are they going to become a customer of you, give you your money but what are they going to get out of that list as well. Then designing content that has win-win undertakes your reader from a problem they have to a benefit that they receive but also taking them from cold subscriber to actually responding to the call to action that you’ve got as well. Think carefully about those two things and then I reckon even as you think about those two things you begin to see opportunities as well. A lot people in their emails, autoresponders will do things like send out extra exclusive contents. A sequence of case studies, or a sequence of tutorials that you can’t get on the blog, A sequence of emails that answer frequently asked questions that tackle pain-points or that tackle the gains that subscribers want. Extra exclusive content is one thing that you can potentially do there. The other thing that you might want to do is even think about putting together a little mini course. The email is actually form a course and that’s essentially how we used to run 31 Days to Build A Better Blog and that worked quite well. People are signing up for something that’s going to take them on a journey and in a sense that becomes the opt-in as well. Maybe that is after your top 10 tips PDF giveaway. Maybe you should follow that up with, “Here’s another 10 things tips that are relevant to you but we’re going to deliver them as 10 emails over the next 10 days or over the next 10 weeks.” You transition your readers from getting this free thing—the PDF—into an experience. We’re going to train you now. We’re going to take this further and may even be that you take those 10 tips from the PDF and go deeper into each of them in the next 10 emails. The PDF might become the blueprint and then the emails becomes the unpacking of the blueprint. There’s a variety of ways that you can do. What I was talking about earlier really is give them something that’s a quick win but also relate to the emails that follow after that. Other people will use their email sequences to highlight the best content in their archives. We do this from time to time on Digital Photography School. We have a little email sequence that once every month for two we send out an email automatically that just highlights his 10 portrait photography tips that you may have missed as a new subscriber to our site or his 10 landscape photography tips. Those emails are just about trying to get people over to our site. Other people will include calls to action in their email sequences. Calls to action to buy affiliate products, or to buy your products, or that offer gift codes, or something along those lines. Another really good thing to do early on your sequence is to survey your audience or at least ask a question. Ask some questions to your audience to find out who they are. I’ve mentioned on this podcast before, Caz and Craig make pages from their y Travel blog and their first email sequence asks their new subscriber what is your goal for travel? They’ve got a travel blog. What’s your dream and then what’s holding you back from your dream? And they actually ask their subscribers to hit reply on the email and answer those two questions. That opens up a conversation with their subscribers. It gives them insight into who is subscribing. What are their pain-points? What are their dreams? And then they follow up with an email sequence of answering the problems. They now having received hundreds, if not, thousands of emails back that most people have the same things holding them back from their dreams. They’ve created an email sequence that removes those pain-points or that gives tips on how to make the dreams come true. That might be another way that you can go about creating your auto responder as well. There’s a lot of different ways. Keep it simple though. This is the thing I was telling to Marco, Lia, and Lisa is try to keep what you do as simple as possible, particularly when you’re just starting out. You don’t have to have all the bells and whistles when you first start out. The key is to start. Start collecting the emails, optimize that way that you collect those emails once you’re setup, and then start emailing. It’s so important. People get stuck on each of those three points. Some people get stuck because they don’t sign up for an email provider, then they can’t do anything else. Some people get stuck because they don’t actually call people to subscribe. They’ve got the email provider set up but they’re not actually doing anything to get these subscribers. Some people get stuck because they never send any emails and they’re collecting new addresses every day and they never send an email out. On most people, they’re getting stuck in one of those three points and if you’re at those points I encourage you to take action today. Either sign up, get going with your email collection, optimize your collection of emails, and then start sending your emails. It’s just so important. I hope some of that has helped answer up Marco, Lisa, and Lia’s questions and others of you I know if someone’s asking those questions, other people will be as well. I hope they’ve helped. I would love to hear any other questions you’ve got on the topic of email or anything else over in our Facebook group. Just search for ProBlogger community on Facebook. You’ll find our group or you can hit reply on any of the emails that I send you each week from ProBlogger Plus and that will come back to me or one of my team and I consider those questions for future podcast as well. Lastly, hit over to problogger.com/members where you can grab those downloads and if you haven’t started a blog yet as well, check out The Start A Blog Course which will see the link as well once you’re signed in to the member’s area. Thanks for listening. Talk to you next week on The ProBlogger Podcast. Lastly, don’t forget you can grab today’s show notes at problogger.com/podcast/251 with our all the downloads mentioned today as well as all the further listening to other episodes about email. 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 to Create Killer Filler Content for Your Blog This week I’m sharing a list of content filler types you can use for your blog. And they don’t take a lot of effort or time to create. If you’re struggling to create thoughtful, original long-form content, these will help fill some of the gaps. Here’s how to create killer filler content and add value to both your blog and your readers. Reader Discussions: Ask a question to generate a debate/community workshop Polls: Increase reader engagement and start a good discussion with a question Homework/Challenges: Specify a topic, and give readers an assignment Link Posts: Link to another blog/article (or include a list of links) to build relationships and find out what others are thinking Best Of/Archive Posts: Post useful posts new readers have never seen Guest Posts/Regular Contributors: Include posts written by others, or find a regular writer to do a semi-regular post Embeddable Content: Use photos, cartoons, or go to YouTube; search keywords related to your blog topic, and find a high-value video that helps your readers Interviews: Find interesting experts, and ask them questions to help your readers Answer Question: Address questions from readers and beginners (but make the answers short and sweet) These posts are a little less labor intensive to create, but still serve a purpose for your readers. The key is to experiment. Which get positive reactions? Evolve them into something you can add on a regular basis to your blog. But remember, don’t publish ‘filler content’ just for the sake of posting. Quote of the Week: “If you treat every situation as a life-and-death matter, you’ll die a lot of times.” – Dean Smith Links and Resources for 9 Types of Killer Filler Content that are Easy to Create: Pat Flynn: AskPat podcast Further Listening Deadlines – Are They Good or Bad for Your Blogging? 6 Places to Find Writers to Hire for Your Blog How to Use Embedded Content on Your Blog Examples of 9 Types of Killer Filler Content that are Easy to Create Are You a Binge Photographer or a Snack Photographer? Help this Locationally Challenged Photographer Improve Her Portraiture What Mode Do You Shoot in Most? Photographer in the Picture 18 [+7] Great Photography Links from Around the Web One Year Ago on Lifehacker How to Create Impossible Images 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 Hello. It’s Darren from ProBlogger here. Welcome to episode 250. My name is 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 as a blogger to grow your blog, to build that audience, to create great content, and to build profit around your blog. You can learn more about what we do at problogger.com. In today’s episode, I want to suggest to you a list of types of content that you can use on your blog and potentially in other mediums as well that don’t take a massive amount of time to create. This episode does build upon what I talked about in the last episode– episode 249–where I was talking about deadlines, schedules, and editorial calendars. In that episode, we heard a question from a blogger who was finding it difficult to keep up with the schedule. That actually found having a deadline each week, having that schedule was limiting and they decided to slow down and only post when they had something to say, which I agreed with on some levels, but I did mention that there was a danger associated with that. One of the dangers is that you can slow down so much that you don’t publish anything at all. I suggested last episode that there might be some ways of creating content that don’t take a lot of effort, that still serve your readers, and keep the publishing of content ticking over. I jokingly call this kind of content, filler content. But it’s not really filler content because filler content does have this light and fluffy feeling to it. We want the content to be killer filler content. We want it to be relatively easy to create, but also adding value to your readers and to your blog. Today, I want to suggest nine types of killer filler content for your blog. Before I do, this is episode 250, which feels a little momentous. It’s a bit of a milestone, so I do want to pause for a moment and given the fact that I really didn’t know if this podcast was going to have more than 31 episodes, it’s a bit of a milestone. I’m kind of proud to get to this point, but I also really am very aware that it only has happened because of you. I did want to stop and thank you today as a listener. I just checked our stats. We’re approaching four million downloads. Probably, we will hit that in the next couple of months and that blows my mind. It’s been three years of creating content. The fact that almost four million people have tuned in at some point or another is fantastic. I’m really aware that a number like that sounds a lot, but what really strikes me is that, that represents a lot of people like you taking time out of their day every week to spend a little bit of time with me. I hear from a lot of you that you enjoy our weekly chats and that sometimes you hear things on this podcast that help you to grow your blog. That’s really exciting for me, so I just wanted to pause, take a moment today, and thank you for giving me the opportunity to hang out with you each week, and to contribute to your week and your blogging in some small way. I love these times, even though I don’t get to hear your voices, but I look forward to the chats that we have and I look forward to hearing the stories that come out of this as well. So, thank you. You can find today’s show notes, which will have a transcript of today’s show at problogger.com/podcast/250. Today’s topic—let’s get to that now—is how to create these killer filler content for your blog. I do want to really emphasize today that you probably should never really be publishing filler content. You don’t want to just post for the sake of posting. Every time you publishing something you have an opportunity to add value to your readers to build your brand in some way. I do want you to keep in the front of your mind that as I go through this list of types of filler content, that they can each be used in good ways, but also in bad ways. They can actually all be used in ways that can add value into the lives of your readers and build your brand, but they can also be used in bad ways. If you just get into a routine of publishing filler content that doesn’t add value, really what you’re doing is destroying your brand, frustrating your readers, and not really helping you to build anything, so keep that in the front of your mind. I should also say that I think this type of content that I’m going to share today, you could fill your whole blog up with this, but really, I want to share these ideas to go in between your other content–the deeper, more thoughtful, the original ideas that you have, I think the more of that kind of deeper, longer-form perhaps content, original thought that you can bring to your blog, the better. Really, what I’m describing today are things that can go around that and can add value to that in some ways as well. Let me go through these nine different types of content and then I’ll wrap it up at the end. Number one is something that we’ve been doing on digital photography school and ProBlogger, really since the beginning of both of those sites on a semi-regular basis. We don’t do this every week, we don’t even do it every month. But every month or two, we would do these types of post and it is the reader discussion. There’s a number of ways you could do this. One way is to issue your readers with a question that they can go away and discuss. The question on ProBlogger might be, “Tell us about the most successful way that you’ve driven traffic to your blog. It’s a nominated topic, it’s a nominated question, it opens a discussion, and that maybe all the content that you have. You may write just a paragraph asking the question and then throw it open to your audience. Another way you can do it is set up a debate. You might say, “Here’s two approaches–which one do you agree with?” In digital photography school, we have from time-to-time done debates like, “Zoom lenses versus prime lenses? Prime lenses are lenses that don’t zoom. Which one do you prefer?” We just open that up as a discussion and we know that there are fans of zoom lenses, there are fans of prime lenses, there are fans of people who like to do both, a discussion will open up as a result of that. This is where you open up a debate or you give two alternatives. Another thing that you can do is to ask people to share their stories. You might ask them to share examples of something that you’ve written about previously. You may have written a post, your longer, more thoughtful post earlier in the week. You might publish one on Monday and it might be on that topic of zoom versus prime lenses. You talk about the pros and cons and then on Wednesday you might do a follow-up post that opens up the discussion. You link from one to the others. This, we find, works quite well on digital photography school where we have a tutorial and then we have a discussion. Whilst we could do those two things into one post and sometimes that works, what we find is that we get more comments if we do a separate post later in the week that links to the first, because people have had time to digest that tutorial that we have already published and then I can have a discussion about it later. It also give us a second chance to promote the original content that we published earlier in the week. Discussion posts can be really good. The other bonus about having a discussion post is that you get inspired, you get questions, you get ideas from the discussion that you could then write about later. I quite often find our discussion posts stimulate an idea for me for a follow-up post, which again gives you an opportunity to link back to that discussion, creates more page views on your blog, and it highlights the fact that you got discussion on your blog. Discussions can be great for that. The only thing that you really want to pay attention to is making sure that discussion is relevant to your overall topic of your blog. Number one, discussions. Number two is similar in some ways and that is where you could run a poll. It’s so easy to run a poll on your blog. There are plenty of tools around. There’s lots of WordPress plugins if you’re a WordPress user. There are other poll tools around that allow you to embed polls onto your blog. This again gives you the opportunity to ask your readers a question, and then you can see the results of that. They don’t even have to leave a comment to respond to that. This is something that we used to do every week on digital photography school. We certainly slowed down on the amount of polls that we do these days, but one of the bonuses of doing polls is that they actually give you a result as well. You can do a follow-up post about the result of the poll. Typically what we do is ask a question of our readers of this or that type question or give them three or four alternatives, and then, a week or two later we would look at the results of that and we would write a post sharing the results. Drawing people’s attention back to that poll, we create a chart, show them the results, talk about why maybe the results happened and maybe give them some further reading as well. This idea of taking the results of the poll or taking the discussion that’s already had and creating new content about that is how this content creates even more content for you and I love that. A reader discussion, for example. You could take some quotes from your readers and then put them into a new blog post later on, again adding some of your own thoughts which your readers will love because you’re featuring their ideas in your main content. Number one was reader discussions. Number two was polls. Number three is something that we still do every week on digital photography school and we do it from time-to-time on ProBlogger, and that is to give your readers a little bit of homework or a challenge to do. This is one of the most popular posts that we do on digital photography school every week. My editor will name a theme or a topic and then our readers go away and take a photo on that theme before coming back and sharing the image that they take in the comments of our blog. This, we call it our weekly challenge, it’s a little assignment. Some of our readers, actually the whole week revolves around this challenge. We typically will write a tutorial on the topic of the challenge. We might write a tutorial on shooting with long shutter speeds and then we might have a discussion later in the week on that topic, then later in the week again we give our readers a challenge to take a photo with a long shutter speed. The beauty of this—I’ve talked about this in the past—is that we’re giving our readers information in the tutorial, and then we are giving them an opportunity to discuss, to have some interaction with that topic, and then we give them an invitation to actually implement what they’re learning, get them out and applying the information that they’ve learned. This information, the interaction, and getting them to do something with it not only gives us three pieces content in a week instead of one. It actually challenges our readers to do what we’re teaching them. So, if you have a how-to blog, this is a great little model that you could very easily implement into your blog, that takes you posting from once a week to three times a week very, very easily. Homework challenge is the third type. The fourth type is something that we used to do all the time on blogs back in the day. The link post was so popular. A few years back, this was what everyone did on their blogs, almost every post. I actually looked back on my very first blog recently. I looked up on the Wayback Machine and I was amazed that always every post I wrote out of the first few months was me linking to something else and then making comment about that. I would link to a blog post that I’d read and then I would add my thoughts. I would talk about what I agreed with, what I disagreed with, and tell my readers why they should read that link, that was almost every post I did. It’s the kind of thing that we do today on social media, but why not go back to that and do that on your blog from time to time? It’s relatively easy to create that type of content. There’s a number of ways that a link post you might put it together. One, as I just described, you linking to another blog or an article and then adding a few of your own thoughts to it. I think it is important that you add something original to it, that you give your readers a little bit of context as to why you are linking to that post. The other way that you can do is to create a series of links. It’s almost like a compilation of things to read for your readers. We used to do this even a year or two ago on ProBlogger once a week. Our editor at the time, Stacy, would put together I think about six or seven links from around the web that she’d found interesting that have been published over the last week. We might link to Social Media Examiner, to Moz, and other blogs like Copyblogger who had published new things over the last that we found interesting. Stacy would pull together those links into a list and then she would write a short paragraph, a few sentences about each one. It took a little bit of work to do, but it wasn’t her having to come up with lots of ideas and it was a much easier piece of content to create each week. The other way you could do it is instead of publishing a list of new content that you’d found over the last week, you could choose seven links that all relate to a particular topic. You might do a bit of a search around for a topic that you cover on your blog that gives seven other people’s opinions on the topic. You might have a short quote from each those and then link for further reading. These types of content might sound a little bit lighter than some of the stuff that you do, but what I found is that our readers really love these types of content because it gets other people’s voices onto your blog, other ideas onto your blog. It can add in some really interesting ideas into your content as well. They’re also really good at building relationships with other people on the web in your niche as well. When you are linking to other people, you’ll find from time to time that they will notice those links and they might even reach out to you as well. Sometimes, actually share that content. We had a post on digital photography school a few years ago, which was 18 Great Photography Links From Around The Web. It was just 18 links that I’d found that week. That post went viral. It was just a list of links with a sentence or two about each one and it got hundreds of thousands of views that particular week. These types of posts can do quite well. They also keep you in touch with what other people are writing about, and thinking and learning in your niche, which can be good for you and can stimulate further ideas for you to create content. You can see a theme here. Most of these things not only adds some new content onto your blog. They not only serve your readers in a new way, but they can actually inspire you if you’ve got a bit of writer’s block or if you are searching for things to write about, struggling to come up with new ideas, that can sometimes stimulate that. A fifth type of killer filler content that you can create is similar to the link post in some ways, but this is where you create a link post of content in your own archives. This is going to be particularly useful for any of you who have been blogging for a year, or two, or three and you’ve probably got those archives that most of your readers do not know about because they’re new readers and they haven’t seen the old content in your archives, or maybe they’ve forgotten about it. If you got evergreen content in your archives, it is useful every now and again to bring it to the attention of your readers. A post that you might do from time to time is a ‘best of’ post. “Here is the best post from our category on digital photography school.” It might be our portraits category or “Here’s five articles that you may not have read from our landscapes category.” Actually resurfacing that content, highlighting it again. Now you wouldn’t want to do this every single post, but once a month you might add this into your content schedule. There’s a blog called Lifehacker that I used to read a lot. I assume it’s still around today. I don’t read it so much anymore. They used to do this post which, once a week, they would do a post, ‘One year ago on Lifehacker.’ It was basically them looking at what they published one year ago and then relinking to anything that was still relevant today. It became this weekly thing that people looked forward to. It enabled them to explore the recent history of the archives of that post. That’s the fifth type of killer filler content. Number six is guest post or other regular contributors. I’m not going to talk in great deal about this because just a couple of episodes ago in episode 248, I talked about how to find new writers for your blog and we touched on this again. Obviously, one way to create content for your blog that doesn’t take you a lot of work is to have someone else write it for you, either as guest or as a hired writer. Now, I do need to emphasize that this does still take some work because you need to have some editorial control over that. You want to proofread it, you want to make sure that it is written with sound advice and it fits with the overall ethos of your blog, but I think it is one way to lighten the load because you don’t have to come up with the idea for that content. You don’t have to come up with the original thought for that. You just need to put on your editor hat to make sure it is of a high-enough quality. That’s the sixth way of creating some extra content on your blog. Number seven is embeddable content. I hinted at this one last week’s episode because it’s something that I still do to this day. On digital photography school, we have one post every week that is us highlight and embedding a video that we found on YouTube that someone else has created on the topic of photography and a different aspect of photography. Our editor does a bit of a search on YouTube to find the best video on a topic that she wants to cover, then she writes a paragraph or two introducing that topic, talking about it from her perspective, linking to anything we’ve written on that topic before, and then she embeds that YouTube video into the post. These posts do really well. Sometimes actually, some of the best posts that we do in terms of traffic, which feels a bit awkward in some ways because we didn’t create the bulk of the content, but our readers love them. We don’t normally do video. They allow us to create content on topics that maybe a fringy topic that we don’t have expertise in. They also build relationships with the video creators as well. The video creators get views out of these. They are able to monetize those views if they’re running ads on their site. They help to build their profile. We get a lot of video creators actually pitching us and saying, “Hey, why don’t you feature our video?” They’re actually bringing value to our readers, they’re bringing value to the video creators, but also, they’re bringing value to our site as well because they’re adding a different voice and different expertise into the site. It’s so easy to do. Head over to YouTube and just do a search for keywords relating to your topic. Make sure the videos are relevant, that they’re high quality, that they add something to your blog that they’re going to benefit your readers in some way, then embed that into a post. Add some of your own thoughts around it, of course, link to anything that is relevant to that so you might get the second page view in some way, and this can do very well on your blog. We do this every week. We do one post a week in our schedule using curated content. Now of course, videos are just one type of thing that you can embed on to your site. Embeddable content comes in so many different forms. Back in episode 152, I did a whole episode on the topic of ‘finding embeddable content to use on your site.’ You can use SlideShares, other people’s slide presentations. You can embed those onto your site. You’d be amazed on SlideShare the topics that are covered. You can do almost any social media update that you can find, yours or other people’s. You can embed someone’s tweets, their Facebook post, their Facebook videos, the live videos that they’ve done. Pinterest bookmarks, Instagram, you can take all of that content and use it on your blog within the terms and conditions of those social networks. You can embed audio files. I think, the site Anchor still allows you to do that. You can go to sites like Andertoons and embed cartoons. Videos of other people’s livestreams from Facebook or Periscope. Photos from sites like 500px and Flickr–animated GIFs, infographics–there are sites around that allow you to embed content onto your blog. There’s an amazing amount of great content on the web that people want you to share on your blog. You don’t get into trouble with copyright around this because they actually have enabled embedding of their content onto your site. This maybe one thing you can do on your blog, you might want to do it every now and again. You may actually want to link this up with the link post that you do so you might want to share a couple of links each week, maybe YouTube video that you found, maybe a few tweets or other social media updates and that could become a curated piece of content that you feature on your blog. Again, you’ll find that these sparks ideas for your own writing and content creation as well. It could also be a good follow-up piece of content if you’ve written an article early in the week, you might then find someone else’s perspective on YouTube on that particular topic as well. Number eight type of killer filler content is interviews. This one does take a little bit more work than some of the other ideas that I’ve listed, but interviewing someone in your niche can be a great way of creating content without a ton of work. The hardest part is finding someone with expertise in your area who’s got the time to be interviewed and then constructing some questions that are going to be interesting enough to put to them and also your readers. Again, this can be done in a variety of ways. You might choose to do an audio recording of an interview. You might want to do a Skype call where you record that audio or even the video as well, or you might want to send the questions via email as well and then take the written answers and put them into a blog post as well. Again, it takes some work to do this. It takes a little while to get used to it, but it’s the type of content that your readers love. On this podcast, some of the most popular episodes I’ve ever done have been interviews. Again, they mean that I don’t have to come up with the ideas for the show. I just have to come up with the questions to ask, which is a skill in and of itself, but it uses a different part of my brain. I find it refreshing to switch into an interview every now and again. The last type of killer filler content that I want to add into today’s show is I guess a flip side of an interview. It is you asking yourself a question or letting your readers ask you a question, then creating some content around that. Actually, answering a question that a reader might have or that someone who’s a beginner in your topic might have. I’m aware that some of you may not have enough readers to be getting questions in yet, but you certainly would be able to answer some questions that your potential reader might have coming up with those questions for yourself. Pat Flynn has built a whole podcast around this with his AskPat Podcast. If you’re not familiar with it, he—until recently, I think it was late last year, he posted five podcasts a week answering a reader question. His podcast were very short. They were four or five minutes, some of them, as much as maybe 10 minutes at the most. He kept his answers short and sweet. The expectation with his listeners was that they weren’t long episodes, and then he would take a question and answer it off the top of his head on the fly. You could do that as a podcast. You could also do that as a live video, taking questions and answers. You could do it as a recorded video or you could it as a blog post as well. In fact, I did this a few years ago on ProBlogger. I think I was going away for a week and I was like, “Oh, what am I going to publish while I’m away?” What I did was wrote a post saying, “Hey, if you’ve got any question for me, I want to answer them.” I took those questions and I limited myself to 10 minutes to answer the question. I wrote that in the introduction of the post, these are quickfire questions and answers, and I’m going to limit myself. These are short posts. My readers again weren’t expecting lots of deep analysis in the answers. Just was just me answering the question, limiting myself to 10 minutes. That went across really well. Our readers really enjoyed them because they were short posts. They didn’t have to spend 15 minutes reading the content. I have to link to further reading in them as well, which drove people deeper into the site. Again, it’s a relatively easy thing to do. It does take some effort, but it’s less effort than writing a really long article every week. Now, I’m aware that with these nine types of killer filler content, that I’m scratching the surface. Other ideas have are already being coming as I’ve been talking to you today. The key is to experiment, to test what types of posts get positive reactions from your readers, what types of posts are actually easy for you. You might actually find some of these quite difficult because your brain is wired a different way to mine. The other thing I’ll say is that these types of posts, sometimes the first time you do it, they take a little bit of effort, but over time they become easier to do, and you might find it become very quick for you to do. The other thing I wanted to add in is that it’s really the combination of these types of posts in combination with your longer, more thoughtful content that you do as well that really matters. I encourage you to think about the flow of your content. I’ve mentioned a few times here that you can use this type of content in conjunction with your other content on your blog. Let me give you an example of what a week of content using this kind of flow might look like. On a Monday you might publish your main piece of content for the week. This might be a longer, more thoughtful article that you’ve written on a topic, it might be a how-to piece of content, something that might be three or four thousand words. It’s the main piece of content for the week. That’s Monday. Tuesday, you might do an embeddable piece of content that is on the same topic. “Here’s a video of someone else exploring this same topic.” They’ve got some different perspectives. Maybe they’ve got the opposite perspective, maybe they got the same perspective, so you’ve got an embeddable piece of content. Tuesday is the embeddable. Wednesday might be your reader discussion. This is where you open it up to your readers. “What do you think about this? Now, you’ve seen my opinion, you’ve have seen someone else’s. What do you think about this? Where do you stand with this topic?” You come up with a question that builds upon that in some way. That was Wednesday. Thursday might be your challenge post. This is where you challenge your readers to get out there and to do something that you’ve taught them to do earlier in the week. Friday might be an interview. Maybe it relates to the topic again of the week or maybe it’s something else completely. Saturday might be a link roundup. Again, you could tie that into the theme of the week. All of these posts could be related or you could just mix it up and just do other links that you found. Sunday might be a day off or you might choose to do a quick answer of a reader. Maybe it’s a question that’s come up during the week that you then do an answer of. Now that’s seven pieces of content, with one longer, thoughtful piece of content and then all of the others are centered around that. It brings other perspectives into your site, it gets your readers engaged in your topic, it gets your readers taking action on the thing that you taught them that week. Hopefully, somewhere in the midst of that is something that’s going to help you to create maybe a little bit more content while you give yourself space to write some of these longer form content as well. I should really say that seven posts a week is possibly too much. I just gave you that example as how you could do it if you did want to do daily posting, but you may choose to do that same rhythm over a month or over a couple of weeks, still taking out content every three or four days along that kind of a structure. I hope that somewhere in the midst of that is something of value to you. I’d love to hear if anything has sparked as a result of the ideas that I’ve shared today. Maybe there’s a new topic content you want to have a play around it. Just because you do it once doesn’t mean you have to do it forever. Just throw it into the mix. See what happens for you and your energy, but also see what happens with your readers. You might just find something new that you could repeat into the future. This week’s quote of the week comes from Dean Smith who said, “If you treat every situation as a life-and-death matter, you’ll die a lot of times.” I guess my thought on this quote today is we do give a lot of thought to these things and we stew over, should I publish daily? Or should I publish five times a week? Or should I publish this type of content? Or should I publish that type of content? I do think it’s important to give consideration to this. It is important to your blog, but it’s not a life-or-death matter. Be a little bit playful with it, mix it up, try new things, and see what happens. The worst thing that can happen is the post might fall flat. It may not hit the mark and that can be just a hint that you don’t do that again and then you can move on to try something else. Hope that fits with you. You can find today’s show notes at problogger.com/podcast/250 where I will include a little bit of further listening for you of some of the podcast episodes that I have mentioned today. Thanks so much for listening, helping us to get to 250 episodes. It means a lot to me that you’ve been with us this long. If you have a moment I would love to get your reviews of this podcast on iTunes or wherever else you listen to this podcast. It means a lot to me to read those. I get an email every week letting me know when people have left a review. Thanks so much to those of you who have, and if you’ve got a moment to leave a review and a rating, that helps me a lot. Thanks for listening. I’ll chat with you next week on the ProBlogger Podcast. 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 have been editing all of our podcasts for some time now. Podcast motor has a great range of services for podcasters at all levels, making help you to set up your podcast, but also 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.

Do Schedules and Deadlines Help or Hurt Your Blogging? Have you ever missed a deadline? Do you have a content schedule or editorial calendar for your blog? Yes, today’s episode is all about schedules and deadlines. Whether you follow a daily, weekly or monthly schedule, does it allow you to produce the best content? What if you can’t come up with something good enough to publish? I don’t have a schedule at all because it seems to be too limiting. I won’t publish anything unless I have something that’s worthwhile. Am I doing the right thing? Or am I overthinking and over-worrying? Will my readers even care? Do they pay that much attention to what I do? No rules exist, but here are some lessons I’ve learned from blogging: Quality beats quantity: If the quality of your blog content is suffering, it won’t lead to long-term, sustained growth. Quantity is still important: Don’t slow down so much that you hardly post anything; if you feel everything you write is second rate, that perfectionism will stop you from producing quality content. Deadlines can help or hinder. They can be incredibly motivating for some bloggers, who do their best work under pressure. But for others, schedules and deadlines are crippling. Panic sets in, and stifles creativity. Then there are those who would never have completed high school or kept a job if there weren’t any deadlines. So deadlines can be your friend or your enemy. Deadlines aren’t the be all and end all. Missing one can be a good thing: If your content isn’t great, you don’t have to publish it. If your planned schedule is causing anxiety, you don’t have to stick to it. It”s okay to change your schedule. It’s okay to stop publishing new content for a while to focus on other parts of your blog (or just to have a break). Whether you love them or hate them, deadlines and schedules are a part of most people’s lives. Strive for timely goals that produce quality content for your blog. Quote of the Day: “Working hard is not a waste of time, but a state of mind. Keep pushing your limits until you reach the edge. Then be kind and rewind.” ― Ana Claudia Antunes Links and Resources for Deadlines – Are They Good or Bad for Your Blogging: AdSense Further Listening How to Use Embedded Content On 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 Welcome to episode 249 of the ProBlogger Podcast. My name is Darren Rowse and I’m the blogger behind ProBlogger, a blog, podcast, event, job board, series of ebooks, and courses designed to help you to grow a profitable blog. You can learn more about what we do at ProBlogger at problogger.com. In today’s episode, I want to talk about schedules and deadlines. I want to talk about keeping your content coming out on a regular basis, and if having a schedule or a deadline or an editorial calendar is actually a good thing or not, because this week I had a question coming from someone who is really struggling with having a deadline. They’re actually finding the deadline, maybe, actually holding them back in some way. I want to give some advice around that. Particularly for those of you who do struggle with deadlines. I know some of you love a deadline, others of you struggle with deadlines. We’re going to explore that a little bit today. You can learn more about today’s show and get a full transcript of it and comment on today’s show in our show notes at problogger.com/podcast/249. This week I had a question that came in from Betty. It actually really coincides with another thread that I saw on Reddit this week as well, and I left a comment for it. Hearing the same question twice made me think there’s probably other people who struggle with this as well. I want to read Betty’s question. It does come around this idea of scheduling contents, editorial calendars, deadlines, and then I’ll get into some advice for her and for the rest of us who do struggle with this as well. This is what Betty asked. She said, “I see a lot of advice about the importance of having a content schedule or an editorial calendar, which nominates the frequency that you’ll publish at. I tried a daily schedule, then a twice a weekly schedule, then more recently, a weekly schedule. But what happens when your schedule doesn’t  allow you to produce your best content? What if you can’t come up with something good enough to publish within the time of the schedule? I recently decided to scrap having a schedule as it seems to be limiting me. I told my readers, I won’t be publishing anymore unless I have something good enough to publish. But I wonder if I’m doing the right thing or am I overthinking and over worrying this whole thing? Will my readers really care? Do they pay that much attention to what I do anyway?” Great question, Betty. It is something that I’ve heard a number of times this week and I know people do struggle with this as well. You’re right. The common advice does seem to be that you should be publishing on a regular basis. This is what something I’ve taught in the past, and I’ve talked about the benefits of publishing regularly, benefitting you as a writer to getting into the flow of writing content. It benefits your readers because your readers begin to expect content coming out at certain times. There’s definitely some benefits of having a schedule, but what happens if the schedule seems to be limiting you? Sometimes the pressure of the schedule can actually seem to inhibit some certain types of people. I want to talk a little bit about that today. There’s certainly no rules here about having to publish it at certain times, but as I look back over the last 16 years of my blogging, I guess I’ve learned a few things. I want to kind of share them and I hope that somewhere in the midst of my rambling advice today will be the answer for you, Betty and for others. The first thing I want to say is quality definitely beats quantity everytime. Ultimately, your blogs are only going to regular readers—it’s only going to attract word of mouth sharing of what you do from one person to another if the quality is of a high level. If your quality is suffering because you’re trying to pump out too much content, then it’s going to really hurt the potential growth and the sustained growth of your blog and the brand of your blog, as well. That’s the first thing I want to say. I think you on some levels have made a really good decision by saying that you are not going to compromise the quality of your blog to pump out more content. I think making that decision to only publish when you’ve got something good of a high standard is a good thing. I want to congratulate you for that, but there are some costs of doing that as well. I want to say good on you, but here’s some things to keep in mind as you do that. Quantity is definitely still important. Quality trumps quantity but quantity is still important. It’s particularly important for some models of blog and if you want to monetize your blog, it’s definitely important for some of the models of monetization. As I’ve said many times on this podcast in the past, every time you publish a piece of content, it’s a doorway into your blog. It’s a potential entry point into your blog. The more content you are able to produce, the more potential doorways you have into your blog which means more potential sources of traffic coming in from search engines, from social media, from links from other blogs. If you are not producing much content, you have less doorways. You still can get a lot of traffic by not having much content, but more content can be of a benefit there as well. Whilst my first point of quality over quantity is definitely one to keep in mind. When you slow down the production of your content, you are slowing down the creation of new entry points into your blog and that can come at a cost. I spoke with one blogger last week who was grappling with this very thing. They felt like everything that they wanted to say in their blog had already been said before either by themselves or someone else and they began to doubt every time they came up with a topic to write about that would doubt that it was a good enough thing, and when they were writing now, they were second-guessing themselves. They’re beginning to say, “Is this good enough? Is this standing out from what other people is saying? Is this standing out from what I’ve already said before?” They had this doubt that loomed over every piece of content that they created. They got to a point where in some ways, perfectionism had actually stopped them from creating great quality content because of this doubt that just sort of hung over everything. They got to the point where they realized that they weren’t producing anything. Their content productions slowed down so much that they almost didn’t ever produce anything at all. When they did, they still doubted the quality of that. In effect of what they did is they stopped creating new doorways into their blog, which limited the chance of them being on the end of search engine, search results, social media shares, links from other blogs, which in terms of building traffic to your blog isn’t a great strategy. Quality does trump quantity, but if you don’t produce any content, then you’re really limiting yourself particularly if you have a model on your blog and monetization model that relies heavily upon lots of traffic. I’m particularly thinking if you’re trying to monetize with advertising, particularly ad networks which do rely on a lot of traffic. If you’re monetizing with AdSense, the more traffic, the more page you use, the better in that case. You do need to produce a lot of content. The blogs that I know that are making a full-time kind of level of income using AdSense are generating a lots of content—daily content, multiple pieces of content per day. But if you’re monetizing in other ways, you don’t need as much traffic. You are more interested in a high engagement level—a high level of trust with your audience. In that case, less content can actually be more because the high quality pieces of content. Those few pieces of content that you produced every week, every month, or every year, they can build so much trust with your audience that you can monetize that in other ways. The answer to this question will depend a little bit upon the goals of your blog as well. Quality trumps quantity, but quantity still matters particularly if you’re monetizing in a way that leads lots of traffic. I wanted to shift gears a little bit now and talk a little bit about the idea of schedules and deadlines. Exploring a little bit, do deadlines help or hinder? I think the answer is yes to that. They do help and they do hinder depending on who you are and probably the stage of your blog, as well. Having a deadline can actually be incredibly motivating. Some bloggers actually do their best work because they’ve got a deadline. I’ve got a journalist friend and I can think about the blogger friends who fit into a similar category, but my journalist friend tells me that if it wasn’t for deadlines from her editor, she would not have won some of the awards that she’s received from her work. She told me about an article that she’d written that had won a national award here in Australia. It was only written because she had a deadline. She procrastinated on this piece of work for a long time, but the editor gave her a really hard deadline and there were consequences if she didn’t meet that deadline.  That looming deadline gave her a rush of adrenaline and panic that sparked her creative engine. It helped her to produce a very high quality piece of content. The deadline triggered a healthy and productive panic. She told me she doesn’t like deadlines,but she knows that they’re good for her. She produced her best work as a result of that. Over the last few weeks, I’ve been giving you a quote of the week. I want to give you a couple of quotes today and I’ll do them in the midst of this episode. One of the quotes that I like for this is from Thomas Carlyle who said, “No pressure, no diamonds.” There’s a sense that if you want to create a diamond, you need to create pressure. I don’t really know the science behind it, but diamonds are created out of pressure. This is the case for my journalist friend. She produces her diamond pieces of content because of the pressure of the deadline. I found another quote, Stephanie Pearl-McPhee said, “I am a person who works well under pressure. In fact, I work so well under pressure that at times, I will procrastinate in order to create that pressure.” I shared that on Twitter yesterday and a lot of people related to that. There is a sense that for some people, they need a deadline. They need this moment where there will be consequence if they don’t meet the deadline and that in itself can create a productive panic that helps them. That is one type of person I’m talking about, and some of you go, “Yeah, that’s me! I work at my best with a deadline.” For others, the deadline is actually a crippling thing. This is the sense I get from Betty, is that maybe the deadline is actually the problem here. I know for some people that is where the problem actually comes. For some people, the pressure of the deadline actually gives  a different kind of panic—a panic that paralyzes people altogether. It becomes a destructive thing. The panic clouds their mind and can stifle their creativity. I know as I’m talking about this, some of you are feeling that way. Some of you are going, “It’s destructive for me to have that deadline.” One of the things, I guess I want to say, as I’m talking about deadlines, I want you to ponder which one of those two types of people are you? Because if you are that second type of person, maybe a deadline, maybe an editorial calendar, maybe a schedule, isn’t the right thing for you. Now, I want to also say this. There’s probably a third group of people as well and that group of people is probably one who can relate to both—that’s me. I can actually relate to both of those reactions to deadlines. There have been periods for me where deadlines have been my friend. If it wasn’t for deadlines, if it wasn’t for my editorial calendar, then I wouldn’t have produced the amount of content that I’ve produced over the years. If it wasn’t for a deadline, I would not be creating this episode right now. I know that on Monday night next week, this podcast has to go live. It’s my deadline. Once it doesn’t have to go live, it’s just the schedule that I’ve set myself. As a result of that, yesterday, I started thinking about what am I going to talk about today? I prepared this podcast and now I’m delivering it. If it wasn’t  for the deadline, I probably wouldn’t get this podcast out on time. A deadline is my friend right now in this moment. I don’t like the feeling of a deadline, but I know it is helpful for me. I think most people can relate to that, but I know there are also other times where deadlines have almost been crippling for me, as well. I can relate to another person who many of you would know, George R.R. Martin, who wrote Game of Thrones. This is what he said about deadlines, he said, “I’ve never been good with deadlines. My early novels, I wrote by myself. No one knew I was writing a novel; I didn’t even have a contract.” There’s a sense of freedom, I guess, in not having a deadline for him to just create. I know more recent times with deadlines looming for him, he has struggled to write the latest episode or the latest volume of Game of Thrones. I can relate to that. I can think of times over the last few years for me that deadlines have led me to panic in a way that wasn’t helpful. The deadline itself became the focus, and I was destructive. As a result of that, I ended up either publishing content that I wasn’t happy with—content that wasn’t at the highest standard that it could be or it’s led to stress and anxiety within me. With all of that in mind, I guess my advice on having a deadline, a schedule, or an editorial calendar is to use them if they work for you, but to be aware of how you’re reacting to them as well. I think most of us, probably 95% of us can benefit from having a schedule, can benefit from having deadlines, but there will probably be times for all of us where we need to almost relax a little and allow ourselves to either miss the schedule, miss the deadline, or to even have a period of time where we don’t have one at all. Just be aware that the deadline, the editorial calendar, is not the be all and end all. There are times where missing a schedule is actually a good thing. If your content isn’t up to scratch, if it’s not high enough quality, you don’t have to publish it. You can go a week without that. If your planned schedule is causing you anxiety, you don’t have to stick to it. If it’s actually causing you stress that’s coming out in different areas of your life, in your family life, in your relationships, in the other work that you do, it’s okay to pull back a little bit. It’s totally okay to change your schedule and find a new rhythm over the period of your blog, as well. I’ve talked about how on ProBlogger we’ve changed our publishing schedule many times over the years. Sometimes, we’ve communicated that to our audiences, sometimes, we haven’t. It’s totally okay to stop publishing new content for a period of time and to focus upon other parts of your blog, as well. Or just to have a complete break, as well. There are no rules. I think we need to be kind to ourselves. We need to lighten up a little bit sometimes because we create these expectations. We create our schedule for good reasons, but when it actually begins to hurt more than it’s good, that’s when we need to reassess those things. I want to also just pick up on Betty’s question there about, “Does anyone even pay that much attention to what we do anyway?” I like that question. I like Betty actually saying that because I suspect as bloggers, we think about our audience, their reaction to us way more than they do. I’ve said this before on the podcast as well, most of your audience doesn’t even notice the times that you publish content varying from week to week. I know on ProBlogger, for example, there is a small percentage of you who know exactly when we publish content. You know we publish content on the podcast on Mondays. I’ve talked about that, I’ve told you that’s when we do it. I know some of you know we send our emails on Thursdays or Fridays, depending on where you are in the world. Some of you have noticed that, but I suspect it’s probably 1%—1% of our audience really knows when we are light with a message or when we miss a piece of content. But the vast majority of our audience has no idea. It doesn’t impact their life at all. Again, take a little bit of pressure off yourself. It’s good to have the editorial calendar. It’s good because it helps you—if it helps you—to create content on a regular basis. Some of your audience, it’s good for them as well. But most people, it doesn’t really matter that much. I guess the other factor is even though there’s people who do notice that you’ve missed a post, so what? Nobody’s paying for your content. It’s not like you’re a newspaper where people are paying for a subscription. If you missed a piece of content—that free content that you write for them, it doesn’t really matter in this game of life as well. The last thing I want to say is another way of reframing of thinking about these schedules or these editorial calendars, sometimes a different way of thinking about it is to think about your schedule or your editorial calendar not as something that is a must, but more as something that is a goal—something to aim for. This is something I would say to Betty. I would encourage you to not completely abandon the schedule, but maybe to set yourself an internal goal. You have told your audience, you are not going to publish to a schedule and maybe they were expecting you to publish at certain times. You don’t need to tell people what your internal goal is. Your internal goal maybe, “I need to publish a piece of content once a month.” It doesn’t matter what day of the month. It doesn’t have to be the first Tuesday of every month or every Friday afternoon, but you can still have that expectation within yourself that you aim for. One of the things I would encourage you to think about is just to keep that content ticking over, to have some kind of a goal in mind. It doesn’t have to be a public goal. It doesn’t have to be that you announce to your audience that you’ll publish on certain times. But have an internal goal. I do worry slightly that if you have no schedule, if you have no expectation, if you have no goal, that maybe your content creation may slow down completely. Maybe that’s a halfway point of having some sort of an internal goal that’s not public. That last thing I want to say is that maybe there’s some other kinds of content that you can add into your mix that take a little bit of pressure off when you’re creating a content. I don’t know what Betty’s blog is. I don’t know the kind of content that she’s struggling to create at this schedule, but I suspect that written content—original content, original ideas, maybe some teaching content, these type of content—do take some energy, do take a fair bit of thought, and time to create. The other thing that maybe worth adding into the schedule of content that you create is content that is a little bit less pressure to create, maybe some easier content to create. Now, I’m going to do a whole episode on this type of content next week. I think there’s 10 or so different types of content that you can throw into the mix of your content that doesn’t take a lot of energy to create but still is of high value to your audience. I will go through some of that next week, but I’ll give you one example of that. This is something I’ve talked about back in episode 152 of this podcast, and that is curated embeddable content. Now, I know most bloggers are writing their own content. Most bloggers are coming out with their own ideas and presenting it. One thing that you can do to serve your audience is to find ideas from other people and to showcase them on your blog. One very easy way to do that is to find the embeddable content that you can embed into your content on your blog and add a few of your ideas to it. Episode 152 goes into this in much more depth, but a very easy example of this is to go to YouTube and do to a search for your topic and find a video that someone else has created on that particular topic that you think is of high value that is high quality and take the embeddable code and put it into a blog post of yours. What I would recommend you do is to create some content around that, an introduction to it, “This is why I like this video, this is where I found it,” curate at the source, actually talk about the person who’s written it, and maybe some concluding thoughts as well, what you would add to that. We do this every week on digital photography school. We have one post every week which we have put aside in our schedule to do an embeddable piece of content that we have curated in some way. It’s almost always a YouTube clip. In some ways, the reason we did that was to have a piece of content go up on the weekend that didn’t need a lot of time and energy to create, but what we actually found is that post every week, actually sometimes it’s the most popular post on our site, it does create a piece of content that our readers love. They love the fact that we’ve gone to an effort to find this content. They add a new voice into the site that wouldn’t have been there otherwise. It actually builds a relationship with the person who created that video, the people who we feature love the fact that we are getting more views of their videos and more subscribers to their YouTube channels as well. There’s a win-win-win there, really. It’s a win for us because it’s an easy piece of content to create that brings us traffic. It’s a win for our audience because it’s on topic, it’s relevant, it’s useful content, and it’s a win for the content creator, as well. Maybe there’s a way to create some easier content for your blog that will take a little bit of pressure off yourself to always to be coming up with the idea of your own. It still serves your audience, it still serves your blog, and it also serves the content creator as well. Next week’s episode, episode 250 of this podcast, I’m going to give you a handful more of this type of content. Content that is relatively easy to create that still gives you a win and it gives your audience a win as well. Stay tuned for that one as well. In the meantime, maybe just try an embeddable piece of content. It might just take a little bit of pressure of yourself. In taking that pressure off, you might actually find that it releases some creativity in you as well. Last thing I want to do today is share one more quote. This one’s from Ana Claudia Antunes who wrote, “Working hard is not a waste of time but a state of mind. Keep pushing your limits until you reach the edge. Then be kind and rewind.” I liked that idea. I do think there’s benefit in having editorial calendars for your blog and having deadlines. It pushes you to work, so harness them, but don’t harness them if they are working for you. Push yourself hard. A great blog is built upon lots of hard work, but you also need times of rest. You need to be in tune with where you’re at at this time for you. Be in tune with where you’re at enough that you’re able to take the foot off the pedal and be kind to yourself as well. You’re doing a great job with your blog. I know you are! You wouldn’t be listening to this podcast if you weren’t eager to improve your blog. There’s lots of science even by the fact that you’re listening to this that you are working hard on your blog. Just remember to be kind to yourself, as well, and you’ll be able to sustain this for much longer. Thanks for listening today. You can find today’s show notes at problogger.com/podcast/249 where there’s a full transcript. I’d love to hear your reactions to today’s show, as well. Do deadlines work for you? Are you the type of person who loves them? Who works well to deadlines? Maybe you don’t even need any more deadlines if you’re the type of person who does well with deadlines or are you the type of person who struggles with deadlines? I suspect we’re in the minority of those of us who struggle with deadlines, but I know for a fact that there are people who probably don’t work well to deadlines and maybe need to eliminate them or use them more as an internal thing than a public thing. I’d love to hear your opinions on that and I look forward to chatting with you next week in episode 250. I can’t believe we’re at 250 already and we’ll talk about some of these types of content that can take a little bit of pressure off you as well. I hope you’re doing okay. I hope you’re having a great week and I look forward to chatting with you next week. How did you go with today’s episode? Enjoy this podcast? 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6 Places You Can Find Writers to Help with Your Blog As much as we’d all like to write posts for our blogs, it’s not always that easy. You may find you don’t have enough time to dedicate to your blog. Or you may lose your passion for the topic after writing about it for so long. So why not look for another writer who can help you out? Always be on the lookout for people who: Demonstrate knowledge Seem genuine and generous in helping others Communicate well Put themselves out there and look for opportunities Are interesting and different Understand social media and online communication Six places you can find writers for your blog: Guest Posters: If you have published guest posts in the past, take a look at them. How much traffic did they get? What was the quality like? How easy were they to work with? Did they go above and beyond with the post? If one of the guest posters stands out, contact them. Readership/Commenters: Look at the comments people leave on your blog, and contact the writers who know a lot about the topic, are genuinely helpful, and are well written. Commenters/Participants in Other Places: Check out comments people leave in other places, such as other people’s forums and blogs, Facebook pages/groups and podcasts. Magazines/Freelancers: Find people who already create paid content elsewhere, whether it’s as a freelancer or on their own blog. Word of Mouth: If you’re looking for someone, put the word out through friends, colleagues, business partners and others. Advertising: Use tips and tricks when looking to hire by advertising on the ProBlogger Job Board. If you’re willing to put a little work into going through the applications, you’ll usually find some gold. Once you’ve found someone and they agree to help, do a trial run with them to get a sense of what they’re like to work with, their content, and how your audience responds to them. Quote of the Day: “If you think hiring professionals is expensive, try hiring amateurs.” – Anonymous Links and Resources for 6 Places to Find Writers to Hire for Your Blog: How to Hire Writers for Your Blog ProBlogger Job Board 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 friends, it’s Darren Rowse from ProBlogger here. Welcome to episode 248 of the ProBlogger Podcast. My name is Darren Rowse, as I said and I am the blogger behind ProBlogger, a blog, podcast, event, job board, series of ebooks, and courses all designed to help you to start an amazing blog, to create some great content on that blog, to grow your audience, and to build profit around it. Also, you can find more about what we do at problogger.com. Now, in today’s episode, I want to talk about where to find writers for your blog, particularly where to find paid writers— those writers that you want to add your own voice and to help you to create more content for your blog on an ongoing basis. I want to share with you the five places that I found writers for free without having to advertise for them at all. These are five places that are probably under your nose right now, they may be writers already in your network and it’s about how to unearth them. And then also, I want to share some tips of how to advertise for writers as well if you can’t find them within those free places that I’ve talked about. You can find today’s show notes over at progblogger.com/podcast/248, where is a full transcript of today’s show as well as any links that I mentioned along the way as well. Today’s show was inspired by Richard, who’s one of our listeners who sent in this question. He writes, “I’ve been blogging for three years now, and while my blog is making enough income for me to probably go full time with my blog. I also have a full time job that I love and don’t wish to leave. As a result, I’ve decided to look at hiring a writer or writers for my blog. To this point, I’ve only ever featured my own content and one of guest posts unpaid, and have no idea where to even start when it comes to finding writers. Where should I look for writers for my blog?” Thanks, Richard, for the question, I appreciate it. Firstly, congratulations of building your blog to a point that you’ve come to already. I think it’s great that you have built to this level where you could full time but also I think it’s great that you’ve decided to keep your job. That must have been a tricky decision to make but one I do applaud. Because I do know that a lot of listeners of this podcast dream of going full time but also have work that they really love as well. So you can do both. One of the ways that you can do both is to outsource aspects of your blogging—one of which is the writers. Onto your question, where do you look for writers? Some people are probably thinking that I’m going to just use this podcast to promote the ProBlogger job board. It is a place on ProBlogger where you can advertise for different roles that you’re looking to fill for your blog, including writing but also editing, marketing, copywriting, proofreading, that type of thing. We’ll certainly touch on the ProBlogger job boards later on in this episode. I do suspect that Richard my not even need to advertise for a writer because it sounds like he might already have them under his nose. I started hiring people to write on my blogs and to edit my blogs quite a few years ago now. In fact, I think it was probably around 2005 that I hired my first blog writer and she also became an editor for one of my early blogs. It’s actually a blog that doesn’t exist anymore today; it was a blog about camera phones. Today we all call them smart phones but back then, I don’t even think that would existed. It was just this new type of phone that was coming out that had a camera in it and that seem to be the whole newby craze. I had a blog about camera phones. The reason I wanted to hire someone for that blog was that I simply wasn’t passionate enough about that topic to keep the blog ticking over. And yet, it was doing reasonably well in terms of traffic and revenue from AdSense. I thought it was probably worthwhile hiring someone to keep that blog ticking over. The first person I actually hired came about because that person had already contributed guest posts to the site previously. Richard mentioned that he has published guest posts on his blog in the past. That’s probably where I would be starting to look for someone to hire. The first place is in any previous writers that you have had. I’d be looking back of those guest posters and asking how do the post go in terms of traffic, what was the quality like, how was the guest poster to work with, we’re they easy to work with, did they submit content in a way that didn’t need much editing or was it a lot of to and fro, were they high maintenance or not, did they go above and beyond with the post as well, did they promote it to their own networks, did they reply to comments, how were they to work with and if one of those people stands out as being easy to work with producing high quality content, adding more to the content than just writing it, by going a little bit above and beyond, then that’s probably where I will be starting with. Maybe one of those guest posters comes to mind as someone that you will love to have write in an ongoing way, and I’ll be reaching out to those previous guest posters. That would be the first place that I will look for and I can think of people that I’ve hired that started as guest posters. In fact, Darlene, who currently edits Digital Photography School, working part time for us, started as a guest post as well. There’s been numerous times where that has been the progression. I love when that happens because it means you get a real feel for them, they get a feel for you, you understand their voice, they begin to understand your systems, and it is probably the most seamless way of finding a writer because they’ve already been doing it in some ways. Ideally, that’s a great place to start and it may be that that’s the way Richard finds his answer. I know many of you listening to this don’t have guest posts already and that may actually be one good reason to bring them on but there are other places as well that you can look on your worn blog. On Digital Photography School, I’ve made a couple of my earliest hires in terms of writers based upon guest posters but I’ve also hired one person who was leaving great comments on my blog. They actually had been regularly leaving comments that showed that they knew what they were talking about when it came to photography. That also showed that they were genuinely helpful in their comments and interested in helping people. They also showed by the fact that they’re writing fairly lengthy comments and communicating clearly that they were decent writers as well. I reached out to them to see if they would like to write an article for Digital Photography School. The first article back then, it was probably back in 2006 or 2007, it was a guest post, it wasn’t a paid article, but it was a bit of a test to see how they would go with that format of writing and to see whether they were interested in writing. It went so well that I then offered them a once-a-month opportunity to write a paid article for us. Maybe, there’s a comment around your blog that comes to mind. I know a lot of people don’t comment as much as they used to on blogs but maybe there’s someone of your blog who is demonstrating that they know what they’re talking about. They’ve got some expertise and they’ve got an interest in talking about that topic by the fact that they leave comments. That’s number two place that you might want to look. If you don’t get many comments, there are plenty of other places that you could be looking to find the people who do leave comments in other places. People are commenting all the time. They may not be commenting as much on your blog these days, but maybe there’s somewhere else in your presence online where they are commenting or in other people’s presence as well. Perhaps, these are a few of the places that I found writers in the past. Perhaps, you would find them in a forum. I can think of people that I’ve hired who were forum members of my own forum when I had a forum on the topic of photography years ago. Again, they were writing good quality content in the forum and I approached them and said, “Hey, would you like to write on the blog?” It was a fairly simple ask and in some cases, they transferred across and became writers of the blog. I’ve hired people who’ve left comments in other people’s forums. There’s nothing to stop you going into someone else’s forum, becoming a member, and having a look at who’s the most useful member of that forum and reaching out to them. Maybe they could become a writer as well. The same is true on people leaving comments on Facebook Pages, particularly in Facebook groups. We hired someone relatively recently, about a year and a half ago now who is leaving good comments in a Facebook group that I owned. They were contributing there and I was like, “Wow, they’re being so generous. They’re writing in such a way that they’re effectively writing articles in our group, why don’t they write some articles on the blog and we could pay them for that.” Sometimes people leaving comments of other people’s blogs is a way you could start. If people are contributing useful, genuine, and generous information in different places, you should be reaching out to them and looking for opportunities to work with them. I’ve hired people have been interviewed as guest of other people’s podcasts, I”ve hired people who I have seen doing Facebook Lives of their own Facebook Pages. Ultimately I’m always on the lookout for people who demonstrate a knowledge of the topic that I’m blogging about who seem to genuinely and generously be interested in helping other people, who communicate well, who seem to be putting themselves out there and looking for opportunities, who are interesting, who are a little bit different, maybe a little bit quirky, and people who seem to get social media and online communication. I think we should all be in the lookout for those types of people. It’s not just we should be looking at for these type of people to become writers for us but all kinds of thing. I guess what I would say is if you see anyone who fits those characteristics; you may have in the back of your mind. They could become a writer for you. But who knows what else they may become? Usually when I see that type of person, I just reach out and say, “Hey, I’d be interested to have a chat with you to see where at, what you’re interested in doing and to see if there’s a way that we could work together.” Usually, my approach is usually fairly general. I might think that they could become a writer, but maybe something else might emerge from that kind of discussion. I try and go in open minded into that. It means I don’t have to get locked in to hiring them down the track, I’m not setting that expectation with them, but it also opens up other opportunities and maybe they could create something else for us. Maybe they could create a course for us. Maybe they could create an ebook for us, maybe they already have a cause of their own and we can become an affiliate for them. Or maybe they could become an affiliate for us. Maybe there’s some other job in what you do that you could hire them to do. I remember meeting with one person who I thought might become a writer for me. It turns out that they actually were better suited to another role that I was looking for at the time and actually ended up managing part of my business down the track. Try not to go in too closed mind into these conversations. Be on the lookout for good people. People who get your topic but also get communication and who are—good people with good values as well. There are a few different opportunities they are looking for previous guest posters. I’m looking for people who leave comments on my blog. I’m looking for people who leave comments in other places as well. The other type that I hired, and this has been a less road but I have had some success with this, is looking at people who by creating content in other places, sometimes their own places, or also as freelancers as well. For example, I can think of one person who I hired in the early days of Digital Photography School—actually it’s probably about a year and a half into the APS. I found her as a writer for my blog because I discovered her blog. She had just started; she was a brand new blogger. I can see even in her early posts that she was going places with her blog but I could also say they she just started, she didn’t have much readership. I reached out towards her, “Hey, I know you’ve already got your own blog but would you be interested in writing for us semi regularly as well as a paid contributor? I can see what you’re doing of your blog would really also be appealing to our readers as well. This was perfect for us because I got someone who’s a great writer but it was also perfect for her because her blog wasn’t a point where she can go full time with it. But by me giving her some writing work, I did give her some income while she built her own blog. It also gave her some exposure as well because we also had a byline underneath all of her articles that promoted her blog. Ultimately, her blog became so popular that she could no longer write for us anymore. But for the time being, it was a win-win interaction for us. Be on the lookout for other bloggers who may be bloggers who are just starting out or other bloggers who might be looking for another income stream as well. The other place that I’ve found people to hire out for me is people who are writing freelance articles for magazines and other kinds of websites as well. I remember once, reading a photography magazine and really loving one of the articles and noticing that it was by an offer that I’ve never seen right for that magazine before. I did a bit of digging and I found this person on Twitter and said, “Hey, I loved your article on this particular magazine, how long have you been writing for them?” I discovered that they were actually a freelancer. That was the only article that they’ve ever written for them and their business is just to write freelance articles. I reached out and said, “Hi, I’ve got this photography site, would you be interested in writing for us as well? We’d love something similar to what you did in the magazine.” That person became a writer as well. If they’re writing freelance for other publications, they probably also open to doing it for you as well. The last place and this is probably where you should start is word of mouth as well and the thing has often what for me is when I just let people know in my circle of friends, in colleagues, my network, that I’m looking for writers. And, do you know anyone who’s good at writing about this particular topic and you’ll be surprised how many times that actually does unearth someone for you. That’s another place that I’d be looking. Up unto this point I’ve been talking about free things that you can do. Word of mouth you can be looking for freelancers or bloggers who’s already writing on the topics. You can be looking for people who are leaving comments in public places, forums, Facebook groups; you can be looking of your blog at people who are leaving comments and also people who may have written for you before. And then the last thing that you can do is to advertise. This will cost you some money or cost you some time but also in my experiences worked very well. In the early days, for me, it was all through the things are already mentioned. But since probably 2006, 2007, we’ve had the ProBlogger job board so I’ve used that myself when I’ve come to higher writers as well. Obviously, I have a vested interest in mentioning this in this particular podcast, but every time we advertise for new writers for digital photography school of our job board, we get about 50, sometimes 60 or even 70 applications. We get a lot of candidates and I would say that every time we’ve advertised, we have found some gold. Not all of that 50-60 people are high quality. You do get some people who just apply for every job they don’t read the applications. But every time we’ve advertise, we’ve unearthed amazing people as well. In fact, most times where we’ve advertise, we’ve ended up hiring five or six people, sometimes as many as 10 from that advertisement. You need to also just be aware that it takes a bit of work. You’re getting 50, 60 applications, you need to put a bit of time into sorting through those but it if you’re willing to put in that work, it can be well worth doing. Now, one thing I would say is that over the years, we’ve refined the way that we processed the candidates. We’ve learned the more specific we are in the job advertisement that we put up, the better quality applicant we get. We really try and be as clear as possible as to the type of person we’re looking for, what qualifications they need to have and very clear about what we want them to send us in their application. I have actually written a blog post a few years ago now on the process that we use and I’ll link to that, in the show notes today, but also go through in really quickly here as well. Generally, when we put up an ad on the job boards, we ask people to fill in a form so we might set up a Google form or we get them to apply through the job board itself. This is a new feature that we’ve got of the job board that people can actually put their application in through the job board, which does help us now. We ask them to submit a lot of information. We want to know where they’ve written in the past, what they’re experiences with the topic. We often get them to submit some articled titles that they’d be willing to write about, which show us that they are willing to come up with content and take some initiative. We always ask for them to submit some samples of their writing, either to send us some Word documents that they’ve written, or send us to some links that they written online. Whether it’s their own blog or someone else’s. We have found that the more information we can gather, the better because it does help us go back to the people who we think are high quality candidates. When we put our ad up, we promote that ad to our own network as well so it goes up on the ProBlogger job boards but then we Tweeted out on the Digital Photography School Twitter account, we put on our Facebook Page, because we actually want people who understand our side to apply for the job as well. Because often they are the people who turn out to be the best writers for us, people who have been readers and go, “Hey, I could write for them because I understand what they’re on about.” Generally, when applicants come in, we give them a deadline, which all the applicants need to be in by this time. And then we go through a shortlisting process. We put them into three main categories. No, they are the people we immediately eliminate and we email them immediately and say, “Thanks for your application. We’re not going to progress with you at the moment.” They might be people who haven’t followed the instructions and we can they’re just applying to everyone. People who don’t communicate well in their application, it’s amazing how many people submit applications with terrible spelling mistakes and no attention to detail. People how perhaps English isn’t up to scratch, we want to hire people who are able to communicate naturally with their audience who are English speakers. We have criteria there that we put people in the ‘No.’ then we have a ‘Maybe category’ and there are people that we think, “It’s not a perfect application but maybe we’ll be able to work with him as well and we do know that there are some people who’s communication skills maybe not quite out to scratch but we have an editing process. So we might be at a work with them. So they go in the ‘Maybe’ category, and then we have a’ Yes’ category. Generally, what we do with the Maybes’ is wait to see whether we get enough people to hire from our ‘Yes’ category. We will go back to the people in the ‘Maybe’ and just say, “We need a little bit of time to process this, thanks for your application. We’ll let you know by this date.” Then we go back to the people who we’ve put in our ‘Yes’ pile. There’s usually 10-15 of these. We say to them, “Hey, we’d love your application. We would love to take this a little bit further and give you a trial.” Basically, in that email, we outline how much we will pay them. We outline the kind of content we’re looking for, how much content we’re looking for—try and give them a bit of a feel for what it would be like to work for us, and then we outline the trial process which I’ll talk about in a moment. And then we say to them, “Would you like to progress?” What we find that that point is that usually about 60%, 70% of people go “Yes, we would like to progress,” and maybe 10% or 20% sometimes up to 30% might go, “Yeah. You’ve described something that doesn’t quite fit with me right now, thanks.” But that will say no at that point. We’ve already whittled that down a little bit. Remember you’re into that trial period. Trial period is basically as asking how ‘Yes’ candidates to submit an article that we can publish of the site. This is a paid article, we always pay them at this point, they’re going to put some time and energy into it so they should be rewarded for that, we pay them at the full rate that we pay our authors and we ask them to come up with a topic which we negotiate with them. We go back and forth of that because we don’t want them to submit something that’s really not a good fit for our site. We talk to them about that. We commission that article and we give them a deadline for that. This whole trial process is one that creates a piece of content that we publish of the site. We look to see how that content goes over with our audience but what we’re also really looking to see how this author is to work with. Are they easy to work with? Are they submitting content in the format that we ask them to and following instructions clearly? Are they meeting the deadline? Do they have a gift in writing—those types of things as well. We will publish all of those pieces of content. It’s a bit of work at this point but we’re getting some content out of it as well, then we pay them, and then we make our choice based upon that. There have been times where we’ve hired from this process five people at a time. There was once I hired 10 people from this process just from one ad of the job board as well. There’s been other times where we’re just been looking for one particular type of writer as well so we just hired them. The trial process has really worked very well for us because it really does give us a feel for them. It also gives them a feel for us as well. There have been candidates who we’ve really liked and they’ve gone, “Yeah, I didn’t really enjoy this process.” I don’t really feel like it’s a fit for me.” I rather then discover that during the trial process then three months in the writing for us. The keys I found is that when you’re advertising for a writer or going through any other process that you might want to go through, some of the other things I mentioned. It’s really important that you know what you’re looking for. You need to know how much content you want, the style of content that you want, the kind of topics that you want. The more information you can give potential writers, the better, because it gets their expectations right. Communicate that really clearly through the ad or through the communications you have with people. The second thing is to really communicate really clearly with everyone who applies, and the people you end up hiring and also the people who don’t end up hiring. Because they may actually become readers, they may actually become guest posters, they may become collaborators, they may promote your site. You never quite know where these relationships are going to end up. Communicate as clearly as you can and yeah, get the process moving as well. I hope that that has been helpful for you if you are thinking about hiring a writer of your blog. Hiring a writer can have many benefits for your blog. Obviously, it can help you to create more content which can relate to more pathways into your blog. The other part about having a new writer come onto your site is that it broadens the expertise that you’re able to have in terms of the content that you share. Me adding new writers into Digital Photography School back in 2006, 2007, I can produce more content which helped to grow traffic. It meant I can broaden the topics that I was able to write about. Suddenly, I wasn’t just writing beginner articles, I was writing articles or publishing articles at an intermediate level because these other writers were at that higher level. Or they had expertise in different types of photography that I didn’t have which really helped me to serve my readers as well. I think the other thing that is probably worth mentioning is you don’t want to just know what you’re looking for in terms of the type of content but also think about the voice of content as well and the values that you want your writers to have as well. To really try and hire people that complements your style but really get your values. This has been really important. There’s been a few times over the years where I’ve hired people who are great communicators but they had their own agendas and they had their own values that go right in with my own and that ended up not really helping build the brand that I was trying to build. You want to be a little bit careful about those things. The other thing I would say is there may also be a case of having an extended trial period as well. We don’t tend to do this with our writers but I know a few bloggers who—when they’re hiring someone new, they will hire them for three months, and again, that’s like a trial period. At the end of the three months, things will be evaluated and then they work out whether they want it to be an ongoing relationship as well. That may be worth building into your process too. I hope that’s helpful to you. I would love to hear your tips of how you go about hiring writers for your blog if you’ve done that. If you do want to check out the ProBlogger job board to advertise, it’s at problogger.com/jobs. You’ll find it linked to in the navigation area everywhere on ProBlogger. If you’re looking to find a job, there are always jobs being advertised there as well at any given time. There’s usually about 90 jobs for bloggers, for writers, for copywriters, for marketers, for editors, for proofreaders, a variety of different types of roles there. Even looking now I can see people looking to hire bloggers for men’s grooming writers, lifestyle writers, someone looking for a bitcoin expert, people wanting for people to write about email marketing, people wanting to hire people to write about food. There’s a variety of different topics there as well. If you’re looking to use the job board to hire people, we do have featured jobs as well as just noble jobs, the price to have a normal job, advertise the $70 for 30 days. But there is an opportunity there for a featured listing as well which gives you more prominence, which may be of interest as well. Check it out if you are looking for a job or if you’re looking to hire people. It’s at problogger.com/jobs. There’s also an RSS feed for those of you and then an email alert for those of you looking for jobs there as well. Anyway, thanks for listening. I hope you found these useful. You can find today’s show notes at problogger.com/podcast/248. Before I go let me share with you one quote of the day. I don’t actually know who came out with this one, it’s one of those anonymous quotes but I think it really does apply to this topic of hiring people. Whether you’re hiring a writer, or whether you’re hiring a designer or whether you’re hiring something else in your life, I think this applies. “If you think hiring professionals is expensive, try hiring amateurs.” I think it’s definitely true. One of the things I would say about the ads that I sometimes see of ProBlogger job boards is that sometimes people pay a pittance, they pay not much at all and all they advertise—looking for people and they’re not really willing to pay much for the people that they’re hiring and the reality is that you’re going to get the kind of applicants for your jobs based upon that type of things. If you are not willing to pay much, you’re not going to get a high quality applicant in most cases. Put a little bit of money there and you’re going to get someone who is going to produce something at a higher rate, I hope and not pay for that in the long run if you are going to publish rubbishy content on your content of your site, cheap content on your site, that is in the long run going to cost you a lot more. Pay a little bit more, and reward the writer and you will see the benefits of that in the long run as well. Thanks for listening. I look forward to chatting with you next week. Before I go, I want to give a big shout out and say thank you to Craig Hewitt and the team at Podcast Motor who’ve been editing all of our podcast for some time now. Podcast Motor has a great range of services for podcasters at all levels. They can help you to setup 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.

Starting a Blog on a Topic Where You’re Not an Expert Can you start a new blog when you’re not an expert on the topic you’ll be writing about? Of course you can. You can blog about any topic you like. But should you blog about a topic you don’t have any expertise in? I think it’s okay to start a blog on a topic you don’t know a lot about. I certainly wasn’t an expert when I started my blogs. I had some experience, but I was far from being an expert. I’m not sure I even consider myself an expert now. Part of the success I’ve had with my blogs is due to the factI wasn’t an expert. Experts are great, but they sometimes come across as inaccessible or unrelatable. And not being an expert gave my blogs a sense of momentum and excitement. I was actively learning, growing, improving, and sharing with my readers. Here are a few tips to help you get started with your new blog and topic: Be ethical and transparent. Be upfront about who you are, how much experience you have, and why you’re blogging. Be careful about the content you post. Avoid teaching or giving advice beyond what you know. Actively pursue learning. You may not be an expert yet, but your growth helps people connect with you and your blog. What kind of content should you create if you’re not an expert? What interests you about the topic? What grabs your attention about it? Here are some content sources: Personal stories Case studies Interviews Guest content News items Curated content Research results Answers to discussion questions Links and Resources for How to Create a Blog on a Topic You’re Not an Expert In: Rob Bell Further Listening How to Build a Blogging Business Through Interviewing Others with Mike Stelzner How to Create a Link Post [Challenge] How to Use Quotes in Your Blog Content Legally and Ethically How to Use Embedded Content on Your Blog [Challenge] 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, welcome to episode 247 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 grow an amazing blog that changes the world in some way, but also hopefully, is profitable for you. You can learn more about what we do at ProBlogger over at problogger.com. Now, in today’s episode, I want to talk about something that I get asked quite often about from people thinking about starting a new blog, but also from some who have already started who have doubts and insecurities around this kind of topic. It’s something that I know there’s probably a variety of opinions on, but which I have a fairly strong one on as well. The question that I get asked is, “Should you start a blog on a topic that you don’t have expertise in?” I want to say right up front, I think you could or even should. I think there’s definitely a case for it, and in this episode, I want to tell you why, but I also want to, more importantly, give you some tips on how to do that, because this is something I know a lot of people do struggle with. “I’ve got this blog on a topic, I’m not really sure, I feel secure enough in this topic,” you have these doubts that nag at you. I want to give you some ideas of the type of content that you can create if you don’t yet feel like you’re enough of an expert in that topic. You can find today’s show notes with a full transcription of today’s show at problogger.com/podcast/247. Before I get into today’s show, I just want to say thank you because I have received some wonderful emails over the last few days from readers, some lovely messages on Twitter particularly. I’ve been trying a few new things on Twitter recently, just giving you a little bit more advice on a more of a personal self-development level and I’ve loved the conversation that’s come from those. I’ve had some beautiful little reviews coming on iTunes. I had carolinaprincess843 from the US iTunes, “I love listening to Darren on my way to work, he puts things in a way that is easy to understand.” Thank You carolinaprincess. Crumbsanddirtydishes from the UK left a little review on the 30th of April, “A brilliant podcast offering practical and actionable tips. Darren is so insightful and provides so much value for anyone looking to start, grow, or develop their blog. A must listen for all bloggers.” Thank you for that crumbsanddirtydishes. I love these names. MichaelCowell said, “Great to listen to someone so passionate, honest, and knowledgeable about their profession. I’ve recommended this podcast for so many people. I look forward to every new episode.” Thank you Michael and I do appreciate you passing it on. I just wanted to start off by saying thank you, I’m very grateful for you as listeners of this podcast and I look forward to powering on, as we go towards episode 250 and beyond. With that said, let’s get into today’s show. Can you or perhaps more accurately should you have a blog on a topic that you’re not yet an expert in? It’s something I get asked regularly, and I’ve heard it answered in a variety of ways. I know some people feel quite passionately that you shouldn’t have a blog that you’re not an expert in, or that you don’t have some knowledge in, or a higher level of knowledge. I want to put it out there that I think it’s okay to do that with some certain qualifications around that. I want to give you those qualifications. I want to give you some words of warning and some advice on how to approach it, and then I want to finish this episode by going through some different types of content that I think you might want to start with if this is the position that you find yourself in. Yes, I think you can. Of course, there’s nothing stopping anyone blogging on any topic they like, really, free speech is something that most of us have the right to. Although, I’m actually very aware that there’s a segment of our audience listening to this podcast who I hear from time-to-time who don’t have that right of free speech depending upon where they live and the circumstances they’re in. I want to put that qualification out there. I think for most people listening to this podcast, we do have the right to really talk about anything that we want to talk about. I guess the question is, should you tackle a topic that you don’t yet have that experience in? I’ve already said up front that my answer is, yes. I want to go a little bit deeper and put some qualifications around that before I give you these tips on the type of content. I also want to say right up front that what I’m going to share today really does come from my own personal experience because both of the blogs that I have today, ProBlogger and Digital Photography School, I would say that when I started them in both cases, I didn’t really feel like an expert and in fact I wasn’t an expert. I’m still not even sure I would see myself as an expert today, particularly in my photography blog. When I started ProBlogger in 2004, I’ve been blogging for about two years, so I did have some experience of blogging, but I was very new to the idea of making money from blogging. I’ve probably been doing that for less than a year and when I started ProBlogger, I was still at a part-time level. I wasn’t a professional blogger. I wasn’t a full-time blogger by any means. I never claimed to be that when I started ProBlogger. I didn’t start ProBlogger as an expert, although, I guess, I was probably one of the first people in the world to get to the level that I was at as a part-time blogger Relatively speaking, maybe some people could have said I was an expert because no one was really doing it, but I certainly didn’t feel like an expert. I had doubts about whether I should start that blog. The same is true with Digital Photography. When I first started writing on that topic and that was back in 2003 on a very early blog, I was reviewing cameras. That first blog I only owned one digital camera and I’d only had it for a few months. I was writing about my experience with this first ever digital camera that I had. I had had some experience with film camera, I knew the basics of photography, but I wasn’t an expert. I’ve photographed a few friends weddings with previous cameras, but never with digital. I really did have a lack of experience and expertise in that particular topic. When I started Digital Photography School a few years later, again, I didn’t see myself as a professional photographer. There were doubts in my mind, should I be doing this and I guess what I did is started a blog for beginners because I felt like I could teach them and that’s a big part of what I want to talk about today. It’s actually thinking about who your blog is for, and pitching it for people who it’s appropriate for, and who you can actually help. I look at both ProBlogger and Digital Photography School today and whilst I had started both of those blogs with these insecurities, and with doubts, and with the idea of impostor syndrome which I’ve talked about on this podcast before. I actually look at both of the blogs that I’ve built today and I think one of the foundations and one of the things that did help those blogs is that I wasn’t an expert. I actually think it’s an advantage in some ways to start as someone who is still learning about your topic. I’ve met numerous of my early readers over the years and one of the things that I hear again and again from those who’ve been reading my blogs from the early days is that they found my blogs very relatable. They found them accessible. Experts are great, but sometimes experts can come across as inaccessible or unrelatable. This doesn’t always happen, some experts are very good at talking to beginners, but a complete beginner on a topic may find it hard to connect with someone who has years of experience and who is seen as a guru. On some levels we want to learn from experts, but on other levels I can feel like they’re in another stratosphere to us and not relatable, but someone who’s just ahead of a beginner will use language that a beginner can access, and they’ll come from a position of understanding the place of that beginner. In the case of ProBlogger particularly, I think what made it attractive in the early days was that I wasn’t an expert, and I was just sharing what I was learning, and I was sharing it with people who were perhaps just a step or two behind me in the journey. I was incredibly active in my learning, I was growing, I was improving, and I was sharing what I was learning with my readers and that created a sense of excitement that I’m not sure I would have been able to create on that blog if I was sharing it with years of experience about the topic. You can actually use the fact that you’re not an expert to your advantage in some ways. Before I get into some tips, I wanted to share those stories of me starting out in that way because I want to encourage you that if you are at the beginning of your journey of your topic that that’s okay, but you want to do it carefully, and that’s what I want to move into now. I want to give you three qualifications if you do decide to blog on a topic that you’re not an expert in and this may be the topic of your whole blog or it may be that you want to add a category to your blog that you’re not an expert in. There’s three things that I want to say that you want to kind of be a little bit wary about. Firstly, I think it’s really important to be transparent, to be ethical, in the way that you present yourself and in the case of both Digital Photography School and ProBlogger; I was really upfront about who I was, what my experience was with the topic. I remember in both cases, in the early days of those blogs, probably the first week or two of both of those blogs, I put up posts telling my story, which was all about showing the level that I was at, but also why I was starting that blog. I was really clear that I wanted to share what I’d already learned, but what I was learning and I wanted to gather other people who had experience as well, to give a place for them to talk about what they were learning as well. I put those stories up as blog post, also on my about page, so anyone clicking to those blogs in the early days, particularly, would see my story, who I was and where I was coming from, the position I was taking. I reckon, I probably put off some readers of my blog by doing that and by saying, “I’m not an expert,” but I also as I’ve said before, I think I made my blogs a little bit more relatable as well. I think there’s nothing worse than reading a blog by someone who claims or implies expertise, who doesn’t have it. It usually shines through in the writing that you don’t have that expertise, but it can also set you up for a fall later, if you get found out to not be an expert. Whatever you do, don’t claim to be an expert and don’t let your lack of transparency imply that you’re an expert either. It is really important. Put up who you are, put up where you’re coming from on your “About” page in your sidebar, if you want to. You can actually build it into your tagline if you want. A beginner or an enthusiast or someone who’s curious about this topic, you can actually put that up front and you’ll find that that does make you a little bit more relatable. Number one, I think it’s important to be transparent. Number two, I think you should be careful about the type of blog that you create. If you go back to the early days of ProBlogger, you’ll see that the types of posts that I was writing were different from today. Today, we do a lot of more tutorials that are a little bit more authoritative, that built upon years of testing and experimenting, talking with people, gathering ideas. Back in the early days of ProBlogger, I did occasionally do some teaching posts, they were very beginner focused, they were very short, they were almost always based upon something I’d experimented with. I’ll talk more about that in a moment. Around these occasional teaching posts were lots of other kinds of posts that didn’t require expertise. That’s what I want to share with you in a moment. There’s so many different types of content that you can authentically do if you don’t have expertise. You want to be so careful of doing teaching or how-to or advice content that’s beyond what you actually know and what you are qualified to know. Particularly, I want to emphasize this, if you’re writing about anything to do with health, mental health, legal advice or something that someone could read, take action upon and it would have a detrimental effect on their life. You want to be so careful around those topics. I’ve had hard conversations with people who have come to me asking, “Should I write about this particular topic.” I remember talking to one blogger recently, who wanted to start a self-development blog, he had no experience in that area and he wanted to talk about psychology and some of these kind of deeper stuff and whilst, I think, there probably were some ways he could talk about those things from his own experience. He wanted to teach people on those areas and I’m like, “Well, to authentically do that, you probably need to educate yourself at least to some degree first.” I think it’s so important. There’s been numerous cases over the years, where I’ve seen bloggers blog on topics in ways that they’re just not qualified to do. It can have massive impact upon their readers. I saw a horrific news report recently of someone who had read a blog which gave advice on cancer treatment, they’d made decisions around their own treatment based upon what they’d read, only to discover that that person really had no idea what they were talking about and was just sprouting off something that they’d heard, word of mouth about three other people. The consequences of taking that advice were incredible, I mean the ultimate kind of consequences. You really want to care for your readers. You want to not go beyond what you’re qualified to do. Also, it covers you as well. If you get found to be doing that type of thing, you could get sued, you could ruin your reputation. It’s just not worth doing that, so be careful. Be really careful about overextending yourself. You may want to get some accountability around that and get some advice around that as well. Thirdly, you may not be an expert but make sure you’re actively learning on your topic. I’ve intentionally used the word “yet” in the title of this podcast. How to create a blog on a topic you’re not yet an expert in, because you may not be an expert today, but you can be learning on your topic. You can be intentional about moving forward to the eventuality of becoming an expert. You may never get to an expert level, but the more you’re learning on your topic, if you’re actively moving in your topic and growing in your topic, it will shine through. Your readers will see that. That will create enthusiasm for them and it will also help you to create better content in the end. I love the fact that I can look back on the early days of ProBlogger and see that I gave advice back then which was quite naïve. I look at it now and I cringe on some levels, but I can see the progression in my own knowledge on that topic as well. Your readers will see that progression. That’s something that creates anticipation and momentum and excitement as well, it helps people to connect with your blog. You may not be an expert, but make sure you’re actively learning, I think that is really important. We’ve kind of got those qualifications, those disclaimers, kind of out there, but what kind of content should you be creating on your blog, if you’re not yet an expert in the topic? I want to give you a few questions to ask and also then some different types of contents. The question that I want to ask you is,  “What can you witness to about your topic?” I was I got this question from a guy called Rob Bell, who I listen to. He’s a podcaster. He put together some teaching for public speakers that I bought recently, really great teaching. He was talking about this topic, if you don’t have expertise in a topic that you’ve been asked to do a talk on, the question you should be starting with is, “What can I witness to?” You may not have a high level of knowledge or training or the theory on a particular topic, but what have you seen? What have you experienced? What have you learned? What have you felt? What is your experience? What it what have you witnessed to about that topic on a personal level? If you’re thinking of starting a blog on a topic, you’ve probably had some experience with that topic, I would hope. Hopefully, you just haven’t picked out a topic that’s a random topic that you think will be popular. Start with your experience of that. Hopefully, out of answering that question, some experiences will come to mind that you can share. A lot of them will come out as stories, story posts are great. “This is something that’s happened to me. This is what I experienced. This is what I learned.” No one can critique your story, your experience. That is authentically you. Related to this, story posts that are mistake posts or fail posts can be great. “This is what I did. This is what I tried. This is how it worked out. This is what I’d do differently next time.” If you look back in the early days of ProBlogger, you’ll find that there’s quite a few of those kind of posts there. They did really well. On the other side of things, there’s success post. “This is something I tried, it worked.” Celebrate that. “This is how I’d tweak it next time. This is what I’m going to extend upon.” These type of posts are about sharing what you have done. In essence, it’s creating your own case study kind of post. This is how I started ProBlogger. When I did teaching posts in the early days, when I did how to content in the early days, it was almost always in this way. I wrote a whole series of posts on how to monetize your blog using Adsense. I probably wouldn’t even recommend you go back and read them today because Adsense changed a lot. All of that content came out of my experience. This is how I started out. This is where I position my ads today. This is how I changed the size of my ads. This is what I learned from my experiments with Adsense. Here are the tools that I am using to create content. Here is a mistake I made in sending my emails. This is how I launched my first ebook. These are all content that I created in the early days of ProBlogger that was based upon my experience. They were teaching posts, but they were based upon my experience. You need to get into the habit of looking at your own experiences, mind your own experiences. Take note of what you do, what you’re learning and what you’re experimenting with and report back on those things. No one can critique you for sharing an experiment that you did and talking about what you learned through that experiment. Someone can critique you if you write an expert post when you’re not an expert, but if you say, “Hey I’m not an expert but I’m experimenting with this, this is what I learned.” No one can critique that, and that’s totally fine. What are you a witness to share from your own experiences on your topic. Another question, what are others doing? One way that you can share what other people are doing on a post really authentically is to do case studies. I used to do this on ProBlogger all the time and we still do case studies from time-to-time. Case studies about other people, not just your case studies, but other people. Today, if you look at our most recent case studies on ProBlogger, we generally involve the person that we’re studying. We interview them or sometimes, they even write up their own case study, but back then in 2004, it was hard to get people to be involved in a case study because no one knew who I was and no one was willing to share on that level. I would just write about what I saw other people doing, “Here’s blogger X, they’ve had a new blog design. Here’s how it’s changed, here’s what they’ve changed on their blog. Here’s what I like about it. Here is how I’d improve it. Here’s other blogs that look similar,” and picking up the tools that they use, those types of things. “Here’s blogger X and here’s how I see them monetizing their blog, and here’s three ways they monetize their blog. Here’s how they position their ads.” This type of content can be really useful and you don’t even have to involve the other person. I personally would give them the courtesy of having the opportunity to participate in the case study, so you might want to say, “I’m thinking of writing a post on my blog. It’s going to be what I observed about what you’re doing with this or what you did here. If you’ve got a comment or if you’d like to participate?” You can make that offer, that will improve the post because you’ll get inside word on it. Even if they say no or they don’t respond, you can still create that content, that’s totally fine. You’re writing about your observations of a topic and as long as you do that with grace, then I think most people will be totally fine with that. Another type of content that you can do that involves the opinions and experience of others is interviewing people. This can be a little bit hard to do in the early days of your blog where you don’t maybe have the profile, but it’s not impossible. I did a whole episode back in episode 172 on this podcast with Michael Stelzner from Social Media Examiner. He built that blog on this technique of interviewing other people. He went to conferences and just walked up to people and said, “Can I interview you on video?” He had a camera guy with him, so he made an investment. He had lights so it looked a little bit more professional. If someone walks up to you at a conference and you’ve just gotten off the stage and they’ve got a camera crew with them, most people are going to say, “Absolutely. Totally. This guy looks like he knows what he’s doing.” Mike knew nothing about social media at the time when he first started out, but because he got in front of so many experts in that industry and asked them so many questions, he built relationships with key people in his industry, he grew his knowledge in that area because he asked them questions that he wanted to know the answers to, he was seen alongside other experts in that industry as well, which brought him some credibility as well, and people wanted to share that content because they were in the content. It was professionally made, the people he interviewed ended up sharing his content. He built that blog and that blog is an amazing blog today. He’s got a staff, he runs a conference of 4,000 or 5,000 people and it all began because he put himself out there, made an investment created content that was interviewing other people. It brought expert level content onto his blog, and he didn’t have to present any of it, he just had to ask questions. This type of approach can build credibility, it can drive traffic, and it also creates really useful content as well, and helps you to network in your industry. Interviews are another one, take some work, take some investment. It can really pay off. Similarly, guest content can work. This is another one that you do sometimes struggle with in the early days of your blog unless you’re willing to pay people to create content for you. I probably wouldn’t start with this one if you’re just starting out. Featuring content of other people on your blog when they write an article for you, they might want to do that as a guest post in return for some exposure, or you may want to actually hire people as well. Again, this is not something I would start with both on ProBlogger and Digital Photography School, I didn’t have anyone else’s content for quite some time because I wanted to build up my traffic, I wanted to build a relationship with my audience, I wanted to keep my voice consistent. On ProBlogger we began to involve guest posters. We don’t do so many of those today, but in the early days particularly, we did. Today, we have a smaller team of guest writers on ProBlogger who come in from time-to-time who are on our team. I would see them as team writers. Digital Photography School, we’ve developed quite a large team of regular paid writers as well. This allows me to bring in other voices who are experts. This is the big improvement for Digital Photography School. When I first started Digital Photography School, it was just me writing two or three articles a week, and all of those articles were for beginners because that’s all I felt that I could teach. Today, if you’re going to look at the content, we’ve got professional photographers writing at an intermediate level and even beyond that. Sometimes, we do more advanced stuff as well. It allows us to get more expertise into the blog without actually having to become an expert as well. It can also bring credibility if you choose the right person, it can bring in some traffic as well if the writer promotes it to their own networks as well. Interviews, case studies, guest content can all be ways of bringing in other people’s expertise into your blog in authentic ways. Another type of content you might want to mix in you may not want to go with this for all of your content but from time-to-time, you could do news posts. It depends on the type of blog, what your intent is for that blog, but news content or writing content about the news and developments in your particular niche or industry can be well worth doing. The early days at ProBlogger, I did this from time-to-time. I didn’t do a lot of it, but probably once every couple of weeks I would write an article that was about some development in the industry of blogging and reporting on someone acquiring someone else, or maybe a tool, or the launch of a new tool, or controversy that was happening in the industry. I almost always tried to find a way to add something of myself into it. I didn’t want to just write the news, I wanted to interpret the news for my audience in some way. What does this news mean for us? Sometimes using the news as the start of a discussion as well, we’ll touch on discussion posts in a moment. News posts might be one way to go. Another type of post that you might want to do and consider is curated content. This is where you add into the mix of what you do. I probably wouldn’t make this everything, I wouldn’t want all my posts to be curated content, but from time-to-time adding in a piece of curated content can be useful. You want to be really careful about how to do this. You don’t want to steal someone’s content or present it as your own. You want to give credit where credit’s due. If another blogger in your industry has written a great article on their blog, why don’t you write a blog post that one, links to it and says, “You should go and read this dear readers.” Maybe pull out a short relevant quote from their article and put that in yours, and then add some of your own thoughts to it. Tell your readers why they should go and read it, tell them what you liked about that article, tell them what you would add to that article. They might have 10 reasons to do this, maybe come up with number 11. Tell them what you agree with, what you disagree with, how you would interpret what they’ve said for your particular audience in some way and talk about what their article has prompted you to take action on in some way. This is really useful content for your readers. You’re finding them some useful content to read, but you’re making it even more valuable. The person you’re linking to is going to love it as well, they may even promote what you’re doing as well. This is something I did all the time in the early days of ProBlogger. Today, this type of content, I would call this a link post, isn’t as popular because people are now sharing their links on social media, I think this is a missed opportunity for a lot of bloggers. I would love to see bloggers returning to this. This is what blogging was built on in the early days, bloggers linking from one blog to another, sharing their experience, adding to the ideas of other people. I did an episode back in episode 144 on how to create link posts. I will give you some examples and tips on how to do it as well, also check out episode 173 because that one’s on how to quote people properly, correctly without getting into trouble as well and that’s something you do want to be a little bit careful about, using other people’s content in that way. The other thing I’d say about curated content is using embeddable content as well. There’s so much content on the internet that can be embedded onto your blog. The most obvious of them is YouTube. Find a video that you think is good, embed it into your blog. The YouTuber is totally fine with you embedding their content onto their blog. If they’re not, they would have marked it that they don’t want it to be embedded. Take that embeddable content, add it into your own blog and then put some of your own thoughts around it, make it even more useful for your readers as well. Again, episode 152, I talked a lot more about embeddable content and video is just one of the types of content that you can embed. Curated content is great because, again, you bring in other people’s voices onto your blogs. You’re bringing other people’s expertise. It’s relatively easy to find and it has a potential to build a relationship with that other person that you’re featuring in some way as well. Two more types of posts that you might want to consider, research posts. The best way of describing a research post in my mind is kind of like the essays that you wrote at high school. Your high school teacher or your university professor said, “I want you to write an essay on this particular topic answering this question or discussing this issue,” and then you go away and you read all the books and you synthesize all the arguments, you bring in some quotes, crediting your sources of course and then you come to your own conclusions and you create a piece of content for your professor or your teacher that kind of synthesizes the best thinking on that particular topic. The whole point of writing an essay is that you want to learn something through that process. You learn so much through writing an essay. The same can be true for a blog content as well. You choose a question that you have about your topic. You’re not an expert in your topic, why aren’t you an expert in your topic? What don’t you know about it? Choose one of those things that you don’t yet know about. Choose a question that you have or that you say your readers are having as well, then go out and research the answer to it. This is how you become an expert. You actually go out and you find the answers to the questions that you have, then you take action upon those things. It might mean going out reading more than one book, listening to some podcasts, watching some videos, reading some other blogs, strolling through some forums, having some conversations with other people, sending some emails out, asking other people what they’re thinking are. Once you’ve got all that information, write an article about what you found. You can be really clear upfront, “I didn’t know anything about this topic, but here’s what I’ve learnt about it, and here’s what I know now.” It might include a few quotes from books that you’ve read or blog posts that you’ve written. Crediting the sources of course. It might include an embeddable piece of content, a YouTube clip that you found. It might include different points of view, different approaches that people take. It might include some of the answers that people sent you when you emailed them their questions. You want to get their permission first before you include those into your article. Hopefully, include your own conclusions, what you’ve learned through the experience, ideas or more questions that you have. Maybe some stories that you’ve got, maybe some things that you’re going to do as a result of that. This type of content is so good because you are going to learn so much. You’re actually going to take steps towards becoming an expert through writing this type of content. You are going to show that you are progressing on this topic. It’s also so useful as well for your readers to see a digest of all the best thinking around a topic. This shows that you actually are becoming an authority and an expert on your topic as well. Research posts are one really great way of doing this. Again, it’s expertise kind of content. You’re featuring other people’s ideas and hopefully some of your own as well. The last type of content you might want to try is something that I used to do every week on ProBlogger. I don’t do it quite as often these days, but we still do it every week on Digital Photography School and it takes no expertise whatsoever, it’s simply discussion posts. This is asking your readers to talk about what they think about a topic. You probably wouldn’t want to do this on the first week of your brand-new blog because you may not have any readers to have discussions yet. This is something that you can use once you’ve got a little bit of a readership there, but ask a key question. Ask a question you want to know the answer to, maybe, or ask more of a debate like question, “Do you do this or do you do that?” Those type of questions can really lead to some interesting discussions. They will teach you. They will also give your readers an opportunity to participate, to engage. It may even unearth some experts on your topic as well, which then you can feature in guest content or in an interview or in a case study as well. Sometimes, the best discussion posts that we used to post on Digital Photography School, I would take the comments and then write another post that synthesize those comments, it almost became like a research post. “Here’s what our audience thinks about this particular topic.” I would then pull out some themes in it, I would add some of my own thoughts in it, maybe add some further reading and those types of things as well. Discussion posts can really be useful as well to increase the expertise on your blog, but also build some engagement as well. I hope that somewhere in the midst of those, is some encouragement for those of you who are feeling like maybe you’re not an expert enough to really authentically go into your topic, because you’re not an expert. Those of you struggling with impostor syndrome, it’s okay to have a blog on a topic that you don’t have expertise on, as long as you’re transparent, as long as you’re a little bit careful about the kind of content that you create and don’t overextend yourself.   As long as you’re actively learning and that’s such a key. Most of the types of content that I just share actually are as important because they create good content for your readers—almost all of them are going to teach you so much as well. That’s why I’ve chosen those types of content, case studies, interviewing people, doing research posts, having guest content. All of these have the opportunity for you to learn and for you to become the expert that you don’t feel that you are. I’m sure there’s a lot more that could be said on this particular topic and I would love to get your thoughts on it. If you’d like to leave a comment with suggestions on types of content that you find useful in this particular area, feel free to leave those comments over on our show. That’s at problogger.com/podcast/247 or you can leave those comments in our Facebook group as well. Before we finish off, I want to finish with our quote for the day and I want to thank those of you who’ve been sending some suggestions of quotes for the day in as well, I had a couple of those come in via email this week. Quite a few of you sharing quotes on Twitter, too. This one is a bit of a longer quote, you could almost say it’s an excerpt, just a paragraph or two by an author by the name of Neil Gaiman, who wrote this some years ago. I was lucky enough to be invited to a gathering of great and good people, artists, scientists, writers and discoverers of things. I felt that at any moment, they would realize I didn’t qualify to be there among these people who had really done things. On my second or third night there, I was standing at the back of the hall while a musical entertainment happened and I started talking to a very nice polite elderly gentleman about several things including our shared first name, Neil. He pointed to the hall of people and said words to the effect of, “I just look at all these people and I think what the heck am I doing here? They’ve made amazing things. I just went where I was sent.” And I said, “Yes, but you were the first man on the moon. I think that counts for something.” I felt a bit better, because if Neil Armstrong felt like an impostor, maybe everyone did, maybe there weren’t any grownups, only people who worked hard and also got lucky and were slightly out of their depth. All of us doing the best job we could, which is all we can really hope for. Hopefully, that encourages you, if Neil Armstrong feels a bit of impostor syndrome, then I think it’s okay for you and I, too, as well. Thanks for listening today. I look forward to chatting with you next week in next week’s episode. Again, today’s show can be found at problogger.com/podcast/247, where I will include that further listening some of those episodes that I mentioned during today’s show. Thanks for listening, chat with you 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.

9 Things I Wish I Knew About Blogging That Will Accelerate the Growth of YOUR Blog In today’s episode I want to share my keynote at this year’s Social Media Marketing World – 9 Things I Wish I Knew About Blogging that Will Accelerate the Growth of YOUR Blog. Here are the slides from my talk: 9 Things I Wish I Knew About Blogging that Will Accelerate the Growth of Your Blog from Darren Rowse Keep focusing on the pillars of pro blogging: Profitable blogs are built on great content Take the initiative to drive traffic to your blog Take ownership of building engagement with your readers Monetization. Don’t skip over these pillars or take shortcuts. And here are 9 accelerators to grow your blog faster: Understand and engage with your audience. Know your readers’ needs. Transform your readers’ lives. Great content leaves a mark on your readers. Focus less on the number of eyeballs, and more on engaging the hearts of the right readers. Create a design based on what you know about your readers. Customize their experience. Teach and engage readers through challenges using various mediums. Collaborate with others to: exchange services generate content drive traffic create revenue streams. Focus on creating evergreen content that maintains relevance and doesn’t date as fast as other content. Maintain your archives, or they depreciate. Archives are an income-generating asset. Be careful about where you go all-in on.. Where should you spend your time? Quotes of the Week: “Speed is only useful if you are running in the right direction.” – Joel Barker, Future Edge “Everyone wants to live at the top of the mountain, but all the happiness and growth occurs while you’re climbing it.” – Andy Rooney “Growth is a spiral process, doubling back on itself, reassessing, and regrouping.” – Julia Margaret Cameron Links and Resources for 9 Ways to Accelerate the Growth of Your Blog: Success Incubator New Members Area Social Media Marketing World Social Media Marketing World last year’s virtual pass Further Listening: Strategies to Help Convert First Time Visitors Into Interested Readers of Your Blog How Collaborations Can Accelerate Your Blog’s Growth The Ultimate Guide to Creating Evergreen Content for Your Blog 7 Types of Evergreen Content You Can Create on Your Blog More Evergreen Content Ideas for Your Blog How to get More Traffic By Updating Your Archives Trends in Social Media – Where Should You Focus Your Energy? 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: Good morning and welcome to episode 246 of the ProBlogger podcast. My name is 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 to grow the audience on their blog, to create great content, and to build some profit around that blog as well. You can learn more about what we do at ProBlogger at problogger.com. In today’s episode, I want to share with you a recording of a talk I gave this year at Social Media Marketing World. A great event run by Mike Stelzner and his team from Social Media Examiner. This talk is one that I got a lot of positive feedback on. In fact, I don’t think I’ve have so much positive feedback on a talk at Social Media Marketing World as I’ve received both at the event this year and since the event. I’ve got permission from Mike and his team, who’ve kindly allowed me to republish it here on the podcast in its entirety. The title of the talk is Nine Things I knew About Blogging that will Accelerate the Growth of your Blog. It’s nine things that really–today, as I look back over at the last 16 years, have been really responsible for most of the growth in my blogging. These are things that I think people that are just starting out with blogging will learn a lot from but also those of you who are along the way who wanna be the best in growth in your blogging someway. Some of these are more relevant to beginners than others. Others are a little bit more advanced. I hope there’s something for everyone in this. Now, the other thing I should say is that you’re gonna hear me touch on a few things that I have talked about in other podcasts–of late and also in the past. There will be a little bit of repeat in this for some of you but I’m hoping that by hearing all nine things together, you’ll see how some of them fit together. I would love to hear what you think about this keynote, if you’ve got any comments, if you’ve got any thoughts on it, anything you wanna add, any questions you have, feel free to ask me either on Facebook group or over on the show notes as well. The other thing I will say about the show notes is that, I’ve also put the slides from this talk. you may actually find the slides useful as I go through this talk. It’s probably ideal to have them with you. I’ll put them up as a slideshare over at problogger.com/podcast/246. That’s where you can get the slides, episode 246 over on problogger.com/podcast. There’s also, in the slides, free download links mentioned to some worksheets, some guides that we’ve put together for you. You will see in the slides a link into our member’s area which is brand new and in that we have a variety of worksheets and guides that you can grab but those mentioned in the slides but also some extra ones as well. If you wanna check out those, you’ll see a link in the slides and in the show notes but also you can find them by going to problogger.com/members and that’s a new area that we’ve set-up on ProBlogger, it’s completely free. It allows you just to download some of those guides and we do hope to add more of those in as well. Find all that at problogger.com/podcast/246. Lastly, just a really quick mention, this episode is brought to you by Success Incubator–an event that I’m running with some good friends this year in Orlando. If you enjoy today’s podcast, it will give you a feel for what we do at that event because I do some teaching every year at that event, and we also do a little bit of masterminding as well. It’s in September 24th and 25th in Orlando. All the details are linked to on today’s show notes or you can go to problogger.com/success. Alright, after I’ve said all that, I’m gonna just hit play on this week’s recording from my talk, and at the end I’ll come back and I’ll share my quote of the week and give you some further listening as well. One last little thing, it does get a little echoey in the recording, I hope you forgive me for that, and give you a bit of a feel for being at a live event. I’ll see what I can do with the recording and see if I can get rid of a little bit of that echo but please, do bear with me on that one. Hope you enjoy my talk from Social Media Marketing World. Mike: Our speaker today, of course, is the amazing Darren Rowse. When I started as a blogger back in 2009, he was one of those guys that I wanted to be when I grow up. If you don’t know who he is, he’s the founder of problogger.com. He’s also the founder of Digital Photography School, he has a conference of his own. Without wasting any more of his precious and valuable time, he’s got a lot to give you, please welcome Darren Rowse to the stage. Darren: Thank you for that beautiful introduction. You can come with me everywhere. I want to talk today about things that are going to accelerate the growth of your blog. I’ve changed my title slightly for those of you who have already noticed it. I’m giving you nine ways to accelerate the growth of your blog because I’ve only got 45 minutes, if you want the 10th one, come and talk to me in the hall afterwards and I’ll make something up. The other thing I’ve changed is this word “accelerate.” I think I used the word shortcuts in my talk, and I did that because Mike said, “You really need to get your title in today, Darren,” I just came up with that one. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that shortcuts kind of give the indication that you can skip over bits of the journey. I’m a big believer that you need to really build the foundations first, and so I’ve moved towards this acceleration idea. If you’ve been reading ProBlogger, or listening to the podcast, or you’ve come to one of our events, you’ll know I talk a lot about the pillars of problogging, and these are the things that you really need to be doing day to day, these are the things that you can’t skip over. I want to put these things out front before I get into my nine accelerants because they are so important. They’re not the sexiest things in the world to talk about because they’re just no-brainers, but I really want to emphasize them because everything I say in this session builds upon these four thing. Great blogs, profitable blogs, no matter what profit means to you builds on great content on you taking the initiative to drive traffic to your own blog, you taking ownership over the building of engagement with your readers and monetization. Most bloggers, when they start out, kind of instinctively know that they need to create content. That’s what a blog is about, but a lot of bloggers start out thinking that if they just do good enough content, the traffic will appear, the engagement will happen and opportunities to make money will land in their lap. The reality couldn’t be further from that. You need to take ownership and be working on a daily basis in each of these four areas. It’s the accumulation of the little things that you do in these four areas that build a profitable blog. I want to put that out front and say you can’t shortcut these things. These are things you need to be working on regularly. It doesn’t need to be daily, but regularly; you need to be building in these four areas. Having said those things, I want to talk about these nine things that have helped me to accelerate the growth of my blogs over the years, things I wish I knew back in 2002 when I started out and I hope that that will help you in your journey as well. A few of these are mindset-type things and some of them are a little bit more tactical. I hope they kind of meet different ones of you at different parts in your journey. The other thing I’ll say is that most of these things really relate well to podcasting and video creation. If you are in those spaces, apply these to that. The first thing is the thing I talk about every time I speak these days, and that is understanding your audience. The more you understand about your audience, the more you know them, the better position you’re in to serve them and the faster your blog will grow. I started blogging in 2002. This is a picture of my first blog. It’s really ugly. It’s the only blog I ever designed myself. It took me months to get to that stage and then I realized I needed to find someone who knew something about blog design. It really was a blog that served me. It was a fun hobby. It was a place where I could express myself. It was a place where I could have a creative outlet and talk about the things that interested me. That’s why I started blogging. I started because I just wanted to talk out loud about these things that interested me and it served me. Then, about two weeks into my blogging journey, I realized that, accidentally, I was also serving other people because I started to get these emails from people saying, “That’s really interesting. That really helped me. Thank you for writing that.” At first, I was like, “Well, that’s weird. I didn’t really write these for anyone else. I was just expressing myself,” but I realized there was this opportunity there to serve other people. I remember the day I got my first comment from someone who wasn’t my mom and that was kind of a weird experience, and I realized that when he left this comment, I got his email address. I thought, “Maybe I’m supposed to email the people who comment,” and so I sent him an email. I basically said, “Thanks for your comment. Who are you? I’d love to know a little bit more about you.” That was one of the best things that I ever did because he responded and he said, “I’ve left hundreds of comments and no one’s ever emailed me so thanks for that. This is who I am,” and he introduced himself to me and we began to have this conversation. I decided to do that anytime anyone left me a comment for the first two years of my blog, I emailed every single commenter personally. That was one of the best things that I ever did because it built engagement and built a relationship but, most of all, it helped me to understand who my readers were. I began in those two years to see patterns in my readers, and this idea of who my reader was began to form. What I realized is that the more I got to know who my reader was, the better position I was in to write content that would impact them as much as it would impact me. This thing began to happen as my blog began to grow. I realized the more I understood about who was reading, the better position I was in to drive traffic to my blog, to build engagement on my blog and then, later on when I began to monetize, I was in a great position to be able to monetize as well, because I knew my readers’ needs and I could find ways to meet those needs through the products that I created. One of the best things I ever did when I started my main blog today, Digital Photography School, is to create avatars, one of the best things that you can do. You probably already got one in your head, but I think there’s something really profound about getting it down on paper or getting it down in writing, because it will cement in your mind who is reading your blog. You’ll also begin to picture these people, all these hypothetical people, as you write your content, and your content will come across in a more personal way as well. My first avatars were pretty light, they had demographics, where they hung out online, how they spent their money as it pertained to my topic, the questions that they had, the felt needs that they had. Gradually over time, I began to deepen my avatars. I began to tap into some underlying things that were really powerful to understand about my readers. I really would encourage you to particularly look out for these things. Firstly, look out for the pain of your readers. It sounds really negative, but it’s very important. Understand their needs, not just the questions they have, their felt needs, but their real needs. Over time, you’ll begin to see that behind their questions are deeper things. On ProBlogger, we get a lot of questions about blogging and technical things, but one of the things I’ve learned about ProBlogger readers is that a lot of them are actually really fearful. I’ve had three people this morning come up and say, “I used to have a blog, but I can’t get over fear. It’s stopping me from blogging,” and so we write a lot about fear on ProBlogger because that’s the real need and our readers really respond to that. Understanding these deeper things that are holding them back are really important. The other things you want to look out for are the gains that they’re looking for: What are their aspirations? What are their dreams? Where do they want to be? What are their goals? Unlock these types of things and it will infect your content. You’ll create content that’s not just about your topic, but it’s meaningful your readers. I was really fascinated to hear Mike talk so much this morning about meaningful interactions with people because it’s exactly what I’m about with blogging. The more you understand about your reader, the better position you’re in to be meaningful to them. I’ve got some worksheets for you. Don’t feel under any pressure to grab these at all. If you want to answer worksheets to help you work through creating avatars, it’s there. I’ll show you this link again at the end as well. The second thing that’s really connected to this first is understand not only who’s reading your blog, but how you can potentially transform their life, which sounds very grand and aspirational, but is a very powerful thing. What I’ve learned over the years is that great content leaves a mark on the people who read it, or listen to it, or view it. Your content should transform your reader’s life in some way. It doesn’t have to be in a big way; it could just be that you put a smile on their face because you entertained them or it could be that you informed them of the latest news. It could be that you gave them a sense of belonging. It could be that they’re suddenly feeling all motivated in some way. There’s a variety of ways that you can be transformational with your content. As soon as you begin to understand what the transformation is that you can bring, you’ll begin to see that your content will be transformed as well. Again, a really simple exercise you can do is to grab a piece of paper, on one side, write down a few characteristics of your reader when they arrive on your side. This essentially is the avatar that I was just talking about. This is just great to know in and of itself, but the second part is even more powerful: Create an aftershot. Who will your reader be after they’ve left your blog? Even if after one visit, who do you want them to be? How do you want to have changed them? Who do you want your reader to have been after a year of traveling with you? How do you want their life to be different? Understanding that transformation will impact all of the pillars that I was talking about before. On Digital Photography School, it’s really simple. We are going to take people from being in automatic mode with their amazing camera, to having full creative control of that camera. Simply understanding that gives me ideas for content, but it also gives me a way to promote my blog as well, and to drive traffic to it. It’s so much easier to drive traffic if you promote using the transformation rather than your topic. Don’t ever say, “I have a blog about photography.” “I have a blog that takes people from automatic mode to having creative control of their cameras.” People will want to read that blog if you talk about the transformation. The topic in and of itself isn’t really that attractive, so talk about the transformation. Understanding this transformation will give you all kinds of ideas of how you can engage with your audience as well, what questions can you ask them to build engagement. It will also help you with monetization. The third thing I want to talk about that ties really in with what Mike was talking about earlier, and this is something that will escalate the growth of your blog, maybe not so much in terms of the numbers in your Google Analytics, but in terms of the profitability and the outcomes that you want. Engaged traffic is exponentially more powerful than just traffic of any kind. What I’d encourage you to do, and this will grow your blog so much faster is to focus not so much upon getting eyeballs, but on actually getting engagement with the heart of your readers. I learned this the hard way. When I started blogging, I just wanted anyone to read my blog, my mom, my wife, my friends, pretty much anyone. The way that I got them to do that was just send lots of emails to my friends. That didn’t last so long because my friends got annoyed with it. Now, I began to look at other ways of doing that, leaving comments on other blogs. I left comments on every blog that I ever knew. Gradually over time, I began to see that there were these other sites. There was a site back in the day called Digg. Does anyone remember Digg? It’s like Reddit and you could get your content voted up onto the front page. I remember one day my content got onto the front page of Digg and I had 150,000 visitors in two hours. I was ecstatic. I was like, “This is going to change my blog. I’m going to start making money. I’m going to become well-known. I’m going to get a book deal,” all those dreams. I had all of the dreams. I very quickly realized that it didn’t lead to anything that was good at all. It crashed my server and the only people who showed up, those 150,000 people, were teenage snarky boys. They left negative comments and they destroyed the community on my blog. I realized that, one, I want the right readers but, two, I want readers who want to engage. I learned the hard way that eyeballs make you feel good in the short term, but they don’t actually lead to sustainable growth in the long term. I focus very much upon not the eyeball and getting lots of traffic, get the right reader. Lots of benefits of building this kind of engagement on your blog, which I won’t go through, but it really will help you to grow your blog. Particularly if you’re looking to monetize in some way, no matter what type of monetization you want to do, it will be enhanced my engagement. Advertisers want to advertise on blogs that have engagement. You’ll sell your products so much more if you’ve got engagement. You’ll be able to monetize the engagement itself using masterminds or membership areas. Engagement is where it’s at. A lot of people used to say, “Content is king.” I actually think community is king and content, so it certainly goes alongside it. If you can get this community particularly in this day where the algorithms are really looking for engagement, it’s where you should be acting. How do you get this engagement? The first thing I’ll tell you is, if you want engagement, you need to be engaging. You need to show up. You need to take the lead in that. People will respond to you being generous and being engaging. Some of the ways that you can do this outside of your blog, apart from writing in an engaging style, and that’s where it really needs to start. At the moment, I think live video continues to be a place where you can build that kind of engagement. I don’t get hundreds of thousands of people viewing my live videos; I get a few hundred people at a time who view my live videos, but I know those people are much more likely to show up tomorrow and leave a comment on my blog. Those people are much more likely to share my content on their social media platforms. Those people are much more likely to sign up for my newsletter list to get my opt-ins and eventually to buy one of my products. I see their names pop up all the time. Live video is very powerful. Groups continue to work for us at the moment. I’m really wary about when this will end; Facebook, particularly, changing their algorithms all the time. While they’re working, they should be surfing that life. The podcast. I’ve met so many people already at this conference who’ve come up and said things like, “I feel like I know you,” or, “Can we go on walks together every week?” Someone came up the other day and said, “We have a shower together once a week?” People spend time with you and even though the podcast is not interactive at all, it’s a very personal medium and it builds engagement. It builds this sense that people know you, which is a really important thing, so include that there as well. Meetups and events are probably the best thing that I do in terms of getting to know my audience, whilst you can’t get all of your audience to them, that will really build advocates for your brand and so any way that you can meet people in real life is important as well. The last thing I’ll talk about in a moment is challenges. They’ve been very important for us. This is something I did last year on the way home from social media marketing world. I’ve got a 25-hour commute to get home. I was like, “How can I fill up these 25 hours?” so I got onto my Facebook group and I said, “I’m going to ask every question you ask me over the next 25 hours.” I was sitting in airports a lot of that time. Our Facebook group only had about 800 members at the time, so it wasn’t a big community, but 200 of them showed up and asked a question over that time. It was fascinating to see how spending that 24-hour period with my readers really grew the engagement of that little community. It was really fascinating to see that most of the action actually happened when I was in the air and didn’t have WiFi. My community showed up and answered each other’s questions more than I answered their questions. This illustrates that point: If you’re willing to be engaging, your community will take your lead and they will be engaging, too, not just with you but with each other. That’s where real community happens. The last thing I’ll tell you about engagement is this idea of know, like, and trust. Who has heard that quote? People do business with those that they know, like, and trust. You will hear that quote at least three times over the next two days. People use that quote all the time at this conference. Here’s the thing about know, like, and trust: It’s a two-way thing and people will know, like, and trust you so much faster if you show that you know them, and you show up, and spend time with them, and show that you like them, and that you trust them by being vulnerable with them as well. That’s just an example of that. In that 25 hours, my readers began to realize that I wasn’t just there to get them to know, like, and trust me. I actually wanted to interact with them. The fourth thing I want to talk about is a little bit more strategic, and that is design. I’ve already shown you that I’m not a great designer, so I can’t give you any tips on colors, or fonts. The thing I’ll say about design is, increasingly, our design is about trying to meet our readers where they’re at. You know a lot about your readers just simply by looking at where they came from? Did they come from Google? Or an email? Or social media?  Whether they’ve been on your site before? What part of the site they’re on? These things are things that we know and we get these data, so we should be reflecting this on our design. Some of the things we’ve been trying to do on ProBlogger are to try and create a design that really meets our readers where they’re at to show that we know them and to show that we want to help transform them. In the old days, it was all about trying to get people to view more about content, just any of our content. Today, it’s more about communicating the journey and trying to show our readers where they’re at. If you’ve got a ProBlogger now on the front page, right down the bottom of the front page, we have this heading, “I need help, too.” Underneath that, there’s these eight icons. The eight icons represent pain and the gains of our readers. We’ve identified, over the years, that our readers have eight main reasons they come to ProBlogger. They want to learn to start a blog, they want more traffic, they want to make more money, they want to be more productive with their time, they want to understand the tools, these are the basic things that they come looking for information on. Everywhere on the site, we greet them with an invitation to get help in one of these areas. This is to demonstrate that we know who our readers are, to communicate, “We know your pain.” Instead of directing them to a category page, we direct them to what we call a portal page. On these portal pages, we’ve curated an experience for our readers. We greet them with a video where I communicate that I, too, have this pain or I, too, want this gain and I’ve had experience in that. Then, we’ve curated some content underneath that, both blog posts and podcasts, that take them through solutions to that pain. I know that if I get you to this portal page, you will stay on our site for at least three times longer than the average of our site. You’ll view quite considerably more pages, you’ll sign up to our newsletter, much more likely, you’ll connect with us on Facebook more likely as well. Eventually, you’ll buy one of our products as well. Getting people to a page where you demonstrate you know your reader and you meet them with content that’s where they’re at is very powerful. Traditionally, if people come to a blog, the chances of them finding content that meets their pain is pretty small because the latest content that you’ve got is highlighted to them. If that content doesn’t meet their pain immediately, they’ll bounce away, so we’re trying to meet people where they’re at. Another thing that we do on the front page of ProBlogger is greet different readers differently. If you’ve never been to ProBlogger before, you’ll get this greeting. It’s all about the transformation. This is what we’re in the business of doing. We want to take you from here to here and we’d love to connect with you. If you’ve been to our site before and you’ve got a cookie from us, we don’t want to show you this because you already know about ProBlogger. We want to show you this, and this is, “Welcome back,” and, “Here’s the posts you’ve missed since last time you were there.” This is a very simple way to customize the experience of your reader. It’s thinking in your design about how you can meet different readers based upon what you know about them. The fifth thing I want to talk about is challenges. Since 2004, when I started ProBlogger, I can see that there have been spikes of activity over those years: spikes in traffic, spikes in engagement and spike to profit as well. I can track all those spikes back to challenges that I’ve run on the side. The first challenge I ran on ProBlogger was back in 2005 and I did it completely by accident. One night, I was lying in bed at 2:00 AM thinking about my blog as I often do, and I couldn’t go to sleep. I had idea: “I want to start 31-day series of content on my blog,” and every day after these 31 days, I want to give people a little bit of teaching and then give people a little bit of homework to do, something practical that they could do. I thought this was going to be a teaching series. I launched it the next day. I had no idea what the 31 days were going to be, so I had to make it up on the spot and it took off. The first post I did was the biggest pose I’d ever written, and people joined in this challenge. They didn’t see it just as a teaching experience; they actually saw it as an engagement experience. They wanted to join this event that I was running. I called it 31 Days to Build a Better Blog. They saw it as an event and I was, “Okay. I’ll make it an event,” and so I started to make it more engaging. I said, “At the end of every day, come back and show us what you did,” and readers began to check out what each other were doing and these conversations were opening up. The second year I did it, we added a forum to it and we added an opt-in, so we sent out emails along the way as well. Every time we ran it, it was the biggest traffic we’d ever had, the biggest engagement we’d ever had. At the end of 2009 when I did it, my readers said, “Hey, we really would love it if you could create a PDF version of this.” Some of them were saying, “We’ll pay you for it,” and I was like, “How much will you pay me for it?” They were like, “$15 or $20,” and I was like, “No you wouldn’t pay that,” and they were like, “Yes, we will.” I was like, “Hey, let’s test this,” so I created the ebook and I put it on sale, thinking maybe it would sell $100 or so because all of the content was already on the blog for free. I mean, who’s going to buy something that’s already there for free? About 10,000 people bought that in the first year so I was like, “Okay. These challenges can actually be monetized as well.” People will take this free information, but if you re-package it into something that they can use again and again, that’s useful in an ongoing way, that’ll be great. The other cool thing about this is that other groups of bloggers that I don’t even know about buy the book together and run through the challenge together. They’re running their own challenges. You give them the format, they will take and run it as well. You can do challenges in other mediums. This is a challenge I ran on the podcast a year or so ago, seven days of writing challenges. It really took off and it led to a lot of growth in the podcast. This is another challenge we did earlier this year. We launched this as a course. It’s a free course on how to start a blog and it’s the type of course you could do anytime, but we launched it as a challenge and we took several thousand bloggers through this challenge together. This, really, is one of the best things that we’ve done in the last year or so. Challenges are very powerful. There’s lots of benefits of running a challenge on your blog. Again, for those of you interested in monetization, you can monetize these in a number of ways. Firstly, you could run a free challenge and then do an upsell at the end of that. Our starter blog course is free, but we’ll be selling our 31 Days to Build a Better Course, which is coming out soon at the end of that to people. You can monetize it with sponsorships so, “Here’s a free challenge that you can participate in. It’s presented by this brand,” and you can charge for that. You can do affiliate marketing during it. In our starter blog course, we had about 6000 people go through that. We know, on average, that we make about $6 per participant in that through affiliate stuff that we do. We promote servers and web press tools along the way. We disclose all of those so our readers know that they’re helping us as well. The other way that you can do it is to sell the challenge, and that’s what we did with 31 Days to Build A Better Blog, the ebook. There’s a variety of ways that you can use challenges to actually build a business as well but, for me, the challenge is really exciting because it helps you to get to know your reader better. At the end of our Starter Blog challenge, we’ve got thousands of bloggers now who are engaged with our brand. We just help them to start a blog and they’re really grateful for that. That “know, like and trust” has really grown as a result of them spending a month with us working on achieving something. We’re actually helping them in a tangible way. The sixth thing I want to talk about is collaborations. Collaborations are probably one of the most powerful things I’ve done to grow my blog. Blogging is a juggle. Every blogger in the room knows what that juggle is, to create content, to build engagement, to drive traffic, to maintain all the social media accounts, to keep WordPress up to date and all the plugins. It’s just making me stressed just listing these things off. They’re balls in the air and it’s so hard to keep all those balls in the air. The thing I’ve learned over the years is that it’s a lot easier to keep balls in the air and more balls in the air when you actually juggle with other people. There’s a variety of ways you can do this. You could outsource, you could hire a team but most bloggers don’t have the resources to do that. The best way to do it is to find win-win ways of working together with other bloggers, other content creators. I did this very early on in my blogging. I showed you my blog design before. I realized that I needed to find someone who knew about blog design, so I found someone who was willing to design my blog for free if I did some work for them. I did some writing for them. I drove some traffic to their business as well. It was a collaboration where we exchanged services. Pretty much in every one of the pillars that I’ve talked about before, there are opportunities to collaborate. When it comes to content as bloggers, I think we should be collaborating more. Yes, I know a lot of just post for each other, but why don’t we create content together? YouTubers do it all the time. It’s so normal for two YouTubers to come together to create a video together and then they repost that onto their own channels. Why don’t we do that more as bloggers? People co-author books. People co-author articles in mainstream media. I published almost 19,000 articles on my two main blogs, and two of them have been co-authored posts. I think we could be working together more to collaborate in content. There’s a whole heap of ways that we could also collaborate in driving traffic to one another, to build engagement. Why does every blogger have to have their own Facebook group? Why don’t bloggers join together to create Facebook groups together and come up with win-win ways of building collaborations around that? When it comes to monetization, I particularly think there’s opportunities to collaborate. Back in 2009, I created this ebook. It’s the first ebook I’d ever created and it was basically a rehash of a lot of articles that I’d already written on Digital Photography School. It almost killed me. It killed me to create this ebook. Even though it was already republished content and it was mainly all written, just the design of it, the editing of it, the proofreading of it, the putting-it-together, almost killed me. It took me five or six months to get this ebook together. I knew I should do it. I’ve been procrastinating. I finally did it. I launched it, wondering if anyone would buy it. We sold about $70,000 worth of copies of it in the first 10 days. I suddenly realized that maybe I should do more ebooks but I didn’t want to go through that process again of having to create another ebook so I began to look for ways of getting others involved in this process. I reached out to one of the authors on our site who had been writing some articles for us and I said, “Hey, Neil, would you be interested in writing an ebook? We’ve got the traffic. We’ve got the shopping cart system now. We can do customer service, we can bring that side of things, but I can’t write another ebook. I don’t have the time. Would you do it?” and he was like, “Yes, sure. No problem.” Three weeks later, he’d written an ebook that took me five months. It was completely from scratch. He was just a great writer and, when we put it on sale, it did better than our first one. He wrote another one a few months later, and another one, and another one. We’ve got 30 ebooks now on our sites and I have not written any of them. These are all collaborations. We’ve got six courses. We’ve got Lightroom Presets. We’ve got Printables. All of them have been collaborations, every single one. In that time since 2009, maybe I would’ve written another five or six ebooks on this site, but we’ve got all of this suite of products now. Yes, we share the revenue and sometimes it sucks to think, “We’re only getting 50%,” but it’s actually really exciting that we’ve also opened up revenue streams for all these other people as well. An ebook writer the other day emailed me and said, “You just helped us to buy our first house,” so it’s really great to be a part of that process as well. He’s also helped us to buy a house, too, which is nice, too. As I look at all the income that we earn, these are the main income streams on my blogs. I’m happy to talk about income streams after this session. Almost all of them are actually collaborations. There’s only one that’s not out of all of those. Really, think beyond you when it comes to monetizing your blog. It’s one of the most powerful ways to build profit around your blog. I’m not just talking here about monetizing through affiliate products; I actually think business-to-business. You could be collaborating with others in your industry to create things together and find win-win- solutions. I’ve got a podcast on that that goes into a little bit more depth if you do want to listen to a bit more on that topic. Ever-growing content, I was talking to someone just earlier about this. This is one of the best things that I ever did. I completely agree with Tim Farris on this. One of the most labor-efficient ways to grow your blog readership but also engagement as well is to focus on creating ever-growing content. Ever-growing content is content that doesn’t date as fast as other content. This is my first commercial blog. It’s actually a photography blog that I had before Digital Photography School. It was a news and reviews site, and I did two types of posts. There were news posts and reviews. The news posts would do really well for three days after I write them. “Here’s a new camera! It’s exciting! Canon’s got this new camera,” and then no one would want to know about that post three days later because it’s old news. To create a blog that’s purely news, you need to create a lot of content every day. That’s why some of these gadget sites publish 20 or 30 articles a day because they just need to pump out lots of content to keep the traffic coming. The other type of content I did on this site were reviews of cameras, and these were a bit more ever-growing. You’d write a review of a brand new camera today, people will be interested in that review for about a year until Canon brings out the next model that supersedes the last one. That taught me how powerful ever-growing content was. I was able to track how much our news articles could make us through ads versus how much our review posts would make us through ads. The review posts were 10 times as much in terms of the earnings. I began to wonder, “What would happen if I had even more ever-growing content in this particular space of photography? What would that look like?” and that, of course, chained into Digital Photography School where we teach people how to use cameras because the basics of how to use a camera haven’t changed since I was in Year 10 at high school when I was using film camera. Aperture is still aperture. Shutter speed is still shutter speed. How to hold a camera hasn’t changed that much. There certainly are aspects of photography that have changed but the basic things haven’t changed so I decided to start writing a site that was more about this type of content, content that wouldn’t date as much. Now, we still do some news-y type posts. I thought it’d be interesting to show you a couple of case studies on different types of posts. This is a news-y type of post, a post we wrote three years ago on Adobe’s new version of Lightroom. You can see there the Google Analytics. It did quite well for the first week of this post. I think Day One had about 3,000 visitors. Over the first couple of weeks of this post, we had about 11,200 visitors to it. Over the last three years, we’ve added another 18,000 viewers. It really has not worked for us very much. In fact, at the moment, it’s getting one viewer per month, and they just happen to stumble upon it or maybe it’s me checking out whether it’s still alive. It’s not really working for us at all. It took the writer about an hour to write it and a little bit of editing but it really hasn’t worked for us. This is another post that we wrote two weeks later, and it’s on a topic that we get questions on from time to time and we continue to get questions on. It’s more ever-growing in nature. Now, this isn’t the most spectacular post. You can see that the pattern there in the first couple of weeks was very similar. It had about 16,000 visitors to it over the first two or three weeks but since that time, it’s had 42,000 visitors to it. You can see there are some little extra spikes along the journey, and these are times that we’ve re-shared it. This is the beauty of ever-growing content: You write it three years ago, I can share this again on our Facebook page today and our readers will go, “Thanks. That’s really good.” If I re-shared that news post about Lightroom, people would go, “Why are you sharing this? This is three years old.” Ever-growing content allows you so share it. Other people are sharing it, too. The other thing is if you drill into that graph even more, you’ll see that 40 people every day view this post from Google. Those 40 people don’t sound like much but, 365 days a year, that begins to add up over time. We’ve got 8,000 posts on our site now, too, and if they’re all getting 40 visitors a day, that adds up over time as well. Alongside that, occasionally, you do a post that actually adds up even bigger. This is one of those posts. I wrote it in 2007. It didn’t really start that spectacularly. It had about 100 visits a day because that site was really small at the time, but this one’s actually grown in how much traffic it gets over time. It’s had over 40 million people view it since that time. It took me two hours to write it back then, and this post is working for us today and continues to earn us revenue from advertising but also brings in subscribers to our blog because we have opt-ins associated with that as well. Then, we’re able to sell to those people down the track. This is the power of ever-growing content, all those 8,000 posts with visitors and this one that gets about 3,000 visitors a day still today that begins to add up over time. This is why you begin to see the acceleration of your blog. The more archives you have that are ever-growing, it really does pay off. It doesn’t happen overnight but it grows over time. The second last thing I want to talk about is maintaining your archives, and this is particularly important if you go down this route of ever-growing content. This is a major trend that I’m seeing that’s not being talked about at the moment amongst bloggers. They’re spending more time doing this. Your archives are an asset. I’m just showing you that there’s gold in your archives. You’re probably all thinking about a post that just still gets traffic today. That post is an asset and potentially is an income-generating asset. Here’s the thing: Your assets depreciate and I bet you your archives are depreciating right now. I dare you. Go back to the first post you ever wrote. What are you going to do? You will cringe. I guarantee it. We all do. We all cringe, and that’s because your archives are depreciating. It doesn’t look as good anymore because we used to use these tiny little thumbnails and sometimes their images are broken. We have these call-to-actions that don’t go anywhere anymore because that social network doesn’t actually exist anymore. “Share on MySpace,” and all of those types of things going on. There’s broken links there. Your writing has improved since then. You used to write in a very naïve kind of way. You used to make all these assumptions. You used to format those posts differently. Maybe you didn’t use headlines and it was just a long line of text. Your archives are depreciating. They’re looking dated. They probably have information in them that needs to be updated as well. Why don’t we maintain them? If you maintain your archives, you can actually reverse that trend. I’m just showing you an example of that. That ISO post that’s had 40-something million people? I’ve updated that every six months since 2007. It’s better now than it was when I started. It’s my goal to continue to improve the way it looks, the way it reads and the information in it. I want it to be the best article that I can, and that’s why it’s growing. This is something that’s happening more and more. We maintain all of our assets because we know there are consequences in the future if we don’t. This is what I’m noticing: A lot of bloggers are doing it. They’re actually publishing lists. A lot of the big bloggers don’t publish anywhere near as much new content as they used to, and that’s because they’re publishing better content when they’re publishing new content. It’s deeper content. It’s longer-form content in many cases, but they’re also putting more of the effort into up-keeping their archives because there’s better return in up-keeping and improving their archives than there is in creating lots of new posts. Particularly if you’ve been blogging for five or six years, you’ve probably written about everything there is to write about on your topic. There’s probably not a lot of new stuff to write but you can be improving those old archives and even republishing them and re-sharing them as well. There’s lots of benefits of up-keeping your archives but the challenge I have for you is to really start to build that into your editorial strategy. Identify the old posts that have done well, the best posts–the ones that have had a lot of traffic in particular, start with those–and anything that’s underperformed in the past. I’m not going to go through these individually but these are some of the things that you can do to improve your content–and, yes, you can grab these slides later to work through these. The thing I would encourage you to do particularly is to give your old content the cringe test. I challenge you: Every day, look at one of your old posts. That means, over the year, you’ll have looked at 365 posts. Some of those old posts will be fine; you won’t cringe. They’re probably good. If you cringe, you need to update it. It’s really important to do that. Then, build that into your calendar. Most bloggers have a calendar. I publish new content on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Why don’t you update content on Tuesday and Thursday? Actually, make that a part of your system of creating content. The last thing I want to talk about just for a moment or two is be really careful about where you go, and this is particularly relevant as we go into this conference. You’re going to come home from this conference feeling overwhelmed by all the things you could do. You’re probably already feeling it. Mike’s talk talked about a few things this morning. He’s talking about bots. Should we be doing bots? Should we be doing Facebook, Instagram? Snapchat, I don’t think so. There’s lots of different things that you can be doing there and where should you be spending your time. I just want to give you three pieces of advice on that. Firstly, focus on what is converting for you already. A lot of people come to a conference like this and say, “I’m going to give up blogging to get into Instagram stories.” I’ve seen people do this. I’ve seen bloggers give up wanting to get onto Twitter, to Instagram, to Facebook. All the ones who just jump onto Facebook are all coming back to me and going, “I wish I kept blogging.” Focus on what is working for you now. The new stuff that’s coming up all the time, maybe it’s something you should be focusing your time on, but you should be spending most of your time on what is actually working for you and for others in the industry now. For me, the thing that is working the best for me is search engine optimization. Search sends me over half of my traffic. Facebook sends me 8% of my traffic, and that’s my number one social source. Why do I spend three hours a day on Facebook? Why, when search is converting so much more? Search isn’t going away. The second biggest driver of traffic for me is email. I send my own avalanche of traffic every week. We sent a newsletter last night. I know today will be our biggest day of traffic. Why aren’t I spending more time on that? Focus on what is working. Yes, there’s all this new cool stuff around at the moment. Spend some time on that. Learn to see whether that might convert for you, but spend more time on the things that are working for you today. The second thing: Focus on what you have more control over. You don’t own Facebook. You’re building their asset. You don’t own Instagram. You’re building their asset. Build your asset, your podcast, your blog, your email list. Now, you don’t have complete control over your email list because Google’s now getting in the middle of that and filtering some of your emails into little different inboxes and things, but you still have those email addresses which you can use in different contexts as well. Build your assets. Focus on these things. Yes, experiment in these other things as well, but here’s the thing that you should be doing with social media, in my opinion: Leverage them while they last. Ride the waves of these new things that come. Bots might be the new thing that’s going to last for the next year or two until the marketers all destroy it, but ride that wave while it’s lasting and then be ready to pivot into something new. Gary V. is really big on this. He talks about this quite a bit. If you watch his trajectory over the last three or four years, he’s jumped from platform, to platform, to platform. Now, what he’s doing is building his own platform a lot more. He’s trying to get people to join his community, to get on his email list. Yes, use these things but use them to build your asset. They’re not a long-term plan in my opinion. Thank you for coming. You can grab these slides and a few resources that we’ve put together that are relevant for this session. I’m going to be here for the next two days. I’ll stand out there for all of it. If you’ve got questions that last that long, I’m happy to chat to you and take any of your questions out in a whole way because I need to get a newspaper in here. Thanks so much.   I hope you enjoyed today’s recording. Again, thank you to the team at Social Media Marketing World for allowing us to use this talk. It’s a great conference. If you do wanna head to a conference next year check it out. I’ll link to them in the show notes today. Not sure whether I’ll be there or not next year but I have been for the last four-five years, so it’s highly likely that I will. My quote of the week, something I started last week. I’ve got two or three for you and they’re all on the theme of acceleration or growing your business. These are things that might balance out some of what I taught today. The first one’s from Joel Barker, “Speed is only useful if you are running in the right direction.” For me, that’s a reminder that goals are so important. It’s well and good to grow your business, to grow traffic to accelerate your growth in some ways. But unless you’re clear on the goals that you have, you’re accelerating you, you’re getting faster in the growth of the business for no real ultimate goal, I guess. You could be ending up just going fast in the wrong direction. Get those goals down first. Second quote from Andy Rooney, “Everyone wants to live at the top of the mountain but all the happiness and growth occurs while you are climbing it.” This is something I think is really relevant for a lot of bloggers because a lot of bloggers I know have this goals that I wanna be a full time blogger, a goal that they wanna get a book deal, or a goal that they wanna be doing something with their blog, and opening up opportunities with their blog. it’s great to have those goals but the reality is that the goal doesn’t bring happiness itself. It can be a momentous occasion but enjoy the ride to the goal as well. That’s what I’ve certainly fanned over the years. The goal itself is important but the journey is really rich as well. I encourage you to pause along the way, don’t be obsessed with growth, but actually enjoy the little wins that you have along the way. Enjoy the friendships that are merged from it. Enjoy the opportunities that you have to change your readers’ lives as well. Last quote that is from Julia Margaret Cameron, “Growth is a spiral process, doubling back on itself, reassessing, and regrouping.” If you’re at the point in your business where you’re current plateauing in your traffic a little bit, I hope that some of what you’ve heard today will help in that. But also know that it’s natural to have periods of intense growth but also periods where things feel like they’re slowing down, and even where they’re going backwards. Those times are really great opportunity to assess how things are going, to analyze where previous growth has come from, and to look around and see what others are doing to perhaps try something new as well. It’s completely natural to have those times where things fall flat, where things go backwards, that is part of the process. Don’t give up. Keep pushing forward. Hope you have found those quote useful. I’ll include them over on the show notes today as well. I look forward to chatting with you next week. Actually, I will also just say that over on the show notes as well, I do link to some of the further listening on the nine things that I mentioned in today’s podcast as well. There’s plenty there to dig into if any of those nine things really pick your interest. go a little bit deeper on them by listening to one of those podcasts. Again, today’s show notes including the slides, our links to those worksheets, link to those quotes, all of the links, all of the things, you can find them at problogger.com/podcast/246. 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.

Why Shiny Object Syndrome Can Be Good for Your Blog and Business Do you suffer from Shiny Object Syndrome? Are you easily distracted by something new – a tool, medium, tactic, or income stream? Whatever it is, it captivates and distracts you in the moment. And it can easily take over your day, week, or even month. Shiny Object Syndrome has the power to take you away from your core business, which can be destructive. But it can be a good thing, too. JR Caparas asked me how to avoid Shiny Object Syndrome in blogging. My answer? Don’t avoid it. Just make sure you put boundaries around it. Sometimes shiny objects can give you energy, spark new ideas, and help you discover new ways to engage your audience. So rather than avoiding shiny objects, make time for them. But don’t let them hijack your business, your time and your life. You need to spend most of your time focusing on what’s most important, what keeps your blog growing, what’s already working, and what’s proven to work. But put some time aside to play, experiment, learn, and be curious. And look for what makes sparks fly and gives you energy when you play with that shiny object. Put shiny objects in their place. Quote of the Week: “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.” – Howard Washington Thurman, author, philosopher, theologian, educator, and civil rights leader. Links and Resources for Why Shiny Object Syndrome is Sometimes a Good Thing Success Incubator Further Listening 3 Productivity Tips to Help You Build Healthy Habits 7 Productivity Tips for Bloggers Examples of Why Shiny Object Syndrome is Sometimes a Good Thing The ProBlogger podcast started out as a shiny object. 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 245 of the ProBlogger Podcast. My name is 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, to grow that blog, to monetize that blog and hopefully have a good time while you’re doing it. You can learn more about ProBlogger at problogger.com. Now, today’s podcast is all about something that I know many of us struggle with in this space, it is shiny object syndrome, that time when you’re working away and suddenly you find yourself doing something completely different to what you had set down to do. You’re being distracted by something; it could be a game on your phone, but it also could be something that is good, a new tool, a medium, a new tactic, a new income string. Whatever it is, it captivates you in that moment, it looms large, it can distract you right where you’re sitting not only for that moment, but it can end up distracting you if you’re anything like me, for a day, for a week, for a month, or for the rest of the year. It has the power to take you away from your core business and to be really distracted, but, and this is what I want to talk about today, I think it can actually be a good thing too. There’s some positives when it comes to shiny object syndrome. I want to explore that a little bit in today’s show. It will be a short one, but I want to put to you that shiny object syndrome is actually something you can—maybe you should plan for, maybe you should actually build into your week. Hang with me though, before I get into that, I want to just let you know that this episode is brought to you by this year’s Success Incubator event which I’m running with some good friends this coming September on the 24th and 25th in Orlando, Florida. If you are in the U.S. or you feel like a troop out to the U.S., you could actually tackle this onto another conference that’s happening in the days after theme con, this year, we are doing it again. This is the second time we’ve done Success Incubator. It is a mastermind style event, you get about half the time teaching, and half the time interacting with other people in an intentional way, talking about your business, your blog, and helping each other to improve what you want to build. If that sounds interesting to you, I highly recommend that you grab a ticket sooner than later because we are limiting the numbers this year quite a bit. problogger.com/success will take you there and give you all the details of that event. The last thing I want to say is that I’m going to do something a little bit new at the end of today’s podcast. I want to share with you a quote of the week and I was just thinking maybe I’ll do this for a few weeks and see what you think about it. I love quotes, I spend a lot of my time being distracted by quotes which is a little bit ironic because that’s what I’m talking about today. I do want to share a quote with you today that I think relates to blogging—not all of the quotes that I share will relate to blogging but hopefully it’s just a moment in this podcast that will give you a little bit of encouragement as you go about your business. So stay tuned to the end and I will share that quote with you. Lastly, problogger.com/podcast/245 is where you’ll find today’s show notes and a full transcript of the show. Let’s get into it. Okay, today’s topic was suggested by one of our Facebook group members, JR Caparas I think it is, thank you for your question. “How do you focus and avoid shiny object syndrome in blogging?” JR asks, and then it goes on to talking about the topics, niches, blogging, books, courses, blogging tasks, possible sources of income as examples of those shiny objects. Here’s what I want to say to you, JR, I actually think that shiny object syndrome can be a good thing, and I would encourage you not to avoid it but to put it in its place. Those of you who have been listening for a while know that I’m a big believer in putting boundaries around what we do, all of the things that we do, to actually put things in their place. Here’s the argument that I want to make for shiny object syndrome, is that sometimes, the shiny objects can actually give us energy, they can spark new ideas, they can help us discover new ways of engaging with our audience and they can actually help us to find white space in our minds and are able to rest a little bit. The distractions can actually be good things in a variety of ways for us personally, but also for our business and for our blogs. I’ve discovered this many times over the years, that it is sometimes in the distractions that I get my next good idea. Sometimes, it is listening to a podcast that has got nothing to do with blogging that I actually get the best idea for blogging. Sometimes, it is in playing with a new social network that’s just emerging, a shiny object that really isn’t benefiting my blog in the present. Sometimes, I get ideas from that, sometimes I discover something that I can then translate into my business. What I want to encourage you to do is to think about not avoiding it, not eliminating it, but to actually make time for it and put boundaries around that. The key is not to allow your business, your time, your life to be hijacked by the shiny object. The problem I see—and I’m sure this is what JR is alluding to—is that many times we get completely sidetracked by the shiny objects, by the new medium, by that new tool, by that new platform, all the topics, all the techniques, all the gears, all the conferences, all the books, all the courses, all the income strength. Sometimes these things actually completely sidetrack us and stop our core business and activities that we need to do to build our blog. What I want to encourage you to do is to think about your time and your schedule and actually schedule your week out as much as possible. This is something I’ve talked about, I think it was back in episode 40, for the first time and then more recently in episode 163. In both of those episodes, I showed you my weekly template. This is something I designed for my week. I actually got a calendar—a Google calendar—and I blocked out time for different activities. A lot of those activities were to do with my core business. A lot of them went to creating new content, brainstorming ideas, connecting with my team, doing administrative tasks like replying to emails, moderating comments, interacting in my Facebook group, these are the things that I know are so important. If you’re going to look at my template, you’ll see that probably 95% of my time, maybe 90% of my time, is on these core things that I know I need to do to build my business. That’s particularly between 9:00 and 5:00. But you will also sit down Monday afternoons if you’re going to look at episodes 163. You’ll see on Monday afternoons, I have time for play and that is a time where I have scheduled shiny objects. That is a time I do not plan what I’m going to do, I simply sit down on a Monday afternoon and I say, what do I want to do now? What have I been putting off this week to play with? What am I curious about? What new tool? Sometimes it’s a tool, sometimes it’s a book that I’ve had sitting next to my bed, sometimes I go and curl up in my bed and have a read. Sometimes it’s an episode on Netflix that I’ve been thinking about, sometimes it’s a podcast, sometimes it’s exercise, sometimes it’s playing with my kids, sometimes it’s a new app on my phone or a game that I want to play with. These shiny objects, I actually acknowledge them and I set aside time to do them and to pay attention to them. Sometimes, it’s a very productive time and sometimes it’s a completely unproductive time but I’ve put shiny objects in their place. What I’ve discovered is that I actually begin to look forward to Monday afternoons, it’s a time that I relax, it’s a time that I enjoy, a time that I see almost as a reward for the hard work of the rest of my schedule. Put aside best of time for shiny objects. Now, you might choose to do that on a Monday afternoon, once a week, or you may choose to do that every afternoon at 3:30 just before your kids get home from school or after you’ve written a blog post, you may give yourself a boost of 15 minutes and you may want to schedule it in that way. Put aside time for it, and what you might find is that it will give you energy, it will spark new ideas, it will help you to discover new techniques in what you’re going to do. Some of it will actually then become not just a shiny object but it can actually become the thing that you do, your next big thing in some way. This is again something that I’ve talked about before that your next big thing sometimes will start as a little spark of an idea or something that you experiment with. I can think about many times where this has happened for me. This podcast really started as a shiny object for me. This podcast was something that I had felt that I wanted to do, something that was making me curious, it was something that I’ve been wondering about for many years and I decided to do. But, I decided to do it with boundaries around it. I actually started this podcast for a month. I said to myself I’m going to do a month of content. I’m going to do this first series of this podcast. A part of me there was really limiting myself to just that one month because I didn’t want to become distracted for all time by it, I wanted to see whether ego meet energies and whether it was something that I enjoyed, but I also wanted to watch to see what happened as I follow that spark of curiosity. What I found is that the podcast did give me energy. It was actually something that I enjoyed incredibly but I also realized that in doing it, experimenting with it, was that other people were getting energy with it too. This is the second thing that I encourage you to do as you think about these times where you allow yourself to be distracted, where you allow yourself to be following your curiosities is to pay attention to whether those things give you energy but also as you experiment particularly with the things and to do with your blog, watch to see what happens as a result of those things. If the podcast had given me incredible amounts of energy but no one ever listened to it, I would probably have to ask some tough questions about that. Is this something that is going to bring life to my business in the long-term if no one is listening to it? You want to be finding things that allow you to feel like you’ve come alive, but also things that give other people energy as well. That’s my advice for you, JR, yes, you want to limit your shiny object syndrome but actually find a place for it. Find a place for that because you may just find that in those moments where you follow those curiosities, that new things will emerge from those. I would love to hear your reflections on this podcast and I would particularly love to hear those moments where you have found the shiny object that has distracted you in a good way that has led to something powerful. After they hear people talking about productivity, eliminate distractions. I would love to hear some examples of people who have been distracted by something but have actually found some goodness in those distractions as well. You can let us know what those things are either on the comments of the show notes today at problogger.com/podcast/245, or head on over to our Facebook group, just search for ProBlogger Community on Facebook. Now onto my quote of the day, and it just so happens I didn’t actually plan it this way but as I’m thinking about the quote that I have selected for today, it actually connects with the topic of today, it was meant to be, I might say. The quote is from a man called Howard Washington Thurman who is an author, philosopher, theologian, educator, civil rights leader—I just read that off Wikipedia. I don’t really know a lot about him, but I love this quote, it’s one that has resonated with me for years now and it came back to my attention today as I was listening to a podcast. This is what he wrote or spoke, “Don’t ask what the world needs, ask what makes you come alive and go do it because what the world needs is people who have come alive.” I think this does resonate with today’s show. You do sometimes need to be mindful of the things that make you come alive. Sometimes those things start as shiny objects, things that might even be distracting you and if you don’t allow yourself to follow those curiosities, you might not actually discover what it is that is alive within you. Let me just read that again, “Don’t ask what the world needs, ask what makes you come alive and go do it because what the world needs is people who have come alive.” I guess the last thing I’ll say about this is that it does particularly right to those of you who at the beginning of your journey of blogging have maybe been wondering what should I blog about? Choosing a niche, I do think it’s important to pay attention to what brings you alive, what gives you energy because you are going to be at this for a long time and you might as well enjoy what you’re doing, you might as well feel alive by what you are doing, but the value of it is that if you come alive with your topic, your readers, the listeners of your podcast, the viewers of your video are going to feel that you are alive with your topic and that’s going to resonate with him on a deeper level, and it’s going to make them feel more alive as well. What the world needs is people who are alive, and particularly in the times that we live in today, we do live in a time where it’s very easy to feel like it’s a dark time but what the world actually needs is people who will brush on a little light and they do that by being excited or passionate about what they’re on about. Thanks for listening. I would love to hear any quotes that you’ve got that bring you a bit of life again. Feel free to share them in today’s show notes or over in our Facebook group as well. I might just feature a couple of yours in the future as well. Thanks for listening, I hope that you have a great week of being a little bit distracted at times, but also paying attention to 90% of that time to your core tasks as well. Don’t go too far with the shiny objects. Thanks for listening, chat with you 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.

How to Promote Your Blog Offline Today I’m tackling questions from listener, Julianna Barnaby about whether it’s important to spend time offline building your blog’s personal brand and reputation. The answer is simple. “Yes.” Offline promotion is worth it. Get creative, and get out and meet people. You may need to step out of your comfort zone, but that can be rewarding. You never know when someone you meet will become a reader, collaborator, team member, or even sponsor. The sky’s the limit when it comes to offline promotion, and engagement is sometimes much stronger. People are more likely to comment on, share, and buy your products and services. Offline methods to promote and grow your readership: Events (conferences, conventions, and meetups): Go to events (or create your own) to speed up engagement and build relationships. Media: Pitch ideas for stories to newspapers, TV stations, radio stations, etc. Publications: Pitch story ideas to industry group publications, too. They’re always looking for stories and content. Notice Boards: Post flyers about your blog in cafes, libraries, stores, etc. Collaborate: Find organizations and retailers with networks of people you want to have as readers and receive value from your blog. Links and Resources for How to Find More Traffic for Your Blog Offline: Success Incubator HARO (Help a Reporter) SourceBottle Michael Stelzner Meetup.com Examples of How to Find More Traffic for Your Blog Offline Digital Photography School lets camera clubs republish its articles in newsletters Virgin Australia Airline features blog content for in-flight entertainment Join our Facebook group Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Hey there and welcome to Episode 244 of the ProBlogger Podcast. My name is 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, to create brilliant content for that blog that’s going to change the lives of your readers, and also to work out how to sustain that blog, to make it a profitable venture not only for your readers but for you. You can learn more about ProBlogger and all that we do over at problogger.com. Now, today’s podcast is brought to you by this year’s Success Incubator event, which I’m running with some good friends this coming September in Orlando, Florida. We ran our first Success Incubator last year and it was one of the highlights of my year. We’re going to evolve the event slightly this year to make it a little bit more of a Mastermind-style event. We’re limiting the numbers to keep it a little bit more intimate, and we’re also including considerable time not only for teaching—there’ll be a series of sessions which will be more workshop style—but also putting aside considerable time for Masterminding. We’re running the event over an afternoon and then full day on the afternoon of the 24th of September, and then into the 25th of September, all day on the 25th. On the afternoon of the 24th, there’s going to be what we call our Power Sessions which are short, sharp teaching sessions, finished off by an unofficial kind of dinner, an opportunity for you to meet some of the other attendees. And then, all-day Tuesday you’re going to get some great teaching. We have four sessions which we’re lining up, which we’re calling our Workshop Sessions, so there’s going to be input. And then also around those, having four opportunities for Masterminding. The Masterminds are all about you presenting your challenges, your situation of your online business, and allowing the rest of the group at your table to give you input, including our speakers. You’re going to get access to some of the speakers, some people who’ve got years and years of experience, but also—this is where the value really came from last year—you’ve got access to an amazing group of other attendees who are on the same journey as you. If you are thirsting for an opportunity for a day or so to get together with other people on this journey, to really put out there what you’re doing to have a critique, to have their ideas, and also contribute into other people’s businesses which could turn into all kinds of collaborations, then I really do encourage you to check out Success Incubator. Just head to problogger.com/successincubator. Now, in today’s episode, Episode 244, I want to talk to you about how to find more traffic for your blog through offline measures. We have done many podcast in the past on how to grow traffic to your blog using online methods, but someone actually asked in our Facebook group in the last week or so, in other ways to do this in an offline setting. I actually think there are, and I think that beauty of going offline, is that you get a more engaged, more targeted reader. I’m going to talk a little bit about that. I’m going to talk particularly about growing your audience through different styles of events, conferences made up, and those types of things. Then I’ve got a few other ones. Some of them are a little bit wacky but some of them I have seen do really well for different types of bloggers. If you are looking for more traffic, today’s episode is for you. You can find today’s show notes with the full transcript of the show at problogger.com/podcast/244. Today’s episode really came about because Julianna Barnaby from thediscoveriesof.com asked in our Facebook group a question that stimulated it. She said, “I want to ask you whether you think it’s important to spend time building your personal brand and reputation outside of the online sphere., i.e., in face-to-face networking, in particular. How important do you think this is in cementing and growing your online presence, and what other channels that you found to be most rewarding? Is it conferences? Is it meetups? I would love to hear your thoughts. Julianna.” Thank you, Julianna, for the question. In short, my answer is yes. I do think it’s really important to consider offline, as well as online, when it comes to growing your brand, your profile, seeking exposure, and particularly, finding new readers for your blog. One of the things I’ve noticed over the years in talking to thousands of bloggers, is that many bloggers struggle with the fact that a lot of their online promotion tends to get other bloggers reading your blog more than normal, real-life people. I don’t know whether that’s something that you relate to but one of the things I’ve noticed is that many newer bloggers, they tell me that most of their readers are other bloggers. They don’t actually have too many normal, everyday people. It can be a bit of an insular kind of an echo chamber. And one of the ways to break out of that, to find new readers is to go offline. Let me just give you an example of what I mean by that. One of the big techniques that often is talked about as a way to grow your audience and to grow your profile, is to comment on other blogs. And this does work. It can get you new readers, it can build a relationship with the blogger that you’re commenting on, but it really makes a bigger impression upon the blogger than it does their readers. As a result, you can end up with this new reader or blogger, but not their readers as such. So one of the things I do encourage you to do is think about how can you find fresh audiences, and audiences are people who aren’t bloggers or podcasters or YouTubers—not that there’s anything wrong with bloggers, I have to say, because I know all of you are—but I think it’s also really important to ask yourself, “Where are the kind of reader that I want to have?” And the answer to that maybe online, but it may also be offline. This is really important to some niches in particular. I was talking to one blogger recently and they have an audience of retirees. I know older people, retirees, people kind of in that phase of their life are definitely online today, but there’s a segment of them that perhaps aren’t as online as other ages. Maybe they’re hanging out in different places and maybe there’s an opportunity through that to reach them in different ways. That’s a big generalization, I know, but there are segments of the population who are less likely to be reading blogs, they’re less likely to be listening to podcasts, they’re less likely to be on YouTube, and so, how can you reach them? One of the answers to that is to go offline with your promotion and profile-building. Now, what I want to do in the rest of this episode today is to give you some strategies, particularly around events, but also some other strategies for finding new readers for your blog and to build your profile. One of the things I want to say right upfront is that it’s really worth saying that some of the things I’m going to talk to you about today are not going to bring you deluges of traffic. They’re not going to create viral-like traffic. Some of them, actually, are just going to bring you one or two new readers at a time. But this is really important to hear. That’s where it starts and if you’re a new blogger, one or two new readers is actually a really important thing. Those one or two people will have a network of their own that they can potentially share what you’re doing with, and word-of-mouth always starts with one person sharing what you are doing with another person. The other thing I’ll say about offline interactions that you might have: If you meet someone face-to-face and convinced them to read your blog, the chances of them becoming an engaged reader is much higher. The chances of that person coming back again the next day, that person sharing what you’re doing with another person is much higher than someone just randomly coming in from social media or randomly coming in from Google. Someone coming in from Google has a very high percentage chance of never coming back to your blog, not even taking notice of your logo or coming back again or sharing what you’re doing. But someone that you meet in person is going to be much more highly engaged and that person is much more likely to become a subscriber, to share what you’re doing with other people, to leave a comment, and to eventually buy something that you are selling as well. These methods that I’m going to share with you today may not bring you millions of readers. In fact, they’re not likely to do that at all. But they’re going to bring you an amazing type of traffic and it’s well worth doing. Okay, let’s look at some of the methods that I’ve kind of put together for you today. And I want to say right up front, I feel like I’m scratching the surface here. There are so many things that you can do and the more I thought about this, the more I realize there are all kinds of creative ways of getting your name, your profile, your blog’s URL in front of people. But let’s start with a few that I’ve come up with and, as I said, i’m going to particularly focus on events because Julianna kind of focused on that in her question. Let’s talk about events. Events can be very powerful because they give you that face-to-face interaction that I was just talking about. They allow you to meet people in person, which gives you that chance to build a relationship which warms them up, speeds up the engagement that you might have with them. They’re powerful for that reason. They’re also powerful because most events are fairly targeted. They tend to target a niche so if you can find an event that is a good match for the type of reader you want to have, you can go to that event feeling reasonably confident that most people there are going to be potential readers or collaborators or partners or just influencers in your space. They also have a lot of people in the one space at the one time. It’s likely over an event or a day that you are likely to be in front of quite a few people, even if you are just there as an attendee. Obviously, there’s a variety of types of events. There’s conferences. They’re essentially more around the content and teaching, and also have some networking opportunities. Then there’s exhibitions or conventions or shows, and these are more centered usually about people exhibiting their products. They don’t tend to have as much content but they’re more about the exhibition hall. And then there’s meetups. These are more centered around networking. Now, all three types of these events can be worth attending but each presents a really different opportunity. I think it’s really worth thinking about the event you’re going to and the opportunities that it present, because there’s been times where I’ve been to an event thinking that one thing would happen and another thing ended up happening. Let’s go through these three types again. Conferences. Conferences present opportunities for you as an attendee to network and also present opportunities perhaps, to speak or to volunteer even, or to participate in other ways. I’m going to give you examples of those in a moment. Conventions, on the other hand, tend not to have as much, in my experience, networking opportunities. Some of them do have a bit of networking built into them. They’re not so much about finding new readers, in my experience, but they can be really good for finding new collaborators or even sponsors for your blog. For example, I’ve been to some really big camera shows. These are big exhibition spaces where all the big manufacturers are displaying their cameras. I remember going to the first of one of these thinking, “I’m going to meet lots of potential readers for my blog. There’s going to be lots of people there interested in cameras.” As it turns out, I didn’t meet any potential readers in my blog but I met a sponsor, I met other people in the media who became great contacts, I met people who could send me review units for my blog so that I can review these cameras. So it ended up being a very worthwhile time but I went there expecting that I was going to meet new readers. Conventions tend to be better for those type of opportunities, although, you’ll be open to finding new readers as well. Meetups, on the other hand, are great for networking. They may not get you in front of the whole group but they might be small enough that you can actually get around to each person in the room individually. You can also have opportunities sometimes with meet-ups to become a sponsor, or even to help organize or offer prize for draw. There’s a variety of different smaller ways that you can be involved in meetups. That’s kind of a summary of three of the main types of events. But what can you actually do at an event? Particularly focusing upon conferences, what can you actually do when you’re there? Now, there’s a whole art in using a conference to build your profile and perhaps that’s a topic for another podcast altogether. But ultimately, there’s a few things you can do and probably the best one, the one most people think about, is speaking at an event. Now, speaking at an event obviously gets you in front of a lot of people quickly, particularly if you can get a main speaking slot, which is pretty much unachievable for most of us. But it is unachievable to get even the smaller speaking spots for some people. It’s something that takes time. Usually from my experience, getting asked to speak at an event means that you had to already build your profile quite a bit in an industry or you need to know someone and have a relationship with the organizers of the event in some way. I don’t want to focus so much up on speaking at an event because perhaps that’s a little bit unachievable for those starting out, but there’s plenty of other ways that you can build your profile at an event. Ultimately, a lot of it has to do with getting out there and meeting as many other attendees, speakers, and organizers as you can. It’s largely about networking. Now, that word, ‘networking,’ I know is sending some of you into the fetal position as you think about getting out of your comfort zone, going up to complete strangers, and introducing yourself. To be honest, I’m kind of cringing even saying the word because that’s me. I am incredibly shy. Now, I’ve learned over the years how to push myself out of my comfort zone and I’ve seen the benefits of doing that. But it doesn’t come naturally to me. And really, I find it so hard. I find it so difficult to walk up to someone, introduce myself to someone cold. Now, I’ve got the advantage these days, often speaking at events which does open up opportunities for people to come up to me, but I still find it very hard to meet new people. I went to an event just a couple of months ago and I remember sitting in that event in this massive auditorium. I was speaking at an event, but also I just look like an attendee. I remember sitting there and I was very aware I had people on either side of me that I didn’t know. I knew instinctively that I probably should be putting my hand out saying, “Hey, I’m Darren. Nice to meet you,” but I found it so hard to do it. But you know what? Almost every time I’ve pushed myself out of my comfort zone to do that, something good has come out of it. I have met people who’ve become readers in my blog. I’ve met people who are already readers of my blog who were too shy to introduce themselves. I’ve met people who’ve become collaborators. Once I met someone who became a team member of my blog. I met someone who became a sponsor of my blog who just happens to be sitting next to me in a session. It is so well worth pushing yourself out of that. Now, I know it’s hard but you need to suck yourself up for this sort of thing. Of course, there’s plenty of other things that you can do at an event as well. I know bloggers who go to events and before they go they’ll print t-shirts with their logos so they can wear that. That often opens up a conversation. I know people who go to events dressed in fancy dress costume to draw attention to themselves. It’s probably not something I feel too comfortable doing, but it does work for some personalities. I know some people who create business cards with little mini-gifts on them. I know someone who bakes cookies to give out at conferences or put sweets on their business cards. I know people who use stickers. When I go to meetups, they stick stickers on everyone they meet, which can be a little bit try hard but also can end up fun. There’s a variety of different things you can do at events, too. I guess make your splash a little bigger at the event. Now, you want to be careful about how you’re coming across. Some people that will come across is a little bit try hard, a little bit too self-promotional. You need to think about the event you’re going to and how that is going to be received. Some events are a little bit more conservative, so you showing up in a fancy dress putting stickers on everyone probably isn’t going to fly. But I think just being a good human being, being friendly at these types of events goes a long way. A few other things you can do at events that I’ve seen really work for people. Number one, become prominent on the event hashtag. This is going online a little bit. I know I’m talking offline here but we’re at an event. If you’re at an event, one opportunity that may present is to become very prominent on that hashtag. Not by going spammy and not by going over the top, but by creating value on the hashtag. I’ve seen a number of people do this at our events. We almost always have someone come at our event as an attendee who pretty much live tweets the event. Even though we got people there live tweeting in our team, there’s almost always one attendee who shines through the whole hashtag by providing value there. Answering questions, creating social graphics with quotes on them. I know some people who take visual notes and then take photos of those and put them up onto the hashtag. It’s amazing how that stands out. There’ll be plenty of other people at your event following the hashtag, and if they see someone creating value, someone being generous on the hashtag, that stands out a lot. Because sometimes hashtags get a little spammy and self-promotional, you can really stand out in that way. And that can then open up opportunities for you to meet in real life with those people. Another thing that I’ve seen work very well at events is for you to interview people at the event. I’ve talked about this in the past in a previous episode with Michael Stelzner, who now operates Social Media Marketing World and Social Media Examiner. The first time I met him was at a conference, probably was in 2005, a blogging conference. He contacted me before the event and said, “Hey, I’m bringing a camera crew with me to this event. Would you mind if we do an interview?” I’ve never heard of Mike before but I was kind of open to that opportunity. I was speaking at the event. It turns out he did this with every speaker at the event, and during the event he pretty much met every speaker at the event because he had this camera crew with him. He put a big backdrop up and he interviewed us. I think he was wearing a t-shirt with his URL on it. This did a number of things. Firstly got him to meet all the key speakers at the event. Number two, he get to ask these speakers lots of questions, so he gained a lot of knowledge. Number three, he built relationships with other people at the event at well because he was being seen to be with the speakers and he pretty much launched his whole blog off this idea of interviewing people at the event. Now, you may not be able to afford to get a camera crew at your event. But the fact is, you probably have a camera in your pocket already. You could be pulling out your iPhone at the end of sessions and saying to speakers, “Hey, do you mind if I ask you one question?” That is going to get on their radar and it gives you an opportunity after the event to contact that speaker and say, “Hey, here’s the YouTube clip of me asking that question.” Gives you a chance to take that relationship a little bit further. And it may also mean that that influencer, that speaker shares the clip with their network as well. You can do the same thing not only with speakers but attendees as well, with the organizers of the event. This is just a great way to break the ice with people rather than going up and saying, “Hi, I’m Darren, um—” and then having an awkward moment of small talk. You could say, “Hey, I’m Darren. I am doing a few quick interviews. Would you mind me asking you a question or two?” I would advise you to keep it as short as you can. You don’t want to be dominating someone’s day by doing a 45-minute interview with them. Just a question or two can be really useful. That’s something you could try at an event. The third thing you might want to try at an event, many events are calling for volunteers to be a part of running the event. This can take you away from the content of the event sometimes but it can also put you in a position to sometimes be up front or involved with speakers. Sometimes it just gives you a way to break the ice with other attendees because you are welcoming them, you’re greeting them, you’re signing them in, these types of things. And this can open up opportunities for you to have chats with people as well. The fourth thing that you might want to do at an event is to be involved in other ways that the event is calling for. I went to an event recently and they were running what they called Table Talks during the breaks. These were with the head tables set out for people to chat about a particular topic. Each table had a leader, a moderator. Lots of conferences do this type of thing. These are volunteers who become the moderators but they get you in front of a group of people, and again, give you opportunities to talk about what you do. So, just be open to ideas and opportunities that might come. I know one person, every event she goes to, she contacts the event organizer and says, “Hi, I’m a yoga teacher. Do you mind me doing a yoga session at 6:00 before the event starts?” Not every attendee is going to give you a space in their event to do yoga, but many event organizers are looking to add little quirky things like that in their events. It might get a little bit more interesting. And this person who tell me that they do this, says that most event organizers say yes, many of them give her a space to do it and many of them actually promote the fact that she’s doing it and they promote who she is as well. Other things that you could add at an event. I know another blogger who always does a photo walk every event he goes to. Just an opportunity get a group of people together, who share an interest, to spend some time with them, and to be seen to be doing something proactive and constructive as well. Gets you on the radar of the event organizer but also attendees and can sometimes lead to other cool things as well. Last thing aside that you might want to do at an event is consider sponsoring it. This may not be achievable for many of us because the big conferences particularly can charge quite a bit for sponsorship, but there’s a small event in your area where they are looking for s smaller sponsor, or they’re looking for someone to donate a prize, or they’re looking for someone to promote the event and they’re willing to promote you in exchange for that. Many events will talk to you about different ways that you can be involved in that as well. They could use some promotion as well. The more I’m talking about smaller events they don’t just target the big events. I know some of you are going, “Well, I can’t afford to fly to Orlando to go to an event or to Vegas to go to an event,” but you might find it there are local events in your area that may not be as big. They may not get you in front of as many people but they do still present the type or reader that you want to have and people that you want to network with. A couple of other things I would say about events. One other thing that I’ll mention is that there’s an opportunity, not only to attend the event of other people but to run your own event as well. This doesn’t have to be big. It doesn’t have to be expensive. At ProBlogger, we obviously run some bigger events. I just told you about Success Incubator which we’ll be doing in Orlando this year but we also ran events in Australia and we’ve had up to 700 people at those events. But do you know what? Our events started much smaller. The first ProBlogger event we ran was for 100 people but before I did that, in 2005 I ran a meet-up and 10 people came in. That doesn’t sound like much, but do you know what? I know four of those people still today read ProBlogger and they’ve been reading ProBlogger since 2005. They’ve shown up at ProBlogger probably hundreds of hundreds of times each of them and they’ve told other people about ProBlogger. To run that event it was so easy. I just registered it on meetups.com, which is a place that advertises meetups. Just by simply advertising on meetups.com I got a few people coming to the event who’ve never heard of me before. They became new readers but then I also advertise it to my current readers and some of those came as well. There wasn’t many people to that first meet-up. But the second time I ran that meet-up I had 20 or so people. Later on, that became our 100-person event ProBlogger. Even a small meet-up like that can work. The other option is to collaborate about doing a meetup or an event as well. Maybe you could join with two other bloggers in your local area and run an event together, maybe a couple of podcasts, or maybe look for other types of partners as well. I’m going to talk at the end of this podcast about other types of collaborations but maybe there’s other partners like a media outlet or a brand or a local government agency or your local library. There’s a variety of different potential partners that may be able to work with you on events. There’s also another kind of event that I’ve seen a number of bloggers used and that is local markets or swap meets. Now, just stick with me here. This sounds a little bit random but let me give you a couple of examples. This is going to depend a little upon your particular niche. The key is to find a market or a swap meet or some other kind of local event that matches with your topic. I can think of a few bloggers who’ve done this. I can think of one fashion blogger who get sent quite a bit of second-hand kind of clothing. I’m sorry. She doesn’t get sent second-hand clothing, she get sent new clothing by brands. She gets gifted these to review on her blog. Most of it she doesn’t really want to keep so she sells it, which I think is kind of an interesting way to monetize a blog and the brands are fine with it. She goes to second-hand markets that operates every now and again in her area to sell the products. But while she’s there she’s also promote her blogs. She had this sign made that is the name of her blog and she has some business cards on a table in front of the clothes that she’s selling and some flyers. She promotes the fact that she’s going to be at that market on her blog as well and does a prize draw for anyone who signs up for her newsletter at the event. She’s there primarily to make some money to sell some stuff but she also uses that opportunity because she’s in public to promote her blog as well. I know another parenting blogger who attends craft markets. Again, second-hand kids’ toys and clothes markets. She doesn’t go to these to sell anything. She actually hires a booth to promote her blog. She gets this booth, everyone around her is selling stuff, and she’s there handing out her business card, she’s got a screen set up with her blog on it, she runs a competition to get people to sign up for her newsletter, she’s got little gift packs to hand out to people that promotes her blog. She actually creates a real buzz in the middle of this craft market, and it’s all about her blog. She doesn’t make any money, costs her about $50-$100 depending on the market to do it, but she gets new readers every time she got people signing up for her newsletter. I’ve seen another car blogger do this as well. He goes to car events and he ask the car event organizers if he can either be a sponsor or he can setup a little booth in return for income. He does a similar kind of stuff. So, other markets, other second-hand markets, other swap meets, other places where your kind of reader is showing up. Now, most of this is localized. Most of this is happening in your local area, so it’s probably going to better suit you if you are trying to reach a local audience but it doesn’t really matter. Many of these bloggers are actually looking for a wider audience but they end up having quite a few in their local area as well. These are just creative-wise thinking about it. The last type of event you might want to think about running yourself is a free workshop. Now, I’ve mentioned this strategy in a previous episode as well, so I’m not going to go into great detail. In my early days of blogging, particularly my early photography blog, I used to run camera training workshops at my local library. I noticed that the library just around the corner from my house was doing these Thursday night workshops and they’re doing it on all kinds of topics. I went to one, someone else was running on traveling to Morocco, for example. It was kind of random. I approached the librarian and said, “Hey, I know a bit about cameras. Would you like me to run an event on how to take better photos?” And they said, “Sure.” Well, I was looking for new topics. So I ran my first one and I think about 30 people came. I didn’t know any of them, I didn’t promote it on my end at all. It was just 30 library members. I talked for 45 minutes, answered a few questions, and you know what? I know for a fact that many or at least some of those 20 or 30 people that came to that event became readers of my blog for years after that. I ended up running a number of these events and they grew every time I did it because people recommended it to other people. Now there’s lots of community groups out there who are doing this type of thing, a running free workshop on things. Maybe it’s your local library, maybe it’s your school, maybe it’s your university, maybe it’s a church, maybe it’s a community group, maybe it’s a parenting group. I know there are parenting playgroup type of scenarios in our local area that bring in experts all the time to speak about different topics that relate to parents. Maybe it’s a men’s group, or a women’s group, or a sporting club, or a hobby-related club, or a local council, a chambers of commerce. You probably won’t get paid anything for any of these but that’s good free exposure. And also to do practice at public speaking. This is gold. If you eventually want to be a keynote speaker at a big conference, you got to start somewhere learning the craft to speaking. These type of little opportunities to get up in front of a few people and to share can be good in the now but also to give you new skills as well. The last thing to talk about those type of speaking opportunities is that sometimes that open up doors to speak at other larger events as well. I think it’s the second time I did that library workshop, there was someone who came to that who actually ran a larger photography event. He came because he thought, “Huh, this is interesting. I want to see what this guy knows,” and me getting that talk led me to being invited to this larger event that about 300-400 people at a camera club I was putting on. And it gave me an opportunity to speak in front of 300-400 people. You never know who’s in the audience. You never who the one or two people that you’re taking to might be or who they might know that might open up other opportunities. Okay, I’ve covered events in quite a bit of detail there and hoped that you found some ideas through that. What I want to do now is talk about a few other things that you can do to promote your blog offline. Some of these will relate to some of you better than others but you know… The second thing I want to talk about is media. Mainstream media are always looking for fresh stories. Now, you might hear mainstream media and go, “Oh, mainstream media is dead.” It’s actually not dead at all. The online world has overtaken a lot of it but mainstream media still is being consumed by lots of people. They’re always looking for ideas, for stories as well. The thing I’ve noticed about many mainstream media I like is that they are putting off journalists left, right, and center and there’s opportunities there to both pitch stories and help the journalists that remain, but also potentially to even write for mainstream media as well. If you are going to pitch stories for mainstream media, you get through sort of the big media outlets, the national television shows in most type of things. You’ll probably more likely to get a response from the local television stations or local radio or local papers as well. And again, what you’ll find here is that if you can get into a local kind of space, then that can sometimes open up opportunities for you to get picked up or syndicated by larger outlets as well. I talked to one blogger about a year ago now who told me they pitched their local suburban paper with stories about every six months and they had 80% hit rate on those. Again, she sent a couple of those and then being picked up by larger media outlets. Actually what she does is she take the article that’s written and then she send it on to the larger media. Sometimes they then syndicate that kind of content or pick it up and expand upon that story. Now, think across the board here. TV can work, newspapers sounds a bit old-fashioned but they’re still being delivered, radio. Vanessa, my partner now wife, had a regular spot recently on a local radio station. She was invited to go on to do a five-minute spot every Saturday morning with a fashion tip. The radio host would interview her about things, pre-recorded and then played at live on the air. It was very easy for her to do that, that it gave her exposure to that audience. Free publicity for her blog. Of course, the radio station got five minutes of content out of it as well. So it’s a win-win type thing. She wasn’t paid, but it brought in new readers. If you do want to think about media there, there are a couple of different services the could put you in touch with journalists. Probably the largest and best-known of them is Help A Reporter or HARO. You can find it at helpareporter.com. It’s a site that matches sources or experts in different areas with journalists. So if a journalist is writing about a particular topic and needs a quote or they need an insight on that particular topic, they go to helpareporter.com, they type in their topic and register that they’re looking for a quote or looking for a source and then you, if you registered as a source and you told HARO what your areas of expertise are, you get emailed when there’s a match between what journalist are looking for and what you know about. There’s a number of these types of services out there. There’s an Aussie service called sourcebottle.com. They’re actually global now, they started here in Australia and they do a very similar thing to HARO. These are ways that you can just register and then get told when there are media opportunities. You never know whether it’s going to be a journalist with a big audience or a small one. I’ve heard stories of people getting approached by tiny media outlets, but then others where HARO has opened up a spot on National Television in America in one of the breakfast shows, so you never quite know. It could be well-worth going as well. The other type of media that you might want to explore is actually writing for the media as well. I mentioned just a moment ago how many a media outlet now have shrunk the amount of journalists they have and they actually now using freelance writers quite a bit. There maybe opportunity for you to pitch for articles in mainstream media. You may get paid, you may not, you may just get a byline. You obviously need to go into that knowing what the agreement is, but it can be an opportunity to grow your profile. The other type of thing that’s kind of similar to media is other kinds of offline publications. Maybe there’s opportunity in the industry groups that relate to your topic. I know in the financial services, here in Australia there’s an accounting kind of body, there’s bodies for marketers, there’s bodies in different kind of industries, and many of these bodies have publications. Maybe it’s a newsletter that they email out every week or every month. Or maybe they still do a magazine and there’s opportunities in that case to be featured or to write content for those as well. I know one blogger who works in the financial services industry. He’s a blogger. He’s got a blog on that particular topic and he approached a national body in his industry—the body has tens of thousands of members—and he offered to write them an article every quarter for them to use in their industry magazine. They jumped at the opportunity because he said he’ll do it for free as long as he get a byline. I think he might even get a small honorarium sort of payment for that, but it’s certainly not freelance rates. But they negotiated for him to promote his blog as part of that agreement. Every quarter he sees a spike in traffic and subscribers. And he also told me that it has led to all kinds of other opportunities, particular speaking requests. Because he’s in the industry body magazine, every time it goes out, people get to know his name. He’s build his credibility and it opens up opportunities for him as well. Similarly on digital photography school, we allow our articles to be republished by camera clubs in their newsletters. We have a rule that they’re not allowed to publish it on their websites because we don’t want the same content appearing on lots of websites, but we allow them to send it to their members, either if they print it out or via email, as long as there’s attribution as to where it came from. I know for a fact that by us allowing camera clubs to do that, that we found new readers. It bought us the type of readers we want. Someone who’s in the camera club is enthusiastic about their photography and that’s the type of person we want reading our site. There might be opportunities for you to allow some of your previously published blog content to appear in different places. An example of this that I can think of here in Australia is a particular airline, Virgin Australia, has podcasts in their in-flight entertainment. I know a number of bloggers who have their content featured in that in-flight entertainment. I don’t think that they get paid a lot for that. I think there is some small fee that they are paid potentially—don’t quote me on that—but they get new listeners as a result of that. Is there a way that your content can be shared in another place by different kind of organization? There may be opportunities there for you to grow credibility and to grow your audience as a result. Okay, the next one I want to talk about is notice boards and this is kind of a fun one. It’s one of those ones where you may not end up getting thousands and thousands of new readers for that, but it could get you the right kind of reader. I was at a local cafe a couple of years ago and I noticed they have this notice board. I ordered my coffee inside when I just noticed the notice board. It’s a type of notice board you probably seeing everywhere you go. You see these almost everyday. It allowed people to post flyers of events, or leave a business card for their business. In the middle of this notice board was this flyer that was promoting a blog. I was like, “Wow! I’ve never seen anyone do that before.” It was beautifully designed, in color, stood out from everything else in the notice board, and it basically was about this particular blog. I think the blog was about parenting. It was particularly targeting parents in Melbourne, where I live. I took notice of it. Actually, I took notice of her URL and her Twitter handle. I reached out to her on Twitter and said, “Hey, I just saw your flyer. I’d love to know how it works for you leaving that flyer there.” I thought she probably just left the flyer in that cafe. We have this DM conversation and she says she actually has this little folder in her car full of these flyers and every time she sees a community notice board, she goes to her car and gets one of the notices and puts it up. She only does it in places where she’s allowed to do it, of course, but they go up in cafes, shopping malls, libraries, schools, churches, doctors’ surgeries, shop windows, anywhere where she sees other people doing it and there’s an invitation to do that, she puts one up. She usually asks for permission as well just to make sure. She told me that she pretty much puts one of those up everyday and was something that has worked for her. Her audience is a little bit more local. She’s targeting people within the city so it makes sense to do that, but maybe there’s some ways for you to grow your audience in that way. One more example of a blogger who uses notice boards. I came across this blogger years ago. He had a blog targeting students. Don’t know if the blog is still alive anymore but at that time, he was offering courses that help the students to study. He printed up flyers and he was particularly looking for university students or college students. He put up these notices with a free opt-in on it. It was one of this little notice flyers that had a little tear-off bits at the bottom with a URL. He used this URL, it said, “Tear off one of these, take it home, go to this website, plug-in your details, and we’ll send you a free study guide or we’ll send you something that’s going to help you with your studies.” He was only doing it in the local university and colleges in his city at the time, but had such an impact and he saw a number of people not only getting the opt-in, but buying his upsell from his opt-in as well. He ended up hiring people to do it in other cities around the U.S. as well. He had people in cities everywhere putting his flyers up. He paid them basically to go once a month and put up new ones because they actually drew him not only readers but drew him customers as well. So maybe notice boards. I don’t know. It’s probably going to depend upon your topic on whether you can find a notice board kind of location that matches with what you are trying to do. The last thing I want to talk about is collaborations. I kind of mentioned a number of these sort of collaborations already. But I really would encourage you to think creatively about other kinds of collaborators, other types of organizations that maybe already have networks and profile with the kind of person you want to read your blog. What could you offer them that gives them a win if they help you out by giving you some exposure or introducing you to the right people? Earlier I gave you the example of where I spoke at my local library and in some ways, that was a collaboration. I gave them a workshop, I gave them some content, I got people into their library who maybe wouldn’t have come into their library on that particular day, and they promoted what I was doing to their members, which got me new readers and exposure. There’s so many different ways that you could potentially do this and here’s just a few of them. What about your local government? Here in Australia we call them our local council, maybe it’s a local chamber of commerce, I don’t know what you call it in your particular area, but many times a local kind of governments and councils are running events. Now what events are they running that relate to what you do? What programs do they have? What services do they have for the type of person you were trying to reach out to? If you are a parenting blogger, most local councils in our area are doing kind of early childhood kind of word in some form or another. Maybe there’s an opportunity for you to volunteer, for you to sponsor, for you to participate in the events that they run, for you to speak at their events in some way. Same with industry associations. Other opportunities to collaborate. We’ve already talked about how you can write for their newsletters, but are they looking for speakers for their events? Are they looking for volunteers to help them run their events? Are they looking for help with their social media? Are they just running meet-up, some sales that you need to be participating in? On last one, retailers. Retailers have databases of customers and if you can find a retailer that is selling something that you are writing about, then sometimes there can be synergy there. Now, this never actually came off but for a while there I was talking to one camera store retailer. We were talking really seriously about me offering them a free ebook to go with every camera that they sold. Now it didn’t end up working out in the end. They kind of go a little bit of cold feet. We didn’t quite work out the delivery system on it, but that would have been a great opportunity. This camera store is selling thousands of cameras every month. What if I had the opportunity to have one of my ebooks go alongside each of those cameras that taught people how to use that camera and had maybe some opt-in associated with that, where I could capture their email address and get them across my blog a little bit more. Maybe there’s some sort of creative ways that you could get out and collaborate with some other kind of organization that’s already got the kind of reader that you want to have. Brainstorm it, where are your readers gathering? Where are they buying products? What events are they heading to? Where do they go locally? Who are they listening to that you could reach out to and have a collaboration with? All these sort of collaborative opportunities, almost all of them that I’ve ever had have come out of relationships. The more you can get out there, you can meet people in your industry, you can hear what they do, you can listen to the outcomes that they want, and then you can communicate what you’re trying to do, and try to find some win-win exchanges that you can have with them. And who knows what will come as a result of that. Many times, the things that I’ve talked to you about today, these things have relatively low costs. Probably going to an event is the highest cost, one I understand that that can be a little bit out of some people’s budgets. But many things I’ve talked about today, don’t really have much cost to them apart from your time and your effort. So I wish you luck in promoting your blog and your business in the offline space, as well. Now if you like, I just scratched the surface today. I’ve seen people do so many other things I could talk about, printing and giving away t-shirts with your blog’s name and your URL on them, or giving away other kind of merchandise. I know one blogger who gives out coffee mugs and he tells me people see people drinking from that coffee mug and ask what that is about, maybe you can donate prizes at a local fundraiser, maybe you could offer to judge competitions, maybe you could put on an award ceremony in your local area. All these things can help you to find the reader that you want to have. And I would love to hear what you’ve tried. The sky’s the limit, really and the more we hear from each other on what we do, the better. So if you tried any offline promotion, whether it’s worked or not, I’d love to hear about it. You can leave a comment on today’s show notes at problogger.com/podcast/244 or you could head to our ProBlogger community on Facebook. Just search ‘ProBlogger community’ and you’ll find our Facebook group there. You can tell us, give us a tip. Just start with a hashtag tip or advice or something like that and let us know what it is that you have tried. Let’s share the knowledge, let’s learn from each other. It’s so much better when we do that. Thanks so much for listening today. There’s been a lot of content from today’s show. Thank you for sticking with me through it. I’m almost losing my voice because of this podcast today, there’s so much I’ve talked about. I’d love hearing from many of you in the last week or so. In fact, I saw new reviews on iTunes a couple of weeks ago now. And over the next few days I had another 10 new reviews left on iTunes. I thank you from the bottom of my heart for those. They bring me great joy and encouragement. If you got a moment and you are listening to this on iTunes or on the podcast store in the Apple one, or any other one, please do leave us a review. Leave us a rating. It helps us to grow, gives me energy and inspiration as well. I really hope you have a great week of blogging. Do check out Success Incubator again. It is happening 24th-25th of September in Orlando, Florida. Here in Australia, you’re waiting for our event details, stay tuned. It all happen later this year and I will let you know here in the podcast when that goes live. Success Incubator, just head over to problogger.com/success. Thanks for listening. Chat with you 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.

Tools and Techniques for Blogging While Travelling Today I tackle a question from a listener about blogging on the road. Carmen Fellows asked about technicalities such as how to get content online and ways to access your blog. How can you balance blogging while traveling for work or vacation? It depends on the situation, and sometimes it’s a juggling act.   While you’re away, here are seven approaches to try when it comes to blogging: Take a complete break, and give your readers a break too Work harder, and schedule as much as you can before you go Highlight previous content, or feature a “Best of” series Schedule one of more guest bloggers Blog on the road Use posts that are easy to create (polls, embeddable content, link posts, etc.) Do a combination of the above If you plan on blogging on the road, think about where you can find internet access, and whether you want to bring your computer equipment or leave it behind. There are pros and cons to bringing and using devices such as a smartphone, iPad and laptop. How much do you really need to do with your blog? Working while you’re away can have an impact on what you’re there to do, whether it’s to have fun with your family or speak at a conference. Allow yourself to be present. It’s okay (and important) to have time off from your blog. Links and Resources for Tools and Techniques to Blog Effectively on the Road: How to Take a Break from Your Blog Further Listening Blogger Apps for Smartphone and Tablet 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 243 of the ProBlogger podcast. My name is Darren Rowse and I’m the blogger behind problogger.com – a blog, podcast, event, job board, and a series of ebooks all designed to help you as a blogger to start a great blog, to grow that blog in terms of the content on it but also your audience, and the engagement you have with that audience, and then to build profit around your blog as well. You can learn more about what we do over at problogger.com. Particularly, check out our two courses once you’re there, look for the courses tab up in the navigation and there you will find out two courses, our How to Start a Blog course which is completely free. It will walk you through the steps to getting your blog up and running. And our brand new course, 31 Days to Build a Better Blog which is all about giving you a 31 different activities that you can do to improve your blogging. Head to problogger.com, look for the courses tab and you will find them. In today’s episode, I wanna tackle a question that came in this week from one of our listeners. The listener was Carmen Fellows, thanks for asking the question, Carmen. It’s all about blogging while you’re on the road. I wanna talk to you about how I approach blogging whilst I’m away, whether it’d be for vacation or for work. Carmen particularly wanted me to talk about the technicalities of doing it, how do you actually get your content up online, whether you do it on mobile or iPad or some other way. Also, I wanna talk a little bit about balancing blogging with whatever else you’re doing in your travels, whether that’d be vacation with family and friends or work. You can find today’s show notes at problogger.com/podcast/243. As I said, today’s show was inspired by Carmen Fellows who wrote in with this question via our Facebook group. She says, “Hi Darren, if you haven’t addressed this already, can you review different ways to access your blog while travelling to keep it up? For example, if I can’t get on my computer, do you find that updating via your mobile is suggested or is there a better way? I can be on the road for two to three weeks at a time and find it difficult to fit my blog in but still want to make it work.” A great question, Carmen. It is one that I get quite a bit particularly when I’m travelling. If I’m at a conference, people often ask, “What are you doing with your blog while you’re away?” There’s no one way to answer this question. Over the years, my approach has evolved. It really does depend a little bit upon the type of trip that I’m taking. If I’m away on vacation, I do tend to not want to be working as much as I do. I tend to work a little bit while I’m away most times but if I’m away for work, I’m obviously there to do something else as well. It is always a bit of a juggle and my approach does change from situation to situation. I did do a Facebook live on this topic last year that goes through seven different things that you can do while you’re trying to be away, these are seven different things that I’ve done over the years. I don’t wanna dig into these too much because you are particularly asking about how to blog while you’re on the road but I do wanna mention these seven approaches that I’ve taken when I’m away. Firstly, you can take a complete break. A break allows you to focus on your trip, it also allows your readers to have a bit of a break as well which, I think, from time to time can be good. The second approach is working harder before you go. You schedule a lot of stuff so you don’t have to do as much from the road, that’s something that can help a lot, I do quite often. Number three is to run some retrospective series while you’re still away, highlighting all the content from your archives while you’re away. You might schedule some posts so you don’t have to work quite as hard before you go. Four is using a guest blogger or a group of bloggers or someone to run your blog while you’re away enabling to take a break. Number five is blogging from the road which is what I’m gonna focus in on for the rest of this podcast. Number six was using a lighter post. There are certain types of content that you can have going up on your blog scheduled beforehand or that you do on the road that is lighter, that’s perhaps not as heavy or intense to create like running poles doing or doing embeddable content or doing links posts or a variety of those types of things. The seventh option was doing a combination of the above. If you’re interested in hearing a little bit more about those seven different options, I do link to that video and a blog post that I’ve written in today’s show notes. If you wanna learn more about blogging from the road, that’s what I do wanna focus in on now. Again, there’s a few different options and Carmen has alluded to a couple of them already. What I used to do all the time, this is before the advent of mobile phone technology which shows you how long I’ve been blogging. Mobile phones were certainly around when I first started blogging but when I started blogging in 2002, there weren’t too many smartphones. I remember having an old Nokia which did claim to allow you to get onto the internet but it was such a slow experience and a clunky experience. There’s no way you would’ve ever blog from it. At the very most, you may have been able to get into the backend of your blog and edit a blog post but that was as far as it went. In those olden days and even today, I know a lot of bloggers do this, is finding internet access along the way. This does enable you to travel without having to take any gear with you. In the old days, I would be looking for internet cafes or borrowing a computer from a friend while I was away, finding a blogger that was a local to where I was going, or going to a local library because libraries often have internet access. I guess I’d mention that because that would be one way to travel without any technology at all but still checking in from time to time. What I used to do in those old days, I guess this would still work if you do wanna travel without any technology, is to take a notebook with you and to outline your blog post while you’re travelling. That’s what I did back in 2002, 2003. I’d be on a plane with a notebook, paper, and pen, jotting down, scheduling, outlining my blog posts and the type of updates that I wanted to do. When I sat down at the library or at the internet café or at my friend’s computer, I had it all ready to go and I can blog more effectively in a short period of time that I had access to the internet. That might be one way to do it if you do wanna completely travel without too much technology. Most of us today would be wanting to blog on the road from our own device of some kind. You’ve got three main options there. It’s pretty obvious but I do wanna touch on the three main options and talk about some of the pros and cons. Firstly, as Carmen mentioned, you can blog from your mobile phone, your smartphone. I probably wouldn’t ever blog from my phone, I wouldn’t create text content on my mobile phone. I know it’s possible but I find that too clunky for my purposes, particularly if I was writing anything over 100 words or so, I find it really cumbersome to be typing on a tiny little screen. I know you could probably get a cable and sync it to your phone but even still, you’re looking at a relatively small screen. For me, at my age, with my eyesight, that’s not something that I wanna be doing too much. Having said that, there are things that I do do from my mobile phone and I would use my mobile phone to do while I was away. If I had prescheduled all of my content before I was going and I wanted to check in on social media, maybe create some social media graphics from time to time, interact with comments, moderate comments, maybe even edit blog posts, mistakes that maybe went up, I would do that on my mobile phone. If I was wanting to be mainly doing the social media side of my business while I was away, my mobile phone will be something that I would be quite comfortable using. If I was creating content, particularly text content, I would not be doing that on my mobile phone because, to me, it’s too slow, it’s too frustrating, and I reckon that I would be making a lot of mistakes. You have to look at the amount of auto correcting mistakes that we see in text messages, the amount of mistakes that I make on Twitter when I’m tweeting because it’s clunky, my thumbs don’t quite get it right too often. I wouldn’t be focusing too much on that. What I would be focusing upon is one of the next two options, the first one being the iPad. For me, this has come to life as a good option in the last year for me. I was fortunate enough to win an iPad Pro with a keyboard about 12 months ago, not the really large one, I think it’s probably about 11 inches or something around that size. That, to me, presented itself as a laptop replacement for the first time. I previously tried to use iPads to create content and travel with, I always found them a little bit clucky but the latest versions of iOS particularly have made it much more feasible for me. There are still some things that working on an iPad or another type of tablet are a little bit feebly to do, but for me, if I was traveling for a week or maybe two weeks or even three weeks and I needed to create some content while I was away and needed to do some of the other social media stuff, then I think an iPad is definitely an option that I would take because it’s so much smaller than most laptops. Of course you can get laptops these days that are very thin, the MacBook Air for example is something that I’ve used in the past. They’re tiny but an iPad is even smaller than that. If I was traveling predominantly for vacation, a more relaxing trip, and I needed to be able to check in on my work and maybe do a little bit of work if inspiration strikes or if an emergency happened, then an iPad, for me, is one way to go. The keyboard is definitely something that I would always take with me though, I find it a bit hard to type on the screen. Having that keyboard that is in the iPad cover is definitely worth having, it’s not as big as a normal keyboard but it allows me to touch type. It has apps for pretty much anything that I need to do as it pertains to my blogging. There are apps, of course, for social media, there are apps to allow you to get into the backend of your blog. Accessing the backend of your blog via a browser is totally fine as well on WordPress, I’ve done that many times. It also has apps that allow me to chat with my team, Google Analytics, all those things are available on an app now. It’s a bigger screen than a mobile as well. It allows me with my failing eyesight and fumbly fingers to do okay. I also like the fact that an iPad allows me to watch Netflix and rekindle and do other things that I do to relax as well. If you’re thinking what app should I have, I did do an episode in this podcast on that very topic, episode 207 goes through my favorite apps for iPad and iPhone, many of which are also on Android apps as well. I guess to sum up the iPad part of this talk, there’s not really anything I can’t do on an iPad. It’s just a bit slower and it’s a little bit more feebly than a computer. I guess the question in my mind, how much of that work do I need to do while I’m away? If I’m going away for vacation, I don’t need to do much of that work so I’ll take the iPad. If I’m going away for work, I would take a laptop every time. Most times when I travel for work, I take a laptop. In fact I don’t think I’ve ever taken just an iPad when I’m traveling for work, it’s because I’m away to work and I need to be more effective with my time. I’m usually speaking at a conference and I know whilst I can present from an iPad, it’s more feebly–more reliable to do it on a laptop. Also, I’m usually there working as well. I’ll be working on the plane each way, I’ll be working in the hotel. I’ll be doing several hours of work a day. For me, I’m much more effective on the laptop. For me, I’m taking my MacBook Pro when I’m going away most of the time. They’re the three options that you’ve got at your fingertips; mobile, very feebly, you wanna be doing very light stuff on it. A tablet, it does enable you to do a lot more, it’s probably that in between option. I do know people who use an iPad, that’s all they ever use for their blogging. It’s possible to blog on an iPad, you probably get more effective at doing it over time. Learning how to do those things, it gets a little bit feebly quickly. Or a laptop which is obviously more expensive and larger as well but is much more powerful. In terms of how do you fit it all in while you’re traveling. This, to me, is the crux of the matter. The technology is one thing that you can think about and it can help. But how do you actually do it? How do you juggle being on holidays and blogging? How do you juggle being at a conference and blogging as well? For me, there’s probably two things that I would advise. Firstly, schedule as much as you can before you go. This is something that I do when I’m going away for a weekend or when I’m going away for three weeks or a month. I’ve been away with my family for six weeks. Generally, anytime I go away, I’m working harder for the period before I go away. It’s usually about the period that I’m gonna be away for that I’m working harder. I’m going away this weekend for a long weekend, we’ll be away for four days. For the last four days, I’ve been working doubly hard so that I can go away for four days. If I went away for a month, I’d be working really hard for a month before I went away and trying to increase my output and doing things like scheduling content, writing extra content and scheduling it, scheduling as much social media as I can so that I don’t have to do as much of that and anything else that needs to be done over that month, scheduling as much of it as I can, writing products that I’m doing, writing emails that need to be go out, those types of things. A lot of it can be done before you go. For me, that is key. It enables me to do a lot less while I’m away and focus upon what I’m away for, whether it’d be work, a conference, seeing friends, being with my family. Schedule as much as you can. The other part of it, for me, is to find a rhythm while you’re away and to schedule the work you need to do. For me, this has been key because it’s very easy with smartphones today to be working all the time while you’re away; checking your emails, responding to social media, those types of things. As a result of that, it does intrude upon what you’re there to do particularly if you’re there to be with family or friends and you are constantly checking social media and emails, it means you’re not present with your family and friends, you’re not present at the conference you’re at. What I find is that I look at the trip that I’m gonna be away for and I schedule ahead of time when I will work while I’m away. It usually happens in two ways, I generally find a little bit of time everyday while I’m away. If I need to do a bigger task, I will schedule bigger blocks of time as well. Let’s break that down. For me, generally, when I’m traveling with my family, I don’t work during the day, I’ll only work at the top on the end of the day. Usually, before my family wakes up, I’ll be getting up a little bit early and doing my social media there, checking my email, doing those types of things or waiting till they’re in bed, particularly my kids. I’m often working while Vanessa’s awake but working at the end of the day. That’s the kind of everyday type tasks that sometimes you need to do. You can schedule content, you can schedule a lot of your social media before you go. Engaging with people on social media, responding to comments, responding to emails, those are the types of things you can’t really schedule. They’re the things that I would be fitting into the top and tail of my day. I generally try and leave the bulk of my day to be with family, be with friends or be at the conference that I’m on. The other thing that I would schedule ahead of time—and I’m trying to communicate both of these things to whoever I’m traveling with as well so their expectations are that I’ll be working at certain times. If there’s a big thing that I need to do—there might be a news letter that needs to go out that I couldn’t schedule ahead, or there might be a blog post that I need to write, there might be a review of the event that I’m at—there might be something that I have to create and that is gonna take a longer amounts of time, I try and schedule that ahead of time as well. I might communicate to Vanessa and the kids, “I’m gonna be working on Wednesday morning for about three hours or for about two hours. I’ll need to go and find a café somewhere and I won’t be with you during that time.” That’s something we negotiate as a family. The reason I do that is I want them to understand when I won’t be around so that it’s not just sprung on them. I also find it helpful for me to know when that will be as well because what I find is if I am thinking ahead of time about this hour or this two hours that I’m going to have to work, what I find is my subconscious begins to work on the thing that I’m going to be working on in that time. I try and work out when it will be and what I will do in that time. More often than not, I find that when I come to sit down to take that time to write that blog post or to do that email, in the back of my mind it’s already done, I’ve already got the ideas for the content or I know the order of the email, I’ve got the subject line there because I’ve been thinking about it for the last couple of days that I’m gonna sit down and write this thing. Your mind begins to get to work on that. I find scheduling the time ahead is great for you and your family but also helps you to be more effective in that time as well. I actually find that I can get a lot done in an hour if I know what I’m gonna do in that hour and I just get straight to work. Schedule it out ahead of time and then allow yourself to be present for whatever else you’re there to do. Be present with your family, be present with your friends, be present on the beach, taking the nature that you’re experiencing. Whatever it is that you’re there to do, allow yourself to be present in that way. I do try and work harder to avoid mixing the work and the relaxing too much. I think it’s so important to have time off from your blog. I know a lot of us get a lot of energy from our blogging but I still think we need to take breaks from it as well. I hope that helped you, Carmen. I would love to hear what you do when you’re away, Carmen, and others as well. The technology you use, are you a mobile blogger? Are you using a tablet? A laptop? Or are you doing it all before you go away and then letting things look after itself? Do you put someone in place to help you out with some of those tasks? All of these are completely legitimate ways of doing it. If you wanna let us know what you do, head over to the show notes at problogger.com/podcast/243 where there are comments so you can respond and let us know what you do there or head over to the Facebook group. Search for ProBlogger Community on Facebook and you will find that group as well. I hope you enjoyed that. I’m packing my bags today to go away for long weekends. Luckily I’ve done a lot of work over the last couple of days so I won’t need to blog too much while I’m away but I’m gonna take my iPad with me just in case I’ll need it. I hope that you’ll have a great weekend ahead and a great week. I look forward to chatting with you next week on the ProBlogger podcast. One last reminder, check out 31 Days to Build a Better Blog at problogger.com/31days. It is something that we’ve just launched in completely new format. We previously did have 31 Days to Build a Better Blog, the ebook. We’ve taken some of the exercises from that ebook and updated them, refreshed them, and put them into a bit of a new order as well and edit some new fresh content as well to come up with this brand new course. We hope you enjoy it. Again, head over to problogger.com/31days to check it out. 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.

Creating a Product Library for Your Blog In today’s episode I’m tackling a question from a Facebook group member about creating products to sell on your blog. Kathy Farrokhzad of Horselistening.com is wondering how often she should create, sell, schedule, and roadmap new products on her blog. Is she doing too much in too little time? Try to publish 3-4 new products on your blog each year, whether they’re courses, software, ebooks, templates or updates. You want to avoid audience fatigue. But at the same time you don’t want to wait too long between launches. Either of these two extremes may cost you customers and money. Engage your customers, but don’t burn them out. Create a schedule to plan content and products a year in advance. Figure out what products to create, redo or replace, as well as what promotions to include. The frequency of new products depends on various factors, such as how many products you can create and how many different tools need to be created. Come up with themes for your products based on popularity and whether they’re easy to research and write about. You can also gear your products toward specific audiences, such as beginners or new customers. And don’t forget about your old products. Consider turning into new products by upselling and bundling them. Yes, you can do lots of regular launches. But you can also get by with just one product. Both will work, so the choice is yours.  Links and Resources for How to Create a Library of Products to Sell On Your Blog: Digital Photography School Ebooks 7 Types of Products to Sell on Your Blog Further Listening Why You Should Create a Product for Your Blog Courses Digital Photography School Courses ProBlogger Pro – 31 Days to Build a Better Blog Starting a Blog Join our Facebook group Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Hey there friends. Welcome to episode 242 of the ProBlogger podcast. My name is Darren Rowse and I’m the blogger behind ProBlogger. At a recent conference, I had a number of people say, “I love the way you say ProBlogger.” I’ve never really thought about that before but ProBlogger is a blog, podcast, event, job board, and a series of ebooks, all designed to help you as a blogger to grow as a blogger, to grow your audience, and to build some profit around your blog as well. You can learn more about what we do at ProBlogger over at problogger.com. Today’s episode is brought to you by our 31 Days to Build a Better Blog course, which launches this month. We are currently taking a group of about 100 bloggers through this course in its beta version. We’re getting very close to being able to launch it for everyone. The feedback coming in has been fantastic so far. If you are interested in improving your blog, taking it to the next level, I really encourage you to head over to problogger.com/31days to register your interest in the course or if you’re listening to this in a week or two’s time, it should be already live and you can just enroll in the course. We’ve designed this course really to take you through a month of teaching but more importantly, some action items, which are designed to help you improve your blog whether you’re a new blogger or whether you’re more of an intermediate blogger and been going for awhile. This is a system that we’ve been using since about 2009, previously in ebook format. It’s helped tens of thousands of bloggers to really level up their blogs. I encourage you to check it out. Head over to problogger.com/31days. In today’s episode, I’m tackling a question about creating products to sell on your blog. It’s a question that came in from one of our group members on Facebook, Cathy, who was asking around how often she should she be creating new products for her particular blog. She’s been creating ebooks. I talked a little bit about how often, how frequently you might want to be creating products. Also, we dig in a little bit to how to schedule that and how to roadmap that. Also, how to select which products you want to talk about. How do you choose the right topics? I’m going to dig in a little bit to the format of products as well. I really want to give you an insight, particularly how we do that over on Digital Photography School, where we’ve released over 20 ebooks, a number of courses, and some other products as well. You can get today’s show notes with a full transcription of this episode at problogger.com/podcast/242. Cathy, over in our Facebook group, this week, asked this question. She says, “I’ve written a total of five self published books and ebooks since I started writing my blog in 2011 but I haven’t written anything in the last two years. I thought maybe I was doing too much in too little time. I published approximately one per year. I know you’ve published many books on ProBlogger and Digital Photography School. How often did you publish books and did you keep a schedule for these? What was your thought process around choosing themes for the ebooks that you published? I feel like I should be doing something this year, but I also feel like I’ve done plenty in the past so I’m not sure what to do next. Thank you for everything you do.” She adds in her URL, horselistening.com. horselistening.com is the blog if you want to check that out. Thanks so much for the question, Cathy. I’m going to tackle the three main questions that you asked here, and then also throw in a few other questions as well. First question there was how often do we publish ebooks? I’m going to particularly focus upon Digital Photography School because we do have more products on that and that has been my main focus over the years. ProBlogger is a smaller site and whilst we have had ebooks there, we are now starting to convert some of those over into a course format. That’s probably a topic we could talk about on another day although I’ll touch on some of our thinking of that perhaps today as well. But over in Digital Photography School, which is my main blog now, we’ve been publishing ebooks and other products since 2009. Previous to that, I’ve been doing affiliate promotions and relying more heavily upon advertising revenue to monetize that site. Since 2009, when I did my first ever ebook, we’ve published I think it’s 24, maybe 25 ebooks on the site. But I should add that we’ve really slowed down on the amount of ebooks we’ve been publishing because we have been doing more courses and we’ve also done some software products as well. Since 2009, 24 ebooks, but I think there are also 5 courses and 3 or 4 Lightroom preset packs as well. It’s probably close to 35 products since 2009. On average, it’s probably three to four products per year that we have published. The first year, from memory, was quite slow. We may have only done 1 in that first 12 months but then have begun to ramp it up. We did have one year where I think we released five products in a year, but we’ve slowed that back down now to three to four product launches per year. Around one per quarter is the frequency that we’re operating from at the moment. There are a number of reasons for that that I’ll get into in a moment. Your second question there, Cathy, was do we keep a schedule? Yes. The simple answer is yes. We try and plan out our year in advance. At the end of last year, we sat down as a team and said, “What products do we want to create in the next year?” In fact, what we do is think about it a little bit more broadly than what products do we want to create, we actually think about what do we want to promote over the next 12 months. We begin to form a calendar that not only has the products that we will create and launch, but also any other kinds of promotion that we’ll be doing. We always, at the end of every year, do some sort of a Christmas or Thanksgiving promotion. Sometimes, we do both of those. We usually do a launch or promotion in the middle of the year, which we call our midyear sale. These are times that we do some affiliate promotions and also put some of our older products on sale as well. We factor those things into our year and then around those, we think about when do we want to launch new products of our own as well. We are thinking ahead. We’re really probably thinking about 12 to 18 months ahead at all times. Now, when we’re thinking about 18 months out, we’re not really going to a lot of details as to what the products will be. We maybe have a vague topic in mind but certainly, as things get closer, within 6 to 12 months, we’re beginning to really form what those products will be, who’s going to be responsible for creating them. And so, we’ve developed, I guess it’s really a system now, to think about those types of things. The other thing that we factor into our 12 to 18 month plan is anything that we want to relaunch or anything that we want to update. That’s something I will talk about a little bit later in this podcast as well because now that we do have 24 ebooks and a number of courses and other products, we need to also be paying attention to whether those older products are still relevant for today. Do we need to retire them or do we need to update them? There have been a number of products that we have relaunched, either with smaller updates and then just putting them back on sale to let people know or completely rejigging them as well. One good example of that is our 31 Days to Build a Better Blog course that we’re doing at the moment. It used to be an ebook. We’re completely overhauling it even though it really does have the same format as our previous ebook. That’s the other factor. That may be something that you want to think about, Cathy. Your first product, if you created that in 2011, which I think is when you said you started, that’s now seven years old. Do you want to update that? Is it time for a refresh? A second edition, if you like. That might be something that you want to think about. I will touch a little bit more on that in a moment. Some of the things that we are, I guess, factoring in when we’re thinking about the frequency of new things is that it’s really going to depend upon a number of factors. How often you launch a new product is going to partly depend upon your ability to create the new product. If you’re like most bloggers, you’re probably juggling other work, perhaps other responsibilities, family, or community groups that you’re a part of, friendships, those types of things. I chuckle at that because I know many bloggers who would be saying, “Friends? I don’t have time for friends.” But really, there are a number of other things that you’re going to be juggling there, plus your blogging responsibilities. I don’t know how often you’re publishing new content and doing social media. Life gets busy, and so our ability to create a product really is going to vary from situation to situation. Also, it partly depends upon the type of product that you’re going to create as well. I know some bloggers who have 10-paged ebooks. They don’t even call them ebooks. They call them workbooks or printables. Some of those products, they can turnaround in a week. They could create those things. Other ebooks, for example, the ones that we create on Digital Photography School, some of our ebooks are 200 or 300 pages long. They’re beautifully designed. They take us six months to create. We’ve got a team working so it really is going to depend upon your ability to create a new product, the type of products that you’re creating as well. It’s also going to partly depend upon your topic. I don’t know exactly what your topic is. I had a quick look at it and I don’t really know how big or broad your topic is. That would be one of the things I would be factoring in. My blog, Digital Photography School, is pretty broad. We talk about all kinds of photography. That gives us a lot of options when it comes to creating ebooks or products. We could do wedding photography. We could do how to make money from photography. We could do portraits, landscapes. We could then get into post production. How do you process your images? We could talk about gear. There are so many different sub categories on our blog and so that lends itself to lots of different potential products. Other people have niches that are much more narrow and there’s really not as much to write about and less options when it comes to products as well. Perhaps, that’s a factor that you need to consider as well. As you look at your five current ebooks or books, is there gaps around the topics you’ve already covered of have you covered everything that they’re already eased to cover? That is going to be something to keep in mind. Another factor to keep in mind is your audience’s fatigue. Sometimes, you can create so many products that your readers get confused by the amount of products that you’ve got or they get scared, worn out from you always creating or launching a new product. To be honest, this is something we’ve run into over the years. The danger is that you can have so many products that your audience just becomes a little bit numb to the idea of you launching something. I know when I first launched my very first ebook, my audience, that was new to them. They’ve never seen us launch an ebook before. This is our first thing and so they were really open to hearing about that. Now, we’ve already launched 35 or so different things that, I guess, with our older time readers, it can numb them a little bit too. That’s another thing that you need to keep in mind. There are some pros and cons of launching lots of products or not many products. I think Cathy mentioned two years between the last time she launched a product. The danger of that kind of length is that effectively, you could be leaving money on the table from your most avid fans. There are a segment of your audience, Cathy, who are waiting for your next product. They will buy everything that you launch. By not launching anything for two years, that’s two years where they have wanted to give you money for something and you’ve not had anything for them to make that exchange with. Two years between your launch, to me, feels a little bit too long. It probably depends upon what other things you’ve got going in terms of income, but I do wonder whether perhaps creating something else might be good because you’ve probably got fans there who’ve bought your previous stuff, who’ve been satisfied by what you have sold them in the past, and they are ready and waiting to buy something else. It takes a lot of work to find a customer. It takes less work to sell a satisfied customer a second thing than to find a new customer all the time. That’s one of the costs of taking a long time to release products. On the flip side of that, I do know bloggers who become too reliant upon their launches. They are always something new and these can go the other way. Their audience, as I mentioned before, can get a bit burned out and become numb to their marketing. This burns out that list that can also burn you out as a creator as well, if you’re creating too many things. It also means that you become very reliant on promoting things in launch mode or discount mode as well. You don’t pay as much attention sometimes when you get into this cycle of always launching something. You may not be paying as much attention into the systems to generate the long tale sales. If you come to Digital Photography School today, we’ve got systems in place to get you to our 24 previous ebooks. One of the dangers of always releasing something new is that you cannot work on those systems as well. That’s something that comes at a bit of a cost to ongoing sales of your products as well. I guess what I’m trying to say here is you want to get that balance right between creating new and fresh things to keep your customers engaged, to increase the long term value of those customers, but you don’t want to burn those customers out. You want to work on the systems as well so when new people come to your site, they can see the new things that you’ve got as well. Another thing that I’ve already touched on there is don’t just work on new things. I would encourage you to think about how you can update those older books or ebooks that you’ve already got. I learned the power of this the first time we did the hardcover version of the ProBlogger book, which we published with Wiley. I wrote that book with Chris Garrett. And then about a year and a half later, Wiley came back to us and said, “We want to do a second edition.” Part of the reason for that was the topics are dated so there was a need to update the content in the book. Also, Wiley said, “The other reason is that some people will buy both versions as well.” Think about that there. Could you be taking one of those older products and updating it significantly enough that it’s going to bring new value to your previous customers as well? We did this with 31 Days to Build a Better Blog. Back in 2009, I published that for the first time as an ebook. Three years later, I did a second edition of that ebook. It was quite heavily updated. It was a new version of the same format. We took the format of 31 Days of Teaching and Activities and we added some new days. We took out some old days. We updated every single day in that ebook. It was enough of an update that previous buyers of the ebook wanted to buy the new one. At that time, I think we offered a discount to anyone who bought it before so that they got an extra value out of that, of being a long term customer. Now, of course, we’re doing it again in a completely different format. We’re taking the ebook version. We’re putting it into a course, which is I think a lot better than the ebook version as well. Maybe there’s something in that for you, Cathy, as well. Maybe one of those early books that you’ve done, maybe you could give that a refresh or a complete overhaul, which enables you to sell it again to long term customers with a discount if you’d like, but it also makes it more attractive and more useful to new customers as well. They are the type of things that I would encourage you to be thinking about when it comes to frequency of your launch. I guess the other thing I would say with Digital Photography School, one thing we’ve been trying over the last 12 months is to also do, I don’t really know what to call them, but in essence, they are periodic relaunch of a product. On Digital Photography School, we have a course that we only open up once every six months. We put it on sale for three or four weeks and then we get a new batch of students and we take those students through the course. Once those three or four weeks come about, we shut the course down in terms of taking new students. This is us relaunching a product two times a year. This means we don’t have to create that product from fresh. Again, it’s not a new product, but it’s a relaunch. This is another alternative for creating new things, is to actually only make them available for certain types of time. It probably isn’t going to work for an ebook, but it does work for a course, particularly if you are going to take a group of people through the course over time. That’s another thing we factor in to our promotional schedule at the start of the year. Last thing I’d say about higher frequency of creating products is that it gives you more products, which you can then use to upsell a bundle. This is one of the beauties of having 24 ebooks already published and another 10 courses, is that when we launch a new product, we can often add an upsell in our shopping cart. When we did our last course launch, we were able to bundle that with an ebook. Some people just bought the course, but some people saw the offer to get an ebook at 50% off and so that became a higher purchase as well. It does give you a little bit more option there. You’ve already got five products, Cathy, so you can already be doing that type of thing. You could be doing 2 for 1 deals or those type of upsells. But more products can help with that as well. The last question that Cathy asked was, “What was your thought process for choosing the themes for your ebooks?” I guess I would extend this to our courses as well. The first ebook that I did on Digital Photography School was on the topic of portraits. I think from memory it was called The Essential Guide to Portrait Photography. The reason I chose that topic, well there were a number of reasons. One, it was a proven topic on the blog. I knew that blog posts on the topic of portrait shot always did well. That was a hint that people were probably more likely to buy that product. Also, to be honest, it was a topic I knew I could write a good book on because I had experience with it and it also wasn’t too hard for me to write it because a lot of that content was already written on the blog and that first ebook particularly, was a repurposed content largely. I chose that first book on those factors. The second ebook we did was quite different though. It wasn’t on a topic or a subtopic. It was pitched at a particular level of expertise. That book was very much focused on the topic of photography for beginners so it was broader. It was on all types of photography, but it was for beginner photographers. It was a little bit of a different focus there. It wasn’t on that niche. It was more focused on the level. Since that time, we’ve largely start to those two options or we’ve combined them together. We’ve done books that have been on portraits, landscapes, travel photography, natural light, different types of lighting, but we’ve also done further ebooks that have been focused on beginners and more intermediate levels as well and others that have combined those things. We’ve done portraits for beginners, for example. They are some of the things we keep in mind. Some of the other factors that we can consider, I always ask, “Have we covered this topic on the blog before and how has it gone?” That to me is probably the first thing I think about. If I’ve published content on a blog and it has bombed, it hasn’t done well, it’s a signal to me that an ebook probably won’t do well. But if we’ve done lots of posts on that particular topic and they’ve always done very well in terms of traffic, engagement, interest, enthusiasm from our audience, then that’s a signal to me that maybe that’s a topic that we should choose for an ebook or a course as well. Also, thinking about the broadness of the interest. We get really good response when we write about bird photography, for example. Photographing birds, eagles, owls, those types of things, they all do really well but when we think about it, it’s quite a small focus for our audience. There’s only a small group of our audience who are interested. Even though they’re avid, I’m not sure that it’s the right topic for an ebook for us. We’ve never done anything that niche-y. We try to be a little bit broader. We are going to experiment with some smaller products in the future that are a little bit more niche-y, just to experiment with that. My gut feeling is that we want to choose broader appeal type topics. Another factor that I do consider is is the topic too broad for one product? The topic of portrait photography is actually a very broad topic. Whilst the first ebook I did did quite well, another thing in the back of my mind as I’m choosing topics now is could this be more than one product? We actually took that first portrait ebook off the market. It was my first one. It wasn’t as good as what it could’ve been but also the other reason I took it off the market was because I saw I could replace it with four or five ebooks on that particular topic. Now, if you’re going to look at our range of ebooks, we have a portrait photography called Making the Shot, which is an introduction to making portraits. We have one called Lighting the Shot, which is all about lighting portraits. We’ve got one about posing portraits. We’ve got another one about processing the photos that you get in Lightroom. We’ve got a variety of ebooks all about portraiture. This is another thing that you might want to consider, is how could you replace one of your ebooks with four or five of your ebooks. It’s another way to roll out more products. It enables you to go a little bit deeper into each of those topics but it also opens up topics for bundling and upselling. This is something that we do quite successfully on Digital Photography School, is we bundle those four of five portrait photography ebooks together and it becomes quite a compelling offer. You might buy five but pay for three, that type of thing. That has worked quite well for us as well. Another thing to factor in as you’re choosing topics is could you extend upon something that you have previously already done and has worked well. Picking up that portrait photography idea, once we came to the end of that series of ebooks, we started to think, “Well, portrait has done well for us, what else could we do? We’ve covered most of the main topics there but what else could we offer?” One of the things we did an experiment with was to create, I think it’s called 14 Amazing Portrait Recipes, It’s a small ebook. It’s more of a case study type ebook. Again, it’s something else that we’ve offered and again, enables us to bundle that as well. You may have already covered all the topics, but could you take a different slant on things? Could you build upon the little library that you’ve already got? Another thing we do with portraits was to create what we call a printable, a posing printable. It’s 67 poses that you can use in your portrait photography. Again, it’s not an ebook. It’s something else that relates to the topic. Sometimes, when you get to the end of a range of topics that you’ve covered, sometimes, there are other things that you can create, that can become nice little companion products to other products that you’ve got. Another factor that I always consider before doing a product is have we done an affiliate promotion of something similar to that? This is something that I highly recommend anyone who’s thinking of creating a product, would do. Try and find someone else’s product that you can promote as an affiliate first. It’s going to teach you so much about creating products. You’re going to begin to see what your readers respond to. You can see he price points they respond to as well. And essentially allows you to test whether your product is going to work. You don’t want to just reproduce what someone else has already created. You need to be really careful about that, particularly with plagiarism. Also, it’s just not going to be good for your brand if you’re seen to be creating something that’s too similar to someone else. But you can learn a lot by promoting other people’s products before you create your own. That’s another factor that we would keep in mind. The last thing that I’m always thinking about is what’s the best format for the product? Cathy has talked about ebooks and books but maybe, one way to extend your product line up would not be to create another book or ebook, but to create something else. You might create a course. Maybe you should be thinking about a membership site. Maybe you should be thinking about printables, or templates, or t-shirts, or coffee mugs. I don’t know what it would be but maybe there’s something quite different that would be complementary to what you’ve already got or quite different to what you’ve already got as well. Sometimes, some topics just land themselves better to more of a course type teaching, or a printable, or a membership so maybe you should be thinking about that. The other thing I’d say on that front is that sometimes, actually having a course and an ebook can be best. In Digital Photography School, the second ebook that we ever did was called Photo Nuts and Bolts. It was an ebook for beginners in photography. We still sell that ebook today but we’ve also got Photo Nuts and Bolts, the course. Some people prefer to read. Some people prefer to watch. Some people prefer to get both and so, they bundle those two things together. Maybe your ebook little library that you’ve already got, maybe that could be rolled up as courses as well, either to offer people the alternative or to get both together as a bundle. I know that’s a lot of information to digest. I hope it answers your question, Cathy. One last thought for you though, I know a lot of people who do very, very well with lots of regular launches. Similar to what we do on Digital Photography School, they’ve got lots of products. That’s their model. It works really well for them. But I do know a number of bloggers who just have one product. They focus all their energy on promoting that one thing. In some ways, that’s a much simpler model and they have a lot less headaches than we do at Digital Photography School with lots of different products and always having to update them. Both can work, but one thing I would say is that the people I see doing best with one product or just a handful of products, they generally have an audience that has always lots of fresh people coming in so they may be doing really well with search engine optimization, always bringing new people in. The other thing that most of them do is instead of selling an ebook, which is a sale that they get once, they generally have some kind of way of getting a recurring income from their sale. That type of model with one product does land itself perhaps a little bit better to a membership site or some sort of a subscription as well. Maybe, I don’t know, again, your topic would land themselves to people who would sign up for a monthly subscription to get some regular content from you and maybe a community area, but that might be another model. It means that you do get that one sale or that one customer, but you keep that customer engaged as well, which increases the lifetime value for that customer as well. I hope that somewhere in the midst of that advice is something that’s going to spark some ideas for you, Cathy, and everyone else who’s listening as well. If you’ve got any further advice for Cathy, you can do a couple of things. You can join our Facebook community. Just search for ProBlogger Community on Facebook and join that group. You’d be able to find Cathy in there, the question that she asked, or perhaps, you want to leave a comment on our show notes at problogger.com/podcast/242. We’ve got comments and you can leave a comment there as well. I hope that you’ve got some value out of that. If you’ve got a question you’d like to see in a future podcast as well, feel free to pop it in the show notes or over in the Facebook group as well. A couple of last things for you to wrap up today’s show. If you want to think a little bit more about products, listen to episode 67. It’s one which I did a year or so ago now on the topic of why you should create a product to sell on your blog. If you’re not quite there yet on whether products are right for you, that one’s a good one to listen to. I also give you some tips on how to create that product. And then over on the ProBlogger blog, I write an article earlier this year called Seven Types of Product That You Could Sell From Your Blog, which might be a good companion piece for today. I talked there a little bit about ebooks of course, because that’s where we started out, but also give you some other ideas on different types of products for those of you who maybe aren’t quite suited to the ebook. Lastly, I want to say thank you to a number of you who’ve been leaving reviews on the podcast this week. I just got my email this morning from the service I use to report on the new reviews that come in. I had one from Tim Melville who came in. I don’t know whether it’s a him or her but Tim Melville wrote, “I googled impostor syndrome, something I have diagnosed but really wanted to explore, and I found ProBlogger, and I fell in love. Thanks so much for falling in love, Darren.” Tim Melville goes on to write, “He’s the epitome of everything I had no idea that existed. He’s real. He’s humble. He’s everything you need to understand to build your blog. I incidentally heard one episode, episode 101, I think, and cannot stop listening. I ran into work to talk to a potential partner. I was talking so fast and so excited and she was like slow down and I’ve not lost a moment yet. I love his very real information for everything you need to know. Everything. Thank you, Darren.” Well, thank you for leaving your review. Also, AJ Reid wrote, “Great podcast. I listen regularly. Rowse speaks from experience and has a laid back style. He isn’t just there to sell me something. Learning so much. Highly recommend this podcast.” Thank you so much AJ and thanks Tim Melville for your reviews. If you’ve got a review for us, head over to iTunes today, rate us and review us, or on whatever app you do use as well. I particularly get notified when the iTunes ones come in, but I try and watch those other app services as well. If you’ve got a moment, I would love you to do that. Otherwise, dig into the archives. There are 241 other episodes there for you, episode 67 particularly on the topic of products. Thanks for listening. I’ll be back with you next week in episode 243. 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.