ProBlogger Podcast: Blog Tips to Help You Make Money Blogging

From Imposter Syndrome to Tech Influencer – A Tech Podcaster Tells His Story Today’s episode continues our series where I hand the podcast over to you, the listeners, to tell your stories and tips of starting and growing your blogs. Today’s blogger is Neil Hughes from Technology Blog Writer. Neil shares how he started out writing articles on LinkedIn, and talks about some of his struggles, accomplishments, and goals. Links and Resources for From Imposter Syndrome to Tech Influencer – One Tech Podcaster Shares His Story Technology Blog Writer Blogger Neil Hughes Register for ProBlogger’s FREE Ultimate Guide to Start a Blog Course Facebook Group PB121: 7 Strategies for Overcoming Imposter Syndrome Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Darren: Hi there and welcome to Episode 231 of the ProBlogger podcast. My name is Darren Rowse and I’m the founder of problogger.com – a blog, podcast, event, job board, series of ebooks and a course all designed to help you as a blogger to start an amazing blog, to grow that blog, the traffic to it, the content on it, and to make some money from it as well. You can learn more about what we do at ProBlogger over at problogger.com. In today’s episode, we’re continuing our little series of blogger stories which we are ending 2017 and starting 2018 with in the lead up to our Start a Blog course. My goal in 2018 is to see hundreds, if not thousands, of new blogs started. We’ve developed this great little course which you can find at problogger.com/startablog. It’s free and it will help you, all your friends, to start a blog. As part of the launch of this new course, we wanted to feature the stories of bloggers who had started blogging and to tell the stories of the opportunities that came from that. Also, to share some tips particularly for those starting out but also for those who are on the journey. Today I’ve got a tech blogger from the UK who is gonna share some of his tips. He’s actually used blogging, podcasting. He started out on LinkedIn. He’s got some expertise in that as well. He’s really built himself an amazing little business as a result of that, a business that has enabled him to leave his full time job and work for himself. He talks a little bit about imposter syndrome and pushing through that. He gives a brilliant tip that I wanna add some thoughts to at the end of his story as well. I’m gonna hand over now to Neil Hughes from Tech Blog Writer. You can find his blog at techblogwriter.co.uk. You can also find a link to that on today’s show notes at problogger.com/podcast/231. I’ll be back at the end of Neil’s story to wrap things up and tell you a little bit about tomorrow’s show too. Neil: My name is Neil Hughes. My blog, podcast, and everything that I do comes into the name Tech Blog Writer. My URL is predictably www.techblogwriter.co.uk. I’m hoping that you know what I do from the title there. That was the idea from the very beginning. My story really began in July 2014 when I published my very first post on the LinkedIn publishing platform. It was a simple post calling out gurus, ninjas and those self-proclaimed influences, you know the kind, the Instagram expert with 72 followers. The post was called The Rise of the Social Media Guru. This is where my tech blogging journey started. At the time, I didn’t have any objectives, any hopes, goals or dreams for the blog. I just wanted to share my insights having spent 20 years working in IT. I gotta be honest with you, I was originally scared about blogging on the LinkedIn publishing platform and crippled with that self-doubt and imposter syndrome that so many of us go through. I still, to this day, remember nervously hovering over the publish button full of fears and doubts. What would my professional colleagues, friends, and contacts say? This was my personal brand on a professional platform that everybody would say and judge but obviously, I did hit publish on that post. It was instantly picked up and promoted by LinkedIn themselves. It received thousands of views. More importantly for me, fantastic engagement. A year later, I had over a hundred tech articles against my name on LinkedIn that seemed to act as my own portfolio and cement me as a thought leader in the tech industry. What was also great about writing on the LinkedIn platform at the time was that they displayed all their sharing and viewing stats for everyone to see so everyone could look at all the articles you’re creating and how many views, how many likes, how many shares that you have. Suddenly I found myself with one million views and was voted the number two tech writer on the whole of LinkedIn. Quickly I started getting accolades from my way including being named one of the top nine influential tech leaders on LinkedIn by CIO Magazine. ZDNet included me on the list of you need to follow these 20 big thinkers right now alongside from million names which is Jack Dorsey from Twitter, Elon Musk, Sheryl Sandberg and Jeff Weiner to name a few. I still struggled with that pesky imposter syndrome. When I looked back at the mistakes that I made and I’d advise other people to avoid in their blogging journey, I would say that my biggest mistake was to unwittingly become too reliant on one platform. That platform was also somebody else’s playground. Essentially, I was just a guest there. Obviously looking back, I should’ve diversified my work much soon. My best advice to anyone who wanna be a blogger is that never have all your eggs in one basket and don’t rely on a game where you’re playing by somebody else’s rules and in their playground. Saying that, but I did make the most of so many great opportunities. My LinkedIn work suddenly catapulted me into the tech writing stratosphere. I now have columns in Inc. Magazine and The Next Web. Millions of article views no longer excite me, it was finding other ways to meaningfully engage with those million readers. I launched my own podcast around the same time that Darren launched his ProBlogger podcast. I still remember, on launch day, we were featured side by side on the New and Noteworthy section of iTunes. I tweeted Darren a pic which he immediately replied to. This is where things got really exciting. Fast forward two years, I’ve now performed over 400 interviews with the most significant tech leaders and startups in the world such as Adobe, Sony, Microsoft, IBM, writers and even TV chat show host, Wendy Williams and movie star William Shatner. I still have to pinch myself. This work has enabled me to leave my day job as an IT manager and setup my own business. I’m now living by my own rules and doing something that I love to do. I guess worth pointing out, for me it was never about the Neil Hughes show, it was about me sharing insights and my guest sharing insights. I’m then throwing it out there to all the people listening and reading and consuming my content and asking them to share their stories. This was always my biggest motivation because if we think about it, our ancestors thousands of years ago went from town to town exchanging stories around the campfire. We’re doing the exact same now but around virtual campfires. We’re tearing down geographical barriers and stereotypes by talking, working, and collaborating with each other. That’s what this recording is doing right now, isn’t it? My number one tip for any new blogger would be don’t get carried away with this age of instant gratification where everyone wants instant success, [inaudible 00:07:27] solution but it doesn’t exist. Do not believe anyone that offers you a shortcut. Remember, we all digest content differently. If you wrote two blog posts per week, you can also turn those two blog post into podcast and to videos too. After one year, you could realistically have 100 articles, 100 podcasts and 100 YouTube videos. If your audience likes to read, listen or view their content, you’ve got all bases covered. Most importantly of all, think of the SEO there because all of that content is against your name. That will cement you and your reputation as a thought leader within your industry. Think of the SEO on iTunes, on Spotify, on YouTube and your own personal blog as a hundred pieces of content that sits next to your name. However, most people will end up doing 5 to 10 pieces of content in the New Year and say this is a waste to time and give up by the time they hit February or March. It’s that grind of getting 2 of pieces of work against your name every week until you have a 100 or 300 if you repurpose your content. That’s where the value is. I think this is the only real secret to success. It is hard work. As Gary Vaynerchuk often says, “Don’t complain that you haven’t got a few hours to spend each week when you binge watching TV shows on Netflix.” My number one tip for new bloggers in 2018 is two blog posts per week every week. Two per week becomes eight per month and that becomes a hundred over a year. Along the way, don’t forget to build on your success and grab opportunities along the way. Just like a snowball rolling down a hill, your content and your portfolio will get bigger and bigger. That’s it for me. Guys, what are you waiting for? Darren: That was Neil Hughes from techblogwriter.co.uk. You can again find the links to Neil and his blog on today’s show notes at problogger.com/podcast/231. I loved Neil’s story today. I love today that we’re talking a little bit about a podcast as well because I think a podcast is essentially, whilst a lot of people would differentiate it from a blog because they would say a blog is a written content, a podcast is an audio content. In many regards, they’re a blog, they’re both a blog and they share many features, they’re both presented in chronological order with dates and usually with show notes and comments. I generally would say it is an alternative to a blogger and a nice addition to a blog. I love Neil’s story for a number of reasons. Firstly, he mentions the imposter syndrome there. I know many of you who are thinking about starting his blog in 2018 are probably wrestling with that right now. There are others of you who have already started your blog, this is a very common thing to wrestle with. You have fear, you have doubt about whether you really have the credibility to say what you’re saying on your blog, whether anyone is gonna listen to you. It’s something that we all face in different stages of our blogging and podcasting career. If you’re struggling with that, can I really encourage you at the end of this podcast to go and listen to Episode 121. In that episode, I gave you seven strategies for really dealing with imposter syndrome. It is something you need to push through. In that episode, I gave you some practical things that you can do to really push through that imposter syndrome. That’s Episode 121. I also love Neil’s story because he mentions there a mistake that many bloggers make and that is becoming too reliant upon a platform like LinkedIn. This really could be any platform at all that you don’t have complete control over. Neil mentions there that he really built his asset, he built his archive of articles on someone else’s playground. LinkedIn owns LinkedIn, LinkedIn ultimately controls the content that he put onto LinkedIn. With the algorithm changes that’s on their domain, ultimately what you’re doing by building on LinkedIn or Facebook or Instagram or Pinterest or any of these other places is building someone else’s asset. You put yourself at the mercy of other people. This is something a lot of bloggers who are starting out fall into the trap of. They see a tool like Medium or LinkedIn’s blogging tools or even Facebook and they’ll say, “I can just blog there.” There are certainly some advantages of using these types of tools because they can help you to get some exposure. If that’s all you do, if all your eggs are in that basket, you’re setting yourself up for trouble down the track and you put yourself at the mercy of their algorithms and their rules and there are limitations on what you can do. What Neil did in starting his own thing, in his case it was a podcast, in many other cases it’s a more traditional written blog, in other people’s cases a video blog. Setting something up of your own that you have control of on your own domain, on your own service is one of the best things that you can do. Certainly I’m not saying you shouldn’t be involved in these other platforms. I think LinkedIn is certainly a place that some of you should be working and building a presence but do it to build your own presence as well, drive people back to your own blog, your own podcast, your own email list and build the asset there. I think it’s great to do those things in conjunction. That’s what Neil is doing today. I also love Neil’s tip there of not getting carried away with instant gratification, there are no shortcuts in this. Do what he said, his great call to action there. Create two pieces of content every week, two blog posts every week and then repurpose those two blog posts into two audio files if you can or two videos. You have 100 articles by the end of the year if you do that. I think that’s a brilliant goal for a new blogger just starting out, 100 articles by the end of the year. As you get going, you might wanna then start repurposing and aim for 200 pieces of content with 100 articles and 100 podcasts or 100 videos as well. Start with those articles, start with the medium, I guess, that you’re most comfortable with. In most people’s cases, that does tend to be a written content but you might wanna start with a podcast as well and then learn how to repurpose those things. Ultimately, that grind of creating that content every week is going to pay off in the long term because you’re gonna end up with an asset. The asset will be, if you set up on your own blog, in your own home base, something that you control and gradually over time, that asset builds. Every one of those articles is a new doorway into your home base. It’s a new potential reader who you can get the email address of and you can build a relationship with. Over time, the more articles you’ve got, the more doorways you’ve got into your site. It doesn’t happen overnight, there’s no instant gratification here. This is something that does take time to build but it’s an incredibly powerful thing. It can open up opportunities for you in the ways that Neil has talked about in new relationships in building a business as well. Also, I love that he said that we all digest content differently. This idea of not just creating written content but also exploring some of these other mediums is a very powerful thing as well. I know many of you who are listening to this podcast today have already got blogs. Maybe 2018 is the year where you need to explore that idea of podcasting for the first time or maybe you do need to start creating some videos in some way as well. I hope that you’ve got some ideas and inspiration from that. If you’ve been blogging for a while, you’ve already got this amazing archive, hopefully, of hundreds of articles that you’ve written. It’s not too hard to repurpose those in today’s other mediums. I encourage you to explore that in 2018. Again, today’s show notes are at problogger.com/podcast/231. You can find our Start a Blog course. We’re just two days away from launching that course now if you’re listening to this in the day that this episode goes live. You can find where you can signup to claim your spot in the course at problogger.com/startablog. If you’re listening after the 10th of January 2018, then that course is, hopefully, live now for you to go to as well. If you go to that URL, you’ll be at a signup and start that blog as well. As I’m recording this, over 1300 people signed up already for that course. There’s a whole group of people going through it together. We’re gonna have a Facebook group where you can begin to interact with one another, support one another, ask questions. We’re also going to help you to launch your blog as well. I’ve got some great things planned where we’re going to feature all the blogs that start as a result of this course over on ProBlogger and hopefully find you some new readers as well. Again, problogger.com/startablog. I can’t wait to get going with that course in the next couple of days. I hope you are finding some inspiration in this series. If you wanna listen to a few more stories of this series that we’ve been doing, every episode between 221 and 232 which will be tomorrow’s episode will be these blogger’s stories. Thanks for listening today. We’ll chat in the next few days. How did you go with today’s episode? Enjoy this podcast? Sign up to our ProBloggerPLUS newsletter to get notified of all new tutorials and podcasts.

How a Blog Helped Grow a Voice Coaching Business In our continuing series of blogger stories I’m handing the podcast over to you, our listeners, to tell your stories and tips of starting and growing your blogs. This series started in episode 221, and is helping us launch our new (and completely free) ‘Start a Blog’ course that will go live on 10 January 2018. You can sign up to reserve your spot in the course at problogger.com/startablog. Today’s short and sweet episode comes from My Happy Voice blogger Vahn Petit, and even includes a bit of singing.. Links and Resources for How a Blog Helped Group My Voice Coaching Business My Happy Voice Blogger Vahn Petit 213: Blogging and Content Marketing: 10 Things To Know Register for ProBlogger’s FREE Ultimate Guide to Start a Blog Course Facebook Group Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Darren: Hello, is it me you’re looking for? I promised you that there will be singing today and there’s gonna be more. I’m sorry about that. The singing that will come will be bit better than that. Hi! Welcome to Episode 230 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 soon to be an album, maybe not, all designed to help you to grow your blog and to build some profit around your blog. You can learn more about ProBlogger at problogger.com. In today’s episode, we’re continuing our series of blogger stories where I’m handing the podcast over to you as listeners and as readers of the blog, to tell your story, to share your tips, to talk about the mistakes you’ve made, and to talk about the opportunities that your blog has brought you. This series did start back in Episode 221. It’s all about trying to inspire as many bloggers as possible to start a blog in 2018 because we’ve got this free course going live on the 10th of January, just a few days away now. You can still sign up to reserve a spot in that course, it’s completely free. Go to problogger.com/startablog. My goal, it’s a big one, is to see thousands of new blogs started this year because of this course. If you are thinking of starting a blog, please go sign up. Please get that blog launched. In today’s episode, you’re going to hear from someone who is gonna sing to you. She’s gonna give you some amazing tips. It’s a sweet episode, it’s not too long. The blogger is Vahn Petit, who is a voice coach. She blogs at myhappyvoice.com. Love this episode, is lovely, and sweet, and has some great tips. I’m gonna come back at the end of the episode to share a few thoughts that I have on what Vahn shares with us. I’m gonna hand it over to her now. Vahn: Hello, Darren. Hello, ProBloggers. Hello, my name is Vahn Petit, I am a voice teacher and a vocal coach in modern music at myhappyvoice.com. I started my first blog in 2010. I just wanted a platform to share my journey as a vocal coach. At first, I was writing very short articles, very, very short articles with stories about what was happening in the studio, could be about a student having difficulties to sing a song and how we’re trying to fix it. I remember also I was posting each month a list of songs that had been studied with the links to some YouTube videos. I remember also I was sharing pictures and videos of the concerts of my students. I guess, at that time, I had several objectives. The main one was sharing stories and what was happening in the studio for my students so they could share the articles with their families. The second one was to find more students. I had a page with information about the singing one-to-one lessons, the group classes, and the workshops. I also was posting articles from time to time to attract people who wanted to take lessons. It went pretty well but probably because I started in 2010. I didn’t have that many competitors. I was ranking on Google’s first page without doing that much. That was really great. But then things started to change and my blog was kind of getting old. I had to renew, rebrand. Now, I have a brand new blog but I like the old one still. When I started my blog, it was not a big deal. Just me sharing my singing passion with friends, family, and students. I launched my blog with only one post. The about me page did not exist. I had no business plan but I’m so happy I did it that way and I did not wait for it to be perfect to launch it. I guess it’s a bit different nowadays because of the amount of blogs and online businesses. You probably need to have more than one post and several pages to launch. I’m really happy I did it that way. If I were to start a blog today, I think I would be the kind of person to postpone and postpone again. That was really great for me at that time. Being spontaneous helped me not postponing forever the launch of the blog. Mistakes, oops, I did it again. So many mistakes with my first blog and I’m still learning. The first mistake I can think about goes together with me launching my first blog with no content, just one article. I was doing things as it comes, as it goes. My blog had no visual identity, no consistency, no clear purpose for my readers. It was just me. Decided I wanted to write something that day and so I was writing. Maybe for three months there was nothing on the blog. Now it’s a bit different. For my new blog, I took a notebook and I wrote down everything from the colors I would be using, the different sizes for the images in the posts, the featured image, etc. The colors, the font, the font sizes. Everything is in my notebook. I go to it regularly when I don’t remember which color I’m using or which size or things to have a visual identity really strong. I’m much more consistent in the way I write, the voice I use. I remember you, Darren, speaking about the four voices we could choose. I think it was four. When we write, my voice is the professor artist, and it goes pretty well with being a vocal coach and a singer. The first mistake was the lack of visual identity, I think. The second mistake was I was so disorganized that I forgot to renew my domain name and my site went down for a whole week. I was using too many email addresses. I did receive a reminder to pay but I was not checking that email address anymore and the payment was not recurrent at that time. To get back my domain name, I had to pay around $200. Yes, $200. Don’t do it like me and try to be organized and write down the important things. Another mistake I can think about, I’m still struggling with that, is I am a learner. I love to learn and I get caught up in all the webinars hurricane. I registered in lots of webinars to learn about this and that. I ended up spending too much time doing that and not being able to even implement the tips I have learned plus I had no more time to create content for my blog. If you’re a learner, my advice is each time you find something you’d like to learn, register, learn, implement, and monitor what you’ve implemented. Don’t register in 7 or 10 courses or webinars. One at a time is the right thing to do, in my opinion. The good things that have happened to me since I started my blog is opportunities. I’m sure I wouldn’t have met that many interesting people and really professional singers and I’m even coaching The Voice singers and actors. That’s very, very interesting for me because it’s a different level of teaching. It’s not teaching anymore, it’s coaching. That’s why we say, “I’m a voice teacher but I’m also voice coach now.” I still love to teach the beginners and I love to coach the professionals. That is thanks to my blog, I think. My number one tip for new bloggers would be to take your readers on a journey, on your journey. That starts with stopping comparing yourself to others. It’s as if wanting to write a love song and being so depressed because there are already so many love songs. But hey, only you can write it your way, so don’t compare yourself to others. To take our readers on our journey, we have to be honest and be ourselves, to interact with them the most as we can, and to be consistent so they feel part of our story and they don’t feel let down ever. Blogging is a virtual thing but we’re only human after all. We’re only human after all. That was very, very nice to speak to you, bloggers. Thank you very much, Darren, for inviting us to share our story, our blogging story on ProBlogger podcast. Bye. Darren: Thanks so much for your story today, Vahn. You can find Vahn’s blog at over at myhappyvoice.com. A few things that I love about this particular episode apart from the singing and wonderful accent, just to mix things up a little bit. I love that Vahn uses her blog to grow her business, and again, this is another example of a different business model to what many of us start out blogging. Many of us start out thinking that we’re gonna make money from advertising or selling ebooks or virtual products. Blogs are very powerful at doing all of those things but they’re also a fantastic way to find new clients and grow your profile in an industry and that’s something that this story illustrates really nicely. I love the advice. Don’t wait for it to be perfect to launch. Whilst I’m a big believer in doing what you can before you launch your blog and setting up with good foundations, that is some great advice there. You can really have the intention of making it perfect before you launch to the point where you don’t actually launch anything at all. That’s something that we really wanna encourage you through this course that starts on the 10th of January to not just get the things right but to actually get it launched and to perfect it after it’s launched. It’s better to get it launched imperfect and to get things fixed up on the go afterwards than to wait until it’s perfect to launch. Because you’ll never actually launch it if that is your strategy. Yes, get it looking good. Yes, get some articles ready before you launch. But get it out there as well. Really good advice there also around some of the mistakes that Vahn made along her way as well. Not being consistent nor organized. I love the advice there particularly thinking about the visual identity of your blog. I guess what you’re trying to do there is put together some sort of a brand, a key that’s going to help you be consistent with that. I like the idea that she had this notebook that had all the colors that she’s gonna use. That’s something that I think a lot of bloggers could learn from whether you’re starting out, that’s something good to think through in the early days. But also for those of us who’ve been blogging for a while, it can end up having a very messy looking blog as well. Think through some of the, I guess, visuals and the brand that you wanna portray. Something that might be well worth doing at this time of the year, the start of the year. Maybe you could give your brand a refresh as you move into 2018. Also, I like that she mentioned there being consistent with her voice. She mentioned some teaching that I did on that particular topic, and if your ears picked up at that point of wanting to know what those four voices were, you can go back and listen to episode 213 where I talked about some teaching that I picked up from Jeff Goins where he talked about four different voices that almost any blogger could write in and the prophet is one of them. I actually suggested quite a few more. I think I came up with about 20 different voices. If you wanna learn a little bit more about voice and thinking about the voice that you have needs to be authentic with who you are but also thinking about your audience and what you are trying to help them with, go back and listen to episode 213 and you’ll pick up some thoughts there. It is quite a long episode, kind of halfway through it will get into that stuff on voices or you can just look at the transcript there as well. Another great point there is too much time learning, not enough time actioning. This is something I see a lot of bloggers falling into the traps of online entrepreneurs. There’s so much advice there on the topic of blogging. You could spend your whole life learning about blogging and not actually do any at all. This is something that I’m really aware of particularly as we’re creating courses and we’re creating content. You’ll know that we’ve pulled back on our content creation this year partly because we don’t want to feed the beast of those of you who are just learners and addicted to learning. We wanna create some teaching for you but we don’t want you to spend your whole life reading ProBlogger articles and listening to ProBlogger podcast. I love the fact that you are listening but if you’ve listened to more than five episodes today, maybe it’s time for you to write a blog post. That’s my advice for you today. Yes, to learn. Yes, pick up the latest trends but put plenty of time aside to implement and to monitor what you’re doing as your advice in that particular episode there. I just love the way that Vahn finished off her story today. Take your readers on your journey. Only you can write your story so own it, be yourself, don’t compare yourself to others, make your reader a part of your story. You’re a human being and so are they and the big thing that we love to do as humans is to connect with one another, to hear each others’ stories. Own your story, don’t try and be someone else. Don’t try and pretend and compare yourself and fall into that trap. Be yourself and take your readers on a journey. Thanks so much for sharing your story today, Vahn. I really do appreciate all the advice. Check out her blog at myhappyvoice.com. You can also find today’s show notes at problogger.com/podcast/230 where you’ll also find a link to our Start A Blog course. I’d love you to join us on our Start A Blog course. If you’ve been thinking about starting a blog, maybe to earn an income directly or maybe just to share your story or maybe to help build your business, whatever it is that is your intent, this course is designed to help you set up a blog with great foundations, to help you achieve your goals whatever they may be. You can find more details on how to join that course at problogger.com/startablog. As I mentioned yesterday, we’re gonna have a Facebook group that will help you to connect with others at that same point of the journey and hopefully we can all grow our blogs together as a result of that. Again, it’s problogger.com/startablog. Lastly, we’ve got two more episodes coming in this series of blogger stories. We’re gonna have a little break for the weekend now. That will give you an opportunity if you do wanna dig back into the last few episodes. This series started back in Episode 221. There’s plenty of stories there to dig into over the weekend but I’ve got two more coming for you next week before the Start A Blog course does launch. I look forward to chatting with you then. 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.

2 Finance Bloggers Share their Tips for Taking Blogs from a Hobby to a Full Time Business Once again we’re handing the podcast over to you, the listeners, to tell your stories and tips of starting and growing your blogs. Since episode 221 we’ve been hearing from our listeners about their blogs as a lead up to our new (and completely free) ‘Start a Blog course’, which goes live on 10 January 2018. You can sign up to reserve  your spot in the course at problogger.com/startablog. Today we’re we’re featuring another two bloggers from the same niche. In this case, they’re both finance bloggers. I met both these guys for the first time at our SuccessIncubator event in 2017. In fact, they both spoke and did great sessions. Links and Resources for 2 Finance Bloggers Share their Tips for Building Blogs from Hobby to a Full Time Business Well Kept Wallet Blogger Deacon Hayes Wallet Hacks Blogger Jim Wang HARO – Help a Reporter Out Register for ProBlogger’s FREE Ultimate Guide to Start a Blog Course Facebook Group Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Darren: Hey there and welcome to episode 229 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, courses all designed to help you to start an amazing blog, and to build profit around that blog. You can learn more about ProBlogger over at problogger.com. In today’s episode, we’re continuing this series of blogger stories where we’re hearing from readers of ProBlogger and listeners of this podcast telling their stories of starting a blog and some of the opportunities that that blog has opened up for them. They’re also sharing some of their mistakes and tips for those of you who are starting out. But also you’ll hear today tips that I think are really relevant for those who are along the way with their blogging as well, particularly today, we’ve got a couple of tips that I think are particularly relevant for bloggers who’ve been around for a while, bloggers who maybe had been blogging maybe for a few years and things haven’t quite worked. Today is really relevant for both new bloggers and older bloggers as well. This series started back in episode 221. If you haven’t heard them, we’ve been pumping them out on a daily basis for the last week, there’s quite a few there now. We’re hearing from DIY bloggers, travel bloggers, recipe bloggers, nutritional bloggers, all kinds of bloggers. Today, we are hearing from two bloggers both from the same niche. They’re both finance bloggers and both of these guys who I met for the first time in 2017 in person, I met them at our Success Incubator event in Dallas. Both of these guys, a lot of fun, they both actually spoke at the event and did amazing sessions. There’s a lot of wisdom behind both the men. I do encourage you to check out their blogs. You can find today’s show notes with links to their blogs as well as a few things that they mention along the way over at problogger.com/podcast/229 and you can also leave a comment there. Remember, all of this is a part of our launch sequence for our new course for those of you who wanna start a blog. If you’re thinking about starting a blog, head over to problogger.com/startablog. I’m gonna come back between these stories to just make a few comments, throw out a few points, and then at the end I wanna tell you something new that I haven’t told you yet about the Start A Blog course, so stay tuned right to the end today. The first blogger I wanna introduce you to today is Deacon Hayes from wellkeptwallet.com. He’s got an inspirational story. He’s gone from being a wood flooring salesperson to full time blogger over the last few years and has some really useful tips. As I mentioned at the top of the show, some of these are quite relevant for those of you who’ve been blogging for a while now. I’m gonna hand it over to Deacon. Deacon: Hi, my name is Deacon Hayes from wellkeptwallet.com where we help people save money, make money, and pay off debt. Back in 2009, my wife and I got married and we decided we’re gonna combine our finances. We did that. We realized we had $52,000 in debt which, for us, in our 20s, was a lot. This was outside of mortgage debt and we’re severely in the negative. We knew we need to put together a plan to pay it off in a short period of time. Hence, created wellkeptwallet.com as kind of a way to track our journey, hold us accountable, but also to help other people that were trying to pay off debt by giving tips on how to save money, make money, strategies to pay off debt. Originally, that was the idea. But we were able to pay off all of our debt in 18 months which was amazing. We set this goal, we hit it, and now I was like, “Wow, this would be so much more fun than selling wood flooring,” which is what I was doing at the time. Then, it led me on a journey to kinda figure out, “How could I make money with the blog?” Turned that into a full time job and that’s what I’ve done today. When I first started out, one of the things I was most grateful for was learning SEO, search engine optimization. Because initially when I started the blog, no one was reading it. I would tell my friends about it and it was deaconhayes.wordpress.com. It wasn’t a legit site but then I learned SEO, I put it on wellkeptwallet.com, started ranking for some really competitive keywords, getting traffic, and then figuring out how to monetize it. Really encourage people that start out to kind of learn those different ways to drive traffic early on so you’re not just writing content that doesn’t get read. I did make some mistakes along the way. One of the things was I would just write just to write, not with any kind of intent. I had an audience of five people or whatever, and I’m like, “I have to publish content.” There were short articles, they weren’t thorough. It just really didn’t do the job. Now, we write articles with purpose and don’t write just to write. I really encourage people that are starting out to do that. Along the way, we had a lot of cool opportunities, been featured on US News World Report, Yahoo Finance, and even my wife and I were on the homepage of CNN Money one day for our worst money mistake as newly weds or something. It wasn’t the most glorious thing but the tips were very helpful, I think, for people. That was just a good way to get exposure. We used HARO for that which is Help A Reporter Out and reach out to these different publications, share our story and we found that to be super helpful. Now, we get over 700,000 page views a month which is crazy. Because last year, we’re getting a fraction of that. Now the blog is not a hobby anymore. It’s a full fledged business, makes six-figures a year. It’s an awesome opportunity, never would have thought I would be at this place with it. One of the things that I really encourage people that are starting out to do is to really narrow down your focus. What do you wanna write about? When I first started, I had 40 different categories. I would just think of something, I categorize it, and then they just start adding up. Now, we have three. We kind of edge outside of that a little bit but really those three dictate the type of content that we write. You can’t be good at everything. You have to focus in on, “What are you really good at?” Like, “Well, I was good at figuring out how to save money, going through a budget line by line, and figuring out how to save the most money. I was really good at making money on the side, I’d go to garage sales and flip stuff online. I drive for pizza delivery.” There’s all these things that I was doing to basically help kind of move the needle forward. Those were the categories that we stuck with. I really encourage you if you start now to look for those categories that you’re really good at, that really could add value to your readers. Think about less is more. Don’t write just to write. Write with purpose. Darren: That was Deacon Hayes from wellkeptwallet.com. Love that story and it’s one that I’ve heard echoed, I guess, in many stories over the years. I wanted to share it for a few reason today. Firstly, as we heard in yesterday’s episode from Joanna Penn, the power of search engine optimization. Deacon mentioned that he was grateful that he learned SEO. Actually, at our Success Incubator, he did a whole session on SEO. It was one of the main reasons that his blog went from a hobby, something that he did on the side, to becoming a full time thing. SEO really changed the trajectory of his business. Learning that is such a powerful thing. The mistakes that Deacon mentioned, he used to write just to write. He used to write short and non-thorough articles, and now, he writes with purpose. I really wanna hammer that home. Write with purpose, it’s such a powerful thing. Actually, every post you write has the potential to build your brand, to change the life of your reader, to make a connection with them. Every post you write has the potential to be shared by your readers as well and help you to grow your blog. None of those things is gonna happen if you just write just to write. If you’re just creating content because you wanna publish content, then it’s not actually gonna make any difference. In many ways, you’re wasting your time but if you’re writing with purpose, if you’re thinking about who is searching for the content that you’re writing, what questions they have, how you can change their life in some way, everytime you publish something, you’re going to publish something that can build your business and that is gonna make the world a better place in some way as well. That’s why Deacon’s blog is now 700,000 page views a month, that’s why he has a full time income, it’s because he writes with purpose. Deacon mentioned there HARO. I just wanna mention that again. I’ll link to it in the show notes today. Helpareporter.com, this is a service that will hook you up with reporters, with journalists who are looking for people to quote in their articles. This is what got Deacon on the television, this is what got him featured in a variety of websites. It’s a great service. If you are looking to build your audience through mainstream media, you might wanna check that one out. The last thing I’ll just emphasize there is something that we’ve heard numerous times over this series already. I didn’t really intend for us to go down this path. I didn’t realize how many people are gonna say the same thing but narrow down your focus, narrow down your niche. He said he went from 40 categories to 3. I think that is really well worth saying. I think that this is a really good tip not only for new bloggers but for established bloggers as well. This is an advice that we’ve heard from our tech bloggers in Episode 222, we saw it in the Orlando dating ideas blogger that we had in 226, episode 226, and even Kris in the travel episode as well who said, “Think about who you’re not going to serve and be really intentional about just serving a narrow niche of people.” This is great advice. Really, if you have had a blog for a while now, I wanna encourage you to think about what categories do you have. What are you writing about that’s not getting the traction? Deacon’s advice there was to really think back about what you’re good at. Identify what you’re good at writing about, identify where you are adding the most value to your readers, and focus upon those topics. I’m sure Deacon goes slightly off topic from time to time but going from 40 to 3 categories to me is a really smart move. If you are starting a blog, really think about narrowing that focus down, becoming the expert in a smaller topic. Unless you’ve got a lot of time and energy on your hands, you’re probably going to find a lot more traction doing it that way. If you’ve been blogging for a while, great advice as well. As we go into 2018, what did you write about last year that really didn’t get the traction and that really didn’t add much value? Maybe you strip out some of those categories for a while and just focus on the things that are really getting the traction. Thank you so much, Deacon, for your story. I wanna move now to Jim Wang from wallethacks.com. Jim is another person that I met this year in Dallas and we actually rode mechanical bulls together. But that’s a whole other story. I’ll leave you to go for a hunt for the video evidence of that. I think you’ll find it in my Instagram account if you really are desperate but we had a great time in Dallas. Jim has got a great story, well, some similarities with Deacon’s story as well. He’s obviously a finance blogger too but I’ll hand it over to Jim and then I’ll wrap things up towards the end. Jim: Hi, my name is Jim Wang, I write Wallet Hacks, wallethacks.com. It’s a personal finance blog that I started about two years ago and I share the strategies I use to get ahead financially and in life. It’s actually the second blog that I started. I started one in 2004 called Bargaineering, also about personal finance and it grew to a point where I was able to sell it a bunch of years later for a significant sum. I started blogging back then not because I wanted to start a business but because I just had no idea how to manage my money. I started my first day of work, they handed me this employee manual, I had to make all these decisions about… I have to start at $401k, what do you wanna invest in, here are the fees, it was just a big mess. I thought to myself if I’m having trouble at this, maybe other people are. I’ve always loved the internet. 2004, blogs weren’t really a huge thing. They had only just started becoming popular and I thought to myself, “I can start a blog. It’d be a fun little hobby.” If nothing else, I can connect with other people and we can learn from each other in a way that was better than me just trying to read a manual or read things online not really knowing whether or not I was right or wrong. My friends, they weren’t really that interested in talking about it. As often as the case, people don’t talk about money in person. But on the internet, you can talk about anything. I thought I’d start a blog, and over time, it sort of grew in popularity. I learned that I was the only one writing about money. I started networking, and emailing, and instant messaging other bloggers. There were maybe around a dozen of us back then. Nowadays, personal finance blogging is huge, there are thousands of blogs out there. Back then, it was a much, much smaller community. We all knew each other, we shared ideas, it was really great. I just wanted to just learn more and it wasn’t to start a business. When I think back to it, what I’m always grateful for in starting the business is the fact that I started it. Back then, since blogging wasn’t as big, there weren’t a lot of blogs about blogging. Actually, ProBlogger was one of the ones that I read that really gave me the confidence to think, “Hey, you know what, there are people out there doing these things and making a little bit of money.” If I were to look back and think of some mistakes, it was that I treated it like a hobby for far too long. Started a blog, people started showing up, didn’t really feel like a business so I treated it like a hobby. I didn’t invest in the things that I should have, like investing in technology, investing in people, investing in tools, and all the other things that a business does in order to grow it bigger than a one-man operation. It wasn’t until a couple years into it that I started doing that. It really paid off dividends down the road. If I were to think back to mistakes, it’s really the investment aspect of it. There are a lot of good things that have happened as a result of starting a blog. First off is that I learned a lot about managing money because I write about it all the time. Our finances are relatively strong as a result of just being responsible. A blog also keeps you accountable to your readers, some who you know and are friends with you in person, some who are complete strangers but it’s all the same. You’re sharing your story and people will call you out if you’re inconsistent or if you’re faking it. That accountability is very honest and very good. The other good thing is that when I started the blog, I was working a corporate job full time. Now, I work for myself running Wallet Hacks and that’s in part because I start a business and it gave us the financial freedom to build or pursue the things that we want. That’s always floating out there for folks that are wanting to start business. If you reach success, that’s a good thing because that means you can focus more of your time and energy on this. A lot of folks will say, “Well, I start a blog. I don’t wanna make money. I don’t want it to be about money.” I would say stop thinking about it in those terms. It’s not about making money is bad, making money is a noble good. Think about it like this, if you’re doing this on the side and you really love what you’re doing and your readers really love what you’re doing but you’re not getting paid, you still have to work a job to pay the bills. If this project can earn you a living, that means you can spend more of your time and energy pursuing the things that you enjoy and the things that your readership wants you to pursue. Think about it in those terms and you might not be so worried about making money from your project. If I were to come up with a tip for new bloggers, it will be just to start. Just get into it, reach out to as many people as you can. You wanna find folks that are roughly at your level in terms of blog knowledge and maturity so that you guys can learn together and grow together, make some of the same mistakes. You wanna reach out to potential mentors that maybe, a year ahead of you, two years ahead of you, in terms of size and development. That way, they can point you in some of the good directions. I would avoid trying to reach out to superstars, in part because they may not remember what it’s like to grow a blog from 0 to 10 people a day to 100 people a day. They may not be current on what the trends are today to grow it to that size. You wanna kinda build a mastermind group or a little cohort of folks that you can just talk to who are just dealing with the same struggles that you are, that way, you can both commiserate, give each other confidence, and learn from the mistakes that each of you are making. Most importantly is don’t give up. I’ve seen so many blogs over the years, I’ve been doing this since 2004. I’ve seen hundreds of blogs that have started that I thought were really good but for whatever reason, they failed, they stopped. Life got in the way sometimes. They start a family, the hobby time that they had after work or before work that was once there is no longer there. Try to persevere, and if you do, you’ll look back and you’ll be amazed at what you’ve been able to accomplish. Thanks for letting me share my story with you and I hope you learned something from it. Bye. Darren: That was Jim Wang from wallethacks.com. Great voice for radio or for podcasting, Jim. Thanks for sharing your story. A few things there in Jim’s story. Again, some similarities, I guess, in terms of why he started blogging to Deacon. But I really wanna draw out what he was talking about with the mistakes that he made of treating it as a hobby for too long and not investing into the business as if it was a business. This really echoes from my story as well. For me, first couple of years of my blogging, it was a hobby, and I treated it maybe as a business one day but I didn’t actually treat it as a business today. Really for me I saw exactly the same thing when I started to treat my blog as a business and invested more time and started to invest a little bit of money into the business, it really did pay off for me. I wouldn’t suggest you invest tens of thousands of dollars from day one but begin to think about investing and getting serious about your business. It’s more of the intent and the amount of time, and the intentionality. Writing with purpose as we heard in Deacon’s story. That is part of the investment that you bring, but gradually over time being able to invest in the technology, getting some better tools, and people as well. This, again, is a great tip for those of you maybe who’ve been blogging for a couple of years now. Maybe not quite getting that traction. Maybe it’s time to begin to ramp things up in terms of some of the investment that you can do because, really for me, for Jim, and for many other bloggers, this is something that we’d look back on with, I guess, gratitude, that we did take those steps, that we pushed rather than just coasted. Also, just the advice of starting. It sounds like the most simple advice that you can give someone. But so many people need to hear that advice. Maybe you’ve been thinking about having that blog for a long time. This is the moment to really do that, to get started, make a commitment to do that. This is a great time to do it because we’ve got this opportunity of the course that’s gonna walk you through it. I do wanna, I guess, offer you an extra little opportunity for those of you who are thinking about starting a blog. Jim’s advice there is to get a cohort, to get a group of people around you, and to work with people at your own level. That’s a very powerful tip and many people try and reach out to the superstar blogger in their niche. That’s not always the best person to help you. Because, as Jim says, they are on a different level. But they are also getting pitched a lot of times everyday. They’re hearing from a lot of people who want their help. You’re much more likely to get help from people at your own level or people just ahead of you. As part of our Start A Blog course, we wanna give you an opportunity to get together with a cohort of people at the same level as you. We’re actually starting a Facebook group purely for people who are starting a blog. We’ve got a Facebook group for those of you who are already going. If you haven’t joined that already, just do a search on Facebook for ProBlogger Community. You’d find a cohort of, I think, we’re up over 10,000 bloggers now who are blogging already but we wanna start a smaller group just for people working through the Start A Blog course. If you sign up for the Start A Blog course which is completely free, just go to problogger.com/startablog, we will send you some details. And as part of that, you’ll also get an invitation to the Start A Blog Facebook group as well. That will be a place where we can work through the course together, where you can ask questions, where you can interact with other bloggers at a similar level to you, and also you can make suggestions on how we can improve that course along the way as well. Because this is the first version of it, and we do want to continue to improve it and make it better, and better, and better. We already had, as I’m recording this in December, this is going live on the 4th or 5th I think of January. This is going on the 4th.. Even at two weeks before this episode goes live, we’ve already have almost 500 people sign up for the course. There’s gonna be a lot of people going through it together. The advantage of that is that we’re gonna be able to promote each other’s blogs. That’s what we want this group to be about as well. It’s not just about the learning together but we’re also gonna try and find some creative ways of promoting each other’s brand new blogs. We wanna help you not only to set up your blog, but we wanna help you to find some readers for that blog through this process. One of the ways that we’re gonna do that is through the Facebook group where you have opportunity to share your blog with the rest of the community and perhaps even begin to link to one another. Thanks for listening today. Thanks so much to Deacon, to Jim, for sharing your stories, very inspirational there. I hope those of you who are wanting to start a finance blog have appreciated that but also others of you as well. We’ve got three more stories coming up, one tomorrow, one on the 5th of January, we’re gonna hear from someone who’s got a completely different niche. I’ve never even knew that there was a blog on this particular topic, voice coaching. That blogger has an interesting story to tell, you’re actually gonna hear a little bit of singing in that episode as well. Next week, we’ve got two more bloggers as well. We’ve got another tech blogger story. Then we’re gonna hear from a blogger who is writing another slightly unusual topic. I didn’t know there were blogs about it but it’s a blog for women who live on islands. They’re the three upcoming episodes before we get this course launched. Again, if you wanna start back at the start of the series of bloggers stories, go back to problogger.com/podcast/221 to hear the first in the series and there’s been quite a few since. Thanks for listening today. Today’s show notes are at problogger.com/podcast/229. Thanks for listening, chat tomorrow. 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.

Leaving Her Job to Create a Multi Six Figure Online Business – A Writing Blogger Tells Her Story We’re continuing our series of blogger stories, and handing the podcast over to you so you can tell your stories and tips of starting and growing your blogs. This series, which started with episode 221, is all part of the launch of our new (and completely free) ‘Start a Blog’ course, which goes live on 10 January 2018. You can sign up to reserve your spot in the course at problogger.com/startablog. In today’s episode we hear from Joanna Penn, who has done amazing things with her blog at www.TheCreativePenn.com. Joanna blogs about fiction and non-fiction writing, independent publishing, and making a living from writing. And she’s built an amazing business around that topic. I first met Joanna at the very first ProBlogger conference in Melbourne back in 2010. Joanna is English, but at the time she was living in Brisbane, Australia. Blogging and podcasting has allowed Joanna to move on from a cubicle job she really didn’t like and build a business that not only brings in a multiple six-figure income each year, but has also provided many opportunities for her to travel and speak on the topic she covers. Joanna’s story is one of my favorites in this series, so settle in and enjoy. Links and Resources for From Crying in the Bathroom at Work to a Multi Six Figure Online Business The Creative Penn Blogger Joanna Penn Canva PB094: 5 Mistakes Bloggers Make with SEO and What To Do About Them 194: 5 SEO Tools for Bloggers 221: From 0 to 500,000 Page Views a Month – A DIY Blogger Shares Her Story Register for ProBlogger’s FREE Ultimate Guide to Start a Blog Course Facebook Group Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Darren: Hey there, it’s Darren Rowse from ProBlogger here. Welcome to Episode 228 of the ProBlogger Podcast. ProBlogger is a blog, a podcast, an event, job board, series of ebooks, and a course all designed to help you to start an amazing blog that’s gonna change the world in some way, and hopefully change your life too by building a bit of profit for you. You can learn more about ProBlogger at problogger.com. In today’s episode, we’re continuing our series of blogger stories which I started back in Episode 221. Essentially, this series is all about handing the podcast over to listeners so that I can share their stories of starting blogs. We’ve heard some amazing stories so far, and today I’ve got a really great one, an inspiring one for you. As I said, this started back in Episode 221, go back and listen to those previous episodes. They’re all relatively short stories, and some of the episodes actually have two or three bloggers sharing their stories as well. This is all leading up to our Start A Blog course which launches on the 10th of January, 2018, which is all designed to really help you to start a blog, or someone you know to start a blog. We all know someone who should be blogging, and my hope is that you’ll share that course with them. You can find the course and sign-up where you can register to be part of it at problogger.com/startablog. Please do feel free to share that with others. It’s a completely free course. In today’s episode, we’re hearing from a blogger who has done something quite amazing with blog and podcasting since she started. She has a blog on the topic of fiction and non-fiction writing, covers independent publishing, and making a living with your writing and has built an amazing business on that particular topic. The blogger’s name is Joanna Penn from thecreativepenn.com. I know many of you are familiar with Joanna already, because she’s been hanging around ProBlogger for years now. In fact, I first met her at the very first ProBlogger Conference back in 2010, back in Melbourne. Joanna is English, but at that time she’s living in Brisbane, Australia. Blogging and podcasting has enabled Joanna to move from a cubicle job that she really didn’t like in a sort of a corporate environment to build a creative business that not only brings in a multiple six figure income a year, but has opened up amazing opportunities for her to travel, to speak, and to do what she loves, and have a creative life. Joanna’s story is one of my favorites in this series so I hope you enjoy it. You can find the show notes with the full transcript of the story as well as links that she mentions in the show notes at problogger.com/podcast/228. I’ll be back at the end of Joanna’s story to pull out a few of the things that I hear her saying just to hammer them home so that you come away with some action items. Joanna: Hi everyone. I’m Joanna Penn from thecreativepenn.com. I blog and podcast about writing fiction and non-fiction, independent publishing, book marketing, and making a living with your writing. I started my site, thecreativepenn.com, in December 2008 as a way to share my journey and my lessons learned about writing and self-publishing my first book, as well as the ups and downs of marketing, something where nobody knows who you are. This was before the International Kindle, before print on demand, before we had the independent publishing ecosystem we have now. I also started a podcast in early 2009 as a way to learn from other people who were doing well, and also to meet other creatives. By sharing my lessons learned, I was able to meet other people going through the same experience and attract a community and friends overtime. I was also living in Brisbane, Australia at the time, and most of the self-publishing early birds where in America, so I was able to use my site and my podcast to meet a lot of Americans online. I was also a miserable cubicle slave at that time, implementing accounts payable into large corporates, one of a not very creative job, and I really wanted to find new friends who were writers and online entrepreneurs. My big goal was to leave my job and become a creative entrepreneur and make a living online that was location independent and be able to travel, and create, and live a much happier life. Looking back, I’m really grateful that I learned from professional bloggers and invested in education early, because otherwise you can make so many mistakes. I did make mistakes but I learned to avoid a lot of them by studying. I was living in Brisbane, as I mentioned, in Australia, and I learned from Yaro Starak at Entrepreneur’s Journey, and actually met him because he was living in Brisbane too at the time. I modeled my blog on his, and I even still have a successful author blueprint as my giveaway for email list building that I modeled on his, and followed his training course exactly. I also attended the first Problogger event in Melbourne, in 2010, where I met Darren and other people making a living online and it inspired me to follow that example. Setting up my site on WordPress and following search engine optimization design principles just has set me up so well. It’s meant that I haven’t had to do hugely horrible re-designs which I’ve seen other people go through because they set up on other platforms. Also, learning about headlines and doing audio and podcasting so early has all really helped my business scale. I definitely recommend investing in education so you can set things up right from the very beginning. In terms of mistakes, I actually made some mistakes before thecreativepenn.com, which was my third blog. The first blog I set up was centered around my first book. I’m so tied to it, including the URL was actually the book title, that when I started writing other books, because now I have like 26 books, writing around one book was never going to last long enough. The second one was a niche that I then got really bored with. A really big tip is to choose a URL with the intent that this is going to last 5-10 years, maybe much longer. I’m just coming up myself on my 9 year anniversary. I can use thecreativepenn.com basically for the rest of my life. I can pivot that into all different kinds of things. I also have a fiction site at jfpenn.com. Again, around my name, which means that won’t change. What do you see yourself doing in 5-10 years’ time? What won’t age too much along the way? What are you so excited about that you never run out of content for? The moment I have six months worth of content scheduled ahead of time, that’s how much I have still to share after nine years, and I’ve never, ever run out of content, I always have more ideas. This is so important. I found with those other two blogs I was just bored, and I didn’t want to write, and I didn’t want to podcast on these topics. Topics that last over 5-10 years, and what do you see yourself being known as, that’s really important too. Also, consider technology that my age, say for example, myspaceexpert.com would probably now be obsolete. I don’t know what that site is, I just came up with that. Yes, those would be some mistakes that I made that I hope you can avoid. Some amazing things have happened since I started my site. At first, I ended up making money. In September 2011, I left my day job because I was making a few thousand a month from the blog, and with more time available I was able to write more and grow the site and write more books. My podcast also grew as audio became more popular and self-publishing as a niche went mainstream. Meaning, I got a lot more traffic from SEO based on the content I’ve been producing for years. In 2015, we started to make a six-figure income in pounds from the blog and my husband was able to leave his job. Now, nine years after starting it, we make a multi-six figure income from our business, all powered by thecreativepenn.com. My blog, my podcast, and the books I’ve written along the way, which I sell to the audience that I’ve attracted along the way. It really has been a massive change in0 my life. My life is now completely different. I was that miserable cubicle slave, crying in the toilets at work because of how much I hated my job. I really, really just didn’t know what I was doing with my life. Now, I travel the world for book research trips and professional speaking opportunities that come because of my platform as a blogger and podcaster. I have a creative lifestyle that I love and a community of friends and colleagues who are also creative entrepreneurs. I had a vision of this life back in 2008. It just feels kind of amazing. I’m now living that. But if you put your words out into the world consistently for years, amazing change can happen, and you can live that life that you design. It really is amazing. In terms of my number one tip for new bloggers, I would say that you can think big, and you need to decide what you want to be known as in 5-10 years time. What can you create that will lead to that outcome, because you have to know where you want to end up, and that will really help guide you and keep you going in the nitty gritty bits because there are nitty gritty bits when you are blogging. Secondly, I would say that learning how to write a good SEO optimized headline, and a really decent image. Those two things together will help your work be more shareable, and I use canva.com almost everyday to create shareable images, and it’s a free site, it’s amazing. Decide what you want to be known as and learn to write a good SEO optimized headline and make a good image. I definitely say that blogging for me was the beginning, the turning point of what changed my life. I am so happy that I started blogging, and so happy to be part of the blogging community, and I wish you well. Thanks to Darren, and the ProBlogger Team, and happy creating. Darren: That was Joanna Penn from thecreativepenn.com. I love the story, obviously an inspirational story. Someone going from working in a job that she didn’t really love to I guess having the freedom to be able to explore her own pathways and do something creative that she loves and to enable her partner to join her in that as well. A few things that really stood out to me in that, I love that tip that she gave about choosing a URL, and I guess a focus that’s not going to age. Something that’s gonna last you more than five years. That’s a fantastic question that she gave you there, what do you see yourself being known as in 5-10 years? That’s a great starting point in thinking about what your blog should be about, but it will also begin to give you hints as to the type of content you need to create. If you want to be known as an expert in a particular field, what type of content does an expert in a field need to create to take them to that point from someone who might be relatively unknown to being an expert, or obviously that will reveal the types of content you need to create. You need to create content that shows your expertise, you need to create some social proof, you need to create content that shows credibility, these types of things. Hopefully by identifying that end point, you can begin to fill-in some gaps in the short term that will take you to that place. Start with that question, brilliant question to start with, and those of you who are gonna take the Start A Blog course, that’s a question that I would encourage you to answer before the course starts. It’s gonna help you so much if you’ve got that end-point in mind. Then, what content can you begin to create that will take you to that place? There’s some really good question to be asking, whether you do the course or not. Even as an established blogger, that will hopefully give you a little bit more focus as well. Also, I like the idea that Joanna mentioned a number of times, just creating, it’s the nitty-gritty stuff, it’s the little things that you need to do that will end up taking you to that destination. We often hear the story of someone going from something that they don’t love, a job that they don’t love to a multiple six figure income, and we think that happens very quickly, it doesn’t. Joanna’s been at this now-I met her in 2010 towards the beginning of her journey, and she’d been going before that already. It’s the small actions that you take everyday and that she’s taken everyday that have actually taken her to that point. Also, I love the idea there of investing in education early, put the time into learning. She mentioned there being mentored by someone and actually putting the time into getting to know someone who can teach you and certainly that’s what we’re hoping that you will do with ProBlogger, but there’s plenty of other great bloggers out there in your niche that you should be investing the time into building those relationships. You will learn so much about blogging through those relationships. Invest the time into the reading and the learning that you can do, and there’s certainly some amazing resources out there, and much of them for free online as well. Put that time aside, it’s not gonna happen overnight. I really hope that you are inspired by Joanna’s story there, the tool she mentioned was Canva, we’ll put a link to that in the show notes today. Also, if you want to do some reading on search engine optimization, some listening on that, I’ll have some links in the show notes as well on that because that’s something Joanna did talk about. Really, I heard her mentioning a number of times, it was search engines that have been driving the traffic for her. This is one of the things that I think a lot of bloggers miss out on is they think the traffic’s gonna always come from social media. Traffic can come from social media, but time and time again I meet bloggers like Joanna and the key to their success isn’t social, it’s actually Google. I’m certainly not saying don’t put time into social, you need to do that, but also put time into learning the basics of search engine optimization and thinking very carefully about the headlines you use because they will help so much in SEO. I’ve got some further listening for you that I’ll include in the show notes today as well. The show notes can be found at problogger.com/podcast/228. Our Start A Blog Course can be found over at problogger.com/startablog. I’ll be back tomorrow with another blogger story. If you haven’t already listened, go back to Episode 221 and work through the six or so stories that we’ve got there. We’ve got bloggers who are DIY bloggers, we’ve got travel bloggers, we’ve got tech bloggers, a variety of different niches covered there so dig back in and look out for tomorrow’s episode as well. Thanks for listening, chat soon.   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.

3 Travel Bloggers Share Their Tips and Stories Once again I’m handing the podcast over to you, our listeners, to share your stories and tips of starting and growing your blogs. I started this series towards the end of last year with episode 221: From 0 to 500,000 Page Views a Month – A DIY Blogger Shares Her Story Today I’ve got three blogger stories for you. And like our ‘tech blogger’ episode 222, I’ve put together stories from three travel and tourism bloggers. Links and Resources for 3 Travel Bloggers Share their Stories and Tips Captivating Cappadocia Blogger Duke Dillard 14 Types of Stories You Can Tell On Your Blog Red Sweater MarsEdit 4 Travelletto Blogger Dianne Bortoletto Amateur Traveler Blogger Chris Christensen Register for ProBlogger’s FREE Ultimate Guide to Start a Blog Course Facebook Group Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Darren: Hi there, welcome to Episode 227 of the ProBlogger podcast. My name is Darren Rowse. I’m the founder of problogger.com – a blog, a podcast, event, job board, a series of ebooks, and a course all designed to help you to start an amazing blog, to create great content for the readers who come to it, find those readers, and to build a profit around that blog. You can learn more about ProBlogger over at problogger.com. In today’s episode we’re continuing our series of blogger stories where I’m handing the podcast over to you, podcast listeners and blogger readers, to tell your stories and tips of starting and growing your blogs. We started this series back in episode 221. We’ve had six episodes since that time. They’ve all been from bloggers from different niches. In today’s episode, I’ve got three blogger stories for you. They’re all relatively short, one of them’s only 2 ½ minutes. Like in our tech bloggers episode last week, today’s three stories all come from bloggers from the travel or tourism space. I thought it would be nice to put them together because there are some similarities there. I know a lot of you do have the dream of becoming a travel blogger. I hope you find some ideas in today’s show. This is all part of our series of podcast all to help you to get inspired to start a blog. If you haven’t started a blog yet, we encourage you to join our Start a Blog course, which starts from the 10th of January. You can head over to problogger.com/startablog and find out more about it. It’s completely free. There’s an opportunity there to put your email address in, and we’ll let you know when that course goes live on the 10th of January. More about that at the end of the show today. I want to hand over now to our three bloggers. I’m going to just jump in in between each of the stories just to pull out a few of the thoughts that I have about the stories, a few little tips, and a little bit of further listening for you today as well because I do mention some things that I find quite fascinating. Let me hand over to our first blogger now who is blogging American accent but living in Turkey and blogging about Cappadocia. Duke: Hi, my name is Duke Dillard. My blog is Captivating Cappadocia. It focuses on the amazing Cappadocia region of Turkey. The URL is www.captivatingcappadocia.com. Cappadocia is in the center of Turkey. It’s an ancient region mentioned a couple of times in the bible. We were living in Anchorage before. I just finished a master’s degree and then decided to move to Cappadocia. During my MBA, I have been researching blogging and started thinking about doing a blog for our visitors to Cappadocia. I thought it’d be a great way to meet lots of people and motivate me to get the most out of the area. We moved here in July 2011. I started the blog in September. I’ve been reading all I could and gathering resources. I had a name, and a logo, and tagline, and I’ve written a few posts. One weekend I got away, put it all together, setting up the host, getting a theme, setting the parameters, and plugins, all the technical stuff. I’ve been anxious about it but once I got to work, the site came together nicely. I didn’t have much money so I did it all myself. In the end I was happy for the learning experience. In doing research, I knew I couldn’t compete with the big travel sites like TripAdvisor and Booking.com. I tried to discern what advantages I would have as a resident. I also knew I wanted to spend time with other local residents and not tourists. As I thought about a niche, the idea came to me that what only I could offer would be the backstories of the Cappadocians who were serving the visitors. We write about hotels and restaurants and tourists and sites and activities, and have some list posts. But our bread and butter is telling the stories of the owners and managers and guides when you visit. How great is it to check into a small cave hotel already knowing the personal story of the owner who’s checking you in? How much easier is it to form friendships that can last a lifetime? One of my best friends here owns a small hotel. He’s traveled to Australia, New Zealand, and America himself, and stayed with people who stayed in his hotel. That’s the kind of place Cappadocia is. Our blog helps make that happen more often. Recognizing this niche gave the blog a real focus and for that I’m grateful. It has allowed me to meet tons of people. It has opened the doors all over the region. I’m also glad I built the website myself since I love to learn and enjoy the process. Understanding how a blog works and forcing myself to learn some basic coding gave me more confidence when things went wrong. I didn’t have to call or write someone and be at their mercy. But probably the most beneficial thing I did early on was connect with as many Turkey bloggers that I could find. There were a number of people around the country doing blogs about their regions similar to mine. I wrote to them and asked if they would go through Darren’s 31 Days to Building a Better Blog book with me. “We could do it all together,” I said. I think five agreed. We spent the next month doing the daily activities and reporting to each other about them. It built camaraderie, encouraged all of us and really helped our blogs. Building that community early on was very powerful. But it didn’t save me from some early mistakes. Doing everything myself, man I messed up. I messed some things up sometimes. A few times I was making a change to the child theme and shut my whole site down. I made some changes, tried to open it on the browser, and got an error message. I freaked out, to say the least. Fortunately I was able to figure out what I did wrong but it was stressful for me. The biggest mistake I made, however, was not putting my domain and hostname in auto-renew on my credit card. I thought I had but one day I went over to my site and got nothing. After running through the house, my hair was on fire, scaring my wife. After that I logged into GoDaddy and thank God that there was a grace period. Paid the bill, set up auto-renew, and then made a reminder to double check whenever my credit card expired. I still, sometimes, log in and double check that auto-renew’s on just to be safe. Over all, the blog has been a huge boon. But it hasn’t made me financially rich but I have made a little money, made many friends, received lots of thanking emails from happy tourists, and I’ve enjoyed lots of free stuff in the region like hot air balloon rides, hotel stays, tours, meals, ATV rides, and on and on. Best thing to do in a tourist diary is to promote everyone and have no competitors. As I look back over the last six years of blogging, I’ve been blessed. Here’s my very practical tip to those thinking of blogging. I was thinking of saying something like find your passion or do what you love or don’t do it for the money but those sounded way too cliché for me. The most helpful and practical step I took was to get a program called Mars Edit, which only works on Macs but there are equivalents for Windows. It allows me to manage my blog from my desktop, even offline. Having a way to write, publish and archive on my computer without needing to be in WordPress is quite handy. If you’re considering starting a blog, I pray it brings you as much joy as mine has. Darren: That was Duke Dillard from captivatingcappradocia.com, beautiful part of the world. Spent some time there with Vanessa, probably 10 or so years ago now or even further back from that. I have vivid memories of our hot air ballooning experience we had there, which I’m sure Duke Dillard have written about. I wanted to include Duke’s story today because it shows, I guess, some of the other opportunities that blogging can bring. We quite often talk about profitable blogging. Profitable blogging of course brings to mind money, which we certainly do some teaching about. But I love that this story, I guess, really illustrates the rewarding experience that it can be to have a blog that really is helping people. I particularly love in Duke’s story the idea of storytelling being such a big part of what he does. I’ve seen this time and time again used with great effect in blogs from all kinds of niches, where people really tell the stories not only of themselves but of different people. I love that Duke’s blog really tells the story of the owners, and the guides of that particular area. I can imagine going to that particular region having read Duke’s blog. It would really bring a lot of the experience there and have a massive impact. It would be the type of blog I will want to read again and again. If you want to learn a little bit more about storytelling, we’ve got a great episode back in episode 81 where I go through 14 types of stories that you can tell on your blog. I’ll link to that in today’s show notes. I also love the tip there from Duke of connecting with other bloggers in the niche. You could quite easily look at other Turkish travel bloggers as the competition. But Duke really has stumbled upon a very powerful thing, that is when you work and get to know other bloggers in your niche. The opportunities that come from that can be quite amazing. This is something I have experienced for myself. When I started ProBlogger, I began to reach out to other bloggers, pretty much anyone who’s writing on a similar topic. I would reach out and get to know them. Some people you connect with naturally and some people you don’t, but the ones that you connect with and the ones that you build a relationship can quite often become your collaborators. Many of the people that I reached out to in those early days or that reached out to me, we became friends, we’ve ended up being partners in many ways. I’ve promoted their blogs and their products an affiliate. They’ve promoted mine. Whilst you could see them as competition, actually everyone grows as a result of those relationships. I love the idea there of Duke joining with those other bloggers, and particularly doing something together. Doing the 31 Days to Build a Better Blog ebook is great. We’ve actually got another course coming up after the Start a Blog course that would be great to go through as a niche. I do encourage you to reach out whether that’s doing something at ProBlogger together or whether it’s just getting to know each other is a very powerful thing. To that tip there of checking your domain name that it’s on automatic renew, please double check that. I had exactly the same problem. My first blog I never renewed. I didn’t get it back, it’s gone now, unfortunately. Luckily it wasn’t a profit blog but I do grieve the loss of all that content. I’ll also include in the show notes today at problogger.com/podcast/227 a link to Mars Edit. It’s a tool that I love and use everyday as well. Okay, that was Duke’s story. Next I’m going to hand over to Dianne Bortoletto from Travelletto, who’s another Aussie blogger, a different accent again today. She’s going to tell you her story too. Dianne: Hello, my name is Dianne Bortoletto from Travelletto, travelletto.com. Travelletto.com is a blog about delicious travel adventures with a bit of an emphasis on Western Australia or in Perth where I live, Margaret River where I love, and Italy that I’m just obsessed with. I started the blog because I was living in Rome back in 2007. Yeah, it was more than 10 years ago. Blogging was pretty new back then. Not many people had a blog. I started it, I can’t believe it, on something called Microsoft Live, which is just horrible. But it’s a platform that doesn’t exist anymore. I started because the blog was a way of sharing my stories and adventures and things that had happened to me while living in Rome, without the need of sending lengthy emails with lots of attachments with photos and whatnot. That’s why I started the blog. I got such a big surprise when other people started reading the blog, people I didn’t know. They’re reading, they’re commenting. That was pretty cool. It was probably only about a year after Microsoft Live that I moved everything across to WordPress. That was the best thing I’ve ever done. I’m grateful for WordPress. If you’re starting out blogging, don’t even consider anything else, WordPress is the way to go. It might take a little bit of time to learn it and get things set up. You can pay someone to do that for you. It’s not that complicated, a bit of trial and error. But nothing else compares. A mistake I would suggest bloggers avoid, all bloggers not just new bloggers, is never ever change your permalinks. I changed my permalinks by some bad advice. It wasn’t even advice, someone commented on a Facebook post that I shared on the ProBlogger Facebook page a couple of years ago. This person said, “Change your permalink. Take the date out of your permalink, Google doesn’t like it and penalizes you for it.” I was like, “Oh.” I went into the back end and changed my permalink to remove the date. It broke my blog. My traffic went from 130 visitors per day to 3. It’s taken a huge effect, a major effect to reverse that. I’ve had to pay someone to help me get things back on track and build the audience up again. It’s happening, almost there, but never change your permalinks. The good things that have happened since I started my blog is that my blog’s been discovered. Admittedly, I’m more of a hobby blogger. I don’t put in a huge amount of time or effort into my blog. I don’t really monetize my blog. I use my blog more as a marketing tool for what I do. My day job is public relations. But the good thing that’s happened since I started the blog is that my writing has been noticed. I’ve picked up some freelance writing jobs as a result to that. Now freelance writing is a new career stem if you like. It’s something that I love to do. I’m focusing a bit more of my efforts into building that side of my career. I filed for Broad Shape, they found me via my blog. I filed for redbull.com. I’ve got a regular writing gig with a magazine in Margaret River, that’s been going for two or three years now. There have been some good things that have happened. I’ve been invited to a few events. But like I said, I’m not positioning myself as an influencer. I’m not going to great lengths to build a huge following on social media or an audience. But still, there have been some good things that have happened since I started my blog. A tip I would give to new bloggers is to find your voice. Don’t try to be someone else. Don’t try to be something you’re not. Be you. Find that voice. Think about how you want to talk and communicate with your audience. What sort of language are you going to use? Will it be quite formal in structure? Is it going to be very chatty and informal? Find the things you’re passionate about. Write about those. Blog about those. I’m sure a million people say that passion is key. Blogging is a huge time investment, huge. It’s never a five-minute job to put a blog together. If anyone tells you otherwise, they’re lying. It takes time. It’s a commitment. Be passionate about what you’re doing. If you don’t really care about what you’re writing about, no one’s really going to care enough to write it. Find your voice, find your passion, and blog about that. That’s all I’ve got. Thanks very much. Enjoy the blogging journey. I’m sure you’ll make friends along the way online, and then hopefully in real life. Thanks, bye. Darren: That was Dianne from travelletto.com. I like Dianne’s story, partly because of the Aussie accent, of course love to support Aussie bloggers. But I love the idea of bringing together a blog about delicious travel adventures. I guess the first thing that stood out to me as I listened to her story is that really it’s bringing together of two other niches, we have travel bloggers and we have food bloggers. Dianne brought those together. That’s one way of making your blog stand out a little bit from all the other blogs in the niche. I’m sure there are a lot of other blogs out there that do write about Perth, where Dianne’s from, and Italy. But bringing together the food aspect of it is one way to just, I guess, add a little more flavor to what you’re doing. I’ve seen that used many times over. If you’re struggling and thinking about should I do this topic or that topic, is there a way you could bring them together in some way to make you more distinct? Her story there about changing the permalinks on a blog, that is something you definitely want to be careful about. If you’re starting a blog, this is a really good time to make that decision about your permalinks. I, too, would encourage you to not have dates in your permalinks if you are starting a blog. Set it up that way so that you just got the keywords that you’re trying to rank for. That’s something that we can talk about in the Start a Blog course. But if you do want to make that change, it is possible to do but just don’t make the change straight away. Do the research and really what you’re wanting to do is to redirect all the old links to the new ones. If you are getting the dates out of your permalinks, that’s fine. Just research how to do 301 redirects to get from the old ones to the new ones. Double check it and get someone else involved if you’re not confident in doing that. I also love Dianne’s story. This is something we’ve heard a number of times in this series of how blogs open up other opportunities. Whilst Dianne’s not making a lot of money as a blogger directly, she’s used her blog to open up opportunities for her other work in PR but also in writing services. This idea of using your blog to open up freelance writing opportunities is what I want to hammer home because this is a big stepping stone for many bloggers. This is probably more for those of you who already started your blog. But if you are looking for a new income stream for your blog and you’re in those early days, this is one that I see many people are using. That is almost their writing regime that then I would use to get other writing jobs and to get attention from other potential employees. They do that freelance writing, sometimes forever. In fact I’ve met a blogger recently who’s making over $100,000 a year from freelance writing work. He’s barely blogging anymore because he’s become so well-known in his niche. But often bloggers do use this freelance writing as a stepping stone to other full-time work from their blog. They might do some freelance writing to supplement the income while they’re also building up their traffic on their blog to get it to a point where it’s able to make a full-time living. Be open to that as you go along. Lastly, that advice from Dianne to find your voice, don’t be someone else. You’ve got to find your own, unique, distinct writing voice. That really comes through experimenting with different writing styles. But it also just comes with practice. You’ve got to be at this for a while to really feel comfortable with your voice. I really do encourage you to build up that archive of content, experiment with different styles of writing. Watch to see what connects well with your audience but also watch to see what gives you energy as a writer as well. Our last story today is a really short one, just goes for 2 ½ minutes. I’m just going to hand over to Chris to tell his story now. Chris: This is Chris Christensen from the Amateur Traveler Blog and podcast at amateurtraveler.com. I started the podcast in July of 2005. Within the first year of podcasting, ironically, I thought I was late getting into podcasting at the time. Then I started the blog a while later. One of the reasons I started the blog is, even today where my podcast numbers are over 100,000 downloads a month and my blog numbers are 45,000 page views a month, some people in my industry still just don’t get podcasting and blogging as easier to explain to them. I think what I hoped for was more travel. I hoped that somehow I’d be leveraged this into either more income for travel or more travel opportunities. The first is happening, although slowly in the second which is definitely happening in a big way. I have to say I’m most grateful actually that I started the podcast because even though that’s been harder to explain, it’s an area where I have been able to stand out, part because I started so much earlier. When people go to the Amateur Traveler, we talk about a destination a week. We’ve talked about just hundreds and hundreds, almost 600 different destinations by now because we started so long ago. The first mistake I made and the most obvious one, besides the name Amateur Traveler, was that when I started I thought I was going to be talking about my travels even though I was podcasting 48 weeks a year and traveling 4 weeks a year. That math just didn’t work. The show turned into an interview show and if it hadn’t, it would’ve stopped. One thing I would say is make sure you have content going forward. Make sure you have a plan for where you’re going to get ideas for more content because my plan just didn’t make sense. I mentioned it’s led to some interesting opportunities. It’s led to some strange opportunities. I got invited to the Obama White House for the Travel Bloggers Summit. I was invited to be paparazzi for the Pope with an official press pass in Jordan for a day. If you want to get a job with the foreign ministry of Thailand, you’d be required to listen to two episodes of Amateur Traveler and graded on your understanding of the English in them. On top of that, lots of trip invitations like, “Would you like to come on this cruise?” Or, “Would you like to come to the Yukon and land on a glacier?” Some amazing opportunities have come from the blog and podcast. In terms of a tip for new bloggers, I would say it’s probably as important to figure out who you are not for, who is not your audience, and just not worrying about doing content for that audience. In the travel space for instance, I just don’t talk about the fly and flop vacation, we’re talking about culturally deep kind of travel. That means we’re not the right podcast for some people, we’re not the right blog for some people, and that’s okay. Sometimes it’s as important to understand who is not your audience. Darren: That was Chris Christensen from amateurtraveler.com. The mistake he mentioned, I think, is well worth mentioning again. Make sure you have enough content going forward. I love the fact that he pivoted really quickly there when he realized that the schedule that he’d set himself and the type of content that he wanted to create just wasn’t possible. He was able to pivot there. But this really reminds me of that exercise that was recommended in yesterday’s podcast of really brainstorming those topics that you’re going to write about before you start your blog. You want to really do that work to work out whether you are able to sustain it. Such an important tip that was given yesterday and reinforced, I guess, today. I guess the other thing I’d say about that is as you’re blogging, and as you realize that maybe what you have thought isn’t quite working, it’s okay to pivot, it’s okay to make those changes. I love that Chris was able to do that too. That tip that he gave of working out who you’re not writing for is just as brilliant as well. This is something that a lot of bloggers do struggle with. We want to please everyone. We want a large audience. We want anyone to read our blog. But when you try to cater for everyone, you end up with very vague and diluted content. But when you work out that I’m just writing for this type of person and I’m not writing for that person, I’m not writing for the other person over there, I’m just writing for the one type of person, you’re able to really serve that one type of person so much better rather than trying to please everyone. This idea of really narrowing your focus to a certain type of content, to a certain topic can be a very powerful thing. You’ve heard this time and time again over this series, their blog is really taking off when they narrow their focus down and really just concentrate on serving a particular audience and not everyone. Such a powerful thing. Thanks so much to Chris, Dianne, and Duke for sharing their stories today. We’ve got five more episodes coming in this series over the coming week. I do encourage you to look out for those. Also if you are thinking of starting a blog, and all these blogs started by someone who didn’t have an audience, they didn’t really know what they’re doing, and they started out many years ago now. We designed this course to really shortcut that process and help you, as a blogger, to start a blog with good foundation. I encourage you to head over to problogger.com/startablog. Pop in your name and email address. We will reserve a spot for you in this course and let you know when it goes live on the 10th of January. Over the coming few weeks after that, we encourage you to consume the content. We’ve got seven modules there for you to work through. Once you’ve done that, we’re going to give you an opportunity to highlight your blog to our audience as well to let the world know what you started, and hopefully to help you find a few readers, and to celebrate all of the new blogs that start as a result of this. There are hundreds of people who have already signed up for that free course, problogger.com/startablog. Thanks for listening. Chat with you tomorrow with another story from an amazing blogger. 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.

Over $100,000 in Ad Revenue – a Dating Ideas Blogger Tells Her Story It’s the beginning of January, and I want to wish you all a Happy New Year. You may want to kick off the new year with our Start a Blog Course. Today we’re resuming our series of blogger stories where I hand the podcast over to you, our listeners, to tell your stories and tips of starting and growing your blogs. Kristen Manieri from Orlando, Florida started a blog with no real plan to make money. Kristen writes about dating ideas for a particular location, and her blog has grown to the point where she’s making over $100,000 in advertising. Links and Resources for From Passion Project to Over $100,000 in Advertising Revenue Orlando Night Guide Register for ProBlogger’s FREE Ultimate Guide to Start a Blog Course Facebook Group Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Darren: Hey there, it’s Darren from ProBlogger. Welcome to Episode 226 of the ProBlogger podcast. ProBlogger is a blog, a podcast, event, job board, a series of ebooks, and soon to be a course all designed to help you to start an amazing blog, to create a blog with great content that’s going to serve your audience, and to build some profit around that blog as well. You can learn more about ProBlogger over at problogger.com. It is the first of January as this episode goes live. I do want to pause and wish you all a very Happy New Year. I hope you had a good holiday period, no matter what you did, and ready and raring to go for a great year of blogging ahead. We’ve got a massive amount planned for you this year. Starting on the 10th of January, with our new course, The Ultimate Guide To Starting A Blog, which is a seven-step guide to starting a blog that has the foundations to be profitable. We want to talk you through how to set up a blog but we want to take you a little bit back from that and get you starting a blog that’s on the right topic and is well-thought through in terms of what you’re going to be creating. That starts on the 10th of January. If you head over to problogger.com/startablog, you will have an opportunity there to reserve your spot in that course, it’s a free course, and be notified when that goes live. Today, we are continuing our series of blogger stories where I’m handing the podcast over to you, as listeners, to tell your stories of starting a blog. It’s all about trying to inspire as many people as possible to start and grow their blogs in 2018. Today’s story is an amazing one. It’s of a blogger who started a blog about dating and dating ideas in a particular location. She has grown that blog, which started as a passion project, with no real intent of making money. She’s over the years built that up to the point where it’s making over $100,000 a year in advertising just on writing on dating ideas for a particular location. She tells a little bit more about how she’s going to expand that to more than one location as well. This is a great story. I hope you enjoy it. You can find today’s show notes with all the links to our course as well as the blogger that we’re featuring today over at problogger.com/podcast/226. After she shares her story, I’ll be back to point out a few things that I love about the story and give you a few more tips of my own. Thanks for listening. Kristen: Hi, this is Kristen Manieri from Orlando, Florida. I wanted to tell you all about my blog, orlandodatenightguide.com. I started Orlando Date Night Guide in 2007. It’s a total passion project. My husband, Mark, and I just moved to Orlando the year before. I was immediately struck by how much there was to do outside of the theme parks and by how often when I would share these things with people who already lived here, even people who’d been here for five years or more, how many had never heard of them or hadn’t ever bothered to check them out. I actually started with a book that published in early 2007. Then the website launched a few months later. We just celebrated our 10th anniversary. Honestly when I started, it was just because I thought how great is this that I can write something and take some photos and hit publish. I was a freelance writer from my paid work. To have the freedom to write about what I wanted, when I wanted was really exciting and rewarding for me. In 2011 though, I decided it was time to take it a little more seriously, and I started writing more consistently, and I launched all of my social media accounts. But in 2014, I realized it was time to monetize. I teamed up with someone who sold ads locally. We created ad spots on the site. We now generate just short of about $100,000 a year in ad revenue from local businesses. In hindsight, what did you do in starting your blog that you’re most grateful for that you did? I think for me was that I started it without thinking that I was going to make a whole bunch of money from it. I really just started it because it was something that I wanted to do and that I loved to do. Because I did it with making no money for seven years, I don’t know that I would recommend doing that. I think I probably could’ve monetized it a lot sooner. There was no pressure up until that point. I could just have fun with it and really dive into the passion side of it before I started trying to turn it into a business. I think trying to turn a blog into a business too early can make it too stressful. If you were to ask me about my dream for the blog, it would’ve been to have it grow outside of Orlando. Earlier this year I actually saw that dream come true with the launch of Tampa Date Night Guide, Asheville Date Night Guide, and our national site Date Night Guide. We’re also launching in Baton Rouge in the first quarter of 2018. Few good things have had happened since I started my blog is definitely growing outside of Orlando, that’s been super exciting. But I was also voted best blogger by Orlando Magazine last year. Through the blog I launched an event series called Do Good Date Night where we pair couples with local nonprofits for volunteer date nights. A series was featured in Good Housekeeping magazine earlier this year. That was really cool. I’d been growing to over 60,000 social media followers and over 50,000 monthly readers who’s been pretty awesome. Also growing my team has been really great too. I’ve got such a great group of writers that work with me to create what we create everyday. My number one tip for new bloggers, I think when you’re just starting out a new blog you should write down 100 ideas for a blog post, no less. Before you even create your site, get your URL, make a giant list of 100 things that you’d actually see yourself writing about. Then before you hit publish, before you actually start your WordPress account, write 20 of them, and see if just writing them for you lights you up enough to keep going, and if you’re actually as excited and informed about the topic as you initially thought. I’ve been writing Orlando Date Night ideas for over a decade now. Hundreds and hundreds of stories later, I still never run out of things to share or passionate about sharing them. That’s it for me. Thanks for the opportunity. Darren: That was Kristen Manieri from Orlando Date Night Guide, great idea for a blog. I’ve seen a number of bloggers around over the years who have done similar things for their own locations. I wanted to include that particular story for a number of reasons. One, because it is possible to have a blog that is serving a particular location. You do not have to start a blog that is going to reach the whole world. In fact, you may be better positioned to really focusing on a particular niche. A niche can be a topic but it can also be a type of person, a demographic area as well. Kristen, in this case, is targeting people who might be over dating age in Orlando. I just did a Google search, Orlando has 2.3 million people. It’s a fairly large area that includes the metropolitan area, of course there are tourists coming into it as well. It’s big enough to be able to sustain almost $100,000 a year in advertising. I wanted to include that because you don’t have to have bloggers that are number one in the world. You can build a business by being the number one blog, or not even the number one blog, but a significant blog in a particular area. I love that idea. Fantastic. I love the idea that she’s also built something that can be replicated in other parts of the world as well. Really, this could be replicated in any city around the world. It looks like that the plan is to roll out quite a few of them and to try it around national level. One of the reasons that this particular strategy works very well being localized is that it is going to help to monetize it, particularly in terms of working with advertisers directly. Anyone advertising on that particular blog knows they’re going to reach people who are in Orlando and have a very niche focused: they want to have a date, they want to do something together. I think that is one reason why this works, particularly well with that advertising model as well. She also mentioned their book. I think this is another revenue stream, potentially would be those types of products that could be used by couples in that particular area, whether that be a physical book or more perhaps. I’ve seen this used on other similar blogs, PDF type things or virtual type ideas as well. I did see one person doing an app for a particular area as well that worked quite well. Fantastic story there. I love the tip that Kristen gave at the end there. Her number one tip, coming up with 100 ideas for blog posts and then writing 20. I think for me this is actually a tip that I’ve given many people over the years, whether it’s 100 or not, I think brainstorm as many topics for blog posts for content as you can before you get that domain, before you set up your blog. Because that’s going to reveal to you is your niche broad enough for you to come up with ideas. I’ve seen a number of bloggers that I suggest do this exercise realized that they could only come up with 10 to 20 topics. That showed them that their niche was too narrow. They needed to broaden it out, and perhaps thinking about more categories of topics that relate to their audience. Because they really only had enough ideas for 20 or so posts. That’s not enough. You’re going to be at this for years. I think Kristen started in 2007. She’d been at this for 10 years now. You need to do that due diligence to come up with ideas. Also it’s going to reveal by writing the content. I love that strategy of not only brainstorming the topics but actually setting yourself the task of writing 20 of them. Firstly you’re creating some great content that you can use in your launch period but also you’re going to very quickly discover whether you enjoy your topic, whether you have that interest, that passion for the topic. You’ll also have some content that you can then put a critical eye to it and ask yourself the question, “Is this any good?” Perhaps at that point, it’s also worth sharing it with some friends, with others who can give you some feedback. Do you like it? Can you sustain it? Are you good at it? These are good questions to ask before you go and register that domain, and before you go and set up that blog. Also, doing that exercise of course gives you your first 20 or so blog posts as well, which you can then use to two or three of those a week. You’ve got yourself several months worth of content there, which enables you during that launch period to get on with promoting it, building community, and networking with other bloggers. All these other things that you really need to do in those early days of blogging. Thanks so much, Kristen, for your story and for your tip. You can check her out at orlandodatenightguide.com. I think I left off the guide earlier. Thanks so much for that. Check out problogger.com/startablog for our Start A Blog course, which we’ll be launching for the first time on the 10th of January. If you’re listening to this in the months to follow, hopefully it’d still be there and you can still sign up to do that. We will be updating as we go. If you are listening to this several months later, you’re going to even get a better course. You can go there. You’ll probably be directed the way you can sign up and start up straight away. It is a seven-step course that we’re going to walk you through. It really is designed to help you make some good decisions, to have good foundations for your blog. First step is thinking about is a blog right for you, thinking about your purpose with your blog. Number two is thinking about what you’re going to blog about to finding your blogging niche, making sure it’s viable. Part of that is what I was just talking about with coming out with those ideas. Number three we’re going to help you to make some good decisions about what to call your blog, what domain name to get. Number four you’re going to be walked through, step by step, how to register that domain, to setup your hosting, and how to install WordPress. That’s for technical side of things but really a lot of how to start a blog tutorial step with that. We want to get those first three steps in before you get to that point because really if you go out and get the domain and you setup your blog in WordPress before you think through some of those earlier things, you’re going to choose the wrong domain. That’s step number four. Number five is getting your blog looking good, thinking about the design and the theme choices. Step number six is adding content and functionality to your blog with WordPress. Then step number seven is a blog launch checklist, and some learning modules about email and social media. Some of those other things that you will want to set up in the early days of your blog. This is a free course, steps you through those seven things will get you from idea through the having your first blog, and having some content on it. We’ve got some other stuff that we will be throwing into the course. As well to help us celebrate all the blogs that will start as a result of it. I just checked few minutes ago, we’ve had over 100 people register in just a few hours for that course. You won’t be alone. That’s one of the great things about this particular course. We’re going to be all going through it together. There’ll be some community around it as well. Problogger.com/startablog. You can sign up to be notified when that goes live. Thanks for listening today. I look forward to chatting with you tomorrow. These stories will be coming on a daily basis for the next four more days after this, then a couple more next week as well before we start the course. Thanks for listening. How did you go with today’s episode? Enjoy this podcast? Sign up to our ProBloggerPLUS newsletter to get notified of all new tutorials and podcasts.

How One Nutritionist Uses Her Blog to Help Grow Her Business Here’s another episode where I hand the podcast over to you, our listeners, to tell your stories and tips of starting and growing your blogs. In today’s episode I’ve got Aussie blogger Nina—one of the attendees from our recent events in Australia. She came to our mastermind day, and I really enjoyed getting to hear a little bit of her story there. And I wanted to include her story today because it illustrates another model of building an income around your blog. Links and Resources for From How One Nutritionist Uses Her Blog to Grow Her Business: Register for ProBlogger’s FREE Ultimate Guide to Start a Blog Course Facebook Group Nina Mills Series Started in Episode 221 Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Darren : Hey there and welcome to episode 225 of the ProBlogger podcast. My name is Darren Rowse and I’m the blogger behind problogger.com. A blog, podcast, a job board, an event, a series of ebooks, and soon to be a course designed to help you to start an amazing blog, to create fantastic content for it that will change your reader’s lives and to build some profit around your blog. You can learn more about what we do over at problogger.com. In today’s episode, episode 225, we’re continuing our series of blogger stories. This started back in episode 221. If this is your first one in the series, you might wanna go back and listen to that one. I explained this series a little bit in more detail but basically we’re giving bloggers who are listening of this podcast a chance to share their story and some tips that they have. This is all part of our Start A Blog challenge. We really want this series to inspire as many people as possible to start new blogs. We’re going to launch a course at the end of this series, second week of January, to help you do that. It’s a short course which will walk through some of the technicalities of starting a blog but also help you think about how to build a profitable blog and get some of those foundations in place before you start. If you are thinking of starting a new blog or you know someone who you think will be a great blogger, send them over to problogger.com/startablog and you can sign up there to be notified when that course goes live. In today’s episode, I’ve got another Aussie blogger. This is Nina from Australia and she’s one of the attendees from our recent events in Australia. She came to our mastermind day and I really enjoyed getting to hear a little bit of her story there. I wanted to include this story today. It’s very short, it’s very simple, because, I think, it illustrates another model of building an income around your blog which we don’t talk about enough. I’m gonna leave it at that. Nina is a Nutritionist and she is using her blog to, I guess, help her to build her private following and find some work. I’m gonna hand it over to Nina, it’s a very short episode, and then I’m gonna come back at the end and just make a few comments and give you a few thoughts on what Nina says. You can get the show notes today and find Nina’s blog, whatsforeats.com.au. You can find the link to that and the full transcript over at problogger.com/podcast/225. Nina: Hi there! My name’s Nina and my blog’s called What’s for Eats? You can find that at whatsforeats.com.au. I started What’s for Eats? back in 2010, after I have graduated from a Graduate Diploma in Human Nutrition. I was really struggling to find work. I mean, here I was, a freshly-anointed nutritionist with all of this new knowledge to share and nowhere to share it. Blogging seemed like the perfect opportunity to practice my health, writing, and spread, and I cringe to say this now, messages about “healthy eating.” When looking back at what I did in starting my blog, I’m most grateful for just starting and putting my stuff out there. I do have perfectionistic tendencies and I think that I was lucky to start blogging at a time when there wasn’t that explosion of health-related blogs like there is now to give me that comparison paralysis. If I look back on the past seven or so years that I have been blogging, I don’t think there’s anything I wish I had never ever done. Everything I have done has been a learning experience to get me to where I am today. Without trying things to see that didn’t work for me, I would not have been able to hone in on my audience, and my vision, and my values. Of course, looking back, it would have been great if I had started up my list sooner or been an earlier adapter of using Facebook for my business or using Instagram or getting on video. I think I have to acknowledge that me going back to university to try and become a dietitian, changing careers, and now working for myself has been partly due to my blog. I had an established online presence when I applied to study Dietetics and I think that didn’t go unnoticed by the selection community at the university I attended. That online presence also opened a lot of doors for me once I was qualified. It was a very different story when I started looking for work as a new dietitian with an online presence compared to back in 2010 when I started my blog and I was a new nutritionist without a blog or any social media accounts. I always thought I can only make money from my blog if I were selling a product or doing sponsor posts and things like that. But, after attending ProBlogger Evolve this year, I realized my blog has been, probably, the biggest contributing in me generating a lot of my income as a dietitian. By having a place online to, essentially, sell myself and my skills, I’ve been approached to work on a variety of interesting projects. I’ve branched out into food photography and I’ve found my niche area online that I love. Essentially, success for me hasn’t been about page views or email subscribers, it’s been the ability to move out of the Monday to Friday 9:00 to 5:00, and work for myself, build working relationships with people I wanna work with, and work in an area that challenges and energizes me everyday. If I’m having to think about my number one tip for new bloggers, I understand the value in finding a niche and identify your ideal client or audience before you start blogging. There’s also a lot of value in doing lots of planning around the structure and the look of your blog, getting content ready before you go live, all those things. Basically being prepared and ready to go with some direction. I think my tip for new bloggers is if you really wanna blog, just do it. You can waste a lot of time in this planning preparation stag trying to get everything just right and never end up getting to the actual blogging part of it. Like I mentioned earlier, I’m where I am today by just doing stuff and working things out and tweaking things as I went along. It took me a couple of years to really find my niche and my ideal audience. While I’m not a mega online success, I’ve found my people and my people have found me online. That’s what’s making being online and blogging just that much more satisfying. If I did all of the things that we’re supposed to do before starting a blog, I reckon I would still be here seven years later waiting to start. Darren: That was Nina Mills from whatsforeats.com.au. Thank you so much for sharing your story, Nina. Great to hear from you. I did wanna share Nina’s story today for a couple of reasons. Firstly, because she’s blogging with a model which, I guess, we used to talk about a lot in the early days of ProBlogger but we don’t talk about quite so much these days. She’s blogging, I guess essentially, to build an income indirectly. She’s using her blog to build her profile which is opening doors for her to firstly, get into a university, sort of her studies, but secondly to find work. You heard her during that little story where she said that she used to think that you can build money by selling ebooks and selling something on your blog. But, essentially, what Nina has discovered is that her blog is enabling her to sell herself and her own services. This is something that I think more and more people who are in business, whether they are freelancers, whether they are coaches, whether they are health practitioners, or whether they are legal practitioners, whatever it is really. If you’ve got a service to sell, if you’ve got a business of your own, I think that is a really great reason to start a blog. To monetize it with advertisers, and with ebooks, and courses, and all those types of things may actually be distracting your readers from the number one income stream that could potentially be coming from your blog, and that is the income stream of you and being able to sell yourself in some way. I wanted to include this story today because I know that  a lot of listeners of the podcast, readers of ProBlogger do have, I guess, brick and mortar businesses or businesses where they sell themselves in some way, and yet they’re trying to monetize through selling, advertising, or creating ebooks and that type of thing to sell. There is another way. Maybe your blog actually is better monetized by selling yourself in some way or a combination of selling yourself and other products as well. The other thing I loved about Nina’s advice is it goes, I guess, something that I’ve been saying for a long time now. You can spend a lot of time getting your blog ready to launch but never actually launch it. If you do all the things to try and get it perfect before it launches, the chances are some of us will never ever launch our blogs. You heard Nina talk about having perfectionist tendencies there, that’s something I know many of us can relate to. I, for one, am glad that I started my first blogs rather impulsively. I didn’t allow my own perfectionism to get in the way of starting my blog because, I too, think, I would probably be still thinking about starting my blog if I had allowed my perfectionism to get in the way. If you are a perfectionist, I wanna encourage you to sign-up for our Start A Blog Course. But, also, I wanna encourage you to find an accountability partner and to commit to them that you are going to launch your blog by a certain period of time. Maybe a week or two after you start the course. We do not want our course to get in the way of you starting that blog but we do want our course to help you along that journey. Do the work to be prepared. Do the work before you launch as much as possible. But, launch. You gotta launch that thing. You’ve gotta resist that temptation to waste so much time getting it perfect and never actually getting to blogging itself. If you are thinking of starting a blog, please head over to problogger.com/startablog. We want to see as many blogs as possible started in the month of January, early February of 2018. That’s why we’re creating this free Start A Blog course. If you know some bloggers, or if you’ve been talking to a group of people, perhaps a group of nutritionists that you’re a part of, or perhaps it’s a group of legal practitioners, or other people within your niche and you wanna start blogs together, now is the time to do it. Get a group together and sign-up to Start A Blog course and we’ll kick that off in the second week of January. Thanks so much for listening. This is the fifth episode in this little series. We’ve had a range of bloggers now. A nutritionist today, we’ve had a DIY blogger, we’ve had finance bloggers, we’ve had tech bloggers. A variety of bloggers there already. That’s five in total that we’ve done so far. We have another seven to come. We are gonna take a little break for Christmas now so this is the last episode before Christmas and before the New Year. I did wanna pause at this point and just wish you all a happy holidays, a happy time of celebration if you are celebrating. I really hope that it is a happy time, a peaceful time, and a time where you are able to find some rest but also some inspiration for the year ahead. I really look forward to being a part of your 2018. This podcast will be back on the first of January. We will be getting back into this series on the first of January and that week we’ll be doing another five blogger stories and the following week, we’ll do two more before we launch the Start A Blog course. Do watch out for our episodes in iTunes or your podcast listener. Of course, there’s plenty of other episodes back in the archives as well if you do wanna keep working in this time that we’re having a little bit of a break. We’re at episode 225 today so there’s a lot in the archives there. It’s all still in iTunes. I think once we get up to episode 300, they’ll start disappearing because you can’t have more than 300 but you’ve got some time to dig into those early episodes now before they do disappear. Thanks so much for listening. I hope you have a great end of year and I’ll talk to you in 2018. 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.

From 5 to Over 1,000,000 Monthly Readers – A Finance Blogger Shares His Story Once again I’m handing the podcast over to you, our listeners, to tell your stories and tips of starting and growing your blogs. In today’s episode you’ll hear the story of Robert Farrington, a finance blogger. After a couple of fairly unfocused years where he made no money from his blog, Robert managed to turn things around through storytelling and taking his readers on a journey. In his third year he made $30,000, and today he earns a high seven-figure income from his blogging business, with more than a million people reading his blog every month. I love that how the bloggers in the series who’ve ‘made it’ to a full-time level are giving us insights into their early years. This series is designed to give those starting out (or about to start out) some inspiration, along with some practical tips and encouragement for those early days. It’s part of the launch of our brand new Start a Blog course, which launches in the second week of January. To learn more about it, and get notified when it goes live, head to problogger.com/startablog Links and Resources for From 5 to Over 1,000,000 Readers a Month – A Finance Blogger Tells His Story: Register for ProBlogger’s FREE Ultimate Guide to Start a Blog Course Facebook Group Robert Farrington Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Darren : Hey there and welcome to episode 224 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 as a blogger to grow your audience, to create some great content, to build community and monetize your blog. You can learn more about ProBlogger over at problogger.com. In today’s episode, we’re continuing our series of blogger stories where I am handing the podcast to you as listeners of this podcast and the readers of the blog. To tell you stories, to share you tips of starting and growing your blog over these 12 episodes and they’re daily at the moment so they’re coming thick and fast. You’re hearing stories of bloggers who started out, some of them a few years ago and some of them 10 years ago now to tell us some of what has happened since for them. They talk about their mistakes, their tips, the lessons they’ve learned and the good things that have come as a result of starting their blog. Today, you’re gonna hear the story of a finance blogger who started a few years ago now and it was a fairly lean start. He pushed through a couple of fairly unfocused years where he didn’t really have focus for his blog, where he wasn’t really making any money at all from his blog, but he pushed through it anyway to the point where in his third year, he began to get it together. In that third year, he made about $30,000 which was the beginnings of a new business that formed around his blog. Today, he has over a million readers a month and he’s making high six-figures a year from that blog. I’m not guaranteeing that if you take our Starter Blog course that you are going to get to that point, but really, this series is about giving you a little bit of inspiration, to tell you some stories of what could happen as a result of starting a blog, but also to give you some practical tips, and to give an insight into the beginning days of these blogs. One of the things I love about this series is that we are hearing from bloggers who have, to all intents and purposes, made it. They’re at a full time level, they’ve built successful businesses but they’re giving us little insights into their early years. I love that and I’m very grateful to all these bloggers who are doing that. This series is designed to give you, as a someone who’s potentially starting out in your blogging journey, or someone who’s about to start out in your journey, some inspiration but also those practical tips and some encouragement to get through those early days, to push through those days where you might feel things are a little bit unfocused, or you might feel things aren’t really reaching their potential. This series is a part of our launch of a brand new Start a Blog course which is launching in the second week of January. You can learn more about that over at problogger.com/startablog. If you give us your email address there, we will let you know when that course goes live. Today’s show notes with links to that Start a Blog course and a full transcript of the show today as well as links to our blogger of the day. You can find those show notes over at problogger.com/podcast/224. Today’s blogger is Robert Farrington. I met Robert recently over at the FinCon conference and he is the blogger behind thecollegeinvestor.com. As it might sound, it’s a finance blog, someone who is focused particularly on those people in their young adult years, student loans, those type of things, but trying to help those younger people never get through some of the decisions they need to make. I’m gonna let Robert tell his story and then I will come back at the end to share a few of my thoughts on the story that he shares and some of the tips that he gives. Well-worth a listen, I’ll chat to you at the end of his story. Robert: Hi there! My name is Robert Farrington and I am the founder of The College Investor and it’s at thecollegeinvestor.com. It is a blog all about personal finance for young adults. We talk about getting out of student loan debt, starting to invest, and building wealth for the future. I started this blog because I am passionate about investing. I was that guy in the back of my college class, on the internet, watching stocks, and really just wanted to share my insights about investing. This was all the way back in September of 2009. I’ve been doing this for about eight years now. It’s pretty crazy to think about because, when I started, it was completely a personal blog. I really just shared my thoughts and my opinions, and you know what happened as a result? Nothing. Nothing happened. I probably had five visitors a day, everyday, for the first six months that I started this blog. But, you know what? I really enjoyed writing. I really enjoyed sharing my thoughts. I really enjoyed the technology of it. I find it interesting how you can put things together and build a WordPress site and all that type of stuff. Honestly, that’s how I started. It’s crazy to think about because, when I started, really, I just wanted to educate people. My goal, my dream was just share my knowledge. But you know, my friends were telling me, they were like, “Robert, that’s great knowledge. I love the idea of investing but I have all this debt, and I have all this other stuff going on in my personal and financial life that I really just can’t do that right now.” I started to realize that while sharing my thoughts are great, it was really important to also help my readers with their questions, and their comments, and their concerns.. While I have my own opinions about things and I can inject that, if I am not helping others answer their question, I can’t ever get them where I want them to be. That’s really what I started to transform my blog and it took about a year or two. Around the same time, about the two-year mark, is also when I started connecting with other bloggers. Honestly, when I started, I was in my silo. I didn’t really talk to anyone else. I didn’t really comment on other blogs. I didn’t really reach out to anyone and just hi. I just did my own thing. That was really disadvantageous to me. It really held me back. When I started connecting with others, and I started learning, and I started seeing what other people were doing, and getting some tips and getting some tricks, and getting some help from others. And then, I also started changing my messaging to help my readers more, to share my thoughts, but do it in a way that takes my readers and guides them and holds their hand through it. That’s what I really started to see some traction on my site. Honestly, my site started going from no readers a month, to a couple hundred readers a month, to a couple hundred readers a day. It started getting some revenues well. I made zero money my first two years. Finally, in about year three, I think I was making about $30,000 a year. Getting it up there to $2000 or $3000 a month which was great money considering that I really was just writing stuff on the internet. If I had to go back in time, what would I say to avoid, and what should you have to do? Well, you have to network with others. You have to connect with your community. Whatever your niche is, connect with them, and at the same time, you need to always remember your readers and you need to take your readers on a journey with story and with education, lead them down the path.   Finally, you have to have the best content out there. Because especially in a space like personal finance, there’s only about six or seven topics you can write about. You can write about budgeting, investing, getting out of debt, credit cards, whatever. It’s the same stuff over, and over, and over again. What makes things unique and what makes thing different is the stories that you can tell and the path that you could take people on, and making sure that you have the best content possible out there. I’ve been doing this and focusing on this now for eight years. But my last two years, I really haven’t created a lot of new content. What I have been doing is going back and picking out my gems in my archives and updating them, making them the best. Creating that story around them and resharing them. I can tell you now that after doing this for eight years, we get almost a million visitors a month on the website, we’re making really good money. It’s gonna be a high six-figure to seven-figure blog. The opportunities in income continue to grow because we continue to focus on our readers, networking with others, and writing the best things out there on the topic that really could stand on its own. Hopefully that helps you get started with your blog. Darren: Thanks so much, Robert, from thecollegeinvestor.com. Really appreciated you sharing your story today. I was really pleased when I saw Robert’s audio come in because I had bumped into him several times at the FinCon conference. He was someone who was networking incredibly. He was actually one of those people I just kept bumping into. He seemed to be really well connected. He has actually lived out that tip that he gave in his story today. I find it interesting today to hear the similarities in Erin’s story from yesterday’s story. Robert started out because he was excited to share on a particular topic. This is that common thread that I hear from many full time bloggers today. I think it’s the case for a few reasons, people who start out just genuinely wanting to talk about a particular topic tend to do quite well, at least a lot of the full time bloggers do start that way. I think it’s because when you start out passionate about your topic, genuinely excited about sharing what you know, it comes across in your writing. People can sense that in your writing. When you bring energy and enthusiasm and excitement to your topic, it’s gonna shine through. It will also shine through in the way that you go about promoting your blog, in the way that you network with other people. It’s a very attractive thing. It’s also gonna help you through the lean times. You heard Robert there talking about those first couple of years of what did he say there? Five visitors a day for the first six months? That’s not much in terms of readers. That could be the period where you might, if you didn’t have genuine enthusiasm for your topic, say, “This is too hard. I’m not gonna keep going.” But if you bring enthusiasm to your topic, you genuinely just like to talk about it, then you’re gonna be able to get through those times more easily. I also love what he talked about focus and bringing more focus to his blog. His blogging in the early days was just his thoughts. It was all centered around what he was thinking. But, a shift to begin to think about his readers and to put them front and center, their questions, their problems. That simple shift and re-focusing less on his thoughts and more on his readers. Still able to bring his thoughts but from the perspective of what do his readers want to know, what do they need to know, what are their questions. Less about him, more about his readers, that was certainly a key thing there. Then of course, as he talked about that he’d been operating in a silo, and the realization that he could learn a lot more about blogging, and he can grow his blog a lot faster if he began to network. Look at what others were doing and connect with others within his niche. Really, the sense I get is it was those two shifts from being an [00:12:21] blogger that was all about him and his thoughts to being more focused upon his readers and his niche seemed to really unlock things for him. I was also fascinated there about what he said about the last two years writing less new content and picking out the gems and updating his archives. Whilst that may not be relevant to those of you who are starting a blog, because in the early days you really do need to build up your archives. If you’ve been blogging for a while, I think, this is a really important thing to do is to pay attention to those archives. This is something that I’ve been hearing over the last year or so particularly at FinCom, conference that I mentioned earlier. I met a lot of bloggers who had really pulled back on the amount of new content that they’ve been writing. They really were re-optimizing the gems in their archives, the posts that were already ranking in Google actually taking them to the next level. Optimizing them, improving the content, making them more visually pleasing, adding further reading, making them deeper content, actually improving that content was paying off more than creating new content for them. Again, that’s something for those of you who’ve been blogging for a while now. You might have some archives. I think that’s a brilliant tip and something that we’ve been doing a little bit more of over the last six months as well on both of my blogs. I hope you’ve got some value out of hearing Robert’s story today. I think it’s a great one. Again, you can get a full transcript of Robert’s story and find his blog over on today’s show notes at problogger.com/podcast/224. Tomorrow, another story for you. We’ve done five or four so far this week. I do encourage you to go back and listen to the last four or three episodes if you haven’t listened to those already. I’ve got one more coming for you tomorrow and then we’re gonna have a week off because it will be Christmas. Hopefully, in those last five or so episodes, there’ll be enough there for you to listen to. We’ll come back on the 1st of January with five more in a row and a couple more before we launch our Start a Blog course. Again, if you are interested in starting a blog, check out problogger.com/startablog. Let us know your email address and we’ll let you know when that course goes live. Thanks for listening, chat with you tomorrow in episode 225. 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.

From 0 to Six Figures in Two Years – A Recipe Blogger Shares Her Story In today’s episode we continue our series of blogger stories where I hand the podcast over to you listeners to tell your stories and tips about starting and growing your blogs. We kicked off the series three episodes back with a DIY blogger, and yesterday we featured two tech/Microsoft bloggers. Today I’m introducing you to Erin Chase, a friend of mine. In 2008 she started a blog where she documented what she was having for dinner each night, hoping it would help people on a budget cook affordable meals for their family. Erin’s simple idea has grown into a blog with MILLIONS of readers, and has become an extremely profitable business for her. We’re sharing these blogger’s stories in the hope of inspiring people to start some great new blogs in the year ahead. In the second week of January we’re launching a free course on ProBlogger to help as many new bloggers as possible get started by equipping them with great foundations. Links and Resources for From 0 to Six-Figure Blogger in Two Years – A Recipe Blogger Tells Her Story: Register for ProBlogger’s FREE Ultimate Guide to Start a Blog Course Facebook Group Erin Chase Create an Editorial Calendar for Your Blog The Biggest Lesson I Learned About Building a Profitable Blog in 2015 Should You Blog Anonymously or Use Your Real Name? Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Darren: My name is Darren Rowse and I’m the blogger behind problogger.com. A blog, a podcast, event,  job board, series of ebooks, and soon to be courses all designed to help you as a blogger to grow your blog. The archives of your blog, the traffic of your blog, the community of your blog and the income around your blog as well. You can learn more about ProBlogger and all that we do at problogger.com. In today’s episode, we’re continuing our series of blogger stories where I’m handing the podcast over to you as the listener of this podcast, to tell your story, and to share some tips of starting and growing your blogs as the community of ProBlogger. We kicked off this little series three episodes ago now with a DIY blogger. Yesterday, we featured two tech Microsoft bloggers. Today, to do something a little bit different, I wanna introduce you to a friend of mine, who, back in 2008, started a blog that would document what she was having for dinner every night in the hope that it will help others on a budget to cook affordable, healthy meals for their families as well. It’s such a simple idea but one that this blogger has grown into a blog with millions of readers and six figure income. In fact, she hit that level in her second year of blogging. It’s become an extremely profitable business. We’re sharing these blogger stories in the hope of inspiring some great new blogs to be started in the year ahead. In the second week of January 2018, we’re launching a free course on ProBlogger with the goal of equipping as many new bloggers as possible to get started with great foundations for profitable blogs. If you wanna start a blog or a second blog, sign up to be notified of this free course. Now, we’re starting in a few weeks’ time now at problogger.com/startablog. You can find today’s show notes with a link to that Start a Blog course, and a full transcript of today’s story over at the show notes at problogger.com/podcast/223. Today’s blogger story is from Erin Chase from 5dollardinners.com. I’ve been hearing stories about Erin and the business that she’s built for many years now. When this year I had the opportunity to meet her face-to-face, in person, for the first time and to start an event with her at the Success Incubator event that we ran earlier in the year, I leapt at that opportunity. Erin is a real go-getter who has built a remarkable business. If you talk to her today, or if you go and look at 5dollardinners.com today, you will see something quite special. You see something that doesn’t even look like a blog anymore. She’s got millions of readers, lots of amazing content, she’s been featured in lots of mainstream media and she’s making a good income from her business as well. In fact, she’s got numerous businesses today. What I love about it is that what she’s gonna share today is how it all started. It started so simply – as a blog where she shared the dinner she was making each day and the cost of that. She would not have known when that started where it was going to lead, it started so simply. Today, as I mentioned at the top of the show, it’s now over six figures business, she hit that level after a year or so of blogging, second year. It’s quite remarkable. It all started so simply and that’s what I want to share today. I’m gonna introduce Erin and let her take over the podcast. I’ll come back at the end just to make a few comments about some of the things that she said that I love and give you some further listening and reading as well. Erin: Hey there! My name is Erin Chase and I am the founder of 5dollardinners.com where I share budget-friendly recipes with those who are looking to save money on groceries and make it easier to get dinner on the table. We share all of those tips, and tricks, and recipes at 5dollardinners.com. I started the website back in the Summer of 2008 when the gas prices started to jump up here in the US. My husband had a long commute to work at the time, and we were seeing our gas for our car double. In order to not go into the red, I needed to cut back somewhere, so I decided to cut back on our grocery spending. I was not working at the time, took it upon myself to spend less of my husband’s hard-earned money, and I couldn’t keep my mouth shut about what I was learning, about grocery shopping, about the strategy behind grocery shopping, about how you can mix and match ingredients together to come up with these great budget-friendly meals with these ingredients that I’ve gotten on sale or even sometimes close to free or even free. I started showing about that on my family blog and my sister was like, “Yeah, no thanks. I just wanna see pictures of the kids.” I decided to start a second blog, we had our family blog going which I do not keep up with anymore. I started 5dollardinners as the place to share basically what I was making for dinner that night, and how much I was spending, what I was spending at the grocery store, just tips for cooking, cooking tutorials, cutting hacks, just slicing green bell peppers, just all kinds of different things that I was learning and thought would be helpful for others to learn about as well. It started it originally just as a place to share and it quickly became a business for us. I didn’t even know that it could be a business when I first started but it quickly became one. I’m thrilled that it has. I’ve been on this adventure for the past nine plus years. I’m getting to help people, help inspire people, new ideas for dinner, and help them get out of the dinner rut, help them make getting dinner on the table easier whether it’s meal plans or just start slow cooker recipes or instant pot recipes. It’s just been a pleasure and an honor to do that. Looking back to when I very first started the website and what I’m grateful that I started with, I’m grateful that I started with a consistent plan. When I very first started the blog, I would share what we have for dinner every single day, Monday thru Friday. Then on Sunday, I would share my meal plan for the coming week. It was a rough plan but I did it consistently. Whatever we would make for dinner, I would just snap a picture of it with whatever camera I had back then which wasn’t a great one, and then I would just post what we had. I would post, sometimes, pictures of our shopping receipt which this is really how much this meat cost. I would put the price of what we had. But, I think having that sort of “this is what we’re doing” recipe Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and then sort of a round up meal plan on Sundays. I would sometimes sneak in other articles or I would sneak in some tips in with the recipes and things like that. I am so grateful that I started with that habit of consistency and just having a plan around the content of what we’re gonna be sharing. Because when you’re blogging, and you’re blogging for business, or potentially blogging for business, you have to have a consistent plan not only for the content you’re gonna share but then how you’re gonna share, and how you’re gonna get eyeballs onto that content, whether that’s just eyeballs on your Facebook page, in growing your page, or driving traffic through Pinterest. However you’re going to then get the word out about your content, you have to have a plan for that as well. Having a plan for your content and having a plan for essentially the market you’re content marketing and the marketing of your content. I think, in hindsight, that is what I’m super grateful that I had going from when I very first started out. Mistakes that we made in the beginning I think was not putting myself out there, personally. I’ve certainly involved our family over the years but I think putting ourselves more is always the “what do I wish I had done” answer. What do I wish I had done differently over the years, I think would be putting myself out there. Because people are wanting to connect with you and they’re wanting to connect with your story, and they’re wanting to connect with your experience and your expertise. You have to be able to put yourself out there in order to connect with people in that way. We have been blessed and blown away by the things that have happened with because of the 5dollardinners.com website. We’ve have had millions and millions and millions and millions of visitors onto our website over the years, many millions. I don’t think we’re into the hundred millions yet but we might be close. Many, many millions over the years. I’ve had the opportunity to appear on national television. Numerous times on national radio. Numerous times I’ve had the pleasure of getting to meet many of our readers in person. I’ve had some face-to-face time with them which going from, all across the board, I’ve had this incredible opportunities. I’ve been able to form great relationships with a number of different large food brands, and corporate headquarters, and their peer teams here in the US. I’ve learned a ton about myself, about our family, and about how we operate with our family life and our business in our life, how that weaves all together. I think, looking back, one of the most important lessons I didn’t realize until well into the journey was that being an entrepreneur, owning my own small business, in working on this online business space, it’s really all about personal development. Business development, yes, that happens. But it’s the personal development that happens that drives the business development, and I think that’s a real crucial part of this blogger journey, of this entrepreneurship journey, this online business journey, is that personal development that comes along with it. My number one tip for new bloggers would be consistency, consistency, consistency. I mentioned that a minute ago with having the plan for your content. But if you’re not consistent with your content, people aren’t gonna come back to connect with you. They’re not gonna come back to hear the next part of your story. They’re not gonna come back to see what other recipe you might be sharing. Whatever the story in the content is that you have to share, whatever the lessons you have to share with people, they’re not gonna come back if they’re not consistent. They’re not gonna enjoy your email and newsletter if you only email – they’re not gonna stick around on your email and the newsletter if you only email once every 10 – 12 weeks. You’ve got to be consistent with your content and the marketing of your content. I think that’s the number one thing that I would share with anybody starting on their blogger journey because I think that in the long run, that’ll have the biggest impact not only on yourself, but on the people that you are reaching through your words and through your content online. In summary, I would say, put yourself out there. Be consistent with your content. Work hard to get your content in front of as many people as you can who need to see your content, who want to see your content, who’re excited about the new content that you have, that you’ll bring out again in the future. Just keep at it, keep at it, keep at it, work at it, work at it, work at it. Set up routines, set up systems, set up processes to help make it easier for you. As it grows from a hobby to a business, a large business, a business with a team, just be consistent with all the things that you’re working on, all of the great content that you’re producing for those who are there to absorb, and consume it, and allow you to make that difference in their lives. Darren: That was Erin Chase from 5 Dollar Dinners. Thanks so much, Erin, for sharing your story and those tips. I love that she started out just wanting to share what she was learning. It’s similar to Sumit’s story in yesterday’s episode. Erin had a knowledge, she had this new exciting thing in her life, she was learning how to cook dinner and provide dinner for her family in a more affordable way, and that was something that she just wanted to share. So many people tell me that they don’t have any expertise or that they don’t know what to write about. They’ve got nothing that’s worth sharing but this is just a brilliant example, I think, that there are things in our lives that happen all the time that we get excited about. Maybe one of those things, those things that’s giving you a bit of energy, one of those things that you can’t help but talk to your friends about, that maybe some of them are going, “Ahh, I don’t really wanna hear about that.” Maybe that type of thing is actually something that other people do wanna hear about. If there’s something exciting in your life at the moment, maybe that could be that little thing that could be the beginning of something new, a new blog in some way. Who would have ever thought that simply saying, “This is what we’re having for dinner. This is how much it costs,” would have turned into what it has today. I’ve heard that story so many times over people starting blogs just because they wanted to share something that they were learning. That’s why I started ProBlogger. That’s why I started Digital Photography School. There were places for me just to record what I was learning in the hope that other people will join in in those ways. Love the tip there of starting with a consistent plan, the same plan each week. I don’t know if you picked up, she said every week day, she shared the dinner she was having and how much they cost, the weekend was the round up post. This is a really simple format. Your format might be the same type of thing. You might do weekdays one type of post, on weekends another type of post, or you might mix it up even more. Back in episode 12, I suggested a different kind of format. Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays might all be different types of posts. You might write a review one day, an opinion piece another day, a linked post another day. Back in episode 12, I give you kind of a sample format for what you might do in a week. If you’re struggling to find your groove with an editorial calendar as you’re starting out, you might wanna listen to episode 12. I also really resonated with that mistake that Erin talked about, not putting yourself into the blog early. Again, I’ve said this a number of times, in Vanessa, my wife’s blog, she really resisted putting her face on it, putting her name on it, it’s almost like an anonymous blog in the early days, but it really came alive when she posted a selfie one day and injected herself into it. People do want to have that personal connection with you. It does help to grow your blog. There is probably a time and a place for anonymous blogging as well. We’ve had a podcast on that which I’ll link in the show notes but certainly if you can inject your personality, yourself into it, really can bring things alive. If you go and have a look at Erin’s site, now you will see she’s everywhere. There’s videos of her all over the place and all over the content she delivers today. She’s sharing the recipe but it’s on video and injecting her personality into it. That lesson she shared about being an entrepreneur is really about personal development. If you wanna grow your development as a business, you need to develop yourself. It’s such a great lesson there, reminded me a little bit of my own journey in terms of realizing that my physical health is connected to the health of my business. I’ve talked about that back in episode 38. But certainly, developing your skills in leadership, in communication,  all of these sort of personal development type skills do fall on and impact the growth of your business as well. There’s so much good stuff in there and of course, that theme that you will be hearing from a lot of the bloggers that we’re featuring this week, consistency is just so important. Consistency, those little things that we do everyday that add up to the big things. If you’re starting a blog, and if you’re thinking about starting a blog, I hope that there’s been some goodness in there. If you are already a blogger, I am sure you’ve got some good stuff out of that as well. I really look forward to connecting with you tomorrow because tomorrow, I’ve got another blogger for you. Tomorrow’s blogger is a finance blogger. We’ve gone through DIY, we’ve talked tech blogs, we’ve talked recipe blogs, and tomorrow, we’re getting into finance blogs. There’s something for everyone in this series. I do hope that you are enjoying. Remember, if you are thinking about starting a blog, head over to problogger.com/startablog. If you want to grab the transcript from today and any of the links that we mentioned, you can head over to the show notes from today at problogger.com/podcast/223. Thanks for listening, chat with you tomorrow! How did you go with today’s episode? Enjoy this podcast? 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From Corporate Desk Jobs to Full-Time Bloggers – 2 Tech Bloggers Tell their Story In today’s episode we’re continuing our series where I’m handing the podcast over to you as listeners to tell your stories and tips of starting and growing your blogs. It started yesterday with the story of Brittany Bailey, a DIY blogger who grew her blog to hundreds of thousands of readers a month. Today I want to introduce two tech bloggers whose blogs have allowed them both to leave their corporate jobs to start their own businesses around their blogs. We’re sharing these stories and tips in the lead-up to the launch of our free ‘Start a Blog’ course, which launches in the second week of January. If you’ve been thinking about starting a blog, this free course will walk you through how to do it, and provide you with a good foundation for building a business around it. Links and Resources for From Corporate Desk Jobs to Full-Time Blogger: Register for ProBlogger’s FREE Ultimate Guide to Start a Blog Course Facebook Group Paul’s blog   Sumit’s blog How to Create an Efficient Contact Page That Boosts Your Productivity How I Diversified My Blogging Income and Became a Full Time Blogger Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Darren: My name is Darren Rowse. I’m the blogger behind problogger.com, a blog, a podcast, event, job board, series of ebooks, and courses all designed to help you to start a great blog to create some amazing content that will change your readers’ lives and to build some profit around that blog too. You can learn more about ProBlogger and all that we do over at problogger.com. In today’s episode, episode 222, we’re continuing our series of blogger stories where I’m handing the podcast over to you as listeners, to tell your stories and to share some tips of starting and growing your blogs. This series started yesterday with the story of Brittany Bailey, a DIY blogger who grew her blog to hundreds of thousands of readers a month. You can listen to that. She did the introduction to these series, in episode 221. Today, I want to introduce you to two bloggers, two tech bloggers. Both of whom whose blogs enabled them to leave their real world desk corporate jobs to start their own businesses around their blogs. We’re sharing their stories and tips in the lead up to our Start A Blog course which launches in the second week of January. Have you been thinking about starting a blog? This free course will walk you through how to set up that blog with good foundations for building not only a useful blog to your readers but also good foundations for building a profitable blog. You can get notified when this course goes live by signing up over at problogger.com/startablog. You can also find a link to that in today’s show notes where I’ll also link our two bloggers of the day over at problogger.com/podcast/222. As I said at the top of the show, today, I want to play you two stories, both of which are from tech bloggers who started their blogs in the last four years. Both of whom have grown their blogs to a point where they’ve been able to give up their previous corporate jobs to become full-time bloggers which I know is a dream of many listeners of this podcast. I’ve decided to put these two stories together today because there are some real similarities and I know also that there are many of you who are our listeners to this podcast who blog about these more technical things. I thought putting those two together will give you a couple of examples of the kind of blogs that have done well. The first blogger that I want to introduce you to will be familiar to many of you, it’s Paul Cunningham from practical365.com. Paul will be familiar to many of you who are part of their Facebook group because he’s a regular contributor there. He’s also written at least a couple of articles on ProBlogger, as a contributor. His most recent one was a really popular post on How to Create an Efficient Contact Page on your Blog. I’ll link to that in the show notes as well. Paul also has made many of our Aussie events as well. When he submitted his story, which I found really interesting to hear even though I’ve met Paul so many times, I wanted to include it. He’s an Aussie so you’re going to hear a different accent today or not different to me really although he’s from a northern part of Australia. I hope you find his story interesting. I’ve got another Indian blogger coming up after Paul as well, another technical blogger. I will be back to introduce him in a moment. I hope you enjoy Paul’s story. Paul: My name is Paul Cunningham. I run the practical365.com website which is a blog focused on the topic of Office 365 cloud services for I.T. professionals. I started blogging over 10 years ago. In fact, my very first blog posts are still on my blog at practical65.com today. I originally started blogging because I was noticing some of the people in my industry who had their own blogs and I was finding their blog posts when I was searching for solutions to problems. Up until that point, I was active in various forms and online communities but I was becoming aware that my efforts in these forms were not translating to any real world benefit to myself. It still felt good to help people but being in the I.T. industry which can be quite volatile at times as the economy rises and falls, I wanted to do something that more directly boosted my job prospects. I basically figured that I should start a blog just like those other people that I was noticing who would build up name recognition in the industry through their own online writing. I also figured that it might be a way that I can earn a few extra dollars to go towards things like travelling to conferences in my industry, buying a laptop, getting some nice Christmas presents for my kids and that sort of thing. I think in hindsight, the fact that I just stopped messing around with different blogging software and services and just settled on WordPress and started writing was the first good move that I made. WordPress wasn’t the obvious choice back then. It’s not like today where WordPress is kind of “the” factor in the blogging platform. But it turned out to be the right choice for me and ultimately, it was more important to just start actually blogging not messing around with all that technical stuff anyway. The other good move that I made which in hindsight was probably the best move I’ve made as far as long impact goes, was rebranding my blog and setting on a particular technical niche that I really went deep on. I rebranded to a good name that mixed branding and keywords and so I was good for SEO. I’ve got a nice simple logo, I had it professionally made and I invested in a nice, professional premium WordPress theme. I think that just really elevated the overall appearance of my blog as an authority site rather than just be some guy with a blog sharing his random thoughts online. As far as mistakes go, most of the mistakes I’ve made have really been about me being overly cautious or too slow. I should have started a mailing list sooner, I know we all say that but that didn’t really sink me, it just sent me back a little bit. I should have launched a product sooner. When I finally did it, I was still able to have success from it. They weren’t career-ending blogging mistakes by any stretch. When I did find success in different areas, I was also guilty of not aggressively assuming those channels to really maximize them. Part of that is caution, and part of that was just juggling a blog with a full-time career and a young family. I probably could’ve gone full-time with my blogging sooner than I did but I was being a bit cautious about it. In the end, it still worked out okay. There’s been a lot of good things that have come from starting my blog. It certainly became easy for me to find jobs which was good because most of my jobs in I.T. ended to the company’s outsourcing my team or going bankrupt, or mergers and acquisitions and downsizing and things like that. I was regularly out there looking for new jobs and being a little bit known in the industry certainly helped me along in that respect. I’ve also spoken at overseas conferences. That’s been a lot of fun. I’ve met a lot of great people and travelled a little bit and seen some interesting places. I’ve got some recognition from Microsoft themselves through what they call their MVP program which stands for Most Valuable Professional, which is their award to people like myself who had contributions to the I.T. community. There’s benefits that come from that as well. It’s not a paid award by any stretch but you get some nice sort of insider news and access to Microsoft through that award program. I’ve been able to write and self-publish ebooks. I also landed a book deal with a traditional publisher. My first traditionally published book is in 2016. I also do some contract work creating training courses for one of the leading online training companies in the I.T. industry, they’re called Pluralsight. All those benefits and revenue streams as well as the income that I’ve been able to build from affiliate commissions and advertising on their website, some private consulting and things like that, is what really made it possible for me to quit my full-time job a few years ago. Ultimately, that meant a lot more freedom in my life, more time to spend with my family, be more present for our kids, do more at home, now my wife had a lot more and allow her to pursue her career a lot more than she was able to when I had a full-time job. My number one tip for new bloggers aside from being patient because a lot of the success takes time to build up very slowly, my number one tip would be to use your blog to answer as many simple and small questions as you can. The blogpost that you write that solve all those little problems, they’re not going to be blockbuster, traffic posts that draw in millions of visitors a year and go viral on Facebook and Twitter, but they will help the people who need help the most which is the people who are beginners in your area, in your topic, and in your niche. Those people have lots of small simple questions that made small simple answers and you’re the person that’s going to help them because you’ve got the information right there on your blog and those people will become your most loyal fans as your blog grows along with them. Darren: I love those tips from Paul. He’s a great example of how niching down into a really specific topic is powerful. You don’t have to do all things Microsoft. You don’t have to do all things tech. You can become the go to person in a particular nichey kind of product or suite of products. That can be very powerful, to be that number one person or one of the main people talking about that. A very specific thing can be a good thing as long as that thing isn’t going to go away. Our next story is another brilliant example of that. I also love that Paul went through some of his different income streams there. His blog has enabled him to do a number of things, that he’s self-published ebooks and sold ebooks, he’s written a traditionally published book and had income and royalties from that. He’s done contract work creating training courses and his blog has enabled him to get the profile so that people would hire him to do that type of thing. He’s done some affiliate promotion and earned commissions that way. He’s worked directly with advertisers and he’s also offered private consulting and coaching. This is very, very typical. You’ve heard me talk about this before. In fact, back in Episode 153, I talked about my own journey from being a hobby blogger to being a full-time blogger and how I made that leap through a variety of income streams as well, some of which are the same as what Paul’s done. This is what I hear again and again from people who make that leap to full-time is that they have all these different income streams. If you’re thinking about starting out, you might have one income stream in mind. I challenge you based on Paul’s story to think broader than that. Look at what other bloggers in your nature are doing. Presume maybe two or three different income streams to get you to that full-time level faster. Lastly, I love that tip that he finished on there. It’s building your blog around solving lots of little problems and answering lots of little questions. It is the accumulation of those answers and solutions that often what makes a blog successful. Now I want to introduce you to our next blogger. This is Sumit Bansal from trumpexcel.com. That might sound like a political blog, it is not. It’s a blog about Microsoft Excel. You’re already seeing a bit of a similarity here with both of our bloggers today are Microsoft bloggers. But I wanted to feature Sumit’s advice and story as well. He’s from India, a different part of the world. Again, we’ve got lots of readers from India and countries around India as well. I want to welcome Sumit and I will wrap things up after his story as well. Sumit: Hello Darren, hello team. I’m a huge fan of problogger.com, the blog and the podcast. I’ve been following you guys for more than three years now and I have learned so much from you. A big thank you for all the work that you do at problogger.com. My name is Sumit Bansal and I’m from India. My blog’s name is Trump Excel and the URL is trumpexcel.com. I started Trump Excel in May 2013 and I was working with IBM at that point in time. I started this because in my work, I was using Excel spreadsheets a lot. I used to work with a lot of data and I was learning a lot of new things in Excel. I started this blog and I photo shared what I was learning every and it’s also helping my team then. A lot of my colleagues would come up to me and ask the same questions again and again so I thought maybe I would write tutorials so that these guys can simply refer to those tutorials. I can also then share it on my social media or other people online. With that thought, I created a Blogspot account and I started writing. And then I had written 10 tutorials, then I thought that this is something that I was enjoying, this is something that I wanted to do as a long-term thing. I registered a domain name and got the hosting and started this in May 2013. My objective was very clear, it was to help people in doing things in Excel and shared what I was learning everyday. At the same time, I also hope to make a little bit of side income something that would supplement my full-time income. To be honest, at that point in time, I had not thought that I would be able to leave my full-time job in IBM and to be able to work on my blog as a full-time deal. That happened in January 2015. I was able to leave my job and now I work on my blog full-time. Coming to the things that I’m really grateful for when I started this blog and there are actually two things. Let me quickly also share a short anecdote with you. I wrote my first blogpost, that was 10th May 2013. I also shared it on my social media accounts. I’m a little bit introverted so it takes a little bit of effort and courage for me to share stuff and post to my social media account. I’m not really active on my posts in social media, I am to my Trump Excel account but not in my personal account. I shared my first blogpost on Google+ and Facebook. The first comment that I got in Google+ was, “Really? He found that worth sharing?” And then I read that comment, it really my broke my confidence, at least at that point in time, it broke my confidence. I felt sad and at the same time, I felt really, really angry because the person who had commented did not consider the effort that had gone into writing that blogpost, the courage that it had taken me to post this online on social media accounts. That person completely trashed it. After 15 minutes, I really could not come up with a response to that so I simply replied with a yes, and I moved on and I did not stop. The first thing that I’m really, really grateful for is that I did not stop. Had I taken that feedback, had I stopped because I only have the blogs for the content, I may not have reached where I am, my life would have been really different. I’m really grateful that I did not stop there. The second thing that I’m grateful for is that I created a YouTube channel and I thought that since I’m writing blog posts, I’ll also create videos for my audience. That led to a lot of traction off my blog. Right now, I have close to 18,000 subscribers on my YouTube channel and it also made me realize that I can be a very good teacher. That has become my super power. It’s a nice super power that I can really dump down stuff and teach it to people which also led me to create more online courses. I really just created a YouTube channel because I thought that it would be nice to share to people and share a video of what I was writing, but in hindsight, I think that was a great, great thing that I did and it has really helped me. I’m grateful for that as well. Coming to the mistakes that I made and I would advise others not to make, especially new bloggers, is to reach out to people in your industry, in your niche, the influencers in your industry. I did not do that. I did not reach out to influencers in my industry for at least two years. Had I done that, things could have been a little bit different. My blog might have taken off even faster. It took me close to two years to get to a level where I could think of making this as a full-time income. But had I reached out to influencers, to people who are doing great work in this niche, in spreadsheets niche, then I could have done much better. If you want to start now, just make connections, just network with people, just comment on their blog posts, make a relationship, and that would help you. That may even land you an opportunity to collaborate with someone who’s really big in your niche. That’s a mistake that I would advise others to avoid. The good thing that have happened to me since I started my blog, there are quite a few. As I said, my blog took off after two years and now it gets close to 300,000 page views every month which is growing exponentially every single month. Now I have a lot of social media following, it’s been close to 23,000, 24,000 people on my Facebook page. I have close to 17,000, 18,000 subscribers on my YouTube channel and these are people who are really engage, who would comment on the stuff that I would post. These are some good things that have happened. I was also able to offer my own online paid courses. I have more than 500 students in my paid courses. I’m thankful that I’m now making close to five-figure income every month and hopefully looking forward to a six-figure year next year. Those are the good things that have happened. There are top two things that happened after I started my blog, close to a year, somehow Microsoft came to know about the blog and I was recognized as one of the Excel MVPs. That is the Most Valuable Professional for Excel. I was recognized by Microsoft and that made me 1 of the 2 people in India to have that kind of recognition and 1 of the 100 other people in the world. That really lend credibility to anything I do. If I reach out to anyone, being a Microsoft MVP really helps. That’s something really good that happened. It also helps me in establishing my authority in this niche and in selling more online courses. Another thing that has happened over the years is my blog has been recognized by many different blogs in many different websites as one of the best Excel blogs in the world. People or companies would randomly pick my blog as one of the best resources to learn Excel. This has happened over the years just because I’ve been consistent in writing tutorials and creating videos every single week. One tip that I would give new bloggers is to focus on a niche, not cast a very wide net, but try and focus on one specific niche and then identify where your audience is hanging out. For example, let’s say you’re a finance blogger, then I wouldn’t recommend you to talk about everything under the sun but rather talk about only mutual funds, only equity, or only property, or only goal funds, anything specific. Pick one niche and focus on that niche. Channel all your energy in that specific niche. And then also identify where your audience is hanging out. Maybe it’s a Reddit community, maybe it’s a Facebook group, maybe it’s YouTube, or maybe they’re finding these blogs through search engines. Just identify where your audience hang out and focus your energy on those specific channels. Don’t try and cover everything. Let’s say Pinterest or Facebook or Reddit or StumbleUpon, don’t try and focus your energy on all these mediums. Just focus on those mediums that you think would be helpful in getting the kind of audience that you have and try and niche down. Don’t try and cover all things. That is what I would recommend as my tip for new bloggers. I think that’s it. I’ve covered most of the questions. Thank you again, problogger.com team and Darren. I’ve been a huge fan and I have learned so much from you every week. I look forward to your podcast. I hope you continue to do this great work in many, many years to come. Thank you so much, have a good day. Darren: Thanks so much, Sumit. That is just brilliant. I love hearing the stories. I love hearing the different accents. I love hearing the different experiences. I love hearing some of the overlap there between that story and Paul’s story as well, both in terms of topic, Microsoft blog. Who would have thought we would have two Microsoft bloggers submit but also some similar experiences, they are both being recognized by Microsoft. A couple of things there that I love in what was said, pushing past those negative comments. I love what he said. It didn’t stop him. “I moved on and I did not stop,” were the words there. Don’t let those pushbacks and the negativity of others stop you. It could have stopped Sumit in his tracks and his life would have been remarkably different today. All of us, every single full-time blogger that I’ve ever met has had something like that happen in the early days of their blogging. It might be a negative comment on social media, it might be a negative comment on the blog, it might be a friend who doesn’t get what we’re doing, it might be a technical challenge, it might be a fear or a doubt, it might be something else. In the scheme of things, it’s relatively small, someone leaving a negative thing. But it can become all consuming and it can be that type of thing in those early days of starting a blog where you’re feeling a bit fragile, you’re feeling a little bit horrible. It’s the type of thing that could quite easily stop you in your tracks. If it does, you never will know where things could have ended up. I’m so glad that Sumit pushed past that. I want to encourage those of you who are thinking of starting a blog doing this course that we’ve got coming up to not allow those things to stop you in your tracks. One of the best things that you can do to not allow those things to stop you in your tracks is to join with other people who are at a similar stage to you. I would encourage you to join our Facebook group to join the course. We’ll try to get bloggers who are starting together, together to quick pass those little negative things that happen and to help each other. That’s really what this course that we’ve got coming up is all about. You can sign up to be notified about the course at problogger.com/startablog. I also love there the idea of using video on the blog as well. As I was listening probably for the fourth time to that story because I love it so much, I went to across to Sumit’s blog at trumpmexcel.com and I had a look at his most recent blog posts. Every single post he writes is text but it’s also got a video. They’re three or four minute videos that illustrate what he’s talking about. There’s something really amazing and powerful that happens when you can write about something but also illustrate it. With Sumit’s topic and many of your topics out there I know as well, a visual element can really bring a tutorial alive. Some people like to read, some people like and learn more when they watch. I’m one of those people. I know when I’ve got a technical challenge, it’s one thing to read a post and to read and have to do something but it really comes to life for me when I can see it. If you’ve got any kind of visual element to it and you can create a video that can really distinguish what you’re doing from what everyone else is doing. It can be very powerful, you’ll broaden your audience and you’d be much more effective particularly for teaching. His videos are very simple. They’re just screen captures with him talking in a very similar way to what you just heard. But they do bring alive that article. Those tips there on reaching out to other influencers to making connections with other people. You’re going to hear that tip again in a number of future stories that we’ve got coming up in days ahead as well. Do take note of that. Thanks so much to Paul and to Sumit who shared their stories today. You can find links to their blogs over on our show notes today at problogger.com/podcast/222. If you are inspired to start a blog like Paul and Sumit, head over to problogger.com/startablog and sign up to be notified when I start a blog and the course goes live. It’s completely free and it will help you to start a blog that’s not only technically set up the right way but also it helps you think through some of those foundational things to build a business around your blog and become more effective in your blogging as well. Thanks for listening. Chat with you tomorrow when I’ve got another story from another blogger. Thanks for listening. 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