ProBlogger Podcast: Blog Tips to Help You Make Money Blogging

Today is the first episode in a 12-part series we’re running on the ProBlogger podcast over the next few weeks. We’re handing the podcast over to you – the listeners and readers of ProBlogger – to tell your story of how you started your blog and what’s happened since. As I said a couple of weeks ago, in the second week of January we’ll be releasing a brand new (and completely free) course on how to start a blog. And in the lead up to that we wanted to feature stories of bloggers who’ve already started. Head to problogger.com/startablog for more info on the course In each episode you’ll hear a story (and in some cases two or three) of a blogger who will share: a mistake they made starting out something they’re grateful that they did a tip for new bloggers something good that’s happened since they started. We’ve chosen bloggers from different parts of the world and different niches, and I hope you come away from this series with a little inspiration and a few practical tips to start your next blog. When we first asked for story submissions we were hoping for a handful of good stories so we could feature one a week over the next three or so weeks. But we were inundated with hundreds of them. And while I can’t feature all of them, we’ve decided to feature more than we’d planned. And in the next few weeks we’ll be rolling out 12 short episodes (16 bloggers in total). Five of those episodes will come out this week (daily shows). Then there’ll be a little break for Christmas and New Years before we roll out seven more shows over the next week and a bit. It was really hard to choose which bloggers to feature. We wanted to include a selection of different niches, objectives of blogs, and countries of origin. And of course were looking for good stories and tips. Thanks so much to those who submitted stories. We’re only featuring 16 in this series, but we do hope to use more  submissions later in the year, both on this podcast and on the ProBlogger blog. I should note that not all the recordings are perfect audiowise. But they’re all under ten minutes, and despite some small imperfections in the audio we’ve chosen them because they’re good stories with good tips. So, with that all said, it’s time for our first blogger. Links and Resources: Blogger Brittany Bailey of Pretty Handy Girl Register for ProBlogger’s FREE Ultimate Guide to Start a Blog Course Join our Facebook group Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Darren: Hey there, it’s Darren Rowse from ProBlogger. Welcome to Episode 221 of the ProBlogger podcast. ProBlogger is a blog, a podcast, event, a job board, a series of ebooks, and soon to be some courses all designed to help you as a blogger to grow your audience and to build a blog that’s profitable, as well as a blog that’s going to change the world in some way. You can learn more about ProBlogger and all we do over at problogger.com. Today is the first episode in a 12-part series that we’re running over the next few weeks here on the ProBlogger podcast where we’re handing the whole podcast over to you, listeners and readers of ProBlogger, to tell you a story of starting your blog and what’s happened since. As I said a couple of weeks ago in an episode, in the second week of January we will be releasing a brand new and completely free course on how to start a profitable blog. In the lead up to that course going live, we’ve wanted to feature some stories of you, of bloggers who’ve already started. If you want to know a little bit more about the course and be notified when it does go live, just go over to problogger.com/startablog for more information on that. Over the next 12 episodes, we’re going to push them out a bit faster than normal, you’re going to hear a story in each one and in some cases you’ll hear two or three stories in the episode of bloggers who have started a blog sometime in the last 10 years. In each case they’re going to share a mistake they made, they’re going to share something that they did in the early days that they’re grateful for, they’re going to share a tip for new bloggers or bloggers of all ages really because a lot of them do go beyond that starting out, and they’re also going to share something good that happened since they started their blog. We’ve chosen bloggers from different parts of the world. You’re going to hear some different accents. You’re going to hear some Aussies, some people from India, we’ve got a French blogger, we’ve got someone living in the Caribbean. Different parts of the world but also different niches. We’ve got finance bloggers, travel bloggers, we’ve got business bloggers, we’ve got tech bloggers, all kinds of bloggers. My hope is that you’re going to come away from this series with a little bit of inspiration and a few practical tips. This is going to be particularly relevant and hopefully helpful for those of you who are thinking of starting a blog but I also hope that those of you who’ve already started will get some ideas and maybe will come away wanting to start another one. I encourage you to be open to that over the next week or so as well. Originally when we did call for submissions, we were thinking we might get ten or so submissions and we might be able to use half of them. We had no idea really how many to expect. But over the last week or so, we have been inundated with hundreds of submissions. Whilst I can’t feature all of them, we have decided to feature more than we had expected. Our team’s been working very hard. We’re going to put across 12 short episodes which will feature 16 bloggers in total. In some episodes, you’ll get two, and in one case you’ll get three stories in the episode because all of them are relatively short. Five of these episodes are going to come out this week as daily shows over the next five days. Then there’ll be a little bit of a break for Christmas and New Year before we roll out seven more shows over the next nine or so days. They’re going to come thick and fast. They are short. Hopefully over the Christmas holiday period, you will have a little bit of extra time to do some listening. It was really hard to work at which bloggers to choose to feature. We wanted to include a selection of different niches, different types of blogs, people with different objectives with their blog, people from different countries and parts of the world, and of course we’re looking for good stories and tips as well. I do want to thank those of you who submitted, those of you who we will be featuring but also the hundreds of others of you who have submitted. We do hope to feature more of them later in the year. If you submitted one and don’t hear your story featured in the next 12 or so, hopefully in the later parts of the year, you will hear yourself on the ProBlogger podcast. Also we’ll feature some of them over on the blog as well. I should say just before we get into the first story, not all of the recordings are perfect audio wise. They are all short but to spot some of those small imperfections in the audio. These are bloggers, not podcasters. We’ve chosen them because they do have good stories. I hope that you’ll bear with the little glitches in audio along the way. We just thought it was important to share them as they came out. With all that said, it’s time for our first blogger. To kick off this series of blogger stories, I’ve chosen the feature of submission by Brittany Bailey from prettyhandygirl.com. Brittany in her blog on her side bar introduces herself this way, she says, “Hi, I’m Brittany aka Pretty Handy Girl. I like the smell of coffee and sawdust in the morning. I live to break stereotypes and impel you to take on your own DIY project.” That’s what Brittany’s blog is about, DIY stuff, stuff around the house, being handy around the house. Brittany started her blog in 2010. She has grown her blog in that time too, some months having over 500,000 page views. She’s built something of significance there. She’s working with brands. She’s going to tell you a little bit more about that journey. I will come back at the end to just make a few comments on things that I like about what Brittany said. Brittany: Hey Darren, this is Brittany Bailey from prettyhandygirl.com. I’m going to tell you a little bit about my blog and how it started. It’s a fun little story. Basically, I had been working as a graphic designer and a web designer. But on the side I really like doing little home improvement projects. I had a girlfriend who decided that it will be really fun to offer workshops in my garage teaching women how to use power tools and fix things. We’re both pretty excited about the idea. I told my husband about it. He squashed my idea like a grape. He said, “I think you could reach more people with a blog.” At the time, the only thing I knew about was mommy blogs. I was really frustrated with him and stomped away. But that evening I actually found another blogger who was writing DIY tutorials. I read all of her posts which luckily she’d only been writing for about nine months. I saw, “Okay. I see how this can be done. I see how tutorials can actually be written on a blog format.” June 2010, I wrote my first blog post. I’ve been blogging ever since. My blog has grown from 0 page views to at times I’ve had over 500,000 page views a month. I’m reaching probably about 300,000 people per month. I think my husband was right, although I don’t say it often. I guess I can reach more people on the blog. I absolutely enjoy what I’m doing. I enjoy the emails that I get from my readers, especially people who are of limited finances and they might not be able to hire a plumber or an electrician so they find one of my tutorials on how to fix a toilet or how to swap out a light fixture. There are also a lot of tutorials on the website for how to do crafting and sewing projects, home improvement. It’s not just handyman-type tutorials. In hindsight, what did I do when I started my blog that I’m most grateful for? Having run two businesses before, when I started the blog I really started it as a business, not as a hobby. I knew that I wanted to be as professional as possible. I always charge for sponsored posts. I never did one for free. I always try to just maintain that professionalism when I reply to contacts, some readers, even when I wrote. I think the biggest mistake I made in the beginning was trying to do it all myself or really trying to create content just to create content. I really almost burned myself out. Luckily, I stepped back. Now, I write two posts a week and I have a contributor who writes the third post. Getting help is something that I would recommend; don’t try to do it all. Do the things that you’re good at but then hire out the things that you’re not good at. In this space, and being a blogger that has a pretty big reach has really offered me a lot of opportunities. I’ve gone on several trips to visit the headquarters of specific brands like Steel and La-Z-Boy. One of the most rewarding things that I’ve ever been able to do because of the blog is I worked on a campaign with GMC where we actually drove along the world’s longest yard sale and purchased items to furnish a habitat house. We actually were trying to scrimp and save and purchase as many items as we could for this family that was moving into their first house. That was just an extremely rewarding experience for me. I think the number one tip I have for new bloggers is start out as if you’re going to be doing this for 10 years. What do you want your brand or your company to be? Treat it like a professional and like a company. Another tip that I have for new bloggers is to not get discouraged by what everyone else is doing. One thing I’d say is that you really need to realize that every single person, every blogger that you’re reading, their blog started out with zero page views. Everyone started in the exact same space that you are. Just take your time. Learn a little something new each week and be forgiving. Thanks, Darren, for letting me submit my blog. I hope I get to talk to you in the future. If not, this again is Brittany Bailey from prettyhandygirl.com. Darren: Thanks so much Brittany for sharing your story. It was great to hear that. I hope that those of you listening find some inspiration in that. You can find a link to Brittany’s blog over on the show notes at problogger.com/podcast/221. The things I loved about that story. Firstly, I love the mistake that Brittany mentioned. She talked about creating content just to create content. This is a trap, a mistake that I think many bloggers do fall into. They set these expectations that, “I have to publish content every week or everyday or three times a week.” We set ourselves these deadlines, this rhythm of blogging that isn’t for good reason. It is important to have regularity to your content. But you can get to a point after a while where you do fall into that trap of just creating content because I have to create content today. As a result of that, the quality of that content can begin to suffer. There’s always this juggling act between having to publish something, you do want to be regular, but also keeping the quality up. You have to be really careful about the potential to burnout in that situation. This happens to a lot of bloggers. It doesn’t usually happen in the first month or so of blogging, those of you who are considering starting out, you usually will start with lots of enthusiasm. You’ll start with lots of ideas. But gradually over time, you will find that that is something that you bump into from time to time. I love what Brittany has done and two things that she said there. Firstly, she slowed down her content production. This is something I’ve seen a lot of bloggers do over the last year or so. I think it’s actually a smart move. We’ve done it on ProBlogger. If you’ve been listening to this podcast, you know that we have slowed down our creation of content. This is something I would encourage to those of you who’ve been blogging for a while. You are banging it up against this burnout, you’re seeing the quality of your contents slide. Consider pulling back a little bit to work on the quality of what you do. You’re going to hear a number of bloggers over the next week or so in these episodes talk about different strategies that they’ve used in this challenge. One of the things you’ll hear a number of people doing is putting less time into creating new content and more time into updating all their content. This is something that you might want to consider as well. I also like the idea there of getting some help with the content as well. This is something that I certainly did a few years ago now to actually bring someone on to lighten the load a little bit with that content creation, whether that be helping you with proofreading and editing or whether that be actually adding a new voice into your blog and doing some writing as well. Great tips there from Brittany. I also love the tip that she said, “Start out as if you’re going to be doing this for 10 years. Treat your blog that way.” I think that’s brilliant advice. You’re going to hear that same advice later on in this series from one other person. I’ve seen this time and time again. It’s the bloggers who decide to treat their blog as a business today rather than as a business one day. They’re people who have this idea of where they’re heading. They begin to act in that professional way today even though their blog hasn’t reached that business level. They’re the ones who seem to grow faster. I love that advice from Brittany. Try to visualize where your blog might be going. The chances are your blog is going to evolve in a different way to what you think it will. But treat it as if it is going to become a business. Treat it in a professional way in the early days. It doesn’t have to turn out exactly the way that you visualize it. By treating it in that professional way, by having a vision for your blog, it impacts the way you act in the day to day. That helps you to grow it faster, it helps you to attract new advertisers, to think about new revenue streams, and those types of things as well. Even if you’re just starting out, remember this series is for those of you who are just starting out, treat it with that expectation that’s going to turn into something bigger than that. Treat it that way. Lastly, that advice from Brittany, just bring it for new bloggers particularly. Don’t be discouraged by what other people are doing. Everyone starts out with 0 page views. That is so true. I remember that day in 2002 when I started my blog and I wrote my first blog post. I realized the only person who knew it existed was me. And then I spanned a couple of my friends and got them to look at it. They were my first page views. We all start that way with us as our own first reader and then few people in our real life. That’s how we all start. You will look at other blogs and you’ll think, “Oh, wow. They’re amazing.” Yes they might be amazing but they all started out in that same way, with the same doubts and the same insecurities that we all start our blogs with. If you’re starting out, don’t be discouraged by that. Learn something new every week as Brittany suggests. Hopefully our Start a Blog course is going to help you to do that. If you’re thinking of starting a blog, head over to problogger.com/startablog. We will send you an email with details when this new course goes live. It will go live in the second week of January. All things are going well. It’s completely free. Whether you’re starting a first blog or whether you are starting a second or a third blog, we want to teach you some principles. Just help you to start a blog with good foundations. Thanks so much, Brittany. You can find Brittany on her blog over at prettyhandygirl.com. All the details of our course and all of the other things going on at ProBlogger over at problogger.com/podcast/221 where there’s also a transcript of today’s show. As I said earlier, this is going to be a daily show for the next week or so. Then over the next couple of weeks, you’ll hear 12 or so episodes on this series. Watch out for the podcast. They’re all going to be fairly short. This is probably the longest of them all because I had to introduce the concept. But I hope you get a lot of value from them. Thanks for listening. Chat with you tomorrow. How did you go with today’s episode? Enjoy this podcast? 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What You Should Include in Your Email Newsletters (and Answers to 4 FAQs About Email) Do you email your blog readers regularly? Maybe you put ‘set up email newsletter’ on your ‘someday’ list ages ago, but still haven’t done it. Or maybe you have a newsletter list, but you haven’t sent one in months. You might think it’s optional – something you can do once you’ve finished everything else on your to-do list. You might even think email is dead (or at least old-fashioned), and that you’re better off building connections through social media. (Which is nothing new, by the way. I was talking about bloggers having similar concerns nine years ago.) The truth is, email is still one of the best ways (if not the best way) to connect with your blog’s readers. Email is a big part of my strategy on both of my blogs. It drives traffic, and helps us build our community, understand who’s reading our blog, and monetize both directly and indirectly. If you’re not using it, you really are missing out. But what do you email? What is the content you include in your communications? Email can be used in many ways, and you can sent a variety of email types. But today I want to talk about creating a regular email newsletter, which for me is the foundation of my email strategy. A few of the most common questions I get about newsletters and email strategy: What tool should I use? (we use Drip and also recommend ConvertKit) What content should I put in my emails? What format should they be in – plain text, rich text, HTML? How frequently should I send emails? What other types of emails should I consider sending? How do I get more subscribers? (I’m not going to cover this today, but recommend you listen to episodes 68 and 69) Links and Resources on What to Include in Your Email Newsletters: How I Use Email Newsletters to Drive Traffic and Make Money Comparing Email Service Providers for Bloggers 6 Reasons Why Your Blog Needs an Email Newsletter 3 Examples of Content You Can Include in Your Email Newsletter Other Podcasts On Similar Topics: PB117: Case Study – How One Blogger Used a Blog Post, SlideShare Deck, Lead Magnet, Email Sequence and a Webinar to Earn Over $28,000 PB107: Affiliate Marketing Tips – What Links to Use in Your Emails PB069: Create an Opt-In to Increase Your Email Subscriber Numbers PB068: How to Increase Your Email List Subscribers By 100% Or More Today 161: 3 Things Most Bloggers Don’t Pay Enough Attention To Tools We’re Using: (These are affiliates and we get a small commission on purchases.) Drip – the current email service provider for ProBlogger ConvertKit – a tool we’re just starting to experiment with that looks very promising. Built from the ground up for bloggers. Join our Facebook group Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Hey there and welcome to Episode 220 of the Problogger podcast. My name’s Darren Rowse and I’m the blogger behind problogger.com, a blog, a podcast, event, job board, and a series of ebooks, and soon to come some courses, all designed to help you as a blogger to grow your blog and to make some money from it as well. You can learn more about Problogger at problogger.com. And while I’m mentioning it, sign up for our newsletter, Problogger PLUS. You’ll see calls to action to do that wherever you go on problogger.com. That will keep you in the loop in terms of our new content, but also some of the new things we’ve got coming for 2018. In today’s episode, I wanna talk about email. It’s a fairly introductory… I guess the frequently asked questions that I get about email, particularly what should you include in the emails that you send. I think most bloggers know that they should be sending some emails and collecting email addresses, but I regularly get asked the question, “What should I put in my emails?” I wanna talk today about what we do with our newsletters, talk about some of the questions we get around whether you should use plain text or rich text or HTML, how frequently you should send, and other types of emails that you might wanna build into your sequence as well. We’re talking all things email today. If you haven’t yet got a newsletter or an email list, today is gonna be good for you because we’ll also mention some tools that you might wanna use. And if you have got one but you haven’t been sending, this would be the perfect podcast for you, I hope. Let’s get into it. Today’s show notes are at problogger.com/podcast/220. Do you email your blog readers regularly? Maybe you have had this on your ‘to do’ list, your ‘someday’ list, for a long time now. It’s amazing how many blogger I meet have got ‘Set up an email list’ or ‘Start sending emails’ as one of the items on their ‘one day’ list. I wanna encourage you today, as we approach the end of 2017, move into a new year, to put this on your today list. I really wanna encourage you to make this an essential item, a big part of what you do in 2018, because as I look back over the years in my blogging, this is one of the most important things that I ever took action on, starting to send emails. You might think email is dead or an old-fashioned medium and that you’d be better off building your connections through social media, which is certainly one way that you can build relationships with your readers and drive traffic to your blogs. The truth is, email is still one of the best, if not the best, way to connect with your blog readers. Things are changing all the time in the space that we’re operating in. But email is not going away. It hasn’t gone away. It one day may go away but I can’t see it going away in 2018, 2019, 2020. Whilst all of these other options of communicating with your readers do come and go in terms of their effectiveness, email is still a very effective way to reach your readers. And it’s a big part of the strategy on both of my blogs. It drives a lot of traffic every week. It helps us to build community. We use our email to direct people to some of the social media accounts that we’re building community on, to drive engagement. It helps us understand who is reading our blog because we can get feedback from those who subscribe. And it helps us to monetize the business as well, both in terms of selling our product but also directly monetizing the emails. We actually sell advertising in some of the emails that we do, particularly on Digital Photography School. So it’s paying for itself, and is a profitable part of our business. If you’re not doing email, please consider it, and make it a priority for 2018 in terms of starting that email list or making your email list more effective for you. I do get a lot of questions about email. And I wanna cover some of the more common ones today because it can be used in a variety of ways. There’s no blueprint for how you should do it but I wanna explore some of the different methods that you can use to use in email. Particularly, there are six questions that I wanna talk about today. In fact there’s five and I wanna give you some further listening for the sixth one. The first question is, “What tool should I use?” I get it all the time. I wanna suggest to you a few tools that you might wanna consider. Number two question is, “What content should I put in my emails? What are my options in terms of sending a newsletter?” particularly. Number three, “What format should they be in?” Should you be sending plain text emails, rich text, HTML, pretty, designed emails. Question number four, “How frequently should I send emails?” Number five is what other types of emails should you send in addition to that newsletter that you do. The sixth question, I’ve got some further listening for you, is how to get more subscribers for your list. I’m not gonna cover that specifically, but I do have some further listening which I’ll mention at the end of today’s show. That’s where we’re headed today. The first question, let’s get into it, what tool should you use. There are an amazing array of tools on the market today. When I started doing email, I think it was back in 2004, 2005, there weren’t really that many tools. But today there are so many. Every time I ask in our Facebook group what tools do you use, it’s amazing how many different tools are mentioned there. They come in all shapes and sizes, with different levels of features and different price points. What I really encourage you to do is to pay for an email service. Don’t use a free one. Don’t send your newsletter from your Gmail account. It’s just gonna get you into trouble in terms of spammy practices, and it’s gonna hurt your deliverability. You do want to invest in an email service provider. It does cost, but if you use email right it should pay for itself through selling products, through selling affiliate products, through potentially even having advertisers in your email. It’s not that expensive to start out. Most of the tools that are out there have free entry points, or they’ll give you trial for certain amount of subscribers and then they increase the price as you get more subscribers. You shouldn’t have to pay too much to get started. This isn’t a time or place to compare all the different options out there. But what I will say is over the last 12 months we’ve looked at quite a few of the options at Problogger for our own use. For many years, I’ve been using AWeber as a tool. It is a solid option that I know many Problogger readers use. It’s been around for years, it’s reliable, it’s relatively affordable. But over the last few years, we’ve increasingly come up against challenges that are starting to hold us back in terms of what we are trying to do with our email list. Some of the features aren’t quite there in comparison to some of the other tools out there. You can do a lot, but you kind of have to hack it together. It’s a little bit clumsy in terms of the way that it’s arranged. But it is a good solid tool if you just wanna send a newsletter every week and you don’t wanna get much more sophisticated than that. We’ve decided to start looking around at some of the other options. It’s been years that I’ve been using AWeber. We’ve started to also notice a little bit of deliverability issues. That could be partly because of the size of our list, and because our list is quite old as well. We have a lot of people who signed up for that list in 2005, 2006 and so deliverability is kind of… there’s some issues there for us as well. So when it came to looking at what we should switch our business to in terms of email, we considered a lot of different tools and we came down to two. There are two that I would recommend for you. The two that I would encourage you to consider, and we’ve got links to these on our show notes, are Drip and ConvertKit. We’ll do an episode in 2018 with more detail on these tools and talk a little bit about the actual features of them, but we came down on Drip. We’ve decided to move to Drip. We’ve actually switched Problogger over to Drip in the last six months and it’s been amazing. We’ve loved using it. It’s very powerful. It enables us to do a lot more segmentation of our list and deliver different types of emails to different people to create different sorts of sequences of emails. It’s very powerful and it’s incredibly intuitive to use. It is more expensive for us than AWeber but we’re already seeing, as a result of high deliverability and more powerful tools, that we’re going to be able to make our money back on that. And we will be moving Digital Photography School over to Drip next year. That’s a big task for us because we’ve got so many lists and so many subscribers there. So Drip has been very good for us but ConvertKit, I would highly recommend that as well. It is a newer tool, perhaps it hasn’t matured as a platform quite as much as Drip, and not quite as advanced in some of the tools. When we looked at the size of our list and some of the things we wanted to do, it wasn’t quite there, ConvertKit for us particularly when we made that decision ConvertKit, you couldn’t do HTML emails. That may be coming or it may have already come. You had to do plain text. I know for a lot of bloggers plain text is totally fine. We’ll actually talk about why plain text might be the best option for you anyway. But we came down on Drip. If you are perhaps not wanting to do something quite as sophisticated as Drip and you want a tool that has been specifically designed for bloggers, ConvertKit is amazing. I would highly commend that company to you as well. Both of the companies are brilliant in terms of their customer service. Do have a look at both of them. If you wanna signup for them, I’d appreciate it if you’d do it through our links on the show notes because they are affiliate links and we do get a small commission on those things, help us to keep Problogger running. But even if you don’t, check them out. I do highly commend them to you. Both have a really good customer service as well, they’ve been very helpful for us. They’re the two tools that I would use. I know others of you are using other tools. Most of the tools out there do have the same types of features. Again, if you haven’t set up a list yet, do pay for one. Don’t send your emails from your Gmail account. It’s just gonna get you into a lot of trouble. Question number one was tools. Number two is “What content should I put in my emails?” And “How should I format them?”, I guess, is the third question as well. That’s where I wanna turn our attention to. There are no rules for what you should send in a newsletter. There is one thing I would strongly encourage you to consider and that is to be consistent and to be regular. Be consistent. Email subscribers are like blog readers – they like consistency. They quickly form expectations of what they’re gonna get from your list. They will sign up and they’ll see your first email, and they’ll see your second email. If they are similar to each other, they’ll expect your third email is gonna be like that. If you are storytelling in your emails and then you suddenly switched to an opinion piece and then you suddenly switched to tips and then you suddenly switched to promotional stuff and you’re mixing things up constantly, some of your readers are gonna get frustrated with that. If you’re using different voices in your newsletter, they’ll begin to get a bit frustrated with that. We’ve actually found that our subscribers really like it when we do the same thing every week. I’ll tell you what we do in ours as well. There’s a variety of things you can do in your newsletter. But try to keep some consistency there in terms of how it looks, how it reads and I guess the benefits of it as well. They’re much more likely to stay subscribed and just stay engaged with your list, keep opening your list, keep looking for your emails if you have some consistency there in terms of what they get and also when they get it. Don’t stray too far from the normal – you can mix things up a little bit. Always try to keep some consistency there, particularly in the way it looks, I think, is really important. There’s a variety of things you can do with that newsletter. What I wanna do is just give you three different options. You could also probably do a combination of these things or something else as well. Again consistency is the key. These are the three most common things that I see in newsletters doing. Each has their own strength. The first thing you could do is to write exclusive content especially for the newsletter list. I see some bloggers doing this very effectively. They send a weekly or maybe every second week or even a monthly type of email. You open the email and it’s an article in the email. There’s actually a tip, or there are some news, or there’s a story in the email itself. You don’t have to click on it or anything to go and read the content. They actually put the content in the email. It’s something exclusive and valuable just for the subscribers. It’s almost like they’ve written an extra blog post that week just for the email. There are lots of bloggers who do this. I’ve used the example of Nicole Avery, who is one of our subject matter experts on Problogger. She has written a lot of articles for us. She’s got a blog called Planning with Kids, and she does this in her newsletter. If you subscribed to it you’ll see that she’s essentially writing an extra article or blog post every week just for subscribers you can’t get it anywhere else. This approach works really well because it helps your subscribers to feel a little bit special. You’re giving them a reason to stay subscribed because they can’t get this valuable content anywhere else. Your emails have the value inside them. They actually begin to look for them and begin to expect them and they open them. They don’t say, “This is all just stuff in the blog.” This is something I can’t get anywhere else. They get into the habit of opening those emails. That’s a really powerful thing. The downside of this approach is you have to write something extra every week. It is going to go to a smaller audience than potentially your blog. You write a blog article and it’s there for all time and it gets indexed by Google and it gets shared by social media for all time. It can get a lot more eyeballs on it. It feels like you’re doing a lot of work for less effort. But the work that it’s doing with your subscribers can be very powerful because it can build a deep connection with them. It can make them very thankful for it, and it gets them in the habit of looking for your emails because they know they cannot get it anywhere else. That’s option number one, you create something exclusive for your newsletter list. The type two of what you could send in terms of a newsletter is where you send out your blog post by email. Essentially every time you publish a blog post, you send an email sending people to that blog post or you actually email the blog post itself. There’s a couple of different options within this one. This is something that’s possibly a little bit easier to do because you’re not writing extra content for your newsletter, you’re just promoting that content, or you’re repurposing that content for your newsletter as well. If you’re short on time, this is a good way to go. An example of this is Jon Morrow, Jon has a blog called Smart Blogger. He argues really strongly for this type of newsletter. If you sign up for his newsletter, you’ll get an email anytime he publishes a new blog post. The email generally has two or three paragraphs that introduce the topic and then links to where you can read it. Sometimes he might have the first paragraph or two of the blog post and then says further reading or read the rest here. Sometimes he will rewrite that introduction and give you a good reason to go and read that article. He’s sending out these emails every time he does a new blog post. This works for Jon because he’s not publishing every day. Sometimes, I think, he publishes two or three times a month. It’s less regular. He’s not interrupting his subscribers constantly. It’s probably not recommended if you publish every day or several times a day. I think on Digital Photography School, our readers will get highly annoyed if we email them every time we did a blog post because we publish 14 a week. This approach is good for those of you who are short on time. It’s all about delivering traffic to your blog. The emails themselves don’t deliver a lot of value in the email. It’s not as good in terms of getting people used to the idea of opening the emails because there’s that little voice in the back of their heads saying, “I could read this on the blog, I don’t need to read this email.” You’re giving them perhaps a little less reason to do it. If the content is valuable on your blog and you’re only doing one a month or one a week, it’s possibly something that will work for you. Another approach that I have seen on this is where the blogger has actually put the whole blog post in the email. They might publish the blog post on their blog but then they’ll also send that whole blog post in an article format in the email itself. This is where you do build some value in the emails themselves. This means your subscriber doesn’t visit your blogs often but for some of us, that doesn’t matter. If you’re monetizing your blog with advertises, you do wanna get them over to your blog. Teasing them with that first paragraph or two and then saying read the rest here, that’s definitely a good way to go. If you are just about trying to build credibility, authority, you’re trying to make your readers connected to you, then it probably doesn’t matter where they read your content. This is an option if that is your goal, if you wanna monetize your blog less directly by selling a product to them, then you maybe just wanna deliver that content in the email itself. There’s a couple options there. The last type of email that you might wanna send is what I do, that is where you do a digest type email. You might send a weekly or a monthly digest of what you’ve published in that last period on your blog, you might wanna send links to all of the new content you’ve published or just the highlights of what you published in that period of time. Generally, people are doing this weekly or monthly but you could do it any period as well, you could do it every second week. If you’re publishing several posts a week like we do, you don’t wanna be emailing your readers every time a new post goes up or as people unsubscribe. This is really where you digest it all. Digital Photography School is a good example of this. Every Thursday, I sit down and I look at the 14 posts that were published over the last week and I arrange them into categories. And then I plug them into a template that we have had designed for us. It’s an HTML template. It’s basically a digest of the week. Basically if you open that email, I can put a screenshot in today’s show notes, sometimes we’ll put a little introduction of something that happened during the week or highlighting a promotion that we’ve got on. The email is essentially a list of our new posts. They’ll be 14 new posts there, we also have some messaging from advertises there if we’re promoting something of our own or have a promotion going, we will highlight that as well. But it’s generally a digest of all the stuff that’s going on in the blog. Occasionally we’ll also link to our Facebook page or our Facebook group and promote the community that’s going on as well. Problogger PLUS newsletter is similar although simpler. We only publish three posts a week usually on Problogger – one blog post, one podcast, and one Facebook live or video on Facebook. Our Problogger PLUS newsletter has only got the three links. Occasionally, I’ll also highlight a post in our archives that I think is relevant still today. I usually would include an introduction in the Problogger one because I’m trying to build a connection with readers as well. I wanna give people an insight into what’s going on at Problogger headquarters, or something that has been going on on the blog over the last week. These digest type emails are good for those of you who do have a lot of content. They’re also really good if you are trying to drive traffic to your site, you wanna get people across to your site, you’re highlighting all the blog posts but you’re not annoying your readers if you’re publishing a lot of content. Use an introduction. I would encourage you to do that as well because that’s where you can build a more personal connection with your readers as well. Three different types of newsletters that you can do. The third question I wanna briefly cover is what format should they be in, I get this question all the time. Should you be sending your emails in plain text, rich text (which I’ll explain in a moment), or HTML. On our blogs, and if you get the Problogger PLUS newsletter, you’ll know it’s branded with Problogger, you’ll see the logo in it. It’s a fairly simple design, but it is HTML. There’s a picture of me in it, there’s color, there’s the Problogger color, there’s the Problogger logo. This hopefully makes it a little bit more visually appealing, but it also reinforces the brand and it personalizes it as well because it’s got my face in it. We do the same thing with Digital Photography School as well. We have the DPS colors. We’ve arranged it into categories. Particular on DPS, it’s useful to go HTML because we got a lot of content in there. There’s 14 links, there are messages from our advertises as well. We wanna draw the eye to different paths of it as well. HTML is really good if you’ve got a lot going on in your emails as well. That costs us, we actually had to pay to get those designs done, our developers did it so we pay them to do that. It does take a little bit of time to get our emails together each week, it’s not just a matter of sitting down and writing a few paragraphs. I actually have to sit there and plug it into the template to test all the design to make sure it’s all working. It’s a little bit more involved in terms of putting it together. But I do think it reinforces our brand. Plain text is another option. I see a lot of bloggers doing it. I think there are some really good reasons for just doing plain text emails as well. Firstly it’s cheaper. You don’t have to get anyone to design it. It’s quicker and easy to put together. Generally it takes me 45 minutes or so to put our newsletters together each week, a little less for ProBlogger. A plain text email would be a lot quicker than that – at least half that time not including whatever you’re writing. Sometimes the writing itself could take more. The plain text email would be a lot quicker. Also, the deliverability of a plain text email could be better than an HTML one. We’ve certainly seen that when we do our promotional emails. When we promote with an HTML email, our deliverability suffers. We generally do our sales type emails in plain text. You might wanna test that – plain text versus HTML. Every time we’ve done a split test on that in terms of our sales emails, we see plain text winning. The other option is what’s called rich text. This is where you use some formatting. You might use bold or italics or you make any links, you link a word rather than putting the full link. This makes your emails look a little bit neater. It means you can draw the eye, you’d bold to create headings. It can be more useful if you’ve got slightly longer emails as well to draw the eye down the page. They are your three main options. I would encourage if you’re just starting out and you’re feeling challenged to buy it all and you’re tethering on the edge of should I get into email or not, start with plain text, it’s so much simpler to do. At least you’ll be sending something every week, you wanna get into the rhythm of sending that. You can always progress to HTML later. Start simple. Fourth question, a really brief answer to this one is how frequent should I be sending the emails. Again there’s no right answer here except to say regularity is so important. Your readers will get used to the rhythm that you choose so stick to it. Personally, I really like weekly emails because it becomes a part of people’s week. It also leaves enough space between the emails that you can also send them extra emails. I’ll talk about some of those in a moment. Also, they forget who you are. That’s the danger of going monthly, is that if you go monthly, some will not signup for your newsletter today. They may not hear from you for 29 days if they sign up on the first of the month. Then you send your emails on the last of the month. That distance between emails, there’s a danger there that they don’t feel connected to you, that they’ll forget they even subscribed to you. I like weekly because it is a little bit more regular than that, and it keeps you in front of people at the top of their mind. Ultimately, the frequency you choose really needs to depend upon one, how much time do you have? If you don’t have much time, less frequent is okay. The format that you’re trying to send emails in, if you’re doing HTML, it could take a little longer so it may be less frequent. If you’re doing plain text, it’s a little bit easy to do so it may be more frequent. What are you putting in your emails? Are they long, are you writing exclusive content for them, then less frequent might be okay because one, it’s gonna take you longer to create those emails but two, it’s gonna take longer to read. You don’t wanna be sending really long articles every day to your readers because again they can’t consume that much content. So less frequent might be okay if the content is a really deep content. I guess ultimately, what are your readers’ expectations and what’s their ability to consume the content as well. They’re some of the questions I would be asking. Again, I think weekly is probably a good starting point. You can always decrease or increase it slowly over time, but don’t jump and change too much. Fifth question, it’s really the last question, is what other types of emails should you consider sending as well? We send out our weekly newsletters but in between the weekly newsletters, some weeks, there’s another email. Sometimes there’s even two. There’s different types of emails that we add into the sequence of emails that we send. Let’s go through the three types. Promotional emails, this is where we launch a new product, or run a sale on an existing product, or doing an affiliate promotion of some kind or a sponsored type of campaign as well. If you’ve got a sponsor, sometimes you might send an email out about that campaign or about that offer as well. Emails, for us, result in most of our sales. This is a really important type of email for us, but we don’t wanna go overboard with the promotional emails as well. If we promote something new every three days, our readers are gonna push back and they’re gonna get mad. We really try to be as careful as possible. We wanna be promoting enough that we are profitable, but we don’t wanna promote so much that we lose subscribers. You’re gonna play this a little bit by ear. One key for us is that we map out at the start of the year what promotions we’re gonna run over the next year. We are, at present, mapping out 2018, what ebooks and courses are we going to launch, which ones that we’ve already launched will we do relaunches of or promotions on, what seasonal promotions are we gonna do in 2018, are we gonna do Black Friday, are we gonna do a Christmas sale and what affiliate promotions are we gonna do. The beauty of mapping it out ahead of time is that you can space things out. We typically run a promotion for a week or even two weeks. We know that during those times, we’re gonna be sending out multiple emails in addition to our newsletter. We wanna space those out, we don’t wanna run a promotion this week and then another promotion next week and then another promotion the week after. We wanna space them out, give our readers a bit of a break in between. That’s another type of email that you could build in. An autoresponder sequence would be another option. This can be a really great way to bring your new subscribers up to speed with some of the other stuff that you’ve got in your archives. If someone subscribes to Digital Photography School today, they’ve missed out on over 7000 articles in our archives. What we’ve created is a sequence of emails that goes out automatically to anyone who subscribes to our newsletter. Every 30 or so days, they get an extra email. It’s timed to go out on a Sunday. Our newsletters always go out on Thursday. Our promotional emails usually go out on a Tuesday. We got this rhythm that you always will get a Thursday email newsletter. You’ll sometimes get a Tuesday promotional email, this is maybe one in three weeks and then one in four weeks you’ll get a Sunday email that is highlighting something in our archives. An autoresponder is where you setup that sequence of emails ahead of time. You just let it run to anyone new who subscribes up. There is a whole episode of this podcast dedicated to autoresponders that I’ve done in Episode 70. I’ll link to that in the show notes, but you might wanna also go back and listen to that. It’s a very powerful strategy to use because it’s a set-and-forget type of thing. You do it once, you set up that email once and then for all eternity or until you stop, I choose to stop sending that particular email, that email automatically go out to all new subscribers at the set intervals, a very powerful strategy. The third type of email that you might wanna send as well is more of an interaction type of email. This is where you send out a question to your readers and encourage them to reply. This might seem a little bit crazy, you don’t want all your subscribers sending you emails, but it’s a very powerful thing to do. For example you might send out a welcome email and then at the end of that welcome email say, “Please tell us about your experience with…” That is a very powerful thing because it signals to your subscribers that you’re interested in hearing from them. That adds work to you because you’re gonna start getting more emails but it’s gonna give you incredible insight into your subscribers and it’s gonna make them realize that you are not just wanting to send them emails, you’re wanting to have a conversation with them. Another option that may be a little less work is where you set up an email and it might be part of that autoresponder sequence that we just talked about where you send out an invitation to complete a survey. This is something that we do on Digital Photography School after you’ve been subscribed to our newsletter. I think that’s three months We have an email that goes out automatically on the autoresponder sequence. It says, “Could you take five minutes to do this survey?” The survey has questions about their demographics, but also asks them questions about their photography and it gives them an opportunity to ask questions as well about photography that they’ve got, which gives us ideas for content. These types of emails are not so much about driving traffic to your archives and are not designed to get sales. They’re designed to help you understand who your readers are and also to make them feel a little bit more connected to you. Another option that you might wanna do is adding the occasional email that promotes your Facebook group, your Facebook page, your Instagram account, these type of places as well. Again, this is about engagement – trying to get a second point of connection with your subscribers. These are the three types of extra emails that you might wanna send. There would be others as well. If you’ve got any others that you send out, that you’ve built into your rhythm of sending emails, I’d love to hear about them over in the Facebook group. The last question that I get asked all the time from people is, “How do I get more subscribers to my newsletter?” I’m not gonna cover this today in this episode, but I do recommend you go and listen to two episodes – Episode 68 and Episode 69. These are two different strategies for building your subscriber numbers of your newsletter. I think both of those would be well worth listening to once you finish this one in a couple of minutes. The last thing I wanna say is to make it a priority,. Make email a priority for 2018. I’ve seen something, the two big problems I see amongst so many blogger are bloggers who don’t have email lists, that’s the number one problem, or they’ve signed up for a service and they aren’t collecting email addresses. The second big problem is bloggers who don’t send emails. I see this all the time, people who are collecting emails every day, they’re getting new subscribers, but they’re not sending emails. If you fall into either of those categories, one, know that you’re not alone but two, know that I’m not satisfied until you get that thing fixed. I want you to make it a priority in 2018. I really have seen the way that email has transformed my business. It has really brought a lot of traffic and a lot of income and a lot of connection with our readers as well over the years. It is a central part of what we do. Put some priorities into that. Even if you’ve got an email list and you’re still listening, make it a priority to take a critical look at what you’re doing with your email. Do you need to change up your newsletter? Do you need to start an autoresponder sequence? Do you need to think about the design of your email? Do you need to test the format, plain text versus HTML? Do you need to do some testing in terms of the subject lines that you use? Do you need to consider upgrading your email service provider? I highly encourage you to take a critical look on some of that type of stuff. The last thing I’ll say is if you haven’t started, start simple. Even if you just send a monthly plain text email once a month, a plain text email with three paragraphs that simply links to a recent post that did well for you, that is better than nothing. Don’t let the tools, don’t let the formatting, don’t let the link, don’t let the content itself hold you back. Send something. Make it valuable. It doesn’t need to be long. It doesn’t need to be profound. Just make it deliver a little bit of value to your subscribers and they will keep looking for your emails and it will begin to build some momentum for you. I can’t wait to see what happens as a result of this. Remember to start simple and then let it evolve from there. You can always get more complicated with your emails, but you really need to make a start on it. Today’s show notes, where there are links to Drip and ConvertKit, and there’s a bit of a summary through a transcript of all the things that I’ve said and some further reading for you as well, further listening, you can find that all over at problogger.com/podcast/220. It’s the end of the year and I do wanna add my season’s greetings to those of who are celebrating at the moment and those of you who are listening in the New Year. I hope it’s been a good year for you. We are moving now into a bit of a series of podcasts where you’re going to hear some other voices. I’m gonna introduce them, but as I said in last week’s podcast we wanted to hear some of your stories. And we’ve had some amazing stories submitted. I’m really looking forward to introducing them to you in the coming weeks over at the end of the year and as we move into next year, where we’re gonna start a series of content on starting a blog. I really am looking forward to that. Those of you who haven’t started a blog yet, this is gonna be a great time for you. Those of you who wanna start a second blog, this is a great time for you to do that as well because we’re gonna give you some great content that’s gonna help you to do that. It’s free. We’re also going to help to celebrate some of those new blogs that have started. Make January a time of starting a new blog. I look forward to introducing that whole concept to you more next week on the ProBlogger podcast. If you are looking for something else to listen to, I do recommend you go back and listen to Episode 68, 69, and 70. 68 and 69 are about how to get more subscribers for that email list that we’ve just been talking about and Episode 70 was all about auto responders. You should be able to find them all over in iTunes where I hope you’re all subscribed and have left some nice reviews for us, or over on the show notes areas at problogger.com/podcast and then you just put the number, 68 or 69 or 70. Thanks for listening. Chat with you next week. How did you go with today’s episode? Enjoy this podcast? Sign up to our ProBloggerPLUS newsletter to get notified of all new tutorials and podcasts.

An Invitation for YOU to Be Featured on the ProBlogger Podcast Today’s podcast is a little different. It’s an invitation for YOU to be featured in an upcoming episode of the ProBlogger podcast. Early next year we’ll be releasing a brand new free course for bloggers to help them launch their blogs. And in the lead up we want to feature stories and tips from ProBlogger listeners and readers who’ve already started their own blogs. So if you’ve started a blog, whether it was recently or a long time ago, we’d love to include you in the series. Links and Resources on I’d like to Feature YOU on the ProBlogger Podcast Blogging What’s Your Story? Facebook Group Join the video challenge in our Facebook group Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Hi there, it’s Darren from ProBlogger. Welcome to Episode 219 of the ProBlogger podcast. Today I’ve got something a little bit different. Normally I teach something to you. I share an idea or a tip on how to improve your blog. But today I want to invite you to teach the rest of our audience. I want to try something a little different and give you an invitation to be featured in an upcoming episode of the ProBlogger podcast. Early next year we’re going to be releasing a brand new course for bloggers to help them to launch their first blog, pre-bloggers really. In the lead up to that, we would love to feature stories and tips from ProBlogger listeners and readers who’ve already started their blog. If you’ve started a blog, whether it be in the last few months, the last year, or a long time ago, I would to love to include you in this upcoming series. Today’s episode is all about how you can be involved in this little project we’re running. Listen on to find out how. But let me share the show notes for today where you can find all the details of what I’m going to mention, it’s at problogger.com/podcast/219. Every year in January we notice a really big swing, upswing, in traffic to ProBlogger’s articles on the topic of how to start a blog. It seems that many people make this their New Year’s resolution. “I’m going to start a blog in 2018.” And we’re expecting that in the beginning of next year, many people will begin to do that. This next January, we want to really help as many of those bloggers as possible in a way that we’ve never done it before. We want to really see in 2018 be the year that thousands of new blogs get started. And to do this we’ve been working on a brand new free course on that very topic that’s going to walk pre-bloggers through the process of not only setting up a blog, the technicalities of that, but setting up the foundations for a profitable blog. We’re going to be talking about choosing a topic, and a niche, and really refining what it is that you want to do on that blog. It’s not just about getting a domain and a server, that’s certainly part of what we want to help people with that. But we want to really get the right foundations for starting a blog. If you are one of our listeners, and there are quite a few of you who are yet to start, yet to do your first blog, or you’re thinking about starting a second blog, I want to encourage you to just be on the lookout for that because it’ll happen early next year. You can sign up to be notified of that in today’s show notes at problogger.com/podcast/219. But if you are someone who’s already started blogging, we would also love to involve you in the process as much as possible. We want to ask you to share your story and a few tips on the topic of starting a blog. My team and I are really excited about this course we’ve already put together. I’s very comprehensive. It’s the kind of thing I wish I had when I was starting out. However, we know that in the wider ProBlogger community, there’s such amazing knowledge and some really inspirational stories that come from a variety of different backgrounds that would be invaluable to bloggers just starting out. We know that there are people in our audience who are fashion bloggers, food bloggers, travel bloggers, business blogger, technology bloggers, sports bloggers, the list could go on and on and on. To be honest, I don’t have experience at all of those different niches and all the different styles of blogging. We want to include as many of your stories and tips as possible so that new bloggers have different things to draw and different experiences to draw on. We want you to be involved. And want to give you an opportunity to share some of your stories and advice here on the ProBlogger podcast and potentially over on the ProBlogger blog as well. We would love to hear from you and we’d love to hear from you whether you are an old-time blogger, you’ve been maybe at it as long as I have, from 2002, or maybe you’re a newer blogger. We actually want to feature blogs of all stages and in all niches and of all styles, we want to encourage video bloggers and those who are doing audio blogs, and those who are doing more visual blogs, we really don’t mind. As long as you classify what you’re doing as a blog, we would love to hear your story, no matter what the niche, the style, where your background is, whether you’re from America, Australia, Zimbabwe, it really doesn’t matter. We would like you to keep it in English because that’s where the bulk of our audience is from. But apart from that, whatever background, whatever accent you have, we would love to try and feature as many of you as possible. This is really going to help a lot of new bloggers, but hopefully, it’s also going to be good for you as it’s going to get your story, your blog, your URL, in front of thousands of listeners of this podcast and tens of thousands of subscribers of the email list that we send out every day. Our readers are a friendly bunch, so don’t worry about that. Here’s what we need you to do. If you want to participate in this, and again, blogs of all sizes, it doesn’t matter, we would love you to submit a short audio file. We want to keep it under ten minutes. You can go five minutes if you want, but anything up to ten minutes and we want you to share your story of starting a blog and share some tips for those starting out. You can do it in your style, but there are few things that we do want you to include. Before you go run off and do your recording, we want to have some consistency between the storytelling. There are six questions we would like you to answer. As long as you cover these six things in some way in your story, that would be great. You don’t have to read the question and then answer it (if you want to do it that way, you can), but as long as you include these things we’d love to include you as much as possible. Here are the six things. We want you to tell you us your name, your blog’s name and the topic, its URL, that’s the first thing. Just keep that really short. The second thing is for you to tell us the story of starting a blog. Include things like why did you start, when did you start, what were your objectives, hopes and goals, what were your dreams when you started out. It’s the expectations that you had, I guess, and anything interesting happening in that starting process. The third thing we want you to include is in hindsight, what did you do in starting your blog that you’re most grateful that you did? We want you to identify something that you did right, something that you’re grateful that you did, something that maybe helped you to grow faster or made the process easier. Keep in mind here that these are new pre-bloggers who will be listening to this. Anything that’s going to help them to make their process easier would be great. The fourth thing, what mistake or mistakes did you make that you would advise other people watch out for. Did you choose the wrong domain, the wrong server, the wrong theme, did you not have a tight enough niche, whatever it is, mistake or mistakes. Number five, what good things have happened to you since you’ve started blogging. We would love to hear the upside, what has happened since you started blogging. For some of you, there’ll be a lot that you can choose from. Don’t go into great depth in all of it, just choose one thing. Something specific as possible. Maybe it’s traffic, maybe it’s an opportunity that came, maybe it’s a lesson you learned, maybe it’s you got some self-confidence, maybe you’ve got a new income. Feel free to be specific about that if you’d like. Really, I guess what we’re trying here to do is to share with pre-bloggers some of the upside, some of the good things that can come. We want to inspire people to start blogging. The sixth thing is what is your number one tip for a new blogger. Something practical that new bloggers can do or decide that will have a big impact on their blog. Again, we want them to come away from this with some practical things to do, to try. Keep in mind with that last one that we don’t want to really feature ten of the same tips. You can choose something that might be common. But if you’ve got something interesting, something a little bit unique that you haven’t heard other people talk about, feel free to include that as well. There are the six things we want you to include. Keep it under ten minutes, it’s going to have to be fairly tight. My team has set up a page for you at problogger.com/blogstory where you’ll find all of that information, and it will point you to a Google Form where you can log in with your Google account and submit your audio file and a headshot. We’d love a headshot. If you are blogging anonymously, for your freedom, maybe include your logo or something that symbolizes who you are if you want to keep that anonymous. But we’d love to see who are if you’re happy and comfortable to do that. Before you record anything, please do read through the guidelines that we’ve included on that page just so you do it in the right way to increase your chance of being featured. One other thing: we really need you to act in the next week or so, if possible, to be considered in the first batch of episodes that we’d like to do. We may do more episodes down the track but if you would like to be considered for this first batch, we really do need your audio file by the 11th of December. As this podcast goes live, you got about a week to do that. You can submit after that time for potential lighter episodes but we’d love as many as possible by the 11th of December. It’s also worth saying that I’m very excited about this but I’m also slightly nervous about doing it because we really don’t know how many are going to be submitted. It may be that we get ten, those ten, we’ll probably be able to feature a lot them. But we may get a hundred or we may get a thousand. I really don’t know. We will try and include as many as we possibly can. But it’s really going to come down to trying to choose ones that we think are going to be most practical and inspiring for new bloggers. And maybe something that’s a little bit unique as well. If you’ve got sort of a unique story, or if you’re blogging a unique way or a unique niche, that would be great as well. Your recording certainly doesn’t have to be perfect but do try and make your audio quality decent and clear and think about how you can stand out from everyone else that does submit. I hope that’s clear. If you got any questions, feel free to ask them over at the ProBlogger Facebook group. We’ll be watching out for those over the next week or so. Again, head over to problogger.com/blogstory to participate and I’ll link to that over on the show notes as well. I’m really excited about this. I love this type of thing. We actually, a few years ago now, invited readers to submit video tips. We had 20 or so people record a tip on video and that was a fantastic post, I really love seeing and hearing the voices of our readers. Particularly the breadth of people that came from around the world, all those different accents. I know there are a lot of you who listen from America, or in Australia, or in the UK, Canada. We’ve also got a lot of listeners in India, Singapore, Manila. We’ve got listeners throughout Africa. I’d love to get as many different accents and experiences as possible. It’s fascinating to see that. Please feel confident to do it, please submit something and I really look forward to seeing what comes in as a result of this. Again, problogger.com/blogstory. 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.

Using the SMART Approach to Set Your Blogging Goals for 2018   It’s that time of year where many of us are reviewing the year gone by and setting our blogging goals for 2018. Goal setting is really important in any venture. Without goals, your actions tend to be aimless and random. By setting something specific to aim at, you’ll  be motivated and more focused in your efforts. A lot has been written about goal setting over the years. But one way to set your goals is to use the SMART approach, where SMART is an acronym for characteristics of good goals. Most people say Peter Drucker came up the idea, while others say it was George Doran. In any case, both men were almost certainly contributors. Today I want to work through one version of it (there are a number of subtle variations) and see what we can learn about it as bloggers. Join our Facebook Group Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Hi there, and welcome to Episode 218 of the ProBlogger Podcast. My name is Darren Rowse, and I’m the blogger behind problogger.com, a blog, a podcast, series of ebooks, and a job board all designed to help you as a blogger to grow your blog, to build an income around your blog, and hopefully change the world and make it a better place at the same time. Today in Episode 218, I want to talk about goal setting. It is that time of year where I know many of you are beginning to wind down a little bit. You’re beginning to do some reviews of your blog and you’re starting to think about next year. You’re thinking about what you should be trying to achieve in the year ahead. If you’re anything like me, you’re probably starting to think about some goals or objectives for the year ahead. That’s something that we’re talking about as a team for ProBlogger and Digital Photography School at the moment. I thought I would share some tips on setting some goals. Goals that are going to stretch you, but also goals that would be realistic. Goals that will move your business forward and move you forward, I guess, in many ways as well. I want to give you a bit of a framework for thinking about those goal settings. You can find out a little bit more about what I’m doing today on today’s show notes. There’s a full transcription of today’s show, as well as some further reading as well. Go to problogger.com/podcast/218. There’s also an opportunity for you to sign up for our ProBloggerPLUS newsletter on the show notes. And simply, that is a weekly email that I send out every Thursday, Australian time, on Thursday morning US. That’s just a recap of what we’ve published over the last week. You get a little notification of our new podcast and new blogpost and if I’ve done a Facebook Live as well. Anyway, I want to get on with today’s show. Show notes again at problogger.com/podcast/218. As I said in the intro, it is that time of the year where many bloggers are reviewing the year gone by, beginning to think about goals for 2018. Also, many of us are looking forward to a little bit of a break over the holiday period. Here in Australia of course, we’re going into Summer at the moment. I’m standing here in my shorts and t-shirts which is a welcome relief after a long winter. We’ll be having a warm Christmas and New Year’s period with a bit of a break. That’s what, us, Aussies do. But also, in the midst of all that planning for a break, we’re beginning to think about next year, 2018. I can’t believe it’s almost upon us. Goal setting of course is so important in any part of your life really. If you want to achieve things, it’s much easier to make those achievements if you’ve actually got a specific goal in front of you. Your actions tend to be pretty aimless in life and random if you don’t have something to actually aim for. How do you come up with that thing that you’re going to aim for? There’s been a lot written about goal setting over the years both on ProBlogger. I’ve covered this topic almost every year. I’ve done a blog post or a podcast on it and in the broader blogger sphere, there’s been many books written about it as well. One of the approaches that has come to my attention over the years that I’ve found helpful in thinking about my goals is to use the acronym S.M.A.R.T. This doesn’t tell you how to come up with goals, but as you’re thinking about your goals it’s a good framework to run your goals through to make them more effective goals. I don’t know who came up with the S.M.A.R.T. framework for goal setting. Some people say it was Peter Drucker, other people say George Doran’s. I want to give those men credits but they have both certainly written about this and contributed to this framework. There’s been plenty of others over the years as well. I’ve done research into the S.M.A.R.T. goal setting, there’s lots of different translations of it. The S.M.A.R.T. can actually stand for different things. I want to give you one version of that today. And as I’ll go along the way, I’ll also mention a few other words that I think could be useful as you’re thinking about your goals. Let’s look at them one by one. To start off, I’ll give you the overview. The overview is that your goals should be S for smart, M for measurable, A for achievable, R for relevant, and T for time-bound. As I said before, there’s a few other words that I’ll throw in along the way. Let’s look at each one in turn. Let’s start with S for specific. Make your goals as specific as possible. Don’t make your goals something like, “I want more traffic for my blog,” or, “I want more money from my blog,” or, “I want to write more often.” These are good goals, they’re good things that you should be probably wanting to do as a blogger. But they’re very fuzzy. Make them more specific. If you want more traffic, how much more traffic do you want? If you want more money, how much more money do you want? If you want to post more often, how often do you want to post? Get as specific as possible. You might say, “I want 100% more traffic this year than I had last year,” or, “I want to earn $50,000 this year,” or, “I want to publish a blog post every week this year.” They’re very specific goals. They also tap into the next letter which I will talk about in a moment. The other S word that I came up with that I haven’t really seen too many people talking about but for me, is an essential to any goal. It’s to make it as significant as possible. Don’t just set goals for the sake of having goals. Choose goals that will take you towards your overarching, long-term goals, the things that you are wanting to achieve – not just this year but in the next 10 years. What is the goal of your blog? Why are you blogging? Your goals need to tap into that why on a deeper level. If your goal is to make a million dollars, then you’re probably not going to do that in the first year. But make your goal something that is going to help you to achieve that overarching goal. If your overarching goal is to get a book deal, you may not get that this year. But what do you need to do this year to take you towards that long-term goal? If your goal is to retire by the time you’re 60, then unless you’re 59, that’s probably not going to happen this year. But what can you set as a goal that’s going to take you towards the long-term goal? Consider the big picture and also consider, I guess, what is significant to you. What are you passionate about? What is meaningful to you as well? It’s really important to have significant goals because those kinds of goals, they’re going to be much more motivating for you than just a general fuzzy goal like, “I want more traffic,” or, “I want to double my traffic.” If you tap into the why you want more traffic, that is going to make the goal more significant to you. Make your goals specific but make them also significant. M is for measurable. If you can’t measure, then it’s not a S.M.A.R.T. goal. In the examples I gave earlier, “I want to increase my traffic by 100%,” or, “I want to earn $50,000.” “I want to publish a blog post every week.” They are not only specific goals but they’re also measurable because I can tell whether I have achieved those things or not. I will know by the end of the year if I have increased my traffic by 100%. I will know if I have published every week whether I’ve published every week. I can see whether I’ve achieved those goals or not. Measurable goals are great for that reason. You’ll know if you’ve reached them or not, but they’re also great because they can help you to track how you’re going in those things as well. For example, the $50,000 this year. Fifty thousand dollars might be more or less what you want to achieve. But whatever it is that you want to make, you can then break that down into a monthly, weekly, daily total. I know if I want to make $50,000 this year, then I need to make $4,166 every month. I can see how far through the month am I on track to make that target. Same, you can get even more granular thinking about $137 a day to help you reach that goal. Measurable goals are great because they help you whether you’ve got it or not but also, it can give you motivation along the way that can spur you on and see how you’re tracking with your goal. The other M word that I would encourage you to think about, it kind of taps into the significant one that I was talking before, but it’s to make it meaningful. Make your goals meaningful to you. Try to choose goals that have meaning to you personally but also to your business. Like I said before, this taps into those significant goals as long-term goals, but also, what else is meaningful to you. Your goals could actually be other things that you want to achieve. For example, I talked to one blogger recently who told me that her goal for next year is to raise $10,000 for school of orphans in Africa. That’s what she wants to achieve. Whilst that’s not going to grow her business, it’s meaningful to her. She actually visited that orphanage a few years ago and it’s a meaningful goal for her. She wants to raise that, and she wants to raise that through her blogs. Choose goals that are not just going to further your business, but are going to further other goals that you might have, other meaningful things that you have. Your goals need to be measurable and also if you can, make them meaningful. Now A, a is for achievable goals. Your goals should stretch you. There should be things that are going to make you work hard. But they should also be realistic, based upon the situation that you’re in. If you’re blogging in the evenings after work, after other family commitments, it may not be realistic to set your goal to publish a blog post every day. It may not even be realistic for you to publish every week. You may want to come up with a different goal based upon the situation that you’re in. If you are able to dedicate full time, you’ll probably be able to reach some of those goals of publishing weekly, maybe even daily. Setting your goal too big could actually hurt your blog. It could impact your motivation but also, it could hurt the quality of the work that you’re doing and as a result, could hurt your brand. Do stretch yourself, but don’t bite off more than you can chew. Take account of your available time, the resources that you have, also the stage of your blog, are things really important? I see a lot of bloggers who say, “I want to be a full-time blogger by the end of the year,” and they actually haven’t started their blog yet. That may not be realistic. It might be a stretch goal. I have certainly seen a couple of bloggers go full-time within a year, but in most cases it’s not actually achievable for most bloggers. Usually, it takes a couple of years to kind of get to that stage. Take into account your time, your resources, the stage of your blog, where it’s sitting at the moment. Also, look at previous performance, how’s your blog been tracking, and the experience of others as well. You can certainly ask around to find out whether a goal sounds realistic to other people. It’s also worth saying that another A word is often translated into S.M.A.R.T. goals as agreed-upon. I’ve seen a number of people write about this. Your goals need to be agreed-upon. This is usually said in the context of a team. The A, agreed-upon, everyone in the team should know and agree upon the goal. This isn’t going to be as relevant for all bloggers because I know a lot of ProBlogger and podcast listeners are single person blogs, they’re just them blogging. It’s not too hard to have an agreed-upon goal if you’re the only one there. But if you do have a team, I think it’s really important to communicate those goals that you have. The worst thing you can do if you’re in a team is for you to have a goal and not communicate that to your team. Make sure everyone else knows what the goal is, and get buy in from them as well. A goal really is useless in a team environment if everyone doesn’t know it, but also they don’t buy into that in some way. A is for achievable goals, but also if you have a team make sure that they are agreed-upon as well. R, make your goals Relevant. Make your goals sit alongside each other really well. This is thinking about you’re going to probably come out with multiple goals for your blog in a year. If you’re thinking about that sort of whole year, you probably should have a number things that you are trying to achieve. But sometimes goals can clash with one another. I think back over the years, there’s been tons of set goals that I realized one of the goals that I’ve set for the year stands out on my list as being something that just doesn’t fit with others. Many times the reason is that it’s just not the right time to pursue that thing. For example, I think it was back in 2015, I had on my list of goals that I wanted to run an event in the US. It’s something that I felt strongly about – we’ve got a lot of readers in the US – I wanted to do this, and I felt it would be worthwhile. I thought it would serve our readers. I thought it would be profitable. But as I looked at that complete list of goals that I wanted to achieve in 2015, it became clear to me that if I was going to put an event on this US, it was going to hurt some of my other goals. It was going to take a lot of the focus away from some of these other things that really needed to happen first. I needed to get some more foundational things done before I put on that event in the US. So I decided to put that goal on hold. It wasn’t something that I killed. I knew I would do it eventually. But I decided not to pursue it in 2015. This year, when I decided to look at my goals, it was something that we were much more ready to do. I already met some people who can help us to make that event a reality, and I had freed up some time in my own schedule to be able to put attention into that. This year in 2017, we ran the Success Incubator event. It was a good goal but it just wasn’t the right time for that goal. It wasn’t a relevant goal for 2015. As you look at that list of goals that you’ve got, bring some critical thinking to it. It’s great to have sort of big goals. I think there’s a place for blue sky thinking, brainstorming, when you’re coming up with goals. But also bring some critical thought to it as well. This might be something that you want to involve some other people in. Show your goals to someone else. Often they will say, “Hmm, this one doesn’t quite fit.” There’s some other questions you might want to think about. Do your goals sit well with each other? Are there any in your list that could clash with others, one goal might hurt another? Is now the right time to pursue all of those goals? Will one of the goals cause you to be distracted from some of the other things because it’s so big or it’s so new? Is the current environment suitable for the goal? Maybe your goal is to come up with a new type of product and maybe the market’s not ready for that product yet. Or maybe it’s an old-fashion kind of goal. It would have been a good goal ten years ago, but it’s not so good now. Do other things need to be achieved first? Are there some foundations that need to be laid this year so that you can achieve those other goals next year? Those are some of the questions I will encourage you to ask once you’ve compiled a list of goals to actually think about. Not only are they specific, measurable and achievable but are they actually relevant for my business today? Are they relevant to what’s in front of me right now, the current situation I’m in? That’s R. T in the S.M.A.R.T. is to make them time-bound. It’s perhaps a bit of a stretch too because it’s not a word I would usually use. For me, I would say put a deadline on your goal. This is part of making your goal specific and measurable. It’s also about helping you to begin to think about the how, how you’re going to reach that goal. Once you put a deadline on it, you begin to see what needs to be done at certain times of the year. Put a deadline, “This goal needs to be achieved by August.” I begin to then kind of work backwards from August and begin to slot into place other smaller goals or objectives or milestones that need to happen along the way. It’s also, I find personally, my personality type. Having a deadline actually helps me with my motivation. I work really well with a deadline. A deadline helps me to stop procrastinating. I’ve talked about that in previous podcast as well. Put a deadline on it. One tip I would give you with deadlines. Don’t make all your goals by the end of the year because you’re going to get into a problem at the end of the year. It could mean that you have a really hectic last month of the year. December might be crazy because you’ve got all these goals that haven’t been met yet and you’re trying to work on them all. Think about spreading some of your goals out through the calendar so that you are working on different things at different times of the year. For my blogs, for Digital Photography School for example, we create a calendar for the whole year. We’re actually will be doing that in the next week or so. We begin to slot those goals in as we go. Once we have our overall goal, we might have an overall goal. This year we want to launch three new products. We begin to think about when will those products fit in? Another goal might be we want to do five affiliate promotions. Now, we’ve got our products slotted in, we can begin to see where our affiliate promotions might go in. We might want to have four opt-ins, four lead magnets. Where are we going to slot those in? We’ve already got all these other projects on the go, so we’re able to begin to slot those in. Having a deadline in place means that you are motivated. But it also begins to help you to plan that year so that you’re not doing too much all at once. Really helpful. Another T word that I want to throw in for S.M.A.R.T. goals is to make your goals as thorough as possible. I’ve already alluded to this in some ways. I think you probably should come up with more than one goal for the year. I don’t think you should come up with too many, but think about all of the different aspects of blogging. As I’ve talked about in previous episodes of this podcast, I believe there are certain pillars of pro blogging. If you want to have a profitable blog, there are a variety of things you need to be working on in any one at a time. You need to be thinking about content. You need to be thinking about traffic. You need to be thinking about engagement and building community. You need to be thinking about monetization. For me, they’re the four pillars of pro blogging. It makes sense to me that you probably want to be thinking about coming up with at least one goal for each of those four areas; some goals for your content, some goals for your traffic, some goals for engagements, some goals for monetization. Then of course, there are some other aspects of blogging like design, like tech, the tech side of your blog, your servers and that type of thing and also, your productivity and how you are going to do all of this stuff. You might want to have other goals in some of those areas as well. By doing so, you’re coming up with a holistic kind of thorough approach to goal setting. You’re not just saying, “I want more traffic this year,” or, “I want more money.” You’re actually beginning to break down where does more money actually come from? Well, it probably comes from working on my content, my monetization, my traffic, my engagement, my productivity, my design, my tech. All of these things will help contribute to some of those bigger goals that you might have as well. For me, the areas that I would always be thinking about were content, traffic, engagement, monetization, productivity, design, and tech. They’re probably the seven main areas that we will be coming up with goals for across my blogs. S.M.A.R.T. goals, S.M.A.R.T. goals are specific, they’re significant, they’re measurable, they’re meaningful, they’re achievable, they’re agreed-upon if you’ve got a team, they’re relevant, they’re time-bound or they have deadlines, and they’re thorough. There’s this smart approach to that. A few other thoughts that I would pop in there, write it down, I think it’s so important to not just come up with the goals in your mind because if you’re anything like me, you’ll forget those goals or they won’t be at the top of your mind, actually write them down, put them into a calendar. I think that is so important. If you’ve got a goal and it’s measurable and it’s got a deadline, then it should automatically go into a calendar at that deadline and you should probably even be working backwards. Once you’ve got the goal in the calendar, you want to start thinking about what needs to happen to make that goal a reality. This is where you get into the planning. Work backwards from the deadline. What needs to happen for that ebook that you want to have launched by October? What needs to happen by August? What needs to have happened by April? What needs to happen in the next week? You can begin to put some milestones in place. You can begin to work out the order of what needs to be achieved, and who needs to do it as well. The last thing I would say is make your goals accountable to people. Maybe that’s another A word there. But be accountable to someone with your goals whether that be a family member, a partner, a friend or maybe some other blogger that you want to pair up with this year. Or maybe it’s in your Facebook group or another Facebook group as well. If you want to join the ProBlogger Facebook group, we’ll have a thread where you can share your goals for the year and maybe just by putting it out there to the group, maybe that will make you a little bit more accountable. I would encourage you though to find someone else who will keep you accountable to that, a buddy or maybe a mentoring group as well. I hope that’s been helpful for you. I’d love to hear what your goals are for the year, either in the Facebook groups or in the comments on the show notes as well. Today’s show notes are at problogger.com/podcast/218 and of course, the Facebook group, if you do a search for ProBlogger Community on Facebook, you would find that group immediately. Lastly again, do sign up for our newsletter. It is the best way to keep up with our latest content. We definitely, this year, slowed down in the content creation that we’ve done. This is really as a result of your feedback. We were getting a lot of feedback from people saying, “I didn’t want too many articles every week.” So we slowed it down, there’s only ever going to be one blogpost, one podcast, and one Facebook Live over the next year. Occasionally, we might slip something if we’re doing a series that’s on top of that. But we want to make it achievable for you to consume our content at ProBlogger. That ProBloggerPLUS newsletter, which you can sign up for anywhere on ProBlogger, will help you keep in touch with that new stuff as well. Hopefully that’s helpful for you today. I’ll look forward to travelling with you over the next few weeks as we approach the end of the year. I’ll look forward to chatting with you in the New Year as well. As I said last week, we’ve got a brand new course that we’ll be launching that’s going to help people to start a blog early in the year next year. If you know anyone who is kind of thinking about starting a blog, let them know that we’ve got that coming. Then we’ve got something else coming up straight after that course that’s going to help us establish bloggers to kind of get their blogs firing up again as well. That’ll come out probably on February as well. Some exciting things coming. Can’t tell you much more than that at the moment, but I look forward to sharing more in the coming weeks. Thanks for listening, chat with you next week. How did you go with today’s episode? Enjoy this podcast? Sign up to our ProBloggerPLUS newsletter to get notified of all new tutorials and podcasts.

4 Things to Consider When Choosing a Domain Name for Your Blog This episode is perfect for anyone who’s preparing and planning their first blog, as well as those thinking about starting a second blog. Note: if you are starting a blog sign up below to get notified of our brand new course on the topic which will go live early next year – and check out our article on how to start a blog in 5 steps. Today I’m talking about what to consider when naming your blog and choosing a domain name for it. I’ll share four things to consider when choosing a domain name. You want one that: helps you achieve your goals will have a memorable impact on your visitors helps you to build your brand sends the right message to Google and the search engine bots. (Domain names have an impact on SEO.) I’ll also talk about legal implications of choosing a domain name, because it’s important to stay within the law. Links and Resources on 4 Things to Consider When Choosing a Domain Name for Your Blog: 4 Things to Consider When Choosing Your Domain Name How to Choose a Domain Name Knowem Nameboy GoDaddy Facebook group Legal Links: Copyright.gov Uspto.gov Bloglovin.com Aussies: Asic.gov.au ipaustralia.gov.au   Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Hi there. My name is Darren Rowse. Welcome to Episode 217 of the Problogger Podcast. I’m the blogger behind problogger.com – a blog, a podcast that you’re listening to, event, job board, and a series of ebooks all designed to help you as a blogger to start a blog, to create great content to grow your audience, and to build some income from that blog. You can learn more about what we do at Problogger over at problogger.com. Today’s episode is for those of you who are just starting out. It’s perfect for those of you who are considering starting a blog in the preparing, planning stage, or for those of you who want to start a second blog or even a second business of some kind, because we’re gonna talk about things to consider when you are naming your blog, or finding a domain name for your blog to be more specific. I said both of those things because they really are tied together. Ideally you want a domain name that is the same as the name of your blog, or at least tied to it. In today’s episode, I wanna share with you four things to consider to find something that is going to suit your needs in terms of a domain. Something that’s gonna help you to achieve your goals in blogging, whatever those goals are. Something that’s gonna impact the people who come to your blog and be memorable, but also something that is gonna help to build your brand, to communicate something, a meaning, to those people. Also, something that’s going to communicate something to Google and the bots, the machines, the little robots that come to your site as well and help to determine how your site will be ranked, because your domain name has an impact on SEO. Lastly, something that is gonna help you to stay within the law because there are some legal things that you need to know about choosing a domain as well. If that is of interest to you, listen on. I’ve got today’s show notes with some further reading for you. This is actually based upon an article that we published on Problogger a year or so ago, I’ve updated it slightly but you can find the original article on today’s show notes at problogger.com/podcast/217. I almost forgot the podcast bit there, you would think after 200 episodes, I would’ve got it. It’s problogger.com/podcast/217 where you can find that further reading and a full transcript of what I’ve got for you today. I wanna say right upfront, there’s a lot of different opinions on this. The main thing that I really wanna say is whilst I’m going to talk about some ideal scenarios today, I’ve made every mistake in the book. Everything I’m gonna teach you today, I’ve done the opposite at one point or another. I still had success with my blogs, I want you to keep that in the back of your mind. Choosing the right domain is going to help you with your blogging, it’s going to help you with your Search Engine Optimization and your branding and all of that type of stuff. You can make mistakes in this and fix them, or you can make mistakes and still have success. I’m gonna tell you about some of the mistakes I’ve made towards the end of today’s podcast. I wanna put that right up front, particularly for those of you who are gonna listen to this and go, “He said the exact opposite of what I’ve already done.” I just wanna hammer that home, I have had wrong domains and I still have a blog that isn’t ideal in terms of its domain, but I still had some success with it. Choose the right domain and it is going to help you in your blogging. I sometimes wonder what would’ve happened if I had chosen the right domain on some of my blogs from the start. Right from the beginning. Let’s just go back to basics for those of you who are a bit fuzzy on what is a domain and why you would want your own. Your domain name is, for Problogger it’s problogger.com. It’s that little bit that you type into Google’s Chrome browser or Safari, it’s where your blog can be found, it’s the address for your blog. Having your own domain name is really desirable for bloggers for many reasons. This is something that a lot of bloggers when they first start out, they will start on a site like blogger or wordpress.com and they will use the domain name that is provided for them by those services because those services host your blog on their own service and they usually have some wordpress.com/yourblogsname. It’s on their domain name. That’s okay when you’re just starting out. It’s desirable to get your own domain name at some point because it’s gonna help to build some credibility with your audience. When someone sees that you are on blogger.com/yourblogname, there’s a confusion that happens there because you are on blogger’s brand name and your blogger’s brand name or WordPress brand name is in your domain name as well as your own. That impacts your brand, it impacts the sense of professionalism around your blog that people get from you. It also is more complicated to communicate if you have to tell everyone it’s blogger.com/yourname, that’s a lot to remember for people. It’s longer, it’s more complicated and it confuses the brand. Ideally, you want to have your own domain name. It also gives you some other added bonuses, it can help you with search engine optimization to have it on your own. It also helps in terms of having your own email address so you can have an email address darren@problogger.com, that’s my email address, if you wanna ever contact me. That communicates a little bit more professionalism rather than having to rely upon a Gmail address which again can confuse your brand a little and it comes across with some people if you got a Gmail address rather than your domain address. That can come across maybe a little bit like it’s a bit of a hobby for you. There’s some added bonus in there in terms of having your own domain. They are some of the reasons that you would want your own domain if you’re wondering why you would want it. Let’s move on to some of the factors to consider when choosing that domain. I’ve got four main things that I wanna talk about. I guess what I wanna say is there are billions of websites, I don’t exactly know how many domains are out there but there’s more than a billion websites I’m told out there. You want yours to stand out, and a big part of what you want to do in choosing a domain name is choose something that’s going to stand out, something that’s gonna be easily remembered. That’s harder to do today than it was when I started out because a lot of the good domain names, a lot of the most common words that we would think of in domains are taken. But it’s still important to try and choose something that’s gonna be easy to remember and something that’s gonna accurately describe what it is that you do and that’s gonna help you to rank in Google. There are four main things that I wanna work through here. Some of these come down to personal taste, but try and keep these four things in mind as you are considering it. The other thing I’d say, just before I get into these is don’t rush this process. Don’t rush the process. The mistakes I’ve made have largely come as a result of me rushing through it and not involving too many other people in the discussion. One of the things I would recommend that you do is to do this with other people. I actually find that I’ve made better decisions about domains and names of my blog when I bounce my ideas off other people. Find someone who is not gonna shut down all of your ideas right at the front. They’re gonna be good at brainstorming with you, but also someone that does have a bit of a critical eye on this, and maybe two different people – one to brainstorm with them, one to be the judge or the critic with. Because bringing a bit of a critical eye is going to point out some of the mistakes that I’ve made basically. Let’s get into these four things. The first perspective that you wanna consider is the human perspective. I’m gonna talk about bots and robots and SEO and that type of thing. That’s important. But I think it’s much more important to consider the other person who’s gonna be on the other side of your content and the other side of your blog. This is the case for me with everything that I talk about with ProBlogger. It comes down to the content, the way you build community, the way you build readers. You always need to be considering the other person, the person on the other side of your content. It’s not just about making money. It’s not just about getting lots of traffic. It’s about serving people because in my experience, if you serve people and if you’re considering the person on the other side of your content, all the other stuff tends to flow easier, more easily. The human perspective is the first thing that we wanna consider. Particularly what we wanna focus upon is making it easy for the other person. The person is gonna come and read your blog. You wanna make it as easy as possible. You don’t want barriers in the way of them coming to your blog. When you’re thinking about your domain, you want something that is simple to read. Something that’s simple to say. Something that is simple to remember. If it’s hard for them to remember what it is because it’s complicated, it’s got lots of words or it’s cryptic in some way, that’s gonna be a barrier for them to coming back. They may come the first time because they find you being shared on Twitter but they’re never gonna come back again because they’re not gonna be able to remember that name. It’s gotta be easy to remember. It’s gotta be easy to say because you want people to be able to spread it by word of mouth, and you wanna be able to say it simply as well. It’s gotta be something that’s simple to read. The words in your domain, if you’ve got more than one word, they need to be pretty obvious what those words are. You don’t want them to run into each other and have different interpretations of what those letters could mean. Often I’ve seen domain names and I thought, Does is say this or does it say that? because there are multiple ways of reading that in the content. Make it easy. One of the core values of marketing is to be memorable and to be simple. Simple is good. Short is good if you can. It’s getting harder to have short domains. I know all the four-letter domain names are gone now. You can probably buy them at a premium cost now, but they’ve all been taken as far as I know. It’s hard to find a four-letter one. There are probably some five- and six-letter ones around, but it’s gonna be hard to find one that has actual words in it. They’ll be a random jumble of our letter. Short is good, it’s not always easy to find something that’s super short. If you are going to create something with a number of words, maybe two or three words at the most. Digital Photography School I think is a long domain and I’ve got hyphens in there as well which is a mistake that I’ll talk about later. Digital Photography School is relatively easy to remember, it’s a bit of a jumble to type in though, it’s quite long. One of the things I do wish with Digital Photography School, it’s bit of a jumble for me to even say it now, is that maybe it was a bit shorter. I think it’s good on the memorability front. You’re never gonna find something that’s got all of the things that I’m talking about. You’re always gonna be compromising on some level. But short is good. No phonetic bits to confuse people’s ears, no unusual spelling ideally. If you can do that, I think you’re well on the way to creating a good domain. Short. A note about hyphens. I have already talked about hyphens… may make your preferred domain easier to register because less people will be putting hyphens in. But it is tricky for people to remember, and it’s tricky for people to communicate and for you to communicate. I know for a fact every time I say I’ve got a blog about blogging, it’s called Digital Photography School, I usually just say “Google it” because we do rank in Google for Digital Photography School. If someone wants the domain, it’s digital-photography-school.com. It’s quite long and it’s more complicated for me to say. I do hear people all the time saying “It’s digitalphotographyschool.com”, and I’ve seen people link to it in that way. I don’t own that domain. I couldn’t get it. People wanna charge me a fortune for it. It’s hard to communicate. I particularly would say avoid hyphens if you can. It’s gonna make it hard to communicate and hard to remember. Numbers are another one. I know a lot of people add a number to their ideal word. That could be one way to get your word in there, but it does bring confusion again. If I had problogger9.com for instance, is ‘nine’ the number nine, the numeral, or is it spelled out nine? That can cause confusion as well when you got numbers in there. Ideally what you would probably wanna do if you do wanna use a number is to register both. If I had to do that, and I would never do it, problogger9.com and I would also register probloggernine.com and forward both to the one that I’m using. That would be the way to get around that, but again numbers can bring a little bit of confusion to that. Although if you can get both, maybe it would work. Making it easy for your reader is really important. Making it readable is so important as well. Have a look at how your words run together. Are there any surprises in there that perhaps you haven’t thought of? Sometimes people choose a domain and then someone else looks at it and says, “There’s another word in there that you probably don’t want in there.” For example if you had any probloggersexcited. Probloggersexcited, that might be a good domain name because you wanna talk to excited probloggers but if you think about it, there’s an ‘s’ and then the first two letters of excited are ‘ex’. You’ve got an s-e-x in there, that may not be ideal for you brand. People will look at that and they’ll only see one thing, and that’s bit of a recipe for disaster in terms of your brand. Be thinking about how those words might join together. Are there any other little hidden surprises in there? Another thing I would say is you might wanna steer clear of slang, or any jargon or corporate speak. Different countries also have different vernacular. You wanna maybe run your domain name by someone from a different culture if you’re using a slang word, something that you understand but does everyone else understand what that means because you might end up with a domain that people are really confused by because you are using a word that means something different in a different part of the world. The example that Aussies always use, we call flip-flops that you put on your feet, my American friends call them flip-flops, we call them thongs. That can cause a lot of confusion in America when you are talking about wearing thongs to the beach and I wear thongs every summer to the beach, that confuses people. I know that just brought a whole lot of imagery in some of your minds that you don’t want there. You wanna be thinking about Does this word mean the same thing in different parts of the world?, particularly if you wanna have a global brand. The last thing with readability is make it pronounceable. You want people to be able to say it clearly. I had a domain twitip – t-w-i-t-i-p. It was gonna be Twitter tips. People just couldn’t pronounce that at all. I had all kinds of weird pronunciations, ‘twee tip’ and all kinds of things. It didn’t really communicate what it was about even though it was clever and it had a bit of Twitter and a bit of a tip in it, people just couldn’t pronounce it right. Even ProBlogger, people sometimes struggle with that and because it’s an unfamiliar word, it’s not a real word. I made that one up although that was good for a branding perspective. That’s what I wanna talk about next. First perspective to consider is the humans on the other side of your domain. The second perspective is the brand. The first impression of your domain really counts. Your domain name is an incredible opportunity. You have an incredible opportunity to communicate something about what it is that you are doing. People want to know what is going on on your website in the shortest amount of time possible. Your domain name is one of the signals to them as to what you do. If you have a domain name that communicates, “This is what this blog is about”, that’s gonna help to speed up that first impression. Digital Photography School I think immediately communicates to people that this place teaches photography. Sometimes it does communicate some other things as well. It communicate some things that we don’t do and that is one of the weaknesses of it. We get emails from people saying, “Where is your School? What kind of classrooms do you use?” They imagine a real school. That’s I guess another example of something that’s communicated by the domain that isn’t true. We have to work against that in our About page. ProBlogger I think, even though it’s a made-up word, most people understand what that is. It’s gonna be something that’s gonna teach people to blog professionally or to be professional in their blogging. Your domain name is a real opportunity. Think about your domain name and how you can communicate what it is that you do. Again, this is another thing to test with someone. Tell a friend who doesn’t know what you’re considering doing, what that domain name is. Ask them what they think a site with that domain name would do. It will be really fascinating to hear whether they get it or not. Do they come up with something that aligns with what it is that you want to do on that domain? Or do they come up with something completely different? Because that will be a signal that maybe your domain name isn’t as clear as you want it to be. Another thing to consider for a brand perspective, but also again comes into the human element that I’ve already talked about, is the extension that you choose for your domain. An extension is the categories of internet domain, the most common one is .com, problogger.com. It represents the word commercial, that’s where the .com comes from, it’s the most common one that is used. Most businesses would prefer the .com domain because it’s highly recognizable as a symbol for having a business presence on the internet. It’s also the most easy one to remember. What else I would recommend that you do choose a .com particularly if you’re going to have a global brand, if you are trying to reach people from around the world, there are other options there as well. There are some newer ones like .biz or .info or .me or .shop and the list could go on and on. You might wanna choose one of those if it does really relate to what you’re trying to do and if the .com is already gone and if you’re not gonna get yourself into legal trouble as well. The other option is .com.au which is the local domain for Australia, it’s the local one. If you are trying to reach a local audience, that can be another way to go because again it will be familiar and memorable for people from that local audience. It’s also, from my experience, gonna help you to rank a little better in google.com.au, the local Google, from an SEO perspective. You might wanna consider some of those localized domains as well. This is another mistake that I made, if you wanna put it that way. When I started, problogger.com was taken. Someone was squatting on problogger.com. They had the idea to set up, I think it was gonna be a hosting company and they never actually went with it. Once I approached them initially to buy it, they were interested in selling it that time. Because they weren’t using it, I thought legally I was able to use that word so I registered problogger.net. Once that worked, .net is relatively familiar to people, it was relatively easy for people to remember. I did see a lot of people linking to that other domain. It wasn’t until years later that I bought problogger.com then things got so much easier in terms of that memorability and the building of the brand as well. I don’t know if people see .com a little bit more credible source as well, that impacts your brand. The other thing that you wanna consider from a brand perspective and also from a legal perspective which we’ll talk about a little later is that you want uniqueness with your brand. You don’t want to have a brand name that is a copy of someone else’s, that will definitely get you into legal trouble if they registered it and you can run into some issues there. You also don’t want something too similar to someone else as well because it’s going to be confusing for your readers. If you choose something that’s already an established brand and you do something very similar to that, people could accuse you of copying them as well. Do some research on Google to see what different blogs and other businesses are already out there on similar domains to you. Just because you can get the domain doesn’t mean it’s a good idea if you are choosing something that’s too similar. Google it, look on sites like bloglovin.com to find out who’s blogging under what names. Sometimes people actually have a blog called something on a different domain. They may not have registered the domain but they actually call their blog the exact same thing for some reason. Which is partly their fault – they should’ve registered the domain. Again, it could get you into trouble there, it could end up being a bit of a bun fight. Just make sure you’re not doing something too similar. The other thing in terms of uniqueness is making sure your domain name is available on other social media sites as well. You want to check on Twitter and Facebook just to see who else is using that name and to register that as well. There’s a shortcut for this, I think it’s a site called KnowEm which is a good domain name in some ways – it’s k-n-o-w-e-m dot com, but it’s a bit of a cryptic domain name as well. Maybe an example of one that is cool on some levels, KnowEm, but it’s also hard to remember. As far as I know, that site will also help you to check whether different brands are available on social networking sites. The human perspective was number one. The brand perspective is number two. The third perspective you wanna think about is SEO, Search Engine Optimization. Just about everyone is looking to rank really well on Google, and to help you to rank well in Google you can choose a domain name that is gonna help you to do that. Some people don’t really consider SEO at all and they end up with a clever, funny, cryptic domain name, and perhaps KnowEm is a good example of that. It’s a domain that is being chosen, I suspect more, for the uniqueness and for the branding side of things. It’s not gonna help that company to rank in Google from a keyword perspective. This is a choice that you need to make if you want to rank in Google. If you want your domain to help you to rank in Google, you want to be choosing a domain that does have some keywords in it that you want to rank for. The words in your domain can help with that. Again, you don’t wanna put SEO first. You don’t wanna put it at the expense of the human and the brand because you could have a domain that’s got all your keywords in it but it might be really long and really hard to remember, really confusing for people. That’s probably not ideal unless you just want search traffic. You wanna get the balance right in this. But it is important to think about SEO, and what impact the words in your domain can have upon that SEO. Digital Photography School was what I wanted to rank for as I began to think about what I wanted to rank for. I wanted Digital Photography in there, particularly I wanted to communicate there were a teaching site. Google is smart enough to know that school means teaching. It helped us with that. I also did a little bit of keyword research and found that the people were searching for the words photography school. I knew there were some search traffic to be gained from having that as well. Think about the words that you wanna be found for. If you can incorporate them in, that can really help as well. Another SEO thing that you might wanna think about is just check whether the domain that you’re about to buy has previously been registered. Sometimes spammers buy out domain names or people who are doing dodgy things on the internet and then they abandon them later once they’ve used them up. That abandoned domain name may have been looked down upon by Google. they may have been banned by Google. They may have been penalized by Google and that may be still hanging onto that domain name. You don’t wanna get a domain name that has been previously used in a bad way because Google is gonna look at that and go, “They’re back again.” Some of that may have an ongoing impact with you. You can buy domains that have been previously used. There may even be some benefits of doing that because they may have been used in a good way and there may be links coming in from other sites to that site. But if it’s been used in a bad way, that can have a bit of a negative thing. Thinking about keywords, a good exercise to do is really just to get a piece of paper and to brainstorm the words that people might be typing into Google to find the site that you’re looking at. You want to be particularly paying attention on choosing for your domain name, the broadest, biggest keywords of your site. You don’t wanna get too nichey with the words. If you are going to write about digital photography, you ideally want digital photography in the words. If you’re talking about blogging, you want ‘blogging’ or ‘blogger’ or ‘blogs’ or that type of word in there. You don’t wanna get too nichey, you don’t want to be bringing in all the keywords that you might ever possibly use because when you write a blog post, those words will start to appear in the extension that’s added to your domain name. If I write on Problogger a post about SEO, problogger.com/tips-seo will naturally come in there if I want it to. Those nichey words will be added to your domain name as you write blog post. You wanna think about the broad words that you wanna be found for. Don’t get too nichey there. You certainly don’t want a domain name like Digital Photography School Portraits, Fashion and Travel. That’s just too long, it breaks all those other rules we’ve got. Google is also gonna think that you’re keyword stuffing as well. Think about the broad words if you can. Is your site about recipes? You probably want the word ‘recipe’ in there. Is the site about fashion? Words like ‘style’ or ‘fashion’ and some of those bigger words will work. You don’t wanna get too nichey with them. The other thing I’d say is don’t get too caught up about the keywords, Google isn’t as fooled as much as it used to be from what I can see. There are factors that Google certainly looks at the words, but it’s not the be all and end all. It is harder and harder to get those keywords into domains these days because there are so many out there. If you can do it, that would be great. I think it’s probably more important to have brandability and thinking about human. You can always get those words into your URLs by writing about those topics in your blog posts. The last perspective to think about is the legal perspective. I wanna state up front, I’m not a lawyer, this is not a legal advice, putting that right out there. You do wanna think about copyright and trademark and particularly be looking at what other people are using already and copying it as I’ve already talked about. It’s gonna cost you a lot of time and money and heartache if you’re sued for infringement later because you started trading as a company with the same name or too similar a name to someone else. Copyright is really important to think about. Check and recheck other blogs, other sites, other company names before you register your domain. Don’t just rush and buy a domain and start blogging under that name. You wanna really be thinking about it. You can also check trademark business names in your local area. If you’re in the US, you can check out who owns what in terms of copyright at copyright.gov or uspto.gov. Patent trademark office might even be worth looking at if you’re in Australia. I’ve got some links for you in the show notes today as well. Just simply doing some Googling and looking on Bloglovin and Facebook and Twitter will give a sense for is there anyone using that very similar names to you. That will really help a lot. Include that last one in thinking about the domain name, because I hate for you to register something that’s great for humans and branding and SEO only to find out that someone’s already done that and you’re gonna be sued. You don’t wanna do that. One more thing that I’ll mention are a few tools that you might wanna check out to help you with the domain name registration process. One I mentioned earlier was KnowEm, which is a great little tool that you just pop in the name of your blogs, you put in ProGlogger, you hit the check it button and it will check with 500 social networks. Other places like the USPTO trademark database to check your brand, and to work out whether other people are using it already. It would check sites like Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, WordPress. It checks Flickr, Delicious. It’s gonna check a lot of different social networks including the main ones like Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, and Medium as well, that’s one tool. The link to that is in today’s show notes. Another one that I have used, and I’ve used this for years now, is Nameboy. It is a domain name generator. You put in the primary word that you wanna rank for, so you might put in ‘blogging’ if you are doing a blog about blogging and then a secondary word, so ‘pro’ or ‘professional’. It basically spits out lots of different options and you can have a couple of different things, you can do ‘allow hyphens’ which we’ve talked about. No, that’s not been the best thing to do, or you can allow rhyming words as well. It will then spit out some words and it will tell you most importantly, this is really important if you are doing a lot of potential things. It will tell you which ones are available. It will give you some options for buying them as well. You pop in your words and it will come out with all the different variations. I just typed in ProBlogger and I can see that problogger is taken, problogger.com is taken, problogger.net is taken, problogger.org is taken, problogger.info is taken, all the probloggers are taken but it comes out with other words, pro@home.info is available or bloggepro is available, which probably you wouldn’t want because it’s not that memorable. But it gives you some different options. It looks at different words that you might want to do, so prosomething is available if you wanted that. Have a play with that. It is hard to find them these days ,but it’ll give you some options there. It also gives you the ones that are up for auction as well. It will give you an idea of what price you might need to pay for some of those. That was Nameboy and KnowEm. The other one I would just say in terms of where to register, there are plenty of places you can register domains today. I’ve always done it through GoDaddy, I know some people love GoDaddy, some people don’t. It’s just where I do it and I keep all of mine, I’ve got a lot of domains that I bought over the years that I haven’t actually used, probably need to do a bit of a cleanse there. I like to just have them under one place, I don’t want to be buying domains in lots of different places. There are other options out there. You can find those links in today’s show notes. The last thing I’ll say is what I’ve said is not hard and fast, apart from that legal one, I think that’s hard and fast. I’ve made some bad decisions in this, I have digital-photography- I can’t even say it because I’ve got hyphens in it. I’ve made a mistake but that site gets four million people a month to it. It’s done okay because the content is good and because I’ve worked harder building community and I’ve worked harder building the brand. Whilst it’s not a perfect domain, I’ve worked harder on other things. It’s the other things that are really gonna be the key to your success, it’s not your domain name. It’s not going to be the single key, it’s one of the things that’s gonna help you. You may have made a mistake already, that’s okay as long as it’s not an illegal mistake. But do pay attention to it if can. The other thing I’ll say is all the things I’ve talked about, you’re never gonna get something that’s perfect on all fronts. You do need to make some compromises there. Occasionally you might find something that’s great for humans, branding, SEO and legal. Most cases, you’re probably gonna find something that’s better for branding and not so great for SEO, or maybe it’s great for SEO but it’s not so good for the human. You gotta make some compromises around that. Personally if I was making choices today, I’d be thinking about the human and branding more so than SEO. I think SEO is great to think about if you can, but it can be worked on in terms of the blog post that you do and choosing keywords in your blog titles, that type of thing. There’s more to your blog’s success or failure than the domain names, but make a wise choice as you do. Hopefully some of what I’ve talked about today is gonna help you in that regard. Today’s show notes are over at problogger.com/podcast/217. You can find the links there for some of those legal things, those legal checks that you might wanna do. You’ll also find the original article that Stacey Roberts wrote that I based today’s podcast on. Also, the thing I would say is if you are starting a blog or you’re thinking about starting a blog, we’ve got a resource coming out for you in the coming month. It’ll probably come out late December, early January actually. It’s gonna walk you through how to start a blog and it’s gonna be more than anything we’ve ever done before. It’s actually gonna walk you through in great detail. What I’ve talked about today is actually gonna be part of that little course we’re putting together. If you are thinking of starting a blog early next year for 2018, head to our show notes today and subscribe to our newsletter. We will notify you when that resource is ready late this year, early next year. I really look forward to launching that because it’s gonna be a resource, it’s gonna help a lot of people. If you think you’re starting a blog, head over to the problogger.com/podcast/217 and subscribe. There’ll be an option there for you to subscribe to the newsletter, and we will let you know as soon as that course is ready to go. It’s free, free course, completely free. I look forward to launching that, that’s bit of a teaser of what’s coming on Problogger. Hopefully this helps you. I’d love to hear any other things that you would add to the advice if you’ve already started a blog, you can head to the show notes and add a comment, give your own advice there, or you can do it over in the Problogger Community Facebook Group. Thanks for listening. I’ll be back next week in Episode 218 of the Problogger podcast. Have a great week. How did you go with today’s episode? Enjoy this podcast? Sign up to our ProBloggerPLUS newsletter to get notified of all new tutorials and podcasts.

How and Why You Should Create Style Guides for Your Blog In today’s episode, I talk about style guides for blogs – why they’re important, and what elements you should include in yours. Links and Resources for How to Create a Style Guide for Your Blog AP Stylebook The Chicago Manual of Style Virtual Tickets Facebook group Further Reading and Listening for How to Create a Style Guide for Your Blog 10 Writing Tips to Help You Sound More Human How and Why to Create a Blog Style Guide How to Create a Content Style Guide to Improve Your Blog’s Quality How to Create a Writing Style Guide Built for the Web Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Hi there. Welcome to Episode 216 of the ProBlogger Podcast. My name is Darren Rowse and I’m the blogger behind problogger.com – a blog, podcast, event, job board, and a series of ebooks all designed to help you as a blogger to start a great blog, to grow your audience, and to build some profit around that blog. You can learn more about ProBlogger over at problogger.com. Now I’m just back from Dallas. I’ve had a few weeks off from the podcast and it’s been great to get some feedback from some of you that you missed the podcast over the last few weeks. I’m sorry for the break, but I hope you had a little bit of fun digging around in our archives. As I’ve said, just back from Dallas and we had an amazing time in Dallas. I was at the FinCon Conference where I did the opening keynote and had an absolute ball. I think there was around 1800 financial bloggers, real estate bloggers there. Really great conference, very good community. And before FinCon, of course, we ran the Success Incubator, a little event that we had as well. We had about 80 or so ProBlogger listeners and some attendees from the previous digital collab events and it was fantastic. We had this full day of training, we started about 8:30, 9:00 in the morning  and went through to about 9:30 at night. It was a big day and that was packed with teaching. We had Pat Flynn, Kim Garst, Andrea Vahl, we had Rachel Miller, Kelly Snyder, a variety of other bloggers as well. The feedback we had on that day of teaching was fantastic. People loved how intense it was, the fact that we packed in so much information. That was great. And then we had half a day of masterminding the next day, which I always love – that opportunity to sit around the table with bloggers and online entrepreneurs and brainstorm. You can still pick up virtual tickets for that event, if you go to problogger.com/success. I think they’re US$127 and that gets you the first day, that first full day of teaching. I think it’s about eight hours of teaching and you get the slides as well. That price will go up. It’s not an early bird one because it’s now after the event, but it will go up in the coming days as well. You get some teachings there on live video creation from Kim Garst, Pat Fynn’s teaching on creating an editorial calendar, promotional calendar for your business, you get some training on Facebook advertising, using challenges to grow your blog, how to sell courses, Steve Chu did an amazing session which I picked up so much information on how he promotes his courses using webinars and Facebook advertising. It’s really practical teaching, and again you can check out the agenda there at problogger.com/success. On to today’s episode. Today I want to talk about style guides – how to create them for your blog, and why you should create them for you blog as well. Style guides in my opinion are one way that you can really lift a good blog to a great blog by building more consistency across your content, across from one blog post to another. You can grab today’s show notes with the full transcription of this episode at problogger.com/podcast/216. Lastly, I should say on our events, stay tuned for news of future events both in Australia and hopefully in the US. We’ll hopefully have some news for you on that in the coming weeks and even months as we begin to plan 2018. Thanks for listening and let’s get onto today’s show. Today we’re talking about style guides. I want to talk about why you need them, and also how to create one. I want to give you some practical things that you can include in your style guide for your blog. Now, what is a style guide? Really, as I’ve talked to different bloggers, they mean different things to different people. Some people, a style guide is purely about the writing on your blog. It could be the writing style guide. Other bloggers include a lot more, they will include things like how to use graphics and how the blog should look in terms of colors and the brand. Really, I guess it could be whatever it is for you. But the main reason you want a style guide for your blog is to build consistency in your blog. Most blogs, if you dig around in them, you begin to see inconsistencies, and this naturally happens. I look back on the early days of ProBlogger and I look at the first posts I wrote and they were all text, there was no images in them at all. That’s a big change that’s happened in blogging. I started blogging in 2002, 2004 for ProBlogger, of course things have changed. The style of my writing has probably matured in that time. There’s going to be some inconsistencies through your archives, but bloggers run into trouble when one blog post that you write today is different in style and in how it looks to tomorrow’s blog post. That’s the kind of inconsistencies that many blogs have without even knowing it, and a style guide can really help a lot. Something that really can help your readers to feel like they’re reading a unified publication. If you open a magazine, the magazine is designed in way the reader feels even though there is different articles, that they belong next to each other. That’s the type of thing that you want to be doing in your blog post as well. To state it most simply, a style guide is where you put into writing the guidelines for how you want your blog to be written and presented. And the reason you want to do it is to bring this consistency. This is the type of thing that you’ve probably already got without even knowing it. You’ve probably got a style guide in your mind. Most bloggers have one in their mind, and it’s just because most blogs start out being written by one person. This is why many of us don’t actually feel like we need a style guide in the early days because we think that we’re consistent. We think that if I’m the only one writing this blog, then it’s going to be consistent from blog post to the next blog post. But the reality is if you dig around in your archives, and I challenge you to do this, you’ll begin to spot inconsistencies. I think it’s really important to bed down the style that you want into writing, to actually bed it down because you’ll begin to see these inconsistencies in your own writing. Particularly if you want to add new writers into your blog, whether they’re just one-off guest posters of whether you want to bring on a regular writer, this is where a style guide really becomes even more useful as well. The trouble I see with many blogs is you look through the archives and you can see these inconsistencies. The inconsistencies that you want to be looking for on your blog as you look through your archives are the voice of your writing. What style do you use? There’s a natural exploration of different voices that will happen on many blogs, but generally over time you want to become a bit more consistent with the voice that you use. Are you writing in the first person? Are you conversational when you’re writing? Are you writing for beginners, or are you writing for a more advanced audience? As I say, some variation in this is fine and is natural. But as your blog progresses, you’ll probably want to stick to one voice more and more. Other areas of inconsistency, capitalization of words in headlines, for example, and I see this all the time. You see one blog post that all the main words are capitalized and then you look at the next blogpost and it’s just the first letter of the headline is capitalized and the rest of it is in lowercase. That may not really irk you, but I bet there are some of you readers who are wondering what’s going on there and they notice that type of thing even if you don’t. Grammatical rules. For example, when I write ProBlogger, I capitalize P and B, ProBlogger. Even though I present it as one word. As long as that’s consistent, that’s fine. That becomes part of your brand. You might have those type of things as well. On Digital Photography School, we call that blog dPS, the D is generally lowercase and the P and the S are capitals and that becomes part of the brand. But we want to be consistent in that way. It sort of sets us apart I guess in some ways from other people who have used dPS and those other sites out there who do. Another word that we use a lot both on ProBLogger and on Digital Photography School is ‘ebook’. Ebook is presented in all kinds of different ways on the web. Some people do a little lowercase e and then uppercase B and then present as one word. Other people hyphenate and have it lowercase. Other people just do it lowercase the whole word. Having consistency in that way is important. I see some bloggers who use that word ebook and they will capitalize it differently even within the one article. Again, it doesn’t really annoy me that much, but I know there would be other people who would be having conniptions about that. Use of images and graphics is another one. This is something I know I’m guilty of from time to time – having consistency in the way you use images. If you put typeface on your words, words on your images, do you have consistency in the fonts you use, the colors that you use, the way you use headlines, the way you use lists and blockquotes, and the way you spell words as well. Do you use a US spelling, American spelling, or do you use a British spelling? This really comes into play when you’ve got more than one author as well. All of these things can present inconsistencies. Whilst you might look at them all individually and just say they’re small things, they add up. And generally over time they can really become a big thing. Most single author blogs, you’ll find that most of you will probably have a certain amount of consistency because you write the way you write. You will generally, from post to post, have some consistency. But even single author blogs do change over time. It really does come into play when you have more than one author on your blog. For example, on Digital Photography School we have a lot of writers. We have about 40 writers, we publish 14 articles a week. There’s a lot of opportunity there for inconsistency because our writers come from across the world, even just on the spelling front. We’ve got writers who come from America, we’ve got writers who come from England, writers who come from Australia, and there’s different spelling of words. Then we’ve got readers who come from all of those places as well. To make a decision upfront that we are going to use the American spelling because that’s where most of our readers come from and most of our authors as well, brings some consistency to that. Whilst it’s not going to suit all of our readers, at least our readers will see that we’re consistent in that. When you’ve got 14 posts a week from 14 different authors, there’s incredible potential for a very messy looking blog, in terms of the writing but also how things are presented. Style guides do become more important as you add more people into your blog but I think they’re still important even if you’re a single writer, single author blogger, because you’ll find naturally over time that you’ll change some of your style as well. So how do you create this simple style guide for your blog? What should you include? How detailed should it be? As I mentioned earlier, it’s going to vary a lot from blog to blog. I know some bloggers for instance who have a style guide and they keep it purely to writing – how the writing on the blog should appear. Whilst other bloggers include more broader guidelines like what brand colors should be used. Some people have two style guides for the two different things. I have a brand style guide and a writing style guide. I think it’s okay to merge those things a little bit together. And so what I want to present to you today is a simplified one. I want to give you four or five different areas that you want to make some decisions about and create a little document. And I’m thinking here that you could create a document that’s maybe one to two pages long. You don’t need anything more detailed than that to start with. You will find though over time that you can evolve this document. And I think it should be a living document because you will find over time that there will be more opportunity to add new things in, partly because you might start using different technologies or you might add in different types of content. You might add in some video over time, or there’ll be new opportunities to add in new authors who will bring up different things for you. This is a living document but what I want to give you are some things to include at the beginning of the creation of this. Four or so things to include. The first one is a short description of your audience. I think who is reading your blog really should be the basis for most of the decisions you are making regarding content and what is in this style guide. Ideally, what you want to create is some kind of avatar or persona or reader profile for your blog. I talked about this in Episode 33 where I actually talked through how to create an avatar for your blog and we actually did an article on ProBlogger recently that gave you a template for creating an avatar for new blogs. I think that’s a useful exercise to do. You may not want to include that full avatar in your writing style guide, but at least referring to it and including a sentence or two about who you are writing for, because ultimately that should be informing all the decisions that you make. Include a sentence or two about who is reading your blog, and maybe refer to the avatar if you’ve done that exercise. That’s point number one. Number two is to, again, just in a few sentences, describe the voice that you want your content to be written in, or the tone. How do you want your content to sound or come across to your readers. Even if you just brainstorm a few words that would describe the type of content that you want to create. For example, do you want your content to be conversational? Or do you want it to be authoritative? or do you want it to be humorous? Do you want it to be sophisticated, educational, friendly, irreverent, comprehensive? These words will begin to help you and any other writers you may bring on to understand the tone that you want, the voice that you want in your content. Over time, you’re probably going to say, “I want all of those types of content in my blog.” And that’s totally fine on a blog. But generally you’ll want to keep some consistency on it, and over time you’ll want more and more of your content to fit into a certain style. That’s going to help your readers to engage with you and to build a relationship with you, and to learn from you more as well. So a few sentences there on your voice. If you want to learn a little bit more about developing your voice, you might want to go back and listen to episode 166 of the ProBlogger podcast where I give you 15 types of voices that you can write in. But even just doing that brainstorm of a few words that will describe the voice that you want to write in can be useful as well. There’s no reason why you can’t change that later. This is a starting point for you. Number one was to describe your audience. Number two is to describe the voice – the tone of your writing. Number three we want to get a little bit more into the nitty gritty of things and to talk about spelling and grammar, which I know some of you are squirming about and I’m one of those people. It doesn’t come naturally to me (I’m not a details person), but I think it’s important to address this. Most larger publications, most media would adopt the spelling and grammatical guidelines of an external style guide. There actually are… whole style guides have been written. One very common one is the AP Stylebook. I’ll link to this in the show notes today. There’s another one called the Chicago Manual Of Style. Again, I’ll link to that today. Both of these you can buy. I think the AP Stylebook for example is pretty affordable. I think it’s US$22.95 for the print edition, and I think there’s an online version of it as well which is about $25. It may be that you want to get that. And basically, as you look through them, they’re very extensive outlines of all the rules of grammar and spelling that you might come across. Many media will just say we adopt the AP Stylebook or we adopt the Chicago Manual Of Style and they give all their writers access to these books so that if there’s ever a question of what they should be including or how they should be spelling a word or how they should be using grammar, they can just refer to that. This may be overkill if you are just a single author blog. Or you may actually want to do that if that’s something for you. If it’s overkill for you, all you really need in this section is to address some of these types of things. Firstly, spelling. Do you adopt American or British spelling, and this will probably be determined by who you are and who you author and who your readers are as well. I’m an Australian, so if I was writing for an Australian readership, I’ll probably adopt the British spelling because that’s the way Aussies tend to go. But I have predominantly US readers and so I have adopted the American spelling, even though it doesn’t come naturally for me. It’s something that I do need to edit myself on. Other things that you might want to include in the spelling and grammar section of your style guide are things around punctuation and capitalization. For example, the use of commas. I’m not going to go into the debates around the use of commas. This is perhaps a discussion for another day. There are people who get very fired up about commas and I don’t really want to get into that today. But as long as you’ve got a consistent use of commas, that’s important. The use of capitalization in headlines. The use of exclamation marks. I know some bloggers hate exclamation marks and they don’t allow them on their blogs. You may choose to do something else. Anything around punctuation, capitalization should be included. The use of numbers. Will you use numerals or will you spell them out? That may be something that you want to include in this section. Particularly pay attention to any regularly used troublesome words. Words like ebook, for example, where there can be a lot of inconsistencies. If you’re using the word ebook or if you have a brand name like ProBlogger where you capitalize the P and the B, you want to include that type of thing in this section as well. You might also want to include guidelines around the use of acronyms, particularly if you’re in a niche or a topic where acronyms are used a lot. How are you going to introduce an acronym in an article? For example, you may choose to explain the acronym when you first use it in an article. If it was AOL, I know it’s a bit of an old-fashioned one, the first time you use that acronym in the article you may want to have in brackets what that means and actually spell out the words, and then from then on just use the acronym. These are the types of things that you can include into your spelling and grammar section of your style guide. The fourth section that I’ll include you to think about is more about how you want your content to look, and some other factors as well. And this I’ve just kind of lumped into an other style guidelines section. Let’s talk about images in your article. How many should your article have? For example, on ProBlogger we always want an image. On Digital Photography School we always want an image. That is part of our style guide – we have to have an image. And so anyone writing for us has to help us find that image. Should there be an image? How many images are okay? You might want to have a limit on how many images. It’s up to you. How should those images be captioned? Do you want captions on every image? Only where the image requires a caption? And also how do you want to attribute the photographers of those images? Do you want to do that in the caption, or do you want to do it somewhere else in the article? These are the types of things that you might want to include into your style guide. How big should the images be? How many pixels? How they should be aligned? Do you want them to be full width? Do you want them to be aligned left, to be aligned right? Where can people source them? You may even want to include which stock library you use, and give details there for people. Also, the use of typeface in images. If you’re doing graphic overlays, what fonts should be used? What colors should be used? These are things that can really be mixed up a lot, and you can end up with a very messy looking blog because you’ve got lots of inconsistencies there. Do you want your logo to be included in those text overlays? These are the type of things that will really have a big impact upon the visualization of your content and how people see your content, and what they feel about it as a result. You might want to also include in there that you want very dark images or you want very light, washed out kind of images. Those types of stylistic considerations may come into play there as well. Other things that you might want to include are around your headlines or titles. For example, how long do you want them to be? Do you have rules around the length of them? Some people do that for SEO considerations – they don’t want long headlines. Do you want headlines that are more keyword rich, more descriptive, or do you want more curiosity, clickbaity-type headlines? These are the types of things you might want to include. The length of paragraphs might be something? Do you want short paragraphs. Are you okay with longer paragraphs? I know a couple of bloggers who actually have word limits or how many lines the paragraph should take up because they don’t want their paragraphs to be too long. The use of lists. Do you require numbers or bullets, or are you okay with either? The use of headings or subheadings. Which H tags should you use? This is really useful for anyone who’s coming onto your blog. Most people know how to use a H tag, but you may have some rules around what order they should be in or how many H2 tags or how many H3 tags you might want to have. It’s getting a little bit technical here. But these are the types of questions that some of your authors will have over time. You might want to include things around how to use bold or italics or underline or strikethrough. I personally don’t like strikethrough in my text on my blog. Underlining is something I don’t generally do. But bold and italics we allow for some emphasis. But within reason – we don’t want every third word being bold or in italics. The use of block quotes. How to cite sources. Do you want to use quotes? Do you want to put all quotes in block quotes? Also guidelines around linking as well. Do you want to have nofollow tags on your links, or only when they’re paid, sponsorship type things? All of these questions it’s important to include in there so that as a writer is creating content, they can be having their questions answered without having to keep coming back to you all the time. It’s going to cut down the work that you have to do in editing the content, but also it’s going to speed up their writing process as well. You might want to include word count limits if you want all articles to be over 500 words. Or maybe you want all articles to be over 2000 words. Again, it’s going to help to bring some consistency to your content. Embeddable content. Do you allow people to embed content – YouTube videos or Vimeo videos or even social media? Do you require that type of thing? I know some bloggers that every post they have, they want to have some embeddable content. Again, all of these things can be factors for you. You may look at this list that I’ve created (and you’ll be able to see it all in the show notes today) and you may say, “This is overkill. I don’t need to go into this detail”. But over time you probably will find that you will include most of these things, particularly if you’re adding new authors because you’ll find authors will bring their own style and some of it will clash with what you just assume everyone will want to do as well. Other things that you might want to include in your style guide are things that you want your authors to do after they’ve written their post. For example, if you have a plugin like Yoast (the SEO plugin), if you’ve got that you’ll be familiar with some of the additional fields that are in the backend of your WordPress. For example, you have the ability to write a particular title and description just for Facebook or just for Twitter. You may want to do that yourself, or you might want to ask your authors to do that as well. If there’s anything in there like click-to-tweet plugins, you might want to include those. Do you want the author to do that? In your style guide you might want to include a little checklist of other things that you want people to do as well. You might also want to get your authors to find further reading from your archives and link to those. You might want to have some guidelines around choosing categories or tags, or anything else that you might want to do around SEO. Do you want them to use certain keywords in a certain number of times? And also some guidelines around author bios as well. All of these are factors that you might want to include in your style guide. The thing I would say to you is if you’re listening to this and think this is just overkill, that’s okay. You can start with a very simple one. You might just want to have in yours your audience, who they are, the voice that you’ve got, the spelling that you use, and that may be enough for the early days and then you can begin to add in extra things as you think of them, as you come up with potential inconsistencies in your blog. A really simple exercise that you might want to try is just to go back through your archives and dig back to this time last year if you’ve been blogging for a while, and look at some of the article’s that you’ve got in your archives and just look for those inconsistencies. Maybe randomly choose ten of your posts and look back through them. Pay attention to the images, the way you’ve used images. Pay attention to headlines. Pay attention to the introductions or the conclusions of your articles. You’ll begin to see over time that things in your archives grate on you, things in your archives you’ll cringe at a little bit, And they will be signals to you that they’re things that you might want to put into your style guide that you don’t want people to do as they write for your blog. Create this style guide and put it in a place which you can easily refer back to yourself and as you bring on authors. Build it into your orientation for new authors as well. On Digital Photography School, we’ve now got a fairly comprehensive style guide, but it also includes other things that we want our authors to know. We created almost like a guidebook that we give to any new author who comes on, and it answers things like style guides but also shows them how to submit posts to be edited, and how to log in and how to set up their author bio, these types of things as well. We’ve actually created a little orientation system that our editors are able to walk a new writer through. You want your style guide to be easy to refer to, easy to edit. As I said it right upfront, you want it to be a living document. Involve your writers. If you do have a team, involve them in the creation of the style guide as well, and make note of any question they ask you. As a new author that comes on, any question they ask you is probably a question that someone else is going to ask you later on. So include the answers in your style guide in that orientation book as well. It does take a little bit of work to setup a style guide. But it’s the type of thing that is going to improve your content over time. It’s going to reduce the tension and the clashes that your readers have with your content as well over time. There are certain segments of your readership who will notice this type of thing, and if you can remove these little barriers for them engaging with your content, it’s going to have a massive impact over time. And it’s going to help you to come across as a much more professional publication as well. So work hard on setting it up, and then I guess the other part of it is work hard on being consistent and actually adopting the style that you set down as well. Thanks for listening, I’ve got today’s show notes over at problogger.com/podcast/216, and I’ve also included today in the show notes some further reading and some further listening. I actually did a podcast with Beth Dunn a little while ago on how to write in a more human-like way, how to sound more human in your writing. We talked a little bit in that episode about style guides. Go and listen to that one as well. Also, there’s three articles there that have been written by the team at Canva, another one by the team at Buffer, and another by the team at HubSpot which really do give you some really good ideas for how to create a style guide and some of them even have templates that you can fill in as well. Check out the podcast show notes today at probloger.com/podcast/216 for that further reading, and for a summary of what I’ve talked about today. Thanks so much for listening, I’d love to hear what you think about today’s episode. You can leave a comment on the show notes or check us out on Facebook, the ProBlogger Community Group and there’ll be a link there where you can share your comments on today’s episode as well if you’ve got any questions or other suggestions to add. Thanks for listening and I look forward to chatting with you next week in Episode 217 of the ProBlogger podcast. How did you go with today’s episode? Enjoy this podcast? Sign up to our ProBloggerPLUS newsletter to get notified of all new tutorials and podcasts.

Ways You Can Simplify Your Business and Increase Your Blogging Profitability Today, I want to share two big lessons I learned this year at our Australian ProBlogger events. They were lessons I think apply to many aspects of blogging and online business. It’s all about simplifying what you do while making more profit. I’m heading to Dallas for our Success Incubator event and to speak at FinCon in a few days time.  So I’ll be taking a couple of weeks off the podcast to travel and focus on the event attendees as much as possible. In the meantime, dig into the archives. There are now 215 to choose from. Recommended Further Listening for the Next Couple of Weeks: Episode 137 – 7 Days to Finding Your Blogging Groove Join our Facebook group Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Hi there. My name is Darren Rowse. Welcome to Episode 215 of the ProBlogger Podcast. ProBlogger is a blog, a podcast, event, job board, and a series of ebooks all designed to help you as a blogger to grow a profitable blog. You can learn more about ProBlogger over at problogger.com. Now in today’s lesson, I want to share two big things that I learned at our Australian ProBlogger events this year. They were lessons that really apply to business as a whole, but I think they’re particularly applied to many aspects of blogging and online business. I guess really the theme of today’s show is to think about simplifying what you do whilst also increasing your profit because both of the lessons that I’m going to talk about today do exactly that; simplifying what you do, taking some of the complexity out of what you do, but also increasing profit. Now before I get into the lessons today, I just want to share I’m heading off to Dallas later this week for two events, the Success Incubator event, the ProBlogger event that we’re running in Dallas, and also to speak at FinCon. I’m doing the keynote there. I’ll be taking off to Dallas in a couple of weeks time. I’m looking forward to meeting many of you at those events. There still are a few tickets left for the Success Incubator event, it’s a one and a half day event with people like Pat Flynn and Kim Garst and Rachel Miller who many of you will be familiar with from previous episodes of this podcast. You can go to problogger.com/success to get any last tickets that may still be available. There’s also a virtual pass there which is pretty affordable. You get plenty of teaching with that. I’m heading off to that event in a few days time and while I’m away, I am going to be pressing pause on this podcast. Just wanted to let you know that for the next couple of weeks, there won’t be episodes, highly unlikely that there will be episodes. I may chime in and suggest some previous ones to listen to, but there’s plenty in the archives to dig back into. I will suggest a few episodes at the end of today’s show that you might find useful, particularly practical episodes that we’ve done in the past. Dig around in the archives and I look forward to getting back with you late in October, probably early November. You can get all of the details of our events and I will link to all the podcasts that I recommend you dig back into over on our show notes today at problogger.com/podcast/215. Okay, so let’s get into today’s show. The lessons I learned this year were from our event. As I’ve thought about it, I’ve realized that these are lessons that I’ve been learning over the year in other areas as well, and I’ll touch on some of those towards the end. But just to give you a little bit of the backstory, the ProBlogger event, for those of you who haven’t been, we’ve been running it since about 2010. This makes it our seventh year of running the event. Since we ran the first event back in 2010, the event has evolved a lot. And I’ve told the story of that evolution in previous episodes. Back in that first event, it was a very simple event. It was one day, one stream, so we were all in the room all day. I think it was 120 or so people there. We had five or six speakers and really it was very simple. We didn’t add in extra parties, it was just hastily organized and as a result very simple. Over the years, it evolved from something very simple into something that got quite complicated. We were getting, in our biggest year, I think up towards 700 attendees and speakers at the event, so it was getting quite large. But it also had lots of moving parts. We added in sponsors, we did two days instead of one day, then we added in an extra half a day before it, and some extra stuff at the end. We had five tracks, five different rooms of sessions running multiple at that same time. We had 40 or so speakers one year. It was very complicated. It was great on many levels. Every year, our attendees told us that they loved it and it was the best event that we’d ever run. As a result of that, we felt driven, or I felt driven, to keep adding more and more to it. I’m a people pleaser. I just wanted to keep making it the best event ever, I wanted to make it more impressive, more valuable to people. So we added more sessions, we added parties, we added workshops, we added more speakers. we added teepees one year, which we had our party in. I drove in on a Segway one year. It got more and more complicated. We had more and more bells and whistles, more and more sparkle. But all of this extra stuff came at an expense. It was beginning to take over my life, it was beginning to take over my business. The amount of time and energy that we were putting into this event was enormous, it was taking 12 months to plan. In fact, some years we were thinking about the next year’s event before we had even done this year’s event, so it was taking longer than a year. The other factor was that whilst it was making some profit, the amount of time that we were putting in versus the profit that was coming out, it really didn’t compare. It was profitable on paper but in terms of the amount of effort we were putting in, it wasn’t particularly profitable. And this was partly because we weren’t… well I felt we weren’t able to charge as much as some other conferences. Many of our attendees were new to blogging, or they were mums and dads doing their blogs on the side while they’re looking after kids. And with travel to get to the event, it was a big ask. And so I felt really like I wanted to keep it as affordable as possible. And so the model for the event, in terms of the business model, was that we actually charged less for the tickets than it cost us to put the event on. And we subsidized the tickets and took our profit out of getting sponsors into the event. Now this worked really well some years where we were able to land some big sponsors and we got some great sponsors who added a lot of value and paid us to access our audience. But other years, it was harder to get those sponsors. And so it was a bit of an up and down rollercoaster ride. And it was a lot of work working with sponsors at that kind of level. That was an area where we’re putting in enormous amounts of work and it was quite stressful as well. The event was dominating our time, it wasn’t really the most profitable thing that we do, and we realized also that it was only really serving a small segment of our audience being an event for Australians whilst our audience is very global. And we realized that there was so many of you listening to this podcast, it just wasn’t feasible for you to get to our event, even though a few did fly in from overseas. And so after 2016’s event, I did a lot of soul searching, my team did a lot of soul searching, and we really considered carefully how we moved forward with the event. I realized that we just couldn’t keep going in the direction that we were going by adding more and more value in. To be honest, I very nearly pulled the plug on the events. I almost stopped doing events altogether. But at the same time I had this little nagging feeling that events were also one of the best things that I did. I enjoyed it incredibly and I could see that it was having a big impact upon the people who were coming. So rather than giving up on doing the ProBlogger event, I decided we needed to evolve what we do as an event. And to do that, we really needed to simplify what we were doing and get back to the basics. I guess return to what we did at that very first event. We began to dream of a simpler event. The simpler event that we came up with, we sat as a team and really wrestled with this, but we came up with let’s go back to a single day event, let’s go back to a single stream event, everyone in the one room. Let’s strip back those 40 or 50 sessions that we had available to attendees, let’s just strip it back to five or six core sessions on the core things that ProBlogger stands for. In those 40 or so sessions that we were running, we were doing really interesting stuff but it wasn’t our core teaching. Let’s strip back having sponsors, and add in some extra profitability through other means – through decreasing our expenses but also building in a little bit more in terms of what we were charging as well to people. So that’s what we did. We designed this event. It was significantly less expensive to run because we only had six speakers instead of 40. We weren’t flying in 40 or so speakers and putting them up in hotel rooms. We had a smaller venue because we only needed one room rather than a hotel with lots of different rooms. Really, it cut down our cost in terms of things like audio and video and all of that type of thing. No more teepees, no more Segway. We really pulled back in many regards. We simplified things and we did it for our own benefit, really, in terms of organizing the event. But it had some unexpected benefits which I’ll talk about in a moment. This new format of event felt right. But it also felt risky. I lost a lot of sleep in the lead-up to putting the tickets on sale and running the event. My worry was that our past attendees might feel like they were missing out on some of what we previously offered because we were pulling things out. I was pretty stressed about doing that. But at the same time I felt it was going to allow us to spend more time on other projects, it was going to be a more sustainable model, and it was something I needed to do. There were two other things that we tried as part of what we were doing as well, which I’ll briefly touch on. Firstly, we wondered when we saw this simple event whether we’d designed something that could be run and reproduced in different places. We often talk on ProBlogger about repurposing your content, and I began to wonder what can we do with this event. Could we repurpose this event? It was a simple event where we had almost built a product, a formula for an event. ‘Could we do the event more than once?’ was an idea that I came up with. We began to think about could we do it one on one weekend, one on another weekend in different cities to make it more accessible to our attendees, to reduce some of their expense, which might get more people there. We decided to run it over two consecutive weekends, we did it in Brisbane and in Melbourne here in Australia, and really had the idea that maybe we could even reproduce the event in more places as well, maybe even in other countries in future years. The last big change that we did this year was to offer masterminds – an extra day for those who wanted to have a more intimate, higher-level, more personal, more interactive experience. A smaller group, we knew that it wouldn’t appeal to the large percentage of our audience, but could we offer this higher-value event on top of a premium experience for our attendees. This is something we’d actually been asked for for years, ever since the first year I ran the event. It was always something that I was used to because I knew I’d have to significantly raise the price and charge a lot more to be able to run that type of event. It would take quite a bit more expense of having speakers who are there to really do that one on-one-stuff. I decided, ‘Okay, I’ve been asked for this, the demand’s there, maybe we need to give it a go’. And we decided to add the mastermind day into both of the cities. So day one was everyone all in together, that cheaper event, single stream, larger event, less personal but still valuable. Then, the mastermind event for day two, more intimate. This all felt really risky to me. I worried a lot. I lost some sleep in the lead-up to it all. But the results were fantastic, and I really am grateful that I took that leap and that my team went with me with this as well. The events were a few months ago now. But it was one of the best things that we’ve done over the last year. The planning of the events were so much simpler – we designed the content very quickly, we locked in our speakers very quickly, we booked venues very quickly, we released the tickets and got it all out there very quickly. Not having the sponsors cut down a massive amount of work. Preparing for the event was a lot less work, and it enabled us to then move onto other things within the business. Running the event was so much simpler. We came away from the first event nowhere near as tired. Also, having felt like we were able to really pay a lot more attention to our attendees. It took a much smaller team to run the event and we were more present with that audience. The only tough part of the event really was on a more personal note. Unfortunately my father-in-law passed away the day before that first event which was a tough time for the family. And it was I guess a bit of an emotional rollercoaster for me personally. I’m not sure how I would’ve gotten through the event if it had been a bigger, previous event. Having that event, a simpler event, certainly took a less toll upon me. Despite that setback and that tough part of the event, on a personal level, the event was much more of a pleasure to run if I can say that in the midst of a tough time. Attendees’ feedback was really positive. We did get some of our previous attendees who mentioned in their feedback that they definitely missed some of the sparkle of previous years, but over half of our attendees were actually first timers. They had nothing to compare it to, I guess. I was worried that by stripping back the amount of choice of our sessions, going from 40 or so sessions to six, I was worried that maybe there would be complaints about that. Interestingly, even amongst our previous attendees, the overwhelming feedback was that people actually liked having to make fewer choices. This was a massive lesson for me. We actually simplified the event for our benefit as a business but it actually benefitted our attendees. What we realized is that in previous events, we’d actually created an event that for some of our audience was quite stressful to attend, it was quite overwhelming and they really enjoyed the stripped back, simplified event. I think this is a big lesson and this is something I’ll talk about in a moment or two as well. I lost count of the amount of people who told me they enjoyed the simple event. Whilst it certainly didn’t suit everyone, it worked very well. I guess the big lesson for me was for years I felt like I needed to add more and more and more into the event, but in this case I actually learned that less is more. Whilst we made the event simpler for our own benefit, it really benefitted that audience. They were less stressed out. On reflection, I think maybe we stripped things back a little bit too much and we would probably add a little bit more in, a little bit of that sparkle back in over in the coming years if we continue to go forward with this event. But I think we are on the right track. The other two changes that I mentioned went really well as well. Creating an event format that could be reproduced or repurposed in different cities worked well. I’m not sure whether we’ll continue to do that or not in future years, but it certainly taught me that an event can be repurposed. Creating a simple structure that can be repurposed is something that we could do again. Lastly, the masterminds. They went off. Wow, they were my highlight personally. They sold out and so there was demand there even at that significantly higher price. Secondly, they ran really well. The overwhelming feedback from mastermind attendees was really positive. We saw people taking action at the event that paid for what they paid to attend the event. There were people at the event who were creating courses and products. That week later, they had already made more than what they paid to attend the event. People took action, and that was probably the best thing for me. But they loved their intimacy, access to speakers, the networking, and we’ll definitely be doing more masterminds in future. And I personally loved having that more intimate experience with attendees as well. Again, we’ll evolve masterminds, but it was a big lesson for me. The two big lessons, and these are two lessons that if you’re running events will apply, but I think these also really apply to blogging. I’ll really tie them back to blogging in each case. The first lesson, simple is good, less is more. Sometimes, as product creators, as bloggers, we feel compelled to add and add and add when it comes to value. And ‘value’ I put in italics, I guess. We feel like we want to add in more value, we want to add in more features, we want to add in more bonuses in the products we create and what we do as bloggers. And we do it because we genuinely want to provide as much value as possible. We think it will benefit our readers to add in more. We think it will also make our products more attractive people if there’s more features, if there’s more bells and whistles. Maybe people will be more attracted to what we do. But in doing that, sometimes by adding in extra, we create complexity. Our products can end up feeling overwhelming. They can also end up feeling unfocused, and this is one of the things I realized about our event. Our first event was about how to make money blogging. But we’d actually built an event that was more about how to take photos, how to do social media, and some of these extraneous things which are important as bloggers, but really we’d lost some of that focus by adding in and adding in and adding in. By adding in the extra, we’d actually created something that was stressing out some of our attendees as well. Sometimes, we end up putting out more and more and more and we overwhelm, we create complicated products, and we create complicated blogs. But also, we are putting in more time and expense as well, that really isn’t needed. The big question I came out of this event with was, ‘What else can I strip out of what I do? What other areas in my business have become complicated?’ It’s very easy for a business to evolve and become complicated in many different areas. I’ll talk about some of those in a moment. What can you strip out, I guess is the big challenge, from what you do? We’ve actually been experimenting in a number of ways. I think simplification can relate to blogging in many different ways. Let me just touch on a couple. Firstly, content. The content this year on ProBlogger, we’ve really simplified it. I know some of you have noticed this. A year ago, we were producing upwards of seven, sometimes up to ten pieces of content every week. I was getting emails from readers saying ‘That’s too much, I can’t read it all, I can’t consume it all. I’m feeling stressed by the amount of content that you’re producing.’ So we really stripped it back. Instead of ten pieces of content every week, we now do a podcast, two blog posts, a live video, and an email. that’s five pieces of content every week. The email is really a summary of the other four. It’s really four main pieces of content every week. Simpler, it’s simpler to consume I hope for you, but it’s also simpler to produce. In doing that, we’ve reduced our expenses and the amount of time we’ve put into that and we’ve been able to increase the quality of what we do as well, which is always a good thing. It really has led to no dip in traffic, but it’s increased the engagement that we’ve had around each piece of content. Content scenario you can simplify. Community. This year, again on ProBlogger, we simplified our approach to community. We really focused in our efforts on one area, our Facebook group. Rather than trying to provide community in lots of places, we’re encouraging anyone who’s a part of the ProBlogger audience to join our ProBlogger community Facebook group and to interact in the one place. In that group, we’ve tried to simplify things as well. Those of you who joined that group in the early days knew that it was a pretty noisy place and we’ve simplified it. We’ve pulled it back and we’ve asked you only to share tips and ask questions, not do anything else. We’ve built a rhythm for the week as well, we do different things on different days. Simplifying what is happening within that community has helped as well. Simplify content, simplify community, simplify monetization, simplifying if you’ve got products, you probably can already see some things in what I’ve said before. Obviously, we did this this year with our event, we pulled things out of this product of the event. But you can do the same thing as well with other types of products that you offer as well. I think back to a product we used to offer at ProBlogger, which was our membership site a few years ago. In that membership site, we had weekly calls, I had weekly teaching, we had a forum, we had deals of the week, we offered plugins, we offered a lot of bits and pieces within that community. Again, I wanted to add in as much as possible. I wanted to make it as valuable as possible, I wanted to add in extra features. But in doing so, it created so much work for my team but it also became quite overwhelming. As a result, you as the audience who are part of that weren’t engaging in that community as you could’ve been. I really realized that I created this beast that was hard to continue, it was hard to sustain from my end but it also wasn’t being utilized from others. My friends who have really successful, the most successful membership sites that I’ve come across, really in most cases offer something that is very stripped back. They don’t offer loads of new content every week, they don’t offer forums with hundreds of threads, they offer very simplified things. They offer a little bit of content, high-quality content. They have very focused areas of community, they offer a little bit of coaching and personal access, they keep things minimal, they keep things focused. Again, you can simplify either the products that you create, the monetization that you do as well, and then the systems that you have as well. It’s very easy as bloggers to evolve your systems and what you do to become quite complicated. For example, I know bloggers that have very complicated social media sharing systems. They share 20 times an hour on Twitter. In fact I’ve got one friend who’s a podcast friend who recently I was looking at what he did on Twitter. He tweets every two minutes. It’s not him, of course, it’s automation. It’s evolved to the point where he’s just being very noisy and maybe it’s a little out of control. I think it could be more in that particular case because I, for one, have muted his tweets. I’m not actually engaging at all with him anymore because there’s just too much going on. Less can be more, and it could be ‘less can be more’ in many different areas of your business. ‘What can you simplify?’ I guess is the question that I have for you there from that first lesson, less can be more. The second lesson that I want to talk about that I learned at this event that I think really does apply in many ways to business in general, but also to blogging particularly, online business, is that a certain percentage of your audience is going to be willing to pay a higher premium for more. I’ve always, as I mentioned before, kept our prices for our events very low, the low cost, below what it actually cost us to put it on and we make our profit from sponsors. This was to make our event more accessible. On that front, I’m really proud of what we’ve done. I know that there are people who attend our events because they are so much cheaper. Every year, we get to hear from people saying, “This event is four times cheaper than other events I go to in industry events.” I’m proud of that on some levels, but it also has been an increasingly risky move to do for my business, and it’s not really sustainable. I know that it’s risky. If my business goes under because of it, then that’s a disservice to our attendees to charge them less. Keeping our prices lower is a risky move, it’s something that wasn’t sustainable, but it also actually doesn’t allow us to fully serve our audience as well. Our audience have been asking for more, they want more personal, they want more interactional experiences. We’ve not been able to afford to offer that because we’re not charging as much. This year, we didn’t actually put our prices up. But because we reduced our expenses and reduced the length of the event, that first day as well, we’re able to increase our profit margin and our tickets as well. In essence, we gave our attendees less but charged them the same, In effect, I guess putting our prices up a little. Also by adding in that premium level product, we offered a product that was significantly higher, I don’t exactly remember how much higher, I think it was four or five times what they might’ve paid in previous years to attend that mastermind. Our margin grew in that regards. As I said before, I was really nervous in doing that, by having that premium level product at that higher price point. But I guess what I learned is that it was well worth doing. One of our speakers this year was James Schramko. He’s got a business called SuperFastBusiness. He did a video recently on his Facebook page that said that, “Ten percent of your audience will pay ten times more for what you offer.” Ten percent of your audience are going to pay ten times more, they’d be willing to pay ten times more for what you offer. I’m not suggesting that we all just increase our prices tenfold, but it’s kind of food for thought, isn’t it? If there’s ten percent of your audience who are willing to pay ten times more, that means you’re leaving some money on the table, I’m leaving some money on the table. I was really worried about offering that premium type product, but what I realized is that there was a significant proportion of our audience who wanted more and they were willing to pay for it. Over ten percent of our attendees this year ended up coming to the mastermind, in fact it was closer to 20% of our attendees ended up coming to our mastermind. By significantly increasing the price for the masterminds, I learned that a significant proportion of our attendees could afford a higher price and were willing to afford that higher price if I could offer something extra value. Really, this for me is the key. What can you add to what you offer? What can you add to your products to make it a premium level product? Not everyone is going to take that offer, that’s totally fine. They will continue to buy your low-priced products. But there are a proportion of your audience who would be willing to take the extra step if it’s valuable. Really, that’s the key. It’s got to be valuable. I think our masterminds proved this year that that was the case. As I said before, we saw people taking action at the masterminds who were making money at a higher rate and it paid for them to really attend those masterminds. I know masterminds are going to be a part of what we offer going forward. In fact, if anything, I think we’ll expand them from one-day events to longer ones as something that our attendees actually want more of, they want a longer, more intense, more immersive experience as well. How does this particular lesson apply to blogging? I think it can apply in a few different ways. If you are monetizing with a product, an ebook or a course or something else, what could you add to make it a premium level product? I’m not suggesting just put your prices up, although that may be the case, maybe you could do that. But what could you add to make it into a premium level offering? If you’re selling an ebook, what could you add? Could you add some bonus videos? Could you add some printables? Could you add some access to you personally in a coaching package? Could you add access to a private Facebook group? You might already have the thing that you could add, or you might need to create it. In most cases, something could be added to make it an upsell I guess, to make it a premium level offering. If you don’t have products, you could also take this same principle and apply it in other areas as well. For example, if you’re doing affiliate promotions, maybe you should be considering throwing into the mix of the things that you promote the occasional higher price point product. We’ve done this on Digital Photography School. We typically promote ebooks or courses that may be $20 to $50 as a price point. That’s a sweet spot for our audience. They like to buy products around the $20 mark up to $50. But occasionally, what we’ve done over the last couple of years is promoted very comprehensive courses that have sold for over $200, up to ten times the price of the $20 product. Whilst a small percentage of our audience buy those products, you don’t have to sell too many at that kind of price point to make a pretty decent product. Maybe mixing it up, the types of product that you promote and promoting different price points as well. Alternatively, if you’re promoting physical products on Amazon or some other store, maybe when you promote a product that’s a budget product, maybe putting alongside a premium product as well. On Digital Photography School we quite often review lenses. We might review a budget lens for a camera, might be a $200 lens, very affordable. But we know there are other lenses out there that are more professional grade lenses, maybe during the review, in the middle of the review, we might mention if you’ve got a higher budget, here’s a professional grade lens and here are some of the benefits you’ll get from upgrading. Maybe putting products alongside each other in that way may be worthwhile as well. These are the two big lessons that I learned this year about events, but I think they really do apply across to blogging. Less is more, simplify what you do. You may be adding too much complexity into your content, into your community, into your monetization, into some of the systems that you have. What fat can you cut out of what you’re doing to simplify and reduce the expenses, and also to remove some of the stress and overwhelm amongst your audience as well. Secondly, there are a percentage of your audience who are willing to pay more for what you do than you’re already charging. So what can you add? What extra can you add in to give a premium level product and service to what you do as well? I think it does apply to not just products but also services as well. If you’re a freelancer and you offer your services as a writer, what premium-level package could you add in as well? What could you add in on top of the writing for the clients that you have? You can add in premium level stuff on that regard as well. I would love to hear your feedback on today’s show around these things. How are you going to simplify what you do? What premium-level products could you create? You can let us know over on the show notes at problogger.com/podcast/215 or you can find us on Facebook if you just search for the ProBlogger Community on Facebook, you’ll find our little community, or you can just go to problogger.com/group and you’ll be forwarded into that group as well. Let us know what you think of today’s episode. As I said before, I’m heading away to Dallas in a few days’ time so I will not be doing new podcasts over the next couple of weeks. But there’s plenty of episodes to dig into. One that I really do recommend that you go back and listen to, in fact it’s just the first of a series that we did a year or so ago now, was Episode 137. I really think that if you want to give your blog an injection of goodness and greatness, if you wanna get your blogging groove back, I would really recommend that you go back and listen to Episode 137. It was the start of a series that I did over a week. It was called Seven Days To Getting Your Blogging Groove Back. Actually goes from Episode 137 through to Episode 143, I guess. It gives you, every day for seven days, a different type of blog post to create. Every day I teach you how to do a different type of blog post. Then, I challenge you to create that blog post. We went through this little challenge as a community over seven days a couple of years ago now. It was amazing to see the feedback as a result of that. You may choose to do this over seven days, you might want to do it over the next week, or you can spread it out a little. I’m away for two and a half weeks from this podcast, so over the next couple of weeks, you might want to choose one every couple of days and create those posts as a result of that. You can let us know how you go with those over in the Facebook group as well. If you go to problogger.com/podcast/137, you’ll find links to all of those shows. It’s Episode 137. Alternatively, you can find them over in iTunes, or in Stitcher, or in any of the other podcast apps that you use as well. Episode 137, Seven Days To Getting Your Blogging Groove Back. Hope you enjoy that little series. I look forward to chatting with you in the next episode of the ProBlogger podcast in a few weeks time. 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.

4 Difficult Realities All Bloggers Face During a conference last year I was invited to have dinner with three other bloggers who had all been blogging for 5-10 years and were now doing it full-time. It was a fun dinner, and we covered a lot of ground in terms of conversation. But during dessert the conversation got a little deeper as one of them began to share how they were struggling with their blog. On their surface, their blogging was going okay. They had a great readership, and the content they were putting out was going well. But on the inside they felt disillusioned. And as they continued their story, I looked around the table and saw a lot of nodding going on. Their story was resonating with us all. I related to it a lot. Blogging can be hard sometimes, and it’s to become disillusioned. As a blogger I’ve heard people rave about my, blog with comments like: “You’re so prolific!” “How do you stay so productive?” “How did you write that way?” But on the inside I’ve wondered why they can’t see what a grind and a struggle blogging can be. This podcast is largely positive and constructive about how to build a profitable blog. But after reflecting on this conversation from last year it struck me that while I often talk up blogging, and share the benefits of doing it and the tactics of building profit, it may be worth acknowledging some of the hard stuff we face as content creators. So in today’s episode I want to talk about four realities of blogging that many of us bloggers don’t always share. Part of why I’m doing it is to give you a realistic insight into the life of a blogger. But I also think it’s important for us bloggers to realise that we’re not alone in facing some of these things. Being a little vulnerable with each other during that conversation last year seemed to lift our spirits a little. And out of the conversation came encouragement to keep at it. So today I present four things about blogging that are hard. By no means is it a definitive list – I could probably come up with a lot more for a part two – but I hope it’s helpful. Join our Facebook group Further Listening on 4 Realities of Blogging All Bloggers Need To Talk About 167: My Million Dollar Blog Post (and How Procrastination Almost Stopped me Writing It) Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Hey there, and welcome to Episode 214 of the ProBlogger Podcast. My name is Darren Rowse and I’m the blogger behind problogger.com, a blog, podcast, events, job board, and series of ebooks all designed to help you to grow a profitable blog. You can learn more about what we do at ProBlogger at problogger.com. In today’s episode, I wanna do something a little bit different. Last year, I was at a conference and was invited to have dinner with three other bloggers. They were bloggers who had all been blogging for 5 to 10 years, they were all full time at what they do. Relatively successful bloggers. It was a fun dinner; we laughed, we joked around, it was fairly lighthearted for the main. We covered a lot of ground in terms of our conversation. Somewhere around the time that dessert was served, the conversation got a little bit deeper as one of our dinner party began to share that they were struggling with their blog. On the surface, this particular blogger’s blog was going okay; they had a great readership, they were producing lots of content, they had built a team, they had a beautiful design. It was all going well on the outside, but on the inside the blogger was feeling disillusioned. As the blogger shared, I looked around the table and I saw that we were all nodding at the story. The story that the blog was telling was resonating with us all. I personally related a lot. There are times in blogging where it’s hard. There are times where it’s easy to get disillusioned. There are times as a blogger that I’ve heard people rave about my blog with comments like, “You’re so prolific” , “You’re so productive”, “How do you write like that?” But on the inside, I’ve wondered why they can’t see what a grind and a struggle it can sometimes be. This podcast is largely pretty positive and constructive about how to build a profitable blog, but it struck me this week as I reflected upon that conversation that whilst I talk about blogging a lot, sometimes I don’t talk about the negative sides as well. Perhaps, it’s worth acknowledging some of the hard stuff that we as content creators face. In today’s episode, I want to go there. I want to talk about four realities of blogging that many of us as bloggers don’t always share. We like to present the positives and that’s great, but perhaps sometimes it’s worth going into these slightly darker and more personal, vulnerable places. I hope you allow me to do that today. I want to do so partly to give a realistic insight into the life of a blogger. It’s not all bells and whistles. I also want to share it today because sometimes I think as bloggers, we think that we’re the only ones facing this kind of stuff. It struck me during that conversation with my blogging friends last year that simply by us each sharing about the tough stuff that we went away from that dinner with our spirits lifted a little bit more, slightly more energized and encouraged by one another’s stories. Today, I want to present four things about blogging that are hard. By no means is this a definitive list. I can probably come up with 40 of these things, and perhaps there will be a part two at some point. I hope in sharing these four things that whatever you’re facing at the moment as a blogger, you’ll be a little bit encouraged that you’re not alone and perhaps come away with some ideas about how to combat these four things. Let’s get into the first tough things about blogging that we don’t often share. The first thing that I want to talk about is that it’s hard to be creative every day. Content creation, when you’re doing it on a regular basis, whether it’s daily or even weekly, it’s hard sometimes. There are times where it just flows. There are times where you sit at the computer and ten blog posts just come out of you, or three podcasts, or you get so many ideas and you get into the flow. But there are also many times in the life of most bloggers where you sit at that screen and you wonder what it is that you should be writing about, or you feel like you and everyone else has already written on every topic that there is to write about in your niche, or you doubt whether you are the right person to be writing on that topic, whether you have the skills, or experience, or authority to really go there. Or where you struggle to get into the flow of writing, you’re just getting to that flow. Or where you’re fighting distractions or even boredom with the task at hand. The reality is that it is sometimes hard. There are days where it does flow and there are many days where it doesn’t. I just want to acknowledge that as the first thing today. My tip for you, if that’s what you’re facing, there’s many other podcasts we’ve written, I’ve put together, on this particular topic but my main thing that I want to say to you today if that’s the place you’re in is to push through the pain. You need to know that hurting is an essential part of growing your creative muscles. I’m sitting here at my desk today, I’m standing here actually, and my muscles are sore. My triceps are sore. I went to PT, my personal trainer, yesterday, and he worked my triceps and they hurt. It hurt at the time and it hurts today but I know that the result of that hurt is that I will have stronger triceps. I don’t think they’re ever going to be massive but I’m experiencing growth as a result of some of that pain. The same thing is true of your creative muscles. Good things happen when you exercise that creative part of yourself. You need to push through that, you need to persist with that. Get into the flow by creating something, anything. Sometimes, the hard bit is just starting out. But once you get going, once you push through that initial resistance, that’s where the energy comes, that’s where the ideas come, that’s where the creativity comes. Make creating a regular thing, schedule it into your day, into your week, and push through that regularity and repetition of creating something, anything, even if you don’t publish it. It’s part of getting into that flow. Number two thing that I want to talk about is that first drafts are almost always bad. My favorite bloggers, they just seem to have this innate ability to put words together in such an amazing way that seems, as a reader, effortless. It looks almost like some sort of superpower. There’s a couple of bloggers that come to mind. Every time I read one of their articles, I just feel alive as a reader. It’s amazing, they have this incredible gift. The reality is that behind the scenes, the article that you’re wowing over usually starts out nothing like its finished, public version. The article probably started out as a hastily scribbled bullet point list on the back of a napkin, or them jotting something down into a notes app on their iPhone. It was probably then turned into a first draft that was full of mistakes and awkwardly formed ideas. In time, it was probably refined and re-worked. It was probably revisited time and time again. It was probably added to and then subtracted from. Its headline, its opening lines, its conclusions were probably agonized over, it was probably critiqued and edited numerous times and then polished and eventually it was published. It was probably published by someone who then continued to proofread it and edit it after it was published, in the days after. Creating content takes time. It rarely, if ever, comes out of the author ready for publishing in its first draft. I’ve never, ever written a blogpost that didn’t get an edit, didn’t get reworked. The tip I have for you, if you are looking at that piece of content that you’ve written and it’s awkward and it’s not flowing and it doesn’t look very good is to keep putting effort into editing, into finishing your work. You need to put as much time into the editing and the polishing and the finishing of your work as you do into that first draft, if not much more. The second thing, your first drafts are usually almost always pretty bad. The third thing I wanna talk about is that—this is speaking from my experience—you never really finish anything. Nothing is ever perfect. In 15 years of blogging, I don’t think I’ve ever hit publish on anything on my blog or my podcast that I’m 100% happy with. There is almost always, as I hit publish, a tension within me, mixed feelings. Excitement on one hand, pride, satisfaction. But also on the other side, there’s almost always some uneasy feeling that maybe I could have done a little bit more, or maybe I could’ve added more detail, or maybe I could’ve polished it further, or maybe I could’ve got an extra quote, or maybe I could make it look better. On one hand, these feelings of “I could do more” can be a good thing. I just spoke in the last point about how you should let those feelings drive you to improve those first drafts. On one hand, those feelings are great, but on the other hand some of us as content creators allow these feelings of “I could do more” to stop us publishing or releasing anything at all. I think, really, one of the skills as a blogger is to find a place between those two extremes. Perfectionism can be both a superpower and a curse. Allow it to drive you to improve what you do, but also learn that you sometimes just need to set free, you need to put what you’ve done out there, you need to set free what you create. You can always tweak later, but you will never build anything of value unless you hit publish on it. Leave with that tension. Acknowledge that perfectionism within you. Work with it, but also resist it so that you do publish something. The fourth thing kind of relates to this idea of perfectionism. The fourth thing that I want to acknowledge is that procrastination impacts us all. It happens to us all. We all know what it is to procrastinate. Here’s a little secret for you. I outlined this very podcast in March of 2016. It was the day after the conversation that I had with my friends. Now, as I sit in front of this podcast, my microphone, recording this podcast is now the 4th of October, 2017. It’s taken a year and a half for me to get this podcast done. Even the most productive people have the temptation to put things off. In many cases, it’s the things that we procrastinate about that ultimately have the power to hold us back most. For me, procrastination is often tied to fear. It’s the things that scare me that actually are the things that have the biggest potential to bring good things into our life as well. You need to learn to see procrastination as a signal that it’s something you need to really pay attention to. If you’re a procrastinator, after this episode finishes, go and listen to Episode 167 for my ultimate procrastination story and tips. I hope somewhere in the midst of these four things, there’s some encouragement for you. I don’t want this to be a Debbie Downer, I don’t want it to be a negative podcast, but I want to acknowledge that sometimes it’s hard. It’s hard to be creative every day. It’s hard when you look at those first drafts and you think it’s awkward and it’s not working. It’s hard when you put off things. It’s hard to get things finished. These are four things that I’ve struggled with over the years and I want to let you know that it’s okay to have those struggles too but I encourage you to push through them. I would love to hear what struggles it is that you wish more bloggers would talk about. You can do so in a couple of ways. You can do it over on our podcast notes, show notes today at problogger.com/podcast/214 or over in our ProBlogger community Facebook group. Love to connect with you there and I look forward to chatting with you next week in Episode 215. If you’re looking for something else to listen to, go and listen to Episode 167, the one I mentioned in that particular episode. It’s about procrastination. It was me telling a story of my ultimate procrastination, something that cost me a lot of money when I procrastinated on but it gives you some practical tips about how to get things done too. Go over and join the Facebook group. problogger.com/group. 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.

10 Things I Wish I Knew About Blogging and Content Marketing When I Started Today, I want to share the audio of a keynote I gave at a conference early last year about 10 things I wish I’d known about blogging and creating content for content marketing when I started. In episodes 204 and 205 I shared some recordings of keynotes I’ve given, and the response from many of you was that you wanted to hear more of that style of podcast. So today I dug out a talk I gave at the Super Fast Business conference, which is run by James Schramko here in Australia.s James, who puts on a great event, asked me to share some of my story and give some practical tips on content creation. I talk about defining what your blog is about, the three phases of creating great content, how to mix up the different types of content you feature on your blog, idea generation, creating ‘content events’ on your blog, and how to differentiate yourself in your content.    I loved doing this talk, and I hope you enjoy it too. Don’t forget to join the Facebook group Slides from the Talk For those of you who would like to follow along with the slides – here they are. 10 THINGS I WISH I KNEW ABOUT CONTENT MARKETING WHEN I STARTED from Darren Rowse Further Listening on 10 Things I Wish I Knew About Blogging (and Content Marketing) When I Started 059: What Should I Blog About? 15 Questions to Ask to Help Identify Your Blogging Niche or Focus 033: 2 Questions to Ask to Help You Find Readers for Your Blog 011: Create 10 Blog Post Ideas for your Blog [Day 11 of 31 Days to Build a Better Blog] 084: How to Come Up With Fresh Ideas to Write About On Your Blog 086: How to Get into the Flow of Creating Great Content for Your Blog 087: 9 Questions You Should Ask Before Hitting Publish On Your Next Blog Post 152: How to Use Embedded Content on Your Blog [Challenge] Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Hi there and welcome to episode 213 of the ProBlogger podcast. My name is Darren Rowse, and I’m the blogger behind problogger.com, a blog, podcast, event, job board, and a series of ebooks, all designed to help you as a blogger to grow your audience. You can find more about ProBlogger over at problogger.com. In today’s episode, I want to share with you an audio from a keynote I gave at a conference early last year. The topic was ’10 things I wish I had known about blogging and creating content for content marketing when I started’. A bit of a mouthful, but you get the idea. Back in episode 204, 205, just a few episodes ago, I shared a couple of recordings from keynotes I’ve given at my ProBlogger events and I had so much positive response from that. People really enjoyed that format, a presentation, a talk. Longer form and also the slides from those talks as well. I wanted to do it again because many of you wanted more of that style of podcast. We’re not going to do it every week by any account. I don’t give that many talks. But I did find this one from the Superfast Business Conference. It’s a conference that is run by James Schramko. Many of you will know here in Australia. It’s run in Sydney and it was a great event. I really enjoyed getting to that particular event. James puts on a really good event, and he asked me at the event last year to share some of my story but also give some practical tips on content creation. Really, that’s what the focus of this talk is about. In it, I’ve given a few tips on defining what your blog is about but then we get a lot into content creation itself. I talk about three different phases of creating content. I talk about how to mix up the different types of content that you might want to feature on your blog. I talk about idea generation, some tips on creating content, finishing content, running content events and challenges on your blog and also how to differentiate yourself through your content as well. I really enjoyed this talk and I hope you do as well. I’ll also put up the slides from this talk in today’s show notes. There are a few times during the talk where you probably will want to refer to the slides. Whether you do that as you’re listening if you’re at a computer or whether you want to come back to the slides later, you’ll be able to do that. I bet 95% of what I do talk about in this talk doesn’t rely on the slides but you might want to have them. The show notes are at problogger.com/podcast/213. The only other thing I will note is that at the time of this talk, there was a tool that I was using called Blab. Blab is a live streaming tool that allowed multiple people to be on the screen at once. Now, that tool doesn’t exist today. But when I do talk about it, you can pretty much substitute most of the other live streaming tools that exist today. It’s only a brief mention during the talk but I did want to point that out. Some of the points I mention in passing during this keynote were expanded upon in later podcast. At the end of the talk, I will come back on and suggest some further listening for those of you who want to dig deeper into some of the things I touched on during the talk. But again, I’ll link to all of those in the show notes as well. problogger.com/podcast/213. Thank you so much for listening. I hope you enjoy this talk and I will come back at the end just to wrap things up. Host: Our next guest is a superpower in the blogosphere. In fact, I remember going to an event, my first event in the United States several years ago, and I found out he’d been to one before that, one of the early ones. I found a transcript of what he’d been doing and what he talked about. I read through it and I thought, “This is great.” He’s probably one of the seeds to my original direction towards content marketing. And then I recently saw him in the Philippines, presenting. I thought, “This information is very in line with what we do.” His version of what I talk about with OTR, but he’s been doing it a lot longer than I have. He can do things like write and spell. He’s prolific and he’s really, really good at it. Without further ado, I’d like to introduce Darren Rowse. Darren: Thank you. It’s really good. Who’s feeling like they’ve already got enough value from this and they could go home almost? I, literally in the lunch break, had to rewrite the opening story of my talk thanks to an earlier presentation. I put all my content onto an app, thanks Jared. I’ve killed my idea for the ProBlogger album and t-shirt range. I have been considering doing a pyjama range, ProBlogger workwear for bloggers. I’ve had to call the team and tell them to put all the content behind a subscription. I’ve deleted all the apps on my phone and I just took a hot and cold shower. It’s been a busy lunch break. I hope you’ve had a productive one. I want to talk about content marketing, and to help you understand the perspective that I’ve come to this topic from. I want to tell you a very brief version of my story. I got an email a couple of days ago basically saying, “We’ve got lines for speakers.” It was basically cut out all your story because people just want the tips. I’m like, “But that was the first 20 minutes of my talk gone.” I’m going to tell it to you in two minutes and it does skip over some of the stages of the format for storytelling before. For me, it all started in 2002 with an email from a friend. I was sitting at a desk, one of the part-time jobs that I had, and this email pinged in. A voice said, “Master, you’ve got mail.” Did anyone else install that? I was the only one. Okay, It was 2002 and I got this email and it had four words in it and a link. The four words were, “Check out this blog.” I had no idea what a blog was so I clicked the link out of curiosity. I ended up on this site that changed the course of my life not because of the content on it, although that was interesting, but because it was my first discovery of blogging and of this amazing tool called a blog. What I found on this blog was this tool that enabled this guy on the other side of the world living in Prague, to talk to me in a really powerful, personal way. It amplified his voice in a way I’ve never seen a voice amplified before. I’ve done some public speaking. I’ve never had my voice amplified in that way. Around his voice was this community. Everyone was getting smarter as a result of not only what he was saying but the fact that there was a community there. These two things captivated me. Within a couple of hours, I decided I needed to start a blog. Now, unfortunately, I had no credentials whatsoever to start a blog and if I thought about it for any more than about five minutes, I wouldn’t have done it. I’ve had 20 jobs in the last 10 years, none of which had anything to do with blogging. The only qualification I had was a Bachelor of Theology, which hasn’t really helped a whole heap. I wasn’t a great writer. It was my worst subject in high school and I was incapable of making text bold on that blog for three months after starting it. Back then, you had to know a little bit of HTML and I had no idea, technological. But for one reason or another, I started that blog and that was the best thing that I’ve ever done in business. This is what it looked like. It was ugly. I designed this myself. It was based upon my wedding invitation, which makes me doubt my wife’s choice in colors. But if you’ve seen her blog, she’s a very colourful person. Anyway, I did meet some people who knew how to make text bold and they eventually redesigned my blog for me. It was a personal journal of sorts. I was writing about spirituality, politics, movies. It was pretty much an outward pouring of what was in my mind, which was quite scary. What was even more scary was that thousands of people a day found it and read it. I didn’t know why but I was quite happy that they did. I became very quickly addicted to blogging and creating content, with no intent whatsoever of making it into a business. It was just a hobby. It was something that I did for pretty much seven hours every night when I got home. It was a big part of my life and it became an addiction. I began to experiment with other blogs over time. My next blog was a photo blog. I was going to share photos of a trip I was taking to Morocco with my wife, with my brand new digital camera. Turns out no-one had looked to any of the photos but I posted one review of the camera I was using and it ranked number one on Google for that camera. The entrepreneurial lights began to go in my mind. I transitioned that photo blog onto a digital camera review blog, where I wrote reviews of other cameras and aggregated reviews that other people were writing around the web. It was a good time to start a digital photography blog because digital cameras were just starting to really take off. In 2004, blogging had become a part-time job. In fact, it almost became a full time job. With this particular blog, I started to put some AdSense ads on my blog and some Amazon affiliate links to earn those 4% commissions on those $10 books. I didn’t really earn a lot but it was the beginnings of a part-time job, which over the next year, became a full-time thing for me. In 2004, I started ProBlogger. It was pretty much me saying to the world you can make a living from blogging and is anyone else doing it out there because no-one was writing about it. It was my attempt to find other people on this same journey to learn from and to share what I was learning with. I transitioned my photography blog into Digital Photography School in 2007 and this is my main blog today. It’s about ten times larger than ProBlogger. ProBlogger is a bit of a side project for me, which pays a full-time living in and of itself. But this is the main thing that I do today. It’s a how to take photography-type site. Thirteen years later, I’m not the biggest blogger in the world and I’m not the best blogger in the world. But given the fact that I had no idea what I was doing when I started, I’m pretty pleased with what’s happened as a result of it. There’s a whole heap of numbers there which I pinch myself at. But the thing that I really love about what’s opened up for me is the opportunities. The opportunities to write a book, to start a conference, to speak at amazing events like this, meet amazing people. But the best thing of all is when people come up to me at a conference like this, as happened this morning, and say things like, “You wrote this post that changed my life. In some small way, it helped me to start a business.” Or like James said before, “Influence the way I do things today.” That is something that I get really excited about. That’s the biggest compliment for me. Thirteen years later, I find myself as a full-time blogger. Blogging and content marketing for me really tap into this quote that you’ve probably heard a million times before at conferences like this. “People do business with those that they know, like, and trust,” and content has the ability to help you to be known. Who would’ve ever thought I would be known by four million people a month? To be liked. Who would’ve ever thought that someone will walk up to me this morning in a conference and give me a hug? I’m an introvert. I don’t like hugs, but I love the fact that people actually feel like they know me and they like me. It opens up opportunities for you to be trusted. This is what content marketing, this is what blogging is all about for me. I want to say right upfront, whilst I’m talking about content marketing today, I’m doing it as a blogger. A lot of what I share today comes out of that experience. Blogging for me is the center of the mix. These are all of the other things that I do with my time and I could probably add some more circles to that. This week, I started on an app called Anchor. I don’t know if anyone’s started playing with Anchor. It’s like an audio version of Twitter. It’s fun. You leave a message and then everyone else leaves a voicemail message effectively back on your message and a conversation happens that way. It’s a really cool tool. Anyway, I’m always experimenting with lots of different things. For me, the blog is the center of the mix. Whether that’s the case for you or whether a podcast is that or whether it’s something else, I think pretty much everything that I want to share this morning and the ten things that I’ve learned since I started applies to pretty much any medium and most of the models that you’ll be experimenting with before. I’m going to whip through ten things. The first two are fairly foundational and then we get a little bit more tactical as we go along. This is something you’ve probably already thought about but I think it’s something that you really need to come back to on a regular basis. Define what it is that your blog or your podcast or you are about. There’s a variety of ways that you can think about this. The most common of which is to choose a niche and to think about that niche. Has anyone got a niche in the room that you would say you got a niche? I’ve got a photography blog. That’s my niche. I’ve got a blogging blog. That’s a niche. This is Chris Hunter. He’s got a great blog called Bike EXIF. It’s about custom and classic motorbikes. He’s the only male I know who’s got something like 400,000 or 500,000 Pinterest followers. A lot of people say Pinterest is for women only. No way. There’s a whole heap of men on there and they’ve got their own niches. He has a niche. I’ve got a niche. A lot of bloggers though that I meet say, “I don’t really want to just write about one topic.” And so another way to define what you’re on about is to think about your demographic. This is Gala Darling. She writes about travel, horoscopes, tattoos, relationships, travel, all kinds of stuff. But they relate to the one kind of person. She thinks about her blog as a blog for youthful, alternative, unconventional, individual, eccentric women. Her words, not mine. That’s her demographic. The third way I think is, you can add to these other two, and that is to have a fight. I think this is a particularly powerful one. ProBlogger, when I started in 2004, it was a blog about making money from blogging. That was quite a controversial thing to write about in 2004 because blogging was seen as a very pure medium. And so for me to say I’m making money from blogging and I’m making six figures from it back in 2004, that was quite a stir. People really reacted to that in one of two ways. Some people said, “He’s lying.” Other people said, “You shouldn’t make money from blogging.” And other people said, “Yeah, I want to do that too.” For me, the fight of ProBlogger back then was that you can do it and you can actually do it in an ethical way. That was like me putting a flag in the sand and people either reacted against it or they rallied around it. A lot of people were inspired by that idea. A lot of people shared that journey. Having a fight for what you do is a very, very powerful thing. My wife, she’s a style blogger. She has a niche. Style, fashion, homewear, that’s her niche. She has a demographic as well. She writes for moms. But she also has a fight and it comes out in a lot of the content that she writes. You don’t have to give up on style when you’ve got three little, I was going to call them brats, boys running around in your home who fight against their stuff. That’s her fight. That something that really resonates with a lot of moms and so she weaves that into her blog and people rally around it. When you’ve got a fight, you give something for people to join and that’s a very powerful thing when it comes to content. What is it that you do? This is something I go back to quite regularly and think about. The other thing I’d say about choosing what you do, choose something that’s meaningful to you. You’re going to be at this for a while so you might as well do something you enjoy and something that’s meaningful to you. If it’s meaningful to you, it will shine through in the content that you create. I’ve had 30 blogs over the years. I have to say 28 of them I started because I thought they’d be profitable and they didn’t really mean a whole heap to me. I couldn’t sustain them and people who came across those blogs could tell that they weren’t meaningful to me and so they didn’t come back again. Do something meaningful to you. Number two, understand your reader and how you will change them. Most people have been through some sort of an exercise like this and have created something like this. These are the reader profiles that I created when I started Digital Photography School in 2007. Some people would call them personas or avatars today. I know some people like personas and avatars, other people don’t. But what I would say to you whether you’ve got one or not, you need to understand who’s reading your blog. The better you understand them and what is meaningful to them, the better position you’ll be in to create great content, to find more of those readers because you’ll start to understand where they’re hanging out. You’ll also understand how to build community with them and you’ll suddenly get ideas for how you monetize as well. The better you understand who is reading your blog, the better. But here’s the thing. Most people’s avatars, most people’s understandings of their readers ends at ‘They’re 34, they’re male, they live in these sorts of… ‘Their demographical information. That’s good to know but you need to understand these kinds of things. You need to understand their needs. You need to understand their problems. You really need to understand their desires, where they want to be, their dreams. Those things are really powerful things to understand. You need to understand their fears. Their fears are the things that are stopping them to get to their dreams. Even if you just understand their dream and their fear, that’s a very powerful thing to understand. It will inform your content. Again, it will inform how you brand yourself, how you promote yourself, how you build community and how you monetize. These things need to be crystal clear in your mind. Whether you’ve got an avatar or not, understand these things. Find out what is meaningful to them. When you understand those things, that is meaningful stuff. Understand what’s meaningful to them. You can do it in a whole heap of different ways. For us, we use surveys. One of the things I love about live streaming, Periscope or a tool like Blab, has anyone used Blab? It puts you into a conversation. A very real-time conversation with people. That’s great for broadcasting your ideas and for creating content but it’s even more useful in terms of understanding the needs of people. I remember the first time I did a Blab. It’s like Google Hangouts but it works. It put me into a conversation with three of my readers. I’ve never heard of them before. I didn’t recognize their names but suddenly, I was seeing them on the screen, hearing their voices, hearing their frustrations, hearing their questions. I wrote the best content that afternoon, after that Blab, because it was written out of the pain of my readers and the real life questions of my readers. Use these sorts of tools to understand who your readers are. I think the great thing about an event like this, if you have enough readers to hold an event, is that you understand, you meet those people. It will infect the way you create content. But here’s something where you can take your avatar writing to the next stage. Most people don’t do this. They have an avatar. They might know their reader’s problems but here’s the question I’d ask you. How will you change your readers? How are you going to change them? Here’s a simple exercise that you can do. Actually, before I give you the exercise, great blogs and great podcasts, they leave a mark on their readers and so I want to encourage you to think about the content you create. It’s not only getting people onto your list or getting them to know, like, and trust you but understand that that content that you create has the potential to change your readers. If you create content that changes your readers, that’s a very powerful thing because they’ll come back and they’ll bring other people with them. Here’s the exercise. You can do this later. It’s a very simple one. You just need a piece of paper and a pen the draw a line across it. At point A, I want you to describe who your readers are when they arrive on your blog or your podcast or where it is that you have first contact with people. This will be your avatar of sorts and it should include their needs, their problems, their desires, and their fears, those types of things. Most people do this when they’ve got a blog but hardly anyone does this, where will your reader be as a result of coming into contact with you? Where will they be in a year’s time? Where will they be in five years’ time? What’s your dream for your readers, for your audience? Describe that change. Very powerful to understand that change. It should inform everything else that you do. It should inform the content you create, the product you create, the way you engage with people. Get crystal clear on that change. Digital Photography School, my main blog, the change is very simple. I want people to get out of automatic mode on their cameras and to have full creative control of their cameras. Most people use their cameras in full automatic mode but they don’t know the full potential of their cameras so I want to give them creative control of their camera. That’s a very simple change. I talked to a parenting blogger the other day. She was starting a whole membership site for parents. I got her to do this exercise. We were both in tears by the end of it because she described desperate families who couldn’t communicate, who are angry and dysfunctional and then she described the most amazing families that you could ever imagine. What a change she is bringing. By understanding that change, she suddenly had ideas for content. She suddenly had ideas for products. She suddenly had ideas for what her community could be through this exercise, very, very powerful thing to do. Essentially, what you’re doing is creating a before and after avatar for your audience. Number three thing I want to talk about is three phases of creating content. Most people have a content creation process that was like my one used to be. You sit down and you think, “Shit, what am I going to write today?” Has anyone had that moment? You spend the next two hours working out what you’re going to write about. And then you write it and then you bang, publish, and it goes out. That’s the way I used to publish content. It was thoughtless, it was sporadic, and I’ve very rarely built momentum from one piece of content to the next. Great blogs take their readers on a journey. Great podcasts take their readers on a journey. They build momentum over time. They’re thoughtful. They’re consistent and they do build momentum. Have a think about those words. They don’t just happen. You need to be intentional about the kind of content that you create. I want to encourage you to be intentional in three areas of your content creation. I’m going to dig deeper into each of these. The first one is idea generation. Most bloggers kind of understand they need to come up with good ideas to write about but most bloggers do it in the moment that they’re creating the content itself. I want you to consider doing that ahead of time. Secondly, the content creation. First, most of us understand we need to put time aside for that. Here’s the one I think most people could lift their game in. That’s the completion of their content. Most bloggers I come across either have a whole heap of drafts that they’ve never published. I had 90 at one point on the ProBlogger back end, or they publish content that could be a whole heap better, that they could be completing better. I want to give you some tips in each of these three areas as the next three points of my presentation. But before I do, I want to encourage you to put time aside for this. One of the things I loved in one of the earlier presentations was about separating your tasks out. James shared his weekly schedule before. I’ve got a little way to go to clear mine but this is how I structure most of my weeks. You’ll get these slides later and you can look a little more deeply into it. I put time aside. Every week, I make an appointment with myself every week to come up with ideas. It happens on Friday morning. I spend half an hour on it. That’s all. Half an hour and I brainstorm by myself. Then my team shows up for the meeting and I share what my ideas are and they tell me which ones are good and which ones aren’t. They develop them a little bit further. We probably spend about 45 minutes in total on ideas and that type of thing. Friday afternoons, I spend time planning the content I’m creating next week. I find really useful on a Monday morning when I look ahead for creation of content, to know ahead of time what I’m going to create that morning. I don’t have to come up with the idea. It’s already come up with and I’ve already given myself the deadline of when it needs to be created by. Monday, Tuesday morning, I spend time creating. Whether that be blog post or podcast or webinars or whatever it might be. In the afternoons, I’d spend time completing. That’s really important for me to do because that’s my natural tendency, is to publish half finished content. I just like to get it out there without really going to the next level and taking that content from being good to great. I want to show you how to do that in a moment. The fourth thing I want to talk about is generating ideas. Really, I want you to return to this exercise. This is what I did in 2007 when I started Digital Photography School. I worked at this overall change I was trying to bring and then I decided to fill in the gaps. For you to take your audience from one point to the next, what needs to happen? What do they need to know? What mindshifts need to happen? What skills do they need to develop? What areas do they need to build their confidence in? I started to fill in the gaps. Here are some of the things I came up with for my audience. They needed to learn about aperture, shutter speed and some of those technical things they needed to grow in their confidence. They needed to understand really basic skills of how to hold a camera. I came up with 207 things in this exercise. It took me a whole afternoon to do. I returned to it the next day, I came up with another 100 so right about 300 things that my readers needed to do to get from fully auto to creative control. That was my first two years content for the blog. I turned that content, step by step, into cornerstone pieces of content that I gave away to my audience. I placed them in an order that would take my readers on a journey from being in fully automatic mode to having creative control of their cameras. These four pieces of content here were some of the first pieces of content that I wrote. I looked at the stats the other day. Each of those pieces of content has been read over two million times since I started. To this day, it still gets thousands of people to each of these pieces of content. I’m constantly linking back to these cornerstone pieces of content. Every time I mention the word aperture, it links back to the aperture article. Every time I mention shutter speed, it links back to the shutter speed article. It’s because I mapped out the whole road map ahead of time that I knew with confidence that the end of those two years are the base of what I was wanting to teach. Do that exercise. It’s very powerful. If you’re ever running out of ideas, again, think about the change you’re trying to bring and build a road map for your readers. Six more really quick tips on generating ideas. You need to keep a record of every question you’re very asked or every question you ask yourself, every problem you ever notice. Again, this is the thing I love about live streaming, Periscope, it’s the thing I love about webinars, coming to conferences. I’m constantly writing down the questions people ask me. If one person is asking them, other people are asking them too. Set idea traps. This is so powerful. The best thing I ever did for coming up with ideas was to set up a survey. I did it on day three of Digital Photography School. When I set up an autoresponder, you sign up to our newsletter, two or three months after you’ve been getting these weekly newsletters, I send you an email saying, “Would you mind filling in a survey? It helps us to understand you better. It collects a little bit of demographical information about our audience but there’s an open ended question. The open ended question reads something like, “Do you have any questions or problems you want us to write a blog post about?” It’s an optional question. We had about 200,000 or 300,000 people complete that survey since 2007. That’s a lot of data. About 50,000 of those people have asked a question in that survey. I never run out of things to write about because I just go to the SurveyMonkey and look at the latest questions that we’ve been asked. It also shows your audience that you are interested in answering that question. Set idea traps. You can use surveys. Your Facebook updates every now and again. You can ask that same question. Is there something you’d like us to write about? I’ve come across a number of bloggers recently who set up Facebook groups and they run polls every week in their Facebook group to test five different ideas for articles that they’re thinking about writing and they get their Facebook group members to vote on which one they want them to write a piece of content about. Set up these little traps to collect ideas. You should be monitoring every blog post you write, every tweet you put out to collect those questions. If you don’t have people reading your blog yet, and leaving comments, head to someone else’s blog and look for the questions. Someone who’s a bigger blogger in your niche. YouTube is the best place ever to come up with questions. The comments left on YouTube clips in your industry will give you ideas for blog posts. Forums also, we used to run a forum on Digital Photography School. It was amazing how many people would set up an account and I never post one thing. It was almost always a question. People joined forums to ask questions so you need to sit in those places and collect those sorts of questions. And then find a brainstorming buddy. I don’t know if you’ve got these but one of the best things I did when I started ProBlogger was to commit with two other bloggers in my niche to throw out ideas at each other and to give each other ideas to write about. We became writing buddies. The last thing, this is something that’s very simple to do particularly if you’ve been blogging or podcasting for a year or two, is to look back on your archives and ask yourself the question, how could I extend that old post or repurpose it or update it in some way? I actually do this everyday. Everyday, I look back at what I published this day last year and this day the year before on this same date. I actually go back through the archives all the years that I’ve been writing, every single day, to ask myself the question is that post still relevant? Could I update it? Could I repurpose that content in some way? That’s where most of my podcasts, for the first year of my podcasting, have come from. Just looking back at the blog post that I’ve written and repurposing them and updating them. Number five, I want to talk about creating content. Five really quick tips on this, firstly, write to your avatar or write to people that you actually know who are readers. My best blog post almost always start out as an email, a question from a reader or a conversation that I had at a conference or something that happens on Periscope. I write with the person in mind and my content comes out more personal. It’s amazing how many people come out and say, “I feel like you’re writing to me. Did someone tell you about me?” It’s usually because I know someone like them and I’m writing in a more personal way. Write to your avatar and consider a blogging template. If you’re stuck in your writing, sometimes, it can help to get out of that stuck place by creating a template. This is a template that Michael Hyatt came up with. I really didn’t like this idea when I first came across it. He follows the same template in almost every post he writes. I was like, “I’d never do that.” And then I start thinking about my own writing and I realize I pretty much do the same thing without actually having a template. Most of us develop a style of writing so if you’re stuck, maybe look back at some of your old post and work out what your template is or maybe steal someone else’s like Michael’s. He’s put it up and you’ll get a link to that in a moment. I tend to back track my content. I’d much prefer to sit down from morning and write three or four blog post than to sit down four morning and write four blog post. I’m very much about batching what I do with my time. I set deadlines. We use a tool called CoSchedule, which is a WordPress plugin. It helps us to map out our content plan for a month, sometimes two or three months in advance and to assign tasks. We work as a team. I know what I have to write at certain times and then I may have to pass it over to Stacey who edits my content for me. I’m a really big believer also that if you want to create great content, you need to consume it. This is something that I fell short on for a couple of years. It’s only more recently that I’ve started to re-consume content. Sometimes, it’s very easy to get very busy and not fill your own cup. I think consuming great content, one, is good because you will learn more but two, you will also pick up production ideas. I’ve started listening to podcasts recently. Most of which have nothing to do with what I write about but I always come away from those podcasts with ideas from my own show. I want to talk about completing content. This is a big area that I think most content creators could up their game in. Firstly, get help if you can afford it. This is Stacey and Darlene who edits my blogs for me now. Since giving this to someone else to do, we’ve produced a lot more content and a lot better content. If you can afford to get someone in to help read your content out loud, it’s amazing how many mistakes you’ll find. I find it particularly good if you’re reading it out loud to another person. If I’ve got an important piece of content, I’ll ask my wife Vanessa listen to it as I read it to her. I know she’s not really listening but just the fact that she might be helps me to pick out all the mistakes that I would’ve been making. This is something I think we all could lift our game in and it’s in polishing and making your content more visually pleasing and easier to consume. We don’t publish a blog post, we don’t publish show notes anymore without an image. Every post has to have at least one. Most of our posts have several images. That’s not just because I’ve got a photography site, that’s also on ProBlogger, we’ve tested it. The post that have images get read at least 40% more than the post that don’t have images. The same with all of our social media now. Almost every tweet I do now has to have an image in it. They get retweeted significantly higher. They get more responses to them. It just works. You just have to have an image of some kind. Whether it be a diagram or a chart. Over time, you get to see which images are working well as well. Spend time crafting those titles. The title is going to be pretty much what determines whether someone reads the opening line of your post. And then your opening line needs to be something you really need to polish as well. These are two places that I’m spending a lot of time in my content. I usually write my content first and then come back to the title and the opening line and then craft those and spend significant time on those areas. Pay attention to your formatting, particularly your headline. It’s really important as well. People do not read content online. They scan it first and so if you can use headlines to tease them, they will then want to go back and fill in the gaps between the headlines. So really pay attention to that. Draw their eye down the page with images as well at key points, anywhere you want them to look. Add depth to your content. Every time I go to Hit Publish, just before I do, I always ask myself and I’ve trained my team to ask themselves, could they add more meat to it? Could they make it a better post in some way? Maybe by adding in an example, maybe by telling a story or using an analogy, maybe by adding an opinion. It’s amazing how many blog posts go out about new technology and they have no opinion. It’s just here are the specifications of the new MacBook Pro and here’s a picture. That’s it. Tell us why we should buy it. Whether it’s any good, who would be applicable for it, add your opinion. This is what makes your content unique. People aren’t reading your content for specifications. They want to know what you think. That’s what gets the conversation going as well. Suggest further reading. We have good SEO benefits mentioned this morning about having links to your own content but also links out to other people’s content. It shows your audience that there’s more to do, there’s more to learn and that you know where to find that. That’s good for you own credibility. Also, it builds relationships with other sites when you’re linking to them as well. Add quotes. It’s so easy to tweet someone and say, “Do you have any thoughts on this?” And then embed that tweet reply into your content. I email Seth Godin all the time. He didn’t know me from anywhere but he almost always responds to those sorts of emails. “Do you have one line to say about this topic? Thanks Seth.” I’ll borrow your authority and I’ll plug that into my content. It makes my content more useful and adds another opinion, another voice and shows your readers that you’re going to the extra mile in gathering different opinion for them. Suggest something for your readers to go and do. This adds depth. I’ll show you some examples of how we do this on Digital Photography School. This is something that is just so easy to do. It’s so easy to embed something else. We again heard good SEO reasons for doing that. If you can keep people on the page longer, it helps your SEO ranking, also makes your content better. Just look at all the places you can get embeddable content these days. We all know you can embed YouTube clips. That’s easy to do. Just do a search for your topic and find a video that related to what you’ve got to say. But there are so many other places you can get embeddable content. I judged a blogging competition for social media examiner recently and the blogs that won all used embeddable content. They mixed it up. They were embedding tweets. They were embedding Facebook page status updates. They were embedding videos. They were embedding audio clips. This new tool that I mentioned before, Anchor, you can embed that anchors that you create and the anchors that other people create as well. Give your readers different things to do while they’re on your site. It’s so easy to do. Mix up your content. I was talking to a restaurateur down in Melbourne, a very well known one recently who’s had a top level restaurant now for 10 years. I was quite amazed when I heard that he’d been going for 10 years. He’s been at the top of the game for 10 years. I was like, “This game of having a restaurant, it’s very fickle. There’s always the new cool place down the road that everyone’s rushing off to.” I asked him, “How do you keep at the top of the game?” He said, “Basically, I reinvent myself every year. Sometimes two times a year.” He’s had four fit outs in that time. He reinvents his menu every year, several times. He actually does it seasonally. He’s always reinventing things. The people who have come to this restaurant know what they’re going to get. They know the sort of the food that he has. They know the level of service. But he’s always constantly experimenting with new things. I think this is really true in this place, in this time where so much content are being created. There’s always new sites springing up. Your readers need to understand that quality is always going to be high and the type of stuff you’re talking about is going to be consistent. But you need to mix up the type of content that you’re producing. I want to encourage you to do it in a number of ways. One is to produce content that has different styles to it. This is what I say to my team, “Every week, I want you to create content that informs, inspires, and interacts.” If you look at each of those blog posts that I’ve got up there, they’re all on exactly the same topic. Long exposure photography. We publish the first one on Monday. It’s information. It’s a meaty article, a tutorial. To be honest, hardly anyone reads it on Monday. You know when they read it? They read it on Wednesday, after we publish an inspirational post and we link back to it. The inspirational post is 15 beautiful photos that we’ve curated. That post has hardly any text at all. It’s all about showing what could be. It’s all about showing our readers the type of photos they could take. It gives them a reason to go and read the tutorial. Inspire them and then drive them to the information. At the end of the week, on Friday, Saturday, we give them a challenge. We say, “Go and take a photo using the technique you learned on Monday, looking at the photos that you saw on Wednesday. Go and try it for yourself and come back and share the photo with us.” We use Discuss as a communing tool, which allows embedding of photos in the comments. This really works. Both of those posts drive traffic back to the informational posts. We got extra paid views as a result of it. The best thing though is that our readers actually learn something because they learn information, they’re inspired to use the information. They’re given a chance to implement what they learn. We all know that people learn best when they do. Inform, inspire, interact. 90% of our content is information but we sprinkle it. We season it with inspiration and interaction. Another way to mix up your content is to try different formats. You’ll find over time that your audience will respond best to certain types of content and we’ve certainly worked out that information content is our best, we use a lot of guides, how to’s, tips, tutorials but we sprinkle it with stories. Storytelling is another way of inspiring and some of our best posts have been more inspirational content telling stories. But there’s a whole list of different types of content that you need to constantly be experimenting and seeing what’s working with your audience. The same with different mediums. For us, blog posts have been a big part of it. But more recently, I’ve started to get into more visual content particularly through our social media, infographics, and cheat sheets have really been working very well for us lately and live streaming as I said before. Actually, what I’m finding is live streaming so Periscoping everyday is driving people to my podcast and the podcast is driving people to the blog for some reason. That seems to be the flow of our readers. Just experiment with where you can meet new readers and where you can take them as a result of that. I want to talk for a moment about this idea of know, like, and trust that opened this quite before. People do business with people that they know, like, and trust. So if you want people to do business with you, you want them to know, like, and trust you. How do you create content that takes them through this process? It will be different for everyone of us but I want to show some examples of what we do. This is an infographic. We didn’t actually create it. We curated it. We always link back to the source. We find that infographics work very well as a first point of contact with our audience on Digital Photography School. Our audience share these like crazy. They can’t get enough of them. That’s good at getting known. People share that kind of content. But in and of itself, that doesn’t really help because people generally would bounce away from an infographic very quickly. What we do and you can see that underneath a highlighter, that we have further reading based on that infographic. We used to just post the infographic and that was great for traffic, getting the eyeball. But since we started giving further readings that relates to that infographic, we’ve seen a lot more stickiness to the sight so highlight and underneath it, you can’t read it. It’s three articles on how to hold a camera, which is exactly what the infographic is about. We give them a meatier piece of content. That’s the content that people like. They begin to not only see you and know you. They begin to like you and trust you. Underneath that, we have other articles for beginners because this is a topic that’s very beginner-y. But we can’t post infographics all day everyday. We have to go to the next level. You have to start asking yourself, what’s going to take people to the next level of liking us? Again, this is where we have more of our inspirational content. This is where storytelling is very powerful. Content that’s going to make people grow in their desire, in inspiration and motivation. Sprinkle that type of content. But again, you’ll see there, I’ve highlighted links further into the sight. We’re always trying to get people to the content which helps them to trust us. That helps them to build credibility and authority for us. This is another type of content that helps likeability. It’s any kind of interactional. This is one of our challenges. We do them every weekend. Here is something for you to go away and do. Show us your work. People like to show off. People like to talk. We give them an opportunity to do that. That gives them a sense of belonging. And then trust. These are meaty articles. That post there on the right, The Ultimate Guide To Learning How To Use Your First Digital SLR is like 6,000 words long. That’s a big piece of content but it grows authority. We’ve actually found that long form content is outperforming anything else on the sight at the moment. I don’t know if you can see that but that post has been shared over 149,000 times. It took a lot of work to get that piece of content together but it’s paying off because not only is it being shared, it’s growing trust. It’s growing credibility. That piece of content, we tracked it, is responsible for a lot of people buying our ebooks than buying our products as a result of that. Okay, we know, like and trust. What about buy? Because we all want the sale, eventually. How do you actually get them to buy? What we’ve found is that our blog posts are not a very good place to get the buy. For our audience, it just doesn’t work at all. We actually tracked this ebook that we launched last year. It was responsible for about 5% of our sales, our blog content. We just don’t sell blog content anymore. We sell for our email list. We’ve got an email list of about 800,000 now and it drives almost all of our sales. Social media just doesn’t convert for us at all. We don’t use social media or our blogging content, or even the podcast to sell. We use it to drive people to our newsletter. This is what most people do on their blogs. They have their blog and then they have a sight wide opt in on the side bar. Get our cheat sheet or get our ebook, whatever it might be. This works, this is good but what’s even better is to have multiple opt ins. One of the trends we noticed last year was a lot of blogs now are using a library of opt ins and they’re matching the opt in that relates best to a certain category of content. What’s happening even more this year, this is another shift that I’ve noticed is that cool kids are now creating opt ins for every blog post that they do or every podcast that they do. I think James mentioned or alluded to this earlier. This is what Amy Porterfield did. She interviewed me for her podcast a few months ago and she said to me, “Can I take three of your best articles from the blog, put them into a PDF, and then add some of my own thoughts to it? She created a very simple opt in for that podcast. She wouldn’t be promoting it anywhere else except for that episode. This is what RazorSocial are doing in Cleary. He actually gives anyone who comes to his blog a PDF version of every blog post. You can just download a PDF version of the blog post but it’s behind an opt in. It’s converting really well for him. It’s a very easy way to create an opt in. This is Jill from Screw the 9 to 5. They’ve started creating checklists or swipe files the relate to blog posts. They don’t do it for every blog post but certainly the ones that are meatier, the longer form content. They’re adding blog-post specific opt ins to them. I think we’ll see that just well a lot more and more in the next 12 months. Talking about content events, as I look back over the last 12 years of my own blogging journey, I quite often live in Google Ad Analytics and I love just to look at what happens when there’s spikes in traffic came, just a good habit to get into. I noticed recently that a lot of the spikes in traffic in my site have happened around events or content events. The first one was back in 2005 on ProBlogger. I was sitting in bed one night at 2:00AM and I had this little idea for a 31 day series of content on the blog. I was going to give a little bit of teaching everyday and then a little activity to go and do for my readers. I couldn’t go to sleep so I got up and I just wrote this blog post and said, “I’m going to do this thing. I’m going to start it tomorrow and I’m going to call it 31 Days To Build A Better Blog.” Put no thought into that idea at all. I had no idea what the 31 days were going to be. I think I may have had a couple of ideas and I just went to bed and I slept easy. I’ve got it out of me. Put the blog post up, woke up the next morning, there was more comments on that post than I’ve ever had on a post before. I was like, “Okay, what’s day one going to be?” Quickly, I came up with day one and it started this little series of content over the first 31 days. Traffic was two or three times higher that month than I’ve ever seen before. I was like, “What is going on here?” Essentially, I was doing the same thing I was doing every other day. But because I called it something and ran it over a defined period, people wanted to join it. There was a sense of an event happening and people like to join events. I did the same series in 2007. This time I put an opt in around it. I said you can get an email every day and essentially, it was the same thing, almost exactly the same content. It was two or three times bigger than the first year. I did it in 2009 again and this time, we had a little community area. Today, I’d probably use a Facebook group or something like that. People really responded well in not only getting the content and the task, but coming together and sharing their knowledge. This event idea really took off. At the end of 2009, my readers said, “Could you give us this in a PDF or an ebook? We’ll even pay you for it.” I was like, “No, you won’t.” They were like, “Yeah, we will.” I put it into a PDF and I created 31 Days To Build A Better Blog, The ebook. 12,000 people bought in the first three weeks after launching it, at $20 each. I’m like, “What in the world happened?” Events are very powerful. People like to join things. Any sort of a defined period is a very powerful thing. I’m going to let you work through this slide later when you get it but there’s a whole heap of benefits of doing an event. I was going to say I think it’s about joining. It’s about something social. It’s about doing something together, achieving something together that can be very powerful to do. Here are a few examples. This is my wife. She does events. She actually did her first event two weeks into her first blog. She had no one reading her blog at all. I think there was like 10 readers. By the end of that week, she had 200 readers a day because she did this event. It was just a very simple event. She told her readers to take a photo of themselves wearing a certain color everyday for a week and post in on Instagram with a hashtag. It went crazy. She does these events now every three or so months and every time, it significantly increases her traffic. This is one around fitness. You can do this in pretty much any niche. This is one around organizing your pantry of all things, an event that this blogger did. She had thousands of people to the pantry challenge together. This is a 52 weeks event on finances and saving up money. You can really do it in lots of ways. If you’ve ever been to Bali, this is the braiding your hair challenge. Literally, Kristina did. She does 30 days of braiding your hair and she turned it into an ebook at the end of it. People joined in and then she used that as the launch of her new product. Any kind of an event worked really well. Again, I’ll let you read through those. I don’t like bullet points but I thought it would be a quick way of getting the information to you and allow me to get on to my last two points. This is the biggest challenge I think, for us as content creators today. How do you differentiate yourself? We live in a time where, I think I saw the stats the other day, there’s around 74 million plus blogs on wordpress.com. That’s just the wordpress.com version and there’s the wordpress.org version, which is even more popular, then there’s Tumblr and Blogger. There’s so much content being created all the time. Looking at podcasts, app store, there’s so many podcast out there. There’s so much content being produced. It’s probably one of the most important things that we need to really get our heads around as content creators. How do we stand out? Seven quick tips to do it. Firstly, and this is the hardest one. It’s almost impossible to choose a unique topic but it still is kind of possible. Firstly, you could be first and it was helpful to be one of the first people talking about blogging and making money from blogging. But this is pretty much impossible. There’s 1,000 blogs on almost every topic you can think about. But you can be the first one to combine two topics together. This is Manolo, the shoe blogger. He started blogging in 2007 and there were thousands of blogs on shoes already back in 2007. But he was the first person to blog about celebrities and their shoes. He went viral. He went crazy. He was the first one to bring two topics together. This is Jen and Jadah from Simple Green Smoothies. Jada spoke at our event last year. She told the story about how she had I think four or five different blogs, none of them worked whatsoever until she noticed Green Smoothies starting to take off. And so she started Simple Green Smoothies. They have hundreds of thousands of Instagram followers, hundreds of thousands of readers to their blog. They built a massive business around Simple Green Smoothies. This is Donna Moritz, some of you will know, she’s an Aussie blogger. She had a social media blog as did thousands of other people. It was pretty much the same content, talking about all things social media. And then she noticed visual content was starting to grow and become more important. She noticed the post that she was writing on visual content started to really take off so she killed all her other posts and just focused on visual content. Jumped on that emerging trend. Serve and ignore demographic. I think this is a very powerful thing because yes, there is a blog on every topic out there but there’s a whole heap of ignored demographics. Has anyone come across Nerd Fitness? This is a great blog if you’re a nerd. There’s tens of thousands of fitness blogs out there but they all look the same. They’ve all got chiselled guys with six packs on the front and they all speak in the same language that I have no idea what they’re talking about. Steve Kamb decided to start a fitness blog for nerds. He gamified getting fit. Nerds want to get fit too but we’ve been ignored, we’ve been left out of that whole thing. Did I say we? Yeah. This is a great example of serving and ignoring. He’s really presenting the same information. He just changes the language and he’s branding it in a way that is relevant for the ignored niche. There are all kinds of ignored niche, whether it be gender, disability, life circumstances, age that you are. I came across a few bloggers recently who’ve been creating blogs for seniors and retirees, who have felt left out of certain niches as well. There are all kind of ignored demographics. Use a different medium or format. A lot of you read The Verge. When The Verge started, almost every tech blog had been successful the nerd, The Verge was using short form content. Engadget, Gizmodo, TechCrunch, they were publishing 10 to 20, sometimes 30 or 40 blog posts a day and they were almost all one or two paragraphs long The Verge came out now publishing 4,000, 5,000 word articles. They stood out because they changed the format. This is Brian Fanzo. He was a social media expert as were thousands of other people but he spotted this live streaming trend going on and so he now is flying around the world talking about live streaming and he’s made a name for himself because he chained the medium that he was using to talk about the same topics. Publish in a different pace. Everyone here probably knows John Lee Dumas. There are lots of entrepreneurial blogs out there but no one was doing daily. I don’t know how he does it. I don’t know how he keeps us but he changed the pace of publishing content. As a result, that’s one of the reasons that he stood out. This is Dosh Dosh, a blog that was around years ago now. He started I think in 2007. It was a blog about making money blogging. This is three years after ProBlogger started and by this stage, there were thousands of blogs on how to make money from blogging, Macky from Dosh Dosh decided to slow it down. He didn’t go faster. He went slower and longer form. He was publishing at one stage, one piece of content every month. It was long, meaty content that everyone anticipated. When he published that post, it got shared like crazy. Macky’s down at it again. You’ve got to get his latest post that would take you a week to read it and implement the content. It was so meaty but he slowed it right down. It became a part of his brand. Now, he’s disappeared and no one knows where he went. Right for a different level of expertise, this is what I did with Digital Photography School. There were thousands of blogs for photographers in 2007 when I started. It was a stupid topic, it was too late. Digital photography has been around forever. But most of those blogs have been writing for experts. Most of those blogs had this culture on them. If you turned up and asked a beginner question, you would get laughed out of the comment section. It wasn’t because the bloggers themselves didn’t like beginners. It was because the audience had all grown up and become intermediate and advanced users. I started a blog for beginners. One of my first articles was how to hold a camera. The most basic thing you could think of. I almost didn’t publish it because it was so basic. I was embarrassed to publish the post. It’s now had over 800,000 people view the post. People need that kind of information. That’s the kind of information that they’re too embarrassed to ask their friends. Those serve a different level of expertise. Lastly, I want to talk about refining your voice. Something is really hard to teach on. How do you develop your voice? Partly, it comes from experimentation but it’s something that you can make some choices around as well. Some of you might know Jeff Goins. He’s a blogger about writing and he’s written some great books. He says you can write in any of these five voices on pretty much any topic, any niche. The professor is someone who researches, who pretty much spends their whole life dedicating to learning about a particular topic and then they present a hypothesis and they really teach at a high level about a topic. The artist is someone who’s not really interested in teaching, they’re just interested in beauty and aesthetics and inspiration. They’re looking for the beauty in a topic and you can probably think of bloggers who do that or podcasters. But I don’t really teach you anything but you just come away from it feeling motivated and inspired. The prophet is someone who’s interested in telling you the truth. The cold, hard, ugly truth. They bust myths, sometimes they’re not that popular but you know they’ll tell it like it is. Sometimes, they’re not that sensitive in their language that they use but they just get to the point. I reckon someone in this room might be a prophet. The journalist is someone who curates. They gather information from different sources and then presents that information as a story. The celebrity isn’t someone who’s famous. They’re someone who’s charismatic. It’s more about the person and what they think about a topic or how they live their life, their personality, that’s big in that particular topic. Jeff argues that you can pretty much take any of these or a combination of these as your voice. I reckon you could add a couple of more at least. You can be the companion. You can be the person who journeys with someone, who may be just a step ahead of them in the journey. You can be the mentor. You can be the entertainer and talk about the funny stuff that’s going on in an industry or niche. You can be the reviewer. You can be the curator. You can be the storyteller, the guide, the teacher, the thought leader or something else. The more you do it, the better you’ll work out what your voice is and really, I would suggest that you look around at what everyone else is doing and try and find the gaps in that as well. It needs to be who you are and it’s hard to write in a voice that you’re not. But if you can find a gap that reflects who you are, that’s a very powerful thing. Again, when I started Digital Photography School, I wanted to teach, I wanted to give people a how to, but I didn’t want to be a professor. There were plenty of them already so I decided to be the companion. I decided to be someone who’s like here’s what I learned, try this. I’ll be a friend who teaches you. Think about your voice. The last thing I want to say, I’ve got a few minutes left to say it. I don’t need them, is to keep moving. This is just a general piece of advice I guess, for entrepreneurs. You’ve got to keep moving. Pay attention to the little ideas you get that keep you awake at night like I paid attention to, back in 2005, when I couldn’t sleep at night. And don’t just pay attention to those ideas, do something with them. Get up out of bed and write a blog post. Put it out there. See what happens. Look for the sparks that energize you and then test those sparks and look to see what happens. Look for the sparks that energize other people. When I put that blog post out there about 31 days to build a better blog, I didn’t know what would happen but I followed the energy. I saw that my readers were responding and so I went with it. I went hard at it. And then I repeated it and I evolved it. And then I repeated it and I evolved it again. Now, I turned into the product. You know what? The best thing, yes all those sales of that book, I think I looked a couple of weeks ago and we sold 60,000 copies of that book now. It’s going to be a profitable venture. I’m really glad I paid attention to that spark of energy and did something with it at 2:00AM that night. It also led to a whole other journey. Whilst ebooks may not be the best model, maybe we need to all move towards subscriptions, I don’t know, but ebooks and paying attention to that spark was something that really was powerful for me. I’d spend on a whole heap of other product ideas that I’ve created since. We’ve now published about 40 ebooks. We’ve now sold almost half a million ebooks since 2009 when I first created that first one. It’s opened up this whole new way of doing things. I put it all back to the fact that I paid attention to a spark of energy and I enacted, I kept moving. I love this little quote from Jadah Sellner that I’ll leave you with. “Take imperfect action.” It’s very easy to come to a conference like this and be overwhelmed by the people on the stage, telling you their stories of all the things that they’ve done and looking around you at the room and all the other people taking notes about the things they’re going to enact in hearing these stories. The thing that you’ve got to realize is that none of us really know what we’re doing and we’re all just taking imperfect actions and seeing what happens as a result of that. There are plenty of failures that we all have along the way but somewhere in the midst of the things that we do comes life and comes profit. That’s all I’ve got to say today. Thank you for the time. I hope you enjoyed that talk. I do recommend the Superfast Business conference. James Schramko also has a podcast. If you do a search for Superfast Business, you’ll find him. He’s a very smart, straight talking kind of guy. Another Aussie accent to add to your playlist if you’re not from Australia or if you are as well. Thanks for listening. Don’t forget to join the Facebook group, problogger.com/group. As promised at the top of the show, some further listening for you. If you want to listen to a podcast on how to choose a niche, go back to episode 59. If you want to hear a podcast about avatars and thinking about your audience, go back and listen to a really early one, episode 33. If you want to dig into that exercise for thinking about how to change your audience’s life, go back even further to episode 11. That was part of our 31 day series. If you want to dig into more about how to come up with great ideas to create content, go and listen to episode 84, which was a part of a series that I did. It was followed up on episode 86 on how to create content. I really dig into some strategies for thinking about how to get into the habit of creating good content. Episode 87 was also about completing content, finishing things off. Lastly, if you want to learn more about embeddable content, I’d go a lot deeper into that topic in episode 152. There’s lots more in the ProBlogger archives there so dig around and if you do want to get those links, go over to the show notes, which are at problogger.com/podcast/213. Lastly, thanks so much for those of you who left reviews over the last week in iTunes and other podcasting apps. I am loving those reviews and a few good ones came in this week as well. 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.

Evergreen Content Ideas for Bloggers: Part 2 Today I want to talk about evergreen content, and want to suggest seven more types of evergreen content you might like to try on your blog. This episode is essentially part two of what I started in episode 209, where I suggested the first seven types of evergreen content. But whether you listen to this one first and then that one, or listen to that one first and then this one, you should get some ideas either way. 7 More Evergreen Content Ideas for Your Blog Influencers to Watch in Industry Bloggers to Watch in 2017 XX Habits of successful xxxxx 10 Habits of Highly Effective ProBloggers 5 Good Photography Habits to Start Today 3 Habits Every Outdoor Photographer Should Develop to Avoid Missing Shots The 9 Conversion Habits of the World’s Most Successful Bloggers 5 Photography Pitfalls to Avoid That No One Tells You About 4 Mistakes Beginning Landscape Photographers Make 9 Bad Habits of Photographers History of (topic/brand/product/industry) We Analyzed 100 Million Headlines. Here’s What We Learned (New Research) Observations about an Industry 5 Ridiculous SEO Myths Every Blogger Should Ignore Four Common Myths About Full-Frame Cameras Dispelled The Myths and Realities of Becoming a Professional Photographer Links and Resources for 7 Types of Evergreen Content To Create On Your Blog Facebook Group Dallas Event Further Listening 209: 7 Types of Evergreen Content You Can Create On Your Blog Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Hey there and welcome to Episode 212 of ProBlogger Podcast. My name is Darren Rowse and I’m the blogger behind problogger.com, a blog, podcast, events, job board, and a series of ebooks all designed to help you as a blogger to grow a profitable blog. You can learn more about ProBlogger over at problogger.com. In today’s episode, I want to talk about evergreen content again. I want to suggest to you seven more types of evergreen content that you might like to try on your blog. This episode is essentially part two of what I started a couple of episodes ago, back in 209, where I suggested the first seven types of evergreen content. You might want to go back and listen to that one, but you might also just wanna go ahead with today’s as well. I’ve designed this episode as a standalone one and you can go back and listen to the other one later if you’d like. Either way will work. Before I get on with the show, just a quick note that there are still a few tickets for our Dallas event – problogger.com/success. It’s on the 24th and 25th of October. I’d love to meet you at that event as well. There are also some virtual passes available and I’ll talk more about those at the end of the show. You can find them at that same link. Back in Episode 209, I presented the first seven types of evergreen content. I talked a little bit about what evergreen content was, the type of content that doesn’t date. It’s the type of content that you continue to promote on social media again and again, it tends to do quite well in Google. We touched on very much educational content there. We talked about ‘how to’ content, frequently asked questions, research results, stories, case studies, introductions to topics or ultimate guides, and I do recommend that you go back and listen to that episode perhaps after this one is finished. That episode got so much positive feedback. I loved it. I loved getting the tweets and the emails from people saying I listened to this episode, and I planned out my next week’s content. Or, in one case, I had someone plan out their next three months of content based upon that one episode. I was so inspired by the way many of you applied what you heard in the episode that I wanted to create another one. Really, there are so many different types of evergreen content and we just scratched the surface in Episode 209. Today, I’ve got another seven for you. By no means is this the definitive list. There’s going to be more coming in future episodes as well. But today’s seven all have a bit of a theme. They’re all probably going to be quite relevant for those of you who defined your blog by a niche or a topic or an industry. Although having said that, I suspect many of you are going to find this useful if you’ve got a personal blog or even a multi-topic blog. I really wanted to pick some examples of evergreen content today that would be a little bit more specific to those of you perhaps with a business blog, some of you who are blogging about an industry, because I often get emails from people saying I like your how to content but it’s not really relevant to my industry. Hopefully, a bit of variety in what we’ve got today will be a nice companion piece to Episode 209. Let’s get on to today’s seven. They’re not all going to be relevant to everyone, and I will say up front that some of these do overlap a little bit with each other as well. You might actually choose to create a piece of content based on today’s episode that has a bit of an overlap between a couple of these. The first one is what I would call a profile post, or a biography type post. One of the things that people do on Google all the time, and on social media, is search for information about people. I do it all the time. Every time I see someone on television that I find interesting, the first thing I do is jump onto Google and Google that person. One thing that you can do is to create content that’s going to be on the other end of those Googles and those searches. Create a piece of content that is about a person, that is a profile article, a profile piece about that person. Talk about what they achieved, talk about some of their demographic information, their age, their background, any kind of personal information. You don’t want to go too personal but the type of information that people would find interesting. How did they start out in the thing that they’re known for today? How did they rise in the industry that they’re in or their career? Were there any key moments in their life or in their development? Talk about the controversies around the person if there are any, and you don’t want to go digging if there’s none there. Any news related to them, you might want to link to articles that were written about them, you might want to link to social media profiles, their blog if they’ve got one, their podcast, their YouTube channel, anywhere that they have a presence online. Talk about their credentials, their qualifications, links to interesting reads about the person, any quotes that can be attributed to that person. Images of the person also would bring the post to life, the article live. Any kind of stories about the person as well so that you’re not just presenting data, you’re presenting actually a story of the person. The ideal, I guess, would be to involve the person that you’re creating a profile piece about in the creation of that. You might want to reach out to them and ask them some questions, ask if they might jump on a call with you to do an interview with you. But in some cases, you might not get the positive response from that person, particularly if it’s a very well-known person. But there would be plenty of information about many high-profile people already. You would be able to find the information that you would need. A biography, a profile type post is one example of an evergreen piece of content. This is the type of thing you might want to come back to again and again to update it as that person’s story develops. You might want to update it once a year, just adding any new information about that person. It is the type of content that doesn’t date because a person’s story doesn’t date. What they did three years ago is still what they did three years ago. You might want to update it so that it becomes continually up to date for people who continue to find it, but it is evergreen content. This is a piece of content that you could do in most industries, I personally have had these types of articles written about me. Sometimes, people reach out and get my involvement. Sometimes, they just write it based upon their observations and what they can find through research. You could do this about any type of person in any industry, whether they’re well known or someone who’s an up-and-coming type of person. That, I think, would be particularly a good piece of content to create, someone who is on the rise in your industry, maybe an emerging leader, someone who has just done something significant because they’re the type of person that there wouldn’t be as many articles about. You have a higher chance of being able to rank for that type of content. A profile post is the first thing that I’ve talked about today. Number two, it overlaps with this one a little bit, or it could, is what I would call an interview piece of content. An interview with a person of note in your industry. As I said, this could be related to this first piece of content that I talked about, the profile piece. You might actually want to do both at the same time. If you are able to get an interview with a person of note in your industry, you might want to publish a profile article about the person, this is an article that you write about a person, drawing on some of the information that you get in the interview. And then you might also want to publish the interview, with permission from the person. You might create an audio version or you might just publish the transcript. I say this all the time in mainstream media and on podcasts, people quite often will write an article about someone and say, “And if you’d like to listen to the article that we based this article upon, go and listen to it here, or go and read it here.” These companion pieces of content can work quite well with one another. You could do an interview that is about a person’s story. You might want to find someone in your industry and really go from the beginning of their life right through to the end of their life. The interview can be quite biographical in nature, it can be very story telling, or you might choose to really just interview a person about a topic. There’s a variety of different types of interviews that you can do. For example, in the last episode of this podcast, Episode 211, I interviewed Pat Flynn but we didn’t talk about his whole story, we just talked about podcasting. I interviewed him about that. It wasn’t a story telling, it wasn’t a biographical type podcast, plenty of people have interviewed Pat on those topics. It really narrowed in on a topic and it was very how to in nature. It was an interview that tried to draw out advice from Pat. You don’t have to have that more narrative, story telling interview, it can be more of an advice type one. Again, interviews can be done in a variety of formats. You can do an audio one, it can be quite natural. Some people like to listen, some people prefer to watch. You might want to do a video one, whether that would be a screen capture type thing where you do an interview on live video and then repurpose that for YouTube, or you might want to do a written interview. This is how I started out, the first interviews that I did, I would send the person I was interviewing five or six questions and then they would send their responses and I would publish the text of that. There’s a variety of ways that you can do that depending on your skill as an interviewer. There are some tips in that last podcast on interviewing from Pat as well, you might want to listen to that if this is something you want to do, particularly in that audio format. Interviews can be long form, the one I did from Pat was I think an hour and 20 minutes, that was quite a long interview for me. I know other podcasters go for three or four hours, some of the longer ones, but it can be very short form interview as well. I’ve done interviews on this podcast that have lasted for 15 minutes because I want to really focus in on a really narrow topic. Again, you don’t have to do long form interviews, it could be one-question interview and that’s something we’ll talk about in a moment as well. Interviews are great. Again, this is evergreen content, particularly if you’re talking about a story of someone. That story can be quite timeless. People are going to find that interesting for the long form. Sometimes, the more advice driven interviews might date a little bit, but they will be relatively evergreen as well. Interviews are great evergreen content, that was number two. Number three builds upon the interview and this is what many people would call the expert roundup. This is a variation of the interview type content where you do a round up of opinions or stories or answers to questions from a variety of sources. You combine all of those answers, all those stories, all of that advice, all of those opinions into one piece of content. You’ve probably seen these, they’re quite popular at the moment. This is where someone will email 10 different people in an industry asking them one question each and they would just take their responses, copy and paste them into an article. The beauty of these types of interviews, I guess you would call them, the one question interviews in many regards, is that they are a little bit easier to get a response from someone than asking them to do a full interview. They just need to respond with one answer rather than answering 10 different questions or setting aside an hour to be interviewed. I will say that a lot of experts and a lot of high-profile people are getting asked to do a lot of these. They’re perhaps not as easy as you would think these days. Many people would refer to this type of content as the expert roundup, but they don’t need to be with experts as such. In fact, sometimes the more compelling versions of these are where you interview everyday people, people who have expertise but they’re not really well known, they’re not the gurus. That often can unearth some really interesting stories. The other option that you might want to do is to do a roundup of the opinion or stories of your readers, doing a reader roundup can be another variation of this. I’ve done this numerous times on ProBlogger where I would ask my audience a single question, ask them for examples of something they’ve done or a tip that they might have, and then I compile those things into a piece of content. In my opinion, sometimes they’re better than an expert review because the experts do tend to say the same things over and over again. Whereas if you can get a roundup of people who are perhaps not so well known but still know what they’re talking about, like ProBlogger readers—ProBlogger readers and listeners have amazing stories to tell—unearthing some of those can be quite useful as well. The idea here is ask everyone the same question, combine their answers, and then put them into a piece of content. A lot of the times when I see this type of content done, it’s around advice. Everyone gets asked for a tip, and this is the type of thing that I get asked quite a bit. Can you give us a tip on SEO, can you give us a tip on live video? That’s what the focus is. Doesn’t have to be advice, though. You could do one that’s storytelling. Ask 10 people to tell you a quick story on a theme, or ask 10 people for examples of something, or ask them for their predictions of what’s going to happen next year in your industry. Ask them to tell you about their favorite tool or resource. Ask the 10 people for their favorite quote or about their biggest mistake, or about a secret that they haven’t really talked about elsewhere. Ask them about their favorite book. The list could go on and on. I guess what I would encourage you to do is to try and find a unique angle. The expert roundup that’s focused on advice may have been overdone in your industry, but there are other ways to do this. Find a unique angle, find something interesting that’s actually going to be useful to your readers, and then seek out the right people to answer that as well. Usually, these are text-based, a lot of article-based ones, but you could do it if the people are willing to via audio. You can actually ask them, could you record a one-minute grab for me? You could even get them to submit it via video. We did this on ProBlogger a few years ago. I asked my readers to submit a video with a tip for blogging, and then we put all the little videos into the one blog post. There’s a variety of ways that you can do that and that might be a way to mix this up or make it stand up a little from what other people are doing as well. The alternative to an expert roundup where you go seeking information from people might be to find quotes from people that are already online. If you don’t perhaps have a profile, you can get people to respond to your interviews, you might just want to do a search. You could, for example, say do a search for headlines. If I was doing one of these on ProBlogger, I might do an article on what ten people, ten experts say about creating great headlines for blog posts. I might do a Brian Clark from CopyBlogger, I might do a search for him and see what he’s written about headlines and then find a quote from him. Then, I could find another expert in another field, someone from BuzzSumo, and find out what they say about headlines. That would be the other way to do it. To actually do a bit of research yourself and find quotes or find advice from people, and then link to the source of course of the articles that you took those quotes from. Number one, just to summarize where we’ve been, biographies, profile posts. Number two is interviews. Number three is expert roundups. Number four is something we’ve done for the last few years on ProBlogger, we have, at the end of each year, created a post called Bloggers To Watch in 2017, or Bloggers To Watch in 2016, Bloggers To Watch in 2015. We’ve had the same person create all these articles over the years, Jade Craven. I’ll link to the latest one in today’s show notes. You can adapt this to your industry as well. Influencers to watch in the travel industry, or influencers to watch in the food industry, influencers to watch in the accounting industry. You could really take this in any direction at all. Really, I guess this is evergreen for a period of time, particularly if you’re doing it for a particular year. You don’t have to do it every year, and you don’t even have to put a date to it. You can just do top 10 food influencers, or top 10 fashion influencers. You can really take it in any direction, not make it based on a year. We tend to do it for a year because the industry is changing all of the time. We like to have an excuse to continually update that post. You can vary this in a variety of ways. You can do top 10 Twitter accounts to follow, you can do 10 Facebook groups to be a part of, you can do the top 10 podcasts in your industry, really here it’s about identifying key people or key resources for people to subscribe to or to watch in a particular industry. It’s not just about ten people or the people that you want to watch, it could be something else as well. These are reasonably evergreen types of content, but again it’s the type of content that semi regularly you might want to come back to and update or do a second post on. You can link all of those pieces of content together. This is what I would call the influencers to watch type of content. That word influencers, you might want to choose something else as well if it’s not as relevant. You might want to talk about ten leaders, ten people on the rise, ten biggest earners in an industry, you can really take that in any direction as well. That was number four. Number five is a little bit different. It may be linked to some of the interviews that you do, or some of the research that you’re doing of people. This is one that I would call the habits of successful…, and you can put in your own word there. I could do that as ten habits of successful photographers on Digital Photography School. I can do ten habits of effective bloggers. You can do the same thing in your industry, ten habits of successful chefs, of teachers, of accountants; whatever it is that you’re writing about. This is where you really try and summarize the things that you notice about people who have had success or who have had achievements in a particular industry. What makes them successful? What has made them achieve what they’ve achieved? What are some of the common things that you notice about them? You could do this type of article in a very broad way. On Digital Photography School, we have done Five Habits Of Good Photographers. I’ve done Ten Habits of Highly Effective ProBloggers on ProBlogger. They’re very broad, that’s on the overarching topic of my blogs. Or, you can really narrow them down on many blogs as well. For example, on Digital Photography School, we can do a post, habits of great travel photographers. We can do another one, habits of great wedding photographers. The habits of these different people and the skills that they need are different from category to category, so that may be relevant for you. Again, on ProBlogger, we can do habits of great fashion bloggers, food bloggers, or travel bloggers. There would be different ways of narrowing down those types of articles and actually making them into a series. That may be relevant for you. This may be a piece of evergreen content that you’re able to then repurpose the format and make it almost into a monthly article that you do. We did one on ProBlogger recently, The Nine Conversion Habits of The World’s Most Successful Bloggers. This was a narrowing down but talking about a particular skill. It’s not a particular type of person but it’s a particular skill that bloggers might need to have. Again, I’ll link to these in the show notes. The other way to do this type of article, the habits type article, is to do the flipside and talk about the bad habits to avoid. We’ve done this in conjunction with our good habits, articles on Digital Photography School. We did an article, a few years ago, one of our writers did Five Good Habits of Photographers, and then the next day she published Five Bad Habits To Avoid. That actually worked really well because it enabled us to link those posts together and promote them together. They went crazy. I remember the traffic that came into both of those pieces of content were fantastic. You can take the negative side of these things to avoid, mistakes to avoid, bad habits can really work well. Number six is where you do a history of a brand or a product or even an industry. In many ways, this is like doing a profile or a biography article like I talked about earlier, but you’re doing it on a broader topic or brand or product or industry. It’s not based upon a person, but it is based upon a thing or an industry or a brand. To give you some examples, on ProBlogger, I can do the history of blogging and actually create a timeline, I might actually do a visual timeline and then talk about the different years and what happened in each of the years. It becomes a history. That’s evergreen. Again, that doesn’t change. History doesn’t change. The way we tell history changes, and I might want to update that post every year, but the bulk of that content would stay the same. It’s evergreen, it’s still useful. Anyone wanting to know what blogging was like in 2005 can go back and look at that particular period. I can do the history of blogging, I can do the history of photography, you can do the history of the iPhone, you can do the history of Samsung as a brand, you could really do the history of accounting, you could really do whatever you like as it adapts to your particular topic. This is the type of content you can update over time. For example if I was doing the history of the iPhone, it would be something that you can update once a year, every time a new iPhone is announced. The beauty of doing that is that this is a piece of content that is really relevant to be promoting on social media once a year, every time the update comes out, every time a new iOS version is released, every time there’s a new rumor, you can be promoting the history of that particular thing. This is, I think, a really useful type of content that you can continue to bring life to and bring readers’ attention back to again and again. You probably do need to update it. It’s not purely evergreen, it’s not I write it once and then forget about it, but it’s not too hard to update that type of thing. Another type of history would be to take the flipside of this as well, to do the future of. You can do the future of the iPhone, the future of accounting. This is the type of content that may not be quite as evergreen, but I wanted to include it because I read an article recently over at Buzz Sumo and I’ll link to this article in the show notes today. This article that Buzz Sumo did analyzed headlines that had been wildly shared, content that had been shared a lot, particularly in the business space. One of the formats of headlines that does consistently well, in fact it was the second most popular type of headline, headlines that started with ‘The Future Of’. I wanted to just draw your attention to that. It’s a bit of a flipside of the history of, it’s about predicting the future. Again, this isn’t quite as evergreen because you might want to predict what’s going to happen in 2018, once 2018 kicks around that’s perhaps less relevant because it becomes history or it becomes wrong, but this is the type of content that people do like to read. They want to know what the coming trends are, they want to know what the developments will be in the future. You might want to try that type of content as well. In fact, you might even want to be updating that as well, you might want to have a post that you published today that you continually update about the future of your industry over time. In some ways, the page, the URL becomes evergreen because people continue to go back to it, but the content on it might evolve over time. Number six, the history of or the future of a topic, a brand, or a product. The seventh one, the last one I want to talk about today, is in some ways related to that last one. It’s about an industry or about a topic. It’s what I would call your observations about that industry or topic. You can take this in a few different directions, and I’m basing this on some of the experience that we’ve had on my blogs. We noticed that when we write about the myths of an industry, five ridiculous search engine optimization myths that every blogger should ignore is an article that we published. It did really well. These are the myths of search engine optimization. On Digital Photography School, we did The Four Common Myths Of Full Frame Cameras Dispelled. We talked about this new category of cameras, we talked about the myths of that type of camera. This is an observation, these are misconceptions, I guess, that people have about an industry. Myths might be one way that you can make some observations about your industry. Another type would be to talk about the secrets of your industry, things that people don’t talk about. It might be five things no one tells you about photography, and these are things that you think are important but aren’t being talked about enough. You can talk about the white lies, I actually saw an article as I was researching this podcast on Buzz Sumo. A number of people wrote about the lies that get told in their industries. Again, this is an observational piece about an industry. In many cases, these things don’t date, they don’t change. I think about the things that people don’t talk about in blogging, they don’t change. Or the common questions that people ask, they don’t change. The trends, the emerging trends, these are observations about an industry. If you can spot some of those that might be relevant for your audience, that might be another type of evergreen content that you might want to write as well. These seven things today, as I say, they all relate a little bit. They’re all about people or industries. There may be more relevance for some of you than others, but I think most of us could really find a way to write one of those types of articles. Let me summarize them again. You’ve got biographies or profiles, number one. Number two is interviews. Number three is expert roundups, although they don’t always have to be experts. Number four might be influencers to watch or top people to watch in an industry. Number five is habits of successful people in your industry. Number six is the history of or the timeline of your industry. Number seven might be more observational posts about your industry; myths, secrets, or lies, or trends, as they pertain to your industry. They’re the seven for today. As I say, this is the second seven so we’re now up to 14 types of evergreen content. My challenge for you, having gone through 14 now, is to create a piece of content, at least one, that is based upon those 14. My challenge is for you to choose one of the things that we talked about today, or back in Episode 209, and to create one. I would love to know if you do that too. I’d love to know what you do with this. The feedback you gave after the 209th episode was really fantastic. There’s a couple of ways you can do that. You can send me an email. My email is darren@problogger.net. I don’t tend to respond to every email that I get, I get a lot, but I do read them all. A better place that you might want to share your post would be over in our Facebook group. If you do a search on Facebook for ProBlogger Community, you’ll find it. Every week there in the group, we have a thread on our wins for the week. We do #wins. Look for the latest one of those wins threads and share your link. That’s a great place for you to tell us what you did with this episode. I do check out all of the things that are left there as well. Head over to the group, let us know there. Or, you could let us know over on the comments of the show notes. Again, today’s show notes are at problogger.com/podcast/212 where I do link to all the examples and the article on Buzz Sumo. You can find that there, but there’s also the opportunity to leave a comment as well. I’d love to hear from you. Let us know what you come up with, and I’m going to do yet another episode on evergreen content in the next few weeks as well with another seven types of evergreen content that you might want to create. We might actually create a little cheat sheet or a printable as well with a summary of all this stuff. Stay tuned for that. Thanks for listening today. Let us know what you create as a result of today’s episode. Also, before you go, if you are in the Dallas area, Texas, even if you’re in the States and want to fly in for it, I do want to bring your attention to that event that we’ve got running on the 24th and 25th of October. This year, we have Pat Flynn speaking, we’ve got Rachel Miller who you heard from a couple of weeks ago. She’s talking about Facebook pages at the event. We’ve got Kim Garst who is an expert on live video. She’s going to come and talk about selling using live video. We’ve got Andrea Vahl talking about Facebook Advertising, we’ve got Kim Sorgius talking about email funnels, we’ve got Steve Chou who’s a great speaker, he’s going to be talking about selling courses. We’ve got Deacon Hayes talking about SEO strategy, Jim Wang talking about monetizing hot blog posts in your archives, and Kelly Snyder is talking about using challenges to grow your blog as well. I’ll be doing a session as well on evolving your business. It’s going to be amazing. We’ve got a whole day, the first day goes from about 9:00AM to I think about 10:00PM. It’s going to be a massive, long day full of content, teaching. The second day is a half day of masterminding. If that is something that’s of interest to you, head over to problogger.com/success. I’ll link to it from today’s show notes as well. A number of you have been asking for virtual passes for that event. We have just released those. If you can’t get to Dallas, you can get all of the teaching content from Day 1 by that virtual pass as well. It won’t be live but you’ll get the recordings from all those sessions as well. It’s pretty affordable. Head over to problogger.com/success to get details of the live event and the virtual pass as well. Thanks for listening today. I look forward to chatting with you next week in Episode 213 of the ProBlogger podcast. How did you go with today’s episode? Enjoy this podcast? Sign up to our ProBloggerPLUS newsletter to get notified of all new tutorials and podcasts.