ProBlogger Podcast: Blog Tips to Help You Make Money Blogging

How to Build Traffic and Profit into Your Blog On today’s episode I want to talk about a key to creating a blog with lots of traffic and profit.   The topic comes from a conversation I had this morning with a new blogger who was asking me about how to create content that would go viral and as I look back at the growth of my own blogs I think it’s an important lesson to my own business’s growth. Links and Resources on The Secret to Building a Blog with Big Traffic and Profit Facebook group ProBlogger Success Incubator ProBlogger Event 4 Techniques to Get More Eyeballs on Your Blog 31 Days to Build a Better Blog 10 Things You Can Do Today that Will Pay Off On Your Blog Forever Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Hey there, my name is Darren Rowse. 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 and all we do over at problogger.com. Today’s episode is episode 201. In it, I want to talk about a key to creating a blog with lots of traffic and profit. It comes from a conversation I had this morning with a new blogger who was asking me about how to create content that will go viral. As I look back on the growth of my own blog, I think it’s a really important lesson for bloggers of all stages, good reminders on how to grow a business around your blog and traffic to your blog. You can find today’s show notes with some further listening at the end at problogger.com/podcast/201. Also, join our Facebook group at problogger.com/group. Just wanted to let you know, a bit of a reminder of our events that we’ve got coming up. If you are in Australia, we do have a limited number of tickets left for our events that are happening at the end of July and the start of August in Melbourne and Brisbane. You can get more information on those events at problogger.com/events. If you’re in America and can get to Dallas, Texas, in October, we’ve got a great event coming up there. You can find out more information on that event at problogger.com/success. All of those events, Pat Flynn will be joining me and we’ve got a raft of other amazing speakers happening at all of those events as well. I’ll link to each of those pages in our show notes as well. Let’s get into talking about traffic and profit and how to build those things into your blog. This morning, I had a conversation with a new blogger who asked me a question that I do get from time to time. They ask me, “How do you get viral traffic with a blog post?” It’s not the first time I’ve been asked it. I suspect it’s not going to be the last time that I’ll be asked it. Every time I am asked this question, I find myself wondering whether I should give the answer that the blogger wants to hear or whether I should give them the one that they need to hear. In this case, I told them the one they needed to hear. But the answer that they really want with that question is for me to reveal some secret to writing highly shareable content. Now, of course there are many techniques that you can use to increase the shareability of your content. I’m going to suggest some further listening on that topic at the end of this podcast. There’s nothing at all wrong with writing shareable content and hoping for it to get viral. I actually think you should write some of that type of content but it’s not the answer to building a sustainable full time blog with big traffic. In fact, when you become obsessed with writing just that type of content, it can hurt your blog. The answer that the blogger I talked to today needed to hear is that in most cases, the reason a blog grows into a sustainable business is that they don’t have viral content. It’s actually not the viral content that helps them to grow that. The key to building a blog with big traffic and big profits is to build it one step at a time. I’m sure there are a few examples around the bloggers who have hit it out of the park with a single blog post, who’ve had overnight success with one piece of content that goes viral. In fact, I’ve heard a few of those stories but it’s certainly not my experience. Whilst I’ve met thousands of full time bloggers over the last 15 years, I’m yet to meet one who got there with a single viral blog post. Full time bloggers rarely have that kind of overnight success. The fastest I’ve heard about is around for months of working on a blog before someone got to a full time level. I’m sure there are faster examples out there but even that four month example is an exception to the rule. In most cases, blogs with big traffic, significant traffic, it takes years of work to get to that level of blogging one step at a time. I know some of you who are listening to this podcast are feeling a little bit disappointed right now. We do love to hear those stories of overnight success. We love hearing about things going viral. Those are fun stories. I understand your disappointment. For those of you who’ve had those moments of going viral, you actually know that they are fun experiences as well. I know this because I remember one of the first times it happened to me. In the early days of Digital Photography School, I was kind of obsessed with writing viral content. I remember one post going viral. In fact, it was probably one of the first posts that went viral for me. It was January 2007. I just looked up the Google analytics stats a few minutes ago and I hit the jackpot with a post. At that time, my blog was seven months old. I was averaging around 4,000 visitors a day, which wasn’t too bad. I’d actually managed to grow my blog relatively quickly to 4,000 visitors a day. That growth was based upon the fact that I’d had a previous photography blog. I was able to bring some readers across from that, I was ranking relatively well in search engines already, and I was bringing in that kind of traffic from search. But things have begun to plateau at around this 4,000 visitors a day mark. I published a lot of evergreen cornerstone content, which had helped to get to that point, but I wasn’t satisfied. I wanted more traffic and so I began to look around at what other sites were doing. I particularly was drawn to social bookmarking sites. At the time, they were huge sites. Today, we see sites like Reddit. Back then, it was site like Digg. They were the big sites that you could get lots of traffic from. I began to analyze the type of content that was being shared a lot on these sites. I realized there were certain formulas to it. There were certain headlines that did pretty well. There were certain topics that if you write about those, they seem to get shared more. I began to try writing some of that type of content. It was quite different to the kind of content I’d already been publishing on my blog. It was fluffy content. It wasn’t overly deep. It wasn’t really that helpful. They were listicles. They were top 10 lists. They were posts that were more about controversy than helping people. They had clickbait-y kind of titles and yet I began to write that type of content. One day, it worked. I remember on this day, early January 2007, I published a post and I woke up one morning and I realized that it had been linked to by a larger blog. A blog called Lifehacker. I’d pitched them the previous day of my post. I’d say, “Here’s my post. You might find this interesting. Your readers might find it interesting.” And they’d taken the bait. They linked to my post. That link doubled our traffic that particular day. That was fantastic. In some way, I didn’t just have 4,000 visitors. I had 8,000 that day. This was just the beginning. The next day, the post was picked up and linked to on a site called Digg, which was one of the forerunners to Reddit. Things went crazy. Overnight, we went from having 4,000 visitors a day, the next day I had over 100,000 visitors. I remember that day vividly. I sat there at my computer refreshing my site stats over, and over, and over again. I did very little else that particular day. I remember watching the numbers grow 4,000, 8,000, 16,000, 20,000, and continued to grow and grow. It was amazing rush. I felt like I finally hit it big. I’ve had this success. I finally was going to have a full time income from this particular blog, but it didn’t last. The next day, I woke up expecting to continue to have massive traffic to my blog, but it was all gone. The next day, we had 4,100 visitors. I was so disappointed. The rush of traffic was amazing. It was an amazing feeling. It really was. I understand why people want viral content. Believe me. But virtually, none of it ever came back despite my best efforts, despite me trying to get that traffic to go and visit another post, and to sign up for my RSS feed, and to follow me on Twitter, and all these other things that could have happened to help me make it come back. It didn’t work. For the next month, my traffic was flat, 4,000 visitors a day. Sometimes, it went slightly high. Sometimes, it went slightly lower. I got really down about it. I wanted that rush of traffic again. I started to write more posts like the first one, trying to recreate it, but none of them took off. I pitched almost every post I wrote to Lifehacker, hoping that it would trigger another rush of traffic, but they didn’t link up again. I tried to game Digg and get my post up to vote it up on Digg but that didn’t work either. I became obsessed with trying to go viral again. For months, that became my number one goal. I wanted to repeat that “success.” For me, it felt like it was success but the reality was that it didn’t help my blog at all. The result was that for the next few months, I continued to create fluffy content. It was designed to trigger shares but not really to serve my readers. Now, it did happen again. I did have a few more of those viral days over the coming months, where my traffic would be huge, where I would get to the front page of Digg or another site like, there was one called Delicious back then. It was social bookmarking sites or another big blog would link up. I’d feel on top of the world. I had a successful blog for a day only to find the next day, my traffic was 4,000 visitors a day. I actually looked at my stats the other day and it was flat for month after month after month. There used to have the big spikes and then nothing, 4,000 visitors a day. This continued on for a long time until I had a realization that 4,000 visitors a day wasn’t just a number. It wasn’t just a number. 4,000, it was 4,000 people a day, 4,000 human beings have landed on my site each day and that wasn’t something to be depressed about. That was actually something to celebrate. But the realization that I also had was that when they were landing on my site, they were actually finding fluffy content. They were finding formulaic headlines, they were finding content that was designed to be shared but not designed to solve their problems. I wasn’t serving them at all. This was a massive mind shift for me. I realized that the traffic that I already had, that I thought wasn’t enough, was actually pretty amazing. The fact that 4,000 people, human beings have given me attention each day was pretty amazing. Whilst I’ve been hoping for these 100,000 visitors a day spikes in traffic, the reality was that even with a big spark in traffic every couple of months, that it was the 4,000 visitors a day type traffic that was actually outnumbering my viral traffic. 4,000 visitors a day is 120,000 visitors over a month. I already had the equivalent of a viral traffic each month and yet I was focused on something that just really wasn’t paying off at all. I began to wonder if instead of focusing upon trying to hit the ball out of the park with one post a month, whether I’d have more success in trying to serve those readers I already had. If I spent more time trying to get that number from 4,000 visitors a day to 4,001, to try and grow them one at a time rather than 100,000 at a time, because when I was getting those 100,00 visitors, it really wasn’t converting to anything that took me closer to my goal of becoming a full time blogger. That’s what I started to do. I started to try and take little steps towards that bigger goal rather than trying to get to the big goal all at once. Some of the things I started to do around that time; I started to survey my readers. I started to ask them, “What are your questions? What are your problems? Who are you?” I didn’t even know who they were really at this point. I began to gather that information. With that information, I suddenly started to have a wealth of content ideas. I started to see what their problems were and I started to understand what they need. I started to understand what motivated them, what turned them on and off. I began to suddenly get a lot of ideas for content. I also found that because I was spending less time on sites like Digg and trying to get links from other sites, because I was sitting on my Google Analytics less each day refreshing it wondering if I was going viral, I suddenly had more time to write content. I had more ideas for content and I had more time to write it. I increased the amount of content I was producing on the site. I went from 4 posts a week to 5 posts a week, to 7 posts a week, and then later on, to 10 posts a week. I began to just focus less upon the stats and more upon serving my readers. I also had more time in my hands to interact with my readers. I began to respond to comments more. We ended up starting a forum and trying to build some community there. It was also around this time I began to work more on not just trying to get traffic but trying to convert the traffic that was coming into becoming subscribers. It was around this time I began to really focus more upon trying to build my email list and signed up for AWeber and began to grow that particular list. I began to create content via email that would engage those readers and bring them back to the site again and again. I still did try to write the occasional piece of shareable content. I actually did one probably every couple of weeks but the ratio of the kind of content that was shareable and the kind of content that was more evergreen serving my readers, it changed considerably. I went from trying to hit the ball out of the park with viral content from every post with every post to 1 in 10, 1 in 14 posts. What I found is that those shareable pieces of content actually started to get shared more by my readers because I’d been serving them better. Because I’ve been paying attention to them, they began to share that content more. It naturally actually began to happen more often. I would begin to get more viral spikes in traffic. Now, again, those viral spikes didn’t lead to a lot of ongoing growth to my blog but it did begin to happen more and more. That was actually helpful with social proof. The impact was that a month later, after I made this mind shift, I remember actually, the date that I did it because I wrote it in the journal. I looked it up yesterday and I went and had a look from a month after making that decision, my traffic was at 4,500 visitors a day. It had actually began to go up. It was going up sort of 10%, 20% per month. Three months later, I was already on 6,000 visitors a day. A year later, my traffic was at 9,000 visitors a day. We did continue to have a few viral days of traffic but my efforts were not about making viral traffic happen. It was more about trying to serve my community. Those viral things were sort of like the cream on top. The real focus became trying to grow our traffic from day to day, the longer term visitors. I realized that a reader who came back everyday for the next year, was 365 times more valuable than a reader who surfed in one day and never came back again. These days, the site has grown a lot. These days, 100,000 visitors in a day is a normal day for us. But that only happened because I changed the mentality. I stopped chasing viral traffic and started doing the things that would grow loyal readers. Here’s my point for today. Do you have dreams of big traffic and profits for your blog? I hope you do. That’s fantastic. Dream big but don’t allow your big dreams to distract you from the truth that the way those big dreams are usually achieved is one step at a time. Dream big but the reality is that you’re most likely to get to those dreams coming true if you begin to take single steps at a time. What are the steps that you need to take? That’s my question for you today. I’ve got some suggesting points but it’s going to be different for each one of us. Maybe your next step is starting that blog that you’ve been thinking of starting. I know a lot of readers or listeners for this podcast haven’t started a blog yet. You’ve been thinking about doing it. Maybe today is the day. Start that blog. I’ll link in our show notes to our guide to starting a blog. Maybe your next step is writing a blog post. Maybe it’s a post you’ve been procrastinating on. You’ve heard me talk about my procrastination issues. Maybe you’ve been procrastinating on something. Or maybe you didn’t need to write any blog post. Maybe your blog has been a bit dormant. That might be your next step. Maybe your next step is to just get into your blog and look at the last comment and reply to it. Maybe your next step is to come up with some sort of system to share your content on social media. You might want to look at tools like Edgar. They enable you to set up systems to be able to share things. Maybe your next step is to set up an email list. Maybe your next step is to send an email to your email list. Maybe your next step is to do a survey of your readers to understand their needs better. Maybe your next step is to meet one of your readers. Maybe you need to arrange a Skype call with one of your most prolific commenter, someone who leaves a comment on your blog just to understand who they are. Maybe your next step is to reach out to another blog in your niche, to begin to get to know them, to network with them. Maybe it’s to join a Facebook group in your niche and to begin to participate there, begin to be useful there. Maybe it’s to start your own Facebook group. Maybe it’s to do your first Facebook Live. Maybe it’s to get onto Twitter and to look for questions that people are asking in your niche and to answer those questions. Maybe your next step is to reply to an email from one of your readers or to write a guest post for another blog. I don’t know what your next step is. Maybe it’s one of those things or maybe it’s something else. But what I do know is it’s the accumulation of those small steps that’s going to build your blog the most. It’s the slow one by one addition of a new piece of content everyday or a new addition of a reader everyday, the serving of those readers everyday. It’s the accumulation of those things that you’re going to have the biggest impact on your blog over the long term. By no means am I saying you shouldn’t try and hit the ball out of the park occasionally. Big hits can be great. They can give you a rush of motivation. They can actually bring in some new readers but you’re going to find out that if you obsess about hitting it out of the park every time that you’re going to strike out a lot. You need to also build those little small things into your days. What’s one thing you can do today that’s going to take you a step closer to your big dreams? I’d love to hear what your next step is going to be, what that next thing is going to be. You can head over to our Facebook group and let us know what your step is going to be today. Tell us your story of those viral days. I’d love to hear if they did convert for you. But what are those small things that you’ve done over time that have lead to a longer term ongoing growth as well. Share those things over on the Facebook group. If you head over to problogger.com/group, you’ll be forwarded into that group. If you’re wondering what you should listen to next. I’ve got a few suggestions for you. I did mention at the top of the show that there are some things that you can do to write more of that shareable content. There’s nothing wrong with that as long as you do it in moderation. Episode 113 is one where I suggest 4 different techniques for getting more eyeballs to your blog. One of the techniques I do talk about there is writing shareable content, so that might be of interest to you. Episodes 1 through to 31, old time listeners would know what that was. That was 31 days to build a better blog. It’s where I turned my ebook, 31 Days to build a better blog into a series of podcast that give you 31 activities that you can do to help you grow your blog. If you’re looking for one of those small things you can do and you’re not sure what to do, go back and listen to some of those episodes, episodes 1 through to 31. They’re still all in iTunes. All in the show notes as well. The other thing that you might want to do is listen to episode 66. Episode 66 is one where I started a little series of 10 things you can do today that will pay off on your blog forever. Actually, over the 10 episodes that follow that go through 10 different things that often we procrastinate on, often are the things that we put off doing, and the 10 things that we should prioritize I guess, and 10 things that I’ve done that have really led to a lot of ongoing growth on my blog. I actually think those 10 things are well worth looking at almost every year, just to do some assessment on. That’s episode 113 for some shareable content tips, episode 1 through to 31 for the 31 Days to Build a Better Blog tips, and episode 66 if you want to begin that journey of looking at those 10 things that will have a long term impact upon your blog. Lastly, you can check out today’s show notes at problogger.com/podcast/201. Thanks for listening, chat next week. How did you go with today’s episode? Enjoy this podcast? Sign up to our ProBloggerPLUS newsletter to get notified of all new tutorials and podcasts below.

Lessons Learned in 200 Episodes of Podcasting Today’s episode is #200, and while it’s a podcast about blogging, today I want to talk about podcasting and share some of the big lessons I’ve learned about this medium since starting this podcast 2 years ago. I want to present with you my biggest lessons in podcasting, some tips on launching, recording, producing and promoting a podcast. I’ll share the tools that I use in putting this show together. I’ll tell you about our stats and share which episodes did best. And I’ll also share some of my frustrations and challenges and how I’ve been working to overcome them. So if you’re a podcaster or are curious about whether it might be a fit for you – this episode is for you. Links and Resources on What I’ve Learned About Podcasting in My First 200 Episodes Facebook group Podcast Motor Libsyn GarageBand Skype Call recorder Auphonic My Podcast Reviews PowerPress Plugin Rode Podcaster Pat Flynn’s Podcast Tutorials Top 10 ProBlogger Podcast Episodes 31 Days to Build a Better Blog Series (Episodes 1-32) Episode 48 – How to Make $30,000 a Year Blogging Episode 100 – 10 Things I wish I knew about blogging Episode 67 – Why You Should Create a Product to Sell on Your Blog (and Tips on How to Do It) Episode 53 – How I made over $500,000 with the Amazon Affiliate Program Episode 95 – What Do I Need to Have Ready before I Launch a Blog Episode 193 – How to Become a Prolific Content Creator (an interview with Kelly Exeter) Episode 51 – How to Make Money as a blogger Through Affiliate Marketing Episode 109 – 15 Reasons Why You Should Consider Having a Personal Blog Episode 120 – Should You Start a Blog? 22 Questions to Ask to Identify If Blogging is a Good Fit for You Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Hi! Hey, it’s Darren Rowse from ProBlogger here. ProBlogger is a blog, podcast, event, job board, and a series of eBooks, all designed to help you as a blogger to grow an amazing blog and to build profit around that blog. You can learn more about ProBlogger over at problogger.com. Today is our 200th episode; it’s also our 2-year anniversary of blogging, so it’s a big celebration day. I was pondering to myself, “What shall we make number 200 about?” A few people in our Facebook group suggested that I do an episode on what I’ve learned about podcasting. It’s a milestone episode. Surely by now, I’ve learned a few things about podcasting, so I sat down today to list all the big lessons that I’ve learned about podcasting. That’s what I want to share with you today. I want to share with you my big lesson. I want to share some tips on launching, recording, producing, promoting a podcast, and I also want to share with you the tools that I use to put the show together. That’s changed a little bit over the years. I’m also going to share with you our stats, how many downloads we’ve had, which episodes did best; and I’m going to share with you some of my frustrations and challenges. Some of the challenges that I see other podcast is having as well and one of the things that I’ve been doing to work to overcome some of those things. If you’re a podcaster, maybe you are new to it, maybe you’re an experienced podcaster and just want to hear someone else talk about it, or maybe you’re someone, who’s thinking about whether podcasting might be a good fit for you, then this episode is one to listen to. You can find today’s show notes, where I’m going to share some links to the tools that we use, as well as a list of those top episodes for you to dig into a little bit more. You can find our show notes at problogger.com/podcast/200 and also join our Facebook group to connect with the other bloggers on the journey as well. We might do a bit of celebrating the 200th episode in the group this week as well. Just do a search for ProBlogger Community on Facebook or head to problogger.com/podcast. Two hundred (200) episodes – I never thought we would get to this point. I remember thinking after those first 31 episodes or 32 episodes – after that first series that I did which was a daily series. I remember just being exhausted about putting that series together and wondering how long I would last. I never would have imagined 200 would be the number that we get to, and beyond, of course, because I’m not stopping. Just to give you a little bit of some of those metrics because I know some of you are interested in that sort of things. By the time this episode comes out, there’ll be 2.7 million downloads, so by no means is it up there with podcasts like Serial or This American Life or any of those big ones. But for a niche topic, it’s doing okay, and it’s exceeded the expectations that I had with podcasting. In terms of our most popular episodes, I will link to them all and list them all on the show notes. The 31 Days to Build a Better Blog series at the start is among our top podcasts. I think episode 1 is probably the most listened to podcast that we have, and that’s pretty typical for a podcast. Most people do experience that their first podcast get listened to a lot, which is a little bit stressful because it wasn’t my best recording, but I guess people do tend to go right back to the start and get curious about how it all began. That first series is certainly some of our most popular episodes. After that, episode 48 was number 2, outside of that series, and that was one, where I talked about how to make $30,000 a year blogging. I guess in terms of the top podcasts, two or three of them were about making money from blogging, which is really the core topic of ProBlogger, and so it’s no surprise there that the core topic is really important. I guess, as I looked down the list, most of them are fairly called this [00:04:05]. In episode 100 and another milestone was on 10 Things I Wish I Knew About Blogging, episode 67 How to Create a Product to Sell on Your Blog, episode 53 about How to Make Money with Amazon Affiliate Program. They really were quite a few topics about monetizing blogs. Then the other topics that were quite big were around the beginning of blogs, on whether you should start blogging. Episode 120 Should You Start a Blog At All: 22 Questions to Ask to Identify If Blogging is a Good Fit. Really some of those beginner-y type topics, which is a really good reminder. I think if you are thinking of starting a blog or even as a podcaster, really good to think about the beginner topics. Many times as bloggers, as podcasters, we think we’ve said it all. We think some topics are just too basic – people aren’t interested in those really beginner-y things like Should I Even Have a Blog? But people are, and they’re actually the questions that people are asking, so it’s those really beginner – those first questions people ask – really worth going into those type of topics. I often tell the story on Digital Photography School about that post I wrote on how to hold a camera. Such basic content, but it’s been viewed hundreds of thousands of times – that particular post. The beginner-y type stuff has done very well for us as well, but you can look at those top episodes over on the blog. But what I’m more interested in sharing with you today – some of the lessons that I’ve learned along the road over those 200 episodes. Firstly I love podcasting, and the only real regret I have is that I didn’t start earlier. I have shared that regret with you. For a while I procrastinated for years in starting a podcast, and I wish I’d started earlier. Speaking is my first love in communication. It’s what I did before I blogged. Having that background certainly was useful in starting a podcast, but it’s also helped me to improve in my public speaking. It’s given me some renewed passion for that mode of communication as well, so if you’re a speaker or someone who wants to improve your speaking, podcasting is great for that. I’m not sure that the podcast itself has increased traffic to ProBlogger, and whilst I think I was expecting that it might, it certainly has had traction in terms of those number of downloads, but I guess I’ve realized that there are other benefits far beyond traffic to my site. Actually the biggest benefit has been that it’s built a relationship with my audience. The feedback that I get from people who listen to this podcast, it’s like nothing else I’ve ever had, when I’ve met readers of the blog. When I meet readers of the blog, they can be very familiar. They can be very grateful. They can be very friendly, but people, who listen to the podcast – you can tell when you meet them almost, because they talk to you in a way that is much more friendly, more like they know who you are, and more like they’ve had conversations with you. I guess that’s one of the big reflections that I have about podcasting is that it does show a different side of you, and it also draws you into a relationship with your reader or your listener in a way that a blog really can. I get the sense when I’m talking to podcast listeners that we have had chats before. As I think about it, we kind of have. Podcasting is such a conversational medium. As I talk to listeners and you, and as I hear back from you, I realize that we’ve done the ironing together. We’ve driven to and from work together or to and from family activities together. We’ve actually had conversations when your kids have been around or your partners have been around or your friends have been around. Some of us even go to bed together. Some of us even have a shower together. Some of us exercise together. It’s weird – the places that we hang out. As a result of that time together, our relationship then is – there’s something deeper than I’ve ever seen in a blog before. It’s difficult to describe it, and I guess it really comes down to the fact that you listen to me and you hear the voice and you hear the expression. You hear those days when I’m croaky and I’ve got a cold. You hear the days when I’m excited about something, and it’s definitely a conversational space. I guess the way I look at it is that each week I get to have around 10,000 conversations with people for half-an-hour at a time. Where else could I have that many conversations with people? That’s a really exciting thing. I love podcasting for those reasons, and I guess they’ve been the reasons that I regret not starting earlier. They’re the main reasons that I say to people, “Consider this medium. Consider it as a way to change people’s lives,” and really that’s what I am all about. I’ll come back to that point a little bit later. But also purely from a business sense, where else could you have that many conversations with potential customers? Ten thousand (10,000) people a week listen to this podcast. You may not get that many. You may get more, but all of those conversations are time added up. It’s like 5000 hours of me having meetings with people and building relationships with people. You just can’t do that in any other way. There are a lot of benefits from podcasting on that front. I’ll talk about a few more of them a little bit later. Let’s go back to the launch. Two years ago now, I think it was the 1st of July 2015; I launched the first episodes. We started with 31 Days to Build a Better Blog. Many of you have been through that series of podcast. It’s still sitting there. You can actually do 31 Days to Build a Better Blog anytime. You can go back and listen to tips. In fact there’s a whole group in the Facebook group, who are about to go through that series together over the month of July, so check that out. But I think launching with that series really got things cranking. They got the archives built up. Doing 31 episodes in 31 days actually filled our archives. I knew bloggers who’ve been blogging for six months, who didn’t have 31 episodes, and I had that many after the first month. And so the archives were fuller. Having more content in iTunes means that you do get found a little bit more by people doing searches in iTunes as well. Probably also helped us to rank in New and Noteworthy and What’s Hot on iTunes and that type of thing as well. But I think the most important part about launching with that kind of series is that it built anticipation and momentum. Anyone who listened to that first episode, who decided that we’re going to do 31 days to build a better blog was listening every day over those 31 months. Having said all that, it almost killed me as well. It’s a lot of content to record, to prepare for, to edit, and to get up online over a month, when you’ve never ever done a podcast before. But I learned so fast, and I learned so much in that month. I learned that having content that flows from one episode to another is a very powerful thing, and it’s something that I’ve done since a number of times having these series of content. I learned that having a podcast doesn’t always have to have a sponsor to be monetized in those first 31 episodes. In fact for the first 10 episodes, we did have a sponsor, but we’ve rarely had one since. The reason for that was it wasn’t that I didn’t like the sponsor we had or I was closed to that way of monetizing, I just found that in that episode that that sponsor didn’t get as much traction as I wanted them to get, and yet I was selling eBooks from that series that I was doing. I made more money over that from selling eBooks than I did having a sponsor on the podcast, so I’ve always used the podcast more to monetize in that way and to build the brand but also to sell the products and the events that we have. Other series of content that we’ve run since have worked well as well. One of the tips I would give you is that if you’re producing a podcast or a blog, tie your episodes together into a series. It allows you to go deeper into a topic to create momentum, and it also helps to get people subscribed. What I think is that starting off with those 31 episodes really did help me to – it gave people a reason to subscribe. If I just started with 31 random topics and they didn’t tie together, there would have been no reason for people to subscribe. But if you subscribe today, you get the next 31 episodes – that gave people a reason. It’s a really great way to start it off. I was excited to hear in the last week or so that Apple is making some changes to iTunes over the next little while to help podcasters make series of content easier to consume. I suspect that once they launch that, I will do more series of content on this podcast as well. Let’s switch over to tech and production. I’m really glad that for the first 15 or 16 episodes I think or it might have even been the first 20 that I did all that podcast editing myself. I set up my own podcast. I got it all set up with the service, and I’m really glad I did that. I know you can outsource that type of thing, and I will recommend a service later that can help you with that. But I’m really grateful for the fact that I did it myself because it gave me an understanding of what’s going on behind the scenes. It also means that when I come to troubleshooting different things, like if an episode doesn’t go live in iTunes, I can troubleshoot that because I’ve got an understanding of that. If you’ve got the ability, if you’re slightly techy, it’s not too hard to do. I followed Pat Flynn’s podcasting tutorials to set it up, and I’ll link to those in the show notes today. It was a really useful resource that I’m very thankful for – completely free, and so I did that. It also taught me how to edit my first episodes as well and get them up online. I’m glad that I set it all up. I’m glad that I learned how to edit podcasts, but I’m also glad I outsourced it. I’ve got the understanding of it, but outsourcing – it was one of the best things I did as well. I’m very, very grateful to Rose Wintergreen, who helped me in the early days of editing the podcast, and then in more recent times, Podcast Motor, who have been unbelievable in the service that they offer me in helping me to get the podcast up. You can check them out at podcastmotor.com. They do all our editing. They arrange our transcriptions in the show notes, so they actually put the show notes together as well. They upload it all to the service and basically schedule it for us. They also offer services in helping you to set up a podcast and talking you through your launch and all of that type of thing as well, so if you do need that hand-holding, they’re a great service, Podcast Motor. Basically what I do is I plan my show, I record my show, and then I upload all the bits, the intros, the outros, the teaching, the interviews. I just put them in a Dropbox folder, and then they do the rest. I give them a Google doc, which basically has any instructions that I want them to include, any links that I want in the show notes, and then they go to work and they get it all together. It’s one of the best things that I’ve ever done. It really did come because I was burning myself out doing it all, particularly being a daily show in the early days. Outsourcing, of course, has some costs, but it does mean I spend a lot less time on that stuff that I’m not really gifted in. I think it’s also increased the quality of what I do as well, and it enables me to focus on what I’ve got strengths in. Another thing that I’m glad I did is add more detail into our show notes, so I’m really glad that we have transcriptions now in all of our show notes. The early episodes still don’t have the transcriptions on them, but I used to get a lot of feedback from readers saying, “Hey, I’m not a listener of podcasts, but I like to read them.” I guess this was because my first listeners were my blog readers. I’ve been blogging for years, and so most of the people who knew me were blog readers. There’s no wonder that that was their preference. They wanted to read – a lot of them. A lot of you also love to listen, and that’s fantastic, but I probably should have gone to that transcription earlier. I was a really bit tight. I wasn’t quite sure how long I will keep going with podcasting. I wasn’t sure how to monetize it, and so I put that off for a little while, but I’m really glad that I added that in. It also makes the podcast a little bit more accessible to people, who are unable to hear, and that’s a great thing as well. A few other things in terms of production and the technicalities – let’s talk about iTunes. ITunes is a mystery to me and how they rank content and all of that type of thing. I remember in the first few months being quite obsessed with checking, “Where am I ranking today? Am I above this person or am I below that person? Why am I not ranking higher?” I know for a fact that I get a lot more downloads than some of my podcasting friends, and yet they rank higher. I don’t really understand why that is, and I think I could quite easily become quite depressed about it and quite obsessed by it. I guess the big advice I come to you, when it comes to iTunes, is – yeah, it’s great if you can get into New and Noteworthy. It’s great if you can rank higher because it does help a little bit. It’s the biggest podcast listening platform, but don’t obsess on it. Obsess on useful content. Obsess on the quality of the production. Because all of that is going to help you in the long run with iTunes. The other thing to know about iTunes is that it’s a search engine. Pay real attention to the keywords that you use in your titles, in the descriptions that you have, because people are searching for content in iTunes. I know for a fact because I get emails from listeners who say, “I never heard of you until I searched in iTunes for blog tips or for how to start a blog or those type of things.” It can be a great source for new listeners as well. Don’t become obsessed with ranking in iTunes; become obsessed with useful content. Pay attention to those details like getting your titles right, in the same way that you would pay attention to the headlines of your blog post. People will find you because of your titles, but they’ll also determine whether they’ll press play or not depending on your title, so make them enticing. Let’s talk a little bit about recording podcasts. One of the big differences for me in the first 10 or so episodes to now is that I stand up to record every podcast. A big thank you to Rachel Corbett, who emailed me after a week or two podcasting, and she told me that she thought I would have so much more energy in my delivery if I stood up. And she was so right. Standing up to me is a more natural way for me to speak. I never ever, ever in my public speaking days, ever sat down to speak; I always stood. I paced around the stage, and so standing up does bring some energy to that. I think it’s really helped. Also just getting that advice that maybe I was a little bit flat in those early days – it was really useful. So one of the tips I’d give you is to stand up – is to bring energy to what you do, but also get someone else to listen to your podcast and give you critique. I wish I’d actually gone out seeking that critique because it took me a couple of weeks to work out how to improve in that way. A few people have asked me in the Facebook group about how I outline my podcasts. Do I write it all out and read it? In the early days I did do that a few times, but I also discovered very quickly that it was much more natural for me to bullet point my outlines. What I’m looking at right now is a Google Document. I do all my notes in Google Documents. I have some subheadings, and then I have bullet points down the page. I’ve got quite a few of them today. But I don’t tend to read. Unless it’s something really important, I don’t read it. There are segments of what I deliver each week, but it’s generally just bullet pointed. I don’t practice my podcast too much ahead of time, but I do spend a lot of time doing it. I prepare quite a bit, and I’ll touch on that in a moment. Big thing I will say about podcasting for the first time is that you’re going to feel really weird doing it the first time, particularly if it’s just a single voice podcast, which is what I’ve predominantly done. You’re going to feel exposed. You’re going to feel weird. You’re talking into a microphone in an empty room. If you’ve got other people in the house, you’ll wonder how it’s coming across and whether they’re going to think you’re talking to yourself. It’s going to take you a little bit out of your comfort zone, but you’ll get used to it over time. You’ll get better at it over time as well. I tend – and you’ll know this, if you’ve listened to more than one – I tend to do my podcast in one take. As a result there are occasional stumbles. I’ve made one before. There are little mistakes. I know some people edit those things out, but I think and I hope my audience forgives those stumbles. It’s less editing time, which reduces the cost a little bit, but it also humanizes you. I think most people relate to those stumbles in conversation. It does make it a little bit more personal and conversational, I guess. I’d rather spend my time doing other things as well as podcasting than just spending hours and hours and hours getting my delivery just perfect, so I tend to do it in one take. Having said that, I spend a lot of time, as I said before, really preparing a lot for my podcast. If I’m doing a teaching podcast that typically lasts 20 or 30 minutes, I would spend an hour to two, maybe three hours preparing before I record anything. The recording may only take me 20 or 30 minutes, but I’ve spent two or three hours getting that outline right, thinking about the flow of the teaching that I want to do. If it’s an interview, I spend a lot of time – even more time preparing for that interview. Speaking of interviews, the format – and this is something I get asked a lot about, and it’s partly because it’s changed a little bit since I started. Almost all my first podcasts were just me talking; all of them were teaching podcasts. This was because that’s where I felt most confident. I’m used to public speaking, and I’m used to planning, designing the flow of the talk, and really thinking about the journey that I want to take those who are listening to me. I love that process. I love doing the slides, when I’m doing a public speaking talk as well, so it was a natural thing for me to want to do that type of podcast. Also, I guess, I wanted to start that way because I saw a lot of interview podcasts out there – in fact, most of the podcasts that are out there in my particular categories are interview-based ones, and so I wanted to do something a little bit different. I think that worked quite well. I got a lot of feedback that it was a bit different to other people, and they actually enjoyed that teaching style rather than the interview. Having said that, I’ve started to do more interviews, and if you’ve been listening for the last little while, almost every second episode now is an interview. I got through little patches, where I do more than others, but there are a number of reasons that I’ve started to do more interviews. Firstly, I don’t know it all, and I know there’s a lot about my topic that I don’t know. You are going to miss out as a listener, if I don’t get other voices on this podcast. That’s one of the reasons that I’ve set out to do some interviews and do some case studies and find some experts in different areas. Secondly I wanted to stretch myself out of my comfort zone. I hardly ever get nervous about doing a podcast episode, where I’m the only one talking. I’m not nervous at all right now. I’m actually really enjoying this, but I get really nervous when I’m doing an interview. For that reason, I decided I wanted to do more interviews, because it took me out of my comfort zone. I know I’m not as good in that format, but I feel like I’m getting better, and I want to learn how to do it better. It’s partly about facing those fears and wanting to grow and stretch myself. Thirdly I also started to get some good feedback about those few interviews that I did, particularly when I was interviewing bloggers, more of a case study type – one like Nikki Parkinson we did very recently. The other reason is that it’s really hard to come up with a teaching topic for 20, 30, 40 minutes every week, particularly when you also want to write content for a blog, when you want to speak at events, when you want to travel, when you want to do other things. So I decided that one way that I could slightly lighten the load when it comes to the teaching is to bring other people on as well. That’s been the reason for some of the changes in this particular show over the last little while. Let’s talk about length because that’s a question I get asked a lot by other podcasters. What’s the best length for a podcast? I don’t believe there’s a best length for a podcast, but I have found in my podcast that 20 to 30 minutes seem to be a sweet spot. I’ve had a look over the years at the amount of downloads that I get at different lengths, and I’m not sure that length is the biggest determinant. I think the title was probably a bigger one and the topic itself, but those 20-, 30-minute ones do pretty well. Having said that, I’ve had a few interviews lately. They’ve gone over the hour mark, and they have really quite amazing download numbers. There was one recently about how to become a prolific writer or content creator with Kelly Exeter. That’s in now Top 10 Most Listened To Podcasts. Some of those longer ones do very well as well. As I said with blogging, there’s no perfect length for a blog post. There’s no perfect length for a podcast. I think, do as long as you need to do to be useful, and that’s important. The other question I get asked a bit about is frequency. How often should you podcast? Again, as with blogging, there’s no right or wrong answer here, and things have changed for me over the years. I started out daily for that first month, and that was partly because I just wanted to do that series just to launch it. I then scaled back to twice a week, and that was a real sweet spot. I had a lot of positive feedback about that. It stood out again from others in my niche, who were doing weekly shows – a little bit more than them. I was tending to do shorter, sharper shows. They were 10-15 minute shows. More recently I’ve started to do once a week. Again, there were a few reasons for this. Firstly I already had quite an established archive of shows already in there. Also in the early days, when I started, I had a lot of energy for podcasting, and whilst I still really love it now, I guess some of that newness has worn off. Perhaps now, I want to get back to some blogging and some podcasting and get that balance right again. Also, I only have so much to say in twice a week. That’s a lot to come up with to say. I guess some other of the format of what I’ve done has changed to a slightly longer episodes. I know it also takes a lot of time for you to consume that content as well, so I have scaled back a little bit on that. It also fits in with what we’re doing on the rest of ProBlogger. We used to publish on the blog, on ProBlogger, 10 times a week, and we’ve really scaled that back to 2 posts a week. Two posts a week, one podcast a week, one Facebook Live a week – that’s our new schedule. That has come out of us wanting to increase the quality, but also listening to you as readers saying, “Ten posts a week is too much for us to consume.” So we really are scaling it back on that front. Having said all that, I’ve done a few series along the way. Back in August last year, I did 7 days of daily shows again. That was this little series I did called 7 Days to Get Your Blogging Groove Back. That worked really well. If you are on a certain frequency (maybe it’s once a week), it doesn’t mean you can’t throw in a real burst of extra content for that week. We actually did really well over that week. Our download numbers were crazy, and it built some real momentum and engagement as well. Few other quick tips on the production of your content – listen to your own podcasts. You will find it incredibly awkward to do. You’ll probably hate, like I do, the sound of your own voice, but you will also start noticing when you are flat, when the show loses a little bit of its momentum. You’ll also notice when you say certain words too much, like I say the word “heaps” a lot. I’ve been trying to cut back on that. I think it’s a bit of an Ozzie thing because I know a few other podcasters here in Australia, who say “heaps” a lot instead of “a lot.” Listen to your own podcast, but also listen to other podcasts. You’ll learn so much about flow, the design, sound, how to have energy, how to ask good questions, how to make good calls to action. You’ll learn so much when you start to see what others are doing. You’ll also start to see what everyone is doing and how you can stand out a little bit. The last thing I’ll say is consider who else is listening. I mentioned before, I know that a lot of you have your kids right now sitting next to you listening to this as well. You might be in the car driving them to school or at home or something like that. I love the fact that this is family-friendly, so I worked really hard to keep it family-friendly and accessible to different ages as well. If you are a kid listening now, I’ll share that to you. I will say, I’ve been toying with the idea of an episode for kids on how to be a kid entrepreneur or how to develop a web presence online, if you’re a kid. If you want to hear that episode, let me know. Before I wind up and talk to you about our tools, I want to talk to you about some of the frustrations and challenges that I’ve had with podcasting because it’s not all easy and it’s not all roses. Firstly I always am frustrated by the sound or quality of the room that I record in. I know I need to take action on that. I live in a house. I’m in the front room of the house, and you can probably hear from time to time buses driving past. We have a bus that goes past every 20 minutes at our house. I have a printer in my office. The room is a bit echoey. That’s something that I’m aware of. We’re actually toying with the idea of moving house in the next year or so. There’ll be some opportunities at that point to make some big changes. The best ever episode I did was recorded in my son’s room. Because it was so messy, it seemed to soak up all the echo. I could probably move in there full-time because it’s always in that state, but I’m not sure I can bring myself to spend too much time in there. It does mean moving all my gear in there. By the way, kids, if you’re listening, clean your room. The next big challenge that I faced – and I’ve really noticed it’s quite different between podcasting and blogging – is that people tend to listen to a podcast, while they’re doing something else. As a result of that, getting them to take action on a call-to-action can be really tough. Many of you are driving a car right now or you’re on a train or you are surfing the web, or you’re doing something else, while you’re listening to me right now. You might be out for a walk. As a result, if I say, go to this link right now, the chances are pretty small that you’ll do that – less chance that you’ll do that just based upon my voice saying, “Go. Do it” than if I had a link in front of you right now that you could just click. This is something I find a lot of podcasters struggle with. How do I get people to take action? How do I get people to my sales pages? How do I get that type of action? One of the things that I think is really important is to find out where you can get a second re-point of connection with people, where you can get them on your email list, or the big thing that we’ve been working on is our Facebook group. You’ve heard me every podcast talking about “Join the Facebook group.” That’s partly because there’s a lot of value in that Facebook group, but also I know that if I can get you to come over to the Facebook group, that gives you another opportunity to hear the call-to-action that I make. I can remind you in that Facebook group of the event that we’ve got running, or I can remind you of the challenge that we’re doing this week. I know you also get a lot of value and enjoy being in that group as well. The group for us has really helped in terms of getting people to take some action. Getting people to join the group is still a challenge, and that’s why we emphasize it at the top and tail of every show. But I know once you’re in that group, it becomes a lot easier. Another frustration that I have had – and this is a big difference I’ve noticed between blogging and podcasting, and social media and podcasting – is that there’s no real interaction. I put my podcast up, and some of you listen to it on the show notes, but most of you listen to it on iTunes or on some other player, where there’s no way that you can leave a comment. I personally would love it if iTunes would add comments. I think that would be fantastic. But it can be a bit of a strange experience, if you’ve been a blogger. Again, this is one of the reasons that I really am enjoying the Facebook group because it gives me immediate feedback on the shows that we’re putting out. I can get questions. I can do follow ups. I can understand if I missed the mark. I get ideas for future shows and future content as well. That’s something just to be aware of when you do make that switch to become a podcaster is that you are going to at times feel a little less interactive with your audience, and you may need to find a way to build that interaction. The big tip I’ll give you about podcasting is the same tip I give about blogging. The key to a successful podcast – and I say this both from my own experience but also as a podcast listener. I listen to podcasts every day – for at least an hour every day. Make your audience’s life better as a result of listening to your podcast. If your audience do not get something out of what you do as a podcaster, they won’t come back. The same thing is true for blogging as well. If you are thinking about starting a podcast or if you already have one, really focus upon who it is that you’re trying to reach and how you’re going to change their life. Great podcasts and great blogs leave people different in some way, as a result of them interacting with that content. You may have a teaching podcast like me, and for me the change that I’m trying to bring – I’m trying to help you to start great blogs. I say it at the start of every show. I want you to start a great blog, I want you to create great content, I want you to build your audience, and I want you to build profit around your blog. That’s the change that I’m trying to bring. That’s the action that I’m trying to bring about as a result of you listening to this show. You may not have a teaching show, but you may have a show that tells stories. I listen to a lot of storytelling podcasts. They leave me informed. They leave me inspired. They leave me motivated. They leave me feeling something. Those are changes that they are trying to bring. Identify the change you’re trying to bring. Identify the journey you’re trying to take your readers on, and make sure that every episode that you publish brings about that change in some way. Work at how you want to change people’s lives and deliver that. Before I finish, I want to just run through some tools that I use in my podcasting. I’ve already mentioned Podcast Motor, who do a lot of the editing work on my podcasting. My podcast server – I use Libsyn. I’ll link to all these in the show notes. I record my podcast directly into Apple’s GarageBand. I use Skype recorder from the same people who make Ecamm to record interviews. It’s a Mac tool. I’ve used the tool called Ophonic, which levels out your podcast, particularly if you’re doing interviews. You can get different volumes, and it just brings consistency and cleans up the audio a little bit. I use a tool called mypodcastreviews.com. They send me a weekly email that pulls in all the reviews that you leave me on iTunes and other podcasting tools as well. If you leave a review on iTunes, I get an email every week and get notified about that. I look forward to those emails every week. I use a tool called PowerPress. It’s a WordPress plugin that enables me to get those podcasts up into WordPress and get those show notes together. The microphone I use is a Rode Podcaster, which is a microphone that’s been around for a few years now. I think there might be newer versions since the one that I’ve got, but it’s always been a good performer for me. It’s a USB-based microphone. I would love to hear from you. As I said before, podcasting can feel at times a little bit lonely like you are talking to yourself, which I kind of am right now. But sometimes you wonder, “What are people thinking? How are they reacting to what I’m saying?” When you tell a joke, are they smiling or laughing or cringing? There are a few ways that you can give me a little bit of feedback. I particularly love the feedback at the 200th episode mark. Tell me what you think about the podcast. I would love to hear that. You can do that in a number of ways. There’s social media. Our Facebook group is probably the best way, problogger.com/group or search on Facebook for ProBlogger Community. You can give us your feedback in there. Our show notes all have comments on them. Just go to problogger.com/podcast/200. It’s a WordPress blog. You can leave comments there. Or you can leave us a review on iTunes or any of the other podcast players that have reviews on them. As I say, I’ll get an email every week about those. Of course you can tweet me at ProBlogger as well. The last thing I want to say is thank you. Those 2.6 million or 2.7 million downloads are not downloads; they’re people like you who listen. I really appreciate that. I do appreciate those who’ve joined the group and who do give feedback and who do give encouragement. I appreciate those times where I bump into people in real life as well at conferences and hear your stories of where you spend time with me each week. I really do appreciate all of that. I appreciate you coming to our events and buying our eBooks as well, which really is how we sustain what we do at ProBlogger. I really do look forward to spending the next maybe 200 episodes with you. I hope the podcast has delivered some value to you, and I look forward to chatting with you next week in episode 201 of the ProBlogger podcast. Head over to the show notes, problogger.com/podcast/200 where I will list the top 10 podcast episodes that we’ve done so far, so you can dig into some of those as well. 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 below.

A Tool to Create High Quality Live Video on Facebook This episode is presented by The Success Incubator – a brand new event I’m co-hosting this year for ProBlogger readers and online entrepreneurs. The event is happening in Dallas Texas on 24-25 October, and I’m so excited to announce that joining me in presenting at the event are a great lineup of speakers including Pat Flynn from Smart Passive Income, Kim Garst founder of Boom Social and Andrea Vahl who is a brilliant social media consultant. In today’s episode, I’m going to share with you another COOL TOOL for bloggers that will help you to create high quality live video on Facebook. Facebook Live continues to be a medium that is well worth investing time into. Use it and you’ll grow your reach and engagement on Facebook. The problem with it is that to create a high quality professional looking video can feel a little out of reach. While FB is updating tools there’s still a lot you can’t do without investing a lot into software. Today, I present to you an affordable option that for under $30 will enable you to do some pretty cool stuff including share your screen, schedule your broadcasts, add overlays and more! Links and Resources on A COOL TOOL To Create Professional Facebook Live Videos Ecamm LIVE 7 Types of Facebook Live Videos that Grow Your Audience, Build Your Brand and Make Money Success Incubator Event (Use coupon code SUCCESS17) Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Hi there it’s Darren from ProBlogger. This episode is presented by the Success Incubator, a brand new event that I’m co hosting this year for ProBlogger readers in Dallas, Texas on the 24th and 25th of October. As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, we’ve got this year some great speakers coming to this particular to this particular event. In addition to myself speaking, we’ve got Pat Flynn from Smart Passive Income, Kim Garst, founder of Boom! Social, and many more speakers. There’s more speakers to be announced in the coming weeks but I’m excited to have Pat, Kim, and Andrea join us. I’m excited to offer you an early bird discount ticket for this particular event. If you go to problogger.com/success and use the coupon code SUCCESS17, you will get a $50 discount on tickets to this year’s event. I look forward to seeing you in Dallas this October for our only US event this year. Again, go to problogger.com/success. As I said at the top of the show, 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 to grow a profitable blog. You can learn more about ProBlogger over at ProBlogger.com. In today’s episode, I’m going to share with you another cool tool for bloggers that will help you to create high quality, live video on Facebook. Many of you have heard me raving about Facebook Live pretty much for the last 6 to 12 months. It continues to be a medium that is well worth investing time into. I have been doing it on a weekly basis for the last couple of months and am seeing the benefits every time I do it. If you are to use Facebook Live, you’re going to start to grow your reach and engagement on Facebook. It does help to deepen the relationships that you have with your readers. The problem that many people have with Facebook Live is that to create a high quality, professional looking video can feel a little out of the reach of the ordinary, everyday person. Whilst Facebook themselves are updating their tools, there’s still a lot you can’t do without investing quite a bit of money into software or hacking together a system and being quite technical. Today, I want to present to you an affordable option that will, for under $30, enable you to do some pretty cool stuff including sharing your screen, which is something that many of you have been asking for, scheduling broadcast, adding overlays, and much more. Today’s show notes are at problogger.com/podcast/199, where I link to the tool but also give you some examples of live videos I’ve shot and broadcast onto Facebook using this tool. You can also check out our Facebook Group where I do live videos every week at problogger.com/group. Facebook Live continues to be a great way to build a presence on Facebook itself to support your blog. It’s a great way of getting extra reach on Facebook. We know that Facebook continues to show live broadcast more than almost any other type of post that you can put on Facebook. It’s a great way to extend your reach and to reach those people who follow you on Facebook, who don’t see your other posts. It’s also a really great way to build relationships with those who follow you and have real engagement with followers, real time engagement. When you get on and you actually get a comment from someone, you can respond to that immediately. That takes the relationship further faster. It’s also a really great way to personalize your brand. Back in episode 188, I gave seven different types of Facebook Lives that you can do. We do talk a little more there about why Facebook Live is so great. Today, I want to talk about a tool that I’ve been using that has really helped me in my Facebook Lives. Facebook have been developing what you can do with Facebook Live a lot since it first went live. In the early days, you could only do it from the mobile phone. More recently, they allow you to do it from your desktop computer just from within Facebook itself. That’s pretty cool. But there still are some limitations of what you can and can’t do either through the mobile app or through your desktop computer. That is why I’ve always been interested in what some of the other apps and tools will allow you to do. One of the ones that I’ve been playing around with over the last couple of months, really, is Ecamm Live. That’s what I want to talk about today. They first came onto my radar years ago now when I was looking for a solution to record Skype interviews. When you hear me interviewing someone on this podcast, we did Nikki Parkinson a couple of weeks ago now. That interview was recorded on a little tool that plugs into Skype. It’s called Call Recorder. It’s a Mac based tool that allows you to record your Skype conversations. That’s where I first came into touch with this company who produced Ecamm Live. One of the things I love about that Call Recorder tool is that it’s really cheap. There’s so many software tools around now which are exorbitantly priced. The Call Recorder was something that I felt was affordable and it’s something that I use all the time so I’ve always been interested when they release a new product. One of the new products that they released a few months ago now is this new one, Ecamm Live, which allows you to put Facebook Live videos up using their particular app. I want to say right up front, this is a Mac Based tool so if you’re not on a Mac, you’re not going to find this particular episode too useful. There are other solutions out there that you can look at for PC based Facebook Lives but if you have a Mac, you’re going to want to check out Ecamm Live because it is really feature rich. They’re developing it fast and it is very affordable. It’s $30. $29.95. Whilst that may be out of the price range of some people, I think most people can probably afford that if they’re going to invest into Facebook Live because it’s so much cheaper than a lot of the other tools that are out there. It does allow you to do things that you can’t do easily through Facebook itself and their particular apps. I’m amazed how cheap it is really. I’ve been using it now for six or seven weeks, maybe a little bit more even, on both ProBlogger’s Facebook page and also my Digital Photography School Facebook page. I’m really impressed by what you can do with this particular app. Let me run through really briefly some of the things that you can do with this tool, Ecamm Live, that you can’t easily do just using Facebook’s native desktop app or phone app. The first one is overlays. You’ve probably seen video online for years now, people will add some kind of an overlay to their video. There are numbers of different types of overlays that you can add into your live video using Ecamm Live. Firstly, you can put an image onto your video. If you go to ProBlogger Facebook page, you will see one of my videos and in the corner, I have the ProBlogger logo showing all the time through the video. I’m able to brand my live video with my logo, which reinforces my brand. You could add in a larger image and you could actually pop it in as a large one that takes up the whole screen if you want it to but I tend to just put mine in nice and small. You could also use an animated GIF in that place as well. It’s really easy to do. You just get an image off your desktop, drag it onto the Ecamm Live app and there it is. You can resize it and reposition it if you want. You can add in an image. You can also add in text. Even during your Facebook Live session, you might want to emphasize a URL, you might want to add in your name at the bottom of the video, you can type in your name and you can change the font and the color and the size of the font as well. You can add in more than one text overlay if you want as well, as well as having that logo. In the last Facebook Live that I did on the ProBlogger page, I had the ProBlogger logo up in the top left hand corner and then under the logo, I had a URL to the Facebook Group that we have at ProBlogger. You can do a number of different types of overlays during your Facebook Live. That’s one cool feature that you can’t do using Facebook’s native app. Second thing that you can do is show video, pre recorded video in your Facebook Live. This is really useful in a number of different ways. Any video that you’ve got on your desktop, you can simply line it up, press play, and then show it to people on your Facebook Live. This could be really useful if you are a business person. If you have a business sales widget and you have a video that sells the widget, that demonstrates the widget, rather than having to do it live in front of the camera, you could have this pre recorded video. You could introduce what you’re going to show and then press play on it. You can have a keynote presentation that you’ve delivered at a conference and you’ve got the video of it. Rather than giving the presentation again live on Camera, you show the video. There’s many number of ways that you can use video. You just play it in the middle of your livestream. You could have a video lined up. Introduce it, press play, stop it halfway, get back on you showing your face and then again, show more of the video. You can shop and change during your Facebook Live, really very useful. Number three, and this was the killer things for me. This is the reason I got Ecamm Live, is that you can share your screen on your desktop. This is a desktop app and this is really what I wanted because a lot of the Facebook Lives that I tend to do are teaching Facebook Lives. If you’ve tuned in to the ones that I’ve been running over the last few weeks, you will know that I show slides and these are slides that I’ve repurposed from talks that I’ve given. I’ve worked hard on those slides and so it’s really great to be able to show them. I introduce my video, I will give a greeting, and then I will say, “Let’s move into a teaching session.” And then I share my screen and I show a PowerPoint presentation that I have already developed. You could also share your browser. From time to time, during a Facebook Live, I will jump on over, “Hey, let’s look at this site,” and I will show an example of it. Pretty much any app, you can then show on the screen. The cool thing about Ecamm Live is that they recently did an update which allows you to just show one app. You don’t have to show your whole desktop. You can just show your Safari browser or your Chrome browser. You could show a PDF. You could show your keynote slides. You could share a text document. Any app that you’ve got on your computer, you can just highlight that and just share that or you can choose to share your whole screen. I tend not to do that because my desktop is pretty messy with lots of icons everywhere. Screen sharing, this is the killer app for me. This is the reason I got it and it works so easily. You literally just press a button and then highlight the app that you want to highlight and there it is up on the screen for people to see. The fourth thing you can do is have multi cameras. If you want to add a little complexity to your setup, you might want to have one camera set up on just your face, another camera set up as a wide angle, a little bit further away from you to show your office or the set that you’re in. You might have a camera even set up on something else or another person if you’re interviewing them so you can switch between cameras. That’s pretty easy to do as well. You can actually have an external camera. I used to use my webcam built into my iMac, which is a good little webcam but it’s not as good as some of the other webcams out there so I recently bought myself a Logitech webcam, which is an HD webcam and it works better in low light so I plug that in and use that as well but I could switch to the webcam as well. Another feature you can do very easily through Ecamm Live is schedule your broadcasts. You can actually say I will be on live on this time at this day. I think it’s anything up to seven days into the future so I could today set one up for tomorrow at this time. I’ve been doing that as well. Anyone who’s following you on Facebook in their newsfeed will see Darren is planning to go live at this time and they have the option to set a reminder when you’re about to go live. If they are on Facebook at the time that you’re going to go live, a notification comes up that says Darren’s about to go live. Go and check it out. This is something you can do using numerous tools. You can actually kind of do it through Facebook itself but it’s not an easy simple process to do. You’ve got to go to settings at the moment to do that, so this is just a seamless way to do that. There are other features. You see the comments of anyone who is responding to you during your session come up on the screen. As you’re broadcasting, you see what your viewers see, which is really useful. You actually see yourself and then over that video of yourself, you see the comments scroll up. One of the things I don’t like about it is that the comments are quite small and they are white and so if you have a white background behind you, they can be a little bit hard to see. This is something I feed back to the team at Ecamm Live. I hope that they will fix that and make it so that those comments stand out a little bit more. But you do get that feedback, which is fantastic because it means you don’t have to have Facebook open to go and see what people are saying to you. You also see the likes and the hearts that people give you as well. You get that feedback from people. Another feature, its HD quality if you choose to have it that way. You can switch that on or off depending upon your internet speed. My internet speed here in Australia is not super fast. I’m on a cable connection but I’ve already got 1MB per second upload, which isn’t really fast. When I did switch HD on, I’ve got a few connectivity issues. I’m not sure whether it’s my internet or whether that was a little bug in their tool at the time so I switched that off and since then haven’t had a problem and the quality is still pretty good. They’re also adding features regularly. This is one of the things I love about Ecamm Live, is that they are updating the app and they’re updating it almost every second week at the moment. They have a little Facebook group which is reasonably active where they preview upcoming features. They released a new version of it last week, which did add scheduling and some other tools as well. You can location tag your videos if you choose to do that as well. They also shared the other day that they’re going to add a feature which will allow you to use a Digital SLR as a camera, which will be pretty cool because you’d be able to shoot at a large aperture, getting a little bit technical now in photography terms, using different lenses which will allow you to blur your background, which is a really nice effect and is something that I’m keen to experiment with as well. It’s a cool tool. There are plenty of other tools around out there that will give you all of these features. There’s nothing unique just to Ecamm Live. But, at $29.95, I am amazed at what it can do. Some of the other tools that are out there are upwards at $400. I saw one the other day for $500. I will say that that tool is a professional level tool and it is pretty amazing. You can do a whole lot more than what I’ve just said. But for $29.95, I’m pretty amazed that Ecamm Live is putting this out there. They guarantee that you get this lifetime updates with that as well. I’m pretty excited about this tool. I would love it if they would allow us to see the comments a little bit more. I would love it if we could do split screen interviews with other people so I could bring on a guest. That’s on my wish list. They have said in their Facebook Group that they’re open to doing that if Facebook would allow it in their API. Hopefully, that will come. That’s something that you can now do through Facebook’s mobile app, I think or at least some people can. Hopefully, that’s coming. Again, it’s a Mac only tool. Unfortunately for those of you who aren’t on Mac, you’re not going to be able to use that. I’ve got a link in the show notes to this. It’s an affiliate link. I think I make 15% on that $29.95 so it’s not a great deal but it is a tool that I’m using and genuinely do recommend. I’m not doing this just for that 15% of $30. I’m doing this because it is a tool that is so simple to use and I’m really genuinely very excited about. I’m excited to see what they continue to do to add to it. Thanks to the team at Ecamm Live for creating this tool and putting it in the hands of normal people and making it so accessible to people. If you give Ecamm Live a go, head over to our Facebook Group at problogger.com/group and share a link to your Ecamm Live video that you did. Back in episode 180, I did challenge you to do some Facebook Lives and I know some of you did take that challenge. I want to issue that challenge again. Give it a go. Give this tool a go, They actually have, I think, a free trial for 7 days or 14 days. You can even use it for free just to give it a go as well. If you do, share the link in our Facebook Group so we can see hey, you went, and give you some encouragement as well. Thanks for listening today. This is episode 199. You can check out the show notes at problogger.com/podcast/199, where there is a link to this amazing tool. I might also embed a couple of videos that I shot with it so you can check them out as well. That’s problogger.com/podcast/199. If you’ve got a moment and you’re listening to this in iTunes or on the podcast app on your iPhone or some other iPhone network, please leave us a review. It does make a massive difference not only to helping us to be found by other people, but also it makes a big difference to me because I get an email each week with those reviews. It gives me a lot of energy to keep on keeping on with this podcast. Thanks so much for listening today. Look forward to chatting with you next week in episode 200 of the ProBlogger podcast. Thanks for listening today. If you would like something else to listen to, I do recommend that you go over to listen to episode 180 where I go through seven different types of Facebook Lives that you can do. I know some of you will be asking the question I want to do a Facebook Live but what would I do on Facebook Live. That episode is going to give you some hints on that. As I say in the show today, head over to problogger.com/group, where you can share your videos and learn from 6,000 plus other bloggers who are on this journey with you. There’s a great community going on in there. Lastly, if you do want to check out that Dallas event, head over to problogger.com/success and use the coupon code SUCCESS17 for a $50 discount on that particular ticket. I do really hope to see as many of you as possible at that Dallas event. It’s the only event we’re doing in the US this year. We have a great time lined up for you. One of the things that we will be doing more of at that event than we’ve been in previous events here in Australia is masterminding. We’re also doing a short sharp series of sessions in the evening of day one of the event called Our Power Sessions. In these power sessions, we are inviting people to share for 20 minutes on a particular topic, really short, sharp practical hacks and systems and templates that they’ve been using in their business. That’s a particular focus of this year’s event. We’re going to churn through as much actionable content as possible. If you are interested in that Dallas event, head over to problogger.com/success, and again the coupon code, SUCCESS17 to get $50 off that event. Thanks everyone. 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 below.

6 Recommendations to Monetize Your Blog In today’s episode I want to talk about making money blogging. More specifically, I want to tackle a question from a reader who has been blogging for a while without monetizing but is wondering which income stream she should try  first. I’ll suggest 6 income streams that I see bloggers often starting with and at the end nominate my favorite one that I think can be a good place to start for many bloggers. So if you’ve been wanting to start monetize your blog – whether you’re a new blogger or an established one – or even if you’ve been monetizing but want to add another income stream – this episode is for you. Links and Resources on 6 Recommended First Income Streams for Bloggers Facebook group ProBlogger Event Dallas, TX  Coupon code SUCCESS17 you’ll get $50 off Is it Really Possible to Make Money From Your Blog? My Tips for Making Money As a Blogger Through Affiliate Marketing How to Make Money With the Amazon Affiliate Program How to Develop a Product to Sell on Your Blog Nikki Parkinson from Styling You, Shares How She Built a Business Around Her Blog Amazon Associates Program Commission Junction ShareASale LinkShare/Rakuten Commission Factory AdSense Mediavine Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Good morning and welcome to episode 198 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, to create amazing content that’s going to change your audience’s life in some way and to build profit around your blog. In today’s episode, in episode 198, I want to talk to you about that topic of making money from your blog, building a profitable blog. Most specifically, I want to tackle a question from one of our readers from the Facebook group who’s been blogging for a while now without monetizing. She has actually built up a bit of an audience, some archives of content, but is wondering which income stream she should try to add to her blog first. In today’s episode, I want to share with you six different income streams that might be a possibility for this particular blogger. These are six income streams that I see bloggers often starting with. At the end of presenting the six, I want to nominate my favorite one that I think could be a good place to start for many bloggers. If you’ve been wanting to start to monetize your blog whether you’re a new blogger, or an established one, or maybe you’ve been monetizing for a while and want to add another income stream, this episode is for you. You can find today’s show notes where I will be listing some further reading and listening over at problgger.com/podcast/198. Also, you can join our Facebook group and connect with other bloggers on this same journey of monetizing their blogs. The Facebook group is over at problogger.com/group. Lastly, if you are in America, in the US, check out our upcoming Dallas event which I will be co-hosting. We’ve got a great lineup of speakers including Kim Garst, Pat Flynn, myself as well as a range of other bloggers and online entrepreneurs. You can get the details of this event which is happening in October, I think it’s the 24th and 25th of October. You can get those details at problogger.com/success. If you use the coupon code SUCCESS17, you’ll get $50 off over the next couple of weeks but don’t wait too long on that because that discount won’t last long. All those details will be on the show notes today. I think it’s time we go into today’s episode. I got a message from Danielle who’s one of our Facebook group members this morning. She said in her message and she gave me permission to share this, “I saw your recent Facebook Live on how to make money blogging. I love the idea of adding multiple income streams to a blog.” That’s something that I did cover in that Facebook Live recently. “But as a blogger who’s been blogging for a while and has a medium sized audience but who’s never monetized, what income stream should I add first? Thanks, Danielle.” Thanks for the question, Danielle. I do appreciate that. If you do have questions at any time, pop them into the Facebook group or send me a message if you would like to do that as well. On the group would be great because that way we can answer I publicly. But there are a few options for you, Danielle, as is often the case with question that I’m asked about blogging, the answer is, often, it depends. It really does depend. There are a number of factors that are going to help us to work out what income stream should work best for you. Some of the factors that you will need to ponder and I guess you need to think about as you’re listening to some of what I’m about to suggest. Different factors will impact the income stream that you choose. Some of the factors might include your topic. Some topics lend themselves very well to different income streams whereas other topics don’t at all. For example, I found talking to many bloggers who blog about spirituality of different faiths or politics that advertising doesn’t always work so well on some of those, particularly advertising with advertising networks like Google’s AdSense. Your topic is going to come into it. Even more important than topic though is your reader’s intent. The question is why are readers on your site? If you can really tap into that, why are they there, you will, hopefully, begin to see some opportunities to monetize. For example, if your readers are on your site wanting to learn information, they want information of some type, they want teaching, they want how to information, then that’s going to land itself to monetize by selling information, information products. I’ll talk a little bit more about that. If people are there because they want to connect with other people who share a similar interest or a similar life situation, it may be harder to sell information but it might be easier to sell them into a membership community. Ask yourself the question why are readers on my site? What is it that they’re there for? Because that might help to reveal the right income stream. Some other factors that come into play, your audience’s size, whilst you’ll always find that as you grow your audience your income will grow with most of the income streams I’m going to talk about today. Some of them are almost not worth trying if you’ve got a tiny audience. For example, Google AdSense. You’re not going to make much on it at all unless you have a sizeable audience. Your audience’s location is another factor. Some locations monetize better with Google AdSense, with things like Amazon’s affiliate program. If you have an audience who is all in the one location whether that be in the one country or even the one state or even the one town, I know some of the bloggers in our Facebook Group have very localized blogs, then they will lend themselves to different types of income streams. For example, I know one blogger who has a blog in Melbourne and they monetized their blog by advertising on their blog to Melbourne businesses. That really lends itself very well to that, your audiences’ location. Also, the source of your traffic, you’ll find that some different types of traffic will monetize differently. Traffic coming in from search engines might do better with Google AdSense but traffic coming in from social media might do better with affiliates. Really, it’s going to depend on your certain situation. I’m generalizing a little bit there. Email, I find, works really well when you’re selling a product, for example. The source of your traffic is another factor to consider. There are some other things to keep in your mind, your topic, your readers’ intent, the size of audience, the location of your audience, the source of your traffic, these types of things, it’s worth knowing what they are because as I go through these six different income streams that you might want to consider, those factors will come into play. Let me outline six of the options. By no means are these six the only options. These are just six of the most common things that I see bloggers doing as their first income stream. I’m not saying any of them are the best for you, Danielle. You’ve got to give it a go and I’ll talk a little bit later about trying different income streams because different income streams will have different fits for different blogs. Number one and by no means am I putting this in order of priority, this is just the most common one that I see a lot of bloggers starting with, it is actually the one I started is Amazon’s affiliate program. Amazon’s associate’s program is what you will need to Google. To find it, I’ll link to it in today’s show notes. Some people are pretty much turning our podcast off right now because they don’t like Amazon’s associates program and I understand why that is. There are a number of reasons that I regularly hear from people that they don’t like it. For one, in some places it’s just not available. There are some states in America that you cannot join the Amazon’s associates program and it’s got to do with tax and the legal aspect of it. I don’t really understand it because I’m not in one of those jurisdictions. Other people might be from other parts of the world where there’s not an Amazon store. There are legitimate reasons not to do it. But often, the complaints I hear about Amazon’s program are that the commissions are quite small, they are. The commissions that you make on Amazon when you recommend a product and someone buys that product, you earn a little commission and the commissions are quite little, they’re I think 4% depending on the products. It can go a little bit higher. I have high commissions up to 8% or 10%. It’s not a massive commission that you get, particularly if you’re recommending low priced products. If you’re recommending a $10 eBook and you’re earning 4%, not a lot there, which I understand. Other people complain about Amazon because the cookies don’t last long. If you send someone into Amazon, if they make a purchase, I think it’s within 24 hours you can get a commission but after that, you don’t. I will need to check how long that cookie lasts today. They’re some of the reasons that I hear Amazon being critiqued and they’re valid reasons but I still like Amazon and I still like to promote on Amazon. If you follow my Digital Photography School blog, you will see that I recommend cameras on Amazon all the time. Every time I talk about a camera, we link into Amazon with our affiliate code. There are a number of reasons for that, that we choose Amazon even above camera stalls and that is because Amazon’s an incredibly trusted brand. We have a very US based audience. We know most of our audience know, use and trust and like Amazon. They know that brand, they trust it. It’s a safe option for them to spend their money on. Another reason that I like Amazon is that it’s not just books on Amazon. There are all kinds of products. If you have a high value product that you write about on your blog like a camera, 4% isn’t really much when you’re talking about a book but if you’re selling a $2,000 camera, it add ups over time. That’s one of the reasons that I particularly like it. Another reason I like Amazon is that there’s more than just books on Amazon, there’s products from almost every category that you can think of. People tend, once they’re in Amazon, to start surfing around and I can see, I actually recommended a lens on Amazon yesterday from our Facebook page and no one bought the lens but I can track that people bought other things. I saw people buying books. I saw people buying cosmetics. I saw people buying nappies. I saw someone buying a necklace, jewellery and this was because I linked in pointing to lens. I would say that most people are buying more than one items. They tend to surf around and Amazon is very good at suggesting things for people to buy. Get people in the door at Amazon and Amazon’s very well refined, very well tested and then I will get this out for you. Another reason I like Amazon as a first income stream, just to begin to learn how to monetize your blog is that it’s so easy to integrate. Amazon provides a variety of different tools and widgets that you can use on your site. You can just create text links but you can also develop little icons and widgets that you can put in your sidebar and even a shop that you can build as well. Another thing I like about Amazon is that particularly around holidays like Black Friday, Cyber Monday, they are very well optimized and they often have really good promotions on them. If you can get people into the store at those times, people are in a buying mood but Amazon also have a lot of specials and so you can promote those types of specials as well. Amazon’s not going to be a perfect fit for every blog but I do think it’s worth considering if you want to start out. One of the reasons I do particularly like it as a first one is that it’s so easy. You can be up and running with Amazon within a few minutes, just go to Amazon’s associates program, signup and you can be generating links pretty quickly. The times that it may not be good for you is if you do live in one of those US states where it’s not allowed or if you have an audience that doesn’t live within one of the locations that Amazon has a store. Amazon has stores in America, they’ve got a UK one, I think they’ve got a German one. They’ve got a variety of different stores and you’d be aware of the ones in your particular area. I think there’s about to open up in Australia as well. It may not be perfect for you but it’s one to consider. If you want to learn a little more about Amazon, check out episode 53 where I talk about how I made over half a million dollars with Amazon. That’s sounds like a lot but it’s come out of almost the last 15 years of blogging so split that up a little bit. I also have written a really extensive article on the topic called the Ultimate Guide to Making Money with the Amazon Program which is a text based version of that particular podcast in podcast episode 53. I’ll link to those in the show notes today. That’s the number one, by no means is it the best. Number two that I want to talk about is other types of affiliate programs. This is another option that I think is very easy to do. There’s very little investment that you have to make when you’re promoting someone else’s products and there’s a variety of different types of products that you might want to promote. Again, just for a recap for those of you who aren’t even familiar with that term affiliate, it’s when you recommend a product and you earn a commission when someone buys that product. You are given a link that has a little tracking code and so the person who’s selling the product knows you referred that and they were able to pay that commission. There’s a variety of options here. You might want to promote a physical product. For example, Vanessa, many of you know Vanessa, my wife, she has a style fashion blog. It’s called Style and Shenanigans. She has an affiliate link from numerous types of physical products. She’s writing about fashion so she is linking into clothes store, clothes and shoes and bags, accessories, those types of things. She also writes about books so she’s recommending books on online stores. She’s recommending them on Australian stores because her audience is in Australia. She doesn’t do so much on Amazon. She’s linking and promoting home wear products, vases and paintings and all kinds of those types of things, sheets, duvet covers and those types of things and then gift ideas. Around Christmas, she might do a list of 10 things to buy a guy for Christmas, or a woman for Christmas, or mother’s day, that type of thing. She’s talking all the time on her blog about physical products. When she promotes those products, they work quite well for her. If you’re talking about physical products on your blog, find an affiliate program where you can recommend those types of products. You’ll find many these days, many normal retailers like actual brick and mortar retailers in shopping centers and malls that you go to. Many of them will have programs already. You could simply do a search on Google for the shop name affiliate program and you’ll probably find that many of them do. Of the shops that Vanessa shops in, there’s only really one or two that don’t have an affiliate program already. Some of them will have their own affiliate program but most of them will use what’s called an affiliate network. Some of these might be networks like Commission Junction, or Commission Factory, or ShareASale, or LinkShare. I’ll link to those in the show notes today as well. There are networks around as well. The beauty of the networks is that they actually represent quite a few different retailers and different options for you so you might sign up for a site like LinkShare or ShareASale and you might be promoting three or four of their merchants at once which means you’re not getting lots of little checks and lots of little payments coming in. ShareASale will just send you that one payment every month. Physical products might be a good fit for your blog if you’re writing about those types of things already and you can find products related. The other type of product that you can recommend as an affiliate is virtual products. These are usually more information based products. This is really where I started to ramp up my monetization. I started out with Amazon’s affiliate program and AdSense which I will talk about in a moment but then I very quickly learned that you could earn a higher commission if I was recommending an information product particularly an ebook. The first ones that I promoted were ebooks on photography. I found that many of the people who are writing ebooks, even 10 years ago, now were paying 50% commission. You’re not looking at a 4% or an 8% commission like Amazon, you can earn a higher percentage. Again, really, it’s going to depend upon the reader intent. If your readers are there to learn something, information products like ebooks, or courses, or even membership sites can be very, very good. If you have people wanting to have community, you might promote membership sites. They tend to be more about where people have a forum and can connect with other people. If people are there to learn how to do something, you might also want to recommend software products. On ProBlogger, we recommend hosting options, we recommend tools, landing page sites, plugins, those types of things, WordPress themes, they all have affiliate programs as well and they relate to the reason that people are on ProBlogger because they want to have good blogs and these tools enable them to do that as well. Think about that and you might want to do some research and look at what other bloggers are promoting in your particular industry. You might want to Google your topic and affiliate program, or your topic and ebook, or your topic and course. Many of the products you’ll find will have an affiliate program attached to them. Some of those affiliate networks that I mentioned previously will have lots of information products in them as well. I find ShareASale has a lot of software as a service products that might relate to your niche. There’s another one called Clickbank that has a lot of more information product. E-junkie also as a lot of affiliate options for information products as well. Again, it’s really important that you not only choose a product to promote that is on topic for you, but you want to also match it to the intent of your readers. Many of you will remember I had a camera review site back in the day. When I recommended teaching products or ebooks on that site, people weren’t buying those products because the intent of those people on that camera review site was to learn about which camera they should buy. It was much better for me there to link into Amazon because that’s where the product they were researching was. Promoting books on how to take better photos just didn’t work there at all. These days on my Digital Photography School site, the intent of the reader is to learn how to use cameras and so those ebooks do so much better. Again, match the intent of your readers with the product. I do share more about affiliate marketing in episode 51. If that’s something you want to learn more about, go check that one out. Again, I’ll link to it in the show notes and I’ll remind you of all of these further listenings later as well in the show. Number three thing that you might want to try and I see a lot of bloggers starting this way, particularly bloggers who’ve already built a bit of an audience and they want to start monetizing is advertising networks. This probably won’t suit a brand new blogger who doesn’t have an audience because this is one of those income streams that does really require you to have traffic. It’s not going to convert at all. You might earn a few cents if that, using an ad network. In fact, you might not even get into some ad networks until you have some traffic. This is how I got started, but again, I’ve been blogging for a year and a half before I started to monetize. I signed up for Google’s AdSense network. It actually came out about the time that I started to think about monetizing my blog so I was lucky in some ways to get in the ground floor. AdSense is another one of these income streams that gets a bit of a bad rep from some bloggers. Some bloggers don’t like it because they don’t make much money from it and that could be because they don’t have much traffic or it could be that they have a traffic from a location that doesn’t monetize while using Google AdSense. I find Google AdSense works really well for US audiences but it doesn’t seem to work as well for audiences from different parts of Asia, for example. It really is going to depend upon that location but it’s worth a try if you do have some traffic but you’re going to need a lot of it to really ramp things up. Another advertising network that I do know a lot of bloggers who are doing quite well from these days is a network called Mediavine. Again, I’ll link to it in the show notes. They do have a few restrictions on who can join but the bloggers I know who get accepted by it say they do a lot better than they did from AdSense. On their page, you can actually go and have a look at some of their guidelines that they say. They say that you have to produce original content so you’re not let to repurpose content from other places and the categories that they say they accept bloggers from are food, parenting, DIY, health, fitness, fashion, travel, crafts, education or entertainment. It’s fairly broad but there are some categories that they don’t seem to represent like politics, religion, those types of things. Really, if you fit into one of those niches, you might want to have a look it. They do require you to give them exclusive access so you cannot be running other ad networks here. They also say, “It has to be exclusive across mobile and desktop.” You also need to have 25,000 sessions a month, that’s a Google analytics measure there. If you’re getting under 25,000, you may not get accepted into it but it’s something to aim for, again. They’ve got some requirements. You can check that one out if in you’re in one of those categories. There are other advertising networks around and if you are in another niche and you’re looking for one, you might want to pop into the Facebook Group and ask if anyone else is aware of any that might suit your particular niche. That’s the number three. Number four is related to that because it’s still advertising. It’s what I would classify as a sponsorship. This is, again, not going to be relevant if you’re a brand new blogger because like ad networks, you do need to have some existing traffic to be able to sell sponsorships on your blog. Danielle seems to have some traffic so it might be a good fit for her. This is where you find a brand that is willing to work directly with you. In some ways, it’s cutting out the middleman like AdSense or Mediavine, you’re going directly to the advertiser. I’m not going to go into great detail on this one because I think we’ll do a full episode on it in the coming episodes but I did talk to Nikki Parkinson about this in her recent interview in episode 196. There are a variety of ways that a sponsorship can work. Again, it’s only going to really work if you’ve got that traffic but a sponsor may be interested in buying a banner ad on your site, they may be willing to sponsor some content so they might want you to write a review of their product and then pay you for that. They might want to sponsor a series of content, we’ve done that type of thing on Digital Photography School where we might have done a whole series of articles on portrait photography, that was sponsored by Canon. They didn’t actually do that but that would be an example and it’s not where you’re actually promoting a product but you’re presenting content sponsored by them. A brand might also be interested in hiring you as an ambassador if you’ve got a well-known face or profile in the industry, a brand might want to sponsor a giveaway or a competition on your site or they might want to do a combination of those things. This is what we often do on Digital Photography School, we will sell some banner ads, we might sell a banner ad in our newsletter as well, maybe some social media promotion and it’s a competition as well. We bundle things up. There’s a variety of ways that you might want to work with a brand. Again, it’s going to only really suit bloggers who have a bit of an established profile and some traffic as well. You want to find a brand who wants to associate them with you. For that to happen, you need to be in good standing and have a good reputation. The fifth thing that you might want to consider is creating your own products to sell. Up until this point, we’ve largely been talking about promoting other people’s product as an affiliate or working with a brand. You’re sending people away from your site selling other people’s stuff. That can work quite well particularly if you can get a cut from what you sell and that converts. But your own products might be another one. This is one that I would suggest most bloggers might not have as their first income stream unless they have been around for a while because it does take some traffic but it also takes a lot of work. It’s going to be some investment that you have to make into creating a product particularly if it’s a physical product. You need to get it designed. You need to get it made. Even a virtual product like an ebook, you’re going to have to take some time to create that product. My first product was an ebook. What I did is turn some of my previously published blog posts into the ebook and then I wrote some extra content that was exclusive to the ebook as well. It took me some time to get it together. It took me three or four months to create that ebook and get it ready to sell. It does take some work. The reason it worked very well for me was that I had a lot of the content already written and I already had an audience who is engaged. I had fans of the site. They’re willing to buy what I was selling. There was trust and relationship there. This one is definitely more risky if you don’t have many readers or they’re not an engaged reader. If you have a lot traffic coming in from search engines, for example, and they’re people who just come in once and then never come back again, they’re less likely to buy from you because they don’t trust you as much. You have to really work hard on your marketing to convert them because you got to convert them in that one time they’re on your site unless you do some retargeting advertising later. But if you’ve got readers who are coming back again and again particularly if you’ve got email addresses of those readers, I find email is a great way to sell products. If you got that engaged audience and you’re looking for your first income stream, it might be that selling your own product is the best way in because if you’ve got a very engaged audience, they’re going to be excited about your product and you’re going to actually make it a bit of an event and include your readers in the development of that product as well and bring them on that journey. Let them know that you’re writing an ebook ahead of time. Get them even to crowdfund the ebook using Kickstarter or that type of thing. If products are something you’re interested in, you could check out episode 67 where I tell the story of my first products and also outline some steps that can help you to work out what product to make and how to make that product as well. The last income stream that I want to talk about is where you sell your own services. Again, this won’t be relevant for everyone, not that any of them are. This is another way that I see some bloggers monetizing early in their blogging, it’s where they sell themselves in some way. This is obvious, if you’re a professional, you might be an accountant, or a lawyer, or a child behavior therapist, or you might have a business of your own on the side and this is where you use your blog to promote that business. I do know quite a few bloggers who didn’t have an existing business but then decide to sell services that relates to their blog. Let me give you a few examples. I know two bloggers here in Australia who are fashion bloggers who now sell their services to fashion boutiques and fashion manufacturers, small fashion manufacturers to write copy for their websites and also to manage their social media. Because they’ve built up their profile as a fashion blogger, they’ve got some expertise in those areas, they then offer those services to others in that particular industry. If you’ve got a decent reputation in your industry already, you might do well from that. Another example is a parenting blogger that I know who writes paid articles for a parenting magazine and for local newspapers. She has a regular column and she gets paid to do that. It may be that you have a service that you can offer people in your industry as well. Again, not going to be relevant for everyone but if you’ve already built up that reputation, it may be something you can do. When I did a recent survey of full time bloggers, I surveyed about 100 full time bloggers. I found that over half of them offered freelancing services. I was really surprised at that but it makes sense because often when you are selling yourself as a writer, or a consultant, or as a coach in some way, you are able to charge a higher rate than you might able to get from selling an ebook or two. That’s another one to consider. I’ve gone through six different options there. We started with Amazon’s affiliate program then we talked about other affiliate programs, we talked about advertising networks, we talked about sponsorships and working with brands, we’ve talked about creating your own products and then we talked about selling your own services. But the question still remains, which one should Danielle do and which one should you do if you are wanting to monetize your blog for the first time. Again, it really does depend. But if I had to choose just one, if I just had to choose which one, for me, it would probably be affiliate, it would probably be affiliate marketing. Whether that’s Amazon or whether that’s another affiliate marketing relationship with a brand that’s more suited to your audience, I think it could work well. There are a variety of reasons that I think affiliate is the best way to go for many bloggers, not all but many. That is because there’s very low barrier to entry. You can sign up for an affiliate program and some of them will take 24 hours to approve you but many of them will approve you instantly. You can be generating some links that you can then be putting into your blog straight away. The reason that I love affiliate marketing so much isn’t so much the income that you’ll get because in the early days, you’ll probably won’t earn a lot from it but you’ll going to learn a lot from it. You are going to begin to see what products your audience are interested in buying. You could be promoting a variety of different products. You could be promoting some physical ones, you could be promoting some high priced ones, you could be promoting some low priced ones and you could be doing some information products, you can try few things and then begin to see what your audience response to. This might help you to work out what you should create, what product you could then build. Creating that product might be your ultimate goal but to work out which one to create and how to market it and how to price it, how to promote it, you’re going to learn a lot by doing some affiliate marketing first. For me, that’s probably the real beauty of it. The other thing you might also learn by doing some affiliate marketing is what type of products you could then be approaching to sponsor your blog. You might find that jewelry does really well on your blog or why not reach out to some jewelry stores or jewelry manufacturers and see if they would want you to become an ambassador or to become a sponsor on your site. This is what I actually did in the early days of my blog, I did a lot of affiliate marketing and I worked out after a while on my Digital Photography School blog, the ebooks work really well. I didn’t create an ebook till 2009 but I was promoting ebooks since 2007 and I worked out that my audience, they like ebooks and they like them on certain topics and at certain price points. I created my first ebook on the topic that I knew would work and at the price that I knew would work as well. You’ll begin to learn a lot about what’s going to work with your audience. I also learned on my very first blog, that camera review blog, that Amazon affiliate links were working well on my site. I began to approach camera stalls directly to sponsor the site. Again, you’re going to learn a lot there that can flow onto other income streams as well. If I was starting today, I’d probably identify a few key products to promote on my blog as an affiliate and then start with that. A few last things to really keep in mind, and I really want you hear this. Making money from blogging takes time. It’s not an overnight get rich quick program. Most bloggers also have more than one income stream and that’s what Danielle mentioned in her question. We’re talking today about your first income stream, it’s not your only one. Most full time bloggers have at least two. Many of them have four or five different income streams. Most full time bloggers try income streams that don’t work for them too. Most full time bloggers have a stream of things that they have tried that didn’t work. Don’t just rely on one. Just because the first one doesn’t work, it doesn’t mean that others won’t as well so hang in there. Keep experimenting. Another thing to keep in mind is that making money from your blog isn’t a passive thing, it’s not passive income. You are going to need to set aside time to monetize. A lot of people tell the story of my first ebook making $70,000 in its first couple of weeks. I’ve told that story from the stage a few times and I’ve heard other people retell that story. But they tell it as a he got rich overnight type story. The reality couldn’t be further from that truth. The reality is that it took me two years of building up traffic to a site. It also took me three months of working everyday to create that ebook and getting ready for that launch. It took years of developing trust with my audience. Yes, you can make money quickly but it’s usually built on the foundations of a blog with a great archive of content that has an audience that you’ve worked really hard to build up, an audience that’s engaged. These are the foundations for that profitable blog. Yes, experiment with those income streams but don’t do it at the expense of creating great content, engaging with that audience, and promoting your blog as well. Those things are just so important. I hope that somewhere in the midst of that is an answer for you, Danielle. Maybe affiliate marketing but maybe as I’ve talked today, something else has peaked your interest as well. I have mentioned a lot of further listening. I just want to emphasize that again. If you do want one of those income streams, here’s a list of a podcasts that you might want to listen. Firstly, episode 32, I’ll list all these in the show notes. 32 is an episode on answering that question can you really make money from blogging. I talked about seven things that I’ve learned about making money from blogging. Episode 51 is about affiliate marketing, if you do want to explore affiliate marketing, how to do that, how to convert better than just putting an ad in your sidebar for an affiliate product, episode 51 is for you. If Amazon is one that you want to look at, you can listen to episode 53 which really builds on episode 51 so those two might work well in conjunction. If you want to create your first product, go back and listen to episode 67 because I really do talk about my journey in that as well. If you want to learn a little bit more about working with brands, you might want to listen to that interview that I did with Nikki Parkinson. Just a couple of episodes ago in 196, I think it was. She actually talked there also about how she monetizes in a few other ways as well. It could be a good one to listen to if you haven’t already. All those will be listed on the show notes at problogger.com/podcast/198. Lastly, if you want to do check out the Facebook group, head over to problogger.com/group where I’d love to hear about how you monetize your blog. There’ll be a thread announcing this podcast in the comments of that. We’d love to hear about your first dollar, how you made that first dollar, and what you would do differently if you’re starting out again today. Thanks for listening today. I’ll be back with you next week to talk about another cool tool that’s going to help you in your blogging. Thanks for listening. Chat with you soon. How did you go with today’s episode? Enjoy this podcast? Sign up to our ProBloggerPLUS newsletter to get notified of all new tutorials and podcasts below.

A Free Tool to Create Videos For Your Facebook Page This episode is presented by The Success Incubator – a brand new event I’m co-hosting this year for ProBlogger readers and online entrepreneurs. Today I’m announcing 3 great speakers – Pat Flynn, Kim Garst and Andrea Vahl (more details here). Save $50 with the coupon code SUCCESS17. In today’s episode, I’m going to share with you a free tool that I’ve been using over the past few weeks to create videos for my Facebook pages, Twitter accounts and other social media profiles that is getting crazy amounts of reach. It’s a tool that enables you to take a blog post that you’ve already written on your blog and to repurpose it into a short video to promote that blog post! Yep – you heard me. This tool takes a blog post you’ve already written and with a little help from you (just 10-15 or so minutes of work) it will create you a short video that you can then use anywhere you like to drive people to your post. I’ve been doing these videos for a week or so now and some of them are getting a lot of reach on Facebook. In fact I’m not the only one. One of our Facebook group members messaged me this morning about a video she created with this tool and on her FB page of just 20,000 followers she has had a video get over 300,000 views in 24 hours! So if you want to create great short videos for your FB page in just a few minutes – this episode is for you. Links and Resources mentioned in todays show Success Incubator (use coupon code SUCCESS17) Facebook Group Lumen 5 How to Create Amazing Videos on Your SmartPhone And here are some examples of the videos you can create with Lumen5. Firstly – here’s one from my Digital Photography School Facebook Page. Here’s one from the ProBlogger Facebook page. Lastly – here’s another from Vanessa’s facebook page. Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view  Hi there. It’s Darren from ProBlogger. Before I get into today’s episode, I want to let you know about a brand new event that we’re running this year in Dallas, Texas on the 24th and 25th of October. This is our only US event this year. I’m really excited about what we’re doing. The event is called The Success Incubator. I’m co hosting it with another group of people who’ve been running another amazing event called The Digital Collab. The Success Incubator is for bloggers, online entrepreneurs, anyone who really wants to build a business online. It’s being held on the 24th and 25th of October in Dallas, just before the FinCon conference, which is another great conference, by the way, that I am speaking at this year. I’m really excited today to announce three of our speakers, our keynote speakers for The Success Incubator. Firstly, there’s Pat Flynn from Smart Passive Income, who will be a no stranger to most listeners of this podcast. He delivers amazing practical value. He’s built an amazing business. Secondly, there’s Kim Garst, founder of Boom! Social and someone who is just brilliant, particularly when it comes to Live video. That’s what she’ll be focusing her session on as well. And then there’s Andrea Vowell who is one of my favourite speakers. She’s a very funny person but she’s also very experienced in social media and will be speaking about Facebook Advertising. There’s more speakers to be announced in the coming weeks but I’m so excited to have Pat, Kim, and Andrea joining us. I’m also very excited to offer you as a ProBlogger podcast listener a special little discount code. You can get $50 off Success Incubator over the next week or so if you head over to problogger.com/success and use the coupon code, it’s really important that you get this right, SUCCESS17. When you go to problogger.com/success, you’ll see there more details of the event and you can get that $50 discount as well. I’ll link to that and have all the details of the discount code as well in today’s show notes. I really do hope to see you in Dallas this October for our only US event. I’ll be speaking as well and we have a line up of some amazing speakers as well. The other thing I will say about this event is that there’s going to be time on the second day for masterminding and workshopping so lots of interaction. We’re also going to be doing a special thing this year called our Power Sessions which would be short chat practical sessions from some of our attendees as well so there is an opportunity for you to share some of your knowledge if you want to do that too. Thanks for listening. Again, probolgger.com/success will get you to the event page and use the coupon code SUCCESS17. Let’s get into today’s show. My name is Darren Rowse. 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 an amazing blog, to grow your audience, to create content for that blog that’s going to change the  life of your audience, and to build profit around your blog as well. You can learn more about ProBlogger at problogger.com. In today’s episode, I am going to share with you a free tool that I’ve been using over the last few weeks to create videos for my Facebook page, for my Twitter accounts and other social media profile, and pretty much anywhere on the web. The amazing thing about this tool is that it’s really working well. It’s, particularly in Facebook, giving me amazing amounts of reach. It’s a tool that enables me and you to take a blog post that you’ve already written on your blog and to repurpose that content that you’ve already written into a short video to promote your blog post. Yup, you heard me. It’s a free tool that takes a blog post you’ve already written and with a little bit of help for you, 10 or 15 minutes of work, it will help to create a short video that you can then use anywhere on the web to drive people to your post. I’m getting reports that these videos are going viral for people. At least, they’re getting a lot more reach than they’re normally getting from a Facebook update. I’ve been doing these videos for a week or so now on my own accounts. I’m getting big reach. I’m getting hundreds of thousands of visitors. Now, I have a lot of people following me on Facebook but the exciting thing is that I’m hearing from people with smaller Facebook pages that they’re also getting great results as well. One group member from our ProBlogger group messaged me this morning, very excited to let me know that on her Facebook page, which has about 20,000 followers so not small but also not a massive one, she had a video in the last 24 hours get over 300,000 views, just using this little tool. If you want to create great short videos from your blog post that you’ve already written and put them on your Facebook page, this episode is definitely for you. I’m going to walk you through how you use this tool and who it’s good for as well. Today’s show notes are at problogger.com/podcast/197 where I will have some examples of videos that you can use with this tool. Also, checkout out our Facebook Group, problogger.com/group. Video is so hot right now. You’ve heard me talk about it in previous episodes. I think it was back in episode 189. I had an episode where I interviewed Justin Brown on how to use a smartphone to create videos. In that particular episode, we were talking about you being on camera a fair bit. In today’s episode, I want to talk about a tool that’s going to help you create videos. That means you don’t need to be on camera at all. The type of videos I really want to talk about today are the type of videos that you probably want to share onto social media to promote a blog post that you have already published on your site. It’s almost like a tool that’s going to enable you to repurpose the content you’ve already got on your blog but turn it into a short video to promote that content. That’s what I’ve been doing with this tool over the last few weeks. It’s so easy to use. In fact, I’ve made a few videos this week with the tool that only took me about 15 minutes to make and then when I uploaded them to Facebook, they got really good reach. The tool that I want to talk about is Lumen5. If you go to lumen5.com, which I’ll link to in the show notes today, this is a web based tool. It can be used on Macs, PCs. You could even use it on your phone although I looked at it last night on my phone and it’s not really responsively designed so it’s going to be tricky to use. It’s going to be quite fiddly but you can probably use it on one of the larger iPads or tablets as well. I personally think it’s much better on a desktop. At the moment, it’s completely free. I don’t know how they’re going to monetize it in the future. It’s very early days. In fact, it’s kind of almost in a beta test so it’s a little bit buggy but what it can do is really exciting even for a brand new tool. I want to walk you through how I’ve been using it and how others in the Facebook Group have been using it because I shared this on the Facebook Group a week ago now and I’ve had so many messages from listeners in the podcast and members in the Facebook Group saying thank you for sharing it. That’s why I want to share it on the podcast today because I think this is a tool that many bloggers will be able to use. It’s an entry level tool. It’s not got very powerful features but the features that it has really is going to be really useful to bloggers who want to quickly make a video to promote a blog post. Let me walk you through it. I really think you’ll get a lot from heading over to the show notes today to check out some examples of the videos that it creates. Do that perhaps as you’re listening as well. Here’s how it works. Firstly, you will need to sign up for an account so that’s really step one. But once you’re logged in, you’re going to find that you’re presented with a dashboard where you can put in a URL of a blog post that you’ve already written. Go to your blog. Look for a list post or a post that is a step by step post. Something that can be broken down into segments because this type of tool is going to enable you to build some little slides or some little modules and it’s best if you’ve already got some structure to a blog post. What I’ve used this for is to repurpose blog posts that are step by step guides. We did one on Digital Photography School, a post that was a step by step guide to creating what’s called a bokeh background. You don’t need to know what that is but the post itself was five or six steps of how to use aluminium foil to turn into a little photography tool. The blog post itself had features of each step in the process and so this was perfect for this video. I grabbed that URL from our blog and I plugged it into Lumen5. And then Lumen5 goes to work for a minute. It sort of is a bit of a spinning wheel thing as it looks at that blog post. It actually pulls in the content from your blog post. It’s smart enough to know what’s a content and what’s a sidebar. It just pulls in your content and it all also pulls in any images that you’ve got in your blog post. After a minute or so, I looked at Lumen5 and there was the content, all the text and there were the images that I had in the post. This really cuts down the work. It actually goes to work for you, pulls in all that content and then you can highlight any text that it’s pulled in and click on it and it will take that text over and create a slide. It’s almost like you’re looking at a PowerPoint presentation for those of you who are familiar with setting up a PowerPoint presentation or using the Keynote on a Mac or if you’re familiar with slides. It will pull that text across into a slide and then you can choose the next slide. What I do as I look at that bokeh background post that I was looking at, I was looking at the titles. I had five or six subheadings in that post and so I clicked each of the subheadings and within 30 seconds, I had five slides already created for this particular video. Once you are happy with the text that you’ve got into slides, you can preview it and see how long your video is going to take and then you can move on to the next which is adding images to the slides. Basically, what it allows you to do is to drag an image onto the slide and it will put that image behind the text. What you’re basically doing is creating a series of slides that have text overlays with images. You can get the images in a number of ways. Firstly, you can use the images from your blog post that it has already pulled in for you. You will see any image that is big enough, that’s got high enough resolution, it will automatically pull that in for you. That’s all you may choose to do. You may have some really great images in your blog post already, pull them across, underneath, or the overlays and you’re almost ready to go. If you don’t have images in your blog post that are suitable, there’s a stock library of images already there for you as well. It has already done some work for you. It’s got some artificial intelligence going on. It’s already got some images that it thinks might be relevant for you. It’s looked at the keywords in your content and if you’ve used the word photography, or mountains, or cupcakes a lot in your article, it will already have images there ready to go. Free images from free image stock library which is amazing. A lot of the images are really good. Some of them aren’t so great. You really do need to scroll in. If you can’t find an image that it suggested, you can then do a search for image. You can actually do a search for cupcakes or you can do a search for kelby dogs. You can get specific about the type of image that you’re looking for and really dig in. You can find images in those stick libraries and there’s also a few little videos, really short videos that you can put in as well. You can actually have some moving images behind the words as well. The third option really for images is uploading your own. If you’ve got some other images that you already have on your computer or you find some through a stock photography site that you are a member of, you can use those images as well. As far as I know, you can’t upload videos yet. That would be pretty cool but the amount of images that are already in the stock libraries are a lot there, thousands and thousands of images that you can choose from. At this point, you have already pulled in the text. You’ve pulled in some images. The last step is selecting some music. It again has a little stock library of royalty free music that you can use. I don’t know how many tunes are in there but there seems to be hundreds of them. You can do searches based on the type of music that you want. If you want a dramatic piece, or if you want a cinematic piece, or if you want a pop, or electronic, or whatever it might be, the different genres, you can do a search through that. You can listen to them and then you can select one that you want. At this stage, you can preview your video and you can have a look at the images. Some of the images that you’ve got might not be quite high resolution enough so you might want to swap an image out. You can see how long the video goes and you might want to add a slide, you might want to take a slide out, that type of thing. This is I guess that last stage before it’s ready. The one thing I will say about the images is that the images actually move and you need to go and have a look at the show notes to day to see some final videos that I’ve created but the image is sort of panned across the screen. You actually need quite large images or images with good resolution to make this work. If you have images in your blog post that aren’t big enough, it will actually not let you use those images. I think they need to be 500 pixels high. But even then, I’ve imported some images from my blog post and they weren’t crisp enough and they weren’t quite high enough resolution so I did have to find some large ones as well. Once you’ve got your slides ready, you’ve got your music in, you’ve got your images in, you’ve got your text in, you can then add a call to action slide at the end. This is where you can add in a  call to share the video so by default I think it shows the logo of your site and again it’s already pulled in the logo of your site for you. You can change that if you want to something else and then it will by default say share this video but you could write anything at that point. Followers on Facebook, you could write buy our ebook. You could write click the link above this video. you could do any call to action at that point. There is also a stage where you can add some branding. You’re seeing the videos that I created, there’s a little watermark on the videos that has the logo of Digital Photography School or ProBlogger. You can upload the logo that you want to have as a watermark and also a logo for that last slide as well. Once it’s all ready to go, you hit publish and it goes to work at rendering the video. This can take a little while. The shortest that’s happened for me is three or four minutes. Yesterday, it was pretty slow. I noticed that they were having some issues with their rendering on a Facebook Group that I’m a part of. It took I think 20 or 30 minutes but usually, it’s just a few minutes and it will email you when the video is ready. At that point, you can download it and you can then use it wherever you want. You could upload it to Facebook. That’s where I’ve been using it. You could upload it to Twitter. You could upload it to YouTube. You can upload it anywhere that you can upload videos. For me, I’ve been putting mine mainly on Facebook and Twitter. You may have seen them if you’re in the Facebook Group already. I’ve shown a couple of them there. If you follow us on the Facebook page, you will have seen a couple as well. Lumen5 is so simple to use. I was amazed. The first video took me about 15, 20 minutes to make. The one I did yesterday took me about 10 minutes. I’m getting faster at doing it. Really, you could spend a lot of time doing it and just tweaking things but it’s very simple to use. Having said that, it doesn’t have a lot of heavy features. You are limited in a few different ways. You’re limited in terms of the font that it uses. There is only one at this point to choose. You’re limited in terms of the size of that font. You can have it as a larger size which they call a title. You can have a smaller size which they call text. You can also do a quote type font. It puts a box around your text. You can actually have no text on a slide as well. You’re limited in where you can position that particular text. They have nine options. You can have it right at the center. You can have it upper center, lower center, or in one of the corners. You can change where it sits on your image so if you’ve got an image with a person’s face on the left, you can position it off to the right. It does a bit of a best guess to where to position it for you but you are limited in that. You also have some choices when it comes to the text in terms of color. There’s quite a few choices there but you are limited. You can only use that one font style or size. You can’t change, as far as I can see, the length of time that each slide shows. It seems to take a guess at how long you should be showing that particular slide for in the video. If you’ve got a longer sentence, you will show that slide for longer as far as I can tell. If you’ve only got a couple of words, it will show up for a shorter time. There are limits in terms of how long you can have each phase although I guess you probably could have two of the same slide in a row to make it a longer stage. You could probably get a little bit creative there but there are limits at this point in what you can do. But it’s so simple to use. If you are someone who wants to use video on Facebook and Facebook at the moment really is elevating video. It gets a lot more reach of video. It gets a lot more reach than it takes to update or a link update or a feature update. If you know that Facebook wants video and felt like you can’t create video, this could be a really easy way to do it for you. After I did about five videos, so far none of them took me more than 20 minutes to make although there is the rendering time which adds a little bit to that. The videos I’ve been creating have all been about the one to two minute mark. You’ll see the examples in the show notes. They actually recommend you don’t go over one minute because once you go over one minute, you don’t get as much traction on this style of video. I have uploaded these to Facebook and then I’ll leave a link next to the video where people can read the article. For me, I guess the case that I’m using this for is to take a post and repurpose the basic ideas of a blog post. This is almost like a summary of the blog post and then I have the further reading link. People are viewing the videos. They’re liking the videos. They’re sharing the videos but they’re also clicking on that link and they’re visiting my site. As I said before, videos are getting a lot of reach on Facebook at the moment. It does seem to help you get a little bit more reach for your content. I think these videos would be ideal for list posts so any post that has 10 points in it or 5 points in it, any kind of post that is a step by step guide, if you do how to posts, and this step by steps, particularly if you’ve got blog posts that have lots of images of the different stages in a process, that would be perfect for this type of post. This would probably be good for quotes. If you had a series of quotes on a particular topic, you can then put some images behind that. Sort of a motivational post, I guess you could use them as well. You could use it for most types if post but I think particularly any kind of blog post that has structure to it, that has subheading to it will be very easy to repurpose over. A few tips that I would give you in terms of creating these videos with Lumen5, keep your videos to one or two minutes max because you can’t add in your own voice. You can add in longer video like talking head type video. It’s going to be hard to keep people interested in the video for 10 minutes so keep it fairly short particularly if you’re going to use it on Facebook. Choose your images really carefully. Some of the images I noticed in the library don’t have as good resolution as others. I’m not sure whether that’s the image’s problem or whether there is some issue or bug going on there so you do want to preview the images, how they look in the video before you publish that video. If you want to use your own images, make sure they’re big enough. Make sure they’re more than 500 pixels high. The higher resolution, the better. Also, do try out adding in some little videos behind the text that you use as well. You’ll notice in the stock library that there are a few videos there. That can bring the video alive a little bit more, have a little bit more movement. Last thing I’ll say is that this tool isn’t perfect. It’s new as far as I can tell. It’s pretty basic. It’s a little bit buggy at times. There’s been a few days where their service have been a bit slow, particularly the day after I shared it on Facebook to our Facebook Group. I think several thousands of our members must have gone across at the same moment and so their service didn’t really cope with that. But they have been adding server power to it and they’ve been really responsive on customer service as well. They actually have a Facebook Group for users of the tool as well and they’ve been very interactive with me. I’m going to give them a warning when this podcast goes live as well to up their service. It had been a little bit buggy. As I said, it’s sort of in a beta phase and so they’re still developing it and they seem to be adding new features as well. It’s not perfect but for what it is, it’s pretty amazing. It’s free. All those images are there and it’s relatively easy to use and it automates the process as well. You just put in your URL and it starts creating the video for you. What could be better than that? They do have a feature in there called smart templates which hasn’t worked yet for me but the idea there that they’re working on is that you can put your blogs RSS feed in and then it sends you the videos. I’ve been really interested to see that working and I hope it does get developed a little bit more because that would be pretty cool if they sent you an email after your blog post went live and say here’s the beginning of your video. That’s pretty cool if they can do that. Last thing I’ll say is literally 10 minutes before I started recording this, I got a Facebook message from one of our group members who messaged me saying that they created a video using Lumen5 and published on their Facebook page 24 hours ago. Their Facebook page has 20,000 followers so it’s a medium sized Facebook page and the video has already been viewed 300,000 times. She is ecstatic that she gave this a go. To say that is kind of an understatement, she used so many exclamation points in that message, I couldn’t believe it. It is something that I think if you choose the right blog post to repurpose, and you take your time with it, and make it look as good as you can, this could really help you to get more reach on Facebook and to drive some traffic to your site as well. Give it a go. I put some examples in the show notes of some videos that I’ve created. I’ll embed them from Facebook as well. You can go and have a look at how they’ve gone on Facebook. They have had quite a few views. I haven’t gone quite as viral as that person but they have been really good for me. The last thing I would say is if you do give it a go, come over to the ProBlogger Facebook Group and share your video. I’d love to see what you used Lumen5 to create. I’ll set up a thread in our Facebook Group, the ProBlogger Community group on Facebook. If you go to problogger.com/group, you’ll get forwarded straight to that group. I’ll set up a thread where I’d love you to share your videos. There’s already a thread going when I went to it last time with a few examples but we’ll start a new one where you can check it out. Again, Lumen5 is the name of the tool. lumen5.com. Give it a go. Let us know the results. Let us know how you used the tool. It’s a little bit buggy because we’re all trying to do it at once. Be a bit patient with it. Maybe come back to it again but it’s pretty cool. The last thing I will say is you can save your videos and then edit them later as well. You can come back in if you want to change a video or if you want to use that same sort of template, I guess you could create a second video as well. Check it out. Let us know what you think. Check at the show notes, examples as well and over in the group. Thanks for listening. If you’ve got a cool tool like Lumen5, let us know because I’d like to feature a few more of these kinds of tools as well for bloggers. Thanks for listening today. We’ll chat with you next week. I really hope you enjoyed today’s show and check out Lumen5. Just a disclosure, I have no affiliation with Lumen5 whatsoever. Don’t get any better for promoting this particular tool. Just want to be really clear on that. Check out our event Success Incubator. problogger.com/success. Get that discount code SUCCESS17. Check out the show notes today at problogger.com/podcast/197. Also, check out our Facebook Group, problogger.com/group, where you can submit the videos that you create today. Thanks for listening today, I’ll be back with you as we approach that 200 episode mark with next week’s episode 198. Thanks for listening. Chat with you soon. How did you go with today’s episode? Enjoy this podcast? 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Blogger Nikki Parkinson Shares How She Built a Business Around Her Blog In today’s episode, I have recorded an interview with one of Australia’s better known bloggers – Nikki Parkinson from the style and fashion blog – Styling You. I first met Nikki at one of our first ever ProBlogger events. While a newish blogger at that time she stood out to me as a blogger to watch – partly because of her journalistic background (she was one of the first journalists I’d seen make the switch) but also because she was someone who was blogging ‘smart’. Most bloggers, back then, were blogging from the heart – blogging just because they had something to say – but Nikki even back then was not just interested and passionate about her topic – she was being smart and strategic with her blogging (at least, that was the impression I got). Nikki started Styling You in July 2008 and today – 9 years later – she’s not only grown her audience, but she’s built a pretty amazing business around her blog. Nikki has written a book, launched her own shop, is an ambassador to numerous brands and has her own paid membership program for readers. In this chat, we go right back to the beginning to talk about how she got started, the mistakes she made and the things she did early that paid off. We talk about her approach to writing, where she gets her ideas for content from and her approach to planning content. I found this fascinating because her approach to planning was very different to what many bloggers teach. We talk about how Nikki built her audience and how to stand out in a competitive niche. Nikki talks about how she’s not just built a large audience – but how she’s built such an engaging community. We talk about her private Facebook group and a strategy she’s using not just to build her group but one that simultaneously builds her email list – really smart. We also talk about how Nikki monetizes – how she made her first dollar, how she works with brands, how she built her membership program and a little about her ‘shop’ where she sells the products she writes about. Nikki also talks a little about the ‘free stuff’ that brands often send bloggers and how she’s turned some of those approaches into paid partnerships. Lastly we talk about productivity and scaling her business by hiring a team to help her. If it sounds like we cover a lot of ground in this interview – you’re right – we do. The cool thing is that while Nikki’s blog is a styling blog for women, I think most of what we cover is really relevant for most niches. So grab a cup of your favorite beverage and settle down with a blanket in your favorite bean bag, or get your hiking shoes on and get ready for a long walk or get that massive pile of ironing that you’ve been ignoring ready… let’s spend the next hour or so with Nikki Parkinson from Styling you Oh – and her dog decides to join us at the end :-) Links and Resources Mentioned on Today’s Show Styling You Sign Up for Nikki’s Facebook Group CoSchedule Listen to our episode on CoSchedule in episode 195 ProBlogger Facebook Group Join the video challenge in our Facebook group Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Darren: Hi there. My name is Darren Rowse. I’m the blogger behind problogger.com, a blog, podcast, event, and a job board as well as a series of ebooks, all designed to help you as a blogger to start an amazing blog, to grow your audience, to create some great content for the audience and to build some profit out of that blog. You can learn more about ProBlogger at problogger.com.                     In today’s episode, I have recorded an interview with one of Australia’s better-known bloggers, Nikki Parkinson from The Style Blog and Fashion Blogs Styling You. I first met Nikki at one of our early ProBlogger events. It must have been 2011, maybe 2010. Whilst at the time she was a newish blogger, she really stood out to me as a blogger to watch partly because of her journalistic background. She was one of the first journalist I’d seen make that switch from mainstream media to blogging but also because she was someone who was blogging smart. Most bloggers back then were blogging from the heart. They’re blogging just because they had something to say, was almost more of a hobby for many bloggers back then but Nikki even from the beginning seemed to be blogging in a more smart way, in a strategic way. She wasn’t just interested in her topic or passionate about a topic, which she is, but she was also being a little bit more strategic, at least to my outsider perception.                     Nikki started her blog back in 2008, I think it was July. It’s almost nine years to the date. She’s not only grown her blog’s audience to a pretty large audience but she’s built an amazing business around her blog. She’s written a book, she’s launched a shop, an online shop, where she sells clothes and accessories, she’s an ambassador and done lots of sponsored work with numerous brands in her niche. She also has her own paid membership program for her readers.                     In this chat, we cover a lot. You’re going to want to settle down for this chat because it will go for a little while but we cover so much ground. We go right to the beginning and talk about how she got started. We talk about some of those mistakes she made but also the things that she did early that really paid off. We talked about her approach to writing and creating content, where she gets ideas from. Also, what I found really interesting was her approach to planning content. It’s quite different to my approach to planning because of the niche that she’s in which is very nuzzy, it’s very topical, it’s very seasonal. The approach she has for planning is a little bit different and her approach to writing is different than what many bloggers do as well, which I think you’ll find interesting. We also talk about how she built her audience, how to stand out in a competitive niche. Nikki also talks about not only how to build a large audience but how to build engagement with your audience. This is something I particularly think she’s very good at. She’s got an amazing Facebook group, a private Facebook group. She tells us about the strategy that she’s used not only to build that group up in numbers but also a strategy that simultaneously builds her email list. It’s really smart and something that I’m considering doing as well. We also talk about monetization, how she made her first dollar, how she worked with brands, how she built a membership program about her shop where she sells the products that she writes about. Also, I know this will be interesting to many of you because we get asked about this in the group all the time, she talks about how she deals with brands who want to send her free stuff. Many bloggers get this as well, and how she turns some of those approaches into paid partnerships. Lastly, we talk about productivity and scaling her business and hiring a team to help her. If it sounds like we cover a lot in this interview, you are right, we do. We go deep. We go wide. We cover a lot of stuff. The cool thing though is that whilst Nikki’s blog is on styling, particularly for women, I think most of what we cover is really relevant for most niches. Grab a cup of your favorite beverage and settle down with a blanket in your favorite bean bag, or get your hiking shoes on and get ready to go for a long walk, or get that massive pile of ironing that you’ve been ignoring in the laundry ready. Let’s spend an hour or so with Nikki Parkinson from Styling You. Oh, her dog does decide to join us at the end as well so get ready for that towards the end. Today’s show notes are over at problogger.com/podcast/196. If you want to check out Nikki’s blog, Styling You, head over to stylingyou.com.au. Okay, I’ll be back at the end of the interview and we’ll wrap things up there. Enjoy this interview with Nikki. Hi Nikki, how are you? Nikki: Great, great to be here. Darren: Yeah. I was just looking back in your archives, which is always a scary thing. Nikki: Oh no. Darren: I realized that when this podcast goes out, you’ll be about a month away from have been blogging for nine years so congratulations. Nikki: Thank you. I am the accidental blogger though. I didn’t actually know I was blogging. I just had a website that I found out right up. Darren: I think it was 2008, July maybe? Nikki: Yes. It was. Yeah. Darren: I wonder maybe if we can go back to that moment. Your first post was titled What to Wear When You Don’t Have A Uniform. Maybe people could get back to that. Nikki: How did you dig that? Because I was a journalist, Darren, I just thought, “I’m just going to get a lot of content up there.” They would be very boring. Darren: They were useful from day one though. That’s what I found. Your first one is a how to post or what to wear type post. You obviously started with some sort of a how to teaching type thing in mind. Maybe if you can just tell us why you started and give us a little bit of information about what you were doing before. Nikki: I was a journalist for 20 years and edited a weekly magazine in the newspaper where I worked. I kind of had a now or never moment sort of about this time actually, this time nine years ago. I thought, “Oh my goodness, is this it? Is this me?” I was 41 and I loved what I did but you could feel like there had been redundancies and that was the first time I’d seen redundancies in a quite long career in the editorial department. I knew the things to go would be the things I like working on which was the magazine type things and the feature stories. The politics around it was getting quite toxic because if it’s a squeeze from resources from above then it all flows down and it’s not a very nice work environment. My husband had also started committing to Brisbane about an hour and a half at a good day, mostly two hours each way. One of us needed to be flexible around the family. I was so naïve. I just went, “Oh, I’m just sleeping. I’m going to start a business.” I had full month’s long service laid behind me and that was it. I look back and I go, “I’m kind of glad I didn’t know anything.” Because even on the business product, interviewed hundreds of business people over the years of my former career but actually running one yourself is a very, very different ball game as you would know. I said I would start a personal styling business because in my former role, coordinate fashion shoots and this heavily involved I was the fashion editor and video to full quite some time. I just thought, “I’ll just start it, because you know, you could just do that, can’t you?” I obviously needed a website for that but I didn’t want a website that I would have to go back to someone to update. Nine years ago, that was still very much the norm that if you were a business and you wanted a website, then you paid a ridiculous amount of money for something that you couldn’t even change yourself. I was very fortunate that a person who worked with my husband said, “Oh well, you need a blog.” And I went, “Sure, just get me one of those.” Darren: Yeah. Nikki: Because I wanted to continue sharing information like I had done in my former job. That’s why I call myself the accidental blogger because I just wanted a website I could update myself. It was really in that towards the end of that first year that I realized that blogging was a thing and it was more fun than what I was doing in terms of content. Darren: Yeah. Your early goal was to use a blog almost to support your business? Nikki: Correct. Darren: The blog became your business? Nikki: Yes, it did. Darren: Would you say that was the accidental part of it. How do you think your background in journalism helped you in your blogging? On the other side of things, what mind shifts did you have to make from journalism to become a blogger? Nikki: Where it helped me is that we were always, especially in the latter years, trained to imagine the reader, readers first was the policy. You’re always putting either a separator in the story or you’re writing it because it was a topic that would be pertinent to your reader. They had various demographics and everything that we were writing to. That mindset was definitely very helpful in forming content.                     What I had to personally change, and this is what if people are digging back in the archives in 2008, was a very non-personal style of writing. I’m not a personal blog but I’m a blog written personally. I think that if you’re an individual blogger, that’s the key to content connecting with people. That was a major change. As a journalist, unless you’re a columnist, you were trained not to put yourself into the story. Obviously, I’m flipping that on the head. Darren: If you look at your blog today, you’re there, everywhere. Your face is there, but not only that, it’s in your content and it comes out, your story comes out, you’re writing personal things. Nikki: Yes. Darren: Yeah. Do you think that has been a big part of your success, having that personality in your content? Nikki: Yeah. Not everyone is going to like me. That’s probably my big message to people is that you can’t be anybody but who you are. Not everyone is going to resonate with you but hopefully you will find your tribe by just being yourself. That’s all I’ve done over the period of time. Obviously, as the blog’s grown and I’ve done live events, and I’ve talked to people, imagine if you hadn’t been yourself all this time, it would be very hard to keep up something that you’re not for starters. Plus, just the sheer volume of content, it would be very difficult to not be anything but yourself and keep that consistency. Darren: Yeah. Did you find it hard to do? Was that something you had fear around, putting your face on your blog, allowing yourself to come out in that way? Nikki: I didn’t at the start. I guess because of my background, I had a small profile just where I lived. Also, when I started, you don’t have a lot of people following. There would be cases today where people start and they have a very quick following, suddenly. With the social media that it’s around now, it’s a very different possibility with that. It’s always been such a gradual organic thing that it’s not a sudden thing. I think that enables you to not get freaked out. Darren: Yeah, you get used to it step by step. Nikki: Yeah. Darren: Looking back on those early days, were there one or two things that you did that you’re really glad that you did, even accidental things? Nikki: Really glad that I paid someone else from the get go to set everything up. Really glad that he did a WordPress blog. It’s just two things that I know that a lot of startup bloggers struggle with. Not so much the platform they say it’s because I think that back then it was the blogger versus WordPress situation but more on struggling with their own thing to get the platform up. I know you can do it yourself but I’m a big believer in your zone of genius. You can get a very basic sized WordPress startup that you can manage then yourself. I think that’s your best investment straight off the bat. Darren: Conversely with any mistakes that you made in those early days, that you would advise people avoiding? Nikki: Mistakes were mainly the way I wrote wasn’t in a connective way. I don’t think that would happen anymore because blogging is just such a known thing these days that if you’re wanting to do that, you can really stalk and follow and look at people do content and everything and get a hook on that. I think that was the biggest mistake I made but I soon came around to it when Twitter really became a thing in Australia, right back when it was a fun place to hang out, wasn’t it? Darren: Yeah, it was. Nikki: It was like, “Ah, let’s just go to this little party tonight on Twitter.” That’s where I met a lot and connected with a lot of people working in the online space and realized that this blogging thing, and then I delved into their blog. That’s when I realized that it was about how the content was written to make it engaging so that people would leave these things called comments. Up until then I just had spam. That was the biggest mistake I made. I think if writing conversationally isn’t something that comes naturally to you, then that’s something to work on to get going. Darren: That’s great. How did you actually learn to do that? How did that conversational style of writing come about? Did you have a person in mind that you began to write to or did something else happen? Nikki: I think sort of locked away all those years as a journalist was someone who was just yearning to have a chat as opposed to writing in an editorial structure or creative structure. For me, it is just imagining a girlfriend sitting down, having a cup of tea or a glass of wine depending on what time of day it is and writing like that. And then that becomes second day chat to you because that is generally how you talk. Darren: Yeah. Do you have an avatar in mind? Have you ever gone to that stage of creating up a sign or an avatar, or is it just the girlfriend that you have in mind? Nikki: Yeah. I think over time, I’m going to have to develop more because I’m 50. By time this airs, I’m 50. I’m almost edging myself out of my chief demographic. I probably have a number of avatars now that I think about and could probably put names to them because they are beautiful readers and followers who come back time and again. In my groups, on my paid program, you really get to know these women and understand how you’ve already helped them and how you can help them again. That’s where I’ve been fortunate to makes some quite close connections. My avatars are pretty related to exact people, which is reverse stalking creepiness but that’s okay. Darren: That’s really interesting. I found since I’ve done live events that I start writing and creating podcasts for individuals. I’m actually thinking about a person as I’m speaking and it comes across more personal I think, yeah. Nikki: Yeah. I think that is the next step from the avatar, that if you’ve met people or you’ve had a really close connection with them online, then it is really easy to make that connection and understand what that is that they want from you, how you’re going to help them. Darren: Let’s talk about content for a little while. Sally in the Facebook group asked me to ask you about how you come up with ideas to write about. Nikki: Yeah. That’s something I’ve never struggled with. I think part of that also as a journalist, you weren’t told what to write, you had to come in every day to the chief of staff with your ideas. Your brain gets trained to always be on the ball with things. That has its own track. Plus, reader interaction gives you great ideas all the time. If someone is asking the question, you can bet your bottom dollar that 50 other people want to know the same thing. To my topic, things come up as well. Sometimes it can be just something that I’ve experienced that I have a feeling that other people will be keen to hear about that as well. It’s a combination of all those things but it is training your brain to always be alert to ideas and taking note of them obviously when they come through. I would have more ideas than I have time or capacity to write on them but I think if you are blogging about a topic that you really, really enjoy and live, those ideas will keep flowing. Darren: Yeah. I guess writing on fashion style, beauty, those types of topics, there are always new things happening in those spaces as well. I personally just wear blue t-shirts. I have for 10 years. Nikki: That’s a blog topic for me there. Darren: I know. I’m happy to write that for you, 10 blue t-shirts that you can wear. I guess if you’re really into that topic, there’s always something fresh emerging that you can write about. I guess the question that I have about that is how do you keep it fresh? You’ve been doing this for nine years, you’ve written about autumn fashion for nine years I presume. Does that ever get boring and how do you stay fresh yourself, but also how do you keep that fresh for your readers? Nikki: That’s a really, really good point and a good question because you do have new readers every year. In your head, you’ve already covered that topic, it still needs to be revisited. An example is ankle boots, think about that being a topic in some shape or form on the blog for the last five winters. Whenever the need is there, then I will tackle it and I will look back at the post that I’ve done. Go, “Okay, those tips are still relevant. I’ll include those but I think I should add these.” You’re almost re editing what you did, adding different things in and the key thing that is new each year or each season is the products that you are linking to have to be fresh. It’s all very well for them to dive back into the archives. They’ll get tips but none of those products will be available. I guess it’s fresh by the product that you’re featuring and recommending. Darren:         Right. How far in advance are you thinking about content? Nikki: Not far enough, probably. I use CoSchedule. I have a rough plan that probably extends a couple of months out. And then that’s always subject to change but because of the product driven nature, I’m not generally writing that far in advance. Because if I said, “Oh yeah, I’m going to do all these things and I’m going to write three months in advance.” None of those products would be available.                     A big thing for the topic that I deal is that people are actually wanting specifics to buy or to click through and have a better look at. I’m only going to annoy people if I do all that in advance and don’t have what’s available now. Sometimes it’s not unusual for me to be writing the day, night before. Darren: Right. Nikki: I’m not your productivity blogger. You know what? I think it’s still a hang out from the journalism days where it wasn’t fresh unless you wrote it the day before. Darren: Yeah. This is what I say with Vanessa. She’s writing on similar topics that she can’t be writing two weeks out like I do when I’m going on holidays for that same reason. I didn’t really understand that when she first started. Yeah, present some challenges. You don’t write multiples posts at a certain time of everyday, what’s that writing process look like for you? Nikki: That’s been my goal for the last nine years, Darren. Every week I’ll say, “No, today, today is the day I’m just going to have a writing day.” And it just goes out the window. I am my own worst enemy. My daughter is 20 and she’s in fourth year of uni and had her and her housemates around the other night for dinner. They’re all productivity guns and my daughter is explaining what happens to her. I said, “I think I’m really sorry because I think I’ve just passed that on.” We always get it done but we’re always shocking at the last minute. Yes, I’m shocking. In my head, I want to have a day a week that I do all the writing. So much other stuff cuts in and it shouldn’t cut in but it deals with the nature of working for yourself that at times you can’t have that happen. Darren: Perhaps that’s your personality style and when you work at your best. Nikki: Maybe I shouldn’t fight it. The worst thing is I’m more creative at night but that is not conducive to getting up early the next morning and exercising so I’m working against my own rhythms at the moment. Darren: Alright. We just had an interview with Kelly Exeter very recently where she talked about getting up, I think it was 4:15AM to exercise and I was like, “Hmmm, yeah.” Nikki: 5:30 is killing me at the moment. Darren: Oh my gosh. You’re putting me to shame. What about finding readers? You obviously have a readership, it’s fairly active, you’ve got lots of engagement going on as I look around your blog and particularly on Facebook. Did you spend much time and effort focusing upon that growth of readership or did it happen to you? Nikki: I did both. Focusing comes from being where your readers are potentially going to hang out. If you go back to 2008 when I started, Facebook business pages started not long after. I’m thinking October 2008. Anyway, it was very much in alignment with when I started. I started the business page. I am very good at this early adapting kind of thing. I just jumped on every social media as it’s happened. I’ve either stayed around or I’ve just got it for the handles and no one else has it. I remember that being, even with the couple of thousand on Facebook, that made a big difference to how you can grow the community. Back in 2008, no one was accessing on your phone. It was all desktop or laptop so it’s a very different scenario. I always saw answering the comments, being present on social media, think about it, that’s part of building your community on a daily basis. I never saw it as separate to the job. It’s always been part of it. It’s always been an organic growth. Someone coming in could say, “Oh she’s got 65,000 on Facebook, 50,000 on Instagram.” It’s not big numbers for nine years but I’ve never been about the big number, I’ve been about the engagement. That is a two way situation. That’s not something that you can just hope happens. You’ve actually got to talk to the people who are actually taking time to talk to you. There is no quick fix about it. I think if anyone is starting out, you have to be patient and you have to build that time of engagement into your work day. Darren: I was just talking to my personal trainer this morning and he said, “The only thing that’s going to change your life is persistence. Education will change things a little, genius will change things a little, but persistence in every area of life.” I really see that with blogging, it’s persistently showing up, persistently engaging, and creating value that does it. It is a long term thing. Nikki: Yeah. I still do it. I still look around to other people’s blogs or Facebook pages, comment on Instagram. Other people in either likeminded niches or not in a spammy way, genuinely, “Hey guys, great. I’m really enjoying what you’re doing. That was interesting.” That part does not stop. What I really have loved about being in this whole blogging sphere is that it’s a connective path job with the readers that you’re hoping to get but it’s also connective with people who are doing the same thing. Big believer in getting around and supporting everybody with a comment, or a like, or just anything, and that flow on effect. It has to have an impact not just being seen in other spaces but for just getting out there and sharing that whole online love. Darren: For sure. What would you say is your largest source of traffic today? Nikki: It is still Facebook. Darren: Right. Nikki: Yeah, it’s still Facebook. The percentage used to be massive from Facebook. What year is it that you had the ProBlogger event at Etihad Stadium, what year is that? Darren: Oh gosh. I think that was the third or fourth year. We’re looking four or five years ago now. Nikki: Yes. I remember everyone at the conference talking about how the algorithm had stuffed up all that traffic. That was when Facebook first started the algorithm things.                     I don’t get too frustrated, yes. Stuff happens and you go, “Ah, goodness, another thing we’ve got to deal with.” I still think good content will win. You might not have to be hit that you may have had before whatever changes happened but good content will still rise to the top and win out.                     For my demographic, this is what I say to anybody, know where your demographic is most likely hanging out on social media because this is where you need to reach them to try and get them back to your blog. For me, Facebook is still the biggest thing. I have the page but I also have a close group of more than 7,000. That’s extremely active. Someone told me the other day that we’re tracking it and there was a new comment every five seconds or something at night time. That is where I’ve seen the evolution of where people are asking questions. It’s all happening in that group. I think you’ve got to see whatever social media you’re doing and ride where most people are going to be comfortable about chatting. But definitely fewer comments on the blog now than they are on social media. Darren: Jade asked over in our Facebook group about Facebook and your community, and asked if you had any tips on community management in that space? Nikki: Look, I’m very lucky. I set the tone for all of my platforms from the get go. I don’t like nastiness and I don’t have it in my house so I’m not going to have it in any of my online spaces. You don’t see it in any of my posts or anything like that. That tone is set by me being me across all of my online platforms. That actually discourages a lot of people from landing and being a bit knocky or a bit ranty. It doesn’t mean we lose all of it. We definitely get the odd comments, just wrong tone. In the groups, we’ve got very good guidelines that we just don’t accept judge, don’t accept any attacking another person, attacking me, making anyone feel less than they should because what I’m about is beyond style. It’s about women feeling confident and supported so I can’t have a group or online space where they are fearful of asking a question for being made to feel ridiculous. Setting the tone has been crucial but we have those official guidelines in place. We are not afraid to block because it will ruin the experience for everybody else. Darren: Yeah, yeah, that’s great. Nikki: A bit tough like that but you worked hard to build up these communities and people come to you for a reason. I think if you set the tone, and your tone might be ranty and snacky, which is fine, just go for it. I think you’ve got to have those strict guidelines. I also have community managers supporting me so it’s not me monitoring it 24/7. Darren: How did you find those first people? Are they a paid group or is that volunteers from within the group? In your Facebook group managers, community managers. Nikki: They are paid, part of my team. Probably since that year at Etihad Stadium. Kim [00:33:00] came up to me and said, “If you’re ever looking for any help, I’d love to help you out.” I contacted her the next week. From that moment, I’ve always paid someone to help out in some kind of way. How that’s looked has changed to reflect what projects I might be doing or what that focus is.                     For about a year, late coming up to this 12 months, I actually paid writers to write. What was happening is that people weren’t coming to read what they had to say because they wanted only content from me. It was great content, I loved it. Gave me a break from the writing but I realized it wasn’t the best use of resources. And then I was talking to Kim Beach, Kim Beach Fit. He runs beach fit community and her husband about how they’ve set up their communities. That’s when I thought, “Oh you know what? I’m just going start this group for subscribers.” It went to 2,000 very quickly. It was July we started and so we’re 7,200 and it’s nuts, they are wonderful. We thought, “We’ll have all these plans to generate content from the start, generate conversation from the get go.” They were answering each other’s questions, helping each other out. If you could bottle that atmosphere and put it out there, it would be fantastic. That has all been very helpful for me. Originally I went to the blogging community and people who I know to help me with that. Originally it was Rubina from Mommy and the Minks. And then I got Christian from Christian & Co. Rubina went back to her culprit work inside of CIA and that’s when I got Jasmine from pretty chafed on board. They share the day and they’ve worked it out who wants the morning and who want the night and checking in. They also help me behind the scenes with different things, campaign reports, helping around my paid program as well. Great to have women also working in the online space and understanding it, and that they’re incorporating that into their working week. Darren: One of things I noticed as I was looking at your group or the way that you promote your group is that you don’t ever link to your group on your blog or on your site, instead you ask people to sign up, and then you send them a link to your blog, which I found fascinating. You are building your email list as well as getting people to your group. How does that work for you? Nikki: Well, it definitely has grown the subscriber list or if you’re already on the list, that link is always in there because obviously you’ve signed up. What happens now though is that it comes up as one of Facebook’s recommended groups. We don’t apply resources because I didn’t think it was valid enough to go back in and check that they’re actually subscribers. The whole method and motivation was something that I’ve talked to Kim Beach about and that’s how they generate their email list and it very much works for them. Darren: Yes. It’s almost like an opt in. Some people give away PDF but you give away your group. Nikki: A community. Darren: That’s fascinating. I think that would be one strategy a lot of bloggers could use. It’s a closed group but it’s not a secret group? Nikki: No. Darren: Yeah, okay. Just one more thing on community, you’ve used hashtags really well. I love #everydaystyle. I see it in my Instagram all the time which is great. Where did that idea come from, #everydaystyle, using that hashtag to build your brand I guess in many ways? Nikki: Yeah. It’s end of 2013 and I had a question from a reader saying, “I like all the outfits you put on the blog. You dress up and everything but I’d love to know what you wear every day.” I had to laugh. I think I remember looking down at shorts and t-shirt. It wasn’t a blue t-shirt, it was probably something else. I thought I’m really not living what I’m promoting. I’ve got a whole wardrobe full of clothes and I’m not wearing them. I thought, “Oh, I’ll do it for a week. I’ll just show on Instagram what my daily outfit is for a week. I’m going to just call it everyday style.” I think Vanessa had already been using the term everyday style and I was horrified when I started because I realized that I’ve just taken it. Darren: I didn’t even know that. Nikki: I didn’t think I was going on with it. I just thought it was a week. And then by the end of the week, people were joining in and I’m going, “Okay.” And then my book was in proofing and production so we got put in a book. I thought, “Oh, I got to keep going on this.” I haven’t actually missed a day since November 2013. Other Instagrammers got on board with it as well. A mistake I made from the start is not putting why or something with it because it’s now more than 200,000 shares on it. Cheers to that hashtag. It’s not all part of this community. It’s certainly for Instagram style bloggers around, it’s been a lovely way to connect. That would be my only suggestion if you want to get a hashtag going is… Darren: Brand it somehow. Nikki: You brand it somehow. I know Chantel had similar things in her early days without FMS attached to photo a day, it got not hijacked but people see that a hashtag is popular, and then they just throw it on. Darren: Yeah. Gets a life of its own I guess. Nikki: Whether they’re participating or not, they’re just throwing it on there. Definitely, it’s been a fun thing. I’m not going to miss a day. Literally people ask me, “Do you shoot all those in advance?” I said, “No, it’s literally what I’m wearing that day.” If I’m down the street or doing school run or after school and not I’m in what I posted, it’s like getting caught out. It is what I’m doing. Darren: Yeah. I guess it humanizes your brand but also the thing I love about it is that your readers are participating and so they not only get to see themselves on the hashtag but they see who else is reading the blog. I think that somehow brings about community. Nikki: Yeah, it does. Also that community within other Instagrammers and bloggers in Australia because part of my ecosystem is that all women are real, trying to create inspiration for a whole wide range of women on that hashtag, there is someone your age, your shape, your style that can get ideas and everything from and they’re an everyday person. That’s been a great thing. Yes, more readers have become confident about sharing their outfits and that’s been a great thing.                     In my online program, they share their outfit in that group every day. For some people, that’s a huge step and that’s in a close group. Yeah, to do it on Instagram but also then for those people who are, they’re actually providing awesome inspiration for so many. Darren: That’s great. You’ve talked about your online program a few times. Let’s talk about monetization. How did you make your first dollar from the blog? Nikki: Well, technically, it would be from people booking one on one styling appointments. Actually, on the blog was a banner ad, probably 2010, later that year or in 2011 first sponsored post. That was definitely the first way that I did it. My first site wasn’t even set up to take banner ads, it didn’t have a sidebar. It was a second incarnation. I think that the banner ad thing was a hangover from newspaper days because media like that just seemed an obvious thing, and people asked me for them so I went, “Oh, okay.” Darren: How long did it take you to get to that point where you considered what you were doing full time? Nikki: I would say I stopped taking personal styling clients at the beginning of 2012. That was because the income from the blog was far exceeding the personal styling. The personal styling wasn’t a good business model for me. In fact my clients would say, “This is great. I’ve had two hours with you. I don’t need you anymore.” And I’m going, “Ah, okay. Kind of thought you’d come back but anyway.” That’s when I thought, “That takes a lot of energy and effort and it’s said amount of time that you can devote to it every week. When the blog side had started to take off, then I bit the bullet.” There’s always going to be a tipping point, I had to back myself. Sure enough, it was fine. I have called myself full time blogger since the beginning of 2012, so it’s five years now. Darren: Can you talk to us just for a moment about that in between period? You were doing personal styling on the side? Nikki: I was doing everything, university tutoring, freelance PR, freelance writing. This is what I say to people, that was essentially me having a job and building up a blog. If you’re already in a job, maybe stay in your job, build up a blog. Crazy ridiculous hours. I think my husband had probably given me about six months. Six months of seeing the back of me at the computer at night time to make things happen or we’re going back to finding a job.                     I looked back and I remember very tough periods; tough emotionally, tough financially. We’re lucky my husband had his job so the mortgage was paid and everything but you know, it just went from two sure incomes to one. If you look at it on paper of the year, it did make it up but it was a very hard slog to make it up. All I can say is that I just really, really enjoyed what I was doing. I still enjoy it. There isn’t an easy day now. It’s not like you just have a day to fluff around and do nothing. Running a business and feeding the blog and feeding other content is hard work. I look back and I never felt like I wanted to give it up. I think in hindsight, that can only be that I really enjoyed that part of it. I enjoyed the connection with other people doing blogging but I also enjoyed the connections that I was growing with my community. There was never a point where I went, “Oh, I’m just going to throw this and go back or find a new job.” Darren: Can you talk to us a little bit about your income streams today? What are the main income streams, obviously banner ads probably isn’t the number one anymore I’m thinking. Nikki: It’s still there. This is why I never diss on that either because some of my banner advertisers grow into sponsorships and ambassadorships. Because of the association and relationship, they’ve grown with me. I’ve probably got about three case studies and just a new one yesterday that they are doing a six month campaign with me from August. They’ve been a banner advertiser for maybe three or four years. It does help to build a relationship with the brand. For that brand, especially independence, it’s a low level way to buy in. If that makes any sense. Still the line share of my title blog income is from sponsorships and ambassadorships. Ambassadorships are basically 6 or 12 month long contracts that include a variety of different things on and off the blog for that particular brand. That’s still the line share.                     I introduced my seasonal online shop two years ago. We’ve just almost finished the sixth of those edits. That brings in income twice a year. Probably by the time this goes live, I’m going to stock some of my favorite products, not just fashion in between the seasonal edits so that something that my personal assistant has driven which is awesome because she’s very good at handling all that side of things.                     Then, the online program I started, the first one last September. We’re almost at the end of the second one and that’s seasonal as well. That was a new income stream last year. That has been really successful income stream wise but also for really connecting with a smaller subset of the community and offering as close as I can get to one on one advice without actually physically going out and doing that. Darren: Can we just go back to ambassadorships and maybe walk through those three that you’ve just mentioned? I’d love to know a typical of ambassadorship might look like for you. I know it probably does vary a bit from brand to brand but what would one look like? Nikki: The constant content is still going to be sponsored posts on the blog. That is quite key but packaged in with that over 6 or 12 months can be in store appearances, Facebook Live events, I did one last night for a brand I’m an ambassador for, next week in Frankie4 in Melbourne. That’s part of my ambassadorship with them that I’m going down there.                     It is engaging me to connect a brand to my audience. How that looks from the brand perspective is feeding in with their marketing. It’s obviously also social media content and that as well. It’s being involved in campaign shoots for a brand. There’s a whole lot of different things and a lot of flexibility in working with that brand’s aims across a longer period of time and how you can support that, how you can best share what they’ve got going on. Because it’s fashion, it’s always new stuff so it’s always around the new.                     They’re the best alliances that I like doing because you’re really getting involved with another business and really helping them grow as well. All of my long term ambassadorships, current ones, have started from a very small beginning. Frankie4, for example, gifted me a pair of silver sneakers which I just loved and then everyone loved because I put them on Instagram and then it went nuts and they sold a lot. That has grown from a very small beginning. When I’m talking to people about working with brands, the most successful relationships I’ve had have started from those small beginnings where you’ve actually grown with the brand. You love the brand, you know your audience loves the brand, so you’re all on the same page. That’s where if I look back, that’s been the most successful campaigns that I’ve done. Darren: Sure. You spoke there about gifting. I know a lot of bloggers they sometimes don’t know what to when they’re asked by brands, “Can I send you something?” Some bloggers are like, “Well, should I be charging for that? Should I just accept it?” What’s your stance on that particularly for a new blogger starting out? Nikki: For a new blogger starting out, if you’re still building your audience and building your relationships, then you’re probably not going to be able to charge anything for that. What I’m very big on, whether you’re starting out or whether you’ve been going a long time is you don’t have to accept something just because someone is sending to you. If it’s not your style, I’m talking about fashion, it’s not something that you could seamlessly fit into your content. I guess this is my journalism background, if it’s something that I know I can incorporate into my everyday style, just as part of the editorial process, then that’s okay. But if they start asking for specific hashtags, specific dates of placement, specific timings, then that’s bordering, that’s commercial, they’re potentially booking advertising. When they gift you something in the hope that you’ll feature it, then there’s not usually a payment involved.                     It’s tricky when you’re starting out because it’s really exciting and people want to send you things and all of that thing but you need to at some point draw a line in the sand. That line gets pushed for me every week. What I’ve learned is if you push back because something is not right, then it tends to come through or something else better will come through. I think that’s the toughest part. Brands start thinking, “I’m just going to send something. They have to feature it.” My heart tip to brands is actually source out whether the person wants to receive it in the first place because there are plenty of bloggers who don’t want to receive product. Actually give the blogger a choice. So if it’s clothing, say, “I’d like to gift you a piece of clothing, would you like to choose from X, Y, Z or go to my website?” The person on the receiving end is either going to make the choice going, “Oh I really like that piece of clothing. I like that brand, I’m happy to feature it in this post I’m doing.” Say it’s a knit wear, “I’m going to feature in this knitwear post.” That goes into their content seamlessly but not exclusively. That’s the other thing. If you want exclusive content, no other brands mentioned on my blog or social media, then that’s a paid situation. I think the media background definitely has helped for me to draw those lines and be able to build relationships but say no, actually that’s a commercial arrangement so let’s talk about how we can make that work for each other. Darren: Let’s talk about your shop. I’ve always wondered what’s going on, on your shop, whether it was an affiliate marketing thing, or whether you’re drop shipping, whether you’re taking orders and then some else is sending it, or whether you’re holding the stock yourself. Can you give us a little bit information about that? Nikki: Yeah, sure. To start with, back in 2015, it was set up as a drop shipping arrangement. We are on a Shopify platform, which was really easy to set up and get going very quickly. What I chose to stock was not random things just all thrown in. It was actually putting together a seasonal capture wardrobe that people could use as the building blocks for the season ahead. I was working with suppliers who I already had a relationship with. The orders would come through to us and we would forward the orders onto the suppliers, each supplier would send out the garments from that particular order that were pertaining to them.                     This one we’ve just done, we actually have bought all the stock, wholesale the stock. That has been a big step and it has been driven by my assistant who has a Scottish voice. I’m not even going to attempt the accent but last year she said, “This is ridiculous. We should be doing this ourselves.” I went, “Okay, Rach. We’re on.” Yes, it is more of a risk because you’ve got to buy but I had two years of reporting about what sold, quantities, and sizes. You’re never going to hit completely on the mark but I wasn’t coming into a cold and trying to understand what was going to be popular and what was going to sell. That has been a great thing to do this time around and we will continue that. That’s why we’ve also started stocking other things in between times in the shop as well.                     The seasonal edit works really well as well because I’m not selling a whole bunch of clothes across the whole year. I’m actually getting people a formula, I’m creating demand, and we do most of our sales the first two days that the shop launches each season. Darren: Right. You’re doing a lot of those sales via email to your list and Facebook group I presume? Nikki: Yeah. Email, Facebook group, Facebook, there’s a blog post always to launch it. This time around, we launch it in conjunction with the online program. The online program features the capture wardrobe as a road map for the season ahead. 20 of the 30 pieces in that capture wardrobe are actually available for sale in the shop. People could buy from the shop or I had five other suggestions as to what to buy. That definitely generated sales in itself. People on the flip side weren’t necessarily in the online program but they’ve bought from the shop before and so they trust what they get. Darren: The style program, the online program that you’ve mentioned, what do people get for that? I noticed at the moment, I can’t sign up. Not that I think you’ve got anything for me, there’s no blue t-shirts on your blog. Nikki: I’m going to keep that in mind. Darren: Yeah, well maybe. Nikki: I was contacted by a woman called Alison Levada from Star Logistics in States. It was one of those emails that was a bit random and out of the blue and I’ve gone, “Actually, I’m ready to listen. It’s making sense.” She says jump on a Skype call and I jumped on a Skype call and she made a lot of sense which is really good. It’s something that she’s developed based around a capture wardrobe program. I’ve just adapted it obviously for my audience. Also, the amount of time, I think she runs herself. She runs probably about six or seven a year whereas I’m just doing the two and I’m combining the seasons, autumn, winter, spring, summer. All the creative is mine. I choose all the garments, I choose all the options, and this time I use my own graphic designer to put together all the pieces for her platform because I needed that seamless look. The actual program itself, people log into a different platform and they send out the daily emails and they send out all the sales stuff and handle that kind of thing and then pay me less their commission. Darren: Sure. When someone is signing up for your program, what are they actually getting? Nikki: What they get is six weeks’ worth of outfit prompts and really tailored advice in the Facebook group which is way smaller. We’ve got I think about 200 in there doing the program at the moment. Like a smaller subset of the bigger community. It is a whole bunch of women of different ages who for whatever reason are just wanting some style support throughout the season. The ones who are doing it the second time, they just love the community aspect of it as well as the fact that we don’t have to think what we’re wearing each day. Basically, they had a blueprint for the whole season. I’m teaching them how to create an adaptive capture wardrobe for themselves. Darren: Right. What do they pay for a season? Nikki: If they’re just doing the six weeks, it’s $99. If they do the six months, it’s $149. Some people, there’s no outfit prompts after the six week period but the Facebook group exists as a way to get to me and get specific information from me and group camaraderie for the season. Darren: Yeah. I presume you’re talking about the products in your shop. At least some of them as part of that as well so there might be some additional income that comes in there? Nikki: Yeah, definitely, definitely. A lot of them were very keen buyers at the shop because those pieces were recommended. For every piece, say a blue t-shirt was recommended, I had a budget option, a petite option, a plus size option, and a work wear option. Doesn’t matter what your lifestyle is, I offer those options up for the person to have as guidelines.                     The other thing is that they don’t necessarily have to buy any clothes at all. It could be a way that they organize their own wardrobe to fit into the program. Darren: Sure. That’s great. I love that. I love the way that you start a program and shop work together. I would presume there’s almost a flow on with some of your products from the shop, from ambassadorships and sponsorships as well, on those types of relationships. It’s a monetization strategy that does have some overlap. Nikki: It does. A lot of overlap. I think the key thing of all of the monetization that I do, whatever avenue it is, the most successful ones have been those relationships. It’s been based on relationships and that’s been the key. It’s relationships between the suppliers/sponsors and then the relationships between the community. They actually want to buy from you, which is a really nice feeling because they could actually go to all these shops, individual online shops, and buy the things but they actually wanting to buy from you which is a really lovely thing. Darren: That’s great. Let’s move towards wrapping this up but I do have a few questions from the group about your productivity. How do you get it all done? We certainly touched on a little bit earlier. One of the things I have noticed when I talked to full time bloggers is that they have to make mind shifts along the way. Many times I build systems or routines that help them to get things done. Has that been the case for you? Can you talk to us about maybe a couple of the mind shifts and the routines that you’ve had to develop? Nikki: I’m a shocker. I am. People who know me think I’m the most organized. My friends would say I’m the most organized person out. I think because I get the thing done. It was the interesting talking to my daughter about it because we get the things done. I need a deadline. Don’t send me and something and say, “Here’s some questions. Put a date on there, put a time on there.” That has to happen. Having said that, I ran my iCal like nobody’s business. I have a big calendar up on the wall that’s very visual as well. Maybe it’s just my problem. I’ve got too many things where I’m writing stuff down. Productivity tools, I use Asana for my team. That’s really good. Everybody assigns task in there to each other. I obviously assign tasks to the team in there. For editorial content on the blog and social media and in the groups, CoSchedule has been. Probably having those tools keeps me in check. One of my biggest weaknesses is easily distracted. That’s really bad when you have a workload. I think my best days are when there are no gaps and you just have to put your head down. Irony is social media is my biggest distraction. Part of the mind set is you tell yourself that you’re going to be on it. Email, email shocking. I tell myself that I should only check twice a day but I’m not good at that either. I’m sorry. People need to talk to Kelly about productivity. Darren: No. I think it’s good that people hear different things because I’m probably more like you than Kelly, although I can snap myself into a week of Kelly where I’ll be very good. They’re often the weeks that I just have to switch on. The rest of my life, I allow myself to be a little bit crazy and distracted and spontaneous, because that’s my personality. I actually do my best work in those weeks as well where I allow myself to be myself. Nikki: I guess the other thing is no two days for me could be the same. Darren: Yeah. Nikki: This week, I had a very long day in Sydney for a client all day, like work. I had photoshoots and a Facebook Live yesterday. I have meetings tomorrow. Yeah, just a lot of different things that you don’t necessary have a uniform week because it can be quite client driven. That’s what can throw me out. Darren: Thanks for chatting with us today, Nikki. I really do appreciate all your time but also words of wisdom. It’s been great to chat with you. Nikki: Thanks, Darren. It’s been awesome. I can’t believe you went back to my first blog post. Oh my God. Darren: I won’t link to it in the show notes but we certainly will link to Styling You and some of the other things that you’ve mentioned in the show notes today. Yeah, I really do appreciate your time. Is there anything that you would like our readers to come and check out? Anything that you’ve got new going on at the moment? Nikki: No. The actual blog itself is the funnel to everywhere. The program has finished. The shop will have some fun things in it. Just come over to the blog, join the community, we’d love to have you there. Darren: Great. Thanks so much. We’ll chat soon. Nikki: Thanks, Darren. Darren: Wow, we did cover a lot of ground there. I hope you enjoyed that interview and had a good walk, or got some ironing done, or had a good time in that bean bag. If you want to check out Nikki’s blog you can go over to stylingyou.com.au. You can also check out in our show notes today at problogger.com/podcast/196. I’ll have a link to her blog. I’ll also have a link to her Facebook group sign up page, which I think is really interesting. Nikki also mentions CoSchedule in this interview and if you are curious about that, check out our last episode, Episode 195, where we talk about how we use CoSchedule at ProBlogger as well.                     Lastly, check out the Facebook group over at problogger.com/group where we talk about every episode, where if you got questions, if you got feedback on the episode, you can do it there. We also have every week, there must be 50 or so different discussions on different topics around blogging as well.                     Also, I’ve been doing a Facebook Live once a week, a teaching Facebook Live once a week. We stream that into that group as well. If you want to check that out, head over to problogger.com/group and it will forward you into Facebook.                     Thanks for listening. If you’re still looking for something to listen to, head back to 195, the episode that we just put up last week on CoSchedule or dig around in iTunes because every one of those 195 episodes is sitting in there. Would appreciate it if you’d subscribe and leave us a little review. Thanks for listening today. I’ll be back with you in Episode 197 and 198 as well, coming out to that 200 mark. Thanks everyone, chat soon. How did you go with today’s episode? Enjoy this podcast? Sign up to our ProBloggerPLUS newsletter to get notified of all new tutorials and podcasts below.

Using CoSchedule as a Blogging Tool In today’s episode, we’re going to take a deep dive into a tool we’ve been using on ProBlogger for the last 18 months that has been incredibly useful for our team both as an editorial calendar tool but also to help us with our social media promotion of content. The tool is one that you may have heard of – CoSchedule. We installed CoSchedule a year and half ago now as our editorial team began to grow and as we began to get a bit more organised with the ways that we schedule and share content and since that time it’s become more and more central in what we do. In fact, it’s gradually taking over from some of the other tools we’ve been using to share content onto social media. To help me run through the tool I invited the General Manager of ProBlogger – Laney Galligan – onto the show to take me through it. Laney has taken over not only the management of the business side of our event and whole business but recently has taken the editor role at ProBlogger and uses CoSchedule as part of that all day every day – and as you’ll be able to tell – she loves this tool and is doing things with it that I didn’t even know it could do. In this chat Laney shares: What CoSchedule is We look at how we’re using it (and discuss a little of our own approach to planning content on PB) Her top 10 features of CoSchedule What she doesn’t like about it The pricing options of and whether we think it’s worth it for different types of bloggers. Resources on a Tool to Revolutionise Your Blog’s Editorial Schedule and Social Sharing Facebook group CoSchedule PDF of Words that Can Work Well in Headlines CoSchedule’s Headline Studio tool Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Darren: Hey there and welcome to episode 195 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, to start an amazing blog, to create content that changes your reader’s lives and to make a profit from that blog. You can learn more about what we do at ProBlogger over at problogger.com.                     In today’s episode, I want to talk a little bit about a tool that we’ve been using on ProBlogger for the last 18 months that has been incredibly useful to us, to me, and my team, both providing us with an editorial calendar but also with the social media promotion of our content.                     The tool is one that you have probably heard of before because it does get mentioned from time to time in this podcast. It’s a tool called CoSchedule. We installed this tool about a year and a half ago now as our editorial team began to grow and as we became more organized with the way we planned our content, the way we scheduled our content, the way our team worked together, and also the way we were sharing our content.                     Since that time, it’s become very central in what we do. In fact, it’s gradually taking over from some of the other tools that I’ve previously been using to share social media content. To help me run through this tool and to go deeper with it than I could, I’ve invited my team member, the General Manager of ProBlogger, Laney Galligan, onto the show to take us through what CoSchedule does and some of its features.                     Laney will be familar to many of you who’ve been to our events, she has directed our events for several years now. Over the last couple of years, has taken on more and more management roles at ProBlogger. She actually is our General Manager now and manages the whole business of ProBlogger but in the last few months, she’s also taken on more of the editorial role at ProBlogger as well.                     As a result of that, she’s using CoSchedule everyday, all day, everyday. She’s able to tell you a lot more about the tool than I can. As you will tell from this interview, she loves this tool and she is doing things with it that I didn’t even know it could do.                     In this tool, we cover the following. We talk about what CoSchedule is. We look at how we use it at ProBlogger and in doing so, we actually talked a little bit about how we plan our own content. Laney lists off her top 10 features of CoSchedule. She talks about what she does like about it which is a lot but also touches on a couple little things that she doesn’t like. We talk about the price of this particular tool because it’s not a free tool. It does have a 14 day free trial but then it goes onto a paid plan. We talked about price and who we think of the different plans would suitable for, I don’t think it’s suitable for everyone but I do think bloggers of all stages, there would be a case for it. We’d get a little bit more into that today.                     Today’s show notes, where we do link to CoSchedule and another link that we mentioned during the show is our shownotes at problogger.com/podcast/195. I’ll also link to it in our Facebook group as well. Lastly, just want to be clear. We are an affiliate for CoSchedule but we’re not actually making any money from it as we discuss in the show. They do have an affiliate program which enables you to reduce what you pay for the tool so if you do have an audience that this will be interesting for, you can reduce how much you pay for your plan. I think everyone you refer to CoSchedule, you get 10% off the cost of the tool. We’ve referred 10 people so the tool is now free for us. Whilst we do share it with an affiliate link, we don’t actually get anything out of it. This is not an affiliate play today. It’s not an ad in any way. We just love this tool. We use this tool everyday and so we thought it would be interesting for you to learn about it as well. With that out of the way, let’s get into this interview with Laney Galligan talking about CoSchedule. Hey Laney, how are you? Laney: Very well, Darren. Darren: It’s been 195 or so episodes and I’ve not had you on the podcast yet so it’s time to get one of my team members on. I want to talk to you about tools. In particular, a tool that we are using, have been using for a while now on ProBlogger, CoSchedule. Do you remember when we first started using it? Laney: Yes. I think it was about 18 months ago. Probably when I was first coming on to start doing my general management of the business. That’s about 18 months ago now. Darren: Alright. You know much more about CoSchedule than I do. We’ll probably touch on why that is, a little later, in terms of our personality types. Tell us a little bit about what the tool is for those who haven’t heard of it before. How would you describe it in a sentence or two? Laney: Really, it’s an editorial calendar but it’s a lot more than that. Most people would just think, “Oh, editorial calendar, I can do that in WordPress with a plugin easily.” They say it allows you to plan, publish, promote, and automate. I think that’s where its main strengths are. It’s not just about scheduling your blog post, it’s about managing all the different types of content that you create because we are multi content creators now. It’s not just blog posts. We could have podcasts. We could be doing email and newsletters, other marketing promotions. It allows you to schedule that content, settle them in place but also get the most out of the content that you’re creating by promoting it. I guess that’s the really important part of it because your job doesn’t finish with just creating the post, right? Darren: That’s right. I think, for me, the first ever editorial tool that I tried was a WordPress plugin which showed me a beautiful way like the calendar that was upcoming and all the post that were coming up but as you say, that’s just part of the process, creating content. It’s promoting that content, and ongoing, promoting that content that most of the other tools miss out on. Who would you say that it is for? Laney: It has different levels that you can have with the different plans. It does actually aim at different types of content creators. Bloggers, for sure, when you’re creating a blog post, it’s great just to keep yourself organized. I know those plugins that I’ve used previously as well, whilst I see things that I have scheduled in there, I’ll see every single little draft that I started as well. Sometimes, that’s quite overwhelming and confusing so this allows you to get a clear look at what you’ve got coming up and what you’ve actually planned.                     For definitely multi contributor blogs as well. If you’ve got more than one author, there are some really good opportunities within the next plan up that allows you to have different team members or allow you to have contributors as well and just managing people’s different content in the different ways that they create it as well.                     And then I guess juts content marketers in general. Whether that be a department within a company who have got control of every bit of content that’s going out for that brand as well as different promotions and things like that. Different social media accounts, they might have lots of them so it can scale up to different people but it is really great at ground level for bloggers who just want to get a little bit more organized that what they can do within WordPress itself. Darren:         I guess that was one of my big questions. Is it overkill for just a single person blogger? We started using it when we had a team, when we had two or three of us wanting to be at access at once. Do you think there’s user cases for single persons, bloggers? Laney:          I do because of I guess the nature of social media. Different platforms are popping out everywhere. As bloggers, we’re not just in charge of our blog anymore, we have to be these content creators and curators across all these different platforms. Whether that be Facebook, or Instagram, or Pinterest, or Twitter, a lot of people are already going and using other scheduling tools to schedule content on those platforms. They’re doing that directly with them or they’re using apps to do that as well or even worse, they’re not scheduling at all. They’re just promoting ad hoc when they remember to.                     Having it all in one, and I guess as we talk more about the features, you’ll get an understanding of why it’s so powerful is that you can just control the content and the marketing of your content from one spot and one easy place which is going to be great for a person who’s doing it all on their own. Darren:         For sure. The first time I started using a calendar, just a normal WordPress calendar, not CoSchedule but other ones, it was just helpful for me to see the flow of the content that was coming up as well. Even if you don’t use CoSchedule, being able to see it a month out that I’ve got a case study coming up, well I’ve got four case studies coming up, maybe we need to change that up and add in a different type of content or maybe we’re focusing too much on this category and not that category, to be a bit more strategic in that way is great.                     I’m looking at our calendar now and I can look at the next month or so of content and be confident that we’re covering the different categories that we want to cover on ProBlogger. Laney:          For sure. I really like to have visuals and that we can see when something is still in draft, or we can see when something doesn’t have social schedule for it, or we can use colored labels to label things out differently for different types of content. CoSchedule also allows you to I guess create or put into your calendar different types of content. A blog post versus a podcast versus hey, I want to put a new email newsletter in here.                     It’s just the content type that then allows you to create. You can actually see the different types of content that you’re creating and to make sure that you’ve got a good spread. I think we’re starting to fall into a good rhythm of the types of content that we create, different types of content that we’re creating for ProBlogger as well. It’s really nice to be able to visually see that and see, at a quick glance, the status of it as well. Darren:         Yeah and you’ve color coded it all beautifully as well which makes it very impressive. I log into the calendar some days and I go, “Whoa, there’s so much going on.” It’s quite overwhelming on some levels but once you dig into it and you understand how you’ve set it up with your colors and your tags, it makes a lot of sense.                     Maybe you could talk to us a little bit about how we’re using it on ProBlogger. Just give us a little bit of a run down and then we’ll get into some features that listeners might be interested in. Laney:          For sure. I guess one thing is that our planning for content actually starts off CoSchedule so we still do spreadsheets, something that I apologize to you about all the time. Sometimes, you can’t get away from a good spreadsheet. We do have a spreadsheet which I guess provides the buckets or the structure for the different types of content that we want to create and when that’s going to be published on a regular basis.                     We brainstorm there and then decide, “Are we going to go with that blog, that podcast topic?” It gives us an opportunity to see are we covering the breadth of topics that we know that we need to cover across the different types of content that we produce. Darren: It might be even worth saying that we do this once a month or just started doing it once a month and our spreadsheet has Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and we know that podcasts come out on Mondays, and Tuesdays a Facebook Live happens. Wednesday, a blog post happens. Thursday, a newsletter goes out. And Friday, a guest post happens on ProBlogger. We have these different days allocated. We brainstorm ahead of time what the actual pieces of content will look like. Laney: Exactly. Once we’re happy with what we’re going to do here, I transferred it into CoSchedule so that we can see, “This is what we’ve got coming up.” Within CoSchedule, especially because we’re a team and there’s different tasks for different people to do, that within each of the pieces of content that you schedule into CoSchedule, you can have tasks and put on messages and comments to each other when you’re on that team plan, for example.                     I can just say, “Hi Darren, you need to do this. Here’s the link to it.” I even put things into myself like when I schedule all of the social for Facebook. I have a list of the different types of things that I have to go through and curate or include in that schedule. I’ve got these little tasks as well. That all happens within CoSchedule. It might be something that I move our guest contributors into as well with our regular contributors. That might be able to give them direct access to CoSchedule too so that we can actually more closely help manage the creation of the content; making sure they know when their deadlines for drafts are, any notes and things that we have for them as well. Darren: Maybe we should mention that this really all sits within WordPress but also you can look at it all outside of WordPress as well. We’ve got it very much sinking with WordPress and I use it within WordPress quite a bit. Also, you can log in at CoSchedule, their website, and see it all there. Laney: That’s right. That’s generally how I use it. I’m always looking at the overview. However, when I do schedule a blog post, I then continue with my workflow within WordPress in the backend of WordPress and go, “I’ve done everything. Here are the categories. We’ve got the metadata and then you just go straight to scheduling the social messages for it as well which is really great in terms of workflow. Darren: Let’s go through your top 10 features and there’s probably 20 or more that we could probably talk about so we aren’t going to cover every feature that CoSchedule has but take us through your top 10. Laney: I’m discovering them all the time so that’s great. The thing that I love the most is about how it integrates with WordPress. Just what we were talking about, when you go into your calendar and you decide, “I’m going to write a blog post here.” You can actually attach a Google document, a word document, an Evernote note to that piece of content. I’ll say this is my content. I love that because I’ve been burned so many times writing a post in WordPress directly and something bad happens and I lose it. I prefer to create my content personally in Google Docs. It’s great if you’re collaborating with someone where you can review it and make suggested edits and everything like that. Once you’re happy with it, you can actually then just press a button and it will convert it into a WordPress post for you. That includes if there were any images in there as well. It posts it into your media library. It’s a thing of beauty really. I love how well it does that. I guess the thing with that too is that I can create blog posts or drafts of blog posts without it actually creating drafts in WordPress until I want it to. It keeps your drafts a little less cluttered. Sometimes, they can look really overwhelming if you’re just trying to see what are coming up and like every idea under the sun might be in there as a draft. This enables you to work on things, and then when you’re ready to, convert them into WordPress posts. Darren: I didn’t even know it did that. Writing in Google Docs is going to change my life because I’m a bit old fashioned in a way, but that’s great. Laney: Or even just a Word document. You can actually attach a Word document and it’ll convert that as well. Darren: And it doesn’t bring in all that horrible code that sometimes when you copy and paste out of those documents. Laney: That’s right. It does it really cleanly. I’ve been really impressed with how well it does that. That’s the one top thing I love about it. We’ve already talked about how you can schedule all your social on one spot. Again, in the backend of WordPress, once you’ve finished editing things, you can then go straight into creating your social posts.                     I suppose something that we haven’t really talked about yet is what CoSchedule actually allows you to do to create your social posts. Essentially, you just click a button and when it publishes, my post publishes this message to Facebook, this message to Twitter and this one’s a Pinterest, for example. You create your different messages very easy just as though you were actually in the platform itself. You type the message out. It might be a link. It could be an image. You create that and then you schedule it. You can do it at the same time.                     Another great thing that it has is time scheduling so you can just say, “Post it at the best time between 9:00AM and 12:00PM.” It’ll do that for you as well. You can create almost like a template. It actually does allow you to create templates. For our particular blog post, we know that we’re going to promote it straight away. On Twitter for example, we wait a few hours before it goes onto Facebook. We might tweet it again later that day. We’ll tweet it the next day and then we have a bit of a next week, next month schedule for our blog posts. You can actually create those schedules and then save them as a template and so when it comes to creating your blog post, you can just say, “Apply this template.” And then fill in the blanks. Darren: That’s great. I’m looking at a post that we’ve got scheduled to go out. I think it’s tomorrow or the day after and there’s 10 social messages already lined up. I can see that four of them go out tomorrow, two go out the day after, two the week after, and two the month after. It’s not like you had to write those 10 messages. You had to write a few of them but once it’s set up, it looks after itself and that immediate engagement on social media is going to happen. It’s great. Laney: Absolutely. You can edit every single message if you want to. Darren: So you can change them up? Laney: Yeah. That other really great thing with the whole template side of things is that they have social helpers which are almost like you merge field type of things that you use. If you just put permalink, it’ll put the link. If you add title, it’ll pull the title in, and if you put excerpt, it’ll pull the excerpt that you put in your blog post. And then you can create custom ones as well.                     I know there are some things that we continue to… I keep talking about it all the time, “Hey, if you missed it last week, here’s that.” You can actually turn that into a social helper as well and it’s just a click of a button and it pops it in there.                     You can automate quite a lot of this. The great thing about that is that it’s sit and forget. You don’t have to remember to keep promoting your content. It’s just going to do it for you. You can get so much out of a piece of content if you remember to keep marketing it well. Darren: That’s right. This is all happening in WordPress so you don’t have to logout into another app. You can put your post in there, schedule it, and then schedule messages all in the one sitting and then it takes over. Laney: Absolutely. Yup, just like that. We’ve already gotten to my third favourite one which is the template side of things. Doing all those social sharing templates, the helper text. We talked a little bit about workflow before. You can set up templates. When I do my weekly Facebook content, I schedule 30 pieces of content. I sit down and I schedule it across the week. I have a template that reminds me that I need seven questions, and six of these, and five of these. I put them all. They’ve all got placeholders within the schedule. Really, it’s just a matter of going in and filling them all in.                     Something that I found recently which I thought was pretty cool, it isn’t necessarily something turned on as a default, you can actually apply it, is a headline analyzer. Darren: This is great. Laney: Once you’ve got your blog post set up in the calendar and you put your title on there, it’ll actually analyze your headline for you. I can tell that we need to do a little bit of work on there, it seems to be stuck in the late 60’s, mid 70’s. Darren: Because you’re rating out of 100. The one I’m looking at for tomorrow, we rated 64. Maybe we could tweak that one a little. Laney: I think we could. I think [00:22:08] as the length of our headlines. I like them to be a bit shorter. It does give you a rating but it also allows you to see how that rating came about based on your use of power words, or emotional words, or uncommon words versus common words as well. They do actually have a PDF. We’ll include it in the show notes: all emotional palette and uncommon words that you could use in your headlines just to get you out of the same old, same old and perhaps improve how well your blog posts perform. It’s just something really simple but it’s right there with your workflow. “Oh, better check my headline.” “Oh, maybe we could improve that.” That’s just something I’ve tuned on recently. Darren: This is all again within WordPress and there’s a little link underneath it where you can get a full analysis of that headline and it will take you to another page where it goes into even more depth for that. How your headline is going to look in Google including the description, how it would look in the RSS feed, how it would look in a tweet. It actually gives you some more information if you want to dig in a little bit more about how it will look and some other suggestions there as well. That’s something I just discovered today too. Laney: Yeah. CoSchedule is really smart about the level of reporting that they can give you. Some of them are only at the higher level plans that it’s included. But it just allows you to make your content work harder. I think that’s just the smartest thing about this.                     Those are sort of the plan and the publish things that I really like about CoSchedule. I guess where the real power comes in though is the promotion and the automation of that promotion. We’ve already talked about how the social sharing templates help you do that. But another really neat little thing, if you’re going to schedule a social message and you think, “I should be sharing something from my Facebook page but I’m just not sure what.” There’s a little button that just says share old post and you click it and you can go from last year, from the last six months. There’s a bit of a time scale that you can choose where the post could come from. It shows you a list of posts that you published previously. It even gives you a little indication to say how popular that post was in terms of how often it was shared. You can know, “Oh, that one actually performs really well. I’m going to share that one again.” I really like that one. I think that’s great when you’re just looking for maybe a bit of a filler. If you think, “Oh, I’m not really saying much at the moment.” It’s a really easy way to just share some old content that could work well. That comes from the top content report. This is really great when you log in and you’re looking at your dashboard, your dashboard is telling you, “This is what content you’ve got coming up. Here’s some content that’s performed really well in the past.” You can again adjust the time scale on that to see content recently or of all time. For example, we’ve got a post that we shared on social etiquette that has been our most popular post in terms of how it’s been shared across the different platforms, that’s just a great way to say, “Oh, you know what? That’s a really good post. I should make sure that I share that again.” I’ll talk about this a little bit later as well when we talk about ReQueue but that’s a really good thing. If you see something that’s performing well, you can add it to your evergreen sharing schedule which is called ReQueue with CoSchedule. Darren: The thing I like about that top content report is you can dig in a little bit and see where it’s been shared a lot. That post you mentioned was shared like crazy on Pinterest which is unusual for a lot of our posts so you can do that type of analysis on your types of posts that you publish and where they’re being shared which is really useful. Laney: I’ve definitely looked at that previously and I’ve been surprised that some of the ones that performed really well on LinkedIn. You can see different titles are enjoyed and shared by different types of audience as well. Yes, definitely a good one to use to help you plan curation of your own content I guess as well but also giving you an understanding of that performed really well, let’s write more of that. Darren: Excellent. Let’s go onto the next on. Number seven. I think we haven’t given out numbers but that’s number six just done. Seven is the next one. Laney: There is a chrome extension. As you’re cruising around the internet and you read something interesting, you can just click the chrome extension and create a social message right there and then. It’ll go into your social schedule. Darren: That’s great. I just did that. I installed it this afternoon actually because I saw you mentioned that, and I’m like ooh, I need to get that one, so I shared one. It was great. I used the Best Time thing. You did mention Best Time before in terms of queuing up a social message. Best Time basically looks at your previous social interactions and works out when other things have worked out well for you in terms of timing. That was quite good. Laney: That’s right. It looks at the levels of high engagement. In terms of trying to get your own content shared not just by yourself but by others, there is another little app that you can download through CoSchedule called Click to Tweet. It does allow you to insert a click to tweet cute little box right within your own content as well. Rather than just relying on social sharing buttons, there’s other ways that you can get people, encourage people to share you story. I just thought that was pretty cool. Darren: Is that where you add in a sentence that you think people might be inspired by and then they click that and it tweets out that on their account? Laney: That’s correct and it shares your post. Darren: That’s great. Laney: Number nine, ReQueue. We were talking about this just before. ReQueue is an Evergreen content scheduler. If you’ve got content that’s always going to perform really well, then you can create a social sharing schedule for that, a calendar just for that. The different platforms that you want to go add on, you can say the Twitter, we want to go these times or only this many times in a day, or a week, or a month. It’s very similar obviously to Edgar which we use. It will also schedule things in and around all of the other content that you’re scheduling when you’re creating blog posts and things as well. Darren: Basically, it’s creating a library of tweets or Facebook updates and then you tell it how often you want things to go out. Laney: That’s correct. One of the things, we didn’t really use this much, we’re just starting to try a lot recently, is that if you’ve got a great post and you can see on that top content report that it’s performing really, there’s just a little toggle. You can just toggle out onto ReQueue and it will go into your library. You’ve got your different categories and things well. You can group them all differently.                     Say you’ve got different groups of content and you can say when they want to be shared too. It’s quite good and that actually keeps everything together. If you’re creating social posts for your blog post, and podcast, and everything like that, then there’s schedules around those as well. Darren: That’s very cool. To have it all in one place, I think again, is the thing that I love about this. We’ve got Edgar going at the moment but Edgar is not talking to CoSchedule and so to be able to have it all happening within CoSchedule so that those evergreen messages are not going to clash with the new messages that goes out makes a lot of sense to me. Laney: That’s right. At the moment, we have created a template of sharing times that work around when we know things are going out on Edgar so we try to coordinate those to make sure that they don’t clash. ReQueue I guess is a bit more intelligent because it’s within the same system and it can see when you’ve got other content scheduled as well. My number 10. Google Analytics tracking. This isn’t included in all of the plans, like the first plan, it’s not included in. But it’s worth it. Sometimes for me because I’m still getting used to things, I could spend maybe an hour and a half scheduling all of our social for a week, for example. You think, “Is it worth it?” What CoSchedule allows you to do is integrate with your Google Analytics account and what that will do is it will automatically add your team tracking link to every post that goes out for CoSchedule.                     When you go into your Google Analytics and you look in the acquisition section and go to campaigns, you’ll see that CoSchedule is in there. If you click on it and drill down, you can see where exactly the traffic has come from. Whether it’s been the Facebook page, the Facebook group, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, wherever, that will actually show up in your report so you can see how well your social scheduling is actually generating traffic for you. Darren: This is gold because a lot of people look at where traffic is coming to their blog and they see Facebook. They don’t know where on Facebook it’s come from. Previous to us using UTM codes in Google Analytics, we just saw Facebook. It was just this massive collection of traffic. It could be from our page, it could be from our group, it could be from someone else’s page. We never knew. But now, we know at least our Facebook page has sent this much traffic through the UTM track links and our Facebook group has sent this much as well.                     We can even see other people who are using CoSchedule as well so I could see someone in there at the moment. Their Facebook group sent us three visits over the last month which is kind of handy to know. I can see on Twitter that someone that we know well used CoSchedule to share on her Twitter feed as well. That’s really handy to know. Laney: That’s exactly right. We can see other people curating our content and sharing it via CoSchedule, which is cool. Again, to be able to get those different results separated out from your general Facebook traffic, because when you look at Facebook onto your social channels, that doesn’t include your CoSchedule traffic. You have to add those together so you know. It’s really good to be able to measure your efforts and making sure that you’re getting a routine on it. Darren: That’s right. We’ve raved and gushed over CoSchedule there. Maybe just to bring a bit of balance to it, what don’t we like about it? How could they improve it? One of the things I will say about them is that they are adding features constantly, getting messages every time I login to CoSchedule about something new that they’ve added. Other things that we want to see, that we get frustrated with? Laney: I think this is a cool thing but sometimes it annoys me. The fact that you can actually tag someone as you’re creating a social post. For example, on Twitter or Facebook, I might want to tag somebody, you can use the @ symbol and it allows just like it does on the platform itself. The name pops up and it’s great. You can click on it and you know that that’s actually going to tag him when that post goes out. Sometimes, I can’t find them. It can be a bit frustrating and you have to try different things or separate the name out a bit or put it together. Sometimes, I can’t even find them even though I know they exist. At least you can actually tag them and schedule it to do that as well. We were talking about being able to view the social schedule in WordPress, the backend, sometimes I can’t scroll to the end of my schedule. I can’t actually scroll any further. I don’t know if that’s got anything to do with the amount of all the stuff we’ve got in our WordPress backend that might be taking up a bit of real estate. Speaking of that, they’ve actually got an app now. You can actually schedule on the go from your phone, which is great. Maybe that’s number 11, they have an app to your phone. I guess for me, being really vigil, I like to see the big picture. With CoSchedule, the calendar view, you can decide whether you want us to see four, five, I think maybe six weeks. You can choose but I would like to see months at a time sometimes or just the entire month from start to finish. It usually starts halfway through. I haven’t quite figured that out yet. Sometimes, I get a little bit frustrated that I can’t see more at once which is when I go back to the spreadsheet. I get the overview anyway but it’s just a little thing that I think it would be great if you were able to customize a little more how you viewed your upcoming content. Darren: I think they start on a Sunday and they end on a Saturday so they add in extra days. Laney: You can change that too. You can change the day that it starts on. But what I’m not sure, I changed it to the way that I like it, do you have to see that as well or can you change it to the way you like it as well? I’m not sure. Maybe we can experiment with that one. Darren: Yeah, we might have to try that. Overall though, they’re fairly minor things like probably little glitches, it may also be that we’ve got a fairly large archive of 8,000 posts in the backend of our site. It might be churning through a bit of extra to get through it all.                     It seems like a very powerful tool and as you said before, we’re discovering new things all the time. That’s probably because they’re adding in new features but also there’s a lot to dig into there. One of my questions for you is, is there much of a learning curve? And potentially, is it going to suit certain types of people more than others personality wise? I’m asking that with an agenda. Laney: It was actually Stacey who was editing at the time. She had used it personally for her own blog. We were looking at it and I’m like, “This is great. I love it.” We were just such little nerds looking at it together getting excited about the pretty colors and everything. But even then, I would still find it quite overwhelming to look at. When you’ve got a whole bunch of social messages scheduled and there’s different colors and you’re not intuitively understanding what the different colors mean, it can be really overwhelming.                     One thing that CoSchedule does allow you to do is to filter what you’re looking at. If you just want to look at blog posts, you can do that or if you just want to look at Twitter messages, you can do that as well. It can adjust quite well to those  different personality types. All the pretty colors, sometimes it was just a bit much for me. It took me I guess a good few weeks to start to understand what I was looking at and how it worked. During that time, CoSchedule bought in a few little cool things. If you hovered on the blog post that you were looking at, it animated and highlighted the social post that are associated with it and that made it for me a lot easier to see what was going on as well. There’s little things like that. I know that you’ve probably been a little bit on that overwhelm camp when you go on to have a look at that as well, which is why I’ve pointed out the filtering things to you before as well so you can sort of just shut down the things that you don’t want to see so you can get the information out that you do need. In terms of learning, it’s all fairly intuitive. It’s not that hard to learn and it is pretty customizable to your own preferences as well. Darren: I am not a structured person and that won’t be a surprise to anyone listening to this who’s listened to more than a couple of episodes. As a result of that, it does feel a bit spreadsheet-y and a bit organized for me but it’s what I need. If I didn’t have the structures in my life, I don’t think I’d get much done. This is the type of thing that I’ve had to force myself into. Every week, I’m learning a new tool and I’m learning a new feature. I’m learning how to shut down things which is really useful. I guess I would like it almost that if I could log into it and only see from the start certain things, maybe I’ll just need to learn how to set it up a little better.                     It can be a bit overwhelming but I think it’s well worth persisting with. I’m seeing the power in it more and more. Laney: For sure. I think it is friendlier than a spreadsheet and that if you go into a blog post, we can have the conversation on the sidebar or I can have notes for you, or a set of tasks assigned to you with due dates. Darren: Which I then ignore. Laney: Yes, you’re very good at that. It does allow you to have more of a collaborative approach at content than just a Spreadsheet. For that, I think that’s really great. Again, if you’re working with teams, but even if you’re just working on your own, there are so many things that you need to remember. I think it’s great to have a set list of tasks even if it’s something as simple as when I create the blog post, I will check the headline, do this, do that. Don’t forget to select the category. Don’t forget to set the featured image. All those little things that you’ve just thought. It’s so satisfying to tick those little boxes off as you go, if you’re that kind of personality type. It makes you feel productive and in control and you are being productive because you’re actually creating content and there are lots of things in there that supports you to do that. I think as you become more consistent with it, it helps you to be consistent and I guess more prolific. Darren: I think it’s also about habits as well. This is one of the things I realized when I started the podcast and I was setting it all up myself. I needed a system. I needed a pattern to follow to be able to get those podcasts, those 31 podcast up in 31 days. I created a little to-do list and I was able to check it off every podcast. After 15 or so podcasts, I didn’t need the to-do list anymore. If you’re trying to get into the habit of social sharing, of checking your headlines, of optimizing your post in different ways, I think CoSchedule could be really useful in that regard as well.                     Let’s talk a little bit about how much this amazing system costs. It’s not a free tool although there is a 14 day trial so you can certainly test it out for free. Laney: That’s right. When you go onto the site and look at the pricing plans, it says it starts at $30 a month. That’s for a marketing calendar or like a blogging or solopreneur calendar but there is actually a solo standard package which is one step back which is $15 per month or $19 if it’s month by month. We’re talking in US dollars here. It’s available for one user, you can have up to five social profiles on it. You get access to the calendar and social scheduling. There are restrictions on the integration so you can’t integrate with Google Analytics, or with Google Drive, or Evernote for example, but you can still create your content in there. You can still schedule it. You won’t have custom templates for social sharing or task management. It’s a much more slimmed down version of what we’ve been talking about today. But definitely a great place to start if you want to go further than the 14 day trial. Otherwise, you’re starting at $30 a month or $39 month to month. That’s going to give you, again, still, you’ve got your one website with the calendar, your 10 social profiles, and you’ll be able to do most of the things that we talked about today other than customized workflows for tasks and things like that with the team because that’s not a team plan as such. We’re on the next. It’s the team marketing which is $60 a month or $79 month to month. Darren: I think starting out on that standard plan would give you a lot of the features and in some ways, it would be a good place to start because you’ve got less things you can do which means you’re probably going to be a little less overwhelmed by it as well. Laney: With those standard and solo marketing plans, they don’t include ReQueue which we talked about so you can actually add that on. That’s $30 a month if you’re solo and $60 if you’re a team. That is an add on. If you go to the pro levels, it’s included. Darren: I guess the big question that a lot of our listeners are thinking is is it worth it? Is it going to pay for itself? This is one of the things I always ask myself when I’m looking at a tool like this. How am I going to make that money back in some way? Do you think it is going to be worthwhile? It’s probably going to change from person to person but has it been for us? Laney: In terms of saving time, absolutely. Just in time saved where I can then use that time doing something else, that’s creating value for the company for sure. It really helps you to streamline your efforts. It’s like an opportunity cost, really. It’s that saved up time. Use it somewhere else to be valuable.                     I guess as well, it’s ensuring that the time that you do put into creating content is maximized like marketing it to its full potential. One of the things that we’re definitely looking at, so when I do that weekly schedule on Facebook, one of the types of content that I’m making sure that we originally had on that schedule is optimized content. Evergreen content that we know will drive revenue for us in some way, whether it’s promoting a product or promoting an affiliate offer for example. Just having that on a bit of a sit and forget type of thing that you just know that it’s just passively going to be working away for you definitely allows you to have that return on that investment on that tool. It isn’t a huge outlay each month. One of the things you can do is become an affiliate for CoSchedule. It’s not a monetary reward but you do earn credits as discounts towards it. You can essentially end up using it for free. Darren: It’s probably worth disclosing that we use an affiliate link for CoSchedule when we mentioned it on the blog but we’ve already paid for it so we maxed out, we’ve referred 10 people so we get it now for free by having referred those 10 people. That’s one way to cut down the cost if you do have an audience that might be interested in it.                     I think for me, if I was a new blogger just starting out, if I already had tools for a library of re sharing evergreen content, if I already had a system in place for sharing content, if I already was using spreadsheets for an editorial calendar, I guess I could probably say maybe it’s not worth it because I’m spending the money on some of those other tools where I’ve already got systems in place. The only reason I would switch to this if I had all those things in place is to have them all in the one space. That certainly is going to save me some time. That’s where I’d be headed. But if I was a blogger starting out who didn’t have all those tools in place, but wanted to step things up and wanted to get some systems and some automation in what I was doing, then this would be a tool that I would definitely be doing the free trial of. If not, going a step further. Laney: Agree, 100%. Even if you are already using other paid tools and different systems, and things like that, that is worth doing the math and figuring out, “Well hang on a minute, I’m paying this here and that there, this over here, I could be doing this in one place and it would cost this much and just comparing those sums as well.” Darren: I think even comparing the cost of CoSchedule for us if we were paying for it as a new user, we would be able to cut out a couple of the other services and probably be paying less. In terms of the support and how they’re upgrading, what they’re doing, they’ve been fairly responsive with us I think. Laney: For sure. Their support is always responsive and friendly. They’ve got a good ticketing system through email. You can contact them directly through the app on your desktop and it all goes into email so there’s a record of your conversations with them. They’ve always been friendly and helpful and there hasn’t really been anything that they haven’t helped me figure out. It’s usually just me not knowing what to do. How do I find this tag? How do I integrate this?                     For example, when we just moved the podcast over to the same install as the blog, I was really excited about that because I wanted to see all the podcast in the same calendar as the blog, live and real time. They didn’t show up and I’m like, “Oh, why is it not showing up?” And it is just a process that I had to go through to enable things. Click this. Do that. There we have it. Darren: It is working beautifully. Alright, I think we’ve covered enough of there. We will link in the show notes to CoSchedule. I guess if there are any other questions that listeners have, they can chat to you in the Facebook group. You’re very active in our ProBlogger community Facebook group. If you’ve got any other feedback or other suggestions of other tools that do this type of stuff, we’re all ears on that as well.                     Thanks, Laney. I appreciate it. Laney: You’re welcome, Darren. Darren: I hope you enjoyed that particular interview and check out CoSchedule. As I said, we do link to it in today’s show notes at problogger.com/podcast/195, or you can just Google CoSchedule, or got to coschedule.com where you’ll find it as well. We do link to that PDF in the show notes as well on some of those keywords that you can use to increase the effectiveness of your headlines. We’ll link to that in the show notes as well.                     Lastly, head over to our Facebook group at problogger.com/group where we do link to all of our new podcasts so it’s a great way to subscribe to the podcast but also we share new posts on ProBlogger and there’s so much discussion going on in there. It’s actually getting so active now that every morning, I get up and spend a good half an hour reading through what has been discussed while I’ve been asleep. There’s some really good stuff happening in that group. Again, that’s at problogger.com/group. I really do appreciate everyone who’s been active in there.                     Lastly, if you’ve got a moment and you’re listening on iTunes or another podcast network like Stitcher, please leave us a review. It does help us a lot. It gives me a lot of energy to read those reviews but it also helps us to be found by more people. I appreciate those reviews that are being left.                     Thanks for listening today. Be in touch with you in the next week with episode 196. If you got any ideas about how we should celebrate our 200th episode, let us know as well over on the show notes or in the group too. 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 below.

5 Blogger SEO Tools In today’s episode, I’ve got Jim Stewart from StewArtMedia back on the show to talk about SEO tools to help you to rank your blog higher. I had Jim on the show back in episode 94 to talk about the biggest mistakes bloggers make with SEO and since that time have had a lot of questions in the Facebook group about what tools to use in SEO. So in this episode we talk a little about the most commonly advised tool – the Yoast plugin, as well as two great browser extensions that are useful in SEO. We also talk about Google’s Search console and how it’s really an essential thing all bloggers should be using. We then talk about the paid tool that Jim recommends to help you find broken links, identify duplicate content, build sitemaps and much more. In passing we talk about an issue that faces many bloggers – what to do if you’ve got multiple posts on the one topic competing with each other in Google! Lastly we touch on Google’s most recent updates and how they are impacting bloggers. You’ll want to listen to this part especially if you do affiliate marketing! Resources on 5 SEO Tools for Bloggers Yoast SERP Trends Stylish Browser Extension User Styles maker of Stylish Google Search Console Screaming Frog Jim’s Site Jim’s Course Jim’s Facebook Group ProBlogger Facebook Group Listen to our previous interview with Jim on the 5 Mistakes bloggers make with SEO and what to do about them Link to the article Jim mentioned on setting up the Stylish extension Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view  Darren: Hi there, my name is Darren Rowse. I’m the blogger behind problogger.com. A blog, podcast, event, job board and a series of ebooks, all designed to help you to grow a blog, a profitable blog. You can learn more about ProBlogger at problogger.com.                     In today’s episode, I’ve got Jim Stewart from Stew Art Media back on the show to talk about search engine optimization tools to help you to rank higher in Google. I had Jim on the show back in Episode 94 to talk about blogging mistakes or mistakes bloggers make from an SEO perspective. Since that time, we’ve had a lot of questions in our Facebook group and via email about tools to use in SEO and that’s what today’s show is about.                     We talked about five different tools that you can use in your blogging to help you to rank higher in Google, particularly. We talk about Yoast, the most common tool that gets mentioned. A little bit about how to set that up and what to particularly pay attention to. We talk about two browser extensions, free browser extensions that are both useful in SEO tools that Jim uses every day in his own SEO. We also talked about Google Search Console and how essential it is for bloggers. I know it can be quite overwhelming, Google Search Console, but it is so important to have it set up and to be monitoring that. Then, we talked a little bit about a paid tool that Jim recommends to help you find broken links, identify duplicate content to build sitemaps, and a lot more.                     Towards the end of the conversation, we talked a little bit about a really common issue that I find a lot of bloggers are facing. That is when you’ve been blogging for a while and you have posts, multiple posts that are all trying rank for the same search term. Jim gives us some ideas on what we can do there to help one of those to get a higher ranking.                     Lastly, we talked a little bit about Google’s most recent updates and how they’re impacting bloggers. If you are an affiliate marketer, if you’re doing any kind of affiliate marketing, you want to listen to that last part of the interview as well.                     It’s not a long show today. You can find it over on iTunes as well, if you wanted to go for a walk and listen to it. You can also find the show notes over at problogger.com/podcast/194.                     Lastly, join our Facebook group because I do regularly update in there all our new episodes and blog post over on the blog. A couple of new posts a week and we’re having some great discussions in there at the moment. You can find the Facebook group at problogger.com/group. Okay, let’s get into today’s show. Hey Jim, welcome back to the ProBlogger podcast. Jim: Hey Darren, thanks for having me. Darren: Yeah. It’s always good to chat. It’s been about 90 episodes since we had you on. He was on at Episode 94. We did 5 Mistakes Bloggers Make with SEO. A very popular episode according to my stats so I thought it was time to get you back on and to talk about tools. Every time I ask people in our Facebook group what they want to learn about, search engine optimization come up and what tools should we be using because there’s so many tools being sold and available on SEO. I thought it would be good to come back to that topic. Is that cool? Jim: Yeah, very cool. Darren: The number one advice that everyone always gives when it comes to SEO tools is install Yoast, the plugin for WordPress. Jim: Yeah, exactly. Darren: I thought maybe if we start there and you can tell us a little bit about, for those who don’t know about it, what it is, also, what do you then do with it? Do you just install it and then it just looks after itself? What do we need to do once we’ve installed it? Jim: Any of these SEO tools, they’re not going to make you rank number one. What they’ll do though is help you get you site in order, basically. Yoast is probably the most used in that category.                     Originally, it was only available for WordPress. I think there’s been a Drupal version as well. Basically what it does, there’s two sides to Yoast. There’s what I call the site configuration side and then there’s a post level side.                     The post level side is probably the part of Yoast that most people are familiar with. It gives you some guidelines on how many, whether these pages optimize for a particular keyword and has these little lights and codes to guide you into writing a post that’s optimized.                     We don’t use that side of it. We don’t use that post level side of it. It’s good when you want to get started. It helps you understand some of the concepts behind getting a page ranked. The main reason that we use Yoast is to stop Google crawling things we don’t want it to. These can be things like archives or they might be tag pages. A lot of bloggers will use tags so that people can easily find posts with a keyword that posts are focused on. That sounds great, but what happens a lot of the time is that people will tag a post. There might only be one post that has that tag. Let’s just say you might have a tag called teddy bears and you have one post with that tag. That tag page is basically then just duplicating the post that you tagged so you’ve got two versions of your post. You’re showing them both to Google and that’s duplication. The problem with that is that Google doesn’t know which one to rank and it makes it hard and can be confusing for the user. We use Yoast to get rid of a lot of those things. It easily allows you to edit things like no index tags to pages that you don’t want indexed. It allows you to easily set up Google sitemaps and Bing sitemaps. They’re really important to help the search engines find the content on the site. There are other plugins that you can get to do sitemaps and things but Yoast is really nice because it allows so much flexibility over that side of things. Darren: Excellent. There are a few things you need to I guess tweak. Once you’ve got it installed, where would you suggest people look for those? Jim: One of the big things that people should do is make sure that they’re not allowing Google assign their titles and methods. You got to make sure that you’re not letting Google crawl things like attachment pages where you might have attached a piece of media to a page and then there’s another page created just with that image on it. Yoast allows you to switch that off so Google can’t crawl that because it’s just a page with an image on it, which is no value to anyone.                     Make a decision about your tag pages in the text on a meet area. I would usually, for a WordPress site, not let Google index archives, tag pages, and for some sites categories as well but that depends on how you’re using categories. For the most part, those areas, you can sight just another replication of another post or whatever. You don’t need them to crawl post. You don’t need Google to index them twice. Yeah, that’s where I’d start. Darren: We’ll link to some further reading on Yoast and setting it up in the show notes today as well. What other tools do you use? Let’s start with some free ones for bloggers because a lot of our readers are on a budget. They haven’t got a lot to spend on the SEO but any tools that you would suggest that they just have installed on their computer on their browser? Jim: Yes. There’s two that I use all the time. Here, it’s maybe a way of the different analysts like different tools. For me, I really like one called SERP Trends which does a few things. The thing that I use it for is that it numbers every result in the search results. We have our search results page in Google set to 100 results whereas Google usually just has 10. The reason that we do that is so we can find sites that are languishing or where are they today? Are they’re moving up? Are they moving down? This allows us to quickly say what number they are. Just a simple thing, it just numbers each result. It will tell you, “The last time you did this search, it’s gone up or down from when the last time we do the search.” You can also see sites that you’re competing with, how they have moved since the last time you’ve done this search as well. It’s a simple tool and it gives you one measure but it’s really easy to use and it’s just a plugin for Chrome. Darren: I think it’s also on Firefox. I was just looking at their page. It’s just an extension really for Firefox, for Chrome? Jim: Yes, it would be. Darren: I use this one and it is interesting. You do have to keep doing the search. Jim: Yes, exactly. Darren: Basically it’s looking at every search that you do and then keeping a record of where things are ranked at that point the last time you searched. Would you be doing that search every day? Do you have a list of things that you search for everyday just so that you can monitor with that? Jim: Yeah, definitely. For instance and sometimes several times a day, like if we’ve made changes during the day and re fetched it, told Google to go and refetch the page, we’ll go and have a look at it a few hours later. We use it all the time.                     The only caveat on that is that it’s important to remember, this is sometimes a difficult concept for people to understand, is that ranking doesn’t actually happen until the request is made. A page is not ranked in the search results until someone actually makes that request. There’s no predetermined rank because the reason for that is that the search result depends on who’s doing the search, where they’re doing the search, and when they’re doing the search.                     If for instance you’re in Melbourne today and then you go to New York tomorrow, you’re going to get different results on those different jurisdictions. Just keep that mind. Darren: Yeah. It’s not like you’re ranking number three for wedding photography in the world. It used to be a lot more global, didn’t it? Jim: Yeah, definitely. Darren: Back in the day, if you rank number one for something, you are pretty much ranking almost everywhere for it. Jim: Yeah. Darren: That was nice in some ways. Okay, so that’s our SERP Trends which we’ll link too in the show notes. You mentioned another one you use? Jim: Yeah, Stylish. Stylish is actually another plugin for Chrome. I think there’s probably one for Firefox as well. It is a design tool so it allows you to basically put a little bit of code to highlight different things on a page when you hit them. What we use it for is highlighting where heading tags are on a page because what happens with a lot of themes, this is the H1s, Hs2, and H3s. A lot of themes don’t use those as they were intended. They’re designed as the description suggest, they’re heading tags. Headings on posts and subheadings on posts, and those sorts of things. That’s how we like to see them used because that’s good document structure. What this tool does is it shows you on a page, if you can figure it in this matter. I’ve got a bit of code which I will give you. It’s on a blog post so you can share. Darren: Yup, we can link to that. Jim: It allows you to quickly easily see where a heading one tag is. Sometimes with some things, you’ll see that you have a heading one tag on every page and it might be a logo, which really isn’t a good use of a heading tag because there are no words in a logo. Obviously, it’s a picture so it doesn’t make sense to have it in a heading tag.                     It highlights things like that that you can see. Sometimes you’ll have the H5s all down one side on all your widgets, which really doesn’t help Google understand what the page is about because you’re using the heading tags inappropriately. We’ll tend to ignore them in that situation.                     If you can use a tool like this to see where your heading tags appear in your site around, you can start to use them in a way that helps Google understand what the pages are about. Darren: Just for those who don’t really understand heading tags from an SEO perspective, they are telling Google what your site is about and H1 carries more weight, I guess. Is that a simple way of saying it? Jim: Yeah. I try to explain it to people, think of it as a good document structure. If you’re writing a Word document, you might have a heading one at the start of the document. That’s a title. Darren: It’s the title. Jim: Yeah. You’ll have subheadings and they’ll be H2s. If you have a subheading of the H2, becomes a H3, it becomes indented. That’s the same thing for a web page or a blog post.                     Having that structure is good for the user to read but it also helps machines understand the importance of what’s following in the content. Darren: That’s a tool called Stylish. I just looked it up. userstyles.org is the people who made it. For me, Install Chrome came up but I suspect it will come up depending what browser you’re using with a different option there. Again, we’ll link that in show notes.                     You also touched on when we’re talking early at Google Search Console. This is something that I know a lot of bloggers look at and they become incredibly overwhelmed. I don’t really know what to do. Can you give us the beginners guide to the Google Search Console? What do we do with it and how important is it if we sign up for that? Jim: It’s incredibly important to sign up for that. It’s basically telling you everything that Google knows about your website. It’s telling you, “This is the only place you can get this data. You can’t get in Google Analytics. There’s nowhere else you can find this information.” It’s basically Google saying, “Here’s everything that we know about your site.”                     It does a lot of things. It will tell you speed, it will tell you errors on your sites, it will tell you what’s being indexed on your sites. It’s where you put your sitemaps after you’ve used Yoast to set them up. The most important thing I think bloggers should look at because it can be a real eye opener, especially if you’ve been blogging for awhile and you haven’t looked at this, go and look at this because it’s going to open up some massive opportunities for you and specifically the area you should look at is Search Analytics.                     Have a look in Search Analytics because that will tell you all the keywords that people have been typing in and that your site has appeared for. It not only tells you if someone has clicked, but it will tell you if your site has just appeared and they haven’t clicked.                     For instance, I was looking in a blogger site this morning. I’ve just found about another 30,000 or 40,000 potential clicks per month we can get to the site just by optimizing two phrases. They’re on bottom of page one for those phrases. What the Search Analytics shows is that there are so much opportunity because I can see how many impressions they’re up a month. They’re getting maybe 5% of that. It allows you to go and see those. You can see opportunities. You can also see which posts are driving that keyword traffic. You can pick a keyword and then go and have a look at all the pages that have appeared when someone has typed that in.                     For instance, as the case with the blogger this morning, you might look, let’s just say a chocolate truffle recipe. You might go and have a look at the word in Search Analytics and you find that there’s actually three or four pages all ranking for that phrase. Basically what that does, it dilutes the authority of one page. In the case of the blogger this morning, they had 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15. They had five pages ranking for this one phrase. That would be the only site that had multiple pages. What our job now is to funnel the authority to one page so Google ranks that one page higher. We’re not dispersing the authority across five pages. We wouldn’t have known to focus on that or even go and search for that had we not looked in Search Analytics, because it wasn’t a phrase, the one we’re looking at this morning, that the blogger said they really want to rank highly for that. It was only because we had a look at Search Analytics and we looked at the volume of search. You can use tools like AdWord Planner and those sorts of things as well to get keyword volume. When you see it in your own site ranking, you can go and then drill down and see which post it’s ranking for. You can see the position over time, over the last 90 days, it gives you a much better idea. That’s really in your face and you can sort this data any way you want. If you like data, you’ll love Search Analytics. Darren: Yeah. There’s so much to dig into there. It can be overwhelming. Do go and make sure you’ve got your site is set up and begin to dabble in there a little bit. It is probably the only place you ever get a message from Google? Jim: Sure, sure, sure. Darren: I’m looking in there now. I can see a few months ago, we got an alert that we were getting a lot of 404 errors. We wouldn’t have known that if Google hadn’t told us. If there is a problem with your site or if you’re being penalized, I think they’ll let you know in there. This is a good place to go digging if you do notice that you’re getting a lot less search traffic because the answer might actually be there waiting for you. Jim: Exactly. It’s a good idea to explore that because that data only lasts 90 days. It’s a 90 day window, basically. It’s a good idea to explore it so you’ve got a point of reference and then you can go back and look back at that data as well. Darren: Great. If our listeners have a little bit of money to spend on search engine optimization, what tool, if you had to choose one, would you recommend they go and have a look at and begin to use? Jim: Just spend money on, you’d have to say Screaming Frog. There is a free level of access. There’s a lot of rank tracking tools out there but they can be a little bit inconsistent in the data that they provide, because Google’s constantly changing the algorithm. There are a lot of paid tools. We’re just switching with one of our paid tools at the moment because the data on the one we’re currently using has become unreliable. That’s not uncommon. It’s a tough job building ranking tools. Don’t spend a lot on your ranking tools but you may have to spend some money and just keep double checking and cross checking the results. Darren: Okay. Jim: Screaming Frog is the big SEO tool though. There is a free level access that will only do I think 500 pages now. The yearly rate isn’t cheap, I think it’s ‎£100 sterling a year, something like that. Darren: ‎£149. Jim: It just went up. Okay. It’s not a cheap tool but it is the best one out there. If you are using it, one of the things that is invaluable, that you can just do quickly, you do a crawl of your site and then you just sort by status code. That will bring up any broken links that you’ve got on your site. You’ll see them quickly. You’ll see things like redirects that are happening in your site quickly. It is a very complex tool but it can give you some very, very simple valuable information as well. Darren: It’s basically a Crawler. I’m just going off of their page, you find broken links, auto redirects, discover duplicate content, review robots and directives, integrates it with your Google Analytics, and generate sites maps as well. It does do some things there that if you are wanting to take that SEO to the next level, it can really help, particularly that finding the broken links. It’s tough to find those. Jim: Yeah, yeah, I know. You gotta start somewhere. That’s probably the best tool for it. Also, just on that duplication, one of the things that we look at as well is finding duplicate titles throughout the sites. You might have written a post five years ago and then you got to write another post on the same topic again. You don’t realize but you’ve used just very, very similar page title. Darren: Interesting. Just on that question, you mentioned that example before of a blog at ranking for four or five different things. I suspect particularly niche blogs, a lot of bloggers would have that issue of having written almost the same article five times over ten years. Jim: Yup. Darren: How are you going to approach fixing that for that particular blogger? Is that a matter of deleting some of those post or linking from one to another? What’s the strategy that we should be looking at there? Jim: Initially, usually what we will do is, for instance, the one this morning was, it’s just about those recipes. There were five different recipes ranking for this one recipe because they had similar ingredients basically. What we would say in that situation is, “Well, there’s only one of those pages that really is accurate for the user for that particular search.” That’s what we take it back to. It’s like, “For this search, which page is best for the user?” Then, we would call that our target page for that phrase. Then, we would look at those other posts and say, “Okay, how can we put a little bit of information in here for the reader if they’re interested in our target page post? What do we want to say?” And then we’d link to that tagged page post.                     For instance, in the case of recipes, I would say, “Hey, if you’re interested in the savory version of this, then here’s the page.” We just put that at the end of the post or whatever. By that, it doesn’t only help the user, it gives Google a better idea of that this page over here is important as far as you’re concerned for the user. Darren: Sure. Jim: I don’t like to delay content unless it’s not getting any traffic. If it’s not getting any traffic, it doesn’t have any traffic, it’s up to you how to want to judge that. For me, if it doesn’t have any traffic for six months, I’m probably going to delete that post because I can’t see adding any value. I think that’s a better experience for the user as well because they’re not finding posts that are of no interest or whatever else. Darren: Sure. Jim: Usually we will use interlinking strategies. We will look at that tag, a page and say, “Can it be further optimized for this page? Are we just using descriptive file names, images, and those sorts of things? Is the name of the post exactly what the people are searching for? Is there a difference between singular and plural and all those sorts of things?” Typically, we try to make the tagged page more authoritative, and then link from the other pages to that page. Darren: Great. Work out what you want to rank for, what’s most useful, link to that from the other places and optimize that page the best that you can. Jim: Yup. Darren: Yeah, excellent. Last question, not really tools related but it came in our Facebook group a couple of times in the last week, it’s around Google’s latest updates. Can you give us a really quick update on what Google seemed to be doing there and how it might impact bloggers? Jim: Yeah. A lot of quality type stuff. When I talk quality, I mean is this a good experience or bad experience for a user? There was someone in your group that got hit back in March. I lost that 80% of the traffic overnight. It was an update that Google rolled up but didn’t announce, and was probably multiple updates. What we found was for that particular blog, was that they were overusing keywords in all the headings. Pretty much every post had a key phrase in every main heading and every subheading. Like what we were talking about before, they would have the keyword in the H1s, the H2s, the H3s. It was just overly optimized. He went through and he basically called one of the key phrases that he was using and all his rankings and traffics came back. That was globally too. The other one that we’ve seen is affiliate marketing. If you’re doing a lot of outbound affiliate links, just be careful that they’re not deceptive. The ones that we’ve seen drop have been once where you’re just reading this article and you click through to this thing, and you don’t know it’s an affiliate link. It’s not clear it’s an affiliate link. It looks like Google was punishing those sites. Because when they took away the affiliate links, their rankings came up. That isn’t to say you cannot have affiliate links but just don’t be deceptive that, “Hi, I’m independent.” Make it clear. There might be a relationship. Darren: Yup, which is legal anyway. Jim: Yeah, there you go. Darren: Yeah, very good. Thanks for that. Jim: Alright. Darren: You have your own Facebook group. As much as we keep promoting people to come and join, we actually quite often recommend yours as well. Do you want to tell us a little bit about that? Where people can find it? Jim: Yeah. It was after PB Event last year, I came away thinking, “Oh, I need to set up a group to go further in depth with SEO because we’ve got a short course at the moment as well.” The idea of the group is just throw your site in there, tell us what you’re doing, what problems you’ve got. We do live training in there as well. It’s all free. We do have paid products if you just want to cut the chase. Darren: Yup. Jim: Yeah, we’ll go and have a look at your site. There’s a team of 20 of us here in the office and if I can’t get to the site, someone else will. Darren: That’s great. That’s called the Bloggers SEO Support. I’ll link to that in our show notes as well. Our listeners can also find you at stewartmedia.com.au. Jim: Correct. Darren: You mentioned a course as well. What’s the course? Jim: Yeah. bloggersseo.com, you can head across to bloggersseo.com. That’s where we’ve got the training there. Basically it’s a system. It’s a step by step system where you can first of all work out what’s wrong with your site, and then have the tools to know how to fix it. Darren: Excellent. I will link to that in the show notes as well. I am not an affiliate so I’m just placing that so Google doesn’t penalize me. Jim: I should make you one. Darren: There we go. Well, maybe by the time this episode comes out. Thanks so much, Jim. I appreciate your time today. We’ll get you on in another 90 episodes. Jim: No worries. Thanks, Darren. Darren: Thanks man. Jim: Okay, bye. Darren: I hope you enjoyed listening to today’s show with Jim Stewart. You can find Jim and more of what he does over at stewartmedia.com.au and his Facebook group, Bloggers SEO Support. I’ll be linking to Jim’s site, his course, his Facebook group over on the show notes today. It’s at problogger.com/podcast/194. You can also find the other episode that I did with Jim over in Episode 94. It actually was 100 episodes exactly since I last had Jim on the show. You can find that one at problogger.com/podcast/94 or back in iTunes as well. Lastly, do check out our Facebook group at problogger.com/group. We’re almost at 5,000 members. We do a weekly live video into the group. We have some great discussions every week. We’re doing some challenges and do some monthly accountability stuff as well. If you are looking to connect to other bloggers, to learn from them, to share what you know about blogging, that’s important as well, do head over to the group, do a search on Facebook for ProBlogger community or hit the problogger.com/group. I look forward to chatting with you next week in Episode 195 where I’m pretty sure we’re going to be talking about a tool that we use at ProBlogger on creating an editorial calendar. That helps us to really work as a team together but also plan the content that we are creating. I’m going to have Leni on the show who works with me on the ProBlogger team to talk about this particular tool. Look forward to chatting with you next week on the ProBlogger podcast. How did you go with today’s episode? Enjoy this podcast? Sign up to our ProBloggerPLUS newsletter to get notified of all new tutorials and podcasts below.

Prolific Content Creation With Kelly Exeter In today’s episode, I want to explore the topic of prolific content creation by interviewing  one of my favorite online buddies – Kelly Exeter about her experience of creating content online. Many of you will be familiar with Kelly because she’s been a regular contributor on the ProBlogger Blog where she writes about blog design and creating content, she’s presented an episode of this podcast back in episode 119 where she talked about how to choose a WP theme and she’s presented numerous times at our ProBlogger events. I first came across Kelly when she was wearing her hat as a blog designer (she designed Vanessa’s blog) but since that time, I have watched her put on many other hats. Kelly blogs regularly and is a great writer. She co-hosts two podcasts, and edits the FlyingSolo website while still being able to write 3 books in the last 3 years. So today, I sat down with Kelly to explore a few aspects of her journey. We start off tackling a question I get asked a lot – how personal should you get on a blog? Kelly used to get very personal but lately has changed her approach. We then talk about Kelly’s writing process where she talks about another change she’s made – moving from being very structured to learning how to use ‘free writing’ techniques. My favorite quote from this section – let yourself write crappy words We touch on editorial calendars, what to do when you start second guessing yourself in the writing process and how she goes about researching her posts. Then we talk about her experience of writing books and how to go about writing those longer writing projects. We also talk about podcasts – why she started, what that workflow looks like and how it’s different and compliments blogging. And lastly we talk about how to be a prolific content creator. Kelly reflects upon some of her systems and routines and techniques for getting so much done. We talk burnout, personality types and how to become a more disciplined person. If you think that sounds like a lot of ground to cover – you’re right! I originally thought about splitting this episode into 3 shorter episodes as we do shift from one topic to another a little but the more we talked the more I realised how some central themes wove through all of the topics. So settle in – this episode is perfect for those of you who like me take have a long walk each day – or maybe a long commute. There’s a lot of value here! Further Resources on How to Become a Prolific Content Creator (an Interview with Kelly Exeter) Kelly Exeter So you want to write for Flying Solo Take your writing from good to great in 6 steps Kelly’s Posts on ProBlogger How to Decide on a WordPress Theme for Your Blog Facebook Group ProBlogger Event Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Darren: Hi there and welcome to episode 193 of the ProBlogger podcast. My name is Darren Rowse. I’m the blogger behind ProBlogger.com, a blog, podcast, event, job board, and a series of ebooks, all designed to help you to create an amazing blog, a profitable blog. You can learn more about ProBlogger at problogger.com.                     In today’s episode, I want to explore the topic of being a prolific content creator by interviewing one of my favourite online buddies, Kelly Exeter, about her experience of creating content online. Many of you will be familiar with Kelly because she’s been a regular writer on the ProBlogger blog for a year or two now where she writes on blog design and creating content. She’s also presented an episode of this podcast, you might remember back in episode 119, I let her take over the show for the day. She talked about how to choose WordPress theme that is going to be effective for you. She’s also presented a number of times at our Australian ProBlogger events. Many of you will know Kelly and you’ll know that she has different hats that she wears now. I first came across Kelly when she was wearing her hat as a blog designer. She was designing quite a few Australian bloggers, quite well known bloggers. She actually designed Vanessa’s blog as well. We love to design so much. But since that time, I’ve watched her put on many other hats. I really do mean many other hats. She is a blogger. She regularly blogs on her own blog at kellyexeter.com.au. She also guests posts on quite a few blogs including ProBlogger. She co hosts two podcasts. She’s been editing the Flying Solo website and over the last three years, she’s managed to write three books as well. She is prolific. She is creating a lot of content in different mediums. Today, I sat down with Kelly to explore this journey that she’s been on. We started off tackling the question that I get asked a lot. How personal should you get on a blog? I wanted to ask Kelly on this, this question because she’s someone who has changed to attack on that. She was very personal when she first started out. She talked a lot about quite personal things but in recent times, she’s changed her approach. We unpacked that a little bit. We then talked about her writing process where she talks about another change that she’s made. She’s actually changed her approach from being a very structured writer, having outlines to using free writing. She talks a little bit about that technique and how she does that. We’ve got some further reading in the show notes on that as well. My favourite quote from that particular section was, “Let yourself write crappy words.” I love that part of this particular interview. It really is something that I learned a lot from and I was quite challenged on. We talked about editorial calendars. We talked about what to do when you start second guessing yourself in the writing process and researching posts as well. We talked about then her experience of writing the longer form content like the three books that she’s written and how her approach again, has changed in that. We then talked about podcasting, why she started, how that work flow works for her, and how podcast and blogs are different from one another. Lastly, we talked about the unifying theme, I think, of this podcast. That is prolific content creation. Kelly reflects upon some of the systems, routines, and techniques for getting so much done because she does get a lot done. All of that that I’ve talked about plus she’s a runner, she’s a mom, she s a reader, and she does get a lot done as well. She’s very disciplined or at least comes across that way. We talked a little bit about how to become more disciplined. We cover a lot of ground over the next hour. If you think that sounds like a lot, you are right. I originally did consider splitting this episode into some shorter episodes but I think there’s this unifying theme, being a prolific content creator. I think together, it comes across. You’ll see some themes coming up again and again. Settle in, this episode does take a little while. You may actually want to pause halfway and continue it or if you’re someone like me who takes long walks, this would be perfect for you. There is so much value here. I actually got a lot out of it, myself and have already changed a couple of things in my own writing process. By the way, Kelly is one of the speakers at this year’s Australian ProBlogger event. She’ll be talking about content creation and she always gives a lot of value. If you want to learn more about that event, head over to problogger.com/events. Today’s show notes are at problogger.com/podcast/193 where there is some links to some further reading that Kelly mentions along the way as well as some other stuff that Kelly has written that you might find useful. Lastly, join the Facebook group, problogger.com/group. We’re seeing a lot of activity in there. I’m loving that group at the moment. I really do look forward to connecting with you there. All of that is linked on the show notes. I’m going to get into this interview now. Settle in, grab your favourite beverage or get out on a walk and enjoy this chat I had with Kelly Exeter. Hi Kelly, how are you? Kelly: Hey Darren, very good, thank you. Darren: Nice to see your football team on the weekend. Kelly: I know and yours as well. It’s funny, when I went into work yesterday morning I was like, “Everybody’s team won.” How unusual is that with a Dockers’ supporter and a Carleton’s supporter in the office. Darren: Very good. No one here is wanting to hear us talk about football so maybe we can get on to talk about blogging. A few of our audience are familiar with you because you’ve been on the podcast previously but I just wondered if you can give us the two minute version of how you got into blogging, why you started, and what that first blog is about. Kelly: The reason was I have a graphic in web design business. It must be seven years ago now, I just had a meeting with my staff to say, “Look guys, I think it would be really good if you guys each started a blog because we’re building sites in WordPress and it would be really good if you were across WordPress, etc.” I was already across WordPress doing stuff for other people but I didn’t have anything of my own at the time.                     At that time in my life, I was totally overwhelmed and have way too much going on. I didn’t have time to be starting a blog. Of course, I went home that night and I thought to myself, “I told all of my staff to start a blog, maybe I should start one too.” Because of course, that’s what you do when you have no time. Being me, right there and then, I created the blog because I could. It was called I Love Pretty Things.                     I saw this as an opportunity because I do literally love pretty things but I don’t like stuff in my house. I love going out art markets and things like that and looking at all the beautiful things but I don’t like buying them so I was like, “Oh, this blog will give me the excuse to go to all these art markets and write about these things even if I don’t buy them.” I remember my very, very, first post was about MOR products and how beautiful they are because they got this beautiful packaging. That was my first blog, I love Pretty Things. I’d love to know how many people remember that one. Darren: I didn’t even know about that one. I start of as a style blogger. Kelly: It was funny it got attraction really, really quickly. I actually didn’t even know that there were other people blogging at that time. I just thought it was something people did for business. I thought I was the only one doing it for fun. It was probably a few months later that I stumble all the Aussie bloggers on Twitter. Surely, after that, I think that was when you announced your second ProBlogger in Melbourne. I was like, “Oh yeah. I’ll go into that.” I still don’t even really know why I went along because I was so new to it but I’m so glad I did. That’s where it all started. Darren: Where did it progress from there for you? Kelly: By the time I got to ProBlogger in Melbourne, I started that first I Love Pretty Things blog maybe four months, by the time I got to Melbourne, I had four blogs. I have my own Kelly Exeter blog. I had a blog for our business which was Swish design. And then I had also started a blog called Small Business Blog. In my head, I was going to build the funnelling on all these blogs and create products for the creators. Fast forward to the passive income dream of lying on the beach and making lots of money without doing anything, that was the goal. Darren: That was the goal. Kelly: That’s where I ended up. Darren: As I was preparing for this episode, there’s so much we could talk about. We could talk about, I think even in your email footer, it says you’re a writer, designer, and an editor. Where do we even start here? One of the things I do want to focus on this personal blogging because that’s certainly been a part of your journey, writing about what’s going on in your life and what’s going on for you. I’ve got this question from Sally. She said, “I’m wondering how much of my personal life I should include in my blog?” I see bloggers sharing every intimate detail of their lives. Some blogger do that while others don’t even use their real name. Perhaps the answer to this is it depends but do you have any thoughts on how personal to get in your blog? That can mean from selling in the Facebook group. Interested to hear your perspective on that. Kelly: Sally is right in saying the answer is probably it depends. I guess what it depends on is why you’re blogging. To say why you’re blogging when you first start blogging will probably evolve to something else. You can only really address that question in the moment.                     Some people are blogging to position themselves as an authority in their field. They want to maintain some distance between themselves and their readers. Those people put a lot less of themselves into their blog. Some people will blog about products. Remember when you use to blog about printers. I know that you put a lot of yourself into the printer post. You can do that because you’re blogging about products.                     I just think for the vast majority of us blogging the power of it comes from the connection that we get. It’s either trying to connect with like minded people so parenting bloggers are trying to connect with other parents or a book blogger is trying to connect with people who either read books or write books. If you’re trying to connect with people, you do have to bring a bit of yourself to it.                     If you’re trying to build a personal brand, then you have to bring a lot of yourself to it. That’s what you’ve done with ProBlogger. That’s what I’ve done with A Life Less Frantic. At the end of the day, the most powerful connections are coming from vulnerability but you, as a blogger gets to decide just how vulnerable you’re going to be. That line is hard to know where it is.                     What makes it even harder is the fact that every single blog will tell you that it’s the post where they were like, “I don’t know. Should I publish this?” They press publish and they ran from the room. They come back two hours later and bang, it’s like their most popular post ever. They hesitated to press publish because there was a lot of vulnerability in there. It’s difficult because the most vulnerable posts are the ones that get the best reaction and the best resonance.                     At the end of the day, you just have to decide what you’re comfortable sharing and what you’re not. Sometimes, you’ll overstep them up but the good thing is you can always delete it. You’ll know for next time that that’s where your mark is. The mark will shift as well. I know a lot of people who blogged a lot about their kids when their kids were very young. Now, they don’t mention their kids at all because the kids are a bit older. Sometimes, they wish they hadn’t blogged so much about their kids when they were younger because that stuff stays forever. It’s hard to know where the line is but I think the short story is you need to be vulnerable if you’re going to connect with people and you need to share your hopes, fears, and dreams but you have a lot of hopes, fears, and dreams so share the ones you’re comfortable sharing. Over time, you’ll get a bit braver about what you shared but you’ll also develop a bit more of a fun to balance about knowing what you don’t want to share. Darren: Yeah. I think it really depends on the topic as well and what part of you, you share. I know I share quite regularly on ProBlogger about my fears and a lot of those fears have to do with blogging but I’ve got a whole heap of other fears that I don’t share on the podcast or on the blog. I choose what part of myself to reveal. Kelly: That’s right. Darren: You sort of talked there about changing your approach. Maybe changing from less personal and that’s something that you late last year, you had a post called Time For Me To Stop Writing About My Life. Kelly: It’s a bit dramatic, wasn’t it? Darren: It is. At the time, I remember thinking, “Oh wow, what’s going on here? Is this something life causes?” And then I read the post and it wasn’t quite that. You did talk in that post about how despite being a really quiet and private person, you’ve used your blog for many years to share very openly about your life and dealing with stress, anxiety, depression, overwhelm, and lots more. But in that post, you’ve talked about how you’ve decided to stop mining my life a blog further which I think a lot of bloggers can probably relate to or at least their husbands and wives could. I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about that decision. Let’s start with why did you blog in such an open, revealing, personal way for the first six or so years and then why the change? Kelly: I think when I first started my personal blog, not the I Love Pretty Things blog but my personal blog, I was quite lost. I was stressed and overwhelmed. I was fighting depression. I was really, really unhappy in life. I was on a journey out of that. I had started the journey out of that. It already hit rock bottom. I was having therapy. I was doing the things to get out of that. I knew there were other people on that same journey and I knew that they would benefit from moving along the path with me or moving along with me just slightly ahead of them. That’s I made the decision.                     As you said, on ProBlogger, you share your fears about blogging. I made the decision in that moment to go right this more aspect of my life, this big thing. I’m fighting the overwhelm, the anxiety, the depression, and the stress that I’m going to share about that specific part of it. A lot of people ask me, especially a lot of my close friends I quite bemused at how open I am on my blog given I’m such a quiet and very private person in real life. I think the reason for that; there are two things at play. The first one is I’m pathologically shy in real life which a lot of people don’t believe because I’ve developed a lot of management techniques but not presenting in that way. The fact is that shyness does get in the way of connecting with people. For people who don’t understand shyness, it’s a social anxiety that manifest quite differently for different people. For me, it means if I don’t know you really, really well, my assumptions is you don’t really want to talk to me and if you are talking to me, I need to be adding value to your life while you’re talking to me. I think you can imagine that kind of gets in the way of good, meaningful conversations and being in the moment. When I write in my blog, I’m released from that self perceived obligation. I’m released from it because I’m not talking directly to someone’s face and if they even so much as glance over my shoulder, I assume that they don’t want to be talking to me and they’d rather be talking to the person behind me. If you’re reading my blog, I know that you want to be, that you’re making the choice to be there. The second thing that I guess frees me up to be quite personal is that even though when I’m writing, I do have the reader very clearly in mind. To me, they’re like this one, big, amorphous mass. I’m not picturing like individuals reading my words, I’m picturing this mass. I think if I pictured individuals reading my words, in fact, I know this because in the past, there is a period there where if there was a blogger I really, really admire, like I went through a really big Penelope Trunk phase, and I went through a Sarah Wilson phase, and Mia Freedman phase. I kind of imagine every single blog post I wrote in those various phases was written for those guys, like those individually, specifically. I was imagining them coming to my blog and reading. Anything I thought they would think was a bit lame, I edited it out. I can quite confidently say that those periods of my blogging were not my best work because I was writing for that very specific person. When I write for the big, amorphous mass of the shapeless blog, that’s when I’m quite free to be very personal, if that makes any sense. Darren: Yeah, that’s fascinating because I know some bloggers are very different today. They do write best when they’re writing for one person. They really tap into that person that they’re writing for and come across in a more personal way. I think I’m more like you on some levels particularly for my speaking. You’re not an introvert, you’re not shy. I’m like, “Oh my gosh, if you have a one on one conversation with me, I’d much prefer to speak to 1,000 people than one.” Kelly: Oh yeah. People are always fascinated by the fact like you, I love speaking but to me speaking is wonderful because you get to share your ideas. If the people there in the room, they’re generally engaged in what you’re saying and they choose to be there, whereas when you’re one on one with someone, like I said, my thought is always they would rather be talking to someone else and they’re talking to you, you better make it worth their while. Darren: I found with the talk, and with a blog post, and with the podcast, there’s no one interrupting me. I can present my full idea and I can know that I’m going to take my readers on a journey from A to B and not be asked a question. Those types of things freak me out whereas if I can design the flow of the interaction and be in control, maybe I’m a control freak. Kelly: I was going to say this is your control freak side coming out. I’ve never seen this side of you. Darren: Maybe, I’m not sure whether I am or not. I think we’ve got very similar personalities. I was reading one of your post on that and I think we’re very similar except you’re a thinker, I’m a feeler. Kelly: No, I’m a feeler. It’s just you’re a P and I’m a J. I think that’s where we’re different. Darren: You’re a bit more organized than me. We’ve established that you openly shared on your blog and that was why but why did you decide to stop doing that or change the direction at least? Kelly: There was a period of about 18 months there where I just felt with my blog where I was like, “I’m just not connecting with people in the way that I want to and I cannot figure out why.” It took me 18 months that what happened was that my readers were further behind me in their journey than six or seven years ago.                     Six or seven years ago, people are at the same spot in their journey as me and we travelled it together. Most people evolved and outgrew me and then they left and then they were replaced with people who were at the start. So, with each successive year that I’ve blogged, I’ve gotten slightly further ahead of where my readers are actually at. Effectively, my problems weren’t their problems so there’s a disconnect there.                     I didn’t like to write about things once I’ve been through them, fully processed them, understand them, and understand the learnings that I’ve taken away from them. What I found was by the end of last year, I had literally mines in my life for every last bit of learning, everything else that I was in the process of learning. Some people don’t mind sharing in the moment like, “This is my problem right now and I haven’t processed yet.” You travel the journey with them and that’s very intimate. I don’t like doing that. I only like sharing things once I’ve fully processed it and come out the other side. That was what I’ve gotten to.                     My readers were much further behind me than I was. I just didn’t have fully processed learnings to share anymore. That’s why I decided it was time to stop going to my life because every blog post was like, “Here’s something I experienced.” I’d start with the story of something I experienced and then I would go from there about here’s what I learned. I’d kind of run out of the stories. Darren: What’s the change look like in reality? What’s the new style of content? Kelly: I guess where do I find my ideas or what do I write about now. It took me a while, probably took a good four or five months where I was experimenting and trying new things. What I now discovered is I’m noticing more. I notice what people are reacting to or responding to more. If I have an answer for that thing, I’ll respond to it.                     Late last year, I noticed Carrie had posted something on Facebook about being a bit burnt out. There was this massive string of people who responded and said, “I don’t know what it is about right now but this is why I’m burnt out. I just don’t know what’s going on.” I knew the answer. The answer was it was the end of the year and we all have decision fatigue basically towards the end of the year.                     I wrote a blog post to address that. That blog post went off. It got shared quite a lot. More recently, I shared something on my Facebook page about decluttering in a study that someone had done that discovered that a really big problem for me to class families was that I was drowning in stuff and it was of course a lot of stress. That share of someone else’s article started a discussion on my page about people had taught about how they had declut it and had felt so much better.                     I started writing a blog post because I noticed that there was a lot of discussion around it. I thought, “I know a lot about decluttering. It’s my favourite hobby.” I started writing a blog post about how to declutter. I actually realized, “Oh, hang in a minute. There’s a piece of the conversation missing here.” That’s the fact that there’s just no point decluttering if you’ll then re clutter your half and have to declutter it again in a year’s time. That’s bad from both the mental health point of view and the environment.                     I flipped the post in the middle of writing it to be more about, okay, you’ve decluttered which is great. Everyone’s into decluttering right now, thank you to the minimalist but now let’s talk about not re cluttering your house. That post has been shared 2,400 times which is like 5 times as much as any other post has ever been shared on my site. It’s interesting to me how the more I open my eyes, the more I pay attention to what people are talking about and what’s on their mind, if I had the answer for it, they’re the post that I’m really going off at the moment.                     They’ve got nothing to do with me. They’re not starting with a personal story. They’re not sharing my experiences but they’re sharing my learnings and my research. Darren: There’s an application, I guess, as a result of it. Kelly: All practicality. Darren: Verging more on how to practical type stuff. Kelly: I think that’s the thing I’m known for. Not just saying you should do this, you should do that, I’m known for the practical, here’s how you do this thing or here are little ways that you can make this thing happen in your life. Like actual things that you can do not just aspirational things you can do. Darren: That’s great. In some ways, the topic of your blog is similar but you’re presenting that topic in a different way. Kelly: Yeah, absolutely. Everything before was here’s something I experienced, here’s what I learned from it. If you learned something from this as well, that’s great. Now, it’s shifted to here’s a problem I’ve noticed you guys are having. Here’s my answer for it and here’s how to make that thing happen in your life. I understand what your life looks like so I’m not going to tell you to do things that are just not possible to do. Here are things I know that will actually work for you. Darren: That’s great. It sounds like readers are responding well. Kelly: Yeah, they really are. It does take awhile to get the balance right. Certainly, every blog post, I’m not hitting it out of the park but the ones that go well do seem to go really well at the moment. There seem to be a bit of a tipping point happening at the moment to me. Darren: That’s great. I’m sure that helps Sally in her thoughts as well. We might move on a little from personal blogging. Now, I want into tap some of your experiences as an editor. You’ve been working at Flying Solo. Many of our readers will remember Robert Garrish who I interviewed back in episode 191. You’ve been working on that site for a few years now.                     A lot of the questions that I got from reader’s Facebook group came about editing post and writing post sa maybe we can switch gears into that little expertise that you’ve got there. A question from Dan and/or Wendy, Dan and Wendy share an account on Facebook. They asked about researching posts. I’m noticing in that we’re just talking about that you said you want to do more post that will require some research. I wonder if you have many tips on how you approach writing about a topic that maybe you don’t have expertise on and that you do need to do some researching. Kelly: I approach not from the point of view of trying to become an expert, I approach it from the point of view of being an enthusiast. A lot of Carly, my Straight and Curly podcast co host, we share a lot of research in our podcast. we always say to people we’re not trying to present ourselves as experts but we are enthusiasts. It means that you only share research that’s interesting to you. There’s heaps of research out there. A lot of it is very dry. A lot of it, you could share it but you’re not going to engage the reader with it. With regards to that, I try not to approach it from presenting myself as an expert. I’m trying to be you, the reader. I am presenting you with research in a way that is interesting to you and also I guess actionable for you as well. There’s no point sharing that 20% of people on Facebook process ads in this way. If it’s something that you, the reader use, that’s a piece of research that has no interest for you. I’m not sure if that answers the question but that’s how I approached it. Darren: I love that. In some ways, that’s what I’ve always done with ProBlogger, particularly in the early days because I wasn’t an expert on making money for blogging because I was just learning how to do it but I was presenting what I found that I found interesting and being really clear that I wasn’t an expert. I think that’s important too. Kelly: I think you, as a writer, have to remember if it’s not interesting to you as writer, it’s not going to be interesting to the reader so don’t share stuff that you don’t find interesting just because it’s research and someone’s big at that thing. Darren: Another question from Dan and/or Wendy. Do you use standard templates or outlines for posts—I know Michael Hyatt had talked about how he writes almost like a template type way—or are you more free flowing in the way you write? Kelly: It’s kind of a bit both. My most basic tried formula for a post is to open with a story or anecdote that kind of introduces the idea that I’m trying to share and then follow up that introduction or that story with some really practical how to’s or practical takeaways in dot points or numbered points so that people connect with the story that hooks them in. And then the practical how to’s or the practical points, it means I’m not just telling them what to do, I’m showing them that they can actually do it. I find that to be a very, very strong formula for post.                     Actually, I’ve written something on Flying Solo that outlines that formula so I can give you the link for that. Darren: That will be great. We’ll link to that in the show notes. Kelly: With that said, I don’t approach writing of my post in that way anymore. In the past, I was quite structured. I try to outline post before I write them but these days, I free write all my post first. When I say free write, I’ve got the idea, I sit down, I put the timer on for 15 minutes, I start writing, and I don’t stop even if I have to write, “I don’t know what to write here.” That’s what I wrote.                     What I find that free writing does is it tests the idea. If the idea is no good, if I don’t have as much to say about it as I first thought, that comes out in the free writing stage and the idea gets dumped.                     If the idea is good, then the free writing stage tends to throw up something interesting that I might not have gotten through if I’d approach the writing of it in very, very structured way. After, I free write the post, I let it just sit for a day because then it marinates. It marinates in my head so like when I’m washing the dishes, I’m thinking about what I wrote. If I go for a run, I’m thinking about what I wrote. When I go back to it the next day, like a much better place to refine it into something that’s very coherent and connects well with the reader because it’s got a connect.                     I do tend to think I’m not actually that good of a writer but I’m a really, really good editor because I’m really willing to put the time in to refine the post and make it really connect. To me, free writing is about connecting fully with the idea, teasing it out, and then identifying exactly what you’re trying to communicate. Editing is about removing anything that does not take the reader where you want them to go. In short, whatever is left behind, it takes the reader on a really logical journey and to leave a really nice pay off. That’s kind of my process. Darren: That’s great. How much changes between the free write and the editors? It depends. Kelly: Quite often, it’s almost a complete rewrite from the free write today which I know would just freak out a lot of people because in the past, I remember Penelope Trunk saying she would write 4,000 words to get an 800 word blog post. I just want to die when I hear her say that but I’m not probably that extreme now but I would probably write 1,600 words to get an 800 word blog post. I think that’s just the difference between being good and being better than good, if I want to blow on my own trumpet, but certainly, I’m a very harsh critic of my own writing. The writing that I’m happiest with and love the most is the writing that comes from this process as opposed to the very structured process. Darren: Do you think the years of experience of using that structured process has helped you in the free writing process in some way? Was that something you had to go through to get to where you’re at now? I’m trying to put myself on the shoes of someone starting out. Is it good to start with an outlined type process, or is it better to start with a free writing as you just described or really, does it come down to personality? Kelly: I would say it’s better to start with the free writing theme. The free writing theme, most people resist it because it involves throwing away a lot of words. That’s very hard to do when you are a new writer. You think like, “If I have taken time and effort to write those words, then I should use them.” But the other thing that we all do, I’m a new writer, is we edit as we go. We’ll write a paragraph and then we’ll edit that paragraph and then we’ll write another paragraph and edit that paragraph.                     What that does is it makes the writing process much longer than it needs to be. It also means that by the time you’ve written a post that way, you don’t want to let any of it go because it’s been so hard to get those words out, editing as you go. What we have to remember is that writing and editing are completely discrete task in the completely different parts of your brain that do those thing well. If you allow yourself to free write, if you allow yourself to write crap words which a lot of new writers don’t want to allow themselves, a lot of new writers, they think that the best way is to sit down, tap out 800 amazing words and bang, their first draft is fantastic. The reality is the better the writer you are, the more crappy your first draft probably is. I just think as a new writer, you can train yourself to not edit as you go and allow yourself to write crappy words. Sooner rather than later, your writing will improve faster than if you start with a structured approach. Darren: That’s great. It reminds me a lot of how I prepare for a talk. I prepare for a talk, I free talk. I don’t know if that’s a thing or I just invested something but I just get up in my room and I start talking about the topic. Somewhere, as I’m talking I find these little snippets of, “That resonates with me even though I had never thought of it before”. I’m going to note that down. Those little phrase become the points that I then build up the talk around. Kelly: The thing is if something resonates with you, you’re excited about it because you’ve never spoken about it in that way before. If you’re excited about it, that comes out in your talk and is so much more powerful than just talking about something you’ve always spoken about. Darren: I can’t remember who said it but it was from the advertising industry, they talked about how they would brainstorm, as a group, ideas and the things that made the group laugh or gasp, they were the things that they would make note of because they got an emotional response from people. It was just a brainstorming session and then they come back to those things that seem to resonate and build and add around those things. Kelly: I think the key to any kind of brainstorming sessions is there are no dumb ideas because as soon as people get caught up thinking, “Everything I say has got to be good.” Then you never get to those really cool little things that really resonates so I think it’s important that people remember that. If you’re not willing to write crappy words, you’ll always be able to write good enough words but not great words. Darren: That’s correct. As you’re talking down, it leads me to Shelly’s question that she asked in the group. What do you do when you’ve got those doubts in your writing, when you start to second guess whether what you’re writing is any good or not? Is that signal that maybe it’s not good and you should throw it away or is that something you need to learn to push back those little voices? Kelly: You gotta learn to push back. My advice to Shelly is to press publish and leave it to your readers to tell you. The thing that’s very frustrating is the some of your very best writing will not resonate with your readers and some of the stuff that you think is a bit bleh, will. This is the very frustrating thing about blogging. You just never really know.                     It’s interesting I met Jeff Goins at a conference earlier this year. I really want this year to be the year that my writing goes the next level. Should I start just publishing one blog post a month but make that blog post completely killer? He said, “No.” He said, “Look, I’m a really big believer in publishing at least one a week, once a week because it forces you to show up. It removes the perfectionism and the hang-ups that will come if you are trying to publish a killer post once a month.” Interestingly of course, he’s proven to be very right because I published that post I mentioned earlier that got 2,400 shares, that’s not my best writing, that post. The idea was good and it resonated but it certainly wasn’t my best writing. If I was only publishing once a month, that post would never have made the cart. Now, it’s like the most shared on my site ever.         One, you have to get comfortable with the fact that your very best stuff will not resonate with people the way you think it will. Just press publish. If it bombs, who cares, if it goes well, enjoy the surprise. Darren: If it goes well, you found something that resonates so that you can then build your next thing on or write a book about or become known for. Kelly: I think it’s key to remember that people aren’t necessarily resonating with your writing. Lots of pretty ordinary writers technically out there but they have brilliant ideas and they’re able to talk about those ideas in a way that reaches people so people resonate with the ideas and not necessarily resonating with your writing. If there’s any freedom in the fort, take it. Darren: Interesting. Terry asks kind of similar question. Something like how do you get your ideas and information into a post without sounding like you’re being opinionated, or self centered, or it’s all about me? I guess there’s another little voice that sometimes we hear as we’re writing like, “This is going to make me come across like I’m just self centered.” How do you deal with that? Kelly: I guess that’s the one big thing I learned years ago from Penelope Trunk when I did a blogging course with her is that blog post is never about you. If you do feel like it’s about you, you probably shouldn’t publish it. I guess my first rule is I never place myself above the reader. Some people do that because that’s the brand they’re trying to build but for the most part, people don’t really like feeling like you as a writer are above them.                     A good way to not be coming across the self centered is to not subtly tell the reader I know more than you are, better than you. The second thing to remember is people do want your opinion. It’s why they’re reading your blog but they want to know where your opinion comes from. If you’re just talking at them and telling them what you think without giving any supporting reasons this thing happened to me or this thing to a friend and that’s why I think like this, then you’re robbing them of the chance to change their thinking, or learn something new, or appreciate these new thoughts that you’re bringing to an old topic. I guess rather than thinking about yourself and am I self centered, ask yourself what’s in here for the reader? If you approach all your blog post like you read it over at the end and you go, “What’s in here for the reader?” as long as there’s something in there for the reader, you’re okay. If there’s nothing in there for the reader, then you got to either rewrite the post or not publish it. Darren: Yeah. One of the questions I get asked a lot is about editorial calendars. How much to plan ahead and how to plan ahead? How do you come up with the ideas? Jason asked in the Facebook group the same question. Do you have any tools that you use or any techniques that you use? Particularly with a blog like Flying Solo which is a very much about a topic but there’s lots of different things that you could cover within that big topic of being a solo entrepreneur. There’s a lot you could write about there. How do you make sure you are not just going over the same things over and over and develop an editorial calendar that’s going to appeal to you readership? Kelly: The first thing I’d say is it doesn’t matter too much if you are going over the same topics as long as the writer is bringing something fresh to that topic. Usually, what the writer is bringing to that traffic that’s fresh is their own personal experience so I strongly, strongly encourage Flying Solo contributors to come at a topic that formula that outlined earlier which was here’s a problem that I had, here’s what I learned, here’s what you can take away from what I learned in a very, very practical way. That said, you don’t want to just be writing about the same things over and over again. I’ll go back to tools. The first tool that I use is Spreadsheet. I’m really low tech and I really resist changing some things. My husband is always trying to get me to dig in those because he loves all those tools and automation. I’m like, “You know what, I really love my Spreadsheet.” I know a lot of people use CoSchedule to plan out the editorial calendar. At Flying Solo, I go to Spreadsheet. It allows to get that high level view of what we’ve got coming up, what we’ve published, who’s up when? We build that a month in advance so I’m always a month in advance with content for Flying Solo and that’s because I just don’t want to be scrambling for content a week out from publication. We publish five to seven posts a week so I like to have those locked in a month out because what does it frees me up to do is then it frees me up to look at where there are holes and go to our contributors and go, “Guys, I’ve compiled the list if you’re struggling for topic ideas.” Because for the most part, they come to us and go, “I’ve written a post about this. Is it suitable for you guys?” Most of the time it is but sometimes it’s not and it breaks my heart a bit to not back an article I know someone put a bit of effort into so I compile ideas and thoughts. I read other publications. I take note of headlines that capture my attention and then I kind of, Flying Solo eyes the headline, then I drop it into this idea spreadsheet. In one way, I want the contributors to come to me with their own ideas because they bring fresh ideas that I wouldn’t have thought off but then on the other hand, I also give direction about like these are the things our readers are telling us that they want and I direct them in that way as well. You’re getting the best of both worlds as far as I’m concerned. That’s managing aside where there’s lots of contributors and you’re in charge of all the content. For my own site, I’ve never had an editorial schedule and I’m never ahead in writing for that because I use to try writing my post two to three weeks ahead of time. I think I’ve listened to Nicole Avery talk at a conference and I’ll be like, “I really need to do an editorial calendar. I need to plan out my strategy.” And then what I found was if I write a post two or three weeks in advance, by the time it published I wasn’t engaged with that idea anymore. It probably didn’t matter but it mattered to me because I wasn’t into the idea so what I do now, I have lots of ideas I have in Evernote. Every time I have a blog post idea, I put it into my Evernote. But generally speaking, as I mentioned before, I will notice something that people are talking about or resonating with like say, today and I will free write my post for Thursday today. I’ll edit it tomorrow, publish it Thursday. It just keeps things super, super fresh. Certainly, for my own blog, because I’m only publishing once a week, that works really well for me. It just depends what you’re publishing schedule is. Also, your topic and how personal your blog is that really dictates whether it’s nice to keep the content super fresh or whether you can plan well in advance. Darren: You certainly see on blog like ProBlogger and Digital Photography School, it’s much more like the Flying Solo experience. I’d say in Vanessa’s blog, she writes a day up to her head because she wants to be able to engage in the comments with energy because that was something she just wrote and she’s still excited about it and she doesn’t have to think back a month ago when she wrote the post to how she was feeling to re engage. Kelly: That’s exactly where I’m at with my process. I find it very hard to engage with the comments and the thoughts people are sharing if it’s something I wrote a  month ago. I’m like, “Yeah, I moved on from the idea now.” Darren: There’s nothing worse than that. Not even remembering the post you wrote because it was so long ago that you created it. One of the other things that I love about what you’ve done over the last few years is that you’ve been doing blogging and podcasting which we’ll touch on in a moment but also, you’re doing some bigger projects and you’re writing books. You’ve written three and I hear you’re thinking about the fourth or started writing the fourth. Is that right? Kelly: Yeah. The fourth is still thinking. I know what it is but I just haven’t been able to get to it. I’ll talk about that. Darren: One of the things I noticed is that you’ve got three books so far. One is called Your Best Year ever: 7 Simple Ways to Shift Your Thinking and Take Charge of Your Life. Another one is Practical Perfection: Smart Strategies for an Excellent Life. The third one is 20 Simple Shortcuts to Small Business Success. As I went over to Amazon to have a look at them all because they’re all Kindle and they’re real books as well. They’re all in different categories. You’ve got self help, religion and spirituality, and business and money.                     You’re covering some broad categories there. I’m wondering what’s the thinking behind that. How did you come up with the topics? Maybe your fourth one, I don’t know, is it building on one of those ideas or is it another category altogether? Kelly: This is me. I’m very organic in my approach to things. It’s funny because I can be very, very structured but when it comes to what I’m writing about, I do like to be very organic and I do like to respond to a need that I see or perceived. With Your Best Year Ever, that came about at the end of 2013 when it just seemed like everyone was just dying for the year to be over. Lots of people had a bad year that year.                     I had actually, in my mind, been writing this book for a year. Every time I went for a run, it was there. It just seemed at the end of 2013, there was a real big need for it. The book’s in my head was about simple mindset shifts that you can call on when it feels like life isn’t going your way. It seemed like there was a need for that book at that time. I really just put myself on the pressure to make it happen. I wrote that in a very short period of time which I think we’ll discuss in a sec.                     Practical Perfection, that came about because I wanted to write another book. I was like, “Okay, what’s a really common problem for my readers?” The common problem for my readers at that time was that the high standards they hold themselves to were getting in the way of them living their best lives. This is something that had been a problem for me in the past but I had figured out a way to get around it. Be able to set goals, go after big things, but still lead a simple family oriented life. That’s what Practical Perfection tackled. Managing those perfectionist tendencies we all have while still being able to lead a happier life.                     The business book, again, I’ve been wanting to write a business book for a while. I was the editor of a small business website. I’ve owned and run a small business for 10 years with my husband and I just felt like I had a lot to share in that regard. I guess I was thinking what book to write last year, let’s be honest. I was like, “Well, this is the one. It’s time to write that business book.” I knew what I wanted to write and it was 20 simple strategies that have helped me achieve business success. That one came out of that.                     I guess with all three books, they came from me listening to what people were saying their problems were and then putting together something to address those problems. Darren: Yeah, which is similar to what you’ve said with the blog posts, really. I get the sense it might be looking for those bigger themes in the things that you’re hearing again and again. That’s interesting. Are you taking the same approach with book four? Is that a need you see that you’re responding to or is that something more within you that you just have to say? Kelly: That one is responding to what you call a spark, noticing sparks. Last year, I had noticed there was, I think it was on Thought Catalog or something. There was this post about over thinking and it got it shared, I don’t know, 30,000 times or something stupid like that. I’m an over thinker, always have been, always will be. I’ve always seen it as a bit of a character flaw and then there are 30,000 people who shared this post and I was like, “Clearly, I’m not alone in that regard.”                     Carly and I on Straight and Curly, we did a podcast episode on over thinking. It’s funny because we finished recording that episode and we were like, “Can we publish that because we’re going to sound like freaks?” We published it anyway and that just got a huge response from our listeners. Our listeners are very engaged but their engagement on that particular episode was just next level.                     From people going, “Oh my gosh, I thought I was the only one who thought like this.” And then there was a third theme that, “Oh yes.” I put it out there that I was thinking that my third book, I was going to call it Over Thinker’s Anonymous. It was going to be about over thinking. I started a Facebook group for people who might be interested in those themes and following the journey of the book and then bam, within like the first week, there were 600 people in that group. I was like, “Okay, there’s definitely resonance here.” I guess it was kind of a stage journey. If I hadn’t seen those sparks and then if I had said, “This is what I’m thinking my next book will be. Here’s the Facebook group.” And like 20 people joined, then I would have gone, “Uhm, no spark.” There is something definitely there so now, I’m engaging with the people in the group and really try to get down to the bottom of what is the problem for you with regards to over thinking, what is it holding you back from life, what’s the cause of it, and then that’s what I’m going to address in the book. Darren: It strikes me that a group of over thinkers will really be useful in that process. You just have to ask a question and you get a lot of responses. Kelly: They’re very engaged and very helpful. They’ve been amazing to date, really helping me refine the core idea of the book. The other books were written in very, very compressed period of time and then I had no energy to launch them. At the end, where it’s this one, I really want to do this. I want to give it a bit more time and I want to launch it properly and do everything right with this one.                     I look at the first three. I was like textbooks, I learned a lot from writing them. I learned a lot about titles and how important the title is. I learned a lot about the essential idea has to be one that resonates. I learned a lot about launching, what works and what doesn’t. This fourth one, I’m hoping I can get a few things right. Darren: You touched on the writing process. I suspect you one, you’re giving it more tie by the sounds of things, the fourth one. What does that writing process look like? Is it different to what we talked about earlier with a blog post, free writing, refining, editing phase? Is that you approach a book as well? Kelly: With the books, definitely a lot less free writing. I definitely try to have a structure that I watch. That went really well for Your Best Year Ever and for 20 Simple Shortcuts Small Business Success. All three books have been written in very short periods of time so Your Best Year Ever was written in 12 days. Practical Perfection, the first draft is written in 30 days. I took a more of a free writing approach to Practical Perfection. The editing process was so harrowing and basically involved rewriting 2/3 of the book that I’m not sure I would take that free writing approach to a book again. With 20 Simple Shortcuts, I again returned to the whole thing of archive. 20 Simple Shortcuts, that’s effectively 20 blog posts. Okay the way that I’m going to write the first draft of the book is I’m going to write literally 20 blog posts. In May last year, I worked 20 blog posts to that topics that I wanted to cover for 20 Simple Shortcuts. That was effectively the first draft.         The reason I wrote all of those in such compressed periods of time is because I don’t have heaps of time on my hand and it seems to be the only way I can get a book written. Say for Your Best Year Ever, that was written, we had two weeks off at the end of the year, we shut our business and we took some time out. I wrote that book in the mornings on the 12 days that we had off. With Practical Perfection, I just locked off, November, a couple of years ago. Again, every single morning I wrote 1,000 words in the morning. And then 20 Simple Shortcuts, I wrote a blog past a day, everyday. That method’s great because it gets the book written but it does burn you out quite badly. You literally can’t write anything else while you’re doing those things. I couldn’t blog. I couldn’t guest post for anybody. I couldn’t go on Facebook which is probably not a bad thing. It’s very intense. It burns you out but it gets it done. The cross benefit is the okay, it burns you out but it’s a very, very short period of time. Everyone around me understand that Kelly is not at her best right now but it’s only for 20 days or something. Darren: It sounds like there were some tough patches in it. What do you do, what’s your approach when that writing process gets hard, when it’s not flowing? When you’re hearing the little voices, do you recommend getting away, having a break, do you push through? What’s your go to advice there? Kelly: I cry first. I definitely don’t recommend pushing through. Is you’re in your first draft and you’re free writing, then push through but if you’re into that editing phase where draft is very important, then for me, stretcher is the most important thing. Everything that I write, whether it’s a blog post or a book, I want to take the reader on a journey. I want to deliver payoffs along the way. I want them to get to the end feeling energized that, “Okay, this thing, I’m going to do this thing now.”                     Usually, when I ran into problems, it’s a structural problem. I’m like, “I don’t know how to get them from this beat to this beat seamless kind of fashion.” When I find myself stuck there, I do have to just walk away either literally like I’ll go out for a walk, or I’ll go have a shower, or I just have to let it sit for two or three days. Usually, you come back after two or three days, it’s so obvious to you how to fix it but in the moment, you just can’t see it. That’s my method for dealing with those bad, bad days. Darren: I find for me similarly, it’s usually about how to I get from A to B. Sometimes for me, I need to almost break it down into imagining the person in one state and I want them to be in another state. What are their minute, little steps that they would need to take and that sometimes reveals the links of how to structure a post but also how to take them on that journey. You’re focusing on that change, I think for me would be the answer. I’m a big walker too. It all happens when I’m on a walk. Kelly: I never had as many ideas as when my kids were babies, infants and I took them for a walk for an hour everyday. I had to walk with my phone. I was just talking into my phone the whole idea going, “I’ve got another idea. I’ve got another idea.” Darren: Second last shift in the video to podcasting because I think it’s only been a year and a half, maybe two years that you’ve been podcasting? Kelly: A year and a quarter. Darren: I can’t believe that. You have shifted a lot of your content creation into the podcast. You’ve got two. One Let it be, another, Straight and Curly. Both are co hosted podcast. Now, if you go to kellyexeter.com, to your blog, there a lot of podcast in the midst of all the writing as well. We haven’t got a lot of time but why podcasting for a start? Let’s just start with that. Kelly: It’s interesting because when I first started working at Flying Solo two and a half year ago, they said to me, “Are you still in podcasting at all? I was like, “Not in the least. I’m a writer. I can’t bear the thought of unedited words going out into the world.” At the same time, I think this is the tropical thing that you were at, I don’t know if you remember because that was the moment you decided to start your podcast.                     Everyone was talking, everyone had a podcast. It was the next big thing. I was like, “Maybe for Swish Design, we should do a little podcast or something.” But I never thought of doing one for myself. Just over the course of that year, I started getting interviewed on a lot of people’s podcast about Your Best Year Ever. I discovered after the first few where I was like emailing the person who interviewed me and saying, “We got to do that again because I can say all those things I said so much better.” They’re laughing at me and going, “No, it’s fine.”                     I started to relax into it a little bit more and then I started to actually really enjoy it because the big difference for me between podcasting and writing is podcasting, you can go on a tangent and it doesn’t matter as long as the story that tangent is following is good whereas when you’re writing, you can’t go tangential because you lose the reader. That’s just a fact. It doesn’t matter how good the story is, they’ll be going, “What does this got to do with the topic of this post?”                     I really enjoyed being able to tease out topics with tangents which I can’t do with writing. The opportunity came in a very round about way to start the podcast with Carly and with Brooke when Jackrabbit.FM started out. The other thing was I had no time. I was like, “It’s all well and good to do a podcast but I don’t have time to produce it.” Jackrabbit said, “We’ll take care of the production. All you guys have to do is record.” I was like, “Okay, let’s give it a go.” It’s been amazing. I’ve loved it, loved it so much.                     I think I’ve chosen pretty good co hosts, Carly and Brooke are both my people so I think that that’s why it’s so enjoyable because it’s kind of we’re creating content but we’re also getting to catch up all the time. Darren: It’s a good excuse to have a call with someone. Have you considered giving up blogging after you started podcasting? Because I know a lot of bloggers do when they get this bug? Kelly: I did. I didn’t really consider giving it up but I did send Brooke and email after the first few episodes came out. I said, “I might never blog again.” She was like, “Yes, that always happens.” But I think I kept blogging because for me the big difference between podcast and blog post is the sharing thing. It’s so easy to skim a blog post and decide it’s good enough to share. You can share it right then and there. With podcast, people don’t generally share them even if they’re really good because when they’re listening to it, they’re not in the position to share it.                     What I see, I see podcast is brilliant for connecting really deeply with people and for people really getting to know you because it’s such an intimate medium but I do think for the purpose of spreading ideas and I guess my big thing that drives me with writing is I want to be known as an interesting thinker and someone who has interesting ideas. Blog post for me, still win the day in that regard. Darren: It’s interesting. We’ve been, over the last few episodes, talking about some of the different types of content. We’re yet to get to podcasting but I think very similarly that it’s a deep connection with people but it doesn’t tend to go viral in any way as much as written, or visual, or video, all of those things are much easier to share.                     When you’re considering a topic, this maybe a little different for you because you’ve got co hosts, but how do you decide whether your idea should become a podcast or whether it should become a blog post? Kelly: Generally speaking for blog post, I generally only write about things that are fully processed and have very fully formed thoughts on. Certainly, that crosses a little bit into the Straight and Curly podcast because we’re generally speaking only formed ideas there too. They’re much more like tip type things or research thing around a specific topic.                     Even though my blog is in theory about self improvement, Straight and Curly is kind of like next level all self improvement, all about make yourself better whereas my blog writing is more about gentler, a gentler approach to living your best life. That’s how we distinguish a content between and Straight and Curly.                     Those topics are probably closer to my standard blog topics but what I find Brooke and I tends to in the podcast is we tend to discuss ideas and topics where our ideas aren’t yet fully formed. I quite enjoy those discussions because they might eventually then lead to a blog post because in having the discussion on the podcast, then I’m able to more fully form ideas and then write about them.                     I will say that Brooke and I are talking about something we’ve not fully processed or were fully across. It’s quite interesting for the listeners because they’re discovering things in real time with us. That’s another level of intimacy of there as well. It’s quite fun for the listener. Darren: Interesting. I feel like there’s so much more we could delve into podcasting but I’m going to keep that for another day. The last thing I want to talk about. I kind of hinted it at the top of the podcast as I was trying to work out where to go with this. I realized that you are doing so much stuff. You’ve got a blog, you’re writing for that, you’re creating two podcast episodes a week, you’re writing a book a year, you’ve been actively editing Flying Solo, you’re in social media, you’re a designer, you’re involved with your Swish Design business, you’ve got a family, two kids and a husband, you watch football, read books, and go on runs.                     A few question, Kelly. This might turn into a therapy session. How in the world do you do it all? Is that routines and systems, or you’re outsourcing, or you’re just not sleeping, is there some magical tool we don’t know about? Tell us the secret. Kelly: I wish it was magic. I wish I had some magical tool to offer. I guess a few things. One biggest thing that I do that most people probably don’t want to is I get up early. I won’t say how early because I don’t want to freak everybody out. But the hours before 7:00 AM in my house, everybody in my family knows that that is for me to write an exercise. Those hours are untouchable to everyone else.                     If I get up at 6:00AM, I’ve got an hour. If I get up at 5:00AM, I’ve got two hours. If I get up at 4:15AM which is when I get up, I’ve got a bit more. Those hours are so precious to me. They’re the real reason I get to do as much as I do because my kids are good sleepers and they know that time in the morning is untouchable. I guess that’s one quick tip for parents in particular is that you’re family will be far more respectful of the things that you do every single day than the things you do every so often.                     My kids, they know, if they get up before 7:00AM, they go in the living room and they watch TV. I’m not available to them at 7:00AM. That’s everyday. If it was something I was doing every so often, they would feel much more empowered to interrupt me and I would feel less able to go, “No, you know this is my time.” But because I do it everyday, like I said, untouchable.                     In order to get up early, I go to bed early which means avoiding addictive Netflix shows or being really disciplined about only watching one episode. We were watching Suits. It really ruined my productivity because sometimes we were watching three shows a night. I was like, “Okay, one a night. That is it.” Then we went to bed. The morning hours that I’ve spoken about, I do not use them to stuff around. I use them to write and to exercise.                     With the podcast, we record those in batches of two to three episodes at a time. We’ve actually just moved both podcast to seven or eight episode seasons with a three week break between each season because we were finding the publication schedule was quite full on in the scheme of what we all had going on in our lives. As I mentioned before Jackrabbit takes care of everything other than the recording so if I had to do anything about that, I wouldn’t be able to do it. The only reason I’m able to do the podcast is because I take care of all the production and everything.                     I think key piece of the productivity equation that a lot of people miss out on, that I don’t, is that I really, really prioritize the things that are going to give me good energy levels for everyday. I prioritize good sleep. I won’t sacrifice sleep. I know that’s the first thing most people sacrifice when things get really busy but I don’t sacrifice sleep. I exercise everyday and I eat really well because those three things ensure that I’ve got the energy levels to be productive in the time that I allocate to be productive.                     Routines, of course, every single thing I can build a routine around, I do. The reason routines help you produce quality content is because it free up head space. Between 7:00AM and 7:30AM, I’m doing stuff in our kitchen. I’m making lunches. I’m making people breakfast and doing things that I’ve got on auto pilot. I’m not having to think about what I’m doing because I do it in the same order every single morning. Even though that can, in theory, be quite a busy time of the day, it’s mental down time for me. I can and muse while I’m doing those things. That’s what routines do for people. People who pushed back against routines, they don’t restrict you, they are freedom. I could go on about that forever. Darren: We could both talk about that for awhile. Kelly: And then, I think I do often find myself on the edge of burnout because I have I have taken on too much. When I do, what I do is I just recalibrate. Say, right at this moment in time, I am in a recalibration mode. I actually finish up at Flying Solo at the end of May. I’ve pulled right back on the amount of guest posting I’m doing because I was guest posting two or three times a month. Those were taking me 10 to 15 hours to write.                     As I mentioned, we’ve moved our podcast to seasons and the reasons I’ve done all of that is because as I mentioned to you before, I want to want to get to the writing of this fourth book. I didn’t want to write that book in a compressed period of time again like I did with the others. I’ve gone, “Right, this is really important to me to get to this fourth book. I need to step back from some of these other commitments that I’ve had and free up that time.”                     I think people get afraid to recalibrate because it feels like they’re not managing their time properly. I just say, “No, it’s being sensible and it’s being smart to acknowledge that you actually can’t do everything that you want to. You gave it a go. You did it but now, it’s time to step back.” It doesn’t mean that you’re never going to do those things again. It just means you’re not doing them right at this moment.                     I do think the biggest secret to consistent and prolific content creation is to set a standard and then hold yourself to that standard. Be realistic but set yourself that standard. What it is, is building the habit creates the discipline. Most people think they have to have discipline in order to do these things that were doing and do them well whereas it’s the opposite. The habit’s built out the discipline and then the discipline keeps you going because you get to see all these things you’re producing and it creates success momentum.                     Build the habits, the discipline will come. Set yourself a standard and you will meet it because that’s what you do. Darren: That’s great. Very tweetable. I think they’d actually share this podcast because no one needs, no one does. They all listen. There was the tweetable building, the habit building, the discipline. The other one from today that I wrote down is let yourself write crappy words. Kelly: That’s my favourite one. Darren: You’ve got to tweet each of those. If you’re listening, if you still made it to this part in the podcast, there’s two little task for you to do. Thank so much, Kelly. There’s so much ground that we’ve covered there. I really got a lot of value out of that, myself. Where can people find you or what many places can they find you? Kelly: Best place is definitely is kellyexeter.com.au. If you’re looking the best place to start, go to kellyexeter.com.au/simple because that kind of gives you a little bit of roadmap for where to get started on my site, freebies, and stuff like that as well. Darren: Excellent. Thank you so much and we will link to that and I think you mentioned another resource on Flying Solo. We’ll link to those in the show notes today. We look forward to hearing seeing all those years of the podcast. Kelly: Thanks, Darren. Darren: Thank you so much.                     Thanks for listening to that interview with Kelly Exeter. I hope you got a lot of value out of it as well. I certainly am feeling very motivated having just listened to it again. You can check out Kelly’s blog and podcast at kellyexeter.com.au, link to that in the show notes today. I’ll also link in the show notes to some of the articles that Kelly has written on ProBlogger about blog design and about writing content. The show notes are at problogger.com/podcast/193. Also, remember that Kelly is speaking at our Australian events this year both in Brisbane and Melbourne in late July, early August. She’s talking about content creations. She’s going to dig really much deeper into some of the things that she’s been talking about particularly it pertains to monetizing your blog. She always delivers a lot of very practical and actionable information. Her sessions always get very highly rated that’s why have invited her back this year. You can find out more about those Australian events at problogger.com/events. Lastly, if you did enjoy this episode, you might want to check out episode 119 in which Kelly took over the podcast for the day. She talks about choosing the right WordPress theme for your blog. A little bit of a different theme to today’s podcast but it is Kelly and it will show you a little bit of a different side to her as well. Thanks for listening. Don’t forget to join the Facebook group. Do a search on Facebook for ProBlogger Community and you’ll find it all. Head over to problogger.com/groups. Thanks for listening today. I’ll be back next week with a shorter episode in episode 194 but still some actionable advice for you. Thanks for listening. Chat with you soon.  How did you go with today’s episode? Enjoy this podcast? Sign up to our ProBloggerPLUS newsletter to get notified of all new tutorials and podcasts below.

The Things Successful Bloggers Do to Build Their Blogs Into Businesses In today’s lesson, I want to talk about some of the things that successful bloggers are doing to increase the conversions of their website. This episode is inspired by a post we had on the ProBlogger blog this week from John Stevens who shared 9 conversion habits of the world’s most successful bloggers. I want to pick up, highlight and expand upon 3 of the points John mentions but also want to share something I’ve noticed about many of the social media marketing bloggers that I follow that fascinates me. Resources for 3 Key Things Bloggers Do to Grow Their Blogs into Businesses Join the ProBlogger Group for goal planning, a new live streaming tool, SEO, affiliate marketing, video and more!   The 9 Conversion Habits of the World’s Most Successful Bloggers How to increase the signups to your email list How to create an optin to increase signups to your email list How to create a start here page for your blog Michael Hyatt Smart Passive Income Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Good day there! 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 to start an amazing blog, to create content that will change people’s lives and to hopefully make some money from your blog as well. Learn more about ProBlogger over at problogger.com. Today is episode 192. In today’s lesson, I want to talk about some of the things that successful bloggers are doing to increase the conversions on their website and to guarantee their success not only as bloggers to build an audience but also to help them to build a business and to make money from their blogs. This episode is actually inspired by a post we had on ProBlogger, the blog this week, it was a post from John Stevens who shared Nine Conversion Habits of the World’s Most Successful Bloggers. It’s a post that I’m going to link to in today’s show notes because it’s essential reading for anyone who does want to monetize their blog and to learn this stuff. In today’s episode, I want to pick up on three of the nine points that John mentioned. I want to highlight them, expand upon them a little bit, and talk about why I think they are so important. At the end of this episode, I also want to share something that I’ve noticed about many of the social media marketing bloggers that I follow, these people who are experts in their fields, who are doing something a little different to what John says in his post. By no means am I saying John’s wrong, but there’s also something else that I’ve noticed about these other bloggers and I want to highlight that at the end of today’s show as well. You can see John’s post over in today’s show notes, there’s a full transcription of the show as well over at problogger.com/podcast/192. I’ll highlight John’s post there. Also, check out the Facebook group, the ProBlogger Community Facebook Group. You can go to problogger.com/group. This week being the start of May, we’ve been talking in the group about our goals for the month. We’ve been doing some accountability there. I also share the new tool I’m using for live streaming on Facebook which is just blowing my mind, really affordable tool. We’ve had discussions on SEO, affiliate marketing, video and much more so we would love you to join the group at problogger.com/group. Let’s get into today’s show. Last week on ProBlogger, we published a fantastic post by John Stevens, a guest post. It was titled, as I said in the top of the show, The Nine Conversion Habits of the World’s Most Successful Bloggers. In this post that John wrote, John analyzes how some very well-known bloggers have built successful businesses around their blogs. He talks about these nine habits that they’ve gotten into. These are things that have been around for a little while but have changed over the last few years. As I think back to 2002 and look at how blogs are today, what he’s highlighted are really some of the key changes that have taken successful bloggers to be successful business people. There’s a rule distinction there. Just building a successful blog that’s well read is great and that could be just your goal, to have lots of readers but if you want to monetize your blog, if you want to build a business around your blog, there are certain things that you probably need to work on. John has highlighted some really good habits to build. There’s lots of good advice. I really do recommend you have a read of the post because it’s a great snapshot of some of the current trends in blogging and building an online business from a marketing perspective. In today’s episode, I want to just pull out three of the things that John talks about and add some of my own thoughts. As I said at the top of the show, I want to add in something that isn’t really there in John’s article. I’m not saying he’s wrong, I’m just saying that this is something that I think is just as important, if not more important, than these other things to keep in mind. Because sometimes we can get a little bit distracted by the new things, and the trends, and these strategies, they’re important but there’s other stuff that we need to keep in mind and keep in balance. The first thing that I want to talk about that John picks up and it’s his first point as well, is that the successful bloggers that he’s talking about use multiple opt-in boxes on their site. John correctly identifies in this article that email is so important in most of the most successful bloggers’ strategies. This is something that shouldn’t be new to you. I’ve been talking about emails since my very early episodes. If you go right back to the start, you’ll see there’s numerous episodes on how to build your email list. Email is so important if you want to sell anything to your audience, if you want to build traffic to your blog, if you want to build community with your audience. It can help you in all of these different ways. It’s really important to build that list. I’ll link to some of the shows that we’ve had in the past on email on the show notes today. But John here is really highlighting one strategy that will help you to build your list. That is that you shouldn’t just ask for people to opt-in to your email list once on your blog or even once on any one page. John identifies here that most of the key successful bloggers that he’s looking at have multiple calls to action to opt-in on every page on their blog. The reality is that people are becoming increasingly blind to our calls for them to opt-in to our email list. If you think back to 2004, 2005 on the Internet, the big cool thing back then was banner advertising. I remember seeing my first banner ads and I was fascinated by them, “Oh, what are these things?” Google AdSense was starting to put all these text ads around the internet. People were clicking those links and those ads like crazy back then because they were new. Then couple of years later, people in the advertising industry began to write articles about how people were suffering from ad blindness. This is a thing that we all know today because we all know there are ads on most websites on the internet but very few of us even see the ads anymore because we’ve become blind to that marketing technique. This is something that is happening in most marketing techniques today and one of them is opt-in blindness. People are becoming increasingly blind to our calls to action to subscribe, whether that be by us offering them a free guide to something, or a free video, or a free report, or a free resource, download these calls to subscribe to my list and get a free stuff, people are increasingly ignoring them and that’s because they’re seeing them so often. I don’t believe that we should stop doing opt-ins on our site but we need to get a little bit smarter about how we call people to get those opt-ins. One of the ways that we can do that is to have multiple opt-ins on our page. The key with this and John talks about this in the article, is to find balance. We’ve all been to sites that constantly interrupt us, asking us for an opt-in. You arrive on the site and there’s a pop-up before you can see anything and then 30 seconds later after you’ve closed that pop-up and you scroll down, there’s a little slide in box that comes on. Then before you visit the second post that you want to visit on the site, there’s another interruption. Then as you’re leaving the site, there’s another interruption. All over the site there are calls to action. I’m not talking about that. I don’t want you to annoy your readers to the point where they either leave your site or give you their email address. But I do think we can be slightly more aggressive than just having one call to action. This is something that I’ve experimented with both of my sites Digital Photography School and ProBlogger. On Digital Photography School at the moment, if you’ll arrive on that site, you’ll be greeted if you’re on a desktop computer with a welcome mat and it’s a big slide in from the top. It’s fairly aggressive and that works really well. If you come back again, you won’t see that. We don’t want every visitor every time they visit to see that so the first time they’ll come they’ll see that. Then there are a couple of more subtle calls to action on the site. In the sidebar, there’s a really subtle call to action. In some articles, we also have at the bottom of the article we might have a call to action. Also, if you view a few pages while you’re on the site, you’ll see an exit pop-up as well. This is where you go to leave the site and there’ll be a little box come up and ask you to subscribe then if you haven’t already subscribe that is. It’s tracking whether people take action on the first few times and if they have, they won’t see, the second recall to action. What we found is that by adding that last exit pop-up, we’ve increased our sign-ups quite considerably. I think it went up 30% or 40%. Having more than one opt-in on your site is something that a lot of bloggers now are doing. As I said before, you got to get the balance right. There’s a couple of bloggers that I have been to their sites recently where I’m just like, “This is just too much. I’m just being bombarded.” In some cases, there are bloggers that have already subscribed to their email list and it’s even more annoying because I know they produce good stuff but I just don’t want to keep seeing those messages. There’s a variety of ways to do that. I’m going to link in the show notes to a few episodes that I’ve had in the past on email and how to get those subscribes. But do experiment with the different technologies that are around at the moment. The second thing that John highlights in the article is to use the space above the fold on your website really well. Good use above the fold. If you’re new to blogging, if you’re new to the internet, you’re probably going, “What in the world is Darren talking about?” Above the fold is a term that’s a bit geeky. It basically means if you go to a website, what you see above the fold is everything that you can see before you start to scroll. If you go to a website on your desktop, you will see the top part of the website and then you begin to scroll. Everything that you see as you begin to scroll is technically called below the fold. Really want to think about what can people see when they arrive on your site because what they see without having to scroll, they’re much more likely to take notice of and they’re much more likely to take action on. It’s significantly high. What is above the fold on your site is really important. John shares some examples of what people do on the front pages of their blogs above the fold and talks about particularly on the front page of your site, including things like benefit statements, social proof, your opt-in calls so getting that email address, proof of authority. These are some of the things that John talks about as being important. He does give you some really good examples of what bloggers do above the fold there. The other thing I want to encourage you to think about above the fold is what’s happening on your blog post pages. The reality is that most people will be arriving on your blog not to your front page but to a blog post. What happens above the fold on your blog post is really important as well. One of the things I’ve noticed happening increasingly over the last few months is bloggers putting so much stuff above the fold on their blog post that you can’t actually see the content when you first arrive on their site. Whilst I can understand why they might do that, they might want to have a big email opt-in at the top of their blog post because that’s the most important thing to them, the reality is that if someone arrives on your site expecting to read an article on a particular topic and they can’t see it then that creates an impression upon them. Whilst a percentage of people might give you their email address before they read the article, I think that it’s smarter to show the article first and then try to get the email address or give them a chance to start reading it and then interrupt them in some way as well. Really think about above the fold, it is very important. But on blog posts it’s really important to make sure your content is viewable immediately when people arrive on your site so that they don’t have to start scrolling to read anything and to get some value. You want to start delivering value right up top on your site. Pay attention to what’s happening on your front page obviously, I’m going to talk about that in the next point as well. Above the fold, there is a different kettle of fish. You want to be doing some different things on that front page but in the blog post itself, make sure there’s content above the fold as well. The third thing I want to pick up from John’s article and there’s lots more in it than just these three things is he talks about the use of the home page. He talks a little bit about how that has changed in blogs over the years. The successful bloggers that John’s talking about, he talks about how they use static home pages to funnel additional leads. This is been a massive shift over the last few years of blogging. If I think back to my first blog in 2002 and my blog back then was pretty much the same as 99% of blogs back in 2002. If you went to the front page of that blog or any other blog, you would see the last 5 to 10 blog posts on the front page of the blog in their entirety. You would go to my blog and it was a very long page, you would see the whole latest article that I’ve write. Even if it was a 5000-word article, it would all be on the front page and then you’d scroll below there and there’d be the next article in its entirety. Then it would be the next article in its entirety. I did that, I went back and had a look at my first blog in an internet archive version of it.  This is what happened. It was a very long page. There were 10 articles in their entirety and this is what bloggers did back then. It’s just what happened. It’s just the way that the things were. Then things began to change a little bit. We began to see in probably 2004 or 2005, people began to just show excerpts of their articles. It would just be down the page, it would be the most recent article at top and then the next one, then the next one. It’d be 5 to 10 articles, the title and then excerpt, might be the first couple of paragraphs. There was massive debate about this when it first started and people first started to do it. People are like, “I don’t want to have to click.” They were complaining about having to click to read more and yet people did it. They realized it was a better user experience for people. People would be able to scan from page to find the article that they wanted to read. It would be a shorter front page as well, takes less time to load all of that type of thing. We began to see other changes. A few years ago, we began to see front pages of blogs that look more like magazines. They were more of a grid-like layer. You still see a lot of these today that would show their latest posts but usually they’ll be an image for the post because the way they become more visual by this point, it would have the title. Many times it didn’t even have anything else, just the title and the image. Sometimes it would have a little excerpt. Sometimes there’d be a big slider at the top with a featured post but it was all about the content. It was all still about the content on the front page of the blog. In many ways, they began to look a little bit more like portals or magazines. These magazines has worked a lot of them were called on. This is what I began to experiment with on my blogs. For me on ProBlogger, I began to realize that I didn’t want to just show the latest content. I wanted to show other things that were happening on the site. Really, the next stage that some bloggers went to is to really change things more into a portal on their front page. Previous to my current design on ProBlogger, some of you will remember that we had my latest video on the front page. I had my latest blog post. I had the latest jobs on the job board. When I started the podcast, I pulled in the latest podcast and so it became more of a portal to the different things that were going on as well as some featured content as well. I realized around this time that it wasn’t just my latest content that I wanted to highlight but other key posts on the side. This is where the changes has been coming, people began to realize that it’s not just about the latest, it’s about getting people to the right content. This is really what John is picking up on in this article. He highlights a few examples of it. More recently we’re seeing people create front pages that don’t really look like blogs at all. In fact, some of them don’t even have any content on their front page. They’re more like landing pages that funnel their readers to do certain things. John picks up in the article about how many of them are funnelling people to subscribe to their email list. For example, if you go to the front page of Michael Hyatt’s blog or site I would call it now. You get taken to his welcome page. This welcome page is all about building credibility. It’s about telling you what he does and then getting your email address. That’s really what it is. If you got to have a look at his pages, very cleverly designed, the only thing you can really do on that page is to put in your email address unless you scroll right to the bottom of the page and that’s the only place that you can find a link to any other part of his site. Everything on that front page is about trying to get the email. He does that with a series of download opt-in offers. He doesn’t just have one. He has a number of different offers on that page. It’s all about trying to get people to give the email address. It’s not until you get to the footer, the very bottom of that front page that he has links to his blog to the content itself. The other way to get to the blog is to scroll pass all the opt-ins to that. Michael is a fairly extreme example of that. There are others that are certainly trying to get the email but also try and do other things. Pat Flynn is a great example of that. If you go to the front page of Smart Passive income, Pat’s blog and I’ll link to all these in the show notes today, you’ll see there that he, Pat also has a very strong call to action to subscribe. It’s right front and center. In fact, pretty much takes up most of the above the fold space. But then if you scroll down a little further, he begins to highlight his most recent content. He highlights his latest blog posts, his latest podcasts and also highlights some of his recommended affiliate products. Pat has a slightly different approach to his front page. It’s not just about getting the email. He wants to highlight his content. He wants to highlight some of his affiliate products. ProBlogger’s front page is more similar to Pat’s. We certainly call for a subscribe on the front page, in fact we do it twice. We do it at the top and we do it down the bottom, there’s also another call to action to subscribe there. I’ve found that that bottom subscription works quite well. But then between those calls to subscribe, we highlight our content, we highlight our recent blog posts, we highlight our recent podcasts, we highlight some of the information about our events. The key for me is to get to subscribe but I know from my experience, that people are much more likely to subscribe to my list if I give them some of my content first. If they get a taste for what I do, they’re much more likely to subscribe. For me, that’s the approach I’ve taken. There’s no right or wrong in designing your homepage but you’ll see from the examples that a lot of the blogs that John’s talking about in his article don’t look like blogs anymore, in the traditional sense. What I would encourage you to do is to think about what’s your number one goal and to do that above the fold on your homepage and make some really strong calls to action on your homepage. You don’t just have to show your latest content there. You can show something else as well. The other thing that you’ll see in the article that John wrote is that he highlights that we do something else on the front page of ProBlogger. That is to show something different to a new visitor to a returning visitor. If you come to ProBlogger for the very first time and if you’ve been there before, you won’t see this so you might want to open up an incognito browser and go to problogger.com. New visitors see something different to returning visitors. New visitors get an explanation of what the site is about and a prominent link to our start key page and a strong call to subscribe. Returning visitors don’t see that introduction to the site, the big button to the start key page. They get shown new content since the last time they visited. We can actually track how many posts you’ve missed and we highlight that as well. This is another creative thing that we’ve been trying out on ProBlogger and it’s worked quite well. There are three things that I think are really worth highlighting in John’s article. Let me just recap them. The successful bloggers use multiple opt-in calls to action on their blogs, sometimes more than one on a page. They use the space above the fold really well. I would really encourage you think about that for your front page but also for your blog post as well, making sure that there’s content above the fold particularly on blog post. The third thing that I highlight is the static home page and really thinking about what your goals and objectives are for the front page of your blog. There are lots more in the article that John talks about. He talks about making your content easy to share. He talks about using overlays to capture additional emails. He talks about using social proof. He talks about the use of the start key page which I think are really worth highlighting. I would’ve talked more about that but over he talked about start key pages in episode 111 so go listen to that one if that’s something you need to do. It is very powerful to start a key page, more powerful in my opinion than an about page. He also talks about the better use of the footer and also using prominent calls to action. I reckon this article from John really nails it but I don’t really highlight too many articles on ProBlogger in this podcast. But I really do want you to go and read it. But I want to add a little bit more to it. John’s spot on with his observations but one of the things I’ve noticed recently as I was preparing for my talk at Social Media Marketing World in March. I was asked to talk about the future of blogging, in which I did cover some of the stuff that John talked about in his article. But in preparation for my talk I decided I wanted to do some research on the blogs of the speakers of Social Media Marketing World. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Social Media Marketing World, it’s a conference attended by 3,000 or so social media marketers in San Diego. It’s run by Michael Stelzner from Social Media Examiner. He brings on hundreds of social media marketing experts from around the globe to speak at this event. Amazing people like Justin Brown and Peg Fitzpatrick, who you would’ve heard in previous interviews over the last few weeks. He brings in people like Pat Flynn, Mari Smith, Michael Hyatt who I just talked about, Chris Tucker, Amy Porterfield and some of these gurus in social media marketing. I decided in preparation for my talk on the future of blogging to do some analysis of the blogs of the speakers of Social Media Marketing World. Firstly, I wanted to work at how many of them were blogging today. They were experts. They were talking about all kinds of things from Instagram to Pinterest to Facebook advertising, all that type of stuff. I wanted to work at how many of them were using blogs but also what innovative stuff were they doing on their blogs, what I found was really interesting. It took me about 3 days to go through about 200 speakers so it’s a lot of time really digging into their blogs. What I found is that almost all of them were blogging in some fashion. If you have a very broad definition of blogging, if you include video blogging and podcasting and even Instagramming, creating regular content as I talked about a few episodes ago, most of them are blogging on that type of scale. But only about half of them had what I would consider to be traditional blog and mainly written content. About half of them were doing that type of blogging. Most of those bloggers were updating their blogs at least once a week, they were regularly blogging. It was a fairly central part of their business. One of the things I noticed as I was working through the speakers and I was particularly looking for what they were doing that was innovative. One of the new sexy things that people are doing, some of the things were just talked about. I wanted to find some examples of that. Whilst there were a few people doing that type of thing, what I noticed is that the vast majority of bloggers who were speakers at Social Media Marketing World were not doing really anything that I would consider to be sexy. They weren’t doing the new innovative stuff. Most of them had front pages on their blogs for example that looked like blogs from 2010 or even before. Most of them had just one call to action to subscribe in their list. Most of them weren’t doing anything that I would consider particularly innovative with their design or user interface. I didn’t know what to do with this at first. Part of me was a bit surprise and was like, “Do these people know what’s going on?” But then, I realized that maybe they were doing something right after all because as I dug into their blogs, I realized that they were getting a lot of comments on their blogs. As I began to look at their social media accounts I was like, “These people have a lot of people following them. They have a lot of people sharing content on their blogs as well.” Whilst their blogs maybe looked a little dated and maybe they weren’t doing the most sexy stuff, they were doing something right. Still, they had quite large and engaged audiences. It really struck me that whilst some of us get really into all the latest technologies and some of us get right into tweaking the plugins and the tools, and tweaking user interface and watching whether our page views go up, when we make a little change onto a button here and there. Whilst we’re spending a lot of time tweaking all these stuff, there’s these other set of bloggers who were doing amazing things who are focusing on other stuff, maybe the non-sexy stuff. What I realized as I dug into these blogs is that they were doing three things brilliantly. They were prolific at these three things. It was a good reminder for me as I begin thinking about all the innovations and all the cool stuff that you can do. Don’t thrill at these other three things that these amazing bloggers are doing. Firstly, they’re prolifically and consistently creating meaningful and useful content that answers questions and solves problems of the people who follow them. They know the needs of their audience and they create content regularly to meet those needs. That is what they’re spending most of their time doing. It is very evident as you look at these blogs. They may not look the coolest blogs but they’ve got amazing content, really deep, useful, life changing content in many ways. Spend time prolifically, consistently creating meaningful and useful content. Number two thing that they’re obsessed with and that is engaging with their audience. If you dig into their social media accounts, you’ll see them there present answering questions, getting to know their audience, serving those who follow them. It was amazing to see the speakers of Social Media Marketing World this year, so many of them would sit outside their sessions after they were finished for an hour, two hours, three hours answering questions, serving their audience. They realized that more important than how their blogs particularly looked and the user interface on them was the fact that their readers knew that they cared about them and that they wanted to serve them. Number two are serving their audience, engaging with their audience. Number three they’re prolifically promoting what they do. They’re networking, they’re guest posting, they’re attending conferences, they’re spending time getting to know other key influencers and they’re doing whatever they can to get themselves in front of the type of readers that they want to have read their blogs. It struck me as I was looking at these 100 or so bloggers that whilst a lot of the design and user interface and site optimization, things that John talks about in his article are really interesting, they really are cool things to be talking about and they can have some really positive impacts upon your blog. It’s actually the relentless pursuit of creating great content, being highly engaging and promoting yourself is what really going to be the key to your success. I’m not saying that design and sexy interface are not worth doing, but don’t do it at the expense of the quality of your content and the serving of your community. I’m personally investing time and money into the stuff I’ve already talked about in this episode. I’m spending time and money investing into design on my blogs and to user interface and to testing some of these new cool things that you can do on your site. But what I found is that every time I do a site redesign, every time I do this type of stuff I see 1% increases in conversions. I see very small increases in conversions. They’re the cream on top. The real substance comes from what you do around your content, around the community that you build in, the engagement that you build and the promotion of your content. Yes, investing all this new cool stuff really tweak and test and give them all a go but don’t do it at the expense of the other key elements of building a successful blog: great content, engagement with your audience and promoting what you do. I hope you found that helpful. I would love your feedback on this. Are you someone who has a tendency to spend a lot of time on the cool stuff or do you spend more time on the content and the community and the engagement? Love to hear what you think. I actually think it’s when these two sides of the equation come together, the real magic happens. I hope that somewhere in the midst of that you feel a little bit challenged to work on the areas that perhaps you’re neglecting and find that balance. You can let us know what you think about today’s episode over on the show notes at problogger.com/podcast/192 or over on the Facebook group, problogger.com/group where I love to have a chat with you this week. Thanks for listening, chat with you next week on the 193rd episode 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 below.