ProBlogger Podcast: Blog Tips to Help You Make Money Blogging

Making the Most of Tools, Apps and Services to Create Visual Content for Your Blog In today’s lesson, we’re going to talk tools for creating great visual content for your blog. Over the last few weeks, we’ve been exploring different types of content that you can use on your blog. In episode 187 we talked written content, in 189 video content and back in 180 we talked about live video. Each are important types of content to be able to create for your blog – but one that is increasingly important today is visual content. When I was looking back at some screenshots of my very first blog from 2002, recently, I was amazed by how boring it looked. Not a single post in the first few months of my blogging used even an image – it was purely text. Today, the web is a much more visual place and I can’t remember the last time I published content without at least one form of visual content in it. Visual content helps you to stand out from the crowd, it gives your content personality, it makes it more useful and it increases the chances of it being shared. The great thing is that we’re operating in a time where there are so many great ways to create visual content. There are so many tools and services available to us – so many that it can be overwhelming to know which ones to use. So in today’s episode, I asked Peg Fitzpatrick to come on the show to talk to us about her favorite tools, apps and services. We talk about apps and tools for creating great content, great sources for free stock photos, a tool that will help with the sharing of your visual content and one for organising all of the visual content you create. As you listen you might want to have today’s show notes open where I list all of the tools, apps and services mention. Resources and Tools for Creating Great Visual Content for Your Blog Join our Facebook Group Adobe Spark Canva Ripl Giphy Skitch Adobe Draw Adobe Color Eye Dropper Chrome Extension Libre Stock Unsplash Big Stock Photo Stocksy Trello Social Warfare Plugin Peg’s blog Peg’s post on visual style guides Peg’s post on using Trello Is written content dead? How to create great video content How to create great live video How to Life the Quality of your Blog with Embeddable Content Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Darren: My name is Darren Rowse and I’m the blogger behind problogger.com, a blog, podcast, event, job board and a series of ebooks, all designed to help you as a blogger to start a blog, to grow the audience to your blog, to create content that’s going to change that audience’s life in some way and hopefully make a profit from your blog as well. You can learn more about ProBlogger at problogger.com. In today’s lesson, I want to talk about tools that you can use to create great visual content for your blog and for your social media. Over the last few weeks and episodes of this podcast, we’ve been exploring different types of content that you can use on your blog. In episode 187, we talked about written content, perhaps the most obvious type of content for a blog. In 189, I talked about video content and had a great interview with Justin Brown on how to create great video content. Even back in episode 180, we talked about live video and how to create a live video particularly for Facebook. Each of these types of content is really important to be able to create for your blog today. But one that’s increasingly important today is visual content. It can actually be used in a lot of the other types of content as well. I looked back the other day at my first blog and some screenshots of it from 2002 and I was amazed at how boring it looked. Not a single post on the front page of that blog in 2002 had even any image in it, it was purely text. Today, the way it is so much more visual as a place. I personally can’t remember the last time I published a blog post without at least one image in it or one chat or one page of visual content in it. Most paper today are at least including any image or good image. But there are so many other types of content that we can create, visual types of content as well. Visual content really does help your blog, your content to stand out from the crowd. It can differentiate you from all of those other means or pieces of content out there. It gives your content personality, it helps it to become more useful, it makes it easier to read, and it also increases the chance of your content being shared because studies have proved again and again that when you have content with visuals, it gets shared at a much higher rate. The great thing is, today that we operate in a time when it’s so easy to create visual content. There are so many great ways to do it. There are so many amazing tools and so this is a valuable to us, many of them free. The problem though is that there are so many tools that can be quite overwhelming to know which one to use. In today’s episode, that’s what I want to explore. I want to suggest to you some tools that you can use to create visual content. In fact, it’s not going to be me who will be suggesting them. It’s an expert in this field, Peg Fitzpatrick who I’ve heard speak many times at conferences on this particular topic. As I was pondering how do I explore this topic, Peg was an obvious choice. She’s going to suggest to you some great tools that you can use for creating visual content, designing visual content, great sources for free stock photos. She’s going to suggest to you a tool that will help you in the sharing of your visual content particularly if you’re a WordPress user. She’s also going to share with you her favorite tool for organizing the visual content that you create. Today’s episode is going to be well-worth listening if you are at the beginning of this journey creating visual content or you want to find the latest tools because some of these tools are newish tools as well. As I mentioned before, a lot of these tools are free or at least have free versions. I will list them all on today’s show notes so you might want to open then up as we get into this episode. You can find the show notes over at problogger.com/podcast/191. I’d also love it if you would join our Facebook group, if you just go to problogger.com/group or do a search for the ProBlogger community in Facebook. I love it if you would tell us what your favorite visual tool is as well because there are lots of others out there and I’m sure there’s others that we haven’t covered in this particular episodes well. Head over to the group after you’ve listened as well and share with us what your favorite tool is too. Again, the show notes are at problogger.com/podcast/191 where I’ve listed all of the tools that we covered today as well as some other further reading and listening. Thanks for listening and I’m going to get into this interview that I do with Peg Fitzpatrick. Also, you can check out Peg’s blog over pegfitzpatrick.com. Peg, in our recent episodes, we’ve been looking at different types of content that can be fitted on blogs. We talked about written content, which is obviously a big feature for me and video content and even had to do live video. But today I want to talk about another really important topic content which I think you’ve got a lot to say about and that’s visual content. I’ve heard you speak about this at many conferences so you’re a bit of a no brainer in terms of getting someone on to talk about it. I want to welcome you to the podcast. Peg: Thank you for having me. I’m super excited. Darren: I’m surprised I actually haven’t had you on already. It’s overdue. Peg: Me too. What’s up with that Darren? Darren: I actually don’t do too many interviews. It’s bit of a new thing for me to do interview so bear with me while you’re my guinea pig. One of the things we’ve talked about in the last few episodes is the superpowers of different types of content. I’ve talked about written content being really good for being found in search, being scannable. I had Justin Brown recently on to talk about video. He talked about how it’s really great for showing your personality and getting shares. I wonder if you can tell us what you think visual content superpower is. Peg: The superpower is helping all of your other content be seen because blogs used to be just all about the best ideas and the newest ideas and now, as you know, I don’t even know, are there a billion blogs now? Because I know it was millions starting everyday so I don’t know how many there are in the world but there’s a lot of written word out there now. The visuals on your blog are what help more people number one, they stay to read it longer because when people see it they’ve long while of text, people have such short attention span and I’m really shocked. Have you ever asked your readers how many people read your blog on their phone? Darren: Yeah, that’s a lot, isn’t it? Peg: Isn’t it? I was also like, “Who reads a whole blog post on their phone?” But lots of people love it. You need something to break the text up, the big pieces of text because people’s attention span are getting shorter and shorter because everybody’s bombarded with so much information and we’re used to seeing shiny things around the internet. Thankfully, the flashlights with the music are gone. Now, when people go to a blog post, they like to see visuals. It’s not only just for looking in a blog post but it’s also for shareability because people want to hit a social sharing button. Honestly, I’m shocked when I go to people’s blogs and they have no social sharing buttons. There are so many people that have no social sharing buttons still. They’re like, “I don’t get any social shares. Why is that?” I’m like, “Remember, one, you could add some buttons. Then people can hit that.” They’re like, “Oh.” I realized that when people are new, it is hard. There’s so much to learn when you’re a new blogger but you can definitely Google those things like 10 things I need when I start on my blog, you can get the basics. Make sure you have the basics in place which are your social sharing buttons. But also images so when people hit the share button, a great image goes with it. If you go and hit a social sharing button to Facebook and it is text only, a lot of people won’t share that. Darren: If I do, it doesn’t work. It is not going to get the attention of that person as well. Peg: Absolutely. It will go nowhere in the news feed. Occasionally, people can do a text only post on Facebook and it does okay. But even Facebook they added that feature where you could change your text only post and then making it into a graphic, which I actually, dislike that feature on Facebook. But Facebook is even recognizing that sometimes people just have text. You don’t want that to be your blog post. You don’t want something bad to go out with your blog post. There’s a lot of different ways that I look at it. Number one, you want it to look nice when people go. They go to the ProBlogger site. They’re going to see this great image that reminds them of other visuals that they’ve seen around. Then when they hit the share button, you want that to share but with the right size. That’s the tricky, tricky piece because one image doesn’t fit on every social site, they all have different parameters. The thing is you don’t also want a weird size photo to go out because then that doesn’t look it either. I do have a tool for that, if you want I could begin to explain right away. Darren: Let’s talk about different types of visual content then we’ll get into the tools because I know people will hang in for the tools. Peg: Wait for it people. It’s coming. Darren: It’s coming. I like to tease. Before we get into the tools, I’d love to hear your thoughts on the different types of visual content that a blogger can use on their blog because one of the things I love about your blog, and our usual blog is a case study when I speak is that you have so much variety in the visual content that’s on your blog. Every time I look at a blog post, there’s at least one or two pieces. I suspect you’ve got a policy that no can take as it without visual. Is that the case? Peg: Yeah. All of my blog posts have visuals. Darren: That’s what we do as well. We always have to have one but what I love about yours is there’s a lot of variety in them. Every blog post has at least one and they’re all kinds of different types of visual. I wonder if you could talk about some of the different types of visuals that bloggers can use on their blogs. Peg: Absolutely and thank you for looking at my blog and using it as a case study. I’m always so flattered. I was like, “Oh thank you for reading my blog, someone.” Honestly sometimes it depends on what type of post it is. Say for example, we’re at social media marketing world and I was going to share one of my presentations, I would upload that to SlideShare. I would upload the presentation. Sometimes, it depends. Some speakers don’t like to give away everything if they do the same presentation everywhere. They don’t want to give away their whole presentation. But you could do a shorter version, maybe just the intro with just the tools that you shared because that’s what people want to see afterwards. They see so many people speak that they might forget. I’ll load it up to SlideShare so then it’s SlideShare content and then I can embed that into my blog post. Then I could break some text with it. Because like you speak at different preferences too and I’m sure people look if you share something, people ask a lot like, “Can I see your presentation?” They don’t get the whole thing but I give people part of it so they can get some piece of it. So they feel like they were there, maybe they hear some new stocks or some new tools or something that I shared. That’s one thing that I’ll do is share SlideShares. I embed videos so I will upload a YouTube video and then I will embed that into a blog post also. I love doing social images. Instagram images are awesome because you can legally use the images when you’re embedding a social post like a Facebook post or an Instagram post. It’s not taking someone else’s image without permission because it embeds their post and it keeps their name at the top and their comments and their social shares. If you see an Instagram post that you like and you want to use it in a blog post, you can’t just cut and paste their picture. That’s not okay. You could get a DCMA takedown notice for that because it’s somebody else’s intellectual property. But you can embed their social post and if it’s a public Instagram post, then it will embed and then you can share that image. If you were writing a blog post about you have a lot of photographers that follow you. Say you were doing a study on like 10 Instagram accounts that post great landscape photos, you could embed the photos in there. You could talk a little bit about it. You could say like they go out at different times of the day, they use different lenses. You could have the different techniques that they use in there to get the different types of photos. You could use their photos by embedding their post. It also gets more engagement back to their posts. Darren: It’s a win for them as well as you just getting people back to you. I guess the big thing I want to get across to our listeners is that whilst we’re going to talk a lot about today is tools that you can use to create great visuals that you don’t have to create all the visuals. There’s so much visual content out there that you can be embedding legally onto your blog. We talked a lot about that in episode 97 about embeddable content but I really encourage listeners to go and have a look at Peg’s blog to see this in action. Because every post almost have something embedded, whether it’s a Twitter. Peg: I do. I also do tweets. I like to do the click to tweets because those are super popular. Like for you, you do a blog, you do a podcast, if you say something or if you have a dash time and it says something that’s nice, short little tweetable, you could make that into a tweet. You could have it, it shows as a quote in your blog post and then people can click to tweet and then it goes out on Twitter and it adds a link back to your podcast. That’s a win-win too. Darren: Let’s get into some tools. Let’s start with tools that you can use to help create visual content. Peg: One of my very favorite and I have worked for them as a brand ambassador is Adobe Spark. Have you tried Adobe Spark yet? Darren: I’ve tried it a little bit. I think I tried it right in the early days and since then I’ve heard it’s developed a lot. Talk to us about it. Peg: It had. It’s great. They have three different tools in them. One is called Adobe Post, one is Page where you could make landing pages. Then they have Spark Video and I’m not great with video. Here’s the big secret with all my great visual content, I actually can’t use Photoshop and I can’t edit video. I am like most people where I don’t have the super high-tech skills. Where I think a lot of people feel like, “I can’t make great graphics because I don’t know how to use Photoshop and I don’t know how to edit video.” I don’t either. I taught myself how to use other things that look professional. I test things. In Adobe Spark, what I love about it is everything looks crisp and professional no matter where you put it. There’s a tool that a lot of people use and I don’t like to say bad things about tools. But when you would do the photos, like you put it in your Facebook cover and the text would be blurry. And it looks very unprofessional. I think it had to do with Facebook whatever they did to the photos. But Adobe Spark, everything looks 100% professional. When you add the text in, they have a little dragging tool where you could just move it without having to realign your text. Everything stays aligned perfectly and you can center it, it has the little gridlines. It’s just easy to use and they do right in app have free photos that you can use, that you can legally use. It makes it one-stop shopping. Darren: Adobe Post is something that you can use on your phone but it’s also desktop, isn’t it? Peg: Yes. What I like about that is I like to make my stuff usually on the computer and then if I need to, I’ll bring it over to my phone. Like if it’s something for Instagram, sometimes I’ll make it on the computer and then bring it over to my phone to share it. When you’re on the phone, you can make animations. If you wanted to make something that had some motion to it with a text or something, you can do that on your phone but not on desktop. Darren: Wow, very cool. You’re using this mainly for text overlay type stuff? Peg: Yeah, I use it for text overlay stuff. I’ve even made slides for presentation on it. You can use it for all different kinds of things. I use it a lot to do my Instagram stories because they have little Instagram story size in there and then you can animate them and put stickers and stuff on them. It’s super fun. I use that for my blog post graphics. I use it for social graphics. I use it for all different kinds of graphics, presentation stuff sometimes. It doesn’t have a multi-page feature so it’s not ideal for presentations but for my blog graphics, I love it. It has a feature where if you make one that ends up being really popular, I like to pretest my social stuff, just like your blog content, if it’s popular then you reproduce that template like, “Okay, that blog post works.” If you have a graphic that’s really popular, you can just hit a duplicate button and it makes a template from it. Then you can just rearrange the photo and it makes it nice so you’re not recreating the wheel every time. Darren: Yeah. That’s great and that would help with consistency between your images as well. Is there any cost associated with Adobe Spark? Peg: It’s 100% free right now. Everything is free in it. The images are free. Everything is free in it right now. Darren: Isn’t it amazing? Unbelievable, the things that work at our fingertips. Peg: If you are an Adobe Photoshop user, it’s part of the creative cloud. It will tie all your things together. You could pull your lightroom photos in there. It’s connected to everything Adobe. Darren: Excellent. I’m going to learn how to use it a bit better. Peg: It’s so easy, it really is. Do you use Lightroom? Darren: Yeah, I’m a big Lightroom user. I think that would be pretty cool to be able to pull in my own photos and sync between them. That’ll be great. I created a video with the video part of it and I think I created a video that used the audio from this podcast and then I put some images over the top of it. I thought that was interesting because a lad made a share that onto Facebook as a way to create some moving images with the audio, Just as a teaser for the podcast, I think I did a couple of those in the previous days, lots of potential there. Peg: They updated a lot in the video section too. You can embed a video in a video now. Darren: Wow. Okay. Peg: It’s all like drag and drop. It’s so easy, even I can use it. Darren: If I can do it, anyone can. Peg: Yeah, it’s true. It’s not complicated at all. It’s really just coming up with the ideas for your blog post like what type of blog post is this one? Is it a podcast or is it a tutorial, is it a how to? Some of the other blog posts are how to blog posts. I have examples like where Canva is another tool I use. It’s a down under company. They have output stuff in there and I’ll do a screenshot and then you could put circles around softer areas pointing to things or text overlays. Not to do a blog title but just to point out something when you’re showing something new. When you’re explaining something so you could do the steps, you can do step one, step two, step three. That’s easy to do in Canva because they have a multi-page feature. You could put the screenshot in and then add the different layers in there. That’s also easy. Canva, they have a free version and then they also have Canva for work which is great if you’re a blog that wants to be consistent which should be everybody. In Canva for work, you can add your logo, add all your colors. You can add in some fonts that are your custom fonts that aren’t in the apps for everybody to use. You can add two or three fonts in there. You make your own little brand kit with all your official colors and official fonts and your logos. Those stay in the app and you can use those on any design. You don’t have to reload them every time. Then by default, your brand colors come up. Darren: That is a tool that we’ve used quite a bit particularly with our events. To be added between our team members as well, it’s quite useful. Peg: It’s great to be able to share designs. You can create templates and share the templates with other teammates. Darren: That’s something that was really missing a few years ago. You had to create everything from scratch every time. That was really tough. Peg: And if you make a mistake, if you have a typo which it happens. Sometimes you have a typo on it, you make the whole design and you finish it and then you can’t edit the design. That’s the big benefit of Adobe and Canva and Spark and Canva. You can go back in and edit that same design. If you were doing event marketing and then something changed, you need to change one thing. If I had to redo the whole piece of art, that’s horrible. Darren: It is horrible. We’ve got Canva and Adobe Spark. Any other? I’m sure you’ve got plenty. Peg: Little fun apps. There is an app called Ripple that I like that makes really fun animations. I don’t know if you’ve tried that one before. Darren: No I haven’t. Tell us a little more. Peg: Ripple is a paid app. I call it a premiere app because it is one that’s more expensive. You do have to pay for it to take their logo off it. I don’t like to use anything with a brand’s logo. In your blogs, I don’t think it’s very professional to have the logo so I paid for the app. You could make really cool animations that have text. They have a lot of different templates. You can add music in there and do all kinds of fun things to make a fun graphic. You can play your own photos in, it could be text only. There are a lot of different things that you can do in it that are fun. That’s just like the ones that are a little fun groovy kind where you’ve done your basic blog graphic but then when you want to do animated ones. Those are fun to do. If you post it on Instagram and then go back and embed it into your post or you can tweet them, you can post them anywhere in social. But you can also download them and upload them into your blog post. Darren: It’s going to be useful within the blog post but also promoting it as well. Anything that boosts really does get a little bit more attraction on Twitter, of anything. Peg: Especially on Twitter. Giphy is another great one. I love Giphy. Do you use Giphy? Darren: Only for fun. Finding other people’s GIFs and sharing them but not creating them. I didn’t realize you can create them in there. Peg: You can make GIFs on Giphy. I have to say I pretty much just go on and look for stuff too because there’s just great stuff in there. But those are really fun. GIFs are great in blog posts because they don’t slow your page time at all. Because they’re fast and they don’t take up as much of the time like a regular video or photo. You could embed GIFs into your blog post. Have you done that before? Darren: I’ve done it a couple of times and usually it’s to do something a bit humorous just to brighten things up and give people a giggle. I found that come out quite well. Peg: It’s great for social sharing as well. If you have your blog, Twitter especially, it’s great to have the animations on there. You can make your own but I usually take the ones that are in there. But if you were doing a tutorial blog post, you could make a little GIF showing the steps on how to do something. Darren: Excellent. We got Spark, Canva, Ripple, and Giphy so far. Peg: Sketch is one that I like to use. Do you use that one? Darren: I’ve used the desktop version. I think it’s Sketch that I used, anyway. Peg: I like to use that one to do screenshots on my phone when I’m writing tutorials that have to do with anything mobile. So then I can do the little arrows and have little things like if there’s something new that happens on a social platform and you want to show. I like to just do the arrows and stuff because if you show a screenshot, people don’t necessarily know what it is you’re trying to highlight. You try to make it as easy as you can for people. I love to use that on my phone. I really go back and forth between my phone and my desktop a lot. I also use my iPad Pro and I’ve been experimenting a little bit with using Adobe Draw to do some hand lettering but I’m not super professional at it yet but it’s really fun to add onto a graphic just to do a signature or something. Darren: Okay, excellent. That you use with the pen on the Pro? Peg: Yeah, the Apple pencil. Darren: I use Sketch on the desktop as my main screenshot tool. Peg: Oh you do? I don’t even know it did that. Darren: You can have that installed on your computer and instead of just using the Apple screenshot, you can do your screenshots in that and then it allows you to add in arrows and all of the same things that you’ll be doing on your phone but on your desktop as well. As far as I know, it’s a free tool too. Peg: Cool, I’ll check that one out. Because I haven’t done that on desktop and I like to do that. I’m always switching around to find the easiest one to do screenshot. Because when you do that on your Mac, it just saves it to your desktop but then you have to put it in another program so it’s a lot of stops. Darren: There is another one that I use to do a whole website. If I wanted to do a screenshot of a whole website from top to bottom and it’s not all on the one screen, it will scan that whole site but it gets a little bit buggy because Hello Buzz and things like that tend to get captured numerous times across the screen. It’s bit of a problem. Peg: It shows you how many pop-ups you have on your site. Darren: It’s getting less useful. Any other visual tools? Peg: One of the things I was going to say with the multitude of tools that out there, it’s really important to pick one and try it for a while instead of constantly jumping around to a bunch of different ones because it gives you more consistency in your brand and your graphics. If you switch around a lot, it’s hard to get the same exact fonts unless you’re a Photoshop user where then you’re always using your same fonts. But also, you could take classes at Skillshare. Have you done any Skillshare stuff, Darren? Darren: No, I’ve seen them quite a bit. Peg: It’s really reasonable, it’s $10 a month and you can take unlimited classes. If you did want to pump up your blog, if you’re going to be a blogger and you’re in it for the long haul and I always tell myself, “I’m going to get better at it.” They do have classes for Photoshop so you could learn how to use those. Or YouTube is great for tutorials for all the design programs. People have made really great tutorials for it. If you’re somebody who feel stuck and you’re not sure, you feel like they might be too complicated for you, definitely check out YouTube and blog posts to find how to’s and how to do different design things. Give it a good try before you switch to something else because it’s like social platforms. Do you want to use HootSuite or Buffer? It’s personal preference. It’s like going to a doctor, you choose the one that you feel best with that gives you the best advice. They’re all a little bit personal. Some people like more choices. I feel like too many choices gives you design after feel and then you can’t make any decisions. You definitely want to get to the proficiency stage so you can stop using the templates. The templates in all of them are great when you start out but you really need to get proficient so you can make your own template so your designs look different. Darren: I was going to say, this is one of the questions we’ve got in the Facebook group from one of our members is that people love the audio of the graphic overlays but they bring you so much. How do you create them so that they’re different? That was one of the question I’d wanted to ask you. How can you add a little uniqueness into that apart from learning the tools a little bit better? Is it something that you can give us some tips on with that? Peg: Sure. Definitely, the thing is it’s good to have those at the beginning so you could learn how the tool works. You can get ideas, you can play with them because Canva and Adobe Spark both have templates. But then, once you’re comfortable using the buttons and everything, you definitely want to step away from that and instead of taking a templated design, just start your own design. Then just think about really what your blog post is about. You want to create your own brand. If you don’t already have one, a brand design. You want to have a visual style guide for your brand. You have your font and your colors. Even in style of photos, your brand should have a personality so you might have always humorous, funny photos or maybe serious photos. I write about social media, you write about blogging so maybe they’re going to have computers or people working. But you don’t want them to be too stock photo-ish but just of the same theme because eventually what you want is for people to see your images and to know that it’s yours. I have people that see my stuff on Twitter or on Facebook and they say, “Oh, I knew this was yours because I saw your graphic and I loved it and I knew that it would lead to a great blog posts.” They tie that together, they tie seeing a graphic on Twitter with knowing it’s going to my blog. That’s why it’s so important. If you don’t have that, they’re going to click on somebody else’s great image on Twitter. Because tweets don’t last very long, a tweet lasts 20 minutes from the time you hit send or it’s published. After 20 minutes, it’s dead in the water unless somebody goes and says, “Oh, I wonder if Darren’s published.” They’ll think lately and they click over to your profile and they scroll down. But most people look at their news feed or lists so it’s important to have really eye-catching images that do look the same. You want to create a visual style guide. I do have a blog post about that on my blog. But the things that you want to come up with are your brand colors, you want a main one or two colors, maybe one more accent color. You want a main font and maybe one accent font so maybe it might have one that’s a little bit more decorative and one that’s a little bit smaller for the sub header. Then you’d have your logo that you would use the same every time. Then you just want to remix that into different variations but keeping it in the same family. It’s not as hard as it seems, the more consistent you are, the easier it gets. Then you build the brand and you know when you go in, you’re going to use the same blue, you’re going to use this font. You start seeing what things work well together. Then you think, “Okay, this one is a lighter background so this needs a darker color over it.” Play with the templates to get a feel for what designs look balanced. You can create something that’s visually the same style as of one of the template but change all of it to match your brand. It doesn’t look exactly like the template but you could say, “Oh, well they used a little shape in the background.” Then you can copy the elements of it and then tweak it to match your brand. Once you start doing that, you’ll get more comfortable with it. Darren: I find that templates are sometimes good starting places as well and you can change it from a rectangle to a circle. Change the shape. Change the fonts from what they’ve got there. You can use them as a stepping stone towards learning how to use the tool and making them completely unique. Peg: It’s not as hard as it seems. Just try to practice with the templates and then bring yourself off the templates and create your own designs based on your own brand. It’s really important if you guys are listening to this, I know you want to be pro bloggers too. Take the time to figure out your visual brand and then it’s not a decision you have to make anymore. You always just know these are the fonts and these are the colors. Another tool, speaking of colors is if you need to create a brand new brand, there’s Adobe Color. It used to be Kolor but in Adobe, they have a tool where you can make different color palettes. I love that because what I did for my blog makeover, two blog makeovers ago, was I had this picture that I absolutely loved. It was the inspiration for my whole design. I put this into the tool and it gave me a color palette based on that. It picks the colors out. Then even going one step further, it gives you different colors. You can be all coordinated, you can have opposite colors, tertiary colors. It gives you a whole bunch of different brand palettes. Darren: It’s going to give you a collection of colors that are going to work together. Excellent! Peg: You can pick your main color. It gave me combinations that I wouldn’t necessarily thought of. Then you could just save those and you get the hacks codes and you save them and then you always have it. You can figure it out, it’s not that hard. But you definitely do want to have a visual style that includes your color. Then, another tool that I like it’s a Chrome extension called Eyedropper tool. I like that because if you have your brand colors but you’re making something that has a certain color in it, you can use a little Eyedropper tool and then it grabs the color out of the photo so you can match the photo exactly, which Photoshop has that built-in but the other tools don’t have that. Darren: To be able to do that from your browser makes a lot of sense. Give me a list of all these so anyone who is listening along and wanting to find all these tools, I will link to them all in the show notes today. Peg: Cool. Darren: One of the questions I’ve had a number of times over in the Facebook group is around images. A lot of these tools have stock photos in them. Adobe Spark does, Canva does. Do you have any other image stock photography sites that you love and that you recommend? Peg: Yes, I have one I found. It’s amazing. It’s called librestock.com. When you do a search in there, a search is like 43 other photo sites. Everything is free on this site. Searching this one free site takes you to all the other free sites. Images are really good. The one that I like the best out of all the ones that it searches is Unsplash. It has really gorgeous photos on there. But I usually start with Librestock just because it searches Unsplash and 42 other ones. All of them you can legally use. When you click on them, it does show you what the other site that it comes from and then you have to click through one more thing. You’ll click through and it takes you to that site and then usually you just download them or they may have question or something on there but all of them are free. It just gives you a huge variety. Darren: I’m going to be checking that one out. I use Unsplash a lot as well. In fact anytime I open a new tab on Chrome, it opens up a photo for me in Unsplash which I like as well. Peg: There are beautiful photos out there, really beautiful. Darren: The only problem I have all these free ones is you do see the same image a lot on blogs. You got to dig in a little bit and find something that maybe hasn’t been used as much. Peg: That’s the nice thing about Unsplash and Librestock. You’ll find things that aren’t the same that you see. They’re not traditional stock photos. I used to use big stock photos a lot but those are the ones that are the more typical “stock” photos. But Unsplash are like because it’s different. It makes it harder when you have a subject like social media business or entrepreneurship because there’s a lot more nature photos and things like that. Darren: I find that I’m always looking for photos of photographers because that do really well for us but there’s only so many photos of cameras and photographers on these sites. Peg: Yeah. You’ll find some good ones on Librestock because I have searched for photos on there. My favorite paid one, it’s a pretty expensive one but I love it. It’s stocksy.com. If you have a project that you want a really stellar photo, Stocksy has beautiful photos. They’re very not stock photo-ish, they’re like lifestyle photos. Those are my favorite ones. But it’s hard to say even on the other ones because when you know you can go on Librestock and get all the other ones. But that being said, I do search a lot right in Adobe Spark and Canva because I know that you can use all of those legally. I’m sure you probably had other podcast where you talked about legally using photos. Darren: Yeah. We’ve talked a little bit about using other people’s content. I guess the other option that some people go for and I’d love to hear your opinion on it is such like Flickr or 500 Pixels where they’ve got creative commons photos that you can either embed or use as well. Do you have any thoughts on those sites? Peg: The embedded, I looked up both of those 500 Pixels and Flickr and they both have embeddable images. If you use the embeddable images, then you do have permission to use the photos no matter what. That’s really good because it does the photo attribution right when you embed it. You’re 100% set. I used to get tons of photos from Flickr but my fear was you can go and change the settings on photos and change the creative commons license. Then I was afraid that if I use the photo and then a year later they change the license on it, you could get hit for that. Darren: This is something I ask the question with an opinion as well and that is exactly what you said. I had a lawyer approach me recently asking me for payment for a photo that I embedded on the site 2004 I think it was. It was a creative commons license photo at that time and then they changed it. I was able to go back and show them using the internet archive that it used to be a creative commons image. Peg: Sneaky. That’s a good sneaky trick, Darren. Darren: Thank goodness, it saved me $10,000. There is some risk associated with that but if you use the embed, it should be okay because they don’t allow you, at least on Flickr, to embed unless the photographer gives you permission to use the photo if that’s the case. Peg: Yeah. It’s said that and then also if they change them gassing them, the embed would just have an air image on there something. Darren: That’s the other risk is that you end up with posts with broken images in them because the photographer takes them off and you end up with this ugly gray thing saying this image is no longer available. It doesn’t look too professional. Peg: It’s tricky. That’s the thing that people really need to think about. Other people say like, “I can’t afford a photo.” And I always say, “Can you afford the $10,000 if you get busted for taking somebody’s photo from Google?” No. The other thing that can happen which I mentioned briefly is you can do a takedown notice with Google. You get the black mark on your blog and you get zero traffic or referral for that forever. I reported someone because they took all these content from one of my blog post and they put it into an infographic and they didn’t credit me for it. Which even when they credit on an infographic, it’s just your name on there. It’s not a link back or anything. Their infographic went viral at Pinterest. I said, “You took this and you didn’t ask permission.” It was a secret formula that I created for how to do well on Google +. They took it and I was like, “You can’t just do that.” They didn’t want to change it because it was viral so I reported it to Google. They get nothing for that now. Darren: You got to be careful, got to give good credit. Peg: We’re the same way with our writing. We don’t want people to steal our written word. People really just steal images and they don’t think twice about it. They just take them and they think, “Oh, I Googled it and it came up. I was looking for this and I just wanted to use it.” It’s not okay if it’s somebody else’s image. Even if it’s on the internet, it’s not okay. Darren: There’s more and more legal firms now targeting use of image in this way. They’re approaching photographers and say, “We found people using your images.” They’re doing the leg work before they even talk to the photographer because they know it’s easy money. Just be really, really careful on that front. One of the challenges on many bloggers’ face is that they can get overwhelmed in terms of the organization of all these visual images that they’re creating and keeping track of them. You mentioned as we’re preparing this interview that you might have some tools in helping on that side of things as well. Peg: I have one really great one that I love so much and it’s Trello. Have you used Trello yet? Darren: We’ve used it a little bit and then we started using Slack and it took over some of what we were doing as a team but I do know we’ve got some readers who just use Trello for themselves, not even with a team. Peg: I use it for myself and I’ve used it on a team. Slack is great for communication but sometimes it’s hard to find stuff from an old conversation, that’s the problem with Slack. You can integrate Slack and Trello together but Trello is the organizational tool. I look at Slack as the communication and Trello as the organization. They set up to be virtual post-it notes so you could save a whole bunch of things and you can create lists in there. You can add photos in there. What I like to do is create an editorial calendar right on a Trello board. Then you can keep all the pieces for a blog post on one little card. In that one card, you can create a little checklist for each blog post. On my little blog post checklist, I have blog post title because I like to check it to see how it does like that CoSchedule had linear analysis thing. Then, you have the SEO for the post and the is post written in? Do you have the graphics? You could do a little checklist for all the pieces. If you’re working with a team and you have one person editing, one person’s doing the graphics, there’s the checklist that can really be checked off on there. Everybody on your team can be on the cards and you can have conversations in there. If you want to, you can share the link to the Trello card in your Slack channel so you can say like, “I finished doing all the parts for the checklist on here.” And you can put it into the Slack channel saying like, “It’s ready for editing now.” Or “It’s ready for graphics now.” You don’t have more than one person working in the same blog post. Even for me, even for one blogger it helps a lot. What I like is that you can embed all the images in there. If I get my images and I have them but I’m not going to make my graphics, I can just load the raw images in there and then I can make the graphics and put the finished graphics in there. Then work on the blog post later. Blog post, you can have a formula of it. Sometimes you work in different order. Sometimes, I come up with the title first and then I write the blog post. Sometimes I’m writing the blog post and I’m not exactly sure of the title. We work on a different order but then this way, even really experienced bloggers, you can forget a piece. You’re not going to forget them on purpose but you could forget something but it’s great for working on a team as well. But I like it mostly for the graphics because you could load all the pieces. You could load all your social graphics in there too. We didn’t get to the other tool. I’d share that one too. I almost forgot. You almost make me forget one, Darren. We’ll skip with Trello stuff. When you’re in Trello you could create all your social graphics. Say you made the perfect size tweet and you made a great Pinterest graphics, you could put those into Trello and then when you’re done with the post, you put them over in a column that’s just all the finished blog posts. Say two weeks later you want to share that blog post again, you can go back in there and get your graphics out again. Darren: That’s great because I’m always looking for old stuff and then I have to search Twitter to find that graphic that I have already shared. It gets so messy. Peg: When you go in Canva and you have three years worth of graphic, I have so many graphics in there and I’m scrolling forever. This way you create it once and you put it out in that one Trello card and it keeps all the pieces together. It integrates with your iPad, your desktop and your phone. If you did all your work on your desktop but then somebody is asking you, “Hey Darren, did you have a blog post about how to use Trello?” And you’re like, “Yes I do, by the way.” You can tweet it to them and you can pull out the graphic on your phone from your Trello board. Darren: That’s great. Speaking of post about Trello, I just found yours online and I will share it on the show notes. It’s 10 Ways Trello Will Make Us Your Social Media Management Pro. It’s a go to post so I will link to that on the show notes as well. Peg: The one that I use on my blog post is a plug-in called Social Warfare. The website is warfare plug-ins. What I love about this is it’s in the back end so it doesn’t slow your blog post down at all. If you just have an image on the top, if you’re super old school and you just have the one horizontal image at the top, you need to get up to date into 2017. People hit the Pinterest button, there’s the big tall graphic. But you don’t want an 800 x 1200 graphic on your blog post. Then when they hit the Pinterest pin it button the big image pulls up because it’s in the back end. In there you add two separate graphics. You add one that’s a horizontal and one that’s a vertical for Pinterest. The horizontal one is sized, it works for LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook and then when you have all your open graph stuff set up, everything goes perfectly. It also lets you do custom text for the tweet so you can add hashtags and stuff in there if you wanted and then a separate Pinterest description because they’re all a little bit different. If you have a Pinterest description, you would have more keywords, more conversational tone. You wouldn’t just have the title of the blog post. You would say like, “I can’t believe how many great things you can do with Trello. Check out this blog post and learn how you can be a social media pro.” You would want to put something else. It makes it easy to customize it. It’s very similar to using Yoast in the back end of your blog post where you’ve got a couple extra fields. Then it also builds the ability to do the custom click to tweet right in your blog post. It used to be you’d have to go out to the click to tweet site, learn this quote or whatever. It’s built right in. I love that just because the Pinterest graphic for me is the money. My blog gets organic traffic number one and Pinterest traffic number two. Darren: Just a recap on this one. It allows you as you’re writing your blog post to add some extra images and text so that when people hit that share button and appropriate images shown and appropriate text is shown alongside that if that’s a tweet for example. Is that a good summary? Peg: That is a good summary and it doesn’t slow your website down which is important. The reason that some blogs don’t want to put a lot of images is because they feel like it’s going to slow their site down. This keeps them on the back end. It’s extra steps with the graphics in there but if you’re going to the trouble of writing your great blog content, you definitely want it to have optimal sharing when someone else sharing it. You share them initially but then you need to think about when people are coming back to your blog post. Darren: This is a $29 per year product just looking at their website now that allows you to use it on one of your websites. They’ve got other packages if you’ve got more than one website. It’s a paid one but definitely looking at the feature list, it’s got some pretty cool stuff on it. Peg: It’s the only plug-in that does this. To me it’s worth the money because the Pinterest traffic is awesome. It’s not just the web traffic because Pinterest, Shopify did a study and it showed that people spent two times as much on Pinterest as they do on Facebook. If the average Facebook customers’ worth $40 in sales, it’s $80 in sales in Pinterest. People are there really buying more. If you’re selling anything: courses, books, whatever way you’re making money, Pinterest is a great place to be. It’s worth it to me. Darren: One more question that’s just coming on Facebook, from Max is around sizes of images. He’s saying if you had to create, it’s picking up in the fact that you need different size images for different social networks. What sizes are you preparing for each blog post? Peg: Good question. For every blog post, I do 800 x 1200 which would be my Pinterest or 735 x 1102, it’s the same ratio it’s 2:3 ratio. I do a really big one for Pinterest. If you don’t want it, put it on your blog post or use this plug-in. You could just share it to Pinterest with the big image even if you don’t have it on your blog post, you can still create the graphic to share on Pinterest. Twitter I do 1000 x 500 that one’s 2:1. Then Facebook, off the top of my head, I’m totally blanking. That one is a rectangle but you could also just use a 1:1 ratio on Facebook. What I tend to do, I use 1:1 just because I can use that on Instagram and Facebook. Darren: Is it 1200 x 627, was that right? Peg: Yes, that could be. Darren: I think that might be what we do on Facebook. I found if you only want to create to then the Facebook and Twitter one, you can sometimes get away with that because they’re not too far off. Peg: Yeah they’re not too far off but then you definitely need to do a long, tall one for Pinterest. Darren: 800 x 1200 is Pinterest, 1000 x 500 for Twitter, and we think Facebook is 1200 x 620. Peg: Like I said, I usually do 1:1 now just because square does work on Instagram and Facebook. For a while, it didn’t work on Facebook and then they changed it. Darren: Interesting, I’m going to try that for Facebook. That would take off a bit of a vertical space in the page too which isn’t a bad thing. Peg: It works on Twitter as well believe it or not. Square is pretty good, it’s almost the most versatile. If I had to pick one shape, if I was only going to do one, I would do a 1:1 because it’s not the worst on Pinterest either. It sucked into the big, long, tall one. If you did an 800 x 800, it would be pretty good everywhere. But I like to take up as much as I can on Pinterest. Darren: We need to do another Pinterest episode at some point because I have a few other questions on that. We’ve covered enough today unless you’ve got any last tools that we didn’t squeeze into the episode so far. Peg: No, those so far were the ones we’re waiting and waiting. I’d love to come back and talk about Pinterest because I love Pinterest. Darren: Definitely put that on the to-do list for sometime in the coming months. Thanks so much, Peg. Where can our listeners find more about you? Peg: I’m Peg Fitzpatrick everywhere. You can find me on my website at pegfitzpatrick.com or any social media, I’m pretty much there. Come and say hi. Darren: We will link across to Peg’s blog as well as some of the posts that I’ve referred to during the episode as well. Thanks so much, Peg. Hopefully, that you’ve stimulated some great visual content for our listeners’ blogs. We’ll chat again soon. Peg: Okay, thank you. Darren: Thanks for that. Wow. What a lot of information there. As I mentioned at the top of the show, you can head over to our show notes today to get a transcript of everything we discovered as well as all the links to the 14 or 15 tools that we mentioned, as well as some of those posts that we mentioned. There’s a great post I linked there on Peg’s blog on creating a visual style guide which is really worth having a look at. Also, she’s got a great post on how to use Trello, 10 different ways to use Trello as a blogger. I’ll also list there on the show notes some further listening if you did miss one of those early episodes in this series on creating great written content, on creating video content, and creating live videos as well, as well as one on embeddable content. They’re all listed over there on the show notes. Head over to problogger.com/podcast/191. Thanks for listening and I’ll be back with you next week with episode 192. 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.

How to Move Through Failure in 6 Steps In today’s lesson, I want to talk about failure in business and how to move through it. I’ve been asked questions on this topic a number of times in the last few weeks and while it’s a topic most of us probably don’t want to have to learn about – it’s something that we all will need to deal with at one point or another because it’s a part of any business story. We all fail – in fact failure is an essential part of any startup and if you’re not having it it could be a sign that what you’re doing is not pushing hard enough and that you’re spending a lot of time in your comfort zone. SO in this episode I’m going to give you 6 things that I try to do when facing failure of different sizes. I think they’re relevant for the small fails and mistakes that happen to us regularly but am particularly thinking about some of those big ones too! Further Resources on How to Overcome Failure in 6 Steps Facebook Group 3 Questions to Ask When Facing Fear Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Hi there and welcome to episode 190 of the ProBlogger podcast. My name is Darren Rowse and I’m the blogger behind problogger.com. A blog, podcast, event, job board and a series of ebooks, all designed to help you as a blogger to start a blog, to grow your audience, to create amazing content, and to hopefully make some profit from your blog. Learn more about ProBlogger over at problogger.com. In today’s lesson, I want to talk about failure, failure in business particularly, and how to move through it. I’ve been asked questions on this topic a number of times over the last few weeks and when I hear the same question more than once, I often pick up my ears and it often turns into a podcast and that’s what I want to talk about today. It’s something that I guess most of us don’t really want to have to learn about. We don’t want to have to learn how to move through failure but it is something that we will all need to deal with a one point or another, both in our personal lives but also as part of a business story and our blogging journey. We all fail. In fact, I think failure is an essential part of any start up, any business. If you’re not having times of failure, if you’re not having things where things don’t succeed, it’s possibly a sign that what you are doing really isn’t outside of your comfort zone and perhaps you’re not pushing things hard enough. In this episode, what I want to do is give you six things that I try and do and I emphasize try here because there’s a right answer when it comes to failure and there’s an actual answer, so most of us swing from the good things through to the unhelpful things. Those are six things that I try to do when I’m facing failure or mistakes of different sizes. I actually think most of what I’m going to share today is relevant for the small failures we have, those things that just don’t go right from day to day but also those bigger things as well. I’m particularly thinking of those because some of the questions I’ve heard over the last week have been on those bigger failures. You can find today’s show notes with the six points that I’m going to go through as well as some further reading over at problogger.com/podcast/190. Also, check out the Facebook group at problogger.com/group where there’s some great discussion going on at the moment. We’ve seen a lot of new members over the last few weeks. Let’s get into today’s show. Like I said in my introduction today, I’ve had a number of questions on the topic of failure recently. Willie over in the Facebook group asked just a few weeks ago, how would you recover from a massive failure? And then Max also messaged me and gave me permission to share his question. He said, “I’ve just had a big failing in my blogging business and I feel unable to move on. Do you have any advice?” That’s what I want to address today. What do we do, a lot of these will be applicable to other areas of life too, but particularly in a blogging business, the failures we have can sometimes be very public failures and sometimes the mistakes we make, the things that we say we’re going to do don’t often work out and there’s public consequences on that. I guess I’m tackling it from that angle as well. Firstly, let me give you what I usually do first. That is to freak out. Usually for me, when I have a failure, when I make a mistake, when something doesn’t go right, I usually have some kind of an emotional response. I’m a fairly measured person, you would meet me in person you might not think that I freak out but I do. I throw as good tantrum as anyone else, I panic as much as anyone else, I think the worst as much as anyone else, and as I was preparing this podcast, I was going to say, “Move past that phase as quickly as you can and get onto the more constructive things.” I actually think that it may be important to have that moment of freak out. Failure takes its toll on us and that is a natural thing. I think it’s probably important to get through those feelings and to some extent embrace them and sit with them, and to let them out. I think it’s really important to let those feelings out, to not bottle them up. This is going to come out to a lot of what I’m going to talk about today. I think we do need to get those feelings out. All I would say is as you are having your freak out, as you are having your tantrum, as you are having that panic, try to do it in a safe place that wouldn’t have long lasting consequences on you, those around you, and your business. I think it’s totally fine to feel the pain, to feel out of control for a moment. That is natural and it’s okay to do that so allow yourself to do that. But as you’re feeling that, try to move yourself towards the six things that I’m going to talk about next. Out of that panic, out of that freak out, here’s what I would suggest you do. The first one is so important and that is to try. This is hard, all of this is hard, but try to separate your failure away from your identity. One other the biggest challenges that I think many people face today is that they equate their self-worth with their achievements or their lack of achievements, also, what other people think about them and I think this is a real trap. This is a huge trap. I want to give you an equation. This is an equation that I see the world suggesting when it comes to our self-worth. The world says self-worth equals what I achieve plus what others think of me. Let me repeat it, self-worth equals what I achieve plus what others think of me. This is a message we hear all the time. We hear it in conversations, we say it in the media, and we say it in marketing. My self worth is all about what I achieve my success, and what others think of me. So to be worthwhile, I need to achieve a lot, I need to have other people think well of me. This idea creeps out in a lot of what we do. Most of us don’t even know that we abide by that equation, but we are constantly looking for success, and we’re constantly looking to look good in front of other people. The problem with this equation is that it really sets us up with problems because it’s just not realistic. All of us are going to have times in our personal lives and in our business where we do not achieve, where we fail. It’s just human to have failures and so if we equate our self-worth with achieving with success, then we’re setting ourselves up for a massive fault. All of us are going to have times in our lives where other people don’t think much of us. If we base our self-worth upon our success and what other people perceives of us, then our self-worth is going to have times where we will have very little of it. That’s an unhealthy thing. It’s going to only lead to poor self-worth. It’s going to lead to a roller coaster ride through your life. I guess one of the big things that I want to get across and this is something that I try and really remind myself in those times of failure is that my self-worth doesn’t come from what I achieve and it doesn’t come from what other people think of me, it actually comes from something else. For me, that comes more from my faith. For other people, it will come from something else. But if there’s one thing I really want to get across today, as we tackle this topic of failure, is that you are not worthless because of your failure. You’re not worthless because of your failure, you are not a failure. What you have done, your business may have had a time of failing but that doesn’t mean that you are a failure, don’t personalize your failure. Particularly if it’s a business failure which is really not connected to you, it is something that you do. Yes, it’s an action that has failed, but it is not you. Don’t identify yourself as a failure just because of something that you have done. Number one, separate your failure out from your identity. Number two, don’t face it alone. I’m not sure whether this is a gender thing, whether it’s more of a personality thing, but a trap that I’ve seen many of my friends fall into is that they face their failure alone. They internalize their failure. One of the best things that I think you can do is to admit your failure and to share with another person, just one other person. That will help so much. Even if that person has no real understanding of your business, by telling them what you are facing, you’re doing something very healthy. To verbalize it and to start a conversation about it actually is a very powerful thing. Name the mistake, name the failure, first, by you alone and internalize it and you will very luckily become overwhelmed by it. It will become bigger than it really is. This is something I’ve fallen into the trap of, many times. Even last year, the end of last year, I had a couple of months where revenue wasn’t really great for the business. It wasn’t particularly anything I had done, it just was a bit of a lean patch and I know many other bloggers went through that. For the first few weeks that I noticed that, I internalized it and I would lie in bed at night thinking that the end of the world was coming and not being able to see anything positive in my business, even though there was lots there. It was only once I shared that load with Vanessa, and for me, Vanessa, my wife, my partner, is the place that I go to. By simply naming the issue, by putting words to it, it put things back into perspective. I realized, even as I spoke the words of what was going on that there were solutions, that there were ways forward. The other person may not even know what you are talking about but you, simply verbalizing it to another person, can be a very powerful thing, so tell a friend, share the load. As I said, it’s usually for me, talking with Vanessa. Today, she is a blogger and so she does have some understanding of what I’m talking about but even in the early days, back in 2002, 2003, when none of my friends knew what blogging was, when social media didn’t even exist, I found simply by verbalizing those things really did help a lot. In doing so, you’re actually going to find that you’re not the only person who has failed as well, we all do. Most of the people that you share your failure with will be able to recount some story in their own life where they faced something similar, even if the details are different. The other thing I would suggest you do though is to also find someone who does understand your business. Talk about it and this might be the second person that you talk to. It maybe that you need to find another blogger, it may be, for a period of time you need to find a business coach or a mentor. Those types of relationships are really important, even if they’re not formal business coach type relationships. There are a few people in my life, if I’m having a tough time in business, I’ll pick up the phone, and even though they might be in the different type of business, to me, they understand some of the pressures of what it is that we’re going through. Get some professional advice. It doesn’t have to be an ongoing thing. It might just be a simple phone call with someone who’s been through what you’ve been through and to draw the wisdom of them. It might also be something like more of a group type of support, maybe finding a Facebook group like the ProBlogger Facebook group or there are plenty of others online as well to actually have those types of people we can present the failure, the mistake or part of it to that type of group and get that type of advice. Lastly, I would say is that there are times where you might need to find a therapist. You might need to find a counselor. Perhaps your business failure has rocked your world, your confidence, your personal health, your mental health in some way. There is no shame in actually finding someone to give you support on that emotional level. When you’re sick physically you go and see a doctor and when you shaking up emotionally with your mental health, I think it’s important to seek help there as well. That’s something that I’ve done from time to time as well. Sometimes, our business life spills out into our personal lives. Just to encourage you if that is spilling out to actually get some help in that way. Maybe going to speak to a doctor and getting some help in that way as well. No shame at all in that. It’s an important part of this journey. Number one is to not take on that failure in your business into your personal identity. Number two, don’t face it alone and number three, is related to not facing it alone and that is to be transparent. It really does relate a little bit to what I’ve just talked about, you speaking with that friend, or that colleague, or that doctor, and being a little bit vulnerable with another person, it’s being transparent about the type of failure that you’ve had. Often as you begin to process these failures, you realize there are other people impacted by your failure. This doesn’t always happen but in many cases there will be someone else who has been impacted by the mistake that you have made. It maybe that there is a business partner, maybe there is a team member, maybe there is a colleague, maybe even your readers as a blogger have been impacted by your failure, by your mistake. The temptation when other people are hurt by our failures or impacted by our failures is to save face, it’s to hide our failures, and to actually even pretend that it didn’t happen or to lie about them, perhaps. But in most cases, this just escalates the problem, and this is really tough. I know it’s tough and I’ll say it’s kind of hesitating but come clean. Admit to your failing to those who are impacted, own your part in it, take responsibility for the mistakes that you have made and attempt to deal with those consequences to find a win-win solution for those who are impacted and to I guess seek forgiveness and to actually right the wrongs that have been done. This isn’t really relevant to all types of failures but in many cases, I’m sure you can realize that those times in your life where you have had a failing, other people are impacted by that. Many times the failing, there’s ripple effects that go out from it. To give you a really quick example, and this is a small failing, I know many of you are probably thinking of bigger things of what I’m about to share with you but this sort of illustrates in my own business a mistake that was made a few years ago, we sent an email, a sales email that was supposed to go to a few hundred people. It was a small segment of our photography blog. A few hundred people was supposed to get this sales email. We actually sent it out to every single person on any of my list including my ProBlogger readers. I think it was close to 700,000 to 800,000 people who got this email. The email was irrelevant to most people. It was a sales email and it went out. My immediate reaction was to panic, to throw a bit of a tantrum, to run away, to pretend it didn’t happen and I was really worried, particularly my ProBlogger readers, that they were going to get this photography sales email. How was that going to impact? Was it going to impact my credibility? I really hoped that no one would notice but I quickly realized that people were going to notice and so I had to come clean about that mistake as quickly as I could sent an email again to those hundreds of thousands of people, apologizing and owning the mistake that we’ve made and apologizing for that. I sent that second email with a lot of fear. I wasn’t quite sure how it would be received. Whether people will believe me? I was amazed, instantaneously I started getting emails from readers, messages from readers, saying that they understood it, that they were confused by the first email but they really appreciated me owning the mistake. By no means was there any intention for this to happen. It actually ended up being something that built the brand. I think people were impressed by the way that it was handled and people reflected back that they could relate to the mistake. In many ways, sending that email, owning that mistake, owning that failure, actually humanized the brand of ProBlogger and Digital Photography School. That’s not a big example. I know there are bigger failures. There has been bigger failures in own life but I’ve seen time and time again, when we own our mistakes, when we own our failures, when we take responsibility for where we have done the wrong thing, that often will be received well from other people. Most people are incredibility generous and gracious and can actually be something that can lead to solutions as well. As you are transparent with people, you will hear back things that can often help you to move forward through that failure. Number three is to be transparent. Number four is to learn from it. This is something I say to my kids all the time. I say to my kids all the time, making a mistakes are not a bad thing, it’s actually making the same mistake repeatedly and not learning from that mistake, that’s the issue. That’s where I get across with my kids. If you made a mistake, that’s totally fine. What are we going to learn from it? How are we going to do things differently next time? When they make the mistake again, that’s when we have tough words. That’s where we really need to address it, I guess. Making mistakes is a part of life. It’s actually I think a sign of life, that something that you are building momentum, that you are moving forward. Mistakes come when we do that. Failure comes when we do that. Embrace those mistakes, but look for what you can learn through that mistake. All businesses will have their times of failure, but what you can learn from it, why did the failure happen? Spend some time with that question, what actually happened. Don’t just move on to the next thing, what actually happened, what could you have done differently that would provide a different result. What can you learn from that failure, what lessons were there? Don’t run away from the mistake, the failure, embrace it. It’s a learning opportunity. If you can find some way to see as a positive and to do it differently next time, that’s a very powerful thing. You know that for a fact, if you actually think back to previous failures you’ve had, you know that those times, sometime they make you who you are today. In hindsight it’s really easy to see that but trying try and convince yourself out in the moment as well. What can I learn for this? How I can turn this around? Number five thing is to keep moving. I do think it’s important to sit with the problem, to sit with the foe, to learn from it, to rest perhaps, if you need to recover from it, because sometimes it does take an emotional toll. There are times where I think in business we need to rest, we need to stop, and we need to have a break. Sometimes, after failure, that can be a really good time to do that, to look after ourselves, but I think it’s really important to then move on to keep the momentum going in some way. Right now I’m teaching my five year old to ride a bike. I know a lot of you listening to this podcast, the parents, have had that experience yourself, and he has had his fair share of crashes over the last few weeks. He has scrapes, bruises, and sores on his elbows, on his knees and he even got a little one on his nose at the moment. He has had these crashes and that’s part of learning to ride a bike. He kind of understands that but there are these moments after he has a crash, after he has banged into a fence sort or something, that his natural reaction is to say, “I don’t want to do it. I don’t want to ride a bike,” and to ride off this whole experience. I understand that, I understand that’s a natural reaction, I understand the little tantrums that he throws at those point, but I also understand that if he wants to develop this skill, he needs to get back on the bike. He understands that too in many ways as well and sometimes a little rest is in order, sometimes a little what went wrong is in order so we can learn from the mistake, but most importantly, he gets back on that bike. The same is true in our business, failure can paralyze us. It can stop us in our tracks but it’s important to keep moving, get back on the bike. Identify your next best step, maybe that your next best step is about picking up the pieces and starting again. Maybe it’s about evolving what you do, tweaking it, taking the lessons from the mistake and just evolving and tweaking or it may even be that your next best step is to start something new. Drawing out what you’ve learned, identify something that you need to do to keep you moving and if possible include someone else in that conversation, tell someone about that next best step as well. The last one I want to share with you is going to annoy some of you. This comes from my personality type which I’m told can be quite annoying at times, but that is to be positive. It’s so hard to do it but I always try and look at the bright side. I’m told by Vanessa and her friends that I am eternally an optimist and that can be incredibly annoying, but I am always looking for positive. I think even in those times of incredible failure there are sometimes, there’s almost always some sort of a glimmer of something positive in the midst of that. Sometimes, it does take a little while for this positive glimmer-y little sparks to emerge but when you see them, grab them and move towards those glimmers, focus upon them. It’s often the small little sparks that fly in the midst of a failure that can become our next big thing. It can actually be the failing, the mistake that we’ve made that shapes us and that becomes a part of who we are and how we move forward. It can actually become a part of your brand in many ways. I can think of many people over the years, who actually through failing that they’ve actually discovered a passion. They’ve actually discovered out of their own pain a way that they can help other people who go through a similar things as well. Be very aware that in the midst of the gloominess of failure can actually be the seeds, of something really important. Be on the lookout for those things and on the lookout for those small sparks and to be positive about those sort of thing. Celebrate those little things in small ways in the midst of that pain as well. I know as I’ve gone through this, part of me is cringing if I’m honest with you because I know in the midst of failure sometimes you don’t want to hear this kind of stuff. Hearing things like find the sparks, it sounds a bit corny, but I really hope that somewhere in the midst of those six things is going to be a way forward for different one of us, who are going through different stages of failure at the moment. Separate your failure from your identity, don’t face it alone, draw other people alongside you to share the stuff that you’re going through. Number three, be transparent with the mistake, with the pain. I think that’s particularly important in the blogging space because many times when we try and hide the issues, the failings, and the mistakes, these things actually come out later. They can actually come back so be transparent. Number four analyze the failings, analyze the mistake, and work out what you can do to do things differently in future. Number five is to keep moving, keep momentum going, get back on the bike. And lastly, find those glimmers, those sparks of opportunity, those sparks of positivity, and focus upon those things. I really do hope that somewhere in the midst of those six pieces of advice is something that helps you to move through the inevitable failures that will come your way, the inevitable mistakes that we all do, and that will help you to move through those things into exciting times ahead. You can find today’s show notes over at problogger.com/podcast/190 where you have the opportunity to not only get a transcript of today’s show and find other episodes that relate to the show, but you can also leave a comment. Also, check out the Facebook group problogger.com/group. That will redirect you into that Facebook group. Lastly, if you’re looking for something else to listen to, check out episode 54 of this podcast. It kind of relates. There’s some overlap in topic. In episode 54, I gave you three questions to ask yourself when you’re facing fear, which is something that I know relates to these times of failure as well. If you want something else, you’re feeling fearful at the moment about those sorts of failures that you go through, go and listen to episode 54 as well. It may help you to move through that, that time as well. Thanks for listening today. I look forward to chatting with you in episode 191 next week on the ProBlogger podcast. Before I go, I want to give a big shout out and say thank you to Craig Hewitt and the team at Podcast Motor who’ve been editing all of our podcasts for some time now. Podcast Motor have a great range of services for podcasters at all levels. They can help you to setup your podcast, but also offer a couple of excellent services to help you to edit your shows and get them up with great show notes. Check them out at podcastmotor.com. How did you go with today’s episode? Enjoy this podcast? Sign up to our ProBloggerPLUS newsletter to get notified of all new tutorials and podcasts below.

Removing the Barriers to Create Video Content on Your Blog In today’s lesson, I’ve got some very practical and actionable information for you on how to shoot great video for your blog using your smartphone. As I’ve mentioned a few times lately in episodes – video is becoming one of the hottest types of content online. While the written word isn’t going anywhere video content helps you to grow your reach, stand out from the crowd, make a connection with your audience and is highly shareable. We’ve all heard about the opportunity but if you’re anything like me – you have a few questions, challenges and barriers that stop you getting into video. I don’t have the right gear! I don’t feel comfortable in front of camera? I don’t know the first thing about the technicalities of shooting and editing good video? Recently at SMMW I bumped into a fellow Aussie by the name of Justin Brown who was doing a workshop on how to create great video using the camera that most of us already own – the one in our smart phone. Justin teaches how to create great online video at his site – primalvideo.com I heard so many great things about Justin’s workshop that as soon as I got home I decided to get him on the podcast. I just finished our interview and I’m so excited by what Justin shared. Over the next 35 minutes Justin is going to remove all of the barriers to getting into video that I just mentioned. He’s going to tell you what gear you need (your smartphone is #1). We talk affordable options for mics, lights, apps etc. He shares tips on getting comfortable on camera. Tips on how to set up your shot – we talk framing, lighting and more He gives tips on editing your videos – he suggests apps and software as well as how to approach the edit And we finish up by talking about how to export your video so it’s ready to be used online. This is a highly practical interview that we designed to help you to create that first video. Tools and Apps mentioned in this episode: Microphones: Lavalier: BOYA BY-M1 (approximately $20)   Shotgun: RODE VideoMicro (approximately $59) Wireless: RODE Wireless Filmmaker Kit (approximately $399) (not mentioned but a wireless option) Lighting – Portable: YongNuo YN300 Air  (approximately $40)   Aputure Amaran AL-M9 (approximately $45) Lighting – Studio (not mentioned but worth checking out):: SOFTBOX: StudioFX Lighting Kit (approximately $79) LED: StudioPRO S-600D Dimmable 600 LED Kit (approximately  $426) Wide Angle Lens: Techo Universal Professional HD Camera Lens Kit (approximately $16) Tripods (not mentioned but worth checking out): SMALL: Arkon Tripod + Phone Mount (approximately $20)   MEDIUM: Velbon EX mini (approximately $35) LARGE: Slik Video Sprint 2 (approximately $152) Monitoring Software (PC/Mac) Reflector 2   Filming Apps: iOS: FiLMiC Pro     Editing Apps: iOS: iMovie        iOS: Pinnacle      Android: Cyberlink PowerDirector Link to Justin’s site – Primal Video Justin’s YouTube account Join the video challenge in our Facebook group Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Darren: Hi there and welcome to episode 189 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 to grow a profitable blog. You can learn more about ProBlogger over at ProBlogger.com. In today’s lesson, I’ve got some very, very practical and actionable information for you on how to shoot great video for your blog using your smartphone. As I’ve mentioned many times over in the last 100 or so episodes, video is becoming one of the hottest types of content online at the moment. Whilst we covered in episode 187 the written word isn’t going away anywhere soon, video content really does help you to grow your reach, to stand out from the crowd, to make a connection with your audience, and to create content that is shareable. We’ve all heard about this opportunity of video but if you’re anything like me, you probably have either some questions or some challenges or barriers that stop you from getting into video. Things like I don’t have the right gear, or I don’t feel comfortable in front of a camera, or I don’t know the first thing about the technicalities of shooting and editing good video. They’re the questions I hear a lot, they’re the questions that I have, the barriers that I have myself to creating video. Recently, I was over in San Diego at Social Media Marketing World and I bumped into a fellow Australian on the first night, a guy by the name of Justin Brown. Justin was one of the speakers at the event. He was doing a workshop at that event on creating great video using the camera that most of us already own, the one in our smartphone. Justin teaches how to do that and he has some great teaching on creating online video at his site, primalvideo.com. I heard so many great things about that particular workshop that as soon as I got home, I decided to get him on the podcast because I think he’s got some really good information for the ProBlogger audience. I literally just finished our interview. I’m so excited by what we covered for about 35 minutes. Over the next 35 or so minutes, you are going to hear Justin remove all of those barriers that I just mentioned for getting into video. He’s going to tell you exactly what gear you need. The number one thing is your smartphone but we talked also about things like microphones, lights, apps, attachable lenses, and just how essential those things are. He really does suggest some very affordable options in each of those categories if you do have a little bit to invest. He also talks about how the smartphone itself is creating good enough videos, that you don’t need a lot of that stuff as well. He also shares some tips about getting comfortable in front of a camera. We talked about some different types of videos that you could create, that don’t necessarily mean you need to get in front of that camera. He shared some tips on how to set up your shot. We talked about framing, lighting, and sound. He gives tips on editing videos including which apps and software might be best to use. We finished up talking about how to export that video so that it’s ready to be used online. This is probably the most practical interview that I’ve ever done. You’re probably going to want to have something to take some notes on or you want to head over to the shownotes where I do list all of the pieces of gear that he mentions as well as the apps and software as well. At the end of this interview, I issue you with a challenge. Be warned, I’m going to ask you to create a video. I really would love it if you would share it on our Facebook group. If you go to ProBlogger.com/group, you will find the ProBlogger Facebook group. In that group, that’s a safe place where you can share the videos you created as a result of this particular interview. You may not share it anywhere on else on the web but the challenge today is to create a video because by creating that video, it might be your first, you are going to learn so much. You may not share it but you’re going to learn a lot that will help you to create a better second video and a better third one. Take the challenge today. If you want to head over to the shownotes to be able to follow through some of the tools and apps that Justin mentions, head over to ProBlogger.com/podcast/189, where there’s also a full transcript. Let’s get into today’s interview. Justin, I spoke in my recent episode 187 about how different types of content have almost like superpowers, different strengths, I guess. Written content is really great for being found in search engines, visual content is great because it gets shared a lot and grabs people’s attention, audio is good for building intimacy with your audience. I’d be interested to hear what you think video’s super power is. Justin: I think it’s a hybrid of all of them. These days, you can get some really good optimized SEO for your videos. YouTube is the second biggest search engine followed by Google. What we do with our YouTube channel is we tailor or we optimize our videos for Google rankings. A lot search terms these days when you search for a problem or search on Google, you’ll actually be served up a video first before you actually get to the web pages themselves. I think video is really a hybrid because you get a different level of connection than just audio or just text with your audience a well. I think it’s a bit of a hybrid of both. Darren: Maybe you could just give our audience a little bit of your back story. How did you first get into video and why do you major on it today? Justin: I’ve pretty much worked in video production my entire professional career for as far back as I can remember. I’ve been able to work on some really crazy projects with some really amazing people. I followed the big wave surfer Mark Visser, Australian guy, around the world for a few years following his big waves. I think he’s the guy that surfed Jaws in Maui at 2:00AM and was throwing jet skis out of planes and all sorts of stuff. I’ve worked with guys that have 22 minute breath holds. Some really crazy people but also some really inspirational people like UN Women. I’ve had opportunities to work on some really top level documentaries as well in the health and wellness space. From that, I’ve started a company with my brother Mike called Primal Video. We really just help people get better results with their videos faster. Essentially, removing all the barriers that we have and that we create to creating video content. That’s what we’re up to these days. Darren: That’s a great introduction to what I really want to cover in today’s episode because every time I talk to bloggers about using video in their content creation, I get these recurring objections that people have or barriers that they have into getting into video. I even asked about it in our Facebook group just a few minutes ago and already I can see seven or eight people with questions but they’re all to do with these common objections I get. Do you get a lot of those objections? What are the main ones that you get? Justin: I guess the fear of being on camera is a big one and actually sort of stepping out. From someone who’s always been behind cameras, a camera man, producer, or director, to step in front of the camera, it’s a freaky thing. It’s not normal for most people. Some people love it. Some people have that gift but I can guarantee you that most of us don’t have that. It’s something that I don’t necessarily struggle with but it’s still not something I’m really comfortable with. It’s definitely something that everyone should practice and I think that everyone should be doing but it’s normal to have these fears. It’s the fear of being on camera but also the fear of the technology or the technology, using it as an excuse like, “Next week I’ll have a different camera so I’ll hold off creating the content until then.” Or “My audio is going to be bad because it’s noisy outside.” All these little things that we can talk ourselves out of creating the content. I guess the key is actually starting and doing it, you can always grow from there but it’s also the hardest part. Darren: The first objection I wanted to talk about was pretty much related to that. I don’t have a good enough camera. It’s too expensive. I can’t afford to buy it. The reason I wanted to get you on is your session at Social Media Marketing World this year was about creating video with smartphones which most of us have in our pockets. I guess the first question is do you really think a smartphone is good enough if you want to create video for your business? Justin: 100%. As you said, I had that session at Social Media Marketing World which was purely based on that. We have these awesome cameras now in our pockets, in our hands. The cameras on them are actually really phenomenal. As long as you set them up right and get your lighting right, and all these sorts of simple things really, once you hear them, then you can actually get some really good results with them. It’s always a case of using the gear that you’ve got instead of delaying until future gear, until you’ve got that new camera. It’s not needed. Use simple things like a plugin microphone to get better results. We can dive into that if you’d like. Darren: Yeah, for sure. What other gear would you recommend people investing in? Maybe, if you could put it in a priority, what would you get first to take it to the next level? Justin: First off, 100% would be a microphone, an aftermarket microphone. If you don’t have one, then I’m still big advocate for start now. Don’t say, “Justin said I need to have a microphone so I’m not going to create a video.” Use your phone to still create videos, but if you’re going to spend money. If you’ve got bad video and good audio, you can replace the video and use slides or images or animations, anything. You can still use your video. If your audio is bad, then your whole video is going to look and sound bad. Audio would be by far the number one. Darren: Do you have a first mic recommendation? Like for an actual microphone that people should look at? Justin: There are three that I would recommend. There’s a $20 US microphone called the BOYA BY-M1. It’s a wired lapel or lavalier microphone. It’s got a huge cable, it’s like a six meter cable on it. You’re then connected to your phone but the audio that you would get through that is phenomenal. If you don’t want to be tied or tethered to your phone or to your camera—that microphone lets you work on both your phone and your camera, both DSLRs and smartphone so that’s pretty cool—then you can get Shotgun Microphone, something like the RODE VideoMicro. I think this sells in Australia for around the $79 mark. It’s a little Shotgun Microphone so you can move away from your phone a little bit but the closer you are to it, the better the sound. All these things aren’t going to be breaking the bank account but they will make a huge difference to the quality of your videos. Darren: Great. What would you be looking at next? We’ve got microphone, lights. Justin: Tripod, I would go tripod or some sort of stabilizer over lights. Lights would probably be number three. Getting the phone out of your hands or getting it stable is the next important step I would say to creating professional looking videos. If you had a production team coming out to do your videos for you, they’re not going to handhold the cameras, they’re going to be stable. Whether it’s a selfie stick even if you’re going to be walking around, it’s going to be so much more stable in a selfie stick and out of your hand. If you’re going to be sitting down on a desk, then get a desktop tripod. If you’re going to be standing up, then get a tripod that’s going to go up to your eye level of where you’re going to be standing. It sounds so simple, really, it essentially is simple, it’s just to get it out of your hands. Mimic what a production team would do if they showed up at your place to film. Darren: That’s right. There are so many great tools now like this custom made things for live streamers and all kinds of little tools that you can use. It’s probably worth looking. Justin: The little desktop tripods are awesome and you can use them again for Facebook Live, YouTube Live, or Periscope from your mobile. That’s something I think that everyone should grab. You can pick them up for $10, $15 as well. Darren: Yeah, okay. Lights, you mentioned there’s another option. Justin: With your lighting, there’s a heap of options. If you look on places like Amazon, you could waste the part of half a day looking at all different lighting options. The ones that I like at the moment, that are relatively new ones, there’s a brand called Yongnuo. It’s $40. It’s essentially an LED light panel. You can power them from you 240 volt or from your wall socket as well. These are awesome little LED light panels. I guess with your lighting, you want to make sure that you’re lighting up yourself first as the priority. You are the focus, you’re the one that’s delivering the content, you want your audience to be able to see you well and connect with you. Lighting up your background and the rest of your scene or your studio should be secondary. If you’ve only got one light, then make sure it’s lighting yourself up. Another really good portable light is by a company Apache. This is a smaller one. It’s the ILM 9. Another one, I think it’s $45. We’re not talking lots of money but these are great little portable lights that even if you’re going to be out and walking around and want to set up at a park bench to create some content or go live, these are fantastic little lights. Darren: That’s great. I just actually got asked in the Facebook group I run to ask about lighting but also the value of some of those mounted lenses, the wide angle lenses that you can clip on to the front of your phone. Do you put much sway into that type of thing? Justin: I think it’s the kind of thing if you’ve got it or you’re happy to spend the money to get one, again, it’s not a lot of money, then do it. They’re always handy. I always carry one with me. They’re fantastic if you’re going to have more than one person in your video or in your livestream because you get so much more room, but also it helps your phone camera mimic more what a professional camera would. It’s going to be more aesthetically pleasing to the eye. It’s going to be more matching what we’re used to seeing on TV and these sorts of things. I think you could pick them for under $20 price point. TECHO is a brand that we use. It’s a bigger lens and it will fit on the front end, the rear camera for most smartphones that’s why it’s a good, safe bet. Definitely, I think it’s an awesome tool to have with you. I wouldn’t rank it as high as a microphone or as a tripod or as lighting but the more of these things that you can tick off, the better the end result. Darren: In terms of shooting the video, do you generally shoot in the native camera app or do you recommend looking at some of the other apps that are in app stores? Justin: We really come down to the individual. Definitely, you can get great results using the inbuilt camera apps in either iPhone or Android. These days, it’s so easy to manually lock down the exposure and the focus so that you’re not going to have those changes while you’re filming. It’s just a matter of pressing and holding on the screen itself and it will lock down the focus point and the exposure, the brightness so it’s not going to change as you move in the shot or if the cloud comes over or those sorts of things. That’s really important if you’re going to be using the stock camera app. If you want to take things up a notch and really get professional with it and really get the most out of your front cameras, then there’s a great app called FiLMiC Pro. I think it sells for around $14 Australian, $11 US. That would give you full manual control. Essentially, all the settings that you would find on a DSLR or video camera, you will be able to mimic those on your smartphone. Things like your white balance or your color changing throughout the shot. A lot more settings around your exposure and your shutter speed. We’ve got a few videos on our YouTube channel as walkthrough. It’s taking you through how to set those up. I personally think they’re definitely worth using but don’t use that as a barrier. Like, “I’ve installed this app and I’m not sure how to use it. I’m not going to make a video today. I was going to keep coming back to it.” Just create the video as the priority and then grow as you’re comfortable or as you can. Darren: I think that’s a great advice and that’s what we advice people on digital photography school with some of the apps on iPhone as well. Start on your camera, learn the basics there, and then once you start seeing the limitations of the camera and start noticing those limitations, then start looking for some of those other apps which really can take it up a notch but it’s kind of 1% of stuff for the average eye. Justin: If you did a video on each, I would pretty much guarantee that your audience isn’t going to know, “Oh, he used FiLMiC Pro for this one.” Or “This one was the in built camera app.” I guess it’s more peace of mind for yourself, knowing that nothing is going to change and removing the chance that something is going to go wrong because the last thing you ever want to have to do is to re-record content that you’ve already recorded. It’s not only a pain but it’s a mental drain as well. You’re already past and you’re done with it. Try to eliminate that wherever possible. Darren: Great advice. Objection number two that I get is pretty much what you mentioned before, I’m not confident enough to present on video. Do you have any tips for people who don’t have that experience of appearing on video or the confidence? Justin: Once again, that’s something that I struggled with big time. Even moving from behind the camera to in front of it, it’s something that I’m still not 100% comfortable with but the key really, it’s going to be obvious, is to practice and to start now. Even if you’re creating videos and not releasing them, just show your friends and family and get some feedback. Get used to really seeing yourself on camera and seeing yourself in the end video product. Most of the practice of talking to a little camera lens which is a weird thing, it’s a daunting thing if you haven’t done it before and when you’re first starting out. The other things you can do are to put a picture behind your camera, or your webcam, or your phone, whatever you’re using of either a friend, a family member, or your ideal audience or client and just talk to them behind the camera. It sounds simple, it sounds silly but it makes a huge difference when you’re just starting out because you still then get some sort of human connection. A lot of people, they just run out and lock themselves to the room and start recording. There’s no connection. You’re not talking to anyone. It’s a strange thing. Getting used to it and practicing, even if you’re driving along, press record on your phone and don’t crash while driving. Just get used to saying what am I doing today? What am I doing right now? Where am I going? These sorts of things just to get you used to talking on points. It’s amazing how fast you grow from there. Darren: I find the same even with public speaking. The more I practice, the more I run through it, the more confident I am with what I’m saying but also visualizing that person that I’ll be speaking to is really important. We actually advice our readers when they’re writing content to have a picture of someone in front of them as well. I think that that would really work very well. I guess the other thing that comes to mind is that there are other types of video that you could be creating where you don’t have to stand in front of the camera. Do you have any advice on other types of videos that people could be experimenting with as their first video? Justin: I guess we’ll come down to the type of videos that you want to be creating. If you’re going to be doing sort of how to videos, then the obvious one is to do a screen recording and talk through something or even do a screen recording of a PowerPoint presentation or a slide show so that way you don’t have to be on camera, you’re just talking through your presentation. That’s a really simple way to get started with video. You can also use animations, or graphics, or animated text on screen so that you don’t have to be in front. What I would really suggest is that you practice and learn to do it because even just from the personal brand building and the deeper level of connection when people see your face, they can then associate that with the content and with the information you’re sharing. It’s a deeper level of connection. Even if you’re going to do a screen recording, I would say turn your webcam on and put yourself in the bottom corner of the screen recording. Even if you don’t use it as the end video, you can remove it in the editing software. Start now and get used to it because I think this is where everything is going. The quicker you can learn, the quicker you can get used to it, the more you’ll be able to leverage the power of video. Darren: One of the questions that have been asked in the Facebook group by Susan is whether to use a script or whether to use bullet points and talk a little bit more off the curve. There may not be an answer to this question, it might come down to personality but what do you recommend people do? Justin: I think it does come down to personality but I think it also comes down more so to the type of videos you’re creating. If you’re creating a sales video or a video for the front page of your website where you need to be very specific on what you’re saying especially in a sales video, in the offering, and you don’t want to miss any point, then I would say use a script if you can, use a teleprompter, or read through the paragraph first and then present it back to the camera. You can chunk it down. You don’t need to worry about doing your videos in one take. Focus paragraph by paragraph and just focus on getting that paragraph right or how you like it and then move onto the next one. You can chunk it down and that’s a much easier way to create the content. As for dot points, that’s another way to do it as well. For all of our videos I started out scripting them all but I think you actually get more personality through if you’re just able to use dot points because then they become more of a conversation instead of a teaching or a lesson. That’s again where you’ll get more personality through and the deeper connection with your audience. Again, it’s practice. Try both and see which one works for you. The easiest way for most people is to write it out and present a paragraph at a time or if you have to do a sentence at a time because next time you might be able to move to a paragraph and then progress through the dot points. Darren: I found the same with this podcast. I used to have a script and it was pretty much read. These days it’s dot points, it comes across in a much more conversational tone as well. Justin: I think to be reading from a script, same as using a teleprompter, there is an art and a skill to using a teleprompter so that people don’t know that you’re reading. If they can tell that you’re reading, then there’s that big level of disconnect. It’s not authentic so it can have a big negative effect if you’re not able to present without looking like you’re reading. That’s where the end goal should be, dot points, in my opinion. Again, don’t let that freak you out. Start now with paragraphs and I guess probably all the sales videos and things that we do and products and all those sorts of things, I definitely have them scripted out and sometimes I will use a teleprompter if I have to be so specific on the words that I’m using. Darren: Great advice. Are there any teleprompter tips, skipping back to gear, I guess if someone does want an affordable option, what would you recommend them? Justin: The one that I use and the one I recommend is by a company called Prompt-it. I’m pretty sure it’s actually an Australian company. It sells for around the $300 mark but it lets you put your iPod or iPhone and use that as the display to send the text up. It’s really easy to use and it just sits in front of your camera. As for tips to make it look like you’re not reading, again, if you can use dot points so that you can see what you have to talk about next. But I guess the biggest way to remove that obvious part where you can tell people are reading is with your eyes. If you look outside of where the camera lens is, then it’s so obvious that you’re reading because you’re not then making the eye contact with the camera lens so you’re not making the eye contact with your viewers. You can shrink the font size down so that all the text is in line with the camera lens. That way, even if you’re reading from left to right, as long as the text doesn’t go outside the camera lens, then you’re not breaking that eye contact with the viewer so it’ll be less likely for them to see that you’re reading. Darren: Objection number three that I get is around the shooting of the video, things like I don’t know anything about framing shots, or lighting. We’ve already talked about some of the gear but do you have any tips on shooting the video. How do you light the subject with those lights you recommended? Any tips on the actual shooting process? Justin: I guess the first one is an obvious one. This applies whether you’re using a smartphone or really any camera is to clean your camera lens first. It sounds so obvious but no one does it. Especially with our phones, that’s up against your face when you have makeup, dirt, grime, or fingerprints on it. It’s about getting the fundamentals right first. You’ve got to create a checklist; clean the lens, use your microphone, then adjust your exposure and your focus. You really want to lock those down. You don’t want to have your cameras on automatic so that if something changes, your camera is going to make that adjustment. You want to know that it’s all set and it’s all sorted. It’s going to look good and sound good so you can focus on delivering the content. In regards to the framing of the shot, you want to make sure that your entire head is in the shot. A lot of the times, you’ll see on videos, especially people doing it themselves, they don’t check the shot first so they might then move around in front of the camera and they’ve chopped off part of their head. Simple things like that. Do a test. Get everything set up until you think it’s right or perfect but before you start, do a 15 to 20 second video. Go back and watch it, plug in headphones if you can so you can really listen to the audio and make sure that that is how you want it before you actually start shooting. Specifically, in regards to framing, if you have to, put yourself in the middle of the frame. Ideally, if you had yourself slightly off to one side, left or right but not way off to the side, just a little bit off center, you’ll get a much more aesthetically pleasing shot. If you think of a documentary that you might have seen, no one is sitting smack in the middle of your shot. They’re always off to the side a little bit. Maintaining eye contact with the camera lens is probably the most important thing you can do because you’re talking, you’re sharing your knowledge, your story, your message you want to be sharing with a person. If you’re having a conversation with someone face to face, you’re going to be making eye contact with them so you need to do that with your videos as well. Darren: That’s great advice. Louise in the Facebook group just asked, do you suggest using the front facing camera or the back facing camera? If you’re using the one where you can’t see yourself, do you set up in front of a mirror so you can see how you’re framed or anything along those lines? Justin: Great question. That’s a big one. I think the obvious answer is the easiest way to do it is use the front facing camera because you can monitor everything and see what’s going on. The front facing camera is more than enough for most people. We have a video on our YouTube channel that’s filmed with a front facing camera on an iPhone 5 and people are still blown away with the quality of it. That was just with the built in camera app, without FiLMiC Pro or any of these things. The front facing cameras on any of the newer phones as well, newer than the iPhone 5 is going to be really good. Wherever possible I would say to use the rear facing camera because it is much higher quality. Obviously as you said, the logistics of doing that, in framing and making sure that you’re actually are recording well and you can’t see what’s going on makes that a little bit difficult. Mirror is one way but what you can actually do, there’s a piece of software called Reflector 2. I think it sells for just under $15. You can install that on your Mac or PC. Whether you’re using an iPhone or an Android device, you can screen share over Wi-Fi your phone screen to your computer so that you can sit in front of your phone and use your phone for the recording but next to the phone on a computer you can see exactly what’s going on with your phone. That is an awesome app for monitoring what’s going on. That would be the ideal setup if you don’t have anyone there to monitor all of that for you. Darren: That’s sounds like a very useful piece of software because I’ve shot numerous videos and then at the end I realize that I had chopped off the top half of my head which isn’t a bad thing when you’re bald. It can work. Justin: It happens all the time. Back to our core message, we really want to remove these barriers and these bad experiences that people have creating content. Reflector 2 is an awesome piece of software that will hopefully eliminate you from having to reshoot because you’ve chopped off your head or something. Darren: That’s great. We will link to all of these tools, apps, and softwares in today’s show notes. Objection number four, literally, as I’m saying I can say Vanessa has just asked in the Facebook group about editing. She said, “I technically get how to do it but I don’t feel like I’ve got a sense of style. What is the video equivalent of avoiding comic sense?” I think that’s a great way of asking it. “Do you have any tips on editing? What software should we be using? Should we be doing it in camera, in phone, or putting it into our computer? Any tips on getting a nice edit?” Justin: Where I would start with is you’re always going to have more power and more control if you’re editing on a computer but it’s not always practical, you definitely can edit well using your phones or your iPads. On iOS, I would recommend iMovie. If you want to take things up a notch, then you can get Pinnacle. It’s a great app. Pinnacle will really replicate what you can do on a system, on a computer. Those are two great places to start with editing on iOS. On Android, check out PowerDirector. That’s a fantastic app that gives you pretty much the same functionality as you would again, on your desktop. The limitations on those pieces of software when you really want to get creative with effects and those sorts of things which aren’t really necessary for most videos, they’ll either just trim the start off, move your clips around, do color correction, those sorts of things, all the important stuff and save it out in a high quality format for YouTube or for Vimeo, wherever your videos are going. You definitely can edit on your device and those are the apps I would recommend to check out. Obviously, moving onto a computer, your process is longer because you’ve got to get the files off of your phone or off of your device or the camera. The key focus should be around, with any editing, first and foremost, edit your content down or chunk it down into the content itself. So many people would jump in and get to the fun stuff, the color correction, the audio, and the music, do all of that first but there may be actually be something wrong with your content or your might’ve missed something. It actually delays the entire editing process if you don’t get your content down first because by adding all these color effects and things, you’re actually putting more load on your computer or on your phone to actually edit the video down. It’s another obvious one but get your content down first and then worry about the music and then worry about the audio and then the color correction. Probably the most important thing with any editing and any video is that your editing actually starts in your filming. If you’ve planned out your video and you have a set structure that’s already defined, or you’re working through when you’re filming, then your editing will become much faster. If you only move on from one paragraph to the next paragraph or from one dot point to the next dot point once you’re happy with it so that your last take is always the best one, then when you’re editing the video, you can edit backwards. Instead of starting left to right as you normally would, if you start at the end, you’re always going to hit the best take first. You’re editing actually becomes much, much faster if you edit backwards, right to left, because you’re always going to hit the best takes first. Be aware when you’re filming that you’re going to be editing so the least amount of takes or the least amount of stuffing around that you have will make your editing process faster as well. Darren: The last objection that I hear a lot is around what to do with the video once you’ve got it and a common question again being asked in the Facebook group is how do I export my video in a way that doesn’t leave me with a massive file that is too hard to do anything with or that’s so low of quality that it’s not really viewable? Do you have any tips on what settings or export settings to set? Justin: I guess the ideal scenario if your end goal is to upload your video to somewhere, Facebook, YouTube, Vimeo, you should be uploading the highest quality video that you can. It’s easy to say if you’ve got a really good internet connection which probably most people don’t. That’s why you would want to compress or reduce the size of your videos. It really is a chicken and the egg kind of thing. There is no set perfect solution because it comes down to how long your video goes for that you can then apply a different level of quality to reduce the file size of the video. Where I would suggest everyone start is with the video preset that are built in or the exporting preset that are built in to all editing software. Whether you’re on your desktop or you’re on your phone, they’ll all have a preset for YouTube. Whether you’re going to export to YouTube, Facebook, or Vimeo, use the YouTube ones because they’re the ones that are normally the best optimized in my opinion. Use those and see how the files size comes out from there. But you always want to be exporting on the highest quality possible. These days, I think no one should be uploading videos online that’s less than 1080p. If you’re uploading at 720p, they should be only because you have to. Your quality these days and even with some people’s bad internet connection, you should still be able to produce a high quality 1080p video. That’s where I would start with. The setting to look for if you need to tweak this is called the bit rate. It’s the number of megabits per second without getting too technical here, we’re taking 25 photos every second to make up our video so it’s the compression that’s applied to those. The higher the number, the bigger the file size, the better the quality, the lower the number, the more compression is going to be applied. If you need to tweak the preset, again, without going too technical, the bit rate is the setting that you want to adjust. Darren: Sonia, actually, just asked in the Facebook group about using multiple cameras which was something that I hadn’t thought to ask you but do you think that’s going to add much to the video, to have different cameras? Are there any other advantages of shooting from different angles or does that get too hard in the editing process? Justin: That definitely adds a step or adds a couple of steps to your editing process but it can also give you greater flexibility when you’re editing. For any high end videos that we will create, we’ll always use two cameras. The beauty of that is you can cut people’s sentences in half and switch to the other camera angle and it will then still look seamless. If they’re having a really good run and they’re halfway through a sentence and stop for some reason, you could switch camera and pick it up on the next take. The viewer watching doesn’t realize that that’s happened, still looks like a seamless take. In saying that, you’re also going to need a second camera, second batteries, second memory cards, your storage is going to go up and then you got to sync the two cameras together to make sure that they’re perfectly lined up. Logistically, there’s definitely a lot more involved and for most people’s content videos, I would say that is way too much overkill unless you’re going to be recording in your computer with multiple webcams. That could be the easiest way to do it. If you’re going to use software OBS or Wirecast for maybe a Livestream or a screen recording, then that would be the easiest way to get going with multi camera. Darren: Second to the last question is around the most common mistakes that you see people making. I get the sense probably the biggest one is not making videos at all and letting the obstacles stop you making the videos, but any other mistakes that you think people really do need to just be aware off as they’re creating those first videos? Justin: I think the planning is really the key and getting really precise on who you want to be targeting or who you want to be talking to. The more specific you can be with your avatar or with your target market and knowing directly who you’re talking to is really the key, especially if you’re looking to do things like to grow an audience on YouTube or something like that. You want to be talking directly to those people so you’re not talking to the masses. For example, our audience on YouTube, we don’t ever tell them a free option unless it is the best option because we don’t want to be targeting people that are only there for the free answer. Essentially, that’s our lead generator. We want to be bringing in customers and clients through our YouTube channel. We know who are our ideal customer is for our courses and products and we target all of our video and all of our messaging to that. That’s probably the first point that a lot of people miss. They’ll create videos for the masses and hope they rank. It’s actually a lot harder to rank a video that is designed for everyone. Same with SEO in general, you want to get specific on who you’re talking to but also around the content that you’re delivering. If you can get it down to dot points and get a structure around it, and follow that structure, then there’s no thinking why you’re creating the videos. You know that you’re going to hit every mark and create the content that you want. Darren: Great advice. Last question, if you had a little bit more to spend on your setup, would you be looking at upgrading your camera or do you think it’s better to invest your money into something else in the process? Justin: I guess it really depends on what you’ve already got. I would recommend at this day and age is that if you’re going to spend some money, get a camera that can shoot in 4k, that’s higher than 1080p. If you’re going to release your videos in 4k, there is some advantage. YouTube has a 4k section and features 4k videos, as far as we know, higher. But also if you’re only going to be releasing your videos at the 1080p resolution and you’re recording in the higher quality, 4k, then you’ve got so much more flexibility in your editing. You’ll essentially get a wide shot and a tight shot from the one piece of footage. It definitely gives you more flexibility and more creative control in your editing but also you can hit a different market or get more attraction on your videos if you’re going to release them at the highest quality. A lot of people still think 4k is too far away and it’s not worth doing it. I beg to differ and say that if you can and a lot of smartphones even these days will have the 4k option. You will need more storage because the files are going to be bigger, you will need a slightly more powerful computer because it’s going to be more load on your computer but if you can and if it’s feasible for you, then I would recommend shooting in 4k. Darren: Where can people learn more about what you do and your business and learn how to take the video shooting to the next level? Justin: Our website is primalvideo.com and our YouTube channel is youtube.com/primalvideo. Darren: Excellent. We will link to that in the shownotes today as well as all of the other tools, apps, and suggestions that you’ve made. Any last advice for the ProBlogger audience? On video? Justin: You can already guess what it’s going to be. Start now. Use what you’ve got. Practice, practice even if you don’t release your first video, it’s always the case of everyone that we’ve helped, they always wished that they’d started earlier. A lot of the barriers and things that we have, they’re in our head. We’ve got the gear. If you’ve got a phone, you’ve got enough. If you’ve got a DSLR, even better but don’t wait for the technology and just start now. Darren: Great advice. I’m actually going to issue a ProBlogger challenge to our audience. Those of you listening now, I want you to go and shoot a video in the next week if you can, don’t delay. You could probably do it faster than that. I want you to share it in our Facebook group. It’s just a small group of 3,500 of your closest blogging friends are going to see it. It’s not going to go any further than that. We’d love to see what you create there and give you some encouragement as well. Maybe we can give each other some suggestions on how we’d improve things as well. That would be pretty cool. If you are listening to this, head over to the ProBlogger Facebook group and share your videos there. That would be great. Thank you so much, Justin. I really do appreciate this. It was nice to meet you in San Diego, another Aussie in another part of the world. Justin: There was a few of us there. Darren: There was. There were a lot of us there. I actually heard a lot of really positive feedback about your sessions. You’d have a lot of value today for our audience. I appreciate your time. Justin: Thank you very much. It was awesome to meet you too. Thank you for having me on the podcast. Darren: No problem. Thanks a lot. I just listened to that again and there is some really good information there. Thank you so much to Justin Brown. You can check out more from Justin over at primalvideo.com where you’ll also find links to his YouTube channel which has some really good quality videos on how to create great video online. You can check out our show notes over at ProBlogger.com/podcast/189 where we do have links to all of the tools and apps mentioned today. Also, please do head over to the ProBlogger Facebook group. I really loved doing that interview and seeing the questions come up as I was interviewing Justin from the group. I would love to see the videos you create there. I will set up a thread. Once this podcast has gone live there will be a thread over in that Facebook group for you to share the videos you created. I might even invite Justin over to the group as well so he can see some of the things that he inspired today. Really looking forward to looking at some of those videos and connecting with you further in the Facebook group or on the shownotes in the comment section. Thanks for listening today. Happy shooting with your videos and I’ll chat with you next week in episode 190 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.

The Pros and Cons of Having More Than One Blog In today’s lesson, I want to talk about having more than one blog on the go at once. Regular listeners of this podcast know I have two main blog – ProBlogger and Digital Photography School. I’m fortunate enough to have been able to build them up so that either one of them could be a full time venture which is great – but having two businesses to focus upon not only comes with some benefits – but some costs. In this episode I want to share: The story of how I built them to the point they’re at today The pros and cons of having more than one blog or business Some tips on juggling two things like this at once Lastly – today’s episode is proudly presented by this year’s ProBlogger events. This year we’re holding three events – one in Brisbane Australia, another in Melbourne Australia and a third in Dallas Texas. These events are designed with very similar goals to this podcast – to help bloggers to grow blogs with world changing content, with lots of readers and which are profitable. All of these events will have some amazing teaching from experienced bloggers (people like Pat Flynn who i speaking at our Australian events) but also have opportunities for masterminds and really drilling into the blog and business that you have to help take it to the next level. If you’re interested in the Aussie events head to problogger.com/events and if you’re interested in the Dallas event head to problogger.com/success but please don’t wait too long as these events are selling quickly and the early bird price ends in the coming weeks. Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Hi there, it’s Darren from ProBlogger here. Welcome to another episode of the ProBlogger podcast, this is episode 188. For those of you who are new to ProBlogger, ProBlogger is all about helping you to start a blog, to grow your audience of your blog, to create content that’s gonna change that audience’s life and hopefully to make some money from your blog as well. You can find out more about ProBlogger and what we do at problogger.com. In today’s lesson, I want to address a question that I’ve been getting quite a bit lately and that is, “How do you juggle two blogs and should you have two blogs?” A lot of regular listeners of this podcast know that I do have two main businesses and they both center around blogs. It’s ProBlogger which you are listening to right now, which is a blog podcast event and numerous other things. And then there’s Digital Photography School, which again is a very similar model in many ways. It’s centered around the blog, and then there’s ebooks and courses and other aspects of that business as well. I’m fortunate enough to have been able to build up these two businesses so that either one of them could really be a full-time venture, which is great. It also presents with some interesting challenges, to say the least. Having two businesses comes with benefits but it also comes at a cost. In this episode, I wanna share with you the story about how I built up these blogs to the point that they’re at today, the pros and cons of having more than one blog and business. And then for those of you who are considering juggling two businesses like I am, some tips on how to do that and how to approach that if you do decide to do that. Lastly, today’s episode is proudly presented by this year’s ProBlogger events. This year, we are holding three events over in Australia; Brisbane, Australia, and Melbourne, Australia and the third event in Dallas, Texas in the United States. These events are designed with very similar goals to this podcast, to help you to grow your blog with world changing content, to grow your readership and to build profit around your blogs. All of these events have some amazing teaching from experienced bloggers like Pat Flynn who’s speaking at our Aussie events but also we have opportunities for master minds at all of our events as well. These help you to really drill down with some experts, with some experienced bloggers to drill down into your business and to really pick apart your business and work at how to take it to the next level. If you’re interested in our Australian events, head to problogger.com/events. If you’re interested in coming to our Dallas event which is in October this year, head over to problogger.com/success. Please don’t wait too long on either front because the events are selling out quickly and we do have some early bird pricing on these events that end in the coming weeks. Today’s episode really is inspired by a question that I had over in the Facebook group this week from Sandy. Sandy wrote to me, “You blog on ProBlogger and Digital Photography School. I have heard that you had many other blogs in days gone by. Can you give me some advice on whether having more than one blog is a good thing or not?” Thanks so much for the question, Sandy. I do appreciate it. It is a great question and as I mentioned at the top of the show, it’s one that I’m getting increasingly regularly at the moment. I know a lot of you as bloggers are wondering whether you should have one blog or more than one blog. That’s really what I want to talk about today. I want to tell you the backstory, the pros and cons of having two focuses, and then some tips on how to juggle two businesses really I guess is what we’re talking about today. First, the story. I’m not going to go into great detail. The first thing I really do wanna say is that most people when they come across me, and dig into what I do, see a snapshot of how things are today. Two blogs that are established with thousands of blog posts already in the archives and a decent readership with multiple income streams, that’s what you see as the snapshot. This is just the reality of today. What you don’t see is the whole journey of almost 15 years behind what you see today. I guess what you see today wasn’t the reality when I first started. It had to evolve. I guess why I wanna tell you the story today is that it didn’t just arrive like this, it actually was something that evolved over time. To be honest, it started completely as accident, and it really is not something that I’ve planned to be like it is today. To go back in time, 2002 is when I started my first blog. That first blog’s name was The Living Room. It was a blog about my experience of being involved in a new church. As well as many other aspects of my life, it started off as me wanting to tell the story of that church. That church was called Living Room as well. As I began to blog, as I began to find my voice, I realized that I really enjoyed writing about all kinds of things. I wrote about life in Australia, politics, television, movies, sport, blogging, photography, getting married, all of these different things that were going on in my life at that time. It became I guess an extension of the different compartments in my brain as I began to talk about these different things. Back in 2002, it was very normal to have a blog that covered such a wide spectrum of topics. That’s why I did it, it worked. My readers didn’t really push back too much on me covering that diverse spectrum of topics. But gradually over time, as blogging matured and as other people begin to niche down with their blogs and focus upon specific things, and as my audience grew and different groups in my audience came for different things, I did began to have some tension on my blog. There were readers who came because I wanted to hear about the church that I was involved with. They were interested in photography and they were interested in blogging. And then there were other people who began to read that blog, Living Room blog, because I was writing about blogging and not many other people were writing about how to make money from blogs at that time. Those readers really were interested in hearing about photography or church. I began to feel this tension. It began to constrain my blogging in many ways as well. I began to think, “Well, I’ve just written about blogging yesterday, can’t write about it tomorrow. I need to throw in another topic there to serve those other people.” I began to feel constrained. I didn’t really have the freedom to write that blog in the way that I wanted to. I began to take some of the categories in my blog and start new blogs based upon those categories. The first one I did was a camera review blog which I started late in 2003. It was about a year after I started blogging. It was a blog where I reviewed cameras and many of you have heard me talk about that blog in the past. It worked really well, it’s actually the first blog that I began to make some money from by putting some Adsense Ads on and referring people over to Amazon with affiliate links. It worked so well that I decided that I’m gonna start to replicate this and so I started a camera phone review blog. This is right when those first phones came out with cameras, Nokia cameras have little tiny camera on it. I began to do reviews of camera phones. Then I thought, “Okay, I’m gonna do another one on printers.” Printers are kind of related to photography and so I began to review printers. I think the next one, I’m kind of a bit fuzzy here about the order of it all but I did another one on the Olympic Games. Was it the Athens Olympic Games? It must have been 2004-ish. And then I started ProBlogger, that was in 2004. I definitely remember that one. That was where I began to talk about making money from my blogs. I began to share what I was learning about making money from blogs. At this point, I already had four or five blogs going. Some of them were making good money. The camera review blog was making good money. The camera phone blog was doing okay. And then ProBlogger came about, and it completely took off. It was really about the timing of launching that blog. No one else had a blog about making money from blogging back then. A few people are beginning to explore how to do it, but no one had a complete blog about it. When I announced that I was making a full-time living from blogging and six figures a year from blogging, that became big news. A lot of other blogs linked to it. Some because they didn’t like the idea of people commercializing blogs and other people because that’s what they wanted to do. ProBlogger had this tipping point moment, it was even just a few months into the blog and it already had a fairly sizable audience. It began to make a little bit of money. And I began to explore different ways of monetizing that blog. Around this time, I also started my first blog network, it was called The Breaking News blogs. I did that with some friends over in New Zealand. By 2005, I think I had about 30 blogs including that network of blogs that I was involved with at that time. The reality though was that only three of them were really working very well at all. The Camera Review blog was doing well. The Camera Phone blog was doing okay. The Athens Olympic Games blog did really well for the two weeks of the Athens Olympic Games and then it died away. And then there was ProBlogger. Whilst those blogs were working, there was really one that I was enjoying. I wasn’t really enjoying the camera reviews, I wasn’t really enjoying camera phone reviews, I was enjoying ProBlogger. I decided that I needed to make some changes because I knew I really was gonna have to be at this for 10 or so years to do anything significant with blogging. I thought to myself, “I might as well enjoy what I’m doing.” I decided to make some big changes. Luckily, ProBlogger by this stage was at the point that it was starting to make a decent income from it. I was doing some affiliate stuff, I was launching some of my products. I decided to focus upon that more and to start killing off some of those other blogs. The first thing I decided to stop doing with my partners was to stop the Breaking News blog network which freed up a lot of time from me. That enabled me to put more time into ProBlogger, and it grew ProBlogger even more. In 2006, I decided I was gonna stop the Camera Review blog and the Camera Phone blog. That was a big risk because those blogs at that point were my main source of income. In fact, they were making over $100,000 a year in income but they were killing me. They were soul sucking kind of blogs to run because I’m not a techy kind of guy, I’m not a review kind of guy. I didn’t really feel satisfied with the quality of what was going on on those blogs either. I decided to transition from being a Camera Review blog to being a How to Take Better Photos blog, which is something I really was much more passionate about. It was something I was much more interested in. The other aspect of it is that I knew I could build my audience over time with the how to blog more than a review blog. People I knew read review blogs when they’re in a buying mode, when they’re trying to work out which camera to buy. But people would subscribe to a how to take better photos blog for a longer period of time. I kind of knew that was a better business model and opportunity around a how to blog, and so I decided to make that switch. Felt risky, but I did had the back-up plan of ProBlogger by this stage. It had been going for two years. I guess that’s one of the reasons I wanna share this story is that I didn’t launch Digital Photography School and ProBlogger on the same day. I actually did ProBlogger first. I got it up and running, I got it to a point where it was profitable which enabled me then to start something new as well. That, I guess, is one of the big lessons that I wanna get across to you with this story is that you might have two things in mind, you might have two blogs in mind. I would encourage you to really invest into one of them first, and put one of them on the back burner perhaps for a little while, you might want to get the domain, might want to reserve some social media or accounts but put it on the back burner and really focus on one thing. I personally find that I’m much better at launching one thing at a time. It takes a lot of energy, a lot of creativity, a lot of thought to launch something. Don’t try to launch them both at the same time. 2006 came around and I decided to make the switch. To be honest, when I started Digital Photography School, it was really tough. It was the first year or two of Digital Photography School, the growth was really slow, it was completely different to ProBlogger. ProBlogger had this tipping point moment and I’ve gone into Digital Photography School rather naively thinking that I would just be able to grow that blog really quickly and it didn’t happen. There was no big tipping point day like there being with ProBlogger. My readers from my original photography blog weren’t interested in the new blog. Not many of them came across, hardly any of my ProBlogger readers were interested in the new blog, that was too different of a topic I guess. I had to work for those first two years on DPS to really grow the archives up, to write a lot of content, to grow traffic to the blog through writing sharable content, through networking, through writing guest posts, through collaborating with other bloggers. Eventually, to get some traffic in from Google and some other social media sort of sources. I was doing it all myself, particularly for the first year, and most of it for the first two years. Initially, I was doing all the writing, all the promoting, all the comment moderation and all the partnerships and all the monetizations as well. There were numerous times during that first couple years of DPS where I almost gave up because it just wasn’t taking as fast as I wanted. There was growth, but it was really slow growth. In hindsight, I look back on the stats and I actually see that the growth was steady. I guess that’s the reason that I continued with it is that even though it wasn’t spectacular growth, I knew that if I could keep growing that blog by 10% per month or even 10% every two or three months, over the long haul, I could see that that would grow to a point where it would be a significant amount of traffic and a significant amount of income. I kind of tried to take this long term view all the time knowing that I had ProBlogger already at a point where it was doing reasonably well. Eventually, Digital Photography School did grow to a point where it got to the same size as ProBlogger and then it grew bigger than ProBlogger. Probably took about three years to get to that point where Digital Photography School was bigger in terms of traffic and income than ProBlogger. It continued to grow. To this point, I haven’t looked at the stats for a few months but Digital Photography School is probably about eight or nine times larger today than ProBlogger. It’s where I put most of my time and resources today. ProBlogger’s still something that I put a lot of my time into because it’s a personal brand, I’ll talk more about that later. Digital Photography School is where most of the focus of my business goes to. Now, I should say at this point before I get into some tips that both DPS and ProBlogger are more than just blogs today. They both started out purely as blogs but today the blog is at the center of other things. Digital Photography School today has a range of products around it, ebooks and courses and software. It’s also got a little sister business called Snap and Deal that runs alongside it. It’s more than just a blog and the same is true with ProBlogger. Of course you’re listening to the podcast today but we also have a job board and events as well. There’s lots of moving parts with both of those businesses and either one of them is a full-time thing in terms of income but also both of them could be quite overwhelming. There are a lot of parts to run. That’s the story. Let me talk a little bit about the pros and cons of having more than one blog or more than one business. Let’s start with the good stuff, the benefits of having multiple blogs. I’ve kind of picked up on some of these already as I told my story. The first benefit that I would say of having more than one blog, and I guess the reason that I started having more than one blog is that it brought a certain amount of freedom to my blogging. One of the reasons I decided to have more than one blog in those early days is that I felt like I had something to say on more than one topic. I’m a multi-passionate kind of person. I know a lot of you as readers and listeners of ProBlogger are on the same boat. I talked to many of you who say have multi-passions. You’re interested in travel as well as food, or you’re interested in technology or science or you have this multiple kind of interest. For me, in those early days and still today, I have multiple interests. I’m interested in spirituality, I’m interested in photography, I was interested in blogging, I was interested in communication. All these things were things I wanted to talk about. To have more than one blog enabled me to do that with more freedom. I didn’t have to worry about my readers so much and whether they wanted me to talk about the different topics. I knew that they could just really drill into the blog that they wanted to read rather than have to wade through all the other stuff that they weren’t interested in. If you’re a multi-passionate person, then maybe that is one reason why you might want to have more than one blog. Second benefit of having more than one blog from a business perspective is the income diversification. Another advantage of having more than one blog, if you’re blogging for income is that by having more than one iron in the fire can be a good thing. It can increase the chances of one of them working for you. Most bloggers know that there are no guarantees that a blog is gonna work. There’s no formula for a successful blog that will guarantee you’re gonna have success. And more so, I teach a lot of principles of building successful blogs. There’s no guarantees that any of this is gonna work, or any of it will hit them up with your readers. I had 30 blogs and two of them really worked, 28 of them didn’t. That kind of gives you the kind of chances of having a successful blog. Having more than one blog and my strategy was, “Okay, I’m gonna start lots of blogs. Let’s see which one works.” Which one works for me as an author but also which one works with my readers as well. This is one of the reasons that you might wanna have more than one blog. To actually have a couple of irons in the fire, to test which one works best and then to be able to focus on that. I knew really quickly after studying all my blogs whether they had a chance of success. I knew when I started that printer blog that I talked about before that it was not gonna work. I knew within a couple of months of starting that blog that it was not getting traction. I got no comments, I got no emails, I got very little traffic. I knew it wasn’t gonna work. I also knew that it wasn’t giving me any energy as well, it wasn’t something I enjoyed at all. I knew that even though Digital Photography School was slow, and it was tough and I felt like giving up at points, I knew it had a good chance of working even after a few weeks of having that blog because I started to get comments. I started to get emails from people going thank you. I also felt a lot of energy. Having numerous blogs and starting those blogs, it was good in that regard. It showed me what I wanted to do. It unveiled my true passions, but it also showed me where my audience was responding in different ways. It’s good for testing different ideas and diversifying your interest in that way. Also, it can help in terms of the actual income and diversifying that income as well. I’m having different income streams on those different blogs, I guess spread the risk a little bit. Digital Photography School in the early days, I monetized it mainly using Google AdSense and a little bit of affiliate marketing on Amazon. Whilst ProBlogger, the income from that was more about ebooks and promoting software and tools. There were quite different income streams and I guess that diversifies the risk in some ways as well. If AdSense was to go away, I still would have other income streams by having those other blogs. I guess in terms of topics as well, there’s some diversification there. By having more than one topic that you’re blogging about, if one topic was to go away, if blogging for example was to be a trend that disappeared after a couple years, I would still have another topic that hopefully would have sort of an increase in trend as well. Diversifying I guess the topics, the income streams they could be some benefits of doing that. The other benefit for me of having more than one blog is that as a multi-passionate person, I tend to get a bit bored if I just have one thing to do. This is why before I started blogging, I’d had 20 jobs in the last 10 years before my first blog. I was someone who just needed to switch around, needed to try new things. Having more than one blog enabled me to switch. There’s times over the last 10 or so years where ProBlogger has been my passion and there’s been other times where Digital Photography School’s been something that I’ve really served myself into and enjoyed. By having two things to really focus my energy on, I’m able to mix things up which for me keeps my interest and helps me continue to be passionate as well. Some of the cons, some of the costs, I think you could probably work it out. Firstly by having more than one focus, you run the risk of lowering the quality of what you do. At the height of my diversification, when I had 30 blogs going at once and I was creating content for all 30 blogs, I know for a fact that the quality of what I was doing was not great on most of those blogs. In fact, on most of those blogs, it was pretty boring. I think back and I kinda cringe at what I used to put onto those blogs. I remember putting press releases up onto my blogs, it was not good content though. It wasn’t personal, it was robotic, it was machine like. It was formulaic, I was rehashing the news that was being sent to me by camera manufacturers and printer manufacturers. It was more about trying to gain the search engines and trying to get AdSense clicks than anything else. It was boring for me and it was also boring for my readers in hind sight. It was never gonna lead to a sustainable business because the quality just wasn’t there. It wasn’t interesting, it wasn’t meaningful, it wasn’t really that useful to anyone at all. As it turns out, I’m glad I got out of that kind of model because Google has put more and more emphasis onto ranking quality content. Back then, you just had to have the keywords in the content and work at how to get a few links to your site. Today, Google’s so much better at it and same with the social networks as well. Thirty blogs for me, it was never realistic if I wanted to keep the quality up. Even just having two blogs at times has led to me having to decrease the quality as well. That’s been one of the struggles, particularly when I was writing all the content myself for both ProBlogger and Digital Photography School. I was really aware that by having those two focuses, the quality at times did suffer. That’s one of the reasons I began to get some help in terms of building a team around the blogs as well. Having more than one blog, it’s something that you’ve really gotta be aware of. It may be that you have to write less content but to keep that level of quality up again. In terms of cost, I guess it could be that you not only lower the quality but you could be lowering the quantity of the blogs. For me, quality is always more important than quantity but quantity can help as well. The way I kept the quality up on both of those blogs was to really pull back on how much content I produced, and that’s fine. When you’re first starting a blog like Digital Photography School, one of the ways that you can really grow a blog faster is to produce more content, to begin to put more content out there because every piece of content on your blog is a new doorway into your site. You really aren’t able to produce as much if you have more than one blog. I guess the other cost of having more than one blog is the risk of burning out. When I had 30 blogs, I was living a crazy, frantic life. I was working 12 to 14, 15, 16 hours a day just trying to get content up onto all of these different blogs. I was trying to produce content on every blog everyday which just wasn’t realistic. Reducing my efforts to just two blogs really helped me a lot in terms of work-life balance, my own health, my own passion for what I was doing. Even just having two blogs, there’s been times where it’s been a struggle as well. These are some of the costs. The risk of burning out, the risk of lowering quality, the risk of lowering quantity and all of these things can have an impact upon whether the blog has a chance of working as well. Some of the things that I would encourage you to do, if you really do have those two passions and you really do wanna explore having two different businesses, I think it can work. I’ve made it work. I do sometimes wonder whether if I just focus on one of them, will I build something bigger? That’s something that possibly the answer would be yes. If I just focused on ProBlogger, could I build ProBlogger into a better thing for my readers, for me? Same with Digital Photography School, if I didn’t have ProBlogger, could I build Digital Photography School into something bigger as well? I think the answer would have been yes. I probably would have built bigger businesses, but I’m also someone who’s fine with that. Big isn’t everything for me. I don’t want to be a multi, multi-millionaire. I don’t wanna have a business with a hundred employees. I like small. I think I can make something meaningful on both fronts, for myself but also for my readers. I guess really you’ve gotta do some analysis on what’s your ultimate goal. Do you wanna be a multi-million dollar company? Do you wanna just build something small, that’s meaningful, that sustains your life? For me, it’s the latter. That’s probably the first tip I could give you, is really think through: what are your goals? If you want to build something massive, if you want to build something like Telstra or Google, then you probably wanna just pick one thing and really go after that thing. But if you’re happy to have something smaller, something that’s sustainable perhaps, and you wanna explore different passions in your life then maybe two things. Firstly, consider what it is that you’re trying to achieve, what it is that is your goal, what it is that’s your dream. Secondly, if you really do wanna explore two things, as I mentioned before, spread out the launches. Don’t launch two things at once. I’ve talked to a number of people who’ve done this, it’s possible but you’ve probably got a much better chance of both of them working if you spread things out. For me, the reason I told you my story earlier is that I wanted to show you that things were spread out. I started blogging in 2002, spent two years really learning the skills. I started ProBlogger in 2004. After I had the skills, after I’ve had some experience, I started Digital Photography School in 2006. It was really two years after ProBlogger that I started. There were other things that I started in the midst of it but I think the reason that Digital Photography School worked is that even though I had that all idea when I started ProBlogger, I could have done it in 2004 in terms of an idea, but I really allowed myself to get ProBlogger established first. That meant I didn’t have as much pressure on me to make Digital Photography School work straight away. I didn’t have to make an income from that blog straight away, because I already had ProBlogger up and running. Spread out your launches, if you can. Give yourself a period of time where you can just focus upon one thing to get it established, to make it operate as a business, to be able to build some systems and procedures and to build a team so that first thing can run relatively independently so that you can then give a lot of your attention to that new thing. The next tip I’ll give you is to build a team. I did okay at launching both Digital Photography School and ProBlogger with largely just me working on those businesses. I learned very quickly that I could only really scale those businesses to the point that I was willing to let go and bring others into what I was doing. This is probably a topic for a whole other episode as how to build a team. But for me, it initially meant bringing on some other writers. My first writers were guest writers and then I began to build a team of paid writers. That also meant getting some administrative support, getting someone in. I think the first person I actually hired was to do comment moderation. Now I’ve got someone to help me with some email and customer support, I’ve hired people to help me with design and tech. And then also some more managerial type roles. I’ve got someone working for me at the moment who helps me produce new products and do busdev. Again, this is not something that just appeared, this is something that really evolved. That comment moderator, I think they were earning $10 a day for 10 minutes of work. It’s really tiny kind of stuff. It’s gradually growing over time. Today, I’m fortunate enough to have an amazing little team of seven or eight people who I talk to most days. They help me with different aspects of the business. They’re all part time, but they all do things that either free up my time so that I can do what I do best. I don’t have to answer emails or I don’t have to moderate comments or do these things that they can do. They’re either freeing up my time or they’re doing things that I could probably do but they can do it better than me. Editing this podcast, the team of PodcastMotor helped me to edit this podcast. They do a much better job, they do it faster than me which frees up my time but they also do it at a high quality. That’s really the kind of hires that I make, they either free up my time and free up my mindspace or they have skills that I just don’t have. Keep in mind, all of these hires didn’t just happen, they were all tiny hires in the early days. Some of them actually started as me bartering services and giving exposure and that type of thing and then growing in that relationship. While I’m also talking about team, I guess the other thing I would say about teams, this is something that’s become more important to me over the last couple of years. If you do have two businesses and you’ve got teams, you probably in the early days will have team members who are working on both of the businesses. To give you an example, Jasmin who today manages Digital Photography School, Jasmin actually for a while there was working on both sides of the business. She was producing and I hired her to help me produce products for Digital Photography School. She was also working on the ProBlogger event and helping to manage that. She was doing an amazing job on both of those things and did really well. One of the things that we’ve tried to do with the business over the last little while is to separate the teams out. This is something you probably won’t be able to do in the early days but there are some real benefits of being able to have different people on your team to focus on different aspects of the different businesses. The problem with having people working on both of your businesses if you’ve got two businesses is that there would be times where they would feel torn between the two businesses in terms of what they should be focusing their time on and you will as well. This is one of the things that we’ve really worked on over the last years, we now have two separate teams. I work on both of the businesses but all my team members work on different aspects of the businesses except for our developers. Our developers are kinda working on both aspects, and again that’s got some cost, there’s some tension there at times. I think that’s certainly been something that’s been really beneficial for us to have different people working on different parts of the business. The second last thing I’ll say is to think really carefully when you’re launching your businesses about how much personal branding you put into the businesses. One of the best things that I ever did was to make Digital Photography School a non-personally branded site. Digital Photography School, if you’re gonna have a look at it today, you find it really hard to find many references to me. My name is not really on that site much at all. It’s only the about page I think as the founder. Occasionally, we’ll write a blog post if it’s more of a sales type blog post. But 99% of the content is written by a team of writers, the editor is someone else, not me. I’m really not there at all. It’s not a personally branded site. The benefits of that is that I don’t need to really do much to keep that site running. In the early days, I did it all. But even in those early days, I didn’t really promote myself. I promoted the brand, Digital Photography School. It wasn’t really a Darren thing. I knew that that would enable me to scale it and to get others involved in that. Right from day one, I knew I wanted to have other people writing most of the content on that site because I knew I just wasn’t going to be able to invest heavenly in that for all eternity because I had ProBlogger which is much more personally branded. Again if you look at ProBlogger, you see my face on the front page. You see videos of me every week, you see my name on a lot of places. I’m the voice of this podcast. It’s much more personally branded. As a result of that, there’s a lot more that I have to do to keep ProBlogger running. I’m committed to that, I enjoy that so that’s not a problem. But if you had two personally branded sites, that’s gonna be really tough. I encourage you if you are gonna do two things, maybe consider making one of them or both of them non-personally branded if you can. It will enable you to scale things a lot bigger. It will enable you to be less involved in the day-to-day running of one or both of those businesses. It’ll really help a lot. It will also help you if you eventually wanna sell what you do. I think I would have much better chances of selling Digital Photography School one day than ProBlogger. ProBlogger I think could be sellable as well but there would probably be conditions that I would have to hang around because my name is associated with that brand a lot more. Think carefully about your personal branding. The last thing I’ll say is one thing that helped me a lot is to really work on my routines and batching what I do. I‘ve talked about batching in the past. One of the biggest challenges that I faced having to have my head across both of my business even though I’ve got Digital Photography School to a point where it almost runs itself in many regards, there are dead lines that loom for me every week on both of those blogs. It could be hard when you’re involved in the day-to-day of two different businesses to keep track of what you’re supposed to be doing at any given time. Particularly when you got a personality type like me which is not the most organized type person, I’m not great at diaries and these types of things. That’s an area that I’ve really had to work on. I had to build routines and I’ve talked in previous episodes about my routines but Tuesday afternoons for me is the time that I create the ProBlogger Plus Newsletter. Thursday afternoons, until about a year ago, I always did the Digital Photography School Newsletter. I separated those two things out onto different days. Today the DPS one gets done by a team member. Monday afternoons I’ll record this podcast. Every Monday afternoon I’m recording this podcast, it’s Monday afternoon right now. Wednesday is a day that we have our DPS team meetings. On Fridays, we have our ProBlogger team meetings. Actually having these rhythms, these routines to your week actually enables you to remember, to create a rhythm that helps you to be productive as well. It also helps your team, when you do build a team, to know what it is that you’re working on. My team knows that Wednesday is the DPS team meeting. If they’ve got something they wanna ask me, they can just hold off until Wednesday morning and when we have that if it’s a non-urgent thing so they’re not pinging me all week, they’re putting things onto the agenda for that particular time. Conversely, the ProBlogger team knows that Wednesdays is the time that I spend more thinking about DPS and so they don’t tend to annoy me as much on that about the things that are associated with ProBlogger and vice versa. The more you can set-up those sorts of rhythms where you focus upon different aspects of your business, the better. That’s good for you but it’s also good for you team as well. Alright then, my tips and some of the pros and cons of building two different businesses simultaneously, I don’t know that I’ve got all the answers on this particular front but I hope that somehow what I shared today is some wisdom you can apply to your particular business. If you’ve got anything that you would like to add to this conversation, I would love to hear it because I love to learn from you. That’s a completely selfish request. Let me know what you found to be useful for you if you’ve got two businesses. You can do that over on the comments at problogger.com/podcast/188, or you can head over to the ProBlogger Facebook group, just go to problogger.com/group and you’ll find the group. We’ll forward you over to that particular Facebook group where we’ve got just over 3,500 members now interacting with each other every week and discussing the episodes but also sharing the tips that we’ve been picking up on blogging as well. Lastly, if you’ve got a moment, head over to iTunes and leave us a review if you haven’t already, I love getting those reviews, it means a lot to me. Helps me to actually stay on track and create podcasts that really serve you. If you’ve got any reviews that you wanna leave, head over to iTunes or your favorite podcast network to do that as well. I look forward to chatting with you in next week’s episode, Episode 189 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.

What the Future Looks Like for Written Content In today’s lesson, I want to talk to you about written content vs other mediums and respond to a few questions I’ve been getting lately about which medium is best to focus upon and to answer the question – is the future of written content dead! Listen to this episode in the player above or here on iTunes (look for episode 187). Events: Before I get into today’s show though I’ve been hinting for a few episodes now that I’ll have some news for you about this year’s ProBlogger events in Australia and the USA – and how you can get early bird tickets to both. Today I’m pleased to announce what we’re doing: In Australia – we’re running two events. We’ve got Pat Flynn coming out to speak in both Brisbane and Melbourne on two consecutive weeks. Brisbane is 29-30 July and Melbourne is 5-6 August. There’s two options with tickets in both cities. On the Saturdays we’ll be doing a larger single stream day with 7 sessions. Pat, myself and some other special guests will be teaching on how to monetize blogs. We’ll be talking monetization models, content, traffic, engagement and conversion. On the Sundays there’s an option to upgrade your ticket to come to a mastermind day. These will be much smaller (32 people) and give you an opportunity to really drill down into your own blog and business and to talk with both Pat, myself and some other experience bloggers to brainstorm, strategize and plan how to grow your business. These two Aussie events are already selling quickly – the Melbourne mastermind is already sold out but there are tickets as I record this for day 1 in Melbourne and both day 1 and the mastermind in Brisbane. Check out the Aussie event at problogger.com/events, where for the next week or so you can save $100 when you get an Early Bird Ticket. If you’re in the US, I am co-presenting/hosting an event in Dallas on 24-25 October. I’m doing this in partnership with the Digital CoLab and we’re calling it the Success Incubator. This event will be a combination of very practical/actionable teaching but also a chance to really drill down and mastermind/discuss your business in round table sessions. We’ll be announcing more details about speakers and agenda in the coming weeks but have put tickets on sale for those of you who are keen. We have a limited number of tickets and they’re already selling fast. You can see what we’re planning and grab your ticket at: problogger.com/success, where there’s currently an Early Bird ticket available that saves you $50. OK – that’s enough about our events – let’s get into today’s show where we’re going to talk about the place of written content in blogging today. Mentioned in todays episode – A series by Colin Gray on Content Stacking. Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Hey there and welcome to episode 187 of the ProBlogger podcast. My name is Darren Rowse and I’m the blogger behind the ProBlogger.com – blog, podcast, event, job board and series of eBooks all designed to help you, as a blogger, to grow your audience, but first, to start you blog, to grow your audience and then to create some amazing content that’s going to help people to improve their lives in some way. This is going to make the world better but also, hopefully, be sustainable for you to build some profit into your blog. You can learn more about ProBlogger and all that we do over at ProBlogger.com. In today’s lesson, I want to talk to you about written content versus other mediums, other types of content. I want to respond to a few questions that I’ve been getting lately about which medium is best to focus upon and if there’s any future in the written word. Is the future of the written content dead? That’s the question I had a few times at Social Media Marketing World last week. I want to address in today’s podcast. You can find today show notes where I’ll have some further listening and further reading over at ProBlogger.com/podcast/187. Before I get into today’s show, I have been hinting over the last few episodes that I’ll have some news for you about this year’s ProBlogger event in Australia and the USA, and how you can get some early bird tickets to both those. Today, I’m pleased to announce what we’re doing. I’m going to give you some further reading if you are interested, over in the show notes. But if you’re in Australia, we’re running two events this year. We’ve got Pat Flynn coming out to speak from Smart Passive Income. He’s coming out to Brisbane and Melbourne on consecutive weeks. Brisbane is the 29th and 30th of July and Melbourne is the 5th and 6th of August. There are two options for tickets in both of those cities as well. We’re doing two-day events as you know. The first day, in both cities is a larger single stream day with a seven sessions. Pat, myself and some other special guest will be teaching you on the topic of monetizing blogs. We’re going to be specifically talking about the different models that you can do, content tips and traffic tips, some engagement tips and a little bit about conversion, making the money from all that stuff. That’s the first day. It’s everyone in the same room. We’ll have 100 plus people in on that day, potentially even more. On the Sunday, the second day, there’s an option to upgrade your ticket to come to a mastermind day. Again, these will be with Pat, myself, and some other experienced blogger. It’s going to be limited to 32 people for that second day. We’ll give an opportunity to really drill down into your blog, into your business, to talk to Pat, myself and some of these other experts that were bringing in to strategize, to plan and to really brainstorm what it is that you need to do to grow your business, much more intimate kind of thing. Those two cities, Melbourne and Brisbane, that’s the format. We’ll do the same thing in both events with slightly different speakers in addition to Pat and myself. I have to say the Melbourne mastermind is already sold out. It’s sold out in the few hours when we launched it. As I record this, there’s still a few tickets left for the mastermind in Brisbane and then there are plenty of tickets for day one of both of those events. We should be able to accommodate most people who want to come to those first days. If you’re in Australia, check out ProBlogger.com/events and for the next week or so you get $100 early bird discount on both tickets there. If you’re in the US, as I know about half of our listeners are. I’m co presenting or co hosting an event in Dallas, in October. It’s the 24th and 25th of October. It’s in partnership with some friends of mine called the Digital CoLab and we’re calling the event that’s partnership of both of our different businesses, we’re calling it the Success Incubator. I’ve got some link for you on that as well if you go to ProBlogger.com/success. ProBlogger.com/success, there’s a $50 discount at present for early birds. That event is going to be a combination of some practical, actionable teaching but also some mastermind type of experiences as well. We will be giving you a bit more information on that in the next few weeks but at the moment, you can get that early bird offer. Again, if you’re in Australia, ProBlogger.com/events. If you’re in America, ProBlogger.com/success. That’s all I got to say on the events, I would love to see you there. It’s the whole out of my year doing this events. It’s probably the best thing that I think I do. If you get some value from this podcast, you’re going to love what we do at those events because it’s very similar. I’m trying to do practical, actionable stuff that you’re going to get a lot of value at. Some of my best online friends will be there to deliver that value as well in addition to what I’ve got to present. That’s enough of the events. You can find today show notes over at ProBlogger.com/podcast/187 where I’ll link to both of those event types as well. That’s the longest introduction I have ever done. I’m not going to do that in every show, that’s for sure but I want to get onto today’s show. We’re going to talk about written content. Just a little word of warning, I’m completely jet lagged out of my head. I got back from Social Media Marketing World a couple of days ago in San Diego, 25 hours both ways. Those of you who were in the Facebook group, who know that I, pretty much, every time I had a layover, I answered questions in the group. I want to thank those of you who kept me company over that particular trip. That was a crazy trip. I’m pretty tired but I want to get into today show, we’re talking about written content. The reason that I want to talk about it is because at Social Media Marketing World, I recon I had about 10 conversations with people about written content and whether it has a future. People are coming out and going, is written content dead? Everyone at Social Media Marketing World is talking about video. There were whole streams about podcasts. There were lots of streams about visual content. In a lot of our sessions on written content, people were saying, “Is it dead? Is there a future in it?” That’s why I want to talk about it today. To do so, I want to rewind the clock back to 2002, in my first blog. While it’s the first blog, it was called Living Room, it’s not online anymore the other day, I was actually looking back as part of my preparation for my talk at Social Media Marketing World. I went onto one of my favorite tools, the Internet Archive, which is a tool that records what sites you used to look like in the past. It’s actually recording what it looks like every few months. Once you’re site’s in there, it will continue to grab what things look like on your site right now. I went back as far as I could on the Internet Archive to find what my blog look like, that first original blog looked like. I got to it eventually when I remembered what the URL was because it was on Blogspot when I first had it. As I was looking at it, I found myself really cringing. Probably because of the horrible design, I hacked it together myself. I’m not a designer at all. Back then I was even less of a designer. I also cringed at the spelling mistakes and some of the naivety of what I was doing on the blog at the time. As I was looking at it, I was amazed by a couple of things. The main thing that I was amazed about was the complete lack of visual content on that blog. The front page had 10 posts on it and not a single one of them had anything other than text. The only visuals on the front page of my blog were a tiny little series of 100×100 pixels that I put in the header of my design, these tiny little images which, if memory serves me correctly, took me days to get those images right up there in the design. That was the only visual on the whole site. Every blog post I had was text and it really, to me, stood out as being very different to what my blogs look like today. If you go to my blogs today, ProBlogger for instance, you’ll see there’s video on the front page and on key pages around the site. Every single post has images. There’s obviously a podcast on there as well. It’s a much more of a multimedia experience. Back then in 2002, I didn’t use images or any other mediums at all for a number of reasons. Firstly, people just didn’t do that back then. I do remember a few bloggers who were doing visual stuff but really not many at all. Most bloggers that I was reading were doing purely text as well. Dial up internet, that’s what I was on at that time in 2002. That made it hard to upload images. I remember trying to upload an image at one stage, even those 100×100 pixels, it was really slow to get them up there. Any time that I did start to do images, I would get pushed back from my readers because some of my readers were on dial up as well. I really didn’t like it when I did use images. I don’t know if you remember those days when you would load up a website with images on it and the images would load line by line, a big image would take 5 to 10 minutes to see images. I guess the other reason that people weren’t doing multimedia, video and audio in particular, was that the tools to do that were pretty primitive. This is pre-YouTube, this is pre-iTunes. The tools to make that topic content were pretty primitive as well. It was possible to do it but it was pretty hard to do. Things have changed a lot since 2002 when I started blogging. Today, not a blog post goes by on my blog where there’s not at least a single image. That’s a rule I have. We have to have an image in every post. Of course, I’m doing a weekly podcast. We’re doing live videos over on Facebook and embedding some of those into content on the blogs as well, playing with different types of mediums, some infographics and other visual content as well. The web today is just so much more visual and the tools at our fingertips are so powerful. The fact that I can get my phone now and go live on Facebook is just amazing, so much easier to create content, to edit that content today. There’s this expectation amongst our readers today that if content isn’t at the very least visual, then it’s often seen as second right. As a result, we’re seeing a lot more bloggers shifting their attention to audio, to visual, to live content and visual content as well. As a result, I’m starting to see some of my friends shift away or at least decreasing their reliance on the written word. Hence, the question I’ve been getting this year at Social Media Marketing World. Is the future of text, of written content gloomy? Is written content dead? I don’t think it is. I really don’t think it is. What I think has been happening over the last five years is a needed realignment to get the balance right between the different mediums. If we look over the last few decades of mainstream media, even before the rise of the internet, we’ve always seen room for text, newspapers, magazines in largely a textual content with images as well, I guess. We’ve always had, over the last few decades, room for audio radio, we’ve always had room for video over the last few decades at least, with television, movies whether that be live television or recorded televisions. As we look back in history, we’ve always had these types of content sitting side by side, at least over the last few decades since television came out. We’ve always had them sitting side by side but there had been periods of time where certain mediums have dominated. We’ve seen the rise and fall of different mediums. None of them have ever completely died, often. Over the last decade, we’ve seen of course a massive shift to the internet. Now, it’s so much easier to produce all of these different types of content on the internet. In comparison to 2002, it’s so much easier to do video. I think what’s been happening as we’ve seen the rise of audio and particularly the rise of video is just a realignment. I actually think it’s going to balance out and we will see a place in another few years where these three different types of content or four different types if you include visual sort of sit side by side. At the moment, it does seem like video is everything. We’re saying Facebook, putting a lot of time in the video as well. But I think things will balance out again particularly with the web getting faster and faster and more and more of the world getting access to fast internet. We’re going to see things continue rise perhaps for audio and video for the next little while, but written content is not going away. I actually think, at the moment, written content is still, the dominant or at least in the top two types of content that people are consuming online today. Yes, we have seen the rise in video but I think written content is still perhaps the most popular, if not, the second most popular. There’s a few reasons that I will give you that I don’t think written content is going away. For me, the main reason for this is that some people simply prefer written content to anything else. I saw this when I launched these podcast. When I launched these podcast, I was really excited about it. I was really excited about audio because I’m an audio kind of person. I learned best through listening to someone. But when I launched it, I got some really positive feedback. I also got quite a few of my readers who were a bit angry that I was starting to do audio. They pushed back. I got a number of emails in that first week or so and in the weeks afterwards from people saying, “I don’t listen to audio.” When I do the same thing with video, when I do a Facebook Live and I link to it in a newsletter, I get emails from people saying, “I don’t watch video.” There’s a variety of reasons why they don’t, for some it’s accessibility, they’re on slower internet. Some, it’s they don’t have an iPhone and they don’t know how to listen to the audio or they don’t want to download an app to listen to it or they don’t want to do that and for some people, it’s just a preference. Some people learn best through the written word. That’s why we’ve added transcripts for all of our podcasts but the reality is some people just prefer an article to listening to something or to watching something. This is not going away. The written word is not going away because some people just are going to be searching for that topic content. For me, that’s the number one reason. There are other reasons as well. For now, the type of content that search engines present most in their results, this is changing a little, is written content. If you do a search for anything in Google on google.com, you will find that Google is presenting a few videos and images to include some visuals in their search results but still, the vast majority of what they’re indexing is text and written content. That might be partly because there’s more written content on the internet than video but Google is still showing more of that, I think it’s another good reason to continue to create written content. Another reason that I think written content is great is that it’s scannable. Most people can scan an article much quicker than they can watch a video or listen to a podcast. You can speed up YouTube clip, you can double the speed of a YouTube clip. Some of you listen to these podcasts at one and a half times speed or even two times speed but there’s only some file you can speed up listening. It’s very hard to find an exact moment in a podcast. You can’t scan and go, “Yeah that looks interesting, I’m going to just go straight to that.” Same with video unless the creator of that video or audio goes to the effort of marking when things happen, they do timestamps. In most cases, written content, you can take a quick scan and go, “Yeah, I want to read that section.” That’s another advantage of written word. We’ll see some changes in these, we’ll perhaps see Google indexing video and audio in a better way that helps people to be able to scan it and find the right beat that’s relevant for them but for now, written content is the best in terms of that. Text also allows you to really comprehensively cover an idea. Of course, this can be done in other mediums too but I think people are used to reading those comprehensive pieces of content, at least some people are. I’ve got books that take hours or days to get through. My last holidays, I read a book that took me several days to read, that really long form content people are used to. They have the mindset that they’re willing to really invest time in reading. In terms of video content, perhaps people aren’t quite as used to that although we’re seeing changes with this. With live streaming, people are now binging on video content a lot more. Things are changing in that regard but I think text does allow you to comprehensively cover an idea in a way that people are used to and willing to invest time into. Text is still perhaps the most accessible type of content for many people today. In terms of internet speeds, we still see some parts of the world that are on slower internet speeds than others. Text opens up a way of communication with those people. I think text builds credibility, I’m not saying video and audio don’t, but I think it does build credibility. People are impressed by the written word. Written content is also really easy to create. This is another advantage for the written word, I think. While it’s very easy these days to create and edit video, it does take more work to get that to a final point where you can publish it. It’s something that takes some certain level of technical expertise as compared to written content where you can open up a WordPress document and type it straight in and then you can edit it on there as well. You can even go back and edit it once you’ve already published. I guess that’s the other advantage of text, for me. In comparison to audio or video, once it’s published, it’s really hard to go back in and then edit it. Sometimes, I’ll be listening to my own podcast and think, “Oh my gosh, I can’t believe I made that mistake.” I could go back and edit it but it would take so much more work than it does to edit a blog post, for example. There’s a variety of reasons why I don’t think written content is going away either from a consumer standpoint or from a creator standpoint as well. I’m sure other people would give me some other benefits of written content. If you’ve got any, I’d love to hear them in the comments over on the show notes or on the Facebook group. I do want to say I’m not arguing that it should be the only medium. I’m not arguing that written content is the best medium even, that everyone should be creating it even. I just want to emphasize that I don’t think it’s going away. I see a lot of hype about how video is going to be the only thing that we consume online and I personally don’t see that day coming. I actually, personally think I will always listen to podcast. I prefer audio. There are certain types of content I prefer to read. I don’t have all day to sit and watch videos, to find the snippets that I really need to learn about. I want to be able to scan content. I don’t think written content is going away. I’ve just argued for written. I think there are also some real benefits of having other types of content as well. I guess the way I look at it is it’s like a tool bell. I want in my online content creation to be able to pull out written content, to be able to produce video, to be able to produce audio, to be able to produce visual content at the right time. Each medium has its strengths. To be able to create them all enables us as communicators, as online entrepreneurs to communicate more effectively at the right time. For example, let’s just go through different types of content. I’ve just argued the case for the written content. Let’s think about visual content. Visual content is really good today, obviously, it’s a very visual web. But what I found is the visual content helps you to get shared, it helps you to get exposure. It helps you to become known. People share visuals on Pinterest, Instagram, Google Images, help us to become known and found through visual content. Creating visual is really important because it helps us to become more known, it helps us to become shared. Video is great, also for being found. We’re seeing video coming into the search engine results more and more. But for me, the strength of videos, that helps us to be liked. We talked about visual content helps us to be known. I think video helps us to be liked. It shows who we are. It shows people our expertise. It shows people our sense of humor, our delivery style. It helps us to become liked. It helps us to build credibility. It helps us also to illustrate ideas and processes in a way that text sometimes struggles to do. To be able to show someone this is how I do something, that’s something that you can’t do in text but it’s so much easier sometimes in video. Video is really good in that. For me, the strength of audio is that it’s incredibly personal. I lost count of the number of times at Social Media Marketing World that people came out to me and said, “You know I feel like I talk to you every week. I feel like we have conversations. I feel like I know you on a deeper level.” There’s something very intimate about putting ear buds in the ears and listening to the voice of someone. It helps people to make a connection with you on a really deeper level. It helps people to build trust with you. We often talk about people want to know, like and trust you. We want to be known. We want to be liked. We want to be trusted. For me, if you’re using these different types of mediums, it enables you to be known, to be liked and trusted. Particularly, if you bring those different types of medium together. I guess what I’m trying to say here is there’s real advantages of text but there are also real advantages of these other mediums as well. If possible, gather as many skills as you can in those different areas because there’s something very powerful that happens when you bring those things together. My friend, Colin Gray, he’s spoke at our Australian event, ProBlogger event last year. He has a blog podcast called The Podcast Host. At last year’s event, in Australia, he talked about something that I’ve never heard anyone talked about before, he called it Content Stacking, Content Stacking as a way to communicate more effectively. He talked about designing a series of content or a season of content that takes people through a number of pieces of content or a number of different types of content. He talked about bringing written word, podcast, video, visual content together to create a stack of content that leads people through a learning process. Ever since I heard him talking about that, it’s something that I’ve been wanting to do more and more often. I’ll link in the show notes today an article that Colin wrote on that particular topic. In fact, it’s actually a series of articles that he wrote on that topic. I’ve really been digging into that series. On ProBlogger, we’re going to be exploring content stacking a little bit more in the coming months. You’re going to see us roll out some content that is stacked. It will take us a couple of months to get it together but you’re going to see us put together some content that’s written content and audio content and video content and some visual content as well that will walk you through a process over on ProBlogger. It’s something that we’re putting together at the moment. We’ll present almost like a course but I could see it being done on a blog as well. I really encourage you to really grapple with bringing the different types of content together but don’t throw out written content. Is written content dead? No, way. Keep creating it. There are so many reasons to do it. Should it be the only type of content you create? This is really going to come down to your goals but I think most bloggers today should be mixing their mediums. They shouldn’t be just creating single medium blogs. I still think there is a place for single medium blogs. Someone like Seth Godin, is a great example. Seth Godin is a gifted writer. He writes really well and his articles are short and punchy, they’re short but they’re powerful and I think he presents those articles in a really good  way. He’s a gifted writer and so that’s all he does. You go look at his blog, it looks like my blog in 2002. There are no images on it at all. He’s got a bald head and his glasses a part of his brand. But really, vast majority of the content he’s creating is written content. It can be done that you just focus on one medium. If you are an amazing writer, write. If you are a gifted video maker, go with video. If you’re audio is your skill, be a podcaster. There are no rules. You can focus on one of the mediums but I think most bloggers today are bringing these different types of mediums together but don’t give up on the written word. I guess that’s my message for tonight. Don’t give up on the written word. It still does have a big place on the web today. If you want to listen to a little bit more, explore some of these things a little bit more, I’ve got two podcast episodes for you to go back and listen to. Firstly episode 97, I talked about embeddable content. I think this is the easiest way to get multimedia onto your blog today. Some of you are listening to this and going, “Yeah, I do written word but I don’t know how to do visuals. I don’t know how to do video. I don’t know how to do audio.” The easiest way to get those different types of mediums onto your blog is to embed content other people have created. You go to YouTube and find the best video possible. 99% of those videos on YouTube, you can embed onto your blog. That content creators wants you to embed that content on your blog and this is the easiest way to get these different mediums onto your blog alongside that written content you’ve created. If you want to learn more about embeddable content, go back and listen to episode 97 of the ProBlogger podcast. It’s sitting there on iTunes or you can go over to the show notes as well. I talked about some of the different types content that you can be embedding onto your blog. The other one that you might want to listen to is episode 134 which is one where I talked about how to choose which social network but also which medium is best for your blog. If you’re just starting out and you want to experiment with adding a different type of medium into your blog but you don’t know whether you should video or you don’t know whether you should do audio or you should do something else, that episode 134 is one that you can go back and listen to. It asks you some questions, it gives you some questions to begin to explore which medium might be best for you. Hopefully, they’ll help you. That’s episode 97 and episode 134. Otherwise, dig into the archives. There are 186 previous episodes of this podcast. There’s plenty to listen to. Lastly, don’t forget to join the ProBlogger Facebook group. We’ve seen explosion of people joining that group out over the last little while. If you want to find us, I setup a redirect for you to make it easy for you to find, just type into your browser ProBlogger.com/group and you’ll be forwarded straight to that group. Thanks for listening. I’m looking forward to chatting with you further of the ProBlogger Facebook group or over on the show notes as well. You can find today’s show notes at ProBlogger.com/podcast/187. 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.

How I Write a Blog Post – My Step-By-Step Process Today, I want to walk you through my step by step process for writing a blog post! I get asked about this regularly over in the ProBlogger podcast listeners Facebook group. So today I put together some notes on the workflow I use and want to run you through. Before I do – and speaking of the Facebook group – I wanted to let you know that I’ve shared some exciting news with members of that group  in the last week – particularly about an event that ProBlogger is involved in running later this year in the US. We’ve not fully launched the event yet publically but if you’re curious about coming to an event that ProBlogger is collaborating on – head to the Facebook group and check it out. But enough of that! – let’s get into today episode. Further Resources on A Step-By-Step Guide to How I Write a Blog Post How to Craft a Blog Post – 10 Crucial Points to Pause Episode in which I talk about avatars How to create great blog headlines How to use mindmapping 7 Steps to Editing Blog posts Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Good day, it’s Darren from ProBlogger. Welcome to Episode 186 of the ProBlogger Podcast. My name is Darren Rowse and I’m the blogger behind ProBlogger.com, a blog, podcast, event, job board and series of ebooks all designed to help you as a blogger to start a blog, to grow that blog’s audience, to create some really useful content for that audience and to make some money from your blog. Today, I want to walk you through my step by step process for writing a blog post. I get asked quite regularly over in the ProBlogger podcast listeners group on Facebook about my writing process. Whilst I’ve talked about different aspects of my process, various episodes of this podcast, I’ve never really gone from start to finish. Today, I want to walk you through it. Before I do, I just did give you a little hint, that we’ve got some events coming up with ProBlogger. This year, we are planning to do an Australian event. In fact, there may be more than one, we’ll let you know a little bit more about that in the coming weeks. But we also, this year, want to do something in the US because we do have so many of our readers of ProBlogger, listeners of this podcast in the US.and speaking of the Facebook group – I wanted to let you know that I’ve shared some exciting news with members of that group  in the last week – particularly about an event that ProBlogger is involved in running later this year in the US. This year, we are planning an event in the US. Whilst we’re not quite ready to launch details of that quite yet, I’m working with some partners on this particular event, we have let some details slip out in the Facebook group. We wanted to do a bit of a soft launch. If you’re curious about coming to an event in the US, go join the ProBlogger Podcast Listeners Facebook Group. Do a search on Facebook for ProBlogger Podcast Listeners and you will find the group. Join and you will find some details in there. By the time this episodes comes out, you may even be able to pick up an early bird ticket to that event. If you’re curious about coming to an event in the US, check out the Facebook group. If you’re in Australia or willing to come to Australia later in the year, stay tuned, we’ll let you know a little bit more about that. But enough of all that, enough of me teasing you about events. I know I’ve been known for doing that. I want to get into today’s episode. Let’s get into talking about my writing process. Ben over in the Facebook group today asked me this morning if I could talk a little about how I go about writing blog posts. He particularly wanted to know how I outline my posts and then how I go about ordering the writing process; when do I write headlines, introductions, and that type of thing. I started to write back a rather long post to Ben describing what I go through. As I was writing it, I realized I’ve never really fully run through that whole process on this podcast. That’s what I want to do today. I hope it will be helpful for you. I have touched on some of the different things that I’m going to talk about in previous episodes, so I’m not going to rehash all of that today. I’ll refer you back to some of those episodes as we go along. Let’s get into it. The first thing that I do is pretty logical, really. It’s to pick a topic. Pick something that I want the post to be about. I should say this process really does apply to creating videos on YouTube or a podcast even. I went through almost this exact process in preparing this podcast. I actually use a very similar process when I’m creating a talk as well, a presentation, a keynote presentation. This, for me, given the type of blogs that I have is almost always about either identifying a question that one of my readers is asking that I can answer, or identifying a problem that one of my readers has that they’re trying to overcome, or identifying a task that someone is trying to complete, or identifying a goal that someone is trying to reach. I’m a teaching blogger, I’m a how-to kind of blogger. 95% of my posts are how to content. I always start with one of those things; a question, a problem, a process, a task, or a goal that someone is trying to achieve. Generally, that defines the topic of my post. I’m coming from that perspective today as a teaching blogger, I’m sure other people would choose topics based upon other things but that’s where I’m coming from. Number two, this is something I think is really important, I don’t see too many other people writing about this when they outline their process. Number two for me is to remind myself of my reader. I’ve kind of eluded to this in my first point, picking a topic, because almost all the posts that I write tend to come out of questions or problems or goals that my readers have. In this step, I take a moment before I write anything to try and imagine the situation of my reader. You are so much more effective in your blogging if you write with your reader in mind, if you write to your reader. I think it’s really important to pause before you write, to picture your reader. I’ve talked in previous episodes about how I’ve got avatars or reader profiles. I think I talked about this in Episode 33, about how to develop an avatar. In this step, I go a little bit deeper and I try and write a sentence before I write anything else about who my reader is and how they look at this topic, how they view the topic that I’m talking about, the perspective that they might have on this topic. If I’m writing about a problem, why do they have that problem? Why does my typical reader have that problem? How do they feel about that problem? What have they previously tried to overcome that problem? What has stopped them from solving that problem in the past? Take a few minutes to put yourself in the shoes of your reader. This might be about you going back in time to when you had that problem or when you had that question, and actually just let yourself marinate in the situation of your reader for a moment because if you write from that perspective with that person in mind, you’re going to be so much more effective in your writing. You’re going to write with empathy and you’re going to write a relevant piece of content for them. You’re not going to write a hypothetical post, you’re going to write something that’s going to solve a person’s problem. Let me give you a really quick example. I might choose to write a post on my photography blog answering a really common question that we get quite a bit. The question we often get is, “How should I light my portraits?” That’s a typical question we get. It’s a good question, but there’s a lot of different ways that I can approach that question depending on who is asking the question. My readers, who are they? What type of gear do they have? What type of budget do they have to buy new gear? What type of experience or level are they at in their photography? If I was doing this for my readers on Digital Photography School, I’d write a short sentence or two describing my reader. If I was doing this for DPS readers, I might identify that a lot of our readers are just starting out with photography, they’re beginners. Their perspective, their viewpoint of lighting a portrait is they don’t even know where to start. They may not have too much lighting gear at their fingertips, they may have one flash, they may not even have a flash, they might be just using lights around their home, they might be on a real budget. Knowing that gives me a viewpoint to write that article from, it gives me a perspective to tackle, it gives me a real understanding of who might be reading their article. I’m not going to write an article about how to light a portrait with professional photography gear in this case, I’m going to write something from the perspective of someone just starting out. Think about your reader, think about the situation they’re in, the feelings they have, the questions that they have around your topic. The more you can do thinking around that, the better position you’re going to be in to outline an article and to write that article with real empathy and in a relatable way. The other thing I’m thinking about when I’m thinking about my reader is what do I want them to do after reading my article? Thinking about the call to action before you start writing anything is really important because it will shape your article, it will shape your headline, it will shape your introduction, it will shape the way you write your main part of the content, and it will shape your conclusion. Don’t just get to the end of your article and ask yourself, “What do I want my readers to do now?” Ask that question before you start writing. Number three, create a working headline. This is something that I’ve actually changed my perspective on, I used to write the article and then write a headline. I know some people prefer to do it that way and that’s totally fine, I understand that perspective. What I like to do is spend a little bit of time taking that topic, taking that reader perspective, and trying to come up with a headline. I find that sometimes in the creating of a working headline that I find a unique angle to write the post from, particularly given the work I’ve just done on understanding my readers. If I want to take that example a little bit further, the question I’m writing about is how do I light a portrait. I’ve done the work in understanding my reader, I understand they’re beginners, they don’t have much lighting gear. I might brainstorm headlines and come up with things like how to light a portrait using lights you find around your home. That might be something that interests that type of reader. Or, how to light a portrait when you’ve only got one flash. They’re not really fully formed headlines yet, but they’re good enough for a working headline. I might choose one of those. Really, by coming up with a variety of those type of headlines, I actually now have an angle for my article. I might take that one how to light a portrait using the lights that you find around your home, that gives me the whole article. I can start to think about what lights do I have around the home and begin to construct that particular article. Or if I choose the one how to light a portrait with just one flash, I now have the boundaries of what that article needs to be about. For me, creating that working headline upfront sometimes just gives a little bit more tightness to what the article is about. I will say, it’s important that this is just a working headline, it’s just a working title. I often, if not always, go back and tweak and change the headline later after I’ve written the article, or sometimes even as I’m writing the article I’m thinking about I need to change that headline a little bit. I do talk a lot about headlines in Episode 156. If headlines is something you want to learn more about, I give you a variety of different ways to come up with a great headline for your article in that episode 156. Number four is to brainstorm and list the main points or the main teaching of your article. I’m coming from someone who’s teaching in most of my articles. For me, it’s about trying to construct something that is going to teach people or is going to convince people of something. At this point, I’m not really writing a lot, I’m coming up more with a bullet point list, and I do this in a text document on my computer, sometimes I’ll do it on a notepad or I’m doing this in mind mapping. I did talk about that in Episode 182. I use a couple of softwares to create mind maps. Sometimes, for some of my larger articles, I like to visualize it. In many cases, it’s about doing it on a piece of paper or on a text document. I’m trying at this point to brainstorm the answers to the questions that I’ve identified, or solutions to problems, I’m outlining the steps that a reader needs to go through to learn a new skill or master a process. I’m really trying to add the bones to the article, I’m not adding muscles, I’m not really adding much at this point. I’m just coming up with bullet points. Those bullet points will often become subheadings in my articles. I tend to almost start with a list, my articles don’t always end up as a list although sometimes they do. I find that by coming up with some main subheadings for my article for the main sections, and then beginning to come up with a few sub points for each of those sections, that’s where the article begins to form for me. This is really the outlining process. I often start with more points than I actually end up using in the article. I’m thinking about all the possible things I could write and then I begin to call it down and come up with the main things that I want to say, the most valuable things. I don’t get too precious about how many points I’m going to make, I know some bloggers only create lists of seven things. I don’t do that, I use as many points in my articles as I think are useful and I try and make it the best article I can. Some of my articles and podcasts have one point, sometimes it’s most effective if you’ve just got one big idea, and sometimes I have up to 20 or 30. I think I had a podcast recently with 21 points in it. It’s about trying to come up with what you’re going to say, outline that in a bullet point or in a mind map in some ways. You may want to write a sentence about what you’d say in each of those sections, or some sub bullet points as well. I think it’s really important to arrange those points in the right order. This is something I think a lot of bloggers could improve their writing by just taking a moment or two to ask themselves is this the right order? Is it a logical order? Are my points building upon one another? Most articles, it’s much more effective to put them in a logical order, in an order that builds momentum and makes sense to your readers. Spend some time on that. At this point, I’m still outlining, I try and take a bit of a critical look at the outline I’ve come up with. When I’m happy with the outline, I look at it and then I start to ask myself some hard questions. This sometimes isn’t a very nice process, but sometimes things like is this outline going to be useful? Usually, you can tell from an outline whether it’s going to be a lightweight article or whether it’s gonna be really useful. Is someone going to have a fist pump moment when they read this article, given the points you’ve come up with, or are they going to say that was okay? “They got me to click but it didn’t really change my life.” Is that article useful? Is it meaningful? Is it going to change someone’s life in some way? What questions might people still be asking at the end of reading that type of article, looking at the points that you’re going to make. Will they have some questions? Make note of what those questions are. Is there something that you don’t know as the author yet about this topic that you really should know? Sometimes when we write articles, we get to the end of the article and we go, “I didn’t really know enough about that. I should’ve done some research on that.” What arguments and objections might people have about this article having a look at that outline? I think it’s really important to ask those types of questions, be critical about the outline that you’ve come up with. Don’t just ask those questions at the end when you’ve written the whole thing. I think it’s important to ask some of those questions as you’re drafting an outline for your article. Because sometimes, at this point in the process, you realize that you need to go away and do some research, or that you need to go away and ask some questions of your own to learn more about that particular topic, or maybe at this point having asked those questions you think actually this is a bit of a weak article, I’m not going to write it. That’s happened to me many times, I’d much rather come to that conclusion that this is not a strong article. At that point then after I’ve already written something because that’s going to take me several hours more. Ask some of those critical questions at this point. It may be that you need to go away and do some research. I try not to look at what other people have written too early in the process, I like to outline my article first, and then do some research and see what other people have written to see if there’s any other ways that I can improve it. I tend to do that later. It’s also really important to make note of who inspired you so that you can give some credit for that as well. The other thing you might want to do, having asked some of those questions, if you realize that the article is not going to be strong enough, you may want to go away and seek some help from other people. You can seek help by reading other people’s articles, but maybe there’s someone you can do an interview with or ask some questions or even get them to write a section of your post for you. This point in the drafting of your post, it’s important to have asked those questions so that you can put in place answers to the objections people will have, that you can strengthen something that’s shaping up to be weak. Number five is where we begin to work on the introduction. I do know that some people wait until after they’re written their article and then go back and write their introduction, in the same ways that people sometimes do that for their headline. I, again, find that for me, writing the introduction upfront is good, it helps me get into the flow as a writer. Sometimes, I find that if I’ve written an introduction, again it shapes the direction of the article and it helps me to write the rest of the article faster and more in the flow. I will say as with a headline, I will often go back and re-work an introduction later, I think it’s important to do that. I find for me writing that introduction early is good. When you’re doing your introduction, a few things I’ll say about that. Again, as you’re writing an introduction, be really thinking about your reader and their position, the questions and the feelings that they have. I think a good introduction not only identifies the topic, which is important, but it also should empathize with the reader. It should show your reader that you understand their situation, that you understand the question they have or the problem they have and how they feel about that. I think if you can show some empathy in those first few lines, you’ll make a deeper connection with your reader and that will drive them to want to read the rest of your article. Show them that you know how they feel, that you understand their situation, rather than you’re just writing a hypothetical article on a topic. Paint a picture also of what the benefits of them reading the rest of your article are. You might want to make a promise, you might want to say this is an outcome that you’ll have as a result of reading this article. They’re the type of things that I would put in an introduction. For me, an introduction is generally between one and three paragraphs. As I’ve said, this will get reworked later, it’s a working introduction. Point number six is to expand your main points. With the introduction written, I then tackle each of the previously outlined points that I’ve gone through in putting that outline together. This is where I write the bulk of the article, this is where I spend a lot of time. Sometimes for me, it will take a couple hours to write a couple thousand words or a thousand words, sometimes it will take me a couple of days to really work through this depending on how hard it is and whether I’m in the flow or not of writing. Generally, what I do is take a bullet point from my outline and come up with a subheading for that part of the article. And then, I write a paragraph or two or three, or maybe a little bullet list as part of that article. I try and stick to the outline I’ve previously come up with, but it’s not unusual for me to also be thinking of more things that I can say as I’m going. I’ll either make note of the other ideas I’m getting on a piece of paper next to me, or I might add them to the outline that I already come up with. I also find as I’m writing articles, I get ideas for new articles. It’s often in this part of the process that I’ll be tempted as I’m writing to take a tangent. I’ve trained myself to be aware that sometimes those tangents take in the middle of an article are actually new blog posts. I think it’s really useful to have somewhere as you’re writing that you can just brain dump other ideas that you get, or other questions that you think readers might have that relate to your topic. Really, point number six here is about expanding the main points. It’s adding meat to those bones that you’ve come up with earlier in your article. You can see here that I tend to write my articles in the order that my readers read them. For me, this is really important. I write the headline, the introduction, the main part of the article. Point number seven is really moving onto the conclusion. The age old advice of Aristotle says, “Tell them what you’ll say,” that’s your introduction. “Then, tell them,” which is the main part of your article. “And then tell them what you just told them,” this is the conclusion. Good articles have some kind of a conclusion. For me again, I do this after I’ve written the bulk of the article. Once I know what I’ve told them, I then try and sum up my teaching in some way. Usually for me, this is about trying to return to the problem or the question that I set out in the introduction to tackle, to remind people what I’ve tried to teach them. Give them a bit of a summary of the main points again. You’ve probably heard me do this in the podcast quite a bit. I generally go back through the points that I’ve made, put them in a nice, quick summary statement. And then, it’s important to ask your readers to take some kind of action and to go back to that thing that you identified right at the start that you want your readers to do and then ask them to do that. It’s important not to ask them to do too many things but clearly state the one thing you want them to do next. Make it very clear what you want them to do. That can really be anything. Depending on the article, it could be to do something that you’ve been just teaching them to do. Go away and try this technique I’ve just talked about, or it might be something more about leaving a comment, or telling a story, or responding and interacting with what you’ve done in some way. There’s no right call to action, it really has to flow from the goals of your blog and the goals of this particular article. Number eight, before I do any editing, I’m looking to polish and add depth in some way. I think almost every article could be improved in some way, and not just by editing, there can be more added to it. Could you add a story? Could you add an image? Could you go and find a video on YouTube that you can embed into it? Could you create a chart that illustrates something that you’ve done? How could you make it look better and how can you make the content actually be better? Could you go away and find a quote from someone and add that particular thing in? Could you go away and do a little mini interview with someone to add in some of their ideas, with maybe an alternative viewpoint to what you’ve written. It’s really important to make your content look really good but to add depth to it as well. Step number nine, the last one I want to talk about, is to edit and proofread. You’ve spent a lot of time by this point steering over your article but you need to take a little bit of a step back at this point and do some editing. For me, I find putting a bit of space between when I write and when I edit is really important. I think we use different parts of our brains for this more critical thinking about editing. I suggested seven steps for editing your work in Episode 168, but I do want to emphasize it’s so important to do. You waste all that energy by publishing something that’s not quite good enough and that’s got glaring mistakes in it. Do some editing, or get someone else to help you with that particular process. Build editing and proofreading into your workflow. Quality control really does matter. To summarize that, because all good conclusions have a summary, pick your topic, number one. Number two, remind yourself of your reader, do a little bit of work about putting yourself in their shoes. Number three, create a working headline. Number four is to brainstorm and to list the main points of your article. Number five, write a working introduction. Number six, expand the main points. Number seven is write a conclusion and call to action. Number eight is to polish. I should’ve said in the polishing stage for me, that’s where I go back to my headline, I go back to my introduction, and rework those so that they’re not just working headlines, working introductions, they are the final ones. Number nine is to edit and proofread your content. That’s my workflow. I would love to know how this differs from yours, what you would add into it. I wrote a whole series of posts on this topic quite a few years ago now on the ProBlogger blog. I’m going to link back to that because I think it’s still relevant today, I do go into more depth in each of the things that I’ve talked about. I also have another one right at the end about what to do after you’ve published your content as well. The title of that series was actually called How To Craft A Blogpost, 10 Crucial Points To Pause. The whole idea of that series was that I think a lot of bloggers—I’ve done this myself. It’s so tempting to just bang out a blogpost, just bang out an article and hit publish and put it out there. The whole point of that series, and hopefully of this particular episode, is that I think it’s so important to take your time and to craft the content that you have. That means pausing to ask question, pausing to imagine your reader, pausing to make it better, to add depth, to polish. Crafts people don’t just bang out art, they really take their time and they add depth to it. They make it the best it can be. I think it’s important that we do that with our content. Whatever workflow you have, I really encourage you to pause along the way to be reflective about it, to ask those questions along the way. Most importantly, to really keep coming back to who is reading that content. On the other end of that content is a human being who has needs, who has problems, who has feelings, who has a situation that they’re in, and to really spend a little bit of time throughout this whole process, to picture them, to understand them, and to write for them. It’s such an important thing. Your content will rise in quality, it will rise in relevance to people, and it will be the type of thing that people will want to share because they feel connected to you if you go to that extra effort of understanding who’s on the other side of that content. Craft your content, don’t just create it, craft it, take your time with it. You can find today’s show notes with all the further listening that I mentioned along the way over at problogger.com/podcast/186. I hope you found this one useful, and also as I said before, check out the ProBlogger Podcast Listeners Facebook Group where we do have some details of some upcoming events, particularly an event coming up in the US. Love to connect with you and hopefully even meet you and see you there. Thanks for listening today, I’ll chat with you in Episode 187. 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.

How to Apply for a Blogging Job In today’s lesson, I want to talk about finding a job as a blogger – particularly how to apply for a blogging job. Back in 2006 I noticed I started getting a lot of two types of emails: People wanting to hire bloggers would email me asking if I knew anyone suitable for a blogging job that they had. Bloggers would email asking if I knew anyone looking to hire a blogger. After months of getting these kinds of emails and manually playing matchmaker I decided it would be easier if I just created a place for people to meet one another. I started the ProBlogger job board where those looking to hire bloggers could advertise their blogging job opportunities and bloggers could apply for the jobs. While it started slow with just a new job every few days – since 2006 we’ve had well over 10,000 jobs listed! These days there’s usually 1-5 new jobs listed on the boards – with some days as many as 10 new ones going up. Late last year we redesigned the job board and added some new categories. Now you can not only advertise to find a writer but there’s the ability to find people to work as editors/proofreaders, ghostwriters, promoters/marketers, copywriters and more. I use the job board to advertise for writers on my own photography blog several times a year and we always find great candidates but every time we do it highlights to me that some people could do with some help in putting their application together. So in today’s episode I want to give you some tips for applying for a blogging job. If you’re looking for work at the moment – this is the episode for you. Further Resources on How to Get a Blogging Job Job Board RSS Feed for the Job Board Facebook Group Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Hi there and welcome to episode 185 of the ProBlogger podcast. My name is Darren Rowse and I am 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 your blog, to grow your audience, to create great content, engage with that audience and hopefully make some money from your blog as well. You can learn more about ProBlogger and all we do over at problogger.com. Just look at the menu at the top and you’ll find all of the different things I’ve just mentioned. In today’s lesson, I want to talk about finding a job as a blogger, particularly how to apply for a blogging job. Back in 2006, I noticed I started getting two types of questions quite regularly from readers of ProBlogger. Firstly, there was one group of bloggers who wanted to hire someone to work for them. Either as a writer, an editor or in some other aspect of their business and these people would email me and go, do you know anyone who’s suitable for this type of job? The second type of email were from people looking for work. People saying I want a part time job, I’m building my blog, I need to pick up some other work. Do you know anyone wanting to hire someone like me? I realized I was good at playing the matchmaker and I used to try and match people up and look through the emails I was getting from people wanting to hire and try and match them up with a people looking to be hired but it was a bit of a clunky process. I decided it would be a lot easier if I just created a place where people could meet one another. I started the ProBlogger Job Board. This is a place where people looking to hire bloggers could advertise their jobs and people looking for work could apply for those jobs. It started in 2006, I can’t remember exactly when in the year but it started very slowly. I remember going to a few of my friend’s and saying, hey, do you want to advertise for free on it? Just to get some jobs out there and I think it launched with five or six different jobs. Every few days someone else would advertise on it. Since that time, it’s grown and the demand for people looking to hire writers and bloggers for different aspects of their business has grown. Since 2006, we’ve had well over 10,000 jobs listed on that job board. Over 10 years now, we’ve had about 1,000 jobs per year on average, although it has escalated. These days, typically, there’s at least one new job advertised every day. Sometimes as many as five or six. I think our record was 12 jobs in one day listed. As I just looked at it now, there’s over 100 jobs listed on the job board right now, four whole pages worth of them. Late last year we redesigned the job board and added some new categories. Now you can not only advertise if you want to find a writer but you can also advertise for editors, proofreaders, ghostwriters, copywriters, even people to help you promote your blog. There’s a number of different categories that you can advertise there for. If you are looking for work at the moment, as a blogger, you want to supplement your income in some way, there’s a variety of different types of jobs being advertised there. Most of them are writing related but we’re increasingly seeing people looking for editors and other types of content creators as well. I use the job board to advertise for writers from my own Photography Blogs several times a year. One of the things I noticed is that we get quite a few applications, last time we advertised we had 60 people apply but quite a few of the applications really didn’t themselves any favors. I’ve realized every time I advertise that a lot of bloggers are applying for jobs in ways that really don’t help them to get the jobs. In today’s episode, I want to give you some tips for applying for a job on the ProBlogger job board or another job board as well. If you are looking for work at the moment, as a blogger or in some related field, this episode is for you. I’ve got today’s show notes over at problogger.com/podcast/185 where I’ll link to the job board and also give you some further reading as well. First thing I want to say is that if you are looking for the job board, head over to problogger.com/ jobs. It’s pretty simple to remember, problogger.com/jobs and you’ll find the job board. You’ll see on the front page there are some featured jobs, advertisers who pay a little bit extra to have their job featured for the whole month at the top. If you scroll through the pages, there are three or four different pages with 30 or so jobs per page there. You’ll see there are some fascinating jobs listed there from time to time. That’s the first thing I’ll say, head over to the job board and have a look at what is being advertised there. I’ve got 11 things for you to keep in mind as you’re putting together your application. First thing is to act quickly. The jobs on the job boards do go quickly and we regularly see advertisers put a job up and within 24 hours they take the job down because they’ve already filled the job. You’ll see there’s three or four pages where the jobs in there. There’s also been other jobs advertised in the last month that are no longer there. I do encourage you to act quickly. You don’t want to rush the process, you don’t want to apply with a half organized application, you want to actually put together something of quality but you do need to act reasonably quickly. Even 24 hours is a long time in blogging land. If you see an opportunity, put aside some time to act fairly quickly. There are a number of things that you can do to make sure you see the jobs quickly as soon as they’re advertised. Firstly, you use RSS feeds and you have an RSS feed reader. We have an RSS feed, you can follow that that into your feed reader and see the jobs as they come up. Secondly, there’s also a feature in the sidebar on the job board. If you go to the job board now, if you’re looking at a desktop, you’ll see in the sidebar. If you are in a mobile, you might need to scroll down a little bit to see it. There’s an opportunity there for you to setup an email alert. You can add in your email address and you can add in a keyword as well if you want to filter the jobs. If you only want to find food blogging jobs, if you write about food, you might want to put in the word food there and it will only send you an email if the job is listed that uses the word food in the job. Or if you’re a travel blogger, you might want to just put in the word travel. If you’re interested in lots of categories, you can leave the keyword field empty and we will email you once a day with all the new jobs. I actually subscribe to that just to see the new jobs that come up and the email comes through once a day and you get a digest of the new jobs. That’s one way to be alerted via email when the new jobs go up. Lastly, you can also follow the ProBlogger Twitter account because every new job gets tweeted out once as well. You want to see all the jobs there unless you’re sitting there and looking everyday on Twitter but that might be another place as well. The other thing to say is that jobs stay listed for 30 days. We do encourage anyone who advertises on the job board to close the job down when they hire someone but not all advertisers do this. You will see some of the older jobs on the job board may already be filled. You probably get better luck at high hit rate if you do apply for the newer jobs, but sometimes in those archives, sometimes advertisers are looking for something very niche-y or something very specific and they’ll keep the job open for the whole 30 days as well. Do dig into the archives. If you see something that’s a perfect fit for you, just send them an email and see whether it is still open. Number two is to follow the instructions in the job, it’s amazing when I’ve advertised for people on Digital Photography School when I’ve advertised for writers, we ask for some specific things in the application. We ask for examples of their work, we ask them not to send in full resumes, we ask them to do some specific things. It’s amazing how many people obviously do not read the job and don’t follow the instructions. If you are applying for a job and it’s been asked for you to supply some examples of your work or not to do something and you don’t follow those instructions, it’s a signal to an advertiser that you are someone who doesn’t pay attention to detail. Carefully read the job and follow the instructions. I shouldn’t really have to say it but it’s amazing how many people don’t do that. Number three tip is to sell yourself. It’s amazing, when I look through the applications that come in for jobs that we’ve put up on the job board, how many people who sell themselves short and I understand this on some levels. I’ve got a bit of an inferiority complex myself and I find it hard to sell myself but you really need to put your best foot forward. As with any job, you’ve got to give people a reason to hire you. List some reasons why you would be good for the job, talk about your experience, talk about your knowledge of the topic, talk about your passion for communication, your passion for the topic. The way you work with others, the skills that you have, all of these things are going to help you be noticed. You don’t have to hype yourself up, you don’t have to sell yourself as something that you’re not but put your best foot forward. If you need some help with that, find a friend, find a colleague, find someone who can help you to put words to those skills and might help to sell you. Number four is to write your application well. This is one of those ones I’m amazed that people don’t proofread their applications. Blogging, you’re applying for a job, that is a largely written medium in most cases and your written application gives your prospective employer a hint as to how well you’re going to do your job. See your application as an audition for the job. If you put forward an application that’s well written, that is spell checked, that’s well structured, that demonstrates that you know grammar, then you’re going to do yourself a lot of favors. Proofread your application. Really important. If possible, find someone else to proofread it for you because they’ll pick up mistakes that you will miss. It’s really important to put your best foot forward in that regard. Tip number five is to give examples of your work. Most of the jobs that you see listed on the job board do ask for this and they ask for it in different ways. Sometimes they ask for links for articles that you’ve published somewhere else, whether that being on your own blog or on other line article sites in different ways. Some people actually want you to send them a document or send them a PDF. Have a look at what they’re asking for, you may need to do a little bit of work to get it into the right format but it’s really important that you do put forward some examples of what you’ve done. There’s a number of things to consider when you think about what pieces you want to show them. They sometimes will ask for something very specific but in many cases just give us some example of your works. Include links to your blog. It’s really good if you can show them that you are a blogger already, share links to that. You want to choose to show them content that relates to the topic, if possible. If it’s a travel writing blog and you’ve never written a blog post about travel, you might want to go and quickly write a post for your own blog on travel to show them that you can write on that particular topic. You want to actually show them the style as well and sometimes it can be worthwhile going and having a look at the advertiser’s blog or their website to find out what style of content they produce. Some people write in a more conversational style, sometimes people want a more formal style. Go and have a look at their blog, try and understand who their reader is, what style of content works well in that site and then show them examples that they could imagine seeing that topic content on their sites. You really want to do some research. Pick examples that are relevant to the topic, to the style and also maybe try and show a few different types of content that you can do. Show some examples that show your versatility in writing a different styles. You might want to show them a list post that you’ve written, you might want to show them a how to piece of content that you‘ve written, you might want to show them a humorous post that you’ve written, a story that you’ve written. Showcase that you’re not just someone who’s going to write one type of content, if that’s what they’re looking for. Again, this will come from the ad itself. Hopefully they have said a little bit about the topic content that they want but do the research, go and have a look at their site, find out what works well. You might want to take the URL and put it into a tool like BuzzSumo, buzzsumo.com and see what has done well on their site in the past. BuzzSumo will show you what on their site has been shared the most; that will give you some hints as to the type of content that they might want to be producing. If in doubt, you can always email them in many cases as well. If there’s not enough information in the ad, you can actually email them and say, “I’m putting together my application, I’d love to know a little bit more about the style of content that you want.” Going back and asking some questions may be something that can help you to shape your application in some ways. Tip number six is to be concise. Advertisers that I talk to on the ProBlogger job board are telling me that they are getting quite a few applications. Last time we advertised, we had 60 or so different applications for a job that we were advertising, they’ve got to get through a lot of applications and if they see an application that is really long, it’s a bit of a signal to them that there is going to be a fair bit of work involved here. You want to be concise, you don’t want to be too brief, you want to include everything that they ask for but don’t overwhelm people with your application. It’s important to get that balance right. Tip number seven. Demonstrate a knowledge of blogging. You don’t want to just demonstrate your knowledge of the topic which I’ll talk about in a moment but also show them that you understand blogging itself. Obviously they’re going to want to know that you know about your topic but if you can show them that you’re a blogger, share a link with them and that you’ve been at it for a while, if you have, that you have a professionally regularly updated blog that you regularly produce content, and you can give some examples of that, that you are familiar with tools like WordPress or other blogging tools. These types of things are signals to a prospective advertiser that you’re serious about blogging, that you’re serious about your craft, that you’ve gathered some skills already. It’s also going to help them to know that they may not have to train you as much. They don’t have to walk you through how to update a blog post because you’ve already done that on your own blog. If you haven’t got a blog yet, get one going. Check out our five step guide to starting a blog but get one going because that’s a great resume, it’s a great portfolio for you if you do want to find this type of work. Demonstrate that you are a blogger, that you understand the tools and that you got some skills in that area. Tip number eight is to demonstrate the knowledge on the topic itself. This is so important, probably should be in my number one tip but people don’t employ people to write on their blog if they don’t have an understanding of that particular topic. If you’ve got some experience in that area and writing about that topic, that’s really great, but if you’ve got other experiences as well. Maybe you’ve had some training in your topic, maybe you’ve delivered workshops, maybe you subscribed to other blogs. You can actually show that you are across the topic, you know what the latest trend are in that particular topic and that is going to add a lot as well. Tip number nine. Don’t apply for every job. I’ve discovered over the last few years in my own advertising that some people do apply for every single job that comes up on the job board and this comes across in the application. But usually, it’s a copy and paste kind of application that people are sending in. The applications themselves often demonstrate that people haven’t read the ad, they don’t have any knowledge, they’re just desperate for a job. Really take the time to filter through the jobs. Find the ones that you can really be a good fit for and just apply for those and really tailor those applications. So important. Don’t apply for everything, it’s just going to annoy the advertiser. Tip number 10. Demonstrate that you’re willing to go beyond just writing. If it is a writing job, that’s great. Demonstrate that you can write. That’s really important. Demonstrate all the things I just said but also show them how else you can add something to their blog. If you can demonstrate to an advertiser that you don’t just write well but you have experience in design, in writing for search engine optimization, that you have experience in social media, in editing, in design, in creating visual content, in creating video. Any other skill that you’ve got, just list it as other skills thing in the bottom of your application. There are other thing that I do because they will peak the interest of advertisers. That will show advertisers that maybe they’re not just getting a writer here, maybe they’re getting someone who can help with search engine optimization or maybe you could help them create some new types of content for their blog. The other thing that I think is really important is if you have a social network already, if you’re already on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, any of these networks, include links to those, show them that you’re already networking in these areas and include that you’d be willing to promote the content you write to your own social network. This will grab people’s attention because they want new eyeballs on their content. If you’re willing to share your content with your own network, and share it with other bloggers that you know, that to them will signal new eyeballs on the content, new traffic to their site. That will be something that will hopefully get them interested. Demonstrate in your application that you’re not just willing to write the content but you’re willing to respond to comments, that you’re willing to share the content on social media, and that you’re willing to go the extra mile to help them to build a successful blog. You’re not just there for content, you’re there for a little bit more than that. The last tip I’ll give you is to stand out from the crowd. I’ve already mentioned a number of times that you won’t be the only person applying for this job. I don’t remember ever getting an email from an advertiser saying I didn’t get any applications or I only got a couple of applications. Most advertisers are reporting that they’re getting quite a few application, so you won’t be the only one sending your application. Think about how can I stand out from the crowd. Hopefully you’ll stand out from the crowd by doing the things I’ve already talked about, demonstrating that you’re going to go above beyond writing, that you understand your topic, that you’re a great blogger but also think about how can you stand out with the opening line of your application, how can you show them that you are an A-list candidate because they will be going through the applications and probably getting rid of over half of the applications very quickly. You want to do something to really grab their attention. Hopefully somewhere in those 11 tips, there are some that you can take on board as you are applying for jobs on the ProBlogger job board. Again, it is at problogger.com/jobs, that will get you to that job board. Do give it a go, check out the latest jobs that are there right now. We promote the job board to advertisers regularly so there’s always fresh jobs coming up. Make sure you subscribe to get the alerts. I think it’s really important to at least be subscribing via email or RSS and then maybe checking out the Twitter account as well. Let us know how you go with the applications. Let us know if there are any improvements that you want on the job board as well as either as an advertiser or as someone applying for jobs as well. You can don that over on today’s show notes at problogger.com/podcast/185, also if you’ve got any feedback on today’s show, you can also do that in the ProBlogger podcast listeners Facebook group. This week we went past 3,000 members of that group. Lots of activity happening in there and some really good conversation again. Do a search on Facebook for ProBlogger podcast listeners and you’ll find that group and I usually let people in who apply within 24 hours, although I will be on the road this week going to Social Media Marketing World in San Diego, and that’s the last thing I wanted to say. If you are going to be in San Diego for Social Media Marketing World in the next week, pop on my session. I’m doing a session on the Future Of Blogging, The Changing World Of Blogging In A Social Media A`ge. I’d love it if you’d come along and check out that session and come and say hi. Love to meet you at Social Media Marketing World this particular week. Thanks for listening today. Good luck with your applications for jobs and I 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.

Strategies to Increase Your Blog Earnings In today’s lesson, I want to talk about two things I’ve been doing on my main blog to increase the profitability of the blog – both have been working really well! I’m going to talk about 3 income streams in particular – AdSense Ad network (although this will be relevant to other networks too), Affiliate promotions and selling our own products. So if you want to increase the profitability of your blog – this show is for you. Further Resources on 2 Blog Monetization Strategies that Have Increased My Blogs Earnings by over 40% AdSense New Ad Placement Guidelines Facebook Group UPDATE: it’s been a couple of weeks since I made some of the changes mentioned in this episode and we’ve now completed some of the extra AdSense tweaks to ads shown to those on desktops. The results have been better than expected. While I talk in this episode about 40-50% increases in earnings my AdSense earnings are over 100% higher than last month. In fact here’s a graph of my weekly AdSense earnings over the last 12 months. You can see there’s natural variation week to week but since making the changes we’ve seen two great weeks of increased earnings. Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Hi there! It’s Darren from ProBlogger here. Welcome to episode 184 of the Problogger Podcast. My name is Darren Rowse and I’m the blogger behind problogger.com, which is a blog, a podcast, an event, a job board, a series of ebooks and numerous other things all designed to help you as a blogger to start a blog, to create great content that’s going to change the world in some way and make your audience’s lives better and build that audience to the point where you are able to make a profit from your blog. You can learn more about ProBlogger over at Problogger.com. In today’s lesson, I want to get a little bit personal. I want to talk about some other things I’ve been doing over the last month or so to increase my blog’s income. To increase the profitability, particularly of my main blog, Digital Photography School. In particular, I want to share with you two different strategies that I’ve been working on with my team there that have worked well. I am actually going to talk a little bit about three different income streams. One of them is AdSense, the Google’s Advertising Network. Although what I’ll share will probably be relevant for other advertising networks too. I want to talk a little bit about affiliate promotions and also selling our own products. If you monetize your blog in any of those ways, today’s episode will be relevant for you. “What are you doing on your blog this year that you’ve never done before?” That was the question that I asked in the ProBlogger podcast listener’s group on Facebook this week. The responses that you, as a community, shared with me were fascinating. The reason I asked that question is that I’ve become more and more convinced lately that many of us as bloggers fall into patterns and habits as bloggers that can limit what we achieve. One of the things I strongly believe and I’ve always believed this but I need to relearn it again recently, is that if we want success with our blogs, we need to be willing to do new things, to experiment. If we want to increase traffic on our blogs, we need to promote our blogs in new ways. We need to let that evolve. If we want to build income on our blogs, we need to constantly be trying new things in that area too. You’ve probably heard the definition of insanity that often gets attributed to Albert Einstein. He was said to have said the definition of insanity is, “Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” I’ve heard that quote attributed to numerous people but whoever said it, smart person because there’s truth there. If you want to experience new, good things in our lives, we need to be willing to step outside of our comfort zones and live in new ways. To live our lives exactly the same way year after year and expect new things to happen to us? There’s really not much sense in that. The same is true for our blogging. Anyone who’s been blogging for awhile now will know that it’s very easy to fall into patterns and rhythms and habits of doing things on our blogs that are just the same year after year after year. It’s very easy to almost see what we’ve built as machines, as something that we need to continually feed and we’ve always done it that way so we’ll continue to do it that way. As a result, even though some of those habits start out for good reasons, we can end up seeing our blogs, our business plateau or even slump. To be honest with you, last year that’s what happened to me. The realization at the end of last year as I looked at the stats of my blog in terms of traffic but also in terms of profit, that perhaps I become a little bit complacent. Perhaps I had allowed some of the patterns that I built into my blogging to stagnate a little bit and I’d become a little bit lazy in my approach to blogging. Particularly, that was the case in how I monetize my main blog, Digital Photography School. Since 2009, I’ve monetized Digital Photography School with three main income streams. Previous to 2009, my income had largely been about AdSense, that’s continued. That’s the number one income stream on the site. Not in terms of size. It’s not the largest but it’s been a consistent good part of the income of Digital Photography School. Another area is affiliate promotions, we tend to promote ebooks and courses and memberships of other people and take an affiliate commission. The third way we monetize DPS is through our own products. Initially through ebooks, some courses that we’ve developed and also some Lightroom Plugins, some software. We have these three income streams on the blog. I’m a little bit complacent in each of these areas. Whilst I’ve always believed that we need to need to constantly be experimenting and I talk about that on the podcast all the time, in terms of monetization, I hadn’t done much experimenting, I hadn’t changed things out for quite a while particularly with the AdSense Ads. AdSense, if you’ve ever done AdSense on your blog, you know that you put a bit of code into your sidebar, you might test it a bit in the early days but then it’s a set and forget type thing. it’s very easy to just allow it to sit there on your site. It seems almost like passive income but unless you tweak it, unless you’re willing to experiment with new things, you can see diminishing returns on it. In all of these areas, I kind of become a little bit complacent. At the end of last year, I looked at the stats of how much the site had earned and whilst it had been a really good year, profitable year, a year that had paid for our mortgage and enabled us to take holidays and all that type of thing and we had a profit, it was a lower profit than the previous years. There were a numbers of factors at play but one of the main reasons that I identified for this small slump in our income was that I become complacent and I realized that it was time to shake things up on Digital Photography School a little bit and to try some new things particularly with monetization. The year before, I’ve shaken thing up quite a bit in terms of driving new traffic to the sites and we did some SEO on the site, we’d really shaken things up in terms of getting more email subscribers. I’ve become a little bit complacent on monetization. There’s been a number of things that I’ve been working on this year on Digital Photography School. Today, I want to share with you two of them because I think they cover most scenarios in our listenership. Most of our readers are monetizing through launching their own products or doing affiliate promotions or running ads on their site. I want to give you two things that I’ve done that relate to those. The first thing that I want to talk about is the way we’ve been doing our launches over the last couple of months on Digital Photography School. Since 2009, we’ve done periodical launches on Digital Photography School and those launches have largely been about our own products. Every time we create a new an ebook, we do a launch. Every time we create a course, we do a launch. But also when we promote someone else’s product, we will do a launch as well. Typically since 2009, our launches have usually gone for 3-5 weeks with our launches. Ever since about 2010, we’ve had this pattern of our launch. The pattern really worked well in the early years and it’s continued to work okay but the first thing that we’ve done to shake things up this year is to shorten our launches. We’d been doing 3-5 weeks for our launch. Typically our launch in previous years had gone like this: we would send out a big email to our full list on the day the product launched. We would usually do discounts at 30%, 40%, 50% discount for early birds, we might sometimes add in a bonus, we might sometimes run a competition as well. And then for the next 3-5 weeks, depending on how long we had in our calendar, we would send out one email per week and then in the last week, right at the end of the week, we would send out a last chance email. That had worked quite well for us. We weren’t emailing everyday, we were emailing once a week and each of the emails had a different flavor to it. One of our emails would announce the product, we’d do another email that was a testimonial type email once we start to get some feedback from other people who’d bought it. We might do an email that talked more about the benefits of the product, we might do an email that promoted a guest post from the author of the ebook. We might do an email that was a last chance type email towards the end of the campaign as well. Each one of the email are a different flavor. We would typically do a blog post at the start, we would do a number of social media updates throughout those five weeks as well. It was long, it was spread out, we were trying not to annoy our readers too much with lots of emails too quickly. One of the things we’ve been trying this year is different types of launches. We’ve really tried to shorten our launch period. This is for a number of reasons. One, it means that we’re able to get a launch from start to finish over and done much quicker which is less work for our team. It doesn’t tend to drag on. One of the things we heard from our readers was you aren’t emailing us too often. It’s only once a week but it’s five weeks of hearing the same thing over and over again. We’ve decided to shorten our launches for those main reasons and to see how it went. The first launch we did this year was for a course that we had on Night Photography. We launched it on the 31st of January and it was all over by the 14th or the 15th of February. It was just over two weeks and one day. In that time, we ended up sending four emails. We ended up sending as many emails but we really shortened the space of that. In the first email, we said, this process is only going to last two weeks so we built that urgency right from the start. In previous launches, we would build that urgency towards the end of the launch and it really worked a lot better. We still did very similar types of social media updates, there were less of them because it was over two weeks but there was a little bit more urgency in them as well. We also built into our launch this year a ticker, a counter with a countdown for how long the launch had to go so people could see how long that process is going to last. That was both on the sales page but also on the rest of the site. We have a bar that would appear at the bottom of the site that was counting down, so anyone arriving on the site would see that something was happening as well. That probably helped quite a bit as well. But definitely making a short launch worked well. The other type of launch that we’ve done since, we did this a couple of weeks ago now, was an affiliate launch. This launch went for five days. It was even shorter again. Five-day launch and it was a bundle of products, photography based products that we promoted that someone else had put together. I was nervous about it being a five-day launch, a five-day campaign because we typically, we’re going five weeks and then we’ve done a two week one and we’re like oh, this is the jackpot, this has worked very well but how’s five days going to work? But we had no say in that, the partner that we were working with, that’s what they were doing so we promoted it for a five-day launch. There were a number of reasons why that particular promotion did really well. For one, it was a great product, it was $4,000 worth of products for less than $100, so it was a big discount but I think it being a short launch worked really well as well. We sent out a number of emails over those five days. Again, I was nervous about that, sending so many emails in such a short period of time. Was it going to annoy our readers? And I’m sure it did for some of our readers but we were amazed how few unsubscribes we got from that particular campaign over those five days. Again, that one worked really well. Short, sharp launches is a new strategy that we’ve been trialing. We’ve so for done a two-week launch and a five-day launch. We will probably do some other experiments with different lengths of launches as well. But I will say, so far, the signs are really good and it’s now, as I record this of the 8th of March, my wedding anniversary, my mom’s birthday. Happy anniversary Dawn and happy, happy birthday, Mom. But it’s been the best start of the year that we’ve had for many years. In fact, it may be the best part of the year ever we’ve had in terms of affiliate income and income from our own products as well. If you’ve been playing around with different types of launches, change things up, see how they go. Try something shorter and sharper and more intense. If you’ve been doing short, sharp ones maybe you want to try something that’s longer. I’m not saying that short is the only way, I’m saying experiment with it. The other reason I think it works to change things up is that your audience can become aware of the pattern of your launch as well. The reason I know that is that occasionally I’ll get an email from one of our readers saying I know you usually add in a prize or usually these launches go for a few weeks, do I have enough time up my sleeve to make this decision? Whilst there’s probably some positives if your reader’s beginning to know what your rhythm is, I actually think there could be a bit of complacency as well and maybe your audience can become a little bit blind to the techniques that you’re using. Change things up. See what works. Try some new graphics on your screen. Try some new social media strategies as well during your launches, you might just find that you unlock something that really works well. One of the things that we’ve been trying in addition to shorter launch is sending in a very last minute email as well. We’ve been sending out an email as the last email in our campaign saying you’ve got four hours left in this campaign. Again, I was nervous in doing a four hours to go type email because I’m like what if someone gets it six hours after we send that email and the launch is already over? But that email in both of these last week campaigns that we’ve done has generated more sales than any of the other emails in our campaign as well. Last minute emails can really work very well. For us, in both times that we’ve used it, it’s been a very short email, it’s always been like a courtesy type email, just didn’t want you to miss out on this, there’s four hours left, check it out here. That’s what worked really well for us as well. That’s the number one strategy. Play with different types of launches and reinvent your launch sequence. Don’t become complacent. You’ll learn so much by trying new things. Number one, reinvent your launch sequence. Number two is about our AdSense. I did an AdSense order on the site. One of the things I realized with AdSense is that I really haven’t played around with new types of positioning for ads for quite a long time. I think we redesigned Digital Photography School about three years ago now and that was the last time that we changed anything with our AdSense account. That’s a long time, that’s ridiculously a long amount of time. I should have been tweaking and playing with that for quite some time. The reason I hadn’t been playing with it is that AdSense isn’t our biggest income stream. It’s been something I’ve used since 2004, and it’s done really well for us over that time and it’s just a slow burner but I really hadn’t changed things for about three years and so I decided that we needed to do a bit of a review of that and we really dug into our stats, worked out what type of ads were working well for us. It’s really clear from our site that 300 x 250 pixel ads are working really well for us. The ads that work best for us are ads that we put inside the content so we actually put an ad in the middle of an article, they are the ones that work best for us because they are the ones that people are seeing as they’re reading the content. Ads over in your sidebar or up in your header, they will work, they’re worth having on your site but the ones in your content worked much better. What I realized is that there are few things that I could do to really change things up in terms of the ads on our site. Firstly I decided to look out what was happening in our mobile theme. We’ve got a responsive design of Digital Photography School. The way we set it up is that we had 2-3 ads on any page for mobile. If you are viewing Digital Photography School on your mobile phone, you scroll through one of our typical articles. You might see two ads, you might see three. That was how things were set up. That was partly because AdSense used to have a limit on how many ads you could show on a page. I think their limit was three up until August last year. I’d heard that they changed their policy but I didn’t do anything about it. That was a bit crazy. I should’ve done something about it. The new policy is that you can have as many ads as you want on your page except that they do say you do want to have more content than ads which is probably really wise not only from their perspective but also your users. You don’t want to overwhelm your users with too many ads, so you can change things up. One of the things that we have done in terms of our ads for mobile, and this is really what we’ve been working on so far is adding more units per page, particularly adding more units into the content itself. Previously, we had two ads in our sidebar which came in underneath the content on mobile and we only have ever had one ad in the content itself for mobile. A lot of the articles on Digital Photography School are 2,000 worth articles. We only really have one ad in the article itself, so we realized that those longer articles we could be inserting more ads in. We’ve got some rules now on our site the way we’re displaying our ads, we’ve built it in, coded it into our system that if the article is over 500 words, we’ll add two ads in. If the article is over 1000 words, we’ll add three ads in. If the articles are really longer like a 3000 word article, we’ll add in four ads. Depending on the size of the content, you’ll see different amounts of ads. We’ve got some rules in there about them not appearing too close to each other so there’s always paragraphs between them. We’ve got rules in there, I think on how close they will appear to pictures because we don’t want them right budding up against the picture, we want to space them out. We’ve built some rules in on that regard and that’s taken a little bit of coding to do but it means that we are seeing more ads shown on the site which will increase the income and has increased income as well. We’ve also pushed the ads a little bit higher on the page. One of the things that I realized in doing this order was that we had more ads right at the bottom of the page because that’s where we were showing our sidebar and not so many at the top. Of course many people won’t get to the bottom of the page and they’re scrolling on a mobile, so they weren’t seeing those bottom ads, so they weren’t earning us anything at all. We’ve been a little bit more aggressive in terms of where we show the ads on mobile as opposed to desktop as well. There’s more ads, they’re higher on the page, particularly showing different types of ads for different lengths of content as well. How is it going for us so far? Purely by just changing the ads on your mobile we’ve increased our advertising revenue through AdSense by—it’s seven days since at the moment and each day is a little bit different but it’s between 40-50% higher every day since we launched that compared to the last few months of earnings. The next thing that we’re going to do is a bit of an order on our desktop ads as well. And again, we are going to add in an extra ad unit per article, at least one, some of the longer article will get two extra ads and we’re going to be a little bit more aggressive with ads inside the content on the desktop as well and I’m pretty confident that we will be able to increase our revenue from advertising, hopefully another 30-40% as well. Don’t get complacent. That’s the big lesson when it comes to monetizing today. Don’t do what you’ve always done. The reason we’ve been positioning our ads like we’ve been positioning them was because I learned some lessons years ago. Things change. AdSense has changed since years ago. There’s new types of ads that you can put on your page. There’s new policies constantly being added so you can tweak your approach. That’s the key lesson here, when it comes to your launches again tweak and you will see lots of new things as well. Let me give you one little last thing that we’re going to be trying in the coming month or so in Digital Photography School. We’ve decided to add in a new type of promotion on Digital Photography School and this is a promotion of our own products, our own ebooks and courses. We’ve decided to do what we’re calling pop-up sales. These will be sales that appear on the blog itself. We’re not going to send an email because we’re already sending a lot of emails through the year and we don’t want to continually bombard our list with email after email but we’re going to promote these sales of our products throughout the year. Every month for the rest of the year, we’re going to nominate one of our ebooks or one of our courses or bundle of our courses and ebooks together that we’re going to do a pop-up sale. The pop-up sales will last between 24 hours and 48 hours so they’ll be really quick shop sales. We’re promoting them with a blog post or we’re promoting them with a hello bar with a timer in it like we did in our recent longer launches. Also, we’ll be doing some social media around that as well. The idea here is to bring a bit of attention to one of the many products that we have sitting in our store. We find that typically on every day, we might sell one of a certain ebook. Over a month, we might sell 30 of each of our ebooks, which is great. That’s a nice little bubbling income that comes along but I guess the question is how could we shine a little bit more light on those products to sit there, to increase the long tail income from those as well. Those pop-up sales, we’ll test some different percentage of type deals, or test some different bundles of products as well. It’s really just to try and increase some of that. I don’t expect that those pop-up sales are going to bring in a massive amount of income like if we send out several emails, but I’ll be very interested to see what we can generate in terms of those just to bring out a little bit of the income from day to day as well. There are couple of things we’ve been trying on Digital Photography School. There’s a lot more going on behind the scenes as well that I’ll continue to report back to you on but I’d love to hear what you are trying. To answer that question, you might actually want to go join the group and find that question that I asked, what are you doing this year in your blogging that you’ve not done before? If the answer is nothing, can I encourage you to come out with something? If you want to achieve results that you’ve never had before, you need to be willing to do things you’ve never done before on your blog. This really relates to monetization but also relates to driving traffic, it also relates to the content that you’re producing as well, the ways that you’re engaging with your audience. What are you doing this year in your blogging that you’ve never done before? Answer that question over in the ProBlogger Podcast Listeners Group on Facebook or on today’s show notes at ProBlogger.com/podcast/184. Thanks for listening. Head over to the show notes where I’ll have some further reading for you as well. How did you go with today’s episode? Enjoy this podcast? Sign up to our ProBloggerPLUS newsletter to get notified of all new tutorials and podcasts below.

The 9 Questions You Can Ask to Increase FaceBook Engagement In today’s lesson, I want to give you some really practical things that you can do to increase engagement – particularly to get people to comment – on your Facebook page and if you have them – groups. Most bloggers spend a lot of time on Facebook and it’s for good reason. The amount of potential readers for our blogs who are on Facebook on a daily basis is staggering. It’s where people are online and so it makes sense to have a presence there. However using Facebook to grow your audience is getting increasingly tough – particularly if you want to do it organically and don’t have a budget to advertise. I won’t go into the reasons for this in this podcast but will say that one way to increase the effectiveness of what you do on Facebook is to put concerted effort into increasing engagement with those who already follow you there. Facebook has an algorithm with many factors that determine how widely they’ll show your updates – and one of them is how many people are engaging with your posts. If FB sees you’re getting lots of likes, shares and comments on your posts – they’re seeing what you’re doing as worth showing to others. So if you want to increase the effectiveness of your FB strategy – this show is for you. Listen to this episode in the player above or here on iTunes. Further Resources on 9 Types of Questions to Ask On Your FaceBook Page to Get More Comments School Mum Facebook Page Example of where I asked a question in a link post Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Hello there and welcome to Episode 183 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 start the most amazing blog, to grow your audience, to create content that changes that audience’s life in some way, and hopefully to make a little bit of money from your blog along the way or a lot, hopefully. You can learn more about ProBlogger over at problogger.com. In today’s lesson, I want to give you some really practical things that you can do to increase the engagement, particularly to get more people to comment upon your Facebook page. If you have them, your Facebook groups, and other types of social media as well. Most bloggers do spend a lot of time on Facebook and that’s for a good reason, it’s not because we’re all distracted and sit there looking at cat memes all day, some of us probably do that too. The main reason I think bloggers tend to be attracted to Facebook, particularly with their blogging, is the amount of potential readers for our blog who are there at any one time on a daily basis. If you look at the stats of how many people are using Facebook, it is quite staggering. It’s where a lot of people are spending a lot of time. It makes sense for us who want to reach those types of people to have a presence in this platform. The problem is using Facebook to grow your audience is getting increasingly tough. If you’ve been blogging for two, or three, or four years, you probably have seen the changes that have happened over that time, particularly if you want to grow your audience on Facebook organically and you don’t have the budget to advertise. You can certainly reach a lot of people if you’ve got money to spend, but if you want to do it organically, it can be tough. It’s not impossible though. One of the reasons that it’s not impossible is that there are still things that you can do to increase your effectiveness on Facebook. One of those things is to build engagement with those who already follow you on Facebook. Facebook has this algorithm with many factors that determine how widely they will show your updates. One of the signals to Facebook that you are doing something worth showing to more people is to build engagement with your posts. If Facebook sees your posts getting some engagement, they will show your post to more people. If you are like me and you want to get more engagement on Facebook, you are going to want to really work on engagement. That’s what this podcast is all about today. I particularly want to focus upon how to get more comments for your Facebook page. If that’s something that is of interest to you, this show is for you. Getting people to comment on your Facebook updates is very important. I’ve already told you the main reason for that, it’s a signal to Facebook that what you’re doing is good and it helps you get seen more. But, there’s some other reasons why I think engagement is well worth trying to get on your page. It’s also a signal to your readers that you’re interested in them and you’re not just interested in them following you and clicking on your links, but you are actually interested in engaging with them. It’s like going to a party and meeting someone for the first time and they ask you a lot of questions, you get the sense that they’re interested in you. That’s a good thing because you have a good feeling and you want to spend more time with that person. It’s a great way to build that relationship, to warm up that relationship with a potential reader. The other reason, it’s really great for social proof as well. If someone else stumbles upon your Facebook page and sees that you’re engaging with your audience and that they are engaging with you, that’s going to make you much more attractive to them and they’re much more likely to join in. There’s a variety of different reasons why engagement and particularly getting comments on Facebook is a useful thing. There’s also a variety of ways to get that engagement. Obviously, the number one thing that you want to do is to get people to like your Facebook page, that’s one type of engagement. Then, there’s getting people to react to your updates on Facebook. Traditionally, this was about getting a like on your post but today there’s all these other emoji reactions, people can love, laugh, they can do the wow emoji, they can be sad, they can be angry. Those type of reactions are one type of engagement that Facebook lets you get. And then, there’s getting the share which is really great. It’s where someone shares the update that you’ve done to their followers or on a page or a group that they’re involved in. All of these things are signals to Facebook, they’re really positive. The one that I like the best is the comment. Getting someone to leave a comment on your Facebook update is great. Again, it’s a signal to Facebook, the reason I like it though is that it tells you something about your audience and it’s them stepping out of lurking mode and putting themselves out there. If you can get a comment on your Facebook page or even your blogpost or anywhere on social media, that’s someone pausing and not just going for the easy option of the like button but they’re actually putting themselves out there to react. That very often is a really important part in the building of that relationship. If you think about real life and when relationships take off, think back to when you first met a friend. It’s the first words that come out of your mouth and the first words that come out of their mouth that often create that impression and take that relationship to the next level. It’s the conversation where you go deeper. This is why I want to focus today’s episode on how to get more comments on your Facebook page. We may go into how to get more shares and likes and those types of things in another episode but today I want to focus on the number one way to get more comments on your Facebook page. It’s not really rocket science, but there’s a variety of techniques in doing this. The number way that I found to get more comments on your Facebook page, on your blog post, on social media of any kind, is simply to ask questions. That seems pretty obvious but I’m amazed how many Facebook pages never, ever ask questions. I followed lots of Facebook pages, I’ve lost count of how many I follow. Most of them never actually ask questions, they never do the most obvious thing to get me to comment and to engage with them, they never ask me a question. They make it so easy for me to look and to stay passive in that relationship. If you think about the real world interactions that we have, a very large percentage of conversations start with a question. Think about it, you might even want to track it over the next 24 hours. Over the next day, track how many times a conversation that you have starts with either you or the other person asking a question. Usually, they’re kind of almost greeting like questions, like how are you, what are you up to, how is your day, how are you feeling? These things are almost substitutes for saying hi. Here in Australia, we go hey, how is it going, mate? We’re not always expecting an answer to that question, it’s more of a greeting than anything, but it’s still a question that opens the conversation. There’s questions opening conversations but that’s also how conversations go deeper. Think about the last deep and meaningful conversation that you had, it almost always gets deep and meaningful because at least one person in that conversation starts asking some deeper questions. They start scratching and going below the surface with a question. Questions lead to meaningful conversations, questions lead to learning, to deeper relationships in real life. If the goal of our blog is to grow an audience with people who feel like they know, like, and trust us, then I think we need to ask questions online too, and particularly in the Facebook space. Questions are great but what type of questions should we be asking? This is what I want to do for the rest of this particular episode. I want to actually outline for you some of my favorite types of questions to ask on Facebook. I’ve actually got nine types of questions that you can ask. You may even, an idea to do this, ask one of these types of questions on your Facebook page as this episode is going on. I dare you to do it and then to leave a comment at the end and let us know what question you asked. Nine types of questions that you can go away right now and ask on your Facebook page. Number one, and this I think is the easiest one to do and it is possibly the most effective one as well. In fact, I just did it a few minutes ago on my own Facebook page on Digital Photography School and immediately started to get comments. Number one, ask a fill in the blank type question. This is where you might say, this is the exact question that I asked on my Photography School Facebook page—I had: Fill in the blank, “The lens attached to my main camera right now is ______.” I’m basically asking what lens is attached to your question right now. I used the fill in the blank type format to do that. If you’ve got a blog about blogging, you might ask, “My first blogging platform was ________.” You might say, “My first camera was ________.” “The words that describe my approach to diet is _______,” if you’re a food blogger. “My favorite comfort food is _________.” Really, any question can be turned into a fill in the blank type post. The beauty of this type of question is that it is incredibly simple for someone to answer. All they have to do to leave a comment is to write one word. This is the lowest barrier of entry that you can possibly give to anyone leaving a comment. Often, this is a good way to get that person who might have been following your page for a while now to leave their first comment. They don’t really have to reveal anything too deep and personal, they just need to put in a word. You want to make sure that the question is related to your overall topic, you don’t just want to be asking random questions that have nothing to do with your topic. Too often, I do see some Facebook pages doing that. I’m a big believer in trying to keep it relevant. Fill in the blank type posts are the first type of questions you might ask. Another one which is similar in some ways because it sometimes can mean a one word response or one word comment is when you ask a question that is this or that type of question. It’s where you give your followers the choice between two options and in doing so, you say here’s the two responses I’m looking for, which one are you? You might say are you a cat or dog person? On Digital Photography School, we occasionally have a question which is about Nikon versus Canon. That always starts a bit of a fight. Or, do you post process your photos or do you not post process your photos? We know that within our audience, there’s these two camps. We start a discussion on that. Yes or no questions might be another option. If you’re a fitness blogger, you might say do you exercise daily, yes or no? There’s only two answers really there. Some people will come in with a sometimes, but that’s totally fine as well. A true or false question might be another one, it’s a this or that. I guess the last one I’ll say there is you might actually want to choose a question that is some sort of a controversy or some sort of a debate. You want to be a little bit careful with this because these types of questions can be a bit edgier, so during the election you might have said Trump or Hillary. On the photography space, the Nikon Canon one, that’s a bit of a debate. The reason we don’t ask it too often is we do see other camera manufacturers, people who have those cameras chime in but it also can get a bit negative. You do want to be a bit careful about this or that questions, particularly if it’s a debate or a controversial type thing. They can be a really good discussion starter as well and are worthy experimenting with. Number one was fill in the blank type questions, number two were this or that questions, number three is another one. I’ve got a few types but I’ve seen other bloggers use this incredibly well, it’s actually a technique that one of my online friends Samantha Jockel from School Mum regularly uses. She actually takes questions that readers have emailed her and she puts it up on Facebook as a discussion starter. The questions, because her blog is School Mum, her questions generally relate to parenting or family life or school life. I was just looking at her page a few minutes ago and the last one of these that she posted, she starts it with this little phrase, “A school mom asked…” That’s the signal to the audience that it’s this type of question. Everyday, she does a School Mum ask type post. After it, she says, “Can I please ask how much do you give your kids for school lunch, as my kids are always hungry. P.S. Any food ideas, please.” This is a question that someone sent Samantha. She has put it up on the page. If you go and look at her Facebook page, every single day, there is a post that is a reader question. Sometimes, the questions are heartfelt, sometimes it’s a real problem that a person is having, they’re always anonymous so people do tend to ask those personal questions. Sometimes, they’re funny, sometimes they start debates, sometimes they’re on those controversial type issues. Perhaps, they’re an easier way to get into those controversial questions because it’s a reader asking the question rather than you. These posts, many of them do really well. Again, I encourage you to go and look at Samantha’s Facebook page and you’ll see some examples of the different types of questions that she’s asked. Ask a reader question. If you’re getting questions from readers, you probably just need to dig into your blog posts, comments, or comments that have been left on your Facebook page, or emails that you’ve been receiving, or you might actually want to do an update saying do you have any questions, and actually gather the questions that way. If you get questions, turn them into Facebook updates. Let your readers, let your community find the answers to those questions as well. They can do really well. The fourth one is questions where you ask your readers to talk about their biggest problems, challenges, or obstacles, or even fears. This might seem like a negative thing to do, you might want to keep a positive vibe on your Facebook page, but it’s amazing what comes out when you actually nominate a topic and say what’s your biggest problem in this area? To take Samantha’s example again on School Mum, she might ask a question like what’s your biggest fear as a parent? What’s your biggest challenge at the moment in raising boys? What’s the biggest problem that you have in the area of discipline? You can actually target the types of questions that you want to explore. To actually get your readers to come out and share some of the problems and challenges and pain that they have, the fears that they have, it might feel like a negative thing but it actually does lead to high engagement, people are willing to share this type of stuff. The best thing about these types of questions is they’ll help you to understand who is following your page. You’ll begin to see things about your audience that you never knew before. These things will inform future pieces of content for your site as well. This is something if you follow me on the Facebook page, at the ProBlogger Facebook page, you’ll see that almost every week we ask a question that is really about trying to work out what the biggest obstacle is for our readers at the moment. Those answers often turn into blog posts. The other great thing about this type of question is that you’ll find that in the responses, people will nominate problems that they’ve got that you’ve already written about. You can reply to that and say hey, here’s a tutorial I wrote on that topic, or here’s an article with some tips on how to overcome that challenge. You can actually drive people back to your archives by sharing links in response to the problems that people have. The ultimate thing here, being willing to talk about people’s problems is that you show your readers that you’re interested in helping them, you’re interested in hearing about their problems, and you also give them a chance to solve one another’s problems as well. This is something I did in our Facebook group, the ProBlogger podcast listeners group that we’ve got on Facebook the other day. Actually, on a Friday afternoon I think that was, I said what’s your biggest problem now? I’m going away for the weekend but I know you can answer each other’s problems. It was amazing to see people chime in and respond to each other’s problems in that way. That may not work quite so well on an open page, but in a Facebook page it might work as well. It gives your followers a sense that they’re not alone. Even though I just said I went away for a weekend when I asked that question, I did qualify that by saying you need to look after each other here. When you do ask these types of questions, it’s really ideal if you hang around immediately after you ask that question. You want to be there to respond to the problems that people have, to be present, interact with them, help them where you can, and to show empathy. It’s really important not just to ask those questions to trigger the pain in people’s lives but to be there to walk with them in that as well. The fifth one is the flip side of this and that is to ask people about their dreams, to ask them about their aspirations. It’s really important to not just understand who your readers and their problems but to also understand who they want to become. Again, this shows them that you’re interested in them making some changes in their life and you also will get a lot of ideas for the types of things that they want to learn how to do. Then, you can create content that helps to move them along towards those dreams that they have as well. People do love to talk about their dreams, they love to talk about their hopes for their future. That’s the fifth type of question that you can ask on your Facebook page. The sixth type is what I would call a tips question. This is where you ask your followers for their tips. They’re probably coming to your Facebook page because they want to learn from you, but the reality is that in any community, more than two or three people, there’s a lot of wisdom in the crowd. In fact, many years ago now, I read a book called Wisdom Of The Crowd that really highlighted this. Any group of people has the ability to solve most problems that we face. This is where you actually say to your audience, “I want to hear from you today with your tips,” about a particular area. You may not get as many responses from this type of question as you would from a fill in the blank type question. The responses that you will get will be deeper, they’ll also be longer and they’ll be more useful, they’ll be the types of comments that other readers will gain a lot of value from as well. You might ask a question that really taps into a typical question that a beginner in your topic has, and then you put that question to your audience and say what would you answer to this type of question? What tips do you have, what stories, what tools would you use? You really are looking for those tips there. The other thing that I love about this type of question is that you can turn the answers into content if you get permission. This is something that again you will probably have seen me do on my Facebook page, the ProBlogger Facebook page. If I’m writing a blog post or if I’m preparing for a podcast, very often in the week before the podcast comes out in our Facebook group for instance, I will ask a question that relates to the podcast. Really, what I’m trying to do there is to get the audience’s ideas that I can then incorporate into the podcast. Of course, you want to give credit to the people who leave those responses. You might say if you’re writing a post about exercise on your fitness blog, try to work out the top ten exercises that your readers love to do. You can ask what’s your favorite exercise and why do you like it? Underneath that, you might say I’m going to use some of your responses in a future blog post. Anyone who does leave a comment is kind of agreeing that they want their comment to be on the blog post. Then, you can take their responses and you can either embed them into your post or you might just copy and paste them into your blog post. Of course, giving credit to the person who left their response. And then, you are basically creating reader generated content for your site. It’s not just your voice, it’s theirs as well. Of course, you probably want to add a few of your own comments to that to build upon the ideas that your readers share, but these types of questions work really well. Typically, these types of questions would usually start with how do you do type questions. How do you do this, how do you do that? How would you approach this situation? Asking for tips, that’s question number six. Number seven is another one. This one probably won’t work for everyone but I think it can probably be stretched to a lot of Facebook pages. It’s something we do very regularly on our site. We actually ask our readers to share a photo. You could ask them to share a photo or a video. If you go on our Facebook page, you will see that when people are given the opportunity to leave a comment, there’s a little icon in that comments window where they can upload a photo or a video as well. I’m amazed how many pages don’t utilize this feature. Obviously, it works really well on my Digital Photography School site. We have a site about photography so every week, at least once, we ask our readers, upload your best portrait from the last month, or upload your best landscape in the last month, upload a picture that you think will be improved in post production. We have some discussions around that. We actually ask our readers to upload a photo or a video. It works really well. We end up with a long list of photos instead of comments. Many people don’t even leave an actual comment, they’ll just share the photo. You might think this doesn’t really to my blog, I don’t have a photography blog, but I have seen this work on plenty of blogs. I saw a parenting blogger ask recently, show us a favorite piece of art from one of your kids. I saw a food blogger ask, show us the last picture in your camera phone that you took of food. That was pretty funny actually because there were really nice pictures and really ugly ones as well. I saw a fashion blogger ask, show your your favorite pair of shoes. A technology blogger asked, show us a picture of everything that you have in your laptop bag. You can, at a stretch, find at least one question that you could ask that you want people to respond to with that picture or a video. It’s just an alternative way. Again, you might not get quite as many comments but you’ll get some really interesting ones as well. I guess again you could probably takes some of those pictures if you made it clear in your question and put it into a blog post. Maybe you can create a little SlideShare of all the different photos that were submitted, or maybe you can pick your best three or four and write about why you like them in a blog post. Again, you want to get a bit of permission on that because you don’t want to use other people’s photos without their permission. I think most people would be pretty cool with that, that’s question number seven. Number eight is accountability questions. This, again, may not work for all pages but I think a lot of them might work. This is where you ask your followers, the people who like your page, a question to get them to nominate something that they’re going to do in order for you to keep them accountable. You may have been a part of Facebook groups that do this and this happens in a lot of Facebook groups. What’s your biggest goal of the week? You can ask that on your Facebook page. I think you can take it a step further if at the end of the week you went back to that post and asked anyone who responded with a goal how they went with that goal. I actually saw this happen on a Facebook page recently where the person on Monday morning just had a very simple question, what do you want to achieve this week? What’s your biggest goal this week? And then on Friday, he came back and he left a reply on every single person’s comment who mentioned a goal and all he had was a few words, how did you go with…? I was actually someone who left a comment at the start of a week and I hadn’t done my goal by the end of the week. You know what? I went away and got it done about ten minutes after he left that comment. I’m really grateful for him because he took the time to come back to me and keep me accountable to that. I think this could be done on all kinds of Facebook pages, not every time. If you have any kind of page where people are trying to build a habit, where they’re trying to learn something, where they’re trying to become something, you could certainly ask this type of question and then come back to them. Not to whip them, not to make them feel bad if they haven’t met their goal, but simply to encourage them and to build some accountability into that. I think that makes a massive impression upon people. I know I’ll be going back to that page, I’ll be making it a big part of what I do because I know that guy is taking the time to notice my goal. The last type of question that I want to briefly talk about is where you use questions in other types of blog posts. Most of what I talked about in the previous eight types of questions that you can ask is really when you ask a question as your status update. The fill in the blank question, that’s your update, that’s all you have in it. You might include a picture or something like that but really the update is the question. You can also ask questions in other types of updates too. I think that can actually make them more effective. I want to give you an example, and to see the example, you’re going to have to go over the show notes. A few days ago on my Digital Photography School Facebook page, I shared a link to an older post that I’ve written, about three or four months ago now. It was a link to a post which listed popular cameras in our readers. Again, you can check this out on the show notes. The title of the post was very simply The 19 Most Popular Compact System And Mirrorless Cameras With Our Readers. I could quite easily have just put the link in the Facebook but in addition to that, I also added a question. When I put the link in the Facebook, Facebook automatically pulled in the title. It automatically pulled in the picture from the post. There’s also an opportunity to add a little bit extra into your Facebook update. Before I schedule it, I added the question, “Do you use one of these popular compact system cameras?” Just a little question. My goal for that post was to get people over to my blog post. By adding that question, I also got people answering the question which I think in the end helped me to get even more people to the blogpost because at this moment, as I just went and looked at it now, 23 people have answered that question which is good for us. When we share a link, we don’t tend to get a lot of comments because people either ignore it or they go and read the blog post and then they don’t leave a comment. In this case, 23 people answered the question. That’s higher than normal for us. The post also had a higher than average reach, and I suspect because people were leaving comments, Facebook thought something is good with this, we’re going to show it more. It got a higher reach than normal, and it also got a lot of really good click through traffic to our blogpost as well. I think that’s because the question I asked, people needed to go and read the post before they could answer it. Those 23 people who left a comment, they at least went away and had a look at the cameras listed on the page so that they could answer the question. Asking questions in link posts can work. Sometimes, I will make the title that I use on Facebook to a link post a question rather than the actual title of the blog post, you can change it. Asking questions can actually just give your normal post on Facebook a bit of a boost as well. There are the types of questions that I think you could be asking on your Facebook page. Hopefully by now, you’ve already asked one of them. You could’ve done the fill in the blank post question. You could’ve done a this or that type question. You could’ve done a reader question, you might’ve done a question to unearth the problems, challenges, obstacles and fears of your readers. You could ask a question to unearth their dreams, their aspirations, you could ask your readers for a tip. You could ask your readers a question that is about making them accountable. You could ask them a question as a part of a link post that you’re doing as well. The key is to get in the habit of asking questions and to mix it up. I’ve got a few other really quick tips when it comes to asking questions. Number one, I think it’s really important as I said earlier to make your questions relate to your topic. You may be able to get some engagement by doing off topic questions from time to time and that might be okay from time to time, but if you do that regularly, your readers are going to feel that your page topic has begun to dilute. Be a little bit weary of going too off topic. Number two, consider using an image. You can ask a question and that might get seen by people but if you use an image that relates to your question, it’s just going to pop in the news feed a little bit more. People will notice that a little bit more. You might just have a plain image or you might even get an image and then put some text over the top with the question itself, that can also get a little bit more engagement. Another alternative might be to ask the question as a video. You might actually want to do a Facebook live, we talked about that a few episodes ago, get on Facebook live and ask your readers a question. That will then appear in their feed later on after the Facebook live is open as a replay, as a video. We all know that Facebook Lives get more reach than other types of posts. Maybe try and incorporate the Facebook Live episode a couple of weeks ago with asking a question. The fourth thing I’ll say is that timing is really important. You don’t want to ask questions when your audience are all asleep. I did this stupidly the other night, I had this question pop into my mind that I wanted to share my audience. I asked it at 3:30PM Australian time which is in the middle of the night when most of my audience are awake in America, and it’s also when my Aussie audience are picking up kids at school or about to go home from work. It was just a bad time. I know my readers aren’t online at 3:30PM. If you’ve got a question that you want to ask, schedule it for a time when your readers are engaging with your page. It’s really important to do that. Don’t ask too many questions would be another little tip. I think it’s important to mix up the type of post that you publish. Share some links, share some videos, share some pictures, and share some questions as well. When you mix up the types of content that you share, Facebook seems to reward that. Be responsive, as responsive as you can on your Facebook page. When people respond with an answer to a question that you have, it’s really nice if they then get a response from you. They’ve taken the time to respond to you, take some time to respond to them. You need to be the community that you want to have. If you want engagement, you need to be engaging with your posts. Another really quick tip is to ask timely questions. If something big is happening, whether it be a holiday, an event that’s relevant to your industry, maybe it’s an event like the Oscars which just happened. If you can find a relevant way to ask a question about that timely event, it can really help. For starters, it’s on the top of mind of your audience and so they may have already been thinking about that and be more likely to want to talk about it. It also can work in Facebook as well. Facebook has trending topics. If you use words that are trending at a time, Facebook might share that a little bit more often as well. The last thing I’ll say is you’d be really careful about how open ended your questions are. You can ask really open ended questions but I find I get much better responses if I’m specific with my question, if I’m narrow-ish and have focus with my question. That’s why I think fill in the blank questions do quite well because they’re very narrow, you’re just looking for one word and you’re nominating the topic. If you’re too open ended, sometimes the response tend to be a bit wishy washy or people don’t know how to respond as well. You want to make it easy for people to respond to your questions, at least as easy as possible. I hope that somewhere in the midst of today’s show, there are some questions that you can ask on your Facebook page. Again, these are the types of things you could also be asking in a Facebook group, LinkedIn group, pretty much any type of social media. Or, even on your blog. You may actually want to try doing some blog posts that are centered around questions as well. This is again a big thing that I get asked a lot by bloggers, how do I get people to leave a comment on my blog post? One of the best things you can do is to learn to ask good questions. I’m sure as I’ve gone through this that some of you are thinking, “He didn’t mention this one,” or that, if you’ve got another type of question that you’d like to ask, I would love to hear what that is in today’s show notes. You can go to problogger.com/podcast/183 and tell us about the types of questions that you like to ask. I’m also really interested if any of you, during the listening of this podcast, went to your page and asked a question. If you did, congratulations, I would love to know what that question was. You might even want to leave a link on the comments on the show notes today as well to that question. You can also leave comments in our Facebook group, just search on ProBlogger for the ProBlogger Podcast Listeners group, there’s 2,500 people in there who do discuss each episode and who do a few challenges together as well. Thanks for listening today, I’ll chat with you next week on the ProBlogger Podcast. How did you go with today’s episode? Enjoy this podcast? Sign up to our ProBloggerPLUS newsletter to get notified of all new tutorials and podcasts below.

How to Create MindMaps for your Blogging In today’s lesson, I want to talk about one of my favorite techniques in business for organising my thoughts, helping me to review, plan and organise my business and to think creatively and generate loads of ideas. Today’s episode is about Mind Mapping. I want to talk about what mind maps are but more importantly I want to suggest a variety of different ways that you can use them in your blogging. I create mind maps almost every day in my business – they help me in my content creation, how I promote my blog and grow traffic, how I monetize my blog, in my design and much more. In fact – I designed outlined this whole podcast in a mindmap which I’ll show you in today’s show notes. I’ve got at least 19 ways you can use mindmaps and am going to share with you the mind mapping tool that I use (and suggest some others to check out too). Here’s the mindmap of today’s show (click to enlarge):   Here’s a mindmap I used as an illustration in a blog post on making money blogging. It was used on this post – https://problogger.com/make-money-blogging/ Here’s a Keynote-Your Future mindmap: Here’s a mindmap I made on finding blog readers: Further Resources on How to Use MindMaps in your Blogging How to Discover Hundreds of Post Ideas for your blog with Mind Mapping Problogger Podcast Listeners Facebook Group MindNode MindManager SimpleMind Cmap Coggle    NovaMind MindMeister xMind Mindomo MindMaple Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Welcome to episode 182 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 and real life books as well, all designed to help you as a blogger to start an amazing blog to create some content that’s going to change the world and make your reader’s lives better in some way. Hopefully, it’s going to help you to make a little bit of money from your blog as well. We do have a growing number of our audience on the way to full time blogging but the vast majority of our audience are adding an extra income stream into their lives. If you would like to do that, you can learn more over at problogger.com. In today’s lesson, I want to talk about one of my favorite techniques in business for organizing my thoughts to helping me do reviews of my business, to plan my business and to organize my business as well as to think creatively and generate loads of ideas. In today’s episode, I want to talk about Mind Mapping. It’s a tool that I’ve used ever since I was a kid. I used to do it on a blackboard at school but today there are some amazing tools that help us to do it. I want to talk about how you can use mind maps in a variety of different aspects of your business. You can use Mind Maps in the creation of content, in the planning of that content but also the outlining of that content, in the planning in the way that you’re going to grow traffic to your blog and how you monetize your blog, how you design your blog in many other ways. In fact, right now, I am looking at a mind map. I designed this episode in the mind ap. I’m going to show you that Mind Map in today’s show notes. I’ll tell you where to find that in a moment. In fact today, what I’ve got or you is 19 different ways that you can use mind maps. I would probably come up with a 20th as I’m running along too. I’m going to show you some of those mind maps in today’s show notes. You can find them over at problogger.com/podcast/182, just see some of those examples and to get a full transcript of today’s show. Last thing I’ll mention is that the Facebook group, our ProBlogger Podcast Listeners Facebook group is going really well. This last week, we’ve had some amazing discussions where the listeners of this podcast have been sharing some of what they’ve been learning, as well as some of their challenges. If you’re looking for a group of other bloggers to journey with, do a search on Facebook for ProBlogger Podcast Listeners and join that group and I’ll approve you as soon as I can. Let’s get into today’s show where we’re going to talk mind maps. As I said in my introduction today, today I want to talk about mind maps. Mind maps are something that I use on a daily basis in my business. A lot of times, mind maps get talked about as a way to generate ideas for your blog and that’s certainly one thing that I do with mind maps. But today, I want to share with you a whole variety of other ways that you can use mind maps in your business as well. But first, for those of you who are wondering what in the world I’m talking about, what is a mind map? Probably the best thing you can do is head over to the show notes where you’ll see some mind maps and you’ll very quickly understand what they are but Wikipedia’s definition of a mind map is that it is a diagram in which information is represented visually, usually with a central idea placed in the middle and associated ideas arranged around it. If you’re like me, you probably did mind maps at school and the teachers would often write a word in the middle of the board and put a circle around it and then they would get you to brainstorm things that relate to that word, sometimes as a tool as you’re writing essays. At its most simple, it is a circle with a word in the middle and then other words written around that. You can also add other layers around those secondary words that you put as well. That’s what a mind map is. In general, the most obvious way to use a mind map is for brainstorming. Another way about a mind map is that it’s almost like a list with sublists. I, personally, am a visual person, I find making a list helpful, I like lists and sometimes I’ll do a bullet list and then I have little bullets under the bullets, I have sublists, actually I’m a more visual person and so it’s an alternative to making a list. It’s a more visual way of doing it. There are some amazing tools around at the moment. I’m going to share some of those tool that I’ve been using to create mind maps in a moment. For me, mind maps are great for brainstorming, they’re also really good for helping you to clarify your thoughts. If you’ve got quite a complicated thing that you’re thinking through, sometimes to be able to list things out and to visualize those thoughts can help you to clarify those sorts. It’s also really good for anything that’s to do with a system or a routine or a procedure. I’ll show you some examples of these in the show notes but I find when I’m trying to clarify a system in my business, sometimes it’s good to be out to be able to create some sort of a flowchart or mind map to help me to visualize that and make sense of the idea that I’m thinking through. What I want to do for the bulk of this particular episode is to share with you a variety of different ways that I use mind maps in my business. I’m going to start off with the most obvious one and the one that gets talked about a lot and that is around brainstorming, particularly content ideas. We’re going to start with the basic and then I’m going to share with you another 17 or 18 different ways that you can use mind maps in other aspects of your business as well. Number one is to brainstorm topics for your blog and to come up with ideas to write about. You can very easily grab a piece of paper and write a list of things that you might want to write about. One of things that I like to do is to create a mind map that in the central node, the node is the central idea, I’ve put the name of my blog. If I was doing one for ProBlogger, it would be ProBlogger in the middle. And then after that, I might come up with my main categories of content. On ProBlogger, we write about content, we write about finding traffic, we find about building community, we find about monetizing blog, we talk about productivity. I might have those five nodes around the main node, that’s the next level of the mind map. And then of each of those, I might have different sub categories. In the finding traffic and growing your traffic to your blog, there’s a variety of different ways that you can get traffic to your blog. We might have a sub category on search engine optimization, we might have another sub category on social media, we might have another one on getting traffic from other people’s blogs-referral traffic. For each of the main categories, there’s probably a variety of sub categories. You can see here we’re getting more granular with the ways that you can grow your blog. Around those five main categories, we might end up with 25 layers. And then around those 25 things, I begin to brainstorm on a really granular basis. In the section on social media as a way to drive traffic, I might start to brainstorm on how do you get traffic from Facebook, how do you get traffic from Twitter, how do you get traffic from Pinterest? And then I might even go further and if there’s three or four different techniques for Facebook then we’re starting to get into the blog post ideas then. We’re really drilling down into very specific techniques. At the edges of the mind map, once you go right down to the most granular ideas, you find ideas for blog posts. That is one technique that you can use with a mind map to come up with potentially hundreds of ideas for writing about on your blog, in your podcast, or in your YouTube channel. Another technique that I use to coming up with ideas for my blog posts is something that I wrote about a few years ago on ProBlogger, in a post called Discover Hundreds of Post Ideas For Your Blog with Mind Mapping. I’ll link to it in the show notes. Another idea that you can do is to actually, as your central node in your mind map, start with a previously written blog post that you’ve already written. You might have a post that you wrote a year ago, go back and find a post that you wrote a year ago. Have that as the central idea and then make a mind map around that. How could you extend that blog post? How can you write an opposing viewpoint? How could you update it for today? What points could you add to it? What questions might your readers have about that particular post? You can begin to create a mind map extending that idea and hopefully come up with a variety of different blog posts that you could write as a result of that one. You can use as your central node your blog itself and then build categories and then sub categories and blog posts from there or you might start with the blog post itself or you might just choose to do a mind map about each of the categories of your blog as well. That’s what I’ve done on ProBlogger. I’ll share some of those in the show notes today. Brainstorming topics to write about to have as a podcast is probably the most common way of using mind maps on a blog. It’s incredibly effective. I love to do this exercise with a group of people, I find when you do it in a more of a social context and brainstorming together, that’s when the real magic sometimes can happen. But I would put aside a little bit of time every week just to do this type of exercise alone, as well. I think getting in the habit of brainstorming in this way can unearth all kinds of ideas for your blog. Number one thing you can do with mind maps and the most obvious is to brainstorm topics and ideas to write about on your blog. Another thing you can do in a similar vein is to outline your editorial calendar. Particularly, if you’re going to do a series of content on your blog. This is what I did when I first came up with 31 Days to Build A Better Blog, many years ago now, it was a 31 day series of content on my blog. I came out with that idea late one night and I didn’t really know what the 31 days are going to be until I woke up the next morning and the first thing I did was to get my whiteboard out and to brainstorm the 31 topics that I wanted to cover over that month. I knew that I wanted to take my readers on a journey. I didn’t want to come up with 31 random ideas, I wanted to have them in the right order, I wanted them to be able to build upon each other and so I mind mapped it using a whiteboard. I created almost like a flowchart style of a mind map where I outlined the topics of each one and I even drilled in a little bit deeper. For each of the posts, I had a sub node around the main node and then of each of those 31, there were two or three other things and each of those were what I wanted to say or do in that particular post. I began to outline those posts in the mind map as well. If you’ve got a series of content coming up, it might not be a 31 day series, it might be, it might be a seven day series, it might even be just three posts, you can begin to plan that content out ahead of time using a mind map. Let’s talk about another way you can use mind maps in term of content on your blog and that is to outline a specific piece of content, whether it be a blog post, a podcast, a talk or webinar, a video that you’re doing, you can actually outline that specific piece of content in a mind map and that is what I’m doing right now. What I’m looking at right now is a mind map of this particular podcast episode. I don’t do this for every piece of content that I create but I thought I’d give it a go today for this particular one. It really did help me to plan this podcast but also it’s helping me to deliver it. Instead of looking at notes, I’m looking at a mind map and I’m working through each of the different sub nodes in that particular mind map and you can go and have a look at it over on the show notes. You might have a long mega post that you are writing, a really in depth article. Instead of outlining it in a list or on a piece of paper or in a text document, you might choose to do it in a mind map. I would probably only do this for longer pieces of content, longer form content. I do this all the time if I’m preparing for a presentation or a keynote at a conference. This is where I always start with those type of things because when I’m wanting to do a longer piece of content, getting up and talking for an hour in front of people, I need to know how that’s going to flow and so I like to visualize that. I also do this sometimes with postit notes and that would be the other thing I do. I get a wall and I put all my ideas on post it notes and then I begin to create a mind map on the wall. That’s another way I’m doing a mind map. Outlining a piece of content. You might actually use a mind map in a variety of different ways, you might actually outline the content as you’ll see in this particular mind map but you might also use a mind map to brainstorm titles for your blog post as well. That might be something that you can do. The piece of software that I use for my mind mapping is called Mind Node and the thing I like about that particular piece of software is that it allows me to create more than one mind map on a document. What I sometimes do if I outline a blog post in a mind map, I might create a second mind map on the same document for titles and where I just brainstorm the titles for that post as well. There’s a variety of things you can do in looking at specific pieces of content. Another thing you can do when it comes to content is plan out an interview for a podcast or a video. Those of you who listened to the last episode of the ProBlogger Podcast will have heard me interview Robert from Soloism. The way I prepared for that particular interview was to do a mind map as well. I had about seven or eight different areas that I thought out interview might go to. I mind mapped those seven or eight different areas and then I came up with two to three questions I could ask about each of those interviews. I actually find a mind map really helpful when I’m interviewing people because it’s a little bit more open. It’s not a list that I work through from top to bottom. It’s some areas of discussion that I might explore. I didn’t actually explore all of the things that I planned in that mind map but it gave me some reference points as the conversations flowed. I actually find a mind map helps me to get the conversation flowing a little bit more than a list of questions. If you do interviews, you might find planning for those to be useful with a mind map as well. Another thing when it comes to the content on your blog is that mind maps sometimes can make really good illustrations to give your readers a visual. Particularly if you want to outline a process for your readers, if you’re teaching them a process, that can be really usefully illustrated in the mind map or if you want to illustrate the possibilities in an idea. A really good example of that is a post that I wrote on ProBlogger many years ago now on How to Make Money Blogging. Many of you will have seen that before if you go to problogger.com/make/money/blogging, you’ll see the mind map that I had there. I’ve got a second version for that now and that mind map has the different ways that you can make money blogging. There’s about 30 different ways that you can make money blogging there and I have categorized them. That particular mind map has been shared tens of thousands of times around the internet. People love that and I see other people using it in their presentations all the time. It’s a really good way of outlining possibilities. You might find using a mind map is good for you in planning content but also can be a part of the presenting of that content as well. The last thing I’ll say in terms of content and using mind maps in your content is that sometimes they can be used in video presentations as well. This is not something I have ever done before, but I have seen a number of bloggers do screen share videos where they actually walk through a mind map. If you’re teaching a procedure, if you’re teaching a workflow, if you’re teaching something that goes through different possibilities, you can use that mind map in a video. Again, one of the things I love about Mind Node, which is tool that I use, is that you can fold in the nodes and then reveal the nodes. You can hide all of the sub nodes and then reveal them one at a time. That’s really effective when you are using a video. If you’re doing a screen share video, you can then walk through that mind map. That might be another ideas if you do a lot of videos. These are some of the ways that you can use mind maps when it comes to content; brainstorming, topic ideas, outlining a series coming up with the outline for a specific piece of content, planning an interview, using them as illustrations on your blog and then doing a screen share video. These are some of the ways you can use a mind map for content. Let’s move on a little bit now to some possibilities in using mind maps in the promotion of your blog, on the marketing of your blog. One thing that I like to do if I’m planning any sort of series of communications, whether it be a sequence of emails if I’m creating an autoresponder series on my blog or a little funnel of emails that I want to send people, mind maps can be really useful in designing the flow of that type of communication. You might have a blog and you’re starting an autoresponder sequence, series of emails that is about welcoming new readers to your blog. You might want to send them seven emails over seven weeks. You can design that sequence of emails using a mind map. Email one, what do you want to achieve in that email? You want to just welcome them and ask them a question. Email two, you might want to introduce them to your Facebook page. Email three, you might want to introduce them to some of your old content, you can begin to design a sequence of emails in a visual kind of way using a mind map. That’s one thing you can do. You can do the same thing with social media messaging. If you’ve got a campaign of social media messages that you want to get out over a series of time, you can use the mind map to design that type of communication sequence. Another thing when it comes to marketing your blog, and this is something I’ve not done myself but I’ve seen other bloggers using mind maps for their keywords in search engine optimization. They brainstorm the different keywords that they want to rank for and keep track of what they’re doing with SEO. Again, it might be another possibility for you. Another thing you might want to use a mind map for is to design a social media strategy, the process that you use to promote a blog post. You might come up with a strategy for every piece of content that you create, you want to share in these places, you can use the mind map to design that process. You want to post to Twitter five times, you’re going to post to Facebook three times and then begin to outline at what frequency do you want those posts to go out. Mind maps can be useful in that way as well. Let me just go through a few other possibilities for mind maps and you’ll see all these outlined on the mind map I’ve created for this particular podcast. You can use mind maps in the monetization of your blog. This is something I do every time I’m doing an affiliate promotion of a product that someone else has. We’re actually about to do a promotion on Digital Photography School of the bundle of products and ultimate photography bundle of products. It’s worth $4,000 and it’s being sold for $100 or something along those lines. What we’re doing is promoting that bundle over a series of weeks. We’ve outlined the communications that we want to send over that period of time. We want to send a series of three or four email. What is each of those email going to say/ We want to have a series of blog posts on the blog that promote the bundle. What are they going to say? We want some social media to support that affiliate campaign, what are they going to say? At what intervals will they be sent out? We can design a whole campaign of promoting an affiliate product using a mind map. The same can be true if you’re launching one of your own products, say you’ve got an ebook or a course that you are launching or a printable that you want to launch. Actually map out how you are going to promote that product. Are you going to start with blog post? How many emails will you send? What social will come as a result of that? The other part of it is in the design of the product, in the same way you can outline a blog post in a mind map or a series of blog posts in a mind map, you could outline that course that you’ve been thinking about doing in a mind map, or that ebook that you’ve been planning and you start as the central node is the central idea of the ebook and then of that comes the chapter titles and of each of those chapter titles comes the sections that you want to be in each of those chapters and then you can begin to come off each of those with some points you want to make in those. You could plan a whole ebook, a book, a course, using a mind map in some way, brainstorming what the content will be and then brainstorming how you are going to launch that as well. Monetization, you can use mind maps in all of those ways as well. And then there’s a variety of other things you can do with mind maps that I’ll quickly whip through. If you are beginning to hire people in your team, you can use mind maps as an organizational chart. This is an exercise I did a couple of years ago, as I was thinking about who do I need to work with me at ProBlogger. I’d been working on Problogger largely by myself for a number of years and so I began to map out the different roles that I was doing to keep ProBlogger running and then I began to look at each of those roles and assessed was I good at those roles or do I need to find someone to help me in those roles? What roles weren’t being done? Having that mind map helped me to work out where the holes were in my business in terms of people and team members and also as I began to add people in, I was able to put their names there and I describe their roles, and worked out where there was overlap, or where I needed to put other people as well, where we needed to find other resources. An organizational chart, you can use mind maps in the design of your blog. If you were wanting to do a redesign of your blog, you can actually map out the different pages that you want and what you want to happen on each of those pages using a mind map. You can map out your navigation, your menus in a mind map. It can be used in the visuals of your blog. If you’ve got a big goal that you’re working towards, and this is something I got from Jason Stevens over in the Facebook group when I asked yesterday, how are people using mind maps? He say he uses mind maps to help him with big, hairy, audacious goals and I can really understand that. If you’ve got a big goal, you want to launch a blog for example, if you haven’t got a blog yet and that’s a big goal, it’s audacious, you don’t know how are you going to do it. Start with that as your central node and then begin to brainstorm what you need to do to get that big goal into reality. Again, talking here about the tool that I used, Mind Node, one of the things I love about that tool is that you can turn your mind map into a todo list. You can add little check boxes to different elements of the mind map that you do. You can brainstorm what you need to do, outline the steps that you need to achieve whatever that goal is that you’ve got and then as you do them you can check them off and it tells you how far along the process you are into completing that goal that you have. Any kind of process that you need to work through that feels overwhelming, lay it out on the mind map and begin to tick off those things. Another thing you can do with mind maps is to create a reader persona or an avatar. I talk about this quite regularly. Sometimes, it’s really useful to have a picture of who your reader is. Why don’t you go to Google images, find a random picture of the type of person that you think might read your blog, put them as a central element of your mind map and again, with Mind Node you can use images in your mind map so you put that in there and then you begin to brainstorm and develop these picture of who they are. You might have a sub node coming off demographics, what language do they speak, where do they live, how old are they? You might have another sub node, spending habits, how do they spend money as it pertains to your topic. You might have another sub node, the questions that they have, their frequently asked questions and you begin to brainstorm that. You might have another one, their challenges. You might have another sub node, their dreams. You begin to get this picture of who it is that is reading your blog. You may want to do some surveys to find out the answers to those things and then again you plug those things in. You develop this avatar of who is reading your blog all based on a mind map. That’s another thing you can do. You can use mind maps to do to do lists, as I’ve already mentioned. If you’ve got anything that you want to achieve, any sort of list, if you are more of a visual person and you find lists really not that helpful, again the mind map might help you with that. You can use mind maps to do analysis or review of your blogs. Those of you who do SWOT analysis on your blog every year, one way to do that is through a mind map. You might have in the central node your blog’s name and then you have off that subnodes the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. Off each of those, you come up with the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. It is the more visual way of doing that type of review on your blog. The last thing I will say for mind maps is I sometimes like it when I’m in a conference to take notes using a mind map. It depends a little bit on the type of presenter and whether they’ve got a structure to their talk. I like listening to people who have a structure to their talk but you can actually take notes using the mind map, that can be helpful as well. It’s like when people do a visual note taking and they draw the notes, it’s a step towards that, I guess, but it’s more word based. There are some of the ways that you can use mind mapping in your blogging and I’m sure there’s a lot more that can be said as well. Just a few final thoughts and again, if you’re following along on the mind map outline of this podcast, you’ll see where I’m going with this. I find mind mapping is more useful with a group of people. It’s a social experience that can really come alive there. It’s something that you can do by yourself but do use it if you have a team, if you are in a mastermind, it can be really useful. If you’ve got a mentor, if you’ve got people working for you. Involve other people in it, you’ll find that it does bring things alive. Again, that was something that Jason mentioned on the Facebook group as well. You don’t have to use software to do this. I have mentioned a few times, I use my white board, I have two white boards in my office and sometimes I love to do it with those white boards, sometimes I like to do it with paper and pen. I always sit with a pad next to me. As I mentioned before, I used post it notes as well. The thing I like about post it notes is that you can write things down and then move them around, which is similar to the software that I use as well. I’ve already mentioned many time in this presentation that I use Mind Node and I’ll link to it in the show notes. I’ve got no affiliation with them at all, it’s just a tool that I find really useful. It’s a Mac tool and it’s also on iOS, so on your iPhone and iPad. One of the things I like about that is that it syncs between them using iCloud. I can create a mind map on my computer and then within minutes it’s on my iPhone and iPad as well so I can update it when I’m on the go as well. It can be shared with other people and whether they’ve got the tool or not, it also can be exported to PDF as an image if you want to embed it into your blog post as well. As I mentioned, it can turn elements of your mind maps into tasks, it can become a to do list. You can also add in visuals as well. You can bring in little icons or you can bring in an image to use as more of a visual representation of the things that you’ve got in your nodes. The other thing I love about it is that you can have multiple maps on the one document. When I’m planning a blog post, I will often plan the outline of a post in one map, I’ll plan titles for that post and have a little map and brainstorm there and then sometimes I will even have a third mind map on that same document of how I would promote it on social media. Some little taglines that I might use to promote that particular post. The other thing you can use in Mind Node as well is that it has a notes function. For each of your nodes, if you want to write more about that particular node or that particular category, if you want to take a node, if you want to leave some links in there for yourself for further reading, you can expand that even further and have those notes as well. Mind Node is my tool of choice, it’s not a free tool. You have to pay to use that, you have to pay to get the Mac version and then again to get the iOS version, which is a bit of a pain but I find that it’s just incredibly intuitive and simple to use. Having said that, there’s a lot of other tools around and if you do a Google search for mind map tools, you will find just like 100 of other things. Some of them are free, some of them are Mac only, some of them are Android only, some of them are web based tools and I’m going to list a few of the ones that I’ve seen and that you have recommended in the Facebook group as well. I’ll list them over on the show notes today. Mind mapping is an amazing tool. I use it every day in my blogs and I know a lot of you do as well. Particularly useful for those of you who need something a bit more visual than just a list. Essentially, it is a list. The thing I love about it particularly using the tools that I use is that it’s a list that I can drag around and I can rearrange and that these are much more visual for me. I’d love to hear though whether you use mind maps, if you do what tools do you use? Are you a paper and pen person, are you a whiteboard or a post it person, or do you use some kind of app or web based tool? You can tell us all about that over at problogger.com/podcast/182 where I’ve got a full transcript of today’s show and there will be all the links to the tools that I use and the others that I found and there’s some examples there of different types of mind maps that I’ve used as well. I’ll show you there the mind maps for this particular podcast which will show you how you could outline a blog post or a presentation but I also got some mind maps there of courses that I’ve used the mind maps to outline and other things as well. Thanks for listening today. Hope you found this useful and I hope to see some of the mind maps that you create hopefully over in the Facebook group as well. Again, do a search for ProBlogger podcast listeners on Facebook and join in the discussions that we have there every day over on Facebook. Thanks for listening, chat with you next week on the ProBlogger Podcast. How did you go with today’s episode? Enjoy this podcast? Sign up to our ProBloggerPLUS newsletter to get notified of all new tutorials and podcasts below.