“Taking a 5+ Figure Blog to the Next Level” plus 1 more

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Taking a 5+ Figure Blog to the Next Level Posted: 23 Sep 2012 01:01 PM PDT This guest post is by the Web Marketing Ninja. In my work, I get to speak with a lot of people who’ve done really well from the web. Some have done seven- and eight-digits “well,” others who have more modest, but still impressive, five- and six-digit success stories. And one of the common challenges I encounter with the five- and six-digit bloggers is that they really struggle to take that next step. How do they go from $100,000 a month to $1 million? This issue seems to be coming up more and more often, so I thought I’d share the feedback I typically give in this situation in case you’re in similar circumstances. Taking stock The web and its low barriers to entry for certain business models can be both a blessing and curse. The blessing is that you can start a business—a good one—with the notes you already have in your wallet. There are not many industries that can lay claim to that. Millions of these online businesses start every year and quite a few of them succeed, delivering senior-management or executive-level incomes to people working from home on something they love.  Although it might be hard to see that there’s a downside to earning $100,000, $200,000, or $300,000 a year, when you grow to that level, you’ll generate a thirst for more. Trust me! And that’s usually when people come to me. These conversations often start with the comment, “I’ve done really well, but growth is flattening off. I’ve got lots of ideas, but don’t know how to take them forward.” Then I’ll see a model that looks something like this: monthly revenue = $50k admin costs = $1k website costs = $2k business costs = $2k In general business terms, this is an operation running on mind-blowing profit margins. Spending $5k to deliver $50k?! Wow. I’ll then hear statements like this from the blog owner: “I want to create an app.” “I want to build a private community just like…” “My website’s slow and I want to fix it and update the design.” “I think there’s an opportunity for me to offer XYZ service.” “My traffic’s high, but flat, and I’m getting the same responses to my launches and campaigns.” “I know I’m leaving money on the table by not doing ABC.” Being a straight-down-the-line sort of person, my response to these comments isn’t always what the business owner wants to hear. For example, I used this analogy just today… If this is you… You need to get off the bike you’re on now—the one you built yourself from spare parts.  It’s served you well, but it’s worn and won’t go any faster than you’ve got it going today.  It’s already performing above its class. What you need to do is to go and order yourself a new race bike that’s expertly designed to take things up a level. Unfortunately, you need to buy it before you can go fast. In a nutshell, it’s time to invest back in your business if you want to enable it to continue its growth, and go beyond the limits of one person. This is always a pretty bitter pill to swallow, and I can understand why. You built your blog and your business on blood, sweat, and tears. It has put food on the table and money in the bank, and now I’m telling you that you need to give some of that up to go any further! Of course, it’s not the only choice.  You can live very comfortably on $45,000 a month, and you’re taking a risk spending your money on something new—after all, you might not get it back. But you need to understand that it’s very unlikely you’ll be able to continue to grow a blogging business at this level without spending any money on it. Typically, the response from my client is one of four: They decide they’ll just continue to pocket the profits from their current blog for as long as they can. They’ll make the decision to invest their own money into their business. They’ll find a partner to share equity with—someone whose skills complement theirs, and who can grow their current capability. They’ll seek funding from investors to support growth. There’s nothing wrong with any of those outcomes, as long as you make the decision based on your own desires. Looking to grow Let’s assume you’re in one of the last three categories, and look at how you might implement some of the growth tactics I mentioned above. If you want to create an app… Apps can be quite simple and cost-effective to produce, or their creation costs can run into the millions. While there are still a few nuggets out there, a lot of the low-hanging, simple-but-valuable apps have been gobbled up in the goldrush. Also, simple doesn’t necessarily mean cheap. You’ve probably heard about the $750 million Facebook paid for Instagram, but let’s not forget the $50 million in funding the app’s creators received to build and manage it in the first place. Now this isn’t meant to deter you. Just realise that unless you can build your own app, and you want to do something unique, you’re up for a minimum of $10K to produce a quality app in most instances. If your website’s slow and you want to fix it and update the design… Chances are you’re running WordPress, and you might have tweaked a template or got a theme designed for you. You’ve probably installed plugin after plugin, with a bunch you’ve totally forgotten about. Maybe you’re on shared hosting that’s not scalable. The result is that your website is slowing down and can’t deal with your traffic. In this instance, you’ve got two problems to solve. Your website is inefficient and you need more sophisticated hosting. To get it done right—by people who are experienced with high-traffic sites—you’re looking at spending $5-$10k, at a minimum. That’s only going to solve your immediate problem, and that’ll be back again before you know it, unless you bring in developers and other experts to give your blog constant attention. If you know you’re leaving money on the table by not doing ABC… This one’s pretty open ended. “ABC” might be something simple, such as setting yourself up as a merchant so you can take credit card payments directly, rather than using PayPal. It might be breaking the limits of your basic checkout system, the creation of an ebook or other product—the list could go on an on Simply by making that comment, though, you’re admitting that your To-do list is longer than you can handle, and that in itself is costing you money. It might be time to get some help. Just a blogger? Or a business? Are you “just a blogger?” Or are you “in businesses?” It’s an important question to answer. The prospect of spending money on your business, when you have the means to do so, is often a telling moment. What you do will reflect just how serious you are about building a business, rather than “just” being a blogger. Businesses hold the keys to greater financial gain, but unfortunately, along with that potential comes more pressure and risk—and that’s not for everyone. But if you’re finding yourself in a similar scenario to those I’ve mentioned here, you need to come to terms with the fact that your dream run of growth will someday reach its peak, if you stick with your current capabilities. It’s going to cost you to change that, but that cost could turn you into one of those eight-, nine-. or ten-digit superstars. We can all dream of never-ending growth with minimal investment. But in most cases, the real world doesn’t work like that. How’s your blog’s growth going? Do you think it’s time to invest to build it further? I’d love to hear your plans below. Stay tuned for more posts by the Web Marketing Ninja—author of The Blogger's Guide to Online Marketing, and a professional online marketer for a major web brand. Follow the Web Marketing Ninja on Twitter. Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger Taking a 5+ Figure Blog to the Next Level

We’re Spending the Week On Your Blog! Posted: 23 Sep 2012 07:07 AM PDT It’s Monday—the start of a new week on your blog—and I wonder what challenges you’re facing. Image courtesy stock.xchng user Jan Willem Geertsma If you’ve neglected your RSS or social media feeds over the weekend, you’ll likely find plenty of good advice there—advice that you feel you really should try out if you want your blog to be its best. But before you become overwhelmed by all the things on your weekly To-Do list, let me tell you what we have planned for the week ahead. This week, we’re focusing not on promotion or social networking or reaching the right readers or affiliate programs or SEO. We’re focusing on you and your blog. Entirely. A week on your blog Imagine if you could put aside all the other, external things you usually do to keep your blog humming along for a whole week. Imagine if you could instead spend the next five days really honing your approach to blog design, content, and your own productivity. If you’re anything like me, you rarely spend this much time focused exclusively on your own online presence. I know I normally slot the tasks of content and design around other things, mainly to do with product development, reader engagement, and promotion. While I don’t think any of these elements exists in a vacuum—they all interplay thought our blogs and our lives as bloggers—I do feel that sometimes it’s good to take a break and really home in on our blogs themselves. Stepping back Blogs evolve over time. Each day we learn new ideas to try, and we want to see what the produce. But ongoing blog tweaks can be a curse as well as an aid. If we never step back, the tweaks we make to our designs, our interfaces, our content, our structure, and our brands overall can slowly erode the sharp focus we began with. That can be more than unfortunate—that can undermine your ability to maintain and grow reader loyalty. So if you’ve spent the past months in the trenches, head down, backside up, working hard at a tactical level, then this week’s posts will hopefully help you step back and look critically at some key elements of your blog. We’ll have posts on landing pages and logos, on voice and audience, and on making the most of the time you dedicate to your blog. We’ll mix writing and design tips with productivity advice. The aim? To help you focus on the thing that matters most—the thing that keeps you attracting readers, converting subscribers, and selling products: your blog itself. And to help you take stock of where you’re at, and where you can improve to make your brand more coherent and powerful. We’ll kick off later today with a post by the Web Marketing Ninja which is designed to help those with bigger blogs whose growth has stalled. He’ll show you how to look closely at your online presence and face up to the tough questions: why has your blog stalled, and what do you need to do to get it going again? Before we get to that post, I’d love to hear about the challenges you’re facing in building an online presence on your blog. Share them with us in the comments. Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger We’re Spending the Week On Your Blog!

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“My First AdWords: How to Trial AdWords Promotion for Your Blog” plus 1 more

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My First AdWords: How to Trial AdWords Promotion for Your Blog Posted: 22 Sep 2012 01:00 PM PDT This guest post is by Kole McRae of Chilled Soda. Many of you probably have AdSense on your blog. It's a great system for monetization, especially for those with smaller blogs but how many of you have been on the other side? AdWords is the system Google uses for advertising. It's how you place ads on it's search engine and on the huge network of sites that use AdSense. Right now Google is offering $75 free to anyone that wants to try out AdWords. That's a good chunk of change but it can easily disappear in a day on AdWords and give you nothing to show for it. So I've written this little guide to help you out a bit. I wrote this with a few assumptions in mind: that you know how AdWords works in terms of buying clicks and that you have full control over your site. If you have never heard of AdWords you should probably start here. I have also assumed you have made an AdWords account. If not, use the link above and make one. Step 1: Keyword research The first step to a successful AdWords campaign is research. I know what I'm about to recommend sounds really boring, but not only will it help your AdWords campaign but will also help you understand your niche better. I want you to take ten minutes and write down every combination of keywords you can think of for your blog. What words do you want people to type in to find your blog. For example: cool tech blog tech news technology news Canadian technology news. Write them all down and keep going until you just can't go anymore. You should be able to put together a pretty sizeable list. Next sign into your AdWords account and click on Keyword tool, which is under the Tools and analysis tab. Paste your list into that tool and hit Search. Next, click the Keyword ideas tab. This will give you a much larger list of keywords (usually in the hundreds or thousands). It also tells you about how many people a month search for those terms and how much competition there is. This can be invaluable data. Take this new list and download an Excel copy of it. Then take the time to divide the keywords into different groups, or “themes,” and choose which ones to focus on. I'd go over just how to do that but it would take far too long. So I'll simply suggest using common sense and your own judgement. Try to find keywords that have low competition, low CPC cost, but high monthly searches. These are called low-hanging fruit. They tend to be the juiciest! Remove any words that are too generic. Single-word keywords that have millions of searches will not be helpful to you. Another quick tip is to look up your competitors and go to their pages. Then right-click and select View source. Though Google has said they no longer use the Keywords meta tag, some people still fill it up, which might give you even more keyword ideas. There are many other ways to get even more keyword ideas, so get creative and see what you can find. You should also look for keywords in your lists that are not relevant at all. These you will want to add to your negative terms list so that people who search those terms don’t see your ad or cost you any money. The most important thing I can teach you about AdWords is that it is not about getting as many people as possible to your site. It is about getting the right kind of people to your site. So make sure you remove any and all keywords that are not relevant. People searching for Python programming tutorials do not want to learn more about snakes and will only cost you money with no added benefit. Step 2: Ad copy Once you have put together your keyword lists and organized them into categories (or “adgroups,” as Google calls them) you need to write ads for each one. I say ads, not ad, because the most important thing you can do with AdWords is rotate and test ads. I suggest writing two ads for each category or adgroup. Google will automatically rotate these ads and give you stats for both so that you can choose the one that works best for you and test it against an even better one. This means your ads will get steadily better as you test them against each other. Your ad copy needs to be simple and to the point. Tell people exactly what to expect when they land on your site. Some best practices: Start Each Word With a Capital Letter. It looks weird in an article but in an AdWords ad, it stands out and looks professional. End each line with a period. Don't cut sentences off halfway through because of character limits. I'm going to reiterate a point from above. AdWords is about getting quality traffic to your blog, not just getting as many people there as possible. You want people that will become part of your community. This means your ad should be written in a way that will build a community and invite people to join it. Step 3: Landing page The final thing I want to talk about is your landing page—the page people land on after they click your ad. The first instinct for a lot of people is to land folks on your home page. This can be a bad idea for two main reasons. The first is that it can be confusing, especially if your home page is just a bunch of blog posts. People may not know where to begin or what to do. Secondly, it's very possible that Google's AdWords quality algorithm may not understand that your site is relevant based on the page it lands on. It may be searching for instances of “Canadian Tech News” but only find it once on the main blog page, so it will lower your quality score and may not show your ad as many times. The best practice is to send people to relevant posts and guiding pages for each adgroup. If you have an adgroup for Microsoft technology news, send people to a page specifically about Microsoft that has a bunch of news for it. Or maybe to an About page or a category page. The more specific, the better. This is only the beginning I've written over 1000 words here and it hardly scratches the surface of AdWords advertising. It fails to mention local searches, conversion tracking, match types and a million other things that go into a proper campaign. The best part? This is all for Google search, I didn't even bring up the content network. Which reminds me: I suggest going to your Campaign settings and setting it to Google search only, as this will give you a bit more control over where your site shows up. The content network requires an article all on its own and has a habit of eating up all your advertising money without giving you nearly the quality of traffic the search network gives you. That is, of course, unless you do a lot of research and use it correctly. Hopefully, I've helped you get more out of that $75—and maybe even inspired you to start learning more about advertising on Google in general so you can fully leverage any money you spend on it. Kole McRae is an Internet Marketer for 9th Sphere. He also runs a blog called Chilled Soda, which is about tea, music and all the chill things in life. Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger My First AdWords: How to Trial AdWords Promotion for Your Blog

Score Face Time with New People in Your Niche Posted: 22 Sep 2012 07:03 AM PDT This guest post is by Stanley Lee. We all know the benefits of networking are obvious, so why are we neglecting it? Are you scared about meeting new people in your industry? Do you spend a fortune to attend conferences and trade shows? Or do you waste a lot of time with travel and setting up your computer to work properly? If you’re sick of making compromises, read on. Get in touch using Airtime Airtime allows you to talk to strangers and friends on Facebook via video chat without leaving your home office. You can meet new people on the platform based on: where you live your interests their relationships with your friends. The information is extracted from your Facebook profile. The best part of all this is you don’t have to acquire strangers’ permission in advance to talk to them, which is typically common when you try accomplishing this feat with Skype or even on Google+ Hangouts. Also, you won’t find any random dudes doing weird stuff (remember Chatroulette?). I mean, who really wants to expose their Facebook identities while doing that? If you’re concerned about Airtime’s credibility, let’s start with its leaders. Sean Parker was founding president of Facebook and co-founder of Napster, and Shawn Fanning, was co-founder of Napster. Celebrities such as Snoop Dogg, Alicia Keys, Jim Carey, and Martha Stewart checked Airtime out on its launch day. If you aren’t familiar with any of those guys and girls, how about Gary Vaynerchuk? He loved using Airtime to connect with other social media fanatics. Now that you’re excited, let’s learn how you can use Airtime to connect with readers and others in your blog’s niche. The How-tos Basic requirements Before logging onto Airtime.com, you will need the following: A compatible web browser: For simplicity, I suggest using Google Chrome. A Facebook account: For obvious reasons. A webcam that works with Airtime: Most laptop cameras should work without problems. Plug-in webcams may have problems. See the steps below to find out if yours does. Step 1: Log into Airtime.com A simple process—just visit Airtime.com and follow the launch process. You will need to press some buttons to authorize certain permission settings in Airtime’s login process. These are required in order for your camera to work properly. Step 2: Choose your target You will see this splash screen after successfully configuring your webcam. I blacked out my Facebook contacts to protect their privacy here. If you want to talk to your existing Facebook or Airtime contacts, you can click on a name on the right-hand panel and explore for yourself. But since you’re most likely interested in discovering industry colleagues, let’s look at that. You have two ways to accomplish this goal. The first way involves finding users with a common interest to talk to (as indicated by the blue rectangle). Then, click the Talk to Someone button. This is the easiest way because: By checking the Near option, you can find people located close to you. If I live in Vancouver, Canada, I’m more likely to be connected to someone in, let’s say, New York City than New Delhi, India. By checking the Common Interests option, you can specify multiple interests to find like-minded people. For example, if you read ProBlogger, your search won’t just be limited to this publication. You likely read Copyblogger, Think Traffic, Social Triggers, SEOmoz, and Blog Tyrant regularly. You may have even liked them on Facebook. By checking the Friends of Friends option, you increase your chances of talking to a second-degree connection rather than the third, fourth, fifth, etc. Let’s face it, life is already complex enough as it is. Enabling these options simplifies your Airtime experience and helps you home in on the right readers and industry contacts. The second option involves finding users with a specific common interest. This is a great feature, but I do not recommend this method at the moment. Airtime does not have enough simultaneous users for you to find strangers with a specific common interest in a reasonable timeframe. Still, let’s take a look at how to do this just in case you want to play around. Click on your profile, indicated here by the red box. Move your cursor down to the Interests section, indicated by the blue box. You can click the More button at the bottom-right corner of the section to expand it. Click on an interest, then click the Find people who like this hyperlink, indicated by the blue box. Step 3: Start talking In case if you’re a networking novice, here are some quick conversational basics before you begin talking. Your goal should be to make new friends and make a great impression. How? By asking these simple questions in the following order, you will be able to spark deep conversations with your contacts: How did you find yourself trying out Airtime? What are you interested in these days? What challenges are you facing when you’re doing that? Feel free to add one or two more questions specific to your industry or niche. The point is to break the ice, inquire about their hopes and challenges, and steer the conversation into the direction where you can provide—rather than extract—value. This is the key to keep the conversation going beyond this meeting. After asking each of these questions, stop talking, and listen actively. After all, mutual exchange is a key ingredient to the art of networking. If you really like talking to the person, you can add the contact into your Airtime list by pressing the blue button. You can also find other interests you may want to check off in your contact’s Interests panel on the right. Step 4: Closing the loop So you’ve met some new people and added the contacts you’ve bonded with particularly well. However, you’re just beginning the relationship. You’ll need to stay updated with what they’re up to, and close the loop by learning what you can help them with. Here are some suggestions of what you can offer them: Advice from your expertise: Act like a consultant giving them free advice on their problems related to your blog’s niche. Leave money off the table, as you want to keep the relationship social rather than transactional. Be a connector: Doing so would not only help out your connections, but also build your reputation as a connector. Read this guide to get started if you don’t know how to be a connector. Share relevant resources: This could be as simple as sending a quick email with actionable information you come across that’s helpful for them. It takes several iterations of loop closing in order to build trust in those new relationships. If the first tries seem daunting, don’t worry. Networking is a learned skill, and you’ll improve with more practice. And Airtime is a great environment for you to practice quickly. Let me know about your experience! I hope you have enjoyed learning how Airtime can improve your life. Both in business and personal contexts, but particularly in terms of your blog. Now you know how to use Airtime to build new relationships with other similar-minded people in a fail-safe manner. Or improve the quality of your relationships. Or even just conduct research for your blog that would otherwise be time-consuming and difficult to get without a large existing readership. All within the comfort of your workspace, without the headaches of messing around with software packages. Don’t you want to focus on big wins rather than being buried in the endless list of trivial tactics (e.g. spending all your resources tweaking SEO or honing a sales page when you don’t even know if it has its place in the marketplace)? Have you used Airtime? How did it help you? What were the good points and bad points? Share your thoughts with us in the comments. Stanley Lee blogs about systems building, marketing, and societal topics, providing in-depth commentary for the benefit of his readers. Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger Score Face Time with New People in Your Niche

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