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ProBlogger: 10 PBEVENT Speakers Tell How They Stay Motivated

ProBlogger: 10 PBEVENT Speakers Tell How They Stay Motivated

Link to @ProBlogger

10 PBEVENT Speakers Tell How They Stay Motivated

Posted: 25 Jun 2015 07:00 AM PDT

10 ProBlogger Training Event speakers tell about how they stay motivated in their current work. Inspiring stuff!

All secrets are being revealed on ProBlogger this week! We’ve had the morning routines of superstar bloggers and online entrepreneurs, and also their number one life hack (especially for time management). Today, they share how they keep going when the going gets tough.

HEATHER ARMSTRONG: Author, speaker, and blogger at Dooce

Heather-Headshot-1.2015-200x200One, I am the sole provider for my children. Keeping them housed, clothed, fed and happy is the highest priority in my life. Two, I love where I am in my life and cherish the experiences that have brought me here to do what I do. I stay motivated so that I can create even bigger and broader experiences.

 

Heather will be presenting the keynote session: The Courage of Compassion: Transforming Your Experience with Criticism

MRS WOOG: Mouthy 40-something housewife from the burbs. Blogs at Woogsworld

Kayte-Murphy-200x200

 

Because I have the best job in the world and I want to keep it.

 

Mrs Woog will be on the panel for: How to monetise a personal blog with Heather Armstrong
 

BENJAMIN MANGOLD: Director of Digital and Analytics at Loves Data + Google-certified expert for Google Analytics

benjamin-mangold-800-2-200x200Seeing people learn new things and exploring new ideas keeps me motivated. When you see things 'click' for someone it's extremely rewarding. I also love it when I hear how the work and training we do at Loves Data has helped someone – it's an incredible feeling to receive a card, an email, or a chocogram, from someone saying how much they appreciate what we do.

Benjamin will be presenting the session: Metrics that Matter: Google Analytics for Actionable Insights

KELLY EXETER: Owner of Swish Design, a boutique web and graphic design company.

KellySquareHeadShotHiRes-200x200Habit. I’m very good at negotiating with myself and can talk myself out of doing anything so relying on motivation to overcome this just makes life too hard. Instead, I’ve created habits around the things that are important to me/just need to be done. For example: writing and exercise are super-important to me but it would be so easy to de-prioritise them in amongst everything else going on in my day. So being in the habit of getting up early and doing them as the first order of the day every single day … it means I never have to go looking for motivation.

Kelly will be presenting the session: Blogging voice and the art of creating meaningful connections through writing

RUTH SOUKUP: Founder of LivingWellSpendingLess.com

Ruth-Profile-600x600-200x200Honestly, I don't have to try very hard to stay motivated—I LOVE what I do! I can't think of a job that I would enjoy more, or that would allow me to combine all the things I love. I get bored easily, but the blogging world is always changing. I enjoy strategizing & the process of trying to get ahead of the curve. My biggest problem is not getting motivated, but trying to find the time to implement all my ideas. This year my husband made me promise to take Sundays off, which I have, but I often find myself wandering around the house wishing I could work on my latest project!

Ruth will be presenting the keynote session The 5 Ordinary Habits of Extraordinary Bloggers, and breakout session Pinterest Marketing 101: The Three Elements of the Perfect Pin

NAT KRINGOUDIS: Women's health revolutionist and fertility fixer at natkringoudis.com.au

Nat_1698-200x200If you are fully aligned to your vision, living and breathing it, it all falls into place without too much effort. It's so important to fully integrate yourself in your message and what you do. The rest then will simply follow and flow. With this in mind, I don't need to stay motivated, I'm generally always motivated.

Nat will be presenting the session: How to create your gangbuster e-product

 

BRANDON COWAN: 21-year-old co-founder and Director of Crazy Dog Apps

Brandon-Cowan-1-200x200Simple (sort of)… I live my life using a bit of Steve Jobs' philosophy – if I find that I am not enjoying something in life and know that I can do something better, I will make the switch or adjust my life accordingly. By always doing what I want, I will always be motivated to do what I do.

Brandon will be presenting the session: Creating Business Ideas
 
 

PAMELA WILSON: Big Brand System and Copyblogger Media

Pamela-Wilson-600px-sq-200x200I really, really love what I do. My full-time job is Vice President of Educational Content at Copyblogger. I am running the day-to-day operations of the Copyblogger blog, which is an honor and a wonderful challenge, too.

Along with Editor-in-Chief Stefanie Flaxman and Chief Content Writer Demian Farnworth, we set the tone and editorial direction of the Copyblogger blog, and plan how we'll complement the written information with editorial images that help tell the story of each post.

In addition to that, I'm overseeing the educational content offered at Copyblogger Media, and there's a lot of it!

I'm a teacher at heart, so both of these jobs make me feel like I'm contributing to help people make progress in their businesses and their lives.

That's all the motivation I need. :-)

Pamela will be presenting the session: Design 101: How to Use Design Basics to Polish Up Your Blog, and How to Create a Content Event That Builds Your Email List

DAN NORRIS: serial entrepreneur, award winning blogger and the author of the best selling business book The 7 Day Startup

dan-norris-1-200x200I work on what I love and what inspires me at the time so who wouldn’t be motivated to do that? I do lose focus a little bit sometimes so I have a few things that pull me back into line like chatting with other entrepreneurs, listening to podcasts and speaking at and attending conferences.

 

Dan will be presenting the session: How to use your blog to supercharge your small business

CAROLINE MAKEPEACE: Co-founder of y travel blog

Caz-Makepeace-bio-square-600-x-600-200x200I think about my old life waking up every morning to an alarm to go to a job I hated and my first words uttered were “Oh F***!”. That memory makes a 15 hour day working on my blog easy to do. I also have a very engaged email communication relationship (which I’ll share more about in my session). Each week, I read stories about my reader’s lives, fears, hopes and dreams and I’m so so inspired to continue working to help them. I seriously would have quit if it were not for those emails.

Caroline will be presenting the session: From Blog to Business – the steps you need to take from to create a profitable business online

THE EVENT

There are a handful of tickets left, so be quick to ensure you don’t miss out! You can go here to purchase.

PBEVENT is Australia's biggest and longest-running blogging conference. Our first 400 tickets sold in around 20 minutes this year, firmly establishing it the ‘go-to’ event on the blogging community's calendar for training and networking.

In 2015, ProBlogger Training Event is presented by Olympus and will be relocating to the spacious RACV Royal Pines Resort on the Gold Coast, ready for over 650 bloggers on August 14 and 15.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger
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10 PBEVENT Speakers Tell How They Stay Motivated

The post 10 PBEVENT Speakers Tell How They Stay Motivated appeared first on @ProBlogger.

Shoemoney - Skills To Pay The Bills

Shoemoney - Skills To Pay The Bills

Link to ShoeMoney

Should You Sell Products, Use Ads, Or Be An Affiliate?

Posted: 25 Jun 2015 12:06 PM PDT

There are a lot of different ways to make money online, and it can be hard to know what methods to choose for your specific blog or website.

Some say products. Others say ads. Still others insist on affiliate marketing. Is there a right and a wrong, or do all of these models work? More importantly, what’s right for you?

At the end of the day, you can go about this in a number of different ways, so here are four different approaches that can help you choose your specific focus.

  1. The Viability Approach

If you’re a numbers kind of guy or gal, then you might want to consider what monetization models have worked best for others.

There’s an older article on Blog Marketing Academy called Top 10 Blog Monetization Strategies, Ranked In Order.

From it, we can see which of the three strategies have proven to be the most reliable for other bloggers out there. In order, they are:

  1. Products
  2. Affiliate programs
  3. Advertising

This may seem like a fairly sensible and even scientific approach to determining your monetization strategy, but we do have to keep in mind that what works for others may not always work for you.

If you sell your own products, you get to keep most of the money. With affiliate programs, you only get a percentage. With advertising, it largely depends on the model, but you usually make significantly less per click and/or impression. If you’re selling ad space to sponsors, that can change things up a bit.

But it shouldn’t come as a surprise that products are ranked high, since the $97 product deal is so pervasive across the web. Just remember that, unless you find a deal that converts, it doesn’t really matter how many products you have out there; you won’t make any money.

  1. The Case-By-Case Approach

Let’s say that you do something really well, and you have a lot of people asking you how you they can get the same results. All they really want to do is download information from your brain into theirs.

In that case, there’s already a demand for a product. You just need to spend some time talking to these people to figure out what their challenges are, and listen to the language they’re using. By incorporating those elements into your product, you can ensure that it will reach more people later.

Now let’s say that your website visitors really want to know what tools you’re using in your trade or online business. They’re interested in tapping the same resources you are.

If that’s what you’re finding, then affiliate marketing could be your cash cow. You could write reviews for individual products and show people how to use them. You could create a resource page where people go to learn about the various tools and click through to buy them. If you like writing reviews, this can be a really lucrative way to go.

Now imagine having a site that gets boatloads of traffic. The visitors aren’t always quality, but you consistently see a high number of people visiting your site. They don’t appear to be coming for anything besides your content.

This is where advertising can be a good fit. Even if you have a high bounce rate, that’s not a bad thing if your site is primarily monetized with ads. Of course, even within ads, you have a lot of different options, whether it’s clicks, impressions, or sponsors. Regardless, a large amount of traffic helps.

So that might be one way to figure out which way to go with your site.

  1. The Experts-Know-Best Approach

We can look at a post like 26 Expert Bloggers Share Their Favorite Blog Monetization Strategies to figure out what the experts out there are saying, and then determine what they think the best monetization methods are.

We have to be somewhat careful in doing that, because sometimes even what the experts say is just opinion, but for now we’ll give more weight to what they’re saying.

If you look at the previously mentioned post, you’ll see that most experts are actually talking about one of the three methods we’ve been talking about here: products, ads, and affiliate programs.

The good thing about this approach is this; if you resonate with a particular expert, and you find that you’re somewhat of a similar personality, then what works for them probably has a better chance of working for you.

It isn’t so much that their thoughts are always right, but it’s more that if you could see yourself doing what they did to get to where they are, and follow their advice, you’ll have a real chance at reproducing their results. If you’re teachable, then you can make a lot of things happen that other people might not even try.

  1. The Combined Approach

At the end of the day, there’s nothing saying you can’t explore all rabbit holes to find out which one holds the golden egg. Figuring out what works for you might be a matter of experimentation.

The tough part is that this makes it hard to keep your website focused. You could end up with a lot of different call to actions in different spots. If you’re too unfocused, you’ll have a hard time converting your visitors with any one offer.

Spreading out your income is not bad, and combining different monetization methods can be effective. It’s just that you’re going to have to give some thought to how you’re going to pull it off. It’ll take a bit of planning.

One thought might be to launch three different sites simultaneously to test different niches and monetization models. This would be pretty work-intensive though, so don’t do it unless you have the resources, a team, or the resources to hire a team.

Final Thoughts

What we can see from successful bloggers and marketers out there is that any monetization model can work. It really depends on the situation.

There might be those who are vehemently opposed to ads. Others might say affiliate marketing is a waste of time.

That stuff doesn’t really matter, because others can’t tell you “it doesn’t work” when you’re holding a big paycheck right in front of their face. Don’t be too swayed by what others say, because you as a website owner always have the best information to act on.