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- Why Mom Didn't Make it as a Blogger
This guest post is by Chris The Traffic Blogger.
We always hear stories about the people who eventually succeeded as bloggers … but what about the ones who didn’t?
What of those millions of people who heard that you could make money online, tried it, and eventually gave up? Why aren’t those stories shared and, more importantly, why don’t we discuss the reasons these people failed? Here is but one story in a sea of millions that can shine some light on the subject.
What does it mean to fail as a blogger?
For some, money is not everything in this life. They value relationships, connecting with others and sharing time together more than anything. This is exactly the mentality my mother had when she began her own blog. She wrote about life as a mother of five children, her incredible ability to cook great food with awesome wine pairings, and her love for her faith.
Her articles were well written and thought-provoking, funny sometimes, and even touching. Having read through her first few posts, I thought to myself, “Wow, my mom is really going to do this and be an awesome blogger.”
However, she failed.
Having seen myself making $10,000 a month with a video gaming blog, my mother thought that she could try her luck at it as well. After eight months and only $2.14 for her efforts, she simply gave up. To her, yes, blogging was fun, but it was too much like a job and she still had a little one to take care of at home. There just wasn’t enough free time for her to justify writing as a hobby with no income to show for it. Despite my best efforts to show her how to draw traffic to her site, she simply gave up due to the learning curve and time involved.
My mother didn’t fail because she couldn’t write, or because she didn’t have a revenue stream. She was an excellent writer and had AdSense/affiliate links on her site in good locations. She failed because she lacked connections and social interaction with her potential audience.
Where things went wrong
Here are how the conversations went with my mother, and here are the responses she had to them. If this sounds like you, stick around because I’m going to show you how to be successful with your blog traffic.
Me: You need to sell something.
Mom: But I have nothing to sell. I don’t own anything.My mother thought that because she didn’t have a pre-written ebook that she couldn’t make money online.
First off, I didn’t have an ebook when I first started out. What I had was grit and determination to find my audience and market products to them. My mother lacked this, nor did she want to start to learn how to do it. Her fundamental argument is flawed, however, because she did have something to sell: her opinion. Mom had great ideas, great outlooks on life, she was entertaining, and often made people think with her posts. That’s what she could have sold.
Maybe that would have taken shape as an ebook on how to pair wine with food, or maybe it would be life lessons from a mother of five children. I don’t know, but she did have something only she could sell and I’m sad it never came to be.
Me: Mom, you need to read other blogs and forums, then post comments on them.
Mom: I don’t have the time and they don’t know me.Despite my mom’s expertise in three separate niches, no one knew about it. All she needed to do was start visiting blogs and forums and comment on them, and she would have started developing a following rather quickly. She’s a smart, witty woman with a lot of talent, and it would have been obvious to everyone she interacted with that she knew her stuff.
Sadly, she equated leaving comments at these locations to knocking on doors like a salesman, or preaching in front of random people on the street corner. She didn’t see it as the networking opportunity it really was.
Me: Hey Mom, did you contact any bloggers this week?
Mom: Yes, but I haven’t checked my email in over a month.When Mom was first starting out, she did make an effort to contact bloggers … well, at least the ones I found for her, and whose email addresses I sent to her. But she never followed up (one even wanted to do a guest post swap!).
Due to time constraints, my Mom never was able to do the essential tasks necessary to manage her PR efforts. Following up seems like a no-brainer, but when you don’t check your email more than once a month, it’s virtually impossible to have a conversation with anyone!
Mom can still succeed
This is it: the part where I show you how she (and you, if you sound like my Mom) can turn things around.
Let’s say my Mom can spend three hours per week blogging. Here’s how I would change her schedule from 100% writing to a different setup, and get her on the path towards blogging success.
1. Spend one hour emailing and responding to emails.
2. Spend one hour commenting on blogs and participating on forums.
3. Spend one hour writing posts.Yes, she would write one-third of what she was creating before, but she would have a far greater number of interactions with people. Simply improving your own blog is not enough—you have to get out there and connect with your potential audience.
In fact, that’s all you need to do: go out there and find your audience. It seems simple, but to many it feels like added work because they spend all their time writing. Freeing up time solves half of this issue. The other half is getting over the fear of sounding like a salesman. Entering into a conversation and leaving your intelligent opinion on the matter is all you really need to do to avoid sounding like a salesman.
If you need help finding your audience, try searching Google for “[your niche] + forum” or “[your niche] + blog.” Then, after you find a few sites, try looking through their links and blog rolls for additional sites to check out. Get involved, build relationships, and most importantly, have fun! That’s what it’s all about!
Chris is a self proclaimed expert at showing bloggers how they can get traffic, build communities, make money online and be successful. You can find out more at The Traffic Blogger.
Post from: ProBlogger Blog Tips
Why Mom Didn't Make it as a Blogger
Переслать - Inside the Compendium Blogging Platform
This guest post is by Jenny Dean of Business Blog Writers.
If you run a business that sells a product or a service, you need a strong online presence. If you’re considering blogging, or if you are blogging and it's not doing what you want it to do, then you might look into a different blogging platform to help you achieve your online goals—Compendium.
Seeing that the distinction between blogs and websites has become blurred in recent years, many online visitors don’t even realize whether they have landed on a blog or a website. In fact, static websites are becoming less desirable, since a blog has a fluid ability to target specific visitors with the most up-to-date and relevant information.
Email and searches continue to dominate the online market, so you have to be equipped with the best ROI-producing tool available. Compendium’s blogging platform targets organic keywords in search engines, helps businesses acquire new customers, and serves as a hub for your social media strategy.
Compendium’s platform involves a SEO strategy approach that targets the organic side of the search engine results page (SERP), and is designed to win keyword searches.
If your business has these three qualities, then Compendium may be a great fit:
- a business domain with some age/authority
- an understanding of analytics and how you make money online
- an understanding of what types of key phrases blogs are best suited to win vs. PPC or traditional SEO tactics.
As of March 2011, Compendium's pricing ranges from $3,500 to upwards of $50,000 a year, based on the needs of the client. Their packages are scalable based on keyword selection and services, as well as any upgrades that you might request.
Why would you want a blog as a business?
- To increase search engine traffic
- To create an online community of fans of your product or service
- To increase awareness of your product or service
- All of the above.
No matter what your company's blogging goals are, Compendium's platform is set up to make them happen. Of course, Compendium's approach to Third Generation blogging has to do with more qualified search traffic and lead generation online. There are millions of searches around almost every business, topic, industry, etc. every day, week, and month. If your business has a product or service, then someone is out there searching for you.
In my business, we write content for a number of blogs, but our favorite platform to write on is Compendium and here's why.
Please note: I mentioned in my ProBlogger post, How to Brand Your Blog's YouTube Channel that I have another website called Floppycats.com, and I purchased the Compendium platform for that site. All the photos and examples below are taken from Floppycats.com's Compendium blog).
Strategy
- Compendium has nearly 500 relationships with savvy marketers and business leaders all over the country. These leaders are just like you—they want to increase their ROI without a lot of effort. So when you have a platform through Compendium, you are set up with an Account Manager who can share tips and ideas among clients, allowing you to save time and money. It's like having a marketing firm behind your blog that is also well-versed in SEO.
- Compendium helps you offer a conversion point or a call-to-action (CTA) to your blog These CTAs can include requesting more information, signing up for a free demo, downloading a document, or even a "buy now" option.
- Compendium helps to create a blog that has strong key SEO elements like informative page titles, consumer-focused keywords, recent and frequent updates, strong inbound links, and relevant content. Their platform allows your blog to target thousands of organic keywords in a search. It automatically organizes your blog’s keyword-rich content into lots of unique landing pages that are found in an organic search.
Monetization
- Many of Compendium's clients are generating 400% marketing ROI with only minutes of effort each day.
- Compendium's easy-to-use blogging and search engine optimization (SEO) tools help you achieve aggressive lead generation and revenue goals with less time and money than other marketing activities.
- Compendium llows you to make a true investment in your marketing dollars. The more content you create, the deeper and richer your search results become. In other words, the blog data never goes away; rather, it gets compounded and enhanced with new content. It’s not like PPC marketing that you pay for, where it’s up and then it’s gone forever. What’s more, 80-90% of all clicks happen in the organic section of a results page.
Optimization
- Compendium can be set up on any domain, even WordPress.
- You won't find an easier or more efficient way to target a huge search market and get the highest return on their marketing efforts.
- Search engines look for the following when determining the rank of organic search results:
- titles
- keywords
- recency/frequency of content creation
- links
- volume
- relevance
- Compendium partnered with two industry-leading SEO companies (Distilled and SEOmoz) to make changes to their platform to enhance organic search benefits. You may have read a recent article about the Google Algorithm change that affected many blogs and many companies' efforts to bring in search engine traffic. Search engine algorithms love Compendium's system, and Compendium clients are unscathed by such search engine modifications.
Social Networking
- Compendium's platform includes social media integration that allows you to push content to your company's accounts on Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin, all from within the platform.
- There are upgrades available with the system that allow for your blog to be built entirely on user-generated content. It's one of the most incredible marketing strategies I have seen to date. To explain it would require a whole other blog post, so here's a link to one I wrote a few months back explaining it.
Analytics
- Compendium's platform allows you to log in at any time, track how the platform is driving traffic to your website, and see how your different calls to action are converting.
- The Account Manager who is set up for your account also integrates your blog with Google Analytics, so you will benefit from Compendium's own internal tracking system, as well as an external tracking system.
Content report
Link activity report
Link activity chart
Ease of Use
- You do not have to be technically savvy to use Compendium. If you can login into an email account, you can login into Compendium and create a post.
- The Compendium gods were on our side when they delivered the Keyword Strength Meter! It’s one of my favorite things about Compendium (see image below). The Keyword Strength Meter is a bar that appears at the top of every post as you’re composing it, and goes from red to green, helping you know when you have used the optimal number of keywords for a specific post. In other words, you don't have to worry about whether or not you have used the proper number of keywords, or guess what the search engines will like.
The keyword strength meter in action
- You can schedule your posts to release on the blog on different days and times. In other words, you could write five posts on Monday and schedule them to post on every day that week without having to sign into the system again (WordPress has this capability as well).
Protection
- Compendium is backed by SaaS security. There's no IT or plug-ins necessary. Compendium is a fully hosted SaaS company, so Compendium hosts all of its clients' blog pages. Compendium is built on an enterprise-level structure with all the security necessary to work with even the largest corporations.
- One of the clients that we write for mentioned to me that they chose Compendium because of the security measures involved—they knew their content would be protected on Compendium, whereas they couldn't obtain a similar level of protection on other blogging platforms.
- Compendium is not an open-source platform (on an open-source program anyone can develop plug-ins or add-ons to the platform). Compendium is specifically built for enterprise and the security that they require. This includes features like SSL (for users signing in—think of a bank-like sign in), backups, redundancy, 24-hour monitoring, SLA (service level agreements), and more. All of these features, and the architecture on which Compendium is built, are far easier to control and monitor than freeware, giving an added level of security to this platform.
- Compendium allows for unlimited users that are all attached to an administrator. When a user submits a post it doesn't go directly onto the company's blog. Rather, the admin of the blog gets an email notification letting them know there is a new post ready to go. The administrator can then go in and read, edit, or decline the post, and offer feedback to the author without leaving the system. If your company has a PR department that would like to review the posts before they go live, then Compendium is a great option because it allows the user to input the posts and the PR department to edit and approve them as needed, without excessive back-and-forth comments with the writers.
Customization
The platform can look however you want it to—and you can have it easily match your website. I use my Compendium blog as a way to find potential subscribers for my main site, which is on WordPress. That may seem funky, but it has allowed more people to find me. It also allows me to post things with which I wouldn't want to bug subscribers to my main site, but that I still think are worthwhile to have on my site in some manner. Below is a screen shot of the home page of my Floppycats.com website and a screen shot of my Compendium blog site.
The site on WordPress
The site on Compendium
Updates
Compendium is constantly improving the product, making enhancements every week to service the needs of clients.
The main reason I like Compendium is because with any business, it is important to get referrals as well as retain clients you already have. It has been my experience that when Business Blog Writers write on the Compendium platform, we are more likely to retain the client, because the content we provide on that platform actually works, delivering the results the client was looking for. Therefore they find the value in continuing their content creation agreement with us.
If you are interested in checking out Compendium, you can request a demo through the website. One of their fantastic sales representatives will schedule a time to show you a demo of their software.
Does your company use Compendium? How do you like it? What advantages have you seen from it?
Jenny Dean is a 31-year-old-business owner and entrepreneur from Kansas City. Jenny is currently working on Business Blog Writers, a company that supplies blog content specifically for company's blogs, Floppycats.com, an informational website about Ragdoll cats and Antioxidant-fruits.com, an informational website about the antioxidant powers of fruit. Follow Business Blog Writers on Twitter or on Facebook.
Post from: ProBlogger Blog Tips
Inside the Compendium Blogging Platform
Переслать - Third Tribe is Closing to New Members—Join Us Before Friday, April 1
No, it’s not an April Fool’s joke: we’re closing our flagship community, the Third Tribe, to new members on April 1, 2011 at 5:00 PM Eastern Time (U.S.).
If you’re not familiar with Third Tribe, it’s a community that I co-founded in 2010 with Brian Clark (Copyblogger), Sonia Simone (Remarkable Communication), and Chris Brogan (ChrisBrogan.com). We built it to provide a learning and networking opportunity for internet marketers who wanted cutting-edge information about how to grow their sites—without the high-pressure hype or “black hat” techniques you see on some other sites.
We took the most effective techniques from Internet marketing and blended them with the content-rich, community-building style of the social media crowd.
What can you get from Third Tribe?
- Each month, you get at least one audio seminar on an essential marketing or business technique. We talk about SEO, social media marketing, blog monetization, affiliate marketing, and heaps more. Implement what you learn in the seminars and you’ll start to see real growth in your business. Full transcripts are provided, as well as “Next Action” worksheets that will give you the next steps to take.
- Each month you also get two Q&A sessions with Tribe founders. These are fantastic “mini consulting” sessions where you can get specific advice that relates to your own business. Imagine stopping any of the four founders in a conference hallway and getting five or ten minutes of our undivided attention to address your business question. That’s what the Q&A sessions do for our Tribers … twice every month.
- 24/7 access to a thriving community of online marketers. Ask questions, get feedback, form JV partnerships, or just ask your pals for a “Like” on that Facebook page. When things get tough, it’s great to know you have peers and friends who have your back.
If you’d like a taste of some of our seminar content, we’ve prepared a “free sample” for you. This case study was a bonus seminar for this month, with Sonia Simone grilling Third Triber Shane Ketterman on how he grew his niche site from zero to 10,000 unique visitors a day … in seven months.
Even if you don’t join the Tribe, do yourself a favor and download the case study. It’s filled with lessons you can apply right away to your own sites. (For example, he has a nice technique for using AdSense to quickly find the most profitable corner of your blog.)
So why is the Tribe closing down?
It’s not really closing—it’s being transformed into something bigger and better. And … yes … more expensive.
That’s why this is great opportunity to come into the Tribe. Join today and you’ll get in at the best possible price, plus you get instant access to more than 24 hours of archived seminar content.
No, the Tribe isn’t the cheapest resource you’ll find. But if you’re serious about treating your blog as a business, it’s an investment that can repay you many times over.
I hope you’ll come join us in the Third Tribe today. Remember, the site will close to new members on April 1, 2011, at 5:00 PM Eastern (U.S.) Time. Don’t get locked out—you’ll never be able to join at this price again.
Post from: ProBlogger Blog Tips
Third Tribe is Closing to New Members—Join Us Before Friday, April 1
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