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- How to Land a Job as a "Resident Blogger"
This guest post is by Jane of Runaway Jane.
I recently secured the position of Resident Blogger at PLUS Hostels, a large hostel and camp site chain based in Europe.
I’d spent more than two years blogging on my independent travel blog RunawayJane.com, and that experience undoubtedly led to me securing this position.
But it wasn’t the only factor.
I thought it would be useful to illustrate exactly what led me to land this job so that if you’re looking to secure a freelance position like this, you’ll have a head-start on your competition.
Initiative is key
I approached PLUS about becoming their Resident Blogger. This was an idea that I pitched to them.
I had looked at their social media output and saw that they were very active. They also had a very cool, well-designed site targeted at a young audience.
So I was surprised that they didn’t already have an active blog, and I took it upon myself to email them and ask if it was something they’d be interested in doing.
My first email was short, to the point, and didn’t waste anybody’s time. I simply asked if it was something they’d be interested in. I decided to wait for their response before I’d go into more detail about how we could potentially partner.
Timing and a bit of luck
As it happened, my timing was spot-on: PLUS was already looking at implementing a blog sometime over the coming months when they received my email.
However, before I approached them, I was not on their radar as someone who could help—in fact, they were considering approaching other people. I was told in my interview with them that one of the reasons I was chosen above other candidates was because I approached them. They knew I was keen.
I guess you can guarantee that someone who’s approaching you is more likely to work hard for you, because they obviously have an interest in working with you that goes beyond just monetary value (although of course money is important!).
Follow up
I initially approached PLUS around January or February 2012. I remembered they’d said they would be considering bloggers in April, and would get back to me then.
So I sent them a follow-up email in mid-April to ask whether they had considered my proposal, as I hadn’t head anything from them.
This was another key factor in me securing the position, as it meant I was not forgotten, and, again, that I appeared keen and interested.
Previous blogging matters
There is no doubt that if I hadn’t been blogging as Runaway Jane for some time, I would not have been considered for this position.
As soon as I got in touch with PLUS they were able to go onto my blog, and access hundreds of blog posts I’d written. They could see the quality and style of work that I was producing, and assess whether or not it would fit their blog.
They could also see I was active on social media channels, and already had a following. This proved that I understood the demands of blogging (as opposed to straight-up travel writing), and had demonstrated the self motivation over two years to create my own standing within the blogging world.
They could see that I updated my blog regularly, was interactive with my readers, and could write the types of content that engaged an audience. That audience also happened to fit their target market.
Get paid!
I was asked by quite a few other bloggers whether or not I was getting paid by PLUS for this position.
These questions surprised me. To me, the matter of getting paid was obvious—of course I was getting paid! It was a freelance blogging position that I was going to be putting a lot of time and effort into, so payment was only fair.
That said, PLUS are also putting a lot of effort into promoting me, my brand, my Twitter handle, and my site. I took this into consideration when I was quoting them a price for my services—after all, not everything is about immediate monetary gain.
For me, long-term value is more important, and securing this position was more important than an extra hundred dollars a month or so.
If you’re trying to build a brand and a long-term future in blogging, it’s important to be able to seek opportunities that allow you to promote yourself, further your experience, and create case studies that help to prove your abilities for future opportunities.
It’s also something which I hope will grow to become a long-term partnership, rather than something short lived.
With all that said, I’d be lying if I said I was an expert on quoting a price for such services. Blogging is such a new industry, and a new way to earn a living. Even now, people still look puzzled when I explain to them I make a living from blogging.
Prices and expectations change all the time, and you have to weigh up factors such as earning a living now against the long-term gains and opportunities for building a career. Then there is the fact the the value of bloggers is now starting to be realised by big companies in almost every industry. I predict more positions will open up like this in the future…
Create your own job
I hope that if you try to create a Resident Blogger position like I have, you’ll find some success using these tips.
Overall, the key is to go out and create your own opportunities (although what I did involved luck in terms of timing). All this would never have happened had I not approached PLUS myself.
To be a successful blogger you really need to seek out and create as many opportunities for yourself as you can. Offers that land on your doorstep are great, but I wouldn’t plan on that happening!
Jane has been blogging from her travel blog www.RunawayJane.com since early 2010. She has been making a full-time income from blogging since 2011, and travels the world full-time as she goes, living a location independent blogging lifestyle.
Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger
How to Land a Job as a “Resident Blogger”
Переслать - Titles That Work on ProBlogger—And Why
Darren recently highlighted some of the posts that attract clicks at Digital Photography School. Many readers were interested to see the kinds of titles that do well here at ProBlogger, so today I thought I’d show you the posts that garnered a lot of traffic here in April.
The top titles
Here are the top seven, in order of their traffic levels:
- Win 1 of 10 Trips to the Great Barrier Reef in QLD, Australia #QLDBLOG
- 19 Essential WordPress Plugins for Your Blog
- 9 Facebook Marketing Tactics That’ll Triple Your Fans
- 3 Reasons No One Comes Back to Your Blog—And How to Fix It
- And the Winners Are… #QLDBLOG
- Attract 100,000 Pageviews in 1 Month Using SlideShare
- A Systematic Approach to Writing Successful Blog Posts
Why they work
Looking at this list, a few features immediately jump out at me—I wonder if they do for you, too?
- Titles that quantify the post’s benefits work well: Facebook tactics that’ll triple your fans? 100,000 pageviews in one month? 19 Essential plugins? Win one of ten trips? Quantification of benefits is a theme among these titles. I know people say “list posts do well,” but I think the issue—at click—isn’t the list so much as the perceived payoff. And all of these post titles promise a big payoff, up-front. Of course, to be shared, the posts need to deliver on that payoff, and these ones obviously do.
- Natural language speaks volumes: The title 3 Reasons No One Comes Back to Your Blog—And How to Fix It quantifies a benefit, but it also speaks in natural language. It’s a slight exaggeration—you’re probably not getting zero repeat visits to your blog—but it’s one that we’d use in conversation with our blogging friends: “Man, no one comes back to my blog!” The same goes for “tactics that’ll triple your fans.” Bloggers seem reticent to use contractions in titles, but they can work really well—especially in keeping the rhythm of the title swinging along. They also suggest that the post will be written in language that’s approachable and on the level.
- Titles that speak to “you” have cut-through: Three of these titles refer directly to the reader: your blog, your fans. While you’ll want to mix your titles up a bit, bringing the message and the benefits home to your audience by speaking to them directly is a good way to pique readers’ interest. Using “you” and “your” can give titles personal relevance.
- Unique ideas grab attention: We see titles about Facebook marketing and WordPress plugins all the time, and they’re basically essential reading. But some of the other titles in this list communicate unusual ideas, and get attention for that very reason. Get 100,000 pageviewss a month … using SlideShare? That’s going to make a few people stop and sit up. Similarly, systemizing writing is a bit of a foreign concept for many: just how do you systemize what’s seen as an unruly, unpredictable creative task? So topics are important to the success of these posts, too.
How we tweaked them
Finally, I wanted to show you how we’d altered these titles, so you can try similar tweaks on your own post titles.
- Win 1 of 10 Trips to the Great Barrier Reef in QLD, Australia #QLDBLOG: This post was originally called “Queensland Competition” but Darren updated it before publication! Smart move.
- 19 Essential WordPress Plugins for Your Blog: The only change I made here was to the ending. The post’s original title was “19 Essential WordPress Plugins for 2012″ but I thought the content would have more longevity without the time-limitation. I also like to use “your” in titles where I can, because I think it gives some titles more cut-through: “Essential plugins for my blog? Really? Alright, I’ll take a look.”
- 9 Facebook Marketing Tactics That’ll Triple Your Fans: This post was submitted with the title “9 Facebook Marketing Strategies to Triple Your Fans”. I changed “strategies” because, well, they weren’t strategies. I also wanted a stronger sense of causality between the tactics and the results, so I used “that’ll.” Altogether, these changes alliterated well and gave the title a strong natural rhythm, too.
- 3 Reasons No One Comes Back to Your Blog—And How to Fix It: This post was originally titled, “3 reasons no one comes back even after a huge spike in traffic”. The problem was length, and context. Comes back to where? When I see titles in my Twitter feed or RSS feed reader, keywords jump out. I wanted to get “blog” into this one. Also, since Alex had included “The fix?” headings for each of the reasons he’d identified in the post, the “—and how to fix it” part of the title basically wrote itself.
- And the Winners Are… #QLDBLOG: Again, Darren wrote this one and, within the context of the blog, there was no need to change it.
- Attract 100,000 Pageviews in 1 Month Using SlideShare: This one was submitted with the title, “How to get 100,000 views in 1 month using Slideshare” but I wanted to get that big number closer to the start of the title. Also, we have a lot of “how to” posts on ProBlogger, so I try to vary them a bit so the blog doesn’t come across as one big how-to post. Finally, the full word “pageviews” seemed a bit more Google-responsive than “views.”
- A Systematic Approach to Writing Successful Blog Posts: This post was submitted with the title “How to write a successful blog post,” but on reading it I saw that it presented a system for writing, and I’d just scheduled another post on systematized blogging. I thought this post would be a nice follow-up, so I scheduled it for the same day and gave it a title that tied it to the theme of systematized blogging. As I mentioned above, this title was a bit more of a head-turner, since the whole problem with creative tasks like writing is that they seem so slippery and difficult to manage.
How do you go about creating good titles for posts on your blog? Share your secrets with us in the comments.
Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger
Titles That Work on ProBlogger—And Why
Переслать - 10 Cheap Survey Tools for Bloggers Who Want Answers
This guest post is by Neil Patel of Quick Sprout.
Whether you want to write a persuasive post or a headline that grabs attention, or create a call to action that grows your RSS subscription count by 243%, you first have to understand who your reader is.
So how do you go about finding this out?
You could guess, measure, and repeat until you hit upon a winning formula … but that could take months or years.
The easiest and fastest way to find out what will resonate with your readers is to ask them. And the best to do that is with a survey.
How can surveys help you?
You probably have a good working understanding of who your readers are because of your experience in the field. This will help you create surveys, but it won't help you get to those breakthrough insights that will turn your posts into reader magnets.
To do that you need to know information like this:
- Demographics: A survey will tell you who’s reading your blog. It can tell you their sex, age, income, and interests.
- Content: A survey will tell you what kinds of content your readers like. Do they like practical articles or more research-based posts? Do they want those to be long or short? What about frequency?
- Products: A survey will also tell you what kinds of products your readers may be interested in.
- Problems: Finally, a survey can tell you what problems that your readers want solved. This is probably the best piece of information you could have when it comes to creating engaging content, right?
Top survey tools
AJ showed how to create a survey that gets insightful answers from your readers earlier today.
Now, let's look at some in expensive tools that will help you gather this all-important information professionally and securely.
Comments
One of the simplest ways to get feedback from readers is to write a post with survey-like questions, and then ask your readers to respond in the comments.
There are some disadvantages to this approach. For example, because people are free to say anything they want in the comments, it may be hard to get the exact information you want.
Also, with this approach, the survey responses are out in the open, and this may suppress the response since people may be a little timid to share information so publicly.
What I've found about using comments for surveys is that this approach is perfect for simple questions like "What was the worst work experience you ever had?" If you want something more specific, then you need to use one of the tools we’ll look at next.
WP-Polls
Using a WordPress plugin like WP-Polls on your blog will give you the option of asking very specific questions that should generate very specific answers over an extended amount of time.
This plugin is embedded on your site as a widget, and actually adds another element of interaction with your readers. Every month, you can change the questions.
The nice thing about WordPress plugins is that they’re simple to install from inside your WP admin control panel.
Google Docs
Google Docs offers a tool that will help you create surveys that you can link readers to (for example, in an email), or actually embed into your blog.
It creates these forms out of HTML, gives you several survey styles, and even gives you a huge selection of themes to choose from:
This is the form that Chris Brogan uses:
On the back end, you can review the collected data in a charts and graphs:
Survey Monkey
Survey Monkey is the most well-known survey tool online, having been around since 2002.
While there are paid plans that won't bankrupt you, I've found that the free online version suits most of my needs. The only drawback to this type of survey is that it will drive your readers away from your site, as they need to go to Survey Monkey to give their answers.
The service gives you a choice of 15 question styles to choose from.
And you can even customize the survey to match your blog color scheme.
KISSinsights
This tool is one my team developed. KISSinsights is a simple tool that takes two minutes to install, and allows you to ask one question of your readers. You can update that question at any time.
What I really like about this survey tool is that we tried to make it as little a distraction from your site as possible: it pops up, but then the user can close it and move on to your site immediately.
WP Survey and Quiz Tool
This robust WordPress tool, WP Survey and Quiz Tool, will let you do more than just create surveys—as the name suggests, you can also use it to create quizzes and polls.
There is no limit to the number of surveys or quizzes you can create, and the tool gives you these features as well:
- Limit answers to one per IP address.
- Send customized notification emails.
- Send notification emails to one email address or a group of WordPress users.
- Create custom contact forms.
- Export your surveys and quizzes.
The drawback to this tool is that your survey is limited to s single post—it’s not available site-wide.
WordPress Simple Survey
The jQuery-based WordPress survey tool Simple Survey will allow you to create basic weighted surveys that route users to a location based upon their survey “score.”
The page doesn't need to be reloaded as the user progresses through the quiz:
You can have results emailed to you, or you can simply login into your WordPress dashboard to see the results.
SodaHead Polls
SodaHead gives you great options for customizing and publishing polls. In addition, you can:
- add videos and photos
- add questions with more than ten choices
- protect against voting fraud with a Flash-based security code.
The feature that I really like about this tool is what it can do to help your poll go viral through features like one-click sharing to Twitter and Yahoo, and adding your survey to SodaHead's network to get more exposure.
Polldaddy Polls and Ratings
This fully customizable survey tool for WordPress gives you the ability to post your poll on a single post or as a sidebar widget:
The nice thing about Polldaddy Polls is that it supports 57 different languages, making it a better option for those serving audiences outside of the United States.
Unfortunately if you have the latest WordPress update, 3.3.2, then it may not be compatible with your site.
Survey Me
For the people who don't code out there, SurveyMe is probably the WordPress plugin you want to use.
This simple install will allow you to role out a poll within minutes.
Maximizing responses
By the way, if you are concerned about how many responses you'll get to your survey, don't worry. People love to share their opinions—you'll probably get as high as a ten percent turnout!
If you are interested in getting an even higher response, I'd recommend you tell your readers that you’re going to share some of the best responses that you get from the survey. With a promise that they might get some exposure on your site, more people will be motivated to leave a response.
If you want an even higher turnout, or if you have a small audience and want to maximize the number of answers you receive, you may want to offer some kind of incentive (for example, everyone who responds will be entered in a drawing for a $50 Apple iTunes gift card).
What survey tools do you use? Tell us your faves in the comments.
Neil Patel is an online marketing consultant and the co-founder of KISSmetrics. He also blogs at Quick Sprout.
Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger
10 Cheap Survey Tools for Bloggers Who Want Answers
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