ProBlogger Podcast: Blog Tips to Help You Make Money Blogging

Today I’m going to talk about an issue I see a lot of bloggers struggling with. In fact, I see a lot of blogger’s really crippled by this. I am talking about imposter syndrome.

Note: this episode can be listened to in the player above or on iTunes or Stitcher

This is something I have suffered with quite a bit over the years. I’m going to get a little personal today and tell you about those times when I was pretty much paralyzed by it.

I’m going to get a bit honest today, and tell you that these weren’t the best times of my life. If you want to hear about it, then listen on.

I think if you’ve suffered with this imposter syndrome. Hopefully, you’ll get something out of my story that will help you get through it yourself.

Today I am going to present to you 7 different strategies to overcome imposter syndrome. We are going to touch on fear, self-doubt and feeling like others think you are a fraud. We are going to get really raw today.

Do you ever fear that you’re about to be found out and that everyone is about to discover you’re not as smart as they think you are or that you don’t really know what you’re doing in some area of your life?

Do you feel this way about your blogging?

If so – you’re not alone at all, but you may be suffering from Imposter Syndrome.

Here’s the video that was recorded of the talk that I eventually did give at World Domination Summit. While it’s not on the topic of Imposter Syndrome I hope it shows you what fun you can have by pushing through it!

Darren Rowse from Chris Guillebeau on Vimeo.

I want to present to you with seven different strategist for overcoming it. We’re going to touch on fear, we’re going to touch on self-doubt, we’re going to touch on feeling like maybe other people think you’re a fake or a fraud. We’re going to get really raw today, but I hope that’s okay with you because I think it’s really important.

This is important stuff, whether you’re a blogger, a podcaster, or a speaker, a YouTuber, Instagrammer. If you’re putting stuff at different other people, then this is something you probably are going to grapple with one time or another. In fact, I recently read a study that said 70% of people suffer from this at one point or another in their life. If this is you, go listen on. If you know someone else who might enjoy this and find it useful, please feel free to pass it on to them as well.

You can find today’s show notes at problogger.com/podcast/121, where I’m going to include some quite detailed notes of what I’m going through in this particular episode. If you do prefer to read, you can head over there. I’ll also include some further reading and some resources that I found helpful in dealing with this myself and also preparing this particular podcast. Again, it’s problogger.com/podcast/121. Are you ready to get a little personal? Let’s do it.

Do you ever fear that you’re about to be found out and that everyone is about to discover that you’re not as smart as they think or that you don’t really know what you’re talking about on your blog? Do you ever feel that way about your blog? If so, you’re not alone, but you may be suffering from imposter syndrome. I recently asked some of our ProBlogger newsletter subscribers to send me a sentence about their biggest challenge. One of the common themes that came back was around self-doubt and the feeling like a fraud. Many bloggers definitely grapple with these feelings and I’m one of them. 

As I look back over the last, and I’ll say, years of blogging, there’ve been many nights where I’ve laid in bed worried that people’s expectations of me exceeded the reality of who I was. Many times of these thoughts have come. Often, just before I’m about to speak at an event or when I’m about to launch a new product, usually when something big is about to happen. I’ll wake up in a cold sweat and have that moment.

Imposter syndrome is a term that was first used in the 1970s by clinical psychologists, Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes (I think it is), who were studying high-achieving individuals, who had an inability to internalize their accomplishments, and who had this persistent fear of being exposed as a fraud. Despite their being really good evidence that they knew what they’re talking about. People suffering to this often dismiss their success as lack or good timing or had this feeling that they were deceiving people in some way.

Now, I got that definition from Wikipedia. Thank you, Wikipedia. Sometimes this feeling is accompanied with feelings from people who are successful of just being lucky or I don’t really know what I’m talking about, I may have fooled everyone and there’s a counting fear of being found out. 

This is a feeling that people across many different fears suffer from. I did a little bit of research today and I found actors talking about it, I found many public speakers talking about it, I found podcasters admitting to it, I found plenty of big examples on bloggers who also had this struggle with fearing that they’re about to be named as a fraud or a fake, even though there wasn’t really any evidence of that. If you’re feeling this imposter syndrome, you’re definitely not alone. 

One of the things I’ve come to in my own imposter syndrome is that maybe it’s actually not necessarily a bad thing to think it. What is bad is when you let that feeling and thinking hold you back from some success or when that feeling sabotages what you do. Imposter syndrome, there’s an element of fear and fear is something I’ve talked about in many podcasts in the past. In fact, if you want to go back and listen to episode 54, I gave you three questions to ask when you’re feeling fear and maybe they’re applicable for this particular issue as well. Fear is something that is actually useful. It can hold you back and that is a bad thing, but it can actually prepel you forwards. I think with imposter syndrome, you can actually the same thing.

When you feel like a fake or a fraud and you allow those feelings to paralyze you, or stop you, or sabotage you and your blogging in some way, then that’s a bad thing, obviously, and that’s something you need to deal with. On the other hand, when you’re able to take those fears and use them as a motivation to do better, to learn more, to be more thorough in your content, to serve your readers better, then your imposter syndrome can be put to some good news. That’s the first thing I really want to say about it. 

Now, it’s a lot easier to say than it is to make that switch and make the imposter syndrome work for you. What I want to do today in this particular episode is give you seven pieces of advice for bloggers, podcasters, online entrepreneurs, speakers on the topic of imposter syndrome. This really does come out of a little bit of personal place for me. Please forgive me if I do get a little bit personal with this because it’s something I have really grappled with many times in the past. It’s not something that I think I’ve really even talked about much in public before. 

Here’s a few things. I’ve come up with seven but it might actually turn into eight or nine, who knows where this is going to go. The first thing I want to say (and this is a bit of a word of encouragement for you if you are feeling this) is that you need to understand that you’re probably suffering imposter syndrome because you’re a high-achiever or you have the potential to be. Every piece of research that I found about imposter syndrome is always talked about as being a problem that high-achievers have or at the very least, people who have high expectations of themselves.

If you listen in this particular episode and you’re resonating with your idea of imposter syndrome, you can at least be comforted by the fact that your feelings are probably coming out of a place where you’re not willing to set off a poor performance and you’re someone who wants to give your best and achieve something. I think that’s a good thing. 

I want to start off with that. Not because it solves your imposter syndrome, but you’re feeling those things because you got standards. You don’t want to just get by. You want to achieve. Start with that. That’s a positive. That’s something that we need to hang on to. If we weren’t feeling these feelings, we’re probably just be willing to fly above the seat of our pants. That’s the first thing I want to say. 

The second thing I want to say and this is one of the main things I really want to talk about is that if you’re feeling imposter syndrome, you do need to work and I need to work on self-acceptance and setting realistic expectations of yourself. As I look back over the years, there’s been a number of times where I’ve pretty much been paralyzed by imposter syndrome. One of them was in the lead-up to a talk that I was invited to give at the World Domination Summit a few years ago. I was invited by my friend, Chris Guillebeau, to give this talk in front of 4000 people in Portland, Oregon.

Once I immediately let that opportunity, almost within seconds of saying yes to Chris, imposter syndrome began to sink in. I began to have these thoughts that haunted me and that would literally wake me up in the middle of the night with a cold sweat. I wrestled with the thoughts for months and at times I became really stuck in the preparation for this talk. I almost got to the point pulling out.

I remember drafting an email to Chris saying, “I’m really sorry. I know it’s last minute but I can’t do this.” Now, I did end up talking myself down and delivering that talk and I’ll post a video to it because it was one of the best things that I’ve ever done. It is one of the best days that I’ve ever had and I’m so glad that I’ve talked myself down from this imposter syndrome. What I did in talking myself down was realize that a lot of what I was thinking was completely unrealistic and I was having unrealistic expectations on myself and of the talk. 

Once standing in front of 4000 people is a pretty big thing. I pictured it in my mind even bigger than the reality. When I pictured doing that talk before I did it in my mind, I started to picture the perfect talk. I was picturing it as the peak of my speaking career. The thing that everything else in my life would hang on afterwards, a talk that would change the life of everyone in the room and that will make me look so great. Really, a lot of my expectations on that talk and a lot of the things I was dreaming of were perfectionism, but perfectionism way beyond what was possible. This perfectionism began to creep into my thinking. 

I actually think perfectionism can be a bit of a good thing because it can help improve, but the problem with it is that when you obsess about it the way I was obsessing about it, is that you begin to realize that you just cannot possibly achieve what you are starting to think. Sometimes (and this is what happened for me), alongside that perfectionism thinking begins to creep in other equally unattainable realities that you began to think of.

One of those for me was that I began to think that I was about to be exposed as a fraud because I realized I wasn’t able to deliver the perfect talk and I wasn’t able to do this thing that I was imagining, so I went to the other extreme and I began to imagine things like a crowd booing me and a hate campaign unraveling on Twitter because of something that I said, and that then lead to the crashing of my business, my family, and my life. I know it’s crazy, but they’re the kind of things that would go through my mind in bed at night as I began to talk.

I’d be swinging between these two unrealistic realities. Perfectionism on one hand and my world literally crashing around me because I didn’t achieve perfectionism on the other hand. I would swing between these two things and neither was a reality, neither was realistic. In the end, I woke up to myself and I managed to talk myself down into a more realistic picture. I came to my senses by realizing that nothing I can do in that talk would be perfect but that was okay and that it wouldn’t lead to the end of the world. What I needed to be in that talk was honest and true to myself and to focus upon giving my best.

I know a lot of people don’t suffer with this imposter syndrome, probably don’t relate to that at all. They’re probably wondering about my mental health, but this is the process that I went through. Really, what I want to encourage you too as you deal with your imposter syndrome is to try and take yourself to that place where you find a middle ground between two realities that you’re imagining. Ultimately, my advice here is not to be too hard on yourself and to do whatever you can to bring yourself to a place where you are kind to yourself in that. 

The third thing I want to say—this is particularly relevant for bloggers, podcasters, speakers, anyone who has an audience—is that you really need to focus upon your audience. As I was coming out of this experience in the preparation for World Domination Summit, as I talk myself down, one of the things that really helped me a lot was that I had this really confronting realization that all of the worry I was doing was incredibly selfish. None of the things that I was doing in my thinking was focused upon my audience, it was all about me and how I was going to be perceived. 

I don’t really like to admit the fact that that’s going on in my mind and I’m talking a bit of a punt here and admitting that to you and hoping that you’d be kind to me as a result. Ultimately, I’m being really greedy with my thinking. By thinking all that means how I was going to be perceived. The reality was that I have this incredible opportunity to give something of myself to these 4000 people. I realized that I was being selfish, I was being greedy, and I decided that everytime I found myself beginning to worry about how I would be perceived, that I needed to start changing the way I was thinking.

I needed to challenge myself to think about who my audience would be, how they might be feeling, what the realities of their life might be, and how I might have an impact upon their lives with my words. I began to refocus my thoughts. This was a very powerful thing for me. It took me away from my self-centered, greedy, selfish thinking which was really not helping me anyway. It began to focus me upon what the whole point of that talk was, the people who were in the room listening.

I think this is just great advice for speakers or anyone creating something where other people would be listening, reading, watching. Whether you’re a blogger, a YouTuber, an Instagrammer, a podcaster, a speaker, it’s so easy to allow our minds to wonder how our content makes us look. I found myself doing this as I write a blog post, as I prepare podcast and, “How is this going to make me look? Am I going to come across okay?” You really need to challenge those thoughts and ask yourself not, “How is this going to make me look?” but, “How is this going to make my readers feel?” and, “How is it going to change their life in some way?” I think it’s really important to refocus your attention upon your readers, your listeners.

This is why over the last years over my blogging, I’ve really tried so much harder to interact with my readers as much as possible because I find that the more interactions I have with my readers, the better the picture I have in my mind of who they are and the more easy it is for me to focus upon their minds on creating content. This is why I’m doing more live video. This is why I’m doing more question and answer in a lot of the content that I’m producing. This is why I try to attend more events.

I find the more I know you as my listener, the easier it is for me to focus upon creating content that is going to change your life, that makes you look good, and that makes you better in some way. The more I focus upon you, the less I’m thinking about me and that has really helped me a lot with my imposter syndrome. 

One of the other things I would say on this particular topic of focusing upon your audience is one of the best things that you can do to show others that you are not a fake, that you are not a fraud is to deliver value to them. If you’re dealing with imposter syndrome, when you begin to think this way, let that propel you towards doing something of high value for other people. 

This is another thing that I’ve started to train myself to do when I’ve seen myself falling into this pattern of thinking this negative way, this imposter syndrome thinking, I’m trying to use that as a signal to create a blog post that’s going to change someone’s life or create a podcast that’s going to have some content in it that helps people in some way. This is where I’m encouraging you to see imposter syndrome as your friend because it can be a signal for you to go and do something that is going to work against you over being accused of being a fake or a fraud. 

The fourth thing that I want to say is to be transparent. That’s the most powerful thing that I think you can do to smash imposter syndrome is to blog, to podcast, to speak with transparency. Here’s the thing. People can only ever, really, truly call you a fraud or a fake if you’re trying to be something you’re not or if you’re hiding some reality of your situation from them. That’s the only time that you can ever really be a fraud or a fake, is if you’re hiding something. 

I was at Social Media Marketing World a couple of months ago now, and Cliff Ravenscraft from the Podcast Answer Man briefly talked about imposter syndrome. He made this really quite quick observation that you are only really an imposter if you’re lying about who you are or what you’ve achieved. His suggestion was just to be as honest as you can when you’re writing your content by revealing three things, by telling your reader really transparently, “This is who I am, this is what I’ve experienced to this point, and this is what I’m learning, and these are my hopes, dreams, and goals for the future.” I think that is great advice. Let those things shine through in the content you create.

I think this particularly relates to bloggers who might be blogging on a topic that they don’t feel they are qualified to write about yet and I get asked these quite a bit, people saying, “I want to write about this particular topic, maybe it’s accounting but I’m not qualified as an accountant. Can I legitimately write about that particular topic?” When I get asked this type of question, I almost always tell my story of starting ProBlogger.

I started ProBlogger back in 2004 and once I was on the way to being a full time blogger when I started ProBlogger, I still felt like I was at the beginning of my journey and I suffered from imposter syndrome as a result. I’ve only been blogging for less than two years, I hadn’t reached the full time level (although I was on the way), I didn’t feel I have as much experience as other people, I didn’t feel I was technical enough, I didn’t feel I was a great writer. I did feel I’ve been a bit lucky and I’ve been in the right place at the right time. I worry that people would spot my weakness, insufficiencies, and the gaps that I had in my knowledge. The way I decided to combat that was to get in the front fort and to be very transparent about what I did know.

For the first couple of years on ProBlogger, it’s really my story more than anything else. I shared what I was trying, I shared what was working for me, what wasn’t working for me. I pointed out the areas that I didn’t have skills in. I shared my own questions and asked my readers to teach me. I pointed out the failures I had and the mistakes that I made as embarrassing as some of them were. I admit when I didn’t know the answer to a question when people ask me a question.

As I just said, in the early days of ProBlogger, the blog was more of a story of my own journey rather than a guide claiming to be the comprehensive and such all questions on the topic. If you feel like maybe you legitimately don’t have all the answers and legitimately you don’t have all the qualifications, just admit that. That takes any ammunition that anyone could ever have of accusing you of being a fake away from them. 

When you bog in this very transparent way, it’s very hard for someone to call you fake or a fraud because you’ve been transparent about the things that they might want to accuse you of wanting to hide. So blog with transparency. That’s what I did. In time, you will gather the knowledge and you will gather some of the expertise that you might not have by simply blogging in that way. 

The fifth thing that I want to talk about is to own your successes. Those suffering with imposter syndrome or those of us suffering with it have difficulty internalizing and owning our successes. This goes right to the heart of the definition of it. We have really difficulty owning the things we have achieved, the successes that we have. 

We write off success as being the result of external things—lack of the people’s actions, good timing. It is hard to combat that because it’s a lot of just the way we think. Even just being aware of that problem that we have can help. There are some things you can do to combat that thinking. Often, I think it really is about patterns of speaking and speaking. We need to break those patterns.

Begin to become aware of when you are saying things like, “I was lucky. I was in the right place at the right time.” Replace that thinking with other things. For example, when I find myself wanting to say, “I was just lucky.” I am trying to say, “I worked hard to take the opportunities that came.” Which is a more realistic and more true statement. I wasn’t just lucky. Yes, I was in the right place at the right time when I started blogging but I have worked my butt off everyday since that time. I’ve worked hard to take the opportunities that I was given. That is a more realistic, that is a more true statement than I was lucky. You need to own your successes, you need to own the work that you have done to achieve what you have done. 

When people acknowledge your success or give you positive feedback, instead of trying to write it off and push it away, you need to own that as well. So, thank them rather than explaining away any success that you’ve had. Don’t deny your success. Embrace it in some way. Another way that you might want to help with this is to keep a diary of the things that you have achieved. It sounds very egotistical but it’s only egotistical if you show it to other people. It’s a private thing for you. It’s something that you need to be looking at over time. Record the positive feedback, the testimonials that others give you as well. Not to show off but for you to help you internalize your success.

The other thing I’d say about this is to give other people around you permission to pull you up if they hear you not owning your success. This is something that I really would encourage you to do. You may not want to tell everyone to do this but maybe a part or maybe a family member, a friend when they hear you writing off your success, not owning your success, give them permission to pull you up on that.

While we’re talking about success, on the flip side, there are times where we fail as well. My advice around failure—there are times when we fail—is to really try not to get bogged down in that failure because this can feed the imposter syndrome but rather reframe your failures as learning opportunities. Acknowledge the failure, don’t ignore it but use those failures as springboards into success. Again, that’s another way that you need to get yourself thinking and change your mindset. 

Two more things I’ll say about imposter syndrome in terms of advice to overcome it. Number six is to say yes to opportunities that stretch you. This may sound a little counterintuitive but I’m a big believer in saying yes to things that you’re not sure that you can do yet as long as you bring transparency to it.

Here’s the thing, the only way you are going to become an expert or the go-to person in your industry or niche is if you gather knowledge, if you learn, if you put yourself in a position where the rubber hits the road. If you are someone who lives in fear of being called out as a fake but you’re not willing to put yourself in a position where you will learn and you will develop, then unfortunately, you’re never going to move through that. Put yourself out of your comfort zone.

If someone else thinks you can do something that you’re not so sure of, they give you an opportunity, take that as a vote of confidence from them and say yes to do it and then, learn how to do it. Now, you can catch your acceptance of the opportunities that come to you by being transparent and I do encourage you to do that. You might want to say, “Yes, I’m going to do this, but I’m going to have to learn some things along the way or I’m going to need some support in this particular areas where I don’t have any qualifications,” where maybe you don’t think you’re ready. But take the opportunity that takes you out of your comfort zone because you will grow so much by doing that. 

Taking that opportunity to speak at World Domination Summit a few years ago, it gave me so much confidence of moving through that and I’m getting so much insight as a result of that. I became a better person as a result of that as well. So, take those opportunities that come and you’ll be taking a step closer to being that person that you want to be and making the achievements that you want to achieve.

The last thing I’ll say about imposter syndrome is to live with it. I’m no psychologist, but I’m not sure that imposter syndrome really ever goes away. It hasn’t for me. I find myself thinking this way even after decades of dealing with it. Part of me has come to terms with the fact that I need to live with it. We need to put it in its place, we need to deal with it, we need to learn to use it when that’s appropriate to do so, to help us to grow, to help us to achieve, and help us to learn. Above all, we need to learn not to let it paralyze us. If it’s paralyzing you at the moment (and I know some of you listening to this right now are paralyzed by it), I want to encourage you to get some help to talk about it, to get some accountability around it. It might need to get some professional help or maybe it’s just about having a conversation with a friend who can talk you through it. 

Above all, I just really, really want to encourage you not to let this fear, not to let this imposter syndrome rub the world of what you know, of the story that you’ve got to tell, of the potential that you have to make the world a better place as a result of your contributions. When you let imposter syndrome rub the world in that way, then that’s just such a shame. I want to encourage you to tackle it, to learn, to live with it, to put it in its place and to include the others in that journey if you can get the support that you need.

I’m going to give you a whole heap of reading in today’s show notes. This is stuff that I’ve come across in putting together this particular podcast and I really would encourage you to check out those show notes and check out the links there. There are a lot of reading, you’ll see some of the things that I’ve talked about there as well as a whole heap of other advice from other wiser, smarter people than me. Not that I’m not smart because that’s feeding my imposter syndrome fear. 

I hope you find these useful and I would love to learn from you. What has helped you with your imposter syndrome if this is something that you struggle with? What do you do? What ways of thinking have you developed to overcome this? Leave a comment on today’s show notes and let me know exactly what it is that has helped you the most.

I hope you find today’s episode useful to you. It’s not always the easiest topic to talk about—fear, self-doubts—but I hope that’s been helpful and constructive chat to have. 

If this is something you want to talk further about, I do encourage you to find a friend, find someone who might understand that you can debrief with on this particular one, to give you some advice, some accountability, and some support with it. Also, if you feel able, we’d love to learn from you and how you’ve dealt with this particular issue yourself. 

You can head over to today’s show notes at problogger.com/podcast/121 where you can share your own tips, your own story. I would love to learn from you for the next time that this becomes a big issue for me. Thanks for listening today. I look forward to chatting with you again in episode 122.

Lastly, if you do want to share this with someone, please do share those show notes. I would love anyone who’s struggling with this to hear this kind of information. Thanks so much for listening. I will chat with you in the next couple of days. 

You’ve been listening to ProBlogger. If you like to comment on any of today’s topic or subscribe to the series, find us at problogger.com/podcast, tweet us @problogger, find us at facebook.com/problogger, also it’s ProBlogger on iTunes. 

Before I go, I want to give a big shout out and say thank you to Craig Hewitt and the team of Podcast Motor who has been editing all of our podcast for sometime now. Podcast Motor have a great range of services for podcast at all levels. They can help you to set up your podcast, but also offer a couple of excellent services to help you edit your shows and get them up with great show notes. Check them out at podcastmotor.com.

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Today I want to talk about the characteristics and qualities of professional bloggers.

Lately on ProBlogger we’ve noticed a bit of a surge of readers who are what I would call ‘PreBloggers’.

People asking questions about how to start a blog and even wondering if they should.

As a result we’ve recently published a 5 step guide for starting a blog which walks you through some of the technicalities of how to start out.

I want to step back a little from that process and tackle an important question that really should come before you start your blog. Should you start one?

Today I want to suggest to you 22 questions to ask yourself if you are considering starting a blog. These are not yes or no questions. These are 22 indicators to whether or not you might be suited to blogging.

If you have gone through this list and answered no. You are not alone. I struggled with many of these things, but I still did it. This list is to give you some areas to work on and be aware of before you start blogging.

I asked on my Facebook page for bloggers to tell me the top 3 characteristics and qualities that they see in bloggers. I was thinking I might get a handful of responses that I could use in this episode but the response was quite overwhelming.

I’m going to list some of the first responses below but even by the time that I’d gotten these in there are many more already being added. So to see the full list of advice head here.

Peta Lee

Trudie Bristow – Success is many things to many people, but as for qualities and characteristics that allow particular bloggers to connect with their audiences and do it well I’d have to say:

Carly Jacobs

Kate Shelby

Krystal Abbott

Brent Vaartstra

Bling and Butterflies

Annette Hill

Vanessa Smith  

Brooke Ciccozzi – A great blogger should be:

Kathy Marris

Sharon Gourlay

Kelly Exeter

Kym O’Gorman

Bukola Oriole

Blake Powell

Nanda Rahmanius

Cherie Bobbins

Yan Zhao Tan

Patricia Martin

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Today, I want to suggest to you 22 questions which might sound a little overwhelming but it’s not; I’ll race through them. Twenty-two questions that you might like to ask yourself if you are considering starting a blog, to work out whether you’re the right kind of person for blogging. Now, these are not yes or no questions that you will determine whether you have success or not. These are 22 indicators to whether you might be suited to blogging.

I actually think that today’s episode is great for ProBloggers, but it’s also good for you if you are in the first year or so of your blogging as well, because these are things that you can work on. These are things that you can improve on to help you increase the chances of success with your blog as well. 

I’m going to summarize all of the 22 things that I’ve come up with as well as some other suggestions for you from my readers over at today’s show notes at problogger.com/podcast/120. Let’s get in to today’s show.

As I said in my introduction, we’ve had a whole heap of people lately coming to ProBlogger who are in the early stages of their blog and even before starting their blog asking questions about how to start. As a result, we recently published a 5-step guide to starting a blog which walks you through some of the technical aspects of setting up a blog (which I’m not going to get into today).

Today, what I want to do is step back from that process of starting your blog and tackle an important question that really should come before you start your blog. Really, this question is more about should you start a blog? Is the blog a good fit for you, your personality, and who you are? Do you have what it takes to become a blogger? Or is there maybe another type of website that is better suited to you?

I was recently asked a question by a ProBlogger reader at an event that I spoke at. This particular person was about to start a blog. He asked me whether I could list some common characteristics of successful bloggers. There was a question I answered on the spot with five or six different things that I’ve observed about professional bloggers, people who’d had success with their blogs. Particularly building a business around their blogs. 

As I went home, I realized in the car on the way home, there were a whole heap of other things that I could have said. That’s where this particular podcast episode comes from. These are things that I’ve noticed over the last 13 years that come up again and again in the type of people that I see being successful with blogs. What I’ve done today is I’ve turned these qualities or characteristics of successful bloggers. I’ve turned around a little and I’ve got some in terms of questions to ask yourself about yourself and about your own qualities to see whether they are a fit with the things that I’ve come up with. 

Before I share the questions with you, I really want to emphasize though that if you don’t have some of these qualities, it is not the end of your blogging dreams. Even as I look at the list right now, there are aspects of what I’m about to share with you that are not in me. These are qualities that some of which I do not possess. I don’t know of any blogger who probably has all of these things. This is, therefore, a very idealistic list of questions. They’re really there to help you as a potential blogger or as a new blogger to enter into blogging with your eyes open and making a good decision about whether blogs are right for you. It’s probably more at getting expectations right as well.

It’s also worth noting that this is a list of qualities that I see in people who’ve built a successful business around their blog. It’s not really talking about personal bloggers who’ve had success. These are people who had built a business around their blog, who generated income from their blogs. Some of them will also relate to personal bloggers but really, today’s list is more focused on those of you wanting to start a blog as a business. If that’s your goal, then hopefully this is useful for you.

Let’s get into the 22 questions that I got. As I said, I’m going to whip through them fairly quickly. I haven’t really ordered them in any logical order as well. These are just 22 random things that you might want to think about, some of which relate to each other. Let’s get into them.

The first question you might want to ask yourself is, do you have a message? Do you have something that you wanted to say? While there are many applications for blogs, underline most of them is that there’s some sort of a communication of a message that the blogger wants to do. Do you have something just bursting out of you that you really need to say? 

When I started Digital Photography School, my message was all these people have great cameras. I noticed that a lot of people have great cameras, but they weren’t using them to their full potential. I guess my message was you can get out of automatic mode. That was really essential to a lot of what I had to say and very simply, that was my message.

Now, your message will be different and depending upon the topic of your blog, but really at the center of what you’re on about as a blogger, most successful blogs do have some of a central message. It might relate to a passion that you have, or an interest, or a belief that you want to explore. Ultimately, I guess the question is, “Do you have something that you really need or want to communicate?” That’s the first question.

The second question is, are you a good communicator? Now, I don’t believe that only good communicators should have blogs because if the answer to you is, “No, I’m not a good communicator,” a blog may actually be perfect to you to help you improve in those particular areas. Certainly, it can be an advantage to have some communication skills.

When I started a blog, I wasn’t a great writer, but I have done a lot of public speaking. Communication was something that I did have some experience with and it was a bit passion of mine as well. So, are you a good communicator, is question number two.

Number three, and this is important, are you willing to be in the public spotlight? Are you willing to put yourself out there? Blogging is a public act. Every day or regularly, you are going to be putting yourself into the gaze of other people. Other people are going to be analyzing your words and the things that you speak about. They’re going to be analyzing what you look like, what you do, what you say, how you say it. They’ll be analyzing your lifestyle if you reveal some of that.

Some people will want to know more about you. Many people will just make casual observations about you, but you’re putting yourself out there. You may even get recognized in public. It’s only happened to me a few times. Particularly, when I go to conferences, obviously, but sometimes walking down the street, I get people randomly walk up to me. This is something that takes a little while to get used to and some people simply do not want that to happen to them.

A few bloggers make it to celebrity stages. I’m far from that, but all bloggers are putting themselves at their every time they post. This is something you need to consider when you are entering into blogging. When you put something online, it’s going to be there forever. You can delete your blog post but really, there will be remnants of it on the internet. Many of them archived in sites like the Internet Archive. Are you willing to put yourself out there and have your thoughts out there forever? That’s question number three.

That sounds like a scary question but it’s one that you need to consider. I should say, you can blog anonymously, but there are many instances that anonymous blogger has later on been identified. So, you do need to consider that as well.

Number four, again, is a little bit of a negative one in some ways, but I think it’s worth considering. Are you thick-skinned? If you start a blog, the chances are it would be found by others (that’s our hope) and the chances are that other people are going to make observations about you and are going to critique what you say. Sometimes those critiques are really positive and constructive, but we all know that the internet is not always a constructive and positive place. Sometimes, you’ll be critique in a way that perhaps are not fair and sometimes are attacking even.

My experience is that most of the critiques that I’ve had over the years have been fair, they’ve been positive, and they’ve been constructive. I haven’t had to worry about them at all. They’ve actually helped me in many cases when people have given me feedback. But there’ve been a handful of times where things have gotten personal and things have gotten nasty. It’s worth knowing that that is a possibility and to ask yourself, how do you take criticism? How do you take that type of critique?

If you’re someone who takes critique well, then that’s a good thing. If it’s not, then that may be one of those areas that you need to, entering to blogging, being aware of and maybe even doing some work on. I do find that over time, most bloggers do get thicker skin simply by the act of blogging. Maybe that’s a benefit of blogging as well, but it’s definitely a question you might want to ponder before you get into it.

Question number five, are you a self-starter? Just starting a blog is taking initiative. You are taking initiative by starting that blog, but that’s not the only time you’re going to start that. It’s not the only time you’re going to need to create. That’s not the only time you are going to need to take some initiative. 

While blogging software these days makes it really simple to start a blog, they don’t run themselves. You obviously need to continue to feed that software. You need to create content. You need to respond to readers when they come. You need to be proactively promoting your blog. You need to be building community with your image. You need to be proactive about the way you monetize your blog if that’s a goal for you.

Successful bloggers don’t tend to be passive people. They build. They experiment. They don’t wait for success to come to them. They go chasing after success. Occasionally, opportunities land in our laps. I’ve seen that happened a number of times. Occasionally, it’s happened to me. Most of the times where I’ve built any kind of profit for my blog or where I’ve grown my blog audience in any way, I’ve done something proactive. I had to build it myself. 

If you’re a self-starter, that’s a great thing. That’s something that really will help you as you build your blog. If you’re not, it may be something that you need to work on.

Question number six is going to be tied into the last one that I talked about. The question is, are you disciplined? Now, I want to say right upfront, when I started my blog, my first blog in 2002, if I had asked myself this question, I would’ve said no. I haven’t probably the most undisciplined person I ever met. Particularly, when I was 30 or so when I started my blog. 

Blogs require regular attention over time. I didn’t know that when I started, but I very quickly realized that regularity was a big part of it and I do take a lot of work. For me, discipline came later and it came as a result of getting hooked on blogging and becoming passionate about blogging. It came as a result of me seeing the results of my blog on other people as well. 

Discipline can come later, but certainly if you’re a disciplined kind of person, then that’s going to pay off for you as well. You’ll be able to motivate yourself to create new content for your blog, podcast, or whatever it is that you are creating on a regular basis.

If the answer is no, then you’re going to need to build something into place that’s going to help you stay on track and create content on a regular basis. Discipline is important. Sorry to say that for those of you who are like me. You’re going to need to find some way of disciplining yourself and being accountable. You may need to find some external accountability with another person or another group of people or you may need to, I guess, find some internal accountability as well and find out how you motivate yourself in some way.

Question number seven is really important. Do you have time? Do you have time to blog? Linked to the last point that I said, you need to be regularly updating your blog. Obviously, you need time to be able to do that. Do you have enough time in your schedule to write regularly?

This is another one of those questions that I’m glad I didn’t asked in the early days because I was a very busy person. I was working three part-time jobs, I was studying in the evening, I was doing a whole heap of voluntary stuff as well, but I managed to find the time and I’m glad that I did. If you don’t have much time in your hands, you need to think about where you’re going to find that time to blog. 

There’s a whole heap of productivity tips that we could give you and we’ve done regular shows in the past on productivity tips, but I just want to put that question out there. Not only do you need to write content, you need to moderate your comments, you need to respond to emails that readers might send you, you might want to be reading other blogs in your niche and network with other bloggers. There’s your design, there’s SEO, there’s monetization. All of these things take time.

It doesn’t mean to say that you need to be a full-time blogger. Obviously, I didn’t have a lot of time when I started out, but I found it and I became disciplined. So, those two things are linked together. 

The number eight question I was asked is, again, linked to this idea of time and that is, do you have the energy for blogging? You may have the time but you may not actually have the energy. I’ve got an email just a few days ago now from a reader who said that he does have time to blog but he got from his work at the end of the day where he’s being creative, where he’s been focused, where he’s done technical things, and when he’s being bombarded with questions from other people. He works all day in a really intense environment, so when he gets home, even though he has the time, he finds it very difficult to focus. 

His questions are about, how do I get myself energized again to start blogging? This reveals a challenge that some bloggers have who perhaps have low energy levels because they are focusing their energy on other things, whether that be raising kids (which I know take a lot of energy), or whether it be really intense job or some other aspect of life. You might have the time but do you have the energy to be able to think creatively? This is one of the things I’ll talk about in a moment. You need to bring some creativity, you need to bring some focus, you need to bring some thoughts to blogging, so do you have the energy to blog?

Question number nine is not an essential but it certainly will help. Do you have any technical ability? If this was a requirement for being a successful full-time blogger, then I would never have gotten far at all. Many of you heard my story before. It took me three months to work ahead of my text bold on my first blog. I was the most technological Luddite that you’ll ever meet, but it is certainly an advantage to have some technical ability or the willingness to learn and to work on a technical level.

Now obviously, when you are blogging, you will be using a computer, or an iPad, or some other device that gets you online. You will need to be working in the back-end of a blogging platform like WordPress. You’ll be needing to use other tools, maybe some photo editing tools, or maybe some social media tools.

Obviously, all of these things, as user-friendly as many of these tools are today, the more you are able to grasp technical language and tools, the better off you will be. You don’t need to know it at all. You will need, though, to be able to learn some of these things or to find someone to help you and that could cost you some money as well.

Don’t feel you need to know everything, but certainly, one of the things that will be an advantage to you is to have some kind of technical ability, or at least some willingness to learn, or some technical intuition. A lot of people just seem to know how to find their way around the tools, even without really understanding them. There’s some intuitive type stuff going on there.

Question number 10—we’re almost halfway now—is, do you have a blend of humility and ego? This is a weird one. I wasn’t quite sure how to word it but I think a lot of the successful bloggers that I met have these. They’re able to walk the line between humility and ego. Certainly in the blogosphere, I’m sure there’s plenty of big-headedness around and yet, it’s often the more humble blogger who ends up on top.

Many of the, “Look at me! Look at me!” kind of bloggers that I’ve come across over the years have not lasted a distance and I suspected that maybe it’s for a couple of reasons. One, maybe because people didn’t look at them initially, they gave up, and because they needed that “look at me” thing that maybe they gave up, but maybe it’s also because that approach doesn’t tend to go down too well. 

I know here in Australia particularly doesn’t go down too well. Maybe that’s a part of the cultural thing. But having said that you need to have some humility about what you’re doing, I think you also need to have a healthy ego and a good view of own self-worth as a person as well because there are times where you need to be self-promotional when it comes to blogging. This is a bit of a tension that many, many people feel.

I know many of my friends say, “I couldn’t blog because I don’t want to put myself in there. I don’t want to promote myself. I don’t want to make people look at what I’m doing because that’s sends a bit big-headed.” But you do need to be able to put yourself out there. I guess it’s a balancing act. You need to spend some time, building something of substance, but you also need to be able to get out there once that thing is built, have the confidence to promote it, and to show people what you can do.

Getting that balance right is not always easy and there have been times where I’ve probably going one way or the other too much, but it’s something that you need to be able to juggle and work on. Perhaps it’s more than just being aware of where your weakness is. Some people have no problem in self-promoting. Maybe they need to just be aware of that and pull themselves back whereas other people perhaps have trouble self-promoting and they need to force themselves to do that a little bit more. So, are you willing to walk that line? I guess it’s a different way of asking that question.

Question number 11 is, “Are you an organized person?” This really touches on some of that discipline that I was talking about before but I think there’s a little bit more to it than just being disciplined. I’m sure there are plenty of bloggers listening to this right now who have built some success in a fairly chaotic and unorganized way but there does come a point in most serious blogger’s lives where they have to atleast get a little bit organized with what they’re doing.

Most successful bloggers that I’ve come across end up having systems in place for things like moderating comments, incoming emails, monetization systems, editorial calendars, these types of things. There’s a whole spectrum, obviously, of how organized bloggers are and I’m certainly not someone who’s on the more organized end of the spectrum and I’ve managed to still muddle my way through it, but for me, it’s been really helpful over the last two or three years to begin to build some systems and to be able to put team members in place to help with that.

That may not be something you can afford to do right upfront but be aware of your weakness if that’s one of your areas. Whatever you can do, try to build some little systems. One of the things that I found really helpful in the early days was to build some little checklist and to build some little work flows which were based just upon what I was already doing but actually by formalizing those things, it put me in a great position to get a little bit more efficient with the way that I spent my time. So, are you an organized person?

Number 12. We’re over half-way now. Are you a social person? Are you a people person? Again, this is not an essential but there are certainly some advantages if you like people and if you like your readers. Great blogs, obviously, need to attract people to them. If you’re someone who shines through in the content that you create, then you actually do like your readers, that you are willing to engage with them, and that you want to help them in some way, then that’s a great thing.

I do find that a lot of the most successful bloggers, while many are introverts, many of them are shy, most of them have a genuine love for their readers and are interested in changing the lives of those who read their blog in some way. Are you the type of person? Do you like people? Do you like helping people? Do you like taking them on a journey? This is going to shine through in a way that you create your content.

Now, I do know even as something about this of some bloggers who are not people persons at all, but they have different style of blogging and their blogs are perhaps a little bit more technical, a little less relational, but they still can work. I think they work from the style that they have and the personality that they have. They don’t pretend to be warm and gushy just to try and connect with their readers. They’re just who they are.

I guess it’s partly about understanding your personality type but if you are more of a warm, social, people-person type person, that can certainly help you to grow a community around your blog. 

Question number 13 is tied to that last one. The question is, do you enjoy virtual relationships? Some of those most social people, they’re really warm in person when they meet people. They can do really terrible when it comes to online interactions. It may actually be because that they are so good in person that they struggle online when they can’t see the face of the person they’re talking to.

Some of the people who really struggle with virtual relationships are much better face-to-face than via email, or in the comment thread, or in a forum, or on social media. Being comfortable with speaking to and working with people that you’ve never met before can be a real advantage if you’re a blogger.

This is something that I just really enjoyed early on. The first experience I had in mind was in Internet chat rooms. I just found myself very comfortable for some reason in that environment where I didn’t actually have to see the other person and where it wasn’t relied upon my body language, and perhaps where I could have a little more time to think about what I was going to say before I said it.

If that’s you, if you’re really good, if you’re better virtually than you are in person, then that could be an advantage that you have as well. I guess some of us are perhaps, what I might call virtually intuitive. Of course, those of us who are a little bit better in the virtual probably have some other areas that we need to work on when it comes to in-face person-to-person communication. That’s something I’m really aware of and we’ve got our own issues to deal with there, but if you are virtually comfortable with people, then that could be an advantage for you as a blogger.

Question number 14 is a quick one. Are you willing to learn? Are you willing to gather information? Are you willing to expand your knowledge? Particularly of blogging. I looked back on my own 13½ years now of blogging. Those first two years where really a steep learning curve as I got to understand the tools, learn how to make text Bold on my blog, learn how to promote myself and these types of things. So, are you willing to learn? Because it’s going to be a steep learning curve when you just start out.

Also, this also relates to the topic that you’re going to talk about as well. Most industries change over time. I looked back to when I started ProBlogger in 2004. Blogging looks completely different now. I had to learn a lot about blogging, I had to learn a lot about the topics that I’m talking about so that I can be better as a blogger and that I don’t just have to say the same things over and over again. So, are you willing to learn on that front, too?

Question number 15. Are you a creative person? Are you creative? Again, this isn’t a must. It’s just an advantage that you might have. The web is a place where creativity really stands out. If you’re able to do something in a more creative way than other people, then that’s going to be attractive to people. Are they going to share that type of thing? Creativity can really come out and this comes through in the content you design, all of these different aspects of blogging. So, are you creative, imaginative type person? 

Question number 16. Do you have stickability? Or perhaps another way of asking this is, are you a patient person? Now, I am not the most patient person, I have to say. Maybe in some ways that’s a bit of an advantage because it pushes me to keep working harder and harder and harder. The reality is that very rarely do blogs hit it big overnight. They’re usually a bit of a slow burn.

You need to take a long-term approach with your blogging. Most blogs are never really as successful as their owners would like to be and even the ones who get the most successful still take years to build that. So, you are going to need to take a long term approach with your blogging.

Are you willing to go through perhaps years where your blog doesn’t really take off and then hits its steeping point. Patience is a real virtue when it comes to blogging. 

Question number 17. Are you consistent? One of the most common reasons that I see bloggers getting into trouble with their readers is that they change the way that they blog mid-stream time and time again. Your blog should evolve. It needs to pivot over time as you see how your readers are responding to what you do. 

But if from week to week, your blog is completely different, you’re continually changing the design, you’re changing the topic content that you produce, you’re changing the topic of your blog, you’re changing the name of your blog, constantly changing it in big ways, then that’s going to start to annoy your readers. 

Your blog doesn’t need to change. It needs to evolve, it needs to pivot over time, but generally, those changes that we make are far between or there’s more little tweaks rather than big changes all of the time. Again, one of those balancing things. You need to be able to revolve, you need to grow your blog, change your blog, but don’t be someone who is inconsistent with what you’re producing for your readers because your readers will get frustrated with that over time. 

Question number 18. Do you take yourself too seriously? One of the characteristics, I think that bloggers should have is a sense of humor, particularly when it comes to looking at themselves. I’m sure a lot of successful bloggers do take themselves very seriously, but most successful bloggers that I’ve come across had the ability to laugh at themselves. 

The reality is you’re going to make mistakes. You are probably going to make a fool of yourself at some point with your blog. You’re going to do something in public which is embarrassing and how you deal with those failures, those mistakes, those foolish moments is really important. Being able to laugh at yourself, yes, be dissapointed but laugh at yourself. Don’t take yourself too seriously. 

A mistake in your blog isn’t the end of the world. You need to be able to pick up yourself, have a laugh, dust yourself off, maybe be a bit self-depreciating in the way that you can talk about it and then move on. You need to get on with life. Don’t take yourself too seriously. 

This is something I struggle with to be honest because I do take myself seriously. Sometimes, I do need to take a step back from those moments and just laugh at myself and laugh at the situation that I’m in. 

Number 19. Are you honest? Are you transparent? This is a tough one. I’ve seen many bloggers who have been quite successful completely fall over and end up disappearing from the internet because they got found out not being honest and not being transparent.

In real life, perhaps you can go through your life being a little bit two-faced or keeping secrets but the blogosphere has a culture of people keeping their eye on each other and digging where you don’t always want them to dig. I think most people aren’t pretty honest and transparent, but occasionally, I’ve seen people get into real trouble in this particular area. I can think in the Australian blogosphere over the last couple of years where bloggers have gone down in just piles of critique and hatred towards them because they did things that were not honest, they did things that were not transparent. 

You need to disclose conflicts of interest. You need to be honest about who you are, what you know, what’s in it for you and treat people with respect in that way. I don’t really even want to say this one but the reality is that they have been a handful of times over the last 13 or so years where I’ve seen people do the dodgy kind of stuff and really pay the consequences of that. 

So, are you honest? Are you transparent?

Question number 20. We got three more to go here, so don’t worry. It won’t take this long. Are you willing to step outside of your comfort zone? Are you going to step out of that comfort zone? You will have seen in the last 19 points that I’ve made, there are times where you have to put yourself out there, you need to be open for critique, you need to be willing to learn. A lot of those things take stepping outside of your comfort zone. 

Bloggers often need to be the type of person who is going to be willing to do that. Of course, this is not just something that it is true for bloggers in most areas of life. If you’re not willing to step out of your comfort zone, then you’re probably unwilling to step into a new opportunities and good things that might happen to you. So, are you willing to do that?

Question number 21. I almost didn’t put this one in there even though I do strongly believe in it. The question is, Do you have passion? As I say, I almost didn’t include this one because sometimes, passion gets over emphasized. You hear people say, “Just do what you’re passionate about,” and I think there’s some truth in that, but I also think that there’s more to it than just passion.

I think passion can be an important thing in blogging in a couple of ways, but both are not always present. Firstly, passion for your topic. Many blogs start because the blogger is just passionate about their topic. I’m sure many of you that are listening to this thinking about starting a blog, the reason you want to start that blog is because you’re obsessed with that topic. You love talking about it, you love helping people around that particular topic. You’re a topic person who can barely hold in what you’ve got inside of you because you’re so passionate about it.

The advice do what your passionate about is great if you have a passion for something. It will help your blog as well. If that’s you, then that’s fantastic. It’s an advantage that you’ve got. Because when you’re passionate about your topic, it’s going to shine through in the way that you blog and that’s going to be contagious for your readers. 

We all know people who just sounds so excited about their topic and you can’t help but get excited when they talk about it. So, that’s great. If that’s you, then that’s fantastic. But here’s the thing about passion. As I’ve talked to many entrepreneurs over the years, not everyone has a passion. Not everyone has one or many people have a passion that’s not realistic for them to follow. 

When I was growing up, I wanted to be superman. I was passionate about that. That’s not really that realistic. Many people have those sorts of passions. It’s not really realistic for them to be in rodeos or for them to play in the Super Bowl, all those types of things. And not everyone has one that’s realistic. Some people just don’t have a passion. Not everyone has a thing inside them that they’re just passionate about in the sense that I can think of nothing else about it or that it is their calling. 

Here’s what I would say about passion that I think is applicable for people that don’t have a passion or who don’t have a realistic passion. You may not have a single passion, but you can approach what you do in passion and this needs to be brought on when you’re blogging.

When you are blogging, you can serve your reader with a passion. You can be passionate about your readers. You can dedicate yourself to being useful with a passion. You can dedicate yourself to learning about your field with a passion. You may not always be able to do what you’re passionate about, but you can be passionate about what you do. So, I would encourage you to blog with passion. Do you have passion? I guess is the 21st question that I want to ask you.

The last one I want to just briefly touch on (and you probably pick this one up already) is, are you willing to work hard? The level that you will need to work on a blog will be really dependent upon the goals that you have for your blog, but if your goals are to build a business, to build an income stream, to have a large audience, you are going to need to work hard. You’re going to need to be disciplined, you are going to need to be organized, you are going to need to have some passion, you are going to need to find the time. All these things that I’ve just talked about, this is work. 

Blogging for an income is not a passive thing. There are other things that you could do that would be a little more passive. I’m not really sure how many are completely passive though, to be honest. If you want to build a business around your blog, you are going to need to work and not just for a short period of time, but in an ongoing way. This is true in the case of most things in life. It’s not just about blogging, but particularly with blogging, it’s something that you’re going to need to work on. 

I’ve just gone through 22 questions and that was a lot of questions. I’m going to summarize them all over on the show notes. What I want to say before I finish is that if you have gotten through this list and you have answered “no” to any of these questions, then you are not alone. Even as I’m going through this list, you will have heard me say this is not a strength of mine.

When I started blogging, particularly, I reckon almost half of the things I’ve talked about I would have said no to. I wasn’t disciplined, I didn’t have the time, I wasn’t fixed in, I had no technological ability. Ego, I struggle with that kind of humility and ego balance, I wasn’t organized. All of these things that I’ve talked about was struggles for me and some of them still are today. But I still did it.

I guess I shared a list today not to help you determine whether you should or you shouldn’t blog or maybe I have for you, but more so to give you some areas to work on and to be aware of as you go to blogging. As I look at that list, some of those things have changed for me. For example, being not very technical or having no ability when it comes to the technicalities. That’s something that I’ve grown in, I’ve learned about. I’ve surrounded myself with people who do know, who have taught me, and also some that I’ve outsourced. There are some ways that you can tackle some of these weaknesses that you might have and some of the things that you lack by either putting other people around you or by learning.

Some of these things come with time as well. For example, passion. You may not have passion for the topic that you start your blog on but because your blog changes people’s lives, because you write about it and learn about it, you may actually find that passion comes for a particular topic as well.

If you said no to some of these things, don’t despair. Some of those no’s may become yesses as it answers over time. And some of those may never change. Some of those things may never come. You may never be a technical person, but there are ways to overcome some of those things as well. 

The reality is there are many people out there who’ve started highly successful blogs, who would’ve said no to a lot of those things, that perhaps are not suited to blogging but still did it anyway. So, I don’t want you to get despondent about this list.

The last thing I’ll say is I asked my Facebook followers over at facebook.com/problogger the same question. I asked my followers there to name three things that they saw in successful bloggers, characteristics and qualities. When I asked the question, I said, “Use some of your sponsors in this podcast and post some of them on the show notes.” I had no idea how many responses I was going to get when I asked that question. 

What I’m going to do today is take some of those answers, some of which are very similar to what I’ve just gone through and some of which are quite different. I’m going to post some of those into the show notes today to give you some other perspectives on it as well. There’s been some great responses and I’m also going to link to that the place that I ask that question over on Facebook as well so you can see all of the rest. Even as I have been recording this podcast, I’m seeing more responses coming as notifications.

There is some really good stuff there and if you’ve got anything you would add to it, you can either leave that on that Facebook discussion. Don’t forget to like the Facebook page as well, or you can leave a comment on today’s show notes at problogger.com/podcast/120. I’m very aware that there are a whole heap of other things that could be added to this list of 22 characteristics or qualities of successful bloggers and I would love to hear what you’ve got to say on that topic as well.

Thanks so much for listening, I appreciate that and thanks for the continued emails that so many of you sent me. I’m amazed by the way that this podcast is helping people. I love hearing the stories, the way you listened to it. There’s so many of you listened to it in cars, with your children.

I have someone emailed me this week, thanking me for not having any swearing or cursing in my podcast because you listen to it with your kids. That’s fantastic. I’ve never even really consider that. I’m just not someone who tends to do that, but I love the fact that the knowledge that we’re exploring in this podcast is going beyond the people I’ve got in my mind but there’s this whole other generation of people listening and consuming this information as well.

If you’re a kid listening to this right now, special hi to you from Melbourne, Australia. I’ve got three boys myself. They’re four, seven, and nine. They’re all about to turn, had their birthday in the next three weeks. In fact, by the time this podcast comes out, we’ll be in the middle of birthday season at our house so we got Lego going crazy in our house right now. They all say hi from Melbourne, Australia and I love the fact that your little ones are listening to this as well. 

Let me know, send me an email, [email protected]. Tell me where you listened to it, who’s listening alongside you and any stories that you’ve got of how this podcast is impacting you. That certainly energize me everyday. I love the fact that there’s so many people listening and I really appreciate that. 

Again, today’s show notes at problogger.com/podcast/120. Blog on. 

You’ve been listening to ProBlogger. If you like to comment on any of today’s topic, or subscribe to the series, find this at problogger.com/podcast. Tweet us @problogger. Find us at facebook.com/problogger. Also, it’s ProBlogger on iTunes. 

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Today I have a treat for you. Today we have a special guest, one of our new subject matter experts, Kelly Exeter from Swish Design. Kelly is one of those people who produces a heap of great content and also runs a business on the side. Kelly is one of the go to people in Australia when it comes to blog design.

I received a question from Nils from Soul Thoughts who asks a question that many bloggers who are starting a blog. What is the best WordPress theme to choose for my blog (and how to make that decision). I’m not a designer, so I’m going to let our design expert Kelly share her tips on choosing the right WordPress Theme.

You can either listen to the episode via the podcast player above or check it out on iTunes or Stitcher. Alternatively if you prefer to read – Kelly has written up the full show below for you to keep coming back to including all the links and resources mentiond in the episode.

Hello! I’m here today to try and answer this very big question: What are the best themes to use if you have a WordPress blog?

And the very short answer to this is – there is no best theme. There are many themes out there that will work well for your needs. The hard part is narrowing down the list.

If you type ‘WordPress themes’ into Google you will usually end up some place like ThemeForest where, at current count, there are over 6000 themes to choose from. Even somewhere with a slightly smaller selection like Elegant Themes has 87 on offer and Studiopress, the home of Genesis themes has over 50.

So – how on earth do you choose the best theme for your needs from this wealth of choice?

Well, my number one suggestion is to stop looking in those theme libraries and start instead with the blogs out there whose designs you love.

Most WordPress themes these days are built on off-the-shelf templates which means that blog you love, you can access the same theme they’ve used.

A quick word about this however – that blog you love – is it their header you particularly love? Or their typography? Or their imagery?

If so, those are design elements that can be incorporated into any theme out there.

When you’re deciding on a theme, you really need to choose one based on it having a layout you like – so you like how their logo and menu are placed, how their blog archives are laid out, how their blogs posts are laid out, and most importantly, what elements they have on their home page and where those elements are positioned.

For example, if you choose the Metro Pro theme from Genesis – make sure you are choosing it because you like how it’s laid out … not because the demo has.

So – let’s say you love the new Being Boss blog design at beingboss.club and you’re thinking that could work well for you. The first thing you want to do is find out what theme they’re using. You do this by viewing the source code of the website.

To do this, type into your browser window: view-source:http://beingboss.club/

(NB: You can do this for any site by typing in view-source:FULLWEBSITEURL)

Once you’re viewing the source code do a search for this: wp-content/themes.

This will come up in a few places in the source code and the word that directly follows the word ‘themes’ in the source is the name of the theme.

So for Being Boss, I can see their theme is called Art Mag.

If you then Google ‘Art Mag WordPress theme’ you’ll see it’s a theme you can buy from Themeforest for $49.

A word of caution.

When you’re checking out your favourite website, loving how it looks and you’re thinking I’m saying just buy the same theme and your site can look like that too, there is a giant caveat here. If you’re loving how a site looks, it’s probably because they have killer imagery. If you don’t have the same killer imagery, then use the same theme as them all you like, your site won’t look like theirs.

This, incidentally, is both a good and bad thing.

The bad comes from the disappointment you feel because your site doesn’t look as as the one you like the look of.

The good comes from the fact that you can use exactly the same theme as someone else but your two sites will look quite different because you’re using different imagery, logo, fonts and colours. Just make sure your site uses great imagery and fontography and you’ll be fine.

Another thing that’s important to remember is that when you install a theme, any theme, on your website, it needs to be set up to look like either the demo version or the website you loved. In other words, it won’t look like that straight out of the box. If you’re able to follow instructions, then, using the theme documentation, you should be able to get the layout looking the way it was sold to you in the demo.

If you’re struggling, get in touch with the guys at ThemeValet.com. For $99 or thereabouts, they will set the theme up to look like the demo for you.

Another caveat – if your site has no pages and no posts (ie no content), it will be very difficult to get it looking like anything. So I always recommend creating at least an About and a Contact page and loading in 2-3 blog posts before loading in a theme and trying to make things look pretty.

Now – what if there aren’t any sites out there that have caught your eye? Well, some fairly common themes doing the rounds currently are:

Note: with the Genesis themes you first have to install the based Genesis framework (which comes as a theme), then you install and activate whichever of the look and feel themes you’ve chosen.

Another really important thing you need to keep in mind when choosing themes these days is that they are responsive on mobile. Happily, most themes in most marketplaces these days are. All the themes I mention today certainly are.

These are themes that allow you to set up your site pages pretty much any way you like via inbuilt Page Builders that allow you to drag and drop elements.

This sounds like a dream but in reality, I have found these Page Builders to be really slow and painful to use. You make a small tweak to say the padding around an image, or the size of a heading, for example, and then you have to save the draft of the page, and then preview it … it’s really slow going and frustrating.

Also – as much as these types of site sell themselves on being easy for non-tech savvy people to use, they’re just not.

Now, if you are quite tech savvy, these themes are amazing because they offer a huge amount of flexibility and design freedom. If you are not tech savvy, just do no go there – they will make you cry.

Of all the ‘Page Builder included’ themes out there (and I have seen many) – the one that has impressed me the most is the X theme. At Swish Design (my business) we have the ability to design and build custom themes and this is what I intended to do with my own website re-design at kellyexeter.com.au recently. I did the page design, and then because I needed the new design faster than my guys would be able to code it, I actually rebuilt the site using the X theme (+ Beaver Builder instead of the X Theme’s inbuilt Cornerstone builder) as a temporary measure. And guess what, it did the job so well I haven’t bothered to get my guys to code a custom theme for me after all.

No other theme like that – not Divi, not Bridge, not any of the several ones I’ve tried – have been as easy to use as X + Beaver Builder.   

So there you go.

As I mentioned at the start, pointing you in the right direction as to a ‘best theme’ for your needs is a very ‘how long is a piece of string’ question because there are so many variables to consider.

My major tip in this regard is that, if ever you’re in doubt, choose the simpler solution.

And remember, people are coming to your blog to read, and they’re mostly doing so on mobile. So as long as your theme is responsive, loads fast, and makes it easy to read your posts on mobile devices, you’ll already be ahead of the pack.

——-

Kelly Exeter has been a web and graphic designer for 15 years and has worked with WordPress for over 8 years. You can find her at Swish Design by day, and tinkering with her personal blog design at night.

I hope this has been helpful today. If you have more questions, I would be more than happy to tackle them myself or enlist one of our subject matter experts.

Disclaimer: ProBlogger is an affiliate for some themes and services mentioned in this article. We make a commission if you purchase these products which is how we keep the vast majority of what we do on ProBlogger free (and how Darren keeps his expensive coffee habit going). Affiliate products are carefully chosen and are always genuine recommendations of products that we either pay for and use ourselves or that come with strong recommendations from our trusted expert friends.

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Today, I want to introduce you to Kelly Exeter. Kelly is one of those people who just manages to produce a whole heap of great content, but also runs a business on the side. She’s one of the go to people here in Australia when it comes to blog design. Many of Australia’s biggest bloggers have been designed by her. She actually design Vanessa, my wife’s blog and has really helped hundreds if not thousands of Australian bloggers to get their blogs up and running. She’s a speaker at our ProBlogger event and today, she’s going to talk to you about choosing a great WordPress theme for your blog.

We actually had a question come in (which I will play for you in a moment) from Nils from soulthoughts.com who asks about how to choose the best WordPress theme. When I got the question, I was like, we really need to do a podcast on this, but I’m not the right person to do this podcast because I am not a designer. While I’ve chosen WordPress themes, there are other people like Kelly who can give you much better expertise on how to make that decision. 

She’s recorded ten minutes of just great advice when it comes to choosing a WordPress theme. If you are starting a blog at the moment and need to get a design in place, a premium WordPress theme or even a free one might be the best way to go to get things up and running, and Kelly really walks you through how to make a decision on what’s the best theme for you.

This is also really suitable for anyone who’s wanting to do a re-design of their blog. I know a lot of bloggers, about a year after they start blogging, they look at their theme and they think, “Oh, it’s not quite working for me anymore. I’m going to redesign my blog,” and basing that on a WordPress theme might be the way to go. Kelly has also put together a blog post version of this exact podcast. We are going to publish that post, it’s pretty much a transcript of this podcast over at problogger.com/podcast/119. 

If you do want to come back to her advice and there’s a lot in it, there’s lots of links that she mentions, lots of different resources that she mentions, I would encourage you to head over to the show notes where you can pretty much get all of these information in the written form. But for those who like to listen, I’m going to play it for you now Nil’s question (thank you Nils for asking it) and then I’ll get straight into playing Kelly’s answer to that and at the end, I’ll wrap it all up. Thanks for listening.

Nils: Hi, Darren. My name is Nils and I’m a freelance writer. I blog at soulsthoughts.com. I’m just wondering what your thoughts are about the best themes to use for WordPress blogs? I currently use the themes called Hemingway. I just downloaded one called […] how to use it. I just want to get your thoughts on what are the best themes to use. Thanks very much.

Kelly: Hey, guys. This is Kelly Exeter from Swish Design and I am here today to try and answer a very big question and that is, “What are the best themes to use if you have a WordPress blog?” The very short answer to this is there is no best theme, but there are many themes out there that will work well for your particular needs. 

The hard part is really narrowing down the list. If you type, “WordPress themes” into Google, you’ll usually end up some place like ThemeForest where (at current count) there are over 6000 themes to choose from. Even somewhere with a smaller selection like Elegant Themes or Studiopress, those places have over 80 and 50 themes on offer, respectively.

How do you narrow down from this wealth of choice? My number one suggestion is to stop looking at those theme libraries and start instead with the blogs out there whose designs you love. 

Most WordPress websites these days are built on off-the-shelf themes or off-the-shelf templates, so that means that you’ve got access to the exact same theme that the blog you love used. You just need to figure out which theme that is. 

Before I get to that, I do have to say one quick word about that blog that you love. You just need to check in and ask, is it their header that you particularly love? Or is their typography? Or is it their imagery? Because if so, these are design things that can be incorporated into any theme out there.

When you are deciding on a theme, you really need to choose one based on having a layout that you like. 

You like, for instance, in their header, how their logo and menu are placed side to side, or how their blog archives are laid out with the giant thumbnail image and their heading beneath, or how their blog posts are laid out with the featured image at the top. 

Most importantly when choosing a theme, you are choosing it based on how that theme’s home page is laid out, where all the elements are positioned because most themes on the inside, especially for blog posts, you are going to have that content on the left, the sidebar on the right, the header at the top, and the footer at the bottom. But it’s really the home page’s layout is what you are looking at when you are choosing a theme.

How do we figure out which theme our favorite website is using? Let’s say you love the new Being Boss blog design at beingboss.club  and you are thinking that one could work well for you. The first thing you do is view the source code of that website and if you are not sure how to do this, just Google, “find out website source code” and you’ll find instructions for your particular setup there. 

Once you are viewing the source code, do a search for this: wp-content/themes. Just search for that phrase, it will come up in a couple of places in the source code and the word that directly follows the wod ‘themes’ in the source code is going to be the name of the theme that that particular website is using. 

This is a quick word. If you are setting like the ProBlogger website or the Fat Mum Slim website, chances are when you see the theme that they are using, it will say, “ProBlogger” or “Fat Mum Slim.” That means they’ve had custom designs or custom themes developed for them and you won’t be able to buy those in any theme library out there.

For the Being Boss […] however, I could see their theme is called Art Mag and when I Google ‘Art Mag WordPress theme’ I can see it’s a theme that you can buy from Themeforest for $49.

Another word of caution. When you are checking out your favorite website, you are loving how it looks, and you are thinking, “I can just buy the same theme and my site can look like that too,” there’s a giant caveat here and that is, it’s probably looks the way it does because they’ve got killer imagery and if you don’t have the same killer imagery to use on your site, then it doesn’t matter how much you use the same theme as them. Your site won’t look like theirs.

This incidentally is both a good and a bad thing. The bad comes from the disappointment you feel because your site doesn’t look as good as theirs. The good comes from the fact that you can use exactly the same theme as someone else, but your two sites will look kind of different because you are using different imagery, logo, fonts, and colours. 

If ever you are thinking, “Oh, that person might hate me because I am using the same theme as them,” don’t stress because there are so many people using similar themes out there. You would be surprised.

Another thing that is important to remember is when you install a theme on your website, any theme, it needs to be set up to look like the demo version or the website that you love. It won’t look exactly the way you want it to straight out of the box. If you are able to follow instructions, then using the theme documentation, you should be able to get the layout looking the way it was sold to you in the demo.

If you are struggling to make that happen, get in touch with the guys at ThemeValet.com for $99 or thereabouts. They will set up the theme to look exactly like the demo for you.

Another quick thing to understand or consider is that if your site has no pages and has no post, so no content, it’s going to be very difficult to get it looking like anything at all so always recommend creating at least an About and Content page and loading in two to three blog posts before they are loading a theme and trying to make everything look pretty.

What if there aren’t any sites out there that have caught your eye? Are there any common themes out there that a lot of people are using? 

Yes, there are. Simple Mag is one that can be found on ThemeForest.com. This is a particularly great one if you are looking for a magazine style layout. They offer heaps of different layouts for Home pages depending on how many things you want on there, how great your imagery is, how busy you want things to be. The Simple Mag Home page is going to be quite busy if you want them. 

If you are looking for more bloggy type layout, then the Foodie theme, Metro theme, and Lifestyle Pro theme are all great looking, easy to use Genesis themes and they can be found at StudioPress.com.

Just a quick note. With the Genesis themes, you first have to install the base Genesis framework which comes as a theme quite confusingly and then you install and activate whichever of those look and feel themes you’ve chosen on top of it.

Another really important theme you need to keep in mind when choosing themes these days is that they need to be responsive on mobile. Happily, most themes in most marketplaces these days are responsive. It’s just something to check before you spend your hard earned on anything that you find.

A quick word about themes like Divi, Bridge, and the X theme. Divi and the X theme are quite popular themes right now because they are Page Builder type  themes which means that you can set your pages up pretty much anyway you like and you can set different pages on that to look quite different to each other because they have this inbuilt Page Builders that allow you to drag and drop elements. 

This sounds like a dream, but in reality, I have found these Page Builders to be very slow and painful to use. You make a small tweak to say the padding around an image, or the size of a heading, then you have to save a draft of the page, and then preview it, it’s really slow going and frustrating.

The exception to these rules I have found has is the X theme with Cornerstone or the X theme using the Beaver Builder page builder. That combination allows you to make little changes and preview the changes like in real time without having to save, preview, or do any really time-consuming stuff.

That’s more for the tech savvy people out there. These themes do try to sell themselves as being for the non-tech savvy people and I can assure you, I’ve been building websites for 15 years, I consider myself fairly tech savvy and I have troubles with some themes sometimes. If you are not tech-savvy, stay away. If you are very, very tech-savvy, then they do offer amazing flexibility and design freedom.

Just a quick word about the X theme + Beaver Builder. At Swish Design, we have the ability to design and build custom themes and this is what I intended to do quite recently with my own website redesign at kellyexeter.com.au. I did what I always do. I did the flat sheet page design. I designed exactly the way I wanted it to look and then because I needed the new site up faster than my guys would be able to code it, I rebuilt it using the X theme as a temporary measure. 

Guess what? it did the job so well. I haven’t bothered to get my guys to code a custom theme for me after all of that.  Just for those who are a little bit more tech-savvy, are looking for something that gives you quite a lot of freedom and the ability to build out pages anyway that you like, and people who are looking to build landing pages as well, the combination of X theme + Beaver Builder for me, I haven’t found anything quite like it out there at the moment.

There you go guys. As I mentioned at the start, this is not an easy question to answer as there are so many variables that go into choosing a WordPress theme. My major tip is that if you are in doubt, choose the simplest solution and remember that people are coming to your blog to read and they are mostly doing it so on mobile devices. So as long as your theme is responsive, loads fast, and makes it easy to read your posts on mobile devices, you’ll be laughing. 

Darren: I always love it when Kelly speaks. I hope you enjoyed hearing from here today. We will be hearing more from her in the future, particularly I run a blog where she will be contributing articles as one of our subject matter experts. In the meantime, you can find out more about Kelly.

I’ve read her blog at kellyexeter.com.au where you’ll also find her fantastic podcasts and her book, A Life Less Frantic. You’ll also find more from her on a design front over at swishdesign.com.au. I highly recommend you to check out her and the resources and services that they offer over at Swish Design.

I hope it’s been helpful for you today. If you’ve got more questions that you like us to address in a future episode of the podcast, I’m more than happy to tackle them myself for being in one of our subject matter experts. 

You can find today’s show at problogger.com/podcast/119 where you’ll also find at the bottom of that shownote, a green bottom which allows you to record your question like Nils did today, and you might just find yourself appearing on the show. Just let us know what your name is and your URL and we’ll be happy to link back to you as well from the show notes.

Thanks so much for listening today and we’ll be back with you in a couple of days time with Episode 120. Thanks for listening. 

You’ve been listening to a ProBlogger. If you’d like to comment on any of today’s topics or subscribe to the series, find us at problogger.com/podcast, tweet us @ProBlogger, find us at facebook.com/ProBlogger, or search ProBlogger on iTunes.

Before I go, I want to give a big shout out and say thank you to Craig Hewitt and the team at PodcastMotor, who has been editing all of our podcast for sometime now. PodcastMotor have a range of services for podcasters at all levels. They can help you to set up 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.

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Note: this episode can be listened to in the player above or on iTunes or Stitcher

Today I am talking about the topic of juggling priorities and finding time to do the work we need to get done.

In our last newsletter, I asked two simple questions. What is your dream, and what is your biggest challenge?

The recurring theme of the replies is that for many bloggers a lack of time is an issue. It’s about juggling priorities. There was also tension around the topic of monetizing blogs.

One of the emails I received was from Bradley. He writes:

“I’ve been building an audience on my blog for the past two years, and to this point have made money with sponsorship and a little affiliate marketing.

My dream is to shift my monetization strategy to selling information products like ebooks and courses. I’ve started writing my first ebook. My challenge is that my schedule is full. Between a full time job, kids, writing blog posts, promoting my blog, and looking after my readers, I just don’t have enough time.

To get this ebook finished something has to give. I’ve been working on this ebook for the last couple of weeks, when I can, but at this rate, it’s going to take me another six months to complete. I can’t give up my job or my kids, so the only thing I can really give up is the blog itself. Should I put writing new content on hold while I write the ebook?”

This is a great question that really taps into what a lot of our readers are struggling with. So today, I am going to talk about seven things that might help Bradley get that product created without giving up on his blog.

Further Reading: Check out Episode 67 where I talk about why creating products is something bloggers should consider doing.

Product creation is something that can really pay off over time. A recurring income stream is a great thing to have. I would encourage you to find a way to get it done.

If you have a question you would like me to answer, feel free to leave a voice message with the start recording button on the bottom of this post or send me an email or leave a comment.

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I want to share today an email from one of our readers, Bradley, who gave me permission to share his thoughts. I think it perfectly illustrates this tension. Bradley is someone who wants to change the way he monetizes his blog by creating products but he has no time to create those products and his attention there. Here’s the question or the comment that Bradley left in response to that email that I sent out.

Bradley writes, “I’ve been building an audience on my blog for the past two years, and to this point have made money with sponsorship and a little affiliate marketing. My dream is to shift my monetization strategy to selling information products like ebooks and courses, and I’ve started writing my first ebook. My challenge is my schedule is full. Between a full-time job, kids, writing blog posts, promoting my blog, looking after my readers, I just don’t have enough time. To get this ebook finished, something has to give.

I’ve been working on the ebook for the last couple of weeks where I can, but at this rate, it’s going to take me another six months to complete. I can’t give up my job or my kids, so the only thing that I can really give up while I’m working on this product is the blog itself. Should I put writing new content on hold while I write the ebook?”

Great question from Bradley. It does really tap into one of the issues that I see a lot of our readers struggling with. Today, in this episode 118, I want to tackle this question and I want to suggest seven things that might help Bradley to get that product created, get that ebook written and launched, whilst not giving up on the blog. You can find today’s show notes where I’ll summarize a lot of the thoughts set on and going to go through in this particular episode at problogger.com/podcast/118.

Thanks again to Bradley for putting this question together for us. Because I do think it is something that many of our readers are going to benefit from hearing some thoughts on. Now, I see this dilemma all the time with readers, and it’s one that I felt myself. The first time I felt this exact dilemma was when I wrote the ProBlogger book many years ago now. I really struggle with this. I had numerous blogs going at the time, more than just the two I have today. I had a business, we’d started a blog network, I had no team, I was juggling it all by myself, and I didn’t really know how to get that book completed. It kept me awake at night. It was a bit of a stressful situation because I’d committed to writing the book with the publisher and there was a contract in all of these things involved. 

Then, it suddenly dawned on me that my life was full. My life is completely full. I was newly married. I think we just had our first baby. There was no more time in my life to write, so there were few things that I needed to do. I’ve come up with several things that I would say to Bradley and I really dug back in to that time in my life where I had to wrestle with this challenge myself. 

The first thing I’ll say is don’t put your blog on hold completely. This is one of the things that Bradley suggests in his question. “Should I put writing new content on hold while I write my new book?” I understand why you say that, but I would really encourage you not to do that. I’ve seen numerous bloggers over the years stopped blogging completely to create a product and then when they come to launch that product, they come back to their blog to promote their product, the audience is either cold or it’s just not there anymore, or it’s shrunk incredibly. 

Your product’s success is obviously going to depend upon you creating the product. You do need to create it. You do need to find time to create it. But your product’s success is also partly are reliant on you having someone to sell it to, which requires you to build up your audience to continue to grow your audience and the size of your audience, but also the warmth that your audience has towards you. Now, in the last six episodes, we’ve really talked through how to warm up your readers, how to build that audience and warm them up towards you. I have to say there’s nothing passive in those last six episodes. This is not a process that just happens with the occasional piece of content juggling out on your blog. This takes work. Whilst that can feel a little overwhelming at times, I think it’s really important to acknowledge the fact that it does take work to build that warmth with your readers.

Tip number one is don’t put your blog on hold completely during the process of creating a product. You need to find a way to create that product, but also keep your audience engaged and ideally growing and warming up towards you. That’s the first thing I’ll say. That doesn’t give you the answer to the question, but I think it’s really important to not put that blog on hold. There are bloggers that I’ve watched over the years, they have stopped blogging time and time again to create products and then they have to do all this hard work again to build their audience up and then they continue to do the same thing again. I do see people doing it, but I wouldn’t advise it myself. 

Tip number two, one way that you can possibly create some extra time to put into your product creation is to scale back on some of your blogging activities. This is kind of a bit of a compromise. You’ll notice in the first tip I gave was don’t put your blog on hold completely. I do think that there are times and there are seasons in most blogs where it’s natural to pull back a little. Now, I’m not sure exactly how many posts a week that you’re doing on your blog, Bradley, but most blogs have seasons when they post more or they post less depending upon what the blogger has on their plate. I know for a fact when I was struggling with writing the ProBlogger book, I pulled back on their production of content on the blog. I think at the time from memory, I was publishing at least daily.

At the time that I assigned that book contract, I am pretty sure on ProBlogger, I was publishing more than once daily. Sometimes it was two or three times a day. So it was quite a bit of content. During those months that I was creating that book and writing that book, I pulled back to two or three posts a week. I remember explaining this to my readers. I told them there’s a book coming and so I’m going to be pulling back a little, but don’t worry, I’m still going to publish Monday, Wednesday, Friday or whatever day is it was. My readership really understood why I was doing what I was doing. A couple of people pushed back a little and said, “Continue. I want your content. I want your content,” but most of my readers understood that, particularly the regular, most loyal readers. 

The other thing that doing that did was build some anticipation towards the product. To actually saying there’s a book coming, you’re going to be able to get all of my best stuff in paperback. Some of my readers really responded to and that built some anticipation towards the launch of that product. There may be some different ways that you can scale back. One of which might be to decrease the frequency of your posting. One of them might be to do the same thing on your social media. If you’re publishing on Facebook four times a day, you might want to pull that back to a couple of times a day. And you got to publish on weekdays instead of everyday. Again, I don’t know exactly what your schedule is like, but there may be ways that you can pull back a little and bring your readers along on that journey as well.

Tip number three is I really would encourage you to think about batching the creation of content and other activities on your blog. I’ve talked over the years many times about batching and how in a typical way I would try and write two or three posts at a time, or try and record two or three podcasts at a time to really put aside some time to work on my blog and really focus on key tasks for defined periods of time, so that then I don’t have to focus on those tasks for a couple more days. For me, it’s Monday as I’m recording this. It’s Monday morning. I’m going to record three podcasts this morning. Which will mean that I wouldn’t have to record another podcast for another week-and-a-half. Batching your time in that way is really useful and most bloggers tend to do that. 

You can do exactly the same thing with the creation of your book or your ebook. What I did during the process of writing the ProBlogger book, which is a pretty massive task because tens of thousands of words is quite an intense period of editing, the publisher had an editor so I was getting drafts back and engaging with them. I had a co-author that I was communicating with.

There was a lot of work going on there. What I did two times during that process was to set aside weekends purely for writing. I was newly married, and I think we had a newborn, so there’s a bit of a sacrifice to do this. I’m very lucky that Vanessa, my wife, understood that this was an asset that we were building. This was an important part of the business.

What I did is I booked a cheap motel in regional area of the state that I live in and I locked myself in that motel for two weekends, and I just wrote during that time. It was a pretty intense weekend. Often you see the writer sitting in their log cabin by a fire, there was none of that going on, it was a cheap and nasty motel, but I just sat there and I wrote, and I wrote, and I wrote. 

I worked really hard late into the night. I remember setting myself some really big goals to get certain amounts of words written over those weekends and I remember before I went on the weekends, working really hard on the outline of what I needed to achieve. I planned what I would do during those weekends.

That really enabled me to get larger chunks of the project done in relatively short periods of time. Up until those weekends what I had been doing was writing around the edges, when I had 15 minutes to spare I was trying to write. And that’s fine, you can get a lot done that way. Certainly, that’s how I wrote my first photography ebook. But when you want to do a larger project, you want some consistency, you want a momentum, and you want to really take your readers on a journey through that ebook, you want larger chunks of time to be able to really focus and you get a lot done as well. 

As I said before, Vanessa was really understanding in this. I remember explaining to her that while it was an inconvenience, it was a sacrifice particularly for her, being home alone with the baby and it was an expense for us to go and hire this motel as cheap and nasty as it was, it enabled us to invest in something that would come back to benefit us. It would provide a new income stream but it also opened up new opportunities by having that product there as well. She completely understood that and encouraged me to do that. It was well-worth doing. 

Maybe, and again, I don’t know your circumstances Bradley, but maybe there’s a way that you can batch some time. Maybe it’s not a whole weekend, maybe it’s not even going away, maybe it’s just taking a day off work to write, or maybe it’s just a Saturday morning to do that. It’s a bit of a mind shift. What you’re doing here is not escaping from your efforts. You’re investing time into building an income-producing asset as well. Some sacrifices in the short term will certainly help in the long term. That was tip number three, was around batching your work. You could apply a lot of those batching techniques to the way you’re writing your blog as well, which may also free up some time, too. 

Tip number four is to use some of the product content that you’re creating, your ebook content as blog content. This is something that helped me, again, as I was writing my book. Some of the content that appeared in the ProBlogger book had already been published on the ProBlogger blog. I took some of the archives from ProBlogger, updated them, edited them, refreshed them and put them into the book. That helped me to create the product. The other thing that happened is that as I was writing the book, there were other segments of the book that I’d never published anything on those topics before on the blog. So what I did is I said, “Here’s a little excerpt from the book that I’m writing at the moment.” And I published that as a blog post. 

This did a couple of things. One it made writing the book a bit easier because I was taking archives and putting it into the book. It also helped my blog to keep going because I was able to take some of the excerpts from the book and put them all into the blog. Again, by doing that, by taking excerpts from the book and putting them onto the blog, it built anticipation of the product as well. It also cut down the work that I had to do to get that blog running. It may be that there’s some crossover there between your product and your blog, and it can flow both ways as I’ve just described. Maybe there’s something in your archives that you can put into your book.

Now, I wouldn’t do that with every single part of the book, you don’t want your product to be just a complete rehash of your archives (although I’ve seen people do that). You want to update it, you want to refresh it, you want to add to it, and make your ebook have some unique perspective or some unique feature. That might help you to create that product, but it also might help you to get your blog running as well. That’s tip number four.

Tip number five is about deadlines. Sometimes setting a fairly aggressive deadline can be helpful. I don’t know if you’ve heard of Parkinson’s Law, it’s not an official law, but it’s one of those kinds of laws of that describes the way things work. Parkinson’s Law states, “Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.” If you give yourself 12 months to write your ebook, it’ll take 12 months to write that ebook. If you give yourself one month, you will likely to get it done in a month to a point. You can probably squeeze that down to a day and it’s not going to get done, but the principle is that if you have a fairly tight deadline, you are much more likely to get it done in that kind of time. That’s again, what happened for me. I found having the deadline of working with a publisher and having committed and signed a contract that things will be ready by a certain time helped me to get things going.

One of the problems that I say a lot of bloggers facing is that the only agreement that they’ve got to create the products is with themselves. There’s not really much accountability there. There’s a number of ways that you can set yourself a deadline. One, you could set it with a partner, with a family member, with a friend, with another blogger just to keep some accountability there. Another thing that you might want to consider doing is announcing to your readers that there will be a product on this date and that gives you a bit more accountability with your readers. The ultimate way of having some accountability is to take pre-orders of your product as well. That can really ramp things up because once you started taking money for a product and you say that you are going to release that product at a certain time, kickstarter style, then that really ramps up some accountability and there is some legal accountability there as well. 

It may also, by doing the prelaunch type approach, it may actually give you a little bit of an income stream that might enable you to pull back on some of the work that you’re doing. Again, it really is going to depend upon the work that you do. You mentioned, Bradley, that you’ve got a full-time job, so you may not have the freedom to do that, but that might be an approach that might suit some people to do a pre-order type situation. Deadline might really help.

Tip number six is to create version 0.1 of your product or a beta version of your product. Maybe if the product that you are creating is a big one, there might be some sense in getting it to a point where you can sell it as that beta version or as the first version of it. I think of a conversation I had a couple of months ago now with a blogger who had a goal of creating her first course. She wants to create this course. I won’t say exactly what the course was, but I remember she showed me the outline of her course and it was such a massive beast of a course. It was huge! There was over 50 hours video content that she needed to produce. She needed to write numerous written resources, she was going to get some software developed to giveaway as well as a bonus. It was such a massive task to get this course completed. She was feeling incredibly overwhelmed by the task that she’d set herself and paralyzed by it. 

I remember having this conversation, looking at her course and saying to her, “Why don’t you just break this down and release it as 10 modules and just release the first module and get that ready for launch?” She realized that if she was going to tackle that whole thing, she’d probably would never get it done, but by breaking it down and releasing the first version and the first part of the course and selling just that, she realized that she would get something shipped and she would get something out the door.

This is exactly what she did. She did get that product ready and she got that mini course out the door. It gave her some initial income, but also it gave her proof of concept and that her readers would buy that type of thing and also gave really valuable feedback. She realized that her readers didn’t want as much content in the course. They actually wanted something a little lighter. She was then able to roll out several of the next modules already in a time that she would never been able to do that previously. She’s now, I think, in her fourth module of this course and it’s really coming out quite differently to the way that she planned it because she got the minimum viable product there at the door.

This probably relates a little bit more to a course type situation but maybe you want to really look at the topic of your ebook and ask yourself the question, is it too big? Could you break it down and make it into two ebooks? Could you produce a later version of it as your first version and then update it later? You can always add more to your product later. 

31 Days to Build a Better Blog’s a great example of this. The first time that that ebook came out on the first version, I think it was 2009. It was smaller, and we’ve since updated it. The second version is out and there’s a whole new week of content alongside that. Products can evolve. It’s okay to get something out the door that is a little lighter, you still want it to be useful and of a high quality, but it doesn’t need to be the finished product. It might be step one, version one. 

The last thing that I want to put out there to you Bradley and to others who are struggling with this is, that maybe you want to get some help. If you’re at your absolute limits and have no more time, you can’t batch, you can’t pull back any further on your blog, you need to find more time, then maybe you need to get someone to help you. That is one way to find more time, is to get someone else working with you.

There’s three ways that you could do this. Firstly, you could get someone to help you with your product, you might find a co-author. That’s what I did with the ProBlogger book. Our fan Chris Garett. Many of you know him, Chris G, and he co-authored my book because I realized very early on, I wasn’t going to be able to get that product out the door if I was going to do everything. And I also realized that he bought other expertise to that product and that book that I didn’t have or I couldn’t authentically have. I probably have taught a lot of what he wrote about, but I couldn’t have thought about it in a way that he did.

Maybe you need to get a co-author, maybe get some help with design, with the development setting up the shopping cart, maybe get some help in proofreading and editing, or maybe some help in marketing. Again, this is one of the big issues that a lot of bloggers have is that we can write, we can create content, but we maybe don’t have some of those other skills. And it will take us 10 times longer to get our ebook designed than if we just got someone to do it. And they could do it in a couple hours what will take us 20 hours.

Again, that’s something that I’ve been able to do in the launch of my own ebooks over the years. Even from the first ebooks, I found people to help me to get those shopping carts set up. Once I had some income from my first ebook, I got someone to help me with the design in my future ones in the marketing of them as well. Maybe, there’s a way to get someone involved in helping you to create that product. Now, not everyone has the income to be able to pay someone a flat fee, you will find people out there who might be willing to do that on a revenue share basis as well. It’s more of a partnership. That’s what the first area that you could get some help. 

Secondary you might want to get some help is to get some help with your blog or your business. Maybe, during the period that you’re creating your product, you want to have a guest post once a week. Or maybe you want to hire someone to write a post a week for you and they become a regular contributor. Or maybe you get some help by hiring someone to help you with editing or proofreading. Or maybe you’ve got a friend who could help you if you can’t afford that. Maybe you want to get someone on board to help you with community management or your social media. This could be a paid thing or you might find someone who’s willing to do it for free in return for some exposure. You are going to get what you pay for probably. Or maybe you got a family member who can help out for the short-term as well.

Getting someone to help with your blog could be an on-going thing or could just be to help you through those few months where you really need to focus on creating your product and then you come back on board again. Getting someone to help with your product, with you blog, and the other area that you might want to consider getting some help with that might free up some time is other areas of your life. Maybe you need to hire someone to help you with some cleaning around the home, or gardening, or child care, or getting a personal assistant to help you with some other aspect of your life. 

Now, obviously, this isn’t going to be achievable for everyone who doesn’t have the income there, but if you’re paying someone $20 an hour to do something that enables you to spend an hour on doing something that builds an income-generating asset, then maybe it’s worth while. Again, this doesn’t need to be an on-going thing. Getting someone in to help you to do an hour of work around the house, they’re probably going to do it in an hour what you would take three hours. That’s going to free up time for you. And it may only be for those few months that you create that product. It’s just another option that might help you to free up some time. 

I hope that’s been helpful, Bradley. I do feel your pain, but I really would encourage you to struggle through this. As I’ve talked about in previous podcasts, creating a product is so important. Creating a new income stream to your blog to put it alongside the ones that you currently have, you can have a product on your blog, an ebook, or a course and still run advertising, and still do affiliate marketing. It adds a new income stream. It’s one of those things that can pay off for the long-term. 

One of my first ebook, 31 Days to Build a Better Blog, sold a whole heap of content, of copies in the first few weeks that it launched. It continues to sell copies every day since, so it becomes a recurring income stream for you as well. Really an asset that produces income is a great thing to have. I really would encourage you to find a way to get that done. There’s some short-term sacrifice for a long-term gain. It’s one of those things as we talked about in a series of podcasts a little while ago. It’s one of those things that you can do today and that’s going to take some work today, but it’s going to pay off for the long-term of your blog. Do struggle through it. 

Let us know how you go. I’d love to hear how you make it happen and if you need some accountability with that, Bradley, you shoot me another email and I’m happy to send you another email in a month or two to ask you how you’re doing. 

If you’ve got a question for us here for the ProBlogger podcast, there’s a number of ways that you can get that question, too. Email me directly at [email protected]. I get all those emails myself. I can’t respond to every single email I get, but a lot of those questions I get do turn into podcast episodes.

You can also leave a question on today’s show notes in the comments. Also, there’s a little microphone button there, a little green button on the show notes at problogger.com/podcast/118 and you can leave me a voicemail there. I think it’s about a minute to ask a question and sometimes, I type those questions and turn them into podcasts as well. Your voice might actually appear on the podcast. Just make sure that there’s not too much noise in the background if you do that. 

Thanks so much for listening today. You can find today’s show notes over at problogger.com/podcast/118.

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Today I’m wrapping up the mini series we have been going through that is all about warming your readers up. We have been talking about how to take readers from being completely unaware of who you are or cold to being fully engaged with you or warmed up.

I’m going to wrap this series up by sharing a case study of how one blogger, who had a relatively small list of readers, used the principles that we have been talking about in this series to generate over $28,000.

She did this by using a single blog post, a SlideShare presentation, a lead magnet, an email sequence, and a webinar.

Episode 112

Episode 113

Episode 114

Episode 115

Episode 116

Today, I want to give you a case study that picks up on many of the strategies that I’ve talked about, so you can see how these might come together to help your readers flow through these stages.

To walk us through it I want to introduce you to Donna Moritz from SociallySorted.com.au

I was sharing these 4 stages of warming up readers on my FB page a few weeks back, and Donna shared with me a great example of how she brought them together.

This was the perfect ending to this series. With great examples. The webinar is a great way to end this series. We haven’t talked about monetization, and the webinar is one way to sell something. If Donna had any regrets, it was she wished she did this earlier. Her advice is learn to track and it doesn’t take that much effort to add in the extra steps.

I hope you enjoyed today’s podcast. I picked up a few things from Donna that I am going to give a go. I hope you enjoyed this series.

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Darren: Hi there! This is Darren Rowse from ProBlogger. Welcome to episode 117 of the ProBlogger Podcast. Today, I want to wrap up the little miniseries that we’ve been going through over the last few episodes which has all been about warming your readers up. We’ve been talking about how to take readers on a journey from being completely unaware of who you are—if you’re cold—to being highly engaged, to being connected to you, and engaging with you, hot, warmed up readers.

The way I want to wrap this series up is to share a case study with you of one blogger who was only having a relatively small-medium sized list of readerships. Used the principles that we’ve been talking about this series to generate over $28,000 by simply using a single blog post, a SlideShare presentation, a lead magnet, and an onboarding email sequence followed up by a webinar. The same things we’ve been talking about in this series. I’m going to walk you through this blogger’s story.

You can find today’s show notes over at problogger.com/podcast/117 where I’m going to link to the blog post. I’m going to link to the SlideShare and all of the other things we talked about in this interview.

Before we get into the interview, I just want to take a couple of minutes to just rewind on this series and to recap it because I think it will be really useful to have the exact things that we’ve been talking about in your mind as I talk to this blogger, to Donna Moritz from Socially Sorted.

Back in episode 112, I introduced you to the topic of warming your readers up. I suggested that there are four main stages warming your readers up. First, you need to get their attention. Second, you need to get them interested. Third, you need to get a connection, to get a subscriber. Fourth, you need to get engagement. And then in the following episodes, I walked you through how to do each of those four things.

Episode 113 was all about getting the first eyeball, how to get attention. I suggested using guest content. Not just guest posts but interviews and other types of guest content. I talked about creating shareable content on your blog. I talked about repurposing content. I talked about SEO–Search Engine Optimization not just in Google but other search engines like iTunes in the app store.

Episode 114 was about getting your first-time readers a little bit more hooked into what you’re doing, to get them interested, to look twice at your blog. I suggested a few techniques for getting that second look from people, to get them interested. I talked about making big promises. I talked about differentiating yourself. I talked about creating the fist pump content that gives your readers a quick win. I talked about how to funnel your readers from being first time readers to the right content for them—the relevant content that meets their needs right now using your site’s navigation, using Start Here pages, and using portals. Then I shared some tips on using social proof to make people look twice. That was all episode 114.

Episode 115 was all about getting a connection with your readers, getting them to subscribe. I talked about pop-ups, welcome mats, and other ways to get that first subscriber. I talked about using lead magnets through creating content-specific upgrades, something that you’re going to hear about in the interview that follows. I talked about creating lead magnets and content that create momentum and build anticipation. I talked about cross promoting your different subscribe points whether it be social media or your email.

In the last episode, I talked about deepening engagement with your readers. That’s episode 116. I particularly emphasize how to use onboarding, a sequence of email that gets your readers from being subscribers to engaging with you. Again, in today’s interview, I pick up with Donna on this exact thing. She uses onboarding quite well. I’m going to talk about how to create content that promotes engagement and gives your readers a sense of belonging. I talked about, in episode 114, how to use content events.

You can see we’ve covered a lot of ground over the last four episodes. I would encourage you to go back and listen to them. Now you bookmark them and keep coming back to them when they’re relevant to you.

Today, I want to give you a case study that picks up on many of the strategies that I talked about so that you can see how they come together. At this point, we’ve been talking about these four different areas of getting attention, getting interest, getting the subscribe, then getting the engagement, as if they’re four separate things. They’re actually a lot more interwoven in that when you do them right. Now, you’re going to see an example of how one blogger, Donna from sociallysorted.com.au, and how she uses a variety of different tools—blog post, SlideShare, repurposing content, and the onboarding sequence to do the four things that I’ve been talking about.

She’s been incredibly generous with us. She talks about her actual conversion numbers. She talks about the income that she’s generated by the webinar at the end of this series. I want to thank her. I encourage you to check her out over at sociallysorted.com.au. You can also check out all the links mentioned in today’s podcast over at problogger.com/podcast/117. That’s enough of me talking, I want to get straight into these interviews now. I encourage you to go back and listen to those other podcasts if you need to but let’s get with the interview now with Donna. Thanks for listening.

Hi, Donna. How are you?

Donna: I’m great, thank you. It’s nice to be talking to someone in Australia.

Darren: It is. It’s one of those podcast interviews that I didn’t have to work out time zone conversion or anything like that. It’s nice to chat with you.

Donna: Yeah. We’re actually even the same time, not even daylight saving so it’s very rare.

Darren: It’s very cool, very cool. Thanks for jumping on with me today. I just love that we can finish this series that we’ve been doing on warming readers up with a really practical example. I appreciate you putting forward your case study for us to look at in this way.

Donna: No worries.

Darren: Most people who are listening to this have already been through the episodes preceding this one where I’ve talked about getting people’s attention first and then getting their interest in what you’re doing, getting connection with people, and then getting engagement. I really want to walk through this example that you showed me a month or so ago now of how you’ve walked your readers through this. It’s hard to know where to start because you’ve created this process, a funnel. It looks very complete and very well-thought through. It may have been very well-thought through but it’s hard to know where to start with it.

Maybe if we start with the blog post. I’ve got, “21 pro tips for a packed house,” at your webinar or your live event using visual marketing. It’s a great post in and of itself but not so much interested in the topic itself but more this post itself and how you used this to grab people’s attention in the start of this process. Maybe if you can talk through us a little bit about where did the idea from the post come from and we’ll go from there.

Donna: Sure. I have, over the last couple of years, done a couple of bigger blog posts that worked really well. Probably a couple of years ago, I did a tools blog post, “36 Visual Content Tools that the Pros Can’t Live Without,” or something like that. We did a SlideShare and the SlideShare just went nuts. I learned that if you do one of those big blog posts, you’d be getting lots of people to contribute. Obviously, it does well.

I started to do them before I was promoting something. Even either in my own webinar or formulating a program or promoting even someone’s else’s webinar or something like social media examiner tickets for their events, I started to do a blog post beforehand—at least two to three weeks beforehand. Sometimes not as much if I wasn’t very organized. I was finding that that could drive traffic to whatever I was promoting.

For this one, I was lucky to be asked to be an affiliate by Amy Porterfield, and she only has a handful of affiliates. I went into overdrive. I decided I needed to do one of these—I call them the firecracker blog posts—one of these big blog posts, that’s where it came from. I’ve done a couple leading up to my launch like my program promotions for my visual content program but being handed affiliate for Amy is like being handed a baby. I took it very, very, seriously. That’s why I did a blog post specifically for that.

I had done a lot of promotions for her before and I’d done a similar thing. It was a very natural niche topic. It was very targeted. I knew it wouldn’t be one of the big, big, blog posts that I’ve done. I wasn’t expecting thousands of shares because (a) people had to be interested in doing some sort of an event which is a big deal or a webinar even and (b) they had to be interested in visual marketing. It was going to be very targeted from the start.

Darren: I love that you started with an end in mind. You’ve got this affiliate promotion that you want to do but you winding right back to, “How do I get people in the process? To get them to this webinar?” I guess that was the end result; a webinar with Amy that we’ve got in mind.

Donna: Yeah. Amy’s great on webinar. She converts really well. I just needed to get butts on seats basically which is a lot of the promotion I had around. It was very measured. I needed to get butts on seats, and I was trying to teach people how to butts on seats because if they were interested in that topic then they were going to be interested in what Amy’s going to be talking about which was how to use webinars to get people to be able to look at your content and to buy your programs.

Darren: Great. You’ve got the end in mind. How did you choose exactly what to write about for this blog post? Because it obviously relates to the end that you’ve got in mind but the blog post itself doesn’t mention your endpoint.

Donna: No. I guess it’s priming people to be interested in a topic. To be honest, I had done this a little bit before and Amy talks about it in her training, this idea of she calls it the fill-up formula where you’re getting people to an event via content like this. I like to prime people to be doing two things: they first realize that they have a challenge or there’s something that I want to change or get better at and be just really finding out that there’s a solution–the webinar is the solution at the end of it.

I do give them lots of tips. I knew that if people were interested in the blog post and interested in the content then I could gently market to them about the webinar a bit more than gently.

Darren: Yeah. How long did the post take to create?

Donna: It took a couple of weeks of emailing and collecting information from influencers. I’m pretty lucky. I know a lot of people from speaking. I have a pretty good success rate for blogger outreach. I don’t do a lot of it; I keep it for when I really need it. Usually, I get a yes. Occasionally, someone’s busy. That took a little bit of time to collect info. I’ve got a bit of a system now. I have an assistant that helps me a little bit.

The actual writing, probably, a good part of a day with my procrastination here and there. I’m getting quicker at writing especially when you get content like that. It’s already ready to go. It was the extra bits. I put some images in and optimizing those—all of that. I probably would recommend starting about four weeks out. Giving people to contribute is the biggest drag on time.

Darren: People can find a link to this post in our show notes today. I really would recommend people check it out. I think it’s just a brilliant example of a blog post that is the type of thing that people want to share but also leads to an outcome. Just for those who are listening, who are maybe driving at the moment and can’t visualize it, it’s a long post. It’s 21 tips and each tip has an expert including Amy Porterfield, Kim Garst, even Laney who worked for us at ProBlogger.

Donna: You were too busy, so I went straight for Laney. No, it’s alright. I knew that Laney had done your promo.

Darren: Yeah. She was a good one to talk to in this particular topic. There’s some really big names there. This is certainly a trend we’ve seen over the last few years. Almost like interviews, one question interviews, and then compiling all the answers together. Do you have any tips on how to get people to respond? You obviously have some connections already that you were able to leverage but any thoughts on how someone who maybe doesn’t have those connections could put this type of post together?

Donna: Sure. It’s something I feel quite passionate about. I’m sure you probably get bombarded way more than me with requests. I didn’t see people doing it wrong all the time. I guess I didn’t set out to be able to do these blog posts, but you do have to put in time and make relationships with people, share their content. A lot of these people I’ve been in their programs, their groups,00 they were starting out when I was. We helped each other.

People like Ian Cleary weren’t always speaking at social media marketing world. He was a friend of mine. We discussed and helped each other out. If you’re going to approach people cold, you need to at least show that you’ve been reading their content, maybe commenting on their post, sharing their content, and just interested in what they do. Just show that you’ve done a little bit of research and for goodness sake, get their name right.

It’s easy for me to get some of these guys to contribute. But don’t always look above you to the big A-listers. Just look to the left and right of you because the people to the left and right of you still often have decent size blogs. They’ve got great content and they can contribute. They are experts in their field. I think sometimes people jump straight to the ones that are so busy that they’re going to ignore their emails or just too busy to reply when they’re not necessarily. Definitely, aim high but I also look to the left and the right. The people that you are networking with are great to ask as well. Offer to help them too. That can really help out.

Darren: Yeah. I guess just be aware that people are being bombarded. I’m certainly not the biggest out there but I’m getting two or three requests a day for these types of posts. I’m generally trying to respond to those I know, and I do have a relationship with. It’s really tough to say no to everyone else.

Donna: It is. I’m not very good at that.

Darren: It is tough to do. I take time to put together as well just from the write-up. I guess you’ve got to realize you’re asking someone else to help write your blog post and that takes time.

Donna: The other thing to do is to give them as much information as you can. Say, “I only need one or two sentences. This is the date I need it by.” Don’t send an email saying, “I’m running a blog post. Would you be interested in helping out?” Because then you’ve already started an […].

Darren: One of the things I love about this particular post—this is going a little bit off the side—but the visual-ness of this is great. That’s probably not very good grammar but you’ve embedded stuff into it. It’s got a YouTube clip in it; it’s got embedded social media. Every single person who’s spoken has their picture on there. I think you’ve got an embedded Instagram as well. I think it would help to get people to contribute to the next one as well because anyone who’s contributing—if you show them what you previously done—that may help to build a little bit of social proof but also show you are not just going to copy and paste their answers into a blog post. You’re creating something that’s going to make them look good.

Donna: Definitely. I think the more you make it easy for them to share, if there’s an image about them, I don’t do it for every single post, these are special ones, but they know that I like visual content so they kind of expect it now, but it gives them something that I can share and be proud of. Yeah, it’s much easier for them to share.

Darren: Cool. What do you think the post worked? Did it work? Can you tell us anything about the post, how was it responded to, maybe why do you think it worked?

Donna: Sure. It wasn’t one of the most widely shared posts, but I didn’t expect it to be. As I’ve said before, I was fairly targeted. It was under 1000 shares. Some of the bigger ones I had were between 3000 and 6000 which is pretty good for the little old me. I’m not ProBlogger. It had an impact. Like I said, it was designed for specific types of people interested in specific things.

The reason why I think it went well was (a) it was at list post. As you said in the series, that’s quite a good way to go. At the title, I think I included pro tips, packed webinars. That’s what people want. If they’re going to start webinars, they want to have people there. Like you said, it was very visual. I always have at least one great image to share. I’ve reached a point where when I blog, I had Michael Hyatt say this once, “He takes as much time to look for the image.” I can’t really write until I have a good title image. I think the title image was fun.

We shared quotes from the—obviously, we’d get to that—but we shared quotes from slide deck out to social as well as on Twitter, etc. They could see that the sharing was happening. There’s lots of different ways for people to share. I’ve always had a banner ad on there as well for sign-ups to the webinar, but we’ll get to that and to some other things on there. Yeah, I think they were the main things. Because there was a cheat sheet on it, we had a quick win for people.

Darren: From my perspective, it’s one of those meaty comprehensive posts even though each of the tips was quite light, they didn’t go into great depth for each person—it was in paragraph or so—but there was a sense of about 21 tips that’s quite comprehensive. Like you said, the least post is visually appealing. The social proof when we talked about social proof in this series using other people’s images and what they say can bring social proof. Whilst this one didn’t really say anything about you directly, it wasn’t talking about, “Donna Moritz and what she’s talking about,” the fact that these people talked to you brings some social proof as well which helps as well.

I think a great example for people to look at to help get those eyeballs. I think the post itself does more than get the eyeball; it’s got enough meat to it that it gets people to that next level of being interested in who you are and who’s behind this as well which is great.

Donna: I’m very honored that you liked it.

Darren: No, it’s fantastic. I’ve used that as an example in a couple of talks now already as what people could do. The other part of this post is towards the bottom of it I think there is the SlideShare. You have taken the content and repurposed it. We’ve talked about repurposing as part of this series. I thought this was a fascinating example. We’ll include a link to the SlideShare. I’ve run SlideShare, but you’ll find it in the blog post itself. You’ve got 32 slides there taking quotes from those who responded. Again, there’s that social proof in there. Maybe tell us a little bit about why SlideShare? Why did you use it? Maybe some tips on how to do it—what you did in this case?

Donna: Sure. Everyone has a funnel and it might start with a blog post. It always […] and then the social would direct to the blog post as well. With the ultimate aim of usually email subscribers or whatever you’re aiming for whether it’s webinar signups. Three years ago, I think it was before I spoke at ProBlogger event, I did a slide deck, it went really well. Then I did a second one and I put a cheat sheet on the blog post that it was leading to. I just checked the other day, at the time that I did it, around the time that it was really active, we had 700 subscribers on the cheat sheet which is a lot for me. 

Since then, we’ve had 1000. It’s not only doing well at that time. I had a webinar I was doing. I had banner ads and I had a cheat sheet. It’s got longevity. It’s still driving traffic. I knew that SlideShare not only was a great visual piece of content that you could repurpose, but it also actually drives not only traffic but subscribers that are interested. People say, “Don’t worry about SlideShare. It’s B2B. It’s very targeted.” But I find that the actual product that you end up can share really well on Twitter, it can share really well on Pinterest because the slide deck from SlideShare will open up in the news feed. It doesn’t matter if the person is a SlideShare user. It just means that you can share it really well everywhere else. People that aren’t even on SlideShare can benefit from seeing the content.

That’s where you get a lot of the viewers. One slide deck has had 150,000 views or something. Since then I’ve done 11 and they’ve all done recently well. They’ve all been featured by SlideShare and I’ve had almost 500,000 views of my SlideShare presentation. I can’t ignore the fact that eyeballs, as you said, eyeballs on content. If I’m doing a really big firecracker blog post, I take it to the next level, and add something else in whether it’s an infographic or slide deck. I’ve been a little obsessed with SlideShare for the last couple of years. That’s why I’ve been using that mainly. I sort of create them at the same time now.

Darren: You’re creating your blog post, creating the SlideShare pretty much at the same time. The SlideShare is driving traffic to your blog post but also, they’re qualified leads. You’re also using the slides in your blog post as well. I just don’t know the way to get that content across.

Donna: It gets the views up on SlideShare. It goes in reverse, I guess. They might go through the SlideShare, click through, and see some of my other decks as well. I have someone help me create the slide decks. I’ve done a few myself. I like doing them. The bigger ones I now have a girl that works for me and she does them. I pretty much write the blog post and then send it. As I’m writing it, I send her the content, she gets started. I’m quite involved in all the photos that we use and everything. I’m trying to keep my hands off it. That’s the plan. You can use templates. It doesn’t have to be a designer […].

Darren: A lot of the most successful SlideShares that I’ve seen are pretty much very simple. A lot of them are just nice images with a nice few words on them as well. I’ve seen SlideShare do really well that are plain, with just texts on them as well. A lot of it can be about the title whether it’s a good topic, whether it’s got a benefit in it, pretty much like any content. You can go the extra mile with beautiful visuals as well.

Donna: You’ve hit the nail in the head. The big thing about it, you give attention to the cover because that’s what’s going to catch attention. Just remember, there’s no presenter, so each slide should really encourage people to click through and give enough information. You’re not there talking at the same time. They can’t get all that extra context. Yeah, keep it simple. You want people to click through. You want them to want to know what’s on the next page.

Darren: You linked from your SlideShare to the blog post. I think it was at least two or three times throughout it. You hinted at the fact that you had a cheat sheet on the blog post as well.

Donna: Yeah. You need to have some sort of call to action. If it’s a short deck or 10 or 15 slides, you will only need to put it at the end. But because it was a longer one, I usually put at least one in the middle. If it’s a really long one like 50 slides, I do two. You can do paid leads with SlideShare. I’m not knocking that, I’m sure it’s great, I just like to do things a little bit more organically. I always have like, “Get more information,” in some way. Like, “Get the full script,” or whatever I write. Something like Read More, click to the Read More. Then they’re being led to the blog post. I also say, “…and download the free cheat sheet, tools list,” or whatever it is.

To be honest, the first one I did that was really great was actually 36 tools. All we did was summarize the top five which anyone could really work that out. I had a thousand people download a cheat sheet with the five tools that they could really have worked out. That has helped. People want to know the easy way.

Darren: I love it. I particularly love the fact that you’re driving people across with the intent of getting the cheat sheet. The fact that the blog post itself was even more useful than the slides. They’re really wanting the cheat sheets, so those are qualified leads. Can you give us any stats on how that particular deck went? I think what I’m seeing on SlideShare at the moment is 21,000 views of it. That’s pretty amazing.

Donna: Yeah. Normally, my top traffic drivers would be Facebook and Twitter. SlideDeck jumps to the top as soon as I do that. I think it would probably see the webinar signups with the biggest key for that one. Interestingly enough, we had Facebook ads running. I’ve had good success with them. I’ve had someone help me. The Facebook ads just bummed for the webinar that I was doing for Amy. We probably got about a little less than half than what we would usually get. Even my Facebook ad expert was like, “I don’t know what’s going on.” We had two people look at it. It was just one of those one-off cases where it just wasn’t clicking.

I was relying on social media. We had 300 subscribers to that piece, that content upgrade or that cheat sheet for the webinar, for the 21 Pro Tips, the webinar tips. Usually, I would get 300-1000 or so for a cheat sheet. It was lower. The sales on the actual webinar that I did worked out about 28,000 Australian. It was massive. I tracked back and I could see that we got traffic from SlideShare and we got traffic from social media. If I wasn’t promoting on social media—and obviously my list as well—normally we would rely a bit on ads, that’s probably a huge affiliate promotion for me.

Darren: For most of us, I think. I don’t know too many people and not back that kind of money. 

Donna: I remember feeling really down the time that we didn’t have as many on the webinar as we normally would. I think even just follow-up, a lot of that traffic was still coming through the follow-up. Most of these content upgrades I’ve had between 300 and 1000 downloads of them. I think even 300 is a good amount of people that are interested in a particular topic. I think that was the key. I could also follow up with emails to those people specifically.

Darren: That’s great. Any last tips on SlideShare or why you think that particular deck did well?

Donna: Yes. It was fun. It had a theme. We did a Vaudeville kind of show time theme. The title was good. Each page clicks through as you go to the next page. It was telling a story. Even the cheat sheet was done in a fun way. We said, “Do you want the backstage pass?” For the backstage pass, we just used terminology that was fun but around the particular theme, so the whole thing was around events.

The other key with getting seen on SlideShare is that I made sure it was Tweeted out from the actual slide deck. When you tweet from the slide deck from SlideShare, it tags the SlideShare team. They are watching on Twitter all the time; there’s two or three different Twitter accounts. They showcase different slide decks all the time. Even if you can get the SlideShare of the day, you can get a featured SlideShare, or an editor’s pick, there’s lots of different ways that they feature you.

Facebook and Twitter don’t do that but SlideShare does. I think it’s just great. There’s lots of different ways. They can Tweet out about you. They featured me as well. That’s why that was a little bit higher, that 20,000. Even when I haven’t been featured once or twice, it’s been about 5000 shares. It’s still pretty significant.

Darren: Yeah. Again, a great example of repurposing content to help you get the extra eyeballs but also to create content to make your blog post more interesting. If you use social proof as well, you’ve created something that I suspect the influencer featured would want to be sharing because it’s beautiful as well. You’re going above and beyond what I’ve ever seen in one of these expert roundup posts. You’re creating something that they want to participate in. Really, a great way of getting the eyeball but also getting interested in building some anticipation for their content upgrade which is what I want us to talk about now.

The actual lead magnet, the content upgrade, and this is one of the things we’ve been talking about in the series. I’m encouraging people to try and go beyond just having a site wide opt-in for their blog. One e-book that appears on every page, you created an upgrade specifically for this blog post. I’m presuming you can use this opt-in anywhere else on your blog.

Donna: No.

Darren: I encourage people to go and signup. I think it’s still available on the blog post. You can go and join Donna’s list. I encourage you to do that. We’ll talk about what you’ll get in that in a minute as well. The lead magnet, the content upgrade, talks us a little bit through your choice of what to do with that. You’ve chosen to do a cheat sheet. Why did you choose that format?

Donna: Like I said, I did look at cheat sheets two or three years ago on the big one that worked well. Since then, everyone’s been talking about content upgrades. Ian Cleary said, “You got to do this. It’s great.” Amy obviously does them every podcast with her podcast that she does. I know that they work.

I’ve done an e-book back when I was a bit green. I’ve done a video series. I can’t remember who said it, it might’ve been with Derek Halpern, I can’t remember but somebody said, or maybe it was the Leadpages guys. I think it was Leadpages. They did all this research on different types of opt-in freebies or download. They found that the one-page cheat sheet is the best. It converts best because people just want to be able to have something actionable that I can get a quick win on. And I don’t really always have the time to watch videos or read e-books. A lot of them have been one page. This one in particular was a bit longer. Again, it was probably just me trying to make sure I gave value before such a big webinar. It paid off, I guess.

I like the cheat sheet. I think people just resonate with it better. I think the key is how you follow up because sometimes people think, “Oh, this is going to get a free cheat sheet. I’m not going to be interested in what you’ve got to say afterwards.”

My mistake over a couple of years was not actually following up. They would download it and then that was it. You’re probably going to annoy them if you’re going to market a webinar later or you’re just sending a newsletter or whatever. I started to switch that and give them a bit more value in the emails afterwards. I think the cheat sheet is very effective.

Darren: Yeah, for sure. I love the fact that it’s kind of a minimum, viable, product. It’s probably one of the easiest opt-ins to create. They’re not completely easy; you can put a lot of time and energy into making them great. But in comparison to a video series, my goodness. If they’re converting at the same rate as that video series, you’d want a pretty compelling reason to do the videos. There may be a good reason because that may help people, move people, to where you can make an offer. The cheat sheet obviously works as well.

Any practical tips on what tools to use? Do you have someone helping with that? Anything practical you can give for advice on creating your first cheat sheet?

Donna: I used to use Photoshop very badly. That’s what I use. Then I went to […] I just used Canva. If you’re not familiar with design art, I mean, I did them from scratch. I’ve made up a template now. You can just use their templates. They’ve got four templates for PDFs and things in there. To be honest, if you’re not savvy, here’s a really good tip, go to your designer and get a template design. If you think you’re going to do a whole bunch of these, get something designed with maybe a logo or just some cool branding. Leave space in the middle. All you have to do is add the text in the photos. Then you could do a whole series of them. That’s what we’ve done in Canva. If you’re not really great with design, then just get a designer to do you a one-off that you can reuse over and over. That will be great.

Darren: We’ve done that exact thing using templates. It cuts down so much work. Yeah, you are investing into something, but you are investing into something you can use over and over again which is great. How do you decide what to put in the blog post and what to put in the opt-in? Is that something you’ve ever struggled to work through?

Donna: Yeah. What I’ve learned is with the blog post give tips and then go deeper into the cheat sheets in some ways. It might be that you’re giving the top five tools which might sound a bit easy but that was what people liked. Or in this one, we’ve had lots of tips from the experts. Then I went deeper into some of those. Amy Porterfield talked about a couple of tips and then her tips went deeper in the actual PDF.

What I’m actually talking about with you today is actually in that PDF. Some of the, “How to do the firecracker blog post, the SlideShare, and things like that.” I went deeper. I try to keep that content behind an email but the blog post itself, people could get great value from. Try to go deeper in something even in just one part of something. 

This cheat sheet for this blog post is probably a little bit too detailed even. I could turn it into five cheat sheets, but you learn.

Darren: Yeah. I think there’s something to be said for generosity in your opt-in as well. You don’t want to overwhelm people with too much. That was one of the things we’ve done without it. In my most recent opt-in, I was going to deliver 180 blog post ideas, I thought that’s too much to really be able to use so I turned it into a series of six. I started dripping it out. That might be a bit frustrating for some of our readers who want the whole lot, but I think they’ll use it more if you break it down.

Donna: Actually, I was in the car the other day. I wished I had a pen. I was like, “Oh my gosh.” I’m listening to one of the episodes. Just having three or four things you can takeaway is great.

Darren: Yeah, for sure. I think Ian does it well with his opt-ins in summarizing his blog post and giving a PDF version of it. It doesn’t need to be completely new even. I talked to him the other day at Social Media Marketing World and he said, “That approach works really well as well.”

Donna: I think it’s just a quick win for them and easy for you in trying to find the sweet spot. 

Darren: Just to summarize this part here, I guess for me, and you’ll see this as you download this particular opt-in, I encourage you to go and do that. The opt-in builds on the blog post. It’s a great design. It is comprehensive. It’s generous. It’s nine pages long, I think, when I looked at it the other day. I don’t think it’s too long. I don’t think it’s so overwhelming that you just wouldn’t be able to apply for it.

It has quick wins on it, really practical examples. It suggests some tools to use. For me, as I looked at it, it was just a generous thing. It’s probably beyond the cheat sheet in my mind. I think people would appreciate that and that really warms them up. This is really what we’re talking about here, it’s getting the connection. We’ve got their attention; we’ve got them interested. This is about getting the connection, but it also takes on that next little step of impressing them which I think opens us up to an engagement which is the next step.

Let’s move on to what happens after they opt-in for you. I know you’ve got the webinar in mind, but you’ve also got a really nice onboarding sequence. We talked about onboarding in the last episode. Do you want to run us through what happens after they subscribe?

Donna: Yeah, sure. There are two levels at which people would come in. Normally, they’d come in, either they’re cultural webinar ads or something, or the cheat sheet or something like that—some sort of content. Some people just signup from my blog to sign up for my insider updates which is my newsletter basically. It goes up roughly once a week; sometimes, not always. 

I was terrible at doing onboarding sequences. I didn’t even know what that was. I’ve always had an email saying, “Tell me your biggest challenge.” Then follow-up with another email on what to expect. I never really thought of doing a sequence. Again, some of the people I’ve mentioned have all suggested this including my […] expert, Diana. She’s like, “You’ve got to do this.” What I have now is if they’re just signing-up for my newsletter, they get a welcome email. Actually, all of the content upgrades usually I sort of ask this as well, “What is their biggest challenge when it comes to creating visual content or social media?” Some of them are slightly different.

I set up expectations of what will follow. I tell them what to expect from my emails, that they’re going to get a few tip emails after this and then they’ll get my newsletter. I’ll let them know about any upcoming events and webinars. I’ve added that in because I don’t want them to feel like I’m just suddenly out of the blue saying, “Oh, I’ve got a webinar on.”

Of all these series of emails now, there’s two or three emails that they get value from before they’re nicely moved over to my newsletter sequence. Unless they’re on a particular sequence of emails then that’s where they’ll get the basic content from me. I really enjoyed doing it. That question has been great. I struggle keeping up with the replies, but I do try and get them all eventually. It’s like an ongoing survey. We’re going to get better at analyzing it because the responses are amazing.

Darren: Yeah. I used the example in the last episode of […] onboarding sequence. I asked questions as well. I think you share a consultant, you mentioned.

Donna: Yes. We’ve all been made to do this.

Darren: Yes. She told me that she gets a lot of responses. You don’t want to ask that question unless you’re willing to get the responses, I guess. I actually took the idea and did it in my last newsletter. I just wrote in my last newsletter with, “Tell me about your biggest pain and your biggest dream of blogging.” I had probably 400 or 500 responses in 24 hours. Our listeners are probably bigger than some, but I was amazed at what people told me. Right from the typical responses that I expected through the incredibly personal responses. When you ask for someone’s biggest pain, they tell you. That’s a real privilege that helps you to get to know your audience incredibly. There’s also responsibility to be at a response there as well.

Donna: Yeah. I have fallen behind a bit with those. I am responding to a lot of them. I did put in that, “Sometimes we get a little bit swamped with these so please bear with me. I will get to it eventually. Please know that this is really important. Your response has been so really helpful for me to create content.” I try to let them know that even if I don’t get back to them, it is helpful. It will come back to them in terms of content. Cass and Craig do great on onboarding. I’m subscribed to their list. They’re very personable with it.

There’s a book called Asked. Have you heard of the book Asked? Brian Levick, I think is how you say his name. I heard him being on Twitter with Pat Flynn. I think it was him that said, “The questions that you get—the really long responses—they’re your ideal customers because they’re responding.” It might be a lot to go through but the one-way answers or the short answers aren’t necessarily going to be the first people that will buy when you launch a product. I take note of who gives long responses.

Darren: One of the things I’ve started paying attention to when I get those types of questions is the exact wording that has been used as well because that can give you great ideas for your titles for blog posts. Particularly, sales copy if you’re selling anything. To be able to use the words of your readers rather than yours. It just teaches you their language, it teaches you what they’re searching for, it teaches you how they would express the problem that they have which is really fascinating as well.

Donna: We did that the last time. We actually pulled some out and put it into a sales page. It just felt like you were talking in a much better way too.

Darren: Yeah. I took all those hundreds of responses and put them into a spreadsheet then handed them over to Stacy and said, “We need to write content on these things.” We just came up with our next series of content. The onboarding is really good there—ask questions, you’re generous again, you’re linking back to the PDFs. I think, from memory, you give away a number of PDFs in your emails.

Donna: Yeah. My onboarding sequence was never great. I was looking at Cass’s going, “Oh, I got to do that.” Since we’re all being trained the same way. What I did was I decided to reboot that. I added in just a couple of little cheat sheets that I actually just repurposed from my program like a shorter version of what’s in my program. One was just a tools checklist and the other one was just like a visual content check—just checking how you’re using visual content if there’s anything going well or not aging well and how to do some more. Just two PDFs during that process.

I did write down the open rates. We’ve talked about it. On that, just a general newsletter sequence, not necessarily the cheat sheet we’ve been talking about but just from signing up from my newsletter, the first email gets 70% open rate, the second is 60% and the third is 48%.

Darren: Yeah, which is pretty amazing. I was talking to someone the other day and I told him, “We get 20% on a newsletter.” He couldn’t believe it.

Donna: My newsletter, on average, is around 25%. Obviously, I’m smaller than you. It’s easy when you’re smaller. Generally, most of my onboarding emails, I had a look this morning, they might start at around 50%, 60%, and obviously that one’s up to 70% and it dropped back down to maybe about 35%-45% at the most. That’s the lowest they go. I think it’s way more than what it was before.

Darren: Yeah. You’re obviously building some expectation there with your subscribers which is great.

Donna: That’s the other thing, they learn how to click. They learn how to open your account.

Darren: That’s right. I think giving those PDFs, it’s giving them something that’s not just a blog post, it’s something that they download–there’s a perceived value around that type of thing as well.

Donna: And it’s a surprise. They don’t expect that. I like to throw in one occasionally.

Darren: Generosity is great. Let’s move on to the last stage here. You’ve got the webinars. I can’t remember exactly when I signed onto your newsletter list. It may just happen that you are running a webinar at that time or it may be a regular thing that you do. We haven’t got time to go fully into webinars right now, but I know I get a lot of questions about webinars from our readers. I’d just love to get some feedback on what impact had webinars had on your business. Why do you continue to do them?

Donna: I’m not super comfortable on camera—face the camera—but I really love teaching. I do a bit of both but the place that I feel really comfortable is doing a webinar. I like the interaction. I like the way that I can provide really good content. I’m getting better at the sales part of the end. I’m just really honest to people and say, “I’m going to show you a program at the end.” Recently, I had a webinar where our internet just went right down in the middle of it. I was like, “Here we go. I’m just going to watch people leave.” They could still see my slides but not me. It was GoToWebinar. I don’t know what happened. They all still stayed. I had over 100 people stay on saying, “We like the slides.”

I just like that interaction with people. It has been successful. I’m getting better at them. I’m not an expert by any means. Due to Amy’s course, we learned a whole lot more when we’re doing the promotion. There can be a great way to connect with people, provide value, and hopefully sell some programs. It has been my main way of selling programs. I have an evergreen program as well. The thing is that I’d love to do more of them and more regularly, I think. I think that there are good options if you want to connect better with your community. I know you’ve done it too.

Darren: Yeah. We’ve put pause on a while. I’ve got the podcast up and running. I think there’s something missing. The podcast is very intimate, very personal, but it’s not interactive. The thing I love about the webinar purely as an engagement tool, not even thinking about the selling, it’s obviously good for selling but we run them as part of the ProBlogger community when that was live last year.

Whilst I didn’t get a heap of attendance, that was one of the frustrations we had, the people who came felt like they had a conversation with you. I think that’s a great tool. I’m starting to see people do them now on Facebook live which gives you that interaction, but it doesn’t give you the email address which is probably important if you want to do a selling type of element to it as well.

Donna: Yeah. A friend of mine saw the other day online that you can now present from your screen […] technology. I think for closed groups, I’ve got a big Facebook group that’s got about two-and-a-half thousand people, that’s my free group and I’ve got member groups. Just to be able to do them in most groups is really valuable, not necessarily selling anything, but just to be able to check in and do those trainings I think is really beneficial.

Darren: Thanks so much. I just think this is a perfect end to this series. You’ve talked about creating blog posts using SlideShare to get the eyeballs, to generate interest. You’ve given us a great example of how to create a cheat sheet that gets the connection. Then you’ve taken us generously through your onboarding sequence which is still a work in progress as they all are for everyone. Then the webinar.

I guess in some ways, the webinar kind of neatly ends this series because we haven’t talked a whole heap about monetizing. We’ve taken people unaware of us to engage about how we sustain ourselves. Obviously, the webinar is one way to sell something either of their own or someone else’s. I really appreciate you taking us through that.

Have you got anything you wanted to say that you haven’t said yet that you want to leave for our readers?

Donna: Sure. There are a couple of things. One, I wish I had done all of these earlier. I procrastinated. Once you write the emails, it’s not that hard. You sit down and you write it. Then they go out to thousands of people in months and months. You can update them and edit them easily. It’s just a matter of sitting down and doing it. You can change them. It doesn’t have to be perfect. For me, learning to track things more. I’m just starting to use UTM tracking even just having this discussion with you, I was like, “Oh.” And just even going back and looking at some of this stuff like I wasn’t really consciously looking at my open rates and then I went, “Well, this has been really effective.

That would be my recommendation: learn how to track things better and focus on email subscribers, focus on loving them a little bit more. I probably have been guilty of neglecting them at times. They’re your best asset and the most valuable part of your whole business. I’m just very honored to have been asked to speak to you today. I think it’s been very enlightening for me as well.

Darren: Good. Sometimes, it’s being asked the questions just makes you, like going back to some of those stats that we recently went back through all of our email lists, worked out which email list generated the most sales, and put a value on each of the people on each of the list. It was fascinating. We had this list that was highly profitable and lists that were not profitable at all. Just doing those simple exercises can be really profound. Maybe we should interview every one of our readers just to make them go back and look at their stats.

Donna: I know. It’s been interesting. Even just listening to the first episode or two, I had so many ideas. You can never stop learning.

Darren: I’m sure you’ve given our listeners many ideas today. Where can people find you? We will be linking to you in the show notes but let us know where can we find you? What do you have that could benefit them?

Donna: You’ve already given the cheat sheets. Obviously, they can just sign up anywhere on my website at sociallysorted.com.au. I’ve got various side bars and opt-ins to join the newsletters and they’ll get the sequence. I just do an insider update every week or so with a new tool, a new tip, and a latest blog post. It’s fairly actionable. I also have a video series which is pretty packed with content and it’s helpful. That’s at sociallysorted.com.au/training. That’s a three-part video series all about creating visual content even if you’re not a designer.

Darren: That’s what I love about what you do. It’s all stuff that even I can do. It’s visual content. Your Facebook group is great as well. They should be joining that for sure.

Donna: If you just Google “visual content creators” that’s the best way to find it but it’s groups/videocontentcreators. I consider myself a crash test dummy for visual content. In that group, it’s just people that are very, very, supportive. We have an engaging post every day. We have a challenge every now and then to create visuals. It’s quite a great group. There’s a lot of valuable information there.

Darren: Yeah. It’s one of the better groups that I’m in. […] these days, but I definitely think it’s one of the better ones.

Donna: Yeah. It’s good fun.

Darren: Great.

Donna: Thank you very much.

Darren: Thanks, Donna. I really appreciate you joining us today. We will include all those links in today’s show notes. Thanks so much.

Donna: Thanks. I appreciate it. Have a great day.

Darren: You too.

I hope you enjoyed today’s podcast as much as I enjoyed creating it. I picked up a few things even as I was talking to Donna that I’m going to give a go myself. Particularly, the next time I do an affiliate promotion, I think the sequence that she just presented for us really would work very well for an affiliate promotion or a launch of your own products. I hope it’s helpful for you.

You can find today’s show notes over at problogger.com/podcast/117 where we will link to all of today’s links mentioned to the blog post, to the SlideShare. We may even embed that SlideShare into those show notes so you can see it there, and also all of Donna’s link and her resources she’s got for you.

Thanks so much for listening. I appreciate you listening particularly through this miniseries that we’ve been working through. I look forward to chatting with you in episode 118. To make sure you get it, please do subscribe to us over on iTunes or Stitcher or subscribe to the ProBlogger plus newsletter which will be linked to today’s show as well. Thanks for listening. I’ll chat with you soon.

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Welcome to episode 116. I am working through a series that helps you to warm your blog readers up.

 In episode 112, I introduced the four stages of warming your readers up. In episode 113, I talk about how to get the first eyeball to your blog. In episode 114, I talk about getting people to give your blog a second look and become interested. In episode 115, I talk about how to get readers to subscribe and connect with you. This is crucial for building an ongoing relationship with your audience.

Today, I am talking about the final step which is getting engagement.

In the process of getting readers warmed up, we have people who subscribe, but they often never actually comment or connect or engage with us. Today, I will be giving strategies for getting our readers to talk back to us.

Next week, In episode 117, I will be going over a case study that pulls together all four stages, and I will be interviewing somebody who has developed a system for taking people from becoming aware to becoming fully engaged.

Let us know what you thought about today’s show. Leave a message or a comment.

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Today, in 116, I want to talk about how to get engagement. This is the final step in this particular process of getting people warmed up. Many times, we have readers who are subscribed or they’re connected to us on a social network but they never comment. They never actually retweet, they ever share. They never engage with us. We all know a relationship is really a two-sided thing. We’re talking a lot as bloggers but how do we get our readers to talk back to us? That’s what I wanted to get into in today’s episode and I’m going to give you some strategies for doing just that.

I do have one more podcast in this particular series to come. In episode 117, we’re going to do a case study, which pulls together these four different stages and I’m going to interview someone who has developed a bit of a system to take people from becoming aware, through to becoming fully engaged. If you want to get that one, you need to subscribe, either to our newsletter, ProBlogger Plus on today’s show notes at problogger.com/podcast/116, or you can subscribe to us on iTunes, or your favorite podcast listening network. Let’s get into today’s show.

Today, we’re talking about getting engagement with our readers, Readers, hopefully by now, have eyeballed us for the first time, they’ve become a little bit interested in what we’re doing, they’ve been compelled to subscribe to our list and maybe even connected with us on social media, but they’re passive, they’re lurking.

This is a major frustration for many of us as bloggers. I was, just literally five minutes ago, looking in my AWeber email system, looking at the amount of people who open emails and it’s a minority of people. This is the case for most people who send emails. I was just looking at my Facebook page and thinking, “You know, I just put that Facebook post up,” and of course Facebook filters how many people see that. Even the people who see it, so few of them comment, like, or share.

How do we get people to engage with us? How do we get them to participate with us? How are we going to get them out of passivity, out of lurking, to fully contributing to our site? That’s what I want to talk about today, I want to give you some strategies for doing that.

Before I give you some strategies though, I want to give you an overarching principle that I really do believe in. We need to be the community that we want to have. If we want engagement, we need to be engaging and this is a big challenge to us all as bloggers. Now, I know some of you, this community, this engagement just oozes out of you. I can think as I’m speaking to you right now, there are a few bloggers who just breathe into this. My wife’s pretty good at this. She responds to every comment. She sees every person who engages with her on Instagram and is commenting backing going and liking their pages. She just loves these kind of engagements.

Whereas, others of us, this is a bit of an area of struggle. We need to realize that if we want people to engage with us we need to engage with them. We need to be engaging. We need to be the community that we want to have and that is a commitment. That’s a mind shift that’s something that we need to commit to doing. As I look back over the years of my own blogs, there’s been times where I’ve been really good at this and has been other times where this has been lacking and my blogs have suffered as a result of me not engaging as much as I could have.

It is a big thing that we need to commit to. Are you willing to be engaging? Are you willing to be the community that you want to have? Hopefully, the answer is yes, because if it’s not, some of the strategies I’m going to give you aren’t going to really take you so far. Be the community you want to have.

The first thing I want to talk about strategically is about helping you readers to get on board. There is this thing called onboarding. Some of you will have heard of it, some of you will have already done some onboarding of your readers. If you imagine a train conductor helping people on board the train, you can help your readers to get on board your blog. This is particularly relevant if you have an email list.

We talked in the last episode (episode 115) about how to get people onto your list. It’s so important to have that email list that you list is the thing that you control, but how do you get people on board what you’re trying to build through that email list? One of the best things that you can do with an email list is to set up an auto-responder that helps your readers to get on board what you are trying to achieve with your blog.

Now, I talked more in depth about auto-responders back in episode 70 and I would encourage you to go back and listen to that particular one because auto-responders can be used in a number of ways to build traffic to your blog, to sell your products, but most importantly for this particular episode, they can be really useful to help you to get your readers on board and to become engaged with what you are on about.

I would give you an example of someone who I think or couple people who I think use an auto-responder really well and it’s a very simple auto-responder sequence, but it’s one that I think is very effective and it comes from Caz and Craig Makepeace at yTravel.

I used Caz and Craig a few episodes ago to show you their start here page, which (I think) is a really great example of a start here page, but you can also sign-up for their email newsletter and you will see this great little email sequence that they send out, set-up through an autoresponder. 

Now, the best way for you to experience that is to sign-up and it’s a great newsletter to sign up for, particularly if you’re interested in traveling as a family. Just really briefly, I want to point out a couple things in the first few emails that they send. The first email that they send, particularly thanks you for joining their email list. It talks a little bit about what the email will be used for. It begins to set some expectations of when emails will be sent, so it says, “Every Wednesday you’ll receive an email with a personal inspiring message.”

It gets people looking forward to when those emails will come. It encourages people to add their email address to the address list to help with deliver ability of the emails. It gives people a free audio download, so there’s some generosity there and this is part of how they get people to sign-up, it’s an opt-in, as we talked about in our last episode. Opt-ins are really a great way to get people subscribing, so they deliver that opt-in.

Then, they signal forward, that build some anticipation that they’ll not only get that opt-in but there’s something else coming in a future email, in a couple emails’ time, so they’re building at a bit of anticipation there.

What I love about the first email that Caz and Craig send is that they invite their readers to reply. Now, this is a big call. If you are getting a lot of subscribers and you’re asking readers to reply to you, that’s going to increase some workload for you. Caz and Craig have got this little invitation to reply and to introduce yourself if you’re a subscriber.

This is how it reads, it says, “Reply now and introduce yourself. Tell us what is your travel dream, why travel a priority for you and what is the biggest obstacle in your way right now? How can we help?” This is an invitation to a relationship and I love the fact that the very first email that anyone ever sees from Caz and Craig has this section, inviting people to introduce themselves, which is the start of any relationship, but not only that, the three questions that they ask get their readers to tap into their dreams.

Remember, we talked about dreams a few episodes ago, where I suggested the exercise of brainstorming, what you readers achievements, their gains that they want would be. Caz and Craig are actually asking the readers to tell them about the things that they want to achieve.

The second question is getting their readers to tell them about the priority, why travel is a priority to them. Again, this is an aspirational thing. This is helping them not only to start a conversation with their readers, but it’s also really useful information about their readers.

The last question they ask is, “What’s the biggest obstacle in your way of travel right now?” and these taps into the pain, the obstacles, the problems of their readers.

I love this approach. One, it invites a conversation and people do reply to this email every day, Caz tells me she gets a lot of emails, but number two, it gives Caz and Craig a lot of really great information about the aspirations of their Readers and the pain and the obstacles of their readers, which is going to help them to serve those readers even better to create content that helps them a lot.

I think this is just a brilliant technique to use in the first email that you send it’s going to help your readers to become engaged and that’s what these particular email is all about. Email number two in the email sequence is, again, has some of the same types of things, there’s a bit of generosity there, they remind their readers of the free audio that they’ve sent.

Then, they talk about how they’re going to help their readers to make travel part of their life. Here, they’re promising. They’re making a promise of the gain here. Then, they go into trying to get that reader back again and they suggest three links that they should read. These three links really closely relate to the pain of their readers and the gains that they want to have.

They’re trying to get people back to the site and this is about getting them to come back again to become re-engaged, which is again is really important. It’s one thing to get people to your site the first time, it’s really important that you get them back there within a day or two of them being there. This reinforces your brand to get some used to showing up on your site.

Ideally for fully warmed-up reader, you want them to be hitting your site at least once a week, if not more regularly than that. You’ve got to train those subscribers that you’ve got to come back again and to realize that there’s fresh content happening again and again. They point out that there’s some useful stuff on their site.

Again, at the end of all this particular email (the second email in the sequence), they have another invitation to reply. It’s a PS, it says, “P.S. Don’t forget to reply to our emails at any time to tell us any content you feel is missing on our site that you like us to write about.” There’s this encouragement to reply again going on there.

The third email, similar type of thing, but the third email (I think) is really great because it taps into the pain of their readers. Here’s what they write in the middle of that third email, “We’ve discovered that there are five reasons why you won’t travel,” and I reckon they got those five reasons why people don’t want to travel from the first email where they ask their readers to tell them why they don’t travel.

Their readers have already told them, “This is why I don’t travel,” and now they’re presenting them with this series of blog posts to help people to overcome these barriers. They say, “We’ve discovered there are five main reasons why you won’t travel. We wrote a series of posts to help you to discover ways to overcome these barriers.”

In the first email, they ask them what are your obstacles, then in their third email, they give pain relief and they suggest three articles that will help you to overcome the things you’ve probably already told us about in email number one.

Again, this is about getting people back to the site, but they’re getting people back to the site to get those quick wins that we’re talking about a few episodes ago, to have a fist pump moment, to remove a barrier, to help relieve pain. I love these email sequences and I highly recommend that you go and sign up for it, particularly if you’re interested in travel, but just to learn from Caz and Craig as well.

Now, I’m going to give you, in the next episode, another case study of someone else who’s done a very similar type of thing and we’ll walk through that. I really would encourage you to think carefully about those first emails that you send. There are some things that you want to do in those first emails to get your readers on board, to train them to come back to your site, to get them to some of that fist pump content that’s going to bring about a quick win and to invite a relationship, to signal to your readers that you are interested in engaging with them, that you want them to talk to you rather than just consume the content that you’re creating.

Work out what it is that you want to achieve with your readers. What’s the ideal? Do you want an engaging relationship? Then signal that you readers in those first few emails, by getting them used to coming back to your site. It’s important, you want to reinforce your brand, you want to reinforce that you are a helpful destination.

Another strategy that you can use to get fully engaged readers is to create (as a part of your regular production of content) engaging content. Now, this can come through in pretty much every post you write, simply by asking a question at the end of every post, asking for engagement, but you can also create blog posts and content for your blog that is all about engagement.

A very simple way to do this is to have a discussion post. Instead of writing a post where you share information, you have a blog post that is centered around a question and you do not give the answer to that question, you ask your readers what the answer is for them. You get them to share this story or their opinion or their experience or an example of something that they would bring to that particular discussion.

An example of this, very early on in Digital Photography School, I got a question from a reader that I simply couldn’t answer. It was, “How do I photograph a funeral?” this reader had been asked to photograph a funeral which sounds very morbid, but they had family members who weren’t able to be at that particular funeral and so she’d been asked to photograph the funeral and that was a daunting thing for her, so she emailed me. I’ve never done that. I didn’t know the answer to it, but I decided to write a post about the question and I opened it up for my readers to give their thoughts on this particular question.

This is one of the first times I ever did a reader discussion post on Digital Photography School and it worked really well. We had an amazing discussion. Some really helpful readers came on who’d had experience in that or at least who had suggestions and it showed me the power of opening a discussion in your readership.

That is one example of a post that might help to get a discussion going. It might start to get that engagement, but it goes beyond getting a comment and actually shows your readers that you’re willing to help solve their problems as well by actually making it a reader question, rather than just a random question. It showed my other readers that I was interested in helping them. That particular discussion post stimulated a whole heap of other readers sending me their questions as well, and so it became a bit of an ongoing series of discussions that we had.

Another simple thing that we do on Digital Photography School on a weekly basis is to issue our readers a challenge. We name a theme for the week and say, “Go take a photo on this particular theme.” I used to do this on ProBlogger as well. We used to do these writing challenges where I would say, “Everyone write a list post or everyone write an opinion post, and everyone would go, “Why?” and then I would share a link to their post. There’s different ways of getting that type of engagement.

Another thing you can do is to run polls. Put together a survey, but don’t just collect the information from your readers, share it back to your readers. What we often do after we’ve run a poll is we will present the results in a further blog post which shows our readers that we have not only got their information, we’ve not only got their opinion or their experience in the poll, but we’re willing to feed that back to them and interpret that for them. There’s a whole heap of different ways that you can create content that is about engagement and belonging.

On Digital Photography School, we publish 14 posts per week. Two of those posts are usually about engagement. They’re usually about belonging. They’re a challenge, they’re a poll, they’re a discussion of some type. They’re an opinion piece that invites discussion as well. About 10 of our posts per week of what I would call fist pump content, which is what we talked about back in episode 130, these are the useful quick win type pieces of content. The other two pieces of content every week are more shareable types of content.

You can see here what I’ve built in our editorial strategy is we actually build into it every week, content that’s going to get the eyeball, that’s going to take people from giving us their attention to get them more interested (episode 13), and then content that’s going to get engagement. This whole process that I’ve been talking about over the last few episodes, we’ve tried to build into our editorial calendar. I would encourage you to look at the type of content that you’re producing on your blog and to ask yourself the question, “Are you focusing on just one of these areas?”

I know a lot of bloggers who just produce eyeball content. They’re just trying to get attention, but they don’t actually produce the quick wins, or they only produce the engagement. If you seriously want to take your readers on a journey through becoming aware of you, to becoming interested, to becoming subscribed, and then to becoming engaged, you need to create content that takes your readers through that journey on your blog, but also in your social media as well.

Let me also emphasize here again the effectiveness of using personal mediums in this. I’ve touched on this in the series already but one of the beauties I think of using live streaming is that it’s a very engaging experience. Literally 10 minutes before this podcast was recorded, I was on a Facebook live video on my Facebook page. I had 30-40 people ask a question or leave a comment on that. I know from past experience that the people who left a comment on those live streams are much more likely to leave a comment on my blog as well.

There’s something about engaging with someone in a live kind of way using Blab, or Facebook live, or Periscope, or any of these live tools. There’s something about those live interactions that stimulate a lasting engagement with people. Do consider using those. Blab (I think) is a particularly useful way of doing this. It puts you into a real conversations with people. They’re not just typing engagements, they’re actually appearing on the screen with you as well, so you might want to check out Blab for that. I’ll put a link in today’s show notes to a podcast where I talked about Blab as well.

Another thing I encourage you to think about with getting engagement from your readers (and I’ve touched on this one already) is that it’s really important to not only have engagement between you and your reader. It’s not just a one-way or a two-way thing. It’s not just about you and your reader individually. It’s about you and your readers, and your readers and each other. You want to introduce your readers to one another.

I’ve already talked about this in that funeral discussion post. That wasn’t a discussion between me and a reader. That wasn’t me putting a post and a reader commenting and then me commenting on theirs, and that was the only interaction. By having that discussion post, my readers got to know one another. I think this is a really powerful thing. If you can not only make your readers feel like they know you and you know them, but that they know some of your other readers, that’s when the community really takes off. I’ve seen this happen on the number of my blogs to the point where sometimes, I wonder whether my readers like each other more than they like me. That can come to be a little bit weird, but that’s a very powerful thing.

You want to let your readers meet one another and there’s a number of ways that you can do that. Using some of these live streaming tools is one of the ways. I have noticed when I live stream that sometimes my readers leave comments for each other more than they do for me, which again can be a bit disconcerting, but I think it’s a really great thing when they’re answering each other’s questions even before I can answer them in the chat. That’s pretty cool.

Using Twitter chat is another way to do this, having a Twitter hashtag party. I found, we’ve done this a number of times with ProBlogger readers and it’s great. Your readers get a chance to interact with me and you as a blogger, but they also get to see who else is reading ProBlogger, and they get to engage with one another.

There’s also something to be said for real life events and I’ve run a number of tweet ups over the years, and meet ups when I travel in different cities, and having readers come together in those type of meet ups can be very powerful as well.

Certainly running our annual events here in Australia every year. The relationships that form in that event are amazing. I know that strengthens my brand as well, because they met at ProBlogger, these new best friends, or these new people who collaborate with one another. Try and build that into your strategy as well. It’s not just about you knowing all your readers, and them all engaging with you, if you can build in some interaction between your readership, that’s very powerful as well.

One last strategy I want to give you on building engagement with your readers is to use what I call content events. Many of you will remember back in 2005 (long-time readers I guess), I ran a series of blog posts called 31 Days to Build a Better Blog and it was the first time I’d ever done a series of blog posts that went for longer than a week. I announced that I was doing this at the start of a month and I noticed—I’ve told this story many times—that got a lot of subscribers to my blog. It was about building anticipation which is what I talked about in episode 115.

The other thing that happens when I did that first 31 Days to Build a Better Blog is that engagement levels went through the roof as well over that particular month. It was partly because everyone of these 31 blog posts that I wrote was an invitation to do something and to share something. For those of you who are unfamiliar with it, everyday people would get a little bit of teaching and then an activity that they could do on their blog. Then, there was an invitation to come back and share what they did.

I think day one was create and […] for your blog. There was another one, write a list post for your blog. People would go away and do these activities, which helped them to implement the teaching I’ve given them, but then they came back and shared the link to what they’ve done, and readers began to engage with one another.

Number one, people were sharing a comment, giving the example of what they did, but then they began to see what other people were doing, and that grew the community as readers began to engage with one another. I did this series three years in a row, turned it into an ebook. Every time I did this event, this month-long event of content, subscriber numbers went up, which was great, but engagement went up as well, and it brought a lot of life into my blog.

What I realized is that by turning content into an event for a defined period of time is a very powerful thing. It generated a lot of traffic, but it built a lot of stickiness on the side. It brought people back again and again every day. This is all part of this whole getting your readers onboard. It’s about training them to show up regularly. It’s about training them to engage with you regularly. It’s about training them to take notice of other people on your site. If you can build an event into your content strategy, then that’s a very powerful thing. There’s something about an event that people respond very well to.

I guess there’s a bit of fear of missing out going on there (FOMO), people would see an event happening, they want to be a part of it, but it’s also something about having a defined start and end that I think people like as well. When you say, “My blog is about this topic,” and it will go on for the next 10 years, there’s no end point there, but if you say, “For this next week, we are going to explore this,” or “We are going to do this together for the next month.” People can take that on. They’re willing to join up for that type of thing rather than just an event that’s just going to go on forever. So, maybe try and build some events into your strategy as well.

I’ve used the example of Vanessa (my wife) numerous times in the past as someone who does little events. She runs events on Instagram every two to three months. Little events where every day for a week, she will nominate a color, a type of print, or a type of fabric that she gets her readers to wear. She’s a fashion blogger, style blogger, and she gets her readers to show a photo of themselves wearing that color or that print everyday for a week and then hashtag their photo.

Every week I see when she does this, traffic goes up, she gets more Instagram likers, and engagement goes through the roof. The first time she did it, I think she had 10 people participate on the first day and on the last day, she had 100. That happened in a week. That kind of engagement level grew. Every time she does it, it grows.

Another really great example of this is someone who does them every couple of months who’s Dan Norris. Dan many of you will be familiar with, he has a blog called WP Curve. He also has written a great book called 7-day Startup. I interviewed Dan a few months ago on the podcast as well.

Dan does 7-day Startup challenges where he creates content every day for seven days, invites people to consume that content through a Facebook group. So you join up, you join his Facebook group, he gives you a piece of content every day (I think the last time he did it, there were live videos using Facebook live), and then he gets his readers to do something, or participants to do something every day for seven days.

By the end of the week, they need to launch something. There’s this intense period of work. This group of people work with one another for seven days, intense period of work to launch something, so there’s an app come at the end. Then at the end of that period, he offers people who joined that Facebook group the opportunity to join his paid program which is an ongoing program for people who are starting things. This is just really great, it’s very simple.

It does take him a lot of work for that particular week, but it’s a very simple way to get people from lurking from passive, who might be aware of his brand, who might be even interested in his brand. He actually takes them through the 7-day process to the point where they’re very engaged with him, and they’re actually buying from him as well in many cases by signing up for his membership site. It’s just another example that you might want to check out.

These are the strategies I’ve got for you today on warming up your readers in this last stage of getting them to engagement. Let me recap. Be the community that you want to have. If you want engagement, be engaging. Number two, help your readers get onboard and design a simple autoresponder sequence that trains people to come back to your site, that gives people quick wins, and that invites relationships. Create content that is stimulating engagement and gives people a sense of belonging. Use personal mediums like video live streaming, in particular. Introduce your readers to one another, let them meet each other. Lastly, use content events.

I’m going to summarize all of that over on today’s show notes at problogger.com/podcast/116. If you haven’t already listened to the last four episodes in this series, I highly encourage you to go back and listen to them. They start at episode 112 and work through up until 113, 114, 115, and now 116.

In the next episode, I’m going to give you a case study of someone who has pretty much implemented all of the strategies that I’ve been talking about and it’s a real life example. You’ll actually see how readers flow from becoming aware of her particular brand, to becoming fully engaged, and becoming buyers of her product. Really step-by-step, we’re going to walk through the system that this particular blogger has built to take readers through that. If you want to get that particular episode please do make sure you subscribe to our newsletter which you’ll find on today’s show notes, or subscribe to us on iTunes.

Thanks so much for listening. If you’ve got a comment you’d like to leave, there’s always the opportunity to do so on our show notes. There’s also an opportunity for you to ask a question using the green audio voice recording button and you might just hear yourself in a future episode of the ProBlogger podcast. Thanks for listening, everyone, and we’ll chat with you in a couple of days time.

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Welcome to episode 115. Today we are continuing our series on warming up your readers.

This series began in episode 112 where I presented 4 stages of warming your readers up. Taking them from being completely unaware of you and your blog to taking them to becoming highly engaged readers.

In episode 113, I talk about getting the first eyeball on your blog. Getting the visitor to your blog for the first time, and I talk about some practical techniques to do that.

In episode 114, I talk about how to get people to take a second look and become interested in your blog. I gave some techniques for getting readers to pause and take that second look.

Today I am talking about building a connection with your readers. Even when you get that first eyeball or a second look, chances are, they will leave your site and never return. Today I am giving some practical tips on how to get them to subscribe or give you permission to connect with them again.

We love to learn from you. Let us know what you have done to connect with your readers and get them to subscribe.

Never miss an episode – Subscribe to the ProBlogger podcast on iTunes

In episode 113, I talked about getting your first eyeball; getting that visitor to your blog for the first time, and I gave you some practical techniques to get that first eyeball. In the last episode, 114, I talked about how to get people to not just give you their eyeball but to have a second look, to become interested in what you’re on about, to take that second look to pause, and really look at what you’re on about. Again, I gave you some techniques on that.

Today, I want to talk about building connection with your readers. This is so important because even when people do give you that first eyeball and they even take a second look and become interested in what you do, the chances are that they’re going to leave your blog and never return. Today, I want to give you some really practical tips on how to get them to come back again, to subscribe, to connect with you, and give you permission to contact them again, to get them back to your blog.

Today’s podcast episode is brought to you by the ProBlogger Event. You can find more information on this particular event which we’re holding on the 9th and 10th of September at probloggerevents.com. We put together two days of amazing training for bloggers, both Australian bloggers where we’re holding event, but also bloggers who are willing to fly in from around the world, and those who want to attend virtually. We’ll have more information on that virtual ticket in the months ahead. Let’s get into today’s show where you can find today show notes at problogger.com/podcast/115.

Today is all about getting a connection with your readers. To this point in our series, we’ve talked about getting the eyeball, getting people to your blog for the first time, getting people surfing around and looking a little deeper into your blog, getting the right content in front of them to make them think, “Yeah. This is relevant for me.” Now, that all is really important and it can happen pretty quickly but the reality is—as I look at my blog stats and as I look at the stats of other bloggers—that most people who come to our blog for the first time don’t ever come back again.

I don’t know about your Google Analytics but sometimes that stats of how many people bounce away from my blog without actually doing anything else, gets a little bit depressing. Many bloggers come to me with that particular feeling of being stressed out that so many people come but no one ever comes back again. We don’t get the subscriber; we don’t get the follower in our social media accounts.

Today, I want to talk to you about how to actually take your reader to that next level. Not only get their eyeball, not only how do you get their interest, but how do you get them to actually connect with you? How do you get that subscribe? There’s a number of things that I can say and I’m going to give you some further reading in today’s show notes as well because this is a massive topic.

The number one thing I would say is that, you need to think really carefully about where you want them to connect with you. There’s no one answer to this question, but I do believe in most cases, the best place to get the connection, to get the subscribe to your readers is email. I know some people are going to probably disagree on that one, but for me, it’s been the case in both of my blogs. Getting the email address is certainly being the most effective for us and most bloggers that I talked to, it’s also the case.

For us, email drives most of our traffic to our blog and also drives most of the sales to our products. It is the place where our most loyal readers come to us from. Getting the email is just so important. Social media is definitely important but for me, it’s secondary. It’s too risky in my mind to build my primary point of connection with my readers on a Facebook page, or on a Instagram page, or on an Pinterest account, or on a LinkedIn account. Those places can be useful, you can certainly build engagement with your readers there but the problem with all of those places is that you don’t control them.

Even in the last couple of weeks on Facebook, we’re seeing Facebook changing the rules again for pages, influences. I’ve seen a whole heap of bloggers over the couple of weeks realize that the Facebook changing the rules really has decreased the effectiveness of them reaching their readers. Use those places but use them as a secondary point of connection. Grab the email address, if you can, of those first-time readers on your blog. That’s what I’m going to put most of my attention to today—in talking about how to build this connection with your readers—email is just so important.

There’s a whole hip of techniques that we can use to get people’s email addresses. I’m going to go over a few and then give you some further reading so you can dig into each of these. The most obvious way to get the email address of your reader is to have prominent calls to action on your blog. You can do this in a variety of ways and at the very least you want to have in your side bar some kind of subscribe form or a call to action to subscribe. At the very least, that’s what you want. That’s the bare minimum. It’s not the best way to get an email address but it should be there, at least in your navigation somewhere or in your sidebar, very important to do that. That’s the bare minimum.

On top of that, I highly recommend that you think about some other ways to get your reader’s email address. Some of the ways I’m going to suggest may cause a little bit of controversy because I know some people do not like anything that interrupts the experience of a reader. Some of the ways that you can increase the chances of getting the subscribe are a little bit more aggressive, they do interrupt the experience of your readers, but I want to put them out there anyway because they’ve worked very well for us. I think you can do them in some fairly elegant ways, some ways that, hopefully, don’t put your readers off too much.

Certainly, the most effective ways for me have been about using pop ups or welcome mats. I’m going to give you some further listening to do on this in episode 68 of the ProBlogger podcast. I’ll link to it in today’s show notes, but you can go back and listen to episode 68. I talk about the importance of email, but I also talk about how we view pop ups and welcome mats on ProBlogger and Digital Photography School.

The first time I started using a pop up on Digital Photography School, it increased our subscriber numbers tenfold, tenfold. You heard me correctly. We went from, I think, 40 or 50 email subscribers a day to well over 500. It just blew my mind. As I share in that episode, it didn’t decrease the engagement we got from our readers, we didn’t see a whole heap of our readers abandoning our site, we didn’t see our bounce rate go up, those things did not change as we added the pop ups.

Yes, you’re probably going to annoy some of your readers by using these techniques but the vast majority will either shut that pop up window and never see it again unless you continue to bombard them with it—and I don’t encourage you to do that—or they’ll subscribe and a significant proportion of them will subscribe and then you’ve got the email address.

As I just mentioned there, I would encourage you not to show that pop up over and over and over again on every page load. We ask our readers once, you see the pop up once and then, unless you’re blocking cookies which most people don’t, you don’t see that call to action again. Most people do subscribe in that first one anyway. So, don’t bombard them over and over again but that helped a lot.

We use Aweber to deliver our pop ups. When I first started using them, there are some more elegant solutions today. One of the ones that we use, and I do talk about it in episode 68 is SumoMe’s welcome mat. We also see a great solution from OptinMonster who have a welcome mat as well. The welcome mat is where you see the whole screen slides down and that the whole screen is taken over by the pop up. That may seem a little over the top, but it actually is a more elegant solution, I think.

It doubled our email subscribers again. You’re looking twentyfold, pretty much improvements there. But you can dig into episode 68 in a lot more depth, I talked a little bit more about the type of welcome mats that we use as well. They definitely are the best way that I have ever seen to get a subscriber to your list. The other thing I would encourage you to think about to add on top of your pop ups already use, even if you just need to add in your sidebar.

If you don’t like the pop ups, you don’t like the welcome mats, that’s totally fine. But even in your sidebar, another way that you can increase your subscriber numbers is to use a lead magnet or other people might call this a content upgrade or an opt-in. This is something that you will be very familiar with, I know many readers already have these, but I want to suggest some ways that you can increase the chances of your lead magnet converting.

The first thing I’ll say is I talked in more depth about lead magnets in episode 69. This is part of a series I did—episode 68 introduced email and talk about the welcome mats; episode 69, talk about lead magnets. I’m not going into great depth on that except to say that one of the things that I’ve noticed over the last couple of years with the lead magnets is a real move amongst some of the cutting-edge bloggers away from just having one opt-in or one lead magnet on your side.

Most bloggers, this is what they do. They create an opt-in, so the opt-in might be, “Give us your email address and we’ll give you this free ebook,” or, “Give you this list of resources. We’ll give you this checklist. We’ll give you…” whatever it is that you’re giving away and that works. You put it on your sidebar, you might put it in your pop up, you might link to it on your About page and that will work, it will increase the subscriber numbers that you have.

What we’ve seen over the last few years, a lot of bloggers are moving away from just having one opt-in that appears on every page on their site to having multiple opt-ins. People are showing a different invitation depending upon where they are on your site. The easiest way to do this is to create an opt-in or a lead magnet for each of the main categories of your blog.

Let’s take ProBlogger for instance. ProBlogger has a number of categories. I introduced to you our eight new portals in the last episode. We have these eight main areas on ProBlogger. We have one on starting a blog, we have one on finding readers for your blog, we have one for creating great content on your blog. These three topics was there, all are to do with having a profitable blog, they’re quite diverse. Someone on our blog looking for information on finding new readers for the blog has a different set of things on their mind than those on the blog looking to start a blog or looking to learn about creating great content. It’s hard to find that opt-in or a lead magnet that relates all of those different categories.

What I would encourage you to think about is to move towards developing a little library of opt-ins that relate to each of your main categories on the blog. That way you can have an opt-in that relates to all the content on your blog depending on where readers are. It’s pretty easy using WordPress to show a different opt-in to people depending on what category of content they are viewing at the time on your blog.

The bloggers that I’ve seen introduce this type of approach—and this is what we’re rolling at the moment on ProBlogger—tell me that they are seeing significantly increased subscriber numbers using opt-ins. Again, you would be on a blog viewing a piece of content that relates to an opt-in, you’re much more likely to subscribe to that call to action, one that’s just a generic one on your blog. So, this does take more work; this is going to take you time to implement, it’s going to take you perhaps a little bit more technological know-how to get those different opt-ins showing different paths of the site, but it’s worth it because you’re going to increase the chance of someone subscribing.

You can take this to the next level as well. A lot of bloggers are now starting to do in creating content upgrade. This is where you create an opt-in or a lead magnet for a specific piece of content on your blog. Instead of having a different maybe eight opt-ins for eight categories, you begin to develop a whole heap more of opt-ins that relate to specific pieces of content on your blog.

Again, this really takes things to the next level in terms of showing people on opt-in that’s highly relevant for a piece of content that they’re viewing but it also means a lot more work for you as the blogger. You may not want to go down this track for all of your content, but certainly, I think, it’s a very well worth doing if you have a hot post in your archives. I’ll touch on that in a minute.

Let me give you a few examples of what you can do to create content specific opt-ins. I’ll give you a few examples and I’ll link to this in today’s show notes. The first example is from Amy Porterfield. Amy is going to be familiar to many listeners of this podcast. She runs a great blog on Facebook, also other aspects of Internet marketing. She has an amazing podcast as well which you should check out. I’ll link to a specific episode in her podcast series where she interviewed me.

I’m not going to link to it because I think it’s a great episode although I really did enjoyed her chat; I want to link to her show notes for that particular episode because in those show notes, she has a content specific upgrade. She actually asked me before she interviewed me whether she can pull together some of my best articles from ProBlogger into a PDF and then add some of her own thoughts into that.

You can download, from that show note, a whole heap of articles that I’ve written, as well as some of her thoughts that relate to the interview that she did with me. That is behind an opt-in form, to get that PDF, you need to subscribe to her list, which I encourage you to do, she’s got a great list. The thing I really want you to see here is that little opt-in that she created for that episode of the podcast is not available anywhere else, that’s the only place. This is one example of an opt-in that you could do if you’re interviewing someone, for example, on your blog or on your podcast.

Another example of a content specific upgrade that is perhaps a little easier to do in some ways is to do what Ian Cleary from RazorSocial does over on his blog. He’s got a great blog about social media tools, Razor Social. Again, I’ll link to it in today’s show notes. You’ll notice that every blog posts that Ian writes, he has this little call to action that read something like, “Don’t have time to read these posts now? Download a PDF version of it to read later.”

He has created for every blog post that he writes a PDF version of that exact same blog post. In fact, I think, his wife actually creates all these little PDFs for him and then he puts those PDFs behind an opt-in form. If you want to get a downloadable version of any blog post that he writes, you can add your email address and he’ll send it to you and then you’re added to his email list, you’re on his list. There is a good way to do it because you don’t have to come up with a new something to give away from every blog post. You just build in to your workflow of creating a blog post the additional work of creating a PDF version of it and then you can upload it and you can give that away. That’s another alternative.

Last example that I’ll give you is Jill from Screw the Nine to Five. It’s a blog site about quitting your corporate job then building your own business. Great blog, amazing community. I’ll give you a couple of links in today’s show notes to blog post that Jill has published. The first one is a blog post called How to Start and Grow a Facebook Group for your Business. It’s a great post about using Facebook groups, so if nothing else, you’re getting a good basic content there, but you’ll see in that post that Jill has an opt-in there.

She’s giving away a checklist for people who want to start a Facebook group. The blog post is about starting a Facebook group and then she gives away a checklist. It’s not the longest piece of content. That checklist is almost like a summary of the content that she’s giving away in the blog, but it’s specifically relates to the blog post there.

Another example I’ll give you from Jill’s blog is that she wrote a great post about how to create to the blog post there about How to Create A Dangerously Effective Automated Sales Funnel. A bit of a mouthful there but a really great post about sales funnels, and then in the post, she offers a swipe file of all her own emails that she uses as part of her sales funnel. She’s talking about sales funnels and then she gives away all the emails and talks about that in the post, but also has graphics, Steal My Emails, that she has there.

These opt-ins are probably also on other parts of her blog that relate to those pieces of content, but she’s created opt-ins specifically for pieces of content there. I hope you can see what I’m saying there is that you create a piece of content, a blog post, a podcast, whatever it might be and then you think about, “What could I add to these that I could put behind an opt-in form?”

Again, this takes a lot of work, you can see there. You’re not only creating a blog post but you’ve got to create something else to give away so you may not want to do this with every post you write. If you post daily, that’s a lot of work. I have seen a number of blogs recently decrease the amount of postings they’re doing a week so that they can create opt-ins for every single post.

The other thing you might want to consider doing is just creating opt-ins for certain posts. If you’re writing a mega post like an ultimately guide to a particular topic, you might want to create an opt-in for those type of posts that you think will get more traction or you might want to actually look at what post in your archives are already performing that you could be adding an opt-in to. This is where I would probably be starting if I was you.

Most bloggers that I talk to have at least one post in their archives that’s getting a whole heap of traffic either from search engine optimization or long-term search traffic from another big blog might be linking to or you might be getting a whole heap of traffic coming in from a social network. For example, Pinterest often sends a lot of traffic to a certain post. It’s not just for one day, it often lasts for quite some time or you might even be linking to a certain piece of content from one of your own social profiles and it’s just generating a lot of traffic over time.

If you’ve got a hot post in your archives, ask yourself the question, “Could I add a content upgrade to that particular post?” That’s probably going to pay off in the long term more than doing it on of your new post. Unless that new post that you’re writing about is something that you just know is going to generate a lot of traffic. That’s where I’d be starting with my content upgrades and we’re doing this at the moment with our own blogs. We’re identifying some of those really hot posts and trying to build a little bit of a library of opt-ins around some of those messages.

The good thing is that if you create an opt-in for that particular post, you may find that there are other posts in your archives or other new posts that you write that you could use that same opt-in for as well. It does take a lot of work in the short term but as you build that library of opt-ins, the work that you’re doing can be rolled out in different places.

The other place that I would encourage to think about putting these opt-ins is on any other key pages on your blog where first time viewers are landing. One thing that I really would encourage you to do is look into Google analytics data and do a bit of a search for the content that people who are first time visitors are landing on. You will see there that pages like your ‘Start Here’ page or your ‘About’ page are places that people are going to to find out information when they’re first time visitors to your blog.

There also maybe other key pages on your site that you’ve got in your navigation area or a hot post that maybe you highlight in your sidebar. That type of post is going to get more eyeballs on it, they’re great places to have opt-ins particularly if they relate specifically to why people are on that particular page.

The last thing I want to say about opt-ins and lead magnets—I have talked about these briefly in another podcast—is that I think if you can create an opt-in that has ongoing […] to it that will increase the chances, not only getting the initial subscribe, but it also increases the chances that people are going to stay subscribed. The example that we’re using on ProBlogger at the moment is an opt-in that we created to give bloggers ideas for content for their blog, so I created a six-month series of emails that we sent out. Once a month, you get 30 different ideas of content that you could be writing about on your particular blog. We’ve seen already that people are staying subscribed to our newsletter a little longer than they were when we didn’t have that ongoing series as part of our opt-in.

Again, I will give you a link to that particular example (one) you might be interested in subscribing to it if you do want ideas for blog post but (two) it’s just a good example of creating an opt-in that’s not just a one off opt-in. Go to problogger.net/ideas. You’ll see there that six months series of emails that we we’re willing to send to people as well.

That’s how I want to talk about in terms of opt-ins but there’s a number of other things that you can do to increase the chances of getting subscribers on your blog. One of the other things that I’ve noticed recently is that I did a little bit of analysis on Digital Photography School. We contract on our site which pages our readers view before they subscribe to our blog. I was really interested that one of the types of pages that seems to get a lot of subscribers for us doesn’t have really prominent calls to action on it. I was a bit intrigued by this.

The type of post that works really well for us is where we do what we call out image collections. I’ll give you, in today’s show notes, some examples of this but we have a post, 11 Great Examples of Using Converging or Leading Lines in Photography. That’s going to be mumbo jumbo for those of you who don’t know about photography but it’s a photographic technique, composition technique. I noticed that when people are on that page, they ended up subscribing at a much higher rate than a lot of other pages on our site.

When I look at the post, I was a bit confused about that because the post itself was just 11 Great Images, it didn’t really have much texts at all, it’s just 11 inspirational images. Then I noticed that some of the other pages on our site that were also image collections, more inspirational posts seem to be generating subscribers as well. We have another one, I’ll give it to you as an example today, 21 Surreal Levitation Images. They’re just these fun, inspirational images that illustrate a technique that we previously talked about.

These inspirational posts seem to be driving subscribers. What I realized is that when you inspire people, when you show something that perhaps they can’t do yet, but they aspire to doing, you put them in the state where they want to learn how to do something. Even though we didn’t have strong calls to action on those posts originally, people where then seeking out ways to take those photos and they’re in a much better state to want to subscribe to our Digital Photography School site, a site that promises, I guess, to help people to improve their photography.

One of the things I started to do is to go back to some of those image collection posts as inspirational posts, those posts where I could see people already subscribing at a higher rate. I’ve put stronger calls to action in those posts. In the first paragraph or two now you’ll find calls to action to subscribe. Again, it even increased the subscriber numbers even more.

You may want to do some analysis; you may want to set up a goal in Google Analytics. The goal would be to track when people subscribe and then look at the history and look at the top pages that they go through to get to that and add stronger calls to action to those places but particularly pay attention to any content that you do that’s more inspirational. Maybe it’s a storytelling post or maybe it’s a case study, that type of thing, can really give people more incentive to want to find more information.

Another thing that I’ve noticed is that people subscribe to our content more when we are doing a series of content. You will have heard, even at the start of this particular podcast that I did a fairly strong call to action to subscribe. In every podcast that I’ve done in this series of content, I’ve had a strong call to action to subscribe to us in iTunes so that you don’t miss the rest of this series. What I’ve noticed is that when you have a series of posts, people want to get the rest. You’re building anticipation, you’re signaling to people that you are creating something tomorrow, or next week, or next month that’s going to continue the series of content that you are creating that they’re listening to or they’re reading right now.

I’ll say again now this is episode 115. In the next episode, 116, you’re going to get some techniques on how to get people to engage with your content. If you want to get that, you need to subscribe. You need to get with us in some ways so we can let you know when that episode is out there. This is just a really simple example of how to build desire, how to build anticipation in your readers, in your listeners, and this will increase the chances of them subscribing.

The first time I realized that this was a thing was the first time I did the 31 Days to Build a Better Blog blogpost series back in 2007, I think maybe it was 2005. I did 31 days in a row of blog posts that built upon each other. I noticed our subscriber numbers really went up the first time I did that series. The same when I did it again in 2007, then I did it again in 2009. These series of blog posts really helped us to increase our subscriber numbers, not only to our email list but also to our RSS feed and on social media as well. When I launched 31 Days to Build a Better Blog as a podcast series, the same thing happened as the first episodes of this particular podcast.

If you can think about, “How could I create a series of content?” That might be a daily series of blog post, for a week, for a month. Or you might say, ‘For the next year, every first Tuesday of every month, I’m going to do a post on this.” Or, “Every Thursday, I’m going to interviewer another blogger, another influencer on this particular topic.” Anything that signals to your readers that you are doing something tomorrow, next week, next month, or next year is going to increase the chances of them subscribing.

Build anticipation with your content, think about series of content. The series need not be long. It might be, “I’m just going to do a second post on this topic tomorrow,” and that’s the end of your series but that signals to your readers that there’s a reason for them to subscribe. Even if you just say that, “Tomorrow’s post is on this topic that will help.” But if you can also mention that there’s a way that they cannot miss that post by calling them to subscribe in that will work even more.

The last thing I want to talk about today in terms of getting the connection point—actually, it’s the second last thing—is to promote your secondary connection point as well. The start of this episode, I talked about how email is king for me. Email is, in most cases, the place that you should probably be trying to get your primary point of connection because getting a connection on Facebook or Twitter whilst it’s useful, they can change the rules. It’s like building your house on rented land as many people talk about. I think it’s definitely is useful to have more than one point of connection.

I found that our most avid fans on ProBlogger and Digital Photography School, when I meet them in person, they tell me that they’re subscribed to our email, yes, but they’re also following us on Facebook, Twitter, connected on LinkedIn, and all of these other places as well. Certainly, email, number one. You may have another number and that’s totally fine, it’s up to you but think about what other points of connection you might have. Really, this will depend upon where you’re most active and the type of place where most of your readers are active as well. For us on ProBlogger, it’s Facebook and Twitter, they’ll be a secondary point of connection.

Digital Photography School, again, it’s Facebook, Twitter, but also Instagram is a big run of us, and Pinterest is another one. We’re cross promoting those particular social networks and there’s a number of ways that you can build up those secondary points of connection. First, promote them in your emails. I’ll give you an example in the next episode in this particular series. I would highly encourage you in the first emails that you send people, set up an autoresponder and one of those emails should mention your other places of connection. Send out an email, a welcome email and say, “Hey, we’re also on Facebook. We’re also on Twitter,” wherever it is that you’re most active. Promote those secondary points of connection in your emails. That will certainly help you to get the second point of connection.

Number two, promote those things in your blog navigation, in your sidebar. Have the icons there that are most relevant to your particular audience, promote them in your blog post. From time to time, not in every post but from time to time, you might want to weave into your blog post something about your Facebook page or something about your Twitter account. I do this on ProBlogger all the time, I’ll say, “I got this question on my Twitter account,” or “I got this from our Facebook page.” That’s a relevant way. Just mention, “By the way, we’ve got this Facebook page.” It also shows that you’re willing to engage with people then you get those ideas from those places as well.

You might want to promote your Facebook page to people arriving from Facebook and there’s some really great tools that will help you to do this. If people are coming from a particular social network to your blog, it signals to you that they have an account in that place and so they’re more likely to subscribe to you there. Use a tool like SumoMe, which is what we drive a lot of the things on ProBlogger. If you go to ProBlogger, you’ll see the top of all of our pages at problogger.net, on the blog, we have a hello bar, it’s just a thin strip.

What we’ve done is that we’ve said to SumoMe, the tool we use, that if someone arrives on ProBlogger from Facebook, in the hello bar, we want them to be shown a call to action to subscribe to us on Facebook. You could do the same thing with your welcome mat. If someone arrives from Facebook, instead of showing them an email subscribe call to action, you could have a welcome mat that says, “Hey, we’re on Facebook. Like us here.” You could do the same with Pinterest or any of the social network. SumoMe enables you to do these types of things, OptinMonster, again, will enable you to do that. I’ll link to both of those tools in today’s show notes. Definitely, it will increase the chances of you getting the subscribe.

The last thing I’ll encourage you to think about doing to get the secondary points of connection is, if you’re active on more than one social network, you can promote other social networks on those places as well. If I’m about to do a Facebook live update on the ProBlogger Facebook page, I’ll often tweet a link to the Facebook page saying, “I’m about to do a Facebook live here.” If there’s a good discussion going on on one of my tweets, sometimes I will link to that from my Facebook page. You can cross promote your social networks in this way and this gets you that secondary point of connection as well.

I’ve talked a lot about getting the connection today. The last thing I just want to briefly touch on is that there’s an opportunity now to get connection even when someone has already left your blog. It’s going to cost you a little bit of money to do it, but you can retarget. You can do some advertising about retargeting and this is probably a topic for another episode. I might find an expert who can come in and talk to us about this but it’s relatively simple to do Facebook advertising and relatively cheap to do it as well if you do have a little bit of a budget.

You can set up a Facebook pixel on your blog that enables you to target someone who’s been on your blog, who didn’t subscribe with an ad to get them back to your blog. Just a really simple way to get people who’ve bounced off your blog, who’ve come for the first time but haven’t subscribed, you can retarget them. You can serve them up with an ad on Facebook that shows them another piece of content or a call to action to subscribe.

Do a bit of exploring around that if that’s something you have a bit of budget to do. I’d love to hear your results on that. That’s something that we’re playing around with at the moment on our Facebook pages. I’ll certainly do another episode in the future on how to do that particularly if a lot of people leave a lot of questions on today’s show notes.

I feel like I’ve just created a surface in terms of how to get the connection with your readers. I know there’s a lot more techniques that we could talk about. I will give you some further reading in today’s show notes at problogger.com/podcast/115. You can also leave a comment there, leave a question, leave a tip that you have used to get the subscribe as well. Love to learn from you what you are learning as well.

As always, I’d love it if you would subscribe to us over at iTunes or your other favorite podcast network. You will be notified if you do, of course, of the next episode which is episode 116 where I’m going to continue this series and talk about how to take people beyond connecting with you and to get them out of passively lurking on your site. This is another massive frustration that so many bloggers have is that people come, they subscribe even, but they never comment, they never retweet, they never share, or they never actually do anything on your site. I want to give you some techniques in the next episode on how to do that in a couple of days’ time, so do subscribe to us on iTunes, over on Stitcher, or your other favorite podcast network.

Thanks so much for listening in today. Look forward to interacting with you in the comments of today’s show notes.

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Today I’m talking about getting readers to take a second look at your blog. In episode 112, we started this mini series on warming your blog readers up to your blog.

In that episode I presented you with four different stages of warming your readers up. In the last episode, number 113, I talked about how to get the first eyeballs on your blog, how to get the reader to take a first look.

The first step of warming up your readers is to get their attention. Today I’m going to give you some strategies on getting readers to take a second look at your blog.

Getting people to take a second look can be a massive challenge. Looking at statistics, we can tell people land on our site and then bounce away. We need to do something really quickly to show them why they should stick around.

In the next episode, we are going to talk about how to get people to connect, and then in the next episode we talk about how to get people to engage with you.

Please subscribe if you don’t want to miss any episodes of the series.

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I especially want to draw your attention to our event that is happening on the 9th and 10th of September here in Australia. You can find more information on that two-day event, which is really the peak of what we do at ProBlogger every year. Two days of training on how to make money from your blog. You can find more information on that at probloggerevents.com.

Today, I want to talk about getting people to take a second look at your blog. We started this miniseries on warming your readers up back in episode 112. In that particular episode, I presented you with four different stages of warming your readers up. In the last episode (in episode 113), I talked about how to get the first eyeball, how to get people to view your blog for the very first time, to get that first visitor.

Today, we’re going to take the next step. We’re going to make them look twice. We’re going to get their interest in your blog. If you’re interested in this particular series, I do encourage you to subscribe to this podcast over in iTunes or hit our show notes today, where you can also subscribe via email at problogger.com/podcast/114.

I should mention, before I get into today’s topic, please forgive my croaky voice. I went to the football yesterday and screamed and shouted at my football team, the Carlton Football Team, here in Australia. We won, but I lost my voice in the process, and I do have a bit of a cold, so please excuse the croakiness today.

As I said in my introduction, today I want to talk about how to get people to look twice at your blog. How to get the interest. The first stage of warming up the readers is to grab their attention. It’s to be seen, it’s to get the eyeball. Today, I really want to dig in and give you some strategies on making people look twice, to get them to have a second look at your blog. This is a massive challenge.

We know, looking at the statistics of pretty much any blog on the Internet, the people disappear from our blogs very quickly and this can be really frustrating for us. As bloggers, we put a lot of time and energy into creating content. People arrive at our blog and then seconds later, they bounce away. This can be for a whole heap of different reasons, some of which I talked about a couple episodes ago. People do have fairly short attention spans. People are clicking link after link after link and disappearing from every site they visit very quickly. We want to do something to make them pause, to make them have a second look, to dig a little deeper into who we are and what we’re on about.

We’re particularly here focusing upon those first time readers. Those readers who don’t know about our brands, who’ve never been on our blogs before. We need to do something really quickly to grab their attention, to get their interest in what we’re doing, to show them that what we are doing is relevant to them.

I want to present you today with some strategies on doing that. Now, a lot of these needs to happen pretty quickly. It’s about creating a really strong first impression and there’s a whole heap of ways that we can do that, your design, certainly, makes a strong first impression and it can make people look twice, but one of the things I think is very effective at getting people to look twice at our blogs is to make a big promise. If someone lands on your blog and you make a big promise that is relevant to them, they’re going to look twice, I guarantee you.

One of the things that I would encourage you to really do is a really simple exercise and I talked about this exercise a few episodes ago in episode 105. I talked about in that case, in the context of writing a great sales copy, but I think this is particularly useful to do when you’re thinking about making a big promise on your blog, that is going to get people interested. The exercise is very simply to list the pain of your readers, to list the problems that they have, to list the challenges that they have.

These pains that your readers have could just unlock this promise that you can make on your blog. If you make a promise on your blog, in your tagline, even with the title of your blog or somewhere prominently on your about page, on your start page, pretty much everywhere all over your blog. If you make a promise that alleviates pain in some way, you’re going to make people look twice. That’s the first part of the exercise, list the pains of your readers.

The second part is to list the gains that your readers want, the things that they dream, the achievements that they want to have, the successes that they want to have. Again, this can be presented in this promise that you make. I really want to encourage you to think about the tagline of your blog, how can you make a promise in that tagline that is going to make people look twice.

On ProBlogger, one of the promises that we make is that we’re going to help you to add income streams to your blog, and we know that that is something that our readers are coming into our blog looking for. If you have someone coming to blog with a particular pain point or particular gain that they’re interested in, having happened to them and you make a big promise about that, that is going to make them look twice.

I guess what we try to do here with these taglines on our blog and the way that we write our start pages (I said a couple episodes ago), is to get people to look forward as to the type of life that they want or the achievements that they want to have, so make a big promise. This is one of the best ways that you can make a first impression.

Really, what we’re doing here is showing our readers, our potential readers that we know them. We know them. It’s not just about them knowing us, we need to do something to make them realize that we know who they are, we know their pain, we know their aspirations, so make a big promise in some way.

The second thing that I think can make people look twice is to do something a little bit different, to differentiate yourself in some way. Now, this will probably be more the way you write your content, but you can also weave this type of thing into a branding as well.

Differentiation can take a whole heap of different forms, but think to yourself, is there something you can do in your branding that makes people realize that you are a bit different to other people? Really, this can take a whole heap of different forms. It could be that you are more contrarian than everyone else, or that you reveal more secrets than everyone else, so that you’ll be more transparent than anyone else, so that you’re more generous than everyone else. You’re more useful that you tell a bit of story, that you have better data, that you’re funny, that you debunk more myths. All of these things can help to differentiate you.

I guess I’d ask yourself the question, why are you different to any other blog in your particular niche? If you can communicate that in some way through your design, again maybe through your tagline, maybe through the greeting video that people view when they first land on your site. Maybe it’s through even the pop up on your site that you can communicate, that you are a bit different in some way, that can make people look twice. These are all about creating first impressions, what promise can you make? How can you show them that you do something a little bit different to other people?

The other thing I think is really important and that I guarantee you will make people look twice, is when you create content that gives them a quick win, when you give your readers quick wins. One of things that I actually talked about at the Social Media Marketing World recently was one of the best things I think that we can do as bloggers is  to create fist pump content.

Have you ever listened to a podcast or read a blog post that you’ve just gone, “Yes, that’s exactly what I needed to know.” Have you ever come across a blog post and you start reading, you’re going, “Yes, this is exactly going to solve the problem that I have.” I suspect most of us have had that experience of finding the content that we needed to find. That’s after lots of searching, going through lots of Google results. We find this piece of content that’s got the answers to the question that we have.

The reality is most people when they first arrive at your blog, are not going to arrive at your homepage. Most people are going to arrive at a blog post they found in Google, or that they found are being shared on social media in some way, their friend has recommended for them. We want the content that we write, to give people fist pump kind of feelings.

Fist pump content delivers a quick win. It moves people from one place to another. Not emotionally moves them, but actually changes their lives in some way, gives them new information or it gives them new insight or it gives them new news or new teaching that is going to bring about a change in their life. We want to be producing lots of these contents.

Now, this is not new. I’ve talked a lot about creating content that changes people’s lives in previous episodes, but one of the things that I think we missed out on as bloggers is that we create this kind of problem-solving content, but then it disappears into our archives, never to be seen again. This is one of the massive challenges for us as bloggers is that, I wrote a post today, it’s gone in a week from my front page and it disappears into my archives.

Let me give you a really quick example. Two or three weeks ago now, I wrote a piece of content on ProBlogger called, How To Start A Blog In Five Steps. That piece of content (I would say) is a fist pump content. It changes people. It gives people the information that they need to start a blog. It’s five steps, it walks people through that process and I’ve had emails already from people saying, “Thank you for this blog post. It enabled me to start my first blog.” I’ll link to it in today’s show notes for you, those of you who are in that stage of needing that guide.

It just simply walks people for how to start a blog and that’s a fist pump moment for a lot of people. They’ve been looking for that information, it gives them that information, but the problem is, two weeks later, it’s already off my front page. It is in my archives and if you archives are anything like mine, it’s like a black hole. People go searching in there and sometimes they find the information they’re after, but sometimes they don’t. It really depends (I guess) upon what sort of search tool we use and what keywords they put into that tool.

Many times, people don’t even know what to put in there, so I guess one of the things I want to talk about today in making people interested in what you do is highlighting the very best fist pump content that you have. We need to write that kind of content, but more important than just writing it is we need to funnel readers to the right part of our site. We need to get people directly to the content that they need that is relevant to their particular need, their particular challenge, their particular pain point at this moment.

One of the things that I would encourage you to do to help people to find that content is to really do a bit of an order in terms of the navigation of your site, the user interface of your site, to think really carefully about how am I going to get people the best content for them? Don’t just rely upon the search box on your blog, that will sometimes work and sometimes it won’t. There’s a whole heap of other ways that you can funnel people to the right content for the right time for them.

One of the ways we talked about a couple episodes ago (episode 111) when I talk about “start here” pages, I think a start here page is one way of getting people to the right place at the right time, particularly first time readers. I’m going to talk too much about that because I talk quite extensively about how to create a start here page in episode 111. I highly recommend you go back and listen to that particular episode. There’s some really good feedback on it already, but that’s one way that you can get people to the right information for them.

Another way that you can do it is something else that we’ve done in our new redesign on ProBlogger, and that’s to use what we’re calling portals. Now, portals aren’t a new thing, we’ve actually had portals in the past on my sites, but we’ve completely reengineered the way that we do them in our latest blog design.

If you go to the front page of problogger.com, you’ll see a section which we have titled “I need help to…” and it’s got eight icons underneath it. Those eight icons correlate exactly with the top eight reasons that we found our readers come to ProBlogger.

We did a survey earlier in the year, a bit of a census of ProBlogger readers. Many of you will have participated in it, and we asked our readers to tell us about the biggest challenges, the biggest needs that they had, the biggest pain points that they had. They told us eight things, they told us they wanted to learn how to start blogs. They told us that they wanted information on how to create better content, how to find readers for their blogs, how to build community with those readers and deepen engagement, how to monetize their blogs, how to be productive, how to understand the technology, how to find work, and how to find freelance opportunities. These are eight things that we heard back from our readers that they had pain around, they had aspirations around.

We’ve created a portal for each of these eight areas and you can see it linked on our front page, but you’ll also see, as you scroll around ProBlogger, the blog, you’ll see those same eight icons on a lot of our side bars and you’ll begin to see it in other areas of ProBlogger as well. You’ll start to see it on our podcast and other parts of the blog and site in the coming weeks.

Each of these icons links to a portal. If you click on one of these portals, say for instance, you click on the start a blog portal, you will end up on a page that we’ve designed for people who want to start a blog. Within two clicks of arriving at our site, you will see the opportunity to click on that start a blog portal. You’ll be on a page where you are greeted with a video as I did on my start here page.

I have a video on each of these portals and in each of the videos, I talked about the pain around this particular issue. I talked about the challenge. I talked about the aspirations. I try to make a personal connection with people and then directly under the video, we have curated our best content on that particular topic. Immediately, people who have a need in that particular area are presented with fist pump content. You’ll see on the start a blog portal, the first piece of content we present there is the five steps to starting a blog post that I wrote a few weeks ago.

Yes, it’s off the front page now of our blog, it’s not actually findable there if you land on the front page, but if you land on that portal—we give people a big, strong call to action to land on that portal if that is their pain point—you’ll immediately be presented with a fist pump content. Underneath that, you’ll find our latest content. The content that we’ve written more recently on that particular topic of starting a blog.

These portals already are being very successful for us in directing people to the fist pump content, to the right content for the right time for them. It’s about getting the relevant content in front of people immediately.

I really would encourage you to do a bit of an order on your site. How easy is it to find the best content on your site for your readers? You may design a portal, you may want to come up with some other way of getting that content in front of people.

On Digital Photography School at this point, we don’t have portals, but we’ve woven into our navigation some drop-down menus that offer people some of these fist pump content. You’ll see there on Digital Photography School if you go and have a look at it now on our menu system, there’s a bit of a drop-down type system there. In that, we point people to some of those pieces of content that we know are going to help them the most. It’s about getting that content that converts, that helps people in front of them as much as you possibly can.

Another great way of making people look twice at your blog, to get them a bit interested is in the topic content you create as well. One of the types of content that I’ve noticed particularly recently that has had a massive impact in getting more second looks (I guess) from people is content which is more personal in nature. Story-telling content, but also when I do video. This is one of the reasons that we’ve been doing a lot more video on ProBlogger in the new design. You’ll see it on all of our portal pages on our start here page, and you’ll start seeing a little bit more throughout the site as well. Video makes people look twice.

One type of video that particularly makes people look twice is live streaming video. You’ll have noticed over the last year or so, live streaming has become very popular. Particularly with brands and particularly with influences. One of the reasons I think it’s become really popular is that people are really engaging with it.

Literally 10 minutes ago, I was on Facebook. I scrolled through my news feed and I just scrolled and scrolled and my eyes began to glaze over. I noticed one of my friends was doing a live video and it made me stop. It stopped me in my tracks and I clicked the link and immediately, I was there watching him race a motor car. It was Mike O’Neil. He was doing a live stream of him racing around a track in his motor car. 

Live video grabs people’s attention and it makes them interested. That’s one of the reasons that I’ve been doing a lot more of it recently on both of my Facebook pages. The ProBlogger Facebook page (if you follow us on Facebook), there you will have noticed that at least 2-3 times a week I’ve been doing live videos there and it really, really works at getting people to give you a second look. Whether they’re watching the live video as it’s happening or whether they’re watching the replay.

If you’re comfortable in front of the camera, I really would encourage you to use Facebook Live, or Periscope, or any of these other live streaming tools, but even if you’re not going to use the live technology video that can be replayed is useful, too. I think YouTube videos is another way you can do it, or just a storytelling content, more personal content. Even content that has your photo in it. I’ve told a story on ProBlogger a number of times now when Vanessa, my wife, started blogging. When she first started blogging, she wasn’t comfortable putting her face or even using her name on the blog Style and Shenanigans, her blog.

She summoned up the courage one day to put a selfie up on it. She showed her face and she used her name for the first time. I can look in her Google Analytics back to the moment her blog began to grow and it was that day, the day she started to get more personal with her content. She did something there in doing that, that not only got people’s eyeballs, but it got their attention, it got their interest, and it made them feel a personal connection with her. I think that the one way that we can really make people look twice at our content and our blog, is to make them realize that there’s a real person on the other side of it. Use storytelling, use personal content where it’s relevant to do, some way you feel comfortable to do that.

The last strategy I want to really briefly talk about that will make people look twice at your blog is to use social proof. When people come to your blog and they see social proof, people make them look twice. It builds a little bit of credibility to your site. Now, you’ve probably heard that term social proof before. There are a number of different types of social proof that I want to talk about. Let me run through them.

The first type of social proof that I want to touch on is where you use an expert, or a celebrity, or someone of influence in your particular industry who says something nice about you. If you go to Leadpages, the landing page software that we use on ProBlogger, you’ll see there on the front page of Leadpages that they feature Amy Porterfield, who is a Facebook expert. They have this nice little quote from Amy and a photo of her right there on the front page. The quote is her talking about Leadpages and why she likes Leadpages. This is social proof. Someone landing on that page goes, “Oh, there’s Amy Porterfield. I know Amy Porterfield. I like Amy Porterfield. Oh, she uses Leadpages.” This is social proof.

Now, you can do the same thing if you have any kind of contact with anyone in your particular industry who has any credibility or influence. If they have written an article about you and says something nice about you, ask their permission if you could use that quote. It’s a win-win. It’s good for them because they start to be seen in more places and you might even link back to them, but it’s good for you, too, because it helps to build some credibility.

Again, if you go to CoSchedule, that’s another tool that we use for our editorial calendar. You’ll see on the front page there, they have a number of testimonials from influencers including someone called Jay Baer, who is another influencer in this particular space and a great quote there from him. That’s one type of social proof that you may be able to build into your blog. I’ve given you two examples there of businesses, but you can do exactly the same thing, and many bloggers do this really well.

Another type of social proof that you can build is where you don’t use the quote or the testimonial of a celebrity or an influencer in your particular niche, but you actually use a quote from one of your readers, a user of your site. A great example of this is over on Copyblogger. Copyblogger started out as a blog, but they have now become a software company as well. They feature all over their site testimonials all of not famous people, but their users. People that perhaps you haven’t heard of before, but people who are like other people who are checking them out.

This is a really powerful way of building social proof on your site, it’s to show your readers that there are other people like them who are reading your particular blog. If you’ve got somebody who comments all the time on your blog, you may want to email them and say, “Hey, would you mind writing a sentence about why you like what we do and could I use a photo of you?” and use that as social proof on your particular blog.

The last type of social proof that you might want to use is wisdom of the crowds. This is where you use numbers rather than individuals, so far, we’ve been talking about using the celebrity or the expert in your field, or your users, and in most cases, you want to use a quote from them as well as their photo, or at least their name.

When you use wisdom of the crowd, you use their numbers. If you have a blog that has 1000 readers, then that’s a really good thing. You want to highlight the fact that you’ve got 1000 people reading your blog. This one perhaps isn’t as relevant for new bloggers who don’t have any readers, but if you do have some readers, if you have a lot of commenters, if you have a lot of subscribers, then use those types of numbers to highlight the fact.

This is so easy to do. If you’ve got 1000 monthly readers, highlight that on your about page, highlight that in your tagline, highlight that around your blog, highlight that particularly around anywhere where you’re encouraging people to subscribe. You can do the same with numbers of subscribers, numbers of Facebook followers, numbers of Twitter followers. Using those types of numbers can be really effective on your blog.

A quick example of this over on Digital Photography School (my main blog), we’re fortunate enough to have over a million people who are subscribed to our different social media channels and email list. We just have a very simple call to action right next to our social media icons. “Join over 1.4 million subscribers,” and that builds a bit of social proof. That’s the type of thing that makes people look twice. That’s the kind of thing that makes people go, “Huh, maybe this is relevant for me, too.” Social proof is all about showing people that what you’ve got is already being accepted by other people and maybe it should be accepted by them as well.

Today, I’ve talked a whole heap about making people look twice at your site. We’ve talked about social proof. I’ve talked about using personal content whether it be live streaming, or video, or just storytelling. That type of content makes people go, “Oh, yeah. That’s a real person. That’s someone I want to connect with.” Using portals, using start here pages to highlight your fist pump content, and differentiating yourself through your design, through your taglines, and making big promises. Promises of relieving pain and bringing about gains in your reader’s life.

These are just some of the ways that we use on ProBlogger and Digital Photography School to try and make people look twice, to capitalize on that eyeball that you’ve got. You worked really hard to get that eyeball, to get that first view. You need to make people look twice in order for them to take that next step towards becoming warmer towards your brand.

If you miss this step, you’re going to end up with a blog that might get a lot of eyeballs, but doesn’t actually convert, doesn’t actually take people a step closer to connecting, to subscribing, which is what we’re going to talk about in the next episode, and then towards engaging, and that’s what we’re going to talk about in two episodes time.

I hope this has been helpful for you. I would encourage you to check out today’s show notes at problogger.com/podcast/114 where I’m going to link to the pages that I talked about, I’ll link to some of their portals, and also give you some further reading on some of this type of stuff. I highly recommend that you do subscribe to us over on iTunes, subscribe to us on our newsletter, so that you can get the next two episodes in this particular series.

As I talked about in episode 115 (which I’m going to be releasing in a couple of days), I’m going to talk about how to get people to subscribe, how to get people to connect with you. Once you’ve got that second look, once you’ve made them interested, you really need to work hard on getting a connection. Otherwise, they’ll disappear and  never come back again.

The episode after that, I’m going to talk about how to get engagement, how to get people to comment, how to get people to share, how to get people to retweet, how to get people to feel like they belong to your community which again is so important if you really want to warm your readers up, so do subscribe.

If you are subscribing over in iTunes, I’d love to read your reviews as well. I get notified of every review that’s written in iTunes and on other podcast networks like Stitcher as well. If you can leave a review, I would be very grateful. Thanks so much for listening today. I look forward to chatting with you in episode 115 of the ProBlogger podcast.

You’ve been listening to ProBlogger. If you’d like to comment on any of today’s topics, or subscribe to the series, find us at problogger.com/podcast. Tweet as @ProBlogger, find us at Facebook.com/ProBlogger, or search ProBlogger on iTunes.

I base many episodes of this podcast upon questions answered by ProBlogger Podcast listeners and Blog readers.

You can use the following widget to ask a question. Please include your name and blog name (if you have a blog).

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Note: this episode can be listened to in the player above or on iTunes or Stitcher.

Today I am talking about how to get more eyeballs on your blog. How to get more attention for your content. How to get people on your blog for their first view.

This is part of my current series on the 4 different steps you want your readers to go through if you want them to be fully engaged.

The 4 steps were about taking your readers from being cold about your brand to becoming fully engaged with you and your brand and becoming raving fans of your site.

Today is all about the first stage – Helping People to Become Aware of Your Brand Getting attention isn’t for those just starting out, it needs to be incorporated for the long haul.

Note: listen to the next part in this series in episode 114 which is all about converting first time readers into people who keep coming back.

Challenge: Getting readers to know that your blog exists.

Objective: To get the eyeballs, and have your blog seen.

Hey there, welcome to episode 113 of the ProBlogger Podcast. Today, I want to talk about how to get more eyeballs on your blog, how to get attention on your content, how to get people onto your blog for that first view. This is part of a series that I’m currently doing. It started in the last episode, episode 112, where I outlined four different steps that you want to take your readers through if you want them to become fully engaged. 

The four different steps were about taking your readers from being cold towards your brand, and even being unaware of your brand, right through to fully engaged to become raving fans of your site. Today’s episode is all about the first stage, helping people to become aware of your brand. You can find today’s show notes at problogger.com/podcast/113.

I would encourage you to listen to the last episode, episode 112. It’s only about 20 minutes long and it will help you to walk through the four stages. But if you’ve already listened to that one, let’s get into today’s topic which is all about how to get attention. Remember in the last episode, I told you about these four stages that your readers go through if they want to become fully engaged. Each stage has a challenge, and in this case the challenge is that your reader is completely unaware that you exist, which sounds very melodramatic and very much like a teenage boy pining after his first love or teenage girl, I guess for that matter as well, “They don’t know I exist.” That’s something that we’ve all, I guess, grappled with in our romance of life. 

But also, as bloggers, it’s very easy to feel that way as well. As we look at our Google Analytics and we see that number zero staring us in the face, or that number one or two and realize that the only person that knows our blog exists is our mom, or our partner, or our best friend. 

The challenge we have here is that our readers are somewhere other than our sight. We can all relate to this, but it’s not just first time bloggers, or first time podcasters, or first time Facebook users who feel this and need to work on this. All of us need to be working on this area, and this is one of the things I probably should have mentioned in the last episode, is that getting attention isn’t just for those starting out. It needs to be something that you incorporate into your business, into your blogging for the long haul.

You perhaps need to focus more in the early days, but even when you’ve got an established blog, the reality is more people don’t know it exists than do. My main blog, Digital Photography School, gets four or five million people on a good month land on it. That’s considered to be a medium to large blog, that’s really good. But if you think about it, four or five million people out of the world’s population, or atleast out of the world’s digital camera owning population, that’s a pretty small percentage of people that are aware we exist. We need to continue to work on that as well. 

The objective for this episode is to get the eyeball, it’s to get attention, it’s to be seen. I want to give you some strategies to do this. Now, there’s a whole heap of things we could talk about on this particular topic, there’s probably 20 or 30 different episodes we could go through, but I want to share with you four different ways to get to attention. These are four places that I would probably be starting. 

I have mentioned a couple of these in previous episodes, but I want to refresh them, because I think they’re very powerful. They’re things I would really be focusing my attention on if I needed to up the antea in terms of getting more eyeballs on that sight.

The first strategy is to create guest content, to leverage other people’s blogs, forums, podcasts, and sites, to get eyeballs on me and to get eyeballs on my blog. This strategy should not be new to any of you, I’ve talked about it in the past and many of you will have done it. I first did guest content on another blog about two weeks after I started blogging in 2002, this is before guest posting existed. I got an email from another blogger–about two weeks after I started–who had read one of my blog posts and who said to me, “Could I interview you on my blog?” He sent me a list of five or six questions and said, “Could you just write 400 or 500 words on each of these questions?”

My initial reaction to that request was not very positive, I have to say. I was like, “What? You want me to write two and half a thousand words? You want me to write your content for you? You just come up with five questions, you want me to write it all?” Then a little light went on in the back of my mind and I began to think, “Okay, well that’s a lot of work, but this guy has been blogging for a year now, he has an audience; I do not. Apart from him, that one guy and a few other people.” I thought, “Okay, I’m going to do it. I’m going to see how this works.” 

I wrote that post and I put a lot of time and energy into answering his questions and ended up writing three-and-a-half thousand words in this interview, much more than I wrote in the original post that he’d got the idea from. It went live on his site. The next day, my readership just jumped up. I don’t remember the exact number, but it was more than ten-fold, which wasn’t too hard, because I didn’t have many readers, but I immediately saw the value in creating content for other people’s sites, for other places on the web.

There’s a whole heap of different opportunities for us existing today. It goes way beyond being interviewed on someone else’s blog, although that might be one. A really simple exercise that I would encourage you to do–and I’ve mentioned this in a previous episode–but I’d go through it again for you here, because I think this is very powerful. In fact, I think it was episode 37 that I first talked about this, it’s the exercise of listing the top five blogs that your potential readers are already reading, listing the top five forums that they belong to, listing the top five Facebook groups that they engage in, or LinkedIn groups that they engage in, the top five podcasts they listen to, the top five media that they consume, whether that be television shows, or newspapers, or magazines, the top five books and authors that they follow, the top five events they go to, whether they’d be online events or real life events, the top five Twitter influencers, Pinterest influences, Instagram influences, Facebook pages, I guess it’s the influencers in those different social networks. You want to list the top five of all of these things for your ideal reader. 

Before you do that, you really need to ask yourself who is your ideal reader and do some work on that, but then start to list where these ideal readers are already gathering online, because the list you come up with should give you some hints about where you can be creating some guest content. 

Some of these places, you need to get permission to add the content. Like when you come up with a list of five blogs that your ideal readers are reading, you can’t just have your content appear there, you need to build a relationship with those bloggers, you need to find out whether they accept guest content. There’s a certain level of work that you need to do there to get a guest post, but pretty much every blog on the internet by a handful has comments, and you could be adding content in the comments section.

Someone just asked a question on another blog that I read. About 20 minutes ago, I just wrote 400 words responding to that question that I saw on another blog. I basically wrote a guest post for that blog in the comment section of that blog. I know that that 400 words is going to be seen by the person who asked the question and possibly hundreds of other people who discovered that. It’s also going to be read by that blogger and build a relationship with him. That’s guest content. Leaving a comment in a forum, leaving an answer to a question in a Facebook group, these types of things are creating guest content. 

As you work through the list of 50 or so places that your readers are hanging out, look for opportunities to create content, whether that be by writing a guest post or being interviewed on a podcast, whether that’s just in the comment section in these places as well. There’s all kinds of opportunities. 

One great opportunity I saw, just recently, I was at Social Media Marketing World, Michael Stelzner was up on stage doing the opening keynote and talked about how they have been giving other people in their niche the ability to do a live video on their Facebook page. I think that’s an amazing thing for Michael to do on his Facebook page, it adds a lot of value. He had people like Mari Smith, Joel Comm who have expertise in different fields, come and take questions, do Q&A on Social Media Examiner’s Facebook page. They’re the first site that I’ve seen do that, but that’s a whole opportunity for people like Mari and Joel to create guest content on someone else’s site.

There’s all kinds of new ways constantly evolving in this area. Guest posting on blogs was big a few years ago and it’s kind of died off a little bit now. Although, that’s still something that has a lot of benefits. It’s kind of died off a little, because Google has cracked down a little bit on the SEO value of the links in guests posts, but I still think there’s all kinds of opportunities.

One of the big ones that has been taking off over the last couple of years has been getting interviewed on other people’s podcasts. I know I’m getting pitched all the time for this podcast for people wanting to be interviewed here, even though I rarely interview anyone at all. That seems to be one area that’s spiking at the moment.

Even with tools like Blab, which I’ve talked about in previous episodes as well, Blab is a live streaming tool that allows four people to have conversation at once. If I was you and looking for more eyeballs on my site, I’ll be hanging out at Blab and jumping into the conversations that are relevant to your site. That’s one way that you can get your face in front of other people in your particular industry, to have those conversations. Guest content is strategy number one.

Strategy number two that I think is so important for bloggers of all stages, particularly those of you just starting out here and trying to get that first load of attention, that first load of eyeballs, is shareable content. Shareable content is just one way of getting more eyeballs on your site. If you’ve been blogging for a while, you’ll know the kind of content that I’m talking about because you will know–having looked in your Google Analytics–what content gets shared more than others, what content drives you more fresh eyeballs into your site.

I just spent a few minutes in my Google Analytics looking at the most eyeballed content on Digital Photography School. I came up with a little list of the content that is getting more eyeballs for us. Everytime we do a myth-busting blog post, that gets shared a lot, that gets more eyeballs, people like to share any kind of content that busts myths, or that disrupts commonly held ideas. If you sort of attack a commonly held idea and show the flip side to it, then people like to discuss that, they like to share that. 

Humor, any kind of content that has humor in it, tends to get shared more. Debate, when you write this versus this, people like to share that to justify their own opinions on those sort things. Research results, anytime we do a poll with our readers and then present back the results of that poll, that kind of content gets shared a lot. You can take that to the next level by doing a survey or by doing more significant research.

I know, again, use Michael Stelzner of Social Media Examiner, they research their readers every year in a major piece of research and then they present that information back to their readership. I know for a fact that that kind of content gets shared a lot, because it’s cutting edge research findings. Listicles, list posts, very simple to write a list posts and it’s a kind of content that whether you love it or hate it, it gets shared more in most cases than the same content written in a non-list format.

We find cheat sheets work really well for us. Infographics, any sort of visual content in that way. Long form content for us is getting shared like crazy. It’s not our short posts that always get shared, it’s the long meaty stuff that people share with other people. That kind of content that’s really meaty, that’s really in depth, that goes the extra mile, that makes the people look good who share it. I will share that content, because it makes me look good, it makes me look like I’ve read that whole article, even though maybe I haven’t, although I usually do. 

The other type of content that works well for us in terms of shareable content is beginner guides. This doesn’t tend to get shared on mass. If you are a beginner guide, it may not get shared from a big Facebook page, unless it really relates well. But you might find that people share it with other individuals that they know who it’s relevant for.

For example, we had a post, can’t remember the exact thought, but it was something like your guide to learning how to use your first digital SLR. When I shared that on Facebook, I see a lot of people tagging Mari, Mari you should read this, that one on one sharing can be quite prolific on those beginner guides. That’s kind of just a little list of shareable content that works on our site.

It’s different from blog to blog though, one great resource that you can use to find this content is to check out BuzzSumo. BuzzSumo I think is just a brilliant resource. I’ve upgraded my account to the premium one and I think it’s well worth it, because you get a lot more data. BuzzSumo allows you to put in any domain, so you can put in your own blog’s domain and then click whatever the button name is, and it will pump out for you the most shared content on your own blog. That is golden information.

It will give you information that you can’t find in your Google Analytics, because it will also show you which social networks each piece of content has been shared on and how many times it’s been shared. You can look at this list and go, “Okay, what’s the most shared content on my site?” Begin to look for some trends in that. What I do when I plug my domains into BuzzSumo is to begin to look at topics. What themes and topics have been shared a lot? That will give me hints as to the kind of content that my readers like to share.

I look at the format of the post, the medium. Is it a video? Is it a listicle? Is it some sort of visual content? Is it long form content or short form content? Is it curated content? Is it someone else’s that I’ve embedded or is it my own? Is it for beginners or is it for advanced? Are there any key words in the titles that seem to recur? You will find over time that there are certain keywords in your titles that trigger sharing, so be on the lookout for that.

That’s BuzzSumo, you can use their free version and get some of the data, but if you want to get all the data, you need to upgrade there. I’ve got no connection with them. I’m not an affiliate or anything, although maybe I should sign up as one, if they’ve got one. 

The other thing you can do with BuzzSumo is analyze your competitors content or other bloggers in your niche, other podcasters. You can do the same analysis, plug in their URL and you’ll see the most shared content on their site. Again, you should be looking at topics, the format of their post, the length of their post, the keyword titles, and that type of thing.

Here’s the thing with shareable content, you really don’t want to go overboard with it. It’s really important to create content that will be shared or that has a chance of being shared, but don’t get obsessed with it. This is a trap that I see many bloggers falling into, is that they get completely addicted to the eyeball. The feeling when you get a rush of traffic from one of these pieces of content is magic. It’s great. We love that feeling and we’d be lying if we said we didn’t, but we need to remember that it’s just the beginning of this process.

Getting the eyeball is just the first step in getting people interested, connected, and engaged. We need to work on these other three areas as well. Yes, work on getting the eyeball, but do not become obsessed with it, do not ignore those next steps in the journey. A quick tip with shareable content is that you should always link it to something deeper in your site. Always look for opportunities to get people to another type of content on your sites.

If you’ve got an infographic, find a related tutorial that you’ve written that you can link it to. If you’ve got a humorous piece, that sometimes can get a bit harder, but maybe you want to link it to another humorous piece of content or something that kind of vaguely relates to it. You want to get them deeper into your site and to a point where they’re more likely to subscribe and want to connect with you. You want to take them from the eyeball to get the second look. That’s the type of content you want to be linking to constantly with your shareable content.

Have a look at the pieces of content on your site that are doing well and then look for opportunities to link deeper into your site. 

I’ll leave you with a little quote from Seth Goding as we finish up talking about shareable content. He writes, “Entertaining the people who clicked on 50 things a day will get you numbers, but they won’t make a difference. Always be looking for that opportunity to take readers to the next level.”

Key strategy number three for getting more eyeballs on your blog is repurpose your best content. Repurposing content is just a great way of getting fresh eyeballs on that site. The big lessons that you need to learn and that I’ve learned over the last few years, is that if content has been shared a lot in one form, then it’s highly likely to be shared again in another form.

Let me give you a really quick example on this. There’s a post that I wrote back on ProBlogger, back in 2012, I’ll link to it in today’s show notes. It’s called Can You Really Make Money Blogging? And then subtitled, seven things that I know about making money from blogging. This piece of content did really well. It came up in my BuzzSumo report, as being one of my most shared pieces of content. I began to ask myself, “Where else could I share this piece of content?” I repurpose that blog post into a talk. That was the first thing that I did.

I gave a talk at a conference in Sydney, I think it was last year or the year before. I’ve actually given that talk two or three times now, probably about a thousand people have seen that talk. Already I’ve got fresh eyeballs just through giving a talk. I took the slides from that talk and tweaked them a bit, so they didn’t rely upon my voice. The slides themselves told the whole story. 

Then, I took those slides and I put them on SlideShare, which is a tool where you can present as you can put slides, it’s owned by LinkedIn. It got featured on the front page of SlideShare, because I drove a bit of social media traffic to it. Those slides are linked back to the blog post. I think that those slides got viewed around 5,500 times over the coming months. 

I took the same slides and put some music behind them, put them into a video format, and put them on YouTube. I think I also put them on Vimeo. The YouTube clip of those slides, and it goes from three minutes to four minutes, I think. It got about 6,000 views, and again, it linked back to the blog post.

I took the same blog post and put it up to Medium, which is another blogging tool. I tweaked it a little bit so it was a bit different, so it wasn’t duplicate content. That Medium post got around 2,000 views. 

I took the same content for my talk and repurposed it into a podcast, episode 32 of the ProBlogger Podcast, it’s called Can you Really Make Money Blogging? I’ll walk you through the same Seven Things That I Know About Making Money. That episode had 20,000 downloads.

You can see here that the eyeballs on this same piece of content are starting to mount up now. The great thing is that in each of the places I put it, it continues to get fresh eyeballs, because YouTube is a search engine, because Live Share is essentially a search engine, iTunes is a search engine, people are searching for content in all of these places and so it continues to get more eyeballs for me.

Really, the places I’ve repurposed that content to have now had more eyeballs than the blog post that I first did. If you’ve got a piece of content that’s doing well in one form, you should always be asking yourself the question, “Where else could I repurpose this?” Maybe you could repurpose it into any of those ways, maybe you could create an infographic or a cheat sheet, maybe you could picture it through a newspaper to be written there, maybe you could picture it to someone to interview you on a podcast, there’s any number of ways that you can repurpose content.

The last thing that I want to briefly touch on is search engine optimization, and this is because I’ve really already talked about that. As I just said, YouTube is a search engine, people are searching YouTube for ‘make money blogging’ and that video comes up. 

Another quick example, I wrote a post back on Digital Photography School a few years ago on a Leica camera that I owned. The blog post was a dismal failure, it hardly got viewed at all. I took the same content and I stood in front of the camera, recorded myself talking there on video, and showed this little Leica camera. That particular video has now been viewed 60,000 times. YouTube is a search engine. People are now searching YouTube for that camera name and my video comes up. 

Another place that is a search engine that you might not think of as the search engine is the App Store. A good example of someone using an app that a blogger could do is Jarrod Robinson from the PE Geek. He’s created this little content aggregation app. Jarrod, his blog is for physical education teachers. He teaches them how to use technology. He basically created this little content app and it aggregates content from his blog, his podcast, and then it promotes the workshops that he does and the membership sites that he has.

Jarrod gets thousands of downloads of that app every month. Not only that, people get push notifications every time he does a new blog post. The App Store has found him a whole new readership, so that maybe another area that you could be thinking about in terms of your search engine optimization, putting yourself into a place where people are searching for information, iTunes is another one. 

Starting a podcast has been one of the best things that I’ve done in the last few years for ProBlogger. A whole heap of people find me, find ProBlogger for the first time, because they do a search in iTunes. I hear this story all the time and I’m sure some of you listening to this podcast right now found this podcast, because you did a search ‘how to blog’ or ‘how to make money from blogging’ or something to do with blogging and a podcast of mine came up. It gets you eyeballs, it’s great sources of free traffic. Then of course, there’s Google Search Engine Optimization as well. I will link in today’s show notes to two episodes that we’ve recorded on that topic, because it is a big topic.

The one thing I will say though about Google Search Engine Optimization, that we’ve done a little bit of work on recently, is Google’s featured snippets. Have you heard of Google’s featured snippets? Have you all seen them? When you do a search on Google these days, sometimes Google puts into the search results the answer to your question. One of the most common ones is how hot is it in Melbourne? It gives you the temperature in Melbourne, or what is the time in New York, and it tells you the time in New York, and then lists all the search results underneath it.

If you were listed underneath the answer, you’re probably not going to get a whole heap of traffic where you might have in the past. Some people don’t like featured snippets, but sometimes featured snippets can work to your advantage. Sometimes, Google gives you a snippet of your blog post as the answer, and then pulls in a little image from it, and then puts the search results under that, but it also links to the source of the content.

One of the featured snippets that we’ve had recently, we’ve re-optimized our blog post called How To Make Money Blogging and we re-optimized that post so that it would get a featured snippets slot also that we hoped it would. We found that when we moved from just having the number one search result, to having that number one search result and the featured snippet, that traffic to that blog post increased some way between 150%-200%. It changes from day-to-day a little bit, but by getting that featured snippet, we’re getting about 200% more eyeballs on our content.

I’ll link in today’s show notes to a few tutorials from around the web on how to write that type of content. Sometimes, it’s just a matter of tweaking the blog post that you’ve got, to include a little list of answers to the questions that people are searching for. SEO is a great area that you really should be paying some attention to. I do recommend you go back and listen to the episode that I recorded with Jim Stewart on that particular topic. I’ll link to it in today’s show notes.

There are some techniques that I would encourage you to think about in terms of getting more eyeballs on your site. We’ve talked there about guest content, we’ve talked there about shareable content, we’ve talked there about repurposing your content, we’ve also talked there about search engine optimization. Not only Google, but things like YouTube, the App Store, iTunes, and plenty of other places where people do searches as well.

Now remember here, what we’re talking about is the process of taking your readers from being unaware, from being cold towards your blog, your brand, and you to being supper engaged. This is what we’ve been talking about today, getting the eyeball is just the first step.

In the next episode, I want to talk about what you need to do next. The next step is about getting people interested. It’s about going beyond the eyeball and getting people to look twice. Snapping people out of that zombie like state that they surf the wave in and making them pause to take in what it is that you’re doing. To make them go, “Ha, this looks interesting.” That’s what the next episode is about.

If you’re not already subscribed to iTunes or your favorite podcast listening app, please hit the subscribe button so you don’t miss out on this next episode, because I’ve got some really great techniques to help you to create great first impressions that will help you to make people look twice for your blog.

I’d love to hear what you think about today’s show on getting eyeballs for your blog. Love to hear what you do to get eyeballs on your blog. Do you do something on Pinterest or something on Instagram? There’s a whole heap more that we could talk about, share your tips, share the knowledge in today’s show notes ProBlogger.com/podcast/113. Thanks for listening and I’ll chat with you in a couple of days time.

You’ve been listening to ProBlogger. If you’d like to comment on any of today’s topics, or subscribe to the series, find this at ProBlogger.com/podcast. Tweet us @ProBlogger. Find us at facebook.com/ProBlogger. Also, it’s ProBlogger on iTunes.

Leave a comment below and let us know what you have done to get more eyeballs on your blog.

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I base many episodes of this podcast upon questions answered by ProBlogger Podcast listeners and Blog readers.

You can use the following widget to ask a question. Please include your name and blog name (if you have a blog).

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Welcome to Episode 112. Today I am kicking off a mini-series of podcasts that are designed to help you to move your readers from being cold towards you and your blog, to being fully engaged towards you and your blog.

I’m going to talk about the benefits of getting your readers warmed up, and walk you through a series of steps to do that.

Then over the next four upcoming episodes I’m going to get strategic and tactical and give you some practical exercises that you can do to help move your readers through these four stages.

In the sixth episode, I am going to give you some case studies and examples. Go to iTunes and subscribe to the podcast, so you don’t miss any episodes in the series.

I’m going to get into these tactics in the next episodes. Before I get into them I would like for you to ponder the question of “where is your weak link”?

You may have had success with one or two of these tactics, so we want to focus on getting all of these stages working towards your blog.

I would love to hear your feedback of where you think your weak link is. I would also like to see examples of how you have overcome these weak links.

Never miss an episode – Subscribe to the ProBlogger podcast on iTunes

And then over the upcoming episodes of this little series, the next four episodes, I’m going to get strategic, I’m going to get tactical, I’m going to give you some practical things that you can do, some exercises that you can do to help you move your readers through these four stages. And then in the fifth episode, at the end, I’m going to give you some case studies as well. It’s really important that you subscribe to the ProBlogger podcast to get all of this content. It’s all completely free, but if you don’t subscribe you’re not likely to get the message that the new episodes have come out.

Hit us on iTunes and hit that subscribe button. Subscribe to the ProBlogger Plus Newsletter on today’s show notes as well. I look forward to walking you through this journey. You can find today’s show notes where you can subscribe and you can find us on iTunes at problogger.com/podcast/112.

Do you dream of having warm readers, hot readers, readers who are warm towards you, who feel like they’re engaged by you and who are engaging back with you, a community that is alive? If that’s what you want, then this next series of podcasts is designed particularly for you. 

Over the next few episodes, I want to walk you through four steps to warming your readers up. To taking your readers from being unaware of you, very cold towards you, the first time they come across you, they’re cold for one reason or another. Taking them through to being warmed up to become interested, to become connected, and to become engaged with you. 

This is the dream that many bloggers have and if you’ve said yes to my question of is that your dream, then you are certainly not alone. We hear case studies all the time of blogs and social media being used in this way to warm people up. I’ve talked about it myself and how when I first started blogging in 2002, I was a complete unknown. Apart from my real-life friends and the people that I work with, nobody knew that I existed. Everyone was very cold to me, except for those who really knew me. The vast majority of the earth’s population had no idea that I existed, they were cold towards me.

But over the last almost 14 years now, I’ve gradually built an audience to the point where four or five million people a month show up on my blogs and have become warm to my brands. Not everyone in that four or five million readers are coming back every day, they’re not all hot, they’re not all highly engaging, but there are a growing percentage of them who are. How do you take your blog from having lots of cold readers to being warm? That’s what I want to focus on over these next four podcasts. I want to present to you four steps to doing it. Because the reality is that most blogs look like they should warm readers up, but they don’t actually do it. We end up with cold readers in one way or another.

Cold readers can be the result of a number of things. Firstly, one of the big challenges that we have as bloggers is that we are trying to get people onto our blogs who are incredibly distracted. Even if we end up with people on our site, often they are doing two things at once. They might be watching television while surfing the web on their computer, answering messages on their phone, and their kids are in the background asking for dinner, or the boss is about to walk into the cubicle. We’re distracted. This is I guess the reality of life at the moment in the world that we live in.

Another reason they might be cold towards us is they might be a bit suspicious of us. I talked about this in the last episode on start here pages, how often people come to our site a little bit suspicious, a little bit skeptical that we’re credible, that we know what we’re talking about. Or they’re a little bit skeptical that what we’re saying is relevant to them. Suspicion is one of the reasons that people are a little bit stand-offish towards us.  

Another reason that readers might end up being cold is that they’re in that zombie state that we get into when we click on one link, after another link, after another link. I don’t know about you, but as I look at my Twitter stream there’s all kinds of things to read and it’s very easy to almost fall asleep at the screen as you follow the links. Related to this is the short attention span that some people seem to have today as well. This can leave people cold towards us because they almost wired these days to look at a site for three seconds and then move on to the next one.

For whatever reason, the reality is that many of us have cold readers. This is a major challenge because we know there are many benefits in having warmer readers. When you get a warm reader, when you warm someone up towards your blog and your brand, you increase the chances of them coming back again. 

When you get someone returning to your blog over and over again, this reinforces your brand in their mind. It makes you more memorable. Warm readers contribute to your site, this makes your site more useful. Warm readers who are answering other reader’s questions or even asking questions help to make your site more useful to other readers. That also helps to build social proof when you have people engaging in a warm way, it’s easier to attract new people. Warm readers also share our content, they help us to promote ourselves. Word of mouth kicks in when readers are warm towards us, warm readers trust us, they take action on our calls to action, they buy our products and services.

For all of these readers we want to warm up our readers, but how do we do it? That’s what I want this series to be about. The first thing I will say is that it’s really important to think about the process that your readers are going to take to become warm. Lot of people have this idea, “I want an engaged community.” But I think it’s really useful to step back from that question to say, “Okay, that’s what we’re aiming for, but what are the steps your readers need to go through to get to that point?” 

I’ve been asking this question in my own mind, with my team over the last year or two particularly. What’s the journey of my readers, those readers that do become engaged, how do they get to that point? I’ve realized slowly over time that there are different stages that our readers go through. Some of these stages happen very quickly. Readers who first arrive on your site make decisions very quickly and they move from one of these stages to the next within seconds sometimes. But some of them are quite slow as well.

I want to present to you in today’s podcast four stages of warming up your reader. And then over the oncoming episodes, I want to dig deeper into each one and give you some strategies for moving your readers through these stages.

Let’s get into these four stages. I want to say right up front that these stages are not rocket science. In fact, they are stages that you will have gone through as you think about the brands that you are warm to, the blogs that you read, the podcast that you listen to. You will have gone through these stages. I want to encourage you as I move through them to be thinking about what moved you through these stages, what made you warm towards your favorite blog, and your favorite podcast, your favorite social media influencer. What were the things that moved you along in the journey, because the things that moved you along are hints to the things that you can be doing with your audience as well. 

Let’s move through to these four stages. Each stage has a challenge, a state that your reader is in, an objective, a goal that we have to move our readers through.

Stage number one, we’re presented with the challenge of readers who are completely unaware that we exist. This should be a challenge for most us who’ve started a blog. The reality is when we start our blogs, no one knows that we exist or no one knows our blog exists. I remember the moment very well in 2002 when I hit publish on my first post, and I realized that whilst I created this blog and that was a bit of an achievement, no one knew it was there and I had to email my wife and say, “Hey, check out this link. It’s my new blog.” And then I had to explain what a blog was. Then, I send out the link to a few other friends, and family, and colleagues, and then I ran out of people to send it to. 

I realized I had this massive challenge before me to go beyond just my own circle of influence to grow awareness of my blog. That’s the challenge, people don’t know we exist. This is the challenge that faces us all, it faced me again last year when I started this podcast. I remember the moment it went live in iTunes and realized, again, I was back at ground zero. No one knew it existed.

The challenge is unawareness. The objective at this point is to get attention, to get attention. I want to present to you some strategies for getting attention. Another way to term getting attention is to get the eyeball, that’s the first stage. 

Second stage is that even once we’ve got attention–people may now be aware that we exist, they may even be on our blog, they may be listening to that first episode of the podcast–the next challenge that we face is that they are disinterested. They’ve given us the eyeball, but because they are distracted by other devices, and their kids, and all the things going on in their life, or because they’re suspicious or because they’re in that zombie like state, they’re not actually fully giving us their attention. In some ways, they’ve given us the eyeball, but haven’t given us both eyeballs. Or they have looked once and they haven’t looked twice.

The challenge here is to get them interested. This is the second key objective. We want to get their attention first, and then we want to make them look twice, we want to get them interested in what we’ve got to say. I want to present some strategies in a couple episodes time on taking people from first time viewers to a little bit more interested in what we’re doing, that’s a really important step along this journey. If we don’t get their interest, they’re never going to connect. They’re never going to engage.

Step number three is we got them interested, now they’ve given us a second look, they’ve gone, “Huh, that’s interesting.” But they’re about to leave our site. This is a massive challenge and it can be incredibly frustrating for us as bloggers. We see people arriving in our site, but no one’s actually connecting to us. This is the third objective. 

We get their attention, we get their interest, and now we need to get their connection. Because if we don’t, they’re gone. They will leave our blog and the statistics show us that most people never ever return again. Even if in the back of their mind, they’ve said, “I need to come back to this site,” they will not do it in most cases unless we got a connection. That connection—it can be email, it can be social media, it could be getting their business card if you’re in a real life event or something else. But the key objective is to get connection. It’s to get permission, as Seth Godin says in his great book Permission Marketing, to contact them again. 

First step, we want to get their eyeballs. Second step, we want to get a second look. The third step is we want to get the connection. The fourth step is so important. This again is another major frustration. The challenge that we have is thought we might get the connection, but we don’t get the engagement. Our readers remain passive. 

If you’ve been blogging for more than a few months and you’ve got a few subscribers now, you know how hard this is. You look at the email subscribers that you’ve got and then you send an email, and you look at how many people open those emails and you get depressed by the small percentage of people who opened the email or who even verify that they’ve subscribed. You look at your Facebook stats and you see all the people who have liked your page and the tiny percent who actually are reached by your messages, and even tinier percent who comment, or share, or retweet the social messages that we have.

We see the amount of people who look at our blogpost in Google Analytics and then look at how many people comment. It’s less than 1% of people, the studies show, comments on blog posts. It’s probably even gone down further than that because commenting seems to be something that people are now doing more in social media. This is another massive challenge: passive, lurking readers. The objective here is to get engagement. I want to present with you in a few episodes time some strategies that we’ve been using on ProBlogger Digital Photography School to get the engagement.

These other four stages, the four challenges that we are faced with and the four objectives that we have. Let me recap them. Firstly, our readers are unaware, we need to get their attention, we need to get their eyeball. Secondly, they’re disinterested, we need to get their interest, we need to make them look twice, we need to make them go, “Huh, this could be for me.” Third stage is they’re interested but they’re disconnected, we need to get connected, we need to begin that relationship, we need to get permission to contact them again, to speak to them. Number four is that they’re passive, they’re lurking, they’re at an arm’s length. We need to work on getting them closer, we need to work on getting them to engage with us, to talk to us, to share with us, to build a relationship with us.

We know that if we can get their attention, interest, connection, engagement, they become a warm reader. That’s a very valuable thing, but how do we do it. That’s what I want to present over the next few episodes, but before I get into the techniques and tactics and the strategies that I’m going to present, I’m going to share two or three or four things on each of these areas in upcoming episodes. I do encourage you to subscribe in iTunes or however else you listen to podcasts so you don’t miss these four episodes.

Before I get into those tactics, I want you to ponder this question. Where is your weak link? In those four different areas, where is your weak link? Most bloggers I talk to are pretty good at one or two or even three of these areas. They’ve worked hard on it. I know a lot of bloggers who are really great at getting attention. They create content that maybe is controversial, or humorous, or is very shareable, and that’s one of the things we’re going to talk about in the next episode. But that’s where it stops. They get a lot of eyeballs but they don’t get any subscribes. Maybe the weak link there is getting the subscribe.

Or maybe they’re really good at the engagement end of things, but they’re not so good at getting the eyeballs in the first place. That really decreases the amount of people who end up getting to that engagement level. Over time, as I look back over my own blogging, there’s been times where I’ve almost obsessed over each of these four areas. I remember times in the early days in my blogs where attention was the big thing, it probably should have been. Because when you start out, that’s where you do need to start. I would work so hard on creating viral content. But viral content alone is not good enough. If all you do is get eyeballs, you’re never going to get anyone to leave a comment, to buy your product, that type of thing which comes out of engagement.

There’s been other times where I’ve been so obsessed on the engagement side of things that I’ve actually stopped focusing on getting new readers. This is something that was kind of a bit more recent even for ProBlogger. We’ve put a lot of attention with ProBlogger in the last year or so into trying to get the connection, we’ve really done well in getting more email subscribers and trying to get more engagement, tying to draw people into conversation, using live streaming, that type of thing. I had the realization a few weeks ago that we hadn’t really been doing so much to get the eyeball, we’ve not really been creating as much shareable content, we’ve not really been addressing some of those needs so we need to put a bit more attention back into that area.

My question is where is the weak link for you? Where are you falling short? Because you’re only ever going to get as far as your weakest link. You’re never going to really get fully engaged, lots of fully engaged readers unless you’re working on all four of these areas.

Again, the key challenge, number one, is unawareness, you need to get their attention. Number two, you’ve got to get them interested. Number three, you’ve got to get the connection. Number four, you’ve got to get the engagement, which is your weak link? I’m going to get into each of these four areas over the next four episodes. I want to give you some really practical, tactical, strategical kind of things that you can be doing and give you some examples of things that we’ve been on my blogs over the last little while to move your readers through these stages. But before I get into them, I think it will be really worthwhile. You, number one, subscribing, so you don’t miss those episodes. Number two, asking yourself where have you been falling short.

I’d also love in today’s show notes at problogger.com/podcast/112 to hear your feedback on where you think your weak link is and to see your examples of what you’ve been doing in each of these four areas. I actually asked this on Facebook recently and got some amazing responses on people who designed the whole almost processes to move people through this. 

What I’d like to do at the end of the next four episodes is to get into some case studies and then share some stories of how people are using the techniques that I’m talking about. If you’ve got a story to tell about how you’ve gotten more attention, how you’ve moved people to get interested to connect and to get engagement, I love to hear from you. You can leave a comment on today’s show notes, episode 112 over at problogger.com/podcast, or you could shoot me an email at [email protected], or you could even leave a voice message on today’s show notes as well.

But the number one question, where is your weak link? Love to hear from you. I look forward to taking you through this journey in the next four episodes of the ProBlogger podcast.

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