ProBlogger Podcast: Blog Tips to Help You Make Money Blogging

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Today I am talking about start here pages. This topic comes from a question by John at TheResourcefulCommunity.com

Why a Start Here Page? John wants to know why we should have a start here page and the best way to create one.

We recently put a start here page on ProBlogger. For us, the start here page has replaced the about page. If you have been blogging for awhile, it becomes challenging for a reader to know where to begin.

A start here page can help a new reader find the most relevant content to them, and direct them on how to use the site. It is also very clickable. Start here is a compelling call to action.

What you should put in your start here page will vary depending on the goals for your blog, but here are some compelling ideas.

When it comes to format, there really are no rules. I would use whatever medium you usually talk to your readers with. If your blog is primarily text, then write your start here page. If you’re a podcaster, then add audio.

Use whatever voice your readers are used to hearing you in. We have found video to be particularly effective and that can be a great choice too.

You can see our new start here page here.

I would love to hear about or see examples of your Start Here Page. Please leave a link of your Start Here Page or of another great Start Here Page example.

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Today, I want to talk about start here pages and this topic comes as a result of a question from John at theresourcefulcommunity.com.

John: Hi Darren, this is John from theresourcefulcommunity.com. I have a question I’m hoping you can help me with. I’ve noticed that more and more bloggers are putting “start here” tabs in their main navigation menus and I see that you have a start here page on your redesigned website, which looks great by the way. My two-part question is this, first, what are the most important elements of a start here page, particularly for someone like me who doesn’t have a lot of content up yet?

Second, is there a particular program or plugin I should use to create a start here page? Is this a job for Leadpages, WordPress Page Builder, or some other program? Thank you so much for your great work. Your blog and podcast offer both practical and inspirational help, always when I seem to need it the most. Thanks again. Bye.

Darren: Thanks for your question, John. I really appreciate your listening and your kind words. You are correct, we have put a new start here page on the brand new ProBlogger design, which you can see if you go over to problogger.com and it is a new thing for us and it’s something that I’ve wanted to do for a long time. I’ve always had a very prominently displayed about page on my blog and really the start here page for us has kind of replaced that. I think most bloggers do have an about page and I think that’s a really good thing to have and you can have an about page and a start here page if you want, but in some ways for us, I guess, we just decided to go with the one.

Most WordPress things come with an about page kind of already built into them and most bloggers do have them, but I think a start here page can be even more effective than an about page and there’s a number of reasons for this. I think a lot of it boils down to the fact that when you have a blog and particularly as you’ve been blogging for awhile, it can be very challenging for a new reader coming to your blog to find the right stuff for them. Anyone who’s been blogging for awhile—I know, John, you say you perhaps haven’t been at it for as long and don’t have as much content there—as you develop more and more content on your blog, your archives become something of a rabid war room for your readers.

It can be really difficult to find the relevant content for them. Someone arriving on your blog for the first time will likely see if they clicked your homepage, the most recent post, but you most recent post may not be the right post for them. It may not be relevant for them and your most recent post is probably unlikely to effectively communicate to your reader who you are, what your blog is about, who your blog is for and how to use the site.

They’re going to have to click around from post to post to post and kind of stumble upon the right stuff. A start here page can be really effective at doing those things that I just said, getting your readers to the right page, communicating very quickly into simply who you are, what you’re on about, and how this all is going to help them.

We know for a fact that people make decisions very quickly about whether your blog is for them within seconds of being on the site. Having a page that they got to click on and find the right information for them is going to help to speed up that connection that you might have between you and your reader and increase the chances of them hitting that subscribe button and starting that ongoing relationship with you.

The other thing I’ll say about a start here page or a start here call to action in your menu bar is that it’s very, very clickable. We have already found within (I think) less than two weeks since we did our redesign. The start here page is already the number one page that people are clicking in our menu bar. It’s not the most viewed page on our site. We’ve got a few blog posts that get more search traffic, but once people are on the site, it is the thing that they tend to end up on more than any of the pages. It’s outranking everything except for our front page and a few of those really hot posts, there’s something about those words “start here” that certainly calls people to go, “I’m going to click that.”

Within a few seconds of them being on your site, they’re probably clicking that link and then you have this amazing opportunity to get the right content in front of them and your message in front of them and your calls to action as well, so I think it is really important. There are a number of things that I think you should incorporate into your start here page. It’s going to vary a little depending upon the goals of your blog, the type of your blog, what you’re trying to get your readers to do. I want to run through seven things that you should probably consider adding to your start here page. You should probably add at least four of these, maybe all of them, if you can incorporate them, although I think it’s also something to be said for not having too overwhelming start page as well.

Some of the examples that I’ve looked at today and even thinking about this podcast, I’m like, “Yeah, there’s probably a lot going on this page and maybe it’s a bit overwhelming,” you might want to just sort of hit three or four of these types of things. Anyway, here are the things that I would encourage you to put into your start here page.

Number one, do something to make a personal connection. I think people are very suspicious of brands. They’re very suspicious of new sites and perhaps this comes from operating in the make money blogging space where there is a lot of suspicion, because there is a number of, let’s say dodgy characters out there who lead people down […], taking the money out of their pockets as they go.

Certainly, not everyone is in that category and there’s the vast majority of people writing about how to make money online are doing a great job and have great motives and very helpful, but there is, unfortunately, some people in our particular niche who don’t do the right thing, so people come to ProBlogger with some suspicion, and they should.

I think a personal connection can help to break down that suspicion. It’s not just the make money blogging space where there’s suspicion. People are wary in the way that they use the web. People are wary when they meet new people in real life. It takes a little while to warm up, so personal connection can really help with that. Talk about who you are, what your story is, what are your values, why might they listen to you, express your personality. I guess write that page in your voice, so you give them some hints as to what they’re going to get out of your site.

I think you can use storytelling. Story works really well on a start here page, works really well on an about page as well. I’m going to talk a little bit more about the format that you should use with your start page later, but certainly having an image of yourself, if you’re comfortable with that, having a video can be very powerful. It need not be a video of you, it could be a different type of video and I will show you an example of that in a moment as well. Anything that’s a little bit multimedia can certainly help if your voice, if your picture, if your image, if a video of you is on there as well. Making a personal connection is one of the most important things.

Number two, you want to communicate who your blog is for. Number one was about showing who you are. Number two, you want to show your readers that you know them. You know their needs and you know their dreams as well.

I think it’s really important to do the exercise that I talked about in episode 105, where I got you to brainstorm the pain of your readers and the gains that you want your readers to have. If you haven’t listened to that episode, I really would recommend after this one, going back to episode 105.

It’s just a great exercise to get in touch with who you readers are and you want to communicate that you understand your readers in that. I’m going to give you some examples at the end of this podcast of some great start here pages that I think do these particularly well.

Now, this is not about saying to your readers, you are […], you are 34, you are from America. It’s about showing your readers that you know you their needs, that you know you the dreams that they have and who they are.

Number three, you want to communicate (and this can be woven into number two, really), what your blog is about, so how does your blog help change the life of your reader. Now, it might sound a bit grandiose, but even if it’s just, I’m going to make you laugh then that’s a change in your reader.

You want to signal to your readers that you’re going to take them on a bit of a journey. You might teach them something, you might inform them, you might inspire them, you might into tying them, you might encourage them, there’s all of these things that you can do for readers. You want to communicate that to your readers. What are they going to get out of reading your blog? I think communicating that in different ways can really be a powerful thing. It motivates people to subscribe, if you show them that there’s going to be some benefit of doing so.

Now, this can be really woven into number two, communicating who your blog is for. If you might say to your readers, “I know that you get migraines.” If your blog is about health and helping people be relieved from migraines, you might talk about the pain of your readers, a very physical pain, and then in your next breath say, “And this blog is all about helping you to get through these migraines.” Actually show your readers you understand their pain and you’re going to help them with that.

Number four, you want to be pointing people to the right content for them. You want to get people to content on your blog in your archives that is going to give your readers a quick win, that’s going to help to relieve a pain that they have or help them to achieve a gain that they are dreaming of. This I think is really important.

As I was saying before, it’s tough to do this, because you end up with thousands of posts. ProBlogger has almost 8000 posts in it and I know in the archives, there are posts that are going to help all of our readers. We’ve written about everything there is to do with blogging, but how do I help my readers to find that?

I’m going to show you in a moment some examples of some start here pages that attempt to do this. You want to find the best content that you’ve got and be pointing people to that content that is going to help them to take their first step towards that win you’re trying to bring in their life, that change you’re trying to bring in their life. You want to get people eyeballing that content.

Number five is some kind of call to connect with you. I think it’s really important to get a connection with first time readers. Most people who are ending up on your start here page are new to your blog. You really do need to find a way to get a connection with them. To get them to subscribe to your email list, to get them to connect with you in your primary social media place, where you’re building a presence whether that be Facebook, or LinkedIn, or Pinterest, or somewhere else. A call to connection is really important and you may want to do this in a couple of places on your start here page. Maybe top and […], that’s certainly what I’m doing on mine.

Number six, depending upon the goals for your blog, you might want to highlight your products or your services or an affiliate promotion that you’ve got going. Now, this is going to vary from blog to blog. This is not an essential one, but if your main business is about selling your services, then you want to highlight that on your start here page. You want to signal to people that this is what you offer. Even if they don’t take action on that right in the first moment, you want them to know your agenda right upfront, and that can actually build some credibility, too.

If you say, “This is a blog about legal advice, and I offer legal advice, I’m a practicing lawyer,” then that builds credibility for you as well, but it also signals to them that, one day, when they do need that legal advice, they may come to you. I think offering your services or at least pointing out that you do offer services can be a worthwhile thing. Also if you have a product, maybe an eBook, a course, or a physical product, you probably want to highlight that on your start here page.

Now, you don’t want your whole start here page to be about that. You probably don’t want right upfront, “Hi.” You want to make a personal connection first, you want to get them to subscribe first, you want to begin that relationship, but certainly weaving into that page. Maybe a little further down the page that you offer something, then that’s a good thing to do.

I’m also going to show you an example later (or a couple of examples, actually) of where people have woven affiliate marketing into their start here page. I think that can be quite effective as well if you have something that you recommend that is a main source of income for you, I would be recommending that on your start here page. Particularly if it helps people to take first steps.

The last thing you might want to include in your start here page is some kind of social proof. There’s a number of different approaches that you can take here, but if there’s good things already happening on your blog, whether it be lots of readers, or good comments, people who are experiencing change as a result of your content, then you want to highlight that in some way on your start here page.

If you’ve got a lot of readers already, you might want to talk about how many readers you have. If you’ve got 1000 people every month landing on our blog, then highlight that. That’s a sign to new readers that something good is happening on your blog. If you can get some testimonials perhaps.

Someone of note in your industry has said something nice about you, perhaps include that on your start here page. It builds a bit of credibility for you. It makes people look twice. If you’ve got readers who are really being transformed in some way as a result of being a part of your community, you might want to have some testimonials from them. If you’ve been highlighted in some mainstream media, then you might want to include a video clip of you speaking on television or perhaps even some icons of some other blogs or mainstream media that you’ve appeared on.

These types of things are probably not what you want to have right up the top, but they can reinforce that you are a credible source of information. That would be one thing that I would be considering as well.

Now, a question that wasn’t asked in the question from John but one that I think is worth pondering is what sort of content should you have on your page? What format should it be in? Should it be written? Should it be audio? Should it be visual content? Should it be something else? What I would say here is that there are no rules, but what I would say is consider using the medium that you are going to continue to talk to your readers in.

If you are going to primarily use text, blog posts, written content in your blog, then you would want to include some text on your about page. If you’re going to do a lot of podcasting, then maybe you want to imbed some podcast episodes into your about page. If you’re going to do video, then you use video. I think you want to signal to your readers the kind of content that you’re going to produce, and you want to write your about page, create your about page in the voice that you’re going to produce that content on.

You don’t want that to be too disjointed, you don’t want a very formally written about page or start page and then have a very humorously written content on your blog. You want those two to meld together. Now, having said all that, I think video is a very powerful thing. In fact, most of the examples I’m going to give you in a moment use video in their start here pages. I think this is just really powerful because it does create a personal connection with people and it communicates who you are very clearly.

I will say you don’t have to have the most professional video. I’m going to give you some examples of people who are using very beautiful videos, but also some people who obviously just stood in front of their camera or their webcam and added maybe a little preroll with their logo and a little bit of music, but the bulk of their video is quite a simple one. I think that can be very effective as well.

I know it takes you out of your comfort zone to jump in front of a camera, but I would encourage you to consider doing that for your start here page, but again, even a written one can be very effective if you do it well.

John asked about how you create that start here page and again, there’s no rules here. Many of the start here pages that I’ve seen over the years are purely just pages that have been created in WordPress and that used the normal template of the site.

In fact, the about page that I had on ProBlogger up until our redesign was done just that way. Instead of creating a post, I created a page and I just used the header, the footer, and the sidebar. That wasn’t customized in any way and perhaps I could have done some cooler things with it. It was still effective and it was still a page that worked really well for us.

You could just create a page. I have even seen bloggers just write a blog post and use the blog post itself as a start here page or you could take things up a notch as well. You’ve mentioned a few things there, John, in your question. There’s definitely some templates in Leadpages that you could use as a start here page. You could sort of tweak them a little bit.

One I saw just as I was preparing for this was a testimonials landing page that Leadpages have in there. You could very easily turn that into a start here page just by changing the heading really. There’s a number of templates in there, or you could use their template builder and build your own.

There are many other landing page tools out there that you could use to create a start here page, or you could find someone to customize it for you. I’m sure if you dug around, you’ll find people who could create a page for you and that’s how we created ours, our development team. We’ve got some guys who work with us and did the whole redesign of ProBlogger. They customized our start here page and widgetized it as well so we can actually drag and drop some different things into it.

Speaking of our start here page, I thought maybe I just run through what we’ve done on ours. This is new and it’s a bit of a work in progress even in preparing for this particular podcast. There’s a few things I’ll probably change on this at some point. If you want to have a look at ours, you go to problogger.net/start-here and you’ll find that we’ll link to that in today’s show notes as well.

You can see on our start here page, there’s a number of things that I’ve already really mentioned. We do have a statement of what the site is about. That’s the number one thing we have. Quite a prominent call to subscribe button. A big orange button right up the top there. And people click that quite a bit. I’ve done some click tracking on this particular page and that’s one of the most clicked on things. It works very well.

Next to that, I have a video and this is a video of me standing in front of a camera and doing a number of things that I’ve talked about there. In the video, I talk a little bit about who I am, why I started ProBlogger. I talk about the content areas on the site, the portals that we have and how to find the right content. I talk a little bit about the benefits of reading and then give a call to connect, a call to subscribe, which is why I guess people connect, hit that orange button next to the video and also mentioned our social profile.

I found by using video on this page and a number of other pages on the site, our portals, those videos are being clicked a lot. We’re getting a lot of views on those. Some people just prefer to watch. Most of what I’ve got in that video is also replicated underneath. Underneath the video, I’ve got a little bit more information in written form.

I tell my story, I actually start with the dream underneath that. I ask the question, “Do you dream of making money from your blog?” I’m getting my readers to think about the end result that they want. And then underneath that, I’m telling my story of starting my first blog and building it from a hobby into a full time income. I know for a fact that when I tell that story in the past that people get a little bit inspired, they get a little bit interested. Very short version of the story there. 

Then I talk about why I started the site. I talk about the main sections of the site, and point people to the podcast, the blog, the job boards, the ebook. And then I tap into the dream of making a living from blogging. Talk about some of the pain points of our readers. And then point people to our portal pages. This is where I know if someone clicks some of the links to my portal pages (and we’ve got at least of those portal pages in the written content), I know they’re going to start seeing some content that has a quick win. They’ll also see a second video from me. It deepens that relationship with people. And then there’s a call to action, to subscribe, and mention of our social pages there as well as some links to other parts of the site. 

That’s our portal page. I’d love to hear your feedback on it. It’s a bit of an evolution. I’ve got some ideas of things that I would like to change on that particular page, but it’s where we’ve started. I think this is the most important thing. You’re never going to get that perfect start here page right out front. It’s just not going to happen. It’s really important that you have something, though. Whether it’s a start here page or an about page, you want a page like this where you link to it prominently in your menu bar, in your navigation, invite people to learn more about the site, and do these things with it. 

Let me give you a few examples of some other start here pages that you might want to check out. I really like Marco Hyatt’s start here page. I’ll link to it in today’s show notes. I particularly like how he starts his start here page. I’ll read the first paragraph to you. He says, “If you’re like most of my readers, you’re a successful, high-achiever. You are committed to winning at work, and equally important, succeeding at life. You strive to grow, get better, and reach your potential. You want to leave a lasting impact on your world, but something keeps getting in the way. There just seems to be too much to do and too little time. Maybe you feel like this reader,” and then he uses a comment, a question from a reader that identifies the pain of many of his readers.

I just think that’s a brilliant start here page. It taps right into the dreams of his readers and who they are and what they want to achieve. The high-achieving type people. And then he goes immediately into the pain of his readers. He does exactly what I talked about before, talking about the dreams, the gains that they want and the pain, the things that are stopping them from achieving their dreams. This really builds very quickly a connection with his reader and probably filters away people who won’t be a good fit for his site as well. Someone reading that and going, “No, I’m not like that type of reader at all.” He’s probably going to not find as much value from his blog. He’s helping himself to find the right type of readers. 

Really, in those first two paragraphs, he’s signalling to his potential reader what his blog is about. He follows that with a section which is titled, I Know How You Feel. This gives him an opportunity to tell his personal story and he does it through the written word. He’s actually one of the few examples I’m going to give you who doesn’t use video. I think a video would work really well as well, and I know he uses a lot of videos on his site.

He tells his story, he has his photo in there, and creates a personal connection. Then, he tells his readers his goals for writing the blog and I suspect some of Michael’s readers are goal-oriented type of people. He outlines exactly what his goals are and then he pushes people to his most popular posts on the site in different categories. He gets people to the best stuff in his archives and that’s really important. 

He does highlight his products and services at the bottom. It’s not the priority of his page, but he’s certainly upfront about it. And then he calls people to subscribe, which is really important. I probably would also add a subscribe button somewhere up the top of that page as well, but I think it’s certainly a logical place to have it right at the bottom because people get to the end of a page like this and they are looking for something to do. A subscribe button can work quite well. 

Having said that, I think he does have a pop-up that greets people when they arrive on his blog as well. They probably already had an invitation to subscribe. Maybe just having it at the bottom works as well. That’s one good example.

Another one that you can check out and I’ll link to in the show notes is Caz & Craig from Y Travel Blog. They’re Aussie bloggers, they’re travel bloggers, and they’re all about helping parents and families to take great trips, and overcome some of those obstacles that face us when we’ve got young kids. I will link to their start here page in the show notes today.

I think it’s really great. It has this statement right up front. It’s a big statement. Start here. How to plan your perfect trip. And immediately this statement says what the blog is about and taps into that dream that many of us have of having a perfect trip.

First paragraph, again, really effectively written. It is, “Is lack of money and time stopping you from taking your dream trip? Do you get overwhelmed and suffer information overload? Not sure how to find the best deals on flights, accommodation, and car rentals?” And Michael did this, too. Asking questions is a very powerful way to make a connection with readers. 

Again, this first paragraph is all about pain, it’s all about the obstacles that we face. Second paragraph moves into how Caz & Craig can help. They say, “We created this page to help you plan your perfect trip. We know from 17 years of experience that smart planning can save you money and time. We’ve learned the lessons so you can avoid the same mistakes.” There they’re signalling they’ve got 17 years of experience, but they’re also making some promises there to help people to overcome those pain points.

You scroll down that about start here page and you find that they are pointing you to effectively portals of their best content around some of the main pain points that their readers have as well. And then, at the bottom of the page, very simple, quite a short page, there is a call to subscribe. 

The next one I’ll point out and this one you’ve probably seen this Pat Flynn’s. Pat just recently redesigned his site as well. There’s actually some really interesting similarities between what he’s done and what we’ve done. His start here page has always been good and the new one is particularly good.

I particularly like how he uses multimedia. There’s a play button right up the top to bring a pop-up video. He uses embedded podcasts in his about page. It basically says, “Here’s the required listening. Here’s three podcasts you really should listen to.” That gets people used to listening to his podcast, which is a very important part of what Pat does, but it also gets people really good content that helps them to understand what he’s on about.

He has a section there, defining his main thing which is passive income. He has a section on busting myths, which I think is really great as well. He gets the expectations of his readers right. Right there on his about page, there’s obviously a lot of false expectations that people have to this particular topic. So he uses his start here page to get his readers aligned with his vision for them and what he’s on about. I think that’s really important. You want to get people to understand your values and the reality of what you’re trying to teach them.

He points people to his resources that he recommends and he uses some affiliate products there. I think he points people to hosting and that type of thing. I have a suspicion there that, depending on how many times you’ve been on the site and where else you’ve been on the site, that you’re probably seeing some different resources recommended there. Then he has some calls to subscribe as well. And then finishes the page with just a personal thank you. Pat’s really great at this. He really values his readers and he signals that. His signature at the bottom of that page and just in a heartfelt way thanks his readers for coming to his site. 

I’ve got two more really quick examples for you. These both actually come from speakers from our event this year. Natalie Sisson from The Suitcase Entrepreneur. Her start page is really great. I think it’s got a lot of good things and we can probably spend 20 minutes really pulling apart, but I love the opening.

She uses asking questions again. She says, “Have you always known you shouldn’t be working for someone else? You know, doing something that doesn’t really float your boat in the 9-5 world? Do you rebel against conforming, against authority, and believe things can be different and you can set your own rules and create your own lifestyle choices?” And then she says, “You’re my kinda person!”

I love the way she writes it. It’s very conversational. Uses words like “kinda” and kind of a brief humor in there and very conversational. This is the way she communicates. This is Natalie through and through. But she’s asking questions there to get people to say yes to her questions and to put them in the right state to really begin that journey with her.

Her about page is all about joining her on her mission. It’s about being part of her tribe, it’s about being her friend. She uses the word freedom again and again and again. Obviously, freedom is the dream that people want here. She uses a great video here and this is an example of a video that’s not a talking head video. She appears halfway through the video for about five seconds and speaks, but the rest of it is more inspiration-based and it’s showcasing what she does, some of her retreats that she runs, shows her travelling the world, having fun, having freedom, teaching people. She’s showcasing what she does there as well. 

There’s also elements of social proof in her video as well, as we see some of her clients, their updates on Facebook and Instagram with the freedom lifestyle they have developed. She offers a free starter kit here. I think this is really a great place on your start here page is to have an opt-in and she does that there. Through and through, it is Natalie and it showcases what she does and who she is and I think that’s really important. There is a whole hit more on that about page as well. 

Last one I will just briefly mention is Lisa Corduff who’s another of our speakers this year. She’s going to be talking at our event this year about creating online products. I’ll link to hers as well. I love Lisa’s because it’s quite a simple page. She has a video at the top and it’s a very simple video. It’s her standing in front of a webcam or just a simple camera and it has just a nice little intro and outro with her branding and some music, but the video itself just shows her personality.

It talks about the why of her site. It talks about the fact that she’s a mom and that she’s been really journeying with her topic, which is healthy, real food. The signals there that it’s a slow hard process that she’s been through. I think this really just builds up a connection with her readers as well. Underneath that video, there’s links to the best stuff on her site and points people throughout the site. Very simple start here page, but I think very effectively communicates who she is, what she’s on about. I felt like I wanted to click a lot of links as I looked at their page as well. 

They are the examples. Again, I’m going to link to all of those examples on today’s show notes at problogger.com/podcast/111. I know there’s a lot of information to digest there, but I would love to hear and see examples of your start here page. If you’ve got a start here page or if you’re seeing someone else’s that you think is effective, please head over to those show notes, leave a link to it, and talk about why you designed yours the way you did or what you like about other people’s as well. 

Today’s podcast has been sponsored by the ProBlogger Event. We have just in the last week released tickets to the event and for the next month or so, until the first of July, you can save $100 on the event. You’ll find all the details of this year’s event, which is on the 9th and 10th of September here in Australia at probloggerevents.com.

We have had quite a few questions from people asking about virtual tickets for the event. We will be releasing virtual tickets on the first of July. If that is of interest to you, you can sign up to get notified of when those tickets go on sale over at probloggerevents.com. 

Thanks so much for listening today. I hope you found this particular podcast helpful. Thanks, John, for your question, and if you have a question you’d like me to tackle in our future episode, you can find a little green button on the show notes today where you can press record and send me a message. Even if it’s not a question, I love to hear back from you and what you think about the podcast. It’s just a simple way you can leave me a voice message. Again, you can find that at problogger.com/podcast/111.

You’ve been listening to ProBlogger. If you 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.

Never miss an episode – Subscribe to the ProBlogger podcast 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).

Note: this episode is available to listen to in the player above, on iTunes and Stitcher

Today we are talking about the ProBlogger event. I’m going to tell you the story of how the event came about, and run through what will be happening at the event.

For those of you interested in coming – you can grab your ticket (and save $100) here.

If you aren’t able to make it to the live event in Australia, we also have an option to purchase a virtual ticket.

The first ProBlogger event in 2010 started on an impulse. I had just come home from Blog World Expo, a discontinued event in the States.

I was so excited about what happens when bloggers got together. I tweeted about having a mastermind blogger event in Australia. More people than I realized were Australian bloggers.

I got a cheap hotel convention room, and we put on the event about six weeks later. It ended up being a great day. The common question was “when I we doing this again” and things grew from there.

Last year the event was at the Royal Pines Golf Course and about 800 people attended.

In between the keynotes, we have sessions. The amount of choices can be a bit overwhelming, but we record everything. We will divide these into tracks.

All of our session ideas came from feedback from previous attendees. Some of the session topics will include:

We are also adding a fourth stream. These will be in smaller rooms and will give you the opportunity to ask questions and dig deeper into the topic. Some of these will run twice so everyone will have a chance to attend.

At night, on Friday night – We have the most amazing party. This year, you have the option to buy a ticket to the party for $50. Saturday night, everyone just hits the bar.

There are some additional Master Class opportunities on Sunday. You can add these to your ticket. These run from $90 to $199.

Ticket Options This Year: Main Ticket: Price – $499 AUD (385 USD). This will go up to $599 on July 1st.

This is a subsidised price thanks to our amazing sponsors. Olympus, Virgin Australia, RACV Royal Pines.

Add Ons – Friday night party ($50) and Masterclasses

If you can’t make it to the event, we offer a Virtual Ticket – $299 (recordings of keynotes and breakouts). 10 days after the event. On sale 1 July.

I thought about running you through the event in the hope that maybe I’ll convince some of you to come over. I also do have an option for those of you who can’t get into Australia. I know it’s a big ask because we do have a virtual ticket. I will tell you a little bit about that during today’s podcast. You can find today’s details of all the links that I’m going to mention at problogger.com/podcast/110 where you’ll find today’s show notes and you can ask questions on the event itself. Let’s get into today’s episode.

I’m really excited about this particular episode because it’s a story I love to tell—the start of the ProBlogger Event. The first event actually started almost on an impulse. It was almost one of those accidental things. This is 2010, I’d just come home from a conference in the States, I think from memory, it was Blog World Expo which isn’t called that anymore. In fact, I’m not even sure if it’s continuing to run but this event had 4000 people at it and I was just so excited about what happened when bloggers got together.

I got home and tweeted on impulse one day, “Who would want to come to an Australian blogging event?” 2010, I didn’t know a whole heap of Aussie bloggers. I knew of 10 or so full-timers so I had this vision in my mind of us 10 bloggers getting together around a board table, me maybe hiring a boardroom in a hotel or something like that and having sort of a mastermind event.

I didn’t think any bigger than that but within an hour or so of putting that tweet out, I had 50 or so people saying they’d love to come to an Australian blogging event. All these people came out of the woodwork. I didn’t realize a lot of them were Aussies. We’d been interacting online together.

I very quickly decided to get out and see if I can find a big room in a hotel. I had no budget whatsoever for this event so I went to the cheapest hotel that I could find which was a bit of a dodgy one. It’s being condemned now and knocked over. That tells you a lot about the quality of that first venue. I hired a room for 50 people and I think it was about 6 weeks after I had tweeted that first tweet saying, “Who would want to come?” We actually put on the event.

That is not recommended. We had 6 weeks to put on a full-day event for 120 people who eventually did come. I hired to get a second room and add that to the first. It’s not really recommended to put on an event that quickly but we did it. Perhaps because it was so hastily organized on such an impulse and because my readers were all excited to be together in one room, people didn’t notice that the hotel was as dodgy as it was. It was a great day. The most common question at the end of that day was, “When are we doing it again?” We actually had a few people fly in. I think I convinced Chris Garrett to come across. He was living in the UK. He spoke and we had a couple of New Zealanders fly across for it as well. We had international attendees from day one.

We ran the event the next year. It grew by 100 people. I think, from memory, we went to the Novotel in Melbourne, a bit nicer venue. We had multiple streams running across the day, different sessions going on in different rooms which was different from that first year where we’d all be in a very tight room all day. It’s still a one-day event and it grew to about 200 or so people.

The next year, we moved it to a stadium, Etihad stadium. We hired some rooms there in this football stadium here in Australia. It was about 300 people. We had 2 days of conference and it grew to 300 or so people. The next year, we moved it up to Queensland, Australia, onto the Gold Coast and it went to 400 people and then 500 people the following year. Last year, we held the event at the RACV Royal Pines Resort, up on the Gold Coast in Queensland, a beautiful place. It’s an amazing golf course around it, beautiful views of the Gold Coast. We had, I think it was almost 800 people, come to that event. 

It’s grown a lot since that first one and it’s taken us a lot more time and energy to put on the event every year. In fact, we begin planning our event now 12 months before the event so we’re already thinking about future years before we even run the event. We usually get in three or four international speakers and then we have speakers from Australia predominantly as well.

Every year, it grows in terms of numbers of attendees. Every year except for last year, we sold out our tickets very quickly. Last year we moved to a much bigger venue. We’re hoping this year that the venue’s big enough. I think we can fit 1000 or so people in there. Hopefully, there’s room to grow this year.

The event has grown and changed every year as well. We went from a one-day event to a two-day event. We added more streams and different styles of sessions as well and this year’s no different. We’re changing things up again. If you’ve come to our event in the past, you’re going to see some different things this year and I’m going to go through some of those things in a moment.

What I thought I might do is just run you through what’s beyond two days of conference now but the main two days of the conference. I want to run you through what happens at our event and talk to you about some of the speakers and sessions that we’ve got running this year. This is how it goes. The event this year is on September 9 and 10. That’s a Friday and a Saturday. They’re the two main days of the conference and most of the people come for those two days but we do have things going on on the Thursday, in the lead up and on the Sunday this year as well. That’s some of the different things that we have going on.

We kick things off usually on Thursday night with a gathering for our new attendees, our newbie orientation. Last year, we had several hundred people come to that. We were overwhelmed by how many new people there were so we’re going to do that a bit differently this year but it will still be on that Thursday afternoon, I think around 3:30.

I’ll talk about and give you a bit of an overview of how the event’s going to run, welcome you, and give you an opportunity to meet some other first-timers as well because it can be quite overwhelming walking into a room full of 800 people. You get a chance to network if you’re a first-timer. Then we welcome other people.

This year, on Thursday and out, we’re going to do some pre-conference niche networking. You get an opportunity not only to meet other first-timers but also an opportunity to meet other people in your niche. We have a lot of fashion bloggers, we have star bloggers, we have food bloggers, travel bloggers, business bloggers, all kinds of bloggers, all the different niches. There’ll be an opportunity to connect with other people who are doing similar things to you which is something we heard back from our attendees last year that they wanted to do more of.

Also, on Thursday this year, there is a master class running Shayne Tilley who many of you know from ProBlogger. He’s written many posts and has been involved on ProBlogger for a number of years now. On Thursday afternoon, he’ll be running a master class on creating products. That’s an additional ticket that you can buy on top of the main conference ticket. I’ll talk to you about some of the other master classes in a moment because we are running a number of them this year on the Sunday after the event.

Things really kick off on Friday where we go into the first of our two main days. The main conference runs all day Friday, all day Saturday. We structure our conference the same way on both days. Both days start with keynotes and our keynotes are generally a little bit more inspiring and still on topics relevant to bloggers, podcasters, and influencers.

This year we’ve got a number of keynoters. We’ve got Bryan Fanzo flying in from the States. He’s great on live streaming and his first session will be on digital storytelling, leveraging different platforms to tell your story. He’s great on Periscope, Facebook Live, Snapchat. That’s his strength so we’re exploring some of those new technologies this year. We also got Natalie Sisson speaking. Natalie is from New Zealand although she’s one of those people who travels around the world a fair bit. She’s going to talk about getting the most out of an event like ProBlogger Event.

That’s how we’ll open up on Friday. At the end of the day, we finish the day with another keynote from Daniel Flynn. Daniel Flynn is a great young social entrepreneur. He’s got a not-for-profit called Thankyou which has been at least successful. He’s written a great book which has been a best seller here in Australia. He’ll close out our day.

We top and tail our day with keynotes. On day two we’ve got Dan Norris from WP Curve who’s going to speak about how to blog like an entrepreneur. We’ve got Emilie Wapnick of Puttylike and she’s going to talk about combining many passions into one blog. Emilie did an amazing TED talk on that topic. I think it’s been viewed over 2 million times. Again, she’s one of our international guests. I’m also doing a keynote on the first day and I’ll close things out on Friday.

Top and tailing each day with keynotes, and between the keynotes we stream things. You have lots of choices between them. Some of our attendees get a bit overwhelmed by the choice but the good thing is we record all our sessions as audio, so you get access to all the recordings, all the audio recordings and slides of all the keynotes and all of the breakout sessions. There’s a lot captured for you to dig into over the next 12 months. You can really keep them as long as you’d like.

We’ve, this year, decided to stream things in a number of different tracks. We’re going to have a fundamentals track which is all about the basics of blogging. In that track, I’m going to write a session on how to find readers’ feal blog and how to monetize your blog. We’ve got Nicole Avery from Planning with Kids talking about things that she wish she’d known when she started blogging. That’s a track particularly designed for those who are just starting out. We always have 10%–15% of our attendees who are pre-bloggers that haven’t even started blogs. That’s an ideal track for those first-timers but it’s also great for other beginners or people who want a refresher on some of these core topics. That’s one of the tracks.

We have another track called Tools, Tactics, and Techniques which is obviously about tools, tactics, and techniques, and more of a practical track. You’re going to get some very actionable stuff in that one. And then the last track is for our breakouts, at least, is called Strategy, Ideas, and Inspiration. It’s slightly bigger picture stuff. This year, in those three breakouts, you’re going to get some amazing topics and we surveyed our attendees from last year and designed this whole schedule around what we heard from our readers

There’s sessions on how to create great content without killing yourself. We’ve got a session this year on YouTube. We’ve got an SEO tools session. We’ve got one on how to create online products, how to create great content, how to find readers, visual content, how to build your email list, how to build community on your blog, email, affiliate marketing strategy, how to write a great sales copy, how to get sponsored post opportunities, how to write great blog content, using your blog for social good. We’ve got a session for Instagram, on monetizing your blog, legal issues for bloggers. The list goes on, and on, and on. There’s a whole heap and I’ll give you a link in today’s show notes for the schedule itself so you can dig in there. There’s other sessions on Facebook and Instagram, advertising and blog design, and all kinds of stuff there.

That’s the bulk of what’s happening. Now, each of those breakout rooms will seat several hundred people. There’s plenty of room in those. You shouldn’t really have too much trouble getting into those sessions. This year, we’re also adding a fourth stream and we’re calling it our workshop stream. This is an opportunity for you to sit in a smaller room with a smaller group of people, probably around 40 people in a lot of these. With your ticket, we get to choose one, possibly two of these sessions.

These are opportunities for you to sit in a smaller room and to workshop a topic. There’ll be an opportunity for a bit more Q&A, maybe an opportunity for you to say, “Could you look at my blog and pull that apart?” Obviously, not all 40 people will get that opportunity but a little bit more of an intimate session and this enables us to really dig into some more advanced topics and some more specialized topics.

We’ve got a session on Google Analytics. We’ve got one on SEO. We’ve got one on Facebook advertising, one on copywriting, one on building courses and selling courses. We’ve got a number of sessions with our partner, Olympus, on how to take great photos and use them on your blog. We’ve got one on the back end of your blog, how to get the back end of your blog in order as well. How to choose what products to create on your blog. We’ve got a number of workshops on podcasting. We’ve got one on how to use a microphone and make your capture the best sound possible. We’ve got another one on presentation skills and another one on launching a podcast.

These workshops enable us to go a little bit more specialized and to tackle some topics that we haven’t been able to tackle because we’ve always had to fill a room with 200 or 300 people. Some of these sessions will run twice. We’ve left some spaces open in the schedule. You’ll see if you do check out the schedule for OnCourse. If there is a lot of demand for the Google Analytics session, we might run that twice. We may even run it three times if there’s enough demand.

We’re trying to tailor things there so when you buy your ticket, you’ll be able to select straight away some of those workshops. Some of you will be able to get two of them as well. This is something new for us and we’re just trying to work out how to run these using the extra rooms that we have around the place.

That’s what’s happening during the training. This is daytime. At night, things change gears a little. Particularly on Friday night, we have an amazing networking party. Our venue, RACV Royal Pines, last year, put on the most amazing party. The most amazing array of food was just amazing. That’s too many “amazings” in that sentence but it really was and it was a load of fun.

This year we’re giving our attendees the option to buy a ticket for that event. Last year, we had about 30% of people who didn’t come to it. They just liked to network in smaller groups or have some downtime in their rooms. We have a lot of introverts come. We didn’t want to waste your money so you can purchase that networking party for $50, Australian.

Friday, you’ve got all-day training then the party, the networking party the Friday night. Then Saturday, again another full day of training and then on the Saturday night we generally just hit the bar at the RACV Royal Pines. That’s just a pay-as-you-go type bar so a lot of people have a bit of a dance, a bit of a boogie that night.

Then on Sunday this year, we’re adding some master class opportunities and these will run on Sunday morning, from 8:30AM until around 1:00PM. I think we’ve got seven master classes that you can choose from and some of these will be quite small. I think the smallest one is for 14 people and the largest one is for 160 people. That large one is on productivity and planning and that’s with Natalie Sisson and Nicole Avery.

The other ones are between 14 and 40 people. These are all additional costs so you can add them to your ticket. They all range in price from $90–$199. The smaller ones are on things like creating a course to sell on your blog, profitable podcasting, email marketing and lead automation, Facebook advertising, and search engine optimization. Again, you can find details of those on the schedule page and I will link to that in today’s show notes.

Really, when you look at the ticket options this year, we’ve given you a few different options so that you can tailor the experience just to your needs. If you want everything, if you want all the training, the networking, and the master class, you can do that or if you just want to come to the main two days of the conference and then have Friday night to yourself or in a smaller group, then you can do that as well. Totally up to you. I’ll have links to some of the frequently asked questions that we’ve been getting about those ticketing options in today’s show notes as well.

Just a recap for the main two-days conference ticket. We’ll give you all of that content. We’ll give you lunch on both days. You’ll get morning and afternoon tea on both days as well. You’ll get the opportunity to go to 24 track sessions, 6 keynotes, and 2 workshops, and you also get a recording of all the sessions except for the workshops. We won’t be necessarily recording those workshops this particular year. Then you can add on the $50-party or one of the master classes.

So, who’s this conference for? It’s actually for bloggers of all stages. As I’ve mentioned before, we always have 10%–15% of our attendees who are yet to start blogging and the amazing thing is by the end of the conference, most of those people are ready to start. They’ve got the skills, they’ve got a lot of their questions answered, and they’re, most importantly, inspired to do it.

Every year, we hear back from attendees who are coming back to their second conference of how they’ve started a blog since our last conference. In fact, last year, I met a couple of people who started their blog at the conference. They were so inspired that they didn’t come to the party. They started a blog.

It’s for bloggers. It’s also for other influencers as well. This year, you would have noticed as you look at the schedule that we have sessions on podcasting, we have sessions on YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, live streaming, Periscope—those types of those technologies. A lot of the sessions that we’ve got this year, whilst they are being presented for bloggers, they are very relevant for people using different platforms. Search engine optimization, Google Analytics, these are as relevant for someone who has a blog as a podcast because a lot of podcasts are hosted on blogs as well.

This conference is also for brands who want to reach bloggers and influencers. Every year, we have quite a few businesses who want to meet influencers come to our conferences as well. We have a special brand ticket for you. It’s a little bit more expensive because it’s not subsidized by our amazing partners of the event. If you are a blogger and you’re coming to learn about blogging, we have quite a large discount for you. The main ticket for you as a blogger is $499, Australian, at the moment. It does go up on the July 1 by $100 but for the brands, they’re $799. You’re not being subsidized by our sponsors to come but you’re more than welcome to come on that basis as well.

For internationals, I know a lot of you who listen to this podcast are not from Australia, you are more than welcome to come if you want to make that trip out. Every year, we’re having more and more internationals come. Last year, we had quite a large contingent come across from New Zealand. I think there were 8–10 of them and I know this year that there’s quite a few New Zealanders going to come across as well. We’ve had people from Singapore, India, Malaysia, the Philippines, Indonesia, South Asia. We’ve always had people come across from the US to the conference, both as speakers and as attendees. We’ve had people from the UK, from the Middle East—all kinds of parts of the world. You are more than welcome to come.

Right now, the exchange rate is in the favor of those of you who are coming into Australia, in many cases, for the US particularly. The $499 ticket price, that’s Australian dollars. If you’re in the US, that’s about $385, US. Flights coming into Australia from the US of late over the last few weeks in particular have been quite amazing. I’ve never seen them this low. There’s a bit of a price war going on at the moment. It might be a good time for you to come to Australia. I would highly recommend you stay on for a week or two afterwards because it’s a great country and every American I’ve ever met says, “I want to come to Australia.” Well, now is the opportunity so do come across.

Those of you who can’t make that trip, I know it is a big ask. It takes a good 24 hours, really, with connections and that type of thing to get out here and it does cost a little bit to come out. If you can’t get here, we will be bringing back this year a virtual ticket which will get you all the recordings to our keynotes and breakout sessions. There’ll be a bit of a delay delivering them to you. We like to focus on our attendees and so we focus on the real, live event and then when we get home, we get those recordings up. There are a few days delay on that. We’re saying within 10 days. Those virtual passess will go on sale in July. Hold off on that but do stay tuned if you do want to come on a virtual basis.

What are the benefits of coming to ProBlogger event? Well, you get two amazing days of teaching and training, three if you stay on for the master classes. Every year, we hear stories of people who have started new things as a result of the event. I’ve lost count this year of the amount of people who’ve started podcasts as a result of last year’s event.

I’m sure, I’m certain, this year we’ll stimulate a whole heap of live streaming content. We’ve had people start ebooks, get publishing deals as a result of things that they’ve learned at the event find freelance writing opportunities and all kinds of new skills. The bulk of what we’re doing here is training and giving you the tools and information you need to build profitable blogs. That’s really my goal for this event.

But then, on top of that, there’s also other collaboration opportunities as well. For many of our attendees, this is what they really come for or this is at least why they keep coming back. Most people come because of the training then they realize it’s the community itself that has all the other benefits. There are many stories of attendees who are now in best friend friendships with people. I know of numerous attendees who are now in informal and formal masterminds with people that they met at the event.

In fact, there are quite a few attendees who stay for an extra day to do their masterminds after the event with other attendees and all kinds of collaborations have come out. There’s been business partnerships. There’s been more informal kinds of partnerships around creating products together. All kinds of opportunities come out of that.

The other benefit that comes out, and I know for many of our attendees, this is why they come. It’s sort of like a shot in the arm. It’s an inspirational time. It’s a time to get motivated. It’s a time to make some goals for the following 12 months. I know every year one of the things I try and get our attendees to do is to identify some priorities for what they’re going to go home and do. For me, that’s really important. We want to give you as much actionable information as we can but we also try and mix in some inspiration so that you not only learn how to do things, you have some reason to those things as well. Inspiration’s a big part of it. 

I guess the other thing that you’ll benefit from by coming to this event is you’ll hear about some of the latest innovations, technologies, and tools, both in the conversations that you have with other bloggers, there’s a lot of sharing of information in those conversations but also in the sessions themselves.

If you’d love to come to our event, we’d love to have you. Please go to probloggerevents.com and you’ll be able to find there links to where you can buy a ticket and also get more information on the event. There’s an opportunity there for you to contact us as well. My team will be more than happy to answer any questions that you have.

Can I just encourage you, though? If you are thinking about it, don’t hesitate too long. The prices will go up on July 1 if there’s tickets left. We always have that qualification because except for last year, we sold out every other year. Last year we didn’t sell out because we had such a big venue to fill but we’ve already taken a big step forward to filling that venue based on last year’s figure. By the time this podcast goes out, I’m hoping there’s still some tickets left and if there’s not, we will certainly make an announcement about that as well. There’s a Facebook group for the event as well. I’ll link to that in today’s show notes too. That’s another great place that you can get information on the event.

I hope that answers your questions. I hope that you will join us on the Gold Coast here in Australia on September 9 and 10. If you’ve got any feedback for us, I’d love to hear that over on the show notes today as well. All of the links that I’ve mentioned, all of the information that I’ve mentioned as well, I’ll try and summarize in today’s show notes at problogger.com/podcast/110. Thanks for listening and we’ll get back to our regular podcast schedule in the next couple of days.

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 us @ProBlogger, find us at facebook.com/ProBlogger or search ProBlogger on iTunes.

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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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Today’s question comes from Dorothy K from DorothyK.com.au and she asks: “I’d love you to talk about the “usefulness” or “value” of personal blogging. There has been a bit of a discussion about this lately on a few blogs.”

I think this question is relevant to a lot of people. I frequently get this question when I am doing Q & A sessions at conferences.

People want to know if they should have a personal blog as well as a niche focused blog. I actually think having a personal blog is a good thing.

Just about everyone at one point or another should have a personal blog, and I’m going to give you 15 reasons why.

So why do people say personal blogs are not recommended? Why is the common advice to go for a niche.

The main reason many people recommend niche blogs over personal blogs is because personal blogs are more difficult to monetise. Still, it is possible to blog about a range of topics relevant to a group of people and monetise around that.

Most bloggers, I know, who make a living from a personal blog do a couple of things:

Lastly – there are no rules of blogging. Your blog might evolve. You might start out for self expression and end up doing something else (or vice versa).

Blog On!

This week I had a great question come in from Dorothy K from dorothyk.com.au who wrote, “I love you to talk about the usefulness or value of personal blogging. There has been a bit of a discussion about this lately on a few blogs and I’d love your thoughts.”

It is a great question. If you were in Australia, you may have seen some of the discussion. I think most of the discussion that Dorothy is talking about relates to some of the Australian bloggers who are writing about this particular topic.  I think it may even be started by Stacey Roberts who is the editor of ProBlogger. I’ll include some of the links to some of these discussions in today’s show notes.

I do want to tackle this question because I think it’s one that is relevant to a lot of people. In fact, I regularly get it when I’m at a conference doing Q&As. People are like, “Should you have a personal blog as well as a niche-focused blog?”

I actually think (and this may surprise some people who argue strongly for just having a niche-focused blog) a personal blog is a good thing. I almost argue—I’m not sure if I would go quite to this extent—that everyone should (at one point or another) have a personal blog. I want to give you 15 reasons for having one, 15 things that I think you can benefit from having a personal blog. 

Let’s just define what a personal blog is here. This is a blog where you just write about anything and everything. Maybe something that you do in a WordPress blog, or you want might want to use a Medium blog, a Tumblr blog, or a Blogspot blog. It doesn’t really matter what platform it is. A personal blog is where you mix things up a bit. You write from the heart (maybe a little bit more) or just things that are interesting to you.

It turns out that most bloggers I talked to started this way. They start with a personal blog. I think that’s some of the reason’s I’m going to give are tapping into that. That’s what a personal blog is as opposed to a more niche-focused blog. Increasingly, we are seeing people start with a niche or a particular audience in mind. They’re starting with the intent (perhaps) of monetizing or building a business around that niche-focused blog, while most personal blogs (at least) start out with no real intent of monetizing.

If I think back to 2002 when I first started blogging, I think it was November 2002. I don’t remember the exact date, but it was a personal blog. I was writing about spirituality, the work I was doing as a minister in a church and a youth worker. I was writing about the movies I was seeing. I was writing about politics from time to time. What else? Watching on the television, the movies I was seeing, what was it like to live in Australia, all kinds of bits and pieces. Some of it was humorous, some of it were serious, some of it were long, some of it were short. It was whatever’s going on in my mind. It was almost like what we use Twitter for today. Sometimes I’ll publish five times a day. It was just a short little, “This is what I was thinking right now,” type stuff. Anyway, that’s where I started. 

Let’s get into the 15 reasons. I’m going to whip through this. This is not a long podcast, at least I’m not intending it to be. First one, I think personal blogging is great because it gives you an avenue just to express yourself. That’s why I started my first blog. I saw other people pretty much verbalizing what was going on inside their minds without getting the words out and expressing themselves. I think that’s a healthy thing for all of us, particularly us guys. Many of us guys hold those things in, although I don’t think that’s just a male thing. A lot of my male friends struggle with that one. I think verbalizing is a good thing, expressing yourself. Number one, express yourself. Just like a Madonna song.

Number two, it’s a great way to record your life. This is another thing that I started doing. I was involved in starting a new church back in 2002. I wanted to record that journey and record my experience of being in that. Unfortunately, that blog was no longer live because I know some of you are going to go, “I want to read that blog.” It’s no longer there. A personal blog is just a great way to record your life. 

There’s a whole heap of ways that we do these days. Facebook’s one way that I think a lot of people are doing this. But a blog might be one way to do that as well. Record the life of your family, you move to a different country, or whatever it is that you’re going through at the moment. That’s number two.

Number three, I think a personal blog is just a perfect way to see if you like blogging. A lot of people have this dream of becoming a full-time blogger or building a business around the blog but they don’t really know what they’re going to talk about. They don’t know if they’re going to enjoy it. Why not just jump on one of those free blogging tools? You don’t even have to have your own domain. I know some people are going to think that’s the worst thing I could ever say. Just see if you like blogging and start writing. You’re going to learn a whole heap. I think you’re going to work out pretty quick, whether you’re certain to blogging, whether you can do it, whether you can enjoy it, and whether it gives you life. That’s number three, see if you like it.

Number four. If you are thinking down the track one day, you want to be a full-time blogger, then number four is about getting used to the idea of putting yourself out there. I think this is really important. If you do see yourself one day as being a full-time blogger, you need to get used to that idea. You are publishing content everyday. You’re putting your ideas out there. And that takes some getting used to because people are going to respond to those ideas. Sometimes it’s fear associated with that. Sometimes it’s insecurities. A personal blog can be a really great way of getting used to that idea of putting yourself out there on a regular basis. 

Number five is to learn about the technology of blogging. I kind of hinted this one a couple ago. I think by starting a blog, you’re going to learn how to blog. You’re going to become (for me) with the idea of hitting publish on a post, of formatting a post, getting a title together, inserting an image, that type of thing. These are all good skills that are really good to learn if you want to start another blog. They’re also good skills to learn if you want to get a job somewhere one day. To be able to say you’re that familiar with WordPress or you’re familiar with blogging is going to be another thing that you can add to your resume.

Number six is to experiment with different topics, to test different ideas, niches, categories, and that type of thing. I think this is really useful, again if you’re thinking of starting a niche-focused blog but you’re not quite sure which topic to go with. This is really what I learned when I have my first blog.

My first blog has 30 different categories at one stage. I was writing about blogging. I was writing about photography. I was writing about politics. I was writing about spirituality. I was writing about all these different things. I realized over time that by writing a whole slew of different things, that some of those topics really energized me and I wanted to write more of them. I also realized that some of those topics were really connecting with my readers and they wanted more content on that. That unlocked the idea for ProBlogger, Digital Photography School, and some of the other blogs I started over the years. 

If you are one of those people who has a multi-passionate view and you like fashion but you also like travel, food, and you’re not quite sure which one to blog on or whether do all three, you can test those things with a blog.

Number seven is to try different writing styles and voices. Again, this is something that’s so easy to do on a personal blog because there’s no expectation there from your readers that you’re going to get anything because you write about anything and everything. You can also write in different styles. You can try different voices. You can try writing in a character, in a third person, or whatever it is. You can write long verse, short verse. Again, this will help you to reveal what your style is but also what people respond well to. 

Connected to this is number eight. By having a personal blog, you’re going to improve your writing. This is a great school to have whether you end up being a blogger or not. To be able to communicate with the written world is really important. It’s also going to help you to think about how you communicate. More broadly, it will help you to order your thoughts, and to learn to express yourself. I found that even just starting blogging helped me in my public speaking and has a whole heap of flow-on effects as well. Number eight is to improve your writing.

Number nine reason why you might want to have a personal blog is that I found that it will help you to improve your thinking. This is related to what I was just talking about. By being forced everyday to put words to your thoughts, you become more thoughtful. You begin to learn to order your thoughts and to take your ideas to a conclusion rather than just go, “That’s interesting.” You are forcing yourself by writing about topics to look from different perspectives, to order your thoughts, come up with conclusions, and come up with your own ideas as well. We’ll help you to improve your thinking. I think it’s great for brain development as well.

Number 10 is it’s going to open up (potentially) opportunities to connect with other people. It might help you to find friends, a relationship, a partner. Who knows what it could open up. There’s been so many stories.

Everytime we run the ProBlogger event here in Australia, I just love the squeals of delight when one attendee meets another attendee for the first time in real life. They’re connected through their blogs and they’ve journeyed with each other. They’ve become friends online. They actually meet and become friends in real life as well. It does open up the potential for you to connect with really interesting people and a global connection as well. 

That’s what I loved when I first started blogging. I was suddenly interacting with people in Europe, in America, through Asia, and different parts of Africa who were all on a similar journey to me, who had a similar mix of interest to me. I find that just wonderful, very refreshing. Number 10 is to help you connect to other people.

Number 11 is to help you to develop discipline, habits, and structure in your life. This one I found really useful. I talked about my personality type before on the Myers-Briggs measure. I am an INFP. I’ll talk about my introversion, which is the “I” in the past. One of my other characteristics in my personality is the P. The P part of that is that I’m pretty much all over the place. I don’t have a whole heap of structure naturally in my life. I may not be the most disciplined person. I’m pretty spontaneous, like to go with the flow. While I like being that type of person, I know that sometimes I need some structure. 

When I started blogging for the first time back in 2002, it gave me a rhythm to my day. That rhythm has changed over the years. I published it at different times. I do different things at different times now. Back in 2002 when I first started, I identified the time every morning that I would write. By creating that time every morning that I would write, I actually developed a rhythm. I developed a habit. I developed discipline. I learned to stick things. I learned to meet deadlines. I learned the joy of having some structure in your life as well. If you’re someone who needs structure in your life, it may be a blog that’ll help you to do that.

Number 12 is to help you to see life differently. This is a bit of a hard one to explain. One of the things I noticed when I started blogging in my first personal blog is that because I was writing about the things of my life, I was writing about the things that were going on in my brain that I was experiencing, I suddenly started to look at my life a little bit more intentionally. I started to look at it a little bit differently. I knew that it was an opportunity to write something.

This is one of those things that is tricky to explain. I guess I just began to notice more things as well. I would always look for things I could write about. I started to notice those little things that happen to us everyday that we float by. By observing them, by living in the moment of them, and capturing them in some way, I began to notice those little things. I guess I became a bit more mindful. Mindfulness is a big buzzword in the last few years. I think by blogging it, it helped me to pause, to celebrate those little moments, to notice those little things, and to see those patterns. That was just a good thing for me, probably good for my mental health, and good for the way I saw life. 

Number 13, maybe it’s tied to that one a little bit is I think by having a personal blog you discover what’s meaningful to you as well. I don’t know. There’s something about writing and expressing your thoughts, analyzing those thoughts, putting stuff out there, where it helps you to filter it. I remember many times starting to write a blog post and just going, “I can’t publish this. This is just fluff. It’s just not really meaningful to me. I don’t really believe in this.” 

Other times, I start to write on a particular topic that I was interested in. By the end of the blogpost, I was just really passionate about it. I think those little signals to yourself about things that are meaningful and you discover your “why” path a little by expressing ideas, expressing your beliefs, and putting ideas out there. It’s your opportunity to test things (I guess) and find out really what drives you. That’s important.

On the flipside of that, I think it also helps you to do something that’s meaningful to other people. A lot of people say that a niche blog serves people. A niche blog is useful. You’ve got a blog about photography, helping people to learn how to do photography that’s useful. Sometimes I think a personal blog can be really useful to people, too. Even if you’re just chatting, even if you’re just observing life, that can be useful to people because it helps them to see life a little bit differently, too. They hear a different perspective, too. Understand a different person’s journey and story. That (I think) is good for everyone. It’s good for our world. The more people who are sharing their life, what they think, and what they do, I reckon that’s just a good thing for humanity. 

Number 14 for me is to serve, inspire, give hope, teach, and encourage others. A blog need not stick to a single topic to do that. Your personal blogging can be incredibly useful without necessarily solving a particular problem or teaching a particular thing or breaking news in some way. You don’t have to stay on a particular topic to be useful to share your journey. That might just inspire someone. That might just give someone hope. That might just teach someone a lesson that they need to know.

It’s not just a niche blog that can be useful. If anyone tells you that it is, then I don’t believe in that. I saw many times in me rambling through my own thoughts on my first personal blog telling a story that didn’t have a point or telling a story that I haven’t realized the point yet. Sometimes those posts actually have the biggest impact upon people because they were real. They encourage other people to take those journeys as well.

Last thing I’ll say about having a personal blog is it’s a great place to let off steam, to talk about passions, to record what you’re learning on topics that don’t relate to your professional blogs. There’s been times where I have started a personal blog because there was stuff going on in my life that I just needed to get out. They didn’t relate to my niche blogs, so I just had to get them out. Some of those personal blogs I have lived for a little while, some of them I just did personally and just told a few friends about them as well. 

The other reason I reckon that a personal blog is a good thing, I’m sure you’ll come up with a whole heap more. I would love to hear about them in the comments of the show notes. I also thought about talking about them from the flip side, why do people say that their personal blogs are sometimes not recommended.

I heard blogging experts say, “Don’t have a personal blog. Have a niche blog” I kind of wanted to tackle that a little bit, too. I think the reason that many of us talk a lot about niche blogging (I’ve talked a lot about it over the years, too), I think it is useful to try to find what your blog is about. Most times, I talked about that. I guess I’m talking about it from a monetization perspective. It’s not impossible to monetize a personal blog, but I think it’s a bit tougher to monetize a purely personal blog. It’s not impossible. There are examples out there and I can think of a few. Most blogs that are monetized will have some kind of focus on them.

If you want to monetize with advertising, most advertisers are looking to advertise on a blog that either explores a certain topic, industry, or niche. Or, that has a certain demographic. That’s where there is an opportunity (I think) with the personal blog. If you have a personal blog that’s going to appeal to a certain type of person, I think that type of personal blog may monetize.

One obvious example of this is Heather Armstrong who blogs at Dooce or did blog at Dooce (it’s going through a bit of a transition at the moment). For many years, she had that personal blog and it was largely about her life. She wrote on a whole range of topics, whatever it took her fancy (I guess) from day to day. Many of her posts were quite personal and she managed to build an audience through doing that. Most of her audience were women and probably at a similar life stage to her, so it became an appealing blog to advertisers to advertise on.

If you want to monetize through advertising, you may want to think about, “Okay, yes, I’m going to write on a personal nature but I’m going to write stuff that appeals to a certain type of person.” Some personal bloggers do that intentionally. They say, “I’m going to write for women,” or, “I’m going to write for men,” or some bloggers just naturally do that because they’re a woman or they’re a man, they’re at a certain age, and they might attract certain audiences similar to them.

I think there are other income streams that could work on a personal blog. Sponsored posts and advertising are certainly one. Some affiliate products, some affiliate promotions. Maybe your own products if you start to write a lot about a certain topic. Maybe advertising might be the best way to go. It’s not an easy journey. I think a niche-focus is going to maybe accelerate that. Although, there are plenty of examples as well.

Most people that I know who make a living from personal blogs tend to either write for that demographic or they tend to end up specializing. This is (I guess) the other thing. I’ve seen a number of personal bloggers start out writing about anything and everything. Then they realize that certain categories in their blog are the thing they’re most passionate about and the things that people are responding to. They end up morphing into a semi-niche blog. I can think of a few personal bloggers who started writing about everything in their life and struggled with health, depression, parenting, travel, food, and style. Then they realize that’s the food and style stuff that seem to appeal. They tend to gravitate more towards that. I’ve seen bloggers move in that way as well.

Two last two things I’ll say. Firstly, there’s no rules in blogging. I don’t think anyone should ever say, “The only way to blog is like this,” “The only way to blog is a niche-blog,” or, “The only way to blog is personal.” You need to do what you need to do. If someone tells you you have to have a niche, then there may be some good reason they’re saying that. There may be some elements of truth in that and some benefits of following their advice. There’s so many more reasons to start a blog than just to monetize and just to become an expert in the field, to get a book deal and all those types of things. There’s many ways to start a blog and there’s many ways to use it.

The last thing I’ll say is that blogs evolve. You might start your blogging on a personal blog but it might morph into something else. You may start even as a professional blogger, a niche blogger, and then morphe that into something more personal, into something broader as well. There’s no real rules to it. Don’t let anyone force you into any particular type of blog. Blog on. Just blog on. Follow your heart a little bit. Yes, take notice of the advice that people give you, but ultimately, it’s up to you. You need to make that decision. You need to set the direction for your own blog. I encourage you to keep grappling with all this stuff if it’s something a bit of a grapple for you. 

If you have any questions, any examples of blogs that you think can do this stuff really well, any extra reasons that you would add for having a personal blog, I’d love to hear about that. I’d love to see your personal blogs if you’re willing to share them at the comments over problogger.com/podcast/109 where you’ll find today’s show notes. You’ll also find some links to some great Aussie bloggers who were grappling with this stuff in their own writing as well. Thanks to those bloggers who have been sharing their journey.

If you’re the one that I missed, feel free to add a link in today’s show notes as well. Thanks for listening. I’ll chat with you in a couple of days time in episode 110.

You’ve been listening to ProBlogger. If you 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.

We would love to hear how today’s show went for you. Do you have a personal blog, and if so how do you monetise it?

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Today’s podcast was inspired by a question from Grant. He asks:“I just discovered another blog is republishing my content in full on their site. They seem to be scraping every post using my RSS feed. Can I stop them and is it worth my time to do that?”

Is it worth your time to do anything? In the past, I would try to chase down sites that stole my content to avoid duplicate content penalties, but Google has gotten better about knowing who the original author is.

Now, I just do a couple of things to identify that the content is mine when it is being scraped.

When the content thieves strip out my links and don’t acknowledge the source, I still go after them and try to get the content taken down. Below are seven steps that can be taken to combat content thieves.

Usually, a polite notice and conversation with the offending blogger or webmaster is enough to get the content taken down, but if they don’t respond the above tactics can be applied.

How did you go with today’s episode?

Let us know if you have ever encountered this problem and what you thought of today’s show.

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Today’s show notes can be found over at problogger.com/podcast/108, where you’ll find some resources and tools that we recommend you do check out on this particular topic. You’ll also find information about a new little resource that we’ve created over a ProBlogger where we’re willing to give you six months of blog post ideas for free. All you have to do is sign up for the ProBlogger PLUS newsletter and we will send you, over the next six months, 180 blog post ideas, 30 per month. They’re just little prompts to get you going, to get the ideas flowing for you for those of you who do fine coming up with ideas to write about a little bit tough. You can find those prompts on where to sign up over at problogger.net/ideas.

Grant emailed me this question just today actually. He writes, “I just discovered another blog is republishing my content in full on their site. They seem to be scraping every post using my RSS feed. Can I stop them and is it worth my time to do that? Looking forward to your answer, Grant.” This is a great question. One I get a fair bit and one I suspect that different bloggers take different approaches, too.

Now, let’s take the second part of that question first, “Is it worth your time to do anything about this?” My answer may surprise you because with one exception, I’ve all but given up chasing down sites that use my content on their blogs. The reality is there are just so many sites who are doing this these days that I could quite easily spend two or three hours a day trying to track down all of these sites and then trying to get them to stop.

Now, I used to try and combat it, I used to try and track them down, I used to try and find them all, and then try and get them to stop, but I ended up realizing that I’d rather spend my time in a more constructive way. Rather than stopping people from scraping my site, I think I’d rather spend my time creating more content that serves my readers.

Now, that’s just my approach to it, but I’d at least encourage you to consider it. The reason I used to try and stop it was that a few years ago, there was a feeling amongst many bloggers that Google could potentially penalize sites that had duplicate content. I used to worry that Google would look at my content, look at these other sites, not know who was the original, and that ended up penalizing us both. But what I’ve realized over the last few years is that Google seems to have gotten better at working out who the original first source of that content is and I’m not sure it’s such a big concern anymore.

I guess you do need to do some analysis, do some searches on Google for some keywords in your posts that are being scraped and see whether your site is ranking higher than theirs. That might be one of the times where you might want to do something about it. If the other site is outranking you for your own content, I probably would take action on that. But if you’re outranking them, if Google’s working out that you’re the original source of that content, then you probably don’t have as much to worry about in terms of duplicate content. You might find that it’s better to spend your time creating more content than having to get defensive.

There are a couple of things that I would encourage you to do to help you when your content is being scraped in this way. The first thing you can do is very easy. You probably should be doing this already is include as many links in your new content as you can to old posts on your site. In most cases, when someone is scraping your content from an RSS feed, they will republish everything that you have including your images, including any links in your content.

If you’re linking back to your own site in that content and talking about it in the first person saying things like, “Here’s a post I wrote last month that explores this,” then anyone who finds that content is going to go, “Hey, just a second, this isn’t the original source of this content,” and they’re going to end up on your site. Also, it may even help with your SEO a little to get those extra links coming in.

The other thing you can do is to use a tool like Yoast. We’ve talked about Yoast in the past. It’s a great SEO plug-in for your site. Yoast allows you to put a link back to your blog and to the original blog post in the footer of your RSS feed. If they are scraping your RSS feed—again, this is the most common way that people will rip your content—they will, in most cases, also publish that footer. That footer can say anything you like. You could say, “The original source of this article is…” and then link back to your post. Again, that tells Google that you are the original source of that content. That can help with some of that duplicate content issue and it might just give you a little bit of extra SEO juice as well.

I would encourage you to check out the Yoast WordPress plugin if you’re not already using it. You probably should be using already for other SEO benefits but just check out the footer feature of that plug-in as well, see that you’ve set it up right, and check your RSS feed to make sure that you are getting those links in your feed as well.

Before, I said that there’s an exception to when I will do something about people using my content and it’s when they use it without acknowledging the source and they strip out any identifying crediting features like the links in my feed, the RSS footer that I just talked about, any author credits. Some people go to that, they will republish your content, and say that it’s theirs. Sometimes, they even put their own name on it and they might change it a little bit, they might take a paragraph and introduce it a bit different, and then they use the rest of your content.

I have to say this hasn’t happened a lot to me, at least, to my knowledge but probably every year or every year-and-a-half, I do find someone who is doing this. Sometimes, they just do it with one post and sometimes, they do it with a whole heap of posts. I’ve come across a number of bloggers over the years who have taken up to 100, up to 200 of my posts from ProBlogger or Digital Photography School, they put their own names, they put their own images into it, and published it as their own. You see these huge large chunks of text in the middle of their articles which are just direct from your own content.

This really makes me mad. It gets me angry because I’ve put a lot of time into my content and the writers that I hire, (1) I pay them to write that content, and (2) they put a lot of time into it as well. It does make me angry and it is something that I try to hold that anger in and not responding too much of a public way, although there maybe is a time for that as well. I try and follow a bit of a process. I’ve written this process down to try and hold me to it because it’s very easy when you see this to just get on Twitter and go, “Look at this site, this is what they’re doing,” and then you think that maybe you could have done that a little bit differently. I’ve got a process in place and I try and follow through on this process.

The first thing I do is always try and contact the site concerned. The first protocol should always be to try and contact that blogger. Now, this can be hard. Sometimes, the bloggers who are doing this type of thing do not have any way of contacting them on their site, they don’t have a contact form, but you need to, if you can, explain to them as politely and as not angrily as you can that they are breaching copyright.

Now, I have to say there have been a couple of times where this has been done to me. It turns out that the other bloggers either have just no idea about copyright and they’re just doing it ignorantly. Sometimes I claim that and you can tell that maybe they’re not really as ignorant as they’re claiming, but there have been a couple of times where it’s been teenagers and they just, obviously, don’t understand it. I want to try and give them as much benefit of the doubt as I can.

There’s been one case where I did actually find that the blogger had hired someone to write a whole heap of content for them. They’d been ripped off by this person. This person has basically scraped a whole heap of content from my site and other sites. While it’s hard to get to the truth of these matters, in one case, I was able to do that and we actually got an omission from the writer themselves. You’ve got to at least go into that with a bit of benefit of the doubt for the other person.

I usually ask people to remove the content on the site within 24 hours. Sometimes, I’ve asked them to apologize and admit that they’ve done the wrong thing if they’ve really done the wrong thing in a big way. There was one person who’d scraped 500 of my articles and I forced them to issue an apology because they were on a reasonably well-known blog at the time as well. I always try and contact the other blogger first.

If you can’t find their contact details, the second thing you do is to run a WHOIS check of their site. I use the service Copyscape to do that, but Google WHOIS, and then you can plug in any URL. Depending on how they’ve set up their site, you can often get a contact email for them or for their web host. Sometimes, they hide that information but, in most cases you are at least able to find out who’s hosting their site.

That gives you two further avenues for action. Firstly, you may get the person’s contact email address and you’re able to email them directly and if not, you might be able to contact the site that is hosting them.

This is probably the third step, if I don’t get any response from the blogger themselves, I usually will contact the company that has their servers hosted with and contact them telling them about this breach of copyright. That host, that server has a legal obligation to do something about that. They’re legally not allowed to host copyrighted information. They know that they’re going to get in trouble for that. You find that many servers, many host companies will have a process for you to follow to issue them with a DMCA takedown notice. That’s what you need to put together, a DMCA takedown notice.

This is a legal document. You need to sign it. It’s one of those things that’s pretty serious. If you issue one of these and it’s not true, you can have some legal consequences to you. But if you feel like you are in the right and this person has taken your content without your permission, breaching your copyright, you can issue a DMCA takedown notice to them or to their site’s host, and that server company has to remove that content. Most will do it very quickly because they don’t want to get tied up in a legal fight with you.

If the blog is hosted on Blogger, Blogspot, wordpress.com, Tumblr, or Medium, they will have somewhere in there citing their terms and conditions in their frequently asked questions. They’ll probably have the process outlined for you. That’s what you need to do. You need to find out how to issue that DMCA takedown notice. You will need to provide where your content was originally published online so that they can go, look, and compare the two pieces of content. You’ll need to give some information on when you publish that and that type of thing as well just so that they can do a bit of an investigation.

But it’s usually not too long of a process. In most of the cases, and I’ve only had to go this far probably about 5 or 6 times in the last 10 years, most of the cases were taken down very quickly. Sometimes just threatening the fact and that you are going to issue a DMCA, if you write to the blogger themselves, and say that your next step is to issue a DMCA to your host, sometimes that’s enough as well. That extra threat to the blogger themselves is enough because they don’t want to lose their blog.

There was another time where I did contact another blogger’s advertisers. I’m not sure whether this is the right way to do it but it worked in this case. The blogger themselves weren’t responding to me so I started to ask myself what the motivation of their site is and I realized they were running ads all over their site. I contacted one of their advertisers, who was also one of my advertisers, and said, “Did you know you’re advertising on a site that is stealing my copy?” That advertiser went back to the blogger and that’s when I got some action as well. Maybe that’s another option that you can do.

That’s the fourth step. The first step was to contact the blogger. Number two is run a WHOIS. Number three was to contact the server company of that site or the host whether it be Blogger a WordPress. Number four is, maybe, try some advertisers of that site. Number five, I’m not really sure, I hesitate to say this, but maybe there is a place to shame those suckers. Maybe there is a time and a place to name, shame them, and expose them for what they are.

I’ve done this a few times. Sometimes, I’ve done it a little bit earlier than perhaps I should, but sometimes, people just have to own up to their own responsibilities. I’m (I guess) lucky, fortunate enough to have a fairly large social profile, so my reader’s outrage probably helped a little. If you’re smaller, it may be a little bit hard for you to do that.

The sixth thing you might want to try—I never had to do this; I’ve heard other bloggers try to do this one—if to file for that other blog to be banned from Google and other search engines. There is a Digital Millennium Copyright Act. You can do a bit of research on that. As I said, I’ve never done it before and I don’t really know how much success you’ll have with it but you might want to research that particular one.

I guess the last point of call could be legal action. This is something I’ve never had to go to the extent of. I’ve threatened it a couple of times but usually, that WHOIS search might give you enough point of contact to be able to issue those sorts of proceedings. But it’s probably a last resort and a bit of an expensive route to go.

In most cases, I’ve found that people will respond if you send them an email and say, “Hey, I’ve caught you, here’s the proof,” try and be polite, give them a little bit of a benefit of doubt, they’ll probably make some excuse. I’ve never really had anyone admit to doing it, it’s usually someone, their employee, said they didn’t know, or they usually come up with some excuse, but usually, they’ll take down that content pretty quick when you start saying to them that you’re going to issue a DMCA takedown notice to their server. In most cases, I’ve had a resolution on that.

Now, there is a service you can use called Copyscape paid service. I think they might have a free option as well, you might want to investigate that. That’s a service that will help you to identify when your content is being stolen. You can run some tests on using Copyscape or you could just simply Google some of your own content. Just grab a couple of sentences of your content that you know no one else would have written exactly the same way. Put quotation marks around them, put them into Google, and see what comes up. You’ll find, in many cases, that someone is using your content in one way or another.

Again, the question is “Is it really worth your time to do something about it? Could you use that time in some more constructive way?” Really, only you can answer, that once you’ve looked at things like how that content is ranking, is it outranking yours, and are they giving you acknowledgment, are they linking back to your source, at least, which, in the long run, may actually benefit you if someone does find their content.

I hope that’s helpful to you, Grant. I thank you for your question. If you’ve got a question that you’d like me to ask, you can just head to problogger.com. There are contact forms all over my sites and you can ask a question using any of those contact forms. Or you can just email me directly at [email protected] and I will try and tackle as many of those questions as I can in future episodes.

Thanks so much for listening. Again, if you do want to check out today’s show notes, they’re at problogger.com/podcast/108. You can also grab that opt-in six months of content ideas at problogger.net/ideas.

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 us at @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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Today I’m going to talk about affiliate marketing and where the links should point to when sending an email promoting a product to your list.

This topic was inspired by a question from Scott.

“I want to try my hand at some affiliate promotions and have selected an eBook to promote. I have heard to say that your affiliate promotions work best when you email your list but I am wondering if I should email that affiliate link or send them to my own blog where I review the product.”

“I’d love your guidance – how do you promote an affiliate product?”

Affiliate marketing is a great way to make money with a blog. If you are not familiar with the concept you can learn more from Podcast Episode 51: My Tips for Making Money As a Blogger Through Affiliate Marketing.

Ideally, you want as few clicks as possible, but there are times when some extra clicks and pre-selling will get your readers in the buying mood. I hope that answers the question.

I would love to hear what you do with sending readers to landing pages or pre-selling on your blog.

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).

Enjoy this podcast? Sign up to our ProBloggerPLUS newsletter to get notified of all new tutorials and podcasts below.

One of the ways that many of our blogger’s readers sustain their blogs and make a profit from their blogs is through affiliate marketing. That’s what I want to talk about in today’s episode. In particular, I want to talk about where the links should point to when you send an email to your list promoting an affiliate product.

This question comes in from Scott who asks, “I want to try my hand at some affiliate promotions and have selected an ebook to promote. I’ve heard you say that your affiliate promotions work best when you email your list, but I’m wondering if I should email that affiliate link or should I send them to my own blog where I review the ebook?” This is a great question from Scott and I want to tackle it today, giving you a few insights into when you should do each of the options that Scott mentions.

We’re talking about affiliate marketing today. I want to encourage those of you who haven’t tried promoting affiliate products in the past to give it a go. I think it’s a really great way to get into monetizing a blog without having to create your own product. You’re going to learn a whole heap about how your readers respond to marketing messages and you’ll probably learn a little bit about the type of products that your readers are going to respond to as well. It might give you some hints as to the type of products you should be creating.

Now, if you’re listening to this and you are thinking, “What in the world is Darren talking about? What is an affiliate promotion?” you need to go back and listen to episode 51 where I do introduce this great way to make money from your blogs. I’m not going to go through the beginnings of what is affiliate marketing except to say that it is the most common way that our readers on ProBlogger tell us that they’re making money. I think it’s probably worth exploring if you haven’t explored it yet. If that’s you, head back to episode 51 right now and then come back to this one because we’re going to get into this choice that we have when we do send out an email to our list.

To Scott’s question—thank you for the question, Scott, I do appreciate it—you’ve identified a choice here that we talk about as a team for every affiliate promotion that we do. The reality is that we don’t always do the same thing. I’m going to give you some examples of where we’ve done both of the things that you’ve suggested.

Just to recap, we’re talking here about which link you put in your email. If you’re sending an email out to your list, promoting an affiliate product, do you send out pointing directly to the sales page of that product that the product creator has given you, the affiliate link that they’re giving you or do you write a post about that product, put it on your blog, and use that link in your email?

Now, there are some good reasons for taking either approach. Let’s start by, perhaps, talking about using the affiliate link, linking directly to the sales page of the product that you’re promoting. The reason that you would consider this is that it gets your reader closer to them hitting the add to cart button faster. It removes a click if you like. If you’re sending people directly from your email to the product sales page, you’re sending them straight there without having a middle page in the way. That always increases the chances of them putting that product in a cart and checking out, almost always. It’s the ideal.

Now, we do this on most of our affiliate promotions. We particularly are doing it when the sales page that we’d be sending people to is a good one, where we think it’s well-designed and well optimized, and has good calls to action. We also would do this if we don’t have to do a whole heap of pre-selling in the email that we’re sending out. If we’re sending out an email and we just think the sales page sells itself, sells the product itself, then probably we’ll just do a relatively short email and say, “Look, you can get all the details here,” and then give them the link.

An example of this would be last year. We do a ‘Twelve Days of Christmas’ campaign on Digital Photography School every year. As one of the promotions we were doing during that 12 days, we were promoting a course which we had promoted in the past, we knew it converted with our audience, and the sales page was just fantastic. The sales page had a great video on it, it had a well-written copy, it really sold the product well. We knew it was a good match for our readers, we knew that all we had to do is to get our readers to see that page, and there was a pretty good percentage of them who are going to buy that product.

I had no hesitation, whatsoever, in linking directly to that sales page. There was no need to put a link to a blog post that then explained what the product was and everything because the sales page itself did such a good job. This is my ideal. This is what I want to do every time I promote a product, I want to get people to the landing page, but there are times when you should consider not sending people directly to that landing page and sending them to some other destination, ideally your own blog.

There are a few reasons why you might want to consider this other option. Instead of sending them directly to the affiliate link landing page, you might want to send them to your blog. Let me give you a few times when you might want to do this second option.

The first time you might want to reconsider sending them directly to the landing page is if you’re promoting a product that has a sales page that you don’t really think does a great job of selling the product. I’m not going to name the product, but I can think back to a product a few years ago that I promoted on Digital Photography School. It was an ebook. The ebook was great, it was a really good fit for our audience, the product itself was perfect for our audience, but the person who’d written the ebook was a better ebook writer than they were a marketer.

As I looked at their landing page, I was like, “No, I’m not sure that this page is going to really sell this product very well. I might need to pre-sell the product a little bit more.” Instead of sending my readers to the landing page, I wrote a review of the product on my blog. That review acted as a landing page in and of itself. In the review, I talked about whom the product would be great for, what it was about, I ran through some of the sections of the ebook. I think I even used a screenshot or two from the ebook with the permission of the author. I showed the table of contents and I really talked about the pros and cons of the book.

Naturally, there were more pros than there were cons. It acted as a landing page. It acted as a testimonial of all sorts as well. By the time people clicked the affiliate link to go to the sales page, they were ready to buy. Anyone who clicked that link was ready to buy. The landing page itself didn’t need to convince them a whole heap. If anything, it probably would unconvince them because it wasn’t the best design, but hopefully, my review warmed them up enough to buy that product that they didn’t really pay a whole heap of attention to the landing page itself.

That would be one instance where you might want to reconsider sending them directly to a landing page where you think you could do something to enhance that product. It was interesting, the person who wrote that ebook actually asked me if they could use parts of my review as a new landing page. I actually said to them, “Look, I think that would be great and please do use that.” It worked out quite well for the person in the long run.

The second time you might want to link to a review or something on your blog is if you think a review itself might help to sell the product. Sometimes, the sales page is good, but you still think your readers will respond better if they hear you really talk in-depth about that product. This is something that I’ve done a little bit on ProBlogger over the years, where I might do a walk-through of how I use a tool that I’m using on ProBlogger that I’m also an affiliate for.

If I use a tool myself, I find that it’s really helpful to me, and I think showing my readers how to use that tool is going to benefit them, then I might do a screen capture video and then put that into a blog post where I talk about the product as well. Now, the reason I would do that instead of sending them directly to the affiliate link is I think that illustrating the product and how I use it is actually going to enhance the chances that they will buy it as well.

There will be some instances, and particularly, I find when you are promoting software, this can be a really good way to promote an affiliate product. This shows that you genuinely use the product and gives your readers some tips on how to use it themselves, which will be helpful to them.

The other time when I would consider not sending someone directly to an affiliate product landing page is if I’m going to promote that product over a period of time with a number of different emails. In episode 51, which I do recommend you go back and listen to, you’ll hear me talk about how (quite often), if I’m promoting a course, a software, or even an ebook that I think is really good, I might do a multi-pronged campaign promotion.

This is where instead of just sending them an email and saying, “Buy this product. This is a really great product,” I might send them two or three emails over two or three weeks. Each email will have a different approach to it. If I’m doing that, the first email might be an email announcing this product and the deal that is for my audience. I always do try and get some exclusive deals for my readers. That email might be, “Here’s this ebook. I’ve arranged 50% off for you and this bonus.” That might be all I really do in that ebook. I might talk about what it is, of course, and some features of it but that’s about it.

Then a week later, I might send a second email saying, “Here’s a review of this product.” They’ve already heard about this product and a lot of people will probably have already bought it, the fast-acting readers that we have, the people who buy everything that we recommend because they trust us, but then there’ll be another segment of readers who want to know a bit more. They want to hear some pros and cons, they want to weigh it up, and they want to see it in action perhaps.

A second email might go out in the second week, where we link, not to the landing page, but we link to a review that we’ve done of that product, maybe we interview the creator of that product and put that up as a blog post, or maybe we get the author of that ebook or the creator of that product to write a guest post and put that on the blog.

The second email might just link directly to that review, interview, or guest post or it might do both. It might say, “Hey, just a reminder, here’s this product we’re recommending. It’s a deal for you. You might also want to read our review of it.” That email might have both links for those people who just trust your recommendation and for those who want to know a little bit more. 

Then we might do a follow-up email in week three that might be just a quick last chance reminder, “Forty-eight hours to go before this deal ends.” That, again, would link directly to the landing page. You can see there that a multi-pronged campaign is going to communicate different things over time and there’s a time and a place for linking to different destinations within that campaign.

For me, it’s really about looking at the product, looking at the landing page that you’re given as an affiliate, and work out whether that landing page is going to sell that product well to your audience or whether you, getting involved in the middle and adding that extra click into the process—which is risky in some ways—whether that is worth it. If that extra click is going to increase the chances of people buying that product, then I definitely think adding that extra clicking can be worthwhile.

Ideally, you want as few clicks as possible between when you send your email and when they hit Purchase, but sometimes, that extra click will really help to put your readers in a more likely position to make that purchase.

I hope that answers your question, Scott. I do really recommend you go back and listen to episode 51 whether you are just starting out with affiliate marketing or not, I go into more detail of some other techniques that I use in my own affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing probably sits, at some months my number one income stream, some months it’s number two, and some months it’s number three. It really depends on what I’m promoting and what we’re launching in terms of products as well. But certainly, every Christmas time, when we do our Twelve Days of Christmas campaign, about half of the days in that campaign are affiliate marketing.

Over our year, I’d say affiliate marketing ends up being about 30%–40% of my overall income. I really would recommend that you go back and listen to that particular podcast if that’s something that you want to get into or you want to improve how you do it.

I would love to hear your own tips, your own opinion. Do you send people directly to landing pages? Do you send them to a product for reviews that you’ve written? Or do you do both like we do? You can tell us about that over on today’s show notes at problogger.com/podcast/107.

Thanks for listening today and I’ll chat with you in a couple of days’ time in episode 108. If you haven’t already subscribed to this podcast over on iTunes, it’s probably the best place for you to get updated about new episodes. There’s also an option for you to subscribe to our ProBlogger PLUS newsletter on today’s show notes. That will get you not only the episodes that we produce every two a week, but also any new blog posts that we have promoted, and some of the new library of resources that we have created over in ProBlogger as well. We send out an email every Tuesday, Australian time. That’s well worth subscribing to if you do want to keep in touch with us.

Hope that helps you, Scott, and anyone else doing your affiliate marketing, and chat with you soon on 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 us at @problogger. Find us at facebook.com/problogger or search ProBlogger on iTunes.

Note: this episode is available to listen to in the player above, on iTunes and Stitcher

Today I’m going to talk about going full time as a blogger. I received this question from Charlotte.

“When did you make the transition from blogging being just a hobby to blogging as a profitable business?  What was the turning point for you and/or what were the major changes you made to get where you are now?”

Today I’m going to share the 7 things that happened when I went full time. These aren’t a blueprint or a step-by-step, these are just what happened with me and my blog.

For a little context, I started blogging in 2002 as an experiment and a hobby. After a while, I got hooked on the idea of creating content and interacting with readers.

After about 12 months, I started dabbling with AdSense and Amazon ads. Gradually after about another 12 months, it became a part-time job. Two years in things started to escalate, and I knew this was going to be a full-time job for me.

In this episode I want to share 7 things that contributed to me taking my blog from part time to full time.

Note: I also highly recommend you listen to episode #48 How to Make $30,000 a year Blogging in which I talk in very practical terms about building different income streams up to make a living from blogging.

I hope these tips were helpful in going full time. If you have made the transition, we would love to hear your story. I’d also love some feedback on the new blog design.

Hi there, it’s Darren from ProBlogger here. Welcome to episode 106 of the ProBlogger podcast, where today I’m going to talk about going full-time as a blogger. I actually had this question come in from Charlotte. “When did you make the transition from blogging being just a hobby to blogging as a profitable business? What was the turning point for you? What big changes did you make around that time to get where you’re at now?” 

Thanks so much for the question, Charlotte. You can submit a question anytime. My email address, don’t tell anyone, is [email protected]. They all come directly to me. If you do have a question that you want me to answer in the future, please put it in there.

Today, I want to give you seven things that happened around the time that I went full-time that I think contributed to that happening. These are not seven things you must do. This is not a blueprint to follow, seven steps you have to take in this particular order. These are just seven things that happened as I thought back to 2004 when this was happening that I wanted to share with you today. I actually shared these straight back to Charlotte via email. Let’s get into today’s show.

Just very quickly, to give you a little bit of context to the time that I’m talking about. For those of you who are new to ProBlogger, I started blogging in 2002. It was November. I remember the exact moment. At that moment, I had no intention of it ever being anything more than an experiment, and a hobby. In the back of my mind, I’m pretty sure I thought I would give up on it pretty quickly. I had a bit of a track record of doing that. I had 20 jobs in the last 10 years. I had a garage full of sporting equipment that I don’t ever use once. I’m that kind of guy. I never really stuck at anything. 

I really had no intention of this ever being a life-changing decision or a job, but I got very hooked on it. Within a week or so, I had a few readers and I was hooked on this idea of creating content, putting it out there, seeing what people thought, and interacting with a few readers that I had. Very quickly, it became a bit of an obsession for me. It took about 12 months when I was just blogging on a personal blog about anything and everything.

Around 12 months in, I realized this blog was starting to cost me a little bit of money and I have to find a way to break even on it because I was newly married, my wife was working as a brand new lawyer, I didn’t have a whole big income, and I was working part-time jobs at that time. I had to find a way to pay its way for the server cost, the domain and all that type of thing. 

About 12 months after starting blogging, I started to dabble with some ads on the blog using Google AdSense and recommending a few products on Amazon through their affiliate program. The first few days, both of these experiments didn’t really lead to a whole heap of a few dollars here and there in the first weeks. Gradually, over the next 12 months, it grew to a point where I started to see it as a part-time job—a day a week of income, then two days a week, then three days a week. 

In about two years after I started blogging, about a year after I started dabbling with making money from it, I was about two or three days a week. I had the dream of being a full-time blogger one day. I knew it was probably on the cards that that was the way it was heading, but it certainly wasn’t heading there fast. It’s taken two years to get it from a hobby to a part-time job. It was around that time (two years in) that things started to escalate for me. There are a number of contributing factors and I want to run through them now for you.

Some of these I’ve shared before, some of them I haven’t really gone into. The first one and probably the most obvious one was around that time my traffic got to a point where I was able to make enough money. Traffic gradually grew over those two years. It continued to grow after those two years as well. As soon as I made the decision that I was going to make money out of this, I became a little bit more proactive about building the traffic on the blog.

This is one of the things I would say to you. If you do have that dream of becoming full-time, traffic is probably the biggest contributing factor (or one of them). No matter how you monetize your blog, whether it’s through advertising, affiliate, or having your own product, you’re going to need traffic and you’re going to need more traffic than what you started with. You do need to put some thinking and some proactive energy into growing your traffic. I’ll include in today’s show notes some links to some previous podcast on the topic of growing traffic to your blog.

Traffic was definitely a factor. It was something that I made a priority. I think that’s really important. You don’t just want to prioritize creating great content. That’s certainly something you should be thinking about, but you want to prioritize getting off your blog and promoting it. I’m going to talk about that in a couple of moments. That was one thing.

The second thing I’ll say is that around a year to two years into my blogging, I started to think about my readers in a slightly different way. I started to write more for my readers than for me. Probably in the first year of my blogging—my first personal blog—I was just writing for self-expression, and I was interested to see how people responded to what I wanted to say. Around a year, two years in, I started to pay more attention to what my readers wanted to read about, what they were searching for, what questions are they asking, and I started to anticipate their needs. It was a bit of a transition there, I guess.

Now, I still write a bit for self-expression. I write to share what I’m thinking, feeling, and experimenting with, but I’m doing that because I also know my readers want that. I guess that shaped some of the content on my blog a little bit more. One of the things that I did around the two-year time was beginning to write for what I felt people would be searching for in a few weeks, a few months time. 

To give you a really simple example of this, American Idol was on television at the time. I think that show is still on. In Australia, there was Australian Idol as well. This talent show was on television. I started to write about Australian Idol on my personal blog. I realized people started landing on my blog because I had written a post title, “Australian Idol Winner.” I’ve written that post predicting who would win. I actually got it right. In the lead up to the grand final, people started to arrive at my blog searching for the winner, and searching for information on that.

This taught me that if you can anticipate what people are going to be researching for in Google in two, three, four weeks time, then you can put yourself in a position for that type of traffic. I know it’s a massive spike in traffic the night the winner was announced as well. I began to write some content in anticipation of what people will be searching for. I’m anticipating my readers’ needs or potential readers’ needs as well. 

Around that time, we also did a blog on the Olympic Games. We’re one of the first people to have an Olympic Games blog. I’m sure the Rio Games coming up, there’ll be lots of blogs on that topic. We wrote lots of posts in advance that, had details of every single event that would be running, and had keywords on those pages for winners, gold medal, those sorts of terms, that we knew people would be searching for.

I did this with a friend, Reagan, from New Zealand. Together we ran this blog for two weeks. It might’ve been the Athens Games. I think we made $10,000 or something in those two weeks. That was around the time I went full-time on my blogging.

I guess what I’m trying to say here, I started to not just write for self-expression. I started to write in anticipation of my readers’ needs, sometimes what they would be searching for. I don’t do that a whole heap anymore, I have to say. It’s probably a bit more competition today than there was. Really paying attention to what posts are ranking well, what type of post my readers were appreciating, what type of questions I was getting asked, so really pay attention a lot to my readers and their needs. That would be something I would encourage you to think really carefully about—who’s reading your blog, what do they need, how you’re going to change their lives in some way.

The third thing I would say is it wasn’t something I did. It was just a different way of thinking. I had a mind shift. I regularly say (and regular readers would have heard me say this), “If you want your blog to be a business, you need to treat it as a business.” For me, this happened around this time in the two-year mark. I’ve been telling my wife for a while, “I’m going to be a full-time blogger one day.” I was showing her graphs. In three or four years time, I will be full-time if things keep going the way they were. 

I had this idea that I would one day be a full-time blogger but it was a dream. I wasn’t really acting in a way that was speeding that process up a whole heap. My wife and I sat down. We set ourselves a deadline. The deadline was I needed to be a full-time blogger in six months or give up blogging and go find a real job. That really put a rocket under me. I think partly about having a deadline, but I think it was also that shift in my thinking that, “I’m not going to treat my blog as a business one day. I’m going to treat it as a business today. Even though it’s not a full-time thing now, I’m going to treat it as if it is.” I still had other jobs and I still had other responsibilities, but I started to push harder strategically. 

A couple of podcasts ago, we talked about blogging smart. I suggested nine different areas you should be being strategic about with your blogging. They were the kinds of things I started to do around this time. I started to push harder with trying to find advertisers. Up until that point, I relied upon AdSense ads on my blog and I never approached an advertiser. It was around that time I started to ring advertisers and say, “Would you advertise on my blog?” I hated doing that, but I knew that if I was going to be full-time, I needed to do that type of thing, and I push myself out of my comfort zone to do it.

I started to think more strategically about content. I started thinking more strategically about traffic. I started thinking about starting new blogs and diversifying my business. It was around that time that I began to start other blogs on other niches. I’ve had 30 blogs over the years. I only have two today. The two that have worked came out of that experimenting with lots of different types of content. I did that by starting a lot of blogs.

I started to pay more attention to what other people were doing and learning from them. I started to learn more about Search Engine Optimization. I guess for me, it was that mind shift of starting to treat my blog as a business today, having that deadline looming over me that pushed me into treating my blog today as the business that I want it to become in the future. I find this is the case for a lot of bloggers. They had these dreams, but they’re not acting in a way that will make those dreams come true. Maybe that is part of it for some of you who are listening today.

The fourth thing I wanted to talk about you is diversifying my income streams. As I’ve mentioned twice or three times now, AdSense was a big part of my early experimenting with my monetizing blogs. Amazon was the other one. I started out with those two income streams almost within a week or two of each other. I started to experiment with them.

I realized very quickly that my traffic was drawing. There was another way to grow my income even faster. That was to add new income streams into my business. I began to experiment with other advertising networks. I began to experiment with promoting other products as an affiliate. Later on, I began to experiment with creating my own products to sell. That came out a little bit later. 

I talked in episode 48, I think, of this particular podcast where I talked about all of the different income streams that you might have as a blogger. Actually, I just published a post in the last couple of weeks on ProBlogger titled, How To Make Money Blogging. It’s an update of an old post. I’ll link to that in today’s show notes as well. 

There’s so many different ways to make money from blogging, but almost every full-time blogger I’ve ever met has more than one income stream. Don’t just become obsessed with the one. Think about, “Could I experiment with something else?” You may not implement the second income stream now but be working towards it. Be working towards releasing that product, researching affiliate products, getting advertisers on your blog, or experimenting with different ad networks. I think it’s really important to do that. 

I remember the day when I added a second ad network onto my blog. Up until that point, I’ve been having just AdSense. I started to experiment with another one called Chitika. It’s still around today. I haven’t used it for a long time, so I can’t really talk to whether it’s worth doing any more, but I added Chitika ads on my blog. It didn’t remove the AdSense ones, just had these two ads running side by side. They’re quite different in nature, so they didn’t really compete. It doubled the income overnight. Diversifying your income can really speed things up if you do it smart. That’s number four.

Number five is I began to become more of a collaborator with other bloggers and I started to look to what other people were doing, to learn from them, but to also partner with them. I started to go to conferences in America about three years into my blogging, to learn and invest in my learning but began to work with other bloggers.

I did start to work with other bloggers quite early, collaborate, barter my services, and their services. I had other bloggers help me with my design and that type of thing, but it was around the time that I went full-time that I began to partner with other bloggers to develop my first product. I developed the course of the back of ProBlogger. I think that was in 2004 with a guy called Andy Wibbels. It’s called Six Figure Blogging. It was about how to make money from blogging. Now I began to partner with other bloggers to start a blog network and start to collaborate with other bloggers.

We had this attitude back then (that is still around with some bloggers today) that if I promote you and you promote me, then we all grow. That’s good for everyone. I suspect competitiveness has crept in a little bit today. I still see this opportunity for us as bloggers (even at the same niche) to support one another.

I’ve reached out. Even in the last two weeks, I’ve reached out to another blogger in the photography space. I have offered to promote some of his stuff on my Facebook page if he’ll promote some of our stuff on his Facebook page. I don’t see him as a competitor. I see him as an opportunity for us to both grow as a result of collaborating. I guess that was an attitude change that happened in me around this time as well.

I encourage you to think about how you could do some networking with other bloggers in your niche. Is there a conference that you could be attending to meet other bloggers in your niche? Could you be reaching out and offering to work together with other people to collaborate and partner in different ways? It need not be a formal partnership. It could just be any informal collaboration. That’s number five.

Number six is something that I’ve touched on already. I do want to stress it because I think it’s important for many bloggers. One of the times in my own growth as a blogger where things really did escalate in terms of my income streams was having a product to sell. I mentioned the first product that I created with Andy was back in 2004, Six Figure Blogging. It didn’t really last that long but that was a great learning experience. We did make some money off of it. Not a whole heap, but it was a great learning experience and it informed a lot of what I did in the years since then in creating other products.

I told the story many times before on this podcast about creating my first ebooks on both ProBlogger and Digital Photography School. I’m not going to retell them now, but they certainly led to brand new income streams that helped me diversify. I really would encourage you to think about how you could create something to sell on your blog rather than just relying upon advertising, which is where you’re effectively sending people away from your blog. You’re making money from that.

Even affiliate marketing. Again, you’re sending people to someone else. They potentially become their reader and their customer. While that can make you some money and that’s a good thing, I want to encourage you to consider making something that you serve your readers with. A product that you can be proud of. Something that is going to change your readers lives in some way that keeps them on your site and has the opportunity to deepen that relationship that you have with them.

I do know it’s hard to create that first product. It took me months to get my first product together. It’s something you’re going to learn a lot through. It’s going to bring a new income stream in and it might just open up a whole new opportunity for you as well. I’ve talked in much more depth about creating your first product in episode 67. I would encourage you to go and listen to that episode after this one if creating a product is something that you are interested in. I outlined eight steps to follow to create that first product. It’s probably the best thing I ever did in terms of monetizing my blog.

The seventh thing is the last thing that I just want to touch on briefly. That happened around this time of going full-time was that I began to shift in my thinking about sources of traffic. The first two years of my blog, search engine traffic was number one for me. Probably 95% of my traffic was coming from search engines. There’s nothing wrong with search engine traffic. It’s actually really good. It’s fantastic, I loved it, but it’s risky when that much traffic is coming from search engines. It wasn’t very satisfying as well because what was going on is that people were coming into my blog, they’re reading my content, then they’re bouncing off again and never coming back again. 

While I could turn that traffic into money through advertising and a little bit of affiliate marketing, that customer was gone forever. There was no ongoing relationship there with that reader. I began to think about, how can I blog in a way that is more relational, that hooks people in, and keeps them coming back to my blog over time? I began to think a little bit differently about search engine traffic. 

To me, search engine traffic is a great way to open the relationship. What you do next is really the most important thing. If you got a lot of search traffic coming into your blog, that’s fantastic. Congratulations. A lot of us would like more of it, but it’s not the end game. That’s the first step. Having them on your site gives you an opportunity to hook them in some way. I really would encourage you to try and think about how you can get them in your email list, how you can get them to follow you on social media, and to put a whole heap of time and energy into building a sticky site. Again, I’ve got some further reading and listening on that in today’s show notes.

This whole rethinking of search engine traffic led to a whole heap of other stuff. I haven’t got time to go into great detail on it, but it ended up changing my whole blogging strategy. Up until two years in, my main blog at that time that I was making money from was a camera review blog. It was getting all the search engine traffic, but I realized that no one’s ever going to subscribe to that blog because if you are reading a camera review blog, you’re more than likely just buying a camera. Once you’ve got that camera, you’re never coming back again because you’ve got the camera. 

That’s the time when I started to think about a new blog, Digital Photography School, which I ended up starting because I wanted to have a blog where people will come back to again and again over time.

There are seven things that I think contributed to me going full-time. Number one, it’s partly about traffic. Number two, it’s about thinking more about your readers, and creating content more for your readers than just for yourself, anticipating their needs, solving their problems, answering their questions. Number three is a mind shift; if you want your blog to become a business one day, treat it as one today. Number four was diversifying my income streams. Number five was collaborating more with other bloggers, learning from other bloggers, partnering with other bloggers. Number six was having a product to sell, something of your own that you can create to sell to your readers. And number seven was thinking about search engine traffic in a different way. It’s the opening of a relationship. Thinking about creating a blog where you hook readers in and serve them over the long haul. 

I hope that has been helpful. I’m sure there’s a whole heap of other things I could talk about in terms of going full-time. I’m sure that many of you who have made that transition or in the process of it could also add to this discussion. You can head to today’s show notes where there is a heap more reading and some more listening. Every link I’ve mentioned today will be there. It’s at problogger.com/podcast/106. 

While you’re there, you might also want to check out the new design of ProBlogger which I’m hoping will be launched by the time you hear this. We actually just launched it. I’m hoping it will be launched over the blog section of the site. It will roll out into the podcast show notes in the coming months as well. 

If you go to problogger.net, you’ll see this newly-designed ProBlogger blog. I’m a bit nervous, I’m a bit excited, but I’d love to get your feedback on that as well. If you do have any feedback, feel free to leave a comment on the post that I’ll have up there explaining the new features of the design. Or on today’s show notes as well; I’m more than happy for you to leave that comment there. Or as I’ve said before, my email address is [email protected]. You can email me anytime with a question or feedback that you might have.

Thanks for listening today. I hope it helps you in your own journey to increasing your own blogging income, whether that be to a full-time level or a part-time thing. Everyone’s different, there’s no one way to do this, and I hope it does serve you in that process as well. I look forward to chatting with you in episode 107 of the ProBlogger podcast.

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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Today I’m going to share a simple exercise that will benefit your blogging and help you with writing sales copy. You can do this exercise in as little as four minutes, and I found it to be effective.

Ed Dale of The Challenge and MagCast recently shared this idea at a conference. His talk was brilliant, and I took pages of notes on copywriting and sales because these are things I’ve struggled with.

For most people, selling doesn’t come easy. Ed made a lot of sense when he said that selling shouldn’t be about getting people to buy, it should be about “pain relief” and “gain creation”.

If you are trying to sell a quality product that will enhance other people’s lives, you might want to give this exercise a try.

Hi there and welcome to Episode 105 of the ProBlogger Podcast. My name is Darren Rowse and I’m the blogger behind problogger.com, a blog and podcast designed to help you to blog better and build profit around your blog.

Today, I want to talk to you about writing a sales copy. It’s a task that many of us as bloggers avoid and don’t feel comfortable doing. We’d much prefer to write a blogpost than to sell something, but it is an important skill to develop. Today, I want to suggest to you a simple exercise that can help you to do it—to get you into the right frame of mind to write a sales copy. You can find today’s show notes at problogger.com/podcast/105.

The exercise I want to share with you today should only take about four or five minutes. It’s something that, as I’ve mentioned before, is going to help you to get into the right frame of mind to write sales copy. It’s something that I learned a couple of weeks ago now at a conference from a guy called Ed Dale. You can find Ed at eddale.co and he’s the founder of The Challenge, MagCast, and numerous other businesses.

Ed gave a really great talk at the conference, SuperFastBusiness, which was all about practical tips on copywriting. I literally took pages and pages of notes on his talk, mainly because selling is something that I’ve always struggled with. If you’re anything like me, you also probably need some help with writing sales copy. It’s a job I don’t like to do because selling never really came easy for me.

I used to actually work in sales in an office supplies store and I really didn’t enjoy the job. For me, it always felt a little bit on the sleazy, manipulative side, trying to make people buy stuff that perhaps they didn’t really want to buy. Ed’s exercise that he talked about in his talk reminded me that selling really shouldn’t be that way. Selling really shouldn’t be a sleazy, manipulative type of thing.

Ed said something during his talk that really stuck in my mind. He said, “Selling shouldn’t be about trying to manipulate people into buying something that they don’t really need. Selling should be about pain relief and gain creation.” This will become a little bit clearer as I explain this exercise. 

Before I give you the exercise, I do want to stress that this only works when you’re selling a quality product, if you’re selling something and writing about something that’s going to enhance people’s lives. It’s not going to work if you’re selling a dodgy product, but that’s not the type of product that I’m confident you’re creating.

Hopefully the products, the ebooks, the courses, the physical products that you’ve created are things that help people in some way. As a result, we need to be confident about that. I think that’s one of the first things that we really need to understand when we’re writing sales copy, is that we need to believe in the products that we are promoting. It’s not manipulating someone when you are presenting them with an offer to buy something that you believe in.

Ed’s talk was a good reminder to me on that because the products that I’ve developed over the years, the ebooks, the courses, and the events that I run, I believe in them. There are things that I do believe eliminate pain and help people make gains. I think that’s the first point—is you need to think about that product and I guess there’s an analysis on is it a good enough product. That’s a whole other podcast. Today, I want to talk about this exercise and this exercise is very simple. It only takes a few minutes. All you really need to do it is a piece of paper and a pen or something to write on and something to write with.

The exercise has two parts to it. Grab your piece of paper and pen. You may actually want to do it right now. Pause the podcast in a moment when I tell you to start writing but for two minutes, I want you to list as many pains of your readers as you possibly can—as many pains, as many problems, as many needs, as many painful things in their lives that relate to the product that you’re going to sell them, of course.

Anything really goes here. They might be deep pains, they might be little pains. They might be pains that are justified and they might be pains that are a little bit selfish. Anything goes at all. They could be tangible or they could be something more personal. It might be something like, “I don’t know how to do something and that’s painful,” or it might be something really more personal like, “I feel lonely,” or “I feel like a failure.” If you’re able to, I encourage you to pause this podcast and list as many pains of your readers as you can in two minutes. Set yourself a timer and go away and do it right now. Okay, go.

Hopefully you’ve listed a whole heap of pains of your readers. Now, the second part of this exercise is a little bit more positive. We’re not going to dwell on pain the whole time. The second half is to do pretty much the same thing but this time, I want you to list as many gains that your readers want as you can in two minutes. What results do they want? What outcomes do they want? What dreams do they have? What do they want? What are the gains that they are looking for as they pertain to your product? You might want to pause the podcast again and list them off. You’ve got two minutes to write as many gains as you can. Go.

You’ve got this list of pains and gains. Now, the task is to write your sales copy based upon those things that you’ve written, those things fresh in your mind. This exercise is most effective when you have these things at the top of your mind as you think about the sales copy. Your sales copy is more effectively written when it comes about from these things and it aims to bring pain relief or gain creation. When we tap into the reality of the pain of our readers and the gains that they want, we’re going to write something that is much more effective.

I found this to be true because two days after the conference, I found myself sitting at my desk with the job of finishing writing a sales email that I’ve been assigned to do. I’d not really had to write too many sales emails for the last couple of years because I’ve hired someone to do that for me, but that person finished up in their role just before the conference. So, I had this task fall upon me, to write this sales email. It was to promote an affiliate product that we were promoting on my Digital Photography School. That job fell on me.

Before the conference, before I heard Ed’s talk, I sat down to write that email and I’d gotten very stuck. I’d gotten very bogged down in writing that email. It wasn’t something that I was enjoying. I got bogged down in writing about the product’s features, its price, and all kinds of things about the product, but I knew the email wasn’t very good so I put it aside and then I went off to this conference.

Then, on returning home with Ed’s talk fresh in my mind, I decided to tackle that email again but this time I was going to start with his exercise. I set myself a timer on my iPhone and for two minutes I brainstormed the pain of my readers as it pertained to the product that I was writing about; the product was an ebook. Then, I came up with a list of about 15 pains of my readers. Then I did the same exercise again, thinking of the gains, things that my readers wanted. Again, as it pertained to this particular ebook.

I came up with 20–25 things, the pains and the gains. Once I had my true list, I spent a few minutes going through the lists and then highlighting the top pains and gains. I circled a few that I felt this particular product, this ebook, was going to help my readers with—pains that I thought it would help relieve and gains that I thought that would help them to create. Then I started to write. 

This time, it was a very different process. This time I wasn’t writing about the product anymore. I wasn’t writing about why the product was good. I wasn’t writing about its features or its price. I wasn’t writing about the offer itself. This time, I wrote about the pain I knew my readers had and I wrote about the dreams that I knew that they had. Then I introduced them to the product that I knew would help fill the gap between those pains and gains.

It was like chalk and cheese. The first email and the second email were so different. The first draft of the email was about the product. The second email was about my reader. The first draft felt like I was trying to convince people to buy something. The second email felt like I was presenting a solution to something that I knew my readers were already looking for. It really changed the email itself and also changed the energy that I wrote with.

It was quite a remarkable thing. It’s something that I’ve done a couple of times since. I had to write a second email a week later about the same product. We did a two-email campaign and I did the same process again. That time I wrote about a couple of different pains I knew my readers had that I knew this product would solve. I was able to come up with this two-email campaign that was based purely upon the pain of my readers and the gains that I thought that this product was going to deliver to them.

I had this first email edited, loaded up. We sent it out that night and it converted really well. I even got emails back from my readers thanking me for selling them that ebook. That, to me, is gold—when you not only make a profit but you get people thanking you for convincing them to buy that product. That is just where it all comes together for me. That’s a dream come true.

This exercise really did help me, and I would encourage you to use it next time you need to write something where you’re selling something to your readers. Having said that, I think this exercise is also useful for a whole heap of other places. I want to suggest that you do it whether you’re writing sales copy or not. I think this is ideal to do in a number of places. Let me suggest six of them for you.

I think this is actually the best place that you can do this is before you develop your product as well. Don’t just do it when you are writing the sales copy for a product but before you even create your product, do this exercise. What are the pains of your readers, what are the gains that they’re looking for and develop a product around that. That, to me, is an even more logical place to do this exercise. You can do it again when you’re wanting to sell that product. But if you’ve done that before you create your product, you’re developing a product with those pains and gains in mind and selling it is going to be so much easier.

Another place that you might want to do this exercise is if you’re thinking of starting a new blog or you’re thinking about choosing or refining your niche, working out your unique angle as a blogger—the sorts of decisions, “What’s my blog going to be about? How am I going to brand it?” Those types of decisions that we make in the early days of our blog, this would be a perfect exercise to do just before that.

When you’re choosing categories for your blog, it might be another time to do it. List the pains of your readers and put them next to the categories of your blog. Do you need to add a new category, a new topic, for your blog?

You could do this before you’re wanting to create an opt-in for your blog. If you’ve heard us talk in previous episodes about the value of having an opt-in for your blog to get people to sign up to your newsletter but you don’t know what to create as an opt-in. Again, do this exercise. Brainstorm the pains and the gains of your readers. Then create a little opt-in that relieves pain, that creates a gain for your readers.

You could do this exercise when you’re deciding what to write about on your blog, when you’re brainstorming ideas for content. To me, this is probably one of the most logical places to do this exercise. You can do it for two minutes and come up with 20 different pains of your readers and then go away and you’ve got 20 different blogpost ideas there.

Of course, you can do this in the moment just before you’re about to write your blogpost. You might have your topic but you want to really get in touch with your reader’s pains and gains as well. That’s going to make your blogpost much more effective as well.

I hope you can see the value of this exercise. I actually think it’s probably well worth doing at least once a week in one of these different ways on your blog. You may actually want to do it every time you write a blogpost. I’ve certainly used it probably four or five times in the last week, both alone but also with team members to help them to get inside my reader’s heads a little bit more as well.

Even as I’m just thinking about this, this is something you could do with your team. I’m just thinking of my customer service team, this would be great to do with the person who does my customer service emails to help them appreciate where my readers are coming from, to help them appreciate the support or request that they get all the time. You could use this exercise and the results of this exercise with potential advertisers on your blog as well.

I’m coming up with a whole list of things here on the fly but hopefully you can see the use of this particular exercise, and I would love to see what happens when you do it. If you go to problogger.com/podcast/105, there’s an opportunity there for you to suggest where you think this exercise is most useful and to tell us about the results that you get when you do it as well.

Hopefully, this has been helpful to you. Love to hear your feedback on it, and I’d also love it if you have a moment to review this podcast over on iTunes or on Stitcher, or whatever podcast listening tool that you have. Those reviews help us to get more people to listen to the show but they also help me stay a bit inspired but also improve the show. If you’ve got any practical suggestions, you can leave them there.

The other thing I would encourage you to do is to head over to problogger.com/podcast/questions. I’ve actually just set up a little tool there on that particular page where you can ask a question using your voice. I want to take some of the questions that you ask on that particular page and feature your voice on a future podcast and tell everyone where to go and find your blog if you want to leave a URL as well. But most importantly, I want to get your questions and answer them.

I would love this podcast to be based upon the real problems, needs, pains, and the gains that you want. I would love the future episodes to be based upon those. If you’ve got a question, a problem, a pain, or a dream that you want to achieve, head over to problogger.com/podcast/questions where you can ask a question. You’ll see there is a little green button with the words, “start recording.” You’ll need to have a microphone. Most computers have them built in. Hit that button. It may ask you to give permission to use the microphone and then you’ll be able to record your question. You can listen to it back before it goes live and then it will be sent to me via email just like a voicemail. If it’s a question I think I can answer, I will tackle it in a future episode.

Again, problogger.com/podcast/questions, if you’ve got a question. Please do leave your name and a URL to your blog if you don’t mind people knowing where they can find you. You might get some new readers as well. 

Thanks for listening to episode 105. I’ll chat with you in the next couple of days in episode 106.

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 us @ProBlogger, find us at facebook.com/ProBlogger or search ProBlogger on iTunes.

I hope you see the value of this exercise. I would love to see what happens when you do it. Tell us about your results and how useful it was for you.

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).

Enjoy this podcast? Sign up to our ProBloggerPLUS newsletter to get notified of all new tutorials and podcasts below.

Note: this episode is available to listen to in the player above, on iTunes and Stitcher.

Today I’m going to talk about some posts that have worked for me in the last month on Digital Photography School, my main blog.

This episode comes about from a question received by one of our readers, Matthew. He asks if I could walk through a number of posts that have recently done well and why they have worked.

We have done this before on the blog and it worked really well, so let’s try it for the podcast.

In the last month, these four posts have all been in the top 20 on Digital Photography School. I checked Google Analytics for the most read posts, and I tried to pick ones that I haven’t talked about in the past.

Hey there and welcome to Episode 104 of the ProBlogger Podcast. Today, I want to talk about some posts that have worked for me in the last month on Digital Photography School, my main blog. This episode really comes about from a question that I received via email from one of our readers, Matthew, who asked if I could walk you through a number of posts that have done well for us recently, and talk about why they have worked.

We’ve done this in the past on ProBlogger on the blog. These posts have always gone really well, so let’s try for the podcast.

You probably want to check out the post I’m talking about today. I would recommend that you head over to problogger.com/podcast/104 where I will link to the four posts that I’m going to talk about. You can go away and look at them. Whilst I’m very tempted to edit these posts right now because there are a few things, particularly one of them, that I do want to update. I’m going to resist that temptation so you can see them as they are right now. Again, they’re at problogger.com/podcast/104. Let’s get into the first one.

The four posts that I want to share with you today have all been in the top 20 posts on Digital Photography School in the last month. I’ve looked in Google Analytics for the most read posts. I try to pick ones that I haven’t talked about too much in the past and particularly looking at some of our new posts which have done quite well. Traditionally, some of our older, longer term posts that have done well because they generate pretty good search traffic, but I’ve resisted the temptation to just go with those. I’ve got one of them, the other three are all fairly new posts.

Let’s start with the old one. The first post that I want to talk about before, I think I have mentioned this once before in a podcast, is a post called 21 Settings, Techniques, and Rules All New Camera Owners Should Know. It’s a bit of a mouthful title. In some ways, I’m tempted to change it to make it a little simpler. It is pretty much what it says. It’s 21 Settings, Techniques, and Rules All New Camera Owner Should Know. It was written back in 2010. It’s a post I wrote myself. 

It was about two and a half years after I started Digital Photography School that I wrote that post. There was a fair bit of content on the site already. This was a bit of an attempt to do what I would now call a sneeze page. If you’ve been listening to the podcast for a while, you remember back in episode 18, I talked about this technique of building sneeze pages for your blog. Basically, if you look at this post, you’ll see that it’s basically just a list of links to other things I’ve written about already. There’s a paragraph to each point. Then there’s a link where you can go away and read more. 

As the title says, it’s 21 Settings, Techniques, and Rules All New Camera Owner Should Know. For each one of them, there is a paragraph which describes the settings, or the technique, or the rule. Then, there’s a link where you can go away and read more about that particular topic.

The post itself doesn’t have a whole heap of teaching in it. To give you an overview, a big picture kind of post. Whilst that’s quite different to a lot of the posts on the site, I think it really has appealed to our readers. They get this really quick overview. It’s a fairly introductory type of content as well. Unashamedly, we say in the title it’s for all new camera owners. We’re qualifying it. This is useful if you’re just starting out. As a result of that, it has been shared a lot. 

Every time I share this post on social media, I see people retweeting it, or tagging a friend who they think it would be relevant for. You get a lot of, “This post would be great for you because you’re just starting out,” type of sharing of content. It’s a good topic. It generates a lot of page views for us because it’s linking to 21 other posts on the site. It not only gets shared a lot and gets a lot of page views itself, it’s generating a lot as well. 

This is the beauty of a sneeze page. I really would encourage you to experiment with that technique as much as possible.

One of the other reasons I think this post particularly works is the title itself. It signals with 21 Settings, Techniques, and Rules—it’s a fairly comprehensive post even though it turns out it probably isn’t in the post itself. Although it does give you so much to go away and read. It also makes a big claim. This is 21 things that all new camera owners should know. It does make that big claim. I guess it generates some curiosity. 

People seeing that title are like, “Do I know all of these things?” It does make a bit of a big climb. I hope that even though the post is fairly short, it’s not a long post because it does link through that site so much. I hope the content backs up that particular claim.

The other thing I would say about this post is that I have changed a bit over time. It probably is in need of a bit of an update in terms of its visual design. I have changed the feature image. I did test that feature image. You’ll see there if you go, there’s a picture of a camera, its styles, and settings which relates to the topic. It is also something that seems to work on social. It signals that topic. I think in talking to a few people who’ve seen this post, they say it builds a bit of anxiety. The picture itself builds some anxiety on those who see it. 

There’s this feeling a lot of people have about cameras when they see all the dials and things that they don’t really know what any of it means. That builds some anxiety. I wonder whether that particular image is building some anxiety and maybe stimulating people to click on the link to see what it’s about. 

I guess the other part about is that it is a great starting point. If you come away and you’ve read the article and some of the others, it starts that journey for you. A lot of people do have that challenge of how do we get out of automatic mode, what do all the dials on my camera mean. This begins that journey for a lot of people in helping them to decode what’s going on with their camera. I guess it brings about change for people. It equips them to begin to get control of their camera which is what the whole site is about. It’s a good first point of contact with us.

As I’ve said, this is the post I think I would like to redesign. I probably will in a month or so once you’ve had a chance to have a look at it. I don’t want to go away and change it now, midstream. There are a few things that we can do better. I do think that this is a post that is ideal for us to add and opt into. I think we can come up with an opt in specific for a post whether it’s just a PDF version of it or whether it’s a free report for new camera owners or something like that. I think it needs an overhaul in terms of its visual appeal. It could be formatted better. Some use of headlines and some better images down the post would really help to lift this post as well. I think there’s probably some followup that we could do on this post as well.

We can do a second post—another 21 Settings. Or, we can replicate the format for posts for different niches of photography so we could do 21 settings, techniques, for portrait photographers or for landscape photographers. These are some of the things as I look at this post, it’s worked really well for us. It has probably close to two million page views over time which is pretty amazing. It’s probably now a top 50 post on the site but I think we could improve it as well. 

I guess that’s one of the things I would encourage you to do if you’ve got a great post on your site. Do the analysis, why does it work? What could you learn from it? How could you improve it? How could you make it convert for you even better? 

One of the things we have added to it in the last few months is that we now use this post to promote a course that we’ve since developed, that solves the same problem. It’s a course that we’ve developed for new camera owners. You’ll see as you look at the post down the bottom, there’s a call to action, and a video from that particular course there. It has worked pretty well for us on that front. I do want to test out a lead magnet specifically for that post as well. That’s the first post. 

Let’s look at another one. The next one I want to talk about is one that we published just four days ago as I am recording this podcast. It’s called 11 Stages That Every Photographer Goes Through. It was written by one of our guest writers—a regular writer actually—James Maher. I have to be honest, when I first saw this post, I just went live on the site. Then I do it in our Facebook sharing. I see every post that goes live usually the day it goes live.

When I look at them, I’m like, “I’m not sure whether this one’s going to really fly.” I think it’s a good post. I thought it would go done okay with our readers. I didn’t think it was going to go viral or anything. It turns out, I was wrong. I supposed that’s been in the top three posts from the last week on the site and probably end up being one of the most read posts on the site this month.

My reservation when I saw this post, again, you can find the link on today’s show notes, was that it was a bit different to most of our content on the site. It’s not a tips post, it’s not a how to post. That’s generally what we’re known for at Digital Photography School; we produce tutorials, we produce technique-based posts, this one wasn’t.

This one was written with a bit of tongue and cheek and a bit of humor. It was James telling his story in photography and the stages he went through as a photographer. It didn’t have that teaching element and a bit of humor. I wasn’t sure how my readers were going to interpret it. It also didn’t really have a hero image. A lot of our content has a beautiful inspirational image at the top of it. Whilst this one’s got some okay images in it, they almost illustrate some of the problems that we have as photographers. I was like, “Is this going to work?” Turns out it did. 

I think the number one reason that this post worked is that it’s relatable. When I shared it on Facebook, I did so with a question. I asked, “Which of these stages can you relate to the most?” Remember the title, 11 Stages That Every Photographer Goes Through. Asking that question, “Which of these do you relate to the most?” I think it was actually a good question to ask on Facebook. It may have been one of the reasons why so many people clicked on that particular post, went, and checked it out. I made them a bit curious. To really answer that question, I had to read the post first. When you go and read the post, you’ll see there that James used a bit of humor but he’s also touched on some pain of our readers as well.

It’s interesting, the most common answer to the question, “Which one do you relate to the most?” by far, people have said stage six. If you go and look at the post, stage six is titled, OMG, everything sucks and I suck. In stage six, James talks about how a lot of photographers just get to this point where they think everything that they take photos of, it sucks. It seems like that stage in particular really resonated with the readers. 

I guess my key lesson for this one is you don’t always have to solve a problem with your post, even on a teaching side. Sometimes you need to create content that shows your readers that you know their pain and where they’re at. Show them that you can relate to that, and that you’ve been there yourself. I reckon that’s why this particular post went so well. It may also be 11 Stages. I think our readers do respond well to list posts but they’re also in stages or steps or anything that walks people through something that does well to our readers. Most of all, I think it’s just one that our readers really relate to. I encourage you to try and create some content that shows your readers that you know the journey that they’re one and you’ve been there too.

The third post I want to talk about is a fairly recent one. I think it’s probably two or three weeks ago now that we’ve published this one. It’s titled, Everyday Carry—Must-Have Tools for Photographers. This was another one I was a little bit unsure how it was going to go. It surprised me that it did so well. Although in hindsight, it probably shouldn’t have. The bulk of the posts on Digital Photography School are tips related, as I’ve mentioned before. They’re tutorials. From time to time, we throw in some gear posts—posts about cameras, lenses, or accessories. This one is about accessories. It’s a suggested collection of 14 small things that photographers should carry with them all the time. 

The writer of this post, this gorgeous little tin, and shoved all of the things in quite a small little tin. I think one of the reasons that this post worked really well is that it had that strong visual—an intriguing visual. There’s something about this little tin with everything packed in it. In another shot, he unpacks everything from the tin, lays it out flatlay, and numbers out all the items. Underneath the image, lists what the items are. The items in it are a memory card, a 12-in-1 multitool pen, a Paracord, a Blu-Tack, cleaning cloth, pain relief tablet when you get a headache. It had all these little things that are just useful for photographers to have with them. All the stuff in the tin is really quite affordable.

I think it probably appeals to our readers as well. We’re not talking here about, “You need to go spend $2000 on your kit.” Here’s some little things that are going to be useful for you and you can carry with you in your pocket all the time. I think that was probably part of the appeal of this post. We also make a bit of a claim here. These are must have tools for photographers. That probably makes people a bit curious as well. 

I find that even just the word tools works well. We’ve seen this on ProBlogger recently. We’ve written a few posts, “Here are the tools we use.” People liked to see those tools. They like to compare the tools that someone uses to what they use. I know from myself if I see a post with tools that photographers should have, I’m opening that post. I want to see what these tools are. It’s just one of those things that grabs my attention.

This particular post also has a bit of a DIY about it. One of the tools is Blu-Tack. One of them’s a Paracord, like a shoelace. It’s a bit of a hack kind of thing going on here where the author shows you how to use some of these particular tools. They’re kind of DIY type of stuff. I think that appeals to our audience as well. We’ve certainly seen anything DIY works well. 

Then, the last thing is there’s this whole movement at the moment. You may or may not be aware of it called EveryDayCarry. There’s a whole forum and blog set up for the things that we carry in our pockets. I suspect this post got shared on a couple of those forums which might help generate some extra page for use as well. That one worked for a number of different reasons. I’ll be interested to experiment with that type of post again.

The last one I just really quickly want to touch on, is a post that was about a month ago now. It’s titled, How to Make Colors Pop in Your Portraits—Without Using Photoshop. This one I had a feeling at that time when I saw it that it would work well. I think there’s a number of reasons here. One, it connects with something that people want. They want their pictures to pop. That word pop has worked for us before in titles. I guess it’s something about the visual. We’re talking about photography so we want to have photos to pop. It’s just a word that I think has worked. It’s something that people desire. They want to have photos that look crisp and colorful. It taps into that. 

The post itself has very strong visual images in it. They were probably four or five images from this particular post that I could have used in social media, really beautiful images. Some of them with gorgeous, cute kids and very colorful images as you’d expect on a post on the topic of color. That really worked well for us as well. They grabbed attention. I suspect that really stood out on Facebook and on Twitter. 

Then there’s the topic itself. There’s something about this topic that I just knew would work well. Every time we talk about Photoshop on Digital Photography School, it polarizes our readers. Some people love photoshop and have no problem with post-processing images. There’s quite a segment within our readers who hate Photoshop. They think Photoshop is evil. Anything you do in postproduction is altering the true character of the image. Everything you should do should happen in the camera.

I had a feeling this particular post, How to Make Your Colors Pop in Portraits—Without Using Photoshop, I had a feeling that this particular topic would appeal to that segment of the audience who sometimes don’t like all the post production tutorials that we have. It certainly would’ve grabbed their attention and maybe appealed to them as well.

I guess the last thing about this particular post is that it’s really useful. It’s got some really simple but useful techniques as well that I think people would have benefitted from. Also, it’s on the topic of portraiture, which is our most popular topic on the site as well.

Anyway, there are four posts that I just randomly went through Google Analytics. They’re all in the top posts for us in the last month. They all have between 40,000 page views and 110,000 page views. That 21 Settings one did the best. They’ve all done pretty well in one way or the other. They all have different sources of traffic as I’ve said before. The Everyday Carry one, I suspect, had a bit of referral traffic to the others. The Color Popping one and the 11 Stages That Photographers Go Through, they all did pretty well from Facebook. Then, the 21 Settings, Techniques, and Rules did okay from Facebook. I did share it this month. It also always does well from Google. It ranks well in Google for some reason. They all had different sources of traffic. Generated quite a bit of sharing amongst our readers as well.

I hope you find that useful. It’s a bit of a different approach to our podcast. If you found it useful, please let me know over in the show notes at problogger.com/podcast/104. You can let us know why you think the post did well and maybe share your most popular posts from the last month. Tell me why you think it worked. I wouldn’t mind doing a podcast, looking at some of your most popular posts. If you’ve got one and it worked well for you, share the link in today’s show notes. Tell us why you think it works. Maybe I will pick it and tell my readers why I think it worked as well.

I look forward to chatting with you again in Episode 105 of the ProBlogger podcast in a couple of days time. Thanks for listening.

We would love to hear from you. Let us know why you think these posts did well and share your most popular post. I wouldn’t mind doing a future podcast on the topic of your most popular posts, so share one and why you think it did well.

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ProBlogger is designed to help bloggers reach their potential along with how to monetize and build a sustainable blog, but I am also interested in blogs that change people’s lives.

Today’s show is a continuation of episode 102 where I talked about how many bloggers start out blogging from the heart while others have a strategic, clinical formula.

The last podcast told the story of two bloggers who took these very different approaches. Both were ready to give up because neither approach tends to work alone. You have to blog with heart and have a strategy for success.

In the last episode I suggested 7 ways to add heart and soul to your blog, and today I’m going to suggest 9 different ways to be strategic with your blogging.

These strategies may sound overwhelming, but just pick one area to focus on. Goal setting or branding can be great methods for kicking off your blog strategy. Then move on to the editorial strategy, or marketing, or whatever you need to fill in the gaps.

It’s a continuation, really, of the last episode. If you haven’t listened to that, I would encourage you to go back and listen to episode 102 as well in which I introduced these 2 different approaches to blogging that I see many bloggers taking. A lot of bloggers start out blogging with this attitude that, “I’ll just go blog from the heart and opportunities will come to me.” Other bloggers start blogging saying, “I’m going to start blogging strategically, very clinically. I’m going to follow a formula and then I’ll have success.”

I told a story in the last episode of two bloggers that I met who had taken these two very different approaches—one blogging from the heart, one blogging strategically—and both of them ended up wanting to give up their blogs because they realized that they’re taking those extreme approaches to blogging, with one blog without any real strategy and one blog without any real heart, and neither was successful as a result. Neither approach tends to work alone. In the last episode, I suggested seven ways that you can add heart and soul to your blog.

If you haven’t listened to that, you might want to pause this one and go back and listen to that because I think those seven strategies really give some context to what I want to talk about today. Today, I want to suggest nine different areas that you can be strategic about with your blogging but my worry is that if you haven’t taken on some of these heartfelt stuff, that today’s episode is going to come across very clinical. It’s going to come across a little bit too strategic and I think it needs to be held together with the heartfelt stuff.

My experience is that when you add the heart and the strategy together, you build something that not only touches people but touches people and then leads them to take action. That helps you build something sustainable for you which also serves them better in the long-term as well. Sometimes when you talk about strategy alone without the heartfelt stuff, you can end up building something that purely is there to serve you and doesn’t actually serve your readers. I think that heartfelt stuff really needs to sit with the strategy for you to have that long-term success, success that not only serves you but serves your readers which comes around just of you as well.

Today, I want to talk about nine different things that it means to blog smart. These are nine different things I would encourage you to at least have strategy on or at least have some thought behind. I’m not going to go into great detail in each of them. I will mention some other episodes along the way that you can go back and listen if there’s an area you want to explore further but these are the nine different things that I would encourage you to jot down as we go through them and then ask yourselves some questions about, “Do you have a strategy in these areas?”

The first one is something I actually talked about a couple of episodes ago so I will brush over it fairly quickly but it really is really important if you want to build a business around your blog. It’s this statement, “If you want your blog to be a business, treat it as one.” We talked about this in episode 100. If you take the attitude that one day your blog might become a business, then one day it might but it might not, too. You really need to change your mindset and treat your blog as a business today. Act accordingly. Change that mindset today and start acting as if your blog is a business today. That is probably the first place that you really need to get your head around on.

This is something that I know a lot of blogs really do struggle with because they do start with that heartfelt approach to blogging. “It’s just self-expression. I just want to pour out my heart on my blog.” That’s totally fine. That’s a great place to start but if you do want this to be a sustainable, profitable thing, then the day will come when you will need to make a bit of a mindshift on that. It’s better to do that right up front. If you want your blog to be a business, treat it as one today.

The second thing is kind of related to that first one. That is something that I hear people encourage people to do when they’ve got a business of any kind is to have goals. If you don’t know where you’re aiming for, you are unlikely to get far. If you haven’t defined what success means to you, then how will you ever know if you’ve ever achieved that and how do you know which direction to start striving in to take you to a place of success?

Do some work today on defining what success means to you. Write down your goals. Be crystal clear about them. Once you know what your goals are, you can then use those goals as a filter for what you do. That’s the best thing for me about having a goal. By knowing what my goal is, I can then filter the opportunities that do come my way and I can make informed decisions about how to spend my time. Write down your goals. Have them somewhere where you will see them everyday next to you.

Number three is to be strategic about your reader. Actually know who they are. Do some work on trying to understand who your reader is, who that person is on the other side of your Google Analytics stats. Understand who they are. Understand their needs. Understand their challenges. Understand their dreams. These things are very important. Create a reader at avatar or a persona. I explained how to do this back in episode 33. I think it’s probably one of the best exercises that you can do.

Whether you are a new blogger or an old blogger, understand who it is that you are trying to reach. By understanding them, you’re in a much better position to serve them, to create content that touches their heart, that actually makes their lives better, that heartfelt stuff we were talking about last episode but that doesn’t just happen. You just need to put yourself in a position where you can understand who they are. Also, do some thinking about how you’re trying to impact that person. What change are you trying to bring about in their life?

This is something that you just need to really do once early on and then keep doing. You need to define who it is that you’re trying to reach and then periodically coming back to researching who they are because over time, you might find that that reader avatar changes a little. Maybe your readers become a little bit more experienced, maybe they’ve become older. You want to keep on top of—who it is that is reading your blog. One of the things that I do on both of my blogs is an annual survey of my readers just to test whether that reader is still reader or whether there’s a new segment of readers coming through. Know your reader.

Number four area that you want to think about strategically is your brand. Jeff Bezos says, “Your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room.” That’s a great definition of a brand but to me, it feels very passive. It almost feels like you’ve got no control over that. It’s just what people say about us. On some levels, that is true. People do make their own decisions about what they think about you, about what they think of you, and what they share with other people.

But what do you want people to say about you? What do you want your brand to be? By defining what you want your brand to be, what you want people to say about you when you’re not in the room, you’re in a much better position to create that, to live that, to be that. Don’t just hope that that brand emerges and that it’s a positive thing.

Determine what you want to be seen for doing and start building that. The more clarity around what you want your brand to be, the better position you’ll be in to build that and to have that actually happen. Do some thinking about your brand. Write a few sentences about it. What do you want to be known for? What do you want to be seen as being different as a result of? By determining that, you’d be in a much better position to build that brand.

The fifth area that I encourage you to really put some time aside to thinking through is to develop an editorial strategy. Most bloggers when they start out sit down and write content that’s at the top of their brain. Then they publish their content and hadn’t put a whole heap of thought into that. In some ways, that’s a good thing because it comes from the heart and that comes through in your writing but there will come a point when you want to build a blog, a long-term, profitable blog, where you’ll need to put some strategy behind your content and your editorial approach.

One of the best things that you can do—I’ve talked about this numerous times already in this podcast—is define what kind of change you are trying to bring to your readers. Map out that big change. Where do you want your readers to be taken from and to? What’s that change look like and then start to fill in the blanks with the content that you create. One of the best exercises I ever did is to decide.

Digital Photography School, my main blog, is about helping my readers get out of automatic mode with their cameras and to get creative control of their cameras. To actually fill in the gaps, I sat for an afternoon and brainstormed over 200 different things that someone would need to learn to get from point A to point B. That was one of the best things that I ever did on Digital Photography School because it gave me a road map of the kind of content that I wanted to create.

It enabled me to create content that didn’t just help radically, it actually took my readers on a journey from point A to point B. Really, think carefully about that journey that you are trying to take your readers on. What process are you trying to lead them through? What do they need to know, to experience, to believe for them to get from point A to point B?

Then think strategically about the type of content that your readers respond to as well. What type of content makes them comment? What type of content makes them share? What type of content do they ignore? What topics seem to really hit the mark with them, that get them excited? What mediums do they respond to best? Do they respond best to the written word, podcast, YouTube clips, or whatever it might be?

Then, also think strategically about near the links of your content, the frequency of your content. There’s no one type of content that is going to hit the mark with every type of blog. You need to think strategically. You need to experiment and test different types of content—different links, different frequency of posts. Experiment with different types of content. Watch what happens when you put that content out there. Test those things. Learn from those tests and then adapt.

The first couple of years of Digital Photography School for me were experimenting with all types and different types of content. We did a lot of videos. We had long posts, short posts. We had two posts a week. We had 10 posts a week. We tried all these different things and we eventually learned what our readers respond to best.

So now, once we do the other things from time to time, we know what is tried and true. We know what our readers are going to respond to and what they need, and we’re in a much better position to serve them with the content that we create because we’ve done a lot of that experimenting in the early days. If you’re just starting out, do a lot of experiments. Watch out what works well and repeat that, build on that.

The sixth area I encourage you to do some thinking around, and again there’s some podcast that you can go back and listen to on this, is marketing. Don’t have “a build it and they will come” mentality. Don’t do that. Just building a great blog with great content, that’s just half of it. You need to get off your blog. You need to go out there and put your content in front of people.

Ask yourselves some questions like, “Where are your potential readers gathering? What social networks are they using? What are the blogs that they’re using? What forums are they reading and participating in? How can you develop a presence in those places?” That stuff doesn’t just happen. You need to be strategic about it. You need to put time aside to promote yourself, to write this post, to participate in forums, to participate in social media. Assign some resources, whether that be your own time and energy or would that be hiring someone to help you with that.

The other thing I’ll say with this is it’s not just good enough to ask this question once. Things shift. Your readers may have been on Facebook two years ago but right now they might be on Snapchat, or they might be on Pinterest, or they might be on Instagram, or they might be somewhere else altogether. You need to continually ask yourself that question. Where are my readers gathering now? What new technologies are they using? Where’s the cutting edge? Where are things moving towards? How can I adapt to my approach?

This is something that we’re constantly doing on my blogs. It’s realizing that our readers aren’t where they used to be. We need to continually push and experiment with our marketing. What type of content do you need to create to attract your new readers? What type of content do your readers share that helps you grow your readers as well? Episode 34, we talked a lot about shareable content and I think that’s a big part of growing your readership.

Don’t just have a “build and they will come” mentality, be strategic about growing your readership. That comes also into play with a search engine optimization which we talked about in a recent episode as well. You need to continually be looking at these potential sources of readers for your blog because if you want to build a profitable blog in the long-term, you are going to need readers.

Then, the next stage of this is the seventh area I encourage you to think about and that is, “How are you going to get them to connect and keep coming back to your blog?” What hooks can you put into place? What are you going to ask those first-time readers to do when they first arrive in your blog that will hook them to get them to come back again tomorrow?

Getting that first eyeball, that first view of your blog’s not really enough. You’ve got to think strategically about how you’re going to get them to subscribe. What is the primary thing that you’re going to ask them to subscribe to? Is it an email list? That’s what it is for us, or is it Facebook or is it something else? Then what are the secondary points of connection can you offer them as well? It’s much better to have someone subscribe to you on your email list and following you on Facebook, LinkedIn, or wherever it is that you’re active to get that secondary point of connection. It helps you to build a quicker relationship with them when you’re communicating with them in multiple places. So, where will you ask them to connect?

Then, just as importantly, you need to think strategically about what comes after them subscribing. What process are you going to lead them through after they subscribe? Are you going to design some sort of an order responder email that’s going to walk them through, warming up in their relationship to you where you going to walk them through different aspects of what it is that you do and take them from being cold and cool as readers to warm, loyal, and even hot readers for you, and passionate about what you do? 

What comes after they subscribe? These are all areas that you can think and you should be thinking strategically about with your blog.

The eighth area, the second to last area I want to touch on today is monetization. How are you going to make your blog sustainable? It’s amazing how many blogs are made who just have this vague idea that if they build their readership, that opportunities will come to them. They might have heard of people getting a book deal or advertisers approaching them out of the blue.

Occasionally, this sort of stuff does happen. It happened to me. I got a book deal after I built a readership around my blog but many bloggers don’t get those opportunities. What are you going to do to build sustainability in your blog, to build profit into your blog? These opportunities might come but in the meantime, build something that is sustainable of your own. Research the different monetization strategies that are available to you.

In episode 37, I give you a money map of a whole heap of different ways that you can monetize your blog. What’s the best way for you? Research what else is working in your niche. What are other bloggers doing? Probably the best thing you can do is to create something of your own to sell to your readers. What can you actually build on your own? Whether it be an ebook, a course, or something else that you can sell of your own rather than sending your readers away to advertisers or to other people’s products that you promote as an affiliate, what can you sell and deliver to your readers of your own?

Then think about diversifying your income streams too. Most profitable bloggers that I’ve come across over the last 13 years have more than 1 income stream. Many of them have 10 or so income streams on their blogs. You don’t want to just start off with 10. You might just want to start up with one but how could you diversify that?

If you’ve been blogging with one income stream for a while now, maybe it’s time to think a bit strategically about adding in a second one. If you’ve been doing affiliate promotions, maybe it’s time to create your own product. Maybe if you’ve been doing advertising for a long time, maybe it’s time to experiment with some affiliate marketing. These are all different ways of doing this. Be strategic about it. Don’t be passive when it comes to monetization.

As bloggers, we all know we need to put time aside to create content. Most of us know we need to put aside time to promote our blogs, but it’s amazing how many bloggers don’t put any time aside in their weekly schedule to monetize their blogs. Put aside an hour a week at least to think about how to monetize your blog. If you want that area to grow, you need to dedicate time towards that. Be strategic about it.

The last thing that I just want to say is really wrapping up this idea of experimentation, tweaking, and evolving what you do. I’ve said this in pretty much all of the other strategies that I’ve talked about. You need to get into the mindset of being someone who’s constantly running experiments on all of these different areas.

It might sound a little bit overwhelming to you, this podcast so far, but can I just encourage you to choose one of those areas that I’ve talked about? Maybe it’s your goals. If you haven’t got goals, start with that one. I think it’s really important. If you’ve got goals, maybe you want to put some time aside to understanding who your reader is and doing some research on that, maybe running some surveys, maybe running a focus group, and really narrowing down who it is that’s reading your blog, building an avatar.

If you already got that down in place, think about your brand. Do some work on that brand that you want to build, to find what you want people to say about you when you’re not in the room. If you’ve got that down in place, put some time aside today to think about your editorial strategy, or your marketing strategy, or that process you’re going to take people through once they do subscribe to your email, or your monetization.

Put some time aside today to think strategically about at least one of these areas and to come up with an experiment that you could do on one of those areas as well. The best bloggers I meet are constantly running experiments on these types of things. They understand that blogging with heart is not enough. They also need to be a bit more strategic in these types of things and part of that process is being a bit scientific about it—testing, seeing what happens when we do things. Most importantly, not just doing an experiment and then just not learning anything from it but you need to experiment and learn, then evolve your approach over time.

I hope this particular episode hasn’t been too overwhelming. Do remember that it really is designed to sit with episode 102 as well. I really do believe that it’s the intersection between blogging with heart and blogging smart with strategy, that’s really where the magic happens. If you get into blogging with just one of these approaches, you’re only ever going to go so far. Bring some heart and soul into your blogging but bring strategy into it and you might just find that things really take off as a result.

As always, I would love to hear from you and your thoughts on this particular episode. You can go to problogger.com/podcast/103 and add to this discussion. Tell me what other areas you think bloggers need to be strategic in. Tell us about a time where you got more strategic about your blogging in one of these areas or some other area and what happened as a result of that. I’d love to learn from your experience in that way as well.

I look forward to chatting with you in episode 104 in a couple of days’ time. Do subscribe to us over on iTunes. Please leave us a review, if you have a moment, over on iTunes, on Stitcher, or your other podcasting network. Those reviews not only help us to grow the podcast and for people to find us, they build some social proof, but most importantly, they give me a bit of encouragement. Also, those podcast reviews that we get that give any insight, that have any suggestions, or any feedback, that’s something that I do pay attention to and learn from as well. You can really help us with that.

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Thanks for listening. Look forward to chatting with you in a couple of days’ time.

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I hope this wasn’t too overwhelming. Remember this episode intersects with episode 102. I think the blogging magic happens when blogging with heart is combined with a strategic strategy.

As always, I would love to hear your thoughts on what areas bloggers need to be strategic in.

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I had a recent meetup with two local bloggers and they both said that they wanted to give up blogging. They each had different reasons for wanting to give up their blogs and different reasons for starting their blogs. Their blogging strategies were also opposites.

Blogger #1 was under the impression that all she needed to do is blog from the heart and everything else will take care of itself. I could relate to this, because that is how I started out. I just wanted to express myself.

She had been blogging from the heart and telling her story, but she hadn’t built an audience, and didn’t have any sustainable opportunities coming her way.

Blogger #2 had been told that to have a successful blog all he needed to do was follow a formula. He had been in a program that said that great content, plus good branding, proper ad placement, SEO, following a social media formula, and creating clickbait titles, all combined with good design would lead to blogging success.

He followed the formula, but his blog had no heart and soul. It was built with clinical precision.

I would argue that it is possible to blog smart while still blogging from the heart. Today I am going to talk about blogging from the heart, and next episode I will talk about smart blogging strategies.

Hi there. Welcome to Episode 102 of the ProBlogger Podcast. My name is Darren Rowse. You can find today’s show notes at problogger.com/podcast/102 where you’ll find some further reading on today’s topic, the topic being how to blog from the heart.

I recently had a conversation with two bloggers. It was a meetup that I’d arranged with these two local bloggers who are both saying that they wanted to give up blogging. It was a fascinating conversation because they both came from completely different perspectives. Both were thinking about giving up blogging because they had very different reasons for doing it. In fact, their reasons to stop blogging were quite different as well. The whole strategy of building their two blogs were almost opposite. 

Blogger one—I’m not going to reveal who these bloggers are—but blogger one had had this attitude when she started her blog that all she needed to do was to blog from the heart and the rest would look after itself. She’d heard from other bloggers that that’s what you needed to do. “Just bog from your heart. Just tell your story. Just be yourself and opportunities will come to you to build a profitable blog.” That’s the attitude that she’d had. 

I related to this particular blog because that’s the way I started out. I just blogged from the heart, I didn’t even know that you could make money from blogs. I started back in 2002. I think many bloggers probably relate to that. They just want to blog because they want to express themselves. And then there are other bloggers more recently who hear these amazing stories of bloggers who built successful blogs by just blogging from the heart and think that’s all they have to do. 

This blogger had done that for two years. She just blogged from the heart. She just told her story over and over again and shared on that very personal level for two years. Unfortunately, opportunities had never come. She actually had not really built much of an audience and certainly had not been able to build any sustainable way of keeping that blog going in terms of profit. 

It’s interesting, the other blogger who is at this particular coffee that we’re having was thinking of giving up blogging for a completely different reason. He started blogging for a very different as well, with a different strategy. He had been told that all you need to do to have a successful blog is to follow a formula. He’d actually been given a formula by someone selling a program on how to blog. I can’t remember the exact formula, but went something like this: great content + good branding + putting ads in the right spot + search engine optimization + following these three formulas with your social media + writing clickbait-y titles + good design = successful blogging. He actually showed me this formula. He printed it out and brought it to coffee. I don’t really know the person who sold this formula to him, I do know that it cost him $500 for this training. 

But the struggle that he’d had is that he had followed the formula to the letter. He’d done everything that he’d been trained to do but ended up with a blog that ticked all the boxes in some ways, but had no heart, it had no soul. It was very clinical. It was stuffed with lots of keywords and it was written for search engine optimization. There was no heart to it, there was no soul to it. 

Blogger number two worked on all of the right things. By the right things, I mean, according to the formula. But the blog really was built with clinical precision, but no soul. Blogger number one had that great heartfelt blog, but nobody was reading it. They’d built it on heart, but there was no real strategy there. 

What I want to talk about today and in the next episode is, how do you actually bring these two things together. I want to argue that you can blog from the heart, but still blog smart, still blog with strategy. Most of the bloggers that I’ve come across over the last 13 years who have had ongoing success with their blogs, who have built sustainable, profitable blogs. In the long term I have done a bit of both. They’ve blogged from the heart, but they’ve also had some strategy. 

What I want to talk about today in today’s episode is how to blog from the heart. I don’t want this to sit separate from the next episode which is going to be about how to blog smart. Today, I want to suggest to you seven different ways that you can blog from the heart. This is particularly for those of you who have perhaps a blog that is following a formula, that is perhaps a little clinical, that lacks a little soul like a blog or two.

Perhaps you have been taught a formula and maybe the formula has worked out to some degree but you’ve ended up with a blog that doesn’t really have much heart and that maybe that’s what’s missing from your blog. In two days’ time, the next episode, episode 103, I want to suggest to you around nine different strategies that you might want to think about—if you’ve been blogging from the heart but you haven’t been thinking strategically about your blog.

That’s where we’re headed with these two episodes, but today, I just want to focus upon this area of blogging from the heart. By no means am I saying this is all you need to do. It needs to be held with the next episode as well. These are seven or so different things that I would encourage you to do if your blog is perhaps a little clinical. The first one is passion—blog with passion. I’m not going to spend a whole heap of time on each of these points. I kind of just want to move through them and somewhere amidst them all hopefully, will be some answers for those of you who need to add a bit more heart to your blog.

Passion, I think, is very important. Passion is infectious. It actually is something that your readers pick up on quite incredibly. I love that quote and I think I’ve mentioned it before, once in this podcast before from Robert Frost. “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer and no surprise in the reader.” Robert there is talking about putting passion into your writing.

If you want your readers to have passion towards your blog and towards the things that you are writing about, you need to start that off, you need to set that culture as part of your blog. Blog with passion. Blog about things that are meaningful to you. Blog about things that you feel strongly about and that will come out in your writing. That will give your blog heart.

Number two, something we’ve talked about numerous times on this podcast before—tell stories. Storytelling is perhaps the number one thing I think we can do as bloggers to build deeper connections with our readers, to create heartfelt content. Your story is what makes your content unique. It adds heart to your blog. It creates memories in and connections with your readers.

I talk about this in episode 80 and 81 of this particular podcast. I think in 81, we talked about 14 different types of stories that you can tell on your blog. Go back and listen to that episode, 81. Commit to telling at least one story a week on your blog. 

I remember the time on Digital Photography School when we told the story of an organization here in Australia that goes into hospitals—photographers who go into hospitals and who take photos of really traumatic times in families’ lives. It’s an organization called Heartfelt. We told the story of one family who tragically lost a baby and how this organization was already going and created some beautiful portraits of that baby and her family, portraits that helped that family through the grieving process.

That particular post touched our readers like no other. One, it was on a heartfelt topic but I think it was a story that was told that really impacted people the most. Digital Photography School is 99.9% a blog full of tutorials. It’s a blog full of information, but by occasionally throwing in and seasoning that blog and those tutorials with a story, a heartfelt story, was a very powerful thing.

Many of our readers tell us about that particular post. It’s the post that they remember the most. So, tell stories and don’t be afraid to go to those places which are perhaps a little more heartfelt, a little more emotional from time to time, even if your blog is a little bit more information-based and doesn’t usually go there. Tell stories is number two.

Number three is to build a community. People are no longer satisfied just to go online, to consume content. We all know this because we’re all not satisfied ourselves. We want to have our say. We want to contribute. We want to create. We want to share. Most of all, people want to belong. They want to sense some belonging. They want to connect with their tribe, with people who share their eclectic mix of interests.

Give your readers an opportunity not just to read, not just to learn, not just to passively consume the content you create, but do everything you can to draw them into the process of creating content on your blog as much as possible through the comments but also through contributing content as well. I think when I opened up on Digital Photography School the opportunity for my readers to write tutorials for the rest of the community, that changed Digital Photography School, my main blog.

I still remember that day where I’ve been writing all the content myself and then I wrote a post saying, “If you’ve got a tip to share, I’d love to publish it.” We had a number of nervous readers approach us and some of them submitted one-paragraph posts and they weren’t amazing but we published them anyway. It changed the culture of the blog. It showed our readers that we valued them as contributors, as co-creators of the blog. Build community, engage, ask questions, interact with your readers.

The fourth thing that I encourage you to do if you want to build a heartfelt blog is to create inspirational content. Lift the eyes of your readers to what could be in their lives. Inspire them. This, for me, took a little while to learn this. Again, particularly on Digital Photography School, it’s a blog full of tutorials. They’re all how-to content but what I found, and I’ve talked about this recently on ProBlogger, is when you actually paint a picture at the start of a tutorial with something a little bit more inspirational, for us, it’s about using a beautiful image or telling a little story to get your readers in the zone of what could be if they take on the information that will be presented in the tutorial.

It changes the way that your readers respond to that tutorial. Inspire. This could be through just doing posts that purely are about inspiration, the post is all about it or as I just spoke through, you can start those informational types of posts with a moment of inspiration in your content. Do whatever you can to help your readers to dream, to have a vision of a future, to give them hope, to show them what they can achieve or what they could become is something better than their current reality. It might be a small inspiration, it might be a really big picture type one but when you inspire your readers, they will come to your blog with a different intent. That can be very transformative. Inspire your readers. Don’t just hit them with information.

The fifth thing I think is really important in terms of adding heart to your blog is being personal. Today, we operate in a space where there are so many tools, literally at our fingertips, that enable us to show a little of who we are, to show what we believe, to show what our lives are like. Think of Instagram. It is an amazing tool that enables you to share your life with your readers.

We have mediums like the one you are listening to right now that enable you to hear my voice, to hear my expression, and to hear what I feel as I am communicating to you in a way that is impossible to do through writing, or at least to the ability that I have as a writer. We have tools like video that enable us to show, to illustrate, to walk people through different processes but also to give a glimmer as to who we are as a person as well.

I think these tools that we have at our fingertips, and I’m thinking of live streaming, I’m thinking of all these amazing tools that are right there, on our phones, in our computers, they enable us to create content that connects, that creates a brand that is more relatable and more likeable. The more I experiment with mediums like podcasting, live streaming, and video, the more I get reactions from my readers when I meet them at conferences that blow my mind. The more I have conversations with the readers that feel like I’m talking to old friends and to realize that my readers do know me. They don’t just know of me but they know me.

I encourage you to step out of your comfort zone a little and to be personal, to show your readers who you are. It can be a little scary to do that and I understand the fear that comes along with doing that but with boundaries, in a safe way, I do encourage you to share of yourself with your readers. You’ll be amazed as to their reaction to that.

The sixth thing I want to talk about is being playful. The tools that I’ve just been talking about not only allow us to show who we are but enable us to be a little playful with our audience as well, to use humor, to surprise and delight our audiences, to let them see that you’re not just a one-trick pony. One of the things I realized when I started playing with video, almost like nine years ago now, is that it enabled my readers to see that I wasn’t just into blogging.

I used to produce these videos on ProBlogger and occasionally, my kids would walk past behind and people would send me emails after those sorts of videos and go, “I didn’t realize today that you’re not just a blogger, you’re actually a dad.” It’s amazing how many people just didn’t relate to me as a father until they saw my kids wandering by in the back of videos or saw me showing parts of my house in my video by presenting from the kitchen table in front of a piece of artwork.

Those sorts of tools enable you to show that you have a humor, you have other hobbies, that you have other passions, that you are a normal person. I think from time to time, using these mediums and even using your writing to show that you do have a sense of humor to surprise, to play tricks on your readers, to do these types of things that normal people do with their friends can be a very powerful thing. I think back to some of the April Fools’ jokes that I’ve played on ProBlogger. It’s been a couple of years since I’ve done them but by doing those, I actually broke down some of those walls, some of the formality that often happens when people read your content everyday.

Sometimes people can have these perceptions of you that are sometimes good things. People see you as an expert but they don’t see you as a human being. I think by using some of these mediums, you can actually show that you do have a sense of humor, that you are like them. That helps to create a different type of connection with your audience.

The last thing that I want to talk about in terms of blogging from the heart is to create content that changes people’s lives and that makes the world a better place. At the heart of your blog should be the desire to make your audiences’ lives better in some way. Change their life—they’ll keep coming back and they’ll bring other people with them. I think that really does need to be at the heart of what you do. Every day you sit down to create content, you should be thinking about, “How is this content going to make my reader or my listener’s life better in some way?”

But, there’s a bigger picture type of thing that can happen on a blog as well and I encourage you to wrestle with this one—how can you use your influence to make the world better in some way? As bloggers, we often talk about influence and how we can leverage that influence to make a profit. That’s great but we also have these opportunities to use our influence to make the world a better place. We can use our social influence for social good. 

I think back to 2011 where I had the opportunity to go to Tanzania and spend a week in a disability hospital there to tell the story of the staff and patients in that hospital using social media and blogging to put the microphone that I’ve been using for my own good in front of some of these patients.

I remember sitting in that hospital, interviewing a young girl who was 10, who for her whole life had not been able to walk and for her whole life had dragged herself for kilometers to school every morning and kilometers home every night with the dream of one day becoming a doctor to help children like her. I remember that moment when I sat next to Amina, her name was Amina, on her bed and interviewed her in that way. I got to tell her story on ProBlogger and on Digital Photography School.

I remember the tension that I had within me that day. Now, here I am going to talk about disability in Tanzania, at a hospital, and a young girl, Amina, on my blog about blogging and on my blog about photography. I remember having some tension around that, “How are my readers going to respond to that?” But do you know what? When I started to publish those stories and tell the story of that hospital and some of those patients like Amina, my readers really responded in an incredibly positive way.

I realized that by allowing my worlds to collide a little, allowing my passion for issues like disability and my hope for developing countries like Tanzania, allowing those to collide on my blog which is about blogging, actually wasn’t a bad thing at all. It showed a different side of me. My readers really responded very well to that. I guess I’d encourage you to wrestle with how you can allow your different passions to collide on your blog? I probably wouldn’t recommend that you write about those types of issues all the time but it’s okay occasionally for your readers to see that you are passionate about other things and that you are willing to use your influence, not just for your own good but to make the world a better place in some way.

I’ve just talked there about seven different things you could do to add heart to your blog but as I’m talking about it, I’m realizing that I’m just scratching the surface here. I guess the point of this particular podcast is to encourage you to create something that has heart, to encourage you to do whatever you can to add soul to your blog in some way. Particularly, I guess this message today is for those of you who do approach blogging in a strategic, clinical way. There’s nothing wrong with bringing strategy to your blog and I think it’s an essential ingredient and something that I do want to explore in the next episode of this podcast

But I think sometimes, we can become so strategic in our thinking that we create something that has no heart. It’s very easy to lose sight of the fact that there are human beings reading the content that we’re creating, that they’re not just numbers in a Google Analytics report but behind each of those sessions. Behind each of those unique users and viewers is a human being with a heartbeat, with a human being who’s interested in engaging, with a human being who wants to be inspired, a human being who wants to belong. Don’t lose sight of that person. Do whatever you can to remind yourself who is reading, who is listening, and create content from that perspective is so important.

In episode 103, I want to take the flipside. I want to talk about some strategic things that you should be focusing upon as you blog from the heart. But in the meantime, before that one comes out, I’d love you to hit our show notes over at problogger.com/podcast/102. I would encourage you to talk to me there about what else you would suggest and that bloggers do to add heart and soul to their blog. Perhaps you want to share a link to a post that you’ve written that has heart and soul. Or perhaps it’s an approach that you take to remind yourself that there are human beings with heartbeats on the other side of those Google Analytics numbers.

I really would love to hear from you because I feel almost like this episode has been a bit inadequate because there’s so much more that could be said so I invite you to say it. Head over to problogger.com/podcast/102 and have your say. Let us know what you think about this particular topic. I’ll chat with you in episode 103 in a couple of days’ time. Thanks for listening.

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 us at @problogger. Find us at facebook.com/problogger or search ProBlogger on iTunes.

I want to encourage you to create something with heart and add soul to your blog. I’d love for you to share an approach you have used to blog with heart. Leave a comment or link below.

Update: Check out the next part in this series – How to Blog Smart (9 Strategies to Focus Upon)

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).

Enjoy this podcast? Sign up to our ProBloggerPLUS newsletter to get notified of all new tutorials and podcasts below.