ProBlogger Podcast: Blog Tips to Help You Make Money Blogging

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Today I’m talking about being more consistent with your blogging. This topic originated from a question by Jason Stevens from Digital Tools of the Trade.  Jason wants to know how to maintain consistency when blogging? This is an important question, because consistency matters when creating content for a blog or any medium.

There are so many blogs out there that were started with energy, passion and enthusiasm for a topic. Eventually, the enthusiasm fades and those blogs are neglected or even dead.

Today we are going to discuss tips and resources that will prevent your blog from ending up in the blogging graveyard. Also, don’t forget to check out our new resource of 180 Blog Post Ideas.

This will give you six months worth of idea prompts and blog post ideas, and that’s if you blog daily. For most people, 180 prompts will last a year or more.

You can find today’s show notes and listen to this particular episode if you so choose at problogger.com/podcast/101. You’ll also find there some details of our brand new resource that we’ve just released for bloggers, podcasters, YouTubers, content creators. It’s completely free. It comes when you sign up for the ProBlogger Plus newsletter.

It’s a blogging prompt resource. It will give you 180 ideas for blog posts, podcasts, or YouTubers. One hundred eighty content ideas. That’s enough if you daily post for six months of content on your blog, or if you spread them out a bit further, it might last you a whole year. This resource comes as a series of six monthly emails. Every month, we’ll send you a PDF with 30 new content prompts for your blog. You can check out that at problogger.com/podcast/101 where I will include all today’s show notes and details of this new blogging prompt resource. Enough of that now, let’s get into today’s show.

Today, I want to talk about being consistent with your blogging. This podcast was stimulated by a question we received from Jason Stevens from Digital Tools Of The Trade.

Jason: Hi, Darren. Jason from Digital Tools Of The Trade here. My question for you is how does one maintain consistency with blogging? I know one, for a period of time, can be consistent and then that consistency can become inconsistent where I work on a blog and fall by the wayside for the period of time. I’m just curious to your thoughts on how one, when maintaining a blog, producing articles, videos, and so forth on a blog can maintain consistency?

Darren: Thanks so much for your question, Jason. It is a really important one because consistency is very important when it comes to blogging or creating content on any platform. Almost every week, I meet someone who tells me that they have a blog and then quickly tells me that they have a blog that they don’t write on anymore. There must be millions and tens of millions of blogs out there that were started with enthusiasm, passion, and energy for their topic and which naturally lead to a lot of ideas in those first few weeks and months but then several months later on, it’s dead. It’s really difficult to keep that blog going. There must be tens of millions of those kinds of blogs out there.

Today’s podcast is all about trying to stop you from joining that number of dead blogs in the blogging graveyard. I want to give you 11 or so tips that hopefully will help you to keep more consistent with your blogging. Some of these are pretty obvious, but I think they’re worth saying because you can build some things in your workflow that will help you to keep moving on. Let’s get straight into them.

Firstly, I think it’s really important not to bite off more than you can chew. Don’t set yourself up to fail by committing to a rate of publishing that’s beyond what you can do. I’ve seen many bloggers do this. They say, “I’m going to be publishing daily posts on this particular topic.” And then they realize that the posts that they’re writing are 1000–2000 words long and it really takes longer than they’ve got to be able to produce that type of content at that frequency.

I think it’s better to publish less often but consistently than to promise the world and not deliver. You don’t want to set up the expectations with your readers and with yourself, probably more importantly, that you’re going to publish more often than you are able to. It’s so easy when you fall short of the deadlines that you set yourself to become disillusioned.

Your readers may not actually notice that you’re not publishing as much as you say you were going to but you will and that can be really disheartening to you. It can hurt your motivation. I’d rather set yourself two or three posts a week and then over-perform, publish four than promise four or five and then only publish two or three. Number one, don’t bite off more than you can chew.

Number two is to generate as many ideas for content ahead of time. Now, we’ve talked about this in episode 84 and I gave you a whole heap of tips in episode 84 on how to generate ideas for content. But I think it is really important, as I think I mentioned in that episode, to separate out the two tasks of generating ideas for content and creating that content. Separate those two activities out. I’m not a scientist, a neuroscientist, or whoever decides these things. My belief is that you probably use different parts of your brain to come up with ideas and to plan and to create. You probably want to separate those two tasks out.

Don’t just sit down and say, “Today, I need to write about something and what am I going to write about?” You want to have thought about that ahead of time. This is where this blogging prompts tool that we’ve just released comes into handy. Check out that in today’s show notes as well because it gives you 30 different ideas for content that you can set out ahead of time and then when it comes to sit down to write, you’ve got them sitting there for you.

Tip number one, don’t bite off more than you can chew. Tip number two, generate ideas ahead of time. Tip number three is to block out times to create content. Again, this is something we’ve talked about in episode 86. Setting yourself time to create. It doesn’t just happen. Great content won’t just appear. You need to dedicate time for it and make appointments with yourself to create that content. Make it a part of your daily rhythm—content creation—or at least a regular thing for you. I find that I’m much better at creating content when I’m doing it on a daily basis.

If I say I’m going to create all my content on Mondays or all my content on the first two days of the month and then I don’t do any content creation for the rest of the week or the rest of the month, I find it really hard when I do sit down to write. If I’m in the regular rhythm of creating content, it just seems to flow more for me. Block out regular time. I personally would much prefer to set aside an hour every morning to create content than a whole day once a week to do it because you just find yourself slipping into that creation mode a little faster.

The fourth tip builds on these two last ones. We’ve set aside time for idea generation. We’ve set aside time for the creation of content. Then you want to set aside time for completion, polishing, and publishing of your content. Again, I would argue that it’s a different part of your brain that is good at looking critically at your content, polishing that content, and making it the best that it can be. I think I would argue that you would set aside separate time to finish your content, to polish it, to complete it, to be critical about it, to edit it. Again, we’ve talked about that in episode 87. I gave you some really practical tips in that episode on how to complete content.

Tip number five is to consider some easy posts in your mix. If you’re struggling to pump out regular content, there are ways to create posts that don’t take as much time to produce. I don’t want you to hear me saying here is to just publish filler content, really easy content that doesn’t actually help your readers in any way. But there are certain types of content that can be useful to your readers that don’t take a whole heap of time to create. Let me give you a few examples of some of these easier types of posts that you might want to throw into your mix from time to time.

Firstly, reader discussions. This is something that we do semi-regularly on both of my blogs. The post itself is really not a whole heap more than a question. Your content doesn’t have to contain a whole heap of answers. It doesn’t have to be 5000 words long. It could be as simple as you asking a question and then opening up a discussion. For this one to work, you probably do need to have some readers already. It may not be one that you want to start out with if you’re a new blogger but if you already have some readers, why don’t you just ask a question?

Number two type of post that you might want to do that’s a bit easier to do is to ask a poll. If you use WordPress, there are so many poll plugins that you can install. This is a different version of that reader discussion. Come up with a question that’s got five options and then put the poll up. Polls are actually easier than discussion posts to get a response from, and they, sometimes, can continue a discussion as well. You might combine those first two together. Put a poll in and then say, “Discuss your answer. Why did you choose what you chose?”

The third type of post that you might want to throw in, it’s a little bit easier, is a post where you challenge your readers to do something or you give them some homework. Then you ask them to come back and report on what they did. We do this on Digital Photography School every Saturday. We name a theme, and we say, “Go take a photo on this theme and then come back and share your photo with us.”

You could do the same sort of thing on different types of niche blogs as well. Getting your readers to go do something and then share what they did. Again, this doesn’t take a whole heap of time to create that post. It actually is a good type of post to do because it gets people doing things, taking information that you may have already published. You can link back to an old post that you wrote. Say, “Go read that and then go and do what it says.” Third type of post is homework or challenge.

Number four type of post is a link post. This is where you don’t have to write a whole heap of content. You just find what other people have written over the last week or a whole heap of links on a particular thing. On ProBlogger, from time to time, we’ve done these. We might have SEO—search engine optimization—and we would write a post that is basically 10 posts you need to read from around the web that all have something to do with SEO. You could quite easily do these theme link-ups, once a week for example.

The other way to do it is like what we do on ProBlogger. We do a reading round-up and Stacy puts together a post over on problogger.net once a week, and she summarizes all the great articles that we’ve been reading as a team over the last week.

We actually send her all the posts that we find most helpful on other people’s blogs, and then she writes up a link post. That’s once a week and it’s useful to our readers. Our readers really love that particular post. They give us a lot of good feedback on it because we don’t have to come up with all the helpful stuff, we just have to find it and curate it for our readers.

Another type of post that you might want to throw in from time to time is a best of archive post. This is where you do a link post but you base it up content you have already written. This is something we do, particularly at the end of the year, both on ProBlogger and Digital Photography School. Basically, it’s a recap of what we’ve done over the year.

On Digital Photography School, usually, the week between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, we do a series of posts that are our best of portrait articles, then a best of landscape articles, and a best of Adobe Lightroom articles. Basically, it’s looking back over the main categories of the blog and pulling together a list of suggested reading on those particular posts.

This is a great way to get people back into your archives. It works really well on a blog that has been going for a year, two years, or three years. A lot of your new readers haven’t seen that old content. It’s quite easy to put together, really. It’s just about surfing through your own archives to find the best stuff.

Another type of post that you might want to consider doing is an embedded content post. Again, I talked about this in episode 97. This is where you go to YouTube and you find a great video that’s relevant to your audience. It may not even be a video that you created, it might be just something someone else created. You embed it into a post, you might add some of your own thoughts, maybe some further reading and then you publish that.

You could do the same thing with all kinds of different embeddable content. It’s not too hard to do. This is actually something I did in the early days of Digital Photography School once a week. I’ll do a video post every Wednesday. It was just an easy post. I had to go and find that content, do some further reading, add a few thoughts to make it a little bit more original but my readers loved that because they loved videos. It’s not a filler piece of content. It actually can be a killer piece of content. It can be a really good one as well.

Another easier type of post is where you might consider having a guest or feature another voice. It may be by doing a guest post. Allowing someone to write on your blog, if you can find someone to do that or where you interview someone. Sometimes, when you interview someone, it’s an easier post because you just have to come up with the three or four questions to ask them and then put their responses into a post. It’s not like you are coming up with the content, the answers yourself.

The key with all of these types of posts, the seven types of posts that I’ve just gone through—reader discussions, polls, homework, link posts, best of archive posts, embedded content, and guests—is to keep those posts relevant. You really need to be careful that you don’t just do filler content. You want it to be on-brand, you want it to be useful, and you want it to be relevant, not just posting for the sake of posting.

Just lastly, on these different types of easier types of content, you may actually want to build them into a weekly rhythm. I’ve hinted at this already. Wednesday used to be a video post on Digital Photography School. Saturday at Digital Photography School is when we give our readers  a challenge.

You might be able to build in some regular types of posts. A week might look like this: Monday might be a guest post, Tuesday might be a reader discussion post, Wednesday may be a longer, more thoughtful post that you’ve written, Thursday might be the video of the week, Friday might be a longer, thoughtful post again, one of your main posts of the week, Saturday might be a link roundup post, and Sunday might be a challenge or a homework post. You can see there that you could take those different types of post that I’ve done and then sprinkle in some longer, more thoughtful content that you spend your time writing, and you come out with an interesting week of content for your blog that maybe hasn’t taken as much work as you might have thought.

That was tip number five. It was a bit of a longer one but I think it’s an important one. It’s one that I think a lot of bloggers could use. Tip number six is to use tools like CoSchedule or other tools that you can get to come up with an editorial calendar. I think this has really helped me and my team with our blogging. It’s actually starting to plan ahead with our content. Part of this is coming up with deadlines for the content that we create. Part of it’s by visualizing ahead where we’re headed and it helps you to create content that builds from one post to the next as well.

I really like to be able to visually visualize the content that’s coming up. That’s why I love a tool like CoSchedule, in particular, that puts everything into a calendar, enables us to drag and drop things around. And of course, it’s got a whole heap of other types of features on it as well. The other thing I love about being able to visualize ahead of time the content that’s coming up is that it actually helps me to be on the lookout for ideas, illustrations, or examples that I can use in those posts. If I know that next week, I have to write a post on a particular topic, in the back of my mind, I’m looking out for things that I could say in that post. Using those types of tools can be really helpful.

Seventh tip is to write out of relationship. This is something that’s come up a number of times in previous podcasts, but it’s something that I’ve really become aware of. I find myself being much more motivated to write content and I find myself writing better content and being more energized in my writing when I do so knowing that what I’m creating is for real people and it’s on real issues that they face.

I think I mentioned this recently in a podcast. Some of my best posts are written on a plane on the way home from a conference. I find that it’s just the time when I’m writing my best stuff and fresh in my mind is a conversation that I might have had with one of my readers or someone who just has a real need. It’s out of those discussions, out of those relationships with my readers that I find my best content comes.

This podcast could actually be a good example of this. Jason asked that question. He asked it over on Anchor. By hearing his voice and by having met Jason in the past at one of our events, I feel more motivated to create this podcast. I hope that it comes through in the way that I’m presenting as well, that I actually put effort into answering his question because I know he’s a real person.

I guess what I’m trying to say here is to get to know your readers. Put yourself in a position where you’ll meet them either in person or online. Do Twitter chats. Do live streaming. Experiment with a tool like Blab which puts you into a real live conversation with them. I love what Pat Flynn does. He occasionally rings his readers. He gets on the phone with them and spends 20 minutes just hearing about their life and how he can help them better.

The more you understand who your readers are, the more real-life interactions with them or at least as close to real-life as possible, the better position you’ll be in to write content that actually has an impact upon them. I find that really motivating. It helps me to be more consistent. It gives me energy to create content because I’m not just creating content for machines. It’s not just an abstract thing. It’s actually a real thing.

Tip number eight is to batch write. This is something that I’ve talked about before in previous podcasts, so I’m not going to get into it in great depth. But I find that it can be useful to get a little bit ahead in your writing and to write and create more than one piece of content in a sitting. I did say earlier in this podcast that you should be writing regularly. So, it’s probably better to do one post every day than to sit at the start of the week and then not create anything for the rest of the week but there is an argument also for creating multiple pieces of content in a sitting and to focus upon that task ahead of time.

That’s what I do, particularly with my podcasts. I find that I’m much better if I plan out two or three episodes at a time, then I record them all at once, then I upload them, and that task is done. You’ve got to find what works for you. Sometimes it is a daily thing and sometimes batch writing or batch creating can be a really powerful thing as well.

Tip number nine is on the flip side of this one, a little bit, and that is to be spontaneous. I’ve talked here about visualizing ahead of time, having a plan for the content that you create, batch writing, and working ahead on creating content. But I think, also sometimes the best posts that you write are spontaneous posts, the post that you get an idea for and you just bang them out really quickly. You publish them really quickly as well because they’re timely posts. It might be a reaction to something that’s happening in the news, something that you just read, or something that’s just happened on Twitter.

Sometimes that spontaneity is important as well. While I’m a big believer in planning ahead, being thoughtful about the journey you take your readers on, and having editorial calendars, I think it’s really important to also be aware and be ready to create content on the fly. This is where I love live streaming particularly.

I jumped on Facebook this morning and did something based on something that I just thought about. It was fresh and hopefully, it came across as a little bit more energized. I think readers really respond well to that as well. If there’s something that you’ve just experienced, something you’ve just witnessed, something you feel strongly about at the moment, put time aside to create content based on that as well.

Remember, here we’re talking about being consistent with your creation. You want to be paying attention to what’s energizing you at the moment and not just being planned which when you put time aside ahead of time to write content, sometimes that removes you a little bit from your reader and from what you feel. Be spontaneous as well.

Number 10 is to create content that is meaningful and content that creates change. If you’ve been reading ProBlogger for a while, you know this is one of my passions is that you really want to be doing something that’s meaningful. This is connected to what I was talking about before, writing out of relationships, but for me, the times I’ve most struggled to create content on a consistent basis are the times when I feel like I’ve lost sight of what my blog is about. When you lose sight of that meaning behind your blog, it can be really hard to motivate yourself to create content.

I’ll be really transparent here. There have been times, a few years ago, where I, for ProBlogger, lost sight of the goal of the site. I lost touch with the meaning of that site, lost sight of my reader. To be honest with you, I guess I have to apologize to my readers. There have been times when I know ProBlogger hasn’t hit the mark and I think they’ve been really tired to those times when I’ve lost touch with the meaning of that site.

I know ProBlogger, on the flip side, has been most effective and the content has been best when I’ve been very in touch with the meaning of the site and very in touch with my readers as well. For me, it’s about getting in touch with the meaning. Understand the “Why” of your site. If you want to learn, think more about that, check out some of Simon Sinek’s work on “Why” and why “Why” is so important.

The 11th tip that I want to give you in terms of being more consistent with your content is to understand what kind of content drives you. Here I’m talking not just about the topic, but I’m talking about the format and the medium. Sometimes the struggle that we have as bloggers and content creators is that we’re trying to produce a type of content that we’re not as passionate about.

Maybe your problem isn’t that you’ve got the wrong topic, maybe your topic is you’ve got the wrong format. While I’m a big believer in blogging and I literally, a couple of episodes ago talked about why you need to have a blog, maybe the better format for you is podcasting. Maybe you’re better to speak than you are to write. Or maybe you’re better in front of a camera than writing.

I think it’s really important to get in touch not only with your topic, what’s meaningful to you, and how you’re helping your readers but also get in touch with how you present best, how you communicate best. Have a play with some of these different mediums to see whether you respond well to them. This has been one of the things I’ve discovered in the last eight or so months. For me, podcasting has been a game-changer. Not only has it helped me to reach a new audience who likes audio better, it’s actually something that’s bought a lot of energy to me which has impacted the rest of what I do.

I’m not going to give up on blogging. I still am passionate about blogging but by experimenting with a new medium and changing up the format, that’s brought a lot of energy to me. Partly, that’s about the format, partly, that’s about the fact that it’s audio, and partly, it’s because I’m doing something new. If you’ve been at this for a while and you’re finding it hard to be consistent with your blogging, have a play in a new space and see what that brings to you. See whether that energizes you again in a fresh way.

I hope in those 11 tips are some things that are resonating with you. I’m going to summarize that in today’s show notes over at problogger.com/podcast/101. I would love to hear what you would add to this because this is a problem that many bloggers and content creators have. They started out passionately with lots of energy, lots of ideas, and then things drop off. I think it’s something most of us could relate to and I would love to hear your tips on how you combat that inconsistency in your content creation.

Again, check out the summary of today’s show notes and further reading over at problogger.com/podcast/101 where you can also get those content creation prompts as well. You’ll get 180 ideas for fresh content for your blog, podcast, or YouTube channel. I hope you find that helpful. I’d love to hear how you find those prompts as well and any others that you would come up with. Maybe we could come up with another 30 or so and add to the 6 months of ideas that we send out.

Thanks for listening and I will chat with you in a couple of day’s time in episode 102.

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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Welcome to episode 100. Today I would like to take a look back, not over the last 100 podcast episodes, but back to when I first started blogging 13 ½ years ago.

I’m going to talk about some important lessons, and identify ten things that I wish that I had known when I first started blogging in 2002. I hope to share some of the things that will help you get over the bumps in your blogging venture.

My blogging journey began when my friend Steve sent me an email with these four simple words, “check out this blog” and a link to TallSkinnyKiwi.com. I had never heard of blogging before, and I was curious about who the tall skinny kiwi was.

I clicked the link and loved the content that Andrew Jones had created, but I also fell in love with blogging. I was intrigued with the idea of building a community around a blog, and I dove in with no experience or credentials.

Darren Rowse from Chris Guillebeau on Vimeo.

Hi there and welcome to episode 100 of the ProBlogger Podcast. My name is Darren Rowse. Today, I want to look back. Not over the last 100 episodes (although that was tempting to do), but over the last 13 ½ years of my blogging. I want to pull out some of the important lessons from that time. I want to identify 10 things that I’d wish I had known when I was starting out back in 2002.

Not all of them will be relevant to every single listener of this podcast, and some of them do pick up some themes from previous podcasts, but I hope that over the next 30 or 40 minutes, I’ll share some things that will help you to get over some of the bumps in your own journey as a blogger, whether you are just starting out or whether you’ve been blogging for a while.

You can find today’s show notes and I’m going to link in the show notes to some further reading on each of the 10 points that I’m going to talk about, and link back to some of the episodes we’ve done in our first 100 episodes that are relevant to these points. You can find the show notes at problogger.com/podcast/100.

My blogging journey all started with four simple words from a friend who shot me an email one day back in November of 2002. The email simply said from my friend Steve, “Check out this blog.” After those words was a link to a blog called tallskinnykiwi.com. Many of you have heard me tell this story before about how those four words literally changed the direction of my life, and I often wonder what would have happened if I’ve not got the email or not taken any notice of them.

There was something about those four words and that link Tall Skinny Kiwi that got me a little bit curious. I wanted to find out who the Tall Skinny Kiwi was and what this blog thing was. I’d never seen or heard of that word before. I clicked the link and long story short, I really enjoyed that blog, the content on it. But more than that, I fell in love with this medium, this tool that Andrew Jones, the Tall Skinny Kiwi, was using to communicate, to amplify his voice and to build a community around his ideas. That really intrigued me a lot.

Within an hour or so, I decided to start my first blog without having any of the credentials that a good blogger needs. I’d had a whole heap of jobs over the last 20 years, I’d been working as a youth worker, as a minister of a church, I’d been working in warehouses, I’d been working in in-flight catering, kitchen. I’d been doing a whole heap of things, none of which really had a whole heap to do with the web. The only one that slightly did was that I was working in the warehouse of an online gift store.

I saw the results of the web in the sales that went through my hands and the products that went through my hands, but they never really let me touch the computers because I was a technological Luddite. I didn’t really have any qualifications at all. I was halfway through a Bachelor of Theology, I’d been a drop out in the Bachelor of Marketing, and I wasn’t really a great writer, so there was a whole heap of reasons why.

I probably shouldn’t have started that blog back in 2002, but I did, and that’s probably one of the best things that I ever did. If I’d thought too much more about it, I probably wouldn’t have. If there’s any advice I can give you if you’re just starting out, just start. Even if it’s not perfect because as a little back up, my first blog, which was called Living Room, was an extension of what was going inside my mind.

It was a personal blog—we might call it today—where I talk about all kinds of things. As I look at that first blog and screen shots of it—that’s all I have, it’s not online anymore—I see an ugly blog. I see someone who didn’t really write very well, who didn’t really know what they were doing. It was pretty obvious, but you know what, it didn’t matter. People found it. That was mainly through me commenting on other blogs that they found mine. There was something on my blog that they enjoyed, so they came back. That readership (gradually) over time grew.

Now, I did meet some people who knew a little bit more about blogging than me. They taught me how to do things, like make text bold on my blogs. You had to know some HTML back then. One of them, Rachel Cunliffe from New Zealand, helped me to redesign that first blog. I learned a whole heap by starting and by reaching out to other bloggers.

Gradually, over time, I became incredibly addicted to it and that blog evolved. I added new topics, I added new ideas, I got it redesigned, and gradually, over time, began to think about starting other blogs. The first commercial blog I started was about a year later. It was a blog about digital cameras, where I wrote about my camera, one of the early-ish digital cameras, and then began to aggregate reviews from other people around the web.

That was the first blog I started to make a little bit of money from. I started out doing that through putting AdSense ads on my blog and recommending some products on Amazon through their affiliate program. Gradually, it began to earn a few dollars. A few dollars a week at first, it wasn’t too great. It was small, but it was a few dollars. The whole goal (of course) was to try and pay for my server and to maybe one day get off dial up internet onto broadband and maybe upgrade my computer down the track. I thought that it would probably take several years to get to that point, but I realized very quickly that it was a reality. It was something that I could do.

I already did have some readers at this stage, so that process was a bit quicker than if I was just starting out. At first, I’m putting ads on my blog from day one, but those few dollars a week gradually grew into a few dollars a day and then it grew to a point where it was a part-time job, a day, a week of income. And then two days a week of income. And then three days a week of income.

Around a year after I started to experiment with monetizing that first blog, I realized that I was going to be a full-time blogger if things continue to grow as they did. That’s when I really ramped things up. I convinced my wife that I was going to be a full-time blogger. She humored me at first, but caught […] side of the fact that there was potential there. 

We gave ourselves six months to be full-time as a blogger and that’s when things really escalated. In 2004, I started ProBlogger, and that was around the time (I think it was September in that year) that I was about to go full-time with my blog. That was an attempt to share this story because I realized that people around the world had a potential to make a living from this medium, to not only share information that change the world and help their readers, but that information that they shared had the potential to help them to earn an income, that they can build a sustainable and a profitable blog.

That was the whole point behind ProBlogger. It was also a bit selfish, I wanted to try and meet other bloggers who might be on the same journey. No one was really writing about how they make their blogs sustainable.

In 2007, I transitioned that first camera blog into a photography blog, Digital Photography School, which regular listeners of this podcast have heard me talk about many times. It’s the main blog that I have today. It has between three and five million readers per month, which blows my mind. I could share a whole heap of stats that blow my mind. There’s almost a million social media followers. The fact that now, we have around 30 or so people write for my blogs, and I have a core team of 5 or 6 people who work part-time, some of them full-time on the things that I’d built.

These sorts of numbers blow me away, but you know what really blows me away? It’s the emails I get from total strangers, telling me stories about how something I’ve written or something that I’ve published from one of my writers has helped them. That’s really the exciting part about this. Not the money, not the stats. It’s that I’m doing something that’s sustainable and profitable, but it’s also making the world a little bit better. That’s the thing I love most about what I’m doing at the moment.

That’s my story. I wanted to share that to give a bit of context to these lessons that I’m going to share now. I want to share 10 things that I wish I’d known when I started back in 2002. The first one comes straight out of that story.

Lesson number one, if you want your blog to be a business, you need to treat it as business. This is something that took me a little while to get my head around. For a long time, I thought my blogs could one day be a full-time thing. Even when I started to make a few dollars a week, I thought, “If I could just increase my traffic, if I could just learn who to use these monetization strategies a bit better, maybe it could become a full-time thing.”

I had this grand dream that one day, it would be a full-time business. Gradually, over time, it started to move towards that. At first, it was pretty slow. It was a 10% increase from one month to the next month. 10% sounds pretty good, but when you’re earning $3 or $4  a week, 10% increase isn’t that much. But I could see that there was growth. I began to create these spreadsheets. What happens if it continues to grow 10% or 20% each month. I could see that in five, six, or seven years, that if it kept growing at that rate, I’d be a full-time blogger. This dream remained in my head.

Gradually, I began to share the dream with Vanessa, my wife. I remember going out to her after things have grown. It was a day, a week of income. I remember saying to her, “If things continue to grow the way they’re growing, in seven years time, I’m going to be a full-time blogger.” At this stage I was 30 years of age. She humored me for a while, but I remember one day, bringing out the spreadsheet again, and saying that same line, “If things keep going like this in seven years, I’ll be full-time.”

One day, she looked back at me and said, “In seven years’ time, we’re going to be 37 years old, you have kids, and you probably should have a full-time job by then.” You need to escalate this, it needs to grow a bit faster than what it is if you want to be a full-time blogger.

That was around the time that we started to put some deadlines on things. There was one day when we put a six-month deadline on things. At that time, I wasn’t full-time. I was still a little way off being full-time, but we decided six months was the time. You know what? That day when we decided that if I wasn’t full-time in six months, I had to go away and get a real job, that was the day when it put a firecracker underneath me. It really forced me to think about what I was doing in a more strategic way as a business rather than as a dream of business. 

That was the first that I picked up to find or rang a potential advertiser, and talk to them face-to-face or voice-to-voice. They said no. That first advertiser said “No, we don’t want to advertise on your blog.” I rang another one, and I rang another one, and that was the first day I ever landed my first direct deal with an advertiser. It was only $20 a month. It wasn’t really that much, but that $20 a month turned into $20 every month.

Gradually, over time, the advertiser began to pay $30, $40, $50, and they ended up paying a couple of hundred dollars per month to have their advertising spot. While that $200 in and off itself didn’t take me to be a full-time blogger. It was an important step towards that goal. 

Sometimes giving yourself that deadlines and forcing yourself to think about what you’re doing is business is enough to really take you to the next level. That day, when I gave myself that deadline and Vanessa helped me to get that deadline going, that was the first time I began to think  I need to increase my traffic here. It wasn’t just a hope, I’d love to have more traffic. I need more traffic here, and I began to think more strategically about how I am going to get more traffic. I began to diversify the way that I’ve got traffic to my site. I needed to think more strategically about who is reading my blog. I needed to think more strategically about the editorial calendar and the content that I was producing. 

So, lesson number one, if you want your blog to be business—not everyone needs to have a business as their blog, and not everyone should—if you do want that, if you dream of that, then treat it as a business today. Begin to think strategically about what you’re doing today. You want to be able to map out the exact journey that you’re going to take. But set yourself some goals. Treat it as a business today. That’s lesson number one. 

Lesson number two, it flows out of that first lesson. One of the things that I did when I started to treat my blog as a business was to pay real attention to who was reading my blog. Lesson number two is to identify who you want to read your blog. The more you understand about who you want to read your blog or who is reading your blog, the better informed you’ll be to create content that meets their needs.

Knowing who you want to reach really informs that content strategy. It will inform how you promote your blog. By knowing who you want to read your blog, you’ll be in a better position to identify. You know they’re hanging out on Facebook, or they are the type of person who hangs out on Instagram. I need to develop a presence in those places. By knowing who you want to read your blog, you’ll be in a much better position to understand how to engage those readers when they do come. How do I get them hooked into the community? What questions do I need to ask that trigger them to leave a comment? By knowing who you want to read your blog, you’ll begin to see ways to monetize your blog. 

One of the things that I started to do back when I started Digital Photography School (and even a little bit before that) I began to think about reader profiles. I began to think about creating these avatars (as many people call them today) or personas. I just opened up with documents and I described who I wanted to read my blog, simply by taking that guess coming up with this hypothetical person.

The first person I came out with was a reader called Grace. Grace was a mamarazzo photographer, she was a parent who is taking photos of her kids and simply by saying, “This is who I want to read my blog.” I suddenly had all these content ideas, suddenly, I started to think about writing in a more personal way, I started thinking about her needs.  

You might already have readers and it might not be a hypothetical thing. It might not be about who you want to read your blog. It might be who is reading your blog. You need to dig into that by creating some surveys, by maybe emailing those readers, and maybe even meeting some of your readers. The more you know about who is reading or who you want to read, the better position you’re going to be in to make a difference in their lives and to create something that has an impact upon them.

Lesson number two is to really spend time every day, every week, every month, put time aside to understand your reader and do anything you can to get inside their heads. One of the best ways you can do this today is live streaming, do Periscopes, Facebook Live updates, or use a tool like Anchor, which enables you to speak in a very personal way to your readers, but also hear their voice and to see their face if you use a tool like Blab. Anything that puts you into that conversation with your readers is a very powerful thing. It helps you understand who’s reading your blog. That was lesson number two.

Lesson number three is one that sounds a bit old-fashioned, but is very powerful. That is the email is a very powerful thing. One of the best things I ever did was start a newsletter for Digital Photography School, and then in more recent times, ProBlogger. When I started Digital Photography School back in 2007 (almost 9 years ago now), the way that bloggers were trying to get their readers to subscribe was through their RSS feeds

 All blogs have a feed. Back in 2007, everyone had these huge orange buttons on their blog. “Subscribe to my blog,” and it subscribed their readers to a feed which they would then use a tool like Google Reader, Bloglines, or some other RSS reader. That was what was going to kill email as a way of subscribing. But I realized in 2007, that my people like my dad, my wife, my friends, had no idea what an RSS was, and they were unlikely to ever subscribe to an RSS feed knowingly.

I decided to start a very simple email newsletter, to enable my readers who did understand email to get a weekly newsletter from us. This is the best thing I ever did. I remember looking at the stats of who was subscribing via RSS and who was subscribing via email back in 2010.

I realized that over 80% of my subscribers were subscribing via email and less than 20% was subscribing via RSS. I would say that number has gone even narrower on RSS. I don’t really know too many people who use it anymore. I’m sure some of my listeners do. But we’re bloggers. We’re a little bit more technological perhaps than the normal person out there.

Email for me, was really important. I discovered very quickly that it was a great way of driving traffic. It was a great way of driving sales of my products. It was a great way of building community when you’re communicating with your subscribers on a weekly basis through a medium like email. They begin to feel like they know you, and that helps to build your brand.

Every Thursday night, when I send out the newsletter for the Digital Photography School—one of my team does it now—I know that brings us a spike in traffic, but it also brings a spike in sales of our ebooks as well.

Email is really important. If you haven’t set up an email list, can I just suggest that you pause this podcast right now and go away and do and then come back because it’s so important. There are some previous podcasts on this topic as well. One of the best ways that I ever built my email list (and this may turn some of you off a little bit) was to start using pop-ups. Pop-ups subscribing opt-in forms.

Back in the day, most bloggers who didn’t have an email list just had a little “Sign up to my email list” in their sidebar. That (for me) was converting at about 20 or so sign ups per day. It may be slightly more on a good day, but I remember the day when I summoned up the courage to put a pop-up on Digital Photography School.

Now, we’ve all seen them and most of us don’t really like them. They are interruptive, but you know what? They work. I was worried about putting it on Digital Photography School when I first did it. I thought I would get a whole heap of nasty emails, I thought people would stop reading my blog, and I didn’t really know how many people use it. But you know what? The day I put that pop-up on my blog, my subscribers went from 20 or 30 a day, up to between 300 and 400 confirmed subscribers every day. It went up tenfold.

You might think that the complaints that I got went up tenfold as well, they didn’t. I didn’t get hardly any. One or two every six months, someone would email me and say, “I don’t like your pop-up.” Now, I set my pop-ups so that they only ever show once ever. If you come to the site, you shouldn’t ever see the pop up again. Mine aren’t as aggressive as some are. I go to some blogs and every time I load a new page there is a new pop-up there. To me, that is (perhaps) a little bit too intrusive, but it would work as well, and I understand why people do it. You want to think about experimenting with that.

I think it was episode 64, we talked about different types of serving that form. This is something we’ve been using on ProBlogger and Digital Photography School in the last 12 months, and that is the welcome match. It’s like a massive pop-up, it covers the whole screen. It’s even more aggressive in some ways, but I think they are a little bit more elegant as well.  They slide in, you can put a beautiful picture, you can have a nice big call to action. To me, there are a little bit gentler even though they take up the whole page. If you want to listen to our results with those, they even increased their subscriber numbers even further than a pop-up. You can go back and listen to episode 64 on that.

My point three of this talk is that email is a very powerful thing, and while we’re talking about Facebook all the time, we’re talking about Twitter and all these different social networks (which certainly weren’t around back when I started blogging), they are important as a way to hook people in. Even those social networks don’t give you complete access to people who want to follow you. Most of us, as bloggers know, people don’t see all of our messages on our Facebook pages. The same thing is beginning to happen on Twitter now. We’re also seeing it in the last week or so. Instagram have announced that there’s an algorithm now that’s going to determine whether people see our images and our videos on Instagram. It’s frustrating.

Not everyone opens every email we send, but it is your reader who makes that decision. The only real change that’s happened in the last few years with email is really Google (through Gmail) is now giving people their little folders, promotional, or updates. That does decrease the effectiveness of email in some ways, but I haven’t seen it massively decrease the effectiveness. I still think today that email is the number one way that most of us should be getting subscribers to our blog.

Lesson number three was email is so powerful. Lesson number four is that there are so many ways to make money from blogging. When I started out, I said before, I started out by putting some AdSense ads on my blog. That was the first way I started to make a few dollars.

I began to experiment with some Amazon affiliate promotions. I was already promoting books, so I was earning 8% commission on a book. It wasn’t really a massive amount of income. Simply by adding a second income stream, that diversified my income and it increased my income. Many bloggers soon start out, and they look around at all the blogs in the nation, they might see everyone monetizing with sponsored posts. But I want to encourage you to open your eyes to the fact that there are probably hundreds of different ways that you can monetize your blog.

If you go and listen to episode 37 and check out the show notes there, you’ll see a money map that I created, that has 30 or 40 different ways of monetizing a blog listed. You can do it through a variety of different types of advertising, affiliate marketing, continuity programs, having a membership area, selling all kinds of virtual products like ebooks, courses, or reports. You can sell your services as a coach, as a speaker. You could write a book. There’s a whole heap of different ways in monetizing your blog. Go and check out episode 37 for a variety of different ways that you can do that.

Just be aware that there’s not just one available to you. There’s a whole heap of different options. At different stages of your blog, you may actually find that some of these different options work better than other times. As you get a bigger readership, it opens up different avenues to make money from your blog. Really, it varies from niche to niche as well, and the style of blog that you have.

For me, I have a teaching blog. Digital Photography School teaches people how-to, same with ProBlogger, really. Using advertising like AdSense doesn’t really convert as well as selling a teaching product like an ebook or a course. Depending on the style of the blog that you have, you want to experiment with different styles of monetization.

There’s always new ways of monetizing that are popping up as well. In the last year or two, we have started to sell things like printables on Digital Photography School. We started to sell software presets for Adobe Lightroom. These are things I would not ever even imagined selling off my blog in the early days.

Lesson number four is there’s a whole heap of different ways to monetize your blog. Lesson number five is also about monetization. That is to create something to sell. I’ve already mentioned numerous times, I’d started off predominantly making my money in blogging through advertising, running ad networks like AdSense. Another one is called Chitika, which I used in the early days. I experimented with another one that Yahoo! used to run. Ad networks and then selling ads directly to advertisers. These worked really well for me. But I always had this dream that I wanted to sell ebooks on my blog. I just explained why because I have a teaching blog. I wanted to teach people, and I thought I could probably monetize for that.

I put off creating that ebook for a long, long time. I may tell you that story a little bit later on in this podcast. Eventually I did and I decided to create my first ebook and it was called The Essential Guide to Portrait Photography.

Essentially, it was me taking some of the best articles that are written and published on the topic of portraiture and putting them into an ebook, a PDF. I was really clear to my readers that all this content, most of these content was already available on the blog for free. I did add in a little bit of original content by doing some interviews with portrait photographers.

I wasn’t sure whether that was going to sell or not, but I put it out there, I put the work in, and I created this ebook. We sold it on the first day. At $15 a pop, we sold 1100 ebooks. Over $15,000 in a day. That launch of that ebook lasted about 10 days. It dipped off a bit, and the last day I sent out another email saying, “Hey, The introductory offer’s discount is ending today.” On the last day we sold another 1200 or so ebooks. Over the week we sold 4000 copies of this ebook.

It illustrated to me that it’s a very powerful thing to have something of your own to sell, particularly if you’ve got a loyal audience. The reason that ebook sold well is that I had already worked for a couple of years on really building trust with my audience, providing value to my audience, and showing them that I cared about them, and building community with my audience.

When you build a blog and you do that, you are useful to people, you change their lives in some way, and then you offer them something to buy of yours, not just something you’re recommending on someone else that you’re getting a commission on, but something of yours, that’s a very powerful thing. Some of your audience will buy whatever you sell just simply to say thank you. I found that quite amazing. I got emails from people saying, “I know this is all on the blog already, but I just wanted to say thank you because my photography has improved.”

Other people ordered because it was more useful to them to have it all in one spot. It was logically arranged for them. Even though they had read all those articles, they wanted to dig back into them again and again. And then new readers came to the blog, and they couldn’t be bothered surfing around the whole blog finding all these scattered articles. They just wanted them all under one place. For whatever reason, it was a very powerful thing.

The other thing I realized about having something to sell is that it brought a bit of legitimacy to the side as well. To be able to say, “We’re not just a blog, we have published this thing. We’ve created this thing for you.” And people paid attention to that. I noticed the same thing happened when I became a book author as well. Wiley approached us to write the ProBlogger book. That brought some legitimacy, some credibility to the site as well. Creating a product to sell has a whole heap of different tangible benefits.

Back in 2009, before I created that book, I think my income was about 60% from advertising, it may have been even 70%, and about 30% from affiliate commissions. In February 2011, after I launched that first ebook, I doubled my income essentially that month because my advertising revenue didn’t go away. I just had this extra income from this product. It’s an easier way to grow your income as well.

For those of you who have been listening to ProBlogger and seeing Digital Photography School, you know that we didn’t just stop at one ebook. I created a whole series of them. I think we’ve published something like 35 ebooks now and a number of courses. As I’ve mentioned before, we’ve sold presets for Lightroom, printables, and a variety of other products as well. Advertising is a small part of our revenue. Even though it didn’t go away, that revenue is still about the same of what it used to be, but we’ve added these other streams in as well.

If you want to learn a little bit more about creating products, I encourage you to go back and listen to episode 67. That was part of a series I did called Today, Not Someday. It was a series of 10 things that you can do today that will pay off for the long-term of your blog.

Go back and listen to episode 66, that was the start of that Today, Not Someday series. It gives you 10 really practical things to do today that would pay off forever. Episode 67 is where I talk about creating a product for your blog. Very powerful lesson. It’s something that completely changed by business and my whole approach to blogging.

Lesson number six is a bit different. I’m not going to talk about monetization here. I want to talk about content. Those of you who have heard me speak have probably heard me talk about this particular one. I’m very big on creating content that informs, inspires, and interacts.

If you look at most of the content on my blogs, I fit into the information category. We teach people. We produce a lot of tutorials, how-to articles. This is our bread and butter. Probably 90% of the content that I publish is how-to. It’s good. It lends itself to selling information products and how-to content as a product, whether it be an ebook or a course, and also to recommend other people’s products as an affiliate.

It’s a good model to have, but you know what? I’ve noticed that people read my how-to content a whole heap more if I also sprinkled in some inspirational content. Most of my articles, I’m just looking at one now on Digital Photography School, it’s Eight Tips for Long Exposure Photography. It’s about how to use this technique, a long shutter speed and take and a cool photo using this technique.

But do you know what? That article (and I remember publishing that article) did pretty well. The next week I published a collection of images that used that technique. I think we called it Long-Exposure Photography: 15 Stunning Examples. When I published that inspirational piece of content that shows the results that you could achieve if you use this informational tutorial, the numbers of people who read that first information post exponentially increased.

I did this by accident the first time. I was like, “I’ve written this tutorial. What can I post today? Let’s just post some cool images that used that sort of technique.” I linked back to that first article and do you know what? People went and read that article like crazy that day. It illustrated the power for me of inspiration. Your inspirational content has the power to drive people to your informational content.

Then what we started to do is something different. This is probably about a year later. I’d already discovered the power of information and inspiration together. I then started at the end of the week, once we’ve done a tutorial, and then an image collection. At the end of the week, I started to challenge my readers to do something with that information. It became an interactional piece of content. We would issue our readers a challenge. The challenge might be long-exposure photography. Go away, read that article, have a look at the inspirational images, practice it, and come back and show us your best photo using the technique that you’ve learned, having been inspired by those photos.

What I found is that by doing these three pieces of content every week and linking them together, it increased page views which was nice, helped with stats. But you know what it really did? It actually made our readers learn something because I had information, I had inspiration to take on that information, and then they had the opportunity to do something. We all know that we learn so much more not just when we’re taught but when we do.

Experiment with those types of content. You will also find that by doing those three different types of content, you will hit different personality types. Some people don’t like a whole heap of information. They just want to be inspired and that’s okay. Some people are more social. They like to interact around the topic. Experiment with information, inspiration, interaction. That’s lesson number six.

Lesson number seven is a little bit more entrepreneurial and it sounds a little bit more new-age in some ways. It is to look for sparks. Look for sparks. What I realized is that most of the big things that I’ve done over the last 13 years actually started as tiny little things. Little glimmering sparks that made me curious or that gave me energy.

When I told you that story earlier about how I started blogging, I got an email with four words in it that made me curious. That was a spark, and because I paid attention to that spark, followed my curiosity, and then acted upon it, I experimented with something, it changed my life. It literally changed the direction of my life. Pay attention to those little things that give you energy, those little things that keep you awake at night. You never know, those little things just might become your next big thing.

I’ve said this in a number of talks and I’m going to link in the show notes today to a talk I gave at the World Domination Summit. It’s quite a long talk. It almost goes for an hour and I talk in more detail about this idea of paying attention to sparks of energy. One of the things that I mentioned in that talk is that at the end of every day, I ask myself as part of our meditation (usually as I fall asleep), “What gave me energy today?” I make note of those things that gave me energy.

Then I ask myself a second question, “What gave those around me energy today?” Particularly, things that were in reaction to something that I had done. Did I write a post? Did I tweet? Did I put out an Instagram image? Did I release a podcast? It gave energy back. Did people resonate with those things? Pay attention to those sparks.

I’ve told the story many times of when I just created 31 Days to Build a Better Blog. The first time I did that, it really started as a very impulsive thing. I was lying awake in bed at night, 2:00 AM, and I just had this idea to do a month-long series of posts on ProBlogger. I didn’t know what to call it. I didn’t know what the 31 posts would be but the idea was that every day, I’d give people a little bit of teaching, then an activity to go away and do, and then people would come back and share what they learned and what they’d done during the day.

This idea gave me a bit of energy. I got a bit excited. I couldn’t sleep. I got up, out of bed at 2:00 AM and I wrote this post saying, “Tomorrow, I’m starting this thing. It’s called…” and I came up with the name on the spot, “31 Days to Build a Better Blog. If you’re interested, leave a comment.” Then I went to bed. I forgot about it. I slept easy. Woke up the next morning and it was a vague memory in my mind. Did I really do that? Did I really publish that? Went and checked out the post and there were more comments on that post than I would normally get in a week. This idea that gave me energy, made me excited, I put it out there and it gave other people energy. It made them excited.

I had to quickly work out what day 1 of this 31-day series was going to be because I promised I was going to start it the next day. That began this series of posts that became the biggest month of traffic on the blog to that point. When I did it again two years later, again it was the biggest month of traffic. Then two years later, I did it again and then it turned into an ebook. Those of you who have been listening to this podcast since the beginning know that I launched this podcast with 31 episodes, which were basically a rewrite and an update of 31 Days to Build a Better Blog. If you’re new to the podcast, go back to episode 1, work yourself through those 31 episodes.

That all started because I paid attention to something that gave me energy, something that gave me a bit of excitement, that made me curious and I put out there. I experimented with it. I allowed it to get some oxygen and I watched to see what people would do, how people would react to it. This is a pattern that you need to build into your life whether you’re a blogger or an entrepreneur in some other way.

Whether you’re a podcaster, whether you have an online store, pay attention to what gives you energy. Experiment and watch what gives other people energy. Pay attention to those things because they’re the golden things. They are things that you will be able to sustain because they excite you. But they’re also things that have the potential to be profitable because they excite other people as well.

Lesson number eight. I took longer on that one than I was going to, but I do go into it in more depth in that World Domination Summit Talk. The other thing about that talk is you will see me dressed in tights during it, in a superman costume so you want to watch right to the end of that one. That hopefully makes you a little bit curious. Don’t look too close at it though.

Lesson number eight is to be active. Just to say really quickly, one of my mantras, one of the things that I’ve had printed out next to my computer for many years is a question. The question is, “What action will I take today that will grow my blog?” What action are you going to take today that will grow your blog? I get distracted so easily. I find that it’s so easy to get to the end of the day and just think, “What did I do today and did it take me towards my goals?”

It’s very easy to be passive and reactive. It’s so easy to become reactive. First thing we often do in the morning is look at our emails, and then we answer our emails. That’s just reactive stuff. There’s nothing wrong with being reactive but the best entrepreneurs are creators. They’re initiators. They build stuff. They don’t just spend their life reacting. They take action.

Constantly assess how you’re using your time. Are you being reactive or are you being constructive? Be someone who is taking action as much as possible. One of the best things I ever did when I created that first ebook, Essential Guide to Portrait Photography, I had this dream of creating that ebook but I didn’t know how to get it done because my life was too full. I didn’t have time to create, to construct, to build that project.

So I decided the only way I was going to get it done is to take 15 minutes every day and to build it 15 minutes at a time. I got up early every morning and I wrote that ebook. I created it. I spent my time initially planning it, then I spent my time writing and then collating it. Then I spent my time finding a designer for it, researching how to get it up online, and which shopping cart to use. Then I spent my 15 minutes a day doing the sales copy for it, and researching how other people did their sales pages. Then I spent my 15 minutes a day getting the email ready, and getting all the technical parts of it ready. Then I put it out there.

It was 15 minutes a day over 3 or 4 months. It took a long time, but 15 minutes a day of action. I told you what happened before. We sold 4000–5000 copies of that thing in the first 9 days. During those nine days as I watched those sales roll in, the thing that kept going through my mind was, “Why didn’t I do this earlier?” Be an action taker.

Lesson number nine is simply to let your worlds collide a little. When I had previously gone through these 10 things, I used to say, “Do good.” I think that could be another way of saying it. One of the things I’ve realized over the last 13 or so years now doing this is that it’s okay to let your readers see what you are passionate about that’s beyond the niche that you’re writing about. For me, as I started blogging and as I started ProBlogger in 2004, I was really aware that I had to blog about blogging, yet I also had a whole heap of other passions in my life.

I used to keep those things separate. I used to think, “You know, yeah. I’m passionate about issues in developing countries and this world, I’m passionate about disability, and I’m passionate about giving people a voice who are marginalized and some of these types of things.” This is stuff that I’m passionate about in my own personal life. I don’t want to shove those things down people’s throats, but I used to think if I talk about those things in the context of ProBlogger, people are going to react against that. They didn’t come to ProBlogger to hear about those types of things, so I never mention them, at all.

A few years ago, I think it was in 2011, I was approached by a not-for-profit to go to Tanzania to witness some work that they were doing. It was an organization, it was called CBM, and they were doing a lot of work in Tanzania with people with disability. They’re working in a hospital there with people who ran a whole heap of different issues. There was a women’s maternal health issues and fistula. There were issues around cataracts and blindness. There were issues of kids born with clubbed feet and orthopedic issues.

This was the stuff that really excited me to go and look at this place, but the whole thing they wanted me to do was to write about it and to blog about it and to share what I saw. I was really nervous about doing that project. I didn’t really know how my readers on ProBlogger or Digital Photography School were going to react when I started talking about these sorts of issues. But you know what? My readers really responded really well. I didn’t get a complaint. I didn’t do heaps of posts about it, but I certainly shared what I was doing on my social media and I did write a few blog posts about it.

You know what? It was one of the best things that I ever did. One, because I was able to use the influence that I built to do something that really mattered and that made a difference (I hope), to be able to put the microphone in social media and blogging in front of these kids that I met in that hospital in Tanzania. It was a powerful thing, and it brought some attention to the good work that was being done there.

It actually made me more personal to my readers. I got a lot of my readers say, “I’d never seen that side of you before and I suddenly feel like I can relate to you a lot more.” I hesitated to talk about this one today in these 10 lessons, but I think it’s really important. There are ways to let your worlds collide a little bit, to talk about the other things that you’re passionate about.

You don’t want your blogging blog to become overrun with you writing about disability, for instance but I think it’s okay to allow your readers to see there’s this other side of you. It may simply be by talking about your family a little bit or by talking about where you’ve been on a holiday or vacation. Those types of things, they can be important, too, in personalizing what you do and showing you’re not just this robot who talks 100% about the topic of whatever it is that you write about but that you are a person, too. I think that can personalize your blog.

If you’re passionate about things that do matter and that are meaningful, that makes the world a better place. I guess I encourage you to let your worlds collide a little and use your influence not only for your benefit, not only for your readers’ benefit, but to make the world a better place in some way. If you can find a way to do that, I encourage you to do that, to explore that, to at least wrestle with it because you never know what you might find. It may actually become your thing. That intersection between your two worlds, that may become what makes you distinct and that may become your big thing, the way that you make a difference.

All right. I’ve talked for a long time here, and this is probably the longest podcast I’ve ever done in my 100, but I’m really passionate about all these 10 things. The last one is I think really important, too. This is lesson number 10. Aim to have a big impact upon the readers you already have.

I put this one in because just fresh in my mind is a couple of conversations with bloggers who seem so obsessed with finding new readers for their blog, that they almost seem blind to the fact that they already had some readers. I’ve seen this many times over the years that as bloggers, we often fall into the trap of always looking for the new traffic and always looking for the new reader. Most that’s important (and we talked a lot), there’s a whole category of podcasts that we talked about finding readers, tactics to do that.

I’m a really strong believer in not losing sight of the readers that you already have. The readers you already have can help you find new readers. They’re the ones who are much more likely to buy your products, to respond to your affiliate messages, to help you to monetize your blog. The readers you already have, have already been on the journey with you. They feel most connected to you. They trust you. They like you, hopefully. They know you. These are very powerful things.

Don’t lose sight of the fact that you already have readers. Don’t just chase after the new ones. Look after the ones that you already have. The reason I wanted to include this is one is that I am incredibly grateful for you listening to this podcast that I’ve done over the last 8–9 months and my first 100 episodes.

I have kept at this for 100 episodes now because of the emails that I get from you, the comments that I see from you, the tweets that you send me, and the fact that I know that on the other sides of the almost 900,000 downloads of my episodes so far, I know that there are people. There are people who (by the sounds of things) are benefiting from what I’m doing. I just want to acknowledge you and I want to thank you at this time for listening for this amount of time, for investing in this episode, listening to this episode, but also for many of you investing in, listening to 100 episodes and committing to listen to more.

I want to thank you and I want to commit to continuing to podcast going forward. I have no end date in mind. I have at least another 100 ideas of other episodes, but I really wanted you to know that I value you and look forward to continuing this journey together.

There are my 10 lessons. You know what? As I was putting this particular podcast together, I realized there’s probably another 10 things that I could talk about. So maybe, I’ll put that together as an episode at some point as well. I wanted to put this one out there partly just to thank you and share some of my story. I know this podcast at times can get a little technical, and we can talk very topical. I kind of wanted to take a step back and talk about some of the big picture stuff as well.

I’d love to hear some of the lessons you’ve learned. You can go to today’s show notes at problogger.com/podcast/100. Share the lessons you’ve learned. I’d also love to hear which of the 10 things I’ve talked about resonate most with you, which of them are things that are going to stimulate change for you. What have you learned in the first 100 episodes of the ProBlogger podcast? That’ll be the other thing I’m interested to hear. If you’ve got suggestions on what you like to hear in the next 100, you can leave those comments, too.

Lastly, I want to thank my team. I have an amazing team. Laney, Grove, and Stacy who work really hard on ProBlogger. There’s a whole team of others who work at Digital Photography School. I want to acknowledge Rose who was a big part of editing so many of the first 100 episodes. The more recent times, I want to acknowledge podcastmotor.com who have become the editors and producers of our podcast here at ProBlogger. They are an amazing service and you can check them out at podcastmotor.com.

Thanks, everyone for listening and I’ll chat with you in the coming days on episode 101.

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 value my listeners, and I look forward to continuing this journey together. Thank you for listening and, I hope you enjoyed my story.

I’d also like to thank my team on ProBlogger and Digital Photography School, and Rose who edited most of the last 100 ProBlogger podcast episodes, and our new podcast editors and producers, PodcastMotor.

I’d love to hear some of the lessons that you have learned and what lessons resonated most with you. Leave your comments or suggestions for the future 100 shows below.

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Today I am speaking with Tim Paige. Tim is the conversion educator for LeadPages. With LeadPages, you can publish an optimized landing page in five minutes. They also offer other great conversion tools like LeadBoxes, LeadDigits and LeadLinks.

Tim is the guy that educates everyone about how to use LeadPages and its products and how to create the best performing landing pages.

On this show, Tim shares time-tested strategies for better conversions with or without LeadPages. Including Reverse Value Bomb opt-ins to really increase your subscriber count. He also shares how to use “content upgrades” as an opt-in strategy.

Tim discusses the latest emerging trends for marketers, and gives his best tips on email segmentation. He also shares a special offer with ProBlogger listeners.

What exactly are landing pages and how do they fit in with blogging? What would be the advantage of LeadPages over just doing them in WordPress?

Can I use LeadPages to build up my list, while I’m in the process of the design and setup of my new site?

LeadPages is a great tool that we use on ProBlogger. I’ve mentioned it numerous times in previous podcasts. I’ve had Tim on my list of people that I wanted to interview for quite some time now. His role at LeadPages is conversion educator, which sounds a little unusual, but he is fantastic teaching people how to get better conversions on their website. I think this is something that us as bloggers need to learn a whole heap more about.

LeadPages do have an offer for you today which we would love you to checkout. It’s at leadpages.net/problogger. We’ll talk about that in the podcast. Whether you take that offer or not, there’s a  whole heap of value in today’s episode. 

Tim talks about his Reverse Value Bomb strategy for getting more opt-ins for your site as well as using a little strategy called content upgrades which is something that we’ve seen a number of bloggers using incredibly effectively to increase the number of opt-ins on their site. He also talks a whole heap about some of the emerging trends for online marketing that we really need to be paying attention to as bloggers.

Check out the following interviews. It goes for about 40 or so minutes and has a whole heap of great content. I will say right up front that we are an affiliate for this particular product. It is a product that I’ve been paying for some time now, and we’ve been using on ProBlogger and Digital Photography School. In fact, if you check out our show notes, you all have seen one of LeadPages products for quite some time now. There’s a little yellow button at the bottom of all of our show notes which is a LeadPages tool. You can find today’s show notes at problogger.com/podcast/99. 

Let’s get into today’s interview with Tim Paige. Good day, Tim Paige. Nice to talk to you.

Tim: Oh, man. Thanks for having me. I’m excited to be here.

Darren: Yeah. It’s been a long time coming. I’ve been wanting to have a chat with you and to talk about LeadPages, landing pages, for a while now. We do get a lot of questions about it from ProBlogger. It’s great to have you on. 

I was just looking at your bio. You’re the conversion educator. I never heard of that title before at the LeadPages. I wonder if you can just fill in the gaps with what in the world that is and also, how you got into that. Give us a little bit of a backstory in a couple of minutes if you can. I was getting into that point, in case anyone wants to be a conversion educator themselves.

Tim: No problem. It’s kind of a made-up title. That’s the fun part about it. What it means is that, my job is to take everything we’ve been learning as a company over the past few years and just share that information with other people so that they can apply those same things in their business. I speak at live events all over the place. I host our podcast, ConversionCast, which we ran about 150 episodes now (which is really cool), and I host our webinars. In fact, I’ve done, as of today, over 450 webinars in the last two years.

I got here in a really weird way. I was a professional touring musician for about seven years. I traveled all over the country, got signed to a record label, did all that stuff, but was living on $5 a day. Paying the bills, the rent, and all those things is tough to do on $5 a day. We would come home, everybody would go scramble to get a job at Dunkin Donuts, gas station, or whatever. I would always get sales jobs. I was really good at it. You could make a lot of money really quickly. When I left, I always had a job when I came back because if you’re good at selling, you can work anywhere. 

I really got deep into the sales psychology thing. One day, I felt like I was ready for a different way of life. I’ve had enough of constantly being out there spending 12 hours a day selling stuff. I stumbled upon Pat Flynn’s website, The Smart Passive Income, and I started to learn everything I could about online marketing. The beautiful thing is sales psychology and marketing psychology hold hands together. It’s the same thing just spread out widely. That led me to the path of podcasting, blogging, and all this stuff.

I was introduced to Clay by John Lee Dumas from Entrepreneurs on Fire. From there, it was just magic. I’ve been with them ever since.

Darren: It’s amazing how these things evolved, isn’t it? One thing does lead to another or end up in a very different place.

Tim: Yeah. A series of a few little, some would say, luck. I would say partial luck, a series of lucky steps and here we are.

Darren: Yeah. I’m a big believer in luck. That’s a whole other topic. We probably will get ourselves distracted if we go down that path, so that’s great. 

Whenever I ask my audience, when I’m interviewing someone, I do ask some of the audience on our Facebook page for questions that they want to throw at podcast guests. There were quite a few about LeadPages and landing pages. One of the things I picked up, I was a little bit surprised by it, having people actually want definitions and explanations on really basic stuff. That’s where I want to start today. 

I got this question from Warren. He said, “Landing pages get talked about a lot on blogging, podcasts, as though everyone already understands their purposes, and where they fit into the whole picture.” He says that he’s been spending a long time over the last couple of years getting his head around blogging, but once he explained where a landing page ends, if you want to talk about LeadPages as well, it fits into the blogging approach. Particularly, he says, “What can you do with a product like LeadPages that you can’t do on his own WordPress site?” I got the sense that he’s doing his own landing pages already (or a version of them) using a page on WordPress.

Tim: That’s a great question. Great series of questions. We’ll define what a landing page is but before I do that, one thing that’s important to understand is that in this age of access to everything online, we are just completely overloaded with choices, options, and information. Our brains just explode every time we go online. When people have all of these choices, it can be really difficult to make any decision, any choice at all.

You, as the blogger, as the reluctant marketer (that’s what we are), one of your primary functions is to take away that confusion, take away that over stimulus of options. A landing page is just a page designed to do that. It’s a page that is focused on getting the visitor to that page to do one particular thing.

When most people refer to a landing page, they’re talking about an opt-in page designed to get somebody to give you their email address. A landing page could be a sales page. It could be a subscribe-to-my-podcast page. 

The key thing to understand about a landing page is it is really designed to get somebody to do one thing. That’s really needed in this world of craziness. That said, it’s a great question. “Why wouldn’t you just create a page on your own?” You could absolutely do that. 

The difference where LeadPages come in, LeadPages is a software tool that has been built from the ground up based on billions of points of data about what gets people to give you their email address, what gets people to register for a webinar, what gets people to buy whatever it is that you’re selling. Everything in LeadPages is based on that. What it does for you is it is a whole compilation of tools, but the most well-known one is LeadPages itself which are landing pages, sales pages, et cetera, all built based on those points of conversion. You can go in there and in five minutes, have a landing page that has been tested across 40,000 customers, and proven to get incredible results. 

You don’t have to guess. You don’t have to go out there and throw up a landing page and hope it works. It’s just already been tested and proven for you. That’s the main reason why you would want to use that. Usually, LeadPages is supposed to make something yourself.

Darren: Yeah. That’s exactly our experience at ProBlogger and in Digital Photography School. We built our own landing pages for over 10 years using WordPress pages which, initially, I hacked together myself. I would get my developers to do it. I invested significant money into getting a team to build them specifically for us. Using a tool like LeadPages is just so much quicker. It’s not just exactly taking the template and just using it out of the box, but to adapt to it, change the colors, and that type of thing so quickly is a very powerful thing.

You mentioned a couple of them already. Talk us through some of the different types of pages a blogger might use. You’ve got an opt-in landing page but what are some of the other ones you see bloggers are particularly using?

Tim: Two that I recommend to every blogger, that opt-in landing page but also the webinar registration page. I know that a lot of folks who just love to write can’t stand being behind the microphone. I totally get that. I’ve got many friends that feel that way. But a webinar is such an incredible way to connect within an audience that’s only used to seeing what you’re doing in text format. It’s a way to really show your personality like who you are, shine, and of course, we found that they convert really well. That’s one thing I would recommend.

Another page that I would encourage bloggers to have and focus on is your actual home page. I think a lot of people think that in order to be a blogger and have a successful blog, your homepage needs to display your five most recent posts. Really, the best marketers in the world have figured out that every page on your website is a landing page. That first connection people get with you, if the first thing they experienced is you say, “Hey, here is something that will help you. Some guide, a checklist, a worksheet, designed to help you. If you’re looking to accomplish this goal, you should get this guide. Just send in your email address and we’ll send it to you. If you’re not interested in that, just click here and you could check out the latest blog post.”

That has proven to be really, really effective for a lot of bloggers in the world both specifically focusing on blogging, and in the world of blogging as a part of an overall business marketing strategy.

Darren: I’m totally on board with all of that. Even as you’re talking, I’m looking through some of the templates that you do have in there. You have thank you pages, launch templates, sales templates, webinars ones, upsell ones. There’s a whole variety of things there. It’s amazing how many different types now we’re starting to see. Really creative stuff from bloggers as well.

The other thing I loved about the LeadPages products is you’ve got the different tools as well. LeadPages is just one of those things that you’ve got. Can you run us through LeadBoxes, LeadLinks, and LeadDigits as well? I think there are applications there for bloggers, too.

Tim: Absolutely. LeadBoxes is my favorite thing that LeadPages has ever made. We’ve got a lot of tools but I think LeadBoxes is the fastest way, especially for a blogger, who can grow his or her email list. LeadBoxes are a pop-up opt-in form that’s triggered when somebody clicks on a link, a button, or an image. I know a lot of people will say, “I’ve heard that in traditional marketing wisdom, the more steps you give somebody, the less likely they are to actually give you their email address.” 

A lot of times in history, that’s proven to be true, but we tested this particular concept. The idea of not having an opt-in form visible on the page until somebody clicks something and asks for it. We tested that across 35,000 LeadPages customers, and saw an average conversion rate increase of 32%. So, 32% more people give somebody their email address when they didn’t have an opt-in form visible on the page which is pretty amazing. 

That’s what LeadBoxes was. Was it okay if I shared a little tactic that I would recommend every blogger to start doing? I get really excited about this because everybody I talked to that’s like, “Oh, what is that?” Then they start doing it. I get an email not two weeks later, they’re like, “My list has grown.” It’s a concept called a content upgrade. More and more people know about this. Some people called it different things; I’ve heard many different names for it.

The content upgrade, what it is, every time you publish a blog post, you also include a LeadBox. If you’re not using LeadPages, you could just use a regular opt-in form. You have an opt-in form that gives away something that you made specifically for that blog post. A great example, I’m a new homeowner. About a year ago, we bought our first house. Now I want to know how to do everything—how do I build this? How do I make that? 

I was reading a post about how to build a wooden picnic table. It’s a really interesting post and broke everything down. At the bottom of the post, it said, “Okay, ready to build your picnic table? Enter your email address below and you can download a PDF checklist of all the materials you would need to build that picnic table. That way you can just print it out and take it with you to the hardware store. You won’t forget any of the stuff you needed.” That is so brilliant because if you’re reading that post, you are clearly going to want that thing. You’re reading that post, it’s relevant, it’s specific to that topic of the blog post.

The beautiful thing is, the highest converting content upgrades that we ever seen are checklists. It takes all of 30 minutes to make a really nicely designed checklist just even using Word, Pages, or whatever app you’re using. It takes nothing. You have this really effective giveaway and in exchange, people give you their email address. That is the number one thing that grows our list at LeadPages.

Darren: This is something we’re actually preparing some content for ProBlogger on. I can’t emphasize enough how well it works. One of the first people I saw was Amy Porterfield. She does it with every podcast. I was interviewed by her. She actually came to me and said, “Can I use three of your blog posts, put them into a PDF, and use that as the opt-in for that particular post?” Every podcast she does, she doesn’t even need to create that content. I created it for her. I just thought that it brought a lot of life to me as well-being on her podcast. Really think about what extra thing can you add, give away as part of an opt-in. It works brilliantly. 

This is a big shift that’s happening in the blogosphere at the moment. People are moving away from the site-wide opt-ins to not just category-specific opt-ins which is a better thing but post-specific opt-ins. Great tip there, Tim. Really love that.

Tim: Just to toss that other thing out there. For those of you out there who feel like you don’t have any time to create that kind of thing, you already spend a lot of time in your blog post, and in all the other things that you’re doing, I totally get that. I’ll give you something that is not quite as effective as something new and specific in custom. If you still want to implement the content upgrade tactic, what you can do is take the same text that’s already in the blog post that they’re reading, put it into a PDF, and offer it to download.

There’s this weird psychology where people, when they download something, they feel like it has a higher value. People will want to download that. If you need a way to position it, right up at the top of the post, say, “Short on time but still want to read this post? Enter your email address and we’ll send you a copy of it so you can read it when you’ve got a few minutes.”

Darren: Yeah. It’s a tactic I’ve seen in […] from […]. If you look at his blog, every post on his blog has the option to get a PDF version, and he sells that as you can print it. It becomes a printable version of his post that is behind the opt-in. It’s a very simple thing and just so easy to do. Like you said, it probably won’t convert quite as highly as something else. They haven’t yet got but it’s an easy way to do it. It would be hard to create that PDF. 

You’ve talked about LeadBoxes. We actually use the LeadBox on the ProBlogger show notes. If you check out problogger.com/podcast/99 (which is today’s show notes), you’ll see right at the bottom of the show notes, a little yellow button. I need to redesign it. It’s a little bit ugly at the moment. It is a LeadPages LeadBox. It converts higher than any other opt-in we got on that site.

You also got LeadLinks?

Tim: Yeah. LeadLinks is a tool that (I think) a lot of people had a hard time understanding which is okay. It’s a tool that allows you to insert a link in an email where when somebody on your email list clicks on that link, they are automatically added to another list or registered for a webinar. There are three main reasons why people use this. You can use it for a lot of things, but the main things that people use them for, one is segmentation. If you want to get people into different groups or buckets in your audience based on who they are, what they’re interested in, or demographics, you can use LeadLinks and just say something like, “Click on the link below that speaks to you. You are a . You are a .” They’ll click that link, and they’re automatically added to that other list. 

One of my favorites is for webinars, specifically. You’ve already got these people on your list but now you want them to join your webinar. You can say, “Here are the details. If you want to join me and reserve your spot, just click the link below, and you’ll automatically have your spot held.” They click the link and they registered.

If you’re looking for a way to use that to quickly grow your list, if you have any partners that you work with whether they’re affiliate partners or just friends that help you promote, and you help them promote, you can give somebody else your LeadLink. If they email their audience with your LeadLink, anybody from their audience who clicks on that link will be automatically added to your list. That’s the power of LeadLinks.

We’ve got a lot of things coming out. The other one that’s really worth talking about, too, is LeadDigits. It’s our newest tool. It’s a tool that allows you to collect opt-ins via text message. There’s a lot of uses for it but my favorites are if you do any public speaking at all, it’s tough to get people on your email lists from the stage. But, if you say something along the lines of, “Hey, I’d like to give you my slide deck so you don’t have to frantically scribble notes. Just text Tim’s slides to the phone number 33444,” or whatever the number is.

When they send that text, they get a response that says, “Okay. What email address should we send the slides to?” They text back with their email address and now they’re added to your list. That’s great for podcasts. We do it on our podcast ConversionCast. We invite people to our webinar using LeadDigits. It’s great for YouTube videos. It’s really great if you do banners or billboards or business cards. It’s just another way to be able to reach out to people in a place that is typically, even if you’re using mobile responsive websites and landing pages, the mobile device is still the best thing that people are used to doing on a phone is texting. It should be calling but it’s texting. So, make it easy, let them do what they’re used to doing on the mobile device, and have them text to opt-in.

Darren: For sure. I think, particularly as a podcast, people are often driving. They’re often doing other things. “I can’t go to a link. I can’t type in the details.” But if you can get them to text which they probably shouldn’t be doing either, it’s so much easier to get someone to text than to go on, and jump through 10 hoops.

Karen actually asked a great question particularly for those that are starting out. She says, “I’m setting up a new website. The design and content are going to take me some time to put together. Can I use LeadPages in the interim to build up my list?” I think that’s a great use for it. What do you think?

Tim: That’s a fantastic, fantastic, question. The answer is yes, absolutely. Of course, I’m going to say you should absolutely use LeadPages for it. Even if you’re not, if you’re not using LeadPages for whatever reason, I would encourage you the first thing you should do in business—the thing I wished I did when I first started my first business—is to grow your list. Start by growing your list.

The best way to do that is to have a simple landing page that has some kind of giveaway that speaks to the target audience that you’re going to have. You have an idea of what you’re going to blog about. You have an idea of your topic. Who’s somebody that’s going to read your blog? What’s the pain point or frustration or problem that they have? I recommend that first lead magnet—the thing you give away to get them to give you their email address. I recommend that the first one be a simple list of tools. Maybe one page that lists some tools and resources that you use to accomplish whatever it is that you’re going to talk about in your blog. That can be books, apps, websites, resources. Anything that helps them quickly accomplish a goal.

Yes, I would definitely encourage you to do that. You can get your domain, whatever domain you want, and link that to a LeadPages landing page. Just direct them there. Just to explain the thinking as to why you would want to do that because I’ve had many people say to me, “Wait a minute, why would I want to do that? Why would I want to have a landing page up before I even have a blog?” 

Think about it this way, if you’re going to open a local pizza shop, and you were given two options. The options were if you go open your doors, you can have crickets. Just open the door and there’s nobody there. You’ve got to go out and find your customers. Or you can open your doors to a line around the block of people ready to get your pizza. Obviously you would pick the second option. You want that line around the block.

When it comes to a blog or an online business, it’s harder to conceptualize that line around the block but growing an email list before you ever launch that, that’s your line around the block.

Darren: Yeah, that’s just a great strategy. The other thing you can do in a similar vein is if you’re developing a product and you haven’t yet got that product ready. Why not set up a LeadPage for that particular product? You may have an ebook coming. Set up a page, give a little bit of way like the first chapter, checklist, or something like that so that when you’re ready to launch that product, you got people who have specifically put their hands up and said, “I’m interested in this particular topic.” 

I’ve actually seen one blogger. I can’t remember who it was. She said, “I’ve had three LeadPages for three different products and then developed the one that got the most sign-ups.” She actually used it as part of her research for which product to create.

Tim: Yeah. I was just going to recommend that. That’s the other thing. If right now, the thing that you’re creating is a blog, and you don’t know what your product is going to be, a great way to do it is just to talk to your audience. You’ll hear many people tell you, “Yeah.” It doesn’t count until people vote with their wallets. I agree. You shouldn’t invest a ton of time and money until somebody has actually opened their wallets and said, “I’m ready to pay for it.” That being said, you’ve got to start somewhere. What a great place to start by reaching out and saying to a few people who have subscribed, “Hey, what’s the biggest thing you’re struggling with right now?”

If you could wave a magic wand and make something happen, what would that thing be that could help you with that? If it was a tool or a training or a coaching thing, what would you want to get out of that? Now, suddenly, people are telling you. It’s a starting point.

Darren: Yeah. There are so many ways that you can use this stuff. 

I’d like to shift our attention just to lead generation a little bit more. This is just one of the things that you can do with the landing page. I’m wondering if you’ve seen any best practices. Anything new that people are using (whether it’s using LeadPages or not) for growing your email subscribers. I know you interview a lot of marketers in your podcast. What’s the latest thing that people are doing?

Tim: I have to say the biggest thing right now that I’ve been hearing from a lot of people in terms of actual list building is something that scares a lot of people, but I’m going to bring it up because I think it’s important. It’s something that we refer to as a Value Bomb landing page. We actually call it a Value Bomb Reverse landing page. The idea behind this being that you create something of massive value. I’m talking tons of content. The  thing that actually does take a long time to create. People will tell you to go out and create something quickly that’s short and easy. You hear me say that all the time. I definitely recommend it.

Once you’ve got that and you’ve got those content upgrades growing, you’ve got that landing page that’s giving away a simple one page PDF, then you can focus on something that’s your big lead generator. The big thing that you create once you put a bunch of time into it, you put it out there in the universe, and it’s constantly getting you a slew of leads.

If you need an example of this, Michael Stelzner published his every year at Social Media Examiner this report. It’s like the year-end social media report. He does a ton of research. It’s this big, huge, massive thing. He gets a ridiculous amount of leads from doing this. Yes, it takes a lot of time, but he has quite a successful blog, and part of it is because he put in that time and effort to do that.

We do the same thing. We actually have three of them. I’ll tell you how we do it, he does it a little bit differently. Ours is a little bit different but this is something I’m seeing more and more people do. What you do is if you want to do this in written format, that’s fine. You can create a big report and put a couple of pages of the report up for free. If they want to get the whole thing they opt-in for it. That’s a great way to go. The most effective way I’ve ever seen is if you can bring yourself to do a video. I say it like that because I can’t stand doing a video, I’m an audio guy, I’m also a voice actor. I love being in the booth and I’d rather not have a camera but I totally understand that we’ve tested this over and over and over and the video’s important. 

What we encourage you to do is to create two to three hours worth of videos. Sounds crazy but trust me. You can break them up to 10 or 15 videos. What you do is put all those videos up on one landing page for free. Right there, people can go to the landing page, and they can watch the videos. You can upload them to YouTube or whatever and put each video all on the landing page. 

Take all those same videos, get the audio ripped from those videos, get all the videos transcribed. Create a couple of checklists for infographics or something that can go along with the videos and zipped all of that—all those videos, all that stuff, into one file, and make it available for downloads. But in order to download all that stuff, people have to opt-in. They’ve got to give you their email address. 

People say, “Why would you opt-in for that? You can just go back to the page and see the videos.” We’re talking hours worth of content. It’s very rare for somebody to go to the page and go, “I’ve got three hours to kill.” That doesn’t ever happen for me. You get there and you see all that content. It looks like a ton of value. Maybe you watch a few minutes of the first video then you’re like, “I’m going to download this.” Again, it speaks to that power of possession we want to have something on our hard drive. It feels like something that has more value. That one tactic alone has generated over 25,000 new emails subscribers for us in six months.

Darren: Wow, that’s fantastic. This is a trend I’m noticing more and more. You mentioned it before not actually having the form on the page. You wait until people are ready to give you their email by providing value first. I like the idea you’ve just gone through because everything is there. They don’t have to jump through a hoop to get their content to start with. You create some value. You show people what you can do. You put it all out there. 

They’re driven to want to give you their email, because they want more from you. You proved yourself first. I’ve actually seen this more and more in sales pages as well. People not having a call to action above their fold, which traditionally, you would’ve never done that, but they wait until they’ve proved their value by the top of the sales page actually giving some value, engaging in some ways. I really loved that approach.

Tim: It’s great because with a traditional landing page, that page only benefits both the person visiting the page, and you as the person who put that landing page out there. It only benefits you if they give you their email address. If they didn’t give you their email address, they just went to a landing page, and left. Whereas the Value Bomb Reverse landing page that I was talking about, that gives value either way. If they’ve opt-in, you’ve got them on your list, and they’ve got your whole course and everything. If they don’t, you’re still giving them a bunch of value. They see that you’re willing to give regardless. They see all that value, they learn, they trust you more.

On top of that, there are a lot of other non-email list building benefits. In terms of ranking in the search engines, Google absolutely loves video. If you have a page with 15 videos and you’ve got enough keywords in there—there’s lots of text in there which will most likely give you the keywords that you want, that is a landing page that can rank. This is unheard-of. Your typical landing page will not rank in Google, but this page that is so valuable is likely to rank. Also, it’s very shareable. This is a whole free course. 

The stuff that people charge you $1000 or $2000 for, you’re giving it away. That’s very shareable. People are very likely to share that on social media. We know that because about half of the people that opt-in on our Value Bomb Reverse squeeze pages came as a result of somebody sharing the Value Bomb Reverse squeeze page with them. It’s really amazing.

Darren: Yeah. One Of the things we’re tying on ProBlogger—it should be live by the time this podcast comes out—is trying to create value that keeps on giving. I think a lot of the opt-ins I’ve seen have the most success. Don’t just give someone something straight away that has a cycle to them. The one that we’re—I think I’m allowed to talk about it—giving away to our readers over the coming six months is we’re going to give you six months worth of ideas for blog posts. We’re going to send you an email every month. That gives you another 30 ideas. 

Actually, not only giving value away today. They’ll get one immediately, but they’ll get one in another month which is a reason to keep subscribed. I think a lot of people give away an ebook.  These people just unsubscribe from the list because they don’t want anything else that’s coming. So, building that anticipation. I’m almost wondering with the Value Bomb approach, if you build a part two coming next month or there’s part three coming the month after, where building that anticipation may actually explode that even to a further level?

Tim: Yeah. It could be an interesting thing to try. What we’ve done is after that, we know that if they’re downloading that whole program, that whole course, it’s a little bit of a commitment. They’re committing to even though we know we downloaded lots of stuff and never watched it. It’s a commitment at least at some level for them to commit to learning from you and saying, “Hey, this is something that I want help with.” 

What we do is the first email that they get after we deliver that free file invites them to a webinar. We can take them to that next step and say, “Come on with us. Get to know us a little bit. Spend some time with me because I’m the one that’s on the webinar.” That’s one way. Then they automatically, every three days after that, get a follow-up course. We’ve got three of them right now. They get a follow-up course that comes every three days that is related to the topic of that thing.

Even if they don’t ever watch the thing they downloaded, they’re getting more free stuff that is specific to what they’re interested in. That keeps them engaged, keeps them going. We found that by about email number four, most of the people that will buy, will buy by email number four.

Darren: Let’s flip it around a bit. What are some of the most common mistakes you see bloggers or other marketers are making, particularly with their email opt-in landing pages? 

Tim: One thing is not really having an offer at all. It’s nice enough to say, “Subscribe for updates.” But if you think about your own email inbox, do you need another email with updates? I’m not saying that you should not use this. That’s great because there will be some people that genuinely want updates. We use it at LeadPages. I use it on ConversionCast. Many people that I know, that is their only opt-in. It’s the only way that they’re getting new subscribers. The majority of the people (unfortunately) will not be interested in updates. You need to give them some incentive. We’ve talked about a whole bunch of them in this episode. I would say that’s the biggest mistake.

The second biggest mistake that people are making is one of two things. They’re either having a landing page that is thrown together based on a couple of things. There’s a little headline, maybe a little image of something, then an opt-in form. Believe it or not, your landing page—the design, the layout, the structure, everything, has a really big impact on whether or not people opt-in. We love to think that if we create something that’s compelling, that people will just opt-in because that thing is compelling. It’s not about the landing page.

Unfortunately, that’s just not the case. You really do have to have something that really makes people want to opt-in for that thing that they should be wanting to opt-in for anyway. That’s where LeadPages come in. The other side is I studied copywriting for a long time. We learn all these copy reading tactics. What words get people to opt-in, what words get people to buy. Those things are good. It’s great to learn that stuff. What I find is that people end up writing this copy that has nothing to do with their audience. They’re just using emotional keywords and not speaking the language of their audience. 

I used an example every time I talked about this in a webinar. It does not come up every webinar but I once saw a comic book shop. I’m a huge comic book fan. I love comic books. I saw a comic book shop’s website. Their opt-in form looked like an Internet marketer opt-in form. I can’t even remember the exact text but it was very buttoned up and very professional kind of stuff. I was like, “We’re talking to comic book fans here.” If I were to design that, that opt-in form would say something like, “Hey, you want to up-level your comic book wisdom? Enter your email address, and we’ll teleport the guide to you.”

Talk to your audience. It’s the biggest thing that you can do to get the most amount of people on your list. If your offer is something that will help them solve a problem and your copy speaks their language, then that’s the one-two punch.

Darren: That’s great. It reminds me of Ed Dale. I don’t know if you know Ed, but I heard him speak last week at a conference. He talked about really making your product but also your copy either a pain reliever or a game creator. Rather than using those emotional words that trigger people to respond to actually write about something is going to relieve pain or create a gain or both (ideally both), more and more that’s the type of copy we’re writing in our sales copy but also opt-ins. That’s pain relievers, game creators. If you can’t do that, why is anyone ever going to subscribe at all?

Tim: Yeah, that’s exactly right. That’s exactly it. Again, if you’re not speaking the language of your audience, they’re going to assume or at least you’ll find that they’re likely to assume that you don’t really understand them. You don’t understand their problems or what they care about.

Darren: Yeah. I could go for a whole tangent there, but I’m going to resist the temptation. I’ve got two more questions for you. Before I do, I want to ask you about your best-converting page. I want you to think about that. Don’t answer yet. I want something that people can go away and give it a go themselves. Also, what’s next? Emerging trends and all that stuff.

Before I get onto that, I know LeadPagees does have an offer for ProBlogger listeners. This podcast isn’t just about trying to get people to sign up for LeadPages. We want to give you some real value as well. Thank you for delivering that. I do want to put that offer out there for ProBlogger readers. Do you want to just talk us through what you’ve put together for our readers?

Tim: Yeah, absolutely. I would love to. If you go to leadpages.net/problogger, that’s leadpages.net/problogger, and you sign up for an annual or two-year plan of LeadPages, what we’re going to do is we’re going to give you some really awesome bonuses. The first bonus, we will custom design a one-page resource guide lead magnet. That’s the one-page list of tools that I recommend that you use as a lead magnet earlier. We’re going to design that for you. You just tell us the text you want and our design team will make something that looks really nice that you can give away.

Darren: That’s a fantastic plan […]. Can you do that for us, please?

Tim: Yeah, you got it. That’s one. Then, we’re going to give you a few courses. One is the Landing Page Copywriting Course. This is going to walk you through some of the elements of the best converting copy that we’ve seen. Part of that is speaking to your particular audience and speaking their language. You’re going to learn some of the tips and tricks that we’ve learned over the years as well as how to craft in that course. You’ll also learn how to craft a followup sequence that gets more people to go from new subscribers to buying whatever it is that you’re selling.

The next thing you’re going to get is we’ve really worked hard on our webinars. Webinars are one of our top revenue streams for our company, overall. They’re the second-highest generator of leads for us. Content upgrades are number one, webinars are number two. They’re really important. It’s easy to go out there and try it and just go, “I’m going to do a webinar,” and it doesn’t work. We think that it doesn’t work. 

We’re going to give you a course that we’ve created called the Webinar 2.0. It’s going to walk you through set-by-step how to do webinars. We’ll tell you how to create content, how to layout and script your webinars, how to get people to register, show up, stick around, and buy whatever you’re selling. It’s going to tell you the technology options available. It’s going to tell you how to follow up with your webinars so that you have webinar replays that are always selling for you. It’s a really fantastic course. It was actually the first training I ever did, I ever learned, on how to do webinars.

Next, we’re going to give you something called the Presell Formula. This hearkens back to the old days of our CEO Clay Collins before he started LeadPages. He created this really incredible program that will tell you how to build a list of people interested in a product that you’re thinking about creating. Then, how to talk to them to have them specifically tell you what products they want from you. It’s going to tell you how to pre-sell your product to them so that your audience is funding the creation of your product before you even create it. We’re going to give you that course.

The final bonus (I’m really excited about this) is we’ve worked together with you and your team to create a special template. This template was something we built using the Drag and Drop Builder together. We’re going to be giving people that template which will normally be for sale. We’re going to give that template away. Again, for anybody who buys an annual or two-year plan when you go to leadpages.net/problogger.

Darren: Yeah. There’s a whole heap of great information on that page about all those bonuses as well as some of the questions like, “I’m already a member. Can I get the bonuses?” There are options there for existing LeadPages members. Can I just say that the quality of the content that you guys create, I love the fact that you’re not just getting a tool, you’re actually learning how to use it, and where it fits in the rest of what you need to be doing. I love the fact that LeadPages is very passionate about not only selling their tool which is a great tool in and of itself. Actually, making the tool work so much better because thinking about what to do after you’ve got that in an email subscriber. Thinking about how to use webinars. Even how to create products is something that is just so important for bloggers.

I think as bloggers, a lot of us know about content. We know about how to get readers, hopefully, but how do you actually make that sustainable is so important to get some of these teachings and to use tools like that. Thank you for putting those banners together. I think this ends on the 31st of March. Is that right?

Tim: Yes, I believe so.

Darren: Midnight, Eastern, on the 31st of March. You’ve got a couple of weeks to grab that. We will have a link to that on today’s show notes. It is leadpages.net/problogger.

My last two questions, I wonder if you can give us an example of an opt-in page or is there a template that just works better than any other in the LeadPages templates that you can just talk to a little bit? Maybe talk about why you think it works?

Tim: Yeah. One of my favorite things about LeadPages is that you can actually click one button and it will sort all the templates in order on how well they convert across 40,000 people using LeadPages. Any time you ever want to know what’s working best, you can always do that.

Right now, the template, last I checked and that was a couple of hours ago, the template that was converting the best is called the Modern Webinar page. It’s a webinar registration page. It’s really very, very, simple. It doesn’t include pictures of the presenters. It has a big spot for a headline right at the top. A big headline, a little sub-headline. Below that is a countdown timer that counts down to the webinar because that urgency is important. Below that, there’s the call to action button, some information, and some basic copy of the webinar. It’s very simple but it has just proven to convert with so many different types of audiences. 

I have my theory as to why. I would say the main thing is that it is so simple in a world of complexity. It’s really easy. “Hey, here’s what the webinar is about. Here’s so much time we have left. You better register.”

Darren: Yeah. Simple is definitely the way to go, I think. It’s simple to create, too, although you do need to really learn how to edit and stop yourself going on and on.

The last question, as I’ve mentioned before, you were interviewing heaps of marketers in all kinds of fields. You’ve already given one answer to this. Is something else that you see people doing at the moment that is the next thing that we all need to be thinking about?

Tim: Yeah. I think the biggest thing, the number one trend that I’ve seen—in fact, I’ve had to turn down many guests for our podcast, ConversionCast, because so many people want to talk about the same thing—is the power of segmenting your list. Doing that through learning more, through talking to them more. In this day and age, it’s tough to just have one list, add everybody to the list, and talk to everybody the same way. It’s getting harder and harder to break through the noise that way. There are a lot of really fun and unique strategies for finding out who people are, what they’re looking for from you. 

We’ve even gone as far at LeadPages as to segment our own list by how often people want to be emailed. As opposed to saying, “What do you want to be emailed about?” We’ve said, “How often do you want an email? Every other day? Once a week? Or once a month?” From there, you can find out other things. Learning more about your customers tastes, interests, preferences, who they are, and what they care about, and then marketing to them properly if you emailed based on that, that’s the biggest thing that’s going on right now. We’re learning a lot from diving into that.

Darren: Yeah. It feels overwhelming when you’re just starting out with it. You don’t have to start at that point, although the tools now are getting better and better being able to think ahead in that way as well. 

I really appreciate your time today, Tim. I feel like we could’ve gone in about 20 different directions at times during this podcast. I hope that our listeners have got some real value out of some of those practical things. They can check out leadpages.net/problogger for the offer and today’s show notes at problogger.com/podcast/99 for some further reading and some extra resources that I’ll include on some of the topics we’ve touched on today. Thanks so much, Tim. Where can our listeners find you personally and learn more?

Tim: If they want to reach out to me, I’m always on Twitter. It’s @TimThePaige. You can always hit me up there. Also, I have my public Facebook account but just search for my name on Facebook add me, and I will add you. You’ll get to see me posting much more about comics books than anything else. If that’s your thing, you’ll enjoy it.

Darren: Beautiful. Thank you so much for your time today, Tim. I appreciate it.

Tim: Thanks, Darren.

Darren: I hope you enjoyed today’s interview with Tim Paige as much as I did. I was jotting down notes furiously during that podcast; things that I wanted to try out, adapt, and tweak in our own strategy on ProBlogger and Digital Photography School. I encourage you to go back and listen through that podcast again when you’ve got some more time. We do have today’s show notes at problogger.com/podcast/99. The offer that Tim mentioned does expire on the 31st of March 2016. It’s at leadpages.net/problogger. 

I highly and genuinely recommend LeadPages to you. It’s a tool that we’ve been using for some time now on ProBlogger. It is so easy to use. As I’ve mentioned during the podcast, they genuinely want to help people to not only use their tool and make a profit, but to learn how to use it effectively. That’s what I love about those bonuses that they’ve put together for you. Do check that particular deal out.

The last thing I’ll say is that I know a lot of you do listen to this podcast while driving with your hands full of dishes, ironing, or that type of thing, and […] you can’t get to our show notes right as you are listening to the podcast. If you do happen to get across to those show notes today, do look for that yellow button at the bottom of all of our show notes, and subscribe. In that way, we can send you the show notes every week. You’ll get the ProBloggerPLUS newsletter which is just basically a quick email that I put together personally every week. Just a summary of any new podcast that we published, any new blog post that we publish, and anything else that’s happened in the ProBlogger brand where there’s something on our Facebook page or something that I’ve been experimenting with on Periscope, Facebook Live, or something else.

Look out for that yellow button on our show notes and subscribe. You will get all the updates and all of the links to the show notes so that you don’t have to remember to check them out later on as you are driving or that type of thing.

Thanks for listening today. I look forward to touching base with you in the next couple of days in Episode 100 of the ProBlogger Podcast. What am I going to do about it? I don’t know yet but hopefully, it will be one where we connect again. Thanks for listening.

I hope you enjoyed this interview as much as I did. I was furiously jotting down notes.

Disclaimer: ProBlogger is an affiliate for LeadPages but it is also worth noting that were paid up users of the product and have used it in our own business as we believe it is a great tool. 

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Today, there are so many new mediums that people often ask if blogging is dead. I certainly don’t think blogging is dead, but it has changed. Today I’m going to talk about why blogging is alive and well, and the benefits of blogging.

I received this listener question on Anchor, from Marcus Boswell. What does the modern blogger get out of blogging? This question is common, because there are so many other things we could be doing with our time.

Let’s explore why blogging is still relevant today. If you have a business or are starting a business, the reason to have a blog really boils down to this quote by Bob Burg.

“All things being equal, people do business with, and refer business to, people that they know like and trust.”

Besides building trust and relationships with readers, there are many secondary benefits of blogging.

These secondary benefits are fantastic, but the relationship building and showing your customers that you really understand their problems and know them is really why blogs are so powerful.

“Honest and transparent content is the greatest sales and trust building tool in the world. Period.” Marcus Sheridan from Sales Lion

Creating great content on a regular basis that changes people’s lives helps us, but is blogging the only way? Podcasting, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and other social outlets can all help build trust.

Darren: Hi there and welcome to Episode 98 of the ProBlogger podcast. My name is Darren Rowse and I’m the blogger behind problogger.com and today, I want to tackle a question I get asked a lot. Is blogging dead? There’s heaps of other mediums around at the moment and I constantly hear people saying, “You know, blogging is dead. It’s been killed by,” and you can insert your favorite medium here. 

I want to tackle that. I want to talk about the benefits of blogging today because I obviously don’t think that blogging is dead, but it has changed and that’s what I want to talk a little bit about today. You can find today’s show notes with some links that I will mention in today’s show at problogger.com/podcast/98.

Today I got this question from Marcus Boswell over on Anchor. 

Marcus: The question I would have for you is, “What does the modern blogger get out of blogging?” I feel like I got dozens of other things I could or should be doing with my time so I need to give myself a really good reason. Does that make sense? I hope it does. Anyway, thanks for what you do.

Darren: Thanks so much for the question, Marcus. It is a question that I get asked quite a bit. There are so many things that we could be doing with our time and some of these things are actually talked about at times by some people as blog killers. Podcasting killed blogging, YouTube killed blogging, Facebook kills blogging, Twitter killed blogging.

I’ve heard all of these networks talked about as blogging killers. I want to explore today is blogging still relevant for today? If it is, why should we consider blogging. Particularly, I want to talk a little bit about from the perspective of a business or a person who wants to build a business so whether it be an existing brick and mortar business, why should they be blogging? Whether it’s an online business, why an online business should be blogging, and even someone hoping to build a business whose looking to get into starting a business, or an individual looking to sell themselves in some way because essentially, that’s a business too.

For me, the answer to this question really comes out of my own experience of the last 13 or so years of blogging and the benefits that it has brought me. I didn’t start out with the intent of starting a business. I started blogging just to express myself. That’s a completely legitimate way to do it, but what I found in turning that self expression into building a personal brand and business is that it really boils down to what Bob Burg said in his famous quote, “All things being equal, people do business with, and refer business to, people that they know, like, and trust.” 

Know, like, and trust. It’s a catchphrase that gets used a lot in marketing at the moment. Almost every conference I go to, people talk about how to become known, liked, and trusted because that’s how you get people to buy from you. 

As I look back over the last 13 years of creating content on a regular basis, that helps people. It’s helped me to become known. The fact that I went to a conference last week and people came out within minutes of walking into the room and began to talk to me as if they knew me. It was a little bit bizarre, I have to say, but it’s also a powerful thing. What’s more amazing to me is that they not only knew of me, but they spoke to me on a deeper level like they knew me. This takes a little getting used to. The first time it happens, it does freak you out a little bit. 

I remember many years ago going to a conference, I think it was Blog World Expo and someone came up to me and gave me this huge hug and began to pour out their heart to me like they would pour out their heart to a friend that they had for many years.

It was the first time that I realized that by creating content that was useful to this person over a couple of years, and them reading everyday, seeing videos of me, seeing my photos, me sharing some of the stories of my life, they actually felt like they knew me. They felt like they are in some sort of a relationship with me, purely platonic, but there was this relationship there. I had this deep connection like we shared a journey together, like we shared experiences together. That they’d go to that next level of not only knowing of me, but knowing me, liking me, and trusting me. 

For me, this is the case for blogging. It’s all about the ‘relationship’ and I use that word relationship in inverted commas because it’s not a real two way relationship. I didn’t know that person really at all, it’s the beginning of a relationship. 

There are of course many secondary benefits of blogging that would interest any business. Blogging can really be great for Search Engine Optimization. As we talked about a couple of episodes ago, it can be really great for driving traffic to your business and for converting that traffic into leads.

It can be great for helping you to build authority and credibility. It can be great for helping to personalize your brand which is something I think many businesses struggle with. Today, people are very suspicious of brands so a blog can help you to breakthrough that. 

Blogs are great for creating feelings for social media. What do people do on social media? They share content, they share links. So if you are creating content, it’s great for not only your social media accounts but other people’s as well. All of these things are fantastic, but for me they’re all secondary to the relationship thing. 

The blogs do help you to become known, liked, and trusted. They also, on the flipside of that, help you to express that you know your customer. You can show your customer that you know their needs, you know their problems, that you like them, that you trust them. That’s a very powerful thing as well. It takes this know, like, trust thing to the next level if you can create content that not only helps you to become known, liked, and trusted, but the way you reverse that, you show your customer that you know them, that you like them, that you trust them through sharing stories and being transparent with your customer. That shows that you trust them.

These things are very powerful. I love what Marcus Sheridan from the Sales Lion says. I came across this quote a year or so ago now. He said, “Honest and transparent content is the greatest sales and trust building tool in the world. Period.” Honest and transparent content is the greatest trust building tool in the world, period. I completely agree with that so I think we can agree that creating content on a regular basis that changes people’s lives helps us in business, but here’s the question. Is blogging the only way to do this? Has it been superseded by all of these other things? 

Can’t podcasting help to build trust? Can’t YouTube help to build trust? Can’t Facebook, Twitter, Periscope, LinkedIn, Email, all of these other platforms. Messaging, Snapchat, can’t they help to build trust?

The obvious answer is yes. All of these things can be useful in building a relationship, establishing trust, helping you to become known, liked, and trusted. There are examples of individuals using all of the mediums that I’ve just mentioned as their primary vehicle for building their business and brand, so why should you be blogging today if you can use all of other platforms?

Let me say four things. Three main things and then I’m going to come back to blogging with the fourth thing. 

Firstly, it partly comes down to where you create your best content as to what platform you want to use. What will your primary vehicle be? Are you better with the written word or are you better with speaking? Are you better at presenting to the camera? Are you great at creating visual content or something else? Your style and voice should determine what mediums you’d choose as your primary vehicle. 

Number two, where is your audience? How do they prefer to consume content? Some demographics prefer to read some demographics. Some groups of people prefer to listen. Some prefer to watch. Where is your audience? This is one of the factors you need to consider when you work out what is your primary vehicle.

The third thing is what does your topic work best with? Some topics need visuals, others don’t. Other topics need a personal hand holding, so you appearing on camera might be comforting to people. I guess those are the three factors. Your voice and style, what your audience prefers, and the topic itself.

These three things should give you some hints as to what vehicle to use and create content on, but here’s the really important factor. You should always strongly consider using your blog even if the written word isn’t your primary vehicle. I would argue that everyone should consider a blog. 

You may not decide to go with it and you certainly can have success by being a YouTuber, or being a podcaster, or being a Facebooker, or whatever it is. There’s these examples of people who have used just one network alone. But I believe that you should strongly consider a blog alongside any of those other vehicles. 

This podcast is hosted on a blog. You can embed your videos on a blog. You can host any kind of visual content on a blog. By having a blog, you are not constrained to just one medium either. If you are just a YouTuber and you just want to create some written content, where are you going to do that? Where are you going to host that? 

By having a blog, you can dabble in different types of media which as we explored in the last podcast will appeal to different learning styles.

The other good thing about having a blog on your domain or own service is that you have complete control over your home base. Always, you should be wary of making your primary vehicle third-party destination because the rules can be changed in those places. You can be locked out of those places in some way. You want to drive people to home base. 

You might want to choose to host your content in other places as well as your blog, but I believe you should always be pointing people back to your home base and a blog is a great home base.

Let me give you some examples here that illustrate how people are using different vehicles, different mediums, but also having a blog as their homebase. Check out ZenPencils.com, Gavin is a great Melbourne blogger. His primary medium is cartoons. He’s an amazing cartoonist. He takes quotes and puts them into cartoon form, that’s a really motivational place. He’s created some great visual content, but they are all hosted and based around his blog. He’s always driving people back to his blog. 

Checkout LisaEldridge.com. Lisa is a UK YouTuber. She uses YouTube extensively. She talks about makeup, beauty products. She also uses Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. She’s got hundreds of thousands of followers in each of those networks. Her YouTube clips get hundreds of thousands of views and I suspect most people are viewing them on YouTube, but she’s also constantly driving people back to her blog where she posts all of her videos and other content that she is producing. Go and check it out, it’s a great home base. She’s very active in all of these different networks, but she’s driving people back to her home base. 

Check out JayBaer.com. Jay has built a great personal brand around his speaking and book writing, but he is also a prolific podcaster. You can find him on iTunes, he’s got over 400 podcasts hosted on iTunes and all of the other podcast networks. But he also constantly drives people back to his blog where you can find every episode hosted there. You can listen to them there as well as find all of his written content. 

Check out iSocialFanz. Bryan Fanzo, another good example of a personal brand. Bryan is huge on every live streaming network that you can think of, but you guessed it, he posts his replays to his Periscope and his Blabs alongside other kinds of content, visual content and written content on his blog.

Blogs are not dead. Blogs are still relevant today, but they have changed. They are no longer just about the written word. They can be home for all of the content that you are publishing on all of these different platforms that people do say is killing blogging. 

Consider a blog, you may also consider other platforms and you do need to access your style, your voice, your audience, and the topic itself but consider having a home base and consider building it on a blog that you have complete control over your own domain, on your own service, and using a platform like WordPress.org which you have complete control of. 

Marcus, I hope that answers your question. If you do have any other questions, you can find me on the Anchor app and ask your question there as a comment replying to any of my anchors waves. I will put a link in the show notes to all of those blogs that I mentioned as examples as well as my Anchor account. I will do a podcast at some point in the future on the topic of Anchor, but in the meantime check it out and do a search for Darren Rowse and you’ll find me there. 

Also posted on the show notes today is a little post that I wrote on the topic of Anchor recently as well. For those of you who are completely confused by that, I really look forward to chatting with you in the next couple of days in Episode 99 and presenting to you Episode 100, our milestone. 

Who would have thought that we’ll make it this far? I really do appreciate you listening. It’s been fantastic actually in the last few weeks to see our download numbers really starting to escalate, thank you so much. I do appreciate all of you listening, but also the comments that you are leaving on the show notes. 

You can find today’s show notes at problogger.com/podcast/98.

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.

If you would like to ask a question for the podcast, you can find me on anchor. Just do a search for Darren Rowse. I’d love to hear from you.

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Today I am talking about an opportunity to lift the quality of your blog posts using embeddable content. I also list a heap of resources for finding great embeddable content, and deciding which resources to use.

Using embeddable content is a great opportunity to lift the quality of your blog. Many bloggers take it for granted and overlook using it, but this content can increase the quality of your work. It will potentially serve your readers better and even help your blog to rank higher in search engines.

I was recently asked to help judge a blog contest by my friend Michael Stelzner from Social Media Examiner. The blogs that stood out to me were ones that were using embeddable content to really make the posts dynamic.

This is something that is often done on social media blogs and blogs about blogging, but there is a real opportunity to take advantage of this concept on blogs in other niches.

Last week, I was speaking at a conference in Sydney, and this concept was fresh in my mind, so I produced this slide on the 17 types of embeddable content.

You can create or curate embeddable content. I challenge you to create one blog post this week that uses embeddable content. Share your post links in the comments below or share any other ways you use to create this content.

You could also start with a piece of embeddable content and put it into a blog post and add to it. It becomes the “hero” of the topic. You can also curate and summarize someone else’s content with further reading etc.

Darren: This is ProBlogger. Hi there and welcome to episode 97 of the ProBlogger Podcast, where today I want to talk about an opportunity to lift the quality of your blog posts using embeddable content or to give you a whole heap of resources that you can use to find the right embeddable content and help you to make a decision about which ones to use. First, I want to talk a little bit about problogger.com which is the sponsor and the host for this particular episode.

If you go to problogger.com, you’ll find our latest blog tips and tutorials on the blog, new podcast episodes, the latest jobs on our job board for those of you who are looking for writing opportunities and freelancing work, and you’ll also find the latest news on our upcoming events here in Australia for bloggers. We are expecting this year over 750, maybe even more than 800 attendees, fingers crossed, and you’ll also find our latest ebooks, including the bestselling 31 Days to Build a Better Blog. You can find all of that on problogger.com, but now let’s talk about embeddable content.

Creating great content, finding an audience, building engagement, monetizing your blog, this is ProBlogger.

Today, I want to talk about embeddable content, because I think it’s an incredible opportunity for bloggers and it’s something that I think most of us overlook and take for granted, the fact that we can but we don’t actually use it. I want to argue today that using embeddable content has the potential to increase the quality of what you’re doing with your content. Also, it has the potential to help you to serve your readers better and potentially to help your blog rank higher in search engines. What put me on to this kind of train of thought was an invitation I received recently by my friend Michael Stelzner, from Social Media Examiner, to be one of three judges in a blogging competition that they ran on Social Media Examiner.

I’ll share a link in today’s show notes over at problogger.com/podcast/97 of the final 10 blogs that won that competition, but I was given a short list of 20 or 30 blogs, all on the topic of different aspects of social media to judge. It was no easy task to complete and the standard was really, really high, but I did notice something interesting. That was that a lot of the blogs that I felt most drawn to and that I felt produced the best content were using embeddable content in a lot, if not all, of their blog posts. 

This is something I’ve noticed in the niche that I operate in blogging about blogging, or blogging about social media, a lot of blogs in this industry are using embeddable content from different social networks. That makes sense in some ways because we are writing about things which have a lot of embeddable content.

I actually think it is an incredible opportunity outside of the niches that I operate in to use this type of content and it’s something we’ve been doing on Digital Photography School for a while, but even there I think we could do a whole heap better. One of the things I noticed as I was doing that judging was that the content I felt most drawn to often had these embeddable content. When I looked at the results of the competition as my results got put in and collated with the other judges was that those blogs that used embeddable content kind of rose to the top. In the list of the 10 winners, I think you’ll find that a lot of them are using a bit of content in at least half of their blog posts, maybe even more.

You’re listening to ProBlogger.

Last week, I was speaking at the super fast business conference in Sydney from James Schramko. I had a great time there by the way. If you do get an opportunity to go to it, it’s really got some great content, going way beyond blogging into online business. As I prepared my talk and I was asked to talk about doing great content, producing great content, I found myself thinking about embeddable content a whole heap. I produced this slide which I’ll share in the show notes today with 17 different types of embeddable content to choose from, and I want to work through each of them in a moment.

Before I do, I want to talk about why embeddable content can lift the quality of your content. Why it’s something you probably should consider on almost every post that you write. The first reason I think it’s really good is that it can potentially lift the usefulness of your content. You have to choose the right content to add into your blog posts, by adding a video, by adding a slide show or by adding something else into that blog post you’re about to get hit publish on, you could just make it more useful to your content, to your readers in a number of ways. I’ll talk about why that is, right now actually.

The second point I want to make is that using embeddable content can actually appeal to different learning styles. Each of us learn differently. Some of us learn through visual, some of us learn really well through the written word. Some of us need to watch something and learn a lot better if someone’s talking to us or someone’s showing us. Using different types of embeddable content can open up your blog to different learning styles and different personalities. I discovered this quite recently, six months ago, when I started a podcast. It brought a whole heap of new people into the ProBlogger brand, people who I had been just not serving because they like audio content. By adding audio, it opened up my audience.

The same thing happened years ago when I started doing occasional video, it drew a whole heap of a different type of people into my blog. By adding in some embeddable content, you might just find yourself appealing to different learning styles and personalities. It also shows your readers that you’re willing to go the extra mile. Adding embeddable content, it’s easy, but it does take some work. To actually go to the extra effort of finding a video or finding a SlideShare or embedding some tweets or some of the other means that I’m going to share with you in a moment, actually shows your readers that you care. It shows that you’re willing to go a little bit further with your content, to find extra opinions or extra ways of exploring a topic.

One of the other things I love about embeddable content is it’s a very easy way to add in other voices, opinions and experiences into your blog. If you’re anything like me, you teach people on your blog or you share news on your blog and that comes from your perspective, it contains your opinion, it contains your experience, your story. But by using embeddable content in a smart way and using the right pieces of content, you can actually add to your voice. This can make your content more useful and more interesting. Adding in a piece of content from another expert or someone who’s just starting out, even in your field, can actually add another dimension to your content.

The last reason I think embeddable content is really useful is that it keeps people on your page longer. If someone comes to page, they read your blog post, they might be there for a minute. If you add a video add a SlideShare or something else, you might keep them there for two minutes. 

Now, this has a number of flaws and effects. Firstly, it keeps people on your page longer, being exposed to your brand for longer, gives you a longer period of time to create an impression upon people, but also—a lot of people argue—impacts your search engine optimization. Google has announced that the amount of time that people spend on your page is one of many signals to Google about how engaging and how useful your content is. If Google sees people staying on your page longer, that’s a signal to them that maybe they should be ranking your content a little bit higher.

There’s a variety of different reasons there about why you might want to consider embedding content. Now, I want to run through some of the different types of content that you might want to choose from. Most of us know about YouTube and we can embed any YouTube video, but what are some of the other types of content that go beyond YouTube?

Creating great content and building your audience, this is ProBlogger.

Okay, so let’s look at some of these different types of content that you might want to choose from when you’re thinking about embedding extra content into your next blog post. The first one is video, that’s the most obvious one, it’s the one that most of us as bloggers are familiar with. Most of us have either created a video or gone and found someone else’s video and featured that in our content. You could do the same thing on Vimeo or any of the other video providers out there. It’s probably the easiest and one of the best ways to do it, because it does add a visual element to your content, but also an audio-based piece of content, but there’s a whole heap of other things you can do.

Another one that many of you, I know, experiment with and I’ve done this from time to time in the past, is using slides, using a tool like SlideShare. Again, it’s very easy to turn one of your list posts into a slide deck. For example, you might have a list post that has nine different ways to use eggs, I don’t know, I just came out with that randomly, but you could very easily take those nine points and create nine slides that show the different ways that you use eggs. That might be a boiled egg, a scrambled egg, a fried egg, a baked egg, and you might even include a little recipe on each of those slots, that’s a very easy way to turn a blog post into a second piece of content and then you can embed that piece of content using SlideShare into the blog post as well, giving your readers an alternative way to consume that content. Slide is the second one.

The third one is tweets, every tweet that you do to be embedded into a blog post, every tweet that that I do could be embedded into one of your pieces of content. Every tweet that anyone does can be embedded into a piece of content and this opens up a whole heap of very easy ways to add other thoughts or other voices into your content. For example, you might be writing a blog post about nine ways to use eggs and then tweet out to your followers, “How do you like to use eggs? What’s your favorite type of egg?” And then you take some of the tweets that reply and you embed those things into your content.

It just adds another visual element, but also shows that you’ve got people engaging with you and that can be quite useful. Alternatively, you might approach a few high profile people who are on Twitter and say, “Hey, do you have a quick tip on this topic?” and then embed their responses into your blog post. That could actually become the whole blog post. You could just have embedded tweets as your post, but I’d also encourage you to mix it up, add some of your own thoughts as well.

Twitter is another way that you could use embeddable content in all kinds of different ways. Facebook, very similar. You can embed Facebook posts, your status updates, videos, images. You can also embed audio files using a tool like Anchor. I’ll give you an example of a post that we did on ProBlogger just last week where I embedded anchors. Anchor is like an audio file where I quickly put my thoughts out onto these social networks called Anchor and then people reply using their voices to my recordings, and you can embed either just yours, or you can embed yours and the replies. Really interesting way of using embeddable content that appeals to a different type of learning to people who respond well to audio files.

How to build and monetize your blog. This is ProBlogger.

You could use cartoons using a tool like Andertoons, you could use a live streaming actually and embed replays of your periscopes using a tool like Catch Me or even in embedding Blabs into your content. You can embed pictures from Instagram, videos from Instagram, you can embed slideshows from photo sharing sites like Flickr. You can embed infographics from services like Infogr.am, you can even embed pins on Pinterest. You can embed Google Maps, Google Earth if that’s relevant to your topic. You can embed polls, quizzes, using a tool like Qzzr. Mind maps from a tool like MindMeister. Google Docs, Google forms, PDFs using Google services. You can even embed podcasts if you have a podcast into your blog. You can embed animated gifs using give GIPHY.

These are 17 different ways that you can use embeddable content and I’m sure if I thought longer, I could come up with more, and I’m sure you could come up with more and add them into the comments on today’s show notes. There’s a whole amazing array of pieces of content that you could be adding into your blog post. It’s not a definitive list, but I wanted to run them by you just to open your mind to the different types of content that you could be creating.

It’s really worth noting here that even within all these categories, you could be the one creating that content to embed, or you could be curating content from other people. You might get to the end of a blog post and say, “Hey, I really want to embed something there. I’m going to go and create a SlideShare document to add in, or you can go to SlideShare and do a search for what else has already been created. You’ve got two options with most of those different 17 types of embeddable content.

Here’s my challenge for you and I would love it if you took this challenge and then came back and share the results of the challenge with me. The challenge is, over the next week, to publish a blog post that contains at least one piece of embeddable content. Before you hit publish on your next blog post, ask yourself the question and you need to get in the habit of asking this question, “What could I create or what could I curate that could add value to my blog post through an embeddable piece of content?” What could you create or what could you curate to add value to what you’ve written in your blog post by embedding something else in there.

Obviously, you need to make sure that whatever you embed is of good quality, that it comes from a reputable source, and that it’s not just in there for the sake of just to say, “I’ve done an embeddable piece of content.” It’s got to add value, it’s got to make your blog post more useful, it’s got to enhance it in some way. The other little piece of warning I’ll give you is not to overdo it, but I did see one piece of content that a blogger produced recently that had three videos about 10 different tweets, two Facebook updates, an Instagram picture, and a cartoon, and an infographic all in one piece of content. It got a little bit crazy and a little bit overwhelming.

You want to think about how it comes across. You want to think about the visual appeal of having so many different types of mediums. In most cases, you probably want to stick to one or two types of content to add to your blog post. There’s another alternative that you might want to consider for this challenge and that is to start with a piece of embeddable content. I’ve been talking about adding an embeddable piece of content to support a blog post that you’ve written, but you could really make that embeddable piece of content the hero of a blog post, and there’s a variety of ways that you can do this.

For example on ProBlogger, some of you would have seen me doing this recently, I would go and do a Periscope where I talk about a particular topic. I take the embed of that Periscope using Catch Me as the service to get that embed, and I put that into a blog post, and then I add to it, and it gives some further reading, or maybe summarize my main points. The embeddable piece of content becomes the hero of the post and then you might add some text underneath it.

Another way to do that is to curate someone else’s piece of content. On Digital Photography School, I’ll give you a link in today’s show notes to a post that I created last year that went viral and I didn’t really have to create much content at all because I used someone else’s video. I found this great video on YouTube that went through nine different compositional techniques. It was a beautifully shot video. I embedded that piece of content, that video, into a blog post on Digital Photography School, and then I summarized the video.

I went through the nine different points and just said, “Here is what the video goes through and here’s some further reading on each of those.” Now, I gave credit to the creators, I linked to their website, I made sure that everyone knew where they could find that clip on YouTube. Then, I added something to it, and I made it in my mind I think, more useful, by giving people further reading, places to go to learn the principles that were kind of glossed over in the video.

The video was quite quick, and short, and sharp, but if anyone wanted to dig deeper into any of those nine points, I gave them further reading underneath. That post was a very shareable piece of content. It went viral like I said before, but the better thing about it was that it created a whole heap of people being sneezed deeper within the content on my site. You might want to try that technique as well. Find something that someone’s created that they’ve allowed to become embeddable, and then expand on it. Make it even more useful. Make the curated content more useful than it was.

I’ve gone through a whole heap of stuff there. I’ve mentioned 17 tools that you could use and a few different ways to use them, but really what the point of this podcast is about is to challenge you to do something with it, and I would love to see the piece of content that you publish on your blog that uses embeddable content. You can go to problogger.com/podcast/97. We’re getting close to 100 here, 97 and leave a comment there on the piece of content that you have created or maybe something that you’ve created in the past.

I’d love to see your links. You can leave links there. I’m more than willing to check them out and to be inspired by what you’ve done. I’m sure other listeners of the podcast would love to see what you have done as well. Again, it’s problogger.com/podcast/97 all the links to the tools and some of the example posts that I’ve mentioned will be there. I’d love to see what you create. Thanks for listening. Look forward to seeing what comes out of this podcast for you.

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.

Let us know how you use embedded content on your blog and leave a link below.

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Welcome to episode 96. Today we are talking about business blogging and using your blog to promote your business or products.

One of the most common questions I get asked when I’m speaking at conferences for business people and blogging is how do I create a business blog without a team to dedicate to the task.

Often times, this question is asked by the person assigned to create the blog or the business owner. Here are a few tips that can be used to build a business blog on a shoestring.

You can listen to today’s episode above or in iTunes or Stitcher (if you have a moment, we’d LOVE to get a review).

Here are a few tips designed to help you create a business blog and have a regular and consistent workflow.

Today’s further reading is an article I wrote for LinkedIn about 56 ideas to use for business blog posts. I have heard back from a number of people who actually used this article as a basis for their yearly blog post ideas.

Hi there and welcome to episode 96 of the ProBlogger Podcast where today I want to talk about business blogging. Blogging, if you are a business wanting to use your blog to promote your business, to promote your products, rather than using the blog as the business itself.

I get asked to speak a lot at conferences for business people on the topic of how to build a business blog and one of the most common questions I get asked is, “How do I create one when I don’t have a team that I can dedicate to that task?” 

The question is often asked by the person who has been assigned to get the blog up and running or by the business owner. They know it’s a good idea, but they don’t really know how to do it when they’ve got a fairly small business, or even a solo business.

I want to give you a few tips on how to build that business blog on a shoestring. I’m not going to talk so much about the content that you need to publish, but rather how you get that workflow going, how do you get yourself regular and consistent as a business blog.

You can find today’s show notes at problogger.com/podcast/96. Let’s get on with today’s show.. 

Before I get into some tips on building a business blog on a shoestring, I do want to mention I have a little bit of further reading for those of you who want to talk more about content. I wrote an article from LinkedIn a year or so ago now with 56 Ideas for Blog Posts for your Business blog. I have heard back from a lot of business, I should say, that are using this as the basis for almost an annual calendar of blog posts, so you might want to check that out today in the show notes. 

But the focus of today’s episode really is how you build a business blog on a shoestring and how you do that when you’ve got a limited team. We look at a lot of the big corporations that have blogs and social media and they’ve got teams dedicated to these tasks.

I was talking to one person from a large Australian company the other day and they told me that they have 30 people dedicated to managing their blog, their social media accounts, and their podcast, their Periscopes. They are doing all of this stuff. Obviously, they’re able to do that because they’ve got this massive team behind it; experts in different aspects of social media or blogging.

But as small to medium businesses, we don’t always have those resources at our fingertips. In fact, we rarely do, yet many of us know we need to have a blog. These are tips that are designed to help you. 

The first thing I would say, and this is particularly relevant for blogging, but I think you can probably extend it to different social media channels as well is that it’s important to have one person responsible as the editor. One person who is the champion of that blog.

I talked to a number of businesses in the last six months who I convinced that they need a blog. They talked to their web developer guys and I set up the blog for them, and then everyone in the business looks at each other and says, “Why aren’t we blogging?” 

It’s because no one is actually being given the authority to blog and no one is being given the authority to crack the whip over the rest of the company to get content produced. 

The editor doesn’t need to write everything. They don’t have to produce all of the content but they are responsible for making sure that content is published and they are given authority to ask people to produce content for the blog. Now they might write some of the content and they might work with different people within your team, but this person is more about editing the content and getting the content up and ready, and thinking strategically about the flow of content on the blog.

I talked to one business recently and I suggested this to them and they gave this job to their receptionist who wasn’t a great writer, didn’t have much experience in content creation, but who did have an eye for detail, who was able to edit the content that other people in the business wrote. But she was also able to crack the whip, she was able to go to different people and say we need a blog post on this topic. It’s your turn to write something, and she overtime grew her confidence to the point where she began to see the type of content that was working and was able to be a bit more strategic about who to approach within the company and helping them to produce that content.

It doesn’t really matter who the person is as long as they are able to have that authority to go to people within the team and to help produce that content. Make one person responsible as the editor. 

The second tip I give you is to establish a publishing rhythm. I think it’s really important to have a rhythm of content. This is important whether you are a solo blogger blogging with your blog as a business, or whether you are a business blogger wanting to blog to promote your business. 

I think it’s particularly important in that case where you’ve got a team because things are very easy to let slip. “We won’t post something this week, we’ll catch up next week.” Particularly if you got someone driving that, it’s very easy to miss those deadlines. 

Workout how often you got to publish and give that editor authority to keep that process moving. You probably don’t want to start with daily content if you are a small team, maybe once a week or twice a week, but establish that rhythm. Maybe think about the types of post you’ll publish on different days, and that’s often a good way to setup a pattern for content. 

Maybe Mondays, a day where you post a tip. Thursdays might be a day where you post something more newsworthy for your industry. That might be a whole publishing schedule but by having that format for post, it gives you a bit of a headstart when you want to create that content.

When it comes to coming up with ideas, the third tip I’ll give you is to brainstorm those ideas ahead of time. Again, this is a relevant tip for all types of bloggers but particularly when you are working as a team, it’s very hard to know who’s going to write what. 

I think getting that team together and brainstorming together the types of content you might want to create can be really helpful and to slap those topics in ahead of time into that publishing rhythm. You might want to say once a month we are going to get together as a team to brainstorm and then we are going to allocate who is going to write what and when those posts are due. That way, everyone knows what’s coming, rather than everyone hoping that this week someone else will write a blogpost. Once you get all of that, you can setup that editorial calendar with deadlines, that’s tip number four. 

Personally, I find batch writing really helpful and stockpiling of content. The business I was actually talking to before who gave the receptionist the task of being the editor. What she started to do was stockpile content so she went to people and rather than saying, “I need a post this month from you,” she asked them to write three posts that she can use over the next three months. She didn’t have to keep having those conversations with people. 

That was a system that worked really well in their business, and they actually got to a point where people were given a whole day off from their normal task to write content for the blog every three months. That’s the way they produce their content. 

Someone was approached in the sales team to write three sales related blog posts that will be used over the next three months. That’s going to depend on the type of content, if you’ve got more timely content, that’s not going to work as well. But that may be one way you can work and give people permission to create that quality content.

Again, another tip I do recommend for all bloggers of all types. I think it’s really important in this team environment when you have team bloggers is to dedicate time to create, complete, and promote content that you create. 

Everyone knows the benefits of social media. Everyone knows the benefit of having content, but I guess we just have to come to the point of acknowledging that it doesn’t just happen. It won’t just appear out of nowhere and you need to dedicate time within your business, you need to allocate time for people to create their content as I just talked about, but also think about who is going to have time in their job description allocated to editing.

Who’s going to have time allocated in their job description to engage with people who leave comments, to watch social media. Those things shouldn’t just be fitting around the edge. If people have time, they need to be priorities, if you really want to take the business blog to the next level.

Another great tip I’ll give you is to not look within your team as to the type of writers and content creators you might have. They may actually be guests that you can get in and in the type of blogging that you do where my blogs are a business, I regularly feature guest writers.

I think this is particularly a strategy that you can use in your business blog as well. Of course you do want to have writers from within your team because that builds credibility for your organizations. Their employees really know what they are talking about, but within your network as a business, there will be other people who will be great at producing content for your blog. You might have a supplier, you may have a customer, you may even have a competitor that you’re friendly with. 

These are people that you can collaborate with to create content for your blog. It doesn’t need to be them sitting down and writing an article for you. It could be as simple as you jumping on Skype with them and recording an interview with them that you post as an audio, or that you transcribe, or that you write an article based upon that interview.

I think interviews are a brilliant way particularly for businesses to create content, but also when you interview someone they are more likely to share that content for you. If you write about one of your customers and a story they’ve got about how they use your product, that is fantastic. 

One, it’s proof that you’ve got a customer, that’s a bit of social proof there. But two, that customer is highly likely to share that story with their own social networks. Involve other people. It may be industry leaders, suppliers, customers. Involve them in the creation of content.

Another quick tip that I will give you in terms of content creation is to really look at your everyday activities. There are things that you do as a business that would be interesting to potential customers. There are questions you are asked everyday by your customers that should turn to blog posts. There are things that happen in team meetings that would be interesting to other people in your industry, so it’s about a mindset.

It’s about constantly being on the lookout for interesting moments within your business, interesting processes in your business, interesting questions that happen in your business. The things you forget you do everyday might actually be interesting to other people, and we’ve got these wonderful technologies in our pockets with our phones where we can video and take photos of the things that happen everyday.

Be aware of those types of things. Be aware of the stories that happen within your team that may actually be the beginnings of really useful content.

The last tip I’ll give you if you are a business looking to use blogs is to experiment prolifically with different types of content to track the results and to evaluate what kind of content is working. It’s so important that you dedicate time not only to creating content, to promoting that content, to engaging with people as I mentioned earlier, but also dedicate time to analyzing what the impact is of the content that you are creating.

You need a return on your investment. Every business needs that. The things we dedicate our time to shouldn’t just be fun for us, they should actually have a return on our investments. Dedicate some time to digging into your stats, looking at how things convert, and experimenting with lots of different types of content to see which types of content work best. That should then inform your strategy going forward.

I hope some of those tips have been useful to those of you who have businesses and are wanting to use blogs to promote those businesses, and build a profile of your business. I know there are quite a few ProBlogger readers who fit into that category and I hope this has been helpful to you. If you got a tip for other business bloggers, please head to our show notes today. They are at problogger.com/podcast/96 where there’s an opportunity to share your own tips in the comments, and also to get those 56 blogpost ideas for your business blog which may just give you enough content for the next years or so of content on your business blog. 

Thanks for tuning in. I’ll chat with you in Episode 97 of the ProBlogger Podcast. 

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

I hope you found these tips helpful. If you have any tips of your own that you use for your business blog, please share them with us in the comments below.

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Note: this episode is available to listen to here on the site but also on iTunes and Stitcher.

Today we are talking about launching your blog. I’ve been getting a lot of questions in terms of content and design and what types of things you should have ready before you launch your blog.

Pre-bloggers often want to know how much work should they have done before launching their blog. They ask questions like how much content should I have ready? How many posts should be live? Should I have a customized theme? Should I invest in a logo?

Sometimes excitement kicks in when launching a blog, and it gets launched before it is completely ready to go. Today we are going to talk about the ideal blog launching scenarios.

I used to be a partner in a blog network, and what we would do content wise is what I’m going to share with you today. We aren’t going to talk about choosing a blog platform, hosting, or choosing a domain today, but we have a post here on how to Start a Blog that walks you through those decisions.

Note: I am an affiliate for some of the tools and resources listed above.

Hi there and welcome to Episode 95 of the ProBlogger Podcast. My name is Darren and I’m the blogger behind problogger.com. You can find all of our stuff at problogger.com. We’ve got this podcast but there’s also a blog, there’s an event that we run which we will be releasing tickets for in the coming weeks, on the 27th of April. You can find information about that over at problogger.com. Follow the link to our events page where you can subscribe to get further updates about that event. 

There’s also a job board. Many of you have been letting me know lately that you found some great jobs for bloggers over on the job board. You can, again, find that if you head to problogger.com, you’ll be able to see a link there to that job board. There are new jobs being advertised there every day. If you’re looking to hire a blogger, check out the job board as well. I had an email from someone yesterday who said, “Please take down our job.” This is 24 hours after they posted it, because they’d had 50 applicants, and they said they could’ve hired about 20 of them. The quality was really high.

We’re actually in the process of relaunching that job board at the moment. About $50 to have your job advertised there for 30 days. There’s a whole heap of stuff going on over at problogger.com, check it out, that’s in addition to this podcast. The best thing you can do, of course, is to subscribe to the ProBlogger PLUS newsletter which you’ll find a link to there as well.

Today, I want to talk about launching your blog. I want to respond to some questions I’ve been getting lately about what should you have ready to go on your blog in terms of content, in terms of design, and some of those types of things. What should you be doing before you launch your blog? You can find today’s show notes at problogger.com/podcast/95.

Creating great content. Finding an audience. Building engagement. Monetizing your blog. This is ProBlogger.

One of the categories of questions that I’m often asked by pre-bloggers—these are people who are yet to start their blogs, they’re not pro bloggers yet but pre-bloggers—is how much work should I do on my blog before I launch it. How many posts should I have live? How many posts should I have ready to go? Should I have a customized design or should I just use a default theme? Should I invest in a logo? Some of those types of questions.

I wanted to tackle some of these today to give you some starting points, things to aim for before your blog goes live. I want to say right upfront that this is one of those do as I say, not as I do type of podcasts. I’m sure many of you as bloggers can relate to this, something happens when you’re starting a blog where the excitement kicks in and you sometimes just release it before it’s quite ready. Pretty much in every case that I’ve ever launched a blog, this is what’s happened for me. I guess there’s an ideal launch scenario, but sometimes it’s not the reality.

I want to give you the ideal, this is what I would aim for. Back in the day when I was a partner in a blog network—which I no longer have anything to do with,—what we would do before we launch a blog in our network was to pretty much do what I’m about to share with you now, particularly in terms of the content.

The other thing I will say is that there’s stuff here that I’m not going to talk about. I’m not going to talk about choosing a blog platform, or domain, or hosting. We are in the process of publishing a mega post on that on ProBlogger at the moment. I’ll link to that in the show notes if it’s ready. If it’s not, I’ll add it later. 

But what I really want to talk here about is particularly the content and the design of your blog. Here’s what the ideal is, and remember this is not what I always have done myself. It’s probably somewhere between this ideal and what I do, which is just rush things a little because I’m so excited.

The first thing that I would encourage you to do before you even get the domain, before you get the hosting, before you do any of that, is to brainstorm post topics. I think this is just so important because generally, if you can’t come up with 20 or so post topics in a 5 or 10-minute brainstorm about what you would write on your blog—now you don’t have to write the post, you just have to come up with 20 or so topics. If you can’t come up with 20, it’s probably a signal that your blog topic may not be sustainable. 

Having 20 ideas before you even invest in a domain is really important because it may tell you, if you haven’t got 20 ideas, that your niche is too narrow. Maybe there’s not enough to write about in your niche, or maybe you’re not passionate enough, or maybe you don’t know enough about that niche.

I would do that exercise even before you invest in anything. Can you come up with 20 or so things that you would write about? This is something I encouraged my wife to do before she started blogging, and she came up with about a hundred. I was like I think you’ve got enough, love, I think you can do this. She did invest in the domain.

Brainstorm topics. This is really important before you launch as well because it means that once the launch happens, once people start coming, once you start getting excited about your social media and all that other type of stuff, you’ve got ideas ready to go before you need them. Brainstorm post topics. 

Then, I would encourage you to write, ideally, 10 blog posts. Now, 10 may be a bit too much. As I say, this is not what I’ve done in the past. I would have at least 5-10 blog posts written and ready to go before I launch the blog, and I would make three of them live, and seven of them draft.

You want to have at least a few posts live on your blog so that when a new visitor comes… Maybe you share it on your Facebook page, and one of your friends comes and maybe they share it with one of their friends, those first readers are not just coming to your blog and seeing one post which might be your “Hi, I’ve started blogging,” type of post.

You want to at least have a cornerstone piece of content there, something that is a bit meaty or something that is really useful, something that shows people what you’re on about. If you can have at least one of those, maybe two or three of those types of really good posts, those first readers are going to get excited.

They’re going to go, “Well, there’s three ideas here that are going to change my life.” That’s the type of content that you want to be live from day one of your launch, at least one, and aim for two or three live posts so that there’s more than just one article for them to read. They can click around a little bit, they can actually see that you didn’t just fluke one good post but you actually have a good couple of posts there. Those early readers are so important. 

Once you’ve got two or three live on the site, aim to have another four or five, or up to seven posts written and ready to go as drafts. This will release you in the first week or so of your blog to be focusing upon other things. If you’ve already got that content there ready to go, it means you can be focusing on networking with other bloggers, engaging in forums, and writing guest posts for other blogs; some of those things that could potentially bring new traffic into your site.

The more content you’ve got ready to go, the more time you will have on your hands to promote your blog and to build community with the readers who come, to be able to email some of those early readers, to be able to respond to their comments.

If you don’t have anything in draft, you may be spending all your time trying to work out what your next post is going to be about, and ignoring some of these other things that are really important in the early days. 

For me, that’s the content side of things. Ideally, 10 posts written, 2 or 3 live, up to 7 in drafts.

Like I said before, it’s not what I’ve done in the past. I usually launch with a couple live and maybe have another two in drafts, have them outlined. The more work you do in advance, the better position you’ll be in.

You’re listening to ProBlogger.

That’s content. Number two question that I always get asked is design. Should I have a unique design, should I use a premium theme, should I get a customized design? There’s going to be different approaches to this.

I’ll say, for me, most of the blogs that I’ve launched, when I first started them, started with a hacked together default theme, or a fairly cheap sort of premium theme, a theme that I might have spent $30 on and that I kind of hacked together myself.

I’m not a designer and any of you who have seen my blogs when they launched will know that they’re not always the most pretty or visually pleasing. The more unique you can make them look, the better. I would be aiming—in an ideal world—to have a unique-ish kind of design. There’s a couple of approaches that you could take.

Yes, you could probably invest several thousand dollars and get a custom design, but I would probably say until you get some runs on the board, until you get some proof of concept, until you get some readers and find that you feel an energy towards that blog, and you know that you’re going to be able to sustain it, I probably wouldn’t invest in a custom design. I’d probably take a premium design using a blog design from someone like StudioPress or WooThemes, some of these types of premium design providers and use one of those. Then, maybe put your own logo on it, change the colors a little bit so that it doesn’t look like everyone else’s.

That’s generally what I’ve done. I’ve either used those or I’ve kind of hacked together a default in the earliest days. With ProBlogger, I launched it with a custom design but that was because I already had been writing on that topic and had readers of that topic on my previous personal blog. I kind of knew that it was going to be something that I could continue to write about, I’d have the energy for, and then I knew I would get some readers over to that new design. 

But with Digital Photography School, I started with a free theme that I kind of hacked together myself. Several months later, I upgraded that using a premium theme. At first from StudioPress, and then later on got a custom design.

Creating great content and building your audience. This is ProBlogger.

That’s design. The next thing I would highly recommend you do, and I talk about this a lot, is to set up your email newsletter before you launch. I know not all bloggers use them. I know not all bloggers kind of connect with their registry email. But for me, it’s just been gold.

It’s been the number one source of traffic, building community, and being able to monetize my blog. It’s the best thing I ever did. I would highly recommend you choose one of the providers we talked about, I think in episode 91, AWeber, Mailchimp, ConvertKit. You can find them in the show notes from problogger.com/podcast/91, and set up a list and use a tool like SumoMe or OptinMonster. Again, there’s links in those show notes, to start to collect those emails. It’s so important.

Those early readers, if you can get them on your list, you can speed up the growth of your blog because you’re giving yourself away to get that first-time reader back again, and that’s really important. It’s much easier to get one reader back again a hundred times over the next five years, than to find a hundred new readers and to have to find a new reader every time you want a visitor.

Set up an email newsletter list, it’s really important. I can’t emphasize it enough. It’s probably the number one thing I’d suggest you do as a result of this podcast. 

The other thing I would do is to set up social outposts, and this where you need to choose which social network you want to engage with, which one is the most relevant for your audience, which one you personally would like to operate. It might be Facebook for you, it might be Twitter, it might be LinkedIn. You need to choose it and then you need to set up and register those accounts. I’d probably register the accounts on all of the major social networks, but I just choose one to be the primary one and promote that on your blog from day one.

For me, the social outposts, so Facebook on Digital Photography School is our secondary priority in terms of connecting with our readers. Number one, we want them to sign up to our newsletter. Number two, we really would like to connect with them on Facebook. And then probably Twitter is the third one. Instagram as well is one that we’re trying at the moment.

That’s kind of the priority for us. We want email, we want them to connect with us on Facebook if they’re on Facebook. We then want them to connect with us on Twitter and then on Instagram. We’re building that into an autoresponder sequence that we send them, just highlighting these accounts that we have.

It’s not a hard sell. It’s more of a by the way kind of mention in a lot of our newsletters that we have these accounts. We cross-promote between our social media accounts as well. But on launch day, secure as many of them as you can and then promote the number one one that you want.

How to build and monetize your blog? This is ProBlogger.

That’s the kind of stuff that I would be thinking about before I launch. There’s a whole heap of other things that you could do. You could invest in SEO plugins, you could really customize your blog and get a new comment system, like Disqus and all those types of things. But really if I had to just launch again today, they’re the barebones type of things that I’d be working on.

I’d be getting some content ideas, I’d be focusing on creating some content before I launch and having some ready as drafts. I’d be trying to get a unique-ish design, not investing too much until I get some proof of concept. I’d definitely be setting up an email newsletter and I’d be setting up some social outposts.

I’d love to hear what you would add to this. What did you do when you launched your blog? If you’re a blogger, established already, what would you add to that? What advice would you give a pre-blogger about what they should be doing as a bare minimum? If you’re a pre-blogger and you’ve set up a blog as a result of this podcast, I’d love to hear back from you with a link to that brand-new blog. I want to see a whole heap of links to brand-new blogs in the comments over at problogger.com/podcast/95 where I’ve also got some links to some of the tools that I mentioned in today’s show notes, some further reading, and some further listening for you to go away and do if you’re a new blogger.

I hope this has been helpful for you, pre-bloggers. Let me know how you go with it. Check out that post that we’re about to publish on ProBlogger about how to actually set that blog up as well. Looking forward to chatting with you in episode 96, we’re getting close to the big hundred and we’ll chat with you within the next few days. Thanks everyone.

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.

There is always more you can do to customize a blog, but the top listed items are what I would focus on. I’d love to hear what you would add to this. Let us know what you did to customize your blog, and if you are a new blogger leave us a link to your new blog in the comments.

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In today’s episode we talk about search engine optimization, and in particular, the five mistakes bloggers make with SEO and what to do about them.

My guest today is Jim Stewart from Stewart Media. Jim has years of experience with SEO and has helped me with my SEO for ProBlogger and Digital Photography School.

He is currently helping us with SEO while we move ProBlogger to a new domain, and he is also going to be a speaker at this year’s 2016 ProBlogger event.

In this episode (which you can listen to above or on iTunes or Stitcher) we discuss the five SEO mistakes bloggers make, and then we move on to some reader questions from our Facebook page.

Jim adds that one thing that bloggers are getting right is creating great content. Here are the five mistakes and how to correct them:

My guest today to walk us through this is Jim Stewart from stewartmedia.com.au. Jim is someone who has years of experience with SEO and has helped me with ProBlogger and Digital Photography School. In fact, at the moment, he is working on some SEO stuff with us as we move our blog at ProBlogger over onto a new domain. We’re going to walk through these five mistakes that bloggers make. I’ve got some frequently asked and recently asked questions from the ProBlogger community for Jim on the topic of SEO.

You can find today’s show notes at problogger.com/podcast/94 where there’s some further reading and also links to all of the tools that are mentioned in today’s show. Let’s get on to today’s show where we’re going to talk about SEO.

Good day, Jim Stewart. Nice to chat with you.

Jim: Good day, Darren. Nice to be here.

Darren: It’s very kind of you to jump on. It has been a bit of a spontaneous one. I had this influx of questions from readers about search engine optimization, so I thought I’d go to the guy who’s been helping us with our own SEO on ProBlogger and Digital Photography School (please don’t reveal how bad we are).

Jim’s really been helpful in helping us to fix up some of the issues that we had particularly because we’ve got quite large sites with a lot of archives, we’ve been switching domains, and we have numerous iterations of our designs. I thought I’d get Jim on the line and get him to maybe give us a few things that he sees that bloggers aren’t doing right. Is that okay Jim? Have you got a few things in mind that you can kind of run through?

Jim: Yeah.

Darren: I’ve got a whole heap of questions that have been submitted from our community, mainly from our Facebook group and Facebook page. I’ll throw as many of them as I can get away with taking up your time. Do you want to just give us the things that you see people as getting wrong with their SEO?

Jim: I’d like to start with one thing that they’re doing really right, that most of our commercial or business customers aren’t doing right, and then it’s creating great content. It’s something that we struggle with our business customers getting them to do all the time, but what the blogger community seems to be (well, certainly all the blogger sites I’ve looked at), there are some major things that they’re not doing well.

The first one is basically understanding how Google sees the site. We call this, what has Google indexed with your site? When I say the Google index, these are the pages that Google has actually crawled and are now in the Google index. The way you can find that out is to simply type the word site:web address, it will bring back all the pages that Google has crawled on your site.

The number of pages should be roughly the same as the number of posts and pages that have you in WordPress or whatever platform that you’re using. Quite often though, you’ll find it’s a lot higher and that’s because, for the most part, bloggers either haven’t installed the Yoast plugin or haven’t got the Yoast plugin configured properly.

Some of the things that they’re doing to cause that huge number of pages is that they’re letting Google go and index all their archives, they’re letting Google index tag pages, and basically content we don’t want Google to go and index because it means that, in some instances, it can be duplication of content.

If I’ve got an author (I was just looking at a site the other day) where the author archives, the posts are so short that when you go into the author archives, the entire posts are shown on the author archives, not just the snippets. We’ve duplicated all the content and duplication is a bad thing because it can be confusing to Google. It doesn’t know which page should it show. If you’ve got two pages that are exactly the same, which one should we show?

Getting that number right of how many pages Google has indexed and how many posts and pages you have actually published, getting that to a similar number is really important. You’re eliminating a lot of problems there straight up.

Darren: That’s great. That’s a simple thing. You could pause this podcast right now, listeners, and do that test. Site, was it colon?

Jim: Yup.

Darren: Then your domain. Then just go and look at how many posts you published, and does it correlate or have you doubled it or have you tripled it? That’s going to reveal that you’ve got some issues. What would you suggest people do for a beginner looking at if they find a real discrepancy between how many pages they should have and how many are? Is there something that might bring that down quickly or is that something you need some help with?

Jim: No, you can do it yourself. If you install the Yoast plugin, typically the things that have been indexed and why that number is huge can be noindexed using the Yoast plugin. It will depend on how you’re set-up and Yoast is only available for Drupal, WordPress at the moment, I think. If you’re on WordPress, certainly use this, it’ll be easy to do yourself. If you’re not on WordPress you might have to get a web developer to do it. The Yoast plugin allows you to say do not index author archives, tag pages, and category pages; you just go in and check those boxes. Most bloggers that I’ve looked at have not done that. They’re using Yoast quite good at the post level but not at the site configuration level.

Darren: That’s great. I think Yoast has some good tutorials that help you to work through those setup processes as well, so it is worth investing in that domain. I don’t know if it actually costs at all, does it?

Jim: I don’t think so. Certainly Yoast, the free version, there are heaps of tutorials they have around about that, very intuitive.

Darren: That’s number one. Number two, what have you got for us?

Jim: Set up Google Search Console. A lot of bloggers don’t have Google Search Console set up. This used to be called Google Webmaster Tools; it’s very easy to set up. Once again, if you’re using Yoast, you could set it up via Yoast. It’s just tied to a Google account, so if you have a Gmail account you would probably use that or any other Google account that you use for your normal Google activities, you can just really easily set up Google Search Console.

What Google Search Console is, it’s what Google knows about your site. It’s everything that the Googlebot goes out and finds about your site and puts it into one place. This will tell you all the errors that Google will find on the site, so things like broken links, 404s, server errors, or duplicated page titles, which is a sign that you’ve got duplicated content. Basically, you go through and fix all the errors. If you’ve got a large problem with the index number, fixing all those errors will usually fix that problem as well. The areas to look at are the HTML suggestions, the errors, but get that set up first so at least you can know what errors the site has.

Darren: Google is basically telling you how to fix your search engine rankings with that console so it’s a bit of a no-brainer to install it and learn how to use it. It can be a bit overwhelming when you first get into it, I know I am certainly overwhelmed by it. What would you say the two or three things that you should start looking at there? Is there a tab that you should be living in and watching on a daily basis or is that something you should be doing on a less regular basis?

Jim: Initially, when you first get into it, I’d be looking at it on a daily basis. After you’ve cleaned everything up, usually once a week is enough just to get in there and just go and have a look and see if any errors have developed.

One of the things that Google Search Console allows you to do is to submit a sitemap, and this is just basically something that, once again, most content management systems will generate a sitemap. You just submit that to Google and that tells Google where all your content is, you do that by the Search Console.

I’d be looking at the sitemap area, I’d be looking at the crawl errors area, and the HTML suggestions area. They’re the three areas that if you keep an eye on those if you’ve got problems, they’ll probably pop up there first.

Darren: Let’s keep moving through these problems and mistakes that bloggers have, number three.

Jim: Optimizing URL structure. I did this recently with a blogger. She was ranking number nine for her key phrase. Once we did this, she went to number two overnight, and now she’s number one. Basically, all this is, is a lot of sites will have the permalinks out of WordPress, where they’ll have either a date in the middle of the URL or in the case of this blogger I was talking about, she had I think it was a date, she may have had something else in there as well. Basically, by changing that permalink structure, so it’s just domain name/post name, it greatly increased her rankings.

The reason behind this is Google’s trying to make things really simple and easy for people to understand, so if you’ve got a really long, convoluted URL, it’s probably going to show a simpler URL on another site above you. If you get those simple URLs fixed, once you do that, you do have to go and actually change all the internal links on your site, so they match the new URL structure. That can be a bit daunting if you’re not up to that. You might want to get a developer involved in that side of things, but it does have a big impact. One of the things that Google is all about is making it easy and fast for people to access the content that they want. If they can’t understand your URL, they’re less likely to click on it.

Darren: We’ve certainly got this problem at the moment on problogger.net. I think we’ve got the date in there. I know some bloggers often have the category in there as well, which just lengthens it again. There are all other kinds of things that WordPress allows you just to get in there. I think you can actually have an author name as well and some of that type of stuff.

Really, you want to just have it set up so that it pulls in the title. Yoast allows you to chop out extra little words like ‘a’ and ‘and’ some of those sorts of words as well, so you might want to check that option with Yoast. Can you just, again, give us that warning, if you change this is it going to go and change all your archives in WordPress?

Jim: Yeah. It’s not going to change the links on the page. They will have to be redirected or changed.

Darren: What’s the redirect that they want to be able to set up there? What number is it?

Jim: It’s a 301. With SEO, you never use anything else except for a 301 redirection. That’s known as a permanent redirection.

Darren: Let’s keep moving through. There’s an opportunity for our readers to ask questions of clarification in our show notes today, so I might flick some of those questions to Jim if they come in. If you do want some further clarification on any of this, let me know and I’ll pass them on to Jim. Let’s get on to number four.

Jim: Number four is just a really good post structure. A good SEO is a good document structure. What I mean by that—both ProBlogger and DPS did this quite well—is your page title, which is probably the most important thing as far as Google is concerned on the page because it tells us what the post is about.

For most WordPress users that will simply be the name of the post. What you want to happen is that page titles to also be the URL of the post and you also want it to be a heading 1 at the top of the page. Depending on the theme that you’re using and maybe the framework that you’re using, when you create a post you want the title of that post to be the page title, but also to be a heading 1 at the top of the page on that post. So, it’s in the page title, it’s in the URL, and it’s a heading 1 on the top of the page.

Most bloggers are not using that heading structure properly. In your editor, when you’re writing a post, you’ve got the drop-down box which will allow you to do a heading 1, heading 2, heading 3, you should use them as they’re designed to be used. Heading 1, it’s obviously the most important thing, heading 2 is a subheading of the heading 1, and h3 is a subheading of heading 2. If you use those properly, it’s good document structure and it tells Google what the content following is about.

The same applies to file names of images, for instance. One of the things that Google recommends is that be descriptive with your file names. What they’re actually saying there is use your keywords in your file names; don’t just name a photograph image023.jpeg, call it photographofmydog.jpeg or whatever it is. Explain to someone who might be vision-impaired and might be using a screen reader, let them know what that image is about because that’s basically Google as well.

Darren: Excellent. This relates to one of the questions I get asked a bit and Nathan actually submitted this question. He said, “What is keyword stuffing and at what point does a post become stuffed?”

Jim: It’s a very good question. I don’t tend to worry about necessarily keyword stuffing. I always look at it from the reader’s perspective. If you can use a keyword and it’s good for the reader, it helps the reader then do it; if it doesn’t then don’t use it. Some weeks, I’ll write a blog post and every week, I try to get relevant keywords in my titles. Sometimes, I want to get a keyword in there but it just doesn’t make sense, it just doesn’t read well, so you don’t do it. It’s about having that balance between signposting everything well for the machines like Google but also making sure that it is a good read.

Darren: The age-old advice of write for humans not machines really is key there.

Jim: Yeah, and the only difference I would say to that is—I’ve had this argument a lot with PR people and all sorts of people over the years—think of search, your search headings, your search titles and those sorts of things. Make them as specific as you can be to the person doing that search. If you try to be too cute with creative headlines, you may not get as much search traffic off that because you may not be having your keywords in your creative headlines.

I tend to use those creative, eye-catching, link-baity type headlines more for email subject headers or tweets or whatever it might be to encourage people to click. But when you’re in search, they’re actually looking for the thing that they’ve just typed in. They want to see an exact match to that. Sometimes it’s a bit of linguistic gymnastics to get that right.

Darren: No one’s ever going to go to Google and search for “you’ll never believe what happens when this elephant meets this cat.” That’s good for Facebook (maybe; that’s debatable in itself), but you want to say “cat meets elephant” or you want to put yourself in the shoes of whoever’s doing that search. That might be not the best example.

Jim: No, but that’s exactly right. This blogger I was talking about recently wanted to rank for healthy Thermomix recipes, but she didn’t have the word Thermomix anywhere on her site. I said, “Well, we’re going to talk about […],” and subsequently she went number one for that, but you use your keywords.

Darren: Number five, I think you said you had five.

Jim: Yeah. This is a really good technique, and I know you’ve talked about things like sneeze pages or series of posts and those sorts of things, and that’s actually really good for SEO. One of the things that helps a post rank is not only backlinks from other sites that you may have shared it to but just links within your own site, so getting that internal linking structure optimized so that the post that you write ranks for what you want it to rank for.

One of the things that you can do there is either use a sneeze page to link to other pieces of content (and that will help Google understand that it’s an important post on your site), but also you could write a series, you could write parts one, two, and three and then link them all together over a course of a week or two weeks or however you want to do it.

By writing a series, it allows you to link like pieces of content together, and Google can see the depth there. It’s more for the readers to come back later, and they can see that there’s another two posts that they should be reading as well. So that’s really, really helpful to do.

Darren: It’s good for the reader as well. It’s good for the user experience. The more pages that they view once they’re on your site, the more sticky your site is, the better your brand is in their mind. It’s good on both fronts there, both the machines and for the humans as well. They’re great starting points. I think particularly those starting out with SEO, there are five really actionable things that you can be doing on your blog. I’ve got a ton of questions if you’ve got time to answer a few.

Jim: Yeah.

Darren: Excellent. Amanda asked, “Should I invest my money in buying SEO tools like those offered by,” and she’s named a few, “Moz, SEMrush,” that type of tool. Do you think that’s useful for a blogger, particularly in their early days or is that something that’s a bit more advanced?

Jim: I would say that’s more advanced and when you’ve got a much larger blog and maybe you’re across lots of different content. One of the things I think you should buy and get used to if you’re thinking about buying tools for SEO would be Screaming Frog. That’s probably the best SEO tool out there. What that does, it’s a robot basically that crawls your site similar to the way that Google would and it shows you all the problems and errors and just displays things really, really well for you.

Those other the ones that you’ve mentioned, I think SEMrush, if you’re really advanced you’re really looking to find out what’s maybe your competitors are doing or you’re really look them to find out more about who’s doing more advertising in a certain niche, SEMrush is awesome for that.

The Moz products are great for people starting out. I know a lot of people use the domain authority information from there (which is quite handy), and also some of the backlinking tools to find out who’s linking to you and those sorts of things, but Screaming Frog would be a must.

Darren: Okay, that’s Screaming Frog. I’d probably recommend the other ones I’ve used myself and found for an intermediate level if you’ve done the five things that Jim’s already talked about and you want to take it up a notch, particularly if you’re doing research into keywords and monitoring of those keywords and how your ranking, that can be quite helpful.

Crystal asks (and you’ve already mentioned Yoast, “Is using Yoast plugin enough or am I using a big SEO element that I need to add in somehow?” Maybe you’ve answered that with that last question as well?

Jim: Yeah. With all the tools, they’re not going to all of a sudden, get you ranking number one or anything like that. Anyone can wield a hammer; it depends on how good you are with it to what you end up with. The main thing I would emphasize about Yoast is that a lot of bloggers are focused on the post-level tools that Yoast provides, which are great, but they really need to look at the SEO settings of Yoast and get those configured properly.

Darren: Karen would like to know some numbers to aim for. I know this is always a hard question to answer, but she writes, “A lot of SEO advice out there but nothing to measure against if you’re doing it right. For instance, if someone’s putting out a blog post per week and following SEO advice, what sort of numbers should they see?” She does say that it will be for different industries, but do you have any advice there in terms of measuring the success, I guess? Obviously, you want to get a higher ranking in Google, but is there something else we should be looking for there?

Jim: I’d be looking at the key phrases that you’re focusing on and getting an idea of the search volume for those phrases, then you can get an idea of the target that’s in front of you. The Google Keyword Planner is a great tool for doing that, for getting the keywords out and the volumes of those keywords. There’s also a tool in the Google Search Console called Search Analytics. It will tell you what you’re actually ranking for or what people are typing in and when your site comes up for those phrases. A lot of people don’t even know that that’s there.

If you’re already on page two or page three for the key phrase that you’re ranking on, you can get some really accurate numbers out of Search Analytics in the Google Search Console, which will tell you the volume numbers. Then you can decide, of the 5 phrases I want to rank for, each gets 1000 searches a month. If I can get to 2 or three, I might get 20% of those clicks. That’s the way you work it out. Obviously, monitor what’s going on in Google Analytics so that you can see what traffic is coming from search. That’s the way we monitor it.

Darren: While we’re talking about keywords, how many would you target with a typical blog and how many would you target on a blog post is one question that I had.

Jim: On a blog post, usually, I only go for one.

Darren: One word or a phrase?

Jim: No, one phrase for a blog post. For a site, especially if you’re a blogger, it’s difficult if you’re trying to talk to a lot of different buyer personas on your blog because they’re all going to be typing in different things to Google, so that becomes difficult. It’s also difficult if you’re across very, very different subject matter on your blog, so the more focus that you can have on your blog.

To give you an idea, for a client that might be selling outdoor furniture, we’ll target outdoor furniture, antique furniture, and concrete tables, and all sorts of things around that. You start with the one that’s going to bring in the most traffic and convert the best. A real estate agent doesn’t want to rank for real estate, it’s going to take too long, and they’re not going to get any business out of it. They’re better off focusing on a three-bedroom home Bundoora or something like that. 

Keep your keywords focused. Blog posts, you’re only going to be aiming for one phrase, you’ll end up rate ranking for a heap of others. One keyword, if you focus on that, get ranked for it. You might rank for fifty variations of that and that’s the thing to remember. I try to monitor as many key phrases as I can because it gives me more information about what’s happening with my site and how Google thinks about the site. Go for the big phrases that you can rank quickly for and that will convert well.

Darren: Sally asked a question that I hear a lot of bloggers with this sentiment, and they’re probably all stopped listening by now. Her question is, “How much is on-page factors like getting keywords in your posts, image tags, headings, apart from ranking and how much is really out of my control? Is it really worth all the hard work of doing the on-page stuff because it’s more about the links coming in?”

Jim: Here’s the great thing about bloggers, because they’re already doing the audience building stuff, once you get all this stuff right, your rankings will actually go through the roof. If you get this stuff right as a blogger, provided you post on a regular basis, you’re active in your communities and all those sorts of things, Google loves people that build an audience.

I saw this with a few blogger sites I worked on last year. We went and fixed these things and all the results just went through the roof. That was because they were already building their community. To me, it’s almost criminal that you’re doing all this hard work but there’s all this benefit you could be getting really, really quickly if you just went and did these five things. It’s really, really worth it.

Darren: It really can be the difference between your blog being seen and not and it can happen relatively quickly, like Vanessa, my wife, started blogging. In three months after she started blogging, she was ranking for a fairly highly searched-for term around Christmas. She was getting 2000 or 3000 visitors a day from this thing, and she’d only really published probably about 15 posts on her blog at that time. It didn’t have many links coming, I don’t know how it happened really. I didn’t link to the post, no one was linking to it. I don’t know whether it is getting quicker potentially. Do you have a view on that?

Jim: Yeah, I do. Google’s looking at popularity the way that they used to look at backlinks. The idea of a backlink was that it was a vote for your webpage, so if one web page linked to your web page, Google would consider that a vote for your page. That was the thing that made Google a very different search engine to all the others at the time, and they all disappeared and Google won the war.

Over the years, SEOs have gained that and basically mucked it up for everyone and so Google’s been increasingly nailing down on people who are trying to scam it by buying backlinks. In fact, as I talk, we’re waiting for a Penguin Update, which was meant to come last year, we’re still not getting it this year. The Penguin Update is to punish people who are buying backlinks.

I think popularity might be the new backlink, so Google’s looking at what people are saying about you in the various areas that you play, they’re looking at the traffic. I’ve shown that when your site is busier, Google is more likely to come in with the Googlebot and look around. We’ve seen that with a number of different sites that when they’re busiest days of the week, that’s when the Googlebot comes in and has a look and calls the site.

I think popularity is replacing the old backlinks. That’s possibly what happened to Vanessa. If a lot of people saw her post, were talking about it, and came to the site to look at it, Google would’ve seen that as well.

Darren: Another factor I wonder about on that particular post was it was quite long and I know time on site is one factor that seems to be helping on some bloggers, I’ve certainly noticed some of our longer-form content ranking better than it had in the past. There’s probably a few reasons there, but time on site might be one. This relates to another question we had from Juanita. Is there any value for SEO in getting links from social media or is there any indirect benefit?

Jim: I think there’s an indirect benefit, but that’s not the reason I think you should be doing it. Obviously, you should be doing it to get people to your site and getting people on your lists and all those sorts of things. The side-effect of that is that Google will love you for it.

Darren: Bryan asked another related question, “Should I invest any time into getting links from other blogs and sites or would you just invest that time into creating great content and engaging on social media?”

Jim: I would probably do the latter. What we’re trying to do here is build an audience. If you think you can do that better by writing guest posts and those sorts of things, do that. Some people feel more adept at getting into Facebook groups or on Instagram and those sorts of things. Just play where your audience is, where the buyer personas are and get people back to your site. Don’t worry too much about the links and things, just focus on the reader.

Darren: Grant asks, “Another site is scraping my content on their blog and I can’t get them to stop their ranking above me for the same content. What can I do other than issue them a DMCA notice?” Any thoughts?

Jim: Just issue them a DMCA notice. At least that’s what I would do. It’s going to be the quickest and easiest way to fix that.

Darren: Yeah. No problem. I’ve got a couple of questions around switching platforms. One question that came in, “Do you have any tips from moving from Blogger to WordPress? We do certainly switch quite a bit among our audience. I’ve been blogging for six years on that Blogger platform and want to move to WordPress. Should I repost old posts on my new blog? Should I point people from my old blog to my new? Should I erase and restart?” It sounds like she’s got quite a big archive there. Any suggestions?

Jim: I’ve just actually done this for a big client. There’s a conference every year, a big retailer’s conference. The way to do it is call the change of address. You do it through the Google Search Console. It sounds like when you’re coming from Blogger to WordPress, possibly changing domain names. Basically, what has to happen, I don’t know whether you can do this as a Blogger, but you’ll have to redirect every post to the new equivalent post on the new WordPress site.

The process is, get the new WordPress site up and running and populate it with your new content. Then you can go back to the old Blogger site and redirect every post to the new WordPress site. Then you go into the Google Search Console and you’ve got to have both of those sites set-up in Google Search Console. Look for what’s called change of address under the settings in the Google Search Console. Then you can say to Google, “I’m moving this Blogger site to this WordPress site.” Over time, Google will then make sure all the traffic from your old site goes to your new site.

You also don’t have to change Google Analytics for that either. You can just use the same Google Analytics account so you won’t lose any data. […] We have to go from .net to .com.

Darren: Don’t let this stop you. It sounds a bit complicated and it is a little bit overwhelming. I’ve done it twice now. It works and it does take a little time for Google to catch up. Personally, getting off Blogger into WordPress (for me) was probably one of the best things I’ve ever done. It’s certainly the best tool decision I’ve ever made. I don’t think you’ll regret it.

Another question from the same person, “I’ve heard domains don’t rank until they’re a year old. What should we realistically expect time-wise from building SEO with a new domain?”

Jim: No. That’s a myth. Especially when you’re doing a change of address because you’ll inherit the age off the old domain. It’s a brand new domain, you can still rank a lot quicker, you’re just going to be incredibly popular all of a sudden. You got to work out a way to do that. If you do the change of address, the new site will inherit all the love of the old site.

Darren: Okay. One last question for today. I’m just seeing a whole heap more come in, so we might have to do part two at some stage in the future. If you do have questions for Jim, please pop them in the comments and I’ll […] this down to do another podcast at some point. “Are there any SEO issues with the host that you choose? Are some hosts better than others from an SEO perspective? Anything you need to weigh up in choosing that host?”

Jim: Yeah, look for speed. I didn’t get into speed today. Speed is one of the biggest things that can give you a big jump. If your site is currently slow, getting it faster would really help a lot. You can have a look in the Google Search Console once again under crawl and look under crawl stats in the Google Search Console and have a look at the page load time that Google’s telling you. You need to be under a second.

Now, a lot of that can be to do with the way that your website is built, to the speed. Another factor could be your hosting company itself; they might be really slow. Go and have a look at the page load times. There’s a number of different awesome web posts out there for WordPress sites. Getting that right, getting the best and fastest possible site you can have. If it’s good for the user (which will be), it’s great for Google.

Darren: “Are there any issues,” this person asked, “around dedicated servers versus shared servers, and you sharing with dubious sites?”

Jim: Google just recently said no, that’s not a factor, but you don’t want to be an underpowered server, basically. If you’re on a server with 1000 other sites, and it’s not state of the art, using all the various load balancing, Cloudflare, and all these wonderful […] things we hear of, then you’re going to have a problem.

You can also look at the PageSpeed tool, just google PageSpeed tool from Google and that will tell you why your pages are slow. Get one that talks about speed. WordPress, one of the ones that we use is WP Engine, which is a dedicated WordPress hosting platform, but there’s a bunch of others out there as well.

Darren: Great. Thanks so much for your time today, Jim. Where can our listeners find more from you?

Jim: They can find us at stewartmedia.com.au. We’ve got a blogger product coming out soon which, if you want to find out about that, just go to bloggersseo.com.

Darren: Excellent. We’ll certainly update our readers and listeners once that comes out. I think I’m allowed to announce that you’re involved this year at our ProBlogger event again in some capacity as a speaker, I hope. If I’m not allowed, Lani will tell me to cut this bit out of the podcast.

Jim: Yes. I’m very excited to come back in and do it again. I love the conference.

Darren: It has been good to have you involved in the past. I do appreciate the time that you have given to our listeners today. Thanks very much. We might wrap it up with that.

Jim: Thanks, Darren. I really appreciate it. I love your work.

Darren: I hope you found that interview with Jim Stewart to be useful to you. Again, you can find today’s show notes with links to all of the tools and resources that were mentioned at problogger.com/podcast/94. Yes, I can confirm that Jim is a speaker at this year’s ProBlogger event. I had to quickly get on Slack and ask Lani who’s heading up the event this year, but if you head over to probloggerevents.com, you’ll find a little bit more information about that event.

Tickets do go on sale at the end of April. I would love to see you there. It is in Australia though. There’s a bit of an airfare involved for some of you, but if you can get out here, we’d love to have you involved, and I’ll certainly give you more information about that event in the next little while.

The last thing I’ll say is that there was a lot of information in today’s show. While we do summarize some of it and give you links in the show notes, it might be one that you need to maybe make a note of and come back to over time. I would highly recommend that you go through those five mistakes that bloggers make and have a look and see whether you’re making them. You might not have even been aware of some of the stuff that Jim worked through, but eliminate those mistakes if they are happening on your blog, and do something about it.

Do that test that Jim mentioned in point one. Look at some of your old posts and look at whether the structure of your posts is working. Sign up for the Google Search Console and think about how you can interlink the posts on your site. I think those five things that Jim worked through today could really have a big impact upon your blogging, and I hope they do. Please let us know if you’ve got any further questions, or comments, or suggestions on tools over at the show notes. Again, they’re at problogger.com/podcast/94.

If you have any additional SEO questions for Jim, please feel free to leave them in the comments.

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Do you want to create content that lives on in th ememories of those who read it? If so – this episode is just for you.

This episode is brought to you by the ProBlogger Training Event. Sign up to be notified when tickets go on sale here. Tickets go on sale 27 April 2016.

I get to meet a lot of ProBlogger readers at conferences and often when I meet one who has been reading for a while I ask them if there’s a blog post or podcast that we’ve published that stands out in their memory.

It struck me recently that a number of blog posts get mentioned more than others and it got me wondering why?

In this new episode (which you can listen to above or on iTunes or Stitcher) I share 7 types of blog posts that seem to create memories in your blog readers.

We talk about:

Good day and welcome to episode 93 of the ProBlogger podcast. My name is Darren Rowse and I’m the blogger behind ProBlogger. Today’s podcast, I want to talk about how to create content that lives on in the memories of your readers. It’s a special topic content because it helps to build your brand and it helps to build a personal connection with your audience. Today’s show notes are at problogger.com/podcast/93. I can’t believe we’re at 93 already, almost at a 100. 

Today’s podcast is actually brought to you by the ProBlogger event. It’s my own event. We’ve been running it now for, I think this is now our seventh year. Those of you in Australia, many of you have been along to that event. Last year we had 750 bloggers and speakers. We did have quite a few people fly in from around the world, some of our speakers but also a few attendees.

So if you are overseas, we do welcome you at this event, and we hope to try and arrange some sort of a virtual pass for you this year if you can’t make it live. But if you are in Australia or if you’re willing to come—it’s a great place to come—the event is on the 9th–10th of September this year. Tickets are going on sale on my birthday, 27th of April, so just a few weeks away now.

You can subscribe to get updates about our speakers which we’ll be starting to announce over the next week or so, and our schedule. You can get those tickets over at probloggerevents.com. We’ll link to that in the show notes. There’s also a Facebook group if you want to do a search on Facebook for attendees of that event. So we do limit that just to Australians or people willing to come out to the event in Australia. It’s purely for an event kind of discussion, so it’s not a general work for everyone.

Okay, let’s get into today’s show.

Speaking of events and conferences, I do get to go to quite a few of them. I’ve got one coming up next week, actually, in Sydney. One of the things I love about going to events to speak is I get to meet ProBlogger readers, and that’s a great opportunity, (1) because you get to learn who’s reading your blog and that enables you to serve them better, but (2) I like to ask them questions.

I don’t ask them all questions, but one of the questions I do like to ask occasionally to really engage readers, people who I get to sense have been reading for a while, is if there’s any blog posts that we’ve produced that lived on in their memory, any specific posts. It’s a great question to ask a reader because you find out what’s living in on in their memory. This is often the kind of stuff that they would describe as your brand. It gives you all kinds of clues as to how people see you. It’s really interesting that it’s very rare when I ask that question for anyone to mention any of the tutorials that I’ve published.

This is a bit frustrating in some ways because 99% of the content on ProBlogger and Digital Photography School is how-to tutorials. Now, I’m not saying that no one’s reading them, I’m not saying they’re not useful for the people, but those aren’t the type of posts that people mentioned when I asked what content do you remember. There’s a whole different kind of content that people remember.

Now to me, this is not an excuse to give up my how-to content because I think that still has an impact. But I think it’s really important to trickle into that how-to content. Some of these are the types of posts that live on in the mind because that type of content creates a memory in your reader or your listeners of your podcast, and it’s what people tell other people about you. When someone says I met Darren Rowse they don’t say “He wrote this great post about SEO or WordPress plugins.” They tell something else. It’s these types of posts that they often recount in their sharing.

So I’ve come up with a list of seven types of posts that I’ve noticed that people seem to remember. I think these are really important types of posts because they help you to make a connection with your readers on a deeper level. They create a memory for them, so let’s go through these. I’m not going to take a whole heap of time. I’ll give you a few examples of each one as well.

The first type of post that people always say is any kind of story post. Stories live on in people’s memories. The number one post that people remember is a post I wrote in 2009. It’s now seven years later, but people always tell me about this post. I think I called it, The Number One Reason My Blogging Grew Into A Business. It’s not a technical post, it’s not a how-to post. It’s me telling a story of when my wife gave me a six-month ultimatum to either get full-time as a blogger or get a real job, and it’s me telling that story.

Now, it wasn’t really an ultimatum, although I did tell my wife, Vanessa, is not really an ultimatum-type person, but it’s the story, and it’s the story that people remember. I tell that story in the book that I wrote, the ProBlogger book as well, and that is a section of the book that people always tell me that they remember from the book. Stories build connections. They build memories. People relate to stories, so stories are really important to tell on your blog. Will they be your stories or other people’s stories?

It’s interesting a few episodes ago I told the story of the Cavanagh brothers, the gold miners. A number of people shot me emails straight after that episode and said that they felt more impacted by that episode than a whole heap of other ones, and I think that’s because I told the story. Now, that story wasn’t my personal story, but it connected with some people. Stories do that. So, the number one type of post that you might want to weave into your tutorials, your news, or your other sort of head-orientated post are heartfelt stories.

Number two is playful posts, so posts that kind of surprise people a little, they might use humor, or they might be written in a different voice. A good example of this that people often tell me about is another post that I wrote back in 2007. This is now nine-year old this post, but it’s a post that I wrote in the voice of my son, who I think at the time was two or three. It was called, Five things you should know about my dad, the ProBlogger.

I wrote the post. He was two, but I wrote it in his voice. Because I never written in the third person before and because I included a cute picture of him poking his head out above my laptop computer, it stood out in people’s minds. And it did (I hope) contains some useful information about blogging, but because it was written in a different way, it was playful. It created a memory. It also created a personal connection. I revealed something of myself and my family in that as well. So playful posts, surprising posts can work quite well.

Another type of playful post that I used to do on ProBlogger quite a bit were April Fool’s Day jokes, where on one year, I announced that Google had bought ProBlogger to extend their blogger.com brand and it was for professional bloggers. Because I’m in Australia and April Fool’s comes 12 hours earlier than a lot of you get it, we sucked a lot of people in. Those are the playful, funny, joking kind of posts that can do quite well.

Of course, you’d want to be a little bit careful about how playful you get. I still get people today who congratulate me for selling my blog to Google and I have to break it to them that it was an April Fool’s joke that’s now lasted for seven years.

So the third type of post that you might want to weave in—it helps to create memories—is more emotive posts. Posts that have some sort of emotion attached to them. Now, you want to be a little bit careful here about perhaps getting too emotional on your blog if you’ve got a really hardcore business blog, but do allow your emotion to come into them.

Now I’ll give you some examples of these in the show notes as well, but three of the examples of that I’ll give are open letters that I wrote to Youtube once I got kicked out of Youtube. One of my posts got deleted (I think it was) and I got banned from Youtube. So, I wrote an open letter to Youtube on ProBlogger. I wrote an open letter to the Amazon Associates Program when they changed one of their policies once. And I wrote another open letter to AdSense way back in 2008 when they changed one of their policies.

These are the posts where (again) written in a different voice, are a bit playful. They were also me putting my heart out to these big corporations. Interestingly, I heard in each of those three cases, that those posts not only connected with my readers, they showed that I did get a bit fired up at times, but they also got onto the attention of people at Google, for Youtube; Amazon for the Amazon’s Affiliate Program; and AdSense at Google again. Each of those open letters got through to the people I was trying to write to. And because I wrote to them in a kind of critical way, I wrote to them about things I didn’t like but I did it in a playful way. I was able to bring in some emotion, but I also brought in a bit of humor.

One of them was a love letter to AdSense about how I love them, but this change they were doing was impacting me. It was received very well. In a couple of the cases, they changed their policies back again. Now, that was partly perhaps because I had a big readership. But it also (I think) was because I expressed my opinion, I expressed my emotion, but I did it in a respectful, humorous way. It had an impact.

I actually heard that the open letter or the love letter that I wrote to AdSense back in 2008 actually got read at one of Google’s open meetings for their employees in front of Larry Page and some of the other big-wigs at Google. You never quite know where those sorts of posts are going to go, but they do create memories. Again, they’re the three posts, another three posts that people do remember from eight or nine years ago.

We’ve covered stories, we’ve covered playful posts, we’ve covered emotive posts. The fourth type is inspirational posts. Another post that people mention to me all the time is when I wrote back in 2013 on ProBlogger, and it was 12 blogging income streams.

Now, that kind of sounds a little bit dry, it sounds a little bit boring, sounds a little bit technical, but I told it as a story. I also tried to bring some inspiration to it. I tried to tell how life was before, I tried to tell about the first few dollars I was making, about how it grew into a part-time job, and then it gradually grew to a point where I was able to be a full-time blogger and then beyond.

It’s amazing how these people tell me that that post is one that they remember because it showed them that I had humble beginnings, that I was just like them when I started, I was earning just a few cents a day (if anything) in the early days. That gave them a sense that they could do it, too, because it was a similar journey. They could find themselves on that journey. They weren’t just being presented with, “I make this much money.” They were being presented with the fact that, in the early days, I didn’t really make a lot, and they can connect with that. So, inspiration is really important.

Another guest post that we’ve published on ProBlogger is from John Murray. Many of you have read this post because it’s one of the most-read posts on ProBlogger. He wrote How to quit your job and move to paradise and get paid to change the world. John tells his story from a wheelchair and using word-recognition software because he’s unable to type. He was able to build a business through blogging. Again, that’s an inspirational post. It’s also a story post. You can see he’s […] between some of these types of posts.

So number four is inspirational posts. Actually show people not just the end result, but take them on the journey, give them an opportunity to connect with the early stages and where they’re at at the moment, but show them what could be. Paint a picture of how things could be for them as well. Those types of posts can work quite well.

Now, with all of this, you need to be a bit careful. You don’t want to manipulate people, you don’t want to manipulate their emotions. You want to be realistic. There’s plenty of posts on ProBlogger where I try and say not everyone is going to have that dream come true moment. Being balanced with the inspiration but the reality as well is really important.

The fifth type of post that seems to create memories for people are opinion posts. Now, I’ve already given you some examples of those, particularly those emotive posts, the open letters that I wrote, they contain my opinions. One of the reasons why I think they stood out from a lot of the content that we produce on ProBlogger (which perhaps is a little bit more how-to) is that they did have some strong opinions in them as well.

Opinions are one of the things that can really differentiate your content from everyone else’s because your opinion is quite different to anyone else’s as well. You do want to be aware that when you do share your opinion, you get opinions shared back at you though. Be willing to have a dialogue, be willing to have some debate, and to perhaps moderate some of those discussions. But opinion posts can create those memories.

The sixth type of post—I’ve kind of given you some examples of this one already—is where posts get a little bit more personal. Anything that shows a little bit more of your own journey and perhaps some behind the scenes of your life. Now, you want to be a little bit careful here because you want to have some boundaries around your family. You want to have some boundaries around personal security and some of those types of things, so be careful about how much you share. But when it’s appropriate, I think it’s good to just give people a little bit of an insight.

There’s a couple of posts on ProBlogger, not many but a couple of posts where I talk about family. There’s a post I was sharing in the show notes where I wrote some tips on getting the family-blogging balance right. And I shared a little bit of my own personal life in that post. 

Another example of this is back in episode 38 of this podcast. I talked about my own health journey and I talked about how my weight kind of got a bit out of control and shared how I wasn’t looking after myself on a health perspective, but also I guess my mental health and the way I was inspiring myself.

I shared quite personally in that type of post, and it was amazing how the people have come up and said that that post is the one that they remember. How I wrote a post about it, I did a podcast about it, and that really had an impact on a lot of people and it got shared around a lot as well. I think it’s because I sort of stepped back from the normal type of post that I was doing, did something slightly different in terms of topic (although I did bring it back to blogging), and it had an impact, it created a memory.

The seventh type of post—it kind of relates to the sixth one as well, the personal post—is vulnerable posts. So posts about failure, posts about the problems that you have as well. We’ve done this in a number of ways. One example is back in 2011 where we sent an email out to the wrong list. We sent an email that was supposed to go to about a hundred people up to about a million people. Big mistake.

It was something that we panicked about as a company, we didn’t really know what to do, and we tried to fix it the best we could. Then I shared that story on ProBlogger with Shayne Tilley, who was working with me at the time. That post created a whole heap of memories as well because it did contain some practical information. It contains some tips on how to avoid doing that. It was a story, but it was also vulnerable. It showed that we make mistakes, we stuff up, we fail as well.

I think by sharing those types of posts, you not only show people that you know what you’re talking about. You become a little bit more relatable, and you’re making more of a personal connection because everyone makes those kinds of mistakes. You build trust with people as well, which is kind of ironic. Before I published that post, I was like, “Is this going to show my audience that I don’t know what I’m talking about? Is this going to show my audience that they shouldn’t trust me with their email address?” Maybe some people did read it that way, but I actually think that by telling that story, I showed my audience that I trusted them.

I love that quote from Bob Berg, “People do business with people that they know, like, and trust.” It’s true, but I also think people also do business with people who know, like, and trust them. So it’s a flip side. When you can show your readers that you trust them with something personal, with something vulnerable, you’re actually building a deeper connection with them. With a lot of people, that is going to be the difference between them seeing you as a person and seeing you as a brand. And seeing that you are real and making a connection with you. That’s a very powerful thing.

Again, I’m not telling you to write these types of posts so you can manipulate your readers. I’m telling you this so that you can build a connection with your readers. That you can shape your brand in the way it is more heartfelt. There’s nothing wrong with content that aims to impact the head, but you also need to create these types of content that makes a personal connection with your audience as well. That’s a very powerful thing. These are the types of posts that people remember. These are the types of posts that shape your brand, these are the types of posts that people will share with other people when they talk about you.

I hope this has been helpful. I encourage you this week to take one of those types of posts. Either a story post, a playful post, an emotive post, an inspirational post, an opinion post, a personal post, or a vulnerable post, or some combination of those, and include that on your blog this week. Once you’ve done it, I’d love you to share with us over at problogger.com/podcast/93. Share a link to your post, I’d love to see what this podcast inspires you to go away and write. I’d love to read that post and I’m sure other readers of this podcast would like to do that as well. You’ll find links to all of those posts that I’ve mentioned as examples on the show notes at problogger.com/podcast/93.

Thanks for listening and I’ll chat with you in a few days time in episode 94.

I really hope this episode stimulates some ideas for future blog posts and would love for you to share the posts that you write as a result of it. Please take the challenge of writing one and leave a comment below with a link to it so we can check it out.

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If on publishing a blog post you immediately start thinking about the next – this episode is for you.

Most of us spend a lot of time on the content we publish but if we don’t take a few simple steps AFTER publishing much of that hard work will be wasted.

This week I received a question from Susan – a long term listener of the podcast. She asked:

Darren, thanks for your podcasts so far. I have a question that I hope you might have some insight on. I’ve been working hard on my blogging workflow after hearing your podcasts about bloggers block.

I feel like my idea generation is going well and that the writing and completion phases are great but I can’t help but wonder if there is more that I should be doing after I hit publish and wonder if you could give me some tips into what I should be doing before I move on to writing the next post.

This is a great question and one I wanted to dive into with a podcast. Before I do you might like to listen to the series on Beating Bloggers Block that Susan mentions where we discuss how to come up with post ideas, give some tips on getting into the writing flow and talk about how to get your posts polished and published.

In this new episode (which you can listen to above or on iTunes or Stitcher) I want to suggest 5 things that you should do AFTER you hit publish on your next blog post to help your post to get seen and read by more people and to help draw those readers into your blog and to start to engage with you.

In this episode I share tips on:

I mentioned a few tools in this episode (also check out my 19 Blogging Tools Episode)

As promised – here are some articles we’ve published on the ProBlogger blog and a podcast that I previously recorded that go deeper into some of what I covered in this episode.

This is a great question from Susan and I’ve got five things that I would encourage you to consider doing as you hit publish on every blog post. You can find today’s show notes where I will have a summary of the points at problogger.com/podcast/92.

I love that question that I just read from Susan. She actually mentioned there a previous series of podcasts that we produced on three stages of creating great content for your blog and beating blogger’s block. They were episodes 84, 86, and 87. We walk through idea generation, writing great content, polishing, and completing that content.

These are all really important parts of producing great content, but Susan is so right in her question. The point of completing and hitting publish on a post is really just the start. What you do next can be the difference between people reading that post or not. It could also be the difference between people reading and then just leaving or are they making a decision to connect with you and ending up being a loyal reader. The day, the two days, the three days after you hit publish is a crucial time and it’s a time you should be working. It’s not such a time that you should be passive.

If you’re anything like me, you put a whole heap of time into writing your blog post. You ponder that topic, you pour your heart and soul into the writing, you obsess over choosing the right headline, and you put a lot of effort into polishing the post so that it looks its best and it reads well. You put all that time in but what happens next is really important.

For a lot of bloggers and for me, certainly in the old days, back in 2002, when I hit publish I then started moving on to the next post, but I think it’s really important to pause. Today, I want to suggest five things that you should at least consider doing after you hit publish on a post.

Now, some of these things you probably should already be thinking about as you’re getting ready to hit publish, so it’s not just hit publish and then do the things. You should probably already have some plans of workflows in place, but these are things that have become a part of the workflow that I have and I would encourage you to build into yours.

Let’s get into the five things. Firstly (this is probably the most obvious one, this is one that I think most bloggers automatically do or have at least some system to do) is to socialize the post for maximum effect.

Now, there’s a number of factors that will need to come into play here. We actually had some podcasts on designing a social media strategy for your blog, and we’ll link to them in the show notes, but a few factors to work through some questions to ask yourself.

Firstly, which social network is best for you. This will depend upon your style, how much time you have, where your readers are gathering—that’s probably the most important one—and the network that’s relevant to your type of content as well. Also, where there’s critical mass. You don’t want to be hanging out on the network when no one else is hanging out.

I don’t have a whole heap of time to go into great depths on those questions, but I will give you a link to read through on ProBlogger on how to choose which social network to be active on. What I will emphasize here is the key to developing a rhythm of sharing, and to think about how you get your post in front of those followers.

Now, there are some great tools and I actually mentioned some of these tools in the last episode. An episode where I went through 19 tools that I use in my blogging. Tools like CoSchedule can really be helpful here, MeetEdgar can be really helpful here. I think it’s probably really important as you publish your post—that’s what this podcast is about—to be automatically thinking, “Where should I be sharing that?” and, “At what intervals should I be sharing that?”

If you’re using a tool like MeetEdgar, get it into the library of tweets and updates that you’re going to do, so that that post not only gets tweeted out automatically when you post it and then it’s never tweeted again, but develop some workflow where you can highlight that post again in a few days time or in a week’s time or in a month’s time. That’s what I found is, in terms of the power of using MeetEdgar. For us, we use the two tools, MeetEdgar and CoSchedule. 

CoSchedule is where we share that post over the next few weeks, so we will use CoSchedule to get a tweet out there for example as soon as the post goes live. We also schedule a tweet for a day later, at a different time of day, and then we schedule a post to go up on CoSchedule as a tweet a week later, and then a month later. We know that it will be tweeted multiple times over that first month.

Then, we put it into MeetEdgar. We know that it won’t tweet out every month, but it will be tweeted out every couple of months. This extends the life of that post. It means that people are continuing to have it highlighted to them through social media. You want to develop some kind of workflow. The workflow we’ve got works for us, but you may want to work on your own.

Build some sort of a system, find the tool that’s right for you, and develop that as a workflow. We’ve worked out our workflow. It works well for us. We do the same thing for our Facebook account on ProBlogger. The post will go live on that within 24 hours of a post going up, and then it gets highlighted again a week later. Then, usually a month or two later, it will get highlighted again.

Again, find the tool that’s right for you and only develop this workflow for evergreen posts as well. You probably don’t want a news-oriented post being tweeted for the next three years, because it’s not relevant.

I often see people doing that, they just tweet every tweet again every month and that doesn’t work, but Evergreen posts, you want to do that. Socialize your post. Develop a system for that.

Always use images in your posts on social media. I’ve certainly noticed over the last couple of years since I started using images in my tweets, they get so much more in terms of likes and retweets and responses, same on Facebook, obviously on Pinterest images as well. I think it was Dan Zarrella found that tweets with images are 60% more likely to be retweeted. Make sure you got images in every post.

Socialize your post is the first thing. This is something that I think most bloggers do pretty automatically, but it might be worth it right now just taking a step back from the way that you do social and just asking yourself, “Is this something that I could do differently? Could I use one of these tools or something else to extend the life of the posts that I create?”

Maybe you put so much time and effort into those posts, you want them to be seen, you want to give them a chance to be read but also shared. Every time you share it gives the opportunity for other people to share it as well. That’s number one, socialize your posts for maximum effect.

The second thing that I would encourage you to do—this is something that we’ve started to build more and more into our post on ProBlogger, Digital Photography School—is to optimize your posts for search engine optimization, for SEO.

There really is no need to forget about Google and search engine optimization, I see a lot of bloggers say, “Well, I just let SEO look after itself.” Believe me, I understand it. SEO makes my head hurt and it’s something that I don’t really enjoy, but it’s something that you should really be paying some attention to.

Now, you don’t need to spend your whole day doing SEO. I know a lot of bloggers get into the nitty-gritty of that and trying to get links to that blog and all that kind of stuff. I don’t tend to spend a whole heap of time doing that, but what I do as I hit publish and just before I hit publish, is give my posts a once over and look at the title, look at the words that you’ve got in your permalink. Look at the keywords in your article, look at what keywords that are in your image tags.

It’s really important to choose good keywords for your posts and that’s something you should be thinking about as you write your post, but it’s well worth it as your post goes live, so just give it another once over. Going back and just tweaking the keywords that are used, particularly in headlines and your titles are really important.

Now, I will say I’m no expert in SEO and I’ve got someone coming on in this podcast in the next couple of episodes who is going to answer some of the most frequently asked questions that I get asked with SEO. I’d encourage you to tune in with that. In the meantime, in today’s show notes, there are a couple of links that I’ll include.

One post which we published on ProBlogger a year ago, from Rand Fishkin from Moz, is just a great post. We’ll give you some things to work on with your posts, without investing your whole life into SEO. It’s amazing what happens if you can raise your posts ranking in Google, even by one or two spots. That can significantly increase the amount of traffic that comes into your blog over the long haul. So number two, optimize your post for SEO.

The third one I want to focus on a little bit longer now and that is to repurpose your content or at least ask yourself, “Is this post that I have just published, is there an opportunity to repurpose this piece of content?” Now, repurposing content is a catchphrase that has been used, probably for the last two or three years and it gets talked about a whole heap.

I like Erin Everhart’s definition of repurposing content. She defines it as repacking one piece of content across many different media. Each time, you’re adding to it or taking away from it and making it unique from the source. The medium and the user who’ll be reading it.

The idea here is that you’re investing a whole heap of time into creating a post. What about if you could use some of that content in a different way, in a different medium? There are some definite benefits of repurposing your content but there are also some risks. I want to just really quickly look at the benefits and the risks of repurposing your content.

I want to say right up front, not every piece of content you publish should be repurposed and I’ll talk about why I say that in a moment, so just quickly the benefits. Firstly, it does enable you, hopefully, to reach more people on other mediums. If you take a blog post, produce a video, and put that on YouTube, that opens up not only the opportunity for people to find your blog from Google but also when people are searching on YouTube.

It does work. It significantly increases the potential reach for your ideas. It does, in some cases, help you rank higher in search engines. If you have different pieces of content all linking back to your blog post, it can help your blog posts to rank higher. It can increase the shareability of your ideas. It can deepen the impact upon your readers.

I love this quote from Seth Godin, “Delivering your message in different ways over time, not only increases the retention and impact, but it gives you the chance to describe what you’re doing from several different angles.” Being able to talk about that same idea in three different ways, as long as that content is presented in three different ways and it’s slightly different from each other, could actually be the difference between your reader understanding and acting on what you’re talking about or not.

If they hear in a blog post and they hear you talking about in a podcast, that might be the difference between them taking action or not. It can deepen the impact upon your readers and also can take a little bit of the pressure off. You can’t come up with a world-changing idea every single day of your life. I don’t think that’s possible. I certainly can’t and so to be able to take a world-changing idea and then to use that multiple times in different ways in different platforms over time, can take a little bit of the pressure off. You don’t have to keep coming up with fresh ideas every day.

On the flip side, there are some risks with repurposing content. I don’t really see many people talking about the risks. I think we really do need to because I think repurposing your content can be done very badly and it can be overdone.

If you have a blog post, it’s good, and then you repurpose in five different ways, but because you’re repurposing it for so many platforms, you don’t do any of those five ways well, it can actually hurt your brand. Polyproduce content—because you feel this pressure to reproduce it in lots of different ways—can hurt your brand. It can also become a bit formulaic.

This is one of the things that I’ve seen in a number of blogs that I’ve followed over the years says that you begin to see what’s coming. You see the blog post coming out. You know you’re going to be hit with a podcast about that exact same topic tomorrow. You know that there will be a SlideShare produced. You know there will be a YouTube video. You end up anticipating that.

Some of that whack of surprise is predictable, and that can hurt the brand as well. I much prefer a little bit of surprise, a little bit of randomness as well. It can actually become a bit of a quantity over quality thing, and it can also become a bit fluffy just hearing the same thing in the same way over time.

I think it’s really important when you do repurpose content, is to think about how you can bring some variety to that. You don’t want to just raid your blog post as a podcast, and then you don’t want to just use that podcast and put some slides over it for YouTube if you’re going to promote that content to the same people, because that’s going to get boring for people. That’s going to burn your readers out, by hitting them too many times with exactly the same stuff just presented in slightly different ways.

I want to read Erin’s definition again. I want you to hear what she’s saying. “Repackaging one piece of content across different media each time, you’re either adding to it, or you’re taking away from it. You’re making it unique for the source, the medium, and the user who’ll be reading it.” Here, what she’s saying there, there’s variety. Once we are repackaging maybe a central idea, it really has a much better impact if you are able to bring some variety to that in different ways. If you’re repeating the same idea 10 times to the same people in different ways, it can get tiring, so really be careful about that.

A few really quick tips on repurposing your content. Firstly, choose the content that you repurpose really carefully. I’ve already alluded to this above, but the selection of which content to repurpose is critical. You don’t want to repurpose every single piece of content that you produce. It has to be something that is evergreen, it should be something that’s a core idea, something that’s central to what you stand for, and it might be something that has already got some runs on the board.

Maybe watch for a day or two to see how your blog posts are being received. If one takes off, if one ‘s getting a lot of comments, if one ‘s getting a lot of shares, that’s an idea that people are resonating with. That might be a hint to you, that that’s a piece of content that you might want to repurpose. For me, I’m repurposing content that (1) is evergreen, (2) is a core idea, a core need for my readers, and something that has had some success already.

The second thing I’d encourage you to think about with repurposing content is to think really carefully about the medium. Not every idea lends itself to every different medium. Not every idea that starts as a blog post is going to be relevant for SlideShare. It’s not all going to be relevant for Periscope, it’s not going to be all relevant for a video. Think about the medium and don’t just produce every piece of content in 10 ways the same every time. Think about how you can bring some variety to that. That adds an element of surprise and delight even to some of your readers.

Some of the types of mediums that you might want to think about repurposing to SlideShare or OfficeStream are great for producing content as a slide deck. If you’ve got a 10-point blog post, you might turn that into 10 slides. Using a tool like SlideShare or OfficeStream to communicate those 10 points might work. At least a post does work quite well in a slide deck.

The good thing about having a slide deck is that then you could use that slide deck as the basis for other types of content as well. That could be then used in a video for YouTube or that could be used even in a Periscope. Some of my best periscopes have had slides that I’ve used as well. 

Other types of mediums that you might want to explore. Infographics are really great for presenting stats. They can actually be useful for presenting histories, or any kind of visual content as well, and you can use tools like Piktochart or  Visual.ly to create those infographics.

Instructographics are similar to infographics, but they’re more focused on presenting a how-to or a step-by-step process. It’s a visualization of a step-by-step or some blueprint.

Podcasts, obviously, take the core ideas of your post and then record yourself exploring them expanding upon them. A podcast is really great for having more of a conversation about the post that you’ve published. It might be actually useful to bring someone else in and to get their perspective on what you have written. I think that’s a really easy way to repurpose a blog post in many cases.

Interviews. Get someone in your niche to interview about the topic of your blog post. Seek a second opinion, seek a second point of view on the post that you’ve written.

Using screen capture videos. If your blog post talks people through a process that can be captured as a screen capture video. Then, you could record that and upload that to Youtube. You can use tools like Camtasia, Jing, Screener, ScreenFlow. I use ScreenFlow on my Mac to do that.

You might want to repurpose your ideas as a talking head video in a similar way to a podcast. It’s particularly useful if you’ve got some kind of visual that you might want to bring to that idea.

You might turn your blog post into a PDF download. A lot of bloggers now are doing that and this is something that we’re exploring for both of my blogs at the moment. Some of the readers on some of their posts want to take that post away, print it out, and use it in a different context. Offering that as a PDF, there’s a variety of tools Anthologize, Zinepal (I think) is one that we’ve used in the past, BlogBooker. These turn blog posts into PDFs.

You might repurpose that content to an ebook, or a report, or a white paper. You might repurpose it into some visual, some graphic that you could use for social sharing. Using a tool like Canva or PicMonkey, or even outsource that using a tool like Swiftly. There’s a whole heap of different ways that you can take those core ideas or take quotes from your posts and make an eye-catching graphic that can then be used to share that post on social media.

You could even take a post that’s doing really well and break it down into an autoresponder series, an email autoresponder series. A series of emails that walk people through a process. I think that’s a keyway. If you’ve got a post in your archives that’s performing really well, that’s a long meaty post, why don’t you rewrite that post as an autoresponder series and use that as an opt-in? It could become almost a mini-course.

What about repurposing your content for a blog post and take some of those ideas and use them in guest posts for other blogs? If an idea has resonated with your audience, take those ideas and explore them, perhaps in a different way. Just submit your post to another blog, but get those ideas out there into other circles. If they’ve resonated with your readers, they might just resonate with other readers of other blogs.

In a similar way, you could do the same thing and submit your content or repurpose content to articles from mainstream media or industry publications. You could take the ideas and put them into a webinar, Hangouts, Periscope, or Blab. You could even take an idea from a blog post and then run a Twitter chat about it or a Facebook chat. What about if you said, “That post resonates so well, we’re going to discuss it on Twitter this time using this hashtag,” and get your readers together to give their feedback on it.

You could take your main points and repurpose it into a workshop that you do at a real-life event or online. If you’ve done a podcast, you could transcribe that content and use it in some other form as well, a webinar.

Lastly, maybe take some of the ideas from your blog post and create a printable. Create a checklist or a template that relates to the blog post. I just went through 15 or so different ways that you can repurpose content there, but hopefully, you’re seeing that not all of them are going to be relevant for every post that you write. You really need to look at the post that you’ve got.

Ask yourself, how can I extend this idea? How can I present it in a different way so that it will have a different impact on my readers? That if my readers do see it in two or three different forms, they’re not just seeing the same thing in the same way, but they actually have the chance of really being impacted in a deeper way by that idea.

A few last tips about repurposing. I do have a lot to say on this particular topic because I do see a lot of people even missing opportunity here, they’re not doing it and they could do so much more, or people are overdoing it. The last tips I’ll give you, firstly, spread it out. There’s no need to bombard your readership with the same idea over and over again quickly, you can spread it out over time. You might publish your blog post today and then share a slide deck based upon it next week, and then follow up with a video or an infographic next month. It doesn’t all have to come out in one week.

Now, it can have an impact if you do produce exploring ideas in different ways or very quickly. If they’re all very different and they do build and have variety, but if it is the same kind of idea, you might want to spread it out further. Just so that there’s a bit more variety and your audience has a little bit more of a chance to breathe and explore other ideas before they revisit that idea.

Another quick tip, repurpose as you write. As you’re writing your blog post, pay attention to the ideas that you get and about how you could repurpose them. Often when I’m in the middle of writing a blog post, I’m also making notes about how I could get a graphic or a slide made, or use it in some other context.

The third last tip is to pay attention to your archives. Don’t just think about repurposing your recent post. Actually go back and look at what you did last year. Maybe there’s something this time last year that you could be repurposing today in some different way. This is something that I try and do pretty much every day. I look at what we published this day last year, (1) so I can share that on social media, but (2) maybe there’s an opportunity there to repurpose it in some way. I think it’s a really good discipline to be reading your own archives.

The second last tip, make it visual. It’s really important to take advantage of the fact that we are operating in such a visual space with social media at the moment. The more visual we get, the better. Either invest in some skills and tools in creating great visual content or outsourcing, get some help in that.

The last thing I’ll say about repurposing content is to cross-link between your repurposed content. If you write a blog post and then you produce a slide share, in your slide share you should be linking to your blog post. If you’re producing a Youtube video, link back to that blog post. If you’re producing a podcast, link back to that blog post. This helps your SEO but it also gets people back to your site and hopefully on your site you’re well-optimized to getting them to subscribe as well. Get people back to your home base and try and get people on your email list, or whatever it is that is your primary way of connecting with your audience.

I’ve got some further reading for you in today’s show notes on repurposing content. I know that was a lot of information to digest. You might want to go back and listen to some of that. I’ve got two more things for you to do before you move on to writing your next blog post. These are two more things you need to do after you hit publish.

The fourth thing that I really want to just quickly touch on is to deepen your relationships, to interact and engage with those who read your blog posts. It’s so important rather than just moving on to write your next post to actually watch and see how people respond to your content. Reply to comments is probably the number one thing that you should be doing. You might want to email readers to leave a comment, as I talked about in one of my earliest episodes of this podcast—it might have been episode two or three—a really great technique of making a big impression upon people.

Work hard at deepening and extending comments. When you reply to a comment, don’t just say, “Thanks for commenting.” Actually ask the person a question, ask them what they […], ask them for an example. Work hard at getting a second comment. This is really important because people then feel like, “Oh they’re paying attention to me. They want to know my opinion, they think I’m important enough to engage with.” This is the beginning of getting a loyal reader in many cases.

You might want to provide more information in the comments. If you think of another idea that you could’ve incorporated into a post, add a comment. Engage with your readers in that way. Ask people questions and maybe add a poll to your post. This is something you can do on all posts using poll plug-ins and that gives you an excuse to reshare it on social media. You might say, “I’ve updated the post that I’ve previously published and I’ve added a poll, I’d love your opinion.” That’s another legitimate way to share that post on social media but to get a little bit more engagement.

You might want to highlight the conversation that’s happening on a post. If you publish a blog post and the conversation takes off, take that conversation and share that on social media. Rather than saying, “Here’s another link to my blog post,” actually link to that blog post and say, “There’s an amazing conversation going on,” or, “I love the comment that Peter left on this blog post.” Use that as a way of sharing it because it highlights the community, it highlights the interaction. It shows your readers that you value conversation.

You might want to add a homework or an activity to the end of your post that readers could do. Again, I’d be sharing that on social media. Anything you can add to a blog post really gives you another legitimate way of sharing that blog post. Of course, people are watching on social media. These days people aren’t just commenting in your comments.

This is frustrating for us as bloggers because we want that conversation all in one spot, but you also need to be watching on Twitter. You need to be watching on Facebook. You need to be watching on the different platforms that you have chosen to engage in because that’s often the place where people will be interacting with your ideas. Again, I’ve got some more reading on developing the relationships with your readers in today’s show notes.

The fifth thing I would encourage you to always do just after you hit publish on a post or even just before it, is to ask yourself a simple question. Is there anything in what I’ve just written that I could extend or follow up with another blog post? This is a great habit to get into. Get into the habit of asking that question because you’ll naturally start to create content that goes deeper and builds momentum with your posts.

One of the things I’ve noticed about great blogs is that they take their readers on a journey. Great blogs don’t just hit them with random blog posts one after the other. Great blogs actually take the readers on a journey and one of the best ways to build momentum between your blog posts is to ask yourself that question at the end of every blog. Is there something in what I’ve just written that I could extend or follow up with another blog post?

A few things that you could do with posts once you’ve written, pay attention to the tangent you can see taking mid-post. This is something I do all the time. I’ll be halfway through writing a blog post or halfway through creating a podcast, and I find myself taking a tangent and I realize that to take that tangent actually gets off-topic. It’s a legitimate post idea that I could then repurpose into another post. Pay attention to those things that kind of distract you as you’re writing that are still somewhat on topic for your audience.

Pay attention to the questions your blog posts readers have but also the questions you get at the end of your posts. Sometimes, writing a post gives you a question that you don’t know the answer to. Maybe that’s something that you should go away and research. Examine all the posts in your archives that could be developed in some way or that could be updated.

If you’ve written an opinion on a blog post—opinions are really great to write in posts because they make them unique—maybe you could follow up that by exploring the opposing view by interviewing someone who has a different point of view on that. That’s a great way to do a follow up because it shows your readers that there is more than one way to go about things. It can also create a bit of a conversation or debate, which is another great way of getting engagement from your readers.

Maybe you could follow-up your blog post with a case study, an example, what you’ve learned since writing that post, or another tool that does the same thing as the tool that you’ve mentioned.

One thing I’d encourage you to do on blog posts, particularly, that are doing well with your readers, if you do get a post that’s been shared a lot, if you get a post that gets lots of comments that resonates with your audience, is to just do a mind map. Get a whiteboard or a piece of paper, or use a mind mapping tool, and brainstorm how you could extend that post because something in that post has resonated with people. There’s an opportunity in those posts, in particular, to extend and deepen. Maybe even replicate the style of that post. I think it’s really important to pay attention to the posts that resonate and to see what you could do to extend that.

The example that I’ve given many times is a guest post that we published over on Digital Photography School quite a few years ago. It was a post which had posing tips and it had a whole heap of hand-drawn poses that you could use when photographing women. It was just a random guest post that we got, we published it, it took off, it went crazy. We had a lot of shares on it, lots of comments, and lots of questions about how to pose men, how to pose children.

We went back to the author of that post and said, “Hey, how about doing a series on this?” I think he ended up producing eight or nine different posts for us. We then took that idea and turned it into an ebook, we turned it into a printable, and really paid attention to what was working with our audience and extended that idea. Pay attention to that when sparks fly in a blog post like that. Again I’ve got some further reading for you on how to extend your blog posts as well.

This has been a bit of a meaty podcast. I’ve now covered a lot of ground here. I just want to really quickly recap the five points that I made. Firstly, when you hit publish on a blog post you should be thinking about how to socialize that post for maximum impact. Number two, you should be thinking about how to optimize that post for SEO. Number three, ask yourself a question, at least consider, should you be repurposing that content in some way, even now or in the future? Number four, deepen the relationships, the interaction and the engagement with your readers. And number five, extend your ideas with future content in some way.

These are five things that I would encourage you to build into your workflow. It needs to become automatic. As you’re writing content, as you’re publishing content, just automatically have systems in place but also questions that you ask yourself that help you to do these five things.

I hope this has been helpful. I would love to hear your feedback on it. Which ones do you do, what tools do you use to do them, what workflow have you built after you hit publish on a blog post? Share your ideas. This is where we learn from one another. I’ve got so much to learn about these things, too, and I’m looking forward to learning what you do. 

Maybe some of the stuff that you share with us might turn into a future podcast. Who knows? I’d love to interview some of you about the things that you do and extend this blog post with a future one based upon some of the things that you do. If you’ve got something that I haven’t mentioned or you do something in a different way, share that story in a comment, and we might just end up talking to each other in a future podcast.

Look forward to chatting with you. If you think this is helpful for any of your readers, any of your followers on social media, please do share it. You can share and find the show notes at problogger.com/podcast/92. I’ll chat with you in a couple of days’ time in episode 93.

What would you add to my tips on what to do after you hit publish on blog posts? I’d love to learn what you do, particularly your thoughts on repurposing content.

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