ProBlogger Podcast: Blog Tips to Help You Make Money Blogging

Note: you can listen to this episode above or load it up in iTunes.

Today’s episode is about the top tools and resources we use on the ProBlogger and Digital Photography School blogs. I share what they are, where you can find them, and how we use them behind the scenes to keep my blogs running smoothly, so you can use them to simplify your blogging life too.

You can listen to today’s episode above or in iTunes or Stitcher (where we’d also LOVE to get your reviews on those platforms if you have a moment). In today’s episode:

Email Opt-Ins

Email Providers

Landing Pages

Communications

Organization

Social

Editorial and Social

Other Essentials

Episodes in my recent miniseries on the important things bloggers/online entrepreneurs should do to find success:

Darren: Hi there and welcome to episode 91 of the ProBlogger Podcast. My name is Darren Rowse and today, I want to talk about the tools and resources that we use and recommend over on ProBlogger. I get asked this question all the time, “What tool should I use for _____?” Fill in the blank and it’s always different. What tool shall I use for SEO? What should I use for my hosting? What blogging platform should I be on? But then also questions around what email provider should I be using? What communications tools do you use? How do you organize yourself?

Today, I want to whip through around 10 to 15 tools that we use on ProBlogger and Digital Photography School. There are many options out there and I will give you a few different options for some of these different categories. You can find today’s show notes over at problogger.com/podcast/91 where I’ll link to all of the tools mentioned in this episode, and where I would love to hear the tools that you use as well in the comments of those show notes.

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

Today, we’re talking about tools and resources that you can use to improve your blog. As I mentioned before, there are hundreds of blogging tools out there. There’s probably thousands of things, if you add in all the plugins that have been built. I’m not going to so much touch on plugins today, although some of the tools that I will mention do have plugins connected to them for WordPress. I’m going to cover all the categories of tools and resources that I could because that would go on for hours. I will link in today’s show notes to the resources and tools page that we do have on ProBlogger, where we do list a whole heap of other tools and recommend hosts for your blog, where to get your domain, and some of those types of things.

Also, we talk about WordPress versus bloggers and some of those types of questions. Today, I want to talk a little bit about the tools we use around email, tools that we use around landing pages, tools that we use for our internal team communications, some tools for organization, social media, editorial calendars, and then just a few other random ones. I haven’t actually counted them all, but I think I’ve got about 15 tools that I want to mention. 

I’m not going to go into a heap of depth on each one because in future podcasts and in previous podcasts, I will, I guess, review some of these tools in more depth. I want to whip through them just to give you a bit of an overview of what we are using as we head into 2016.

The first category that I really want to briefly touch on is email. Anyone who’s been listening to this podcast for a while and reading ProBlogger for a while knows that email is an essential part of my blogging. On both of my blogs, ProBlogger and Digital Photography School, we send out a weekly newsletter. That newsletter drives a whole heap of traffic, but we also use that email list to drive sales of our products, particularly on Digital Photography School, whenever we launch an ebook, or a course, or some software, or do an affiliate program promotion. Email drives 90% of the sales.

It’s really important to think carefully about how you collect those email addresses and some of the tools I want to mention after that, but also how you deliver the emails. Let’s talk about collecting email addresses. There’s a couple of tools that I would recommend. One that I’ve talked about in a previous podcast–I’ll link to that in today’s show notes–is SumoMe. 

SumoMe is a way of, I guess, delivering opt in forms on your blog. It may be that you use them in your sidebar or underneath your posts, but in the previous episode, I talked a little bit about how we use the welcome mat tool from SumoMe. If you go to ProBlogger and you haven’t been there before, you’ll see a big drop down invitation to subscribe to our newsletter there.

That’s operated through SumoMe’s welcome mat. That has significantly increased the sign ups to our newsletter on both of my sites. I’ve previously been using a popup, and I know popups, some people don’t like them, pop ups do work very well, SumoMe does have a popup option as well. The welcome mat well and truly outperformed any popup that we’ve ever tested before. They have a whole heap of other types of opt in forms as well. Hello bars which are right at the top of your site, opt-ins via sidebar, so you don’t have to use as aggressive ones, but SumoMe is a great option.

The other one that we have used in the past is OptinMonster, which gives you a similar array of tools that you can use. I’ve actually found the SumoMe ones sort of suit the way that our site operates a little bit better and has been very effective for us. But either way, check them both out, again links in today’s show notes.

You’re listening to ProBlogger.

That’s how you collect your emails. The other tool that we have been just starting to use is a landing page tool called Leadpages, many of you will be familiar with it. On Leadpages, you can create those I guess landing pages to get people to sign up for your email address, to give you their email address, but there’s a whole heap of other types of landing pages that you can also develop using Leadpages. For example, if you’re running webinars, you can do lead page, a landing page for that webinar. If you’re wanting to give away a free ebook in exchange for an email address, you can do that with Leadpages.

Again, I’ll link to Leadpages and we will do a future podcast on it to go into it in a lot more depth. It’s actually something that we’re going to be using on ProBlogger in the coming months to give away an opt in, which I’m really excited about. We’ve got something pretty special for anyone who subscribed to our newsletter and new subscribers, and we’re going to deliver that through Leadpages. Once we do that, I’ll be able to talk a little bit more about how we’ve used it in that way. We’ve got an exciting little partnership with Leadpages hopefully coming up as well.

Email is really important in the way you collect those email addresses, but then you’ve got to also send the emails and there’s a whole heap of different ways of sending emails. One thing I would highly recommend you don’t do is send it from your Gmail account to anyone who subscribes. That’s just going to not be delivered well. It’s going to get you in trouble with Gmail.  You really do need to have an email service provider. Now, there are a variety of them that we have used on ProBlogger and Digital Photography School over the years, and I know many of our readers, in fact we just surveyed our readers recently and there’s a whole heap of different providers that you use.

The first one, the first paid service that I started to use was AWeber. Up until probably a year or two ago, that’s what I solely used, but we started to experiment with a few other different providers as well. We’ve used MailChimp. Particularly on Digital Photography School, we do a big end of year campaign with our readers and MailChimp has been really great on that front. There’s a new one that we’ve started to experiment with over the last few weeks and months called ConvertKit, and the jury’s still out with that, I’ll be up front, but so far we are really liking it. It has been built with bloggers in mind.

I think on their sales page, they actually say that it’s an email provider built with professional bloggers in mind, that’s their kind of catch cry. You can see that as you use it. This will be something that we will talk about in future podcasts, but what I really like about it is the workflow for creating automation within your email sequences and the ability to really simply tag people who subscribe to you. 

If someone buys an ebook, to be able to tag them very easily and intuitively, automatically, so that you don’t send them further sales emails about that product. That’s something that we’ve kind of struggled a little bit with. You can do it on Aweber or MailChimp but it’s really not as simple a process as we are seeing over on ConvertKit. Again, the jury’s still out on ConvertKit, but I’ll update you on how we found it in the coming months, so you might want to check that one out as well.

Okay, so email, it really is important. I would encourage you to consider a paid option there. Really, you want high deliverability and you want a system that is not doing dubious things. I certainly got into trouble many years ago now, the first email provider that I used was doing really good stuff. And then they sold it, and it went into the hands of people who weren’t using it very well. As a result, my deliverability went down and impacted my own brand as well, because a lot of emails were ending up in spam filters and that type of thing. 

Do invest in a good email provider. It’s not free, but it’s one of those things that does pay for itself if you use your email well. There’s a whole heap of resources on ProBlogger about how to do just that.

Let’s move away from email now and talk a little bit about some of the other areas that I particularly get asked about. One of the questions I get asked all the time is how do you communicate with your team? Many of you already have heard me talk about our team. I think there’s five or six of us now working part time, I’m full time and most of the rest of the team are part time, but they work remotely. Most of them are in Melbourne where I live, but we have one in Toronto, and we have team members in Mexico, so we do have some remote. One at the moment is in Nepal.

We do need to communicate online, and traditionally we’ve always used Skype for that. That’s been a big part of my business since as far back as I can remember, particularly for chat and for our calls. We still do use it for our calls, but over the last year, we’ve transitioned all out chat instant messaging to Slack as have probably most people in the world. I suspect Skype’s really suffered in terms of the chat features and Slack has really taken over.

We love Slack. We have two different, I guess, accounts, one for Digital Photography School, one for ProBlogger team and we use it for direct messaging, one on one, but also group chats. We have little channels, I’m just opening it up here. On the ProBlogger account, we have a channel for our events speakers, so anyone in our team who’s involved in working out who should be speaking at our event is a part of that. We have a chat for the podcasts, so anyone who’s part of the podcast can see that one. We’ve got a chat going for editorial for ProBlogger. There’s the opportunity there for anyone in the team who’s got anything to do with editorial to have a chat there. 

That way, if we are looking for a previous conversation, we’re able to really narrow it down by just being able to go into that particular chat. Now obviously, that is going to be useful for you if you do have a team. 

Another tool that we use which you could get a lot of value out even if you are a solo entrepreneur, but we use it for our communications, but also for I guess planning and organization, it is Trello. Trello is one of those things that’s kind of hard to describe it to you, but it’s kind of almost like the way someone described it to me when I first saw it. It’s kind of like cards. You have cards where you’re able to write things and move them around. You can setup folders for different cards. 

It’s kind of like in the old days where you have those little cards with lines on them. I used to use them when I was delivering speeches. A lot of people use them for organization. Check out Trello. I think it’s really useful if you do have a team to help organize projects.

Another thing that I love about it is it’s great for brainstorming and mind mapping as well. You might want to check that out. I may do a future podcast on Trello because I think there is a number of different ways that you could use it as a blogger. That’s where a lot of our communications happen. Since moving to Slack and Trello, our email between our team has really decreased a lot as have our communications on all the other messaging. In the past, we used to have some messaging going on on Facebook, and some going on on Skype, and some via email. Now having them all in one place via Slack and a little bit on Trello has been fantastic.

The app that I use for my own personal organization is Evernote. I’m not going to talk in great depth about that because I have mentioned that numerous times in the past. The app that I use for my social media scheduling. Again, I’ve talked about this in a previous podcast is Meet Edgar, and there’s quite a detailed video that I’ve created about how I use Edgar that I’ll link to in the show notes as well. It’s just a great tool for not so much scheduling future posts on Twitter or Facebook, although you can do that. It’s more for those tweets that you want to happen periodically.

You can build a schedule of those evergreen tweets that you just want to appear maybe once a month or once every couple of months. It really is like a personal assistant who manages your social media for you, but it’s all automated. A very powerful tool and I know since doing that video and talking about it in a previous podcast, many of the listeners of this podcast have moved to Edgar, and I get all kinds of thank you emails from people who have enjoyed it. We’ll link to that.

Another tool that my team is constantly thanking me for moving to in the last year is CoSchedule. We’ve moved ProBlogger over on to CoSchedule and it’s a really powerful tool for a number of things., but the thing that I think my team loved the best with CoSchedule is its editorial calendar features. I guess we do some of their internal communications on CoSchedule as well and particularly around anything to do with editorial. It’s really helped us to map out and get smart about upcoming posts, who’s doing what within those posts.

Also, I know Stacy loves being able to schedule her social media from within CoSchedule. To be able to publish a post and then to say, “I want this to be tweeted on these days at this time, and to go up on Facebook these days and this time, and to go on LinkedIn these days and this time.” To be able to sneeze that out onto all the different social media accounts in a smart spread out way that’s not going to be too intrusive for our followers, but it’s going to be seen over time, is something that we love. We have noticed all social engagement around our new posts going up just through using CoSchedule. Check that one out, and again, that’s something that we will do a future podcast on as well.

How to build and monetize your blog, this is ProBlogger.

Just a few other what I would say essential tools for us in our team, Google Analytics. I know most bloggers are already on it, but I do come across bloggers from time-to-time who aren’t measuring their stats or don’t know which tool to use. You just got to get on to Google Analytics, it’s almost an industry standard. It’s free, it’s very powerful. it can be a bit overwhelming, but even just a glance at the status they give you on their dashboard are going to help you to have an understanding about what’s happening on your blog.

Another tool that we are in the process of switching to at the moment is FeedBlitz. This is something that’s been on my to-do list for quite some time now. Traditionally, we’ve been using FeedBurner to manage our RSS feeds. Google really haven’t been looking after FeedBurner and there’s rumors constantly circulating that they may in fact kill it off at some point, but we’re in the process of moving our RSS feeds on ProBlogger over to FeedBlitz and we’ll do the same for Digital Photography School once we’ve made that transition for ProBlogger.

A couple of tools that we use for graphic design that many ProBlogger readers already use are Canva and PicMonkey, just great for creating visual content. I also use a little app on my phone called Word Swag for Instagram particularly. Those of you who’ve been following my new Instagram account @influencetalks will have seen a lot of the graphics that I create pretty much purely on Word Swag. 

A couple last tools, Fantastical is a great calendar app that I use on my Mac. I have two Macs actually. I have a laptop MacBook Pro and then an iMac desktop. I use it on those, but it also is on my iPhone and even my Apple Watch. It’s just a tool that I find just a little bit clearer. I like the layouts a little bit more than the calendar app that comes with Macs.

The last tool that I have been quite a long term user of is MarsEdit. MarsEdit, I guess you’d call it a desktop blog editor for Macs. It’s again just a Mac tool but allows me to write my blog posts without being in the back end of WordPress. It’s just a little app that sits there. I don’t know, I just find it really useful for writing there, save my drafts without actually having to upload them to WordPress, and then I just upload them when they’re ready to go live. Stacy then takes over and makes sure there’s no spelling mistakes and that type of thing. Then, she schedules it through CoSchedule. MarsEdit is the last one that we are using. I

‘ve been using it on ProBlogger for a year or so now and we’re kind of in the process of starting to move Digital Photography School over. It’s our shopping cart and that is Easy Digital Downloads. Some of you will be familiar with that. We previously used E-junkie which is cheap and really doesn’t have the features that we need with the amount of products that we have over on Digital Photography School. We have over 30 ebooks now and a number of courses. E-junkie really for up-selling and managing who’s bought what and all that type of thing. It isn’t really doing it for us on E-junkie, but Easy Digital Downloads is better on that front. There’s a whole heap of plugins that make it even more powerful as well. That may be something that we can talk a little bit more about in future episodes because I know those of you who are selling products are constantly asking about shopping carts. 

As I said before, there’s a resources page on ProBlogger which I’ll link to. I will link in today’s show notes to all of those tools and products. Some of them are free, some of them are paid, some of them I’m an affiliate for. I want to disclose that right up front, but all of them I use, and are in the process of using, and almost all of the paid ones, I pay for myself.

In fact, I can’t think of any that I get for free. I’m not doing a cash for comment there, but I do make money if you purchase some of those things. I want to be up front about that. That’s how we keep ProBlogger operating for free, I hope that’s okay with you.

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

Hopefully you found some good tools there. I would love to hear what you’re using. I’m always on the lookout for what other bloggers are using to operate their blogs. There’s constantly new tools being released. I get emailed about a new tool every day. It’s hard for me to keep up with them all, but one of the things that I’ve wanted to do is just listen to what other people are using and when I hear the same tool being used by multiple people, that’s when my eyes light up, my ears prick up a little bit.

Just do let us know if you see a new cool tool that you think other bloggers might benefit from. You can do that over on the show notes at problogger.com/podcast/91. I can’t wait to hear what you use and I hope you’ll give us some feedback on the tools that I’ve mentioned as well. Chat with you in episode 92.

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.

Do you have tools you use on your blog that have saved you time and made your blog stronger? I would love to hear what tools you have found useful in the comments below.

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Note: you can listen to this episode above or load it up in iTunes.

This is the third podcast in a miniseries about what you need to do to find success as a blogger on online entrepreneur. The first episode was about the importance of establishing the habit of starting new things, instead of just coming up with great ideas and thinking about them. The second episode was about the importance of persisting.

Today’s episode is about how to decide whether now is the time to quit your blog, business or project. There is definitely a time to quit a project; it’s a part of life. But timing your quitting can be important! I share my own personal experience, as well as questions you can ask yourself to work out what is right for you. 

You can listen to today’s episode above or in iTunes or Stitcher (where we’d also LOVE to get your reviews on those platforms if you have a moment). In today’s episode:

Other episodes in this miniseries on the important things bloggers/online entrepreneurs should do to find success:

Real life examples of people who have successfully ‘pivoted’ or changed direction:

Let’s talk about quitting. It’s not something that really is the most uplifting topic in some ways and it’s something that a lot of people avoid really talking about. As we’ve talked about in the last podcast, persisting is something that is very common in entrepreneurial advice. This podcast really comes about because I wasn’t satisfied that the last two podcasts had it all in it.

Those of you who are joining us now might want to go back and listen to episode 88 where I talked about the most important thing online entrepreneurs need to do and that is starting. Then in episode 89, I talked about the second most important thing we need to do as entrepreneurs and that is persisting, and I told the story of the Cavanagh brothers who struck gold simply because I persisted longer than anyone else. I truly believe that those two things are just so important and as entrepreneurs, we really need to focus upon those things. We need to be starters, we need to have a mindset of starting, we need to be ‘persisters’. This is good solid advice and it’s no wonder that it features in many entrepreneurial teachings.

I found some quotes as well; I was going to share in the last episode as well. I love this one from Albert Einstein, “It’s not that I’m so smart; it’s just that I stay with problems longer.” He persists. Bill Bradley said, “Ambition is the path to success. Persistence is the vehicle you arrive in.” Marabel Morgan says, “Persistence is the twin sister of excellence. One is a matter of quality, the other is a matter of time.” There are lots of quotes that we could talk about on the topic of persistence and that’s because it’s so important.

But I do think we do need to talk about quitting. Because as I said in the last episode, if those two Cavanagh brothers, those gold miners hadn’t persisted with no results, they actually would’ve done themselves a disservice. There is a time to quit. There is a time where we find ourselves digging in the wrong spot. When should you actually give up on your blog, your business, or the projects that you’re working on? It’s a question I get asked quite a bit particularly from bloggers who’ve been at their blogs for quite a while. They’re losing some passion, or they may not be seeing the results that they want, or they feel like they want to start something else, and that’s often the time we feel disillusioned with our current projects too.

There’s definitely a time to quit a project, that’s part of life, but timing your quitting can be important too. I want to give you some questions to ask if you are in that place of wondering whether you should quit. These are four questions that I’ve asked myself before quitting and not quitting in the past as well. Hopefully, by asking these four questions, you make a better decision about whether now is the right time to quit? Now, I will say before I give you these four questions, this is just the process I go through and there may be other questions you want to throw into it. I ask myself all four questions because I see a lot of bloggers giving up because the answer to one of these questions is a negative. Let me go through them and then I’ll explain it a little bit more.

The first question that I ask is one that I suspect most people ask, “Am I enjoying it? Is this blog or is this project or is this business giving me energy? Is it something that I enjoy?” Now, obviously, that’s not just a good enough question by itself but it should be part of it. If it’s not giving you energy, if it’s sucking energy from your life, maybe that’s a sign, maybe, that you need to quit. Now, I put that in conjunction with these other questions as well, so don’t just make the decision based upon what you feel at the moment and whether you’re enjoying it at the moment.

Second question I ask myself is, “Am I good at it?” Take an objective look at the quality of what you’re doing. If you look at your blog and it’s high-quality, it’s really good, but you’re just not enjoying it, maybe you need to persist with it in some ways. This is the second question, “Are you good at it?” You may actually need to get someone else’s opinion on that as well because it’s very hard to be objective about whether you’re good at it or not.

Third question I ask myself is, “Is there demand for what I’m doing?” Think about the potential for your blog. Don’t just give up based upon the current reality of it. Think about the potential. Is there demand and is the demand growing for what you’re doing? Maybe it’s not succeeding right now because you’re just a little bit early and everyone else is about to arrive where you are. It would be such a pity to give up on your blog if in a year’s time your blog’s topic is the big thing and you would’ve been the first. “Is there demand for what you’re doing?” Or, “Is the demand shrinking?” Perhaps it’s not working because it used to be a popular thing but it’s not so popular anymore. If your blog’s a Myspace blog, a blog about how to use Myspace, maybe you missed that boat, maybe it’s time to quit. Look at the popularity of the thing that you’re writing about. Are you positioning yourself for growth?

The fourth question that I ask myself is, “Are people responding to what I’m doing?” There’s a way you need to look at the actual results. Paying attention, not only to the feedback you get, what other people are telling you, but some of those cold hard stats such as traffic, such as your earnings. If you are blogging and you’ve been blogging for 10 years now with the hope of being full time one day, and you are not making anywhere near full-time level of income then maybe that needs to inform what you should do. I’ve seen a number of bloggers who probably should have given up a number of years ago because they’ve invested in something that’s just not got any return.

The idea here is to look at, “Am I enjoying it? Am I good at it? Is there demand for what you’re doing? Are people responding to it?” As we go through those questions there’s actually another word that I would put associated with each one. The first one, am I enjoying it? This is about your energy. Are you good at it? This is about the quality. Is there demand for it? This is about potential. Are people responding to it? This is about results. The idea here is to look at your energy, the quality, potential, and the results together. Because I see a lot of people making their quitting decision based solely upon one of those factors while ignoring other potentially good signs.

For example, I see bloggers quitting just because they don’t feel like it anymore. It’s about their energy but they could be just going through a rough patch. Maybe ignoring that they’re doing something that is significant even though they don’t quite feel it at the moment. Maybe there’s huge potential just around the corner that they’re ignoring. Maybe the indications are from their readership that they are on the right track in their stats.

There is a time to quit but it might not be now. These are four questions I would ask. Now, I would say there is a time to quit but maybe instead of quitting, you need to pivot. This is the other thing that I kind of want to focus a little bit upon here, is that I would always prefer to pivot than quit. Because whatever you’ve been building over the last few months, the last year, the last decade, hopefully in that, there is at least some value that you can leverage for your next thing.

As I look at successful entrepreneurs that I’ve met over the years, there’s hardly anyone that I can think of that has had success as a result of traveling in a straight line. Success is rarely, if ever, the result of traveling in a straight line. Almost every successful entrepreneur I’ve ever met has a long history of pivoting; they changed directions over time. I believe that successful entrepreneurship is often built upon being able to relentlessly focus upon and persist with that task at hand but also simultaneously having the ability to have loose expectations and to be able to spot new opportunities as they arrive and to change direction. It’s almost a bit of a paradox there—the ability to persist but also to change direction. These are two things that you need to hold onto as an entrepreneur.

If you are at a point now where you’re feeling like you just want to quit—and maybe answering those four questions that I’ve just gone through gives you the indication that you should quit—I want to encourage you to ask one more question. Rather than just giving up, “Is there potential to pivot? To take what you’ve built so far in a different direction?” Perhaps in what you’ve already built there’s a spark of opportunity that you could leverage.

As I talk about this, I’m thinking of a blogger here in Australia, Donna Moritz. Some of you will know her, she’s got a blog called Socially Sorted, a great blog. It’s a blog that’s all about social media but particularly about visual content in social media. Now, that’s not what her blog used to be about; her blog used to be more about other aspects of social media, it was a more general social media blog–from my memory at least. It was doing okay but it was only when she realized that the content that she was writing about—visual content—that was the content that was really taking off with her readers.

She looked at her stats, she realized that that’s what she probably should be focusing upon rather than the broad topic of social media. She decided to pivot. She decided to change her blog’s focus and focused just in on that narrow segment of what she was writing about. I think it’s actually probably the stuff she enjoyed writing about the most as well. She was best about it. The quality of her work in that area was higher. She seemed to enjoy that more and people were responding to that. In answering those questions, she could very well have said, “Yeah, I’m going to give up.” But rather she decided to focus on visual content. I’ve got a post that you can read that tells that story that Donna wrote.

It’s rare to find a successful entrepreneur who’s doing exactly the same thing today that they were doing five years ago. In fact, if you are doing exactly the same thing that you were doing five years ago today, it could probably be a sign that you’re in a rut. Pivoting is a sign of life in my opinion. Maybe rather than quitting today you need to pivot.

I want to give you one last example, it’s the Buffer Social Blog. A lot of you have probably used the Buffer tool. Their blog, I love, I read it quite regularly. But do you know back in January 2011 that blog started as a Twitter tips blog? It was just focusing on Twitter tips. They realized that wasn’t getting the traction that they probably could’ve. They decided that they needed to pivot. They pivoted in late 2011—about a year later—to be a social media tips blog.

They widened their topic but again it still didn’t quite work. It still didn’t quite find its market, still didn’t get the response that it needed to. They didn’t feel like they were doing the right thing either and so they decided to pivot it and to broaden it even further. They decided to make their blog into a life hacks blog. It has lifestyle tips; it does still have some business-y kind of tips, but they found their stride when they pivoted the third time. Again, I’ll give you the further reading for that in today’s show notes where they tell that story. It took them two pivots before they found what they’re on about and perhaps you need to pivot a couple of times before you find what it is that you will have most success with too.

Let me just quickly say again, there is a time to quit, but it might be better to pivot. Some questions to ask, “Are you enjoying it? Do you have energy for it? Are you good at it? What’s the quality like of what you’re doing? Is there demand for what you’re doing? Is there potential? Are there people responding to it?” Look at the results and then before you quit ask yourself the fifth question, “Is there something in what you’re doing that perhaps you should pivot to focus upon more?”

I hope somewhere in the midst of all of that, some answers for those of you who are thinking about quitting at the moment. There’s nothing wrong with doing that but maybe the pivot is a better thing to do at the moment. I hope this has been helpful. I look forward to getting your feedback on this. Maybe there are other questions that you think maybe would be helpful for people to ask. Please leave a comment over at problogger.com/podcast/90 because I’m sure other people would benefit from your wisdom and your experience of quitting or pivoting in the past.

Also, if you’ve got any stories or examples of times that you’ve pivoted, I would love to hear those stories. I really enjoy reading that type of story. I might actually ask your permission to use that in a future keynote that I’m giving on that particular topic. Again, that’s problogger.com/podcast/90. I look forward to chatting with you in episode 91 of the ProBlogger podcast.

Have you had a time when you wanted to quit? What did you decide to do? If you chose to ‘pivot’, or change direction, what did you choose, and did it work for you? Do you have other tips or tools that helped you make your decision? I’d love to hear from you in the comments below.

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Note: you can listen to this episode above or load it up in iTunes.

In today’s episode, I share the inspiring story of the Cavanagh Brothers. It’s a tale of finding success and glory through stamina and dedication over a long period of time, something that holds true for finding blogging success. It reveals the second most important thing you’ll ever do as an entrepreneur.

You can listen to today’s episode above or in iTunes or Stitcher (where we’d also LOVE to get your reviews on those platforms if you have a moment). In today’s episode:

The year was 1851 and two brothers stood by a bend in a creek that had wishfully been named by gold prospectors ‘Golden Point’ in days gone by.

The two brothers’ surname was Cavanagh and they’d been digging, along with around 600 other miners, in their ‘claim’ at Golden Point for days.

Some gold had definitely been found on this particular bend in the creek. In fact numerous miners had made good, although not spectacular, money from their finds in previous weeks.

Most of the gold had been found in the sandy ground to a depth of around 1 meter (3.2 feet) but at that point everyone who dug hit a hard layer of clay and received no reward for their effort. Digging through the sandy ground wasn’t hard but as soon as they hit clay it became back breaking work.

The result was that the area was littered with abandoned claims. Holes in the ground were everywhere, all dug to a depth of around 1 meter.

Miners around the Cavanagh brothers that day were beginning to talk of rumors coming from further up creek of richer pickings and in the 24 hours that followed most of the men had moved on.

But the brothers Cavanagh had a hunch.

They wanted to see what would happen if they dug deeper and so began the arduous task of digging into the hard clay that everyone else had stopped digging into.

They chose an abandoned claim from another miner and began to dig.

The work was hard and unrewarding.

They dug and found nothing but more clay.

Inch by inch they chipped away at the clay only to find more clay.

All day they dug.

The second morning they continued to dig as the last miners around them abandoned their claims and moved on to chase their dreams up creek.

I can just imagine the other miners abandoning their claims shaking their heads as they looked at the Cavanagh brothers and laughing at their foolhardy efforts.

But the brothers had a belief and kept their focus.

As sunset approached on the 2nd day, and after hours of back breaking work the brothers finally broke through the last of the clay at around the depth of 2 meters.

Under the clay they found what centuries ago been the old bed of the creek and in it were pockets of gold which had been washed down the creek from the mountains over hundreds of years.

The brothers worked into the night feverishly until the light from their lamps gave up. Imagine how they must have felt as they attempted to sleep that night!

The next day they rose early and assessed their work. In the light of day the full reality of what they’d uncovered started to sink in. There was gold down below that clay, and lots of it!

In a single day alone the Cavanagh brothers found 27 kilograms (60 pounds) of gold.

That day’s takings alone earned the men over £3,500 which was more than enough to set the two brothers up for life.

Word quickly spread of the brothers’ success.

One month later, 10,000 miners worked in the area around Golden Point and the wider Ballarat area and it became known as the richest known gold field in the world for that time.

You can bet that those who followed the brothers dug deeper than they had previously!

I first came across the story of the Cavanagh brothers while researching a project I was doing in high school and have since found myself reflecting upon it many times.

I love the determination, the focus and the persistence of these two men.

I love how that despite the distractions of rumors from up creek that they continued to dig where others had already dug and given up at the first sign of clay.

I love that they persisted while others followed the exciting rumors of fortune and in doing so found a fortune that others could only dream of finding.

I love that through their persistence, they not only found their own fortune but opened the eyes to others – others who probably had looked at them thinking that they were crazy for digging into that clay – to a new way.

There have been times over the last few years where I’ve at times felt a little like the brothers Cavanagh.

While my hands do not toil with a pick or shovel digging into hardened clay there are days where I do second guess my actions and wonder if I should head up stream to start something new.

I’ve seen many bloggers come and go over the years. People who, like me, saw the opportunity in blogging to build something significant but who at the first sign of clay abandoned their blogs.

Then there were others who abandoned their work because of the exciting rumors from up creek, bloggers who stopped blogging to get on MySpace, to tweet, to Tumblr, to Facebook, to Google+.

The blogosphere is littered with abandoned blogs and I sometimes wonder what might have happened if some of those bloggers had kept digging through the clay.

While I know not all would have succeeded I do think that persistence is a big part of successful blogging (and success in almost all fields).

My experience of blogging is that while there have been days where I’ve dug into rich veins of gold and great fortune that they’ve always come after focused effort of digging in hard ground.

The year was 1851 and two brothers stood by a bend in a creek that had wishfully been named by gold prospectors Golden Point in days gone by. The two brothers’ surname were Cavanagh and they’d been digging along with around 600 other miners in their claim at Golden Point for days now. Now, some gold had definitely been found in this particular bend in the creek. In fact, numerous miners had made good, although not spectacular money from their finds in the previous weeks, and that’s why 600 other miners had shown up. Most of the gold that had been found had been found in the sandy ground to a depth of about one meter or about three feet. But at that point, everyone who dug hit a hard layer of clay and then they received no further reward for their effort.

Digging through the sandy ground wasn’t too hard but as soon as they hit clay, it became backbreaking work. The result was that the whole area around the brothers’ claim was littered with abandoned claims, holes in the ground were everywhere, all dug exactly to the same depth of about one meter. Now, the miners around the Cavanagh brothers that day were beginning to talk of rumors coming from further up the creek of richer pickings. In the 24 hours that followed, most of the miners had moved on, but the brothers Cavanagh had a hunch. They wanted to see what would happen if they dug deeper. They began the arduous task of that day of digging into the hard clay that everyone else had stopped digging into.

They chose an abandoned claim from another miner and they began to dig. The work was hard, it was unrewarding. They dug and they found nothing but more clay. Inch by inch, they’d chipped away into the clay only to find more clay. All day they dug. They went to bed that night with no reward for their effort. The second morning they continued to dig as the last miners around them abandoned their claims and moved on to chase their dreams up the creek. I can just imagine the other miners abandoning their claims and shaking their heads as they looked at the Cavanagh brothers and laughing at their foolhardy efforts, but the brothers had a belief and they kept their focus.

As sunset approached on the second day and after hours of backbreaking work, the brothers finally broke through the last of the clay at around the depth of two meters. Under the clay they found what centuries ago had been the old bed of the creek. In it were pockets of gold which had been washed down that creek from the mountains of the hundreds of years. The brothers worked into the night feverishly until the light from their lamps gave up. I can just imagine how they must have felt as they lay in bed that night attempting to sleep. The next day they arose early and assessed their work. In the light of day, the full reality of what they’ve uncovered started to sink in. There was gold down below that clay—and lots of it.

In the single day alone that followed, the Cavanagh brothers found 27 kilograms or about 60 pounds of gold. That day’s takings alone earned them over three-and-a-half thousand pounds which is more than enough to set the two brothers up for life. Word quickly spread of the brothers’ success. A month later, 10,000 miners worked in that area around Golden Point, and the wider Ballarat area—just a few hours from where I live here in Australia—became known as the richest gold field in the world for that time. You can bet that those who followed, those 10,000 miners, dug a whole heap deeper than they previously dug.

I first came across the story of the Cavanagh brothers while I was researching a project back in high school. It’s one of those stories that I continue to find myself reflecting upon today. I love the determination, the focus, and the persistence of these two men. I don’t even know their first names. I only know them as the Cavanagh brothers, but I often think about them. I love how despite the distractions of rumors from up creek that there was gold further up that they continued to dig where they were, where others had already given up.

They actually dug in the abandoned mines of others which I find quite funny. They found something as a result of doing so that others could only have dreamt of finding. I love that through their persistence that they not only found their fortune, but they opened their eyes to others, to try things in new ways, to dig deeper. Others who had probably looked at them and thought that they were crazy suddenly started doing what they were doing.

Success comes through digging in hard places. I guess this, for me, is the big lesson. This is the thing I guess I want to communicate today. Whilst in the last podcast I talked about starting as being something that’s really important, it’s probably the most important thing we can do as entrepreneurs. I think persisting is the second most important thing. We all know this but it’s so tempting to chase those rumors from further up creek and to abandon our mines.

There’s been a whole heap of times over the last few years that I’d felt a little bit like the brothers Cavanagh. Whilst I don’t actually like physical labor, and I would never pick up a pick and dig into a clay, I feel like I’ve done that over the years with my blogging. I’ve seen many other bloggers come and go over the years. People who are like me, saw the opportunity in blogging, to build something significant, but at the first sign of clay, abandon their blogs. Believe me, I’ve been tempted to give up my blogs many times over the years because it does become hard work at times.

I see a lot of bloggers who abandon their work because of these exciting rumors from up creek. I think back many years ago just after I started, I heard about bloggers who were giving up their blogs to get on MySpace. Then I’ve heard other bloggers who’ve given up their blogs to get on Twitter, or to start on Tumblr, or to start on Facebook, or to get on to Google Plus. There are many abandoned blogs around the blogosphere; there must be tens of millions, if not more. I sometimes wonder what would have happened if some of those bloggers have kept digging through the clay. I know not all of them would have succeeded.

Persistence doesn’t guarantee success, but I do think it’s a big part of it, particularly in the blogging and in the online space. My experience was, there have been days where I’ve dug into rich veins of gold and great fortune. It sometimes feels like you do find gold overnight. It almost always comes after a focused effort of digging in hard ground.

I hope you enjoyed today’s story as much as I enjoyed telling it to you. I think of it often and I always get fresh inspiration from it. You can find today’s show notes including a full transcript at problogger.com/podcast/89. I also want to encourage you to tune in in a couple of days’ time to episode 90 because I want to continue on in this little miniseries of important things that you need to do and talk about quitting.

Now, it might seem strange, I’ve just told you to persist, but I do believe there is a time to quit. Now, the story of the Cavanagh’s is one where we see the upside of persisting, but I’m sure there are many miners over the years who have dug in the one spot for too long and perhaps should have quit earlier. In the next episode, I want to give you a few pieces of advice for working out whether now is the right time to quit or perhaps change direction.

You’ll be able to find that podcast at problogger.com/podcast/90 once it goes live in two days’ time. For those of you listening, after the fact, it’s probably already live. I look forward to chatting with you then.

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.

Have you got your own ‘Cavanagh Brothers’ story? What hard places will you dig next to improve your blog? I’d love to hear from you in the comments below.

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In today’s episode, I share the most important thing you’ll ever do as an entrepreneur. Thirteen years ago I opened an email that changed my life forever. I share the story of what it was I read, why it changed me, how it helped me become the entrepreneur I am today, and how it can help you to become the successful blogger and entrepreneur you want to be.

You can listen to today’s episode above or in iTunes or Stitcher (where we’d also LOVE to get your reviews on those platforms if you have a moment). In today’s episode:

It was a completely unremarkable moment in an unremarkable day, 13-and-a-half years ago, but it completely changed the trajectory of my life. The moment was when I opened an email. A friend shot me this email that I could quite easily have deleted. It only had four words in it and then a link but something in those four words made me curious. He wrote this, “Check out this blog,” and then the link tallskinnykiwi.com. I’ve not heard the word blog before, so I clicked the link to find out what it was and to find out who the Tall Skinny Kiwi was as well. Two hours later, I was completely hooked—hooked on the Tall Skinny Kiwi blog—written by a guy called Andrew Jones, but more so, I was hooked on this blogging thing that I saw Andrew and many other people doing.

To cut the long story short, I started my first blog that very day. I did so despite a very long list of reasons why I probably shouldn’t have started that blog. I wasn’t a great writer. I’ve never designed or set up a website before, I didn’t know how to code, I had no money for a domain or hosting. I didn’t know any other bloggers. I’d never even heard the word two hours beforehand. I was worried about what people would think about my ideas. I wasn’t very technical. I didn’t have a niche or any idea that would be central in my blogging. I had this long list of excuses and reasons why I wasn’t qualified to start blogging, but I did.

In doing so, I changed the direction of my life. That might sound like a big statement but it’s completely true. I didn’t know it at the time but just a few years later, I would be a full-time blogger. I’d be offered a book deal. I’d be speaking around the world—at conferences—and have millions of people every month reading what I wrote. Now, by no means am I the biggest or the best blogger going around, far from it, but every day I pinch myself at the opportunities that have opened up as a result of starting that day.

I often speak about this day and some of you have probably heard me tell that story before as a bit of a sliding door moment in my life, but it struck me a while ago that this a life changing moment, but it wasn’t just that moment that changed my life. Starting has been something that I’ve actually done a whole heap of over the last 13-and-a-half years. Starting wasn’t just something that I did on that November afternoon in 2002; it’s something I’ve done many times since. There’ve been many, many, many starts. I started writing that first blog, yes, but I’ve also started writing a book, I’ve started writing avenue blogs, I’ve started working on different social networks, I started business partnerships, I’ve started to write eBooks, I started my first course. I’ve started a job board, I’ve started an event for bloggers, I’ve started a podcast.

Now, all of these starts have contributed to where I am today. It wasn’t just that first start. These starts all kind of felt momentous in different ways at the time that I did them, but along the way, there have been a whole heap of other little starts as well. Even if you really break it down, everyday there has been a start. There have been starts of new blog posts, there’s been starts of new tweets. All of these starts start in different ways. Sometimes, I’ll start with a spark and run on an idea that won’t go away in the middle of the night. Sometimes the starts really quickly fizzle, false starts, if you like. But it’s amazing how many of them over the last 13 years have actually led to wonderful opportunities.

One such start came at 02:00 AM, about 9 years ago. It was an idea that came to me in the middle of the night for a month-long blog post series that I was going to produce on ProBlogger. I was going to give a daily tip, coupled with an activity, a piece of homework that people could go away and do on their blog. This idea came to me at 02:00 AM. It was an idea I just couldn’t get out of my head. I gave the idea a little bit of oxygen by getting up out of bed that night and writing a blog post saying that I was going to start these new series of blog posts called 31 Days to Build a Better Blog.

Now, that first series of blog posts turned into a second series of blog posts and then it turned into a third series of blog posts, and eventually, after a number of years it turned into an eBook that sold over 20,000 copies. Later, I took that eBook and created a 31-part series of podcasts–my most listened to podcasts today. That spark of an idea that I enacted—that I started—led to a whole heap of other things as well. It sparked ideas for other eBooks. I’ve now created over 30 of them and they’ve sold hundreds of thousands of copies over the years, but it all started with that spark of an idea. It all started because I couldn’t sleep one night, and I took the idea and I started something to see where it might lead and then I continued to evolve it.

I guess in some ways I share this story today because I want to encourage you to pay attention to those little sparks of ideas that come to you in the middle of the night; the things you can’t get out of your head. Don’t just get excited by those ideas, do something with them, start them. Pay attention to the ideas that come after you have started as well. That first idea could have just ended with that first series of blog posts, but I continued to evolve it; I continued to start new things with that idea, and to evolve it into something that I couldn’t have even imagined that first night at 2:00 AM when I got the idea.

I want to finish with this, it’s a tweet I had I put out several years ago that I often think about. I tweeted this, “Starting is not something that should be contained to a moment in time, that you can tick off your to do list, it’s a mindset. Starting is a mindset.” I want to encourage you, yes, you’ve probably already started. Many of you have already started that blog but pay attention to those new little ideas that can evolve what you’re doing and change what you’re doing gradually over time. Be a starter.

You can find today’s show notes at ProBlogger.com/podcast/88 and stay tuned for the next in this miniseries that I’m doing, because starting is just part of it, obviously. Starting is really important and you need to continue to evolve your ideas, but in the next episode, episode 89, I think it is, we’re going to talk about the second most important thing you’ll ever do as an entrepreneur. You can find that over at problogger.com/podcast/89 once it is published in a couple of days’ time. I look forward to chatting with you then.

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.

Have you had a ‘sliding doors’ moment? What are you starting next? Have you got a strategy that helps you finish what you start? I’d love to hear from you in the comments below.

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Note: you can listen to this episode above or load it up in iTunes.

Today’s episode is about how to get into the habit of finishing what you start. It’s part 5 in a mini-series of podcasts that looks at how to be more productive with your blog and beat common blocks. In today’s episode, I’m sharing how I managed to switch from regularly starting but not finishing blog posts, to finishing and publishing them most times. I share my strategy, tools and process so that you can finish every blog post every time. 

You can listen to today’s episode above or in iTunes or Stitcher (where we’d also LOVE to get your reviews on those platforms if you have a moment). In today’s episode:

9 questions you can use as your blog post completion checklist:

Other episodes in this series about beating blogger’s block:

Today, I want to finish out a little series on blogger’s block. We started the series back in episode 83 where I talked about three different types of blogger’s block. We talked about that blockage that you have in coming up with ideas. We talked about the block that you have sometimes when you’re creating content, and also completing content. Actually hitting publish and this is something a lot of bloggers actually struggle with, they end up with a whole heap of drafts or they sit on posts for a long time before they publish them for a variety of reasons. 

You can go back and listen to the previous episodes in episode 83, 84 and 86. There was an 85, it was Pat Flynn’s interview to catch up on the series. Today, I want to talk about this idea of completing content. I want to talk about some of the reasons why people don’t complete that content. I want to give you three quite practical tips on how to get through that block if that’s something that you struggle with. Either you complete stuff poorly, or you don’t complete stuff at all. That’s what we’re focusing on today. You can find today’s show notes and I do have some further reading for you today at problogger.com/podcast/87.

As I said, today I want to turn our attention to the third type of bloggers block, that of completing and publishing your content. When I speak at conferences to bloggers, one of my favorite questions to ask is, “How many posts do you have in your WordPress or your blogging platform that are marked as drafts? How many half-written pieces of content have you written?” I’d actually love to get your feedback on that. You can tweet me at @ProBlogger and just say, “I’ve got this many drafts.” It’d be kind of interesting to see that. 

I’m always amazed how many bloggers have a lot of half-written posts. I probably shouldn’t be too amazed at this because as I said back in episode 83, my own record for the amount of drafts that I’ve got in a single installation on WordPress is 93. That was in the early days of ProBlogger. Some of those drafts were just titles with maybe a couple of points. Some of them had maybe introductions and not much else. Others were almost fully written but needed conclusions or an image added or some for the reading, or maybe were complete but I just didn’t feel they we’re ready to go live for some reason or another. 

I obviously had a problem at that time with completing posts and if I’m honest, it’s something that I continue to struggle with at different times today. There are a variety of problems I think that bloggers can have that lead to these completion blockages. I think I called it completion constipation back in episode 83 and had a couple of people giggle at that one.

Some of the reasons why people struggle with completion, one, it could be, like me, back at that time, I had so many ideas that I wanted to write about that I couldn’t really complete the post because I was already thinking about the next post, and I was getting distracted by all the ideas. I remember one day sitting down to write a post, it was quite a long post and as I wrote it, I had so many tangents that I wanted to take that I started writing seven other posts before I completed that first one. Everything I was writing stimulated new ideas. That’s kind of a good problem to have because it gets you through that other type of bloggers block we’ve already talked about, that of coming up with ideas, but it can mean that you come up with so many starts and posts that you don’t actually finish any of them.

When I’ve shared this in the past, I’ve come across plenty of other bloggers who share this affliction if you like. There are other bloggers who struggled to complete posts for different reasons and that is perfectionism. Some of you struggle to publish posts because you don’t think they’re good enough yet. Perfection paralysis is something that I find a whole group of bloggers struggle with. Other bloggers don’t finish posts because they lose interest in the post they’re writing halfway through them and this is something I struggle with at times. Particularly with some of the longer posts that I’m writing, I occasionally will sit down and try to write a mega post, a complete guide to a topic.

Whilst this post can do really well, they do take several days, if not weeks, to write and simply by taking so long, I sometimes find myself getting a bit disinterested or sometimes you’ll write yourself into a corner with the post that you’re writing as well, you kind of write and explore tangent, and then you don’t know how to finish it and you become a little bit disillusioned with it. That could be another reason that some bloggers don’t complete their posts.

The other type of problem that I do want to address in this podcast is still around completion but it’s almost the opposite problem. Some bloggers hit publish before the posts are ready, and this is a problem with how they complete their posts too. I want to talk about that today. These are bloggers who push publish on pieces before they’ve been proofread, or maybe they don’t have enough depth, or maybe they’re just not valuable enough yet and they could be more valuable, maybe they haven’t felt through the title, or their opening, or their conclusion. This is something that I think most bloggers do struggle with at times as well, is hitting publish on posts that really haven’t been completed yet at all.

The problem with that, I guess, is that it does have an impact upon your brand. When your publishing stuff is not really polished so that’s not really good enough, people are going to—that’s going to impact the way they see you. There’s a whole heap of things that I’ve just talked about there. They all really relate to either not completing posts or not completing posts well enough. Today, I want to talk about, I’ll just give you three practical things that you can do to ensure that you complete your posts and you complete them well. 

The solution to this problem partly just comes down to your mindset and being disciplined. I almost hesitated to say that today, because it’s so simple and so obvious, but really for me, when I have those 93 posts, I just had to get my act into gear. I just had to sit down and complete those posts.

The first thing I want to say today is you need to dedicate time to this. We’ve previously talked in the last two podcasts on the series about being intentional about putting aside time to brainstorm and plan your topics, being intentional in putting aside time to create content, it doesn’t just happen. 

I think the same is true here, we need to put aside time and effort into completing our content. In my mind, this completing of content is just as important as any other part in the process. The way you complete your post is just as important as the ideas you come up with and the writing itself, because if you don’t complete your posts, nothing ever goes live and that has no impact upon anyone. If you complete your posts poorly, that can really hurt your reputation and your brand and can destroy all the work you do in coming up with great ideas and writing some of the content, so you’ve just got to really put the effort into this particular area.

For me, that really means dedicating time every week to completing. I’ve shared and I think it was back in episode 40, I showed you my schedule, I showed you my calendar and I have a template for my week. In that template, there is a time for brainstorming and coming up with ideas. There’s a time for creating content. In fact, there’s a number of times every week, usually in the mornings. In the afternoon, you’ll see in episode 40 that I dedicate time, three afternoons a week to complete. I actually am very intentional about that because I know if I don’t put that time aside, it won’t get done. This is a problem for me and so I dedicate time to it. In those times, I complete a number of things. I dedicate that time every week to completing blog posts and I’ll almost always have a post that I’m working on, that I really should spend some more time on and get ready to publish.

The focus here is often on finding a good image, or adding some further reading, or adding depth, or adding another point, or editing and proofreading. For me, editing and proofreading is like pulling teeth. I hate it, I don’t enjoy it at all, but it’s so important. Completion time for me is completing the blog posts, but it’s also completing other projects as well. For me, it might be completing podcasts, it might be completing an eBook, or a presentation that I’m working on, or an article I’m working on for some of the sites. 

Dedicate time to completing. I think it’s really important for creators of all types, whether you’re a blogger or whether you’re something else. Dedicate time to prepare, create, and complete. They’re the three things that I’m dedicating every time to every week. Number one, dedicate time to it. It is a bit of a logical one, it’s a bit of a no brainer, but it’s amazing how many people do not dedicate time to completing.

Number two tip is build a workflow, build a system, build some sort of a checklist that’s going to help you to complete well. Some of you might actually find it helpful to build a completion checklist. This is going to be particularly helpful for those of you struggling with publishing things before they’re really ready, not publishing things that aren’t really good enough yet. To have a checklist is going to help you to improve your posts. It’s also I think helpful for those of you who are struggling with perfectionism, to actually have a checklist and to be able to say, “I have done everything that I need to do to have these posts ready, it is good enough.” That can sometimes help you to push past your perfectionism.

I want to give you right now nine questions that I would be asking if I use this checklist. I don’t actually have a checklist. I don’t tick these things off, but these are the things that, I guess, I’ve trained myself to ask myself before I hit publish. I’m going to publish these in the show notes today for those of you who do need a checklist that you do want to work through. Number one, does the post matter? Is it meaningful? Is it valuable to readers? I think that’s the ultimate question that you have to ask before you hit publish. If the answer to that question is that it’s not meaningful, it doesn’t matter, it’s not valuable in some way to someone then it probably shouldn’t go live. If the answer is no to that, you probably now need to go back to that post and make it valuable, make it meaningful, make it matter to your readers.

If you’re just publishing stuff just for the sake of publishing it, it’s not really worth publishing. There’s probably some exceptions to that if it’s meaningful to you. If it’s not meaningful to anyone else, maybe it’s just self-expression or maybe that’s about it. I think ultimately, most of your posts need to be meaningful. They need to be valuable to your readers, so that’s number one.

Number two, is your title good enough, could you do more work on that? Number three, have you got a good opening line? Does your post open well and does it intrigue people? Does it make them want to read on? Number four, have you clearly explained your main point, so your teaching, or your opinion, that’s going to depend a little on the type of article that you’re writing, but really, have you got some depth there, have you got some meat there, is it valuable to that content?

Number five, have you added an appropriate conclusion and/or call to action? This is really not just about have you opened your posts, but you also need to end them well as well. Did it just die, did it just stop, or does it actually lead your readers to do something, does it actually sum it up well with your conclusion? The next question is, could you add more depth in some way? Could you add some further reading, could you add a quote, could you add an example, could you actually take your content to the next level and provide more value, I guess, ultimately there.

The next question is have you invited your readers to interact, respond, and/or share? Have you made your posts not just information, but have you invited interaction. The next question is have you proofread it, have you edited it? Are there grammatical mistakes out there, spelling mistakes? And the last question, could you add more visual appeal to your posts through images, through maybe embedding some video, or embedding an Instagram or a tweet, or could you improve it in terms of the formatting? Could you make it more visually appealing by adding some headings, or lists, or adding some bold in certain parts.

These are questions that I think I’ve kind of asked myself naturally now. I’ve been blogging for 13 years. I’m asking myself these questions almost as I’m writing the content, but particularly before I hit publish, but these are things that if you are struggling with completion, I think it might be helpful to develop a checklist, to actually tick these things off, and others that you might have in your mind that will help you to move past perfectionism. If you get to the end of that list, and you’ve answered yes to all of those questions, then your post is probably good enough, and you need to hit publish on them.

If you go through that list and there are some no’s, if you say no, the title is not good enough, or no, I haven’t done a conclusion well enough, that’s going to help you improve your blog post as well. Now, on today’s show notes, I’m going to give you some further reading on a series of articles that I wrote a few years ago on crafting blog posts that really touch on some of the questions that I’ve just asked. There’s a post there on adding more depth to your content, there’s a post there on polishing your content to make it look better. There are I think 10 posts there that touch on some of those different things; titles, opening lines, those types of things there. We’ll have a link to that series. I think it’s called 10 Crucial Points to Pause as you’re crafting a blog post, or something like that.

I think it’s a really good series to help you to really work through those questions. I’d encourage you, if you are struggling with perfectionism, if you’re struggling with publishing posts that aren’t quite ready yet, come up with a checklist to work through.

The last thing that I want to talk about is involving others in the completion of your content. Getting some help is the third tip. There are parts of this that you do need to do yourself. I can’t outsource my voice, I can’t outsource the majority of my writing, but I can outsource the completion or parts of the completion. I can outsource editing, and proofreading, and scheduling of posts, and some of those types of things. That’s something that I have done over the last 2-3 years really on both of my blogs.

I have part time editors on ProBlogger and Digital Photography School. They both work a couple of days a week not only helping me complete my posts, but also for those of our writers. They also help with some editorial strategy and planning as well. Now obviously, I’m in a position today to be able to afford to pay people for those roles, but it wasn’t always that way for me. Even in the early days when I didn’t have money to dedicate to that, I did find some creative ways to involve others in the completion of my content. Let me give you a couple of examples of that. 

At one point, I did a deal with another blogger in my niche where we agreed to read each other’s posts before they went live. We each agreed that we would put aside 10 minutes every day to read through and give feedback on the post from the other person that they were going to publish the next day. It was relatively quick. All it really took was for me to read through their post and to give them feedback on that. It included spelling mistakes that I found, I didn’t usually find too many of those. Grammatical, things that didn’t quite read well. I give them feedback on titles. I give them feedback on, “Maybe you need an image here, maybe you should add a sub heading there. Maybe you can add this point. Maybe there’s some further reading that you could add,” and I was just giving a little bit of feedback. I was giving a fresh perspective on that post. It only took us 10 minutes each per day. They did the same thing for me. You’ve got to find the right person to be able to do this type of thing, but if you can find a blogging buddy to work on that type of thing with, that can be gold. I would say that my post significantly improved during that period. 

There was another point where I had a small group of guest writers on Digital Photography School who did pretty much the same thing. We had a little email group. We didn’t send each other every single post that we wrote, but if we were struggling to finish a post, whether we didn’t know what to give it as a title, or we didn’t know how to conclude it, or we were looking for an image that would help to make the post better, we would send each other an email around that.

I actually know of a group of four bloggers here in Australia who have a Facebook group that does pretty much exactly the same thing. They each have agreed that they can share two posts a week that they’re working on and that they want feedback on. The group helps them with ideas, proofreading, and again, helps them to improve those posts. These things only work if you find the right person. If you find people who are willing to dedicate time to put into critiquing, and improving your content, and if you are willing to help them as well.

If you can find that right group of people, blogging buddies, writing partners, it can be an incredibly powerful thing. I would encourage you that if you are looking for that type of person, do a bit of a hunt and ask another blogger if they’d be willing to do that. Even if it’s just one post a week that you swap and allow each other to read. That can significantly improve your content. I’m sure there’s a whole heap more that could be said about completing blog posts and I would invite you to do so in the comments of today’s show notes at problogger.com/podcast/87.

Now again, in my opinion, the way you complete your posts is as important as any other part of the creation of content that you come up with. It’s as important as coming up with ideas. It’s as important as the way you actually write your posts, because if you’re not completing your post well, it has a massive impact upon the way people perceive you. Dedicate time to it, be disciplined about working through some sort of a workflow, or a system, or a checklist to help ensure that your content is as good as it can be, and where possible, look for the help and support of all the people in that process.

I want to thank you for listening to this podcast. Not only this one today, episode 87, but all previous ones. I actually got an email today from a little service that I use, it sends me all the reviews that I get around the world, on all the different iTunes around the world, and Stitcher, and a couple of really great reviews came in. 

This one came in from John Patterson from the US back earlier in January. He gave a 5-star review. Thank you so much John. He said, “I listen to more than a dozen podcasts. Of those, I can count on one hand those that qualify as can’t miss for me, but the ProBlogger podcast is the only one I’m taking notes on. Incredibly practical and extremely useful as I launch my own platform at theresourcefulcommunity.com.” Thanks so much, John. I do appreciate that feedback and I love the image of you sitting there with your notepad or whatever it is that you take your notes on.

This one came in from Tony just a week ago now. “Here in the US, we often hear people calling in on talk radio who say a long time listener, first caller. Well, that describes me. I’ve been listening to Darren Rowse’s solid advice on ProBlogger for a while. It finally occurred to me that I’ve never bothered to write a review. I have no idea why I waited so long. Darren adds massive value in my life with his podcast. He helps me from end-to-end to be better at my craft. Listen and you’ll understand why I say that.” Thank you so much, Tony. That just lightened my day when I got that email today and I really appreciate that, and for you John as well, and for all the others who are leaving reviews, and are sharing this podcast. It really energizes me, I have to say. I hope you can hear that in my voice today.

I look forward to chatting with you in episode 88 of the ProBlogger podcast. Please do subscribe to the ProBlogger plus newsletter which is also linked to on today’s show notes. It is how we let people know about new episodes of this podcast as well as new blog posts on the blog. The last thing I’ll say is in the coming weeks, you’re going to see some real changes over at problogger.com where we are moving all of the content that was on the ProBlogger.net. Bear with us a little bit as we make those changes.

As many of you know, when you make changes like that, things do tend to break and there are bugs, but also I would invite you to come over and check that out in the coming weeks as well. I really would value your feedback as we release that. I’m both excited and nervous as it always comes, those mixed emotions when you’re launching something new. Anyway, thanks so much for listening today. I look forward to chatting with you in episode 88 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 @ProBlogger, find us at facebook.com/ProBlogger, or search ProBlogger on iTunes.

Have you suffered from not being able to complete your blog posts? How many unfinished draft blog posts do you have? Have you got a strategy that helps you finish and press ‘publish’? I’d love to hear from you in the comments below.

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Note: you can listen to this episode above or load it up in iTunes.

Today’s episode is about how to get into the flow of regularly writing great content for your blog. It’s part 4 in a mini-series of podcasts that looks at how to stop blogger’s block. I get asked about it all the time and suffer it too! In today’s episode, I’m tackling the challenge of hitting the wall in terms of creating content, traditionally known as ‘writer’s block’. I share 10 key strategies you can use to beat writer’s block.  

You can listen to today’s episode above or in iTunes or Stitcher (where we’d also LOVE to get your reviews on those platforms if you have a moment). In today’s episode:

Other episodes in this series about beating blogger’s block:

Back in episode 83, we talked about three different types of blogger’s block. Coming up with ideas was one of them, writing content was another, the third type was completing the content. Episode 84, I talked about how to come up with ideas for what to write about. 

Today, I want to talk about how to actually get in the flow of writing and creating that content. You can find today’s show notes with some further reading and some tools at problogger.com/podcast/86. 

Today, we’re tackling the challenge of hitting the wall in terms of creating content. This is probably traditionally called writer’s block but it applies to different forms of creating content as well. I know bloggers or podcasters who get podcasting block. YouTubers have YouTubing block or whatever it might be. Coming up against that wall of creating, it can come about for a variety of reasons. There’s probably different types of writer’s block in the midst of it. Sometimes, you get too many ideas and they all jam together that you can’t get anything out. Sometimes it’s just things that aren’t flowing, your words are getting jumbled up, things just don’t seem to sound right. Sometimes it’s more about being out of rhythm. 

For instance, I have to find it really hard when I come back after taking three or four weeks off for a holiday, vacation, or travelling for a conference. Sometimes I find it hard to get back in the flow of writing every day. Sometimes you’re just tired. Sometimes you just feel uninspired, and just feel a bit burnt out. There’s been a whole heap of times for me over the last 13, 14, years where this has been an issue for me. I just can’t get in the flow of writing and creating content.

In this episode, I want to give you 10 different things that I do to try and get things flowing again. I am very much coming from my own perspective here. I’m an individual person and not going to be the same as any one of you. I hope somewhere in the mix of these 10 things that you’ll get something that will help to unblock that creative flow if that’s something you’re facing as a challenge at the moment.

The first thing I want to talk about is mixing up your environment. For me, this can mean different things at different times. For me, quite often, it’s about getting out of my home, and into a cafe. I like white noise. I find that I get in the flow of writing really well when there’s the clinking of glasses and other conversations in the background. A little bit of music, perhaps, and people around me. I know for other people, it’s the exact opposite. That’s the worst nightmare for you. You can’t really get in the flow in that space.

For my wife, Vanessa, as a blogger, for her, it probably means getting into a library. She loves to go to our local library to get out of the house, away from distractions of home, noise of our children, and me. She seems to work really well in that environment. It’s probably going to be different for different people but try to mix up your environment and experiment with different places for writing. Also, different tools, I guess, as well.

I found that I worked really well when I write offline. When I’m in a cafe, I won’t tether my iPhone to my computer so I can’t get online. That can be a bit frustrating at times when you want to look something up. Usually, I actually find that it helps me to get into the zone because I’m not being distracted by Skype, Slack, or not being tempted to jump on Facebook and all of those types of things. 

Of course, there are different tools that block out distractions on our computers as well. I’ve never really tried any of those that block me from getting me on Facebook. If that’s helpful for you, do search for those types of tools. Of course, you can use full stream mode in many writing tools at the moment as well. I use Evernote and quite often write in full screen mode so there’s no other windows to distract me. You might also want to mix up music versus silence, that might be something. I actually use both. I write most often with silence or with a bit of white noise. Occasionally, I find that music really inspires me. I’ve got a few playlists that I use on Spotify that just help me to get into the zone depending on what I’m feeling at that time. Point number one is to mix up your environment.

Tip number two is try freewriting. This is something that I haven’t done a whole heap of. There have been periods where I have been really stuck with my writing. I’ve just free-written. For me, it usually works like this. I’ll be a bit dry, I just decide to get up early every morning for a week and to write. I actually wrote about this a couple of years ago, I’ll leave a link in today’s show notes. I did this for a number of weeks, I decided to get up at 6:30 every morning and just write.

When I usually do this, I just write on whatever is at the top of my mind at the time. Sometimes it’s personal. Sometimes I’ll write something and get silly. It doesn’t really mean anything at all, it’s just words. Other times it’s about business or work, maybe it’s an idea that I’ve got. Sometimes I write about my children, sometimes I just write about the movie I’ve seen yesterday. It doesn’t really matter. The agenda isn’t to create a piece of content. Although, sometimes you do. Rather, it’s just to write, to get into the flow, and to express yourself, maybe to order your thoughts as well.

It’s about getting into that space where you are writing again. I find that freewriting for me is often a thing that I will do after I have been away for three or four weeks on a vacation, or if I’ve been travelling for a trip and haven’t written for a few weeks. I just find that it just seems to unblock that part of my brain which controls my writing. Sometimes it actually gives you ideas as well, you might actually be writing and it’ll jumble. Suddenly, an idea pops out at you and becomes the beginning of a blog post. That’s certainly been the case for me a number of times now. 

Try brief freewriting. Again, there’s a post in ProBlogger that I’ll link in the show notes that talk a little bit about how I’ve done. There’s plenty of other resources if you do a google search for freewriting as well. If you find a good one, please leave it in the comments on today’s show notes as well.

Tip number three is one that has worked for me many times, that is to write to someone. Sometimes when I’m writing a blog post, I freeze out because I worry about my audience. I worry about the thought that maybe hundreds or thousands of people might read what I’m writing and it’s not just good enough. I freak out. I’ll feel the need to be profound or to say something massive that’s going to change the world and change how everyone lives their lives. It gets a little big in my mind. In those cases, I find that writing to a single person can really help me.

There’s a number of ways that you can do this. You could just pretend that you are writing your post to one of your readers. Two, you could actually write one of your readers an email. Many of my best posts started this way as a response to a question that I got from one of my readers or just me saying, “I see this reader. I know them. I know that they could improve in some area of their blogging if I gave them some advice or if I gave them unsolicited advice.”

There’s been a number of posts I’ve written in ProBlogger where I’ve just written one of my readers a letter. I’ve never published it with their details. Many of the posts on ProBlogger have actually started with me responding to something that I think one of my readers could benefit from. By writing to that individual, then changing it a little bit later to make it a bit more applicable to everyone, it comes across in a more personal way.

Sometimes I actually do send that advice to the individual that I’m writing to. Many times I just publish it because I find out it’s going to be helpful to other bloggers as well. Maybe you want to write a piece of advice to someone you know who’s just starting out in your particular area of expertise, maybe you want to respond to another blogger’s post. This is a technique I’ve used a number of times now. If you are stuck right now with your writing, I challenge you to pause this podcast, go and read five other blogs in your niche. Leave 5-10 comments on different blog posts on those blogs with the goal of writing something useful in those comments. Go on a commenting spree on other blogs in your niche.

I guarantee you that as you write those comments, as you add value to those blogs, you can be getting ideas for things that you can write on your own blog. You’ll be exercising that writing muscle in your brain on your topic. I actually find that technique has unlocked all kinds of blog posts for me. It’s a technique that I’ve never really talked about before but I use quite often. Go find a blog post, read, and write useful content in terms of comments. After that, it will unlock ideas to write about in my own blog.

Tip number four is to really get in touch with a problem, need, or pain point of your readers. I find that I’m most inspired to write when I feel that I’m writing something that could change the life of those who read. My best blog posts often come about after a conversation with someone who has an issue, a problem, a challenge. After a few really emotional problems and challenges, when I see pain in another person, that is after when I feel most inspired to write. It sounds a bit silly and it sounds a bit mean in some ways that I write best when other people are suffering. I guess it’s more about the response to that suffering. That’s just my personality. I write best when I know I’m helping people.

Hangout in the places where places are in pain. That sounds like horrible advice but actually works. Forums can be a great place to hang out because people go to forums and they express their problems. I actually find coming home from any event where I had conversations with people—those deep conversations with people who are struggling in some particular area, that’s after when I write my best post on the way home from the conference. 

Look for those pain points in other people and use that as a motivation to write. Write from those places. Allow yourself to feel their pain. You will find yourself writing with a more genuine passion, a genuine intent, and hope that you’re making other people’s lives better. That comes across in your writing. If you are feeling something in your writing, you’re much more likely to write something that’s going to impact people. You’ll write in a better way, I guess. It will hopefully flow a little bit more as well. Tip number four, get in touch with a problem, a need, or a pain point for your readers.

Number five, get in a rhythm. Put aside a dedicated time to write. For me, regularity is so important with my writing. If I’m writing every day, I find it so much easier to write. If I’m only writing once a week, if I’m writing once a month, it’s really hard going from me. I find that I need to put aside time to create content every weekday. For me, my golden hours are the morning. In mornings I create so much better contents than evenings. The times I try and work to write at night, it doesn’t really flow generally for me. 

My diary will reflect this. If you look at my calendar, I’ve shared it numerous times on this podcast in the past, you’d find that I do my creation in the morning. I try and dedicate at least a little bit of time every morning to some kind of creation of content, whether that be podcasting or writing or video. Get into a rhythm and make appointments with yourself to create content.

Tip number six is to set yourself deadlines and use an editorial calendar. Again, we’ve talked about this in previous episodes of the podcast. We’re not going to great detail here. In the last episode in this series, I think it was episode 84, I talked a little bit about how to generate ideas to write about. The next step for me is taking that brainstorming of ideas and putting them in some kind of an editorial calendar or schedule. We use CoSchedule, there’s a link to that in today’s show notes, which is really great for helping to visualize where your pieces of content are going to fit. You can use any calendar tool to do that, or even paper and pen to help you to work on that. 

I generally plan out my next week or two in terms of what I need to create. I sit down to write and I know that on this day, I need to create this piece of content. I know other bloggers who think much further in advance. They’re brainstorming their next three month of content or even longer than that. In the midst of that, I try to leave a little bit of time to write spontaneously too. I’m a fairly spontaneous person. If I get a random idea, I have the flexibility within my workflow to be able to write about that, not just work to the deadlines. 

I certainly do work well with deadlines in place. Particularly, when other people are aware of them as well. It’s been great for me to have editors on my blog that I have hired over the last few years. They’re able to say, “Darren, where is that blog post that we’re waiting for?” Set yourself deadlines and use an editorial calendar. That’s tip number six.

Tip number seven is one of my favorites. It’s to stimulate your mind and inspire your mind. Your brain needs food if you want it to give output. This means physical food. Good, healthy eating certainly does help you, I find with my creative output. It also means stimulation. What goes in, it comes out. If you’re not putting anything healthy in or anything good into your brain, you’re not going to get much out of it. For me, that means that I work best when I’m getting all kinds of mental stimulation. When I’m learning, when I laugh, when I’m being stretched, when I have good conversation. As a result, what I’m trying to do in my day to day is listen to podcasts, read books, and watch movies, documentaries. To do so, not just on the topics that I’m writing about, but other things as well.

This morning, for example, on my morning walk I listened to an episode of the Hidden Brain Podcast. It’s an NPR Hope podcast on human behavior. It’s not really connected to what I write about but I always get ideas as I’m walking and listening to that particular podcast. I love podcasts like Invisibilia, another NPR podcast.

I try and read novels. At the moment, I’m reading the first Harry Potter book to my youngest children. I try and regularly watch TED Talks, I try and dip into listening to different comedy podcasts. This approach of listening to and exposing your mind to different types of things I think is good because you do get random ideas as you’re doing it. It also gives your brain a break from your work. I find somewhere in the midst of getting this stimulation and not thinking about your topic often leads to those lightbulb moments. That’s certainly the case for me. 

Do make sure that you are learning about your topic as well. I think it’s really important to not rest easy and feel like, “Yeah, I know everything there is to know about my topic.” When you’re learning, you’re going to be more dynamic in your writing. When you are freshly learning new lessons, of course that’s going to be much more interesting to your readers than just you writing about things that you learned 10 years ago all the time. Number seven was to stimulate your mind.

Number eight is to use outlines. Most of my blog posts, at least the ones that have the biggest impact, are generally written in the same kind of way. They usually start with some kind of an outline. In fact, most of my blog posts, particularly on ProBlogger and also in Digital Photography School have revolved around and started their life as lists. Generally, this is what I do in terms of coming up with blog posts. I’ll start with the need or problem that I’m trying to solve. Then, I come up with a list of things that I want to say on that problem. 

Usually for me, I start with a problem then I come up with a bullet point list. It starts out very light, very lean, just a few words for each of the points that I want to make. With that list, it might be five things I want to say or 10 things I want to say. I then work through the list and write more in each of the points. If there’s not much to say on each of those points, it might end up that I published that list as a list. It might be a post that’s, “Here’s 10 ways to do this.” 

If I’ve got more to say in each of those posts, it may actually turn into a longer form article which is then broken down into 10 segments or might have subheadings across it. It can end up looking quite differently but usually my posts do start as some kind of a list during the outline of what I want to say. Once I’ve written that meaty part of the content, I usually then turn my attention to the introduction. For me, an introduction is something that I generally will write after I wrote the main meat of my content. Occasionally, it’s the other way around. My introduction’s generally focused upon the need or the problem that I’m addressing and making some kind of a promise of the value that our reader will receive from reading it. After I’ve written the introduction, I then turn my attention to the conclusion which usually is some sort of a call to action. Either call to action that’s going to benefit my reader, or me or somewhere in between. Then, I usually turn my attention to the title.

In general, that’s the flow from me. I find that by having that outline, by breaking down my blog posts into smaller chunks sized pieces, it makes it more achievable to do. Of course, there’s different ways of doing this. Michael Hyatt, for example, I’ll link to a post that he wrote in the show notes today, he has a six point template for his blog posts. He starts with a compelling title then he has a lead paragraph, a relevant image, personal experience. Then, he has the main body of his content and he finishes with a discussion question. Again, I’ll link to his post where he breaks that down. He finds that by having that template, the writing comes easier for him. You might want to try that as well.

Point number nine, second to the last point, try different styles of posts. This is something I don’t do all the time. If I’m stuck, sometimes I challenge myself to write a different type of blog post. If you’re always writing how to content, perhaps try writing a story post. If you’re always writing personal blog posts, try to write a review post. If you’re always writing news-y sort of posts, write yourself a case study. If you’re always really long meaty posts, challenge yourself to write a 100 word post. If you’re always writing 100 word posts, try and challenge yourself to write a 2000 word post. Mix it up in some way. 

I did this one day when I was really dry. I just challenged myself to write in the third person. I actually wrote a post, 10 Things You Don’t Know About My Dad, The ProBlogger, which was written in the voice of my 2 year old son at the time. I found that just by setting myself that creative challenge, it just got the juices flying. It was fun, it was a different way of doing it. My readers really responded very well to that as well. You might want to try a different style of blog post. Give yourself some sort of challenge, you’ll find that it not only helps you to get into the flow better, it teaches you about writing as well.

The last tip I’ll give you is something I do quite regularly. I’m sure people who see me doing it think I’m a little bit crazy. I try to speak my blog posts out sometimes. Sometimes I think best out loud. I need to say it before I can write it. This is my secret that I’ll reveal to you today. I, quite often, on my walks, I do take a walk most days, I will speak my blog post on my walk. I walk around the block doing this. I’m sure people have heard me in my local area talking out loud to myself. It’s something I do when I’m preparing for a keynote or a talk. Often, my blog posts start that way as well. 

Another thing that I’ve done before, many of you will see me do this, is jump on the Periscope to talk about an idea that’s half formed in my mind. That later becomes a blog post. By having spoken it, had a conversation about it in that way, even if it’s just a one way conversation, it seems to give you inspiration. It comes out better, I find. Sometimes when I’m out on my walk, I’ll pretend to be talking or doing a podcast. Sometimes it’s more of a conversation. If you have a friend who knows about your topic, you might want to have a conversation with them as well. Even have them help you to outline the blog post. It might just help to unlock your ability to write that post.

Similarly, I’ve been known to publish drafts of posts on other social networks as well. Many of you have seen me do this on Google Plus, on LinkedIn, and on Facebook. I might publish that outline of the post. “Here’s 10 things you can do to do this. I’d love your feedback on it.” Then, based on the feedback and the list that you already published, you could turn that into a blog post as well. If you’re feeling stuck, you feel like you’ve got the basics, the outline, it’s getting into the flow, put it out there in a different format, and see how people respond to that. You might just find that those responses inspire you to finish that post and to fill that out in some way.

They’re just 10 of the things that I do and have done over the last 13 or so years of blogging that have helped me to get into the flow of writing. Now, I’m very aware that I’ve created this list out of my own experience. I am different to a lot of other writers. I know other people work very differently to me. I would love it if you would let me know what unlocks that writing, gets you into that writing flow. You can do that on today’s show notes over at problogger.com/podcast/86.

I would love it if you’ll leave me a comment and tell me a little bit about what helps to unlock the writing flow for you. If you have a moment, I’d love it also if you’ll leave us a review over on iTunes. I’ve been reading the reviews, there’s been quite a few come in this week which have given me a lot of joy to read. Some of you are quite funny in the reviews you’re leaving as well. I love it particularly when you do leave a link to your own blog or at least give me the title of your blog so I can check out your blogs as well. If you’ve got a moment today, I do appreciate those.

The next episode in this little series will complete this series on blogger’s block. I’m going to talk about completing your post which is something else that I know a lot of bloggers do struggle with. They get the ideas, they write the content, but they never actually publish it. The post just sits in their draft folder. Episode 87 will be on that in a couple of days’ time. 

Thanks for listening. I hope you have a great week of blogging.

Have you suffered from not being able to get into a regular rhythm with your blog? Have you got a strategy that helps you feel more ‘in the flow’? I’d love to hear from you in the comments below.

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Note: you can listen to this episode above or load it up in iTunes.

Today’s episode is a special interview with Pat Flynn about how to turn your great ideas into real life products.

Pat Flynn is a blogger at Smart Passive Income, speaker, podcaster, author and entrepreneur, widely known for the great tips he shares about how to increase your income.

Many bloggers have great ideas for generating income but don’t end up following through due to fear, or being unsure about how to go ahead.

Pat shares his tips and answers your questions so that you can transform your product ideas into reality.

Pat has also just released his brand new book – Will it Fly.

You can listen to today’s episode above or in iTunes or Stitcher (where we’d also LOVE to get your reviews on those platforms if you have a moment).

In today’s episode:

You can find today’s show notes at problogger.com/podcast/85. That interview is kind of a bit of a funny one. The audio is not great but it’s me and Pat talking about what we knew back in 2010 about making money blogging, and it kind of gives you a bit of an introduction to Pat and how we started out. I think it’s kind of a funny but also kind of interesting interview, so I have included it in today’s show notes. Also on today’s show notes, there’s a whole heap of links to things that Pat mentions, some of the projects that he runs, and also a link to his brand new book which we talked about in quite a bit of depth today. 

His book is called Will It Fly. It’s all about trying to work out whether that crazy idea you’ve got in your head will fly, and really that’s what we’re talking about in today’s podcast. Getting those ideas out of our heads, and testing them, and working out whether they are valid or not, and taking them to that first step, actually getting the ideas out of our head and into action. That’s what this interview is all about and we cover a whole heap of other ground along the way. I hope you enjoy it, and at the end of the interview I will be back to make a few other comments. Enjoy the interview with Pat.

Hi there, Pat! How are you going?

Pat: Oh man, it’s going well. I’m so thankful to talk to you, Darren. Every time I talk to you, it just reminds me of some of the first times that I started blogging because you were my inspiration for blogging when I first started. I remember, I don’t know if I told you the story, but you did a livestream once, I think it was on YouStreamer livestream and everybody’s asking you questions. You actually called out my name one time and it was probably at that time in my life like the highlight of my life because it was like, “Oh my gosh! Darren said my name!” Here we are now, we get to chat with each other, it’s crazy.

Darren: Yeah. It’s funny you talk about the old times because I was literally five minutes ago listening to the first interview that we ever did. I don’t know if you remember.

Pat: Oh, yeah.

Darren: It was January 2010

Pat: Oh, that’s such a long time ago.

Darren: We sounded so young, it was only five years ago but I guess you were still in your 20s and I was still in my 30s.

Pat: Also, I have had two kids since then.

Darren: Well you just had a baby literally 20 days before that interview.

Pat: Oh wow.

Darren: I think in the background you could hear a baby a time or two, or something like that. And our audio was terrible, you sound so much better today!

Pat: Yeah, now I’m old because that’s what happens when you have kids and get gray hairs and stuff. But anyway, that’s so funny! I have to listen to that because I often listen to some of my older stuff. I look at all my older blog posts, I watch some of my older videos. For a couple of reasons, once so I can just remember where I came from and cringe a little bit, and appreciate the journey, but also because it just reminds that I’ve come a long way so I’ll definitely listen to that one.

Darren: I’m going to put it in today’s show notes because it’s still online and if radars want to have a listen to how we used to do it back in the day. And that was what either of us had ever thought about podcasting, I’m sure. Please forgive us, listeners. 

Speaking of kids, I was actually in a café, and we will get on today’s topic in a moment, but I was just in a café with my 7-year-old. I take him there every Wednesday morning on the way to school for Daddy Day. Over a hot chocolate, he asks me–my kids have never asked me this—“What are you doing today, daddy?” I told him about you and I’ve heard your story told to many people before like on stage and in podcasts, and people’s eyes always light up when they hear your story, but my 7-year-old as he heard your story today, his eyes lit up.

It might have been the Back to the Future references that I put in there, but there’s something about your story. Being laid off 2008 and then creating the business that you’ve created ever since, that I think really captures the imagination of a lot of people. I wonder if just those two listeners who haven’t heard of Pat Flynn, whether you could just give us the 30-second version of your story, and most of it is in that other recording. We can point people back to that, but just give us that really quick oversight in that story.

Pat: Sure, absolutely. Thank you to everybody who is listening. 

Now, I am sort of known for smartpassiveincome.com which is where I call myself the crash test dummy of online business, I put myself out there and experiment in building businesses, try new things, and see what’s trending, and see if it works. A lot of times it doesn’t, but either way, it’s a lesson for everybody and that’s kind of what I’m known for now in podcasts, blog, YouTube channel and so on and so forth. 

Before that, it was after I got laid off in 2008 that I started a business helping people pass an exam in the architecture industry, which, to make long story short, I did extremely well, pretty much changed my entire life, and the course of my life, and my thoughts on online business, and entrepreneurship, and blogging and all those sorts of things. It’s just been an incredible journey. I’m so humbled and blessed to be able to connect with people like yourself and help people along the way too. Man, I wouldn’t trade it for the world.

Darren: One of the things I love about your story and the business that you’ve created is the way that you have evolved. You are someone who has, whilst it’s all about smart passive income and this passive word comes up again and again, you are anything but passive in the way that you continue to evolve and experiment. The idea of being a crash test dummy I think is just a brilliant way to describe you because you’ve tried new mediums, you’ve tried new sites, you’ve shipped numerous products whether they be ebooks, iPhone apps, and podcast players. You’ve done affiliate stuff, you’ve done AdSense stuff, you’ve done sponsorships, and now you’re doing a book Will It Fly which we’ll talk about in a moment. I just love the fact that you’ve continued to evolve, and create, and ship things as well.

Pat: Yeah, it’s funny because a lot of people call out the same thing. On passive income, you’re like the busiest person I know. Well, the income part is the passive part, but that allows me to then open up time to do other things. It’s not just these other products, and other businesses, and it’s cool because I’ve had businesses that have been alive for four or five years and continue after month after month without really working to help support me, but it also opens up time to spend time with the family and stuff.

I know you have young kids, I do too, my son’s five, my daughter’s three. I am just so happy because that’s completely motivating to do what I do, so that I can continue to open up time. I do go through these perks. You’ll notice this so this is kind of how a lot of businesses run today. They go through the sprints, so for a while I’ll sprint and I’ll work hard on something. My wife will know, so she knows that she’s going to be taking care of the kids a little bit longer than normal during that time, but then I’ll pull back, things are in motion. 

Even better now I have a team, which is kind of pretty recent actually and that’s been a huge discovery for me, is the amazing effect a team has had on my business and my ability to serve. Definitely passive income, but the things I’m working on now, like all of us, a lot of stuff we work on we’re not getting paid for those things. This book, it could go either way. A lot of the courses that I’ll be creating, it could go either way. I’m going to be experimenting with other sites. Once this book comes out, I’m going to be using these principles in the book to run the exact same experiment with a brand new business, totally not in the niche that I’m in, not using any of my contacts to validate a business idea, and then move forward. It’s so crazy, like this is what I do for a living and it’s awesome, and also very stressful.

Darren: I completely relate. I can be recording this. We are now busy for 12 days of the year. We do a 12 Days of Christmas campaign and it’s a sprint. Right now we are in the middle of the sprint and everything else in my life stops for these 12 days, then there’s time to rest and there’s pay off as well. What I want to do in the rest of our time today is really talk about how you get those ideas that you have into a product; whether that product be a new website, or an ebook, or something like that. 

I know a lot of our readers really do struggle with that. They have all these ideas, or they know they should create a product and a new way of monetizing their blog, but getting those ideas out of their head and actually happening is a struggle for a lot of people. 

In episode 67, for listeners, I did talk about why you should have a product to sell on your blog and why it is a really powerful thing. I don’t really want to get into that why side of things today, but really want to delve into some of the roadblocks that bloggers particularly face with getting a product up and running. I think you’ve probably got some good stuff to say on that front.

Pat: Absolutely. There are a ton of exercises, first of all I absolutely agree. Products, that’s the way to go. If it’s not your own products, it’s affiliate marketing for somebody else’s products. Products aren’t just for you to make money, it’s for you to serve your own needs too. There’s a lot of stuff out there that we can use to help serve our audiences. Affiliate marketing, your own products, absolutely. 

But if you have an idea for something, it’s hard because that idea is in your head. Our brain does a very good job of not creating that idea into something real because there’s just so many different parts of it. We might think of one part of it for a while, I know a lot of us when we have that idea we get into this really cool, almost out of body, what if this could be cool, that you start thinking about all these things. First of all, write everything down that comes across your mind. My favorite strategy is actually to mind map these things, list out all these things that’s in your head because when you list them out, when you see them, it actually starts to make a little sense. You can immediately start to either cross things off, or highlight certain things that might stand out amongst everything else.

The trick is to take all that mush that’s in our brain, which is good mush, but we have to find the things that matter in that. One of my favorite tools to use is actually a post-it note. If you have this one idea and you really want to know what it is, I think the most important thing to do is before you do anything with it, is to really define it and refine it. That can be done in many ways just simply writing, almost just like your brain throwing up on the table and idea by idea, pulling it out, everything in your brain in these post-it notes.

There is mind mapping software out there too that can help you do that. There’s one called mindmeister.com which is my favorite, but again this is just a way to organize those thoughts in our brain. What’s really cool, and this is actually the process I use to create my book, is you’ll start to see patterns, you’ll start to see groupings, and things will start to make a little bit more sense. When you can see visually that things are starting to have a little bit of order, your brain will start to have a little bit of order too. Creating these mind maps are really important.

Then, my favorite thing to do is to take this idea that you have and see if you can explain it. We always can explain through ourselves in our head, but a lot of times we try to explain it to somebody else but we might fumble. Even before you share it with somebody else, you want to try to explain it to yourself by writing it down, write down a whole page of everything this thing is supposed to do. Once you see this transfer from your brain, your hand to paper, things start to make sense and you can begin to see what’s important and what’s not. 

The trick I like to do is take that one page that you write, just the complete summary of everything this thing does that’s in your head, this idea from post-it notes, just pep one page then try to narrow it down to one paragraph. Can you explain what this thing is? What that does is it forces you to just pick out the really important parts or things that actually matter. From that one paragraph, can you take it and actually put it into one sentence? Can you describe this idea, and the benefits of it, and who it’s for, and just one sentence. If you could do that, that actually becomes a useful tool for you when you then talk about this with other people, or when you put it on a sales page, and when you put it in a survey. 

Again, it’s just really massaging that idea into something concrete and refined. From there, this is actually something that surprised me, I actually interviewed a guy named John Saddington, an amazing serial entrepreneur, we met at a conference once. He sold multiple million-dollar businesses in all different spaces. I was curious because he has been very successful. He obviously knows something, so I said when you get an idea for something new, what’s the first thing you do? 

He told me, and it surprised me, he said, “I talk about it with as many people as I can.” I was like that’s counterintuitive because a lot of times a lot of us think we don’t want other people to know what’s going on, or we don’t want to either look stupid, or we don’t want to have somebody steal our idea or anything. He is like, “No, share it with as many people as you can that are around you, go to Starbucks, talk to a complete stranger about it.” Talk to as many people as you can and when I asked him why would you do that, he said, “Because they’re going to see it from a position that you are not, they’re going to poke holes in it, they’re going to ask you questions, you’re going to get to gauge their reaction and this product is not for you, it’s for them.” 

If you have an audience already, a great thing to do is just really pull somebody out from your email list and talk to them on Skype. I actually schedule this every month. It’s been so beneficial to my brand in all different ways. I schedule every month a couple of hours to have 5 to 10minute chats with about 10 members of my audience. It’s actually really interesting because when I reach out to them and tell them that I want to get on the phone, they think it’s like an automated thing and it’s not real. Then when they get on the phone with me, it’s really awesome. 

A, this helps make you even more real, but B, you can extract these amazing ideas from them and get actual reactions on this idea that you have and what they think about it. Again, you’re not trying to sell on anything, you’re just gauging the reaction, allowing members of your own audience—who is what you’re building this thing for—to really give you insight on if it would be good, if it would be bad, what else would make it better, and that sort of thing. 

This is something that I used during the launch of the Smart Podcast Player which is my podcast player that I use for AskPat, that then got turned into a product that is my software company now and it’s doing really well. In the beginning, I just talked about it with people. They said, oh it will be great if it did this or didn’t do this. I showed them what kind of a wireframe, because this was a software product with a design, I showed them what it would look like and how it would feel so they can give me real reactions to it. It was absolutely crucial, the process of determining what was needed and what was not.

We had some amazing ideas that we wanted to put in it that people are like I don’t think I would use that, and it saved thousands of dollars in development time, it saved me a headache, and it saved the player I think. How many times have we used software or something that looks like our tv remotes with a hundred different buttons on it, two of which we use, and the rest that are kind of just there taking up space. 

Really expanding on this idea to a point where you can talk and observe people’s reactions to it, that’s the first step really. Just that alone will open up your eyes to what else can I do, or how can I make this even better. That can continue on if you would like.

Darren: I just want to rewind slowly back, because one question I actually had yesterday from a blogger was, “I know I need a product but I can’t come out with any ideas. I know a lot of what you’re talking about is refining when you’ve got lots of them, but can you just briefly speak to those readers who are perhaps in a niche that doesn’t flow into an ebook, or a course, or something like that. Have you got any tips for that type of person, or should they just be looking for affiliate products to sell if it’s just too hard?”

Pat: The affiliate products will give you good insight on what people are offering, and potentially what people are buying. That’s a good start, but don’t consider that you only have to affiliate marketing. I would, again, try to build something up your own. Again, I wouldn’t approach it as okay what’s my ebook going to be about. Before you even know what it is, your ideas, you don’t want to approach it as an ebook. The ebook may not be the right solution, it might be a software, it might be coaching, it might be something else. You don’t know until you talk to others to understand what their problems are. 

You go into that market and you understand really what it is that they are struggling with. If you want to take it to the fullest extent, go and talk to people on that target audience. You might find different places online through forums, Facebook groups, just ask what they are struggling with. That’s the number one question you can ask whether you have an audience or not. What are you struggling with? 

I know some people who have validated and created businesses off the back of small businesses asking them what’s something that you do everyday that you just don’t like to do? I do this and that. What would you do if there is a software product that would actually do that for you in 10 minutes. “Oh, my gosh, I would pay a billion dollars for it.” “Good to know, I’ll follow up with you. I’m going to talk to a few more people, but that’s actually something I was considering creating.” Again, just really getting into the problems and the struggles. 

What’s that recurring thing you do everyday that you dislike, that’s one. What’s something that if you had a magic wand you wish could be changed right now, that’s another one. Again, you’ll observe these through conversation. When I created my other niche site which was foodtrucker.com, which is for food truck owners, I went to San Diego food truck gatherings, stayed there after hours so that I wouldn’t interrupt them during business hours, and I just started to talk to food truck owners and ask them what’s something that you wish you knew before you got started?

Then we ended up having these like 30-minute conversations. Through those conversations, I started to discover that there were actually a ton of different ideas, not just on how to get started but for example some specifics are through those conversations, I found out that a lot of food truck owners really struggle with the fact that their truck breaks down every once in a while. Most of them rent their trucks and because of that, they are not in tiptop shape. They break down for whatever reason. 

They are not mechanics, so they struggle with finding a mechanic that’s nearby. I was like okay well, what if there’s an app that you could pull it up and it would give you the address and phone number of the nearest mechanic that specializes in food trucks. “I would pay for that service right now because it would immediately pay me back.” Again, just through conversation, you naturally start to hear about these problems and pains that people are having. 

If you have an audience already, a survey is a great way. Again, that one question, what are you struggling with right now, or what’s your number one challenge related to blank. That’s going to give you a lot of information too. I recently did that with a survey that I ran to my audience in July, and that has been an eye opening experience. There’s actually a book called Ask by Ryan Levesque which is a very, very good book. If you have an audience already and you want to survey them. Even if you don’t have an audience, you could still do this. But again, you have to go out there and see what those problems are because that’s what a business is. A business or a product is a solution to a problem, and that’s where it starts.

Darren: Great. I think that will definitely help people and that’s certainly been the case for my own business and the ebooks that we’ve created, almost always started because of a conversation we’ve had with a reader who have just expressed in a new way perhaps a problem that they have, and I would position a solution for them.

Pat: Here’s a good example. I know a guy named Cole. He’s actually in the photography space.

Darren: We work with Cole.

Pat: Oh you do? Okay.

Darren: Yeah, we do.

Pat: Cole is awesome. He has a blog and he talks about photography and stuff. He actually had a guest post on his site who is somebody who was into newborn photography. He knew nothing about newborn photography, but he had this person guest post. This guest post went viral, it exploded. People were like, “Oh my gosh, I want more information about newborns. I want to do this. I want to do that.” They were getting really excited about newborn photography, and that alone was the sign that wow, this is something that could be turned into a product, so then he worked with that person who wrote that guest post. Because it was such a popular topic, when they created this ebook, this product, it sold like gangbusters.

Going into your analytics and seeing what your most popular posts are is actually a good place to start too, and then you can use that as a hypothesis, and then test that through these validation sequences. It’s very much like a scientific approach that I talk about in the book. I don’t know if you have seen the show MythBusters, Darren. When they do these experiments to try and confirm or bust a myth, or something that people said that happens, they use science to do that. Oftentimes, when it’s a very large-scale experiment that they’re trying to test, what do they do? They scale it down and they just test it in the laboratory, at like 1/18 scale or whatever, just to see what happens, so they can understand what’s going on and then take it full scale if they want to. 

That’s kind of what you want to do. You create this hypothesis of what the solution is that you’re creating, whether it’s an ebook, a course, or whatever. Again, your audience will tell you the best way to deliver them that content if you let them tell you that, and then you kind of test it. You see if these people will actually be interested. Not only that, the truest form of validation is actually getting in to pay for it, before you actually create it, that’s kind of the new thing now. 

Collecting pre-orders just to determine whether or not people are actually saying yes with their dollars, not just with their words. A lot of times, the extreme is you go to your mum and you just say, “I’m creating this, what do you think?” “Yeah, I would buy it.” Well of course she would buy it, she loves you and wants to support you, and so would your immediate friends. Would somebody in your target audience actually do, that’s where this validation process comes in. But again, I just wanted to touch on the using other factors to kind of determine where to start, because most of your audience is obviously blogging and your analytics is a great place to do that.

Darren: As bloggers, we’ve got a great advantage with our blogs, and social media to be able to test those ideas. Probably the first thing I always do when I am thinking about an idea is just to write a blog post, and to test that idea, and to socialize that as well.

Pat: Totally.

Darren: You were kind of leading us up through a bit of a process there and I interrupted you.

Pat: No, that’s a really…

Darren: Do you want to get back to that next step I guess in what you were describing?

Pat: Yeah, absolutely. The reason it’s called Will It Fly is because we are leading up to some sort of launch, and that’s a term we all hear in the blogging space, the online business space, is we launch something. The whole purpose of this is to know whether or not it’s going to continue to fly after you launch, because just the launch is one part of the process but is it actually going to take off?

One thing you want to do, and this is a great part of the research process, even before you get deep into your idea and how it fits into the market that you’re getting into, you want to understand this market. You know how they say you want to stand out of the crowd, how do you know you’re going to stand out if you don’t even know who is in the crowd or what’s there? 

I came up with this thing called creating your market map. This is going out there and actually creating spreadsheets of a whole list of your three Ps. The first P is the places, the places where people are in your space, in your niche. Different blogs, different websites, forums, communities, Facebook groups, that sort of thing, all the different places. 

The second P, the second column, the different people. That might crossover a little bit with the places but these are influencers in the space, and so you list all those out. 

The final thing is the list of the products. What are they paying for? What types of things are they buying? The cool thing about this is when you create this market map, a couple of cool things happen. One, you get this incredible bird’s eye perspective of what’s going on in the space that you’re about to enter. 

A lot of times, people who are coming up with new ideas and starting new businesses, they worry because they feel like they’re late, “Oh man, somebody’s in that space already. They’ve taken my idea, or it’s going to be hard because it’s so competitive.” You actually have an advantage coming in late because you get to create this market map and come in out of bird’s eye perspective and see what’s going on, and you can notice patterns, and see what might be missing. That’s very important. 

But also just a byproduct of this exercise is for one, you’re going to have a whole list of different places that you could either guest post on, or become a guest on, influencers that you could build a relationship with and partner with, look to see where they speak. If they speak near you, then you can reach out to them. Also, a list of the products to see what price points are being used. Are people actually buying, and also what potential products you could be an affiliate for. 

Again, this market map is not just to learn about your audience, but you can usually use this information for you moving forward. Once you start to see what’s going on in the space, then I like to go into discovering your Customer PLAN

The first part is through these conversations that you have, and now that you have a list of these places, you see who the influencers are, you see what the products are, you’ll be able to discover the first P in the plan which is the problems, so you list out those problems. It could be several problems. I remember when I did this for foodtrucker.com, there were 10 or 12 problems that I could potentially create a solution for, as opposed to one product to solve each, each of them could become their own of course.

The second part, the L is the language that they use, and this is most important. I think this is where a lot of bloggers struggle. When we describe a problem, when we are creating steps in a blog post, or creating a podcast episode, or ebooks or whatnot, we like to use our own language. That makes sense, it is the language we know. But if you speak in the language of your audience, you’re going to make an immediate connection with them just because of that language that you use. 

If you run a survey, pay attention to what words they use. If you go on Amazon, look at the three start reviews for some of the books related to your topic. They are going to give you a really honest view of how people feel about that item, but also the real language that somebody in that marketplace uses, different forms, you can look this up too. 

The language that you use, there’s a quote by Jay Abraham, it says if you can define the problem better than your target customer, they will automatically assume you have the solution, and it’s so true. It is why Taylor Swift is so popular, because she in her songs speaks directly to her teenage audience, because she uses the same words that they do in her songs. Like Shake it Off, shake, shake it off, whatever. I don’t want to sing on the show, but the haters are going to hate, hate, hate, all that stuff. She just is right in-tune with who her audience is, and you should be too. 

A are anecdotes, or stories. The reason this is so important is because you want to see and feel your audience, get to know them and really understand the pains that they’re going through.

You’ve probably heard this, the thing called the customer avatar, or finding out who your avatar is. That’s really important, the principles behind that exercise are true. You want to know who your audience is, and speak to them. My issue with the avatar, whenever I’ve tried to create this person, this imaginary person with the fake name, they represent my audience, it just never felt real to me, like I could go to Jimmy and ask him a question because Jimmy isn’t real. But if you see the stories, you can get really into the minds of your audience. Your customer avatar is almost created and 10Xed when you use this customer plan. We talk about the problems, the language, the anecdotes, or the stories. 

The N is the need. Based on all that, what’s the need? The need becomes your hypothesis, or your plan how to solve this specific solution. Each of those problems are going to have a different need of course, and so that’s what you test. If that aligns with your original ideas, great. But every time I run this exercise, the ideas start to change and morph a little bit because they are realizing that wow, their idea was their only own idea, they didn’t consider the market yet. Now that they are in the customer’s head, the idea starts to shift towards who it’s for, which is exactly what you want to happen.

Then, you pick one and then you kind of test it out. The validation process is a very specific process that is really cool because, again, it allows you to see if people are interested in this thing before you actually build it and put it out there. As opposed to traditionally, which is like writing an ebook or building a product, and then you run to your rooftop and shout like, “Buy my product.” Maybe it doesn’t go the way you want it to, it’s a struggle because you don’t even know what went wrong along the way. Maybe it’s the product, but maybe the product was great but it was the way you said it, or maybe it was the price, or maybe there could be a whole number of reasons. If we just go to rooftops and shout, we’re never going to know. If you break it down into different iterations and validate each little step along the way, you then get to see where the error points and then just work on that before you move forward. 

The way the validation formula works, is step one you get in front of an audience. If you have built an audience already, you are already ahead of the curve. If you have a blog, or a podcast, or built an email list for example, you’ve already skipped step one. But a lot of people start from scratch, or they have a small audience. There’s a lot of things you can do to get in front of an audience that isn’t even yours. I think the best thing, and I think you would agree, would be to have an audience of your own because you’ve earned that trust with them, you know who they are. Correct me if I’m wrong there, it takes a little bit of time to build that authority and audience on the blog, am I right?

Darren: Totally.

Pat: Getting in front of somebody else’s audience is something you could do, number one you could do target advertising if you want which means you are going to have to pay a little bit but this is the quickest and easiest way. There’s an audience on Facebook, for example, and you could target specific people to then get to reach out to them, that’s one way. But then, you could also do private advertising which is advertising on somebody else’s site, you can do guest posting, you can go on forums.

Forums and groups are probably the number one thing you could do. If you don’t have an audience yet, to find people in that audience who you could speak to. Facebook groups, LinkedIn groups are great, things like that.

There’s also this concept that I want to share with you. I think this will be very useful to your audience no matter what they’re doing because this is a great way to have an influencer really promote you and your stuff. This is what Bryan and Harris–who was recently featured on my blog­–he calls as the poster child formula. This is like every teacher uses their best students as an example, right? They are the model student, they always do their homework, they make everyone else look bad for not doing theirs. As much as you hated that kid in school, they always get talked about by the teacher, and that’s kind of who you wanted to become. 

What you do is you find an influencer who is teaching stuff related to the space that you’re in, and you do their thing. Whatever their thing they’re teaching, you do it, and you crush it. You blow their mind so much that they would be an idiot not to share your results because it was their teaching that did it.

You are a prime student, and therefore you will get so much exposure. This has happened on my site, a lot of people who have done the work to go through a lot of the concepts I talk about on Smart Passive Income. Some of them will reach out to me and be like, “Pat, it works! Look at my results.” And then what do I do? I share it on Twitter immediately, I share it on Facebook. I sometimes invite those people on as a podcast, and it’s a win for everybody.

A lot of times, Bryan has been featured on the front page of many sites because they link back to his as a prime example of somebody who is taking action. That’s a great strategy that all of us can use for just getting in front of an influential audience. And then there’s of course offline audiences, too. You don’t just have to do this offline, but after you get in front of that audience, step two, is for everybody now again, is you hyper target.

Going back to the photography stuff, for example, let’s say you had a product that was for wedding photographers, you wanted to test and see if it worked out well. As you land a guest post on Digital Photography School, great, that’s awesome! Now you’re going to get a lot of people looking at it. But is your wedding photography product perfect for everybody who is reading that site? No, so you’re going to have to hyper target. You’re going to have to have those people who are wedding photographers essentially raise their hand and say, “Oh, yeah! That’s me.” That’s the kind of group that you collect.

If you were to test your business idea, or your product with everybody in that macro-niche, it’s not going to go very well because it’s just not made for some of those people. I hope that we’re products that are specifically made for certain groups of people, for example, like a wedding photographer would have a wedding-related thing for the general photographer population.

From there, step three is you actually interact with them, you talk with them, you get to know them. You get to kind of dig into their head in terms of finding out what’s really the problem, how you might be able to solve that problem. Then, you actually share the solution. It’s done in a very honest way. 

A lot of people hear about this thing of validation, and they kind of go back to what Tim Ferriss used to talk about, which isn’t bad, it’s just a different way of doing it that I don’t prefer. In 2007, he came out with a very famous book, The 4-Hour Workweek. In that book, there was a chapter called Testing the News, which is about micro-testing. He did that validation back then. This isn’t anything new, but the way he did it was he would drive cold traffic from Google AdWords, pay for keyword visibility, and he would drive cold traffic to a landing page. 

I think the example he used was French sailor shirts. He was validating whether he can sell French sailor shirts, so completely random. He had a sales page with all the information about these sailor shirts, there in the middle of the page of course was a buy now button. Again, he hadn’t made this business yet, but it’s as if this business existed. Then, he would keep track of how many people clicked on that buy now button because that told him that yes, people are interested in it. But then, when they click on that of course, there isn’t, and so he would say, “Oh! Sorry, we’re out of stock but once more become available, we will let you know.” They would collect email addresses from there. 

That’s okay, but I like being very open, and honest, and saying for example if you interact with these people who have raised their hands and say yeah, I’m a wedding photographer. Then, “Okay, well, I’m actually creating something and this is what I’m doing with it, I just wanted to talk to you for a second if you got the time and reach out to see if this is actually something that is of interest to you.”

Again, you are not selling them anything, you’re not asking them to do anything except just comment on that thing. And then you come back to them later, this is the next step after that. You say, “I have talked to a few people, they do seem interested in it, but I want to make sure that this is actually something that is worth my time to build,” again being completely honest about it. You say, “I’m going to build this if I get 20 people,” the math and the formulas are in the book in terms of how many do you need, but just as an example, “if I get 20 people to pay me half of the cost of what it will become, get a little early bird pricing, I will then build the product.” 

You can either pre-sell it, or collect payments right there. A lot of people who do this are like just sending this much money to my PayPal address which is kind of sketchy for a little bit, but there are tools out there like Gum Road for example, where you can create a pre-sell or preorder page to validate that product. If you get a certain amount of people who do preorder, which means they have to take the action to do that thing of the preorder instead of just saying, “Oh yeah! I will buy it,” then you know. Then, all of the guesswork goes away. Then, you go and build that thing. 

The cool benefit of the people who worked with you in the beginning, these are called early adopters. Not everybody’s going to want to be involved, but the early adopters, part of the joy for them is they’re paying to not only get this thing when it comes out eventually but to help influence what it becomes. That can only benefit you because you’re talking to somebody who has actually paid you money to tell you exactly what it is that they want, which is a representation of what everybody else in that space would likely want too. That’s the validation process, and in the book there are several different examples of people who have done this across all different spaces.

There’s a guy named Joey who did this and he used a webinar as a way to get in front of his audience. Then, he hyper targeted those people and was able to pre-sell an animation, ebook, and course for tens of thousands of dollars, even before creating that product, which is insane. 

A number of other people from software, to coaching, to there was a guy who validated beef jerky, a beef jerky subscription service. In 24 hours, he was able to collect over $1000 from people who had said yes. When you create this, I want to be the first subscriber. He found that space and he works in Austin, so a lot of people there are very health conscious, they work out and stuff. That was his target audience. He went to gyms, he talked to people in offices, and was able to get $1000 even before this thing was created, even before he figured out really how he was going to do it. But you know that after he got that $1000, he was like, “Okay, I’m motivated now to go and really figure this out and fill-in the pieces in the middle.”

Darren: That’s fantastic. The great thing about early adopters is that they do give you really honest feedback as well, if you’re upfront with the fact that this is new, and they are the first people to try the product once it is released as well. I’ve seen a number of people recently who set up Facebook groups for that type of early or pre-sell group. I guess it’s a beta test group in some ways, but they also become the evangelists of it later, once they have actually seen that process that you’ve taken the product through.

Pat: Absolutely.

Darren: That becomes very powerful for you.

Pat: If you were one of the first people to use Uber, you probably would tell everybody in the world after it got so big. “I was one of the first users of that product,” and that’s exactly what happens as people become evangelists. A lot of people who have gone through the beta process of being a part of my Smart Podcast Player for example, they are some of my biggest fans, they are affiliates now, they are promoting it and they also helped me shape it into what it has become. They’ve paid me money, I am on a great end of this, but they’re also getting something that is for them in the way that they want it to.

Darren: Yeah, for sure. All right. You’re testing the ideas, you’re validating it, you’re getting some pre-sales at this point. Where to from here?

Pat: First of all, you kind of just have to get over the excitement, because a lot of people when they get those first dollars, it’s the most incredible feeling in the world. A lot of people will either then move too fast, they go all in on spending all their life savings on creating that thing. You want to go through a few more iterations after this just to make sure. But then, it’s creating that platform. Or if you had the platform already, then it’s good, then you go into that bigger launch. You’ve gone from small scale–like the Myth Busters example–you have done a small scale test, now it’s time to go big scale. Then, you can connect with these influencers that you have a relationship with or that you know based on your middle of those three Ps because you have listed them out already. 

You can find websites where you can then talk or pay for banner advertising, because you have a whole list of those already and all these other things. You can go to your list of products that you’ve created too, and see which ones you could potentially partner with, or have as a bonus or anything like that. There are so many things you can do, but I think the best thing is then you start to map out the business from there, you start to determine okay what’s the best way to reach the masses. I was able to hyper target the small group of people and do a small scale test, now it’s time to go bigger. 

A lot of people, because they have used Facebook for getting traffic to validate these, for them, it’s just let’s pump more money into Facebook and get more audience that way. For others, it’s like let’s reach out to more influencers, then you can create that sales page. A lot of people validate these products even before a sales page exists, really.

Darren: I’m trying to put myself in the shoes of my listener here a little bit. I think one of the things that some are going to be reacting to here is that this sounds a bit scary. I know fear has been a part of your journey…

Pat: Totally.

Darren: This whole selling before you have a product, what if it doesn’t work, what if I’m not good enough to actually deliver on that. Some of that fear aspect of it there, I wonder if you can talk to those who are about to stop listening now because they’re a bit scared of it. Can you give us some tips on moving forward through that fear?

Pat: Yeah, I’m so glad you mentioned that. That is a big chunk of the book obviously, because I’ve gone through it myself and people who have gone through this process. That is there. It is absolutely there, and you’re not alone. I think the first thing to realize is that you’re definitely not alone. This is a process that is going to test you, and it is for those who are really passionate, who want to help people. I think when you realize that in order to help people, you kind of have to put some of those fears aside, and that nothing terrible is going to happen when you do that, then it opens up.

That’s what opened up for me. A lot of times in the beginning, I was scared and I would ask myself this question, what’s the worst that can happen? When you think about that question, in reality it’s not always that bad as we think. When you go through this process, what’s the worst that can happen? Well, you go through this process and nobody’s interested in it. That’s actually a great thing to happen because now you know instead of you hiding behind the scenes working on a blog and creating this stuff and working forever on building this product to then put it out there, and then after all that time, realizing it.

This book is a way to help people fast forward through that process, and it’s not easy. I’m just going to be completely honest. This isn’t something that people are going to pick up, read through in one day, and then all of a sudden they’re going to have money in their bank account. No. I am just always completely honest about that, so if that’s what you’re looking for, please don’t buy the book. This book is for people who really want to know the way to make sure that what they’re doing is something that will give them the best chance to move forward and succeed. Again, another honest point of this book is this isn’t a book that’s been in creating a successful anything, it’s much more than just the idea.

The idea of course is very important, this is what this book takes care of. This idea actually is worth moving forward with. But in order to succeed, there is the execution part, there’s the mindset, there’s all this other stuff that goes along with it too. I do talk about these things in the book as well. 

I know you’re similar to me, Darren. I remember us talking at the ProBlogger event, we aren’t always jumping up and down, super excited when we’re about to go on stage for example because we’re nervous, right? We want to deliver a ton of value and that’s what everybody here who’s feeling this resistance, they want to do something great, too. 

We also know that if we don’t go on stage, we’re going to let a lot of people down. We’re not going to be impacting the people who we want to impact, and I would much rather put aside those fears or just bust through them to be able to help people than down the road either regret not doing that or knowing that somebody else could have benefited from me but I was just too scared.

Darren: I’ll link back to a podcast we did on fear a few months ago now. Fear is a sign that something important is about to happen. If you want to do something, if you want to chase something, you have to have fear alongside that. If it’s not there, maybe you’re not putting enough into it. I love that question, what’s the worst thing that can happen, but also what’s the best thing that can happen as a result of this.

Pat: Right? What if it does work? Oh my gosh!

Darren: It’s usually somewhere between those two things on what actually happens. By answering that question, what’s the worst thing that can happen, you can also come up with a contingency plan, what would you do if that happens. You can be prepared for the worst as well. That’s like the 30-second summary of the 30-minute podcast.

Pat: I love that, that’s great.

Darren: We will link to that in the show notes as well.

Pat: I used to be definitely afraid of speaking, and I still am. However, it was somebody who told me and helped me get over these fears, this is a sign that you care about this audience, this is good. I was like I didn’t get it at first exactly what you said… This person was like, “I would be more nervous if you weren’t nervous, because then it would mean that you just didn’t prepare enough, or you don’t care. You obviously care, so go out there and rock it.” This was right before I came onstage. It was really helpful actually, so helpful so that’s what I would recommend other people to think about too.

Darren: I read the introduction of your book, and I can’t wait to read the rest. One of the things I highlighted in the introduction is a paragraph, and I’ll just read it to you because I think it really is very powerful in terms of speaking about your idea, not just as the idea but as being part of the rest of your business. Here’s the book reading, I will read it to you.

NASA has never launched a mission just because it sounded like a good idea, and neither should you. There is a very specific purpose behind each and every launch, and a lot of time is spent planning and considering how each new proposed idea fits into the overall plan, purpose, and mission. Although you are not flying to the Moon or Mars, you would be putting a lot of time and effort, and potentially money, into what you’re about to do. If you discover that your business idea does not fit into your overall mission, then it’s very easy to make a decision to not move forward with it. 

I love this because I hear a lot of bloggers say, “I’ve got this cool idea, and the idea is a cool idea but it doesn’t actually fit in with the rest of their plan. I think what you’ve just written there is just brilliant. I think you’ve got to also step back from the idea and ask the question, “How does this fit in with where I’m headed with my business?” 

One of my questions I’ve got for you is, “When you’re right at the start of this journey, as many of our readers are, and thinking about your first product, are there any things you need to consider there with choosing what type of product does well?” I don’t know if you got anything to say about that.

Pat: The first part of this book is all about how this idea fits into yourself, because traditionally the validation process, everybody thinks of validation as how is this product going to work in the market. I know that there is a more important part, which is why this is part one, which is how does this business idea fit with you, and how does it fit into your life plan, how does it actually compliment your strengths, if at all.

The first three major chapters are three different exercises, or thought experiments, that you can use to help you discover what these things are and how these things might fit into place. The first one is what I like to call the airport test, and this is actually a thought experiment that the guys over at International Realty use, this is Jay Papasan and Gary Keller, author of one of my favorite books, called The One Thing.

They use this when they hire people, and this is the question. They talk to their potential hire and say, “If you and I were to see each other at the airport five years from now, and I go up to you and I say how’s life? What’s going on? You say life is amazing, life couldn’t get any better. And then I say tell me why.” What would make you say that your life is awesome and it couldn’t get any better? 

The exercise is you actually divide a piece of paper into four quadrants and you write down the top four categories of your life, whatever the four most important things of your life are important to you, for me it’s family, professional, finances, and health.

Within each of those categories, you start to write down what would make you say that life is awesome and it couldn’t get any better? You write those down. It’s not what you want to wish to happen, this is five years. You take the delirium down the road and that’s what would make life exactly what you want it to be. The interesting thing is whenever I’ve done this with people, and even when I did it myself, it makes it so easy for me to see whether or not a new direction fits with another or not. I’ve said no to a lot of amazing, potentially life changing business ideas because they just didn’t fit in that plan. 

A lot of us stress over some of those decisions. When you have it mapped out like that, it becomes very easy. This sheet of paper becomes an incredible decision tool for you. That is just one part of the process, but then of course there are some other exercises in the book that help you understand if these actually complement who you are, what you like, or not. 

I am just helping people realize this upfront. For example, there’s a lot of people out there who aren’t very keen on the idea of being the face of their brand, like putting themselves out there, getting in front of a camera, in front of millions of people, that scares them. If your idea would require somebody to do that, then it would either have to not be you, or this isn’t your idea. There are exercises to help you discover these sorts of things, but yes, it’s very important to determine this stuff upfront before, which I know I’ve seen a lot of people do this. 

They have these amazing businesses; they are successful entrepreneurs. They have tens of thousands of dollars coming in, but they are not happy. They are not happy when you dive deep because they just aren’t in line with what they are doing, they picked up low hanging fruit but that maybe isn’t the thing that they should have gone with but it was just the easiest at the time.

Darren: That’s great advice. I feel like we just scratched the surface today and I am so glad you have written a book that has the rest of it.

Pat: Thank you.

Darren: I do want to get into some reader questions, just some really quick ones, in a second. Just to finish off talking about the book, where can readers get it? What else is in it that you haven’t touched on already?

Pat: The book can be found at willitflybook.com. I’m actually doing something pretty special that I haven’t really seen anybody else do. A lot of people when they launch a book, they have bonuses that go along with it. I have what’s called a companion course. I set myself up on a platform called Teachable which allowed me to essentially create an online course to go along with this, but it’s absolutely free. Every chapter is represented in that course, and it has bonus materials for that chapter all located inside of that course. You’ll see instructions for getting access to that. 

For example the airport test, the one I just talked about, I actually played a video and showed you how to do this in that companion course. It’s not needed, but again it is free and I thought it would be kind of a cool way to enhance the experience of going through this book. This book is very much like not just you read and you learn, but you do. 

That’s been one of my pet peeves with a ton of books that I have read lately, they tell you the what, and they tell you the why, but they don’t give you the how and they don’t show you. I really want it to stand out and do it that way. That’s why I am self-publishing this book, I am not working with a traditional publisher this time around. In order to help people in the best way I can, I can’t have other people get in the way, if that makes sense. That’s willitflybook.com, a lot more tests, a lot more step by steps to help you do the proper research for both you and your business in the market that you’re getting into.

Darren: Fantastic. I love the sound of all the exercises that you can work through. I think for me that makes a lot of sense, particularly with this type of topic. Well done on that.

Let’s get into some really quick fire questions. I’ve got like 30 of them, so we just got to do it. I am just going to pick five of the best ones and maybe we have to do a Q&A with Pat at some stage as well. Vanessa Smith says, “What activity was the biggest time commitment that was most valuable to outsource, automate, or get someone else to do?”

Pat: I’ll tell you, for the first three years of my life my podcast for example, I did it all myself. I loved it, I was good at it. It was done in the way exactly I wanted to, and I would not let anybody touch my baby. But just recently, I started outsourcing and I started small with just the show notes, I’ll have somebody do the show notes, then I started to have somebody do the editing. Now, I am at a point where all I have to do is record the episodes and just drop into Dropbox, everything else gets taken care of.

It saves me about five hours a week. It has open my time to be able to write this book, so I hope this is just a good example of how just doing a little bit of time shifting, and being smart with how you do what you do, and putting the right people into place, can help open up new opportunities to create new things, to deliver value, and also hopefully it’s the book as well, make more money too.

Darren: I’m so glad that you talked about that, because I did that at Episode 15.

Pat: Good for you, it took me some 120 episodes to realize it.

Darren: Excellent. 

“I would love Pat to update the top 5 apps that you’re going to use in 2016 for your business, or start 2016 with.”

Pat: Ah, I love this question. This is one of the most popular posts that I wrote last year. Anybody can write a post like this because everybody’s interested in what we all have in our phones, or on our desktops. Last year, it was the top 5 apps that I will be using in 2015. 2016, it’s going to be a lot of the same. Slack is a big one, I have a big team now that communicates, and we found that email is just completely lagging. Slack is more real time, almost like a chat room with different channels. You can @ reply to people similar to Twitter, so Slack is the big one. 

I’ve also been in tune with Evernote. I have always been a fan of Evernote as well. Google Drive has been a big part of the brand too because that’s now actually where I write. Evernote, I used to store stuff that I find, but Google Drive is what I use to write, and do spreadsheets, and that sort of thing. Another tool that I am using right now is Periscope. Periscope is pretty fun, and I know you’re on it too. It’s just a great way to get an immediate connection with people. A lot of people are like, “Uh, Periscope, does it actually help you?”

Darren: Yeah.

Pat: Yeah, absolutely. Oh my gosh, not only for connecting with your audience and building relationships, but literally for getting them to take action on certain things. Anything from exercises that you want them to do, to actually making purchases. Absolutely, that’s a big part of what I’m doing now. Also Co-Schedule is probably one that my team and I just got involved with, I hired a content manager very recently to help me wrap my head around, being ahead on schedule in terms of especially blog content which I fell behind on a little last year. This year, it’s going very well, we use Co-Schedule to really schedule all the team activities in and around content.

Darren: You’ve pretty much just said my top 5 as well, maybe not Google Drive, we’re not quite as into that. “If you were just starting out today and have $500 to invest in getting your business off to a great start, where would you invest it?”

Pat: I would put $10 up to set up a website with a quick little landing page, a little bit about who I am and what I potentially have to offer. Beyond that, I would spend pretty much 100% of that money to go to a conference, meet people in person who are in and around a space that I’m interested in. By far, the number one thing that has helped move the needle more than anything are the relationships that I have been able to build in this space. By going to a conference, you can meet people, you can talk to them, you can get them interested in what you’re doing and you can learn about how you might be able to fit in, and help, and provide value to them. Man, that’s really why I go to conferences. 

I love learning at conferences and going into presentations, but I am mostly in the hallways talking and trying to help people out, and in return, getting help back. With this book coming out, I have been offering and providing value for so long, I’m now at the point where I need help. I’ve been reaching out to those people that I’ve met in the halls and shook hands with and stuff, not just big names like yourself, Darren, but a lot of the people who are fans of SPI, who I’ve met in person, who I remember, who had offered help. By far, the relationships and putting yourself out there in that environment can really help you wrap your mind about what’s needed, what else, who you can be with, and who can serve you, and vice versa.

Darren: Yes, no answer. Elaine asked, “Is there still room for new podcasters?”

Pat: Yes.

Darren: Kyle asked, “Your top tip for picking yourself up after a setback?”

Pat: I have a folder, and I also have in my office on the wall thank you notes. The folder, speaking of, on Gmail, but I collect all my thank you letters and notes. I just have them in a place where when I get down, I go in there and I realize that I can make a difference. I am doing something right, I have to keep going. On my wall right behind me, I have a 5ft x 5ft board that I have tacked on all the handwritten notes that I get. I use that every single day because I struggle every single day, but I see those things and I’m motivated to move forward, and it definitely picks me up.

Darren: Great, two more. “If you could recommend one book for a budding entrepreneur for holiday reading, what would it be?”

Pat: The One Thing.

Darren: Who wrote that one?

Pat: Gary Keller and Jay Papasan.

Darren: Excellent. Last question, Guy asked, “What’s the one thing you wish you’ve done from the beginning?”

Pat: Speaking of one thing, the one thing I wish I’d done from the beginning was I was going to say outsource, but you kind of need to do a few things on your own first, I am not going to say that. I do wish I did that earlier. I wish I had talked to people in my audience sooner. When I started creating greenexamacademy.com, my LEED Exam website, these all behind the scenes. If I had to simply talk to a few of them on the phone, which I was afraid to do, which is why I didn’t do it. I probably could have learned a lot more about what I could have done better, and probably could have created a lot more offshoot products vertically in that space.

Darren: Great. Thanks so much, Pat. You have been so generous with your time today. Everyone needs to head to willitflybook.com, we will have the link in the show notes as well, as well as some of the other resources that you’ve mentioned today. Really do appreciate the time that you spent with us today, Pat. I’m sure there’s been a whole heap of ideas that will be validated as a result of what you’ve given us today in this book, congratulations on writing it.

Pat: Thank you so much, I really appreciate that, Darren. Thanks everybody for their time.

Darren: I hope you enjoyed today’s interview with Pat. I certainly enjoyed chatting with him as I do every time we have the opportunity to catch up. Again, you can head over to willitflybook.com to check out his brand new book. It was released today as this podcast goes live, so check it out, support him any way you can, and I am sure he would appreciate you sharing it with your own network.

Also, check him out over at smartpassiveincome.com and find today’s show notes at problogger.com/podcast/85. As always, I do appreciate any reviews that you can give to this particular podcast over on iTunes, or Stitcher, or wherever else you’re listening. I read all those reviews and do appreciate them as well, even read a few of them out on episodes of the podcast, so be sure to leave your name and your blog’s URL as well. I look forward to chatting with you in Episode 86 of the ProBlogger podcast.

Have you struggled with turning your ideas into real products? Have you got a different technique that works for you for making your ideas a reality? I’d love to hear from you in the comments below.

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Today’s episode is about how to beat writer’s block. It’s the second in a mini-series of podcasts that looks at how to prevent writer’s block holding you back from making your blog a success. Writer’s block is very common. I get asked about all the time and suffer it too! In today’s episode, I share tips about how you can come up with fresh ideas to write about and keep your blog exciting and useful for your readers. 

You can listen to today’s episode above or in iTunes or Stitcher (where we’d also LOVE to get your reviews on those platforms if you have a moment). In today’s episode:

In the last episode, episode 83, we talked about three different types of blogger’s block. Those were coming up with ideas for your blog post, writing the blog post themselves, then completing your blog post. Three areas where I know bloggers do get stuck. Today, I want to tackle coming up with ideas to write about for your blog. You can find today’s show notes with some further reading at problogger.com/podcast/84.

This whole series is really about getting unstuck, battling that blogger’s block that so many of us face. This particular area of coming up with ideas to write about is probably the most common area that I find bloggers are struggling with. After it happened about a year into your blog when you’ve been through many of those initial ideas that you had when you started out, you generally have a whole heap of ideas. Sometimes, too many ideas. Then, you run out.

You feel like sometimes, you’ve written everything there is to say, you’ve written everything that you know to talk about, and everyone else has already written everything and you come out against, “What could I write that’s fresh? What could I write that’s going to have any impact upon my readers? What could I write that’s going to stand out from everyone else?”

This is something that many of us struggle with. It’s actually one of the reasons a number of bloggers that I’ve come across over the last year or two have given up blogging. It’s actually like they have nothing left to say. I would really encourage you to push past this particular type of blogger’s block. All of us do have all kinds of things to say. There are always new ways of saying things that perhaps we’ve said before as well, and that’s a mind shift that you need to push through, is being able to write on topics you’ve already written before. There are always new and fresh ways to do that.

In this particular episode, I want to give you some practical tips on how to come up with ideas to write about. The first tip that I’ll give you is to go back and listen to episode 11 of the ProBlogger Podcast. This episode gives you a practical exercise that you can do. The whole idea of that episode is to identify the change that you are trying to bring to your readers, the big change that you are trying to bring.

Blogs that change the lives of their readers in some tangible way tend to be successful. If you are changing someone’s life, obviously, they’re going to want to come back and read your blog again. Identifying what that big change that you’re trying to bring is and mapping out the journey that you want to take your readers on is a powerful thing to do. I walked through how to do that in episode 11. I’ll link to that in today’s show notes but it’s at problogger.com/podcast/11. You can also search for it on iTunes.

Identifying the big change that you’re trying to bring and then break it down into the journey you want to take people on. That’s the first thing that I would encourage you to do. Go back and listen to that episode. Perhaps, at the end of this episode. There’s another way that you can tackle this idea of blogger’s block that I found really helpful to me. It’s just a different way of thinking about it. In some ways, it’s quite similar to identifying that change. 

The thing that I’ve realized over the years is that most of the blog posts that have been most successful for me have solved problems; solved problems in some way. This is really what I have built my blogs completely around. Every time I write a blog post, I’m trying to solve a problem. 

On my blogs, the problems are educational. I’m trying to teach people something to help them solve a problem. Problems that just need to be tackled in that way. Some people’s problem, they’re bored and they want to be entertained. Some blogs are all about entertaining people. Some people’s problem is they don’t know what the latest news is, so they need the latest news. There are blogs around that tackle that problem.

Don’t just think about problems in that you need to educate people. There is a whole heap of different problems that people have. Another type of problem that some people feel is that they’re alone. They don’t have a community. Some blogs solve that problem by helping people to realize that they’re not the only ones. That’s solving that problem or building a community for people. There’s a whole heap of different ways that blogs can solve problems. Really, by thinking about the problem that you’re trying to solve, sometimes that can help you to unlock ideas to write about.

I love this quote from Joseph Sugarman. He writes, “Each problem has hidden in it an opportunity so powerful that it literally dwarfs the problem. The greatest success stories were created by people who recognized the problem and turned it into an opportunity.” Every problem that people have, there’s actually an opportunity there, particularly for us as bloggers who can solve those problems and build businesses around that. It’s not rocket science, really, but every time I sit down to write a blog post, I generally am thinking about a problem that I’m trying to solve for my readers. Then, I’ll write a blog post that solves that problem. It’s not rocket science, but it’s a very powerful thing to do. 

In my experience, when you solve someone’s problem, you’re going to create an impression upon them. Then, you have every chance of them thinking about you again the next time that they have a problem and come back to you. If you solve enough problems of people over time, they’ll keep coming back again and again, and they’ll recommend that other people come to you as well when they have problems. What’s the big problem that you’re trying to solve?

This is similar in some ways to that big change that you’re trying to bring. It might be a different way to think about it. What’s the big problem that you were trying to solve with your blog? Most blogs have a big problem that they’re trying to solve but in most cases, that can be broken down into smaller problems.

On my blog, ProBlogger, the big problem is most of the bloggers who come to ProBlogger the first time are just starting out with their blog. They’re trying to build a profitable blog but they don’t know where to start. They’re feeling overwhelmed by all the things they need to do. The big problem is building a profitable blog. Within that, there are many medium-sized problems. These are the categories in my blog—finding readers, monetizing, designing a blog, writing great blog content. Within each of those categories, there are other smaller problems.

Generally, when someone’s facing a big problem, they don’t actually face a big problem. They’re facing a whole series of small problems. On ProBlogger, in the category of writing the content, there’s a whole heap of small problems that people face. Not knowing how to write the title of a blog post or coming up with ideas to write about. This is a problem that many bloggers have. I’m tackling that now in this podcast and have done so in blog posts in the past. 

What are the problems that your readers face? I’m going to give you eight practical ways of identifying problems to write about. I’m going to whip through these very quickly but you might want to pause this podcast and actually do the exercise of coming up with problems that these questions and exercises help you to come up with.

The first one is to solve your own problems. A really great question that I quite often ask myself- is, what problem did I have last year that I don’t have anymore? And how did I solve that? What problem did you have when you started out in the area that you are writing about today? When you first started out, when you were a newbie, or a year ago, when it was two months ago. Or what problems do you have right now that you are struggling to overcome?

You can actually write about those problems as well. You may not have the solution yet but by sharing your story of what you’re trying, that can be a very powerful blog post as well. In many ways, that’s what I built ProBlogger about. I shared the problems that I just solved and I shared the problems that I was having with blogging. By doing so, I told my story. Storytelling is really important as well. So, number one, solve your own problems.

Tip number two is to make a note in any question you’re ever asked that relates to your topic. Over time, you’ll begin to see that you are asked the same types of questions over and over again. These frequently asked questions are very powerful. If people are asking you these questions in blog comments, via email, or in conversations, you can bet that other people have those same questions. So, take note of the frequently asked questions, but also, the less frequently asked questions as well. You need to take note of any question you were ever asked. 

Number three, look for questions in search referrals to your blog. Hopefully, you’ve got Google Analytics or some other analytics program installed on your blog. That will give you some indication of some of the things people are searching for when they arrive on your blog. Google doesn’t reveal all of the search terms anymore. They used to reveal all of them and it was a goldmine. They still do reveal some of those search terms that people use to arrive on your blog. That’s really used for information.

The fourth tip is related to this. It’s still around search. What people are searching for when they’re on your blog? Again, in Google Analytics, you can actually find what people are searching for when they’re on your blog. Most blogs have a search bar where people can type in a word that they may be searching for or a phrase. If you look in your Google Analytics, you can find that information by the pages that they end up on when they do those searches. This is a little bit complicated to explain in a podcast. I’m going to give you a further reading in today’s show notes which will help you to work out what people are searching for when they’re on your blog. 

What you are looking for are landing pages in Google Analytics with /?s if you’re using a WordPress blog. That will reveal to you the pages that people are landing on when they’re doing a search on your blog and that’s a gold mine. Again, I’ll give you a post. It’s quite a long post but in the middle of it, there’s a section on how to identify those searches.

Tip number was to solve your own problems. Tip number two was to make note of any question you’ve ever asked, frequently asked questions, particularly. Number three was to look for questions in search referral. Number four was analyzing internal searches. And number five was to ask your readers for their questions. You can actually ask your readers, “What questions do you have? What problems do you have?” We do this in a number of ways in my blog.

We have a survey that we do on ProBlogger once a year. We actually ask our readers to complete the survey. We asked them on Twitter, Facebook, also in the blog, and through our newsletter. We try and survey a breadth of our readership, our podcast listeners, everyone. But in Digital Photography School, we do it slightly differently. We have a survey that comes up in the autoresponder that we run. After you’ve subscribed for a while, 20 years later, you’ll get invited to do a survey.

A survey is great for this type of thing. We find a whole heap of information about our readers through that survey. We always have a question that is really an open-ended question where we ask our readers to tell us what their problems are. It’s amazing how many people will. It’s anonymous so they feel okay to tell you what their problems are. They’ll tell you all kinds of things which are really useful and can turn into blog posts. 

You can also tap into the questions in other ways. You might do a poll. You might try and get some of your readers together to do a little focus group. I talked to a blogger recently who has a Facebook group that they set up once a year just for a small group of their readers. I actually approached some of their most prolific commenters in their blog and said, “Would you join this little focus group? This little Facebook group? I want to ask you some questions as a group.” The group is a whole heap of fun and makes that group of readers feel really special as well. There’s a whole heap of different ways that you can ask your readers to tell you their problems. 

Even just simply emailing some of your readers or phoning them up. I talked to Pat Flynn recently in an interview. He said that in the early days, he used to ring his readers. He’d say, “Hi, this is Pat. I want to talk to you about how you’re using my site and some of the problems you have.” It’s a really powerful thing both in terms of making an impression upon those readers but also learning about them.

Tip number six is to look at other sites in your niche. The questions that people are asking in forums, on other Facebook groups, on other blogs and comments, these can be particularly good for giving you ideas of what to write about. You can also look at other blogs in your niche, what they’re writing about, and build upon those posts. If someone else has written seven tips for something, write building upon that. Link to it and say, “This is a great post I read. Here’s three more tips that I’d give.” You can find all kinds of inspiration by looking at what other people are writing about. 

This is something that used to happen in the blogosphere all the time. Bloggers used to look at other blogs and they would build upon the posts that other people have written about. It doesn’t seem to happen so much anymore. It kind of saddens me in some ways. I would love to see more people building upon content that other people are writing about. It doesn’t matter if you link to another blog. They know they’re competitive. They might become a collaborator. Link out to what other people are writing about. Build upon their ideas. In this way, everyone becomes smarter. That was tip number six.

Number seven is to use social media to gather questions or problems. I think this is a real goldmine. It’s just so simple to get onto Twitter, to put in a keyword of your particular niche, and to see what people are asking. People go to Twitter all the time to get advice. They’re asking questions all the time. If you can tap into some of those questions, it might give you ideas for blog posts.

Tip number eight is to use other social tools like Periscope or BLaB or even webinars to have conversations with your readers and to gather questions with them. I’ve recently done a number of Periscopes where I’ve just said, “I’m a full-time blogger. Ask me anything.” That was the title of my Periscope. I see now that the bloggers do this as well. It is a goldmine for getting ideas for blog posts. 

You may not have a whole heap of people come and ask questions, but those types of Periscope do tend to work quite well. I’ve seen them become quite popular. They’re a great way of building your brand, your profile, by putting yourself out there and showcasing what you know. You should be recording all of those questions that you get as well. I found Periscope and webinars particularly every time I have an opportunity to do a Q&A at a conference or just at a little meetup, those types of questions that you get there are really powerful as well. They can identify the problems that people have.

They’re eight quick tips for identifying problems amongst your readers or your potential readers. Just a few more last tips on this whole area of coming in with ideas. Firstly, put aside blocks of time and ahead of time. I find, personally, that when I’m coming up with problems and trying to brainstorm ideas to write about, I’m much better to do that by putting aside half an hour or an hour to come up with as many ideas as I can, rather than to do this exercise every time I need to write a blog post. I much prefer to spend half an hour and come up with 10 great ideas that I can use over the next few weeks rather than have to do this whole exercise every time I want to write a blog post. 

So, put aside time. Perhaps, every Monday morning or every Friday afternoon, to come up with ideas for your next week or do it once a month with another blogger. I do find doing it with other people can be really stimulating (sometimes) to come up with a month’s worth of content. I actually talked to one blogger recently who comes with a whole year’s worth of ideas. She writes two posts a week. She has to come up with 104 ideas. She does it in January every year. It comes out with 104 ideas so that she’s got her ideas mapped out. She all put dates on them even and deadlines on each of them. That’s how she does it. She puts aside that time batch processes, this whole process of coming up with ideas.

A couple of tools that I use, I generally do this process either in Evernote or using mind mapping tools. In mind mapping, you can do it on a whiteboard or a piece of paper. There are also tools on your computer. There’s this little tool called MindNode. It’s a Mac tool but there are other tools for PCs as well. 

Tip number one, put aside a block of time ahead of time. Tip number two, set up some sort of a system for recording those ideas. I really would encourage you to capture the ideas that you get and have some sort of a system for capturing those ideas that you have with you all the time. 

In the old days, for me, it used to be a notebook that I would carry around with me. Then, I started to have text files on my computer. I have a little folder on my laptop, desktop. I just put text files in it with ideas as I got them. Then, I started to use Dropbox so I can sync my ideas between different devices. Today, I used Evernote. I have a notebook for ideas and I just set-up notes for each of the ideas that I get. It doesn’t really matter what the system is as long as you’ve got a system and as long as you’ve got something that you can capture those ideas because those ideas can be fleeting.

Tip number three is as you’re writing posts, be able to look out for ideas during that process. I quite often find as I’m writing a post that little questions or tangents come in that I want to take. Or I start to imagine my readers asking questions to me as I’m writing. I don’t know if that’s weird to be hearing my readers’ voices as I’m writing content. That’s often the time I’m getting other ideas. I’m taking note of those little tangents that I’m tempted to take but don’t take, all the questions that I can imagine my readers are asking. I’ll take note of those things.

As I’m finishing a blog post, one of the little things that I do is always say, “What questions do I predict that I’m going to get as a result of this blog post?” Sometimes, I weave the answers to those questions into the blog post. Sometimes those questions stimulate the next blog post that I’m going to write. It might be a helpful thing to do as you’re writing your content as well.

The last tip I’ll give you on coming up with ideas to write about is that it is more than okay to come back to an idea that you’ve already written about and to do a fresh post on that or to update it in some way. I think this is actually something that a lot of bloggers just need to get over, this idea of coming back to something you’ve already written about. You don’t have to come up with a completely new idea every time you write a piece of content. 

If you’ve been writing for a year, two years, three years on your blog, actually build into your routine that you go back to some of those old posts. Ask yourselves the question, should I write another post on this topic? Or should I update that post and republish it in some way?

In today’s show notes, I’ve actually got a post with a little exercise that I encourage you to build into your rhythm, which really does go back to some of that old content that you’ve got, that can bring some new life to it. I would encourage you to do that on a regular basis to actually update your archives and republish some of your content in a fresh and more useful up-to-date way. That’s actually solving problems for your readers. It’s not actually a cop-out to go back and use old posts again. It’s actually serving your readers. Not all of your new readers have seen that old content. You can actually do something really powerful with that old content that solves problems for your readers.

I hope that somewhere in this particular podcast has been some ideas that have stimulated ideas for your blog. I’d encourage you to put aside some time right now at the end of this podcast to do some brainstorming, to actually do some planning about the type of content that you want to produce on your blog for the rest of the year. Do some work on this particular thing right now while you’re freshly thinking about it. Hopefully, you’ll come up with some really great content ideas for your blog for the coming months.

You can find today’s show notes at problogger.com/podcast/84. I would love to hear what you do in terms of coming up with ideas for content on your blog. How do you identify those problems that your readers have? How do you actually go about that? What tools do you use? What questions do you ask yourself that have unlocked ideas to write about on your blog? I’d love to hear it from you.

I’m going to give you some more tips on battling blogger’s block on episode 85 in a couple of days time. We’re going to talk about writing content for your blog. Stay tuned for that episode. Also, subscribe to the ProBlogger PLUS podcast in today’s show notes as well where we do update you with any new podcast that I produce as well as new blog posts on the ProBlogger blog and other developments around ProBlogger. Thanks for listening today. I’ll chat with you on episode 85.

Have you suffered from a bout of bloggers block? Have you got a different technique that works for you to come up with great new ideas? I’d love to hear from you in the comments below.

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Note: you can listen to this episode above or load it up in iTunes.

Today’s episode is about how to beat writer’s block. It’s the first in a mini-series of podcasts that looks at how to prevent writer’s block holding you back from making your blog a success. Writer’s block is very common. I get asked about all the time and suffer it too! In today’s episode, I share tips about how you can work out why you are stuck in the first place, along with solutions that will help you move forward. 

You can listen to today’s episode above or in iTunes or Stitcher (where we’d also LOVE to get your reviews on those platforms if you have a moment). In today’s episode:

Sally, you are not alone in your blogger’s block. It’s something that affects all of us as bloggers at one time or another and I’ve had many bouts of it over the years. So today and in the coming episodes, I want to share a few different tips and to help you to tackle it from a number of different directions.

You can find today’s show notes at problogger.com/podcast/83 where you can also subscribe to the ProBlogger PLUS newsletter. It’s just a simple newsletter that I send out every week, usually on a Tuesday or a Wednesday, depending on what part of the world you’re in. It has our latest podcast episodes, but also anything else that I’ve produced over the week, including blog posts, periscopes, and other live streaming.

There’s also the occasional promotion of a new ebook that we might be producing or one of our events, but it’s largely just updates of content from ProBlogger. You can subscribe to those show notes. Again, it’s at problogger.com/podcast/83. Let’s get into talking about blogger’s block.

As Sally says, a blogger’s block is something that really does hit us as bloggers at different times. It can be incredibly frustrating and I feel that frustration in Sally’s email. She actually went on to write a little bit more about the problem she was having and I really relate to it. It’s why I put aside the other podcasts that I had planned for the next few weeks to really tackle it because it’s something that I know impacts a lot of us. Particularly it can be frustrating at this time of year when we’re in January and we’re excited about taking a blog to the next level, but it’s just not flowing and we can’t make it flow.

So today, I want to talk a little bit about different types of blogger’s block. In the coming episodes, I want to tackle each one in turn. What I found over the years is that blogger’s block comes in different forms. A lot of people just describe it as Sally did that it’s just not flowing. What I found helpful is to really step back from the blogger’s block and to analyze what’s going on when you’re feeling that because a number of things might actually be happening there. To give you some tips, you really need to know what the problem is that you’re having.

Where do you get stuck in your blogging? It’s the question that I want you to ask today. Where do you get stuck in your writing, in your creation of content? Because what I found over the years is that there are different places that I get stuck in. Some of these might relate to you. I want to go through three different types. There may actually be other places that you get stuck, but simply asking that question, “Where am I getting stuck?” can sometimes be the answer that you’re looking for by just simply identifying that you are getting stuck in one of these areas. You might just find that blockage suddenly is removed or you might find a very simple solution.

Here are three different types of blogger’s block that I’ve suffered from over the years. Like I said before, I’m going to tackle each of these in an upcoming episode of this podcast. I really want to dive into each of these three types and give you a whole heap of different tips on each one.

The first type is where you have what I would call an ideas impediment. This happened to me a couple of years ago. It’s actually happened to me a number of times, probably every year almost as I’ve blogged. It’s where I found blogging really tough because I just kept getting stuck on coming up with the ideas of what to write about. I’d sit down and I get the feeling that maybe this is what Sally is talking about. She says she sits down and nothing comes, no ideas come. This is something that many of us face. The ideas is the struggle. It can be incredibly frustrating.

For me on the last time I had this, a lot of it came because I felt like I’d written everything there was to write on my topic. I’ve been writing about photography. I’ve been writing about blogging on my two main blogs since 2004 and 2007. It’s a long time of producing content. You can feel like I’ve said everything there is to say or everyone else has already said everything there is to say. Just coming up with something fresh and new to write about can be incredibly hard to do. That was one of the blogger’s blocks that I’ve had. For me at that time, the way I broke it, the last time I had it, was to sit down with a friend and to brainstorm together.

There’s one simple tip that you might have is to actually sit down with someone else to get some fresh perspectives on your particular niche or industry. As I say, I’ve got an episode fully dedicated to coming up with ideas. It’s actually the next episode of this particular podcast. Do you have an ideas impediment?

The second type of blogger’s block that I’ve suffered from is hitting the writing wall. This is where you get writer’s block, where you have got plenty of ideas for blogging, but you might find it really difficult to get into the rhythm of actually writing the content. Sometimes you actually have too many ideas. This is something that I struggled with when I started ProBlogger. I just had so many ideas that I just found it really difficult to get into the flow of writing some of that content down.

Another time that I’ve suffered from this, it was because I was trying to write all my content at night. Nighttime is just a horrible time for me to write content. I know for some of you, it’s the best time, but mornings, I produce much better content. You might find that your struggle is the writing. For me when I last had this, the solution was pretty simple. I changed the structure of my working wake around to dedicate a little bit more time for the writing process. I also set myself some deadlines of when I needed to create content by. I work quite well to deadlines.

I also changed what I was writing on. I wasn’t writing on my main computer which is connected to the internet and being constantly bombarded by Skype messages and Slack messages. I actually wrote offline on my other computer and I did it in a cafe where there was no internet. Just by changing some of those things around, I actually was able to get more into the flow. I set up a regular time every morning to get into some of that writing. Now again, I’ve got a whole heap more tips on writing tips that will help you to get into the flow in an upcoming episode.

The last type of blogger’s block that I have suffered from over the years is “completion constipation.” I’m not sure whether that grosses you out too much. This is where you get stuck in completing posts. You might have a serious backlog of unfinished posts that you just can’t get out. I’m embarrassed to admit that this is something that I struggled with over the years.

I remember when I first started ProBlogger, after I got into the flow of writing, I had this problem. I remember looking at my half-written blog posts one day, the drafts in my WordPress to discover that I had 93 half-written posts there. I also had a notebook full of ideas of things that I wanted to write about and text documents on my computer, bullet points of posts. I was starting a lot of stuff, I was coming up with titles, I was coming up with outlines, but I wasn’t actually completing stuff. This is something I know a lot of bloggers also struggle with.

Every time I talk about this one, I ask people, “How many drafts do you have in your WordPress installation?” It’s amazing how many people will come out and say 50, 100, or 200 half-written blog posts. This is where you’ve got so many ideas and so much that you want to say, but you never really complete anything. You’re constantly being distracted by the next idea.

The solution from the last time I had this was to just dedicate a little bit more time each week to completing, to finishing, to polishing, to getting those posts from that half-written state into completion. Again, I’ve got a whole podcast coming up on this particular topic as well and hopefully will help you to complete a little bit more.

The thing I would really want to ask you today is, “What part of the process do you get stuck at?” You might actually find that this is one of these areas constantly is your biggest problem. Coming up with all ideas might be your problem, and it’s just a constant problem that you have, or you might be someone who at different times has different problems.

This is my case. There have been times where I’ve had problems with ideas, problems with writing and creation, and problems with completion. I had to change and adapt the way I spend my time depending upon the problem that I have. Just spend a few moments asking yourself that question, “Where are you getting stuck?” You might just find that by giving a little bit more time and a little bit more intentionality to that particular area that things begin to flow.

Stay tuned for the next few podcasts. I’ve got a really great interview actually coming up with Pat Flynn in a couple of episodes. But before and after that, I’m going to tackle blogger’s block and give you some really practical tips on how to get those ideas flowing, how to get into the flow of writing, and how to get your blog posts completed.

Again, you can find today’s show notes at problogger.com/podcast/83 where I will have some further reading for you and I will update links to the future podcasts that we do. I would also love to hear your answer to that question. Where do you get stuck with your writing? Is it in the ideas? Is it in the writing itself? Is it in the completion? What have you found that has been the most helpful in getting through some of those types of blogger’s blocks yourself?

I look forward to hearing from you and talking with you further on this topic in Episode 84.

Have you suffered from a bout of bloggers block? What variety was it? What did you do about it? I’d love to hear from you in the comments below.

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Note: you can listen to this episode above or load it up in iTunes.

Today’s episode is about how to make the most of the time you have. Juggling time to blog with other things in your life is one of the most common challenges that bloggers experience, including me. I recently got together with 5 other bloggers where we talked about this, and I’ve spent a lot of effort myself in trying to get better at managing my time. In today’s episode, I share eight tips and strategies you can use to make fitting blogging into your life less stressful.

You can listen to today’s episode above or in iTunes or Stitcher (where we’d also LOVE to get your reviews on those platforms if you have a moment). In today’s episode:

Tools I use to save time: 

I had a recent coffee with five other bloggers. It’s kind of an end of year breakup of sorts for those of us who have small businesses and don’t get a chance to have a big Christmas party. As we’re having our coffee, we went around the circle, and we talked about our biggest successes over the last year but then talked about our biggest challenges for the year ahead. Every single one of us as we went around and talked about challenges for next year, mentioned that we were struggling with time in one way or another.

Most of us had busy lives not just with our blogging but many of us had families, some of us had other commitments to churches, community groups, sporting groups, and other priorities. Most of us have friends as well. This juggle of how to fit blogging into the rest of our lives was a common thing that many of us faced as we went around. Our conversation then moved to what tips could we give to one another to juggle our time better. 

What I want to do today is to share some of the tips that came to mind from me as I spoke into that conversation but also some of the things that others suggested as well. I’m someone who periodically does struggle with being productive in my own blogging and in my own life. Over the last 10 or so years, I have settled into a bit of a workflow and a bit of a routine. Some of what I’m going to share today comes out of that as well. Let’s get into some of the tips that I’ve got. I’ve got eight for you today. I hope you’ll find some of them helpful to you.

The first thing I want to talk about is not blogging at all. It’s about your life and your life priorities. Now, I do feel a little bit like a parent saying this, but the truth is time management has a lot to do with priorities. It’s important to take a little bit of a step back from your blogging and to ask yourself what are the priorities that you have in your life at the moment.

I remember as a young adult—I must’ve been in my early 20s—going away and doing a time management course. It was part of the study that I was doing at that time. I remember at that time being challenged to do an exercise where I kept a record of every minute of every day and what I did with that time. It was an incredibly confronting exercise to do. All day, I had to carry a piece of paper with me and just write down what I did every 15 minutes.

I remember getting to the end of that week and telling up the different activities that I’ve done. I was amazed to discover how much time I’ve been spending on things that did not feature in my priority list at all. My priorities at that time in my life were study, career, relationships. But as I looked at the way I was actually using my time at that point in my life, my time was dominated by things like television, computer games (I was a young man), and time in the pub. I was a university student at that time. 

The way I was spending my time did not reflect my priorities at all. Of course, at that time I was young, I was reckless, I was a young adult living life and having a good time. I think there’s a point in your life where that’s probably not a bad thing to do, but I realized that that time, there was a real disconnect between my priorities and how I was spending my time. I think if I was to do that same exercise today, I’m sure I’d be confronted in different ways.

That may be an exercise that you actually want to do, is to actually think about how you spend your time day-to-day. I’m sure most of us could find a few activities that we do that maybe don’t reflect the priorities that we have. I’ve talked in a previous podcast about how I’ve used the tool RescueTime which is a tool that you can install on your computer to watch how you spend your time when you’re on your computer. That will give you a bit of feedback on how you’re spending your time. Again, that’s a good one to balance through the priorities that you have.

So, number one is to work out what your priorities are and then ask yourself, am I spending my time in a way that reflects those priorities?

The second thing I want to talk about is your blogging priorities. Previously to this, I’ve just been talking about your life priorities, and I think it’s really important to take that big picture look. I think it’s also really important to look at the priorities that you have for your blog and to really hone in on that, particularly. Actually ask yourself, what do I need to be focusing upon in my blogging right now?

Now, it’s very easy to get quite overwhelmed by blogging. There’s a lot to do. You’ve got to write blog posts, read the comments that get left, have social media accounts—multiple ones. A lot of people are responding to comments. There’s reading other blogs. There’s design. There’s monetizing your blog, finding readers, media kits, all kinds of things that you might want to spend your time on. It’s very easy to get overwhelmed by that.

When I get overwhelmed by all of the tasks that there are to do—I regularly get that feeling that I’ve been overwhelmed—I try and strip it right back and ask myself, what are the really core things that I need to do? Start with those things, plug those things in first. These are the big things, the big priorities, that you need to have with your blog.

For me, it really comes down to four main areas: Writing or creating great content. Finding readers, promoting my blog. Number three is building community or deepening engagement with the readers that I have. And then the fourth area is monetization. These are the four pillars that I always talk about in this podcast and on ProBlogger. In fact, we’re in the process (at the moment) of redesigning the ProBlogger blog around those four key areas and a couple of other areas.

These are the four non-negotiable things that I have to do with my blog. I think, sometimes, by simply naming those priorities you have with blogging, that can help you to be more effective in the way that you use your time. For some people, that’s not enough. Some people need to go the next step and actually build those priorities (whatever they might be for you) into the way that you organize your week.

Again, I’ve shared my calendar in the past with you. We can share a link to that in today’s show notes which reflect those priorities—creating content, finding readers for my blog, building engagement with my readers, and monetization. They’re four things that will always be in my weekly calendar. These are the four things that I just have to spend time on. If I don’t spend time on those four key areas, I know I’m not going to be effective in my blogging.

Once you’ve done your life priorities, actually work out what are your blogging priorities. It may actually be those four things. I think most bloggers will probably find those four things but you may have something else that you really want to add to that for the next few months in your blogging, for the next year in your blogging.

For me, it was writing content, finding readers for my blog, building community or deepening engagement with those readers, and monetizing blogs. Actually, build those things into your weekly calendar into the way that you spend your time. I believe if you spend your time focusing upon those four things, then you will begin to grow your blog. You’ll grow a blog that changes your readers’ lives and that continues to grow. 

Work out your priorities as a blogger then work out how you can slide those things into your week. You may not have a lot of time but if you can spend a little bit of time each week on those four things, I think you can really begin to see some progress. 

The third thing that I want to talk about is batch processing. Some of you will be on top of this and already be doing it. Some of you don’t even know that word (batch processing), but you might be doing it. For me, this is something that I’ve discovered pretty early in my own blogging. 

Up until the point I made this discovery, I spent my blogging life sitting down, writing a blog post, getting onto social media, then responding to comments. I’ve flipped between one activity and another, and do five or six different things almost at once. It was almost like multitasking or flipping between activities. I discovered I was much more effective when I focused my sole attention upon one task at a time. I did it for a longer period of time. I did more than I needed to do on it and was then able to use what I did at that time multiple times.

Let me give you an example of this. One of the ways that I batch process is that I write multiple blog posts in a sitting. I will sit down on a Monday morning. I might write three or four blog posts. On a Tuesday morning, I might try to recall two or three podcasts in a sitting. Rather than sitting down and writing a post, publishing it, doing some comments, then doing some social media, I try to put aside larger blocks of time to do those activities. 

I do the same thing with social media. I’ll sit down for half an hour at the end of my morning. I’ll put half an hour aside doing social media. I do Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, whatever it might be. I try and schedule things ahead of time as well so that the half an hour that I spend on social media actually pays off for the rest of the day. The same thing that I do at the end of the day in social media, I schedule all of the next day’s social media updates at once for the next day. 

Batch processing, I’ll give you some further reading on this on today’s show notes. I found that I’m much more effective rather than flipping between jobs, I’m able to really get a lot done in those particular times. I will share a post that I wrote quite a few years ago when I first discovered this, How Batch Processing Made Me 10 Times More Productive, in today’s show notes.

Another quick tip that I’ll give you—this is tip number four—is to do what I call mental blogging. It may sound like a strange thing to say. In the very early days of my blogging, I had very limited time to actually blog. I was working three part-time jobs in those very early days. I was also studying in the evenings. I was nearly married. We were going out a lot, living close to the downtown area, it was a great place to live so we’re always out. I have a very limited time to blog. As a result, I would often have about half an hour in the morning before I left for work. I would have a bit of a lunch break or I would be blogging late at night. I have very little time to do it.

What I started to do was while I was working in a warehouse, some of the more menial tasks that I was doing in my work, I would blog in my mind. I would write blog posts in my mind so when I did sit down to blog in that lunch break, I actually had my blog post already planned out in my mind. I also used to carry a notebook. As I was working, while my boss wasn’t watching, I would jut down a few words just to remind me what I would want to write about at the end of the shift that I was doing at that time.

There were many times, I remember, I get home from work and I would have this half an hour window before I had to go off and do my studies. I would just bang out a really quiet detailed blog post because I had already outlined it. I already had it in my notebook, the main points that I wanted to make. I’ve already written it in my mind. Today, I would probably not use a notebook. I’ll probably use Evernote. I’ll probably dictate some of the main points that I want to use as well using Evernote, being able to record my voice. I think it’s really a useful thing to do. 

However, you want to capture that on the road, use those sorts of tools. I guess use those times in your life where you might be doing something that you’ve got the mental capacity to be able to work on your blog. I did the same thing. I was working in in-flight catering in a kitchen on a conveyor belt in my early days of blogging. I have one job where I was working in a warehouse. Another one where I was working on a conveyor belt putting orange juice on trays that you eat off on a plane. I was really menial work, but I got the best blogging done while I did that. Every morning tea break, I would be sitting there with my notebook jotting down the ideas that I come up with as I’ve been putting orange juice on trays. There’s my fourth tip, mental blogging.

My fifth tip for you today is to spend time when you batch process and you come up with your calendar. Putting aside time for idea generation. One of the things that I realized fairly early on my blogging, that I was spending a lot of time coming up with ideas for a blog post. I would usually come up with the idea just before I wrote it. I put aside some time to write but I spent half of that time trying to work out what should I write about today. Should I write about this? Then I might start, and then go, “No, that’s no good.” Then, I go back to idea generation again. 

One of the tasks that I began to batch process was putting aside time to come up with ideas with no pressure to write anything. Just brainstorming ideas. When I would sit down to write, the next time, I actually had an idea already waiting for me there. I would use a technique called mind mapping. I use a tool called MindNode. It’s a Mac tool. You can also get in on an iPad or an iPhone. It’s just a mind mapping tool. You can do the same type of thing in a whiteboard or a piece of paper or there are other tools around as well. You can basically brainstorm ideas for content. 

Today, I’ll also use Evernote sometimes for this. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m a bit of an Evernote user. I’ve come across a few people recently who use a tool called Trello. Trello is a project management tool that many teams use. I’ve seen a number of bloggers using it for mind mapping as well. You might want to check that one out. The key here is to set aside time to come up with ideas.

You could actually extend this a little bit further, I think, by not only coming up with the idea but actually coming up with the few points that you might make in the post. When you sit down to write, you don’t just have the topic. You actually have the beginnings of the post. Maybe a bit of an outline. What I typically would do is come up with an idea and then try and come up with three bullet points that I want to cover at that point and in that post. 

Even as I’m coming up with bullet points, I might come up with further reading, an example, or something else that I could use to make that post a little bit more interesting. The key’s not to get too far into the creation of that content and just come up with the idea. You could take this a little further by actually sliding your ideas into an editorial calendar.

This is something that we’ve been doing at ProBlogger recently, using CoSchedule. We take our ideas and we actually put them straight into CoSchedule and give them a date. Then, we’ve got a deadline. That, for me, is one of the best things that I can do in terms of getting productive. If I know that I’ve not only got the idea but I’ve got the date it needs to be published and to do the things that I need to achieve to get that post written, I’m much more likely to get that post written or that podcast recorded. That tool, CoSchedule—I’ll have a link in today’s show notes—is really powerful in helping me to get things done and be more effective with my time as well.

Tip number six—we only got three to go—is to break down big jobs into small bites. This is almost the opposite of batch processing in some ways. Batch processing, you put aside a big amount of time to do multiple things on the same type of things. This way is when you’ve got a big job. Say, you want to write an ebook or you want to create a course or you want to do a redesign of your blog, these big tasks can be very overwhelming.

Quite often, when I’m confronted with those big tasks, I get paralyzed. I actually don’t act on them at all because they’re too big. As I’ve shared in the previous podcast, what I tend to do now when I’m confronted with a big task is to break it down. I build a process on what needs to be done to get the big task down. I try and chunk it down into things that can be achieved in 15–30 minutes. When I get up in the morning, even before the kids wake up (sometimes), I can get a little chunk, a little task done that takes me closer to the big task being completed.

If you’re being confronted by something that you’re just not acting on at the moment, then break it down. Break it down into small bite-size tasks that will take you closer to achieving that big task that you need to get done. 

Tip number seven is one that you may not have heard most blogging teachers talk about. I think it’s really something that has helped me a lot. It has taken a bit of the pressure off that some bloggers feel. Tip number seven is to embrace slow blogging. Slow blogging is okay.

Many bloggers have this little voice that is in the back of their minds that says, “I have to post something today. I have to get a post out today. I have to post every day.” It may not be every day for you but it may be, “I have to post on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays,” or, “I have to post at certain times.” We have these little voices in our minds that set ourselves these deadlines and set expectations that blogging has to be daily or has to be multiple times a day. Or, “I have to be on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest. I have to publish on those networks 10 times a day.”

I’m not saying there’s anything wrong in posting daily. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with being engaged in all of those different social media activities. Sometimes, as bloggers, I think we create monsters for ourselves. We create machines that we have to keep feeding. We do it for no good reason when it comes to frequency. I’m guilty of this. There have been times in my own blogging where I had that voice in my mind putting pressure on myself. It ends up hurting my blog. 

Here on ProBlogger, we’ve actually slowed down in our posting schedule. There was a time a few years ago where I was posting 14 times a week on ProBlogger. That little voice just kept nagging at me saying, “You should be posting more. You should be posting more.” I was seeing sites like Mashable. I’ll see sites like TechCrunch and other tech, webbie, startup-y, type of blogs publishing more, and more, and more content. I was comparing myself to them. I wanted to try and keep up.

I realized that for ProBlogger, that less can be more and slow blogging is okay. We pulled it right back. We actually pulled it back to one state to three posts per week. Since then, we’ve actually increased a bit. We’re at six or seven a week now. We’ve gradually built it up. I’ve only done it as a result of building up my team with the hope that we’re maintaining our quality as well.

Slowing down can be okay. It’s really interesting that voice in the back of my head that said, “You need to post more, more, more.” As I slowed down, it started saying other things like, “You’re going to lose your traffic. You’re going to lose your traffic.” The reality is we actually kept that traffic and grew it as a result of slowing down by putting more time into the creation of our content and being proud of the quality of our work. Also, using some of the time was freed up by posting less. We do other things like working our design which is very close to being released. Now, we’re able to increase the quality of what we’re doing as well.

I’m not saying that everyone needs to slow down but consider it. Are those little voices in your head that are telling you to post more, to do things that other people are doing? Sometimes it can be good things to listen to but they’re sometimes not. They can actually sometimes hurt your blogs. So, slow blogging is okay.

A couple of years ago, I came across an Aussie blogger by the name of Kemi. I’ll give you a link to her blog in today’s show notes. She created this video which I loved. It’s just a few minutes of her talking about her blogging, about her business, and about the way she spends her day. She talked in this video about having preparation days, success days, and inspiration days. I think the idea originally came from someone called Jack Canfield who talked about having creating days, preparation days, success days, and rest days. 

I liked these ideas of having certain days of the week for certain types of things. The way Kemi described it is she has days where she just puts aside time to prepare. She doesn’t actually create anything at all. She spends that time preparing for her success day. Her success day is where she creates and it’s where she completes things. She has other days which are more for inspiration. She just put a whole day aside to get inspiration, to read, to watch, to listen, and to get inspiration. Of course, the cycle continues. Out of that inspiration comes a day for preparation. Out of that preparation comes a day for success and creation. 

I liked these ideas a lot. You will now see this reflected in my own schedule. I don’t put a hole aside a whole day for things like preparation, success, or inspiration, but I do try to put aside time in each day for those things and actually spend time. Each week I’m spending time preparing for the next week. Usually on a Friday, I’ll actually put aside some time to think about how I’m going to spend my time next week. I’ll also have (in my schedule now) time for inspiration. Every day, I try and watch a TED talk, sometimes two, or sometimes three. Every day, I put aside a little bit of time to just read a novel. I put aside time every day to create. 

Whether you take on preparation, creation, and inspiration as your three things, or whether you’ve got other things that you want to build into your day, I think it’s really useful to put aside time in that type of way. The other thing I really liked about Jack Canfield is that he has rest days. I think this is really important if you want to be a productive person, whether it be in your blogging or other aspects of your life. You do need to create time for rest.

There was a time in my own blogging where I was working 60 or 70 hours a week. I’m quite proud of the fact that I was. The reality, though, was while I was able to be productive and sustain that for a period of time, it began to take its toll upon my health, my relationships, and other aspects of my life as well. It actually ended up making me unproductive because I was having to take time off because I was sick. I was having to be distracted because my relationships weren’t as good as they could’ve been. 

By setting aside time to rest, I’ve actually (last time) worked less and more productive in the time that I do work. I’m happy as well. Also those around me. Setting aside time for things like preparation for creation, for inspiration. Setting aside time for rest, while it may seem a little counterintuitive that you’re putting aside time for stuff that’s not actually being productive, actually is. It’s going to make you so much more productive.

The last thing I’d say as part of this is put aside time for your well-being. Rest is part of that but so is exercise, so is healthy food. Many of you know that in 2015, it was a big year of me actually really starting to look after myself for the first time. I actually think that over the last six or seven months, I have increased my productivity tenfold. Maybe not quite tenfold, but at least, I doubled my productivity. I think a large part of that is because I’m setting aside time for me. I’m setting aside time for my health. I’m setting aside time to walk for my social life and also for my learning. My mental capacity as well. Again, we’ll give you some further reading on that in today’s show notes. 

I feel like I’ve scratched the surface today with these tips on how to be more effective with your time, how do you make the most of the time that you have. I hope that somewhere in the midst of these eight tips are a few things you can go away and implement as you’re heading to 2016. This is a great time to step back from life a little bit and hopefully set yourself up. Set yourself up some good habits and routines for the year ahead.

Again, let me just quickly whip through the eight things that I’ve said. Firstly, it starts with life priorities. Secondly, it’s about identifying your blogging priorities. Thirdly, build batch processing, particularly around some of the main tasks of creating content, social media. Number four was to think about mental blogging. Do you have any time in your day where you’re doing menial tasks? You could actually be putting aside time in your mind and using some tools like Evernote, too. Begin to create content. Get the post ready to be written. Number five, put aside time for idea generation. Maybe even develop an editorial calendar system to give yourself some deadlines. Tip number six was to break down the big jobs into small bites. Tip number seven was to consider slow blogging. It might’ve been worthwhile slowing down to increase the quality of what you’re doing. And tip number eight was to create space for preparation, creation, rest, and for you.

I hope this has been helpful to you. I’d love to hear your tips on productivity, what you would add to this, what you agree with, what do you disagree with, over at today’s show notes at problogger.com/podcast/82. If you would like to keep up-to-date with the ProBlogger Podcast, you can (of course) subscribe to us on iTunes or another service like Stitcher. We also do offer a newsletter. 

In all of our show notes, there’s a little yellow button at the bottom of our show notes. It’s yellow today. I don’t know whether it will be in the next 10 years. There’s a button at the bottom of all our show notes that gives you the option to subscribe. This is a once a week newsletter. It’s called ProBlogger PLUS. It just gives you an update once a week. Usually on a Tuesday or a Wednesday of all of the latest blog posts that we have written over the last week as well as our new podcast.

At the moment, we’ve been doing a weekly reading roundup. The reading roundup is a post that Stacy puts together all of the things that we, as a ProBlogger team, are reading on other people’s sites. There are usually about 10 of them on sites like Social Media Examiner or HubSpot, Buffer Blog, all of these great blogs that we read every day. We actually collect their best posts and put them into a post on ProBlogger, and that’s in our ProBlogger PLUS newsletter as well.

Again, you can get it at problogger.com/podcast/82. Scroll to the bottom of the show notes and there is an option there to subscribe to ProBlogger PLUS. I hope that you have found something useful in today’s podcast and I will chat with you in the next couple of days.

What other strategies have worked for you? I’d love to hear from you in the comments below.

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