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 how to work out what to write about when you feel like you have nothing left to say. It’s part two on this topic, so you might like to listen back to episode 80 first. I share 14 different types of stories you can use to get people excited about reading your blog, and resources and reading you can refer to into the future when you get stuck.

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:

But today, I want to give you some different types of stories that you might want to tell on your blog. Some of these are stories that you could tell about your own story, but some of them are also other types of stories. I’m going to give you 14 of them. You can find today’s show notes where I’m going to give you a whole heap of examples of these types of stories. You may actually want to open up this link so that you can pause the podcast as we go along and check out the examples. You can find the show notes at problogger.com/podcast/81 where I’ll give you those examples and you can also share your own examples in the comments. Let’s get into today’s episode.

Let’s get into the 14 types of stories that you can tell. The first one is the personal discovery story. This is where you tell the story of you discovering something for the first time, a lesson that you’ve learned if you like. These stories are really great because they do allow your readers to see that you are on a journey that you’re still learning. It’s often the type of story that they can really relate to because they are often in the position before you discovered your lesson, can relate to you before, and then get inspired by the after.

A good example of this is episode 38 of my own podcast here where I shared a lesson that I’d learned in 2015 about blogging, which was more about my health. I talked about my own health journey. By sharing that story, I had hundreds of people contact me and many of them said things like, “You just described me and you’ve inspired me to do something about my health as well.”

I have seen this over and over again when I’ve shared those personal stories of discovery and the lessons that I’ve learned not only the personal ones but also the discoveries in my professional development as well. How I had maybe learned a new technique in blogging or in photography as well for my photography blog. That’s the first type of story.

The second one is a story where you tell a story as an analogy or as an illustration. Again, I can give you an example from a recent episode of this podcast in episode 67. I was talking about creating products for your blog. I started that podcast off by telling the story of a busker, or in fact, two buskers street performers that my family and I had come across a few years ago. While the story of those street performers had very little to do with blogging, they illustrated the power of having your own product to sell quite well. Here’s where you tell a story that may not seem like it’s particularly relevant to what you’re talking about, but then you make it relevant. You use it as an illustration or an analogy.

The third type of story is, I guess, a little bit similar to number one, but it’s a success story. It’s how you achieved something. These stories are quite often inspirational. They’re motivating for your readers. Perhaps the best example I can give you of this is a guest post that John Merrow did back in 2011 on ProBlogger, where John told his story of overcoming some real hardships in his life and just having some remarkable success.

That guest post has been one of the most viewed posts on ProBlogger, including all the posts that I’ve written as well. That post really resonated. To this day, five years later, it’s still getting read every day and being shared on social media. It’s a story that doesn’t date. It’s an evergreen story if you like. But the key again is the before and after the journey that he’s been through and the success that he’s had despite the hardships.

That story, type three. On the flip side of that is story type four. This is where you tell a failure story. These are also incredibly powerful, particularly if you’re able to share a failure or a mistake that you or someone else made, but also pull out some practical lessons and things that people could learn from your failure.

One of the examples of this that comes to mind is a couple of years ago. We shared the story on ProBlogger of how we sent an email to hundreds of thousands of people that were supposed to go to about 100 people. I think about the numbers. It may have even been more than 100,000 people. We shared that story about how we made that horrible mistake. It was a horrible […] we felt terrible, but we wanted to share that story because it’s so easy to do and we wanted to share what we did after we made that mistake.

Again, I’ll share the link to that story and all these others in today’s show notes. But again, we had a lot of really positive feedback about sharing that story. We could quite easily have tried to keep it sacred and not share it, but we really wanted to come clean and most importantly, help other people who may have been in a similar situation to that or help people avoid doing the same thing we did.

The fifth type of story that we wanted to briefly touch on today is where you tell someone else’s story. You could do this in some of the other ways that we’ve already talked about as well. This is where you share the journey of someone else, what they learned, what they overcame, and how they succeeded perhaps in different ways.

Again, a good example of this is a fairly recent post that we did on ProBlogger where Stacey who edits ProBlogger interviewed Carly Heitlinger from College Prepster. You’ll find if you go and check out that post, it’s partly an interview post but Stacey also tells her story before she does the interview as well. We’ve done that a number of times that semi interview, semi storytelling-type posts, and they’ve worked really well for us.

The sixth type of story that you can tell is a “how I did it” story. These are a little bit more practical and might not be so emotive or so much about the story, but it’s almost like a tutorial that you tell with an example. This is how I actually achieve this thing or this is how I work through this process.

A good example of this is one which we had as a guest post recently, How a Simple Blog Led to Writing for Forbes, Mashable, and TechCrunch. That was a guest post that we wrote where the author walked through that process of how they actually took a simple blog and opened up all kinds of opportunities as a result of it.

The seventh type of story is the biography. This is where you pick a key person in your industry or niche, and then you tell your readers that person’s story, pulling out useful parts or interesting parts that perhaps your readers could apply. You don’t even need to interview that person to tell a biography. You just need to be able to research.

This is particularly good if you don’t have an opportunity to speak with that famous person or that notable person, but you will actually find that a lot of people will be open to being interviewed to help you put those biographical types of posts together. Don’t be afraid to approach someone and say, “I’d love to just write a post that shares your story.” You might include some quotes or you may even find that they’re willing to guest post that for you.

The eighth type of story is the autobiography. This is where you obviously tell your own story from start to finish. I’ve done this a number of times over on ProBlogger. Again, I’ll give you an example of one post that I wrote back in 2006 that told my four-year story to that point of blogging and how I started as a hobby and grew it into a part-time job and then into a full-time thing. I then went back and updated that post in 2008, I think it was, so there are the first six years of that story now. I probably could go back and update it again, although I’ve done a similar thing on the about page on ProBlogger as well.

This is where you tell your own story right from the beginning, right to the end. Those types of stories often do quite well as a landing page perhaps on social media to include those types of stories because people do like to see where you’ve come from.

The ninth type of story is where you use images or videos to tell a story. You don’t actually have to write your story. You could actually shoot it on video, you talking or even visually if you want to get a little bit creative just by sharing pictures with very few words.

The 10th type of story is the case study. This is where you pull apart your own situation and really delve into the processes that you’ve gone through, or you do that for someone else, or perhaps even a client if you have a client.

I’ll give you an example of a post on ProBlogger that I wrote a couple of years ago. It was my 12 blogging income streams post where I actually walked through how I started to monetize my blogs right from the very early days, the first money that I made from blogging. I walked through how my monetization has evolved over the years and talked about the top 12 different income streams that I’ve used.

I could quite easily have just written a post with 12 income streams, but I found that by telling that story and telling why I chose the different income streams at certain points, and how I found them, and how much they made in the early days, it actually made it much more relatable to people. People actually read that post right through. Whereas I find if you just list 12 things, people don’t tend to engage with it quite as much.

The 11th type of story is where you write a fictional piece. I’ve never actually done this. I’ve never written a post in that kind of form, but I know there are quite a few fiction bloggers around in the blogosphere. That may be either a good to have as a whole post or to lead into a post in a similar way perhaps to an illustrative or an analogy type of post.

The 12th type of post that you might want to experiment with is where you ask your readers to tell their stories and share their experiences in the comments. You may actually want to get them to submit via a Google form for example where you get all of their stories in and then you post some of those as actual posts on your blog as well. I find reader stories can really work very well. They don’t need to be long. You might just get your readers to submit a 200-word story of how they discovered something or all their experience of a certain situation.

The 13th type of story is difficult to explain. This is a collective story. This is where you might tell the story of a group of people. It’s biographical but it’s not just of one person. It’s over a group of people or an industry, a collective group in different ways. You might want to tell the story of how Silicon Valley developed, as an example. It’s a biography all that, an area or a group of people within a particular area.

I might tell a story of blogging, how bloggers started out, how blogging has changed over the years, and give examples of different people along the way. It’s more of a collective story or a history of a particular aspect of life.

The last type of story that you might want to experiment with is what I call an “imagine if” story. This is where you tell a story that projects forward. You’re not actually telling a real story. You’re actually telling a hypothetical scenario. I’ll give you an example of this as well.

I started off by a series of blog posts that I wrote a few years ago called How to Craft a Blog Post, 10 Crucial Points to Pause on a Talk over these 10 blog posts about 10 different aspects of writing a great blog post, but I kicked off that series with a little story. It was a hypothetical story. I’ll actually read it to you. This is the start of that blog post.

“It hits you like a ton of bricks. It’s an idea for that killer blog post that’s just bound to bring you all the traffic you’ve ever dreamed of. With the idea fresh in your mind, you sit down at your keyboard and bang it out desperate to hit Publish as quickly as you can for fear that someone else will beat you to the punch. As smoke rises from your keyboard, you complete your blog post, quickly add a title to it, and proudly hit Publish. Visions of an avalanche of visitors, incoming links, and comments swell before you, but then reality hits you like a slap in the face. There are a few visitors, no comments, no links. It’s not a killer post. It’s dead.”

I told that story and then I went on to say, “Well, have you ever had that experience? I’m going to start this series of blog posts and it’s going to help you to not have that experience again.” It wasn’t a real story but it was a story. It was an imaginative story. It was trying to get my readers to start feeling while I was writing that series of blog posts and get them in the mood for it and get them ready for it.

That’s just 14 types of stories that you could perhaps experiment with on your blog. I know in my last podcast, I talked a lot about you telling your own story and I think that’s a really powerful thing to do. In many ways, your whole blog may be your own story and maybe a continuation of your story from blog post to blog post, but you don’t need to just tell your own stories. You can also tell other people’s stories. I think it’s a really powerful thing to practice the art of storytelling.

Now, in the last episode, I did have some further reading on how to tell good stories. We’ll include those same links in today’s show notes, as well as all the examples that I’ve mentioned in this particular podcast. But like I said before, I would love to see the stories that you’ve told on your blog. I love a good story myself and I’d love to read them. I’m sure other listeners of this podcast would love to read them as well.

Do feel free to either tell your story in the comments of today’s show notes or share a link to a story that you have told on your blog. You can find today’s show notes at problogger.com/podcast/81. Look forward to seeing your story there.

What other types of stories have worked for you? I’d love to hear from you in the comments below. Feel free to include a link to an example of one of your story blog posts that has done well.

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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 work out what to write about when you feel like you have nothing left to say. It’s a short and sweet podcast episode, designed to be quick and easy for you to listen to even if you’re incredibly busy or having a lazy holiday.

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:

Today’s podcast is another really short one but I think it’s so important. In fact, I think it’s probably one of the most important things that many bloggers need to hear. I get asked the question all the time, what should I write about when I don’t feel like I’ve got anything unique to say. You can find today’s show notes at problogger.com/podcast/80.

If you ever felt that way like you’ve got nothing unique to say, like it’s all been said before, like there are some so many other people out there who are smarter, funnier, more witty or cleverer than you, “Why would anyone listen to me?” you might be thinking. While if you have ever been feeling like that, you are not alone. I think that most bloggers have that moment in their story where they felt that way. Why would anyone listen to me? I’ve got nothing unique to say.

Here’s my encouragement to you. Nobody, nobody at all has ever lived your life before. Nobody has your story. Nobody has faced and overcome what you’ve overcome in your life. Nobody thinks in exactly the same way that you do. No one has your story. So write, but infuse writing with your story. Your story is what makes your content unique. Your story is what has never been said before. Your story is something that nobody else could ever know better than you. Your story is why anyone would listen to you. So share your story. When you’re in doubt and you feel like you’ve got nothing unique to say, come back to your story.

You can find today’s show notes at problogger.com/podcast/80 where I’ve got some further reading on storytelling. I hope you find this podcast helpful and I’ve still got 15-seconds to go so I would love to also hear your comments over on the show notes today. Thanks for listening and I will chat with you again soon.

What other strategies have worked for you? 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 more comments on your blog. I share 11 tips you can use to get more attention and interaction. Today’s podcast is a challenge to myself – to include as much high quality advice as I can in just 3 minutes! These are tips you can keep coming back to in future to keep improving your relationship with 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:

So let us get into the tips.

Number 1. Invite comments. You exponentially increase the chances of getting comments on your blog post simply by asking for one at the end of your post.

Number 2. Write in a conversational tone. The more your readers feel like you are talking to them rather than just writing a post, the more likely you are to get comments, so write in a conversational kind of tone.

Number 3. Ask questions at the end of your blog posts. Rather than just saying, “Leave a comment,” include a specific question. This gives your readers a starting point when they are thinking about what to comment on.

Number 4 is building upon this idea of asking questions and it is to ask a question in the headline of your post. You would not want to do it in every single post, but when you ask a question in your blog post title, it invites your readers to start thinking about their response even before they read anything at all. It really works well.

Number 5. Be open-ended with your blog posts. If you said everything there is to say on your topic in your blog post, there is much less chance that your readers are going to feel the need to comment at all.

Number 6. Interact with the comments left. If you are not willing to interact in the comments why would your readers. This makes your comment section become a conversation section.

Number 7. Kick off the comments with your own comment. If you are not getting many comments on a post or any at all, answer your own question or add a new point to your post by leaving a comment. This sometimes gets the ball rolling.

Number 8. Deal with trolls and spanners. If comments on your post are going toxic, be willing to step in and get things back on track. An unmoderated comment section can be a real put-off to those who are new to your blog.

Tip number 9. Reward good behavior. Acknowledge and reward good commenters. You do not have to actually give them a prize or anything, but just responding to their comment, emailing your commenters, promoting a great comment or blog post, or you may even want to send them a little gift by drawing attention to those who comment well. You will find that they will come back and comment again, but it also shows other readers that you value interaction.

And number 10. Promote conversations in your social media feeds. When a conversation is really going well in your blog post, promote it to your social media accounts by saying, “There is a great conversation going on here.”

And the last tip, well, I am going to leave that up to you. I want to know what you would add.

I could go on with this list for quite a while now, but I want to take my own advice and get your opinion on it, so I would love you to leave a comment over at problogger.com/podcast/79 with your own tip on how to get more comments on your blog. I went 30 seconds over today but I hope you forgive me and I would love to hear your feedback on this particular podcast at the show notes. Thanks for listening.

What other strategies have worked for you to get comments on your blog posts? 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 sure your blog posts are really interesting. I share 11 tips you can use in your writing to get attention and maintain interest. Today’s podcast is a challenge to myself – to include as much high quality advice as I can in just 3 minutes! These are tips you can keep coming back to in future to keep improving your blog.  I’m also including a lot of extra resources in the show notes with examples and further ideas that you can refer to.

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:

Number 1. Be useful. If your blog post isn’t informing, inspiring, entertaining, or making someone’s life better in some way, do not publish it until it is.

Number 2. Share your opinion. Opinions are often what sets your blog post apart from what everyone else is writing about, so share them.

Number 3. Cut out the fluff which is what I am trying to do in this podcast. Before you hit publish, revise your post and remove anything that does not add value.

Number 4. Visualize your reader as you are writing. Writing with a reader in mind personalizes your writing in ways that you cannot even imagine.

Number 5. Make your posts scannable. Only 16% of people read every word that you write. Format your post in a way where your main points stand out using bullet posts or headlines.

Number 6. Work and rework your headlines. A good headline can be the difference between a blog being read or ignored completely.

Number 7. Write with passion. When you share that you care what you are writing about your readers will most likely care, too.

Number 8. Give your readers something to do next. Ask your readers to do something once they are finished reading. It could be reading something else, commenting, sharing, or applying the lesson that you have taught.

Number 9. Tell stories. Stories are incredibly powerful at connecting with your readers in inspiring and teaching them. They will also create memories in your readers.

Number 10. Give your posts visual appeal. The inclusion of a great image or a well-designed diagram can take your post to the next level and help it to be shared so much more.

And lastly practice. The best way to improve your writing. To write content that changes people’s life is to practice, practice, practice.

I hope you found this interesting and useful. You can find today’s show notes, including further reading on each of these 11 tips at problogger.com/podcast/78. And I did it; 2 minutes and 55 seconds. Thanks for listening.

What other strategies do you use to make sure your blog is attention-grabbing? If you’ve got a blog post that has got much more attention than normal, feel free to include a link and let me know why you think it worked. 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 set goals that will improve your blog. Research shows that by simply writing goals down, you are more likely to achieve them. I find setting goals difficult, but this has definitely been true for me! Today’s episode is a special interview with Stacey Roberts, the author of the Vege Mama blog. We talk about what you can do to make sure you have the highest chance of meeting your blog goals, in the most painless way possible.

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:

Edgar is a tool I’ve been using since January 2015. It enables you to make the work you do on social media keep paying off for the long term. You put a little work into Edgar today by adding social media updates highlighting the great content in your blog’s archives and Edgar goes to work to share them to your followers not just once but by queuing your updates to keep delivering to into the future.

The team at Edgar have put together a special deal for ProBlogger readers which gives you a free one month trial. Sign up for your free one month trial at meetedgar.com/problogger. Here’s a video of how I use Edgar:

If watching videos isn’t your thing – here’s a blog post I wrote on how I use Edgar.

Darren: Hi there. This is Darren from ProBlogger and welcome to episode 77 of the ProBlogger Podcast and the first episode of 2016. It feels a little bit strange to me saying that. I haven’t said that too many times yet because it (as I record this) is halfway through December in 2015 if I’m honest, but I wanted to get this one recorded because I think it’s so important.

Today we are going to talk about setting blog-changing goals for your blog. Goals that are going to help you to take your blog to the next level in 2016. To help me to explore this topic, I decided to bring in Stacey Roberts who is the editor of ProBlogger and has been for the last couple of years now. Stacey has really been instrumental in helping me to take ProBlogger to the next level over the last year or so, one of the teams that I have brought on to help me with that. She is a little bit different personality-wise. We do talk about our personalities in this particular episode. 

It helped me, as well as a few other people in my team, too, to get a little bit more structured in my thinking about this type of stuff. It has really helped us to achieve so much in the last 12 months in particular.

You can find today’s show notes at problogger.com/podcast/77 where we will include some further reading. In particular, I recall that Stacey wrote recently on ProBlogger that we’re really bouncing off in this particular podcast. I hope you enjoyed today’s interview with Stacey.

Good morning Stacey. It’s good to be chatting with you today. Happy New Year. This is actually being recorded in December but it will come up in the new year, so I feel like I can almost compel to say Happy New Year.

 Stacey: Happy New Year to you, too. I feel very ahead of myself.

Darren: How was your happy 34 years? 

Stacey: Absolutely fabulous. I was on this yacht and there were cocktails. Nah, I’m sure it will be fun. It will be great.

Darren: Excellent. The reason for today’s podcast is that it is that time of year. Well, it will be that time of year when you are listening to this for our listeners, where people are after making their new year’s resolutions or setting goals. I do prefer to set goals and make resolutions, although maybe that’s a bit of a […] definition thing, but I was just thinking this morning, a good question maybe to start this particular podcast for our listeners to ponder is, is the way your blog is today the same as you want it to be in a year’s time?

I think a lot of people say, “I don’t need goals,” but asking that question from me gets you thinking about change and the change that you want to bring. Maybe just to get us in the mood for why we might need some goals, you may want to pause the podcast, listeners, answer that question, and actually take it to the next step and ask yourself the question, what changes do you need to happen in the next year or how do you want it to look different in a year’s time? Maybe that’s just a kick us off question to ponder. 

I wondered (to introduce this particular podcast), Stacey, by saying I was going to do a podcast on goal setting and then I was looking on to ProBlogger for what I’d written in the past on that. I found a post that you had written in the past.

Stacey: Not since September 1st.

Darren: Was it? Ah okay. September of this year? It was really recent and […].

Stacey: I’ll give you a pass on that one.

Darren: I thought it would be really good just to walk through some of the things that you wrote in that particular post. You start off by talking about why goals are important. I don’t really want to spend the whole heap of time in this podcast on that, but I think it probably is worth stating some of the things that you have said there. Do you want to run us through some of the reasons why goals might be important to make it this time of year?

Stacey: Sure. It helps keep you on task and I know that, particularly for me, when I’m at home, I’ve got a job, and I’ve got kids, I’ve got very little time to spend on my blog and I don’t want to waste it. Often I do find myself wasting it because I don’t know what to do. Because I don’t have a direction, I just slander around, doing bits and pieces of nothing really at all. It really helps you keep on track of what you’re doing when you’ve got the time to do it.

It also motivates you when you are so passionate about your blog and you really want to see where it can go. You have to know where you want it to go before you can push it in that motivation. It’s good for direction. It’s good for motivation and it’s good for helping you be really productive with your time.

Darren: Yeah, I think for me, I pretty much have the same list of things. I think I found it very easy and maybe it is just my personality type, but I find it very easy to drift throughout the day. For my goals on a grand scale, I am quite motivated, so my goal for the year or for my next 10 years is that those are the goals that are really motivating. But what keeps me on track in the day-to-day are those mini goals or objectives that I set during the day, which really flow out of the big […]. 

Stacey: Yes, it does take a little bit of time to sit down and really pen those out, but it is so worth it if you do.

Darren: The other thing that I found useful and maybe it’s more coming from hiring people who are good at this kind of stuff is that it gives you something to base your reviews on. As you are assessing how you went in the last year, while I don’t spend the whole […] look time looking back, I think it is important to have some way of assessing—

Stacey: Yeah. It is also pretty motivating, too, when you don’t think you’ve done very well, but if you look back at the traffic we had in January and you see how it has grown, you think, “Oh, I really have actually seen some progress.”

Darren: For sure. I think partly, our approach to goals often does reflect our personality type and for those listeners who haven’t heard me talk about personalities before, I am a self-confessed INFP in the Myers-Briggs test that I’ve done. I think P comes in to count TR and those are perceived as someone who is perhaps living a little more in the moment, a bit more spontaneous. I am not the most organized person in the world, so I find goal setting really hard. I often avoid this type of activity. Is that the case for you? 

Stacey: I am an INTJ, so you think that I would just be like super on to all of this, but I have really good intentions. I think this is the year I am going to start goals. This is the year I am going to start checking and I just never do. I have vague goals, write an eBook, but I hadn’t actually sat down and written anything and being specific in both the notebook and done it. I like buying the notebooks and the pens but I don’t actually do anything. When I was writing this, it was after an experiment of how I have done it. I realized it had made such a difference and I felt like a bit of an idiot for not doing it before.

 Darren: I didn’t used to spend a whole heap of time on it, but I think just having the team makes you a little bit more […]. Also, if you start paying people, you want them to be doing something worthwhile. 

Stacey: Yes. You want some return on investment. 

Darren: And getting through an outcome, that’s right. The people I have hired, I think everyone on the team is a J personality. I can’t think of anyone who is like me. 

Stacey: You have the ideas and we put them into place.

Darren: I always forget […] but—

Stacey: And where you’re working on the idea and you were like, “Hey, wait. Did I say that?” 

Darren: Yeah. I think a lot of the objections people have to having goals come down to I don’t have the time. I am not that type of person, maybe that personality thing, or I don’t have the framework to do it, and really that’s what this podcast is about. It is giving you a bit of a framework to come up with those particular goals. Perhaps if you can start to walk us through some of the process that you came up with in the article? I might butt in occasionally and disagree or add my thoughts as well but you started off with writing them down. 

Stacey: Yes. It is such an important thing for many reasons. Often, you don’t really know how you feel until you’ve written it down or you don’t really know what you want until you sit there with a piece of paper and a pen, and you’re forced to come up with something. And you realized instead of tapping into that idea of what you’re looking for. that you haven’t been able to put into words yet, so that’s really useful.

It is also really useful so you don’t forget them. I am quite forgetful, so if I haven’t written it down, I think that I will remember it but I won’t. It is also really good because it makes them real. It makes them quite concrete, like this is a goal that I want. It’s not just something that’s I have an idea in the box. This is actually a goal. I have written it down, I’m serious, and now we are going to achieve them.

Darren: I think you wrote in the article, people who write their goals down are significantly more likely to achieve those goals and I have certainly read those studies as well. 

Stacey: Yeah, and for so many different reasons, not even quantifiable reasons, but you are more likely to achieve them if you have written them down.

Darren: Yeah, I think they just did the writing of them down. They become clearer as well and being able to put words around them, articulate them, makes them easier to communicate to other people if you’ve got other people if you’ve got other people working with you too. 

The second point was don’t have many […]. 

Stacey: Yes. I think part of the reasons are especially in this time of year when you’re gung-ho to start a new year, turn over a new leaf and all that kind of thing. You have a million and one ideas but to be successful in achieving the goals that you are choosing, you really have to not bite off more than you can chew. So far, it’s  prone to failure.

Even if you feel though you’ve so much that you want to achieve, you have to boil it down to 3–5 major goals that you want to achieve in the next year or two, and then break them down into steps because once you’ve broken them down, you realize that they actually take a fair bit of work. You might even misjudge the amount of time these tasks will take you because you think it’s over in five minutes but you aren’t. By the end of the year, you’ve only reached one of the 25 goals; you feel a bit of a failure. The best thing to do is have a smaller amount of goals, achieve them, and then move on to the bigger ones. 

Darren: I find this true both in business and also in personal parts of our life as well. Vanessa and I sit down usually at the end of every year and come up with our goals for the year. In the past, we used to have […] of goals. These days, we set ourselves goals for physical health, family goals, spiritual goals, and just have three or four different areas that we are really focused on. 

I think the family is much more likely to action any of them if we finally got the […] them as well. I wonder whether for bloggers it might be helpful to identify maybe four or five areas that you really want to work on in the next year. Maybe content is an area that you want to set a goal or readership for monetization, or design and tech, maybe just set a simple goal when each of those areas might be the way forward for […].

Stacey: Definitely. I think once you achieve that goal, by the time you achieve it, you realize where else you can go. What other goals you can achieve because you got to be flexible, you got to be a bit adjustable. By the time you’ve achieved that, you will have realized what needs changing.

 Darren: That’s right. The next point was to make them look smart. 

Stacey: It is and it’s going around for a while. It’s been the consciousness of this for quite a few years now but mostly, if you’re looking to have a goal they need to be specific, measurable, actionable, realistic, and timely. You can’t just say, “I want to be happy.” You can say, “I want to meditate 10 minutes a day, everyday for the next year. By default, that will make you happy. Being more specific about the actual wording of the goal rather than having them be airy […]. That is the very first step to making sure that you’re actually achieve that goal.

Measurable is pretty interesting because lots of people make a goal that isn’t something that is quantifiable. I want more traffic where it is probably better. Again, this is being very specific to say, “I want to grow my traffic by 10% in six months,” or, “I want 500 more Facebook fans in the next year.” So, keeping that really, really specific.

Actionable. The goal needs to be something that you do rather than something that you are or something that you become. […] goal that you will need. It’s better to say, “I want to have this much traffic and I want to have this much money coming in,” rather than saying, “I want to be a big blogger.” Something really actionable that you can do.

Realistic. Not everybody is going to be Brad Pitt. If they are going to be acting or whatever it is, they can aim for the top, but being realistic means that you are going to be more likely to achieve it, more motivated to then create another goal, and then you are on a better track and you are in a more positive frame of mind. Something realistic like 500 Facebook friends is really realistic and when you do achieve that goal, make a bigger goal. 

Timely. Deadlines are super important. You can’t just say I want to create an eBook that’s going to bring in X number of dollars and I’m going to be an eBook author. We really need to say I ‘m going to write an eBook by this date and then I am going to design it by this date. I’m going to publish it by this date. Have real, actual times attached to each of those goals that you have. This mark filter, you could probably call it, really makes you think and work down those goals until that very, very specific and have a deadline. 

Darren: This is the area that as a key person […] with the most and sometimes, as I am thinking about goals, have a little imaginary […] in all of these, sitting up my shoulder. I put them there and say, make it more specific and actually try. […] to the goals that you set and work harder at them. The first draft is not ever good enough of a goal. I think my big lesson is that vague goals lead to vague action. 

Stacey: I was going to say you should have […] that. It’s so true, though. It really is. Like I say in the post that I started an eBook two years ago, that I had an idea about a year before that, and I haven’t touched it since because it was too vague. I was like, “Oh, no. I’ll just write an eBook,” because I never sat down and I said I will write an eBook by this day, I will have an eBook about this particular topic, and I am going to sell this number of eBooks. I never did that, so it’s just been out there in vagueland. Just not doing anything. 

Darren: So the next one I think is my favorite and that’s breaking it down. 

Stacey: It’s my favorite, too. It’s a breakthrough moment for me. It’s when I realized that I could achieve goals and I could make it fit into my very busy daily life. It’s something that helped keep me accountable because of the goals, the tasks I have broken the goal down into were super achievable and I just felt so good about the path that I was on.

What you do is when you have your big giant goal, say 3–5 in your design area, your content area, your social media area, then you figure out the deadline for that goal, then you break it down, say month by month, week by week, and daily if you’re going to be really specific about it.

Say you want 500 more fans by the end of the year. You are going to think about exactly how you are going to do that. What are you going to offer your Facebook community ? How are you going to be useful to them? How are you going to get shared? It’s the same in the post I talked about growing in new […] by 50 readers in a month.

The first thing you do is to think about the quantifiable number. How many readers in this case? It’s 50. When? In this case it’s the end of the month. You’ve got four weeks in that month that you can break the task down into. The first week (say) you create or upgrade a new subscriber’s incentive. By the end of week two, you’ve got an extra sign-up box at the end of your posts. Week three is where you write the post, telling everybody that they should sign up to the newsletter, and week four is when you offer a real short-time bonus right at the end and say, if everybody signs up, they get this, that, yada-yada-yada. So it’s taking that very specific goal in a months’ time and breaking it down into […] to help you actually get them. 

Darren: I think it is so important and there are a variety of ways you could probably break up goals as well, like one is to do exactly what you’ve done there. Another way would be to set mini goals, so you might say, by the end of the year I want to be making $30,000 from my blog. That’s a pretty measurable, specific, timely goal, but you could break that down both in terms of how you’re going to do it. So, I am going to make this much from these different income streams. You could also break it down, That’s $2500 per month, so it’s a mini goal. How am I going to get this month’s $2500. I think there is a whole heap of ways that you can break things down rather than just see this massive big goal. The other thing I love about this is what you said up to do this.

Stacey: Yes. I love to do this.

Darren: Isn’t there a bit of feeling of […] 

Stacey: It’s online might do this and when I check the box it makes a little noise and if you’re so good do you hear that little noise […] just making little check noise.

Darren: I occasionally add things to my to-do list that I have already done.

Stacey: I do that. Just sneaking it at the bottom. Check, yup done that for today.

Darren: Yeah. I used one in the list which is an online tool. It allows you to set up a to-do list and then have sublist within it, so you can have your big goal list, a big thing, and then you can break it down. That’s what I do with setting up the podcast earlier this year (and last year for those listening). I have my goal of I needed to launch a podcast and have 31 episodes launched.

Stacey: Yeah, you’re crazy. 

Darren: Yeah, stupidly crazy goal, but anyway, I got it done was to actually create a list and just check those things off as they happen. Some of the things on the list were the workflow but many of them were I needed to learn how to do hosting and I needed to do all these little things that took me towards that goal. So, breaking it down is the beginning.

Stacey: The best thing about breaking them down to that I really love is taking the time to note how long you see that task has been taking, so you can be realistic as to whether you can see it into your to-do list for that day or for that week. I always underestimate how long something is going to take me, so I like to break them down into maybe an hour task here, then have a list of 10-minute tasks. Then, when I find myself at a bit of a loss of what to do, I will just look at that list of 10-minute tasks. I can pick two or three off that list and that is something that I had not planned on doing for that day, but it’s there to be done and I can feel more productive and get closer to my goal at the same time.

Darren: Another useful framework for thinking about goals is when you think about goal strategies, objectives, and tactics. That’s another way of really breaking it down. The goal is your broad, primary outcome that you are trying to achieve, the strategy is the approach that you are going to take (and it is still fairly broad to achieve that goal), and then the objective is the little milestones that you set along the way. To get to that goal, I need to go through these six objectives and then the tactics of the really actionable, what am I going to do to get to the first objective. That may be another helpful way to think about goals if you are struggling with this topic.

Your next point in the article was set by short- and long-term goals.

Stacey: Yes. I think that is so important mostly because we love our pie-in-the-sky dreams. We know we want to aim high, we know in a direction that we want to go, and most of us want to do our best, we want to be the best we can go about it. It would be lovely to reach those goals. It’s good to have a year goal, a 5-year goal, a 10-year goal, not even just with blogging but with life in general.

But often if you have got a 10-year goal, it’s all very well and good, and theoretical, but it’s also really important to have those smaller short-term goals that you reach those milestones as you get to the bigger goals. That helps really keep you on track because it is motivating when you have reached the goal and you are on an upward swing (you could call it). It’s good to have shorter goals that will help keep you on track to get to the big pie-in-the-sky dreams.

Darren: Yeah, I do write down the goals of the day and even the hour sometimes. Those little objectives that we have along the way.

Your next point was to have a buddy and this one is a bit controversial. I have heard so many different opinions on this. I don’t really know what to think but what way were you coming from with having a buddy.

Stacey: Well, having a buddy works, so people who won’t do it of their own accord but will do it if  someone’s counting on them or if someone knows about the plans that they have made. I do not find that it works for me personally, mostly because I think no one cares really of what I am doing, but I am sure they would if I asked them. Also, I am just quiet and then I keep myself to myself so it does not really work for me to tell anybody what I want. 

I am quite self-motivated. I have an intrinsic sense of motivation, so when I get something I feel really proud of myself. I certainly did not have to involve anybody else but other people who would not show up unless someone is waiting for them or would not do anything unless people know that they have come right out and said it. So, it depends.

If it works for you, get someone that you can text or they can text you. I know people that have Friday afternoons catch-up. They have a list of each other’s tasks that week and they are like, “So, how did you do?” You have got to then tell that person whether you reached all the goals that you said that you are going to or not. So, it can work but I think you need to have an accountability partner who actually is for you, who is excited about what you are doing, who helps keep you and motivate you on the road where you are going.

Darren: It’s so true. It really does depend on your personality and where you get your motivation from. I think Gretchen Rubin talks a lot about this in her book called Habits.

Stacey: Yes. If you are an obliger, it works really well for you.

Darren: Yeah, it’s all about internal and you sound like an internal motivator. For me, I think it probably depends on the thing. I found, though, it does help me to have some accountability but it does not work when I get nagged and that makes me not want to do it.

There is a great little talk that Derek Sivers did as well. It’s a TED talk about how and his argument was sharing your goals can give you a sense of satisfaction that is similar to […]. I think there is almost chemical proof of this since we are talking about it rather than doing it can give you that same sense of satisfaction. So, his argument is do not tell people. 

I personally think if you find the right type of person, so I am looking for a special person and there is someone who might kill the idea or judge it, and critique it too early. There are some people that will tell your brand new embryonic plan to a nice […], just squash it and then you do not want to do it anymore. So, you want to find someone who is going to give you permission but also someone who is going to keep you accountable and maybe even join in and motivate you […] journey as well.

Stacey: If you’ve got a mastermind group, a blogging buddy, or someone else who is equally as excited to work on their blog and to reach goals as you were, then you can help each other out, you can get together at the end of every week and say, “How did you do it? How did you reach that goal that might be useful for me? This is how I reach this goal and it might be useful for you.” So if you get someone on the same level, it can probably really work very well.

Darren: Yeah, I know a number of bloggers have coaches as well and that obviously need a little bit of money to invest into that. Even if they are not a blogger but they are just purely there to keep you on track and accountable, it would be useful.

Stacey: There is also that idea that if you invested money and that you will actually perform things you say you are going to, like ebooks are free and people were like, “[…] it’s free and I won’t bother reading it,” but if they have spent money on it, then they think, “I need to invest some time to get some return on that investment of money.” So, perhaps if you do have a coach, they are there every Friday waiting for you, and you have paid for it, you may as well find that that is going to be motivating to you to get something done.

Darren: Yeah. The next one really relates to this and that you need to keep tracking.

Stacey: Yeah, this relates to my love of stationery. I like notebooks, I like organised Evernote folders, I like all of these things. The biggest thing for me was that I did not know how far I had come, so I could not see how far I had yet to go. So the best thing that I could have done was I wrote down the goals, I wrote down where I was at when I made the goals, and then (obviously), I wrote down where I wanted to go and the steps that I had to get there.

When it comes time to the next point to review them, you’ve got all the data there in front of you, you can’t really make a proper assessment if you are just looking at it quite vaguely. A little notebook that’s just for your blog goals, an Evernote folder, or the note app on your phone, whatever it is just as long as you’re keeping track of where you were, how you’re doing, and where you got yet to go.

Darren: And then the last point was with you.

Stacey: Yes, but it’s the only real way that you can see if you have made any progress. I am sure you have got an intrinsic idea of what you have been doing but reviewing them not only to see how you have gone. If you’re still interested in that goal, there’s no point trying to reach your goal that no longer serves you or you are no longer interested in, so it’s still good to see if that’s still going to get you where you’re going. If you’re still excited about it, if it’s still something you feel as though you want to spend your time on. There are a few reasons to review the goals but at some point that you do, sometimes it’s a step that people skip and I wouldn’t recommend that. You definitely need to have a look at what you’ve done.

Darren: Yeah, I find that it’s obviously a great time of year to review the role of playing, and we always, as a team these days. When I used to do it by myself, I would always sit down and do a review and then do the plan […]. It’s often in the review that you do notice little things that happened during the year that you didn’t even notice the time but when you look at where you were at the start, where you are at the end, that you can see something quite big did change.

Stacey: Yeah for sure. I actually wrote a post last week about how to do an end of year blog audit, to see whether your blog has performed the way you wanted it to and also how you would feel about it, like are you still excited about that, is that still something that you want to spend your time on. I think it’s still important. It’s such a busy time of year and everybody’s running around doing everything they need to do but 10 minutes, 20 minutes, half an hour that you sit down and really assess where you’ve come from and that’s the only way that you’re going to get a proper goal for next year is to see what you’ve actually done this year.

Darren: So you finish off the post with three reasons people don’t set goals and we’ve touched on a couple of these already. The first one was you are too busy. What do you say to those who were saying, “I don’t have time for this”?

Stacey: No one has time. They make time. If it’s important to you, you will make the time. Maybe don’t watch that TV show one night, maybe clear everybody out of the house and have half an hour where it’s just you and your notebook. We have to make time scheduling and if  your schedule is on, if that’s the only thing that’s going to work for you, then you actually have to sit down and say this is important to me. Here is the time that I’m going to do it.

Darren: Yeah and it can be short or long as well. I know a couple of friends of mine just went away for a weekend together. They’re both bloggers and they spent the whole weekend brainstorming and planning next year, whereas I’ve got another friend who took a 10-minute coffee break then came up with her goals in 10 minutes. The kids were going crazy but she just put that time aside. I think whatever time you’ve got available you just need to put that time […].

Stacey: Yeah, and you’re really going to make a priority or just make it done.

Darren: I think you’ve mentioned a few times your love of stationery. Sometimes, getting that new book, that notebook, starting to use Evernote for the first time, or getting that new app, sometimes that can just give you that little spare one as well. I don’t think you should spend too long looking for the perfect app, but sometimes, you just have to do that type of thing, just to give that little nudge along as well.

Stacey: Yeah, and I have definitely been known to scribble down some ideas on a scrap of paper and then write it neatly in my new book when I get it. So you just got to get them down. There is no way it is going to get done if you don’t make it a priority.

Darren: I found the next one that you talked about really interesting because I often come across people who say, “Oh, I just don’t really know what I want with my life. It’s almost like I have these vague feelings of what I want to be or what I want to achieve but they haven’t actually got that firm idea. Maybe that’s a personality type thing or maybe she just hasn’t had the time to think about it, but […].

Stacey: There is also the personality type like me who’s interested in so many things that they never pick one or two to devote their time to because everything is so interesting. You would love to be a master of it all. It’s pretty important, again perhaps like physically writing it down when you spend that little bit of time having to think about where you would like to see yourself in a year’s time or in five years’ time.

As you are going along doing the dishes, taking the kids to school, whatever it is that is taking up your time during the day, your brain never gets that chance to really just relax and have that idea of what you really want to do and where you want to be going. So, until you take the time to have a think about what you want, you probably could not articulate what you wanted and you have never taken the time to.

It is a big thing. People are just too busy or they want to do everything all at once. They don’t quite know what they want and that can be such a big stepping stone to finally figuring out where you are headed when you take the time to think what do I want? Where am I going? Where do I want to spend my time?

Darren: I’ve jotted down a few notes on this one as well. I think some people will just get so overwhelmed about not knowing what the future is going to look like, that they don’t actually […] anything and I think one thing I wrote down is you don’t need to know your whole future. You just need to identify that next best bet for you and that was something that I think […] said at the World Domination Summit a couple of years ago. Identify your next best step and so don’t always be thinking that you need to know to be looking at the horizon because you don’t often know what is on the horizon. It’s just vague shapes and you just need to work out. 

A general direction sometimes would take a step towards the vague hunches that you have. It’s okay to not see it clearly. Also, I think having a goal doesn’t lock you in. You touched on this before. You’ve got to have some flexibility and it’s often in that next step that you work out the goal.

Stacey: For sure. I have done that so many times.

Darren: You discover your passion. You discover, “Ah I really love that,” and people really responded to that. The next step might be a little experiment that you do that reveals to you the big thing in your future as well. The other thing I like about that next best step is that it doesn’t have to be perfect, your next step and your goal might actually be you discovering that you shouldn’t go in that direction anymore. I think that is totally fine as well.

Stacey: It might be a big fat fail, but it will point you (eventually) in the direction where you are going.

Darren: Definitely. So, just put some time aside and work out your next best step. The last thing that you said in terms of an objection people have the goals is that they don’t know […]

Stacey: Yeah. When you talk to people about goals and they are like, “I would not even know the first thing about setting a goal,” well I am just taking care of that for you with this post. The best thing to do is get a cup of coffee, get a glass of wine, get 10 minutes, a nice notebook, and just let your brain slow with whatever it is that you want to do with your blog, with your life, whatever, and have a little bit of a brainstorm.

As I said before, you prioritize those into short- and long-term goals, run them through the snot filter, and then break them down into those little chunks that you can achieve daily, weekly, monthly whatever it is. You can put that list of goals where you are going to see them, so can keep on track, you can paste them on your wall, you can put them on your laptop, you can use it as a screensaver on your phone, anything like that.

If you are into accountability, then you email your friend or you find a buddy to buddy up with him and help each other. Do the first task that you have set down for yourself. Just as you said, take that next best step. I’m sure the post will be in the show notes for people to come and check as they are writing down their goals, but you can no longer say, “Oh, I don’t know how to write a goal,” because I’ve just done it for you.

Darren: Yeah, we definitely will link it to the post in the show notes today. One last little tip I think really bounces off your last point there, is actually once you have written your goals and identified your next step is make that first step something that you can achieve in […] 10 minutes. Make it a really little first step, so within 10 minutes you have achieved something that is taking you towards your goal. This really gives you a sense of achievement, it gives you a sense of momentum, and I think it’s really important. Maybe the first few steps should be the little things that you can really take off quick and will give you a sense of […] as well.

I hope you enjoyed my chat with Stacey today. I certainly enjoyed kicking the New Year. I hope with her today on this particular topic and hope that it does help you with your goals-setting for 2016. It is really important to do this type of thing and I would encourage you to set a little bit of your time aside in the next day or two to look at your own goals. 

Again, you can find today’s show notes including some further reading at problogger.com/podcast/77. Just a little announcement that for the next few weeks over the month of January we’ll be going into a weekly show. I know in December we are doing three shows per week but January here in Australia is summertime and I am away with my family doing a little bit of relaxing.

I may record a podcast or two while I am away but I do have one weekly show plan for you over the month of January. Once we hit February, you can expect a couple of shows per week as per normal. We’ve got a really great one with a very special guest, which will kick that series off in February. I look forward to chatting with you in the next few weeks on the ProBlogger Podcast. Happy New Year.

What other questions, strategies and tools do you use to help you set and achieve your goals? 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 the last in the ‘Today, Not Someday’ series of 11 podcasts and 10 challenges that you can do now to make next year your strongest year of blogging yet.

The focus is actioning your ‘someday’ list, the things you’ve always wanted to do to improve your blog but have struggled to make happen. For details about how the series works, check out episode one here. I’ve included a full list of episodes below.

The focus of today’s episode is about how to plan what content you will post on your blog during 2016. Having a plan will save you stress, energy and time, and will make your blog more consistent, increasing your chances of attracting new readers and keeping current readers engaged.

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:

Edgar is a tool I’ve been using since January of this year that does exactly what this series is about. It enables you to make the work you do on social media keep paying off for the long term. You put a little work into Edgar today by adding social media updates highlighting the great content in your blog’s archives and Edgar goes to work to share them to your followers not just once but by queuing your updates to keep delivering to into the future.

The team at Edgar have put together a special deal for ProBlogger readers which gives you a free one month trial. Sign up for your free one month trial at meetedgar.com/problogger. Here’s a video of how I use Edgar:

If watching videos isn’t your thing – here’s a blog post I wrote on how I use Edgar.

Hi there. My name is Darren Rowse and welcome to episode 76 of the ProBlogger Podcast. This is the last in a series of 11 podcasts and 10 challenges that you can do on your blog to help you prepare for a fantastic year of blogging next year. We’re working through 10 things that often get put off and put onto our someday list and really should be on our today list. This is the last challenge in this series.

I want to thank those of you who have been listening and following along. I know some of you are putting off some of these challenges to do a little bit later, but I’ve just been amazed by the stories that I keep hearing from listeners of this podcast who are implementing these things. For me, that is the biggest compliment of all, people who are taking action on the content that we’re presenting. Today’s challenge is one that all bloggers should be thinking about, at least to some level. We’re going to be thinking about next year’s content on your blog.

You can find today’s show notes at problogger.com/podcast/76. You can follow along on Twitter or Instagram by sharing what you are implementing from these podcasts with the hashtag #TodayNotSomeday. Also, check out Edgar, which is a great tool that you can use to help with your social media. They’ve got a special offer for you as a podcast listener at meetedgar.com/problogger.

The last little announcement or logistical thing that I need to say at the top of this show is I hope you have a great Christmas if you are celebrating Christmas. If you’re not, I hope the end of your year is a fantastic one. It has been my absolute pleasure this year speaking with you two or three or even seven times a week when we started out in this podcast. I have loved podcasting and really look forward to continuing to podcast in the new year.

With that said, I’d like to get into today’s episode, episode 76, where we’re going to talk about your content.

Your challenge today is to think about your content calendar for next year. Yesterday’s or two days ago, the podcast that we put together was all about your promotional calendar. The things that you’re going to do to monetize your blog, but really a blog is not a blog unless it’s got content of some kind going on to it. I think it’s really useful at this time of year to be planning our approach to content for the new year. I actually would suggest you do this more regularly than once a year, but it’s certainly something that it’s great to do at this time of year as well. Just a few reasons why I think this is important, I think having some forethought to your content rather than just sitting down one day and working out what to write about on that particular day. Giving it some thought ahead of time really has some key benefits.

Firstly, it takes the pressure off at the moment. In the day-to-day of your life, it means that you don’t have to come up with ideas to write about or plan what you’re going to do over the next week on your blog. If you’ve got a plan already set out, you just need to sit down and implement that plan rather than coming up with ideas and working out the direction for the next week or so. It also helps you to create content that is much more thoughtful and that builds from one post to the next. It enables you to create content that takes your readers on a journey rather than just hitting them with semi-relevant content from day-to-day.

It also really fits in very well with episode 75, where we did come up with a promotional calendar for the year. When you are thinking about how you’re going to monetize and how you are going to create content, those two things really should sit together. When you’re creating content that builds up to the product launches that you have, all the affiliate launches that you have, you’ll find that it’s much easier to monetize.

Lastly, it helps you to be more consistent with your content and more disciplined over time if you have a plan. It’s very easy in the day-to-day to say, “I’m just going to let today’s post slip,” or, “I’m going to let tomorrow’s post slip.” But if you’ve got a plan with some sort of a deadline, some sort of a structure to it, you’ll find that you will stick to that and stick to creating and producing and publishing content on a more regular basis. At least that’s been my experience.

The first thing that I’d love you to do today is to spend a little bit of time reviewing your content from the last year. Again, we have put a post up on the ProBlogger blog which we will link to in today’s show notes, which encourages you to do an audit on your blog from the last year. Part of that audit is looking at content. If you’ve already done that, you might want to skip over this for a couple of minutes. But if you haven’t, there are a few questions that I typically would ask at the end of every year that help me to work out how content went over the last 12 months.

Probably the starting point, the most obvious question to ask yourself is what posts did well over the last year? You probably want to open up Google Analytics and check into the report that shows you the content that was the most read. You might also want to dig a little bit deeper by using a tool like BuzzSumo, which allows you to look at which content got the most shares over the last 12 months. You may want to dig in a little bit deeper and look at the content that got the most comments as well.

There are three different ways of measuring how well content in traffic shares and comments. What topics this year were hot? Was there a certain subtopic within your overall niche that was really hot this year that did really well? On the flip side, were there topics that just did not fly at all that people just didn’t respond to? That may give you some indications about what you should be focusing on in the next 12 months.

Is there a topic that’s slowly growing in its popularity that could emerge into its own category going forward? Take a look at the length of posts as well. Were they longer posts or shorter posts that did well? Or was it a mix of both? What type of headlines seems to hit the mark this year? Were there certain words that were trigger words that seemed to get people reading the content? What category of content on your blog did best? What categories didn’t work? Were there certain times of the year that you struggle with creating content?

Maybe it was a busy time for you. Maybe there was something else going on in your life, but it’s good to do some analysis in your own energy for content. Were there times that were particularly good for creating content? Do some analysis on that. Do some analysis on the times of the year and how they’re related to traffic. Were there certain times of the year where traffic just exponentially grew because something seasonal was going on? On the other side, were there times that were really flat? Maybe that will inform your strategy for next year.

What was the hardest part about creating content this last year? Was it coming up with ideas to write about? Was it finding time to write? Was it finding time to complete your content? Where were the stumbling blocks? Where were the challenges for you? By identifying those things you’ll be in a much better position for the next year to be able to come up with strategies to overcome those challenges.

Were there certain days of the week that did better than others in terms of traffic and shares and comments? What formatting of posts tended to work better? For instance, the images that you use, did those have an impact upon the content, it being shared and commented on? What type of questions have you been getting from readers lately?

All of these questions are worth spending just 30-60 seconds on each and jotting down the answers to it. Hopefully, as you ask those questions, you begin to see some trends, you’ll begin to see some opportunity, or perhaps you’ll begin to see some things that just aren’t working that you need to stop focusing upon.

I’ll also include in today’s show notes a little exercise that I published, I think it was at this time last year on ProBlogger, which is an exercise that I go through every year in Google Analytics. It does touch on content but it also touches on some other areas of your blog. While we’re in review mode, it might be worth going back to that post that I wrote and I will share it in the show notes. Just working through your Google Analytics reports, to see what worked this year and what didn’t work. Having done that review, hopefully, you’re in a much better position to be able to come up with a content strategy for next year.

Now that you’ve done your review, comes the time to do some planning. There’s no right or wrong way to do this. What I want to do is share some questions that you might want to ponder and some points that might stimulate you to a fresh approach with your content in the next year. 

The first question is, is there a theme that you could focus upon next year? You probably don’t want every single post that you write next year to be on that particular theme, but maybe there’s some overarching journey that you want to take your readers on, some emerging trend in your particular niche, or some message that you really want to convey to your readers and encourage them with over the year that you want to keep coming back to time and time again.

Maybe it’s the type of theme where you might kick off every month with a post on that particular topic. Your readers begin to see that you’re returning to it. You may announce it to your readers and use it as part of your branding for the year. You might even create a product around that theme as well. It might just be something that you know and that you keep coming back to and your readers may not even notice that you’re doing it. Is there a theme that you could focus on in the next year?

In a similar way, you might want to identify some series of content that you want to work through in the next year. In Digital Photography School, we do week-long series of content, and we do one week per month. Recently, we did a whole week of content that was focused upon the topic of composition. In the past, we’ve done other weeks that have been focused upon macro photography, landscape photography, or photography for beginners. During that particular week, most of our posts are related to that particular topic. We find our readers really respond well to that.

We do mix in some other content during those weeks as well for those who aren’t interested in that topic. By having this little mini-series of posts sprinkled throughout the year, it enables us to really beef up our archives on those particular topics. It also gives our readers a sense that we’re taking them on a journey over time. We find those weeks are really good for growing traffic to our blog.

They’re also opportunities for us to promote products, whether they be our own products or an affiliate promotion as well in a gentle way in those series. During our week on beginner photography, we will be promoting an eBook for beginner photographers and giving a coupon code away during that week. By identifying the series that we want to do over the next 12 or so months, we can begin to think about what products we could match with those things.

In a similar way on ProBlogger, I did a series of podcasts this year on 31 Days to Build a Better Blog. In fact, I’m finishing that series of podcasts today. What I found in both of those instances and working through a series of content is that it gives readers something to join in on. While I believe the content that isn’t a part of a series on this podcast has (hopefully) been just as useful as the series, by defining a period of time that you’re going to tackle the topic just seems to really motivate people to listen in for that period of time and to make the most of it in some way.

Your series could be a week-long series, it could be a month-long series, or it could even be a series that you return to periodically. The first day of every week for a month or the first day of every month for a year. Whatever it is, a series can really bring a lot of life to your blog.

Another question, is there a certain type of post that you want to feature as a recurring thing on your blog in the next year? An example of this on ProBlogger this year we decided to start trialing Reading Roundups on, I think it’s on Fridays that they go out. It’s a list of links to other sites that we found really useful during the last week. It’s something that we trialed this year for a period of time and it worked really well. It’s actually grown in terms of its popularity since we started doing it, but you might want to try something else. You might want to have story Sundays or Tutorial Tuesday or some other type of post or topic of post that goes out on a weekly or a monthly basis.

Another question, is there a new category that you might want to create to capitalize on a growing trend on your blog? It’s really important, so pay attention to new emerging sub-niches within your niche or new technologies or new trends that are happening within your niche that relate to your niche. Maybe it’s time that you need to start a new category and come up with a bit of a strategy for how you’re going to build up the archives of that category. Again, it might be with a weekly post or a monthly post or just a whole series of content on a particular day.

Another good question that is worth asking during the year as well as how often should you be posting? Going forward into the new year, what will be your posting frequency? You may decide that what you are doing at the moment is just fine and working quite beautifully for everyone including you and your readers. Maybe now’s a good time to change it up. Maybe you want to go more frequently with your posting. Maybe you’ve been doing three a week and you want to try every weekday. Maybe you want to actually decrease it. Maybe you want to try a period of slow blogging, increase the quality and maybe the length of your posts, and post less frequently.

There’s certainly no right or wrong with that. I will share some links in the further reading on some pros and cons of more and less frequent posting, but now’s a good time to at least ask that question and to assess how your energy levels are as a writer, as a creator of content. You need to change the frequency based upon those. How are your readers responding? Are they wanting more content or are they feeling a bit overwhelmed with that at the moment? Maybe now’s a good time to begin to experiment with a new frequency of posting.

Similarly, you might want to begin to experiment with some different mediums of content. Over the last year, we’ve certainly seen the rise of live streaming, Periscope or Blab. Even Facebook’s live if you have access to that yet. We’re also continuing to see the rise of video and podcasting. 

Maybe now’s a good time to begin to think about experimenting with a new medium that you want to tackle in the new year. That doesn’t mean you need to hit the ground on January 1 with that new medium up and running, but you can begin to schedule that and put that into a bit of a plan for the next year. What do you need to learn to get that happening? What do you need to set up in terms of your blog to get it working as well? By making those plans now, you’ll be in a better position to make them actually happen rather than just having them on your someday list.

Will you develop any new rhythms to your posting? Sometimes blogging can get a little bit monotonous. It can get a bit the same for you as a writer just doing the same kind of stuff every week. It can also get that way for your readers. Sometimes, by changing up the rhythm of your posting with new types of posts at new times, it can just bring a bit of freshness, a little bit of life to your blog.

Maybe you want to do what I know many bloggers do and come up with certain themes or certain types of posts for certain types of days. Monday might be the day that you write a list post, Tuesday might be the other day where you ask your community a question, Wednesday might be a day where you write a review, Thursday might be an opinion-writing day, Friday might be a tutorial day where you write a how-to. You can really come up with your own style of post for whatever day of the week suits you.

I’ve talked to many bloggers over the years who’ve got a bit dry and a bit stagnant with their blogs and decided to come up with this rhythm where they take all different types of posts on different days. It just helped them to get going again. That might be something that you want to start the new year with as well by giving a bit of structure to the types of posts. It may be that you don’t want to change the type of posts but might want to put a different topic each day. You might have five or six categories of content on your blog and you might want to assign each of them for a different day of the week. Again, that’s a good way to kind of get back to some of those categories that you haven’t been writing much content for recently.

Another good question that is really good at this time of year when we are feeling quite often a bit tired and sometimes feeling a bit burnt out is when are you going to have time off next year? When are you actually going to allow yourself to have a break from blogging next year? This is something that I have learned this year that is really important that you do need to have those times off your blog.

I have been blogging now for 13 years and I haven’t missed a day of publishing in that time pretty much. It’s been 13 years of creating content and that’s good on some levels but that takes its toll as well. I have taken time off. The way I approach that is to work harder the week before I go away and schedule posts. More recently, I’ve been able to get other people involved in the creation of that content as well. I don’t have to be involved in the publishing of every post.

I think it’s really important, at the start of the year maybe or during the year, to work out when over the next 12 months you’re going to have breaks. This is something I’ve been in discussion with Vanessa, my wife, about over the last month or so, is when are we going to take our breaks next year? We’ve actually started to put time aside at certain times of the year where we’re just going to get off our blogs and not work.

The second question related to this is what are you going to do in those times? Are you going to work harder the week before to schedule content? Are you going to just take time off and not let content go up on your blogs during those times? Are you going to get someone in to do some guest posting to help you out with content in those times? Perhaps you’re going to use that week to highlight content on your blog?

On ProBlogger the blog, between Christmas and New Year’s, we’re actually going to do that last option. We’re going to do our summer series of content that we’ve run on ProBlogger for the last year. During that week, we actually just write very short posts that point out the best content that we’ve published over the last 12 months on different themes.

It serves our readers because those who have missed out on some of that content get reminded of it, but it also helps us as a team to take a week off. It gives Stacey as an editor a bit of a lighter week and it gives me time off as well. What are you going to do in terms of taking a break from creating content this year? Also, what are you going to do during those times?

Another question that’s sometimes good to ask at this time of year, if you haven’t had enough questions already, is what were your approach be this year to visual content? Do you need to change things up a little bit? It’s very easy to create the same graphics for your blog day-in-day-out if you create social media graphics or header graphics for posts. They work really well to help your content get more shared on Pinterest or on Twitter or on Facebook, but after a while, they can all start to look the same.

If you’ve been using a certain template maybe you want to design something for next year. Fresh colors, a fresh font, something a little bit different to help your content to stand out, to be a little bit more alive to your readers. You may want to use a tool like Canva. Canva for work allows you to create some templates. That’s a great way to go about this. It’s something that we’re using as a team at the moment. I’ll link to that in today’s show notes.

Similarly, you might want to ask yourself the question, how are you going to approach repurposing your content next year? This is something that could actually help to bring some life and freshness to your content as well and also cut down a little bit of the work.

One of the things I’ve been trying this year is to do daily Periscopes, that’s a new type of content. On the Periscopes that go really well, I’ve actually turned them into blog posts. I’ll take the Periscope and I use a tool called Katch Me, katch.me, and it allows me to embed those Periscopes into the content.

You might want to just have that video as the content itself or you might want to write content around that. I’ve experimented with both. I’ve actually found that my readers like the embeds with content around it. I write a blog post on what I’ve written about in that Periscope. It creates a second piece of content from that first one. It gives that work that you do in creating that Periscope a second life. Maybe you want to experiment with the repurposing of content in the new year.

In the same way, you might want to think about your promotion strategy. I’m not going to talk a great deal about that because I talked in episode 73 about really thinking about your social media strategy and mapping that out. This is a good thing that intersects with this idea of creating content.

One of the last questions I’ll get you to think about today is do you need a new tool for your editorial calendar? Sometimes the tool that we use becomes a bit dated or sometimes we just need something new and fresh to play with that brings a bit of energy to our content creation. 

Recently at ProBlogger, we’ve switched our editorial calendar system over to CoSchedule, which I know many of you use and love. It has energized us as a team. We love it. It’s great for planning out content. It’s great for collecting ideas. It’s great for sharing your content on social media. Again, we’ll have a link to CoSchedule in today’s show notes.

The last thing I’d encourage you to think about is brainstorming some topics for next year. I actually find that this is really useful to do as I am looking at my review of this last year. As I go through Google Analytics, I’m looking for the content that’s done really well, the topics that have done really well, the headlines that have done really well. Often as I’m looking at that type of content, I’m seeing opportunities to update it, create a follow-up post, or to take that type of post further and to make a more in-depth post, or to tackle it from a slightly different angle.

Spend some time before this year ends actually doing some brainstorming, so when you hit your blog in the new year, you’ve got a list of posts already there waiting for you. If you’re using a tool like CoSchedule, you could even take it to the next level and put into your calendar the posts that you want to create on certain days so that when you sit down to write, there’s already a draft in WordPress for you.

I hope I haven’t overwhelmed you with this podcast today. I have asked you, it must be 20 or 30 different questions to ponder. It may be that you want to go back to the start of this podcast and work through them again, pressing pause along the way and writing down your answers. It probably is worth taking some time on this particular challenge. It may be something that you need to break up into a couple of parts to do your review of this current year and then to do your plan for content for the next year. I’m sure I could have said a whole heap more as well.

If you find yourself asking other questions, then, by all means, throw them into the mix as you plan the new year. I’ll actually love to hear what questions you found helpful to ask in the comment section on the show notes at problogger.com/ podcast/76.

Again, on those show notes, there is information about our fantastic sponsor, Edgar, who has sponsored this last series of 11 podcasts. I want to give a huge shout out to Laura Roeder and her team for believing in us and sponsoring us in this way. It does help us to continue to create content for you. So, check them out. Thank them on Twitter as well. Check them out at meetedgar.com/problogger.

What excites me most about having Edgar on as a sponsor is that I genuinely use them. I’m a paying customer and I’ll continue to be. It has really changed the way I do social media. Again, as I’ve mentioned before, I will put a video in this particular blog post about how I use Edgar as well. You can see the way I use it and how useful it really is.

Thanks again for listening to this particular series—it’s been a lot of fun for me—and thank you for listening to the ProBlogger podcast in 2015. I have learned so much in engaging with you and you with your reviews, your tweets, your feedback on Facebook, and the emails that you’ve sent me have really energized me. I feel like I’ve kind of fallen in love all over again with the topic of blogging (not that I was ever out of love with it). By approaching it in this new way with this new medium, I feel like it’s brought a lot of life to me.

I want to thank you for your support. I do wish you a happy time of year, whether it be celebrating Christmas, or celebrating the end of a year and the start of a new one. I hope that it is a meaningful time for you, a time where you find some rest, a time where you are energized and excited, and that you connect with those that you love, not just your blogging community (although there’s nothing wrong with that either).

I look forward to chatting with you in the new year when I continue the ProBlogger podcast. Thanks for listening and have a good few days off before I get back to you with the first episode of 2016.

What will you include in your content calendar? What other questions do you ask yourself to help you plan your content calendar?

I’d love to hear from you in the comments below. The hashtag I’ll be using to talk about this journey on social media is #TodayNotSomeday and I encourage you to share your journey too, using the same hashtag.

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

Today’s episode is part 10 of the new ‘Today, Not Someday’ podcast series. The focus is actioning your ‘someday’ list, the things you’ve always wanted to do to improve your blog but have struggled to make happen. For details about how the series works, check out episode one here. I’ve included a full list of episodes below.

The focus of today’s episode is about how to map out the next year’s promotional or marketing calendar for your blog. If you want to build a profitable and sustainable blog you need to put effort into thinking about how to make your blog profitable, and this is a key part to making it happen.

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:

I’d like to welcome a new sponsor to the ProBlogger podcast for the duration of this 10 part series, my friend ‘Edgar‘.

Edgar is a tool I’ve been using since January of this year that does exactly what this series is about. It enables you to make the work you do on social media keep paying off for the long term. You put a little work into Edgar today by adding social media updates highlighting the great content in your blog’s archives and Edgar goes to work to share them to your followers not just once but by queuing your updates to keep delivering to into the future.

The team at Edgar have put together a special deal for ProBlogger readers which gives you a free one month trial. Sign up for your free one month trial at meetedgar.com/problogger.

Here’s a video of how I use Edgar:

If watching videos isn’t your thing – here’s a blog post I wrote on how I use Edgar.

The hashtag we are using over at Twitter is #TodayNotSomeday and the idea is that these are things that you’ve probably got on your someday list. Things that you have been putting off that you really need to do today because they have a long term impact upon your blog. 

You can find today’s show notes at problogger.com/podcast/75 and if you are just […] this podcast for the first time, you might want to go back to listen to episode 66 where we introduced this series to you. It also has links to that particular episode (number 66) to all of the podcasts and challenges I’ve been over the last few days. 

Also, I would like to acknowledge Edgar who is the sponsor of this series. You can find more about Edgar, a great social media tool at meetedgar.com/problogger where I do give you a month-long free trial. Without further ado, I like to get in today’s episode where we are going to talk about mapping out your next year of promotional activities. 

Today’s challenge is to do something that I do at the end of every year, to map out the next year of marketing activities that you are going to do. I used to do this alone when I had no one working with me on my blog, probably for the first seven or eight years of my blogging, but these days, I do it with my team. 

I can understand if you are a solo blogger wanting to tackle all this by yourself, but also if you have others working with you, this is a great activity to do together. 

It may actually be good to do with another blogger. If you don’t have a team, you might want to team up with another blogger and actually bounce off each other. It’s sometimes good to get an outside perspective on it whether you do it alone or together with others, really the challenge is to map out your coming year in terms of your marketing efforts.

By marketing, I don’t mean by promoting yourself. What you are going to sell on your blog, how you are going to monetize the blog might be a different way to put it. 

The reason that this is really important is that I think most bloggers intuitively get that they need to spend time every year thinking about content, thinking about finding readers, thinking about building community and reader engagement. These three areas—content, finding readers, community—are things we all need to focus on as bloggers. We all naturally do that, but many bloggers fail to put as much time into how they are going to monetize their blog.

If you want your blog to be profitable, if you want it to be sustainable, you need to think about how you are going to do that. You need to be quite intentional about that. You don’t want to just have built a great blog and they will come. Build a great blog and the opportunities will come. That doesn’t really happen. You need to think intentionally about how you are going to monetize your blog over the next year and that’s what this challenge is all about.

Before you begin planning, I think it is worth saying that you probably do need to do some reviewing as well and while this podcast is more about planning your next year, it might be worth just hitting pause on this podcast and doing a bit of review on your blog first. 

We actually just published a post at ProBlogger last week which walks you through how to do an audit or a review on your blog. I’ll link to that in today’s show notes. It may actually be worth listening to that before you do your planning, but particularly just think about your last year. Particularly, when it comes to monetization, what were your main income streams over the last year? How did those income streams perform? Were they on the increase? On the decline? What did you launch? What products do you have? How did they perform for you this year? What affiliate promotions did you do? What advertising campaigns? Whatever it is that you do on your blog to monetize, do a little bit of a review on that before you think about the year ahead.

Once you’ve done that review, what I generally do is grab a calendar. Sometimes it’s a paper one or sometimes it’s an online one, sometimes it’s one that I make myself in a spreadsheet or draw upon a whiteboard. It doesn’t really matter but have a calendar in front of you. As you look at the next 12 months, think about how your year might flow in terms of monetizing your blog. What are you going to do over the next 12 months to monetize your blog? 

What I encourage you to do is to put the big things first. What we do is we ask ourselves the question, “What products will we launch over the next year?”

If you haven’t yet thought about products for your blog, go back to episode 67 where we actually talked about creating products to sell on a blog. What type of product are you going to create? What other topics do you want to cover? And when would be the best time to launch it?

Start to think about the products that you want to create next year and begin to mark them down in your calendar as to when you want to launch that product. Once you got something marked in your calendar—perhaps you want to launch an ebook in June—then start to ask yourself the question, “How much work is it going to take to get that ebook together? What phases of development will be needed? How long will it take?” And you might want to put in the calendar those phases and work backwards in the calendar as to the significant milestones that you want to hit. 

For Digital Photography School (my main blog) we are actually during this process deciding which products we are going to create over the coming year and we usually do four to five products every year.

When we are planning a year ahead, sometimes, we don’t always know the exact specifics of what we will create but we do know that we are aiming for four or five and we generally know the first few.

Right at this point in December of 2015, we know the next two or three products that we will create and we got some guesses as to what the fourth and fifth one will be and we’ve already got them slot into our calendar. 

Because we know that we want to do an ebook in January of next year and we want to do a coursing March of next year, we know how much work is needed for each of those products so we are able to slot into our calendar exactly how much development time will be needed.

At any point in here, we know where each of the projects is at and I’m actually going to show you in the show notes a screengrab of one of the spreadsheets that we use and those of you who love spreadsheets, those of you who are spreadsheet geeks are going to love this particular spreadsheet because it’s actually a spreadsheet of this previous year and what we did. You’ll see all of the different products we developed and when we were working on each.

It’s very geeky and I’ll have to admit that I didn’t create the spreadsheet, it was one of my team, Jasmin who created it. It’s really great to be able to look at this sheet and say, “You know? In April this year, there’s going to be three products in development. We are getting to launch this other one,” and to get that snapshot.

For ProBlogger, it’s perhaps a little bit simpler. We don’t launch four or five products every year. As we are thinking about next year, there are a couple of products that we’ve got in mind. We got them to slot into our calendar, but we also slot into our calendar the events that we run and the key dates that we need to hit certain milestones for those events to happen as well. It may be that your calendar is about ebooks, courses, real-life events, or other products that you are developing as well.

The big things are your own products then you can also start to slot into your calendar other sales or promotions of existing products that you might want to do over the next year. For Digital Photography School, we run a media sale every year so we know in June or July that we have to block out ten or so days for us to do that media sale. We also do a sale at the end of the year, 12 Days of Christmas is the sale that we have been running for several years now. We slot that into our calendar as well.

Then, you might want to slot in some affiliate promotions. You may not know exactly what products you’ll promote at this point at certain times of the year, but I think it’s really useful to slot into your calendar that in April, we’ve got a four-week window where we can do an affiliate program, a launch of a product, and you can begin to be on the lookout for something that you might want to do a promotion of at that particular point.

What other promotions might you do? Begin to slot these into your calendar. Other things that we tend to slot in as well this time are things like when our team will have vacations, so we know exactly who’s going to be on hand at certain times. Public holidays and particularly thinking about the holidays where there are sales opportunities around them, so this time of the year with Christmas and Thanksgiving and some of those types of holidays, particularly useful to have in.

Even Valentine’s Day sometimes there’s a way to spend Valentine’s Day into a promotional opportunity depending upon the topic that you have and other projects that you are thinking about starting. If you are thinking of starting a podcast or if you are thinking of starting on Periscope, you may want to slot in then have a time where you will be focusing on that because that type of thing takes energy and you might not want to double up with a product launch at those times as well.

Then, you might also want to slot in things like, “We are going to develop an opt-in next year or we want to create a little mini free course for people on our newsletter.” Again, you want to slot those in. The reason we are doing all of these is so that we can look ahead at the next year and begin to see things that are going to class, hopefully at this point when you’ve got all of these stuff in your calendar, you’ll begin to see, “Yeah, we got too much going on in the middle of the year. We need to spread things out,” or there are gaps in your year that you may want to do other things.

Last year when we did this exercise for Digital Photography School, we realized that there were these two little windows in the year where we could do something else to monetize our blog. So, we went out and found affiliate products that we can promote at those times. You can also see by looking at this when you need to be working on certain projects as well. Particularly, if you are doing what we do and actually putting aside periods of time to create the products that you are going to sell. It also helps you to allocate resources whether that be hiring people to help you to design products, or whether that be finding authors to help you create things as well. It gives you a sense of when you need to mobilize your team or find help during those busy times.

The spreadsheet I’m going to show you in the show notes is pretty complex, it’s pretty crazy. I look at it and my mind boggles and it sends me into the fetal position. It stresses me out a little bit. I’m not wired this way but when I used to do it by myself, it was actually quite simple. I just had a simple Google calendar and I slotted things in and I kept it as simple as possible.

The other thing I would say about these calendars is that nothing you create now in your plan needs to be set in stone. While we have deadlines and we know even for this time next year what we are hoping to be doing, we constantly are tweaking our plans. We are constantly moving things around. 

I think it was this year that we came up with a product idea in February or March of the year and we’ve never ever dreamed of doing that product, but we decided that there was an opportunity to create something, so we slotted it in and we moved other products around to be able to do that. You should leave time and some flexibility in your plans for those types of opportunities.

Whether you do something as complicated as we did or whether it’s just simply saying, “In these three times of the year, I want to launch these three products or do these three different marketing campaigns.” It’s up to you, but I think it’s a really powerful exercise to look ahead at the next year of your blog and set yourself some goals, set yourself some deadlines and how you are going to monetize your blog.

I would love to hear the results of your planning. Now, you may not want to reveal the exact products that you are thinking of creating, but I would love to get some feedback from you on how you found this particular exercise. You can do that in a couple of ways, either tweet me @ProBlogger with the #TodayNotSomeday. By someday, I don’t mean Sundays in the days, some-day. I saw someone tweet today #TodayNotSunday, which is funny but didn’t really get viewed by people. 

You can tweet me what you are doing, but you can also leave a comment on the show notes at problogger.com/podcast/74. Leave a comment there as to how you found these exercises and you may even want to show us your calendar if you are a spreadsheet geek like some of my team as well. I’m sure others would love to see your organizations in a visual way if you feel comfortable doing that. 

I would also love to get your reviews on this podcast over on iTunes or Stitcher. As I said in the last episode, I do read them all and it really inspires me but also shapes what I do, so if you got any suggestions there, I’d love to see those.

Thanks for listening today. I’ll be back in a couple of days’ time for episode 76 of this podcast series, which will be the last of this series. I look forward to chatting with you then.

What will you include in your promotional calendar? I’d love to hear from you in the comments below, and feel free to include a link or screenshot if you’ve already created it.

The hashtag I’ll be using to talk about this journey on social media is #TodayNotSomeday and I encourage you to share your journey too, using the same hashtag.

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

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

Today’s episode is part 9 of the new ‘Today, Not Someday’ podcast series. The focus is actioning your ‘someday’ list, the things you’ve always wanted to do to improve your blog but have struggled to make happen. For details about how the series works, check out episode one here. I’ve included a full list of episodes below.

The focus of today’s episode is about how to create a resources page to help your readers, grow traffic, and grow income.

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 resources page on ProBlogger, a page where I list useful tools, services and training for bloggers (since recording this podcast we’ve begun updating this page – but we’ll further refine it for visual appeal in the coming weeks).

I’d like to welcome a new sponsor to the ProBlogger podcast for the duration of this 10 part series, my friend ‘Edgar‘.

Edgar is a tool I’ve been using since January of this year that does exactly what this series is about. It enables you to make the work you do on social media keep paying off for the long term. You put a little work into Edgar today by adding social media updates highlighting the great content in your blog’s archives and Edgar goes to work to share them to your followers not just once but by queuing your updates to keep delivering to into the future.

The team at Edgar have put together a special deal for ProBlogger readers which gives you a free one month trial. Sign up for your free one month trial at meetedgar.com/problogger. Here’s a video of how I use Edgar:

If watching videos isn’t your thing – here’s a blog post I wrote on how I use Edgar.

You can find today’s show notes with some examples of resource pages and some further reading at problogger.com/podcast/74 where you’ll also find a little information on Edgar, who is the sponsor of this series. You can find out Edgar’s special offer for ProBlogger readers at meetedgar.com/problogger and see this great social media tool that will help you to really take a lot of the pressure off your updating of social media. I’ll talk a little more at the end of this podcast about them as well. Let’s get into today’s show, episode 74.

Today’s challenge is one of those challenges that I’ve included in this series mainly because it’s something that I’ve got on my own someday list. It’s been there for way too long and really needs to get onto my today list. Simply by preparing for this podcast, I’m proud to say that it has gone onto my today list and I’ve already begun work on it.

Today’s task is to create, or in my case to update, a resources page for your blog. I’ve long had a resources page on ProBlogger. It’s a page where I list useful tools, services, training, and further reading even for bloggers. You can see it at today’s show notes; I’ll share the link there. Although, I have to say that by the time you hear this, that page will look different and have different content on it than what it does right at this moment as I’m recording. I may include a screenshot so you can see what I did have there.

I first created this page seven years ago. It was a page that aimed to serve and answer my readers’ questions. Some of their most frequently asked questions. Questions like what hosting should I use? What domain service is the best? What blogging platform is best? What tools should I be using on my blog? And what are the best services to start monetizing my blog? Those sorts of questions which I get quite a bit, and I’ve always had quite a bit. The page is pretty simple. It’s just a page on WordPress, not a post. It was largely a series of lists of the tools and services that I used or recommended. I broke it down into categories. There’s a list of blogging tools, blogging platforms, blogging hosting services, and all of those questions that are read up out before. There’s a list of answers to that.

It had a lot of outgoing links and not a whole heap of other content on it. Some of the links were affiliate links and some of them were just links to the tools and services particularly where they didn’t have an affiliate program. It also had a little bit of further reading for each of the categories where I had something useful to say on the topic. For example, in the blog design section of the templates section, I had a little bit of reading on how to choose a template.

The page served a few purposes. Firstly, it answers some of the most frequently asked questions I get, so it’s useful. I was able to point to it in my navigation area, which cut down the emails that I got because people are finding the answers pretty quickly by finding that particular page. It was also useful as I was responding to emails as well because when I got a question that did come in about a particular thing that I’d included on that resource page, I was able to just simply say you might find this link helpful.

It also generated some pretty nice income through affiliate links. I was actually talking to a blogger the other day and they admitted to me that their resources page, which has some affiliate links, is the number one source of income for their blog. They link to it really prominently on their blog. It has some affiliate programs on it that have recurring income. They recommend a service where if you sign up, they earn 50% of anything that that person pays forever. That adds up over time. It can potentially earn some nice affiliate income for me and for you if you set one up.

It also has the potential to help with traffic as well to your blog. I found my resources page ended up ranking pretty well in search engines for blogging resources. It’s also the top post, if you design it well, and if it’s useful and comprehensive enough that you could quite easily share on social media regularly. I think it would do pretty well because it’s lists of tools and lists of services and lists of things that are useful to people are the type of content that people do share.

It’s a page that has served me quite well in the past. My problem is that I didn’t keep it up-to-date. In fact, WordPress an hour ago just told me that the last time I updated that page was—wait for it—six years ago. I’m really embarrassed to admit that. I almost didn’t because I wanted to save face, but I think it gives you a really great example about how leaving something on your someday list can end up hurting your brand because some of the links on my lists right now are broken. Some of them are links to services and tools that don’t exist anymore. Some of them even have been taken over by dubious operators. I just found one link which was to a site that I just do not recommend anymore. That page right now could be doing me more harm than good. It’s a prime example of why you need to tackle these types of things that sit on our someday lists because they could end up hurting our brand.

Here’s my challenge for you today. It’s twofold depending on whether you have a resources page or not. If you have one, is it up-to-date or could it be improved in some way? Could you be adding some new resources to your page? Please do it. It might be hurting you at the moment if you don’t. If you don’t have one could you create one? This need not be a complicated process. It could be something that you could whip out in half an hour, an hour depending on how comprehensive you want to go.

I would encourage you to make it a comprehensive one, to make it as useful as possible. That will take some time but you may want to just start with something simple just to get it going. It’s something that you can add to over time. That’s certainly how I developed mine. Over the year that I was updating my resources page, I was adding new resources every week or two weeks. You can add to it over time. Get something up if you think this is relevant for your particular blog.

Most of the resource pages that I’ve come across have a combination of different types of things on them. If you’re wondering, “I can’t do a resources page because I don’t have any tools,” tools are just one type of thing that you might want to include on a resources page. I’ve seen a whole heap of different ones. I’m going to link to some examples in today’s show notes. You could include tools. Tools or services that you use. You could also, on your resources page, make it more about learning resources. Books that you recommend, articles that you’ve read that are helpful, ebooks that you recommend, courses that you recommend, other blogs that you might want to read, forums that you should belong to, sites that you recommend, and training that you can recommend. You might want to include some downloads.

In one of our last podcasts in this series, we talked about developing opt-ins. Creating resources for your readers to get subscribers, you could include those on your resources page as well. You could also include your own products on your resources page. There’s a whole heap of different types of things that you could include on your resources page. It doesn’t just have to be tools or services, but it could be to do with the learning as well or anything else that you recommend.

Remember, it can include some affiliate links, but it probably works best if it isn’t just about affiliate links. You want this to be a page with genuine, useful, and comprehensive recommendations. That will probably include things that don’t have affiliate programs. Your readers will respect the page even more if they see that it is not just about you making money but it’s you about serving them in some way.

If you do have affiliate links, it’s a good idea to disclose that. You can do that on your page without it being something that is detrimental to your page. You can explain there that that’s how you make your income. Explain that them buying that through your affiliate program doesn’t increase the cost. You can actually show them that it’s a way of you being able to provide the blog that you have for free by earning a little bit of a commission.

I found most of my readers completely respect that, particularly when I include on my resources page something about the products that I’m recommending are not only products that I’m earning a commission from but they’re products that I pay for and that I use myself. If you make that clear, if it’s the case, then that certainly helps to show that you are genuinely recommending that product because you’ve already purchased it yourself.

I would encourage you to go a little bit beyond just creating a list of links. Add some content to it, add some context to why you recommend the products. Perhaps you might want to, for each of the products you recommend or each of the resources you recommend, just write a short sentence about why you recommend it, who it might be relevant for, and how you found it to be useful for yourself.

You could also consider approaching some of the people that you link to. If there’s a company that you use their service or tool, maybe approach them and say, “Hey, I want to put you on my resources page. Would you be able to put together a deal for my readers?” and actually makes it even more useful to your readers. Not only do they get what you recommend, but they also get the opportunity to get it at a discount or with some sort of a bonus.

When you’ve put your page together, you want to also think about how you can get as many people as possible to that particular page. Just having the page is half of the battle. You want to get people to view it. A few tips on that. Firstly, make the page as prominently linked to as you can. If you have a navigation area on your blog perhaps a menu at the top of your blog. There might be an opportunity to link to that page from those areas. Also in your sidebar and any other relevant posts on your blog. You might actually want to put a call to action underneath blog posts around the comments area. Any calls to action to get people over to view that particular page is really important.

Also, from a search engine optimization point of view, you want to think carefully about what you call that page. It may not be the best thing to call it a resources page if it’s not particularly relevant. You might want to say recommended books or recommended training resources. Put yourself in the shoes of someone’s searching for that type of information, what would they be typing into Google? Resources may not be. It could be or may not be the best term to use. If it is a page of tools then call it a tools page. If it’s a page of books make it a page of books for your particular niche. Think about exactly what people might be searching for.

One last tip is to keep it as visual as possible. One of the things that I look at my particular resources page and critique it at the moment is that it’s just a list of words. There’s no visual at all. I know that I could probably make it a more visually appealing site. That’s one of the things on my list to do in the next few weeks, not just today. In the next week or two particularly.

The last thing I’d say is that you want to keep this particular page up-to-date. This has been where I’ve got into trouble with mine. Maybe it’s worth adding a reminder to your calendar. Maybe once a month, the end of every month to simply alert you. Have an alarm to go off to update your resources page. Maybe you just want to do that every three months or once a year even. It would be better than every six years as I have done it.

I really look forward to seeing your resource pages. I’ve already asked on my Facebook page today for people to share theirs. I’ll include some of the links to examples on today’s show notes at problogger.com/podcast/74. I would love to see links to yours. You can do that in a couple of ways, either by leaving a comment on the show notes today or you could tweet me at @problogger with the hashtag #TodayNotSomeday and then share the link to your resources page.

Also, check out Meet Edgar. I’ve talked about Meet Edgar in the previous podcast, but it is a fantastic tool that really does fit into this series so well because it enables you to put a little bit of time into creating some great social media updates today that will continue to pay off for the future. You can find out more about them at meetedgar.com/problogger.

Lastly, I would really love to see your reviews of our podcast over on iTunes or Stitcher. I’ve been watching the reviews come in. I want to read out a couple of them today that caught my attention that are more recent reviews that have come in.

Firstly, Kylie from DIY Decorator. I love this one. Kylie writes, “I’ve listened to every podcast so far. I’ll listen in the car after the school run when the car is nice and quiet. Darren’s information is practical and useful and his manner is relaxed and genuine. I feel like Darren is sitting in the passenger seat talking to me. What I like best is that each podcast contains actionable tasks. So step-by-step you can create a better blog without being totally overwhelmed.”

I love that idea of sitting next to Kylie after she dropped her kids off from school. I know those moments very well. It’s a time I often listen to podcasts as well. What I would love is if you could tell us where you listen to the ProBlogger Podcast in your review. That would be pretty funny to see a whole heap of reviews of people saying where they listen to the podcast. Thank You, Kylie, for your review.

Then, there’s Deborah from girlfriendology.com, which is a great name for a blog. I don’t know what it’s about. I can’t speak to it or recommend it really, but I think it’s a cool name. Deborah writes, “Coming up on 10 years of blogging and attending and even speaking at conferences, you’d think I would have heard it all. Heck, maybe I have, but I find Darren Rowse’ ProBlogger smart, genuine, and amazingly committed to helping bloggers be successful.

I listen to every word he says on his podcast, Periscope, and his blog. Now, this podcast is unique in the genre of social media blogging advice. It’s not salesy, self-serving, ego-based, or using goofy introductions. I find those annoying,” she says. “It’s just solid information and support in the generous format. Thanks, Darren, for sharing and caring.” Thank you, Deborah, for your particular review. I love that one. I try not to be goofy. Occasionally, it may go there, but hopefully, I’ll continue to stay on the straight and narrow.

As I say, I’d love to see your reviews on iTunes and Stitcher. I get emails every week with any review that’s been added no matter where you are in the world in the different iTunes stores or on Stitcher as well. So, that’s pretty cool and I do read every single review. Thanks so much for listening today. I look forward to seeing your resources pages on your blogs. Do share them over on Twitter or in the comments of today’s show notes at problogger.com/podcast/74.

What will you include in your resources page? I’d love to hear from you in the comments below, and feel free to include a link if you’ve already created it.

The hashtag I’ll be using to talk about this journey on social media is #TodayNotSomeday and I encourage you to share your journey too, using the same hashtag.

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

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

Today’s episode is part 8 of the new ‘Today, Not Someday’ podcast series. The focus is actioning your ‘someday’ list, the things you’ve always wanted to do to improve your blog but have struggled to make happen. For details about how the series works, check out episode one here. I’ve included a full list of episodes below.

The focus of today’s episode is about how to give your social media workflow a good going over to prepare you for the new year. I share tips about how to get bigger reach, more traffic, and higher engagement, and how to maximize productivity so that you save 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:

I’d like to welcome a new sponsor to the ProBlogger podcast for the duration of this 10 part series, my friend ‘Edgar‘.

Edgar is a tool I’ve been using since January of this year that does exactly what this series is about. It enables you to make the work you do on social media keep paying off for the long term. You put a little work into Edgar today by adding social media updates highlighting the great content in your blog’s archives and Edgar goes to work to share them to your followers not just once but by queuing your updates to keep delivering to into the future.

The team at Edgar have put together a special deal for ProBlogger readers which gives you a free one month trial. Sign up for your free one month trial at meetedgar.com/problogger. Here’s a video of how I use Edgar:

If watching videos isn’t your thing – here’s a blog post I wrote on how I use Edgar.

This is the 7th challenge of 10 in this series. If you want to go back and listen to the first one, it was in episode 66, using the hashtag #TodayNotSomeday on Twitter. You can find today’s show notes at problogger.com/podcast/73. 

Today’s challenge is all about getting your social media strategy in order. Let’s get on to today’s show.

Today, I want to challenge you to give your social media workflow and your system (if you have one) a good going over to prepare you for the new year. It’s a good chance to do a bit of an audit this time of the year on different aspects of your business. Social media’s one of those areas that I think is really important to come back to from time to time because it does change quite a bit.

Most of us already know that social media has a lot of good things going for it and as bloggers, it’s an area we should be thinking about and leveraging in some way. Social media obviously has the power to drive a lot of traffic to your blog, to help you build community with your readers, and I think it’s a really great secondary point of connection after your email list which we’ve already talked about in a number of the challenges in this series.

I think it’s really important once you’ve got your email working and your strategy in place—they are some of the things we’ve already talked about—that you do turn your attention to social media because it can really support that email strategy. Also, it connects with a different type of reader who may not be interested in email. 

While social media does have some real benefits, it also is one of those areas that we do run into challenges with as bloggers. As I say, it does change from time to time. I know Facebook (for instance) is one of those areas that’s just constantly evolving and changing. The same is true in other social networks as well. This year we’re seeing quite a few changes with Twitter. They’ve introduced polls and all kinds of new features there. There are other emerging opportunities with new social networks as well.

Change is one of those challenges that we often need to come up against as bloggers. It’s also an area that’s very easy to get disillusioned with and to give up on. I know a number of bloggers that I’ve talked to even in the last three or four days have told me that they’re thinking about giving up on Facebook because they’re just not getting the cut through this.

Many of us get these moments of disillusionment. It’s also very easy to get stuck doing the same things in the same ways over and over and over again. Maybe it’s because things have worked that way in the past and you’re hoping they’ll continue to work or maybe it’s because you see if anyone else is doing things the same way, you think that you’re just going to keep doing that. Maybe that’s the way it’s being done for you and it becomes a bit of a habit.

I think it’s really important to take a fresh look at things every now and then. There are opportunities to break out of the norm, to do some new things, cut some new ground, and to lead the way as bloggers in our use of social media. It’s very easy to get overwhelmed and to feel quite distracted with social media as well. I think it’s important in that regard to ask yourself the question, “How effective am I with the use of my time around this particular area?” These are some of the challenges that we faced as bloggers. I’m sure you can add your own to that list. They’re the things I’ve struggled with over the years.

This time, last year, I realized that my own approach to social media was in real need of change particularly on my ProBlogger accounts. I realized that as I’ve looked at my Twitter and Facebook accounts, there was a real lack of anything dynamic there at all. They were quite boring to look at. There were no visuals, particularly on Twitter. I have a lot of automation going on on my Twitter account. The new jobs on my job board and just new posts from the site, they’re all making up the bulk of the tweets that I was doing. I have no visuals whatsoever.

The only other time I was really using my social media account was to sell. My readers, my followers, weren’t getting a whole heap of value. The updating was quite sporadic. I wasn’t effectively promoting evergreen content in my archives. I wasn’t highlighting my new content very well either. I knew I was leaving a lot on the table in terms of traffic.

Lastly, as I looked at my social media accounts, they weren’t the most engaging accounts either. There were a lot of reasons why my Twitter account and my Facebook page had become this way. It was partly because I’ve been quite distracted with Digital Photography School (my main blog) and I’ve been managing those social media accounts. I felt like I didn’t have a whole heap of time. I also didn’t have a system or routine in place to feed my accounts. 

I saw the time I was spending on ProBlogger Twitter and Facebook accounts as almost wasted effort. I don’t know if you ever felt that way yourself but you spend 10 or 15 minutes crafting a tweet, getting a visual, you put it out there, and then two minutes later it disappeared and no one ever looks at it again. I found myself thinking, what’s the point of putting the time into those social media accounts when the pay-off wasn’t really there? I decided I needed to take a really good, long, hard look at my strategy on those ProBlogger social media accounts. 

This year, 2015, has been a year where I’ve completely changed my approach to social media. I know many of you have noticed that because I get feedback about it all the time. I’ll talk a little bit more about that in a moment. I can’t possibly share everything I’ve tried over the last 12 months, but I want to try and give you three or four things that you could go away and do yourself. It came out of my own learnings this year, particularly on the ProBlogger Twitter account and Facebook page. I want to ask you to think about four questions that will hopefully give you a bit of a framework for doing an audit of your social media, whether that be Twitter, Facebook, or another network.

The first question I want to encourage you to ask is where are my readers gathering? How are they responding to what I’m doing? How are they responding to social media? It’s really about your reader. For me, this is where it always comes back to, whether I’m thinking about social media, whether I’m thinking about the content on my blog. I always try to think about who is my reader and how are they responding to what I’m doing. Where are your readers gathering? What social networks are they gathering on? This is the type of thing you need to be gathering information on wherever you can. Anytime you chat with a reader, include this question, “What social networks are you using?” Even when readers email me, I quite often will just pin them with a question like that at the end of my response to their email.

It’s also something we also do surveys on. We ask on Facebook even, “What other social networks are you active on?” We’re trying to get that picture where our readers are. What I would encourage you to do is to think about which one or two social networks are you going to put most of your time into. You might want to also ask where your competitors or other bloggers in your niche are focusing their attention. That’s partly to work out what’s working but also, you may actually see that none of them are engaging in a new social network.

That’s the other question I’ll be asking. Are there new opportunities opening up particularly with social networks like Periscope, Blab, or Facebook Live, if you have access to that with the Facebook account that’s a verified account. Live streaming is one of those areas where I find a lot of bloggers really aren’t even aware of those networks are there. Maybe you could be one of the forefront bloggers in that particular space, if it relates to your particular niche.

The last question around this is on Facebook or LinkedIn, you might find that your readers are there but are they in groups? That’s another opportunity for you. I’m finding particularly on Facebook, a lot of bloggers are having a lot of really good success with groups. That might be something that you might want to consider as well. So, where are your readers and where are you going to focus your attention?

The second question is what type of content are your readers responding to? Whether that be on your own social media accounts or other people that you see, is the content that they’re responding to a video? Is it a text? Is it live interactions? Is it links? Is it visual? Is it Twitter chats or those other things on Facebook? Is it quotes or something else? 

When I did this analysis on ProBlogger, I found that visual content was something that my readers and my followers responded very well to. On our Twitter account, any tweet that had a nice graphic or a nice image in it got retweeted, shared, over four or five times as much as a nonvisual piece of content. The same is true on our Facebook page. That was one thing I just knew I needed to focus more attention upon.

I also found that live content seemed to be having a bigger impact on our readers. Any kind of live interaction, whether that be in a Twitter chat, a Periscope, a Blab, or a webinar, they didn’t tend to get shared a lot but I noticed that my readers became incredibly engaged when they had those interactions with me. I’ve seen this time and time again this year with Periscope, in particular. Periscope doesn’t get viewed by tens of thousands of people. The hundred or so people that are on those Periscope (I find) become more loyal readers. They become advocates for the blog. That was one of the things I’ve noticed since one of the reasons I started to do more live interactions this year.

I also found my Twitter account that any time I shared slides from a talk that I was giving, they did really well. That was partly because they’re visual but often because they also had some really good take-home information in them as well. Even though that didn’t link into my content, they got really good engagements. What type of content do you get good response from and what type of content do you see others getting good response from in your niche? Once you’ve done that analysis, ask yourself what type of content do you want to focus upon delivering from here on.

I began with ProBlogger to make those observations. Every day, I want to share this type of content. You can begin to make that list. You use that list in the moment as I ask this third question. So far, we’ve talked about who are my readers and where are they gathering. Number two, what type of content are they responding to. Number three, ask yourself, what frequency and timing of sharing do you want to aim for on your social media accounts?

This is partly going to depend upon your time to be able to engage in your social media accounts—how many social media accounts you have. Also, it needs to come out of who are your readers and how much content do they want. Also, the medium itself. On Facebook, you tend to not do as many updates—most people don’t—but on Twitter, you can get away with doing a little bit more. Ask yourself, “How often do I want to update content on the different social networks that I’m engaged in?” Come up with a bit of a schedule of how much content you want to share. Begin to slot into a typical day when you want to update. 

Create a calendar for yourself and actually work out. Do the exercise of saying, “Well, I want to tweet at least 10 times during the day,” or at least 3 times or 50 times. It’s up to you, really, as to the number. Also, for Facebook. “These are the key times that I want to update.” Once you’ve got the number of posts and the slots you want to be able to fill, what would you put into those slots? This is where that little list of the types of content you want to share will come into place. You can begin to slide in, “I want to share evergreen content. I’m going to do that at these certain times. I want to share quotes,” or, “I want to share visual content.” You can begin to slot them in.

I’ll run through how I did this on ProBlogger because I think it might help you to visualize what we did. For ProBlogger’s Facebook account, I worked out that I wanted to update ideally on our Facebook account six or seven times per day. We’ve worked up to that kind of level. When I first did this exercise, it was three times a day because I didn’t want to overcommit. At this point, we update six or seven times per day.

We’ve decided as a team—I do have a team helping me with this, which is great, but I started doing this by myself—that I wanted to update at certain times of the day. At those times, I’ve had different types of content. At 9:00 PM, Australian time, we post an evergreen piece of content from our archives at ProBlogger. We’ve got thousands of our archive posts. A lot of them are evergreen. They’re useful today as they were when they were written. At 9:00 PM, we typically share an evergreen post from our archives. 

At midnight, Australian time, this was just when America’s waking up, we post our new post for the day if there is a new post for the day. At 3:00 AM, we either publish a link to our new podcast, if we’ve got a new podcast or an archive post—an evergreen piece of content. At 6:00 AM, we publish or share a curated piece of content from someone else’s site that we think will be useful for our readers. At 9:00 AM, we posted a post that was featured last week. This is a newish piece of content but we want to give it a second go. At 9:00 AM, we know that the last time we shared that piece of content, it would’ve been at midnight the previous week. It’s a different time and day to get a different audience.

At midday, we usually publish a discussion question. At 3:00 PM, we published a post from last month. Again, this is the third time this piece of content has been shared over a month but again, it’s a different time of the day. It’s hopefully getting a different type of audience. That’s the schedule that we have. You can see there that we’ve got seven slots for the day but different types of content go up throughout the day. You can see there that newer content is getting shared more often. Once it gets to that point where it’s been shared three times—today, the week later, and then a month later—it goes into the evergreen category. Then, we’ll only be sharing once or twice a year at that.

On Twitter, we do a similar type of thing but it’s more frequent posting. I’ll show you a video later where I talk about Edgar which is the tool that we use mainly for Twitter. You’ll see there the actual schedule that we have. We publish pretty much on the hour on Twitter. Different categories of posts, again, are featured throughout the day. It includes evergreen posts from our archives, evergreen podcast episodes, new content, quotes, slides that I’ve used in keynotes, curated content, discussion, polls, and promotion of our ebooks and our events. All of those types of things go up on our Twitter account as well.

The three questions, just to recap what we’ve talked about so far are: Where are your readers? What type of contents are they responding to? What frequency and timing of sharing do you want to aim for? 

One last thing to think about is how can you build a system around what you just designed? Hopefully, by this stage, you will have a calendar. Maybe a weekly or a daily calendar of what you’ve want to be aiming for your Twitter account or your Facebook page. The last question is how are you going to make that happen. You might be feeling quite overwhelmed by that and you might want to do either one of three things to help you with that.

The first thing you could do is do it all yourself manually. Number two, you could be outsourcing. I don’t typically outsource a whole heap although I do have a team that works with me. Stacey who edits ProBlogger does help to schedule some of the social media updates for the ProBlogger Twitter and Facebook accounts. I also do a lot of it myself. Outsourcing is not a big thing that I do because I want to retain the voice and I want to control the Twitter accounts and the interactions that people have on those accounts with me. I want them to feel confident that they are with me.

I do use some tools. This is the second area that you can focus upon to help you with managing that schedule that you’ve developed. What tools could you use? What automation could you use? I’ve talked about some of these in the past. Obviously, Edgar is a sponsor of this podcast series. I’ve talked about them a number of times during this series. I use Edgar mainly for our Twitter account and for anything that’s evergreen in nature. We’re using Edgar to schedule quotes, to schedule my slides (my ProBlogger keynote slides), to schedule evergreen content for podcasts and the blog as well.

I don’t use it so much for anything that has a shorter shelf life or anything that’s timely or to highlight our new post. For that, we use CoSchedule which is an editorial calendar that has some really amazing tools for scheduling your social media accounts. On our Facebook page, when a new post is published, we schedule that with CoSchedule. That goes up, as I’ve mentioned before, at midnight. Every day, CoSchedule schedules that new post. As we schedule that one, we also say, “We want this to appear in a week’s time. We want it to appear in a month’s time.” That’s all managed via CoSchedule. It doesn’t actually go into the Edgar system until a month after it’s been published.

We also use Slack as a team communications tool. That is really helpful for us if we’ve got someone asking a question on social media. One of my team will say, “Hey, Darren. There’s a question there that you should be answering.” We use that as a tool to communicate internally.

The last thing I wanted to talk about is that you really need to be on social media and also looking out for those new opportunities that do come your way. One of the big opportunities that has come in the last six or so months particularly for bloggers is live streaming. You’ve heard me and seen me, hopefully, on Periscope over the last six or so months. Also, the other tool was Blab, which I had a podcast episode on a few months ago as well.

I’ve really focused more of my attention more on Periscope than Blab over the last three or so months. What I’ve started to do is because I’ve got this other system in place now, what I’ve just described to you for the ProBlogger Twitter account and Facebook page, I’ve had some of my time freed up to be able to experiment with something new. I decided to put that time into Periscope. That’s enabled me to start experimenting. Really, the process that I’ve just described to you, I do have use with Periscope as well. I’ve been really experimenting a lot with different types of content in Periscope. I’m asking myself the question, what are my readers responding to well or not so well on Periscope? 

I started to work out frequently. How often do I want to be on Periscope? I’ve decided that I want to be there every weekday morning. Sometimes not quite in the morning, sometimes it goes in the afternoon, but once a day on weekdays. I’ve started to develop a system for that, what tools can I use. I’ve got some hardware. I’ve got my iPhone. I’ve got a little gorilla tripod. There are software tools as well.

I use a tool called Fullscope which helps me to monitor the stats. I’ll have links to this in the show notes. Then, another tool called Katch which enables me to make my Periscopes live longer than 24 hours that Periscope keeps them online. They catch the replays and help me to be able to embed and repurpose the content from Periscope into a blog post or into other pieces of content that I might want to use. 

Again, the same questions that I’ve asked you to ponder above already in this podcast, I’m using in this new network as well. Where are my readers? I actually work out that a segment of my readers are on Periscope. What type of content are they responding to? For me, it’s been teaching content similar to the podcast, actually, but sometimes a little bit more visual. On a podcast, it’s difficult to help people get a visual. In Periscope, that’s been good. What frequency of timing am I aiming for? What tools can I use to help me with that? Then, a lot of that has come in this workflow. 

Now, when I do a Periscope, I go and get the replay from katch.me. I put it into a blog post then I put some show notes. I put some extra content around that. That appears on the blog. I developed this system for not only doing the update and creating that initial piece of content but also thinking about how to repurpose it.

What I described to you today may sound a little overwhelming. I acknowledge that. I guess I don’t want to come across as having the perfect social media strategy. I know I still have  a lot of work to do. This is a work in progress for us. It’s taken me a whole year to get ProBlogger social media accounts up to the point they’re currently at. It’s started off slower. I don’t want to pretend that I just suddenly had tweets every hour and seven Facebook updates per day. 

When I started this process back in January this year, I think I was using Edgar for three or four tweets per day. I was using this new system for Facebook just with two posts per day. You can start slow then begin to add in extra pieces. There’s so much upside to giving your social media accounts a bit of an audit.

We’ve noticed on ProBlogger larger reach, more traffic, higher engagement, but it also had an impact upon the brand. This is one of the things I noticed, when I go to a conference, people come up to me and say, “Hey, I’ve noticed something’s different about ProBlogger. It seems more professional. It seems like you are doing more stuff.” It’s interesting that a lot of the content on ProBlogger hasn’t changed a whole heap. It’s social media. It’s what people are seeing in social media, what people often see of you. It has a massive impact on your brand. Even if you change nothing else, you just re-energize your social media, it can have a massive impact upon your blog. 

I would love to hear what you decide to do after this episode. You may not want to do it all. You may just want to focus on one particular network or one particular thing. You may be using one new tool. I’d love to hear what you do. You can do that either in the comments of today’s show notes at problogger.com/podcast/73 or you can Tweet me at @problogger. You can use the hashtag #TodayNotSomeday, so others who listen to the podcast can see what you are working on today; it’s moving off your someday’s list. That really will inspire the rest of us.

I have some links for you today, some further reading. I’ve got a video of how I use Edgar. You’ll be able to see that whole workflow that we’ve developed three. You will also see some information on Edgar who sponsored this podcast. You can find a special offer that they’ve put together for you at meetedgar.com/problogger, where they’ve actually set-up a free month trial of that tool. You can work out if it’s right for you.

I love to chat with you online further about what you’re doing. I look forward to chatting with you in episode 74, the eighth part of this particular series of the ProBlogger Podcast.

What will you do to make your social media more effective in 2016? I’d love to hear from you in the comments below.

The hashtag I’ll be using to talk about this journey on social media is #TodayNotSomeday and I encourage you to share your journey too, using the same hashtag.

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

Today’s episode is part 7 of the new ‘Today, Not Someday’ podcast series. The focus is actioning your ‘someday’ list, the things you’ve always wanted to do to improve your blog but have struggled to make happen. For details about how the series works, check out episode one here. I’ve included a full list of episodes below.

The focus of today’s episode is how to make money as an affiliate by creating a best seller list. I’ve earned over half a million dollars from the Amazon affiliate program during my blogging career. I share tips about how you can make money as an affiliate on your blog.

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:

How to Dramatically Increase Amazon Affiliate Sales with Bestseller Lists

Edgar is a tool I’ve been using since January of this year that does exactly what this series is about. It enables you to make the work you do on social media keep paying off for the long term. You put a little work into Edgar today by adding social media updates highlighting the great content in your blog’s archives and Edgar goes to work to share them to your followers not just once but by queuing your updates to keep delivering to into the future.

The team at Edgar have put together a special deal for ProBlogger readers which gives you a free one month trial. Sign up for your free one month trial at meetedgar.com/problogger. Here’s a video of how I use Edgar:

If watching videos isn’t your thing – here’s a blog post I wrote on how I use Edgar.

Hi and welcome to episode 72 of the ProBlogger podcast. My name is Darren Rowse and we are motoring through our series of little challenges that I’m giving you to do before the end of the year, that are going to help get your blog in tip-top shape before 2016. Some of you have been asking, do you have to do all of the challenges? No. That’s not the way I designed this little series. I’m hoping that at least two or three of them are going to be things that you could achieve. 

Just a reminder, these are things that we often put on our someday list and I’m encouraging you to get them on your today list. We’re using that hashtag #TodayNotSomeday over on Twitter. People are adding in the things that they’ve been working on. I’m really inspired and excited by it and learning a lot from you as well. I encourage you to use that hashtag and tag me if you’ve got the character space at @problogger as well.

You can find today’s show notes at problogger.com/podcast/72. You’ll find there is some further reading. There is some further reading for today. Also, you’ll find information there about Edgar, which is a tool that I use to really help me with my social media. I’ve got some further reading there on what the tool does and how you might want to use it as well. They’ve got a little special offer for you. It gets you a month free trial of Edgar at meetedgar.com/problogger. Anyway, let’s get on with today’s show where we’re going to be talking about creating a bestseller list for your blog.

Today’s podcast is going to be a little shorter than some of the ones that we’ve done as part of this series already. I have gone on a little and given you some fairly meaty things to work on. Today’s task or challenge is something that you can definitely achieve in a fairly quick time. I reckon you could probably knock it off today pretty easily if you’ve got the time to do it. It’s something I’ve used numerous times on my own blogs to generate some pretty decent income on Amazon’s affiliate program. You could probably adapt it to other affiliate programs or even if you’ve got your own products you could use it as well. The idea is to create a bestseller list that promotes either affiliate products or your own.

I mentioned this technique in episode 53 in passing as a technique that has helped me to earn quite a bit of money on Amazon’s affiliate program. If you go and listen to episode 53, I talk about how I made over a half a million dollars on Amazon’s affiliate program over the years. This is one of those techniques that has helped me with that. I got this idea of creating bestseller lists on my blog one day when I was in a bookstore. I was filling in time waiting for my partner to go shopping and get her own things. I was sitting in his book shop as I often do and I realized that almost everyone who walked into the store went to the wall at the front of the shop that had the bestseller list. It ranked the top 20 best-selling books.

I don’t know whether it was just the best-selling books in that store or whether it was drawing on some other list, but I sat there and I watched people into the store. Almost every single person who walked in would go to that wall where all the books were laid out. Some people did go on and buy other things, but I was amazed at how many people didn’t go any further than that wall. They just chose one of the 20 books, went to the cashier, paid for their book, and then left. I guess it illustrated to me the power of a bestseller list.

As much as we like to think of ourselves as unique individuals, we are social creatures and we like to know what other people are doing. We like to feel like we’re a part of trends. We don’t really want to feel like we’re being left out. If we’re honest, most of us are kind of lazy as well. Any shortcut to finding something good quality is going to appeal to us. These sort of social interactions that we have in the purchases that we make is something that I guess many marketers have used using these bestseller lists. Whether it be in bookstores or whether it be on online shops where you can often rank products by how well they’ve sold. I know for myself I use that sort of feature all the time.

As I sat there in the book shop that day I wondered if there was a way of incorporating that idea into my own blogging. Particularly into my own affiliate promotions on Amazon, which I’d been using at the time quite a bit. I went home and I created my first bestseller list.

My first one was just a blog post and it was a blog post where I ranked the most popular photography books that my readers had been buying on Amazon. I realized that Amazon had a report of pretty much anything that anyone bought as a result of clicking on my affiliate links. They then ranked it and you could look at the last month for the last three months over the last year. I think from memory, I did the last 12 months because I didn’t have a whole heap of commissions coming in at that point, so I had to go back twelve months to get enough data to be able to create a list.

I put up the blog post and it was a fairly simple blog post, it just had a short introduction, and I told my readers how I got that data. I was transparent about the fact that I’m an affiliate for Amazon and then I presented the top ten photography books that my readers had been buying.

A couple of things happened as a result of doing that particular post. Firstly, I saw my affiliate income go up quite a bit. It went up over 100% than it had been over the last week. The next week was 100% up on the previous week. A lot of people went on and bought those books that I had ranked, but then as they do on Amazon, they went and bought other things as well, which helped as well.

The other good thing about doing this particular post was that it was my most commented upon post that month. I was surprised by that. I didn’t think that a post that simply ranked products would create discussion but it did. People really wanted to either agree or disagree, or debate what was on the list. Some people wanted to add other books that they thought should be on the list and give their own recommendations. A real conversation started on that particular post.

I was a little hesitant about doing the post in the first place because I thought, “People are just going to think I’m trying to make money off them here,” but it actually ended up being a really useful post.

The other type of comment that I got was, “Thanks, this is really great. It’s given me some ideas for books that I should read or books that I could give my partner, my friend, or my brother who’s a photographer.” It was a useful post as well.

I decided to continue to do bestseller posts. I reckon I’ve done probably 50 or 60 of them over the years on Digital Photography School, in particular. Fairly regularly, I’d do them on different categories of products that relate to my readers. Just recently, just before Thanksgiving and all the Black Friday sales and Cyber Monday sales, I did the most popular digital SLRs. I did one that was the most popular photography accessories, most popular lenses, most popular mirrorless compact system cameras. Different categories of products within the overall niche that I am writing about. I’ll give you some examples of these in today’s show notes.

I tend to do these two or three times a year. I’ll do them for over a week. I will say, “This week, we’re going to be looking at some of the most popular products amongst our readers. Today we’re looking at digital SLRs.” Then over the week, I will drip out three or four posts. I mix them in with other kinds of content so that’s not the only type of post that’s going up. Then I interlink all the posts as well. So trying to get people I guess across to the different categories that are relevant to them. Then, of course, include them in our newsletter as well. We drive quite a bit of traffic that way and also through social media.

These posts always do well. They do well. People click through from our newsletter quite a bit. They do very well for us on social media, particularly on Facebook. I can give you a couple of links to how I’ve promoted them on Facebook as well. You can see there that they get fairly good reach. In fact, this last round of posts that I did, two or three of those posts got as much reach as anything else I’ve done over the last month on Facebook. They’ve done quite well.

Some of you are probably saying, “Well, I’m not an Amazon affiliate.” Whether that’s just because you’ve never signed up or whether you live in one of those states in America that don’t allow it, but you could probably do this type of technique in a number of other ways. If you’re an Amazon affiliate but you don’t have enough data to get the trends, maybe you just started out and you’ve only got a handful of people who have bought things through your affiliate links.

You can actually create a bestseller list based upon the best-selling items in a relevant category on Amazon. If you went to the relevant category in your particular niche, so it might be books on parenting, you can actually arrange those books by bestseller and then create a list that way. As long as you are transparent with your readers as to where you got that data when you got that list, I think that’s totally fine.

You could also do this type of thing for another type of affiliate program. If you’re signed up for another store. I’m also signed up as an affiliate for B&H Photo Video, it’s a photography site. I could create that kind of report based upon the data that I get from them or based upon their bestseller lists on their site.

You could also do this for your own products. If you have a number of ebooks that you’ve got for sale on your site, you could create your own bestseller list. My five ebooks are the best-selling ones and actually use that as the basis for a post. I would suspect that a lot of your readers would find that really useful in making their own purchases. Maybe you could offer a coupon code for the top one for a limited time. That type of thing could work quite well.

Also if you have promoted other people’s products, perhaps you’ve remoted over the last 12 months a range of ebooks or a range of courses, why not create a bestseller list of the things that you’ve promoted? You’ve got all that data, you know how many referrals you’ve sold of different ebooks or courses that you’ve promoted, so maybe put that into a bestseller list as well.

There’s a variety of different ways that you could create a bestseller list for your particular blog. You will find that the more you promote affiliate products, the better data you’ll get and the better your lists will be. If you’re just starting out, go to a store like Amazon and look at what is selling well there and create a list based upon that.

I’ve got some further reading for you today in the show notes at problogger.com/podcast/72 or I’ve got a post that I’ve written on exactly how I’ve done bestseller lists. It’s got some examples in it. I’ll also put in our show notes today some of my bestseller lists that I’ve done on Digital Photography School and some of those social media updates that I’ve done as well so you can check those out. If you’d like, just use the same format of posts that I’ve done because they have worked for me on Facebook, particularly.

I would also love it if you have time today to give us a little review on iTunes or on Stitcher or wherever you’re listening to this podcast. It does help us to rank higher and also is really encouraging for me and my team to see those reviews as they come in. It is really exciting also to see them coming in from around the world. Wherever you are, I’d love to see your reviews.

Also, on the show notes today, you’ll find a bit more information about Edgar. You can check out Edgar and their offer that they have for you at meetedgar.com/problogger. It is an amazing tool. It does really fit in really well with this series that we’re talking about, things that you can do today that are going to pay off for the long term on your blog. Edgar is something that I will be talking about in a future podcast. I’ll walk you through some of the things that it’s done for me, but it’s one of those things that you can set up some social media updates today that’ll continue to work for you in the future.

I can’t wait to see the bestseller lists that you’ve come up with. Again, share them with us on Twitter with the hashtag #TodayNotSomeday or over on the show notes in the comments. I’d love to see the bestseller lists that you’ve got so please do leave a URL to yours there. I look forward to chatting with you in episode 73 just in two days’ time for the ProBlogger podcast.

What will you include in your best seller list? I’d love to see your new blog affiliate best seller list in the comments below.

The hashtag I’ll be using to talk about this journey on social media is #TodayNotSomeday and I encourage you to share your journey too, using the same hashtag.

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