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 part 6 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. Part 2 was about why you should sell a product on your blog (and how to do it). Part 3 was about how to increase your subscriber numbers for your email list. Part 4 was about how to get readers excited to join and stay on your email list. Part 5 was about how to use auto responders to drive traffic and profit with your blog.

The focus of today’s episode is how to refresh the design of your blog to maximise your chances of making people feel what you want them to feel and doing what you want them to do.

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:

StudioPress has a great range of options for wordpress themes. Check out what StudioPress has to offer here (ProBlogger affiliate link).

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 and welcome to episode 71 of the ProBlogger podcast. My name is Darren Rowse and today, we are going to talk about your blog’s design. This is part of our ongoing series of challenges that I’m giving you every couple of days over the month of December, to go away and do something today that you have probably got on your someday list.

Design is something that many of us, as bloggers say, “Yeah, one day I’ll redesign my blog,” or, “One day I’ll look at that navigation area,” or, “One day I’ll give my sidebar a spring-clean.” Well, I have got some news for you. Today is the day. We are using the hashtag #TodayNotSomeday” over on Twitter and a lot of you have been sharing the things that you have been doing over this month and that’s fantastic.

You can also find today’s show notes at problogger.com/podcast/71 where I will have some further reading for you for today because there is a lot to cover on this topic. I will give you some links to some tools that you might want to use as well. You will also find on the show notes a little bit of information about our series sponsor, Edgar, a tool that I use to help me with my social media strategy.

For the last few episodes of this series we have been talking about email and I want to move away from that because we have focused the last three challenges upon email. I want to give you something completely different to go away and work on today and that is the design of your blog. Remember with this series, we are looking at things that you can do today that will pay off for the long term of your blog and I think the design really fits beautifully into this particular theme in this series.

The other way your blog looks, what it makes people feel, what it makes people do is vitally important and it has a really long-term impact upon your blogging. What if you could turn 10% more of those first-time visitors that come to your blog into long-term readers? Your design can help to do that and that has an ongoing impact. 

What if you could increase the number of pages that a typical visitor views while they are on your site by say 10%? Again, that has long-term impact and design can have an impact upon that. What if you could get 10% more clicks on your affiliate links or your advertising on the site? Design can help with that. What if you could get 10% more comments? Design can help with that. What if you could get 10% more people to see your eBook sales page or your services pages? Again, design, the way your blog looks, the way you call people to action with visual elements on your blog can impact that.

All of these things can be achieved by re-optimizing your design and that is what today is all about. Really it is a bit difficult for me to tell you exactly what to do today because it is going to depend a little upon your blog and what you are trying to achieve with your blog. It really comes down to entering a simple question. What do you want people to do on your blog? That is a question that I would encourage you to ask before you do anything else today. What do you want people to do when they are on your site? Are you reflecting that in your design? In the way that your blog is laid out? In the calls to action, the visual calls to action that you have got on your site?

I want to suggest a few things that you could do today. You may want to do all of these things, or you may just want to do one of them. Some of them are bigger than others, but let us just start with the first one. The first one is something that I think many bloggers could probably benefit from and that is to give your sidebar a spring-clean. I don’t if this is true for you, but I think many bloggers (including myself) end up with sidebars. You just add one more element and then you have another element. Two years later, you’ve added 20 different elements to your sidebar and lots of different links and tools. Some of it is dated and some of it is broken. 

Maybe today is the day that you just need to give it a bit of a spring-clean. What’s in your sidebar that is dated? What’s broken? How could you declutter it a little bit? What features or tools were a good idea at that time but that you just do not need them anymore? Another question to ask is how does your sidebar function? How does it look when people are viewing your site on a mobile or on a tablet? Tackle your sidebar today and let me know how you got with that with a hashtag #TodayNotSomeday on Twitter. You might want to do a before and after snapshot and share that as well. You can do that in the show notes too because our comment section there does allow you to share images.

The second thing you might want to do today—this might be in addition to looking at your sidebar or might be something else that you just might want to do—is to tackle your navigation on your site. Take a critical look at how people can navigate through your site. Your menus, particularly, are what I want you to look at. Your menu bar at the top of your site or in your sidebar is something that people do use and they do look at quite a bit. They will be clicking on those links, perhaps more than any other links on your whole site, so it is really important every now and again to do a bit of an audit of what you’ve in those navigation areas. Again, is anything broken? It is amazing how many times I go to blogs and you click on the about page and it does not actually go to the about page or it goes somewhere else, so test those links.

Are you linking to something that is no longer relevant or active? You might have a category in your navigation area that you just do not write on anymore and it is a bit embarrassing if someone goes to it, and they say that the last post written was in 2009. Do you have too many options in your navigation bar? Is your main call to action the main thing that you want people to do in that navigation area? Is there something important on your site that you have started doing since you set up the menu that you need to add to it? And again how does it work on mobile? Does it look too overwhelming? Do you need to remove some elements just for mobile? Some of the themes that you can get designed for mobile will allow you just to show some of the options.

Again this might be something that you want to do in addition to tackling your sidebar or as an alternative, but I would love to hear how you go with it. What is our exercise like? I actually just redid it on Digital Photography School and I realize there are a couple of things that were a bit confusing. We actually removed a couple of items from our menu bar just to declutter things and to really funnel people towards the important things, the things that we really wanted them to do.

The third action that you might want to take today is to really tackle the calls to action that you have on your blog. One of the best questions you can ask (and I have mentioned this before) is what do I want my readers to do on my blog. Now you can actually ask this question on different pages of your blog and have different answers to it. One of the exercises you might want to do is to actually look at some of the key pages on your blog and ask that question. 

When someone arrives at your homepage, what do you want those readers to do? Are you actually calling them to do that thing? It may be to subscribe to your newsletter. It may be to read your about page. It may be to read a certain key blog post that converts really well for you. It may be to get people to look at your sales page or your hire me page. It will be different for all of us, but are you actually calling your readers to do that when they are on your homepage?

You can actually ask that question for other pages, too. When they are on your about page, what do you want them to do next that might be a bit different from what you want them to do on the homepage? What do you want people to do when they are on a blog post? Look at a typical blog post and ask, are you calling people effectively to that action? It may be on some other key page on your site like an eBook sales page. Obviously, you want people to buy that eBook on that page, but are you doing it effectively? This is another option that you might want to look at today. When you look at your design, how are you calling people to action on key pages on your site?

The last thing you might want to do today is just to do a complete overhaul of your blog design. This may actually be the one thing that you have been putting off and that has been sitting on your someday list. When I started this series, we kind of knew, we all kind of know at certain times we need to do this and maybe that is what you really need to tackle right now, between now and the end of the year is to actually give your blog a complete overhaul. Perhaps if your blog design is broken, very dated, or it just does not reflect your brand anymore, this is maybe what you want to do.

There are a few options that you can take here. You might want to hire a designer to give you a completely new customized design that is going to take some cash though. You may want to do it yourself and actually tackle that if you have got some technological know-how or perhaps you want to use a premium theme and find yourself a new theme. Check out what Studio Press has to offer, they are our friends. I’ve got a link (which is an affiliate link) in our show notes today. I like a lot of the designs that they do, but there are plenty of other options out there as well, and I will link to a few in the show notes today.

It is how to give you tips for redesigning your blog and giving your blog a complete overhaul in a podcast. That is not very visual and because everyone’s blog is completely different and your blog needs to reflect your brand but a few general tips that probably apply to most blogger redesigns.

These are the things that I hear from my blog designer friends quite regularly. The first one is what space is your friend. You really do need to give the different elements of your blog room to breathe. This includes your background and not having a background that is perhaps too cluttered. It includes anything between and around your blog design elements like your logo. You want to have room to breathe around your navigation area and even between the text on your blog. You want to have space between the lines that are appropriate and that is really good advice around that. You want to keep your whole design simple and this relates to that white space. One of the mantras that I hear many blog designers use is when in doubt, subtract.

If you are wondering whether you should add something in, that the answer may probably be no. You want to make your design as simple as possible and not to confuse or overwhelm your readers. When it comes to colors, obviously trends change and that is something that you can tweak on your blog.

We are actually looking at the moment at a redesign of ProBlogger which we hope to roll out in the coming weeks. One of the things we have done with that redesign is really just taking a bit of a critical look at the colors that we use. While we have evolved our color scheme on ProBlogger, there is going to be some new element on that front. We want to keep the color scheme as simple as possible and choose maybe a couple of colors, maybe three at the most. I think most designers that I talked to say, “You know you really want to pull back and not have too many colors and particularly focus on a feature color or maybe two at the most.” 

The same is true with fonts, you do not want too many different fonts on your site, one or two is probably enough, three at an absolute stretch and then you might want to use the styling of those fonts to highlight different things so rather than getting a new font in maybe just bold the font that you are using. You do not want to go too crazy with too many visual styles when it comes to fonts. 

The other thing that really comes across in most of the things that I have already said is you want consistency. You want consistency across your blog so when people come to different pages on your blog they feel like they are in the same site, your logo, your styling, the fonts you use, the colors that you use. Now, I am not a blog designer and this is probably reflected in the tips that I have given you, but I am going to link to some further reading that you can do in today’s show notes that will hopefully help you and send you off to some blog designers that I really know and respect.

I have given you four different things you can do today on your blog: to tackle your sidebar, to tackle your navigation area, to tackle calls to action, and maybe to give yourself a complete overhaul. You might want to choose one of those things to do today or it might be something else that relates to blog design. If you are feeling a little bit convinced today that your blog design needs a spring-clean or an overhaul, I really want to encourage you to get it off your someday list and put it on your today list.

I really want to encourage you to tell us what you’re going to do with that #TodayNotSomeday over on Twitter or Instagram. This is really going on for Instagram. I would love to see some before and after shots of the things that you tackled or you can show us and tell us in the show notes today at problogger.com/podcast/71 where I will have some further reading for you. You will also see some information there from our sponsor, Edgar, who does have an offer at the moment for you. Edgar is a tool that I use for my social media, particularly to highlight some of the evergreen content in my archives. I realized a few years ago that I was doing the same tweets over and over again to some of those key posts on my site.

I wanted to highlight those old posts that I have that are evergreen, but I just kept doing the same tweets over and over again, and I realize that I needed a tool that would do that work for me. Edgar is that tool. You can check them out at meetedgar.com/problogger for the little deal that they have got running for you at the moment to give you a free trial of their service. We will have some more information on the show notes as well.

I really look forward to seeing what you do today and to checking out the new design elements and some of the work that you do on this particular challenge today. Do let us know how you go in the comments or over on Twitter. I am @problogger on twitter and love to see feedback on the podcast today. I will chat with you in episode 72 of the ProBlogger podcast in the next couple of days.

How will you spring clean your blog design? I’d love to hear about what you decide to do to refresh your blog in the comments below (feel free to include pictures).

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 5 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. Part 2 was about why you should sell a product on your blog (and how to do it). Part 3 was about how to increase your subscriber numbers for your email list. Part 4 was about how to get readers excited to join and stay on your email list.

The focus of today’s episode is how to use auto responders to drive traffic and profit with 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:

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 at problogger.com/podcast/70, where you’ll also find some information about our show’s sponsor, Edgar. You can find more information from Edgar at meetedgar.com/problogger. It is a tool that I’ve used really successfully over the last year. This brought a lot of life to my social media strategy and I’ll talk more about that at the end of this podcast, but for now, let’s get into today’s show.

Today, we’re going to talk about autoresponders as part of our series of things that you can do today, invest a little time in today that will pay off for the long term on your blog. An autoresponder certainly fits into that case. Autoresponders are tools that you really do need to spend a little bit of time investing in in the day to day when you’re setting them up, but they actually become quite passive. Once you set them up, they continue to work for you for as long as you allow them to continue to run.

In the last two episodes of this year’s podcast, episode 68 and 69, we’ve talked about email. Episode 68 was about setting up an email list and optimizing the number of sign-ups that you get to that list. Episode 69, we were talking about opt-ins and lead generator options, creating some interval way to get subscribers.

Today, I want to talk about how to actually deliver some content through that. One of the ways that you can get content out to these subscribers is through an autoresponder. I don’t want to spend a whole heap of time talking about what an autoresponder is because I’ve written about this previously, I know many of you already understand that. I will put some links in today’s show notes to give you some basic information on them.

Really quickly, an autoresponder is a tool that most email service providers do offer. They often go by different names, though, so on Mailchimp, they talk about them as automation workflows. AWeber just recently changed to talking about them as campaigns. An autoresponder is really just a sequence of emails that you set up ahead of time that will be sent to anyone who subscribes to your list. There are more complicated ways that you can do that, but at its most simple, you set up a series of emails to go out at predetermined intervals to a user who subscribes to your list. That’s the most simple way of explaining it.

Once someone subscribes today, they’ll get asked to confirm their subscription and on doing that they set off a chain of emails and you can separate those emails by a certain amount of days. Every seven days or every 30 days, or you might do different amounts of time between different emails. You could do them daily if you want. I’ll talk about some of the alternatives of timing later.

What you put in these emails will depend upon your goals. I’m going to give you some suggestions on the types of content you might want to use. The great thing about an autoresponder is that while they take some time to set up—you’re going to need to write the emails and put them into the autoresponder queue—they continue to be sent out to your subscribers forever. For as long as you leave those emails in the queue.

I know the emails that I put into my autoresponder several years ago have been sent out every day since to new subscribers who are at different stages of the sequence. It really does pay off, it’s a very powerful tool. Some of the benefits you probably already are hearing and thinking about as you’re listening to me talk, but let me just run through just a few, a handful of benefits.

Firstly, they’re great at helping your new subscribers, people who don’t really know much about you. It helps them to get on board with what you’re on about. You can use an autoresponder sequence to help people to understand who you are. To show them that you’ve got something valuable to say, to build some credibility with your audience, to help them to understand your site and help them to get engaged with your site.

They’re also really good for keeping your list warm. I think I mentioned this in a couple of episodes ago that there’s no point in having an email list, collecting emails unless you’re communicating with them. If you don’t communicate with them regularly, they go cold and they forget that they’ve subscribed, and they wonder who you are and why you’re sending them emails when you do send them. An autoresponder, setting up a sequence of emails can take a little bit of the pressure off of having to always be emailing your list to keep them warm. You can keep them warm by setting up a sequence of emails ahead of time.

Of course, they’re really great for driving traffic to your blog which is something as bloggers we’re interested in. They’re also great for helping you to build relationships with your readers. Helping them to feel like they know, like, and trust you, but they’re also great for sales. If you have a product to sell—we’ve talked about that recently on the podcast, too—or a service to offer, they can help to make those sales to ultimately build your brand.

Let’s talk a little bit about the types of emails that you might want to set up in your autoresponder. This will partly depend upon your goals. I would encourage you to think really carefully about what it is that you’re trying to achieve with your blog. But if you’re clear on that, hopefully, you’ll begin to already have some ideas about things that you could do in your autoresponder.

Some bloggers set up multiple autoresponders and I’m not going to talk about that today. That’s getting a little bit more complicated. Most bloggers have what I would describe as a general autoresponder that all new subscribers get into the queue often. For the sake of this podcast, that’s what I’m going to be talking about today. We may do another podcast in future episodes that are a little bit more advanced. A typical autoresponder sequence, that is something that you’re going to send to all of your new subscribers will probably have some of these types of emails in the sequence

Firstly, you probably always want to have some kind of a welcome email or you may actually have a series of welcome emails that take subscribers through different parts of your site. A typical welcome email might tell your subscribers who you are and what you do, what your site’s about, maybe share your story in some way. You probably don’t want to put a whole heap in that first one, you don’t want to overwhelm them. Really it’s about building that relationship with your readers.

I sometimes find adding a story in there can work quite well if you write in that personal tone. For example, on Digital Photography School, my welcome email is not a story because it’s not a personally branded site. Rather it takes my readers through the site and actually introduces them to the fact that we’ve got a forum, and we’ve got some social media accounts, and talks about what they’re going to get from being a subscriber.

Another thing that’s often really good to include in one of your emails as well, actually say, “You’re going to hear from us on a weekly basis,” or, “You’re going to hear once a month.” Actually give them some expectation on what they’re going to get which helps to build some anticipation of your next email. Your welcome email should be part of that autoresponder.

Some other types of things you might want to include might be highlighting some of your evergreen contents. On our Digital Photography School autoresponder, we have a series of emails that go out, I think they go out every 30 or so days, that introduce our subscribers to some of our content in our archives that they would’ve missed. They’ve just come on as a subscriber, they haven’t traveled with us for the years that we’ve been creating content and so introduces them to some of the themes of the site.

We have an email that goes out, I think it’s in the first few weeks that they’ve been a subscriber, that basically gives them the best of content on the topic of composition. They get introduced to a whole heap of different articles that are in our archives. Articles that I chose because they performed well in the past and they have really good information. It’s basically a list of those best articles. You can highlight your best evergreen content.

This serves a couple of purposes. One, it drives traffic. I know for a fact that some of those articles get traffic every single day from people getting that particular email but also shows your readers that you’ve got a lot of content in your archives, that perhaps you’re a credible source of information and someone to pay attention to can really impress them.

Another thing you might want to do which is a little bit different to that but still taps into some of that evergreen content you might have in your archives is to actually instead of sending out a list of links, you might actually take one of your old best posts and put it in the email itself. Some people really appreciate not having to click links and go and visit your site. If you’ve got a really good article that you’ve already written, perhaps not an overly long one, you could actually put a copy of that in the email itself and actually use that as content for your subscriber. They’re types of emails that I would be popping into a sequence and you might have once a month an ever-growing article that goes out.

Another type of email you might want to include perhaps in the early stages of an email sequence is an email that introduces your subscribers to your social media presence and what you do in the different social media networks that you’re involved in. To try and get that secondary point of connection with your subscribers.

Another thing that we do in our sequence of emails on Digital Photography School is to send out an invitation to participate in a survey. Now we don’t do this until they’ve been subscribed for about three months. We send out just a really short email as part of the sequence that thanks them for being a subscriber but then invites them to take this survey so we can understand who they are a bit more.

This does a couple of things. One, it shows our subscribers that we’re interested in them and that we base our content upon their feedback. Two, this survey is just golden information. It has six or seven different questions in it. Some of them are gathering a bit of demographic information, where our subscribers are, what level of photographer they’re at, that type of information. There’s an open-ended question in that survey that asks them what their problems are, what their questions are, and what they like us to write content on. The information that they give us in that survey is gold. If we ever run out of things to write about, we go into our survey and just look at the questions people ask in that particular survey response.

Another type of email that you might want to consider adding into your sequence is pointing people to some sort of a community activity. If you have a blog post that just generates really good discussion, you might want to point people to that, or if you have a forum area. You might want to have an email in your sequence that just points people to the forum and it encourages them to sign up to that. Sending people to community’s really great because it builds social proof and it shows people that you have other readers. It’s not just them that you’re talking to but there’s this whole community there and that can be a very powerful thing.

Other types of emails that you might want to send would be more sales-related ones. If you have a product that you sell, an ebook or a course, or a physical product, you could actually build into your autoresponder sequence an email that offers that product at a discount or that promotes that product in some way. This is effectively like doing a little mini launch of your product every day forever. Just say you have that set up 60 days after someone becomes a subscriber, it might be the fifth email that they get in the sequence. They’re warmed up, they’ve been seeing some of your evergreen content, they feel welcomed, they’ve engaged in the community on your blog, and then you send them a coupon code to your ebook and they get that sort of 60 days in.

If you’re getting subscribers every day to your newsletter, that means every day someone’s getting that offer made to them. You’ll find, over time, that the sales that you get from those types of sales emails actually do add up quite a bit. I know that every day someone’s getting an offer through an autoresponder email that I set up years ago on my blogs and it’s paying off today.

You could do a similar thing with an affiliate promotion. You might want to promote somebody else’s product as an affiliate. You might want to do a deal with that particular person, say there’s someone else, another blogger in your niche who has an ebook. Ask them if they’d be willing for you to send out a coupon code to your subscribers as part of your autoresponder sequence. You just need to make sure that that coupon code is valid forever because people are going to continue to get that email for a long time.

There’s a whole heap of other things that you could do as part of an email sequence. You could set up emails that are case studies that are results of research that you’ve done, all kinds of stuff. Pretty much any kind of blog post that you’ve written you could repurpose that into an autoresponder email.

A few other tips that you might want to think through as you think about the types of content to put into your autoresponder sequence. Firstly, the content really needs to be evergreen. People are going to continue to get that email for as long as you keep it in your sequence. If you’ve got something that’s more news-related or more timely that something is going to date, you probably don’t want to include that as an autoresponder email. You might want to send that out as a single one-off email to your whole list or a segment of your list.

Ultimately, your autoresponder needs to be evergreen and it needs to focus upon your reader and their needs. While you might want to have lots of sales emails as part of your autoresponder, people aren’t going to respond very well to those sales emails if they don’t feel like they’re getting some value from you and the other emails that you send. You want to get the balance right between selling and delivering real value to your particular readers. This really comes down to understanding who your readers are, what their problems are, and delivering content in your email that’s going to take people on a journey and bring about change in their life in some ways.

A simple exercise that you might want to do is to actually identify the change that you’re trying to bring to your subscribers and actually break down how to bring that change. I’ve used this example before but the change I’m trying to bring on Digital Photography School is I want to give my readers creative control of their cameras. I want to get them out of automatic mode and to have full control of their cameras. The emails that we send as part of our autoresponder try to help our readers to achieve that outcome. We send them emails on composition, we send them emails on how to get creative control of their cameras and how to understand exposure, how to hold their camera.

We actually take our readers on a journey, so hopefully, by the end of them being subscribed to our newsletter, they’re actually going to learn photography. If they do that, they’re going to be much more open to those sales-type emails that we will send from time to time in the mix. Think about the change you’re trying to bring and map out a sequence of emails that are going to help to bring that about.

The other thing that you might want to think about is the state that your readers are in as they view you. How do they actually see you when they subscribe to your email? The chances are that when someone subscribes to your email list, they might be kind of interested in your topic but they may not know who you are. They might be even suspicious about your intentions, they might be unsure about whether you’re someone that they should be listening to. They might be unsure about how to use your site, they may be unaware of your past history, the past content that you’ve created.

Actually put yourself in the shoes of a subscriber and the type of suspicions or the type of questions, the type of view that they have of you. Actually, try and move people along not only in the topic that you’re writing about but the state and their view of you. You want to take people from being maybe a bit suspicious and standoff-ish of you to being someone who actually knows who you are. Someone who likes you, someone who trusts you, someone who’s a customer of you, someone who’s an evangelist for you.

That’s ultimately where we want to take people. How could you design a sequence of emails that actually helps them along in that journey of feeling closer to you? If people do business with people that they know, like, and trust, how could your email sequence move people along that?

What I’m trying to get you to think through here is your first email, probably you don’t want to come across as too salesy. You want it to be something more about building trust, building credibility. Then your next emails, maybe it’s more introducing them to the type of things that you’ve got on your site. Helping them to understand how to use the site.

Again, this builds trust and likeability. It’s about just trying to lead your readers along that journey and not going too fast with the emails that you send. Now, there are different approaches to this and I’ve heard other people say that they just start with the sales email and it works for them. I’m a little bit more gentle with the type of emails that I send.

The last thing I want to briefly touch on is how often should you schedule emails. I get that question a lot and what other emails should you be sending. I’ve already mentioned that autoresponders are just one type of email that you can send. The other type again gets called different things with different email service providers, but AWeber calls them broadcasts. These are where you manually set up an email to go to your full list or a segment of it. You may just want to target particular types of people who may be subscribed at a certain time or that have clicked on previous links, but that’s getting a little bit more complicated. Here, these are emails that you send out to your whole list, let’s just say.

For me at Digital Photography School, once we have an autoresponder set up, we also send out a weekly newsletter. These are things that I manually set up every Thursday and send to our whole list. These have our latest blog posts and other timely updates. Again, sometimes it’s got evergreen content in it but this is not an email that I want to send out again and again and again, I just want to send it out once to my list.

Now I also send out other emails when we launch a product. This is another type of email that I send out to my list. You can already see here, I’ve got our newsletter, I’ve got product launches when we do a new product, and then I’ve got autoresponders. You want to get the balance right here between keeping your list warm, sending out regular emails, and not overwhelming your list with too many emails.

The different tools will help you in spreading your emails out a little bit, so AWeber, who we use on Digital Photography School, I send out our broadcasts, our newsletters on Thursdays. It goes out the same time every week. I send out product announcement type emails always on Tuesdays, so I know there’s a couple of days. Then our autoresponders, AWeber allows you to choose which day of the week that they can be delivered on.

I block out Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday because I don’t want to be sending out emails three days in a row. I don’t want my readers going, “This guy just keeps sending me emails.” Typically, those autoresponder emails usually go out sometimes on Mondays but usually Saturday, Sunday, or Friday. Just to spread them out a little bit. Use those types of tools and think about how often am I going to be sending out the extra emails that are not part of the autoresponder.

I would encourage you to try and send out emails at least every 30 days just to keep your list warm, but not too much more than twice a week. You probably really don’t want to go more than twice a week. It may be that if you’re doing a big product launch, you may actually want to pause your autoresponder and some of the tools will allow you to do that if you feel like you’re going to be sending out a couple of emails in a week about a product launch. You probably don’t want to be sending out autoresponders during that week as well. The different tools will allow you to do that.

The other thing that you might want to consider is using an autoresponder as part of an opt-in. Yesterday, in the last episode, we talked about using opt-ins, so getting people to subscribe to your list by giving them a free ebook. One of the alternatives that you could give them is a free seven-day course that you deliver via an autoresponder. This is a really effective way of getting people not only onto your list but getting them engaged with your emails which is something I talked about in the last episode.

If you’re a photography site like us, you might set up an opt-in where readers who subscribe to you get the seven days of emails. Just short seven emails that are just really good basic tips on how to use a camera. This is actually something we’re considering doing for Digital Photography School. Then at the end of the seven days, they don’t get daily emails after that because they might just be a bit overwhelming but you might then set up every 30 days they get just an extra tip that continues to keep them engaged in some way.

My challenge today is for you to set up an autoresponder, to get it off your someday list, and to actually get it on to your today list. If you don’t have an autoresponder yet, map out a sequence of emails. You may only want to map out the first 5 or 10 emails; don’t go too far. You can add to your autoresponder later by adding in extra emails to it and I would encourage you to do that.

If you’ve already got an autoresponder, my challenge to you today is to do a bit of an audit of it. Is it up to date? Are you sending out emails that are dated, that look bad, or that have out of date of information? Are those emails converting? Maybe dig into your stats and actually work out which are the ones that get all the clicks, which are the ones that generate sales, and which are the ones that maybe people are unsubscribing after they get it. That’s a really good one to check out. If you’ve already got an autoresponder, should you be adding some new emails into it? Should you be extending that in some way?

These are the types of things that are often on people’s someday list. Whether you’re sending out for the first time or whether you are doing an audit of your existing autoresponder, I challenge you, today you spend on your autoresponder.

Just let me finish this story. A few years ago, I was out on a walk and I realized I’d let my autoresponder list. I hadn’t really looked at it for a while. I’d set up about 12 emails in my list and those 12 emails went out over about a nine-month period. New subscribers were getting these autoresponders for about nine months and then there were no more autoresponders going out. They were just then, at that point, getting newsletters.

I was like, “That’s okay on some levels, I send out newsletters every week so my readers will be feeling engaged but maybe I should be adding in a few more emails.” I came home for my list and I decided to add to my autoresponder list by just simply doing an offer to my readers on one of my ebooks. I added that extra email to my autoresponder. Over the next week that email began to go out to my readers.

I actually looked at the results of that one email that I sent. It took me an hour, maybe an hour-and-a-half to write the email and to add it to the autoresponder. That one email generated tens of thousands of dollars over the next 12 months. It was a small thing that I did today, or I did on that day, that continued to pay off over the long haul.

What are you going to do today that’s going to get something off your someday list and on to your today list? I would love to hear what you are going to do as a result of this podcast. You can let us know on Twitter or on Instagram if you want to do it visually using the hashtag #TodayNotSomeday. This is the hashtag we’re using for this series of podcasts and there’s been some great engagement on it already, #TodayNotSomeday. The other place that you can let us know what action you’re going to take (and this series is all about action), is on our show notes at problogger.com/podcast/70, where you can leave a comment and encourage your fellow listeners with the things that you are doing today, not someday.

Also on today’s show notes, you will find a little bit of information about our sponsor of this series, Edgar. You can find more information on them at meetedgar.com/problogger where they’ve got a great little offer for ProBlogger podcast listeners to get a free month trial of this tool that I’ve been using since January of this year, that really has changed the way that I’ve approached social media.

I’ve seen so much more engagement on my Twitter accounts, particularly on both the ProBlogger Twitter account and also the Digital Photography School one where I’ve been using Edgar. I’m also using it to drive one of my Facebook pages and it’s saved me so much time by using it. You can check that out at meetedgar.com/problogger and there’ll be a bit of information on today’s show notes as well.

I look forward to chatting with you in the next episode of the ProBlogger podcast episode 71.

Do you already have an autoresponder? Will you start one today? I’d love to hear about what you decide to set up for your blog and how it works for 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.

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 4 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. Part 2 was about why you should sell a product on your blog (and how to dot it). Part 3 was about how to get people to sign up onto your email list.

The focus of today’s episode is about how to create the most effective ‘opt-in’, or ‘lead magnet’ for your blog, or if you already have one, how to make it even more powerful. An opt-in is a free special offer that you can give to people who join your email list. Having an opt-in is one of the most significant things you can to do to increase your subscriber numbers and grow your business.

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:

These tools are great and I use them for my blogs:

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 it at meetedgar.com/problogger.

It’s been great to see so many people on Twitter already sharing what they are working on to get off their Someday List. You can find today’s show notes at problogger.com/podcast/69 where you also find a little bit of information about Edgar—our show’s sponsor. Edgar is a great social media tool that has really revolutionized the way that I do social media. I’ve included some more information on how I use Edgar in today’s show notes. Without further ado, let’s get into today’s show.

In episode 68, I talked a lot about email and getting people on to your email list. My challenge was to either start an email list or to do a bit of an order as to how you get people to sign up for it. As part of that episode, I did mention that I was going to be talking later in the series about creating an opt-in or a lead magnet. Something that you can give away to potential subscribers to get them to subscribe for your blog and that’s what today’s show is all about.

As I said, these are sometimes called lead magnets or opt-ins and you’ve probably seen them on many blogs before. There’s lots of different types and I’m going to run through a whole heap of options that you’ve got to create one today and give you some tips on how to do that. This is where you do give something away as an incentive for someone else to give you their email address to get on your list. I talked to you in episode 68, the last episode, about why email is so important. I’m not going to go over that again today except to say that this is a strategy that you really should seriously consider and that’s also something that I know for a fact that many bloggers put off doing. It is something that is fairly and squarely on many bloggers, if not most bloggers’ Someday List. I know that for a fact because I’ve had it on my Someday List for quite some time.

Only recently have I started using an opt-in on Digital Photography School—my main blog. We’ve been lucky that on Digital Photography School and ProBlogger we get fairly healthy numbers of subscribers to our list through the welcome mat that I’ve talked about yesterday and pop-ups. But I know that having an opt-in would increase the amount of subscribers that we get and so I put it high on our agenda this year that we need to get it off our Someday List. I’m really grateful for my team who got that off the list this year for Digital Photography School but it’s not off the list for ProBlogger and that’s something that we are working on at the moment. I’ll talk a little bit more about that later. It’s something I’m getting off my Someday List and so that’s why I want to talk about it today.

Now, before I get into the tips, I do want to talk to those of you who already have an opt-in list. You’re not off the hook. I want to ask you a question today too, “Is it time for you to create another one?” Actually, I think it is probably really useful to have multiple opt-ins at your disposal. Perhaps it’s time to create something that’s more up-to-date or maybe it’s time to create a second opt-in that you could use alongside your first that might attract a different type of person. Something that you could potentially use on a certain category on your blog or even on a certain post that’s a hot post. It’s also something that you can give away to your current subscribers to, I guess, get a bit of goodwill going and to warm up your list. If you already have one, this episode is for you too.

Let’s talk a little bit about why you should create an opt-in list. Obviously, the biggest reason is it gets people on your list. It does increase the percentage of our people who subscribe to your list. First, on readers who come along, see something for free that you’re giving away, and it gives them an incentive obviously to jump on the list, but I think there’s a whole heap more than a good opt-in can do. It can really show your new subscribers that you know what you’re talking about.

If you give them something that actually changes their life, that actually solves their problem for them, and that shows that you’re a credible source of information, it can show people that you know what you’re talking about. But also, it builds trust, builds reciprocity—I struggle with that word—and goodwill with your new subscribers. It also shows your subscribers that you care about them. If you’ve gone to the effort of creating something for free for them then I guess that makes an impression upon people.

The last thing I think that a good opt-in can do is that it can lead people closer to becoming a customer. If you’ve got something to sell which is what we talked about a couple of episodes ago, creating a product. If you’ve created that product, a good opt-in will lead people towards purchasing that product, partly because you’ve shown them that you know what you’re talking about, you’ve built relationships, you’ve built trust but also because you may actually grow desire for your product. You may grow interest in your product through your opt-in. I think it’s really useful to do but how do you do it?

I want to talk about how to deliver it first. On what format should your opt-in be? What form should it take? The most common one that I see bloggers are using is what I would call a written opt-in, a PDF. Often you see people giving away an eBook or a report or a guide or a white paper or maybe something in printout, a cheat sheet or a checklist or a template or a sample, like a sample contract. The list could go on and on. This is probably a good starting place because written content, well, you don’t need to produce a video, you don’t need to put together a course or anything like that. You just open a word document and you start writing. If you want to, you could export that word document as a PDF. I would encourage you to get it designed and make it look a little bit prettier and to integrate it with your brand a bit more but a written PDF might be a good starting place if you are looking at creating a first opt-in.

There are plenty of other options as well. You could do something that’s more visual. Again, this may be delivered as a PDF but maybe you create a mind map or a process or a blueprint or an infographic that you give away. Something that’s really useful that’s more visual content. Your giveaway might be a video, maybe it’s a single talking head video where you talk subscribers through a process or maybe it’s a series of videos that you deliver as a mini course.

Similarly, you could use audio giving away a free podcast. This is actually something that I did in the early days of ProBlogger. I recorded an interview with Pat Flynn—it may have been one of the first interviews that he ever did. I recorded this story of Pat talking to my subscribers and I gave that away to my newsletter subscribers. This is years and years ago now. It was also good for Pat because I linked to that so anyone who subscribed to my newsletter suddenly was introduced to Pat and went to his side as well.

You could give away a test or a checkup tool. I’ve seen people use personality tests as a lead gen if that’s their topic. You could say, “You get to do this test and you get the result if you give us your email address.” You could create your opt-in as an email series, “Opt-in to our list and we will send you a weekly email with tips on how to do…” whatever it is that you teach. You could sell that as a course. You could give away a live webinar or a private Periscope or some kind of a live interaction. I’ve seen people give away 10-minute consultations with people who subscribe. You want to be a bit careful about that because you might get a thousand subscribers and not be able to deliver them but if you have a smaller readership that might be a useful way to get opt-in as well.

Maybe you want to give away some sort of membership area so a private Facebook group or an area on your blog that gets unlocked if they give you their email address that has premium content or a library of reports or articles. It might be that you want to give away some kind of software. I’ve seen people in the photography space giveaway lightroom presets. I’ve people in the Word Press space giveaway plugins for WordPress. Maybe you want to give away a chapter from an eBook that you’ve got, a paid product that you have, a sample chapter, or maybe you want to give away access to a service that you offer or a tool for a month of free trial of the service that you have.

All of these things are completely legitimate ways of getting the email from those first-time readers on your blog. All of them can work. I think you should consider all of them but here’s a question that I would ask you before you run away and create that eBook or that guide or that report or that piece of software. How can you give something away that incentivizes people to stay on your list and stay engaged? Most of the things that I’ve just given you as examples are single one-off incentives, “Give us your email we will give you an eBook.” The problem with that is that people will subscribe to get the free thing and they will then either unsubscribe because, “I don’t want to continue to hear from you.” Or they will become disengaged, “I got the eBook. I then filter those emails off or I just don’t look at them anymore.”

How can you create something that makes people look forward to your emails? Perhaps a better approach than just giving an eBook or a report or a one-off thing is to create something that is a series of things. Instead of giving an eBook or report, perhaps offer them a monthly eBook or a monthly report. It’s a bit more work but you’re going to get subscribers who not only give you the email address but they’re going to be looking forward to the next installment. Perhaps instead of giving a webinar offer a monthly webinar or a weekly one or whatever period that suits you and your time of availability. Instead of offering a single video, maybe offer a daily video for a week or once a month. Instead of giving away a preset or a plugin, offer a regular one.

Hopefully, you can see here that I’m pushing you to more work but I’m also pushing you to think a little bit more creatively about how to create an opt-in that keeps people engaged, keeps people subscribed. We’ve talked so far about what form your opt-in should take but what should it actually be about? What should it be? It’s all very well to say it’s going to be an eBook but what’s the eBook going to be about or what’s the course going to be about? What’s the series of things that you give away going to be about? I can’t give you the answer to this, but I can give you a few tips in thinking about what it should be about.

The first thing I’d encourage you to think through is creating your opt-in to solve a problem. I was on a great little Periscope recently with Zac from zachothustle.com. In his Periscope, he talked a little bit about opt-ins and there was this golden nugget in it that I have been thinking about ever since, since I’ve been creating my own opt-in for ProBlogger. He said that it needs to give people a quick win. Your opt-in should solve a problem in the next 10-15 minutes after they get it. It needs to solve a specific problem.

If you create an opt-in that solves a problem, it gives people a quick win. It gives them incentive to subscribe. It shows them that you deliver value that you solve problems. It makes them grateful to you. It’s the kind of thing that they will want to share with other people, but it doesn’t give away everything that you’ve got. At least something for you to sell or continue to deliver value on and gives them a reason to continue to deliver value on and gives them a reason to continue to stay subscribed and hopefully leads them towards making a further purchase from you or hiring you in some way.

This really means that you need to be able to solve a problem that your readers have. You need to understand who they are. I think this is a step back from making this decision about what your opt-in should be about. You really need to have done the exercise of trying to work who it is you’re trying to reach and understanding their problems and needs. Make your opt-in something that’s going to solve a felt need that they have. It’s not just a problem that they have that you know they have; it’s going to be a problem that they have a strong feeling about. It’s something that they have come to you hopefully with a problem that they are looking for a solution on.

Another way to kind of unpack this is, “What’s the most common question that you’re asked by your readers?” I know every time I do a Q&A with ProBlogger readers; I get five or six of the same questions and that gives me a hint as to what I could be creating an opt-in about. These are things that the people are coming looking for answers on. I can actually give them an answer and it doesn’t take me a whole heap of time to create that. Create something that solves a specific need. It doesn’t need to be big. It doesn’t need to solve every problem they have. It just needs to be something that creates a quick win for them.

Again, example, I saw recently one photographer on his blog offered a free guide to help people feel comfortable in front of the camera. When I talked to this photographer, he said he had realized that one of the biggest anxieties that people had when they hire a photographer is that they are just going to feel awkward in front of the camera. He created this little guide. It was just a few pages long and had a bit of a checklist of things that you can do to make yourself feel comfortable. It worked really well for his audience when I talked to him about it. He said he found that it really showed his clients that he knew what their pain point was, and it helped them to feel comfortable just that he knew that.

The other benefit of it is when they actually came to photoshoots with him, they came more relaxed because they’d read his book and it made his job easier as well. It showed that he understood them. It helped them to overcome something that they were feeling—that they have pain and that anxiety around—and actually improved the service that he could offer. In the end, it led to better photos which helped satisfy his customers as well.

What you choose to create your opt-in on is really up to you. I can’t give you the answer to that, but it needs to have some kind of value to your potential subscribers. If it can lead them to your ultimate goal of them buying your product or staying engaged, then you are really on to a good thing.

The next thing you really need to think through here is how you’re going to create it. Again, this is something that I can’t really give you the answer to because it’s going to depend upon what type of product you create but what I would say—having created a couple of my own—is to make it a bite size. I have seen bloggers make their opt-in so big and complicated that they never actually get it done and they spent so much time on their opt-in that they’ve got no energy left to create a product to sell or to create a content on their blog. Make it bite size, make it something that you can achieve.

Another thing I would say, and I mentioned this a little bit earlier is to make it look good. It can be worth getting a little bit of help with this. Use a service like 99Designs or even Fiverr to just get a simple but clean design that fits with your brand. You want it to have the same sort of colors as your blog, use your logo where you can. Ultimately, it’s going to be useful and this is something that you just need to have front of mind all the time.

Once you’ve created it, then it’s really about trying to get it in front of your subscribers. A lot of the stuff that I covered in the last episode, in episode 68, will be useful to you here. You can use a number of tools. One is Leadpages, which I’ll link to in our show notes; SumoMe, as I mentioned in episode 68. Both of these are good tools for getting your opt-in in front of people. You can then be promoting it on your social media accounts. This is something that you probably if you’re using a tool like Edgar should be in your library and that you should have scheduled to be promoted fairly regularly to your social media followers.

You should be promoting your opt-in in your content particularly any content that related to the opt-in itself. If you have a post on your blog that relates to the topic of your opt-in, you should be promoting that opt-in in all those posts. Any time you mention your newsletter, you should be promoting that opt-in as well. You should—if you’ve got the budget—consider advertising your opt-in as well. I know not everyone who listens to this podcast has the budget for that but if you are advertising on Facebook or on Twitter or some other social media, I would really highly recommend that you promote that opt-in through that advertising.

I’ve kind of skimmed over the surface, a whole heap today. I have a whole heap more reading for you and links to some of those tools that I mentioned in today’s show notes. But here’s the challenge that I want to give you today: What opt-in will you be creating? What opt-in are you going to create that is going to help increase the subscriber numbers for your blog in the coming months and in 2016 as we approach this new year? It does take work. I’m not saying this is easy. This does take work but it’s one of those things that once you’ve completed this, and once you’ve got this new little asset, it will continue to work for you in the months and years ahead. What opt-in will you be creating? For those of you who have already got one, what’s your next opt-in going to be?

I would love to hear what your opt-in is going to be. You can do it in one of two ways. One, you could go to our show notes at problogger.com/podcast/69. I almost forgot what episode I was on or you can use the hashtag #todaynotsomeday on Twitter or on Instagram to tell us, tell me, but also tell others who are doing this challenge, what opt-in you have created. I would love to see people sharing their ideas.

I want to commit to you that this is a challenge that I’m working on right now. I’ve just written a six-part giveaway for ProBlogger that I’m going to give away in the New Year. I’m not going to tell you exactly what it’s about yet, but it is answering one of those most common questions that I get asked all the time on ProBlogger. It gives you a whole heap of ideas that’s going to be really useful. I am going to send it out every month for six months. It’s a type of thing that I know people are going to find valuable and they are going to look for every month after they sign up.

This is something I’m working on and as it gets closer to finishing, I will share on the hashtag what it is and share that back with you here on the podcast as well. I will report back to you on how I’m progressing with it, but I really would love to hear what you’re working on as well. If you’re going to share some ideas, hopefully, you’ll get some ideas of other people who are leaving comments and using that hashtag too.

Thanks for listening to today’s podcast. Again, you can find today’s show notes at problogger.com/podcast/69. As a special thanks to Edgar who is the sponsor for this series of podcasts that we are doing, you can find that more information on them and the great tool that they offer and how I used it in today’s show notes. Also, check out meetedgar.com/ProBlogger for the offer that they have for you as ProBlogger podcast listeners. Thanks for listening. I’ll chat with you in episode 70 of this ProBlogger podcast.

What opt-in are you going to create to increase your blog subscriber numbers?

If you already have an opt-in, how are you going to improve it? If you’re creating a new one, what will it be?

I’d love to hear from you about what you’re working on in the comments below, or on Twitter and Instagram using the hashtag #TodayNotSomeday.

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 the second 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. Part 2 was about why you should sell a product on your blog (and how to dot it).

The focus of today’s episode is about why and how you should have a good system to allow people to subscribe to your email list. I have spent lots of time over the years experimenting with different ways to let readers subscribe across my blogs. I share the technique I use that increased my email list subscribers by over 100% so you can use it 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:

The great thing about SumoMe is that:

I’ve seen between 80%-1000% increases in subscribers on every site I’ve tested it on.

Check out the increases in subscribers I’ve seen to a couple of my sites. First Digital Photography School.

Next – here’s the increase in subscribers here on the ProBlogger Podcast show notes page.

My wife even saw a 1000% increase in her subscribers on her blog!

The feature I specifically mention working very well for me on my blogs (and being responsible for these increases in subscribers) is the ‘Welcome Mat’. SumoMe has a special offer for ProBlogger readers, a free month of ‘Welcome Mat Pro’, which is pretty amazing! Access the special offer here. 

Update: check out Part 3 which continues the theme of growing your subscriber numbers by creating an opt-in for your blog.

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 it at meetedgar.com/problogger.

As promised in today’s podcast – here’s a video of how I use it:

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

Today is the third part of an ongoing series that we’ve got running on this podcast for the month of December where we’re looking at things that you can do on your blog today that are going to pay off for the future of your blog. These are 10 things that often we put off because they do take a little bit of work but we really shouldn’t be putting off these things because they have the potential to pay off tomorrow and the next week and for months and years to come.

You can go back and listen to the introduction of this series in episode 66, and in the last episode, episode 67, you can listen to the first challenge that I gave to create a product. I have seen a few of you already sharing on Twitter using the #todaynotsomeday, the products that you’ve decided to create. Good on you for doing it. I look forward to seeing more of your hash tagged tweets and Instagram.

I want to thank Edgar for sponsoring this podcast series. Edgar is a tool that I use to help me manage my social media and make the tweets and the Facebook updates that I do today pay off for the future as well. You can check them out @meetedgar.com/problogger.

If there’s one challenge that I would prioritize overall the others in this series, it is today’s. It is all about getting people to subscribe to your email list. Whether you’ve got one or not, this is relevant for you because it is something that you need to pay attention to when you first set up your email list but also pay attention to over time. I’m going to give you some real and practical tips that you can do today to increase the percentage of people coming to your blog that end up signing for your email list.

First, I want to talk a little bit about the why of setting up an email list. I first set up an email list on my blogs back in 2007 when I started Digital Photography School which is my main blog today. At that time, bloggers were all trying to get people to subscribe to their RSS feeds. Huge, big, orange buttons were being plastered all over blogs everywhere, “Subscribe to my feed. Subscribe to my feed.” It was going to be the email killer–RSS was. It was being touted as the biggest technology to hit the internet and whilst it still exists today, it’s not really anywhere near as big as what everyone thought it would be.

The reason I started an email list which was quite unusual for a blogger back then was because of my dad. My dad was an aspiring photographer and he wanted to subscribe to my Digital Photography School blog, but he just did not understand RSS. I went over to his house, I set up an RSS feed reader for him and said, “Dad, all you need to do is check this piece of software every day and it will give you the latest posts on the blog.” Of course, I went back two weeks later, and he hadn’t looked at the RSS reader at all. The only thing he used the web for really was email and so I decided I am going to set up a way for him to subscribe to my blog using email.

I set up this little newsletter. I said, “I’ll send out a weekly email of just our latest posts, just the list of links to our latest posts.” I thought, “Whilst I’m doing this for my dad maybe I should just publicise it on the blog,” and so I put it up on the subscribe page of my blog as a secondary way to subscribe to the blog. I had no idea that what I was doing there was probably the best thing I’ve ever done on my blogs. Today, hardly anyone subscribes to our RSS feed. There are a few thousand people who subscribe probably in those early days but today we have close to 900,000 email subscribers. Thank you, dad! I really appreciate your lack of technological know-how because you changed my blog.

So, why email? I’ve kind of answered this already. It’s a very familiar and used everyday technology. Most people check their email every day. While there have been many technologies over the years that was supposed to kill email, RSS being one of it, Facebook being another, and I even remember an article in the old days about how Myspace was going to kill email, most of them have come and gone or at least have not killed email. One of the things I love about email is that it pretty much gets through all the time to the people who subscribe and who you send the email to. Occasionally, they do get filtered as spam but unlike things like Facebook, emails get through. Your Facebook updates get filtered in Facebook’s algorithm and increasingly I think we’ll see that on other social networks as well.

Another great thing about emails, it’s not temporary or fleeting like social updates can be. If you tweet now, five minutes later your tweet is highly unlikely to be seen by anyone. If you Facebook now, in a couple of hours’ time, it’s probably not going to be seen either. If I email right now, you will check your inbox for the next 24 hours or so and probably see it and perhaps even longer.

I like email because it drives a lot of traffic to our blog; it’s one of the highest referrers of traffic to Digital Photography School. It is fantastic for selling whether it be affiliate products or your own products that you would have developed yesterday as a result of the last podcast episode. We find that about 90%-95% of the sales of our eBooks and courses come from the emails we send even though we also update on our blog and social media.

Interestingly, I noticed that the AdSense ads that we run on our site were able to track which traffic makes the most and you guessed it, this traffic we send via our email list tends to convert better without AdSense ads than any other kind of traffic as well. Email is good for driving people to pretty much anything you want them to see whether it be a particular blog post or whether it be to a community area of your blog as well so you can use it to deepen reader engagement. Ultimately, it is just good for building a brand. If you send out regular, useful emails to your subscribers they are going to feel like they know you. If it’s good stuff that you are sending them, they will begin to like you and trust you which is good for you and the business that you’re building.

The keys though with using email well are rather three of them. Firstly, you want to keep your list warm which means that you need to send regular emails. If you just get subscribers but don’t send anything out people will forget that they have subscribed–so you need to keep your list warm. Number two you need to add value wherever you can and not just use it for selling. This is really a key in a lot of bloggers who have this list and they only ever use them to sell stuff. That’s a pretty fast way to annoy your subscribers. I guess the other key that I want to focus on in the rest of this podcast is that for an email list to work you need to get people on it. You need to get them to subscribe.

Here is my challenge for you today—it’s to do one or both of two things. Firstly, if you haven’t yet got an email list and I know every time I talk to a roomful of bloggers, over half the people in the room do not have one. If you are among them, please, please sign up with an email provider. I highly recommend one of two, there are others out there which are great as well, but I use Mailchimp and I use Aweber. I’ve got links in the show notes which give you little deals as well. Mailchimp will give you a $30 free credit if you sign up using our link and Aweber will give a 30-day free trial. You can get those in the show notes today. I am an affiliate for them, but I am also a paying user of both services and I use them in different ways on my different sites.

If you haven’t yet got an email list, please sign up for one of those providers or another one and get collecting emails. It’s so important that you do it even if your blog is brand new. Those early readers can be particularly powerful because they will have travelled the full journey with you so hook them in, get them subscribed in some way. Please, while I am talking about email providers, don’t just send your email newsletter from your Gmail account. That is going to get you in all kinds of bother and trouble. Use a service, invest a little. It doesn’t cost that much to get going with those sorts of services.

If you have already got an email list or if you have just gone away and signed up for a service and now have one, the challenge that I’ve got for you today is to think about the way you’re collecting emails and to I guess do a bit of an audit about how you are collecting emails and start thinking about how you could improve the way that you collect emails. There are a lot of different ways to get signups for your list and you will find that each will convert differently. It will partly depend on all kinds of factors. The calls to action that you use, the words and the visuals around your calls to action, the positioning of your calls to action on your site and the method of delivering those calls to action as well. There are all kinds of different ways of doing that but I want to suggest six or seven different things that you should be testing and you should be considering when getting those calls to action to subscribe to your email up on to your blog.

First, a few quick tips. I think it is always really helpful when you are trying to get subscribers in whatever method you choose to state the benefit of subscribing to your list. What will your subscribers get? Now, here I’m not just saying, “You will get an email every week.” That’s a fact. But what are they actually going to benefit from by subscribing? We have tested all kinds of benefits on our Digital Photography site. Things like, “You will take better photos if you subscribe. You will get creative control of your camera. You will develop confidence in your photography,” all kinds of benefits. They’re the type of the benefits that you should be putting around your calls to action—become a better whatever it might be that you are treating people to do. It’s really important that you test the different calls to action that you have. Think about the benefits of what it is that people are going to get when they subscribe.

Number two, try out some kind of an incentive to subscribe. Now, the benefits of subscribing on an incentive in and of themselves but you can also offer something free as an incentive to subscribe. I’ve long resisted doing this on my blogs, but I’ve also seen the benefits of it more recently of having something that people get when they subscribe. The reason I resisted for so long was that I had heard stories of people giving away free things to get the subscribers and then they get subscribers who don’t really convert because they’re not really interested in the list itself and what you’re going to provide in an ongoing way. But if you think carefully about the opt-in that you offer it can convert very well. I am not going to talk a whole heap about this in this particular episode because I am planning a future one on it, but it might be something that you consider working on as a result of today’s challenge.

A third area that you might want to think about testing particularly is the different colors and visuals that you use in your calls to action. One of the tests that I did in the early days of my blog was to test a variety of pictures around my calls to action. I had a design, I put together some really beautiful pop-up kind of calls to action. They’re really smooth designs. I was going to test them against each other, but I also decided to test one of my own.

Now, I am no designer and when I saw my pop-up next to the designers, I almost did not run my own test because I was embarrassed. My design was not as smooth, but it was a bit cleaner, it was a bit simpler, and probably was a bit ugly as well which may have caught people’s attention. I thought the designer’s pop-ups were going to win hands down when I tested them against each other and so I ran some split tests.

I had four versions of the pop-up showing every four rotations. You had one in four chances of seeing mine and one in four chances of seeing each of the other three from the designers. Of course, you know, mine one, it was 30% higher converting than the designers. It’s really important to test your designs. Test the different buttons on your pop-ups and your calls to action, test the different colors, test different photos, test photos versus icons, test bullet points, test the way your calls to action look. It can make a big, big difference.

I am going to give you some tools that will help you to test these types of things in a moment. Probably the number one thing that I would say has impacted the sign-up rate on my blogs is testing different methods of collecting the emails. This is getting into some sort of controversial areas now because people have different opinions on how aggressive you should be in collecting emails. But I want to put it out then that sometimes it is worth going a little bit beyond what you are comfortable with or what you think might be the best option to at least test to see how things work on your site. Let me tell you the story of how I began to do this.

Originally, I used to have my calls to action in a little box in my sidebar of my blog. This is on Digital Photography School in the early days just after dad convinced me to have an email newsletter. This little box just had a, “Put your email address here to get our newsletter,” type call to action. Not really well thought through. It got me 30 to 40 subscribers every day which I thought was amazing. I was like, “This is fantastic.” I could see that that was going to grow into the thousands of subscribers but after a year of doing that I decided to test using a pop-up that appeared on my site 30 seconds after people arrived. You have seen them I’m sure. You arrive on the site. The content kind of gets a little bit blacked out or opaque around the edges so you can still see the content and this pop-up invites you to subscribe.

The pop-up is an aggressive and intrusive way to try and get a subscriber. I was kind of worried when I first started using it that it was going to impact my traffic. I thought that my bounce rate would be affected, that people would view less pages per time on my site and that people would just get angry and go away and start abusing me. Here is what happened. Subscribers went up from 30-40 per day to 300-350 subscribers per day.

There is a pretty clear benefit of having a pop-up but what about the traffic. Well, the stats proved that traffic didn’t change at all. In fact, in the weeks that followed traffic went up because I was slowly sending my newsletters to more and more people. Bounce rate did not alter a single bit. All of those complaints that I thought I was going to get from my readers, I think I would probably get one every couple of months at the most. Things didn’t really change except my subscriber rate significantly rose.

I had my pop-up set so that it only ever showed to people once ever. I used a cookie that just said if they have seen it before do not show it again so it was not as aggressive as it could have been. I know a lot of people have pop-ups appear every time you arrive on their site even after you have subscribed but even at that rate of only showing the pop-up once ever it worked. For many years this was all I really used on Digital Photography School and my other blogs, a pop-up. In fact, I did not actually use it on ProBlogger for many years because I thought ProBlogger readers might get even more angry than Digital Photography School but I kind of regret that now because I would have seen significantly more subscribers over the years.

A pop-up tool is pretty easy to set up. If you sign up for Mailchimp or Aweber, they have a tool built in but there are some other tools available and I have tested a number of them over the last year. The one that we used today is SumoMe. I’ll have a link to an offer that they have got on at the moment in the show notes today. I will tell you about that in a moment but SumoMe do give you a variety of different methods of getting subscribers and I have tested a number of them.

Firstly, you can install a hello bar. A hello bar is the little strip that you see at the top of a site when you arrive at it and the strip kind of follows you down the page and you can use it for all kinds of things. You can use it as a call to action, to buy a product or you can put an invitation to subscribe and you can subscribe right in the hello bar. I don’t find that the hello bar converts at a really high rate, but it is a nice little thing to have as a secondary subscribing place on your site. You could use it in conjunction with any of the other methods that I am about to talk about.

Another option that you can use with SumoMe and some of the other suppliers that have these tools out there is what is called the exit pop-up. The exit pop-up is similar to the pop-up that I described before, in that it pops up and sort of blacks out the rest of the screen, but it happens only at the end of a visit. Rather than it happening as soon as someone arrives on your site or delayed by 10 or 20 or 30 seconds, you can have it show when someone’s cursor is about to close down the window so you can be confident at this point that they are about to leave your site and hopefully have had a good experience of it.

I tested the exit pop-up on ProBlogger, it was the first ever pop-up that I did put on to ProBlogger. Previous to using the exit pop-up, I had a reasonable subscriber rate from sidebar, invitations, the hello bar, and a couple of other spots on the site but when I used the exit pop-up, my subscriber numbers went up by 100%. Yup! I doubled my subscriber numbers overnight with that exit pop-up. Again, it is a little bit aggressive but perhaps not as aggressive as the greeting pop-up.

The other option that we have been testing moreover the last month or so on both ProBlogger and Digital Photography School and my wife’s blog and the podcast site because it’s working so well is what SumoMe calls the welcome mat. This is what we’re using if you go to any of my sites you will see it. Although if you have seen it before you would not see it again because we have it set that it shouldn’t show again. If you do want to see it, you can head to problogger.net or problogger.com/podcast but go there in an incognito browser and you should see it.

Basically, the welcome mat loads the content on your site and then pushes down that content and the welcome mat itself takes over the whole screen and in a fairly big font, you will see an invitation to subscribe. You can actually use the welcome mat for other purposes as well—to point people to a product or to introduce yourself or something else but we are using it largely to get subscribers. Again, it is a little bit more aggressive than some of the other options out there but the way that it operates is very smooth and quite elegant, I think. At least I think it’s more elegant than a pop-up and it converts better too.

On ProBlogger we have been testing it on the ProBlogger blog and we saw 100% increase from the exit pop-up which was already 100% increase from what we were previously doing so it was significantly better. I have been using the welcome mat over on Digital Photography School too and it is a 120% increase than our previous pop-up. I’ve been using it on my wife’s blog. She did not have a pop-up previously. She only had an invitation to subscribe in her sidebar and her sign up increase has been 1000%. We’ve seen the same kind of increase, 1000% on the ProBlogger podcast where previously we have just been using a sidebar-hello bar combination. You can see here that on all of my sites we have seen at least 100% increase by using the welcome mat option.

SumoMe does have an offer for you at the moment running for ProBlogger readers. I will link to that from our show notes today. It gives you basically their welcome mat feature for free for a month. They’re Pro version of the welcome mat so you can test it for yourself. Again, we are an affiliate for that product but as with all our affiliate promotions, we’re paid up users of it as well. I have been using it now for several months.

The great thing about SumoMe is that it does allow you to test all of these different types of pop-ups and hello bars in combination as well and this is pretty cool to target people coming from different traffic sources. This is something I would highly recommend that you do and there are other tools around apart from SumoMe that do it.

Basically, you can have the welcome mat show for people coming from Google but not people coming from Facebook. If you think the people coming from Facebook are your regular readers or you could say that you don’t want the welcome mat to show for people coming from your email list or direct traffic. There are different ways that you can target different types of people with different messaging. There are all kinds of things you could experiment with there.

The next thing I’ll encourage you to test is calls to action in your blog posts–in the content itself. I’m kind of amazed how little I see this being talked about and being done by bloggers but one of the most effective ways I found to grow my list is to simply ask my readers to become subscribers in the content that I produce. This is particularly effective when you are doing a series of blog posts. When you are doing something that might last a week or something that might be once a month for six months, the same type of post over and over again having a call to action to subscribe in those types of posts works very well because you’re building anticipation.

For example, in Digital Photography School, once a month or so we will do a week-long series of posts. We did a week-long series of post on macro photography last year and in every post that we wrote over the week, we just had a simple line of the start from the editor saying that this was part of a series and to get the rest of the series subscribed to the newsletter and you get emailed and that worked really well. I think that was the first time that we’ve done that type of approach at the start of those articles of the series and our subscriber numbers that week were something like 50% higher than a normal week so test that one out. Build some anticipation with a series of blog posts and see how it works.

Another good place to put calls to action in your content on any hot post that you might have in your archives. Most bloggers have at least one post that gets a lot of traffic from Google. Google just ranks up really well and it gets a lot of traffic so they’re the types of posts that you should be perhaps a little bit more aggressive with. I mean the people are just coming from Google anyway and typically they will be gone again and never come back. You might as well be a little bit more aggressive and at the top of your post put a call to action to subscribe. You may want to even include a graphic that does that.

Likewise any key page on your site, it might be your about page, it might be your contact page, any page that is getting traffic, they are pages that you could be a little bit more aggressive with your calls to action to subscribe. Of course, if you are building, creating content on any other platform like Periscope or podcasts or YouTube, you should be including calls to action in those pieces of content too. I find in probably every second or third Periscope episode that I do I mention my newsletter and give people a URL they can go and subscribe with.

I think I might leave it at that. There are five or six different areas that you could go away and work on as part of today’s challenge, but I really would encourage you to do a bit of an audit. What are you currently doing to get subscribers for your list? How is it working? What test could you run? Just choose one test that might be a new tool, it might be a new call to action in terms of the words, it might be changing the color or design, it might be creating a series of blog posts that you put a call to action in the content itself, or going back to some of those old hot posts and put in calls to action there.

I’d love to hear what you are going to do today on this particular challenge. You can let me know on Twitter just tweet me @problogger with #todaynotsomeday with what you’re going to do. This is one of those things that you should probably return to every now and again to do some new testing on. It’s very important to do this. If you can increase your subscriber numbers by 10%, 20%, 30% that adds up in massive ways over the next week, month, year, decade, it really does add up so keep coming back to this type of challenge.

You can sign up to my newsletter, if you haven’t already, over @problogger.com/podcast/subscribe. I want to thank our sponsor of today’s podcast, Edgar. I have talked about Edgar in the last couple of episodes. That is a tool that I have used to help me to bring in new energy and increase the conversions that I experienced in my social media. But one of the great ways that you can see Edgar in action is via a video that I created and posted on the ProBlogger blog a couple of days ago now. I am going to link to that video in today’s show notes.

If you go to problogger.com/podcast/68, you will see this video where I walk you through in a ScreenFlow video exactly what I do with my social media. You will get really familiar with the Edgar tool there so check out the video over on today’s show notes @problogger.com/podcast/68. I hope you find today’s challenge useful. I look forward to chatting with you in episode 69 of the ProBlogger podcast.

Do you already have an email list? Will you start one today? If you already have an email list, what strategies are working best to convert people into signing up? 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.

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

Today’s episode is the second of the new ‘Today, Not Someday’ series of podcasts that will take us up to the end of the year about what you can do to make your blog ready for success in 2016. The focus is 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.

The focus of today’s episode is about why having something to sell is so important, and tips about how you can develop a product to sell 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:

Update: you might also like to check out this followup episode on how to create more time to create your first product.

This is the series of blog posts I mention about ‘creating products’ that Shayne Tilley and I shared on the ProBlogger blog:

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 it at meetedgar.com/problogger.

These are all things that have been, and are currently on my ‘someday’ list, things that we often put off as bloggers that we really should do today because they have so much potential to bring our blog alive. For the next 10 episodes, I’m going to give you 10 different things you can do today to improve your blog. 

You can find today’s show notes at problogger.com/podcast/67. You can listen to the introduction to this series in the last episode, Episode 66. 

This episode is sponsored by Edgar, a tool that I’ve been using since January of this year, that does pretty much what this whole series is about; help you to improve your blog by doing something today that’s going to pay off forever. Edgar allows you to create social updates for your Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn accounts that will continue to be able to be used forever and it cues them up automatically for you. You can check out what Edgar does at meetedgar.com/problogger. 

And now, let’s get into today’s show.

Today, I want to talk about creating a product for your blog. Having something to sell of your own is so important as a blogger, but also, in other aspects of business as well. Want to tell you a little story. A few years ago, while on a beach vacation up in the northern parts of Australia, my family was out having an ice cream one night when we came across two street performers. We call them buskers here in Australia, but I know in other parts of the world, you call them ‘street performers’. Both of them were quite similar in some ways. They both were sitting there playing their guitar and singing, but they were doing it quite differently in terms of their business model. 

The first one was set up about 15 meters to one side of the ice cream shop that we were visiting. He had a guitar and he had his guitar case open in front of him to collect the loose change of those walking by. He was pretty good at what he was doing. He was a good singer, a great player of his guitar, and we stopped to listen to him for a moment. Our kids nagged us to stop and listen. They love and are fascinated by street performers. 

We listened for a few moments before walking on and leaving a couple of dollars in loose change in his guitar case. After buying our ice cream, we noticed another performer a little further down the road on the other side of the ice cream shop. Now, this guy was similar in some ways, but he was a bit of a one-man band. He had his honky-tonk guitar and a harmonica, bells on one foot and a home-made kick drum box on the other. He was a little bit different in that he had a little bit more going on, but he was a similar kind of style of performer. He was just as good as the first guy. 

He too had his case out for donations and tips. But, he was doing something different that in my estimation pulled in at least 10 times as much money that the other performer was making. He had two CDs for sale. Just by saying he had CDs for sale probably dates the story slightly, but he had a physical product there to sell. You could buy one of his CDs for $15 or both of them for $25.

Not only was this guy pulling in tips at a similar rate to the other guy, but I’d estimate 1 in every 10 or so people approached him to buy at least one of his CDs, and many bought two. In the 15 minutes that we stopped to watch this second guy, because our kids were quite fascinated by his act and they actually caused quite the impromptu of their own by dancing along to him, I saw him sell eight CDs in those 15 minutes. He was obviously pulling in some really decent money in comparison to the first busker. Having a CD to sell was great for revenue, but, interestingly, I think it also had other impacts on the audience. 

People seem to take him a bit more seriously than the other guy. I heard at least a couple of people in the crowd who were watching, and there was quite the crowd, comment on the fact that he was obviously pretty serious about his music because he recorded a CD. It gave him credibility as well as giving him a talking point when it came to chatting with people, and, of course, something to sell. 

The other aspect of selling a CD was that people walked away with something in their hands. They not only heard him and they had an experience of him, they actually had something to make that relationship potentially live on. They were much more likely to remember his name, connect with him on social media, tell other people about him because they had something, something that would remind them of him. 

I think this story illustrates some of the reasons why I think it’s really important to consider making a product to sell on your blog. As I tucked my boys into bed that night, and my three-year-old at that time insisted on sleeping with his new honky-tonk one-man band CD—you guessed it, we bought one, in fact I think we got both of them. It struck me just how powerful it is to have a product to sell. 

As bloggers trying to make a few dollars from our online activity, many of us get stuck thinking about making money by putting ads on our blog. But in doing so, I wonder if perhaps we’re doing it for the equivalent of busking for tips. That’s not the perfect illustration, but in my experience, having a product to sell really takes things to the next level. I know I’ve fallen into that trap myself of thinking that busking for tips was okay, and I’ve seen a variety of benefits of creating products for my own. 

Obviously the biggest benefit that I see is revenue. Having a product, whether it be a book, or an ebook, or a membership site, or some consulting, or coaching or something else has a potential to make you money. That’s great because it can be an addition to those tips, or to the advertising that you have on your blog. 

But, it also brings credibility. In the same way that people took that second busker a little bit more seriously, I’ve noticed that when I’ve had something to sell on my site, people tend to take me a little bit more seriously as well. This can bring in all kinds of other opportunities. 

I know within 24 hours of releasing my first ebook, I had an approach by a publisher wanting to publish that ebook. I would never have had that approach if it wasn’t for the ebook itself. It adds a little bit of credibility, it can add authority, and it can bring in opportunities. It also has the potential to deepen relationships with your readers in the same way that going away with that CD made that memory live on of that performer for us. As we played his CD, we remembered him. As we played his CD, we were reminded of his name because it was on the front cover of the CD. As we played that CD, other people who heard us playing it asked who the author was and gave us an opportunity to talk about him. All of that deepened the relationship with him, it made that memory live on. 

In the same way that happened with that CD, I’ve noticed the same thing happens with our ebooks and our courses. When people buy an ebook, they then go away and read that ebook and it takes them more than a day to read that ebook in many cases. I know for a fact that as people work through the 31 Days to Build a Better Blog ebook, that I get emails from people all along the way. For 31 days as they work through it, they have an ongoing relationship with me–and I see their tweets and I see their emails come in as they work through the ebook. It lengthens and deepens the relationship that you have with your readers. It also brings in traffic. 

This is kind of one that I’ve not really heard many people talk about before. When you launch a product, that often brings a spike in traffic to your site as well, whether that be through the emails that you send or affiliates promoting your product, or whether it’s just word of mouth, people coming to check out what you’re doing. I know every time we launch a product, we have a good month of traffic and that has other ongoing benefits for our site. 

Just a couple other benefits: you learn new skills and you’re forced to think about your topic in a way that you perhaps haven’t thought about it before. When I wrote the ProBlogger book for the first time–many years ago now–whilst I’ve been blogging about blogging for a while by actually being forced to write a book and have a publisher wait for me to submit a manuscript, it forced me to think in a deeper way, in a bigger picture way about my topic. So, creating a product can do that for you as well. It will improve your blog going on. 

I could go on and on about the arguments for having a product and I’m going to stop there. I think the argument for having a product is pretty strong. I think most bloggers I come across have, at least, have a dream of a product of their own, whether it be a book, or an ebook, or a course, or a membership site, or even a t-shirt, or some other kind of physical product or virtual product. 

Most bloggers seem to be sold on the idea that products are good, but most bloggers I know also have a lot of excuses as to why today is not the right day to start creating that product. That might sound a little bit harsh, but I say it because it’s been true for me as well. In fact, if I’m quite honest about this, it’s probably true for me right now. That’s why I’m actually starting this series with this topic because I know I need to move this off my ‘someday’ list and onto my today list. 

Some of you have heard my story of my first product before, so I won’t tell it in the long version, let me just give you the short version. When I started my main blog Digital Photography School in 2007, I had the dream of monetizing that blog with an ebook. I kind of knew what the topic might be, and I knew I had potential as well because I’ve promoted ebooks on that blog before and they kind of worked. My readers seemed to buy them, but I also had a long list of excuses as to why today wasn’t the right day to start writing that ebook. 

I had no time, we had a newborn baby in the house which meant I had even less time, I wasn’t thinking clearly because I was sleep deprived. I wasn’t confident; I lacked confidence about creating an ebook, I’d never done it before. I lacked skills; I didn’t know how to really write, or edit, or design, or sell one. I had a whole heap of questions about what shopping cart to use, and what marketing tactics to use. I guess I had a lot of doubts as to whether anyone would buy anything that I created because I wasn’t a professional photographer after all. 

For all of these reasons, the idea of that first photography ebook remained on my ‘someday’ list. It remained there for two years, in fact, before I decided to act. I decided that I either needed to kill the idea, the dream, or act upon it. In 2009, I decided to start creating that product. I did it by putting 15 minutes aside every day for three-and-a-half months to get it done. I spent my first 15 minutes a day planning it out, and then as the days progressed I started writing it and editing it, and then I started looking for a designer and started using my 15 minutes a day to research shopping carts, and then to start writing marketing copy, and sales pages, and sales emails. And then I put it out there. 

I’ve told the story before about how on the night I put it out there, I still had a lot of the doubts, but at least I’d completed it. I learned skills in that process that I knew would benefit from it, and I was proud of myself. 

I hit send on the email that launched that e-product to my list, to my readers, and I waited. Nothing happened at all for the first 10 minutes, but about 5 or 10 minutes later, a sale came in and I got notified via email that I’d made my first $15 from my first product. I was so proud of myself, and then I waited for another 10-or-so minutes, and then another email came in. I made $30, and I was excited. I began to think $30 for three months’ work, it’s not a great return on it but I was proud of myself. 

Eight minutes later, the next sale came in. Then five minutes later, the next sale came in. They started coming in every three minutes, and then every two minutes, and then every minute. Then, I began to see them come in every 30 seconds, and then every 10 seconds. The sales began to come in, they snowballed. I remember running into my wife at 3:00 AM because I launched this at 11:00 PM stupidly and waking her up and saying, “You wouldn’t believe what’s going on in my inbox.”

At that moment, I was incredibly excited as I saw this product becoming profitable. But, the biggest feeling I had at that point was why didn’t I do this earlier?  

That first ebook went on to make US$72,000 in the first 10 days after I launched it. I keep to myself every day of those 10 days as to why didn’t I do it sooner? Why didn’t I make it a priority? Why didn’t I put it on my today list way back in 2007 instead of waiting for 2009?  

By putting it on my today list, I opened up a whole new income stream for my blog. It proved to me that my readers would buy something from me. It proved to me that I had the skills to do it. It proved to me that I had the ability to get that done. 

Forty products later, we’ve now created 40 other things. I’m really glad that I put it on my today list way back in 2009. Whilst I could’ve done it sooner, at least, I did it. 

But you know what? The reality is that this creating a product still creeps back on to my ‘someday’ list from time to time. It’s very easy to get complacent, even when you’ve got products already, because those products sell and you can keep putting them on sale. And then, you kind of start putting the next product on the ‘someday’ list and stop being as proactive as you could. 

That’s my reality right now, and it’s the reason I’m starting this series with this topic. I’ve not created a new product on ProBlogger for over two years. I’m a bit embarrassed to say that, but I want to be transparent with you. It’s been on my ‘someday’ list for all of those two years. I’ve got some good excuses; I’ve been busy working on my other blog and creating products for that every three or four months. I’ve been running an event here in Australia which, I guess, you could call a product in some ways and building that. 

But you know what? It’s time for me to move this from my ‘someday’ list onto my today list so that I’ve got something to launch in 2016, something early 2016. That’s what I’m committing to do today. I’m going to start working on my next ProBlogger product. 

I want to finish this podcast today with a few quick tips on how to create that first product, particularly tips for those of you who are wanting to create your first product. Those of you who’ve already created a product, I know, and I’ve just shown you how this can creep on your ‘someday’ list again today. I want to challenge you to create your second, or your third, or whatever it is that’s next for you. 

But particularly for those of you who are looking at your first product and thinking, “I can’t do it,” “I don’t know where to start,” I want to give you a few tips. It’s impossible for me to give you specific tips because I don’t know what type of product you’re going to create, but a few thoughts came to mind as I was preparing for this podcast today. 

Firstly, identify what are the top three problems or needs that you see your readers having. Focus on one of these for the thing to build your first product around. Having a pain point that you can solve for your readers I think is a great place to start when you’re thinking about what to create as your first product. 

Number two, ask yourself have you already created content that could be the center of your first product? Particularly if you’re starting out in creating your first product, it can be quite overwhelming. Maybe you could base that product around something you’ve already created which will help you cut down on the work that you need to put into that first product. 

That might sound a little bit like cheating, but both of my first two ebooks had repurposed content in them. Both that first photography book which a lot of it was already published on the blog, and I updated it, put it in a logical order for my readers, and also, my first ProBlogger product, which was 31 Days to Build a Better Blog, which was a series of blog posts that I’d written, which again, I updated, added some extra content to. But it was largely stuff I’d already written. That’s totally legitimate as long as you’re upfront with your readers about what you’re doing and add some new content. 

Third thing that I would give you as a tip is could you test a product idea with some content on your blog? Write some new blog posts, so you’re writing blog posts that’s actually serving your blog and improving your blog. But write them with the intent of using them as the cornerstone of an ebook or a product. Rather than repurposing content that’s already out there, write some new content that you could repurpose into an ebook. Don’t give it all away on your blog, keep some back for the product itself, but put it out there. 

This does two things that helps you just start creating that product, but also test the ideas. Hopefully, you will get some feedback from your readers that will improve the product that you create as well. 

A fourth quick tip. Just some analysis of what other people have created in your niche, your competitors or other blogs in your niche. This will give you a hint as to what kinds of products might sell well and what kind of topics might actually be good to cover as well. 

But alongside this, also look for opportunities to promote those products as an affiliate. It might sound a little bit strange promoting one of your competitors’ products, but if you can sign up as an affiliate, one, that brings in some income stream; but, two, it also shows you whether your readers are going to respond to that type of product and that type of price point and you’ll learn so much about selling a product by promoting someone else’s. Look for those opportunities while you’re developing your product.

Number six tip I’d give you is to ask yourself, “What would be the simplest and quickest product to create?” Your first product doesn’t have to be a mega product. It doesn’t need to be a month-long course, it could be something quite simple. A short ebook might actually be a better first product than a longer one. A short course, or even a printable, something just a few pages long that you sell for a few dollars may be a good starting point. It will give you some new skills, it will show you that you can do it, and it will get your readers used to buying from you as well. You’ll learn so much from it. 

The last two tips I’d give you are pretty much based upon my own experience of those first products, is to break it down. You will look at creating a product as being an overwhelming task, but break down the process in the same way that I did into bite-sized chunks, into things that you need to achieve to get your product created. For me, I knew I needed to plan it, I needed to write it, and I broke down the writing process by creating an outline. Then, I needed to research shopping carts, and I needed to find a designer, and so I made myself a list. It had 20-or-so things I needed to achieve to get the idea from an idea into reality. Write that down so that you can tick those things off one by one and make them bitesize, make them achievable in a few hours or a day. 

The last thing I’d encourage you to do is to set aside time to do it. It’s all well and good to plan out the process, but unless you put aside time to do it, it’s never going to happen. There’s a few ways you could do this. You could do it by 15 minutes a day or 30 minutes a day in the same way I wrote my first one, or you could put aside a whole day to get a big chunk of it done. This is what I’ve done for other products as well. Whatever way you do it, put aside some time to do it. 

Back in 2009, I moved the idea of creating a product from my ‘someday’ list onto my today list. As I mentioned before, today, we have 40 products: ebooks and courses. I did the sums the other day, we’ve had over 300,000 transactions of those products. It’s hard to know, we’ve changed systems a few times, I don’t exactly know how many we’ve sold. Many of those transactions are bundles of products as well. It’s probably closer to half-a-million products that we’ve sold since 2009. But you know what? It all started because I decided to do it and not just dream about it anymore. 

That’s what this series of podcasts is all about; small things you can do today that can lead to a massive impact in the future of your business. Not everything that you’re going to try and do will work, but doing is so much better than dreaming. And it increases the chances of finding something that will work. 

What product is on your mind that you’ll create some day, and what could you move on your today list? I want to encourage you to tweet it out. Have some accountability. Tweet me at @problogger with the hashtag #TodaynotSomeday with the product that you are going to create. 

Keep us updated as you create that product with that #TodaynotSomeday. When you’re finished, I want you to celebrate that and I really would love to see you celebrate that, just with a tweet, or a blog post, or something that you can hashtag as well. I would really love to see the products that are created as a result of this challenge. 

You can find today’s show notes where I’ve included some further reading. We actually ran a series of blog posts, I think, last year on ProBlogger which was designed to help you to create your first product. There’s a series of five posts there that will help you to work out what product to create, and to work out how to create that, and how to launch it as well. There is some really good further reading there, a lot of it written by Shayne Tilley who helped me to create my first products as well. 

You can find today’s show notes with that further reading at problogger.com/podcast/67. 

I can’t wait to hear what comes of this series of podcasts for you, and particularly, this one in creating products. 

Also want to thank Edgar who is the sponsor of today’s podcast. Edgar, as I said at the start of this podcast, is a tool that I’ve been using and paying for quite happily since the start of the year that has really revolutionized the way that I approach social media. Before I started using Edgar, a lot of my social media updates, I felt like they’re almost like wasted time. They would go up on my Twitter account and then 10 minutes later, no one would ever see them again and all that work I put into getting the tweet just right and finding an image for it really didn’t pay off ever again.

Edgar enables you to use that tweet, or that Facebook update, or that LinkedIn update again later on. The tweet can live on and it will queue up your tweets to redeliver them to your followers at a schedule that you determine to make that investment of time that you put into your social media pay off again and again. You can check out meetedgar and the offer that they have for you as ProBlogger readers at meetedgar.com/problogger.

Look forward to chatting with you in Episode 68 of the ProBlogger Podcast in just two days’ time.

How did you go with product ideas? What product do you think you will create and launch first? 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 the first in a new series of podcasts about what you can do to make your blog ready for success. The focus will be your ‘someday’ list, the things you’ve always wanted to do to improve your blog but have struggled to make happen.

I’ve realised many of the things on my ‘someday’ list are things that could significantly improve my blog and my business and lead to a rise in income, things I really should be doing and could be achieved with a concerted burst of effort, if only I could get past my procrastination.

This series is about me sharing my journey to turn my ‘someday’ tasks into things I make happen today. I’ll share with you what works and what doesn’t, and give you tips and resources to help you work through your ‘someday’ list too. We’re all more likely to make these changes if we’re not doing it alone!

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 it at meetedgar.com/problogger.

How did you go with writing your ‘someday’ list? What has worked for you in the past with moving tasks from your ‘someday’ list to your ‘today’ list? 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.

Update: the rest of this series has started – listen to the next episodes at:

Just as a little aside today before we get going, I am today podcasting from my son’s bedroom. It’s a bit of a strange one. I’d set aside the whole day today to record a number of podcast episodes, and of course, today was the day that our painter—that is doing the outside of our house—decided to start painting right outside my office. He is scraping and making all kinds of noises, so I’ve moved my whole podcast setup into my son’s bedroom. It’s a bit of a strange run. If I do sound a little different today, that’s why. I suspect it’s probably a little bit better for audio in here because it’s a little bit more muffled because there’s stuff everywhere. He doesn’t pack up.

Anyway, let’s get on with today’s show. Do you have a Someday List of things that you want to do in your blogging? If you do, you’re not alone–I do. It’s not an actual list that I’ve ever written down onto paper or written up into a document on my computer but it’s a list that lives inside my head and it has a whole heap of things on it. Some of them are fanciful, and things that probably will never get around to doing—just grand ideas. We all have them but most of what’s on my list—my Someday List—is mainly made up of things that I know I should do but things that I’ve not gotten around to yet. I guess you could say it’s largely a list of things that I’m procrastinating on.

If we’re honest, I suspect most of us have a Someday List but recently, I was thinking about my Someday List and realized a few things about it. Firstly, I realized that many of the things on my Someday List were things that had real potential to significantly improve my business. Some of them would lead to increases in traffic to my blog. Some will lead to a better perception of my brand. Some will lead to a definite rise in income. There were things that I really should be doing.

Another thing I realized about my Someday List is that most of the things on it were things that probably could be achieved and knocked off with a concerted burst of effort. Some of them might take a morning, some of them might take a whole day or even a few days of work, but most of them could be knocked off in at least a week if I really put my mind to it. They weren’t unachievable things. There were things that could improve my business and things that I could achieve if I really put my mind to it and got my act into gear. The other thing I realized about many of the things on the list is that they would lead to an ongoing benefit to my blog, into my business. There were things I could do today that would pay off over the long haul potentially for months and even years.

I guess, I was pretty confronted by these three things and realized I needed to start working on my Someday List and at least move a few of them onto my Today List. Some of you may have seen me jump on Periscope just after I had this realization a couple of weeks’ ago. I began to share some of the things that were on my list and some of the things that I thought bloggers could do today that would pay off for a long time. It was really interesting to say the response to that Periscope. A lot of people really were energized by it.

I came out with a #todaynotsomeday. It was really interesting to see people using that hashtag to talk about the things they were going to do today and not someday. My listeners of that podcast said you really should do this as a podcast series and so that’s what I’ve decided to do. As I tackle my Someday List, I want to encourage you to tackle yours. This is the perfect time to do it with the end of the year approaching. My hope is that as you hit 2016 because you’ve tackled some of these things, your blog will be in so much better shape for the New Year.

Here’s what we are going to do. I’m going to come up with the next 10 episodes of this podcast, which will fit into this Today Not Someday series. Each of the podcasts is going to focus upon a different activity that you might choose to do. Something that you could potentially do today. By today, I don’t mean just today. It could take you a few days, it might even take you a week, but these are things that you should be doing now that will hopefully pay off for the long term of your blog.

I will give you something to do as well as a few tips on how to do it in each of the episodes. It’s a bit similar to what I did with the 31 Days to Build a Better Blog series, which I kicked this podcast off with but they’re different things and perhaps a little bit meatier things. Some of those 31 Days were things that you could knock off in an hour. Some of these may take you a little bit more but I think they have the potential to really be profitable and great investments for your blog in the long run. Some of the activities that I’m going to mention could possibly be knocked off in a few hours but most of them will probably take a week, maybe a few days at least.

Now, I’m not suggesting you do all of these 10 things before the end of the year. Some of them are going to be more relevant to you than others so there might be a couple of the podcasts that you might want to listen to and go, “Yeah! I’m going to leave that one on the show for today or for another day.” But I want to encourage you to at least choose a couple of them to get working on. Knock off as many of them as you can. I challenge you to knock off as many things from your Someday List by the end of the year as possible.

I want to encourage you to use that hashtag #todaynotsomeday. Use it on Twitter. Use it on Instagram. Just share what you are doing that you’re knocking off your Someday List. They don’t have to be just the things we talked about in the podcast. I’m sure you’ve already got things on your mind that you could do them on. I want you to use that hashtag (1) to keep yourself a little bit accountable, (2) maybe to give yourself a bit of motivation, but (3) also to share what you are doing and hopefully that will inspire the rest of us to do some of that type of stuff as well. Hopefully, we can get a bit of community going around the ProBlogger #todaynotsomeday between now and the end of the year.

Now to get these 10 episodes done between now and the end of the year—in fact, I would like to get them done before Christmas—I’m going to increase the frequency of this podcast from two per week to three. For the next few weeks, you’re going to get podcasts every Monday, Wednesday and Friday–that’s Australian time. If you’re in America, that will be Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday but you can listen to them anytime you like and to get notified of them as usual you can be subscribed to our newsletter. You can sign up for that at problogger.com/podcast/subscribe.

Here’s what I want you to do right now. I want you to write down your Someday List and to workout which of the things on your Someday List you’re going to start working on. You might already have something in mind, and you might be motivated enough to actually get that done today or start working on that today. But if you haven’t got something in mind, tune in for the next 10 episodes and hopefully something in my list will inspire you to do something today, not someday.

Lastly, before I finish this episode, I want to welcome a new sponsor to the ProBlogger podcast for the duration of this 10-part series. It’s a sponsor that I think can help you with this exact challenge. I’d like you to meet my friend, Edgar. Some of you know Edgar already but Edgar is a tool that 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 and highlighting the great content you’ve got in your blog archives, on Twitter or Facebook, and then Edgar goes to work to keep sharing them to your followers not just once but by cueing those updates up to keep delivering them in the future. It’s one of those #todaynotsomeday things. You can spend some time getting social media in order today and it pays off for the long term. We’ll incidentally talk about social media in one of the challenges coming up. You can sign up for a free month-long trial of edgar@meetedgar.com/problogger.

Tune in for the next episode of the ProBlogger podcast where we will get into the first of 10 challenges that hopefully will inspire you to do something today rather than someday that’s going to improve your blog and set you up for a great 2016. I’ll check with you then but for now, you can go to problogger.com/podcast/66 to get today show notes with some of the links and also to check out Edgar. Thanks for tuning in. I’ll chat with you soon.

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

Today’s episode is about how you can learn to make decisions for your blog more quickly and with confidence, freeing you up to focus your time on what really matters most.

One of the most common questions I’m asked is how I manage to fit everything in – blogging, social media, speaking appearances, product development and family life. The truth is, I don’t get to do everything I would like. But I have learned skills and developed habits that make me feel less overwhelmed and stressed about making decisions about how to spend my time.

If you’re feeling like you don’t have enough time to fit everything in, this episode is for you. I share tips that will help you get more focused about how to choose to spend your time to make your blog a success.

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:

Do you ever feel like you don’t have enough time to fit everything in? Like there’s some opportunity staring you in the face to start something new, but to take it on would mean everything else you are already doing would suffer. You know that feeling I’m sure. 

You’re working away on your blog, creating content, updating your Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, LinkedIn accounts everyday, responding to comments and emails from readers, then you got to read other people’s blogs and comment on those, watch other people’s Periscopes and create the occasional product for your blog and update your advertising page. 

The list goes on and on and on. The things that we all do as bloggers everyday, but then comes along an opportunity. Sometimes the opportunities are real ones. Someone asks you to do something, “Would you like to guest post on my blog?” or, “Can I interview you on my podcast?” or, “Would you like to come on my Blab?” “Would you like to speak at my events or work with us as a brand?”

Then some of the opportunities that come along are more perceived opportunities. Everyone else seems to be doing something, so maybe you should be doing it too. Maybe it’s a new social network like Periscope, MiChat, or Blab, or maybe everyone else seems to be podcasting and you wonder if you should be doing that too, or this other blogger has a second blog and maybe you should start a second blog as well.

Invitations, whether they are real opportunities or perceived ones, seem to come along quite regularly almost every day. I think of something that I could be doing and the fear of missing out rises. What if that thing starring you in the face, that opportunity or perceived opportunity is the next big thing. What if it’s your lucky break and if you don’t take it, you’re going to look back and regret?

The result of feeling this is that either you take on more than you should and then not doing everything less well or you let things go and have regrets and then wonder what if I had done that or what if I had done that? 

I get asked questions around these feelings all the time by readers and our event attendees. How do I work out what to focus upon is one of the big questions. The other big question I get from people is, “How do you fit it all in, Darren?” 

I don’t know why I get asked this all the time, but people seem to think I can fit it all in. I guess I blog, I podcast, I Facebook, I tweet, I Periscope, I speak, I publish ebooks et cetera, but the reality is I don’t fit it all in. I think it’s important to say that. Now, what I would say is that I am able to fit perhaps more in than I used to partly because I’ve built my business to a point where I could delegate some of it and outsource some of it, and that’s one strategy for getting more done. 

I’ve also worked on my own productivity and my own efficiency and discipline. If you want to learn more about how to become more productive and efficient, listen to episode 40 from my Seven Productivity Tips. I think it’s also really important to say that one of the things I’ve come to make peace with is that I just can’t fit it all in and I become very good or at least better at saying no to things. 

I say no quite a bit. Sometimes I say no to people who ask me to do things that don’t fit in with what I should be doing. Sometimes I say not to myself when I start wondering if I should be doing whatever everyone else’s doing. I’ve said no recently to getting on Meerkat and Snapchat and having a video channel on YouTube, but I’ve said yes to some things as well. One of the things I’ve said yes to recently is Periscope. I’ve been trying to Periscope every morning. So, there are some things I say yes to and some things I say no to.

The question that I am hearing some of you ask right now or at least I’m imagining you asking is, “How do you work out what to say yes to? And how do you work out what to say no to?” I have to say there are no exact signs of this. Sometimes it’s a bit of a hunch that I have, but there are a number of questions that I ask myself as I look at an opportunity, whether that be a real opportunity like someone asking me to go speak on an event or whether that be a perceived opportunity of me taking on something that I maybe think might work.

Here are some of the questions that I ask. The first question I usually ask is, “Do I have time for this?” and there’s usually a negative response to that because I just don’t have time. I operate to a point where my life is pretty full and even if that is full of empty space because I do try to put aside time every day to have empty space just to be, to think, to play, and to spend time with my family. It’s not empty, really. It’s productive, but to other people, it might seem empty. So do I have time for this? The answer is usually no so I know if I answer with a no, then it’s going to come at the cost of something else.

Am I going to do something else less well as a result of taking this new thing on? So, I start to ask myself my second question, “What would I give up to take it on?” Is there something that I can give up to take it on? That’s a tough question. The other question I sometimes ask around this is, “Could someone else on my team do this better or could they outsource it?” and that’s often the way I can fit more in.

Those are some of the first questions I ask. Do I have time? What cost will it bring to take it on? What could I give up to take it on? And could someone else in my team do it better? But there’s a whole heap of other questions that I then start to ponder. “Does it take me closer to my goals?” and this is a big one and I think it’s really important to understand what you are hoping to achieve. What are your goals? What is your why? Where are you headed? If the thing is going to take you close to your goals, then it’s definitely something you should consider but if it’s going to take you away from your goals, it’s just fun and might be interesting, then it’s probably a no.

Another question that I always ask (and this is one I often ask particularly when I’m thinking about whether to take on a speaking engagement) is will I learn something useful from this experience? If I’m asked to go to a conference, is it a conference that I will learn some new skills at? A related question is will I meet someone useful if I do this? Often, the answer to that is yes, since I might take on those opportunities.

Another question that I ask myself is will these give me energy? A good example of this one is Periscope. I get a lot of energy from the Periscopes that I do and the same probably is true for podcasting. I find that after I get off Periscope, even though it takes me time to put together and to actually run the Periscope—it probably takes me an hour almost to prepare and to do a decent Periscope; that takes time—I’m super productive. I have this adrenaline running through me and for the next hour or so, I’m extra productive. I also get a whole heap of ideas from doing it. I’m learning a lot from doing it, I’m meeting interesting people as well. So, I’m able to say yes to Periscope because it pretty much answers yes to all of the questions that I ask so far. If something is giving you energy, then that maybe is a good thing as well.

Another question that I ask (and this is a really important one for me) is will this opportunity make a difference to someone else? For me, it’s not just about will this take me closer to my goals? Will this get me something? But will this also be useful to other people? Is this going to make the world a better place? Is this going to be useful to people?

This is partly because I just want to have a business that does make the world better, I love hearing feedback, that something that I did change someone’s life in a big way or a small way. It’s also a little bit selfish because I know that if I’m useful to people, it’s much easier to build a business around that.

This links to my last question, is this potentially sustainable? Is this going to sustain itself? I’ve learned while sometimes, things give me energy, sometimes things are fun, not all things are sustainable, not all things are profitable to do. I’ve also learned that if I’m going to continue to be useful to people, if I’m going to make the world a better place, if I’m going to make other people’s lives better in some way, I need to find a way to sustain that. I need to be able to profit from that in some way. It’s so much easier to help other people if you are able to pay your bills.

There are some other questions that I ask. Do I have time? Will it mean that I do something else less well? Could I give this to someone else in my team? Does it take me closer to my goals? Will I learn something useful from this? Will I meet someone who will be useful to have that relationship while doing this? Will this thing give me energy? Will it make a difference to someone else? And is it potentially sustainable for me?

These are the other questions I ask myself when an opportunity—real or perceived—comes my way. I’m sure there’s a whole heap of other questions that I could ask and I’d love to hear what you ask yourself to try and work out, whether you take something on or not.

The last thing I really want to say is that it’s impossible to fit it all in, so you need to come to make peace with that for yourself and come up with some sort of a system to work out what you should and shouldn’t fit it.

I hope this is helpful to you. It’s something that I’ve shared with a number of people recently, particularly on Periscope, even just this morning. People seem to find it useful, so I wanted to share it on the podcast as well.

If you’ve got any feedback on today’s podcast, you can go to problogger.com/podcast/65. There’s an opportunity to leave a comment and to let me know what you would add and what do you disagree with me in what I said today. I also love to get your reviews on the ProBlogger podcast. You can go to iTunes and Stitcher to leave your reviews there.

Lastly, I just want to let you know that the next podcast, episode 66, starts a new series; a 10-part series. I think it has the potential to get your blog ready for 2016, in a way that (perhaps) your blog has never been ready for a new year before. It’s 10 episodes that are really going to help you to get your blog far in, to really give you a profitable and worthwhile 2016. So, stay tuned, keep refreshing iTunes, and in a couple of days’ time, you will see episode 66 which will hopefully help you to take your blog to the next level. Thanks for listening and I’ll talk to you then.

What did you learn from today’s episode? Do you have other tips that have worked for you? What will you try next? 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 build your business using content marketing. It’s an interview with Dan Norris, a serial entrepreneur and popular blogger. Dan has used content marketing as his key strategy to building his successful businesses. He shares his experience and insider tips so that you can turn your blog into a successful business too.

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

Today’s episode is sponsored by our event partner Telstra Business.

Telstra business is there for advice on all your technology needs like cloud and communications, so you can do your thing. If you’re in Australia visit your local Telstra Business Centre or

‘Do Your Thing’.

In today’s episode:

You can connect with Dan and more of his tips on:

Dan recently spoke at the ProBlogger event in Australia as part of our small business boot camp that we ran in partnership with Telstra Business. For those of you who are from an international audience who don’t know Telstra, they’re Australia’s largest telco and have been a great supporter of ProBlogger. In this interview, I talked to Dan about content marketing and a bunch of some of the content that he presented in his presentation at the event. It was actually one of the most highly-rated sessions at the event this year. It’s something I wanted to circle back to and share with a larger audience.

In this interview, he gives some really great tips on how to create great content marketing, how to differentiate yourself from literally hundreds and thousands (if not millions) of others who are creating content online, how to scale your content creation and much more. 

We want to thank Telstra for their support in this podcast episode. Telstra business is there for advice on all your technology needs like cloud and communications, so you can do your thing. If you’re in Australia, visit your local Telstra Business Center or go to telstra.com/doyourthing. 

You can find today’s show notes at problogger.com/podcast/64. Now, here’s the interview that I just recorded with Dan Norris.

Good day there, Dan. How are you?

Dan: Good day, Darren. Thanks for having me.

Darren: It’s really great to have you. As I’ve said in our introduction, you recently spoke at our ProBlogger conference here in Australia and raided it off the charts with our attendees in terms of your content. I’d love to talk through a little bit about some of the stuff you touched on in that. I really want to focus on content marketing which was a fairly big part of your presentation. 

Before we get into that, I really would love to hear a little bit about your story which you did share a little bit in your session as well. I wonder if you could just share with our listeners your story of entrepreneurship. I know back in 2002 you weren’t working for yourself. You’re working for, was it a government department of some kind?

Dan: Yeah. Thanks for that, first of all. I just found out about the ratings. That’s really nice. I was kind of worried I offend a lot of people by telling them they shouldn’t think of themselves as bloggers and they should think of themselves as content marketers. I always see myself offending many people.

Darren: No. It goes very well, I think.

Dan: I think after talking about my entrepreneurial journey all day, if I could do it in a couple of minutes, I would say that I started in 2006 just because I was bored working for someone else. It’s interesting that a lot of entrepreneurs start being entrepreneurs because they want to get rich or because they want to discover themselves or whatever. Other people will just do it because they literally don’t fit into the alternative. I was sort of one of those people. 

I didn’t mind working for someone else but I get bored every three months. It was always impossible to find a job that was flexible enough to keep me motivated to more than a three month period. I left, I was about 26. I had no idea what I was going to do. It was a very good job, a well-paying job. I like to build websites for people. I didn’t know how to build websites. I’ve got a bunch of books out, learned how to do JavaScript, PHP, and whatever else you had to do back then to build websites. Sort of pre-WordPress.

I struggled for seven years working on that concept of building websites for people. I’m trying to understand that business and making the transition from, “Yes, I’ve got a business where people pay me to do something for them,” to, “Now, I own a business and other people did the work.” It’s more of a service and a scalable top offering.

I battled for seven years trying to figure that out with the agency. I eventually failed. To my judgment, I failed and wasn’t able to do that. So, I sold it, gave myself a year to build something else. I spent that year working on a piece of software which failed even worse than the agency. Two years ago, I had nothing left. I was two weeks away from having to go back and get a job. Probably move back to Brisbane. That’s when I started WP Curve and a whole lot of stuff has happened since. I hope we’ll talk about some of that in this interview.

Darren: Yeah. Maybe if you could just introduce our readers to WP Curve. I know some are definitely familiar because it comes up with the conversation all the time. Where did the idea come from? What is it today?

Dan: I was in that awkward position where I felt like things were going well because I have my blog going. I was building my email list, building my traffic on my site. At one point, I think I won an award for blogging. I sort of felt that that aspect was going well but no one wanted to buy the software I built. I have to come up with something that my audience wanted to pay for. What I came up with was a monthly subscription where we would fix whatever small problems you have at WordPress sites. I defined it in small 30 minutes jobs and for $69 a month at that time. You would get as many small 30 minute jobs as you wanted on a same-day turnaround and 24/7. 

I made that up because I thought, “Well, if I have a website, I would want this service. I wouldn’t want to think about when the developers are available. I wouldn’t want to think about what it’s going to cost me each month or how quickly are they going to respond.” I would just want to pay a fixed monthly fee and just know that it’s looked after. I emailed my list and had 10 people signed up in the first week. I had about 10 people sign up, net, so every week since then over two years. 

Now, it’s more exactly the same service, it’s $79 a month up to $200 a month, depending on what your response time is. I think we’ve got about 900 customers each month and a team of 40+ people. It turned into a really interesting business.

Darren: What sort of jobs do people typically ask for? I know a lot of our readers who’ll probably be interested in this type of service.

Dan: It ranges from bugs, where things break. The good thing about WordPress is you can customize it. You can have a bunch of plugins. You can tweak whatever you want with the themes. You can do anything you want with WordPress. The downside of that is you do have the capacity to break it. If it can break, it will break. Bug fixing is a big part of it if something breaks, if it is proactive type stuff, like setting up backups, helping with security, those kinds of things. There’s the bulk with small tweaky sort of things, like you’ve installed a sidebar widget and it’s not the color you want, it’s not quite the size you want, or you look at it in the mobile and something comes up over the screen that’s unusable. You need a developer to get in there and fix it.

It’s all the little annoying things that would take an expert WordPress developer 30 minutes to fix but it’ll take you a couple of hours trying to figure out or take your developer a couple of $100 worth of work because of the way their business works.

Darren: I think I need to sign up for my wife because I end up trying to fix a lot of bits of pieces. I’m not a developer and I end up spending three or four hours of time on something that should take three minutes.

Dan: Yeah, and sometimes it’s not even stuff that really a developer is native for. Sometimes, it’s just procedural. We know what plugin to use or, “This was broken because of this reason.” We know that. We don’t need to be a developer. We just need to know WordPress. It’s a little bit an overlap with things you might be able to crack it. But more often than not, it’s much easier for someone who knows WordPress backwards to fix it or know what the problem is rather than having to crack it yourself.

Darren: Okay. Let’s get on to content marketing. I think it’s the best business ever. The thing I loved about the way you built the business is that you’ve used content really well. WP Curve blog is something that I’m sure most readers have ended up on one time or another without even realizing it because it produces so much great content. I presume that’s where most of your business was coming through or at least a fair bit of it?

Dan: Yeah. I have to answer this question every day in my community. What business was started and marketed primarily through content? My answer was, you would probably never know. Content marketing is pretty much the only marketing we do, but whether or not someone has heard about us through content or whether or not they heard about us because we’re covered on Fox TV, we’re on inc.com, someone read my book, someone read our blog, someone referred a friend, or someone saw someone’s affiliate review, it’s impossible to know exactly where your customers come from. Otherwise, I just had to see the overall philosophy that I don’t want to do other sorts of marketing because I try to live it and I suck at all of it. All I wanted to do is content. 

I just set out to start a business using only content marketing. I suppose, all that press in there as well. I think those two go hand-in-hand. They’re the only deliberate marketing we’ve done. It’s a broad definition of content marketing which I include in writing my books, in interviews, in podcasting, and presenting in events. Also, just getting press and getting attention to our ideas. Between those two things and word of mouth, that’s the only way anyone’s ever heard about WP Curve.

Darren: All right. Let’s just get into the definition here. How would you define content marketing?

Dan: You talked about blogging. I think for a while I saw myself as a blogger. I got to the point where I knew that I primarily needed to build a business. When I think about content marketing, I think that primary motivation is to figure out how to build a business. I do that by generally giving stuff away free. It could be broader than that. I know there’s a lot of content marketing that goes on out there that actually turns into paid products. For the sake of having a useful definition, the way I think about it is really giving away anything free that builds trust, credibility, and eventually gets people to refer people to your business or to become a customer. 

The way I did it was I tried hundreds of different things. I rely mostly on written content because that was the one I could do that I could manage and do effectively. People do podcasts, written content, videos. It ranges all up to high production Hollywood star movies for companies like Red Bull or all the way down to Seth Godin writing a two-sentence blog post and emailing it out. It’s putting the information out there that’s going to be inspiring or at least is going to be interesting to someone, and it’s using that to build your brand.

Darren: Yeah. I think for us, it’s a lot of creating interest, building relationships, and grabbing attention. It’s that trust, credibility, and authority that can convert someone from just being interested into a customer and into a long-term relationship. 

Dan: I think that relationship stuff is really interesting. The thing I always come back to is it’s so hard to measure. Even if I think about just me being at your event and this podcast, I wrote a guest post for you in 2012. One of the first guest posts I did. I didn’t think you’re even involved, you probably don’t even remember.

You’ve been on my radar for years and years and years. It’s exactly the same thing with anyone else and at any other event I’ve spoken at. It’s been a situation where I’ve been on that person’s radar or they’ve been on my radar, I probably had a podcast with them or they’ve been on my podcast, or I’ve written on their blog or they’ve written on mine. It’s an ongoing thing that after years and years, it ends up turning into something really powerful.

It’s a thing where you have to believe to do it because you wouldn’t invest in something new for the benefit in six years’ time unless you really believe it was a smart thing to do.

Darren: Yeah. It’s really ever (in my experience at least) the one piece of content that actually does it. It is that relationship. It’s almost a spotted web of all the things that you do just build this momentum towards a relationship. It’s a tricky one to describe sometimes.

Dan: I think the more I learn about business—you have things to go well and things don’t go well—is just about building a brand and having a story that people might not consciously tell people but they subconsciously know the story. I’ve seen that with WP Curve. 

It was a great story. I was a couple of weeks away from happening to get a job. I was desperate and I was doing these income reports every month that people really delve into because I was doing everything right by the book, but it was just failing miserably and I turned it all around, so it was a really cool story at that time.

Now, I’ve noticed with our income reports, I actually stopped doing them because no one reads them anymore. It’s no longer an interesting story. I’ve noticed with our other business, Black Hops (with the beer), this really interesting story is emerging with that business the people have really grasped them and it led also to amazing things. Now, when I start a business, all I really think about is what’s the brand and how people are going to talk about it? What stories are they going to tell? When things have failed, they haven’t done a good job with that. When they’ve gone well, I try to do more and more of that.

Darren: One of the things I love about your presentation at our event this year was you’ve stepped back a little from the content itself. I think you mentioned three things successful content marketing needs. Number one was great content which I expected from that presentation. Number two was a great business. I think it almost should go without saying, but it shouldn’t at the same time. I wonder if you could just talk to that a little bit and why you included that in the presentation about that content marketing. You talked for five or so minutes about building a great business.

Dan: In the Content Machine book, I started writing that content. I think I wrote about 25,000 words before I thought, “People are just going to implement this and fail if they don’t have good businesses.” I added about 6000 or 7000 words on how to build a good business. I put it right up at the start of the book. Just from observing, a lot of people will lean on me or on my Facebook group, they’ll come and say, “What’s wrong with my content?” You can give them as much feedback as you want to make it better. Great content is obviously part of it. 

If there’s something wrong with the business, it’s not going to matter. The way I think about it, you need to dial into some great content. We can probably talk about that all day. I think this is something that people don’t really understand that well. They’ll look at the quantity of their app and not necessarily how deeply it’s impacting people which is difficult to do. When you create something, it does impact people deeply. You’ll know what that is and you know you can do more of it. That’s a great content side. 

The really great businesses that have built themselves on content marketing have this really solid business fundamentally behind what they’re doing. I mentioned brands. When I think about business, I think about brands. I also think about things like how scalable it is? How’s the underlying profitability? Is it just something you’re working on and getting paid for your time? And as soon as you replace yourself, you are no longer going to make any money? It’s that fundamental, like what is a good business and what is a good brand. It’s how the two are linked together. 

I remember the exact examples I used in the talk. If you think of something like Moz, I know Rand spoke at your event before. You look at the early content those guys were doing. That SEO guide was industry-standard SEO advice. When I was learning about SEO all those years ago, everyone you would ask would point at Moz’ SEO guide. Their content was bang-on, but their business, this recurring software business, is high lifetime value. It’s a really well-known brand. It’s a really strong asset they’re building, their algorithms in understanding links and whatnot, and a really good team. That stuff is really fundamentally good business. They had this amazing link between the two.

In the book, I called it monetization logic. I only called it that because I was in a hurry. I didn’t think of a nicer word to call it. Obviously, you have to have business, you have to have money, you have to be pretty keen on SEO because you need to be happy enough to spend a couple of $100 a month on software. If you read that SEO guide, you see their content, and you see their brand everywhere, it’s logical that you will become a customer of theirs. This is a mistake I see a lot of bloggers make. They’ll blog until the cows come home but just from a lack of really basic fundamental level, it doesn’t make sense for someone to read their blog, and become a customer for what they’re selling. I think the people who do this really well just have that really neat linkage between what they’re writing about or what content they’re putting out there and the business that sits behind it. 

You see epic scales of these. You see amazing businesses that do no content but do really well. You’ll see amazing blogs that just don’t have a good business but have this huge blogging, this huge audience, but can’t make enough money from them. Where I try to get to is somewhere in between where you’re producing great content, you’re getting a lot of traction, engagement, and growth from the community but you also got a great business. For those people who had made sense to sign up as a customer or refer a customer, then they do that because they see your brand and they refer people to your brand.

Darren: I think you have a diagram of the slides of the three things. You had great content on one side, a great business on the other, and then monetization and logic in the middle. As I saw that diagram, I’m thinking of readers who read ProBlogger. They usually fit into one of the categories. They have a problem with one of those three areas.

A lot of people come to ProBlogger because they think they’ve got a problem with content but they actually have a problem with their business. They don’t have anything to sell there. They don’t have an asset there.

There’s others who have a disconnect between the two. They have great content, but they’re not getting people to their business because there’s no logical step in between. This thing is a great format for thinking through. I’d encourage listeners of this podcast to actually identify where their problem is and to work from that place, would you agree?

Dan: Yeah. I think that’s true. The great content is so hard. It really frustrates me because everyone says to produce great content. People have been saying that for years even in the grey hat SEO days where everyone was buying links and whatnot. People are still saying, “Google loves great content.” I still think people just misunderstand it.

For me, the difference was I wrote 300 or 400 blog posts before I wrote one that got real traction. I think I’ve got a maximum of 10 tweets. I don’t think I even got 10 tweets on any of those 400 blog posts before I wrote a podcasting guide. When I wrote the podcasting guide, I got 200 tweets just for that one post. That’s a turning point for me. For the first time I understood, the quantity just doesn’t really matter. It doesn’t matter how much you’re putting out there. You need to somehow figure out a way to get those posts that people really liked so much that they share. 

When I’m looking at content, I don’t really look at the other metrics. I just look at sharing because it’s a friction-filled process for someone to share your content. It’s okay for them to like it or to double tap it on Instagram but for them to actually share with their audience, it’s a whole new step. I think if people still know that, write good content, great content but then, “I don’t know what that means,” then I would encourage them to look at where people are sharing and what they’re saying about your content. That will hopefully get you closer to really tap into the stuff that people really need. They’re not getting elsewhere.

A big part of it is it’s business generally. If you think like an entrepreneur, the first thing you think, “How can I stand out from other people? How can I differentiate?” Content is the same. You need to be thinking about, “This monthly income report was really cool in 2012,” because there weren’t that many other people doing it. There’s certainly no one who does it. It wasn’t making any money. I think I was the first there, the lack of income report. Doing it now, everyone’s doing it. It’s not that interesting anymore because it doesn’t stand out.

You need to not only look at what you’re producing but you need to look at what’s actually getting traction in your audience, what other people are doing, what you could put your head up above everyone else and get noticed.

Darren: Yeah. Let’s dig into great content a little bit more. I think you defined great content in your talk as something you provide to your audience, that captures their attention, encourages them to engage and share, which is pretty much what you just said. When […] give seven things that you can do in great content to make it great. I don’t know if you’ve got that in front of you but I can walk you through it if you want.

Dan: I think from memory I had examples from people, I said, “These are six models of differentiation,” but they’re actually seven on the screen. Hopefully, you didn’t notice that.

Darren: Yeah. The first one was don’t be afraid to go outside your niche. I thought that was an interesting one because a lot of advice in blogging is just go stick to your niche. Never go outside your niche. You seemed to be advocating that it’s okay to go outside your niche. I wonder if you could talk to that for a moment.

Dan: Yeah, definitely. My number one rule with content is it needs to be interesting. If you look at the core definition there, it’s to capture people’s attention and build trust. If you’re not capturing attention, it’s dead on arrival. I think going outside your niche, for me, probably didn’t happen again just because I didn’t want to write about WordPress. I’m really not that excited about writing updates on WordPress. 

What excites me are stories about entrepreneurship, online marketing guides, and stuff like that. I sound like a nerd, don’t I? That was by accident. I thought, “Okay, I put this WordPress blog but I don’t want to write that much about WordPress.” I started writing about other things. That was the best thing I could’ve done because at least I passed that first hurdle of creating something interesting to my audience. 

It’s just an automatic thing. I think people take this niche advice far too seriously. They hone in on an avatar and they try to create everything for that avatar. They try to just make the topic about what exactly they’re doing in their business. The only outcome of that is something that’s either boring or it’s already been done a million times because it’s what everyone does. I think going outside your niche gives you the opportunity and the freedom to just create something interesting to start with. That’s what you have to do to get through the first hurdle type of content. 

Darren: Do you think with you going off topic or outside your niche beyond WordPress, you still are really writing for that avatar? Are you still writing for a particular type of person who may have interest outside of WordPress?

Dan: I think all of our aidence has interest outside of WordPress. In fact, I don’t think any of our audience has an interest inside of WordPress. 

The avatar thing has always troubled me a bit because it’s just too tied to the definition when it comes to content. I think what happens to content in the real world is that I’ll write something and over the few years, it’ll become the usual resource for people, and people will refer to others there. Eventually, the WP Curve will be mentioned so many times when someone has a WordPress problem. They’ll call us. 

When creating content, I do think broadly, “Okay. I’m not creating content for doctors. I am creating content for online entrepreneurs as a broad group of people.” I don’t have a specific avatar. If anyone reads out content and they’re in a position to share our content, that’s going to get in front of more eyeballs. In the generally broad space of online entrepreneurship, that’s where our niches want to go.

Darren: Yeah, that makes sense. Number two is to care about your community, that you’re talking about, with great content.

Dan: Yeah. Again, it all comes back to that definition. You need to get people’s attention and build their trust. The only way you’re going to get people’s attention is to do something they care about. I think you can do this in a number of ways. You can be super useful with people. If you’re really close with the community, whether it’s through turning up to events, just by being active on social media, or just being a member in the community. A lot of great blogs are started by people who’ve actually got that problem to start with. They’re a member deep in that community already. 

With Black Hops, with the beer, that’s what happened to us. We’re in that community already. We’re going to the events hanging out online with all these guys and are really passionate about that community. That’s put you in the position where you know what they want and what they’re not getting from elsewhere. 

Fundamentally, if you want to get their attention and you want to be useful in that community, then you need to be a part of it or care about it. That’s what I’ve got now. There’s a bunch of points when it comes to great content. The community is a huge one. The others are more things that have worked for me. Going outside your niche is a general thing that a lot of people could try. With all this stuff, I think it’s okay to try and see what works. Caring about the community is a no brainer thing that every content marketer should be doing. 

Telling a story, I think, is another one. These are broad things that pretty much anyone doing blogging or content marketing can do. The other one’s are things that have worked for me. The other things on that list were being more generous. As an example, I talked about in the book and in the presentation, when I was in the Pat Flynn podcast, I listened to Noah Kagan on that podcast. I was like, “This guy is just off his mind, generous.” He was on there for extra 20 minutes. He’s confirming with Pat, “Have I delivered enough values? Is the best podcast you’ve ever had on this podcast?” 

He’s like, “You know what I would do? We’ll fly people out to Austin. We’ll do a competition where one guy will come out and spend the day with me working his business.” […] podcast, he gave a pair of undies. It’s like that relentless […] more generous in the next person.

When I was on Pat’s podcast, I offered to do website reviews to anyone who commented on the post. I ended up having 700 comments on that post. I spent the course of the next couple of months traveling around, reviewing these people’s websites. It was the best thing for me to do because it was a couple of hours over a couple of days and over that month. It was something that just got a lot of attention, it helped a lot of people, and it drew attention to our brand. That generosity had really built trust. If you’re going to aim to build trust, then generosity, transparency, that kind of stuff is a really good way to do it.

Darren: Yeah. I think the other ones you have were, be more transparent, be more contrarian, and be insanely useful. I think different bloggers almost take on some of those but not all of them. Would you agree with that? These are just sort of things that you can try, probably need to reflect your personality a little bit too, particularly contrarianism.

Dan: Well, it should be. If it’s not, then you can pull up that because you’ve been contrarian. The way I see all of this stuff is to try as many things as you possibly can and figure out what works for you. That’s exactly what I did with my stuff.

Transparency, I talked about with the income reports. Being insanely useful is just by writing really super practical posts and really thinking about how people are using what you’re creating and how you can make it easier for them to do that. I talked about the podcasting guide I wrote. That was the first one I did that was really useful for people. It showed them exactly how to start a podcast. This was quite a few years ago. It’s still useful now.

I started my Black Hops Podcast a couple of months ago. I brought up that blog post and used it. I think that’s a really good criteria to have. The contrarian was interesting and that happened by accident with me because I wrote one blog post that pissed a lot of people off because it really went against the lean startup idea. It was called Is Startup Validation BS? I just noticed how much traction got that for me. That blog post ended up turning into a series. The series ended up turning into a book called The 7 Day Startup. That 7 Day Startup book ended up becoming my online community of which I’ve got thousands of free members and about 90 paid members now. 

It’s become this movement, this 7 Day Startup thing, that I can trace all the way back from one blog post that I wrote out of frustration having a go at what everyone else was saying. You’re saying this to me before, quite often when you have an event, the top speakers will also be the one that generates some of the negative criticisms because they polarize people. That’s almost part of getting attention. You’re naturally okay to have a crack at an idea and do something interesting and contrarian, then I would definitely encourage you to do that because it’s a very good way to get attention.

Darren: Yeah, definitely does. We noticed it with our speakers and also on the blog as well. When we have a guest poster, often the best ones or the ones that polarize people. The realization there is you don’t need to please everyone to have a business. You just need to find your people who are on the same track that you are. 

I think one of the things that I’ve heard you speak about just then but also in the presentation was traction. The word traction came up quite a few times. I get the sense that you experiment prolifically in terms of different types of content and really honed in. You mentioned starting with a blog post. For me, 31 Days to Build A Better Blog, my bestselling ebook started with a blog post as well. It continued to evolve over time, went into a series of blog posts, and a second series. Then, it turned into an ebook, then it turned into a podcast. You really got to pay attention to those little sparks of energy that come along when you try all of those different things, would you agree?

Dan: Yeah. This is what I learned over the 9½ years of being an entrepreneur. You can do all of the same things but if you’re doing them in an area that has traction already, you’re going to get 100 times the results if you’re doing it in an area that’s getting no traction. It’s weird because people look up to people that have some success like their gurus but quite a lot of the time, they’re just doing the same stuff as everyone else. They just found this momentum. 

I actually wanted my first book to be called Momentum and to be about the idea of momentum but I just couldn’t really think of a useful thing to say on the topic except that when something works, do more of it. Try to avoid stuff that’s not working.

Darren: Yeah. I was actually trying to write a book on the same topic. I’ve written a paragraph and I think I’ve said that it turned into a Periscope. 

Dan: Yeah. It was just so important. It frustrates me because I see people going to events and posting in forums saying, “What I’m doing is not working. What am I doing wrong?” It’s not a case of what you’re doing wrong. It’s just that when something has that natural momentum, it’s almost like you’re doing something wrong for it to stop. With WP Curve, I’m in the […] interview I just did recently and he’s like, “What did you do to grow the business?” I’m like, “To be honest, we just try not to stuff anything up for two years.” That’s mainly what we did. 

We did the content, we got the press, and all the rest of it. The thing just exploded. That happened to be a couple of times. It happened with my book. It’s sort of happening with Black Hops with the beer as well. I’d love to claim credit for it, but the reality is that sometimes, things just hit on something and the story captures people, the brand captures people. It’s hard to predict and it’s hard to understand, but what it can do is double down on that when it’s happening and really milk it, for want of a better word. That’s what I’m trying to do with the things that I’ve taken off. 

In the case where things haven’t taken off (of which there are hundreds), I’ve just been ruthless. Over the years, I’ve got more ruthless and ruthless about scraping them quicker and quicker to the point where I’ll do something one week. The next week it’s not working. I completely scrapped it, forgot about it, or moved on to something else. 

Darren: I find most bloggers that I talked to who had success have 5–10 types of blog posts that they just keep doing. It always becomes, not a formula, but they’ve tested hundreds of these five types of blog posts. I looked at Digital Photography School. I know there’s 10 different types of blog posts that we pretty much do every month. What types of content worked best for you in WP Curve? Not so that we can all do it exactly the same because it’ll be different for every blog. What types of content have worked for you?

Dan: I pick three. I pick contrarian. So, anytime I have a view on something that was not shared on a mass scale, I’d be happy to put that view forward. That’s got me a lot of attention. Things like the startup validation post, questioning gospel in the startup world, pretty much. That kind of stuff has worked well.

Storytelling has worked incredibly well. I would include in that book, The 7 Day Startup Book, which is the story of how I was close to failing at entrepreneurship, and turning that around. My income reports which early on by far the most popular post on the site.

With Black Hops with the beer, the same thing. It’s the story, it’s the podcast, the press we’re getting, the attention for the story of every guy just made a homebrew, and all of a sudden, we’re brewing the beer for the biggest brand on earth. That kind of stuff has really worked for me. 

Just learning more about storytelling, getting better telling those stories when I speak at events, and just accepting how powerful those stories are. Even when I liked to think, they’re the ones that are really going to be actionable, useful stuff. I have a podcasting guide. I’ve got marketing guides on the WP Curve blog about hiring remote stuff, using Slack, using Trello, for content marketing calendars. Anything. There’s so much stuff on that site. That stuff goes really well as well.

As much as I’d like to think that a highly actionable online marketing guide is the secret to what we do, I think the storytelling is really being so powerful. If you ask people how they heard about WP Curve or how they’ve heard about Black Hops or how they’ve heard about 7 Day Startup, it’s probably as a result of a story in there somewhere. They’re the three things—storytelling, contrarian, and being as useful as possible.

Darren: Yeah, that’s interesting. I’d say, probably for us, it’s been the insanely useful kind of stuff but again, it’s the stories that create the memories, I think. People don’t remember the useful stuff as much. Sometimes they do but it’s almost always, “I remember when you tell this story about your wife or your kid,” or that type of stuff, and how it related to a breakthrough moment in your business. That’s what seems to create the memory and I think that’s what builds the brand.

Dan: It also creates a deeper connection. People will read a blog post about starting a podcast and get some values from it, but it’s when they listen to a story they feel that they’re a part of. I was really surprised when I started attending more events and speaking at events. A lot of people will come up and say, “I felt like you’re telling that story about me with my agency being unprofitable,” that kind of thing. That’s when you know you’re really connecting with someone because they feel like they’re part of it. It’s a much deeper connection than someone who’s just getting value from you. 

It’s interesting. I was chatting with Nathan. You know Nathan from Foundr magazine?

Darren: Never met him but he’s on my list of people to track down. I think he lives in Melbourne as well.

Dan: Yeah, he does. You should try and get him for ProBlogger next year. It’ll be awesome. He’s a smart dude. He’s got this insane thing going on in Instagram. He started this less than a year ago. He’s up to about 430,000 followers on Instagram. Absolutely insane. He just shares quotes. He’s got it down to a fine art. In America it’s the same. They know the sort of quotes. It’s not just the way the qutoes look. There’s emotional connections, some of the quotes have with people. They know when they post a quote which one’s going to get a lot of traction.

Nathan knows. He’s like, “I could share one of your quotes.” I’ll send him five and he’s like, “No. Those four would be useless. This one’s going to be really good.” I’ll look at him and I’m like, “They’re just quotes.” But because he’s gotten so good at tapping into his audience and knowing exactly what they like, what inspires them, and what makes them feel like they’re on the right track, he just knows. I think that comes back to knowing your community and understanding how they feel, giving them something that connects with them.

Darren: One of the things I loved in your talk was when you talked about differentiating yourself. This is probably one of the biggest struggles I see bloggers and content marketers have. There’s this massive content being produced every second. There’s something new being published. It’s really just so difficult to stand out and differentiate yourself. You shared seven models of differentiating yourself. I think some of them you’ve already touched on in what you’ve talked about. I just wonder if you can talk to that pain point that so many bloggers have right now.

Dan: I guess I’ve mentioned it before, but I think the approach to take if you haven’t got to the point where your blog is getting traction is to test a whole bunch of different ways of doing something interesting. You just need to figure out a way to do something interesting for a group of people. 

I really want to hone in on who the people are to grab my attention early on and what did I actually do that was different to other people. I went through a bunch of these examples. I’ve talked about being more generous, the Kagan example. Just being obsessed with giving more is a relay, really, good way to stand out. I listened to a lot of Smart Passive Income episodes. I know Kagan was the one that stood out for me. That’s the most memorable one for me. 

If you want to get to the point where you’re the most memorable at something, then you need something. For him, it was about giving more. Humor and another really interesting one. If I’m to go to a conference, […] ask me about the speakers, I’ll always remember the funny ones. Otherwise, they have more of an impact because humor’s such a massive attention grabber and a deep connector for people. 

I think if someone like Marie Forleo, I’m sure she’s put out a lot of super useful videos before. For the most part, what I remember when I first discovered her videos was just her sense of humor. I just remember her being really funny. I remember being quite surprised that she was telling these rude jokes. I’m sort of expecting to be educated but I was just being entertained. I supposed I was both. I was being entertained and educated. That’s what stood out for me. I know Marie Forleo’s a famous name now. I don’t know exactly what basis people connect with her but for me, it was a sense of humor. That is what really stood out for me. 

I think that was one of the things I wanted to try out. I would really focus on that, really learn about what standup comedians do, which I’ve delved into a little bit in my looking at content marketing in a book. These guys are trained professionals. Most of them, for the most part, are naturally funny people but a lot of people weren’t actually funny people. The good standup comedians, they’re just really good craftsmen at standup comedy. They do follow rules about telling jokes. They have ways of presenting things that are just a lot more funny than the way an average person presents something. If you’re naturally a funny person, I would delve into that. Maybe that’s going to be your thing.

Design is another one I’ve talked about a lot. I look for areas that are sort of underutilized. Design, I think, is something that a lot of people don’t take seriously, so if you can put out a lot of content that is just really beautiful. Instagram is huge for this. The company is […]. There’s a whole bunch of companies at Instagram that have literally built million dollar companies just by posting beautiful images on Instagram. 

A couple of years ago, you wouldn’t even have thought that it would be possible to start a business like that. Design is such a powerful way of connecting people. If you’ve got that aptitude and you want to explore that further, that could really be a big differentiator when it comes to content. It doesn’t have to be Instagram. I think Instagram is so powerful. If you have any kind of product that lands itself well to that, then Instagram is a no-brainer. 

It could be your blog, it could be infographics, it could just be the attention you pay to the way your blog looks. I know a lot of really top writers that I look at, they take this stuff really seriously. They have really beautiful looking websites. They do infographics that are really nicely designed. I mentioned Nathan before, if you look at the Foundr stuff, look at that magazine, it’s a beautiful magazine. The images are really amazing. It stands out so much from the average blog. It’s like in a league of its own. 

Design is a huge one. I like standup comedy or just generally being funny, being more generous. They’re three of them. I could probably go all day with the others but the message is to find something that naturally resonates with you and also somehow connects with your audience.

Darren: That’s right. I think what I love about the examples you gave at the event, you talked about Michael Sheridan revealing secrets and John Lee Dumas at hustling. I think they grabbed attention in the early days by doing these things and they kind of evolved into something else like Marie. She was funnier than anyone else. That grabbed everyone’s attention and then she followed it up with other stuff as well.

It’s almost like they’ve got the foot in the door with being more transparent or being funny or giving more or doing something first or being beautiful with design. Once the foot was in the door, they then presented something else as well. You just got to find that thing. 

For me, in the early days of ProBlogger, it was being first. You can’t always be first. You’ve got to find something else that’s your foot in the door to create that first impression with people.

Dan: Right. Being first was on my list, too. I could’ve had you and a bunch of people on there. The real point is, when you discover something for the first person, you’re like, “That’s the guy.” The example I have was Pat Flynn with his income reports. I could have had it with the blogging or any number of other people that really doubled down on something for whatever reason became the guy or the girl right at the top.

Darren: Yeah. I actually was the first to do the income report. I actually beat Pat to that but I never continued it. It keeps me up every day. 

Dan: You did okay. Come on, share it around a bit.

Darren: For me, it was the “Aussie not wanting to talk about money” type thing. I was like, “I don’t want to really keep talking about how much I make,” because it just felt grated on me personality-wise. The lesson there is you’ve got to find something that really fits with your personality whereas Pat just does it brilliantly.

Dan: For me, I’ve always struggled with consistency. I know a lot of other people struggle with this as well. There’s probably two ways I’ve been able to manage that, which is probably a personality flaw—the inability to do something consistently—which is something important in business. One is just to really choose something that I’m passionate about. That’s why I want to build this business using content marketing because it’s the only thing I’ve been able to do on an ongoing basis as an entrepreneur. I’ve been doing it since 2008 or 2009. I’ve been able to keep doing it. It’s the only thing I can think of that I’ve been able to keep doing. Choose something that you really love doing.

Also, get really good at automation and delegation. That’s the other part of the Content Machine message. Once you’ve dialled all the stuff in (which I imagined is going to be one of your questions), the automation and delegation part is so critical especially for someone like me which I imagined a lot of people in your audience are similar. You get excited about doing something like your income reports. Maybe you just get to the point where you just don’t want to do them anymore. Maybe they’re still good, but you need a system, a staff member or something, a process to make that happen consistently. I had to get good at that because that’s been a really big challenge for me every year I’ve been an entrepreneur. 

Darren: Funny you mentioned that. That was my next question. How do you actually scale this? Your book is called Content Machine. How do you build it into a machine as such? I think you’ve mentioned in the talk that you don’t write most of the content or any of the content anymore on WP Curve. You’ve got people working with you. How did you build that? Any tips for taking it to the next level?

Dan: Yes. When I started writing this book, I thought, “This is one of the more interesting things about the WP Curve blog.” We’re not a funded company so we weren’t really able to employ a huge content team to take it off. I just actually knew that I couldn’t do 10 blog posts a month consistently for WP Curve anymore. I just lost interest in doing the same thing. I have to get really good at the procedures.

What I put in the book was a whole bunch of frameworks. I think 10–11 different frameworks that we use to manage our process for creating content. They range from editorial guidelines, Trello boards content ideas, a framework for generating ideas, and for exploring those ideas into multiple post-topics. A style guide for just really simple, absolutely everything you need to do in a blog post to make sure it meets the WP Curve standard, a template for promoting your content. Everything to do with content that I used to do myself. I put it into a Google doc and I did my best to explain it to someone else to look after. 

All these resources are free. I don’t know if you could put up a link in one of your URLs to tell people. To me, it’s about, first, figuring out the content puzzle which is how you create something interesting and engaging for people to the point where they want to share it. That’s the content part. Then, have you do it consistently. To me, you do it through the use of software, processes, and people. 

In our content team, we have a content marketing manager. We’ve got a great person that helps with the aspects related to content and how it’s leveraged like email opt-ins, sequences, and stuff like that. We’ve got an admin team that does the content promotion. We’ve got a bunch of tools like Zapier, I use it extensively. Trello, we use to manage our ideas, manage tasks. Slack, we use for communicating. Google docs, we use for the processes. All of those things combined with this stuff happening without me actually having to do anything. I’ve approved a few ideas once a month and have a weekly call to make sure everything’s on track.

Darren: That’s so good. You just covered off my next two questions that are all about tools and some of those frameworks. That’s great. Can you tell us a little bit more about Content Machine? What’s in the book? You’ve already touched a lot of it but I think it is such a useful book for bloggers, business people in general, entrepreneurs.

Dan: Yeah. It really just goes into a lot more detail and all the stuff we talked about. My philosophy’s around content are probably a little bit different to what people are used to hearing if they’re following the blogging well. I think if you’re a blogging sort of person, it would be useful hearing it from a person who identifies himself primarily as an entrepreneur and secondly as a blogger. If you’re an entrepreneur, I think it’s useful because that counter that content world and that blogging world, and I tried to put the two together. The book is my best effort to put everything that I know about content and entrepreneurship through content marketing into a book and a bunch of free resources. 

It was well received. It actually got to number one in the web marketing category in Amazon, I think a few weeks after I launched which was actually high ranked from my first book which was a nice thing to happen. I think I sold 10,000 or 15,000 copies and it’s going quite well.

Darren: What’s next for you? You’ve mentioned your beer brewing company. Can you just give us the one minute version of what’s going on there? I know there’s been some exciting news over the last few weeks that you’ve announced.

Dan: Yeah. This is, again, just following traction. We brewed homebrew and I got carried away. I put together a logo, put together a fake bottle, put it in there. I sent it around the bloggers, and started getting attention. People started asking when we’re going to brew it commercially, so we brew a batch commercially. People started asking when we are going to open a brewery, so we got the money together and started looking into how we can build our own brewery.

That all started a year ago. We’re now working on a location in Gold Coast to open the tasting room and the brewery. We’ve ordered equipment from China. We just brewed a beer with Call of Duty, it’s the biggest entertainment brand in the world. It’s just a crazy story where I’m trying to spread as much as possible. 

From the blogging side, it’s cool too because what we’re doing with the Black Hops podcast and the blog is quite different to what people are seeing in the industry. Again, just taking some of those lessons from the online marketing, transparency, telling people what we’re up to, doing really detailed useful blog posts on how to order equipment, how to put together […], all that kind of stuff. Sort of second nature stuff for online entrepreneurs with things that people in a more traditional industry have probably never seen before. That just had tremendous success for us. That’s really what I’m really excited about at the moment. Hopefully, we’ll be open. I’ll say, at this stage, it’s probably early 2016. We’re hoping to brew this year but it’s quite a process.

Darren: I can imagine. This brick and mortar stuff that I’ve got no idea about. 

Dan: It’s a fun journey. It’s one of those things that I’ve never really thought I’d be evolving something like this. It’s probably quite a high risk and maybe a little bit stupid, but I’m lucky enough to be in a position to do it because of the success I had at WP Curve. I’ve got a bit of stability there, a bit of success, and a bit of credibility to be included in a team to do this. It’s a good story about what some of these blogging stuff can lead to.

Darren: That’s great. Thank you so much. There’s so many more things that we could’ve delved into today, but I think we’ve covered some really useful ground for our listeners. Can you let our listeners know where they can connect with you if they want to get in touch?

Dan: Yes. My focus for the online marketing world at the moment is with my Facebook group which is The 7 Day Startup Facebook Group. I’ve got a free group and a paid group. If you just put 7 Day Startup into Facebook, you can see the free group. If you want to learn about the paid one, you can just go to 7daystartup.co. I’ve got a bunch of stuff there about it. That’s where I’m focusing my attention now.

Darren: That’s great. We’ll link to that in today’s show notes along with all of the other things that you’ve mentioned in all of your other projects. Good luck with the beer. I’m really looking forward to tasting it myself. 

Dan: Yes, I’m sending you some. I hope you’ll enjoy it.

Darren: I’m looking forward to it. It’s something for summer. Excellent. We’ll certainly put all those links in the show notes today. If you’ve got anything else, you can shoot them through, and we’ll include that for our listeners as well. We’ll chat with you all. Thanks for listening to everyone. We’ll chat with you in the next episode of the ProBlogger Podcast. 

A huge thank you to Dan Norris for being so generous with his time today. I hope you found value in today’s episode. You can find today’s show notes at problogger.com/podcast/64.

As I mentioned at the start of this podcast, today’s episode was presented by Telstra Business who is one of our ProBlogger event partners in Australia. As a business owner, you don’t want to spend all your time fretting over wifi issues or counting all the missed calls from the customers. You’d rather spend your time on the things that you do best like blogging, looking after your clients, talking up sales, and growing a business.

Telstra’s there for advice and helps with your technology needs like cloud and communications so you can get on with doing your thing. If you’re in Australia, visit your local Telstra Business Center or head to telstra.com/doyourthing.

I look forward to chatting with you in the next episode of the ProBlogger Podcast.

What did you learn from today’s episode? Do you have other tips that have worked for you? What will you try next?

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 write a blog post about a mistake you have made. Across my blogs, the most popular posts ever have been the ones that include ‘mistake’ in the title. Writing a confessional post about a mistake you have made gives your readers the opportunity to learn from your experience, but will also increase your blog traffic if you set it up well. I share how to write a ‘mistake’ post to make sure you get the most blog traffic possible and to deepen the relationship you already have with existing 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:

The most popular ‘mistake’ post on my blogs:

More examples of my most popular ‘mistake’ blog posts:

The ProBlogger podcast example of a ‘mistake’ post that I mention:

Examples of popular ‘mistake’ blog posts by other bloggers:

Previous blog writing challenges, full of tips on how to write different styles of posts (you could use one or more of these formats to help you write your own ‘mistake’ blog post):

For those of you who don’t know, a writing challenge is where I give you a type of post to give away and write in your own blog. You have the opportunity to come over to our show notes, leave a link to it, and check out some of the other posts that other listeners have put together, hopefully, getting us all a little bit more traffic and improving our writing. 

As I mentioned, we’ve previously done some writing challenges that have been the lists posts, link posts, opinion posts, call-to-action posts, review posts, how-I-do-it posts, and today, I want to challenge you to write a mistakes posts. This idea came as I was surfing through Google Analytics of my blogs today, and I noticed a recurring theme in some of the most-read posts on my own blogs over the last year. The word “mistake” came up time and time again in the headlines of the posts that have been the most-read on my blogs—ProBlogger and Digital Photography School—mistakes posts.

Let me give you an example. The most read post with the word “mistakes” on Digital Photography School this year was a post called Top 10 Mistakes that Cause Blurry Photos. This post went crazy. We’ve […] published it a few times on our Facebook page and every time I promote it on social media, it gets a whole heap of click-throughs to the site. I’ll give you a link to it in today’s show notes along with some others that have done well. There have been quite a few.

We’ve published a post called 10 Common Mistakes in Long Exposure Photography, 7 Landscapes Photography Mistakes to Avoid, 4 Mistakes New Photographer Makes and How to Avoid them, and the list goes on. In fact, in the top 200 or so posts on the site this year, in terms of traffic, 10 have been mistakes posts and the same trend is the case over on ProBlogger.

In fact, one of our recent podcasts here was a podcast that I wrote. I put together episode 46 which was titled, Do You Recognize These 21 Blogging Mistakes? That particular podcast was listened to a whole heap more than other podcasts on either side of it in terms of the order. It seems that “mistakes” is a word that triggers people to want to read your post, particularly, if you want to use it in your headline. 

There are a number of reasons I think why mistakes posts work. Firstly, they make people curious about if they’re making those mistakes. Particularly, that podcast—one that I just gave you the example of—by having the title of that post, Do You Recognize These 21 Blogging Mistakes, I guess that builds some curiosity. The subheading of that particular podcast was How To Avoid Making 21 Blogging Mistakes. Again, there’s a promise there to help you to improve in some of these areas as well. 

I think there are a number of other reasons there why they work. Firstly, they help people in quite practical ways to either avoid falling into common traps or potentially save them time and money. It’s actually a question that I get asked all the time in podcast interviews as well. “What mistakes did you make? What mistakes did you see other people are making?” People ask that because they want to shortcut success in different ways. 

Mistake posts also cause really good discussion many times. Sometimes, debate and sometimes they can even potentially polarize people if you’re not careful in the way that you write them. But, I find that they do cause discussion. People want to chime in with their opinion on whether it’s a mistake or not or whether they’ve made that mistake, and they’d often tell stories as well.

The other good thing about mistakes posts is that they give you, as a blogger, an opportunity to be vulnerable, to share your own failings or mistakes. What I find is that when you do share your own mistakes, that people respond very well to that. It makes you more human, more relatable, and it will stimulate discussion where people feel more able to share their own mistakes if you take the lead in that.

Mistakes touch on pain points as well. Often, if you start a post by sharing a mistake that you made, people are then in a much better state to read your solution to that. If you’re offering a solution or a way to avoid that mistake. Starting with a mistake can really bring out pain in your reader, and can prime them for a solution. 

The other reason that I find mistakes posts really work well is that they simply just give you an opportunity to solve a problem and to bring about change in your readers. Readers will be grateful for that. There’s a number of reasons why mistakes posts work and why I think you should try one for your own blog. 

Before you go away and write that post, let me give you a few tips. Firstly, don’t just give them mistakes. Give some solutions, some ways to overcome the mistakes, to avoid the mistakes, or alternatives if it’s about a choice that the reader might be making. Some of the posts that we’ve written include that in the title. One that I’ve mentioned before, 7 Landscape Photography Mistakes to Avoid, signals that there are some hints there as to how to avoid those things. These are many of the posts that we’ve written that have taken that approach. Here are some mistakes that you can avoid and how to overcome those mistakes.

Another tip is to not only write mistakes posts for your whole nation, for your whole topic. I gave you some examples there before, some quite general ones. Mistakes that New Photographers Can Make, but you could actually drill down and to write these types of mistakes for different categories on your blog.

As you heard before, we wrote one on mistakes that can cause blurry photos, mistakes that can impact your long exposure photography, we’ve written mistakes post on travel photography, on photographing kids, and the list goes on. You can really do these types of posts multiple times on your blog as long as they are different from one another. 

The next tip I’ll give you on this is to not go overboard. You don’t want seven days in a row just mistakes posts. Your readers will get annoyed with that and they don’t, every post in the same format and using those same keywords all the time will get a little bit boring for people. Now, become a little bit blind to them. It’s the type of post you might want to share once a month or even every couple of months. 

Another quick tip is to try to make it personal. A post that’s titled Five Mistakes That I Have Made as a Photographer could get more cut-through than Five Mistakes Photographers Make. I’ve certainly seen that in a number of posts I’ve written on ProBlogger over the years, where I make it really clear that these are the things that I’ve done wrong. People, as I have said before, really relate to you being vulnerable and you sharing the things that you’ve done. It makes you a little bit relatable. 

A couple of other quick tips, particularly in how you’re sharing these posts on social media. One of the things that I quite often do when I’m sharing a mistakes post on Facebook will be to include a question like, which of these mistakes have you made? Then, share the link. This invites a discussion which will help you to get more reach with your post because people are leaving comments and it also gets people to think about their own situation a little bit more, which could help them to bring about some change.

Another one that you might want to try, what other mistakes have you made that you would add to this post? If you have a list of five mistakes, invite your readers to come up with another five. This could actually make a really good follow up post so you might have a second post a week or two later, a month later, another five mistakes that photographers make, which again, gives you a chance to link back to that first one you did. It also gives you a chance to highlight perhaps some of the comments from your readers on the previous post, which makes them a little bit famous and puts their name in the spotlight, but also gives you a second piece of content on a topic that does often work quite well.

Again, my challenge for you today is to go away and to write a mistakes post and I’d love to see it. If you could go to problogger.com/podcast/63, you’ll find some examples of mistakes posts that we’ve published on Digital Photography School, on ProBlogger, and a couple of other sites, but there’s also an opportunity there for you to leave a comment and to check out the post that other listeners of this podcast are submitting as well.

I’d love it if you just make those links that you share there new posts. This is all about writing something new, not just highlighting stuff you’ve already written in your archives. If you do want to talk there about posts that have worked well for you in the past, that’s okay, but I’d really prefer it if you’d go away and write something new as well. I want to stimulate action with this podcast rather than just celebrate our archives.

I really look forward to reading your mistakes posts, be it a little bit vulnerable, remember? It does help. I will check out those posts and share a few of them if they’re relevant to my audiences on my social accounts as well.

Thanks for listening today and I’ll talk with you in episode 64 of the ProBlogger podcast.

What did you learn from today’s episode? Do you have other tips that have worked for you? What will you try next?

I’d love to hear from you in the comments below, with a link to the ‘mistakes’ blog post you write.

Finally, if you have a moment we’d love to get your feedback on the ProBlogger Podcast with this short survey which will help us plan future episodes.

Enjoy this podcast? Subscribe to ProBloggerPLUS for free to get free blogging tutorials and podcasts in your inbox each week.

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

Today’s episode is about how I almost lost my blogging business overnight. It was right after I had decided to blog full time and had quit my part time job. My traffic fell by 80% and my income fell by about 85%. It was an awful feeling and I’d like to share this story with you to make sure you know what to do if disaster ever strikes your blog. I share why it happened, what I did to recover from it, and what I do now to prevent it ever happening again.

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:

This graph shows my blog traffic at the time that it dropped overnight:

I want to talk to you about what I did to recover that traffic by diversifying my traffic sources and ask you a really important question that I think could potentially help you if a disaster was to strike you. You can find today’s show notes at problogger.com/podcast/62.

I want to tell you this story. It happened back in 2004. I think it was the 17th of December, literally a week before Christmas. I was in that winding down mode that particularly us Aussies do at that time of the year. Christmas is a time where we take our summer holidays, so I was getting ready to take a week or two off blogging and to relax. 

In the last few months, I’ve gone full-time as a blogger and quit my last part-time job to completely dedicate myself to blogging. I had no other forms of income, my wife was a brand new lawyer and not making a whole heap of money, so my blogging was now my family’s main source of income. Then, it happened. 

One morning I woke up—a week before Christmas—I checked my blog stats and something was wrong. I knew it immediately as I saw it. My stats for the day which was nowhere near what they normally were. At first, I thought it was a glitch and began to check on the internet to see whether other people were having problems with the stats package I was using at that time and no one else was reporting it.

I continued to watch the stats all day, literally refreshing it over and over and over again, and began to realize I had lost a whole heap of traffic. Traffic was trickling in. I was getting 10%-15% of my normal traffic, but most of it was gone. It didn’t take me long to work out where it had gone because at that point, 85% of my traffic was coming from one source, the day before at least it was, and that was from Google. 

My blog at that time, it was a photography blog, camera review blog was ranking number one in Google for most cameras at least here in Australia on google.com.au. It was sending me almost all of my traffic and overnight it disappeared. In fact, overnight my blog pretty much disappeared from Google altogether. 

To this day, no one really seems to know what happened. Obviously Google changed their algorithm at that point. Back in 2004, there wasn’t really a whole heap of information on Google’s algorithm changes. It just happened and no one really knew what was going on every time it happened, but at this particular moment, it pretty much meant we completely disappeared from Google.

This completely threw me into a tailspin as I said earlier. I had just quit my last part-time job and along with 85% of my traffic disappearing, went almost all of my revenue for my blog. In fact, it was even more than 85% of the revenue disappeared as well. I guess I realized at that point that I became very reliant upon Google traffic. In fact, I became quite complacent on my whole blog because I had to have this increasing traffic from Google over the years and had never expected that it would go away. As a result, I really stopped pushing hard on my blog to continue to grow my blog. 

I worked hard for the first two years, but because I got to this full-time level, I became a little bit lazy, a little bit complacent. That traffic disappearing on that particular day just before Christmas in 2004 was the wakeup call I needed. While it completely threw me for the next day (actually probably for the next week or two) and I got quite depressed, in the long run, I’m very grateful that it happened because it started a sequence of events for me that led to my blogs becoming much much bigger in the long run. It taught me some really important lessons, the biggest of which was to diversify.

From that point, I decided to diversify in two ways. I started to diversify my income streams because most of my income at that point was from Google AdSense, but I also decided to diversify my traffic. I’m going to talk about how I diversified my income streams in a future podcast, but today, I want to talk a little bit about how I began to diversify my traffic because what I learned that day was that relying on any single source of traffic is risky, very risky.

This whole situation threw me so much that a few days after it happened, I actually went out and started applying for work. I actually got myself a part-time job to get me through the next few months, but I also began to work really hard on different areas of my blog and I want to walk you through ten of the things that I did around this time that paid-off big time in the long run. Ten different ways that I began to diversify the traffic that was coming into my blogs.

Let’s get into the ten things. Firstly, I began to work really hard on trying to identify who I wanted to read my blog. Up until this point, I was pretty much just open to anyone reading my blog. I just wanted traffic. But this whole process of losing money made me start to think that maybe I needed to get a little bit smarter about who I was trying to attract.

This is something that I talked about in previous episodes of this podcast. You can go back to episode 33, in particular, where I talk about developing a reader profile or an avatar for your blog to actually identify who it is that you are trying to reach. To spend some time thinking about who they are demographically, but also what their needs are, what their problems are, what their challenges are, who they are. This is something that I began to do. I began to identify who I was trying to reach with my blogs which made finding those readers a whole heap easier.

A little action item for you is to spend some time developing a reader profile for your blog or an avatar if you haven’t already. If you haven’t, go back and listen to episode 33 where I give you some ideas on how to do that. That was the first thing I did. 

The second thing I did was connected to that. I decided to put a renewed focus upon creating great content that solved those readers’ needs. I became a little bit complacent with growing my readership in this particular period back in 2004. I spent a whole heap of time thinking about what would people be searching Google for, what could I rank in Google, optimizing my site for Google, and that’s why I had so much traffic coming in from Google.

I realized once this traffic disappeared, that I have been spending so much time developing content for Google, that I wasn’t actually spending a whole heap of time developing content for real people with real needs and real problems. So, this process of actually working out who I wanted to read my blog and what their problems, needs, and challenges were was actually a really good exercise to do because it enabled me to refocus my attention on creating content for real people with real needs and real problems rather than trying to develop content that was all about the keyword that people might or might not be searching for. 

Making this switch of attention was really a powerful thing. I spent more and more time every day trying to understand what my reader’s needs were and creating content around that. My action item for you today is connected to the first one, work out who you want to read your blog, but then really dig into what are their needs, what are their problems, what are their challenges, and how can you find those things.

We actually have just done a survey on ProBlogger and I want to give you an invitation to participate in it in today’s show notes. We do a census every year on ProBlogger asking our readers about who they are, but also what their needs are, which is trying to understand their habits, the way they spend their time, the way they spend their money as it pertains to our particular topic, but particularly, asking them what their problems are, asking them what their challenges are.

I think this is a really useful action item that you can do on your blog, whether your blog is big or small, whether you got a million readers or whether you got a hundred readers. To run a little survey with your readers, asking them about who they are and what their needs are, is a very powerful thing. It actually will help you in the long run with your search traffic as well because what I discovered throughout this whole process is that people are just typing in their problems into Google. The more you understand about their real need and real problems, the better position you’ll be in to create content to be found in Google anyway. These first two things aren’t really technical things, but the third one is. 

The third thing I started to do was to think about how I could appear on other people’s blogs as a guest author but also as a commentator. What I realized is that whilst I had fallen out of Google at this point, all the other blogs on my niche had not. They still had all the traffic they previously had and they had the readers that I wanted to have as well.

While there was no such thing back in 2004 as guest posting, it wasn’t something people talked about as a technique, that’s what I began to try and do. I began to get to know other bloggers in my niche and that’s something I’ll talk about a little bit later, but I also began to offer to write articles for them and to be interviewed by them, and to contribute to their blogs whether it be by content but also by comments on their blog. 

This is something I’ve talked about in previous episodes so I won’t go into great detail, but you can find a little bit more on guest posting, creating content in forums and Facebook groups in episode 37 of this blog. My action item for you on this one is to identify a few other blogs in your niche, Facebook groups, Facebook pages, or forums that are on your topic, and to try and come up with some content that might be able to appear in those places. Again, episode 37 will help you in this process.

The fourth thing I started to do back in 2004 at this point where I lost all this traffic from Google was to start a newsletter. What I realized at this point was that I needed to be able to direct traffic to myself through my own means and the best way to do this was to start collecting email addresses of the people who came to my blog so I could email them with updates on new content that was coming. I started to use Aweber at this time and started to gather email addresses from my readers at this point.

At first, it was only a trickle of emails that started to come in that gradually over time, that trickle grew. To this point, on all of my email lists, we have over a million subscribers. Each week when I send a newsletter out to my subscribers on Digital Photography School and ProBlogger, I am able to direct my own massive wave of traffic to my own sites. This is probably the most powerful thing I’ve ever done and I really wish I started it earlier. 

If you haven’t got a newsletter today, please set one up. If you are not collecting email addresses from your readers, please start doing it and more importantly than just collecting the email addresses is starting to warm up your list and communicate with the people who are on your list. If you are just collecting emails and you don’t send them anything for another year or two, they’ll forget that they subscribed. You need to keep your list warm.

The fifth thing that I started to do to diversify my traffic streams was to begin to promote other subscription methods. Email is a great way of driving traffic to your blog and is also a great way of selling to your list as well, but there are other ways that you can get a secondary connection with your readers. Some people just don’t like emails, so you might want to offer them another source, but it’s also good to have a second resource of connecting points with them. 

Back in 2004, the thing that we were focusing on as bloggers was to get people to subscribe to our RSS feeds. Blogs do have RSS feeds today and it is a way that you can grow subscribers to your blog, but today I’ll probably be putting more emphasis on trying to get subscribers and followers on social media. This will vary from social media network-to-network, depending upon where your readers are hanging out, but you should probably be looking at Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, even Periscope, or Blab.

Actually, as part of the survey that you do with your readers, ask them where they are hanging out and begin to develop a presence in those areas. Don’t just rely upon one source of traffic. Your main source of traffic actually may be Facebook. It may be Twitter. It may be Pinterest. So, go beyond that as well.

The sixth thing that I started to do was to network more. I became quite insular with my blogging. I became quite self-reliant and had not been interesting as much as I had previously done with other bloggers in my niches. At the time back in 2004, there weren’t really too many social networks to interact with other bloggers on, so most of the networking that tended to happen back then was through forums or through email. 

I decided to put a renewed effort to that and put aside a little bit every week to be emailing other bloggers in my niche to get to know them, to ask them if I can help them in any way, and to try and even meet them in person if I was able to do that. This renewed effort on networking led to some really great friendships and also led to a couple of profitable partnerships in time, but more than that it actually began to open up opportunities for me to link to other bloggers and them to link to me which was about sharing traffic.

In the long run, I brought in a lot of traffic and had the secondary effect of helping us with our search engine optimization as well and helped to repair some of the problems that we had with Google because when you get links from other sites, that helps a lot. Today, we have a lot of ways we can network with other bloggers. There continues to be email and there are forums around but there’s social media as well. Twitter and Facebook groups are wonderful places to begin to network with other people, other influencers in your niche, and you probably want to interact with other bloggers but also other influencers on social media as well. 

Probably the best way you can network with people is to meet them face to face, so if you do have the ability to get to go on a conference for social media influencers, bloggers, or people in your particular niche, take that opportunity because the real face-to-face interactions that we have, the meals that we have, the chats we have over coffee and drinks, while we are lining up to go to the bathroom and sitting next to each other in sessions, those interactions that we have lead to all kinds of wonderful win-win, fruitful relationships in the long run.

The seventh thing that I began to do is related to what I was just talking to. I began to go to events and began to run some events of my own. What I realized is that if you can get in front of a potential reader, shake their hand, meet them, learn their name, and they learn your name, that the potential for them to become not only a surfer, someone who pops by your blog every now and again, but to have them become a reader, to have them become a fan of you and your blog, it really grows when you meet them face-to-face.

The first event that I have ever run was me noticing as I walked down the street one day that my local library ran workshops and people could volunteer to teach on different topics in the local library. So, I went in and said, “Hey, would you be interested in me running a class on how to use digital cameras?” and the librarian said, “Sure. We’ve never had a photography class before. You can do it.” 

I put up a sign in the library and I had about 20 people come to that first workshop. I ran a few of those and while 20 people isn’t a lot, I know that 10 or so years later, that some of my readers for my blogs actually continued to read my blogs because I met them in that library all that time ago. It’s likely that some of them probably brought their friends along to my site as well. Little by little, this helped to grow my traffic and also gave me the confidence to start to attend other people’s events, go to meetups, to attend conferences, and also down the track to start the ProBlogger event that we run today, which now has 700 people come to it. 

Again, I know for a fact that every time we run an event for ProBlogger that the people that we meet at those events become more entwined in the brand. They feel like they know us because they actually do know us. After every event, I notice that the people commenting on our blog and social media are often the people who come to our events. They become advocates, they become evangelists for the site, and they become the most engaged users as well. If you can have an interaction with your readers at a real-life event, it can have a massive impact. 

The eighth thing I began to try and do (this actually came a little bit later) was to have other personal interactions with readers as well. I’ve actually talked in previous episodes of this podcast how I used to email readers who left comments and this is something that I began to do more and more particularly back in 2004, but there’s a whole heap of other ways that you can build in more personal interactions with your readers. I think I mentioned in episode 61 about building community with your blog, with your readers that mediums like Periscope or Blab can give you that particular personal interaction with your readers, but there are all kinds of other ways you can do it as well. 

Build those relationships one by one. Respond to comments, email your readers, interact with them on Twitter. Anything that is personal. Anything that shows your readers that you noticed them, that you value them is a really important thing. Your readers that you already have are very powerful. Once I lost 85% of my readers back in 2004, I guess I realized that I still have 15%. I still have some readers and they have the potential to help me grow my blog. 

The ninth thing that I began to do was to pitch other bloggers. This is something that perhaps is a little less relevant today, but I think there is a way that you can do it. Back in 2004, the main way that people shared links on the internet was on their blog. So, it was quite normal to have blog posts which just link to other blog posts. I remember on ProBlogger doing it quite regularly. I think we had a weekly post that was just the things I’ve been reading this week. It was quite normal to pitch other bloggers and say, “Hey, you may want to share this with your readers.”

Today, that doesn’t tend to happen as much. Bloggers don’t tend to link out in those places as much, but where they do link out is on Twitter and on Facebook. I still think it’s irrelevant to share your blog post with other influencers. You won’t want to just spam every influencer you know with every link that you write, but if you write a blog post and you think it’s particularly relevant to another person, whether they be someone on Twitter, a blogger, or a Facebook user, then shoot them a note and say, “Here’s something I wrote. It might be useful to your readers.” 

Don’t force them to do it or try to twist their arm. Just put it out there and say, “Hey, if you are willing to share, it might be useful to you,” and if it’s a useful post that you’ve written, you’ll be amazed how many people will share it because they realize that if they can help their followers, if they can help their readers, they may look good as well. Again, you don’t want to do this with every post that you write and you don’t want to just be pitching the same people over and over again, but begin to think about who I could be sharing this with. That may be able to extend the reach of my content and again, this brings in a different source of traffic.

The last thing I began to do and again, this was 2004–2005 was to do what I now would call a content event. I began on my first blog to start doing group writing projects. I think the first one I ever did was called Blogger Idol. This is the time where American Idol, Australian Idol, and all of the Idol television shows began to become quite big and I decided to do Blogger Idol. 

I don’t remember exactly how it ran but I think it was me suggesting a topic. I think from memory, the first one was the 80s and I encouraged my readers to go away and write a post on the topic of the 80s on their own blogs and then to come back and share links to the post that they had written. Then I developed a list of all the links. Some people might call it a link party today and people would (of course) share my blog post where their link was featured. This sent traffic to them or the participants but it also brought a lot of traffic into my blogs. 

I later started doing group writing projects on ProBlogger in similar ways and did 31 Days to Build a Better Blog which is a series of 31 blog posts over 31 days, which gave my readers something to learn but also something to do and to come back and share with other readers. In some ways, it was a content event as well.

Running projects like this, whether it be a week-long challenge where you get your readers to go away, take a photo, and share it on Instagram, or whether it’s something that they go away and do their personal lives, come back and comment on, these types of things bring readers back to your blog daily for the period that you run the challenge, but they also are shareable, and many times I see a lot of traffic come into bloggers who do this content events.

They vary a lot from blog to blog depending on what your niche is and what your readers like to do, but if there’s anything you like to do like that, whether it be a series of blog posts that gets people to go away and do something and they share it or whether it be something that you ran on Instagram, they can be very powerful. 

I have done all these ten things that I ran through, but what actually started to happen was I started to get traffic from all of these other different sources from other blogs, from social media, from my email and newsletter list, but the other impact of doing all these things was that I actually started to rank again highly in Google. This is partly because Google just changed their algorithm again six or so weeks later, so I lost all that traffic for six weeks and then six weeks later the traffic came back again. 

It didn’t come back at the same rate and this think was because Google changed its algorithm, but as a result of doing all these other stuff, my traffic actually ended up being a whole heap higher than it ever was and we started to rank even higher than we had previously because suddenly, people were linking to us and I was getting a little bit more engaging with my content as well. As a result of doing these ten things, our Google rankings and Google traffic began to rise as well. 

The question I want to ask you today is this, “What is your number one source of traffic?” It’s very easy to find out. Just go into Google Analytics or whatever stats program you are using and check it out. Then, ask yourself, what would happen if that traffic was to disappear tomorrow? Would you be able to survive? Would you be able to sustain your blog? Or would you be in trouble like I was back in 2004? 

Once you asked that question, what could you then do to start to diversify your traffic? To grow other sources of traffic into your blog as well? What can you do as a contingency plan if that worst thing happens? Also, how can you perhaps alleviate that problem from ever happening by beginning to build up that other traffic as well? Could you be a guest posting on other blogs? Should you be starting an email newsletter? Should you be changing your approach to creating content on your blog? Could you be promoting other subscription methods? Could you be networking more with other bloggers? Could you be running an event, beginning to attend other events? Could you be a little more proactive with the readers that you already have? Could you be pitching other bloggers? Could you be running content events on your blog? 

Don’t wait until the crisis happens to begin to do some of these things. Build into your weekly flow, being proactive about building traffic in these ways, and you might just find that if the worst thing happens, it’s not as bad as you think it might be.

I’d love to hear your feedback on this and what some of the other things are that you would be doing to build proactive traffic into your blogs. You can find today’s show notes where there’s an opportunity to comment on problogger.com/podcast/62. Before I finish, if you have heard any screaming children in the back of this podcast, apologies. I’m a dad. I work at home and I have four 4-year-olds in the house right now having a playdate, so I hope that this has been […] for you today and that you’ve enjoyed the screaming as well as some of the content that I produced for you today. If you haven’t heard it, please disregard this disclaimer and I’ll chat with you in the next episode, episode 63 of the ProBlogger podcast. Thanks for listening.

What did you learn from today’s episode? What is your number one source of blog traffic? What would happen if that blog traffic was to disappear tomorrow? Would you be able to survive? Would you be able to sustain your blog? What could you do to start growing other traffic sources for your blog? Do you have other tips that have worked for you? What will you try next?

I’d love to hear from you in the comments below.

Finally, if you have a moment we’d love to get your feedback on the ProBlogger Podcast with this short survey which will help us plan future episodes.

Enjoy this podcast? Subscribe to ProBloggerPLUS for free to get free blogging tutorials and podcasts in your inbox each week.