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 all about how to make money as a blogger through affiliate marketing. Making money through affiliate marketing is not easy money, but there are things you can do to increase your chances of earning a regular stream of income from it. I share insider tips about what’s worked for me in making money through affiliate marketing on my blogs.

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:

Best Seller List Examples:

Affiliate Networks Mentioned:

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

Let’s start with the question: what is affiliate marketing? I don’t want to spend too long on this because I know many of you already do some affiliate promotions on your blog. In short, as a blogger, when you do an affiliate promotion, you promote a particular product. It might be an ebook, or it could be a physical product. Really, there’s a whole heap of things that you can be promoting. When you promote it, you’re promoting it to your readers with a special link which has a tracking code in it. Or, you might be using a coupon code, which also tracks the sales that you send. If the reader buys the product, they go to the business’s website that has that product. They buy it as a result of clicking on your link which has that tracking code. The business knows that you referred that business, and then they pay you a commission for promoting that product.

In my digital photography site, occasionally, we will mention a camera. It might be a Sony Cyber-shot DSC-HX50V camera. Bit of a mouthful there, but that’s what a camera is called there. When we mention that camera, we link to Amazon. Amazon, the bookstore, but also has a whole heap of other products. When someone goes to Amazon and buys that camera—it might be a $300-camera—and someone buys that, we earn a 4% commission on that. We might make $15 or so dollars for that sale. It doesn’t sound like a lot but when you refer a lot of business to Amazon, that adds up over time. 

Other affiliate programs might pay you a higher commission. For example, on an ebook that you might be promoting, you might get paid 40% or even 50% of the sale. It’s a way of you promoting products to your audience, and then earning a commission if there is a purchase made.

Why does affiliate marketing work? Why is it an alternative to advertising as an income stream for your blog? Advertisers like affiliate marketing, because they only have to pay you when there’s a conversion. If they advertise on your site, they don’t know if there’s going to be a conversion. They’re paying you to get exposure with no guarantee of reward. They’re taking all the risk. With affiliate marketing, the advertiser is not really taking any risk at all. You, as the publisher, are taking the risk; but the rewards can be greater than with advertising. 

Let me give you an example. I was doing some business with a company who was advertising on Digital Photography School. They were advertising using a banner ad on my site. They’re paying me $2,000 for a one-month campaign to have their banner ad on my site for a whole month. At the end of the month, they did not renew that campaign. When I asked them why, they said, “Well, we didn’t really see too many conversions from it. It wasn’t worth our time that we’re paying out more than what we earned as a result of that.” So, they went away.

I approached them a few months later when I noticed they started an affiliate promotion for their product. I said to them, “How about we try something different? How about I promote your product as an affiliate with a post on my site?” I wrote a post reviewing their product. I did a few promotions on social media as well of that particular post. That post generated over $9,000 in sales for their product. They earned $4500 of that, I earned $4500 of that because it was a 50% affiliate commission. 

With an affiliate promotion in the content on my site, it completely outperformed the banner ad. The advertiser was happy, and we were happy. Everyone got something out of that. You can see here, it’s a different model to advertising. There can be real rewards there. It doesn’t cost you anything apart from the time that it takes you to set it up. It doesn’t cost your advertiser anything unless there’s a sale. In some ways, it’s a no-risk type approach, because no one is actually out of pocket. Unless there’s a sale where in that case, everyone’s got money in their pocket.

Affiliate marketing works best on blogs that have three things. Firstly, on blogs that have perceived authority or expertise on their topic. If you are seen as someone who knows what they’re talking about, can be trusted, and has authority, then that works. The second one is trust and relationship between the reader and the blogger. It really works a whole heap better if your readers feel like they know you, and they trust you, and they’re in a relationship with you. That’s really important in affiliate marketing, and something that you’re going to hear me talk about a number of times during this podcast.

The last factor is, I think, it works best when the readers of your blog are in a buying mood. Some blogs, readers come for different reasons. If they’re coming to your blog with some mood for buying, then that works even better. The first photography blog that I had was a blog about reviewing cameras. Pretty much anyone who came to that blog was in a buying mood because they were there to learn about, and to research whether a particular camera was good. On that blog, affiliate promotions worked really, really, really well. They can work on blogs where people are there for other motivations, but that certainly is one factor that comes into play.

Before I get into the tips, I want to address one thing. This is not easy money. There are things that will increase the chances of affiliate marketing working on your blog, I’ve already mentioned three of those. But it’s not easy money, even if you’ve got those three things. Effective affiliate marketing relies upon having traffic to your blog. The more traffic, the better. It’s got to be the right traffic as well. You can get a whole heap of traffic from Reddit or another blog that might send you a whole heap of traffic, but if they’re not the right type of reader, and they’re not interested in the product that you’re promoting, it’s not going to work. Traffic is one thing. Finding relevant products to promote to your readers is another thing. That’s really important that you find products that really fit with your audience.

If I’m a photography blog, and I’m promoting fashion, shoes or bags—unless they’re camera bags—that’s not going to work with my audience. You need to find products that really relate to your audience. You need to find quality products as well. That is partly to get people to buy those products. It’s also about the relationship that you have. If you’re recommending relevant products that are rubbish— that are going to fall apart, and your readers are not going to get a good experience from that—that then reflects badly upon you. That destroys trust. 

Effective affiliate marketing really does rely upon that trust with your readers. You might be able to get a sale by recommending a rubbish product today, but you won’t get a sale tomorrow as a result of that. Having your readers in that buying mood is a part of it as well. Being able to communicate effectively is another factor that comes into play.

Let me touch briefly upon how I do affiliate marketing. I actually make income on my blogs from a number of different forms, ebooks. I do sell some advertising on my site and use some ad networks as well. Depending on the month, affiliate marketing probably makes up between 12% and 20% of my income from month to month. It’s not my main source of income, but it’s an important one. There are certain times of the year where that goes up. For example, for December, we do a big promotion. I’ll talk a little bit about that later in this podcast. That promotion includes selling some of our own products, but also some affiliate products as well. We do see our affiliate income going up in December.

There are three types of affiliate programs that we generally promote on my blogs. As you look around at the options for you, you’ll probably find that you are drawn more to one of these particular types. 

Firstly, there’s where you promote a product from a particular store, like Amazon or a site like eBay. They have their own affiliate programs. Amazon is a place where many bloggers start out to get a feel for what an affiliate promotion is. It’s also good because they’ve got a lot of variety in their store. You can promote everything from books, to clothes, to food, to all kinds of stuff there. I actually would like to record a podcast in a couple of episodes’ time on how to promote as an affiliate Amazon because I think it is a great place to start. It actually can convert really well. I have over $500,000 over the last 12 or so years through that particular program. It’s one that you definitely would want to consider. That’s the first type. This is where you’ve got a big online store that has its own program.

Many other online stores don’t have the resources to set up their own program. They use what is called an affiliate network. This is what most online stores today would use. They sign up to a network, and then the network offers for you as an affiliate to join their network, and then promote a variety of different products and different suppliers. One of the big ones is Rakuten, also known as LinkShare, I think they merged at some point. You can find them at linkshare.com. I’ll put that link and some other links in today’s show notes. They have a variety of programs that you can join once you join their network. Commission Junction, which is at cj.com, is another one that is similar. Event Gate, ClickBank, ShareASale are other ones. 

Once you check out those links, you’ll see that you need to sign up and join the network. In most cases, you can apply to promote a particular product or a particular supplier. Some call them ‘particular advertisers’. Within that, there’s often thousands of different products that you can promote. You will find, if you are in a particular geographical area, that there may be affiliate networks that are more specific to your area. I know here in Australia, there are programs that are more specific to Australian stores that you might like to join. That’s the second type of affiliate program.

The third one is where you might want to promote an ebook or a course. There would be more of a private affiliate program that is set up. For example, on our photography blog, we have ebooks for sale. We have our own affiliate program, which other photography blogs can join. We pay 40% commission on our ebooks. You’ll find a lot of ebook makers, bloggers who have an ebook, or a blogger who has a course will have an affiliate program associated with that. If they don’t, it’s sometimes quite easy to set up. You might like to actually approach anyone who’s got a relevant ebook to your audience to ask them if they’d set up a program.

Let’s get into some tips for affiliate marketing on blogs. The first thing that I really want to emphasize is that you should not do affiliate promotions without a really high commitment to your readers. You need to take that relationship that you have with your readers really seriously because you can do a lot of damage by promoting the wrong product to your audience. You want to really value that trust and not break that trust. They’re not going to buy your products again in the future if you recommend the wrong product, if you’re just doing it for a quick buck. They’re not going to continue to read your blog if you rip them off either. 

I’ve seen a lot of bloggers really get into trouble with this. You can make a lot of money with some affiliate programs, particularly ones where you refer someone, and then if that person signed someone up as a multi-level type thing. You can make a lot of money that way, but you can also damage your reputation if you put people into the wrong type of program. I want to emphasize that right up front, don’t promote stuff that’s rubbish. Don’t promote stuff that’s not relevant to your audience, because it’s just going to break that trust.

Tip number two is to aim for the affiliate sweet spot. There are three things that need to be relevant here, that are really connected here. Your readers intent—their need, where they’re at, their problem that they have, the challenges that they face—needs to come into play. The more you understand about that, the better, because then you’re able to choose a product to promote to them that fulfills some of those needs and that seats well with that intent. Here, it’s about finding the sweet spot between who your reader is and the products that you promote. 

The third part of the sweet spot is how you promote that to them, thinking about how to communicate with your readers. I’ll share a little graphic in today’s show notes at problogger.com/podcast/51, which shows you this sweet spot. You really want to match the needs and intent of your reader with the products you promote and the way that you promote it.

Third tip is to really think about choosing the right products for your audience. By this, it’s partly about relevancy, which I’ve already mentioned. You want to be thinking about, “My readers are interested in this, so I’ll promote something that’s relevant.” Also think about the right products in terms of the price of the products that you promote. 

On Digital Photography School, if I promote a $2,000-course with my readers—and there are $2,000-photography courses around—I know my readers are very unlikely to buy that. Because they’re largely beginners who don’t have a lot of discretionary income to spend. They’re much more likely to buy a $20 ebook or a $5 ebook, something at that low end. That’s just who my reader is. I need to choose the right product for my audience. At times we do promote higher value products, but it’s usually where we give them another option as well at a lower price.

The last part about choosing the right product for your audience is thinking about the source of that product as well. You want to be recommending trusted stuff. That’s actually why I think Amazon works well for my particular audience because Amazon is a trusted brand. Whilst they don’t pay the highest commissions, people have confidence that when they buy something on Amazon, they’re going to get that product delivered to them. That does come into play as well. Choose the right products for your audience.

Tip number four is to go beyond banner ads. Many of these affiliate programs that you’ll set up will give you the option to promote the product that you’re promoting in a number of ways. They will say, “Here’s the link that you can promote on social media,” just the raw link. They might also give you the option to get a banner ad, or to get a button for your sidebar. These can work, but they’re not going to work anywhere near as well as other forms of promotions. I see a lot of bloggers saying, “Well, I’m going to become this affiliate, and then I just put banner ads or whatever at this site.” 

People become incredibly blind to any kind of advertising on a site. In fact, many browsers these days will block those banner ads from being seen. What I find works best is when you use your affiliate link in one of two places. Firstly, in the blog post. Actually writing about the product, reviewing the product, mentioning the product in a contextual way in a blog post is probably the ultimate way. Two, in emails, sending an email to your newsletter list, writing about that product, calling your readers to buy that product.

There are two places that affiliate links will work the best. You can also share links in social media. That can work particularly if you have social media followers who are in the right mood, and they have the intent of buying. That can particularly work well there. I tend to find in blog posts or emails, they work better. Yes, you can use the banner ads, but it’d be much more likely to see success if you actually wrote about the products that you’re going to recommend.

Tip number five is really related to this genuine, personal reviews and recommendations work best. Write your blog post but make your review really transparent and genuine. If you’re writing about a product and it isn’t perfect, I actually find when I talk about the imperfections of the product, as well as the good things about it, my readers really respond well to that. Quite often, when I’m writing a review of a camera, I’ll say this is the type of person who’s going to find this really useful. This may not be the most high-end product, but it’s useful for you if… 

People actually make a purchasing decision saying, “Yeah, I actually fit that category of type of person that this is relevant to.” Other people are saying, “Yeah, that one’s probably not right for me, but I respect the fact that Darren said that it’s not for me. He’s not just after the quick buck.” Genuine recommendations point out the pros and the cons of the purchase. You can also mention other things that might be more relevant for that particular audience that you’re writing for.

Tip number six is to use social proof. If you’ve been into a bookstore, or a DVD store—if they still even exist today—you’ll find that, in many cases, they have best seller lists. I remember going into CD stores back in the day. You’d go in and you’d see a whole wall full of the top selling CDs and top selling DVDs. The top selling books, they work like crazy in retail. People like to make their purchasing decisions based upon what other people buy. You can use that same technique on your blog, particularly if you’re using an affiliate network that gives you really good detail on what people have been buying as a result of your affiliate links. 

Amazon is a great example of this. I know when I promote cameras on Amazon that at the end of the month, I can see exactly what my readers bought. I don’t know which reader bought it, but I can see a report that shows me what products people bought on Amazon. That’s really useful information for working out what promotions have worked and tracking. It’s also really great for creating these bestseller lists. 

I’ll give you an example in today’s show notes of some bestseller lists that we’ve created on Digital Photography School, but the best ones that we’ve done have been best-selling camera lists. Every now and again, usually every three months on the blog, I write a post saying these are the best-selling camera lenses from our audience. I can report back to my readers, here’s the top 10 Canon lenses that have been purchased over the last three months. Here’s the top 10 Nikon. Here’s the top 10 Sony. Here’s the top 10 Pentax. My readers love that type of information. 

Those lists, just basically the top 10 cameras, link back again to Amazon. All of the links in those lists are affiliate links, which again, drive more sales. People actually find that content really useful, but it is also very profitable to do. If you can get that  information from the things that you’re promoting, that can work very well because people do make their purchasing decisions upon what other people are buying.

Tip number seven is to drive traffic to your best converting promotions. When we do these bestseller lists, I know they convert very well for us. I drive as much traffic to those posts as I possibly can, that’s through social media. I send an email out to our audience driving traffic to those posts. I include them in our site navigation. Our banners and navigation menus across the site are also linked to other blog posts on the site. Pretty much any way that you can get people to see those posts is a great thing.

Tip number eight is to be transparent and to use disclaimers. When you are promoting a product and you have a financial benefit in promoting the product, in many cases around the world, it is your legal responsibility to disclose that you are making something from that. I also think ethically you probably should be doing that as well. That’s my view on that. Other people may take a different stance, but I actually think that it comes back into play with this building of trust and the relationship that you have with your audience. If you’re making something, I don’t think your readers should have that hidden from them. I think they need to understand any motivations you might have in writing that post. 

If you write your post in such a way that points out the good and the bad about the product, that is very clear about who that product is ideal for. If you’re genuine in the way that you write, I think most people will see that you’re not just in it for the money. You’re actually there to serve your readers as well. I actually find that some of my readers buy products through my links because they want to support me as well. To disclose that these are affiliate links, some people will actually say, “Well, I’m going to buy it through him because he’s given me value in the past.” Be transparent and disclose any benefits that you might get. I think that’s really important.

Tip number nine is to track the results. Many of the programs that you will sign up for, even the most basic ones, will have some kind of reporting system. Watch to see what works in your promotion. Some affiliate promotions will allow you to have different links so you can track what worked on social media versus what worked in email. Some are not that advanced, but in any way that you can track and work out what has worked is going to help you in future affiliate promotions.

Tip number 10. I’m coming to the end here on my tips. Tip number 10 is to try a multi-pronged promotion. Again, I’ll share with you a little graphic which outlines the promotion sequence that we do on Digital Photography School when we’re promoting an ebook, for example, as an affiliate. There’s a number of things that we might do if the ebook is one that we really think is going to go well with our readers. We don’t do all of these things for every promotion. You could actually do some guest posts from the author of the book. They could actually write a guest post for you to promote on your blog or you could do an interview with the product creator. You can write a blog post announcing the product, you could be emailing your list, you can be doing social media promotions, you can mention it in your newsletter. You might do another blog post at the end that promotes the deal that you might have negotiated with the product creator coming to an end. 

There’s a variety of different things that you can do. Don’t just write a blog post and leave it at that. This is almost like a little event. We actually find that the affiliate promotions that work best on Digital Photography School are ones where there’s some limited time discount. When you’re promoting an ebook or a course, if you can negotiate with the creator of that ebook or course, they’ll put it on special or they’ll give you a coupon code for a week or two weeks or three weeks. That then enables you to treat it as a bit of an event. You might do an email and a blog post at the start and then another one at the end. In between, do an interview with the person who wrote the book. Anything that you can do to start it, to finish it, and then to have multiple things in between can really work quite well.

Tip number 11 is to try seasonal promotions, or events, or bundles. This is what I mentioned earlier, but at the end of every year, we do our 12 Days of Christmas campaign on Digital Photography School where we negotiate deals with different affiliates every day for 12 days before Christmas. We also throw in a few of our own books there. Every day for 12 days, we have a different deal that’s on offer for our particular audience. You don’t need to do 12 in 12 days, you might just look on Amazon and see if they’ve got something on special at Christmas time or Thanksgiving or Cyber Monday. Anything around those particular times, these times when people are in the mood to buy. It’s a good time to be sharing links to products that might earn you a commission if they do buy those products.

The last thing I’ll say, and this is Tip Number 12, is to balance the frequency of your promotions. It’s very easy to promote something every day. There are so many products out there that you could be promoting. Every time you promote something, you’re potentially gaining something, but you could actually be taking away from your readers. If you’re just promoting, promoting, promoting, promoting all the time, your readers will begin to get a bit sick of that. You really want to think about how you balance that out over time. Certainly, you don’t want every post to have an affiliate link in it. You want to be adding value in different ways as well. 

What we actually do at Digital Photography School at the end of every year, we think about the year ahead. We assign certain periods of time where we will be doing a promotion. We know we launch four ebooks a year of our own. In between those, we might do three major affiliate promotions over the years. We know there are seven times during the year where we will be doing promotional activity. Between those times, we’re really conscious about not selling in those times. We just want to add value at those times and to build relationships with our readers as much as possible. 

I think it’s really important to get that balance right, and to be very aware about any pushback that you might be getting from your readers as well. We know 12 Days of Christmas, that 12-day promotion we do, we actually send out an email every day for those 12 days. We try to make it a fun experience for our readers; but we know if we went any longer than 12 days, our readers would push back quite hard. We give people the option to opt out of all that promotional activity. It’s interesting how many people don’t because they want the deals at that time of year. We’re really always listening for how they’re feeling and how they’re responding to the promotions that we do. 

If we’re doing an affiliate promotion, we might have a three or four-week period. We start to see that we’re getting a lot of pushback from our readers, we may shorten that to a three-week instead of four weeks. We may actually push that back to two weeks. We may give our readers a break for a week in the middle of a three-week campaign. Be very aware of how your readers are responding. If a promotion is not working halfway through, we’ve been known to just cancel that as well. Let it go away and not do any further emails as well. 

I guess ultimately what I’m trying to say here with this point and also the first one that I made is that you want to be very aware of the relationship that you have with your readers. If you’re serving them, they’re going to allow you to sell to them from time to time, but you don’t want to get that balance out of whack.

If you found today’s podcast interesting and useful to you, if you’re starting out in your affiliate journey, or perhaps if you’re a little along the way, I’d love to hear your feedback on today’s show notes at problogger.com/podcast/51. I’d love to hear what affiliate promotions you do. Are you promoting Amazon or eBay? Are you using one of the affiliate networks? Perhaps are you promoting a private affiliate program in some way? What success have you had? What’s worked well for you? What hasn’t worked? Any questions that you’ve got, I’m more than happy to take a look at those and have a go at answering them for you. Like I said earlier, I want to do a podcast in a couple of episodes’ time, really focusing on the Amazon affiliate program because I think it is a good place to start for many people. You’ll learn a lot by using it, it can have some really good conversions if you’ve got the right type of traffic as well. Look forward to chatting with you at episode 52 of the ProBlogger Podcast.

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

What did you learn from today’s episode? Do you already use affiliate marketing on your blog? What works for you? What will you do next to explore affiliate marketing on your blog?

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 all about podcasting. We usually talk about blogging in this podcast, but to celebrate reaching the milestone of 50 podcast episodes, I thought I might share what’s worked and what hasn’t worked in my podcasting journey so far.

In just three months my podcast series has hit #1 in iTunes Australia, was in the top 10 international chart for the first weeks, and is hovering in top 10 for Business/Marketing categories for Australia and America.

I still have a lot to learn, but I’ve been getting asked a lot about how I create this podcast series, so I decided to share what I’ve learned so far (and am sharing my most listened to podcasts and the tools I use below).

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 share:

The most popular episodes in my podcast series so far:

The videos I used to help me in setting up my podcast, by Pat Flynn: 

The podcasting tools I use:

Well, we made it to episode 50. It was something I wasn’t sure whether I was going to make it to and I was halfway through the first 31 days because it was so much work in those early days. While I enjoyed it, it was tough going and we finally did make it to episode 50 which has been fantastic. As I’ve been wondering how to celebrate the milestone, a number of you suggested maybe I should talk about the journey so far. As I recalled this episode, it’s actually been three months to the day since I started, so 50 episodes in three months and it has been a wild ride. It’s become a bit of an obsession, something that I’ve really enjoyed, become a bit addicted to. 

Today, what I want to do is talk a little bit about some of the benefits of starting a podcast. I’ll talk a little bit about the content, what’s done well, what hasn’t done well, talk a little bit about some tips on how to deliver good content from my limited experience. I want to talk a little bit about that first 31 days, the experiment of doing 31 podcasts in 31 days. I want to talk about the tools that I’ve used because I know a lot of the questions that I get asked about podcasting are around tools. And I want to talk a little bit about building an audience and monetizing because they seemed to be the questions I get a lot of.

Let’s go back to some of the benefits of podcasting. Now, keep in mind I’m only 50 episodes in and I’m a newbie still. There‘s a lot still to learn, but I have certainly seen some benefits of podcasting already. Let’s start with statistics. I’m not a massive fan of looking at statistics, but they do give you a guide. I tend to look more at how things are trending rather than the actual raw numbers. But for those of you who do want to know what the raw numbers are and I do not see a lot of podcasters talking about their numbers, so perhaps it’s good to do.

I’ve had about 350,000 downloads of those first 49 episodes. Actually, it’s the first 48 because as I record this, 49 will go out in the next few hours, so around 350,000 downloads. The most listened episode (I think) is approaching around 20,000 of those and certainly, the earlier episodes that we’ve had, have had more views and more listens than the more recent ones. 

We hovered in the top 10 for business and marketing categories for both America and Australia. They are the two iTunes stores that I’ve been watching the most. I haven’t really found the tool that enables me to watch how I’m trending in terms of different iTunes stores around the world because they are quite siloed. Maybe there is a tool out there, but I don’t intend to pay a whole heap of attention as to how I’m ranking, although it does feed the ego.

In the first week, particularly, when we were actually number one on iTunes for all podcasts in Australia for a while and in the top 10 internationally, it was a real buzz. But as I’ve said before, stats are an ego boost. For me, it’s more important to look at other metrics, including how things are trending, whether things have been going up, plateauing, or going down. I’m more interested in the flow-on effects, the number of comments, the number of emails that I get, the leads that it generates in terms of sales of eBooks and that type of thing. Certainly, there has been a whole heap of benefits in all of those areas. 

Probably the other benefit that I’ve really noticed is that it does seem to personalize the brand. I’ve been to a few conferences since I started podcasting and it’s amazing. There are currently different reactions that you get when someone comes up to you and says, “I read your blog,” to “I listen to your podcast.” When they listen to your podcast, they speak to you in a different way. I can’t really put my finger on it, but there is something much more personal about listening to someone’s voice and that comes through in the reactions that I’m getting from people. People feel more connected in some way.

I know writing can transform people. It can have a big impact upon people but some of the stories that I’ve heard from the podcast and how it has impacted people, particularly one of the episodes that I did where I talked about my own personal health journey, it’s been quite amazing to see the profound impact that that episode and other things that I’ve done have had. I would say that podcasting is perhaps a little bit more relational.

There are some of the benefits. Obviously, there is some cost associated with podcasting as well, both in terms of setting it up, the financial cost, you need some gear, but also the amount of time that you need to put into it. I actually think the time that I’ve put into podcasting is actually similar to the time that I put into blogging. I research my podcast. I prepare my podcast in the same way that I researched and outline my blog post.

I probably spend more time actually writing the blog post than I do recording the podcast, but then, I spend more time on the podcast editing the podcast than I did on the blog post. There is a bit of pay-off there in the amount of time that it takes to do. It’s probably quite similar. I’ll talk a little bit about how my approach has changed in a few moments to particularly the editing part of the podcast though.

Let’s talk about content for a while. Most of you who are listening to this have at least listened to a few episodes. You probably have some really good feedback from me on the content and I’d love to hear that. But the ultimate lesson that I’ve learned about content and the content that does well on podcasts is that a podcast episode that brings about a change in your readers in some way is probably going to be the most popular and the most powerful content.

It’s the same with blogging. If your blog posts change someone’s life in some way, whether that be a big way or a small way, it’s going to have a lasting impact upon them. They’re going to be more likely to come back again if you’re bringing about some sort of change. They are also more likely to tell other people about it as well.

As I look at the most popular episodes here on the podcast, I actually see that a lot of them are very practical episodes and they’re things that do bring about change. I’ll talk about some of those episodes in a moment. Some of the lessons I’ve learned about the delivery of content in a podcast and this has been a bit of a steep learning curve for me. I suspect those of you who have been listening for the whole 50 episodes will have noticed a bit of a change in the way that I present and that is because I’ve actually changed how I present. 

I’m a big planner of my episodes and in the first few, I overplanned my episodes incredibly. A number of people said to me, “Were you reading those first episodes?” While I wasn’t really reading it, I did have a lot of the content sitting in front of me. I was paying a whole heap of attention to my notes in those first episodes. That was because I just really wanted to deliver as much useful content as I possibly could.

What I’ve learned is that less detail in my notes is actually better because I’m then able to speak like I talk or rather than speak like I’m trying to scan my notes and get every single point as I’ve written it. While I was not reading those early episodes, I certainly was paying a whole heap of attention to my notes. I still am but now if you see my notes you will see that I’ve got bullet points rather than long paragraphs of content that I want to get across. 

Up until this point, up until actually the last episode that you all have heard, I have produced all my podcasts as a talking head type podcast. I’ve not had a guest to this point. Having said that, the episode that you would have heard a couple of days ago did have for the first time someone else’s voice in my podcast. We used a recording from the ProBlogger conference that we ran but up until episode 49, it was all me.

I wanted to start out with the first 50 or so episodes in that way because most podcasts that I listen to are interviews. While I enjoy interviews, I personally really enjoy someone taking me through a topic, really taking me on a journey that’s thought through, that builds upon points, and that teaches me something. While interviews can certainly teach, my style of presenting is very much the way that you’ve heard in this podcast.

Now, I’ve got really good response and feedback from that style of presenting, but I do want to experiment with different ways of delivering content. The last episode, episode 49, where I played some snippets from our conference is something that I want to continue to experiment with. I’ve just lined up the first interview which will come out in the next week or so for this podcast with Beth Dunn who I heard speak at the Inbound Conference recently. I do want to mix up the type of content a little bit more and I’m really keen to hear from you as to whether you enjoy that.

I actually did a survey in the early days of this podcast with those of you who were listening and overwhelmingly, you fed back to me that you wanted a podcast with one person talking. That was the number one style of podcast that you want but a number of you did also indicate that you are open to interviews as well, so we’ll do a bit more of that.

Probably the big thing that I’ve learned most about delivering content in a podcast is that my energy levels are really important. I had a really great email from Rachel Corbett who is an Aussie podcaster and radio personality, with a lot of experience in radio, and an attendee of our conference. She actually sent me an email and it was a link to a podcast that she recorded just for me. It’s not been published anywhere else as far as I know but had some really great advice in it.

It was really beautifully worded telling me that I didn’t have as much energy as I could in the podcast that I was delivering and I already knew that. I had already listened to them and thought, “I could probably deliver these in a different way. I really appreciated her sending me that podcast with that advice and would love to feature her in a future episode as well to talk a little bit about that. She gave me some really great advice on that. It’s actually similar advice that I give to bloggers.

One of the pieces of advice that she gave me was to imagine I was talking to someone as always delivering the podcast. That’s the exact advice that I give to bloggers as they write their content, picture the person that you are writing to. So, taking that advice from Rachel and that I’ve given myself has helped me I think. It certainly is still a learning process as to delivering in an energetic way and with expression when you are standing in an empty room looking at the walls and there’s no one actually there but it’s certainly something that I’m thinking a little bit more about over the last 10 or so episodes particularly. 

I really enjoyed that a podcaster allows me to go back to old topics that I’ve covered previously on the blog. I’m able to repurpose that content and update that content. I’ve done that with a number of episodes and it’s going over quite well. The other type of episode that I’ve done is a number of my better episodes in terms of the number of people that are downloading them. Have been ones where I’ve actually turned keynote talks that I’ve done into podcast episodes as well. one of the lessons I’ve learned is just that when I put all that time into preparing a presentation for a conference, I can then use that in a different way in the podcast that has been really great. 

Probably the hardest part of creating content on this podcast has been the editing. For the first 15 or so episodes I did all the editing and production of the podcast myself and that almost killed me, 31 episodes in 31 days, when recording it, coming up with content, and then trying to edit it as well. That was a lot of work. While I’m glad I did it to learn the process, I’m also glad that I’ve outsourced that. I’ve brought on Rose Wintergreen who has been editing the podcast ever since and we’ve got a little workflow that revolves around me recording it and then putting it in a Dropbox and then her taking over from there. I’ll tell you a little bit about some of the tools that we use in that process. 

Let me talk a little bit about the most popular episodes that we have had so far. Obviously the earlier ones have had more downloads because of a lot of people when they discover your podcast goes back to the early podcast episodes. They have had higher than usual downloads. Probably the first five episodes have been very popular and that’s also partly because I started the ProBlogger podcast with 31 days to build a better blog. For the first 31 episodes, I take you through a process of different aspects of building a successful blog. But there certainly have been a few other episodes that have stood out in terms of a higher number of downloads than others in that stage.

Episode 32 is probably the one that stands out the most and that was one where I answered the question, “Can you really make money blogging?” Now, this is based upon a question that I get all the time from my readers. It is delivering the answer to a question that I know people are asking and making money is also a bit of a trigger topic I know with my audience. Any of the episodes where I’ve kind of tapped into real questions have done very well.

Episode 38 is probably another stand out one. That was where I talked about my journey with health and how I kind of let myself go. It was a little intense in my diet and exercise and talked a little bit about losing weight but also getting my act together in terms of other aspects of health as well. I think that one, in particular, did well because it was quite personal. I talked about how I messed up and I talked about how I had made some changes that had brought about a real change in May, and that is something that I think a lot of people could relate to. While this is a business podcast, to go into that personal space actually really seems to connect with a lot of people.

Other episodes that did well were episode 11 where I talked about coming out with blog post ideas, which again is a real felt need when I’m doing Q&As at conferences. That’s always a question I get asked is how do you come up with ideas.

Episode 18 was how to get people to view archives on your blog. Again, this is a felt need. A lot of people have real frustration. I’d put all this time and energy into writing content for their blog and then no one sees the archives once they have left the front page.

Episode 29 was on growing readership. Again, a big question I get asked over and over again. 

Episode 40 was about productivity, how to juggle life and blogging, and how to use your time effectively. Again, this was another felt need. This is another common question I get. What I’m trying to get across here is if you can create content that people feel they have a need with, then that’s the best place to start. If you can start in those places where there is a pain point—I don’t have readers for my blog, I don’t have enough time, or people aren’t viewing my archives—these are felt needs. These are pain points for people, so tapping into those and particularly creating content that brings about a change in those areas is really important.

Let me talk to you briefly about that first 31 days where I did create an episode every day for 31 days. I already touched on the fact that there was a stupid amount of work in that. I almost killed the podcast in some ways because I felt quite overwhelmed at times. But there were certainly some upsides of doing it. Perhaps one of the best benefits of it is that it created some momentum. So, a lot of my early readers came on and they were like, “Oh, there’s All this content.” They were touching base with me every day and hearing my voice every day. They got into the habit of listening in and touching base with the ProBlogger brand.

It certainly seems to have an impact on getting into new and noteworthy on iTunes. Perhaps not as much as I’ve thought. I still don’t quite know how iTunes works in terms of their algorithms. I was creating a lot of content, but not all of the posts were getting as much traction as I thought they might because I was new and noteworthy. A lot of people talk about you’ve got to get new and noteworthy. Yeah, I think it probably did have an impact but I’m not really sure how much. There is no real way of measuring that for me, but it certainly was a good way to build up a stock of archives there which is good for long-tail traffic.

People are searching iTunes for content, so the more episodes you’ve gone in there, the better. There were some good things about it. I think in hindsight, because my 31 episodes were all action-based episodes where I’m giving my listeners homework, perhaps it was too much for some of my listeners to be out to get through all of those 31 episodes in 31 days. Perhaps, I did lose a few listeners or people took their time with that which is totally fine. In fact, I know a number of listeners are still on episode 18 and they email me every now and again until episode 20 now and some people are still working through that.

I do think it’s actually great to have that series of episodes that people can go back and listen to and work through as well. I’m glad I did that and I may do that again. I may create a week-long series of episodes as well in the future that I can go refer people back to us and say “Listen to these seven because it will help you in this particular way.

Let’s talk about tools. I’m no expert in this area. Actually, I used a lot of the videos that Pat Flynn created. He created a great series of short simple tutorials for YouTube which I found really helpful in setting up my podcast. I used some of the tools that he recommends there and a few others as well. I used Libsyn for hosting my podcast episodes. I used (I think it’s) Blubrry PowerPress, which is a plugin for WordPress, which takes care of getting the podcast into iTunes and that integration. It’s been almost pretty seamless and particularly the way Pat described in his videos.

I used a tool called all Auphonic (and I’ll link to all of these in the show notes for today). Auphonic is really useful at getting the levels in your podcast right so if you record half of your podcast at one time and then half of your podcast at another time and they sound different to you, Auphonic kind of levels them out. It’s also good (I’m told) when you have an interview with someone and their levels might be a bit higher than yours. It kind of gets things sounding a bit more normal and it works really well. This is a paid product but has worked well. 

Another one that I’ve started using in the last day or two has been My Podcast Reviews which enables you to see the reviews that people leave in iTunes and in Stitcher from all around the world. As I mentioned earlier, iTunes is quite siloed. Here in Australia, I can view the Australian iTunes stores but it’s different from what’s happening in the American iTunes store and it’s different from the Canadian iTunes store and the Slovakiain one and the Swedish one. They are all different ones. So, if you want to see the reviews that people are leaving in all the different countries, you need to go to all the different iTunes stores and that is a pain.

I’ve been largely living in the US and Australia one and occasionally checking out Canada or in the UK, but I’ve been missing a whole heap of reviews. So, I signed up for that and again I’ll give you the link in today’s show notes. Just by clicking on that and setting that up, I discovered I think we’ve got over 150 reviews. I only have ever seen 70 of them. Reviews from Malaysia, Singapore, Switzerland and all over the world. I really do appreciate those reviews and I’ll read a few of them at the end of this podcast as well for people who have kind of made observations about this podcast.

The last tool that I’ll talk about is my microphone because I get asked about it all the time. I use a RØDE podcaster microphone. It’s been great. Although, I’ve kind of heard about all kinds of other great microphones as well. I’m sure there is some great advice out there on that particular topic.

Let me finish up this podcast by talking about two last things. Firstly building an audience and then monetization. Building an audience for your podcast. Now, again, I’ve only been at this for three months. I’m still beginning, but certainly for me, I’ve had the added advantage of already having an audience to leverage my blog, so I’ve done that. I will say that probably the biggest driver of traffic (I think) to my podcast has been the emails that I send on a weekly basis to ProBlogger readers. That certainly has helped to get things going. iTunes is the biggest source of downloads. Stitcher and a couple of other places as well, but iTunes certainly is the bulk of our listeners.

Number two has been people listening on the blog at problogger.com/podcast, the player there and that has been number two. After that, it is a mix of other places. Sending people to your podcast episodes via email has been great. That’s been king for me and as a distant second has been social media and driving traffic from social media. I certainly have a little system that I use over the 24 hours after I released the podcast. I tweet about it four times I think maybe five times. It goes up on my Facebook page and those have driven a little bit of traffic but nowhere near as much as traffic as email does when I send that on a weekly basis. We get a big spike from email and then every time I release a new episode, I get a spike from people who suddenly see it on their iTunes again as well.

I’m being featured on other people’s podcasts. This has certainly driven some traffic as well. I was really fortunate to be interviewed by Amy Porterfield, James Schramko, Chris Ducker, a number of the Copyblogger podcast as well, and that certainly helped. I’ve heard from other people that’s how they found me and that is certainly one way to do that. Then, as I mentioned before having more episodes in iTunes and more episodes in Stitcher means people will start to find your content that way when there is certainly searching for content.

The last area I’ll talk about briefly is monetization. I’m still on the journey with this one and still trying to work out how to make this pay for itself, to be honest. Those of you who listened to the first 10 episodes, I started out with a sponsorship from 99 Designs who were really generous and came on for that 10 episodes series of sponsors.

We decided together not to continue with that. They decided they do want to continue at least for the next 10 episodes, they want to talk later, but I also decided around that time that it did not quite feel right. Not because of the product, I actually do believe in their product and do genuinely use it, but I just thought it was disrupting the flow of the podcast and wanted to step back from it just to see what impact doing something else would have. The things that we did start to do at around that point was starting to talk about the 31 Days to Build up a Better Blog eBook.

We had that on sale. We still have that on sale actually at 50% off with a coupon code, which again we can share in today’s show notes. By promoting that product instead of someone else’s product, we saw ourselves in that eBook quite significantly. Now, it’s not enough to say it was just a success doing that but certainly, it did show me that you can monetize a podcast with your own product. That is something I’ll look to do more in the future.

I do also know that I’ve got a number of people subscribed to our event updates. We run an event here in Australia. There are a number of people who are interested in coming to that event based upon finding us through the podcast, so that’s another income stream. I’ve had a number of speaking invitations based upon people coming across us all through the podcast. That’s when people hear you speaking that gives them a good sense of how you might talk at an event as well. 

There have been some indirect income streams that I could say have come from the podcast as well but I’m still finding my way with monetizing it as well. Ultimately, it’s building the brand of ProBlogger which we’re monetizing in different ways.

There have been my reflections on podcasting so far. I’m only at 50 episodes in and I’m committed to continuing to do it. Going forward, as I said before, I’m going to change up some of these styles of content. You are going to start hearing a few more interviews and a few more snippets of our conference recordings as well. I may even bring our team into some of our podcasts as well, to get their opinion and expertise in some of the things that we are talking about. But I’d love to hear more from you about the ProBlogger podcast and what you would like, what you don’t like, what you do like, and how you’d improve it.

I’m also tempted to increase the frequency of my podcast slightly. I’ve gone from being a daily show, going back to two shows per week and my gut feeling is that maybe three shows a week might be better. That’s partly because I really enjoyed doing it and it feels like a long time between episodes when I’m only doing two per week. Again, open to your feedback on that. We do have a survey that we have opened and I’ll include the survey link in today’s show notes. That’s just a really simple way, just a few questions of you telling us what you think of this particular podcast.

You can find today’s show notes at problogger.com/podcast/50. Before I go, I want to just give a big thank you to those of you who have left reviews; 150+ reviews so far. I’ve read every single one of them today and it really moved me to read your responses. Some of you put a lot of time into your reviews.

“I love you,” Sandra Chan from Malaysia, and she says, “Get this, I’ m not even a blogger. I’m a YouTuber.” She listens to the podcast and has got a lot out of it.

There’s Amanda Irwin from the Lilac Lounge from Australia. She said “Thank you, Darren. I love your podcasts. I spent a lot of time doing short trips in my car and find your podcast perfect for this. If I’m feeling flat your podcast motivated me. If I need ideas, you have a plethora of them, and you have a great way of communicating. That may seem sound doable for anyone wanting to give new stuff a try.”

Thank you, Amanda, for that. I’m glad to spend that time in the car with you. I’ve had all kinds of people tell me where I listen to the podcast is well which is quite amusing. There’s a number of people who fall asleep at night listening to my voice which is kind of a little bit strange but it’s nice to share that time of day with you as well. 

Hitoshi from Japan writes, “Thank you, Darren, for providing must-listen content. I’ve been listening to every episode from day one, sometimes I feel like I can’t wait for the next episode but I know it’s better to listen back and work on hard to not miss older things that you’ve shared. Huge thanks from Japan.” Thank you for your review. It’s great to hear people from all over the world listening. It’s so exciting to hear from you.

There’s Dawn Rose from Bridal Perfection, another Aussie, we have got quite a few Aussie’s listening in and she writes, “This podcast made me realize that blogging is not so scary. I still haven’t launched my blog but I’ve listened to every podcast and I’ll re-listen to the 31 days to build a better blog once I’m ready to launch.” I love that we got people who aren’t bloggers or who are thinking about starting blogging. We’ve got YouTubers, we’ve got people who are using the content here for other social media and streams as well, or just because they are interested in the space and because they read blogs and they want to understand blogging as well.

So, if you’ve got time to leave us a review on iTunes or over on Stitcher. Again, there will be links in today’s show notes is the way you can do that. I do read every single review. I can read them all now wherever you are in the world. We love to hear how you listen to it, where you are listening to it and how It’s helped you, particularly any change that is brought up in your own blogging or anything else that you do.

Thank you, everyone, for listening to our first 50 episodes here at ProBlogger. It really does energize me to do this. I hope you can sense that in this particular episode how much I’ve enjoyed this. I love hearing from you, so do keep giving us the feedback that you have for us. Thanks for listening and I’ll talk to you in episode 51 of the ProBlogger podcast.

What did you learn from today’s episode? Do you already have a podcast? Feel free to share a link. I’d love to hear what’s working for you. Or perhaps you’re thinking about starting one?

I’d love to hear from you in the comments below. Don’t forget to share a link to your blog and your podcast if you have one.

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 all about how to build your blog’s brand. Many bloggers don’t think about branding, they let their brand happen to them, instead of building it. Your blog brand sets the scene for the relationship you will have with your readers and how they will perceive you. If you have a clear brand, it also has a flow on effect of making it easier to make the right decisions about your design, your content, and the way you build community. I share my tips and some exclusive advice shared by Clare Hillier (from Checks and Spots) recently at the 2015 ProBlogger Event.

Man with a Note and a Single Word Branding by Kenneth Sweet on 500px

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:

Questions to ask about your Brand Essence

Questions to ask about your Brand Values

This is a really practical episode. I got a special guest who’s going to give you practical things you can do to build that brand and to set that scene. You can find today’s show notes at problogger.com/podcast/49. 

Today, I want to talk about building a brand for your blog. Jeff Bezos says, “Your brand is what people talk about you when you are not in the room,” which I think it’s a really interesting quote. It’s how people perceive you in many ways and that’s a quote that many of us know, use, and understand to at least some level. But if that’s the case, what do you want people to say about you when you are not in the room? How do you want to be perceived?

Many of us have an idea about how we want to be perceived, but we are not as intentional as we could be in actually setting the scene for what that brand might be. We don’t have complete control over how people will perceive us, but we can certainly do things to build that brand. 

Today, what I want to do is share with you a five-minute recording from the ProBlogger event that just happened six or seven weeks ago here in Australia. Those of you who are in Australia probably know of our event. We have an annual event, this was our sixth year this year and we had about 714 (give or take a few) people come to the Gold Coast in Queensland for two days of teaching on blogging. One of the sessions that we ran was a blogging for beginner session which Clare Hillier spoke at.

Clare is an Australian blogger. She runs a blog called Checks and Spots and I’ll give you the link in today’s show notes. She ran this great session for beginners, but she talked about building a brand in the middle of her talk, and I think it’s incredibly relevant for bloggers of all levels. It’s certainly relevant if you’re just starting out because you do want to be intentional about your brand.

But as I said before, I think many bloggers haven’t thought of these stuff through for themselves, even intermediate bloggers and even more advanced bloggers. So, I wanted to share this five-minute snippet from her talk with you to get you thinking about your brand, even if you have thought it through. This is something that you do need to revisit over time.

Clare gives you some really great questions to ask, so this is a practical session and you probably need to get a notebook out to jot down these questions. We’ll put them in the show notes as well. Stop the podcast along the way and answer the questions and you might just find that your brand is impacted by what she’s got to say.

Again, this is Clare Hillier from the ProBlogger event in Queensland Australia just a few weeks ago. I hope you enjoy what she’s got to say and at the end of this talk, I will come back and give you a few more thoughts. 

Clare: The single most important thing that you can do to set yourself up to work with brands is to think about your own brand because your brand is the heart and soul of your blog. Even if you don’t want to work with brands, you just want to be blogging as a hobby, this is the single most important thing that you can do to have consistency about your blog, so don’t tune out if you only want to blog as a hobby.

Before we jump into what brand is, let’s talk about what it isn’t. It’s not a logo, it’s not a mission statement, and it’s not a tagline. These are the shadows of the brand. Just the way a hat doesn’t make a cowboy. Instead, a brand is a story. It’s a set of expectations, it’s the relationship, it’s the connections, and the emotions that people feel that come in together of all of those elements, that means people will choose your blog and keep coming back to your blog over others.

There are two really simple things that you can do to find your brand. The first is to think about your brand essence. Your brand essence is one thought that underpins your promise to your readers. It’s what sets you apart from other blogs. It should be simple, easy to communicate, and you should feel really inspired by it.

Some of the questions that you can ask yourself when you are writing your brand essence are: Who are my readers? Why do people visit my blog? Why do they spend some time coming to see you? How did people feel when they read your blog? Because the emotional connection is so important to a successful brand. 

How do my readers benefit from my blog? Again, that’s just tapping back into saying something helpful. What do I do that makes me stand out from everyone else? Another way of asking is what would people miss if your blog is no longer there? Also, what do I want my blog to be known for?

I’ll share with you my brand essence. My brand essence is life by design. It’s just three words and it’s very hard getting it down to three. I think it’s easy to have a long sentence but to will it down to three words and to be able to feel it with multiple meanings is what a good brand essence is. 

On the one layer, life by design means that my blog has a strong visual aesthetic. The content I run has a strong design focus. I talk about interiors, creative artist design. The second meaning that life by design has—this is how I try to be helpful and serve my readers—is I share tips and tricks that will help my readers design the life that they want. They can be proactive about creating the life they are after. 

Once you have your brand essence, you then need to have your brand values. They are what underpins and determine what you do all day and every day. That code by which your blog lives by. I think because blogs are extensions of ourselves, you probably find that your brand values are an extension of your personal values.

The three questions I’d like you to think about are: What values do you express? What values do you want your blog to live by? And what values do you think resonate deeply with your audience? 

I’ll give you another example from my brand values. One of my brand values is nature is the way of life and that’s an extension of my personal values. I don’t use products that have lots of chemicals or nasties in them. Recently a gel or a nail polish brand contacted me, wanted me to create sponsored content, and they offered me a really nice fee to do that, but I politely declined because it doesn’t fit with my brand values. 

By being clear on your brand essence and your brand value, you are able to create a strong and consistent brand. By having a strong and consistent brand, you will be authentic. That authenticity is what brands will be drawn to and it’s what your readers will be drawn to. Having a strong, consistent brand means that it becomes this guiding light. You know what you will do and what you won’t do.

You know what content you will run, what content you won’t run. You know which brand you work with and which brand you won’t work with. Even if you don’t want to go out and work with a brand, that strong and consistent personal brand or blogging brand is such an important thing to have. 

When I was looking at the questions that people were posting on the Facebook community about this session, a couple of people were saying, “How do I know what content to run and what not to run?” When you have a clear brand, it becomes very, very clear what you should and shouldn’t be doing.

Darren: I hope you found that of value. I certainly did just listen to it again then. While Clare was certainly talking there in the context of how to work with brands, as she said, this is really applicable even if you don’t want to work with brands. I think it has flowing effects into many areas of your blog. 

Once you understand what your brand is, that can then flow into the design of your blog. It will flow into the content that you create. It will flow into the way that you engage on social media. It will flow into the way that you build community with your audience, how you speak to them, the way that you do customer service with them, and the way that you promote your blog as well. 

I think it also really plays into the way that you find readers for your blog. You certainly want to inject your brand, your brand essence, and your brand values into the promotion that you do because if you do that, you’ll start to attract the right readers to your blog. People who resonate with those values particularly.

I just want to recap over some of the questions that Clare mentioned because I think this is a great, very practical exercise that you can do. Firstly, you want to think about your brand essence and the questions that Clare said there that you need to think through are: Who are your readers? Why do people visit my blog? How do people feel when they read my blog? How do my readers benefit from my blog? What do I do that makes me stand out from everyone else? What would people miss if my blog was no longer there? What do I want to be known for?” 

Those questions (I think) are really powerful questions. There are seven of them there and I would encourage you to stop the podcast right now, go back over those questions, and just jot down some notes on those things. 

The other thing that I think might be useful to do here is to actually do a survey around these things or to do a focus group. Actually ask some of your readers to answer those questions, particularly things like how do people feel when they read my blog? What do they benefit from when they read your blog? What will they miss about your blog if it wasn’t there? What do they know you for?

You can actually begin to test some of these questions with a survey, with a poll, or even with a discussion on Facebook. Take one of those questions and ask your readers. You’ll begin to get in touch with not only what you want to have, but how people actually do perceive you. This is something that I think will be useful if you do have a brand essence already to test that.

Do they actually see that brand essence themselves? Brand essence is part of it, then your brand values and the three questions Clare had for you on brand values are: What values do you personally express? What values do you want your blog to live by? And what values do you think resonate deeply with your audience? Again, these are things that need to come from you. You need to set this agenda, but again you can test this and you can actually ask your readers questions around their values as well. 

I hope you found today’s podcast useful. I love to hear your feedback on whether you found this format useful. We’ve got a whole heap of recordings from our event and while we can’t share the full sessions with you because our attendees paid to come to our conference, I’m more than happy to share some of these little snippets and then speak to them myself. 

If you found this format useful, I love to hear that feedback. I also love to hear what your brand essence is and what your brand values are. You can share those with us and any feedback that you have on today’s show notes at problogger.com/podcast/49. You can also connect with me and let me know on Twitter at @ProBlogger or over on my Facebook page at facebook.com/problogger.

I look forward to chatting with you in the next episode, which is our milestone 50th episode. Still not sure what I’m going to do in it, but it’s going to be a bit of a celebration I’m sure because I never quite realized that I was going to get to 50. I knew that I was going to get to the first 31 episodes so it’s kind of special to have got to 50 as well. If you got any ideas on what we should be doing to celebrate the 50th, do let me know on Twitter or on the show notes as well and I’ll talk to you then.

What did you learn from today’s episode? Do you already know what you want your blog to be known for? If you’re still developing your blog brand statement, what brand essence or values are you planning to include?

We’d love to hear from you in the comments below. Don’t forget to share a link to your blog.

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 all about how to make a full time income from your blog. There are no guarantees, but earning a full time income from your blog is not an unrealistic goal if you’re willing to get very specific about your money goals, be patient and consistent, and break the work down into achievable chunks. I share my own personal journey, and my tips for how you can work out a realistic journey for making a full time income from your own 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:

Here is the breakdown of my blogging income streams when I hit my $50,000 a year target:

A few years ago, I was chatting with a blogging friend who was feeling completely overwhelmed with their goal of making a living from their blogging. Through the conversation, I asked him a whole series of questions, but one that started this conversation going was getting them to identify how much they actually wanted to make from blogging. They had this goal that they wanted to be full-time, but I really pushed them to try and come out with a figure, to actually work out what full-time meant for them. This is actually where I would encourage you to start with your goal of making a full-time living. What does it actually mean for you?

For this particular blogger, they said that they wanted to make about US$30,000 a year. That was probably not what they ultimately wanted to make. They wanted to make more, but that was the point where they had in their mind that they would be able to quit their current work to focus fully upon blogging.

For some of you, $30,000 a year sounds like way more than you’d need to be able to quit your job and go full-time. For others of you, it’s not enough. It doesn’t really matter what the amount is, but what I want to talk about today is actually starting with that figure and then try to work out what does it mean to be able to achieve that because for a lot of people, even with that figure in mind, still feel completely overwhelmed and doesn’t really help to have that figure, but it’s a great starting point.

Here’s my advice for you. Firstly, if you’ve got your figure in mind, don’t give up your day job yet as a lot of people who do give up their job to start blogging. I’m not sure that’s the wisest move because it’s actually going to take you a while to get to whatever point you have nominated in your mind, and there are no guarantees either. So, please don’t give up your day job. This is going to take you some time.

It actually took me about two years of blogging to get to that right of being a full-time blogger. For me, it was actually about US$36,000 a year; that was my goal. That’s about AU$50,000 a year at that time. That was what I was aiming for, that’s what I could’ve earned in the other work that I was doing. This was about 12 years ago. So, don’t give up your day job.

Secondly, be specific. We’ve already been talking about that. Saying you want to be a full-time blogger is great but it’s not specific enough. Come up with a figure, talk to your partner if you’ve got one, talk to family, talk to friends. What is it that is your goal in terms of the amount of money?

As I mentioned, for me, it was AU$50,000 dollars a year, about US$36,000. That’s when I knew if I was working full-time in my other work that I’d better give that other work up. For me, I was actually working a series of part-time jobs at the time and also doing some part-time study but that was the figure that I came up to.

The third thing (and this is really important) is to break that down into something that’s more achievable. My friend said $30,000 a year and that still overwhelmed her. That sounds really big when you’re a new blogger and you might be earning a dollar a day, if that. And $30,000 a year is a big thing when you are at that point, but there are different ways of thinking about that figure.

The helpful thing that I used to do when I was just starting out is to break that figure down. So, $30,000 is $576.92 per week, so that’s one way of breaking it down. Suddenly that becomes a little bit more achievable and you can break it down further. On a daily rate that’s $82.19 per day. Now, $82.19 is what you would need to earn every day for a year to get to $30,000. That’s actually a little bit more achievable.

Remember that a blog generally is making money every day of the week. It’s seven days a week, it’s making money 24 hours a day if you’ve got a global audience as well. That’s one of the reasons why that figure comes down a little. If you’re working a five day a week job, that figure would be higher but $82.19 a day, and if you want to go even further, that’s $3.42 an hour. Although, that may not be as helpful because there are certainly some hours that do better than others. But break it down at least to a daily rate. What do you need to make each day or what do you need to make each week?

For me, having $82.19 in my mind, I can then begin to say, “What do I need to do to make that much money?” Let’s look at some different income streams that you might have on your blog. When I started, AdSense was the number one source of income for me. AdSense may or may not be for you but on my blogs, I use AdSense which is an ad network that’s run by Google, for those of you who don’t know. I make about $1.72 per 1000 page views from AdSense. At that rate, I can calculate how many page views I would need to get to $82.19 and that is 47,000 page views which is a lot. AdSense is probably the hardest work in terms of making money, in terms of the amount of traffic that you need. Putting those banner ads on your site, you do need a lot of traffic.

There are plenty of other income streams. You might sell ads to sponsors on a monthly basis and I know there are a lot of bloggers out there who have spots on their sidebar or they might have banners around their site where they say to an advertiser, “You can appear there if you pay me an amount per month.” To make $30,000 a year you would need to sell about $2500 per month in ads. If you have six ad spots on your blog for six different advertisers, that’s about $416 per advertiser per month.

You might sell sponsored posts on your blog. Let’s just say you charge $300 for a sponsored post. That may be more or maybe less, depending on how much traffic you have but at about $300 per piece of content, that’s about eight posts per month, which might be more than you’re comfortable to do.

You might promote affiliate products. To get to $82.19 per day, if you’re promoting low-cost affiliate products like a book, for example, you’re going to need to sell a lot of them. On an average book, you might earn $0.20 or $0.40 per sale and to get to $82.19, you need to sell hundreds of books. If you’re promoting higher value affiliate products, you might be promoting an ebook that another blogger has produced, in that case, you’re probably able to earn a little bit more per sale.

For example, our Digital Photography ebooks on my Digital Photography blog, if you became an affiliate for that you’d earn 40% of the total price of an ebook. You could earn as much as $8 per sale and there you would only have to sell 10 ebooks per day to get to your $80.

Then there are other bigger commission affiliate products. You might be recommending a training course which might be worth hundreds of dollars. Again, you could be earning higher commissions there. Another common method is to sell your own ebook. If you might have an ebook that you sell for $20, you need to sell four of those per day to get to the $80 mark.

Some of you I know are selling yourself as a consultant or a coach and that may be a higher value. Maybe your day rate is $300 and I know a lot of you probably charge more than that, but you need to sell eight days of your time to get to the $82. There’s a whole heap of different ways you can break it down.

Some of you are still thinking this sounds way out of reach. 47,000 pages to get enough money from AdSense is way more than you’ve got or selling eight days of my consulting time is way more than I can think. Here’s what you got to keep in mind. Most full-time bloggers that I come across don’t just monetize with one income stream. The things I’ve just run through you could technically be doing all of those things. You don’t need to be full-time and get $82 per day from each of those things. You might only earn $10 a day from each of those things and suddenly becomes a little bit more achievable.

Let’s break it down even further. Let’s just say you’re a fashion blogger and I’m actually basing this upon a conversation I had with a fashion blogger recently at a conference I went to in the States. She told me that she sells sidebar ads on her blog for about $150 per month and she has four running. That’s $600 towards her total for the month. She does two sponsored posts a month at about $450 per post. She’s got decent traffic but it’s not a massive blog, that’s another $900 for the month. She promotes her friend’s ebook as an affiliate and sells 10 of them at $10 commission per month, that’s another $100.

She promotes a clothe’s online retail store as an affiliate and she has around 20 sales of clothes and shoes per month, it’s probably making about $400 from that. Then, she also writes freelance for a magazine every month and she earns $400 for that article. All of those different income streams together, they’re quite bitsy, there’s nothing there that’s over $900 for the month which doesn’t get her close to $82. But when you combine those things together, she makes about $2400 per month which is just under $30,000 per year.

You can see there if you break it down and if you diversify your income, you can achieve that mark. You still do need traffic and it still takes time to build it to this point. I actually found when I started out by breaking it down and by diversifying my income, it became more achievable.

Let me give you another example. This is a photography blogger that I know, again, in the States. He sells about 100 ebooks per month of his own. These are ebooks that he wrote and they’re about $10 each, that’s $1000 here. He had some AdSense running on his blog, he makes about $200 a month from that. He does a little bit of freelance writing that’s about $500 a month from freelance writing. He promotes other people’s courses and ebooks and it makes about $400 a month from that. Then he sells a few of his photographs as well so he’s got a product to sell and he makes about $300 from that. Again, he makes about $2500 per year from those five different income streams.

The last example I’ll give you is that of a recipe blogger. She provides on her blog free recipes that you can go away and cook. She also has a membership area on her site where she charges $10 a month to get some extra exclusive content and some cooking lessons that she’s recorded on video. She has about 100 members who pay her about $10 per month to do that so she’s at $1000 just from that income stream. She sells some of her own ebooks for about $400 a month. She promotes some other people’s ebooks as an affiliate, that’s about $200. She does three sponsored posts per month and never goes beyond those three and that’s about $200 per post. Then she occasionally gets to Speaking Geek and that averages out at about $400 a month. Again, she’s earning about $2600 per month which takes her just over $30,000 per year.

You can see there three very different bloggers who are actually monetizing in three different ways. None of these bloggers have massive amounts of traffic. They don’t have tens of thousands of readers a month, they’re in the thousands mark which, again, for some, that sounds really big, but if you stick at it for a few months, for a few years, you’ll actually begin to grow that kind of traffic, hopefully. I’m not going to guarantee it but hopefully, you’ll get to that kind of level.

When I look back on my own figures for around the time that I went full-time which was about $36,000 a year, I was earning from five main income streams. Number one for me at the time was AdSense. Number two is Chitika which was another ad network that was quite popular at the time, still around today. I was doing a few private ad sales so these are monthly sponsorships. I was recommending some products on Amazon and I was also recommending a few ebooks and courses from other people.

My split was that I was making about $35 a day from AdSense, about $20 a day from Chitika, about $20 a day from private ad sales, about $15 a day from Amazon, and about $10 a day from other affiliate commissions. That got me into around the full-time mark. I had those five different income streams. From month to month, they each went up and down a little bit but it averaged at that. I’ve been blogging for two years at that point, so again, this is going to take some time to build. Don’t give up your day job.

I actually found it really helpful to better break it down and to better think about, “Could I add another income stream to it?” To actually go from just having AdSense on my blog to adding Chitika, which is the other ad network, I almost doubled my income just by adding another income stream without having to increase my traffic a whole heap. It really does depend upon the income streams that you use. As you’ve probably seen already, some of them will monetize with less traffic than others.

In general, if you are trying to monetize with AdSense or a banner ad, you’re going to need a lot of traffic. In fact, if you’re trying to monetize with sponsorship, you’re probably going to need some reasonable traffic even if you’re doing sponsored posts. No one’s going to pay you $200 or $300 for a post unless you’ve got some half-decent traffic. To monetize with an affiliate product or even your own ebook or your own course, you’ll probably need a little less traffic than sponsorship. If you’re trying to monetize by selling your own services (which are higher value), you’ll probably need even less traffic again. It really does depend upon the niche, it depends upon the income stream. The key is to diversify your income and this is something you can do gradually over time as opportunity opens up.

The other things to keep in mind is that you really want to target the right readers. I’ve talked in previous episodes of this podcast about really trying to identify who you’re trying to reach, this is really so key. It’s so much easier to monetize if you have a few of the right readers rather than lots of just anyone reading your blog. I know if anyone just surfs in from anywhere on the web to my photography site and they don’t have a digital camera, they’re not interested in photography, they’ve got no chance of buying my ebook.

Whereas if I get a couple of people referred from another photography blog, they’re qualified, they’re the right type of reader for me. They have a camera, they’re interested in photography, they’re much more likely to buy my ebook, they’re much more likely to click on the sponsorships that we have from other photography sources. You need to focus on building the right type of readers, and then, you want to try and really work hard on getting people to keep coming back again and again. You want a connected reader. It’s so much easier to make money from a reader if they’ve been coming to your site every day or if they’ve been coming every week. If they’re engaged, if they’re connected with you, if they feel like they belong to your community.

Focus upon multiple income streams, focus upon finding the right reader, focus upon getting them subscribed and getting them hooked, and then focus on getting them engaged and interacting with you, and contributing to the community. If you do that and you stick at it for a few years, you are much more likely to get to that level of being a full-time blogger. Again, break it down, whatever your target is. Don’t think about it as this massive amount of money. Break down what that means and what you would need to do to achieve that. Gradually, as you get traffic, you’d begin to see how much traffic you’re going to need as well.

In the early days, you might sell one ebook a day and your goal might be to be able to sell 10 a day to get to that level. Either add new income streams or you need to multiply the amount of traffic that you have by tenfold to get to that point. You can begin to estimate how much traffic you need and begin to see what you need to do to achieve that kind of level.

I hope that by breaking it down, that makes it a little bit more achievable and perhaps point you in the direction of what you need to do to get to that point of making a full-time living from your blogs.

I’d love to hear your feedback on today’s episode. If you’ve got any questions please go to today’s show notes at problogger.com/podcast/48. Any questions, throw them in there. Also, if you feel like you’re able and you want to, show me the kind of income streams that you are working on for your blogs. I’ve mentioned just a few of them there and every day I come across bloggers who are monetizing in different ways. If you’ve got a different income stream, I’d love to hear about it. I’d love to learn from you in today’s show notes as well.

If you have a moment to leave a review of this podcast on iTunes, I’d be incredibly grateful. I’ve been checking out the local iTunes stores and I’ve just found this one from SuperLany from New Zealand, “It’s very easy to just keep blogging away without spending time thinking about how to improve it. Going through this podcast has been useful to reflect and improve on my blog.” Thank you for your review SuperLany and from ForeignGeek who is from Singapore, “These are some of the best blogging tips I’ve ever got. Packed with information, these ideas are easy to follow and good to implement.”

I’d love to see your review. I’d notice that there are no reviews yet from the Philippines and I can’t find any in Indonesia. I know we’ve got a lot of readers from those regions so if you’re all from those regions, please leave a review and Tweet me at @ProBlogger when you leave one and it appears in the store. I’d love to check it out and see what you think of this show today but also the podcast overall.

Thanks for listening and we’ll talk to you in episode 49. We’re getting close to that 50 mark now which is a big milestone. We’ll talk to you tomorrow in episode 49.

What did you learn from today’s episode? Have you worked out your money goals for your blog? What income streams are already working for you on your blog? What income streams might you try next for your blog?

We’d love to hear from you in the comments below. Don’t forget to share a link to your blog.

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 all about how to write a very simple but extremely powerful style of blog post – the ‘How I Do It’ post.

Smart woman researching info by Ryan Jorgensen on 500px

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:

Tips about writing different types of posts (these are previous podcast episodes):

Examples of ‘How I Do It’ blog posts:

It has been a while since we’ve done a writing challenge. In fact, the last time we did it was in episode 28, which was day 28 of the 31-day challenge that I ran at the start of the podcast series. We’ve actually done five of these in the past. If you want to go back and listen to some of the previous podcasts, you can go back to episode 2 where we talked about writing list posts, episode 7 where we talked about writing link posts, episode 19 where we talked about writing opinion posts, episode 23 where we talked about writing a call to action post, and then in episode 28 where we talked about writing review posts.

I will put links back to all of those episodes in today’s show notes. The thing I love about these particular episodes is that a whole heap of ProBlogger readers went away and did the challenge. They created a post on a particular type of post. We had a whole heap of people sharing their list posts and their link posts in the comments on those show notes. That’s what I want you to do today. Today is not a theoretical podcast, it’s a challenge. Are you up for that challenge or not? If not, you might want to stop listening, but if you’re up for a challenge and you want to write a post today and then come back and share that post with us, then here’s what I want you to do.

Write a post that is a “how I do it” or “how I did it” post. There are two variations really today. This is a very simple style of post, but it’s a very powerful one as well. It’s actually what I’ve built a lot of my business around is showing people how I do things, showing people how I’ve done things. Post that work and walk people through a process like this go down really well. They can go down a whole heap better, in fact, than just a normal how to do it post because they’re more personal. This is how I do it. This is how I’ve done it, but they also go beyond giving someone the theory of a topic and showing them how to apply it and how you apply the theory.

In general, there are two types of posts that you might want to try. The first one is the “how I did it” post. This is how I did something, a one-off thing in general and it’s something that you’ve done in the past. This really could be anything depending upon what your niche is, so it could be a post on how you lost weight, or it could be a post on how you made a dining table for your family out of wood, or it could be how you wrote your first book, or how you overcame your fear of heights.

What I want to do today is give you some examples. I’m going to link to all of these examples in today’s show notes. The first example I want to give is a post that my wife, Vanessa, wrote. She’s got a blog called Style and Shenanigans. One of her most popular posts is a post she called Traveling to Bali with Young Kids. I’ll give you the link in the show notes. It basically shares tips from our own experience as a family of going to Bali with our kids last year.

In it, she walks readers through the choices that we made with accommodation, what to pack, how to get around, where to visit, where to eat, all of the things that we did. It was basically a recap of our holiday. That was a good holiday. We enjoyed that holiday, but it actually turns out that it’s really useful content for other people who are thinking about going to Bali.

It wasn’t necessarily a step-by-step post. It wasn’t “do this, then do this,” but it’s amazing how many people we’ve had email us, telling us that I did exactly the same trip. They went to the same restaurants, they stayed at the same place. They did the same activities. It’s amazing how many people pretty much replicated our holiday, which might sound a little bit creepy, but that post made going to Bali so much easier for so many people.

Most people didn’t replicate the whole thing but might have replicated the restaurants that we ate at and all the activities that we did. Vanessa has actually done similar posts on a trip that we did to the US last year, as well. Our time in New York, our time in Los Angeles and what we did. Again, we’ve had people let us know that they pretty much followed our footsteps when they went to New York. This is the benefit of doing this type of post is you’re actually making life easy for someone by outlining what they should do, or what you did, and then it’s their choice as to how much of it they do and how closely they follow your steps.

A variation of this might be “what I learned” post, so rather than what I did, or how I did it, this is what I learned by doing something. A good example of this is a post I wrote back in 2009 on ProBlogger, which was basically the lessons I learned in launching my first ebook. I think it was eight lessons that I learned as a result of launching my first ebook. It was a case study of sorts. I’ll give you again the link in today’s show notes. It was a recapping of what I did, but more importantly, what I learned and what I would do differently.

These, how I did it posts are one approach that you might take today. You might identify something that you’ve achieved or something that was a big thing in your life that you did, that you might find your readers interested in.

Now, the other type of posts that you might want to do is a “how I do it” post. This is similar to the last one but it’s more how you do something that you do regularly. This might be walking your readers through a process that you use in your life. Many of these things will be things that you take for granted that other people may actually be interested in. I want to give you some examples of this again.

Example number one is a post I wrote on ProBlogger earlier this year, I think it was in February, and it’s called how to build an efficient social media workflow to increase traffic to your blog. This was actually a post that included a ScreenFlow video of me using my social media workflow, of me actually walking through how I update my Facebook page every night. This is actually a process I do every night. It usually takes me about 20 minutes and I captured it in a video.

Now, something I almost take for granted, I just have this rhythm that I go through, but I realized one day while I was talking to a friend and describing the process that it was actually useful to other people. So I captured it and I shared it in a blog post. Actually, it was one of the most popular posts on ProBlogger this year.

Another example very similar to this was a post that I wrote on ProBlogger called a powerful exercise inside Google Analytics to set up for a successful year of blogging. This one some of you will remember I did it at the start of this year, I think it was January this year. It was a process that I go through with Google Analytics.

It’s a fairly simple process and it’s something that I just do intuitively, but I captured it. I didn’t capture it this time in video; I took a whole heap of screenshots of what I did. I gave my readers a step-by-step process to go through to unearth things in Google Analytics that will be useful for them as bloggers. Again, I’ll share the link in today’s show notes. Both of these were either screenshots or ScreenFlow video capture of what I do.

Another example is Vanessa’s blog. She published a post which was called how to style your bed. This is a little bit odd for me because it actually shows my bed, the place I sleep, which was a little weird when I saw it on her vlog but it’s actually something that she takes for granted every day.

She does it every day. Our bed has lots of pillows on it. It’s always doing a cover on it. She styles it beautifully. I don’t have anything to do with it. I make the bed, but I don’t style up, but it’s something she gets comments on all the time from friends when they’re over. It’s like, “Oh, how do you get your bed looking so styled and put it all together in that way?” So, she wrote a post, how to style your bed. It’s a post that her readers really enjoyed. I looked at this morning, it had almost 40 comments on it, which is a lot for her.

Another example that we use on Digital Photography School (my blog) is what we call A Step-by-Step Guides. We’ve actually learned that when we use the words “step-by-step guide” in the title of a blog post, they do really well with our readers, our readers love step-by-step guides. Particularly, they like it when we’re talking about post-production, so Lightroom or Photoshop. This is the type of thing that can overwhelm some people. Some people look at Lightroom and they go, “It’s too complicated,” but if you break it down into steps, do this, then do this, then do this. That is something that people can achieve.

We do it in other types of posts as well. For example, we have a step-by-step guide to doing a headshot on a white background, which is a technique type post where we actually talked about the set-up of the shot, we talked about the lighting and how to set up the lights, and we talked about how to pose your subject. That particular post has lots of pictures in it, pictures of the set-up of this particular headshot type thing.

It actually has an animated GIF as well of the set-up, so you can actually see how the same changes. I’ll include links to that and also include some links to some other step-by-step guides, particularly in our post-production area.

The last example I’ll give you is a friend of mine, Nicole Avery, who has a great blog called Planning with Kids. Nicole does these “how I do it” posts all the time, and they are of things that you would, at a glance say, “Why would you write a post on that,” but they’re actually really effective posts. She’s got a post for her family’s morning routine, which might seem a little strange. It might sound just a little bit basic. I don’t need a family routine.

Nicole actually has a fairly large family. She’s got five kids. In the post, she actually walks through what the family routine is in the morning. She’s got another one on how she prepares food for her five kids’ lunchboxes each week, which I think is a pretty remarkable feat. As the person who doesn’t know how to generally make lunches, I actually found that post really interesting.

These are things that Nicole probably takes for granted. She doesn’t really put a whole heap of thought into it, because she’s just got her system. The fact that she developed the system is really interesting, and other people would learn a lot from it. I guess the question I’m trying to lead you towards here is what routines, what workflows, what systems do you have in your life? What things do you do every day that other people might actually be interested in seeing?

You could capture these in all kinds of ways. You could just write them up, but you could also take pictures of them, you could create a video of them. If it’s on your computer, do screen captures or do a ScreenFlow. You might talk people through it in a podcast. There are all kinds of ways that you can talk people through something that you do.

Here’s the exercise I’ve got for you today. Brainstorm ideas for a how I did it or a how I do it post. The how I did it one is something you’ve done. It might be a one-off thing that you could talk people through or how I do it thing is where you talk people through an ongoing thing that you do regularly. What are some of the big one-off things that you’ve done, but also what are some of the things that you do every day that perhaps you take for granted?

Here’s the hint, pay real attention to the questions that you regularly are asked by your family and friends or your colleagues about how you do things. Think about those things that people ask you about. For Vanessa, it’s how do you style your bed or how do you put together an outfit? They’re the type of question she gets asked all the time. There are some of her most effective posts.

Think about the big things that you’ve achieved and how you did those things. For us going to Bali, that was a big thing. It took a lot of work, took a lot of energy, and we get a lot of questions about it. “Where did you stay? Where did you go? How did you get there?” Those types of questions that you get will reveal some of the things that people will be interested to be talked through.

Once you’ve chosen your topic, come up with a title, come up with an outline. I actually find these types of posts, it’s best when I start with an outline. I usually start with bullet points of here’s the process that I go through to do it, then I write a paragraph or maybe two paragraphs on each point, and then I try to find a visual to illustrate each point as well.

Take it step-by-step in writing it and then include some visuals. I think it’s really important to include some visuals because people want to see what you are talking about. If you can do that it’s really powerful.

The last thing I’d encourage you to think about is can you weave a story into it? If you’re talking about how you did it, or how you do it, can you actually show people why you did it or why you do it, and how you felt along the way of doing these things?

I guess how it changes your life to do these things as well. If you can weave yourself into it, it actually personalizes that a whole heap more. It will take your post from being a theoretical post on how to do something to being how you do something, and that’s more relatable for people.

I hope you found today’s exercise helpful. I’m really keen to see the posts that you write. I really don’t want these podcasts to be something that you just listen to and say, “Yeah, I might do that.” I want this podcast to stimulate action, and this is really what the ProBlogger podcast is all about. I want to see the posts that you write as a result of this.

It doesn’t have to be a long post. It could be quite simple. In fact, sometimes the most simple posts that walk people through, something very simple are actually the most effective posts, and they’re the posts that people find most useful. Don’t think that you’re how I did it post is too insignificant. You can actually couch it, introduce it as something that you find quite basic but you hope others might find useful.

When you’ve written your posts, go to problogger.com/podcast/47, which is where today’s show notes are. I’m going to include all the examples that I’ve given you in this podcast there, but I also would love you to leave a comment and just drop a link there, maybe the title as well of the post that you’ve written, and check out the post that other people are writing as well.

You might want to come back to the show notes in the next couple of days and see what other people have written. You might just find that you find some really interesting content that you can share on social media there. I encourage you to support one another as ProBlogger readers, but you might also find some ideas for posts that you could write from the approaches that other people take. So, go to problogger.com/podcast/ 47, where you can get today’s show notes and share your post with us.

Thanks for listening. I’ve got a couple more ideas for these challenges, which I will drop into this podcast in the upcoming weeks. Do subscribe to us on iTunes. Just search for ProBlogger. You’ll find us there and you’ll get updated with all the future episodes of the ProBlogger podcast. Thanks for listening. We’ll talk to you in episode 48.

What did you learn from today’s episode? Have you already written a ‘How I Do It’ or ‘How I Did It’ blog post? What ‘How I Do It’ or ‘How I Did It’ blog post will you write and share next? We’d love to see it!

We’d love to hear from you in the comments below. Don’t forget to share a link to your blog.

Don’t forget, you can also grab the 31 Days to Build a Better Blog Workbook with a 50% discount using the coupon code PODCAST50 during the checkout process here.

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.

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

Today’s episode is all about the mistakes I see bloggers making, and an honest look at the mistakes I’ve made along the way in my own blogging journey.

Big Mistake by Frank Daske on 500px

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:

What did you learn from today’s episode? What mistakes are you making? What’s one mistake you’re going to work to avoid in future, and how will you make it happen?

We’d love to hear from you in the comments below. Don’t forget to share a link to your blog.

One of the most common questions that I’m asked when I’m interviewed about blogging, whether that be in media or other podcasts, is the age-old question: what mistakes did you make that you wish you hadn’t made along the way or what mistakes do you see other bloggers making? I’ve got this stock standard three or four mistakes that I see all the time, but every time I answer that question, a whole heap of other mistakes sit in the back of my mind. Recently, I sat down and tried to write down all of the mistakes that I’ve made and all of the mistakes that I see other people making. I very quickly learned that there are literally hundreds of them we could talk about today. Today, I’m just going to pick about 20 of them, 21 maybe.

Like I said in the introduction, most of these things are not just things that I see other bloggers making in terms of mistakes, but they’re also mistakes that I’ve made along the way. I want to say right upfront, some of these things I could even work on right now 13 years after starting blogging. We could all improve. I’m just like any other blogger in that regard. These are listed in no particular order. They’re things that I’d encourage you to just ponder, is this something that I could improve on as I go through this list.

As I say, there are a whole heap of other ones that I could add and I’ve got another list of about ten others, but I kind of want to leave some room for you to add your own mistakes to what I’ve come up with today.

Let’s get into mistake number one. This is something that I see a lot of bloggers, or at least pre-bloggers, struggling with. The mistake is putting off starting the blog altogether. This is something that many bloggers struggle with because many of us are perfectionists and we want everything to be just right before we launch our blog. We want to have the perfect topic, we want to have the perfect first post, we want our design to look perfect. We want to have all the social media accounts set up, we want to have our hosting all set up, we want to have everything ready to go. Whilst there’s nothing wrong with being prepared and having everything lined up, the reality is that if we wait for everything to be perfect before we press go, then we may never press go.

I know of a number of bloggers, or at least pre-bloggers friends of mine, who have been telling me about the blog’s that they want to start for over five years now. In fact, I’ve got one friend who has been telling me about the blog that he wants to start which he’s been thinking about for over 10 years, almost since I started blogging. Whilst he’s got a busy life and he’s got some really good excuses why he hasn’t started, he’s got other projects on the go, every time I talk to him I say, “You could have started this 10 years ago just in a small way and seen what happens.” 

If you’re in that I’m putting it off stage, I want it to all be perfect, I want to have clarity around what my blog is going to exactly be, can I encourage you just to start. It may be by just setting up a simple blog on wordpress.com or blogspot.com. It doesn’t have to be on your own hosting, it doesn’t have to be on your domain. Just start and see what happens and let things evolve from there. It doesn’t have to be perfect from day one. In fact, it never will be. Give up on some of that perfectionism and give it a go, get going.

Mistake number two is kind of at the other end of the spectrum. Some people put off starting, and that’s mistake number one. Some people give up too early, and that’s mistake number two. Blogs take time to take off. Each of my own blogs over the years has taken at least a good year, to two, to three, to four years before they get going. Get to the point where they’ve got decent traffic, get to the point where they’ve got decent income. The reality is, a lot of blogs never get going, but those that do take a long time to get going up.

I see a lot of bloggers giving up a range of points. The first point that a lot of bloggers seem to give up on is their two to three-month mark. This is, I guess once you start, you’ve been starting with a passion, you’ve been publishing posts every day and then you either get sick or you go on holidays, or you just get a bit disillusioned with the results. This is something that a lot of bloggers struggle with. The other point is a year into blogging. Often, bloggers get to that first anniversary of blogging and they look back and they think, “I’ve spent all this time and energy doing this and what results have I seen?” 

I would encourage you to look at your results. Sometimes, you do need to take a good hard look at them and decide whether you want to keep going. There’s nothing wrong with stopping, but if you do want to build a profitable blog, you need to have a long term approach to it. Don’t give up too early. Give it a go and certainly evolve what you do along the way. Try different things, but don’t give up too early.

Mistake number three is a big one, and this is not differentiating yourself from everyone else or echoing what everyone else is talking about. This is a really tough one and we probably should do a podcast just on this topic: how to differentiate yourself as a blogger. Because the reality is that there are hundreds, if not thousands of blogs, on almost every topic that you can think of. It’s really hard to come up with something that’s unique. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of blogs about photography, which is what my main blog is about. Even when I started back in 2007, there were hundreds of blogs about photography. I had to really think hard about how I am going to differentiate this blog.

There are a number of ways that you can do this. I’m not going to go into great depth about it, but just some simple ones. Sharing your own opinion is one way you can differentiate yourself. No one shares the exact same opinion as you. Share your story, share your experiences. No one has the exact same story or experiences. Inject a little bit of your personality into your blog, whether that be your humor, or your story, or whether that be using a tool like Blab, which we talked about in a recent podcast or using video or a podcast in some way. You can inject a little of you, your personality, and a personal aspect into your blog.

You can also work on developing your voice. The way that you present, the way you write the tone, and the position that you take with your topic can differentiate you. You could be the companion, you could be the friend to your reader, you could be the teacher to your reader, you could be the journalist, you could be the artist, you could be the person who tells the cold, hard, ugly truth about your topic. There’s a whole heap of different voices that you can bring and this is a way that you can differentiate yourself. 

Of course, you can choose to produce a blog that aims to hit a different level. Digital Photography School, my main blog, I’ve tried to bring my companion voice to it, but I was also aiming for the beginner. That set me apart from a lot of the other photography blogs who were taking a more advanced level in their content but also teaching in a more professorial voice. Do whatever you can to differentiate yourself from everyone else and find unique and new ways of trying to speak about the topic that you’re writing about. It’s a tough one I know, but the more you can differentiate yourself and develop your unique perspective the better.

Mistake number four is all-around domains. Not blogging on your own domain and choosing the wrong domain. I’ll be completely honest, most of the mistakes that I’ve made in blogging have centered around domains. I reckon I have made almost every mistake possible on this front. Let me go through a few potential mistakes. 

Ideally, you want to be on your own domain. You don’t want to be on a hosted blog like a wordpress.com blog, or a Blogspot blog, or a Medium, or a Tumblr. You want to be on your own domain and your own platform if possible. I’ve already said earlier in this podcast that you might just need to start on one of those hosted options. That’s totally fine in the early days, but if you want to build a profitable, successful, and sustainable blog, you probably want to get your own domain.

When you choose that domain, you probably want to get the .com domain if possible, unless you’re trying to target a geographical area. If you’re an Australian and you just want to have Aussie readers, it’s probably okay to get .com.au domain. If you’re an organization and not-for-profit, you might be okay to get a .org domain. In general, you want to aim for a .com and you want to try and have a domain that’s relatively short, that doesn’t have a whole heap of hyphens in it like my Digital Photography School, which has three hyphens in it between each word. You want to choose something that’s memorable in some way.

If you don’t do any of those things, I guess you fall into the mistake category as I have. On ProBlogger, for instance, I started out on a .net domain. Digital Photography School, I had hyphens in it. My first blog, it was a .org.au even though I was going for an international audience. I made all of these mistakes. What I want to encourage you with these mistakes is that you can recover from them. My two profitable blogs today are on .net and the other one has lots of hyphens. It’s possible to do okay with this, but I guess here we’re trying to reduce any friction and reduce any problems that you might run into. You can recover from these mistakes and others.

Mistake number five, irregularity in your posting. You don’t have to publish every day on your blog but do try to establish a regular rhythm of posting. Regularity of posting is good for a number of reasons. One, it’s good for you as a writer. It helps you get into the rhythm. It helps you to establish getting into that flow of writing. It’s also good for your readers as well. If you are posting sporadically, like once one week and then 10 times the next week, you’ll find some of your readers will push back at that. If you establish a nice regular rhythm, say Mondays and Fridays, or Tuesdays and Thursdays, or Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, your readers begin to get into the flow of knowing when to turn up. You’re not going to overwhelm them with a whole heap of content and then nothing for three weeks. Your readers will really appreciate regularity.

It’s also really good in terms of establishing a good number of posts in your archives over time. If you publish once a week, you’re going to end up with 52 posts at the end of the year. If you publish three times a week, you end up with 156 posts at the end of the year. Whilst it doesn’t really matter how many posts you’ve got, there are certainly some advantages of accumulating lots of posts in your archives because that’s going to present different doorways into your site from search engines but also some social media as well. Establish a rhythm with your posting. You might want to start out a little bit lower than what you think you can handle and then increase that over time.

In Digital Photography School, I started out with two posts a week, and then I moved to three posts a week. Originally, I think it was Tuesdays and Thursdays, and then it went to Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Then gradually, I moved towards five times a week every weekday, and then I went seven times. Today, it’s fourteen times a week, but that’s taken years and years and years to get to that high level of producing content. Regularity is really important.

Mistake number six is don’t be too apologetic. This is something that some of you won’t struggle with, but I do know some of you as bloggers feel bad about the fact that maybe you hadn’t published last week, so you start your next blog post with something like, “Sorry, I haven’t written for a while,” and then you explain why you haven’t written for a while and then you start writing your post. Whilst I understand that on some levels, the reality is most of your readers probably didn’t notice that you were away last week. Drawing their attention to it just shows something that they don’t really need to know. It can distract them from the post that you’re actually writing. Invest your time into building up your blog rather than highlighting its problems would be the advice that I give you around this.

Mistake number seven is focusing upon quick traffic more than focusing on your readers with your content. There’s nothing wrong with writing a blog post from time to time that is kind of designed to be shared with the hope that maybe it’ll go viral, maybe it’ll help you to find some new readers. If that’s the only type of blog post that you write, you could actually end up annoying your regular readers. Don’t just write blog posts that you think might go viral. Don’t just try and chase the eyeballs on the traffic. Actually think about who’s reading your blog and what kind of content they need to be presented with. Some of that content will never go viral.

Let me give you an example on Digital Photography School. We know that infographics do really well on our site. I actually published one just two or three days ago and it went crazy. It got hundreds of thousands of shares on Digital Photography School on our Facebook page. It drove a lot of traffic to our site. It was kind of useful and it’s kind of interesting. If I just shared infographics day after day after day, we’d get a lot of first-time visitors but we wouldn’t get so many people coming back the next day because an infographic by itself doesn’t actually bring about a change in our readers.

I know that if I want my readers to improve their photography, I need to write some content that may not get shared as much. I need to teach my readers about what is ISO, what is aperture, what is shutter speed, and some of these less sexy topics. I know that if I focus on that type of content, the content that actually brings about a change as the majority of my posts, that my readers are going to keep coming back day after day after day.

The way we kind of tackle this is once a week we’ll do something that’s a little bit more shareable. Then once a week we try and do something that’s a bit more engaging. Then once a week we do something which tries to get our readers to do something, so it has a strong call to action. The rest of our posts a week, so another eight or nine posts a week are really trying to teach our readers different things. You’re going to really mix up the types of content, but don’t focus on just getting the eyeballs. Focus upon building engagement and bringing about change in your readers with the bulk of what you produce.

Mistake number eight is all about clutter. There’s a lot of bloggers who really struggle with this. If I’m honest, again, my own blogs do struggle with this at times. We’re actually about to do a complete overhaul of ProBlogger’s blog because it’s getting a bit cluttered and a bit tired. It’s very easy for your blog to become cluttered. We start out with nice, clean, beautiful blog designs and then we just add that widget. We add that widget to the sidebar, or maybe we add something underneath the comments of our post, or maybe we just want to add another ad unit in. Maybe we’re going to add another element to our navigation or menu items, and then gradually, over time, we add more and we add more and we add more and we don’t take anything away. It’s very easy after a few months or a year or two to end up with this sidebar that has hundreds of links. Tens and twenties of widgets and all kinds of things in our navigational areas.

The advice here is to try and resist a little bit adding lots of things. When you add something, perhaps consider taking something away. Also to do a bit of a spring cleaning every now and again. Give it a good hard look. Perhaps, even ask someone else what they think of your blog design too. Maybe it’s time for a spring cleaning.

Mistake number nine is to write great blog posts with terrible titles. This is something, again, I have struggled with. I’ve been guilty of this over the years at different times. I spend hours writing my blog posts, sometimes I spend days on some of the longer posts. Then it’s very easy to just slap a title on it and publish it. After spending all that time on the content, slapping a title on it that isn’t really thought through can really cost you. It can be the difference between people reading that great blog post and just glossing over it. The people who do this best actually spend considerable time on their titles. Ideally, you probably want to come up with at least ten titles for your blog posts and then choose the best one. It’s actually probably something also to involve other people in if you’ve got other people who are willing to help with that.

If you’ve written a really great blog post, shoot it around to a few friends and ask them what they would title it as or give them some options to choose from. Take that extra time with your titles. It can really make the massive difference in your blog.

Mistake number 10, almost halfway now, is not defining a topic or a niche for your blog. I’m not talking here about your blog post, I’m talking about the overall topic of your blog. Most successful blogs have a well-defined topic, or a niche, or at least target a certain demographic of reader. There are certainly examples of blogs that don’t really have an obvious topic or a niche, but they usually have something that defines them. It’s usually the topic, it’s usually the niche, but sometimes it’s the type of reader they’re trying to attract, sometimes it’s the style of the blog or what they do. Whether it be humor, or whether it be essays, or whether it be thoughtful writing, there’s something usually that defines the blog.

I know some people are going to push back on this particular one, and that’s totally fine if you want to intentionally have a blog that’s about everything. That’s totally fine, but there are some costs associated with that. For one, you might find some readers find it really hard to know whether your blog is for them if it’s about anything and everything. It can be tricky unless you write it perhaps in a certain style, which may actually be what defines your blog. It may be hard to build that audience. It also might be hard to monetize if that’s something that you want to do. Particularly if you want to work with advertisers, sometimes an advertiser really wants to align themselves with a particular topic or a particular niche or a particular type of person. Also, monetizing with a product as well can be really tricky if your blog is about anything and everything.

Again, there are probably some examples of blogs out there that break this particular one and make this mistake on purpose. In most cases, successful blogs have at least some way of defining what they’re about that readers and others can hang their hats up on in some way.

Mistake number 11 is choosing a topic, or choosing a niche, that you have no real interest in. Another way to put this is to choose profit over passion. Again, this is another one that I made in the early days of my own blogging. When I first started to make money from blogging, my first blog that was commercial, was a blog about digital cameras and I reviewed digital cameras. It was quite profitable. It actually got to a point where I was making over $100,000 a year, which just blew my mind. I was like, “Wow. Can a blog actually make that much money?” It could through affiliate marketing, mentioning the cameras, but also through some advertising. 

I began, naturally, to think about what other blogs could I start and could I do the same sort of model with. I had, at one point, about 30 different blogs. One of them was about camera phones. That was something that I was kind of interested in. It was a new emerging technology and then I started to think about other blogs.

One that I started was about printers, which was a natural progression from the digital cameras because it was technology-related. It was around printing images but also documents. The reality is I didn’t really enjoy printers, I have no interest in printers. I don’t like them and they don’t like me. They kind of cause me all kinds of grief. It wasn’t something that I could naturally write about, but it was a profitable topic. Even though I didn’t have much traffic, it did make me some half-decent money, but it wasn’t satisfying. Also, it showed through in my writing. My readers, I’m not sure that there were any regular ones. It was driving search engine traffic mainly, but I’m sure that anyone coming to that blog could tell that I wasn’t really engaged with that topic.

I had about 30 blogs at one point, today I have two. They’re the two topics that most interest me. They’re the ones that I was able to sustain, but they were also the ones that I was able to build a readership around. I think that was because people could tell that I was engaged with those topics. It’s going to take some time to build a profitable blog. You might as well choose something that you got some interest in.

Mistake number 12, having too many ads on your blog. I don’t have a problem with putting ads on your blog at all. In fact, I would encourage you, if you’re going to put ads on your blog, to consider doing it from day one because it actually sets an expectation with your readers that this is a monetized blog. You don’t have to have that conversation with your readers in a year’s time about why you’re putting ads on your blog if they’ve been there from day one. You want to be really careful about how many ads you have on your blog. Whether they be banner ads or whether they even be sponsored content.

There’s a number of costs of having too many ads on your site. For one, it makes your site cluttered and less visually appealing. Two, it could disillusion your readers if all they see are ads and all they see are calls to action to buy this and buy that, but you’ll also run the risk of being penalized by Google for having too many ads on your site. Be a little bit careful about that. 

The last reason is that if you’re selling ads to advertisers, they’re going to get much better results if there are fewer ads on the site. If that advertiser is competing with 20 other ads on your site on your sidebar, people are much less likely to click those ads if there’s lots of ads there. In fact, they’ll become blind to them. If you’ve got one or two ads there, your advertisers are going to get much better value from that.

We actually know this from our event, our real-life event, which we have sponsors too as well. Some conferences have 20, or 30, or 40 different advertisers or sponsors of their conference. Last year we had three, three main ones. We know that if we have fewer sponsors, we’re able to deliver much better value to those sponsors. People will remember those sponsors. As a result of that, we’re able to charge more to those sponsors as well. It actually serves our attendees and the readers of your blog, but it also serves the sponsor and it also serves you. It’s better for everyone.

Mistake number 13 is being too insular, expecting your readers to come to you rather than going out to them. Many bloggers when they start, they think that if they build a great blog people will just find them. Build it and they will come. The reality is this doesn’t work in blogging. Unless you’ve already got some sort of established readership. If you do do something great and you build something great and you’ve already got readers, then they will spread the word for you. 

In the early days, particularly, you need to get off your blog. You need to identify where your potential readers are gathering and how you can interact in those spaces. Don’t just build it and don’t just expect people to come to you, go to them. This is something I know some bloggers really struggle with because they don’t want to be seen as self-promotional all the time, but you do need to come to terms with this. You don’t need to go out and say, “Look at me. Look at me. Look at me,” all the time. You can actually go out and just serve people in the places that they’re gathering. Be useful to them. That, in turn, will promote your blog.

Mistake number 14 is a pet peeve of mine, and it is blogging as your first blog, choosing the topic of making money blogging as your topic. I’ve seen a number of bloggers do this. They get into blogging and they look around and they think, “What’s the most profitable niche? Oh, the people who are making the most money from blogging are the people who are writing about making money from blogging. I’m going to start a blog on that.” It’s bizarre to me that someone would choose that as their first blog’s topic when they’ve never actually made money from blogging. Don’t make that mistake. For one, making money from writing about making money blogging is actually not that easy because there’s so many blogs on that topic. I personally found it’s much more profitable to have a blog about photography than it is to have a blog about blogging.

Choose something that’s normal, that a normal person out there would be interested in. There are more people with digital cameras than there are with blogs. There are more people who eat food than have blogs. There are more people who travel than have blogs. There are more people who wear clothes, and they’re interested in fashion than have blogs. Choose one of those topics. Something that you’re interested in and something that you can genuinely talk about that you’ve got some expertise or some experience with. 

It’s okay to have a blog about blogging. It’s okay to talk about making money online, but you’re going to have much more success with that type of blog if you’ve already done it on another blog or if you’ve already had some experience in that. By all means, choose to have a blog on that particular topic, but do it out of your experience of building a successful blog in some other area first.

Mistake number 15 is a strange one in some ways, it’s a bit of a big mistake. It’s hard to define in some ways, but it’s not being useful with your blog. The blogs that are most successful, that at least I read, are blogs that solve a problem. They’re blogs that meet the needs of their readers. People are much more likely to come back to a blog if it has an impact upon them, if it changes them in some way. Ask yourself this question, is your blog making a difference? Is it bringing about some sort of change? Is it solving a problem? Is it useful? Your blog doesn’t need to solve big massive issues like poverty and world peace and all these types of things. It might, it could actually be something really simple that is useful to someone.

Teaching them how to hold a camera, or teaching them how to make a soufflé, or teaching them how to be a better parent or giving them a laugh, making them smile or making them realize that they’re not alone. These things make a difference, they’re useful. They don’t need to be massive, but if they’re not bringing about some change or solving some kind of problem, you might want to rethink what it is that your blog is about.

Mistake number 16 is one that I see many bloggers falling for, and that is writing for search engines before they write for humans. You really want to focus on writing for human beings. That’s a hot tip for you, it’s a bit of a strange mistake to talk about, but I do see a lot of bloggers who are obviously writing content that is all about trying to rank highly in Google. I understand it on one front, Google can send a lot of traffic to your site if you work out how to manipulate it and how to rank high. The problem is if you do that at the expense of writing useful content for real people by just focusing on keywords and algorithms but not actually thinking about who’s reading it, then what’s the point of getting anyone to your blog anyway because they’re just going to disappear again. They’re not going to want to come back.

What I found is that if you write great content for human beings, for real people with real problems and real issues, and you can help to solve those problems, they’re going to want to come back. They’re going to start sharing your content with other people, which has the byproduct of helping you to rank higher in search engines. Search engines watch to see how people share your content, they watch to see how long people are spending on your content. If you’re writing content that engages people, that keeps people on your site for a long time, and that that they want to share you’re going to rank high in search engines over the long term. Don’t write for search engines. Certainly understand how they work, but keep in mind your reader as the first thing that you want to serve and the first focus.

Mistake number 17. Every time I share this one I see people going, “Yes, that’s me. That’s me.” This one is something I have struggled with over the years in different ways. The mistake is this, becoming a statsaholic. The lure of checking your stats, your metrics is completely understandable. They’re seductive, those metrics. It’s so easy to spend your time in Google Analytics looking at those real-time stats wondering why no one’s reading your blog right now, looking at which pages they’re reading. 

There’s other stats too that can be quite seductive. Maybe it’s the how high your blog is ranking in Google, or maybe it’s how many comments you’ve got, or how many page views you’ve had, or what your bounce rate is, or how much you’ve earned from those AdSense ads, or how many followers you have on Twitter, or how many likes you have on your Facebook page. Then there’s the temptation to start comparing your stats to other people. I know a lot of people just get completely sucked into one, looking at their own metric metrics but then two, comparing themselves to others and their metrics.

Whilst I think it’s good to understand how many people are reading your blog and how they’re using your blog and to watch some of those metrics, they can be an incredible distraction. They can actually take you away from creating great content. They can actually feed your insecurities and get you really down if you don’t watch that. What I would encourage you to do is to set aside time each week, specific time to check your stats. It may be that you want to set aside a few minutes every day to do that at the start and the end of the day. 

What I do is I start my day by checking my stats to look at what happened last night. At the end of the day, I do the same. Then once a week, I also set aside about an hour to really dig into my Google Analytics, and to really dig into looking at some of the social media metrics around my blogs as well. Then the rest of the week, I resist that urge. I try and keep away from doing that and focus my energy upon creation of great content for my blogs.

Mistake number 18 is something that I saw a lot four or five years ago maybe even a bit further back. This is growing your blog with link baiting or personal attacks. I saw this quite a bit particularly when I started ProBlogger, probably about 2007-2008. I saw a lot of bloggers who realize that they could grow their blog’s traffic by attacking other bloggers, by kind of baiting them, by attacking them or critiquing them in different ways. Sometimes they use satire, which was kind of bordering on the edge of attack, but sometimes it was just a blatant attack. Sometimes they did it anonymously as well. 

Whilst you can grow your traffic that way, the problem is that you also grow a reputation. The way that you blog impacts your brand. You will become known for the kind of approach you have to content. If you write snarky, attacking content you will become known for that, and that will be attached to you and it’s very hard to shake.

On the other side, if you spend your time creating uplifting, constructive, and life-changing content, you will also become known for that. Just be really careful about how much you do go into that kind of ranty, snarky space. There probably is a time to be blunt and to rant, but you want to be aware of how you balance that with different types of content on your site.

Mistake 19 now, I’ve got three to go. This is one that kind of taps into some of the others that I’ve already talked about but I think it’s worth saying. The mistake is not knowing why you’re blogging. Most of us, when we start out blogging, are not particularly clear about what our goals are or what our why is, but it’s really important, as you begin to blog, to work that one out. If you don’t have goals, it’s very hard to hit any goals and to have success. Yes, good things will come your way if you blog over time, particularly if you’re changing people’s lives. You really want to think carefully about the goals that you have. This really applies to all areas of your life. 

I try to set aside some time at the beginning of every year to come up with some goals. That helps me to keep on track over the year and to make progress. What I find is if I don’t have a goal, it’s very easy just to become kind of a bit lazy. You’ve got nothing to drive you forward with your blog.

Mistake number 20 is thinking that there’s only one way to monetize your blog. A lot of bloggers I know fall into this one. They see another blogger and usually, what I find is bloggers start blogging because they see another blogger. It’s usually one or a small group of bloggers that they admire and they think, “I’d like to do that.” They model themselves on that particular blog and they tend to think that that’s the only way that you can blog. 

The reality is when it comes to making money from blogs that there are many ways to monetize a blog. If you go to problogger.net/moneymap, you’ll see there, and I’ll put it in today’s show notes, a money map of 40 or so different ways that you can make money from blogging.

A lot of bloggers, when they start out, they think advertising’s the only way. That’s just one of many ways that you can monetize a blog. Don’t just think that there’s one way to do it. You’ll find over time that there are different methods that you can use that will work differently depending upon the size of your audience, the topic that you have, and the life stage of your blog.

The last mistake is thinking that you have to know it all to have a successful blog. I come across a lot of bloggers who have insecurities around different aspects of blogging. For a lot of bloggers, it’s like, “Yeah, I’m not technical enough,” or “I don’t know about design,” or “I’m not a great writer,” or “I’m not very good at marketing,” or whatever it might be. We all have an area that we don’t know a whole heap about when it comes to the technicalities of blogging. That’s totally okay.

When I started blogging I didn’t know how to make text bold on my blog for three months after starting. I am still, to this day, not very technical. I leave that aspect of blogging to someone else. The tools today are so much better than they were in those days as well so you don’t need to know as much. You don’t have to know it all before you start. When it comes to your topic as well, you don’t need to know it all either.

When I started ProBlogger, I’ve been blogging for a couple of years, but I certainly didn’t know everything there was to know about making money from blogging. I was very transparent with my readers about what I did know and what I didn’t know, what I was learning and what I already knew, the mistakes I made as well as the successes that I had. Be transparent with your readers, you’ll find that people are very forgiving of you. You don’t need to know it all.

Keep in mind with these 21 mistakes, that I’ve already been through today, that there are plenty of others that we could have talked about. I would love to hear the mistakes that you’ve made in your own blogging and the mistakes that you see other bloggers making as well. Also, really keep in mind that there’s a recovery from most of these mistakes. I can’t think of anything I’ve just talked about that’s not recoverable from. I’ve built a full-time business around my blogging despite having made most of these mistakes at one time or another. You can recover. 

Making mistakes is part of learning. It’s part of success. All successful entrepreneurs can identify mistakes that they’ve made. The key is to learn from them, to not repeat them, and to evolve what you do as a result of the mistakes and failures that you do have.

I want to encourage you to go over to our show notes. They’re at problogger.com/podcast/46 where I’ll have a few notes from today’s show. I’ll share some of the links that I’ve mentioned and some further reading, but I also would love to hear your comments on today’s show. Let us know the mistakes you’ve made. Let us know the mistakes that I’ve talked about that resonate most with you. Get to know one another as ProBlogger Podcast listeners. If you also got a moment to head over to iTunes and let us know what you think about the show in a review, I would be incredibly grateful for that.

Thanks so much for listening to the ProBlogger Podcast. 

I was recently at the Inbound Conference and I had probably about 40 or 50 people come up to me over those three days and tell me that they’ve been listening. I can’t tell you how exciting it is to hear and meet people who are listeners of this. What I’ve noticed is that the podcast listeners approach you sometimes with more warmth than the blog readers. There’s probably not a personality thing. I think there’s something about listening to someone that brings that out and about. I really do appreciate you listening and particularly those of you are addicted to it and waiting for our podcast episodes to come down the tubes every Monday and Thursday. 

Thanks so much for listening. I will talk to you in episode 47 of the ProBlogger Podcast.

Don’t forget, you can also grab the 31 Days to Build a Better Blog Workbook with a 50% discount using the coupon code PODCAST50 during the checkout process here.

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

Today’s episode is all about how to increase the chances of lucky things happening to you. Some people believe luck is random or based on personality, but I believe luck is a choice. You can choose to increase the chances of lucky things happening to you by creating conscious habits. Today I share the habits you can choose to develop to grow your own luck as a blogger and entrepreneur.

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

The 2 Questions to Ask Yourself Every Day:

My ideal weekly schedule that I created to remind myself to regularly focus on cultivating the habits of lucky entrepreneurs (note: this is an updated version from one I shared a few episodes ago):

Have you ever been in the right place at the right time? I certainly have been, numerous times along that way in my own blogging, right back at the first moment when I first discovered the first blog. I did have a little bit of luck. I was in the right place at the right time. It was a rainy afternoon in November 2002. A Friday afternoon, if I remember correctly, and I was sitting at my computer at one of the part-time jobs that I was doing at the time. A voice came out of my computer. It was a bit of an embarrassing voice, now that I think about it. It said, “Master, you’ve got mail.” I was a lot younger back then and a bit more immature. I’m not sure why I installed that little plugin. 

But I went and checked my Hotmail account and there was an email from a good friend of mine, Steve. It was the kind of email that I normally would’ve probably passed over and not paid a whole heap of attention to because it only had four words in it. It was one of those emails where someone sends you a link and you never quite know what you can end up on when you click those links. The email basically said these four words, “Check out this blog.” 

I never heard the word blog before. It was 2002 and I wasn’t familiar with that term, so it made me a little bit curious. I clicked the link and I ended up on this blog called tallskinnykiwi.com. Now, the blog itself, I was interested in.

To cut the long story short, it was this medium of blogging that really grabbed my attention on that day. To cut that long story short, 3½-year long story short, I started a blog that day. In doing so, it really did change the trajectory of my life. That sounds quite dramatic, but it really did change my life. Today, 3½ years later, I’m a full-time blogger, I have over 5 million people a month to check out my blogs. I’m also not the biggest or the best blogger out there. I sometimes wonder, what would have happened if I hadn’t clicked that link? It was one of those sliding door moments in my life. I was in the right place at the right time. 

I’m often asked, how much of your success was to do with the fact that you started in 2002? I guess I reflect that. It was a great time to get that email. 2002 was a brilliant time to start blogging. Even though at that time I felt like I was too late, I looked around and saw the other bloggers that were more established. In hindsight, it was very early days. There was this rise in the interest of new media. Social media hadn’t even really been born as a term (although, this blogging was really the beginning of it) and I’ve been writing that wave of interest in blogging and social media ever since.

In some ways, I was lucky. It was serendipitous that I got that email at that time and I paid attention to it and acted upon it. I was lucky. As I looked back over the last 13 years, there’ve been many moments, lucky moments along the way. Being in the right place at the right time, meeting the right person at the right time, chance encounters, things coming out of the blue have helped me to grow my blogs. While there’s also been a whole hip of hard work, strategy, there was also serendipity along the way.

If you’ve been following me for a while and have listened to podcasts, interviews that I’ve done, webinar interviews that I’ve done in the past, you will have heard me asked a question of many online entrepreneurs. I quite like to ask them about this idea of serendipity. The question I’m asking quite a few people, both in conversations but also on Webinars is, has your success had more to do with serendipity or strategy?

Now, strategy always plays a part. Hard work always plays a part in success, but so too (as I’ve found) does serendipity. It’s amazing how many online entrepreneurs tell me, “You know? There was this moment where I was very lucky.” It’s often at the beginning of the journey. What I find is often, serendipity opens the doors in many cases and then, the strategy often comes later.

It’s not always the case, but as I’ve read a lot about entrepreneurship, I do see this recurring theme. Luck seems to play a part, serendipity or happy accidents seems to be a part of entrepreneurial stories. As I look at these stories and as I talk to online entrepreneurs, I’ve also noticed that these lucky entrepreneurs also seem to share traits, also seem to share qualities, and sometimes I think of them as personality traits, but also, it seems to be more about the way they spend their time. They tend to do things that seem to open up the luck opportunities, increase the chances of lucky things happening to them.

Today, what I want to talk about are seven habits of lucky entrepreneurs. These are seven things I’ve noticed behind the lucky encounters that seem to play a part in increasing the chances of lucky things happening. By no means of this, the only seven things are not a definitive list and I would love to hear what you think of them, I’d love to hear what you would add to them as well. Let’s get into them.

The first one is that these lucky entrepreneurs seem to be, more often than not, avid learners. Not all of them have high educational qualifications. In fact, many of the online entrepreneurs that have the most success that I’ve come across don’t have any at all but they all seem to be avid learners. They are the type of people who read a lot, listen to a lot of podcasts, or go to a lot of conferences. They’re gathering information and knowledge. They’re also the type of person who asks a lot of questions.

I’ve got one quite successful entrepreneurial friend. We catch up for a coffee every now and again. He’s the type of person you sit down for a coffee and he just peppers you with question after question after question. I don’t even think he does it on purpose, he just can’t help but gather knowledge at every time he has an interaction with someone. It’s not just me, he does it with everyone he meets. He just can’t help but gather information whether they’re an expert or not. He understands that everyone knows something so he wants to pick their brains.

These online entrepreneurs, these lucky entrepreneurs also have mentors. More often than not, they’re a part of mastermind groups. They put themselves into situations where they will learn information. Now, what’s this got to do with luck? There’s a Roman philosopher by the name of Seneca. He once said—you might have heard this quite before—”Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.”

What I think is happening here is that when you have the knowledge, when you are educated, when you have learned something, you’re more likely to be able to make lucky, educated guesses. When you have the knowledge, you’re also luckier to be able to notice and see how to leverage and take advantage of anomalies and opportunities that come your way. When you have the knowledge, you’re more likely to be able to join together dots that have previously been disconnected. Knowledge helps to prepare you for lucky instances to notice them but also, to make luck. 

The question I’d ask you today is are you filling your cup? This is something I’ve talked about in previous podcasts, but it’s worth talking about it again. Are you actually learning? Are you putting yourself to a position where you are learning? Do you read? Are you listening to podcasts? Well, you’re obviously listening to this. Are you going to conferences? Do you have a mentor? Are you part of mastermind groups? Are you asking questions of those you meet? Are you putting yourself in a position to learn?

What I would encourage you to do is to set aside time to learn. All of these habits that I’m talking about today, I think you can actually develop systems and you can put aside time to do these things. My argument today is that these seven things are choices. These are not personality traits, these are choices. The way you spend your time can help you to have these lucky instances happen. Of course, there are many other benefits of setting aside time to learn as well. So, set aside time to learn.

The second habit of lucky entrepreneurs that I want to talk about today is that they seem to be fascinated with problems. The lucky entrepreneurs that I’m thinking about have this really positive way of viewing problems while most of us are wired almost from birth to avoid problems at all cost, to run away from them, to complain about them, to avoid them, to take shortcuts to get around them. Lucky entrepreneurs actually embrace problems. They’re very optimistic in the way that they view problems. 

Problems are not something to be avoided, they’re not something that should be seen as a roadblock. They’re actually springboards into opportunity. They’re signals of solutions, said one person that I met recently. He talked about how, when he comes across a problem in his own life or in someone else’s life that he actually sees them as a signal to a solution. He admitted to me that he hears a little “cha-ching,” sort of like a cash register sounds when he comes across a problem. That’s the way he trained himself to be. Again, this is a choice. How we react to problems is a choice. 

The question I’d ask you today is how do you respond to problems, both your own problems and the problems of others? Do you even notice them at all, other people’s problems? Another question related to this is do you capture those problems? Do you have a system to notice, but also take special notice of problems? Because problems could be opportunities. Particularly as a blogger, noticing the problems of your readers is a very powerful thing and having some system to collect those problems is really important. I’ve talked in previous podcasts how I used Evernote to make note of these types of things, the question that I hear but also the problems that I noticed in my readers.

The third habit that I want to talk about today is really building about this idea of embracing problems. It’s the way that lucky entrepreneurs respond to problems. They do so by practicing the art of curiosity. This is the third habit I want to talk about, practicing curiosity. Rather than running away from a problem, rather than complaining about a problem, the lucky entrepreneur responds to problems with curiosity. They play with problems.

It’s almost like this picture of a cat playing with a ball of wool. You know how they play with it, they tap it around, and they just, gently overtime, unravel the ball of wool. This is how lucky entrepreneurs respond to problems. They play with the problems, they enter into this playful state of asking questions about the problem. Many times, the questions start with the words what if. What if we try this? What if we try that? What would happen if we did this?

This is really hypothesizing. This is coming out with a solution, a playful solution to the problems. It’s often when we tease problems, it’s often when we play with them in this brainstorming away, this non-pressured, “we don’t have to find the solution, we’re just playing with the problem.” It’s often when we enter into this state that we see the light bulb moment happen. Curiosity isn’t a personality trait, it’s a choice. It’s something that we can choose to be and it’s something, I think, that we can try in ourselves to have. 

Next time you come across a problem, whether it’d be your own or a problem that you notice of someone else, I would encourage you not to run away from it but to embrace it and to embrace it with some of these what-if questions. Some of us are perhaps more wide to these things, perhaps personality does play a part here. But I believe you can set aside time to do this and it may be helpful to this with other people as well if you find this hard.

Set aside some time and tackle a problem. Brainstorm it, play with it, exercise curiosity in response to it. I actually have time set aside every week where I, by myself, just pull apart a problem and just brainstorm it. I also had people to do this with as well. That’s the third habit.

The fourth habit builds upon this curiosity. It is to experiment prolifically. Up until this point of noticing a problem, embracing that problem, and then practicing it out of curiosity, everything is still stuck in your head. You might have had a light bulb moment, but if this is where it stops, then it’s kind of useless in some ways. You’ve got to get that idea out of your head. The way that I see a lot of lucky entrepreneurs doing that is to experiment prolifically. 

I think someone like Leo Babauta from Zen Habits. Leo is the kind of guy who’s constantly experimenting. He’s constantly trying new things whether it’d be his diet, his exercise, or something else. Tim Ferriss is another person who does this. They’re constantly experimenting in their own lives. As a blogger, we have all kinds of tools at our fingertips that can help us to experiment. Particularly, I think about social media.

As I look back over my last 13 years of blogging, almost every product that I’ve created, every ebook (and we’ve released over 30 of them), every course (we’ve released a couple of them), the book that I’ve written, the event that I ran, almost every single one of these products started with a tweet, with a Facebook update, or with a blog post update, and these are seen as experiments. When I get an idea, my first reaction is to test it, to put it out there and to see whether other people respond to it, to see how things are responded to. Have I resonated with the sparks fly when I put the idea out there? 

The question I have here around this habit is do you have your ideas stuck in your head? I come across a lot of want to be entrepreneurs, people who really do want to be entrepreneurs, people who want to have online businesses whose ideas are stuck in their heads. I think the best thing that you can do is start to experiment.

You don’t need to create the perfect business on day one if you’ve got an idea in your head. You need to find a way to test it and it may be just a short tweet that tests that, blog post, maybe a conversation with someone, it may be that you build a prototype, or you build something that takes you towards that journey. You don’t need to create it on day one. Set aside time to test your ideas.

The fifth habit that I want to talk about again builds upon this. The fifth habit is to create time, to set aside time to watch for sparks. This is really the next step after the experiment. An experiment is great, but unless you create time to watch to see how that experiment went, then it’s kind of useless even doing the experiment.

This is something that I think it’s really a big challenge for people today. The problem that we face today is that we fill every second of our life, every minute of our life with activity, at least many people do. They just don’t have time to observe and watch for sparks of opportunity.

Quite often when I go to a conference—I just got back from the Inbound Conference—it was interesting to see that there was this recurring question that I was asked at that conference. I reckon about 10 times in 3 days I was asked, “What’s your next big thing? What’s the next big thing for you, Darren?” It’s a great question, I love getting that question, I’ve asked it myself but the realization that I’ve had over the years is that my big thing, the biggest things that I’ve done have always started out as really tiny, small things.

The biggest products that I’ve created usually start as an idea that I get lying in bed at 1:00 in the morning, that I then test and I put it out there as a tweet or a blog post to watch to see what happens. It usually comes back as a small positive reaction from my readers. These little sparks of resonance, these little sparks of energy that I get in myself but I also see in other people, it’s paying attention to those little things that actually you can fan those little sparks into flames. 

Your next big thing might actually be the tiny little thing waiting to be noticed right in front of you right now. The question I have for you is do you have time to notice the sparks? Do you have practices to help you unearth those sparks of opportunity?

One of the things that I do everyday is at the end of the day, I ask myself two simple questions. I quite often ask myself these questions either before I go to bed or even in bed. I encourage you to do it before you go to bed because sometimes when you ask these questions, you have to get up and write down the answers. These are the two questions I ask myself every night.

It’s kind of a meditative exercise, although not a spiritual one, it’s just a mindfulness exercise in some ways. The two questions are these. One, what gave me energy today? What did I do today that gave me energy? This is about paying attention to the ideas that you’ve got, the things that you feel excited about or at least feel warm towards. By paying attention to the things that give us energy, we might just unearth something that is becoming a passion for us, becoming something that excites us. It’s often these things that can become our next big things. 

The second question is related to the first and it is, “What did I do today that seemed to give other people energy?” This is where you pay attention to some of those experiments that you do. What did you create today that other people responded to in a positive way? This might be a blog post that you write. Did you write a blog post story? Did you create a tweet that got lots of energy? Did you have a conversation today where when you talked, someone else got really excited about something that you said? By paying attention to what gives other people energy that you do, you see opportunities, all kinds of opportunities.

This is really something I learned to really pay attention to over the years, whether you do that kind of exercise, whether you get some other journaling exercise, or whether it’s just paying attention during the day to the opportunities that come. This is really important. My suspicion is that a lot of people aren’t lucky because they have no time to observe the opportunities that come their way. I suspect that lucky things happen to us all the time but many of us just don’t have the time to observe those lucky things.

Let’s get moving. The sixth habit of lucky entrepreneurs. I’ve noticed that lucky entrepreneurs are people who spend a lot of time creating, initiating, and constructing. Again, this is something I’ve talked about in previous podcasts but I suspect that most people don’t spend much time doing this.

Most people, in my observations, spend a lot of their time reacting to the agendas, the demands, the expectations of other people. Their time is spent in a reactive state. This is why most people work for other people, this is why most people spend a lot of their time in their email responding to emails. We respond to the demands, the expectations, the agendas, the questions of other people and there’s nothing wrong with that. Even as an entrepreneur, we need to learn to do that.

But the best entrepreneurs that I’ve ever come across are people who spend significant time creating. They spend significant time initiating, they spend significant time constructing. They don’t spend the majority of their time responding to what other people want them to do. They spend time forging forward on what they feel they need to do. Lucky entrepreneurs spend most of their time in constructive mode. This is what sets them apart, the most successful entrepreneurs, from the rest of us.

Here’s my big question for you on this front is are you spending most of your time being responsive or constructive? I’ll probably add another category. Are you spending a lot of your time being passive? Most people I come across are doing one of these three things. They’re being responsive and just responding to the agendas of other people or they’re being passive doing very little at all. Perhaps you might call them lazy, or are you being constructive? Are you being creative with your time?

As I said a few podcasts ago, this is something that I was challenged on earlier this year. I realized I was spending a lot of my time being responsive, I spent a lot of my time on social media responding to people and the agendas I had, I spent a lot of my in emails responding to the agendas of other people, and I needed to rebalance the way I spent my time. I set aside time in my week to create. 

The seventh habit of lucky entrepreneurs is that they have this ability to pivot. Success is rarely the result of traveling in a straight line. Almost every successful entrepreneur I ever met has told me stories of pivoting. Sometimes, pivots are massive pivots, 180 degree turns. But many times it’s just a small pivot, a change in direction, a subtle change in trajectory. This is the thing I’ve learned. Even small changes today, changes that you might not even notice looking from the outside can take you to a very different place in the long term. Just a small change in trajectory takes you into a different place in the long run.

The question that I have for you today is are you evolving? Is what you’re doing in building your business what you’ve always done? If you’re doing the same thing today that you were doing three or four years ago in exactly the same way that you were doing three or four years ago, it could actually be a sign that you are in a rut. It could be a sign that you have a problem because we’re kind of designed as beings to evolve and to change. Changes are a sign of health. If what you’re doing today is the same as what you’re doing a couple of years ago, you might want to ask yourself, should you have evolved? You should be changing at this point? Choose to change, choose to evolve, choose to pivot. 

I’ve just talked about seven habits of lucky entrepreneurs and as I said in the start, these are just seven ideas that I’ve had, seven observations that I’ve made, and I’d love to hear what you think. Here’s the thing about each of these seven things. They’re not personality traits. Some of us are maybe wired to do these things more easily than others but these are not personality traits, these are choices.

Lucky entrepreneurs choose to spend time learning. They choose to embrace problems and to respond to them with curiosity. They choose to spend their time experimenting, taking out ideas and their hypothesis, and testing them. They choose to spend time watching for sparks of opportunities. They choose to spend time building, constructing, creating. And they choose when the opportunity comes to pivot. As a result, I would put forward the argument that we can choose to do things that increase the chances of lucky things happening to us. 

I guess the question I’ll have for all of us today is are we spending our time choosing these things? It’s very easy to drift along in life. Just drift, to be reactive with their time, and to be passive with their time. The most successful entrepreneurs that I have come across actually unintentional about these things.

I talked about in the podcasts a few weeks ago on productivity about how I designed my ideal week. I’ve actually updated that design. In the show notes today, I’ll show you the update that I’ve come up with, the way that I spend my week. But simply by doing this exercise of creating the ideal week, you can plug in some of these sorts of activities and you’ll see in the one that I shared with you—I created a Google calendar of how I want to spend my ideal week—you can see that I’ve plugged in some of these different habits to help to stimulate these things. I’d love to see your examples of some of the calendars, the ideal weeks that you’ve created as well.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this, what would you add to these seven habits. Do you think there are other things and there are a few others in mind that are almost put into this list but wanted to keep it a bit shorter? I’d love to hear what you think, the things that you think are missing, the things that you agree or disagree within this particular list. You can go to today’s show notes for this podcast at problogger.com/podcast/45 and leave a comment.

I’d also love to get your review of the ProBlogger podcast. Over the last few weeks, there have been some fantastic reviews. I came across one today from Ruth Turner from Dog Audity. She wrote quite a long review on iTunes, but in part, she wrote, “The 31 Days to Build a Better Blog series was the first podcast that I ever listened to. Not only did they get me hooked on podcasts but it was the best thing I ever did for my blog.” That’s fantastic to hear, Ruth. I really appreciate your leaving that review.

I love this one from Sam Nolan Smith as well. Sam writes, “Loving this podcast especially Darren’s down to earth and really practical approach to building your blog and your business. I still listen to someone who’s not hyping it, just sharing smart, actionable advice.” I love that particular review because I do see a lot of hype in blogging about the blogging space, in podcasting about blogging space. There are some great podcasts and blogs out there who don’t hype it up but sometimes it does get a bit hyped up. I do try and be as down to earth as I can, and is really sticking and helping people get realistic expectations. Thank you for your review as well, Sam. 

I’d love to see your review of the podcast. If you can pop by over at iTunes, leave a review. I’d love to hear your feedback. Again, you can find today’s show notes at problogger.com/podcast/45. I look forward to chatting with you in the next episode. Until then, I hope your blogging is going well and I’ll chat with you on social media. Bye for now.

What did you learn from today’s episode? Do you have any of these habits? What habit will you try to establish next? Has your success had more to do with strategy or serendipity? Have you created your ideal weekly schedule? We’d love to see it.

We’d love to hear from you in the comments below. Don’t forget to share a link to your blog.

Don’t forget, you can also grab the 31 Days to Build a Better Blog Workbook with a 50% discount using the coupon code PODCAST50 during the checkout process here.

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.

Over the last few weeks I’ve been experimenting with a new live streaming service by the name of Blab – a tool that I think has the potential to be as useful (if not more useful) than Periscope.

In this episode I share my experiences of Blab so far and talk about how it differs from other Live Streaming tools.

Update: in the next 24 hours I’m doing a Blab here. Subscribe to check it out live.

Curious woman listen with tin can phone by Lars Hallstrom on 500px

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

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 this podcast episode I share:

Check out my Blab page here (where you can follow me and be notified of future Blabs that I run).

As promised in this episode here is an embedded version of the recent Blab broadcast that I did:

You can also see this episode as a replay over on Blab here (where you can see the rest of the interface).

Here’s the LinkedIn post that I used as a basis for this Blab.

I also mentioned ManyCam in this episode (a tool to enable you to do some fun and useful things with your webcam).

PS: Shoutout to Joel Comm who has been a great support on Blab. Check him out here – he’s doing great stuff.

I’m recording this podcast a couple of weeks before you actually hear it because I’m trying to get a little bit ahead. We’re going to the Inbound Conference in Boston on Monday, just a few days away from now, and so I’m recording a few ahead of time, and I am really excited today because I’ve pretty much spent quite a bit of my time today on this new tool called Blab. It has been around for a few weeks now, but as usual, it takes me a little while to get on it.

I usually pay attention to it too when I start saying multiple other people who I respect and who I listened to using a new tool. It’s usually not the first person who’s on that I hear it from that piques my interest, but it’s multiple people. Within about 1½ days, I saw four people that I really respect jumping onto Blab and trying out this tool.

I think the first person was actually Cliff from the podcast man who jumped onto it one night and he said, “I’m going for a walk, do you want to come with me,” on his Facebook page and I clicked this link. Suddenly, I was watching him have this conversation while he was on his walk. Now it’s kind of like Periscope for those of you who know that except that had this difference.

Not only was Cliff on the screen, but so are three other people and now having a conversation together. Three of them were sitting at their desktop computers, and they were live streaming from there and Cliff was out and about on his mobile phone, and there was these chats stream going on alongside it at the same time, almost like a backchannel if you want of people watching and asking questions, but also talking to each other, and immediately struck me that this was something that solved the problem that I’d had with Periscope.

For me, Periscope is a great tool. I really enjoy using it. It’s me standing in front of a camera and talking. I’ve used it a number of times to present different ideas and to have conversations with people. For me, it felt a little bit like it was too much centered upon me, which sounds strange because this podcast is all about me. I’m the only one having a conversation here at all, but there was something missing from Periscope for me and that was the conversation.

While people could comment and leave, tap my face and leave little love hearts, and there was interaction, I felt like it could have been more if other people were able to have a conversation as well. When I saw Blab, I suddenly felt like, “Yes, this is probably a more useful tool for me.” There’s been a lot of tools released over the last six or so months that have been useful for live streaming, we saw Meerkat come out, we’ve seen Periscope. In the last few weeks, we’ve seen Facebook release its Facebook Live feature through its mentions app, which is available to influencers.

Now we’ve got Blab as well. Of course, if you go further back from that there are tools like Google Hangouts, and even tools like Ustream and live stream which came out years and years ago and I actually used to use live stream quite a bit and even back then, when I used to use live stream, I really enjoyed the live interaction that you could have with people through live video.

There’s something about getting in front of a camera, talking, presenting, and having a conversation that personalizes your brand in a way that’s very difficult to do in other mediums, podcasting is great for that as well because people are actually hearing you in their ears, they hear your accent, they hear your expressions, they hear you be funny, and there’s something also really special about videos. So talking head videos can be really useful that you record. People they see you, they see your body language.

Live streaming has that element as well, but the fact that it’s live and interactive, and has the potential to be conversational is really special too. When I used to do Ustream chats, I used to jump on their Friday afternoons, and I think I called them Have a Beer with Darren type chats and I would sit there drinking beer, and people would ask me questions, usually blogging-related questions, and what I found is the people who would respond to me in those chats.

I’d see them a lot more in the week that followed on the blog, leaving comments and it was something that escalated the relationship that took the relationship to the next level and deepened the relationship very quickly that I loved in those chats. I’m seeing the same thing happening both on Periscope, but also on Blab.

I think there are lots of benefits and there are lots of different ways that Blab and Periscope as well perhaps could be used to help you as a blogger. What I found useful, apart from the fact that it personalizes the brand and perhaps breaks down some misconceptions that people might have about you, is they actually get to hear what you’re like and see what you’re like, is that it gives you all kinds of ideas for content.

I did a Blab this morning. I think we had about 1300, 1400 people come on that Blab to watch and that Blab went for about 1½ hours, so it was quite a long one. I presented for the first 45 minutes. I talked, it was pretty much the length of a keynote presentation and I presented 20 tips for bloggers. I’ll link to where you can watch the replay of that Blab in the show notes of this particular podcast, so you can actually go back and look at it. 

For the second half, I’ll open it up for question and answer. For the first half, it was just me on the screen, largely. I did have Lainey, who’s one of my team on there for a while as well. She was moderating some of the questions that were coming in, but it was largely just me talking. All times in the second half, there was at least one other person in a seat, or in the video, and at times, we had four people at once having a conversation.

I got so many ideas from that chat. We captured all of the questions that were being asked, and certainly, we will turn some of those questions into future blog posts and future podcast episodes as well. Getting that interaction and feedback with people is great. The other great thing about Blab is that it creates content that you can repurpose in different ways. About 10 minutes after a Blab finishes you get an email from Blab, and it has a link to the audio file of your Blab, and it has a link to the video of your blood, and also gives you an embed code.

What you could do is jump on the Blab. Talk for 20 or 30 minutes. Even if no one shows up, you’ve got content that you can then use in other places. The audio file, it would be so simple for me to take that audio file and to create a podcast out of it. In fact, I may do that. The particular file that I got today, there were a few little noises in the background, it wasn’t particularly clear and so I probably wouldn’t be overly comfortable in using it. Although I could very easily take an excerpt from today’s Blab and insert it into a podcast or use part of it.

You could also do the same thing with a video and put that video straight up onto YouTube. I could do that right now and have that video up on YouTube within minutes. I’ve already taken the embed code and put it into a ProBlogger post on the problogger.net blog. I’ll give you a link to that in the show notes, so you can see that in action. You can see here that the Blab that you do could actually be used in multiple places. It’s not just those who show up to the live Blab.

The other thing about the replays—it’s pretty much 10 minutes after you finish your Blab—there’s a functionality for you to replay it if you press record. As you run your Blab, you can either press record or choose to be off the record but if you press record, you get it as a replay, and that drives the embed, but it also something that people can find once they are on your profile on Blab. If you go to blab.im/problogger, you’ll see there as I record this for replays available for you to watch, so you can watch the one that we did today, as well as some previous ones that I’ve done. Hopefully, by the time this podcast goes live, there’ll be a few more for you to watch there as well.

You’ve got this opportunity for that content to live on, and that’s one of the key differences between Periscope and Blab. Periscope allows you to keep the recording there for 24 hours and unless you use some third party app to record it in some other way, or you then take it and download it to your phone and then upload it to YouTube or some other server, you have to do a bit more work to keep that recording. 

The other thing I love about Blab is that it gives you an opportunity to repurpose posts that you’ve already written. The Blab that I did this morning was actually something that I’d written before and I repurposed it for Blab. I actually had written an article on LinkedIn of all places, which had 20 tips for bloggers and it was a very short sharp list, just 20 quick tips for bloggers. I use that post on LinkedIn as the basis for my blog today. At the time of the Blab, I would direct people back to that particular post on LinkedIn. Also during the Blab, I gave people further reading, so of the 20 points that I made—probably about 7 of them—I added links into the comment section for people to go and check out and I know it drove traffic to those particular posts.

I also mentioned a couple of podcast episodes during that Blab and again, left links for people in the comments for people to go back and go back to those old archive posts. There’s potential there to repurpose old content to create new content and to drive traffic back to your blog.

There are a few different ways that people are using Blab at the moment. The best way to learn about is to watch them work. You need to sign up with a Twitter account to get an account at the moment, but you can watch them in lurking mode as well. You’ll see pretty quickly that there are all kinds of things happening. A lot of the chats that are on Blab at the moment are about Blab, which is a little bit sad, but everyone’s excited about the tool. Increasingly, even over the last few days, we’ve started to see chats on all kinds of topics. I was involved in one today on health.

I’ve seen Blabs on music, on Fantasy football. I’ve seen them on all kinds of things and people interviewing celebrities as well and people that you might have seen on television. There are unstructured chats, so people just jump on, start a blab, and then the conversation evolves as people get to know each other, but then there are others who are being a bit more intentional, so I’ve seen a number of people interview people on Blab. They actually get on Blab just to do an interview and then they open it up to other people to join the conversation.

I’ve also seen people doing what I did this morning and it’s pretty much like a keynote presentation or a podcast with Q&A at the end. Personally, that’s probably what I’m going to do more of because that’s the kind of person I am. I love to teach, I love to communicate, I love to walk people through something in a process. Other people are much better at that more conversational-style Blab. There’s a whole heap of things going on there, and there’s increasingly people doing all kinds of creative things.

I’ve seen blabbers get on there, and then use one of the third streams to play a video game. You can watch the two of them, and then you can watch the video game. There are all kinds of stuff going on there. Some people are now using external tools like there’s a tool called ManyCam which enables you to show your screen, which you can’t do natively within Blab at the moment and it also enables you to set up a second camera, so you can have two views of yourself and I’m sure there’ll be more and more creative things being used as well there. 

Now, of course, like all tools, the success of Blab is going to be to the extent that he can attract new users to it. I have to say it is quite small at the moment. On my blab today we had 170 or so people live at the same time. Over the hour and a half, we had about 1300 people show up. That doesn’t sound like a massive amount of people. I’ve certainly had webinars with that many people show up at once; we’ve had up to 1000 people on a webinar. That’s small in terms of listeners of this podcast or readers of my blog, but it’s also pretty significant. I’ve accepted speaking engagements to fly around the world and speak to 300 people.

Today, I had 300 people listening to part of that blab 170 at once. I’ve spoken to rooms smaller than that, and that actually is quite significant, if you begin to think about it in terms of that. The fact that those blabs, those chats are still up and still getting people to visit them and listen to them, means that those numbers will rise as well. This is very early days and it reminds me a little bit of some of the early days of some of the other social networks. The early days of Twitter were quite small but over time it grew. As it became more mainstream opportunities grew for us as bloggers as well.

One of the questions I’m constantly asked about Blab is how is it different from Periscope and Periscope seems to be the live-streaming tool that most of the people that I interact with are on at the moment. There are certainly some similarities, but there are some real differences as well. One of the first differences that I noticed was the recordings. Periscope’s recordings disappear after 24 hours on Blab they can live on forever, you can delete them later, or you can be completely off the record.

Obviously, the biggest difference between Periscope and Blab is the ability to have four people on the screen at once. I’ve seen some really creative uses of Periscope. I know Chris Ducker has done some really interesting interviews on Periscope where he gets someone on Skype on his computer and then he holds his phone up and you see the person on Skype on the computer through his front camera, and then he double taps the screen and then you see him. And in some ways, it’s pretty much Blab on Periscope, but Blab does that for you. The ability to have two, three, or four people at once is something that you really have to hack to be able to do that on Periscope.

I love the fact that on Blab, you can also do Q&A in two ways: (1) you can see the comments coming in for people who don’t want to show themselves on video, but (2) you also get these real-life interactions with people as well. You get to see their face and understand who they are, see where they are in their room, how they’re dressed, and how they hold themselves, and that certainly deepens the engagement that you can have there in a Q&A session, but also the opportunity to hear someone else’s opinion. I had people on some of my Blabs yesterday, who knew a whole heap about different topics and they added a lot of value into the conversations that we were having.

Another key difference of Blab that you can’t do on Periscope is actually drive it from your computer. Periscope is not all mobile-based and while you can watch a Periscope on a computer, you can’t be as interactive with it as you can on Blab. I love that on Blab, I can stand at my computer at my stand up desk, which I’ve just gotten very happy about. I can drive that whole thing from my computer, or I can drive it from my phone.

At the moment it’s just on iOS. It’s not on Android, although that’s coming soon. You can actually switch between and I saw someone do this earlier. They started their Blab on their computer, and then they had to go out. They said, “I’m just going to switch over to my phone,” and then suddenly they were on their phone. I’ve never seen that kind of thing on a Periscope, so that’s pretty cool as well. You get the video and the audio afterward, which opens up opportunities.

You can embed it, you can sync Blab with other tools like the tool I was talking about before, like a mini cam. I’ve seen other people adding captions into their Blab, so you can actually see who they are underneath and doing all funny things with their blabs like making their cameras go upside downs and all that stuff. The comments on Blab are perhaps more usable than on Periscope. One of the things I’ve noticed about Periscope is that the comments can whizzed by so quickly that you lose them and it’s difficult to go back and find old comments at least I found it difficult whereas on Blab the last 200 comments that are left you can scroll up and down as many times as you like.

If someone leaves a comment, you can hit reply to that comment and it automatically puts their name in it, and they get highlighted for that particular person that someone’s replied to them. You can also like or favorite comments as well and give people a little bit more feedback in that particular way. There are also shortcuts to ask questions, so if you do a /q and then ask your question, it will come up in the comments feed as a question which is really helpful for you as a host to be able to identify questions that are coming in.

It feels to me different from Periscope, and I think this applies for both. Periscope, as I said before, it’s more about the person who’s on. This feels like it’s engineered right from the ground-up to be a conversational live streaming. It’s not just about the person. In fact, I was just on a Blab with Joel Comm a few minutes ago. There were four of us on the screen and Joel said, “You guys just chat for a while,” and he walked off-screen and the three of us just continued to chat. And so it wasn’t dependent upon him at all. It was actually dependent upon the conversation.

I really love that and I think there are all opportunities there to leverage that. It’s very early days with Blab and there’s a lot more for it to develop. We’re going to see more features added, and even by the time this podcast comes out, I suspect there’ll be new things added to it. I’ve seen a number of Blab chats with people from Blab itself talking about some of the features that they’re thinking about adding. I suspect you’ll see quite a bit of development. It is in beta, so I’ve seen a few glitches at times on Blab, but largely it’s pretty easy to use. It’s all very intuitive.

The other thing I will say is it’s very integrated with Twitter at the moment. If you want to share your Blab, there’s a button in it saying tell a little bird and you just click that and it will automatically pop up with a tweet for you to tweet to your Twitter account. Sharing your blabs is very easy, but it’s not integrated with other social networks at this point. That may be something that they develop further and you have to manually go and update it to your Facebook page if you would like to do that.

The other thing I’ll say about Blab is that you get the ability to either start a blab impromptu. Right now, I could be having a blab up and running in 30 seconds, you just put in a title, you choose some tags, and then you basically start the blab, or you can schedule one. The one I did this morning, I actually did that four days ago. That enables you to build some buzz about it. It enabled me to share it on Twitter a few times and share it on my Facebook page. I actually emailed our email list to say that it was happening about 12 hours before it happened.

When I actually went live, we had 130 or so people there waiting for it to happen. Almost like a webinar in many ways. To schedule, it is quite useful as well. If you go to blab.im, you’ll see the live blabs at the top, and then if you scroll down the page, you’ll see “Schedule One.” I would encourage you to go out and check it out. If you want to follow me on Blab, I’m at blab.im/problogger. If you just follow me, if you’ve got notifications set for to be alerted, you’ll notice when I go online, you’ll get an email or you’ll get a notification on your phone to say that I’m online and I would love to connect with you.

Over the next couple of weeks, I will be doing a few blabs, although, as I said before, I’m going to Inbound on Monday, so I probably won’t do a whole heap while I’m away. After that, I’ll be certainly doing some fairly regular blabbing to see how it goes and to learn more about it. I’m no expert with it yet. There’s a lot of people already on Blab calling themselves Blab experts and I guess that’s bound to happen. I don’t think anyone really knows exactly how this is going to unfold, but it’s certainly a really useful tool. As bloggers, I think it’s one to watch and it has a lot of potential, but it really will depend upon getting the critical mass of people there. If you’ve already got an audience, you can drive your own audience to it as I did overnight. That can be a really great way for you to deepen your engagement with your audience.

I would love to hear what you think about Blab. I would really encourage you to go away and experiment with it for yourself, but then come over to our show notes at problogger.com/podcast/44 where you can give us a comment. I’ll also link to my own blabs that I’ve done so you can see it embedded but you can also check out the replays there. I would encourage you if you’re on Blab, go to our show notes and leave a link to your profile on Blab because I really want to check out how other bloggers are using it.

I’ll certainly be checking out some of your blabs but I would encourage you to check out each others’ as well. Go to problogger.com/podcast/44. Tell us what you think about Blab, how you might use it, but also share a link to your profile and connect with one another there. I look forward to chatting with you in episode 45 of the ProBlogger podcast in the next couple of days. 

If you’ve got a moment and you’ve enjoyed today’s podcast, I really would appreciate any reviews that you can give us over on iTunes or Stitcher or just even dropping me an email via the contact form on our show notes. I really do appreciate any feedback that we get. We’ll chat with you in the next episode of the ProBlogger podcast.

I’d love to hear what you think of today’s episode – particularly for those of you who have tried Blab for yourself. Feel free to link to your Blab profiles below and to any interesting Blabs that you’ve recorded as I’d love to hear more about how bloggers are using it to help grow their blogs.

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 all about answering your questions about how to create great content for your blog. We’ve had so many questions on this topic that we’ve had to split the answers into two episodes. This is part 2. You can listen to part 1 here. Don’t be shy about asking us questions in the comments below! Your question could be featured next time.

Question Mark by Dejan Krsmanovic on 500px

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 we answer these listener questions:

Our 3 most popular blog posts ever:

You can find today’s show notes at problogger.com/podcast/43 where I’ll include some further reading and you can also let us know what you think about today’s episode. I’d also love to get your feedback on the podcast in general with a review on iTunes, Stitcher, or whatever other medium that you are listening to this on. Those reviews certainly help us to shape this show but also help us to find new listeners which I do appreciate. Let’s get into today’s questions. 

The first question I want to tackle today is a fun one, it’s from Samantha who asks, “Tell us about three of your best posts ever and why they worked.” This is actually something I’ve done before on ProBlogger and I’ll give you a link in the show notes to a post I wrote almost on the identical topic.

In it, I actually talked about five different posts that I wrote in the first year of Digital Photography School, that led to a combination of over six million visitors to those five posts. I’m going to actually three different posts today because I don’t want to replicate that. You can go and check out that post. That does give a whole heap of information, but I want to just talk about three and these all do come from Digital Photography School which is my main blog. 

The first one is probably a post that I almost didn’t publish at all. I thought it was too basic to really be published. It’s on the topic of How to Hold a Digital Camera and I will link to all of these posts in today’s show notes. As I said, this is a post that I almost didn’t publish because it is just so basic; how to hold a camera. I mean, everyone knows how to hold a camera, don’t they? Well, the reality is they don’t.

The reason that I did write this post and hit publish on it was I could tell that among my readers on Digital Photography School, there’s a certain number of them who were simply taking bad photos because they weren’t holding the camera right. Their photos had blur in them because the camera was not still when they hit the shutter, so I wrote the post. I was nervous about publishing it, but I decided to do it even though I thought it would probably get laughed down. 

The results of this post were not spectacular on some fronts because there was never a spark in traffic, it never got to the front page of Reddit, Digg, or got linked to on any other big blog, but it had a constant stream of readers to it ever since I published it back in 2007. I just actually looked up the statistics on it and this post just had over 730,000 visitors to it since 2007. 

The biggest I have traffic was a day that got 2500 visitors, which sounds like a lot for a single day, but in this game of our site, it’s actually not that successful in terms of a daily visit or its spike, but it just had this steady stream of visitors to it.

As I look at the statistics, I can say that the vast majority of those people have arrived on this page from Google and this means that people are basically searching for this information. The reason that this post works is because it has a tangible benefit, it’s a problem that people have, a real problem that real people have, and it’s the type of post that answers a question that people are probably too embarrassed to ask to their friends, so they do go to Google searching for that answer. 

The other reason I like this post is because it’s attractive to type the readers that we want to have on our site. Digital Photography School started out as a site for beginner photographers, people who didn’t know how to hold their cameras, people who were right at the beginning of their journey, so this has attracted the perfect type of reader for us. What I’ve seen in the statistics is that people go on to view a whole heap of other pages once they hit this page because it’s answering a question that they have and helping them to solve a real problem and it has other links in the page to other relevant content.

The other thing that we’ve noticed from this page is that people subscribe to our newsletter on this page at a higher rate than on other parts of the site. It’s got success in terms of being a sticky post, in terms of hooking people into our site. That’s partly because we called them to subscribe to the post itself but just by nature of it being a helpful post and talking to people as if they’ve got a real problem and not something that’s a silly problem, seems to have an impact upon people. That’s the first post.

The second one is another one that I published early on at Digital Photography School. It’s titled, 10 Ways to Take Stunning Portraits. This post has had a whole heap more traffic and it has had some days where it spiked in terms of number of visitors. It’s had over 2½ million people visited over that time and it’s had success in terms of traffic but also getting people deeper into the site.

If you look at this post, you’ll see it actually is a pretty simple post. It’s 10 simple tips that you can use to take better photos. It kind of scrapes the surface, it’s not the deepest post in the world. It’s useful but it’s also digestible and it doesn’t go into great, great depth. I find these types of posts often get shared quite a bit. It’s also on a core topic, so portrait photography is something that I know is quite popular, so it’s no surprise that there’d be a lot of people interested in it.

Those also make a big promise, 10 ways to take stunning portraits. Stunning portraits is an aspirational thing that works quite well. If you look at it, you’ll see in the opening line, it asks the question, “How do you take portraits and have the wow factor?” Again, this is tapping into more on aspirational feeling there, which is backed up with some great images in the post. It covers 10 points presented as a list post, but throughout those points, there’s also some great illustrative images. I find that that combination of digestible list posts with some great images works quite well.

It’s also what I’d consider to be a sneeze page of sorts. We tackled this topic of creating sneeze pages or sneeze posts in episode 18 of this podcast and that is probably the most effective way I know of getting people deep into your site. You’ll see throughout this post, there’s a gathering of links to other articles on relevant topics. People do click those links like crazy. This post has a great bounce rate. People don’t get to this page and then disappear, go straight back to where they came from. They actually go on to surf other pages on our site.

This post works really well. It’s got a lot of traffic, it got good engagement in terms of comments but it drove people deep into the site. It works so well that I did a follow-up part two to this post and you’ll again see that link. A lot of people click that link, too. That second post did very well as well, so these two posts drive traffic back and forth to each other. They actually became a part of my first ebook, an ebook on portrait photography.

It also became a couple of posts that I began to link to pretty much anytime I mention the word “portrait” for the first few years of my blog. It’s an evergreen post that I referred back to constantly. I would call this a cornerstone piece of content. It’s just something that, any time I’m mentioning portrait photography, I can link back to which again drives traffic back to it and I know will help to make a good impression upon readers. 

The third post I’ll quickly talk about is a post titled, Long Exposure Photography: 15 Stunning Examples. This is one of our earliest image collection posts. In fact, it may have been the first one that kind of really worked for us. If you look at the post, you’ll see it actually got very few words. It’s simply 15 great images, all on the same topic. They’re all images that have fairly long exposure so the shutter speed is quite long. 

This post works for a number of reasons. One, it’s aspirational. It’s great images and people do love great images and people like to share great images. This post did quite well on social media. It had some big spikes in traffic on the early days of it, but since then, I’ve also shared it again and again on Facebook and other social media sites. Again, every time I share it, it does well.

This actually was a follower post to a tutorial that we’d previously published on exactly the same topic and you’ll see I link to it in this post. That tutorial on Long Exposure Photography had done okay in the past, but it never really took off until I published this post. By following the informational tutorial up with this inspirational post, this aspirational post with lots of great images, people suddenly wanted to learn how to take this type of image. This is a really great example of where throwing in an inspirational content can drive people to your informational content.

This is a technique we use quite a bit on Digital Photography School. We write a tutorial on a topic and then we follow it up a few days later with a more aspirational post that showcases the type of images you can take if you read the tutorial. The tutorials don’t tend to get read as much until we post the inspirational post.

This has actually become a weekly thing for us. We publish the tutorial, we publish the inspiration post, and then at the end of the week, we also usually follow it up with a challenge to our readers to go away and take a photo of their own based upon the information and the inspiration from the previous posts.

The other reason that this post particularly worked well is that we added some further reading at the bottom of the page. This drives people back deeper into the site. This is a trend with pretty much all the successful posts on our site. We try to leverage those hot posts, those posts that do well, to get people deeper into our site. This is something that you should be thinking about every time you have a post that goes viral, does particularly well, or pretty much every time you write a post at all. You always need to be thinking about, how can I get people to view another page? It works best when it’s relevant reading that they can do.

These are three posts that have done well, I will link in today’s show notes to each of them so you can check them out. I’ll also link to the other post I wrote on ProBlogger where I talked about five different posts that did quite well on Digital Photography School. 

The next question is from Graham. Graham asks, “It’s been said that the key to success is creating excellent content. What type of content do you find most resonates with your audience? Is video or the written word more important and why?” This relates to what we’ve already talked about. You can definitely see some trends in some of the things that I’ve already talked about in this podcast about what kind of content works quite well. There’s also a bit of information in episode 41 on this as well.

In terms of video versus written word, I think a combination of both can work quite well. I tend to concentrate more on written word, although, more recently with podcasting, I guess I have gone beyond both written and video. I actually found that it really comes down to your personality, what you feel comfortable doing, that you have the resources to be able to produce in terms of the gear that you’ve got and also, what you’re confident in being able to present.

Personally, I find the written word seems to connect with the broadest amount of people but there are certain personality types, certain life stages, and certain situations where people do prefer video or they prefer audio. Experiment, mix it up. See what works with your particular audience, see what fits with your style. You will find that written content at this stage does tend to do better in search engines, although Google is increasingly incorporating video into the search results as well. I’m not sure that audio really is ranking as well in search engines unless you put a transcript or something in, you might want to play with that as well.

There are different benefits of video that I found over the years and podcasting would fit into this as well. Certainly, video appeals to a different type of person. Perhaps it’s their learning style or personality. When I started doing talking head videos on ProBlogger and certainly, since I started podcasting, I’ve had emails from people who say things like, “I feel like you’re talking to me. I feel like this is so much more personal than your previous writing.” It certainly does hit the mark with some people and it is more personal. It gives you a face and a voice, and certainly some reason to experiment with video, podcasting, and perhaps some of the live streaming type services that have emerged in the last few months. Mix it up, see what works best for you and there’s no right or wrong on this particular one. 

Rebecca asks, “When you first started taking on paid writers, how did you recruit them and how did you include them in your schedule?” This is a good question and this is one that I know a lot of bloggers say get it a few years into the blogging often and I sat thinking, should I actually add in new writers into the site? I actually got a second question from Sarah on a very similar question. She asks about outsourcing content and the pros and cons of adding other voices into your content as well. I’ll tackle these two together. 

There certainly are some pros and cons of involving other people on your blog, whether they are paid writers or whether they’re guest writers. Let’s tackle that first. On the pro side, on the good side of things, when you add new writers into your site, it does diversify the voices on your site. It can add expertise.

When I started Digital Photography School, I’m not a professional photographer. I was an intermediate-level photographer and I was writing for beginner photographers. But as my audience began to get better at their photography, I needed to find professionals, people who knew what they were talking about at a higher level of expertise. By adding in new writers on that site, I found that I was able to serve my readers better by adding that expertise. New voices, new people that can certainly help with changing the level of your content.

Another benefit of hiring people or bringing on guest writers is it certainly does cut down the work in the writing of the content. It does mean that you have to edit more though. It also helps you to stay fresher. If you’re not writing post after post after post, you only write perhaps half as much as you used to, that can bring a freshness back to you. It can also open the opportunity for you to spend more time doing other things. 

By hiring writers for Digital Photography School, it enabled me to spend time doing other things on that site and in other projects. Digital Photography School today, I don’t write any posts at all. My voice is not there at all. That’s something that took a little bit of time to transition, but it was never a personal site, it was never a personal blog. It was always written as more of a magazine-style blog and so it didn’t really matter as much. On ProBlogger, though, if I was to stop producing content on ProBlogger, my readers will push back. It’s a more personal brand. You do need to be a bit careful about that.

On the negative side of adding new authors to your blog, whether they’d be paid or guest, there are definitely some negatives. One of them means that you do lose your voice and lose control perhaps of the content. You still have editorial control, you don’t have to publish things that are submitted, but by having other voices there, I guess it does dilute your voice a little bit and it perceives that you are less engaged with the site. 

This can impact your brand, it can actually improve your brand in some ways because you might be doing something that’s more useful to people but it can also dilute your brand particularly if it’s a personal brand. As I mentioned before, it also does take more work to edit and manage your writers. If you are hiring people just simply because it’s going to mean less work for you, you might have another thing coming for you because managing writers, keeping them to deadlines, and editing their work can also be a lot of work. 

Edit, I actually do it for me. The first time I hired someone for Digital Photography School, it was actually someone who came from the guest post type aspect. The first people who started writing at Digital Photography School were not paid writers, they were guest writers. They are people who write guest posts for us and then I promoted one of them to be a paid writer. I like the style that they had, I like their voice, they seem to connect well with my readers. I ask them if they would be willing to write one post. I think it was every two or three weeks, the first time. They were able to commit to that. What they’re actually doing is guest writer so I was able to pay them in that way.

Gradually, that increased. Actually, I think from memory, became a weekly writer from there. These days, if I’m hiring someone for Digital Photography School, we actually advertise on the ProBlogger job board. There’s a bit of a plug there from my own product but if you got a jobs.problogger.net—I think that’s the one anyway; I’ll link to it in the show notes—it’s where you can advertise to hire bloggers for your particular blog.

When we advertise there for Digital Photography School writers, we generally get at least 70 or so applicants. Then, it’s a bit of a whittling down process, to get people to the point of hiring them. We can’t, obviously, hire 70 people so we have a process. It involves us asking them to submit a post which we pay them for, I guess we look at the 70 and we look at the 30 or so that we think are the best and we say sorry to the others.

With the 30, we go to them and say, “Would you submit a paid post?” It’s just a one-off paid post and it’s to see how we like their writing, how we like working with them, and how their post goes down with our readers.

Of those 30 posts, most of them actually have a good enough quality that we can publish it. Sometimes, we go back and forth with them to improve the post or to shape it a little, to help them to choose a topic. It’s about working out, how did the post go, how is it working with them, and do we want to offer them a position. Usually, we start with our writers writing once or twice a month and sometimes, they increase from there.

That’s the process that I went through and like I say, I’ve taken different routes on Digital Photography School to ProBlogger. The other job that I’ve had for content creation on both of my sites is to have editors. This is partly to improve the quality of my writing, in particular on ProBlogger, and to help me to produce enough content there, but it was also to help manage the writers that we did have as guests and as paid writers as well.

Certainly, that took some time, though, and it didn’t happen overnight to get to that level. It was many years of writing before I even began to outsource any of it. I hope that gives you some insights on outsourcing and delegating content creation on your sites. 

The last question for today comes from Philip. This is probably one of the most frequently asked questions I get about content creation. I’m glad it was submitted because I know people will be asking in comments about this one. Philip asks, “Is there an optimal length or word count for a blog?” This is a frequently asked question and I have answered it before. I hope I’m not annoying those of you who’ve heard me talk about it before.

Generally, when I talk to the writers on my sites and they ask me about how long should a post be, I generally say to them, “Write as many words as you need to be useful and then stop.” I do not have anything in my mind that says, “You have to write a certain amount of words.”

If it is a paid post, I probably would react poorly to someone submitting a 50-word post all the time, but there are some topics which you can answer a question or that it can be useful in 50 words. I’ve certainly published posts on my blog over the years which have been very, very short. On the flip side, I’ve also published posts that are over 5000 words long, which are like chapters of books if not short ebooks. So, both amounts can work. Both in that spectrum can be useful to your readers. 

Some people would say, “Posts need to be at least 400 words for SEO consideration.” That may be true. I’m no SEO expert but I would think that Google is probably going to be looking at word counts as one of the factors that they used to rank contents. If you are wanting to factor that and you’re probably looking at 400–500 words, something that’s at least got some depth to it.

On the flip side, I have heard out the people say, “You want to keep your post short because today when people are reading the web, they have a very short attention span,” so short and sharp is actually going to serve your readers better. 

Like I say, for us, there’s no length that we aim for. I’d say probably most of the posts that we publish around the thousand-word mark or maybe at least 800–2000. That’s because our site is a teaching site and we want to take people through a process. We also add quite a few images into our sites, particularly on Digital Photography School. It’s not just about the words, it’s about how long it is visually as well and breaking up the words with images. 

Ultimately, you want to experiment to see what works with your type of reader. We’ve actually found over the last few years that while a lot of bloggers are getting shorter with their content that our longer-form content is doing even better than it has ever before. I can’t think of a couple of posts on ProBlogger in the last year which were 3000 or 4000 words long that did really well, that were shared a lot, that were commented on a lot, and that had a lot of traffic to them. So, try the different lengths, see what works for you, and mix it up. Your readers might actually appreciate you mixing it up for them and giving them some variety. 

Hope you found today’s episode helpful. This was episode 43 of the ProBlogger podcast. you can find today’s show notes and some further reading on the topics I’ve discussed today at problogger.com/podcast/43. Look forward to chatting with you in episode 44.

What did you learn from today’s episode? Did it answer some of your questions? Do you have a question for future Q&A episodes?

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Today’s episode is about how we reached six figures launching a new product. We share what worked and didn’t work, and some of our takeaway learnings for future launches.

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 we talk about:

Today, I want to talk about a product that we launched four weeks ago on Digital Photography School, which is my main blog. This particular product was a new one for us. It’s actually a Lightroom presets pack. For those of you who aren’t familiar with presets, Lightroom is a post-production tool for photographers to manipulate their images and to get their images looking great. They have the ability to use presets within that, which—the way I describe it to people—is like on Instagram where you manipulate a photo with a click. You just say, “Here’s a filter that I want to put onto this particular photo.”

In some ways, it’s similar. A preset enables you to say, “I want to treat this photo in this particular way.” It takes a whole process of manipulations to an image and puts them into a single click. You take the whole heap of things that have adjustments and then you can click a link or a button and it will change your photo. This is a tool that’s been built into Lightroom. You can actually develop your own presets, but you also can download other people’s and install them into Lightroom.

We developed this presets pack as 101 presets that enable you to change photos in 101 different ways. We developed them and bundled them together into different areas. There’s presets for landscape photos, there’s presets for portraits and different types of presets. The idea for this pack came really out of some affiliate promotions that we had previously done. This is actually something I would really encourage you to think about no matter what kind of product you are thinking about developing for your blog.

One of the best things that you can do before you develop a product is to test it by promoting someone else’s product. This might sound a little strange but you will learn so much by doing an affiliate promotion of someone else. This is something I’ve done time and time again. Before I developed my first ebook, I promoted someone else’s ebook. Before I developed my first course, I promoted someone else’s course.

There’s a number of things you’re going to learn by promoting someone else’s product first as an affiliate. For those of you who don’t know what an affiliate is, basically, an affiliate program is where you recommend someone else’s product and you earn a commission if someone goes on to buy that product. Usually, you are given a link that has a tracking code in it. The person whose product you’re promoting knows that you referred that sale and then you might earn the commission. It might be 30%, it might be 40%, or it might be 50%. 

Over the last year, we have promoted a number of other people’s Lightroom presets in promotions that we’ve done on Digital Photography School. The beauty of promoting someone else’s product, no matter what that product is, is that you’re getting to test a number of things.

Firstly, you’re getting to test that product type. I knew years ago that ebooks were going to sell with my audience because I had already promoted other people’s ebooks as an affiliate and I’d seen decent results. The same was true when we started developing our first course. We tested that first by promoting other people’s courses. We knew that courses sold with our readers.

The same thing is true with the presets. We actually had presets in the last two years of our 12 Days of Christmas sale that we run on Digital Photography School. Our 12 Days of Christmas sale is actually where we promote 12 different products in the lead up to Christmas to our readers. Some of those products are our own products, so our own ebooks and courses, but we also allow affiliates on those deals as well. We noticed that presets were selling quite well with our audience. In fact last year, it was our number two product. This told us that presets work.

When you’re promoting other people’s products, you also get to refine what kind of products are working so the topic perhaps of the ebook that you’re selling. You also get to test pricing. You can promote different products or different prices and see what price point your audience will respond to. You also get to see how different products work in terms of their marketing. When you are promoting a product as an affiliate, you’re generally sending someone through a different kind of landing page. You can learn what kind of landing pages work for those kinds of products. You also get your audience used to that kind of product as well without having to invest anything in it.

When we first promoted presets to our audience—and people responded reasonably well—that has grown as we’ve promoted them again and again, and our audience has begun to get warmer to this idea. This is probably the biggest take-home of this podcast for me is that if you are thinking about developing a product, find someone else who’s already developed a similar product—it may not be exactly the same—and promote it as an affiliate. You’re going to learn so much, but you also, hopefully, get some income out of that, which will get you through while you’re developing your own product.

The key is not to just completely copy what someone else has done. You don’t want to just take their product and then release it as your own. You need to find your own spin on the product and your own branding to it, but you will learn a whole heap through testing it as an affiliate.

That’s where we got our idea from. We’d actually had promoted a number of different Lightroom presets packs and bundles and products over the last couple of years. We’ve seen that they have been quite popular on other sites as well. Then we decided we wanted to create our own bundle. 

Generally what we do when we are wanting to put together a product is that we look for someone else to partner with. In fact, all of our ebooks on Digital Photography School except for the first one that I ever did, have been partnered-type products. Our ebooks are all offered by experts in different fields of photography. Our portrait ebooks are all authored by Gina Milicia, who’s a fantastic portrait photographer. All our landscape photography ebooks are by a guy called Todd Sisson from New Zealand, who’s a great landscape photographer. We look for people who know what they’re doing in particular areas. We then work with them to develop a product.

Typically, we work out what kind of product we want and then go hunting for the right person for it. We rarely do it the other way around. We don’t generally find a great person and then work out what the product is. That was certainly the case in this presets pack as well. We decided we wanted a preset bundle. We talked a lot about what we wanted that to look like, so we knew we wanted a big bundle. We’d promoted small bundles of like 10 presets in the past and they hadn’t sold very well, but we’d sold bigger bundles in the past and they had worked really well. We knew the price point that we wanted to go with. We’d done a lot of the work, but we had no idea who we were going to partner with until I listened to a podcast one day with Pat Flynn. He was interviewing a guy called Cole and he had a site called Cole’s Classroom.

That podcast introduced me to Cole. It turns out that we’d actually done a little bit of work with him in the past on one of my other sites. A little site called SnapnDeals. We’d promoted one of his products in the past, but this podcast with Pat Flynn showed me that Cole got Internet marketing and that he’d already created some presets that had worked well on his site. I shot him an email and that began a conversation around working with him in some way. I liked his style, I like that he had the experience, that he had the expertise, and that he seems to be open to collaboration as well.

Typically, our products take three to six months to produce. That’s largely thinking about our ebooks and courses. This one took a little less because there was a little less production needed. Usually, when we’re doing an ebook, the author goes away and writes it. We sometimes help them by providing them with an editor. It then goes to our production team, then it goes to a designer, then it has to get proofread, and then it goes through our marketing team. There are quite a few steps.

In this particular case, it wasn’t quite as long because Cole was able to produce the presets. Then we didn’t need to edit and we didn’t need to really do a whole heap of design because, essentially, it’s software that we’re selling, it’s a plugin for Lightroom. There wasn’t a need for some of that type of stuff. It probably took about three or four months from the idea to when the product was created.

Then we decided it was ready to launch. We’d identified a time that it would launch right at the beginning. We usually plan our calendar of products that we launch on Digital Photography School. Usually, at the start of the year or 12 months in advance, we’re always thinking about what we are launching eight or nine months from now, sometimes even further ahead because it does take us a while to produce our product. We knew that this product would come out early or late July-early August. It fit into our calendar, so we were always working towards that.

As the product was nearing completion, we began to switch into marketing mode. We have a bit of a marketing system in place in terms of how we market our ebooks and courses. This was a bit different because it was a new type of product for us, so we had to educate our audience a little bit as part of our marketing, but we usually go with a fairly similar approach. This actually followed the same pattern in many ways, apart from some of that sort of educational messaging that we had to also do in our marketing.

It was presented as 101 presets. We decided to launch with a discount. Its normal price will be $50 so there are 50 ­­­cents per preset in our minds, but we launched it with a 60% off offer. It was $20 as an intro offer. We decided to make it $20 for the first four weeks. That usually works quite well for us to discount and to do an early-bird offer. At the end of the year, we do tend to discount our products even further than that, but as a launch, we don’t tend to go right to the bottom. We tend to try and find some middle ground so 50%-60% off is a good zone.

We also did a competition as part of this launch. This is something you need to check the laws in your local area as to what you can do in terms of competitions. We offered a $1000 prize for one person who bought the product, but we didn’t announce that competition right up front. We brought that competition in week two. We usually wait to see how a product is being received before we decide whether to go with the competition. The key benefits that we were using in our marketing: this is a time-saving product, it helps you to create great images quickly, and it’s easy to use. The idea of great shots in a click was one of the featured messages through this campaign.

We’ve learned with our audience that our marketing works best in email. Email is our number one strategy for launching products. We usually go with either a three-, four-, or five-week email campaign. Our list gets three, four, or five emails depending on how the campaign’s going and depending on how much time we’ve got to launch a product. In this case, we sent four emails over four weeks. Every Tuesday night, Australian time, we sent an email during this launch.

The first email was sent four weeks ago. The focus of that one was really to announce the product, to do a little bit of education about what the products could do, and how you could use it. We had to emphasize that it was a product that could only be used if you already use Lightroom. There was a bit of educational, sort of the frequently asked questions or at least the anticipated frequently asked questions we tried to answer in that first email. The whole point of the email is to try and get people to our sales page.

The second email, a week later, it was when we launched the competition. Again, we were still talking about the product, but we introduced the idea of the competition so we built some incentives into that.

The third email was our one week to go email, but it also had a testimonial in it. By this stage, we almost always are getting feedback from our readers about how they like the product, how they’re using the product, so we were able to build in a testimonial into that third email. We find that social proof usually works quite well. The testimonial we used, in this case, was actually a comment that was submitted on the blog about the product.

Then, the last email (which went out as I’m recording this) was last Tuesday night two days ago and was a “48 hours to go” email. This is where we say, “The competition will end. The price will go up. It’s your last opportunity to get it.” We try not to hype it up or anything. It’s usually a very short email, a polite email. It’s just for your information, this is the last chance to get in on this.

Typically, we find the first and last emails get the biggest sales. In this case, they all performed quite well. We’re really pleased with the way the campaign ran. We usually go into the campaign thinking that it’ll be a four-week launch, but if a launch isn’t going particularly well, sometimes we do shorten that to a three-week launch or sometimes we keep it at four weeks but don’t send the third email. We give our readers a bit of a break.

We don’t want to—this is a horrible expression—flog a dead horse. We don’t want to keep promoting something that’s not working because we know every time we email our readers, there’s fatigue associated with that. The more we email, the less responsive they’ll be in the future. We will hold back on the emailing too much if things aren’t quite working. We always keep an option open to go to a five-week launch as well.

On this occasion, we probably would have gone with a five-week launch if we didn’t have other campaigns that needed to come next. We’ve already got our next product locked in in terms of dates, so we want to have a gap between this product launch and that product launch.

Email is definitely where most of our sales come from. We actually did the stats a year or so ago and we found over 95% of our sales come from our emails, which is pretty remarkable because we are also promoting it in other ways. I don’t think it’s because we’re promoting it badly in the other places. It’s just email converts really well. In this case, we were also promoting it elsewhere.

We promoted it on the blog itself on Digital Photography School, we’d written a blog post to launch the product, and that became a featured post on the site. There was a big image on the front page of the site that sat there for most of the four weeks as the number one post on the site. It’s also promoted in a hello bar. At the top of the screen, there’s a message that comes across. In our sidebar, there’s a button, and throughout the site as well as on a number of posts that talked about sets that are getting Google traffic.

We also had Cole, who was the producer of the product, wrote a guest post. We almost always have guest posts from the creators of our products to showcase what they can do and what the product entails as well. The posts are almost always how-to posts. They’re not sales posts, but they fairly prominently have a call-to-action to the product as well.

We also promote it on Facebook. Over the four weeks, there were five Facebook updates that went out. Facebook does tend to throttle anything that has any kind of promotional aspect to it. You have to be a little bit vague sometimes in the posts that you do on Facebook. I also did some boosting of those posts and ran a few ads particularly targeting people who’d been on the landing page of it. You’re able to insert a pixel onto your landing page of the product, the sales page of the product. I was able to target ads to anyone who’d been on that page previously.

I did a whole heap of tweets. At the start of this four-week campaign, I scheduled at least a couple of tweets every day for the whole four weeks that went out on our Twitter account at different times of the day so different people around the world would see them at different times. 

We also promoted it in our newsletter. We do a weekly newsletter every Friday. In that newsletter, we were able to insert some messaging as well. Usually, it was a fairly subtle thing. We might include it in our introduction with a link. We had a couple of weeks over the last couple of weeks where we didn’t have advertisers in certain spots on the site so we were able to use some banner ads on those weeks as well. That certainly does drive some sales.

Then lastly, there are affiliates. This product didn’t go particularly well with our affiliates this time around. I’m not exactly sure why that is. I need to do a bit more research on why that was the case. Our affiliates didn’t seem to promote it as much as they have promoted our courses and ebooks in the past. I suspect maybe it’s because it’s a new type of product to them and perhaps they weren’t as familiar with it. Perhaps, we could have worked with our affiliates to educate them a little bit more. There’s certainly an opportunity there to go to some of our affiliates and to do some further work with them on this particular product.

We are just about finished our four-week launch. The price will go up tomorrow, probably in about 36 hours from now as I’m talking. We’re still yet to see some of the final sales come in, but we’ve seen over 6,000 sales of this particular product. We’re approaching $120,000 worth of sales at that time, which to me is definitely a pass. It’s above average for a product. Knowing that we’ll still see some more sales come in, there’s one more newsletter to go out tonight before that product ends.

It’s been relatively successful. It’s certainly not our number one bestseller ever. You’ve also got to consider in that $120,000, there have been some expenses. That’s just total revenue. It doesn’t include our PayPal expenses, our shopping cart expenses. It doesn’t include the split that we do with the creator of the course. It’s certainly not all profit. Please don’t think that we just made $120,000 in four weeks. It’s not the case.

Where to from here is the next thing. I’m always thinking about what do we do next. On a couple of fronts. Firstly, there’s the long tail. How are we going to keep getting sales? US$120,000 is great. That certainly is a success for us, but it’s only the beginning. I’m hoping that this product will sell way more than that over the coming few years. That’s really where the success of our products is.

Some of the ebooks that we launched six years ago now are still selling significant amounts every time. We’ve got 30 ebooks now, which we promote at different times throughout the year. Where to from here? It’s really important not just to get sucked into you only make money on your launch. You’ve got to build in systems that help to continue to promote those products.

There’s a number of things that we’re doing. We are now linking to the sales page from a variety of places around the site, particularly, articles that relate to this particular topic. We’ve got a whole category on our site for post-production. There’s an opportunity there to run some internal ads, to insert some calls to actions on those articles on the site, and to drive people on a day-by-day basis to this particular sales page.

As I mentioned before, there’s an opportunity to really go back to our affiliates and to do some education there with them and to help them to promote this product. It may be that we go to some of our better affiliates and say, “Hey, we notice you didn’t promote this. Would you like us to do a special offer just for your readers?” We’ve seen some success when we’ve done that in the past. It’s running almost like a mini-campaign just for particular affiliates. That can work quite well.

There’s also an opportunity there to go to those affiliates and bundle some of our other products. We have a post-production ebook that teaches people how to use Lightroom. We could bundle that ebook with these presets. It actually makes it a slightly more expensive product, which can be attractive to affiliates as well. It may be a $30 ebook with a $50 bundle, so $80 normal retail price. We could do that (say) for $40 for that affiliate, which is a more attractive commission because our affiliates take 40% of that $40. It adds up for them.

There are some creative ways that we can go to our affiliates. We will definitely feature this particular bundle of presets in our future seasonal promotions. We’ve got our 12 Days of Christmas campaign coming up at the end of the year. I would guess that this product will be a part of that. There are also opportunities to bundle this product with our other ebooks and other related products in that particular campaign, but also at different times of the year as well.

The other thing that I’m interested in promoting—I’ve seen this work on other sites—is sites where they use presets as an incentive to get people to sign up for a newsletter. I’m in two minds about whether we’ll do this, but it might be worth us trying this. The idea would be that in our pop-up that we have on the site that gets newsletters we might advertise that if you sign up for our newsletter we’ll give you 10 free presets. Then that gives you the opportunity to do a follow-up email to upsell them to this particular pack. I’m not convinced about that yet, but that’s certainly something that I’m pondering and I’ll talk to my team about.

That’s one of the ways I’m thinking about next steps is you know how can we continue to get sales from this and not just make money on the launch. As I said before, my hope is over the next 12 months that will double the amount of income that’s come in from this particular product. We may not quite get there, but that’s about where I’d be aiming for over the next 12 months. Then the 12 months after that probably wouldn’t be quite as much because a lot of our readers would already have that, but it certainly has the potential to continue to earn for some time.

The other way that I’m thinking about the next steps is thinking about what comes next in terms of products. It’s very easy to just get comfortable when you promoted an ebook in the past, “Oh, yeah. We just do ebooks.” Then just keep doing ebook, ebook, ebook, ebook.

The problem with that is that ebooks may not always work and that ebooks may not always be attractive to your readers. Your readers may actually burn out on ebooks. You need to begin to think about what other kinds of products you could promote.

This is why earlier this year, we created our first course. It’s actually based on one of our ebooks. It was on the same topic, but we realized some of our readers didn’t like ebooks, but they preferred to learn through video, so we created a course. We’re actually about to launch our second course because that first course did quite well.

Last year, we also launched a different kind of product. It was a printables pack. It was a pack of different poses that you can use in taking photos of people. That did quite well as well and now we’ve got our presets. We’re always thinking about what other types of products could we release, then also what other variations of products.

The first ebook I ever created was on portraits. Then I started thinking about what other types of ebooks could there be. We’ve done them on how to use your camera, we’ve done them on landscapes, we’ve done them on lighting, and we’ve done them on different types of things. I’m thinking in the same way about this particular product. What could we launch next that builds upon this?

There’s a variety of different things. We could launch another bundle pack, almost exactly the same concept, maybe in 12 months’ time. Probably one a year would be enough of that, but there’s also an opportunity to really narrow down and to release our portraits presets pack or a landscapes presets pack. There are also opportunities to create other products that teach how to use presets. Maybe an ebook on using presets or maybe a course on Lightroom. There’s a variety of different things that you can do there.

The key for me is to always be thinking ahead. Like I said before, we’re always thinking 9-12 months out about what our next products will be. At the moment, we’ve got (I think) three other products in production already. We’ve got a course coming and a couple of ebooks that are underway. We’re also thinking about our 12 Days of Christmas launch. 

We’ve got a number of things underway that we’re building towards launching in the next 6-9 months. Next month, I think it is or actually early October, we’ll get together as a team and we’ll plan next year’s products. We already know the first one for next year but we start planning out the next ones, which enables us to work out what products we want and then to go hunting for partners, whether they be people we’ve worked with before or finding new people.

I hope this has given you some insight into how we develop products for Digital Photography School. The process is similar on my ProBlogger blog in terms of how we’ve done ebooks there in the past, but on ProBlogger, we’ve also got our events. That’s really become the main product. That’s a different kettle of fish, which I might talk about in a different podcast.

I’d love to hear your feedback on this process. I know many of the listeners of this podcast have their own products that they promote and market differently. I’d love to hear how you do it, what do you do similarly, what you do differently. You can find the ability to leave a comment on today’s show notes. It’s at problogger.com/podcast/42. I’d love to get your feedback on this.

Also, I’d love to hear what kind of products are you developing? What do you have in development at the moment? You may not want to give us the exact specifics if you’ve got some concerns around other people copying your stuff, but give us some ideas about what you’ve actually been experimenting with. It’s great to learn from each other on this. I hope that by being quite transparent about how we do things that I’ll also learn from you in how you do things also.

If you could leave us a review on today’s show on this podcast on iTunes or on Stitcher I would love to get your feedback. There have been some great ones really coming in particularly over the last week or two. I will be featuring some of these in future podcasts, but I love to get more reviews. It does help us to rank higher in iTunes and on Stitcher, but it also really drives me on those reviews. I read them all the time because they give me inspiration, they give me energy for a future podcast. I do appreciate them, I do read them, and I look forward to chatting with you in episode 43 of the ProBlogger Podcast.

Have you launched a new product before? What worked? What didn’t work? What’s something new you might try?

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