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 answering your questions about how to create great content for your blog. Don’t be shy about asking us questions in the comments below! Your question could be featured next time.

So Many Questions That Answers My School by Alice Zed 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:

I had quite a few questions submitted but also had a number of people email me questions as well. I want to tackle some of those today, particularly, questions around content. There were quite a few questions on other areas that I’ll tackle on the future show, but today, I want to focus on the content creation side of blogging. You can find today’s show notes where I’ll include some further reading on each of the questions where I can find it at problogger.com/podcast/41.

Today’s first question comes from Stephanie Hammond from the Motherhood and Sex blog. I haven’t checked that one out yet—it sounds interesting—but the question Stephanie asked is, “How often should I be posting on my blog?” There’s no one answer to this. Really, it will depend upon your situation, the topic that you have, and a whole heap of other factors. There are a few things that I would say. There are certainly some pros and cons of different frequencies. Quite often I’m asked, “Should I be posting daily?” That seems to be the most common question that I get.

There are definitely some benefits to doing that. Daily or even more than daily can help you get into the groove with your writing. If you’re writing or posting frequently, you’ll be needing to write frequently. That can help you certainly to get into that groove.

I personally find that if I go away for a couple of weeks and don’t post for a few weeks, I find it a little bit hard to get back into that groove. Regular posting means regular writing which is good for you as a writer. It also means that you’re producing more content. Hopefully, because you’re practicing more, you’ll improve in your writing.

I also find that more regular posting helps you with reader engagement and reader expectations. If a reader knows that every day, for instance, that there’ll be something new on the blog or every weekdays—Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays—they begin to show up at those times. That can help with engagement.

Also, the more you post, the more doorways you have into your blog over time. If you’re posting everyday, that’s 365 doorways into your blog from Google at the end of the year. If you’re only posting 52 times a year, weekly, that’s only 52 doorways into your blog, which is more than if you only post monthly or less.  The more that you post, the more doorways you have into your blog both through Google, social media, or potentially other people finding your content and sharing it on their sites.

It’s also worth knowing that the more you post, there can also be some cons. There can be some costs that come. Firstly, if you’re posting too frequently, it can lead to blogger burnout. You can actually dry up in terms of your inspiration and ideas to write about. It can also lead to reader burnout. If you’re posting too much content, readers can get a little bit overwhelmed by it and actually engage less with you. It can also lead to a lower quality of content. This is where you really need to be paying attention if you decide to increase your frequency but you notice the quality of your producing is going down, that’s a warning sign.

Here are a few questions that you can ask to help you work out how often you should post. Firstly, how much time and energy do you have to give to your writing and creation of content? Remember, as you’re doing that, there are also other things you need to pay attention to on your blog like promoting your content and engaging with readers. How much time do you have? How much time do your readers have to read content? How thirsty are they for that content? 

If you’re writing for a type of reader who’s a very busy type of person, they may not be able to handle too many posts. How big is your topic? How big is your niche? How much is there to actually write about in your topic? These are actually really good questions. I saw a blogger once who started a blog on a particular model of a printer. There wasn’t a whole heap to write about that printer after the first post. They wrote a review on it and then they realized that they didn’t really have much more to say on it. That’s an example of a very small niche, a very small topic, not much to say. Frequency of posting, probably once, ever. 

There are other topics that have a constant stream of topics that you can write about. Gadgets, for instance, is one type of blog. There’s Engadget and Gizmodo, these blogs that produce content sometimes up to 20 times a day because there’s just a never-ending stream of things to write about on that. It’s going to vary a little bit depending upon the topic and the niche of your blog. 

Another question to ask is how long are the posts that you write? How much time do they take to write, create, but also to read? If you’re producing lots of long posts, that can be quite overwhelming to write but also to read. If you’re publishing three posts a day and they’re really long meaty posts, your readers aren’t going to be able to fully engage with them. Less frequent is probably good for longer posts. If your posts are 100 words each or less, a picture and maybe 50 words, you can probably produce more of those yourself without burning up. Your readers will probably be able to consume more as well.

Other questions asked, how old is your blog? Sometimes, in the early days of your blog, it can be good to have more content so that new readers have more to explore. How much do you have to say right now? How much energy do you have for your topic? Most bloggers go through bursts, where they just naturally have more to write, so you need to pay more attention to that. 

Of course, the last question to ask yourself is, is the quality of your posting suffering because you’re posting too often? That’s probably my main question for you. How much can you sustain without burning up and without lowering the quality of your content? The last thing I’ll say is I think regularity is really important. It’s not so much that these many posts are the right amount of posts, it’s about being a regular. That’s good for you as a writer, to get into the rhythm of creating content, but it’s also good for your readers because they begin to know when to show up. 

I hope that answers your question, Stephanie. I will link in the show notes to a post that has more that you can read about.

Another question comes from Martin. Martin asked, “How do you develop compelling content?” This is a really tough question to answer in just a minute or two. A few thoughts on it. Firstly, you really do need to be in tune with your readership—the needs and the problems they have. What’s compelling to one person will be very different from what’s compelling to another person. That’s based upon who they are, their needs, and their situation. The more you’re in tune with who’s reading your blog and who you’re trying to reach, the better position you begin to create compelling content.

Be as interactive as you can with your readers. Invite their comments, invite their participation, and leave room for them to share their situations and their stories. That’s going to help you to understand them, but it also makes your content more compelling because people are not just finding what you write interesting. If you’re leaving space for people to contribute, they actually find the community compelling as well. 

Experiment with different voices and different styles of writing. Find out what your readers actually find compelling. They may actually find that when you share personal anecdotes if that’s compelling or that’s something they really respond to. Or you might find that they respond best when you don’t write many words at all, but you use more images or you use talking head videos. Different readers are going to respond to different types of content, different voices, and different styles of content. Mix it up and really watch to see what people are responding to. 

Another thing that I’d say in creating compelling content is you want to create content that builds momentum over time. What I find is my readers become more engaged when I’m writing a series of blog posts about a particular topic. For example, 31 Days to Build a Better Blog, which was the series of podcasts I produced on this podcast from the first 31 posts. Readers really responded very well to that because they felt that I was taking them on a journey over that month. 

So, if you can create some momentum. It doesn’t need to be a month of posts. It might be three days of posts. Build some anticipation, create content that builds upon previously written content. That’s going to have a big impact on people. They’re actually going to feel like you’re being more thoughtful with your content and they’ll be more thoughtful on how they respond to that as well.

It comes down to knowing your readers and watching how they respond to what you’ve previously done. One of the things you need to do is to get into your blog’s statistics and metrics. Work out how people are responding to your content, what they are reading, what they are searching for on your blog, and really pay attention to any questions they’re asking. If you’re responding to their actual needs, their actual problems, it’s going to be so much more compelling for them.

The next question comes from Michaela Clark who’s from Tradies VA—good Aussie blog; it was good to hear from you, Michaela. She writes, “As you know, I have a business blog for tradies. Occasionally, I want to put a personal post up. For example, on my 39th birthday, I wanted to post my list of 40 things to do before I’m 40. What are your thoughts on personal posts on a business blog? Not about parenting, cooking, et cetera, but more personal growth type posts?”

That’s a great question. Many business bloggers I come across have this exact question. I’m glad you asked it. Again, there’s no right and wrong answer for this. There are certainly some pros and cons of being personal on a business blog. It probably comes down to the type of brand you’re trying to build and the type of business that you have. I guess what style of being personal on your blog is you going down the root of it.

If you have a small business and you, as a person, are at the heart of that small business, it will benefit you from people who know who you are and what your story is. I think injecting some personality in your blog is probably a good thing. There’s probably other styles of business where it’s probably less appropriate.

It’s really going to depend upon your personality and the type of business that you’re building, so I can’t really answer that one. I think being personal on a business blog has the potential to make you more relatable and to break down some of that suspicion that people have of brands sometimes. I think sometimes people see a brand and they’ll say, “This logo,” or “this building.” People have this perception. 

ProBlogger, for instance, I get emails from first-time readers occasionally. I get the sense that they think I’m this corporation and there are hundreds of people working behind the scenes. The reality is I have a small team and they’re all part-timers. To actually show who you are, to show what you do, where you work, and inject some personal stuff into your blog can actually be a powerful thing. It’ll make you a little bit more relatable. 

I’d love the quote, “People do business to those that they know, like, and trust.” I think injecting something of yourself into your blog can help with all those three things. It helps to further know who you are, to like you, and to trust you. However, if you do get too far off-topic with your personal posting, it could feel a little awkward for readers. They might say, “That’s too much information for me.” You really want to think about the content that you’re creating. It sounds like you already are, Michaela, by saying you’re not going to write about parenting or cooking. You want to write more about personal growth. I think that’s probably a good way to go, personal development stuff. 

If you can show what you’re writing in a personal way actually relates to the rest of what you’re writing, I think that’s probably the ideal. If you’re writing personal development stuff that shows how what you’re writing about can benefit the business of your readers, then I think that makes sense, particularly on your blog.

This is what I’ve done on my own blog recently by writing about my own health journey. Health and well-being don’t really fit on ProBlogger because it’s not about blogging but I can work really hard to show how it did have an impact upon blogging. It was really well-received because I did that. If I just did this post in the middle of nowhere about personal health without tying into the rest of my topic, I think I probably would have more pushback on that. 

The other thing I’d say is to experiment with it and start slow. Don’t switch your blog suddenly to be a personal development blog. Just throw in the old post every now and then. It shares a little bit more personally. See how that goes down with your readers. I hope that helps, Michaela.

I’ve got another question here from Sharon. Sharon asked, “What time of the day is the best to post?” A lot of the answers to today’s questions have been “it depends,” and this is another one of those. It really is going to depend upon a number of factors. It probably depends mainly on when your readers are online and likely to see your new posts.

When I publish a new post on ProBlogger, I know that triggers a number of things. Firstly, it gets pushed out onto our RSS feed. Those readers who are subscribing via RSS will suddenly see it appear in their RSS feed readers. I want it to appear there when I know they’re going to be awake and potentially reading their RSS feed. It also triggers a tweet on my Twitter account that there’s a new post up. Again, I want them to be potentially awake and there to see it.

I’m trying to publish my post when the majority of my readers are online. Most of my readers are in the US. Scheduling when they’re awake is really important. I also have quite a few people in Australia.  The time it works best for me—it depends a little bit on daylight savings—is when Australia is waking up. When Australia’s sitting at the breakfast table, I find that’s when they’re on Twitter for the first time of the day or that’s where they’re on Facebook for the first time of the day. I find anything that updates around that time is going to get them. It’s also towards the end of the day for my US readers. That’s a time that often works quite well for me on ProBlogger.

On Digital Photography School, my main blog, more of my readers are in the US. In fact, the vast majority of them are. We do have Australian readers and other parts of the world, but certainly, the best time then for us is about 3:00 AM Australian time. That’s because that’s earlier in the day in the US. Really, it’s about trial and error. You want to be testing different times and seeing what happens. 

One thing that you can do if you’ve got a Facebook page, check out the insights there. They have a great statistic there, a graph or a chart there that shows when your Facebook followers are engaging most on Facebook. They’d be times where I’d be paying particular attention to it. If they’re on Facebook at that time, they’re probably also on other social media, checking RSS feeds and that type of thing.

The other thing that you would also want to pay attention to is the time you send your emails if you’ve got an email newsletter. Again, we find that the best time for us—we tested it quite a few times—is around 11:00 at night Australian time which is early in the morning US time. Our readers seem to respond really well if we send them an email when they’re just getting to work or on the way to work.

You just got to keep trying different times, see what works, see what translates into the amount of traffic that you might be getting, the number of comments that you might get, or other important metrics for you.

Mike asks, “How did you come to have the great writing skills that you use on your blog? Did you get any formal training?” Thank you, Mike. I’m not sure I do have great writing skills. I’ve practiced a lot. Probably, that’s the main answer that I’ll give you. I’m not sure I’m the greatest writer in the world, but I’ve certainly written a lot of posts.

The last time I counted it up, it must’ve been over 10,000 posts. Malcolm Gladwell talks about the need to have 10,000 hours (I think it is) before you become good at something. Certainly, that’s been the case for me. For me, I’ve never had any training in writing beyond high school. Even there, I wasn’t the best writer, but it’s something that I always enjoyed doing. I think that’s probably part of the reason that my writings are well-received. It shines through that I’m enjoying the process of it. 

For me, it’s really about practice. It’s really about the more posts that you write, the better you get. It’s also about understanding who you are writing for and personalizing that. I very much visualize who I’m writing to as I’m writing. I write in a very conversational style of writing. 

Many of my best posts actually started out as emails to people or me imagining that there’s someone there on the other side of the post. I’m really trying to think about who is going to be reading it. Sometimes that means I actually visualized one of my actual readers that I’ve met at a conference, for instance, or sometimes it’s me imagining my avatar. I’ve talked on the blog and in this podcast before about creating avatars or personas that you write to. Understanding that, readers, are really important.

Also, try different voices. You need time to develop your voice. That’s a slippery thing to grasp. What is my voice? A lot of people talk about developing a voice. I guess it’s the position you come from in your writing. Are you going to be a teacher? Are you going to be a fellow journeyer with your reader? Are you going to be a professor? Are you going to be a journalist? Certainly, there are different positions that you can come from in your writing.

In the early days of your writing, you want to try waiting all of those styles to see what works for you but also what your readers are resonating with. Also, being a reader is really important and actually watching how other people write in books, in media, but also on other blogs. That can inform the way that you write.

The last thing I’ll say is you just need to keep practicing. You just need to practice, practice, practice—the only way that you will improve your writing. You can learn about writing all you like but the more you practice, the better you get.

For me, there came a time where I was able to afford to get someone to help me with the editing of my writing. That certainly has helped a bit. It’s particularly around spelling and grammar which is not my strength at all. If you can get some help with it in that way, whether it be proofreading, editing, or having someone do some teaching with you, I think that can be well-worthwhile as well.

Shawn asks another question, “What have been your most effective techniques for engaging readers? What type of posts have generated lots of authentic comments from your readers?” This question isn’t just about creating great content for your blog, which is the theme of today’s podcast, but it’s also about engagement which is another thing I’ll do another show on in the future. There are definitely certain types of posts that I think do tend to get more engagement for readers. Some of the types of posts that I found do get higher amounts of comments than other types of posts are these ones.

The first one is personal stories. This is by far the one that has worked best for me in terms of getting engagement. When I am personal with my writing and with my speaking, that is the time that I tend to get overwhelming responses from readers. When you step out of your comfort zone a little, when you reveal who you are, particularly when you reveal an area that you may have messed up, have a failure in or make a mistake in, or you had personal success or some sort of a personal triumph, those are the posts that (for me) always get the most engagement. Also, telling other people’s stories as well but less so than my own stories. That’s always the way for me. 

Opinion posts can get a higher amount of engagement. When you give your opinion, you’re going to see a lot more of your readers give their opinions. That may or may not be something that you want on your blog. You need to be a bit careful about that. I think adding opinion is certainly one way that differentiates you from other bloggers but also brings about some engagement.

In a similar way, any kind of post that takes on some sort of controversy or some sort of debate. In Digital Photography School, we did a post about Nikon versus Canon or Digital SLRs versus mirrorless cameras. Some kind of “this or that” type of post where you express your opinion can trigger all kinds of comments. Again, it can become a negative conversation quite quickly if you’re not careful. You need to moderate that and set the boundaries of that.

Another type of post that we do quite regularly on both of my blogs over the years is question posts or discussion-related posts where the post itself is couched as a question. It’s purely there to engage your readers. You may not actually really write much at all. You may answer it yourself or you may choose to simply open up a discussion. That obviously is going to trigger engagement. Similarly, if you run a comments competition, that’s probably the number one way of getting comments on your post but you don’t want to do that too often on your site.

The other thing I find that works quite well is when you run a challenge or you give your readers homework in some way. On Digital Photography School, every Friday, Saturday, we run a challenge with our readers. We name a theme and ask our readers to go away and take a photo on that theme, then come back and share their photo. Anything that you get your readers to go away, do something, and then share what they learned or what they did does increase the engagement. 

Similarly to this podcast, 31 Days to Build a Better Blog, the first 31 days we taught something every day. I teach something every day and then I ask people listening to go away and do something. I found the comments on our show notes, particularly in the early days of that challenge were huge, massive amounts of engagements. This was where people were engaging one another, sharing what they’ve done. They’re probably the main kind of posts that I find gets more comments and more engagements. I’d probably be starting with those if that’s something that you want to work more on.

I’m going to call it quits there. That’s episode 41 of the ProBlogger Podcast. I do have some more questions, but I think we’ve probably gone long enough for this episode. I’ll do another episode in the coming weeks where I’ll finish the questions on this topic of content. Thank you so much for those of you who’ve asked the questions.

If you do want to go to our Facebook page at facebook.com/problogger and scroll back a little, you’ll find where I did ask you to leave your questions. I’ll also include a link to that post in today’s show notes. Today’s show notes are at problogger.com/podcast/41. 

If you do have a question you’d like me to tackle either in this format where we do a few questions in the show or if it’s a big question, I’ll tackle it as a whole podcast episode. I would love to get those questions. Again, you can leave those questions in today’s show notes or over on Facebook. I look forward to chatting with you in the next episode of the ProBlogger Podcast.

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?

As promised, here’s the call out from the Problogger Facebook page:

We’d love to hear from you in the comments below. Don’t forget to share your name and a link to your blog. We’ll give you a shoutout if we include your question in future Q&A episodes. 

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 about how you can create more time to create great blog content by becoming more efficient in the way you manage your blog.

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

Also – here is the ‘ideal schedule’ that I developed for my own situation earlier this year. It has already evolved a little since this point but hopefully it’s helpful to see. It was created in a Google Calendar.

Lastly – as promised in the episode here is my process for creating podcasts (created in wunderlist)!

In the last two episodes of the ProBlogger Podcast, I’ve been asking you questions. These questions came from a talk I recently gave at the ProBlogger event here in Australia. The first question was how are you? Behind that question was the idea that if you want your blog to shine, you need to make yourself shine. The well-being of your blog is tied to the well-being of you. I talked a little bit about well-being and as bloggers, if we want to be producing great quality content, we need to be looking after ourselves. 

The second question was in the last episode. That was the simple question, what is your why? It was designed to get you to think about what is your purpose, tap back into why you started blogging, and talk about some benefits of having a why. 

Today, I want to ask you one last question. Again, this was a question I asked at the ProBlogger conference. This one in particular really seemed to get a reaction from attendees. The question is this, how are you using your time? 

Knowing your why, which was what we talked about in the last episode, we’ll definitely get you started. Having a strong purpose gets you going. It motivates you, particularly in the early days of your blogging. How you spend your time in the day to day, that will get you to your destination. Let me say that again. Knowing your why gets you started, but how you spend your time day to day gets you to your destination. 

This is where the rubber hits the road. You can have all the dreams, goals, and purposes in the world, but unless you’re using your time effectively to take you towards those goals, dreams, and your why, then it’s always going to be something that stays in your head and what becomes a reality. One of the things I learned over the last year is that I really need to do some analysis of how I’m spending my time and come up with some proactive ways of using time more effectively.

My personality type, for those of you who are into personality type, particularly if you are into the Myers-Briggs Personality Types, I’m an INFP. We could break each of those parts down but I want to talk about the P part of that. I am a perceiver. I don’t really like that word. On that spectrum, that last spectrum you have Js at one end, the judges, and Ps at the other end, and that’s me.

The Js are the more organized type. They’re the ones who like plans, who like schedules, who like routine, who like to know what’s happening next. At the other end of the spectrum, there’s me. I’m the P. I like flexibility. I like spontaneity. I don’t really need to know what’s going to happen next. In fact, sometimes I work best when I am operating out of that spontaneity and flexibility. But I also learned that if I just stay at that end of the spectrum, then I’m likely to just dream and not get anything done. 

For me, this year, particularly with my personality type, I’ve really worked hard on using my time better. Over the last year, really, I’ve done seven things to help me to do that. I want to run you through seven steps to using your time better. This will hopefully be relevant to everyone, no matter what type of personality you already have but especially those of you who share the characteristics that I do. 

The first step is one which I found quite confronting and that is to analyze how you are currently spending your time. I was at an event earlier this year, it was actually another ProBlogger event we did in Perth. One of our speakers there, Nicole Avery from a blog called the Planning Queen, Planning with Kids, suggested that attendees use the tool RescueTime. It’s a tool that many of you who’ll be familiar with, you install it on your computer, and then it watches how you use your computer. It looks at the apps that you use, the software that you spend most of your time in, and the websites that you go to. It classifies how you spend your time in different categories. 

This was pretty confronting for me to install on my computer. (1) That felt a bit weird. Someone watching over my shoulder or some software watching over my shoulder. (2) It’s quite confronting to see how I was spending my time. The first week that I ran RescueTime on my computer, I found that I was spending over 40% of my time—I think it was actually 44% of my time—on social media.

As a blogger, I’ve got a bit of an excuse to spend time on social media. The bulk of that time was actually spent on Facebook. I do use Facebook quite a bit to drive traffic to my blogs and to build a community with my readers, so there’s some legitimacy to spending that time on Facebook. But immediately, I realized I was spending too much time there. I don’t need to spend 44% of my time on social media. 

The other part of my time which was quite confronting was how much time I was spending in my email account. I think I was over around 15%. Those two together were 60% of my time on social media and in email. Just knowing that motivated me to use my time differently. 

RescueTime will classify things and you can reprioritize them. You can actually say that Facebook is a legitimate app for you. By default, it classifies Facebook as a very distracting time. While I do use it for my work, I would put it in the distracting category, too, because it’s so easy to go into Facebook and end up somewhere down the vortex of watching cat videos. 

The first step is to analyze how you’re using your time, whether you use a tool like RescueTime or whether you just get to track it on a notepad and paper, and then do some analysis at the end of the day. I think this is a really great place to start when you’re thinking about how to be more productive with your time.

The second step is to filter how you are spending your time through your goals, your purpose, and your why. As we talked about in the last episode of this podcast, knowing your why really does help improve your productivity. It helps you to make good decisions about the things that you do. Obviously, as I looked at how much time I was spending in different activities, I immediately began to see that I could use my time more effectively to tap into my why. 

One of the things I realized as I was looking at the results in RescueTime was that I was spending a lot of my time every day responding to other people. 15% of my time I was in email. I wasn’t spending most of my time in email asking questions about the people. I was responding to other people. I was answering emails, answering questions of others. I’m responding to problems that others had. While responding to people is important, particularly in blogging, we want to be responsive; it’s probably not the best use of my time. 

Social media, again, I was being very responsive to my social media. Yes, I was creating some updates that drive traffic to my site, but I was spending a lot of time responding to questions and interacting with my readers. Again, there’s some value in that. As I think about who I am and what I’m trying to do (I’m a blogger), I’m trying to create content that makes the world a better place. I realized that perhaps for me, I become a little more responsive with my time and less constructive with my time. I think you need to do both, but for me, as I filtered how spending my time through my why, through my goals, and through my purpose, I realized that I needed to spend more time creating content rather than just responding to people.

In 10 years’ time, the things that I know I’ll be most proud of, other things that I created, not the emails that I’ve responded to, not the responsiveness of how I spend my time. It’ll be the assets that I’ve built, the things that I’ve created. Again, this doesn’t mean that I can’t respond to people. I just needed to get the balance back in check.

The third step that I did was to design my ideal schedule. If you go to today’s show notes, I’ve actually got a screenshot in there of the schedule that I designed. It’s at problogger.com/podcast/40. You’ll see there a week—an ideal week—of how I wanted to spend my time. It goes from 8:00 AM in the morning to about 8:30 at night. It has time at the start of every day for the family. It has time at the end of every day around dinner time for the family. It is around that other time which has more to do with my work. You’ll see at 12:30 PM every day, I scheduled an hour for lunch and for my walk. That’s an important part coming out of my renewed focus upon my health. 

You’ll see in that that I also scheduled quite a bit of time for creating. I’ve colored those times in yellow. Most of my creating time actually happens during the day time, particularly in the mornings. On Monday and Tuesday mornings, I spend the mornings creating. That’s the time where I write blog posts, I create podcasts like this one, and where I prepare for talks that I’m giving. It’s the creation of new things. In the afternoons, I tend to create but that time’s more dedicated to editing, revising, and completing the things that I’m creating. I find that I’m more creative in the mornings so that’s the time I spend more time creating and in the afternoon, I’m less creative but I still have the capacity to better finish things off and revise them.

You’ll also see in the schedule that during the day, I spend time on social media. I’ve really become quite strict in the amount of time that I’m spending on social and the times that I do it. I dedicate half an hour at the end of every morning, then at every end of the afternoon, and in the evenings to spend on social media. I need to spend that time on social media. By giving it boundaries, it has become a much more effective time. 

You can have a look at how I schedule my week there. I will say that that schedule that I’ve got there is the one that I designed earlier this year in March. Things have changed a little since then. I probably should update it. Today, I actually have a little bit more white space in my schedule. You’ll see in the one that I presented that Monday afternoons, I left white. That’s a time that I actually built into my schedule to be spontaneous. To do what I felt the energy to do or to have time off if I felt I needed to do that as well. Today, my schedule actually has a little bit more white space. I try to build a bit of white space every day because that’s my personality. I actually work best out of spontaneity and out of flexibility. 

By designing my ideal schedule, I feel like I immediately am being more productive. By designing my schedule, I don’t get up anymore and say, “What will I do today?” And spend the next half an hour trying to work out what I’m going to do and try to remember what my priorities are. I just have the day laid out in front of me and take some of that design-making out of my day. 

I love this quote from Stephen Covey, “The key is not to prioritize what is on your schedule but to schedule your priorities.” Out of your goals, out of your dreams, out of your why, design your ideal schedule. 

Step four is to develop workflows, systems, and routines to help you with the different components in your schedule. Within that weekly ideal schedule that I’ve already talked about, I can then draw down even further into different activities that I need to do every day. The social media time that I have in my evenings, for instance, you’ll see in my schedule that I have a little red strip called promote. I have a social strip underneath that and that’s for other social media type activities.

That hour of my time is actually the same every single evening. I sit down and I go through the same process every night. It’s about looking at new posts and scheduling them on Facebook and Twitter for the next day. It’s about identifying all posts in my archives and scheduling them and creating visual graphics that I can use in the social updates. I know exactly what I need to do every night. It’s a little routine that I developed over time. 

The same is true when I create a podcast. Again, on the show notes today at problogger.com/podcast/40, I will share with you the workflow that I’ve developed for producing a podcast. Now, those of you who’ve been following this podcast for the last 8 or 9 weeks now know that I started this podcast off with 31 episodes in 31 days. What you probably don’t know is that I decided to create those 31 episodes about three weeks before I started.

At that point, three weeks before this podcast went live, I’ve never ever recorded a podcast. I didn’t know how to host a podcast. I didn’t have a blog to host it. I didn’t really know how to edit a podcast either. I felt quite overwhelmed, but I knew I needed to start it because I was on a bit of a deadline because our event was happening later. I decided that the only way I was going to get it done is to do some research and then develop a workflow.

I developed a workflow and you’ll see it if you go to the show notes. I think it has about 20 different steps in it. Basically, to create a podcast episode, I worked my way through these 20 steps. It goes from brainstorming topics right through to getting the post up in my show notes and everything in between. Instead of having this overwhelming task of, “I’ve got to create 31 podcast episodes,” I had broken it down into small achievable steps into a workflow. 

By systemizing it in this way, it decreased that feeling of being overwhelmed by these massive tasks. It also really quickly enabled me to master the skills that I needed to create this podcast by simply following the steps every day as I created those podcasts. I very quickly go to the point where I didn’t need the list anymore because I mastered the skills. It also increased the effectiveness of it. As I began to go through the checklist, I began to realize that some of the things in the checklist I could do at the same time, like a multitask. As one process is happening, I can start the next process. I became more effective. 

It also helped me to develop good habits. It also helped me when it came time to outsource. At episode 15 of the 31, I decided to bring someone in to help me edit my podcast and get show notes ready. I was able to get that person to come into my office and because I had the process already laid out, I was able to pass that onto her. Just simply by having a workflow, by having a system in place, even at that point though it wasn’t particularly written down, it was more in my mind, it certainly helped me to be able to outsource that.

By systematizing things in this way, you also eliminate unnecessary decision-making. I think this is really important. I’ve read a number of studies over the last year or two that talk about how our brains only have the capacity to make a certain amount of decisions every day. I don’t know if there are actual studies and whether that’s actually true or not, but it certainly resonates with me. I know I find making decisions all day that by the end of the day, I’ve got no capacity left to really make decisions. By systematizing things, by creating routines, by making things habits, you just go into the flow of creating that podcast without having to make decisions along the way.

I’ve actually systematized a whole heap of different areas of my life. A lot of them have to do with my work but also have little routines that I do for the rest of my life as well. I ate the same lunch most days. I don’t have to think about what I am going to have for lunch today. I wear the same clothes on most days. I have a uniform, the same type of jeans, the same tops. Unless I’m going out somewhere special, I pretty much wear the same thing every day. I don’t have to think about what I’m going to wear. 

I said at our event recently that I’m a fashion blogger’s worst nightmare. I’m a food blogger’s worst nightmare because I systematized these things. It enables me to use my decision-making capacity for other things. The more you systematize, the more effective you get.

I love this quote from Jim Rohn, “Success is nothing more than a few simple disciplines practiced every day.” Workout what you need to achieve, develop a system, develop a workflow, then stick to that, and practice those things every day. 

The fifth step in using your time more effectively is to automate the systems that you build where possible. Some of the things that I do every day, I have to do every day. Some of the things that I do, I don’t need to do myself every day. One of the ways that I can become more effective is to automate some of those systems. 

One of the things that I automated this year is some of my social media broadcasts. Not all of them, just some of them. I’ve been using a tool called MeetEdgar. I know many of you are familiar with it. Some people get put off by MeetEdgar because it is a paid tool. By no means am I affiliated with them or making anything from talking about it today. I’ll be clear on that. It is a paid tool and it is an investment. It’s a monthly fee. What I found is it has helped me automate and to eliminate some of that 44% of the time I spent on social media. 

MeetEdgar is a tool that basically enables you to build a library of tweets and updates for Facebook or even LinkedIn as well. Some of those tweets that you might do over time, again and again. Part of my social media strategy is to highlight the old posts that I have written in the past. A post that I wrote last year that I want to retweet again. I don’t want to retweet it 10 times a day but over time, I want it to come up in my tweet stream every month or two. MeetEdgar enables you to build a library for those types of tweets and to set up a schedule so they will be published at semi-regular intervals. 

Instead of every three months, me going to that post, and setting up the tweet, it just doesn’t for me. It’s a bit of work to set up. It’s actually something quite a bit of work to set up. But over time, it cuts in the amount of time that you’re spending on social media.

Now, I’ll be clear. I do a lot of extra tweeting and Facebook updates that are all manual when they’re more conversational. That’s actually me interacting. Some of those tweets that you see at @problogger Twitter account are things that I’ve set up through MeetEdgar. It saved me a lot of time. It actually made those tweets effective as well because I put a bit of good time in the setting up of them and in creating some good graphics. I actually do get a really great engagement. So, automate systems where possible and where it makes sense to do so. 

The other thing that you can do is to delegate the systems that you build where possible. Outsource them. It might be the other way but you might want to think about that. Over the years, I’ve done this in a variety of ways. I have a team now of probably 10 people who work as part of my team on a regular basis. Some of these people are editors. Some of them are writers. Some of them help us produce our ebooks. Some help me produce this podcast. Some do development work and keep us service running.

Most of them are local people here in Melbourne where I live and a couple overseas. These are people who have taken roles of things that I was previously doing. It enabled me to focus my time on things that I need to do and the things that I’m good at. So, delegating your systems is much easier when you’ve got a system to delegate. 

The last step that I’ll talk briefly about is to find the tools that you need to keep you on track. A lot of productivity talks start with the tools. I actually was at a conference a couple of months ago. It was a session on productivity and they spent almost the whole session talking about tools. It felt a bit backward to me.

I love tools. I love learning about new to-do lists and new productivity tools. The reality is, if you start with the tool and don’t start with your system, start with your why and what you’re trying to achieve, then the tool can actually distract you from your purpose. You can actually spend most of your time researching tools, which ultimately makes you even less productive than ever. I’m a big believer in developing the systems and finding tools that help you to achieve those things. 

I actually use three simple tools in most of what I do. These are things that you probably won’t actually use yourself because you’ve got a different system. I’ll mention them because they may actually connect with what you’ve built in terms of the systems. I use a to-do list called Wunderlist. It’s on my iPhone, it’s on my computer. It’s about a to-do list app. I know there are other to-do list apps that probably have even more features than the Wunderlist but this one is simple and it’s everywhere. It’s everywhere I go.

I use a calendar called Fantastical 2. Again, it’s on my computer, it’s on my phone, and it’s on my watch as well. Then, I use Evernote. This is where I keep all my ideas and I do most of my writing. Increasingly, I’m also spending time interacting with my team on it.

The other tool that we’ve started to use as a team more recently is Slack. I know many of you are familiar with that. This helps us to communicate as a team. They’re the tools I spend most of my time working with. Again, I’ll say, design your systems, design your routine, before you go hunting for the tools.

Let me quickly go through those seven steps to a better use of time. First, analyze how you’re spending your time. Secondly, filter how you’re spending your time through your why, through your goals. Thirdly, design your ideal schedule. Fourthly, develop workflows, systems, and routines. Fifthly, automate those systems where possible. Sixthly, delegate those systems where possible and where you’re able to afford that, I should add. Seventhly, find the tools to keep you on track. 

I will say again that a lot of what I talked about in this podcast is almost painful for me. It comes out of my personality type being quite flexible and wanting to be spontaneous. I have needed to build some time for that personality or characteristic to come out because that’s when I do sometimes operate at my best. I have learned this year that if I don’t develop these systems, if I haven’t developed this routine, as painful as it is and as counterintuitive as it is for me, if I don’t operate in this way, then I’m much less effective with my time. 

I’ll finish with another quote from Jim Rohn. This pretty much sums up the lesson for me. “We must all suffer one of two things: the pain of discipline or the pain of regret.” This has been my realization this year. Yes, it’s painful to set up these systems. It doesn’t feel good sometimes to do that. But it doesn’t feel good to get to the end of the year and think I didn’t really achieve anything this year either.

The last thing that I’ll just briefly add (that I skip over) is that in the designing of your ideal schedule—that schedule that I am sharing with you in the show notes today—what I did to help me get in the rhythm of that schedule is to set up alarms. Every time that you see on that schedule there’s a change of color from one task to another task, I’ll actually set up an alarm on my phone to let me know what I needed to be doing at that time. 

I made appointments with myself all day every day to spend time creating, to spend time doing admin, to spend time doing my social, to spend time going for my work. I actually had to make appointments with myself to get this routine into place. That was quite painful particularly in the first couple of weeks. Gradually, over time, it became natural. It became something that I began to anticipate the alarms. After a while, I actually switched them off because I was so into the system and habits began to form.

I hope you found today’s podcast to be helpful for you. I know some of you out there are productivity junkies and you could teach me a thing or two about productivity. I would love to hear your suggestions. I’d love to hear about the systems that you’ve built. I’d love to hear what you have learned on this whole topic of productivity.

You can leave a comment on today’s show notes at problogger.com/podcast/40 or you can shoot me an email at [email protected]. You can connect with me on social media at @problogger on Twitter or on our Facebook page at facebook.com/problogger. 

Lastly, I’d love to get your review of today’s show and of this podcast on iTunes or on Stitcher, if you’re listening to us there. I do read all of those reviews and certainly have been featuring a few of them lately. Again, leave your name and your blog’s name on your review and you’ll get a little shout out as well. 

Hope you’ve enjoyed today’s podcast. I look forward to hearing your comments on today’s show. I’ll talk to you in the coming days on episode 41 of the ProBlogger Podcast.

Have you got a weekly schedule? What systems and tools do you use to increase your productivity? What’s something new you might try?

I’d love to hear about your experience 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.

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

Today’s episode is about how getting clear about why you’re blogging can help you and your readers.

dog puzzled by Danilo Biancalana 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 talk about:

Today, I want to extend this idea a little bit further. In that last podcast, we are talking about your well-being and we touched on things like health, exercise, movement, diet, rest, relationships, and brain health as well as part of helping yourself to shine, which has a flowing effect for your blog. 

Today, I want to ask you another question that is tied to your well-being and is going to directly impact your blogging. The question is one that also will impact other areas of your life so it’s a good one to ponder every now and then. The question is what is your why?

Most of us know that our well-being, our health is tied to things like health, movement, diet, rest, relationships, and brain health, but increasingly over the last few years, studies have also found that purpose has a massive impact upon our health and well-being. Purpose directly impacts our physical health but also impacts our longevity.

Studies show that it increases our productivity and has an impact on our happiness as well. Purpose significantly impacts our health and also (in my experience) impacts our blog. I know that when my blogs have been firing, have been hitting the mark with readers the most, and have been growing, it’s often during a time when I’m really tapping into my why, my purpose. 

When I started ProBlogger back in 2004, I did it really strongly out of purpose, out of my why. Back in 2004, I could see that blogs were changing the world and bloggers were changing the world. It was happening in all kinds of different ways. In small ways, bloggers were teaching, they were sharing inspirations, they were sharing knowledge, but we are also seeing it in politics and global issues as well. Bloggers were using blogs to make the world a better place and I wanted to be a part of that. I want to resource that. That was one of the reasons I started ProBlogger.

The other reason I started ProBlogger was that I saw that not only could bloggers make the world a better place with their blogs, but they can also build businesses and this is something I discovered through my own blogging that I could not only teach people and help people, but I could sustain that by building a business and looking at different business models for my blogging.

When I started ProBlogger, I was really tapping into this purpose. I really believed that blogs could change the world and that bloggers could sustain what they were doing by building businesses. I got great feedback—even from the very early days of ProBlogger—from people who were being impacted by my blog and that fed the why, fed the purpose even more, and it really inspired me to keep that blog running and keep it as good as it could possibly be.

I remember getting an email from a young man in India. I dug up the email recently actually and he told me, he must have been seven or eight in age, he didn’t tell me his age but he was quite young and he had a younger sister. He was an orphan. His parents and her parents had passed away, so he was supporting his sister and he was working as a cleaner. One of the places that he cleaned was an Internet café. Instead of paying him, they gave him internet time in return for cleaning the Internet café.

One day, he was using his Internet time and he came across ProBlogger and he discovered this new way of making an income, so he decided to start a blog. He sent me this email about ten months after he started blogging and he told me his story about how he started a blog and he put some AdSense ads on it. In fairly broken English in his email, he told me about how his blog didn’t have much traffic as my blog and didn’t make as much money as my blog, but that he was able to make enough to pay for his sister to go to school and to pay for them to eat; something that they struggled to do in the past.

I remember getting this email and just being so inspired by it. I hadn’t really expected that impact upon people. That my blog, something I had written could change a life to that extent. I really tapped into that and that type of story is something I’ve heard numerous times over the years in different ways. Every time I go to a conference, people come up and say, “You wrote this thing that changed my life in some way.” When you are tapping into those types of stories and tapping into that meaning with your blogging, it has a massive impact on your blog.

What I also discovered over the years is that sometimes your why, sometimes your purpose gets a little bit fuzzy. I’ve lost count of the number of times that I’ve talked to bloggers who start their blogs with real purpose, who start their blogs out of a really impassioned kind of why, and then gradually over time, things slip a little and they get distracted from their why. It’s so easy to do and I’ve experienced this myself. 

After a few years of blogging, many bloggers feel like they’ve created a machine. I don’t know if you can relate to that, but I’ve talked to a number of bloggers in the last year or so who pretty much expressed that their frustration with blogging in those exact words that they’ve created this machine, that they feel like they’ve created these expectations upon themselves to always publish at certain times and to publish a certain amount of content. 

They get the reader’s expectations and they need to keep publishing certain types of posts because they drive more traffic. Maybe, some of those posts don’t tap into why they started their blog, but they got to keep getting that traffic because they need to get that traffic to be able to earn a living. Slowly over time, their focus moves away from their why, away from their original purpose and they end up doing something quite different from what they started out doing. 

While blogs should evolve and blogs shouldn’t stay the same, you should change what you are doing when you lose sight of your why. It has a negative impact on your blog. The other thing I’ve discovered and I’ve realized over the last few years of my own blogging, is that as you grow a blog and as you scale your blog, and you begin to involve other people in your blog, it’s also easy to lose your why because you begin to focus more upon your team and less upon your readers. A gap can open up between you and your readers.

So in my blogging, I’ve hired an editor and we now have other writers on our blog. This is a good thing in many ways because it increases the expertise in the team and it also increases the variety of what we are able to communicate and in different voices. But if you are not careful, you can also open up this gap between you and your reader, and lose touch with that reader. In doing so, you hear less of the stories about how you’re impacting them and again, your why can become a little fuzzy. 

This has been my story over the years. There have been times where my why, my purpose has been really in focus and then gradually things drift and then you come back to your why and things really focus, then things gradually drift again. This is a cycle that I see in my own blogging, but also in many other bloggers. Today, I want to ask you the question, what is your why? And I hope that it helps you just to get back to why you are blogging and get back to some of that purpose. 

Knowing your why, there are a number of different things (I think) that have a really massive impact upon your blogging, so knowing your why gives your blog direction in terms of the how and the what. Now, after you listen to this podcast, I really would encourage you to go and watch a video by Simon Sinek. It’s a TED Talk and many of you have probably seen it. It’s one of the most viewed TED Talk ever. In it, he talks about the gold circle and in this golden circle he has three layers, three circles. In the inner circle, right at the inner part like an onion, the core is the word why and then around it is what, and then around that is how. Or maybe it’s actually why, how, and what. 

You can go watch it, but in this video, Simon talks about how most companies know what they do and most companies know how they do it, but most companies don’t know why they do it. I actually think that’s probably true for many blogs as well. Most bloggers may not actually know what they do. I got a blog about photography, or I got a blog about fashion, or I got a blog about being a parent, and most bloggers know how they blog. I publish four posts a week, these are the types of posts I do, and I’ve got a social media account in these ways. But many bloggers don’t know why they actually do it and when you don’t start with your why, your how, and what, becomes just a bit random.

But if you go back to really defining what your why is, it impacts the how and the what. Go ahead and have a look at that video. I think it’s really worth looking at and trying to look through the eyes of a blogger. He’s not talking about blogging, he’s talking about business, but I think the principles he discusses are really true. 

The second reason I think knowing your why is really important is that it provides you with motivation in tough times. When you’re really having a hard time of it, when you are perhaps not thinking about giving up blogging, having a why, having a purpose behind it can keep you on track and can get you through those tough times. One of the things occasionally I get to do is to talk to bloggers who are thinking about giving up blogging and in the last few months, I’ve actually talked to a couple of bloggers who are at this point.

In both cases, I encourage the blogger to go back to why they started blogging. Why did you start blogging? And in both cases, both of those bloggers actually came back to me after pondering that question and said, “I actually want to keep blogging because I realized my why is still valid,” and getting back in touch with that why gave them the motivation to keep on going. 

Interestingly, though, both of those bloggers in going back to their why decided to change the way that they blog. They realized that their why was still important, but their how needed to change because that had gotten off track and that the frustration that they had, the reason that they wanted to give up wasn’t so much about their why, it was their how. Tapping back into that is a really powerful thing. 

The third reason I think knowing your why is really important and this is something I found to be true this year, is that it can really help you to make decisions. Having a why gives you something to filter the opportunities that come in your way and to look at the way that you are doing what you do. 

This year, I had to make a massive decision and that was to close down a part of my business. Some of you will have been a part of the problogger.com community which was live earlier in the year but which we closed down a few months ago, problogger.com was a membership area on ProBlogger. People paid us a monthly subscription to get access to webinars, some plugins, a forum area, and a few other bits and pieces that we offer in that community. It was a relatively successful part of my business because thousands of people every month were paying us to access problogger.com.

The problem was that I was increasingly realizing that it wasn’t tapping into my why. I could tell that while it was making a profit, that people who are paying us every month were not using our community and we’re probably not benefiting from it in the way that I really wanted to help them.

Remember my why is to make the world a better place. I want to resource bloggers to make the world a better place for their blogs and also to build sustainable businesses and I could see that people were simply not listening to the webinars. That people were not simply using the forum and that a limited number of people were using the plug-ins. People were paying us every month, but they weren’t actually getting benefits out of it.

I can see that quite clearly through the way people are using the site and while it was profitable, it was successful in some ways, it actually wasn’t successful in bringing about my why, so I decided to close it down and that was a scary decision. That was something I didn’t do lightly because it didn’t mean losing income, but on making that decision, I felt like the weight lifted off my shoulders and I was able to tap back into my why and I was able to think about how I’m going to use my time and reallocate the time that I had been putting into that community and to use it in a different way that may tap into my why.

One of the things I decided to do as a result of having some extra free time was to start podcasting and in the first two episodes of this podcast, we had more people download the first two episodes in that first week than we had had people to listen to all of the webinars in problogger.com over several years. This podcast has really tapped back into my why and I am getting feedback from people again who are being impacted by it and we see that in the reviews on iTunes but also the emails that we get in the comments as well. 

Having a why gives you a filter to make decisions and to keep you on track in many ways. Having a why also attracts other people and I think it shows through your writing. I know that when I write out of my why, I write out of my purpose, I write about something I’m passionate about so that people can see that. That comes through in your writing and it attracts other people who share your why or who need your why.

The other thing I guess about having a why is that it significantly changes your productivity. In that problogger.com community, I used to really struggle to create those webinars because I just knew that it wasn’t tapping into my why. It was tough to create those two webinars every month for problogger.com whereas this podcast has been the complete opposite because it’s so much tapping into my why. It’s something I’m really enjoying and I can see the impact and that I can see it’s been meaningful for people. 

I was able to produce 31 podcasts in a week when I did the 31 days to build a better blog series of this podcast. It increases your productivity and it shines through in what you create. For me, retapping into my why is something I’ve gone back to a number of times over the years and it’s something that you do need to keep coming back to and keep coming refocusing upon. 

For me this year, there’s been a number of things that have helped me to rediscover my why again. One of the things that I really enjoyed this year was getting out and doing some local events around Australia. 

We did a series of events in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, and Perth. These are smaller groups of people, so 80-100 people at a time and just by getting in the same room as readers actually reignited my why because I began to hear their questions, see their challenges, and see their problems and also had faces and names to put into the statistics. You, people, are reading my blog, but to actually meet them really is quite inspirational. 

Not everyone can run an event, although if you can, I would encourage you to do that even if it’s just a simple meetup. You can get on a tool like Periscope which is pretty much like doing a mini live event anyway. Even if you just do a Periscope and three people show up, you can have an interaction with them that is more meaningful. Personally, I find jumping on Periscope every time I do, I get new ideas and I get inspiration because I’m in conversation in almost a real-time way with my readers.

The other thing that I’ve actually found this year is really helpful in re-tapping into my why and refocusing my why’s simply by exploring a new medium like podcasting and by going back to some of the core things that I’ve written about previously but speaking about them in a new medium has again fed into that why and has been really helpful for me. 

I want to finish with a quote from Tom Rath and he’s written a book called Are You Fully Charged? which I’ve been listening to as an audiobook this year. He talks a lot about meaning and he talks a lot about purpose in that particular book. It’s really worth reading, but this quote stood out to me as I listened to it. He says, “You create meaning when your strengths and interests meet the needs of the world.”

If you are wondering what your ways are, if you are trying to refocus your why at the moment, can I encourage you to just simply ponder that statement? You create meaning when your strengths and interests meet the needs of the world. 

So what are your strengths? What are your interests? I’d add to that your passions, your experiences, the things that keep you awake at night because you are so excited about them. If you can find an intersection of those things and the needs of the world, you are going to be doing something that is meaningful not only to you, something that excites you, but it’s going to have an impact upon others and that’s a meaningful thing, and that’s a purposeful thing, and that taps into your why. 

I’d love to hear what your why is. If you want to go to problogger.com/podcast/39, there’s the opportunity on the show notes to leave a comment and I’d love to hear what your why is. Have you got it clearly on focus or do you need to rework that a little bit? If you need some help in doing that, we’ve love to hear about that in those comments and perhaps other listeners in the podcast and help you to refocus that as well. I look forward to chatting with you in episode 40—I can’t believe we are up to 40 already—of this podcast in the next few days.

Have you got your ‘why’ clearly in focus? Maybe you’re struggling to work out your ‘why’? What’s something you will do differently to get clear about your ‘why’?

Either way, I’d love to hear about your experience 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, I talk about the humiliating wake up call that changed my life and my 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). Today I talk about:

I’d love to hear your experience. Let me know in the comments below, and share a link to your blog.

Good morning and welcome to episode 38 of the Problogger Podcast. It’s Monday morning here in Australia, and I’m getting into my week. Today, I want to talk about something that I think has the potential to transform your blogging and not only that it can transform many areas of your life. I want to tell you a little bit about my own personal journey for the last nine months. Before I do, I want to encourage you to check out today’s show notes at problogger.com/podcast/38, where I’ll give you some further reading, and also, you have the opportunity to leave a comment and let us know what you think about today’s show.

If you do enjoy today’s show, we’d love you to leave a review on iTunes. Also, there’s been some fantastic reviews coming in over the last couple of days. Quite a long one came in from Get Fit Now with Cheryl, who wrote in part—I’ll just read the first part—”I’ve watched my email and podcast list every day for the next episode of ProBlogger. If there’s a new episode, no matter what else I’m currently listening to, I switch to ProBlogger.” I really appreciate that Cheryl.

I got this one from Sharon, which I really enjoyed as well. This is from Sharon Bogan. “Darren Rowse’s strength is that he can take massive complex information and break it down into small actionable pieces of advice. None of it is rocket science, but it’s all doable and useful.” I love that comment because I think it actually illustrates a point that I try and get across in my teaching all the time. None of what I teach is rocket science. Most of it is quite logical, but the reality is, most people don’t apply the simple truth that is behind most successful blogs.

Most successful bloggers that I’ve come across don’t do amazingly cutting-edge things. They consistently produce useful content on a day-by-day basis. They interact with their readers. They get off their blogs and interact in other places on the web. Those three things build the foundations for a profitable blog. None of it is rocket science but it is all so important.

That leads me to today’s topic. Today, I want to pick up a theme that I talked about at the ProBlogger event just over a week ago. My opening keynote, my topic was Three Ways to Make Your Blog Shine. We had a party on Friday night and the theme was shine. Everyone was encouraged to come wearing something a little glittery or shimmery. I myself wore a Michael Jackson glove.

That was my touch of shine, but I picked up the theme of shining in my opening keynote because really, that’s what the point of the conference but also ProBlogger is about. We want to help bloggers to shine, their blogs to shine, to reach their potential in some way. In my keynote, I talked about three ways that you can do that. I just want to focus on one of them today in this podcast, because I don’t have an hour to talk to you as I did at the opening of the event. The first thing that I talked about was really not about blogging at all, but it was everything to do with blogging, and that’s what I want to touch on now.

The question I asked our attendees and the question I want to ask you is a question that we get asked all the time. It’s probably the most asked question today. The question is this, how are you? It was a strange question to start a blogging conference off with and it’s a strange question to ask in a blogging podcast in some ways because I’m not asking you how is your blog, I’m not asking you how is your business, I’m asking how are you. How are you? I really would like to know and I’d encourage you to leave a comment in today’s show notes.

I really even more so, encourage you to ask yourself the question, how are you? As I mentioned before, this is probably the most asked question in all of humanity today, because we asked it as a greeting, at least we do in Australia. Quite often the conversation goes, “Hey, how are you? Good. How are you? Good.” That’s the opening of most conversations that I have. While it’s the most asked question, it’s also probably the most glossed-over question as well.

“Yeah, I’m good. How are you,” and that’s the end of answering the question or many times we just say, “Yeah, I’m busy. How are you? Yeah, I’m busy. How are you?” and it goes back and forth and then you start talking about the weather or something else incidental. Today, I want to encourage you to not to gloss over the question to actually ponder, how are you going? How are you, internally going? The reason I asked this is because probably the biggest lesson I’ve learned in my own blogging this last nine or ten months has been that if I want my blog to shine, I need to not only work on blogging technique, and not only need to work on writing great content, or finding readers from my blog, or monetizing my blog.

Those strategic things, they’re great to learn about, and basically what we’ll be talking about in this podcast ongoingly. If I really want my blog to shine, I also need to work on making myself shine as a person, as the person behind that blog. The well-being of my blogs is directly linked to the well-being of me. It’s not the only factor but it does play a part, so how are you?

It was late last year, I think it was November. I went to my doctor for my annual men’s health checkup. It was one of those things that as you get to a certain age, it’s probably a good thing to do. I started doing it as I approached 40 a few years ago. Basically, an annual men’s health checkup sounds nice, but it’s not, really; it’s a bit of a humiliating process. I’m sure there’s an equivalent for women, but basically, you go in and the doctor runs a whole heap of tests on you, and he pokes and prods you in ways that you can’t even imagine and don’t want to really think about.

He made me step up and down on steps for about three minutes and halfway through that test to assess my fitness. I fell off the step and couldn’t continue. He took my blood pressure and a whole heap of other things, blood tests and all kinds of stuff. I went for about 45 minutes and then usually at the end of the test, he sits you down and says, “Here’s something you can work on over the next 12 months to improve your health.” It went through the normal pattern. I did all the tests and was humiliated. He sat me down at the end and he said, “Here’s the list of things that you need to work on over the next 12 months.”

That was the first time he’d ever presented me with a list at the end of the checkup. It was confronting to hear that there was a list and then to see the things on the list. There was nothing on it that was life-threatening, at least not immediately life-threatening. It was important stuff, though, and it was stuff that I already knew.

There was my weight. My doctor told me I was about 15 kilograms or about 33 pounds overweight (for those of you who measure such things in pounds), and I knew that already. I’ve seen my belt, the notches letting out and I actually had had to buy a new belt recently, and I’d seen that I’d gone up a size in jeans and it had been a gradual process over 10 or so years. But then, there were other things on the list like my blood pressure being too high. The fact that I was vitamin D-deficient which means you have to go outside (apparently) to get some vitamin D. I don’t tend to do much of that.

My fitness was too low. These were the things he’d noticed. None of it was a surprise, as I say, because I’d noticed it, too. I went home from being presented with this list, and I was a bit down about it. I remember lying in bed at night over the next few nights and just thinking about, he’s right. I’ve seen these symptoms, too, and then I realized that there were other symptoms that he hadn’t seen. These were probably more symptoms to do with internal stuff, how I was thinking, and how I was acting.

There was a whole heap of these things that I could go through. Things like being a bit disillusioned with my work, being a bit more unmotivated, a little less motivated than in the past. My memory wasn’t as good as it had been. My focus in my work, my productivity was lower. All of these things I put down to the fact that I was maybe getting a bit older and I’ve written those things off. Maybe I’m not as creative as I used to. Maybe the ideas won’t flow as much as I used to. Maybe this is what happens when you get to middle age. I accepted these things as reality, but I realized that perhaps many of them were tied to my health and my well-being.

I decided I needed to make some changes. I realized that I had slipped up and that I’d let things go a little over the last 10 or so years, and it’s really easy to do. As I talked about this at the event last week, it was amazing how many people came up to me afterward and said, “I’ve slipped up in very similar ways.” For me, it was around having a family. Over the last 13 years, I’ve got married, and I’ve got kids and, kids particularly, they take more and more of your focus. It’s easy to focus on their health and their well-being, and then not work on some of these things as much for yourself.

And then there was having a business and for me having two businesses with ProBlogger and Digital Photography School, and the responsibilities that come along with that, to pay the bills, develop your team, and these types of things, which are all important things, but they do take your focus off you. For me, it was business and family. For other people, it will be different things. Not everyone is in the same situation as me, but I do find it’s a universal thing in many ways that we do tend to let ourselves go in different aspects of our lives as we focus upon other things.

Every now and again I think it’s good just to have a wake-up call. For me, it was a good wake-up call because it wasn’t an urgent thing, but this list that my doctor presented me with the other symptoms, I noticed, was enough for me to start getting my act together, and there are a few areas that I decided to work on.

I didn’t do it straight away, I’ll be honest. That actually probably took me a month or so before I started to make some changes after having this chat with my doctor. It took me a while to sit with it and to feel motivated to do something about it, but the first area I started to make some changes in was around movement exercise. The reality was that I was not doing any movement, or very little at all. I’d actually switched on the Health app on my iPhone when I got my new iPhone, I think it was in late last year, December. I don’t know why I switched it on but I’m glad I did because it began to track my movement.

I remember switching that app back on about six weeks later and realizing that it had been tracking my movement and my steps in particular. At first, I was a little bit indignant that Apple is tracking my movement, and then I realized there wasn’t a whole heap to track at all, because on an average day in February this year, I was walking about 1200 steps, and 1200 steps are not much at all. It’s pretty much what I take moving around the house on an average day. Moving from one end of the house to get the kids ready for school, go to my office, walk to the kitchen, have lunch, that stuff.

It’s not really even leaving the house at all. Twelve hundred steps were nothing, and it was quite confronting to see that there was actually this other app on my old phone (which was a Samsung) and Google had been tracking my movement on Google Maps. I remember one day a friend shooting me this link so I could see how far I’d moved. It was a privacy type thing and so I checked it out. I remember being quite confronted by that as well because there was nothing really to track there either.

Google had basically been plotting me walking around my house, and occasionally walking to the school, which was about 500 or 600 meters away to pick up my kids and for a whole month, I barely went beyond that. Movement was not something that was really a part of my day. The day I actually realized I was only walking 1200 steps, I decided to set myself a challenge to walk 10000 steps that particular day. I had friends who were doing the 10000 steps a day challenge, and so I decided, for one day, I could do it, so I went for a walk.

That walk changed my life in many ways, because I came back from that walk and took me about 45 minutes, 50 minutes to get close to 10000. I didn’t quite get there because I realized I’d do a few more steps around the house that night, but I came back from that walk after 45 minutes with ideas. I had the most productive afternoon that I’d had for a long time. I realized that simply by walking and spending less time working and more time walking and moving that the work I did afterward was more productive.

That triggered that I wanted to do this on a regular basis, so I set myself the goal of 10,000 steps a day, and I began to do it every day. Sometimes I’ve got a little bit obsessive about it, I’ll be honest. I remember there were a few nights where I was jogging around our living room trying to get my 10,000 steps up. Just the discipline and the rhythm of it really helped. Later on, I got a Fitbit and that actually helped even more because I was able to join competitions and be a bit more accountable to my 10,000-step goal.

Just by moving, a whole heap of good things came out of that. The other thing I did in terms of movement was starting to stand more. Many of you have probably seen the articles that have come out over the last few months, sitting is the new smoking. Our bodies are not designed to sit all day and yet we do it for a lot of hours and I realized that I was doing it pretty much all day apart from the walks I was taking.

I pretty much decided I needed to start standing up. Now, there’s a lot of great standup desks out there. I’m a bit tight with my money and so I got a cardboard box, and right now as I’m giving you this talk I’m standing in front of a cardboard box, which is sitting on top of my desk and my computer sitting on top of the box cost me about 30 cents. I’ve noticed that by standing more—I don’t do it all day, but I do it for at least a couple hours a day as I work—it helps me to become more focused and more productive with my time. It’s one of the factors that has brought about some change for me.

I’m probably going to actually invest in a stand-up desk. I found a good one in which you can sit on top of your desk. I can give you a link to it in the show notes. But just these two simple changes walking every day and standing have brought about real change. The other area that has had a probably even more of an impact for me is my diet.

I said at the start, none of this is rocket science. This is the stuff that we’re taught when we’re in primary school, elementary school. My 4 year old knows about diet and how it impacts your health, but if you’re anything like me it’s one of those areas that it’s easy to slip up on. My reality was that I was eating good food. We eat meat, we eat vegetables every day for dinner. I was eating a relatively healthy breakfast, and I was eating relatively healthy lunches.

Lunches were probably the area I slipped up the most but I was also eating extra stuff, and I was eating two lunches some days, like I’d have an early one, then I have a later one. I was snacking extra and many of the extra snacks were the unhealthy stuff. You know how it goes. Most of us fall into these patterns at different times. If I’m honest, probably the other aspect of it for me was emotional eating. When things didn’t go right, or when things didn’t go my way, or when something unexpected happened, I would cope with that by eating and most of those exceptions were not good food.

This is something that is very easy to fall into these poor habits with and it’s a gradual thing for me (at least it was). I realized over the last 12 months, I’ve gotten pretty bad in this particular area. I was actually starting to eat secretly and it wasn’t a good healthy way to go. So, I decided to make some changes in this area too. It wasn’t rocket science. What I did is I basically started to reduce my calories through a few things. Firstly, through the reduced frequency of eating—cutting out some of those extra snacks—reducing the portion sizes. I gradually started to eat more and more […].

I started to focus more on real food, so not processed food but more healthy food, the stuff that we’re taught to eat when we’re kids, and also watching for the triggers that were triggering the emotional eating, simply becoming more aware of them and then having some strategies in place so I could do something different in those times.

The other thing for me which I’ve talked about previously is I began to do some fasting, and this is something that I really would encourage you to talk to a health practitioner about before you begin to do it because intermittent fasting is something that can be really helpful to some people, but there are certainly some people who shouldn’t do it, depending on their own health conditions and stages of life that they’re at.

It’s something you can learn about and I can give you some links to it, but I really would encourage you to talk to someone about doing that. Diet and movement were the two big things that I began to change. There were other things as well, but even just those two things brought about some immediate change.

The thing that everyone notices when they meet me after the last nine months is that I’ve lost weight. That’s certainly been the most externally visible change. I’ve lost the 15 kilos that my doctor asked me to lose and a few more; I think I’m up to 17 now. It’s plateaued and I’m maintaining that and have maintained that for the last three months. That’s about 37 pounds, which is fairly significant. It’s not that much more than my 4-year-old child actually weighs, which freaks me out in some ways. That was the most external change, but then, there’s been a whole heap of others, and these are things that other people don’t see but I’ve noticed even more than my weight loss.

The increased fitness has been great. I still have some way to go on that. I need to work on my strength, but there are other things that have flowed, and these things have impacted my blogging; I’m getting better ideas. I feel like I’m more creative than I was. I feel like I have more stamina and energy to bring to my work. I feel like I’m more focused and more alert in my work as well. I’m more optimistic. I’m in a better mood and I bring that mood to my work and the work that I do. I feel like I’m more productive. I feel like the quality of my work is increasing as well.

While I didn’t do all these things to get better as a blogger, be more productive, and increase the quality of my work, it’s had this flow-on effect. Also other areas of my life, I’ve noticed it’s impacting my parenting. I noticed it’s impacting my friendships and other things that I do. It’s one of those things that has this ripple effect throughout your life.

I don’t know what the motivation is for you but I really would ask you the question, how are you going in these two areas, movement and diet. Of course, there’s a whole heap of other areas that have to do with health and well-being as well. There are the connections that we have, the relationships that we have, and this is something for me that I know I need to work more on. I’m an introvert. I tend to gravitate to online interactions with people because I can monitor them, I can turn them on and off, and I retreat into the online world.

I know many introverts have a tendency to do that, and sometimes that can have come at the expense of real-life interactions. I think it’s really important to think about how you’re going with the relationships that you have. For different ones of us, there will be different responses to that, but it’s a good question to ask. That may extend to things like your real-life interactions, you’re online. I think it’s important to have both particularly as bloggers to have online relationships with people who do get what we go through as bloggers, but it also extends to things like having mentors and having people who can ask you questions about your business.

Another aspect of well-being that I’ve been working on over the last few months, in particular, has been rest. Sleep is very important but I think rest goes beyond just sleep. It’s about having breaks in your day. I’ve been working in shorter batches. I tend to work for 45–60 minutes and then have 10–15 minutes off during my day. I find just by breaking up my day that way and doing other activities during the day, like going for a walk, having a drink, having a conversation with someone, I feel like I’m more focused when I am working.

In terms of rest, there’s also having time off, so having boundaries around when you don’t work. This is an area that I used to struggle a lot because I used to say I love my work. It gives me energy. The lines between when I was working and when I was resting blurred a lot. I didn’t really have any lines there. On one hand, as bloggers, we love what we do and we feel drawn into it, but it’s not a sustainable thing in the long term.

When we don’t have any boundaries between work and rest, it has an impact on those other areas of our life. Our family life, our relationships, and we also build habits that are hard to change later on, when we do need rest, when work isn’t perhaps as enjoyable as it once was. Establishing some boundaries is really important. 

The other thing for me in terms of rest this last year has been as a family, we took a month off early in the year to travel in the US and that was a really life-giving time for me. Here in Australia, we have long service leave, where a company gives you extended time-off after you’ve served the company for seven or ten years, depending on the company.

As a blogger, I have never had long service leave even, though. I’ve been blogging for 13 years now. So to have that month off, that extended break, really refreshed me and I found that helpful. 

The other area of well-being that I want to touch on—this is the last one I want to touch on today—is something called filling your cup. That’s how I refer to it anyway, filling your cup. I want to ask you today, are you filling your cup?

I’ve got this idea from Michael Hyatt at Social Media Marketing World this year. I think he touched on this in his talk, and he asked the question, “Are you filling your cup?” I realized that it was another area of my well-being that I’d let slip. What I’m talking about here is, as bloggers, we’re blogging a lot, we’re outputting, we’re writing, we’re creating content, and to create great content, to output in a great way we need good input, so filling your cup is about learning. It’s about getting inspiration.

When I started blogging back in 2002, I was reading so many books. I used to read a book a week, at least. I used to read over 300 blogs in my RSS reader. I was going to conferences. I was meeting with mentors. I was intentionally spending time learning about technology and about blogging, but also the things I was writing about and just other stuff that interested me. I was addicted to learning and I was getting a lot of input, and I think that had a lot to do with the quality of the output that I was doing, but this is one of those areas that it’s very easy to slip up in.

As your life gets busy in different ways, it’s very easy to take time from when you were learning and put it into other activities. I realized I wasn’t getting the input that I used to get. That had come for a variety of reasons. One, I was busy, but two, when you’ve been blogging about the same topic for 10 years, it’s very easy to become a bit complacent and to begin to believe what other people say about you. “He knows what he’s talking about. He’s a guru or he’s an expert.” You begin to believe that and stay in the comfort zone of what you are doing.

It’s worked before I’ll continue to do it, and you stop learning the new things that are happening in your industry. I realized I’ve become a little bit stale in some of my writing, I wasn’t as cutting-edge, perhaps, as I once was. I put a lot of that down to the fact that I wasn’t reading as much as I used to, I wasn’t getting the input that I used to get in, I wasn’t getting the inspiration that perhaps I had as well, so I decided to make some changes in this particular area of my well-being as well.

For me, it was a number of things. One, I was now walking every day for 45 minutes, at least every day. I had this opportunity to listen to podcasts and to listen to audiobooks. For the first time in my life, I began to listen to podcasts, and that was one of the reasons I started these podcasts, but for the first time of my life, I started to listen to audiobooks as well. I found that that was really helpful. Now I don’t listen, get input in every walk I take. I think it’s also important to have rest, have space, and to have time to think about certainly two or three times a week when I walk on now getting input in that way.

I started to read blogs again. I have a number of blogs, not only in the niches that I’m writing about, also for podcasts. I actually listen to podcasts to do with health, comedy, business, and entrepreneurship, but many aspects of life. Even though you might not be learning about your particular topic or area of expertise, just learning something seems to trigger a part of your brain that wakes it up and helps you a lot.

I’ve started going to conferences not only to speak but also to learn. Social Media Marketing this year where I went to speak, I actually spent most of my time there in sessions on topics that I didn’t know about, rather than going to see the stuff I already knew about, which is tempting to do because you want to connect with those speakers. I spent more time in the podcasting sessions, I spent more time learning about visual marketing, and things that I hadn’t really been learning about before.

The other thing for me is that I started to seek out mentors. This is one of those areas that as you become well known in an industry, you can feel a bit awkward about seeking a mentor, because everyone thinks that you already know enough, but the reality is it’s really helpful to have mentors, so I’ve started to seek out those relationships.

Some of the people that I’m hanging out with now don’t know that they’re my mentors. I haven’t really labeled the relationship in that way. It’s about interacting with people who know about things that you don’t know about, but also who achieve and who push boundaries and ask questions that are good for you to hear. I think it’s really good to have those friendships but also mentor-mentee type relationships as well.

Another thing I’ve started to do more is to seek out inspiration. In the early days of my blogging, I used to listen or watch videos that I found inspiring particularly when TED Talk started coming out. I used to start every day with a TED talk, and a lot of those talks had nothing to do with my topics of interest. Simply by starting the day in a more inspired state, I think it helps you to flow into the rest of your day, in a more positive way.

The last thing in terms of filling my cup that I think has changed for me this year is that I have started to seek experiences that make me laugh. I realized that I used to laugh a lot more than I do today. It sounds bizarre, but I think it’s true, and so some of the podcasts that I’m listening to now are comedy podcasts. I think simply by injecting a little bit of laughter, a little bit of humor into the day—actually, again, I’ve read some studies somewhere—releases some endorphins in your brain. Someone out there will tell me what that is. It actually impacts your optimism and impacts the way you look at life if you’ve laughed, and I think it’s a really important thing to do as well.

There’s a whole heap of other areas of well-being that we could talk about today. I’ve talked about movement, diet, rest, connections, relationships, and filling your cup. We could also talk about mental health, perhaps your spirituality, and other areas of your life as well. But I want to put the question out there today, how are you? Again, this is a strange thing to ask on a podcast about blogging but I think it’s so important. There are a number of reasons that I wanted to put this out there at our event recently, but also on this podcast.

As bloggers, most of us are working by ourselves most of the time. I sit in my office most of every day, working alone, and so I don’t have a boss. I don’t have colleagues around me asking me questions around these things, or noticing perhaps the habits that I have, that aren’t good habits, or just having conversations about this stuff. I want to put it out there because many of us don’t have this accountability in their life. Don’t have people watching how we live our lives. So I think it’s important to ask that question.

Most of us also as bloggers are putting ourselves out there a lot. We’re talking about our opinions, and we’re putting them onto the web, we’re telling about our lives, and we’re putting our photos out there, and putting videos of ourselves, and we’re creating content that reveals something about ourselves. As we do that we get feedback, and people react to that, and some of the reactions are really positive, but some of them can at times be attacking, hateful, and bring us down.

If we’re not in a healthy place, we’re not going to be in a good place to respond to that, and it takes its toll over time. The other aspect for me is that, if we want to help our readers and we want to help our readers to reach their potential in different ways, then we need to be in a good place as well.

I use the analogy of the oxygen mask talk that we hear when we get on a plane. They say, “An oxygen mask will appear from above you, if there’s an emergency, put it on yourself before helping those around you,” and the idea there is simply that if you don’t put it on yourself first, you’re not going to be in a position to be able to help anyone. The same is true with blogging. If we want to help our readers we need to be in a healthy place, too.

The last reason I bring this topic up is that over the last 12 months, but also over the last 12 years, I’ve noticed a number of bloggers, at times really get into trouble with their blogs, and some of them fall from grace quite spectacularly. Even in the last 12 months here in Australia, there’ve been bloggers who’ve been on television who made big mistakes with their blogs in different ways and who’ve been found out doing the wrong things.

I’ve talked to other bloggers who very privately have gone through similar stuff or they’ve not been able to sustain their blogs. In many cases, the reason the bloggers either mess up or can’t sustain what they do is not really about their blog at all. It’s because they’re not well, in one way or another. I sometimes wonder whether some of the bloggers who I’ve seen fall, some of the bloggers who’ve been found out doing the wrong thing and acting perhaps in unethical ways, and some of the bloggers who have not been able to sustain their blogs in different ways. Some of that has been to do with this stuff. 

I want to ask you the question today, how are you going? How’s your health? How’s your well-being? How’s your movement? How’s your exercise? How’s your diet? How’s your rest? How are your relationships? Are you filling your cup? As you asked that question, actually start to pay attention to the areas that perhaps you feel a bit uncomfortable, perhaps that you’re reacting against these, even as I’m talking about these things, and ask yourself other things that you can do to make some changes.

Now, most of the changes that I made that brought about real change, were actually quite small changes that were tweaks, that were different allocations of the way I was spending my time. Even though small changes can have a massive impact over the long term, 10 or 15 minutes a day doing something different around your relationships or around movement can have a long term sustainable impact upon your life but also your business and blogs.

The last thing I’ll say is that if anything I’ve talked about today has triggered something in you that you need to make a change, and I hope it does in some ways, although part of me hopes that you don’t need a change in these areas, too, because you’ve got it all together, but if you do need a time of change in your life in any of these areas, can I encourage you to talk to someone about that? You don’t have to tackle those things alone. You can talk to people online about that, I’d be more than happy to interact with you on social media or via email on it.

Also, I really encourage you to find someone in your real life that you can talk to about it. Particularly, someone who has some training in these areas, so a health practitioner in some way. You don’t need to tackle these things alone. To seek help, to seek support, to seek accountability is actually a sign (I think) of strength rather than of weakness, so I’d really encourage you to do that.

You can find today’s show notes at problogger.com/podcast/38. I’ll have some further reading there. Again, I’m not an expert in this stuff and I’m still on my journey with it, but I’m more than happy to chat with you there on social media as well. I’m also at [email protected] if you want to shoot me a quick note. I look forward to chatting with you in the next episode, episode 39 of the Problogger Podcast.

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

Today’s episode is about how to find new readers for your blog. It’s the question I get asked most by bloggers, so this is the forth of a series of podcasts on this topic.

Today, we talk about how to grow your readership by posting and creating content for other blogs, forums, media and events.

hands up by Ricardo Tavares 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 talk about:

Today, we’re going to continue our series on growing your blog’s readership. I’m going to particularly focus upon techniques around creating content for other destinations on the web including, but not limited to, through guest posting. 

You can find today’s show notes at problogger.com/podcast/37. If you enjoy today’s show, we’d love to see your review on iTunes. We had some really great ones come in so far. Here’s one from James. He says, “James here from Borderless Blog. I took the challenge,” he’s talking about the 31 Days to Build a Better Blog, “and did many of the things Darren suggested and had the best month I’ve had yet. I look forward to continuing to implement his advice to take my blog to the next level.” 

There’s Carrie from Carrie Harris Photo. She says, “I’ve been blogging for over five years. I’ve learned a lot during that time. This podcast does re-energize me to take another look at my blog and find areas I can improve in terms of content, design, and layout. It’s perfect for beginners and experienced bloggers. I always look forward to new podcasts from ProBlogger.” 

Thank you so much, Carrie, and thanks to you, James. I’d love to see your reviews, too. Do feel free to leave your blog’s name. I’m more than happy to check out your blog if you do that in your review. I do read them all and value them all. Let’s get on to today’s episode. 

Today, we’re talking about how to grow traffic to your blog through creating content for other parts of the web. Also, we’re going to touch on some other methods as well. I want to encourage you, if you haven’t listened to the other episodes in this series, to go back a few episodes.

It started in episode 33. In that, we talked about identifying who you want to reach before you go hunting for them. In episode 34, we talked about two types of content that will help you to grow your readership. In 35, we talked about how to build a sticky blog so when people come, they get hooked. They keep coming back again. In the last episode in episode 36, we started getting more specific with how to drive readers to your blog. We talked about commenting on other blogs, forums, and working in social media groups. We also talked about relational marketing—how to build your traffic by getting to know other bloggers, even collaborating with, and working with those bloggers.

Today, as I’ve said already, I talked about content creation for other blogs, forums, media, and maybe even getting up as a guest interviewee on a podcast or even speaking at a conference. One of the best ways that you can showcase the value that you’re able to deliver on your blog, to people who aren’t yet readers is to find other destinations on the web or offline that you can showcase what you do. To do this effectively, you really do need to go back to that exercise I mentioned in episode 33 about creating a reader avatar and thinking about where they’re hanging out online. I’ve talked about this a couple of times in the last few episodes. I won’t go into great detail. 

Ultimately, you want to create a list of the type of blogs, podcasts, forums, Twitter accounts, Twitter chats, hashtags, Facebook pages, YouTube accounts, and the mainstream media that your ideal reader is already following and engaging with. If you can identify these destinations that your ideal reader is already hanging out, watching, and involved in, then you’re going to be in a much better place to find that type of reader. 

I’d also extend this to, where offline are they hanging out? Where offline are they watching? Newspapers or magazines? What conferences are they attending? What meetups do they attend as well? Once you’ve got a list of all these places, you then need to start to think about, “What opportunities are there to create content for these places?” That may seem like a big question, a hard question, but what you’ll find is that with many of the things on your list, many of the blogs, many of the forums, many of the people that you’ve listed in terms of the influences, many of the Facebook pages, there’s actually an opportunity for you to create content and build a presence in this places. 

The most obvious of these and the most common of these is through guest posting on other blogs. It extends much further than that. Pretty much everything I want to talk about today relates to guest posting but also to things like writing articles for mainstream media, contributing articles in forums, being interviewed on other people’s podcasts, being involved in Twitter chats or Twitter parties on Twitter, or even speaking at other people’s events. Each of these strategies is really worth a podcast episode on its own and we will get to that in future episodes, but today, I want to talk about some general principles that I think apply to all of them. 

What you’re trying to do here is to leverage someone else’s exposure and profile to put yourself on to their site. That might seem a little spammy but most people will be more than willing to let you have some exposure on their site if you add value to it. I loved the analogy that John Murray uses. It’s like being the warm-up act at the concert. He says, “Guest posting on someone else’s blog gets you exposure.” If you are the warm-up act for a band like One Direction, people go to the concert to see One Direction—not that I’ve ever been to a One Direction concert—but if you’re good and you’re the warm-up act, you’ll gain some fans as a result of that. They’re there for some other reason but if you can contribute some real value in that forum, people are going to notice and they’re going to want to check out who you are. The warm-up band is going to sell some CDs out the front if anyone actually buys CDs anymore. 

Let’s talk about some principles about how you can contribute content to other parts of the web. The first thing is you want to choose the right destination. You want to really think about submitting content to the right places. There’s a number of things that you want to factor in this decision. As you look at the blogs on your list of the blogs that your ideal reader might read, you want to be asking yourself, do they have the right reader? That’s probably the number one question. Do they allow outside contributions? Do they allow their guest posts? Do they allow people to come in and do interviews or contribute infographics or whatever it might be that you’ve got to contribute? Do they have traffic? You don’t have to choose a massive blog to do this. It can actually work quite well on a smaller blog if they’ve got the ideal reader. But you obviously want them to have some traffic to make it worth your while. 

The last thing is, can you add value to it? Is the topic of the blog that you might want to submit to, is it something that you feel that you have something to say to? Can you actually contribute something of value there? Or is it beyond what you’re able to contribute? You want to actually dig around on their blog and get a feel for it. Get a feel for the fact that people are reading it, people are engaging, people are interested in the type of things that you got something to say on. 

If the answer’s no, you might want to continue to search. One way to find blogs where you can submit guest posts is simply using Google. Identify the keyword for the type of blog that you’re trying to reach and then just do something. Search for “guest post by” and then use the keyword as well in the search. You’ll begin to see destinations that accept guest posts. Similarly, you might use the keyword in the search and then put “guest post guidelines.” Many of the blogs that accept guest posts will have a page where there are guidelines. That’s a simple tip for finding the type of blogs that might accept guest posts. Again, don’t just think about guest posts; there are other ways you can create content.

Another one that we get pitched for occasionally at ProBlogger is infographics. You might be a designer, you might have some design skills, or you might want to hire a designer to create an infographic. Again, that’s another way to get on a blog to create something that’s useful for that blog for that blogger, for their readers, and also get some profile as a result.

The second thing I’d encourage you to do is to think about your goal for the content that you are creating. What is it that you want to get out of it? Also, what do you want to contribute to it? Ultimately, your goal when you’re creating content for another blog, a forum, or some other destination on the web is that you want to create the best content that you possibly can.

I actually heard someone speaking about guest posting recently. They said, “Your best content should be on your blog. You can just write anything anywhere else on other sites.” That’s almost the wrong way to work around. Of course, you want great content on your blog so that when people come to your blog, they’ll see it. You also want to put your best, your very best content, on other people’s blogs. Otherwise, no one’s ever going to come to your blog if you’re just submitting average content as a guest post. 

Don’t do what you’re doing half-heartedly. If you’re writing a guest post for a blog or an article for the media, make it the most polished and useful thing you’ve ever written. Go all out. If you’re going to be interviewed for someone else’s podcast, come prepared to deliver the most valuable and practical insights you can at every turn. If you’re creating an infographic for someone’s site, make it the most beautiful, easy to read, but helpful infographic that you possibly can. If you’re preparing a talk for a conference, make it the best talk you possibly can. Work on your slides, work on your delivery, work on your presentation. 

Ultimately, you want to create something that’s going to impress people, that’s going to stand out by the quality but also usefulness. To do this, you want to do some research on the blog that you’re submitting to. I would really encourage you to go back through their last 50 or so posts. Really do some analysis on the blog that you’re submitting to, the conference that you’re speaking at, or the podcast that you’re going to be interviewed on.

Who reads it? What voice or style does the blogger, the podcaster, or the writer presenting? What is the reach of the different topics that are covered? What topics seemed to connect best with people? What type of posts gets the most comments? What type of posts gets the most shares? What level is the blog being pitched at? Is it beginner ‘s stuff? Is it advanced? Is it intermediate? 

The more you understand about the blog or the media or the podcast that you’re submitting to, the better position you’re going to be in to deliver something that is something of high value, that is going to impress both the blogger that you’re submitting to but also their readers. So, dig deep. Do your preparation. There is nothing worse as a blogger who gets pitched for a guest post than getting pitched by people who obviously have no idea what you’re doing or who just know the topic and who spend no time at all researching what you’re on about.

The third thing I’ll say is that it takes time to get on blogs. Your first pitch to a blog is probably going to get rejected. It’s just the way it is. It takes time to build your reputation. It takes time to build relationships with other blogs that will allow you to guest post or to get on the radar of podcasters who might interview you. You may get lucky and have a yes the first time you pitch someone but do come prepared that this will take some time. It needs to start on your own blog with great content. 

What I would encourage you to do is to see every piece of content that you create as being almost like your portfolio that you can then present to these sites that you want to appear on. That needs to start with great content on your own site. That’s the place that someone is going to go and look to see whether you can write, to see whether you can do what you’re offering your services to do. Your own blog needs to have great content. 

You might want to start writing some articles for forums. Many forums on your niche will accept tips and articles for you to submit. You don’t even have to ask. You can just say, “Here’s something I’ve written about this topic. I hope you find it interesting.” You can contribute to that to a forum. That could add to your portfolio. It helps you to improve your writing and actually can drive some traffic back to your blog as well. I’ve seen a number of bloggers who’ve grown their readership purely through writing articles for forums. It also gives you another link that you can share when you’re pitching someone. “Here’s the article I’ve written on this other site.” 

You can start to approach the other bloggers. You might want to start with the big bloggers but I would encourage you to submit some guest post ideas to medium or even smaller bloggers. Again, it’s adding to your portfolio. If you could go to someone and say, “I’ve appeared here, here, and here,” that’s more impressive than you just saying, “Here’s my idea. Could I be on your blog?” Show them that other people have accepted you.

Gradually over time, as you begin to appear on some small or medium blogs, some of those larger bloggers will be more likely to feature you because they can see the quality of your work. They can see someone else actually agreed that you’ve got something worthwhile to say. Of course, once you get those bigger blogs on the side, all kinds of doors can open up to you including more mainstream media work as well. 

I’d encourage you to keep a record of your best work. Just keep a list somewhere so that when you are submitting guest posts pitches or pitches to be on a podcast, you can actually show people your portfolio.

The fourth thing I’d encourage you to do is to think very carefully about the content ideas that you pitch. When you are approaching a blog, a mainstream media, a podcast, or even a conference to speak at, you really want to think carefully about what it is that you are going to pitch. Obviously, this starts with the topic.

A lot of the best pitches that we get from guest posts on our blogs, the person doesn’t write the content. They actually come to us with a title, a topic, maybe a paragraph, and some key points that they will cover. Maybe a key action item that they want to encourage our readers to do. That helps us to get a feel for what the article is going to look like but you’re not wasting your time by actually writing it until we say yes.

Personally, that’s how I prefer it to be pitched. Other blogs will have different ways of doing that, so you want to pay attention to their guidelines. What we’re looking for is the relevance of the topic as a starting point. 

As I’ve mentioned before, go back through some of the more recent posts that have been published on their site, blog, or that media site. Look at what they’ve already published. They’re probably not going to want to publish another article on exactly the same topic. That’s one thing to avoid. 

Also, go back and look at what has worked before. You may want to find an article that they’ve previously published that you can build on, so part two or another 10 points that the first article didn’t cover. Maybe you want to actually go back and give the opposite viewpoint. Sometimes that can be quite interesting. If someone’s written one argument, maybe you could present a flipside. Particularly, pay attention to posts that have worked well before because the blogger’s probably going to be more open to one going to that topic again but also going to that style of article. That can really work quite well. 

Look for any common questions that you see being asked by readers on that particular blog. You might want to dig into the comments on some of the old posts that have been there or you might want to look in if they’ve got a forum or if they’ve got a social media page that people are submitting questions, that can be a really great place to look for ideas for content. In fact, I pitched an article the other day where the person pitching the article said, “I noticed that you had three questions in this recent post all asking the same question. I’d like to write the answer to that.” That piqued my interest in that submission because I knew that my readers had that particular question.

Often, to create content, maybe look at emerging trends in that particular niche that haven’t been covered before and any gaps in content. Look back over the last 50 or so posts that they’ve written. What haven’t they written about that you could fill the gap of?

Again, look at the voice they’re writing. Look at what level it’s being pitched at, the style of the post that they write. Do they write in list posts? Do they write with lots of images? Do they write long articles or really short articles? You really want to pay attention to that, (1) because you’ve probably wanted to do the same type of content, but (2) every now and again, it can be interesting to submit something that’s quite different. You might find that that blogger actually likes the idea of doing something they couldn’t personally do themselves. 

If they’re writing lots of short articles, you might want to say to them, “Hey, I’ve got an idea for a mega post like the Ultimate Guide to this particular topic.” That may actually stand out to them. Again, go to them with the idea before you write the content. What type of contents? What headlines that they’re using? What visuals do they use? All of these can help you to think about the pitch that you create. 

One tool that you might want to use is BuzzSumo, which is a really useful tool for a number of reasons. One of the things that you can do with BuzzSumo is type in any domain and it will show you what kind of content has been shared the most from the domain. You can type in your own blog. You could also type in the blog that you’re submitting too for a guest post or the mainstream media site that you’re submitting to. It will show you the most shared content on that site. This is really useful because it shows you the kind of content that the site’s readers connect with in terms of its shareability. That may give you some hints of the type of content that you want to submit. 

Ultimately, you want to pitch an idea that the blogger knows is going to deliver value to their readers. Something new and something useful, that’s what we’re looking for when people submit content to us. We don’t want submissions on the same stuff that we’ve already published. We want something new and we want it to be of high value. That helps me as a blogger to achieve my goals. If you can help that blogger to achieve their goals in serving their readers, increasing traffic, and increasing engagement, then they’re going to be more open to that. 

Pay attention to any guidelines that that blogger might have on their site. Many blogs will have a guideline for submissions page. Pay attention to that. Personalize your pitch. Show them that you know what their goals are and they’re much more likely to take the content that you are submitting to them.

Once your pitch has been accepted and your post has been published, there are a few things you can do. Your job is not over at that point. The first thing I’ll say to you is to promote the content to your own social networks. This is really important. We see a lot of people submit content and then they just go missing. That’s the end. They think, “I’ve got the link. I’ve got the traffic.” That’s just part of the journey. You want to be promoting the guest post that you submitted and seen published to your own networks. You may want to link it in your own blog. You might want to link it to Facebook or on Twitter and to your own social network. You may even want to email your list to show your list of contents that you’ve created.

This does a number of things. One, it shows those who already follow you, already read you, that you are published somewhere else, and that can really impress them. “Hey, this person’s been published on this site.” That adds social proof. It can build your credibility with the current readers you already have. Two, it helps the blog, the media, or the podcast that you’re on to get more traffic to it, which impresses the blogger, the podcaster, or whoever it is that you’re dealing with. It increases the chances that they’ll want you to come back again. It also increases the chances that the content you’ve submitted might go viral. Again, that can really lead to a snowballing of traffic to that particular post which, in the end, is going to drive traffic back to you.

Think about how you can promote that piece of content to your own networks and maybe even pitch it to other social influences as well. In a similar way, you want to also be engaging with anyone who engages with that piece of content. Don’t go missing. Don’t see the publishing of that content as the end result. You want to pay as much attention as you can to those who are reached by that piece of content. If it’s a blogpost, any comment that comes in, you need to be responding to that. Go above and beyond in your engagement with people. People are much more likely to come back to your site if they’ve had a conversation with you. 

Again, the blog’s much more likely to want you to come back if they can see that you, not only created a piece of content, that you’re not only creating content that had traffic, but you engaged with their readers.

Another thing you can do is watch where that piece of content is shared and engage in those places as well. If it’s a guest post, it’s likely that the blogger is going to share that on their Facebook page or on their Twitter account. Watch those shares and any engagements that come as a result of that. If someone shares it on their Facebook page and there are comments, you should be commenting there as well, thanking people for their comments, answering their questions.

On Twitter, you can do the same thing. If someone shares it on Twitter, you can click on that share and watch the conversation unfold as a result of that. If someone else retweets it, thank them for the retweet. If someone responds to the blogger’s share on Twitter with a question or a comment, you can engage them as well. This deepens the engagement. This really stands out to people when you do that.

I see some of our guest posters doing this. It really impresses me. They actually go above and beyond and make some big impact. If you’re speaking at a conference, for instance, I guess that’s another way of creating content, stay back and answer questions. Network, add value to that conference in that way and engage as much as you can. 

Another thing to consider is the amount of pitching for guest posts or for interviews you do at once. What I’ve seen a number of bloggers do really well is a burst of guest posting activity or a burst of interview activity on a podcast. I’ve seen this work particularly well of Leo Babauta a number of years ago when he started his blog, Zen Habits. He would do guest posting on other blogs but he didn’t just trickle them. He did like an intense week or two of guest posting. For a week or two, he was appearing on every blog as a guest poster. He’d be on five or six blogs over a week. People began to say, “You’re everywhere, Leo.” “This is amazing.” “Who is this guy?” 

I did the same thing when I launched the ProBlogger Podcast. I appeared on about 10 different podcasts as an interviewee all within a week or two. People began to say, “Oh, wow. I’ve heard Darren in this place, this place, and this place.” Now, you don’t want to overexpose yourself. You don’t want to be writing the same thing in all of those places. You want to find different angles and different ways of approaching content. If you can deliver useful content in lots of places over a short period of time, it’s all interesting and all varied, then that can have a massive impact. 

The other thing you might want to consider is submitting multiple pieces of content to the same destination over time. This is where I’ve seen (again) a number of people use guest posting on our blogs to build their reputation. It’s unlikely if you go to another blog and say, “I want to write a series of 10 articles on your blog,” that they’re going to say yes. They’re probably not going to do that. But if you write one really good article and it resonates with their readers, get back in touch with them a couple of weeks later, and say, “Hey, would you be interested in a follow-up?” or, “Would you be interested in another article?” The chances are pretty good that if you’ve had a guest post or if you created an infographic or you’ve done an interview and it goes really well, they’re going to want to have you back. That’s highly likely. 

By coming back again, you have another opportunity to deepen the engagement that you’ve had with their readers, to grow the profile, the credibility, and the trust that you have with their readers. Don’t go too hard too soon, but do be open to that. 

We actually have one guest poster on Digital Photography School who pitched us one idea. It was a guest post on posing. This particular post did so well that he came back a week later and said, “Hey, I did well. I could do part two if you want.” I was like, “Yeah. Don’t just write part two. Let’s do a whole series.” We ended up doing 10 posts over the next year or so with this one guest poster. That became probably the most successful series of posts that we’ve ever done on the site. To this day, it still gets a whole heap of traffic. That would never happen if we just stop at that one post. So, be open to deepening relationships with people that can really help well.

The last thing I want to talk about is how do you actually drive traffic from these guest posts, these infographics, or these podcasts? There’s a real fine art here to leveraging this content. It’s going to vary from place to place as to how you’ll be allowed to link back to your own blog. In most cases, there will be some kind of by-line that you can use. If it’s a guest post, at the bottom of the article, they’ll probably give you an opportunity to write a sentence or two about who you are, and perhaps provide a link. Maybe two or three links, maybe to your social media accounts, or your blog. You’ve got to stick within the guidelines there. You want to think carefully about how you can actually leverage that. In some cases, you’ll be able to add a link to the article that you’re submitting. 

You want to be really careful about doing that. If you are linking to your own blog in an article, don’t just link to the front page, link to something that’s relevant, something that’s going to add value. It may be a post—a previously written post that you’ve written—that relates to the content. It has to relate really well. It has to be super useful. Ideally, you want any link back to your own site to be to some page that is sticky. Again, we talked about this a couple of episodes ago. A sticky blog is a blog that’s going to hook people. It’s got some sort of a call to action for them to subscribe or connect with you in some way. Be careful about linking too much in your articles. Do link where it’s highly relevant, highly useful, and where there’s some call to action to subscribe, follow, or connect with you in some way.

I find when people submit posts to us, we are much more willing for them to link to their own posts on their site if it’s relevant and useful. Also, if in the rest of the article, there are also links to other places. It’s more natural. There’s not just one link that links back to you. That seems a bit selfish but if you’ve got links to other articles on the site you’re writing, you’ve also got links, perhaps, to the other places on the web, other destinations, other blogs, other articles, that are relevant and useful, and you also weave on your own, that feels more natural to me. Readers are going to respond to that better and also the bloggers’ going to respond to that better.

As I’ve said before, don’t just link to your blog’s from the page. You may do that in your byline but you’re probably going to have more success if you link to a specific piece of content. Even in your byline, you might say, “This post was written by Darren Rowse, the author of ProBlogger. For further reading, you might also like to read…” and then have a relevant link there to a post that has some stickiness to it. 

Another option there is to link to a post that creates anticipation in some ways. You may be starting a series on your blog on a particular topic that’s going to go for a week or two. That’s a great time to be writing guest posts. You want to be linking to the first post in the series because when people arrive on that, they go, “Wow! There’s this whole series of stuff coming.” That creates anticipation and some momentum that increases the chances that they want to subscribe. 

Also, remember here, it’s not just about the direct traffic that your piece of content is going to drive. Yes, traffic is great but it’s also about building your profile. It’s about building your credibility and your expertise. It’s also another part of your portfolio of work that may lead to a bigger site or a mainstream media or a conference wanting you to come. Don’t just drive traffic, traffic, traffic. Actually use the post to showcase who you are. That can be something that has less short-term benefits but more long-term benefits. 

Another technique that I’ve seen used really well in guest posts is not to really drive traffic at all but to tell a story and create connections. Perhaps the best guest post in terms of exposure that I’ve seen on ProBlogger is a post that John Murray wrote where he told his story. He told his story of overcoming hardships and challenges to do something great. It’s just a brilliant story. It creates memories for people and evokes emotions from people. 

I presumed it drove some traffic back to his site. I suspect the real benefits of that post were about people knowing who he was and feeling a personal connection to him. Yeah, the traffic is probably nice. I know it drove some sales of his product and got him some new readers, but I think it sent people to his blog feeling connected to him and wanting to engage with him.

As you’re creating content, don’t just write a great piece of content that’s useful. Actually see if there’s a way that you can inject a little of yourself into it. It will drive traffic that’s warm to who you are and what you’re on about. Do inject your story into it.

The last thing is to keep remembering. The content you create is going to be more successful when it serves the reader, when it serves the other site, the blogger, the podcast, or whoever it is that you’re submitting to. It’s going to be most effective for you if you do the two things. Again, drive value to your reader, drive value to the blog that you’re appearing on, on the podcast that you’re appearing on, and make personal connections. I think that will come back to really benefit you as well.

I hope you found today’s episode useful. This, for me, is probably the most effective way to build traffic to your site. I would highly encourage you to think it through. It’s not going to work exactly the same for everyone. Guest posting may not be for you but think about, “Is there somewhere where I can create content that might appear on other people’s sites?” 

Just let me address the question I know I’ll get, it is around guest posting and SEO. Google, a year or so ago now, really changed the way that they value links from guest posts. A lot of people at this point said, “Guest posting is dead as a strategy.” If you’re trying to build your search engine ranking through guest posting, yes, it probably is dead. If you’re trying to build your expertise, your profile, your perceived credibility, then it is not. It is a great way to do that. It’s a great way to be seen and to drive traffic to your site. It’s not going to help you with the SEO as much as it used to, but it’s going to have a whole heap of other benefits. I encourage you to do it. This is a way that I’ve seen, time and time again, bloggers break through into niches. 

If you’ve enjoyed today’s episode, I’d love to hear your comments. You can go to problogger.com/podcast/37 to find today’s show notes where I will include further reading. I’ll also include some links to some of the things I’ve mentioned in today’s show including the BuzzSumo tool and where you can also leave a comment. I particularly love to hear your comments on what you have done as a result of this episode.

This episode is only going to be useful to you if you do something with it. I would love to hear what you are going to do and see some examples down the track of posts that you’ve written for other blogs, things that you’ve written in other forums, podcasts that you’ve been interviewed on, and anything else that you have done as a result of this. This is going to be more useful to you if you do something, but it’s also more useful to other people if they can see examples of that. I’d love to hear your stories and your suggestions on what has worked well for you. 

Again, you can find today’s show notes at problogger.com/podcast/37. Also, on that page is an opportunity to subscribe to our newsletter, to get updates from ProBlogger, of new articles in our blog but also new episodes here on the podcast.

Lastly, thanks for listening. I really do appreciate your listening at our conference recently. I had so many people come up and say, “I’ve been listening to you on my walks,” or, “I listen to you in bed at night,” or, “I listen to you as I’m on the train to work in the morning.” It’s just so great to hear those stories. I’d love to hear where you listen to us and I’d love to hear your feedback on how we can improve our site.

Again, there’s a contact form on the problogger.com/podcast page where you can give us your suggestions on what you like to hear in future episodes. Just drop us a note and say hi. I’d love to connect with you on that page and hear how you enjoy the podcast. We’ll chat with you on the next episode of the ProBlogger Podcast.

Are you already posting and creating content for other blogs to grow your blog readership? What would you add? What will you try next?

I’d love to hear your answers to those questions. Let me know in the comments below, and 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.

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

Today’s episode is about how to find new readers for your blog. It’s the question I get asked most by bloggers, so this is the forth of a series of podcasts on this topic.

In part one we looked at two really important questions to ask before you go hunting for readers to read your blog.

In part two, we talked about how to use two types of content to find readers for your blog.

In part three, we talked about building a blog that readers will want to return to again and again (a ‘sticky’ blog).

Today, we talk about how to grow your readership by commenting and networking.

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:

Before we get into today’s show, I just wanted to give you a little update. Today is Monday, the 17th of August as I record this and literally, just last night, I got home from the ProBlogger event for 2015. We had 700+ attendees come up to the Gold Coast in Queensland, Australia where we got together for two whole days to talk blogging. There’s a whole heap of people there, it was quite amazing.

The previous year we had I think I was close to 540–550 people so it was quite a bit larger than the previous year, almost 200 larger and we had a great time together. We did a few new things, we had a few more networking events at this particular year, we had a great party on Friday night, but the main reason we were there was for some great content. We had, I think, it was over 24. It might have been closer to 30 sessions this year.

We had speakers fly in from around the world: Jadah Sellner from Simple Green Smoothies, Heather Armstrong from Dooce, Pamela Wilson from Copyblogger, and Ruth Soukup from Living Well, Spending Less. Then, there was a whole heap of amazing Australian bloggers there speaking as well. We had Dan Norris, Claire Healy, Nat Kringoudis and many more. You can actually find them all listed at probloggerevents.com, but it was really just a fantastic time.

I’m, right now, feeling simultaneously, incredibly energized and incredibly exhausted as well, physically exhausted but mentally really energized and really looking forward to what comes next for particularly the Australian blogosphere. This year, we also had people flying in from India, quite a few from New Zealand, and even attendees flying in from other parts of the world including the Middle East and America. It was quite a diverse group of people, all kinds of niches. We had quite a few younger bloggers this year as well as older bloggers. As usual, a lot of women. It was in the 90% range of male to female ratio but it was just a fantastic time.

Despite my croaky voice today, I’m feeling really great about the state of the Australian blogosphere and also blogging around the world, and looking forward to what we’re going to do next. Now, I’m going to actually use some of the snippets from our recordings of the event this year in future podcasts. The full recordings are just for attendees, we do provide them but we’re going to use a few snippets in future episodes and I look forward to sharing some of the key messages that we had this year.

I want to get into today’s episode and we’re continuing our series today on finding readers for your blog. If you haven’t listened to the last three episodes, I really would encourage you to do it now. This series started in episode 33 of the ProBlogger Podcast. The first podcast from this series in that episode 33, we talked about identifying who you want to reach for your blog and building a reader avatar which wasn’t directly about how to find readers but it was one of those foundational things that you really do need to work on. If you haven’t listened to that one, I do encourage you to go back to it because many of the things we’re going to talk about today build upon knowing who you’re trying to reach.

The second episode in this series was episode 34 where we talked about the type of content that you want to have on your blog if you want to find readers. Obviously, you need to have content that’s going to serve your readers when they come but you also want to create shareable content and I share some ideas on how to create that kind of content for your blog.

In the last episode, episode 35, we talked about building a sticky blog, so how to actually hook your readers in once they come. Again, this is something else you need to do before you go hunting for readers really because, otherwise, I’ll just come and then bounce away from your blog. I do encourage you to go back and listen to those three episodes before you get into today. I will say that in the next episode, I’m also going to continue this series by sharing with you a few more techniques for building your readership.

Today, I want to look at two kinds of themes. One will be quite quick and the other one, I’m going to dig in quite a bit deeper. Let’s get into it.

The first thing I want to talk about is building your readership through prolific usefulness in commenting. Now, the reason that I don’t want to talk for too long on this one is that we have already touched on this in a couple of episodes of the 31 Days to Build a Better Blog, but I do want to touch on it here.

The reason I actually am bringing this one up today is because I’ve actually had some really good conversations with bloggers in the last few days at our event who built their readership through this very technique; commenting prolifically on other people’s blogs, forums, and other places as well. This, I would say, is a really great place to start if you are just starting out with blogging and you are looking to find your first readers for your blog.

It will not bring you thousands of readers overnight. It’s something that is going to bring you a few readers at a time. That’s particularly good as you’re getting going, as you’re establishing yourself, as you’re gaining your own confidence. This is a lower level strategy. Over the rest of this episode and the next episode, I’m going to get into some higher-level things, but I think this is a good place to start.

It will help you to grow in your confidence as you begin to express yourself and grow your profile. It also helps you to learn about your niche because you’ll be commenting on other blogs in your niche and forums and in doing so, you’re actually starting to hear how other people blog and see how they interact with their readers as well. You also begin to see some of the needs in your niche. It will also help you to get to know others in your niche (which is something that I want to expand upon in a moment) and also begin to build your profile while driving and use some smaller amounts of traffic.

Now, I’m not going to go in a whole heap of detail about how to do this, but if it does interest you, I encourage you to go back to episode 9 of this podcast. It was part of our 31 Days to Build A Better Blog series. In that episode, I talk about using forums and commenting at other people’s forums but also commenting on other people’s social media groups, so finding Facebook groups and finding LinkedIn groups that are on your topic, and just being a useful participant in those groups.

Also in episode 20, I talk about how to comment on other people’s blogs in a way that grows your profile and drives traffic back to your blog. That would be a great starting place for you if you’re just starting out.

Another similar tactic that I’ve seen a number of people use quite well is to be prolifically useful in other social media channels and really this is similar in some ways to commenting on blogs, in Facebook groups, or forums, but it’s about watching out for conversations that relate to your niece. Again, I talked to another blogger and I’ve had a whole heap of conversations in the last few days with bloggers so these are fresh in my mind. 

One blogger that I talked to at the event said that she has some keyword searches set up on Twitter. She uses a tool called Sprout Social that allows her to set a keyword. I won’t tell you what the keyword is because I don’t have permission to share it but she watches a keyword that she knows a lot of people use when they’re searching for information that relates to her niche.

Anytime she sees anyone using that word or asking a particular question, she’s able to jump in with an answer. That often opens up all kinds of conversations with people and some of those people then go on to check out who she is and what her blog is. Sometimes, she’s able to answer the question they’re asking with a link to a post that she’s written on the topic as well.

Again, this doesn’t drive her thousands of readers at once. It actually finds her one new reader at a time, but because she started that relationship with a conversation with someone on a social media channel, sometimes they go back and forth for up to 10 times. That reader is already engaged before they land on her blog and they’re much more likely to subscribe and keep coming back.

They’re also much more likely to recommend her and her blog to other people and she sees that constantly after these conversations. People tell other people, “You should check out this particular blog.” Not a high-level strategy. It’s not going to drive you thousands, but it’s going to drive you people who are engaged, people who you have significantly helped in some way.

Another blogger I’ve met previously to this year’s event does almost exactly the same thing on YouTube where she watches a number of other YouTube channels that relate to her niche. When people ask questions, she’s able to respond to those questions. Now, she’s not spamming the question and the comments with her links but she’s commenting as her brand name. She has a YouTube channel that that brand name links back to and people go and check out what she does. She’s also got a YouTube channel there. From her YouTube channel, she is able to link back to her blog.

It’s all really about trying to work out where your readers are engaging⁠—whether it be another blog, forum, YouTube, or a social media channel⁠—and then being useful in those places. It’s not about spamming them, it’s about being useful but having a way that people can find out more if they want.

I’ll just emphasize this again. When you’re useful to people, when you’re answering their questions, when you are helping them to achieve something that is a challenge for them, they’re much more likely to want to know who you are but come to your blog in an open state wanting to connect with you, wanting to give something back to you, and wanting to share you and who you are with the people that they know.

The key here is to be useful and it’s to be regular. So, don’t just comment once on a blog and never go back to it. Actually, have a few blogs that you want to comment on regularly. You might not do it every day, you may do it two or three times a week but if you do it two or three times a week, other readers will begin to get to know who you are and the blogger will also get to know who you are as well. The same thing is true in forums and in social media. If you’re regular, people begin to notice you over time and that has a snowball effect over time as well. 

Technique number one is to be prolifically useful by commenting, whether it be on blogs, forums, or social media challenges.

The next thing I want to talk about, I want to go into a little bit more depth to it. This one, I’ve seen a number of bloggers, particularly here in Australia over the last couple of years, use very well to grow their readership. It’s a bit of a slow burner, but like the last one, it actually has an accumulative effect. It’s all about networking, it’s all about building relationships with other key influencers in your niche.

I’ve seen a number of bloggers do this particularly well and really broke through with their blogs over the last couple of years. These bloggers are looking for win-win opportunities with other people in their niche, that will help them to grow their exposure and their profile but also to grow traffic to their blog. I’m going to give you some specific things that they’ve done here, but I want to start with a fairly unspecific one and that is just informal networking.

This is about getting to know other bloggers in your niche and that’s a good starting point for many of the other things I want to talk about over the rest of this podcast. The reason you want to do this is that many of the types of readers that you want to reach with your blog—we talked about this in a previous episode, building an avatar for your blog—will be reading other people’s blogs. A little exercise that you might like to do is to identify who are the key bloggers that your potential reader is already reading.

You can do the same thing with Twitter. One of the key Twitter accounts that your potential reader is already following, one of the key Facebook pages, and the list can go on. YouTube accounts, Periscope accounts, podcasts, one of the key places that your reader is already engaging in, reading, and listening to. Once you know that, you can then begin to think about who should you try and get to know, who are the main players that could help you to grow your readership to that type of reader.

This may sound a little strategic and it is on some levels but as I’m going to say over and over again in the next little while, this all works best if you genuinely reach out to people and you genuinely look for win-win collaborations with people. Who are these people? Who should you try and get to know?

You’re probably going to come up with a list that includes some very well-known people and some very popular people. Some might turn these A-listers, the A-list bloggers. I don’t particularly like that term but I can’t really think of anything that’s better at the moment so let’s use it.

Some of these A-listers are getting approached all the time and they are going to be hard to get on the radar of, they’re going to be hard to build a relationship with. Although, some of them will be quite open to that. I want you, in your list, to also include that second-tier down again. We may call them the B-listers, the C-listers, or the D-listers but they’re the less popular bloggers, perhaps the more recent bloggers into that field. 

Here I’m also talking about other fields as well so it might be Instagram, it might be YouTube, or it might be people with Pinterest accounts. By identifying who you want to get to know, you can then begin to work at getting to know them and building relationships with them.

This could happen in all manner of ways. It might be shooting them at a friendly email to introduce yourself, it might be following them on social media, just commenting and responding to the things that they say. It might be commenting on their blog. It may actually be about going to a meetup to meet them if they are speaking at an event, to go and line up, meet them, and introduce yourself.

There’s a whole heap of ways that you can do this and I will say it takes time to do that particularly if that blogger is on the radar of lots of people if they’re an A-lister.

The other thing to say here is that relationships take time to develop, so don’t expect too much too early. Don’t expect that your first tweet to someone is going to make you best friends with them, it takes time to grow these relationships. Another thing you can do to begin to deepen that relationship is to be generous to that person; share their links, retweet their tweets, comment on their blog posts, help them to achieve their goals in some way as well. This sometimes will open up reciprocation, this sometimes will help them to take notice of who you are and want to check out who you are and get on their radar.

I want to give you a really practical example of this. Again, I’m talking about one of the bloggers from our conference and again, I don’t have permission to share this story in great detail, so I’ll keep it fairly general. I talked to one blogger at our conference this week who told me that, when she started her blog, she put together a list of 20 bloggers, Instagrammers, and YouTubers that were already more established in her niche.

She was just starting out so she didn’t know any of them. She had no relationships with anyone else in her niche at all. These included the A-listers but it also included some smaller bloggers and bloggers that had—some of them—just started in the last few months. She went right from other newbies of bloggers and Instagrammers right through to the more experienced ones, but these were 20 people she wanted to get to know. Her goal wasn’t just to get traffic from them, her goal was to learn from them, her goal was to watch them and to see how she could help them in some way.

She decided that she’d set the goal for herself, that she wanted to connect with each one of them in some way every 72 hours. Every three days, she wanted to have some kind of interaction with them. She actually set up a spreadsheet to do this. This might sound a little dry and strategic, but it helped her to keep on track and she just made a note of how she reached out to them every 72 hours.

She wasn’t emailing them every 72 hours, calling them, or anything really annoying. It included things like responding to tweets, it included things like commenting on their YouTube video, on their blog post, or their Instagram accounts. Occasionally, she would actually email them. Occasionally, she told me that she even went to meetups that they were running to meet them or to meet their readers. It was a whole variety of things. Some of them quite involved and some of them very simple.

Over three or so months, she noticed that some of them began to respond back to her. It didn’t happen overnight but it gradually grew. She said that after about three months, about half of these 20 people had engaged in some kind of conversation with her. So whether that be a comment’s conversation or a social media conversation, she’d begun to get responses from them. She wasn’t stalking them, she was just being friendly with them. Over time, opportunities began to grow.

Some of them shared her content, some of them invited her to guest post on their blog. One of them interviewed her on a YouTube clip through a Google Hangout, and gradually over time, she became good friends, genuine friends with a couple of them as well. That also opened up opportunities to collaborate. That blog is now two years into her blogging and she’s quite well-established in her niche and she really puts it down to this relational growth, and just informally getting to know other people in her niche.

This is a great place to start but what I’ve actually seen over the years is that many bloggers, once they get to know other bloggers, maybe they meet them at a conference and spend a couple of days with them, maybe it’s through purely virtual forms of getting to know other bloggers. Many bloggers, though, take it to the next level and this can take some time to get to.

Over the years, I’ve come across a number of bloggers who form slightly more formal relationships with one another. Some people actually would call this forming a blog alliance. Some people would maybe call it a mentoring group or a mastermind group. I’ll give you a really good example of this and this came out of our event. Lots of these examples are at the moment because they’re so fresh in my mind.

I was talking to a group of three bloggers. They came up to me at our networking party on Friday night and they told me that they met at our event three years ago. Three years ago, they’re all newbies at our event and they got to know one another and realized that they were all writing about very similar things, they were all very new bloggers writing about similar things. They decided to start a little group.

It started as an email group. They just decided that once or twice a week, they would email each other and have a discussion about keeping each other accountable for some of the things that they decided to do at our event three years ago.

It started very informally, it was relational, but then over time, they decided to get a little bit more serious and so they started a Facebook group. In the Facebook group, they decided they wanted to have daily contact with one another. One of the things they did in that Facebook group was to share links to the posts they were writing each day.

At first, it was so that they could comment on each other’s blog posts which helped to build a bit of social proof but over time, they also began to share each other’s blog posts, they began to add further reading to each other’s blog posts. If one wrote about a topic that another had already written about, that would include the link to that other blogger’s post at the end of the article as further reading.

They continued to comment on each other’s blogs, they began to brainstorm ideas for content for each other’s blogs, they began to tackle the same topics as a series of posts but on different blogs. One would start the series one day, the next will continue on the next day, and then the last one would finish the series on their blog the last day. Then again, they would interlink their posts.

They also began to monetize their blogs together. They wrote an ebook together, the three of them, and then they jointly launched it on all three blogs. They also did a joint campaign with a brand. They each wrote a sponsored post for the same brand and were able to get the attention of this larger brand by the three of them working together.

You can see here that they did all kinds of things together and it’s becoming more and more formal, I guess, this relationship that they have. When they told me that this little alliance that they had formed three years ago when they were very new bloggers, has been the number way that their blogs have grown since that time. Each of the three blogs has had moments in the spotlight where they’ve had bursts of traffic but they’ve committed that they want to bring each other along on that journey. When one grows, the other two grow as well. When the other two have their moments in the spotlight, that first blog grows as well.

I just love this because it’s very easy for bloggers to become competitive in their niche and to compare one another themselves with one another, for animosity to build up, jealousy and that type of thing, but these three bloggers have really decided that they’re not going to let themselves go there but they’re going to work together. They’ve grown quite quickly as a result because they’ve worked together.

They haven’t done a whole heap of other activities to promote their blogs. The main part of their growth has been through this relationship that they’ve grown. I would encourage you, as you do get to know other bloggers in your niche to reach out to them, you may not get as far as these three bloggers have in terms of you know the structure of the group but even just some sharing of each other’s posts can really help you to grow.

We’re talking today about these relational ways of growing your blog. Another way that you can do this and this is perhaps slightly less relational although it can be quite relational is to pitch other influencers, pitching them your links. When I started blogging, this used to happen mainly where you would email another blogger in your niche and say, “Would you consider linking to a post that I’ve written?”

Today, it happens perhaps less on blogs and more social media. People tend to share their links on social media and I know a number of bloggers in the niches that I operate and actually love to be pitched ideas because it’s part of their brand, their followers actually follow them because they’re sharing interesting links. 

If you’ve written a piece of content on your blog that you think would be particularly suited to the audience of another person, don’t be afraid to shoot them a note and suggest that they might check it out and even consider linking to it. Now, you want to keep in mind a few things here.

Firstly, A-listers—again that term, I don’t like it, but I’ll use it today—get a lot of this kind of approach. You might not get as many responses from them, so consider doing it more with smaller bloggers or medium-sized bloggers and particularly pay attention to people who are regularly sharing content on their social channels. Some people do it more than others and so if they are, then they’ll probably be more likely to share your stuff.

You don’t want to do this with every single post that you’ve written to the same blogger or the same social media influencer, you don’t want to be spammy with them. You want it to be highly relevant to what they’re trying to do and to the type of stuff that they share, and it needs to be the highest quality work that you’ve got.

Ultimately, you want to pitch your most useful content to these influencers and of course, we want all our content to be useful but some content is more useful than others and some is more likely to be shared and more likely to be helpful to the people who come to your site. So, keep the quality as high as possible. 

Also, you want to pay attention to any benefit that you can bring the person who’s sharing the content. As you’re writing content, you might want to quote them, you might want to link to their blog on something they’ve written on the same topic. If they’re mentioned in the post, they’re much more likely to want to share that. You may actually want to approach them before you write the post and say, “Could I get you a quick comment or a quick quote from you?” and then you include that in the post and then again, they’re more likely to want to share that.

As you’re approaching people, be as friendly, courteous, personal, and short-winded as possible. People respond when you are to the point but you’re friendly as well. Don’t do mass approaches. Don’t send the same email out to 40 people and not use their name. People can tell if you’re doing that, but if you genuinely approach someone in a polite, courteous way, and don’t take too much of their time, they won’t mind those sorts of pitches.

Share their stuff as well. Show them that you’re actually interested in supporting them and if they do share your stuff, of course, follow up with a thank you. Pitching other bloggers works much better if they know who you are. This is one of those things that build upon what I’ve already talked about, actually getting on their radar, getting to know them, being helpful with them.

Another technique that you might like to use—this also fits under this idea of relationships and promoting a blog through relationships—is featuring other influencers. I’ve seen a number of bloggers and particularly podcasters grow quite quickly on the back of featuring guests on their blog. Guests that have some level of influence. Again, this may not be the A-lister. This may actually be just another blogger who is a bit more advanced than you, but actually having them guest post on your blog, you interview them on your blog, on your podcast, or you featuring them in a Webinar, for instance, can actually bring your blog a lot of life and drive traffic to you.

This can be a bit harder at the start. If you have just started your blog and no one knows who you are and you’re trying to approach someone who is famous to appear on your blog in an interview, you may not get so lucky with that. You want to start to think at a lower level here. Who is someone a bit more advanced than you that you could interview? By getting them, that person might be on the radar of someone the next level up.

Gradually, over time, as you begin to interview people, as you begin to feature people in different ways, those who know them would be more interested in appearing in your next episode. So quite often when people ask me to do an interview on their podcast, they’ll say we’ve already had these people on our podcast and some of those people, if I know who they are, I’ll probably be more open to taking that interview.

Think about building a portfolio and again, take your time with this. This builds with momentum over time. There are a few benefits to doing this. Firstly, if someone who’s got some influence appears on your blog, in some ways, you borrow the influence. It makes an impression upon your readers and those who eventually do come to see that person on your blog. It’s also more shareable content. People like to share that kind of content. “This famous person or this person of influence is on this blog, and here’s what they think about this.” That is shareable content.

You might also find that the person you’re interviewing, the person you’re featuring may want to share that with their networks as well. This is where things can really take off. I remember the first time that I interviewed a media personality here in Australia on ProBlogger and that person then shared it with their Twitter following that led to a boost in traffic and that helped me to grow in my readership as well. 

Lastly, this type of content sometimes gets searched for. I know on iTunes, for instance, people search for people’s names there. If you’ve done an interview with that person, you will come up in the search results. The same is true for Google as well. 

The last thing I want us to talk about in today’s podcast. Here, we’re talking about relational ways of growing your blog and this is just one type of approach. One of the things I’ve noticed is that many of these things I’ve been talking about escalate and they get faster in terms of their impact out of real-life interactions.

This is impossible for everyone but when you meet someone in real life, it does speed up the relationship very often. I particularly noticed this this year at our ProBlogger event. I know mentioning it a lot here, but it’s so fresh in my mind. What I’ve noticed is that people who meet one another and then meet one another in an ongoing relationship are the people who have grown the fastest through these relational ways of growing their blogs.

If there’s some way that you can meet someone by going to a conference or a meetup, that can really cement these relationships and grow things much faster. It’s not possible for everyone, so don’t give up on the virtual relationship, either. But if there’s an opportunity to meet in real life or even to have more personal interactions with people online through video, through a Skype call, and hearing their voice, this can speed up some of the stuff that I’m talking about today.

The last thing I’ll say is that relationships do take time. Reaching out to other online influencers may not have the success that you imagined straight away but persist with it and things do tend to snowball. As you get to know one person, other people will be more open to meeting you as well if they see you interacting with them.

If you’ve got that portfolio of interviews, they’re more likely to take your interview. If they see you interacting with them on social media they’re more likely to want to interact with you as well. It sounds a bit sad in some ways and it kind of is but it’s the way we are as humans. When we see people interacting with other people and we know one of the parties, we’re more interested in meeting the other people, too.

The last thing I’ll say is don’t just look inside your niche, look for related niches, too. When I started Digital Photography School, I was interacting with a lot of other photography bloggers. Some of the best promotions that we did were when we actually pitched our articles to other blogs slightly outside of our niche. I used to pitch my articles to a blog called Lifehacker. Lifehacker, some of you are familiar with, it’s actually a tips blog and it does have a technology spin but it wasn’t just about photography, it was about many aspects of life. It was a broader niche in some ways.

While it wasn’t directly about photography, the readers of that blog were actually interested in learning technological type things. When they did link to us, it sent us some really good traffic. Large numbers because it was a large blog, but it was the right kind of traffic because they taught people how to improve different areas of their life. Don’t just pay attention to the key players in your niche, go beyond that as well. 

One of the problems that I see a lot of bloggers doing is that they only ever focus on people who are like them. That’s good in the early days of your blog, to find your first readers, but if you’re only ever interacting with the same bloggers all the time, it gets to a point where you might be just preaching to the converted. You might find that your blog’s readers are pretty much the same and that may be a ceiling point for you. Then, you want to start to think about other bloggers that you could interact with other set social media influencers.

Always be looking for the win-win. Don’t go into this with selfish motivations. Yes, you do want to grow your readership but you want to also help them in some way. This works best when it’s genuine. People will be a bit suspicious if you come to them and say, “Could you link to my blog? Could you link to my blog?” But if you’re actually looking for a win-win solution where they have some benefit out of a relationship, too, everyone benefits and that’s where real friendship emerges. 

The thing that I’ve loved the most about this kind of approach to growing my blog is that I don’t only end up with readers, I end up with friends. That’s one approach to growing readers for your blog. It’s actually through relationships and this is probably my favorite way of growing my blog’s readers because I’m a kind of a relational person.

In the next episode, I’m going to get a little bit more technical and I’m going to suggest some more strategic things that you can do, some practical things that you can do to grow your blog. Before we get into that, I love to hear your feedback on this approach to growing your readership. 

Today’s show notes are at problogger.com/podcast/36. I would love to hear: (1) What are these strategies that you are going to try yourself? How are you going to approach building relationships with other bloggers? (2) What have you already done that’s worked? Have you ever formed a relationship with another blogger in some formal way? Do you have a blog alliance or mentoring group that you do this type of thing with? If you don’t and you want one, perhaps leave a comment in the show notes there and be open to that from other bloggers as well. There’s a whole heap of bloggers listening to this podcast every day. You may just find, if you leave a comment there, about what your blog is, that someone else might reach out to you and who knows where that friendship might lead.

I love to hear your feedback on this and I love to connect with you on our social channels as well. Go to facebook.com/problogger to join with our Facebook community and follow me on Twitter at @ProBlogger. Talk to you in episode 37 of the ProBlogger Podcast in a couple of days.

Are you already using some of these commenting and relationship techniques to grow your blog readership? What would you add? What will you try next?

I’d love to hear your answers to those questions. Let me know in the comments below, and 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.

Today’s episode is about how to find new readers for your blog. It’s the question I get asked most by bloggers, so this is the third of several podcasts on this topic. In part one we looked at two really important questions to ask before you go hunting for readers to read your blog. In part two, we talked about how to use two types of content to find readers for your blog. Today, we talk about building a blog that readers will want to return to again and again (a ‘sticky’ blog).

i don’t understand this Hamlet!!! by David Pereiras 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 talk about:

Today, we’re continuing our series on finding readers for your blog. It’s a topic we’re all interested in as bloggers. In the last two episodes, I’ve been building some foundations for finding readers for your blog. In episode 33, I’ve talked about two questions to ask about the potential readers you’re trying to attract. In the last episode, episode 34, I talked about two types of content that can help you to find new readers for your blog.

Today, I want to suggest one more thing to think about as a good foundation for building a blog with lots of readers—building a sticky blog. You might be asking, what is a sticky blog? A sticky blog is one way a first-time reader of your blog finds it difficult to leave. That might sound like you’re going to try and trap them or send them a virus to their computer or something like that. It’s nothing like that at all. It’s because something in your blog motivates them to explore it further and/or they make a decision to return and keep connected in some way. The goal of what we’re talking about today is to get people deeper into your blog, viewing more pages, subscribing, connecting, and following in some way. 

The reality is that most people who arrive on your blog surf away and they’re gone again within seconds. It’s less than 10 seconds (I would guess) in most cases. How are you going to hook them? How are you going to keep them on your blog longer? These questions are questions that I think are really important. I’m surprised how few posts there are in blog tips on this particular topic. It makes sense to me that it’s better to find a reader and keep them coming back once a week for the rest of the year—52 times—than to go way out and have to find 52 new readers. Turning that one reader into a regular reader will pay off in the long term. 

This is actually how I think it’s best to grow your readership. If all you’re doing is promoting your blog to new readers and not convincing any of them to hang around, you’re going to hit a ceiling as to how many readers you can have. But if you continue to add new loyal readers into your blog every day by hooking them in, then you can begin to grow your readership over time. 

What I want to do today is to suggest 15 ways that you can hook readers into your blog, that you could build a sticky blog. None of these 15 things go for long. I’m going to whip through them pretty quickly. I’ll give you some further reading in many of them, but I think some of these will help different bloggers, depending on what type of blog you have and what life stage you’re at with your blog, too. 

The first thing is to have some ways for people to subscribe, follow, or connect. This is not rocket science, but it’s amazing how many people haven’t really thought this one through. Firstly, it’s about trying to work out which is the best option to subscribe. Personally, I find email is the best way both for my blogs. Social networks can be good, too, but they tend to come and go over time and they don’t give you complete control over how you can communicate with people. Facebook, for instance, filters your updates, so not everyone will see all of your updates. On email, generally get through to people and you have more control over it.

It will vary from blog to blog. There is a whole heap of different ways to get people to subscribe or follow. One might be email. Another might be your blog’s RSS feed. There are also services out there that turn your blog’s RSS feed into an email. FeedBurner has one, for instance, but there are others. Social media is another way you can get people to follow, connect, or subscribe. Many people use their Facebook page almost like an RSS feed. They just put in a new post there. Twitter, Pinterest, Google+, Instagram, or even a new tool like Periscope that’s become more popular recently. Then, there are other platforms that you can get people to subscribe to your podcast, your YouTube channel. There’s a whole heap of different ways that you can offer for people to connect with you. 

Here’s the thing, I would encourage you to work out which is your number one priority. Call people to subscribe to that, number one. I think having a one clear call to action is going to be less overwhelming and less confusing to people. That doesn’t mean you can’t have multiple but I would have one key one which is your main call to action then follow that up with some others. For us, email is our number one. We do have buttons for others but email is the big priority. We’re pretty aggressive with how we try to get people to sign up.

In Digital Photography School, we actually use a popup. In ProBlogger, we don’t use that. We have a more subtle slide in at the bottom of the page on problogger.net. You need to really tailor that depending upon your blog and how your blog readers will respond to it.

The other thing I’ll say about calling people to subscribe is that it’s totally fine to have multiple places on your blog where you do make that invitation to subscribe. A popup might be one. That may be a bit aggressive for you and that’s totally fine. A hello bar at the top, in your sidebar. 

Another great place that I find really useful and it converts quite well is at the end of the blogpost; we’ve actually built it into our template. Underneath the post, it’s the place that people pull at the end of the post and they’re looking for something else to do. It’s a great place to put further reading or something like that. An ad, even, if you’re monetizing with ads and also a call to subscribe can be useful. So, that’s the first thing, is to decide how you want people to subscribe and then call people prominently to do that. 

The second thing related to that. It’s about not only calling people to subscribe in your blog template, in your design, but also in your content. During a blog post, that may actually be relevant there to call people to subscribe. I actually find those in content invitations convert particularly well. The other thing you might want to do in your blog post is to educate your readers as well.

When Twitter first came out, for instance, we ran a number of posts in Digital Photography School about how to use Twitter. We’re actually educating our readers on how to use these different social networks. Now, a lot of people would know how to use Facebook these days but a new tool like Periscope (which just came out), maybe something that you might want to write a blog post on, partly to educate your readers and be useful to them but also to call them to action to follow you on that new social network.

Number three way to make your blog sticky is to really pay attention to the first impressions that readers get when they come to your site. People decide, as I’ve mentioned before in the first few seconds, what your blog’s about whether it’s relevant for them. You want to think very carefully about what your blog is communicating in those first few seconds to really communicate that effectively. If people are confused about what your blog is about, then they’re probably unlikely to stick around and subscribe.

A great place to think about that is to go back to episode one of this podcast where we talked about creating an elevator pitch for your blog. That elevator pitch may actually turn into a tagline that you might want to include. Other ways to communicate really quickly what your blog is about is the title of your blog, the tagline, the categories of your blog, what’s appearing in the navigation areas, and the design as well, which leads me to point number four in making your blog sticky—the design of your blog.

The first impression that your blog design creates is so important. People are making snap judgments about whether your blog’s professional, whether it’s relevant, whether it’s on-brand for their type of person that they are. You want to make your blog as clear, as clean, and as inviting as possible to people.

Not only the design of your blog but actually the way you layout your blog posts can have a massive impact as well. The difference between someone coming to your blog and then bouncing straight off again because it’s too hard to read and it’s not presented in an aesthetically pleasing way. It can be the difference between them bouncing away or them actually reading on. Things like using images in your blog posts can really be the difference between your post being read or not. Creating a blog post that’s scannable, using headlines, shorter paragraphs, using formatting like bold, italics, that type of thing, using lists, and even the headlines of your blog posts and how accessible they are.

The other aspect of design is how it looks on the mobile. Increasingly, people are landing on your blog on their phones. How does it look to them on that? Is it beautiful? Is it engaging? Or is it crowded, confusing, and hard to use? These types of things are factors in building a sticky blog—a blog that people want to subscribe to and keep coming back to.

The fifth thing I want to talk about briefly is building anticipation on your blog. If you think about the blogs that you subscribe to or the blogs that you follow on social media—the ones that you’re most engaged with—think back to when you first subscribe, to when you first followed them. Why did you do that? Why did you follow that blog?

I would argue that in almost every case, it’s probably because you anticipated that something was coming that would enhance your life in some ways. It’s about projecting forward. As you sat there looking at that blog, “I want to be in touch with this blogger because they’re going to produce something that could make my life better in some way.” So, it’s anticipation, it’s momentum. There are ways that you can build anticipation in someone arriving in your blog.

One of the best ways to do it is to write blog posts that are a part of a series of content. In some ways, that’s what happening here in this podcast right now. This is the third part in the series. We still got another couple of parts to go. At the end of this podcast, I’ll tell you what the next episode is about. That gives you an incentive if it’s relevant to you to subscribe. I encourage you to do so in iTunes. Creating a series of content could get people thinking about the future post and how they’re going to get those. Hinting on what’s to come is one way of building that anticipation.

Another way to do it is to have a regular type of post that comes up in your blog. On Digital Photography School, every Friday, we give our readers a challenge. We say, “Go away and take a photo on this theme. Then, come back and share it.” We have readers that that’s the only post they read every week. They subscribed and engaged because they love that post. You might do an opinion post every Tuesday. You might review a product every Wednesday. You can actually build regularity into your post and communicate to your readers that this is the type of post that you do on this day. Once a month, you might do another type of post. This regularity shows your readers that there’s more to come that might be relevant to them. Anything you can do to build anticipation is worth doing.

I’ve got a link in today’s show notes on building anticipation on your blog.

Another really simple way of making your blog sticky is by interlinking your posts. Any opportunity that you have to link to another post that you’ve written already is a great way to get people to view another page on their site. If they’re viewing extra pages, they’re more likely to see your good stuff and more likely to subscribe.

Get into the habit as you’re writing a post and you mentioned a topic that may not be exactly what your blog’s about but it could be interesting to someone, link back to those old posts. A great way to do this is at the end of the post, include further readings. You’ve got to the end of your post but there are other things in your archives that your readers might find interesting. So, create a further reading, at least.

There are tools and plugins around that that can do this for you automatically. They might pull in things like other posts in your categories or your most popular posts. You can also curate these lists by yourself.

Related to this is my seventh tip. That is to create a sneeze page. We talked about this in episode 18. It is probably the most effective way that I’ve come across to get people reading other posts in your archives and getting people deep into your archives. You want to use these sneeze pages to highlight your best content as much as possible. Then, include the links to these sneeze pages in your navigation areas. If you’ve got no idea what I’m talking about with the sneeze page, go back and listen to episode 18. It is so effective. I had so much positive feedback on that particular episode.

The eighth tip I’ll give you is to use social proof. This is a term that many of you will be familiar with. Most of you have seen it even if you don’t know the term. You probably walked down a street where there’s been a whole heap of restaurants, looked into the restaurants, and noticed that one has a whole heap of people. A lot of others don’t have anyone. You’re much more likely to go into the one with lots of people. This is social proof in action. We like to do what other people do. It’s just part of who we are as human beings. 

There are ways that you can signal that there are parts of your blogs being read more and that there are readers hanging out in your blog. If people come to your blog and they say, “Oh, look.” All those comments that have been left on the post, they’re much more likely to go and read that post. Signaling where there’s action in your blog, highlighting the popular parts in your blog can be one part of this.

If you do have readers of your blog already, perhaps you’ve already got a whole heap of people following you on Facebook, highlight that in different ways. Actually have in your “Follow us on Facebook,” button the number of people that are already following you there. This is something that is a little bit harder if you are a new blogger. You might not have many readers yet or many subscribers. As your blog grows, highlight the action that’s happening on your blog. Any kind of community, any kind of interaction that you have is important.

That’s my ninth tip, get your interaction up. People are much more likely to come back to your blog if they’ve left a comment, if they’ve voted in the poll, if they’ve entered the competition, if they’ve participated in some kind of project that you’re running. Get interaction up. Invite people to comment. Invite people to participate in your blog. Community breads community. It’s part of the social proof part of your blog which I just talked about. 

If you’ve got a tool like Disqus as your commenting system on your blog, that actually lets people know when you respond to their comments. There are other plugins around that you can install if you’re just using WordPress comments to let people know when someone responded to their comments. These types of tools can be good but they mean that you need to be responding to comments as well. Getting interaction up is really important.

My tenth tip of the 15, I want to run through quickly, is to be as personal as you can. I found on my blogs that people are much more likely to subscribe and connect with a human being than they are with a brand.

On ProBlogger, everywhere you go, you probably see my face. That’s partly to personalize the brand and people seem to like to be able to connect with that. I don’t think it’s just my face. The way I think, people like people. Being personal on your blog by using your photo, by telling stories, but also by using different mediums. A medium like a podcast, you’re hearing my voice. You’re not just reading some random words at someone out there. You’re actually listening to my words. You can hear my inflection. You can hear my accent and who I am. 

Using other tools like Periscope where people go and actually see you, they can interact with you. These types of things tend to make people feel a deeper connection with you than just purely using words. Words can do it but adding in these other mediums can be really helpful as well.

Be personal with your writing but with the mediums that you use as well. People are much more likely to come and read your stuff after they’ve talked to you or they had some kind of interaction with you.

The eleventh thing I’ll talk about is consider—you don’t have to do this one—removing the dates on old posts on your blog. This is a bit controversial. It will depend upon the type of blog that you have. I do this on Digital Photography School but not on ProBlogger. That’s because the type of content that I’m creating on ProBlogger is a little bit more timely. We’re talking about tools, plugins, or techniques that work today but may not work in a month’s time. It’s important for us to have the dates on those particular posts.

In Digital Photography School, we’re talking about a lot of concepts that do not date over time. I’ve written a post eight years ago now on the topic of aperture. I still link back to that particular post today because it is relevant for today. 

If your content is evergreen, you don’t have to do it, but consider the option of removing the dates from those posts. When someone shows up and sees that a post was written eight years ago, even if it’s completely relevant for today, they’re going to start making judgments about it being old and less relevant for today. If your older content is still relevant for today, consider making that change in the way that your blog displays it. Another way to do it is to put the dates down the bottom of the post so when people are arriving, they don’t suddenly see this old date. They see it at the end once they’ve already consumed that content.

The twelfth thing I’ll briefly talk about is giving people incentive to subscribe to your blog. Again, there are different opinions on this and it can work really well. For instance, offering someone a free download of a PDF or a guide to something if they’ve subscribed to your newsletter. That will increase the number of people that will subscribe to your newsletter and that can be really effective. However, you will get some people who simply subscribe to get the free thing and then they unsubscribe. That’s the risk that you run with that particular type of approach.

A better way to do it might be to offer ongoing benefits. “If you sign up, I will give you a free course on this particular topic.” That course is delivered via a series of emails by that time. They’ve got more incentive to hang around for the next month, the next two months, or the next three months. They’ll also hear other communications in the mix as well.

The key when you’re offering an incentive for people to sign up is to keep it highly relevant to what the rest of your blog is about, of high quality. You want to send them the best stuff and make it ongoing in some sort of way. Hint at the ongoing benefits and that will help to get people not only to sign up but to stay subscribed.

The thirteenth thing is to work on your About page. One of the most highly read pages on any blog that has one is the About page. People hit the About link in your navigation area, if you have one, to (1) decide what your blogs about, (2) work out whether you’re credible, whether you actually know what you’re talking about. To find out what sort of style you have and to find out who’s behind the blog as well. They make a decision, more often than not, while they’re on that page, whether they’re going to continue to connect with you.

Use your About page effectively. Keep it up to date. I use it to tell my story. I think a story’s a great way to be relatable but also to talk about the benefits of subscribers. Actually, give people on your About page the option to connect with you more. Again, drive people to that number one way that you want them to connect with you, and you might follow that up with some secondary ones. And be personal on that page. Again, I’ll give you some further reading on About pages in today’s show notes.

The fourteenth and second to the last thing I’ll talk about today is to consider targeting different readers with different messages. Not everyone here arrives on your blog is in the same state. They’ve all got different intents. One of the ways that you can tell this is where they’ve come from. There are some great tools out there that allow you to deliver a different message to someone arriving from Google to Twitter, for instance.

One of the tools that we use on ProBlogger is OptinMonster. I’ve got a link for that in today’s show notes. It enables us to show a different call to action to someone coming from Google, from someone coming from another blog, or someone coming from Facebook.

For example, we find people coming in from Google, they leave again very quickly. We tend to be a bit more aggressive in the calls to action that we have from people from Google. They’re never going to come back again anyway. We want to interrupt them a little bit more and say, “Hey, here are some benefits of subscribing to this site.” We found that that works quite well for our particular site.

We serve them a more aggressive and a more direct popup on Digital Photography School if they’ve come in from Google. If they’ve come in from another blog, they’re more interested in the topic. They’re more interested and more open to the idea of seeing some more of our content. So, we show them different stuff based upon that. Again, the tool we’re using is OptinMonster, but there are other plugins and tools out there. You might want to do a bit of research on that.

The last thing I’ll say about making your blog sticky is you really want to pay attention to any post or part of your blog that gets a lot of traction, a lot of traffic already. Yesterday, we talked about creating shareable content for your blog. You do want to create that but you also want to watch what happens from time to time you create a shareable piece of content that goes viral. It may not go viral in that it gets visitors but it may get more than a normal post. They’re the posts you want to pay particular attention to honing and really thinking carefully about how you’re going to make those posts sticky. 

You might want to add an invitation to subscribe to that post. You might want to put some further reading or interlinking of posts in that particular post. You might want to write a second follow-up post to it. 

We noticed in the early days of Digital Photography School that we published a post that was 10 Tips for Portrait Photography that did really well. A week later, I followed it up with a second one, 10 More Tips for Portrait Photography. I linked those posts together. You got to the end of the first one which was continuing to get a lot of traffic from Google. You got to the end of it and you were invited to read the second part of the series. That drove a lot more traffic. 

Again, getting people to view a second page increases the chances that they’re going to subscribe and view more content as well. Pay particular attention to those hot posts that you’ve got that might be going a little bit more viral than others. Also, pay particular attention to any post in your archives that’s getting a whole heap of search engine traffic. You’ll notice over time, if you’ve been blogging for a year or two, you have one post in your archives that just randomly seems to be ranking really high for Google and sending a whole heap of traffic. It’s often a post you didn’t expect to rank high. They’re the post to go back and update them.

Another great technique that I’ve seen in action recently is to create an incentive to subscribe that relates to a specific post. I recently was talking to a blogger. She’d written this post on her blog about a particular style of calligraphy. It’s kind of a random, nichey kind of topic in many ways. She was ranking number one in Google for that particular style of calligraphy and she was getting hundreds of visits to this blog post everyday. 

They weren’t really sticking around. They read the post and then they went away. I said to her, “Why don’t you create a downloadable PDF on that particular topic? Offer it if anyone subscribes to your newsletter.” She set up a list on a web that basically offered this incentive. It had a little auto-responder in it. If you signed up, you got sent an email to a link in PDF that taught you a little bit more on this particular style of calligraphy. 

She was converting those hundreds of readers a day to 50 or so sing ups a day to her newsletter simply by adding that incentive to that single post. She didn’t mention the incentive in any of the other posts or anywhere else on the site. It was specific to a particular list. It worked really well. You might want to consider adding an incentive that relates to the particular post that you’ve got.

I hope some of those techniques have connected with you. I would encourage you not to go away and do all 15 at once. Pick one, two, or three of them. Over the next few days, you might want to start implementing them. 

In the next episode on this podcast—I told you that I was going to push forward and build some anticipation—I’m going to get more tactical. We’re going to talk more about techniques and some of the best techniques I’ve seen for finding readers for your blog. Before we get into that, it’ll be a couple of days away. I really would encourage you to choose one or two of these techniques in building a sticky blog. It’s going to help you so much more when you actually begin to find new readers if you can hook them in some way.

You can find today’s show notes at problogger.com/podcast/35. I would love to hear on those show notes what you would add out of your experience of blogging, what techniques have you used to build this sticky blog that would’ve worked well for you, and then what you’re going to do as a result of listening to this podcast. What technique are you going to focus on to implement on your blog?

I hope you found today’s episode useful. I will see you in a couple of days’ time in episode 35, which will be a little bit more tactical- and technique-oriented on finding readers for your blog.

Are you already using some techniques to make your blog sticky? What would you add? What will you try next?

I’d love to hear your answers to those questions. Let me know in the comments below, and 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.

Today’s episode is the second part of our series on how to find new readers for your blog.

It’s the question I get asked most by bloggers, so this is the second of several podcasts on this topic.

In part one we looked at two really important questions to ask before you go hunting for readers to read your blog. Today we talk about one other thing you need to consider before you go hunting for readers – the content on your blog.

Read Me by Kevin Carden 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 talk about:

The successful series of cornerstone content I published on the Digital Photography School blog about exposure:

Also relevant to this topic:

Now, I would encourage you to listen to the last episode, episode 33 before you listen to today because, in part one of this series, we looked at two really important questions to ask before you go hunting for readers for your blog. Those two questions (briefly) were, who do you want to read your blog and what change are you trying to bring in those readers’ lives. These are really important questions, and we’re going to build upon them in the next episodes in this series.

Today I want to talk about another thing you need to consider before you go hunting for readers. Now you might be really itching to get into some of the techniques that we’ve got coming up in future episodes. This one is so important and it’s going to make promoting your blog so much easier. He says, “I look back on my own journey of finding readers for my blogs, and I’ve got around five million people reading my blogs every month today. I can see that the techniques and strategies for growing readers,” that I’m going to talk about in a couple episodes’ time, “were important, but they weren’t as important as the actual content on my blog,” and that’s what I want to talk about today is content.

Most of the techniques I’m going to talk about in future episodes work so much better if you’ve got two things happening on your blog. Firstly, you need to have solid useful content on your blog that serves your readers. Secondly, and this probably isn’t as essential, but it’s certainly useful. You need to have some shareable content that you can use when you’re promoting your blog. In today’s episode, I want to talk about content. I want to suggest that you need to create these two types of content. I want to share some ideas on how to do that, which will put you in a great position to promote your blog in future episodes.

The first thing I want to talk about is building a blog that is worth being found. You can go and promote your blog as much as you like, but unless there’s something worthwhile on your blog, when people surf on by, then there’s little chance that they’ll stick around for longer than a few seconds. There’s little chance that they’ll subscribe or want to connect with you on social media, there’s little chance that that wants to come back again, and there’s little chance that they’ll tell anyone about you.

Ultimately, it comes down to creating something that’s attractive, interesting, and useful to people who arrive on your blog. Now there’s a whole heap of aspects that come into play with creating a blog that’s worth being found, and future episodes of this podcast really will be about that topic. The number one thing that you need to focus on, if you want to have a blog that’s worth being found is creating great content, content that serves people, content that is interesting to people, content that’s useful to people. The number one thing, when it comes to creating that type of content is focusing upon that change that you’re trying to bring to your readers.

This is where the last episode really comes into play and I would encourage you to listen to that. It’s episode 33 and it’s all about creating content that takes your readers on a journey that changes them in some way. If you’ve been blogging for a while, then hopefully you’ve already got a solid archive of great useful content that does change your readers’ lives. You can probably skip on to the next little part in this podcast in a few minutes time, but if you’re just starting out, then this really has to be your number one priority in the early days of your blog before you go hunting for readers.

This is what I would encourage you to focus most of your time on, creating what I call cornerstone content for your blog. Cornerstone content is sometimes called flagship content, pillar content, or even evergreen content. It’s the type of content that you build the rest of your blog around. It’s foundational stuff. It shows your expertise, and it shows your readers or your potential readers what your blog stands for and what it’s about. It’s also the content that you can continually link back to over time.

This is the type of content I really encourage you to spend some time creating in the early days of your blog, in particular. I outlined a really simple exercise for doing this in episode 11 of these podcasts. You might want to go back and listen to that. It’s an episode about coming up with ideas for content for your blog. In that episode, I shared about how I came up with my first 200 or so ideas for posts on my blog at Digital Photography School. 

In Digital Photography School, my number one goal for the first year to a year and a half of that blog was really about building up a library of cornerstone content. I didn’t spend a whole heap of time promoting my blog in those early days, although I did a little bit of that. I certainly didn’t spend much time monetizing that blog. My number one priority in those first two years was really about building up the library content because I knew if I had that as my foundation, then I’d be in a much better position to promote my blog, monetize my blog, and to leverage that content.

An example of this type of content—let me give you that—would be a little series that I wrote, just a series of four posts on Digital Photography School, and I write this series in the first few months of that blog. The series was on the topic of taking well-exposed photos. It was pretty simple stuff. It just had four posts in the series. The first post was about learning how to take well-exposed photos and introduce that concept and introduce three different elements of taking a well-exposed photo, aperture, ISO, and shutter speed. The rest of the series was really expanding upon those three topics, so I created posts on aperture, ISO, and shutter speed.

Now, I’ll link this topic content to these posts in the show notes. This topic content isn’t overly sexy, it’s not the content that people are going to go, “Wow, you’ve got to read this,” and share it all over the web. It’s good solid content on core ideas that are really important in photography. Not a week goes by today, even seven or so years later, where I don’t link back to those posts in posts because it’s cornerstone content. It’s what the rest of my blog is built about.

Anytime I mentioned aperture, ISO, or shutter speed, I’ll link back to those posts. Those posts, even today, are still getting a whole heap of content. In fact, they’re usually in the top 10 posts on my blog, even seven or so years later. This cornerstone content is really important. It’s not going to get shared a whole heap but it’s the type of traffic that tends to get ranked well in Google, and also you’re able to refer your own traffic back in time.

So, a few questions to help you to identify what type of content fits into this category of cornerstone content. A few questions to ask yourself, what questions do new readers always ask me? Or what do my friends always ask me about this topic? If you don’t have readers yet, they might be actually referring to your friends or it might be going back to your own questions that you had in the early days.

What key lessons did you learn to get to where you’re at today? That might help to identify some of those key things that you want to build the rest of your blog around? What keywords might people be searching for when it comes to your topic? Now you might have some actual data on that by what people are searching for on your blog, or it might be just what you would search for in Google.

What themes or topics do you want your blog to be known for? This is about what people might perceive your blog to be about, and that might reveal some of those key cornerstone topics. What posts have you already written that have done well, and so this is more for those of you who have been blogging for a while, actually, those posts may be the cornerstone content, or it may be about you going back and rewriting some of that content.

If you’re launching a blog at the moment, I really would encourage you to think about creating this type of content first, and build up this archive in the first year or so of your blog. When I’m launching a blog, I try to have at least three or four of these types of posts already live on the blog when I launch, so that when people arrive, those very first readers, they can see, “Hey, this is what this blog is about. It’s good solid content. This is useful content. I want to see more of this type of stuff.” That’s the first type of content. That really needs to be probably your number one priority, I’d say spend 90% of your content creation time focusing on that type of content. 

There’s another type of content that’s really useful when you are trying to find readers for your blog, and that is shareable content. If you want to find new readers, you want to create content that people who arrive on your blog or want to tell other people about. The reality is that there are some types of content that are much more likely to be shared than others. The examples I gave you before on ISO, aperture, and shutter speed. They’re not the sexiest content that I’ve ever created. They don’t get shared a whole heap, although they do get shared a bit because they’re useful, but there are other types of content that do better.

I want to say right up front that this shareable content isn’t the only type of content I would recommend you creating. Notice before I said spend 90% of your time creating cornerstone content and that leaves you about 10% of your time to create this more shareable content.

If you only share this shareable stuff, you’ll find that you don’t really always bring about the change that you’re trying to bring about in your readers. You might find readers come but they tend to bounce off a bit negative bit frustrated with this because this shareable content tends to be a little bit fluffier. I’ve referred to this in a talk I gave recently as cotton candy content. It’s sweet, it’s attractive, but you can’t live on it, you need something a little bit meatier in the mix as well.

Mixing in some of this shareable content from time to time will certainly help you to grow your readers. Let me give you some examples of the type of content I’m talking about here, and this will vary from blog to blog a little bit, but on Digital Photography School (my main blog), most of our content is how-to tutorials. If you go to Digital Photography School, you see most of the content there are these how-to tutorials,  how to do this, how to do that, how to take this type of photo.

I’d say it’s more informational type content. But there are types of posts that we do mix into that from time to time that do well in terms of their shareability. Perhaps the first type of posts that I used to create quite regularly once a week—we still do it once a week—is what we call our image collections. This might be a collection of 20 amazing photos that are taken with long exposures or long shutter speeds, they’re gorgeous photos with lots of beautiful lights in them or blurry waves over a beach shore. Sort of aspirational, inspirational type posts that have very few words, just images.

These posts do really well for us. Our readers love them, they get inspired by them, and they like to share them as well because they’re spectacular images. Now, the problem is that if all we ever posted was image collections, we would not be bringing our readers along on the journey of changing them in how they take photos. We’d be inspiring them but we’d never actually be teaching them anything. So, we don’t want to go fully down that road.

Another type of shareable posts for us (and these works on a lot of blogs) are anything that’s funny, so funny photos of someone taking a selfie and then falling off a fence. We shared one of those recently. A funny photo of a father holding his baby and the baby has a bit of an accident, a poo explosion all over him. Those types of photos that relate to our topic. They’re funny and they get shared a lot.

The problem with these types of posts is it doesn’t bring about any change. They’re great for you being seen by more people, but people don’t tend to hang around in these posts. We don’t do too many of those unless they’re really funny. We just get off on them because they’re funny for ourselves. A better type of shareable post for us on Digital Photography School are infographics. We find these worked very well with our audience. An infographic is easy to digest, very visual, and they’re easy to communicate very quickly to people.

By themselves, they don’t bring about a massive change in our readers, but they do start to talk to our readers about a particular topic. There’s one infographic on Digital Photography School about how to hold a camera. This is a really basic topic, but it’s one that’s important to our readers. It’s visual, it shows our readers how to actually hold a camera. This type of post does really well. It’s also very shareable. It got shared around heaps hundreds of thousands of times on social media.

The great thing about an infographic is that around it, it gives you an opportunity to share links to deeper content on the site, so we’re able to say, here’s an infographic on the topic, if you want to learn more, here’s a tutorial that will actually walk you through it.

This is the key. This is about driving people deeper into your site. What I find is that if you can get people to view more than one page on your site, you’re increasing the chances that they’re going to hang around. You’re increasing the chances that they’re going to remember your site and your brand. You’re increasing the chances that they’ll subscribe.

This is really very important. Infographics worked really well for us. They won’t work on every blog, but it might be something to try. Some of those infographics recreate ourselves and some of them we curate from other people’s sites with their permission, of course.

There’s also a whole heap of different types of posts and topics that work well for us on Digital Photography School. We find list posts work well in terms of their shareability. Posts like 10 tips to great portraits are not as deep as some of our other posts, but they’re a little bit more accessible and they tend to get shared a bit more. We find any post that uses the word mistakes in it, for example, does quite well. Five mistakes that travel photographers make. Step-by-step guides work well for us in terms of their shareability. Anything that’s a DIY post does really well for us, so a do-it-yourself post.

Anything with a bit of controversy can get shared a bit, so Nikon versus Canon or Sony versus Pentax tends to get people in. Although, I will say that controversy can also lead to a bit of snark as well on your blog, so you want to be a bit careful about that. Any post that has essential gear, so three essential lenses for wedding photographers will always do well in terms of the shareability. I do want to say this type of content tends to be a little bit fluffier, and some of it will help to bring about a change in your readers, but you don’t want to just do this type of content all the time.

If you just do the shareable types of posts all the time, you will find that some of your readers will get frustrated. You want to also create that useful cornerstone content as well. The key (I think) is to try lots of different types of posts, watch what works, and keep doing what works. But don’t do the same thing so much that your readers begin to spot the formula and get frustrated with it.

You also want to be really careful about anything that has a hyped-up or builds up expectations in your readers. A lot of people say clickbait is a bad thing. Clickbait is where you use a title to get people to view your content. That’s totally fine but if you use a title that builds the expectation of what people are going to see on a post up to the point where they’re so excited, and then you can’t deliver on that expectation in your actual content, that’s where you get into trouble.

Don’t fall into the trap of that. I guess the other thing I’ll say is that sometimes when you create this kind of shareable content, it is exciting and it is fun, and the temptation is just to do it over and over again. Just to end up with a blog that is quite light and fluffy. That might be okay, but if you do want to change your readers’ lives in some way, you also need to mix in that deeper stuff.

These are the two types of content I would encourage you to create. We’re thinking here about the foundations that you want to build in a blog that is going to enable you to then go and find readers. That cornerstone content, when readers come they’ll see that and that will impress them and show that you’re a blog that’s got some expertise and is worth following, and that shareable content will help you to actually find new readers. You use some of that shareable content in some of the techniques we’re going to talk about in future episodes.

In the next episode, I want to talk about another really important aspect of finding readers for your blog that you do really need to pay attention to before you go and promote your blog. In the next episode, I’m going to talk about building a sticky blog. Now it sounds a bit gross. It’s about building a blog that hooks readers in and turns them from surfers into engaged and connected, long-term readers. That’s the next episode.

Today, I’d love to get your feedback on this particular episode. Head to problogger.com/podcast/34, and you’ll find today’s show notes. I’m going to include in the notes a whole heap of further reading and also some examples of the type of content that I was talking about today.

There’s also an opportunity there for you to leave a comment, and I love to see the type of content that you’ve created or that you are creating that fits into these two types of categories: shareable content and cornerstone content. I hope you found today’s episode useful. I’d love to chat with you on the show notes and I’ll talk to you in episode 35.

Are you using these 2 types of content to draw readers in to your blog? What will you do differently in future? I’d love to hear your answers to those questions. Let me know in the comments below, and 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 about how to find new readers for your blog. It’s the question I get asked most by bloggers, so this is the first of several podcasts on this topic. We will be getting into some tactical and very practical ways to build readerships over the next few episodes, but before we do that, today we look at the two questions you must ask yourself if you really want to get blog readers.

abstract concept of education by Oleksandr Lysenko 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 talk about:

Today, we’re starting a series of episodes on the topic of finding readers for your blog. This idea came from you. We ran a survey recently of podcast listeners (which we really appreciated the responses of) and by far, the number one challenge that you asked us to produce podcast episodes on was finding readers for blogs. 

This was absolutely no surprise to me whatsoever because it’s always the number one thing that people ask us to produce content on at ProBlogger. When we run sessions at our events on finding readers, the rooms are always packed. When we write posts on the ProBlogger blog, those posts are always most read and most shared. When I talk to bloggers, this is always the question I’m asked, “How do I find readers for my blog?” It’s also something I’ve experienced myself—the frustration of not having readers or not having enough readers and wanting more. Even from day one on my blogs, it was something I wanted.

I put time and energy into creating content. I wanted people to read that, it’s only natural. The same thing when you create a podcast, when you’ve got a Twitter feed, when you’ve got a Facebook page, you want people to consume the content that you create. 

For the next few episodes, I want to share with you some ideas on how to find readers for your blog. This will probably go for four or five episodes. Later on in this series, I’m going to get really practical and share some actual techniques, some very practical things you can do. 

Before I get into those practicalities, I want to just step back a little, get you to ask a few questions, and talk about some principles of finding readers for your blog. I think if you rush into it, you may actually end up with a whole heap of readers who really don’t convert to anything. They’re not the right readers. This is particularly what I wanted to talk about today. 

I want to suggest two questions to ask yourself before you go hunting for readers. I think if you ask these questions, you’ll be in a much better position to be effective in finding readers for your blog. The techniques I talk about in the next few episodes will convert much better if you’ve asked these questions first. 

The first question is this, who do you want to read your blog? When I started blogging, I gave this question absolutely no thought whatsoever. I just wanted anyone to read my blog and perhaps you can relate to that. Like I said before, you put all this time and energy into creating content. You just want anyone to read it, whether it’s your mom, your wife, your husband, your boyfriend, your girlfriend, your friend’s friend, or a complete stranger, anyone would do. Well, they did for me.

The problem with this thinking is that it really led me to do some kind of silly things that ended up doing more harm than good to my blog. The first thing that led me to do—it didn’t happen straight away but gradually over time without really thinking about it—it led me to start writing on topics that I thought would be popular at the expense of writing about things that truly mattered to me, and perhaps, to others as well. It led me down a whole garden path of blog posts and blogs that I look back now on and I kind of regret doing. 

I had 30 blogs at one stage. The thought behind having those 30 blogs is that if I write on a whole heap of topics that are popular, that people are searching the web for, that I’d get a lot of traffic, and that I’d better make some money from that. I did that without really paying attention to what I wanted to write about. As a result of not being interested in the things I was writing about, I ended up creating content that wasn’t really interesting to anyone at all.

It kind of worked on some levels, though. Some of the content that I produced did get readers. They did get people clicking and visiting, but it didn’t lead to anything that was sustainable. 

I love this quote from Seth Godin. He says, “Entertaining the people who click on 50 things a day will get you numbers but it won’t make a difference.” That was my experience. I actually did get some traffic but people didn’t hang around because there was no real meaning behind the content that I was creating. I wasn’t taking anyone on a journey. I’ve got a bit of traffic but it didn’t lead to a sustainable business and it wasn’t very satisfying to create either.

The second thing that made me do this way of thinking—I’ll just have anyone read my blog—is that led me to promote my blog in trying to find readers in ways that did more harm than good in the long run. It led me to start hanging out on sites that were social bookmarking sites. 

Today, there’s a site called Reddit that many of you will be familiar with. People vote up and down a piece of content. If it gets to the front page, you get a whole heap of traffic. 

Back then in 2006, 2007, when I was kind of in my early years of blogging, there was a site called Digg and it was a very similar kind of model. People would vote up and down content. If you’ve got the front page you got a lot of traffic. 

I started to hang out in Digg and try to create content that would do well on Digg. I started to try and manipulate that system to get to know people that were using it in the hope of getting to the front page. It worked a couple of times. 

I remember the first time getting on the front page of Digg and getting over 100,000 visits in just a few hours to my blog. For the first hour, I was on top of the world. The second hour, I realized that perhaps I’d made a mistake by promoting my blog there. I was getting a whole heap of traffic. The problem was the people who were coming to my blog were not the right type of reader.

Most of the people were using Digg, at least by the comments that I was getting on my blog were probably snarky teenage boys that ended up destroying community and culture on my blog. They left a whole heap of really nasty, horrible comments. They annoyed me, they annoyed my other readers, they crashed my servers, they didn’t respond to my monetization or click any of my ads or buy any of the products I was recommending, and they never came back. 

I look back on the stats now and I see this massive spike in traffic until my server crashed. The next day, my traffic was back to normal. I very quickly discovered that that kind of reader did more harm than good. I realized that getting 100 visitors from another blog that was on the right topic, that had the right kind of readers, was much more powerful in the long term than getting 100,000 visitors from Digg.

I began to change the direction, both in terms of the content that I created but also the way I promote my blog. I began to focus very much upon creating content for a certain type of reader. Part of that process for me was creating what today we’d call an avatar or a persona for my blog, for my reader. I’ll include in the show notes today at problogger.com/podcast/33 some examples of reader personas or avatars that I created when I started Digital Photography School. I got the idea from an advertising agency guy who created personas for the type of people they were trying to reach with their ads. He said that by creating these personas, they were much more effective in creating ads that met the needs of those people and that attracted those people. 

I decided to try that for my own blogs and you’ll see in the show notes some examples of that. You’ll see that in those show notes that they were very simple when I first did them. They were just Word documents and they were guesses at the type of person I wanted to read my blog. I was still in the process of starting Digital Photography School back then, so it was hypothetical. I was guessing at the type of person who might read.

It included a whole heap of demographic information—how old they were, what gender they were, where they lived. It also included things like their needs, their challenges, their problems, also their desires, dreams, and the fears that they had. The goals that they had, the habits that they have, what turned them on, what turned them off, their passions. 

The more I started to describe these types of readers, the better position I was in to create great content for them. I began to see opportunities to find where they were hanging out online and to develop a presence in those places. 

Also included in my reader profiles, things like what did they spend their money on. Were they buying photography magazines or books? Were they spending money on software? Were they buying courses? Were they getting formal education? How were they spending their money? How did they use the web? Were they using email primarily? Were they on social networks? What blogs did they read? What forums do they participate in? What podcasts might they listen to? What social networks are they using? What mainstream media are they listening to? What events do they attend? Who influences them?

All of these questions begin to give you an idea of the type of person that you’re trying to reach with your blog. The more you know about them, the better position you begin to create great content for them, which is a massive part of finding readers. Also, you begin to identify where they’re hanging out and where you can build a presence. You also begin to see ideas for how you can engage with them and build community. You might also get some ideas on how you could monetize your blog. 

Really, what you’re trying to do by creating this avatar is to find out what is meaningful to the reader that you’re trying to reach. Not so that you can manipulate them but so that you can serve them better.

For me, when I created my first reader profile, it was a very hypothetical exercise. I was guessing at the type of reader I might attract to my blog. I created three personas. It turns out that two of them were pretty much on the money. The other one was a little bit off, at least initially. 

I created these reader personas and it really impacted my blogs in a massive way. I started creating much better content because I was creating content that was meaningful to people. I also began to become more attractive to these types of people and also began to see very naturally where I should be hanging out online. 

I really would encourage you to create an avatar for your desired reader. For me, it was all hypothetical, I was guessing. For you, if you’ve already got a blog, you may already have an idea in your mind as to who’s reading your blog. If you don’t, you can use tools like surveys or polls or discussion posts or emailing your readers or doing a focus group of some kind or analyzing your social media followers. You’ll get a pretty good idea and you can begin to test some of the guesses that you have about your reader. I would encourage you to always be gathering that type of information. 

Every year on my blogs, we do a survey of our readers just to see where our readers are at in terms of their demographics but also their challenges and needs that they face. Many of you actually participated in a survey recently of our podcast listeners. That was purely trying to work out who is listening to this podcast so that I can serve you better. I encourage you to do that as well. 

Create your avatar. It doesn’t have to be long. It doesn’t have to be super detailed. Just doing the exercise for 15 minutes will be better than nothing but don’t stop there. There’s a second question I want to put to you. It’s related to this idea of who is reading your blog. It’s this: how are you trying to change your readers? Now, this might sound a little bit manipulative. I’m not trying to manipulate. I’m not trying to change people. Here’s the thing I’ve learned, great blogs actually leave a mark on people. Great blogs change their readers.

As I think about the blogs that have changed my life, I think of someone like Seth Godin. He has changed me in the way that he writes. He’s changed the way I think and that’s had an impact upon me. It’s part of the reason that I go back to his blog. It’s also part of the reason that I tell other people about his blog which is a big part of finding readers for a blog. So, what change are you going to bring for your readers? How are you going to impact them? What mark is going to leave? 

What I’m encouraging you to do here is to create a second avatar. Your first avatar is who your readers are now and then who are they going to be. Create this second avatar. Who are they going to be?

I talked about this exercise of getting a line on a piece of paper and putting point A on one side and point B on the other. At point A, describing who your readers are now, and on point B, who they’re going to become. It’s a really powerful thing to do.

Digital Photography School, my readers when they come to my blog are people who own cameras who are stuck in automatic mode. When they leave my blog down the track as a result of reading my blog, they’re going to have creative control of their cameras. That’s the change I’m trying to bring. That suddenly informs the content that I create. It also helps me to describe my blog to potential readers. 

This is what I’m trying to do for you. You might find this blog interesting if you want this change in your life. Being able to describe that change is a really powerful thing and part of the process of finding readers for your blog. 

Now, every blogger is going to have a different change. For some it’s big and for some it’s small. I talked to a parenting blogger recently who did this exercise and her change was profound. She described at point A, frustrated, angry, confused, hopeless, parents who had kids that had bleak futures, at least in the minds of the parents. At point B, she described people who were patient, who were empowered, who were in control, who had hope about their kids’ futures. 

That’s an incredibly meaningful change that she’s trying to bring. Her just describing that change to me, made me want to know where her blog was because that’s the kind of parent I want to be. That’s the kind of change I want in my life in different ways as I parent my kids. It’s a really effective thing to do not only for you as a blogger, but for your potential readers. 

What change are you trying to bring? It might be a big one or might be small. It might be about giving people information on a topic that they didn’t have before. It might be giving people hope where they felt hopeless. It might be about giving people a realization that they’re not alone when they’ve felt lonely or isolated. It might be about giving people inspiration that motivates them to push through in a tough circumstance in their life. It might be about giving people news or advice that helps them to make decisions. It might be about giving people a laugh in a time that’s otherwise bleak in their life. 

The changes could be anything really. They’ll vary from different bloggers to different bloggers, but it’s a really powerful exercise to do. It’s going to help you create a blog that is so much more attractive to that type of reader you’re trying to reach. 

When you change someone’s life, you create trust. You create loyalty. Here’s the thing, you create word of mouth—opportunities. When I have a friend and I see a change in their life, I want to know how that change happened. When a change happens in my life, I want to tell my friends about that.

Here’s the thing about finding readers for your blog. There’s only so much that you can do to find new readers for your blog. Where blogs really grow is when your readers tell other people about your blog. This is the real potential in growing radius for your blog. 

This is why I want you to really focus on these questions today. Who are you trying to reach? This is going to help you to create a blog that is attractive to that type of person and help you to identify where you should be hanging out to find that type of reader. The second question, what change are you trying to bring? Again, it’s going to help you to build a blog that is attractive, that’s worth being found, that’s meaningful to people. It’s also going to set you up for word of mouth and for your readers to promote your blog for you.

Like I said at the start of this episode, over future episodes we’re going to continue to ask the question, how do we find readers for blogs. Maybe a couple of days from now, in the next episode, I’m going to share three more things that are going to be vital for you to do in your blogging before you go hunting for readers. Then, we’re going to do more practical, tactical, things about how to promote your blog. Like I said at the start, those tactical things are going to be so much more effective if you know who you’re trying to reach and the change that you’re trying to bring in people’s lives. 

I would love to hear the answer to you those two questions: who are you trying to reach and how are you trying to change their life? If you go to problogger.com/podcast/33, I’ll have some further reading for you, but also the opportunity for you to leave a comment and to answer those questions. I also encourage you to leave a link to your blog in the comments there. I don’t mind people sharing links in my comments as long as they’re relevant. That’s useful for me because it gets me to see your blog and to know you which is obviously important to me as you’ve seen in this podcast.

Also, hopefully, you may be seen by other listeners of this podcast as well. I encourage you to get to know each other as listeners. You are going to learn a whole heap from listening to me in this podcast but even more from watching and interacting with others who are on this same journey. 

Again, go to problogger.com/podcast/33 to get today’s show notes. I’d also love to get your review of this podcast. We’ve finished our 31 Days series now and I know it’s helped a lot of people. I love you to share that review when it helps me to get to know you better and understand how this podcast helps you. It’s also going to help us to be found by more bloggers as well. That review really does help and I’d be really grateful for it. 

I look forward to talking to you tomorrow. Actually, I keep saying tomorrow, I’m still in 31 Days mode, but in the next episode of ProBlogger Podcast episode 34.

Who are you trying to reach with your blog? How are you trying to change their life?

I’d love to hear your answers to those questions. Let me know in the comments below, and 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 podcast above or load it up on your device on iTunes here.

Today’s episode is about whether it is really possible to make money from your blog. We take a close look at how many bloggers make money, the methods you can use, and the realities of earning money as a blogger.

Money text on euro bills by Dani Rönneberg 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 talk about:

Hi. My name is Darren Rowse and today, we’re answering the question, can you really make money blogging? This is an important question and I want to answer right up front in this podcast series because there are a lot of misconceptions out there. I see a lot of bloggers coming into blogging with expectations that I just don’t think are realistic, so I want to give you a realistic answer to the question. There’s also a lot of hype out there. There are people making big claims about what you can achieve with blogging and sometimes, some of those claims come from people who have another agenda. They’re quite often selling something that claims to be able to help you to make money blogging.

Today, I want to break some of the myths and give you a realistic answer to the question. Is it possible to make money from blogging? Let’s get into it. What I want to share today are nine things that I’ve learned on this topic in my own journey in making money from blogging. I’ve been blogging since 2002. That’s been about 13 years and things have changed over that time. I’ve learned a whole heap of lessons and I want to share them with you today to hopefully give you a realistic understanding.

The first thing I’ll say is that it is possible. I’m living proof of that in many ways. I’ve been making a full-time living from blogging since about 2004. It took me a couple of years to get to that point. Keep in mind that back when I started in 2002, there was no such thing as making money from blogging. People weren’t doing it particularly directly. It did take a year or so before people began to experiment with that. But it is possible. As I look at bloggers today, I can think of many bloggers who do make money from blogging, but it’s worth noting that many of those people don’t make a full-time living.

We run a conference here in Australia for bloggers and we usually have about 700 bloggers come to our conference. The majority of them don’t make a full-time living from blogging. For some, it’s just a hobby and that’s totally fine. Even at ProBlogger, we give blog tips for people who don’t want to make a living from blogging and I want to make any money from blogging and they’re just blogging because they enjoy it, because they like to talk about their topic, and that’s totally fine.

Probably the majority of bloggers out there probably fit into that kind of category or at least start that way. But there are others where blogging income supplements the income that they might have from other work or supplements their family’s income in some way, in some small way perhaps.

For others, it’s something that they treat like a part-time job. They might do it while they parent for the rest of their time, they travel for the rest of their time, they volunteer for the rest of their time, or work another part-time job. That’s certainly how I started to make money from blogging. I had a number of part-time jobs and I treated blogging as another one of those. It made a day a week of income for a while, it made two days a week of income for a while.

And then there’s a smaller group of bloggers who make a full-time living from it and I think about the ProBlogger events audience and they’re certainly in the minority, but that group has grown over the last six years that we’ve been running that event. The first thing I’ll say is that it is possible to make money blogging.

The second thing builds on this and I’ve already mentioned that it’s that most bloggers don’t make a full-time living from blogging. I did a recent survey of ProBlogger readers that asked the question, “Do you try to make money from blogging? And if so, how much do you make?” and I gave them some different categories. It became very clear from this survey that those who are trying to make money from blogging, the vast majority of them were not making a whole heap, and just a very small minority were making a full-time level.

It was around 3%–4% of bloggers who are making over $10,000 per month. Let me just qualify that a little. That was 4% of those who are trying to make money from blogging. 3%–4% of those trying to make money from blogging were making over $10,000 a month. You can see there it’s possible, but the minority is at that level.

Now, $10,000 a month is $120,000 a year, so that’s more than a full-time income in most places that I know. But even as we look at some of the lower categories, certainly the minority were making a full-time income. Around 9% of those who are trying to make money from blogging were making over $1000 a month and on that $9999. Even if you add those two top categories together, about 13% were making over a thousand dollars per month and the vast majority were sitting onto that. Around 10% of those who are trying to make money from blogging made nothing at all, even those who are trying.

I’ve got those statistics and I’m happy to give them to you in the show notes from today. That’ll be at problogger.com/podcast/32. But I guess what I’m trying to say here is that the vast majority of bloggers are not full-time bloggers, even those who are trying to make money from their blogs. Keep that in mind. It’s really important to understand that.

The number three thing that I’ve learned about making money from blogging is that there’s no one way to make money from blogging. Again, in the show notes today, I’ll share with you a mind map that I created of different ways that I see bloggers making money from blogging. In that mind map, I’ve listed 37 different ways that you can make money from blogging. Most of them fit into one of these categories. 

The first category and perhaps the most common category for making money from blogging is through advertising and through sponsorships. Again, within this category, there’s a whole heap of different ways of making money from sponsorship. You might sell banner ads on your site, you might use an ad network like Google AdSense, or you might sell sponsored posts where if you talk about a product and something from a sponsor.

There’s a whole heap of different types of advertising that bloggers do on their blogs. In a future podcast, I love to break that down even further for you and talk about some of the tips that you can use for those different types of advertising, but today I want to give you an overview. That’s one type of income.

Another one is affiliate products. This is where you mention a product and if someone buys that product after clicking on your link, you might earn a commission.

Another way of making money from blogging is by selling your services. This is where the blog itself doesn’t make the money, you make the money because of your blog. You use the blog to build your profile, to showcase your expertise, and then you might sell your services as a coach, a consultant, or as a speaker.

Another way is to sell products on your blog. These might be virtual products like ebooks or courses, or physical products like books, DVDs, or T-shirts.

Another method is by selling a membership on your site. You might give people exclusive content if they pay you a monthly subscription.

Lastly quite a few bloggers use blogging to make money by promoting an offline business that they might have. You might be an accountant and have a blog about finances and getting your finances in order. Then, people come to that blog and they see that you also offer your services in your offline business.

You can see there I’ve outlined six or seven different ways that you can make money from blogging and they’re just some of them. There’s no one way to make money blogging is the point I’m making here. Again, I’m doing episodes going forward over the coming months where I really want to really dig into some of these different types of income streams and give you some case studies of bloggers who are making money in these different ways.

The fourth thing I’ll say about making money from blogging is that most bloggers who do get to a full-time level are not just focusing on one of these areas. Most of the full-time bloggers that I know have multiple forms of income on their blog.

Again, I’ll use myself as an example here. When I started blogging, I was blogging on a personal blog and I had no idea you could make money from blogging. But when I began to make money from blogging, I did so in two ways right from the very beginning. I put some Google AdSense ads on my blog, that was the main form of income, and I also started to experiment with affiliate programs and I used Amazon’s affiliate program to do that. Neither method in the early days was making a whole heap of money, it was a few dollars a day when I started out. But right from the beginning, there were two forms of income.

Today as I look at the income streams from my blog and I’m beyond full-time now in what they’re bringing in, it really varies from month to month, but there are always at least seven or eight different income streams from any month to the next month.

Last month, for example, the number one stream of income for us was affiliate products. We did a media sale on my photography blog, and as part of that, we had a deal every day on a different product for our readers. Some of the products were affiliate products, so we recommended the course that someone else had put together and we earned a 50% commission when anyone went on to buy that course. That was the number one form of income for us last month, affiliate products and we had a number of different campaigns going on through that period where we had our media sale.

The number two stream of income for us last month was ebook sales. Again, that was part of that media sale that we did on my photography blog. As part of that, we offered three or four of our own ebooks that we had produced. For month to month ebooks are usually in our top two.

The third stream of income last month for us was advertising, particularly using Google’s AdSense program. Some bloggers don’t do very well with AdSense, it works very well on our photography blog.

The number four stream of income last month was courses and selling courses. Again, this is on my photography blog. We have a course there where people can sign-up and go through a series of videos that help them to understand the different elements of photography.

The fifth stream of income was our event which we run on ProBlogger, which is a real live conference and we had to get sales going through last month.

The sixth stream of income was direct ad sales. This is where an advertiser came to us and said, “We’d like to advertise with you on your blog.” It was a direct deal that we did.

We also have a job board on ProBlogger.

I have a book on blogging which was released several years ago now, but I still get some royalties. That was the eighth stream of income.

I do a little bit of speaking, that was the ninth stream of income.

We also sell some printable products on my photography blog as well. That was the 10th stream of income.

You can see last month the top 10 income streams and there were probably a few other smaller ones that came in in a variety of different forms. We will soon be adding to that.

Next month we’re actually going to start to sell some Lightroom presets, so some software. That’ll be the 11th stream of income.

Most bloggers that I’ve met who get to a full-time level don’t just have one form of income. I’m trying to get in your mind here that you need to be open to exploring different income streams. You’ll find over time, different income streams will all do better on your blog. Sometimes it’s to do with traffic, sometimes it’s to do with the type of blog that you have, and whether it be the topic, style of blogging that you have, or the life stages of your blog. So, be open to the idea of having multiple income streams.

The fifth thing I’ve learned about making money from blogging is that there are many different types of blogs that monetize well. This is one of the misconceptions that I see people writing about making money from blogging. It is that the only people who make money from blogging are those who are writing about how to make money from blogging. I see this misconception quite a bit. Sometimes it’s been leveled at me. “Darren makes money from blogging because he blogs about making money from blogging.” That’s partly true, I do make some money from ProBlogger, but in my own situation, I make more money from my photography blog than I do from ProBlogger. Most of the people that I see making money blogging don’t blog about blogging. They actually blog in a whole variety of different topics and niches and in different ways.

Again, I think of the people who attend our event who are full-time bloggers. I think about 10% of those who attend our event are full-time and our speakers, most of them are full-time and they blog in a whole variety of different topics.

I think of someone like Nikki Parkinson. She’s an Aussie blogger, her blog is stylingyou.com. Her blog’s about style. It’s about fashion. She has a variety of different income streams in that blog. Some from advertising, she also has a shop there. Her blog is not about blogging, it’s about style.

I think of Tsh Oxenreider, who has a blog theartofsimple.net. She came from the States a couple of years ago and spoke at our event. Her blog is about simple living. It’s not about how to make money from blogging.

I think of Chris Hunter, a blog about motorbikes, Bike EXIF, a full-time blogger. I think of Christie Burnett, who’s blog is about parenting. It’s called Childhood101. I think of Gavin from zenpencils.com. His blog is about cartoons and he shares his cartoons on it. I think about Lucy Feagins from thedesignfiles.net. Her blog is about design. Caz and Craig Makepeace from ytravelblog.com. It’s a blog about travel. I think of Brook from herpackinglist.com. A blog about packing and how to pack for trips. Christina from hairromance.com. A blog about hair and hairstyles. Jadah Sellner who’s speaking at our event this year. A blog about smoothies, a blog called simplegreensmoothies.com.

You can see here a whole heap of different niches. We’ve got food, we’ve got travel, we’ve got beauty, we’ve got style, we’ve got motorbikes, we’ve got cartoons. There’s a variety of blogs there and these bloggers are all people who make a full-time living from their blog. I’ll list those links and a few others in today’s show notes. The list goes on and on and on. A very few of the speakers and attendees at our event who are full-time bloggers blog about blogging. The few that do usually came to blog about blogging out of their experience of blogging in another niche.

The sixth thing about I’ll say about making money from blogging is that there are no formulas. I’m saying this today because some people claim to have a formula and some people claim to sell you their blueprint of making money from blogging. They do have an agenda there and that’s totally fine. I make some money by selling some teaching products about blogging. But I’m always a little bit dubious when I hear people saying, “Here is the blueprint. Here is the formula. Follow this equation and you’ll have success.”

In my experience of blogging, there’s no formula, there’s no blueprint. All of the bloggers that I’ve met who got to a full-time level have found their own path to it. There are certainly some principles of profitable blogging and that’s pretty evident. We teach some of those on ProBlogger and some of the other people who sell products do as well. There are some great products out there, I will say, but there’s no formula for this. Be really wary if someone says, “Do this, this, and this and then you’ll have a full-time blog.” Every full-time blogger I’ve met has their own path, they have their own different combination of income streams. It takes them a different route every time.

The seventh thing I’ll say about making money from blogging is that it takes significant time to get to a full-time level in most cases. The survey I shared the results to earlier where 4% of bloggers were making over $10,000 a month from their blogs. In almost every case and we had thousands of people take part in that particular survey, there was quite a bit of data. In almost every case, the people in that top income tier had been blogging for seven or eight years. There were a couple of outliers who did it quicker, but most of those full-time bloggers who got to that top tier had been blogging for quite a few years.

I’m actually doing a second survey on this topic at the moment and the initial data that’s coming in again backs this up. The few people that have already indicated they’re in that top tier, most of them have been blogging for over seven years. Most of those in the next tier down have been blogging for 3-4 years. It takes time to build-up to the point where you’re able to own an income from blogging. That’s mainly because it takes time to build your traffic and time to build your profile.

The eighth thing that I’ll say about making money blogging—I’ve only got two to go—is that it just takes a lot of work and this really relates to the last thing that it takes a lot of time. I’ll say this because I hear some people—there’s not many; there’s a few people around—who say income from blogging is a passive income. 

I will say there are some elements of what I do that are passive. The ProBlogger job board would be a good example of that. I do very little work on that job board. It sits there on the side of my blog and because my blog has decent traffic, people see that and it’s become known as being a good place to advertise for bloggers and find bloggers. 

But while it is passive in some ways today, its success is built upon a lot of hard work in the past and it only works because there’s a lot of people coming to ProBlogger today. That’s built on me writing thousands of articles already which are up on ProBlogger. That’s built on me spending years and years and years building the ProBlogger brand.

You can get to a point where elements of your business may become a little bit more passive, but my experience is that blogging is anything but passive. It’s taken a lot of years and a lot of work to get to that point. I’ve been working over full-time hours on my blog since 2004. While I take breaks from time to time to go away on holidays, it’s rare that I would even go away on holidays without doing some work, although I do try and get a bit of break from time to time. It takes a lot of work. This is anything but passive income if you want purely passive income.

The last thing I’ll say really relates to this and this is where I want to indicate some of the things I want to talk about in future episodes of this podcast as well. The ninth thing is that profitable blogs are generally built upon four things. Most of the successful bloggers that I come across do these four things on their blogs, or they do at least three of these things on their blogs because I think of a few exceptions, but the vast majority work on these four things.

The first thing is that they create regular useful content. It should go without saying, really. A blog without regularly updated useful content isn’t really a blog. It’s just a website that’s quite static. The regular creation of useful content is the first thing.

The second thing is getting off your blog and finding readers for your blog, promoting your blog. Those of you who’ve been part of the 31 Days to Build a Better Challenge that we’ve just gone through in the last 31 episodes of this podcast, you’ll have seen that we have focused quite a bit of our time on those two activities. Building useful content for your blog and promoting your blog, getting off your blog and promoting it.

The third thing we’ve also focused on in the last 31 days and that’s building community with your readers, deepening the engagement that you have with your readers. This is one where I do see a couple of bloggers who are perhaps the exceptions to the rule. Seth Godin would be one example of this. He doesn’t have comments on his blog, he doesn’t really engage in social media, he’s not out there building engagement, building community with his readers, but he has some incredible profile to start with and some incredible reach. He doesn’t probably need to spend a whole heap of time on that. He says that he would much prefer to spend his time creating content because he can be more useful that way.

But the vast majority of bloggers that I see who have full-time are focusing not only on creating content, but they’re also promoting their blog, getting off their blog, and they’re also building community with their readers.

The fourth area that most bloggers are working on and being quite intentional about who gets to a full-time level is they’re working on effective monetization strategies. Money just doesn’t happen if you have a blog with great content and lots of readers. You need to actually put some time aside to think about how you’re going to monetize that. That may come a little bit after you’ve worked on the other three, but certainly, it’s an important element. You need to be intentional, thinking about how am I going to turn the traffic that I have into an income stream? How am I going to make my blog sustainable?

These four elements of creating useful content, promoting your blog, building community with your readers, and monetizing your blog, I’m sharing these four things because I want you to see that these are not just things that happen, they don’t just happen to you. Useful content doesn’t appear, promoting your blog just doesn’t happen, building community doesn’t just happen, monetizing doesn’t just happen. You need to work on all of these four different areas, these four different pillars, these four different foundations.

These are some of the principles that I was mentioning earlier. While there’s no blueprint, there’s no formula, because there’s a lot of variety on how you can do these four things, these are the four areas I would encourage you to spend your time on. Particularly, the first three in the early days. You do need to be thinking about monetization, but that really comes as a result of the other three areas.

I’m also sharing these four things because in the coming weeks and months here on this podcast, these are the four areas that I’ll be focusing most of my attention on. Creating useful content, building a readership, building community, and monetization.

I’ve already got a bit of a plan based upon a survey that many of you as listeners of this podcast have filled in. We’ve had quite a few results of that survey come in and it’s interesting to see the challenges that you have nominated in your own blogging. By far, the biggest thing that you’ve asked for information on is for help in building your readership which is one of these areas.

The next four or five podcasts, I’m going to focus my attention on helping you to build readership for your blog. I’m going to give you some principles of that, but also some techniques and some strategies that you can use in the coming podcasts that will help you to do that.

But really, what I do want to finish this podcast by saying is coming back to this question, can you make money from blogging? Hopefully, as a result of what I’ve gone through today, you can say: (1) it is possible, but (2) it’s not the norm for you to become rich from this. This is not a get-rich-quick thing. I really want to be upfront about that. I don’t want to be seen as someone who hypes up blogging and saying everyone who wants to make money from blogging is going to become rich from it. That’s certainly not my experience of it. It’s possible to make money from blogging, but it’s not the norm to get rich from it. Certainly, those who do get to that point of making a good income from it takes time and a whole heap of work as well.

I hope you found today’s podcast interesting. Again, the show notes can be found at problogger.com/podcast/32. I’ll share some further reading there and some of the resources that I’ve mentioned as I’ve gone through today’s show. I love to also get your feedback on those show notes; there’s the opportunity to leave comments there.

I would really love it if you could give us a review on iTunes, Stitcher. or any of the other podcast listening tools that you use. That certainly helps me to know how this podcast is helping you, but it also helps us to continue to grow and this information to be shared on a wider basis.

Thanks for tuning in today and we’ll be back with you in the coming days with the next podcast, episode 33, which will begin to focus upon finding readers for your blog. Thanks for listening in. I’ll talk to you then.

What are the next steps for your blog? Will you try new ways of making money from your blog? If you’re already making money from your blog, what is it that’s working best?

I’d love to hear about your experience in the comments below.

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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