ProBlogger Podcast: Blog Tips to Help You Make Money Blogging

Day 11 is one of my favourite days and one that is going to pay off over the next few days and weeks of blogging.

It’s all about answering that question ‘what should I blog about today???’ that may bloggers struggle a lot with each day when they sit down to blog.

The idea today is to spend some time ahead of time answering that question so that next time you sit down to blog you can get straight into creating some great content.

You can listen to todays episode above or in iTunes or Stitcher (where we’d also love to get your reviews).

1. describe the change you want to take your blog readers through:

2. break down that change that you wish to bring:

Brainstorm at least 10 blog post ideas that you could use in the days and weeks ahead. If you can come up with more – please keep going while they’re flowing but do capture them!

Don’t get into writing the posts yet – just brainstorm. Tomorrow we’ll take the ideas to do something with them so tune back in then with your ideas ready.

Today’s topic is so important. Many bloggers get stuck at this idea stage of creating content, so hopefully, it will give you a head start on that. Today’s show notes, with some further reading and the tools mentioned in the show, are at problogger.com/podcast/11. There’s also an opportunity on those show notes to connect with what others are doing in the challenge. 

Before we get into it, a couple of answers to questions I’ve had over the last few days. One is around how frequently should you be doing these challenges. I know some of you are doing them on a daily basis as I’m publishing them. But if you don’t have time, don’t feel that you have to do them daily. I know some of you are doing them every second day or even two or three per week and that’s totally fine. It’s probably more important that you do them well than you do them every day. These podcasts will be here forever so feel free to take your time.

The second question is about the 31 Days to Build a Better Blog Workbook which I have mentioned in numerous episodes before. As many of you know, this series is based upon a workbook that has been previously available on ProBlogger for a few years now. It has been updated into a second edition and it is available at a 50% off code. You can get full details of that at problogger.com/podcast/workbook, but please don’t feel that you have to grab it.

While it does contain some bonus material that we won’t cover in the podcast, we have designed this podcast to be able to be used without that workbook. Please do feel free to pick it up or to just follow along on the podcast. Now, let’s get into day 11 of 31 Days to Build a Better Blog.

Hi. This is Darren Rowse from ProBlogger and welcome to day 11 in 31 Days to Build a Better Blog, where we’re giving you a challenge every day to do something to improve your blog. Today’s challenge is one that I love, it’s my favorite one. I know a lot of those who have done the 31-day challenge in the past have loved this day, too. It’s actually a day where some of the things we’ve done in the last 10 days begin to come together. Some of the things you’ve already set up, if you’ve been following through in the previous 10 challenges, you’re going to get to use them today.

Here’s the question that I know a lot of bloggers face, some on a daily basis. It’s a question we ask ourselves quite regularly. What in the world am I going to write today? I don’t know about you but I ask that question quite a bit and it’s a question we’ve all lost in one way or another. That’s something that many of us struggle with on an ongoing basis. What do I write about? A trap that many bloggers face is that they don’t ask this question until I sit down to write and they’re under the pressure to produce something now. Set aside some time to write, what am I going to write about?

Today’s challenge is to do something that’s going to alleviate some of that pressure, to allow you just to get on with creating content. What I’ve found over the years is that brainstorming ahead of time what you will write removes one big obstacle in creating great content. Brainstorming ahead of time means that you can just sit down to write and you’ve already got the topic in front of you. Cuts down so much time and allows you just to write.

The other good reason for brainstorming ahead of time is that it allows you to create content that takes readers on a journey. If you are thinking ahead about the content that’s going to be on your blog over the next week, the next month, or even longer, you can actually build posts that create posts that build upon one another in a more effective way. Your readers actually notice that. They actually feel like they’re going on a journey with you rather than just sitting down and every day you hit them with something random. Actually building content in this way is great. It creates momentum, it builds anticipation on your blog and that’s great for building a readership that keeps coming back and gets subscribers.

What I want to talk about today is a process for coming up with ideas for your blog. There are many ways to do this. I actually outline one of them in the 31 Days to Build a Better Blog workbook which I’m not going to talk a whole heap about today. It’s really based upon looking at your last blog post and finding ideas in that for future ones. But today, I want to share with you another exercise. It’s something that I’ve come up with since writing the first 31 Days to Build a Better Blog Workbook. It’s really simple but it’s quite powerful. It will actually give you some clarity about what your blog is about as well as coming out with some ideas. It’s really simple.

All you need is a piece of paper and a pen or pencil. You could do the same thing on a whiteboard if you like to. Get your piece of paper and just draw a line from one side of the page to the other horizontally. On the left-hand side, put an A, point A. On the right-hand side, put a point B. I want you to imagine that that line is a timeline of sorts and it is the timeline of when a reader arrives on your blog for the first time and where your reader will be as a result of reading your blog.

At point A, I want you to write a simple sentence that describes who your reader is when they arrive at your blog for the first time. It doesn’t have to be overly complicated. Depending upon what your blog is, it could be really anything. For me, at Digital Photography School, my point A is that my readers are camera owners who’re stuck in automatic mode. They’ve got this camera that has all these wonderful features, but they never really click their dial out of order. This describes the vast majority of camera owners. That’s your point A. Who is your reader now? Or who is your reader when they first arrive?

At point B, I want you to write a sentence that describes who you want your reader to be as a result of reading your blog. Say for a year, two years, or three years. It doesn’t really matter. Who do you want your reader to become? For me at Digital Photography School, it’s that they are a camera owner who has full creative control over their camera. They know how to use the dials, they know how to use the settings and they’ve got creative control.

That change isn’t going to change the world but it’s a change and really that’s what we’re doing here. We’re trying to identify the change that we’re trying to bring with our blog. This will mean different things for different people. I talked to one blogger recently who is a parenting blogger and she did this exercise and heard change that she described as quite profound. She said her point A was an angry, frustrated, and confused parent whose family was dysfunctional. It’s a pretty bleak point A. But her point B was a patient, happy, and in control parent whose family was functional. She went on to describe these two points in greater detail. That’s a good exercise to do as well but really just doing it in a sentence is a good thing for today’s exercise.

What’s the change you’re trying to bring with your blog? Once you’ve identified this change, then it’s time to break it down and this is where you start getting ideas for blog posts. For that change to be brought about, what does a reader need to learn or what phases do they need to go through? Break it down. Start to describe the process, the lessons that someone might need to get from point A to Point B.

For me at Digital Photography School, it was a lot of things. I came up with over 200 and included things like really basic stuff like how to hold a camera. Concepts like how to take a well-exposed photo so they needed to understand things like aperture and shutter speed. They also needed to get confident. It wasn’t just technical things, it was self-development. How do you get confident in taking photos of other people, asking people to pose for you, and directing people in their posing? Things like composition, lighting, the list goes on and it went on and on and on.

This simple exercise unearthed about 200 things in about an hour. Things that I thought someone would need to know to go from being in a fully automatic mode to having creative control of their camera. Now hopefully, you can see where the blog posts ideas are coming in from this. Each of those 200 things ended up being a piece of content on my blog. In fact, for the first two years of Digital Photography School, that was the content I created. It was the cornerstone content, most of it on my blog. It’s content that I continue to this day to refer back to because it really takes my readers through that stage, that process, that change of getting creative control of their cameras. 

This is an exercise I’ve seen many bloggers do in all kinds of niches. Identify the change you try and bring and then break it down. Suddenly, you’ve got a whole heap of ideas for content. If that process doesn’t work for you, there’s a whole heap of other ways that you could go about this.

Really, my challenge today is for you to come up with 10 ideas for content for your blog. You might use the process that I outline in the 31 Days to Build a Better Blog Workbook, which is really about looking at your last few blog posts and looking for questions that readers might have asked or asking, “How could I extend this post? How could I take a different tack on it? What did I gloss over in writing these posts that I could come back to?” where you might want to tap into some of the things you’ve set up over the last few days. For instance, you could tap into the alerts and subscriptions that you set up yesterday in episode 10. Did someone write a blog post or produce a podcast that you could extend or give your opinion on? That might be a link post that you could write.

You might want to follow up with the reader that you emailed in episode 5 and ask if they’d mind sharing any questions, problems, or challenges that they currently have. You might want to look over the last 20 or so comments on your blog to see if there were any questions there. Similarly, you might want to head into the forum group that you joined in episode 9 or the social media account that you’ve been working on in episode 8 to hunt for questions or discussions that could get you a post idea.

Another brainstorming question you can ask is what problems, questions, or challenges did I have when I started out? What questions did I have a year ago? Writing about your own problems, challenges, questions, and how you overcome them and answer them is a great way to get content ideas.

Lastly, you might want to get on a call with a blogger, a friend, a reader even to brainstorm together. I know in the early days, I was a part of a couple of small blogging groups that I found really helpful to brainstorm. Even today, with the team that I have, we quite often brainstorm together. I find the ideas come so much faster when I’m doing it with other people.

Your challenge today is to come up with at least 10 content post ideas, you might come up with more. If you do, just go with it. Come up with as many as you can because it’s going to save you a whole heap of time later. The key here is not to get out of brainstorming mode and into writing mode. You want to stay in brainstorming mode as long as you can. You might want to come up with a title or a couple of points that you might cover in the post as you come up with that idea that might save you sometime later as well, but don’t do that if it’s not coming easily. Don’t go too deep into each idea, just stay as much as you can in brainstorming mode.

The key, whatever you do, is to write them down, capture them in some way. If you don’t yet have a system for collecting ideas, today’s the day to set that up as well. It might just be a simple notebook that you have on your computer or that you carry around with you. It might be on your computer. You set up a folder and every time you get an idea, you open a text document and you dump it in there with the idea that maybe a couple of points.

The system I use is using Evernote, which is a great app that ‘s also on my computer. Pretty much everywhere I am, if I get an idea, I open up Evernote, I’ve got a notebook for each of my blogs, and I create a note for each idea that I have. Sometimes, I just drop down the idea itself and sometimes, it’s a little bit deeper or I put in a few points and maybe the opening line. If you don’t capture your ideas, you’ll lose them and you’ll never ever write those posts. So, your challenge today is to create at least 10 blog post ideas. You don’t have to do any more than that, just create the ideas. See how many you can do.

I hope you enjoy today’s challenge as much as I do. I find this one to be so useful and I build it into my every week of blogging. I put aside every week to just do this exact exercise both alone and then with my team when they’re around and I get all kinds of ideas from doing it. It’s really helped me to create a lot of momentum on my blog. Give it a go, tell us how you found today’s challenge by leaving a comment on today’s show notes where I also give you some visuals on how to do the exercise at problogger.com/podcast/11.

You can also subscribe to get updates about future episodes at problogger.com/podcast/subscribe and you can just pop your email in there and you’ll get an email every time we update about a new episode of the podcast but also the occasional post about new posts on ProBlogger. That’s only every now and again though.

Thanks for tuning in today. I look forward to chatting with you tomorrow on day 12 with 31 days to build a better blog, where we’re going to take your 10 ideas and do something with them. Please, get your 10 ideas ready and then tune in tomorrow for the next step in the process.

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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Being productive and producing great content for your blog is so important – which is why we’ve had a number of episodes so far that have been ‘writing challenges’ (see episode 2 and episode 7) but today we’re focusing less on what we ‘output’ and more on what ‘input’ we’re getting as bloggers.

I was challenged earlier in the year to consider this for my own blogging and realised I’d become a little dry and out of touch with my niches – so decided to do something about it.

This episode is completely built upon that experience and I hope it gives you some ideas on how to create some inspiring, informed and idea generating input streams for your blogging.

The more you’re learning, inspired and up to date – the better position you’ll be in to help those reading your blog!

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

I’d love to hear how you found todays challenge in comments below.

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Hi, I’m Darren Rowse and welcome to 31 Days to Build a Better Blog. We’re on day 10 of 31. Congratulations on making it this far; you’re almost a third of the way through. There are many factors to having a successful blog. Being productive and outputting great content is obviously one of them. We’ve already spent a couple of our days of this challenge focusing upon producing content.

Another really important area—in fact, I think it’s just as important in some ways—is not thinking about your output but thinking about your input. There’s an old saying that we’ve all heard, what you put in is what you get out. There’s some truth to that in this case of blogging. As I look back over the last 13 or so years of my own blogging, I can see a real correlation between the times that I was outputting my best content and the times I was doing the most reading, learning, and listening to others. I can also see a correlation between the times that I was struggling with ideas to write about, feeling dry, feeling burnt out. In most cases in those times, I wasn’t really learning, listening, reading, or getting good input.

Today is about creating a steady flow of great input to fill your cup and to become really aware of what’s going on in your industry and niche. I think the more aware you are of what’s happening around you and the more you’re learning and listening, the better position you’ll be in to create great content. That’s what today is about.

If you’re following along in the 31 Days to Build a Better Blog Workbook, you see that today’s challenge is to set up alerts related to your niche. We’re going to do that and talk about that in a moment. I also want to suggest today that you go a little bit further and I’ll touch on that at the end of this podcast. Let’s touch on some of the reasons that setting up alerts can be a good thing for your blog.

The first one is that it’s going to give you a whole heap of ideas for blog posts. Seeing what other people are writing about, what other people are learning about, what other people are experimenting with as it relates to your niche is going to be a great source of ideas. I know that if I listen to a podcast from someone like Pat Flynn, it’s going to stimulate all kinds of ideas that I can then go away and write about. It will give me a whole heap of ideas to try in my own life, which may end up turning into blog posts as well. It’s also going to give us the opportunity for some of those link posts that we were talking about a couple of days ago on this podcast. Having a steady stream of relevant blog posts, news articles, and podcasts coming in is going to stimulate great ideas to create.

Second thing is that it’s just going to help you to be aware of any breaking news in your industry. For some of us, that’s more important than others, those of us who are writing on topics that are news-related, it’s really important to be really up to date with industry developments and news. I know on Digital Photography School, it’s important that I know if a new camera has been released because I don’t want to refer to an obsolete camera in an article. It could be quite embarrassing. Setting up alerts is really important.

The third thing (and it’s really related to this) is that it helps you to present as a credible source of information or an expert in your industry. Again, if you’re not aware of the latest developments in your niche and you do something embarrassing, then that hurts your credibility.

The fourth thing is that setting up these alerts and inputs can actually help you to network and build relationships with other bloggers. If you’re reading them on a daily basis, you’re more likely to comment and reach out to them on social media as well. That can lead to all kinds of mutually beneficial relationships and even collaborations. 

The last thing that’s really good when you set up alerts and make sure that your inputs are all on track is that it’s great for reputation management. If you get an alert when someone is talking about you, you’re able to build on that relationship but also if they’re talking about you in a negative way, you’re able to respond, you’re able to fix any misconceptions that they might have about you or what you’ve said or what you’ve done, and you’re able to manage your reputation. At least be aware of what other people are saying.

Today, the challenge is to set up some news alerts in a variety of ways. Firstly, we’re going to talk about Google News Alerts. Google News Alerts were really quite popular a number of years ago, everyone seemed to use this service. But over the last year or two, it’s kind of disappeared a bit. I think it’s probably died a little bit with the death of Google Reader and RSS reading, which you can still do.

Google News Alert is still something that you can set up and use, you don’t need to use RSS to do it. Just go to www.google.com/alerts. You need to be logged in to your Google account but you can set up an alert for any word. You want to be a little bit careful with how broad a word you put in, but over time you can refine them to narrow your search a little bit. There’s a whole heap of different ways that you can refine the search that you do. Typing a word, you might type in a word like wedding photography if you want to keep abreast of what people are saying on that particular topic.

You can refine how you’d like to be alerted. You could be alerted by RSS feed, via email, or you can be alerted as the alerts come in or you can set another time frame so that you don’t get all day alerts coming in. You can set up the language, the region that you want to track. You can set up whether you want to just be alerted from other blogs or news sites, a whole heap of different factors that you can choose there. 

There are a few things that you could set up in your Google alert. Firstly, you could do an alert for your name and this is important to manage what other people are saying about you. For most of us, you won’t get too many alerts on that front unless you do something really bad but it’s good to know when other people are talking about you in that way.

Your blog name might be another thing that you could use as well. Probably, most of us will want to set up alerts for the main keywords that relate to our niche. In my case, I started out with the word photography. Now, I very quickly learned that photography was too broad a search term so I had to narrow it down. Photography tips is one of the alerts that I get. Over time, you’ll begin to see how many alerts you get and whether it’s too broad or too narrow. Any keyword that relates to your niche is going to be interesting to at least start with. 

There’s a whole heap of other ways that you can set up great inputs as well. On Twitter, you can set up a Twitter alert. There used to be a whole heap of great services for this and Twitter changed their API so some of them don’t work anymore but even just using the Twitter search function is quite good. If you go to twitter.com/search-advanced, you get actually the more advanced tool on Twitter and you can do all kinds of really interesting searches. You can search for exact phrases, you can set up searches and then include to show results with words that you don’t want to see, you can do searches for hashtags in different languages, you can set up searches that mention certain accounts that come from certain locations and time-specific searches as well.

Once you’ve done that search, you can see the top results or you can see the live results. I know a number of bloggers who just have a few searches and they just leave tabs open and go in and tap into the live results throughout the day. Twitter also lets you save searches so you can very quickly get back to a specific search that you might have set up. This is what I do with different terms that I have. During the day I can delve very quickly into searches for particular phrases. This is really useful if you know that there are common questions being asked in your industry.

For instance, I came across one wedding-related blogger who had set up search terms for things like, where can I get a wedding dress or such terms of asking for recommendations from people on Twitter. She set it up with specific locations in mind because she wanted to reach out to people in her location. She set this search up and then every day, she was presented with people asking this specific question that indicated that they were shopping for a wedding dress in her location. That’s really powerful if you have a solution for that. There’s a whole heap of creative ways that you can use Twitter alerts.

Another thing you can do on Twitter is to set up Twitter lists. You might have 10 different bloggers in your niche that you want to follow and you can put them all into a Twitter list so you can very quickly click on that list during the day and see what those 10 bloggers have been saying. I also use a tool called Sprout Social to manage my Twitter and it allows me to monitor 10 keywords. Those keywords can relate to my brand but they can also be other things that I’m tracking and you’ll find there are other services around that allow you to do that too if you Google them.

Few other things that you might want to set up today to help you to have alerts, but also think about the input coming into your life because it does impact your output. Firstly, you might want to set up an RSS reader if you don’t have one. I know many bloggers even three, four, or five years ago, almost every blogger had an RSS reader. Most of us use Google Reader. Of course, Google stopped that service, but there are still many services around. The most common one is Feedly and you can subscribe to other blogs in your industry. You just need to remember to go and check your RSS reader.

Another tool that I know many bloggers use is Bloglovin which enables you to follow your favorite blogs and discover new ones. There are other tools and RSS readers around as well. Another thing you might like to do is set up a Facebook interest list. This is similar to Twitter lists in some ways. You can create a list of pages and people on a specific topic.

If you just log in to Facebook and look down on your desktop and look down on the left-hand side in the sidebar, you’ll see a category for interests. Most people don’t even know it’s there but it enables you to add specific pages or people and then name that list. This is a really quick way to dig into that particular topic on any given day.

You can also share those lists. You can mark them as public, you can mark them as friends, or you can mark them as only me so different people could see that list, too. You can also search for and follow the interest lists of others. There’s a lot of interest lists that have already been curated. In the photography space, I know there are heaps of lists on photography, so you can just follow what someone else has already done and that gives you great input.

Another thing that I’ve been doing a lot lately is listening to podcasts and it’s worth every now and again, just going into iTunes and doing a search for podcasts in your industry and niche. I know on my afternoon walk—I walk for at least half an hour, sometimes an hour every day—I will always be listening to podcasts and that’s a great input for me. There’s plenty of tools like Flipboard and other news-reading apps that allow you to follow certain topics as well. It doesn’t really matter what the app is that you choose. The key is to use it. To get in the habit of that, you probably want to set up an alert in your calendar. Now’s the time to go reading and to go searching for these types of things.

Two final words of advice on today’s challenge: don’t overwhelm yourself with input. It’s so, so easy to spend all of your time monitoring, reading, listening, getting input, and then to spend no time outputting. You want to get the balance right. The last tip I’ll give you today is to not just set up alerts for industry-related topics or subscriptions to industry-related news feeds. You also want to set up something that’s going to energize you and motivate you. You might be really energized and motivated by your niche and other blogs in it but consider going outside your niche as well into other areas of interest that you might have and personal development areas as well; things that will keep you healthy and functioning well. 

For me on my podcast walk, I always listen to blogging-related podcasts but also throw in from time to time health-related ones, others that relate to more general topics of entrepreneurship and topics of creativity. I find that if I listen to a mixture of podcasts and read a mixture of blogs that I’m picking up things from other industries that relate to blogging too but I also improve myself. I know if I’m functioning better as a human being, both with my health and thinking, and I’ve got other areas of my life that I’m enjoying, then I’m much better as a writer.

I hope you’ve enjoyed today’s episode. This is such important stuff and I can’t emphasize it enough out of my own experience of getting dry and not filling my cup. If you really find yourself some great information to subscribe to today and set up some alerts, you’re going to come up with all kinds of ideas for content, you’re going to be better informed, and then able to produce better content for your readers. That has a massive flow-on effect in terms of how you’re perceived by your readers and also the impact that you have on their lives.

I’d love to hear how you found today’s challenge. What did you subscribe to? What alerts did you set up? Please share what you did today at our show notes that problogger.com/podcast/10.

Lastly, I want to thank 99designs, the sponsor of today’s show, who’s been so helpful in getting this podcast up and running not only because they’re a sponsor but because they helped in practical ways to provide me with a service for getting great artwork for this podcast.

If you’re like many listeners, myself, and always starting new projects, you will want to have great graphic design as part of those projects. You can get maximum creativity with 99designs in the marketplace that they’ve set up where dozens of designers from around the world will compete to deliver you the best design possible. Whether you’re just starting out with a new blog or a project, you want to check out 99designs.com/problogger and as a ProBlogger listener, you’ll get a free $99 upgrade to use on your first design. I’ll talk to you tomorrow on day 11 of 31 Days to Build a Better Blog.

Also check out the great offer our friends, and new podcast sponsor, 99designs have for you (worth $99). They’re a fantastic place to go if you’re looking for any help with graphic design in your blogging.

I use their services and have worked with some great designers to create graphic design creatives for my blogs.

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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In todays episode I challenge you to focus a little attention today on joining an online forum and/or social media ‘group’ as a way of growing your blog’s profile, finding readers and learning more about your niche.

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

In this short episode I share:

Are you already a regular contributor to forums and/or social media groups? What tips would you add to those in this episode? What do you find works best? What would you avoid doing?

I’m looking forward to learning from your experience in comments below!

I’d also love to hear your feedback on this podcast if you could spare a moment to leave us a review on iTunes or Stitcher.

UPDATE: please scroll down to the comments section and check out the amazing and generous advice of Paul who shares some meaty tips on getting the most out of forums. It’s great stuff!

But first, a quick word from our sponsor, 99designs, the best place for new business or blog to build their brand. If you’re looking to launch a new blog or project and need some high quality but affordable design work done, then 99designs is where you should head. Start your next design project at 99designs.com/problogger and get a $99 upgrade for free.

Hi and welcome to day 9 of 31 Days to Build a Better Blog, a ProBlogger podcast that gives you 31 different ways to improve your blog over a month. Today, I want to challenge you to join a forum that relates to your niche and then to start participating. One of the most common questions that I’m asked by bloggers is how do I find readers for my blog. It’s the number one question we get asked. There’s a lot of potential answers on a micro level, lots of different techniques that we could suggest, but what I generally start with is some bigger picture answers. 

Ask yourselves these three questions: Who are you trying to reach? What type of person are you trying to reach? The more you can get clarity around that question, the better. Ultimately, creating an avatar or a persona or a reader profile is a good thing to do. Once you know who you’re trying to reach, ask where are they gathering already? Are there blogs, are there forums, are there social networks that they’re already gathering? The more you know about that, the better position you’re in to go and participate in those places.

That’s the third question. How can I participate in those places? So, who am I trying to reach, where are they already gathering, and how can I participate in those places? There’s going to be a lot of different places that your potential reader might be hanging out. We’ve already talked about social media and that’s one of the big ones today, but one of the other places is forums. Online forums and membership communities have been around in different forms for decades now. In the early days, they were on message boards, then they morphed into what we might call forums today, and in many ways, what we see happening in social networking groups like Facebook groups or LinkedIn groups, probably still fit into this type of activity today.

I want to widen that a little bit. You can join a forum or you could join a Facebook group, a LinkedIn group, or some other type of group that you can find. Forums are great places for bloggers and groups, too, because they give you an opportunity to do a number of things. I want to talk about three of them really briefly.

Firstly, they help you to build your profile, your brand. If you are building a genuine and helpful presence in a forum over time—not just for a single day but over time—you can become quite well known. It’s an opportunity to showcase your expertise, your knowledge and your willingness to help others. Ultimately, it’s a great brand-building exercise. 

We have a forum on Digital Photography School and I know over the years that there have been a number of members of that forum who’ve built for themselves really good profiles among our members. I can think of one particular person, Richard, who contributed many tutorials to our forum. He used our forum almost as a guest posting place where he would write articles. We loved it as forum owners because we had great user-generated content being added, it was useful content, it helped our members, and our members loved it also. Many of our members wanted to find out who this guy was, so they got to know him and he built some authority and credibility in that place. Building your profile is one good thing if you build a useful, genuine presence over time.

The second thing that comes as a result of that is that you have the ability to start driving a little bit of traffic to your blog. The more useful you are, the more people will want to know about who you are and what you do. If you provide them with a link in your signature or in your profile, they can work out where else you are online. Also, based upon the bank of value that you add to the forum or the group over time, there will also come opportunities to share relevant links to your blog from time to time. The key here is relevant links. If someone’s asking a question on a topic that you’ve written an article on, it’s more acceptable to share that link than just share random links every day in the forum.

You want to be careful about how many links you share. But if it’s relevant and if you’ve already built a profile in that place and people are grateful to you and you’re being useful in a genuine way, people are much more likely to accept you sharing links. The other thing that you’ll find is that as people begin to get to know you, other members will begin to read your blog and then they will begin to share your links. That’s much more acceptable. There’s also an opportunity in forums, at least, to in many cases, have a signature where you can have a link to your blog or your social media profiles. It’s another potential place you can drive a little bit of traffic from.

The third benefit, the last one I want to touch on is probably in my mind, the best benefit of all. Many people don’t talk about it that much, it’s actually the benefit of understanding your niche or your potential reader. This to me is the real benefit of this exercise. Forums are a great place to understand the needs, problems, challenges, fears, dreams, motivations, habits of your potential reader. People really open up in forums. If you’ve ever participated in one, you’ll know that. There’s this real sense of community that often develops in a forum and people feel comfortable to open up. They express their pain points, they express their struggles and challenges. They also express their victories, sometimes in a really personal way.

The same thing happens in Facebook groups. As a result of this, you can get some really great ideas for content for your blog. You can get great ideas for how to build community on your blog as you see what works in the forum. You’ll also get ideas for products and the ways that you can monetize your blog. Take note of the questions people are asking in this forum, they will often turn into blog post ideas. Take note of the common themes that are raised. These might be the categories of your blog. Take note of the needs people have that they keep expressing. These may give you ideas for products to create.

Here’s your challenge today, search for a forum (or a Facebook or a LinkedIn group) that is relevant to your blog. Just hit Google and type in your niche, your keyword and then forum. And see what comes up, you might find quite a few, but choose one. Choose the one that’s perhaps most active or that suits your brand the most. You don’t want to find a dead one. Definitely find something that’s active. If you’re struggling to find a forum, search on Facebook or LinkedIn, there’s lots of groups. There’s almost a group for every niche that I’ve ever come across, sometimes multiple groups. Again, choose one that’s active and that’s probably relevant to you. Many of them are location-specific, for example. You might want to find one that’s in your local area.

Once you’ve joined the group or forum, take 20 or so minutes to do a couple of things. Firstly, watch, observe, how’s it structured? Are there sections of the forum? Are there different categories? What are the rules? Many forums and groups have a rule section, particularly groups I’ve found. Some groups will allow you to do certain things on certain days. Begin to understand the rhythm of the forum, the rhythm of the group. Who are the key members? Who are the leaders? Who are the admins? Who are the owners? Who are the moderators? It’s important to understand who are the key players.

Once you’ve been watching, once you’ve been observing, then begin to participate. If there’s an opportunity to add your signature or a link to your blog, or social media accounts in your profile, then do that. But let that be enough promotion for today. Then find a place to introduce yourself, many forums will have an introduce yourself section or many Facebook groups have a post where you can do that.

And then start searching for questions people are asking, provide useful answers, share your experience. Don’t start sharing links from day one, just add value. Pay attention to any thread of conversation that’s been unanswered. Show you care by answering. Start a thread, perhaps. Don’t start too many threads on day one, but start a thread that asks a question that you have. This idea of stimulating a discussion is really important. People pay attention to those who start the conversations as well as those who answer questions, both are important. Just add value, just for 10–15 minutes today.

It’s really important to make an appointment with yourself, to keep visiting that forum or group over the coming week or two. Just commit to doing it perhaps to the end of these 31 days. Just five minutes a day could have a massive, potential impact upon the building of a profile in that particular group, and you’ll learn a heap from what you observe. Don’t spend hours every day in there, just spend five or so minutes a day. Build up that rhythm of participating in a group like this. At the end of the 31 days, set aside some time to assess how it’s gone and perhaps to look and see if there are other forums or groups that you could do a similar thing in.

I hope you find today’s challenge a useful one. It’s certainly driven a lot of traffic to my blogs over the years, but more importantly taught me a lot about my niche and blogging. Tell us how you found today’s challenger over at problogger.com/podcast/9 where you can leave a comment and interact with others on the same challenge. There have been some great discussions and already a couple of collaborations emerging on those show notes in previous episodes. Also, if you’ve got a moment, please, we’d appreciate any review or rating that you can give us in iTunes or Stitcher.

And lastly, I want to thank our sponsor, 99designs, who have a great offer for you as a listener of this podcast. If you’re like many listeners of this podcast, you’re in the early stages of getting your business off the ground or perhaps starting a new project. Your to-do list may seem like it’s a mile long, but there’s one task you should tackle sooner than later, and that’s your branding. 

You can get maximum creativity with 99designs, the online marketplace where dozens of designers compete to deliver the best design for you. You get to choose from the ideas created just for you from awesome designers all around the world. When you’re just starting out, of course, you want to get your logo designed, but 99designs also makes it easy to round out your visual identity with other designs, too, like blog themes, great banners, or whatever else your business needs. Your brand could very well be the best investment that you’ll make. Get help with that at 99designs.

When you’re ready to bring your brand to life, it’s at 99designs.com/problogger and as a ProBlogger listener, you’ll get a free $99 upgrade to use on your first design. We’ll chat with you tomorrow on day 10 of 31 Days to Build a Better Blog.

Also check out the great offer our friends, and new podcast sponsor, 99designs have for you (worth $99). They’re a fantastic place to go if you’re looking for any help with graphic design in your blogging.

I use their services and have worked with some great designers to create graphic design creatives for my blogs.

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.

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

Today is day 8 in our 31 day challenge and it’s a really important one that I know many of you will get your teeth into.

You’re going to do a social media audit on your blog to assess how your social media accounts are going and to plan a way forward to use them more effective.

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

There are so many posts on the ProBlogger blog on the topic of social media but here are a few that you might like to check out:

And here’s a few others from other sites around the web

I’d love to hear how you found todays challenge in comments below.

First, a word from our sponsor, 99designs, the best place for a new blog or an older blogger to build their brand. If you’re looking to launch your blog or a project that needs some high quality but affordable design work done, then 99designs is where you should head. Start your next design project at 99designs.com/problogger and $99 upgrade for free.

Hi. It’s Darren here from ProBlogger. Welcome to day 8 of 31 Days to Build a Better Blog. Today, we’re going to talk about social media. My challenge to you is to choose one of your social media accounts, to do a bit of an audit on, to do some analysis, to ask some tough questions.

Most bloggers are pretty active on social media but it’s pretty easy to just drift along with it and not use it as effectively as you could. In fact, it’s pretty easy for it to start hurting your blogging as well, whether it be using social media as a distraction away from blogging itself, whether it’s just getting off target in terms of the topic—letting automation get in the way of useful tweeting—or standing to use social media in a more dated way. 

This is the case for me. I recently realized that I’d let ProBlogger’s social media accounts sleep a little. Social media has always been important for ProBlogger and it’s always sent us pretty good traffic to the blog, but I’d become a little bit distracted with other elements of my business that have been going well. 

Digital Photography School’s so much bigger, so I’ve focus so much attention on it that I become a little bit complacent with the ProBlogger, Twitter, and Facebook accounts. My tweets and updates on Facebook could become a bit sporadic. On Facebook, particularly, there will be days where I wouldn’t post anything. Sometimes three or four days in a row. Most of my tweets and Facebook updates have become a bit visually boring. Sometimes I even went off-topic or I became a little bit focused upon selling and ignored other things that I wanted to do with those accounts like engaging with my readers. 

I decided something needed to change. I put aside a whole morning to come up with a new plan and to analyze what had been going on on my accounts. That’s what today’s challenge is about. You probably don’t need to spend a whole morning on it. What I want to encourage you today is just to focus upon one of your social media accounts. You might want to do this later with another one as well. 

The first question you might want to ask is, which social network is best for my site? This is a big picture question that’s useful to ask. Over time, different social account networks emerge and some of them pull away and die. It’s good to ask this question every now and again. Where are my readers engaging in social media? You might get in touch with your readers on this by simply running a poll or a survey on your blog asking them in a blog post where they are engaging.

Another way to get a handle on it is to look at what other bloggers in your niche are doing. Where are they engaging? That might give you some hints. 

The other thing you can do is to get into your Google Analytics or metrics program and actually look at where traffic is coming from. What social sites send your traffic? Are there any that are sending you traffic that you’re not engaging on?

We recently realized at Digital Photography School that we got quite a bit of traffic from Pinterest. At that time, we didn’t have a Pinterest account. That was a hint for us to go and do something there. Is there a social media account that you need to start?

The other question now to ask is, are you focusing a lot of energy on one particular social network that’s not getting any traction? Do you need to pull back and actually stop using that network? Do you need to change your approach in some way? These are some big picture questions you could ask. 

Now, I want you to focus on one social network. It might be Twitter, it might be Facebook, it might be LinkedIn, Google+, Pinterest. Just focus in on one and start asking some of these questions. How are you using it?

One thing that you can do is to actually work out the percentages of your updates that would fit into different categories. For instance, driving traffic back to your blog might be one of the categories. Community engagement and interaction, discussion might be another category. Asking questions for research, selling. All of these categories legitimately can be used on social media. What percentage of your posts would fit into each category? Work it out. Looking back over the last 50 or so tweets or updates on Facebook, ask yourself, is this in balance? Am I doing too much of any one thing? 

I mentioned earlier, I felt like I was selling a bit too much on the ProBlogger Facebook page recently, so I needed to change that balance. I needed to focus more on community interaction and driving traffic. Particularly, driving traffic to old posts because I realized I was only sharing links to new posts that were coming out on the blog. I had a whole heap of useful information in my archives that I could similarly be sharing on my Facebook page. 

Another question to ask is, how much time am I putting into this social media account? This might be a bit of a confronting question for some of us because some of us spend way too much time on social media. Is the time that you’re putting in getting the benefits out that reflect the time you’re putting in? Some of you may not be putting enough time into it. Maybe you’re only putting in five minutes every month and you might want to change that, too. 

Another good question to ask is, am I using any kind of automation on my account? Many of us set up automation, where we share links when we’ve got a new blog post going up or we might share certain posts to keep going up at certain intervals. These can be quite useful. I’m going to share with you a tool later that I use. Over time, some of these automated posts can actually become a bit dated and it can be useful to go back and change your approach. 

Another good question to ask is, what voice am I doing my updates in? Am I writing in a personal conversational tone? Am I using writing in the third person or the first person? Am I being funny? Am I being formal? Is there any clash there with the different voices on your account?

Another good question to ask is, what kind of editorial plan do I have if any? I know many people just use social media when they feel like it. As a result, you can end up with 20 tweets in 10 minutes and then nothing for two days. Do you have any kind of plan? What would be the ideal in terms of timing of your posts? How often should you be posting? What types of posts? What are the goals of your posts and the outcomes that you want? I’ll talk to you in a minute about the editorial plan and what I do.

Another question you can ask is to dig into the stats of your blog. Go into your Google Analytics account and actually look at the kind of traffic that is being driven from your social media accounts. What type of posts seem to do best? What types of posts don’t work? 

The other type of stats you can dig into, depending on the social network, is the stats that you’re given by that social network. Facebook Insights have a lot of information that you can really dig into. Twitter also has stats that you can dig into. Dig into the stats and have a look at what type of posts work best. Not only the topics of the posts, but also the format. 

On Facebook, you can share text type posts. You can use images, you can use videos. Which ones are working best for you? Actually building a spreadsheet and doing some analysis on this type of stuff can be really useful and show you the type of things that you might want to continue to do more of. Were there certain posts that worked well that you could do again at some point in the future? Where are they in the headlines? Certain words that seem to trigger a response in your followers? What topics seem to trigger people to click on links? What topic seems to trigger discussion? What topics seem to trigger shares? Also, look at when your users are online. What times of tweets seem to be working well or Facebook updates? Facebook gives you some good stats on this.

Some other questions to ask, other features that you’re not using. Sometimes social networks add features that we never use. Pinned posts might be one. I found recently on Twitter when I pinned a post, it really extends the life of that post a lot. I haven’t found if it works so well on Facebook but it might work for you. It might be something to experiment with. 

Do you need to update your avatar (your header image) to reflect your brand? Do you need to update your profile description or the links in your profiles? You need to start experimenting with video. Particularly on Facebook at the moment, it seems to be working well. 

Another thing that’s worked well for us on Facebook, recently, is starting groups. While our pages don’t seem to be getting through Facebook algorithms so readily, we find Facebook groups work well. Maybe that’s something to experiment with, too.

The other thing is to focus on your visual content. How visual is your content? This was really confronting for me as I looked through the Twitter feed on ProBlogger’s account a few months ago and realized that I hardly had any images in there at all. The web is such a visual place and I’d been ignoring it. Team up on a site using tools like Canva, PicMonkey or even KeyNote or PowerPoint to design some images to insert into your feed.

The last thing I’d encourage you to think about is to design an editorial calendar. This simply is to design your ideal of how often you want to tweet or update on your Facebook page or LinkedIn, and what types of posts you might have. 

On ProBlogger on my Facebook page, my editorial calendar is really simple. I’ve just identified four times per day that I want to do a post and at certain times of the day, I want to do different types of posts. At one time of the day, I’ll update any new post that I’ve had on ProBlogger. At another time of the day, I’ll ask a question that engages my readership. Another time of the day, I’ll link to an archived post. Something that’s a year or two old but still relevant for today.

By setting aside these specific times in the day—I choose the time based upon when my audience is online—I’m starting to be more regular with my content, but I’m also doing different types of posts at different times of the day. I mix them up from time-to-time as well so that my audience is being engaged in different ways and I’m achieving all of my objectives. On a daily basis, I don’t include selling, but on a weekly basis, I’ll throw in one or two selling type posts as well. 

I’ve done the same thing for Twitter and I used a tool on Twitter called MeetEdgar. It’s a paid tool. There are other free tools out there but MeetEdgar is the only one that I’ve found that enables me to build a library of tweets. I’ve built up 500 or 600 tweets in my ProBlogger library and I’ve set certain intervals for these tweets to go out at.

Now, I’m still adding my own personal tweets every day and these are not automated at all. These are more interactive, more things that I’m doing, but there are these certain evergreen kinds of tweets that mainly link back to old posts on the site, questions or slides that I’ve developed, or images that I found helpful. I find that this helps me to be more regular and also helps me to be more visually appealing on my site. You might want to check out that tool for yourself but there are others out there that enable you to schedule tweets like Buffer as well. 

Really, the key today is to dig into one of your social media accounts and to ask some tough questions. Be a little bit harder on yourself. Is it being used effectively? If not, what changes need to happen? What time do you need to put aside to make those changes happen? 

One of the things that I’ve started to do recently is to make appointments with myself to make the changes that need to happen. I know I can come up with a long list of things I need to improve, but unless I actually diarize when I’m going to make those changes nothing ever happens.

For instance, for me that means every morning at a quarter past nine, I dedicate 10 minutes to Twitter and Facebook. I also dedicate 10 minutes later in the day at about 1:30 PM, and then in the evenings, I dedicate a few minutes as well. Just by putting aside those three 10 minute blocks every day, I’ve noticed that I’ve started to become much more regular, engaging, and useful in my social media accounts. That has a massive impact, so diarize when you’re going to implement these changes. Also, diarize when you’re going to reassess these changes. 

Maybe a month from today, diarize that you’re going to reassess the Twitter account that you’ve just looked at today or the Facebook page. How have those changes gone? Look at the stats again. Have things improved? If they have not, you might want to continue to tweak. If they have been working, you might want to build upon some of the changes that you’ve already put in place.

I hope you’ve enjoyed today’s episode of the ProBlogger Podcast. I would love to hear how you found this challenge. I’m sure others are participating in the challenge. I also would like to hear what you’ve done so head to problogger.com/podcast/8, which is where you’ll find the show notes for today’s episode. 

There’s an opportunity to comment there and to let us know how you found this challenge, what you’re actually implementing today, the decisions that you make, the things that you’ve learned through doing this audit. It’s really important to not only do things, but I found this challenge really comes alive when we’re interacting with other bloggers on the same journey. Again, head to problogger.com/podcast/8 and let us know what you think of today’s episode. 

Also, I’d love to get your review of this podcast. Now, many of you have done it on iTunes and I do thank you for your reviews there. Please do keep them coming in. But if you’re listening to this podcast on Stitcher, we’ve got one review. I know others are listening on Stitcher. So far, we’ve just got one and I do appreciate your review. Foos, who left the review, “Thanks for a great podcast. It was just what I needed to kickstart my blog again.”

That’s certainly a theme we’ve heard in a lot of the reviews, people using this challenge to get back into blogging. If you’re on Stitcher please leave us a review. We’d love to have another one added to Foos’ and I’d really appreciate that. Also, if you’re on iTunes, you’re more than welcome to review and rate us there. It does help us to get a little bit more visibility. 

Lastly, I want to thank 99designs who’ve got a great offer for you as a listener of this podcast. They’re a service that I’ve used numerous times over the years to create great graphics for my blogs and other projects like this podcast, and they’d like to do the same for you today. If you need a new logo or some other graphic design element for your blog or project visit 99designs.com/problogger. As a ProBlogger Podcast listener, you’ll get a free $99 upgrade to users on your first design with them. 

I hope you enjoyed today’s episode. I will chat with you tomorrow on day 9 of 31 Days to Build a Better Blog.

Also check out the great offer our friends, and new podcast sponsor, 99designs have for you (worth $99). They’re a fantastic place to go if you’re looking for any help with graphic design in your blogging.

I use their services and have worked with some great designers to create graphic design creatives for my blogs.

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.

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

It’s time for another writing challenge – today is all about creating a ‘link post’ for your blog.

Link posts used to be the bread and butter of bloggers but have become less popular over the last couple of years – but I think they still have real benefit for your blog – so I challenge you to create one today.

Once you’ve published it I’d love to see what you’ve created in the comments of these show notes below.

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

Let me also give you some quick examples (all taken from the archives of ProBlogger) on the 6 types of ‘link posts’.

Also check out Feedly as a good RSS reading tool.

On day 2 of this challenge I challenged you to write a ‘list post’ and many of you wrote and then shared links to the lists you wrote. You did so well and I enjoyed reading them.

Today I’d like you to share you newly published ‘link posts’ in comments below.

Please only share newly written posts and please also take a moment or two to surf around some of the links that others share so we can get to know other bloggers taking this challenge.

Can’t wait to see your posts!

Before we get into today’s episode, I want to just draw your attention to our wonderful sponsor, 99designs, who make it easy for your next project to get off the ground with a quality, affordable design. To get your logo, business card, mobile app, blog template, or other blog creatives up and going, visit 99designs.com/problogger and get a $99 upgrade for your next design for free.

Hi, this is Darren from ProBlogger. Welcome to day 7 of 31 Days to Build a Better Blog, where I’m giving you 31 different challenges to help improve your blog. Today, we’re going to write a blog post. It’s been a few days since we’ve done one. I think day two, we did a ‘write a list’ post and today we’re going to write a link post. A link post is a post where you are simply linking to another blog in some way. Sounds pretty simple, doesn’t it? And it is. It’s actually something that I used to do a lot on my blogs, but over the years, things have changed a bit.

When I started blogging back in 2002, the link post was probably the most common type of post that I saw bloggers doing. A lot of blogging revolved around the sharing of links on the blog. One blogger would write a post, and then tens if not hundreds of other bloggers would link to that post. But they didn’t just link to it, they would build upon it, react with it, disagree with it, talk about what they liked about it in some way.

It was cool, it was a great thing. Ideas really spread quickly through the blogosphere as a result of these link posts. Relationships with other bloggers grew with every link that you gave. Ideas improve when you add to someone’s idea with a link post, when you disagree, when you react to it in some way, everyone seems to get a bit smarter. Of course, traffic flowed from one blog to another. We all grew as a result of it. It helped each other’s search engine optimization and the direct traffic was great, too.

But things have changed. Today, links are still being shared on the internet, but they’re being shared in other places, less so on blogs. More of it’s happening on Twitter, Facebook, and other social media sites. This is fine, this is great, it’s actually a good thing to do. You can still get some of those benefits that I mentioned earlier, but sadly some of those deepening of ideas, I wonder whether that’s been lost a little. It’s hard to share a link on Twitter with someone and then add to the ideas or disagree with it or really say anything of great value in just 140 or so characters.

The other thing that’s happened over the last few years too is that some bloggers are becoming a little bit more competitive. “I don’t want to share links with competitors,” which is a bit sad. There are a few reasons why I think you should consider linking from your blog, not just social media, to other blogs. 

Firstly, it can be highly valuable to your readers. Good links, useful information, and then adding your own ideas to that, is actually really useful to your readers. Sure, seeing your links being shared on Twitter could be good, but if you can actually give some context of why you’re sharing the links, your readers are going to go and read that content better informed and better primed to benefit from it, and they’re going to thank you for that. It also builds your credibility to show that you’re well-read and that you’re not afraid to share links to people who might be considered to be a competitor. And it does build relationships with other bloggers. It breaks down some of that competitiveness that I was talking about earlier.

Today, I challenge you to reclaim the link post. Even if it’s just for one single post, just to see what happens. The links that you share today, I want them to be of high value, high relevance, and timely. Not too dated. Sometimes, content over time loses a bit of its value because it’s not as up to date, irrelevant for today.

Now, before you go away and write your post, I want to suggest six different types of link posts that you might try. It’s not simply about writing a title, putting the link, and then ending the post. You want to give it some context. Here are six different types of link posts.

The first one is to build upon the point of others. If someone else in your niche has written a post, maybe a list post—10 Ways To, 10 Reasons Why—build on it, share the link, highlight a few of the good things that the other bloggers touched on and then add your own 11th point, 12th point, 13th point. What would you add?

The second type of post that you might want to do is to take the opposite point of view of another blogger. This is where you put up a post and your link to someone else has stimulated your thinking, but then you show your own different experience, perspective, or opinion to what someone else has written. This might be a little bit threatening to some of us who don’t like to be confronted with our posts, but you don’t have to do it in an attacking or nasty way. Be thoughtful, be respectful, share your view, you might actually find that the other blogger appreciates your frankness.

The third type of post is to build a resource on a particular topic. You might want to pick a topic that’s relevant to your blog and then spend some time researching to see what other people have written on that topic previously. You could share your research simply as a simple list of links for further reading. You could say, “Here are 10 posts that I found on the topic of,” and that could be as simple as your post is. Or you might want to write a little bit more. You might take those 10 posts and write a short paragraph on why you like each one and then include a screenshot from it or include the main point or even a quote. That way your readers are getting a little bit more than just simply a list of 10 links.

The fourth type of post is what I used to call on ProBlogger speed linking or a wrap-up post. This is simply where you share a list of what you’ve been reading lately from around your niche. The links may not all relate to the same topic, but they all loosely do. What I used to do in Digital Photography School is once a month, I would do a wrap-up post. Trending great links on photography from around the web, I think it was what I used to call them. Those posts did really well. Our readers love them and the other sites love them too. They used to link up to those all the time on their social media account, so we’ve got a lot of traffic back from them.

The fifth type of post that you might want to try is the one-question interview. This is something I started doing back in 2005 on my first blog, but it’s become really popular over the years on many blogs. You’ve probably seen it many times. You simply email a number of other bloggers in your niche and you ask them all the same question. Just a single question to comment on. They need only respond with a sentence or two or longer if they want, and then you compile their responses into a post. You might want to add some of your thoughts, point out some of the common themes in the answers and then you’ve got a really interesting post.

And then the sixth type of link post is simply where you add some further reading to another normal post that you write. You might have written a tutorial on a particular topic and then at the end, instead of just having a further reading to other posts you’ve written that are relevant, add in a couple of links to someone else’s posts. Those types of simple extra links deepen your post, take it to the next level.

Another thing that you might want to do today is to set up some sort of a system for reading other blogs and collecting interesting links that you can share. Whether you end up sharing them in blog posts like we’re suggesting today, or whether it be for social media. The challenge is to subscribe to other blogs and then use an app like Flipboard or even BuzzSumo to find really interesting content and then have some sort of a collection tool. It may be simply having a text document where you put all the links or you might want to use a tool like Evernote or Flipboard to bookmark those interesting links so that you can come back for them and share them later.

Really, it’s about setting up a system that is going to help you to keep abreast of what’s being written in your niche and provide you with interesting and relevant links that you can then share with your readers. But the main challenge today is to write a post and publish it, a link post. I hope you find it a useful exercise. I know for me, there’s been different times where this type of post has actually become what I do one day a week. It might be Fridays, or it might be once a month, the last day of the month is links for the month. This type of post can be relatively easy to write, but really useful to your readers.

I really hope you enjoy today’s challenge. I love these types of posts and I’m looking forward to seeing the post that you create. Please go to problogger.com/podcast/7 and share the post that you create today. I would love to see what you come up with. When you’re there, also click around on some of the other posts that other people who are listening to this podcast have submitted as well.

One of the things I love about the 31-day challenge is you get to see other bloggers in action. I’ve seen all kinds of wonderful friendships, and collaboration and partnerships emerge from people checking out what other people are only. But not only that, sharing what other people are doing and commenting on what other people are doing, I really would encourage you to get around and see as many of the posts as you can today. You might just find a friend, you might just find a new reader for your blog, you might just find a new blog that you love to read as well. So, head to the show notes, problogger.com/podcast/7.

I’d also like to thank our sponsor today, 99designs, who have really helped us out in getting this podcast up and running. I’d encourage you to check them out. If you’re like many of our listeners and in the early stages of getting your blog off the ground or are thinking about starting a new project off the side of your blog, whether it be an ebook or a podcast, your to-do list is probably a mile long, but there’s one task you should tackle sooner than anything else and that’s your branding and the graphic design that you need to support those projects. 

You can get maximum creativity with 99designs. The online marketplace where dozens of designers compete to deliver the best design for your project. You get to choose from the ideas created just for you from awesome designers around the world. I’ve met some amazing designers on 99designs. 

When you’re just starting out, you want to get your logo designed, but 99designs also make it really easy to get other things round your visual identity sorted out with other designs like blog themes, banner ads, and social media creatives as well. Whatever your business needs, really. Your brand could very well be the best business investment that you make and get the help you need to do that at 99designs.

When you’re ready to do that, head over to 99designs.com/problogger and as a ProBlogger listener, you’ll get a free $99 upgrade to use on your first design. Check them out today. Thanks for listening today. I’ll talk to you tomorrow on day 8 of 31 Days to Build a Better Blog.

Also check out the great offer our friends, and new podcast sponsor, 99designs have for you (worth $99). They’re a fantastic place to go if you’re looking for any help with graphic design in your blogging.

I use their services and have worked with some great designers to create graphic design creatives for my blogs.

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.

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

Welcome to day 6 of the 31 Days to Build a Better Blog challenge where today we’re going to talk about making your blog mobile friendly.

While to get your blog completely mobile friendly will take you longer than a single day today you can come up with a plan to do so if you’ve not already.

This task is VERY important. We’re getting to the point where half of your blog’s readers are probably viewing your blog on mobile devices and if your design isn’t good you could be losing them and also running the risk of falling in Google’s search rankings!

If you’re already mobile friendly – todays a great day to review your design not that front.

Test Your Blog

WordPress Plugins

Responsive Themes

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Note: I am an affiliate for StudioPress and WPCurve. I’ve also been a user of both services and recommend them genuinely fro that experience and from knowing the teams behind them well.

First, a quick word from our sponsor, 99designs, the best place for new businesses to build their brand. 99designs makes it easy to get your next project off the ground with quality, affordable design. To get you a logo, business card, mobile app, blog template or more, visit 99designs.com/problogger and get a $99 upgrade for free.

Hi, this is Darren from ProBlogger. Welcome to day 6 of 31 Days to Build a Better Blog, where we’re teaching you 31 different things that you can do to improve your blog, and then challenging you to go away and do it. Really, the doing part is the most important part of this 31-day challenge, so I hope you are taking action.

Today’s challenge is a big one. Yesterday’s was pretty small in many ways, but it had a big impact, but today’s is a bigger challenge, and it may actually take you longer than one day to implement, but I want you to make some decisions today that you can go away and implement. Today’s challenge is to make your blog mobile-friendly.

I know some of you have already done this and I’ve got some things for you to do as well, but it’s a really important challenge. We’re approaching a time where more people will read blogs on their mobile devices than desktops. In fact, for many blogs, it’s already happened. I know on my blogs, I checked this morning on Digital Photography School, half of my readers exactly 50% are now viewing the blog on mobile. On ProBlogger, 55% of my blog readers are viewing on mobile, so it’s really important.

What I’ve also noticed is that traffic coming from social media is even more viewed on mobile. Lastly, in a recent update, Google announced that if a site was mobile-friendly that would start to count as a factor in how they rank sites in their search results. If you want to be found on Google, it helps to have a mobile-friendly device.

The first thing I want you to do today is to get your mobile out, and if you’ve got a tablet, you can get that out as well. Take a look at what your readers are currently experiencing when viewing your blog on a mobile device. Simply load up your blog on your mobile phone and have a look at what they say. What does it look like? What looks good? Have a surf around. What would they like? What would they find frustrating? Do they have to scroll sideways? Do they need to pinch and zoom all the time just to be able to read the content?

Does it load fast? How do the images and videos display? How do the menus display? Is there anything that’s broken? Do you have pop-ups that are impossible to shut down? All of these things are factors to help you to assess what the experience is of your blog. I’m going to include a couple of links in the show notes to this episode. There are links to tools that Google has created to see how your blog is performing on mobile and desktop. These links will give you a rating for your site, and they’ll also identify areas that you might need to improve. Areas that are loading slowly or broken on different mobile devices. 

It’s worth doing this exercise not only on your mobile but on a tablet as well, because you’ll see different things there. If you’ve got other people in your family or in friendship groups who have different types of mobile phones, it’s sometimes worth having a look at those as well whether they’re Android or iOS.

Now at this point, I want to make a confession. While my main blog at Digital Photography School is fully responsive and has been designed with mobile in mind, ProBlogger is not so great at the moment, and that’s an area that we’re working on at the moment. Today’s challenge is actually something that we’re working on as a team right now. We have a mobile theme of sorts on ProBlogger, but it’s one of the earliest ones and it needs updating. In fact, we’re going to do a fully responsive design for ProBlogger. That change will come soon. 

If you don’t have a mobile-friendly blog, there are few things that you can do. Firstly, you could have a look around your niche and other books to see what they do. I think it’s really important to do this, you actually start to say what the current trends are, what works well, what doesn’t work well, and that can then inform your decision about how you’ll build a mobile theme for your blog.

Once you’ve done this, you’ve got a few options. I’m mainly going to talk here to WordPress bloggers, but other platforms have similar options as well. For example on Blogger, if you’re using Google’s Blogger, they have mobile themes already available, but if you’re on WordPress, there are three main options that you could pursue. Firstly, you could install a plugin. This probably the most simple option, but it may not be quite as customized or as elegant a solution, but some of the plugins are pretty good today.

There are a few different ones. If you go to the WordPress plugin directory, you’ll see a whole heap listed if you just do a search for a mobile theme. One that I’ve used and that I know a lot of other bloggers used, in fact, I think it’s been downloaded millions of times, 5 million last time I checked, is WPtouch. It’s just a plugin that you can install that has a free option. They also have premium options. It does get a bit expensive if you go for the top option, but their free options are pretty good and it would probably be suitable for most smaller blogs.

It can be customized a bit, you can put your logo in and you can change the colors just to make it a little bit more like the rest of your design. Similarly, you could use the Jetpack WordPress plugin. Many of you probably already installed this for the stats, but it also has a very simple and clean mobile theme that you could switch on as well. Anyone coming to your blog with these plugins installed and they’re on a mobile device, the plugin detects that they’re on a mobile and it will show them that version.

There’s another one called WP Mobile Pack as well, which claims to appify your theme. So, there are different options out there. Go and have a look at the ones that suit you and install those plugins. Be a little bit careful with plugins. You want to make sure that they get good ratings, that they’re secure, and you want to keep them up to date, but it’s a fairly simple way to make your blog mobile-friendly.

Another way that you can go about making your blog mobile-friendly is to get a responsive theme. Most themes today, whether they are free themes or premium themes, come with some sort of responsive design. This means that the content will resize and rearrange to fit smaller screens without the need for separate mobile themes or plugins.

I’m a big fan of the guys at StudioPress—they’re with Copyblogger—and all of their designs, their themes are fully responsive, and I’ve got a link for you in the show notes there. Most of the other theme providers today, whether they are WooThemes or one of the others will also have responsive designs. It might be just time to completely change the design of your whole blog. If you’re willing to do that, you’ll probably get a nice responsive theme as well.

The third option is to hire a designer to do it for you. This is the most expensive way to go, and it will probably take the most time as well, but you’re going to get a more elegant solution and something that reflects your brand. There’s a whole heap of designers out there who will do that type of work, but you probably only want to do that if you’re making a living from your blogging or you’re at least on the way to doing so because it’s going to cost you quite a bit.

If you’re feeling overwhelmed by the task of making your blog mobile-friendly, you might want to talk to the guys at WP Curve. They offer you WordPress support for small updates, tweaks, and maintenance issues. They might be good at helping you to install one of those plugins if you are not comfortable doing that. They have a monthly fee, which will enable you to get support like this and for other things as well.

There are your three options. Whether it’s installing a plugin, getting a redesign with a responsive theme, or getting a custom design, it is really important to address this issue of mobile design. If you’ve already got a mobile-friendly blog, it’s probably worth still doing the exercise and looking through your blog or on a mobile device or a number of them, if possible. How could you improve it? Are you on the latest version of a plugin that you might be using? Is it starting to look a bit tired and dated?

Look through the last 10 posts on your blog? How do they display? What you’ll find sometimes is that images in one post display fine, but on another, they don’t. You might want to dig into that and work out why it is. How about videos? How about the titles and headings? How about different formatting? Sometimes things break over time. Is there anything that needs fixing?

The other thing you can do once you’ve got a mobile-friendly blog is dig a little into the mobile stats in Google Analytics. You might find that some posts get really good stats on mobile, but not so good on desktop, or vice versa. There might be things that you can unearth by looking at those stats as well.

I hope that today’s challenge is one that you don’t find too overwhelming. I think I’ve given you some options today that can be more time consuming than others, but it’s really important to ask these questions. I’d love to hear how you found today’s challenge, you can head to problogger.com/podcast/6, and there’s an opportunity there for you to leave comments and see today’s show notes.

Lastly, a quick word from our sponsor, 99designs. If you are like many listeners of this show (and I’ve been talking to a few of you), who are in the early stages of getting their blog off the ground or perhaps starting a new project on the side of their blog, then your to-do list (like mine was a few weeks ago starting this podcast) might look a mile long, but there’s one task you should tackle sooner than later, and that is thinking about branding.

One of the first things I did when I started thinking about this podcast was to get some artwork underway and I went to 99designs to do that. You can get great submissions from designers from around the world for your design, and within a week have a beautiful design for your project. If you head to 99designs.com/problogger as a ProBlogger Podcast listener, you’ll get a free $99 upgrade to use on your first design, so head over there now and grab your discount today.

I’ll talk to you tomorrow on day 7 of 31 Days to Build a Better Blog. Talk to you then.

Also check out the great offer our friends, and new podcast sponsor, 99designs have for you (worth $99). They’re a fantastic place to go if you’re looking for any help with graphic design in your blogging.

I use their services and have worked with some great designers to create graphic design creatives for my blogs.

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.

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

It’s day 5 of our 31 Day Challenge and today is a pretty simple one that could take you just a minute or two (although you could take a few moments extra and do it multiple times to extend the impact).

The task – is to email one of your blog’s readers!

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

Todays exercise is super simple. In fact last time I talked about it on ProBlogger someone commented saying it wasn’t worth doing. But here’s the thing – this kind of action adds up over time.

Like I say in todays episode – do this every day for a year you’ll have made an impression upon hundreds of people – each who could become daily readers to your blog and whom have their own networks that they might just promote you to.

While we’d all love a big rush of overnight traffic as a way to grow readers the reality is that this one by one converting of ‘surfers’ into loyal ‘readers’ is the way that most blogs grow and this is one way to do that.

Give it a go and let us know in comments below how you found the exercise!

I mentioned this same idea in a post on ProBlogger – The Power of Personalisation.

Also check out this great presentation that Pat Flynn gave. He did this same talk at the ProBlogger Event last year and it had a big impact and talks about how to convert casual readers into raving fans. I think today’s exercise very much fits into an activity that could play a part in doing just that.

First, a word from our sponsor, 99designs, the best place for new businesses and blogs to build their brands. If you’re looking to launch a new blog or project and need some high quality but affordable design work done, then 99designs is where you should be heading. Start your next design project at 99designs.com/problogger and get a $99 upgrade for free.

Hi, this is Darren from ProBlogger and welcome to day 5 in 31 Days to Build a Better Blog where we’re going through 31 different activities that you can do to improve your blog. I’m giving you a little bit of teaching and then a challenge to go and do every day over this month.

Today’s task is probably one of the most simple things that you can do. In fact, it’s so simple that many people don’t do it because, well, it’s just a small action and what impact could it have? But I’m here today to tell you that this is one of the things that I did in the early days of my own blog that still has an impact today, 12 years later.

The challenge today is to email one of your readers. That’s it. Just shoot an email to one of your readers. It’s all about building community on your blog. Making an impression on a single reader by giving them some personal attention. It’s an exercise in building community on a micro level. You’re just reaching out to one person today.

This might sound a little bit too small. One reader, I want a thousand readers. We all want a thousand readers, but when you’re just starting out and even once you’ve been going for a while, those thousand readers are just single readers, a thousand of them. If you can build a deeper relationship with just a few of those, it can have a lasting impact.

In the early days of my blogs—my first blog, my first personal blog—any time anyone left a comment, I would do three things. Firstly, I would respond to that comment on my blog, really important. This is good because it shows that person, if they ever come back again, that you’ve responded, that you’re interested in but it also shows other people who might be reading your blog that you respond to comments too. Even though they might not come in, they are impressed by that. That has an impact. It also increases the comment count by another one as well. Instead of one comment, you’ve got two. Even though one of them’s yours.

The second thing I do is just email the person because they’ve left you their email address to leave that comment, just thanking them for reading, thanking them for commenting, and letting them know that I’d responded to their comment. I just give a simple link back to the post so they could go back and see the comment that I left. That gets them back to the site again, if possible, in that email.

The third thing I would do is just to make it a little bit personal. Reference something good that they said, just to show that your email to them isn’t an automated thing. It’s actually you. Sometimes, people are a bit suspicious of that. What I found is that by doing this simple thing and it used to just type me two or three minutes. If that, it had an impact.

What I found is that people were exponentially more likely to come back again and start engaging in a more enthusiastic manner on my blog. In fact, I know for a fact today that there are at least three or four people on ProBlogger as readers who read ProBlogger because I emailed them 10 or so years ago. I still get emails back from people saying, “Wow. I’ve left comments everywhere and no one’s ever emailed me before. Thanks.” Then, you just see them popping up in comments more and more often. This one by one paying attention to readers has a lasting impact.

Here’s the cool thing. If you get someone coming back as a loyal reader to your blog, perhaps it on a weekly basis, that’s 52 extra page views a year. Over 10 years, that’s 500. If you do this every day, 300 times a year, that’s potentially thousands of extra page views on your blog in a few years’ time. It actually does have an impact.

The other thing about it is that these people who you’re making an impression on, each have their own networks. Some of these readers who I know come back today. I know for a fact that there are others with them. They have blogs, they have social media accounts, and they regularly suggest my blog to their readers and to their networks. It has an impact. Maybe not overnight, but over time it has a massive impact.

There are also a few ways that you can extend this idea. If you’ve got an extra two or three minutes, instead of just emailing them, have a look and see if they also leave a link. Many of the people who are commenting on your blog probably have their own blogs. Click the link, go and visit their blog, and leave a comment on a post that they’ve written. That too makes an impression.

If they’re on social media, follow them. Build that relationship. You might just make a friend, you might just make an ally, another blogger in your industry, and you can grow together. You can also take this even further. If you’re on their blog, actually share some of their content on your social media accounts. Help them to achieve their goals and they’re much more likely to help you achieve yours.

If the person said something insightful in the comment on your blog, maybe ask them if he can use it in a future post as a quote, or ask them if they’d be interested in guest posting on your blog. You’ll never know unless you ask. 

These simple actions can have a profound impact, particularly if you do them regularly with lots of readers. A key with this particular exercise for them today is not just to do it once but to do it on a regular basis. Rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat. It just takes a moment to do but it can create a loyal long-time reader for your blog. Do it at least once a day or set yourself a higher target and you’ll build your blog consistently, consistently over time. It might sound like a really small thing, but it has a big impact. 

Lastly, if you don’t have any comments yet on your blog, and I know many people are just starting out and perhaps haven’t had their first comment, that’s fine. Today, I challenge you to go and leave some comments on other people’s blogs. Don’t spam them, be useful, be genuine, interact with people, and you might just find that they come and check out your blog, too.

The show notes for today’s episode are at problogger.com/podcast/5 and you’ll see some links there mentioned in today’s show and also have the opportunity to let us know how you found the exercise. I’d love to hear how you found it. Did you get a response from a reader? What impact do you think it has? We’ll be doing this on a daily basis or building it into your workflow. Please let us know how you find the episode and any results that you get.

Also, I’d love to get your reviews and comments on this show in iTunes, if you could submit a review that would help to get the word out about what we’re doing. Lastly, a huge thank you to 99designs who are sponsoring today’s show. They’ve been sponsoring the episodes in this series so far. They’re a service that I’ve used numerous times over the years to create great graphics for my blogs and other projects.

If you need help getting a logo or website for your business or your next project, like a podcast for instance but don’t know how to get started, don’t have a big budget, then 99designs can help. They’re the world’s largest graphic design marketplace and they make it really easy to get a design that you love. Just go to their website, tell them about the design you need, and pick the price package that works for you.

Then, the fun begins as designers from around the world submit their awesome designs and you get the chance to give them feedback. Within a week, you’ll have your own logo or new design. You get thousands of designers literally at your fingertips through 99designs and there’s no limit to what you can get designed.

If you need something designed, whether it be a T-shirt, a logo, or a business card, head to 99designs.com/problogger and you’ll get a free $99 upgrade to use on your first design. Check them out today and I’ll see you tomorrow on day 6 of 31 Days to Build a Better Blog. Thanks for listening.

A big thanks to our sponsors at 99designs. Check out the great offer that they have for you (worth $99). They’re a fantastic place to go if you’re looking for any help with graphic design in your blogging.

I use their services and have worked with some great designers to create graphic design creatives for my blogs.

Lastly 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.

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

It’s day 4 in our 31 days to build a better blog challenge and today is one of my favourites – in fact it’s something I do very regularly in my own blogging.

It’s all about spending time on another person’s blog in your niche to observe what they do (and don’t do) to see what you can learn (no magnifying glass required).

This exercise can be done in 10-15 minutes (although you can take longer if you wish).

Listen to this episode to find out how I do it.

Much of this episode is a series of questions for you to ask as you look at the blog that you’ve chosen to analyse.

You might like to get the blog’s page loaded up and then run todays episode for a bit while I run through some questions and then pause the episode as you do the analysis.

Here are the areas to analyse that I run through:

I also share 2 words of warning with this exercise.

This podcast is based upon this post on the ProBlogger Blog where some of the questions I run through are included so you’ve got them written somewhere.

Mentioned in this episode were two tools for looking at the traffic of other blogs. They are Alexa and Compete. These don’t give you exact stats and I don’t find them 100% accurate as I analyse my own blogs but they can give you a bit of an idea of how a blog’s traffic might be trending.

For Alexa just add the url of the site in the top right corner where it says ‘Browse Top Sites or Enter a Site’ and then click ‘Find’.

For Compete just enter the URL in the front page but note that for full stats you need to pay these days so you won’t get a heap of information.

First, a word from our sponsor 99designs the best place for new bloggers to build their brand. 99designs is the blogger’s number one choice for quality graphic design. To get your logo, business card, or any blog creative you might need, visit 99designs.com/problogger and get a $99 upgrade of services for free.

Hi, this is Darren from ProBlogger. Welcome to day 4 of 31 Days to Build a Better Blog, where each day we’re giving you a little bit of teaching and a challenge to go away and to improve your blog. Today is one of my favorite activities and it’s something that I do semi-regularly on my blog.

I go through periods where I actually do it every day but at least once a week I do this activity. I never come away from it without learning something that I can go away and improve my blog on. The activity is this, to analyze another blog in your niche. You can do it with a blog that’s not in your niche but you probably get more value by doing it with a blog on your niche.

The idea is really simple. Put aside 10, 15 minutes longer if you can, and just watch what another blogger is doing. It’s about watching, listening, observing, learning, how other bloggers approach what they do. Not so that you can copy them, but so that you can perhaps notice what someone else is doing well that you could emulate, but also watch what they’re not doing so that you can differentiate yourself.

It’s a simple activity. Firstly, identify a successful blog in your niche, or maybe it’s an up and coming blog in your niche that seems to have burst onto the scene in different ways and that people are starting to talk about. Keep in mind, you can do this with blogs outside of your niche as well, but you’ll probably get more value if you choose one in your niche.

Choose a blog that has been successful, maybe start with one of the big ones and then take 15 minutes to do some analysis. I encourage you to ask some of these questions, and I’ve broken them down into different areas. I’ll give you a post that does these and gives you all of these questions.

The first area is this: content. What topics are they writing about? What topics are they ignoring? What voice or style are they writing in? Are they writing in an authoritative voice, or are they more conversational? What style of posts do they have? Are they writing list posts? Are they writing opinion posts? Something else? How often do they post? Is it once a week? Once a day? Once an hour?

What level are they pitching their posts at? Are they writing for beginners or more advanced audiences? How long are the posts that they are writing? Are they writing lots of short, sharp ones? Are they writing really long, deep mega posts? Are they writing posts that are more information-based? Inspiration-based? Are they more about engagement? Are they more writing about the news?

Are they using different mediums? Are they using video podcasts? Infographics? Are they doing purely original content or are they curating content, using other people’s content to bounce off? What topics and categories do they major in?

Look at the headlines. Do they have any formulas that seem to be working? Are they a single author, blogger, or do they have multiple authors? Do they accept guest posts? All of these questions will just help you to understand the content that’s being used on this successful blog. Again, this isn’t so that you can go away and copy it, and just rewrite their posts or anything like that, but it may give you some ideas of the topics that might work on your blog, and may actually show you some different types of posts that you could experiment with as well.

The second area you might want to think about is reader engagement. How are they engaging with their readers that they’ve got? How are they building community? How are they giving people a sense of belonging, or do they engage at all? What course of action do they use in their posts to get people to comment? What types of posts seem to get the most comments, shares, and likes?

Do they use polls, surveys, quizzes, or other engagement triggers? What social media sites do they seem to be using most to get engagement and build community with their readers? Do they have a newsletter? How do they incentivize sign-ups for their newsletter? What topic content do they send to their newsletter? Maybe it needs to subscribe to yourself?

How much do the writers of the blog engage in the comments section of their blog? Do they have a dedicated community area like a forum or a membership area, or are they doing that more on social media? Do they create discussion-oriented posts, or assignments, or challenges to give their readers something to do? What questions are their readers asking of them in their comments?

All of these things will help you to understand a little bit more about how this blog is engaging with their readers or perhaps how they’re not engaging that you could actually do yourself, to help you to differentiate what you’re doing.

Related to this, you might want to do some analysis of their social media accounts because social media is not just for engagement. Have a look on their sidebar, which social media accounts they have. Are there any there that you don’t already do? How are they promoting their social media accounts? How are they trying to get followers?

Are they using all of those social media accounts or some of them just doing automated stuff like posting their blog posts as they come up? Which ones seem to be most important? Which one is getting the most engagement? How often do they update these accounts? What times of day do they update? What types of posts on these accounts seem to be working best? Are they monetizing their social media accounts? What hashtags do they use? All of these things will give you hints as to what you might do.

Another area you might want to do some analysis on is the design of their blog. What layout do they use? Do they have any different navigation or menu items that you don’t have? What’s the first impression that their blog design gives you? What’s the first thing that they seem to be calling people to do? What call to action do they have on their blog?

Have they used a designer, or are they using a blog template? How do they communicate what their blog is about? Do they have a tagline for instance? How are they using their front page, is it just a traditional blog format with the latest post at the top or are they doing more of a portal style or magazine style?

What items do they have in their sidebar? Do they have a Hello Bar at the top? What type of blogging tool are they using? Can you tell? Is there anything you can tell about their approach to search engine optimization from the way that their blogs laid out? What commenting technology do they have? Are they using WordPress’ native comments? Are they using Disqus or another tool?

What logo do they have? What colors do they have? How do they incorporate social proof into their design? Do they offer an app? There’s a whole heap of different ways that bloggers design their blogs, see what you can learn from the way they do it.

Another area you can do some analysis in is monetization. How are they monetizing their blog at all? This might give you some hints as to how blogs in your niche best monetize. Do they have advertising for sale on their blog? If they do, they quite often might have a page for advertisers, and that page can give you all kinds of information about how much they charge for instance or how much traffic they have, and this is really useful information, particularly if you are looking to advertise your blog, but you don’t know how much to charge for it.

Are they using an ad network like AdSense? How many ads do they have on their page? Where are the ads positioned? What size ads do they offer? What can you learn for the way that they sell their own products if they have them? Do they have an ebook, or a course, or a membership area? These again can be useful hints as to the type of products you might want to develop.

Do they promote products as an affiliate? These might be products that you could promote as well. Do they have any disclaimer page or privacy page? What can you learn from that page about how perhaps you should be disclaiming as well? What advertisers seem to be targeting their blog if they are on that? All of these ideas will just give you things that you maybe one day could aim for with your blog. This might be a big blog, so you may not be able to attract the advertisers that they attract, but it gives you something to aim for.

Another area you can ask questions about is their email newsletter? Do they have an email newsletter? If so, how are they getting people to sign up for it? Do they have pop-ups, forms or Hello Bar? Are they incentivizing people? What type of emails are they sending?

Lastly, traffic. How are they getting traffic to their blog? This sometimes can be difficult to work out, but you may actually, as you look around at other blogs, see their guest posting, or you might see that they’re using social media in different ways, perhaps using hashtags, and who are they engaging with on social media?

Are they engaging with other social influencers who are sharing their content? Once new readers come to their site, how they try to hook those readers, it may be through their newsletter or might be through different social media accounts. How they call people to interact with them. You might also want to have a little look at sites like Alexa or Compete that give you an indication of how much traffic they might be getting to their blogs.

These services don’t always give you highly accurate information on the exact numbers, but you might be able to tell whether the traffic’s plateaued or whether it’s still growing, or whether it’s on the decline.

Lastly, you might want to ask some of these sorts of questions. Are there opportunities to network with or partner with this blogger? Do they accept guest posts that you could then submit and write some content for them? Do they have products that you could promote as an affiliate, or do you have a product that maybe they could promote as an affiliate?

If they’re in your niche, what gaps are there in what they do that you could fill with your own blog? What do they do really well, that you’re not doing? What are they doing poorly that you could do? Again, you could do this analysis with blogs in your niche, or you could even look outside of it. I usually stick within my niche, but from time to time, it’s worth having a look at a blog that’s completely irrelevant to yours just to see what they’re doing because you’ll learn all kinds of things that are going on outside of your niche.

The last few things I’ll say, a little bit of a word of warning. Some bloggers when they do an analysis of other blogs become so obsessed with what others are doing, that they forget to actually do anything unique themselves. Maintain the focus of your own blog and build something worth reading of your own, but do pay attention to what others are doing as well because you might learn all kinds of things, and you might spot some opportunities to collaborate and work with these other bloggers too.

I hope today’s exercise has been a useful one for you. As I said at the start of this podcast, it’s something that I do on a weekly basis. Sometimes even more often than that, almost anytime I find a blog in my niche that I find interesting. I’ll spend 10 or 15 minutes really just asking these questions and learning from them. I hope you find it useful, and we’ll see you on day 5 of 31 Days to Build a Better blog tomorrow.

I hope you found today’s podcast useful. Again, the show notes are at problogger.com/podcast/4. Lastly, another quick word from our sponsors, 99designs. Maybe, you see your blog as innovative, perhaps it’s fun and youthful, or maybe it’s all about trust. Whatever it is, you need a logo and branding that shows off your strongest traits. It’s so easy at 99designs, where you’ll fill in an online brief and let designers from around the world compete to deliver the best design for you.

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I would love to hear how you found todays challenge. Please share what you learned in comments below!

Also check out the great offer our friends, and new podcast sponsor, 99designs have for you (worth $99). They’re a fantastic place to go if you’re looking for any help with graphic design in your blogging.

I use their services and have worked with some great designers to create graphic design creatives for my blogs.

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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Today is day 3 in our 31 Day Challenge and today your task is to promote your blog by sharing one of your previously published blog posts (perhaps even your list post from yesterday)!

This is an activity that bloggers really need to be focusing regular attention on so I hope that some of the tips I share in todays episode will become a regular part of your daily blogging workflow.

Building readership for your blog is a question I’m asked about every day and there’s a lot to say about it so I start off talking in slightly more general terms but then give you some specific ways to promote your blog. Here’s what I cover.

Here’s a graphic of the 6 phases from a talk I gave recently to help you visualise it.

But as I say – today is very much about phase 4 of the process.

Choose one (or more) of the 11 ways mentioned in todays episode to promote your blog (or try another that wasn’t mentioned) and get off your blog and put some of your recently written pieces of content out there.

Note: Please go a little beyond what you normally do. If you normally push your posts out onto social media – do something a little extra and see what happens.

Tell Us What You Do! – Once you’ve promoted your post please let us know what you did in comments below these notes so we can learn from you. Also let us know what impact your actions have.

I mention a couple of resources in todays episode that would make great further reading (and listening) on this important topic.

I’ve also included a few other relevant articles to the topic for you to check out if you want to dig deeper.

Hi, this is Darren Rowse from ProBlogger. Welcome to day 3 of 31 Days to Build a Better Blog. Each day of this series—for a whole month—I’ll be sharing with you some tips on an important aspect of growing your blog, and then challenge you to go away and do something based upon that teaching. Today, we’re going to talk about promoting your blog. Actually getting off your blog, not just focusing upon creating content, and the design, and all the things to think about when it comes to your blog, but to get off it, and go hunting for some readers. Go promote something on your blog to someone else. 

This is really important. I actually see a lot of bloggers who have this mentality that if they build a good-enough blog, readers will just magically show up to it. For 99.9% of us, it just doesn’t work, particularly if you’re just starting out. There is some truth to the fact that if you’ve already got readers, that if you write great content, those readers might share your blog for you. Particularly in the early days when you’re just starting out, you need to be the one that is getting that content in front of people.

That’s what today is about, really getting off your blog and spending a little bit of time putting your blog out there. By putting your blog out there, I’m not just talking about sharing your URL. What I want to encourage you to do today—if you can—is to share a post. To put a post out there, not just your blog. This is one of the mistakes I see some bloggers doing is that they’re just constantly promoting the homepage of their blog, which is fine. It actually can help, but if you’re promoting a post, it’s much more likely to be read and to impact people. Then they might end up on your homepage and see what else you have. I really want to encourage you today in some way to put a post out there.

There’s a whole heap of different things that we could talk about. If you get the 31 Days to Build a Better Blog Workbook, there are 11 different ways that I suggest in there that you can promote a post. I want to touch on some of those now, but I also want to talk about six things that are important for bloggers in terms of building readership. Hopefully, this will help you as well. These actually I picked up in a webinar that I created, which I’ll share the link in the show notes for today, but I want to encourage you to just think about these six different phases of growing readership for your blog.

The first one is to think about who you’re trying to reach for your blog. I talk a lot about this. Again, in the show notes, I’ll share with you some links on building a reader profile, a persona, or an avatar of the type of person that you want to reach. For today, just picture in your mind, who is it that I’m trying to get to read my blog? What are their demographics? What is their age? What gender? Perhaps it’s not specific in those things, but go a little bit deeper and think about their needs. What problems do they have? What habits? What motivations do they have? What dreams do they have? What are their fears? What are their challenges? What are they trying to overcome? What experiences have they had?

The more you know about who you’re trying to reach, the better you’ll be in the position to find them. That’s part one, that’s stage one. Really thinking about your reader.

Part two is actually thinking about the content on your blog and the blog itself. That’s what these 31 days are about is helping you to create a blog that’s worth being found. That’s part two, create something that’s worth being found. That includes great content, which we focused on yesterday. It’s about being engaging, and having a community, having a design that’s usable, having an attractive brand. All of these things are important. You really do need to work on your blog. It’s not just getting out there all the time. You do need to focus on working on your blog. That’s part two. 

Part three is creating shareable content. Maybe your post yesterday that we did, creating a list post, that’s the content that might be shared. That’s why I put it on day two because it’s really important. Today might actually be about taking that post that you published hopefully yesterday and putting it out there. Certain types of content are more shareable than others. You don’t want to create shareable list posts every single day. You also want to write other types of content as well, but from time to time, throw that into the mix.

Phase four is getting off your blog, and that’s what really what today is about. It’s about participating in the places where your potential reader is already gathering. Once you’ve identified who you’re trying to reach as part of that process, you might want to start to think about where do they gather? Are they on social media? Are they in forums? Do they read other blogs? Do they go to real-life events in different ways? How can you participate in those places? How can you create value in those places? This part four, this fourth stage is really what we’ll focus on today.

Just to put it in context though phase five is probably the next part. This comes up later in our 31 Days to Build a Better Blog. It’s about looking after the readers that you already have, and engaging with them, and building community with them, and making them feel like they have a sense of belonging on your blog. 

The other phase—this is really important as well—is building a sticky blog. Actually building some anticipation. Getting people to come back again. It’s great to have someone arrive on your blog for the first time, but you also want to give them a way to belong, to subscribe, to follow you, to connect with you so that they might come back again. Those are the overarching stages, the phases of growing readership for your blog that is really important to focus upon.

Today, I’m going to focus on this point four that I just talked about actually getting off your blog. I want to challenge you today to do something, to promote content, to take that piece of content and put it out there for people. It might not have a massive impact. You may just find one new reader today, but when you’re just starting out, one extra reader is a big thing. That’s where it starts for all of us. The challenge is to get your content out to someone.

Just a few ways that you might consider doing that today. Probably the easiest way for most of us is to put that content onto social media. That’s probably something that many of you’re already doing. If you don’t have any social media accounts yet, your challenge today might be to start one. If you do have social media accounts, put that content out there. Take the link from yesterday’s post and put it onto your Twitter account or your Facebook page. Whether that be your personal page or whether that be a page that you’ve already got set up.

To go beyond that, actually think about the other content that you’ve already got on your blog. How can you be promoting that? An activity that you might do today to help you find readers is to actually think about developing some editorial strategy for your Facebook page or for your Twitter account. This is something that I’ve done recently for the ProBlogger Twitter account. You might want to spend some time today actually thinking about that neglected social media account that you have.

Another strategy you might want to think about today is guest posting. Guest posting three or four years ago was massive. Everyone was submitting posts on other people’s blogs. A lot of people were doing that for search engine optimization. Google has changed the rules in the way it treats guest posts, so people aren’t doing it so much for those reasons. Guest posting is still really great for getting your name out there, for getting your brand out there.

Perhaps today is a day where you could write a piece of content for someone else’s blog. You may want to try to aim at a big blog, but that can be hard because big blogs get a lot of submissions. I want to encourage you today, think about a blog that’s about the same size as you. Maybe you can write a piece of content for them. Of course, as payment for that, your byline would have a link back to your blog. Don’t just have a link back to your blog, actually have a link back to a post that relates to the guest post that you’ve written. That’s another alternative that you can think about today.

Another thing that you could do to put yourself out there is to find a forum that relates to your blog’s content. For every blog topic, there’s a forum out there on a similar topic. Google it, forum for your keyword that you’re writing about and join that forum. Not with the intent of spamming, but of being useful in those places. You may just find that your potential reader is already gathering on those forums. You could become a member of that forum, answer questions, and be a useful person. In doing so, you build your profile. People want to know who’s behind that useful content that you’re submitting into a forum.

On Digital Photography School we have a forum. I know that a lot of the people there have actually built profiles for themselves among their readers simply by answering questions and by sharing useful information. Any forum owner is going to be more than happy for you to come and be useful.

Another thing that you might want to think about is pitching another blogger or a social media influencer. You need to be a little bit careful about this. You don’t want to be spammy. You want to be genuine. You want to be relevant. You want to be useful to them. I know for myself if someone messages me and says, “Here’s a post that I’ve written that I think might be really interesting to your readers.” More often than not, I’m open to sharing that on my Twitter account. I probably won’t blog about it because not what I use my blog for, but I’ll share that if I think my readers are going to benefit from it.

As long as I’m being pitched and you’re approaching me in a polite way, and as long as the link that you’re sharing is relevant, most people would be open to that. That might be something else that you want to think about today is to politely suggest something that you’ve written that is really relevant for a particular person and their audience.

Another thing that I did in the early days that might be helpful to you is to actually think about how could I speak at an event? How could I speak at a conference? Or how can I run a workshop for people? This might sound like it’s too grand and it’s too big, and you don’t have a profile to get a speaking engagement at a big conference. That may be true, but what I did in the early days, I volunteered at my local library to teach a class on digital cameras. My library was running regular free workshops for the local community on all kinds of topics. Is there somewhere that you could volunteer to speak?

I know for a fact that when I did these workshops in my local library that only 20 or 30 people came. I know for a fact that two or three of those people that I’ve met in some of those early workshops still read my blog today. I would bet that some of those people have brought other people along with them: family members, friends, or colleagues. You never know what that one extra reader that you find for your blog, what impact they might have on helping you to grow your blog. Again, that might be something you could do. Is there an event, is there a community space where you could volunteer to run a short workshop?

Another thing that I know has helped a lot of bloggers is to join a Facebook group of bloggers in particular niches. These can be a little hard to find but ask around. If there’s no Facebook group for bloggers in your niche, why don’t you start one? These little alliances of bloggers meeting together, supporting one another, sharing content with one another can be a really powerful thing. I know of a few Facebook groups of the niches that I’m in where bloggers every day they just say, “This is what I posted today. If you think it’s relevant for your audience, share it,” Bloggers will share each other’s updates, or they’ll like each other’s Facebook updates, or they might even link to them on their blogs. These little alliances can be really powerful, particularly if you’re just starting out. Even if all the other bloggers are just small bloggers, gradually, over time, you all continue to grow.

Another little strategy you might consider for your blog is to interview someone. Simply interview someone. It may be a really short interview. I once shot Seth Godin a one-question interview. I said, “Seth, you don’t know me, but here’s a question that I’d love to post your answer to on my blog.” This is years and years and years ago. He responded with three sentences. It wasn’t much, but I published his three sentences on my blog. That was great content. The good thing about doing this is that: (1) you get content, (2) you get to borrow some of their credibility.

I remember the reaction to that post. It was just three sentences, but my readers were like, “Wow, you got Seth Godin to respond to you.” That had a big impact and it built social proof. The other thing is you might find that that person might share that link, that post that you published. Seth didn’t tweet or Facebook update my link, but many times when I’ve interviewed other people, they have shared those posts with their audiences. You may just find that by interviewing someone, you build a bit of credibility, you get a good post, but you might just also get them to share your content as well, and that grows your audience.

Probably the most common piece of advice that I hear people giving in terms of building readership for their blogs is to comment on other blogs. You want to be a little bit careful about this. Just commenting to grow your profile and to get people to come to your blog can be a bit of an empty comment. But if you add value on someone else’s blog and respond in the comments section with something that adds to the conversation and it helps people, that can be a brilliant way of growing your own brand and your own profile.

Find another blog that’s in a relevant niche to you and answer someone else’s question in the comments, or add another point that the blogger might have forgotten. Do it in a gracious way. Just say, “This is my experience. Here’s another idea that I had.” You don’t have to leave a link because you get to leave a link in the field that says leave your link. You don’t have to leave your link in the comment itself. People want to know who’s behind this useful comment. If you do that over time, you actually begin to become known to that other blogger and their readers. Commenting on other blogs can be useful too.

The last thing I’d say that you might want to think about is to think about submitting a story to a mainstream media outlet. This is something you probably don’t want to do every day but from time to time, you might want to think about, “What kind of media outlet might be interested in this piece of content that I’ve written?” I remember in the early days of my blogs doing this a number of times. I didn’t do it regularly, but sometimes I would write a post and I’d think this would be really relevant to our local newspaper or our national newspaper.

You want to think really carefully about the pitch. You want to make it relevant to the piece of media that you’re targeting. You want to find an angle for them. They’re not just interested in writing about another blog, they’re looking for an angle. If you can, save them some work, give them some quotes, give them some pictures, give them the story itself so they can rewrite it. A lot of mainstream media these days are looking for those stories because they’re under a lot of pressure.

Hopefully, something in what I’ve just gone over the last 15 or so minutes today has just sparked an idea that you can do. I want to encourage you to get off your blog today, to take that piece of content that you wrote yesterday or another piece that you’ve written in the last week or two, and to put it out there, to actually put it out there. You never quite know when you put it out there where that piece of content may end up and who else may see it and share it as well. It’s highly unlikely that if you’re just staying on your blog writing content that anyone is going to see it.

Get off your blog today. Spend a little bit of time putting your content out there. This is one of the activities that I’d encourage you to build into your daily rhythm as well. Even just 5, 10, 15 minutes a day tweeting, updating your social media accounts, maybe writing a guest post once a week, engaging in forums, pitching your ideas to other people, thinking about how you can attend or present at events, and submitting comments on other blogs. These types of things, just build them onto your daily rhythm. Over time, the accumulation of putting yourself out there so much can have a massive impact on your blog.

I hope you find today’s podcast useful. I look forward to hearing your stories of putting yourself out there and seeing the impact that might have upon growing your blog. I’ll see you tomorrow on day 4 of 31 Days to Build a Better Blog.

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Since I started blogging back in 2002 the ‘list post’ has always been a popular type of post for bloggers. While you may not want every post on your blog to have this format there’s no doubt there are some definite advantages of using them from time to time.

As I look at my most popular posts over the years on my blogs many of them would fit quite well into this category.

So today I want you to create one. Here’s what to do:

Here’s what I cover in todays episode:

All of these examples come from my blog at Digital Photography School but please submit your own new list posts below and check out the examples others leave to see them applied in different niches/topics.

Also mentioned in this episode as a tool to check was Buzz Sumo.

Welcome to ProBlogger podcast, episode 2 and day 2 of our 31 Days to Build a Better Blog challenge. Today, I’ll be talking to you about creating a list to post for your blog. But first, a quick word from our sponsor, 99designs, the best place for new businesses and bloggers to build their brands.

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In fact, I just spent 15 minutes looking back over Digital Photography School’s top posts, going right back to 2009 when I started and listed posts featured in the top 100 or so posts that I’ve written in terms of their traffic and very heavily. In fact, probably over half of the posts that I’ve written that feature that, that most-read post list would be list posts. I’ll share some of them as examples with you in a moment.

I just want to touch on why I think list posts are so important. There’s a whole heap of them. Firstly, they’re scannable. As you probably know, people are much more likely, when they’re reading online, to scan content than to read it, or at least they’ll scan through it first to see whether it’s relevant to them. They might go back and read it or they might stop at different points to read, but they rarely just start reading and then get right through to the end.

Lists by their nature, whether they be bullet posts or whether they be lists that have lots of subheadings and images in them, are scannable and people do like to do that. I think also a list can, by virtue of being scannable, is a little bit more digestible. You can actually get the main points just by looking through it and looking at the headings. They’re scannable.

Secondly, I think they keep your posts a little bit more succinct. There’s something about a list that keeps a blogger from rambling, and that’s certainly the case for me. If I sit down to write a post on a topic, if I can break it down, I’m much more likely to be succinct and concise.

Thirdly, lists look neat. I don’t know about you, but when I arrive on a site that’s full of messily formatted text, I tend to disappear pretty quickly. I hit the back button. But if I come to a post, then I can scan it and I can see the main points. I’m much more likely to dig deeper if it actually looks good. I think lists are neat, they keep your ideas in order. They also can be quite comprehensive.

I know a lot of people say that lists posts are light and fluffy, but you can actually write a list post that is incredibly comprehensive. I’d actually argue that if you have a list post that has perhaps 21 points, that actually can be quite comprehensive and I’ll show you some examples of that in a moment. I also think lists can be quite persuasive. I think the accumulation of points towards an overarching argument can really end up with a very comprehensive argument.

Number six is that lists can add to the ease of writing, and I think this is why I first started using them. When I tackle a big topic and I’m going to show you an example in a moment of a post where I tackle the topic of portraiture, portrait photography. It’s a massive topic but I wrote a post that had 10 different ways to improve your portrait photography.

I think if I just sat down and said I’m going to write everything I know about portraiture, I wouldn’t have ever written that post. But by brainstorming 10 things that I wanted to touch on and then just writing it piece by piece, paragraph by paragraph, breaking it down into that list made it a lot easier to write.

The seventh thing that I love about lists is that they tend to be shared quite a bit. If you look at sites like BuzzSumo, which measures the shareability of content, you’ll see again and again that the most shared posts on different topics tend to be lists. For some reason, people like to share them and maybe it’s the accumulation of all the other things that I’ve already argued about lists. 

The last thing I like about this is that I have the potential to break down really complicated arguments. As someone who actually doesn’t want to just write content to get page views, I’m not really interested in the stats. I actually want to teach people. I want people to be changed by my content. I want people to learn from what I’ve got to say. I actually think, as a teaching tool, lists are fantastic.

I would really encourage you to take today’s challenge and to create a list post. Perhaps you don’t write in this style very often, but to occasionally go back to it, you may actually find that it’s a really useful way to write and there’s a whole heap of different types of lists that you can create.

I will give you a little bit of a warning, though. I think some blogs go too far on the lists and every post they write is in that same format. That might work but sometimes readers get a little bit sick of writing in the same format every day. If you’re a little bit over the top with your list posts already, maybe this is one that you want to try and write a different kind of list post.

In general, I would say there are three types of lists and we cover this in the 31 Days to Build a Better Blog Workbook. Really quickly, the first type is your post itself is just a list. I’ve only written a few of these. I tend to go on a little bit longer, but there are a few posts that I’ve written and there’s no introduction. The headline itself introduces the idea and then I just write a list of 10, 15, 20 or so things and their bullet points, very short, sharp. Sometimes these types of posts, because they’re short and sharp, can be quite effective in communicating.

The second type is an extended list and this is what I tend to do. I usually introduce the topic, might take 2 or 3 paragraphs and then I might go through 10 different points. For each point, I might write a paragraph, two paragraphs, or three paragraphs. Sometimes I even break the points down into sub-lists. Point one might be on one and then it might have A, B, C, D or some bullets underneath it. These posts actually can end up being quite long. I’ve written list posts that are 4000 or 5000 words so they can be quite comprehensive.

The other type of list that you might create is just at least in the middle of your posts. You might write your post as an essay but halfway down it includes a list, a bullet point list and this is probably what most bloggers do most frequently.

I want to give you some examples of lists and all of these examples come from my blog. That’s the blog I know best. It’s probably what I like to talk about the most because it’s the stuff that I wrote or I published. Each of these posts comes from Digital Photography School and in the show notes, I’ll include links to each of them so you can have a look at them.

Some of these posts are quite old and I probably need to go back and update some of them because the formatting is not great and the images are perhaps a little smaller than I would use now, but they’ll give you an idea. All of these posts have been viewed hundreds of thousands, if not millions of times over the years.

Let’s start with the first one. It’s actually one I mentioned in the workbook as an example as well, 21 Settings, Techniques and Rules All New Camera Owners Should Know. This is a really simple post in many ways, it’s just 21 ideas and it’s an overview of the why the subject of photography. It’s quite a big topic. It’s just things that you should know if you’re a new camera owner. It’s a simple list, an overview of a wider topic. It has a short introduction and then it just gets straight into the lists.

Each point basically just has a heading and one paragraph on that point. It’s not very comprehensive in and of itself, but each point also links to an article that I’ve already written on the blog, which went into a lot bigger depth or a lot larger depth. In many ways, this is what I would call a sneeze page. You can find an article on sneeze pages or sneeze posts in the archives of ProBlogger. It really is designed to sneeze people deep within the site. It has 21 points and then 21 links where you can learn how to do each of those points.

The other good thing about this post is that the title makes a massive claim, a claim that you really want to follow up 21 Settings, Techniques and Rules All New Camera Owners Should Know. It’s no wonder that it’s been viewed so many times. This is a post that continues to this day, even though it’s been written about seven or eight years ago. It continues today to do quite well.

The next post is similar in some ways, it’s 10 Ways to Take Stunning Portraits. This one also is an overview post in some way. It’s not quite as wide a topic as the first one. It narrows down to portraiture but it’s still an overview. We actually have this type of post for most of the main categories on Digital Photography School.

For instance, in Landscape Photography, there’s a post, 11 Surefire Tips for Landscape Photography Tips. These types of posts do really well and I quite often, as I start a blog, will write these types of posts and will refer back to them, link back to them quite a bit. Each point in this post has a strong title, their headings. Each point has at least a paragraph, sometimes two or three paragraphs on the point. Each point also has a really strong image that illustrates the point. I find that if you can insert images into your lists, you’re much more likely to draw people down the post.

This post was so popular, I followed it up with a second post and you’ll see at the bottom there’s another link to another post called 10 More Tips to Take for Stunning Portraits. Throughout the post, there’s a whole heap of links to further reading. It’s not quite as many as the first one I showed you, this post gets people deeper into the site again.

The next post I want to talk about briefly is How to Make An Inexpensive Light Tent. This is a bit different in some way. It doesn’t have a number in the title. It’s not presented as a list post in the title, but it’s largely a step-by-step walkthrough of a process of making it a DIY project. It’s really two lists if you look at it. The first list is a list of materials needed and then the second list is the step-by-step process. This is the type of post you could do on many different topics, anything that you could walk your readers through step-by-step is a great way to create a list post.

The next post is 21 Sample Poses to Get You Started with Photographing Women. This actually was a guest post that was submitted to us and really, it’s all a list of images. Each point in the post does have a short paragraph, but I don’t think many of our readers actually read the text. They are just there to look at the images and to get ideas on how to pose a particular subject. This post spurred a whole series of posts.

We now have part two of this photographing women but also photographing men, photographing children, photographing groups of people, photographing couples and so on. This could work in lots of different types of blogs. You might do a list of images that are examples, case studies, or screenshots, illustrations, variations on a theme. You could also do it with videos as well. 

The next post is How to Photograph Fireworks. This isn’t presented as a list, it’s not 10 ways too but if you look at the post itself, it’s actually a list. It’s got 10 tips on the topic of photographing fireworks and some of the points are then broken down further. You’ll see a couple of them there have lists within the list. As always, images throughout the post which helped draw people’s eye down the post, keep them engaged, keep them a little bit inspired.

The next post is DIY Lighting Hacks for Digital Photographers. Again, this is a 10-point list. We tend to do a lot of 10-point lists for some reason. It’s a nice round number. In it, we show an image and a short description of 10 different DIY projects and then we link to where people can learn more. This is a bit different, it doesn’t link to many posts now in archives. It actually links to other people’s sites. This is a curated content piece.

I wrote this quite early on in Digital Photography School when I didn’t have a whole heap of archives to link back to. I just found good content from around the web. It’s great for building relationships with other sites. It shows your readers that you read wider than your own blog, and it’s an easy way to create content.

The next one is The 30 Most Popular DSLR Lenses with our Readers and this is a product-based bestseller list. It’s based upon the reports that we get from Amazon Associates Program, their affiliate program that shows us what our readers buy when they click our affiliate links. Then, we just assemble the bestseller list from that. Our readers love this type of post because it shows them what other people are doing and what other people are buying. It’s great for social proof.

The other good thing about this type of list is that we link back to Amazon for each of the products and its link is an affiliate link. This post and others that we do like earn us affiliate commissions, and we disclose that throughout the post. We actually do this type of post every quarter. We do 30 most popular digital SLR lenses, we do digital SLR, we do smaller compact cameras, we do photography books. Every week or two, we’ll do a number of these types of posts. Our readers really love them and they share them quite a bit.

The next one is 10 Photography Quotes that You Should Know. Again, this is a really simple post to write, it’s just a list of 10 quotes. We didn’t say we didn’t create them, we just curated them.

The last one I’ll just briefly mention is 100 Things I’ve Learned About Photography and this is a long list. This is a hundred different things. It’s a comprehensive list although each one is really short. Again, this post is one of our earliest ones to this day. It still gets read a lot.

I hope these examples give you a few different ideas on the types of lists that you can create. Also, you can go to BuzzSumo, which I mentioned earlier. It’s a great place where you can type in any keyword that you’re interested in and it might be your niche. See what other people are creating. You’ll see they’ve listed the most shareable kind of content and many of the most shareable posts that you’ll see listed, there are lists. It might give you some ideas of what type of list works well in your particular niche.

The last thing I’ll say about creating lists is that you really need to pay attention to the formatting of your posts. As I’ve mentioned numerous times in this particular podcast, you want to use images as much as you can. A great image will draw people’s eyes down the post. It will illustrate the points that you’re making and make your post more comprehensive, more persuasive.

The other thing is to use formatting that breaks up the list in some way. You might use bulleting, but I find even more effective than bullets if it’s a long list with sort of paragraphs or content in the middle, is to use subheadings—big, large subheadings. Use your H tags and that will draw people’s eyes well and help them to scan that content and draw them into the posts.

There are heaps of lists on the Internet and again, some people don’t like these list posts because they think they’re a little bit fluffy but give it a go, see how you like it. Try a different type of list perhaps than you’ve tried before. Let us know over a problogger.com/podcast/2 where today’s show notes are […].

Love to see a link there to your list post, surf around, and check out some of the other list posts that other listeners are writing as well. This way, you’ll see some different styles of blogging, but you may also meet another blogger that could be useful for you later on in 31 Days to Build a Better Blog because this is really about broadening your network as well.

I look forward to seeing your list posts. I’ll share a few of them if I can, on Twitter as well, and hopefully, send a little bit of traffic out to listeners of this podcast. Thanks for listening today. Please do subscribe to us on iTunes. Leave us a review, a rating if you’ve got a moment and we’ll see you tomorrow on day 3 of 31 Days to Build a Better Blog.

This episode is brought to you today by 99designs. If you’re like many of our listeners and you’re in the earlier stages of getting your blog off the ground or perhaps are thinking about starting a new project off the side of your blog like an ebook or a podcast, your to-do list may seem like it’s a mile long but there’s one task you should tackle sooner than later and that’s your branding.

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The key to this 31 Days to Build a Better Blog Challenge is that you DO the challenges. So your challenge today is to write a list post and then to share the link in comments below.

Note: Please only share NEW posts that were written as part of this challenge and not old archived posts. This is about getting you to write something new!

Once you’ve shared your link please check out the links that others leave and get to know some other bloggers involved in this challenge.

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