Are you just Blogging or are you Blogging?

It’s funny, blogging as it comes to mind creates opportunities and gives you the ability to create something of value.  My good friend Darren Rouse over at ProBlogger had a post that I wanted to take the time and mention because it is something that makes all the difference when it comes to blogging.

The thought of just cranking out an article is great when you have something to say, but if that is what you tried to do everyday, it is no wonder why so many give up, trying to crank out a blog post every day would eat you alive. So Darren shares some great things to think about as you “Craft” a post, rather than just “punch” one out.

Here is the list to consider:

Choosing a Topic – take a little extra time defining your topic and the post will flow better and you’ll develop something that matters to readers.

Your Posts Title – perhaps the most crucial part of actually getting readers to start reading your post when they see it in an RSS reader or search engine results page.

The Opening Line – first impressions matter. Once you’ve got someone past your post’s title your opening line draws them deeper into your post.

Your points - a post needs to have a point. If it’s just an intriguing title and opening you’ll get people to read – but if the post doesn’t matter to them it’ll never get traction.

Call to Action – driving readers to do something cements a post in their mind and helps them to apply it and helps you to make a deeper connection with them.

Adding Depth – before publishing your post – ask yourself how you could add depth to it and make it even more useful and memorable to readers?

Quality Control and Polishing – small mistakes can be barriers to engagement for some readers. Spending time fixing errors and making a post look good can take it to the next level.

Timing of Publishing Your Post – timing can be everything – strategic timing of posts can ensure the right people see it at the right time.

Promotion – having hit publish – don’t just leave it to chance that your post will be read by people. Giving it a few strategic nudge’s can increase the exposure it gets exponentially.

Conversation – often the real action happens once your post is published and being interacted with by readers and other bloggers. Taking time to dialogue can be very fruitful.

Become a Craftsman

Taken from the logo above, I have taken this to heart long ago, as it is easier to “Craft” a post, instead of trying to figure it out in 15 min. Too many times we as information providers want to create something, and in order to do so, we need to provide Value, or soon enough all you will have is a  little audience to provide you useless information to. So, That being said, you need to think of yourself as a Craftsman, instead of just simply a blogger, while the idea of blogging is unique and has it’s place, such as this post, that was done after readying Darren’s post.

The majority of posts need to be Crafted and developed over a period of time, while it doesn’t make sense to take a month to write every post, and while some posts come directly from inspiration, and can be done quickly and give value, most for me have taken their sweet time.

Develop a Blog not just a bunch of posts

Part of developing your blog should be the idea that it is more than just a blog it is a Blog, and has inherent value in it’s name, the site, the content, you as a contributor, etc, etc. You should keep in mind that if you ever hope to make any money from your blog you will have to create some demand.  Just as Problogger has done, can you think of a stronger Blogging brand? Other than ImBloggingThat of course! You can’t ProBlogger has developed his entire business model into one large revenue stream. Thinking of the whole picture gives you the sense that Blogging is more than just making posts.

Do you “craft” your posts or just “punch” them out?  I want to know what you do the majority of the time.

It amazes me how many young people are trying to reinvent the wheel.  They are looking at changing the world with their “new” and fabulous Idea.  They take hours and hours away from actually making money when they could use a copied business model and begin making money quickly.

A Copied Business Model

Have you ever seen a company that you either have used their service or seen their service and said to yourself: “I could do that better”?  That is where the copied business model begins.  There have been many copied business models through out history, Take Coke and Pepsi?  It’s simply the same business with enough change to differentiate one from the other. How many national pizza chains are there?  Pizzahut, Domino’s, Papa John’s, Shakey’s to name a few, then think of all of the local mom & pop pizza shops.

My point is that if you want to make $250,000 a year which is in the top 1% in the US you don’t need to reinvent the wheel, simply take a market you want to know more about, or a market you already know more about and create an opportunity for some customers.

Now Go get ‘em!

Early Entrepreneurship
Growing up, I only thought about change my lifestyle, I did not want to end up like my father, while I love and respect him, I did not want to live him life. In High School, my cousin, who is a year older than me, was selling T-shirts to students at the time. I saw how he was making a few bucks so I started doing the same thing, but was selling tie-dyed t-shirts. I quickly realized that I could make about double per T-Shirt than he was, so I branched out to a service, tie-dying other peoples’ stuff, their hats, pants, jackets, shoes, really anything someone wanted, and I could tie-dye it!

Within weeks, I was known as the kid who would tie-dye or sell anything tie-dyed. I then decided to capitalize on this by purchasing-shirts in bulk and selling them to other high schools. Business was booming and I made a few grand in profit.

Reality: There is not a long-term career in selling or tie-dying stuff, so I decided to get into a legitimate business.

Stupid Corporate Life
Income from my businesses was never stable; so I decide to get a “real” job. After 3 months of working at “blank” company, I’d realize it wasn’t for me, or that my manager was an idiot, so I’d quit and get another job. Over and over, I’d work for 3-9 months and then get bored and leave. This cycle happened for a long period of time.

Being a Partner
I decided that since I wasn’t making much money, I needed to start making some money, So I started working with a local furniture company, LoveSac, and was one of the original founding partners. I put in a bunch of time, think 90+ hrs a week and money, a lot of money, at one point I maxed out an American Express card with a $50K limit. Simply because I was a partner, with the hope/dream that we would eventually start making money. We did start to make some money, we grew the company from 1 company owned store to 30+ stores through franchising. It was awesome, we grew to over $50M in gross sales, problem was, and we were only making peanuts, compared to what we were selling. Our costs were too high, our overhead was too high, I saw the writing on the wall, we were slowly dying, I decided to leave and get out while I could. Good thing 3 years later they filed bankruptcy.

Internet Marketing Consulting
Instead of finding another job I decided learned more about the consulting business model and how some consultants were making huge amounts of money and others were making close to nothing or worse.

I found out that as a consultant, I could easily bill companies $125 to $250 dollars an hour or more. I couldn’t believe how much money I could make, which started the entrepreneurial juices again. I tried earnestly to figure out how I could also make that much, so I started looking for consulting jobs. The problem was, I had no clue what “consulting” really was.

I thought that if I could even make a small % of what successful consultants were, I would start to become rich and start making the money I thought I deserved. This led me to start my own company. After spending 5 grand to build the website and have the logo designed, it launched, and then came the thud! No one knew my super-fantastic-awesome website existed. Then I learned the hard way that if you don’t market a site, while it might be super-fantastic and awesome, it won’t make or bring any money in, because NO one knows about it.

Logic would tell you to go and hire a marketing company to bring in the people, but sometimes logic sucks. I did exactly what logically I thought I should do. I went out and hired an Internet marketing company to do it all for me. Within a few months, my allotted budget was gone and they were asking for more money, problem was, they didn’t increase my traffic, I was not making any more money, I had no choice but to fire them and find someone else. I then went looking for others, and hired another firm, whose results ended the same, wasting my money, and not bringing in any more traffic than before.

Because I had spent all my money for a service I never received, I had no choice but to learn how to do it myself. I decided to begin learning about Internet marketing and eventually I started to get better at it. But really had no idea what to do with it, I didn’t make any money with it.

A Little Success
I wanted to find something I’d enjoy, here is where marketing came back into play. I started another company and it started taking off and I thought I was “rolling in dough”. With the money I was making, I started to invest in a few start-ups. Most of them took all the money and died, only a small few ever returned my initial investment and only 1 out of 20+ ever made me any money. Realizing investing was not working out for me, one of my business partners took the rest of the money I had made and started investing it into Real Estate, that was really smart, it was working out greatly.

I then started playing around with the internet and started to see results with affiliate marketing, and with blogging. The traffic started to come in, and I sold my first blog for a low 5 figures, Yeah, that was awesome, to finally have some success, and achieve something more than spending money. I purchased I’mBloggingThat as a way to duplicate the effects of the success of my first blog.

Yonder!
I have no idea what the future holds, but have a positive attitude and know that I can overcome any challenges put in front of me, I believe the same for everyone out there. I luckily have made a little more money than I have lost, spent or blown and I have been able to leverage that money into investments like real estate and offline and online companies.

If I play my cards right, these investments will pay off, and I will beable to retire at the ripe old age of 39, I’m 33 currently. Over the next few years I’d like to share with you how I am going about achieving this goal, so hopefully you can to. I’d love to share and interact with you, so please comment and do not be shy, fire your questions away, I would love to help in any way I can.

I hope that you’ll enjoy my posts, comment, come back around and always feel free to contact me.

We all need to be Validated, but how do you Validate others?  Leave a comment with how you Validate others.

The process of uploading an image was very simple, and you can upload images up to 3.5MB.   They support jpg, png, and gif formats and if you are very busy like I always seem to be, you can upload multiple images with one click, talk about easy.   I have become a huge fan of sharing images, where I wasn’t before, and it must be because the other image hosting websites have limitations, on bandwidth or have ads all over the page, not the case with Pict.com.

If you are looking a service that will let you upload and share your images with a simple click? The Look no further, there are no more confusing instructions and/or complicated procedures, everyone enjoys a one-click feature! With no more bandwidth limitations  like Photobucket or Google Pages, So Yes Go enjoy the unlimited bandwidth! To top it off there are no more sponsored ads like at Imageshack.

Ok here the skinny:

I tested it by uploading some photos I had saved on my computer and the uploading process was quick and the photo quality was Great, very clean. You just need to click the “Upload image” button,  then choose the photo file on your computer, then open it, wait for about 3 to 7 seconds and that’s it. Tadaha! You can also upload images from an url if you prefer.

Time to Share

Simple! To share the images that you have uploaded,  just move your mouse over the specific image and “Share it link”.  The sharing feature allows you to show the image to your friends via ICQ, AOL, IRC …, you can insert the image to your blog … or where ever!

It is my humble opinion that Pict.com is a great image hosting go check them out!

Anyone that’s ever blogged as a way to promote their products or services and, hopefully, make money online knows how effective good blogs can be. However, for them to be truly effective, they need good exposure on the internet. MyBlogLog, a service of Yahoo! makes this not only possible but very easy.

MyBlogLog is a social network service used in the blogging community. A lot of its effectiveness comes from the addition of a web widget installed on the bloggers blog. MyBlogLog membership is free, which makes it even more popular for bloggers hoping to get more interested readers and exposure. When you sign up for a MyBlogLog account, you enter your blog and are starting your own blog community for your particular interest. Other readers that are interested in your blog can subscribe to your community, so they’ll always know when something new is posted. They can also share your posts with contacts in their own blogging community.

Bloggers that have installed web widgets on their site will be able to show other members of the MyBlogLog community who have recently viewed their site. The widgets also allow you to connect with other users by providing links to the other member’s pages in their community. The members that use the widgets are privy to a lot of helpful information such as how many people visited your site, who visited it, what links they may have clicked and their origin. You can also find new communities by typing what you’re looking for in a search box.

If you’re interested in finding out about any new members to MyBlogLog, a list of the new members is shown on the MyBlogLog Communities or Members page. This is a great way to find if there are any new members with similar interests as yours. By looking at what tags have been put on their profile and checking out their communities, you can find many “friends” to view your community and help with the promotion of your stories or sites.

If you already have a Yahoo! ID, you’re well on your way. Once your Yahoo! Profile is set up, add a photo and you’re ready to start blogging. Any time you go to a site that’s MyBlogLog enables, your photo will show up on a widget. All the other user has to do is click on your picture and they can see all you’ve written or posted. You can also add different communities to your blog and learn what others’ are reading and find out whose reading your stuff.

How do you keep it fresh?

If you’re blogging as a way to make money online, which is the reason most people blog, the most important part of your blogs is, obviously, your content. In the same way that a store is going to need customers to stay in business, your blog site needs a steady flow of traffic to remain active and help your online business. Keeping your content fresh is the most important thing to remember when blogging, regardless of the reason for blogging. In fact, having fresh content on your website or blog is the key to success with your online business. Here are a few tips on the best ways to keep your content fresh.

Use Keywords

Using search engine optimization (SEO) through the use of keywords is one of the best ways to generate traffic towards your website or blog. What’s even more important is using keywords that are relevant to your blog site so they’ll show up quickly on search engines. Search engines are what interested readers will use to find websites that are similar to their interests. If your site consists of several different pages, make sure you use different keywords for each page so the chances of them getting to your site will be better. The higher your site shows up on search engine results, the more traffic you’ll get to your site.

Although the idea of having fresh content on your blog all the time may seem difficult, if not impossible, there are ways you can do this if you have a plan from day one and do everything possible to stick to it. Determine the frequency of your posting or, more specifically, how often you will make posts to your blog. If you have time to make posts on a daily basis, this is great. Not everyone, due to work schedules, can do this every day but if you can, it’ll be very beneficial to your blog. Once you’ve determined what your frequency is going to be, let your readers know. This is important for two reasons. One, if they come to your blog and see nothing new, they’ll know when they can expect to see something new. If your content is good, they’ll start to look forward to this day or time. Second, by making a commitment such as this to your readers, you’re also making a goal for yourself and making yourself accountable. When you know you have to do something, it’s much easier to get it done.

Plan Ahead

Don’t be too hard on yourself if something comes up where you can’t make your post as planned. This does happen to everyone at some point, whether they’re unavailable, sick or just don’t have the motivation. Many blogging systems offer an option where you can schedule your posts in advance. This option will come in very handy if you know of something that is going to prevent you from making your regular post.

Blogging is NOT just about Blogging

Never stop researching and looking for new content you can post to your blog. Even though you may feel you know everything there is to know about your topic, there is always something new to learn. Your readers will love hearing about these new things and may have feedback and comments to add to them. Don’t just rely on the internet for your research, however, as you can learn a lot just in your day-to-day living. With the use of cell phones with cameras, you can take interesting shots throughout the day that you may want to share with your readers. Readers also enjoy looking at photos. Just make sure they’re saved in the right size and format so they won’t take forever to open.

Find small items and topics that you can add on a weekly or even a daily basis. While the main topic of your blog may be something larger, you can always break it down into small topics to keep them interested. For instance, if your site is about photography, which is a broad topic, once a week you can have individual feeds about smaller photography-related topics such as filters, lens, film, etc. These small topics or subjects will serve two purposes. They’ll allow your content to remain fresh while giving your readers even more interesting topics to read and enjoy.

Don’t be afraid to add some humor into your blogs. Although most of the readers are there to participate and possibly learn more about your topic, no one wants to feel they’re back in high school in a classroom. Put a friendly and light spin on some of your posts, which will also help you to develop a friendly relationship with your readers. Encourage them to contact you and let them know that you look forward to hearing from them. A contact form can be located somewhere on your blog and encourage readers to leave any comments or feedback they may have. Make sure you respond back to any of the comments you receive so they’ll know that there is a real live person behind the blog and that you care about them. The more contact there is between you and your readers, the better your chance of getting new content from them as well.

Your new content doesn’t have to be some long drawn-out article. It can be a short post of only 250-300 words but it lets them know that you are available and it will keep them interested. Even though your blog site is about a specific topic, don’t be afraid to add some “evergreen” topics occasionally. Evergreen topics are general interest topics that never change but yet will draw their interest. They don’t even have to be related to your blog subject but they can still be interesting. You may even consider finding some private label rights articles where you can get some great ideas. But, DO NOT COPY THEM.

Get rid of any old content that has just been sitting around there taking up space. You should do this regularly, like every other month. Keep an archive, however, so readers can always go back and find something that interested them that they may want to retrieve. An archive will also allow new readers to see that you’ve been doing this for quite awhile and that you blog is not new. This will do a lot towards proving your seriousness and credibility.

Pay attention to the seasons and holidays of the year. People will love your acknowledgment and it will go a long ways towards letting them know your content is fresh. Again, they don’t have to be long posts. It’s quality and not quantity that counts.

1. Pump Out Better Content

Before you do anything else, take a look at your content if it sucks, there is your answer to why you don’t have traffic.   A blog post consists of several elements which are the title and the body copy.  Most new bloggers fail to realize that blog headlines are so important they could make or break their blog.

Before your visitors read your content, they’d have to read the headline first. Writing a poor and uninspiring headline could result in you losing the majority of your visitors.  Lets me give you an example: which of the following headline would you likely click? Leave you choice in the comments.

1. Popular blogs by Technorati
2. 50 Most Influential Blogs

The second element that you have to pay attention to is of course the body copy. Here’s a tip, you don’t need to produce good content with a perfect grammar and so on.

You just have to write posts that your readers want to read.  See, when it comes to blogging, it is often not about what you want but what your readers want.  While you might not be the best writer in town, that doesn’t stop many people from visiting your blog daily.

2. Optimize, Optimise, Optimise

As time goes by, it’s becoming increasing difficult to get your blog listed high up in the search engine results.  While you can perform some on page search engine optimizations which undoubtedly are important, but it won’t guarantee a good ranking because obviously the external factors play a much bigger role these days.

Off page optimization factors include anything from the number of sites linking to your blog, the anchor text used by those sites that are linking to you, primarily your Google PageRank and so on. They all influence your ultimate ranking on the search engines.

While you can’t directly adjust the external factors to your advantage, you can do things such as improving your blog content (my first point), attracting links from other blogs and making your blog more social by participating in the comments.

3. Link are link handshakes

Again, this comes back to your content. You are more likely to attract links from other bloggers if you offer something that people want to read and more importantly want to share with their readers, thus saying they agree or find interesting your content.  The online handshake.   You should also be lining out to others great content.

Also bear in mind that not all links are created equal.  Those that will benefit you most are links from trusted, authoritative, high PageRank’d sites, links that use relevant keywords in their anchor text, links from relevant sites, and links from variety of sources instead of just from one or two of your own sites for instance.   I’m Blogging That… What are you blogging?

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With the internet such a large part of our lives today, more and more individuals are using it as a way to make money online. They’re choosing to sell items they no longer use or items they’re trying to market. Many are even starting online businesses to make money online. The key to having a successful online business is in the advertising and using advertising to draw traffic to your website. Blogging has become very popular as a way to meet people that share your interests and to get them to help promote your website and products. The effectiveness of your website has a lot to do with how successful you’ll be at your business and how many sales you’ll make. This is where the Alexa rating comes in very handy as a tool to measure how successful you are with your website. After all, your website is there to help you make money online so make is as successful as you can.

What Alexa is All About

Alexa is a company that was started in 1996 with the purpose of learning more about the internet and how to observe the different sites as well as which ones were popular and how many visitors come to each site. Alexa uses their major tool, called the Alexa toolbar, to help them make their determinations and Alexa ratings, which are also very helpful in determining the success of your website as well as your blogging sites. The goal you will hope to achieve is to have a higher Google page rank but a lower Alexa ranking. Surprising as this may be, the lower you Alexa ranking will be, the more successful you website is in terms of traffic coming to your site. Statistics show that the websites that have sold the most products are those with the lowest Alexa ranking.

The Alexa Toolbar

The Alexa toolbar is available all over the internet and can easily be installed as part of your web browser. When used regularly, it will give you all the information you need regarding what sites are popular and are being viewed regularly. The Alexa toolbar can only be effective if you use it for information but can really help you to know how your website or blog sites are being viewed. All you have to do is go to a site or type in the name and you’ll be given all the pertinent information about this site including its traffic ranking and if the ranking has increased or decreased. Although it currently is not compatible with Windows Vista, the current issues are being worked on so soon it may be available with all Windows platforms.

Tech-no-rati?

With Blogging becoming very popular in the internet world today, although it may be done for different reasons.  Some people blog on several different blogging posts just for fun and to meet new people that share their interests. Others, however, are blogging as a way to make money online.  These are the individuals that have to spend more time and energy having the right blogging methods so their blogs or advertisements show up more on the internet.  Blogs can be given certain rating points based on how effective they are.  Two popular ratings are Technorati rating and Alexa rating (I’ll cover this in a follow up post).  Let’s get into what this ratings represent so we can work on ways to improve them.

We’re all familiar with search engines such as Yahoo or Google.  When you’re searching for something you type it in a Google search engine.  Hundreds and typically thousands of results are going to show up for you.  The results that show up on top are usually said to be the most effective or “highest ranked”.  How high they rank on the search engines has to do with the proper keyword usage, etc.  SEO (search engine optimization) has a lot to do with making your ads show up on top of the search engine results so users see them first. The same principles go with blogging as a way to make money online.

Technorati is to blogging what Google ranks are to search engines. The world of blogging can easily be described as the “blogosphere” and Technorati is a tracker of the millions of blogs that are posted each day on the blogosphere.  It keeps track of which blogs are linking to other blog sites, etc.  It then ranks the blogs in the same way as Google ranks the results of Google search engines.  There are ways that you can increase your Technorati ranking so your blog links will show up quicker for others to see.  It’s important to remember that your Technorati ranking is not based on how many viewers you have to your blog but more on the number of incoming links your blog receives.  Known as “blog reactions”, they refer to the number of blogs that have linked to yours over a certain period of time.

With the millions of blogs being posted out there, a goal for your blogs should be a ranking of less than 50,000, obviously the lower the better.  Having a good relationship with other blog sites and bloggers is a great way to improve your Technorati ranking.  The Technorati page can give you many helpful suggestions on improving your own ranking, starting with exchanging links with other blog posts, I’m Blogging That… What are you blogging?

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