In part one, I talked about some of my experiences with some of the successful high traffic websites I actually built.

In part two, I shared a little about my belly of the whale strategy, a methodology I use to identify potential software niches to get into.

In part three, I talked about the importance of putting together a baby business plan.

In part four, I described the importance of not wasting time on a logo.

This is part five of the blueprint that will help you begin the process of building a high traffic profitable technology blog.

Today I want to recommend WordPress Hosts to you.

What is a WordPress Host?

A WordPress Host or hosting company is simply the company that hosts your WordPress website files. There are a ton of companies out there that do web hosting but here is everything you need to know in a concise package.

To cut a long story short, there are 2 ways to deal with hosting for WordPress if you’re new to building a business.

1. The dumb way – get regular hosting and figure out all the tweaking and maintenance.
2. The easy and efficient way – with managed hosting.

What is WordPress Managed Hosting?

Managed hosting is exactly what it sounds like – hosting that is managed for you. God I wish I knew this when I started 15 years ago.

You see, a WordPress website has more parts that need maintenance than most people understand.

When you’re building an online business, you need to worry about the following:

• The WordPress installation
• WordPress version updates
• WordPress environments
• The database
• FTP/SFTP
• PHP
• The theme
• MySQL
• Plugins
• Performance
• The CDN (if you’re savvy enough to manually install one)
• Hacking and security
• Images

and more..

When I started out building websites, I had to learn how to manage all this stuff at once and ended up paying contractors to handle one thing here, then another thing there etc. etc.

It adds up and even worse…

It’s a massive distraction from your business!

Most people don’t want to know this stuff and more importantly, don’t need to know all this stuff.

That’s where a good WordPress Managed Host comes in.

The role of a good WordPress Managed Hosting company

It’s real simple, a good WordPress Managed Hosting company will have one goal and one goal alone – to keep you protected from all the bullshit you don’t have to worry about.

They help you with the install, troubleshooting becomes their problem 100%, they worry about performance, security is all their business, on and on it goes.

At the end of the day, they allow you to focus on your business.

While there are a few good hosting companies out there, I only have one recommendation.

WP Engine – Link here

I’ve been on their platform for years and can’t say without equivocation, I couldn’t stay in business without their company.

They are reasonably priced, they have 24/7 chat support, they have the most pleasant staff in the industry and they look after their customers. In addition, their control panel makes site management on the back end a breeze.

You can learn more here.

A managed WordPress company allows you to stay focused on your core business and that is invaluable.

It’s really that simple.

Head to their site and sign up for a reasonably priced hosting package and you’re in good shape.

In the next article, I’ll show you what WordPress Themes I recommend for you to get started quickly.

Enjoy!

The post 13 Steps To Building A Profitable High Traffic Technology Blog – Part five – WordPress Hosting appeared first on Learn About The Web.

In part one, I talked about some of my experiences with some of the successful high traffic websites I actually built.

In part two, I shared a little about my belly of the whale strategy, a methodology I use to identify potential software niches to get into.

In part three, I talked about the importance of putting together a baby business plan.

This is part four of the blueprint that will help you begin the process of building a high traffic profitable technology blog.

Today I want to teach you how to get a logo for your business.

What is a logo?

Simply put, a logo is a symbol or other design adopted by an organization to identify its products, uniform, vehicles, etc. You are obviously familiar with some of the more famous ones.

The importance of a good logo

Logos are relatively important for an online business but their value is misunderstood by most online entrepreneurs. A lot of people starting out in this business obsess about the logo.

• What color should it be?
• What size?
• What tagline?
• What image?
• Vertical or horizontal?

I brought a friend along to help you.

As my friend the Rock just told you – NONE of this matters.

If that sounds like anathema to you I’m wagering that this is your first Rodeo and you still have time for all that quaint nonsense.

Let me be clear. At this stage in the game, your logo does not matter one bit.

What this does not mean

• Doesn’t mean you should have an ugly logo.
• Doesn’t mean you should pay ZERO attention to it.
• Doesn’t mean that you should not have one at all.

What this does mean

• Does mean that you should acknowledge this task is low priority.
• Does mean that you should spend no more than 2 days on this task.
• Does mean that after 2 days, your logo concept should be “good enough”
• Does mean that this is a task that you should come back to.

So this begs the question..

Should I buy a logo or design one myself?

Great question – easy answer.

If you have the skills, put one together in less than 48 hours. If not, buy one.

This begs the next question..

How much should I pay for a logo?

Great question – yet again another easy answer.

50 dollars.

No more than 50 bucks is what you should spend on a logo because quite frankly, anything more is a waste of money.

This begs yet again the next question..

Where should I get this new logo designed?

I would have given you a different answer a month ago but I found  a really cool place where you can actually get your logo design for cheap.

It’s called BrandCrowd.

This is a really cool service where you can buy or alter really cool logos for reasonable prices.

While you can spend more than $1000 to buy a logo, that would be dumb. Pick something cool, modify it and keep it moving.

I did this in 3 hours for another site I’m building – https://www.laptopvideoreviews.com.

This took 3 hours and cost me $45. Logo done. I recommend BrandCrowd because it’s really easy to use and simple to get a good logo done.

Summary

When you start out in this business, a logo can drive you CRAZY and you can spend months trying to get the right colors and branding and sizes etc.

FOCUS ON YOUR BUSINESS!

Don’t get distracted because here’s the secret – you can always double back and get a better logo later. It’s better to have a viable business and a crappy logo than a beautiful logo and a failed business.

It’s simple.

In the next article, I’ll show you what WordPress Themes I recommend for you to get started quickly.

Enjoy!

The post 13 Steps To Building A Profitable High Traffic Technology Blog – Part Four – your logo appeared first on Learn About The Web.

It had a ton of celebrities who were serious and telling me to listen and pay attention.

They start to talk somewhat comedically about a bunch of things I should never do – never fly first class, never get a king size bed, never get a walk in closet etc etc.

At this point, there are hints of comedy creeping in…

Until the final punch line “..and most importantly Never Get Hulu”.

My wife and I are marketing professionals and immediately looked at each other thinking the same exact thing.

Who at Hulu gave the green light to this ad?

Why would you get people’s attention and use the words “Never” and your brand name in the same sentence? From a marketing perspective this seems extremely stupid.

Yes, it gets people like me writing about this and talking about it and sharing the ad. Got it.

HOWEVER, it imprints very negative keywords next to your brand name into people’s psyche’s forever.

Never Get Hulu.

I absolutely don’t get it but hey what do I know, maybe they know something I don’t so I should probably take their advice.

I DEFINITELY won’t get Hulu.

The post Who approved never get Hulu as an ad slogan? appeared first on Learn About The Web.

In part one, I talked about some of my experiences with some of the successful high traffic websites I actually built.

In part two, I shared a little about my belly of the whale strategy, a methodology I use to identify potential software niches to get into.

This is part three of my blueprint that will help you begin the process of building a high traffic profitable technology blog.

Today I want to share with you the importance of creating a business plan but not a regular business plan.

I call this…

The Baby Business Plan

Anyone who has written a business plan knows that to do it properly, it’s exhausting and requires a certain level of expertise and sophistication.

There are businesses and vendors who specialize in helping entrepreneurs write business plans. They are that complex.

Here’s the problem.

For most online entrepreneurs, at this stage in the process, that’s too much work. It just doesn’t make sense.

IMPORTANT – I’m not trying to say that entrepreneurs don’t need a plan, I’m saying at this stage, digital entrepreneurs don’t need the formal rigor of an exhaustive business plan.

You need a baby business plan.

What is a Baby Business Plan?

A baby business plan is a scaled down vision of your plans for your business. Simply put, you need to think about how this website or web based app will make money.

This is different from a real business plan because at this point you simply don’t need all that complexity.

So, let’s get to the meat and bones.

What are the elements of a Baby Business Plan?

A Baby Business Plan has 9 elements:

• Business name ( and URL)
• Business concept (Full description)
• Technology components (list and price)
• Labor costs to start
• Ongoing labor
• Marketing plan
• Marketing costs
• Monetization plan
• Maintenance costs

Like I said, this is a scaled down version that you can put together real quickly.

Let’s do a quick example. Let’s do a Baby Business Plan for a fake domain – http://myloveofstamps.com/.

So if I was the entrepreneur, I would create a plan that looked roughly like this.

• Business name: My Love Of Stamps (http://myloveofstamps.com/)
• Business concept (A website that will bring together fans and stamp collectors all around the world. We will have forums, lists and …..)
• Technology components:
  • Hosting: WP Engine
  • WordPress
  • Thrive Themes
  • etc. etc.
• Labor costs to start:
  • 99 Designs web design – $899
  • Web Development to build – $500
  • Outsourced SEO – $200
  • 100 articles writer: $1000
  • etc. etc.
• Ongoing labor:
  • Monthly writer – $400
  • Monthly SEO – $50
  • etc. etc.
• Marketing Plan:
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Pinterest
  • etc. etc.
• Marketing costs
  • Facebook ads $50/month
  • Twitter Promo: $20/month
  • etc. etc.
• Monetization plan:
  • Adsense on site
  • Stamp ebook that we will develop
  • Amazon ads
  • Stamps.com affiliate
  • etc. etc.
• Maintenance costs
  • WP Engine $35/month
  • Clicky Analytics $9/month
  • etc. etc.

And so on and so forth…

Baby Business Plan – The format

Real simple. Word or Excel file. No presentation no graphics nothing too formal.

At this point you just want to have something that is a living document that you can continue to update as needed.

Why is this step critical?

Simple.

Because a lot of online tools are free or cheap and easy to use, it’s really easy to get started on an idea and build a proof of concept that can turn into a real site quickly.

This step helps you avoid two critical mistakes:

1. Overspending on an idea that you have. Once you have all these costs listed you can start to plan and make sure you actually have the money to support this business.
2. Validation – sometimes an idea sounds good in theory but when you actually write it out you start to see that it makes no business sense or requires too much money to be a viable business.

This step is a good step to keep you disciplined and focused. You need to write down you plan and start to internalize and share it with friends or people you respect so they can pick it apart and criticize it.

Better for an idea to die here than after you have spent lots of hours and lots of $$$ on it.

In the next installment in the series, I’ll show you how to quickly get a logo done.

Let me know if you think I missed anything here.

The post 13 Steps To Building A Profitable High Traffic Technology Blog – Part Three – the baby business plan appeared first on Learn About The Web.

I hate to be the guy who’s going against the grain, who seems to be contrarian where others celebrate but unfortunately, this is one of those articles.

Apple released their new iPhones today.

They released three new models – the iPhone XR, iPhone XS and iPhone XS Max.

The new iPhone XS and XS Max are priced at $999 and $1,099 and start shipping out at the end of this month. The iPhone XR starts at $749 and begins shipping out in October.

Apple iPhone XS (Image Credit – The Verge)

The iPhone XS has a 5.8-inch OLED display with a 2436 x 1125 resolution. Meanwhile, the iPhone XS Max has a 6.5-inch OLED display with a 2688 x 1242 resolution. The iPhone XR, which you can basically think of as this year’s lower-end offering, has a 6.1-inch LCD display with a 1792 x 828 resolution.

At the end of the day, the screen size is the main difference between these three new models.

• The XS is smaller than the iPhone 8 Plus but the screen is as big as the screen on the 8 Plus.
• The iPhone XS Max is as big as the iPhone 8 Plus, and its screen is larger.
• The iPhone XR has a larger display than the iPhone 8 Plus, while its overall size is just slightly smaller.

The iPhone XS and XS Max have dual rear 12-megapixel cameras and improved True Tone flash, and a front 7-megapixel camera. The iPhone XR, as the more budget option, has one 12-megapixel camera on the back, with True Tone flash.

All the new phones are powered by a new seven-nanometer A12 Bionic chip which can handle 512GB of storage. The iPhone XS and XS Max also have faster Face ID, True Tone display, and 3D Touch. They have support for Dolby Vision and HDR10 video.

The iPhone XS and XS Plus come in gold, silver, or space gray. The iPhone XS starts at $999 for the 64GB option, and has 256GB and 512GB options as well. The iPhone XS Max starts at $1,099, with the same storage options. The 512GB option goes for $1,449.

The Apple iPhone XS Promo Video

My opinion

Unfortunately, this is just more of the same.

Apple have made a larger phone, added more storage and made the camera better. The phone OS will be improved as well but that is really all that happened.

As someone who has an iPhone 7 Plus, I will upgrade at some point but the truth is there is STILL no rush.

I have been waiting for a compelling upgrade from Apple that would force me to head to the store and/or pre-order a new phone and the truth is, this isn’t the one.

The Samsung Galaxy Note 9 seems way more exciting from a consumer point of view because of the screen, the pen and the TONS of innovative new features they bring to the table.

When Steve Jobs died, there was a fervent argument among the faithful that innovation at the worlds most valuable company would start to slow.

Unfortunately I fear this is the case.

The most exciting features of the iPhone (IMHO) are FaceID and the upcoming multi-user FaceTime. Beyond those two features, it seems like Apple is just keeping up with the competition.

Let’s be really clear, these are REALLY GOOD PHONES.

But unfortunately, Apple is in a Michael Jackson type situation where they seem to be unable to do anything better than their greatest hit.

Apple continues to live in Steve Job’s shadow and unfortunately, his genius is really the anchor against which the company’s level of innovation will be measured. Using that yardstick, the company fails to measure up.

Preorders for both phones begin on September 14 and ship on September 21st in select countries, with rollout in other countries to follow.

What do you think? Will you buy an iPhone XS?

The post A Failure of imagination – Apple release new iPhone XR iPhone XS and iPhone XS Max appeared first on Learn About The Web.

The interview included the two men drinking whiskey and smoking weed.

It’s a really amazing and deep interview where he talks about the hyperloop, VTOL aircraft and artificial Intelligence.

Worth watching if you want to learn something new and deep about the future of the web.

You can watch this below…

The post Elon Musk interview with Joe Rogan – a deep conversation about AI and more.. appeared first on Learn About The Web.

You should have the inline small CSS inside the ‘’ tag while the inline JS can be in the ‘’ or ‘’ tag. Most of the time, best practice dictates that you should call JS and CSS using an external file, but you can include snippets of both in the HTML, saving multiple round trips, and speeding things up a little.

Many of the top site speed test tools recommend inlining CSS and JS and it is relatively easy to do. However, you do need to be careful that you don’t overdo it and inline too much.

Example of Inline Small CSS and JS

To give you an idea how to do it, this example shows you what your HTML file may look like when CSS and JS are inlined. We’ve enclosed the CSS inside ‘

‘<html>

<head>

<title>Inline Small CSS & JS Example</title>

## Start Inline CSS

<style>

body{background: #f5f5f5;}

a{color: #24890d; text-decoration: none;}

h1{font-size: 26px;line-height: 1.3846153846;}

</style>

## End Inline CSS

</head>

<body>

……

## Start Inline JavaScript

<script>

JavaScript code…

</script>

## End Inline JavaScript

</body>

</html>’

If you have got several small CSS or JS files, the code from each one may be inlined in the HTML file but do keep an eye on the overall size of the file.

Drawbacks

As with everything, there are a couple of drawbacks to inlining CSS and JS, more specifically, a tradeoff between caching and requests.

When you include the resources in the HTML file, you don’t need to make the extra requests to the resource but, where your resource file is quite large and mostly static (it doesn’t change much), it is probably best not to inline it, so the browser can cache it.

The biggest drawback of inlining is that CSS and JS can’t be cached because the browser can’t store what is in the HTML file.

This means that the entire HTML file needs to be fetched every time and, if it is full of CSS and JS, then it could be far more detrimental than retrieving the CSS or JS individually.

For this reason, you must be careful about how much you inline and don’t bloat the HTML file out.

Benefits

The benefits of inlining CSS and JS include fewer round trips thus reducing loading time so, if you some files that have only a little CSS or JS in them, it is worth adding to them to the HTML to make page loading more efficient.

This is also the recommended method to use if you want to cut down the latency caused by CSS, resulting in the critical path being optimized.

As said earlier, don’t overdo this. If the CSS and JS files are too large it is better to let them be cached rather than having to call a bloated HTML file every time.

Alternatively, if you can’t inline then another way is to combine small CSS into one external file and JS into another and call them that way – this also cuts down on round trips and boost page speed.

The post Website Performance Tip – Inline Your CSS and JS appeared first on Learn About The Web.

I have been fortunate enough to have picked up both mentors and mentees over the years and it was an active process that has helped me immeasurably as a digital marketing professional over the years.

Unfortunately however, in my opinion, the topic of mentoring is misunderstood.

What is a mentor?

The dictionary defines a mentor as “an experienced and trusted adviser.” I believe that while that is technically accurate, it’s a minimalist definition of a very important word.

A lot of professionals have an older person who will meet with them for lunch or dinner once in a while, give them some tips and shoot the sh$t for a little bit. That in my opinion is not a mentor. That’s an older professional who will meet with you once in a while.

The analogy is somewhat like meeting a member of the opposite sex for lunch or dinner once in a while and saying that’s a boyfriend/girlfriend. That’s not how it works.

My definition of a mentor

My definition of a mentor is I believe a little more accurate for what most of us need. A mentor is “an experienced and trusted adviser who is INVESTED in your success.” the operative word here is INVESTED.

A real mentor is someone who has bought into your goals and dreams on your behalf, is an advocate and would be PERSONALLY invested in the outcome of your journey, one way or another. Basically, a mentor is a personal connection to your goals.

Real mentors are hard to find because it requires WORK on their end and the truth is, most people are busy, they usually only have time for things that are really important.

So, here are four tips to help you find and approach a mentor.

Understand your strengths and weaknesses

You need to be really honest with yourself and understand what you’re good at and where you need improvement. If you’re great at marketing but suck at sales, you should be spending time trying to find seasoned sales professionals to learn from.

While it’s awesome to network and meet as many professionals as you can (“you never know”), since time is limited, you need to be efficient with your outreach.

Understand your goals

Where do you want to be long term? Where are you in your journey and what questions do you have about getting to the end zone? If you don’t know or haven’t given this serious thought, how the heck can anyone help you?

Without a clear sense of direction, you will keep meeting well meaning and sincere people who will give you advice that will swing you back and forth and leave you no better off than when you started. Not their fault, it’s yours for not having a goal.

Communicate clearly

Share the points above with someone you want to mentor you so that it’s clear how they can add value. This has a bunch of benefits.

First, it shows them that you are a serious professional who thinks things through. Second, it gives them a clear picture of who you are and what you are looking for so they can start thinking of a roadmap they can share with you early.

Third, it gives them the opportunity to sincerely say no if they’re not a good fit. Maybe they can refer you to someone who can be a better guide for you.

Be respectful

If that person agrees to meet with you, they are doing YOU the favor. Be grateful. Send emails thanking them. Pay attention to what they say whether or not you agree.

Don’t argue with that person but try and raise your points or objections respectfully. Once again YOU need them, not the other way around.

That doesn’t mean you have to do what they say, after all you are ultimately going to do whatever YOU decide. It does mean that you should make sure they feel like they were heard and their input was valuable.

Make it easy

In marketing, one of the ways to get someone to review your products (and hopefully endorse them) is to make it easy. Provide a writeup of the product, images and everything they need to share it. This is a more effective way of getting your product or service reviewed.

Likewise, for a mentor, do your homework and make things easy. Offer to drive out to meet near where they are. Offer to buy lunches or dinners. Provide a clear synopsis of what you want to discuss.

Give them credit whenever you can. Show that you are someone worth endorsing and mentoring and try and make it a no-brainer for them to want to partner with you for your success.

The bottom line

Finding a mentor is actually like finding a job. You have to do the research and be focused to find and keep that person’s attention. If you treat the process as seriously as it deserves to be treated, you will see results.

Let me know what your experience has been with this in the comments below.

The post Digital Marketing Tip – 4 tips for finding and approaching a mentor appeared first on Learn About The Web.

So you want to build a technology blog that will actually pick up steam but before you actually get started, you have a few pivotal decisions to make.

After trying to build tech blogs randomly and failing, I figured out the best technique to use when preparing to start a technology blog.

I call it…

The Belly of the whale strategy

Have you heard about the Remora fish? They are really fascinating.

Check this out:

Remora are small fish with front dorsal fins that have evolved to enable them to adhere by suction to smooth surfaces. They spend their lives clinging to a host animal such as a whale, turtle, shark or ray. It is probably a mutualistic arrangement as the remora can move around on the host, removing ectoparasites and loose flakes of skin, while benefiting from the protection provided by the host…

Wikipedia

Now what the heck does that have to do with digital marketing? In this case, everything.

When you decide to start a tech blog, you want to make sure that you become the Remora fish.

You need to find a large technology company that has the following:

• Millions of customers
• Millions of fans
• Lots of promotional/advertising money
• Complicated software that is relatively hard to understand
• Complicated software that people want to understand
• A topic you are (somewhat) interested in

Once you identify that software company and decide you want to become an evangelist, you stick with them and monitor everything they do and figure out how to make money off their scraps.

I say “scraps” but remember, in many cases, these are multi-billion dollar companies. If you do your homework, their scraps can set you up for life. But more about that later.

It becomes a win-win situation.

• What does the company get from you? They get an evangelist who is spreading the gospel of their software to the world.
• What do you get? You get money, some level of “fame” and the ability to build your own community.

If you execute this properly, it becomes a mutually beneficial win-win situation.

The not so obvious mistake

The majority of bloggers who start technology blogs look at successful blogs like ZDNET, CNET and The Verge and think they can replicate those types of online publications.

You can’t. You simply can’t.

It’s real simple, those blogs are run by COMPANIES with TEAMS of writers and editors who can pump out 20 to 30 stories a day in different categories.

In addition, since they are so established, they pretty much will eat up the top 10 search engine results of almost anything they decide to cover.

It’s not fair but that’s just how it goes. So what should you do?

Real simple, you have to pick a niche.

What is a niche?

A niche is simply defined as a specialized market.

You see, in 2018, there is simply no market for “a tech blog”.

There are tons of general tech blogs out there

People know where to go for those and most of the people you want in your audience already know where to go to get general technology news.

You need to think about something more specific than technology to focus on if you want to carve out your own reliable section of the multi-billion dollar tech news industry.

You want to drill down and get really specific.

I’ll get more specific.

Here’s an example from my experience.

I wanted to start a technology blog and I focused on Microsoft.

Microsoft was a fantastic company because they made software that BILLIONS of people used, had a (relatively) great reputation and had lots of fans and customers. It was in many ways, a great whale to latch on to.

Remember my criteria?

• Millions of customers
• Millions of fans
• Lots of promotional/advertising money
• Complicated software that is relatively hard to understand
• Complicated software that people want to understand
• A topic you are (somewhat) interested in

It fit the bill perfectly so I thought I found my niche.

Niche -> Microsoft

Now at this point, the problem was, Microsoft make a TON of software and hardware. Windows, Windows Server, Surface, The Cloud, Surface, Azure, IOT and on and on.

Since we talked about not being a generalist, I realized that I didn’t have the resources to cover all these sectors so I had to drill down and pick a subset of the software that Microsoft makes.

Each of their business units has millions of customers (and potential readers of my blog) so it was hard to go wrong. At this point it was a just a matter of my preference so I chose Windows.

Niche -> Microsoft
Sub Niche -> Microsoft -> Windows

Looking good at this point but Windows had multiple versions on the market at the time (Windows Vista, Windows XP etc) and I knew that I couldn’t handle all that information so (in 2007) I had to drill down one more level.

Niche -> Microsoft
Sub Niche -> Microsoft -> Windows
Sub Niche -> Microsoft -> Windows -> Windows Vista

At this point, I decided that I would build a blog about Windows Vista and that crowd would be my crowd. That audience would be my tribe and I could focus on just one software package.

One decision made.

Why is drilling down so important?

Drilling down is critical for three major reasons.

FOCUS

First, it gives you the ability to focus. You can avoid running down many other rabbit holes and getting distracted if you find the right technology niche.

USER DEFINITION

Second, it allows you to define your readers, visitors and (hopefully), future customer. Once you identify your audience, you can start creating a concrete business plan about the types of goods and services you can sell in the future aside from your daily informational content.

SEO

SEO is critical. Identifying what niche you are attacking allows you to create a concrete content plan that you can use to optimize your organic audience acquisition down the lane.

This is critical.

If you’re thinking about starting a technology blog, think about what product you want to focus on. Does it have millions of interested readers? Is the company large enough to latch on to? Do they qualify as a whale? Do they have lots of informational resources out there?

These are some of the things you need to think through before you actually pick a topic.

Think about this step for a while. In the next post in the series, I will walk you through how to write a baby business plan for a technology blog and help you figure out all the things you should be planning for EARLY.

This information will save you a lot of time and money so stay tuned.

The post 13 Steps You Need To Follow To Build A Profitable High Traffic Technology Blog – Part Two – the belly of the whale appeared first on Learn About The Web.

How to build a profitable, high traffic technology blog

There are over 1.2 billion websites on the internet and hundreds of millions of those are WordPress. Every day, millions of people come on to the web for the first time and millions of people realize that they can try and make money online as well.

In that vein, every day millions of people realize that they will fail at making money online for 2 reasons.

• It’s a real skill – NO BS – There is a lot of learning involved. Most people will never put the time in required to learn how to build an online business properly.
• It take a lot of work – Anyone who owns a blog knows that it’s a labor of love. It involves late nights, long days and lots of business development to get a blog or online business anywhere near decent.

Most people simply do not have the propensity to learn and the patience to fail until they succeed.

As a result, the amount of people who know how to create a successful online business like a technology blog are very few. The amount of us who are able to do it solo are smaller still.

Why create a technology blog?

Technology blogs are awesome if you like technology. Depending on your background and the niche you choose, it can be the most fun you ever have in your life.

In many cases, you get to write about something that is fun, has millions of people interested in it and you can quickly become a leader and influencer if you do it right.

In addition, creating a tech blog is still (in 2018) very profitable if you do it right. You can make a six figure income if you are strategic from the start.

That’s part of the reason why I am writing this series – to give you a roadmap to putting together your own profitable technology blog.

In fact, a lot of the lessons in this series will be helpful for whatever online business you decide to start (if you choose to do so).

My experience with technology blogs

I am fortunate to have done something only very few people have ever done – I created and ran a profitable, high traffic independent technology blog for years.

Some interesting anecdotes:

• I started a Microsoft Windows technology blog in 2007 that took off and made me a sweet six figure income annually as a hobby.
• My blogs got over 50 million visitors and close to 100 million page views.
• I became an authority figure on the Microsoft Windows platform because of my blogs.
• My newsletter email list grew to over 80,000 people (costing me over $750 a month to host).
• I became a Microsoft MVP for Windows because of my technology blogs.
• I got to cover Microsoft events as a member of the Press because of my technology blogs.
• The President of Microsoft’s Windows Division responded to criticisms I made from my blog.
• I made a ton of money and built a lot of great business relationships because of my blogs.
• I built a large social media fanbase because of my blogs.
• I learned more than most people will ever learn about digital marketing because of my blogs.
• Because of the volume of web traffic I was dealing with, I learned more about web hosting and web infrastructure than most people can ever imagine.
• I also learned how to monetize blogs in multiple ways as a result of having a steady traffic stream.

High traffic technology blogs literally changed my life.

Of course, to get to that point, I failed at building a lot of websites and wasted a lot of money like a rock star! Goes with the territory.

But after several years of figuring it out, I came up with a blue print that I was able to replicate over and over again to make money.

That’s what I am going to share with you. For FREE. I’ll share the mistakes I made and give you the 13 steps I discovered to building the framework for a high traffic profitable technology blog.

Tomorrow, I’ll walk you through the first step – how to pick a technology niche to focus on. You’ll learn about how to figure out what technology to cover, what subjects don’t work and my exclusive belly of the whale strategy.

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The post 13 steps you need to follow to build a profitable high traffic technology blog – Part One – Intro appeared first on Learn About The Web.