Back in 2007 I started my own blog focusing on Internet Marketing, Search and Social media: SEOsmarty.com. Before that I had been an in-house SEO for an ecommerce site and by help of blogging I hoped to start some mini personal branding campaign.

Traffic does not mean income

I was new to blogging and to social media; however getting people to visit my blogs wasn’t such a big problem. I quickly found some smaller niche social networks focusing on SEO and social media. From there I learned how people promoted their blogs.

Besides, starting with smaller networks I had good chances to get noticed by people interested in the same topic as myself. They started visiting my blog, commenting and helping me move further.

Just a couple of months of networking in Internet marketing circles and communities, making friends and writing unique articles (once or twice per month) made me quite well-known in SEO community. After just a few weeks of active public activities I won a social media ninja contest and got quite a few loyal readers.

I was so excited and inspired by that new experience that I couldn’t any longer focus on my day job. So I quit.

But you know what. I had absolutely no income from blogging and social networking.

My blog was popular but I didn’t want to monetize it - I was going to earn money by selling my services. But I had no idea how to start.

How I started earning money

This is when Loren Baker, a very well-known Internet marketer and owner of one of the top SEO blogs SearchEngineJournal.com, emailed me inviting to guest post for his blog.

I was so much excited by the opportunity! I’ve been sitting on my guest post for a week and then dared to send it over to Loren. It went live and was a great success.

This is when my name was really heard by the industry experts. People started approaching me for my SEO services and I really started earning money.

After that I never stopped guest posting. It has been the best way for me to promote my new projects, client sites and self-brand. My guest posting soon gave me an idea for my newest project: MyBlogGuest.com which connects guest posters with bloggers looking for free quality content.

I am not going to convince anyone that guest posting is the definitive way to get popular. You may think that it is best to keep your best content for yourself and post it on your own blog.

I can tell you from my own experience only: all I was able to achieve in my internet marketing career was due to guest posting. I’ve offered my best posts for other people’s blogs and got exposure in exchange.

Everyone has his own way to the top. But you may want to give it a try because guest posting is a tactic where everyone wins: you gain valuable contacts, links and traffic and expose your blog to a wider audience.

The main thing is to do that right: don’t try to cheat or look for easier ways to guest post. Only start guest posting if you are serious about your plans. Otherwise you’ll just waste your time.

Good luck!

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Thanks to Deelip(from MaxBlogPress), I am going to share my blogging success story with you and you will learn:

• How I went from not having a clue about building a website to having a rapidly growing blog with 1000 subscribed readers in 7 months.

• How long it took me to get to where I am

• All the shortcuts that you can make that will save you months of trial and error (which I all figured out the hard way).

• Ways to be inspired and motivated to keep working on your project for months without giving up before you reach your desired results.

Where It All Began

My journey started back in mid-2008. I became friends with a guy who did SEO as a job for big companies. I was over at his house one day and he showed me a little about his work and what he was doing, and at the time he had just bought a domain to start a new blog.

I immediately took a big liking to the idea of creating websites and being able to share my thoughts with other people all over the world. When I got home I did a lot of thinking about what I wanted to do. Within a week I had decided on the name UpgradeReality and the .com domain was available so I registered it.

Although I had absolutely no clue about internet marketing, blogging or creating websites, I was pretty good with computers so I was able to fight my way through the steps of buying a domain and hosting.

Too Much Information
Today I realize that it is a problem that most newbies to the online world struggle with. It is the problem of too much information.

So here I was, I had registered my domain and I had the idea of creating a cool website that would get hundreds of thousands of visits, but I had no clue where to begin.

My first instinct was to Google what to do next, and that is what I did. I stumbled upon hundreds of web pages about blogging and internet marketing. For the first couple of months I just read and read and read. I bought a couple of online courses that promised to teach me how to blog and how to make money online.

Guess what happened?

I read these guides, spent some time trying to follow their instructions and then gave up. It was too hard and didn’t make sense. Money down the drain.

I found Squidoo, a community where you can create free web pages and use them to share your content with the world and make money with affiliate links. While I was still experimenting with my blog, I started making Squidoo Lenses and over a period of 9 months or so I managed to make a good $800 from them (with no expense), so that inspired me to keep going and working on my blog.

My Newbie Days

At the time when I wanted to get content up on UpgradeReality, I had no clue that the Wordpress platform existed, so I found a free CSS HTML template and took a few weeks of manually coding it to get a site up on my domain. Thinking back, I was pretty proud of myself, but the site was absolutely horrible!

Luckily, my friend that had inspired me to start blogging pointed me in the direction of Wordpress which I immediately installed. I was amazed that it did so many things for you in such an easy way.

I found a free (but actually ugly) theme that I put on my blog and I started writing some content. My articles were never longer than 500 words back then, the grammar was not perfect and the formatting of the articles was not very professional. In other words, it sucked. I remember thinking that I was well on my way to becoming a good blogger. I had 20 or 30 readers (mostly people I knew) and their few comments on my articles inspired me to keep writing.

For the next months it was just a massive learning period for me with a lot of trial and error. I changed themes every few weeks, tweaked with logos and designs, plugins, affiliate banners and links and I am honestly surprised that those 30 readers did not unsubscribe!

14 Months after having registered the domain Upgradereality.com, I was finally ready to take my blog to the next level and put all the things I had learnt into action.

Kicking Into Gear

August 1^st 2009.

I decided to stop messing around with free themes and purchase a professional and pretty theme. It took some searching but I settled on a ‘wood’ theme that I thought and still think looks pretty cool.

Let me put the things I did and learnt into list form so you can benefit from them:

• Commenting
  I got in touch with many bloggers in the same niche as me (personal development and self improvement) and subscribed to their RSS feed to get their updates. I started to leave real (not generic) comments on their articles and this got their attention and they would head over to my site too. It also helped me gain awareness in the community and got me quite a couple of readers who would click through to my site from my comments.
• Guest Posting
  I started writing articles for the sole purpose of giving them to other blogs to put up as a guest post on their blogs with a link back to my site. This helped them because they got good free content and it helped me because I would get some of their readers to click through to my site and subscribe to my RSS feed.
• Regular Posting Schedule
  I realized that readers get used to checking in to a site for new articles. If there is no regular posting frequency, the readers may lose interest and will unsubscribe or not come back. I decided to post twice a week, on Mondays and on Thursdays.
• Writing Style
  I needed to do something about my writing style. I decided to start writing articles that were minimum 1000 words in length and that were pleasing to the eye. This meant that the articles were broken up with sub-headings which were easy to scan (because most people just scan posts and they don’t like reading massive blocks of text).
• SEO Optimize
  Something that I had neglected up until this point, was SEO. I was not trying to rank for anything and that was a waste of potential and targeted traffic from search engines at a later stage. I read up about SEO for Wordpress and tweaked my site to be as easy as possible for search engines to understand what I am trying to rank for.

Where I Am Today

Fast forward seven months since I started taking Upgradereality seriously and here are the results:

• Around 1000 subscribed readers
• 15000 Unique visits per month
• Top-40 ranking for my keyword

I feel that I am at a stage now where my growth is going to pick up exponentially and is going to me much faster than last year. Although it has taken me a total of 20 months to get where I am, only 7 of those were needed once I took things seriously. I am confident that I could build a blog from scratch to a level where Upgradereality is today within 4 months.

However, I needed all that time and trial and error to gain the experience and knowledge to be able to have these skills.

Anyone who tells you that you can become good at something in a few months is giving you false hope. While it certainly is possible for the few exceptions, it is likely that it will take you 2-4 years to get really good at something. If you have just started blogging or are interested in starting a blog, this is something very important to keep in mind. You have to want to work for 12 months without seeing serious results before you actually start to see results. You should have no attachment to immediate results and be content with the fact that you are working on your skills and your blog, and your hard work is going to pay off sometime in the future. This brings me to my next point:

Inspiration And Motivation To Blog
I have had times where I felt like abandoning the project. I even attempted to sell my blog in the early stages because I felt helpless and was getting zero results.

The reason why I share this with you is because you will experience difficult and trying times. There will be times when you don’t see the point in continuing what you started, but if you give up you will never get to see your own creation grow into something magnificent that you never thought was possible.

You know better than anyone what motivates you. Find something, like a postcard of a tropical island, a cause you support or a friend who encourages you and use that as motivation to keep going.

When you blog, write as if you have 10 000 readers, yet don’t expect to get a single reply or comment. This will allow you to produce your best work every single time and yet you will not get disappointed because you do not get feedback. Even if your article makes an impact on one single person, it is enough to write that article.

I am proof that you do not need special talent or skill to become a successful blogger. I used to get B’s and C’s for English in school and I hated writing essays.

All you need is passion and perseverance. Keep at it and love what you do and you will become successful over time. Guaranteed!

Parting Words
I hope that you enjoyed reading the story behind UpgradeReality!

Currently my goal is not to make loads of money from my blog but instead focusing on getting many readers so that I can make a difference to the world and to other people’s lives for the better with the articles that I write. I feel there is so much positive change we can all make in this world, but not enough people are working together to achieve that change.

How you choose to build your community and the main purpose of your blog is entirely up to you. Whether you want to build up a successful blog to earn your living from or that you can share your ideas and art with others or if you want to make a difference in the world like me, it is all possible.

Decide what you want to achieve and don’t give up until you get it!

Photo Credit

About The Author:
Diggy writes all about self improvement and personal growth. He wants to inspire and motivate as many people as possible to live their lives to the fullest and to be their best selves. Spread the word or subscribe to his blog via RSS or Email

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The sooner you realize we all can’t be JohnChow with a million ads, the better your blogging will be. There is nothing wrong with wanting to monetize your blogs traffic, there is just a fine line to offering information and shoving ads and in your readers face.

I slowly leartned that to much to soon is bad. I hade to many 125×125 ads, I had Google Adsense, I had banners in header and sidebar, I even had banners in each post, it was just way to much.

I’m just happy that I learned this quickly, since my blog is only 10 months old and 2 of those months I left the blog quiet to work on other things, as you can see Sept no posts, Oct 1 post.

I Decided To Get Focused

Once I came back in Nov, I started to really focus on what I wanted my blog to be about, and what was important. For me building a list is important, offering strong helpful content is important, building a community on my blog for other bloggers is important.

So knowing all that I started to stop the leak on my blog and offer what is important to my targeted readers.

At that time my blog had a Alexa score of about 2.2 million, and my 3 month Alexa score was 1.1 million

As of today I have a Alexa score of 168,603

What  I Did Evey Day

First I dropped a lot my ads, now I still have ads up and I think a few ads that fit what your blog is about is ok, but don’t over do it. I try to stay away from ads that are to big and flashy and distracting.

My big secret to my new  success is……Hard Work, Hard Work Each Day!

I know, no big underground secret, but it is what works, below are a few things I have done…

- Using my 40,000 strong twitter community to drive traffic.

- I comment on blogs related to my blog, I comment a lot, I have about 50 blogs saved on my RSS Feed so I can follow each day.

- I comment on KeyWord Luv blogs to get nice Keyword anchor link backs.

- I comment on Comment Luv blogs

- I bookmark each post to about 40 sites with onlywire.com

This has got me to 5,435 uniques below.

My focus now is to post atleast 3 times a week and that alone will boost my traffic by atleast 50% monthly.

I also have 5 top blogs where I plan to guest post, which will really get things growing on my blog.

Final Thought

You first need to know what you want your blog to be about, then post content and ads, and information that fits that topic perfectly. Design wise I would keep things different to stand out, but don’t get to crafty since you still want your blog easy to navigate.

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We’ve kind of got a jump start for our new cruise blog in German language (www.cruisetricks.de). My wife won a competition of Royal Caribbean Cruise Line becoming the “Reporter at Sea” on the brand new cruise ship Oasis of the Seas, just last November. This gave us some popularity but more important, it gave us incredibly much exclusive niche content as we’ve been the first German bloggers ever on this new cruise ship class and we’ve been even a few days ahead of TV and newspaper journalists.

jump start with massive high-quality content

Now we had more pictures and information than we could handle, so we had a fantastic start posting about this cruise ship in every detail over many weeks. And Google started to list our stories on the first page - not for the top keywords like “cruise”, but for nice two- and three-word phrases. Traffic increase was steady over the first few weeks. But then we recognized the traffic increase slowed down as more and more other websites had information and pictures available about the Oasis of the Seas. And also we foresaw that our available pool of content was not lasting for ever.

That’s were we changed a few things and started something new: First of all, of course, we broadened the topics of our postings, writing much more about general cruise related stuff instead of just Oasis of the Seas stories.

news for traffic - but do it right!

But the main issue was: Just the two of us blogging couldn’t continue posting long stories every other day. But as soon as we reduced the frequency of postings, traffic stopped going up and on some days even went down. So first of all, we started to add news to the blog site. The idea was to have new content every day, but not spend hours every day to produce it. To make it short: It works great! After we’ve signed up for the press releases of the cruise companies and subscribed to relevant RSS feeds, information was pouring in and writing short news stories out of this is easy - but brings in the traffic on days where there is no long, content-rich new posting on the blog. It also helps optimizing for long-tail search traffic from Google. That is because we don’t copy-and-paste the press releases (duplicate content), but write our own news stories from the information we get. This is more work, but it pays off quickly.

permanentely attractive content

Second thing to fix was the bounce rate that started to increase. Two things are making the difference now. First, we started adding additional stuff to the blog that drags attention and makes users clicking instead of leaving:

• We added desktop wallpaper pictures as free downloads, with pictures from cruise ships.
• We added a free, comprehensive PDF eBook, the “Oasis of the Seas Cabin and Suites Guide” (we even translated this to English).
• From the beginning we had interactive flash panaromana pictures from the Oasis of the Seas, which are the most viewed pages of the blog from the beginning; it’s unique and hard to reproduce for competitors. Very successful content, though lot of work to produce them, too.

news and special content added to the regular blog posting

Not an overly huge success, but decent, and the bounce rate went down again. Well, not directly, actually. But after we made some changes in the website’s design and moved the news as well as the wallpaper downloads right in the main section of the blog, directly below the Top-Story blog posting, it works great now (see picture; sorry for the nasty green color of the marks).

We’ve got some more ideas, similar to the wallpaper idea, that should make the blog more attractive for this specific audience of cruise ship fans. Basically the idea is to have permanentely interesting content besides the news-oriented content in the blog postings and the news.

the challenge: so much to do, so little time

And that’s actually also our next goal now. To make the blog traffic much more independent from the number of postings and news pieces per week, i.e. adding content that will be appreciated by the audience permanentely; how-to guides; link lists; we’ve added a list of cruise ship webcams, for instance; tutorials like “how to get your cruise cheaper”; stuff like this.

We’re not running out of ideas for our cruise blog; the issue is more a lack of manpower to quickly do all the stuff we’d like to do. But still, if you have any further ideas to keep this working with just me full-time and my wife part-time blogging, please let us know.

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My name is Debbie Lattuga and I blog at BestSLRCamera.org. Like most of you, I have been attempting to make money online. I consider these last couple of years my graduate study. I love to learn new things, and I am good at it. But just learning stuff and not doing stuff, didn’t make me any money. And I wound up with Information Overload.

Here are the graduate courses I studied:

Semester I: Business Models

In order to pass this semester, you must take the following classes. In addition, you must make at least $5.00 in 4 of these classes.
* Blogging 101
Spam Blogs for Fast Money
Authority Site for Aspiring Probloggers
Site Flipping for Cash
Membership Sites for Content
* Pay-per-Click (Not for Thin Wallets)
* Pay-per-View to Make $1 at a Time
* affiliate marketing for Newbies
* product launches a la Jeff Walker

* Made some meager money in these classes.

The good thing is, I learned a lot. The bad thing is, I didn’t stick with one model. And by bouncing around to different business models, I didn’t give any one model enough effort to produce results.

And they are all good models. But I was looking for one that fit. I’m sure if any one of them had taken off - that one would have fit just fine.

It did appear that the blogging model was the one model that I could pursue that would be the best fit for my ability to learn quickly. And I love sharing what I learn.

Semester II: The Blogging Model

To pass this semester, you must take the following 4 classes and be able to produce a power point presentation on each of the core concepts.

1. Search Engine Optimization for Beginners

• linking
• remote blogs
• niche research

2. Advertising to Drive Traffic

• article marketing
• copy writing
• social media
• video production

3. List Building for Income Generation

• writing ebooks
• squeeze pages

4. Content Development for Ranking

• fast post writing
• private label rights
• rss feeds
• outsourcing

Now I passed these classes… but I had to translate what I learned into something profitable.

How I Got 1578 Uniques in One Day

So now you know my back-story, fast forward to starting my first blog BestSLRCamera.org on November 16, 2009. I decided to build several small blogs to generate a small amount of money daily. I did my niche research and determined it would be fairly easy to rank for the term ‘Best SLR Camera’. And I really view this as my test site.

Article Marketing

All the new stuff will get tested on this site. So one thing I’m doing is uploading my blog posts as articles to the article marketing sites. The post goes on my site on day 1, goes on Ezine Articles on day 7, and gets posted to 10 additional sites on day 14. Well, not exactly on that schedule, but close enough.

Around December 04, 2009 I wrote an article titled, “The Top 10 Best-Selling Photography Books on Amazon”. I figured it would be a good link-bait post and would generate some Christmas traffic. I then posted it to Ezine and the other article sites. I’m not sure it really got me any extra traffic before Christmas. My blog was too new.

Little did I know, a photography author that had 2 books on the list, discovered my post. And he gave me a shout out on his blog. BANG! 1578 uniques to my blog the next day. And since that day, I’ve received about 2500 visitors to my blog from his site.

And prior to his post I was averaging 30 uniques a day.

Analytics Stats

My Lesson to You

Write a Top 10 Book post for your blog. Post it to the article sites. Then send an email to each author letting them know how much you like their book. (you did like their book, didn’t you?) Mention that you noticed they were on the Top 10 at Amazon and you’ve written a blog post including them.

And make sure you are an Amazon Associate before you write the post. You want to make sure you get paid for any referrals.

Now use this tip and go drive some traffic. Your wallet will thank you.

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For the whole of 2009 I had this urge to start a blog and share my life experiences. My passion has always been self improvement and spiritual growth. I never thought I could write something that people would actually like, but my experience has been completely different since I’ve started my blog on self improvement.

At the end of 2009, in December I finally had a dream that left an imprint on me. The message I remember from this dream was “start now, don’t wait any longer”, which is when I started taking action and creating the Wake Up Cloud, which is my blog.

My Fear

I was confused and somewhat scared as I was taking steps and putting myself out there. I think most bloggers go through this and experience it for the rest of their lives to some extent. It’s tough putting your face and writing out there for everyone to judge.

But ultimately the more you can be yourself, the more people you will attract that are in harmony with you. If you’ve read my posts, you know I’m a big fan of learning how to find your passion and following it.

We’re all put on this planet for a reason. It is up to each and every one of us to discover what that is so we can start sharing it with those that need it. You don’t have to work a job you don’t enjoy; you can do what you love and make a living, if you work hard and persist.

One of the first things I did when I started my blog was to join a coaching course on blogging. There are many out there, but I decided to pick Authority Blogger with Chris Garrett. It spoke to me and it has helped me immensely in navigating past the pitfalls of blogging.

My Stats

If you really want to speed up your process I recommend you get a coach or join a program that can help you head in the right direction from the start. Many are surprised by the speed of my growth. To be honest, so am I. I have reached 400 subscribers (RSS and E-Mail) in around 8 weeks.

My subscribers have been growing steadily ever since I started. I attribute my growth to the amount I have been guest posting. I think I have written over 30 guest posts soon in my first 8 weeks of blogging. I’ve seen the best results from guest posting on bigger blogs, which have sometimes brought me over 100 new subscribers in a few days.

Most of my subscribers are via e-mail because I offer a course on how to discover your passion in 5 days. I’ve gotten a lot of good feedback on it. People seem to really like it. We all have trouble finding our passion, so it’s something that most people really need.

My unique visitors at the moment range from around 100 to sometimes 200. The first post on my blog went up just around 8 weeks ago, so I haven’t started getting good traffic from the search engines yet. When that starts to happen, I expect to see a mini explosion.

(My current visitor stats. Click to enlarge.)

My Methods

The methods I have used to do this are guest posting, commenting and being social. By being social I mean hanging out on twitter and e-mailing people I thought had cool blogs and starting a conversation. When you’re blogging about something that you’re passionate about it’s fun to make connections with like-minded people.

I never thought about what I could get out of my connections. I just had fun and talked to people. It has surprised me how powerful this is when used together with guest posting and commenting. I’ve realized that it takes hard work to start a blog, but it is a lot of fun, because I get to write articles about things that I truly enjoy.

Being Ruthless

Another thing I’ve discovered is that I have to be ruthless with my time. I can’t overextend and start several new projects. Writing and promoting one blog is enough, not to mention the time it takes to be on social media and hang out with people.

It has all worked out better than I could ever have hoped. If you’re on the brink and don’t know if you should start blogging, just try it and see what happens. When you’re ready for some awesome self improvement ideas, drop by my blog and we’ll chat.

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My Early Days

I focused on all the wrong areas during my first year of blogging.  I tried to find the coolest, most expensive theme (and I did).  I implemented every type of silly monetization strategy such as banner stripe ads and I even had a pop-up box designed to entice visitors to sign up for my email list.  The result?  A mediocre website at best with no real purpose.

Despite some level of growth, the blog did not grow nearly as much as I would have hoped.  The amount of work that i was putting in was not translating into sufficient growth.  I “hit the wall” like many new bloggers do.

A Renewed Focus

I contemplating a complete halt to my blogging activities just because I wasn’t seeing the return on my time.  Rather than quit, I decided to try out a drastic change.  The first thing to go was my theme.  I got rid of the magazine-like, fancy theme with moving featured posts and images, and went to a bare-bones theme.  The reason?  I wanted my readers to visit my site for the content; therefore, I needed to have the theme be about the content and nothing else.  The results were incredible.

As you can see from the below graphic, the immediate impact of the theme change was a huge drop in my bounce rate.  From averaging over 60% rate, I took the bounce rate down to the 4-5% range instantaneously.  This was step number 1 in taking my blog to the next level.  If people don’t last more than a single page view, it’s pretty tough to grow a website.

The next step was to understand my objective. Was I trying to create a real interactive community of readers who had a similar interest (in my case, finance)?  Or, was I simply trying to gain search traffic and get ad clicks?  If you haven’t answered this question yourself, you need to.  I decided that it was time to focus on quality and gaining a real readership versus short term search traffic and Adsense numbers.

I put an emphasis on quality content and became re-energized.  Why would someone want to visit my blog?  I ask myself this every day.  If I can’t come up with a good answer, then obviously, my blog will not go anywhere.  Similar to step one, the results have been excellent.  The traffic growth which I document each month with a monthly blogging update, has been encouraging.

The below graphic shows the steady increase in traffic i’ve been receiving mainly due to my renewed focus on quality content.

Please note that January’s traffic is through January 11, 2010. I’m on pace for my best month yet.

Conclusion

To sum up my advice, it would be to have a fantastic understanding of your objective as a blogger. What are you trying to accomplish? When you can answer that, you should be focused intensely on achieving that goal. Do not dabble in multiple strategies or try out a new approach every month. Determine your own approach for your blog and commit to it. If you do, you will see nice results.

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A few months ago, I received an email from Deelip Khanal of MaxBlogPress, asking if I would share my story with the readers here. At first, I was a little hesitant as I’ve shared most of my blogging advice in a lot of interviews recently, but then I had an idea.

Instead of me sharing my biggest tips about blogging, I just want to show you what is possible. After all, you can read tips on writing scannable content, creating killer-headlines and promoting your blog posts anywhere. However, at times all we really need is a little inspiration from somewhere who has been there and done that to get us going again.

If you’re losing a little bit of motivation for blogging or don’t really think you can achieve what you want to, then this post is for you. Allow me to start this story with a little of my background. In school, I absolutely hated writing. Despite being in the ‘high flyers’ class which meant that myself and 20 others took their English exams a year before anyone else in the country, I was definitely struggling. Computers were far more my thing and I would rather type out an essay than write it.

Being handed another assignment which involved 3,000 words, hand written, just drove me insane.

Over the next two years, I went through college and built up websites (some of which were blogs) on the side. In fact, three years ago, my first ever blog was the one I now write for full-time after giving it a recent resurrection: my site on viral marketing. For a year, I wrote on the site purely as a way to build up search engine traffic. I didn’t care about making my articles sticky or how viral they were; I simply cared about search engine rankings.

Of course, how search engines work and what I focus on has changed a lot, but even after a year of pushing myself to write and hoping that I would start to enjoy the process, nothing seemed to be helping.

Then something changed…

Getting Over Yourself

I slowly let my marketing blog die and wasn’t writing much online until I launched another site, PluginID. In just over a year, the site has gained over 6,000 subscribers and is viewed as a top 10 blog in the personal development industry.

If you’re wondering what changed between a guy that hated writing to one that makes enough money through blogging to support himself full-time, then let me tell you:

• I Started Writing What I Want To Read - I decided this would be the best way to judge whether I was writing excellent content that my audience would care about. Instead of writing things for search engines, or for teachers (like in school), I simply focused on writing what I wanted to write about. And, miraculously, I started loving it.
• I Realised the Importance of Content - Some people get so caught up in SEO, design and their analytics stats that they completely forget about the most important aspect of blogging: your readers. And, your readers are simply on your site for one thing: your content. Instead of writing for search engines, I started to realise that my blog would only grow if I provided massive value to my readers, so I started putting a lot more time and attention into my writing.
• I Stopped Caring About Things Out of My Control - After pumping out articles for a few months, it suddenly hit me that there is just no way I can ‘control’ whether people like my work. At school, I could study as much as possible and try to produce the best work that I can, but at the end of the day it’s up to the teacher to decide on my grade. Focus on what you can control (writing and promoting the best content you can) and then remain indifferent to how ‘well’ that article does. When you eliminate the number of things you focus on, you naturally start to enjoy the things you do.
• I Left Editing Until the End - Typically, with written content, I would edit as I go because I didn’t want to make a mistake on paper and have to start again. As you would expect, when I jumped into the online world, I kept this same method (as many people do). I now find that it’s much more enjoyable, and produces much better results, if you try to get down everything you want to say and then come back and edit the content later. This allows you to stay in the flow and enjoy two separate modes when writing your posts.

Each of these 4 things, individually, had a big impact on how I now operate online. Combining all of these changes meant that I went from literally dreading having to write posts, to living what I do and now enjoying writing as my favorite medium.

If you ever find yourself down about your writing ability or demotivated to write your next post, then keep these in mind. I went from someone who hated writing to making over $50,000 with my blogs in 2009. There’s no way you can’t do the same.

This is a blog story by Glen Allsopp who writes about viral marketing. If you liked this post, you may also enjoy his in-depth article on guest blogging.

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That was the question people threw at me when I handed in my resignation letter 6 months ago. Meet the small-town girl with big dreams - Wong Ching Ya, a social media enthusiast and freelancer of logo/header designs.

My experience in blogging isn’t too long but I have a major thrill utilizing social media as my networking and publicity tool. Now I am happily engaged in some writing offers and landed a couple of interviews as well. Let’s see how it all started:

1. Forum Participation – Quality Outbeats Quantity

I started blogging since August, 2008 owning 2 sites, both for entertainment purposes. I was active in joining forums that I had more than 10 memberships at one time. Later I noticed it’s best to focus and really participate in those I find helpful in my blogging career. No doubt, forum is a great place to build trust and friendship. BloggerTalk founder, Rose DesRochers was kind enough to promote me as the moderator due to my contribution in her forum. I met some nice people there and had fun helping out as much as I could. Authority Blogger Forum owned by Chris Garrett was the one that helped to initiate the idea in transforming my personal site into a niche one. After deliberate consideration for long term goals, I started fresh with a new blog name in February, 2009 – Social @ Blogging Tracker.

2. Start New Niche Post with A Bang!

I need a fresh new start! Something to capture people’s attention and to prove that I’m up for the challenge. It’s not easy to be unique so I tried to come up with a different way to present my post. I spent a lot of time adjusting the chart when finally it was ready to be published: Killer Twitter Apps to Expand Your Twitter Network.

Twitter was a hit topic then so with an immediate effect, this click-able chart received a lot of feedback, especially from my blogger friends. They are generous enough to share this post around and I was deeply encouraged by the results.

3. New Strategy - Authority Blogging with Quality Content

From that point on, I decided to go for quality posting instead of quantity. I keep a minimum posting of 1-2 times weekly, concentrating more on research and discovering ideas to solve social networking problems. At the same time, I was hoping to encourage comments from readers so I can either have a sequel or new ideas for coming posts. Here’s an example of how I responded to a reader’s request by 13 Facebook Applications to Promote Your Blog, which was surprisingly well received on Blogengage, Stumbleupon and Twitter.

4. Guest Posting on Popular Sites to Reach Wider Audiences

I must admit it was a little intimidating to think about guest posting at first. However, I knew I needed to overcome this barrier in order to move towards authority blogging. I’m blessed to have the opportunity to reach out to Mintblogger and Dailyblogtips, both are prestigious sites that are within the same niche as mine. Great experiences and I must say, to be able to post on the sites you respected is simply wonderful! It was the same period of time when I started to gain new readers and subscribers.

5. New Ventures via Quality Comments & Blog Visits

I take commenting very seriously. Visiting to 3-5 new blogs daily earned me a connection with founder of Rotorblog, Maris. He was kind enough to offer me an opportunity to guest post on his informative site and I was more than happy to do it. Later I decided to be a regular poster for him that my second post had a massive support from his readers, especially on Twitter. All these wouldn’t happen if I didn’t comment on his site in the first place.

6. Transforming Your Passion Into Career

Apart from writing, I’m a huge graphic fanatic! I had my first job of logo/header design in August for Miscbytes. The client is kind enough to share it with others in her post and social network, which caused me to think about making this passion of mine a career as well. Recently I offered a header tweaking to a friend that eventually he bought me coffee for it! It feels fantastic when I can earn by doing what I love. For the same passionate reason, I customized 90% of the graphics used on my posts. Some said I’m crazy for spending hours on them! I have to admit I am - it’s my way to personalize my posts while evoke creativity at the same time.

7. To Receive and Give Back on Social Media Sites

I owed what I have today to social media sites. Now I reward my readers with acknowledgements to their sites in my Facebook Fan Page. Twitter and StumbleUpon are my most favorite sharing tools as I had fantastic traffic influx experience from them. To give back doesn’t make you any smaller but in fact, generate good network with your readers. They worth my appreciation for their constant support and I seriously believe generosity is here to stay for all bloggers.

There you have it…

Currently I’m on the process of writing 4 more guest posts, 2 awaiting interviews and a request from a company to review their current social media strategy. I blog and living the proof on how social media catapulted my blogging career to the next level. The power it possesses is way beyond imaginable. I can’t wait to see where I’ll be heading next.

Otherwise, how do you think I made it to Maxblogpress in the first place?

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Here, Southern Spain on the Costa del Sol, there is a plethora of restaurants from the ´Greasy Spoon´variety to the more upmarket establishment and everything in between.  For me a good restaurant is where my friends and I can enjoy ourselves with good food, good house wine and excellent coffee in an atmosphere of attentive but unobtrusive service and which does not empty the bank account to enjoy.

An interesting menu that manages to cater for the wide variety of choices that my friends might wish to make always helps to make the evening or lunchtime that much better.

It was with this passion that I decided to develop www.gourmetinternational.org with my very techie friend Miryam Stenger.  One of our tasks was to master wordpress and to have a host that could manage effectively the various plugins that we wanted to use.  This was easier said than done because not all hosting companies are the same and after numerous emails about permissions etc. we finally found one that suited our needs and which has worked famously for us.

One of the obstacles that has yet to be overcome is that of getting reviews from around the world and it is here that I have created a business opportunity for people who enjoy doing what I enjoy so much, viz. eating out.  Video interviews are not yet much in evidence in the restaurant sector and yet, are such a powerful marketing tool.  For anyone interested in setting up a business in this field with ongoing residual income please feel free to contact me.

That this works and works well is evidenced by our viewing figures and the frequent requests we receive for reviews on different aspects of this sector such as wine reviews, kitchen gadgets etc.  I am a kitchen gadget addict that finds it very difficult to resist a new gadget that makes cooking more interesting.

One of my favorites is corkscrews and particularly antique corkscrews and this particular article attracted considerable interest from the readership, some examples of which have placed here for your perusal.

A regular inquiry I make of restaurant owners is, “What are the facilities for the physically challenged?”, Some of my friends love eating out with both their friends and family and the facilities and entrances can range from excellent to dismal if not insulting.  I am usually shown the facilities but when I criticize the inadequate toilet room space the owners feel quite upset.  It is only when I show them with a wheelchair, how limited the space really is that the truth dawns.  By this time it is usually too late to make any alterations.

As more and more reviews are completed I intend to charge a monthly fee for inclusion as well as the adwords that have been added with the aim of getting several thousand reviews from differing parts of the world.  Most iportantly, I am looking for peaple who share the same interest as myself in good wining and dining and who can regularly contribute to the reviews.  This not a money over night task but one of building up a network of restaurants throughout the world who pay a regular fee for a full review of their best practice.  Hopefully, more people will want to share in bringing these wonderful restaurants to the attention of others who might also enjoy social eating and drinking.

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