In July 2008 I was studying full-time and freelancing part-time as a writer, copywriter and consultant. In that month, I earned more than $8,000 through my own Blog Business Funnel. Every single cent was earned through jobs that came through my blog.

Was I a veteran freelancer? Nope. I took my first ever client in September 2007, only eleven months earlier—a freelance blogging job. I figured I would start with what I knew!

When I added up my earnings and stared in shock at the final figure, I knew I had stumbled across something incredible.

If I’d known then what I know now, I’m confident I could have cracked the $10,000 mark that month.

The book was borne out of the question: Why do bloggers struggle so much with advertising and affiliate programs, when there is clearly a better way?

While others have written brief articles on the topic of using blogging as the foundation for a freelance business, nobody else has outlined a complete blueprint in book form, sharing everything there is to know. If you don’t have a freelance business yet, you’ll learn how to create one.

Whether you’re a blogger, freelancer, or neither, you’ll learn everything you need to create a Blog Business Funnel system.

See Inside

The Blog Business Funnel is a beautifully designed 93 page eBook with 8 substantial chapters. Click the thumbnails to see a one-page excerpt from the beginning of each chapter.

Chapter 3: Trust and Targeted Traffic

Chapter 4: Turning Readers Into Clients

When you have a healthy and thriving blog, the next step is to start funneling readers into your business. You’ll learn how to properly promote your services to your readership.

(See first page)

Chapter 5: Using Business Launch and Re-Launch Formulas

People are always talking about the importance of product launches, but what about a proper launch for your freelance business? This chapter shows you how to create exciting launches that will fill your client list for months to come.

(See first page)

Chapter 6: Advanced Blog Business Strategies

Get a measurable and profitable return on investment with online advertising for your services. Clever tips that some of the world’s biggest companies still don’t know.

(See first page)

Chapter 7: Scaling Up!

The book finishes with three strategies that your competition simply don’t know about: 1. How to charge your dream rates 2. How to create low-maintenance partnerships you can profit from (without actually doing any work) 3. Productizing your business to sell in your sleep.

(See first page)

It’s More Affordable Than You Think

Most eBooks that teach you ways to run a business online require a serious investment. $97 for one eBook is considered cheap. And for other products, the price keeps climbing. $199. $247. $499!

This product is different - I want it to be accessible to as many people as possible, so that the book isn’t out of reach of anyone. If you walked down the aisles of any bookstore you’d never pay $100 or more for a single book. Why should an eBook be different?

The Blog Business Funnel is $29 USD if you buy it now.

If you do one single hour of billable work as a result of reading this book, it has paid for itself.

Of course, it’s my hope that the book will help you land thousands of dollars worth of clients, all while doing what you love.

This book shows you how to do work that makes you happy, and earn a great, independent living in the process.

The Blog Business Funnel (eBook), 93 Pages

By Skellie

Written and perfected over six months, this book outlines an easy to follow process for funneling clients into your freelance business through your blog.

You’ll learn how to create a thriving popular blog your target market loves, how to sell your services to your target market and how to optimize your business and charge dream rates. Filled with Skellie’s clever tips on blogging, freelancing and personal branding, you’ll learn dozens of things you never knew and will be landing clients on autopilot in no time.

It’s time to earn a living online doing something that makes you happy.

This is the third and final part to a series on choosing a topic for your new blog. In it, I’ll discuss how to grow your blog even when you’re pioneering a topic that hasn’t properly been covered before. Read Part 1 of this series, Read Part 2 of this series.

The best aspect of launching in an under-served niche is access to an undivided market. If you’re the first quality blog on a topic a lot of people have been searching for, you’ll generally become the biggest blog in that niche because you were the first — as long as you stay consistent. ProBlogger.net, arguably the first blog about blogging, is still the biggest. FreelanceSwitch, arguably the first blog dedicated to freelancers only, also continues to remain the biggest in its niche.

While it’s increasingly rare to find a blog that is the only one of its kind, it’s still possible to find yourself in an under-served niche (meaning there aren’t enough blogs to meet demand). Because there’s less competition, it’s easier to stand out as one of the best. As long as your leading position in the niche is unchallenged, you’ll grow at a rapid rate. Tapping into an under-served niche is what many bloggers dream about when brainstorming blog topics.

While the potential gains are great, surviving in an under-served niche can present a host of difficulties. Though the challenge is a tough one, it’s certainly not unbeatable. In this post, I’ll show you how to succeed in a tough, frontier niche.

If we’re to think of things metaphorically, imagine an Oak seedling in a rocky clearing. If the seedling can thrive where others couldn’t, there’s plenty of space for it to grow into something grand. Before that can happen, though, the seedling has to contend with a lack of soil to grow from. It sounds cutesy, I know, but I think it’s a useful encapsulation of the potential difficulties and rewards lying before any blogger hoping to engage a previously neglected audience.

Growing From Nothing

Ever heard that old (but good) advice: comment, guest-post and get links from other blogs in your niche? I suggest you throw it out for now. If your niche is under-served, there’ll be nowhere to do these things, or if there are, the other blogs will probably be so quiet that it isn’t worth your time.

Rather than looking for other blogs which slot neatly into your niche (of which there are likely to be few), source-out blogs which non-exclusively write for your target audience. If you run the only blog for fans of a small college basketball team, try to get links or guest-posting gigs at big blogs about college basketball, for example. If the blog’s audience is big enough, you’re bound to reach a sizeable pocket of people interested in your niche.

Some niches are also friendlier than others. For every niche that’s open to guest-posting and sharing links, there’s another niche where trying to do these things is almost impossible. One unfortunate result of a wide and varied blogosphere is that some niches have a much stronger community than others.

Let’s assume that nobody will let you guest-post, nobody wants to link to you and your comments elsewhere don’t bring in any traffic. What do you do?

The good thing about search-engine optimization, often called SEO (the practice of optimizing your blog to gather more search-engine traffic), is that it doesn’t care much what the rest of your niche is doing. If there’s less competition and your blog is cleverly optimized, you stand to net a lot of traffic. Search for SEO on Delicious to access some great tutorials you can use to learn more about this.

The self-sustaining nature of social media is also perfect for growing a blog in an under-served niche. If your niche is under-served, you’re most likely blogging on a topic without widespread appeal. For that reason, I’d suggest putting most, if not all of your efforts, into StumbleUpon. Its highly refined category system makes it much easier for niche content to succeed.

You can start using StumbleUpon to build your niche blog by voting up articles you see as high quality for your target audience. StumbleUpon users with consistent taste in a certain type of content tend to attract like-minded followers and ‘fans’. If your blog is about money-box collecting and you consistently vote up articles on money-boxes or similar collectibles, you’re going to attract the attention of other Stumblers who’re also interested in those things.

Another useful StumbleUpon tip is to erase all your previously selected interests until you have none at all selected, then pick just one: the category which most narrowly suits your niche. As you stumble, many of the sites you come across will appeal to your target audience. If you view the reviews page for the site, you can click through and ‘Fan’ the person who discovered it — a person who’s very likely to be interested in your blog’s niche. I’d suggest doing this with as many people as possible. Not only does having a wide network enrich your StumbleUpon experience, but it also allows you to send your best content to mutual friends.

Once you have a steady stream of targeted SU traffic arriving at your blog it’s entirely possible to grow and thrive almost on that source alone.

Under-served vs. Not wanted

That there are few blogs on a particular topic does not necessarily mean there’s an information-hungry audience waiting to pounce on your new venture. Some shopping strips are empty and dilapidated because nobody wants to shop there, and some niches are empty or lackluster because very few people are interested in reading blogs on the topic.

Notice the difference: very few people are interested in the topic, vs. very few people are interested in reading blogs on the topic.

Thousands of people might be searching for the keyword ‘wheelbarrows’ each day, but that doesn’t mean they want to read an entire blog devoted to them. Sure, people might want to buy them — and a blog on the topic might make a few dollars from AdSense — but how many people want to read about wheelbarrows on a regular basis?

If you’ve ever done research on potential niches with the AdWords keyword tool , next time, compare the search volume for one or two keywords describing your blog concept with the search volume for your blog concept + the word ‘blog’. The difference can be quite remarkable. It’s possible to have a thousand people searching for ‘wheelbarrows’ each day, and only one or two a week searching for ‘wheelbarrow blog’.

Under-served niches are the riskiest and possibly most rewarding settings in which you can start a blog. The space can help your blog grow quite rapidly, but you’ll need to overcome a lack of firm foundations first. You’ll need to make your own soil to grow from.

• Guest post, get links from and comment on blogs which touch on your topic, rather than being solely devoted to it.
• Learn the basics of SEO and apply them to your blog. Focus on keywords your target audience are likely to be searching for.
• Use StumbleUpon to meet and greet your target audience.

This is the second part to a series on choosing a topic for your new blog. In it, I’ll discuss how to grow your blog even when there are a lot of other blogs on the same topic. Read Part 1 of this series.

Starting strongly in a crowded niche will involve emphasizing strengths and minimizing weaknesses. You can use the other blogs and websites in your niche as footholds to growth. Here’s how:

Let your peers provide a platform. Let’s begin with the obvious: your target audience is reading other blogs in your niche, so that’s where you should try to attract them: by commenting, guest-posting, pitching links or becoming a contributing writer on one of your niche’s most popular blogs.

A crowded niche indicates a strong demand.Make the most of this. If no-one is doing quality blogging on a particular topic, it might be because the target audience for such a topic is incredibly small. An empty niche does not automatically indicate an under-served niche.

A crowded niche, however, suggests that it’s serving an audience hungry for information. If you think about your own behavior, you might find that you’re subscribed to a number of blogs in the same niche. A crowded niche would be a death-trap if readers were only ever going to subscribe to one blog in that niche, but that’s simply not the case. Some do, but a lot don’t. Make this decision easier for them by offering something they can’t get anywhere else.

People talk about you

Have you ever noticed that most of the blogs in the Technorati Top 100 exist in crowded niches? Technorati is about links, and crowded niches make it easy to gather them.

If a blogger is looking outward, they’ll link out only to content that is relevant to their target audience. If you share a target audience with a lot of blogs, this means that a lot of blogs also have the potential to send a link your way. This is one area where a crowded niche has an edge over smaller counterparts.

It’s a party – make friends. A crowded niche is full of peers with skills you might not have yourself. Starting an email dialogue with another blogger can lead to co-operation and mutual benefit in future. Bloggers in empty niches don’t have as many options in this area.

Crowded niche = crowded audience. With so many voices trying to be heard, a crowded niche can be overwhelming. To stand out, you’ve got to provide something radically unique compared to everyone else. Alternately, you’ve got to fill gaps your peers have been unable to fill. Shouting louder won’t work. You’ve got to sound different.

Your audience is waiting

Other blogs in your niche are places where potential readers hang out. There’s no neuroscience involved, you don’t need to puzzle out where they’re hiding: they’re right in front of you. Not having to search out your target audience is a luxury many bloggers in a crowded niche don’t appreciate. Every time you guest-post, comment or get a link, you’re building doorways for potential readers to move through.

Follow, but don’t shadow. Other successful blogs in your niche give you a blueprint to follow. By studying them, you can see what your target audience likes, and what it doesn’t like. If you’re blogging in an empty niche, however, you’ll need to learn everything from scratch.

Benchmark yourself against your peers. There’s nothing like other runners in a race to make you run faster. When trying to become popular in a crowded niche, you need to edge ahead of already established blogs. To do that, you’ll need to match the level of usefulness they provide (and then some). Competition breeds excellence.

In part 3, the final part of the series, I’ll talk about the opposite - how to create a pioneering blog on a topic that hasn’t been properly covered before. It’s a situation that presents a challenging but potentially very rewarding opportunity for you.

Many things go into building a house before the first drop of concrete hits the soil, and before the first brick has been laid down. Surveyors pore over a prospective construction site and take measurements, confirming that there’s enough space for the construction, and that the ground is steady. They consider the surroundings, the views, and other environmental factors long before the building tools leave their pouches.

If you’re thinking about launching a new blog (or your first ever blog) I want to suggest that you should approach choosing its niche in much the same way.

The niche you decide to join will play a significant role in shaping the content you create, the people you communicate with, the readers you gather and how you reach out to your target audience.

If you want to start a blog in a very small (or possibly empty) niche, you’re going to have a very different experience to someone starting a blog in a big niche, like gadgets – a very popular blog topic. It’s worth being mindful of this before you start transporting your blog from concept into reality. Like a surveyor at a building site, carefully testing for firm ground and acceptable surroundings, it’s essential that you start to think about the space your blog is going to occupy.

It’s a Tough, Important Decision

Here are a few reasons why it’s important to think about the interplay between your blog and its niche:

Blogs in small or empty niches are challenging to get going. This is because, in the beginning, it’s very difficult for people to find your blog. Search engines are unfamiliar with it, so they’re unlikely to send much traffic your way. Because people haven’t found it yet, they can’t go on to link to it. Furthermore, if people aren’t visiting, you won’t receive votes from visitors on social media services like StumbleUpon and Digg. Links, search-engines and social media are the three ways a new visitor can find your blog. Obviously, it’s essential to get links, appeal to search engines and receive social media votes, but if nobody can find your blog to begin with, there’s nobody around to create links, or share social media votes. Except, of course, you.

It’s Up to You

When you first launch your blog, expect to be a one-person promotional army. You’ll need to find inventive ways to start directing visitors to your blog – usually by laying down links on other blogs, websites and forums frequented by people in your target audience.

Sometimes, though, it seems like there are very few such websites. Self-promoting in a very small (or possibly empty) niche is tough. There are few places where you can create links, and they may not be frequented by many people. A link doesn’t count for much if nobody ever travels through it.

Before you toss away your small niche blog concept and let out a sigh of disappointment, be reassured that launching in a small/empty niche is not an unbeatable obstacle. Better yet, if you do succeed, you may be up for some incredible benefits. Just because there are few quality blogs targeting the same audience doesn’t mean that there isn’t an audience to be found. You might find that there is an audience, that they’ve been waiting for a blog just like yours, and that when they do discover it, they’ll come in droves.

One thing to be mindful of, though, is whether your blog’s concept is going to be self-limiting. If you’re writing a blog for yodelers, you may only be able to grow so big before you reach a natural ceiling: that there are only so many yodeling blog readers out there. This doesn’t matter so much if you enjoy blogging for a small community, and want a stronger connection with a smaller group of readers. But if your goal is to build an insanely popular blog by anyone’s standards (not just the standards of your niche), it’s worth considering whether your blog’s focus will limit you in that goal.

Potential Rewards, Potential Drawbacks

In a crowded niche, it’s easy to start, but hard to stand-out. A new blog in the marketing niche would have no trouble gathering an initial rivulet of visitors, for example. It’s easy to spot your target audience, and there are plenty of highly-trafficked places to create enticing links for them to follow (most bloggers start by leaving comments on other blogs, with links back to their own blog). A blogger’s first challenge in this situation is finding a way to be something other than ‘just another new marketing blog’. If visitors who come to your blog perceive it as having nothing new to offer them, they won’t stick around – and if you’re losing as many visitors as you gain, you can’t grow. It’s like pouring sand into a funnel at the same rate you let it spill out.

But, just like the experience of founding a blog in a small niche, the initial challenges can give way to some impressive rewards. The fact that your niche is crowded means that there is a big audience available. If you can establish yourself as one of the best in your niche, your audience may end up bigger than you could have imagined. That being said, the more competition you have, the harder it is to be the best.

To help you decide whether starting in a small or crowded niche is the right choice for you, I want to provide some advice on what you can expect your day-to-day promotional routine to look like, depending on which path you choose.

I’d also suggest that you read the routine twice. The first time, when you’re still finalizing your blog concept and want to be clear on what you’re getting yourself into. The second time, when you’ve debuted your blog to the public and published your first batch of posts. At that point, I hope the list will help you optimize the way you promote to best suit the niche you are in.

Part 2 of this series shares the list and focuses on how to grow your blog when there are already lots of other blogs on the same topic. How can you stand out and succeed?

There are no new ideas. When we create, we dig into our well of knowledge and experience, grab a handfull of stuff, mash it up and recombine it in new ways. But the idea is still built out of other ideas that came before - ideas we’ve consumed.

The quality of our ideas depends only on what we build them from. What we’ve seen, what we’ve heard, what we’ve felt. To have better ideas, we need richer experiences. But most importantly, like stoking a fire, we must constantly add more fuel to keep the fire vigorous. When we stop, old materials build nothing but old ideas.

What does this mean for the mantra we hear humming beneath all the advice we read online? The mantra that says: “Don’t watch TV, don’t spend too much time reading, don’t play games, don’t waste time on Twitter. Stop consuming other people’s ideas and creativity - if you want to be successful, you have to produce.”

If you want to have stale ideas, follow this advice. Put nothing in, get rubbish out. Get burnt out. When you burn more creative fuel than you add, what do you expect to happen?

But if you want to build something truly creative and meaningful, do the opposite. Great stuff in, great stuff out.

Watch breathtaking movies and mind-bending TV shows. Read incredible books. Listen to great music, with the volume up loud. Play exhilarating video games. Study your idols. Drench yourself in ideas. Go somewhere you’ve never seen. Walk to the top of a mountain and breathe in strange and wondrous air. Consume, consume, consume, and do so unapologetically. Become a connoisseur of the best things other people have done. Absorb everything the world has to offer you. Do this for as long as you can bear.

Only then will you have collected the raw materials needed to produce something you can be proud of.

Most important thing first.

Start now.

I am always the first person to advocate studying blogs you admire to learn their techniques. I’ve dedicated a lot of time to spreading the word about blogs that are doing things right, and how you can emulate them.

But in this post, I want to talk about how we can learn what no to do from the evolution of popular blogs. Because they’ve learned from their mistakes, we have the opportunity to learn without ever having to make the same mistake they did. I’ll show you how, here.

This set of stages shows how the business-side of many popular blogs has evolved over time:

Stage 1 - Begins with fixation on advertising income. Provides the initial excitement of earning some income for blogging. Then the blogger realizes it scales poorly: most blogs reach a natural ‘growth cap’ where traffic begins to plateau at its maximum level. Without more traffic, advertising income can’t keep growing. It’s also inconsistent - a Google pagerank reshuffle or the loss of a major advertiser throws the blogger’s earnings into disarray. Ad-blindness decreases the return you can provide to advertisers. So, the blogger moves on to stage two.

Stage 2 - Focus shifts to affiliate income. By the time Stage 2 is reached, the blogger has developed a large audience of fans who trust what he or she says. The blogger begins to experiment with affiliate recommendations and is surprised by the results. The blog’s earnings begin to increase again. This is a long stage for many blogs, as the negative effects can take some time to manifest themselves. Eventually, affiliate sales slowly drop, and some readers become disenchanted with the blogger. There is only so much selling they can take. Earnings are still good, but no longer growing. The blogger begins to wonder what would happen if they sold their own work, instead of someone else’s.

Stage 3 - The blogger begins to sell their own work through the blog: freelance services like consulting, design or public speaking, or products they’ve created, like eBooks and online courses. These sell much better than affiliate products, because the readers are already fans of the blogger, and the blogger keeps 100% of the earnings. While selling these services and products is highly profitable, it’s also much more rewarding than selling other people’s products through advertising and affiliate marketing.

Stage 4 - Selling services and products is so much more effective and rewarding than advertising and affiliate marketing that the blogger scales back significantly on their stage 1 (advertising) and stage 2 (affiliate marketing) efforts. Many blogs remove all advertising and no longer sell any products other than their own. They know their efforts are better spent creating and selling their own products and services. Many wish they had focused on creating the ideal conditions for this from the beginning.

There are several blogs I follow - and you may follow too - that are just beginning to enter, or are already in Stage 4 at the moment. Yaro Starak, someone whose business strongly illustrates the transition across four stages, recently wrote that he would be scaling back on affiliate marketing pitches, suggesting that “If you’re focusing too much on selling, then you’re slowly destroying your business because you’re destroying trust.” Copyblogger also evolved through the four stages I outlined, and now no longer displays any advertising for products not released through the blog. Darren Rowse was recently floored by the success of a $72,000 eBook launch and is focusing much more on his own products than affiliate marketing and advertising, once the core of his business.

I could fill this post with other examples, but these are just a few you may know. Blogs that once based their core business model around stage 1 (advertising) and stage 2 (affiliates) can’t shift away fast enough. The ‘mistake’ I mentioned in the introduction to this post is that they poured so much time and effort into stage 1 and 2 methods in the first place, and didn’t make the switch earlier. Of course, this kind of ‘mistake’ isn’t a real mistake or failure, it’s part of the learning process inherent in running a business. We keep trying new things until we find the one that works, and sometimes we dedicate too much time and too many resources to the wrong strategy.

Why this is important

If you’re a relatively new blogger, or still don’t believe you’ve met your goals for the success of your blog, you’re actually at an advantage. You can follow the example of the popular bloggers, but skip the wrong turns. You don’t have to spend months wrestling with AdSense, Clickbank and Amazon referrals without real rewards before making the leap into Stage 3 - selling your own services and products. In the time other bloggers spend pitching affiliate products to their readers and expending the trust they accrued, you could take a different path - growing trust slowly and surely over time by providing great value and treating readers with respect. Over time, you allow that trust to flourish until you’re ready to share the services and products you’ve created for your readers.

In many ways, the trust your readers have in you is like a stock portfolio. Expend it as soon as you get it and you will probably lose trust over time. Hold on to it over months, or even a year or two, and it will grow, and grow, and grow. By the time you’re ready to launch your ‘Stage 4′ business you will be a mile ahead of others who sunk time and effort into stage 1 and 2 only to later decide it wasn’t the right path for them.

If you feel like you’re currently stuck in stage 1 or 2, consider moving on to the next stage now. Switch your focus away from advertising and affiliate marketing and towards growing trust will be rewarded in the long-run. If you’re yet to experiment with any kind of monetization, you’re also in a strong position - you have the choice to get it right from the start.

Which stage are you in? I’d love to hear about your experiences in the comments.

Skip to Stage 4

I think this idea is so important that I’ve written an eBook on how to create your own Stage 4 business selling freelance services, like creative skills and consulting, through your blog. It’s called The Blog Business Funnel and will be released within the next few weeks. If you’re interested in this business model, you can sign-up for a $5.00 discount code for the eBook below. You’ll also get a bonus post sent to you called ‘The 2 Secrets to Making Any Project a Success’, which will never appear on the blog. Feed readers, click here to access the discount code sign-up form.

To getting things right,

Skellie

(If you enjoy this blog, there’s some big news at the end of this post.)

The best thing about the internet is the wealth of free, in-depth information on almost any topic. If there’s something we want to do, but don’t know how, the internet is often the first place we turn - and so it should be. The rising class of self-taught experts is impressive to behold, and the number of self-styled teachers is staggering.

If you read blogs in this niche often, you probably know a lot about how to do things just like the experts: how to make money blogging, how to attract a storm of traffic to your site, how to spread your work far and wide through social media, how to launch a product and how to write the world’s best blog post.

But whenever we outline the perfect way to do something - the ideal process that all the experts use - we also outline a dozen wrong ways. Pitfalls to be avoided, common mistakes, amateur errors. As the information on doing everything right becomes more and more prevalent, there are fewer and fewer excuses to do anything wrong - to be less than perfect.

Doing the wrong thing

Have you ever spent so much time trying to do things like the experts do, to get everything right, that you found you ended up achieving nothing at all?

For example, I expect there are a lot of people out there with an encyclopedic knowledge of how to make money from blogs - who know all the right ways to pick a niche, launch a site, put the right ads in all the right places, and sit back and make a killing.

I also suspect there are thousands of people like this who have never actually made more than small-change through blog advertising, despite dozens or even hundreds of hours worth of study. We listen to people who make it look so easy, when really, only a small percentage of people succeed. Because we tend to believe the people who don’t succeed have done something wrong, we’re desperate not to be one of those people. We strive for perfection, and because of this, often end up doing nothing at all.

I think there are a lot of extremely intelligent people, brimming with potential, who’ve spent a long time learning how to get things right - with much less to show for it than they could have. You never started that website. You never launched that business. You never wrote that eBook. You spent so many days and weeks learning how to not mess up - how to follow in the footsteps of the experts - that it stopped being about the idea and started being about following a strict process to the letter.
The flame left you, and your brilliant idea has still never seen the light of day.

My personal notebooks are full of ideas like these - some bad ideas, some good ideas, some great ideas - that were never put out into the world because I spent so much time trying to guarantee their success by focusing on every conceivable thing - other than the idea itself!

It almost doesn’t matter what your idea is - the process is the same:

You’re missing out on sales/traffic if you don’t have a Twitter account, and a StumbleUpon account, and a Digg account, and Facebook fan page - but they have to be active, and regularly updated in an authentic voice…

If you’re launching a product, you need to make sure the niche is hot, and if it’s hot, you’ve got to start building an email list of around 5,000 subscribers, and you’ve got to update both the blog and email list, and have another one for your affiliates, and you’ve got to write a free eBook on-top of your product or you won’t get any email subscribers, but don’t forget about JV partners, or outsourcing grunt-work to a grateful VA in the Phillipines, who can also help you to release your content in video, audio, text…

All this, instead of:

I want to make something really, really, good - make something I would love, and want to tell people about. Then once it’s made, I’ll put it out into the world and find a way to make it work.

Maybe we have to earn the right to be perfect, first?

The experts are able to follow complex plans and tick-off exhaustive marketing lists because they have sweated on their stuff for years. Yet, we expect to follow closely in the footsteps of experts when making our very first business or creative ideas a reality. We’re like the beginner guitarist expecting to learn Purple Haze on our first day - our brains aren’t ready yet. Sooner or later we give up, frustrated that we weren’t able to get it right - we couldn’t execute that many different riffs and techniques, all deployed with speed and confidence. Instead of eeking out Ode to Joy and putting some music into the world, we stop playing all-together.

If you’re someone with a lot of ideas and a lot of potential, who has struggled to make these ideas a reality, to deliver them to other people, and to make a profit off of them - even just enough to cover the costs of the internet bill - then I’d like to challenge you to approach things differently this time around.

If you’re willing, I’d like you to try focusing only on the core, common-sense, gut-instinct aspects of making your idea a reality and a success. And that’s it. No complex strategies, no reading-up on the expert opinions, no elaborate marketing plans. You may even have to ignore what you already know. If you’re certain that successfully launching an email newsletter requires a free resource, it’s probably a good idea to deliberately not include it. This forces you to focus on the bare essentials - the thing that inspired you in the first place - the prospect of creating an awesome email newsletter that will market itself.

Instead of releasing your web app with a staff blog, forum and elaborate social media strategy across five platforms - try limiting the web app to doing only one thing for now: doing what it’s meant to do, and doing it well. Instead of an elaborate social media strategy, challenge yourself to promote the app on the back of a single Twitter account. You might just find that the old saying is true: limitations encourage creativity.

If you have an idea you’ve always dreamed of making a reality, but have never succeeded before, it can’t hurt to try a completely new method. Work-out the bare minimum things you would need to do (dilligently and well) in order to bring your idea to life and put it out into the world.

90/10

I believe the success of anything you make is 90% based on how amazing it is, and 10% based on the other stuff you do to try to get people to know about it and like it. But you’ll find most people spend 90% of their time worrying about the superficialities and 10% of their total time actually bringing the idea into the world.

Once you’ve cut all the corners and ignored all the advice and have actually made something a reality, sold your first copy, received an email from a new fan, conducted the simplest and briefest launch in history - then I think you’ve earned the right to add a little bit more complexity next time. And trust me - once you’ve launched something you’ve built, you won’t be able to stop, and each time you’ll get better at it.

Pull an old idea out of storage - one of the ones you thought was ‘great’ at the time - and work out the shortest route to getting the basics right and building it into reality. Deliberately ignore advice you thought was essential. Strive for imperfection. Limit yourself to almost child-like simplicity.

Just get it out there.

Why I’ll be joining you

Over six months ago I started writing a short book about something I’m passionate about - helping bloggers make good money with their own skills instead of advertising and affiliate programs, which are useless to so many people. I was so excited about the contents of the book and the insights I’d be able to share that I was determined to guarantee its success.

I enrolled in online courses about product launches and read dozens of posts on email list building. I chewed through enough blog posts on creating your own products to last most people a life-time. And somewhere along the line, I realized that most of the things that were portrayed as essential to success were things I didn’t particularly enjoy doing. I started to worry that if I didn’t do them, the book would fail, and my hard work would be wasted, and few people would get to learn the strategies I wanted to teach.

So the file sat untouched for a few months, gathering digital dust, while I moved on to other things. I worked, I dreamed up new ideas, I traveled around France and Italy for six weeks and didn’t think about much of anything at all except where I was and what I was doing, and the people (and two dogs) I missed back home. My passion to write the book and share it had fizzled out because I was petrified I would deviate from ‘correct’ strategy and doom it to failure.

Other ideas have been through the same process and didn’t live to tell the tale, but this book stuck with me. I thought about picking up the process again, trying to push-through were I’d failed last time - but I knew it wouldn’t work. Something had to change.

I finally did it…

I wrote The Blog Business Funnel

That’s when I decided to focus on one thing and one thing only: finishing the book, and making the finished product something I could be immensely proud of. I had to discard my previous ways of thinking and learn to see success in one thing only: the end product. After more than six months of work on the book in total, I’m excited simply to put it out into the world.

Though I know a whole lot about how to hold a successful launch, I’ll be following little of what I know. I won’t be releasing teaser videos, or launching an email newsletter with a free eBook, or trying to get coverage on A-list blogs. Instead, I’ll be spending 90% of the time I spend working on the book alone - making sure it’s the best product it can be, and that it teaches you how to:

• Build a profitable freelance business fed through a blog
• Make a good living doing work you love, so you can be happier
• Create a thriving and popular blog through a variety of advanced strategies
• Throw away your dependence on ads and affiliate programs

The advice within the book is borne of the strategies I used to completely change my life and my finances in 2008, by going from working a crummy part-time job at a bakery to earning high four-figures a month as a freelancer only through my blog. I was a complete beginner back then, having never freelanced before - so I feel confident I can teach other complete beginners how to do the same, whether you’re a blogger who doesn’t freelance, or a freelancer who hasn’t yet created a blog that’s a core aspect of your business.

Most of all, the book is written to help anyone who is fed up with pouring time and effort into advertising and commission-based schemes that earn nothing but small change. Aren’t you just sick of it? I know I am!

And since I won’t be talking about the launch a whole heap on the blog - word-of-mouth based on the quality of the book is my favored method of promotion - I’ve created a separate launch notification list only for those people who want to find-out when the book will be ready and who might consider joining the affiliate group.

Lastly, to say thank-you for reading this far, you’ll get a -$5.00 discount coupon for the Blog Business Funnel as part of your welcome message if you join the notification list below (RSS subscribers will need to click-through to the post).

Here’s to making ideas into real things,

Skellie

In a few days this blog will be two years old. In internet terms, it’s not young anymore, and nobody would consider me a ‘new’ blogger. Now that the buzz of being discovered and rapid growth is moving into a new stage of maintaining and trying to build upon what has already been established, I’ve started to reflect on some of the insights I’ve gained through the successes and failures I’ve experienced as a blogger.

At its most basic, I believe what it takes to reach your full potential as a blogger is split into three key areas, or what I call ‘The Three Ds’. Like me, you’ll probably find that you’re strong in some areas and weak in others - and if you’re not hitting the goals you would like, it is probably these weaknesses that are holding you back.

I hope that you will go beyond reading the theme word of the post and assuming you know what it means, to digging deeper into the content. You might find some unconventional tips and ideas inside!

Desire

Long term success begins with an insatiable desire to write blog posts. If you feel this drive, you will blog prolifically, and you will make time to learn how to blog well. As a result, your reach and influence will grow.

You will have this desire because you love what you’re writing about, or you simply love the act of writing, or the end result, or some combination of these things. You will often hear that, as a blogger, you must be passionate about every single topic you write on. This is true for many, but it’s also true that some of those who love writing will enjoy writing about anything as long as they can flex their creative muscles. My friend and colleague Joel Falconer once told me that he felt he could write about anything simply because he loved the process itself so much. Others simply love feeling heard, being a leader, and having a captive audience. They feel like they could write about anything prolifically as long as more and more people continued to listen.

I’ve learned that we often place too much emphasis on picking the perfect topics when, fundamentally, it’s our attitude to the writing that matters. If you’re someone who craves large scale notoriety, blogging only about painting miniatures may not be rewarding, even if it is a passionate hobby of yours. You’d be better served picking a more mainstream focus with access to a bigger audience, and developing enthusiasm as you go.

Some bloggers who are very successful and prolific enjoy neither the act of writing or the subject of their posts very much, at least not in comparison to their enjoyment of the end result - whether that be income, profile or the simple pleasure of watching statistical graphs tilt skywards.

Maintaining an insatiable desire to write posts is not controlled by selecting the right topics. It’s determined by how well you are able to find and focus on what makes you tick as a writer - whether it’s the process, the topic, or the end result (money, fame, influence, legacy, learning, et al).

What makes you tick as a writer? What would stop blogging from being rewarding if it were taken away?

• What if you could never earn another cent from your blog?
• What if you never received another comment or email from a reader?
• What if your traffic and subscribers were frozen at their current levels for now and forever?

Which of these things could you push through, and which would defeat your desire to blog? By giving some thoughts to these questions you should be able to determine what really makes you tick. If you know what this is, you can nurture it and use it to fuel you over the many months it will take to reach your full potential. You may also discover that the blogging ‘job’ you’ve created for yourself is not actually oriented towards what you care about the most.

Keep the flame burning

The aim of the above exercise is to help you understand the central importance of having and retaining a burning desire to write posts on your blog. If you’ve lost this desire, something needs to change. If you no longer have it, hopefully you’ve felt it once and know what you’re missing. For many bloggers, this feeling is intense in the early stages of blogging, then wears off after you feel you have used most of your best ideas, then will come and go in bursts. I know this is something I have personally found challenging and still struggle with. As for excuses we might put forward, I don’t believe there is ever really such a thing as too busy, unless your life is actually filled with a steady stream of obligations you cannot get out of in every hour of the day. For most of us this won’t be the case. If you have a burning desire for something, you make time for it.

But if you’ve lost the desire, how do you get it back?

In my case, I’ve learned that I need breaks to refuel. If I force myself to write, I produce bad content, so I feel it’s better to wait until I feel inspired again. It’s not ideal, and I have tried for over a year to fix this, but now I’m starting to understand that some habits are just a part of who you are! Often the stress you feel about your bad habit outweighs the negative effects of the habit itself. Sometimes it’s best to just be at peace with your weaknesses and understand them as a natural counterbalance to your strengths.

For some, the loss of a desire to blog might be caused by the novelty wearing off. Particularly when writing in narrow niches, or writing timeless content that is not based on news or new developments, you can begin to feel over time that you have said everything there is to say on your topic, and that you are essentially repeating yourself. In this case, it’s important not to continue in the same way - particularly when writing blog posts begins to feel like a chore. The content you write will be poor and you will damage your feelings about blogging. Try to cover your topics from a different angle, or in a different style, or format. Try video blogging. Just try something different! And if that fails to rekindle your desire to blog, change tack and begin to branch into new topics. You will always gain more readers by writing with enthusiasm and vigor than you will lose by changing your focus.

The next D I’ll cover is Definition. And it doesn’t mean what you think it does!

In the past hidden talents have commonly been defined as things you are great at but nobody knows about, or things that you would be immediately great at if you tried them, skipping beginner and progressing to intermediate in an instant. The first definition is useful mainly in movies, the latter is not really useful at all (arguably more myth than reality).

Your hidden talents are the things you could do that would make you happy. But you don’t know it yet.

This is not just about work, but speaks to the whole content of your life. I’ve already written about the psychological evidence that shows that when people do work or activities that make them feel good and involve skills, either mental or physical, live happier lives.

This is just common sense, and it’s probably nothing you haven’t already heard before. But I don’t think many people actually take the next step and give themselves the opportunity to discover all of their hidden talents.

If you take a pen and paper and write down a list of all the things you’ve always thought you might enjoy or be good at, you’ll be surprised at the number of them that can be tested or teed up within 7 days. With the help of the internet, it’s easy to find local classes, get how-to book recommendations, follow along with tutorials - and find other people who can answer your newbie questions!

There is no real excuse to miss out on finding your hidden talents.

If the barrier to entry on any of your possible hidden talents is too high - for example, you want to try performing mechanical repairs on light aircraft - there is always a way to make it accessible. Try working on your car instead. If you enjoy that, you can take the next step towards your real goal.

You might also worry that your real hidden talent is not on your list. It’s so hidden that you’ve never even thought about it as something you might like to do. If you usually hate exercise, you might never expect that you’d love hiking, for example. But your hidden talents are never that random. You might hate exercise but love nature, so it makes sense that you’d enjoy relatively easy hikes. But you’d be hard-pressed to find a passionate hiker who hates exercise and is bored by natural beauty!

Your hidden talents will always fit your personality or interests in some way. Instead of being hidden and random - things to be discovered by accident - the things you love doing actually make a lot of sense.

You can find a good beginner’s lesson on anything for free, online. This is an incredible privilege of living in our current era. It provides us with endless opportunities.

50 or 100 years ago, a farmhand in a small rural town who loved sculpture may never have been able to learn more about it. His small local library didn’t have the books, he didn’t know anyone who could teach him, he didn’t know where to travel to buy materials or join classes. So he never had the opportunity to find the hidden talent that would make him happy. For us, the barriers to entry are so low that there’s no excuse not to give yourself that opportunity. Get online, Google the phrases ’sculpture classes’, ’sculpture resources’ or ’sculpture lessons’ and in 5 seconds you have more opportunity than that farmhand ever did to pursue something that could be your life’s calling. The free and instant access to answers, advice and learning materials on any topic is, to my mind, the internet’s greatest gift to humanity.

By methodically searching out all your hidden talents, you can:

• Find what puts you into flow and, if you want, build a business on it
• Be happier
• Build a personal brand around the activities you’re passionate about

As myself and other online business pundits have argued, positioning yourself as an authority is the best way to create a valuable personal brand. You become an authority by giving good advice on things that you love and know a lot about. Widening the pool of things you’re passionate about means you will have more options and opportunities in online business. Better yet, it will make you happier.

To finish off, a little homework:

Write down anything you think could be your hidden talent on a sheet of paper: things you might like but haven’t tried, things you liked in the past before life interrupted (maybe you stopped going to art classes when you moved states, or stopped playing sport when you had a baby.)

If it’s in the AM when you read this, pursue one of your potential hidden talents this evening. If it’s in the PM, pursue on of your potential hidden talents tonight or tomorrow. If it’s something you can do without help, read up on some beginner lessons. If you need help, look for a local class, group or team you can join.

My own story is that I discovered one of my hidden talents a couple of months ago. Believe it or not, it’s playing soccer! I’ve enjoyed watching it for many years but never gave myself the opportunity to try playing it until recently. I’m so glad I did. It’s become a passion of mine and I can’t imagine giving it up. My only regret is that I didn’t give myself the opportunity to try it earlier.

Not only has it made me happier, it’s also opened up a whole new sphere of blogs, websites or online businesses I could create in the future based on this new thing I love.

Now I have books on drawing, 3D modeling, fiction writing and game development in the mail - and I’m reading a great book on CSS… just in-case I have any other hidden talents up my sleeve :)