Last month we asked you “what is the most tired or cliched advice online?”

One phrase came up over and over again: “follow your passion.”

People are tired of hearing “follow your passion.” You’ve heard it. You know you should to do what you love.

The real question is: now what? How can you follow your passion AND earn a living? How can you know if your “passion” is worth following? How can you know if it will make a good business or career idea?

What if you want to don’t want to risk ruining your passion by turning it into a business in the first place?

The “follow your passion” model is more complicated than it first appears.

Introducing The “Convergence” Model

Chris Guillebeau from the Art of Nonconformity presents a much better model for turning a passion into a business in his new $100 Startup book.

He calls his model “convergence,” and this is how he describes it:

The easiest way to understand convergence is: the overlapping space between what you care about and what other people are willing to spend money on. Not everything that you are passionate about or skilled in is interesting to the rest of the world—and not everything is marketable.

I can be very passionate about eating pizza, but no one is going to pay me to do it. Likewise, any particular person won’t be able to provide a solution to every problem or be interesting to everyone. But in the overlap between the two circles, where passion or skill meets usefulness, a microbusiness built on freedom and value can thrive.

To understand how this works, I invited Chris to talk about his “convergence” principle and more in this special video session:

(click here if you don’t see the video above)

In this special Think Traffic video, you’ll also learn:

• Chris’s expanded “passion” formula for building a successful microbusiness
• What separates a “normal” idea from one that takes off like wildfire
• Which ridiculously simple ingredient most businesses lack, and how you can add it to start earning revenue quickly

Chris has had to follow his own advice as he built the very successful Unconventional Guides business over the past few years.

As Chris mentions in the video, he was a passionate video game player, but nobody came along and offered to pay him to play Halo all day Instead, he’s smartly developed products around other passions like Travel Hacking and Empire Building.

What to Do Next

Did you watch the video? If not, it’s only 17 minutes long, and this is one of the best interviews I’ve ever seen with Chris (and I’m not just saying that because I’m involved).

After you watch the video:

1. Tell me in the comments below what you learned from the video, and if you agree with Chris’s convergence model (or what you’d change about it).
2. We’re almost to 200 subscribers on Think Traffic’s YouTube channel. Can you please subscribe on YouTube to help us get to 200 and beyond?

And if you’d like to learn more about Chris Guillebeau’s formula for building a successful microbusiness, check out his new book The $100 Startup, which is getting RAVE reviews on Amazon.

Imagine if your site was featured regularly on some of the biggest sites on the web related directly to your site’s topic.

What might that do for your profile and your traffic?

What if you were featured 83 times in less than a year on huge sites like CopyBlogger, Freelance Switch, ProBlogger, Get Rich Slowly, Smashing Magazine, DIYThemes, Stepcase Lifehack, Daily Blog Tips, KISS Metrics and even little old Think Traffic?

That’s exactly what happened to Danny Iny in 2011.

Actually, I shouldn’t say “it happened to” Danny, because all of this was very planned and intentional. Danny figured out how to get his content and his site featured regularly on all these sites and suddenly he was everywhere.

It’s no wonder Danny’s site Firepole Marketing has become so popular lately. Your site would probably be pretty damn hot right now if you were featured in so many places in a short time.

How did Danny pull off this incredible feat?

I decided to sit down with Danny to ask that specific question, and the answer might surprise you.

Watch below as Danny reveals his not-so-secret strategies.

(if you don’t see the video below, click here to watch on YouTube)

Have you subscribed to the Think Traffic channel on YouTube yet?

→ subscribe here for more videos an interviews like this ←

We have an incredible interview coming up with Chris Guillebeau next week that you won’t want to miss. Just click the link above and click the “subscribe” button.

Learn Danny’s Complete Step-by-step Strategy

Join me and Danny next Tuesday, May 15 at Noon Pacific / 3pm Eastern for a special live session on how to get more traffic and subscribers via fast, easy writing.

Danny is going to show us step-by-step:

• How you can land powerful featured writing opportunities on huge blogs
• How to come up with highly sharable content ideas
• His simple strategy you can use to write faster than you thought possible

There is no charge for this session, but spaces are somewhat limited (the platform we use only allows 1,000 people on at once), so register now and show up a little early to guarantee a spot.

Register for your spot in this special session with Danny here (we’ll send you a quick reminder before the webinar).

Now, Over to You…

What did you learn from Danny in the video above?

What surprised you about Danny’s approach and the results he experienced?

What would you like to know more about?

Tell us below if there is anything you’d like Danny or me to cover during our session (there will be live Q&A). We look forward to seeing you next Tuesday.

Welcome to another Think Traffic monthly report!

April was a fantastic month. We had record revenue in April owing mostly to the launch of Traffic School. This was the third time we have offered the program, and it was the third time it has sold out (in record time this launch, just 32 hours).

I’ve realized something over the past year about growing revenue for a business like we run at Insanely Useful Media (the “umbrella” business name that includes Think Traffic and our other sites).

In order to grow an online business beyond a modest income, on the level of what you might make as a salary at a job, you have to find ways to leverage yourself and your time.

Note: I’m mainly concerned with ways to grow a business without adding lots of employees to produce products or service customers. In my case I prefer to keep the business as simple as possible, with very few employees (there are just two of us here now, me and Caleb, our assistant editor).

But, just because you might want to limit the number of employees, that doesn’t have to necessarily limit your revenue potential.

That’s where leverage comes in.

In order for leverage to work, you have to create products or services that can be created once and sold over and over again to multiple customers.

Digital products and information products fit this bill nicely. Online courses, eBooks, software, computer games, apps, music and online services are all easily leveraged.

The incredible thing about digital products is that you build them once and then they continue to earn income for you for many months or years to come.

We built the Start a Blog that Matters course back in December, and we enroll new members every day without having to “create” anything new. The same goes for the affiliate marketing course that I created nearly two years ago.

Finding a product that can be leveraged is just step one. Next you have to understand how multiple points of leverage lead to a “compound revenue” effect.

That’s where the magic happens.

In the short video below, I explain four of the most powerful points of leverage you can use to grow your revenue far beyond what I call the “salary” level (comparable to what you might earn at a decent job).

Watch live as a six-figure business is turned into a seven-figure one through the power of “compound revenue” and these four leverage points:

If you are reading this via RSS, you can watch the video here.

April was a record month for us because the following points of leverage have lead to a compound revenue effect:

1. Our audience is bigger than ever (as you’ll see in the stats below).
2. Due to strong demand, we raised the price of our Traffic School course once again, and have increased our revenue per sale of various products with affiliate offers.
3. We had more products on offer at one time than ever before (Start a Blog that Matters and Affiliate Marketing for Beginners also had strong sales last month).
4. We’ve increased conversions on all products over the past 18 months as we’ve learned what works and have become better copywriters.

How do you plan to use this effect in your own business? Have you seen it work already (for your business or someone else’s)? I’d love to hear in the comments.

On to the results for this month…

April Growth Stats for Think Traffic

We saw 44,703 visits this month (versus 43,836 last month).

If you include traffic from our case study blog of Expert Enough (but not visits to the Start a Blog that Matters or Traffic School site) we had roughly 63,200 visits to our two sites in April.

Also, 396 new comments were left on the site last month, our new posts were retweeted 327 times and we gained 902 subscribers.

7 total posts were published last month (vs. 9 in the prior month), including 1 guest post:

• How Backlash Beer is Redefining “Social Drinking” with Social Media
• Ask The Readers: What’s the Most Tired Advice Online?
• 318,000 Monthly Visitors and $93,826 (Million Dollar Blog Project Update)
• Free Report: The Real Reason Your Website or Blog Doesn’t have Hundreds of Thousands of Visitors (yet)
• How to Earn $12,840 from a Single Guest Post (Plus: Email Scripts & Checklists) (by Maneesh Sethi)
• Happy 2nd Birthday Think Traffic! (Annual Revenue / Growth Details Inside)
• Why Making Money Online in the First 6 Months Doesn’t Matter

Thank you Maneesh for the guest post this month.

Top Traffic Sources

Check out the monthly search visits above. At some point last year Google became the #1 driver of traffic to this site and has grown almost every month since.

We’ve talked about this before, but it bears repeating. We’ve never spent time “link building” or engaging in shady SEO practices. With each Google search algorithm update instead of worrying about how we might be penalized like many sites are, we look forward to seeing how we’ll be rewarded.

Google’s job is to reward good content. Engaging in grey-area SEO practices is like shorting the financial markets. You might benefit in the short-term, but you’ll lose in the long-term.

Great content is the best SEO. Stop trying to game Google and start trying to reward your visitors with the best content you can offer.

Here’s a graph of what our reader-focused strategy has done for our weekly search traffic over the past 2 years:

Top Search Terms:

• think traffic: 759
• blog topics: 619
• unique selling proposition: 419
• unique selling proposition examples: 378
• personal introduction: 259
• sales pitch: 201
• blog topic ideas: 169
• thinktraffic: 149
• unique selling point examples: 147
• blog post ideas: 145

Top Content

Here are two special opportunities I’d like to tell you about:

San Francisco Tweetup

If you’re in San Francisco tomorrow (Wednesday, May 9th), come meet me and some very special guests. We’ll be meeting for a casual “tweetup” for bloggers, entrepreneurs and fun people at 7:30pm.

Email me directly at corbettbarr@gmail.com for details.

Last Chance, David Risley’s Blog Master’s Club

My friend David Risley has decided to close his Blog Master’s Club down for good. Before he shuts the doors, he’s offering an incredible last chance offer to get into his famed course.

Blog Masters Club has been recommended by Darren Rowse (ProBlogger), Chris Garrett and many more big names. If anything, stop by to learn why David is shutting down this popular program (some interesting business lessons there), and to see the low discount pricing.

Over to You

What did you learn from the video above?

How do you plan to use leverage in your business?

Have you seen leverage or compound revenue work already? What are some good examples of how this works for other more established businesses?

Please share in the comments below!

If you’re a blogger who doesn’t receive many comments on your blog posts, you might be feeling inadequate.

Your favorite big blogs have heaps of comments, so you should too, right?

Not exactly. In this post, I’m going to tell you why it’s crazy for some kinds of blogs to care much about the number of comments they receive.

And if you run one of these kind of blogs that naturally doesn’t receive many comments, I’ll show you what else you should be doing instead of worrying about comment numbers.

First, The Problem With Vanity Metrics

Let’s talk about vanity metrics first.

What are vanity metrics?

Vanity metrics are the things you measure that don’t really matter to your business. Vanity metrics might make you feel good, but they’re easily manipulated and can cause you to waste time trying to inflate them.

Vanity metrics are things like number of Twitter followers, retweets of blog posts, number of comments on blog posts, number of RSS subscribers, etc.

These things are substitutes for the measurable metrics that really matter (like revenue or email subscribers). They’re fun to track because A) they’re often achievable long before you have revenue and B) they’re easier to measure than important intangibles (like the impact you’re having on your customers, or the influence you’re creating in your industry).

But here’s the dangerous part: vanity metrics can make you feel OK about your business or blog when it’s really a sinking ship.

So your blog has 10,000 RSS subscribers. So what? How much revenue did you earn last month? How much of a difference did you make for your readers?

You could pay a virtual assistant or use some shady software to inflate your Twitter follower numbers, but you could also just burn a $100 bill in your backyard. Both will be about as ineffective in making your business profitable or respected.

The Intangibles that Matter

They say “what gets measured gets done.”

What if the thing you want to accomplish can’t be measured?

What if your goal is to build influence, change lives and make a difference? What should you measure then?

How do you measure “making a difference” exactly?

I don’t know the answer, but I do know that checking your RSS subscriber number every day isn’t it.

Likewise, it’s safe to say the number of people following you on Twitter doesn’t give you a clue whether you’re really changing lives.

If you have a good way of measuring these important intangibles, let me know in the comments. I bring this up only to point out that metrics can be useful, but they’re not perfect.

Sometimes what you want to achieve can’t be expressed as a simple number.

Which brings us back to how many comments you got on your last blog post.

Are Number of Comments a Vanity Metric?

In some ways yes, the number of comments on your blog posts could easily be a vanity metric.

For example, you might get more comments by writing about Kim Kardashian than you do writing about your core topic.

Does that mean you should write about celebrities more? Probably not.

If you use number of comments as one of your most important metrics, it could easily lead you to write about things that don’t accomplish your main goals.

Those posts might attract more conversation on your blog, but will they make your visitors more likely to trust you or buy from you?

Why do you want conversation to happen on your blog?

Hopefully it’s not just so you can boast about how many comments your blog receives.

The real value in blog comments is to further the discussion. To connect with your audience. To let your readers share their thoughts and give you feedback.

Not all conversations are created equally. If every comment just says “nice post dude,” what’s the value in that?

Sometimes the definition of vanity metric depends on how you measure. If quantity of comments is all you care about, it’s likely a useless or even detrimental thing to measure.

If you want to measure comments, you have to look for quality, engagement and value being added to the conversation.

What About Social Proof?

There is one reason why the number of comments on your blog might matter: when readers stop by your site, they’re using little clues to determine if your blog is worth their time.

This is called social proof.

Social proof is the reason restaurants with a line become even busier, and empty restaurants stay empty. We look to the behavior of others to tell us what to do. People do things they see other people doing.

If your blog has a lot of comments (AND the number of comments on each post is highly visible), visitors might be more likely to stick around and leave more comments.

Does this mean you’re screwed if your blog doesn’t get many comments?

Not at all, but it might mean you should think about redesigning things to make sure this particular social proof doesn’t work against you.

Social proof works both ways. If some of your numbers aren’t attractive you can hide them or make them less prominent and put the focus on other numbers that will work in your favor.

This is your blog. No one said you have to proudly display “0 Comments” on every post if you don’t want to.

Should Your Blog be Getting More Comments?

As bloggers, most of us would love to have more comments.

Comment are validation. Each (positive) comment you get feels like a pat on the head. Getting hundreds of comments can make you feel great.

BUT, there are just certain blog topics that are just not conducive to attracting lots of comments.

I’m going to use a fellow blogger as an example here. Gregory Ciotti runs two popular blogs (one of those blogs is currently atop our blog challenge leaderboard). One of his blogs regularly attracts 30 or more comments per post. His other blog often doesn’t have a single comment on posts.

The interesting thing about Gregory’s example is that both of the blogs are similarly popular (over 30k monthly visits each), and they’re both written by the same blogger.

Despite the similarities in audience size and writing quality, Gregory’s blog Sparring Mind gets tons of comments and his other blog Sophistefunk gets few.

Why does one of these blogs get so few comments?

A big reason is simply the topic choice. Another reason is the posting style.

Sophistefunk is about electronic music. Gregory posts often there (one or more times per day), and the posts are more Tumblr-style than the in-depth style of his other blog (which is about marketing).

Electronic music may simply be a topic that doesn’t drive a lot of conversation, and the content/posting style may not be content friendly either. Neither of these facts have stopped Gregory from building a popular blog.

Take a look at your favorite blogs. Do all of them attract comments? How much does the number of comments matter in those cases?

Now look at the Technorati list of Top 100 blogs in the world. Many blogs on that list receive very few comments per post, while some of them receive hundreds of posts.

Having lots of comments is obviously not a requirement for building a massive or meaningful blog.

Why do you think some popular blogs attract lots of comments while others don’t? I’d love to hear your theories in the comments below.

What does this mean for your blog?

I’d like you to take action on three things today.

1. Take a step back from this discussion about blog comments and think about what matters to you and your blog overall.

   What are you trying to accomplish?

   How can you measure what you’re trying to accomplish?

   Which vanity metrics have you gotten sucked into measuring? What really matters and what should you really be measuring?

2. Think about whether comments are important to your blog, and whether your blog’s topic and style could attract a lot of comments.

   Also consider whether moderating comments is worth the time and effort for you. Some popular bloggers including Leo Babauta of Zen Habits and Seth Godin have decided comments aren’t worth it.

   Remember that the right answer depends on your particular situation.

   Now decide whether you want to focus on comments on your blog or not.

3. Make changes based on your decision about comments.

   If your blog topic/style isn’t naturally a comment magnet, you could alter your design to make comments less of a focus. You could even turn comments off entirely (like Pitchfork or Brain Pickings has done, for example).

   For more, check out the debate we ran between two popular bloggers on whether you should disable comments on your blog entirely.

   If you decide you want more quality comments on your blog, it’s time to start earning them. Attracting lots of quality comments takes some effort.

   A great place to start is with these 12 tips on how to get more comments from the folks at WordPress. They’ve studied why some blogs get more comments than others and have some interesting conclusions.

   With practice and a little strategy you can increase the number of comments on your blog, if that’s what you really want and need.

Now, over to you. I’d love to hear your thoughts:

How much do comments matter as a blogger?

What kind of blogs are more likely to attract lots of comments? What kinds of blogs shouldn’t worry so much about comments?

Share your thoughts in the comments below.

If this post was interesting or helpful, please share it:

A couple months ago, Steve Kamb from Nerd Fitness told us about his friend in Boston who successfully launched a beer company through social media.

Now that’s unique.

Helder Pimentel built the brand and demand of Backlash Beer purely through social media. And they sell out of each batch to bars and liquor stores within days. One of which sold out in just 4 days.

We just had to hear this story first hand from Helder, so keep reading to find out how he has carved out a piece of the highly competitive beer market in New England by using Twitter and Facebook.

Caleb Wojcik: What made you want to start Backlash Beer in such a crowded niche? Were you nervous about it at all?

Helder Pimentel: When I first began to toy with the idea of starting a beer company, it was mostly driven by the fact that at the time, I didn’t really connect with any beer brands. They all seemed kind of old-timey, rooted in some sort of historical or nautical theme. I felt like there was a hole in the craft beer market in terms of brands that appealed to a younger, more edgy demographic.

I was really nervous to start. I think taking that initial leap of faith is the single hardest step in business. I wasn’t sure if Backlash would be well received, but I held onto the hope that if I could create a product I love, then there would be others like me out there somewhere.

CW: How did you build a following of targeted potential buyers on Twitter before the launch of your first beer?

HP: So, just about the time I was considering launching Backlash, I began using Twitter. At the time, my handle was @BrewingBoston, and I really just used that outlet to connect to other local beer drinkers by providing industry news and beer reviews. I think I got up to something like 800 followers just by doing that for a little while.

CW: How do you use your blog to promote your brand?

HP: Mostly I try to share behind-the-scenes stuff with our audience, in order to continue being very transparent and humble. Being that the voice of the brand started as essentially my own voice, I think blogging is a good way for us to cement our brand identity with our audience, as well as just staying personable and real.

CW: What have you done via Social Media to connect with other business like Bars & Nightclubs?

HP: A lot of our connections with potential customers are made via Twitter. I have setup appointments solely via Twitter, but more often than not it’s actually one of our followers who will recommend we reach out to a certain bar, and then @ them on Twitter. We get a ton of leads this way, learning about places we might not have known about otherwise. If we do meet with a particular bar and make a sale, Twitter again helps us out by allowing us to stay in touch with that bar, and know in a very real-time way when our beer is on draft. We can then share that information with our followers and make it easier for them to find our beer.

CW: How do you ensure that you and your brand’s “voice” is congruent with what you do on Twitter?

HP: At this stage in our development, it’s not very difficult. I am obsessed with Twitter, so all of the tweets come from yours truly. Again, because the voice is basically my own, it’s pretty simple to keep everything congruent. It’s pretty much as authentic as it gets. Light hearted, sometimes funny, sometimes angry… pretty much me in a nut shell.

CW: Can you explain the step-by-step process you would use online to launch a new beer?

HP: I started my brewing career by brewing at home. I still do a lot of home brewing, especially while developing new recipes. While I prefer to keep the recipes themselves confidential, I keep all our followers in the loop as to what styles I’m working on. Once I’m happy with a recipe, we begin to promote the beer on Twitter. We have in the past polled our Twitter/Facebook audience to help us decide on the name of a beer (we ended up going with “Convergence” for our Super Saison). With the recipe and name nailed down, I’ll then brew the beer full scale, tweeting pictures along the entire process to give people a behind the scenes kind of look and (hopefully) get them excited about the beer.

After that, we promote launch parties and tastings through our Facebook and Twitter accounts, while trying to connect to as many people as possible who are drinking our beer. We even use QR codes on our labels and coasters which take you to a mobile website where you can review the beer you’re drinking. All reviews are sent to my email where I can read them and gather feedback. I’ll use the feedback to try and coax out common suggestions and improve our beer.

CW: In what ways do you try to compete with the bigger beer brands on Social Media?

HP: I wouldn’t say that we’re consciously or directly competing with any larger brands via Social Media. Part of the reason we’ve been so successful with Social Media is that we’re a 2 person operation, and because Social Media is free, we put all our focus into it. I also think that because we’re the first generation of Twitter users, we *might* have a slight advantage over companies who are trying to “figure out how Twitter works” or maybe don’t see any real value in Social Media at all. Crazy, right? I know… hard to believe those companies exist.

CW: How important is Twitter to your bottom line?

HP: Extremely. I mean, at the end of the day, it’s all about making great beer. But, a lot of people make great beer. Twitter allows us to stay in contact with our existing customers and reach new potential customers, one at a time. People love that sort of attention- and I love giving that sort of attention. Bundle in the fact that you’re establishing and maintaining a brand voice/image along the way, and I really don’t know how we could operate without it.

CW: How important do you think being passionate about what you do online is? Could you give as much effort if you didn’t care as much about your cause?

HP: I don’t think you can do anything noteworthy without passion. Period. I am passionate about reaching as many people as I can in our quest to Reclaim Beer. Passion is what keeps me checking my phone every few minutes for Facebook and Twitter updates (or is that Obsession… hm). I’m not a person to even feign that I care about something when I don’t. I guess it’s just not in my DNA. If I didn’t legitimately give a shit about every bottle of beer we sell, as well as every individual who buys that beer, I would shut down Backlash tomorrow. Social Media is just another way to show how much we care.

CW: What’s next for Backlash Beer?

HP: Right now we are gearing up for the re-release of our launch beer “Groundswell”. We’ll be busy promoting that across the entire state of Massachusetts now that we are state-wide. After that, we’re looking to do some cool community engagement projects and donating any proceeds to charities. We’re also going to start sponsoring concerts to help support local music. We’re very well connected to our audience through Social Media, but it’s hard to beat hanging out over a couple beers, so face to face events are going to be another focus.

***

Thanks Helder!

If you have any questions for Helder, feel free to ask them in the comments below.