Think Traffic

Huge Month! January 2012 Monthly Report – Think Traffic, Expert Enough and Million Dollar Blog Project

Corbett Barr — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 13:45:00 +0000

Welcome to another Think Traffic monthly report!

If you’re new here, in these reports we dive into exactly what we’ve done to grow this blog each month. We also share full details about the growth and revenue for our 3-month-old case study blog called Expert Enough.

This was a HUGE month for us. We launched a new course called How to Start a Blog that Matters. We saw record traffic to both Think Traffic and Expert Enough (full details below).

We also saw record month for revenue from Expert Enough.

Oh, and we have an exciting update on the Million Dollar Blog Project below in this post as well.

Are you ready to dive in? I’m pumped to share this with you.

Let’s get started.

Product Launch = BIG Traffic Boost and More

Here’s something I hear over and over again from bloggers who haven’t yet created a product for sale:

“My audience is too small. I think I should wait until my audience is bigger to launch a product.”

But here’s what most bloggers don’t understand: launching a product can grow your audience in a major way.

Every time I have launched a new product, from Affiliate Marketing for Beginners to Traffic School to How to Start a Blog that Matters, I’ve gotten a huge boost in traffic, subscribers and social media activity.

But that’s just the tip of this awesome iceberg.

Launching a product also always leads to tons of interview requests, links from other blogs, partnership inquiries, and a different kind of respect from colleagues.

If those were the only benefits of launching a product, it would be worth it.

On top of all that there is also the opportunity to earn revenue, both immediately and in the future. Earning revenue from a product you created a year or more ago is a pretty awesome feeling. It’s all gravy for the effort you originally invested.

Plus, if you’re planning to build a business around your blog over the long-term, there will be things you need to learn about building and launching products that you can’t learn any other way than just doing it.

If it isn’t clear already, I’m a big fan of launching products and services through a blog as a way to grow your audience and create opportunities you wouldn’t get otherwise.

If you’re a blogger and plan to monetize your blog in the future, you should consider creating a product or service for sale sooner than later.

Sure, if you have a small audience you might not make many immediate sales. But the fringe benefits alone make it worth it. You’ll also continue to make sales over time as your blog grows.

Questions about creating your first product? Don’t know where to start? Ask me in the comments and I’ll be happy to answer.

January Growth Stats for Think Traffic

We saw 37,894 visits this month (versus 30,113 last month). There was a large increase in this month’s traffic to TT (26%), which was heavily influenced by the launch of our new course, as I mentioned above.

If you include traffic from our case study blog of Expert Enough (but not visits to the Start a Blog that Matters site) we had over 68,300 visits to our two sites in January. That’s over 20,000 more visits than last month.

Also, 346 new comments were left on the site last month, our new posts were retweeted 504 times and we gained 734 subscribers.

9 total posts were published last month (vs. 9 in the prior month), including 1 guest post and 2 interviews:

Thanks to Rick for the guest post and Jeff & Sarai for letting us interview you!

Top Traffic Sources

We drove over 5,000 more visits via organic Google searches than we did in December, without any additional focus on SEO. We’ve said this before: epic content really is a great SEO strategy, especially for bloggers.

Top Search Terms:

think traffic: 653
unique selling proposition examples: 436
blog post ideas: 399
personal introduction: 372
unique selling proposition: 325
sales pitch: 307
unique selling point examples: 233
not stereo: 203
blog topics: 181
thinktraffic: 151

Expert Enough Recap – January 2012

If you’ve been following along with the Million Dollar Blog Project, you know that we launched a new blog called Expert Enough in November as a case study.

The goal is to build a new blog, from the ground-up, in public, and show you everything we do along the way. Our goal is for Expert Enough to earn at least a million dollars in revenue over it’s life by creating something meaningful.

At Expert Enough, we attracted 29,837 visitors last month (vs. 16,823 in the prior month). This is thanks in large part to ‘The Lost Art of Becoming Good at Things‘ making it to the front page of Hacker News and receiving over 1,000 social media shares.

The funny thing about that post is that I originally wrote it for a fairly big-name blog as a guest post. I was introduced to the blogger who runs the blog in question (names omitted to protect the innocent) and wrote the post especially for that blog. I submitted the post thinking I had a good shot.

Then the post was rejected.

This happens when submitting guest posts. Rejection is part of the process, and it’s no big deal. I thought it was a good post, but the blogger I submitted it to felt otherwise.

So I saved a draft of the post and moved on.

Eventually Caleb asked me if I planned to do anything with that post. I had forgotten about it. We decided to revise it slightly for the Expert Enough audience and ran it there in early January.

The ironic thing is that this failed guest post went on to become the most popular post ever published at Expert Enough. It was linked to by Copyblogger, made the front page of Hacker News and has been retweeted and liked on Facebook hundreds of times.

The post has been viewed over 17,900 times.

We didn’t do anything other than publishing the post and sharing it with our audience. The Copyblogger link and Hacker News success happened organically.

Write epic shit and sometimes the rest takes care of itself.

Lesson learned: just because a guest post is rejected doesn’t mean it isn’t good. Your post might be a perfect fit for another audience, even your own.

Now, for some other exciting news.

I’m proud to report that last month we earned $1,327.13 in revenue at Expert Enough!

Here’s how it breaks down:

$1,277.58 through promoting Start a Blog that Matters
$29.51 through promoting Benny Lewis’s Language Hacking Guide
$20.04 through selling manifesto posters

Our goal at Expert Enough is to build it slowly and methodically. We haven’t been trying hard to monetize the site yet. Eventually we will create a course for that audience specifically, but it will probably be six months before we get around to it.

Until then, we’ll be promoting affiliate offers to our audience when it seems like a good fit.

Last month, we decided to promote the new Start a Blog that Matters course.

We didn’t know whether the audience there would be interested, but thought it was worth a shot. We thought that aspiring experts might be interested in building blogs.

It turns out that some of them are. We sold 23 copies of the course through Expert Enough (we track the referrals from that site separately from our other sites).

The total affiliate commissions on those sales equalled $1,277.58, which is pretty damn cool for a blog that was barely two months old at the time.

If we can continue to earn at that level until we release a course specifically for Expert Enough, we’ll be happy.

Million Dollar Blog Project Update

Finally, we have an update for you on the Million Dollar Blog Project.

You can see the leaderboard standings here. Expert Enough is #2 on the list, and there are a bunch of other great blogs listed there that were started as part of this project by Think Traffic readers.

One of our goals for the project is to help our readers start blogs that in aggregate earn at least a million dollars over the next two years.

I’m proud to report that $82,363.02 has been earned from the MDBP blogs so far. That’s nearly 10% of our goal. These are self-reported numbers, so take them at face value, but we’re pleased nonetheless.

Lessons Learned this Month

We learned a lot this month.

One of the most important lessons I’ve learned over the past few years is the value of patience.

The Million Dollar Blog Project is a huge undertaking. Starting Expert Enough is another huge project. Likewise, How to Start a Blog that Matters took us an incredible amount of time and effort to put together.

A younger, more impatient version of myself might have given up on one or more of these projects after just a couple of months.

But now I realize that worthwhile projects take time and dedication. They need room to grow.

These projects are now starting to pay off in a multitude of ways, and I’m happy I now have the patience to let them grow.

Now I’d like to hear from you.

What have you learned over the past month about success and failure online?

How much value do you put on patience and faith in your decisions?

Leave comments below. If you have questions about anything we’re up to here, we’re happy to answer those as well.

Thanks as always for reading. We appreciate you being here.

6 More Priceless Lessons You Can Learn From My First Year of Blogging

Caleb Wojcik — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 13:45:00 +0000

As we rolled into 2012, my main blog Pocket Changed turned one year old. (No, there wasn’t a party or even a solitary candle on a cupcake.)

In honor of the first year, I looked back at 14 Lessons I Learned From Blogging, but a few weeks later I’ve realized there are even more lessons that I didn’t cover in that post that shouldn’t go unshared.

This post will add six more key lessons and delve deeper into the what you can learn from the last 13 months I’ve spent blogging.

Let’s jump right in.

1. If you genuinely help others, they will help you.

This lesson was brought up by Jeffrey Trull in the comments of the previous post and it is definitely true. When you are just getting started with your blog it is easy to publish something that you think is sliced bread reincarnate, hop up on your social media soapbox, and pray that people will start to listen.

Instead what you should be doing is reaching out to other bloggers and creating connections based on things you do for them, while expecting nothing in return. Feature them in your content like this. Write guest posts for them that are extremely targeted to their audience. Interview them on your site and get their name in front of more people.

Help others BEFORE you ask for something from them. They will be more likely to return the favor.

2. Don’t wait for the right moment to start.

If you are waiting for the right time to start a blog, that day is today. Almost every blogger that I’ve talked to has mentioned that they wish they had started sooner. Yes, you need a proper launch plan, a specific unique selling proposition (see #4), and energy to dedicate to it, but don’t waste too much time waiting and “learning” (i.e. just reading blog posts all day).

Benny Hsu pointed this out in the comments of my first 14 lessons post. He said, “Unless you’ve blogged for a long time before, your new blog isn’t going to be perfect at the beginning. Just start posting and improve along the way.”

I couldn’t have said it better myself.

3. Participate in mastermind or social media peer groups.

The power of mastermind groups is not just in connections you make with your fellow peers. Accountability is the biggest reason you should find a mastermind group. Get on a Skype call a few times a month with 2 or 3 likeminded people that you get along with and push each other to accomplish more than you could on your own. (If you need more help with accountability, check out action #21 in this post.)

Another option is a closed social media peer group. This is a group of people (could be up to 50+) that are all sharing ideas and asking opinions of each other on a platform such as a private Facebook group or a closed LinkedIn group. This is one way for you to more passively have a closed network to bounce ideas off of if you don’t have a mastermind group and can also be used as a test ground to find the right 2 or 3 people to create a mastermind group with.

4. Laser focus your USP and keep repeating it.

People should know exactly why your site exists and they should be able to find that answer all over the place. They shouldn’t need to go find the first post in your archives or wade through page after page until they find a manifesto post. Link to content that directly explains your unique selling proposition all the time.

Even if you think your USP is clear from the name of your brand or in the tagline, spell it out in:

the sidebar
the about page
the start here page
a welcome video
the footer
your content

You might think that you are overdoing it, but your USP needs to be clear and concise to the people that are visiting your blog for the first time. Those are the people that you are creating all those bulleted items above for anyway.

If you are a regular reader of Think Traffic, when was the last time you looked at our about page? (Maybe the first time you visited?) Target those landing pages towards non-regular readers. Completely explain what your site is about on those pages (and don’t just talk about yourself).

5. Don’t waste too much time trying to get big wins.

It is fun to read about people’s content getting syndicated by Gizmodo and their site getting flooded by 42,000 visits, but luck isn’t the main contributor to “going viral” like Steve Kamb did in that situation. He had a breakthrough because he had been working his ass off for years on his blog, wrote an amazingly informative and entertaining post, and his audience did the rest.

If you do get a big break or something you make goes viral, most of the time it will happen without much help from you (after creating it of course). I’m not saying that you shouldn’t share what you put up online, but you shouldn’t keep looking for a huge site to pick up your content or for someone popular in your niche to tweet your work.

Focus instead on continual forward progress. Just focus on making today better than yesterday and tomorrow better than today. Then perhaps someday you’ll get a “big break” when you weren’t even trying to anymore.

6. Make everything you post insanely useful & purposeful

While this goes a bit contrary to a theory Joel Runyon wrote about on here last month, making each and every piece of content you publish insanely useful goes a long way. Instead of publishing just to publish (which can lead people to unsubscribe if what you create is lackluster), slow down the frequency at which you put out content.

“Won’t that mean less chances for people to come to my site, share my content, and subscribe?” Perhaps, but the key to publishing less often is to put in as much, if not more, time as you were before into creating content. This will lead to you spending two to three times more effort on a single piece that you publish. This almost guarantees that it is going to be better, more in-depth, and worth sharing.

Try it for a week or two and see what kind of difference it makes.

***

If you’ve been blogging for over a year, what are some of the biggest lessons you’ve learned so far?

I’d love to hear some of them in the comments below.

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Kicked, Beaten Down, Back Up Against the Wall, Now You Have Nothing to Lose

Corbett Barr — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 13:30:07 +0000

You started a website or blog because you thought it would be an easy way to make lots of money.

Or maybe you knew this would take work, but you now realize your approach was all wrong. You thought you had it all figured out from the beginning.

It’s OK, go ahead and admit it.

There’s no shame. Own up to how naive you were.

You’re not alone. We’ve all been there. And, sadly there are plenty of greedy shysters and assholes out there who are happy to prey on you and everyone else who doesn’t know any better.

They’re assholes and someone should call them out on it. I’ll do that later.

For now, this is about YOU. It’s about realizing what you’ve been through and figuring out how to mend your broken wings so you can fly again.

For some people, building an online business is like an addiction. You have to hit rock bottom before you can start the long climb to building something worthwhile. Rock bottom is the only thing that will wake you the fuck up.

Maybe you’re close to rock bottom.

You’ve worked your ass off only to realize you weren’t working hard enough. How could you possibly work any harder?

You’ve been kicked and beaten down. Your dreams have been crushed more times than you can count. Somehow you’ve bounced back each time, but sometimes just barely.

Now you’ve finally learned that it takes WAY more than a few half-assed blog posts and a couple of affiliate links to make some cash.

You figured out that you want more than cash anyway. You want to build something that actually matters. You want to be an influencer. You want to build a community. You want to help people make positive change in the world.

That’s a start, at least your heart is in the right place now.

You’ve also learned that you have to stand out, you have to create epic shit. You have to work your ass off, and you have to work smarter than you have. You have to care. You have to want your readers and followers to succeed more than you want yourself to.

So you know what you’ve done wrong. You know what this will really take. You haven’t given up yet.

And now your back is against the wall.

It’s go time. Fight or flight. What’s it going to be?

Are you going to give up or are you going to fight back?

Here’s why hitting rock bottom just might be the best thing that’s ever happened to you: you have NOTHING TO LOSE.

Your ego has already been crushed. Your plans have been devastated. Your family and friends have confirmed that your plan was bound for failure.

There’s nothing left to lose. There’s nowhere left to go but up.

This is where it gets interesting.

You take the gloves off because you don’t care what people think anymore. You’re not afraid of putting in the work because you’ve already put in more hours than you thought possible.

You’re done fitting in and copying other people. You know you can do this better than most people. You have it in you, you can feel it.

So you start to say shit that matters. You start to say what you really think. You stop cranking out endless boring lists of garbage you don’t even believe in.

You grow some balls and make a real case for why the world should actually give a shit about what you have to say.

And THAT’s where you finally find the seed of something that matters.

This isn’t about finding an easy path to making a living. This is about making the difference you know you can make.

This is it. Go out and grow your seed.

Amazing Case Study: How Sarai Mitnick Attracts 380k Pageviews a Month and Built a Business Around a Sewing Blog

Caleb Wojcik — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 13:45:15 +0000

A common misconception is that you can only make money blogging when you write about blogging or making money online. We disagree.

We’ve featured bloggers who use blogs that matter to do some incredible things:

Shannon Whitehead and Kristin Glenn used their blog to raise $64,246 on Kickstarter to start a new clothing line.
Joshua Fields Millburn & Ryan Nicodemus use their blog to simplify people’s lives and share their creative writing.
Jeff Goins used his blog to land a book deal.

(If you know of any other amazing stories of people that have used blogs to make a living, email us and let us know. We love featuring people that are doing amazing things because of their blogs.)

Today we’re happy to interview Sarai Minick from the sewing pattern company Colette Patterns. Sarai uses her blog as a platform to share her expertise on sewing, give people free patterns, and grow the audience for her sewing pattern store.

In this interview you’ll find out how you can create a valuable product, give away great content to get traffic, and convert that to sales. No tricks, no shortcuts. It just works.

Tell us about your business Coletterie. How would you describe it?

The core business for Colette Patterns is producing cool, modern sewing patterns, so women (and men) can make their own clothes. The Coletterie is our blog, which supports the main business of selling printed patterns. It’s an interesting mix, because so much of what we do is online (with the blog), but the product we’re selling is very old fashioned.

How did you get started online? Did the business start online or offline?

I started completely online. Before I launched the company, I was working on the User Experience team over at Google / YouTube, and the idea of creating a great online experience, selling online, and creating a community was very comfortable to me. It was the other stuff I had to learn: printing, distribution, wholesale.

What made you decide to start a blog around your sewing patterns instead of just a storefront?

I’d been blogging in some form or another for many years before I started the company, though never with a commercial goal before. I knew that blogging would be a great way to connect with my customers, because I’d connected with so many like-minded people through my previous blogs. It was important to me that people see who I was and what I was trying to accomplish, to put a face on it and show my point of view.

I also needed to bring traffic to the business, and blogging was a great way to do that. Sewing is both highly creative and highly technical, which means you can create some really rich and varied content.

What other things besides blogging do you do to build your audience and customer base?

We use Twitter and Facebook, and we also have a forum and a weekly sewing tips newsletter called Snippets.

Can you share how many people visit your site on a monthly basis? Where do most of them come from?

For the last month, the blog got about 200k pageviews (60k uniques), and the main shop was 180k pageviews (26k uniques).

For both sites, the majority of the traffic is organic traffic from google. For the shop, the blog is the top traffic source after google, which is pretty cool. The blog has high quality content, and the numbers show that it’s driving people to the shop.

Both sites get traffic from other sewing sites and blogs. Because of the nature of sewing patterns, customers are always posting their projects online and linking back to the shop or to tutorials on our blog. We have a few popular bloggers that send us traffic, and a long tail of smaller sewing and craft blogs that send even more.

We’re also noticing a new trend, which is traffic coming from Pinterest. Since our content is highly visual, people are starting to post our patterns and tutorials on Pinterest. It’s a great way for new customers to discover what we’re doing. Pinterest works with one of our core strengths, the high quality visuals.

How do you stand out among your competition in the sewing niche?

I’m a very visual person, so I put a lot of focus on visual inspiration and good photography. I also spend a lot of time on tutorials and techniques, which is something my readers are always eager for. But I think what makes the blog different is the voice. We try to be instructive, welcoming, supportive, and personal.

Have you connected with many other people who run sewing and patterning sites online?

I’ve become friends with several other sewing bloggers and pattern designers, which I think is essential. I’ve met several of them in person now, and I’m always trying to think up ways to collaborate and team up to support one another.

I find this aspect important, because having more high quality content and products out there really does help enlarge the market. In that way, we’re not really in competition with each other. We’re raising awareness of the niche as a whole, and bringing new, younger people into it.

Does your blog directly lead to customers and sales? If so, how do you make that happen?

Yes, the blog definitely brings people to the online shop, and leads to sales.

I try to think about what information is helpful for people considering a purchase. Often, what they want to see is more interpretations for a pattern, more ideas about what they could do with it, and to see it on different body types. It’s really easy to provide this on the blog, with ideas, tutorials, fabric suggestions, and reader submissions of their own projects. It gets people excited to see all the different things they can do.

It’s helpful for me to think about what information is actually useful to potential customers, rather than thinking purely about pushing products. The better the content is for my readers, the better my sales will be.

How do you utilize your Snippets mailing list?

Originally, I had a typical monthly company newsletter where I announced new products, promotions, and a few links to our blog. I was really bored with it, and knew that if I was bored, my customers would be too.

I went back to thinking about doing something that would be genuinely useful, and came up with the idea of a weekly sewing tip. There are so many little tips and tricks with sewing, and a weekly email seemed like a great format for that sort of thing.

We write the content in big chunks, and schedule it to go out every week. If there’s anything of particular interest that week, we’ll add it to the end of the newsletter. Occasionally, we might send out a special promo code. But mostly, the idea is to share great content and maintain engagement with our customers. It’s really taken off, and has about 9,000 subscribers right now.

What are your experiences with running a forum on your site? Is it worth the effort?

I find the forum tricky, and we’re still experimenting with it. I can’t tell yet whether it’s really worth having.

On the one hand, it’s great to have a community discussion area, since our readers are interested in sharing their own projects and discussing topics with each other. But it’s difficult to balance it with the blog, our Flickr group, and Facebook. It feels a bit fragmented to me. Honestly, I’m not sure what the answer is!

Can you describe your philosophy on giving away free content and patterns?

Everyone likes free stuff! The free downloads we’ve offered have been extremely popular, and are some of the most highly trafficked pages. One of our free patterns has been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times. Others have been picked up and republished in sewing and craft magazines.

Of course, you have to balance the work you put into free content with the stuff that actually pays the bills. I consider it a part of my marketing effort, and try to spend time on it accordingly.

On a personal level, I like giving stuff away. It feels good.

What advice do you have for creatives who are looking to support themselves from their work?

If you’re interested in starting a business, I think it’s important to really consider your goals, strengths, and interests in an honest way. Running a business means so much more than handling the creative side of things. It means that you’re responsible for everything, from marketing and sales to bookkeeping and sweeping the floor. It’s useful to figure out up front what aspects of that you may need to work on. If you hate everything other than the creative work, you might consider a partner to really run things.

I also think you have to make a serious commitment to understanding time management. To me, integrity is really important as a business owner, and a big part of that is doing what you say you’re going to do. So many people I know struggle with their creative businesses because they don’t have these kinds of skills, but it’s definitely something you can learn.

Finally, I’d say that structure is your friend. A lot of creative people fear structure and organization because they think it’s stifling. But if you’re in it to make a living, you really have to be able to free yourself from the mundane business-y tasks in order to make room for creativity. For me, that means a lot of organization and daily routine.

***

Note from Caleb: If you have any specific questions for Sarai, please leave them in the comments below. She’d be happy to answer them.

Thanks so much for the great answers Sarai!

Sarai Mitnick is the founder and designer behind sewing pattern company Colette Patterns, author of The Colette Sewing Handbook, and writer of sewing blog The Coletterie.

81 Topic Ideas for Starting a Blog that Matters

Caleb Wojcik — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 13:45:54 +0000

On Tuesday we launched a brand new course: How to Start a Blog That Matters.

To coincide with the launch, we’ve compiled a huge list of the topics suggested by all of you for our Million Dollar Blog Project, but weren’t the one we chose.

There are websites about nearly everything imaginable, but that doesn’t mean that they are all good.

At Think Traffic, we believe that anyone that puts in the right amount of focused effort can build an audience online, even if it is about an extremely obscure topic.

Don’t know what topic to start a blog that matters about? Here are 81 ideas to get you thinking about what you could focus (or re-focus) your site on.

(Some of the most creative ideas people came up with are in bold.)

Self improvement/Self-Hypnosis
Health & Fitness for Busy People
Language Learning Blogs
How to Travel on a Budget (Best hotel deals. Car rental. Trip advice.)
Writing Style
Rescued Animals
Personal Development (Passions & Ambition Pursuing)
Social Dynamics & Communication Skills
Working in Uncommon Fields of Expertise While Location Independence
Self Defense
Recipes for couples without children
Male guide to female communication
Using technology in small business (Google Docs, CRM, credit card processing)
Bullying/cyber bullying
Behavioral disorders in children
Body-weight training
Entrepreneurial education for young children & adults
Disc Golf
DIY Projects, DIY Business and Selling Homemade Items
How to have a Strong Marriage
How to be a real and true friend
How to Train for a Triathlon
Careers vs job: following your passion
Getting VMWare Certified
Getting Microsoft Certified
Hamburgers
Self-sustaining lifestyle (grow your own food/ use solar power etc)
Mind strengthening (mind over matter/ lucid dreaming)
Beyond the basics of personal financial management
Healthy eating blog
Ghost-hunting
Home brewing beer
Self defense training (“for women” or “for children” or “for business executives”)
Indie Video Game Development
Video Game tactics shown through video tutorials
Community gardening/Urban farming
Starting and running your own social network
Point and Shoot Photography (How to create incredible photographs with whatever camera you have in your pocket)
Blog & Website Design for Non Designers (How to make your blog look incredible without spending a fortune)
The Art of Getting What You Want (How to use confidence and technique to get what you want from life, your relationships and your career)
Make Good Video for the Web (How to leverage the video medium to take your brand, blog, website, or business to the next level)
Self-Employment (The logistics behind how to start working for yourself (i.e. How to leave your job, find health insurance, set up an LLC, etc.)
How to write an e-bestseller (How could we document the process of creating an Amazon Kindle (or other electronic format) bestseller.)
Rapid Language Learning
How to become a better writer
How to lose weight and feel awesome (Even at middle age! The Primal/Paleo way)
Vegan diet
Cycling. More specifically, urban commuting.
Apartment living (this could range from renter issues to decor, etc.)
Interior design blog
Eating organic on a tight budget
Health conscious, High mileage, Minimalist traveling
How to Become a Famous Rock-star
Sports Photography
Life skills/life coaching for high school students
College planning for homeschoolers
Speaking in Public (How to overcome the fear to the audience; minimalistic approach to presentations, etc.)
A Family related site (Topics centered mostly on improving the relationship between family members; how to increase the creativity of kids and specially parents; how to help kids to find their passion and inner peace.)
Alternative Running Events (Mudruns, Tough Mudder, Spartan Race, Warrior Dash, etc.)
Learning the Ukulele
Learn How to Play Guitar
How to Get What You Want Without Breaking the Law or Burning Bridges
Becoming a wine connoisseur
Build a boat and cross the Pacific in it
Getting good at tennis and qualifying for Wimbledon
Windsurfing
Regular Surfing
How mobile applications that can improve one’s work productivity, relationships with friends and family, and overall quality of life.
Simpler Living (a blog that will explore and map a journey from a miserable 6 figure a year traditional way of living back to an often forgotten way of life.)
The best “places” around the world & do they live up to the hype?
How to do travel photography/videography
The Great Recession (A blog based upon a sustainable lifestyle with a smaller footprint.)
Building an iPhone application
The end of the world and the Maya prophecies for December 21st, 2012
Car maintenance
Running a Small Agile Business (a la 37 Signals)
A “Good Cause” Site (Telling the Stories of Successful Non-Profits & Charities)
Eco-tourism
The world of virtual conferences
QR codes. How to best use them in small business Marketing.
Inspire Bootstrappers (A blog to inspire bootstrappers by posting real bootstrapper success stories.)

***

Now its your turn.

We’d love to hear any ideas you have for a blog you are creating yourself or one you’d love to read. Let us know in the comments below this post.

Starting a blog is actually easy. Thousands of new blogs are started every day. Anyone can create a blog in 5 minutes, but very few people will create blogs that matter.

How to Start a Blog That Matters can help you create a blog that will change your life and the lives of your readers.

Bonus: Two Reasons to Buy this Course Now

Special bonus “kick off” live webinar. To really get things going for you, the first 100 500 (more spots added due to overwhelming demand) people who sign up for the course will be invited to a live “kick off” session to be scheduled in two weeks. This is your chance to start with a bang and ask any questions you have live.

Here’s my special one-on-one coaching guarantee. If you go through the course and don’t get the results you were hoping for, I’ll personally coach you on the phone for 30 minutes to get your new blog on track to become a big success. Just email me at the end of the course.

–> Head over to see if our new blogging course is a good fit for you.