In just 6 days (I don’t have stats for the last 24 hours yet) the first show has been downloaded over 18,000 times. Keep in mind that I didn’t even write a blog post about the launch, so the majority of my audience are only hearing about the episodes now. Episodes was not a typo. I’m adding another recording in the next 24 hours.

On top of that, this website had some of the best traffic days it has had, ever. In fact, January is the highest traffic month for the blog so far since June 2011, and there’s still quite a few days left before it’s over. I’m really surprised by the results and really, the only thing I can complain about is that I wish I had started this podcasting thing earlier.

As you can probably tell, I’m really happy to have launched and can see that this is going to be a big step in taking the ViperChill brand forward. For those of you who see opportunities for audio to grow your business, I’m going to show you the exact, step-by-step process of how to launch a podcast in style.

Why Start a Podcast?

Though there were a number of reasons for me to start a podcast, many of which you would probably relate to, I have to admit that one of my biggest motivations in kicking this off was seeing the success that Pat Flynn has had with his own podcast over at SmartPassiveIncome.

The number of downloads his episodes are getting has been increasing month on month, with over 100,000 being listened to in December alone. Pat interviewed me in one show early on in the life of his podcast and I’m constantly hearing from people that it’s how they discovered ViperChill.

Not only that, but in a survey he gave to his audience he discovered that his podcast was the number one way that new people found SmartPassiveIncome in 2011. Are you itching to start yours yet?

When I was first starting out online I would sometimes listen to recordings from Webmaster Radio on my iPod as I walked to school or was sitting on the bus to work. My favourite show was on the topic of SEO which was put together by Dave Naylor and Mikkel de Mib, two very well known people in the industry who were always up to date on what to do about the latest algorithm changes.

Despite my love for it back then, I honestly haven’t listened to that many podcasts since. I would estimate that I’ve probably heard around 15 different episodes in the last two years, and that was just downloading the individual files directly; not subscribing to feeds in iTunes.

I still love SEO and marketing in general, but since I’ve been doing this for so long, it’s pretty rare for me to hear new things that nobody else is talking about or that apply to the specific types of things I’m working on. I’m always looking to learn, but I have a trusted system for growing my ‘knowledge-base’ and it’s all revolved around text. That aside, I definitely see this as an opportunity for me to give more value and grow ViperChill at the same time.

I see a lot of potential for you all to benefit from this medium as well. Some of the main advantages that come with podcasting include:

• Creating a stronger connection with your audience – For a lot of people, hearing me on this podcast was actually the first time they’ve ever heard me talk. While my weird mix of Geordie (people from Newcastle) and South African probably scared a few people away – heh – I know that others definitely feel more connected with me now and know a little more about the Glen behind ViperChill.
• Increasing the size of your reach – One big thing for me was to reach a new audience, and primarily people who are already listening to Business and Marketing podcasts in iTunes. I can see that thousands of people are now pulling my XML feed through the site – far more than I sent over to iTunes – so I’ve hugely increased my reach by thousands in just a couple of days. Something that’s very hard to do with other platforms.
• Give people who prefer audio what they want – Some people definitely prefer listening to podcasts rather than reading thousands of words of text, so this also allows me to give those people in my audience exactly what they’re looking for. Countless people had emailed me to say that they would love to listen to a podcast from me on their journeys to work or while they’re lazing around on the beach, so this gives me a way to “keep in touch” with people who aren’t in front of a computer screen.
• Have the freedom to switch up your style – When I spend a lot of time writing about marketing, it’s nice for me now and then to go back to writing about personal development for guest posts or in various posts for this website. Podcasting also allows me to ‘switch things up’ and take a break from my regular schedule of just writing and swap the keyboard for a microphone.

There are probably a few items in here that I’ve missed, but those are definitely the most important benefits that I’ve noticed myself. If you’ve decided that producing a few MP3 files or starting a full-blown podcast just might be for you, then I’ll now get into the specifics…

Preparing to Record Your First Episode

Once you’ve decided to give this a try, it’s time to get ready to record your first episode. Though the internal microphone on my Macbook Pro is more than suitable for Skype conversations, I wanted a bit more quality when it comes to producing a podcast so I decided to look around to see what was available.

Since I’m back in Cape Town at the moment (just for a couple of weeks before I start my ‘new life’ on a new continent) I went looking around the computer shops at a few malls to see what was available. Sadly, the best thing I could find was a small Logitech mic for about $30 which the salesman tried to convince me would sound fantastic, but I wasn’t convinced.

After asking around on Twitter a few people like Derek suggested that I pick up a ‘Blue Yeti’ USB microphone that seems to be a popular option. I knew I wasn’t going to have any luck in the shops here so decided to do some searching online. The best price I could find was on an African, eBay-style website where it was being sold for R2,200. That’s around $273, almost triple the price the microphone would cost if I were to buy it in Europe or America.

I wanted a quality microphone and while it wouldn’t kill my bank balance, I had no idea how long it would take to arrive, so decided to pass. I was getting a little frustrated with my hunt when Diggy had the idea of going to a music shop around five minutes from my apartment. My bad luck continued when they didn’t have any USB microphones in the shop, but the person I dealt with said they could order one in for me and it would arrive just after the new year.

I’m usually an impulse buyer and hate waiting for things, but at R749 (around $90) the price seemed a little more reasonable, and compared to the Amazon price of $73 I didn’t feel like I was being totally ripped off either. The microphone – the Samson C01U – arrived in store a few days later and I quickly tested it out (see image to your right). The quality far surpassed that of my internal microphone and impressed Diggy so much that he ordered the exact same one within five minutes of hearing mine.

The next thing on my list was software. For years now I’ve used Audacity for recording DJ mixes and MP3 files for various projects, so decided to go with that again. It’s totally free, and available for Mac and Windows users over here. I know other people like to use GarageBand (Mac) but it’s not something I’ve had much experience with so I decided to stick with what I know. My microphone actually came with it’s own software as well, called cakewalk, which I thought was a nice addition and I’ll definitely test it out for one of my future recordings.

After a few sound checks I silently wished that I had purchased a ‘pop filter’ for the microphone – which stops any P sounds like Pppppp – but found I could avoid that problem as long as I didn’t speak directly into it, and instead had it slightly to the left of my mouth when talking. However, this is an item I’ll still probably pick up in the future.

Deciding What to Talk About

My recommendations for what you should be talking about in your podcast don’t really differ too much from my content idea generation post when I was talking about blogging. The basics really apply here:

• Make sure it’s relevant to your niche
• Cover topics that you’re passionate about
• Give it a title that will make people want to listen

But hey, this is ViperChill, and we don’t just stick to the basics. One cool thing about iTunes is that is shows you the popularity of individual episodes. Just like you can go to blogs in your industry and figure out what their most popular posts are, you can also look at people podcasting in your industry and see which episodes of there’s were hits. What topics they talked about which really got their audience excited.

For example, I can go into the health category and click on a random show, The Meditation Podcast. By looking down their list of shows I can see that the most popular are the ones that focus on sleeping. Now I know this is an area that – if I can share some good information on the topic – will be of interest to a lot of people if I were to produce a podcast.

It’s probably a good idea to suggest here that once you have released a few episodes, make sure you check your own show ratings as well so you can keep giving your audience what they want.

Intro / Outro

If you’ve listened to my own podcast then you’ll know that I apologised for not having any “awesome intro music or cheesy lines from some voiceover guy on Fiverr.” I honestly don’t think that having these is really that important, but I do think it makes your recording sound a little more professional and shows new listeners that you’ve actually put some care into the production of what you’re doing.

When I ran PluginID, at the end of my videos you would hear lots of people saying the name of the website, including males and females with totally different accents, ending with my Taiwanese friend Rose repeating “PluginIDeeeeeee”. I could be wrong, but I think it gave the site a more global feel, and really showed that people all over the world were reading / watching.

I’m contemplating doing something similar with ViperChill, but don’t send in your MP3 files just yet. If you’re looking for voiceover resources besides Fiverr, you could try a ‘voice marketplace’ like Voices.com, or even just contact the owners of podcasts whose intro you like and ask for recommendations.

Producing and Editing Your MP3 File

I’ve created a few MP3 files for various projects before, so I wasn’t totally new to this and had an idea of how I wanted to approach things. Whenever I used to record them I would try and speak off the top of my head without any script, but would find myself losing focus and sometimes missing key points. It’s a lot less time consuming to talk naturally without writing anything down first, but I think I need a lot more practice with this.

I decided to write a fairly detailed outline of what I was going to say before I started recording. This way I know exactly what I want to cover and can ensure there’s nothing that I miss out. This also helps me keep some form of ‘flow’ to the recording as well. One downside to this approach though is that it is slower, and you do run the risk of sounding a little robotic. To combat the latter point, don’t be afraid to go ‘unscripted’ at times and then get back to your next item.

Before I released my podcast to the world I sent it over to my friend Graeme to see what he thought, and listened to it myself for the first time as well. We were both in agreement that the information was good, but I could benefit by first of all, talking slower, and secondly, not trying to cram in as much information as I did.

I’m happy with the recording, but if you space out for a few minutes then there’s probably a lot of information that you’ve lost. I’m contemplating adding a little bit of ‘fluff’ in future recordings and not try and get so many concepts across in a short space of time, but I would love to know what you think about that in the comments.

If you’re anything like me, whether or not you are reading a script or going at it naturally, there are going to be times when you screw up and say something totally wrong or ridiculous. I did leave in a few errors, but some things are best taken out. Whenever I have a slip-up I’ll simply shout “STOP” into the microphone then carry on speaking.

When editing in Audacity, I can clearly see a big sound wave from when I shouted, so I know where the errors are and in turn know where to make my edits.

Once you’ve finished recording, it’s time to produce it as an MP3 file. If you’re using Audacity, you will be asked to locate a certain file once you try to Save it as an MP3. This file doesn’t come with Audacity by default, but you can find what you’re looking for over on this page.

One person that was constantly recommended to me when I was looking to launch a podcast was Cliff Ravenscraft’s website, PodcastAnswerMan. He has some great video tutorials on his site and with the introduction of one of them being “most people who podcast forget to do this” I had to keep watching.

His suggestion was to use a program called ID3 Editor to edit the specific information of your MP3 file and do something I had totally never thought of, embedding an image into the MP3. This image is what will show in the likes of Windows Media Player and iTunes as the cover graphic of your album or individual MP3′s when playing them, as shown below:

Audacity which I use already has options for things like the Title, Album name and track number so these were already filled in for me after producing. I added the simple graphic that I had already created for when submitting to the iTunes podcast directory and it was done. This image should be 300px by 300px.

To test that you’ve done this properly, just open your MP3 file up in iTunes and see if the cover shows when playing the file.

Creating your RSS Feed and Submitting It to iTunes

I was recently asked in an interview why I have a very strong community with this site. Basically, why my posts get so many shares and comments and discussion. One of the reasons, I assumed, was that I don’t claim to be an expert on everything. I’m always willing to learn more things and share my findings with people here.

This step is a good example of that. Simply put: I’ve found something that works, which I’m going to share below, but the way I do things is probably not best way to go about it.

Your podcast RSS feed allows general RSS readers, podcast directories and places like iTunes to ‘pull’ information about your podcast and your episodes such as its title, length, publish date, specific show information and the actual location of your MP3 files. It also allows you to notify these places whenever you add new shows or just want to make some changes to episode information.

The most popular option I’ve found for bloggers who podcast is to use a plugin like the podcasting plugin for WordPress, found here. With over 130,000 downloads, I’m sure you’ll recognise the little player it adds to your posts from some of the blogs you read.

This plugin will also help you create your own iTunes feed from a specific category on your blog, which you can then run through Feedburner and submit to iTunes. For most of you reading this, the plugin solution is probably your best option.

I didn’t take this route for a few reasons. First of all, I want full control over my XML file that iTunes and other services are pulling. I’ve witnessed more than enough people having corrupt RSS Feeds from conflicts with certain plugins (though they’re definitely the minority) and not being able to fully control them in WordPress.

Secondly, I didn’t really need the majority of the features in the plugin. Since I’m not going to be putting podcasts into posts (at least not anytime soon) and instead have them highlighted on a page, there’s no RSS feed that I can generate from a specific category.

Instead, I hand-created my XML feed. Again, for 99% of people, this probably isn’t the best option to take. I’m only going to be adding one or two podcasts to the site per month at most so it’s really not a big deal for me to manually edit the file. However, if you’re adding one every couple of days then it would probably get annoying.

A friend said he could make me a small script in 10 minutes to update this file if I ever wanted to take some more shortcuts. I’m kind of enjoying getting involved in all the technical stuff by hand at the moment though.

You can view the XML data I have for ViperChill below, if you’re looking to go the same route as me:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<rss xmlns:itunes="http://www.itunes.com/dtds/podcast-1.0.dtd" version="2.0">
<channel>
<title>ViperChill Podcast : Viral Marketing</title>
<description>Presented by Glen Allsopp, who at 18 was the social media manager for companies like Land Rover and Hewlett Packard, the ViperChill podcast shares internet marketing insights you wont find anywhere else. I'm ultimately here to teach you how to get more traffic and make more money!</description>
<link>http://www.viperchill.com</link>
<language>en-us</language>
<copyright>Copyright 2012</copyright>
<lastBuildDate>Thu, 08 Jan 2012 11:30:00 -0500</lastBuildDate>
<pubDate>Thu, 08 Jan 2012 11:30:00 -0500</pubDate>
<docs>http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss</docs>
<webMaster>hq@viperchill.com</webMaster>
<itunes:author>Glen Allsopp</itunes:author>
<itunes:subtitle>The ViperChill Podcast teaches you how to succeed online by getting more traffic and making more money. </itunes:subtitle>
<itunes:summary>Presented by Glen Allsopp, who at 18 was the social media manager for companies like Land Rover and Hewlett Packard, the ViperChill podcast shares internet marketing insights you wont find anywhere else. I'm ultimately here to teach you how to get more traffic and make more money! </itunes:summary>
<itunes:owner>
<itunes:name>Glen Allsopp</itunes:name>
<itunes:email>hq@viperchill.com</itunes:email>
</itunes:owner>
<itunes:explicit>No</itunes:explicit>
<itunes:image href="http://www.viperchill.com/podcast-graphic.jpg"/>
<itunes:category text="Business">
<itunes:category text="Management & Marketing"/>
</itunes:category>
<item>
<title>How I Would Make Money If I Was Starting from Scratch Online</title>
<link>http://www.viperchill.com/podcast/</link>
<guid>http://www.viperchill.com/Starting-Online.mp3</guid>
<description> Learn exactly what I would do if I was starting from scratch online in the first ever episode of the ViperChill Podcast!</description>
<enclosure url="http://www.viperchill.com/Starting-Online.mp3" length="21243263" type="audio/mpeg"/>
<category>Management & Marketing</category>
<pubDate>Sun, 08 Jan 2012 11:30:00 -0500</pubDate>
<itunes:author>Glen Allsopp</itunes:author>
<itunes:explicit>No</itunes:explicit>
<itunes:subtitle>Learn exactly what I would do if I was starting from scratch online in the first ever episode of the ViperChill Podcast! </itunes:subtitle>
<itunes:summary> Learn exactly what I would do if I was starting from scratch online in the first ever episode of the ViperChill Podcast!</itunes:summary>
<itunes:duration>00:22:06</itunes:duration>
<itunes:keywords>make money online, starting online, viral marketing, viperchill, glen allsopp</itunes:keywords>
</item>
</channel>
</rss>

It should be fairly simple to work out what you need to change when you create your own XML file if you wish to do so. You’ll see that I’ve referenced the ViperChill MP3 file on my own server. If you don’t want to upload them to your site via FTP like I did you can also upload MP3 files to your site using WordPress, by clicking ‘Media’ on the left navigation menu in your admin panel, and selecting ‘Add New’.

Once you have your podcast RSS feed through whatever format, it’s time to add it to iTunes. To do that, simply open the software on your computer and – making sure you’re connected to the internet – click on ‘iTunes Store’ on the left menu. On the top menu bar select ‘Podcasts’, then a small link on the right sidebar gives you the option to ‘Submit Your Podcast’.

You’ll then be asked to provide your RSS URL, which iTunes will relay back to you so you can check that the information is correct. You’ll then go through a manual review before being approved onto the store. For me this took less than 18 hours so it shouldn’t take too long to see your podcast live once you’ve submitted it.

As far as making any changes to the podcast RSS feed go, I’ve generally found my changes to reflect in iTunes within 3-4 hours, though I’ve heard it can be much quicker at times.

Getting It Out There

The obvious first place to go with the launch of your podcast is in front of your current audience. I wanted to dedicate a page on the site just to view the podcast, rather than writing a post every single time I produce a new recording. Most of you would probably see more sense in the “posting every time you produce something” concept, but I guess I’m kind of weird like that. There’s also no reason why you can’t do both, ala Steve Pavlina.

Though I didn’t write a blog post about the launch, I did send it out to one email list and promote it on Twitter and Facebook. This no doubt helped me get a push up the rankings, and I again want to thank everyone who took the time to subscribe, review and rate over on iTunes. As promised, I’ve been checking out the sites of everyone who let me know via Twitter.

The aim really is to get higher up some of these category pages which iTunes podcast listeners check on a daily basis. If you can get in the ‘New & Noteworthy’ section then you’re probably even more likely to get a listener boost as well. Being high up on these sections is probably the best thing you can do to increase your audience in the early stages of your podcast.

In other words, if you’re going to launch on the iTunes market, try and make sure you can give your show as big a boost as you can in the early days to help your chances of your podcast being featured.

It’s up to you whether your not you want to want to give your audience a transcript to go with your audio files. I only received one ‘thanks’ for having one, yet I’m sure I would have heard a lot of complaints if I didn’t. Around 14% of the people who downloaded the MP3 from me directly (rather than going through iTunes) picked up the PDF, so it is used by a decent amount of people.

Since I had written a lot of what I was going to speak, it didn’t take very long to fill in the blanks and write the rest of the transcript. For transcripts you can once again find works on Fiverr, and assistants on the likes of oDesk, but you may want to look into the various software solutions that are available on Google. I haven’t fully looked into any of these yet, so can’t personally recommend them.

There are a number of podcast directories out there for you to list your new show, but I couldn’t find any that seemed popular, and would assume this is probably a waste of time. Now that I have some decent audience figures I’ll test some out and then update this section. This leaves my final process pretty straightforward, and highlighted in the graphic below:

The final question I want to answer is “Should I Start a Podcast?“. They clearly have a place in the marketing world, but audiences here are definitely more tech-savvy than the average person. I think that even if you don’t want to create a regularly updated podcast, at least create something so you can connect further with your readers.

It’s so easy to create an MP3 file that you can send out to your list or add to a page on your site or use as a bonus to a product that there’s really no reason not to give it a try.

I really hope you got some value out of this post and suggest that, as always, if you have any questions just leave a comment below. Thanks again to all of you who subscribed to and rated the show on iTunes!

Earlier in the year I shared an example of two moms making over $5k/m online. Today I want to share another case study with you and reveal how one guy in New Zealand is making up to $10,000 every single month in the Forex industry, one of the most profitable but competitive industries online.

His name is Cam and he was more than willing to share some of his insights in the hope that you’ll be inspired to create your own success story and get some new ideas in the process.

I’m sure you just want me to get right into the interview, so away we go…

“How long have you been making money online? How did you get started?”

I’ve been making money online for about 4 years. It’s a long story… and in all honesty I stumbled into it really. I was playing golf at a work event alongside a guy who was my account manager at an advertising firm. He was telling the story of his ex-colleague (whom I had dealt with before) and how he had made his first million trading futures after just 6 months of leaving his job! I decided to find out how this guy had managed to do it and made an effort to get in contact with him.

He was very obliging and gave me some links to the courses he had done and the path he had taken. I had to take a $1,000 “leap of faith” to buy one of his recommended courses and spent the next 6 months learning how to trade. I loaded the course onto my iPod and listened to it on the bus most days. Then one bus ride to work I thought to myself “I wonder how many more of these courses are around and how good would it be if people could compare them online?”

Excited by my new idea, I did a quick Google search when I got to work and to my astonishment there where hundreds, if not thousands… and the icing on the cake was that they would pay me commission if I referred people to their sites to buy their products. So I embarked on building my first affiliate site, a trading system review website, called Trading Systems Rated.

“Most marketers I know have suffered a number of failures before find something that works. Did this happen with you?”

My first ever venture online was a complete failure and wasted 6 months of my time. Shortly after my first child was born, my wife bought me the book ‘Rich Dad Poor Dad’. After reading it in about 2 days (which is about 2 months shorter than most books I read) I decided to register a business in preparation for making my millions. An idea came to me a month later. I was going to create a social network specifically for neighbours (this was before Facebook hit the big time).

I spent the next 6 months building KnowMyNeighbour.com from scratch and it launched it with a fizzle. Then, after realizing that I didn’t really want to connect with my neighbours and there was going to be no money in it unless I had millions of visitors, I decided to pull it down…never to be mentioned again!

“Why did you decide to focus on the Forex market?”

After having success in the general trading system market I could see that Forex products were the most prevalent and had low barriers to entry for consumers. Almost every product launch was a Forex product of some variety from manual to automated systems and almost all of them had affiliate or referral programs that were easy to sign up to. I was hooked as I had started trading Forex at the same time.

“Could you tell us more about one of your top earning sites, ForexReviewsRated?”

ForexReviewsRated.com has been around for almost 3 years now and reviews all types of Forex trading products from systems to signals and automated trading robots. It has a focus on trading robots where I run demo tests in what I call my “Forex Lab”. If they make the grade I’ll trial them on my live account and if I feel their risk/reward ratio is good and that they’ll be profitable over the long term they become “Graduates”.

I get about 15-18,000 visits a month (8-9000 unique visitors) with most of the traffic (73%) coming from search engines and the majority of that from Google. The remaining traffic is a split between Direct and Referring sites. I also have an active email list which generates some good spikes in traffic and revenue. The site generates between $3,000 and $10,000 per month. Usually it’s around the $5,000 mark and this comes from a variety of sources with the majority from affiliate commissions.

It originally started earning money with Google Adsense (which I no longer use) within a week and from affiliate commissions within the first 3 weeks. My first sites (TradingSystemsRated.com and StockBrokersRated.com) were about the same.

“What software are you using to run the review site?”

I tried out about 4 different WordPress review plugins and found that WPReviewEngine, although it cost money, was exactly what I needed. It seemed to work better with affiliate sites than other free plugins.

I took a little while to get my head around how to customise it but once you test a few things out it soon becomes obvious. Their support is really good and they helped me out when I needed to integrate it with my theme. I ended up moving my trading systems site to WordPress and used the WPReviewEngine plugin. If I ever start another review site in the future, this will surely be on my list of plugins.

Note from Glen: I know some of the people behind the plugin so asked if they would offer a discount for ViperChill readers who may be interested in starting their own review site. Though they’re already running a 30%-off special for Christmas, they kindly created the coupon code ‘ViperChill’ which will take 50% off the price of your order for the next 72 hours.

“How are you driving traffic to your network?”

I’ve done all sorts in the past and some work well for a short time but in the long term these are the things I do now:

• Put up good and valuable information because this will get you links from sites that you wouldn’t normally be able to get links from. This all helps with your search rankings.
• Follow trends. If you see a particular topic of interest, write a post about it. This also helps with search traffic.
• Start an email list. This is guaranteed traffic and should be your main goal in the beginning.
• Always respond to emails that you get via the site. These people may start commenting on your blog or post links to your blog on other popular blogs/forums. These days I can write a fairly quick and dirty post and expect my regulars to review the product for me and add comments that Google and other visitors love.

“When you work for yourself it can be hard to ‘get going’ at times. What keeps you motivated?”

It helps to have an interest in your niche. The FX market has so many dimensions that there’s always something to keep me interested. Five things that motivate me are:

1. Setting short term goals which are fun to achieve. Some of mine have been: a $1,000 week through Clickbank and a Clickbank “full house” where there are no $0 bars (this means you made a sale every day for the past two weeks) – I achieved both of these at the same time funnily enough.

2. Setting seemingly impossible goals, e.g. pay off my mortgage in two years, get 50,000 subscribers on my list in one year, make $10,000 in one day

3. Reading books written by those who have been there done that, e.g. 4 hour work week by Tim Ferris

4. Looking for an opportunity to do things better, e.g. trying things out on the site to see if something works better or creating other site ideas and taking them to the market (another site of mine is ForexDealDay.com a one day deal site for Forex products)

5. Building relationships with others in the industry and those that have common interests, e.g. I’ve recently partnered with a 17 year Forex veteran from South Africa and now we’re selling his system called the ForexPipMagnet.com using the brand and reputation I have built up through my review site

My drive comes from reading books that help change your perspective and give you focus like “The science of getting rich” by Wallace G Wattle and “The secret”. I find that it’s a bit like a video game where you’re the player. The deeper you get into the game the more exciting and addictive it gets. You get to the stage where you just can’t get enough of it!

“What advice would you give to ViperChill readers who might not be seeing results they expected from their internet marketing efforts?”

I would say:

• Always think long term. Ask yourself this question: Are you providing real unique value to your visitors/subscribers?
• There’s always a cheaper and quicker way to do everything. If you know this, you’ll find the way. This happens to me all the time. A better alternative presents itself out of the blue, even when I’m not looking for it.
• Your worst day can be followed by your best day. Even if you’ve had your worst day of visitors/sales in ages, tomorrow could be your best. This also happens to me all the time.
• Subscribe to every list you can in your niche and learn from what others are doing.
• Aim high. If you want to make $1,000 a week, aim for $10,000 instead.

My Thoughts

Anyone who gets free cloud niche updates will know that I’ve sent out emails about ‘review’ sites before and explained why they’re so effective. These type of sites can can make a lot of money with little traffic because you’re intercepting a sale before someone actually buys something.

The person is likely to already be in the buying mode and just wants to see what other people have to say about their potential purchase. If they stumble on a site that recommends it (or a related product) then there’s a high chance that they’ll make a purchase, earning you money through any affiliate links.

I remember review sites being around when I started out in 2005 and I still see them making a lot of money for people in 2011, further proving how effective they can be. The reason the particular review format (ranking products against each other) works so well is because when you spend money, you want to get the best product. If I’m looking for reviews of a certain hosting company but someone is showing me why a different company is better, I’m likely to go with the new option.

If you’re looking for a style of affiliate site to build then a review site seems to be a good option. Since they are commonly run on top of WordPress, it’s then easy to add fresh, unique content to your site as well. I think Cam will agree with me that their laser focus on email subscribers and affiliate sales means they won’t always be the prettiest sites, but they can generate incredible conversion rates.

Special thanks to Cam for taking the time out to share what is working for him! I hope you all enjoyed the post.

P.S. We’ve had some interesting discussions on the ViperChill Facebook page lately so make sure you hit ‘Like’ if you want to get involved. On Monday I asked how people were planning to change their marketing tactics in 2012 and I personally learned a lot from the feedback. Thanks as always for your support!

In that particular post I looked at the green industry from the perspective of a blogger and shared some of my findings. Based on some of the comments and emails I received at the time, a few of you were interested in how I collected the stats I did and how you could go about investigating your own niche further. I’m going to expand on that topic today, in the way I always do.

First I’ve highlighted a huge list of tools that serve various different functions and can be great resources to add to your marketing arsenal. After that I’m going to give two examples in different industries showing how you can use these services – and the information they generate – to your advantage.

22 Resources for Data-Mining Your Industry

Before you can use any of these tools to their full potential, it’s recommend that you grab a pen and paper (or open up a text editor) and jot down some phrases which would best describe your niche. Of course, be sure to write down anything you discover from this research as well – whether it be other sites in your industry or any marketing ideas that you discover.

Niche research is a little like viewing your website analytics where it’s really pointless checking your stats if they don’t lead to you making any site changes. In the same way, it’s really pointless using any of these tools if you don’t do anything about the little insights you’ll undoubtedly come across.

Ice Rocket Trend Tool

The Ice Rocket Trend tool is interesting in that it gives you an idea of how popular certain topics are around the web over time periods of up to three months. In the example below you can see how many people are talking about different aspects of internet marketing:

Do note though that different spellings get different results. For example there are a lot more people talking about search engine optimization than there are search engine optimisation (which is how I would usually write it).

This tool can be used for a number of things like deciding on which verticals of a certain niche to enter, right down to seeing which sports professionals in specific fields are garnering the most interest at this moment in time.

Spy on Web: Find Other Sites That People Own

Spy on Web is a neat little tool that I’ve had in my arsenal for a few years now. Basically it lets you see which websites use the same hosting company, have the same IP addresses and use the same Google Analytics and Google Adsense tracking codes. This means that in many cases you can easily find other websites that someone owns if you have the URL of just one of them.

Keep in mind that Spy on Web isn’t accurate in all cases. For example, if someone is hosting websites on a shared host like Hostgator, hundreds of domains may appear which actually have nothing to do with the owner of the original domain you entered.

I’ve found this to be a tool that satisfies my curiosity more than anything else, but when it comes to SEO research, it can be interesting to see if any webmasters in your industry are operating their own little ‘link farms’. You would be surprised how many I’ve found, even after Whois checking for verification.

Quantcast Visitor Demographics

I first came across the benefits of this tool when I started advertising on Facebook. Most people commonly try to target a huge audience with their Facebook ad campaigns where as many people have found the best strategy is to lots of ads, each targeting a tiny sub-section of users.

The tool not only tells you similar websites that people visit based on any URL, but you can also see some statistics about the audience that visits a certain site. I ran the social news site Reddit through the tool as an example and I’m told that around 55% of visitors are male (though I expect this to be a little lower than reality) and 24% of the audience are over 50 years old.

Below is Quantcast’s estimation as to which sites people visit after Reddit. None of them surprise me, so I would say it’s quite accurate here:

Run a few sites from your niche through the tool and give yourself a better idea of the market that you’re working with.

Google Reader Subscriber Counts

One tool I like to use when looking for large blogs in a niche is Google Reader, and more specifically its ‘Browse for Feeds’ feature. Though many sites proudly display their Feedburner statistics, the stats can be easily inflated with Aweber and even Fiverr users offering to boost your chicklet count by another 500 readers (of course, they’re not ‘real’ readers) for $5.

In Google Reader you can see how many people are subscribing just via Google. You can do this by logging into your Google Reader account and clicking ‘Browse for feeds’ on the left menu. Then enter any keywords of sites you know:

Strangely, a number of blogs in the IM niche which have much higher overall subscriber counts than me have lower Google Reader counts. I guess this means they’re either inflating the figure with email addresses (which could be their primary aim) or ViperChill readers have a huge liking for Google Reader compared to visitors on other marketing blogs, though I don’t think that’s very likely.

Spyfu

Spyfu is a tool that has been around for quite a while and is very popular, especially among pay-per-click marketers spending money on the likes of Google Adwords. Spyfu helps you to see which companies are buying ads for certain search terms, and even shows the exact ad copy that they’re using.

You can also see average bid prices for any phrases, such as the information below for ‘cape town flights’:

Not only do you get pricing information, you’ll also be presented with a list of domains that are most commonly advertising for such phrases. This can be useful when you want to investigate the landing pages of these sites or just want to find other companies in your industry that are actively marketing themselves.

How Often Links are Shared on Facebook

I found this little trick a few months ago and while it’s nothing really that special, it’s a nice little way to find out the popularity of any pages on Facebook if you were curious as to how many times they’ve been shared.

Simply type the following into your address bar: http://graph.facebook.com/http://www.viperchill.com/wordpress-seo/ changing the part in bold with the URL that you want to check. You’ll see a basic text interface in your browser with the number of shares that specific URL has had.

SEM Rush

Similar to SEOmoz’s Open Site Explorer mentioned below, SEMRush gives you a good amount of information on specific domains, though only a limited number of results are available freely. SEM Rush actually shows you an impressive list of stats, revealing which terms are driving traffic to different domains, how many results there are for that term, and where a site ranks for in the SERP’s for a particular phrase.

Running a few sites in your industry through this can give you a good idea for other keyphrases that you can start targeting that your competitors are currently capitalising on.

Pew Facts & Statistics

Though I’ve never really used this in my own research, Pew is one of the best resources online for – as they put it – “Numbers, facts and trends shaping your world”.

For example, if I look at their ‘social trends’ category, one of the latest reports is a finding that teens on social networks that are ‘mostly kind’ make up 69% of users. While those who are mostly unkind take a 20% share.

Other categories you can look into further for stats include Religion, Economics, the Environment, Legal, News & Media and Politics.

StumbleUpon Buzz

A little known feature of StumbleUpon is their popular (buzz) pages for different subjects. These pages show the most viewed articles that the StumbleUpon audience voted for and enjoyed. I’ll be the first to admit that StumbleUpon visitors aren’t the best traffic source in the world, but there’s something to be said for writing articles that capture their attention. I have a large in-depth guide to StumbleUpon as a service if you want to learn more about it here.

If you can occupy the attention of someone who is randomly clicking through websites via a browser toolbar, you can occupy the attention of anybody.

Not only will you see the pages that are the most popular, you’ll also see exactly how many visits StumbleUpon sent to them which is perfect if you have lots of ideas from this source but just want to focus on a few. I obviously don’t recommend that you copy titles or ideas directly, but instead think you should use this as inspiration for titles that work well, angles that people in your niche are taking, and the type of subjects that people want to read about.

You can find ideas in literally any niche, with some examples being their finance, gadget and humour sections. Simply change the tag in the URL to whatever you write about and you’ll find popular content around that topic.

Most Saved Delicious Links

After being sold for around $10m back in 2005 to Yahoo, Delicious is now back in the hands of its original owners and is sporting a new redesign with a slightly new focus. As interesting as that may be, I don’t personally have a use for the service any more other than for content inspiration and overall niche research.

Type any relevant phrases into their search engine and you’ll find popular sites, blog posts, videos and images which have been saved the most by the Delicious audience. This will give you some insights on how to create your own popular content.

Top Site Posts

I’ve mentioned Open Site Explorer a number of times on this blog and for good reason: It’s a fantastic tool built by a fantastic company. Though you do get far more features with a premium account (it’s not cheap at almost $100 per month), you can still do some basic research with the limited results that you’re shown.

I know that many people use this tool for checking backlinks to competitors in great detail, but what I particularly like is the ‘Top Pages’ section you can view on any domain. If you run a few sites from your industry here you’ll likely find some type of content that was very popular for them – since they have the most backlinks – giving you inspiration for your own content creation efforts.

The People of StumbleUpon (Influencers)

I have put this in a separate section to the StumbleUpon Buzz resource simply because I think this is a great way to find active participants in your industry and in many cases…influencers. When browsing StumbleUpon via their toolbar you’ll be able to see the people who are submitting the stories that are related to your niche.

For example, if you run a gadgets website then you can set-up StumbleUpon to show you gadget related articles and websites. Every time you hit the Stumble button you’ll find new articles and new submitters. A lot of submissions will be from the content owners themselves (which gives you a chance to make some solid connections) but others will be simply from people who really care about that topic.

Click on their username via the toolbar and you’ll be able to go through other submissions that they’ve made to the site, often resulting in the uncovering of not only great content, but major players in your chosen industry.

Compete Details

Compete offer a nice little service which lets you compare analytics (traffic volume, referring websites & search terms) between different websites. While it only gives you an idea of how much US traffic a site is getting – though it’s not entirely accurate like many traffic estimation tools – it does give you a good indicator as to which sites are popular in your niche.

As you can see from the screenshot above, Compete has registered around 3.2 million unique visitors for Pinterest last month. The results page also shows you traffic stats over time and, like Quantcast, displays ‘similar’ websites.

As with other similar tools, the results you get here in the free version are quite limited compared to their PRO offering.

Alexa Site Information

Like Compete, Alexa also gives you a good idea as to how much traffic websites are getting and some of the search terms that are sending them traffic. Right now Alexa claims that the top terms driving traffic to ViperChill are:

• Viperchill
• Viper Chill
• WordPress seo
• viper chil
• building backlinks
• guest blogging
• viral marketing

While the top results in Alexa are not the same as my actual analytics stats, some of the phrases are definitely there. And, as expected, spikes in my traffic do tend to line up with spikes in Alexa as well.

Shown above, another nice feature of Alexa is the ability to compare the traffic levels of sites that belong to the same industry. If you don’t already have the Alexa Sparky extension for Firefox then I highly recommend that you install it. You’ll immediately see a traffic graph and Alexa rank for any website that you visit in the Add-on bar (footer) of your browser.

Technorati Top Blogs

Many of you will know about Technorati and their blog directory already but it’s still worth mentioning them here. The most useful part of their site for me is their top ranked blogs section, which shows you the most talked about blogs in specific categories.

This allows you to see which sites are hot at this moment in time. The top overall blogs are what I would call superblogs and tend to write dozens of posts every single day.

Backlink Sources

Looking into the backlinks of your competitors can give you an idea of other sites operating in your industry, how competitive search results will be for different phrases and you can sometimes even find multiple sites which tend to be operated by the same people. That last point is especially common in more obscure niches, I’ve found.

I would usually recommend the Yahoo Site explorer for backlink counts but sadly in the last week they’ve terminated the service. Your options now are tools like Open Site Explorer, the link:domain.com command in Google (limited results), BacklinkWatch.com (pop-up & lots of ads), and software like Market Samurai.

Google Trends

Another tool many ViperChill readers will be familiar with is Google Trends. Google Trends lets you see the popularity of words and phrases over a period of time in terms of both search volume and news reports. This can be useful when trying to find which segments of your industry are the most popular or which seasons produce the most searches for which terms.

Visual Inspection

You can have all of the tools in the world at your disposal but I would hesitate to suggest that any are as good as your own personal browsing and creativity. Things I look for when looking around websites in a particular niche include:

• Which social services they’re encouraging with people to connect on
• Which type of share buttons they’re using
• The types of content that seems to get shared the most
• How they’re monetising the website
• What are they trying to get visitors to do?

Though sometimes rare, many sites will encourage you to share their posts or connect on platforms that aren’t the typical Facebook or Twitter offerings that you would expect. In the design and home crafts niches you’re likely to see some examples of this which you can then incorporate into your own marketing efforts.

The main aim with this exercise is to see what probably works well so you can integrate it into your own site, and then to discover what everyone else is doing that you can do better / differently.

Board Reader

Not all niche activity happens on the big social networks, of course. Forums have been around for as long as I can remember and it’s not surprising to see some with tens of thousands of members in various fields. Board Reader is simply a specialised search engine for finding posts about different topics on forums.

As you can see, there are over 20,000 posts about the best team in the premiership (no bias…honest) in just a three month time period. Tools like this can help you find new sites for marketing engagement in your respective industry and even help you find reactions to competitors and their products.

Search Queries

We don’t have to use the latest and most advanced tools of course to get some insights about an industry. Simple searches on Google or Bing can often unravel most of what you need to know. Search terms like:

• Related:[competitordomain.com]
• Top [niche] blogs
• [niche] forums
• site:ning.com [niche]
• site:youtube.com [niche]

These should give you a good starting point and can easily see you draining hours of your time if you really want to look at the results in-depth.

Youtube Superstars

Every industry tends to have their ‘Youtube Superstar’ as my friend Alex likes to call them (and himself). I’ll be the first to admit that I have used video very little for my own sites, besides hiring an FHM model and working on a video competition with Hewlett Packard.

Videos were viewed over 20 billion times last month – a record for Youtube – and I’ve seen plenty of people who put a lot of focus on the platform to gain a large audience, especially in the health industry. If you’re not shy about getting in front of a camera, it’s definitely something you should look into.

Twitter Search Results

Just like with the individual inspection of StumbleUpon users, you can use different search terms on Twitter to find which individuals are active in your niche. Additionally, searching for the names of your competitors and their products will give you a good idea as to how popular they are and what people are saying about them.

A Guide for Product Owners

To take things further I decided that I would give you actual examples of some of these tools in use and show how they could help me based on the specific results I find. I asked on Twitter for some random niche ideas and received a few replies. One asked me to look into the surfing industry.

Since there are people who need marketing tactics that don’t just apply to bloggers or affiliate site owners, I decided I would try and give an example for product owners (and the marketing guys who are trying to sell them via the web). The most obvious product that comes to mind in the surfing industry is a surf board, so let’s go with that.

The Actual Product

I’ve never created a physical product to sell online before so don’t take the next few paragraphs as fact; especially in an industry where I have pretty much no prior knowledge of the market.

Though I haven’t made a product, I think it’s fair to say that if you’re making something a little more than ‘another surfboard’ then it’s going to be a lot harder to market yourself than if you were to come at the industry in a different angle and create something entirely new. Something remarkable.

There’s always room to market and/or manufacture every day products in a totally different way. Two examples that come to mind from the investment program Dragon’s Den are relevant here. The first idea was from Andrew Harsley who spent twenty years of his life trying to perfect a new kind of cable tie. You know those thin plastic things used especially for binding together electrical wires and cables.

The problem with cable ties is that you can only use them once and this results in a lot of wastage. Andrew’s invention, Rapstrap, is a simple cable tie that is mostly reusable, which makes his product 4x more efficient than a standard cable tie when it comes to cost and wastage. He went on to make over £36m for his efforts.

Or what about Levi Roots who launched “Reggae Reggae sauce” in the UK. When was the last time you thought about putting a Jamaican sauce on your food? Probably never. When you hear about it you’re probably a little curious. That curiosity leads to people buying the product, and, people loved it (this is important). He too is now worth over £30m (though he is currently in a legal battle about product ownership, but I’m getting away from the point).

So what does this have to do with my surf board? How can I make it something worth talking about? Well, maybe it could come with engravings of the surfers name in the board as standard, shipped directly from the factory. Or maybe it only comes in one style and distinctive colour – kind of like Apple white earphones – so anyone who loves surfing would know which brand of board it is automatically. You don’t need to see the Apple logo or even an iPod to have a good idea what those white earphones are plugged into.

There are lots of ways to go with this, but hopefully you get the idea. What matters more than the product of course, at least in this instance, is how you would get it out there.

Data Mining the Surfing Niche

Armed with just a few basic tools, I started my research into the market.

Google Queries

Some sample phrases that I used in Google include:

• Top surfing brands
• surfing championships
• Famous surfers
• surfing forums

Not only did I come across a information that will help me with the next sections, I also came across this interesting page with a lot of surfing market related stats. Some that interested me basically stated that surfers are willing to pay more for an environmentally friendly product (which could help in the creation stages).

Another finding stated “53.5% indicated they’ve purchased hardgoods online. Among those who haven’t, 81.6% say they’d rather go into the surf shop“. You could view this as a downside if you’re marketing online or you could use it as inspiration to look at other ways in which you could bring the offline experience to the internet.

Facebook Fan Pages

Armed with a list of surfing brands I decided to see how many fans they had on Facebook and how many people were talking about certain pages. My findings are below:

• Billabong: 1,320,810 (6,120 talking)
• Billabong Girls: 1,103,003 (4,014 talking)
• Hurley: 419,375 (2,757 talking)
• Oneill: 254,682 (2,252 talking)
• Quiksilver: 1,297,435 (7,981 talking)
• Rip Curl: 708,519 (6,194 talking)
• RVCA: 140,791 (1,839 talking)
• Volcom: 1,535,929 (7,495 talking)

Surfing Professionals on Twitter

After that I took some surfers I found on the ASP (Association of Surfing Professionals) website and decided to check how many Twitter followers they have:

• Kelly Slater: 128,941 followers
• Taj Burrow: 29,708 followers
• Mick Fanning: 61,168 followers
• Joel Parkinson: 33,233 followers
• Adriano de Souza: 11,817 followers

What Does Quantcast Say about the Audience

After finding a few seemingly popular sites in the surfing niche, I decided to run them through Quantcast to get a better idea of their traffic levels and visitor demographics:

• Surfermag.com: 140,000 monthly uniques. 66% male. 39% are 18-34
• Surfing-waves.com: 112,000 monthly uniques. Hidden demographics
• ASPWorldTour.com: 89,200 monthly uniques. 68% male. 28% are 18-34
• Surfline.com: 692,000 uniques. 61% male. 40% are 18-34
• MagicSeaweed.com: All stats hidden

As you can see, information wasn’t available for all of the domains that I looked into.

Is Surfing Big on StumbleUpon? Who are the influencers?

The final thing I did for this example was browse the top surfing related content on StumbleUpon at the moment. I found the following post titles and have listed how many views StumbleUpon sent them:

• 9 Hottest Female Surfers – 30,000 views
• Mark Visser Rides JAWS at night – 64,000 views
• Indo Board workout for Surfers – 38,000 views
• Beautiful Freaky Surf Shots – 29,000 views

Final Analysis

Even after looking at just a few resources in limited detail I can already start to learn a lot more about this market. First of all, the Billabong fan page has almost double the fans of Rip Curl yet there are more people talking about Rip Curl. It would be worth investigating this to see if I can figure out why.

Also, the Billabong Girls page (I wouldn’t originally have thought of splitting pages up by gender) has well over 1 million fans yet Volcom’s attempt at a fan page for women only has 20,108 likes. It may just be because they haven’t promoted it heavily, or that it’s just not worth the effort.

I couldn’t gather too much from my initial Twitter research. Surfers didn’t seem to have that many fans, though 50,000+ followers for two of the five shows there is definitely a decent-sized surfing audience on the network. To put it into perspective with Facebook though, Kelly Slater only has 1/3rd of the followers on Twitter and the Billabong Girls brand only has 16,908 Twitter followers compared to their 1million+ on Facebook.

Based on this I can assume that if I only really had time for one social network, Facebook would be the one I interact with the most.

After just a few minutes on StumbleUpon I was left with dozens of content ideas I could use on my own site to help get my awesome engraved surfboards noticed. I also found a couple of StumbleUpon ‘power users’ that tended to submit most of the popular surfing related content. Now I know to stay in touch with what these guys are doing and maybe reach out to them at some point.

Finally, the Google queries which revealed popular surfing sites gave me a number of places that I would be able to advertise my product, a social network for surfers that I could interact on, and thanks to Quantcast I could get a good idea of how active they really were.

In just a short period of time I’m infinitely more knowledgeable on what I’m dealing with.

A Guide for Bloggers

Two other people on Twitter suggested that I write about designer hand dryers in toilets and taps. I decided to zoom out of those specific categories and for for this blogging example look at the home decor / interior design industry.

Niche research in the blogosphere can help you to generate new post ideas, find link sources, obtain new design ideas, find how people are making money and much more. If you’re serious about your blog and aren’t picking up tips from your surroundings then you’re really missing out.

I first went to Technorati to find some of the top blogs in the home decor industry, since I’m only familiar with my friend Mihai’s site, Freshome. To be honest, the suggestions that Technorati gave me were actually pretty bad, with only a few of the top 10 results being real authorities in the niche.

I then performed a few blog related Google queries and found a list of relevant sites. I’m pretty sure they’re the biggest in the industry, but even if they’re aren’t, they’re still really big.

I decided to look at five things at once: 1) How many likes their brand pages had on Facebook 2) How many people were talking about them on Facebook 3) How many Twitter followers they had 4) How many subscribers Google Reader showed them as having and 5) How many backlinks they have according to Open Site Explorer.

I’ve charted my results in a table below, highlighting some of the more impressive numbers:

I can first of all see that all bloggers are utilising the two big platforms, though their audiences are noticeably larger in some instances on Facebook. Though that may be the case, I would clearly be trying to connect with people on both networks. Freshome is far and away the most popular site in terms of Facebook fans, so I would definitely spend time looking into why that is. I’m thinking the Facebook box in their sidebar which keeps scrolling when you do has a little something to do with it.

Another thing I noticed was that WebUrbanist seems to have almost 500,000 feed subscribers but only a tiny portion (10,000) of those are actually registered for any URL’s I can find in Google Reader. I decided to put some of the URL’s into FeedCompare to see how they’ve been growing over time in case there was anything abnormal. I then noticed something pretty amazing for another site, Design-Milk:

As you can see, Design Milk has grew by almost 400,000 subscribers in just one year. Similar to the Freshome Facebook likes abnormality, this is far more than the average growth of the competition so they’re clearly doing something right. A little more time spent looking at this site would again be highly recommended if you’re operating in this space.

Other things you should look at when it comes to niche research for blogging include:

• How are sites making money? (Visual Inspection)
• Who is linking to each other? (Open Site Explorer)
• What kind of terms are sending traffic? (SEM Rush & Alexa)
• What kind of blog posts are the most popular? (Visual Inspection, Delicious & StumbleUpon)

Another pro tip I’ll give out for those of you who have managed to keep reading this far is to look at the advertising pages of the big sites. You’ll find that many of them are happy to share their traffic stats which can help give you a good idea as to the true size of your audience.

I don’t operate in either of these industries but I was willing to put in a little time to come away with some insights. Keeping that in mind, there’s no reason you shouldn’t be doing the exact same in your industry. Do make sure you check out the niche rockstar post for the green blogging niche example as well if you haven’t yet seen it.

It’s good to be back writing again a little more frequently so I really hope you enjoyed this post. There’s been a little delay on my $7K/m case study that is coming but it will hopefully be live next week, as will a post on how to create a ‘listening hub’ so you can keep up to date with your industry looking forward, rather than looking at stats of the past and present.

I appreciate any comments…

This post is, purely and simply, for those who want more from their lives. If you’re happy with the position you’re in or at least like how you spend your days, then skip this post and come back next week (I have $7K/m case study on the way). Today I’m simply sharing what I wish someone else had written a few months ago when I was once again at the busiest point in my life and questioning the direction I found myself heading.

In the hectic position I was in, on the verge of the Guardian launch and the countless other travel and project commitments that I couldn’t turn down, I honestly felt as pressured as I had ever been. I decided that since there was no way I could drop any of what I was doing, I was going to use this time to find the best strategy available to deal with my workload.

I’ve spoken about productivity a lot on this site so I was hesitant to do so again. Especially since I still stand by all of what I’ve already said. Then again, if I play tennis daily, I should expect my backhand and serve to improve a lot over the space of a few months. If I’m learning to speak a foreign language then I should, in time, be able to string together a few basic sentences. If I put a lot of focus on getting things done – which I have – then my process and viewpoint should eventually evolve.

I’m now a few months on from when I started my research and I have to be honest, I didn’t find it. Through countless hours of reading, and planning and testing, no magical or mind-blowing solution revealed itself. Not one experiment in the last few months made me a productivity guru. I really wish something had — this blog post would be a lot more popular.

My lack of results wasn’t through lack of trying. My list of tactics and ideas was pretty exhaustive. Though most of what I tried helped in some way, I still never found what I was looking for: A productivity method that would make hard work easier to overcome and thus increase my output. I did however, after spending more time then I would like to admit reading books, watching videos and looking into the lives of successful people, come to a conclusion that I’m satisfied with.

If I had to sum that conclusion up in one sentence then I would say something like this…

There is not a productivity method in the world that can help people as much as they can help themselves.

That’s it. Nothing too flash or (admittedly) interesting. It probably doesn’t make you very excited for the rest of this article either, so let’s hype it up a little. I elaborated on how I came to this conclusion with a friend and he sent me this email a few days later:

And now, if you’re interested, I’ll elaborate on it for you.

Here’s How It Started Out

Before I continue, I want to first say that though my writing style from here on out makes me seem very confident about what I have ‘discovered’, be careful not to interpret this as me wanting to convince you of something. I’m not trying to make you believe me. There is enough research in here to help you come to your own conclusions about whether or not what I’m saying will benefit your personal journey.

Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, let me tell you about one of the first methods I decided to try. The six-step process found in Think and Grow Rich. If you haven’t read this book already then I highly recommend you do so. It’s free, since its copyright has expired. Written in 1937, the book is a published account of what its author, Napoleon Hill, discovered after 500 interviews over 25 years on the topic of what makes people successful (rich).

The entire book is written around Napoleon’s Six Step process to getting whatever you want out of life, which is basically as follows:

• Step One: Fix your mind on an exact amount of money that you desire
• Step Two: Determine exactly what you intend to give in return for this sum
• Step Three: Decide on a date you’ll possess this amount of money
• Step Four: Create a definite plan for how you’re going to carry out this desire and begin at once
• Step Five: Write a clear, concise statement of the money you wish to acquire, when you wish to have it, what you intend to do in return, and how exactly you’re going to do that
• Step Six: Read your written statement twice daily. Once in the morning and once at night. As you do this, see yourself already in possession of the riches you seek

It’s a nice little formula, and he sells it very well. I followed the six-step process for over 30 days and found that while it felt good to have a much clearer focus of where I was heading, I still wasn’t having any fun or ‘easy productivity’ on the way. Work was still a challenge.

One key theme throughout the book that Napoleon stresses is how important it is to have a ‘Burning Desire’ for your goals. In his words:

“The ease with which lack of persistence may be conquered will depend entirely upon the intensity of one’s desire. The starting point of all achievement is desire. Keep this constantly in mind. Weak desires bring weak results, just as a small amount of fire makes a small amount of heat. If you find yourself lacking in persistence, this weakness may be remedied by building a stronger fire under your desires.”

I especially liked his focus on the idea that, simply, if you want $10,000 then you don’t get it by wanting or needing, but instead by providing $10,000 worth of value. Though the book didn’t provide the ultimate solution I was looking for, I came away with a new perspective that I think helped me clarify some concepts later on.

One of my favourite productivity methods has been, for a long time now, the Pomodoro Method. I’ve talked about it once on this blog when I stated that the method basically consists of working on something for 25 minutes (a Pomodoro) at a time. Though there is a little more to it than that.

I used this on and off through the months, finding it useful on a lot of days when I wasn’t really into the task at hand and ‘just another 25 minutes’ didn’t sound too bad in my head.

I had heard through Napoleon Hill and countless others that visualisation was crucial, so I would also sit down and vividly imagine already having what I want. The idea behind this being that I’ll create a more emotional (and thus stronger) connection with my goals and be more likely to achieve them. It’s something I’ve tried in the past but had never really stuck with it. It’s easier to say what the results of this were not rather than what they were. They were not what I was looking for.

I tried a few more things like reading out loud my ‘Dream Day’, using EFT and the Sedona Method on my procrastination and a few other things. All of them, as I said, having their benefits, but none convincing me that I should stop looking for other solutions.

Through my research I came across Jim Rohn, a veteran speaker and author in the personal development world who is sadly no longer with us. I really connected with his no-BS approach to self improvement and quickly went through three of his books; one just dedicated to some of his best quotes. He put a lot of emphasis on the fact that we are our own value and totally responsible for our current situation in life.

“If we lost everything tomorrow, we could easily replace it all. Why? Because we acquired those things as a result of what we are. Assuming “what we are” has not changed; in time we will attract back into our lives everything we may have lost. The same applied knowledge, the same attitude, the same effort, and the same plan will always produce the same results. This fundamental should give us cause for both elation and alarm.”

Think of Steve Jobs being fired from Apple and starting up Pixar or Donald Trump losing his entire fortune and building it back up a few years later.

Like Napoleon, Jim opened me up to more ideas and concepts, but I was still just gaining a lot of knowledge. No matter how much I visualised what I wanted, learned new concepts or tried certain productivity tactics, I wasn’t getting an ‘Aha’ moment. Maybe there wasn’t one out there.

In the end I resigned to the fact that this productivity ‘secret’ solving is a really, really long road. I could be researching the subject for years and not come up with some perfect answer that I’m satisfied with. So, I stopped and looked at what I had managed to achieve in all this time whilst trying to find my answer.

That’s when something clicked.

Though getting things done had not been easy, I had managed to achieve two things that I’m quite proud of. One of them will be revealed next year, and the other was this very article. I realised that the journey to finding an answer had actually been the most productive thing I did. I didn’t need some productivity tactic or tip to start to get going, and there wasn’t even a guarantee that I would get an answer. I read dozens of books, watched countless videos and made pages upon pages of notes. Yet, doing all of that was really easy.

All I can say about the things I completed with much more ease (and to a higher standard) is that I really enjoyed doing them. I know that’s probably not the answer you were looking for. And trust me when I say it’s not the one I wanted to find. But the science does back me up.

Introducing Myelin: Your New Best Friend

After having read a few books on getting things done, my Kindle suggested that I might enjoy The Talent Code. One reviewer described it as being like taking Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers (where he highlights that many professionals have taken 10,000 hours of practice to become immensely talented) and looking at the science behind his findings. Early on, author Daniel Coyle introduces something called Myelin, which I found really interesting.

Myelin, neurologists have recently discovered, is basically the key to all human talking, reading and learning skills. If you view every human movement or thought as an electrical impulse travelling through a circuit of neurons, then think of myelin like the insulation which wraps around these fibres and increases their signal strength. “The more we fire a particular circuit, the more myelin optimizes that circuit, and the stronger, faster, and more fluent our moments and thoughts become” recaps Coyle.

He then looks at research by Simon Clifford into why South America (specifically Brazil) is a hotbed for footballing talent. His findings showed that the popular way of playing football there, known as Futebol de Salão, had a big influence. The game is played on a small court and uses a ball that is half the size of a regular football yet weighs twice as much, so rarely bounces.

A study by the University of Liverpool found that Futebol de Salão players touch the ball six times more per minute than people training with a normal ball on a regular pitch. Futebol de Salão players were able to wrap their football talent circuits in more myelin over a shorter period of time. It also meant that when they played on a full-sized pitch, players felt like they had “acres of space”.

The book also highlights the story of the Brontë sisters, and their love for character creation and writing short stories as children just to keep themselves entertained. Juliet Barker, a six year curator at the Brontë Parsonage Museum revealed that the sisters wrote “twenty-two little books averaging eighty pages each in one fifteen-month period”. That’s a lot of writing.

Coyle once again links this back to Myelin, noting his belief that the sisters’ talent was developed through little more than constant practice. To add even more legs to that theory, Barker says that “The first little books weren’t just amateurish – a given, since their authors were so young – they lacked any signs of incipient genius. Far from original creations, they were bald imitations of magazine articles and books of the day.”

Many of you will know that Charlotte Brontë went on to write literature classic Jane Eyre with her sister Emily producing another, Wuthering Heights.

Coyle comes to the conclusion that passion and persistence are the key ingredients of talent and success. Why? “Because wrapping myelin around a big circuit requires immense energy and time. If you don’t love it, you’ll never work hard enough to be great.”

Once again I found myself getting back to point of just ‘doing what you love’.

“Does This Fit My Reality?”

That’s what I asked myself when I went through research by Daniel Pink, author of Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. I had come across Drive a few years ago and remembered that the ideas found inside were fascinating, but if I had to read it again, then maybe it just hadn’t included what I needed to hear the first time around.

One of the main concepts presented in Drive, backed by numerous studies, is the idea that if a task is purely mechanical (i.e. you do this and get that), then offering someone an increased salary will lead to increased output. If the task however requires even the smallest form of rudimentary cognitive skill, that same increased salary will actually lead to a decrease in performance.

Pink pointed out that the three things which really motivated us were Autonomy (being self-directed), Mastery (getting better at something) and Purpose (why you’re doing something).

When Pink talked about autonomy and how important it is that we’re self directed, I couldn’t help but think of this quote by Robert Benchley: “Anyone can do any amount of work providing it isn’t the work he is supposed to be doing at that moment.”

Not being totally susceptible to ideas just because they’re written in a book, I decided to test the concept based on what I know of my own reality. Was I motivated to do things that weren’t being driven by money? The first ‘Yes’ that came to mind was a house I had built for a friends cat last year when I was bored. Nobody had asked me to build it (autonomy), I had never built one before so I was going to learn how (mastery) and the cat would finally have a place to sit outside (purpose).

Not the greatest looking ‘house’, I know, but he seemed happy enough.

I then thought of something else I had done recently: Split-testing signs and sales tactics for homeless people here in Africa to try and help some of them sustain themselves. Nobody told me to go out and do it (autonomy), I was highly curious about which signs would result in physical sales (mastery) and I had a purpose to help the people I was working with to get off the streets. It once again fit the model.

If you’re interested in how that went, I’ll write a bit more about it on a future post. I do remember at one point a guy I was helping said: “Why are you doing this? You’re losing money” (we were selling R6.50 newspapers for R5 to help increase his confidence). I said “Don’t worry, I’m getting something out of it as well”. I meant it, but I wasn’t sure what I was getting out of it at the time. I feel like I have a better idea of this now thanks to refreshing myself on the AMP model.

I could even look at hugely successful and talented people in their fields and the model would fit their circumstances as well. Jonathan Ive, the head designer at Apple, gets an extra $10m in company stock every single year. Do you think he still needs to cash his pay-cheques? I’m pretty certain he has an abundance of autonomy, mastery and purpose in what he’s doing.

Or what about Doug Morris, the 72-year-old head of Sony Music who helped to create Vevo, the music video player which has a partnership with Youtube. He’s now set on the goal of making Sony the most ‘pre-eminent’ music agency of the next decade. People 10 years his junior are preparing for their retirement years so they can relax and do nothing that looks like work. He’s aiming to transform a huge company from an office each day.

Finally, the model could even account for times when I was doing what I love but then suddenly stopped enjoying that thing. In pretty much every case it was because my autonomy (my self-direction over the work at hand) had been taken away from me. An example being when I was working as a social media manager and loving what I was doing, but had clients that were so rigid and intimidated by the web that I couldn’t implement 90% of the ideas I was so passionate about.

With this science, theory and personal testing behind me, I can now assume an interesting idea: If Tiger Woods had started to play tennis at three years old instead of golf and really enjoyed it (thanks to AMP), he would be one of the best tennis players in the world today. He would have enough time to build up the necessary Myelin for that particular skill and enough motivation to help him keep building it.

One More Thing.

Was the only answer I had gotten out of this entire research just: ‘Do what you love as much as you can’?

In a way, yes. I shot off an email to Guardian journalist Andrea and asked if, like me, she gets some weird satisfaction from writing a sentence that just fits? She confirmed almost instantly, complete with an example sentence to go with it. Based on the science we’ve just covered it should now be no surprise to you that she’s really good at what she does.

Since I tell people who ask what I do that my life is just like those guys from The Social Network (just kidding?) I can’t help but think about Mark Zuckerberg who – despite whether or not TSN was an accurate portrayal of reality – must have been having the time of his life creating Facebook.

I thought about someone else I had researched, Tony Hawk, and found that the basis for all of his success was nothing more than really loving being on a skateboard. When asked in an interview how long it will be until he stops skating he replied ‘When I’m physically unable’.

In a way, no. I have friends that seem to love activities just as much as I do, if not more. One is obsessed with home decor. She can find the quirkiest pieces in the most mundane shops, wont settle for anything other than a certain item once she’s seen it and she’ll even call friends in spontaneous moments to share her excitement about a particular discovery.

I have no doubt that an interior design company somewhere would be lucky to have her. They would get so much more value out of her than any staff who are clearly just ‘going through the motions’.

I have another friend from Liverpool who loves to cook. She is picky about every fine detail when it comes to food preparation. Every meal will be like some big event she has to share online. When someone is having a party she’ll nominate herself to be caterer and go all out. Yet, she currently spends her days as an assistant in an accountants office.

At the start of this post I ‘hyped it up’ by showing you an email from a friend who had been invited to go for a job interview. It all came about when he mentioned one day that he had found a way to speed up the process of something at work, but his manager wasn’t interested when he tried to explain it. I told him what I thought about that, so he documented what the change was (which he thought would be valuable to the company) and sent it to his managers manager.

Then he received an email, inviting him to interview for a higher position in the company. Did he get the job? Sadly not. He was asked to perform a lot of tasks (IT related) that he couldn’t perform. But that’s okay. He now knows what it takes to get the position that he wants so he’s learning the skills he doesn’t have.

The reason he didn’t do anything before talking to me is the same reason my food and decor obsessed friends will probably never spend much time in the food or interior design industries: They think that have too much time and too little permission. They’re not consciously aware that our time on this planet is slowly but surely slipping away, and they have full control over what they want to do about it. If they are, then it’s just not important enough to them.

Think back to Tiger Woods getting the necessary Myelin to be skilled in tennis (instead of golf). We’ve deduced that the only way (okay, easiest way) he can become skilled enough is to love it, because it takes so much effort. Is that enough to make him one of the best players in the world? I would argue against it. Unless you actually have a drive to achieve something with that skill – like winning competitions – and commit to keep going until you do so then you’ll just be another hobbyist.

Steve Jobs was going to turn his love for electronics and building things into a computer. Bill Gates was going to turn his love for programming into Microsoft. Arnold “gym is better than sex” Schwarznegger was going to turn his love for the working out into Mr Olympia titles. 9 year old Keiron Williamson, who’s being dubbed as ‘Mini Monet’, began painting when he was just 7 and took a major liking to it. He turned that into an exhibition and recently sold 33 paintings within 30 minutes. With the earnings from the show he purchased a £150,000 house for his parents.

Unless you decide to do something with your passion, how can you expect it to go anywhere? When things aren’t quite working out, which will sometimes be the case, that love for what you’re doing is there to help keep you going. This article, for example, was a huge mental challenge to put together, but that’s not to say I don’t enjoy the process as much as I love hitting Publish.

Whether or not you put any meaning on this life and whether you decide to ‘achieve’ something with it has to be 100% your decision. Why? Because this is 100% your responsibility. Maybe you can try and utilise the science for something you don’t love. Maybe you’ll end up liking it and get good at it, similar to how there’s probably a specific item of food you didn’t used to enjoy but now you do. Maybe. I don’t know; and I’m not sure why you’re willing to find out.

Sitting in front of a computer screen gathering statistics for a blog post is on one hand just the most boring, unglamorous looking thing on the planet. But to the person who wants to be doing it it’s also just the most awesome thing. Ever. If you can’t say that about the work you’re doing, in and of itself, then you’re probably doing the wrong thing.

It’s possible that Napoleon Hill came to the same discovery, and then just added some action steps to make his book far more interesting and valuable to the average person. Maybe he realised that if you’ve found the thing you truly loved and attached a goal to that, the ‘BURNING DESIRE’ and the avoidance of bad habits is just going to come as a byproduct of the first step.

Did Thomas Edison have to say I want X money by X date to himself morning and night? Or did he just have a real passion for figuring things out and those 10,000 attempts at creating the first commercial lightbulb weren’t down to anything more than loving what he was doing and setting a goal he would never give up on? The fact that he is the owner of 1,093 US patents make me think that’s pretty likely.

I noticed that on the journey to figuring this out, entirely new procrastination habits came into play. For instance if I was focusing on one thing then how I totally waste my time (be knowingly unproductive) was not the same when I was focused on another task. After learning more about Myelin I had to wonder whether procrastination is a just a myelin-dense habit I have which needs to be overwritten.

It’s not like you’ve never done it before…

“A genius looks at something that others are stuck on and gets the world unstuck. A genius brings human insight to a problem and solves it in a new way. A genius writes the manual instead of following it. We’ve all done that. We’ve all found a shortcut, led a discussion, made a connection. We’ve all solved interesting problems, at least once in our lives. No one is a genius all the time. The goal is to be a genius once. And then perhaps again. Small steps.” – Seth Godin

What’s Next

If you think the following action steps here are really important then you either just haven’t quite got this concept yet or I’m such a bad writer that I can’t make a point in 5,000 words. My apologies. They’re just here because I think they’re going to help save you some time once you have the first ‘step’ in place.

Every in-depth piece on productivity comes equipped with action-steps, but these are totally secondary to the person that is following them.

Know the Affect of Your Surroundings

Your surroundings (friends, education, feedback) are a huge factor in determining what you know and what you think is right or wrong. Walk around the streets of Vietnam, even on days where it’s 35C at 70% humidity and you’ll see people outside with umbrellas, wearing so much clothing that they don’t reveal an inch of skin. This is purely so they don’t get a sun tan (being whiter in many Asian country implies wealth). Walk around the streets of any big western city and you’ll easily find tanning salons so that people can get darker.

In the West your typical ‘WoW nerd’ (World of Warcraft game player) is often thought to be wasting their lives but in the East, millions of people are trying to become professional gamers. Corporations like World Cyber Games, a South Korean company, are sometimes paying out up to $2,500,000 in prize money at events.

It’s likely that you had zero input on which of these examples is ‘normal’ to you. And overall that’s a good thing, because being able to adapt to society has allowed humans to evolve and survive, but where is current society leading us?

The average person, out of all 400 million+ people who log into Facebook every single day, visits the site 40 times per month and spends roughly 23 minutes there each time. And that’s only tracking people who go to the website, not the many more who are using related apps throughout the day.

Youtube isn’t much different, with the average person visiting 14 times per month and spending 25 minutes there each time. That’s not counting the views of videos embedded into other sites, which I imagine is much, much higher. And this is just the internet.

I heard a statistic a few years ago that said the average American adult watches 4 hours of TV per day. I guessed that would have declined a lot since the rise of the internet, but Nielsen research from last year states the figure is currently at 4 and a half hours.

There’s nothing wrong with TV, Facebook or Youtube of course. They’re awesome. I’m sure if you woke up tomorrow and they no longer existed you would feel some loss. If not, you would at least hear someone moaning about their disappearance. All I’m trying to get you to see is that current society and what it’s normal to spend your time on is not very conducive to productivity.

If you do decide that you want more from life, not many people are going to make this change easy for you and there are plenty of distractions that will happily get in the way. It’s also very possible that you’ll drift away from a lot of the things and people you’ve always been around. If this happens, then just accept that it’s normal.

I like how Sam Keen’s father put this, as he outlines in his book Fire in the Belly: “The last thing he said before I left was probably the single most important bit of advice I ever got about being a man. “Sam,” he said, “there are two questions a man must ask himself: The first is ‘Where am I going?’ and the second is ‘Who will go with me?’ If you ever get these questions in the wrong order you are in trouble.”

Get on the Right Side of Myelin

“Myelin wraps – it doesn’t unwrap. Once a skill circuit is insulated, you can’t un-insulate it (except through age or diseases). That’s why habits are hard to break. The only way to change them is to build new habits by repeating new behaviours– by myelinating new circuits.” – Daniel Coyle

With this in mind, it’s clear to see that the sooner you start forcing yourself to implement the right habits the better. During this experiment I went from checking Facebook a few times per day to not at all (I deactivated my account) with total ease. The first few days took a little conscious effort, but after that I wouldn’t even think about it.

The other success I managed to achieve, which I said I would reveal next year, also required that I do certain things at specific times throughout the day. It was hard to get the motivation (and memory) going for the first few weeks but after that I was doing things pretty much on autopilot. I’m sure you’ve experienced many similar things yourself.

Make Your Call

Yeah, you. You reading this article right now, probably propping your head up with your left hand (hah). There aren’t many things I will claim to know with certainty on this topic, but there is at least one. The decision to get whatever it is that you want, if made, has to become your number one priority. You can’t just mix it into a group of things you’re trying to achieve. It can’t just be a thing it has to be the thing.

If you just kind of want it, don’t expect anything more then just kind of wanted it results.

Ultimately, this whole thing to me is about looking at the type of person you want to become. Looking at what you’ll accept from yourself in this cosy little existance we call life. At the beginning of this article I said that you shouldn’t keep reading if you like how you spend your days. Based on that, I should be right in stating that you’re not doing what you want to be doing. For me, that isn’t acceptable. What about you?

In Drive Daniel Pink also looked at companies which give employees one day per week or 20% of their time (Google) to work on whatever they want. In these periods people usually fix long outstanding issues and come up with some great ideas. It’s ironic that most people will let their employer give them freedom of direction yet they won’t give it to themselves.

In one of Jim Rohn’s videos he said one of the biggest realisations he had on the path to becoming a millionaire was provided by a mentor of his “Your income is directly related to your philosophy. Not the economy.” We’re at a point in time where the world economy is in a huge mess; starting a new journey in a totally new direction is the last on most peoples minds. Just don’t forget that there will be someone, somewhere, getting through whatever happens and coming out of it in a much better position.

How’s that for a perspective that is likely to take you somewhere?

You may have reached this point and – using your own ideas and whatever information I provided – came to a totally different conclusion to me or none at all. If that’s the case, then make sure you figure out what to believe about productivity, purpose and motivation for yourself. Go and get an answer that’s likely to change something in how you spend your time. If you somehow discover there’s not point to doing anything and you should just keep watching TV or browsing Reddit all day, then at least be able to say that you found out. Don’t let it be the case that you’ve read almost 6,000 words and learned nothing.

You can decide to look and you can decide to start, or you can keep putting things off until you don’t have a choice anymore. The clock is ticking, but I’ll pause it for a few minutes so you can leave a comment. After that I’m going to let go of the second hand…

For a long time I wondered what it would take to fill that gap. What would increase the number of people who follow advice in this space and actually achieve some form of success. Then the answer came to me. Or rather, she did.

Her name was Andrea, and with just a few emails she inadvertently helped me realise where I think those teaching (myself included) may be going wrong. The thing is, these case studies, examples and strategies are very rarely based on someone’s first website. The people behind them have usually had years of experience in this field, and as such, it’s near impossible to know exactly what beginners are struggling with or even how they’re dealing with all of these new concepts and ideas.

Since the maps out there clearly aren’t getting people to their desired destinations, I’m going to draw a new one.

On that note, it’s time to announce my next project. I say announce, and not launch, because I’m not the one launching it. In fact, I’m privileged to say that a media company you’ve no doubt heard of gets those honors. They’re called the Guardian, and you can learn more about my newest project in their newspaper today (September 3rd). It’s the main feature of their Work section.

If you can’t get your hands on the physical copy (blurry pic – thanks to my sister), then you can view the article on their website over here. How’s that for an introduction?

1 Woman, 1 Blog, 6 Months

That’s the headline you’ll see sprawled across the website I’m launching. I’ll link to it in a moment, but you should really go and read that article first if you haven’t already. I’ll still be here. It really is better that you check it out before continuing.

If you read the entire article you’ll see that I’m launching a site which will maximise your whole experience with this case study, aptly named: BloggingCaseStudy.com. It will tell you more about the project and become home to all of the extra guides, videos, links and everything else that we can’t fit in future issues of the Guardian column.

“Wait, a column?“. I’m anticipating you have a few questions already, so I’ll answer them all in one place. Before I do that though, I have something I need to say…

What Really Makes This Project Unique (This is Important)

Though I do hope that we can help a lot of people to start making money online, it’s definitely not my only focus with this project. After all, I can’t think of one highly-successful blogger I know who would tell me that they just did it all for the money. I recently read an article on TechCrunch which highlighted how upset players of Slide’s ‘SuperPoke Pets‘ game are after news that the Google-owned company are closing it down. Reading the comments section was actually quite sad, with hundreds of people saying how much the game meant to them and how much money they had spent playing it.

A few stories that really got to me were from women who had disabilities and thus were bed-ridden 24/7. Many of them described the game as a way for them to be creative and connect with other people around the world. In their unfortunate situation, it genuinely gave them something to look forward to and enjoy during the day.

I couldn’t help but think how much blogging also gives people those opportunities. The ability to share ideas with people across the globe who are passionate about the same things as you is pretty amazing. Just this Wednesday I noticed my friend Steve was in Madrid and told him to connect with another friend, Adam (a presenter for Real Madrid TV). Both people I met through blogging. Steve later tweeted:

There isn’t much I need to say about the creative possibilities that blogging brings besides that it literally gives you a blank canvas to fill with all the words, pictures and videos you want. And more importantly, it lets you do that in your style.

As you’ll read in the Guardian article, blogging for a full-time income isn’t for everyone. More than anything I just want to show people that they can build something they’re proud of and passionate about. I’ve realised how rare it is for people to find things that make them come alive, and if I can help just 100 people find that this is something they enjoy doing, then they’re going to change the lives of a lot more people in turn.

Since I am drawing a new map, I do have to keep all of these things in mind if it’s to be the ultimate resource on this subject. Not only will I be sharing unique advice on how to grow a blog (and documenting the case study) but I’ll also be learning so much as a teacher that I can improve what I’m sharing. And of course, something like this just wouldn’t be complete if you don’t try and help people with the mindsets they need – and pitfalls they need to avoid – when it comes to succeeding in this space.

I want this not only to be something you’re interested in but something you would pass on to your brother / sister / cousin / grandmother and be sure that they’re getting taken by the hand, shown what to do, and helped with their problems along the way. Some members of my family are going to be joining in; hopefully enough evidence that this project is not something I’m approaching halfheartedly.

Never-Asked-Before Questions

There’s an FAQ page over on BloggingCaseStudy.com, so make sure you check that out. I gathered that many of you would be interested in hearing the finer details so I’ve decided to share some more information in a mock Q & A format.

“Okay, so, a column?”

Yep. Not only are the Guardian mentioning myself and other bloggers in today’s feature article, they’re also going to be documenting this project every other Saturday, for six months (!), in their Work section. That’s 13 issues in total.

“How did that come about?”

On February 23rd (yeah, this kind of thing takes a long time) I received an email from a woman who pitched the idea of working with me. Specifically, she wanted me to help her grow a successful blog in the public eye. The email was very long, but the “Can Glen Allsopp help me make money?” subject line definitely caught my attention and prompted me to read the whole thing.

After getting my head around the idea, I said I was interested and she had my backing if she wanted to pitch it to any publications. Though I thought the concept was great, I was somewhat pessimistic about whether anyone would be interested in running with it. Thankfully our first choice publication loved the idea, and once we had all of the specifics worked out about what we were going to do, it was given the go-ahead on July 14th.

Ever since then we’ve been doing everything necessary to get this whole thing up and running. I should add that we’ve never met, making this more of a challenge, but that hasn’t stopped us from chatting on the phone and exchanging literally hundreds of emails.

“Why is all of this free?” or “What’s in it for you?”

You must be new here. There are no hidden surprises. When I said in my niche rockstar post that I really want to put my all into projects and do the work that matters, this is the type of thing I was talking about.

I like to think that I’ll do other things in my life worthy of a newspaper column, but I can’t deny this is a pretty exciting opportunity for me too. You know that feeling you get when you give someone a gift, expecting nothing in return. It feels good, right? Well, times that by a few thousand and you feel even better.

Of course, I’m not the only one working here, and the right people will definitely be highlighted along the way for their efforts. Andrea deserves full credit for the entire concept, after all.

“How do we know she’s a beginner?”

Heh, this one is easy (sorry Andrea!):

“How did you get that domain?”

I was surprised as everyone else when I found the domain available to register. Good timing, I guess.

“Will I learn anything new?”

Hell yes. I’m finally bringing together the flaws I find in current blogging models with the benefits of other strategies I use and creating what will eventually become the most effective blogging strategy I know. I’ve been testing my ideas in multiple niches over the last few months to prepare for this and things are going far better than I expected, though with some surprising results.

Of course, in the beginning, the content we cover is going to be very beginner orientated. If you run a blog already – even a popular one – I still think I have a few things to teach you, but you’ll just have to wait a little bit longer until I get to those lessons.

I’ll make sure it’s worth the wait.

“What’s the case study website?”

It would be kind of pointless to do a case study and instantly send thousands of visitors over to the website we’re working on. If someone else can’t replicate it, then we’re not going to do it. The site is not indexed in Google so shouldn’t be too easy for anyone to find right now. If you do ‘discover it’ then awesome. It means the case study is going well, but please keep it under wraps until we mention it publicly ourselves.

At the end of the day we can disregard certain traffic sources from our stats if this were to happen, but it would be nice not having to worry about it.

“What will you do after the six months?”

Ideally I would like to let everyone do their own thing for a few months, and come back to me with any new challenges, questions or problems they’re having a long the way. Then I can update the site once again, and leave it as an open resource for anyone in the world to freely benefit from.

“Finally, Glen, how do you feel about the whole thing?”

If you want to become the world’s best BMX rider, you don’t learn two tricks and then perform nothing but those for the rest of your career. It becomes too easy, and your growth stalls. You need to keep pushing your own limits if you want to improve at something. The challenge isn’t always fun or easy, but it makes the end result (improved skills) even sweeter.

I’ve been ready for a new challenge for a while and honestly couldn’t think of anything harder than this. Doing a case study takes enough work as it is, and I respect those who try them, but actually having someone else follow your steps and highlight their progress. I think that’s turning the difficulty factor up a notch. Not to mention the fact that she will have to write the Guardian updates at the same time and I’ll be busy working on the website.

I’m excited, slightly nervous, and feel under a ton of pressure (though I’m sure it’s mostly self-inflicted). Getting this out there – since it has been a secret for so long – also feels a bit like a weight has been lifted off my shoulders. Like the first paragraph is written, and now it’s time to turn the page.

Thanks for sticking here after my blogging absence, but you can hopefully see what has been keeping me so busy. Thanks to Thomas, Jeff and Dragos for helping me with some early feedback. Also, I apologise for turning off comments – I know how annoying that can be – but I’m certain I’m going to be really busy today, so if you have any feedback, please send me an email over any form of communication.

If it’s any consolation, I guarantee your mail will be read: HQ -at- BloggingCaseStudy.com

P.S. After you go through the Blogging Case Study opt-in (like that cartoon?) you’ll see links to some other blogs. It’s rare that this industry gets a chance to do something good in public, so I want to link out to even more of you during the course of the case study. If you’re making a difference in your niche, send me a mail.

And if you have any other suggestions on how I can best represent this industry – on top of the zero ads and zero affiliate links approach that I’m taking – then send those over too.

Even though there are thousands upon thousands of micro-niches and active communities discussing the most peculiar topics, there’s still only room for a handful of ‘rockstars’ to emerge from each of them. There are always going to be fewer influencers than there are people to be influenced. That’s common sense, not helped by the fact that gaining a following isn’t some paint-by-numbers process, and it certainly doesn’t happen overnight.

If you’ve read ‘Fooled by Randomness’ then you may believe that most success is just luck. That there are just so many people in the world that there simply has to be a small number who are wealthy, famous and successful.

Maybe my own desire to be part of something bigger is kicking in its defense mechanism, but I like to think success is waiting for the people who most consistently take right action towards their goals. For that reason I believe anyone has the potential to become a Niche Rockstar / Influencer / A-Lister / YouGetTheIdea.

The Benefits of Rockstardom

There are many benefits to becoming a Rockstar in your niche and having some level of influence. The first obvious result of having a large audience is that you instantly have access to connections all over the globe. I could go to most countries in the world now and quickly find people who would be happy to show me around. Before I continue, I want to say that I don’t think of myself as an A-Lister, but the following example is relevant.

When I was in Amsterdam a couple of weeks ago I wrote about it on Facebook and Twitter. Within 24 hours I had five requests for meet-ups, a conference invite, and a woman offering to cook for me. All of which, of course, were much appreciated.

For some people, becoming a ‘Niche Rockstar’ can get them their dream job offers. It happened to me in 2007 and it’s just happened to tech blogger Louis Gray who, this week, announced he is now managing the social team for Google+.

For others, being a rockstar gives them enough of an audience to live from selling their own products or services. This is a path many of you are following, and I have to say…it’s a good time to be walking.

Ultimately, your increasing audience gives you an increasing influence which results in increasing feedback. Increased feedback results in increased opportunities which then continue to present you with a bigger and bigger megaphone in the spaces you want to work. In other words, you just get a lot more of everything.

Now that you can see what you benefits of aiming for rockstar status (or not, as I’ll cover in a second) actually are, I’ll say one last thing before I show you how to do that. Becoming an influencer is not about having 100,000 Twitter followers or constantly getting on the homepage of Reddit. It’s really about having an impact on your own niche community, however small or obscure it may be.

Outside the world of celebrity gossip, it’s nice to see that the true A-Listers are often the people doing the most good.

A recent comment that made me smile was on a Wired article showing how MIT researchers had invented a single drug that could cure most diseases. It said: “These are the type of people we should be getting autographs from.” I agree.

Why I’ll Always Be “Better” Than You…

…and you’ll always be better than me. The greatest mentality I think you can have when it comes to increasing your audience and influence is that of an Underdog. Some people ask me why my Twitter bio, for the last six months, has read “Z-List Blogger with 21 readers”. The answer, is that it’s just a simple reminder for myself that there’s always room to grow and improve what I’m sharing.

It’s important that I emphasise you should only have the mentality of an underdog, because underdogs are thought to have the smallest chance to succeed at something, and you don’t actually want to be in that position. Adopting the mindset of an underdog comes with a number of benefits.

First of all, you can make the mistakes that need to be made on the way to making miracles. Since the underdog obviously doesn’t have some holier than thou view about themselves they’re not going to be so worried about people’s reactions to things. They’re not going to be so worried about screwing up.

For example, the guy who thinks he is perfect with women is actually probably too scared to go and approach the hottest girl in the bar because he doesn’t want to lose the belief he has about himself. The guy that adopts an underdog mentality, on the other hand, looks at everything as a chance to learn and grow. He goes and talks to the girl, and more often than not the interaction will be a good one. If she gives the ‘why are you even talking to me’ look then it makes no difference to him.

For many of you right now, it’s probably easy to mentally view yourself as an underdog as you may literally be one. For those of you who have had some level of success and find this mindset harder to adopt, then I’ll just say that your goals aren’t high enough. If you set a target to do more public speaking this year than Tony Robbins, then I’m sure the mentality will come to you with ease.

My own goal, as I’ve mentioned a few times, is to try and produce the best content available on the topic of internet marketing. Why wouldn’t I set a goal like that? Even if I fall short, the bar is set so high that what I produce is still (hopefully) great work.

Steve Jobs touched on what I think is the core essence of the underdog at his 2005 Standford University Commencement Address:

“Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself.”

The underdog mentality helps give you all the characteristics that people genuinely like to see in others. No matter how much of an Apple fan boy you are, you likely wouldn’t mind a young group of impoverished kids in India making the next big thing in the smartphone space. In fact, you’d probably cheer them on without even meeting or knowing anything about them other than their goals and aspirations.

Finally, the underdog mentality ensures that you’re (rightly so) always learning more about your industry, the world around you, and yourself. To the underdog there’s never too much they can know about their niche. In fact, that’s my very next point…

Make Sure You Know More Than Anyone about X

If you see someone ask Tony Robbins a tough personal-development question, he always has a fast, relevant and useful reply. Mark Cuban is watching the streaming and broadcasting space like nobody else, even after making over $1bn from his related projects. Warren Buffett, the world’s richest man, doesn’t even work on a computer, but instead looks though dozens of papers that his assistants hand him on the stock market every single day.

And if that little speech doesn’t convince you that knowing your industry (and who’s in it) is incredibly important then I’ll add that every big company you can think of have staff dedicated to doing nothing but watching their competition and the markets they operate in. Heck, even your local water company are probably paying someone.

As a personal example, I’ve only had my Amazon Kindle for a couple of weeks yet I’ve already taken hundreds of notes on different books that are relevant to my interests:

I’m a total knowledge junkie when it comes to the subject of marketing. I’m mostly looking for the little ‘golden nugget’ ideas or well-written concepts, like the two you see above, rather than overall strategies (which I prefer to form myself). I don’t do this because I feel I have to, but because I just…love it. When you find the industry for you, you’ll feel the exact same way.

And as not so personal example, let me try and do things the ‘ViperChill way’ and get down and dirty with some stats, rather than making any guesses. For this example I’ve picked the totally random niche of ‘Green blogs’ and decided to analyse the market to show you the types of things I look for. I did this a couple of days ago, within a 45 minute time frame, and learned a ton about the industry with ease.

To begin, I went on over to the Green section of Technorati and opened up their list of top blogs. Opening them in new tabs, I could quickly see that Technorati’s top picks were pretty much spot on when it comes to identifying the industry leaders. The only ranking mistake on the part of Technorati was for Inhabitat, which on my quick examination really appears to be the biggest blog in the niche, and not the 8th largest.

I learned that:

• DeSmogBlog, although one of the smallest that I analysed, was chosen as one of Time Magazine’s Top 25 Blogs for 2011. This instantly shows that there’s a positive aura around the niche.
• Hundreds of different industries regularly reference green blogs in news sites, blogs and forums. Three of the five sites I looked at had in excess of 280,000 backlinks.
• All sites had more Twitter followers than Facebook fans, showing how popular the niche is in those networks. Three of the sites actually had in excess of 45,000 Twitter followers.
• CleanTechnica, while appearing small with just 1,665 Facebook fans and a 45K Alexa rank, actually has a very impressive 15,000 RSS subscribers. More signs that this is an industry that people like to follow.
• According to Compete, the biggest of the five is ThinkProgress.org with in excess of 450,000 unique (US) visitors per month with Grist.org in third, reportedly home to 240,000 unique (US) visitors per month.

It’s not just the stats that I want to look at, but the actual websites to see how they’re laid out, what topics they’re covering, how often they post and so on. The simple task of actually going through other sites in your niche should be enough to start giving you a few ideas.

In less than an hour I’m equipped with post ideas, design inspiration, proof that there’s money to be made if I were to operate in this industry and a clear indicator that Twitter should definitely be a social focus of mine. I also know that people in this niche don’t comment on some blogs very often, but there are ways to get some community activity:

I’ll save the contents of that post for those in the Green space who want to do a little research ;]

The most common form of monetisation was definitely ads, with DeSmogBlog being an exception and directing their traffic towards either the owners’ book or an economy report. All of the sites have multiple authors and write quite a few posts per day; something that would be difficult to replicate if you were doing things on your own.

Another job of this market research is to identify gaps that others may have overlooked. Some opportunities that came to mind include:

• Performing the data analysis and making the stats that so many of them quote on a daily basis instead of joining the noise by quoting them.
• Using a comments system like Disqus to stand out (where people can comment with multiple social profiles) instead of using a separate registration page as many of them require.
• Promoting a DIY Green guide which no other blogs are. Just from my observations I can see they’ve been popular on Clickbank.
• Creating pro-bono environment infographics and in return having my site and (possible graphic design services) being promoted

There are many more points I could make, but I’m sure you’re starting to get the idea. If you haven’t done this kind of analysis on the industry you’re in or about to enter, then I recommend you change that as soon as possible. Everything you need to know about the competition is out there in the open; that’s not something you can say in the offline world, so it would be a shame if you weren’t using the data to your advantage.

Do the Thing I’ll Admit You’re the Best At

“Just be yourself” is probably one of the most overused sayings out there but it points to the truth that there’s nobody who’s better at playing you, than you. Tucker Max took his self-entitled “jerk attitude” to the internet in the form of online stories and earned himself not only a book deal, but a Hollywood film actually called ‘Tucker Max’.

Regardless of what you think about Russell Brand’s comedy or acting abilities, you can’t deny that he’s a very unique celebrity character in the way that he presents himself. His writing ability is also incredible. Not just because of his wit, but the way he puts his own persona into the piece.

Naomi Dunford doesn’t hold back from swearing in her articles and I’m sure the same is true in real life. William Ray Johnson is someone I seem to hear more negative about things about then good, yet he now owns the most subscribed to channel on Youtube and can literally influence millions of people. Lady Gaga is one of the most extreme celebrities of our generation, which is partly why I’ve never been a fan (meat costumes? really?). Then I watched this and was blown away.

These examples of people just being themselves are of course going to mean that some people are instantly turned off by who they are and how they do what they do. Then again, I think that can be said for just about any kind of ‘persona’ you can adopt.

I receive plenty of emails from people asking me to write shorter articles, but receive far more comments from people asking me to keep doing what I do. Though both sides are listened to, neither really matter. I’m doing things how I want to see them done and I’ll hopefully continue to build an audience who like the same things. It’s not working out too badly so far.

It’s your quirks and your little differences that people pick up on. It’s the stories that you share passionately about your life. It’s not acting like you’re actually a rockstar. It’s just…doing you. And doing you is exactly what will help you grow your legion of loyal followers.

From My Private Archive: How to Connect With Influencers

All we want to talk about in this space is the tools we use and the results we can get from them, but what really matters of course, is people. Search engine spiders don’t buy your products and doubling your Twitter count with irrelevant followers won’t change your bottom line either. Real relationships are key to helping you grow your own audience, influence and value contributions.

Tamar’s research made it clear to me that influencers want you to keep things short and get to the point. But more importantly than that, they just want you to have something worth sharing. I’ve said it before but I’ll say it again, there are people who are on my radar like crazy, and I want to talk about what they’re doing, but if what they’re producing is nothing new and can be read / watched in hundreds of other places, then people stop trusting my recommendations.

In the Cloud Niche private archives I said:

Please, for your own sake, continue doing you when you eventually reach out to people. It’s really…weird…when people are just overly nice to me. Sure I appreciate the respect, but it’s really hard to talk to someone who is gushing over how amazing you are. Even more so when you don’t think that highly of yourself. After speaking to a number of far more successful people than I am, it turns out I’m not alone with that sentiment.

Finally, on my post, Cloud Jacking: 7 Steps to Dominate Your Niche, I had the following to say, which is still as relevant today as it was then:

“Instead of giving very specific advice here, which I can’t because thousands of people will read this and your audience is in lots of different communities, I’m going to share ideas for how you can engage in different platforms and with different people:

• Twitter: I find that the people I engage with most in Twitter a) Retweet my articles b) Ask thought provoking questions or discuss thought provoking topics and c) bust my balls. If you want to get involved with others on Twitter, I can only recommend you do the same. The more human aspects you can bring to the service, the better.
• Facebook: Facebook is a tricky one and to be honest, I don’t spend much time there. What I do recommend though is that if you have a profile, put a link to it on your website. That allows people who are viewing your website already to get in touch and create a deeper connection. I know a number of people who have success with Facebook Fan Pages (rather than Groups) and I think you should start engaging with the ones that are out there already until you build your own.
• Forums: I used to be a forum (message board) junkie a few years ago and definitely built my authority in some. The most important tip I have for forums is to put your website link in your signature (if possible) and then just forget about it. Forget you might get visitors for interacting in the site…just interact. Start engaging threads and provide excellent replies and you might quickly find people naturally starting threads about what you’re working on.
• Bloggers: Bloggers are busy. Well, most of them are. So, instead of trying to get on a bloggers radar by annoying them through email, connect in a way that they will love. This could mean stumbling their articles, linking to their blog posts, commenting on their articles and even retweeting them. Giving before you get applies here more than ever. Once you’ve been giving for a while then start to engage in more personal surroundings like email.
• Offline: If you can meet your audience and the influencers in an offline environment, this will help you more than anything. You can create great relationships online, but they are absolutely nothing in comparison the ones you can create offline. If you can go to conferences, tweetups, seminars or anything of the sort then get yourself there. I’m far more likely to help out someone I’ve met than “some guy I spoke to on the internet some time.”

There are two things you need to remember about the sites listed above. The first is that they have not been built for you to spam an audience. They are there as communication tools that allow you to ethically engage with your market. I recommend you use them as such. Secondly, these networks should not be what you do, they should be thought of like a megaphone to amplify what you’re already doing on your website.

Shine the Light on Others

One thing I always try and do (though could definitely do more of, like most) is highlight other people in the spaces I operate. I don’t want to highlight just anyone of course, but people who I think are doing great work. At least on my small radar, I think the likes of Adam, Kelvin and Rishi deserve a lot more attention for the unique content they’re putting out. I’m happy to give it to them (please do check out their sites).

Not only does sharing the work of others make you feel good, the act is also often reciprocated — though that shouldn’t be your motive for putting the spotlight on others. Sending people to various sites in your niche shows that you know your topic well and you aren’t afraid to join in the conversation.

Also, I always check out blogs that link to me purely out of curiosity in regards to what they’re saying. Sometimes those odd links put new blogs on my radar and start a conversation that leads to a stronger connection down the road.

“Shine the light on all of your friends, ’cause it all amounts to nothing in the end” – Jason Mraz.

At the end of the day, you’re never going to be the only person in your industry, so there’s no point in acting like it.

A Final, Important Point

You have everything you need and you’re going to die. There is absolutely nothing, and I mean nothing, that separates you from the rockstars in any industry. Most likely they had an audience of none one day, and they worked at their craft and consistently networked to get to where they are today. If you think you can’t do the same, then you’ve failed already, so get that out of your head.

Death has always been the biggest motivator in my life. In a positive way, I think about death daily, and how everything I do may be the last ‘thing’ I ever leave behind. For all I know this could be my last ever blog post so I would like to make it one worth reading when I’m gone. I’m not the only one to feel this way, again quoting Steve:

“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”

(Note: It is pure coincidence that I have so many quotes from Steve on the day that he has announced his departure as Apple CEO. I assume the decision is for health reasons, so I wish him the best of luck in his recovery.)

The reason I say the above two points is because I have zero doubt that you’re going to fail at times on your path. Things aren’t all going to come together at once. I spent thousands of dollars having my software affiliateSkin developed, only to be – admittedly – in a poor position to offer support and too slow to react to the competition. This resulted in my closing down the product altogether. I could have adapted, but in all honesty my heart wasn’t in it. For now, I still think customising what people are already used to (WordPress) is the way to go. A lesson I couldn’t have learned so certainly without that ‘failure’.

For that reason I created ViperBar and with over 5,000 installs on blogs in hundreds of different industries, I would say it’s been a great success. By the way, we just updated it with a ton of new features (split-testing (!), hex code customisation, bar themes, sticky bar, etc.) so do check it out if you haven’t already. It’s free, as is the branding removal.

When I made CloudFlood I didn’t know what kind of success people would have with it. “1,000 new opt-ins per day” was the feedback from an initial report, and the site was even mentioned on a Forbes.com article in the last fortnight. If I had let my first software launch bother me, I wouldn’t have gone on to create two things which have helped so many people.

Remember: You are enough. You’re going to die. Start leaving that legacy, please?

I’m not saying this to brag, but to show that the changes I’ve slowly been implementing are having a big effect here, and I want to share them with you all today. If you haven’t been getting the results from blogging that you were hoping for, or you just want to fine-tune things a little, then this post is for you.

Very recently I talked about a huge flaw in blogging, which I’ll get to in a minute. Even though I self-referenced this, a few people emailed me to say it’s strange that I am promoting a blogging product and then talk about the downsides of the platform. I wasn’t sure about whether or not I should start this post off with a snippet of the things I love about blogging, so let those emails be a nudge to do exactly that.

Because, let’s be clear, I do love it. I owe so much of where I am and what I have done to this mode of publishing that I don’t even know where to start. I will say that two highlights of my blogging “career” include getting to work in South Africa with huge brands for 18 months and having my Dad phone me in Paris to say that he just heard someone talking about me on the radio when driving to work.

I could go on, but I’ll just add that blogging has changed my life in a vast number of ways, and I still love writing in public now as much as I did when I clicked ‘Publish’ on my first ever post in 2006. Did WordPress look ugly back then or what?

I will reiterate what I’ve said before which is that I don’t think blogging is the thing to focus on if you want to make money online quickly. Blogs take a long time to build, since they’re very much relationship focused, and just relying on RSS – like most bloggers do – sets you on a horrible path when it comes to converting readers into buyers.

I offered the alternative CloudBlueprint strategy, which has proven popular, and two women making $5K per month proved that you can implement it into a blog as well. I want to take my recommendations for this further than ever before, and focus on both plugging the “flaws” that your blog has as best as you can and making sure it’s converting for you better than ever before.

Though I’m sure you take this as a given for ViperChill content by now, the article below is very long and contains a lot of different recommendations. Since my aim with this post is to help you, the last thing I want to do is overwhelm you with too many ideas and things you have to implement.

If you’re one of these people who are new to this whole blogging thing, then just take my top three recommendations and put them into action, and come back to this post another day for the rest.

Create a Page to Emphasise What’s Hot

Over the last year I’ve experimented with the “Popular posts” section of this website quite a lot. In the old ViperChill design I had a gradient-yellow column showing my top 10 posts. But, it was static and I had to make the headline text really small for it to look good in the design.

When I updated to my new theme, the popular posts were now automated, and I could easily set how many I wanted to show. These headlines were originally accompanied by images, but now you will just see them as the blue links in the right sidebar here. I removed the images recently and found that doing so not only speeded up the site but also improved it aesthetically, in my opinion.

I’ve now put less focus on that element of the sidebar, and put a few hours into a page you’ll find in the navigation bar here under the guise of ‘Viral’. The resulting page reveals a list of the most popular ViperChill posts I’ve written in terms of the number of comments that they’ve received. Since it’s highlighting the posts that have already proven popular with readers, it’s likely that at least one of the headlines will entice visitors to click on them, as they have done for so many others before.

I added a visual element to the page for people who are more stimulated by graphics. Not everyone likes to read text on a page, with many opting to look at a cover of something out of habit. I turned my top three posts into small magazine style graphics for this very reason, as you can see above.

I’ve noticed a clear increase on the number of comments this page has generated on older posts, so already know it’s working well in terms of directing visitors around the site. Though I haven’t done this at the time of writing, I’m going to be adding a link to the bottom of all ViperChill posts that takes people to this page.

This will be useful for people who have already opted-in to my ViperChill offerings and just want to read more of my free content. There are 19 posts listed (odd number, I know) so far, but I’ll probably extend the list to the top 30 posts in total.

The Getting Started Page

I’ll continue by looking at what is probably the most prominent change I’ve made to the site recently: The creation of a ‘Start Here’ page. I have Pat Flynn to thank for the inspiration, and his video critique with Derek also gave me the push I needed to finish some other changes I had planned to make for far too long.

Pat found that creating the page meant that people stayed on his site much longer (a 90% increase!), and his overall bounce rate was much lower. This makes sense, since people leaving the site quickly are usually first-time visitors. If they see a page that appeals to them “New Here?” then there’s a good chance you can get them to stick around.

There are some great tips in the video, so definitely check it out. I do want to say however that there are a couple of things that I disagree with. The first being on the way Pat should act on his About page. Derek suggests that Pat should change his wording to focus more on what he can offer the site visitor in terms of benefits, which I think is good advice in most cases.

However, I’ve personally found – especially in the niche that myself and Pat are in – that people are far more interested in hearing about the person behind the site, so they can quickly decide if that person is worth listening to or not. There are so many shady characters in this industry that will more than happily say what they can do for you, so I think his current page is perfect.

I also disagree with constant focus on getting an email address on a lot of pages. Sure it’s highly effective, but if you haven’t converted someone the first few times they see an opt-in box, then you’re missing some other key element. Perhaps what you’re giving away just isn’t enticing enough.

Pat’s “Getting Started” page was created in addition to his About page, where as I have replaced my About page with more information about me and the site. My reason is that I simply like to get to the point when I’m talking about myself, and the ‘philosophy’ of the site is very focused around me, so it made sense to combine them on one page.

The aim of my New? Start Here page is to really take new visitors to ViperChill by the hand, explain more about me and the site, and then offer more content. I am personal (read: cat pics) on the page as I always want my writing to feel as if I’m talking to you one-on-one. Note that I will be updating that video that’s on the page, but it’s a decent placeholder for now.

It was important for me to try and make the page appeal to a wide variety of audience types. For people who are really interested in ViperChill, they can watch a five minute video, find out about some of my top content, and even watch a 24 minute blogging video on that page if they want to. Other people might be enticed by the email subscription box, while some people mentally answer which “level” they are and click links to Beginner, Intermediate and more Advanced content.

I’m sure there are tweaks I’ll make to the page as time goes on so keep checking back, but even if there are possible improvements to be made, what I have now gives me a far more stable and efficient funnel than I had before.

Logic Prevails: A Simple Lesson from Book Covers

One of my favourite books on business and marketing, Rework, also happens to come from one of my favourite companies to follow online, 37Signals. They’re the guys behind Basecamp and some other popular online tools. I’m going to use their book cover as an example of how powerful one testimonial from an outside source can be.

Though I’m a big fan of 37Signals originally and would have purchased their book anyway, seeing the one line quote from Seth Godin at the top of Rework has a huge effect on how people, who stumble across the book randomly, perceive it.

Testimonials work because anyone can hype up themselves, so having other people say nice things about you instantly makes you more credible. And, if you can get someone like Seth Godin to hold you in such high regard, then you’re going to get the attention of his fans and more.

Since testimonials work so well on sales page and squeeze pages, it only makes sense to put them on areas of my blog near where people have the option to subscribe to something. I’m fortunate to have had some well-known publications say some nice things about me, and that’s powerful. If you share too many then you definitely run the risk of showing off or alienating current readers, so sprinkle them in your current design if you have some to share.

A few people on Twitter noticed my sidebar testimonials / quotes have been up for a few weeks now and asked me how they were converting. It’s hard to tell since I’ve added more opt-in boxes to the ViperChill and don’t have split-testing in place for my sidebar yet but I can see a clear difference when I look at my ‘Daily New Subscribers’ chart in Aweber. I went from getting 30 opt-ins per day on average to over 60 on weekdays now and hundreds on post days.

What, those three weren’t enough for you? It’s a good thing I have a lot more to share…

Discover Why People Are Unsubscribing, in Seconds

If you do have a lead magnet in place, which links to something like Aweber, then it’s very easy to see which emails you’re sending out result in people unsubscribing from your updates. If you know you’re sending something that people don’t like, then you can tweak that message in order to keep more subscribers on your list in future.

I have 28 unsubscribed people on my list at the moment. By going to Subscribers then selecting the Unsubscribed drop-down in Aweber, I can see exactly which emails people read before unsubscribing. You can see this data for various emails below…

• Email One: 14
• Email Two: 3
• Email Three: 1
• Email Four: 1
• Email Five: 1
• Email Six: 3
• Email Ten: 5

Nobody unsubscribed from emails 7,8 and 9, so obviously people enjoy the content found inside them. Email one gets a lot of unsubscribes as people often just sign-up for a freebie (such as my 10K eBook) and cancel their subscription straight away.

When I looked at email six, I actually think the content is excellent, so that wasn’t a concern. The only difference between email six and my other emails is that it is set to send out 7 days after the previous one, instead of every 3 days like my other emails.

I did this to give people a little break from all of the information they were getting, but instead I think people are confused by the delay, and unsubscribe. I put this back to being the same delay as other emails, and there has only been one unsubscribe from this message since.

Email 10 is actually the last email in my queue, and I haven’t followed up to it for at least two weeks. My thinking is that people still see the email in their inbox, with no follow-ups, and then unsubscribe. Any other theories on this are welcome in the comments below.

Since I’m getting dozen of opt-ins per day on this list, and sometimes over 100, my email unsubcribe rate is pleasantly low. That being said, any little tweaks – like I made to email six – can still have a positive long-term effect for me, and hopefully for you as well.

Different Sidebars for Different Site Sections

I’ve recently taken advantage of the ability to have multiple sidebars throughout your WordPress website, and I really think that the result is optimal for my current situation. When people are reading your blog posts, they’re getting value, so you want to take that opportunity to either get them to buy something, opt-in to something or read more of your content.

When people are on my About page, they want to know more about me. This shows me that the visitor is engaged. Because of this, I don’t want to still be in their face with an opt-in form which they’ve already seen on my blog posts. So, the sidebar used for posts and static (contact, about, etc) is now totally different. It also has an interactive element where I ask what level the visitor thinks they are in terms of marketing skill.

Each link then takes them to a section of links that are most useful for their level. Finally, I also have a separate sidebar for people following CloudBlueprint as I need to be able to show different information to those people. Ideally I want “CloudBlueprinters” to either share the course around, download the videos, or opt-in to get more information from me.

I put a lot of hard work into CloudBlueprint so it’s important to be clear about what I want people to do after they’ve watched it (if they enjoyed it, of course).

For those of you who don’t have multiple sidebars built into your theme, I have sadly failed to find a good updated guide online that shows you how to do this. However, thanks to the ViperChill forums, I recently learned of ‘Widget Context‘, a plugin that lets you specify which sidebar widgets show on which types of pages on your blog. You can specify them by a number of factors, which should help some of you easily replicate the type of thing I’m doing here if you see value in it.

I can’t say that this has had a huge effect on my conversions, since I’m not yet tracking it perfectly (it gets quite complex since I’m working on yet more sidebar pages). Logic and first impressions tell me that it’s going to have a far better impact than having the same sidebar all over my site, but I’ll let the results tell you all in a few weeks.

If You Don’t Have a Lead Magnet, You’re Missing Out

A big problem I’ve spoken about when it comes to blogging is that when a new visitor lands on your site, you’re often sending them away in order to monetise them. If someone comes to your site for the first time and clicks on an affiliate link or goes to your product page, and doesn’t buy anything, then there’s a chance you’ve lost them for good.

This is why I spoke about squeeze pages being such a huge benefit over regular blogs for collecting subscribers in CloudBlueprint. The $5K Case Study I also shared looked at taking this approach and applying it to blogs by adopting a “squeeze header”.

One way to fix this is to put more emphasis on creating a lead magnet. A lead magnet is something you use to entice people to give you their email address. I’ve talked time and time again about how email subscribers (in my experience and for thousands of other marketers) tend to buy more products and stay more engaged than any other type of audience.

I tend to go above and beyond for email subscribers, since I love the closed off yet personal nature of the whole system. The three most common types of lead magnet, which I unconvered in my pro blogging video tend to be:

• Podcasts
• eBooks
• Videos

If you don’t know how to create any of these then definitely go and check out the video above. You can create them all for free and they’re all effective freebies to giveaway online. I’ve recently heard of people having success with more obscure items, such as a “million dollar business card” with an idea on it, and having those work well.

If you have the time, then definitely be creative.

In my own split-testing I’ve found that adding a graphical element to your giveaway can give you a huge boost in conversions. Not only does it work on squeeze pages, but it works on sales pages as well. You can see I’ve already started adding graphics for the first few modules on the CloudBlogging sales page.

Not only do I have a lead magnet in the sidebar for all blog and post pages, but there’s an eBook graphic in the site footer here which takes you to my 10K subscribers page. My lead magnet is a 30+ page eBook on how I grew VieprChill to over 10,000 subscribers. Since this is a real case-study it’s quite rare to see, and I’ve been told by hundreds of people that they were blown away by how much work I put into it.

As I revealed on this post, I have tested a ton of titles on the page, and found the current header to be the best wording for conversions. Since the page is static (also talked about on that linked to post) I can easily tweak certain design aspects to help conversions even further. You’ll see that page has a very minimalist header and footer, as my main aim is to get people to fill in the opt-in box to receive the eBook.

Even if they just download it and unsubscribe straight away, there’s a chance they will come back to ViperChill in the future if they just open the PDF I sent them as it contains so much value-giving information.

As I stated earlier, not everybody is attracted to text and would be happy to read your content. New visitors are especially likely to skim your page and look for anything that catches their eye. Using a graphic next to an opt-in form or other call to action gives that CTA more chance of being seen.

Test Your Funnel

What I like to do when I think I have my whole lead generation funnel in place is to test my site in full, as if I’m a brand new visitor. I like to turn off any toolbars (even the address bar) in my browser, so you really just get to see your site and nothing else on the screen. The funnel that visitors typically go through is as follows:

• Step One: A new visitor lands on your site and notices your opt-in form
• Step Two: They enter their email address. As soon as they click the submit button, you should be taking them to a page that at least reminds them to check their email address. I say “at least” because visitors are usually in a very engaged state at this point, so may be happy to do more things. One option is to then offer a free eBook, and use a service like Cloudflood to make them tweet or Facebook share it (which gets you more traffic) in order to get the download link. I’ve used this to good effect.
• Step Three: They then visit their inbox and must click on a confirm subscription link. Make sure your text here has been customised in Aweber. Make the confirmation redirect go to a page on your where you give them what they opted in for. By default I had set this to go straight to my About page, but received a few emails from confused readers asking where their eBook was. Finally, remind visitors to once again check their email and to expect another one from you in a few days (if that is the case).
• Step Four: You continue to follow up with relevant and valuable content.

If you don’t have pages on your site for steps two and three then set them up right now. Just a few minutes work can ensure that you don’t lose subscribers unnecessarily.

Utilise the Power of Old posts

One benefit of blogging over a strategy like email marketing is that you constantly receive a trickle, if not a flood of visitors still looking at your old content. There are dozen of posts on this site which get 50+ views every single day because of links pointed here from other sites, search traffic, and people exploring ViperChill.

It’s important to focus on the fact that people coming from search and referring sites are highly likely to be brand new visitors to your website. This means that your blog post is possibly your only chance to give a good first impression and capture their attention. Below I’ll highlight a few common ways to tweak your old posts to get the most out of them…

Get Their Email & More with Shortcodes

With the help of my friend Joost, I recently created a simple WordPress plugin so that I could easily show certain style elements in any blog posts of my choice. I can do this by utilising shortcodes – little codes you use to call the contents of a file – so that if I want the same message on a lot of posts, all I have to do is type a short code, such as [SEOeBook] and an SEO eBook opt-in form would display. If I ever want to tweak this opt-in form in the future, then I just edit the plugin, and don’t have to tweak every individual post.

The great thing about shortcodes is that they can be used for tons of things. For example, they have the ability to easily show an RSS box or a category specific opt-in form which can convert readers much better. You could even create a list of links to your top posts in each category that shows on relevant posts.

At the moment all my plugin does by it output a date. It’s currently being used on my Viral page in order to show how frequently the comment counts on that page are updating. They aren’t automated yet, but I’m working with a programmer on it, so they should be very shortly. Hence the timestamp.

You can download my plugin here, and install it like any other WordPress plugin. At the moment all you have to do is type Thursday, 9th of February on any post or page text, and it will always show yesterday’s date on that post. I won’t go into detail about programming or editing pages, but those of you with a little tech skill should be able to see how you can duplicate the plugin and create different shortcodes e.g. [SEOeBook] to show opt-in forms and more.

Change Your Ending Paragraph

When you first launch a post, your aims with it are usually different to its purpose a few months down the line. For example, you may be advertising a product you no longer have for sale, or asking for comments when you’re not actually looking for them anymore. Since people will still be reading your old posts, tweak your ending paragraph and ask them to do something else next.

Your best option is to send them to a page that is as relevant as possible to the topic they’re currently reading about and offers an enticing freebie.

Show Related Articles

Though I don’t do this personally, it’s a popular choice around the blogosphere so that’s why I’m covering it. Various plugins allow you to easily show articles that are related to the one you’ve just written. These plugins are considered good for SEO and they can help you to generate more pageviews.

The reason I don’t do this is because I ultimately want to take visitors through a different funnel. I would rather send them to a page which offers a ton of value (like a video course or free 30+ page eBook) and then entice them to subscribe or just send them to a page which highlights my best content in all categories.

Interlink

If you don’t want to use a related posts plugin, then another way to improve your internal SEO and keep people on your website longer is to interlink your articles. If you’re anything like me then every post you’ve published in the past can probably be tweaked to include more links to your other blog posts on the same topic.

This task is a little time consuming but if you’re willing to put the effort in then it can definitely be worth it. At least do this for your highest trafficked pages to start with. A few people out there use plugins for this kind of thing but the result isn’t always great. Tweaking things manually would be easier for me since I write less, so do try out the plugins out there and see if any are for you if post by post editing seems too much.

Link to a Product

If you’re not as focused on collecting emails as me and just want to go for the sale, then that’s definitely an option as well. When people take the time to read about a topic online, they’re in an engaged state where they’re happy to read more information on that subject. This is especially true if your blog post didn’t quite cover everything that they wanted to know.

Putting your own products on these posts can result in more sales for you, or you can even promote affiliate products here from the likes of Clickbank as well. If you are going to do this then I recommend that the product offering is highly relevant to the post, and not something you should add to all posts en masse.

Just Get Things Done

You’re going to reach a stage in your marketing career where there is very little for blogs to teach you. The best course of action you can take at this point is simply any form of action. There are a lot more people who know how to make money online (at least in theory) than people who actually do anything with their knowledge. Since you’re a ViperChill reader, and I’m here to help you, then I don’t want you to become one of those people.

Mostly out of personal curiosity, I decided to record myself writing during a Pomodoro. A pomodoro is simply 25-minute time slot where you take productive action. In this case, I wrote an article. I speeded up the typing and you can see how I wrote over 1,000 words very easily in the video below…

My apologies in advance for the cheesy editing. I needed something to make all of that writing a little more watchable ;]. The point I want to make is that you can get a lot done in a short period of time. All that’s needed is for you to just…start (!).

Display Social Proof

I very rarely (if ever these days) find myself subscribing to new blogs, so I always take note when I stumble across a new site and end up adding it to my feed reader. In most cases I’ll enjoy that sites latest posts, but often also see that thousands of other people are regular readers, which shows me there must be more good stuff to come.

If I removed any evidence of social proof from ViperChill – such as my feed subscriber and comment count – then I would still have the exact same content on the website, but people would be less inclined to subscribe.

I believe that your content is everything, first and foremost, and you all seem to do a pretty good job on that front, but if you have social proof that you can show off, then do so. My own WordPress plugin ViperProof (demo in the bottom right corner of ViperChill) is free and allows you to do this with ease.

It’s not so easy to show social proof when you start your blog, but if you’ve been running it for at least a few months then there should be some things that you can share with the world.

Use Heatmap Tracking to Monitor your Visitors

I’ve talked about Heatmap tools on this blog a few times. Right now I have heatmap tools built in to other services I use like Google Analytics and Visual Website Optimizer. Even so, I still opt to pay $9/m for Crazy Egg (no affiliate link) as it’s interface and analytics data is far more advanced than the ‘add ons’ mentioned for two prior services.

An example of something I changed after using CrazyEgg is the word ‘Glen’ in my site footer. According to my heatmap tracking results, that word would get clicked on more than most other links on my page. Yet, it wasn’t a link. Just some bold text.

So, I changed that word to a link (even though it looks the same) and now people can learn more about me when they do so. Though this was a little change, it can have a big difference when thousands of people are visiting my site, so it’s always worth trying to improve usability.

Implement a Feed Footer

Something a lot of bloggers could benefit from – but don’t implement – is a feed footer. A feed footer basically allows you to add HTML to the end of your blog posts that people receive via RSS. This may be in the likes of Google Reader, or in their inbox for people who subscribe that way.

I tweak my feed footer fairly often, and even created a plugin for free to help you tweak your own. I prefer to direct people to areas of my site whether they can either get something for free, or get more content from me.

I’ve noticed other bloggers pitching products at the bottom of their feed – which is fine – but it’s not something I have any plans (or need) to do personally.

Mine Your Data: What Worked?

One thing I know a number of bloggers get caught up in when they first start out is in trying to be everywhere, as often as they can. I’m personally a much bigger fan of narrowing where your spend your time and focusing on creating stronger connections. If you’re someone who really has given everything a try, look at your top referring traffic sources for the last year, to see which actions were the most helpful.

Commit to spending more time on the things that actually worked well for you. It may be that Tweeting is a good use of your time, commenting on a certain blog sends you a lot of visitors, or that you have a few keywords which are bringing in a good amount of search traffic and they could use a search boost.

You will get to a stage where you need to stop looking to others to see what to work on and start using your own real-world results to give you an indication of what is working in your niche. No marketer has operated in every industry out there, so there’s a good chance you’ll discover secrets about your industry we just couldn’t have told you about yet.

Give Your Blog Some Juice

I’ve spent quite a bit of time over the last few weeks ensuring that my blog is as fast as it can be. There is still a lot of work to be done but I managed to take the load time on a slow conection from 12.5 seconds to just over 5. The two biggest changes involved me first of all cleaning up my code, removing CSS files I don’t need, and removing any Javascript calls that aren’t being used.

A good tool to give you an indication of which files are taking the longest to load on your site is this one, from Pingdom. My theme by default (before I massively tweaked it) had no less than 7 CSS files and about 12 Javscript files, which were massively slowing down my pageloads.

A few months ago I also started using Amazon’s CloudFront service. They basically host a few files for me (such as my CSS and javascript) and I handle the rest of the blog loads with my usual hosting. Amazon’s has CloudFront “clusters” in various locations around the world, so when you’re loading files from this site you’re actually pulling them from servers which are closest to you.

You are charged based on how much bandwidth you use, and my biggest bill so far has been just $2.17 for one month.

Next Stage: Flagship Categories

I wanted to leave you all with the final recommendation on what I’m going to next, and if you like the idea, then it may be something you want to do as well. I already my homepage optimised for a keyphrase I want search traffic for – viral marketing – so now it’s time to start branching out on the phrases that I want to try and rank for.

I’m going to replace the ‘Topics’ in the sidebar with links to flagship content, rather than category pages. I’ll create a great guide on various subjects, and then do some smart interlinking from relevant post pages. Since I’ll be sending traffic to these pages, they’ll also be optimised to convert new visitors into subscribers.

For people who are already subscribers and want more content, I’ll still be pulling in each category’s RSS feed so the pages are constantly updated with relevant links to my latest posts. This is something I’ve only ever seen done on a couple of websites and definitely has the potential to be another powerful page idea, just like the “Getting Started” page recommendation.

If you have any questions, leave them in the comments below as always. Are you going to be making any changes to your site now? I would love to hear what you have to say…

It is this keyword research that has allowed me to get 981,000 unique organic search visitors to a 3 month old website, grow blogs faster than I ever thought was possible and – more than anything – allowed me to be free from a boss and the 9-5 grind.

I say this because I want you to understand how important keyword research actually is. You may know one or two places where keyword research can be applied, such as in deciding on a keyphrase to build an affiliate website around or when generating blog post ideas. In reality though, keyword research involves so much more than that.

My aim with this article is to show you the dozens of uses that keyword research has, unique ways to find popular terms, and how to capitalise on your findings. After all, keyword research ultimately allows us to see exactly what consumers are looking for online. Until the internet came along there was no way to get such important insights in so many industries.

As I hope you expect of me by now, I have dedicated days to this blog post and given it my all. As such I have no doubt that you’ll learn something new, and hopefully get a lot of value from what I have to share. Ready? Let’s get started…

The Three Types of Keyphrases

Though keyphrases can be used for much more than just focusing on certain terms and trying to get search engine rankings for them, that is personally a big part of my own strategy (and my income). Keyphrases in this sense are simply queries that people type into the likes of Google or Bing in order to find whatever they’re looking for online.

Most SEO’s generally split keyphrases into two main categories. The head, and the tail. I tend to side with a smaller group of people and prefer to split the billions of keyphrases out there into three groups. The head, the body, and the tail.

Head Keyphrases are generally just one or two words, and very popular. Terms like Facebook, Marketing, Forex and eBay are examples of this.

Body Keyphrases are generally two to three words, and get searched for less than Head keyphrases, but there are more of them. Examples of Body keyphrases could be Facebook Banners (surprisingly popular), Online Marketing, Forex News and eBay Motors.

Tail Keyphrases usually contain three or more words and individually get searched for less than Head and Body keyphrases, but again, there are more of them. Examples of tail keyphrases include Online Marketing Expert San Diego and Forex Trading Software Online.

I have made a graphic to represent this information which you can find below:

(Note: Graphics in this post are not to exact scale)

To be even more specific, in this example model let’s say that Head keyphrases account for the top 1,000 keyphrases used online while Body keyphases make up the top 1,000 to 10,000 keyphrases. Anything beyond that, in my own model, is known as the “Longtail”. Even though each long tail keyword is generally searched for just a few times per month, long tail searches surprisingly make up over 70% of all queries.

To help you visualise this, I’ve made another graphic:

To take things even further, it may surprise you to learn that keyphrases with 7 words in them actually make up around 1.78% of all searches performed online. While that’s a tiny fraction, remember that it’s a tiny fraction of a number which exceeds 90 billion (searches per month) in total, for Google alone.

Finding Keyphrases for Traffic and/or Money

When finalising which keyphrases I want to focus on for various projects, I never focus on Head terms. Since these are the top 1,000 searches online each month, they’re often brand names (e.g. Yahoo) or broad terms (e.g. marketing), where it’s not so obvious what the searcher is looking for.

Instead, I personally focus on Body and Tail phrases. As a rule of thumb, I view body searches as anything getting between 1,000 and 200,000 exact searches per month (I’ll show you how to find this out in a moment). Tail phrases then will get less than 1,000 searches per month each.

We’re going to begin by looking at my most popular sources for each type of keyphrase, and then look in-depth at how to apply keyword research to both blogging and affiliate marketing.

My Most Powerful Long-Tail Keyphrase Source

I haven’t heard anyone else online talking about this strategy (I discovered it by accident) and I’ve never revealed it before on ViperChill so you’ll definitely want to keep reading. Forums, by default, are one of the best types of websites you can own in order to get maximum search engine traffic. The pure mass of user generated content that is created on them, in an organised and crawlable way, can bring millions of free visitors to forum owners around the world each month.

Don’t worry though, this tactic does not involve owning a forum. It involves utilising a popular plugin that many of them have installed. I don’t know the name of the plugin, but basically it adds a section to all forum threads which shows the queries people typed in Google to find that page.

You can see an example of this on the bottom of a random thread on a fishing forum:

Using this little tactic you can view the exact keyphrases that are driving traffic to other sites in your niche. Many of them are long-tail, and many of them are very easy to make money from.

Simply search for the following phrase in Google (replacing niche with any industry you want to):

• “visitors found this page by searching for” niche

Scroll to the bottom of any of the search results that you open and you should see terms which drive traffic to these other webmasters.

Like I said, I haven’t heard anyone talking about this and I’ve never spoken about it before. I’ve recently been using  this to generate keyphrases for content ideas and backlink efforts and they have aided my own traffic levels considerably. That means that if you want to really benefit from this, then take action sooner rather than later. I have a large audience here at ViperChill (we’ve just passed 16,000 subscribers, thanks!) and the majority know a great opportunity when they see one.

Useful for: Body Keyphrases, Tail Keyphrases

A Little-Known Way to View Wikipedia’s Analytics

One little-known tool I like to use when finding out how popular a niche really is can be found at Stats.Grok.se. This resource shows you how many views each Wikipedia article gets per day. This is useful because the majority of visits to any Wikipedia page are sent by search engines. And, since Wikipedia usually ranks in the top 1-3 results (usually number 1, let’s be honest) for Head and Body terms, you can get an idea of how many searches are being made each day.

Here is the daily view count for a term I’m targeting with this website, “viral marketing”:

You can even check how view counts changed over time, and view stats for literally any page on the website. This has been useful to me on a number of occasions.

Useful for: Head Keyphrases, Body Keyphrases, Tail Keyphrases

Google Keyword Tool

The Google Keyword Tool is the most popular and talked about tool when it comes to keyword research. Created primarily for people who use Googles’ Adwords service, it allows you to enter search terms and get an estimated number of monthly searches each term receives.

You can filter your results by exact match and broad keywords, and even drill down search volumes for specific countries and people speaking certain languages. I personally enter a few of the top phrases related to my niche into the search box here and then organise them by exact match results, and by the highest search volume.

“Exact match” basically means people are only searching for the term as it is shown, and it’s not missing or adding any words to the figures (like with broad match). Since I build sites for an English audience, I leave on the tools’ default setting to target anyone speaking English.

Useful for: Head Keyphrases, Body Keyphrases, Tail Keyphrases

Google Webmaster Ranking Terms

If you sign-up to Google Webmaster Tools (free) then one section of the console allows you to see which phrases people are entering into Google where your website turns up as a result. This doesn’t necessarily mean that people are clicking on your link, but that it is showing in the top results for certain terms.

This information can help you see which pages on your site could do with a little SEO help in terms of on-site tweaks or link buidling, which can in turn get you more search engine traffic. It’s often easier to focus on terms that just need a little “boost”, rather than starting totally from scratch with a phrase.

Wordtracker Free Keyword Tool

Though I used to use this tool a lot more in the past than I do now (I rarely build new sites), the Wordtracker Keyword Tool was a staple in my research arsenal for quite some time. Second only to the Google Keyword Tool in my opinion for stats that actually come from sources, the offering gathers its data from Dogpile and MetaCrawler.

According to SEOmoz, Wordtracker also get their data from search queries performed on Yahoo. I can’t actually find any information about this on the Wordtracker website, so hopefully someone can clarify in the comments. The thing I like about this tool the most is that it’s much easier to dig down into phrases to find even longer and less searched variations. Variations that could help get a lot of traffic if actioned upon.

Useful for: Head Keyphrases, Body Keyphrases, Tail Keyphrases

Google Trends & Hot Trends

If you’re a member of the VIP forums, go and check this thread on “How to Find a $10,000 Keyphrase in 30 Seconds“. I recently sent out the content inside to cloud niche subscribers and many said it was the best email they’ve received from me.

Otherwise, check out the post on how I got 980,000 visitors to a site I owned from free search engine traffic. All thanks to Googel Trends (and the site was only 3 months old).

Google Trends and Google HotTrends basically show you which terms around the world are popular right now. Since around 20% – 25% of searches in Google every single day have never been searched for before in the history of the search engine, you can conclude that many of the items in HotTrends are going to be based around current events.

Useful for: Head Keyphrases, Body Keyphrases, Tail Keyphrases

The Power of Questions (Yahoo Answers)

A large majority of searches performed online each day are questions. Questions are often centered around problems, and problems are something that can generally be monetised with ease. Yahoo! own a huge knowledge-base of questions and answers on the aptly named Yahoo! Answers.

Simply enter any terms relevant to your chosen industry into the search box and you’ll see relevant questions around that topic. You can even sort these by which are the most popular, to find out what that audience is really passionate about.

Useful for: Body Keyphrases, Tail Keyphrases

SEOmoz Popular Searches Tool

A bit like with Google Trends, SEOmoz gather the top terms from a number of sources around the web each day to give you a fuller picture of what really is “Hot” online. Data is gathered from Delicious, eBay Pulse, Amazon Most Popular Tags and Technorti Popular, among other resources.

The data changes each day and you can go back as far as 2009 to see which trends were popular this time last year. You can start by viewing a recent days data with the tool over here.

Useful for: Head Keyphrases, Body Keyphrases

Market Samurai Desktop Software

In all honesty, I had never needed Market Samurai (no affiliate). It is one of those tools that I would hear about all of the time, but didn’t think I would find much use for it in my research arsenal. I was wrong, but only slightly. I haven’t digged into Market Samurai as much as I could, but for quick research it certainly saves me a lot of time.

One of my favourite tool features is analysing how competitive search results actually are. Though I enjoy doing this manually to verify what I’m seeing, MS allows you to see tons of factors about every page that ranks for certain terms, enabling you to quickly diagnose reasons why you may not be ranking.

At $149 it isn’t free nor cheap, but I definitely think the price is worth it. I know how much work going into creating and supporting software, and Market Samurai has already been updated a couple of times since I purchased it.

Useful for: Head Keyphrases, Body Keyphrases, Tail Keyphrases

Alexa Search Stats

Though Alexa is highly scrutinised for its inaccuracies and ranking bias towards sites in the marketing industry, one feature you can find on their website does provide some interesting insights into your competitors. Simply enter any site URL on their search form (here’s ViperChill’s page) and then on the bottom right of each page you’ll see top search phrases used to find that site.

Now and then I will find examples of this where the phrases were definitely not popular on my site but they’ll show on Alexa. For the most part though, it’s fairly accurate for most of my websites.

Useful for: Head Keyphrases, Body Keyphrases

Page Comparison Tool

I came across this little tool recently in my hunt to make sure I hadn’t missed anything cool from this article. The idea behind Aaron Wall’s Page Comparison Tool really intrigued me. Basically it tells you the most popular two, three and more keyword phrases that can be found across multiple URL’s that you input.

The idea is great, but the tools execution isn’t so much. It was picking up a lot of HTML code in the results which really messed up the stats. That being said, it’s free, and there’s a chance you can find some great terms with a bit of digging.

Useful for: Head Keyphrases, Body Keyphrases

Compete

Just like Alexa (two above), Compete share what they believe to be the top 5 search terms that send traffic to certain websites. You could then enter the URL’s of the most popular sites in your industry and see what is working for them.

Again keep in mind that these are very rarely accurate, but can often give you some good keyphrase ideas.

Useful for: Head Keyphrases, Body Keyphrases.

Google Suggest

Whenever you type a fairly popular term into the Google search box, suggestions for other keyphrases related to your term appear. These are shown by Google to help you find what you’re looking for, quicker. Based on this, it’s easy to assume that the related keyphrases are the most commonly searched over a period of time.

There have been quite a few “Suggest Bombings”, where people continually search for certain search terms to manipulate the suggestions Google displays. This gives more evidence to the belief that the suggestions here are what people are really searching for.

Useful for: Body Keyphrases, Tail Keyphrases

Google Sets

Though Sets is a basic tool, it’s simplicity perhaps gives it more value since such few distractions are rare in most online tools. All you have to do is enter a few terms that you know are related in a specific niche, and Google will tell you more of them.

So, if you’re trying to think of what aspects of a niche you may be missing, Sets can fill in the blanks for you.

Useful for: Head Keyphrases, Body Keyphrases

Mine Your Own Analytics

I’ll admit that I haven’t used this for content ideas, but I’ve definitely used it for niche ideas. When I started to make a lot of money with affiliate marketing it was because I stumbled across a popular group of keyphrases that were really easy to rank for.

Even better was when I realised that these popular keyphrases could be applied to any niche (just change the niche modifier) and the search results were equally uncompetitive.

You don’t always have to use other resources to give you ideas. You could just use the data from the traffic you already get to your site to see if you can tap into other industries or write more in-depth content on certain topics.

Useful for: Body Keyphrases, Tail Keyphrases

In Summary

I know that 15 resources as interesting as these are a lot to take in at once, so here’s a little table that you can refer to in the future (or scan now for reference) to help you decide which tools to use. Please note that the table looks much better if you actually read this article on ViperChill.com…

Source	Head	Body	Tail
Forum Referrals
Wikipedia Analytics
Google Keyword Tool
Google Webmasters
Market Samurai
Wordtracker Keyword Tool
Google Trends / Hot Trends
Yahoo Answers
SEOmoz Popular
Alexa Search Stats
Page Comparison Tool
Compete Stats
Google Sets
Google Suggest
Mine Your Analytics

We’ll now be looking into two strategy specific applications for keyword research. I’ll first take you through how keyword research can be used in blogging, and then share how I apply it to affiliate marketing.

The Blogger’s Guide to Keyword Research

Keyword research can be useful in many aspects of blogging. There are four main topics that I want to cover in this section, but before I do that I want to share a little tip with you. If you’re using WordPress and have a search box on your blog, go and install a plugin like Search Meter to see exactly what your visitors are entering into that box.

If you use a Google Custom Search Engine on your site then you’ll be able to see this data as well. If you find that a lot of people are searching for a certain term or asking a certain question then you can write about that topic, as it’s clearly something people are interested in.

The three main sections that I’m now going to look at are:

• Your homepage title
• Your post headline and titles
• Resource pages

I’ll show you which type of phrases work best for each element and which tools can help you find them.

Your Homepage Title

Many bloggers make the mistake of thinking that their blog title has to be a description of what your blog is about, or should only include their blog name. Doing so is not inherently bad, but it could mean that you’re missing a lot of search traffic.

As is the case for most blogs, your blog homepage tends to be the most powerful on your site. By powerful I mean that search engines will view it as one of the most authoritative pages on your site, since it’s likely that page will attract the most links from other websites. This makes the page better to rank for more competitive terms.

Since I plan on running a blog for years when I start it, there’s no harm in picking more competitive keyphrases which are going to be harder to rank for.

When I was running a personal development blog, I decided to use the phrase “Personal Development” in my homepage title tag. The keyphrase was targeted to what I was writing about, and received 30,000 exact searches every single month. Thanks to some backlinking efforts, I was able to rank 5th in Google for the phrase, and receive thousands of visitors each month for doing so.

It took me around 10 months in total to rank on the first page of Google for the term, but the wait is worth it since it brings in so many visitors each month. When choosing your own title phrase, I recommend that you pick a term which has between 5,000 and 60,000 exact searches per month (according to the GKT – Google Keyword Tool).

More popular terms will generally be harder to rank for, and anything with a lower monthly search count is not utilising the power of your homepage in its entirety. Try to pick something that is related to what you’re writing about.

On that note I should add that this is not a guide on how to choose a niche for your blog. If you’re looking for information on that, CloudBlogging is probably your best place to start. Instead, your aim is to find a keyphrase around the topic you’re writing about.

I easily came across the term Personal Development because that was the exact topic I was writing about. Viral marketing, which is the phrase I have in ViperChill’s homepage title tag, was not as easy to come by. I don’t actually write that much about viral marketing. I simply found that the term (which was found, again, with the GKT) received a lot of monthly searches and wasn’t too competitive.

I was right when I was quickly able to rank 4th in Google for the term (I currently hover around 4th and 5th) and now receive close to one thousand visitors per month for the phrase. Visitors that would probably never have found me otherwise.

The Quick Win Title

I’ve wrote about quick wins a few times on this blog so I won’t go into them in too much detail here. Quick Wins, in the way that I view them, are basically extensions of your main keyphrase that you use in your homepage title tag. For example, a long-term keyphrase (more competitive) could be viral marketing, whereas a quick win keyphrase for my homepage could be viral marketing case study.

Since the phrase is longer and less popular, it’s likely that the phrase will be much easier to rank for. You can even help your efforts towards a long term phrase – like viral marketing – with link building for the longtail phrase, since they mostly contain the same words.

I find that Quick Wins apply more to affiliate ventures than they do to blogging, however, since the longtail version of a keyphrase is rarely smart to have as the branding phrase of your blog.

Post Headlines and Titles

Some of the keyword research tools mentioned above are excellent for coming up with post ideas for you to write about. Two of my favourites, for this specific purpose, being Yahoo Answers and Google Suggest. The Google Keyword tool, as usual, is also a great tool to help you with brainstorming.

When I was looking for post ideas a few months ago, I returned to the GKT and started entering some of the broad topics that I cover here on ViperChill. “SEO”, “Split testing”, “Affiliate marketing” and others were just a few of my queries. One query which let me to taking action, was “Social Media”.

Through this I found that the related keyphrase – social media strategy – gets searched for 6,600 (exact) times per month. At quick glance the search results didn’t look particularly competitive and social media strategies were actually one topic that I wanted to cover.

I contacted a number of friends online to see if they would share their best tactics with me, and then compiled all of the resulting answers into one huge blog post. It gained a ton of links and, in time, started ranking on the first page of Google for ‘social media strategy’.

One thing I should add is that the headline I used for the post and the title that is shown to search engine spiders / web browsers is not the same. The headline for the blog post is actually “Social Media Supremacy: [...]” as shown below:

Whereas in the title tag of your browser, or in Google search results, you’ll see “Social Media Strategy“…

I did this on purpose, simply because I couldn’t find an easy way to use the actual term, social media strategy in an enticing way that was likely to help me get eyeballs on the post and backlinks in return. I changed the title using a free WordPress plugin you can find on my huge guide to WordPress SEO.

I’ve managed to attain other rankings for popular keyphrases by following a very similar strategy. ViperChill currently ranks 2nd for the phrase WordPress SEO, which gets over 6,000 searches per month. Below you can also see me ranking first for the term “Guest Blogging” which also gets a few thousand searches every single month:

My best advice for your posts headlines is to use all of the tools (above) that you have available to you. Any one of them can spark ideas which can help you write on popular topics. I’ve personally found that really covering a subject in-depth is the best way to ensure that you get backlinks to your post and start ranking for your related terms.

It’s not just the internet marketing niche where I’ve had success with this either. I ranked 2nd in Google for the phrase ‘Personality Development’ when I used to own PluginID, from following the exact steps I’ve just outlined. The phrase received 30,000 exact searches per month and while it wasn’t something I had previously heard of, was a topic I decided to research and write about.

At the end of the day, i always recommend that you write for your readers instead of search engine spiders. But if you can add some little tweaks to your approach and get more search engine traffic, that doesn’t affect readability, then there’s no reason not to in my opinion.

Your Resource Pages

The final blogging area that I want to look at is actually something I need to implement a lot more myself. Since your homepage is your most popular and powerful page, it makes sense that you generally go for the most difficult keyphrases with that page. But, as mentioned, not something too difficult.

Instead of just writing posts about certain topics, you can also create strong resource pages which are then targeted with internal SEO efforts. Just like with the post ideas section, any keyphrases you come up with here should be relevant to what you’re talking about and generally a word or two more than your main keyphrase, as they are likely to be less competitive.

A good example of a blogger using Resources pages coupled with internal SEO for search traffic is Brian at Copyblogger. Brian knows that people are going to be clicking on the navigation bar links a lot, so he wants to direct people to pages that are going to show the true value of his site, and get people to take some form of action.

You can see from the graphic above that the site is targeting some very competitive keyphrases with the terms found in the navigation bar. Though the terms are competitive, the site does actually rank on the first page of Google for most of them.

Look for keyphrases which can help you create a great resource for your readers on topics that people actually search for. You can ‘sculpt’ the pagerank of your pages to focus on passing their juice to these second tier terms and get more search engine traffic in return.

The Affiliates Guide to Keyword Research

My keyword research guide for affiliates does have similarities to the bloggers guide above, but contains a few fundamental differences. Before we get started, I want to say that I’ll personally be focusing on researching keyphrases as an affiliate who relies on SEO, not PPC. I’ve made the majority of my income online thanks to affiliate keyword research and free search traffic, so have never really needed to delve into the world of PPC.

However, there will be quite a few things I say in this section that do apply to Pay Per Click marketing, if that is your area of focus. Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, I’ll highlight the main sections were going to cover here:

• A Dose of Reality
• Finding What Drives You
• Shortening Your Keyphrase List
• Checking for Longevity
• Analysing the Competition

If this five step process sounds interesting to you, then keep reading.

A Dose of Reality

When I first got started in affiliate marketing, I did so purely because I wanted to make money. Though I was partly working in industries that I cared about, for the most part I really didn’t care about the product I was recommending. At the time I hadn’t really made any money online, so was skeptical that a solid income each month was attainable.

If you haven’t made much money yourself, then maybe you can relate to that.

Though I did have some success in industries that I didn’t care about, I want to make it clear that it wasn’t for me. I eventually discovered that there are tons of ways to make money in affiliate around your passions so there’s no reason not to try and do so.

That being said, there are popular ways to make money without having to care about the niche you’re in. Since I want to keep my personal biases aside, I should really talk about them as well. One popular strategy employed by a lot of internet marketers is to “intercept” sales that are made online.

It’s not easy to take a cold (read: new) website visitor and convince them to buy something. But, it’s very easy to make money from someone who is already looking to buy something. Do you know what most people do when they want to buy a product?

More often than not, they head straight over to Google and look for reviews about that specific item.

Marketers caught onto this so they build review sites, intercept the sales process, and then convince people to purchase the product through their affiliate link. Because the customer is already on the verge of buying something, you can convert them very easily, and make a lot of money for doing so.

This isn’t a totally new idea, but the application of this idea is something I think people go about in the wrong way.

A Real-Life Example
(This example was sent to CloudNiche subscribers two weeks ago)

If I head on over to Clickbank now, I can see the top product in the Make Money section is a product called Commission Crusher and the top product in the Health section is Diet Solution.

• There are 388,000 (!) results for “Commission Crusher Review” in Google
• There are 260,000 results for “Diet Solution Review” in Google

Just change the niche and you’ve already eliminated one third of your competition. Still, there’s two problems to point out here.

1. Focusing on make money products means there is a ton of competition

2. Focusing on anything in Clickbank ensures there’s a lot of competition

Fortunately, you can implement this review strategy for literally any product out there. An easy way to find these products is to use Amazon. A good friend of mine, who is currently teaching English in Thailand, is making a good income from selling kitchen appliances on Amazon. Seriously.

If you sell enough of a product, Amazon increase your commision rate, so you make even more money per customer you send their way. The greatest thing about Amazon is that you can see the most popular products in any category, and products people are looking to buy. With just 30 minutes research you can usually find popular items where there are no results in Google for their review related keyphrases.

I won’t reveal the keyphrase I sent out, since there have to be some perks to getting Cloud Niche emails from me .

Finding What Drives You

The reason I don’t focus so much on industries I have no interest in is not only because I can make money writing about what I love, but because doing so makes the overall affiliate process far harder to follow. If you’re using a guide like Cloud Living then sure, it’s easy to pick a random niche in the beginning stages, but it’s not so easy when you have to build a website and write articles around a topic you have no interest in.

Most people online are looking for something to fill a need. People playing games might just want to avoid the school or office work they could (should?) be doing. People reading weight loss blogs may be doing so because they want to attract members of the opposite sex.

Some people really want to quit their day job and leave the rat race, so they read sites like this one. Generally, everything anyone does online is to help them personally, whether you like how that sounds or not. This is probably why Seth Godin refers to eMail as Memail. We care about ourselves, naturally.

To understand what other people might be interested in online, I look at what I’m interested in.

What are my passions?

• Travelling
• Internet marketing
• Driving
• Reading useful, non-fiction books
• Partying (I think my “record” is around 36 nights out in a row)

After I have these written down, then I’ll do the same for fears and problems I have in my life, or I’ve had in the past. Things that I know about. Generally I don’t need to write down these things as I know what I like, fear, and have issues with. However, it’s useful to have a written record for the next step of the process.

Shortening Your Keyphrase List

Once you pick a few topics that you’re interested in, it’s time to find popular keyphrases around those topics that people search for online. The best tool I can recommend to you for this is, just like in the blogging section, the Google Keyword tool.

Simply enter all of the passions, fears and problems that you’ve listed down and then run them through the tool. You’ll then get back a list of keyphrases which are relevant to your initial input. Ideally you’re looking for phrases which get between 2,000 and 20,000 exact searches per month.

This is on the lower scale of the body keyphrases, and usually means terms won’t be too competitive (there are exceptions, of course).

After your first filter (how many searches the term gets), start removing keyphrases based on ones that don’t really interest you. The phrase “make money online” may be relevant for this blog, but it’s not personally something that I would want to try and rank for, irrelevant of how competitive it is.

You should be left with two dozen or so terms. The next step I take is to ask myself whether the keyphrase entered in Google would result in a targeted visitor that I could monetize. In other words, does the keyphrase indicate that someone is likely to purchase something?

Trust me when I say that not all traffic is created equally. I would rather have 100 highly targeted visitors landing on my websites each day than 10,000 people who are not actively seeking the information that I have to offer.

Checking for Longevity

With all of the phrases you have left, run them through the Google Trends tool. I made the mistake of not doing this when I started out in affiliate marketing a few years ago (though in my defence I don’t even think the tool was available then) and spent a lot of time focusing on markets that were getting smaller over time.

To show you what I’m talking about, let me give you an example. A couple of months ago I noticed that the domains MinecraftForum.com and MinecraftForums.com were available on Namecheap.com for $1,800 in total. Minecraft is a game where the focus is on playability, rather than visual effects. It has made it’s sole creator, Notch, millions of dollars over the past year alone.

If I run Minecraft through Google Trends, I can see that at the moment this is one of the hottest games on the internet. I almost purchased the domains the very second that I loaded up this chart (and the Alexa graph for active Minecraft forums that already exist):

However, the pattern that Minecraft is going through generally tends to die down pretty quickly. The popularity of the game can only keep growing for so long. Maybe it would have been a good investment, and it still may be (since the game is coming out on iOS and Nintendo 3DS), but other popular games have not always maintained their huge growth…

The last thing you want to do is focus on a term that is not going to be popular in a few months, so make sure you don’t skip this step.

Analysing the Competition

This step is to simply find out how difficult it is to rank in Google for the terms I want to get traffic for. I’m only going to get a good portion of those thousands of searchers if I’m somewhere in the top five results. If my site is back on page two, I would only get a trickle of search traffic each day. If you don’t know already, the major factor which defines where a page ranks on Google is the number of backlinks that the site / page has. Backlinks are simply hyperlinks from one page to another, like me linking to my about page in this sentence.

My next step was to find out how many backlinks the top searches for this page had. Here are the steps involved:

• Search for your desired keyphrase in Google
• Take the URL of the 1st, 2nd and 3rd results
• Head on over to Yahoo or OpenSiteExplorer as they’re far better at showing links than Google
• Type (without quotes): “link:oneofyourURL’sgohere -site:thedomain.com“
• Write down the number of results that Yahoo shows

Note for step four that after -site: you type the domain name. So, if a result for personal development was johndoe.com/personal-development, that would be my URL, but “johndoe.com” would be after -site:

Run this five-step process for all of your keyphrases and you should have a good idea of how many backlinks it will take to rank for them.

If the top three sites all have tens of thousands of backlinks, it’s unlikely I’m going to try and outrank them as that could take me years. If they have a few thousand, on the other hand, I still might give things a try. I don’t believe that I can get thousands of quality links to my site (although, saying that, ViperChill has 25,000) but I do believe I can get far better quality links than my competition.

I’ve written a huge guide to link building (not as huge as this one, don’t worry) that should teach you all you need to know.

A New Record

The length of a post doesn’t really matter, as it’s very easy to write 6,000 words of poor quality content. That being said, this is the longest blog post I have written in the history of my life (6,530 words at this point) so I really hope the effort I put in led you to getting something out of the post.

I would appreciate some Twitter and Facebook love below if you did learn something, but of course that is not a necessity. The fact that you’re a reader is enough for me. See you in the comments?

It’s one of the most effective tactics used to grow internet empires yet there’s a good chance you’re not even using it. People who have been in the internet marketing world for a while now will know what I’m referring to, but for everyone else, allow me to introduce you to Split-Testing. The basis for another in-depth tutorial and exclusive ViperChill case study.

Split testing, in it’s simplest form, is testing elements of a web page against each other, to see which convince more visitors to perform a desired action. For example, you may want to see which eBook cover graphic on a free giveaway page tempts more people to give you their email address.

The reason that marketers like myself split test is pretty simple: We can make a lot more money and convert more visitors into subscribers, without having to get more traffic.

For a few years I strayed away from split testing, assuming that it was too complex for me to implement or I just wasn’t getting enough website visitors for it to matter. I was wrong. My income has increased dramatically thanks to split-testing, and it’s something you can implement on your website today with ease.

I’m going to first show you some of my own split test examples, then talk about how you can set-up split testing yourself, and finally cover which page elements I recommend that you test the most.

Squeeze Page Header Variations (DOUBLED Conversions)

There is a page on this site where I give away a free eBook on how I grew ViperChill to over 10,000 subscribers in 12 months. I send visitors to the page mostly through this site, but also through purchasing Solo Ads on Warrior Forum. I talk more about Solo Ads in this video if you want to learn more about them.

For this split test all I changed was the words in the headline of the page. Here is how they compared. Note: To interpret the following figures be aware that 54.2% means, for example, 54 out of every 100 visitors would convert (give away their email address) using this headline variation.

Headline #1: “Discover How You Can Grow Your Blog to 10,000+ Subscribers in Just 12 Months” 24.2% Conversion Rate

Headline #2: “My Free PDF Reveals How to Get 10,000+ Blog Subscribers in Just 12 Months” 34.3% Conversion Rate

Headline #3: “Discover How This Very Blog Grew to 10,000+ Subscribers in Just 12 Months” 54.2% Conversion Rate

In the initial stages the figures were actually the total opposite to what they are now. The bottom headline converted the best for warm and cold traffic (people who had never been to ViperChill before) in the end.

I also tested a version of this page with no white bar in the header, leaving no way for a visitor to click off the page. Even after hundreds of conversions, there was no statistically significant difference between having the header and not having it.

CloudBlogging Add to Cart Button

When I launched CloudBlogging I also shared an interesting statistic about people who were visiting my sales page and actually purchasing the product. Even though there were over 4,000 words on the sales page, changing just the ‘Add to Cart’ button that people had to click on to purchase the product made a dramatic difference.

Making the button stand out more and changing the wording above it improved the conversion rate by 39%. The button style with the dashes around it is known as a “Belcher Button” as it was made popular by the marketer Perry Belcher.

The Power of Negative Subject Lines

Not only do I test the pages that convert visitors into subscribers or customers, I also perform ‘split test broadcasts’ when sending out emails with Aweber. This allows me to see which variations of a message get the most opens and entice people to click on links.

I could then use that headline again in the future for new subscribers, or even just keep it in mind for use in a future blog post.

Negativity in subject lines always seems to help me get more opens due to its emotional impact. If you’re going to use this though, I recommend you do so sparingly.

Why Split-Test?

The reason I split test is simply because I can make more money and convert more visitors into subscribers with the same amount of traffic. Though in the later stages of your testing it’s usually easier to double the traffic you send to the page than it is to double your conversion rate, you can make a big impact in the early days.

I said at the end of CloudBlueprint that the people who split-test and optimize their whole marketing strategy the most are generally the people I know who make the most money. If I was personally starting from scratch when it comes to making money online I would follow the Blueprint strategy and do nothing but conversion rate optimisation.

If you can optimise your squeeze and/or pitch pages to get great conversion rates, and then do the same with your sales pages, you put yourself in a much better position than your competitors in your niche. Most people simply don’t do any split-testing on their pages, and they’re really missing out.

There is no reason not to be optimising the conversion rate of your website. After all, you can create tests in minutes, for free, and test virtually anything on your pages. Things like clicks on certain links, people purchasing products, or people filling in sections of a form can be tracked with ease.

The Two Tools I Recommend

There are two tools that I personally recommend when it comes to split-testing. They are Google’s own Google Website Optimizer which is a free tool, and Visual Website Optimizer which is a paid tool.

The different between the two is a little like the difference between Google Analytics and GetClicky. Many of us are moving over to Clicky for the real-time analytics side of things, which enables us to react to traffic spikes as they happen (and convert more visitors).

Visual Website Optimizer in this case is the real-time solution, with Google Website Optimizer having a fairly long wait before showing changes (most notable when your traffic levels are low).

If I’m totally honest, the real time aspect of VWO was not actually enough to tempt me to pay for their service. Though, I am more than happy to since it’s a great solution overall. Whenever I try to use Google Website Optimizer it just never seems to work for me. Granted, I haven’t tried in a couple of weeks, but I could only ever get it to track a few conversions before it would stop updating (even when I knew there were hundreds).

I looked for help with the service online and found people in a similar situation, but no resolution in sight. It was then that I signed up for the free (for 30 days) version of VWO and have used it ever since. If Google Website Optimizer works for you then that should be more than enough for your needs.

How to Split-Test

There are multiple ways to test variations of a page design. Multivariante testing, for example, changes multiple elements of your page on the fly, to find the combination which converts the most visitors. A/B split testing, which is what I mostly use, sends traffic between two different URL’s where you can test varying designs.

When I launched Cloud Blogging, some people were taken to CloudBloggingHQ.com while others were taken to CloudBloggingHQ.com/hq/ and similar URL’s. Each page included variations of certain elements like the headline I used. This is so I could test which version of the sales page convinced more people to purchase the product. I ended up changing 8 elements from the original page very early on and made more money for doing so. I still have more things I want to test.

When split testing, it’s important to test as few elements as you can at a time. Ideally, you should only ever be testing one change against another. I prefer to take my time with the whole process so I can get a high-converting page which will benefit me over the long-term.

When you sign up to either of the two tools above, you’ll need to go through their own wizards which help you create your first test. If this is your first time, then I would set-up a split URL test / A/B Test, and then create another page on your site, slightly different to the one you want to improve.

On the new page and the page you’re testing, simply paste the javascript code you are given in the header section of each of them. You’ll have to do this in whatever CMS you’re using or manually if you’re using static HTML files.

A small guide to split testing using WordPress as your CMS, can be found below…

How to Fully Split-Test on WordPress

Though I haven’t actually tried it, pasting the javascript code you get from either VWO or GWO the HTML tab on WordPress should work fine. Otherwise you can add it to your header file by going to Appearance >> Editor >> header.php and adding it there.

Add all of your code just before the closing < / head > tag and save the file.

If you want to perform big changes in terms of variations then it’s not always easy to do so with the typical WordPress WYSIWYG page editor. I highly recommend OptimizePress to anyone who wants to be able to style squeeze page and sales pages easily so they can vary different elements.

Shown above, OptimizePress is a popular theme for WordPress which I’ve mentioned a few times on this site. It really does take the pain out of creating sales and squeeze pages.

Another alternative is to create static HTML files on your site. For the 10,000 Subscribers eBook page, that’s exactly what I did. All you have to do is go to the blog post / page that will be the original page alongside your variation and view its source code. You can do this on any browser by going to the necessary variation of View > Page Source. Then, copy all of that code into a text editor (I use TextWrangler, for Mac) and save the file.

You can then upload it to a new folder on your server, and edit the page. That way you can remove things like the header from your WordPress page, which wouldn’t have been possible with the original editor. Make sure you include the javascript code from either VWO or GWO and you’re good to go.

If you need some ideas on what to split test, then keep reading…

What to Split-test

The three most common elements things I like to split test are…

• The Headline – As shown in the 10K eBook example above, changing the wording of your headline – even just slightly – can have a huge effect on your overall conversion rate.
• The Offer – Not what you’re offering, but the format that it’s in. You can see big changes between giving away a PDF on a squeeze page compared to a video or podcast in certain industries.
• The Button – Whether it’s your “Free Access” button on a squeeze page or “Add to Cart” button on a sales page, changing the colours and wording of this element can also have a positive impact on your bottom line.

The best thing about split-testing is that you really can test as many things as you want. You can see which sidebar variation convinces people to opt-in to your blog or just get more people signing up for your freebies on your about page. The only limit to this is your imagination.

If you have any questions about this, please feel free to ask me in the comments below. If you understand everything then you’re now in a position to get a lot more out of the traffic your sites currently receive.

In the last few weeks, ViperChill was ranked 9th in a list of the biggest marketing blogs in the world, just ahead of blogging powerhouse’s like Seth Godin and Aaron Wall of SEOBook. The rankings were based on how many times people come back to a site each month, and how many pages they visit. The data was put together by a respected analytics company, and you can find the full list here.

To say I’m happy current situation the site is in is a huge understatement, but the success is all thanks to you – the readers – who keep coming to the site, reading what I have to say and leaving comments. I can’t thank you enough for that, and I hope to see you here for years to come. I’ll do my best to keep providing content worth reading.

Why I’m Sharing My Income

Last year I wrote my 12th monthly traffic report and said it would be the last one ever. Then, a couple of weeks ago I wrote a post about my dream future: Project Warehouse. In that post I mentioned an epiphany I had about what really used to inspire me when it came to making money online in the early days.

For those of you who missed the post I recalled that seeing how much money other people were making online motivated me to work harder at making money online myself.

Since my goal with ViperChill – and especially CloudBlueprint – is to help you make more money online than ever before, I guess I should be the one sharing some of that income proof. I’ve been hesitant to do so for a long time, mostly because I just can’t be as transparent as other people.

I’ve seen too many examples of big marketers releasing the sites they’re working on and having their rankings tank or a ton of negative feedback sent their way. Heck, early last year I showed you all a tiny site of mine making $400 per month and a few weeks later I already had 5 new competitors on the first page of Google (I find popular, uncompetitive niches fairly well).

As much as I would love to share everything with you all, it simply doesn’t make business sense. Instead, I will only be reporting on the money that I’m making with ViperChill.

ViperChill: The Business

Since I’m going to be sharing these reports on a monthly basis, I should really comment on how I feel about making money with this website. The genuine reason for me starting ViperChill in the first place was simply because I love to help people and enjoy having an audience. As soon as I sold my personal development blog, I knew there was going to be a void in my online activities, and I re-launched ViperChill to fill that void.

I love working on ViperChill more than any other site and for over a year, I made literally nothing here. In the first 12 months of writing for the site I probably made $50 in total. Further proof that I don’t care about the money and instead on genuinely helping people.

That changed (the income, not the helping people) when I launched Cloud Living in December 2009, and subsequently Cloud Blogging last month. Both products have made thousands of dollars since then, so I can’t deny that the site is now making a decent income.

I really don’t have any income goals for ViperChill, since I make a livable income from my other ventures online. All of the money I make here is just a nice bonus. I don’t feel bad in any way about making money online, in part, by teaching people how to make a living online. I’ve done nothing but focus on giving value to people here, and as the world works, you usually get something in return for doing that.

I’ve stayed true to my roots in that there is no advertising on this site (and never will be), and I’ve even closed down products like affiliateSkin because I simply couldn’t offer the live support I wanted to for customers.

Sharing my income here is for no other reason than I hope to inspire you to see what is possible online…

ViperChill.com Income for May 2011

• Aweber: $1.50
• GetClicky: $21
• Pop-Up Domination: $175
• Hostgator: $500
• OptimizePress: $630
• CloudBlogging: ~$1,500 (profits are split with my co-creator)
• CloudLiving: ~$5,200

Total: ~$8,027

The income figures for CloudLiving are CloudBlogging projects are estimations since we may get refunds (there’s a 60-day money back guarantee).

My overall expenses are pretty low. Hosting costs me $8 per month (plus around $1.50 for Amazon S3) and I pay $50 per month for Aweber which handles all of my email subscribers. I do all of the design work here myself and don’t spend a penny on advertising, so the majority of the revenue this site makes is pure profit.

Drama At the Top

Most of you probably weren’t around the blogosphere a few years ago when a well named blogger named Kathy Sierra decided to quit blogging due to death threats she was receiving. She owned a blog called Creating Passionate Users and provided amazing advice. Yet because she was becoming successful and well-known, there were people out there who wanted to bring her down.

Some people even Photoshopped pictures of her with a noose around her neck.

I never imagined anything as extreme would happen to me, but I was warned that the trolls appear once you do start seeing any form of success. Sadly, that’s happening to me on a frequent basis at the moment. In the last few weeks I’ve been “outed” on multiple blogs and forums, all trying to get traffic based on bashing my brand name.

Funnily (or not), they usually come to me and apologise for their actions after their viral bait didn’t quite work out.

Apology #1

The only reason the person in the email above apologised is because I used their full name on a public forum where they were trying to slander me, and they wanted me to take it down. Their whole argument was that I stole some content, and I happily proved I didn’t. The situation could have been resolved in seconds with a quick email to me.

Instead, not only did they blog about me with the headline “ViperChill is busted” but they tweeted dozens of bloggers I connect with to share the link. Then this person – Rison – spammed the comments on CloudBlueprint, spammed the ViperChill Facebook wall and created threads about me on multiple forums.

Apology #2

Another example above is where I caught someone pirating software a friend of mine created. They added me as a friend on Facebook and then started talking about it publicly. I asked them to buy a legit copy, and that’s when about 20 of their friends (and the guy above, also Nigerian) started calling me a racist.

And the final entry to the trolling stakes is a lovely man from India who’s name I sadly don’t know. At least once a day he changes his I.P. and leaves a comment on ViperChill calling me a p*ssy. Why? Because one of my free WordPress plugins doesn’t have a feature he wants. I can’t even make this up.

You guys should all totally start a blog today .

Feed Subscribers Growth

In all honesty, I’ve done very little over the past year to grow the audience this blog has. I’ve only averaged 2-3 blog posts per month and I’ve written no more than three guest posts in 2011. However, ViperChill is highly optimized for converting the visitors it does get into subscribers.

You can see the number of subscribers the site has had on certain dates, below:

• September 30th (2010): 9,651
• May 31st (2011): 15,358

The difference between the two is 5,707. If you divide that by the number of full months in between – eight – you learn that the site has grown by 713 subscribers per month, on average.

With that in mind, the site should reach 20,000 subscribers before the end of the year. I’m confident the site will actually have a lot more than that as we enter 2012.

Personal Update

There’s a lot I could talk about in this personal update, but I would probably just annoy you if I told you how many projects I’m working on – and with which people – without being able to reveal any specifics. So, just keep in mind that I’m working on a number of very cool things, and you’ll hear more about them when they’re ready for the world to see them.

Overall, I’m really happy with how everything is going with ViperChill. I know based on the traffic the site is getting and the very minimal promotions I do, the site could be making a lot more money. While true, it’s not something I’m too worried about or focused on right now.

Instead I want to continue to focus on growing the audience here. The money can wait. 9th is good (see intro), but why not go for number one?

As always, thanks for being a part of the journey…