Before I do that, I want to do something I never do and that’s push a project or idea, but here we go: Sign-up to my email list at the bottom of this post or in the right sidebar here. Click through to ViperChill if you’re reading this elsewhere. The emails I have been sharing lately include information you won’t find on any other website (even here) mostly focused around unique SEO ideas. I actually have two more videos going live to the list this week.

I mention the list not only because I want you to subscribe, but I recently launched my Warrior Forum guide there. A quick background check for those of you who don’t know about Warrior, is that it’s basically a discussion board for internet marketers wanting to learn about internet marketing. It’s also huge with thousands of people logged in at any one time. My guide was about purchasing products there and reviewing whether they actually lived up to all of the hype.

Now, I’ve always known their WSO section (marketplace) to be a bit of a shady place. For the most part, it’s frequented by people who only make money by teaching other people how to make money. That’s easily 90% of the listings there. I’ve participated a little over the years (109 posts since Jan 2011) but generally kept out of the WSO area and just offered advice in other areas.

Until recently, when I went super-saiyan rage mode.

I’ve been doing so much SEO work lately with my links guy (to be revealed soon to those on my list) and having a ton of success. I decided I would check out one of the SEO guides on Warrior, just to see what people were talking about these days, as I haven’t been involved in reading others’ ideas much. Rather, I’ve been testing my own.

Needless to say, the first product I bought was terrible.

It happens, I can understand that. But what really got to me was how many excellent reviews this thing was getting, all clearly faked or influenced, and how many beginner marketers were getting scammed out of cash.

My research saw me purchasing 3 more of these products, each with the same, awful end-result. Again, there’s full details and screenshots of the actual products for those on my list. You’ll get the PDF instantly.

Glen get’s a little angry…

I left the first negative review on one product thread for an eBook I purchased. It was a guide teaching people how to make $350+ day from their email list, with a lot of guarantees. The short version of this is that the product was terrible and can be summed up with the phrase “give people free things so they like you”. It was also barely readable, and really just trying to sell you on other products through affiliate links.

My review received 13 thanks (the forum equivalent of likes) and hopefully stopped a few newbies from getting ripped off. I mean, the product owner couldn’t even give me one example of a $350 day. Never mind doing it on a daily basis.

What happened next? Well, he turned the entire sales page into giving away some other product for free. A small win on my part, right? Wrong!

He then had another thread going where he now decided to sell this same product (of course, which lacked my negative review) saying that now you’ll only make $250/day instead of $350. No update to product buyers and nothing mentioned on the other thread. Just an I-got-caught-out bait and switch.

I reported this multiple times over the period of a week. Nothing was done by the moderators there.

Glen needs to step away from the computer…

I have to admit, I was a bit pissed-off at this point. You might think I’m getting a little too emotional over bad products on a forum, but I remember in my teens how I was so caught up in buying money-making-idea after idea on websites like this. It can be really addictive. I see so many people caught up in that trap, and what they’re being sold is absolute garbage, to put it nicely.

I decided to create a thread about the marketplace section of the forum being shady, and how members (like the one who changed his entire thread) were scamming a lot of people there. Lots of people thanked me for the post and sent me private messages in agreement. Within an hour it was deleted. No PM, no message, nothing.

Please note that I’m not just some random member crying on the site. I paid for my account there and I’m 99% sure I have the highest post count to thanks (likes) ratio for any user on the entire forum.

Even more frustrating that my one-week reporting did nothing, but my thread could disappear in less than an hour.

Glen needs to get back on the computer and blog…

I purchased another product. Not out of wanting some secret idea, but I actually wanted to dislike it. I wanted it to be bad so I could be 100% guilt-free when telling people to stay away from that section of the website.

It was terrible. In this 30 minute video, which promised you would make $100 a day with 30 minutes work, you’re simply told to use ‘solo ads’ to build your email list. That was honestly all there was to the course.

Not what email service to use. Not what niche to choose. Not what kind of content to email people. Just “use solo ads”.

Yet, half of the reviews were amazing. I left a negative, but fair, review. Here’s what someone instantly posted on my Facebook page:

40 minutes later, it was deleted. A review of a product I’d paid money for.

I wrote it again, with a slightly nicer tone. Again, deleted within an hour.

Alan (thanks Alan!) prompted me to do a little research into his shady looking testimonials:

It turns out all you have to do is grow a network of people who will all do video testimonials for each other. That should be enough to convince the newbies in your thread – who don’t have too much spare time like I do – that you’re the real deal.

There were actually a lot more than this, but you should be starting to smell something fishy already.

Reviews: Deleted. Thread: Deleted. Here’s How I EVENTUALLY Got the Message Across

My initial idea was just to blog about it. I have a fairly large audience here and I know quite a few of you are active members on the site, meaning some Warriors would hear about it and hopefully be a bit wiser about what they purchase. That’s purely my aim. People are allowed to scam newbies on this forum, so I wanted to get the message across to them to be wiser about their purchases.

What you’re about to read was not done to seem cool, “hey look what I did and they didn’t notice”. I really don’t care about that. I highly recommend that anyone who doesn’t understand my frustrations go and buy a product from the site. More than likely it will be under $20, and you can choose from thousands. Then tell me if your product matches the hypes from the sale page. Hype is supposed to be hype, but it wont even be remotely close (unless you buy software, rather than an info-product).

Then go and tell me if it matches the glowing reviews, or the amazing testimonial videos. Then think about how many hours some people had to work just to get that product. Don’t think you’ll definitely get your refund either.

Also, if you’re reading this via RSS or in your inbox, please read my first comment at the bottom of this post.

Was there a better way than hearing about my blog randomly? Wouldn’t it be better if I could get in front of actual people who are stuck in this opt-in-for-everything and want to buy everything mode? But if my threads would be deleted within an hour (and myself possibly banned) and my reviews weren’t sticking (or if they were, the product owner just moved to a different thread), surely there was nothing else to do but blog?

Well, there was one thing: I could join these scammers in the WSO section, and sell to these people who are buying and opting in for everything myself. And that’s exactly what I did.

I didn’t really sell anything. I just promoted an eBook that has been on this website for over two years (though I did update it a fortnight ago). I sent people to an opt-in page where they could get it for free, here: http://www.viperchill.com/10000-subscribers/

Here’s my thread:

If I’m going to be paying $40 just to have a thread there, I may as well promote something.

Now I can hear you thinking “But Glen, what does this have to do with trying to get people to beware of scammers over there?”. Hold on young padawan, let’s look at one of the reviews:

Sorry if the text in that image isn’t entirely readable. My blog is only 600px wide. He’s basically thanking me for talking about garbage IM products on the internet and says he has been scammed many times before. It seems like a random review and totally off-topic. And it would be, if I was only giving away that 10K subscribers eBook.

Here’s the follow-up you’ll get as soon as you subscribe to my list:

As you can see, in the second eBook they are getting what they signed-up for, just with an added bonus as well. The first thing they’re getting is my Warrior guide, which shows my experience of buying multiple products from the site and then I reviewed them. TL;DR: They all had huge claims, but not one delivered.

I don’t really know if this would be a bannable offence on the site. I don’t see why it should be, but I guess it’s possible when simple product reviews are getting deleted. If I’m banned after this blog post, I’ll accept that, but it will only reinforce my beliefs about the best practices (or lack of) that happen over there.

More importantly, it worked: Over 200 Warriors have picked up the eBook so far. It would be nice if the number was higher, but that’s 200 people who actively spend time in the WSO section of the website, buying products and opting in for any freebies that they can get. Hopefully they’ll pass the message on to even more people.

I could have made the number much higher, but I’m at the point now where I have to keep bumping my thread ($40 each time) but then I’m financially supporting a business I don’t agree with. More importantly than my Warrior fate, is whether people got something from my guide:

To end this section, I want to say that I don’t believe every member or every product being sold there is bad. Not at all. But from my experience, the vast majority of products on the site are garbage and a waste of time. If you’re going to buy WSO’s, proceed with caution.

The World’s Worst Email List

I could have split this into two blog posts, but you know I love making people scroll .

I recently discovered the worst email list on the internet. It wasn’t something I happened to come across overnight, but something that became more clear to me as time went on over the last few months. Unsurprisingly, it was the list of an internet marketer. Not necessarily a slimy marketer, but a marketer nontheless.

That email list was mine.

• It wasn’t the worst because people would opt-in here and suddenly be redirected to Cloudniche.com – leaving them pretty confused
• It wasn’t the worst because some of the links in the eBook I was promoting had expired and didn’t exist
• It wasn’t the worst because some emails had cloud niche in the title and some had ViperChill
• It wasn’t the worst because some ideas were in a follow-up sequence and some were live, leaving people even more confused

Those things were pretty bad – and something I’m a little ashamed of after pushing email marketing so much on this site – but there was another issue…

Nobody took action.

I posed this question on Facebook at the end of March, and received a lot of interesting answers. Three people won the competition, and they all guessed zero.

Since then, someone actually has came to me with a beta version of a plugin they’ve built from one of my emails. It’s not quite finished, but they took action. Unless I’m mistaken (it’s possible after well over 1,000 replies) not one person (out of 20,000+) built a website around the ideas I sent.

And I don’t think it was because they’re bad emails. I literally have over 1,000 emails from people thanking me for the niches that I’m sending out:

If they’re thanking me and telling me they love the suggestions, why wouldn’t they do something about it?

A Lesson in Passion

The simple answer is that people generally don’t want to work on things they don’t care about. As much as I love marketing, SEO and so-forth, I hated my job in Africa at times where I was so limited by what I could do with clients. Here I was, working with some of the biggest companies in the world – my dream job – and they give me little more than a Wikipedia page and say, “go and promote this”. You can be sure that not every day in the office was very exciting for me.

Interestingly, I had people bugging me for more updates. “Hey Glen, when’s the next niche idea coming out”, “Why are you not sending more emails”. I have the ideas; just it feels such a waste to keep promoting them. Almost like I’m contributing to the opposite of what I preach. I’m encouraging people to go from project to project, rather than sticking to one thing and really dominating that industry.

Some of the most common emails I received (besides ‘thanks for the idea’) were people asking me questions on how to take the idea further. How do I build the site? How do I monetise it? Where should I get my theme from? Does X matter? I try to respond to as many as I can, but as one man I can only do so much. Another place where passion would come into play here is that most people tend to figure it out. If you care about the niche enough and want to make money, you will find answers to these questions.

Whether they’re from a person you email or forums and blog posts, you’ll do what you can to find a way. Giving people random niche ideas doesn’t seem to help that.

Losing 1,000+ Subscribers Overnight

I’ve known that I need to change my list for a long time, but it’s been running so smoothly (people have been thanking me, and unsubscribe rates are very low) that I’ve been waiting for a solid reason to take its place. With my focus the last few months more on building new websites for case studies and for rankings, I’ve found that my passion has come back 10-fold.

Now that results (traffic and earnings) are starting to come in for these new websites – in non-marketing industries – I’ve been creating more marketing content than ever (I have 4 more videos lined up for subscribers in just a week, and they’re all of a high quality).

Some people even started to notice:

However, I have a ton of new content that I want to share with my new-found motivation, so I took the decision to reset my list. This means that I deleted every single follow-up email in my sequence, and started again from scratch. This means no more cloud niche, and it also means a lot of confused subscribers.

Some people pointed out that the infrequency of my emails probably had an affect – and I’m sure it did – but no doubt the change in direction (which I explained in a follow-up video to my audience) and email titles caused a lot of confusion. There wasn’t really much I could do to mitigate that.

But here’s the thing: It’s a shame that some people won’t be getting my updates anymore, but it doesn’t bother me in the slightest. This new focus and content angle will not be for everyone. If you’re not interested, the last thing I want to do is take up space in your inbox.

I then went and rectified a few things:

• I fixed the broken links in the eBooks I was promoting (luckily I still had the OpenOffice files from years ago)
• I changed my ‘thank you page’ after someone opts-in so they actually stay on ViperChill
• I redesigned my confirmation page when they confirm their email address
• I gave the email list a brand (the gold VIP Email graphic) and use that on exclusive pages just for email subscribers
• I now have better content coming up on my email list than I do my blog (videos, guides, audio files, everything)

A lesson for those with a list: Don’t be afraid to change if your emails aren’t getting the desired result. You may lose subscribers, but it’s more important to build an audience who are passionate about the same things as you. If you’re not in it, they’ll know. All the praise in the world doesn’t mean anything if your emails are not doing what you intended them to do.

See you on the inside? As always, thanks for reading!

These days it’s all about trust and authority – you need your readers to see your blog as an authority and you need Google to trust your SEO strategy. That means it’s harder than ever to succeed but it also means that the people willing to work away at it for months and years are doing very well.

In this post I’m going to show you:

• My personal theory for this slow-to-grow strategy.
• Why multiple passive income streams are important to mitigate risks.
• How to choose the right affiliate program to promote.
• How to write an “ultimate article” that promotes your product.
• The content strategy that drives traffic and authority.

At the end of it all I’m going to show you an example of this being done extremely well by a very nerdy individual who really knows how to match his traffic to a non-sleazy sale.

This is a pretty long post (Glen doesn’t let me eat unless they are) so grab your caffeine source and dive in.

Note from Glen: The above is true. Also, the example at the end of this post is AWESOME. That is all…

My Personal Theory for this Passive Income Strategy

One of my main goals for exiting the “real world” and starting a blog was to create an income stream where I could work less and spend more time doing things I love and helping people that needed it. And one of the most powerful, sustainable and long-term methods is a trustworthy blog with carefully chosen affiliates.

Seeing as this strategy has worked well for me I thought I’d share the basic structure/idea so that others can hopefully make a bit of extra income.

How does it work?

You build a blog around a topic that you love or a keyword that you think might be profitable. Then you focus on creating quality evergreen content and a good social backing. You then create long-form articles with gently mentioned affiliates and funnel traffic towards them through useful and varied content on related sites.

If done right, this strategy can see you developing high converting articles that promote quality affiliates through top Google rankings for years to come.

How much can it earn?

I’m not a fan of going into detailed earnings predictions for this kind of post because then people tend to get upset when they don’t see the same results straight away. But for the sake of information I’ll say that I make enough to pay my rent and bills from this strategy and I know guys making upwards of $1000 a day.

Another note from Glen: I have a good blogging friend who is pulling in upwards of $10,000 a month from this strategy (no, not Pat) and you would never know it unless he told you.

Why you need to focus on more than one

One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned online is that things don’t last. Even the biggest sites in the world eventually fail (remember MySpace?).

Google is constantly updating its policies and algorithms and you often find that one day something is going extremely well and the next you’re struggling to find lunch money.

When implementing a blogging strategy like this one you need to do two things:

• Protect your main assets
  If you have a “main” blog you need to make sure your don’t risk it by overdoing new strategies that you are really exciting about. This particular one I’m talking about today is 100% legit in the eyes of Google but there is a risk that people could take it too far and make problems for themselves.
• Protect yourself from failures
  If you do overcook something or something changes that you didn’t anticipate it’s a good idea to make sure you have two or three other things in the works. That means trying out multiple things at once or at least making sure you have a “ready to go” backup plan.

There is inherent risk in all business decisions but, if you can, you want to make sure that you are mitigating them as much as possible without talking yourself out of the race.

Now that the preliminary stuff is out of the way we can get into the three-staged process for getting this affiliate thing cranking.

Stage 1: How to choose the right affiliate program

Assuming you’re doing this my way, you’ve already got a blog built up (if not there’s a section for you down below) and that blog has a lot of earned authority. This authority comes in the form of quality distinctive content, an active Google+ account that is hooked up with Google Authorship, a strong and personal brand, a growing community, etc.

What this means is that you will need to select an affiliate program that:

• You have tested for yourself
  It’s a good idea to never promote an affiliate product unless I’ve used it yourself and know that it is a legitimate service that your readers will enjoy.
• You have enjoyed
  You need to make sure that you enjoyed the experience. Not only does a bad product damage your reputation it has financial implications as well: you don’t make money when people return the affiliate. That is a common occurrence when sleazy sales pages push ordinary products that aren’t as good as promised.
• You think fits your brand
  A big part of the “trust factor” is that you are pretty narrow in your niche. So if you have a blog about fitness you don’t promote credit cards or dog training. I can’t prove it but I think Google picks up on these elements.

If you take a look at Glen’s last two product releases, OptinSkin and PostSkin, you’ll notice that they have a very sharp and clean fit with his readership’s needs.

This most certainly was not an accident. They fit a very deliberate narrative in both this site’s journey and Glen’s own journey – those products are things he wanted to make for his own use as much as they were made for his readership and the wider blogging community. And because Glen is perceived as an authority in his niche the readers often purchase his products out of curiosity and a sense of not wanting to miss out.

It’s sometimes a tricky mix; you need to find something that you’ve used yourself but that also fits your readership. For example, you might use OptinSkin on your fashion blog but that doesn’t mean your fashion-interested readers will want to use it as well. The mix needs to be right from both a keyword and a reputation front.

Deciding before you start your blog

The reason I’ve put the “choosing your affiliate product” section before the “blog post writing and strategy” section is because it’s often really beneficial to know what affiliate keywords you’re going after before you start the blog. This gives you a good opportunity to craft the content and the tone of the discussion towards the promotion of the product in the reader’s “journey”.

If you are in this camp then Glen has done an amazing post on keyword research which is a really good place for you to start. The important thing to take note of there is the last part of the article that talks about things you are passionate about. Picking a niche or keyword set based solely on the idea of making quick cash is a really good way to lose interest.

After all of that is said and done, most of you already have a blog and will be looking to do this affiliate thing as an afterthought to the creation of the blog. That’s fine – you just need to take a little bit more time to craft a strategy that works for your readers as well as the search engines.

Where do I find the affiliate products?

The answer to this question totally depends on the type of blog that you are running because every affiliate goes through a different “broker”. The two best places to start are probably Commission Junction and Amazon Associates as they have a wide range of products from mostly quality sellers for you to look at.

The interesting thing to note, however, is that you can often go to the company that you’re interested in promoting directly and see if they have an affiliate program. OptinSkin is a good example – scroll down to the very bottom and you’ll find an invitation to become an affiliate.

In a recent post on blog hosting I decided to promote BlueHost as an affiliate as I had used them for years and felt comfortable talking about them to the hoards of readers asking me for recommendations. In the end I applied to the program through BlueHost itself and the stats, tracking and affiliate support offered has been much better as a result.

Lastly, I’ll show you an affiliate solution at the end of this post that is probably the most intelligent way to go about this part of the equation.

Stage 2: How to develop an “ultimate article” that soft-sells your affiliate

Okay this is where we start to get into the juicy bits. The idea now is to create an article that serves as the “final point” in the process before the reader buys the product.

It is not, however, a sales page. Sales pages don’t rank on Google as well as long form content that is informative and incredibly useful. So what you are trying to do is create a blog post that covers the topic and mentions the affiliate in a way that pikes interest and passes on your perceived authority to that product.

The best way I can think of to describe this vibe is to think about Roger Federer. This guy has never, ever told us to go out and buy Nike shoes or Wilson tennis rackets. But when I’m buying tennis gear that is always what I go to first because he is my favorite player and I somehow connect his success to the products that he uses.

Your blogging authority should work in a similar way. You aren’t necessarily telling them to go out and buy it but you’re setting up a situation where they want to check it out and potentially get involved because they trust you and what you do.

So when you are writing this article there are a few things you need to keep in mind:

• It needs to be distinctive
  Distinctiveness is one of the most important things in marketing. You don’t need to be original but you do need to be different. This can help push people over the edge if they weren’t sure about whether they needed to purchase or not and it helps you to stand out from the competition.
• It needs a unique angle for SEO
  This is probably going to be controversial but a few months ago I remember someone saying that Google is now putting more weight on blogs and websites that have a unique approach. This makes sense. They don’t want all the results on the homepage to be review sites! Since hearing about this and implementing it on a few of my blogs I’ve noticed quite nice results. If you can go one step further and create a unique tool or app to add to the page you’re laughing.
• It needs to be comprehensive
  The back button is your enemy here. If your article is not comprehensive enough to form the “final stage” in this person’s conscious or unconscious quest you are going to find them hitting the back button and not clicking your affiliate link as they don’t feel confident enough to proceed.
• It needs micro-authority
  Micro-authority is a term I use when talking to my readers and clients about all the little things you do on a page to show readers that you are legit and this product is right for them. For example, social proof that helps to remove fear of being alone is important for new readers as is things like money-back guarantees.
• It needs conversion-based design
  Your design matters. If you have amazing content but flashing red text on a black background or some other horrible design error you’ll find that conversions won’t improve. Make sure you use a clean and simple design that is focused on the content, decrease your page load time, break the content up with headers, use testimonials, etc.
• It needs to be SEO optimized
  You’ll be surprised at how often I see great articles with heaps of social love and back links but with terrible on-site SEO. Make sure your URL matches your target key phrase (whether it is root or long tail), make sure your title and header work and ensure you have a good balance of keywords throughout the article.
• It needs the right keywords
  We’re trying to get traffic and rankings for specific keywords and phrases here. Make sure you know what you want to rank for in the long term as well as the derivatives of that root phrase. Work them into your article, headers, title, tags and know whether you’re using plurals or not.
• It needs an evergreen flavor with a focus on beginners
  Lastly, and most importantly, this article needs to have an evergreen flavor that is focused on beginners. We’re not writing for experts – we’re writing for beginners who want to become experts. Why? Because they are the ones that are searching Google for solutions to problems.

So it doesn’t really matter whether you are telling a giant story, writing a comparative review post or reviewing a single product as long as you get the above elements right. That is what will make it an “ultimate article”.

Again, if you have authority and you do the next part right you’ll find that this long form article converts extremely well.

Stage 3: The funnel strategy that drives traffic, authority and sales

So we are on to stage three now – you’ve chosen your affiliate product, you’ve written your “ultimate article” and now you are going to start developing a funnel that sends you traffic, rankings and hopefully some long term buyers.

I have to emphasise at this point that this is not meant to be a short term thing. This strategy is intended to provide a boost to your ultimate article so you are actively promoting it in a way that is also beneficial to your trust and rankings.

The idea here is to create guest post, video and social networking content that is aimed at “pre-interested” people in your niche. You create this content around sub-topics that prime people for you main articles and include keyword appropriate links back to your ultimate article.

Let’s do an example:

Your blog – BonsaiGrowingHQ.com

Your ultimate article – The Beginner’s Guide to Growing a 100-Year-Old Bonsai

Your affiliate product(s) – a quality Bonsai training course, Bonsai tools and pots, etc.

Guest post one – The 50 Most Beautiful Bonsais of All Time

Guest post two – The Top 10 Trees for Growing a Bonsai

Video one – How to Correctly Trim a Bonsai’s Branches and Roots

Etc.

Each of these will be the same sort of quality as your ultimate article except instead of affiliate links you will make the main link at the top of the content a relevant link back to your big post. It’s important that you get this link at the top of the article and get the anchor text correct.

IMPORTANT: Since the latest Google update you have to be extra careful with your anchor text. If you just write “Bonsai growing” as the anchor text on every guest post you do it will look extremely unnatural and Google will likely penalize you. The SEO factor is only part of the reason you are writing these posts so don’t risk a penalty by being too aggressive.

Boosting your guest posts

The other interesting thing you can do with these guest posts is use them to build links to your other guest posts. This has the dual effect of protecting your ultimate article as well as giving it more link-juice and elevating the posts that link to that article.

For example, if you link to your ultimate article in a guest post called The 50 Most Beautiful Bonsais of All Time then in your next guest post on a different site make sure you also link to that guest post.

What you are very gently doing is increasing the number of avenues through which people will find your chosen affiliate program and be interested in purchasing it while simultaneously building trust with Google and hinting at them where you’d like to be indexed.

Choosing the guest posting sites and topics carefully

There are a few things you need to think about when you are looking for sites to guest post on as well as choosing the topics that you are going to write about.

• Is the blog keyword relevant?
  Seeing as this is partly about SEO strategy you want to make sure that the links you are building are coming from relevant sites. For example, if you want to rank for Bonsai keywords there is no point doing guest posts on a site about V8 cars. It looks unnatural from a linking perspective and will send pretty useless traffic.
• Do they have a receptive audience?
  The second thing you’ll want to consider is whether or not it is a receptive audience for both your message and the final sale. For example, doing a guest post on a site about Japanese culture might be a good idea for your Bonsai affiliate post even though the community might not be currently interested in Bonsai growing. Or you could go to a photography blog and do a link-bait post about beautiful Bonsai photographs. The site’s traffic might not buy from you but once the post gets indexed a lot of Bonsai-lovers will find it. Remember, these guest posts, videos, etc. should be sending relevant organic traffic that converts to sales over the coming months and years.
• Is there an active community?
  Some blogs boast of having 650 million subscribers but when a new post goes up everything is quiet. The more active the community the more likely you are to get Tweets, Facebook Likes and +1′s which, no matter what anyone says, have an impact on your short and long term rankings. Answering comments also give you a good opportunity to build trust with your new readers.
• Can you include links?
  There is nothing worse than writing 5,000 words of pure magic for a guest post only to find it gets published with your main link removed. Sure, it’s the owners prerogative to do that but it doesn’t feel great. Of course, those links need to be useful and relevant otherwise you’re no different to a spammer, but make sure the webmaster is happy for you to add one or two before you start.
• Does the post create a successful sales funnel?
  I always think about this process in terms of the sales funnel. You are writing posts and making videos that introduce people to a broader idea or subject and then using backlinks to filter them towards your affiliate program through your ultimate post. When creating this content you want to make sure you select either evergreen topics or link-bait style subjects that build social momentum and attract relevant traffic over time.

I don’t think you need to be too rigid with this strategy. As I said, it’s a long term game that you are creating gently over time. Just be sure not to overcook things by going too aggressive or making your anchor text too similar and you should start to see results fairly quickly.

An important note on anchor text

There are a lot of really smart people out there predicting that anchor text is on its way out. I’d like to join them. That way you’ll think I’m really smart when it happens.

In the old days of SEO you’d build backlinks using relevant anchor text. So, for example, if you wanted to rank for “bonsai trees” that would be the link text you’d use in your guest posts. And then the Panda update happened and Google took a swipe at unnatural link profiles which meant that SEOs started making their anchor text more natural (things like “click here to read the rest”).

My prediction is that the next big thing will be Google using the referring page to pick up keywords instead of the anchor text. Anchor text is too easy to game. There are already people saying that they are getting better results when a referrer links straight to their home page with their site name instead of any keywords. The keywords are now in the referring post.

Using this strategy for your mailing list

I should point out at this stage that I’ve used this strategy quite effectively to attract new email subscribers as opposed to just focusing on affiliate sales.

For example, for a long time I had a free eBook on Blog Tyrant called How to Increase Email Subscribers by 120% Overnight. I then went out and wrote guest posts about topics to do with growing a mailing list or the importance of having a large subscriber base in order to “plant the seed” for my eBook.

These guest posts converted extremely well for me when the posts went live – sometimes getting over 100 extra email subscribers from the article. By then building links to these guest posts I have found they get indexed quite well and continue to send me love.

An Extremely Nerdy (but Great!) Example

I wanted to end this post by giving you an example of how an excellent ultimate article on a site with a lot of trust can sell a crap-tonne of affiliate products if the right product is chosen.

Please note, however, that this person didn’t really build links to the post directly using the guest post strategy that I mentioned above. Rather, they focused on building authority by focusing on community, creating long-form content, etc. and then using a well ranked article to sell a product.

The message is spot on. If you can apply the lessons from this particular example to your own blog you will be on a winner.

Steve Kamb’s Paleo Diet article on Nerd Fitness

The example that I wanted to show you is an article written by Steve Kamb called The Beginner’s Guide to the Paleo Diet.

I first found out about this post when talking to Glen one day and then found out more when I interviewed Steve for a video series that I have coming out soon. Turns out this post is absolutely killing it.

Steve has very kindly agreed to share some stats about his Paleo Post.

Post description: 4,000+ words, 21 photos, one video.

Total page views: Over 3,000,000 since 2010.

Page views in the past 30 days: 275,000.

Total social reach: 700 comments, 17,000 Facebook Likes, 700 Tweets.

Panda update effects: Post went from 500 views per day to over 8,000 per day.

Google rankings: 3 to 6 for “paleo diet” behind Wikipedia and the diet’s official site.

Affiliate product: His own “Is it Paleo?” app.

Sales: Over 25,000 since December.

Steve told me during a recent email conversation (he knows I’m posting this!):

Thanks to NF’s growth and the popularity of my article on the Paleo Diet, this app continues to sell 100-200+ copies a day without a dollar spent on advertising. The number of downloads fluctuates depending on where we are ranking for “Paleo Diet” searches (I can pretty accurately predict app sales based on where the article is ranked on that day). Since launching the 99 cent app in December, it’s already been downloaded over 25,000 times.

There are other apps that do similar things, but thanks to the size of NF and the ranking of that article, we outrank all of them in the app store and usually crack the top 25 for Health and Fitness every day. Also, thanks to the supportive NF community and a simple app that does what it’s supposed to, 98% of our reviews are 4 and 5 star reviews, which helps for people who have never heard of Nerd FItness and find us in the app store instead of through the article.

Steve has been extremely clever here because his affiliate product is completely owned by his company. This is the perfect example of matching an affiliate to a traffic stream. He wrote a high quality evergreen article that naturally developed trust due to his strong brand and large community and then developed the app to solve the problem of thousands of people asking him, “Dude, is that food Paleo?”

NOTE: Steve still loves to be asked whether certain foods are Paleo. Find him on Twitter.

Now, not everyone has the massive site architecture and authority behind them that Steve does. That is where the guest posting and related content strategy comes in. Essentially you are leverage the authority that your guest post sites have in order to rank and drive traffic to your ultimate article.

While writing this post I have wondered how much Steve could increase his sales by creating more brilliant Paleo content and publishing it around the beginner-web to tap into markets where people might not have yet thought to search for “Paleo Diet”.

Do you need any tips for your affiliate attempts?

To reward everyone who read to the end of the post (well done!) Glen and I are going to stick around for a while and answer any questions you might have about the affiliate set up on your own blog.

Do you have an “ultimate article” or a sales page that isn’t performing very well? Are you struggling with your affiliate product selection? Do you have your own product that isn’t getting traffic?

Drop a comment with the deets and we’ll see what we can do. Extra love if you share the post!

Countless news articles have been written by the BBC, New York Times, the Verge and many other huge publications, all highlighting other services that people can be using instead. What people haven’t been writing about though is how this affects us as bloggers and what we can do about it (if anything). Here’s the jist of it: Reader’s closure is going to hit a lot of us very, very hard.

According to their public stats, I have 9,542 subscribers in Google Reader.

Let’s look at some other big blogs:

• SmartPassiveIncome: 8,425
• ProBlogger: 94,647
• Engadget: 6,651,971

I could go on, but you’re starting to see how important Reader really is for the readership of a number of websites. Though niches that have more web savvy audiences like marketing or technology are more likely to be affected, this is going to impact anyone who has built up their RSS readership.

My friend Steve’s health blog Nerd Fitness is sitting on 4,786 subscribers there. Finance blog Get Rich Slowly stands to lose up to 40,388 subscribers and Ramit Sethi of I Will Teach You to Be Rich has 13,688 people subscribed via Google Reader.

Here’s What You MUST Do This Week

The first thing that’s clear is that you are going to have to let your readers know about other ways to keep getting your updates. Google are going a terrible job of it. Do you want to see how many notices there are on Google Reader about its closure? Here’s a screenshot from my account:

I’ll let you look around that image for a second to see if you spot it. Don’t look too long though, as there’s no notice there.

I’ll cut them a bit of slack in that there is a pop-up when you come back to Reader for the first time since the announcement, but it’s the most bland unGooglelike pop-up I’ve ever seen. With no graphics, and two lines of text. I wish I had gotten a screenshot.

Update: Thanks to Brendan, Tim and Doug for the photo below:

The reason I’m so adamant about you contacting your readers in the next week or two is because everyone is going to be doing it towards the end of May, just before the service closes down, and your audience is going to be overloaded with updates they get from other people.

Also, doing it now means you can alert them again in the future with enough of a gap to remind them without annoying people who don’t subscribe via RSS.

Step One: Find Another RSS Reader You’re Happy With

Not only for yourself (if you use the services) but also one to recommend to your readers. The other readers are definitely out there, and some of them are making big money thanks to Google’s closure of Reader.

A list of options includes:

• Feedly – highlighted as the best alternative to Google Reader by The Verge mostly due to its speed, minimalist style, and the fact that it’s free. They are now though working on a Pro version, which should stop them ending up with the same fate as Reader.
• NewsBlur – $2/m or has the option to self-host on your own server. To take advantage of the Google Reader downtime they’ve turned off free accounts (which didn’t allow more than 64 feeds) so this may come back in the future.
• Netvibes – they’ve been around for as long as I can remember, so it should give you some hope they’ll be sticking around. Though they’re more focused on expensive social analytics, they’ve recently relaunched free accounts do allow feed tracking.

Though I’ll admit my own usage of Google Reader has subsided dramatically over the years, there are a few blogs that I like to track. RSS monitoring is great for reputation management as well. I’m personally moving everything over to Feedly, due to the fact they have iOS and Android apps.

Step Two: Put More Emphasis on Email

It would be premature to argue the point that we don’t know when other services are going to die so we should give up on RSS altogether, but I genuinely have no doubt that RSS usage is falling. Especially due to time-sinks social media sites like Facebook, Reddit, Pinterest, Google+ (I’m joking) and Twitter.

11 months ago (I can’t believe it’s that old) I had this to say on my Future of Blogging post:

“I’ve been a huge advocate of bloggers using email lists, writing multiple posts on the subject. The benefits of having a list have been well documented, but let me refresh you on the basics:

• You can ‘test’ different message text, subject lines and subscriber entry points to maximise conversions
• You can create your own tailored follow-up sequence and send messages on set dates and times which can be fully automated
• Subscribers only get the content you want them to see, and not necessarily your blog posts (or all of them)
• You can keep your value for a specific, loyal audience if you want, rather than having to share everything publicly

When I first started writing about this topic over a year ago, I noticed a reader of this site tweet about how everyone is talking about attaching an email list to a blog. I think it was more likely the case that just the people they follow were talking about it, showing a deceiving popularity. Kind of like how if you saw five people tomorrow wearing the same bright green sneakers, you might think there’s a huge luminous footwear trend emerging. Unbeknownst to you, there was a shop down the street trying to clear their stock and were selling them for a dollar.

I still think that most bloggers haven’t caught on to this, but in time it’s going to change.”

I guess this shows at least one of the predictions in that article were right.

If you haven’t already started putting a big emphasis on collecting emails, now would be a good time to start. I’m slightly biased, but OptinSkin was built for exactly this reason.

Step Three: Clean Up Your Social Act

It makes sense that if people are spending more time on all of these other forms of social media where they can receive content, you should look at where you’re optimising your presence.

I’m personally someone who could do a much better job at this, due to my pretty infrequent postings on Twitter (I find it mostly a waste of time), though my Facebook page is updated a few times per week (become a fan).

Youtube is another area where you could be making a big impact, if you have some on-screen presence or know how to make engaging videos that don’t require your face to be on them. Google recently announced that Youtube is being viewed by one billion unique visitors every month so the audience potential is huge. One of my own videos advertising ViperChill has over 120,000 views almost exclusively from Youtube search traffic.

My friend Pat has a great Youtube Marketing guide that takes you through how he’s built a successful channel.

Step Four: Detach Yourself from Feedburner

It’s a shame that the efforts of whoever built Please Don’t Kill Feedburner don’t seem to be paying off, as I really think the service is on its last legs.

One of the biggest aspects of Feedburner for a long time now has been the ability to show off how many subscribers you have. Pretty much every big blog does this, and it is (or has been) a great way to utilise social proof for people who are new to your site. That’s soon going to change though with the huge losses in subscriber counts coming from the closure of Reader.

There’s no reason why the logic of Google closing Reader wont apply to Feedburner. I’m sure it’s usage has also declined, and Google want to focus on fewer products. Let’s be honest though, the real reason will be that the service is not making money. I would happily pay for it, and Phil Hollows, owner of Feedblitz, said he has offered multiple times to take over the service with no promising replies. I can’t see Google adding a monthly fee to Feedburner if they couldn’t add it to their far more popular service, Reader.

One step you can take is to stop directing your RSS feed links to the service. You can keep your chicklet in place but change the URL back to your standard RSS feed. Usually http://yourblog.com/feed/.

It makes me regret not following the advice of Danny Sullivan on Search Engine Land back in 2007 using the ‘MyBrand’ feature on the service to redirect the Feedburner feed to your own domain. Of course it’s too late to take advantage of it when thousands of people have subscribed by the feedburner URL, but I guess it’s not too late to start if you actually utilise their service.

I’m having some issues with Feedburner so hopefully someone in the comments can tell me if this is still available at present.

Step Five: Contact Your Audience

I’ve been trying to find a plugin that lets you contact only RSS subscribers but I didn’t have much luck. Maybe I have to make it myself. There was one available, but it hasn’t been updated since 2007 so it’s probably not worth checking out as WordPress has changed so much.

If I wasn’t going to do a blog post like I am now, I would create a specific page on my site that lists the best ways for people to keep in touch with the blog if they currently subscribe via Google Reader. Noticed I said the best ways, and not all of the ways. You don’t want to overwhelm people with too many options.

This would basically include a recommended feed reader (with a guide on how to add your Feed there), an opt-in form, and links to one or two of your social accounts.

When you do get in touch, make sure you say something that’s going to grab people’s attention (like pretending you’re turning off your RSS feed) to really get the point across. The fewer subscribers you lose from these changes, the better.

Step Six: Follow ViperChill ;]

If you want the non-Feedburner RSS feed: use this link. I recommend Feedly as your new RSS home.

You can also follow me on Twitter but I’m more active on Facebook

Or if you prefer email updates, scroll up to the top of the site (temporarily disabled my opt-in form at the bottom of posts) and subscribe in the yellow box on the right hand side. I always send out emails when I publish new posts – which is pretty rare, so you wont be overloaded or hopefully, annoyed.

And don’t forget, this whole change is going to make your audience question what they read, and that isn’t good if they’re not hooked. In other words, make sure you’re continuing to focus on putting out excellent, relevant content people can’t get elsewhere.

PostSkin is Back on the Market

Just to finish this post, I wanted to let you know that PostSkin is now available for sale again, after being closed down for a few days after the launch promotion. Also, we’ve activated our affiliate program, so you can find more information about that here.

This kind of content is not something I want to write very often – it’s more of a ‘nudge’ in the right direction rather than anything mind-blowing – but I promise I have a lot of great things on the way…

Software Mentioned In This Post

Aweber Email Marketing

OptinSkin Wordpress Plugin

PostSkin Wordpress Plugin

With ViperChill, I was fortunate to have a plugin come with my theme called ‘Popular Posts’. It’s basically just a widget that you currently see in my sidebar (for now). When I designed Butterflyist for Andrea for the blogging case study project, we made sure she purchased a theme which had a similar plugin installed. Without them we would have been a little lost. Until now.

It wasn’t until I came across the sidebar of Engadget about a year ago and the new way they were displaying their blog posts that I decided I had to make my own plugin that let you show off your top content in style. Their design was really attractive, and the width of each highlighted post was proportional to how many comments or views it had received (genius!)

I would love to show it to you, but since their traffic levels started taking a dip because of The Verge, they basically copied The Verge’s site framework on post pages and totally reworked their sidebar.

6 months ago Graeme (the lead developer of OptinSkin) sent me a screenshot of the first iteration of turning our idea into a plugin. Today, it’s the most advanced solution available for WordPress users who wish to not only highlight blog posts, but to showcase affiliate products, product reviews and site pages, without having to know any HTML or CSS.

Say “Hello” to PostSkin.

Turning off Sales on Monday 18th March at 12 Noon (EST)

When we launched OptinSkin one year ago, the support that we had to deal with was insane. We received far more customers than we had ever imagined, and our inbox quickly became overloaded. By opening for just 48 hours (and then opening fully in a few days) we should help to prevent this, and reward customers who take a chance with us early on with a discount.

This also gives us an opportunity to get feedback from people who are going to use the plugin in ways we haven’t even thought of yet, so we can add features and make changes quickly without the initial support burden.

There’s a lot more I want to say on this topic, like why I’ve continued to focus on software and what the highs and lows have been in transforming my business efforts have been, but I really want you to check this out and give it a try if you think it’s for you.

A really long time coming…

We’ve been discussing this project as far back as June (that’s 9 months ago) – shown in the random screenshot below – so it’s honestly a big relief to finally launch it and share it with the world. This is going to free up some of my more personal time, and I have a lot of posts lined up here for VC. Thanks for checking it out, and maybe I’ll see you in the members area!

P.S. If this isn’t for you, no problem at all. Now that we’ve finally got this out there, I can return to normal posting!

It’s no secret that I’m a huge fan of Seth. Though his posts are usually very short, more often than not they contain ideas you can apply to your business immediately. In this post I’m going one step further by taking Seth’s short, motivating style and opening up my Evernote account for you all to see.

In other words, you’re about to hit with a wave of ideas, images and random pieces of knowledge which I’ve collected up over the last few years.

Though not all of these items will be relevant to your business (like the Celebrity Gossip picture), I have no doubt you’ll see something here which inspires you to take action. And that’s what ViperChill stands for…

The Most Profitable Email Subject Line for President Barack Obama Was…

“Hey”.

That’s it. In terms of donations from emails with that subject line, he was able to raise millions of dollars over the course of his campaign. In fact, out of the $690m that he raised altogether, the majority of funds were raised online.

“It quickly became clear that a casual tone was usually most effective. “The subject lines that worked best were things you might see in your in-box from other people,” Fallsgraff says. “ ‘Hey’ was probably the best one we had over the duration.” Another blockbuster in June simply read, “I will be outspent.” According to testing data shared with Bloomberg Businessweek, that outperformed 17 other variants and raised more than $2.6 million.”

Source: Business Week

How to Get The Founder of Wikipedia (or Anyone) to Reply to Your Emails

It may seem like common sense, but simple things are often the easiest to overlook.

“It’s actually surprising how many people don’t follow this simple guideline of courtesy. I often get long tedious emails from people explaining to me in great detail how I can help them, how great it would be for them if I would work on their project with it, or endorse it, etc. But they fail to consider my context – why should I care, and even if I do care, why should I act on this rather than any of a thousand other things.” – Jimmy Wales

Source: Quora

A Simple Idea That Helped Quicken Software Reach 70% Marketshare

“Consider how Intuit’s wildly popular Quicken program got its start. It all spread from a single campaign that contained a basic message: order the product and pay nothing. If you aren’t productive within eight minutes of opening the box, tear up the invoice.

Of course, most users were not only balancing their checkbooks within eight minutes but also discovering that they couldn’t live without this software. The result: 70% global market share in personal-financial-management software with minimal expenses for traditional marketing or selling. Plus an installed base to drive pricier sales of ancillary products such as checks and upgrades.”

Source: Fast Company

There’s No Meaning Behind Häagen-Dazs

“Mattus invented the Danish sounding ‘Häagen-Dazs’ as a tribute to Denmark’s exemplary treatment of its Jews during the Second World War, and included an outline map of Denmark on early labels. The name is not Danish, which has neither an umlaut nor a digraph zs, and it has no meaning. Mattus thought that Denmark was known for its dairy products and had a positive image in the U.S.

His daughter Doris Hurley reported in the PBS documentary An Ice Cream Show that her father sat at the kitchen table for hours saying nonsensical words until he came up with a combination he liked. The reason he chose this method was so that the name would be unique and original.”

Source: Wikipedia

Pinterests’ Growth Wasn’t as Viral As You Think

Though we like to think of some rising internet properties as overnight successes, it’s rarely the case.

“In 2010, three months after Pinterest launched, the site had only 3,000 users. But some of them were active users, and those people loved the site — and both of those categories included Silbermann himself.

So Pinterest started to have meet-ups at local boutiques, and to take fun pictures of people who attended them, and to engage with bloggers to do invitation campaigns like “Pin It Forward,” where bloggers got more invites to the site by spreading the world.”

Source: All Things Digital

How SEO Influences Gamer Buying Habits

“About 40 percent of game-related searches occur in the six months leading up to a launch as individuals evaluate what to buy. Video game related searches increased by 20 percent on desktops and laptops, and they increased 168 percent on tablets and smartphones over the last year during this period. About 28 percent of searches occurred in the 30 days after launch, and 32 percent of searches occurred after that.

During the pre-launch period, players are most interested in official content from publishers. They search for release dates, trailers, artwork, and demo versions of the game. For marketers, this means that the pre-launch window is a key time when they can influence gamers’ purchase decisions.”

Source: Venture Beat

The Ridiculousness of the Celebrity Gossip World

She’s engaged, married and single. Impressive…

Source: 9Gag

22 Infomercials Before P90X Turned a Profit

If you don’t believe in split-testing, or products that do it for you *cough* then maybe this will change your mind.

“The first infomercial was an absolute dud. One of our primary measures of success is media cost, and when it started, we paid the equivalent of $250 per order. That’s a tough way to make a business when you’re selling a $120 product.

In 2007, our 22nd version of the infomercial clicked. It just took off. Eventually we would get the media cost, net-net, down to under $50 per new customer.”

Source: Inc Magazine

A Teacher Making $1M a Year Selling Lesson Plans Online

“Deanna Jump is a 43-year-old kindergarten teacher who earns less than $30,000 a year. But this year, she says she has made $1 million. Yes, really.

“Teaching is a hobby for me now,” Jump says. “I’ve made way more on TeacherPayTeachers, obviously. I don’t need to teach anymore, but teaching is my passion. I cannot imagine not teaching.”

Source: Inc Magazine

Kellogg’s Swapping Tweets for Treats

I think the most valuable lesson here is not the idea they had, but how quickly they were able to execute.

“But the Special K campaign may be the first example of real-life human interaction using the pay-with-a-tweet concept. Dan Glover, creative director of Mischief PR, said, “We believe that physical and social are one and the same. When we had the idea it felt very simple, and we did a lot of checking to be sure it was a world first. We jumped on that and made it happen — it was eight weeks from idea to execution.”

Sarah Case, brand manager for Special K, said in a statement, “The value of positive endorsements on social-media sites is beyond compare, so we’re excited to be the first company to literally use social currency instead of financial currency to launch this new product in our bespoke Special K shop.”

Source: Ad Age

How Mark Zuckerberg Rewards His Staff

I can’t tell if the spelling mistake was intentional. That and the person who received this was later fired.

Source: OKDork

Gawker Closing $2M Worth of Advertising in a Single Day

This was an internal email which leaked (possibly intentionally) from the Gawker CEO Nick Denton to his staff.

“But… this week has been too exceptional to go without mention. And it’s not like this year’s been free of challenges; we should be able to recognize the good times too.

Kate Middleton, iPhone and our excellent coverage of those and other stories drew 39.1m readers in the last month. 22.6m of them from our main market, the US. That’s a record.”

Source: Jim Romenesko

Customer Focused Content Marketing Works for MindLeaders

“I believe heavily in a content based integrated marketing strategy. Content based for me means content in the form of thought leadership, whether it’s white papers or assessments. It’s based on really strong content that’s thought provoking.

When I say integrated, it means they’re not only integrated across channels like social media, print, or banners, but also with the sales process. Creating content for the sake of content doesn’t make sense if it’s not supportive of the sales process.” – CMO, Alan See

Source: Contently

Dr.Seuss Isn’t Really Dr.Seuss

“While at Dartmouth, Geisel was caught drinking gin with nine friends in his room. As a result, Dean Craven Laycock insisted that he resign from all extracurricular activities, including the college humor magazine. To continue work on the Jack-O-Lantern without the administration’s knowledge, Geisel began signing his work with the pen name “Seuss”. His first work signed as “Dr. Seuss” appeared after he graduated, six months into his work for The Judge, where his weekly feature Birdsies and Beasties appeared.”

Source: Wikipedia

The Amount of People Behind the Worlds Biggest Blog

I still find it hard to call the Huffington Post a blog, but I thought it was interesting to see just how many people are involved in their global content publishing.

“HuffPo employs 486 people, including a social team of seven, a community team of six plus 30 moderators and more than 300 in editorial, and manages 30,000 unpaid bloggers (10,000 of which have posted in the last 90 days).”

Source: Contently

The Truth About Tech Blogging

“The vast majority of blogging is about pageviews. Being first is important, but just as important is the mere illusion of being first. You do that by rewriting stories without proper attribution (meaning, again, little or no links back — or burying the links back). It’s a dipshit move — and sadly, a tech blogosphere staple.” – MG Seigler of TechCrunch and CrunchFund

Source: Massive Greatness

Inside the Success of the Business Insider Blog

“Our readers have five minutes,” Blodget said. “They want to get the full impression. Rather than get 3,000 words, you can now see all these beautiful pictures and understand what’s going on in five minutes. It turns out that that’s a perfect application for this medium.”

On aggregation, Blodget noted, “The other thing that’s important, on the aggregation side, is we now are in a world where millions of sources of information are a click away. Lots of traditional publications still have the view that that information should not be used, even though everyone knows it and is being talked about on Twitter. Our view is, of course we’re going to take advantage of that. It’s a link away. People are talking about it already; let’s add value to it.”

Source: Digiday

Warren Buffet Says Free News is Unsustainable

“The billionaire investor said that editors should focus on making the papers “indispensable” to local communities. “Our future depends on remaining the primary source of information in certain subjects of great importance to our readers,” Mr Buffett wrote.

“Technological change has caused us to lose primacy in various key areas, including national news, national sports, stock quotations and employment opportunities. So be it. Our job is to reign supreme in matters of local importance.”

Source: SMH

You Can Compete With Free, And Win

“If companies were not able to compete with free, Microsoft would have been crushed by Linux, Oracle by MySQL, and the dot-com boom would have wiped out half of the world’s brick and mortar economy. Cable TV or satellite radio wouldn’t exist. And, yes, while services like Napster offered consumers the ability to download free music, Apple came along years later with iTunes and charged a fee per download. Today, Apple is the most valuable technology company in the world.

In the end, the best product wins. Focus on building a truly great product and offer it to your customers with great service to back it up. People have proven time and time again that they’ll choose (and pay for) a better product over a free one, whether a yo-yo upgrade or a digital Jefferson Airplane album.”

Source: Inc Magazine

The CD Baby Order Confirmation Email Which Won Repeat Customers

I’ve implemented something similar into my own products and services, and often get overly-positive feedback.

“Your CD has been gently taken from our CD Baby shelves with sterilized contamination-free gloves and placed onto a satin pillow. A team of 50 employees inspected your CD and polished it to make sure it was in the best possible condition before mailing.

I hope you had a wonderful time shopping at CD Baby. We sure did. Your picture is on our wall as “Customer of the Year”. We’re all exhausted but can’t wait for you to come back to CDBABY.COM!!”

Can You Be More Like the Parking Angels?

Source: Unknown

Maybe It’s Time to Start Shouting In Your Emails

I received an ALL-CAPS-LOCK email about a year ago from a reader. I asked them why they were shouting at me, and received this interesting reply:

“Thank you very much! I apologize for the “shouting.” Our office protocol is to have all personal communication in all caps so that we can see at a glance what it is, to distinguish it from business and legal documents, and know that it can be deleted, and thereby reduce the possibility of deleting a document.”

How the Best-Selling Author on the Planet Stays Productive

I’ll confess that I’ve never read a Danielle Steel novel, but there are plenty of her books lying around my house back in England (my Mom’s a huge fan!). I loved this interview on how she stays productive and manages to write so much.

“Late at night, I review what I got done and what I didn’t. I don’t like leaving work unfinished, and try to get it all done each day. I’m willing to stay up very late and sacrifice sleep to do it, I feel better when I finish what I needed to do. But I’ve also gotten better about letting go at some point. Some days you just cant do it all!!! But I try!!

I don’t always feel ‘confident’, in fact a lot of times I don’t. I’m a worrier by nature. But I try to keep centered.”

Source: Alexis Napa

CTR of Search Results

I did say that my Evernote account has been collecting data for a few years, and this is definitely something I saved a long time ago. You can even tell from the look of Google. That being said, it’s still interesting to look at how valuable the top few results are compared to the rest, even if you’re on the first page.

Source: Unknown

Groupon CEO on the Power of Email Marketing

This was well before the Groupon Stock started to fall, and it’s an interesting look at what their founder thought at the time of their entry on the stock exchange.

“Our marketing — at least the customer acquisition marketing that we remove from ACSOI — is designed to add people to our own long-term marketing channel — our daily email list. Once we have a customer’s email, we can continually market to them at no additional cost. Compare this to Johnson and Johnson, McDonald’s, or most other companies. If I’m a Johnson, and I’m trying to sell you a box of Band Aids, I have to keep spending money on commercials and magazine ads and stuff to remind you about how sweet Band Aids are, even after you’ve bought your first box.

With Groupon, we just spend money one time to get you on our email list, and then every day we email you a reminder of the sweetness of our metaphorical Band Aid. There is no cost of reacquisition — that’s unusual (and we created ACSOI to point that out). If Johnson wanted to follow the Groupon strategy, he would have to start a free daily newspaper about bandages and then run Band Aid ads in it every day.”

Source: All Things Digital

A Commenter I Agree with in Response to the Groupon CEO

“Perhaps the most ludicrous of the many ludicrous claims here is the notion that once they have e-mail addresses, they can just market to you forever and ever. Deal quality is declining so rapidly that many people are ignoring their e-mails. Eventually, they get auto-sorted into the spam folder or unsubscribed.”

Source: All Things Digital

If You Have a Time Machine, Don’t Say No to Larry Page

I saved this from a Reddit comment a very long time ago. Since it’s Reddit, it may or may not be true, but they have the business card to back it up. That, and Reddit Karma can’t be converted into cash, so there are few reasons to lie.

“I met both Carl Page and Larry Page at a party hosted by a Stanford friend of mine in 1998. Carl gave me his card for eGroups and said “we’re hiring”. Larry gave me his card for Google—a flimsy bit of paper obviously printed by bubble jet—and said “we’re hiring”.

I said, “Nah, who needs another search engine?” and went to graduate school. I still have the card.”

Source: Reddit

Louis C.K. Making $1M+ from His Online Stand-Up

Since he’s a hit over on Reddit, their community helped his comedy show to reach all corners of the web. During his AMA (Ask Me Anything) on the site after his film went viral, he interestingly had this to say.

“From the moment it went online and I saw the result of every decision I made. The last question the web guys asked me before we posted was if I wanted the mail list button defaulted to “opt in” or “opt out” and I said start it at opt out. It’s such a tiny thing but I keep hearing about it from people. So so interesting to watch this grow.”

I Couldn’t Write a Post With Seth in the Title Without Including Him

In his words, the best way to be missed when you’re gone is..

“to stand for something when you’re here. Works for people, works for brands.”

Source: Seth Godin

As for what ViperChill stands for. Well, I already answered that before the green picture in the introduction. If you like this deviation from the typical ViperChill post then please let me know. I could happily do more of them, but that depends on you…

And maybe not even the write right one to make. I’ve had to tell this story countless times to family and friends over the last few weeks, usually leading to disappointed faces and people not really understanding my decision, so hopefully I can express myself better when I carefully craft the words.

If anything, this post is a lesson in saying no. It’s about realising when something or someone may not be worth your time anymore, and it’s better to cut your losses sooner or later, rather than just appealing to your ego.

F*cking Bullet Points

I joked with my friend Gabe last night that this should have been the title of the post, because in a weird way bullet points are a big part of the reason that I’m no longer writing the book.

The day after I published the blog post on how I landed the book deal (after months of build-up to actually making it happen) was the day I also pretty much decided I wasn’t going to be writing it. It was a very new emotional experience, and although the decision was fairly quick, I promise that it wasn’t easy.

It was the day I received feedback on my first few chapters, and to be honest, I feel kind of stupid based on the suggestions that were made to me to improve the content. It wasn’t my writing ability that was the problem, but rather the format of my writing which would have to be drastically changed.

Almost every page of my draft had a section where the notes were “Add a ‘Warning Icon’ here” or “This would be better as bullet-points“. Not just randomly here and there, but practically on every page I had written. I was a little disheartened, and frankly quite surprised at how much had to be changed.

I flicked back through the Dummies books I had received after signing my contract and honestly felt silly to not have realised it before. Literally every other page of these three books I have are filled with warning icons, ‘remember this’ icons and bullet points. If you have one at home, take a look for yourself.

I don’t know if it’s something I totally overlooked in the excitement of having a book deal and my name on bookshelves, or something I thought I would by able to bypass in my own for Dummies publication. Needless to say, it’s a style that’s a world apart from how I’ve been writing online for the last seven years.

Half way through my re-writing I came to a pretty simple conclusion: The publisher will be happy with these changes, but I wont be happy to be the person with my name on them.

Reaching Out for Advice

I have made a few rash decisions in my life, and since there was really so much to lose by not writing this book, I definitely didn’t rush the decision. I decided to do quite a bit of reading on the topic, and reached out to some friends for their advice (with permission to post here).

I discovered Amy Lynn Andrews, from Blogging with Amy, who has a 7-part series about why she too turned down a book deal. In part 4 she said something that I (or at least my ego) could really relate to:

“There are aspiring authors everywhere for whom a book offer would be a dream come true. I felt very humbled and very honored.

Yes, this was an exceptional opportunity. But was this the right opportunity for me? Right now?”

I reached out to Pat Flynn, one of my closest blogging friends, who had some great advice:

“I don’t know how much this book means to you, I’m sure it’s a dream come true for you to get a book published, just like it is for me, especially one that matches your exact branding efforts on ViperChill, but I can also tell it’s not really going the way you had planned. I’m not sure where you’re at, but I’d do one of two things:

or 2) Know that you don’t absolutely NEED this book deal. You don’t, you’re crushing it already and are going to crush it even more no matter what you do, and who knows a BETTER book deal may be around the corner you just don’t know it. I feel like your gut is telling you to forget about it and you have to ask yourself, how wrong or right has your gut been before. How well has it helped you get to where you’re at today.”

Steve Kamb of the famous Nerd Fitness also had some wise words for me…

“Yeah, this is tough. Honestly? Go with your gut. On top of that, ask yourself why you’re writing the book. You’re obviously not doing it for the money – you have no problem making enough of that. So ask yourself what’s important for you with this book:

Is it because you want to present your angle on a topic that desperately needs help from somebody that actually knows what he’s talking about?”

It definitely felt like if I continued with the writing, I would be doing it more for the ability just to say I’m an author.

Since Andrea is a professional copywriter for a number of popular publications, I also reached out to her to see what she had to say. Her advice was spot-on…

“Well, do you remember when we were trying to get the Guardian into the idea of the column, and they turned around and said they felt I needed to use different experts, and not just yourself? We both knew it wouldn’t have worked that way, and I had to put that to them and was prepared to take the column idea elsewhere if they didn’t listen. This is a very similar situation, it sounds like to me.

I think it’s pretty much a case of being confident in what you know and how this will or won’t work, and putting it to them that you are the expert and they are commissioning you exactly for this reason. And I think (contract permitting?) you may have to be prepared to pull it and take it elsewhere.”

After reading all of this, I felt like I was making the right decision. Even through all three of them tried to steer me into the option of doing all I can to make the book work, the other side of their argument (doing it later / waiting for a better deal) was appealing to me much more.

It was after speaking to Jon Cooper from PointBlankSEO that I was really pushed over the edge.

A few weeks prior, Jon had written a blog post about his uncertainty with his college future. He’s a rising celebrity in internet marketing – and a young one at that – and asked for advice on what he should be doing. Later he sent me this email:

“You have no idea how much of an impact your simple, succinct comment (you left on my personal blog) has had on me. A week after I wrote that post I realized I was waking up each day not looking forward to too many things. The only joy I got in a day was hopping online and learning some bit of code, writing a post, or trying some new online marketing thing out.”

I had forgotten exactly what it is I wrote to him, so went to take a look…

Applying my own advice, it’s clear that the passion had quickly been drained from this project, and I could see it being more of a chore than something I’m really excited about doing. And I know I can be really passionate about writing.

Could I write it if I was determined to get my name on bookshelves? Absolutely. Would I be happy with the end result? Probably not. And I definitely wouldn’t be happy to push it on this blog, and try to convince you all it’s going to be an amazing, easy read.

The Next Chapter: The Book is Still Happening

Before I say anything else, I want to add that I’m very grateful to Wiley and specifically Claire for reaching out to me with the book offer. I was very flattered to be thought of and really excited to be writing it at as well. Nothing they as a company or anyone individually has done was the reason I didn’t go ahead with the book.

If I had to put it down to one thing then it would simply be me overlooking the format of for Dummies books, or at least overlooking that my writing style just can’t be squeezed into the for Dummies mold.

Just because I decided it wasn’t for me, I didn’t want to leave them in the lurch. I was asked if I recommended anyone else who would be a good fit for the title. I put forward two suggestions, and as far as I can see they’ve chosen one and it’s still going ahead.

My position has been demoted from author to ‘technical editor’. That simply means once the book is finished, I’ll be going through it before publication to ensure its accuracy (not style, or flow, just accuracy). I thought it is the least I could do after letting down the team with my withdrawal.

As far as my focus goes now, not much has changed. We’re still working away on OptinSkin (and I’m still battling with Clickbank to get that price increase), and I have over a dozen blog posts lined up (really) for next year to start things off with a bang. Oh and not to forget our new plugin which is finished, and just needs to be launched.

Thank you as always for following the journey, and sorry to anyone who is disappointed by this news. I literally printed out all of the supportive comments I received on the initial post after it went live for motivation, as it really meant a lot to me that so many of you were behind the idea.

I hope what I have in store for the very-near future makes up for it…

P.S. A few months ago I backed my first ever Kickstarter project. Since I’ve spent a lot of time in Thailand I was moved by the journey of the Thai National Cheerleading team who went from pretty much poverty and practicing outside on concrete to being joint winners with America in the 2011 World Cheerleading Championships. It was the first time a non-US team won Gold in the competitions’ history.

I helped to fund their DVD which documents their journey. Not only did it make me and everyone I’ve shown it to cry (no matter how manly they are) but it also won the OS Film Festival and was mentioned in the Wall Street Journal. They sent me this video as a thank you…

I’ll let you all know when the DVD is available to buy if you’re interested

In her enthusiastic style, she suggests to Ray that they partake in Viral Marketing in order to bring more clients to their ‘Happiness Consultants’ business. Ray quickly responds, “What the hell is viral marketing?”

Though the episode premiered in 2009, his response wouldn’t be too out of place in 2012. The phrase is certainly known, but how to go about Viral Marketing still baffles many a media executive, small business owner, and anyone with something to promote. This book aims to change that.

The P.S. In a Blog Post

On the 25th of April I published a blog post on this site that I’m the most proud of, entitled ‘The Future of Blogging‘. With almost 400 comments, it’s the 4th most popular post I’ve published, and at over 11,000 words it’s certainly the longest.

Something many of you may recall is that at the end of the blog post, I had this to say:

“P.S. If there are any publishers reading this, there’s another 20,000 words that I can say on this topic (I haven’t even started on mobile). I can see the “How a P.S. In a Blog Post Landed Me a Book Deal” headlines already . Just a crazy idea to make life interesting…”

And life certainly did become more interesting, because on June 18th a woman named Claire emailed me to ask if I was interested in writing a book for Wiley, one of the largest publishers in the world. Though I’m not going to be writing on the future of blogging directly, it helped someone who was ‘scouting’ me to see that writing a book is something I was interested in doing.

After finding my website through Google for the term ‘viral marketing’ and reading through my articles, I was asked if I would be interested in writing Viral Marketing & Advertising for Dummies. Many of you will know about the for Dummies series already, since their books can be found pretty much everywhere around the world, with over 200 million of them currently in circulation.

I was very honoured and excited to be asked to write the book.

But I said no.

To the advertising part.

Officially, I’ve signed my contract and I’m well on the way to writing the definitive guide to Viral Marketing, due to be released next year, titled Viral Marketing for Dummies.

I Know You’re Not a Dummy

At first I was very excited about the offer, but I did question the angle a little bit. After all, nobody likes to be thought of as a ‘dummy’. I got to thinking whether or not I would buy a marketing book with for Dummies in the title. However, I did soon remember that I have purchased multiple for Dummies books in the past, and definitely never felt offended by the title (and clearly nor have 200 million others).

The books were DJ’ing for Dummies and CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy) for Dummies when I was heavily immersed in writing about personal development. At both times I didn’t know much about the topic and felt I would quickly get up to speed on both subjects without feeling overwhelmed. In an age where knowing how to get people talking is more important than ever (think: increased competition), I don’t think there could be a better time for me to tackle this subject.

Even Google have teamed up with Wiley to help people learn more about how to best utilise their advertising platforms. Their head of marketing in the UK, Lee Hunter, recently said “The respect that our target audience has for the Dummies brand helped to ensure a successful campaign.”

A gift from Wiley to get a feel for their style

What was interesting to me when I was reading over the Wiley author guidelines was a paragraph which basically stated (I’m not allowed to copy directly) that the books in no way should be written as if you’re in a higher position than the reader. Or in other words, don’t treat the reader like they’re a dummy. Especially not in any negative context.

If you’ve read my about page then you’ll know at 16 I was actually mentioned in the book DJ’ing for Dummies due to a successful website I ran, so I think of me now writing a book seven years later as coming full circle on my marketing and web-development efforts.

Actually Writing a Book

To me, writing this book almost feels like the closing of a chapter in my life. I’ve spent years working for myself and promoting projects online. I spent countless hours working for some of the biggest brands in the UK from my bedroom, helping them to get attention. I then spent two years in Cape Town, South Africa working with newspapers, car manufacturers, alcoholic drink conglomerates and more, all on their social media and viral marketing campaigns. With a lot of success.

Though there’s still a huge future in Viral and the field is constantly changing, I’ve been doing it so long that I want to get everything “off my chest” (or really, out of my head) that I’ve learnt through trial and error over the years. You could literally name any platform or almost any niche and I could tell you of a company that has managed to go viral and dramatically improve their bottom line.

Every time I write something for the book, something else from my past comes back to me and I have to quickly scribble it down because I know it’s going to be valuable for readers.

It’s very new to me to have deadlines (and very tight ones at that) for my writing, and I’ll definitely have to get used to having multiple people edit and critique my work before it’s ‘approved’. As far as actually sticking to my schedule, I’ve found the trusty Pomodoro method (written about over here) has helped me the most in terms of just sitting down and actually writing.

Coupled with Evernote for taking the hundreds of notes based on ideas that come to me or I find around the web. Oh, and I can’t forget WriteRoom as well.

Why You Should Pick up a Copy

Pinterest has taken the internet by storm in the last few months, literally growing to tens of millions of users, seemingly overnight. Alexa currently ranks them as the 38th most popular website in the world. Their growth can’t be described as anything other than viral. But do you know how many users they had a full three months after launch? 100,000? 1 million? 5 million?

3,000.

Twitter now boasts over 150 million active users and 400 million tweets per day, but a full-year after launch that tweets-per-day figure was only at an average of 20,000.

With this book I want to rewrite the misconception that viral growth has to happen instantly, and that if you ‘fail’ with one attempt, there’s no way you can recover and have success in the future. I also want to highlight the clear difference between viral marketing and viral media. There’s already a chapter of the book with the title “One Million Youtube Views is Not Marketing”. If there’s no impact on your business from your marketing efforts, then you aren’t marketing.

The book isn’t going to be finished till the first few months of next year and it’s certainly not for sale now, so there’s no point in me trying to convince you it’s for you (yet), but I have been taking a proactive approach.

I’ve actually written in the book that no matter how fancy my marketing efforts are for its launch, unless it’s a really good read, it isn’t going to be very successful (though there are 50 Shades of exceptions).

I’m aware that you can’t please everybody, and I’ll have my fair share of negative reviews no matter what I write, but I’ve spent time reading a number of 3-star reviews on Amazon for books in the same field to see what people thought were missing.

Here’s one of them:

“The book unfortunately delivered nothing of substance. It was a mish mash of generic, over used popular business pablum. And never delivered on the promise of usable, nuts and bolts information.”

I actually enjoyed reading this because (no offence to the author) it’s a criticism I’ve had of other books on the subject too. I don’t just want to say “Create something good. Tweet about it”. I want to say, “Here’s how we came up with the concept for X campaign; here’s the platforms we looked at. Here’s what we didn’t use. Here’s what we did. And here’s what I would do differently if I were to do it again.”

I’ve already teamed up with some high-profile people involved in large successful campaigns, and went directly to the source by finding people with more obscure niches who have had large viral success.

As a final test of my own ‘abilities’ before I get totally immersed in this book, two weeks ago I launched a small viral campaign that took me 24 hours to put together. For the launch, I literally sent out 7 emails. I never shared it on Facebook, or on this blog, or to my email list. From the smallest of promotions it quickly made the homepage of Hacker News and received over 9,000 uniques on day one.

I’ll be revealing what that site was and more about it as a guest post on SEOmoz in the next couple of weeks.

I did another random test a few weeks ago as well, which had some promising results. All based on the ideas I’m going to be covering in the book:

It’s hard to walk into a modern bookstore anywhere in the world without seeing a for Dummies book somewhere, so I’m of course excited to have some kind of name recognition and to see my work on bookshelves. That being said, I like to think you all know I’m a perfectionist, so I’m going to be doing everything I can to make it the most valuable book on Viral Marketing that I can.

With the growing importance of content marketing and the growing blindness to ads online (there are over 15 million people on Google Chrome alone who have the AdBlock extension installed), I think there will be something for everyone to increase attention and grow their business. Whether you’re the single author of a blog or the marketing manager for a Fortune 500 company.

Thanks for sticking around through the irregular posting schedules of ViperChill. I’m always trying to work on something ‘bigger and better’ and hopefully some of you will be interested in the book when it launches next year.

Now, I have to get back to writing…

I had been pushed by a few people when I first announced the product to raise the price, but I wanted to keep it affordable and get it in the hands of people who really need the solution it offers. We’re closing in on 3,000 customers now, so I definitely think that’s happened.

There are quite a few reasons why the price has increased, but the main ones are:

• Feature Growth: The plugin we launched at the end of February, almost 7 months ago, is a shadow on the plugin we have now. It adapts on mobile themes, has improved split-testing, 5 new designs and the backend is literally about 15X faster at loading then when it was released. Add in dozens of bug fixes and other feature additions, and this alone I feel justifies an increase.
• The Cost of Support: Right now I’m actually spending more money on supporting the product than I am on development. This is partly because we’re very happy with where the plugin is feature-wise, but for a small number of users we’ve literally spent dozens of hours helping them with conflicts their other plugins and themes have created, going above and beyond what we really should support. We’ve definitely made a financial loss on a few customers, simply because I wanted to keep our standards high.
• The Company is Growing: We have other software on the verge of being released, and the extra income from each customer will be used to bring more staff into the team, and allow us to focus on development as much as support. At this stage we don’t mind if our customer growth slows, since we have a number of products we would love to get onto the market.

I’ve closed comments because all four of us are checking our inbox right now, so if you have any pre-sales questions, please send an email to hello@optinskin.com. Normal posting will resume next week, where I have an exciting personal announcement to share.

I was going to end this post with all the reasons you should pick up a copy if you haven’t already. But I’ll let our customers do that…

Always said @viperchill was the real deal..but just discovered their customer service is first class too! Excited to use #optinskin

— Stacey Herbert (@BrazenCW) August 27, 2012

@viperchill support on OptinSkin is awesome. I received replies on Sunday and everything was fixed in no time. Thanks

— Le Coz Thomas (@TomLeCoz) June 11, 2012

#OptinSkin… one of the coolest new plugins I have used… major props to Glen @viperchill

— Jason (@methodsem) June 7, 2012

Just invested in OptinSkin by @viperchill – so far I am mightily impressed! A 9.5% opt-in rate straight off the bat on my test blog

— Richard Adams (@richardnadams) May 22, 2012

Just installed OptInSkin from @viperchill and I’m thoroughly impressed. This coming from an email marketing pro. Time to watch my list grow!

— Terry Lee (@ImTerryLee) May 1, 2012

I just installed OptinSkin by @viperchill bit.ly/Hl0a9Y Looking VERY nice (and a super-quick response to a small issue I had).

— Cathy Presland (@CathyPresland) March 29, 2012

@onlyoneadam @viperchill OptinSkin and OP are exceptional products imo – worth every cent, and then some…

— Jon Wiggens (@jonwiggens) March 31, 2012

@viperchill Your new plugin kicks ASS. Love it my man!

— paulgram (@paulgram) March 23, 2012




> Click Here to Get Your Copy of OptinSkin <

]]> http://www.viperchill.com/optinskin-96/feed/ 0 http://www.viperchill.com/blogging-qna/ http://www.viperchill.com/blogging-qna/#comments Tue, 28 Aug 2012 17:26:08 +0000 Glen http://www.viperchill.com/?p=4300 When I introduced Ramsay as a new member of the ViperChill team, one of the things we asked you all to do was share some of the challenges you face when it comes to blogging. Though ViperChill isn’t solely focused on the blog medium, it’s an area we’ve both had a lot of success in, and something a large portion of you clearly care about — the post has resulted in over 400 comments since it went live.

Our plan was to use these problems to plan future content that addresses specific needs you have (and we’ll do that), but recently we had the idea to actually answer a lot of them, in public, and hopefully solve a lot of the dilemmas that the average blogger faces. Especially since we’ve both “been there and done that” and know how frustrating it can be when you really want to get going but have some hurdle in the way. I think we’ve solved that…

Myself and Ramsay have put a ton of time into this post, and as a result it’s well over 8,000 words long. Unlike other ViperChill posts where I recommend that you read every word, check out the questions which you think are most relevant to your situation and see how we can help you. Enjoy!

I’ve only recently decided to get serious about being an online mompreneur and my main challenge at this point is getting more subscribers. With all the social networks available, guest posting and shiny new things that pop up everyday, it would be good to sift through these and just focus on those that do work.

I remember you mentioned before about a strategy where you can do an email publication instead of a blog. Are there updates about results for people who may have tried it? – Jayme

As for the first part of the question goes, I think that has really been my advice all along. Try a number of things that are out there, see what works, for you, and then push that channel as much as you can. For example with PluginID I had huge success with guest blogging as an SEO strategy, and within just 2-3 months I was on the front page of Google for the phrase personal development.

I could have spent time commenting on other blogs, trying to harness Twitter or Facebook, tried to grow an audience on Youtube and so on. Instead, I found something that worked, and kept pushing that channel to get a lot of success for the ‘least’ effort.

I recommend that you try a little bit of everything (including podcasting, article marketing, posting on forums, etc) and then hone in on the ones that are getting you more of the type of visitor that you want. There’s no set answer for each niche or blogging style, so it’s something you generally have to figure out for yourself.

As for the second part, I don’t have any figures from readers. At least not figures that I’m allowed to share. I do know in the ViperChill forums there was a member, Kevin, who successfully reached 80,000+ subscribers in less than a week after following the Cloud Blueprint method.

There’s no way somebody would get that many subscribers to a typical blog page set-up, especially if they’re relying on something like RSS or Twitter only. In my Future of Blogging post I talked more about this, and highlighted a number of high-profile bloggers who have transformed their entire homepages to collecting email addresses, with some more of the reasons behind why I think they’ve done that.

Maybe try mixing the two in a similar way for your own industry, and then you can decide whether it’s better to continue with that mix, or push for one over the other.

My biggest blogging challenge has been finding my voice. For a while I was doing really well with the “list” posts and I’ll still do them, but I’ve recently moved my blog a bit more into what is going on inside my head. – David

Hey David! The topic of “finding your voice” is one of the most common things that I get asked. And to be honest, it is actually one of the hardest questions to answer.

Why? Because strategies for developing your written voice are totally different in theory and practice. It actually reminds me a lot of my martial arts days where the teacher would teach you the technique for a perfect punch and then demonstrate it a few times. It doesn’t matter how well you know it in theory or how many times you’ve seen it done, it matters how well you can actually throw a punch.

And that comes down to experimentation, practice and, sadly, a lot of time.

Finding your voice is really no different. You need to learn the theory of it all which might involve reading other blogs and books that you like. It then involves experimentation where you muck around with different styles and methods until you start to find a groove. And then you just have to repeat the process again and again until you start landing some punches.

One thing is true for both writing and martial arts, however. If you don’t absolutely love the topic you won’t practice it. If you have been blogging for a long time and still can’t find your voice then there is a good chance that you don’t really like what you are writing about.

Speaking personally, I’ve written for blogs in almost every niche. I’ve had fitness, technology, personal development and blogging blogs. I’ve had paid gigs writing for almost every niche on the web. And you can always tell which ones I enjoy writing for because the end result is alive and bubbly and so much more personal. They’re the ones people respond to as well.

So if you want to find your voice I would start at the end and ask yourself whether or not you truly love the topic you are writing about. If the answer is yes then spend more time reading and practicing. That’s the only way to get good at anything – at least for me.

Having a quick read of your stuff I think you are doing really well!

As for me, I started a new “blog” related to mazes. At the moment I am checking out how interesting it is to visitors. In the future I plan to create an ebook or two…and even start to monetize, worldwide.

The plan is to create super interesting, great (“purple cow”), mazes and share them, some for free, some for pay. There is some need, but I am not shure if it is strong enough to make money too. It is a bit weird niche. This is also a part of my question. How do you know niche is viable enough? What kind of tests can one do, to check that out. – Igor

I know there are a lot of obscure industries online, but this is definitely a unique situation. I don’t actually know anything about this niche, but that’s probably a good thing, as I can show you how I would tackle the question.

Before I go into my research areas, I do want to say one thing. Well-known marketing blogger Seth Godin has always held on to the idea that if you can find just 1,000 people who are really passionate about your topic, then you can have success in your field. In Blogging Case Study I argued the idea that I think this should be more like 5,000.

In reality, even the most obscure niches (like this one) are very likely to have that many people interested in the topic, somewhere. The difference is that it may be a lot harder, and take a while longer, to find those 5,000 people and introduce them to your community. Remember this is 5,000 people who are really passionate about the subject, and not just someone who gives you an email address.

If you’re not sure about the niche, then the kind of things I would look for are:

• How active are the most popular blogs / sites on this topic already
• Are there popular books on Amazon / Barnes & Noble websites about the niche
• Would you see anything about the industry on a magazine stand
• Are there active forums discussing the topic
• How about the Twitter and Facebook presence around relevant sites in the niche

This should give you a good idea whether you have found a market worth entering. One point I do want to make is on ‘viability’. This may sound naive, but I rarely hear success stories of people who went into something solely for the money. This may not be an industry where you can have a multi-billion dollar IPO after being involved for a few years, but it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t get into it. If you love it, that’s really all that matters.

I know that’s not what most people want to hear – and I know I didn’t when I started out online – but my experiences tell me it’s the advice I should be giving.

My biggest blogging fear would have to be… ‘Am I too late?’ I set up a blog on myname.com a few months ago without any particular direction, more just because I wanted to express myself and couldn’t keep it all in my head anymore. – George

Hi George! Whenever I hear this question I always have the same answer: “Subway.”

“Um, what? What about Subway?” is usually the response.

Well, just recently Subway overtook McDonald’s as being the largest fast food chain in terms of number of stores.

Was it the first fast food chain? Nope. The second? Nope. It probably wasn’t even in the first 100!

But there it is, growing at an extremely profitable rate, competing with some extremely well established brands and companies with huge marketing budgets.

So is it too late to start a successful blog? No way!

Is it harder than it used to be? Yep.

I hate blowing my own horn (I honestly do) but Blog Tyrant is a really applicable and relevant example. In just a few months I managed to gain a lot of attention in one of the most saturated niches. And, for whatever reason, people mention my site in the same breath as ProBlogger and Copyblogger – a nice little achievement considering there are literally thousands of blogs on the topic.

My advice to people who haven’t started yet would be to get a blog host and your own domain name (which you’ve done) and create a brand that is distinctive. You don’t need to be Earth-shatteringly original but you do need to find a way to stand out and be memorable. And if you can mix that brand with hyper-useful, ViperChill-style content and some solid marketing then you will win.

If you are experiencing doubts about whether or not you can make it in a saturated niche I think perhaps you need to find out two things: do you believe in the topic 100% and do you believe in your brand 100%? I could be very wrong but I think you need both to make sure you stand out in a crowded market place. You have to love what you are working on and the vehicle from which you are working.

That is the only reason I joined ViperChill – I love the content and I believe in the brand that Glen has created.

My problems currently are traffic (what’s a ethical way to get it) and monetization (have currently no clue how to monetize). I think my posts and my stuff is excellent and I really enjoy and creating posts. Usually my articles are of good quality providing a lot of practical how to approaches. I also ask questions and write pretty long posts (>1500 words each).

So here it is, maybe you have some tips especially on the traffic. Currently I would describe my strategy as “hopefully Google sees the quality and sends me visitors”. – Phil

Traffic is something that every webmaster struggles with at one point or another, and there’s no real one-way to go about getting it. As I said in an earlier answer, I recommend that you try a large number of different strategies (guest blogging, article marketing, forum posting, getting involved in Facebook, Podcasting, etc) and then see which tactic tended to bring you in the most visitors.

When Leo Babauta hit the front page of Digg many years ago with his list posts – when Digg could easily send you 30,000 visitors in just a few hours – he really went all out on that style. Nearly every blog post on his site was a list article (7 Ways to do X, 10 Tips for X) and he hit the homepage dozens of times. He didn’t need to worry about other tactics because he had found something that was working really well for him.

As far as ethics go, I don’t think you have to worry too much as long as you don’t feel bad about the ways you’re trying to get traffic. For example, if you’re leaving insightful blog post comments with your name linking back to your website, there’s nothing wrong with that. But if you’re saying “Great post!” with a link to your website in the comment box, you’re clearly just writing the comment in the hope of getting more people to your site.

Another suggestion would be to make sure you’re not just writing content that only you think is good. I don’t know why your articles are so long, but if you’re adopting this strategy just because you’ve seen other people have success with it, then it may be time to reassess your efforts. My own strategy is always to write what I want to read, but I also make sure to package the content in a way that will get people talking (thanks to things like the headline) and write on topics that I know at least a large part of my audience will be interested in.

Content is everything in getting people to read your site, so don’t overlook how important your posts actually are.

My biggest struggle is getting blog comments. For example, I can post a blog with a call-to-action such as “how do you deal with xyz?” Instead of people posting in the comments, they post a response in Twitter. – Chris

Hey Chris. Nice to see you over here.

Some niches do better than others when it comes to comment counts. News, politics, blogging, celebrities, opinion, etc. do very well. Others not so much. So the first question to ask here is whether or not your niche is one that gets a lot of comments. Niches/topics where people are looking on Google for answers to specific questions or problems often have a lot less engagement because as soon as the article is read they leave to work on it.

I think the bigger question to ask here is why you want more comments? Is it an end-goal or are you just looking for some feedback? Or perhaps you want your site to feel more “alive” by showing that people are discussing topics regularly?

When I wrote my ProBlogger article on How to Get 80+ Comments on Your Next Blog Post I mentioned that scarcity is really important. One of the reasons Glen and I get so many comments (I think!) is because we don’t post regularly. When a post finally does come around (and it’s good!) people want to jump on and have a chat. This is even more true if you close comments on old articles like a few big blogs do.

If I remember correctly (Chris and I have had lots of chats), you once mentioned that you thought I should post more regularly. While that may be true for many other reasons, I honestly think it lowers comment counts. I wonder what would happen if you decreased the number of articles you posted and instead focused on perhaps doing more regular guest posting contributions and occasional massively useful posts on your own site?

The other thing to consider is closing comments completely. I’ve done this on a few big content blogs and instead focused on a nice opt-in form and the interactions happening on Facebook. For a while Mehdi from Strong Lifts did this with his blog articles and instead pushed the discussion to his forum. Now the forum has grown so much he is charging for membership and making a great profit!

If you don’t want to do that then I would try two things: asking questions in your blog post titles and then making sure you don’t totally exhaust the topic. I always try to leave a few ends open for discussion even when I write really long and in-depth posts.

I think my biggest problem would be I am too afraid to press the publish button. My spelling and grammar are so bad I feel it’s not worthwhile sharing my information with anyone either that or I’m just embarrassed.

So how do you know when your post is up to par or do you just write and go for it? I’d love to hear of your processes are for finalising blog posts. – Peter

Well, one easy way to solve that would be to run your posts through some kind of word processor / spell checker before it goes live. I use Microsoft Word when I think an article is ready, and it helps me to pick up on random errors like duplicating words by mistake or writing business man instead of businessman.

One thing I recommend is to read your post a few times before hitting publish. Read it out loud if you’re not in a library, and you’ll spot errors much easier. I understand why you would be concerned about this, since pure poor spelling and grammar can put me off reading an article, but a little mistake here and there isn’t that much of a problem.

Though I’ve read this post multiple times before it went live, I’m sure there’s a mistake somewhere. When articles are thousands of words long, it’s hard for there not to be. My real measure for whether a post is up to par is whether I’m excited to hit publish. If I’m excited for the reaction of the audience, and think it’s an article people will really benefit from.

My biggest problem is finding the time to generate more content! – Kimberly

Hi Kimberly. The question of generating more content is something that almost every blogger goes through. This is especially true if you are working another job while trying to build your blog up to full time.

But recently a friend of mine shared a quote with me that sort of changed the way I approach this problem:

“The only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it.” – Steve Jobs.

This helped me to realize that I really wasn’t focusing on the types of internet work that I loved. I love blogging. I don’t really love web design and all the other things I was doing to help pay the bills. And once I realized that I found I had a lot more energy to focus on developing the business that I wanted to really throw myself into.

So if you are constantly struggling to find time to write articles and really resenting the fact that you have to keep pumping out content then I’d take some time to assess whether or not you really love the blog. If you do, and you’re sure, then perhaps it’s time to hire some other bloggers to help you build an income producing asset in a quicker time so that you can finally move away from all those other distractions.

Finding good writers can be really tricky but the best place to start is somewhere like Elance or by approaching other amazing blogs in your niche and offering the writers some part time work. These arrangements can be really flexible if you can promote some mutual benefits that might help you reduce the amount of cash you have to pay them initially.

My biggest blogging problem is time management, or choosing how to focus my efforts. I’ve started my own business doing a little business blogging to promote UK narrowboat businesses (!) and have a personal blog called The Real Life of a Narrowboat Wife.

It started as the incredibly true adventures of myself and my husband travelling the canals and bringing up two very young children. Now I would like this blog to be my business and my income… I have millions of ideas but not enough time to implement them. – Narrowboat Wife

The first thing I want to say is that I love the name of your site; definitely a nice-spin on a very peculiar “niche”. The second thing I have to say is that this is a really complex subject, and it’s hard for me to answer it in just a couple of paragraphs. Hundreds of people have written entire books on the topic, and the majority have still left their readers questioning how to handle their time.

I literally have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 huge posts which cover the topic in some way. I would say that number 5, the post where my entire focus is on productivity, is probably the most relevant to your situation.

The summary of the post – which involved more research than I would like to admit – is that I didn’t really find any productivity secret. The answer is generally what we all know it is, even if we don’t want it to be, and that’s to put your head down and just get things done. Productivity and time-management is a challenge for pretty much everyone on the planet, so you certainly aren’t alone.

One thing I do want to say – which is more relevant to your situation – is that everyone has tons of ideas for their business. Next week we’re launching our next premium software on ViperChill and it has taken months to put together. You can be sure there are 10 other plugins and services I have ideas for and would love to share with the world, but it all takes time.

Do the thing that is likely to take you the biggest step forward to where you want to go. The thing that is going to have the biggest impact on your business either in the least time or with the least effort (these aren’t necessarily the same thing).

I started getting some really awful posts through the ‘contact’ page and then on Twitter. I know rationally that this happens but it can be hard to ‘talk in your own voice’ when this abuse actually happens. I’ve chosen to ignore the person who is saying obnoxious things about my illness and recovery – is that the right thing?

If you look at my blog you can see that the whole thing really knocked my confidence and I’ve stopped blogging – I need to get started again. How do you get your motivation up after a blow like this ? Any tips on managing this kind of abuse? – Susan

This is a really interesting question, especially for people who are managing communities that are attached to larger brands.

For example, in my guide to social media for small businesses I talked about an example of some Twitter-hate that the Australian airline QANTAS was receiving after grounding all their planes to resolve an internal dispute. Their social media people had their work cut out for them as the negativity flowed in for weeks and weeks. Should they address it? Or should they ignore it?

It can be a really complicated issue.

The first thing I would recommend is creating a “comment policy” where you outline what will and won’t be tolerated in the community and the comments. If you lay it out clearly and someone breaks the rules then I would just delete the comment and move on. This is especially true for anything personal, racist, etc.

If, however, they are making comments about the site or something to do with your service then I think it is important to address the issue publicly in a quick manner and then try and move the conversation over to email. For example, some big Australian brands on Twitter will say something like, “Sorry you’re having problems. I’d like to help. Please contact me on xyz to sort it out.”

This type of approach shows other readers that you want to work out issues that are going on while not really encouraging your comment section to become a complaints area.

In terms of getting your confidence back from this type of event, I’m probably not the best person to ask! I am pretty darn sensitive and get upset at negative feedback whenever it happens. But if I really look at it, I think perhaps this just shows that I care and is maybe a good thing however much it annoys me when it happens. I just try to see it as an opportunity to develop patience and move on.

I work in tech during the day (Mobile Security) and so am lucky to do what I love. In the evening I work on my sites, train at my club doing Brazilian Jiu Jitsu or play far too much video games until 3am each night.

My main point is really now trying to find my own group of online friends to click with and help support each other. I think I need to stop being a one-man show so much. – Luke

I have no advice for this. Why? It’s not something I’ve ever really done myself. Actually, that’s a lie. I’ve been involved in a number of mastermind groups, had people who I agreed to chat to regularly on Skype to keep each other motivated and have been a member of exclusive forums with the aim being that everyone helps each other grow their businesses.

Though each one tended to help initially, and some even for a couple of months, they’re not really something I put much importance on any more. Though I have a fairly large audience here at ViperChill, there are practically zero bloggers that I talk to on a regular basis. Most of my close ‘contacts’ are just too busy working on our own things.

I know there are people who have had success with this kind of thing, and I’m sure someone in the comments will give examples, but since it’s not something I do personally, I have to urge you to question whether it’s worth worrying about.

Don’t take this the wrong way, but I would be far more concerned with playing games till 3am every day (at least if you want to build a successful business) than finding people to support you through your challenges. There are forums, Twitter, Facebook and Skype available as and when you need them, but you certainly don’t have to dedicated time to a regular support schedule.

Still, I can’t help wonder, “will this venture ever be truly economically viable?” – Shayna

Hi Shayna! It sounds like you are well on your way but, of course, this is a question that we all need to ask ourselves regularly.

When it comes to making a profit with a blog I think there are a few important points to think about.

• You often make a loss at the start
  Starting a blog is just like starting a shop or a restaurant. It takes a lot of time and money to get the thing turning a profit. In fact, most businesses make a loss for the first two years. It’s unwise to think blogging will be any different. You often need time and money to make money.
• It is a real business
  Just like the shop or restaurant, you need to work on it as if it is a real business. Some bloggers do a 30-minute article and think that because they have posted something for the day they are done. Would you do that if you were opening a store? Nope. You’d clean or develop your marketing or train staff. Blogging needs to be the same.

So if you are passionate about what you do and you’re working hard on the blog as if it was a real business then it comes down to goal setting. Give yourself a time period like two years to make a set amount of profit. And during those two years set yourself little milestones so that you know you are on track. If you don’t do this it is really easy to get distracted and lost along the way.

The last important thing to think about is whether or not there are any other players in your niche turning a profit and making a good living. If you can look around and see examples of success then take some inspiration from their example and learn from their mistakes and lessons. If other people out there are doing it there is really no reason why you can’t as well.

Also, as a little side note, it appears your blog loads it’s mobile theme even when viewing on a PC.

Anyway enough of me moaning on. My problem is as of right now trying to find unique selling point, or a small section of my niche that I can try to dominate and then build on from there.

If you could help me with that it would be awesome! – Bobby

Hey Bobby; that’s a great question, and something that I think everyone should do. The thing I love about the potential in blogging is that there is literally room for people writing all types of content with totally different styles in every niche. Some people ‘write’ with images, some do huge in-depth posts and others might just write a few hundred words to make you think. Though each style may be used in the same niche, there’s a different audience who is interested in each class.

When I was writing in the personal development niche, I think my unique selling point was that I was very young (yeah, I know that can’t be replicated so easily) and very open. If I thought I was bad at something, I would say so, and try to improve…publicly. I also had totally different viewpoints and experiences to most people getting into the field at 30-40 years old, which I think made a difference and helped me to grow a large audience.

The first obvious thing then that sets you apart from everyone else is not being afraid to let your own perspective and life experiences come through in your content. There’s absolutely nobody on this planet who has gone through all of the events you have, so don’t be afraid to use them to help you base an opinion on your subject topic…and stick with it. Not everyone is going to agree with what you have to say, but as I’ve said before if you’ve blogging for everybody, then you’re blogging for nobody.

The style that will generally work best for you is the style that you like to read the most. Do you prefer quick, to-the-point information in your niche or in-depth reports. Or maybe articles more focused on graphics and including entertaining video. You don’t necessarily have to do a totally unique style – someone has probably done it all already – you can then focus on simply offering the best value using that style of publishing.

I’m 16 years old and looking to start my online career with my own projects. How would you tackle your online identity if you were my age and you got another shot at it? Hide behind a fake name, keep it mysterious, no identity, or full out truth?

The only issue I have with using my real name online is when people Google me that I know in real life, and they don’t know about my online endeavors; it’s kind of awkward. – Octavian

This is a really cool question because I was almost the same age when I started blogging. Of course I really had no idea what I was doing and didn’t take it seriously for many more years but I was in high school when it all started. So I know where you’re coming from!

I was obsessed with martial arts, fitness and weight lifting at that stage. I just wanted to write about what I was trying with my own training. And after a while other people got interested and the blog gained some traction.

One thing I noticed was that when a friend or relative found out about the blog they either really didn’t care that much or were really happy for me. There wasn’t much negativity – especially because all my friends at school were in to similar things and so were happy to support me.

So to answer your question I think it all depends on what you are writing about and whom you are targeting. If you have a lot of experience in the area or are writing a “journey” type blog that records your experiences then it might be totally fine to use your real name. If you aren’t that experienced with what you are writing about then maybe you could get some other writers on board and manage the behind the scenes, big picture stuff.

Using a pen name is probably better than going anonymous because people will find you easier to bond with. You just want to make sure you do it in a way that you can still go on TV and speak at conferences if you get really famous!

As a new blogger, here is my question/issue/concern:

Obviously the “making money online” niche is HUGE, but what about smaller niches (like mine, Real Estate Investing). It seems easy to make money with “making money” sites or “how to blog” sites (just refer people to Hostgator and you got it). But what about the rest? – Richard

Well, first of all, here’s the thing about the make money online niche. It’s huge, but at the same time it’s tiny. Sure there are tens of thousands (if not more) blogs covering the subject, but a far smaller number actually generates any kind of respectable readership. Also, you’re likely to be slightly skewed to how many blogs there are on the topic because it’s something you’ve been researching. If you decided you want to become a Forex trader and start researching the topic online, in a few weeks you’re going to think there are a ton of Forex blogs.

It’s purely based on where your attention lies, and it’s giving you that viewpoint. There are just as many blogs on business, health, personal development, personal finance and so on. Steve Pavlina and Leo of Zen Habits consistently make tens of thousands of dollars per month with their self improvement blogs. Ramit Sethi and Timothy Sykes make a living from their personal finance and Forex sites. My friend, the owner of Freshome, makes a very comfortable living from his.

JD Roth of Get Rich Slowly and Trent Hamm of The Simple Dollar in the personal finance niche have made a liveable income from their sites for years.

I do understand your concern, since at times it can seem like everyone and their grandmother is blogging about this industry, but there are tons of success stories outside of this niche, I can promise you that. If money is your main concern before getting started, then I must really stress that you’re thinking about the wrong things. Michael Arrington took home at least $15M last year when he sold his blog TechCrunch, a blog just covering the latest tech start-ups. As I covered in my future of blogging post, he’s still writing on the subject, even though he never has to work again.

Passion: First.

My goal is to create a platform where people can share their problems, get help and support within the community. My greatest challenge is to knowing how to go about building that community. Would you have some suggestions? – Jesslyn

First of all I have to really commend you on creating a blog that helps people. That, to me, is the most important thing and I think if you really do your best you won’t have any regrets later on because you’ll know you’ve at least helped a few people out.

So how you do you grow that community?

Well, when it comes to personal development and overcoming problems you’ll notice that people are attracted (most of the time) to other people that they perceive as having the answers. Sick people go to doctors, sad and depressed people go to psychologists and unfit people go to personal trainers. You see it in religion, business, etc. It is all about a person with a problem finding someone they perceive as having the answers.

So if you want to grow a community around solving people’s problems my advice would be to find some really cool people from different fields to get involved. It might be writing articles on a regular basis or it might take place in a more informal Q&A session like Glen and I are doing right now (you’ll need people cooler than us though)!

One way you could do this is designate one day/week a month as the day that you tackle “x” problem. Let’s say this month is about diabetes.

What you could then do is go out and approach a few experts in the field (doctors, nutritionists, people who have cured diabetes through exercise and diet, etc.) and ask them to answer some questions via email for an upcoming blog post. Make sure you tell them about how the exposure will help their businesses.

You then go out and do some guest posts about the event or ask relevant blogs to send out a question to their readers that you can put to your expert panel. Finally, on the day you invite all the participants to promote the event on their own blogs and social networking sites and you sit back and watch the interaction.

This type of structure could work really well because you aren’t asking the experts/personalities to hang around for months and years writing about all sorts of topics. You could have days about health issues but then move on to things like home renovations, finances, mortgages, raising kids, dealing with loss, etc. Or if you wanted to make the blog narrower in scope you could keep it on the same topic and just ask different experts. For example, if it is about neck pain you might ask a GP one week then an acupuncturist, physiotherapist, sports player, etc. in subsequent weeks.

However you choose to do it I think the most important thing is to make sure you have strong personalities/experts that produce helpful content. The community will have difficulty forming unless they think there is someone that they can learn from or lean on and often if they are just looking for a shoulder to cry on they’ll end up talking to Facebook friends.

I have a huge stack of ideas regarding politics – but that are complete theory – ideas that I think will make people happier and more satisfied with their representatives. I figured it may be better to chose a ‘practice niche’ before trying the politics niche, despite the politics niche being a passion.

So, all-in-all my biggest blogging: problem includes choosing a profitable niche that I am passionate about; fears include spending a great deal of time on something that I may or may not enjoy but will not gain enough subscribers; and frustration is writing high-quality, high-value articles in a reasonable amount of time. I am still a new-born to this field, but hey its still frustrating. – Tim John Jr.

Hey Tim, I recommend that you read a few of my previous answers in this post, as many of them are relevant to your profit vs. passion internal debate. In short, I believe that the passion has to come first. Neglect that, and you can generally forget about the profits. At least with blogging.

As long as you’re niche isn’t ridiculously obscure – like a blog for people who enjoy drinking Gatordate – then I really wouldn’t worry too much about not being able to gain enough subscribers. Actually, what I should really say is that I wouldn’t worry too much about their not being an audience who is interested in the same topic. With enough time and focus on the right aspects of blogging, there’s no doubt that you’ll get the readership.

As for your last point, I would say that there’s no reason to rush to hit a certain posting schedule. I’m pretty much the “poster boy” (I hope I’m using that phrase correctly) of having a random posting timetable. Length isn’t necessarily what takes me a lot of time — my productivity article was half the size of my future of blogging post, yet took twice as long to put together. I think you have the right focus in that you do want to write high-quality, high-value articles. One every week is enough when you start out, and then you can slow things down a little once you do start to grow a readership, if you find even that is too difficult to keep up with.

All that’s left to say is; just get started. Your worries and concerns will generally take care of themselves once you actually get going. After all, if you love the niche, it’s rarely going to feel like work anyway, and the only way is up. The best time to start was yesterday.

The problem is my visitor count is going down and so is my ad-sense revenue. I know it is all about “quality content” but I have been improved in terms of writing and still the site is getting low hits as the days are passing. My ad-sense revenue has gone to dogs and I have simply no idea what I am doing wrong here.

Moreover, there is virtually no engagement on the site, in the comment section (apart from occasional few) despite of the fact that I have 2400+ Fcebook fans and 1500+ email subscribers. – Abhishek

G’day Abhishek. The first thing that I have to say here is that I honestly think that “blog engagement” and “Adsense revenue” are two goals that aren’t always compatible on the same website.

Now that I’ve said that I’m sure everyone will send me links to dozens of sites that use Adsense and also get a lot of comments but I really think they are the exception and not the rule.

Why? Because every time someone clicks an Adsense ad they are gone from your site. You’ve lost them. That potential email subscriber and “brand advocate” who would comment on articles and share your work might be gone for good. If your aim is to get more Adsense clicks then by definition there will be less people on your site interacting with your content.

Don’t get me wrong, I actually really like Adsense in some situations. The first blog that I sold made most of its revenue from Adsense clicks. But looking back, I can’t help but wonder whether or not I could have had more success if I’d focused on soft-selling affiliates while growing a mailing list. Or, better yet, marketing my own products like eBooks and training courses.

So if you really want to improve your comments and engagement I would think about whether or not Adsense is the right fit for your blog.

And if you want to get more Adsense clicks and grow your income that way then I wouldn’t worry too much about comments because your main goal is to get those clicks happening.

Another reason that you might be having problems with visitors and Adsense clicks is that your site loading time is a little bit high. I have a screen capture of your site compared to ViperChill that I got from this website speed test tool.





As you can see, your site is taking around 3 seconds to load while ViperChill is under half a second. When I visited your site it seemed to be quite a lot higher than three seconds so you could take a look at Glen’s article on improving website loading time and see if that helps. People are super impatient these days and a slow loading site will really increase your bounce rate.

BONUS: We Both Answer the Same Question

I would love to pretend that this was some genius idea to finish off the post, but I (Glen) messed up and answered a question Ramsay had already assigned to himself when we were decided who responds to what. Since we didn’t discuss our personal answers, I thought it would be good to place them here side-by-side to see how we differ, and also offer more advice in one place on a very popular question.

My main challenge is to extend beyond my initial, lovely, loyal following. It can be done; a rowing blog monster, Rowing Journal, has just arrived on the scene and because anyone can post on it – and they do – it’s become huge and massively popular in no time. I feel a little like a corner shop just after Tesco has arrived in town. – Patricia

One of the first steps in having success at anything is knowing it’s possible, so it’s great that you have some reference material to go from. I’ve highlighted a few times on this blog, the story of PluginID and how its growth snowballed after reaching a certain plateau of subscribers.

It took 7 months to hit 500 subscribers, 1 year to hit 1,000 (and this is when having 1,000 subscribers was very rare) and just 3 more months to hit 4,000. After a year and a half, the Feedburner chicklet showed 7,000 readers. I put a lot of that down to my own audience marketing my content. Basically, as long as I kept putting out great blog posts, my growing audience would share that to an increasing number of people, and this continued with every article that I wrote.

So, my first recommendation would be to make it very easy (and beneficial) for your readers to actually share your posts. Write content so good that people naturally want to share it with their audience. Not only will you reach like-minded people, but you’ll grow your readership as well.

Another good thing about being aware of sites like Rowing Journal is that you can glean the kind of content that your audience likes to read and share. Looking at their sidebar I can see multiple articles that have 7-8,000 views, and while I don’t recommend copying them directly at all – at least look into the reasons people have enjoyed those topics. Read the comments to see what really gets people excited and participating.

Do this for other sites in your niche as well, and with a bit of consistency, your words will be reaching more eyeballs in no time.

//

This, really, is the most important question in blogging because without new growth you are not going to succeed. Lately a lot of big bloggers have been talking about how the most important thing is having a small number of loyal followers but, to be honest, this really isn’t the full picture.

Yes it is extremely important to have a great troop of readers who comment and share your content. But the end-goal shouldn’t just be loyalty. Why? Because when it comes to selling a product or making a living from your blog the only thing that matters is reaching more people. Apple didn’t become the biggest company in the world by selling to the same group of people – they did it by expanding their market constantly. Pat Flynn doesn’t make his huge monthly affiliate incomes by selling to the same crowd either. You have to grow your audience all the time.

So how do you do it?

Marketing.

Bloggers never really seem to talk about that word. They mention things like commenting on other blogs and SEO for bloggers but rarely do they talk about a wide-arching and comprehensive marketing strategy. And that is exactly what is needed. A blog is like any other business – it grows only by marketing it.

There are all the usual things you can do like guest posting, creating viral content, making videos on YouTube and improving your Google rankings. But you shouldn’t limit yourself to just those methods. Last week Glen showed us the example of a guy who challenged the President of the United States to a Poker game and got massive mainstream press coverage. Why would we limit ourselves to purely “traditional” blogging strategies when there are marketing methods out there that have been making big companies big cash for generations?

So in answer to your question about expanding your following I would suggest doing all the usual stuff but then at the same time make sure you are studying marketing. Buy some books or take some online courses and really develop an interest in what marketing can do for your levels of growth. Treat your blog like any other business in this respect.

For your blog in particular you might want to see what rowing institutions you could partner up with – shops, colleges, etc. – and see whether you could add a regular article to their mailing list or newsletter. You could also try and get in touch with some Olympic rowers for interviews and then try and get some main stream press about the chat.

This is going to be the last post on ViperChill for a while as the team is busy working on the launch of our next premium WordPress plugin (hopefully just a week to go). Myself and Ramsay put a ton of work into this post, and really hope that it’s helped out a number of bloggers reading. We would love it if you leave a comment to let us know what you think or add your own feedback / questions into the discussion…

]]> http://www.viperchill.com/blogging-qna/feed/ 121 http://www.viperchill.com/skype-5k/ http://www.viperchill.com/skype-5k/#comments Mon, 20 Aug 2012 10:52:32 +0000 Glen http://www.viperchill.com/?p=4236 Note from Glen: This is a post by Ramsay, who was recently introduced as a new member of the ViperChill team. Last month I made an extra $5,000 by jumping on the phone with a long-term email client to close a deal. And at that moment I had an important business realization: I’d forgotten something vital. And I think almost every blogger is making the same mistake that I was. You see, blogging and internet marketing can be a really tiny industry sometimes.

There are a few big players who dictate how things are done and then everyone else follows for a while. But within that narrow spectrum of teaching and following there are vital business practices being overlooked. This is not another “how to make money by following this method” kind of post. By the end of it you won’t have a new gimmick to test and obsess over.

But you might have an idea planted in your head that works for you for the rest of your business life.

And it might make you a lot of cash.

Let’s get started.

How I Made That $5,000

If you’ve been reading my blog for a while now you’ll know that my money doesn’t just come from Blog Tyrant. I actually try to get my fingers in as many pies as is reasonably intelligently possible.

The reason for that is simple: if you put all your eggs in one basket you’ll end up getting hurt.

Believe it or not, I learned this lesson from Google when they de-indexed my one and only blog back in University. This blog was my only income – the Adsense clicks were almost 100% of what I earned. So when the blog got turned off I ended up with nothing.

Luckily that blog came back in the SERPs. Not everyone’s does. Since then I’ve tried to keep a sexy mix of affiliate income, premium content writing, blog design and consulting work to help me make a living online.

Here’s how it went down…

Prior to the phone meeting I’d been emailing a long-term client for weeks and weeks about a new project that we were hoping to get started. I had previously built a website for them and we were discussing a new blog that they were desperate to get me on board with.

The problem? It just wasn’t happening.

We’d been emailing back and forth ideas and concepts and I’d told them I was ready to move. I had content plans, product ideas and website design drafts to show them. Excitement was building but no money had changed hands and something always seemed to pop up.

And then we jumped on the phone and met up for a quick coffee.

Within 20 minutes I’d sorted out all their objections and fears and sufficiently assured them that it was time to move. The next day they paid their invoice and the website and copy writing is now all under way. By the end of the year I think they are going to have a pretty cool blog and product ready to go.

And it all happened because of a phone conversation.

What Are We All Doing Wrong?

After I got off the phone to my client it occurred to me that something very important had just happened.

And I realized that it is something that almost every blogger is failing to do: make face-to-face contact.

I was amazed at how quickly the issues had been overcome by simply taking the time to talk to my client in a medium where they could hear my voice and see my face.

It was fast.

It was immediate.

And, most importantly, it was very personal.

I could have kicked myself at all the wasted hours. As I sat there thinking about what had just happened I wondered how many other jobs I’d lost because I was so insistent on being a hermit that only communicates via email. And this problem applies very directly to blogging.

The Problem With the Blogger Mentality

You see the problem with us bloggers is that we are all quite tech-savvy. Maybe it is a Gen-Y thing but given a choice between a phone call and a text message, I’d much rather send a quick SMS. And given a choice between an SMS and an email I’d rather send the email. But in a lot of ways this is a serious mistake.


Image Credit

Sure, it’s nice for us to stay in our pyjamas all day and talk to our clients and potential clients by email instead of meeting up for a coffee. It’s very safe and easy. Your clients might not feel like that though. Nor the people who want to collaborate with you on big new projects. Or the people who might want to buy your expensive product.

Yes we bloggers like to use email and social media to stay in touch. It’s often a lot faster and you don’t have to sit around a boardroom for two hours discussing what, 90% of the time, everyone already knew.

But sometimes you need to show your face. Sometimes people desperately need to see it.

And Skype offers us a way to “have a coffee” with clients and potential clients anywhere in the world and possibly create a whole new revenue stream.

Why is “Face to Face” So Important?

If anyone knows about the difference between being anonymous and showing your face, it’s me. Since unveiling on ViperChill a few months ago a lot of new doors have opened up.

But I’ve also been lucky enough to grow up around some really successful businessmen and women who are constantly closing big deals and impressing their clients on the phone and in face-to-face scenarios.

Some of the simple but extremely important lessons I’ve been told by my family members include:

• Never email a proposal
  My sister told me that she massively increased her sales rates by refusing to ever email a proposal to a potential client. Instead she tells them she has five minutes free and she’ll meet them for a quick coffee to go over it. I’ll tell you why this works later on. Oh, and did I mentioned she was top seller for her firm in the country?
• Never wear sunglasses
  When I was probably around 10 I went to a big meeting with my dad who was wearing transition lenses at the time. As the meeting was outdoors the glasses turned into sunglasses and he took them off and put them in his pocket. When I asked him why he was doing that (he needed them to see), he told me that you should always look clients in the eye to create a bond. Sunglasses prevented that. Computer screens do too.
• Deals that count don’t get closed by email
  Obviously there will be exceptions to this rule but I remember hearing that all the big deals – the ones that count – get closed at lunch meetings, golf games and other face-to-face scenarios. The details might get worked out over email but the real “selling” takes place when you can chat openly. More on this later.

So why wasn’t I applying these things to my work as a blogger or copy writer?

It’s often really tempting to think that just because our services or products are online we can just use email. And in many cases that will be enough.

But what I’ve found recently is that some of the most impressive sales and business relationships have only come about because of a face to face meeting. And Skype gives us a modern version of this. Meeting in person is even better but with Skype we can create personal bonds that were hard to develop before.

So why is it that talking on Skype or meeting a person for lunch can be so much more powerful for selling a product or creating an important alliance? Well, there are a few reasons.

• Humans are social creatures
  By nature, humans are very social creatures. We make families, go out for dinner with friends and play in sporting teams. We are built for that community living – our whole society is set up in that way. Why, then, would we forget to do apply that basic principle to blogging and business?
• Email is still new
  It sounds totally ridiculous for us but for a lot of people email is still considered something new and foreign. Even if they have been using it for ten years, many people from the previous generations don’t feel “at home” using it because they didn’t grow up with it like we did. For them, face to face will always be the default.
• Email causes a physical stress response
  Believe it or not but studies have shown that constantly checking emails causes the body stress. What this means is that for a lot of stressed out people (me included!), emails often represent negative things. Perhaps not a great introduction to a deal?
• People don’t believe you based on what you say
  Strange but true. A lot of the time we don’t trust people because of what they say, we trust them because of how they say it. Facial expressions, tones, etc. This guy has made a career out of reading them. Mix that with the fact that the internet is a scary place for a lot of people and you are much better off showing your face.
• It is an organic and fast process
  As happened to me in the example above, talking face to face can be a much faster process. Emails take time and people put them off (sometimes it takes weeks for Glen to reply to me). But on Skype or at a meeting you can jam and chat and things move really efficiently – if you’re good at it.

One of the most common questions that you guys asked on my unmasking post was about how we can speed up the whole process. So many new bloggers get upset at how long it takes to be successful. And I can’t help but wonder whether part of the missing ingredient for a lot of us is the human connection.

So let’s move on to the fun stuff.

How You Can Use This to Grow Your Online Business

Hopefully by now you’ll be thinking that maybe creating a face to face connection is a good idea. So what’s the best way to go about it?

Let’s take a look.

1. Do the Blog Tyrant — unmask

If you are blogging anonymously I think it might be time to consider getting your face out there.

As you might already know, I blogged anonymously for exactly 99 posts before revealing my identity. It was a huge step for me as I’d built up a lot of brand equity as the Blog Tyrant and was pretty concerned that the “buzz” on my blog would die off after I opened up.

It didn’t. Things got better.

My old friends and loyal readers became more friendly and I seem to be getting lots more personal interactions with people who visit the site. I even got asked out on a few dates!

But if you think it worked well for me, have a look at what happened when James Chartrand from Men with Pens revealed that he was a she! Remember, this was before Twitter was big.

2. Collaboration potential – arrange Skype chats with bloggers whenever possible

This is probably the most important point because by getting on Skype with bigger guys in your industry you often open up a lot of doors to new collaborations. And collaborations are the things that really grow careers.

Blog Tyrant was going really well for me but when Glen asked me to join the ViperChill team I knew that things would really take off. It’s a simple fact of business that you can get a lot more done when you team up with people who believe in and want to achieve the same things as you.

Now, the ironic thing here is that Glen and I never video Skyped before we came to our arrangement. But it did involve me opening up my “secret identity” to him and sharing lots of personal exchanges. I even emailed him pictures of my cat! (Note from Glen: This is true, as well as photos of his GF)



So the next time you get an opportunity to do it, why not drop the phrase, “Hey can you jump on Skype real quick?” You’ll be surprised how many doors open up once a person has seen your face and heard your voice.

So how do you get big bloggers on a Skype chat?

• Start with their needs
  Glen suggests that one of the most powerful ways is to start with their needs and slowly transition to your own. For example, you might hit us up saying you want to promote one of our products or posts and then gradually ask for something in return.
• Be personal and informal
  In my article on how to write successful emails I talk about a similar thing – try to be informal and personal by studying the big blogger and getting to know their favorite TV shows, sporting teams, etc. I love Tweets about tennis!

Remember, the idea here is not to “scam” your way into a phone chat with an A-lister. The idea is to develop real friendships and alliances that you actually value. There are guys like Pat Flynn, Darren Rowse and Brian Clark that I Tweet and email because I genuinely respect and like them. There are also other big bloggers that have similar influence but whom I never email.

3. Emphasize your photo and personality on your site

Since unmasking I’ve made my photo prominent in my sidebar, on my About Me and You page and on my Facebook Page.

I can assure you this wasn’t an easy move for me – propping myself up like that makes me feel like a douche. I’d much rather stay anonymous. But at some point I realized that I had to bring myself in to my brand more. If I want blogging to be a viable long term career for me I need to get myself out there instead of just the website.

By making your photo and story accessible and prominent you can create some distinctiveness even when your content might not be that original.


Neil’s simple but effective sidebar photo and bio.

Neil Patel does this really well as you can see in the shot above.

Adding his photo and story to his sidebar keeps him visible and distinctive no matter which article you click on. Once you see the face and bio a few times you feel a sense of trust and are more likely to stick around when you know it’s something he’s written.

4. Connect with readers and potential clients on Skype

These days a lot of bloggers are talking about loyalty. But something even more important than that is creating distinctiveness. You need to stand out.

Now, I’m sure I wasn’t the first person to do this (Glen: *cough*) but a lot of people have commented on how a number of big bloggers are now replying to every comment after it became well known that I was doing it on Blog Tyrant. And while I’m sure this added to a sense of community and belonging on my site, I think the main thing it did was help me stand out from the crowd.

With Skype you can take this process even further. Sure, it might take a little more time but by jumping on for a quick chat you might close a sale because the person wants to give you the business. You will be surprised at how many people will buy your product or service because they like you more than they like what you are offering.

If you are really good at what you do you can also charge for this time. People will pay for solutions – especially if they come from their favorite blogger. Don’t be afraid to take this relationship/situation to a paid level.

5. Use video whenever possible / reasonable

Videos are getting bigger and bigger every day. As far as I’m concerned, the only drawbacks with video is that people often can’t watch them at work and sometimes they take too long to digest in a world full of “scan readers”.

But if you can do it nicely and at the right moments you can make a big impression.

Someone who does this really well (is there anything he doesn’t do well though?) is Pat Flynn from Smart Passive Income. Let’s take a look at the video he made for his “Start Here” page where a lot of newcomers get to meet the man behind the site.

This approach is personal, warming and, above all, gets noticed. People instantly feel connected to Pat and are more open to his ideas and articles. Although it isn’t a live chat in person or on Skype it does produce a very similar affect. A lot of the time I read articles he’s written that I otherwise might not just because I really like Pat.

Tips For Getting the Most out of Skype

I wanted to finish off this article by giving you some practical tips for using Skype.

More importantly, I’d love to draw on the experience of the ViperChill crowd so if you have any of your own tips please leave a comment. Feel free to drop a link as well if you’ve written anything that might help.

• Photo: Make sure your photo is friendly and recognizable such that when people see you on other media like blogs or Twitter they will know who it is straight away.
• Handle: Ensure that your handle is appropriate for all types of conversations. You don’t want to be doing a big business meeting under the name “lazybugger433434″.
• Expectations: Don’t be online all the time unless you are willing to take calls when people see you there. Set up times to be online so people don’t feel ignored.
• Quality sound: There is nothing worse than having an important conversation on Skype with someone that you can’t understand due to bad sound. Make sure you buy a good quality mic like the one I used here.
• Preparation: When I do my consultation calls I try to set aside at least 20 minutes before hand to go over the topic – even if I know it extremely well. This lets me put together any links or resources I might want to share as well as refreshing my memories of the subject.
• Presentation: If you’re jumping on a video chat then you really want to make sure your hair is brushed and you have a nice shirt on. This matters more for big paying clients than it does for friends and contacts.

The most important thing here though is to be yourself and find your own style.

What Do You Think?

Do you think you could increase your conversions, sales or relationships by adding in some more face-to-face time? Have you ever used Skype in this way? Leave a comment and let me know.

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