Entrepreneurs-Journey.com Down-To-Earth Advice For Bloggers and Internet Marketers

It’s been a while coming, but finally I’ve decided this year I will attend Blog World Expo in Las Vegas in October.

Darren Rowse managed to get me a spot on his problogger training day at the expo that he and co-author Chris Garrett are running on Thursday October 14th. I’ll be speaking at 4pm, very likely on the subject of blog monetization.

Alborz Fallah And I Are Going To Do A Full Day Workshop In The USA

When traveling to the USA I like to visit my family in Toronto, and stop in Hawaii to keep my flights shorter and because it’s a lovely place to be. I may also visit New York and LA for fun and to meet up with some Internet marketing friends I’ve never met in person.

My close friend Alborz Fallah, who you may recall I interviewed back in 2007 when his Car Advice blog was first valued at over a million dollars, is also going to travel. However he had one condition before he agreed to come with me – he wants to teach a live workshop to share what he knows about building a multi-million dollar blog with you.

Alborz’s blog has continued to grow incredibly since the original interview three years ago. It’s now valued at…well let’s say multiple millions – MUCH more than it was, with over 10 staff, offices in Sydney, a board of directors, CEO and investors. It’s become a fully fledged business and it all began with him sitting at home, writing about cars by himself.

My own story of recently cracking the million dollar mark contrasts interestingly with Alborz’s as I have done it with a very different model, no employees or investors and much less traffic, though of course his blog is valued at much more than mine.

Together we have a very wide range of experience when it comes to building million dollar blogging empires, which we want to share with you in the form of a one day workshop.

I Need Your Feedback

Rather than guess what you want, I’ve created a survey that I’d appreciate you fill out if you are interested in attending our workshop in the USA.

I’m asking you to nominate your choice for preferred city to have the workshop, topic, cost and format.

Here is the link to the survey. There are only four multiple choice questions so it will take you about ten seconds to complete. Please click the link and then make your choices.

Survey Questionnaire For Yaro and Alborz Workshop

Once I have the data from you regarding what you want, Alborz and I will put together the details and create a registration form for people who want to attend to fill out. It will be strictly first come first served and we are planning to limit numbers to a very small group.

We plan to hold the workshop sometime in late October or early November.

I look forward to reading your survey responses and possibly meeting you at our workshop!

Income Report: I’m A Million Dollar Blogger

Back during the early days of this blog I used to write income reports on a semi-regular basis. John Chow made the idea of reporting your blogging income popular, and before him guys like Darren Rowse and Shoemoney would show pictures of checks they had received from advertising programs like Google AdSense or affiliate programs. Today guys like Pat from Smart Passive Income keep the trend going, though most of the other guys have stopped reporting now.

There’s no doubt people are inspired by seeing how much money others make (I certainly was before I started earning much online), and for the person sharing their details, it’s great for the ego to talk about how well you are doing. It’s also beneficial as a practice to report income to monitor your trend growth rates and also see if you can sustain a level of income significant enough to live off long term.

I’ve often had people, especially those who work “normal” jobs, question the practice of revealing your income online. How much money you earn is considered one of the most private things you don’t tell even your friends or family, let alone the entire planet through the Internet. I personally don’t think income levels should be hidden, it could be a force for better wages if the knowledge was public, so I’ve never had a problem talking about how much money I generate. Plus it’s fun to report back your successes when you have them, even if it does seem a lot like bragging, which I think it is, but it’s great for social proof too.

How I Made A Million Dollars

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What’s the most common and simplest marketing advice for attracting traffic to your blog?

Leave comments on other blogs.

Yep, it’s easy, it’s quick, and because of that, nearly everyone does it wrong. However because so many use blog comments to pretty much just leave spam, if you use blog comment marketing the right way, you really stand out from the crowd and can enjoy good results.

Watch the video and I explain how to more effectively use comments to market your blog.

If you enjoy this video, please tweet it, you can share it on Facebook or on your preferred social network. And of course, if you haven’t done so already, please join my email newsletter on this page (enter your name and email at that link to join).

In a previous articles I discussed the importance of having a thorough understanding of your customer psychology. Knowing why your customers are motivated to do what they do on an emotional level means you can intimately communicate with them, demonstrating you know their problems better than they do.

In another article I explained the distinction between your grand vision, versus your guiding strategies and your every day tactics.

I taught you that the key word when it comes to understanding your customers and your own process, is “why”. Ask why your customers behave how they do so you can best work to meet their needs and communicate in a language they understand. Ask why you make decisions and take actions so you are clear about how your every day actions relate to your overall strategy and vision.

The final piece of the puzzle, which I will explain to you in this article, is all about execution.

It’s great to conceptually understand these ideas and know the why behind human motivation, but if you fail to execute then you’re not going to get a result. At the end of the day, if you want success, it’s what you do, not what you understand or assume, that will lead you there.

Why People Fail

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Back in 2006 I decided it was time to build my first email list.

I had been blogging for just over a year at that point, and had over five years experience running websites already under my belt, yet I had never created an email newsletter or list of any kind.

Finally, after repeat recommendations from countless internet marketing experts stating that the “money is in the list” and similar comments from successful entrepreneurs, claiming your “business is only as good as your database”, I realized there might be something to this idea.

I went out and did some research on what methods I could use to create an email newsletter. I concluded after reading forums and blogs that using a third party service was the best option if I wanted to minimize spam complaints and maximize deliverability. Deliverability, which means how good your email list service is at actually getting your messages out to your subscribers, turned out to be a very critical component for successful email marketing, so this became my top priority.

Although there were many reputable providers in the email autoresponder market, including GetResponse and Constant Contact, AWeber consistently demonstrated the best reputation based on my research.

I made up my mind and paid the roughly $20 to register an AWeber email autoresponder account, which I still use to this day.

My First Newsletter

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