I agree pretty much with everything you said. I have plans for two of my own products and another one in partnership with two other prominent bloggers.

I hope to get a loyal group of hard working bloggers that work with me and each other to grow our blogs. I suspect with the right people regardless of the blog topic we can all reach one thousand uniques per day, or at least in the 500-1000 range in six months. Some in fact will likely do a lot better than that.

Like you said – I really want the community aspect where I can offer the most hands-on value to other bloggers so I hope it’s those type of people that gravitate to my blog traffic products, not the nay-saying off-target audience who will make my life difficult and not get value from what I offer. It’s all about the positioning in this case.

To be honest I simply can’t afford to offer everything I publish for free anymore. This year is crunch time for actually making money from information products. It should be fun no matter what happens though, I just hope I can make a decent living from it too.

You have some great tips in general, and I know your blog traffic tips will be fantastic. From experience, the pros and cons of giving away information are complex. Just to begin with, if you give it away, you get great publicity – perhaps more than money could ever buy you, and you could probably use it to build a great list, or create some wonderful alliances.

On the other hand, when information is in the public domain freely it can be misquoted, misconstrued, misinterpreted, and is harder to support.

Now if you charge for it as a course, you’re likely to make more money and be able to give better results to your clients, as you’re able to focus on them and address their specific concerns and issues, particularly since the name of the course intends a particular goal.

On the other hand, sometimes it can take half of your work schedule just to talk to people and work with them – so you really need to know how many clients you can take on and still maintain steady operations of every thing else.

The main drawback in my view is that you end up helping much fewer people. It balances with the fact that you get to help a lot more people really well, but my goal has always been to reach as many as people as I can.

So the middle of the road would be an ebook or a course on CD that can be mass distributed. The issue there is making the resource on that appeals across the board to all people and can fulfil the promise you set forth. If a person wants to blog about afterschool snacks for kids, can you still promise them they’ll get 1000 visitors a day? In other words, will the resource be equally useful for internat marketers and non-marketers alike? Of course, I don’t know what your audience is comprised of now, so I don’t even know if that would be your specific concern – it might be something else.

The great thing is when you find the right balance, and it really works for all your clients, its such a great feeling, as good as whatever amount of money you earn doing it. The only other thing I would say is charge what the course is worth – nothing will burn you out faster than having an underpriced product on the market, nothing has shorter returns than an overpriced one.

Good luck.

I’ll have a mailing list sign-up hopefully tonight but it’s only for the E-J readers that are interested in the course and want advanced notice and news about progress, it’s not for mainstream promotion.

I’ve got the official website coming out hopefully by february.

It’s a good niche if you really stick to that – don’t worry about teaching converting visitors (that’s anthoer eProduct).

As you said, there are hundreds of processes available to get more traffic and that’s what a good information product does: thoroughly research a topic, compile it and deliver it into a easy-to-use package.

People have to remember that you don’t make a product for the whole population – eg: possibly many of us here would not need Yaro’s course, but I’m sure that many would.

Also, I think if Yaro thinks he is qualified enough then he is qualified full stop – the market will decide.

All the best, Yaro.

Jason’s comments – you talk about sales conversions, it sounds like you want a business marketing course, not a traffic course. While I would expect a lot of people taking a course on building blog traffic would fully intend to convert their traffic into customers that’s not what a blog traffic course would focus on. First comes targeted visitors, then comes conversion – I would focus on the first part. However that being said given that I run online businesses there will no doubt be moments where I talk about converting traffic, it just won’t always be about a sales conversion – more like a newsletter/RSS sign up etc.

Oh and Jason, yes I do feel quite qualified to write a course on generating blog traffic. You just may not need it by the sounds of things.

Remember everyone starts off as a newbie and they deserve to be treated with respect no matter what point on the learning curve they are. I think some people need to learn that lesson and not be so quick to pass judgement.

Qwerty is quite right – ultimately the foundation of blog traffic is content, but telling people to create good content is not going to get lots of traffic to a blog on it’s own. There are hundreds of processes that can be done to generate traffic and some people want a system to do it. I think it’s very naive for people to ever give one line responses like that when it comes to teaching a skill.

Greg – Your point about providing instruction on writing good content – content that gets traffic – is a good one. I’ve put together a framework for the first month of the course and most of it is devoted to content creation because you need to lay the foundations before you heavily promote a blog. There is no point seeking blog traffic if you don’t have anything to retain an audience when the traffic starts coming in.

Guys I really appreciate comments like yours because A) you provide me with an outlet to demonstrate what I can offer. While I suspect I won’t have you as clients you help me to convert others and B) you occasionally offer constructive feedback that I use to add to/modify what I am doing.

Keep up the nay-saying!

There is often too much of technical focus about online business, Yaro your ofefring looks too much like technical treatment of blogging versus a content focus.

Too bad Qwerty did not provide a link, cause we cannot see the lurker.

It seems that only real internet noobs read this blog, here are the steps:

1-Publish good content updated daily.

I saved you $300.

cheers.

It sounds like it will be valuable to a lot of people. The more people we help to blog the better it will be for everyone.

Offering a blueprint to you might be helpful then again you would probably prefer to do it your way so perhaps that’s why a advanced level community is ideal for you – you can learn from others and implement what you want, when you want to.

What I want to put together is a “hand-holding” course for those either not willing to study themselves and figure out what advice out there is good and worth implementing, or those that are time poor or just prefer to learn from a course environment. Paying a couple of hundred dollars to get the 80/20 advice is often a lot more efficient than trying to figure it out yourself from the abundant resources available at sites like mine, Darren’s and performancing. I certainly would not expect my students to have already read through those three blogs before taking the course.

My competitive edge would be me, my credibility, the fact that I have done it already, the way I write to educate, how I teach, my willingness to interact with students and, most importantly, how I position my course. This would not be “how to be a problogger” course – this would be advice on and activities to build traffic and community at a blog. In this regard it certainly could be helpful to probloggers out there – more traffic equals more money – but also others that want to create a popular blog for fun, for small business exposure, for corporate reasons etc etc.

I don’t doubt that I would cover a lot of what Darren and Andy have already covered in Six Figure Blogging but my course would be a completely different beast. I’m not Darren or Andy so the way I teach would be different, the goals are different and certainly a lot of my methodology would be different as well. I wouldn’t be teaching how best to use AdSense, or Chitika, or how to find a profitable niche. I would teach how to get more targeted eyeballs and long term fans to your blog. What you do with the traffic is up to you.

I also run a successful small business website, which gives me a different perspective regarding business blogging and Internet marketing in general. My 8 years of Internet marketing experience has some credence and relevance to blogging because I’ve seen the evolution of the web and how we got to where we are now. I know fundamentally why blogs work and how they fit into the evolution of ‘web architecture’. This is so important if you want to teach how to build a popular blog.

Anyway, that’s a ramble. As I said before, some will love my course, for some it will be completely redundant. My goal will be to make sure only the right people take the course so we all get fantastic results.

I better get to work. I hope within a few weeks I will have the first month’s worth of materials ready to go and I could take on a small “beta testers” group to try the course at a discounted rate.

I’ll have a mailing list set up shortly for those who are interested in keeping track of the course’s development and launch dates.

1. Unique Visitors
2. RSS Subscribers
3. Community (comments, pageviews)

All three aspects are important and should impact each other positively. As RSS subscribers increase so do unique visits and pageviews etc. However there certainly are specific methods you can use to increase each aspect independently.

I would devote some specific time in the course to theory on each area and also provide ongoing practical tips within the activities to increase the numbers.

Depending on your target market RSS may or may not be a totally appropriate or accurate way to measure success. It certainly is an accurate measure of a web savvy audience.

On my website, which has been targeting small business owners since 1998, it has taken me almost a year to change the focus and have that reflect in the type of visitors, inquiries, and participation.

Your comment about free information is an interesting one because there is a huge difference in people using the word ‘free’ in their search terms and then end up at your site vs. access to free information about the topic and focus on your blog.

I am interested in specific strategies to engage and develop a community to read more of my content and subscribe via RSS. My customers, while business savvy still do not know what RSS is. So if your ebook is focused on getting people to subscribe RSS and does not include how to get them involved via commenting etc. the book would not be a worthwhile investment for me.

http://www.realmoneywebdesign.com is the URL. check it out and let me know what you think?

Cheers
Corby Simpson

I see where you are going with this Yaro, I think an Ebook would definately be a winner in the short term, but what’s the competition like? There is tons and tons of free info out there for bloggers to grab and the ironic thing is you are advertising Darrens course which I have heard is great.

What can you give that is unique?

This is off the top of my head so feel free to hammer, but what about forming a Pro bloggers guild/association where Bloggers who have already jumped a few hurdles and have got blogs that are cooking can become members.

I would help out anyone asking for advice, but first I would expect them to go read all the free materials out there like Problogger and Performancing and your blog Yaro After that they will probably be able to teach me something, lol. The point being, you have to walk before you can run and it takes time and it takes work and then it takes more time.

There is an old Zen story about the novice monk wanting to know the “truth” from the Zen master. The master held the monks head under the water till he was close to drowning and then brougtht him up. He said when you want the information as much as you wanted to breathe send me an email. What, you think Zen masters aren’t online.

BTW Yaro I am a bloke.