Entrepreneurs-Journey.com

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After Mitch’s interview hit the airwaves recounting how quickly his blog grew to 3,000 daily readers in his niche of college football, another success story emerged in the Blog Mastermind private members forum.

A Simple Change To Leigh’s Blogging Made A Big Difference

Leigh runs a blog called The Fat Loss Troubleshooter, and also joined Blog Mastermind during July 2008. Since then her blog has enjoyed huge growth, getting as many as 5,000 unique visitors per day AND - here’s the really good news - she’s making about $4,500 a month now.

This is one of the screenshots she posted into the Blog Mastermind members forum showing her biggest income source - her Clickbank account. As you can see she’s doing between $500 and $1,000 a week from Clickbank sales.

When I hear success stories like this from my students I have to find out what they are doing right and learn what techniques are working for them. I asked Leigh to join me on a case study interview call to find out how she is getting such amazing results so quickly with her blog.

In this interview you will learn…

• The change she made to her blogging style that made the big difference
• How she is now able to learn what her audience wants, rather than guessing what she thinks they want, which means more sales for her
• The techniques Leigh implemented to build her audience, in particular how she uses interviews to drive traffic to her blog
• What exactly Leigh sells to make money from her blog
• Her opinion of how a coaching program like Blog Mastermind can change your blogging and present a clear path to success
• Leigh’s plans for world domination

Here’s the download link again for the MP3 -

• Download the MP3 [ 30 Minutes - 14 MB ]

What I found particularly powerful about this interview was the way Leigh explained how her content writing changed.

The formula for a successful blog goes good content = more traffic = more money, so you can see how changes to Leigh’s content style made such a difference to how much money she now makes.

Success Is Not Guaranteed, But People Do Get Results

I’m never going to tell you blogging for money is easy. Every person I speak to who’s ever made good money from blogging talks about how much work they do, especially during the early days, however they also look at the work in a different angle - it’s fun.

When a passion is driving your work and you see results coming in, all you want to do is work some more. Positive reinforcement fuels passion and passion fuels work. It’s possible to get into a wonderfully positive cycle, if you are just willing to take the steps to move past the challenges and the naysayers.

Here’s to your blogging success,

Yaro Starak
Blog Coach

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I’m often emailed asking whether I do private, one on one blog coaching. As much as I like coaching I know how much time it takes so I always say no, sorry not at this time, I have my hands full with group coaching in Blog Mastermind.

And no, I haven’t changed my mind.

For those of you who want the personal attention that comes from a private coach, experienced blogger Chris Garrett recently opened up his Authority Blogger training program, which includes personal time with Chris.

Personally I think Chris is crazy offering his personal time as he will only be able to take on a few clients, but that’s the kind of work Chris enjoys, so hey, why not take advantage of him!

Seriously though, there are not many other bloggers I would recommend for coaching, but Chris is definitely one of them. He’s been in the game for years, his blog has thousands of readers and he’s focused his previous coaching on supporting individuals in a very personal capacity, so he knows how to teach and support people and help them to build great blogs.

Chris focuses on the Authority Blogging angle - in other words, how to build a blog that gets you attention, respect and trust from all the right people in your niche. He also has a system designed to take new bloggers from 0 to 1,000 readers, which is a compelling offer.

You can find out more details here -

Authority Blogger Coaching

You might be wondering if I run a blog coaching program why I would promote another coaching program? There are several reasons.

In case you haven’t realized, blogging when done right is about collaboration and support, not competition. Chris has supported me in the past so I’m supporting him now.

I also see the need for private coaching and this is something I’m not willing to do now and Chris is, at this time anyway!

Chris has a completely different teaching style and methodology to my own and there’s always room for multiple experts in any industry, so my readers deserve to know the options out there if they decide to take blog coaching.

If you are interested in becoming an authority blogger, see what Chris has to offer here -

www.authorityblogger.com/

Make sure you take a look at the offer he has now during his opening special because if you want private time with Chris, including direct email access to him and private consulting calls, you can save $300 if you order now.

His course has a one time fee too - which is a pretty good deal considering he’s willing to work with you so closely on an ongoing basis.

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During the last few live question and answer sessions with my Blog Mastermind students at least one person every call asks for help determining whether they have a good choice for a blog topic.

Given that new people join the program each week, it’s not surprising that question crops up over and over again. Everyone new to blogging faces the challenge of topic selection as the first big hurdle, and while I can never offer the “right” solution, as only the market can tell you that, I do my best to offer my suggestions and tips for conducting research to aide with topic selection.

What Topic Is Right?

Topic selection for a blog is similar to niche selection for a business. What you decide to write about determines what type of audience you attract and how you make money from that audience. In today’s e-commerce landscape, content is the driving force behind traffic and purchasing decisions online, so topic selection is a big deal.

Today I want to offer a simple answer to this problem, to help choose what topic and niche is right for you. I say simple because it’s possible to make this a very complicated choice, with in-depth keyword research, market analysis and other assessable factors weighing in on the decision process.

Unfortunately I find that many people who do extensive research become paralyzed. With more data comes more awareness of the different variables at play. Sometimes knowing less is a good thing because it gives you a clear next step - an action you can take that actually moves you closer to a result.

This is especially important for newbies and people with personalities that demand they know everything about everything before taking that first step into the big wide world. As someone new to Internet marketing, learning about all the different ways to research a potential topic may be so much work and such a big learning curve that it takes months before any action is taken to actually test the topic in the market.

You have to learn how to choose a niche before even choosing a niche!

I’m not saying you should bury your head in the sand and take a leap of faith when choosing a topic, but you can certainly make it easier on yourself.

Spotting Opportunities

Let me explain how I have selected topics for the businesses I have run in the past. In almost all circumstances the process has gone something like this -

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Last night was the Toronto bloggers and blog readers meet-up organized between myself and John Chow.

I forced John, his readers and my readers to go to the Live Organic Food Bar in Toronto, which I realize is not everyone’s cup of tea (no meat). I was secretly curious to see what John would post on his blog about it because he always covers the food he eats when he goes out.

John wasn’t too harsh thankfully and enough people ordered food, so I think we pulled it off. Who knows, maybe I even converted some people to organic vegetarians or even raw foodists (not likely! - I’m not there yet myself).

You can watch John’s video of the event below and read his recap here -

I’d like to thank everyone who turned up. It was great as always to talk to so many like minded individuals all following the blogging path.

If you attended the event and want to keep up with anyone you met, don’t forget you can go to this Facebook event page and find a list of people who attended (or at least who RSVP’d).

A Common Thread

We talked about all kinds of topics but one thing stuck out in my mind after the event as the most common thread, something which people continued to ask me about throughout the night in some shape or form.

I have to blame Tim Ferriss for this, it’s his fault.

Everyone is dying to emulate the 4-Hour Workweek.

As testament to how much people don’t like their day job and desire travel and lifestyle freedom, I was asked how I manage to travel and blog and earn a good living running a business several times by different people. I think that has to be the greatest motivation for a lot of people to start an Internet business and one of the main reasons you read this blog.

To answer this question, last night I mentioned two factors -

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I had the Conversion Blogging video transcribed into a text document for people who prefer to read.

You can grab it right now as a free PDF download from here (right click “save as” to save it to your computer).

In case you can’t remember, the Conversion Blogging video explains my system for combining blogging with a traditional email marketing system to create a $100,000+ Internet business.

Grab the transcript and you can read all the details, but of course if you want to actually see my examples, you need to watch the video (which is still free).

Update: Jack from VidSummary.com has also put together a summarized version of the Conversion Blogging video. He’s stripped out the best bits so you can consume what you need quickly, however he does charge $7 for the summary. You can take a look here.

400 Students Strong

New people are joining Blog Mastermind every day and we’ve almost hit the 400 student mark, which is awesome. We’ve already done the first of many live group coaching calls and the questions came flying in. The forums are hot and the feedback from the students is fantastic - I love you guys.

If you haven’t jumped on board what I consider the best blog coaching program available today, please come join the party -

http://www.blogmastermind.com/coaching/

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