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• Download Text Transcript [ 18 Pages - PDF ]

It All Started With A Blog

If you opted in after watching my Conversion Blogging video you would have received an email from me talking about a podcast interview with a student of mine running a million dollar blog.

My friend’s name is Alborz Fallah and he was one of my very first students and certainly is the most successful. His blog, CarAdvice.com.au is one of the top blogs in all of Australia in any category and competes right along with some of the biggest media companies in the world for the car enthusiast market in the land down under.

His blog gets phenomenal traffic, brings in hundreds of thousands of dollars in advertising revenue each year and Alborz has traveled to Europe to drive some of the most prestigious sports cars ever created. His blog became a true business and Alborz has to be one of the luckiest people in the world, living out a passion every single day and earning big money along the way.

What’s really great about this story though, is that Alborz started out just like you and me. He wasn’t sure what topic to write about, so he created three blogs at once to see which one would stick. The car blog got the traffic so he dropped the other two and slowly built up his site off the back of his own content.

I convinced Alborz to test AdSense on his blog after much pestering and he immediately made around $10 per day. Over the next few months his income grew, AdSense reached about $100 a day and he started branching out and testing other forms of advertising.

I don’t know how much his blog generates today, but 12 months ago it was making $30,000 a month, so I expect the site generates at least half a million dollars a year now. I do know the site was professionally audited (necessary when you take on capital investors) and valued at 5 million dollars!

Did I mention during this entire time he was still working a full time job?

It wasn’t until Alborz sold some of his blog to investors and his blog became a real serious business that he finally left his job to focus 100% on growing his project.

Since then Alborz and CarAdvice have gone from strength to strength. He’s knocked back a million dollar buy-out (actually I think he knocked back a couple of offers), he’s had more people join his team contributing articles and he recently told me about a deal just made with one of the major online media companies to supply car related content to their network in Australia. There’s also new branches of the blog opening up in other countries.

It’s truly become a massive enterprise, which all started as an after-hours experiment to see if he could build a popular blog.

There’s A Lot To Learn From This Interview

The interview is very practical, and if you pay close attention you will learn a lot about the specific techniques Alborz implemented early on to grow his traffic. You will also hear the story of how he brought on investors to back his blog and help grow it to the next level.

Here’s some of the most important points to take away from the podcast -

• You can start a blog and choose top level categories in very competitive markets, if you niche it down based on geographical location. In other words, you can start a car blog and target just your country to differentiate it. There’s big bucks to be made as the leading blog in just one country for mainstream subjects.
• When you don’t know what topic to blog about, pick what you think might work and just put something out there and see what happens.
• You can build a significant blog based only on part time labor, if you are dedicated and get things done during the time you have available to work on the project.
• Sometimes, being controversial can do wonderful things for your traffic. Strong opinions will always stick out and grab attention.
• Search engine traffic is very powerful if you just do a few things right, like blog post titles in Alborz’s case.
• Think BIG with your blog, it doesn’t have to be just a small publication - consider taking things to the next level with the help of financial investors.

This is one of the most inspiring blog case studies I know of. I don’t expect everyone to do as well as Alborz, but it’s VERY realistic for you to enjoy even just 10% of Alborz’s success with your blog and make a good living as a result, if you can just commit yourself to the goal for long enough to give yourself a chance of success.

Here are the links to the Interview again -

• Download the MP3 [ 49 Minutes - 22 MB ]
• Download Text Transcript [ 18 Pages - PDF ]

I hope you enjoy the interview as much as I did creating it. If you like this style of interview there’s another 10+ interviews with professional bloggers inside Blog Mastermind, which you can download and listen to any time after you join the program.

That’s it from me. I’ll speak to you again soon.

Yaro Starak
Blog Coach

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I’ve been talking about it for long enough. Now is your chance to watch my latest video. Here’s the link -

This video covers a form of Internet marketing that combines the traffic and raw exposure power of a blog, with the direct marketing power of email lists.

I call it Conversion Blogging, and it’s the basis for my entire six-figure online business.

I honestly believe this system represents a much easier methodology for making money with blogs. I’m not saying you shouldn’t make money from traditional blog monetization methods like advertising (I still make a big chunk of change from sponsorship), but a blog can be so much more if you combine it with what has worked in the Internet marketing and direct marketing worlds for years (almost centuries when you look at offline mail order).

Of course for this system to work you can’t ignore blogging fundamentals - you still need to know what goes into building a great blog.

To help with this, after you watch the Conversion Blogging video, you can enter your name and email to watch my second video, a brand new visual presentation of the Blog Profits Blueprint and grab an updated copy of the text version of the Blueprint too.

I’ll let the videos do the explaining, so please go watch now, and then tell me what you think in comment replies here.

http://www.blogmastermind.com/video/

Yaro Starak
Conversion Blogger

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Over the weekend I worked hard on video presentations for the release of Blog Mastermind. Obviously the core topic of the videos is how to make money via blogging, however I’m introducing a new form of blogging for profit, something that can lead to income quicker, it’s more stable and in the long haul is a much better model for bloggers to follow.

I’ve got a name for this type of blogging that I will reveal when the video comes out but what I can tell you now, it is based on email marketing. I’m not the only person doing this form of blogging of course, but I’m one of very few compared to the total number of professional bloggers out there.

How The Humble Email List Changed My Business

Back in 2005 I started blogging. A few months later I began studying the work of some prominent Internet marketers and a trend arose - everyone talked about how you had to have an email list.

Strangely enough, I didn’t listen. Well, at least I didn’t take action, which is just as bad. I could see how having an email list was valuable, but my focus at the time was my editing business and I just didn’t see how email marketing was going to help it. My blog at the time was still more hobby site than a money maker.

Fast forward to the end of 2006 and I decided to finally launch an email list. However I still didn’t get it completely right because instead of leveraging my blog for continuous email opt-ins, I created an off-site landing page and wrote a few blog articles pointing towards it. At least it was a start.

When it came time to do a blog redesign I was well and truly convinced that I had to include an opt-in for my list on my blog. I asked my designer to put the opt-in in the right column at the top in the above the fold area. You can see it in action in most of the 2006 archives of my blog at the Way Back Machine.

Instantly my opt-ins grew and I quickly found myself generating an extra 20-50 new leads per day, which continued to increase as my blog traffic increased.

Since then, nearly every success I have enjoyed online has come thanks to making these decisions. I finally understood what Internet marketers were talking about when they said you have to have a list - and yes, that applies in EVERY niche online, not just the make money topics (email marketing is so good in non-business markets because not so many people use it well there).

How Email Will Make A Difference To Your Blogging

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The prelaunch phase of a product launch in many ways is more important than the actual launch itself. During this period you have to decide what to give away, if anything, what marketing message to focus on, how to source the content and how to distribute it.

A successful prelaunch is all about building excitement and anticipation, but also - and this is critical - cutting through the noise and grabbing people’s attention through the power of your message.

You also use prelaunch content to address the major issues affecting your potential customers and deal with any justifications they may have for not purchasing your product.

The New Blog Mastermind Prelaunch

This week I’m about to kick-off the prelaunch for Blog Mastermind and I’ve been thinking about what to present as a demonstration of how much my training program can help people really leverage the power of blogging.

The Blog Profits Blueprint is available but I won’t be using it as my only launch tool. I certainly recommend it to everyone as the best introduction to the world of making money from blogging and as a great taste of what the full Blog Mastermind program is about, but if I want to make an impact I need something fresh - new ideas and new media.

Concepts For A Successful Prelaunch

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I’m back in Toronto now, returned from Las Vegas and Chicago. By the end of my trip I was really itching to get back to full time work, so I’m happy that the rest of this month is all about the Blog Mastermind launch.

No doubt all of you who had even a tiny interest have watched John Reese’s Traffic Secrets video. Most people were impressed by it and based on some of the comments I’ve seen floating around, people feel that John has certainly had an impact on what we consider good product launch video.

What Content To Launch With?

A few months back I was thinking about what great resources I could come up with for the opening of Blog Mastermind.

The Blog Profits Blueprint has a been a huge success and the best launch resource for Blog Mastermind I could ever hope to come up with.

I was thinking of updating it for the reopening, but after looking at the document, besides a few minor updates, there’s not much I’d want to change about it. It’s still very current. If I added to it I might turn it into a long winded extension, and I like how succinct it is now.

My next thought was to use video. Video is definitely performing great, all successful launches are using it and since I’m eager to improve my video production skills, video seems the right choice.

It’s because of this that a few weeks ago I switched to Mac, which has much better video tools than Windows and now after more than a month with it, I can honestly say is a much superior operating system, especially better than Vista, which is an absolute monster and crashes constantly.

How To Make A Splash With Video

After watching John’s video my heart sank a little because there’s no way I can compete with his production quality given the time frame I have. However, I think powerful content even without the flashy sound and video effects can still make an impact, so I’m not too concerned. The most important thing is to really hit on some key concepts, which I think I can do.

I’ve become proficient at ScreenFlow for Mac, which is just a breeze to use. I’ve already recorded two behind the scenes videos and this week I’m going to put together the main presentation.

I’ve been thinking about the merging of the Blogging and Internet marketing worlds a lot since I straddle both with this blog. I think there’s things to be learned by groups on both sides of the fence and that is where I intend to focus the video presentation.

I can’t talk about it too much now since I’m just formulating the concepts, but you won’t have long to wait, I plan to have this out this month, July.

Bloggers Need To Become Better Business Builders

There is one point I will end with, which I think is a core issue. Most of the Internet marketers I know are much wealthier than bloggers, yet they don’t really work any harder.

The day to day activities a business owner completes result in much more financial success because of what model they choose for their business. Bloggers unfortunately choose a model that is much harder to become long term wealthy with.

I covered this topic in much depth in the series I wrote on whether professional blogging is a sustainable business model. This series is VERY relevant for what I am going to talk about in the video. I strongly recommend you go through these articles either for the first time or as a refresher if you have some time over the next few days.

Here are the links -

• Is Professional Blogging A Sustainable Business Model?
• Do You Have What It Takes To Be A Professional Blogger?
• The Advantages Top Bloggers Have That You Don’t
• The Key Resource For A Sustainable Blogging Business
• Is This The Only Sustainable Blogging Business Model?

If you like where these articles are heading and you are ready to build a real business through blogging, stay tuned, I have some killer stuff coming out.

Yaro Starak
Business Blogger

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