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• Download the MP3 [ 49 Minutes - 22 MB ]
• 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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Download the MP3 [ 30 Minutes - 10 MB]

I meant to have this out to you on Wednesday last week after I recorded it, since the prior evening I attended a Third Tuesday meet-up in Toronto, which was the inspiration for the podcast. However, you see, I bought a new macbook pro.

Don’t get me wrong, I love my new mac, but this is my first mac and since I recorded the podcast on the mac there was a BIG learning curve to figure out how to get it ready for publication on this blog. As you will hear, it’s not quite right, but the message is definitely clear enough to enjoy. Apologies for the change in volume and odd shuffling noises.

How Do You Measure Social Media?

This Third Tuesday meet-up was a good one, the topic being - How do we measure social media? - with three expert panelists (Katie Paine, Marshall Sponder and Marcel Lebrun) taking questions from the audience made up of mostly PR and communications professionals, and related consultants and small business owners.

The idea of measuring the impact of social media is akin to measuring the effect of branding. Social media, much like branding, is often difficult to directly correlate with a business outcome, despite it obviously having a big impact on business results. I won’t go into here since I do so in some depth in the podcast, so have a listen!

If you are a blogger, a business owner or a person interested in the business side of social media, you will enjoy this rambling podcast.

Thanks to Joseph Thornley and his crew for putting on a great meet-up.

Show Notes

1. Introduction to the Third Tuesday event
2. What we mean when talking about measuring social media
3. What this means for bloggers
4. Why it’s the conversation that matters most, not the influencer
5. No industry wide standards for measuring social media are available
6. Not many people are actively measuring, only monitoring
7. There is an opportunity to provide a database of influential sites ranked by social media analysis
8. Use social media to assess how your competition is perceived and use that information to compete
9. Consulting firms providing social media data mining services
10. What changes to ad budget spending at companies means for bloggers
11. Why being an influencer in any niche is so important

Click Here to Download the MP3 [ 30 Minutes - 10 MB]

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Download the MP3 [ 42 Minutes - 10 MB]

With all the talk of doing a product launch online thanks to Jeff Walker’s Product Launch Formula 2.0 release, I thought I should talk a little bit about how blogging can be used to launch a product based on my experiences.

My list was built off the back of this blog and I have conducted a product launch process a couple of times. In this audio I go through some of the techniques, the mistakes and the successes I have experienced over my three years as a blogger, which led to the eventual successful launch of an information product, which I made over $150,000 from.

If you are thinking of doing a product launch online, or a relaunch or closing down sale or any kind of online promotion, and if you want to know my opinion of Product Launch Formula (and let me be frank - I did NOT plan on buying the product at first because I didn’t think I needed it), then this is a podcast you have to listen to.

There’s lots of good content in this audio and some behinds the scenes stuff too, plus at the end I’m offering a special bonus. You will just have to listen to the audio to find out what it is (okay, here’s a clue - the bonus includes a free one of these, the same MP3 player I use - the iRiver S10).

Note: To get the bonus you have to take action on Thursday 27th of March 2008 at 2PM EST (USA time) when Product Launch Formula 2.0 is released for 24 hours only, so listen to this audio before that date or you miss out!

Show Notes

1. How to build email lists
2. How I created my first list of 3,000 subscribers using blogging
3. Some key lessons from Jeff Walker about using surveys before releasing a product
4. The first million dollar launch day
5. The real reason I bought Product Launch Formula (nothing to do with the content itself)
6. Jeff teaches me the importance of list segmentation
7. What I did in the lead-up to my own launch
8. How I attracted top affiliates to my launch
9. The real reason you do a launch - to build a list (so you CAN start with no list and still succeed)
10. Who should and should not invest in products like product launch formula
11. A special bonus from me if you decide to join PLF 2.0

Click Here to Download the MP3 [ 42 Minutes - 10 MB]

******

Success with No List and No Affiliates?

If you are still worried about conducting a launch without an email list, watch the latest free video from Jeff about the guy who started with no list, no web site and no joint venture partners and did over $7,000 in sales - impressive stuff!

Here’s the video - No List, No Web Site, No JV Partners

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Download the MP3 [ 19 Minutes - 5 MB]

Yesterday I was sitting at my computer facing a few too many emails and a rather large list of things to do and I could already feel my head start to hurt.

So what did I do? - I went to the park!

I decided if I was going to continue working I would probably be in considerable head pain by the end of the day, so I dropped everything and went to the Brisbane Botanic Gardens at Mt-Cootha and hung out with the birds.

I had my iRiver MP3 player with me and was listening to some podcasts, which created a desire to make one of my own impromptu rambling podcasts. My little iRiver has a built-in microphone, so I was itching to see how good it was - and wow, I’m impressed. The audio quality is not bad I’m sure you will agree, though I hope you like the sound of birds in the background :-).

The podcast is a short one about a whole range of Internet business topics starting with social marketing, moving on to email lists and then finishing with a little note on keeping perspective.

Show Notes

1. Yaro talks about the recent Rich Schefren Attention Doctrine and StomperSMARTS launches
2. A look at how the Internet marketing focus is shifting to social marketing
3. How Yaro is using email lists with his blog to make money
4. Why it is important to focus on intrinsic values and not just money

Click Here to Download the MP3 [ 19 Minutes - 5 MB]

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