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

In the first part of this series on professional blogging as a business model I explained the content = traffic = money equation as the root formula for nearly all currently successful professional bloggers and those who are working to replicate their success.

If you have not done so already, please read the opening article here -

Is Professional Blogging A Sustainable Business Model?

Darren Rowse, A Leading Professional Blogger

I first came across Darren Rowse in 2004, and his Problogger.net blog appeared to be well put together and intriguing, but at the time I was beginning my research into blogging and was far from making any money from my own blog – in fact I didn’t have any intentions of doing so. If it wasn’t for one unique thing, that Darren was an Aussie from Melbourne and I am from Australia too, I would not have spent nearly as much time studying Darren and his blog as I did.

Darren has a lot to answer to in the professional blogging world. It’s partly his fault that so many people currently do or are attempting to make money from blogging. If it wasn’t for events like this slashdot news post in July 05 about Darren earning between $10,000 and $20,000 per month from blogging, and the countless articles, blog posts and offline newspaper features on Darren’s success (he’s probably seen cheques and payments at double or triple his 2005 monthly income average since then – Darren?), not quite as many would know that this whole professional blogging thing was possible.

If it wasn’t Darren then no doubt some other professional blogger would have risen to spread awareness of the potential of blogging for income. No matter who did it, the outcome was always going to be the same – professional blogging rising in popularity as a new hit online occupation available to the average person with a computer and net access.

What Does Darren Have That You Don’t?

Read the rest of this entry >>

Last week I headed out to a bunch of industry specific social gatherings in Toronto that all happened to fall on the same week. I attended the monthly Third Tuesday social media meetup, the Mesh/B5 blogger meetup and the second Toronto Mastermind group meeting, which was organized by the people from in and around Toronto who are all in Rich Schefren’s Internet business coaching program.

All the events were good fun and it was fantastic to meet so many bloggers, podcasters, Internet business owners and folk who work and play online in similar ways to myself.

At the Third Tuesday meetup Shel Holtz gave a spiel about podcasting and given the room was full of PR related professionals and podcasters it was a captive audience. It was interesting to hear Shel’s speech and the questions from the audience since the group were clearly focused on the PR industry and how podcasting is used as a promotional tool, which is slightly different to the Internet marketing mindset I generally see things in.

At the mesh meetup on Wednesday night I hung around Darren Rowse trying to keep the Australians in the room in one place so we didn’t get lost, which turned out to be an interesting place to stay as different people came up asking Darren – “Are you Darren Rowse?” – obviously recognising the Problogger. When I introduced myself to people they usually had trouble pronouncing my name (as usual) and most were not quite as well aware of my blogging legacy as Darren’s. There were a few who knew “Yaro” though and it always blows me away to meet people in person who know my blogs and work online.

A big hello to Leesa Barnes, Vince Chan (the (in)famous amblogger), Tony Hung (the first real life doctor blogger I have ever met, strangely enough blogging about Web 2.0 and nothing medical), Gary Grant (another blog network owner) and of course the rest of the b5 media crew in attendance, Jeremy Wright (who I had dinner with when I first arrived in Toronto) and Mark Evans.

On Friday I attended the second Toronto mastermind meeting with my fellow Rich Schefren coaching victims. This group is entirely self-motivated and came about via the forums available to Rich Schefren’s clients. There are geographic mastermind groups all over the world that came about through Rich’s coaching. We have a good group going at the moment communicating with teleconferences and the near-monthly get togethers.

The spread of businesses is quite interesting, although we are mostly focusing on the online elements of our enterprises. When we meet we generally discuss a range of topics and also take turns in a “hot seat” to get feedback and suggestions on specific problems we are facing. I find the input from other business owners helpful in reducing the clutter in my head when it comes to decision making and there are always new ideas sparked in our meetings. I think everyone involved finds the gatherings useful and I would recommend masterminding if you get a chance.

Hugh MacLeod Business Cards

During all these social events the fact that I don’t have a business card became apparent as I was given cards from other people plenty of times and asked for my card a couple of times too. I am certainly committing a networking 101 faux-paux by not coming prepared with my card so I decided I better get something to give to people.

Some of the cool people had business cards with Hugh MacLeod (gapingvoid.com) artwork. I stumbled across Hugh’s blog on the weekend again while reading my feeds and happened across the link to the site where you can buy the business cards from and went and ordered some with I think a very appropriate piece of artwork to use as my business card for the time being.

You can see it here.

Now I’m one of the “cool” people too and have something to give out at my next social gathering. Beware!

I had dinner with Jeremy Wright, head honcho of the b5media blog network last week since we both happen to be in Toronto at the moment. Jeremy was in town on business and now the whole world knows what that business was about -

b5media Inc. have raised US$2 Million in venture funding to help grow the business into the future. That’s a fairly big stamp of approval for the blog network and (yet again) demonstrates the possibilities of blog networks as a successful Internet business model.

Congratulations to Darren, Duncan, Jeremy, Shai and the rest involved with b5.

Darren Rowse has been putting in the hours to produce an absolutely mammoth blogging for beginners series. I get tired just thinking about how much work went into it but it wasn’t all by himself, he did get help from a few other bloggers, I even contributed a little article in there too.

Darren realized a need for introductory blogging materials after the results of a survey he conducted showed that many of his readers don’t even have a blog yet. This series is purely for you fresh faced bloggers so if you already know your way around a trackback and a ping it may not be for you.

10 Techniques for Finding Blog Readers

My article contribution to the series was all about blog traffic and was it ever an easy article to write! I literally put together a 1500 word collection of blog traffic tips in an hour demonstrating that my brain is really full of Blog Traffic content ready to be poured out (Blog Traffic Course sign-up is here).

I’ve posted my article below but I recommend you check out the rest of the articles in the beginner series too. There is some fantastic stuff there from Darren and a handful of other blogging professionals.

Incidentally if you like the article below stay tuned, my blog traffic blog is about to launch.

This post has been submitted by Yaro Starak from two of my daily reads – Entrepreneurs-Journey and Small Business Branding. He’s also working on a new site at Blog Traffic King. I’ve asked Yaro to write an introduction to finding readers for a blog – something which I’ll write more on also in the days ahead.

******

In every bloggers life comes a special day – the day they first launch a new blog. Now unless you went out and purchased someone else’s blog chances are your blog launched with only one very loyal reader – you. Maybe a few days later you received a few hits when you told your sister, father, girlfriend and best mate about your new blog but that’s about as far you went when it comes to finding readers.

Here are the top 10 techniques new bloggers can use to find readers. These are tips specifically for new bloggers, those people who have next-to-no audience at the moment and want to get the ball rolling.

It helps if you work on this list from top to bottom as each technique builds on the previous step to help you create momentum. Eventually once you establish enough momentum you gain what is called “traction”, which is a large enough audience base (about 500 readers a day is good) that you no longer have to work too hard on finding new readers. Instead your current loyal readers do the work for you through word of mouth.

Top 10 Tips

10. Write at least five major pillar articles. A pillar article is usually a tutorial style article aimed to teach your audience something. Generally they are longer than 500 words and have lots of very practical tips or advice. This article you are currently reading could be considered a pillar article since it is very practical and a good “how-to” lesson. This style of article has long term appeal, stays current (it isn’t news or time dependent) and offers real value and insight. The more pillars you have on your blog the better.

9. Write one new blog post per day minimum. Not every post has to be a pillar, but you should work on getting those five pillars done at the same time as you keep your blog fresh with a daily news or short article style post. The important thing here is to demonstrate to first time visitors that your blog is updated all the time so they feel that if they come back tomorrow they will likely find something new. This causes them to bookmark your site or subscribe to your blog feed.

You don’t have to produce one post per day all the time but it is important you do when your blog is brand new. Once you get traction you still need to keep the fresh content coming but your loyal audience will be more forgiving if you slow down to a few per week instead. The first few months are critical so the more content you can produce at this time the better.

8. Use a proper domain name. If you are serious about blogging be series about what you call your blog. In order for people to easily spread the word about your blog you need a easily rememberable domain name. People often talk about blogs they like when they are speaking to friends in the real world (that’s the offline world, you remember that place right?) so you need to make it easy for them to spread the word and pass on your URL. Try and get a .com if you can and focus on small easy to remember domains rather than worry about having the correct keywords (of course if you can get great keywords and easy to remember then you’ve done a good job!).

7. Start commenting on other blogs. Once you have your pillar articles and your daily fresh smaller articles your blog is ready to be exposed to the world. One of the best ways to find the right type of reader for your blog is to comment on other people’s blogs. You should aim to comment on blogs focused on a similar niche topic to yours since the readers there will be more likely to be interested in your blog.

Most blog commenting systems allow you to have your name/title linked to your blog when you leave a comment. This is how people find your blog. If you are a prolific commentor and always have something valuable to say then people will be interested to read more of your work and hence click through to visit your blog.

6. Trackback and link to other blogs in your blog posts. A trackback is sort of like a blog conversation. When you write a new article to your blog and it links or references another blogger’s article you can do a trackback to their entry. What this does is leave a truncated summary of your blog post on their blog entry – it’s sort of like your blog telling someone else’s blog that you wrote an article mentioning them. Trackbacks often appear like comments.

This is a good technique because like leaving comments a trackback leaves a link from another blog back to yours for readers to follow, but it also does something very important – it gets the attention of another blogger. The other blogger will likely come and read your post eager to see what you wrote about them. They may then become a loyal reader of yours or at least monitor you and if you are lucky some time down the road they may do a post linking to your blog bringing in more new readers.

5. Encourage comments on your own blog. One of the most powerful ways to convince someone to become a loyal reader is to show there are other loyal readers already following your work. If they see people commenting on your blog then they infer that your content must be good since you have readers so they should stick around and see what all the fuss is about. To encourage comments you can simply pose a question in a blog post. Be sure to always respond to comments as well so you can keep the conversation going.

4. Submit your latest pillar article to a blog carnival. A blog carnival is a post in a blog that summarizes a collection of articles from many different blogs on a specific topic. The idea is to collect some of the best content on a topic in a given week. Often many other blogs link back to a carnival host and as such the people that have articles featured in the carnival often enjoy a spike in new readers.

This concept can be confusing so I suggest you take a look at the Carnival of the Cats for an example. You can also find a list of all the carnivals and submit your articles at the Carnival Submit Form.

3. Submit your blog to blogtopsites.com. To be honest this tip is not going to bring in a flood of new readers but it’s so easy to do and only takes five minutes so it’s worth the effort. Go to Blog Top Sites, find the appropriate category for your blog and submit it. You have to copy and paste a couple of lines of code on to your blog so you can rank and then sit back and watch the traffic come in. You will probably only get 1-10 incoming readers per day with this technique but over time it can build up as you climb the rankings. It all helps!

2. Submit your articles to EzineArticles.com. This is another tip that doesn’t bring in hundreds of new visitors immediately (although it can if you keep doing it) but it’s worthwhile because you simply leverage what you already have – your pillar articles. Once a week or so take one of your pillar articles and submit it to Ezine Articles. Your article then becomes available to other people who can republish your article on their website or in their newsletter.

How you benefit is through what is called your “Resource Box”. You create your own resource box which is like a signature file where you include one to two sentences and link back to your website (or blog in this case). Anyone who publishes your article has to include your resource box so you get incoming links. If someone with a large newsletter publishes your article you can get a lot of new readers at once.

1. Write more pillar articles. Everything you do above will help you to find blog readers however all of the techniques I’ve listed only work when you have strong pillars in place. Without them if you do everything above you may bring in readers but they won’t stay or bother to come back. Aim for one solid pillar article per week and by the end of the year you will have a database of over 50 fantastic feature articles that will work hard for you to bring in more and more readers.

I hope you enjoyed my list of traffic tips. Everything listed above are techniques I’ve put into place myself for my blogs and have worked for me, however it’s certainly not a comprehensive list. There are many more things you can do. Finding readers is all about testing to see what works best for you and your audience and I have no doubt if you put your mind to it you will find a balance that works for you.

Yaro Starak
Blog Traffic King

Download the MP3 [ 38 Minutes - 9.1 MB]

I have a treat for you podcast listeners today – a discussion on blog traffic building with Darren Rowse, the Problogger. In this episode of the Entrepreneur’s Journey podcast Darren and I talk about how he got so much traffic to his big income earning blogs like his Digital Photography Blog, why you really shouldn’t start your own digital photography blog and why you should start a Canon camera blog instead. Darren mentions some techniques he uses to keep bringing in traffic that the big corporate sites can’t do for legal reasons, we talk about following trends and how the first mover who covers a trend in the blogosphere can get the big traffic gains and what Darren is planning in 2006.

There’s also some brief Yaro ramblings in there too, which I promise ties in with the overall theme of the podcast…eventually.

Enjoy!