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

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Caroline Middlebrook has been on my radar for a long time. I enjoy her writing style, her candor and her honesty and of course, she writes about the industry I love, and mentions my name now and then on her blog too, which is guaranteed Yaro-linkbait. It was about time that I invited her on to my podcast for an interview.

In this call you will hear Caroline recount her history online, and she’s been in the game for a long time, even doing pay per click marketing back when Overture was the main player and AdWords didn’t exist! You will also hear a lot about Caroline’s techniques for building traffic to her blog, how she built up her audience (currently 5000+ subscribers) and how she’s managed to make at least $1,000 every month (as high as $3,000 some months).

The Bloggers Bible

The Bloggers Bible is Caroline’s latest project, a new book that teaches her methodology for building a successful blog and then generating an income from it. Caroline has some very unique ideas, is a great teacher and is the least hypey person I know in the industry, and her book does a great job of representing all these aspects.

Caroline is offering a 30% discount off her Bloggers Bible just for my readers, but there’s a catch – it expires January 16th – so you have one week to save yourself some money if you want her book.

You might wonder why bother getting Caroline’s book if you already follow my training on blogging? There’s a simple answer to that – she’s different.

We share many of the same philosophies and Caroline is a Blog Mastermind graduate, but as you will hear in the interview, she doesn’t agree with everything I teach and has her own system, so if you like what she says in the interview, definitely grab her book while the discount is available.

You can find the discount offer here -

Bloggers Bible 30% Discount

Show Notes

• Caroline explains her first experiences making money online
• We learn how Caroline turned to internet marketing by taking Ed Dale’s 30 Day Challenge
• Next Caroline explains her time spent niche marketing and why she didn’t like it
• Caroline launches a blog after ending her niche marketing/30 day challenge days
• She offers some fantastic advice on building traffic to a new blog and how she did it
• Important: Caroline talks about her free report and how she used it to make thousands of dollars
• Caroline explains why she wrote her Bloggers Bible

Click Here to Download the MP3 [ 39 Minutes - 18 MB]

Update: The MP3 audio version of the Roadmap report has been added to the download page and it’s free too. Now you can read and listen to what it takes to build a great blog!

I’m very excited to announce that my latest report, co-authored with Gideon Shalwick, my partner in the Becomeablogger.com video site, is now ready for download.

Gideon and I have been working hard for the past few months preparing this report for you. It’s called “The Roadmap To Become A Blogger“, or as I like to simply call it – “The Roadmap“.

You can download the free report right now from here -

http://www.becomeablogger.com/roadmap/

Why Another Report About Blogging?

I don’t release new products very often. The reason why is because I prefer to invest time in something to make sure it delivers tremendous value and I like to have the opportunity to develop a product with feedback from active participants.

Back in 2007 I hired Gideon Shalwick to produce a series of videos I had envisioned for a domain name that I acquired called becomeablogger.com. I wanted to have some very basic training presented in video for people new to blogs so they could learn how to begin the blogging process by themselves, no matter what skill they currently possessed with technology.

Fast forward to today and we are nearing 60,000 viewers of those videos. Gideon did a fantastic job and I’m so pleased the site has truly taken off.

Gideon and I both agreed that if the videos were well received we would like to do more. However, in order to devote the time and resources into creating the videos (the free videos we currently give away cost several thousand dollars to create), we would need to make the service a membership site, and hence the idea for Become A Blogger Premium was born.

This new premium video membership site will open December 4th 2008 to invite the first intake of students. I’ll have more news about that soon.

As soon as we decided to launch the new training program I knew we would need something to give away as a teaching tool to introduce people to the concepts we are presenting in the new series of videos. After going back and forwards between delivering the resource in video or text, we decided to use both, but focus our core message in one document – The Roadmap.

What Is The Roadmap Report?

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A Million Dollars From Blogging Or Just Another E-Book With Big Claims?

This is the third installment of Rob Benwell’s Blogging To The Bank book, which teaches his method for making money with blogs.

More details about the book are here -

www.bloggingtothebank.com

What’s compelling about Rob’s story is that he’s made over a million dollars using blogs and there’s very, very few people who can claim this. His book has massive appeal just because we all want to find out exactly what he does different – what’s his secret?

I reviewed Rob’s second version this book back in August of 2007, where one thing was quite clear – Rob uses blogs in a much different way to make money online to how I use blogs. You can read my original review by clicking here – Blogging To The Bank 2.0 Review.

Niche Marketing

The strategy Rob applies is about leveraging multiple blogs in multiple niches to make a lot of money. This is not about becoming a dominant player – an expert – in one niche subject area that you are passionate about, which is more the “Blog Mastermind school of blogging”.

Although the overall strategy might be quite different between what I teach and do and what Rob does, if you break things down, the fundamentals remain the same.

Rob’s system for profitable blogging still relies on the same principles to make it work, which are -

Read the rest of this entry >>

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• Download the MP3 [ 30 Minutes - 14 MB ]
• Download Text Transcript [ 15 Pages - PDF ]

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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• 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