feed hat blog

This is one of the most common questions small business owners and new bloggers ask. Blogging is uncharted territory. What should I write about? How often do I need to write? How long should a blog post be? Good questions all, but I’m focusing on the last one in this post.

First, though, I need to share my perspective on what a business blog is. This is how I described it at the GetListed Spokane event earlier this month:

It’s your chance to be real, to be yourself, and to be part of the conversations that are already happening online. It’s your voice, but only with more legitimacy than your main business web site offers. I love Jeremiah Owyang’s quote in this blog post:

The corporate website is an unbelievable collection of hyperbole, artificial branding, and pro-corporate content.

There’s a lot of truth in that, I think. And blogs can provide the opposite — more believability, less artificiality, more real content. So keep that in mind as we get back to the original question.

How Long Should a Blog Post Be?

My answer: As short or as long as it takes to say what you need to say.

1.) There’s no perfect length for a blog post. It’s like the idea of keyword density in SEO; there’s no magic number for keyword density on a web page, and there’s no magic number for how long your blog posts should be.

2.) A variety of blog post lengths is a good idea. For me, the most enjoyable blogs to read are the ones that offer variety; the ones that offer the unexpected. I think a blog is easier to read when there’s a mix of short posts, mid-length posts, and long posts. Too much of one type of post can be monotonous for the reader, and invites the reader to start tuning out.

3.) It’s natural to have posts with different lengths. If you believe that a blog is conversational in nature, then think about your blog posts as individual conversations. Important question: Is every conversation you have the same length? Of course not! You have conversations that last 10 seconds and you have conversations that last 10 minutes (or longer). This is how we communicate. So, if you’re trying to be natural on your blog (and you should be), your blog should have a mix of blog posts, some short and some long.

Blog Post Examples

I’m going to use this blog as an example to answer the question, How long should a blog post be?

Short Blog Post

How to Choose the Right Category in Google’s Local Listings — the main point of this post was to share a link with my readers to Mike Blumenthal’s Google categories tool. Aside from a quick explanation of why categories are important, I didn’t have much to say. The results:

Paragraphs: 4
Words: 135

Medium Blog Post

Alerts on Place Pages? I Want More From Google — the point of this post was to share a list of things I wish Google would add to its local business Place Pages. It was written when Google announced that business owners could post alerts on their pages, and I had seven other ideas of my own to share. So it needed more depth than the post above, but I didn’t need to write a novel. The results:

Paragraphs: 6, plus a list of 7 items
Words: 448

Long Blog Post

Why Reputation Management Matters for Small Businesses — this post was written to expand on one of the concepts in my SEO Success Pyramid. I knew I had a lot to say on this subject and, to be frank, I also wanted to write the type of blog post that others would link to, and that would have a shot at ranking highly for a term like “small business reputation management.” The results:

Paragraphs: 26, plus three lists
Words: 1,538
SEO: number one ranking for “small business reputation management” on Google (not signed in), Yahoo, and Bing

This last post — the long one — also received a very healthy 29 comments, which is often another benefit of the occasional long blog post.

Final Thoughts: How Long Should a Blog Post Be?

I consider all three of those example blog posts to be successful, because they accomplished the goals I had for them. If you’re a new blogger, keep this in mind:

1. Don’t feel like you have to limit your blog posts to a certain length — whether short or long.
2. If you can say what you need to say in 150 words, stop there and hit the Publish button. If it takes 1,500 words to say what you need to say, that’s okay, too.
3. For best results, I think a variety of short and long posts is a Good Thing. It keeps your blog from getting predictable.

Your turn: What are your thoughts on how long blog posts should be? If you’re a marketer, what do you tell clients who ask about this?

Postscript: Having published this post about 25 minutes ago and now just going through my feed reader, I’ve discovered Glen Allsopp’s excellent and related article, Bloggers: This Is How Long Your Posts Should Be, in which he examines the average length of posts in the top 5 blogs across various industries.

Advertisement: Try Site5 Web Hosting free for 30 days! 99.9% Uptime Guarantee and our customer’s love us!

This is a post from Matt McGee’s blog, Small Business Search Marketing.

How Long Should a Blog Post Be?

No related posts.

See more here: 
How Long Should a Blog Post Be?

A few days back I asked readers a question:

What Have You Been Putting Off and What’s Holding You Back?

Some of the responses to the question in comments (and via email and Twitter) revealed a lot of bloggers really wanting to step things up and get what they’ve been putting off done.

So – lets set some goals – what do you want to achieve by the end of February?

I’m not going to be calling you up to check up to see if you’re meeting your goals – but hopefully in putting them down publicly you’ll find yourself a little more spurred on to reach what you want to achieve.

My Goal for February: I want to get a new E-Book out the door by the end of the month.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

What Is Your Blogging Goal for February?

Share This

The rest is here:
What Is Your Blogging Goal for February?

Whew. The 3rd annual SEMMY Awards are finally in the books. The winners in all 17 categories were announced this morning, and it’s a really great collection of articles. I’m proud to say that there are several first-time winners on this list, from several blogs/sites that were never even nominated before. That makes me happy, and suggests to me that the SEMMYS are on the right track. (I’m also proud to see my guest post on Small Biz Trends from last year win — it’s the one in the Small Business category below.)

Here’s the full list of winners:

• SEO: Surviving and Thriving as an Ecommerce SEO
• PPC: Discovering Keywords On the Cheap
• Social Media: 7 Reasons Your Social Media Marketing Failed (and how to fix it!)
• Local Search: Google Maps’ New Rules – Thoughts on Assumed Names and DBAs
• Link Building: 10 Goals For Link Building Campaigns: Moving Beyond “Get More Links”
• Blogs & Blogging: Guest Blogging: The Ultimate Guide
• Viral Marketing: 5 Must Do’s After A Successful Viral Marketing Campaign
• Analytics: Google Analytics For Local Search: Tracking Traffic From The 10 Pack
• Reputation Management: Be Proactive With Your Reputation Management
• Small Business: If I Were Launching a New Small Biz Web Site Today
• Google: Google Enables Real Time Spam and More
• Search Tech: The SEO geeks guide to information retrieval
• Design & Usability: Everyday Usability – 14-Point Checklist for Success
• Online Marketing/General: Thinking Positively About Negative Reviews
• Industry: 10 Questions to Evaluate a Social Media ‘Expert’
• Copywriting: Does Your Copy Need a Makeover? 7 Tests That Measure the Verbal Impact of Your Business Message
• Rants: Ignore the Silly Man, SEO Still Matters For SMBs

What’s Next for the SEMMY Awards

Every year there’s some grumbling and griping about the SEMMYS and how they’re organized. (BTW, if you’re not familiar with how it all works, I had a good conversation with Kim Krause-Berg in the comments of her post here.)

There was a lot less griping this year, which obviously pleases me. But I’ll say what I’ve said before: If anyone has constructive ideas and suggestions for how to make the SEMMYS better, I’m all ears. There’s a contact form right on this blog.

For now, the eight-person nominating committee is already busy nominating articles for next year’s awards. The committee will do that all year, and then next January I’ll roundup the judges to choose finalists in each category and we’ll go through the process again. I’m thinking it would be nice to find some new judges next year, not because I’m unhappy with the folks volunteering as judges now — but because it’s been mostly the same group for three years now, and there are a lot of smart, new people in our industry who I think would add a good voice to the process.

Thanks

First, to web designer extraordinaire David Mihm for all his time and energy keeping the SEMMYS web site in great shape.

Thanks also to the volunteer judges and nominating committee members for their time. They’re all listed in the Contributors & Judges blogroll on semmys.org.

Thanks to the folks who voted for winners in any/all of the 17 categories. There were more votes cast this year than either of the last two years.

Thanks to everyone across the industry who chooses to embrace the SEMMYS, especially those who do so without taking it too seriously. It’s odd to me that some well-known sites/blogs ignore the SEMMYS, but that’s their choice. Life goes on.

And thanks to all the excellent writers and bloggers who continue to teach me and the rest of us with your great articles, blog posts, and other types of content. I hope you see the SEMMYS as a token of the industry’s appreciation for you, whether you win or not.

Advertisement: WordStream’s Free Keyword Tool delivers more keywords, faster than paid tools and always 100% free. Try it today!

This is a post from Matt McGee’s blog, Small Business Search Marketing.

2010 SEMMY Winners Announced

Related posts:

1. 2010 SEMMY Finalists Announced
2. Congrats to the 2008 SEMMY Winners!
3. 2010 SEMMY Nominations Announced (and they include me!)

See the original post here: 
2010 SEMMY Winners Announced

A Guest Post by David Turnbull of Adventures of a Barefoot Geek

After the initial excitement of launching a new blog fades most bloggers are a few steps away from being overwhelmed with the pressure of blogging to the point that they quit, losing the momentum they were building up and all the progress they’d made. This is an unfortunately common occurence.

Writing. Guest posting. Commenting. Responding to emails. Continuous learning. It’s a lot to take in and if you’re not adequately prepared to face challenges as they appear there’s a likelihood that one day you’ll choose not to publish another post and then you’re back to square one.

Recently, just a fornight ago in fact I became conscious of these feelings as my most recent blog was reaching the 6 month mark. I’d surpassed all the goals I’d set for myself but there was stilll that worry of being locked into my work instead of having control over it. I have no problem with hard work, but when it hits the point of dominating my life I prefer to step back and ask myself “How can I make this easier on myself?”

And that’s what I really want to share in this article. This is not about escaping the work of blogging (because I do honestly enjoy it, just not when it causes imbalance in my life) but to relieve yourself of the constant worry and uncertainty that blogging entails.

Set smaller goals

I’m an advocate of thinking big in most areas of life. If you’re dedicated and disciplined then ambition can often fuel creativity and drive. But blogging is different. There are so many interwoven components to blogging that a big goal often becomes an aimless goal, and an aimless goal is as bad as no goal.

Writing is the most important task for a blogger, so let’s use that as an example. One common belief held by many writers is that you should sit down in the morning at 9am and then not move until 5pm. The idea is that this forces you to write. Do this for 3 days in a row and you’ll lose whatever passion for blogging you ever had. The alternative is much more attractive.

When you sit down to write tell yourself this magical phrase: I’ll be satisified when I’ve written X words. Replace X with the smallest amount of words you can be realistically satisfied with. Once you’ve made this decision and are no longer constricted by outrageous word counts or time frames there’s no anxiety as you work and I expect you’ll find yourself greatly surpassing the “satisfactory metrics” you set for yourself.

Clarify and simplify

What do you want to get out of blogging? Answer that question at least once a month for as long as you own or write for a blog. I imagine most people will respond “to make money” and that’s fine, but there has to be a motivation higher than that, because blogging isn’t exactly the most effective approach to generating an income.

Once you understand with crystal clear clarity why you’re blogging you can eliminate a ton of the garbage that leads to blogging-based stress.

When I first started blogging I had the “make money” goal lodged in my brain, but over the past few weeks I’ve had a shift in my thinking, in that what I truly love is writing and making exciting (and sometimes weird) changes in my life. After I had clarified this I realized that my actions were inconsistent with what I wanted. Instead of writing I was spending most of my time leaving comments on blogs, posting in forums, and using other standard blog promotion tactics. Most of this was unfullfilling.

Now my approach to writing and building a readership is far simpler. These days I do 2 things:

• Write (for my own blog and guest posts such as this).
• Care (responding to tweets, emails, blog comments etc).

This has been enormous, so don’t underestimate it. Clarify exactly what you want out of blogging and shape your actions to accomodate for that. Sure, if I were to leave 20+ comments on blogs per day, or become an active member in lots of communities my readership would probably climb faster. But at the same time the very essence of what I love about blogging would be lost, and that’d be setting myself up for eventual failure. Classic example of short term sacrifice (a small boost in traffic) for long term gain (endless fulfillment).

Become a “what matters” blogger

Conventional blogging advice indicates that you should write 3-5 times per week without fail. Yes, in the early days of blogging (at least the first 5-6 months) consistency is crucial. You need to prove that you’ve got the chops and that you’re not going to abandon your readership. But, aside from news blogs and blogs that have multiple contributors, I’d suggest you lower the frequency significantly.

This is something I lifted from Tina of ThinkSimpleNow.com who is well known for taking multiple months away from her blog. I doubt everyone could be met with success using that approach, but the lesson still holds true: to ease the pressure of writing and heighten the respect from your readership only write and publish content that truly matters.

What “matters” is a subjective gauge of course, but at its core it’s your own highest inner standard that you must hold yourself too. Through this approach you will end up spending more time writing individual posts, but:

• Each post will provide you and your readers with lasting fulfillment.
• There’ll be less of a frantic rush to publish content.
• Freeing yourself from a strict deadline and schedule is incredibly liberating.

As a poll here on Problogger indicated, lowering your frequency is not what causes people to unsubscribe from your blog, it’s posting too much that readers dislike. Here’s a quote from Darren himself:

I’ve lost count of the number of bloggers who tell me that scaling back their posting frequency a little brings a new life to their blog…scaling back a little means that they are able to develop better quality posts, that they get more comments per post (the posts remain on the front page of the blog longer) and readers say that they appreciate it.

People don’t unsubscribe from blogs when every piece of content provides them with genuine value.

Successful blogging requires sustained effort over a long period of time. I don’t want to make it seem like you can eliminate hard work and the anxiety that comes with the process. But you can make it easier on yourself. Take action to ease the pressure of blogging and refocus on what you truly care about.

What strategies do you use to ease the pressure of blogging?

David Turnbull is a life-long geek who loves to write about life hacking, simplicity and technology at his blog Adventures of a Barefoot Geek.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

How To Ease the Pressure of Blogging

Share This

See original here: 
How To Ease the Pressure of Blogging

A long rumored Harvard study once found that the 3% of the population which makes the effort to write down their goals makes over ten times as much as the other 97% combined. While further research has shown that this study was never actually conducted, it has spurred a number of other research tests to see how one can maximize their chances of achieving their goals.

One of these research studies was conducted by Dominican University, where participants were divided into five groups, one which simply thought about their goals, one which wrote their goals down, one which wrote their goals and formulated action steps to reach these goals, one which wrote down their goals, formulated action steps, and sent their goals and steps to a friend, and a final group which wrote down their goals, formulated action steps, sent their goals and steps to a friend, and created weekly reports on progress towards the goal.

The test was conducted over the period of a month so it was for short term goals and a total of 149 participants were part of the study.

The research findings showed that of the participants in the study who simply thought about their goal scored a 4.28 on a scale of 8 in terms of achieving their goal where 0 is no progress made and 8 is goal fully accomplished. However, those in the last group who wrote down their goals, formulated action steps, sent their goals and steps to a friend, and created weekly reports on progress towards the goal scored 7.6.

Hence, this research supported the positive effective of accountability as those who sent progress reports to friends accomplished more than those who did not. The positive effect of written goals was also supported as those who wrote down their goals accomplished significantly more than those who did not.

So, what is the moral of the story and how does it apply to web entrepreneurs and bloggers? Well, if you want to accomplish your goals, find out what you want to do, both in the short term and long term. Once you have a list of goals, write them down and create a series of action steps that you must do reach your goals. Lastly find a family member or friend and share your goals and the steps that you will take to accomplish your goals with them. Then check in with them on a weekly basis to share the progress you have made towards reaching your goals.

This post was written by Aditya Mahesh, founder of AMBeat Wire, the ultimate social news website for web entrepreneurs and bloggers.

Discover the SECRETS I’ve Learned to go from zero a month to over $40,000 a month from blogging. Download Make Money Online with John Chow dot Com for FREE!

View original here:
How To Double Your Chances of Achieving Your Goals

Three quarters of the way into our first years of professional schools (law school for Ian, medical school for Josh), we decided that we needed a way to express our views and ideas on topics that were most of the time unrelated to our careers. We needed a way to relax at the end of the day in order to maintain our sanity. In May 2009, we decided that starting a blog would be the most appropriate way to accomplish our goals. Today, we are on our own domain and host and use Wordpress to power our site. However, it took a long time to get to where we are; we started off using Blogspot with little to no knowledge of or experience with blogging.

In the beginning, we used a very simple black and white style template, that was very basic and straightforward. It had no frills. There were very few, if any, widgets on our blog. Every thing that we did was through Blogger’s visual layout page. We never dared to to edit any html. We also only posted two or three times a week. Rarely did we ever exceed that amount of posts for months. It was no surprise to us that our hits were generally stagnant and we barely saw any increases for several months. In the middle of August, we decided to really focus on the blog.

After realizing that we were failing to see any increase in traffic over the preceding three months, we made a decision in August to really start focusing on the blog. The most important decision we made was to try to post at least an article per day for each of us. Often we would write more than two articles a day or we would also post a video we found interesting or funny, attempting to integrate newer methods of interactive social media. As the weeks progressed, and we became comfortable with exploring some more html coding, widgets, buttons, lists, polls, and eventually podcasts appeared on our blog. Blogger was a great first step for us. It allowed us, with little to no knowledge regarding programming on the internet, to publish articles that we thought young adults would be interested in reading.

As of December 24th, our blog is now powered by Word Press. We chose to switch to Word Press because of its great track record, flexibility, and its large community of helpful users. We host our data on Blue Host’s servers and we purchased our new domain name (www.whatsgoodblog.com) through Go Daddy. At first, we thought exporting our Blogger data over to our new servers and setting up the new blog design would be easy, but we were terribly mistaken.

None of the pictures or videos uploaded to Blogger transferred to the Word Press blog. We eventually found a solution online that would allow us to properly transfer our original posts in Blogger to the new blog but would also transfer the search engine traffic of the original articles to our new website.

We started using Adobe Dreamweaver to design the blog’s webpage from scratch and installing Word Press into a subdomain, but with no prior knowledge of PHP, CSS or HTML, this was impossible. Dreamweaver is an extremely intricate and complicated program to use, with a learning curve that is way beyond our limited time frame. We chose to redesign the site last week because it was the beginning of our winter breaks, which are only two weeks long. We therefore decided to simply use a predesigned, free theme for Word Press, after learning that Word Press could be used as a content management system (CMS) and also can be used to design websites. However, there were numerous problems, and after switching to a new theme, we have still yet to resolve several issues. After spending countless hours this week, we have managed to solve many of the issues but several are still outstanding and are beyond our ability to fix.

Another issue we ran into was the unexpectedly programming-oriented side of Word Press. As opposed to Blogger, Word Press is basically edited by code only; only widgets can be installed via a graphical interface. This was extremely limiting once again for us, thus causing us to spend several hours resolving an issue that someone with ordinary knowledge of web programming could resolve within minutes. We also have had great difficulties editing the layout of our site and its CSS style sheet.

We regularly read articles from John Chow dot com about how to increase web site traffic, creatively utilize SEO strategies and eventually earn higher revenues from our site. His advice has been priceless; we have increased our monthly traffic from one or two hundred in the first few months to three thousand hits per month. We record our web statistics using Google Analytics, and the number of visitors has been steadily increasing since we decided to focus on the blog in August. We hope that in making the switch from our Blogger blog to a paid server hosting Word Press, our blog will be able to increase its traffic and revenue in the long run and will allow us to have more freedom with the site itself to expand our creative horizons.

This was a guest post by Ian Sherwin and Josh Bucher of What’s Good Blog.

Discover the SECRETS I’ve Learned to go from zero a month to over $40,000 a month from blogging. Download Make Money Online with John Chow dot Com for FREE!

Read the original post: 
Our Blogging Journey From Blogspot To WordPress

Yesterday I watched this mini disaster unfold before me between a couple exchanging Christmas gifts.

As I watched the repercussions of the exchange of gifts (I’ll tell you what happened below) I found myself thinking about unmet expectations.

Elliot Larson once said – “Anger always comes from frustrated expectations” – as a blogger interacting with readers for 7 years I’d have to say that I agree.

As I think back over the times where I’ve had readers most frustrated and angry with me (and when I’ve been most frustrated with others) – it almost always comes down to there being a difference in expectations between blogger and reader.

Most bloggers who’ve been at this game for a while have had at least a handful of complaint emails/comments from readers:

“You post too often!”
“You don’t post enough!”
“Your posts are too advanced!”
“Your posts are too basic!”
“You do too many promotions!”
“You promised XXX but you never delivered on it!”
“You never replied to my email!”

Sometimes the complaints are legitimate and other times as bloggers we write them off as the reader just not getting us or asking too much.

Whether justifiable or not – in each of the cases above the person making the complaint had some kind of unmet expectation. They signed up for an RSS feed, newsletter, Twitter account or bought a product expecting one thing but getting another.

As bloggers – how do we manage expectations better and minimise these kinds of complaints?

A few thoughts come to mind:

1. Know what your own Goals and Expectations are

As I look back on some of the instances that I’ve had with readers having unmet expectations of me I can honestly say that in some instances the reason was simply that I didn’t have a very clear understanding of what I was trying to do or achieve.

I’m sure many bloggers are similar – we can be an impulsive lot – experimenting, tweaking, changing directions and starting new things at the drop of the hat. While this often leads to great discoveries and creative new directions – it can also leave readers reeling a little and feeling disappointed.

I’m still quite impulsive – but over the years I’ve learned a little more to take my time with new ideas, to test them with small groups of people before launching them publicly and to force myself to plan and think about over arching goals and objectives in order to make the road a little less bumpy for readers.

2. Communicate Your Expectations Clearly

Once you know what your readers will get from you and your blog – communicate it clearly to your readers.

For example – if you have a newsletter and intend to publish it weekly – state that in your subscriber page. If the newsletter is simply an update of what’s happening on your blog – let them know that so they don’t expect completely new content.

If there are strings attached with any aspect of your blog – it can be well worthwhile letting your readers know about them up front.

This particularly applies when you change any aspect of your own expectations or goals.

For example if you’ve been happily posting at a frequency of 4 posts a week but suddenly decide to start publishing at a rate of 10 posts a day – you’ll want to communicate your decision and reasoning to readers. Changes in your own approach might make sense to you but if you have readers who signed up for something completely different you’re setting yourself up for a clash of expectations.

I’ve seen this problem on numerous occasions including about post frequency, changes in topic/niche of a blog and even changes in the way that a blog is monetized (suddenly adding lots of ads, or paid posts, or affiliate promotions).

3. Identify Common Unmet Expectations and Preempt Them

Over time you might find that you constantly get the same complaint from readers. This could be an indication that you need to consider changing your approach – OR it could simply mean you need to work harder to get the reader’s expectations right earlier.

For example I worked with one blogger a few months back who kept getting nasty emails from readers complaining that the blogger didn’t respond to emails quickly enough. The blogger was inundated with emails and found it hard to answer everyone (and it could take a week or more to do so when he did get to it). He was frustrated that readers expected too much and readers were frustrated because they expected more of him.

We added a simple sentence or two to his contact page explaining that the blogger received 100+ emails a day and was not able to respond to everyone. We also added alternative places that people could interact with him (on Twitter) and also added a FAQ section to his blog and linked to it from the contact form to help readers find answers to some of the more common emails requests that he received.

The complaints he received by readers dropped dramatically.

4. Don’t Hype

Many unmet expectations are just simple and understandable misunderstandings between blogger and reader – however at times bloggers could be a little more at fault by falling into the trap of hyping themselves, their blogs and their products up to a point where they’re setting themselves and their readers up for a clash of expectations.

I know this temptation – you slave over what you do, you want it to succeed and you stretch the truth just a little in some of your claims or promise things you probably can’t deliver on in order to convince potential readers that you’re worthy of their readership.

The problem is obvious though – you simply can’t do what you say you’ll do and as a result you end up with a disappointed (at best) or an angry and aggressive (at worst) reader. At the more aggressive end of the spectrum you might also have the reader tell others about how you’ve let them down.

5. Under Promise and Over Deliver

There’s nothing wrong with big promises and claims – IF you deliver on them. However if you’re not sure if you’ll be able to deliver on an element of what you’re tempted to promise – leave it out and add it later.

For example when we launched ProBlogger.com I always wanted to add a featured content area where I would produce extra and exclusive content for paid members. However at the time of launch I didn’t yet have the time allocated in my weekly schedule to be able to commit to delivering regular extra content.

It wasn’t until recently that I was able to do this and I’ve since added the area to the community. The reaction of adding it later was that readers are thanking me for the bonus – something extra to what they signed up for expecting. Perhaps we could have signed up more people earlier by promising this area earlier – but I’d rather a smaller number of happy members than a larger number of angry ones!

What Would You Add?

By no means am I perfect in this area. I still get readers telling me that I’ve not delivered upon what they were expecting from me – I’ve still got work to do. As a result I’d love to hear from you on how you manage reader expectations in comments below?

PS: I promised that I’d tell you how the gift exchange that I witnessed above turned out. Here’s what happened about half an hour later!

It’s not quite an ‘under promise and over deliver’ situation – but both went away happy with a story to tell!

PS: just been told by people on Twitter that ‘pearl necklace’ might have a double meaning. It was not my intention to be funny or offensive with this, it’s really what the gift was!

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

How to Manage Expectations with Your Blog Readers

Share This

See original here: 
How to Manage Expectations with Your Blog Readers

What Are You About?

In order to choose what your blog is about, you first need to think about what you are about. Spend some time thinking about what you value, what your interests are, your goals and aspirations, your passion and drive. If you can identify what keeps you going day in and day out, you can blog about it, and I bet it will be pretty easy for you as well.

When the topic is about something you care about, it no longer becomes work. You are blogging because you want to blog and not because you are being paid to do so. This is the ideal situation to be in.

Is Your Niche On The Rise?

You will need to do a little homework here. Blogging about your passion is not enough to make your blog a hit. Like any other business, you will have to do a market analysis on the area you are interested in. You might be interested in your topic but unless others are too, you will be fighting to build a highly read blog the whole time. The easiest way to find out if your niche will work is to find out its monthly search volume using the Google AdWords Keyword Tool.

The above shows keyword search volume related to Callaway Golf. With over 600,000 searches per month, a blog about Callaway golf would get a ton of traffic if you can rank on Google for the keyword.

How Is The Competition?

The more searches there are for a keyword, the higher the competition there will be. While the odds of a new blog appearing on page one on Google for “Callaway Golf” is very slim, there is a much higher chance for it to show up on a search for “Callaway Golf Putter” because there is less competition for that term.

This is where you will want to drill down into your niche until you get to a level where there is enough volume to send you good search engine traffic but no so much volume that you cannot compete.

If you are going write about a popular topic, think about what the competition is leaving out. If you are just writing the same stuff they are writing, your chance of success is very slim. Your content needs to stand out from competition. You need to offer something that no one else is offering.

Will You Have Enough To Write About?

Nothing kills a blog faster than one that is not updated. The topic you choose should be a niche topic but it should also be broad enough so you can write something about it everyday.

I have seen many bloggers pick a topic that is so narrow, they run out of stuff to blog about after two dozen posts. This is all the more reason to stick with a topic that you are passionate about. You would have a much better idea on whether you will be able to maintain a constant flow of content on a topic that you are passionate about than a topic that you have no interest in.

I recommend you start with a very narrow topic and then expand out. For example, if you were doing a blog about iPod and find you are having trouble finding new content to blog about, you can expand the niche to include iPod accessories and then other MP3 players. Just keep expanding until you have enough content to always keep the blog updated.

Can You Make Money From it?

Once you have found the topics that you are passionate about, the next step is to find out if you can make money from it. One way to find out if your niche will be profitable is with the Google Traffic Estimator.

Enter the main keywords of your blogging topic and the Traffic Estimator will give you the estimated average CPC (cost per click) for those keywords.

Generally, the higher the Cost Per Click amount, the more an advertiser has to pay and that means it is possible that you will earn more by creating content which reflects that specific keyword.

Keep in mind that the traffic estimator shows CPC prices for the Google search engine and not the Google AdSense network. If you are running AdSense ads on your iPhone blog, do not expect to make $1.67 for a click. However, the tool will give you idea on the profitability of your blog topic.

Discover the SECRETS I’ve Learned to go from zero a month to over $40,000 a month from blogging. Download Make Money Online with John Chow dot Com for FREE!

See original here: 
How To Choose A Profitable Topic To Blog About

Last night I was chatting with a blogger who was feeling completely overwhelmed with their goal of making a living from blogging.

I asked them how much they wanted to make from blogging.

They responded that they wanted to be a full time blogger.

I pushed them for a figure – what does ‘full time’ mean for you?

They thought for a moment and said that they could live off $30,000 USD a year (note: they wouldn’t have minded earning more but would be able to quit their current job at this kind of rate).

$30,000 a year sounds like a lot to make from a blog – especially when you’re starting out and are yet to make a dollar. To this blogger it seemed so overwhelming that she had almost convinced herself that it was not possible.

Advice for Becoming a Full Time Blogger

My response was threefold:

1. Don’t Give Up Your Day Job…. Yet

It is possible to make $30,000 a year blogging, but it’s unlikely to happen over night. Keep your feet on the ground and your expectations reasonable. IF it happens (and there are no guarantees) it is almost certainly going to take some time.

2. Be Specific

Saying that you want to be full time as a blogger is a great goal – but it’s not really specific enough. This is why I wanted the blogger I was chatting with to name a figure. For her full time was $30,000 – for others it could be more or less – the amount is not the point, the point is that you need something more concrete to work towards so that you’re able to measure where you’re at.

For me when I decided I want to go full time as a blogger I decided that I wanted to aim for $50,000 (Aussie Dollars) in a year as the bench mark (at that time $50,000 was around 36,000 USD). That’s around what I would have been earning in my current main job if I had been doing that full time (I was actually working a number of part time jobs at the time as well as studying part time).

Knowing what I was aiming for helped me in a number of ways when it came to getting to that goal.

3. Break it down into something more Achievable

$30,000 USD still sounds big when you’re a new blogger – and in some ways it is. However there are different ways of thinking about that figure. Lets break it down in the way that I used to look at my target.

• $30,000 a year = $576.92 per week
• $30,000 a year = $82.19 a day
• $30,000 a year = $3.42 an hour

We could break it down on a monthly or on a minute by minute basis if we wanted to (in fact I did do it by minute from time to time for fun) – but the exercise is really about helping you to see that perhaps your big goal is a little more achievable if you are to break it down. Making $82.19 somehow seems a little bit easier to me than making $30,000 (or is that just me?).

OK – the other way that I used to break down my goal that I found really helpful to me was to do it based upon what I need to achieve to meet that target. For me I would usually look at the daily figure – in this case $82.19.

What do I need to do to make $82.19 a day ($30,000 a year)?

Well there’s a number of ways that much. Lets look at a few:

• CPC Ads – lets say we’re running mainly AdSense on our blog and that the average click is paying 5 cents. That equates to 1643 clicks on AdSense ads (note: AdSense also runs CPM ads so it’s not quite as simple as saying you need 1643 clicks… but to keep this simple lets just go with that).
• CPM Ads – lets say that we’re running CPM ads on our blog and we’re being paid $2 CPM per ad unit and we had 3 ads on each page (which is effectively $6 CPM per page). This would mean we’d need 13,000 page impressions.
• Monthly Sponsorships – one way to sell ads directly to advertisers is to sell ads on a month by month basis as a sponsorship. To make $30k in a year you need to sell $2500 a month in ads. You might have 6 ad spots on your blog so this is 6 advertisers at $416.66 per advertiser per month.
• Low Commission Affiliate Products – Lets say we were promoting affiliate products from a site like Amazon and your commissions were on average about 40 cents per sale. To earn $82.19 you’d need to sell $205 products.
• High Commission Affiliate Products – In this case you might be promoting ebooks and earning $8 a copy (that’s what you’d earn selling my 31DBBB ebook per commission). The math is simple on this one – you’d had to sell around 10 e-books a day.
• Really Big Commission Affiliate Products – of course e-books are not the biggest product out there to promote – there are products like training courses where you can earn hundreds per sale. Lets take one that might pay out $300 for a yearly membership on a bigger product. In this case you need to sell 8 of these per month.
• Selling Your Own E-book – got your own product, perhaps an e-book, to sell from your blog? At $19.95 a sale you need to sell just over 4 of these a day. You can do the sums on cheaper or more expensive products.

Of course there are many many other ways to make money from blogs. Subscriptions, donations, paid reviews, selling yourself as a consultant….. etc. You can do the sums for yourself on your own model.

I know that some of the above figures still sound out of reach for bloggers – 1643 clicks on your AdSense ads sounds massive to a new blogger…. and it is – but do keep in mind that you can combine some of the above (in fact I’d recommend you diversify your income).

You might run 2 ad networks on your site, promote Amazon affiliates, sell your own e-book and promote someone’s membership course.

Looking back on my own figures for around the time when I hit my $50,000 AUD (around $100 USD a day) goal and for me at that time my income mix looked a like this (going from memory here):

• AdSense: $35
• Chitika: $20
• Private Ad Sales: $20
• Amazon: $15
• Other Affiliate Commissions: $10

Note: I didn’t achieve this milestone until I’d been blogging for over 2 years (I blogged for the first year without trying to make money).

This didn’t happen over night but I really found that breaking things down into more bite sized pieces helped me to stay motivated but also helped me to identify what I needed to work on in order to reach my goals (and for me to quite my day job).

Again – don’t quit your day job yet (in fact you may not want to quit it even when you reach your goal – it can be good to have a back up plan) but do work hard at being specific about your blogging goals and attempt to break it down in a way that helps you move towards them.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

How to Make $30,000 a year Blogging

Share This

See the original post: 
How to Make $30,000 a year Blogging