A Guest Post by Kelly Diels.
First, Mom, I don’t even know what Mr. Smalls was selling on the corner but I’m pretty sure it is not smiled upon by the authorities and I have never ever tried it nor will I. Swear.
Second, bloggers-in-arms, as you might have suspected (seemingly insane titles are great foreshadowing devices, yes?) I’m going to go all things white people like and cite old-school hip-hop from a dead artist.
Don’t start composing your irate comments just yet – I haven’t earned the right to say The Word used by the late great Biggie Smalls, so I’m offering the radio-friendly version of Juicy.
Here’s the cleaned-up version of today’s musical call-to-arms:
Yeah, this album is dedicated to all the teachers that told me I’d never amount to nothin’,
to all the people that lived above the buildings that I was hustlin’ in front of that called the police on me when I was just tryin’ to make some money to feed my daughters,
and all the people in the struggle, you know what I’m sayin’?
That’s you and me, baby. We’re in the struggle. We’re trying to make a living at blogging, which, if you haven’t noticed, a whole lot of people are doing and doing badly (or well) mostly for very little money.
That’s why we’re all here hanging out in the ProBlogger salon/saloon. We’re trying to make meaning and money. So we’re not exactly gangsta – although some of our outlaw blackhat brethren think they’re sooooo badass ‘cuz they get their meaningless, money-making sites banned – but it is a struggle.
You might really, really, really be in the struggle but I’m middling away at a mediocre job in middle class land. I’ve got a pretty cute suburban townhouse and some pretty cute suburban kids. Poor, poor me.
That’s why I had to use a gritty, kinda romantic, dramatically up-and-coming lyric for inspiration. My boring life won’t inspire you or a really great rags-to-riches magazine profile. We all have our burdens and Biggie’s were so much sexier and before-and-after than mine.
(Sort of: before he dropped out of school, Biggie was a brilliant, scholarship-winning student. Artists are storytellers and storysellers and sometimes stories we’re selling are more revealing than the truths we’re not telling.)
Call it the suburban curse of the mundane. Call it a paradox. Call it luxury. Birthdays aren’t the worst days but like all the other days they’re kinda boring and meaningless. And so I blog.
You can also call it not-terribly-unique: most of the big-name bloggers didn’t start out blogging for dollars either. There are other rewards. The trouble with these other, non-lucrative rewards is that they plant a dangerous seed.You start humming Biggie and thinking I AM BIGGIE and then the trouble begins.
You think: I’m getting so many accolades. I’m figuring things out. I’m creating something useful. People like it and maybe even need it. Maybe I should believe the do-what-you-love-and-the-money-will-follow lie.
Hence the grand existential web dilemma: how do blogs (and bloggers) make money?
Well, they don’t. Blogs don’t make money. Businesses make money.
When we talk about blogging for money, we’re getting it all wrong. It is not really possible to ‘blog for money’ unless you develop a business model around it. And unless you’ve got a head for business – or are willing to get one, and who needs two heads? – and are willing to put in the time figuring out the unsexy mechanics of this seductive vehicle, blogging might never make you money.
So don’t quit your day job. Hang on to your corner. Keep practicing your craft. Stay true to your vision, feed your passions, and start thinking about the back-end, business side of it.
Here’s what I think about my own imaginary blog empire. In a sense, I’ve gone about it backwards. I started blogging just because. I didn’t worry about money or how to earn it. I still don’t have a single advertisement on my site and I have never, ever made a direct cent from my blog. But I like to write, I’m sticking with it, and people seem to like it, and all of this, I think, is a good foundation from whence to build my blogging castle.
Speaking of fairytales, once upon a time I owned a coffee house. I wrote a business plan, secured financing, bought equipment, designed a process, created a look, implemented a marketing strategy, hired people, trained people, maintained the books, and made coffee.
A blog is coffee. It is what you create, what you give your customers, but it is not the business.A revenue-generating, transactional blog is the end result, or the center, of an infrastructure put in place to create and deliver the content.
But a blog, in and of itself, is not a business. If you want it to act like a business (ie generate income), then you have to think about it and treat it like a business.
So that’s my insight of the day: if you want to make blogging a business, you need to make it a business.
And that’s what I’m doing now. I’m matching my inspirational red shoes to my small business hat and thinking systematically about how to assemble a revenue-generating outfit.
How do you transform your blog into a business? (And by you, I mean me.)
You start by think systematically (not magically, not field-of-dreams-y, not the universe will deliver because You Are Entitled-y) about it. Analyze it. Strategize about it. Focus. Figure out what tools you need. Learn them. Figure out what you can sell, organically, as a result of what need you are resolving for people who land at your blog and (hopefully) like what they read.
In other words, get thee a business model. Pour your passion and inspiration and tap-dancing red shoe love through that juicy model so that it will let you sip champagne when you’re thirsty. (And do not mix metaphors the way I just did. It makes poor, dead George Orwell want to off himself.)
Leo Babauta did it. He writes that the reason he was so successful, so soon, was because he treated his blog as a product. He branded it. He promoted it. He was consistent with his message. But most of all, he crafted a solution to the hurly burly of daily life: Zen Habits. Simplicity. Respite from the hamster wheel of work and over-scheduled family and materialism and conventional thinking.
Sonia Simone at Copyblogger gets it right when she writes that blogging is like high school and the white hat/black hat cliques could learn from each other – that, in essence, the marriage of vision and tactics makes for a power couple. (What she really meant was Kelly get your idealistic, semi-lazy red shoes to stepping and learn SEO already.)
Sonia Simone also writes that “blogs are not television” and it is tough to monetize even a high-traffic blog if you readers are not coming to your site “to solve any kind of real-world problem, other than how can I kill 10 minutes before my boss gets back from lunch?”
And all of this made me realize that how (and why) your readers end up on your doorstep might predict what they are willing to buy from you. How you cultivate your traffic informs how you feed your bank account. And since I’m such a graphic wizard, I made a chart to show you what I mean:
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Your traffic source:
As a quick followup to my post a few days ago regarding how to make more money with the Amazon Affiliate Program this Christmas – today is a key day to be linking to Amazon as their Black Friday sale has just started.
This is on of the biggest days (if not THE biggest day) of shopping all year on Amazon so many of your readers will be heading into the store today anyway – you might as well as earn a commission for what they spend.
The cool thing about linking to the Black Friday Sale today is that next Monday when Amazon’s Cyber Monday sale starts the links you create today will automatically be forwarded to that sale also.
Good luck with the promotion!
Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.
Amazon’s Black Friday Sale Starts – If You’re an Affiliate Today’s the Day to Promote
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Amazon’s Black Friday Sale Starts – If You’re an Affiliate Today’s the Day to Promote
Do you suffer from information overload? Are you overwhelmed by all the different websites that you try to visit each day? The advent of RSS feeds was certainly helpful, but it wasn’t enough to handle your search for used merchandise, your hunt for jobs, and your insatiable appetite for Twitter trends.
While you certainly have many options when it comes to choosing a good web portal, you might learn over the course of this review that you’d prefer to use IngBoo as your starting point each day. By its own description, IngBoo is designed to free you from clutter and deliver only the information that you want.
Using IngBoo as an Internet Launchpad
In a nutshell, IngBoo works as an “easy-to-use Internet retrieval utility.” Think of it as your own custom homepage, loaded up with all the content that you need.
This Internet launchpad can handle all sorts of syndicated and personalized content. You can leave a keyword search on Monster.com, for example, and it will constantly update itself with any new jobs that match that keyword. The same can be said for news reports, sports scores, RSS feeds, YouTube videos, LinkedIn updates, and more.
The IngBoo homepage is comprised of as many IngBoo lists as you would like. Each of these lists will display its three most recent items. These snippets are ordered based on priority and “freshness” of information. You can add things like CNN news updates, Perez Hilton celebrity gossip reports, and so on.
How to Add IngBoo Lists
The IngBoo lists can be added one of two ways. Near the bottom page are a series of preset tabs and options from their library. These are broken down into different categories, like business and jobs, and then you can provide any additional information as needed. For example, if you choose to add the Amazon Deals widget, then you can provide a keyword for the product search. The Craigslist search seems to only work for US-based locations, however.
Alternatively, you can use the search tool near the top of the IngBoo homepage to enter your own custom keyword or RSS feed. For example, you might choose to add the Beyond the Rhetoric RSS feed to your IngBoo portal.
At first glance, it may look like you are only getting a series of headlines that are linked back to the source material. However, when you hover your mouse pointer over any of these items, the original content appears for your reading pleasure. You can see it in action here with one of my blog posts.
After you sign up for an account with IngBoo, you can also sign up to receive email updates and updates to your smartphone. You can choose the frequency of these “digests” and at what time during the day that you receive them.
Extending Value to Publishers Too
This all sounds like it could be useful for web surfers, but what about web publishers? IngBoo has tried to approach this with the IngBoo button. This works in a similar way as an RSS button or an email subscription, except users are sent directly to IngBoo to add your list to their IngBoo homepage.
While most readers of John Chow dot Com are pretty familiar with RSS, many web users are not. The IngBoo integration can help publishers reach new audiences and increase the potential for revisits.
Get an IngBoo Account for Free
The Internet can bombard you with a seemingly unfathomable amount of information, so it’s important that you find a way to organize this information to best suit your needs. This can be for news, weather, job searches, buying decisions, and more.
IngBoo seems to provide a clutter-reducing experience that streamlines this experience, displaying you only relevant and recent items. I would have liked to see a multi-column option and the ability to move the IngBoo lists as I saw fit, but this still seems like a worthwhile web portal. The email digests are particularly useful.
Oh and the best part? IngBoo is free.
CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP FOR INGBOO
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!
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Organize the Web with IngBoo
There are times when it seems the only fact people can agree upon is that they disagree.
And so it goes that on a single panel during a major Internet marketing conference, two speakers regarded for their expertise and experience can disagree on such a fundamental level.
During the presentation Social Media: White Hat vs. Black Hat at Search Engine Strategies New York this past August, Search & Social’s Dave Snyder and MarketingProfs’s Beth Harte sat feet away from each other at a table at the front of a room. And yet a chasm filled the space between their differing opinions.
With more and more companies becoming aware of the concepts of social media marketing and how SMM can contribute to business goals, more and more Internet marketing firms are making SMM training, services and consulting available.
Which raised the debate that has since divided the Internet marketing community: To outsource SMM or not to outsource SMM, that is the question.
As reported earlier this month by The Wall Street Journal, the demand for social media consulting services is there. And while services come in many different shapes and sizes, there’s an across-the-board question that has to be answered before a company commits to a consultant. To what degree will SMM outsourcing work for my business?
One argument goes that since social media is where people communicate, everyone involved is best served if they are sincere and speak for themselves. Panelist Beth Harte also described this effect, which I reported in my liveblog coverage of the event:
Beth has an issue with ghost blogging and ghost tweeting. They don’t know enough about your company. Some products and services are very complex, and an agency will never know enough about the product to produce content that’s compelling to the community. And if you approach it as just putting in the buzzwords, the community will sense the BS.
But, as with anything else, this issue isn’t black and white, as explained by panelist Dave Snyder (and as summarized by me):
Unlike search where there’s a guideline set in front of you, the community guides the social ethics. It’s really important to understand how to utilize each platform. Each community has its own guidelines. There’s spam, then there’s automation, then there’s conversation. It’s different shades of gray. Look at how the community for each platform reacts to different marketing tactics.
In truth, we’re all human and we can all relate to the gripes Internet users face while on their social networks. And we can almost as easily avoid being the source of such annoyance if aware of the trap.
Who better to avoid social media traps than those armed with community experience, a complete understanding of platform terms of service, and standing clout with the audience? There’s no one more equipped than a social media marketing professional in these areas.
The disagreement may stem from a misunderstanding between parties that when social media marketing is outsourced, ties between the social media presence and the organization are cut off. But since when did anyone expect that they could set and forget social media marketing?
As with all outsourced services, communication between client and agency needs to be constant and flowing. The client must always be an active participant in their organization’s social media presence, suggesting topics of interest, exciting announcements to share, and their sense of the industry’s pulse. The agency must be proactive about making sure the message and language fits the audience’s expectation, seeking out clarification when uncertain and receiving client approval when appropriate.
There are no rights and wrongs in social media marketing — it’s about what works, what resonates and what builds community. The company president doesn’t insist on tackling every task within the organization. She relies on her trusted members of her team to do the job right. Likewise, the client-agency relationship is one of members of the same team. And communication, understanding and cooperation are keys to any successful relationship — social media or otherwise.
The rest is here:
Yes, You Can Outsource Social Media Marketing
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If you want to go down this path with me, let’s get started with the overall numbers.
Here’s the overall traffic source chart for 2009. What stands out is that search engines sent me about 51% of my traffic. In 2008, search engines sent only 37.6% — that’s a pretty hefty jump. On the one hand, yay that my blog SEO is working and the search engines 
