Written on February 23rd, 2009 at 01:02 am by Darren Rowse

This is a guest post from Mark Hayward, you can follow him on Twitter @mark_hayward. The article focuses on helping business folk, both big and small, who would like to start blogging.

Do you own a business? Have you noticed a dramatic decrease in sales because of the current economy?

Here’s the thing: For people like Darren, Brian Clark, and Leo Babauta blogging is a full-time job, a primary source of income, and most importantly, a real and profitable business model.

But, what if you find yourself in a different camp?

Perhaps, if you’re like me, you own business that provides a service, manufactures goods or sells consumer products. Blogging is NOT your business, but you use (or would like to use) it as a tool to market and promote your venture.

When I was just getting started as a small business blogger one of the smartest observations I heard on the subject came from Shana Albert (a.k.a The Nanny612). She stated, quite simply: ‘I don’t make money from my blog, but I make money because of my blog.’

In essence, Shana uses her blog to strategically drive traffic to her business website where she sells pre-school curriculum. Her words of wisdom have stuck with me and I think any business, whether large or small, can really succeed in doing the same thing.

Further reading: check out Darren’s previous posts on ways of making money BECAUSE of your blog.

Blogging is for pimply-faced kids!

Surprisingly, a lot of business owners that I meet on a daily basis have a sentiment similar to the one above. In fact, most think;

Sure blogging and social media are great if you enjoy spending your days ‘cyberloafing’, but they certainly can’t help me to promote my business.

Quite honestly, I find it shocking and awfully hard to believe that MANY business owners still have this general view of blogging and social media.

A Personal Case Study

For those of you who might not know, I own a small business in the Caribbean. When I was first getting started I really had no budget to pay for advertising and marketing. As such, I have utilized nothing but blogging and social media for the past couple of years to promote my business. More specifically, when I took over this B&B venture there were no reservations, no customers, and no prospects. In a short period of time I have been able to go from a no cash or customer flow to maintaining a 70-100% occupancy rate depending on the month. (Yes, even in this economy!)

My business provides me with an opportunity to meet incredible people from all over the world. Most recently, I had a guest visiting from a neighboring Caribbean island and, he too, runs a small hotel.

During one discussion the gentleman told me that his business was down a whopping 75% over the past year. According to him, the lack of customers and drop in business could all be attributed to the state of the economy. Truly, I felt awful for him.

While I wholeheartedly agree that the collective global economy is in terrible shape, I asked him what type of promotion and marketing he was doing so that his customers could find him and to help keep his business in the public eye.

His answer (and I think this explains a lot):

‘We are doing what we have always done.’

Upon further investigation, I found out that ‘What we have always done‘ equated to a fairly decent website if it was the year 2000 and a U.S. based reservation service that is paid a percentage to make bookings for him. That’s it.

To be fair, my guest was a bit older and I think he was afraid to embrace new technology and marketing methods. But it tends to boggle my mind that even in this hyper-technical age he and many other business owners are missing a HUGE opportunity to promote their business in an extremely cost effective manner.

Unfortunately, the conversation with my guest ended and I did not have the time that morning to discuss the issue further. However, if I had the time, and or, if you know a business owner in a similar situation, the following is what I would have passed on to him;

Ten Tips to Help You Blog Your Way to Small Business Success

Tip One: Define your goals

Whether you are a plumber, bike retailer, or cafe owner start by assessing your business goals and how you would like your blog to help you achieve them - e.g. Do you want customers to find you? Do you want to be on the front page of Google? Are you all about selling more services and product?

Tip Two: Research keywords

Before you begin blogging have a look at some of the keyword tools like the one found on SEO Book and determine what your potential customers and clients are actually searching for. If your business is active in a mostly local market, or generally for clients in a small town, then include the town’s name in your research. The information gathered from running a couple of keyword searches is extremely valuable when it comes to writing posts that are targeted and meant to highlight specific information.

Tip Three: Use free tools

I think many small business folk are turned off by blogging and social media because they are under the illusion that marketing online costs a tremendous amount of money. My chosen platform for my business website and blogging is WordPress, which, I am sure most of you know, is free to use and has some amazing free themes. (Note: If you want to spend a couple of dollars you can get Thesis theme.)

Tip Four: Educate the consumer

When starting a blog that revolves around your small business the general tendency is to want to publish a bunch of SPAM posts that extol your virtues. While it is okay to do this once and a while, I have found that educating the consumer works tremendously well and is highly effective. Also, please remember that there is a big difference between using your business blog to tell your story (How you came to own the business, defining your passion, etc.) and just telling people to buy your product or service because you are the best.

Tip Five: Allow 3 to 6 months for return on investment (ROI)

There are a few schools of thought when it comes to measuring ROI for business blogs. We all, myself included, are searching for that magic bullet that is going to draw in more customers. However, from my own experience and in discussion with other business owners who blog, three to six months seems to allow enough time to put up an adequate amount of posts (even if you only publish once a week) and to also obtain a quantifiable and measurable amount of customer data.

Tip Six: Research the competition

Small business owners sometimes feel funny inquiring about what their competition is up to. Keep in mind, this is business, I highly recommend having a search around the web to discern what your competitors are up to. In most cases I think you will be pleasantly surprised to find out that they do not have a strong web presence. And if they do, you will now know that you need to step your game up a bit more.

Tip Seven: Keep it simple

Business blog posts do not have to be extravagant Pulitzer Prize worthy affairs. If you should find yourself stuck for topics, or are facing blogger’s block, have a look at this post I recently did, 31 Blog Post Ideas For Small Businesses.

Tip Eight: Forums are your friend

One of the most common complaints I hear from business bloggers who are getting started is ‘Nobody is coming to my site.’ Is that so? I don’t care if you trade in rare eighteenth century chess pieces or high-end designer shoes; chances are a niche forum exists for your specific business. Do a simple Google search to find out where your customers are hanging out online and make a visit to those sites. Promoting your small business within a forum works best when you approach it in the same manner as step four. You need to educate the consumer and gain member trust before you can start endorsing yourself (otherwise you will be seen as a troll).

Tip Nine: Be consistent

Quite possibly the most important piece of advice for any small business blogger - You NEED to be consistent in your efforts.

Tip Ten: Once you are blogging regularly branch out into other social media

Starting a comprehensive social media and marketing plan can really help to give a traffic boost to your business blog. Social media does not have to be intimidating and you can easily start by uploading a few well tagged and described photos to FLICKR and then possibly move on to YouTube, FaceBook, and Twitter.

If you are a business owner who is struggling in this economy, or if you know of someone who is hesitant to embrace the power of blogging for business promotion, here are a few of additional resources that might help.

• ProBlogger - 21 Ways to Write Posts that Are Guaranteed to Grow Your Blog (not specific to small business but still great information!)
• Chris Brogan - Cafe-Shaped Business
• Duct Tape Marketing - My Social Media System
• Small Biz Survival - Small Biz 100

Are you a ProBlogger, or business owner who blogs? What are some tips that you might offer?

Mark Hayward owns a business and lives in the Caribbean. He is co-founder of the nonprofit, Train for Humanity, and you can follow him on Twitter @mark_hayward.

Written on February 20th, 2009 at 12:02 am by Darren Rowse

There are many reasons that a blog post might get spread widely through ‘ReTweets’ (when one person passes on the tweet of another) but one fairly obvious, yet often overlooked one, has to do with the length of your blog post title.

Yesterday on TwiTip I published a post with a formula for getting ReTweeted on twitter. You can read the full thing for yourself but the author of the post (@louisedoherty) proposed that to increase the chances of one of your tweets being ReTweeted that you need to keep your own tweet shorter than the 140 characters allowed by Twitter so that the person can include other information (your username, the @ symbol and the letters RT).

I’ve seen the wisdom of theory of Louise many times in my own use of Twitter. If I tweet something that is the maximum of 140 characters it make it more tricky for followers to retweet - they either have to change my tweet or don’t do it.

OK - so this applies to bloggers how?

Twitter can send you a lot of traffic if a link to one of your posts gets spread around via ReTweeting. Just look at the Top 100 Retweeted Links on Twitter at the moment - as I write this the top one has been passed on 331 times which means it is a link that could have been viewed on Twitter by many thousands of people.

To help the ReTweet thing along a little keep your titles short. They don’t need to be 3 words long - but keep in mind that when someone is going to tweet a link to your post that they will usually include:

1. The title of your post

2. A URL (often shortened using tinyurl or some other shortening service which means it’ll be anything from 20 to 26 characters)

They may also want to include a comment about your link.

That’s not all you want to think about - you then should consider that for the link to be ReTweeted it will include all of the above information plus:

1. The username of the person being retweeted with the @ symbol (usually 5-12 characters)

2. The letters RT and sometimes a : as well as a space after it (3-4 characters)

You can see that the number of characters is starting to add up so shorter Titles can definitely help.

Lets workshop it:

• The title of this post is ‘A Secret to Writing Posts that Go Viral on Twitter ‘ - that’s 52 characters (with space at end)
• Lets say that the URL is shortened with Twurl - that’s 22 characters
• Lets say that the person tweeting it adds the words ‘Reading: ‘ at the start of the tweet (9 characters with space) and ‘ - cool post’ at the end (12 characters with spaces).

So far the original tweet is 95 characters long.

And would look like: ‘Reading: A Secret to Writing Posts that Go Viral on Twitter http://twurl.nl/qejpzq - Cool Post’

Lets just say it was @chrisbrogan who made the above tweet. As Chris has a lot of great followers at least one of them is bound to retweet it.

At the very least their retweet would read:

‘RT: @chrisbrogan Reading: A Secret to Writing Posts that Go Viral on Twitter http://twurl.nl/qejpzq - Cool Post’

We’re still under the limit of 140 and with 29 characters to spare could have added a few words to our title.

This is not something that I would spend a lot of time on and I would not compromise my titles too much to get them down in character length - however as someone who has seen significant traffic from Twitter over the last 6 months it is definitely a factor that I keep in the back of my mind as I blog.

PS: another reason to keep titles down in length is that Google has a cut off of 70 characters when it displays page titles in search results. A title over 70 characters gets chopped off mid title which could decrease the chances of someone clicking it. I’m told that other search engines cut off titles at as little as 65 characters so perhaps that is a better cut off point.

AdSense have just announced a new feature that many of us have been asking for for a while - the ability to change fonts in ad units.

While there’s not an extensive choice of fonts (they allow Arial, Times, and Verdana font faces) it is better than nothing and allows publishers to tweak the way their ads look to fit with the design of their sites.

Find out how to access the new fonts via the official AdSense Blog.

Written on February 17th, 2009 at 07:02 am by Darren Rowse

While many bloggers are monetizing blogs with direct methods like advertising and affiliate programs another method that more and more bloggers are making good money by selling their own e-books. Today Jade Craven of The Prolific Writer reviews a new resource that is written to help bloggers wanting to do exactly that - How to Launch the **** Out of Your Ebook.

Dave Navarros prelaunch of his latest ebook was so successful that he had to delay the official launch. Why? He was too busy earning thousands by coaching others on how to launch the **** out of their ebook.

This review examines the five modules of this workshop and gives you the foundations of how you too can conduct a killer product launch.

Module 1: Analyzing the market for your ebook

Most internet marketers know the basics of researching a niche and ascertaining competition. Fortunately, the authors were aware of this and kept it short.

Put simply – the one purpose of this chapter is to give you the tools to ascertain whether there is a market willing to pay for your product. This point seems obvious, but is one that is often ignored. People get swept up in the excitement of product creation and don’t bother questioning if there is even a demand for it.

Its unlikely established bloggers will discover new methods, but it did allow me to view the research in a different context.

Module 2: Finding and Wooing buyers.

This module contains two steps that would be second nature to many Problogger readers:

• Make Your Blog Attract Your Target Audience
• Drive New, Targeted Readers To Your Existing Blog

The emphasis is on creating relationships with your prospects “far in advance of your product going on sale.”

The tips included:

1. Using twitter and social media
2. Prolifically commenting on other blogs within the niche
3. Guest posting on other blogs
4. Using forums.

I was disappointed in that they didn’t provide any guidance in how these methods compliment each other. While it is beyond the scope of the ebook to provide comprehensive networking advice, I have found that repeated exposure to an audience – via all the methods listed above – is what converts the best.

If you find the information too basic, Dave and Naomi also included a section on how to leverage your existing blog.

Module 3: Setting Up Your Mailing List

This module alone was worth the $97. It showed me how to set up an email list that feels ethical. It is explained how to segment your list and create a positive audience that likes being sold to. Dave also gives the foundations of setting up the list so as to continue to woo the reader.

It was during this chapter that I really started getting excited about the possibilities available during aproduct launch.

Module 4: Writing Your Ebook

I’ve tried writing an ebook before. I gave up immediately because I had no plan, and no focus. This module made me realize the many ways I went wrong and gave a solid blueprint for successful product creation. I learned how to:

• Create an killer ebook outline
• Develop a work schedule you can stick to
• Get others to help you out with the editing.

Naomi and Dave provided their own perspective when it came to creating a product. Some of it is conflicting, but it helped to show you that you have to develop your own style during the planning and writing stage.

Module 5: Launching Your Ebook

It’s in this module that everything in the previous chapters comes together. Dave provides a complete framework for the entire launch process. He discusses:

• How to make your first batch of money during the presale
• How to build up the buzz around your product and increase your mailing list
• How to organize the content for your mailing list
• Ongoing ways of earning money after your launch.

The information is rock solid and much of it is also relevant to someone who is trying to launch a successful blog.

For instance, in the section on getting big names to review your book, he suggested that you “find out who their online friends are and focus some attention on building them up.”

I have personal experience of this working. Recently, Darren hopped on twitter, asking his followers what they were blogging about. I replied instantly, raving about this awesome product I was about to review. It’s that review your reading now. I turned from an impressed consumer to product evangelist just by the full attention Dave gave me in a couple of tweets.

Would I recommend it?

I was that impressed by this product that I immediately brought another of Dave’s products – and have the intention of buying more from both him and Naomi.

I would recommend this book to anyone who plans to release an information product. New bloggers can learn how to optimize their blogs to woo potential customers. Established bloggers can discover a launch method that resonates with market savvy audiences

If your unsure, you can check out his information for free at his new blog, The Launch Coach. The information is top notch and is a clear example of how to effectively launch a new product.

In conclusion.

I tweeted Dave immediately after purchasing this product, thanking him for changing my perception of an entire industry. He replied by saying that he “wants to make ebooks fun again.”

He did. You can do the same by reading the ebook.

Written on February 16th, 2009 at 01:02 am by Darren Rowse

Yesterday I published a guest post here on ProBlogger that gave 7 Reasons to not have Empty ad Spots on your Blog. Today I want to build on this post and give you 5 alternatives to simply removing an empty ad slot from your blog.

Removing the ad is one valid option (especially if you already have a lot of ads) but it isn’t the only option. There are other ways of using the slot to either to earn an income or do something else to build your blog.

When I have an empty ad spot on one of my blogs I generally do one of these five things:

1. Put up an ‘advertise here’ Ad

As Ben says I would only want to have one of these showing per page. Too many of them looks a little desperate. However having one of them shows you’ve got an empty spot and calls potential advertisers to action. I link this ad to an ‘advertise with us’ page that outlines how people can purchase advertising on the blog.

2. Run an Affiliate ad

Just because you don’t have a paid advertisement doesn’t mean you can’t monetize the position. I recently had a spare ad spot on my Twitip Twitter Tips blog (the sidebar one which is now sold) and instead of an ‘advertise here’ ad I slotted in a large ad for a resource that I’d previously recommended on the blog called the ‘Twitter Survival Guide‘.

I was a little dubious about whether it would convert as I usually find affiliate programs work best within a post (as I’ve written in this post on affiliate programs) - but at the end of the month realized that the affiliate program had earned me about 80% of what selling the ad to an advertiser would have - it was a great way to earn something from the position while I negotiated the next advertising deal.

3. Run an Ad Network Ad

Another way to make at least some money from an empty ad spot is to consider placing an ad from another ad network. I generally start with AdSense or Chitika - depending upon the blog and then will begin to experiment with other ad networks to see what converts.

While these ad network ads might not earn you as much as a private ad sale (although they might) they can actually be quite worthwhile using because they’ll give you information on how well an ad spot works and what it earns. This information can actually be helpful in selling future ads in that spot.

4. Run an Internal Ad

Another option that I use quite a bit is tocreate my own ad for a section of my blog that I want to drive traffic to. For example - currently here at ProBlogger in my sidebar I have an empty ad spot halfway down the page. If you scroll down there you’ll see that at the moment I’m putting an internal ad into the slot for the ProBlogger Job Boards. In effect I’m advertising my own site (or a section of it) to my own readers. Other internal ads that you might run would include:

• Ads for your blogs newsletter
• Ads for your RSS feed
• Ads for a category
• Ads for a ‘sneeze page‘
• Ads for a forum area
• Ads for one of your best posts
• Ads for a competition you’re running
• Ads for your business or a service that you offer
• Ads for a series of posts that you’ve run
• Ads for an e-product or resource that you’ve developed
• Ads for your Twitter or account or some other social media connecting point

Essentially any important part of your blog is a good place to drive readers to - particularly if it is something that will drive revenue or increase reader stickiness /loyalty.

5. Swap Ads with another Blogger

I don’t do this one these days but another option is to do a deal with another blogger and arrange for them to show an ad for your blog in their empty ad spot and for you to show an ad to their blog in your empty slot. This way you’re promoting another blogger in your niche and hopefully expanding your readership by the traffic that they send you. This would work best when you do it with a relevant blog to your audience.

Another variation that is a combination of this and option #4 above is to do it with another of your own blogs (if you have more than one). Many blog networks do this - they run ads for other blogs in their stable of blogs in the hope of cross promoting and driving traffic from one blog to another.

What do You Do with Empty Ad Slots?

I’m certain that these are not the only 5 things to do with empty ad slots and am keen to hear what you do with them?

Written on February 15th, 2009 at 12:02 am by Darren Rowse

This is a guest post written by Ben Barden, developer for the CMF Ads advertising network, which offers low cost, no-nonsense advertising.

Blog advertising is an excellent way to reach a wide audience without breaking the bank. It can also make money for your own blog. There is a mistake that quite a few blogs make - using a lot of empty ad spots. There are a few reasons why I think this is a bad idea.

1. It devalues the ads.

If nobody is buying ads on your site, perhaps the ad price is too high for the traffic your site receives. This suggests your site doesn’t provide value to advertisers. Who wants to be the first to buy an ad when there are 5 empty spots?

2. It makes you look desperate.

I’ve seen sites with a whole row of empty ad spots - to me, this looks like the blogger is begging for money. Let’s face it, a lot of people want to make some money from their blog - simply saying “I have ad spots for sale” isn’t enough of a reason for most advertisers, unless they already know your site.

3. It’s a negative lifesign.

It’s like seeing 0 comments or 0 views on a post. If you come back and see the same thing again, the blog is probably dead. Don’t leave empty ad spots on your blog for long.

4. It’s a waste of space.

Some blogs like to put a lot of widgets on the page. But how many of these are worth having? If you have an empty ad spot that just isn’t getting filled, could you put something more valuable in that spot?

5. It puts a limit on the number of ads you’ll accept.

If you have empty ad spots, it suggests there’s a maximum number of ads you’re willing to display. So if you have 6 empty spots, you might not sell more than 6 ads. But if you have 2 running ads and no empty spots, advertisers can just contact you about buying an ad on your site. Also, if you get a very generous offer to advertise on your site, you may want to consider pushing the limit. This is less likely to happen if you limit yourself with empty ad spots.

6. It makes it harder to promote different ad placements.

If a site has different ads running on each post, this suggests the blog is open to flexible advertising. If you use the same “empty ad” image for every ad spot then this doesn’t give the impression of flexibility, as it suggests you can’t buy ads on specific posts. However, you can get around this by using a different “empty ad” image for each zone, or specifying the available ad spots on your Advertise page.

7. It limits you to certain ad sizes.

If you have loads of empty 125×125 ad spots, advertisers may not realise that you offer different ad sizes. Empty spots can show advertisers where their ads will appear, but this could be done just as effectively with an image of your blog, highlighting the various ad spots.

Is one empty ad spot acceptable?

Sometimes it helps to have one empty ad spot if you don’t have any ads up yet. This shows you accept advertising. It’s just better not to have a lot of empty ad spots.

What you should do:

Create an Advertise page that specifies what you allow and what you don’t allow. Advertisers can contact you with their requirements and you can decide if you wish to accept their ad request.

That’s my opinion - what do you think? Do you have empty ad spots on your blog? Why/why not?

Written on February 12th, 2009 at 12:02 am by Darren Rowse

In this guest post, Neil Matthews of WPDude.com talks about the importance of testing your blog backups.

I want to pose you a question. Have you ever tested your blog backups?

We are constantly told to backup our computer systems in case of crash or corruption. Anyone who has lost a store of precious digital photos knows how important this process is.

Bloggers are well aware of the need to backup their content, but what use is a backup, if, when you need to recover it, you find that it is incomplete, corrupt or you don’t know how to restore it?. This post will hopefully encourage you to test your recovery process.

The rest of this post has a definite WordPress bias, but the underlying message can be used for all blogging platforms.

Why Test Your Backups?

You may feel that once you have setup a backup process for your blog you can sit back and enjoy a virtual safety net. If you have a good process in place why should you test it? The three reasons to test are validity, integrity and knowledge.

Validity - are you sure that all of your blog is backed up? You need to test that all of your data is being added to your archives. Blogs are not static, you may have added a plugin which creates new data, but is your archiving process configured to save this?

Integrity - are you sure that the archive file is not corrupt? It may be that in your hour of need, you cannot recover what has been backed up.

Knowledge - another reason to test your backup is to ensure you know how to perform a recovery. It is all well and good to have a plugin sending you a daily email with a database backup, but do you know how to untar the file and load this into MYSQL? Testing your backup will show you the gaps in your knowledge. This will give you the chance to gain the skills so you can recover from a blog failure.

What To Recover

Your must be able to recover two things to have a successful backup recovery test:

Your database contents; posts, comments, tags, catagories and misc. system settings. With WordPress this will be a MYSQL database. The second thing that will require recovery is your code base or the WordPress files you uploaded to your hosting platform. You may think that having a copy of your latest wordpress files held on your laptop are enough to recover your blog’s code base. Whilst this is a good starting point, you are ignoring the non-static area of the code base, the wp-content directory. This contains your plugins, themes and any media you upload to your blog such as images or video. Do you remember what plugins you installed or what changes you have made to your theme. You need to backup and, in turn, test the recovery of your code base.

When To Test Your Recovery Plan

As a rule of thumb, you should test your ability to recover before any major change to your blog, including:

• Before WordPress updates
• After you have developed some high quality content which is generating
• traffic and will cause tears if lost
• Importing or Migrating a large amount of data
• Extending your blog with third party products such as forums
• At least once a year if any of the above do not occur so you know your
• backups are working correctly

How to Test Your Backups

There are two ways to test your backup, the easy but highly risky method, and the difficult but risk free method (who said blog maintenance wasn’t high tension stuff).

The easy but risky method - restore your backup over your existing blog, this is easy because no additional configuration is required and you backup should simply drop into your database/file system. This is highly risky of course due to the nature of the the process, you don’t know if you backup works, but how do you test it? If your backup does not work the restore will bring you perfectly running blog to it’s knees. Another classic chicken and egg scenario.

The difficult but risk free method - build a development blog on your existing hosting platform and restore into this . This will vary from hosting provider to hosting provider, and will require a certain amount of technical knowledge (which is beyond the scope of this post). You can create a new domain, a second installation of wordpress in another directory on your existing domain or even build a blog on your own PC with apache, MYSQL and PHP. It is difficult because it requires a certain level of technical expertise, but it is risk free to your current blog because you never touch it.

In Conclusion

Test your backups frequently so you know what shape your archives are in. As a parting note picture this scene. Your blog and possibly your income steam is down. The faster your recover the sooner you will be blogging and earning again, test your backups!

Written on February 11th, 2009 at 01:02 pm by Darren Rowse

In this post Lisa Newton from Travelin’ Local shares the story of how leaving a comment on a blog increased traffic back to her blog 975% in a day.

It’s a well-known fact that commenting on other people’s blogs helps drive traffic to your own blog. I knew this, but until today, I had never seen its real results. Harnessing the action ability has led individual blog owners to comment back, which happened to me several times, like here, here, and here.

But, this time it was different:

To begin with I received a new digital camera for Christmas.

Now not knowing too much about digital photography, I went searching the experts over the Internet.

One of the first places I landed was at the Digital Photography School.
I immediately fell in love with the site and instantly subscribed to their RSS feed.

Low and behold, the other day, just as I was browsing my Google Reader, a new post from DPS popped up, What is Your Favorite Landscape Location?.
I just had to comment, and like most California girls, my favorite place to shoot pictures is at the beach.

Now, I know I’d hit it lucky because my comment was only the second one on the list. The prevailing theory is that the closer your comment is to being first, the more hits it will get.

Because my blog is only a month old, I usually don’t get much traffic, on average about 15 -20 hits per day. But on the day I made the comment, I got 195 hits, an increase of over 975%, with almost all of it coming via the Digital
Photography School. Recently Darren over at Problogger reported getting his single largest day of hits on DPS to the tune of 250,000 hits. Although 195 isn’t even close to 250,000, but I’ll bet the increased percentage on Travelin’ Local was higher.

All from that one comment.

On another bright spot, dgwphotography left the following comment on this blog post’s featured photo at Flickr:

“This is beautiful - I saw this from your reply on the Digital Photography School blog.

I love the deep depth of field here…”

The power of comments is truly inspirational; when translated into action.

Do you leave valuable comments? Have you ever had a comment experience like this?

My Personal Income Streams

As an update to this post I’ve more recently written one on How I make Money Blogging which highlights the most profitable ways that I use blogs to generate income. I’ve also written extensively on how bloggers make money in ProBlogger the Book.

How do bloggers make money from blogs?

I’ve been reflecting this week about the amazing diversity of opportunities that are opening up for bloggers to make money from blogging.

I’ve long advised that bloggers seeking to make money from blogging spread their interests across multiple revenue streams so as not to put all their eggs in one basket.

The wonderful thing is that this is becoming easier and easier to do 2005 has seen many options opening up. I thought I’d take a look at some of the methods that bloggers are currently using to make money through blogs.

Income Streams for Bloggers - How to Make Money Blogging

Advertising Programs - Perhaps the most obvious changes in the past few months have been with the addition of a variety of viable advertising options for bloggers looking to make money from their blogs. The most common way bloggers seem to earn money online is via the contextual ad program from Google - Adsense. A more recent addition that many are using successfully are Chitika’s eMiniMalls and WidgetBucks, Text Link Ads.

Azoogle Ads, Intelli Txt, DoubleClick, Tribal Fusion, Adbrite, Clicksor, AdHearUs, Kanoodle, Pheedo, TextAds, Bidvertiser, Fastclick and Value Click (to name just some of the options) and there is a smorgasbord of options. Of course there is more to come with MSN Adcenter and YPN both in beta testing and with a variety of other advertising system currently in development (YPN is only available to US publishers).

Lastly there’s BlogAds - one of the first blog specific ad networks.

RSS Advertising - The past 12 months have seen some advances in RSS Advertising also. I’m yet to hear of any bloggers making big money blogging through it to this point - but as improvements are made to the ad programs exploring this I’m sure we’ll start to see examples of it being profitable.

Sponsorship - In addition to the array of advertising programs that are available to join there is a growing awareness in the business of the value and opportunity that exists for them to advertise directly on blogs. I’m hearing more and more examples of this and have been fortunately to have a couple of ad campaigns of my own in the past month - one with Adobe a couple of weeks ago and another just completed with Ricoh for a new digicam over at my Digital Camera Blog. These are not isolated cases - as I say I know of many blogs exploring sponsorship with advertisers at present and suspect we’ll see more of it in the year ahead. Sponsorship is also happening on a post by post basis with some bloggers being paid to write on certain topics by companies - either in one off or a regular fashion - and they are able to make big money from their blogs doing so.

Affiliate Programs - There are larger affiliate programs like Amazon, Linkshare, Clickbank and Commission Junction but also literally thousands of others from the large to the very small.

Digital Assets - Increasing numbers of bloggers have been developing other digital assets to support and add revenue streams to their blogs. By this I mean that I’m increasingly seeing e-books, courses and tele-seminars being run by bloggers. My recent foray into this with the first series of the six figure blogging course that Andy and I ran a few weeks ago and have just released the study version of. This type of activity will only increase in future - in fact this week I’ve seen numerous examples of bloggers running courses.

Blog Network Opportunities - with the rise in popularity of Blog Networks - bloggers are also being presented with more places to earn an income from their blogging - by writing for and with others. While it might be difficult to get a writing gig with one of the bigger networks - there are plenty who are always asking for new bloggers to join and who are willing to pay bloggers using a variety of payment models. While there are distinct advantages of blogging for yourself - blogging for an established network who will handle a lot of the set up/promotion/admin/SEO etc has it’s advantages also. More and more bloggers are combining writing for themselves on their own blogs with taking on blog network blogs as additional income streams.

Business Blog Writing Opportunities - as blogging has risen in it’s profile as a medium more and more businesses are starting blogs. Many of these companies have internal staff take on blogging duties - but an increasing number of them are hiring specialist bloggers to come on and run their blogs. I know of a number of bloggers who in the past month or two have been approached for such paid work. Check out Bloggers for Hire if you’re looking for this type of work.

Non Blogging Writing Opportunities - Also becoming more common are bloggers being hired to write in non blogging mediums. Manolo’s recent coup of a column in the Washington Post is just one example of this as bloggers are increasingly being approached to write for newspapers, magazines and other non blog websites. Along side this is the rise of bloggers as published book authors - this is to the extent that one blogger I spoke with this week complained to me that they were one of the few bloggers than they knew who didn’t have a book deal!

Donations - Tip Jars and donation buttons have been a part of blogging for years now but this last year saw a number of bloggers go full time after fund raising drives. Perhaps the most high profile of these was Jason Kottke of kottke.org who through the generosity of his readership was able to quit his job and become a full time blogger.

Flipping Blogs - Also more common in 2005 was the practice of ‘Blog Flipping’ - or selling of blogs. This has happened both on an individual blog level (I can think of about 20 blogs that sold this year) but also on a network level (the most obvious of these being the 8 figure sale of Weblogs Inc to AOL).

Merchandising - My recent attempt to sell ProBlogger.net T-shirts wasn’t a raging success, but it is an example of how an increasing number of bloggers are attempting to make a few extra dollars from their blogs by selling branded products through programs like Cafepress. While I didn’t have a lot of success with merchandising - quite a few larger blogs are seeing significant sales - especially blogs with a cult following. I’m not at liberty to discuss details - but I know of one largish blog which will see sales over $20,000 in merchandise for the calendar year of 2005.

Consulting and Speaking - While it has been popular for established consultants to add blogs to their businesses we’re also starting to see bloggers with no consulting background able to make money by charging readers for their time in consulting scenarios BECAUSE of the profile that their blogs have built them. Blogging has the ability to establish people as experts on niche topics and we all know the value of being perceived as an expert. I spoke to one blogger last month who charges himself out at over $200 an hour for speaking and consulting work - his area of expertise was something that he knew little about 18 months ago - but through his blog he’s become a leader in his field and a minor celebrity in his industry.

As time rolls on there are more and more ways that bloggers make money from their blogs opening up. Feel free to suggest your own ideas and experiences in comments below.

With a new blog being started every second it can be hard to stand out from the crowd. Following are some tips on how to differentiate your blog from the millions of others out there.

Image by c.a. muller

1. Pick a unique topic - it is easier said than done to choose a topic that is unique from everyone else today in a blogosphere as crowded as we’re currently in - however opportunities do arise to start blogs on topics that are new trends, products or ideas. Being first doesn’t guarantee success - but it can help.

2. Develop a Unique Voice - while it may not always be possible to choose a unique topic it can sometimes be easier to cover that topic in a way that others do not. Whether it be by using humor, blogging as a character (think Fake Steve Jobs blog), blogging in the 3rd Person (Manolo the Shoe Blogger) or some other way - finding a unique voice or style can set you apart from the rest.

3. Design - having a unique blog design doesn’t mean you need to pay big dollars for a custom design - start with a default one (or a premium design like Thesis) and tweak it with a unique logo, colors and layout. Visual first impressions count and can be the deciding factor as to whether people subscribe to your blog or not.

4. Useful Content - perhaps the best way to stand out from the crowd and make an impression upon people is to produce content that impacts them in some way. Write something that matters, that helps people, that solves a problem, that enhances people’s lives and you drastically increase the chances of them coming back and bringing a friend with them.

5. Be Prolific - something that can make a real impression on people is when they keep ‘bumping into you’. Predict where your potential readers will be going online and position yourself there as a prolific contributor. It might be social media sites, it might be the comments section of another blog or it could be a forum on your topic - wherever it is - make sure you have an active presence there. If people keep seeing you in the places that they hang out they’ll eventually take note and want to know more about you.

6. Love Your Readers to Death - this is key in the early days of a blog when readers seem scarce. The reality is that the 10 readers that you DO have already are a powerful resource - focuse upon them rather than the thousands of readers that you DON’T have. Love them - thank them for their comments - involve them in your blogging - promote them and the sites that they have and in doing so you’ll be building loyalty, trust and relationship that one day will pay off. Each reader you have has their own network and can open up new audiences to you.

7. Be Original - there’s nothing more dry than coming to a blog that has much the same content as every other blog that you’ve already read that day. Don’t just rehash news and talk about things in the same way that others are - dare to be different, play devils advocate, look for new angles in stories, translate the news for your readers and help them to work out how it impacts them etc

8. Express an Opinion - people who express opinions seem to get more attention than those who simply report news. Tell people what YOU think and you’re bound to get discussion between those who agree with you and those who do not.

9. Get Visual - whether it be by using eye catching pictures, diagrams and charts or even using video - when you add a visual element to your posts you will grab the attention of those who are more visually oriented. Images draw the eye, illustrate points and add new dimension to what is largely a text based medium.

10. Use Titles with Bling - post titles that draw people to read your post are essential and can be the difference between someone visiting your blog from a search engine, social media site or another blog and visiting someone else’s blog that has a more intriguing title.

11. Longevity Counts - many blog readers are looking to journey with someone and can be a little suspicious of new blogs and wonder how long they’ll last. Blog consistently for the long term and you build credibility, trust and profile in your industry.

12. Build Momentum - one mistake that many blogs make is that there is a sense that the blog is not really going anywhere. Posts appear on the blog that rarely relate to one another. I find that when I’m in the middle of a series or writing content that builds upon something that I’ve written before that readers really respond well. Its also this momentum that builds a sense of anticipation on a blog - which in turn builds subscriber numbers.

13. Drive People to Your Archives - one of the weaknesses of blogs as a medium is that in they often hide their best content. The content that gets most attention is the latest post - whether it is good or not. Blogs that not only highly what is NEW but find ways to highlight what is BEST in their archives draw readers to the content that is most likely to convince them to stay around for more.

Alone the 13 points above will have some impact upon helping your blog to stand out from the crowd - however the key is to work on more than one because together they make a significant difference.

The following post on how to increase website traffic was submitted by Adrian W Kingsley-Hughes.

I started the PC Doctor blog in May of 2005 and for the first few months my traffic was really low - down in the few hundreds of visitors a day. It was pretty depressing I can tell you and there were times when I thought about quitting. I knew that the site was in the Google ’sandbox’ and so I either had to keep on plugging at it until it was out or I had to give up.

Fortunately, I decided to keep on posting but in the interim I decided that I was also going to do my utmost to drive traffic to my site manually until Google kicked in. I took a look around at what some of the successful blogs were doing and came up with three tactics that helped to double my website traffic in a month.

1. First, I made the most of Technorati tags. I tagged every key word in each of my posts. Initially I did this manually but them I discovered a WordPress plugin called SimpleTags that made the job a whole lot easier.

   I found that by tagging my post effectively they were getting a lot more attention then their untagged counterparts, and as an added advantage I was getting focused, quality traffic to the site!

2. I leveraged my existing website. I’ve been running my business website for a few years and that was getting modest levels of traffic that was relevant to my blog - so why not try to drive some of that to my new blog! I placed a few FeedBurner headline animator blocks on some of my most popular pages and after a day or so I noticed a significant increase in traffic for 5 minutes worth of work on my part.
3. Finally, I made effective use of trackback links to popular sites. If I commented on a post on another site I would make sure that I set up the appropriate trackback for it. The results from this are varied depending on the site and post that you are linking to but since I liked to comment and interact with the wider blogosphere anyway, it was free traffic!

Using these three simple techniques, I took The PC Doctor blog from a few hundred hits a day into the thousands in less than 30 days. This kept my interest in the site until it came out of the Google sandbox and I started to receiver some serious traffic. However, I’m convinced that these actions I took at the early stages have helped me create a loyal and targeted readership that continues to benefit my blog today.