Blogging
What Would Happen To The World Without Your Blog?
This is a guest post by Jason Ulsrud, at Forty2Fifty.
I have found myself asking this question a lot lately. Am I providing purpose to the world?
Your blog can effect humanity in one of three ways:
- Make the world better
- Not change the world at all
- Make the world worse
Click Here To Continue Reading »
If I Were To Start All Over Again…
Today, my blogging efforts enjoy a certain bit of inertia. It is easier for me to do things because I have an audience and I have traffic.
What if I didn’t have it? If you take all that I’ve learned over my last 12 years of blogging and told me to start over again from scratch, how would I go about it?
Let me walk you through what I’d do. In fact, this is very similar to what I did when I launched this very blog a couple of years ago. Click Here To Continue Reading »
Talking About Making Money Online In Order To Make Money Online
One of the most common confusions any new blogger asks themselves is… What should I blog about in order to make money?
Many of the times, the conclusion ends up as follows: The people making good money online are the ones who talk about making money online.
It leads to a huge catch-22. It leads to skepticism. But, is it true?
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8 Mistakes Too Many Bloggers Make
I have compiled a quick list of 8 mistakes I see a lot of bloggers make. At least in my view, they are mistakes.
- Not evaluating the niche of the blog before starting it, then coming in AFTER the fact to figure out how to make money with it.
- Packing so many banner ads onto a blog that none of them work. Too often, this comes from the mistaken assumption that you can maximize revenue by simply packing more on the page. Don’t underrate white space on your blog. You don’t have to fill every corner of your theme with a visual component and it is often a bad idea to even try.
- Not posting often enough. No clarification needed.
- Writing in long, justified paragraphs. There is nothing harder to read than a super-long paragraph which is justified on both the left and right. Instead, use short sentences and short paragraphs. Break points up with headers and make use of bullet points.
- Not having a real mailing list for your blog. And, no, Feedburner doesn’t count.
- Not offering a bribe to get people onto your mailing list. Something like “Subscribe to get cool stuff” doesn’t work. Would YOU subscribe to your own list if you saw your blog? Probably not.
- Not writing with any purpose. Some blogs are just brain dumps of the blogger. No rhyme or reason to the content on the site, just whatever is interesting that day. Doesn’t usually work for building a loyal audience.
- Mis-using social media. Some bloggers do nothing by auto-tweet their posts to Twitter or (worse) pre-schedule tweets from their blog archives to tweet all day. That is no different than Twitter spam. If you are a blogger and are not using social media to be SOCIAL, then you’re making a mistake.
So, do you have any you think should be added? Do you take issue with any of them?
Twitter is Great, But Take The Conversation Back To Your Blog
Guest Post from Grant Griffiths.
I would be the first one to admit that Twitter has had a huge impact on both my blog and our business this last year. In fact, I get tremendous amounts of traffic to Blog For Profit every time I do a post when I let my twitter followers know about it. And each and every time one of my followers retweets my new post, I see a spike in traffic too.
I will also admit I love the conversations which are centered around one of my post on twitter. But, and you know there is always going to be a but. I also think twitter can take away from the conversations we like to see on our blogs too.
We would all like to think everyone who is anyone uses Twitter on a daily basis. Everyone doesn’t. And that is why I want to make sure those on twitter don’t forget the importance of the conversations which take place on our blogs. Yes, twitter is social and we do have conversations there. And yes, we can all network there and make connections. However, connecting with our target audience is so much more than just using twitter. Click Here To Continue Reading »
This is Why Most Bloggers Don’t Make Progress
This is a guest post by Melvin Dichoso from MelvinBlog.com
As you are reading this, you are probably aware by now that 90% of bloggers don’t really succeed and make money while only like 10% of them are the ones that do very well with their blog. Making money online through blogging is really cool, and there’s no doubt about it. That’s perhaps the reason why with all the other millions of ways to make money online, most of us choose blogging.
Unfortunately, success cannot take all of us. It can only take very few people and these are people who are dedicated and are doing things correctly. That being said, we can therefore assume that most bloggers are doing it incorrectly. I have been a good observer and these are some of the things I found out why they most bloggers don’t make progress:
Click Here To Continue Reading »
Driving Behavior, Not Conversation
From my observation, I think there is a very important strategic component of blogging that too many overlook.
I preface this whole post by saying that it depends on your intentions. If you want to ultimately make money with your blog, then pay close attention. If you just want to get high comment counts and some fans, then this post might rub you the wrong way. Or at least give you another way of looking at things.
So, here it is… Click Here To Continue Reading »
Guest Appearance on The Metropolis, with Deborah Shane
This afternoon, I was a guest on The Metropolis, a show on Blog Talk Radio hosted by Deborah Shane.
It was a lot of fun being on the show. We touched on a lot of different aspects of blogging successfully and we also talked about trends. The full show is an hour long, and I thought I would just embed it here so you can have a listen.
I hope you enjoy, and if you want to subscribe to Deborah’s show, you can do that right here. She does the show every week, live on Blog Talk Radio.
The Measurable Benefits Of Guest Posting
This is a guest post by Andy Walton.
Many blogs accept guest posts for one very obvious reason – free, quality content is obviously appealing to their owners. And speaking as an author, it’s healthy for the ego to see your work on a high profile and well respected blog. But what are the quantifiable benefits and how can you measure them?
I will not offer any guidelines on how to write your guest post, as David has already written a full guest post checklist. Instead I’ll focus on how to monitor the results once published.
We’ll investigate the impact of a guest post I wrote on a medium size blog (an Alexa traffic rank of 30,000). The post for this experiment was related to our newly launched website, and aimed at increasing awareness. The results were measured one week after the post was published.
For the sake of simplicity, I’ll focus on 3 key areas: Click Here To Continue Reading »
Ten Years In The Military Taught Me [Blogging]
This is a guest post by TheInfoPreneur, at TheInfoPreneur.net.
I joined the military when I was 16 years old. I served all over the world in a variety of roles. I have served along side some of the bravest, funniest and toughest people (men and women) in the world. Those 10 years have given me 10 lifetimes of memories. Some bad, some good and some downright scary.
Every event I have been involved in has taught me a valuable lesson. Sometimes I didn’t realize that straight away, but it taught me the fundamentals of success in any walk of life.
Loyalty
Loyalty doesn’t mean supporting your favorite team whether they win or lose. It doesn’t even mean going to see them even if they are playing away. Loyalty means having some one’s back even if it means sacrificing something you want to do. Loyalty is the ability to drop everything when someone needs you.
Now, don’t get me wrong. Common sense plays a factor in this. For instance, loyalty doesn’t mean if your friend asks you for money and you don’t have it, you rob a bank. But what it does mean, if they need something, you are their first port of call and you do everything you can to do right by them. Making sure they get what’s right for them at that time is loyalty.
Are you loyal to your readers or customers? Do you give back as much as you take? Being loyal to my readers is everything to me. It creates an unbreakable bond. Loyalty is for life.
I'm David Risley. I've been making my living as a blogger for over a decade. Blogging is my business and how I support my family. With this blog, I'm just gettin' REAL and telling you how this business works. 
