Blogging Tips

Selling Yourself on a Blog

September 10, 2011 By Jacob 3 Comments

Under normal circumstances, if someone came up to me and told me that they were going to sell themselves, I would strongly advise that they stop being a ho. But, sometimes a person has got to do what a person has got to do.

However, there are situations where I think that selling yourself is important and one of those is on your blog. Sometimes, selling yourself on your blog is the best way to make money.

Selling yourself on your blog is my way of saying that you offer a service–or many services–that you think your readers would find most useful. Specifically, you’ll want it to be within your niche so that anyone who comes to your site will find useful.

Take, for example, my own services page. I offer SEO, theme customization and writing. Since I write about all of these things and people coming here are looking to learn about it, some might be willing to bypass the learning and go straight for implementation.

The good thing is that selling a service is not limited to just this online money making niche. Many niches can be done and I thought I’d break down a couple of ideas.

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Filed Under: Monetization

Case Study Months 1 – 3

September 2, 2011 By Jacob 3 Comments

What’s sad is that three months flies by really freaking fast. What’s even more sad is that I failed at updating you guys on how Knick Blogger, my latest project, is doing. I’ll start off by saying that it’s not doing all that well and I’ve got a lot of work ahead of me. But, I expected that.

And even then, not doing all that well can be a bit misleading. As you’ll see later in the post, in three months, I’ve built traffic to the site up to an average of 200 visitors a month. Obviously, that’s not good. But, as we’ll see in the post, I have a few reasons as to why and then a few plans to finally start seeing some growth.

For those that aren’t aware, back in June, I launched Knick Blogger because I love the Knicks, but also because I wanted to do a case study. I was going to update on a monthly basis, but time and a lack of real results to show prevented me from doing that.

So, I decided to do it, at least for this first update, after three months. Going forward, I think once a month makes a lot of sense because there is going to be a lot more growth.

One of the important things to understand is that we might have different results. What might work for me might not work for you at all. More importantly, what might work for could be something I totally forgot.

In other words, don’t try and follow what I do step by step hoping to make money. Each site is different and each person has different success. However, once again, this case study is my journey to show you how I build my blogs. So, with that said, let’s jump into the big details. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Blogging Tagged With: case study

Guest Blog Posting: All You Need to Know

August 18, 2011 By Jacob 8 Comments

There are two groups of bloggers out there. The first group is the group that feels that their best content deserves to be one place and that’s on their own blog. Screw the rest of the blogosphere. The second group is the group that recognizes the need to both network as well as give high quality content to other blogs to build their own blog.

If you’re part of the first group, I really hope this article serves its purpose and teaches you how wrong you are. And if you’re part of the second group, here’s a detailed guide to maximize that networking.

Regardless of your group, though, allow me to introduce you to the guest blog post. A guest blog post is, as the name suggests, a blog post from a guest. A guest blog post would be me writing something and then submitting it to ProBlogger.net. I don’t own ProBlogger, but I still give him some content.

There are quite a few reasons that you’d want to guest post on other blogs. And the reasons are rather wide and varied:

Traffic – When you are guest blog posting, you’re getting exposure. Yeah, you gain a bunch of eyeballs on content that you’re writing and that can potentially lead to those people migrating over to your blog to check it out.
Links – One of the most important aspects to Google’s overall algorithm is the link. Therefore, if you want to bring in consistent search engine traffic, you need links. At the end of every guest blog post, you get a link back to your site with your own anchor text…Can you think of a better way to get a highly targeted, one way backlink?
Branding – If you are starting to write on other blogs, those people are going to start knowing you. If you do it consistently within the same niche, suddenly those people are going to recognize you. If you wrote something great once, chances are, you wrote something great twice and that builds your brand.
It’s a win win. You are getting exposure, links, branding and subscribers and the blog owner is getting fresh, new content. That is helping the blog owner which, in turn, makes you look better. That’s an effective way to grow.

But, saying that guest blog posting is great is the easy part. How about actually implementing a strategy that will get you a ton of guest posts? Here’s my guide and the rules that I follow when I am guest posting on another blog. It’s allowed me to get two posts on ProBlogger, a post on Shoemoney.com, and some exposure on JohnChow.com.
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Filed Under: Marketing

Fuck it All!

August 1, 2011 By Jacob 12 Comments

photo credit: CMYKcolours

Don’t you just love when you come up with a great blog post idea and you spend hours working on it. You hit the publish button and you are so freaking excited. People are obviously going to comment, retweet, blog about it and everything else.

Why not, right?

I mean, it’s the best thing you’ve ever written, so naturally, it’s going to be amazing in the eyes of the readers. They’re obviously going to want to read it and beg you to write more.

Except, that doesn’t happen at all. Instead, your blog post sits there, stagnating, and you have to deal with the fact that no one wants to read a thing that you have to say. You’re boring. You’re dry. No one cares.

And yet, we try again…And again…And damn it, we try again. We love to write, so naturally, we continue to write. But, no one cares.

It’s sad really. And, each time that no one comments on what we write, despite all of our efforts, we increasingly get more and more frustrated. And suddenly, we snap.

Fuck it all!

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Filed Under: Blogging

Who Do You Have Coopetition With?

July 19, 2011 By Jacob 8 Comments

photo credit: Symic

One of the big things about being a business owner—blogger, brick and mortar business, or whatever—is that there is always someone else in a similar business as us who are potentially taking business away from us.

What tends to happen is we look at that person as the enemy and we dedicate all of this energy trying to beat them because they are the competition. They are taking business away from us and we need to do whatever we can to stop them.

Even online, it’s easy to imagine that someone else in the same niche as you is the competition. Since they are in the same niche, they are taking readers from you and that’s never good.

However, by focusing so hard on the fact that they are your competition, you miss out on opportunities that, should you take them, could benefit you more than fighting the competition. This opportunity is called coopetition.

As the word suggests, it’s cooperating with your competition in a way that mutually benefits both sides. In a competitive market, the two sides are fighting each other for market share. But, in a cooperative market, the two sides are helping each other, even if they are both vying for the same market share.

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Filed Under: Blogging