Back when I was at the university (around 2002) I went to live in an apartment with three other students. I didn’t know them prior to moving there, but quickly we became good friends. Then one day I was leaving the building to walk to the university and I noticed one of my friends leaving the garage with a BMW Z3 M. Not familiar? At the time it was one of the best BMWs around, with almost 300hp. Below is a picture.
Needless to say I was shocked when I saw the scene. I approached him and said something like “What the heck dude! You never told me you had a Z3 M!”.
Right after that I obviously questioned him regarding how he managed to buy one, since he apparently was just a student. He told me that he made money buying and selling stuff on a site called eBay. I was surprised, but that was it. I guess at the time all I cared about was partying and having fun (I was 19 after all), so I didn’t pay too much attention to my friend’s entrepreneurial endeavors.
Looking back I wish I had acted differently. That is, I wish I had gone to my friend and said something like “OK, you obviously have something working for you here. You figured something out that other people haven’t, with amazing results. I want that too. Would you be so kind to teach me?”
I am sure my friend would’ve been flattered with such an attitude from my part, and that he would’ve done his best to teach me all he knew about the eBay stuff he was working on. I am also sure I would be millionaire by now if I had started doing online marketing back in 2002….
Why I am telling you this story? To illustrate the point that learning directly from other people who already achieved what you want to achieve is one of the best ways to succeed, and yet few of us do it.
And here is the interesting part: I don’t think that convincing people to mentor you is that hard. You just need to show you REALLY want it, and here is what I mean by it. Suppose you wanted to learn SEO and make a living with it. You could email Aaron Wall saying something like “Hi Aaron. You are one of the best SEOs around, and I want to become just like you. Would you mentor me?”. Obviously such an approach would fail, and Aaron would certainly put your email in the spam folder.
Here is what I would do instead: I would find out where Aaron lives, and I would fly there and rent a house in front of his. Then I would ring his doorbell and say something like: “Hi Aaron. I respect your work immensely, and since I want to learn SEO and make a living form it I figured it would be a good idea to learn from the best. I just rented the house across the street to be able to spend some time with you. I hope you’ll be able to teach me the stuff you know, and in return for the favor I am willing to work for you for free during that time.”
Now this is the attitude of someone who REALLY wants something right?
Original Post: We Should Try To Learn More From Other People
This is a guest post by Danny Wong. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guidelines here.
Writing hasn’t always been a skill of mine. I rarely ever read when I was younger, and still had my father read me books for years after I had learned how to read for myself.
So how did I go from a forced writer (I only wrote things when I had to for school and never for recreation) to an influential blogger?
I started writing for our business blog just because we needed content creators. I was new to this whole Social Media thing, and I could hardly write coherent content, nevertheless quality content. I dreaded it.
We quickly killed my future contributions to the blog because I wasn’t enjoying it, the content wasn’t incredibly beneficial or engaging, and instead I focused more efforts on things I could do to really impact the business.
So I turned to learning how to manage Public Relations because I thought, “If I can’t inbound any visitors to the site and business blog by writing quality content, then let me go out and get traffic from other people’s sites and blogs.”
So I spent a lot of time schmoozing bloggers and writers and then I closed a feature article with a writer on a site called Examiner.com. I thought it was the neatest thing to have such a high traffic site featuring me since it had millions of unique visitors a month. After reading and reveling in the feature article, I saw a Call-To-Action saying, “Write for us” and I thought, “Hm. This seems like an interesting opportunity to build brand awareness through links in my byline and increase my personal brand by just being a (sort of) professional writer.”
The CTA called to me and I answered. Using a referral from the writer that featured me, I ended up becoming the Boston Startup Examiner, and then things just snowballed from there. I starting reading blogs like DailyBlogTips, reading more content on Examiner and other news-oriented blogs, and then starting doing guest posts any blogs that would take my work!
Then I just kept stumbling upon opportunities, and quickly built relationships with lots of editors through my formal PR work and then reached out to them with a guest post ready for their review.
Finally, I started publishing on some of the biggest sites in their niche, like SearchEngineJournal and a local NY Times blog, and then I started publishing on some of the biggest blogs in the world like TheNextWeb and ReadWriteWeb.
Now, I have a blogger account with the world’s #1 blog, HuffingtonPost, and I have a pretty strong portfolio of writings published in an even stronger set of blogs, which gives me leverage when trying to publish articles on other sites when I can say, “My name is Danny Wong and I have contributed writings to NY Times (blog), HuffingtonPost, ReadWriteWeb, TheNextWeb and Examiner.”
Just to break down how I went from sucking at writing to writing for some of the world’s biggest blogs:
1. I had a relationship with a writer at a media outlet that had open invitations for writers to join, and spent way too many hours crafting my application writings as well as my first few posts.
2. I was reading more blogs and books, and spent more time writing blog posts that I would never publish just for the sake of practicing writing.
3. I started publishing anywhere and everywhere that would talk to a small-time writer like me, especially one that had some interesting thoughts and experience in startups and entrepreneurship.
4. Some of the bigger blogs I read had published guest posts on their site, so I contacted the first person I knew who was a writer (a relationship I built through my PR work) and asked how I might become a contributor. Sometimes, I was directed to the editor who would then request I submit a post to them directly, or I would have already had contact with an editor who was anxious to see how I could contribute to their business.
5. The bigger sites bit. Admittedly, I did spend several hours writing my first post for each outlet, but it was well worth the time investment because I started the relationship off on the right foot, and then became a semi-frequent contributor.
6. I name-dropped all the different media outlets I had contributed to when pitching myself to publish with a new media outlet, so things just snowballed as I built up my credibility. As I became more credible after publishing posts with more and more influential blogs, the bigger blogs started to pay attention to me and were more than happy to take my contributions.
It took quite a bit of hard work, networking and determination to build up my writing skills and my writing portfolio so now I can proudly say I am a blogger with the #1 blog in the world and write for several of the biggest blogs out there.
What tactics did you use to publish with big blogs and sites?
About the author: Danny Wong is a writer at HuffingtonPost (you can see his column here), the #1 blog in the world, and the co-founder of co-created dress shirts startup, Blank Label.
Original Post: How to Suck at Writing, and then Write for the Biggest Blogs in the World
As you probably know recently I launched a new website, which aims to be a complete resource for people who want to get started online and build their first websites. Traffic is picking up there, and one of the most common complaints I get over the contact form is that readers can’t find available domains that are appealing enough.
That is why I decided to compile a list there with 30 Awesome Tools To Find Available Domain Names. I tried to make it as complete as possible, and you’ll find different types of tools included. Some allow you to search for available domains in real time, others create and suggest domains for you, others yet allow you to add prefixes, suffixes and adjectives to your specified keywords. There are also resources to find recently expired domain names, lists of available domains with a specific number of characters and so on.
I don’t think I missed any tool, but if you know one that is not included there just let me know and I’ll add it. Make sure to bookmark that article too, as it will be useful when you decide to research new domain names.
Original Post: 30 Tools to Help You Find Domain Names
Twitter became one of the most popular platforms to share links online, and as a result most bloggers and website owners are using some kind of retweet button these days.
The button provided by Tweetmeme was by far the most popular one around the web, but a couple of weeks ago there were some news that might change this picture. Basically Twitter launched its own retweet button (here is the official page to get the code for your site), and it seems that they made a licensing deal with Tweetmeme, because that company itself is now recommending people to use Twitter’s version of the button.
I had the Tweetmeme button installed on this blog, but as you can see now I have migrated to the official one from Twitter, mainly to test it out. There is one thing I like so far: the Twitter button is not automatic as the Tweetmeme one was. This means that when you click on the button a pop-up window will open with the text you are about to retweet, but you can customize it as you see fit, and only then send it to your Twitter stream. With Tweetmeme the process was automatic, and as soon as you would hit the button your Twitter stream would get updated with the message.
However, there are some negative points too. First of all the Tweetmeme plugin for WordPress had many more features, including the possibility of displaying the button on your RSS feed and choosing what URL shortener you want to use. Second, the Twitter button seems to have some technical glitches yet. For example, it seems to under-report the number of retweets on any given page, and sometimes it also displays a zero there wrongly.
I’ll probably stick with the Twitter version, because I think Twitter will keep developing and polishing it, but I wonder what most people will do, as there are many options available (e.g., Tweetmeme, Topsy, Retweet.com and so on).
What retweet button are you currently using? Do yo plan to switch to Twitter’s official one if you are not using it yet?
This is a guest post by Celestine Chua. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guidelines here.
In the past few months, I have been working extremely hard at growing my blog The Personal Excellence Blog. The net result is a 3,323 subscribers growth in the past 3 months which I’m very excited about. In today’s post, I’ll share with you the key steps on how I achieved this and hope you’ll learn something for yourself.
How I Got Started
Even though I started The Personal Excellence Blog in Dec ’08, I did not concentrate on its growth up until April this year. Before April ’10, my subscriber count (via RSS/email) was 1,790. For a blog that was less than 1.5 years old, it was a decent subscriber base, but it wasn’t big.
So in April, I got serious about growing the blog. I set specific goals, created clear plans and got down to work. Today, it’s the start of July 2010 and 3 months have passed. Below are the results:
Feedburner Stats (Dec ’08 – Jul ’10)
Feedburner count for The Personal Excellence Blog since it started in Dec ’08. The growth in ’09 was gradual as I did not do anything specific in traffic building. I was writing my best content but did not market much. As you can see, the subscriber base grew rapidly in the past few months (the spike started from April ’10 onwards).
Subscriber Breakdown Week by Week (Apr ’10 – Jul ’10)
A week by week breakdown of my subscriber count from 1st week of April. From Apr ’10 to start of Jul ’10, my subscribers has grown from 1,790 to 5,113 subscribers, a difference of 3,323 subscribers. The average increase is 277 subscribers per week. While it may seem small for big blogs like Problogger and Daily Blog Tips, this is very sizable growth from a blog with an original base of 1,790 subscribers only.
6 Biggest Steps That Helped Me Achieve The Results
I’m sure some of you are curious on what I did to achieve this result and I’m more than happy to share with you here. There are no gimmicky tricks here – these are all real strategies which all of us can apply right now.
1. Set clear goals and plans
You got to have clear goals. It’s good that you want to grow your blog, but by how much and by when? After all, getting just 1 more subscriber can also be seen as growing your blog. Is that all what you want or do you want more?
I had very clear goals when I started. I used subscriber count (via RSS or email) as the key performance metric (You can use other metrics if you want. I feel subscriber count is the most ubiquitous and robust measurement for blogs). I laid month-by-month subscriber goals, then broke them into weekly goals. Before the start of each week, I would design an action plan with clear steps on what to do (guest posting, free ebooks, etc – refer to steps #2-#6) to achieve the target of the week. Then at the end of the week, I would review to see what worked and what didn’t work as I design my plan for next week.
Goal setting and planning are critically important – Unfortunately, many bloggers grow their blog through a very random approach and it gives them random results. It was proper goal-setting and planning that served as the backbone for the results. If you’re interested in the goal setting framework I use, I wrote about it in detail in ESPER: 5-Step Successful Goal Achievement Framework (7-part series). This is an extremely robust goal achievement framework I use to achieve my personal goals as well as in my 1-1 coaching with my clients.
2. Do Massive Guest Posting
Guest posting was easily the largest contributor to my increased traffic in the past 3 months. Besides writing at The Personal Excellence Blog, I was doing massive guest posting on other personal development blogs – large ones like LifeHack.org and DumbLittleMan, to the smaller blogs. Here is my guest post count in the past 3 months:
April 2010 – 7 published guest posts
May 2010 – 8 published guest posts
June 2010 – 5 published guest posts (some sites I submitted to in June have a longer publishing lead time, so some of them will be posted in July instead)
Note that the guest posts weren’t random short posts – each post took a considerable amount of time and was on average 2,000 words/long (the longest ones were over 3,000 words). This guest post you are reading is about 2,300 words.
There were important lessons I learned on how to maximize your traffic through guest posting:
Guest post at larger blogs. In general (assuming all other factors remain the same), the larger the host site, the more traffic it’ll bring you. If you’re going to take the effort to write a guest article, you want to get the maximum exposure possible. Generally host sites with >10k subscribers would be a good, though writing at a blog with 5k subscribers will definitely be helpful if your reader base is small at the moment.
Choose sites similar in theme with yours. If you have a blog for pet lovers and you guest post at LifeHack.org (a personal development site), it’s not going to bring you many readers. Be targeted in your approach. Look for sites in your niche to guest post at. Since The Personal Excellence Blog is about personal development and peak performance, I chose similar sites to guest post at. Currently, the 2 key sites I guest post at are Lifehack.org (85k subscribers) and Dumb Little Man (65k subscribers).
Put your top value in your guest post. Just because it’s a guest post doesn’t mean you should put lesser effort into it. Writing your best content and ensuring it does well in your host’s site is both beneficial for your host as well as for you. If it gets high traffic, it’ll also lead to higher clickthroughs to your site. For example, my guest post 42 Practical Ways To Improve Yourself at LifeHack.org did very well – it had over 1,300 retweets and facebook shares (average post on LifeHack gets is 150+) and is the #1 pick on Lifehack.org out of the hundreds of articles posted this year. Subsequently, it brought the most traffic to my blog out of other guest posts. The time and effort you put into your (guest) posts show – put in the due diligence and readers will visit your blog for more (and possibly subscribe) if they like what they read.
Cover a topic that matches both the host’s blog and your blog. On one hand, you’ll cater to the maximum number of readers at the host site. At the same time, it’ll attract readers who will be potentially interested in what you have to say in your blog.
Use linkbacks in the guest post. If the host allows linkbacks to your blog, use them wisely. Be sure to check if the host has any limit on number of links and keep within the limit.
Put a subscription link in your author bio. Make it easy for readers to subscribe by putting your RSS and email subscription link in your bio. Some blogs have limitations on the author write-up and may request you only have 1-2 lines. If so, prioritize what you want to put. If you look at my author bio in this guest post, you’ll see I included both my RSS link and free subscription for my newsletter.
3. Offer an incentive for subscribing
If you want to grow your subscription count, you have to give readers an incentive to subscribe, preferably via email/newsletter. If you are a regular reader of Problogger, you would know about the importance of having your own email list, which is crucial for your product/service marketing/launches. I recommend using free ebooks / information products as incentive as it’s convenient and highly relevant for blog readers.
Up until April this year, I never had any sign-up incentive for readers. After seeing my article 101 Things To Do Before You Die is the 2nd most popular article on my blog (it also landed me an interview with CNN regarding the topic of bucket lists), I turned it into a pdf ebook with the same title and gave it away as a sign-up gift for those who subscribe to the free newsletter (feel free to sign up for my free newsletter via my author bio below to get the ebook) . I also prominently displayed this ebook incentive in my sidebar (see image below):
In the week I launched the free ebook (Apr Week 3), I had over 600 new subscribers (much higher than the average weekly growth of 200 subscribers), a large part driven by the free ebook. I believe many of these new subscribers were readers who bookmarked my site, consistently read my articles but just didn’t subscribe as there wasn’t a reason. Today, the 101 Things To Do Before You Die ebook remains important in generating sign-ups for my newsletter.
Some notes about your sign-up incentive:
It should be related to what your blog has to offer. Otherwise your readers just going to sign-up and unsubscribe later on when they realize your blog is about other stuff. In my example, people who are interested in creating bucket lists are generally also interested in personal growth/development and hence will appreciate what I write about (daily reflections/tips on living our best life)
It should be elevant to your readers’ needs. ”101 Things To Do Before You Die” is a catchy topic and very relevant since everyone will have a list of things they want to accomplish in his/her life before he/she die. A good way is to see what are the top articles on your blog and use them to spark ideas for your sign-up incentive.
4. Offer free ebooks with top content
In April ’10, I created a Free Ebooks section and converted my most popular series and articles into free pdf ebooks. While it took time to put together the articles, format them nicely and design the ebook covers, it definitely paid off. My ebooks section became wildly popular – to date, I have 8 free personal development ebooks covering key personal growth topics (how to discover your purpose, successful goal achievement, book of 300+ inspiring quotes, how to overcome procrastination, dealing with disappointment, etc) and over 15,000 downloads in total. The ebooks section itself has nearly 20k views on Stumble Upon.
It seems that even though the same articles are available on the blog, having them in ebook format has its own value as readers can access them easily on their computer and read when they’re offline. Not only that, new readers can easily scan and see your top content there, rather than weed through all the articles. It’s also a great way for them to distribute to their friends/family, which serves as positive WOM.
My ebook tips for you:
Look at the most popular articles / series at your blog and turn them into ebooks
You can use My Ecover Maker to make your covers for free. I scoured the whole internet for an ebook cover maker and this was hands down the best.
Include a personal foreword in the ebook, as it’s possible someone new ends up reading it. It should introduce them to your blog and interest them enough to surf over and read more.
5. Place your subscription link in a prominent spot
Your RSS /newsletter sign-up link should be prominent and easily accessible. It always puzzles me why some bloggers put their RSS link in hard to find places. In a highly cluttered internet environment where people have low attention span, you want to make it very easy for readers to subscribe.
I checked out numerous blogs and found out the top right hand corner is the most common spot to place subscription icons. If you look at the screenshot above of The Personal Excellence Blog, I place my RSS / Email links in the top right hand corner.
6. Practice the 8 habits of highly excellent bloggers
Last, but definitely not the least. There are 8 habits common across highly excellent bloggers which I’ve identified. They are:
Deliver their best value in every article
Work harder than anyone else
Practice what they preach
Don’t write to please
Keep things real
Not afraid to be vulnerable
Keep upgrading themselves
Transform lives with their writing
Each habit has been equally important for me in gaining readership and will bring you blogging results if you practice them duly. I’ve written them in detail in 8 Habits of Highly Excellent Bloggers (my guestpost at Problogger) with specific examples of each habit and how to apply them as a blogger, so be sure to check them out.
Moving Forward
I’m definitely not stopping here of course – I’m working even harder now to increase my readership base in the next few months (and years) and look forward to the growth ahead. If you have been enjoying my articles, be sure to subscribe to my feed and newsletter (links in my author bio) for more great high value content.
Are there any traffic building / subscriber building tips which work great for you? Feel free to share in the comments area so we can all learn together
About the Author: I’m Celestine Chua and I write at The Personal Excellence Blog on how to achieve your highest potential and live your best life. Get my free ebook guide 101 Things To Do Before You Die now by signing up for my newsletter (100% free, unsubscribe whenever you want). Please connect with me on Twitter @celestinechua too.
Original Post: How I Gained 3,323 Subscribers in 3 Months
As you probably heard about, Apple is going to have a product announcement event next week, on September 1st. There is a lot of buzz around it right now, because industry pundits expect the Cupertino company to announce its new TV set top box, called iTV.
Some people are saying that this new device will revolutionize the TV industry. It will probably be connected with Apple iTunes, where people will be able to buy shows on demand and what not.
I am not sure how accurate the predictions are, but if the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad are indicators, iTV is going to rock and make a big dent in the market.
What does this means for bloggers and webmasters? It means that if you act fast, you might be able to build a quite popular and profitable website around Apple’s new product. Some people are killing it right now with iPhone and iPad related websites, and iTV should follow alike.
If I had some time available I would start building such a website today. I even researched some domains, and there are good ones still available. Examples:
AppleiTVReview.com/.net/.org
AppleiTVReviews.net/.org
AppleiTVNews.net/.org
AppleiTVGuide.com/.net/.org
iTVreview.net/.org
At this point you might be asking: “Won’t Apple come after me if I use one of these domains?”. In theory it is legal to use a trademark on a domain name as long as the consumer will not get confused and think you are the official trademark owner or related to it. That is why Paypal cannot take down PaypalSucks.com. A domain like AppleiTVReview.com clearly indicates you are not related with Apple in my opinion, but talk to a lawyer first if you want to be sure and don’t take my suggestion as advice (yeah I am covering mine…).
Anyway my plan would be to put the website up today, start putting some content there about the iTV rumors, and start building some backlinks. Then on September 1st I would follow Apple’s announcement closely, and if the iTV turns out to be the product they are announcing, I would keep building/promoting the site to make it an authority inside its niche.
I already have too much on my plate right now though. What about you? If you have time available I would give this a shot. If you end up making thousands of dollars buy me a beer some day!
Original Post: If I Had Time Available I Would Make an iTV Website Today
If the title sounds confusing, here is what the guys from Nmap.org did: they scanned the top 1 million sites on the web, according to Alexa, retrieved the favicon of each one, and created a graph where the size of each favicon is proportional to the traffic of the website.
You can see the result on a post they call Icons of the Web.
You can zoom in and out, and it is pretty fun to keep looking around and identifying the favicon of websites you know. In fact if you have an Alexa rank below 1,000,000 you should be able to find your favicon there too. I spent some 10 minutes looking for mine. In vain.
Then I decided to cheat and use the search function, and bingo:
As you can see the DBT favicon has the same size of the Internet Explorer homepage one. How do you like that Microsoft!
Finally, hat tips to @johnchow, as I came across this site on his Twitter stream.
Original Post: A Favicon Graph Of The Top 1 Million Sites on The Web
Digg launched its much expected version 4 yesterday. There are some big changes implemented, so I think they deserved a small review.
The biggest change is the introduction of social elements into Digg’s platform. Think about mashing Twitter into the old Digg system. Right after logging into your account, in fact, you’ll be offered a list of suggested users you can follow. If you had fans in the past, they will be your followers, and vice versa. You can follow me on digg.com/envec if you want (I’ll reciprocate).
Once you visit the homepage you’ll find another change. Now you’ll see a list of popular stories that have been dugg by at least one of your friends (e.g., people you follow). In other words, each user sees a personalized version of the front page now. You still can get the old style front page though, where the overall most popular stories get displayed. Simply click on “Top News” on the top left corner.
One thing I liked is that when you click on the front page stories you are now sent directly to the original website. Before the change you would be redirected to the Digg page of that story, and then you would need to click a second time to open the original website….
Another positive change is how submitting stuff to Digg works. The process became a lot easier. On every page of the site you’ll notice a box saying “Digg it”. If you want to submit a story you just need to paste the URL there and click the button. If no one submitted it in the past, you’ll just need to write the description and bang, the story is in the system (it is also sent to all your followers).
Finally, managing your profile became simpler. Just click on “Settings” and you’ll see a clear menu with the options you have. Bloggers and web publishers should pay attention to the “Import Feeds” feature, which allows you to connect your RSS feed with your Digg account, auto-submitting all your latests posts. It’s necessary to verify your feed by placing a snipped of code in one of your posts.
Overall I think the Digg team did a great job with version 4. They understood that Twitter is basically becoming a link sharing platform, and they modeled Digg to do a better job at that.
Will it be useful again to drive traffic to small publishers like you and me? I am not sure yet, but I’ll certainly give it another shot, and I’ll let you guys know how it works out.
There are a few pieces of advice that tend to come as standard when you look for help with blogging. “Write compelling content”, “network in your niche”, and “stay consistent” are probably the most common words of wisdom you’ll receive. “Pick the right niche” ranks right up there with them as well.
Choosing the right niche, in the case of blogging, usually just means that you should pick a topic you’re passionate about, which also happens to have a large audience. It’s advice I’ve given myself throughout the years and I still see it on many blogs today.
Yet, I just don’t think it’s relevant anymore.
After more than 15 coaching calls in the last month, I had the realisation that this advice just isn’t helping people, especially with 10 of those calls involving my client stressing out about which industry they should be blogging in.
“Should I define myself as a blog on Lifestyle design or Personal Development?” and “Will people know what I mean by Creative Marketing?” were just some of the related queries that I received.
I instantly replied with “Don’t worry about it” which not only helped bring these people some relief, but also touched upon something that I think everyone should think about. In my opinion, choosing your blog niche – in most cases – just doesn’t really matter anymore.
Defining yourself is a waste of time
I used to run a blog which covered my journey of going from college dropout and leaving England at 18 to working for a big marketing agency in Cape Town where I didn’t know one single person. It was a site that not only grew to thousands of subscribers very quickly, but a site where I worked very hard to define what it was about.
I wanted everyone to know that my blog covered the topic of personal development. Yet, the only place I actually mentioned personal development was in the title tag (to increase search engine rankings for that phrase). The sites’ name, PluginID, didn’t really give much away, and neither did the “Plug into your identity” tagline.
Looking back, my focus on just writing about “personal development” actually hindered me in a number of ways.
The first way being that defining myself was a total waste of time, and probably is for you too. There are simply far more important important aspects to blogging which should be occupying your attention. The most important thing you can do is get the essentials out of the way and then just start writing.
A blog is nothing without its content.
Whether you define yourself as a personal finance blog or a financial advice blog doesn’t really matter. It only matters if you would change your content based on that definition. Nobody is going to look at your blog and think it’s about health if all you write about is money.
Your content is going to show what your site is about; you don’t have to stress about defining it.
Thankfully, there is…
A much better alternative
I can’t write an article which takes out one of the most recommended fundamentals of blogging and not replace it with what I believe is a far superior alternative. Instead of stressing about which direction you’re going to take your blog and the angle of your content, just simply ask yourself “in which way do I want to help my audience?”
That’s it.
Do you want to entertain people?
Do you want to give them the latest news?
Do you want to help them make more money?
Do you want them to become better copywriters?
I can’t answer this question for you, but it should be pretty easy for you. After all, your blog wouldn’t be much without an audience. What do you want to provide for them?
With this one question, you can accomplish a number of things a lot easier.
Content
No longer do you have to worry about whether a certain article fits under the category of ‘personal development’ or whether you’re writing something that your audience doesn’t care about. You simply focus on whether the information you’re providing helps you help your audience.
My aim with ViperChill is to give people the best advice I can about internet marketing and building remarkable websites. I don’t stress if a topic choice is going to be relevant to my readers because I’m always publishing content with that aim so the majority of the time, it just naturally will be.
This question gives you more content ideas, helps you decide if an idea is right for your audience and allows you to twist content ideas from other industries and make them more relevant to your readers.
Audience
Another reason people worry about which blog niche they choose is because they want to make sure they’re attracting – and keeping – the right website visitors. The great thing about this question is that it allows you to build an audience that is laser-targeted.
And as most of you know, a laser targeted audience is exactly what you want if you ever come to monetise your website. Although there are other factors besides what you write about that attract a readership – such as your content length and post frequency – it’s still the biggest factor in growing a blog which can make you money.
Value
The only reason people ever read a blog is because of the value that it provides. That value can be in one of hundreds of forms, but it always exists. For instance, the value I receive from Daily Blog Tips is information which helps me become a better writer, which in-turn helps me to grow my business.
Another blog I love, TechCrunch, provides me not only with boredom relief when I’m not sure what to work on next but also information on the newest social media sites I may be able to utilise. Knowing how you can help people through your site is the exact value that you’re providing to them.
As long as you continue to put out content that is inline with your aim, then you’re constantly giving your audience what they want. That’s true providing true value.
If you’re still not convinced, answer me this: Is it easier for you to tell me how you want to help people, or easier to tell me which category your blog fits under?
About the Author: Glen Allsopp is the owner of ViperChill.com. If you liked this post, you may also enjoy his guide to WordPress SEO.
Original Post: Why Choosing a Blog Niche Might Not Be a Good Idea
Google AdWords is Google’s advertising platform that allows advertisers to display text ads on Google’s search results. Advertisers can choose what keywords should trigger their ads, and how much they are willing to pay for each click on their ads. The ads usually appear on top and to the right of normal search results. The image below is one example of an AdWords ad:
Traditionally the AdWords platform has been used by large advertisers and companies that want to promote their products, services, get more traffic to their websites and so on.
However, even individuals can become AdWords advertisers (creating an account is free, and just requires a valid credit card), and by spending or so you should be able to accomplish some pretty useful things. Below you’ll find 6 of them.
1. Sell Your Car
The Internet has completed displaced the newspaper classifieds section. If you want to sell your car today, you should put an ad on Craigslist.com, AutoTrader.com, Cars.com and so on. The problem with this method is that you’ll be competing with tens of thousands of people who are also putting ads on these sites to sell their cars.
Can you do something to get an edge? Yes, and that is where Google AdWords comes into play. You can create a couple of ads, and target very specific keywords, so that when people search for them on Google they will click on your ad and end up visiting the page describing your car.
Let’s suppose you are trying to sell your Toyota Corolla. The first step would be to put it for sale on Craigslist.com (or on any other website you prefer). Once that is done, you’ll go to your AdWords account and create a couple of ads targeting terms like: “used corolla”, “buy used corolla”, “used corolla los angeles”, “corolla lost angeles” and so on. Finally, just make the ads point to your car’s page on Craigslist.
You will probably need to bid or more per click to get your ads appearing on Google search results, but it sure will be worth the money, as these visitors will have a good chance of purchasing your car.
2. Sell Your House/Apartment
Just like you can use Google AdWords to sell your car, you can also use it to sell your house/apartment. In fact it will be even more effective here, because the return you’ll have is larger, so your advertising budget should be larger too.
The process is the same. You start by creating an ad for your house on some online marketplace (e.g., HouseHunt.com). After that you’ll create some ads on Google AdWords, and target keywords that people looking for houses might be using. Examples include “apartment new york”, “buy apartment new york”, “apartment washington heights ny”, “two bedroom apartment nyc” and so on.
Given the value of a house you could also consider creating a website to sell it. This would allow you to customize the visual elements, with more pictures, a larger description and so on. You would then drive traffic to your website using the Google AdWords ads.
3. Land A New Job
Picture this: the manager of the company you want to work for is on Google, and he decides to run a search for his name (who doesn’t do it these days?). Surprising as it sounds, the very first results says something like this: “Hey John Doe, Googling your name is fun, and hiring me will be fun too!”.
Upon clicking on that results the manager would be taken to a page with your resume and an explanation of why you want to work for his company, and why he should hire you.
This neat trick would certainly increase your chances of getting hired huh? You can do it with Google AdWords (e.g., by creating ads targeting the name of the manager you want to hire you). In fact this idea is not mine, and one guy already used it successfully. He landed 5 interviews with top advertising agencies in New York, and three of them offered him a position.
4. Get Accepted Into College
The same trick can be used to improve your chances of getting accepted into college. Having a high GPA or high SAT scores is not enough these days, as competition for the prestigious colleges is fierce. Often times the creativity and entrepreneurial spirit of the applicant might make all the different.
You would just need to create some AdWords ads targeting the names of the staff who review the applications of the college you want to attend, pointing them to a website where you explain who you are and why they should accept you.
You could create ads targeting the name of the college too, with a headline like “Do you work at Stanford? Then You Got Know About This Kid!”. The more creative the better.
5. Get A Date
If you are into online dating, Google AdWords can certainly boost the number of contacts you’ll get. First of all you could use it to drive traffic to your profile page on existing dating sites (e.g., PlentyOfFish.com, Match.com and so on).
Second, you can also create a website to advertise yourself (including your bio, pictures and what not) and them use AdWords to drive traffic there.
As for the keywords, you can target dating related ones (e.g., “singles in nyc”), but also interest related keywords. For instance, you could target the keyword “punk band seattle” with an ad saying “Are you a girl who likes Punk music? You might be my soul mate then!”. You get the idea.
6. Prank Friends and Family
As you saw in point 4, the ability to target people’s name is Google AdWords opens a wide range of possibilities. Pranking your friends and family members is one of them!
For example, you could create an ad targeting the name of a friend or cousin, with a headline like “Hey John Doe, I Know What You Did Last Summer…”. The ad would then point to a page where you describe something your friend did in the past, mentioning that you’ll be sending it to a local newspaper or something like that.
Just make it clear it is a prank at some point, or your friend might call the police on you!
Over To The Raders: What other clever/innovative uses of Google AdWords have you seen around?
Original Post: 6 Uses for Google AdWords You Had Never Considered
