Blog Income Life

Archive for the ‘Plan Development’ Category

Are you on pace for your 2010 internet marketing goal?

In three weeks and a day the first quarter of the year will have come and gone.  If you are serious about your blog income business this is the time to take a quick overview of where you’re going, where you are and where you’ve been so far this year.

Reviewing your progress in anything that you do is critical to success.  Goals drive success.  So you need to review the progress of your goal for the year.  I review by day, week, month and quarter.  I don’t spend a lot of time on all the details, but come the end of a quarter,my blog income business undergoes a microscopic review. Year to date results are tallied  and adjustments where necessary are made.

This is a good time to take a quick overview of the current situation vis a vis your blog income goal.  With three weeks to go there is still time to save the bacon.

Am I on track?

NO!

Do I know how far off track I am?

YES!

Here is a quick way to review your progress and maximize your internet marketing performance:

1.  Goal.
You can do this for any part of your life, but for the purpose of this blog and post let’s stay with your blog income business.  What was your goal for the year?  .

A common annual goal is to achieve a certain income.  Assume that your goal is $100K  for all your internet marketing streams.  A very simple plan might look like this

1Q = $10,000
2Q = $20,000
3Q = $30,000
4Q = $40,000

Total = $100,000

2.  Progress to date:
What is your year to date income?  With three weeks to go, if you do not make some quick adjustments will you achieve $10,000?  If not how far off the mark are you?  If the shortfall is just a projected thousand or two, what can you do to turn up the heat.

3.  High Gain Activities
A quick review will tell you what in your marketing mix has worked the best and brought you the money to date.  You will notice that every time you took action there was an upward  spike in the results.  Very quickly identify the action that brought you the most income.  Take that model and ramp it up for the rest of the month.  If it is affiliate marketing that is the major contributor, see which affiliate product contributed the most to your bottom line.

4. How Many Sales Needed?
If your current track projection shows that you will be $2000 short of your 1Q goal, what are the steps that will lead you to reaching $10K?  Ask yourself these questions:

a)  What is the commission for each sale?
b)  How many clicks to reach one conversion?
c)  How much traffic  per click?

For ease of calculation:
commission per sale:  $100
clicks to make one sale: 10
traffic to generate 1 click: 10

Armed with this information you come up with this formula
2000 visits = 200 clicks
200 clicks = 20 sales
20 sales @ $100 commission = $2000

5. Which Piston Is Firing  The Traffic Engine?
Look through your statistics to identify which marketing action drives the most traffic.  Isolate it and increase that marketing action in direct proportion to meet and deliver the additional numbers.

This is also a good time to look at your second quarter.  Based on your 1Q results what are the action steps for the coming quarter.  What adjustments do you need to make?

Look at your business as sailing.  When you sail you know what your destination is.  You have a mapped out route.  Depending on how the wind is blowing, how the currents are running and daily weather changes, you need to continuously tack your sailboat to reach your destination.  A review of your  results is just tacking your internet marketing business to success.

In short:  review, correct, continue.

A strong blog income does not happen overnight – for that matter what is a “strong” blog income?  For some a thousand dollars a month is manna from heaven, for others it is just a drop in the bucket.  The difference between the first and the second is where you are in your blogging career and how many milestones you have passed.

What does a blogging career look like?

If you are not currently employed, at some point or another in your life you have been.  When you got your first job you needed to present some credentials:  a diploma, a degree, or some experience at the very least, preferably a combination of the lot. Indeed, acquiring each credential was in itself a major milestone in your professional career.  The same applies to blogging.

While it is easy to start a blog, developing a blog income is an entirely different matter.  For serious newbies who want to become professional bloggers it is important to learn the most essential of the basics involved, just like you had to learn your alphabet, so too do you need to learn the ABC’s of  Blogging for Money.  After getting through the basics you need to keep your eye on the next step, or milestone.  It is a way of monitoring your success and keeping yourself on target.

Your success path will have many, many milestones but you have to get started somewhere.  Here are five easy ones to begin with:

1.  First 30 posts:
This is your entry into the world of blogging.  It tells the internet that you are serious.  Do you know that up to 90% of all blogs ever started have been abandoned after only a few posts?

Thirty posts also sets the tone for your blog, a culture of your own begins to emerge.  Now it will have an appeal to a certain audience. You begin to develop a style.  Blogging will always be a work in progress but this is your beginning, one to build on.

Hint:  post the30 as quickly as possible – one a day if you can, three a week at the very least.

next step:  100 posts.

2.  First 50 visitors

When you first begin to blog you will feel like the Lone Ranger.  No one knows who you are, no one drops by, even the spiders and bots are ignoring your efforts.  But lo!  One day the stats show that your site had a visitor, and the next day there are two.  For some the cumulative 50 visitors will be quick, for others it may take a month or even more.  Nevertheless, it is an important notch in your belt.

Next step:  first 50 visitors day

3.  First comment

This can happen before the 50 visitors, especially if you have promoted your blog amongst family and friends.  More than likely if you, like most bloggers, have decided to keep your newly embraced blogging career as your best kept secret from friends and family, the first comment will take a little bit longer (or a lot longer).

Getting comments on your posts is important.  It is a vote of confidence by your readers and a signal to the search engines that your readers like what you write and are willing to take the time to interact with you.  This is big in the eyes of the bots and spiders that come crawling through your posts.

There are strategies that you can employ to help this along.  Gabe Young over at Free Blog Help has posted an impressive lists of things to do to encourage comments on your blog.  I certainly found it helpful and rather than writing the list here, I encourage you to hop on over directly to his post for the whole meal deal.   “How I Get More Comments Than Blogs That Have 10 Times More Traffic”

Next Step:  Implement Gabe’s list, rinse and repeat.

4.  First Dollar Earned

Earning your first dollar on the internet is a validation that you can earn more.  It is so important that Ed Dale who hosts the annual 30 Day Challenge makes that the foremost goal of that free course.  If you have not participated in the 30 Day Challenge I encourage you to do so.  Every year in August Ed Dale puts up his 30-Day Challenge. The good thing is you don’t have to wait till August, he leaves it up for the entire year and you can go through it in your own sweet time, take months if you want to.

Next Step:  Eliminate one monthly bill with your blog income

5.  PR1 – Google Page Rank 1

While there may be  life without Google it is a difficult one.  Google is the world’s largest search engine and confers page ranks on blogs and sites from 0 to 10 -  the higher the better.  Yes, you can be below 0, it just shows up as “-“ when you look at your stats.  Page Rank, PR of 1 is a good starting point.  Google only updates a few times a year, so if you have been blogging for months and still nothing from Google, don’t despair.  Your tenacity will eventually be rewarded.

Next step:  PR2 and upwards.

There are other milestones that you will aspire to, but these are  good building blocks and should be included in the goals section when developing your blog income business plan.

To Your Awesome Blog Income Life!

Valentina

‘Tis the season of launches and one time offers. If you have been in internet marketing for any length of time chances are that your inbox has a daily inflow of offers that you just cannot pass up.  During the “launch time” which can be as long as one week, a special price is offered along with a bundle of additional products that is enough to make the sugar plum fairy look positively parsimonious.  I love these offers.

Before you go diving into your wallet however, consider whether this is the right time for that unbelievable course that will finally have you the living the blog income life that you have been dreaming of. Some of those courses are indeed phenomenal.  Over the years we have seen some that are now considered classics.  The people who bought and applied have  prospered.  Those who still have the packages sitting on their shelves safely wrapped in their original cellophane  are still looking for the magic to happen.

Here is the thing.  There will always be phenomenal courses.  In my view, they can only get better.  Before you run off and buy one or two of the offers, you need to determine what your next step is, what your goals are and then decide to purchase the course that is a fit for you at this point in time.

I am guilty of having bought without giving much thought as to where I was going.  The offer was always great and seductive. The truth is that while I did unwrap the cellophane I have not always followed through and actually “taken” the course.  Now knowing better, I have created a criteria set that I refer to before buying.  This might be helpful for you too.

1.  Review your current position vis a vis where you were when you started your  internet marketing journey.  Because you are reading this blog may I make the assumption, that like me, you have decided to make money blogging. When looking at courses keep this in mind.

2.  Determine your next step?  I recommend that you make a business plan for the coming year.  It does not have to be a complicated one, a simple

- assessment of your current situation
- where you want to be at the close of next year
- a timeline  on the progression of results need to reach that goal
- Looking at that list, what is it that you need to get really good at?

3.  If you are in the early stages of developing your blog income, then you need to look at ways to increase your traffic.  This is an evergreen need.  No matter how successful you become, you will always want to increase traffic.  It makes sense then to look at courses geared towards driving traffic.

4. Is affiliate marketing in your marketing mix?   If so you need to look at courses that teach you how to build a list.  This is important.  As the saying goes the money is in the list.  Of course it goes without saying that courses on affiliate marketing should be on your shopping list as well.

5. If you are an experienced blogger/internet marketer, you may be ready to develop a product of your own, or start a membership site.  There are courses that are skewed towards these online business models. Look for them.

Personally, I look for systems or software that can help me automate some of my daily tasks.  I think that this is also one of those evergreen products. Before you buy, it is always a good idea to see if any reviews have been written on the product, or if it is a brand new launch, see what sort of buzz there is around the product, and the producer.  Do some online research to see what people are saying about the author.  What is his reputation?  What has he produced before?   What is the verdict on previous products?

Right now it is the result specific products that are being unveiled.   Set a budget.  There is something out there for everyone.  Invest in yourself and your Blog Income Life.   Shop well – shop wisely.

Happy Blogging!

Valentina
Blogging for Money and the Big Awesome (cheese that is).

You have now been on the blog income journey for several months and have come to that proverbial fork in the road. Which one to take?

In yesterday’s post I talked about the next step to take in developing your own Blog Income Life.

The two options covered in that post were:

1. Take the road most traveled. Continue polishing what you have learned so far and get really good at it. While it may seem that this is a static position to take, it really is not if you rinse and repeat with a purpose and have a new goal to aspire to. Certainly you will get more attention from Google and other search engines with a result of at least some incremental traffic increase. Your expertise on your chosen topic will expand – even if you already know a lot about it, it is amazing how much more knowledgeable you will get as you do more and more research so as to meet the fresh content requirement for a robust blog.

You might even want to put up another blog in the same field, using a different niche within it. Your current blog and the new one should be complimentary but preferably not identical. An example might be if your current blog is all about canning vegetables, a complimentary blog could be making your own fruit jams or preserves. Or, you may want to take the same topic but market to a different demographic. For example if your blog is about working a business from home, stay at home moms are a different demographic than boomers facing retirement. This is a strategy that is often taken by the gurus. In fact they often have a slew of complimentary blogs.

One of our exit strategies when we first build blogs is to sell them. When you have a grouping of related blogs, all of which are enjoying traffic, ranking and revenue producing, you can bundle the lot and sell them for a premium over selling just one blog.

2.Choice two is taking the unknown, the road less traveled. If you are ready to take on a new discipline to advance your internet marketing knowledge, to apply it to your blog and see exponential traffic growth (ok, eventually), then this is where you want to go.

This is a good time to decide what you want to tackle next. Here are some considerations:

- Learn how to market smartly using social media
- Choose one social marketing membership site to become an expert at, i.e., Twitter or Facebook
- Specialize in article marketing
- Learn how to effectively market affiliate products
- Become an expert on the importance of keywords and how to best use them
- Become a master at link building

There are plenty more but by now you have some familiarity with the above. This is where I recommend you pull out your wallet and buy a course on your choice. It doesn’t have to be expensive, in fact I recommend that you do not spend more than $100, $200 at best. There are lots of good courses that are significantly less than that.

In my “based on making money” opinion, affiliate marketing is the next obvious fit. Learning how to effectively market affiliates puts bigger dollars in your pocket and it is a good method of getting noticed by the owner of the product – why is that important? It opens the door for future joint ventures and then the big bucks begin to roll in. Yup! That would be the money truck.

Tomorrow more on Affiliate Marketing.

Happy Blogging!

Valentina
Blogging for my big cheese!

What should your next step be in developing your blog income life? If you have been following along with me then you have the basics of your blog set up and running well.  As a refresher here is what we have covered so far:

1. Topic/Niche Selection
2. Domain Name
3. Selecting the right platform for your blog
4. Posting on your blog
5. Monetizing your blog
6. Repurposing your posts into articles & submitting to article directories
7. Link Building

It is time to decide on your next step.  As you have been learning how to blog for money you have also been learning about internet marketing … sneaky huh!  That is why I believe that blogging is the best introduction to internet marketing.  Its user friendly so that anyone can do it yet presents enough of a challenge so that you are learning new skill sets.  I like that part.  I find that my brain is quite happy to be exercised and I feel a sense of accomplishment when I overcome a challenge in my quest to master the art of blogging for money.

But now you have arrived at the fork in the road.

Here are your two choices right now:

1.  Continue applying what you have learned so far.  Keep polishing your skills.  You will find that with continued practice your skill level improves and your confidence level goes up.  You will find that it will take less  time to create a new post,  to re-purpose the post into articles, and to submit to article directories.  You will develop a system.

2. Add a new dimension.  This means learning a new application, or “task” which will take you further along the road to becoming an internet marketing master.  It means leaving your comfort zone and taking on a new challenge.   This is the option I recommend – but only if you are relatively comfortable with option one, and have set up a “system”  no matter how rudimentary, that you can follow.  This is the way to develop an awesome blog income life.

Tomorrow more on new dimensions

Happy Blogging!

Valentina
Living a Blog Income Life
… going for the big cheese

To live a Blog Income Life you have to do some planning and some planting.  Read on.

Living the Blog Income Life to me means that I control my schedule and if I want, I can take a day in the middle of the week and go play.  A friend and I did just that this Wednesday.  Neither of us had been to Whistler for a while and we thought we should take a gander out that way to see how the Sea to Sky Highway had been improved and what the 2010 Olympic ski site looks like today.

It was a great day.

Our planning wasn’t the best — that’s what happens when you do things on the spur of the moment.  Unbeknownst to us many of the attractions had shut down last Sunday, not to be reopened until after  American Thanksgiving weekend which traditionally is the start of the winter season – so no gondola ride, no peak to peak ride, no decadent dining.

Would have been nice.  It did not matter.   We had a wonderful time anyway.

We walked throughout the village, stopped in to the vacant shops and chatted up the sales associates many of whom are Australian – for one brief moment I thought I had been transported to a different country.

Then I saw something that caught my attention.  A crew of gardeners were planting.  They were working on a freshly dug patch of earth in front of the Fairmont Hotel.  They had the bulbs set out in the exact spots they would be dug into the ground and the various bulbs were spaced according to whether they were tulips, daffodils or alium.  I was so intrigued that we stopped to chat with the gardeners and I  took a picture.

This got me thinking.  They were planting today for results that would be seen in the spring – perhaps as long as five months down the road.  For months there will be no sign of the fruits … errr flowers … of their labor.  Then one day, little green shoots will start poking their way out of the ground.  Hardly anyone will notice them.  The shoots will keep growing until one day there are buds on the ends of the stems and then suddenly they will bloom, rewarding us with a bountiful feast of beauty and color.

Blogging is the same thing.  At the beginning when we start posting blogs we do not see instant results.  Sometimes there is no traffic at all for the first few months.  Then visitors begin to drop in in dribs and drabs.  Some like what you blog about and subscribe to your RSS feed, or bookmark your blog, maybe even make a comment on your post.  Slowly your blog begins to get noticed.  It begins to bloom.

Back when I was in the corporate world we were always told that what we do today will begin to bear fruit months down the road.  Its never instantaneous.   Three to six months is common.  In blogging fresh content can bring you an instant positive blip on your stats chart, but what you are really doing is planting bulbs for your future.  The more planting you do the sooner the reward of being able to live  a Blog Income Life.

After considering all the options that are available to me re creating/hosting my new blog, I have made my decision based on the following:

1. Domain Name: to be announced when the blog is up & live (this coming week)

2. Niche Market: Money.
Whoa! That is not a niche market!!!! Yes, I know – this is one of those “Do as I say, not as I do” caveats. Indeed the Internet is flooded with blogs and sites on money, how to make it, how to manage it, how to invest it … and much much more. My chances of becoming the Search Engines’ Darling and be rewarded with top ranking are slim indeed. Having said that I am willing to take longer for this blog to become a money making site for me. The reasons I chose this very broad market are:

a. It is top of mind for just about everyone today.
b. The broad topic allows for many niches.
c. It is consistent with this blog, which is about making money blogging, so it builds on to an existing “product”
d. The niches lend themselves to my being able to promote some of my other existing businesses as options
e. Topic comfort – I write my own material so this will not be as time consuming as perhaps other narrower niches I was considering

3. Platform: Wordpress (paid version)
The reason I chose Wordpress is twofold:

a) Many more options available for development of blog especially as I intend to make this a signature blog. For this same reason I chose the paid version as it offers so many more features and functions that I will be growing into.
and,
b) Having taken a number of courses in Internet Marketing, I was able to capitalize on an offering by Nitro Marketing to set up my blog for free.

4. Host: Hostgator
While both Blue Host and HostGator are offer similar services and product I chose HostGator because it is the host service that Nitro recommends.

OK…. I fudged a bit here. I was going to do the Wordpress thing from scratch – although I was definitely going for the paid version. Techie type stuff is not my strong suite. It would not be the best use of my time. I had other options for a “set it & post it” wordpress blog (I have a few of those with another program I purchased), but decided to go with Nitro. My experiences with Nitro Marketing courses have been that the content is always strong on detail, complete, and delivers great support. I have not had a blog set up by this group before so in a way I will be testing a new product. Actually you can sign up for their free newsletter. They have started to host free webinars which I highly recommend. You will be advised of those webinars in the newsletters.

Lets recap to date:
1. Topic/Niche selection
2. Domain Name
3. Ten Posts written & ready to post in weekly or semi-weekly intervals
4. Platform (Blogger or Wordpress)
5. Host (needed only if paid Wordpress selected).

Happy Blogging!

Quick Links:
Wordpress
HostGator
Nitro Marketing Blueprint

Before you start rolling the presses with your new blog — whether you go with blogger or wordpress, do a little bit of planning. By now you have chosen the topic for your blog, now plan at least 10 posts. If you are doing a review style blog and say your topic is dog toys , you should at least have 10 topics on dog toys, written and ready to go. Here is what I mean

post 1 – How to choose good dog toys. What you look for when you are selecting toys for your dog.

post 2 – Review a new Kong dog toy.

post 3 – Soft Toys or Hard Toys?.

… well you get the idea. The reviews don’t always have to be about a toy. What about reviewing a dog toy site you found on the website, what do you like about it. What in your opinion could improve it. Your overall impression.

This is an important step. Too often people launch a blog, all eager and ready to go. They post two, maybe three posts, and then have to come up with an idea for a fourth post and cannot find appropriate content. A degree of discomfort sets in and an ever so slight coolness begins to seep in. Soon, the posts are far and few in between. There is no traffic. The promise of making money on the blog is a distant memory. The blog languishes.

DON’T LET THIS HAPPEN TO YOU…. this is a business – treat it like a business. Every business requires a plan. Plan a topic within a topic and expand. For example if you are writing about chocolates, then about mid to end January you should start writing articles on Valentines Day, where to buy the best chocolates online (your affiliates). Review some of your favorites.   Post a picture of yourself munching on those decadent morsels. Ditto for March … St Patricks Day, then there is Easter.  If you plan basics for the whole year, you will never run out of content.

But Ten Articles? Come on Valentina?

Yes … its a good way to get started. First it is a good discipline to develop. Then when you open your blog, post them 2 or  3 per week (nicely spaced), all the while writing additional articles. The spiders will love this. Here is a new active blog and the more relevant and fresh the postings, the better these cyber critters like to dine out on it and bring back good reports to the search engines.

More on posting articles on your site further down the road, for now write those articles and get ready to launch your site.

Coming soon …. ok, next week. Announcement of my next blog, its topic and related information.

Quick Links
Dog Toys World

OK. You are ready, able and willing to go.

“LET ME AT IT! Let me start on that blog already!” you say.

Not so fast my little chickadee. We’re almost there, patience. Success is an 80-20 rule and like Dan Lok says, the 80% is the work that goes in at the beginning, the preparation, the research. When all is done your chance of success goes up when you are ready to launch.

So let’s recap:
- niche topic: you’ve got one
- buyers/advertisers exist for this topic
- available affiliates
- keyword rich title picked for blog
- keyword domain availability checked
- decision made to purchase the keyword domain
- READY TO GO!

Not quite!

Your next step is to decide whether you want to use Blogger or Wordpress as your host. Things to consider:

BLOGGER – www.blogger.com

What’s good about Blogger:
a) Easy to set up. Everything is done for you. You just open a Blogger account, register your blog, go through the tutorial, set up your specifications and you are ready to go. All this should take no more than two hours, I know some people who have done it in half an hour!
b) No need to know HTML (that’s a whole different internet language that webmasters are whiz bang kids at, but not you and certainly not me)
c) No need to worry whether you have a c-panel or an how to use FTP
d) No need to know when to upload and when to download — yes Virginia, there is a difference!!!
e) FREE! Unlimited number of blogs.

The downside of Blogger:
a) There is a limited selection of templates.
b) Tabulated pages are not an option
c) If you have a problem and need technical support, they expect you to rely on the forum for your answers – i.e., there does not appear to be a way to be able to connect with Google staff to help you with any technical problems you may be having.
d) Changes/additions you make sometimes don’t take. As an example if you look to the right hand side of this blog, you will notice that there are two gaps. Those gaps are supposed to be carrying Google ads, but for some reason I have not been successful in having them take.

WORDPRESS: www.wordpress.com

What’s good about Wordpress:
a) looks more like a website
b) functions more like a website
c) many more templates available
d) many more options
e) professional bloggers’ choice

Downside of Wordpress:
a) Not as much of a point and click system.
b) Offers two programs – one much more like the blogger, the other (the one with many more options) requires at least a familiarity for HTML, FTP and a c-panel
c) Up to three blogs free (after that it’s a for fee usage)

Most of my blogs are on Blogger. The few that I have with Wordpress were set up for me. My recommendation is that if you are new to Internet Marketing and to blogging, then you cannot go wrong with Blogger. I would go so far as to suggest that your first few blogs are with Blogger. Look at these as your “starter” businesses. As you begin to build your IM muscles, then go further a field.

If you are an experienced Internet Marketer and have some knowledge with HTML, FTP and c-panel, then I would recommend Wordpress … you know, as Mark Burnett says: Jump In! Even if You Don’t Know How to Swim!

There are other places where you can have your blogs hosted, but the above two seem to be the industry standards.

ACTION: Open an account with either Blogger or Wordpress. Don’t go live yet.  Take the time to go over the tutorials

Quick links:
Dan Lok
Blogger

Wordpress
Recommended Reading:
Jump In! Even If You Don’t Know How to Swim! Mike Burnett of Survivor Series