Blog Income Life

Archive for the ‘Starting a Blog’ 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.

Nathan, dear boy, I love you  – honest I do.

I buy your products and visit your blog often but a recent post of yours  got my hackles up.  In your post of Feb 09 “Where 99% of Bloggers Go Wrong” you pulled no punches and pretty much told those of us who are blogging about blogging to pack it up.  The topic has been done to death and extremely well by uber bloggers who cut their chops on this subject and have entrenched themselves as experts for life.  They hold top positions and rankings with all the major search engines for just about every keyword associated with earning an online income and its not likely that any new blogger can add value or anything new to that which has already been written about in every which way except Sunday.

The “A” Listers have got it in spades and who are we to think that our humble efforts would ever see the light of day or  receive the blessings of Google and rub shoulder with the likes of Darren Rowse , Yaro Starak or John Chow – just to name a few.

Whew!  Nathan, you might be right.

That’s a lot of humble pie to eat.

But not so fast my boy.  At the risk of offending someone I admire – yes, you Nathan  here are my two cents worth, a retort if you will:

I am a “Z”Lister – no, you know what, make that a “Y” Lister (recently promoted myself).  I am a shameless hussy climbing the ladder to success and I notice that there are other aspiring bloggers blogging on blogging who are riders on the up escalator ahead of me.  I notice that they have good rankings of PR3 & PR4, and even PR5 with Alexa’s below the 100K mark.  That escalator is pretty crowded but my faves are:

Glen Alsopp of Viper Chill

Dave Doolin of Website in a Weekend

Gabe Young of Free Blog Help

Pat Flynn of Smart Passive Income

Caroline Middlebrook of Caroline Middlebrook

There are plenty more and they all provide some valuable info.  Granted some of the above are not exactly wet behind the ears when it comes to internet marketing, and they brandish some sharp cyber smarts, but for all intents and purposes their blogs on blogging are.

I have learned a lot from these potential usurpers to the number one spot which is not to say that I have not learned from the current reigning kings.  But here are the reasons I like to visit the “new” blogs:

1. Inspiring.
   I can relate to these dudes.  Yes, they are ahead of me but not so far that I need to genuflect at the altar of their blog.  If they can be where they are in less than 2 years, and in Gabe’s case less than half a year, glory be.
2. Timely Information.
   Yes.  I can visit the uber bloggers blogs and go through their archives for content that is relevant to where I currently am in my blogging career.  But quite honestly, that content is somewhat wilted by now.   I realize and recognize that the basic info hasn’t changed, but I like the fresh approach that the new lot is bringing to the make money online market.  They are not so far ahead that I have to dig into back issues to understand what they are talking about.
3. Fresh Perspective
   Did I mention fresh approach?  No matter how grand the symphony a young conductor can infuse it with a new richness, a new energy, show a side that the audience may not have heard in quite that way before.  I also think of the new covers being recorded by no-name artists of the Beattles classics – and you know what?  Great as the originals are, the covers are smokin’
4. Community
   No offence here but what are the chances that a fledgling like myself would ever be noticed by oh say the likes of Darren Rowse (hey I like the guy and have opted in for the membership).  Those lower down the food chain still have the luxury of being able to mingle with us babes in swaddling clothes and actually helping us – they reciprocate with visits to our sites and leave valuable comments, they private message us with helpful suggestions, they give of their time in a way that the A Listers cannot if for no other reason than that logistics just get in the way.
5. Potential Alliances
   Just like the A Listers, this new lot is active and aggressive – they have products in the pipeline, we mere PR oners do too.  Can we ride on their coattails?  You betcha!  Can we form strong strategic alliances?  Ditto.  Can we eventually look to joint venture partnerships?  You bet your sweet bippy we can!

I don’t know why the current upwardly mobile bloggers blogging about blogging  got into that saturated niche.  My guess is that they felt it isn’t so saturated after all, that they had something of value to say.  Maybe they’re just an ornery lot who look at the face of impossibility, stare it down and grapple it to the ground.  I dunno know but I thank them.

I do know why I got this market.  Actually I was visiting Caroline Middlebrook one day and noticed that she was just blogging about her experience in blogging, talking about her success and failures and things to fix and so on.  I thought that was rather brave of her – moreover I liked her online voice, felt the sincerity and thought, hey, I can do that too.  Yup!  I quickly appropriated the idea and wrote and told her so.

By blogging about blogging, or at least my trials and tribulations and ultimate small granules of success I have learned things I probably never would have otherwise.  You see, I had been trying to get into the internet marketing arena for some time (well at least two years prior) and took course upon course.  In retrospect some of those courses were damn good, but honestly, I wasn’t fully up to them.  Almost without exception the early chapters were easy (they seemed to get easier with each course) but within a short period of time the eyes would glaze over and the brain would go on strike.

I thought about that and about Caroline and came to the conclusion that blogging would be the best way to put into practice that which I know – and I felt I knew plenty after all the credit card statements supported that feeling.  So I began my blog about blogging.

By applying things I knew I found holes.  Moreover, now that I was writing something, I had to do some checking to make sure that what I was saying was indeed so.  My atrophied internet marketing muscles began to gather strength.  I have laid a foundation, one that I can now build on.  I have launched other “niche” blogs which blush, yes, do bring in some shekels, but it is this blog that I look to as my flagship.  It is this blog that makes the others possible.

From this blog I learn.  It is my practicum.  Along the way I hope that my experiences are relevant to bloggers newer than I, that my content is helpful to them.  Because of my newbie status I still speak in a language that is devoid of blogspeak although I have caught myself drifting that way occasionally.  I am still at that place of my blog career that fledglings can look at me and say “I have a chance.”  And that is all I want.  It is a right of passage – maybe we will never sit side by side with the Darrens and Yaros and John’s, but we’ll have learned a hell of a lot by trying.

Nathan, forever your admirer …………..

Valentina

Increasingly people are turning to blogging as a means of earning an additional income.  The reasons vary but I venture that the economic meltdown of 2009 was a major motivator. Sadly many jump on the bandwagon expecting instant results – and who can blame them, what with all the ads promising the money truck to roll in overnight!

I was speaking with a retired gentleman a few days ago.  He took early retirement because he could.  His income was almost entirely based on his stock portfolio.  With last year’s debacle he finds that he now has to look for a job, not exactly a promising prospect.  He knows I blog and asked if this might be a good direction for him.

It might be.  He brings a wealth of knowledge from the corporate world.  He could launch a business to business blog, start a paid subscription newsletter, build up traffic and subscribers and sell ad space on his blog and newsletter.  He’s a quick study and I have no doubt that with laser like focus, consistent effort and bulldog tenacity he would succeed.  But it wouldn’t be overnight.

When speaking with would be bloggers who want to earn an online income, my advice to them is to keep the big picture in the background, and work towards small achievements that are part of the picture.  Yesterday’s post was on 5 milestones that are easy to achieve and a good starting point for any blogging career.  One of those milestones was to eliminate one bill.

Intuitively the mind jumps to the biggest bill – the mortgage, or car payment.  But what if instead of the big bill, you decide to tackle the smallest one first?  Here is what you do:

1. Make a list of all your standing order bills along with the monthly amount
2. Pick the smallest bill and make that your first target
3. When you eliminate that bill, take the next smallest one and add it to your blog income goal.
4. Repeat, repeat, repeat.

I’d like to take credit for this process but I believe I first heard it from Kevin Wilke of Nitro Marketing Its brilliant and here is why I think it is so:

1. It’s doable.  You are not starting out to conquer Mt. Everest, just a local hill.  You can relate to it.
2. It’s friendly:  you don’t need a lot of expensive equipment to scale this little incline in your neighborhood – just the will to step out and walk it.  Maybe you haven’t done any exercise for a long time and the top of the hill is a ways off.  Never mind, daily effort eventually brings you to the top of the hill.
3. Success:  When you look at your standing order of services/payments, I bet you’ll find something that is less than $10.  Mine is $1.96 for a membership to Problogger’s Forum (I got in at the first offer – even at $5.95 it’s a good value).  Well, that was easy.  I have several recurring monthly fees that are in the $9.95 bracket – bet you do to.  Decide which one you want to topple first.
4. Success builds on success.  A funny thing happens when you first experience success – your personal energy changes and that changes you forever.  It may be just $1.96, but that is one bill that your blog income is paying for and suddenly your backbone strengthens, suddenly there is a new will and resolve that keeps you moving to the next post and then the next.

Soon the process becomes a new habit – it’s now deeply embedded in your DNA, trust me.  The car payment and the mortgage?  They too will topple.  The debt?   That too will be erased as your blog income grows.

To An Awesome Blog Income Life!

Valentina

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

And now for something completely different for Blog Income.  Barely out of the gate and already one of my 2010 goals has been shot down in flames!

In my post on Reflections of 2009 and Things Yet To Be of December 15 I cited one of my goals as being:

-          Launch a project blog that is centered around a newly planned trip to China in June … it is both a human interest blog and based on a significant but not well known historical event.

Shot down may not be the right term, deferred would be more like it.  Identify, correct and proceed.  A little background:

The planned trip was (is) to Harbin and centers around the Russian connection that is unique to this city in Northeastern China. The connection dates back to 1898 when Harbin became the terminus for the Chinese Eastern Railway – an extension of the Trans Siberian Railway – and figures prominently until 1946 when Russia turned the city over to the Chinese Government of the day.  Actually, it was under Russia’s protection only during WWII, but the relationship between this city and Russia is long and even today there are many Chinese citizens who are of Russian decent.

My family history happens to run a short pace alongside this historical dateline.  The city was once known as the St. Petersburg of Asia not just because of its strong Russian presence but also because it’s buildings are built in the classic style of architecture that St. Petersburg is known for.  Today Harbin is famous for its Snow and Ice Festival which is held in February and is considered to be a strong contender for the 2022 Winter Olympics.

When a friend of mine mentioned that there are now societies being formed to mine and record this historical association and that a small conference was being planned for June 2010 I took up the invite and thought that it would make for a good blog project for 2010.

A “conference” may have been premature, or perhaps not enough thought given to it.  Perhaps it was meant to be a casual gathering of like minded souls, or not.  The fact is that China has a strict ruling re gatherings of 50 or more and it likely takes a bit of bureaucratic filing and stamping and time before approval is given.  Repeated requests for more info have gone unheeded.

I have therefore changed my bend on this.  I still want to visit Harbin and write about it, but perhaps it will be without any conference and therefore need not be in June 2010.  I now have a different process in mind. The blog I planned as a project will now make way for something else.  So an early in the year correction points to a stronger presence on Blog Income Life with a major thrust into Affiliate Marketing.  The bar has just been raised.

To An Awesome Blog Income Life in 2010!

Valentina

Officially I launched my career as a blogger a year ago here.  Had no idea where it would go but was hoping that by year end there would be a four figure blog income for my efforts.  While I have had some paydays no way do the checks add up to four figures; what I have, however, is learned a lot  for which I am grateful and as they say, that’s priceless!

I thought this would be an appropriate time to share my reflection on the passing year, lessons learned and a bird’s eye view of 2010.

Birth of a Blog:
This blog began as a “buddy” system for some friends and myself who bought a program that promised to be a money machine without any heavy lifting..  We found that not only was there lots of heavy lifting but that we did not understand most of it.  We hoped to attract other customers of that program and share experiences here.  Frustration set in. Very quickly my colleagues decided that it was not for them and moved on to other, greener pastures.

There is a stubborn streak that runs down my back.  I don’t easily give up or maybe its just plain pride that does not want to own up to failure … or it could be my downright orneriness.   Right about that time I came across several blogs on blogging, Caroline Middlebrook’s was one.  I thought I could do something like that, chronicle my journey on blogging.   The idea being that I had taken several internet marketing courses and could apply what I learned here, and learn more as I blogged.  Got myself a new domain name, redirected it to the  Blogger one, changed the title in my header.

Plan to Succeed
The danger of knowing a little bit is that you don’t know what you don’t know.  I had the basic text book knowledge down pat – or so I thought and wrote about it.   Anemic results did not phase me, at least not at the beginning. Contrary to my training which I apply to all my businesses, I did not develop a business plan for this blog so did not even have benchmarks to reach.  In retrospect, even though I “launched” my blogging career at the start of this year my approach to it was less than businesslike.  To succeed in anything you need a plan.

Anemic monthly results continued to dog me and began to take a toll … should I just give up?  Was this a bad idea?  What do I know about blogging anyway?  What hope did I have of ever getting Google’s blessing and traffic let alone make money? The temptation to throw in the towel was strong.  Numbers tumbled – ok, slipped – tumble would suggest that there was a long way down to tumble to.

Defining Moment
Attending Frank Kern’s Mass Control was a major turning point for me.  I went not for the blogging, but to learn more on internet marketing.  Suddenly the penny dropped.  Here I was yet again taking another internet marketing course.  Just how many of these do I need? Don’t get me wrong – the event was stupendous but I asked myself, how much of what I learn am I going to implement?  Knowledge is good, but for it to be effective you have to use it, to apply it.

One of the speakers was Ed Dale.  He got a standing ovation.  The man impressed me enormously.  He mentioned his Thirty Day Challenge which he runs every year in August.  One of the uber gurus present, Jason Moffat, apparently was the first winner of the challenge some five years ago.  Thinking about this blog I decided it deserved another chance, or more to the point, I deserved another chance to make something of it.    I would take the 30-Day Challenge.  That was the best decision I made.  I learned a lot.  As a result of that “challenge” I made the following changes:

1.  New Domain Name
Using my newfound knowledge and a nifty tool called Market Samurai I changed the domain name   from Blog Along With Me to Blog Income Life.  I wrote about the reason for the change in this post

2.  Switched from Blogger to Wordpress Direct.  This version of Wordpress is a little bit more user friendly for us non-techie types while still offering flexibility and entry to those who are to be able to work behind the scenes in the html/c-panel/ftp world.

3.  Started to find other blogs of similar content – yes the biggies to start with, but my Google Alert and Google Reader (two services I was not aware of before) introduced me to others who were not yet well known, indeed newer at the game than myself and with better results.

4.  Became a commenter on some of them.

5.  Changed my template when a successful blogger whom I admire observed that my theme was blah … he also suggested that I should write about something I knew, but by then I realized that I actually enjoy writing on this blog, and that what I “knew” is that I have a long way to go before I can actually hang out the professional blogger shingle.  So I continue as a willing apprentice.

6.  The shingle I have hung out is “Open for Business.”  In my 2010 business plan, Blog Income Life figures prominently with stated goals and objectives.  One good thing about having kept track of my journey thus far is that I have data which I am using as my starting point.

I can honestly say that in the last two months I have learned more and done more here than in the previous nine.

My blog related goals for 2010 are:

1 -     Google PR3 for Blog Income Life by year end

2 -     Launch a project blog that is centered around a newly planned trip to China in June … it is both a human interest blog and based on a significant but not well known historical event.  My intention is twofold:

One:  for the interest, learning and my roots.

Two: to draw attention and gain interest from print media to publish my experience/story/visit to China, carriers for contra air in exchange for an article or two for their in flight magazine and ad sponsors on the blog.  In short, I am looking to fund the trip.  I am very late getting into this game, but only recently learned of the pivotal event that is drawing me to China.  The goal is scary, the journey sure to be enjoyable, time will be my biggest challenge.  I also anticipate enormous growth … and some hair tearing along with it!

Thank you for allowing me to share my musings of the past, the current and the future.  Please share yours with me.

To Your Awesome Blog Income Life!

Valentina

I think the cheese will have to be shelved for 2010

It’s beginning to feel a lot like Christmas.  I celebrate Christmas – two of them.  My ancestral heritage is Russian.  The Russian Orthodox Church never switched over from the Julian to the Gregorian, so Christmas falls on January 07!  How cool is that?  This is a month of many celebrations, and whether you celebrate Christmas or something else, I want to begin by wishing each and everyone who comes here, joyous celebrations, goodwill and blessings for you and your loved ones.

It is the first of the month which means a review of the month past for Blog Income Life.   My goals for the month of November were:

1. Increase traffic by 20%+ (I’m following Darren Rowse’s formula here.
2. Get back on to earning some dollars.
3. Spend less time checking my daily stats.

Let’s look at the traffic first:

Last month’s visitors = 130
Target: 20% increase = 156
Actual results                = 158

Just squeaked in!  In actual fact it is probably more like 15% growth seeing as last month’s stats did not include the first 5 days of the month!  I know this is anemic compared to many newbies who are getting that and more PER DAY. I am a great fan of Darren Rowse’s (is there anyone who isn’t), and I read with great interest that he focused on growing his blog traffic by 10% – 20% per month.  I am also a great believer in building momentum.  On that note I will be trying something in the new year that is meant to increase the traffic significantly – 200 per day by end of QI of 2010 is the big stretch.

Search engines stats fell from 15.38% to 8.3%.  I ascribe this to my letting up on my focusing on the keyword that I am fighting to get on page one for.  I am of two minds here.  Everything I have learned stresses the importance of optimizing your posts with the main keyword and sprinkling others here and here.   I feel that to do so for every post is somewhat artificial.  Yes, I want more search engine traffic, I also want to write in a non-forced style.  I think that my readers are intelligent enough to be able to tell the difference.  My readers are my guests.  Foremost in my mind is to treat them as welcome guests.  This probably comes with experience – write keyword optimized posts and make it flow in the most natural of ways.

Income:  Alas, none to report from this blog.  As mentioned before my performing blogs are my stable of doggie sites — even Adsense is delivering.  But I did have an awesome day – my first ever $1000 day!  This was in one of my other businesses.  What I loved about this experience is that it is now in my system.  Once experienced it’s in your DNA.   I look forward to many more $1000 days in 2010.

Checking Daily Stats:  Done!  The temptation, especially at the beginning was hard to overcome.  Eventually I just got fed up with myself in wasting time checking stats on my various sites.  I figured that I was wasting at least an hour.  Now, I check the stats in the mornings – it gives me a sense on what I need to concentrate on for the day and make adjustments to the plan I wrote the night before if needed – and leave them alone for the day.  Yes, sometimes I still sneak a peak before the end of day, but that too is declining.

Popular Posts:

Rock Stars at Frank Kern’s Mass Control
Keywords:  A Spider’s Buffet!
Link Exchange Strategies that Work

What is December to look like?  I realize now that focusing on income is premature for this blog.  I am going to concentrate on other factors and as these improve, I believe the income will too.  I will concentrate on that area that I have a greater control over and that is traffic.  I am also working through the Secret Affiliate Weapon course and implementing the steps along the way but then I am not anticipating results until QI of 2010.   So for December:

1. Traffic:  20% increase = 190.  Up the ante to 200
2. Add a subscription/email registration plugin and a “Tweet Me” button too!

Here’s to an Awesome Blog Income Life!

Valentina
Writing for an Awesome Blog Income Life … and yummy cheese!

What do stories have to do with blogging for money.  More than you think.

Sundays are catch up mornings for me.  Typically it’s the time I spend catching up on the little things in my e.box, you know non blog income items flagged but not urgent, jokes, Facebook and Twitter announcements of new followers or invites to become friends – ok, the last two could be Blog Income items, but you get the idea, it’s not a blogging for money day.

I give myself two hours – what doesn’t get attended to suffers the fate of the delete key. I give myself another hour to go over my Google Reader and read up on items of interest that I may have I missed on my daily scan of this service.  After that it’s a day off.  Today, maybe dim sum in Richmond and then a walk by the bay – yes, even in the rain.

The first item that caught my eye this morning was a post by Darren Rowse of ProBlogger.  I don’t know how I missed this earlier.  I am a raving fan of his.  It is an article on story posts on his blog.  His observation is that over the years the posts that told stories were the most popular. That is not surprising as stories engage the reader.  It is that rule we learned in sales:  facts tell stories sell.  You can read the full article here

The post got me thinking.  I prefer writing stories over technical reports and have enormous admiration for those who can present good, clear facts without much froufrou and still keep the reader engaged.  I had such a challenge this week.

Recently I was invited to author a chapter for an upcoming book.  It was on a subject I know well but the publisher asked for a slightly different twist on it.  For weeks I had the devil of a time trying to manipulate the information in such a way that it would mesh with the new angle.  Writer’s block loomed large as deadline date drew closer.  What to do.  What I had in my computer was dull and boring even to me.  How could I expect others to read it. How could I let the publisher down?

Then I had an idea.  What if I approached the angle from a storyline?  I phoned the publisher and told him what I had in mind.  I can tell you his response wasn’t exactly extatic.  “Sure” he said tentatively “send me a few paragraphs and the rest of the content in point format.  I did.

Suddenly my creative juices began to flow.  I finished the chapter in two days.  Had it reviewed by a friend who said she was galvanized every step of the way. Submitted it just under the wire.

Haven’t heard back from the publisher yet.  I think he’ll like it.  If not it’s not a bad piece of work and I can certainly put it to use in some other way.

Stories are easier to write, at least for me and for most people.  When you think about it blogs started with stories, that’s what a journal is, it is the daily story of something, often that of a personal experience.  The next time you are faced with writer’s block dig deep into your own experiences and fish out those that have a connection with the topic on which you write, guaranteed, your fingers will start flying over your keypad and you’ll be one step closer to an awesome blog income life!

Happy Blogging!

Valentina
Blogging for some good cheese.

Something different today but very important. If you are blogging because you want to develop a blog income, it is that time of year to review your current situation and set goals for the coming year.  In corp speak that would be working on your business plan.

Why is goal setting important?

The most obvious reason is that it gives you something to work towards, a destination that you want to reach by the end of a certain time line and it must be committed on paper.

Why on paper?

One, the very act of writing something down has neurological implications.  There is a connect between the brain and the writing, a greater commitment and a message to the brain that this needs doing.  The goal is then accepted and submerged into the sub conscience.

Two classical studies underline this importance of writing down your goals.  The first dates back to the 1953 graduate class of Yale.  Armed with impressive degrees the graduates were eager to take on the world, to redefine the meaning of success.  Twenty years later the graduates were contacted as a matter of interest to measure their level of success.  While most were found to be doing well, a small group stood head and shoulders above others – a mere 3% had achieved enormous financial success, more than that of the 97% combined. When interviewed further one commonality was found amongst this elite 3% group: each one had written down their goals, something none of the others had done.

A subsequent study at Harvard had similar results.  The year 1964. Once again all graduates stated that they had lofty and clear goals to achieve.  Only 5% took the trouble to write down their goals.  A follow up twenty years later showed that of the 5% who wrote down their goals, 95% achieved their goals, while of those who did not write down their goals, a mere 5% did.

Goals can have different time lines:  lifetime, 10 years, 5 or maybe just one.  Daily factor in as well.  Goal experts recommend 5 year goals, with checkpoints along the way, usually at the 3 year mark and 1 year mark.  They can be complex or simple.  I like simple.

Set a goal for each area of your life for 2010.  Make it doable but not a gimme – it needs to be something that you have to stretch for.  Start with the current situation, and end the year with where you want that situation to be.

In terms of blogging my goal for Blog Income Life for this year was to be at a four figure income at the end of 2009.  I had nothing to base this on.  It was a figure I thought would be nice to achieve.  It’s not going to happen.  What I have achieved however is a stronger understanding of the business of blogging.  On review I know the mistakes I made, I know what works, I know what I need to concentrate on to make the desired income.  I now have a base from which to work for my 2010 goal.

Perhaps the biggest lesson learned is that an income goal is not the best to get started with, I would leave the income goal to a longer term.  Here are some benchmarks that may help you with your goal setting

-         frequency of posting:  3 times a week or more

-         first 100 visitors

-        first 1000 visitors per month

-         first 100 subscribers to your newsletter/email list

-         backlinks:  1000 backlinks

-         first $100 from adsense

-         first affiliate sale

-         first affiliate campaign

-         first 1000 Twitter followers

-         first e.book written

There are plenty more but the above should get you started.  Begin with where you are right now and determine where you want to be on December 31, 2010.  If your current situation on traffic is an average of 5 visitors per day, you may want to look at an average of 100 visitors per day.  Now make a plan for achieving that.

What will it take?  What do you already know on generating traffic?  What more will you need to learn?  Where can you get that information?  Is there a Traffic Generating course that you can buy?

I subscribe to The Goals Guy to plan the year ahead and to keep me on track with my goals.  When you draw up your plan for achieving your goals for 2010, make sure you set up review dates, I make mine quarterly.  It is a good practice to see what is working and what is not.  For that which is not working identify, correct and take action.

Here’s to great goals and great achievements!

Happy Blogging!

Valentina
The cheese is in the goal.

On my top ten “blog income” blogs to visit regularly is Glen Allsop’s Viper Chill. Glen apparently started this blog several years ago, let it lie dormant for four years, and has just re-launched it with impressive results.  Now we’re not talking newbie or even competent here, we’re talking super on the way to uber.

Glen’s online business drops a significant five figure income to his monthly bottom line.  It’s not surprising.  The man knows his stuff.

Viper Chill delivers content like no other blog on blogging that I know of – there is a freshness to it, a lot of punch, but most importantly, Glen mines his knowledge and presents information that is beyond the typical white bread content that proliferates the internet.  He dives deep into his own practices and shares them with his readership which is rising faster than a loaf of bread dough.

And talk about value!  Case in point is his latest post on his 24 point checklist that he implements with every new blog he starts.  Not only have I bookmarked that post, but I have actually hard copied it so that I can follow each step, point by point.  This is now in my internet marketing tool box and  I  will use this checklist for all future blogs as well as go through the list for all my current ones -  I already started on this one and found that there are many holes that need to be filled.  Watch for subtle and maybe not so subtle changes here to see what I mean.

What I find most interesting is that part of Glen’s blog flies in the face of “basics” – the domain name is absent of any hint of what the content may be.   Everything I have read and learned to date is that having the domain name congruent with content is an important factor and topic keyword is highly recommended.  Hey I like the domain name, it captures your imagination and is memorable but never in my wildest would I look at the domain of Viper Chill and say to myself that this is a blog I need to visit because it obviously holds a ton of content on blogging.  Nope.  This is branding at its best.  It just goes to show that in the hands of a master, a domain name bereft of topic/content keywords can fly with the best of them.  Before  you let your imagination take hold however,  the keyword here is “master” and it takes a master to develop a brand.

I encourage you to go read the article for yourself at Viper Chill and save a copy of it somewhere so that you can reference it on a regular basis.  It’s that good!

Happy Blogging!

Valentina

That is some potent cheese there in Viper Chill