ProBlogger Podcast: Blog Tips to Help You Make Money Blogging

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181: How to Overcome the Challenges of Being a Solo Entrepreneur Feb 20, 2017

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If you’re a solo-entrepreneur (or want to be) you’re going to relate to a lot of what we talk about in this episode with Robert Gerrish. Robert is a coach, teacher and community leader who has a passion for solo business owners. He’s the owner of an Australian site - FlyingSolo and has recently put together an excellent resource for solo-business owners called Soloism. We talk about productivity, focus, loneliness, personal development, motivation, feeling overwhelmed and how to get through times when things don’t seem to work. He also gives us some tools and apps that solo business owners will find useful.

180: 7 Types of Facebook Live Videos that Grow Your Audience, Build Your Brand and Make Money Feb 13, 2017

Show notes

Ways to Use Facebook Live to Grow Your Blog In today’s lesson, I want to talk about Facebook live video which is a technology that has been around for a while now on Facebook and that I think continues to be something that bloggers could get a lot of value out of. We’ve seen Facebook continue to develop it over the last 12 months. Initially, it was only available to larger influencers and verified account holders, then they opened it up to everyone and in the last few weeks they’ve made it so you can now do it from your desktop rather than just using your phone. I know numerous bloggers getting pretty amazing results with FB live – they’re using it to build their brand, grow their audience and make money – so I thought today we’d look at some of the different ways that you can use it to grow your blog and business. Stay tuned my quick top 7 ways to use Facebook Live! Further Resources on Using Facebook Live 30 Practical Tips for Running Great Facebook Live Videos Zoom Webinar Tool Listen to this episode in the player above or on iTunes here (look for episode 180). Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Hey there, it’s Darren Rowse from ProBlogger. Welcome to Episode 180 of the ProBlogger podcast where today I want to talk about Facebook Live and give you my Top 7 different ways to use this technology that I think has a lot of benefits for bloggers. As I said at the top, my name is Darren Rowse and I’m the blogger behind problogger.com, a blog, podcast, event, job board, series of ebooks, and many other things all designed to help you as a blogger grow your audience and make money from your blog. You can learn more about ProBlogger over at problogger.com. In today’s lesson, we’re talking Facebook Live and we’ve seen over the last 12 or so months Facebook continue to develop this particular aspect of their platform. Initially, it was only available to larger influences or verified account holders but then they opened it up to everyone. I’ve seen a lot of our audience begin to experiment with the technology. Facebook hasn’t just let this technology sit dormant. Over the last few weeks, they’ve made it even easier to do. You can now do it from your desktop, you just need to log into Facebook itself and there’s an option to do a Facebook Live broadcast from your webcam which really opens it up to even more bloggers. I suspect they’re going to continue to develop it even further. I hope they add things like being able to share your screen and to do split screens. You can do a lot of that stuff using other tools and we’ll touch on some of that a little bit later on today. I know a number of you as readers of ProBlogger are already using Facebook Live but I suspect there’s many of you who have been looking at this technology and wondering how you would use it. That’s what I want to focus upon today. Let me give you seven ways to use Facebook Live to help to grow your brand, grow your audience, and to make money from your blog, and to build your business. Let’s get into today’s show. But before I do, I just want to briefly give you some of the why of using Facebook Live and I’m going to whip through these reasons really quickly. Firstly, for me, Facebook Live, the real benefit of it is that it gives you a live interaction with your audience. It’s all about engagement, it’s all about understanding who is reading your blog and who’s watching you because you get immediate feedback. More important than that, it personalizes your brand and it shows your followers, your readers, who you are. I’ve lost track of the amount of people that have contacted me after watching one of my live videos and having interacted with me on a live video. I’ve lost count of the number of people who have said things like you’re not the way I had previously thought of you, you’re different to my previous perception of you. Usually, the difference is a positive difference, I’m pleased to say. Facebook Live does open up that engagement with your audience and it certainly warms up your audience. I’ve noticed many times after a Facebook Live that people leave comments on my blog for the first time ever having seen me on a Facebook Live or they will purchase a product in the days that follow as well. I think it’s really about that engagement, it helps your audience to understand who you are, helps you understand them, and helps them feel like you have noticed them because you’re seeing their comments, you’re interacting with them. It helps you understand who’s reading your blog which gives you insight into the type of content that you can create as well. I find Facebook Live gives me a lot of energy as well. It’s quite often after doing a Facebook Live that I will have an idea for a blog post and I will have real motivation to write that post because I’ve just been asked a question or I’ve just seen one of my audience members with a particular need. I’ve lost track of the amount of podcasts that I’ve created almost within minutes of completing a Facebook Live because it does give me energy and motivation and ideas as well. It’s also a really great way of testing your ideas. If you’ve got an idea for a blog post or a podcast or a piece of content or a product, jump on Facebook Live and test that. You get immediate feedback with your audience as well. It’s also a great way of increasing your reach on Facebook. Facebook is prioritizing Facebook Live at the moment. They are showing your live videos to a large audience than pretty much any other type of content that you can put onto Facebook at the moment. I’ve seen this time and time again, I did a Facebook Live just last week. I think on the ProBlogger page, we have an audience of about 80,000 people who followed our page. That video had reach of over 150,000. That’s because Facebook prioritizes that. It’s the type of content that people like to share as well, so it is a great way of finding new readers or engaging with those readers who perhaps haven’t seen your content for a while on Facebook Live because of their algorithm on Facebook. There’s a whole lot of reasons there. I think it does help to build your brand, build your audience, and there’s potential for it to help you to monetize as well. The question then is how do you use it and what type of video should you be creating on Facebook Live? Really, there’s no one answer. I’ve seen 10, 15 different types of videos that bloggers are using on Facebook Live but today I just want to share the top 7 that I’ve seen and done myself. Number one is my favorite and that is to do an ask me anything video. We’ll say right upfront that this is the one that you need to have an audience for. If you are a small blogger, this may be a bit of a tricky one, or you may need to really work hard to get people to show up on your ask me anything video. This is where you sit in front of the camera and you take questions and you answer those questions to the best of your ability. This is what I predominantly use Facebook Live for at the moment, I’m trying to do it at least once a week. Sometimes I announce it beforehand with an email or in Twitter to try and get people to my Facebook page just before it happens. That certainly helps to get more interaction. I find that I need 20 to 30 people to be watching live to get enough questions to last me at least half an hour. That’s the minimum that I’m looking to be on Facebook Live for is about half an hour because it takes a little while for your audience to grow and for Facebook to be able to prioritize it. You want to be aiming for at least that long. Ultimately, it’s an ask me anything type session but sometimes it is helpful to be able to put a topic around it as well. You could say, if you’re a photography blogger, “Ask me anything about portrait photography.” Or, “Ask me anything about landscape photography.” That sometimes can help to draw people in with that particular interest. Sometimes it’s also good to be able to go into those sessions with some questions that you’ve already been asked to get the ball rolling. You might say on your Facebook page a few hours you’re going to do the video that you’re taking questions and that you will answer them in an upcoming Facebook Live video. Ask me anything is really great if you do have that audience. It does build engagement, and this is where you do get that conversation with your audience. It’s one of the few places that you can almost have a real time conversation with your audience. These are the ones where I often get those emails afterwards of people really saying thank you so much for answering my question and you are different to the way I expected. You can be a bit playful in these types of sessions. Number two is to teach something. Prepare a talk, prepare some tips, prepare some teaching of some kind. Usually, I would take in about five different points that I want to make on a particular topic and I would make the topic a pain point of my audience or a challenge that they’re trying to overcome and then I would present five or so things about how to overcome that. Again, you want to aim for maybe 10, 15 minutes of teaching and then you can switch into a Q&A. That’s where you get a little bit more interactive. You want to say right upfront that today, I’m not here to answer questions, I want to teach you something and then we’re going to take on a Q&A as well. That really does work well. You can use some visuals with that, I’ve seen people standing in front of a white board where they have their points written. I’ve seen people use their camera on their phone and flipped it around to show the points on the screen, it’s a powerpoint presentation. I’ve seen people stand in front of televisions where they have a powerpoint so they’re able to have some visuals for their teaching as well. Using those visuals can really work well. I really hope that Facebook does add in the ability to do screen sharing natively from their app or from the desktop option that they have at the moment because that will certainly help with the teaching because you will be able to use your visuals. But, there are other tools that you can use to do that as well. There’s a tool called WireCast which will enable you to have multiple cameras and also to share your screen, your desktop on your computer. You could also use a tool called Zoom. Zoom is a webinar tool and you can actually do a webinar and then share that to Facebook Live. That would be another way that you can share some slides in a fairly easy way. The key here is to think about what you’re going to teach and make sure it’s something that really is a pain point of your audience or it’s something that they want to learn. One of the great things as bloggers when it comes to this is that if you’ve already got content on your blog that teaches something that you can really quite easily take one of those old posts that you’ve written and repurpose that into a live video. You’ve already got the content there, you’ve got your main points already lined out, it’s just a matter of speaking those points. Don’t read them, you want to speak them. A number three type of video that you want to use is where you want to use the live video to promote some content that you’ve already published. This is something I’ve done a number of times and I’ve done it a number of times particularly on Digital Photography School. What I was doing for a while on the DPS Facebook page was to jump on and to do a Facebook Live just after our newsletter went out. What I would do is basically run through the newsletter and show our viewers of the video the post that we’ve published over the last week. If you’ve subscribed to the DPS newsletter, you’ll know that we send out once a week an email that just basically shows the 14 posts that we’ve published over the last week. We list them, it’s a very simple email. What I did was basically I showed people the content and I use my phone to do this. I flip the camera around and show the screen of my computer and actually talked about each of the pieces of content that we published over the last week. And then in the description of that video, I shared the links of each of those pieces of content as well so people could then go and find those pieces of content. That did really well, we saw spikes in traffic but it also helped us to get new subscribers to our newsletter because that start of that video I was saying, “Hey, if you haven’t already got our newsletter, here’s what it looks like.” I show them, “Here’s the content that we promoted this week.” That motivated some people to sign up for our newsletter as well. You could do it with your newsletter or you could do it every time you write a new blogpost. You could say hey, today, I published this. You might give a few of the reasons that you published that post. You might even give a bit of a teaser on some of the content itself, and then you give people the link to go and find that piece of content. You might also take some questions. You might say, “Go and read it now, let me know what you think about it,” and get feedback in some way. Promoting content, promoting a newsletter, promoting some feature of your blog is the number three type of video that you might do on Facebook Live. Number four is to do a review or to demonstrate something. One of the beauties of video is that you can show stuff. It doesn’t just have to be you standing in front of a camera talking into the webcam, you can be actually illustrating how to use something or to show a product or something that you’ve got that might interest your readers in some way. You might do an unboxing. If you get a parcel in the mail, you can do an unboxing if you know what it is. Give your first impressions of that particular product. I’ve seen a number of bloggers do this in the fashion space, fashion bloggers who actually unbox a dress and then duck behind a little place and put it on and then show it and then get feedback on it from their audience. I’ve seen parenting bloggers demonstrate toys with their kids, actually showing the product that they have being given for review. You could do this as a first impression review and then go in and write the full review later on. The great thing about Facebook Live is that you can embed the videos that you do as a Facebook Live into a blog post later. That’s pretty cool. You can actually say in your full review that you write up in your blog, “Here’s a video that I shot with my first impressions.” Give the rest of the content underneath that as your written content. Doing reviews, demonstrating if you’ve got something particularly visual that you’re writing about, that could be a great way to use Facebook Live. Similarly if you’re a travel blogger to show a destination. I guess in many ways that’s a review or a demonstration of that destination as well. If you’ve got something visual that you’re blogging about, Facebook Live could be brilliant for you. Number five way that you can use Facebook Live is to recap an event. I know a lot of you go to conferences, you go to workshops, you go to different types of events. Using Facebook Live in that scenario is brilliant. Firstly, you could actually be showing part of the event. You need to get a bit of permission, you need to actually find out what the terms of service are of that event. You probably don’t want to be live broadcasting keynote speeches without permission. But at the end of the day, that is often a great time for you to do a Facebook Live because you can recap what happened at the event. I’ve done this a number of times. Last year at Social Media Marketing World, at the end of every day, I would get on and do a Facebook Live video for my followers of here’s the top five things that I learned at Social Media Marketing World this year. That was great because it actually shared what I was learning with my audience. I have a large audience that wants to…

Full show notes at the publisher

179: How to Lower the Bounce Rate on Your Blog Feb 06, 2017

Show notes

11 Techniques for Lowering the Bounce Rate on Your Blog In today’s lesson I want to talk about a statistic or metric that is in Google analytics that I see bloggers talking about a lot – that of ‘bounce rate’. Just today I was asked twice about bounce rate and how to get it lower. So in this episode, I thought I’d tackle the topic and will talk briefly about what bounce rate is, about why I see many bloggers not really interpreting it in a helpful way and for the bulk of the episode I want to give you 11 things you can do to lower bounce rate on your blog. Lastly I’m going to suggest some homework that you might want to do! So if you if you’re not sure what bounce rate is or you look at the stat in your Google Analytics and want to know how to get it lower – this episode is just for you! Note: you can find this episode (PB179) here on iTunes if you’d like to listen to it there. Further Resources on How to Lower the Bounce Rate on Your Blog Google Analytics Plugin to Open External Links in a New Window ProBlogger Podcast Listeners Group on Facebook Further Reading on Removing Dates from Blogs ProBlogger Start Here Page Digital Photography School Start Here Page dPS Photography for Beginners Sneeze Page 21 Settings, Techniques and Rules all New Camera Owners Should Know (a sneeze post) How to Turn Surfers into Blog Readers by Building a Sticky Blog Getting Blog Readers to Subscribe, Follow and Connect How to Turn First Time Visitors Into Interested Readers of Your Blog (Portal Strategy) Series of Blog Posts vs Long Blog Posts – Which is Better? How to Get People to Comment on Your Blog Posts How to Build a Culture of Community on Your Blog Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Welcome to episode 179 of the ProBlogger podcast! My name’s Darren Rowse, and I’m the blogger behind ProBlogger.com, which is a blog, a podcast, event, job board, and series of eBooks all designed to help you as a blogger to start an amazing blog to create lifechanging content for your readers and to hopefully make a bit of an income for yourself. You can learn more about ProBlogger over at ProBlogger.com. Now today, I’m feeling a little bit strange. Listen to this. Can you hear it? There’s nothing. My house is so quiet today because my youngest son started school this week. Yes, all three of my boys are at school at last. Also it’s been very exciting to see him get in his uniform and waddle off to school with a massive bag on his back. The house is just so quiet. I think it’s gonna take a little time to get used to, but anyway, one of the good things about a quiet house is that I can record this podcast pretty much anytime of the day. I don’t have to set him up with a movie or anything like that or wait till he goes off to preschool. Without further ado, let’s get into today’s lesson. In today’s lesson, what I want to talk about is a statistic or a metric that you can find in your Google Analytics account. It’s one that I see a lot of bloggers talking about. It’s the statistic or the metric bounce rate – your bounce rate. That’s what I wanna talk about today. Even just today, I was asked twice in Facebook groups about bounce rate and how to get it lower, so I thought in this episode, I’d tackle the topic. We’ll talk briefly about what a bounce rate is, for those of you who’ve never heard that term before or maybe you’ve seen it in your Google Analytics and wondered what it was. I wanna talk a little bit about why I think some bloggers aren’t really interpreting bounce rate in a helpful way. For the bulk of this episode, I wanna give you eleven different things you can do to get your bounce rate lower and hopefully improve your blog. The last thing I wanna do is suggest a little bit of homework that you might wanna do to lower your bounce rate. I wanna challenge you to pick one of the things we talk about today to lower yours. If you are someone who doesn’t know what bounce rate is or you have been looking at it in your Google Analytics and wondering how to get it lower, this episode is for you. There is going to be quite a bit of further reading and some suggested further listening today, so you might wanna check out the show notes over at ProBlogger.com/podcast/179, where you can also get a full transcript of today’s show. Let’s get into it. Today I was asked by two different bloggers about bounce rate. [Riva 0:02:44] asked, “What are some ways to reduce your bounce rate?” Riva says, “I’m adding other posts at the end of my post for people to click through to. I’ve written long form and short form posts. I’ve got a ‘Start Here’ and ‘About’ page, but I can’t get my bounce rate below 70%.” Then Paul asks, “What’s an acceptable bounce rate for a blog? Mine is 80%. Is that too high? What can I do to lower it?” Bounce rate – something that’s on the mind of at least two of our readers and I know a little bit more because I just asked in our Facebook group (the ProBlogger Listeners Facebook group) – I asked the question, “What statistic do you watch the most?” About a quarter of the people who’ve responded so far have mentioned “bounce rate.” It’s something that’s on your mind. Let’s quickly define it, and then get onto some tips for lowering it. Firstly, definitions. Bounce rate is a metric in your Google Analytics account that reports the percentage of people, who visit your site and who leave your site from that first page that they arrive on. They bounce off your site. They come to a page, and then they leave straight away without clicking around your site. To find this statistic, it’s very easy. Simply log into your Google Analytics account. If you don’t have Google Analytics, please add it, because it’s an industry standard. It’s amazingly powerful, and it’s completely free. Once you’ve got it set up on your blog – if you’ve got questions about that, ask in the Facebook group, we’ll be able to help you through that. Log into your Google Analytics account. When you are on the first page – once you’re looking at your blog stats, you’ll see the “Audience Overview.” You’ll see a little chart titled “Bounce Rate,” and it will have a percentage number underneath it. I’m looking at mine right now for Digital Photography School, and the number is the 78.25%. That’s an average of the last month of people who bounced away from my site, which sounds pretty hot. 78.25% are arriving on my site, and they’re leaving straight away. It’s very difficult to compare my bounce rate to yours, and we’ll talk a little bit about why that might be in a moment. But you will see that number for yours. That means 78.25% of people are arriving on my blog, and they’re leaving without viewing any more than the single page they arrive on. If you click on that little chart in Google Analytics, it will open up the last month of your bounce rate or whatever period that you’ve got the dates in for. Now most blogs don’t really see a great variation from day to day in their bounce rate. They’re usually a pretty flat line. Mine changes slightly when we send out our email. I’ll talk a little bit about that in a moment, but most blogs will have a very steady line when they click on that particular chart. It’s pretty even over time. In general, when you’re interpreting that number, a high number – if you’ve got 99%, it means a lot of people are leaving your blog without surfing around. If it’s a low number, it means a lot of people are getting to your site and then clicking around your site. In general, most people would say a high number is a bad sign and a lower number is a good sign. But there are some times, where that’s not the case. We’ll talk about those in a minute. A low number means less people are bouncing away from your site. The most common question I get asked when it comes to bounce rate is the one you heard before, “How do I get it lower?” or like Paul asked, “What’s an acceptable rate?” I’m gonna talk a little bit about how to get it lower in a minute, but there’s a few things I do wanna say about bounce rates. This comes into how to interpret that number. First thing, there are times when a lower bounce rate isn’t a good thing. You might think that’s weird, but there are times, where the goal of a page on your site or maybe even your whole site is to get your readers to do something other than click around your site. For example, if you have a site that’s all about promoting affiliate products, you probably want to send people away from your site. You might have a post on your site that you actually want a bounce rate that’s really high. You want people to be bouncing straight off your site, because that means they’re going to visit the affiliate site. That might be one case. It may be that you want people to call your business. If you’ve got a business, your blog is about your business, and ultimately, your goal is to get people to pick up the phone and call you, then a high bounce rate could actually be a sign that that’s a good thing. They’re getting to your site, and they’re picking up the phone and calling you. It may be that you’re trying to sell something on a site like Amazon or eBay, so you want to send people away from your site. It may be that you’re capturing a lead through a tool that doesn’t require another page load on your site. Any of these things can actually mean your bounce rate is higher, but it can be a good thing. I wanted to put that out there, so it’s not always something that you want to lower if you’re trying to achieve one of those things. But most of us are trying to lower our bounce rate. Second thing I wanna just say before I get into some techniques for lowering your bounce rate is that I see a lot of bloggers looking at their sites’ overall bounce rate. The number I gave you before is 78.25% of people who arrive on Digital Photography School are bouncing away. That’s interesting, but I much prefer to look at the bounce rate of individual pages on my blog. Whilst, yes, lowering my overall number might be a good thing, I’m much more interested in lowering the number on individual pages. Let me give you a few examples. On ProBlogger, as I look at my Google Analytics account, I can see on the front page of ProBlogger, over the last month, our bounce rate is 61%. That’s lower than our site average. I think our site average there is similar to DPS. It’s normally in the seventies, but on the front page is 61. That makes sense. When people arrive on the front page of ProBlogger, there’s lots of options there for them to click around the site. They’re probably looking at the front page, because they’re trying to work out what the site is and what the most recent stuff is, and so it makes sense that that number is lower. If you look at other pages on ProBlogger, you might look at our “Start Here” page. The bounce rate on that is 54%. That’s fantastic. Again, that page is purely designed to direct people to different parts of the site. On the job board on ProBlogger – this is where we list jobs for bloggers – the bounce rate is 35%, and that’s great because it means people are clicking on individual jobs on that job board. You can see there, there’s an incredible variance. Whilst the overall bounce rate for ProBlogger as a whole is 72%, there’s pages that are as low as 35%. There’s incredible variance there. I think looking at your overall number is interesting, but looking at individual pages and individual posts on your site is much more interesting. On the converse side, I’ve showed you there some low bounce rates. There’s posts on ProBlogger that have very high ones. There’s a post I was just looking at before. I wrote it in 2012. It’s still getting search traffic every day, but the bounce rate on that individual post is 91%. That’s because the content on it is old. People are arriving on it and seeing the date 2012, and they’re seeing information that perhaps isn’t as relevant for them and they’re bouncing away at a higher rate. Actually digging into your stats and looking at the bounce rate of individual pages, I think is so much more productive and beneficial. A better strategy for looking at your overall is to really dig into those. I really would encourage you to do that in your Google Analytics. You may even just stop this podcast right now and get into Google Analytics. Look at your most visited pages, your front page of your blog, and the key pages in your navigation, the most visited blog posts, pages like sales pages or landing pages for your email lists – all of these pages – it’s really interesting to see what the bounce rate is, and it’s much more worthwhile to spend your time decreasing the bounce rate on individual pages than overall in some ways. That’s another thing I wanna say about bounce rate. The last thing I’ll say before I get into some techniques for lowering bounce rates is that bounce rate varies depending upon the source of your traffic. Again, I’m gonna flip back to Digital Photography School. My Google Analytics there – just looking at that now, and I can see that traffic that comes from Google bounces away from Digital Photography School at 77%, whereas traffic coming from social media is bouncing away at 81%. Then traffic coming in from email is bouncing away at 55%. I could see the incredible variance in the types of traffic and the sources of the traffic, so I think it can be really useful to dig into that. I’m particularly interested in looking at Google traffic because that makes up the bulk of the traffic on my site. Over 50% of my traffic comes in from Google, and most of the people arriving in from Google are first-time visitors as well. I’m looking at really lowering that. Email – I’m not really as interested in lowering that. It’s already pretty low, and that’s because we send out emails with multiple links in them. Someone opening our email might see 10 of our latest posts on the site, and so they’ll click on through to a few of those. That’s why that number is 55%, but I’m not really interested in lowering that much more because those people are already subscribed. People who are coming in from Google – they’re first-time visitors. I wanna get that number down because I know if I can get people visiting more pages on their first view, they’re more likely to subscribe. Dig into your Google Analytics. Look at the bounce rate for individual pages on your site and also the different sources of traffic. You’ll get much more information about your bounce rate if you dig deeper. I made those disclaimers and those general comments about bounce rate. Let me dig into some strategies for getting the bounce rate on your site down, and of course keeping in mind that sometimes, in a few instances, you don’t wanna get it down because you wanna get it higher. You want people to take action off your site, but let’s talk about getting your bounce rate down because that’s what most of us are interested in doing on our site on the individual pages. I wanna go through 11 things, and I’ll kind of whip through them as fast as I can. Firstly, the first thing you can do to get your bounce rate down is to make a great first impression when people arrive at your site. I’ve said this many times in the past. People decide in the first few seconds when they’re on your site as to whether you’re a credible site, whether you’re relevant to them, and whether you’re worth reading. They’re making those judgments based upon the design of your site, the branding of your site, whether you’re clearly communicating the benefits or topic of your site, whether you’re making a promise that excites them. Things like your design, your branding, your tagline – these things can help to create a great first impression. They will make people look a little bit deeper into your site. If they see a beautifully designed site that’s well-branded and that clearly communicates a benefit for them reading, they’re much more likely to click around on your site and see whether you’ve got somet…

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178: How to Get Products to Review on Your Blog Jan 30, 2017

Show notes

Strategies to Get Products to Review on Your Blog In today’s lesson, I want to share 7 strategies that I used to get products to review on my first ever commercial blog – a camera review blog. It’s not always easy to get products to review in the early days of a blog when you perhaps don’t have a big profile so in this episode I rewind the clock to when I was just starting out and share how I did it. So if you’d like to create more product reviews on your blog – this one is for you. Listen to this episode in the player above or here on iTunes. Further Resources on Writing Reviews How to Write Amazing Product Reviews How to Write a Must-read Product Review Facebook Group Using Quotes in Your Blog Legally and Ethically Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Hey there! Welcome to episode 178 of the ProBlogger podcast! My name’s Darren Rowse, and I’m the blogger behind ProBlogger.com, which is a blog, podcast, event, job board, and a series of eBooks all designed to help you as a blogger to start a blog, to create amazing content, and to grow your audience and hopefully make some money from your blog, too. You can learn more about ProBlogger over at ProBlogger.com. In today’s episode, I wanna share with you seven strategies that I used in the early days of my blogging to get products to review on my first commercial blog, which was a camera review blog. I know a lot of you as listeners do reviews on your blog from time to time. Some of you have blogs that are purely about reviewing products, but it’s not always easy to get those products to review. In the early days of a blog, when you don’t have many readers perhaps and not have a big profile, it can be particularly hard to get those products. This is exactly the problem that I faced in my early days, and so today, I wanna give you seven strategies to get some products to review. Some of them are a little bit obvious, and some of them are quite creative and I hope will be helpful to you. If you wanna create product reviews for your blog, this episode is for you. You can find the show notes, transcript, and some further reading over at ProBlogger.com/podcast/178. Just before I start though, I also wanna make one other note. I have in the last couple of days changed our Facebook group’s name. It was previously a group that I’d called “The ProBlogger Challenge Group.” It was purely for sharing challenges for you as listeners, and I decided in the new year to broaden the group a little bit. Now it is called “The ProBlogger Podcast Listeners Group.” If you do a search on Facebook for “ProBlogger Podcast Listeners,” you’ll find it, and we will be still doing some challenges. But I also wanted to open it up a little bit more to discussing each episode and maybe even making a challenge for each episode. If you’ve got any questions or tips that you wanna share with the group, you can do that there. Again, do a search for “ProBlogger Podcast Listeners” or click on the link in today’s show notes. That’s enough of the logistics. Let’s get into today’s show where we are going to talk about reviews. The topic for today’s episode comes from Paul [Sutcliffe 0:02:40], who in a recent Facebook Live that I was doing asked me a question, which I answered in the Facebook Live, but then afterwards thought of a whole heap more that I could say on the topic. This is the question that he asked. He said, “How do people go about doing a good review of a product before you’re in a position to be having them sent to you by the product sellers? Do you spend your own money on them to start with or get info from other reviews and sources on the internet?” This is a great topic. Actually as I was answering it on the Live, it made me think back to my own early days of blogging because I started out, as many of you know, with my first commercial blog being a review blog. It kinda started by accident one day, when I posted a little 300-word review of a camera that I was using. I didn’t really expect much from that particular post, but I learnt very quickly that reviews are fantastic. People search for reviews on Google. One of the things that I learnt is that a lot of people are searching Google for advice on purchases that they’re making. We’ve all done it, and we perhaps don’t just do it on Google anymore. We perhaps do it on YouTube and other places as well, but people are searching for that type of information so it can be a great source of traffic. I know many bloggers, who have blogs on all kinds of topics, who occasionally write reviews and find that their reviews are their most popular posts. People search for them. People find them useful. They’re grateful for them. I used to get emails from all kinds of people saying, “Thank you for the review that you wrote on this particular camera and that particular camera,” and they became readers – long term kind of readers because I gave them good advice. People remember where they get that type of advice, so it can be great for building credibility with your readers. Reviews can be monetized as well, particularly through affiliate marketing if you are recommending a particular product and linking to where people could buy that product with an affiliate link. Those links do tend to convert quite well. The other thing I love about reviews is they get conversations going as well. When you put your opinion of a product out there, you will find that other people will respond to that as well, either those who agree with your opinion or perhaps have a different opinion to you. Reviews are great, but how do you get the products to review? It can be a challenge when you’re just starting out, particularly when you wanna do a lot of reviews. Now my first review came because I had a digital camera of my own. I bought it, and that’s probably the best place to start. I’ll talk a little bit more about that in a moment, but what happens when you run out of products that you own that you want to review. This is the challenge that I had in those early days. After I did that first review, how was I going to get another camera to review? I guess, one source of review products can be the manufacturers themselves, but what if you don’t have a big profile? What I wanna share with you today is seven places that I would get cameras to review – seven different tips to getting cameras to review or products to review on your particular blog. This is how I did it. Number one. The first place to start is with what you already have. The most obvious tip, so I’m not gonna spend a lot of time on this one. That first review I did was on my own camera, but that dried up very quick because I only had one digital camera. That’s the first place to start. What do you already have or what are you about to buy that you could be reviewing? Every time I bought a new photography related piece of gear, I would review that, whether it be a lens or a flash or an SD card, a memory card, or something else. You’ve gotta get in the habit of really turning anything you have that’s related to your topic into a review. Number one: review what you already have. Number two: borrow what you can from your friends or any other contacts that you have. I remember in those early days. Any time a friend would buy a new camera, I would say, “Hey! Could I use it for the weekend?” or “Could I use it for a day?” Write a review on that. It was amazing how many people, not only allowed me to do that, but they began to come to me with their new piece of photography gear because word got out that I was reviewing. A lot of my friends wanted to put the piece of equipment that they bought into my hands so that I could review it because they were interested in my opinion on it. Borrow. Use your networks, whatever it might be. I actually was part of a camera club, a photography club, and that opened up all kinds of possibilities for camera and gear to review. Find any kind of club or group that might open up the possibilities there. Number three – this is as my site began to grow, new opportunities for getting review units began to open up. One of the things that I did was to start to ask myself, “Where are the cameras that I wanna review?” The manufacturers at the time weren’t sending cameras out to online reviewers. This is back 2004 and 2005. They were sending them out to journalists. They were sending them out to other places, but not online, particularly bloggers. I began asking, “Who does have the cameras that I wanna review?” One of the obvious places was camera stores. What I found is that when I would go into a camera store and introduce myself and say, “Hey, I’ve got this site that reviews cameras. Is there any way that I could borrow one of your cameras to review, if I could give you some profile?” What I found is that a lot of the camera stores were actually really interested in building their online profile. This is back in 2005, 2006. I suspect it’s even more so today. I was amazed how many camera stores allowed me to take cameras away and review them. Sometimes they would give them to me for an afternoon or a couple of hours to run around the city and take photos with their cameras. They would keep my driver’s license or some other form of ID. As the relationships grew, they sometimes let me take them home overnight or for a weekend. In return for them giving me the camera to review, I would link to them in the review and say something like, “This camera was provided by Michael’s Camera Store, which is a Melbourne camera store.” I was able to give them some profile in return for them lending me a camera to review. Who has the thing that you want to review? The answer may be a store. It may be a rental place. One of things I found is that there was actually a camera rental company in the US, who was willing to send review units to one of our writers a little bit later on. In return for us, again, linking to them and giving them some profile on our blog. We would always acknowledge that the review unit was provided to us by this particular lens rental company. Who has the type of thing that you want to review? It may be that there’s a local library in your area that has that type of thing. I know here in Australia, a lot of local libraries don’t just have books; they also have DVDs. They sometimes even have toys, so if you’re reviewing toys, maybe there’s a library that has toys that you could borrow as well. There may be other organizations, particularly retailers. Number four tip is to pitch the manufacturer or a distributer of the product that you’re reviewing. Whilst you might not think you’ve got a big profile, you’d be surprised how many manufacturers do actually have review units that you can review. Most of them probably aren’t gonna send you free stuff that you can keep forever, particularly if that product is high value. If you got low value products that you wanna review, you’ll find that they will give them to you at times, but many of them will lend them to you. This is what I found gradually over time. Manufacturers began to have review units available to bloggers and to online influencers. You’ll be amazed how many companies really are quite open to that, even if you don’t have a massive audience. If you’ve got the right audience for them, they will be open to that type of relationship. I would be networking as much as you can with manufacturers. The way I did it in the early days was to go to trade shows – our local shows here in Australia for the photographic industry. At those shows, I was able to meet the manufacturers or their representatives. A lot of the time here in Australia was distributors who I was meeting. As I was able to share the story of my site and begin to get to know them, they began to become interested once they heard how much traffic we had and who was reading our site. They became interested in lending us cameras to review. They never gave us them outright. I wanna make that really clear upfront. We never, ever were given a camera to review that we could keep. We always had them for a couple of weeks, but this certainly was one thing that began to happen more and more. We, even after a while, began to have manufacturers email us and say, “Could you review our products? We’ve got some review units.” Pitch the manufacturers. The key is to not just talk about how many readers you’ve got, but talk about the type of readers you’ve got and show them that whilst you might not have a massive amount of readers that you’ve got the type of reader that they want to get their product in front of. A targeted audience can go a lot further than a big one. That’s number four. There’s a few more. If that one doesn’t work for you, it may take a little bit of time to build those relationships. Number five is consider buying the product that you want to review. I only did this a few times, and I only did it when it was either a really popular item that I knew there’d be a lot of demand for, people wanting information on. If there was a really hot, new camera coming out that I knew everyone wanted to know about, I would consider buying that product, and particularly when I thought I could make enough from the review, through affiliate links, to pay for it anyway. If I knew there was a hot, new camera coming out and I was pretty sure it was a really good camera, I would consider buying that and hope that I can make enough off the affiliate links or on a camera that I wanted anyway. That might be one option for you. The other thing that I did do on a couple of occasions was to rent a camera. I already mentioned that there was a company who rented cameras out. Well, here in Australia, you can also rent cameras. This is significantly cheaper than buying it, but it meant that I could give it a go for a week. I was able to rent that camera for a week and then send it back again. There was some cost involved, but I was able to make that money back from the affiliate links. Tip number five was to buy or rent the product that you want to review. Number six. This is where you get a little bit more creative. What about asking someone else to write a review for you? I published many reviews from other people on my blog in the early days. There’s a variety of different types of people, who might be able to write a review for you. The most obvious one is other bloggers. The idea of a guest post didn’t really exist back in 2005, but people were doing it anyway. One of the things I did was if I saw another blogger who did own a camera, whether they were a photography blogger or some other type of blogger, I would always email them and say, “Hey! I notice you’re using this particular camera. Would you mind writing 500 words on what you think about that particular camera?” It’s amazing how many other bloggers were more than willing to do that, particularly if you were to give them some exposure. I remember there were a couple of friends who were hesitant to lend me their camera, as I talked about earlier, but on those occasions, a couple of them actually said they’d write something from their own perspective. They were decent writers, so I would do that. Another one that worked really well for me was to approach a journalist. I saw in a Melbourne newspaper that there was a journalist, who was writing short reviews on cameras in a weekly supplement in one of our newspapers. I emailed him, and I said, “Hey, is there any way that we could use those reviews that were appearing in the newspaper on our blog?” He wasn’t allowed to do that, but he was able to rewrite them. What he did was when he was reviewing a camera for the newspaper, he would actually write two versions of it and send us one. We were able to do that in return for giving him some profile and giving the newspaper some profile as well. That went on for a couple of years. Couple of times a month, he would send us these reviews. Maybe there’s someone else out there, who’s got the product in…

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177: How to Build Traffic and Momentum on Your Blog After a Blogging Slump Jan 23, 2017

Show notes

In this lesson, I want to give you six things you can do to hopefully boost your traffic, to give you a bit of a kick start in terms of traffic after a slump, and hopefully get things back to where your traffic was or even higher. If you’re looking for a boost in traffic, today’s episode is for you.

176: How to Create Scannable Content: 19 Techniques in 19 Minutes Jan 16, 2017

Show notes

I want to share something really quite simple. It’s a skill that is going to help you with all of the content that you create for your blog. It’s going to help your blog to be more read by the readers who come to it, it’s going to help those readers to understand what you are trying to say to them, and to take action upon the content that you create. It’s also going to help you to get more shares on your content too. Today we’re talking about techniques for creating scannable content on your blog.

175: How to Quit Your Job and Build an Online Business Jan 09, 2017

Show notes

In today’s lesson, I want to tell you a story. It’s a story of advice that I was given when I was just starting out, advice that it turns out I completely ignored. It’s a story of regret and a story that I hope might move you into taking some more action in your blog and your business. I’m not saying you should quit your day job today. That would not be responsible in particular if you haven’t started blogging yet or if you are in the early days of your blog. But if that’s a dream for you, there are things you can do today about it.

174: An Alternate New Year’s Resolution That Will Transform Your Blogging for 2017 Jan 02, 2017

Show notes

If you’re looking at the new year and are wondering how to make it the best year ever for your blog - this episode is for you! In today’s lesson I want to talk about New Year’s Resolutions and Goals and want to suggest setting a goal that I think will help to set your blogging up for a great year of blogging.

173: How to Use Quotes in Your Blog Content Legally and Ethically Dec 26, 2016

Show notes

Using Quotes in Your Blog Legally and Ethically In today’s lesson, I want to talk about using quotes on your blog. I’m regularly asked – particularly by new bloggers – what the etiquette and legalities are around using content that others have written in your own content – or the practice of quoting others. It’s a good question because quoting others and building upon their ideas with your blog can be one way to improve the quality of your content, serve your readers and build relationships with others (the ones that you quote). Having said that – using the content with others in inappropriate ways is something I see semi-regularly and it can really hurt (if not destroy) your reputation if you don’t do it right. There’s no need to worry though – it’s not hard to get right and in this podcast I’m going to share why quotes are beneficial, why you need to do it right, some tips on how to do it and lastly I want to share some ways to use quotes on your blog to create different types of content. Listen to this podcast in the player above or here on iTunes. Further Resources on How to Use Quotes in Your Blog Content Legally and Ethically 8 Tips for Using Quotes and Dialogue in Your Blog Posts The Why, How and When of Using Quotations on Your Blog How to Cite Sources & Not Steal People’s Content on the Internet When Do You Need to Secure Permissions? ProBlogger Facebook Challenge Group Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Hi there, and welcome to Episode 173 of the ProBlogger podcast. My name is Darren Rowse, and I’m the blogger behind ProBlogger.com – a blog, podcast, event, job board, series of eBooks, and a real book, too – all designed to help you as a blogger to grow your blog to create amazing content, to build community and engagement with your readers, and hopefully to make some money from your blog as well. You can learn more about ProBlogger over at ProBlogger.com. In today’s lesson, the last of 2016, I wanna talk about using quotes on your blog. I’m regularly asked, particularly by new bloggers, “What’s the etiquette and legalities around using content that other people have written on their blogs or in their books or in other forms? How do you use that in your own content?” or I guess, questions about the practice of quoting other people. It’s a great question because quoting other people and building upon their ideas with your blog’s content can be one way to really improve the content on your blog. It’s a great way to serve your readers (and we’ll talk a little bit more about why that’s the case) and to build relationships with others, the people that you quote. There’s a lot of benefits of having quotes in your content, but having said all that, using content from others in inappropriate ways is something that I do see people doing semi-regularly. It can really hurt, if not destroy your reputation as a blogger, if you don’t do it the right way. That might sound a little bit harsh, but I have seen people’s profiles and credibility really ripped to shreds because they haven’t done it right. That might sound harsh. I just want to say right up front, there’s no need to worry. It’s not hard to do right. This podcast is all about doing it the right way. In this podcast, I wanna talk a little bit about why you should use quotes, how to do it right, some tips on practically how to do it, and I wanna share some ways that you can use quotes and begin to practice using quotes in your content to create different types of content. You can find today’s shownotes, where I will link to some further reading on this topic that we’ve published on ProBlogger and some reading that I found in researching today’s podcast at ProBlogger.com/podcast/173. I do just wanna take a quick moment to say that this is the last episode of 2016. Christmas was yesterday here in Australia. It’s summer. It’s hot. The air conditioner is on. You might be able to hear it in the background. The New Year is just a few days away. I just wanted to pause for a moment to wish you all very well for the end of the year. If you’re celebrating Christmas or another holiday, I hope you’re having a happy holiday period. I just wanted you to know that I am incredibly grateful for you listening to the ProBlogger podcast in 2016. It has been an amazing year, and I’ve had so much fun putting this show together for you. I look forward to continuing to do it in the new year. It’s summer holidays here in Australia, so over the next few weeks, I may not quite keep up with my weekly schedule. I’m gonna do my best, but family comes first this time of year for us. It is hard to find a quiet patch over the school holidays to record, but I just wanted to let you know that I will get back to a regular posting schedule towards the end of the January. I look forward to sharing with you some news of some changes that are happening to ProBlogger late in January, early in Feb. Thanks for listening, and if you are listening to this from 2017, the future, Happy New Year to you. Okay, let’s get on with today’s show. Very quick disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, and what follows is not legal advice. If in doubt, seek the advice of a lawyer. Today we’re talking about quotes, and I wanted to start off by talking about why quotes are actually something that I think blogs should use on their blogs in some way and in different times. Firstly – and I saw this right from the beginning of my blogging – quotes actually were a big part of blogging back in 2002, when I started. In fact, I would say probably 10, 15, 20% of my blog posts usually started with me bouncing off the idea that someone else had started on their blog, so it was very common for bloggers to be linking to one another and quoting one another in the early days. A lot of that quoting and a lot of that linking now seems to happen on social media, but I do think it’s something that we could rediscover as bloggers. Quoting someone else is a good way to add a little bit of credibility to your articles and to make them more interesting and informative to your readers as well – to be able to add to an article that you’ve written something like, “I’m not the only one who thinks this; so does this person, who said, …” and then to use their quote. That can add a little bit of credibility to your ideas. It makes your arguments stronger. It can also lift the quality of your posts, to include insights and thoughts of other people. In doing so, I think it really serves your readers to be able to add a bit more depth to your articles. You also will learn a lot by seeking the ideas of others. In putting this particular podcast together, I’ve read three or four articles, all of which are linked to in today’s shownotes. I’m using the ideas of other people, and I’ll acknowledge those in the shownotes as well. You’re gonna learn by seeking out the ideas of others and using quotes. The other thing I’ll say about quotes as a benefit of using them, is that sometimes you’ll get noticed by the people you quote. I quoted Bob Burg a few months ago. He’s a guy who came up with the quote, “People do like to do business with those that they know, like, and trust.” I used that quote in an article, and Bob Burg tweeted me the other day saying, “Thanks for quoting me” and began a conversation. People will notice you if they’re still alive and they’re active in the social space. They will notice you when you quote, and this can be the beginning of win-win relationships. Who knows what might come out of those? There are some really good reasons for using quotes on your blog. Now why do you need to do it right? Firstly, I would say there’s ethical reasons for it and legal requirements in some cases to give credit to those whose words and ideas you are using. If you wanna be seen as a good bloke or a good person in the blogosphere, it’s an ethical thing that you wanna do, but there’s also legal reasons to do it. You certainly don’t want to be caught plagiarizing by taking the words and ideas of other people and presenting them as your own. If I think about the way that I see people misusing the words of others, sometimes it’s done with intent to hide the fact that they’re not your own words, and other times, people do it without really knowing what they’re doing. You wanna really be careful. It’s an ethical thing. It’s a legal thing. It’s just the right thing to do. In my opinion, it shows your readers that you’re well-read and that you’re an ethical person as well – and to actually show your readers that you’ve gone to the effort to find out what other people think on this idea and then to quote them – I think shows your readers that you’re going above and beyond. You’re not just sharing your thoughts; you’re going to the effort of finding other people’s thoughts as well. It’s going to get you in trouble in the long run, both in terms of your credibility but also legally if you don’t do it right, so please learn the basics of how to do it and do it right. How do you do it right? Again, I’m not a lawyer here, and I’m gonna link to some more legal advice in today’s shownotes, but here’s what I do when I’m quoting someone. Firstly, I always put quotation marks around the words of someone else’s so that it’s explicitly clear that it’s not my words. I am quoting someone else, and to actually put those quotation marks around the words of someone else’s is just good form. It shows in your content the words that someone else said. Number two – I always name the author. Give the person the credit. If the author is Mike Stelzner, quote Mike Stelzner. If the author was someone long gone, then name that particular person, Shakespeare. It doesn’t really matter. Name the person. Number three – provide a link back wherever possible, either to the exact content that you took the words from. If you took the words from a blog post, link back to that blog post. If you took the words from a podcast, link back, if you can find it, to that podcast. If you took the words from a video on YouTube, link back to that piece of content on YouTube. If you are unable to find the exact piece of content or if it was in a speech, for example, which there’s no recorded piece of content, find some other meaningful page of that person – if you can, their homepage or a social media profile – and link back to that. I think it’s a really good form to link back. There’s a few reasons to why I suggest this and why I think it’s really important to go to the piece of content that you are taking the words from. I think it actually serves your readers to be able to link to that. It shows your readers where you took the words, and it allows your readers to go and have a look at the extended piece of content around those words. If you are taking a few words from an article that you’ve written in a blog post, it gives your readers the ability to go and have a look at the context of those words and see what else is said in that particular article. I think that serves your readers. It also serves the person whose words you are quoting. It hopefully drives some traffic and some more interest in them – helps them to grow their profile and their credibility, which helps to grow that relationship between you and them as well. If you can’t find the specific piece of content, a link to their Twitter account or to their homepage, if they have them, or some other meaningful place for that person. If the person has no online presence at all, I guess you could link to their Wikipedia page or something like that as well. But if it’s someone like Shakespeare, then everyone generally knows who that is and just using their name is good. The other question I get asked a lot is, “How much content can you take from someone else?” This is one where I really – am not a lawyer, but generally for me, I would only ever really take one to three sentences, a paragraph if you like, from someone else’s article. If I wanna use more, I would always try and seek permission. There have been times where I’ve taken longer chunks of content, but I’ve gone to the blogger or I’ve gone to the podcaster, and I’ve actually asked permission to do that. I used an excerpt from Tim Ferriss’s podcast on this particular podcast a few months ago, and I sought the permission of Tim because I realized that what I wanted to share was more than just a few sentences. It was a chunk, and he graciously allowed me to do that. The same has happened for me in blog posts as well. The advice that I’ve read today on this is that the amount that you can use generally depends upon the proportion of the text that you are taking from the overall piece of content that that person has created. For example, I read one piece of advice today that said taking 250 words is okay, if it’s from a book, but if you’re taking a quote from an article that might be 1000 words long, you might wanna only choose 50 or 70 words from that article. Really it depends upon the proportion of the overall piece of content that that person has created. I’m gonna leave some further reading on that, particularly from a woman by the name of Jane Friedman in today’s shownotes. Again, you can find the shownotes at ProBlogger.com/podcast/173. I generally err on the side of quoting less and telling my readers to go and read the rest of the article. I much prefer to say two sentences, and “if you want to read more, this person has more great advice. Go and find out the rest of what they have to say on the topic in the article that they’ve written.” The other thing I’d say about the how-tos of quoting is that sometimes you need to modify the quote. That is either to give the quote a bit of context – you might wanna add a few words to it so that your readers actually understand the context of what’s being said, or you may think it’s best to take a few words out to shorten the quote perhaps or just to find the meaty bits of it. The way that you modify that – I think it’s really important to be very clear about what you have modified. If I’m adding a word or two to a quote, just to explain the context, I would always put that in brackets, so I usually use square brackets. If I am taking words out, I would always add in three dots, the ellipses to show that you have removed something from that particular quote. You might choose a sentence at the start of a paragraph and then one towards the end and put them together and then put the dots between that. Always be really clear about how you’re modifying that particular quote. A few other pieces of advice. One is I would encourage you always to add your own thoughts to a quote. I do see bloggers from time to time just taking a quote and putting that up as a blog post. Now that’s totally fine to do. It’s, as far as I can see, a legal thing to do. It’s even ethical as long as you’re linking back to that person, but I think it would serve your readers better if you would just talk a little bit about why you think that quote is good – so a paragraph of introduction as to why you’ve chosen this quote, a paragraph or two at the end about what you would add to it, how you would qualify what they say, telling a story that illustrates the point of the quote, adding something extra into the quote I think is a really important thing to do. Two other things that I wanna say about giving credit online, and this is where you’re not just quoting people, but you’re actually giving people credit for different things. Firstly, I think it’s really important if you are not quoting the exact words of someone else but you’re referencing an idea that they have shared, I think it’s really good form and probably a legal thing as well to give them credit for inspiring what you’re writing. To give you an example of this – back in 2008, I came across a video presentation from a guy called Chris Brogan at ChrisBrogan.com. Chris, many of you will know – he was doing a lot of writing and thinking back then on blogging, social m…

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172: How to Build a Blogging Business Through Interviewing Others [An Interview with Michael Stelzner] Dec 19, 2016

Show notes

In today’s lesson, I want to talk about how to build a business around creating content on your blog or on your podcast or video channel that is based upon interviewing other people. To help me do this, I’ve invited my friend Michael Stelzner of Social Media Examiner onto this show today because he’s someone, who I have seen build an amazing business relatively quickly in the social media space. In the early days of that business, he did it simply by interviewing other people.

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