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    ProBlogger Podcast: Blog Tips to Help You Make Money Blogging

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    PB071: How to Give Your Blog Design a Spring Clean Dec 11, 2015
    Show notes

    Note: you can listen to this episode above or load it up in iTunes. How to Refresh the Design of Your Blog For Maximum Impact Today’s episode is part 6 of the new ‘Today, Not Someday’ podcast series. The focus is actioning your ‘someday’ list, the things you’ve always wanted to do to improve your blog but have struggled to make happen. For details about how the series works, check out episode one here. Part 2 was about why you should sell a product on your blog (and how to do it). Part 3 was about how to increase your subscriber numbers for your email list. Part 4 was about how to get readers excited to join and stay on your email list. Part 5 was about how to use auto responders to drive traffic and profit with your blog. The focus of today’s episode is how to refresh the design of your blog to maximise your chances of making people feel what you want them to feel and doing what you want them to do. In This Episode You can listen to today’s episode above or in iTunes or Stitcher (where we’d also LOVE to get your reviews on those platforms if you have a moment). In today’s episode: Why the design of your blog is so vital 4 areas of your blog design that you should review and update How to refresh your blog sidebar How to tackle your blog navigation How to tackle your calls to action How to work out if you need to upgrade your blog design completely 5 key principles of effective design that you should implement in your blog design Further Reading and Resources for How to Refresh the Design of Your Blog For Maximum Impact Where to find a new blog theme StudioPress has a great range of options for wordpress themes. Check out what StudioPress has to offer here (ProBlogger affiliate link). Other episodes in the Today, Not Someday Series: Part 1: Introducing New ‘Today, Not Someday’ Series Part 2: Why You Should Create a Product to Sell On Your Blog (and Tips on How to Do It) Part 3: How to Increase the Subscriber Numbers to Your Email List Part 4: How to Get Readers Excited to Join and Stay on Your Email List Part 5: How to Use Autoresponders to Fast Track Engagement and Profit Meet my new friend, Edgar (and a SPECIAL OFFER) Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view I’d like to welcome a new sponsor to the ProBlogger podcast for the duration of this 10 part series, my friend ‘Edgar‘. Edgar is a tool I’ve been using since January of this year that does exactly what this series is about. It enables you to make the work you do on social media keep paying off for the long term. You put a little work into Edgar today by adding social media updates highlighting the great content in your blog’s archives and Edgar goes to work to share them to your followers not just once but by queuing your updates to keep delivering to into the future. The team at Edgar have put together a special deal for ProBlogger readers which gives you a free one month trial. Sign up for your free one month trial at meetedgar.com/problogger. Here’s a video of how I use Edgar: If watching videos isn’t your thing – here’s a blog post I wrote on how I use Edgar. Hi there and welcome to episode 71 of the ProBlogger podcast. My name is Darren Rowse and today, we are going to talk about your blog’s design. This is part of our ongoing series of challenges that I’m giving you every couple of days over the month of December, to go away and do something today that you have probably got on your someday list. Design is something that many of us, as bloggers say, “Yeah, one day I’ll redesign my blog,” or, “One day I’ll look at that navigation area,” or, “One day I’ll give my sidebar a spring-clean.” Well, I have got some news for you. Today is the day. We are using the hashtag #TodayNotSomeday” over on Twitter and a lot of you have been sharing the things that you have been doing over this month and that’s fantastic. You can also find today’s show notes at problogger.com/podcast/71 where I will have some further reading for you for today because there is a lot to cover on this topic. I will give you some links to some tools that you might want to use as well. You will also find on the show notes a little bit of information about our series sponsor, Edgar, a tool that I use to help me with my social media strategy. For the last few episodes of this series we have been talking about email and I want to move away from that because we have focused the last three challenges upon email. I want to give you something completely different to go away and work on today and that is the design of your blog. Remember with this series, we are looking at things that you can do today that will pay off for the long term of your blog and I think the design really fits beautifully into this particular theme in this series. The other way your blog looks, what it makes people feel, what it makes people do is vitally important and it has a really long-term impact upon your blogging. What if you could turn 10% more of those first-time visitors that come to your blog into long-term readers? Your design can help to do that and that has an ongoing impact. What if you could increase the number of pages that a typical visitor views while they are on your site by say 10%? Again, that has long-term impact and design can have an impact upon that. What if you could get 10% more clicks on your affiliate links or your advertising on the site? Design can help with that. What if you could get 10% more comments? Design can help with that. What if you could get 10% more people to see your eBook sales page or your services pages? Again, design, the way your blog looks, the way you call people to action with visual elements on your blog can impact that. All of these things can be achieved by re-optimizing your design and that is what today is all about. Really it is a bit difficult for me to tell you exactly what to do today because it is going to depend a little upon your blog and what you are trying to achieve with your blog. It really comes down to entering a simple question. What do you want people to do on your blog? That is a question that I would encourage you to ask before you do anything else today. What do you want people to do when they are on your site? Are you reflecting that in your design? In the way that your blog is laid out? In the calls to action, the visual calls to action that you have got on your site? I want to suggest a few things that you could do today. You may want to do all of these things, or you may just want to do one of them. Some of them are bigger than others, but let us just start with the first one. The first one is something that I think many bloggers could probably benefit from and that is to give your sidebar a spring-clean. I don’t if this is true for you, but I think many bloggers (including myself) end up with sidebars. You just add one more element and then you have another element. Two years later, you’ve added 20 different elements to your sidebar and lots of different links and tools. Some of it is dated and some of it is broken. Maybe today is the day that you just need to give it a bit of a spring-clean. What’s in your sidebar that is dated? What’s broken? How could you declutter it a little bit? What features or tools were a good idea at that time but that you just do not need them anymore? Another question to ask is how does your sidebar function? How does it look when people are viewing your site on a mobile or on a tablet? Tackle your sidebar today and let me know how you got with that with a hashtag #TodayNotSomeday on Twitter. You might want to do a before and after snapshot and share that as well. You can do that in the show notes too because our comment section there does allow you to share images. The second thing you might want to do today—this might be in addition to looking at your sidebar or might be something else that you just might want to do—is to tackle your navigation on your site. Take a critical look at how people can navigate through your site. Your menus, particularly, are what I want you to look at. Your menu bar at the top of your site or in your sidebar is something that people do use and they do look at quite a bit. They will be clicking on those links, perhaps more than any other links on your whole site, so it is really important every now and again to do a bit of an audit of what you’ve in those navigation areas. Again, is anything broken? It is amazing how many times I go to blogs and you click on the about page and it does not actually go to the about page or it goes somewhere else, so test those links. Are you linking to something that is no longer relevant or active? You might have a category in your navigation area that you just do not write on anymore and it is a bit embarrassing if someone goes to it, and they say that the last post written was in 2009. Do you have too many options in your navigation bar? Is your main call to action the main thing that you want people to do in that navigation area? Is there something important on your site that you have started doing since you set up the menu that you need to add to it? And again how does it work on mobile? Does it look too overwhelming? Do you need to remove some elements just for mobile? Some of the themes that you can get designed for mobile will allow you just to show some of the options. Again this might be something that you want to do in addition to tackling your sidebar or as an alternative, but I would love to hear how you go with it. What is our exercise like? I actually just redid it on Digital Photography School and I realize there are a couple of things that were a bit confusing. We actually removed a couple of items from our menu bar just to declutter things and to really funnel people towards the important things, the things that we really wanted them to do. The third action that you might want to take today is to really tackle the calls to action that you have on your blog. One of the best questions you can ask (and I have mentioned this before) is what do I want my readers to do on my blog. Now you can actually ask this question on different pages of your blog and have different answers to it. One of the exercises you might want to do is to actually look at some of the key pages on your blog and ask that question. When someone arrives at your homepage, what do you want those readers to do? Are you actually calling them to do that thing? It may be to subscribe to your newsletter. It may be to read your about page. It may be to read a certain key blog post that converts really well for you. It may be to get people to look at your sales page or your hire me page. It will be different for all of us, but are you actually calling your readers to do that when they are on your homepage? You can actually ask that question for other pages, too. When they are on your about page, what do you want them to do next that might be a bit different from what you want them to do on the homepage? What do you want people to do when they are on a blog post? Look at a typical blog post and ask, are you calling people effectively to that action? It may be on some other key page on your site like an eBook sales page. Obviously, you want people to buy that eBook on that page, but are you doing it effectively? This is another option that you might want to look at today. When you look at your design, how are you calling people to action on key pages on your site? The last thing you might want to do today is just to do a complete overhaul of your blog design. This may actually be the one thing that you have been putting off and that has been sitting on your someday list. When I started this series, we kind of knew, we all kind of know at certain times we need to do this and maybe that is what you really need to tackle right now, between now and the end of the year is to actually give your blog a complete overhaul. Perhaps if your blog design is broken, very dated, or it just does not reflect your brand anymore, this is maybe what you want to do. There are a few options that you can take here. You might want to hire a designer to give you a completely new customized design that is going to take some cash though. You may want to do it yourself and actually tackle that if you have got some technological know-how or perhaps you want to use a premium theme and find yourself a new theme. Check out what Studio Press has to offer, they are our friends. I’ve got a link (which is an affiliate link) in our show notes today. I like a lot of the designs that they do, but there are plenty of other options out there as well, and I will link to a few in the show notes today. It is how to give you tips for redesigning your blog and giving your blog a complete overhaul in a podcast. That is not very visual and because everyone’s blog is completely different and your blog needs to reflect your brand but a few general tips that probably apply to most blogger redesigns. These are the things that I hear from my blog designer friends quite regularly. The first one is what space is your friend. You really do need to give the different elements of your blog room to breathe. This includes your background and not having a background that is perhaps too cluttered. It includes anything between and around your blog design elements like your logo. You want to have room to breathe around your navigation area and even between the text on your blog. You want to have space between the lines that are appropriate and that is really good advice around that. You want to keep your whole design simple and this relates to that white space. One of the mantras that I hear many blog designers use is when in doubt, subtract. If you are wondering whether you should add something in, that the answer may probably be no. You want to make your design as simple as possible and not to confuse or overwhelm your readers. When it comes to colors, obviously trends change and that is something that you can tweak on your blog. We are actually looking at the moment at a redesign of ProBlogger which we hope to roll out in the coming weeks. One of the things we have done with that redesign is really just taking a bit of a critical look at the colors that we use. While we have evolved our color scheme on ProBlogger, there is going to be some new element on that front. We want to keep the color scheme as simple as possible and choose maybe a couple of colors, maybe three at the most. I think most designers that I talked to say, “You know you really want to pull back and not have too many colors and particularly focus on a feature color or maybe two at the most.” The same is true with fonts, you do not want too many different fonts on your site, one or two is probably enough, three at an absolute stretch and then you might want to use the styling of those fonts to highlight different things so rather than getting a new font in maybe just bold the font that you are using. You do not want to go too crazy with too many visual styles when it comes to fonts. The other thing that really comes across in most of the things that I have already said is you want consistency. You want consistency across your blog so when people come to different pages on your blog they feel like they are in the same site, your logo, your styling, the fonts you use, the colors that you use. Now, I am not a blog designer and this is probably reflected in the tips that I have given you, but I am going to link to some further reading that you can do in today’s show notes that will hopefully help you and send you off to some blog designers that I really know and respect. I have given you four different things you can do today on your blog: to tackle your sidebar, to tackle your navigation area, to tackle calls to action, and maybe to give yourself a complete overhaul. You might want to choose one of those things to do today or it might be something else that relates to blog design. If you are feeling a little bit convin…

    Full show notes at the publisher

    PB070: How to Drive Traffic and Profit in your Blogging with Autoresponders Dec 09, 2015
    Show notes

    Note: you can listen to this episode above or load it up in iTunes. How to Use Autoresponders to Fast Track Engagement & Profit Today’s episode is part 5 of the new ‘Today, Not Someday’ podcast series. The focus is actioning your ‘someday’ list, the things you’ve always wanted to do to improve your blog but have struggled to make happen. For details about how the series works, check out episode one here. Part 2 was about why you should sell a product on your blog (and how to do it). Part 3 was about how to increase your subscriber numbers for your email list. Part 4 was about how to get readers excited to join and stay on your email list. The focus of today’s episode is how to use auto responders to drive traffic and profit with your blog. In This Episode You can listen to today’s episode above or in iTunes or Stitcher (where we’d also LOVE to get your reviews on those platforms if you have a moment). In today’s episode: What is an Autoresponder? Why you should use autoresponders on your blog Tools you can use to create autoresponders 9 types of emails you can use autoresponders for on your blog How to create successful, engaging autoresponders How often to schedule autoresponder emails What other types of emails you should send to support your autoresponders Challenge – set up an autoresponder for your blog Further Reading and Resources for How to Use Autoresponders to Fast Track Engagement Other episodes in the Today, Not Someday Series: Part 1: Introducing New ‘Today, Not Someday’ Series Part 2: Why You Should Create a Product to Sell On Your Blog (and Tips on How to Do It) Part 3: How to Increase the Subscriber Numbers to Your Email List Part 4: How to Get Readers Excited to Join and Stay on Your Email List Tools you can use to create autoresponders: Mailchimp – automation workflow aWeber – campaigns Meet my new friend, Edgar (and a SPECIAL OFFER) I’d like to welcome a new sponsor to the ProBlogger podcast for the duration of this 10 part series, my friend ‘Edgar‘. Edgar is a tool I’ve been using since January of this year that does exactly what this series is about. It enables you to make the work you do on social media keep paying off for the long term. You put a little work into Edgar today by adding social media updates highlighting the great content in your blog’s archives and Edgar goes to work to share them to your followers not just once but by queuing your updates to keep delivering to into the future. The team at Edgar have put together a special deal for ProBlogger readers which gives you a free one month trial. Sign up for your free one month trial at meetedgar.com/problogger. Here’s a video of how I use Edgar: If watching videos isn’t your thing – here’s a blog post I wrote on how I use Edgar. Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Hi there and welcome to episode 70 of the ProBlogger podcast where today, we’re going to talk about autoresponders. Something that many of us have on their someday list but we don’t get around to ever setting up. Today, I want to talk about what an autoresponder is, why you should set one up, and give you some practical tips on how to do it. This is part of our “today, not someday” series of podcasts, a series where we are walking through some of those things that we never quite get around to doing, that have the potential to bring a lot of life and profit to our blogs. You can find today’s show notes at problogger.com/podcast/70, where you’ll also find some information about our show’s sponsor, Edgar. You can find more information from Edgar at meetedgar.com/problogger. It is a tool that I’ve used really successfully over the last year. This brought a lot of life to my social media strategy and I’ll talk more about that at the end of this podcast, but for now, let’s get into today’s show. Today, we’re going to talk about autoresponders as part of our series of things that you can do today, invest a little time in today that will pay off for the long term on your blog. An autoresponder certainly fits into that case. Autoresponders are tools that you really do need to spend a little bit of time investing in in the day to day when you’re setting them up, but they actually become quite passive. Once you set them up, they continue to work for you for as long as you allow them to continue to run. In the last two episodes of this year’s podcast, episode 68 and 69, we’ve talked about email. Episode 68 was about setting up an email list and optimizing the number of sign-ups that you get to that list. Episode 69, we were talking about opt-ins and lead generator options, creating some interval way to get subscribers. Today, I want to talk about how to actually deliver some content through that. One of the ways that you can get content out to these subscribers is through an autoresponder. I don’t want to spend a whole heap of time talking about what an autoresponder is because I’ve written about this previously, I know many of you already understand that. I will put some links in today’s show notes to give you some basic information on them. Really quickly, an autoresponder is a tool that most email service providers do offer. They often go by different names, though, so on Mailchimp, they talk about them as automation workflows. AWeber just recently changed to talking about them as campaigns. An autoresponder is really just a sequence of emails that you set up ahead of time that will be sent to anyone who subscribes to your list. There are more complicated ways that you can do that, but at its most simple, you set up a series of emails to go out at predetermined intervals to a user who subscribes to your list. That’s the most simple way of explaining it. Once someone subscribes today, they’ll get asked to confirm their subscription and on doing that they set off a chain of emails and you can separate those emails by a certain amount of days. Every seven days or every 30 days, or you might do different amounts of time between different emails. You could do them daily if you want. I’ll talk about some of the alternatives of timing later. What you put in these emails will depend upon your goals. I’m going to give you some suggestions on the types of content you might want to use. The great thing about an autoresponder is that while they take some time to set up—you’re going to need to write the emails and put them into the autoresponder queue—they continue to be sent out to your subscribers forever. For as long as you leave those emails in the queue. I know the emails that I put into my autoresponder several years ago have been sent out every day since to new subscribers who are at different stages of the sequence. It really does pay off, it’s a very powerful tool. Some of the benefits you probably already are hearing and thinking about as you’re listening to me talk, but let me just run through just a few, a handful of benefits. Firstly, they’re great at helping your new subscribers, people who don’t really know much about you. It helps them to get on board with what you’re on about. You can use an autoresponder sequence to help people to understand who you are. To show them that you’ve got something valuable to say, to build some credibility with your audience, to help them to understand your site and help them to get engaged with your site. They’re also really good for keeping your list warm. I think I mentioned this in a couple of episodes ago that there’s no point in having an email list, collecting emails unless you’re communicating with them. If you don’t communicate with them regularly, they go cold and they forget that they’ve subscribed, and they wonder who you are and why you’re sending them emails when you do send them. An autoresponder, setting up a sequence of emails can take a little bit of the pressure off of having to always be emailing your list to keep them warm. You can keep them warm by setting up a sequence of emails ahead of time. Of course, they’re really great for driving traffic to your blog which is something as bloggers we’re interested in. They’re also great for helping you to build relationships with your readers. Helping them to feel like they know, like, and trust you, but they’re also great for sales. If you have a product to sell—we’ve talked about that recently on the podcast, too—or a service to offer, they can help to make those sales to ultimately build your brand. Let’s talk a little bit about the types of emails that you might want to set up in your autoresponder. This will partly depend upon your goals. I would encourage you to think really carefully about what it is that you’re trying to achieve with your blog. But if you’re clear on that, hopefully, you’ll begin to already have some ideas about things that you could do in your autoresponder. Some bloggers set up multiple autoresponders and I’m not going to talk about that today. That’s getting a little bit more complicated. Most bloggers have what I would describe as a general autoresponder that all new subscribers get into the queue often. For the sake of this podcast, that’s what I’m going to be talking about today. We may do another podcast in future episodes that are a little bit more advanced. A typical autoresponder sequence, that is something that you’re going to send to all of your new subscribers will probably have some of these types of emails in the sequence Firstly, you probably always want to have some kind of a welcome email or you may actually have a series of welcome emails that take subscribers through different parts of your site. A typical welcome email might tell your subscribers who you are and what you do, what your site’s about, maybe share your story in some way. You probably don’t want to put a whole heap in that first one, you don’t want to overwhelm them. Really it’s about building that relationship with your readers. I sometimes find adding a story in there can work quite well if you write in that personal tone. For example, on Digital Photography School, my welcome email is not a story because it’s not a personally branded site. Rather it takes my readers through the site and actually introduces them to the fact that we’ve got a forum, and we’ve got some social media accounts, and talks about what they’re going to get from being a subscriber. Another thing that’s often really good to include in one of your emails as well, actually say, “You’re going to hear from us on a weekly basis,” or, “You’re going to hear once a month.” Actually give them some expectation on what they’re going to get which helps to build some anticipation of your next email. Your welcome email should be part of that autoresponder. Some other types of things you might want to include might be highlighting some of your evergreen contents. On our Digital Photography School autoresponder, we have a series of emails that go out, I think they go out every 30 or so days, that introduce our subscribers to some of our content in our archives that they would’ve missed. They’ve just come on as a subscriber, they haven’t traveled with us for the years that we’ve been creating content and so introduces them to some of the themes of the site. We have an email that goes out, I think it’s in the first few weeks that they’ve been a subscriber, that basically gives them the best of content on the topic of composition. They get introduced to a whole heap of different articles that are in our archives. Articles that I chose because they performed well in the past and they have really good information. It’s basically a list of those best articles. You can highlight your best evergreen content. This serves a couple of purposes. One, it drives traffic. I know for a fact that some of those articles get traffic every single day from people getting that particular email but also shows your readers that you’ve got a lot of content in your archives, that perhaps you’re a credible source of information and someone to pay attention to can really impress them. Another thing you might want to do which is a little bit different to that but still taps into some of that evergreen content you might have in your archives is to actually instead of sending out a list of links, you might actually take one of your old best posts and put it in the email itself. Some people really appreciate not having to click links and go and visit your site. If you’ve got a really good article that you’ve already written, perhaps not an overly long one, you could actually put a copy of that in the email itself and actually use that as content for your subscriber. They’re types of emails that I would be popping into a sequence and you might have once a month an ever-growing article that goes out. Another type of email you might want to include perhaps in the early stages of an email sequence is an email that introduces your subscribers to your social media presence and what you do in the different social media networks that you’re involved in. To try and get that secondary point of connection with your subscribers. Another thing that we do in our sequence of emails on Digital Photography School is to send out an invitation to participate in a survey. Now we don’t do this until they’ve been subscribed for about three months. We send out just a really short email as part of the sequence that thanks them for being a subscriber but then invites them to take this survey so we can understand who they are a bit more. This does a couple of things. One, it shows our subscribers that we’re interested in them and that we base our content upon their feedback. Two, this survey is just golden information. It has six or seven different questions in it. Some of them are gathering a bit of demographic information, where our subscribers are, what level of photographer they’re at, that type of information. There’s an open-ended question in that survey that asks them what their problems are, what their questions are, and what they like us to write content on. The information that they give us in that survey is gold. If we ever run out of things to write about, we go into our survey and just look at the questions people ask in that particular survey response. Another type of email that you might want to consider adding into your sequence is pointing people to some sort of a community activity. If you have a blog post that just generates really good discussion, you might want to point people to that, or if you have a forum area. You might want to have an email in your sequence that just points people to the forum and it encourages them to sign up to that. Sending people to community’s really great because it builds social proof and it shows people that you have other readers. It’s not just them that you’re talking to but there’s this whole community there and that can be a very powerful thing. Other types of emails that you might want to send would be more sales-related ones. If you have a product that you sell, an ebook or a course, or a physical product, you could actually build into your autoresponder sequence an email that offers that product at a discount or that promotes that product in some way. This is effectively like doing a little mini launch of your product every day forever. Just say you have that set up 60 days after someone becomes a subscriber, it might be the fifth email that they get in the sequence. They’re warmed up, they’ve been seeing some of your evergreen content, they feel welcomed, they’ve engaged in the community on your blog, and then you send them a coupon code to your ebook and they get that sort of 60 days in. If you’re getting subscribers every day to your newsletter, that means every day someone’s getting that offer made to them. You’ll find, over time, that the sales that you get from those types of sales emails actually do add up quite a bit. I know that every day someone’s getting an offer through an autoresponder email that I set up years ago on my blogs and it’s…

    Full show notes at the publisher

    PB069: Create an Opt-In to Increase Your Email Subscriber Numbers Dec 07, 2015
    Show notes

    Note: you can listen to this episode above or load it up in iTunes. How to Get Readers Excited to Join and Stay on Your Email List Today’s episode is part 4 of the new ‘Today, Not Someday’ podcast series. The focus is actioning your ‘someday’ list, the things you’ve always wanted to do to improve your blog but have struggled to make happen. For details about how the series works, check out episode one here. Part 2 was about why you should sell a product on your blog (and how to dot it). Part 3 was about how to get people to sign up onto your email list. The focus of today’s episode is about how to create the most effective ‘opt-in’, or ‘lead magnet’ for your blog, or if you already have one, how to make it even more powerful. An opt-in is a free special offer that you can give to people who join your email list. Having an opt-in is one of the most significant things you can to do to increase your subscriber numbers and grow your business. In This Episode You can listen to today’s episode above or in iTunes or Stitcher (where we’d also LOVE to get your reviews on those platforms if you have a moment). In today’s episode: Why having an opt-in or lead magnet for your email list is so powerful How to create an opt-in for your email list What format your opt-in should use More than 20 ideas of what you can offer as your opt-in gift How to decide what your opt-in gift should be about How I created an opt-in for my Digital Photography School blog this year Why you should update your opt-in Why you should have more than one opt-in How you can give people something that will still make them want to stay on your list, even after they have their gift What your opt-in should look like Tools you can use to help you deliver and promote your opt-in Where you should mention your opt-in Further Reading and Resources for How to Get Readers Excited to Join and Stay on Your Email List Tools you can use to deliver and promote your opt-in These tools are great and I use them for my blogs: SumoMe is the tool I use on dPS to make our new Opt-in Offer. They are offering a special offer for ProBlogger readers, a free month of ‘Welcome Mat Pro’, which is pretty amazing! Access the special offer here. LeadPages is another tool you can use to make your Optin Offers by creating great landing pages for your offer. Here’s a post where we make our latest opt-in offer for a Photographing the Holidays Guide over at Digital Photography School. Meet my new friend, Edgar I’d like to welcome a new sponsor to the ProBlogger podcast for the duration of this 10 part series, my friend ‘Edgar‘. Edgar is a tool I’ve been using since January of this year that does exactly what this series is about. It enables you to make the work you do on social media keep paying off for the long term. You put a little work into Edgar today by adding social media updates highlighting the great content in your blog’s archives and Edgar goes to work to share them to your followers not just once but by queuing your updates to keep delivering to into the future. The team at Edgar have put together a special deal for ProBlogger readers which gives you a free one month trial. Sign up for it at meetedgar.com/problogger. Other episodes in the Today, Not Someday Series: Part 1: Introducing New ‘Today, Not Someday’ Series Part 2: Why You Should Create a Product to Sell On Your Blog (and Tips on How to Do It Part 3: How to Increase the Subscriber Numbers to Your Email List Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Hi there! This is Darren Rowse from ProBlogger. Welcome to episode 69 of the ProBlogger podcast where today we’re talking about something that you’ve probably been putting off doing that you really should do today that has potential to bring a lot of life to your blog. It’s a continuation of our series of challenges for the month of December 2015 where I’m giving you something different every day that you can do today to get off your Someday List. We’re using the hashtag #todaynotsomeday. It’s been great to see so many people on Twitter already sharing what they are working on to get off their Someday List. You can find today’s show notes at problogger.com/podcast/69 where you also find a little bit of information about Edgar—our show’s sponsor. Edgar is a great social media tool that has really revolutionized the way that I do social media. I’ve included some more information on how I use Edgar in today’s show notes. Without further ado, let’s get into today’s show. In episode 68, I talked a lot about email and getting people on to your email list. My challenge was to either start an email list or to do a bit of an order as to how you get people to sign up for it. As part of that episode, I did mention that I was going to be talking later in the series about creating an opt-in or a lead magnet. Something that you can give away to potential subscribers to get them to subscribe for your blog and that’s what today’s show is all about. As I said, these are sometimes called lead magnets or opt-ins and you’ve probably seen them on many blogs before. There’s lots of different types and I’m going to run through a whole heap of options that you’ve got to create one today and give you some tips on how to do that. This is where you do give something away as an incentive for someone else to give you their email address to get on your list. I talked to you in episode 68, the last episode, about why email is so important. I’m not going to go over that again today except to say that this is a strategy that you really should seriously consider and that’s also something that I know for a fact that many bloggers put off doing. It is something that is fairly and squarely on many bloggers, if not most bloggers’ Someday List. I know that for a fact because I’ve had it on my Someday List for quite some time. Only recently have I started using an opt-in on Digital Photography School—my main blog. We’ve been lucky that on Digital Photography School and ProBlogger we get fairly healthy numbers of subscribers to our list through the welcome mat that I’ve talked about yesterday and pop-ups. But I know that having an opt-in would increase the amount of subscribers that we get and so I put it high on our agenda this year that we need to get it off our Someday List. I’m really grateful for my team who got that off the list this year for Digital Photography School but it’s not off the list for ProBlogger and that’s something that we are working on at the moment. I’ll talk a little bit more about that later. It’s something I’m getting off my Someday List and so that’s why I want to talk about it today. Now, before I get into the tips, I do want to talk to those of you who already have an opt-in list. You’re not off the hook. I want to ask you a question today too, “Is it time for you to create another one?” Actually, I think it is probably really useful to have multiple opt-ins at your disposal. Perhaps it’s time to create something that’s more up-to-date or maybe it’s time to create a second opt-in that you could use alongside your first that might attract a different type of person. Something that you could potentially use on a certain category on your blog or even on a certain post that’s a hot post. It’s also something that you can give away to your current subscribers to, I guess, get a bit of goodwill going and to warm up your list. If you already have one, this episode is for you too. Let’s talk a little bit about why you should create an opt-in list. Obviously, the biggest reason is it gets people on your list. It does increase the percentage of our people who subscribe to your list. First, on readers who come along, see something for free that you’re giving away, and it gives them an incentive obviously to jump on the list, but I think there’s a whole heap more than a good opt-in can do. It can really show your new subscribers that you know what you’re talking about. If you give them something that actually changes their life, that actually solves their problem for them, and that shows that you’re a credible source of information, it can show people that you know what you’re talking about. But also, it builds trust, builds reciprocity—I struggle with that word—and goodwill with your new subscribers. It also shows your subscribers that you care about them. If you’ve gone to the effort of creating something for free for them then I guess that makes an impression upon people. The last thing I think that a good opt-in can do is that it can lead people closer to becoming a customer. If you’ve got something to sell which is what we talked about a couple of episodes ago, creating a product. If you’ve created that product, a good opt-in will lead people towards purchasing that product, partly because you’ve shown them that you know what you’re talking about, you’ve built relationships, you’ve built trust but also because you may actually grow desire for your product. You may grow interest in your product through your opt-in. I think it’s really useful to do but how do you do it? I want to talk about how to deliver it first. On what format should your opt-in be? What form should it take? The most common one that I see bloggers are using is what I would call a written opt-in, a PDF. Often you see people giving away an eBook or a report or a guide or a white paper or maybe something in printout, a cheat sheet or a checklist or a template or a sample, like a sample contract. The list could go on and on. This is probably a good starting place because written content, well, you don’t need to produce a video, you don’t need to put together a course or anything like that. You just open a word document and you start writing. If you want to, you could export that word document as a PDF. I would encourage you to get it designed and make it look a little bit prettier and to integrate it with your brand a bit more but a written PDF might be a good starting place if you are looking at creating a first opt-in. There are plenty of other options as well. You could do something that’s more visual. Again, this may be delivered as a PDF but maybe you create a mind map or a process or a blueprint or an infographic that you give away. Something that’s really useful that’s more visual content. Your giveaway might be a video, maybe it’s a single talking head video where you talk subscribers through a process or maybe it’s a series of videos that you deliver as a mini course. Similarly, you could use audio giving away a free podcast. This is actually something that I did in the early days of ProBlogger. I recorded an interview with Pat Flynn—it may have been one of the first interviews that he ever did. I recorded this story of Pat talking to my subscribers and I gave that away to my newsletter subscribers. This is years and years ago now. It was also good for Pat because I linked to that so anyone who subscribed to my newsletter suddenly was introduced to Pat and went to his side as well. You could give away a test or a checkup tool. I’ve seen people use personality tests as a lead gen if that’s their topic. You could say, “You get to do this test and you get the result if you give us your email address.” You could create your opt-in as an email series, “Opt-in to our list and we will send you a weekly email with tips on how to do…” whatever it is that you teach. You could sell that as a course. You could give away a live webinar or a private Periscope or some kind of a live interaction. I’ve seen people give away 10-minute consultations with people who subscribe. You want to be a bit careful about that because you might get a thousand subscribers and not be able to deliver them but if you have a smaller readership that might be a useful way to get opt-in as well. Maybe you want to give away some sort of membership area so a private Facebook group or an area on your blog that gets unlocked if they give you their email address that has premium content or a library of reports or articles. It might be that you want to give away some kind of software. I’ve seen people in the photography space giveaway lightroom presets. I’ve people in the Word Press space giveaway plugins for WordPress. Maybe you want to give away a chapter from an eBook that you’ve got, a paid product that you have, a sample chapter, or maybe you want to give away access to a service that you offer or a tool for a month of free trial of the service that you have. All of these things are completely legitimate ways of getting the email from those first-time readers on your blog. All of them can work. I think you should consider all of them but here’s a question that I would ask you before you run away and create that eBook or that guide or that report or that piece of software. How can you give something away that incentivizes people to stay on your list and stay engaged? Most of the things that I’ve just given you as examples are single one-off incentives, “Give us your email we will give you an eBook.” The problem with that is that people will subscribe to get the free thing and they will then either unsubscribe because, “I don’t want to continue to hear from you.” Or they will become disengaged, “I got the eBook. I then filter those emails off or I just don’t look at them anymore.” How can you create something that makes people look forward to your emails? Perhaps a better approach than just giving an eBook or a report or a one-off thing is to create something that is a series of things. Instead of giving an eBook or report, perhaps offer them a monthly eBook or a monthly report. It’s a bit more work but you’re going to get subscribers who not only give you the email address but they’re going to be looking forward to the next installment. Perhaps instead of giving a webinar offer a monthly webinar or a weekly one or whatever period that suits you and your time of availability. Instead of offering a single video, maybe offer a daily video for a week or once a month. Instead of giving away a preset or a plugin, offer a regular one. Hopefully, you can see here that I’m pushing you to more work but I’m also pushing you to think a little bit more creatively about how to create an opt-in that keeps people engaged, keeps people subscribed. We’ve talked so far about what form your opt-in should take but what should it actually be about? What should it be? It’s all very well to say it’s going to be an eBook but what’s the eBook going to be about or what’s the course going to be about? What’s the series of things that you give away going to be about? I can’t give you the answer to this, but I can give you a few tips in thinking about what it should be about. The first thing I’d encourage you to think through is creating your opt-in to solve a problem. I was on a great little Periscope recently with Zac from zachothustle.com. In his Periscope, he talked a little bit about opt-ins and there was this golden nugget in it that I have been thinking about ever since, since I’ve been creating my own opt-in for ProBlogger. He said that it needs to give people a quick win. Your opt-in should solve a problem in the next 10-15 minutes after they get it. It needs to solve a specific problem. If you create an opt-in that solves a problem, it gives people a quick win. It gives them incentive to subscribe. It shows them that you deliver value that you solve problems. It makes them grateful to you. It’s the kind of thing that they will want to share with other people, but it doesn’t give away everything that you’ve got. At least something for you to sell or continue to deliver value on and gives them a reason to continue to deliver value on and gives them a reason to continue to stay subscribed and hopefully leads them towards making a further purchase from you or hiring you in some way. This really means that you need to be able to solve a problem that your readers have. You need to understand who they are. I think this is a s…

    Full show notes at the publisher

    PB068: How to Increase Your Email List Subscribers By 100% Or More Today Dec 04, 2015
    Show notes

    Note: you can listen to this episode above or load it up in iTunes. How I Increased the Subscriber Rate on My Blogs by 80-1000% Today’s episode is the second of the new ‘Today, Not Someday’ podcast series. The focus is actioning your ‘someday’ list, the things you’ve always wanted to do to improve your blog but have struggled to make happen. For details about how the series works, check out episode one here. Part 2 was about why you should sell a product on your blog (and how to dot it). The focus of today’s episode is about why and how you should have a good system to allow people to subscribe to your email list. I have spent lots of time over the years experimenting with different ways to let readers subscribe across my blogs. I share the technique I use that increased my email list subscribers by over 100% so you can use it on your blog. In This Episode You can listen to today’s episode above or in iTunes or Stitcher (where we’d also LOVE to get your reviews on those platforms if you have a moment). In today’s episode: Why I started using email as a way to communicate with my readers Why email is a valuable communication tool for your blog The 3 keys to increasing the subscriber numbers on your email list An invitation to complete a challenge to improve your blog 5 things you should test in your email list sign ups The tool that has increased my email list sign ups by more than 100% Further Reading and Resources for How to Increase Your Email List Subscribers By 100% Today The email list providers that I use: Aweber Mailchimp SumoMe, the email list tool I use for pop up and Welcome Mat subscription forms (and a SPECIAL OFFER) The great thing about SumoMe is that: It allows you to test different types of popups, hello bars etc. in combination You can target people coming from different sources of traffic with different tools, different CTAs, different frequency of seeing the tools etc. I’ve seen between 80%-1000% increases in subscribers on every site I’ve tested it on. Check out the increases in subscribers I’ve seen to a couple of my sites. First Digital Photography School. Next – here’s the increase in subscribers here on the ProBlogger Podcast show notes page. My wife even saw a 1000% increase in her subscribers on her blog! The feature I specifically mention working very well for me on my blogs (and being responsible for these increases in subscribers) is the ‘Welcome Mat’. SumoMe has a special offer for ProBlogger readers, a free month of ‘Welcome Mat Pro’, which is pretty amazing! Access the special offer here. Other episodes in the Today, Not Someday Series: Part 1: Introducing New ‘Today, Not Someday’ Series Part 2: Why You Should Create a Product to Sell On Your Blog (and Tips on How to Do It) Update: check out Part 3 which continues the theme of growing your subscriber numbers by creating an opt-in for your blog. Meet my new friend, Edgar (and a SPECIAL OFFER) I’d like to welcome a new sponsor to the ProBlogger podcast for the duration of this 10 part series, my friend ‘Edgar‘. Edgar is a tool I’ve been using since January of this year that does exactly what this series is about. It enables you to make the work you do on social media keep paying off for the long term. You put a little work into Edgar today by adding social media updates highlighting the great content in your blog’s archives and Edgar goes to work to share them to your followers not just once but by queuing your updates to keep delivering to into the future. The team at Edgar have put together a special deal for ProBlogger readers which gives you a free one month trial. Sign up for it at meetedgar.com/problogger. As promised in today’s podcast – here’s a video of how I use it: If watching videos isn’t your thing – here’s a blog post I wrote on how I use Edgar. Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Welcome to episode 68 of the ProBlogger podcast. My name is Darren Rowse and I’m the blogger behind ProBlogger, a blog designed to help you to achieve great heights with your blogging and to build sustainable blogs that change the world. Today is the third part of an ongoing series that we’ve got running on this podcast for the month of December where we’re looking at things that you can do on your blog today that are going to pay off for the future of your blog. These are 10 things that often we put off because they do take a little bit of work but we really shouldn’t be putting off these things because they have the potential to pay off tomorrow and the next week and for months and years to come. You can go back and listen to the introduction of this series in episode 66, and in the last episode, episode 67, you can listen to the first challenge that I gave to create a product. I have seen a few of you already sharing on Twitter using the #todaynotsomeday, the products that you’ve decided to create. Good on you for doing it. I look forward to seeing more of your hash tagged tweets and Instagram. I want to thank Edgar for sponsoring this podcast series. Edgar is a tool that I use to help me manage my social media and make the tweets and the Facebook updates that I do today pay off for the future as well. You can check them out @meetedgar.com/problogger. If there’s one challenge that I would prioritize overall the others in this series, it is today’s. It is all about getting people to subscribe to your email list. Whether you’ve got one or not, this is relevant for you because it is something that you need to pay attention to when you first set up your email list but also pay attention to over time. I’m going to give you some real and practical tips that you can do today to increase the percentage of people coming to your blog that end up signing for your email list. First, I want to talk a little bit about the why of setting up an email list. I first set up an email list on my blogs back in 2007 when I started Digital Photography School which is my main blog today. At that time, bloggers were all trying to get people to subscribe to their RSS feeds. Huge, big, orange buttons were being plastered all over blogs everywhere, “Subscribe to my feed. Subscribe to my feed.” It was going to be the email killer–RSS was. It was being touted as the biggest technology to hit the internet and whilst it still exists today, it’s not really anywhere near as big as what everyone thought it would be. The reason I started an email list which was quite unusual for a blogger back then was because of my dad. My dad was an aspiring photographer and he wanted to subscribe to my Digital Photography School blog, but he just did not understand RSS. I went over to his house, I set up an RSS feed reader for him and said, “Dad, all you need to do is check this piece of software every day and it will give you the latest posts on the blog.” Of course, I went back two weeks later, and he hadn’t looked at the RSS reader at all. The only thing he used the web for really was email and so I decided I am going to set up a way for him to subscribe to my blog using email. I set up this little newsletter. I said, “I’ll send out a weekly email of just our latest posts, just the list of links to our latest posts.” I thought, “Whilst I’m doing this for my dad maybe I should just publicise it on the blog,” and so I put it up on the subscribe page of my blog as a secondary way to subscribe to the blog. I had no idea that what I was doing there was probably the best thing I’ve ever done on my blogs. Today, hardly anyone subscribes to our RSS feed. There are a few thousand people who subscribe probably in those early days but today we have close to 900,000 email subscribers. Thank you, dad! I really appreciate your lack of technological know-how because you changed my blog. So, why email? I’ve kind of answered this already. It’s a very familiar and used everyday technology. Most people check their email every day. While there have been many technologies over the years that was supposed to kill email, RSS being one of it, Facebook being another, and I even remember an article in the old days about how Myspace was going to kill email, most of them have come and gone or at least have not killed email. One of the things I love about email is that it pretty much gets through all the time to the people who subscribe and who you send the email to. Occasionally, they do get filtered as spam but unlike things like Facebook, emails get through. Your Facebook updates get filtered in Facebook’s algorithm and increasingly I think we’ll see that on other social networks as well. Another great thing about emails, it’s not temporary or fleeting like social updates can be. If you tweet now, five minutes later your tweet is highly unlikely to be seen by anyone. If you Facebook now, in a couple of hours’ time, it’s probably not going to be seen either. If I email right now, you will check your inbox for the next 24 hours or so and probably see it and perhaps even longer. I like email because it drives a lot of traffic to our blog; it’s one of the highest referrers of traffic to Digital Photography School. It is fantastic for selling whether it be affiliate products or your own products that you would have developed yesterday as a result of the last podcast episode. We find that about 90%-95% of the sales of our eBooks and courses come from the emails we send even though we also update on our blog and social media. Interestingly, I noticed that the AdSense ads that we run on our site were able to track which traffic makes the most and you guessed it, this traffic we send via our email list tends to convert better without AdSense ads than any other kind of traffic as well. Email is good for driving people to pretty much anything you want them to see whether it be a particular blog post or whether it be to a community area of your blog as well so you can use it to deepen reader engagement. Ultimately, it is just good for building a brand. If you send out regular, useful emails to your subscribers they are going to feel like they know you. If it’s good stuff that you are sending them, they will begin to like you and trust you which is good for you and the business that you’re building. The keys though with using email well are rather three of them. Firstly, you want to keep your list warm which means that you need to send regular emails. If you just get subscribers but don’t send anything out people will forget that they have subscribed–so you need to keep your list warm. Number two you need to add value wherever you can and not just use it for selling. This is really a key in a lot of bloggers who have this list and they only ever use them to sell stuff. That’s a pretty fast way to annoy your subscribers. I guess the other key that I want to focus on in the rest of this podcast is that for an email list to work you need to get people on it. You need to get them to subscribe. Here is my challenge for you today—it’s to do one or both of two things. Firstly, if you haven’t yet got an email list and I know every time I talk to a roomful of bloggers, over half the people in the room do not have one. If you are among them, please, please sign up with an email provider. I highly recommend one of two, there are others out there which are great as well, but I use Mailchimp and I use Aweber. I’ve got links in the show notes which give you little deals as well. Mailchimp will give you a $30 free credit if you sign up using our link and Aweber will give a 30-day free trial. You can get those in the show notes today. I am an affiliate for them, but I am also a paying user of both services and I use them in different ways on my different sites. If you haven’t yet got an email list, please sign up for one of those providers or another one and get collecting emails. It’s so important that you do it even if your blog is brand new. Those early readers can be particularly powerful because they will have travelled the full journey with you so hook them in, get them subscribed in some way. Please, while I am talking about email providers, don’t just send your email newsletter from your Gmail account. That is going to get you in all kinds of bother and trouble. Use a service, invest a little. It doesn’t cost that much to get going with those sorts of services. If you have already got an email list or if you have just gone away and signed up for a service and now have one, the challenge that I’ve got for you today is to think about the way you’re collecting emails and to I guess do a bit of an audit about how you are collecting emails and start thinking about how you could improve the way that you collect emails. There are a lot of different ways to get signups for your list and you will find that each will convert differently. It will partly depend on all kinds of factors. The calls to action that you use, the words and the visuals around your calls to action, the positioning of your calls to action on your site and the method of delivering those calls to action as well. There are all kinds of different ways of doing that but I want to suggest six or seven different things that you should be testing and you should be considering when getting those calls to action to subscribe to your email up on to your blog. First, a few quick tips. I think it is always really helpful when you are trying to get subscribers in whatever method you choose to state the benefit of subscribing to your list. What will your subscribers get? Now, here I’m not just saying, “You will get an email every week.” That’s a fact. But what are they actually going to benefit from by subscribing? We have tested all kinds of benefits on our Digital Photography site. Things like, “You will take better photos if you subscribe. You will get creative control of your camera. You will develop confidence in your photography,” all kinds of benefits. They’re the type of the benefits that you should be putting around your calls to action—become a better whatever it might be that you are treating people to do. It’s really important that you test the different calls to action that you have. Think about the benefits of what it is that people are going to get when they subscribe. Number two, try out some kind of an incentive to subscribe. Now, the benefits of subscribing on an incentive in and of themselves but you can also offer something free as an incentive to subscribe. I’ve long resisted doing this on my blogs, but I’ve also seen the benefits of it more recently of having something that people get when they subscribe. The reason I resisted for so long was that I had heard stories of people giving away free things to get the subscribers and then they get subscribers who don’t really convert because they’re not really interested in the list itself and what you’re going to provide in an ongoing way. But if you think carefully about the opt-in that you offer it can convert very well. I am not going to talk a whole heap about this in this particular episode because I am planning a future one on it, but it might be something that you consider working on as a result of today’s challenge. A third area that you might want to think about testing particularly is the different colors and visuals that you use in your calls to action. One of the tests that I did in the early days of my blog was to test a variety of pictures around my calls to action. I had a design, I put together some really beautiful pop-up kind of calls to action. They’re really smooth designs. I was going to test them against each other, but I also decided to test one of my own. Now, I am no designer and when I saw my pop-up next to the designers, I almost did not run my own test because I was embarrassed. My design was not as smooth, but it was a bit cleaner, it was a bit simpler, and probably was a bit ugly as well which may have caught people’s attention. I thought the designer’s pop-ups were going to win hands down when I tested them against each ot…

    Full show notes at the publisher

    PB067: Why You Should Create a Product to Sell On Your Blog (and Tips on How to Do It) Dec 02, 2015
    Show notes

    How to Develop a Product to Sell on Your Blog Today’s episode is the second of the new ‘Today, Not Someday’ series of podcasts that will take us up to the end of the year about what you can do to make your blog ready for success in 2016. The focus is your ‘someday’ list, the things you’ve always wanted to do to improve your blog but have struggled to make happen. For details about how the series works, check out episode one here. The focus of today’s episode is about why having something to sell is so important, and tips about how you can develop a product to sell on your blog. In This Episode You can listen to today’s episode above or in iTunes or Stitcher (where we’d also LOVE to get your reviews on those platforms if you have a moment). In today’s episode: Why having something of your own to sell is so important 9 ways you’re losing opportunities if you don’t offer products on your blog How I made my first product – the mistakes I made and the lessons I learned 8 steps to follow to create your first product Update: you might also like to check out this followup episode on how to create more time to create your first product. Further Reading and Resources for How to Develop a Product to Sell on Your Blog Other episodes in the Today, Not Someday Series: Part 1: Introducing New ‘Today, Not Someday’ Series The ‘creating products’ series on the ProBlogger blog This is the series of blog posts I mention about ‘creating products’ that Shayne Tilley and I shared on the ProBlogger blog: Creating Product Week: How to Create and Sell Products On Your Blog Creating Products Week: Before You Even Think About Creating Products, Think About This Creating Products Week: Which Product Should I Create? Creating Products Week: How to Create Products for Your Blog Creating Products Week: The Launch Countdown Creating Products Week: Making Products Happen – Getting Your Ideas off the Ground Meet my new friend, Edgar I’d like to welcome a new sponsor to the ProBlogger podcast for the duration of this 10 part series, my friend ‘Edgar‘. Edgar is a tool I’ve been using since January of this year that does exactly what this series is about. It enables you to make the work you do on social media keep paying off for the long term. You put a little work into Edgar today by adding social media updates highlighting the great content in your blog’s archives and Edgar goes to work to share them to your followers not just once but by queuing your updates to keep delivering to into the future. The team at Edgar have put together a special deal for ProBlogger readers which gives you a free one month trial. Sign up for it at meetedgar.com/problogger. Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Hi there, and welcome to Episode 67 of the ProBlogger Podcast. My name is Darren Rowse, and today, we’re continuing our series of podcasts on things that you can do today that will help to improve your blog forever. These are all things that have been, and are currently on my ‘someday’ list, things that we often put off as bloggers that we really should do today because they have so much potential to bring our blog alive. For the next 10 episodes, I’m going to give you 10 different things you can do today to improve your blog. You can find today’s show notes at problogger.com/podcast/67. You can listen to the introduction to this series in the last episode, Episode 66. This episode is sponsored by Edgar, a tool that I’ve been using since January of this year, that does pretty much what this whole series is about; help you to improve your blog by doing something today that’s going to pay off forever. Edgar allows you to create social updates for your Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn accounts that will continue to be able to be used forever and it cues them up automatically for you. You can check out what Edgar does at meetedgar.com/problogger. And now, let’s get into today’s show. Today, I want to talk about creating a product for your blog. Having something to sell of your own is so important as a blogger, but also, in other aspects of business as well. Want to tell you a little story. A few years ago, while on a beach vacation up in the northern parts of Australia, my family was out having an ice cream one night when we came across two street performers. We call them buskers here in Australia, but I know in other parts of the world, you call them ‘street performers’. Both of them were quite similar in some ways. They both were sitting there playing their guitar and singing, but they were doing it quite differently in terms of their business model. The first one was set up about 15 meters to one side of the ice cream shop that we were visiting. He had a guitar and he had his guitar case open in front of him to collect the loose change of those walking by. He was pretty good at what he was doing. He was a good singer, a great player of his guitar, and we stopped to listen to him for a moment. Our kids nagged us to stop and listen. They love and are fascinated by street performers. We listened for a few moments before walking on and leaving a couple of dollars in loose change in his guitar case. After buying our ice cream, we noticed another performer a little further down the road on the other side of the ice cream shop. Now, this guy was similar in some ways, but he was a bit of a one-man band. He had his honky-tonk guitar and a harmonica, bells on one foot and a home-made kick drum box on the other. He was a little bit different in that he had a little bit more going on, but he was a similar kind of style of performer. He was just as good as the first guy. He too had his case out for donations and tips. But, he was doing something different that in my estimation pulled in at least 10 times as much money that the other performer was making. He had two CDs for sale. Just by saying he had CDs for sale probably dates the story slightly, but he had a physical product there to sell. You could buy one of his CDs for $15 or both of them for $25. Not only was this guy pulling in tips at a similar rate to the other guy, but I’d estimate 1 in every 10 or so people approached him to buy at least one of his CDs, and many bought two. In the 15 minutes that we stopped to watch this second guy, because our kids were quite fascinated by his act and they actually caused quite the impromptu of their own by dancing along to him, I saw him sell eight CDs in those 15 minutes. He was obviously pulling in some really decent money in comparison to the first busker. Having a CD to sell was great for revenue, but, interestingly, I think it also had other impacts on the audience. People seem to take him a bit more seriously than the other guy. I heard at least a couple of people in the crowd who were watching, and there was quite the crowd, comment on the fact that he was obviously pretty serious about his music because he recorded a CD. It gave him credibility as well as giving him a talking point when it came to chatting with people, and, of course, something to sell. The other aspect of selling a CD was that people walked away with something in their hands. They not only heard him and they had an experience of him, they actually had something to make that relationship potentially live on. They were much more likely to remember his name, connect with him on social media, tell other people about him because they had something, something that would remind them of him. I think this story illustrates some of the reasons why I think it’s really important to consider making a product to sell on your blog. As I tucked my boys into bed that night, and my three-year-old at that time insisted on sleeping with his new honky-tonk one-man band CD—you guessed it, we bought one, in fact I think we got both of them. It struck me just how powerful it is to have a product to sell. As bloggers trying to make a few dollars from our online activity, many of us get stuck thinking about making money by putting ads on our blog. But in doing so, I wonder if perhaps we’re doing it for the equivalent of busking for tips. That’s not the perfect illustration, but in my experience, having a product to sell really takes things to the next level. I know I’ve fallen into that trap myself of thinking that busking for tips was okay, and I’ve seen a variety of benefits of creating products for my own. Obviously the biggest benefit that I see is revenue. Having a product, whether it be a book, or an ebook, or a membership site, or some consulting, or coaching or something else has a potential to make you money. That’s great because it can be an addition to those tips, or to the advertising that you have on your blog. But, it also brings credibility. In the same way that people took that second busker a little bit more seriously, I’ve noticed that when I’ve had something to sell on my site, people tend to take me a little bit more seriously as well. This can bring in all kinds of other opportunities. I know within 24 hours of releasing my first ebook, I had an approach by a publisher wanting to publish that ebook. I would never have had that approach if it wasn’t for the ebook itself. It adds a little bit of credibility, it can add authority, and it can bring in opportunities. It also has the potential to deepen relationships with your readers in the same way that going away with that CD made that memory live on of that performer for us. As we played his CD, we remembered him. As we played his CD, we were reminded of his name because it was on the front cover of the CD. As we played that CD, other people who heard us playing it asked who the author was and gave us an opportunity to talk about him. All of that deepened the relationship with him, it made that memory live on. In the same way that happened with that CD, I’ve noticed the same thing happens with our ebooks and our courses. When people buy an ebook, they then go away and read that ebook and it takes them more than a day to read that ebook in many cases. I know for a fact that as people work through the 31 Days to Build a Better Blog ebook, that I get emails from people all along the way. For 31 days as they work through it, they have an ongoing relationship with me–and I see their tweets and I see their emails come in as they work through the ebook. It lengthens and deepens the relationship that you have with your readers. It also brings in traffic. This is kind of one that I’ve not really heard many people talk about before. When you launch a product, that often brings a spike in traffic to your site as well, whether that be through the emails that you send or affiliates promoting your product, or whether it’s just word of mouth, people coming to check out what you’re doing. I know every time we launch a product, we have a good month of traffic and that has other ongoing benefits for our site. Just a couple other benefits: you learn new skills and you’re forced to think about your topic in a way that you perhaps haven’t thought about it before. When I wrote the ProBlogger book for the first time–many years ago now–whilst I’ve been blogging about blogging for a while by actually being forced to write a book and have a publisher wait for me to submit a manuscript, it forced me to think in a deeper way, in a bigger picture way about my topic. So, creating a product can do that for you as well. It will improve your blog going on. I could go on and on about the arguments for having a product and I’m going to stop there. I think the argument for having a product is pretty strong. I think most bloggers I come across have, at least, have a dream of a product of their own, whether it be a book, or an ebook, or a course, or a membership site, or even a t-shirt, or some other kind of physical product or virtual product. Most bloggers seem to be sold on the idea that products are good, but most bloggers I know also have a lot of excuses as to why today is not the right day to start creating that product. That might sound a little bit harsh, but I say it because it’s been true for me as well. In fact, if I’m quite honest about this, it’s probably true for me right now. That’s why I’m actually starting this series with this topic because I know I need to move this off my ‘someday’ list and onto my today list. Some of you have heard my story of my first product before, so I won’t tell it in the long version, let me just give you the short version. When I started my main blog Digital Photography School in 2007, I had the dream of monetizing that blog with an ebook. I kind of knew what the topic might be, and I knew I had potential as well because I’ve promoted ebooks on that blog before and they kind of worked. My readers seemed to buy them, but I also had a long list of excuses as to why today wasn’t the right day to start writing that ebook. I had no time, we had a newborn baby in the house which meant I had even less time, I wasn’t thinking clearly because I was sleep deprived. I wasn’t confident; I lacked confidence about creating an ebook, I’d never done it before. I lacked skills; I didn’t know how to really write, or edit, or design, or sell one. I had a whole heap of questions about what shopping cart to use, and what marketing tactics to use. I guess I had a lot of doubts as to whether anyone would buy anything that I created because I wasn’t a professional photographer after all. For all of these reasons, the idea of that first photography ebook remained on my ‘someday’ list. It remained there for two years, in fact, before I decided to act. I decided that I either needed to kill the idea, the dream, or act upon it. In 2009, I decided to start creating that product. I did it by putting 15 minutes aside every day for three-and-a-half months to get it done. I spent my first 15 minutes a day planning it out, and then as the days progressed I started writing it and editing it, and then I started looking for a designer and started using my 15 minutes a day to research shopping carts, and then to start writing marketing copy, and sales pages, and sales emails. And then I put it out there. I’ve told the story before about how on the night I put it out there, I still had a lot of the doubts, but at least I’d completed it. I learned skills in that process that I knew would benefit from it, and I was proud of myself. I hit send on the email that launched that e-product to my list, to my readers, and I waited. Nothing happened at all for the first 10 minutes, but about 5 or 10 minutes later, a sale came in and I got notified via email that I’d made my first $15 from my first product. I was so proud of myself, and then I waited for another 10-or-so minutes, and then another email came in. I made $30, and I was excited. I began to think $30 for three months’ work, it’s not a great return on it but I was proud of myself. Eight minutes later, the next sale came in. Then five minutes later, the next sale came in. They started coming in every three minutes, and then every two minutes, and then every minute. Then, I began to see them come in every 30 seconds, and then every 10 seconds. The sales began to come in, they snowballed. I remember running into my wife at 3:00 AM because I launched this at 11:00 PM stupidly and waking her up and saying, “You wouldn’t believe what’s going on in my inbox.” At that moment, I was incredibly excited as I saw this product becoming profitable. But, the biggest feeling I had at that point was why didn’t I do this earlier? That first ebook went on to make US$72,000 in the first 10 days after I launched it. I keep to myself every day of those 10 days as to why didn’t I do it sooner? Why didn’t I make it a priority? Why didn’t I put it on my today list way back in 2007 instead of waiting for 2009? By putting it on my today list, I opened up a whole new income stream for my blog. It proved to me that my readers would buy something from me. It proved to me that I had the skills to do it. It proved…

    Full show notes at the publisher

    PB066: 10 Things You Can Do Today that Will Pay Off On Your Blog Forever Nov 30, 2015
    Show notes

    Note: you can listen to this episode above or load it up in iTunes.

    Introducing The New ‘Today, Not Someday’ Series of Podcasts

    Today’s episode is the first in a new series of podcasts about what you can do to make your blog ready for success. The focus will be your ‘someday’ list, the things you’ve always wanted to do to improve your blog but have struggled to make happen.

    I’ve realised many of the things on my ‘someday’ list are things that could significantly improve my blog and my business and lead to a rise in income, things I really should be doing and could be achieved with a concerted burst of effort, if only I could get past my procrastination.

    This series is about me sharing my journey to turn my ‘someday’ tasks into things I make happen today. I’ll share with you what works and what doesn’t, and give you tips and resources to help you work through your ‘someday’ list too. We’re all more likely to make these changes if we’re not doing it alone!

    In This Episode

    You can listen to today’s episode above or in iTunes or Stitcher (where we’d also LOVE to get your reviews on those platforms if you have a moment). In today’s episode:

    • Why I’m focusing the next 10 podcast episode on #TodayNotSomeday blogging tips
    • How the #TodayNotSomeday series will work
    • How you can be a part of the #TodayNotSomeday journey
    • How to begin your #TodayNotSomeday journey

    Resources for How to Transform Your ‘Someday’ Tasks Into Things You Make Happen Today

    I’d like to welcome a new sponsor to the ProBlogger podcast for the duration of this 10 part series, my friend ‘Edgar‘.

    Edgar is a tool I’ve been using since January of this year that does exactly what this series is about. It enables you to make the work you do on social media keep paying off for the long term.

    You put a little work into Edgar today by adding social media updates highlighting the great content in your blog’s archives and Edgar goes to work to share them to your followers not just once but by queuing your updates to keep delivering to into the future.

    The team at Edgar have put together a special deal for ProBlogger readers which gives you a free one month trial. Sign up for it at meetedgar.com/problogger.

    How did you go with today’s episode?

    How did you go with writing your ‘someday’ list? What has worked for you in the past with moving tasks from your ‘someday’ list to your ‘today’ list? I’d love to hear from you in the comments below.

    The hashtag I’ll be using to talk about this journey on social media is #TodayNotSomeday and I encourage you to share your journey too, using the same hashtag.

    Update: the rest of this series has started – listen to the next episodes at:

    • Part 1: Introducing New ‘Today, Not Someday’ Series
    • Part 2: Why You Should Create a Product to Sell On Your Blog (and Tips on How to Do It)
    • Part 3: How to Increase the Subscriber Numbers to Your Email List
    • Part 4: How to Get Readers Excited to Join and Stay on Your Email List
    • Part 5: How to Use Autoresponders to Fast Track Engagement and Profit
    • Part 6: How to Refresh the Design of Your Blog For Maximum Impact
    • Part 7: How to Optimize Your Social Media to Drive Traffic to Your Blog
    • Part 8: Grow Your Blog’s Traffic And Income By Creating A Resources Page
    • Part 9: Map Out Next Year’s Monetization Strategy For Your Blog
    • Part 10: Work On January’s (Or The Full Year’s) Content Calendar

    Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Hi there! This is Darren Rowse from ProBlogger. Welcome to episode 66 of the ProBlogger podcast where today I am very excited to be starting a new series of podcasts that’s going to take us through pretty much until the end of the year. It’s something that’s going to hopefully help you to really set yourself up for a great year of blogging in 2016. You can find today’s show notes at problogger.com/podcast/66.

    Just as a little aside today before we get going, I am today podcasting from my son’s bedroom. It’s a bit of a strange one. I’d set aside the whole day today to record a number of podcast episodes, and of course, today was the day that our painter—that is doing the outside of our house—decided to start painting right outside my office. He is scraping and making all kinds of noises, so I’ve moved my whole podcast setup into my son’s bedroom. It’s a bit of a strange run. If I do sound a little different today, that’s why. I suspect it’s probably a little bit better for audio in here because it’s a little bit more muffled because there’s stuff everywhere. He doesn’t pack up.

    Anyway, let’s get on with today’s show. Do you have a Someday List of things that you want to do in your blogging? If you do, you’re not alone–I do. It’s not an actual list that I’ve ever written down onto paper or written up into a document on my computer but it’s a list that lives inside my head and it has a whole heap of things on it. Some of them are fanciful, and things that probably will never get around to doing—just grand ideas. We all have them but most of what’s on my list—my Someday List—is mainly made up of things that I know I should do but things that I’ve not gotten around to yet. I guess you could say it’s largely a list of things that I’m procrastinating on.

    If we’re honest, I suspect most of us have a Someday List but recently, I was thinking about my Someday List and realized a few things about it. Firstly, I realized that many of the things on my Someday List were things that had real potential to significantly improve my business. Some of them would lead to increases in traffic to my blog. Some will lead to a better perception of my brand. Some will lead to a definite rise in income. There were things that I really should be doing.

    Another thing I realized about my Someday List is that most of the things on it were things that probably could be achieved and knocked off with a concerted burst of effort. Some of them might take a morning, some of them might take a whole day or even a few days of work, but most of them could be knocked off in at least a week if I really put my mind to it. They weren’t unachievable things. There were things that could improve my business and things that I could achieve if I really put my mind to it and got my act into gear. The other thing I realized about many of the things on the list is that they would lead to an ongoing benefit to my blog, into my business. There were things I could do today that would pay off over the long haul potentially for months and even years.

    I guess, I was pretty confronted by these three things and realized I needed to start working on my Someday List and at least move a few of them onto my Today List. Some of you may have seen me jump on Periscope just after I had this realization a couple of weeks’ ago. I began to share some of the things that were on my list and some of the things that I thought bloggers could do today that would pay off for a long time. It was really interesting to say the response to that Periscope. A lot of people really were energized by it.

    I came out with a #todaynotsomeday. It was really interesting to see people using that hashtag to talk about the things they were going to do today and not someday. My listeners of that podcast said you really should do this as a podcast series and so that’s what I’ve decided to do. As I tackle my Someday List, I want to encourage you to tackle yours. This is the perfect time to do it with the end of the year approaching. My hope is that as you hit 2016 because you’ve tackled some of these things, your blog will be in so much better shape for the New Year.

    Here’s what we are going to do. I’m going to come up with the next 10 episodes of this podcast, which will fit into this Today Not Someday series. Each of the podcasts is going to focus upon a different activity that you might choose to do. Something that you could potentially do today. By today, I don’t mean just today. It could take you a few days, it might even take you a week, but these are things that you should be doing now that will hopefully pay off for the long term of your blog.

    I will give you something to do as well as a few tips on how to do it in each of the episodes. It’s a bit similar to what I did with the 31 Days to Build a Better Blog series, which I kicked this podcast off with but they’re different things and perhaps a little bit meatier things. Some of those 31 Days were things that you could knock off in an hour. Some of these may take you a little bit more but I think they have the potential to really be profitable and great investments for your blog in the long run. Some of the activities that I’m going to mention could possibly be knocked off in a few hours but most of them will probably take a week, maybe a few days at least.

    Now, I’m not suggesting you do all of these 10 things before the end of the year. Some of them are going to be more relevant to you than others so there might be a couple of the podcasts that you might want to listen to and go, “Yeah! I’m going to leave that one on the show for today or for another day.” But I want to encourage you to at least choose a couple of them to get working on. Knock off as many of them as you can. I challenge you to knock off as many things from your Someday List by the end of the year as possible.

    I want to encourage you to use that hashtag #todaynotsomeday. Use it on Twitter. Use it on Instagram. Just share what you are doing that you’re knocking off your Someday List. They don’t have to be just the things we talked about in the podcast. I’m sure you’ve already got things on your mind that you could do them on. I want you to use that hashtag (1) to keep yourself a little bit accountable, (2) maybe to give yourself a bit of motivation, but (3) also to share what you are doing and hopefully that will inspire the rest of us to do some of that type of stuff as well. Hopefully, we can get a bit of community going around the ProBlogger #todaynotsomeday between now and the end of the year.

    Now to get these 10 episodes done between now and the end of the year—in fact, I would like to get them done before Christmas—I’m going to increase the frequency of this podcast from two per week to three. For the next few weeks, you’re going to get podcasts every Monday, Wednesday and Friday–that’s Australian time. If you’re in America, that will be Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday but you can listen to them anytime you like and to get notified of them as usual you can be subscribed to our newsletter. You can sign up for that at problogger.com/podcast/subscribe.

    Here’s what I want you to do right now. I want you to write down your Someday List and to workout which of the things on your Someday List you’re going to start working on. You might already have something in mind, and you might be motivated enough to actually get that done today or start working on that today. But if you haven’t got something in mind, tune in for the next 10 episodes and hopefully something in my list will inspire you to do something today, not someday.

    Lastly, before I finish this episode, I want to welcome a new sponsor to the ProBlogger podcast for the duration of this 10-part series. It’s a sponsor that I think can help you with this exact challenge. I’d like you to meet my friend, Edgar. Some of you know Edgar already but Edgar is a tool that I’ve been using since January of this year that does exactly what this series is about. It enables you to make the work you do on social media keep paying off for the long term.

    You put a little work into Edgar today by adding social media updates and highlighting the great content you’ve got in your blog archives, on Twitter or Facebook, and then Edgar goes to work to keep sharing them to your followers not just once but by cueing those updates up to keep delivering them in the future. It’s one of those #todaynotsomeday things. You can spend some time getting social media in order today and it pays off for the long term. We’ll incidentally talk about social media in one of the challenges coming up. You can sign up for a free month-long trial of edgar@meetedgar.com/problogger.

    Tune in for the next episode of the ProBlogger podcast where we will get into the first of 10 challenges that hopefully will inspire you to do something today rather than someday that’s going to improve your blog and set you up for a great 2016. I’ll check with you then but for now, you can go to problogger.com/podcast/66 to get today show notes with some of the links and also to check out Edgar. Thanks for tuning in. I’ll chat with you soon.

    Enjoy this podcast? Sign up to our ProBloggerPLUS newsletter to get notified of all new tutorials and podcasts below.


    PB065: How to Work Out What To Focus Upon with Your Time Nov 26, 2015
    Show notes

    Today's episode is about how you can learn to make decisions for your blog more quickly and with confidence, freeing you up to focus your time on what really matters most. One of the most common questions I'm asked is how I manage to fit everything in - blogging, social media, speaking appearances, product development and family life. The truth is, I don't get to do everything I would like. But I have learned skills and developed habits that make me feel less overwhelmed and stressed about making decisions about how to spend my time. If you're feeling like you don't have enough time to fit everything in, this episode is for you. I share tips that will help you get more focused about how to choose to spend your time to make your blog a success. Today's show notes are available at: problogger.com/podcast/65


    PB064: Content Marketing – Secrets From an Entrepreneur Who Has Used It to Build a Successful Business Nov 23, 2015
    Show notes

    Today's episode is about how to build your business using content marketing. It's an interview with Dan Norris, a serial entrepreneur and popular blogger. Dan has used content marketing as his key strategy to building his successful businesses. He shares his experience and insider tips so that you can turn your blog into a successful business too. Today's show notes are available at: problogger.com/podcast/64.


    PB063: Writing Challenge | Write a ‘Mistakes’ Blog Post Nov 19, 2015
    Show notes

    Today's episode is about how to write a blog post about a mistake you have made. Across my blogs, the most popular posts ever have been the ones that include "mistake" in the title. Writing a confessional post about a mistake you have made gives your readers the opportunity to learn from your experience, but will also increase your blog traffic if you set it up well. I share how to write a "mistake" post to make sure you get the most blog traffic possible and to deepen the relationship you already have with existing readers. Today's show notes are available at: problogger.com/podcast/63


    PB062: How I Lost 80% of my Blog Traffic Overnight and How You Can Stop It Happening to You Nov 16, 2015
    Show notes

    Today's episode is about how I almost lost my blogging business overnight. It was right after I had decided to blog full time and had quit my part time job. My traffic fell by 80% and my income fell by about 85%. It was an awful feeling and I'd like to share this story with you to make sure you know what to do if disaster ever strikes your blog. I share why it happened, what I did to recover from it, and what I do now to prevent it ever happening again. Today's show notes are available at: problogger.com/podcast/62


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