You may be thinking to yourself, “But Matt, I’m a reader of your blog and I want ‘How To’ Posts.” You may think that’s what you want now… but it’s not really true…

In all actuality, people really want to see real world case studies… They want to see examples of exactly what worked for someone else so that they can take those ideas and those actions and implement them themselves.

When you were taking math classes in school, what was the better way to learn? Did you like it when your teacher said, “this is how you do this math problem, so remember it.” or did you prefer to receive the explanation of why it worked and how it would be applied in the real world? Maybe that’s not the best example… But you probably learned a heck of a lot better when you received the explanation as well as the application. This is what real case studies actually do. They give true examples of the application.

Not only do case studies give the “how to”, they give examples of exactly how the specific technique was applied in real life. They prove to your readers that the results that they are looking for really can be achieved by taking the same actions that you took.

What would you think would make for a better blog post?

Example A: How to build a mailing list really fast.
Example B: How I built my mailing list from 15 people to 2,000 people in 2 weeks.

One of those blog post titles sounds more appealing to you, doesn’t it?

Both of those blog posts are going to teach the exact same topic but one of them backs up the “how to” with real world results. This IS what your readers want to see. They want that “how to”… But they want it with a little bit of results to prove that something actually works.

I came to this realization when I looked over and saw what my current most popular posts are as of writing this. 2 of my top 5 posts are How I Got To Where I am Today and How I’ve Done What I’ve Done. I’ll admit that these aren’t the best titles for blog posts, however, they both have one thing in common… They are both stories about how I did something. They aren’t necessarily “how to” posts. They are posts about real world achievements and how I achieved them.

When you take a look at the success of the popular blog, Shoemoney, you’ll realize where its success came from. Go back to some of his oldest posts, right when his blog was starting to grow, you’ll realize that they are all case study posts about how he achieved various successes through PPC and ad campaigns.

If you step away from the internet marketing niche and look at something like the health niche… The blogs that get popular are the ones from people who were, at one time, out of shape and have done what it takes to get their bodies back to where they want them. One of my favorite health blogs is a site called ZenToFitness.com. Many of the posts on this blog are case studies of how they managed to overcome issues with their weight and health. They give you the steps by showing you how they implemented them themselves.

When people rethink their “how to” posts and convert them in to case study posts, they will find that they are creating material that people really love to read and can really get excited about. Think about this when you’re writing your next tutorial. You will be surprised at how much better of a response you receive from your post.

What are your thoughts on this subject? Do you prefer when how-to posts give real world examples in the form of case studies or do you think standard how-tos are good enough? Please leave your comments below.

After a lot of thinking and a lot of research, I decided that I was basically going to reinvent my blog. I basically decided I’m going to start over and take a completely different approach altogether.

The beginning of this is the complete redesign that you are currently looking at. I think it’s neat and clean and not too cluttered. I’d love to hear your opinions on it but I really like it.

I’m taking a brand new approach to how I market my blog as well. I’m going to put much more time and emphasis in to social marketing and making sure my blog is present everywhere. I’ve also brought a social element in to my blog with the Flickr photos in the sidebar as well as the new social media buttons across the top. On top of that, I started using a cool new tool that ensures my blog posts are syndicated across all of the popular social networks automatically. (I’ll talk about this tool in one of my next blog posts)

In regards to the questions that I asked a few weeks ago… I’ve made a few decisions on those. Some people didn’t like the idea of me discussing non-blogging / non-marketing topics, however, the overwhelming majority wanted to hear it all. Most people also believed that anywhere between three posts per week to one post per day was acceptable. However, anything beyond one post per day was too much and anything less than one post per week was too little.

To be pretty blunt… my decision is that I’m pretty much going to post what I want, when I want. If I’m in the mood to talk about health and fitness on my blog, I’m going to do it. The people who aren’t interested in hearing about it can simply skip that post and decide not to read it and jump back over when a post is more relevant to them. As far as frequency, I will probably rarely exceed one per day but I’m going to make an effort to do somewhere around five per week.

I’m going to worry less about the length of posts and more about just delivering cool content, ideas, stories, tools, videos, and more. I used to e-mail everyone whenever I did a new blog post. However, since I’m going to up the frequency of my posting, I’m probably not going to e-mail about every single blog post. I want to put more focus on getting people to subscribe to this blog through their favorite RSS readers. This will ensure that you’re always up to date with my latest posts every day. See the yellow button at the top of the page that says “Subscribe RSS”? If you click on that, you can subscribe to my blog with a favorite RSS reader or even have my latest blog posts sent to you via e-mail. It will be a great way to make sure your always up to date with what I have to say. (Trust me. I have a lot to say.)

Some upcoming blog post ideas:

• What blog readers really want to read (It’s not “how-to” articles).
• The fastest way to encourage loads of interaction on your blog.
• Christmas gift ideas for the bloggers and marketers in your life.
• Instant credibility and visibility by using this one idea.
• My productivity secrets. (This will probably be a long one)
• My favorite tools to integrate social marketing with my blog.

My list is several pages long… These are just a few ideas to expect over the next week and a half or so…

I always love hearing your thoughts and feedback. Please a comment below because I absolutely love reading what you have to say. Also… Please sign up as an RSS subscriber to ensure that you get all of my upcoming posts delivered to you. I promise that I will make it worth your while!

Easy Video Player / Elite Marketing Foundation
Recently I formed a new business with my long time friend, Josh Bartlett. We are in the process of creating a membership called The Elite Marketing Foundation. There’s already a lot of buzz going around the industry about this because we have several big name marketers lined up to take part and help create content. This is going to be a pretty ground-breaking program. Josh and I share the same business philosophies and ethics and we are going to aim to teach the fact that you can be a hugely successful marketer and be ethical at the same time. To teach this, we are going to be implementing some brand new technology that tracks progress, awards achievements, and continually encourages action. It will be set up in a way that pretty much guarantees that any person who takes action and follows through will succeed.

Anyway, before the Elite Marketing Foundation is officially released, I teamed up with Josh to help him make his launch of Easy Video Player as huge as possible. The new version of EVP has so many new features that I’m not even going to begin to explain them all. There’s just too many to list. Easy Video Player will be officially released on October 19th and anyone who grabs it will get a first look in to the Elite Marketing Foundation. That will be our official unveiling.

Why am I telling you all this? Well first off, I want you to be as excited about the Elite Marketing Foundation and Easy Video Player as I am and second off, I would love to see you help promote Easy Video Player. I won’t go in to detail here about how much money it can make you or how cool all the new features are… If you are interested in helping out check out this page that explains everything.

Autopilot Cash Formula is Closing For Good
Most of you have already grabbed the Autopilot Cash Formula and all of the kind feedback has been amazing. However, October 8th will be the last day that this program will be available. I am shutting the doors for good and I don’t think I will ever reopen them.

I know you’re probably thinking that this is some sort of scarcity tactic but it’s really not. I have decided that I am going to simplify my business. From this point on, I will have two flagship products. I am going to continue to focus on The WordPress Classroom (The program that started it all for me) and the Elite Marketing Foundation (my new joint venture with Josh). So in order to simplify, I’m going to lower the price a little and then leave sales open for the next week or so before closing it down for good.

Now… That basically concludes the announcement portion of this post. Now to the things that I need your opinion on

Do you care about my health?
About 3 1/2 weeks ago I discovered an online health program. I’m not going to mention the name of the product right now but it was being promoted by some really big name marketers. My health has been something that I’ve let slip over the past year or so since I quit my job. I stopped working out and I ate crap food constantly. Not unexpectedly, I packed on some pounds…

I found this product and decided, “yea… I’m going to start eating healthy again and I’m going to follow this exercise regimen. I’ve stuck with this consistently for around 3 1/2 weeks now and I’ve already noticed some great results. My friends and family think I’m crazy because I’ve sacrificed a lot of delicious foods and I’ve never missed a day working out.

I recently came to the conclusion that maintaining your health is almost identical to building and maintaining a successful online business. The same philosophies apply. It is all about discipline. If you have the discipline to do exactly what you know you need to do every single day, you will reach your goals. Don’t get sidetracked and always keep your eyes on the end goal and you will see results. Discipline is the key to success in anything you do. I can say with almost 100% certainty that most people who haven’t made it online, haven’t made it because they haven’t maintained the proper discipline to do everything that they know they should be doing every single day…

Anyway, before I go off on a rant here… My question to you is, do you care or would you be interested in hearing about my successes and struggles with fitness and becoming as healthy as I can be? I know you probably think that it has little to do with blogging or marketing but I tend think differently. I think it all ties together. I may even share the exact program I’m on now and possibly (scary) before & after photos.

I’d love to hear your opinions on the idea.

How often should a blogger post?
This is a strange question for me to ask because well… I run the WordPress Classroom. However, this is something that I’ve really struggled with. I have lots of great ideas for blog posts but I’m afraid to post too frequently.

On one hand, I can post constantly. I probably have enough ideas to make one post per day. However, if I do that, I’m afraid people will get overwhelmed. I won’t have as big of an audience per post. On the other hand, if I only post about once per month, I get a ton of comments and a ton of feedback on every single post. Everything I do gets a ton of exposure, however, I’m not sharing as much content as I would like to. It’s been a tough internal debate.

I would love to hear your feedback on how often someone should post. How often would you want to hear from me? Once per month, once per week, a few times per week? What do you think? Let’s get a discussion going about this specific topic because I really think that this is a common struggle.

If you want to hear from me a few times per week on this blog, just let me know. I just want to make sure you’ll keep coming back and reading what I have to say and leaving awesome comments. If you can promise me that, I’ll make sure to share with you more often and provide as much value as possible.

Do you want to meet up?
Last but not least, I just wanted to mention that I’m going to be hitting a couple seminars in November. If you want to meet up and talk business, let me know. Leave comments if you are going to be at either of these events.

I’ll be at the info-summit in Baltimore between November 11th and November 14th and I will be at AffiliateDotCom Live in Las Vegas between November 19th and November 21st. If you’re interested in meeting up and talking biz, just let me know. We can definitely work something out.

Quick Little Poll
Can you do me a huge favor and answer these questions in a comment below?
1) Would you be interested in hearing more about my journey to get healthy?
2) How often would you want to hear from me on this blog?
3) Will you be at info-summit or AffiliateDotCom Live?

Thanks so much and I can’t wait to read your comments. I will do my best to respond to everyone who posts!

It seems to us that most people have this strategy that consists of basically building a list as large as possible. Their number one focus in life is to build it bigger and bigger. While having a huge list is definitely not a bad thing, most people are putting their focus on the wrong thing. I’m sure you’ve heard by now that “the money is in the list”. You’ve probably also heard the counter-response that “the money is not in the list… it’s in the relationship that you have with the list”. Obviously, the second one is probably closer to the truth. Today I’m going to put a new spin on the idea…

Focus on Building Fans Instead of Gaining Subscribers.

When I talk about a fan, I’m referring to the people that purchase every product that you create just because you made it. These people have so much faith in you that they are willing to blindly purchase what you are selling simply because you made it and they trust that what you made will live up to the quality that they’ve come to expect from you. These fans will purchase products through your affiliate links because they trust you and that you would only recommend the best for them. One fan is worth infinitely more to you that even 100 subscribers on your list.

Think of Apple Computers… They have thousands (if not millions) of fans. There are people out there that will purchase every single product that Apple puts out just because it’s Apple and they’ve come to expect a certain level of quality and usability from them. We call these people Apple Fanboys / Fangirls (and day by day I’m becoming one too). When they put out an iPhone 4, hundreds of thousands of people who already have perfectly fine, working, iPhone 3s drop their old phone to go grab Apple’s latest new toy. It happens with each new product they put out… They have fans.

Another example would be the gaming company, Blizzard. They do games like WarCraft, StarCraft and Diablo. I’m a fan of their company. In my opinion, they’ve never released a bad game. As a result, I own every game they’ve ever released. I buy the games before even reading reviews because I’ve come to expect a certain level from them and they seem to never disappoint. I am a fan…

Let’s put some math behind the idea… Written on the white board on the wall in my office I have “1,000 FANS” written in huge writing. That goal has been on board for months and months now. It is my opinion that if I can build my business to the point where I have 1,000 fans, I will be set…

One fan can be worth any amount to you. I would say at the very minimum, 1 fan is worth $100 per year. Remember, a fan buys everything you release and also purchases most of what you recommend. You only need to sell 2 products in a year, valued at $50 each for one fan to be worth $100 per year. However, at this rate, 1,000 fans is equal to $100,000 per year to your business.

Realistically, though, one fan is probably worth more like $324 per year (or about $27 per month) to your business. So at 1,000 fans, you are probably closer to a business worth around $324,000 per year. At this rate, you only need about 309 true fans to have a $100,000 per year business….

It’s fun to play with these numbers. Obviously, people who only sell and promote really high-ticket items will have a higher value per fan. However, in the high-ticket market, one fan is probably a little harder to come by.

Are you starting to see how simple the concept of building a huge income becomes when your focus becomes building fans as opposed to building a list of subscribers?

How to create fans

There are a few simple rules that myself and Josh tend to follow. Do these things and you will be on your way to building a list of adoring fans.

1. Give tons and tons of high value content for free. Use your blog, create eBooks, make video tutorials, and record interviews. Then just give them away for free. People love to get for free what most other people probably charge to give. As long as the content is quality, people will stick around to see what you’re going to say or offer next. I do my best to share everything I know and learn and I usually give it away for free. The funny thing is, that has never hurt the sales of the products I sell. So don’t be afraid to share what you know for free. People will still pay to get even more details or to dig down a little deeper in to the concepts.

2. “Learn to love getting the short end of the stick” This is one of my favorite quotes and it comes from, fellow internet marketer, Eben Pagan. It basically means that when you do sell products, sell them for a lot less than you think they are worth. Have a philosophy of always over-delivering and make sure that when people purchase a product from you, they are always getting much more than they paid for.

3. Be customer service oriented. I still personally respond to most of my e-mails myself. I do my best to answer questions about my products or my ideas to the people who take the time to e-mail me and ask them. I’m not always the fastest at responding (I get a lot of e-mails) but I pretty much always get back to people. I hired people to manage my support desk as well. I want to make sure that even if I can’t respond quickly, you will get a quick response. No question goes unanswered and theres usually someone to answer quickly no matter what time you send it. These little details really solidify the confidence that people have in you and your business.

4. Never promote anything that you don’t know much about. Don’t jump on launches just because everyone else is promoting them and don’t agree to adswaps without knowing the product of the person you’re swapping with. Make sure that you do what you can to protect the list that you do have. Don’t violate the trust that you are working hard to build by sending crap that you don’t know much about. I’m not against promoting products, promoting launches or even doing adswaps. I just think that you should never mail anything to your list unless you are confident that it will benefit them. Don’t put your credibility with your list on the line by blindly mailing them everything that pops up to promote.

5. Always live up to the standards that you’ve created. If you are going to follow in these footsteps and build a business around creating fans and trust, make sure that any products that you put out continue to be high quality. Don’t let your true fans down. It may take only one misguided slip up to ruin that relationship. Don’t blow it.

Follow these steps and you will be well on your way to creating a huge list of fans. I know people with lists of 60,000 to 100,000 subscribers that get a worse response out of their lists than people with lists of a few hundred true fans. True, sustainable wealth comes from buildings fans and creating trust, not from making a list…

If you enjoyed this post, can you do me two huge favors? Click the “Like” button to let me know that you enjoyed it and leave a comment so we can further discuss it. What are you a fan of? Do you agree / disagree with this philosophy? Get your input heard.

Here’s a look inside… Let me know what you think!

Leave comments below! I’d love to hear your thoughts!

If you are curious about how I made this poll and how you can implement one on your site, check out Blogpolls.com. It literally takes about 4 minutes to set up a poll.

Please make yourself heard in the comments below. If there’s something you’d like me to talk about that is not mentioned in the above poll, let me know.

Thanks so much for you input!

Probably The Most Comprehensive List of Traffic Sources – This is a massive blog post with 21 places to generate boatloads of traffic. I thought I knew about most of the traffic generation techniques that were out there… Man, this article really proved me wrong. There is a ton of great stuff here!

59 Things You Should Be Doing But Probably Aren’t – This blog post is well over a year old but it is a great round up of all of the things you should be doing in your internet marketing business but probably aren’t. There is some amazing advice here!

Here are 3 plugins to boost your WordPress SEO – Phil Morgan put together a short and sweet list of WordPress plugins that will help your blog get to the top of the search engines.

12 Essential Security Tips For WordPress – Well this sort of ties in with my little mishap from last week. Here is a list of things that you should be doing to make sure that your blog is safe and secure.

How To Position Yourself as an Expert – This is very relevant if you are in to blogs or mailing lists. You need to give people a reason to want to listen to you.

That’s my round up of awesome blog posts. I’ll be doing these periodically. What do you think? Do you like the idea of me pointing out some great posts?

It is scary because if I hadn’t have taken a few certain actions a few weeks ago, I would have been unable to recover my blog. I figured that there are probably a lot of bloggers out there that may not know how to backup their blog or how to recover their blog from a backup. It is really scary because your blog CAN go down at any time for no apparent reason whatsoever! Read this post and maybe you can put yourself in a situation where a database crash is nothing more than a 5 minute fix.

The very first thing that you should do is download and install the WP-DB-Backup plugin for wordpress. It’s a free plugin and can usually be searched for and installed from directly inside your WordPress Dashboard. Get that installed today. Once it’s installed set it up to backup daily and send you an e-mail with the backup. By doing this, you can jump back to any point in time and recover all the information that crashed. If you don’t update very frequently, you can also opt to backup weekly. I prefer daily because I know I can restore comments from the previous day as well.

Now… If your blog ever goes down and you have been doing a good job of backing it up, here is how you restore your blog.

1. Login in to your CPanel account and scroll down until you find phpMyAdmin

2. Find the database that your blog is installed on. The backup files that are sent to you from WP-DB-Backup will share the same name as the database you need to recover. So if you are unsure of which database to open, refer to the filename of your backup file.

3. Click on the tab that says import at the top of the new screen that just opened.

4. Click on “choose file” and find the backup file that you are going to use to restore your blog.

That should do it. Your blog should be back in all of its glory. Having a database failure can be extremely scary! Fortunately, if you take the right precautions from the beginning, it can be a very quick and painless fix. If you only have one plugin installed for your blog, make sure that it is a backup plugin. It will save you someday!

Please feel free to make comments. Have you had your blog crash? Do you have any questions about making sure you are protected against your blog crashing?

You can actually schedule posts for later. A lot of times, when I know I am going on vacation or something, I will write several blog posts and then que them up to post over the next several days. This allows me to be “hands off” on my blog while making it appear that I am constantly updating.

Here’s how you do it:

Login to your WordPress dashboard, click on “Posts”, and then click on “Add New”. Then go ahead and write one of your posts like you would anyway. Now, under the “Publish” area on the right hand side of your screen, there is an area that says “Publish: immediately”. Click on the link that says “Edit”.

Now you can change the date and time that you want this post to update.

That’s it. That is all there is to it. You can do this as many times as you want to schedule up as many days as you want.

It is something that is really quick and simple, yet a lot of people ask me how to do this. So there you go. That’s how it is done.

Do you have any burning WordPress questions? I can probably help you out with any questions that you have or anything that you’ve been trying to figure out how to do. I want to get back in to doing a couple of blog posts a week. Post your WordPress questions and what you would like to learn and I will make more tutorials on how to do them. But first, don’t forget to check out my free WordPress video tutorials at The WordPress Classroom.

Ask your questions in the comments below and I will help you out if I know the answer!

Click to Enlarge

Over that last three weeks I have built a blog to between 75 and 100 visitors per day, I have built a mailing list from 3 people to 65 people as of this post, I’ve made blog posts that have gotten over 50 comments, and I have created my own product (with two more in the works). I have also managed to average about $50 per day in affiliate commissions over the past 2 weeks or so. I am not writing this post to brag at all. In fact I want to explain to you exactly how I did it.

People ask me the question every day, “How have you done what you’ve managed to do?” They think that I had a huge head start or that I’m just some blogging genius or something. That’s not the case at all. I started this blog on July 1st. My Alex Jeffreys mentoring started on July 6th. That’s hardly much of a head start. I’m definitely no genius but I have made blogs in the past.

So what I will do is I will relist my acheivements here and then explain exactly what I did to get those results…

I have built a blog to between 75 and 100 visitors per day
The biggest thing that I have done here to gain the amount of traffic that I have gained is that I have helped as many people as I could in forums and I have commented on a lot of blogs. I have made it a goal of mine to assist anyone who asks for help in the forums and I either know the answer or know how to do what they are asking. I have also made it one of my daily tasks to comment on a minimum of ten other blogs per day. I usually end up posting on more like 15 per day. At least two of my comments every day must be on blogs from people that are not students of Alex Jeffreys.

I have built a mailing list from 3 people to 65 people as of this post
I have created a video series on how to set up and do tasks on blogs. I gave away the videos for free in exchange for opting in to my mailing list. I have consistently made a minimum of $100 per month in blogging and I intend to continue to create videos on how I have achieved this. The idea came to me after I began to receive the same e-mails over and over again from people asking the same questions about setting up or running thier blogs. I figured that if I created video tutorials, I could start sending them links to videos instead of explaining the same thing over and over again.

I’ve made blog posts that have gotten over 50 comments
This comes back to how I generated my traffic numbers. I have commented on a lot of blogs and a lot of people have returned the favor by commenting on mine. I have helped people in the forum or through e-mail who have come to my blog and commented as a thank you. I enabled the plugin CommentLuv on my blog so that people who comment get a backlink?to their latest article. I have also installed the top commentators widget, which puts a link to the people with the most comment’s blogs. I have also made it a rule of mine to reply to every comment that people make on my blog. This generates an almost community feel to the readers and commenters. This also drives up the comment count, giving social proof to visitors of my blog that I am someone that they should be reading.

I have created my own product (with two more in the works)
I have created my series of WordPress videos based on common questions that I was receiving. I would have never gotten this started if it wasn’t for my mentor, Alex Jeffreys’ first coaching session where he discussed organization and getting things done. I decided that I need to set goals and create a path to achieve these goals. I started making daily task lists and I posted a list of goals on my wall. This has made me so much more focused and driven to keep moving on my product creation. I also need to thank Josh Bartlett, once again, because he has helped so much with the brainstorming and creation of my current product and the products that are in the works.

I have averaged about $50 per day in affiliate commissions
I have posted links to products that I use and endorse. I only endorse products that I can personally vouch for. If I haven’t used it, I haven’t promoted it. My mentor once said that you need to find the way cash flows and then jump in front of it. I believe I finally understand what he was talking about. One way that I have implemented this philosophy is to promote products that I use and I am affiliated with to people who are going to need them anyway. People come to my blog to learn how to blog. They are going to need a host and an e-mail list. I simply promote who I use for these services. I have offered up my link to people who are going to purchase the services anyway. That is simply all I have done and it has worked so far…

Anyway, this post was a little bit longer than I had intended. I wanted to be 100% honest and outright with every method that I have used to gain the traffic that I have gained. I feel like there are still so many more traffic generation methods that I haven’t even taken advantage of yet. I have not really leveraged social media outlets such as Twitter or Youtube, I have not attempted to promote through article marketing, I have not hunted out more forums in my niche to help out in, and I have not experimented with paid traffic for this site. There are still so many avenues that I intend to venture down to continue to build on the success of this site.

Please leave me some comments. I would love to hear if this was helpful to you or if there are more avenues that you would recommend that I venture down. I also intend to comment on any blog of the people who comment on my blog. Leave me some comments and let’s continue to build our network of blogs in to one of the best resources for internet marketers on the internet!