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Archive for the ‘Blogging’ Category

It is important to make sure that your blog doesn’t get stale. You want people to come back and see that you are keeping up with it. Sometimes, however, you are going to be away from your computer for long periods of time or you have some pressing matters that are going to make it impossible to keep up with your blog. If you know about these circumstances in advance, there is a way to make sure that it looks like you are keeping up with your blog without you having to log in and keep posting.

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!

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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!

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So I have finally done it. I have finally opened up the video tutorials that I have been talking so much about. I have called my program The WordPress Classroom. It has videos about setting up the blog all the way through installing various plugins and hiding affiliate links.

All of the videos are not done yet so I will upload more as they are finished. I just wanted to get this online and going so people can have access to them now. I know a lot of people from Alex Jeffrey’s course will get great use from these.

Please give me your feedback in the comments below!

So you’ve got this really sweet blog setup. You have a cool theme installed, you’ve got all the plugins that make the blog really kick butt, you’ve got some affiliate links sprinkled in to make a few bucks here and there and you’ve got a ton of tools to make your online life so much easier. There’s one problem… How the heck are you really going to get people to your site? I’ve got some good news and some bad news. The good news is that there are so many different ways out there to generate traffic to your blog. The bad news is that they all require either quite a bit of time and hard work or money. If you really want to get anywhere in the business, you are going to need to spend one of the two, either time or money.

Be active in your niche’s community.
I can not stress this enough. This is the biggest thing and the fastest way to build free traffic to your blog. Find as many other blogs as you can that are in your niche, read the posts on those blogs, and leave good, relevant comments. Don’t give them the crappy “great post” comments. Those will usually get tossed out as spam. Read the post and try to add a comment that will add to the topic. Give input or more information that the readers of that blog will enjoy and get something out of. People will come to your blog if they think they can learn something from you.

Jump in to the forums that are related to your niche. I guarantee that there is a forum for your niche, no matter what the niche is. There’s always a forum. Get in to that forum, put your blog’s address in your signature, and make helpful, useful comments. The more valuable and relevant your comments are, the faster they will convert in to traffic. Once again, stay away from comments like nice post or good idea. Give people something that adds to the conversation. You are much better off not commenting at all than leaving a plain, boring comment. People will get irritated and will be counterproductive.

Another method of giving to your niche’s community is to write guest posts. Find blogs that are in your niche and write a post for them. E-mail them before you write the post, give them compliments on their blog, and ask if they would be interested in letting you write a guest post for them. Give them three or four ideas of things that you would like to write about. Let them pick the topic. Using this method, you have the opportunity to grab the readers of that other blog. Unlike comments, your guest post will go out to their RSS subscribers and it will sit on their front page for a few days in most cases. It is an excellent way to get a quick boost. Want some examples of guest posts? Here is a guest post that I wrote about how to make money with Clickbank. Notice also, Bill Romer made a guestpost on my blog. When it comes to guest posts, use your best ideas. You want your absolute best material in these guest posts because you are trying to grab new readers. You need a great first impression.

Article marketing
Article marketing works because sites like ezinearticles and GoArticles are more popular than yours. It’s the truth, Google likes them better. Basically, you want to write an article about your niche and post it to one of those sites. At the end of the article, toss in your blog’s link. When people stumble across your article, if the content is good, they will find you blog.

Using websites like HubPages and Squidoo, you can generate the same effect. Leveraging the fact that these sites are very popular and Google likes them, you can create quick, relevant sites that link back to your blog. My typical technique is to create a squidoo lense with about three articles and a couple relevant YouTube videos. I then throw my blog’s link in at the bottom. People like what they see at my lense and come to my blog to get more.

Social Networking Sites
This is a pretty quick and easy way to help generate traffic. Post the address to your blog on all of your social networks. Make sure you have a link in Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Twitter, and any other social network you can think of. People find you and are curious about your site. It’s quick and easy.

Social Bookmarking Sites
This another powerful way that could potentially generate massive traffic. Every time you create a blog post, submit it to places like Digg, Reddit, Delicious, StumbleUpon, and any other social bookmarking sites that you can think of. I have had blog posts that went viral because I submitted them to one of those sites. The next thing you know, your blog that receives 10 views a day, has over 600 in one day. It happens all of the time. Use these sites. They have the potential to explode your site’s traffic.

Link Exchanges
I like to contact as many other blogs as I can that are in my niche and offer to swap links. I’ll give them a shout out in one of my posts if they sneak one of my links in to one of their posts. This is beneficial in two ways. First you can snag a little bit of traffic from their blog and second, Google loves to see your site linked from other sites. This will help your search engine ranking.

Pay Per Click
This is the first of my paid traffic generation methods. I don’t tend to recommend this for blogs because, at first, you won’t make that money back. It is, however, the absolute fastest, easiest, way to boost your traffic almost instantly. You pick some keywords in Google AdWords and every time someone searches for your keywords, your ad will show up for them. Google will charge you every time someone clicks on one of your ads. As you can imagine, the cost can build up quickly.

Purchasing links
Another option is purchase links from other, more popular, websites. This may be slightly more suited for blogs because I tend to think it will bring more relevant traffic. However, this method is a risk as well because you are paying for that link to appear, not for the clicks on that link. You might purchase a link for one month on a website for $20. If no one clicks that link all month, you just lost $20 and have nothing to show for it.

There are so many more traffic generation techniques available. For a blog, I would stick to free methods. It will take a long time to see a return on a paid ad investment at this stage in your blogging career. I will post a follow up in a few days with more ideas to generate blog traffic.

Stick around! We are just getting started!

Being an online marketer, you are going to need some tools.
I have compiled a list of some of the best tools you can get without spending an extra dime. Check out all of these tools and feel free to make a comment with your recommendations.

Comment Kahuna – This is probably the coolest free tool that I have found. Basically you type in a keyword like “internet marketing”, select that you are looking for a WordPress blog, and click go. This will find a ton of blogs that are talking about the keyword you specified. It will also tell you if the blog is Follow or NoFollow and it will give you the blog’s pagerank (how relevant Google thinks it is). You can then go around finding high Page Rank blogs that allow Following and comment on them. This will allow readers of that blog to find your site and it will also make Google think your site is more popular. This is probably the most used traffic generation tool in my arsenal.

Google Analytics – Probably one of the most important tools you can have as a website owner. This will allow you to track everything about your site. You can see how many visitors you have had, how long they stayed, what site they came from, what site they left on, and so much more. An absolutely essential tool!

Cam Studio – Free software that lets you record a video of what you are doing on your screen. Remember that video that I made yesterday? I used this program to create it and I didn’t spend a dime to make it. I highly recommend it!.

Open Office – This is like Microsoft Office but free, and in my opinion, better. You basically have programs similar to Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and more. It is great when it’s time to make an ebook because the program similar to Word allows you to save your document as a PDF file (With all of your hyperlinks intact).

Keyword Difficulty Check Tool – When you are trying to figure out which niche to blog about, you can use this tool to check how stiff the competition will be in that niche.

The Link Popularity Checker – This will allow you to see how many other sites are linking to your site. You can also compare your site alongside two other similar sites if you’d like. It’s a great way to check what is necessary to climb the ranks of Google.

Weebly – You can use this site to quickly and easily create a free webpage on any topic that you’d like. The web address will end up looking like yournich.weebly.com. It’s actually a really great, free, web site creation and hosting tool.

Blinkweb – Very similar to Weebly. You can quickly create a website and they will keep it hosted for you.

Picnik – This site allows you to quickly and easily resize images so that they fit better on your webpage.

Tweetlater – This site allows you to set up Twitter so that you can autofollow anyone who follows you. It also allows you to schedule tweets. If you are about to promote a new product, you can preschedule a series of tweets about your product and it will post them throughout the day.

BrowserShots – This site lets you see what your website will look like in pretty much any other browser out there. This is an important tool to make sure that your site looks as good to everyone else as it does to you.

FileZilla – The best ftp program out there. This will allow you access to your server’s FTP so that you can manually upload and download files from your server.

Survey Monkey – Create surveys and polls to gather information about users and site visitors. A great tool if you are trying to figure out what your audience really wants.

MindMeister – This is a recently discovered tool for me. You can create mindmaps for any ideas that you might have. Over the last three days, I have created mind maps for every one of my blog posts and I have laid out an entire 18 month business plan. Once you get goin, the mind starts flowin… (I just made that up. Cheesy right?)

Online Stopwatch – It is exactly what it sounds like. I use this a productivity tool. It has a count down timer as well. I set the countdown for 60 minutes of work. When times up, I take a 15 minute break before getting back to it. It’s been amazing for my productivity.

A few more that you might have heard of already

Twitter – One of the best marketing tools out there! Build up a following, tweet things that interest people, and watch them check out your blog because they like what you Tweet!

Skype – Get in contact with other like-minded people. I can’t use Skype enough. I have had conversations with some of the most successful people that are more than willing to share ideas just by contacting them on Skype! You can chat with Voice over internet protocol with them too! How cool is that? Free long distance…

YouTube – Make videos and post them there. Mention your website and people come… Easy enough right?

That’s the best I can do for now… I may make a part two in the future. There are so many great tools available!

I need to give some credit to others for this list as well. Thanks goes out to:
Rob Willis, Shirley Cheung, Adam Spiel and Joe Fier.