General Blogging Stuff

I thought I'd share an interesting chain of events that started with a Tweet.

Image: luigi diamanti / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

The Lead

A Twitter friend @grahunt recently spotted a post on a big real estate portal, and sent me the link. The post was basically suggesting that Twitter was a waste of time as a tool for estate agents. I wrote a pretty strong comment telling the writer he was doing it wrong if he hadn't seen any benefit.

The Opportunity

You might recall my post talking about creating a perfect about page for a blog.

One reader followed the advice, and that of the many commenters, and created a cracking example, which is worth checking out.

Dave Raybould is a snow boarding instructor, and as a boarder myself, we hit it off straight away. His site is called Simplysnowboard.com and here's a direct link to his about page:  http://www.simplysnowboard.com/about/

Most blogs have a list of their most popular posts in the sidebar, or somewhere else on display. And even if you don't tell the world about them, you should be aware of what's attracting the interest of your readers.

But there's a problem with these most popular posts lists. First of all they favour stuff that's been on your site for a long time, and secondly they become self fulfilling - new people click them because they're popular!

For those reasons, it doesn't really provide you with a snapshot for what's useful to your readers right now.

I prefer to look at what posts are getting the most search traffic. That tells me what readers are interested in at the moment. You can get this information from your analytics system - I use Performancing Metrics.

In my case I can tell you that the posts that have had the most search traffic in the past 30 days are:

One about getting and using Google Voice in Europe

Two about Clickbank

One about getting a mentor

So what can I do with the information? Here are some ideas:

We all know that giving links to other websites is good, and that receiving them is even better!

But how much effort do you put into linking back to other people's sites? If you spend a few moments thinking about it, you can do so much more good for the people you're linking to. Let me explain:

I'm going to take a post written by my friend Chris Hinton. The post is about a goal tracking software called 43Things - it looks fascinating, and you'll be able to read about it by using the links in the examples.

Not Good

"...and I enjoyed Chris Hinton's post about the 43Things goal tracking software, which you can read here."

In this example, I've given Chris a link, but the anchor text is "here." It's good to have a link, but that one will not really benefit his post as far as the search engines are concerned.

Better

"..and I enjoyed Chris Hinton's post Track you 2010 goals online with 43Things."

In this example, I've used his own title, so it's much better. But let's pause and think about it. It mentions the product name, which narrows any likely searches to someone who already knows about the product, and it limits it to goals for this year, 2010.

Looking around the net, there are some big differences in product pricing. E Books range from $2.50 to $47, forum membership from $6 to $47, courses from $50 a month to over $2000.

Those of us who use our blogs as business platforms spend hours on pricing - always trying to establish the point at which the volume / profit graph is going to look the best.

What are your thoughts on pricing for your products? Cheap and high volume? Expensive and low volume? Or that fantastic place where you get both a high price and a good volume?

You may remember that I wrote about the book How to be Rich and Happy, some time ago, and that I recommended it to you. You can read my original review here: Review - How to be rich and happy.

Since reading the book, I've come to know one of the authors, Tim Brownson, quite well. He's a fellow Brit who also lives abroad, so we have a fair bit in common.

He's come up with a grand and fantastic idea! Together with co-author John P. Strelecky he wants to give away a million print copies of the book! The plan is to give them to:

- Young people between 15-20 years old
- Single parents on income support
- Unemployed people
- Homeless people

February is a short month, and for that reason it's very common for businesses to fail to achieve their February objectives. It's a shame because it's only the second month of the year, and a failure here can lead to disillusionment. It take some time to recover from a setback now.

Image: Tony Dowson / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

How did you get on with your objectives for February? Did you hit them? If so, well done! Now get going on March's!

Did you fail to hit some or all of them? I'm here to tell you that's OK:

• The world won't come to an end
• You don't need to go into mourning
• You can go forward and do even better than you planned to in the future

We all fail - nobody achieves a constant stream of success, from the newest blogger to the most seasoned professional.

What marks the winners from the losers is how they treat that failure.

That nice young Aussie chap Darren Rowse came up with a good idea today. And I thought I'd pass it on to you, as his Problogger site doesn't have much reach, and we really need to share some of his good ideas.

His suggestion was that we should delve into our archives for some of the good stuff we wrote in those early days when nobody except a lost search bot was reading our sites.

Image: Ron Bird / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

I thought it was a top idea, so I looked back at the first two months of this blog, and pulled out my favourite ten posts. Looking back, the writing was OK, but I sure had some issues with formatting, and it seems I hadn't discovered the joy of images.

I'd love you to take five minutes over a cup of coffee and say hello to a very green and naive Mike CJ, and let me know which of the following you love or hate.

One of the most common questions I'm asked is "How do I start to make money online?" I discussed before how many bloggers see phase one as building traffic, and phase two as starting to make money, and this post is all about the initial steps - those first forays into what can be a murky world.

Image: djcodrin / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

The best place to start is with someone else's product. You don't have to worry about setting up sales pages, delivery systems, guarantees, design or product development. By becoming an affiliate for something, you only have to worry about the front end - getting people to their site.

Choose something that you already use, know and like - something you are happy to recommend to your friends and readers. For our travel blog, we recommended a VPN service that allows people to watch their home TV stations while abroad - a service we use everyday. For this blog, I recommended Aweber (aff), which is an email service I totally believe in.

26th January

Hi Mike CJ
The ShoeMoney System you've been hearing all about
is going live today at 2pm Central, 3pm Eastern.
Let's be honest with each other here: there are lots of
products that get launched in the Internet Marketing space
every year, and there is a LOT of hype attached
to MANY of them.

“Lots of hype? That’s not good.”

27th January

Hi Mike CJ,
Wow! It's only been a few hours since Shoemoney opened
the doors to ShoeMoney System and it's almost sold out!
If you don't want to miss this opportunity, you need
to sign up NOW!

“Not sure it’s me to be honest.”

27th January

Hi Mike CJ,
Its been less then 24 hours and the ShoeMoney System is
about to sell out.  There are only 15 spots left and Shoe
will be shutting the system down probably within the next hour.
If you have any interest in making money on the internet
I highly recommend you go now and signup before they stop
taking signups.

“15 spots? Well they’ll be gone before I can even get my credit cards from the bedroom.”