General Blogging Stuff

Every Friday, and on the third of every month, we have massive traffic days on our travel blog. And that means we earn good income as well on those days. Adsense income and income from our affiliates goes through the roof.

What’s the secret?

Emails.

With over 5,000 subscribers to our email newsletter, anything we send that links back to the site gets us great traffic, so we work hard to make sure that what we send is worth people’s time.

The Friday Email  read more »

1/ Adding new emails to your auto responder series

2/ Going through old posts to update them and link them forward to new content

3/ Writing “Sneeze pages” grouping your content into similar topics

4/ Updating your “About” page  read more »

Up at 6AM, at the computer by 6.15, plenty to do, coffee on desk.

8AM Struggling to think of a title for this post, try another coffee.

10AM This piece of design just isn’t working out for me. Need food maybe. What’s quick? That little cake will do.

Noon Made a mistake on that car hire reservation. Drat, it will take four emails to sort the mess out. Quick cup of tea.

2PM I’ll just finish this chapter on the book, then get some food. Another coffee for now.

3PM That took longer than planned, just couldn’t seem to find the right words. Food time. What’s quick? Packet of crisps and some biscuits.

5PM I’ve spent that last hour surfing, what a waste of time, and there’s so much to do………

 read more »

You probably don’t know Simon Ford. But he’s a perfect example to illustrate my point.

Simon is a car nut with a passion. If he’d been born and lived in the time before social media existed that is what he would have remained.

But thanks to social media, he’s on the cusp of turning his passion into a business, and I suspect he’s also had a lot of fun doing so.  read more »

When you first set up your Facebook page, I suspect that like me, you used the "Notes" section to start importing your blog into Facebook. It seemed logical enough to me a couple of years ago to expose my blog to my friends on Facebook, and it was a useful piece of automation that would save me the time to promote any of my writing on Facebook.

But here's the thing:

Using that process to feed your content to Facebook, keeps people inside Facebook.

It literally imports your whole content there.

I have avid readers of my sites, who have never actually visited them.  read more »

It takes time and some serious hard work to get there, but once you get to a reasonable level of recognition as a blogger, doors will open up that  will surprise and delight you.

Things like:  read more »

I seem to have had an unlucky run recently. I've met several new people over the last few weeks, and too many have been incredibly ego centric.

You know the sort:

• Whatever you mention, they've been there, done it or seen it. Only better.
• After a couple of hours in their company, you know pretty much everything there is to know about their lives and loves. And they know nothing about yours.
• Everything mentioned in a group situation is turned somehow into "their" story.

Being successful socially (or in Social media) is about other people.

Think back to recent encounters on or off line:  read more »

I work with a number of businesses as a consultant, and one thing that horrifies is the language that's often used when referring to customers and potential customers.

"Punters"

"Tyre Kickers"

"Time wasters"

I even came across one business that has derogatory nicknames for some it's clients - things like "Mrs Miserable" and "Mr Comb Over."

And sadly this is often not just condoned by the management, but in many cases is instigated by the people at the head of the company.  read more »

I enjoyed Chris Brogan's post about the passion of Gary Vaynerchuk, and it sparked an interesting debate in the comments about the ROI of social media marketing.

On one hand, there were people arguing that of course you can measure the ROI - using things like vanity URL's and  by asking your clients. Even though the former assumes wrongly that most companies get a majority of their business via the internet, I'd have to agree.

Marketing through social media does generate leads, and that is measurable.

But it's only part of the story.  read more »