Blogs

One of the most exciting days of my life was when we did the monthly accounts for my wife's travel blog, and realized we had earned a full time salary from it.

It had been a long and hard road, but we had started something from nothing, with the smallest of investments, and we had genuinely created a full time income from it. Every word written, every aspect of the design and every cent earned had come from the two of us, with a lot of help from the fantastic community of readers.

It's a corny phrase, but for me, it was life changing. We had proved to ourselves that ordinary people like us can start something with almost nothing, and turn it into not only a source of pleasure and pride, but a real business, with a real value, and something that puts bread on our table each day.

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:

I guess I should start by giving you the rationale behind it. Both Nathan and I have been regular consumers of paid forums, courses and programs over the last couple of years - I dread to think how much we've spent between us!

Many of these have provided some tangible benefits, and a few have been total failures. But one thing they have all lacked has been genuine help for our specific businesses. All have used a generic module approach providing the same general information to a large body of people.

So we decided to do something about it, based on a lot of the feedback we got from the consultancies we did as part of the Beyond Blogging book.

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

I don't know if you saw Jordan's original post a couple of month's ago: Regift and win $500.

Here's the story - he won a prize, and decided to regift it to someone else, so he ran a contest on his blog. But he added a twist:

The winner, and each subsequent winner, could either take the prizes, or add something to them and regift the whole lot by holding their own competition. Each person choosing to regift, will then be put into a prize draw for $500!

I got lucky today - I won the prizes being offered on Rhys Wynne's blog - you can read about it here: Happy Birthday to me

Eventually the value of the prizes will be such that someone will break the chain and take them.

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.