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3 Ninja Secrets for Those Struggling to Take Their Blog to the Next Level

By Christian

I’m writing today directly to a segment of my readers who are frustrated and/or worried about how their blog is doing. A lot of you are struggling to get the result you’re looking for with your blog. I hear you. First of all, I want to be very clear. If you’re one of the readers here who has expressed frustration to me in the last few months since I’ve been doing this blog, I want you to know a very important (#1) ninja secret…your blog is doing a lot more than you think it is…seriously.

Your Blog is Not a Short Term Engagement

It's true...this is your year, and the benefits to starting your blog are significant! But don't think of your blog in the same way as your other marketing. A blog is a long term endeavor. If you go into it expecting immediate results, you're not in it for the right reasons.

A blog is not a short term endeavor. It’s not like placing an ad and then watching for the results immediately. Please don’t put that pressure on yourself. It’s just not realistic. A blog is a long term project that you will ideally maintain for a long time. The principle is quite simple actually…it takes a while to build a significant audience in most cases. Are there exceptions? Of course, and you could end up being one of them. But in most cases, it just takes a while to build a large readership, especially if you’re just doing it part-time and not spending a significant budget on marketing.

Building the result is a long term project that gradually builds up momentum. Before you know it, your blog will have momentum and it will eventually become a force to be reckoned with, but don’t expect that to happen in month one. If you approach blogging as a magic bullet, you’ll be disappointed. But if you approach it for what it is…a long term marketing and community-building endeavor, you’ll see the true value of what you’re doing in the short term.

For all you bloggers out there that have only 50 subscribers…guess what, 5 of those subscribers will likely end up buying something from you and tell their friends about you. Those first 5 advocates are where it all starts. If you write them off as insignificant, you’ll miss all the benefits to come. Yes, it starts small, but your first subscribers aren’t “insignificant” or “small”…they’re the most important subscribers you’ll EVER have.

Bottom line: your blog isn’t nearly as small as you think it is, and you’re doing a lot more right than you think you are!

Everyone Struggles…Struggling Rocks!

Here’s another (#2) ninja secret: I struggle also. No matter how awesome and strikingly fantastic you think I am (joking), I have a million things to learn about sales and marketing, and yes…blogging. 10 years in, and I’m just getting started. I’m a total noobe.

Here’s another (#3) ninja secret: Even A-listers struggle. Yes, even the guys and gals who you think have all the answers and have all their ducks in a row (seriously, who says that? I’m bringin it back!) look at their analytics sometimes and say “what the hell is THAT?” Everyone struggles to get the result. Everyone gets thrown for a loop sometimes. The problem is not the struggle…the struggle is the GOOD stuff. The problem is in thinking you’re the only one. The problem is in thinking you’re struggling alone and somehow not smart enough, lucky enough or talented enough to succeed. Please believe me for god’s sake, if I can make money and build a business around a blog, you can too.

Here’s a fourth and final secret for today: That’s how you get the result…struggling. Believe it or not, that’s the key. Struggling and doing the work, that’s your ticket out of this crummy joint and to the good life you hope to achieve after building your thriving blog community. It will be a beautiful thing, and it will be worth the work you put into it and then some. You will be glad you did it. You will look back and say “Wow, I’m really glad I stuck it out.”

But how do you know you’re on the WRONG path?

  • When you feel like you have all the answers.
  • When you call yourself a guru.
  • When you have an “automated solution” or a “maintenance-free” blog. Haha. Yeah, right. Sucker.
  • When you are NOT struggling.

The Key to Getting Results…

The key to success in blogging is a lot simpler than most gurus would have you believe 🙂

Is there such a thing as a beautiful place in business? Can you make it to easy street? Believe me, you can. But you cannot get there by worrying or doubting yourself, and here’s what you cannot achieve: You cannot get to a place where you’re finished. You’ll never be complete. You’ll never be perfect, so therefore there will always be work to do. There will always be something to focus on and improve, and that is a struggle. It requires digging in. It requires work. So dig in…struggle, and do it with confidence.

So when you’re struggling, how do you know what to do? You are already doing it. You read, and you ask around. You execute, make mistakes, learn from your mistakes are make corrections…and then go execute again. Here’s the problem: a lot of you are trying to “figure it out”, and it doesn’t work that way. A lot of you are looking for a blog post or a consultant or a book to instill some bit of knowledge in you that is going to make everything make sense. Ain’t gonna happen. Research is essential, but at the end of the day you have to DIVE IN. You solve one problem at a time. Then you move on to the next problem, and solve that. Then you move on to the next problem. That’s success…as mundane as it sounds, that’s how you do it.

It’s quite simple, really. Double your rate of failure. You’re thinking of failure as the enemy of success. But it isn’t at all. -Thomas Watson Sr.

Many of you feel bad because you’re at the beginning and not sure how to get big results from your blog. I just wanted to encourage you today, because you see…you’re doing it. You’re already doing it. You read this blog and others. You ask questions, and you apply that information to your business one piece at a time. That’s how it’s done. Is building a successful blog really this simple? Yes, it is. Keep going!

How to Make Money Blogging Pt 2

By Christian

Hi guys! Well I promised a follow up on the last post about making money with your blog. As it turns out, I will be doing a few of these. I appreciate the emails I got on the last one. Interestingly also, most of them came in via Facebook. I like that the Facebook crowd is reading Next Level Blogger. Much thanks! I understand that a lot of you are concerned with getting some cash flow coming in from your blogging efforts quickly, so of course I am more than happy to describe what I’ve done and what works well for me. I welcome questions, comments and confused glances. This stuff is actually pretty simple when you look at it!

As a new blogger, you can make money talking with your readers on the phone. Do you truly have expertise to offer? Charge for your personal time. It's the simplest, most straightforward way to monetize when you're new 🙂 It sure as heck beats what you'll make with Adsense!

Making Money with Services

As I described in the last post, the traditional methods of producing cash flow from a site are things I usually avoid. So if I’m not going to put ads up and monetize that way, what are the alternatives? Making money with services is a no-brainer way to get started. This is where the bulk of my income from Next Level Blogger comes from currently. The thing about offering a service is that there’s no set up time. Simply put up a page describing your service, and voila, you’re in business.

I have a caveat about doing consulting, and it is this: it takes a lot of time. It’s not really scalable, so it’s not a long term focus for me, but it’s a great way to get income started right away. I’m a big fan of my time and value it highly. This is probably true for you also. As a result, I do not consider consulting an ideal long term business model. This is why a lot of consultants charge $250 an hour, $400 an hour or more. It minimizes the time commitment and ensures that the time you spend ear to ear with clients is as hard-hitting, focused and as valuable as possible. That said, working for an hourly rate is a way you can get off the ground quickly and getting some income going right away.

There’s an important point here that I don’t want to be overlooked. Many of you think this doesn’t apply to you, but it does. I know some of you have already written this off as not applicable to your business. If so, you’re wrong 🙂 Hear me out. A lot of you are small business owners. A lot of the people I’ve consulted with are network marketers, Realtors, attorneys, etc. You already have a business, and it’s not a consulting business. So therefore, this method of income generation doesn’t apply to you, correct? I’d argue no…you’re dead wrong.

One of the beauties of blogging is that it can open up entirely new income streams that wouldn’t be possible otherwise. Creating a service is certainly an example of this for many businesses.

Right before creating Next Level Blogger, I was doing affiliate marketing exclusively for income (granted, my own flavor of affiliate marketing…I tend to do very little by the book), so does that mean my blog needed to be about affiliate marketing exclusively? Does it mean I can only write about affiliate marketing and only continue making money through affiliate marketing? Of course not! I have 10 years of sales experience and have been selling online in different capacities (PPC, Ebay, Yahoo Stores, ghost writing to name a few) for over 6 years. So why put myself in an affiliate marketing box? I can cover a lot of ground when it comes to marketing.

How does this relate to YOUR business? I see a lot of small business owners put themselves in a box unnecessarily. One of the industries I’ve worked with most heavily recently is real estate. Real estate professionals are really good (no offense guys!) at viewing their business in only one very limited way. List a house, find a buyer, get a commission. Go list another house, find another buyer, get a commission. No problem with that model I suppose, but what the heck is wrong with opening up your opportunity a little bit? Create some new income streams for yourself! I’ve written about many ways to do this, but a great way is by offering a service via your blog. What’s wrong with offering your real estate consulting over the phone? What’s wrong with knocking out a call or two with your blog readers before going on your regular appointments for the day? To me, making $150 an hour (my current rate at the time of this post) is no way to get rich, but it sure is a fine way to fill in some gaps 🙂

What is your niche? Where is the area of your true expertise? Who can you really help in a targeted way? Don’t underestimate yourself!

A lot of professionals I speak with get locked into just working out of their office and ignore the fact that the people reading their site who don’t necessarily even live in their state, could use their help also! Don’t ignore that opportunity!

If you’re truly an expert in a certain area that is valuable to others, you not only have a perfect foundation for starting a great blog, you have a perfect foundation for starting a powerful service. Do you have to do this? Of course not. I’m just sharing what’s worked well for me, and offering a service got income coming in the first month for me. It wasn’t a lot, but it was something. I got an email from a guy that wasn’t even a subscriber. He’d never left a comment on the site or anything. I was barely up and running, and he hired me for a few hours. I was so excited I made something like $500 my first month blogging 🙂

Do you think I would have been hired for that job if I hadn’t made an offer? No way. All I did was put up a page with a service offer, and bam. It’s not a lot of money admittedly, but very few blogs make $500 their first month. And it sure beats putting up some Adsense like most bloggers do. That would have made me maybe $3.

I will write a more in depth article shortly covering some basics tips on creating a service for your blog, so keep an eye out for that.

I’m also not quite finished with this make money from blogging series. There are a few more points I will be covering in the next post or two. In the meantime, I encourage any questions or comments, and I’ll make sure to include any questions in future content 🙂

How to Make Money Blogging Pt 1

By Christian

Making money with a blog really has to be one of the biggest concerns out there I suppose, so I want to address it directly. There are different approaches of course, and I can only speak to the techniques I’ve personally employed, what has worked well for me and what HASN’T worked well for me. This will be a two-part rundown of what has not worked for me…and what has 😉

Today I’ll cover a couple things I’ve tried that have failed for me. I’ll follow up shortly with more info on what DOES work for me, and what I’m doing today to generate income from blogging.

My Blogging Failures

First off, I’ve failed in a number of areas over the last few years since I’ve been blogging and building niche sites. I made many mistakes when I first started, so hopefully you can read this and avoid the same time wasters. Monetizing a site is always a concern if you’re doing something as a business, and the two most common ways of monetizing are through ads and affiliate marketing.

Making Money with Ads

There are a number of ways to do this on your site. Adsense is the most common way to put ads on your site when you’re small and just starting. A lot of beginners don’t realize that putting ads on your site isn’t something you can just do on a whim, expect through Adsense. If you’re new and wanting to monetize your site, you’ll likely go down this path a bit and look into putting some ads on your site.

Hopefully I can save you some time here…what you’ll find is that most ad networks won’t even talk to you. Why? You don’t yet have the high level of traffic they’re looking for. The most popular networks really want you to have a high level of traffic to start. What do I mean by that? Requirements vary from vendor to vendor of course, but I’ll say it this way: if you’re not getting at least 50k visitors a month on a regular basis, your prospects will be limited. Some vendors won’t be interested til you get into six figures or higher. Adsense doesn’t have this requirement though. This makes Adsense highly accessible and easy to implement.

Adsense is also very simple to optimize and style to your site. How does it pay? It pays fairly well actually, if you compare what most other ad networks pay. The problem is that if you aren’t getting a high level of traffic, Adsense is not going to pay you more than a few dollars (I mean that quite literally) per month.

What do I mean by saying it pays well then? It pays well on a per visitor basis.

It’s important to understand that the larger ad networks (like Federated Media and others) don’t pay much better according to my research. It’s just that monetizing with ads does indeed pay well, if you’re bringing in a large number of visitors. If you’re not, it doesn’t. That’s pretty much all she wrote. Even A-list bloggers rarely depend solely on advertising income. There’s also a growing trend for well-established bloggers to be trimming back or even removing their ads altogether. They’re concentrating on much more profitable income sources. Even when you are getting tons of traffic, advertising still rarely cuts it on its own.

Making Money with Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is another avenue I tried when I was first starting. I didn’t sell a single thing. Nothing. This is just my personal experience. I’ve since learned how to do affiliate marketing more effectively, and it’s a terrific way to earn some extra money. It is not in any way a significant source of income for me at this point, but earning an extra few hundred bucks here and there is not something I’m gonna turn down 🙂

That said, most beginners (like me too when I was first starting) just put up some affiliate banners in their sidebar and wait for the orders to come in. In most cases, they just don’t.

As is the case with most things, you can overcome lack of skill with sheer numbers. Will you sell some product by simply placing an ad in your sidebar when you’re pulling in a ton of visitors? Yes, of course. If 200,000 people hit your site in any given month, it’s likely someone is going to click through and buy something.

I’d like to say I have no problem with this form of monetizing, except for one thing…it simply doesn’t apply to most sites. Yet ironically, it’s what most people try. And then when it doesn’t work, people conclude that “blogging doesn’t work”. It’s a massively incorrect conclusion to draw, although I understand why it happens.

These are the most common avenues I see new bloggers take, and they almost never work…for the same reasons. Hopefully you can read this and save yourself some headaches. However, let me assure you that there are some effective ways a new blogger can generate income. If you’ve read Next Level Blogger for a while, you already know…my experience is specifically in small niche websites. I generate 100% of my income online, and I don’t have a single website that pulls in more than 5-6k visitors a month.

I’m a blogging advocate for a reason! You can most definitely generate a good income and lifestyle with your blog. Even after only running this blog for a short time, I’m already seeing a significant change in the way I do business, and I expect this process to continue. This is what I’ll use to continue in Part 2. That is where I’ll cover some things that really work for me, and they’ll work for you too. In the meantime, please comment or contact me any feedback or questions. Talk to you more soon. Thanks!

Tips on Writing Your About Page

By Christian

On a blog, it’s important to think of every page as a landing page. Every page on your site is an opportunity to convert a visitor or lose them. This is true of your front page, each post and each page on your site. Writing your “About” page is a sticky subject for some bloggers when they first get started, so I wanted to touch on this. Let me know what you think!

Don't think of your "about page" as a place to write a book about yourself. No one cares! Instead, answer the more difficult questions: "Why are you writing this blog?" "Why SHOULD you write this blog?" "Why are you different?"

A Few Tips on Writing Your About Page

Here are a few tips to keep in mind when writing the “about” page on your blog.

  • Your About page is the one page on your blog where you should feel free to talk openly about yourself.
  • Mention a bit about your experience and why you’re qualified to write the content on the blog. More importantly, share honestly why you’re compelled to write this blog. Your readers are looking for a reason to connect with you.
  • Focus on the main problem you can solve for a reader. When visiting an About page, a visitor wants to know about you, but they still only care about what’s in it for them. So, talk about yourself, but keep in mind why a visitor should care. What benefit will they get by being a regular reader?
  • How are you different? What unique value or perspective do you add to the niche you’re covering? It’s rare indeed for you to be covering something that no one else covers. Instead, talk about why you’re different and what you offer that no one else offers.

The About page can be a powerful asset to your blog, or it can also be a great excuse for a reader to take off and never return. How do you feel about your About page? Are you intimidated by it? Do you have any questions about how to optimize it?

A Few Simple Tweaks to Ramp Up Your Blog

By Christian

If you’re running a blog for your business, it’s important to think of every page, every post you publish as an opportunity to either ramp up your business or lose ground. Every page on your site will either produce comments and other forms of interaction with your visitors, or it will fail in this regard. For this reason, it’s important to spend a minute to think about what your goal is for each page.

Sometimes a little tune up will give you much better performance. Here are a few performance tips for your blog 🙂

What do you want this page to accomplish? Not every page is going to have the same goal of course. Some posts, you’ll want to simply generate comments and interaction with your readers. Some will be focused on generating new subscriptions. Some will me meant to sell a product, etc. You get the idea. So here are a few elements I’d encourage you to include on your blog. They’ve worked well for me, so they’re at least worth a try.

  1. Install a share widget. I use this one. It makes it very easy for a visitor to share your content with their friends. Twitter, Facebook and a ton of the biggest social networks are all supported. The viral nature of content is one of the most powerful elements to blog marketing. Make it easy for your visitors to spread your content around any way they see fit.
  2. Have a contact form on every page. You’ll see a contact form in the side bar on almost every page on my site. When I installed this form, specifically for the purpose of just giving general feedback, submitting questions, etc, I found that a lot of people really do use it. Is it hard to click over to my contact page? Of course not, but having a contact form right there in front of you consistently reminds a visitor that I earnestly to want to hear from them if they have anything to share. It’s started a lot of good conversation.
  3. Install SEO links plugin. It’s a free piece for WordPress. You can set certain keywords within your blog to automatically link up to other pages, even outside pages to other sites. An example: I set the words “contact me” to automatically link to my contact page. This produces a number of incoming links automatically to my contact page. I don’t have to think about it or manually put the links in. Internal link structure is beneficial to a site for a number of reasons. I recommend it 🙂
  4. Using Aweber. I’m an affiliate for Aweber for good reason. Why? They rock. Enough said. I’ve checked out all the major email marketing solutions, and my personal opinion is that Aweber is the most powerful provider to use. They are inexpensive, give you powerful ways to measure the effectiveness of the email you send your subscribers, and they offer a ton of creative, effective opt in forms to put on your pages. An Aweber opt in form looks great, and it can be set up in mere seconds.
  5. Use simple graphics. I set up sites to be content-focused. This is just my personal M.O., but I honestly think visitors want content, not fancy graphics. When it comes to blogging, less is more. Keep it simple, spend time on good content, and results will follow!
  6. Use captions on your images. I haven’t always been big on using images in posts. I don’t personally like the use of stock images in posts, because I think it looks cheesy. However, I cannot ignore that other top bloggers swear by it. The fact is that a simple, well-placed image in your post can grab people. Some people respond strongly to visual anchors like this. I’ve found that by taking a minute and putting a caption on the image, it gives it a lot more power. Instead of just putting up a stock image, put in a caption. Your caption will give the reader a frame of reference and make it that much more powerful. Details matter.
  7. Link up your social networks. Are you on Twitter? Are you on LinkedIn? I encourage you to link these things up in your sidebar, so that your visitors can see you’re out there. They’ll see they can connect with you in a number of other locations, which can be of great benefit to you. You may think that you want people on your blog. Why would you encourage them to leave and hit you up on Facebook when you really want them to subscribe to your blog? The answer is that many users are simply more comfortable on Facebook. Connect with them where they’re most comfortable. By sharing your blog content on other networks, users can share your ideas just as easily from Facebook or any other place. Your blog is your hub, but you should be active in other places as well, and it all contributes to your user base. Just because a fan on Facebook doesn’t add to your Feedburner count doesn’t matter at all. Connections are what matter. Facebook counts 🙂

I think it’s important to mention that not every blog is the same of course. Just because something works really well for me doesn’t mean you’ll get the same results with your audience. However, this list should give you a few things to try. Trial and error is the key 🙂

There are many more, but these are the ones that jump out at me at the moment…do you have any additional page tweaks that have worked really well for you? I’ve love to hear what works for you!