Small Business Blog Tips

A Key to Blogging Success: Fun is Mandatory

By Christian

There are so many things to talk about when it comes to making your blog successful. I’ve written 70 posts in the last couple months and I can already tell I haven’t even scratched the surface. Writing Next Level Blogger is going to be a blast! I wish the same enthusiasm for you and your blog. In fact, I want to make a quick argument as to why fun is not just nice; it’s actually the most important element of making your blog successful.

The technical aspects of successful blogging, internet marketing, seo and the like can consume you. There is a lot to learn. The flip side of that coin is that these technical aspects are also valuable. While I do believe it’s essential to take the time to learn the technical basics of blogging, I ALSO believe it’s essential to take a step back from learning at some point, and focus on DOING. The fact may seem self-contradictory, but it’s absolutely true.

The various aspects of success are very complicated, but achieving success is simple. It is not necessary to understand success in order to have it.

So the real question is this: do you want to understand every detail of what it takes to build a successful blog, or do you want to have a successful blog? It’s not necessary to do both!

In other words, you can read all day every day for the next year and still have a lot more to learn when it comes to search engine optimization, ppc, converting leads, etc. Or you can study a bit and then make the decision to IMPLEMENT on what you’ve learned. I recommend the latter.

It’s Smart to Be Dumb. Here’s why…

Why would you choose to implement when you clearly still have so much more to learn? Isn’t it better to learn as much as possible to make sure you’re doing things right? Actually, no. It’s a lot better to be out there hustling than it is to worry about doing everything perfectly.

The reason you choose to implement NOW rather than later, is because you have an idea that excites you…excitement and fun are the elements that are going to carry you through, not technical mastery. Trust me, if you’re having fun you are doing it right. It doesn’t mean you don’t have to work your tail off, but when it’s fun, it’s not really work, is it?

The Success Myth

It’s a myth that successful people do everything right…that they really have their act together…that they’re highly intelligent and sophisticated…that they’re more talented than you. It’s all B.S. The only thing necessary to get huge results is to put yourself out there. Yes, you will fail sometimes, and that’s OK. It’s also a myth that successful people don’t fail. They fail a lot. But they also never stopping hustling. That’s what it takes.

It might sound overly simplistic, but it’s just the way it is. The problem is this: most of us who haven’t achieved the success we feel we deserve just haven’t put ourselves out there enough. We may feel like we’re working very hard, but we’re working hard on the minutia of our business…we’re not hustling. We’re schlepping. It’s not fun to schlep. Schlepping does take care of minor details. But it doesn’t make big money. It doesn’t attract a large readership. It doesn’t achieve much at all in the grand scheme of things.

That’s why I’m arguing that the most important element of making your blog successful is fun. When it’s fun, you work hard, you never stop, you learn constantly, and when you fail you can’t wait to get right back in there.

It doesn’t take any less than this to make any business endeavor work, and blogging is no different.

If you want your business blog to rock, YOU have to rock. And if you want to rock…day in and day out…you simply have to be having fun. It’s absolutely essential!

You need to NOT concentrate on the small details. Don’t schlep. You need to concentrate on the big picture, and the big picture needs to be something that is absolutely exciting to you. It needs to wake you up at night because you can’t wait to get back at it in the morning. That’s what successful bloggers do. It’s what successful business owners in all areas do. They work 24/7, and they love every minute of it. Fun is mandatory.

Action is All that Matters

My hope for this post is to simply illustrate how important it is to act. Reading this blog and others in this space is a very smart thing to do, but the BIGGEST thing you can do to become successful is the simplest of all…dive in. Why? Because it’s fun. And fun is not only an absolute prerequisite to success, it’s also the most important ingredient to success. If you want this to work, it has to be fun!

Why It Really Is This Simple

The fact is you learn more by doing than by studying. Yes, you’re gonna make mistakes. Probably some really big mistakes. Who cares? The biggest secret to making a successful business blog is to make it FUN! That’s really the number one feature of any successful business venture anyway, isn’t it?

If you have a topic that you’re absolutely passionate about, launch it. Get out there and do it. If it’s fun, you will feel like me…that you have an endless amount of content you can produce, that the more you do the more ideas you get. If you’re having fun, the ideas never stop coming, your creativity is bottomless, your energy is piqued. Every new goal achieved simply energizes you even more.

And here is the key: when you are energized by your business, when you’re excited to get at it every day, when you can’t wait to see what ground you can gain every day…THAT is the place you want to be. That excitement and fun makes up for a world of not knowing exactly how to do everything.

Here are a few things you may not have considered:

It doesn’t matter if your site is not designed perfectly.
It doesn’t matter if your ads are not perfectly optimized.
It doesn’t matter if your blog is not 110% search optimized.
If you’re having fun, and you’re pouring yourself into what you do every day…success is in the bag! It’s a done deal. Maybe not overnight, but it’s as good as yours. First, if you’re having fun, you’re already a success. Second, if you’re having fun, you’re going to stick with it until things click. And the whole ride will be a blast 🙂

If you take anything away from this post, take this:

The answers and solutions (all the minutia) will come to you automatically as a result of your success, and your success will come as a byproduct of your excitement and enthusiasm. Don’t wait to have all the answers before beginning. Begin. The details will take care of themselves. Act.

What if You’re Not Having Fun?

I write about blogging. From a technical standpoint, a blog can be created in about 5 minutes if you know what you’re doing. If you’re not having fun, start something else. Seriously. Quit what you’re doing and do what you love. It takes hard work and tenacity to rise to the top in any niche. Make it fun. Fun first; from there, success is automatic. Besides, if you’re grinding through every day to become “successful”, you’re never going to make it. Do you really want to have a hugely “successful” blog that you hate running? Make it something you love. That way, success is yours from day one.

Professional Blogging Free Ebook

By Christian

I want to call your attention please to the new page I’ve added to Next Level Blogger. Click the page “Professional Blogging Ebook“, and it will take you to a new page where you can download a free copy of a new ebook I just completed.

Or you can just download it directly right here!

47 pages of simple-to-follow, straight up content on how to use blogging and social networking effectively to promote your business online. Any professional or business owner who wants to get started using new media marketing tools will get a lot of great tips and free advice.

Here are a few of the topics covered in the report:

Why Blogging is Mandatory
The Rewards You Can Expect
Ways to Make Money
Writing Tips
SEO Tips
Techniques and Tricks
Automation
Twitter tools
Social Networking Tips and Tools
Over 100 links to recommended additional resources, articles, recommended sites, books and more

I spent several hours putting this together…I hope you find a lot of value in this report. Download it for free, share it with your friends and coworkers, and let me know what you think!

I Seriously Doubt You’ll Ever Be Cool Like Me

By Christian

Here’s the thing about learning to rock your business…there’s not a formula. Here’s the thing about success…there’s not a single way to do it. Yet everyone is looking for the formula, or the way. We have to cut this out.

You’re not cool like me. You’re cool like you.

I write every day, because I love to. When I was 9 years old, I would stay up til two in the morning writing. Something in me has just never been able to shut up. I do not claim to be an awesome writer, but I do love to write.

It’s About Love, People! Love What You Do!

It’s kind of like a lot of these young girls who become pop singers. Remember Michelle Branch? She’s really not that great of a singer (sorry girl!). But when you hear her sing, you can just tell that she really LOVES singing. It comes through, and it’s engaging. It’s not talent so much as it is love, and when you have that passion about what you do, you command people’s attention. Love. That’s what we all need to tap into. It sells more than just records.

Do you have to have a blog? Yes. Do you have to write on your blog every day? No. Do you have to be a great writer or passionate about writing to have a hugely successful blog? No. Do you have to do exactly everything that Leo Babauta or Brian Clark or Matt Cutts tells you to do? No. You should probably listen to what they have to say. You really should, but then you need to go do what you love. And you have to really rock it. When you rock, people cannot help but like you. We all love a rock star. And believe it or not, that’s what blogging is about. It’s not about finding “the way” or “the system”.

Rock stars don’t follow all the rules, and neither should you.

Rock n Roll is Not Dead

I love those Intel commercials that say “our rock stars aren’t like your rock stars”. That is the essence of new media. You can be the rock star of Bloomington, IN real estate. You can be the rock star of grilled hamburger recipes. You can rock anything you want. And yes, there are things you need to do, but the most important, crucial, undeniable thing you need to do is lock into what you cannot shut up about and just go with it.

For me, it’s writing. I’ve been criticized for not having pictures on this blog. Yes, I could spend time picking out stock photos that somewhat go along with the post I’m writing. But why? It’s taking energy away from what I’m good at and what I love. I accept that not everyone is going to dig my site. If you require pretty pictures in order to be engaged, this just isn’t going to be your cup of tea. But if you want straight up awesome written content on a regular basis that helps you promote your business and motivates you to grow, I think there’s a lot of value for you here. And I’m just getting started.

If You Don’t Love it, Don’t Focus on It

For you, maybe writing is not your thing. Maybe for you it’s video. Maybe it’s live blogging. Maybe it’s conducting seminars or interviews or meeting people face to face. Maybe you prefer to paint pictures or do podcasts…the point is that the possibilities are endless, and the further point is that there’s SOMETHING that you LOVE to do that is in alignment with growing your business.

You need to find it, and you need to blog it.

Believe me, when you tap into something that is absolutely exciting to you, work becomes fun. You can work tirelessly to make things happen, because you love doing it! And this is what makes you successful.

One True Success Flows to All Other Areas of Your Business

And here’s the thing about success. Real, true success in any one area of your life flows into all other areas of your life. You really think Next Level Blogger is going to succeed or fail based on whether or not I add pictures or not? No. If Next Level Blogger succeeds at reaching my goals, it will be because I was successful at getting my message out, and that can be done through pictures, yes. But it can also be done any number of ways. I choose to focus on my strengths and on what energizes me.

If you do this for your blog as well, you’ll see what I’m talking about. I could point out technical problems with a lot of very successful sites. I’ve seen very successful blogs with horrible permalink structures, confusing navigation, images without alt tags…the list is endless. You think the authors care? Why bother with this stuff?

If you think the success of your blog is going to hinge on whether or not every page is ultra-optimized, you’re not focusing in the right place! Focus on the one thing that you absolutely rock at. Do it every day. Do it with passion. Get your message across. Everything else…all the technical B.S….will take care of itself.

The Power of 100 for Blogging Success

By Christian

I’ve learned something from being in direct sales. It’s something that I feel a lot of other bloggers don’t get. As internet marketers, we spend so much time working on our sites, to optimize and get more traffic. We want to capture as much search traffic as possible, and I think it’s smart to make those efforts.

But I think there’s something a lot more important that we should put at the front of our priority list when it comes to building our small business online. And that something is the power of 100.

For the past week, I’ve been tweeting out updates like “30 down, 70 more to go!” I’ve received many inquiries about what the heck this means, and what it means is that I have a rule, and I’ve decided it’s important to once again follow that rule.

Here’s the rule:

Make 100 contacts a day.

That’s it. Touch 100 people every day. Whether I respond to an email, call someone on the phone, send a letter in the mail…it doesn’t matter. 100 daily. That’s the rule.

Why? Because it forces me to be social. And being social is not only energizing and a heck of a lot of fun, but it’s also an essential process for building your business. In case you haven’t noticed, people rock!

Where the Power of 100 Came From

It comes from my direct sales experience. In direct sales, if you’re not making contacts you’re out of business. Well, I’ve learned to adapt to internet marketing, and here is something I’ve learned about internet marketing…a lot of us hide behind our computers.

It’s very easy to tweak on your site all day. VERY easy. I’ve done it. It’s very easy to spend all day reading blogs or studying tutorials, or God forbid, coding! Tweaking ads, the list goes on…and I’m not busting on any of these things. It’s important to have your site looking good. It’s important for your ads to be optimized, etc. But it’s MORE important…MASSIVELY more important to talk to people.

Why the Power of 100 will Transform Your Business

Why? Because no matter how awesome you are, and no matter how awesome your site is, if you’re not talking to people every day, no one is going to care. Because at the end of the day, no one cares if you’re awesome! People want to know what’s in it for them, and if you want to make money online, you need to be interested in interacting with them to find out how you can help!

Here is My Challenge to You

So here is my challenge to you: make 100 contacts a day. Do it with me! I will continue to put out my updates, and I encourage you to do the same. Are you following me on Twitter? Do it, and let’s kill this thing together! There is power and motivation in numbers! Make 100 contacts a day. It will build your business; I promise!

Here’s an example of what I’m talking about.

I’m using the #powerof100 hashtag to track tweets related to this program. Even if I’m the only one doing it, it’s cool. I’m doing this because I know it works, and since I write a blog, it occurred to me how cool it would be if I could get even one or two other people doing this also. I guarantee, it’s difficult to produce like this every day, and it also changes your business like you wouldn’t believe!

Like I said, I have seen many top performers over the years employ a simple rule like this, and it creates tremendous results. Bottom line, it goes along with all the basic concepts I cover on Next Level Blogger:

It’s very simple
It’s a lot of work
It gets MASSIVE results over time!

Here’s what counts:

Respond to a message: email, tweets, phone calls…it’s all good.
Blog comments: real, thoughtful, engaging ones…not thoughtless spammy ones. The point is real contacts.
Writing a letter, emailing a friend, following up on a lead, etc.
You get the idea…here’s the rule: it needs to be a PERSONAL, ONE-ON-ONE contact.

Here’s what doesn’t count:

Emailing your list: if you email a bulk list of 1,000 contacts, it doesn’t count as 1,000 contacts! Emailing your list is good and necessary, but this principle is only for PERSONAL, ONE-ON-ONE contacts. The point is personal engagement.
Spam commenting: you surely understand this, right? Any form of automation is not the point.

If you make the effort to personally engage 100 people a day on a personal level, you will see real power and real results from this. Like I mentioned, I learned this in direct sales, and I know some of the top sales people in the US literally are employing this concept right now, today, as you read this. It works! Get to it and let me know how it goes!

How to Build a Massive Blogging Business With Only 10 Subscribers

By Christian

I’m a big fan of leverage, and in the internet age, it’s mandatory that we employ as much of it as possible. You need to be able to get things going quickly! You need to be able to launch an idea without delay and build it competently and efficiently, because FAST is the name of the game.

So how to you build a rocking blog with only 10 subscribers? The answer is this: make sure they’re 10 really great subscribers! Make sure they are advocates.

No matter how far you go in your business, you will always have a core business that deserves more of your focus than anything else. This will be your advocates. Even if you have 100,000 subscribers, I guarantee you that only a handful of them are the reason for the majority of your success. It’s the old 80/20 rule. Find your advocates, my friends! That is the key to success; it’s not about huge subscriber lists (although they are fun and profitable of course); it’s about quality, and my point in this post is simple…you do not need a huge amount of subscribers in order to do a huge amount of damage!

Your power is not in your numbers…it’s in your advocates!

Traffic is Not the Answer! Advocates are the Answer

My point is simple. So many of us want to focus on getting more and more traffic to our sites, and that is understandable. But a big part of me believes it’s kind of an industrial age idea being injected into a new business model. It’s natural and human for us all to want a lot of attention, tons of comments, etc. But I contend it’s just not necessary. Fun, yes. Cool, yes. Necessary to run a profitable business? No.

If I had to choose between 10 people who truly love what I do and are willing to do whatever they can to help me out or 10,000 luke warm, half-assed followers, which do you think I’m going to choose? High traffic may be fun, but it’s rarely efficient. It’s also rarely necessary.

You just don’t have to have millions of fans in order to have millions of dollars. It may be your goal for whatever reason, and if so I’m certainly not criticizing. Go as large as you want. With a blog you can take over the world. We see it happening more and more every day.

The Fame Façade

But it’s also true…and has always been true, that a lot of very successful business people are out there operating behind the scenes. Sorry to ruin the façade for everyone (I don’t really think I’m telling you anything you don’t already know), but the very well-known internet success stories we’ve all heard of are only a small sample of what’s actually going on out there. There are also a lot of famous people who are FAR from reaching their personal goals.

I’d encourage you to not look at the famous “success” stories we all hear about to be necessarily indicative of the direction we should all be going, because it may or may not be true. Fame is not a factor. It’s only an interesting an fun phenomenon that happens to some of us occasionally. Fame certainly does not require significant personal achievement, and likewise, significant personal achievement only rarely produces fame.

If it is fame that interests you, fine, but don’t equate it to success.

Blogging to the Power of 10

All I’m saying is that you likely don’t need to start the next Facebook or Twitter or Tech Crunch or whatever to reach all your financial goals with blogging and internet marketing, so don’t assume it to be so. Look at your alternatives, and one alternative is to learn to operate a very powerful operation with only 10 fans!

Of course I use “10 fans” as only an example. The point is to illustrate that many of us assume we need many thousands of people on board before we’re going to be able to do any real damage, and I’m sorry but it’s just not true.

Each Individual Subscriber Really Does Matter

What if one of your subscribers is David Letterman? Impossible you say? I’m sorry, but do you know what David Letterman’s RSS subscription looks like as compared to anyone else’s? I have no doubt that David Letterman gets online from time to time, don’t you think? And if he’s reading your blog, and you’ve written something particularly compelling to him, don’t you see how that could lead to something significant? Absolutely it could.

As of course, here is the magic: While David Letterman (I don’t know why I specifically picked David Letterman, so don’t ask!) knows a lot of people…last time I checked, a LOT of people know a lot of people. It doesn’t take having a celebrity on board in order to make your blog hugely successful and profitable. Here’s what it takes: it takes an advocate.

What is an advocate? An advocate is someone who truly loves what you do, believes in you and actively takes pleasure in helping you spread the word. A few advocates is all it takes. And an advocate can be anyone…as long as they are truly engaged by what you do.

It really does only take 10 advocates to make your blog massively successful. In fact, in many cases it only takes ONE advocate to make a big difference. I had one post recently connect with some people in my network. Several of them tweeted it out and it them got picked up by Perry Belcher, who in turn tweeted it out, and all of a sudden my traffic went up about 800% for a few days. I’ll take it! I got a lot of cool comments and about 50 email subscribers from that one flurry of activity. If I did not have advocates, it would not have happened.

How to Get Advocates

Advocates, like anything of value, must be earned. Sorry, there’s really no short cuts here, and I cannot offer you a link to a website that offers a free tool called “how to get 10 advocates for FAST and for FREE”. This human engagement, and it can only be accomplished through real personal interaction over time.

Think of it this way, which is quicker?

Build 10 significant relationships with people over time, or-
Follow thousands of people on Twitter and hope that half of them follow you back?

Of course it’s quicker and easier to build a crappy list, but the result is a crappy list, so why bother?

How many subscribers do you have now? If you have 100 subscribers, and those 100 subscribers were procured the right way, I bet you that your 10 advocates are already there. Now it’s just a matter of identifying them and cultivating a relationship with them over time. Don’t let them slip away; you’re staring at a literal gold mine!

If you’ve just started this whole blogging thing, and you only have a few subscribers…don’t look at that as a bad thing. You’re not deficient. You’re sitting on a gold mine…I promise you! It only takes a few advocates.

If you rock, they will come.